into apprehensive faculties, as we are, whose perceptions separately apprehend their corres- ponding objects; e.g. sight apprehends what may be seen, hearing what may be heard, so that touch does not taste, and hearing has no perception of odours and flavours, but each confines itself to that function to which it was appointed by nature, holding itself insensible, as it were, to those with which it has no natural correspondence, and incapable of tasting the pleasure enjoyed by its neighbour sense. But with God it is otherwise. All in all, He is at once sight, and hearing, and knowledge; and there we stop, for it is not permitted us to ascribe the more animal perceptions to that refined nature. Still we take a very low view of God, and drag down the Divine to our own grovelling standard, if we suppose the Father speaking with His mouth, and the Son’s ear listening to His words. What, then, are we to suppose is the medium which conveys the Father’s voice to the hearing of the Son? It must be created or uncreate. But we may not call it created; for the Word was before the creation of the world: and beside the Divine nature there is nothing uncreate. If, therefore, there was no creation then, and the Word spoken of in the cosmogony was older than creation, will he, who maintains that speech and a voice are meant by “the Word,” suggest what medium existed between the Father and the Son, whereby those words and sounds were expressed? For ifa medium exist, it must needs exist in a nature of its own, so as to differ in nature both from the Father and the Son. Being, then, something of necessity different, it divides the Father and the Son from each other, as though inserted between the two. What, then, could it be? Not created, for creation is younger than the Word. Generated we have learnt the Only-begotten (and Him alone) to be. Except the Father, none is ungenerate. Truth, therefore, obliges us to the conclusion that there is no medium between the Father and the Son. But Answer to Eunomius' Second Book.
where separation is not conceived of the closest connection is naturally implied. And what is so connected needs no medium for voice or speech. Now, by “connected,” I mean here what is in all respects inseparable. For in the case of a spiritual nature the term connection does not mean corporeal connection, but the union and blending of spiritual with spiritual through identity of will. Accordingly, there is no divergence of will between the Father and the Son, but the image of goodness is after the Archetype of all goodness and beauty, and as, if a man should look at himself in a glass (for it is perfectly allowable to explain the idea by corporeal illustrations), the copy will in all respects be conformed to the original, the shape of the man who is reflected being the cause of the shape on the glass, and the reflection making no spontaneous movement or inclination unless commenced by the original, but, if it move, moving along with it,—in like manner we maintain that our Lord, the Image of the invisible God, is immediately and inseparably one with the Father in every movement of His Will. If the Father will anything, the Son Who is in the Father knows the Father’s will, or rather He is Himself the Father’s will. For, if He has in Himself all that is the Father’s, there is nothing of the Father’s that He cannot have. If, then, He has all things that are the Father’s in Himself, or, say we rather, if He has the Father Himself, then, along with the Father and the things that are the Father’s, He must needs have in Himself the whole of the Father’s will. He needs not, therefore, to know the Father’s will by word, being Himself the Word of the Father, in the highest acceptation of the term. What, then, is the word that can be addressed to Him who is the Word indeed? And how can He Who is the Word indeed require a second word for instruction?
But it may be said that the voice of the Father was addressed to the Holy Spirit. But neither does the Holy Spirit require instruction by speech, for being God, as saith the Apostle, He “searcheth all things, yea the deep things of God?”
If, then, God utters any word, and all speech is directed to the ear, let those who maintain that God expresses Himself in the language of continuous discourse, inform us what audience He addressed. Himself He needs not address. The Son has no need of instruction by words. The Holy Ghost searcheth even the deep things of God. Creation did not yet exist. To whom, then, was God’s word addressed?
But, says he, the record of Moses does not lie, and from it we learn that God spake. No! nor is great David of the number of those who lie, and he expressly says; “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth His handy work. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge;” and after saying that the heavens and the firma- ment declare, and that day and that night showeth knowledge and speech, he adds to what he has said, that “there is neither speech nor language, and that their voices are not heard!!°°” Yet how can such declaring and showing forth be other than words, and how Answer to Eunomius' Second Book.
is it that no voice addresses itself to the ear? Is the prophet contradicting himself, or is he stating an impossibility, when he speaks of words without sound, and declaration without language, and announcement without voice? or, is there not rather the very perfection of truth in his teaching, which tells us, in the words which I have quoted, that the declaration of the heavens, and the word shouted forth by the day, is no articulate voice nor language of the lips, but is a revelation of the power of God to those who are capable of hearing it, even though no voice be heard?
