Christian Questions to the Greeks

Contents

Reading pages: 1 · 2 · 3 · 4–5 · 6.1–6.14

1. 1The Christian asks whether God should deliver humanity from ignorance of him, the greatest evil; a Greek answers that no greatest evil exists and that God must keep the world as it is; the Christian refutes the answer point by point and defends the re-creation of the world.
2. 2The Christian asks how God can be God if the world is unbegotten; the Greek answers that nothing is temporal with God, who eternally makes and guards the world; the Christian replies that making is temporal, that God's activity can begin and end without change in his power, and that the world exists by God's will.
3. 3The Christian asks how a God who makes by his very being, as fire heats, can be simple yet make many different things; the Greek answers that God's being and will are identical and that he makes all things timelessly as things co-subsisting with him; the Christian replies with a long series of arguments that God's essence and will differ and that the world is made and begotten, not co-eternal with God.
4. 4The Christian asks how a begotten world can be co-eternal with God; the Greek answers that the ancients, rightly understood, taught an unbegotten world, since craftsman and product, exemplar and image, are relatives that exist together; the Christian replies that the example of right and left is inappropriate and that God is not made imperfect by creating the world when he willed.
5. 5The Christian asks how God can dwell in an unbegotten heaven that is not his; the Greek answers that God does not dwell in heaven at all, explaining Homer's language as a figure; the Christian replies that the heaven is called God's house and throne to mark it as his creature, imperishable now by his will until the renewal of all things.
6. 6.1Nature itself cannot exist or act unless it is brought into being by a maker who does not work by nature.
7. 6.2Only things produced by nature or art pass through the four stages of beginning, growth, prime, and decline.
8. 6.3Nothing is opposed to God, against Plato's eternal evil; and matter, which is no particular thing, has no being of its own.
9. 6.5Matter, not being an essence, could not be worked by nature or art; and Aristotle's fifth element cannot be heated by motion without being one of the four ordinary elements.
10. 6.7The sun's constant heat despite unequal motion refutes Aristotle's view that it is hot only by its motion.
11. 6.8Aristotle contradicts himself in denying that matter is an essence while making it receptive of contraries, and in deriving things from a matter that lacks being.
12. 6.9Aristotle's matter must either be being or be incapable of producing anything.
13. 6.11Matter, having no qualities, cannot undergo change between contraries, and it cannot both perish with material things and exist before them.
14. 6.13Matter cannot participate in privation if, as Aristotle holds, it is not a being.
15. 6.14The sun's double motion, the mutual need of sun and eye, and the originated year show that the heavens and the things in time are not unoriginated.