Against Eunomius 1.439–1.451

For as the first-formed is father of a son, so conversely the father is first-formed of a son." If this were said in a tavern, what applause and laughter would burst from the drinkers, guffawing at the cleverness of the invention! With such arguments the wise theologian makes his stand against us and runs down the doctrine, when in truth he needs a tutor and a cane, so that he might learn that not everything predicated of something looks in its meaning to one and the same thing, as the example we gave of Abel and Adam shows. It is true to call Adam both the father of Abel and the work of God; but it does not follow, because he is both, that both are said with reference to Abel. So too in the case of the God of the universe: the title "Father" shows what is properly signified by such a word, that he has begotten the Son, and it also indicates that no cause is conceived before the true Father. But it is not necessary, whenever we mention the Son, to stop saying "Father" and call him "unbegotten of the Son"; nor again, if being without beginning is passed over in silence when we speak of the relation to the Son, to cast unbegottenness out of our thought of God. Yet he rejects such usage of names and, like the mimes of the comic stage, mocks the argument, making a joke of the doctrines with the outlandishness of his sophisms. Let me recall his words once more: "If it is the same to say 'unbegotten' or 'Father,' we shall be allowed to leave the word 'Father,' substitute 'unbegotten,' and say: 'The unbegotten is unbegotten of a Son.' For as the unbegotten is Father of a Son, so conversely the Father is unbegotten of a Son." But let us laugh back at him too, if you like, turning the sophism round against him. If "Father" is not the same as "unbegotten," the Son of the Father will not be Son of the unbegotten; for since he has relation to the Father alone, he will be wholly alien in nature to one who is something else and does not coincide with the notion of Father. So if the Father is something other than the unbegotten, and the title "Father" does not include the meaning of "unbegotten," the Son, being one, cannot be divided into relations with two realities and be the same Son of both the Father and the unbegotten. And as it was thought absurd to call God "unbegotten of a Son," an equal absurdity will certainly be found in the converse, in calling the only-begotten Son "Son of the unbegotten." So one of two things follows. Either "Father" is the same as "unbegotten," so that the Son of the Father is also Son of the unbegotten, and our argument was mocked in vain; or, if the Father is something other than the unbegotten, the Son of the Father is estranged from relation to the unbegotten. And if this prevails, that the Only-begotten is not from the unbegotten, the logical sequence will certainly show that for them the Father is begotten; for what exists, but does not exist unbegottenly, certainly has a begotten existence. If, then, according to them the Father is begotten, being something other than the unbegotten, where is that much-vaunted unbegottenness? Where is the foundation and base of the heretical tower-building? It is gone and has vanished through the slipperiness of the sophisms. Unbegottenness has slipped from the grasp of those who till now seemed to hold it; and the construction of the "unlike," like a dream, has melted away and escaped the touch of reason, flying off together with unbegottenness. So it is when a falsehood is honored above the truth: even if it flourishes a little while by deceit, it quickly collapses upon itself and is dissolved by its own constructions. But we have brought these things forward only so far as to smile at the cleverness of the retort made by the party of the "unlike." It is time to bring the argument back to its course. Eunomius does not want the meaning of "unbegotten" to be conveyed also by the word "Father," so that he may establish that the Only-begotten once was not. Indeed this question is often heard from his disciples: "How can he who is be begotten?" The cause of this, I think, is their unwillingness to depart from the human usage of names even in thinking about divine things. But let us kindly straighten out the very fiction of their supposition, by saying what we know on this point. Names signify one thing among us, Eunomius, and convey another meaning in the case of the transcendent power. In all other respects too the divine nature is walled off from the human by a great gulf, and experience shows nothing here like what is conjectured of that nature by guesses and suppositions. In the same way, in the things that names signify, even if there is a sameness of name between human things and the eternal, the things signified by the names are separated according to the measure of the distance between the natures.

