Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: Series II/Volume VIII/De Spiritu Sancto/Chapter 6

by Philip Schaff et al.

Chapter VI.

Issue joined with those who assert that the Son is not with the Father, but after the Father.  Also concerning the equal glory.

13.  Our opponents, while they thus artfully and perversely encounter our argument, cannot even have recourse to the plea of ignorance.  It is obvious that they are annoyed with us for completing the doxology to the Only Begotten together with the Father, and for not separating the Holy Spirit from the Son.  On this account they style us innovators, revolutionizers, phrase-coiners, and every other possible name of insult.  But so far am I from being irritated at their abuse, that, were it not for the fact that their loss causes me “heaviness and continual sorrow,”^[1] I could almost have said that I was grateful to them for the blasphemy, as though they were agents for providing me with blessing.  For “blessed are ye,” it is said, “when men shall revile you for my sake.”^[2]  The grounds of their indignation are these:  The Son, according to them, is not together with the Father, but after the Father.  Hence it follows that glory should be ascribed to the Father “through him,” but not “with him;” inasmuch as “with him” expresses equality of dignity, while “through him” denotes subordination.  They further assert that the Spirit is not to be ranked along with the Father and the Son, but under the Son and the Father; not coordinated, but subordinated; not connumerated, but subnumerated.^[3]

With technical terminology of this kind they pervert the simplicity and artlessness of the faith, and thus by their ingenuity, suffering no one else to remain in ignorance, they cut off from themselves the plea that ignorance might demand.

14.  Let us first ask them this question:  In what sense do they say that the Son is “after the Father;” later in time, or in order, or in dignity?  But in time no one is so devoid of sense as to assert that the Maker of the ages^[4] holds a second place, when no interval intervenes in the natural conjunction of the Father with the Son.^[5]  And indeed so far as our conception of human relations goes,^[6] it is impossible to think of the Son as being later than the Father, not only from the fact that Father and Son are mutually conceived of in accordance with the relationship subsisting between them, but because posteriority in time is predicated of subjects separated by a less interval from the present, and priority of subjects farther off.  For instance, what happened in Noah’s time is prior to what happened to the men of Sodom, inasmuch as Noah is more remote from our own day; and, again, the events of the history of the men of Sodom are posterior, because they seem in a sense to approach nearer to our own day.  But, in addition to its being a breach of true religion, is it not really the extremest folly to measure the existence of the life which transcends all time and all the ages by its distance from the present?  Is it not as though God the Father could be compared with, and be made superior to, God the Son, who exists before the ages, precisely in the same way in which things liable to beginning and corruption are described as prior to one another?

The superior remoteness of the Father is really inconceivable, in that thought and intelligence are wholly impotent to go beyond the generation of the Lord; and St. John has admirably confined the conception within circumscribed boundaries by two words, “In the beginning was the Word.”  For thought cannot travel outside “was,” nor imagination^[7] beyond “beginning.”  Let your thought travel ever so far backward you cannot get beyond the “was,” and however you may strain and strive to see what is beyond the Son, you will find it impossible to get further than the “beginning.”  True religion, therefore, thus teaches us to think of the Son together with the Father.

15.  If they really conceive of a kind of degradation of the Son in relation to the Father, as though He were in a lower place, so that the Father sits above, and the Son is thrust off to the next seat below, let them confess what they mean.  We shall have no more to say.  A plain statement of the view will at once expose its absurdity.  They who refuse to allow that the Father pervades all things do not so much as maintain the logical sequence of thought in their argument.  The faith of the sound is that God fills all things;^[8] but they who divide their up and down between the Father and the Son do not remember even the word of the Prophet:  “If I climb up into heaven thou art there; if I go down to hell thou art there also.”^[9]  Now, to omit all proof of the ignorance of those who predicate place of incorporeal things, what excuse can be found for their attack upon Scripture, shameless as their antagonism is, in the passages “Sit thou on my right hand”^[10] and “Sat down on the right hand of the majesty of God”?^[11]  The expression “right hand” does not, as they contend, indicate the lower place, but equality of relation; it is not understood physically, in which case there might be something sinister about God,^[12] but Scripture puts before us the magnificence of the dignity of the Son by the use of dignified language indicating the seat of honour.  It is left then for our opponents to allege that this expression signifies inferiority of rank.  Let them learn that “Christ is the power of God and wisdom of God,”^[13] and that “He is the image of the invisible God”^[14] and “brightness of his glory,”^[15] and that “Him hath God the Father sealed,”^[16] by engraving Himself on Him.^[17]

Now are we to call these passages, and others like them, throughout the whole of Holy Scripture, proofs of humiliation, or rather public proclamations of the majesty of the Only Begotten, and of the equality of His glory with the Father?  We ask them to listen to the Lord Himself, distinctly setting forth the equal dignity of His glory with the Father, in His words, “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father;”^[18] and again, “When the Son cometh in the glory of his Father;”^[19] that they “should honour the Son even as they honour the Father;”^[20] and, “We beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father;”^[21] and “the only begotten God which is in the bosom of the Father.”^[22]  Of all these passages they take no account, and then assign to the Son the place set apart for His foes.  A father’s bosom is a fit and becoming seat for a son, but the place of the footstool is for them that have to be forced to fall.^[23]

