Against Eunomius 9.819–10.835

That is why the Lord, wishing his disciples to be far from such error, so that they too might never be carried off in their reasonings to non-existence by seeking something older than the hypostasis of the Only-begotten, says, “I am in the Father, and the Father in me”—meaning that neither is non-being in being nor being in non-being. And the very order of the saying interprets the piety of the doctrine. For since the Father is not from the Son but the Son from the Father, he says first, “I am in the Father,” showing that he is not from another but from him; then he turns the statement round, “and the Father in me,” signifying that one who goes beyond the Son in his curiosity passes beyond the notion of the Father as well. For one who is in something cannot be found outside that in which he is. So he is vain who does not deny that the Father is in the Son and yet imagines that he has grasped something of the Father outside the Son; and vainly does the shadow-boxing of our enemies over the word “unbegottenness” wander about, treading on emptiness among non-existent things.

Rather, if the whole absurdity of the argument must be brought to light, let us be allowed to spend a little more time on this consideration. For since they say that the Only-begotten God came into being later, after the Father, it is necessarily found that the unbegotten itself, whatever they imagine it to be, appears together with the notion of evils. For who does not know that, as non-being is set over against being, so to every good thing and name its opposite is set over against it—evil to the good, falsehood to truth, darkness to light, and all things that in the same way stand over against each other as opposites—where the opposition admits nothing in between, and the two cannot be together at the same time, but the presence of the one removes its opposite, and with the withdrawal of the other the opposite comes into being? These things having been agreed by us, this too is plain to all: that, as Moses says that there was darkness before the creation of light, so too in the case of the Son, if, according to the account of the heresy, the Father made him then, when he willed, then before he made him that light which the Son is did not exist; and when the light did not yet exist, its opposite cannot have failed to exist. For we have learned from other things too that nothing made by the Creator is idle, but what is lacking is brought in to the things that exist by creation. It is plain, then, that if God made the Son, he made him because of something lacking in the nature of beings. As, then, when the perceptible light was lacking there was darkness, and if the light had not come to be darkness would certainly have prevailed, so too, when the Son did not yet exist, the true light itself and all that the Son is did not yet exist. For what exists, even by the testimony of the heresy, has no need to come into being; so if he made him, he certainly made what was not. Before the Son came into being, then, according to them, truth, clearly, had not come into being, nor the intelligible light, nor the fountain of life, nor the nature of anything at all noble and good; and with the removal of each of these, what is understood as its opposite subsists in its place. When there is no light, there cannot but be darkness; and likewise in the other cases, in place of each of the things understood as better, when any of them is absent, its opposite must certainly exist instead of what is lacking. It is wholly necessary, then, according to the account of the heresy, to say that when the Father was about to will to make the Son, since none of the things that the Son is existed, all their opposites were about him: darkness instead of light, falsehood instead of truth, death instead of life, evil instead of good. For he who creates creates what is not; for what is, as Eunomius says, has no need of begetting. And with things contemplated as opposites, the better cannot fail to exist in any other way than by the worse existing. These, then, are the gifts that the wisdom of the heresy brings to the Father, by which it dishonors the everlastingness of the Son, setting the catalog of evils before God the Father prior to the manifestation of the Son. And let no one think to overturn, by appeal to the rest of creation, the absurdity of the doctrine shown by this sequence. For perhaps someone will say that, as when heaven did not exist there was nothing opposite to it, so too when the Son, who is truth, had not yet come into being, we are not necessarily forced to agree that its opposite existed.

