Chapter 6.
Chapter 6.
34. This then is the intention with which the Fathers who met together at Nicæa made use of these terms; and next, having shown this, I will recur to what I said when I began. I said that at the Council, Eusebius, after objecting to the definition passed by the Fathers assembled, acknowledged that it expressed the Church’s faith, as it had come down to us by tradition. I then went on to say that certainly what those who went before us had delivered to us was the true doctrine, and of final authority, and to be followed. However, I thought it best, instead of simply appealing to the voice of Antiquity or of the agreement of Bishops, to explain and defend once more the phrases in which the Council had thought right to convey the Christian Truth. This I have now done; but I will not bring my letter to an end without giving these heretical teachers specimens of the language of writers of an earlier date, which are in accordance with that to which the Arians take exception.
35. Know then first, O Arians, foes of Christ, that Theognostus, a learned man, did not decline the phrase “Of the substance,” for in the second book of his Hypotyposes, he writes thus of the Son:—
Testimony of Theognostus
“The substance of the Son is not any addition from without, brought into the Divine Nature by a fresh creation, but It sprang from the Father’s substance, as the radiance of light, as the vapour of water; for neither the radiance, nor the vapour, is the water itself or the sun itself, nor is it alien, but is an effluence of the Father’s substance, which, however, suffers no partition. For as the sun remains the same, and is not impaired by the rays poured forth by it, so neither does the Father’s substance suffer change, though it has the Son as an Image of Itself.”
Theognostus then, after first investigating in the way of an exercise, proceeds to lay down his own sentiments in the foregoing words.
36. Next Dionysius, who was Bishop of Alexandria, upon his writing against Sabellius, and expounding at large the Saviour’s economy according to the flesh, and thence proving against the Sabellians that not the Father but His Word was made flesh, as John has said, was suspected of saying that the Son was a creature and brought into being, and not consubstantial with the Father; on this he writes to his namesake Dionysius, Bishop of Rome, to explain that this was a slander upon him. And he assured him that he had not called the Son a creature, but on the contrary, that he did confess Him to be nothing else than consubstantial. And his words run thus:—
Testimony of Dionysius of Alexandria
“And I have written in another letter a refutation of the false charge they bring against me, that I deny that Christ was consubstantial with God. For though I say that I have not found this term anywhere in Holy Scripture, yet my remarks which follow, and which they have not quoted, are not inconsistent with that belief. For I instanced a human production as being evidently homogeneous, and I observed that undeniably parents differed from their children only in not being simply the same, otherwise there could be neither parents nor children. And my letter, as I said before, owing to present circumstances I am unable to produce; or I would have sent you the very words I used, or rather a copy of the whole, which, if I have an opportunity, I will do still. But my memory is clear that I adduced various parallels of things kindred with each other; for instance, that a plant, grown from seed or from root, was other than that from which it sprang, yet was altogether one in nature with it: and that a stream flowing from a fountain, gained a new name, for that neither the fountain was called stream, nor the stream fountain, and both existed, and the stream was the water from the fountain.”
37. And that the Word of God is not a work or creature, but an Offspring proper to the Father’s substance and indivisible from it, as the great Council wrote, here you may see in the words of Dionysius, Bishop of Rome, who, while writing against the Sabellians, thus inveighs against those who dared to use their language:—
Testimony of Dionysius of Rome
“Next, I have reason to mention those who separate and tear into portions and destroy that most sacred doctrine of the Church of God, the Divine Monarchy, resolving it into certain three powers and divided subsistences and godheads three. I am told that some of your catechists and teachers of the Divine Word take the lead in this tenet, being in diametrical opposition, so to speak, to Sabellius’s opinions; for he blasphemously says that the Son is the Father and the Father the Son, but they in some sort preach three Gods, as dividing the Holy Monad into three subsistences foreign to each other and utterly separate. For it must needs be that with the God of the Universe the Divine Word is united, and the Holy Ghost must repose and habitate in God; thus, in One as in a summit, I mean the God of the Universe, the Omnipotent God, the Divine Triad must of necessity be gathered up and brought together. For it is the doctrine of the presumptuous Marcion, to sever and divide the Divine Monarchy into three origins,—a devil’s teaching, not that of Christ’s true disciples and lovers of the Saviour’s lessons. For these know well that a Triad is preached by divine Scripture, but that neither Old Testament nor New preaches three Gods.
