Against Eunomius 1.353–1.367

For if he goes so far in his ease and readiness toward evil as to suggest both the word and the notion of "less honorable" in the case of any of those believed in within the Holy Trinity, it is right to stop one's ears and flee, as far as one can, from an evil hearing, so that the hearer may have no share in the defilement, as though the argument were being poured from some vessel full of uncleanness into the hearts of those who listen. For how would anyone dare to say anything of the kind about the divine and transcendent nature, by which a "less honorable" is established in argument by comparison? "That all," it says, "may honor the Son, even as they honor the Father." Since this utterance lays down equality of honor by law (for the divine utterance is law), this man sets aside both the law and the lawgiver himself, and assigns more honor to one and less to the other, though I do not know how he discovers the measures of the excess of honor. In human custom, differences of rank determine the honors paid to those in power, so that subjects do not approach kings and lesser officials with the same and equal bearing; rather, the greater or lesser display of fear and reverence on the part of those who approach shows the lack or excess of honor in those honored. It is chiefly by this, by the disposition of their subjects, that one can find who are held in higher honor, when a man, in order to be more fearsome to those around him, is evidently accorded more reverence than the rest. But in the case of the divine nature, because all perfection in goodness is implied in the very name of the Godhead, one cannot find, at least by our understanding, any way of preferring in honor. Where no excess or deficiency is conceived of power, of glory, of wisdom, of love for humankind, or of any conception of goodness at all, but all the good things the Son has are the Father's, and all that is the Father's is seen in the Son, how shall we dispose ourselves so as to show the greater honor to the Father? If we take royal power in its dignity into our thought, the Son is king; if we think of a judge, all judgment belongs to the Son; if we take the grandeur of creation into our soul, all things came into being through him; if we consider the cause of our life, we know the true Life that came down even to our nature; if we learn of our transfer out of darkness, we are not ignorant of the true Light through whom we were estranged from darkness; and if wisdom seems precious to anyone, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God. Since our soul, then, is moved to wonder at such great marvels of Christ, as much as it can contain, what excess of honor can be found, offered exclusively to the Father alone, in which the Lord will fittingly have no share? For the honor that human beings pay to the divine, reasonably considered, is nothing other than a loving disposition and the acknowledgment of the good things that belong to him; and it seems to me that the saying that the Son must be honored as the Father is honored was laid down by the Word in place of love. For the law commands that the honor fitting to God be rendered by loving God with the whole heart and strength; and here the Word, legislating equality of love, says that the Son must be honored as the Father is honored. Great David too fulfilled this manner of honor toward the Lord in an opening of his psalmody, confessing that he loves the Lord and going through the reasons for his love, calling him strength and stronghold and refuge and deliverer and God the helper and hope and shield and horn of salvation and protector, and the like. If, then, the only-begotten Son has not become these things to men, let the excess of honor be withheld from him according to the law of the heresy. But if we have believed that the only-begotten God both is and is called all these things and more, equal, in every conception of good thing and thought, to the greatness of the goodness in the Father, how could anyone say it is reasonable either not to love such a one or to dishonor the one beloved? No one would say that love must come from the whole heart and strength, but honor from half of it. If, then, the Son is honored from the whole heart, by our devoting all our love to him, what conception will find a greater honor, when the whole heart, as far as it can contain, brings him as its gift the measure of honor through love? So he who teaches a "more honorable" among things honorable by nature is foolish, and by such a comparison he presents the notion of a "less honorable."