What, then, do we think of this passage? For it may be that, if we understand it, we shall also understand the meaning of Moses. It often happens that Holy Scripture, to enable us more clearly to comprehend a matter to be revealed, makes use of a bodily illustration, as would seem to be the case in this passage from David, who teaches us by what he says that none of the things which are have their being from chance or accident, as some have imagined that our world and all that is therein was framed by fortuitous and undesigned combinations of first elements, and that no Providence penetrated the world. But we are taught that there is a cause of the system and government of the Universe, on Whom all nature depends, to Whom it owes its origin and cause, towards Whom it inclines and moves, and in Whom it abides. And since, as saith the Apostle, His eternal power and godhead are understood, being d!107 therefore all creation and, before all, as clearly seen through the creation of the worl saith the Scripture, the system of the heavens, declare the wisdom of the Creator in the skill displayed by His works. And this is what it seems to me that he is desirous to set forth, viz. the testimony of the things which do appear to the fact that the worlds were framed with wisdom and skill, and abide for ever by the power of Him who is the Ruler over all. The very heavens, he says, in displaying the wisdom of Him Who made them, all but shout aloud with a voice, and, though without voice, proclaim the wisdom of their Creator. For we can hear as it were words teaching us: “O men, when ye gaze upon us and behold our beauty and magnitude, and this ceaseless revolution, with its well-ordered and harmonious motion, working in the same direction and in the same manner, turn your thoughts to Him Who presides over our system, and, by aid of the beauty which you see, imagine to yourselves the beauty of the invisible Archetype. For in us there is nothing without its Lord, nothing that moves of its own proper motion: but all that appears, or that is conceivable in respect to us, depends on a Power Who is inscrutable and sublime.” This is not given in articulate speech, but by the things which are seen, and it instils into our minds the knowledge of Divine power more than if speech proclaimed it with a voice. As, then, the heavens declare, though they do not speak, and the firmament shows God’s handy-work, yet requires no voice for the purpose, and the day uttereth speech, though there is no speaking, and no one can say that Holy Scripture is in error—in like manner, since both Moses and David have one and the Answer to Eunomius' Second Book.
same Teacher, I mean the Holy Spirit, Who says that the fiat went before the creation, we are not told that God is the Creator of words, but of things made known to us by the signi- fication of our words. For, lest we should suppose the creation to be without its Lord, and spontaneously originated, He says that it was created by the Divine Being, and that it is es- tablished in an orderly and connected system by Him. Now it would be a work of time to discuss the order of what Moses didactically records in his historical summary respecting the creation of the world. Or (if we did)!108 clearly the erroneous and futile character of our adversaries’ opinion. But whoever cares to each second passage would serve to prove more do so may read what we have written on Genesis, and judge whether our teaching or theirs is the more reasonable. But to return to the matter in question. We assert that the words “He said” do not imply voice and words on the part of God; but the writer, in showing!
the power of God to be concurrent with His will, renders the idea more easy of apprehension. For since by the will of God all things were created, and it is the ordinary way of men to signify their will first of all by speech, and so to bring their work into harmony with their will, and the scriptural account of the Creation is the learner’s introduction, as it were, to the knowledge of God, representing to our minds the power of the Divine Being by objects more ready to our comprehension (for sensible apprehension is an aid to intellectual knowledge), on this ac- count, Moses, by saying that God commanded all things to be, signifies to us the inciting power of His will, and by adding, “and it was so,” he shows that in the case of God there is no difference between will and performance; but, on the contrary, that though the purposing initiates God’s activity, the accomplishment keeps pace with the purpose, and that the two are to be considered together and at once, viz. the deliberate motion of the mind, and the power that effects its purpose. For the idea of the Divine purpose and action leaves no con- ceivable interval between them, but as light is produced along with the kindling of fire, at once coming out from it and shining forth along with it—in the same manner the existence of things created is an effect of the Divine will, but not posterior to it in time.
