6. Two senses of the word Son, 1. adoptive; 2. essential; attempts of Arians to find a third meaning between these; e.g. that our Lord only was created immediately by God (Asterius’s view), or that our Lord alone partakes the Father. The second and true sense; God begets as He makes, really; though His creation and generation are not like man’s; His generation independent of time; generation implies an internal, and therefore an eternal, act in God; explanation ofProv. viii. 22 .
They say then what the others held and dared to maintain before them; “Not always P. 154 Father, not always Son; for the Son was not before His generation, but, as others, came to be from nothing; and in consequence God was not always Father of the Son; but, when the Son came to be and was created, then was God called His Father. For the Word is a creature and a work, and foreign and unlike the Father in essence; and the Son is neither by nature the Father’s true Word, nor His only and true Wisdom; but being a creature and one of the works, He is improperly 1 called Word and Wisdom; for by the Word which is in God was He made, as were all things. Wherefore the Son is not true God 2.”
Now it may serve to make them understand what they are saying, to ask them first this, what in fact a son is, and of what is that name significant 3. In truth, Divine Scripture acquaints us with a double sense of this word:—one which Moses sets before us in the Law, ‘When ye shall hearken to the voice of the Lord thy God, to keep all His commandments which I command thee this day, to do that which is right in the eyes of the Lord thy God, ye are children of the Lord your God 4;’ as also in the Gospel, John says, ‘But as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God 5:’—and the other sense, that in which Isaac is son of Abraham, and Jacob of Isaac, and the Patriarchs of Jacob. Now in which of these two senses do they understand the Son of God that they relate such fables as the foregoing? for I feel sure they will issue in the same irreligion with Eusebius and his fellows.
If in the first, which belongs to those who gain the name by grace from moral improvement, and receive power to become sons of God (for this is what their predecessors said), then He would seem to differ from us in nothing; no, nor would He be Only-begotten, as having obtained the title of Son as others from His virtue. For granting what they say, that, whereas His qualifications were fore-known 6, He therefore received grace from the first, the name, and the glory of the name, from His very first beginning, still there will be no difference between Him and those who receive the name after their actions, so long as this is the ground on which He as others has the character of son. For Adam too, though he received grace from the first, and upon his creation was at once placed in paradise, differed in no respect either from Enoch, who was translated thither after some time from his birth on his pleasing God, or from the Apostle, who likewise was caught up to Paradise after his actions; nay, not from him who once was a thief, who on the ground of his confession, received a promise that he should be forthwith in paradise.
καταχρηστικῶς . This word is noticed and protested against by Alexander, Socr.Hist.i. 6. p. 11 a. by the Semiarians at Ancyra, Epiph.Hær.73. n. 5. by Basil.contr. Eunom.ii. 23. and by Cyril,Dial.ii. t. v. i. pp. 432, 3. ↩
Vid.Ep. Æg.12.Orat.i. §5. 6.de Synod. 15, 16. Athanas. seems to have had in mind Socr. i. 6. p. 10, 11, or the like. ↩
Vid.Orat. i. §38. The controversy turned on the question what was meant by the word ‘Son.’ Though the Arians would not allow with the Catholics that our Lord was Sonby nature,and maintained that the word implieda beginning of existence,they did not dare to say that He was Son merely in the sense in which we are sons, though, as Athan. contends, they necessarily tended to this conclusion, directly they receded from the Catholic view. Thus Arius said that He was a creature, ‘but not as one of the creatures.’Orat.ii. §19. Valens at Ariminum said the same, Jerom. adv.Lucifer. 18. Hilary says, that not daring directly to deny that He was God, the Arians merely asked ‘whether He was a Son.’de Trin.viii. 3. Athanasius remarks upon this reluctance to speak out, challenging them to present ‘the heresy naked,’de Sent. Dionys.2.init. ‘No one,’ he says elsewhere, ‘puts a light under a bushel; let them shew the world their heresy naked.’Ep. Æg.18. vid. ibid. 10. In like manner, Basil says that (though Arius was really like Eunomius, in faith,contr. Eunom.i. 4) Aetius his master was the first to teach openly ( φανερῶς ), that the Father’s substance was unlike, ἀνόμοιος , the Son’s. ibid. i. 1. EpiphaniusHær.76 p. 949. seems to say that the elder Arians held the divine generation in a sense in which Aetius did not, that is, they were not so consistent and definite as he. Athan. goes on to mention some of the attempts of the Arians to find some theory short of orthodoxy, yet short of that extreme heresy, on the other hand, which they felt ashamed to avow. ↩
Deut. xiii. 18 ; xiv. 1. ↩
John. i. 12 . ↩
Theod.Hist.i. 3. ↩