To speak of "older" in the case of creation is indeed true. Since the sequence of the works is shown in the order of the days, one might say that heaven is so much earlier than the making of man, and measure the time between by the interval of days. But in the case of the first nature, which transcends every temporal notion and leaves every comprehending conception behind, to think that one goes before in seniority of time and another comes after belongs to the wisdom that has now appeared. For he who declares the Father older than the hypostasis of the Only-begotten declares nothing other than that the Son himself is younger than the things that came into being through the Son, if indeed it is true to say that all ages and every temporal interval came into being after the Son and through the Son. And besides this (and this refutes the absurdity of the doctrine still more), not only will such an argument establish a temporal beginning of existence for the Son, but by the same sequence they will not spare even the Father from being made out to have had his beginning from time. For if some mark lies beyond, by which the generation of the Son is recognized, that mark will evidently also define for the Father the beginning of his hypostasis. For clarity's sake it is perhaps not out of place to examine the argument more carefully. He who teaches that the Father's life is older than the Son's separates the Only-begotten from the God over all by some interval; and he will suppose this interval in between either to be infinite or to be bounded by certain limits and clear marks. But the very notion of a middle will not allow him to call it infinite, or else he will wipe out the notion of Father and Son altogether in his argument. He will not even conceive it as a middle so long as it is infinite and bounded on neither side, since above, the notion of the Father does not cut off the advance of the infinite, and below, the Son does not cut short its infinity; for this is the notion of the infinite: to be poured out in its nature on every side and enclosed by no limit anywhere. Therefore, if the belief that the Father and the Son exist is to remain firm and unchanged, there will be no room to conceive of the interval as infinite; of necessity they will separate the Only-begotten from the Father by a finite one. This, then, is what I say: this argument will make out that the God over all is not from eternity, but has had his beginning from some definite point. What I mean is this, and I will state it by making the thought clear through familiar examples, so that what is unknown may become plain to us through what is seen. When we say, from the scripture of Moses, that man came into being on the fifth day after heaven, we have by this statement implied, without saying it, that before the number of these days heaven did not exist either. Thus what came into being after something defines, by the interval before it, the existence of what is thought of as earlier as well. If we have not made the argument clear enough by this example, the thought can be shown through others too, as when we say that the law given through Moses is four hundred and thirty years later than the promise to Abraham. If, starting from the law, we pass back in our reckoning through the time behind it and reach the end of the years counted, we clearly understand that before that time the promise of God did not yet exist. Many such things could be said, but I will decline to go through each one, as tedious. Let us, then, examine the argument before us as well, following what was said in the examples. According to our opponents' supposition, it was this: to say that, in the hypostasis of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, one is older or younger than another. When, then, we pass beyond the generation of the Son, as the argument of the heresy directs, and then go up through the interval between (which the vain conceit of those who teach these things supposes, since they reckon that something lies between the Son and the Father), if we reach that outermost point at which they bound the interval in between, there we find the life of the God of the universe halting at its upper end as well, so that it necessarily follows that before that point we are not to believe him to be God eternally existing. If you still doubt, let us consider the argument again through examples. Take two rods, one shorter and the other longer. We make the bases of both level and recognize the excess at the tops: setting the end of the shorter beside the other, we know from that point the surplus of the longer; and by measuring off with some measure what the shorter lacks up to the end of the greater, we find how far the greater stands beyond the lesser, whether a cubit or whatever the amount may be. So, if according to our opponents' argument there is some excess of the Father's life over the life of the Son, it is certainly in some definite interval; and they will not admit that this excess lies in what comes after.

For even the enemies of the truth agree that each is alike immortal; but they conceive this difference as lying upward, not making the Son's life equal to the Father, but extending the notion of the Father by the interval of his life. Since, then, an interval is bounded by two limits, it is entirely necessary that the two points that mark the limits of the interval they have conceived be grasped as well. As the one end, according to them, has its beginning from the generation of the Only-begotten, so the other end too will certainly terminate at some other limit, at which the interval, completed, marks itself off. What this limit is, let them say themselves, if they are not ashamed to follow their own arguments. But the argument admits no doubt: they will not find the other end, at the other end of the interval they have fabricated, unless they suppose some beginning of the Unbegotten altogether, from which they mark off in argument the space between, as far as the generation of the Son. This, then, is what we say: he who says that the Son is later than the Father's life by some extension of interval will give the Father too a definite beginning of existence, bounded along with the interval conceived as lying between. And so the much-vaunted unbegottenness of the Father will be found to be stolen away by such a construction at the hands of the very champions of unbegottenness, so that they say the unbegotten God is not eternal and make out that he had the beginning of his being from some beginning; for what has a beginning of being is not without beginning. But if it is right by every means to confess that the Father is without beginning, let no one busy himself about some definite point in the Son's life from which he began to be and is cut off from life beyond that point. It is enough to conceive of the Father before the Son only in the sense of cause, and not to conceive of the Father's life as ever separate and private before the generation of the Son, so that no notion of interval may enter into this supposition before the manifestation of the Son, measured against the life of the Begetter. From that it would necessarily follow that some beginning of the Father's life too is set further back, at which the interval fabricated before him, going upward, will halt, marking off with itself the beginning of the Father's life conceived as prior. Rather, we who confess "from him" should not deny "with him" as