Hexaemeron; On the Holy Spirit; Letters

I have had considerable difficulty in finding a messenger to convey a letter to your reverence, for our men are so afraid of the winter that they can hardly bear even to put their heads outside their houses. We have suffered from such a very heavy fall of snow that we have been buried, houses and all, beneath it, and now for two months have been living in dens and caves. You know the Cappadocian character and how hard it is to get us to move.¹ Forgive me then for not writing sooner and bringing to the knowledge of your excellency the latest news from Antioch. To tell you all this now, when it is probable that you learnt it long ago, is stale and uninteresting. But as I do not reckon it any trouble to tell you even what you know, I have sent you the letters conveyed by the reader. On this point I shall say no more. Constantinople has now for some time had Demophilus,² as the bearers of this letter will themselves tell you, and as has doubtless been reported to your holiness. From all who come to us from that city there is unanimously reported about him a certain counterfeit of orthodoxy and sound religion, to such an extent that even the divided portions of the city have been brought to agreement, and some of the neighbouring bishops have accepted the reconciliation. Our men here have not turned out better than I expected. They came directly you were gone,³ said and did many painful things, and at last went home again, after making their separation from me wider.⁴ Whether anything better will happen in the future, and whether they will give up their evil ways, is unknown to all but God. So much for our present condition. The rest of the Church, by God's grace, stands sound, and prays that in the spring we may have you with us again, and be renewed by your good counsel. My health is no better than it ever is.

I thanked the Holy God when I read your letter, most pious brother. I pray that I may not be unworthy of the expectations you have formed of me, and that you will enjoy a full reward for the honour which you pay me in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. I was exceedingly pleased to hear that you have been occupied in a matter eminently becoming a Christian, have raised a house to the glory of God, and have in practical earnest loved, as it is written, "the beauty of the house of the Lord,"⁵ and have so provided for yourself that heavenly mansion which is prepared in His rest for them that love the Lord. If I am able to find any relics of martyrs, I pray that I may take part in your earnest endeavour. If "the righteous shall be had in everlasting remembrance,"⁶ I shall without doubt have a share in the good fame which the Holy One will give you.

Whom, indeed, could it better befit to encourage the timid, and rouse the slumbering, than you, my godly lord, who have shewn your general excellence in this, too, that you have consented to come down among us, your lowly inferiors, like a true disciple of Him Who said, "I am among you," not as a fellow guest, but "as he that serveth."⁷ For you have condescended to minister to us your spiritual gladness, to refresh our souls by your honoured letter, and, as it were, to fling the arms of your greatness round the infancy of children. We, therefore, implore your good soul to pray, that we may be worthy to receive aid from the great, such as yourself, and to have a mouth and wisdom wherewith to chime in with the strain of all, who like you are led by the Holy Spirit. Of Him I hear that you are a friend and true worshipper, and I am deeply thankful for your strong and unshaken love to God. I pray that my lot may be found with the true worshippers, among whom we are sure your excellency is to be ranked, as well as that great and true bishop who has filled all the world with his wonderful work.

How do you think my heart was pained at hearing of the slanders heaped on me by some of those that feel no fear of the Judge, who "shall destroy them that speak leasing"?⁸ I spent nearly the whole night sleepless, thinking of your words of love; so did grief lay hold upon my heart of hearts. For verily, in the words of Solomon, slander humbleth a man.⁹ And no man is so void of feeling as not to be touched at heart, and bowed down to the ground, if he falls in with lips prone to lying. But we must needs put up with all things and endure all things, after committing our vindication to the Lord. He will not despise us; for "he that oppresseth the poor reproacheth his Maker."¹⁰ They, however, who have patched up this new tragedy of blasphemy seem to have lost all belief in the Lord, Who has declared that we must give account at the day of judgment even for an idle word.¹¹ And I, tell me, I anathematized the right blessed Dianius? For this is what they have said against me. Where? When? In whose presence? On what pretext? In mere spoken words, or in writing? Following others, or myself the author and originator of the deed? Alas for the impudence of men who make no difficulty at saying anything! Alas for their contempt of the judgment of God! Unless, indeed, they add this further to their fiction, that they make me out to have been once upon a time so far out of my mind as not to know what I was saying. For so long as I have been in my senses I know that I never did anything of the kind, or had the least wish to do so. What I am, indeed, conscious of is this; that from my earliest childhood I was brought up in love for him, thought as I gazed at him how venerable he looked, how dignified, how truly reverend. Then when I grew older I began to know him by the good qualities of his soul, and took delight in his society, gradually learning to perceive the simplicity, nobility, and liberality of his character, and all his most distinctive qualities, his gentleness of soul, his mingled magnanimity and meekness, the seemliness of his conduct, his control of temper, the beaming cheerfulness and affability which he combined with majesty of demeanour. From all this I counted him among men most illustrious for high character.

However, towards the close of his life (I will not conceal the truth) I, together with many of them that in our country¹² feared the Lord, sorrowed over him with sorrow unendurable, because he signed the creed brought from Constantinople by George.¹³ Afterwards, full of kindness and gentleness as he was, and willing out of the fulness of his fatherly heart to give satisfaction to everyone, when he had already fallen sick of the disease of which he died, he sent for me, and, calling the Lord to witness, said that in the simplicity of his heart he had agreed to the document sent from Constantinople, but had had no idea of rejecting the creed put forth by the holy Fathers at Nicæa, nor had had any other disposition of heart than from the beginning he had always had. He prayed, moreover, that he might not be cut off from the lot of those blessed three hundred and eighteen bishops who had announced the pious decree¹⁴ to the world. In consequence of this satisfactory statement I dismissed all anxiety and doubt, and, as you are aware, communicated with him, and gave over grieving. Such have been my relations with Dianius. If anyone avers that he is privy to any vile slander on my part against Dianius, do not let him buzz it slave-wise in a corner; let him come boldly out and convict me in the light of day.