To him one can reply that to heaven nothing is opposed—unless one were to say that not being is opposed to its being—but to virtue what belongs to wickedness certainly stands opposed. And the Lord is virtue. So when heaven did not exist there was nothing, but when the good did not exist its opposite was. He, then, who says that the good was not will certainly agree, even against his will, that evil was. “But the Father too,” he says, “is perfect virtue and life and unapproachable light and all lofty concepts and names, so that it is not necessary, when the only-begotten light did not yet exist, to conceive the corresponding darkness as its opposite.” But this is my own argument: that darkness never was. For never was there no light; for in the light the light always is, as the prophecy says. But if, according to the account of the heresy, the unbegotten light is one thing and the begotten another, the one from everlasting and the other coming into being afterward, it is wholly necessary, on the one hand, that its opposite never find room to stand over against the everlasting light—for since that light always shines, the working of darkness has no occasion in its case—but on the other hand, in the case of the light that came into being afterward, as they say, it is impossible that the light did not shine out of darkness; darkness will in every way and entirely be enclosed between the everlasting light and the light that came into being later. For there would have been no need to construct the later light unless what was created was useful for something; and the one use of light is to dissolve the darkness that prevails. What was light uncreatedly is by itself what it is by nature; but what is created certainly comes into being for some purpose. So the darkness must exist first, for whose sake the brightness is necessarily fashioned; and there is no argument by which one can soften the conclusion that darkness came before the manifestation of the begotten light, if it is believed to have been constructed afterward. But such a thing is beyond all impiety. So it has been clearly shown that the Father of truth did not make truth when it did not exist, but, being the fountain of light and truth and of every good, shone forth from himself the only-begotten light of truth, through whom the glory of his hypostasis is always stamped. So the blasphemy of those who say that the Son was added to God later by creation is refuted on every side.

But let us keep to the matter in hand. For going on a little, he fights against those who confess that human nature is too weak to comprehend what is incomprehensible, and he goes through boasts of this kind, belittling our position in these words: “For even if someone’s mind is darkened by ill will, and for that reason he grasps nothing of what lies ahead, it does not follow that the discovery of beings is out of reach for other men too.” But I would say to him that one who says the discovery of beings is within reach has certainly led his mind forward by some path and sequence through the knowledge of beings, and, having trained himself by grasping things easily comprehended and smaller, has in this way applied his comprehending impression to things beyond all thought as well. So let him who boasts that he has grasped the knowledge of beings explain how the smallest of the things that appear to us is constituted in its nature, so that through what is known he may gain credit about what is hidden too. Let him explain in words what the nature of the ant is: whether its life is held together by breath and respiration; whether it is managed by internal organs like the other animals; whether its body is enclosed by bones; whether the hollows of its bones are filled within with marrow; whether its joints are braced by sinews and ligaments; whether the position of its sinews is held in place by wrappings of muscles and glands; whether the marrow runs along the vertebrae of the spine from the crown of the head to the tail; whether, enclosed by the sinewy membrane, it imparts the power of impulse to the moving limbs; whether there is a liver in it, and a gall-bladder on the liver, and kidneys and heart, and arteries and veins, and membranes and midriff and diaphragms; whether it is bare or hairy; whether it is divided into male and female; in what part of the body its sight is seated; whether it shares in the sense of smell; whether it has single or cloven feet; how long it lives; what the manner of their generation from one another is; how long the offspring is carried; and how it is that neither do all ants walk nor are all winged, but some belong to the creatures that go on the ground while others appear in the air. Let him, then, who boasts of having grasped the knowledge of beings first make plain to us the nature of the ant, and then let him discourse on the nature of the power that surpasses every mind. But if he has not yet grasped knowledge of the nature of the tiniest ant, how does he boast of having comprehended with his comprehending reason him who holds all creation in himself? And yet he says that those who confess the weakness of human nature in their own case have the senses of their souls darkened, and reach neither anything ahead nor anything above their heads.

