Earlier Teachers Who Used the Same Words

This, then, is the sense in which those who met at Nicaea used these expressions. Next, so as to cut off even this excuse from them, we will go on to prove that they did not invent the expressions for themselves (for this is one of their excuses), but spoke what they had received from those before them. Know, then, you Arians, enemies of Christ, that Theognostus, a learned man, did not refuse the phrase “from the substance.” In the second book of his Outlines he writes this about the Son: “The substance of the Son is not one brought in from outside, nor one that came about out of nothing. It sprang from the Father’s substance, as radiance from light, as vapor from water. For neither the radiance nor the vapor is the water itself or the sun itself, nor is it something alien. It is an outflow of the Father’s substance, and yet that substance suffers no division. For as the sun remains the same and is not lessened by the rays it pours out, so neither does the Father’s substance undergo change, though it has the Son as an Image of itself.” Theognostus, then, after first investigating the question by way of an exercise, goes on to lay down his own view in the words above. [a]

Next, Dionysius, who was bishop of Alexandria, wrote against Sabellius and set out at length the Savior’s saving work in the flesh, proving from this against the Sabellians that it was not the Father but his Word who became flesh, as John has said. He was then suspected of saying that the Son was a thing made and brought into being, and not of one substance with the Father. On this he wrote to his namesake Dionysius, bishop of Rome, to plead in his defense that this was a slander against him. And he assured him that he had not called the Son made, but even confessed him to be of one substance. His words ran like this: “And I have written in another letter a refutation of the false charge they bring against me, that I deny that Christ was of one substance with God. For though I say that I have not found this term anywhere in Holy Scripture, yet my remarks that follow, which they have not noticed, are not inconsistent with that belief. For I gave human birth as an example, since it is plainly of one kind, and I observed that parents undeniably differ from their children only in not being the same individuals; otherwise there could be neither parents nor children. “My letter, as I said before, I am unable to produce because of present circumstances; otherwise I would have sent you the very words I used, or rather a copy of the whole of it, which I will still do if I have the opportunity. But I am sure from memory that I gave examples of things akin to each other. For instance, I said that a plant grown from a seed or from a root was other than that from which it sprang, and yet was altogether one in nature with it; and that a stream flowing from a fountain took a new name, for the fountain was not called a stream, nor the stream a fountain, and both existed, and the stream was the water from the fountain.”

And that the Word of God is not a work or a creature, but an offspring belonging to the Father’s substance and indivisible from it, as the great council wrote, you may see here in the words of Dionysius, bishop of Rome. Writing against the Sabellians, he attacks those who dared to say such a thing: “Next, I may rightly turn to those who divide and cut to pieces and destroy that most sacred teaching of the church of God, the divine Monarchy, making it, as it were, three powers, and divided hypostases, and three godheads. I am told that some among you who instruct converts and teach the divine word are leading the way in this teaching. They are diametrically opposed, so to speak, to the opinions of Sabellius. For he blasphemously says that the Son is the Father and the Father the Son; but they in some way preach three Gods, dividing the sacred Monad into three hypostases foreign to each other and utterly separate. “For the divine Word must be united with the God of the universe, and the Holy Spirit must abide and dwell in God; and so the divine Triad must be gathered up and brought together into one, as into a summit, I mean the God of the universe. For it is the teaching of the presumptuous Marcion to sever and divide the divine Monarchy into three first principles. That is a devil’s teaching, not that of Christ’s true disciples and of those who love the Savior’s lessons. For they know well that a Triad is preached by divine Scripture, but that neither the Old Testament nor the New preaches three Gods. [f]

“Equally, one must censure those who hold the Son to be a work, and think that the Lord has come into being like one of the things that really came to be; whereas the divine oracles bear witness to a generation fitting and becoming to him, but not to any fashioning or making. It is a blasphemy, then, and not an ordinary one but the very highest, to say that the Lord is in any way a handiwork. For if he came to be Son, once he was not. But he always was, if indeed he is in the Father, as he says himself, and if Christ is Word and Wisdom and Power (which, as you know, divine Scripture says), and these are powers of God. If, then, the Son came into being, once these were not; and so there was a time when God was without them, which is utterly absurd. “And why say more on these points to you, men full of the Spirit and well aware of the absurdities that come to light from saying that the Son is a work? Not paying attention to this, as I think, the authors of this opinion have entirely missed the truth. They explain the words, ‘The Lord created me a beginning of his ways for his works,’ against the sense of divine and prophetic Scripture in that passage. For the sense of ‘he created,’ as you know, is not just one. 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 he not your Father who bought you? Has he not made you and created you?’ says Moses in his great song in Deuteronomy. “And one may say to them: Reckless men, is he a work, who is ‘the firstborn of every creature,’ who is ‘born from the womb before the morning star,’ who said as Wisdom, ‘Before all the hills he begets me’? And in many passages of the divine oracles the Son is said to have been begotten, but nowhere to have come into being. This plainly convicts those who presume to call his divine and inexpressible generation a making of having misconceived the Lord’s generation. “Neither, then, may we divide the wonderful and divine Monad into three godheads, nor belittle the dignity and surpassing majesty of the Lord with the name of ‘work.’ But we must believe in God the Father Almighty, and in Christ Jesus his Son, and in the Holy Spirit, and hold that the Word is united to the God of the universe. For he says, ‘I and the Father are one,’ and, ‘I in the Father and the Father in me.’ For in this way both the divine Triad and the holy preaching of the Monarchy will be preserved.”

And concerning the eternal co-existence of the Word with the Father, and that he is not of another substance or hypostasis but belongs to the Father’s own, as the bishops in the council said, you may hear again from the hard-working Origen too. For what he wrote as if inquiring and by way of exercise, let no one take as expressing his own view, but that of parties contending in an investigation. But what he declares definitely, that is the view of this hard-working man. So after his opening exercises, so to speak, against the heretics, he immediately brings in his own belief, like this: “If there is an Image of the invisible God, it is an invisible Image. Indeed, I will be bold enough to add that, being the likeness of the Father, it never was not. For when was that God, who according to John is called Light (for ‘God is light’), without a radiance of his own glory, so that anyone should presume to assert a beginning of existence for the Son, as if before that he was not? And when did that Image of the Father’s inexpressible and nameless and unutterable hypostasis not exist, that Exact Imprint and Word, and he who knows the Father? Let the one who dares to say, ‘Once the Son was not,’ understand well that he is saying, ‘Once Wisdom was not,’ and ‘The Word was not,’ and ‘Life was not.’” And again elsewhere he says: “But it is neither innocent nor without danger if, because of the weakness of our understanding, we deprive God, as far as lies in us, of the only Son, his Word, who always exists with him, and of the Wisdom in which he rejoiced. Otherwise he must be thought of as not always having joy.” [l]

See, we are proving that this view has been handed down from father to father. But you, modern Jews and disciples of Caiaphas, how many fathers can you name for your phrases? Not one of the understanding and wise; for all abhor you, except the devil alone. None but he is your father in this apostasy. He both sowed in you the seed of this impiety in the beginning, and now persuades you to slander the ecumenical council for putting into writing, not your teachings, but what was handed down to us from the beginning by those who were eyewitnesses and ministers of the Word. For the faith that the council confessed in writing is the faith of the catholic church. To assert this, the blessed fathers expressed themselves as they did while condemning the Arian heresy; and this is a chief reason why these men set themselves to slander the council. For it is not the terms that trouble them, but that those terms prove them to be heretics, and presumptuous beyond other heresies.