Книга пятая

1. Regarding the saying of the Apostle Peter (Acts 2:36), it would be time to more diligently examine what Eunomius himself said about him and what our father (St. Basil the Great) said about him. If careful consideration stretches out our words a lot, then, of course, a favorable listener will excuse us and not accuse us of being talkative, but will lay the blame on the one who gave the reason for it; Let me first be allowed to briefly review what is to be investigated - and this may not be inconsistent with the goal I have in mind. The Divine word has legitimized that nothing created should be idolized by people, almost all of the inspired Scripture teaches us this; Moses, the tablets, the law, then the prophets, the Gospel, the teaching of all the apostles equally forbid reverence for creation, and it would be a long time to separately propose passages related to this one after another. But, although we will offer a few of the many inspired testimonies, the word, without a doubt, will have equal reliability, because each of the Divine utterances, even the smallest, equally serves to reveal the truth. Since what exists is usually divided into two parts: into creation and uncreated nature, then if what is now being proven by opponents, namely that the Son of God was created, had force, it would be completely necessary either to reject the gospel preaching and not to worship the existing God the Word in the beginning, because one should not serve the creature, or, being ashamed of the gospel miracles, which lead to the veneration and worship of the One who is revealed in them, to consider both the created and the uncreated as equal. If, according to the teachings of opponents, it was necessary to worship a created god, who by nature has no preference over another creature, and if this teaching were to gain force, then the dogmas of piety would certainly be brought into a kind of anarchy and multi-powerful self-law, because as soon as people believe that not one nature is worshiped, but turn their thoughts to various deities, then no one will stop the movement of thought, who admitted a created deity; but recognition of a deity in any creature will be a reason for an equal opinion about what follows it, and so on; the delusion will successively spread to everything, as soon as the first lie, through its application, reaches the final extremes. And that my fortune-telling is not beyond probability, I will present a reliable witness to the truth of my word - a delusion that even to this day prevails among the Greeks. For after people, with an inexperienced and weak mind, became surprisingly attached to the beauties of creation and the miraculousness of phenomena, they did not use the miraculousness of phenomena as a guide and guide to the understanding of the premium beauty, but stopped their thoughts only on what was comprehended and each part of the creature separately became an object of wonder, then they did not recognize any one of the visible things as Divinity, but considered everything visible in creation to be divine. Thus, among the Egyptians, who had a particularly strong misconception regarding the spiritual world, countless types of demons were ranked among divine beings. Among the Babylonians, the unchanging circle of the sky was revered by a god, whom they called Baal, and also the seven next circles of Hellenic vanity, having made each separately a god, for some special reason of error, subordinated one to the other. For having realized that all these circles revolve one within the other, they lost their way regarding the highest things, and then consistently preserved the same error to the last extremes. In addition, they recognized as true that the ether itself, and the air spread under it, and the earth, and the sea, and the underground part, and on the earth itself, everything that is useful and necessary for human life and everything else is part of the Divine nature; one thing that had previously struck their eyes in creation gave rise to serving all subsequent parts of creation, and they bowed before each of these objects, so that if at first it seemed impermissible for them to turn their gaze on creation with reverence, they would not have fallen into such the seduction of polytheism. Moreover, we should not suffer from this ailment, taught by the Divine Scripture to look at the true Divinity and instructed to regard all created things as alien to the Divine nature, but to serve and honor one uncreated Nature, whose property and sign is that it never had a beginning of being and will not have an end. So the great Isaiah, speaking loudly about these dogmas, speaks on behalf of God: “I am the first and I am hereafter, before Me there was no other God, and after Me there will not be” (Is. 44:6, 43:10). This great Prophet, who knew more accurately than anyone else the secret of Gospel piety and who announced that wonderful sign of the Virgin, and who announced the birth of the “Offspring”, and who clearly pronounced His very name - this Prophet, who by the power of the spirit declared in himself the whole truth, so that it would be especially clear to everyone that property of the Divine nature, by means of which we distinguish what is self-existent from what has happened, speaks on behalf of God: “I am the first and I am after this, and before Me there was no God, and after Me there is no.” Because neither before God is God, nor after God is God, for whatever is after God is a creature, and before God there was nothing; nothing is God, or, better, before God, He Himself is in unlimited, eternal bliss; since further this spiritual word was spoken by the lips of the prophets, then through this we learn the dogma that there is a certain one Divine nature, identical in itself and indivisible, not allowing into itself either before or after, although it is preached in the Trinity, and having nothing in itself that could be imagined by the elders or after what happened. So, since this is a saying of God, whether you attribute it to the Father or the Son, the dogma of piety is equally affirmed by