well, even if it seems a bold thing, since we are led to this thought by Scripture in its teachings. For when we hear from Wisdom of "a radiance of everlasting light," we contemplate the radiance together with the everlastingness of the archetypal light, conceiving of the cause of the radiance but not admitting an "older." In this way the doctrine of piety will be kept safe for us: the Son's life does not fall short upward, nor is the Father's everlastingness cut short by supposing a defined beginning of the Son. But perhaps one of those who oppose the argument will say that creation too has an acknowledged beginning, and yet the things made are not conceived together with the Creator's everlastingness, nor do they halt, by their own beginning, the boundlessness of the divine life, as the argument, when examined in the case of the Son and the Father, showed the absurdity to do. So it follows from this, he will say, either that creation is coeternal with God or that we may say without fear that the Son too is later; for the argument of the interval will show the absurdity equally when measured from creation to its Maker. But whoever raises such an objection, perhaps without attending carefully to the sense of the doctrine, fights against what was said with things foreign and wholly unrelated to the subject. If he could point to something above creation that had the beginning of its hypostasis at some point of interval, and if all agreed that it is possible to conceive of interval even before creation, he might perhaps have had occasion to try to undo by such arguments the everlastingness of the Only-begotten demonstrated by what has been said. But it is agreed by all the votes of the pious that of all things that exist, some are through creation and some are before creation; that the divine nature is believed to be uncreated, in which the doctrine of piety teaches that the cause and what is from the cause have their hypostasis without interval; and that creation is seen in some extension of interval. All temporal order and sequence of things made is grasped through the ages; but the nature before the ages has escaped the distinctions of older and younger, because none of the things that reason sees as proper to creation is seen together with the divine and blessed life. For all creation, as has been said, having come into being in a certain sequence of order, is measured by the interval of the ages; and if anyone goes up in thought through the sequence of created things to the beginning of things made, he will bound his search by the foundation of the ages.

But the substance above creation, being separate from every notion of interval, has escaped all temporal sequence: it neither sets out from any such beginning nor ends at any limit, found in any manner or in any order. To one who has passed beyond the ages and all that has come into being in them, the contemplation of the divine nature appears to his reasoning like some vast open sea, and it will give no mark in itself indicating any beginning to one who stretches his comprehending imagination to what lies beyond. So the man who busies himself with what is older than the ages and goes up to the beginning of things can halt his reasoning nowhere, since what he seeks always runs on ahead and shows no resting place to the curiosity of his mind. The point is clear even to one who has given the nature of things moderate thought: nothing measures the divine and blessed life. It is not in time; time is from it. Creation, by contrast, starting from some beginning acknowledged in every way, travels toward its own goal through temporal intervals, so that it is possible, as Solomon says somewhere, to examine its beginning and end and middle, marking the sequence of what happens in it by divisions of time. But the transcendent and blessed life, since no interval travels along with it, has nothing that measures it or encloses it. All things that have come into being are circumscribed within their own measures, as pleased the wisdom of the Creator, enclosed as by a boundary in the fitting measure for the harmony of the whole. Therefore, even if the things seen in creation are beyond the reach of weak human reasoning, it is not doubted that all things are bounded by the power of their Maker and lie within the limits of creation. But the power that made things, which circumscribes within itself the nature of all that has come into being, has itself nothing that contains it. It shuts up within itself every thought that hastens to go up to the beginning of the divine life, and outruns all the busy curiosity that strives to reach the end of the unbounded. All the ascent and effort of the mind beyond the ages will rise only so high as to see that what it seeks cannot be traversed. The age and what lies within it seem to be a kind of measure and boundary of the movement and activity of human reasoning, while what lies beyond them remains ungraspable and inaccessible to reasoning, pure of everything that can come under human comprehension. For where no form, no place, no size, no measure of time, nor anything else comprehensible is conceived, the comprehending power of the mind, seeking something to lay hold of, necessarily slips off the incomprehensible nature on every side and seeks among the ages and the creation in them what is akin to itself and of its own kind. I think this is known to everyone who has considered existing things even moderately: that the Maker of the universe laid down beforehand the ages and the space within them as a kind of receptacle for the things that come into being, and creates all things in them. None of the things that have come or are coming into being through creation can have its being otherwise than in place or in time. But the nature that lacks nothing, everlasting and containing all that exists, is neither in place nor in time; it is before these and above them in an ineffable way, contemplated by itself through faith alone, neither measured by ages nor running alongside times, but standing by itself and established in itself, seen together neither with the past nor with the future. Nor is there anything beside it, outside it, by whose passing something goes by and something is yet to come. These are the experiences proper to things in creation, whose life is split by the division of time into hope and memory. But to that lofty and blessed power all things are always equally present, as in the present, and what is still awaited is seen as held fast by the power that contains all things. This, then, is the substance in which, as the Apostle says, all things hold together, and in which we who each share in being live and move and are; which is higher than every beginning and offers no marks of its own nature, but is known only in its being incomprehensible. For this is its most proper mark: that its nature is higher than every characterizing thought. Creation, then, because it does not have the same account as the uncreated, is by this very fact separated from comparison and fellowship with its Maker: by the difference in substance, I mean, and by admitting in itself an account of its own that expresses its nature, having nothing in common with the one from whom it came to be. But the divine nature, being foreign to all the marks seen as peculiar to creation, leaves beneath itself the divisions of time (older and younger, I mean) and notions of place, so that not even "higher" can properly be said of it.