“Equally must we censure those who hold the Son to be a work, and consider that the Lord has come into being, as one of things which really came to be; whereas the divine oracles witness to a generation suitable to Him and becoming, but not to any fashioning or making. A blasphemy then is it, not ordinary, but even the highest, to say that the Lord is in any sort a handiwork. For if He became Son, once He was not; but He was always, if (that is) He be in the Father, as He says Himself, and if the Christ be Word and Wisdom and Power (which, as ye know, divine Scripture says,) and these attributes be powers of God. If then the Son came into being, once these attributes were not; consequently there was a season when God was without them; which is most extravagant. And why treat more on these points to you, men full of the Spirit, and well aware of the extravagances which come into view from saying that the Son is a work?
“Not attending, as I consider, to these, the originators of this opinion have entirely missed the truth, in understanding, contrary to the sense of divine and prophetic Scripture in the passage, the words, The Lord hath created Me a beginning of His ways unto His works.[63] For He created, as ye know, has various senses; and in this place it must be taken to mean, ‘He set Me over the works made by him,’ that is, the works ‘made by the Son Himself.’ And He created here must not be taken for made, for creating differs from making; Is not He Thy Father that hath bought thee? hath He not made thee and created thee?[64] says Moses in his great Song in Deuteronomy. And one may say to them, is He a work, O reckless men, who is the First-born of every creature, who is born from the womb before the morning star,[65] who said, as Wisdom, Before all the hills He begets Me?[66] And in many passages of the divine oracles is the Son said to have been generated, but not to have come into being, passages which manifestly convict of misconception those men who presume to call His divine and ineffable generation a making.
“Neither then may we divide into three Godheads the wonderful and divine Monad; nor disparage with the name of ‘creature’ the dignity and exceeding majesty of the Lord; but we must believe in God the Father Almighty, and in Christ Jesus His Son, and in the Holy Ghost, and hold that to the God of the universe the Word is united. For I, says He, and the Father are One; and I in the Father and the Father in Me.[67] For thus both the Divine Triad, and the holy preaching of the Monarchy will be secured.”
38. And concerning the everlasting co-existence of the Word with the Father, and that He is not of another substance or subsistence, but proper to the Father’s, as the Bishops in the Council said, hear again from the labour-loving Origen also. For what he has written as if inquiring and exercising himself, that let no one take as expressive of his own sentiments, but of parties who are disputing in the course of investigation; but what he definitely pronounces, that is the sentiment of the labour-loving man. After his disputations then against the heretics, straightway he introduces his personal belief, thus:—
Testimony of Origen
“If there be an Image of the Invisible God, it is an invisible Image; nay, I will be bold to add, that, as being the Likeness of the Father, never was it not. For when was that God, who, according to John, is called Light, (for God is Light,[68]) without the Radiance of His proper glory, that a man should presume to assign the Son’s beginning of existence, as if He were not before? But when was not in existence that Image of the Father’s Ineffable and Indescribable and Unutterable subsistence, that Impress and Word, who alone knows the Father? for let him understand well who dares to say, ‘Once the Son was not,’ that he is saying, ‘Once Wisdom was not,’ and ‘the Word was not,’ and ‘Life was not.’“
And again elsewhere he says:—
Another Testimony
“But it is not without sin or peril if because of out weakness of understanding we deprive God, as far as in us lies, of the Only-begotten Word ever co-existing with Him, being the Wisdom in which He rejoiced; else He must be conceived as not always possessed of blessedness.”
39. See, we are proving that this view has been transmitted from father to father; but ye, O modern Jews and disciples of Caiaphas, what fathers can ye assign to your phrases? Not one of the understanding and wise; for all abhor you, save the devil alone; none but he is your father in such an apostasy, who both in the beginning scattered on your minds the seeds of this impiety, and now persuades you to slander the Ecumenical Council, for committing to writing, not your doctrines, but that which from the beginning those who were eye-witnesses and ministers of the Word have handed down to us.[69] For the faith which the Council has confessed in writing, that is the faith of the Catholic Church; to vindicate this faith, the blessed Fathers so wrote, and thereby condemned the Arian heresy; and this is a chief reason why these men apply themselves to calumniate the Council. For it is not the terms which distress them, but because those terms proved them to be heretics, and daring beyond their fellows.