But let us see what the one who has the knowledge of beings knows beyond the rest. Let us hear his overweening voice: “Otherwise,” he says, “the Lord would have called himself door in vain, if there were no one passing through to the understanding and contemplation of the Father; and in vain would he have called himself way, if he offered no ease to those who wish to come to the Father. And how would he be light, if he did not enlighten human beings, nor illuminate the eye of the soul to the understanding both of himself and of the transcendent light?” Now if he were going through reasonings of his own that escape the understanding of his hearers by their subtlety, it might perhaps have been possible to be misled by the cleverness of the argument, since the meaning in it often escapes the hearer. But since he puts forward the divine words, no one at all will blame those who believe that the God-inspired teaching is set before all in common. Since, then, he says, the Lord was named “door,” it is established from this that the substance of God is comprehensible. But the Gospel does not admit this meaning. Let us hear the divine voice itself: “I am the door,” he says; “if anyone enters through me, he will be saved, and will go in and go out and find pasture.” What, then, in these words is the knowledge of the substance? For since several things are said, and each has its own meaning according to what it signifies, it is neither possible to put all of them into the account of the substance, lest the divine be thought a mixture of different things, nor easy to find among those listed the one that might more properly fit the matter at hand. The Lord is the door. “If anyone enters through me,” he says, “he will be saved, and will go in and go out and find pasture.” Shall we say that he means the entrance instead of the substance, or the salvation of those who enter, or the pasture, or the going out, or the finding? For each of these is distinct in what it signifies and does not agree with the others. For being inside seems at first glance to be the opposite of going out, and so with the rest; for pasture is one thing in its own account, and finding something else besides. Which of these, then, is thought to be the substance of the Father?

For surely no one, by naming all these things, which do not agree with one another in meaning, will indicate the simple and uncompounded substance through things that are discordant. And how would the Word be true that “no one has ever seen God,” and “whom no human being has seen or can see,” and “there is none who will see the face of the Lord and live,” if either being inside the door or finding the pasture outside is thought to be the substance of the Father? Yet because this is not so, we will not suppose that the name “door” is idle and meaningless when said of the Lord. For he himself is truly both “a door of protection” and “a house of refuge,” as David names him: through himself he receives those who enter, in himself he saves those who have come inside, and again through himself he leads them out to the pasture of the virtues. And he becomes all things to those who are being saved, so as to make himself fitting for each: way and guide, door of protection and house of refuge, water of rest and place of green grass, which in the Gospel he calls pasture. But the new theologian says that the Lord was named “door” for the sake of knowledge of the Father’s substance. Why, then, does he not drag the rock too, and the stone, and the fountain, and the tree, and the rest of the names to the same meaning, so as to confirm his doctrine by a multitude of outlandish testimonies, since he could fit to each of these the same account that he gave of the way and the door and the light? But I, taught this by the God-inspired Scripture, boldly declare that he who is above every name becomes many-named for us, named according to the variety of his benefits: light, when he scatters the gloom of ignorance; life, when he grants immortality; way, when he leads us by the hand from error to the truth. So too he is called for us tower of strength, and city of protection, and fountain, and rock, and vine, and physician, and resurrection, and all such things, distributing himself variously among the benefits he gives us. But those who are sharp-sighted beyond human nature interpret substances through names—who see the incomprehensible and overlook the comprehensible. For him whom no human being has seen or can see they confidently claim not only to see but to measure; but faith, which alone is proportioned to our understanding, they do not see with the eye of the soul, putting the knowledge that comes from their reasonings in front of it. So I have heard the history accuse the sons of Benjamin, who did not look to the law, yet shot at a hair—the word showing, I think, their preoccupation with what is vain: that in things useless and unsubstantial they were far-shooting and skilled marksmen, but in things plainly profitable ignorant and unpracticed. For the history adds to this their calamity: how, raging after the lawlessness of Sodom, they were destroyed when the whole army of the people of Israel took up arms against them. And it seems to me a kindly counsel to offer the young archers: not to wish to shoot at a hair while failing to see the door of faith, but, letting go of the vain labor over the incomprehensible, not to forfeit the gain that lies at hand, which is found through faith alone.

But when I look at the rest of his treatise, I shrink from taking the argument further, for a shudder runs through my heart at what is said. For he wants to show that the Son is something other than eternal life—and if eternal life were not seen in the Only-begotten, faith would be shown to be vain, the preaching empty, baptism superfluous, the labors of the martyrs for nothing, and the sweats of the apostles useless and unprofitable for human life. For why did they proclaim Christ, if, according to Eunomius, the power of eternal life is not in him? And to what end do they call believers by the name of Christ, if not that through it they might share in eternal life? “For the mind of those who have believed in the Lord,” he says, “having peered above every perceptible and intelligible substance, is not by nature able to stop even at the begetting of the Son, but goes on beyond it, longing, in its desire for eternal life, to meet the First.” Which of these things should I lament more: that the wretches think eternal life is not in the Son, or that they view the hypostasis of the Only-begotten as so low and earthbound that, having mounted up to his beginning in their reasonings, they imagine they peer above the life of the Son in their thought, and, leaving the Lord’s begetting somewhere below, go on beyond it in their desire for eternal life? For what is said has this meaning: that the human mind, searching out the knowledge of beings and lifting itself above the perceptible and intelligible creation, will leave below itself, like the rest, God the Word who was in the beginning; and it comes to be in that where God the Word was not, intruding by the curiosity of the mind into what lies above the life of the Son, and searching there for eternal life, where the Only-begotten God is not.

