26.
And that the Word of God is not a work or creature, but an offspring proper to the Father’s essence and indivisible, as the great Council wrote, here you may see in the words of Dionysius, Bishop of Rome, who, while writing against the Sabellians, thus inveighs against those who dared to say so:—
“Next, I may reasonably turn to those who divide and cut to pieces and destroy that most sacred doctrine of the Church of God, the Divine Monarchy 1, making it as it were three powers and partitive subsistences 2 and god-heads three. I am told that some among you who are catechists and teachers of the Divine Word, take the lead in this tenet, who are diametrically opposed, so to speak, to Sabellius’s opinions; for he blasphemously says that the Son is the Father, and the Father the Son, but they in some sort preach three Gods, as dividing the sacred Monad into three subsistences foreign to each other and utterly separate. For it must needs be that with the God of the Universe, the Divine Word is united, and the Holy Ghost must repose 3 and habitate in God; thus in one as in a summit, I mean the God of the Universe, must the Divine Triad 4 be gathered up and brought together. P. 168 For it is the doctrine of the presumptuous Marcion, to sever and divide the Divine Monarchy into three origins,—a devil’s teaching, not that of Christ’s true disciples and lovers of the Saviour’s lessons. For they know well that a Triad is preached by divine Scripture, but that neither Old Testament nor New preaches three Gods. Equally must one censure those who hold the Son to be a work, and consider that the Lord has come into being, as one of things which really came to be; whereas the divine oracles witness to a generation suitable to Him and becoming, but not to any fashioning or making. A blasphemy then is it, not ordinary, but even the highest, to say that the Lord is in any sort a handiwork. For if He came to be Son, once He was not; but He was always, if (that is) He be in the Father, as He says Himself, and if the Christ be Word and Wisdom and Power (which, as ye know, divine Scripture says) , and these attributes be powers of God. If then the Son came into being, once these attributes were not; consequently there was a time, when God was without them; which is most absurd. And why say more on these points to you, men full of the Spirit and well aware of the absurdities which come to view from saying that the Son is a work? Not attending, as I consider, to this circumstance, the authors of this opinion have entirely missed the truth, in explaining, contrary to the sense of divine and prophetic Scripture in the passage, the words, ‘The Lord created me a beginning of His ways unto His works 5.’ For the sense of ‘He created,’ as ye know, is not one, for we must understand ‘He created’ in this place, as ‘He set over the works made by Him,’ that is, ‘made by the Son Himself.’ And ‘He created’ here must not be taken for ‘made,’ for creating differs from making. ‘Is not He thy Father that hath bought thee? hath He not made thee and created thee 6?’says Moses in his great song in Deuteronomy. And one may say to them, O reckless men, is He a work, who is ‘the First-born of every creature, who is born from the womb before the morning star [^61],’ who said, as Wisdom, ‘Before all the hills He begets me [^62]?’ And in many passages of the divine oracles is the Son said to have been [^63] generated, but nowhere to have [^64] come into being; which manifestly convicts those of misconception about the Lord’s generation, who presume to call His divine and ineffable generation a making [^65]. Neither then may we divide into three Godheads the wonderful and divine Monad; nor disparage with the name of ‘work’ the dignity and exceeding majesty of the Lord; but we must believe in God the Father Almighty, and in Christ Jesus His Son, and in the Holy Ghost, and hold that to the God of the universe the Word is united [^66]. For ‘I,’ says He, ‘and the Father are one;’ and, ‘I in the Father and the Father in Me.’ For thus both the Divine Triad, and the holy preaching of the Monarchy, will be preserved.”