We have only touched cursorily on these proofs, because our object is to pass on to other points.  You at your leisure can put together the items of the evidence, and then contemplate the height of the glory and the preeminence of the power of the Only Begotten.  However, to the well-disposed hearer, even these are not insignificant, unless the terms “right hand” and “bosom” be accepted in a physical and derogatory sense, so as at once to circumscribe God in local limits, and invent form, mould, and bodily position, all of which are totally distinct from the idea of the absolute, the infinite, and the incorporeal.  There is moreover the fact that what is derogatory in the idea of it is the same in the case both of the Father and the Son; so that whoever repeats these arguments does not take away the dignity of the Son, but does incur the charge of blaspheming the Father; for whatever audacity a man be guilty of against the Son he cannot but transfer to the Father.  If he assigns to the Father the upper place by way of precedence, and asserts that the only begotten Son sits below, he will find that to the creature of his imagination attach all the consequent conditions of body.  And if these are the imaginations of drunken delusion and phrensied insanity, can it be consistent with true religion for men taught by the Lord himself that “He that honoureth not the Son honoureth not the Father”^[24] to refuse to worship and glorify with the Father him who in nature, in glory, and in dignity is conjoined with him?  What shall we say?  What just defence shall we have in the day of the awful universal judgment of all-creation, if, when the Lord clearly announces that He will come “in the glory of his Father;”^[25] when Stephen beheld Jesus standing at the right hand of God;^[26] when Paul testified in the spirit concerning Christ “that he is at the right hand of God;”^[27] when the Father says, “Sit thou on my right hand;”^[28] when the Holy Spirit bears witness that he has sat down on “the right hand of the majesty”^[29] of God; we attempt to degrade him who shares the honour and the throne, from his condition of equality, to a lower state?^[30]  Standing and sitting, I apprehend, indicate the fixity and entire stability of the nature, as Baruch, when he wishes to exhibit the immutability and immobility of the Divine mode of existence, says, “For thou sittest for ever and we perish utterly.”^[31]  Moreover, the place on the right hand indicates in my judgment equality of honour.  Rash, then, is the attempt to deprive the Son of participation in the doxology, as though worthy only to be ranked in a lower place of honour.

Footnotes

1. cf. Rom. ix. 2.
2. Matt. v. 11.
3. ὑποτάσσω.  cf. 1 Cor. xv. 27, and inf.  cf. chapter xvii. ὑποτεταγμένος is applied to the Son in the Macrostich or Lengthy Creed, brought by Eudoxius of Germanicia to Milan in 344.  Vide Soc. ii. 19.
4. ποιητὴς τῶν αἰ& 240·νων.
5. Yet the great watchword of the Arians was ἦν ποτε ὅτε οὐκ ἦν.
6. τῆ ἐννοί& 139· τῶν ἀνθρωπίνων is here the reading of five MSS.  The Benedictines prefer τῶν ἀνθρώπων, with the sense of “in human thought.”
7. Φαντασία is the philosophic term for imagination or presentation, the mental faculty by which the object made apparent, φάντασμα, becomes apparent, φαίνεται.  Aristotle, de An. III. iii. 20 defines it as “a movement of the mind generated by sensation.”  Fancy, which is derived from φαντασία (φαίνω, ÖBHA=shine) has acquired a slightly different meaning in some usages of modern speech.
8. Eph. iv. 10.
9. Ps. cxxxix. 7, P.B.
10. Ps. cx. 1.
11. Heb. i. 3, with the variation of “of God” for “on high.”
12. I know of no better way of conveying the sense of the original σκαῖος than by thus introducing the Latin sinister, which has the double meaning of left and ill-omened.  It is to the credit of the unsuperstitious character of English speaking people that while the Greek σκαῖος and ἀριστερός, the Latin sinister and lævus, the French gauche, and the German link, all have the meaning of awkward and unlucky as well as simply on the left hand, the English left (though probably derived from lift=weak) has lost all connotation but the local one.
13. 1 Cor. i. 24.
14. Col. i. 15.
15. Heb. i. 3.
16. John vi. 27.
17. The more obvious interpretation of ἐσφράγισεν in John vi. 27, would be sealed with a mark of approval, as in the miracle just performed.  cf. Bengel, “sigillo id quod genuinum est commendatur, et omne quod non genuinum est excluditur.”  But St. Basil explains “sealed” by “stamped with the image of His Person,” an interpretation which Alfred rejects.  St. Basil at the end of Chapter xxvi. of this work, calls our Lord the χαρακτὴρ καὶ ἰσότυπος σφραγίς, i.e., “express image and seal graven to the like” of the Father.  St. Athanasius (Ep. i. ad Serap. xxiii.) writes, “The seal has the form of Christ the sealer, and in this the sealed participate, being formed according to it.”  cf. Gal. iv. 19, and 2 Pet. i. 4.
18. John xiv. 9.
19. Mark viii. 38.
20. John v. 23.
21. John i. 14.
22. John i. 18.  “Only begotten God” is here the reading of five mss. of Basil.  The words are wanting in one codex.  In Chapter viii. of this work St. Basil distinctly quotes Scripture as calling the Son “only begotten God.”  (Chapter viii. Section 17.)  But in Chapter xi. Section 27, where he has been alleged to quote John i. 18, with the reading “Only begotten Son” (e.g., Alford), the ms. authority for his text is in favour of “Only begotten God.” OC is the reading of א.B.C. TC of A.  On the comparative weight of the textual and patristic evidence vide Bp. Westcott in loc.
23. cf. Ps. cx. 1.
24. John v. 23.
25. Matt. xvi. 27.
26. Acts vii. 55.
27. Rom. viii. 34.
28. Ps. cx. 1.
29. Heb. viii. 1.
30. Mr. Johnston well points out that these five testimonies are not cited fortuitously, but “in an order which carries the reader from the future second coming, through the present session at the right hand, back to the ascension in the past.”
31. Baruch iii. 3, lxx.