Ante-Nicene Fathers/Volume VIII/Pseudo-Clementine Literature/The Clementine Homilies/Homily XVI/Chapter 17

by Anonymous

Chapter XVII.—The Nature of God.

“We call Him God whose peculiar attributes cannot belong to the nature of any other; for, as He is called the Unbounded because He is boundless on every side, it must of necessity be the case that it is no other one’s peculiar attribute to be called unbounded, as another cannot in like manner be boundless.  But if any one says that it is possible, he is wrong; for two things boundless on every side cannot co-exist, for the one is bounded by the other.  Thus it is in the nature^[1] of things that the unbegotten is one.  But if he possesses a figure, even in this case the figure is one and incomparable.^[2]  Wherefore He is called the Most High, because, being higher than all, He has the universe subject to Him.”

Footnotes

1. Lit., “thus it is nature.”
2. We have adopted an emendation here.  The text has:  “Even thus the incomparable is one.”