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By the Monarchy is meant the doctrine that the Second and Third Persons in the Ever-blessed Trinity are ever to be referred in our thoughts to the First as the Fountain of Godhead, vid. §15. note 9, and §19, note 6. It is one of the especial senses in which God is said to be one. Cf.Orat. iii. §15. vid. also iv. §1. ‘The Father isunion,ἕνωσις ,’ says S. Greg. Naz. ‘from whom and unto whom are the others.’Orat. 42. 15. alsoOrat. 20. 7. and Epiph.Hær. 57. 5. Tertullian, before Dionysius, uses the word Monarchia, which Praxeas had perverted into a kind of Unitarianism or Sabellianism, inPrax.3. Irenæus too wrote on the Monarchy, i.e. against the doctrine that God is the author of evil. Eus.Hist.v. 20. [see S. Iren.fragment33, Ante-Nic. Lib.] And before him was Justin’s workde Monarchia,where the word is used in opposition to Polytheism. The Marcionites, whom Dionysius presently mentions, are also specified in the above extract by Athan. vid. also Cyril.Hier. Cat.xvi. 3. Epiphanius says that their three origins were God, the Creator, and the evil spirit.Hær. 42, 3. or as Augustine says, the good, the just, and the wicked, which may be taken to mean nearly the same thing.Hær. 22. The Apostolical Canons denounce those who baptize into Three Unoriginate; vid. also Athan. Tom.ad Antioch. 5. Naz.Orat. 20. 6. Basil denies τρεῖς ἀρχικαὶ ὑποστάσεις ,de Sp. S.38. which is a Platonic phrase. ↩
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And so Dionysius Alex. in a fragment preserved by S. Basil, ‘If because the subsistences are three, they say that they are partitive, μεμερισμένας , still three there are, though these persons dissent, or they utterly destroy the Divine Trinity.’de Sp. S.n. 72. Athan. expresses the same more distinctly, οὐ τρεῖς ὑποστάσεις μεμερισμένας , Expos.Fid.§2. In S. Greg. Naz. we find ἀμέριστος ἐν μεμερισμένοις ἡ θεότης .Orat.31. 14. Elsewhere for μεμ . he substitutes ἀπεῤ& 191·ηγμένας .Orat.20. 6. ἀπεξενωμένας ἀλλήλων καὶ διεσπασμένας .Orat.23. 6. as infr. ξένας ἀλλήλων παντάπασι κεχωρισμένας . The passage in the text comes into question in the controversy about the ἐξ ὑποστάσεως ἢ οὐσίας of the Nicene Creed, of which infr. on the Creed itself in Eusebius’s Letter. ↩
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ἐμφιλοχωρεῖν ↩
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The word τριὰς , usually translated Trinity, is first used by Theophilus,ad Autol.ii. 15. Gibbon remarks that the doctrine of ‘a numerical rather than a generical unity,’ which has been explicitly put forth by the Latin Church, is favoured by the Latin language; τριὰς seems to excite the idea of substance,trinitasof qualities.’ ch. 21. note 74. It is certain that the Latin view of the sacred truth, when perverted, becomes Sabellianism; and that the Greek, when perverted, becomes Arianism; and we find Arius arising in the East, Sabellius in the West. It is also certain that the word Trinitas is properly abstract; and expresses τριὰς or ‘a three,’ only in an ecclesiastical sense. But Gibbon does not seem to observe that Unitas is abstract as well as Trinitas; and that we might just as well say in consequence, that the Latins held an abstract unity or a unity of qualities, while the Greeks by μονὰς taught the doctrine of ‘a one’ or a numerical unity. ‘Singularitatem hanc dico (says S. Ambrose), quod Græce μονότης dicitur; singularitas ad personam pertinet, unitas ad naturam.’de Fid.v. 1. It is important, however, to understand, that ‘Trinity’ does not mean thestateorconditionof being three, as humanity is the condition of being man, but is synonymous withthree persons.Humanity does not exist and cannot be addressed, but the Holy Trinity is a three, or a unity which exists in three. Apparently from not considering this, Luther and Calvin objected to the word Trinity, ‘It is a common prayer,’ says Calvin: ‘Holy Trinity, one God, have mercy on us. It displeases me, and savours throughout of barbarism.’Ep. ad Polon.p. 796. ↩
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Prov. viii. 22 . ↩
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Deut. xxxii. 6 . ↩