For the case is different from that of men endowed by nature with practical ability, where you may look at capability and execution apart from each other. For example, we say of a man who possesses the art of shipbuilding, that he is always a shipbuilder in respect of his ability to build ships, but that he operates only when he displays his skill in working. It is otherwise with God; for all that we can conceive as in Him is entirely work and action, His will passing over immediately to its object. As, then, the mechanism of the heavens testifies to the glory of their Creator and confesses Him Who made them, and needs no 1108 "Hyap. Both Codd. & editt. read so; as Oehler testifies, though he has “H yap. 1109 Reading dnopatvwv as referring to Moses, with Oehler, instead of the conjecture of John the Franciscan dmo@atvovoa, in the Paris edit. Even the Pithcean has dnogatvwv Answer to Eunomius' Second Book.
voice for the purpose, so on the other hand any one who is acquainted with the Mosaic Scripture will see that God speaks of the world as His creation, having brought the whole into being by the fiat of His will, and that He needs no words to make known His mind. As, then, he who heard the heavens declaring the glory of God looked not for set speech on the occasion (for, to those who can understand it, the universe speaks through the things which are being done, without regard or care for verbal explanation), so, even if any one hears Moses telling how God gave order and arrangement to each several part of Creation by name, let him not suppose the prophet to speak falsely, nor degrade the contemplation of sublime verities by mean and grovelling notions, thus, as it were, reducing God to a mere human standard, and supposing that after the manner of men he directs His operations by the instrumentality of speech; but let His fiat mean His will only, and let the names of those created things denote the mere reality of their coming into being. And thus he will learn these two things from what is recorded: (1) That God made all things by His will, and (2) that without any trouble or difficulty the Divine Will became nature.
But if any one would give a more sensuous interpretation to the words “God said,” as proving that articulate speech was His creation, by a parity of reason he must understand by the words “God saw,” that He did so by faculties of perception like our own, through the organs of vision; and so again by the words “The Lord heard me and had mercy upon me,” and again, “He smelled a sweet savour!!!” and whatever other sensuous expressions are employed by Scripture in reference to head, or foot, or hand, or eyes, or fingers, or sandals, as appertaining to God, taking them, I say, in their plain literal acceptation, he will present to us an anthropomorphous deity, after the similitude of what is seen among ourselves. But if any one hearing that the heavens are the work of His fingers, that He has a strong hand, and a mighty arm, and eyes, and feet, and sandals, deduces from such words ideas worthy of God, and does not degrade the idea of His pure nature by carnal and sensuous imagina- tions, it will follow that on the one hand he will regard the verbal utterances as indications of the Divine will, but on the other he will not conceive of them as articulate sounds, but will reason thus; that the Creator of human reason has gifted us with speech proportionally to the capacity of our nature, so that we might be able thereby to signify the thoughts of our minds; but that, so far as the Divine nature differs from ours, so great will be the degree of difference between our notions respecting it and its own inherent majesty and godhead. And as our power compared with God’s, and our life with His life, is as nothing, and all else 1111» with Him, as saith the inspired Teaching, so also our word as compared with Him, Who is the Word that is ours, compared with what is in Him, is “as nothing in comparison 1110 ~~ Ps. xxx. 10 (LXX.). Gen. viii. 21.
Answer to Eunomius' Second Book.
indeed, is as nothing!!!?, For this word of yours was not in the beginning, but was created along with our nature, nor is it to be regarded as having any reality of its own, but, as our master (Basil) somewhere has said, it vanishes along with the sound of the voice, nor is any operation of the word discernible, but it has its subsistence in voice only, or in written characters. But the word of God is God Himself, the Word that was in the beginning and that abideth for ever, through Whom all things were and are, Who ruleth over all, and hath all power over the things in heaven and the things on earth, being Life, and Truth, and Righteousness, and Light, and all that is good, and upholding all things in being. Such, then, and so great being the word, as we understand it, of God, our opponent allows God, as some great thing, the power of language, made up of nouns, verbs, and conjunctions, not perceiving that, as He Who conferred practical powers on our nature is not spoken of as fabricating each of their several results, but, while He gave our nature its ability, it is by us that a house is constructed, or a bench, or a sword, or a plough, and whatsoever thing our life happens to be in need of, each of which things is our own work, although it may be ascribed to Him Who is the author of our being, and Who created our nature capable of every science,—so also our power of speech is the work of Him Who made our nature what it is, but the invention of each several term required to denote objects in hand is of our own devising. And this is proved by the fact that many terms in use are of a base and unseemly character, of which no man of sense would conceive God the inventor: so that, if certain of our familiar expressions are ascribed by Holy Scripture to God as the speaker, we should remember that the Holy Spirit is addressing us in language of our own, as e.g. in the history of the Acts we are told that each man received the teaching of the disciples in his own language wherein he was born, understanding the sense of the words by the language which he knew. And, that this is true, may be seen yet more clearly by a careful examination of the enactments M113 and the like, in the mystic sacrifices, instilling wholesome doctrine under the veil of symbol and a.