For example, the Lord in a parable calls God a man who is master of a house; but this name is common in ordinary life as well. Is the account the same, then, of the man among us and of that man? Is our house like that great house of which the Apostle speaks, in which are vessels of gold and silver and those reckoned of other materials? Or are those vessels of another kind, which no one could easily recognize, seen in incorruption and blessedness, while ours are of another, coming from earth and dissolving into earth? So too in almost everything else there is a sameness of name between our things and divine ones, which, with the identity of names, shows a great difference in the things signified. That is why we find the names of members and of the senses applied alike to us and to the divine life, which all men confess to be beyond the senses: fingers, arm, hand, eye and eyelids, hearing, heart, feet, sandals, horses, horsemanship, chariots, and countless such things are transferred figuratively by Scripture from human life to show divine things. As each of these names is said in a human way but is not meant in a human way, so too the name "father," even if it is said alike of our nature and of the divine, varies in what the word signifies according to the measure of the difference between the realities underlying the names. We conceive generation among men in one way, and we form our conjectures about divine generation in another. A man is born in time, and some place certainly receives his life; without these he cannot exist by nature. For this reason temporal divisions are necessarily found in a man's life: what is before him, what is with him, and what comes after. It is true to say of anything begotten that, not having existed once, it now is, and that at some time it will cease to be again. But in the generation before the ages these temporal notions, since they have nothing akin to that nature, do not enter in for those who reason soberly. He who considers the divine life, passing beyond "once" and "later" and "earlier" and all that signifies this temporal extension, will contemplate lofty things loftily, and will not think that the nature that has no master is subject to everything he sees in human generation. Here, passion precedes the constitution of a human being, and certain bodily materials are laid down for the making of the living creature. Nature, which works such wonders, serves the divine will, gathering from every side what is proper and suited to the completion of what comes into being: from the elements of the world as much as suffices of each, the measure of time's cooperation, and, from the nourishment of those who form the offspring, as much as is proper to what is being formed. In a word, nature, passing through all the things by which human life is constituted, brings what is not into birth; and that is why we say that what is not comes to be, because, not existing at one time, it begins to exist at another. But in divine generation the mind does not admit the service of nature, nor the completion of time contributing to what comes to be, nor anything that reason observed in generation here below. One who does not tread upon divine things with fleshly thoughts will not fall in with any of these low notions, but will seek a thought that befits the greatness of what is signified. He will not conceive of passion in the impassible; he will not reckon that the Maker of all nature needs the cooperation of nature; he will not admit temporal extension in the eternal life. Having understood divine generation as pure of all these, he will agree that only this is shown by the meaning of "Father": that the Only-begotten is not without beginning, in the sense that he has from the Father the cause of his being, but without reckoning a beginning of his hypostasis, since no mark of such a beginning can be conceived. For since earlier and younger and all such notions are found in temporal intervals, if you take away time in thought, all such marks are taken away with it and drawn off together with time. Since, then, he who exists with the Father before the ages, in the ineffable manner, does not admit "once," he exists as begotten, yet does not begin to be at any time. He has his life neither in time nor in place; and when place and time and every such notion are removed in the case of the hypostasis of the Only-begotten, what is conceived before him is the Father alone.

But the Only-begotten, being in the Father, as he himself says, cannot by nature admit the suspicion that he once was not. If the Father too once was not, the everlastingness of the Son would necessarily be cut off upward along with the nonexistence of the Father. But if the Father always is, how can the Son once not be, when he cannot be conceived by himself apart from the Father, but is always named with the Father, though unspoken? The title "Father" carries the meaning of both persons equally, since the notion of the Son enters of itself with this word. When was the Son not? In what was his not-being found? In place? There was no place. In time? The Lord is before all times. If, then, he was before these, when was he not? And if he was in the Father, in what was he not? Tell us, you who see the unseen. What did your reasoning shape in between? What void of the Only-begotten did you conceive, whether a reality or a notion, which extends alongside the Father and shows his life to be longer than that of the Only-begotten? And why do I say this? Not even in the case of human beings can one properly say that someone was begotten when he did not exist. Levi was tithed by Melchizedek many generations before his own birth in the flesh. So says the Apostle: "Levi, who receives tithes, has been tithed"; and he added the proof of what he said: "he was in the loins of his father when Abraham met" the priest of the Most High. If, then, according to the apostolic testimony, a man is begotten while in a certain way already existing, having pre-existed in his begetter through the commonness of substance, how do they dare to bring this phrase against the divine nature, saying that he who is in the Father was begotten when he was not, when the Lord says, "I am in the Father, and the Father in me"? Clearly each is said to be in the other in a different sense: the Son in the Father, as the beauty of the image in the archetypal form; the Father in the Son, as the archetypal beauty in its own image. In hand-made images the time between certainly separates the form taken over from the archetype. But there it is impossible to separate the one from the other, as the Apostle says: neither the stamp from the hypostasis, nor the radiance from the divine glory, nor the image from the goodness; whoever has thought of one of these has received in his thought, conjointly, what is conceived with it. "Being," he says, "the radiance of the glory": being, not becoming. By this the impiety on either side is clearly dismissed. We are not to think the Only-begotten unbegotten, since he says "radiance of the glory" (for the radiance is from the glory, and not conversely the glory from the radiance); nor that he once