“For in desire for eternal life,” he says, “it is carried by the mind to what lies beyond the Son”—as though it certainly did not find in the Son what it was seeking. If, then, eternal life is not in the Son, then he who said, “I am the life,” is caught out as a liar; or else he is life, but not eternal. But what is not eternal is certainly temporary; and that kind of life is common to the irrational animals too. Where, then, is the greatness of true life, if irrational nature shares in it as well? And how will the Word be the same as life, if by a temporary life he makes his home in irrational nature? For if, according to the great John, the Word is life, and this life is temporary and not eternal, as the heresy holds, and temporary life also comes to be in other creatures, what follows by consequence? Either that irrational things are rational, or that the Word must be confessed to be irrational. Do we still need words to refute their accursed and wicked blasphemy? Are such things said in a way that keeps their counsel of denying the Lord hidden? For the apostle says plainly that what is not eternal is temporary; and these men see eternal life in the substance of the Father alone, and, estranging the Son from the nature of the Father, cut him off from eternal life as well. What else is this but a manifest denial and rejection of faith in the Lord, since the apostle says clearly that those who have hoped in Christ in this life only are the most pitiable of all? If, then, the Lord is life but not eternal, the life is certainly temporary and fleeting, at work in the present time, and the apostle pities those who hope in it as having missed the true life. Yet those enlightened in Eunomius’s school pass beyond him and are carried in their reasonings to what lies beyond the Son, seeking eternal life in what is contemplated outside the Only-begotten.

What can one say about such evils but what calls forth lament and tears? Oh, how we should groan over this wretched and pitiable generation that has brought forth such a crop of evils! The zealous Jeremiah once lamented the Israelite people, when they agreed with Jechoniah, the leader in idolatry, in doing evil, and for their lawlessness against true religion were condemned to captivity among the Assyrians, driven from the sanctuary and removed far from the inheritance of their fathers. These laments seem to me more fittingly sung now, when the imitator of Jechoniah drags those he leads away to this new kind of idolatry, driving them from the inheritance of the fathers—I mean, from the faith. For them, quite as in the history, the deportation to Babylon takes place, as they are removed from the Jerusalem above, that is, from the Church of God, to this confusion of wicked doctrines; for “Babylon” is interpreted “confusion.” And like the blinded Jechoniah, this man too, having willingly deprived himself of the light of truth, has become the spoil of the Babylonian tyrant, not learning, poor wretch, that the Gospel teaches that eternal life is seen equally in Father and Son and Holy Spirit. Of the Father the Word says, “To know him is eternal life”; of the Son, “Everyone who believes in him has eternal life”; and of the Holy Spirit, that for one who receives the grace there will be “a fountain of water springing up to eternal life.” So everyone who longs for eternal life, when he finds the Son—the true one, I mean, and not one falsely so called—has found whole in him what he longed for. For he himself is the life and has life in himself. But this man, subtle of mind and keen-sighted of heart, does not, through his great sharpness of sight, find eternal life in the Son; rather, passing over him and leaving him behind as an obstacle to what he seeks, he searches for eternal life where he thinks the true life is not. What could anyone conceive more horrible in blasphemy, or more gloomy as an occasion for laments, than this?