1. I have been very much distressed by a painful report which reached my ears; but I have been equally delighted by my brother, beloved of God, bishop Bosporius,¹⁵ who has brought a more satisfactory account of you. He avers by God's grace that all those stories spread abroad about you are inventions of men who are not exactly informed as to the truth about you. He added, moreover, that he found among you impious calumnies about me, of a kind likely to be uttered by those who do not expect to have to give the Judge in the day of His righteous retribution an account of even an idle word. I thank God, then, both because I am cured of my damaging opinion of you, an opinion which I have derived from the calumnies of men, and because I have heard of your abandonment of those baseless notions about me, on hearing the assurances of my brother. He, in all that he has said as coming from himself, has also completely expressed my own feeling. For in us both there is one mind about the faith, as being heirs of the same Fathers who once at Nicæa promulgated their great decree¹⁶ concerning the faith. Of this, some portions are universally accepted without cavil, but the homoousion, ill received in certain quarters, is still rejected by some. These objectors we may very properly blame, and yet on the contrary deem them deserving of pardon. To refuse to follow the Fathers, not holding their declaration of more authority than one's own opinion, is conduct worthy of blame, as being brimful of self-sufficiency. On the other hand the fact that they view with suspicion a phrase which is misrepresented by an opposite party does seem to a small extent to relieve them from blame. Moreover, as a matter of fact, the members of the synods which met to discuss the case of Paul of Samosata¹⁷ did find fault with the term as an unfortunate one.

For they maintained that the homoousion set forth the idea both of essence and of what is derived from it, so that the essence, when divided, confers the title of co-essential on the parts into which it is divided. This explanation has some reason in the case of bronze and coins made therefrom, but in the case of God the Father and God the Son there is no question of substance anterior or even underlying both; the mere thought and utterance of such a thing is the last extravagance of impiety. What can be conceived of as anterior to the Unbegotten? By this blasphemy faith in the Father and the Son is destroyed, for things, constituted out of one, have to one another the relation of brothers.

2. Because even at that time there were men who asserted the Son to have been brought into being out of the non-existent, the term homoousion was adopted, to extirpate this impiety. For the conjunction of the Son with the Father is without time and without interval. The preceding words shew this to have been the intended meaning. For after saying that the Son was light of light, and begotten of the substance of the Father, but was not made, they went on to add the homoousion, thereby showing that whatever proportion of light any one would attribute in the case of the Father will obtain also in that of the Son. For very light in relation to very light, according to the actual sense of light, will have no variation. Since then the Father is light without beginning, and the Son begotten light, but each of Them light and light; they rightly said "of one substance," in order to set forth the equal dignity of the nature. Things, that have a relation of brotherhood, are not, as some persons have supposed, of one substance; but when both the cause and that which derives its natural existence from the cause are of the same nature, then they are called "of one substance."

3. This term also corrects the error of Sabellius, for it removes the idea of the identity of the hypostases, and introduces in perfection the idea of the Persons. For nothing can be of one substance with itself, but one thing is of one substance with another. The word has therefore an excellent and orthodox use, defining as it does both the proper character of the hypostases, and setting forth the invariability of the nature. And when we are taught that the Son is of the substance of the Father, begotten and not made, let us not fall into the material sense of the relations. For the substance was not separated from the Father and bestowed on the Son; neither did the substance engender by fluxion, nor yet by shooting forth¹⁸ as plants their fruits. The mode of the divine begetting is ineffable and inconceivable by human thought. It is indeed characteristic of poor and carnal intelligence to compare the things that are eternal with the perishing things of time, and to imagine, that as corporeal things beget, so does God in like manner; it is rather our duty to rise to the truth by arguments of the contrary, and to say, that since thus is the mortal, not thus is He who is immortal. We must neither then deny the divine generation, nor contaminate our intelligence with corporeal senses.

4. The Holy Spirit, too, is numbered with the Father and the Son, because He is above creation, and is ranked as we are taught by the words of the Lord in the Gospel, "Go and baptize in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost."¹⁹ He who, on the contrary, places the Spirit before the Son, or alleges Him to be older than the Father, resists the ordinance of God, and is a stranger to the sound faith, since he fails to preserve the form of doxology which he has received, but adopts some new fangled device in order to be pleasing to men. It is written "The Spirit is of God,"²⁰ and if He is of God, how can He be older than that of which He is? And what folly is it not, when there is one Unbegotten, to speak of something else as superior to the Unbegotten? He is not even anterior, for nothing intervenes between Son and Father. If, however, He is not of God but is through Christ, He does not even exist at all. It follows, that this new invention about the order really involves the destruction of the actual existence, and is a denial of the whole faith. It is equally impious to reduce Him to the level of a creature, and to subordinate Him either to Son or to Father, either in time or in rank. These are the points on which I have heard that you are making enquiry. If the Lord grant that we meet I may possibly have more to say on these subjects, and may myself, concerning points which I am investigating, receive satisfactory information from you.