began to be, since the testimony of "being" expresses the continuity and everlastingness of the Son and his transcendence of every temporal meaning. What occasion, then, have our opponents to bring forward this petty question to the ruin of piety, putting it to us as invincible for establishing their own doctrine, and asking, "Is he who is begotten?" We can boldly answer them that he who is in the unbegotten was begotten from him, having from him the cause of his being ("For I," he says, "live because of the Father"), but that his beginning cannot be stated. Since there is no intervening reality, or notion, or temporal interval by which the being of the Son is distinguished and separated from the Father, no point is conceived from which the Only-begotten, disjoined from the Father's life, appears from some beginning of his own. If, then, there is no other beginning that governs the Son's life, but the pious account sees only the Father before the hypostasis of the Son, without interval, and the Father is without beginning and unbegotten, as even our opponents' testimony agrees, how does he who is seen in the one without beginning receive a beginning of being? And what harm comes to the doctrine of piety from agreeing with the words our opponents put forward as absurd, when they say, "Was he who is begotten?" We do not say that he who is receives generation in the manner of Nicodemus's crude perplexity before the Lord, when he thought it impossible for one who exists to come to a second birth. We say that the Son, having his being dependent on the one who is always and without beginning, rising together with anyone who busies himself about what is older and reaching beforehand the furthest point of the mind's inquisitiveness, blended with all our notions of the Father, neither begins to be nor is unbegotten, but was both begotten and was: confessing his generation from the Father by the account of cause, and not admitting "once he was not" by the everlastingness of his life.

But the man of superfluous sophistries opposes what we have said and splits the substance of the Only-begotten off from the nature of the Father, because the one has been begotten and the other is unbegotten. There are so many names piously contemplated in the divine nature in which no variation is seen in the Son, and all apply equally to both; yet he mentions none of the others by which what is common is known, but fastens on the name of unbegottenness alone. And he does not accept even its usual and customary meaning, but makes a new notion of "unbegotten," setting aside the common understanding of the word. What, then, is the reason for this? It is not without some great reason that he draws the argument away from the usual meaning of names and makes it strange by altering the meaning of words. He knows precisely that if the use of names were kept to ordinary custom, he would find no strength for overturning sound doctrine; but if the words were moved away from their common and customary meanings, he could easily corrupt the doctrines along with his perversion of the word. Let us come to the very words that are being wronged. If, in keeping with the common understanding of doctrine, he had accepted that God is called unbegotten because he has not been begotten, the whole engine of their heresy would have collapsed, with the sophism about unbegottenness pulled out from under it. Suppose he had been persuaded by this reasoning, in agreement with almost everyone who belongs to the church of God, that as the God over all is conceived as invisible, impassible, and incorporeal, so also as unbegotten; and suppose he had agreed that each of these names signifies what in no way belongs to God: no body, no passion, no color, no having one's being from a cause. If he had supposed these things to be so, their argument of unlikeness would have had no force, since in everything else seen about the God of the universe even our opponents grant the likeness of the Only-begotten to the Father. To prevent this, he sets the name of unbegottenness before all the names concerning God, those, I mean, that indicate the transcendent power, and has made it the base from which to attack our doctrine. He transfers the opposition in utterance between "begotten" and "unbegotten" to the persons to whom the names are applied, and through this he sophistically makes out the otherness of the substances from the difference of the names. He does not agree that one is called begotten because he has been begotten, or unbegotten because he has not been begotten, but says that the one has his substance from generation; I do not know what kind of wisdom led him by the hand to such an understanding. If anyone studies the meanings of the names by themselves, removing in thought the persons to whom the names seem to be assigned, he will find how empty is the sense of what Eunomius says. Let no one think it right, because the Father is conceived before the Son according to the true account of the faith, that the order of the names too should be arranged according to the dignity and order of the persons underlying them. Rather, let him consider the names by themselves: which of them comes first in the order of conception (the name, I say again, not the reality signified by the name), and which of them indicates the positing of some notion, and which the removal of what was posited. For example (for clarity's sake I think the argument should be set out through similar cases): education and lack of education, passion and freedom from passion, and everything of this kind; which of these is conceived first? Those that present the removal of what was posited, or those that present the positing of the subject? I say the latter. Education, anger, and passion are conceived first, and then the removal of what was conceived. So too with generation and ungeneration. And let no one slander the argument through self-made religion, as though it placed the Son before his begetter. We are not making out that the Son is placed before the Father and conceived before him, if the argument deals with the meaning of "begotten" and "unbegotten." Generation, then, signifies the positing of some reality or notion, and ungeneration, as I said, the removal of what was posited; so that in every way the name "generation" is conceived before the name "ungeneration." Why then do they force themselves to apply to the Father what is second in order among the names, and think that a notion which removes something indicates and comprehends the substance of the name? And they are vexed and provoked with those who expose the unsoundness of their arguments. See how he bears a grudge against the one who detected the unsoundness and weakness of his mischief, and how he retaliates as he can; and he can do so only by abuse and insult, a power of which he has a great surplus. As writers who aim at fine style use certain particles to fill out what is lacking in the rhythm, putting harmony and euphony into the arrangement of their diction, so in most of what he says he embroiders his treatise with abuse, as if adorning himself with the abundance of his power to insult.