both. If the Father said this, then the Son testifies that He is not after Him, for if the Son is God, and everything that is after the Father is not God, then it is clear that the word of God testifies that the Son has existence in the Father, and not after the Father. If anyone ascribes to the Son these words: “there was no existence before Me,” then the teaching will be clear that, together with the eternity of the beginning, one must understand the eternal One to be contemplated in the beginning. So, from what has been said it is revealed: if anyone is after God, then this is a creature and not God, for what exists “according to Me,” says the Lord, is not God. 2. Now, after a preliminary presentation of the speculation about what exists, it is time for us to examine the proposed saying. So, Peter told the Jews that “God created the Lord and His Christ; this Jesus you crucified” (Acts 2:36). We say that the words created are piety requires to be attributed not to the Divinity of the Only Begotten, but to the “form of a servant”, perceived according to the economy during the coming in the flesh; Those who forcibly distort this saying, on the contrary, say that by the word “created” the Apostle means the pre-eternal birth of the Son. So, having openly presented our teaching and carefully considered both opinions, let us leave the listener to a discussion of the truth. A sufficient defender of the understanding contrary to ours will be Eunomius himself, who did not timidly strive in this matter, so that by literally following his words, we will fully expound the thought of our opponents. We ourselves will defend our teaching as much as we can, following as far as possible in the footsteps of what was previously expounded by the great Basil. Those who read, having judged where the truth is (as one of the prophets says, “judge righteous judgment” - Deut. 1:16, John 7:24), will give victorious rewards not to the assumptions of the disputants, but to the truth discovered through research. Now let our accuser appear first, as if in court reading what he has written. “Beyond what has been said, he, refusing to understand the word “created” about the essence of the Son and at the same time being ashamed of the cross, imposes on the apostles what no one imposed, even from those who rudely blasphemed them; he clearly introduces two Christs and two Lords with his dogmas and words, for he says that God did not create the Word, which was in the beginning, as Lord and Christ, but as a slave who was exhausted to the point of vision and crucified from weakness.” (Precisely, Basil the Great writes this way: the meaning of the Apostle’s saying does not represent to us anything about the pre-eternal hypostatic existence of the Only Begotten, about which we are now discussing. For it is obvious that the Apostle is not speaking here about the very essence of the Word of God, which was with God in the beginning (Jn. 1:1), but about him who exhausted himself into the “form of a servant” and became conformed to our lowly body (Phil. 2:7) and “crucified through weakness” (2 Cor. 13:4). Anyone who has even delved a little into the meaning of these words of the Apostle can understand that here he is not teaching us theology, but showing us an image of the economy of salvation, for when he says: “God created His Lord and His Christ, this Jesus, whom you crucified,” means only his humanity and what is visible in him, as this is clearly revealed to everyone from the indicative saying: “this Jesus”). “Speaking (Eunomius continues his speech about Basil the Great), he impermissibly replaces the meaning of the apostolic words with his own opinion and, as it were, accuses the holy men and the best preachers of piety of such madness, he dares to insult them, as if their teaching is so insufficient. But those who base their nonsense on deceased saints, what disorder in their thoughts are they not filled with? What kind of absurdity are they not full of who think that man has exhausted himself into man, and hence conclude that out of obedience he who has humbled himself to the form of a slave is similar to people even before the perception of this form? Oh, you most foolish of all, how does one who has the form of a slave take on the form of a slave? How would anyone drain himself into what he is? You will not find any way for this, although you dare to teach and think the impossible. Aren't you the most pathetic of all if you think that man suffered for all people, and you attribute your redemption to him? For if blessed Peter speaks not of the Word who is in the beginning and is God, but of the one who appeared and exhausted himself, as Basil says, the one who appeared as a man exhausted himself by perceiving the image of a slave, and the one who exhausted himself by perceiving the “slave’s image” exhausted himself by being born a man, then the one who appeared as a man exhausted himself by being born as a man. But this is contradicted by the very nature of things, clearly contradicted by him who glorified such a dispensation in his theology when he says that it is not the visible man, but the Word itself, who existed in the beginning and who is God, who took on flesh, in other words, this means the same as taking on the form of a slave. So, if you consider this to be reliable, then leave the error, stop teaching that man was exhausted into man. If you are unable to convince non-believers of this as incredible, then destroy unbelief with another word and another saying, remember the words: “He who was in the form of God was not equal to God by admiration; There is not a single person to whom these words could apply; not a single saint who ever was was the Only Begotten God, who became man, for this means, being in the image of God, to take on the form of a servant. So, if blessed Peter talks about the one who exhausted himself into the form of a servant, and the Word who was in the beginning and the Only Begotten God was exhausted into the form of a servant, then blessed Peter speaks about what is in the beginning and God and teaches that he is made Lord