of the Levitical law. For they make mention of pans, and cakes, and fine flour enigma. Mention, too, is made of certain measures then in use, such as ephah, and nebe and hin, and the like. Are we, then, to suppose that God made these names and appellations, or that in the beginning He commanded them to be such, and to be so named, calling one kind of grain wheat, and its pith flour, and flat sweetmeats, whether heavy or light, cakes; and that He commanded a vessel of the kind in which a moist lump is boiled or baked to 1112 Or. Cat. c. 1. “For since our nature is liable to corruption, and weak, therefore is our life short, our strength unsubstantial, our word unstable (amayr¢);” and see note.
1113 Lev. ii. 5, seqq.
1114 Nebelis defined by Epiphanius de pond. et mens. c. 24, as follows, NEeA oivou, Step Eoti pEtpov EeotHv p'v' (150 pints). The word is merely a transcription of the Hebrew for a skin, i.e. wine-skin, “bottle.” Cf. Hosea iii. 2, véBeA ofvov (LXX.): Symmachus has coxos.
Answer to Eunomius' Second Book.
be called a pan, or that He spoke of a certain liquid measure by the name of hin or nebel, and measured dry produce by the homer? surely it is trifling and mere Jewish folly, far re- moved from the grandeur of Christian simplicity, to think that God, Who is the Most High and above every name and thought, Who by sole virtue of His will governs the world, which He brought into existence, and upholds it in being, should set Himself like some schoolmaster to settle the niceties of terminology. Rather let us say, that as we indicate to the deaf what we want them to do, by gestures and signs, not because we have no voice of our own, but because a verbal communication would be utterly useless to those who cannot hear, so, in as much as human nature is in a sense deaf and insensible to higher truths, we maintain that the grace of God at sundry times and in divers manners spake by the Prophets, ordering their voices conformably to our capacity and the modes of expression with which we are familiar, and that by such means it leads us, as with a guiding hand, to the knowledge of higher truths, not teaching us in terms proportioned to their inherent sublimity, (for how can the great be contained by the little?) but descending to the lower level of our limited comprehension. And as God, after giving animals their power of motion, no longer prescribes each step they take, for their nature, having once for all taken its beginning from the Creator, moves of itself, and makes its way, adapting its power of motion to its object from time to time (except in so far as it is said that a man’s steps are directed by the Lord), so our nature, having received from God the power of speech and utterance and of expressing the will by the voice, proceeds on its way through things, giving them distinctive names by varying inflections of sound; and these signs are the verbs and nouns which we use, and through which we signify the meaning of the things. And though the word “fruit” is made use of by Moses before the creation of fruit, and “seed” before that of seed, this does not disprove our assertion, nor is the sense of the lawgiver opposed to what we have said in respect to thought and conception. For that end of past husbandry which we speak of as fruit, and that beginning of future husbandry which we speak of as seed, this thing, I mean, underlying these names,—whether wheat or some other produce which is increased and multiplied by sow- ing—does not, he teaches us, grow spontaneously, but by the will of Him Who created them to grow with their peculiar power, so as to be the same fruit and to reproduce themselves as seed, and to support mankind with their increase. And by the Divine will the thing is 111° is the work of the Creator, but the distinguishing names of things, by which speech furnishes us with a clear and accurate deproduced, not the name, so that the substantial thing 1115 Here is the answer to Eunomius’ contention above (p. 270), that “in the earliest of the sacred records before the creation of man, the naming of fruit and seed are mentioned in Holy Writ.” He calls Basil, for not observing this, a pagan and atheist. So below he calls him a follower of Valentinus, “a sower of tares,” for making the human faculty (€mivoix) the maker of names, even of those of the Only-begotten; apparently, as Valentinus multiplied the names of Christ.