Once again we are fools; once again we miss right reasoning, undertake the argument without the preparation the task demands, and fall short of the speaker's meaning. All these things and more are what our teacher is called by that steady mouth. And perhaps his anger is not without cause; the speech-writer has a just grievance. Why did Basil have to vex him by exposing the weakness of this argument, stripping bare and making plain to the simpler folk the blasphemy concealed under the plausibility of his sophisms? Why did he not cover the rotten parts of the doctrine with silence, instead of pillorying the poor wretch, when he ought to have pitied him and covered the indecency of his argument in quiet? Instead he exposes and makes a public spectacle of a man who is in some way honored among his own disciples for wisdom and shrewdness. Eunomius said somewhere in his discourses, "Unbegottenness follows God." Our teacher took him up on the word, pointing out that what "follows" belongs among things observed from outside, while substance indicates the meaning not of anything external, but of being itself, as it is. For this the gentle and invincible man is indignant and pours out reproaches in abundance, because Basil heard what was said and perceived its sense as well. What wrong did he do, if he followed the meaning of what was written attentively? If he did not take what was said according to its sense, then your words stand, and we shall stay in ignorance. But if you blush at the refutation, why do you not erase the words from what you wrote, instead of abusing the one who quotes them? "Yes," he says, "but he did not understand the intent of the argument." What wrong do we do, then, if, being men, we guessed the meaning from what was said, since we have no comprehension of what is hidden in the heart? It belongs to God to see the unseen, to look upon the characters of things that cannot be comprehended in any way, and to recognize the unlikeness of invisible things; we judge only by what we hear. It was said, then, "follows God"; and following along, we supposed that he meant unbegottenness. Again it is said, "or rather unbegottenness itself is substance." Here we could no longer understand the coherence, since we perceived much that was incongruous and odd in the meanings. If unbegottenness follows God, and unbegottenness is substance, the argument constructs the notion of two substances in the same subject: God exists, in the way he is believed to exist, and has another substance following him, which they call unbegottenness, something other than the one of whom it is a consequence, as our teacher says. If he bids us understand these things so, let him forgive us simple men, who cannot attend to such subtle speculations. But if he rejects this account and denies that he speaks of a double substance in God, one known from his Godhead and the other from his unbegottenness, then let this man, who is neither rash nor wicked, advise himself not to give much room to abuse in contests for the truth, but to explain to us uneducated people how what follows and what precedes are not one thing and another, but both become one. For in what he now says in defense of his argument the absurdity remains much the same, and, as he himself says, the addition of those few words corrects nothing of the incoherence of what was said. What teaching is to be found in them I have not yet been able to see. His very words shall be quoted verbatim. "We said," he says, "'or rather it is itself unbegotten,' not combining with being what was shown to follow, but fitting 'follows' to the title and 'is' to the substance. When these are put together, the whole statement would be this: that the name 'unbegotten' follows, since he is himself unbegotten." What interpreter shall we bring in for what he says? "Not combining with being," he says, "what was shown to follow." Perhaps some solvers of riddles would say that by "combining" he meant "connecting." But how could anyone recognize the sense and coherence of the rest? What appeared from the sequence, he says, belongs properly not to the substance but to the title. But the title, most wise sir: what is it? Is it out of tune with the substance, or does it agree with it in meaning? If the name is foreign to the substance, how is the substance characterized by the title "unbegotten"? But if, as you yourself say, the substance is aptly comprehended by unbegottenness, how is it divided here, so that the name of the substance follows one thing, and the substance itself another? And what is the composition of the whole statement? "The name 'unbegotten' follows God," he says, "since he is himself unbegotten." Does he say that this name follows God as being something other than the unbegotten?