For everything conceived in the uncreated power is above, is beginning, and holds the place of what is most sovereign. It has been shown by what has been said that the only-begotten Son and the Spirit of God are not to be searched for within creation but believed to be above creation. Creation, then, may perhaps be grasped at some beginning proper to it by the inquisitiveness of those who are eager to search out such things; but what is above it would not come any further into knowledge by these means, since no indicative mark is found in it before the ages. If, then, the marvelous realities and names, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, are conceived in the uncreated nature, how is it possible to think that what the mind grasps by busying and meddling with things below, placing one before another by comparison through some temporal interval, holds also for the uncreated substance that is before the ages? In it the Father is conceived as without beginning, unbegotten, and always Father. From him, immediately and without interval, the only-begotten Son is conceived together with the Father. Through him and with him, before any empty and unsubsisting thought can slip in between, the Holy Spirit too is at once grasped in conjunction. The Spirit does not come after the Son in existence, so that the Only-begotten might ever be conceived without the Spirit; but having the cause of its being from the God of the universe, from whom the only-begotten Light also is, and shining forth through the true Light, it is cut off from the Father or the Only-begotten neither by interval nor by otherness of nature. For there is no interval in the nature before the ages, and there is no difference in substance. It is not possible to conceive a difference of the uncreated from the uncreated; and the Holy Spirit is uncreated, as was shown in the preceding arguments. Since all who accept the plainness of the simpler preaching hold these things to be so, what occasion is there to try to undo the conjunction of the Son with the Father by means of creation, as though it were necessary either that the Son be coeternal with creation as well or that he be thought later? For neither is the generation of the Only-begotten within the ages, nor is creation before the ages. In no way, then, is it fitting to divide the nature that is without interval, or to insert some suspicion of interval in the cause that made all things by saying that he who gave being to all once was not. The argument given before is therefore true: with the unbegottenness of the Father the everlastingness of the Only-begotten is conceived together, as begotten; but if any interval were supposed between, by which the generation of the Son is cut off from the life of the Father, that interval would also define a beginning of the life of the God over all, which is absurd. But nothing prevents creation, which in its own nature is something other than the Creator, from being conceived as starting from a beginning proper to it, as we said, in no way coinciding with the pure nature that is before the ages. To say that heaven or earth or anything else seen in creation came into being from what is not, or, as the Apostle says, from things that do not appear, brings no discredit on the Maker of the universe, since we have learned from the divine Scripture that these things neither are from eternity nor will remain forever. But if anything believed in the Holy Trinity were believed not always to coexist with the Father, and some notion were conceived, according to the argument of the heresy, that at some time stripped the God over all of the glory of the Son and the Holy Spirit, then, according to the argument of the heresy, God will be shown to be separated from nothing less than every good and divine thing and thought. But if the Father, who exists before the ages, is always glorious, and the Son before the ages is the glory of the Father, and likewise the Spirit of Christ, always contemplated with the Son and the Father, is the glory of the Son, from where did this wise man, and from what schooling, learn to declare an "older" among things timeless and a "more honorable" among things honorable by nature, placing one above the other by comparison and dishonoring the next by his preference for one? For the contrast with "more honorable" plainly shows where it tends. And what does he add to what he has said, and what follows? "Since," he says, "the same energies bring about sameness of works, and differing works show that the energies too differ." Well has the noble fellow come to the unassailable defense of his argument! "The same energies bring about sameness of works," he says. Let us look at the argument, then, in the case of real things. The energy of fire, by heating, is one; but let us consider what agreement its works have. Bronze melts; clay hardens; wax is consumed; other living creatures, if they get into it, are destroyed, but the salamander is brought to life; tow burns; asbestos is washed clean by the flame as if in water.