Answer to Eunomius' Second Book.
scription of them, are the work and the invention of man’s reasoning faculty, though the reasoning faculty itself and its nature are a work of God. And since all men are endowed with reason, differences of language will of necessity be found according to differences of country. But if any one maintain that light, or heaven, or earth, or seed were named after human fashion by God, he will certainly conclude that they were named in some special language. What that was, let him show. For he who knows the one thing will not, in all probability, be ignorant of the other. For at the river Jordan, after the descent of the Holy Ghost, and again in the hearing of the Jews, and at the Transfiguration, there came a voice from heaven, teaching men not only to regard the phenomenon as something more than a figure, but also to believe the beloved Son of God to be truly God. Now that voice was fashioned by God, suitably to the understanding of the hearers, in airy substance, and adapted to the language of the day, God, “who willeth that all men should be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth'!!®,”” having so articulated His words in the air with a view to the salvation of the hearers, as our Lord also saith to the Jews, when they thought it thundered because the sound took place in the air. “This voice came not because of Me, but for your sakes'!'”.” But before the creation of the world, inasmuch as there was no one to hear the word, and no bodily element capable of accentuating the articulate voice, how can he who says that God used words give any air of probability to his assertion? God Himself is without body, creation did not yet exist. Reason does not suffer us to conceive of anything material in respect to Him. They who might have been benefited by the hearing were not yet created. And if men were not yet in being, neither had any form of language been struck out in ac- cordance with national peculiarities, by what arguments, then, can he who looks to the bare letter make good his assertion, that God spoke thus using human parts of speech?
And the futility of such assertions may be seen also by this. For as the natures of the elements, which are the work of the Creator, appear alike to all, and there is no difference to human sense in men’s experience of fire, or air, or water, but the nature of each is one and unchanging, working in the same way, and suffering no modification from the differences of those who partake of it, so also the imposition of names, if applied to things by God, would have been the same for all. But, in point of fact, while the nature of things as consti- tuted by God remains the same, the names which denote them are divided by so many dif- ferences of language, that it were no easy task even to calculate their number.
1117S. John xii. 30 Answer to Eunomius' Second Book.
And if any one cites the confusion of tongues that took place at the building of the tower, as contradicting what I have said, not even there is God spoken of as creating men’s languages, but as confounding the existing one!!!® , that all might not hear all. For when all lived to- gether and were not as yet divided by various differences of race, the aggregate of men dwelt together with one language among them; but when by the Divine will it was decreed that all the earth should be replenished by mankind, then, their community of tongue being broken up, men were dispersed in various directions and adopted this and that form of speech and language, possessing a certain bond of union in similarity of tongue, not indeed disagreeing from others in their knowledge of things, but differing in the character of their names. For a stone or a stick does not seem one thing to one man and another to another, but the different peoples call them by different names. So that our position remains unshaken, that human language is the invention of the human mind or understanding. For from the beginning, as long as all men had the same language, we see from Holy Scripture that men received no teaching of God’s words, nor, when men were separated into various differences of language, did a Divine enactment prescribe how each man should talk. But God, willing that men should speak different languages, gave human nature full liberty to formulate ar- bitrary sounds, so as to render their meaning more intelligible. Accordingly, Moses, who lived many generations after the building of the tower, uses one of the subsequent languages in his historical narrative of the creation, and attributes certain words to God, relating these things in his own tongue in which he had been brought up, and with which he was familiar, not changing the names for God by foreign peculiarities and turns of speech, in order by the strangeness and novelty of the expressions to prove them the words of God Himself!!!?.
But some who have carefully studied the Scriptures tell us that the Hebrew tongue is not even ancient!!° like the others, but that along with other miracles this miracle was wrought in behalf of the Israelites, that after the Exodus from Egypt, the language was 1119 A hit at Eunomius. 1120 unde apxaierv: therefore, if they are not the Divine language, a fortiori this is not. The word cannot possibly mean here “to grow obsolete.”
Answer to Eunomius' Second Book.
hastily improvised!!*? for the use of the nation. And there is a passage in the Prophet which confirms this. For he says, “when he came out of the land of Egypt he heard a strange language’!*5.” If, then, Moses was a Hebrew, and the language of the Hebrews was subsequent to the others, Moses, I say, who was born some thousands of years after the Creation of the world, and who relates the words of God in his own language—does he not clearly teach us that he does not attribute to God such a language of human fashion, but that he speaks as he does because it was impossible otherwise than in human language to express his meaning, though the words he uses have some Divine and profound significance?