And yet for him to din Sabellius and Montanus into our doctrines is the same as if someone fastened Eunomius’s blasphemy on us. For if one who has looked into the matter examines the deceit of these heresies, he will find that it has great kinship with Eunomius’s error. For each of them Judaizes in his doctrine, admitting neither the Only-begotten God nor the Holy Spirit into communion in the Godhead of the one they call the great and first God. For him whom Sabellius calls three-named, Eunomius names unbegotten; and neither of them sees the Godhead in the Trinity of hypostases. Who, then, is akin to Sabellius? Let the judgment of the readers of this treatise declare it.

But so much for this. And since in what follows he spends a long time stirring up the stench of his loathsome attempts, by which he tries to establish that the Only-begotten God once was not, I say that it is well—since our understanding about these things has been sufficiently cleared by what went before—no longer to plunge our discourse into the same evils, except perhaps that it is not untimely to add this one point, selected from among many. When someone had said that unbegottenness is equally conjoined with the substance of the Father, he says, “The argument proceeds by similar steps, as it reached its conclusion in the case of the Son.” The doctrine of piety is clearly strengthened by our opponents’ construction: that we should not think unbegottenness and begetting to be the same as the substance, but that these are contemplated in addition in the subject, while the subject in its own account is something else besides these; and since no difference is found in it, because the difference of begotten and unbegotten is separated from the substance, it remains of all necessity to agree that the substance is without variation in both. Let us examine this point too besides what has been said: in what sense does he say that the begetting is separated from the Father—understanding it as a substance or as an activity? If he thinks it an activity, it is certainly joined equally to what was worked and to the one working, as in every construction one can see the activity equally in what comes to be and in the maker, neither separated from the craftsman nor failing to appear in the construction of the results. But if he says it is a substance separated from the substance of the Father, confessing that the Lord is from it, he plainly looks to it instead of the Father in the case of the Only-begotten, so that two Fathers are understood for the Son: the one named only, whom he calls unbegotten, but who has no share in the begetting; the other, which he names “begetting,” doing the Father’s part for the Only-begotten. And this is refuted by Eunomius’s own words more than by ours. For he says in what follows: “God, being without begetting, is also before the one begotten”; and a little later: “For he who has his being from being begotten was not before he was begotten.” If, then, the begetting is separated from the Father, and the Son has his being from being begotten, then the Father, who is separated from the begetting from which the Son has his being, is inactive in the hypostasis of the Only-begotten. If, then, the Father is estranged from the begetting of the Son, either they fashion some other Father of the Son through the name “begetting,” or these wise men prove by what they say that the Son is self-begotten and self-born.

You see how the thought of one who reproaches us up and down with ignorance in his own words has been caught out; how the blasphemy wanders along many roads, or rather along no road, advancing toward its aim through nothing firm. As one can see with infants, when, playing as their age leads them, they imitate the construction of buildings in sand: their imitation is not made skillfully, with an aim, to resemble the original; rather, they first make something at random out of folly and then consider what they should call the construction. This shrewdness I see in the speech-writer too. For having heaped up words of impiety, like a mound of sand, as they came to him, he afterward reckons what his unthinkable blasphemy, sprung up of its own accord through his words without any logical sequence, is aiming at. For I do not think that the hypostasis of begetting, which takes the Father’s place for the substance of the Son, was fashioned by him on purpose; nor was it the orator’s aim, I think, to prove the Father foreign to the Son’s begetting; nor was the self-born marvel brought in by any forethought. All such things were vomited out by the speech-writer without thought, so that there is not much blame in these matters for one who errs in doctrine but does not know, as the apostle says, either what he is saying or the things about which he makes assertions. “For he who has his being from being begotten,” he says, “was not before the begetting.” If he says this meaning “begetting” in place of “the Father,” I too agree, and there is no one to object. For it is the same thing signified by either expression, whether we say “Abraham begot Isaac,” or, instead of “begot,” that he became the father of Isaac. Since, then, having begotten is the same as being a father, if one changes the words into another form, fatherhood will be shown to be the same as begetting. If, then, Eunomius says, “For he who has his being from the Father was not before the Father,” the statement is sound, and we vote for what is said. But if in his argument he runs back to that “begetting” of his, and says that it is separated from the Father but conjoined to the Son, I think it vain to linger over the contemplation of what is unthinkable.