and Christ. This is how Vasily contradicts himself and clearly shows that he neither pays attention to the meaning of the apostolic words, nor maintains consistency in his own words. It follows from this that either, recognizing the incongruity, he must admit that the Word that existed in the beginning and the existing God became Lord, or, adding contradiction to contradiction and stubbornly standing on it, he must add something else, more hostile, asserting that there are two Christs and two Lords. For if one is God the Word, who was in the beginning, and another, who exhausted himself and took on the form of a servant, if the Lord is also God the Word, through whom are all things, the Lord and Christ, this Jesus, who was crucified after the creation of all things, then, in his opinion, there are two Lords and Christs. But no word will serve him as an excuse for such obvious blasphemies. If anyone, agreeing with this, says that the Word, who was in the beginning, is one with him who became Lord, but that he became Lord and Christ because of his appearance in the flesh, then he will necessarily have to say that before coming in the flesh the Son was not Lord. But even though Basil and the infidels who followed him falsely proclaimed two Lords and Christs, we have one Lord and Christ, “All things were, and without Him nothing came into being” (John 1:3), who was not made Lord by success, but before all creation, before all ages, the Lord Jesus; “To Him is everything,” as all the saints teach in agreement, proclaiming the most beautiful of dogmas. For blessed John also teaches that God the Word, “by whom all things were,” appeared in the flesh, saying: “The Word became flesh” (John 1:14), and the wonderful Paul, teaching those who listen to him humility, calls Christ Jesus in the image of God, who has humbled himself in the “form of a servant” and humbled himself “to the point of death, even the death of the cross” (Phil. 2, 7–8). And again in another place he calls the crucified Lord of glory, saying: “Even if they understood, they did not crucify the Lord of glory” (1 Cor. 2:8), and much more clearly than this he calls the very being (the Son) Lord, saying: “The Lord is the Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:17). So, if the Word, existing in the beginning as Spirit, was Lord and Lord of glory, “God created this Lord and Christ,” then God created the very Spirit and God the Word, and not any other Lord, whom Basil dreams of.” 3. This is the accusation. It seems to me useful, first of all, to briefly present each of the charges raised separately, then to present what has been said so that those who judge the truth can easily remember the scripture directed against us to which we need to respond; In this way we will destroy each accusation in order and successively. He says that we are ashamed of the cross of Christ and accuse the saints, and we say that man was exhausted into man, and we think that the Lord, before coming in the flesh, had the form of a slave, and we attribute redemption to man, and in our teaching we affirm that there are two Christs and Lords, or if we do not affirm this, then at least we say that before suffering there is no Only Begotten Christ and Lord. So, in order to avoid this blasphemy, we must, he says, confess that the essence of the Son was created, since the Apostle Peter affirms this dogma in his own word. These are the main provisions of the accusation, but I will keep silent about everything else that is aimed at condemning us as irrelevant; Perhaps such a verbal attack, according to some rule of art and usually by rhetoricians, was invented for greater weight of accusation; So, let this sophist insult us with his art and hurt us with curses, let him, puffed up by the strength of attacks in a dispute, call us the most unreasonable, the most pitiful of all, restless and reckless, and in every way he wants, humiliates us at his own will; we will demolish it, because it is a shame for one who has intelligence not to listen to the one who reproaches, but to respond to what is said. Perhaps it is even useful that he directed the power of his mind towards us, because by exercising his slanderous tongue on us, he may, at least for a while, stop his abuse against God. So, let him satiate himself with curses as much as he likes, no one will contradict him. For anyone whose breath is bad and fetid from a bodily disorder or from a contagious and evil disease will not challenge the healthy to compete with his misfortune, no one will want to use the same illness to ward off the stench of someone who emits a bad smell, because the nature of all people advises to sympathize with such people, and not to imitate them. So, leaving everything like this, which he so diligently mixed into his word, mocking, annoyed, indignant, blaming, we will consider only what he says about dogmas, and starting with the first, we will stand against each accusation in particular. The initial accusation was that we are ashamed of the cross. It would be much more consistent with the matter to accuse those who are carried away by such an opinion of being ashamed of the cross. Because if we and they equally believe in the economy of salvation through suffering, but we think that God “who appeared” through the cross should be honored as the Father is honored, and for them suffering serves as an obstacle to the glorification of the Only Begotten God as equal with the begotten Father, then the accusation, on the contrary, is not directed at the sophist, and by what he thinks to accuse us, does he not show before everyone his own wickedness in the teaching of faith? For it is obvious that this is why he places the Father above the Son and exalts him with great honors, because the shame of the cross is not seen in Him, and therefore he intensifies to change the nature of the Son for the worse, because the reproach of the cross applies to him only, without touching the Father. And let no one think that I am speaking by deducing consequences from the connection of thoughts of his work, for, running through all the blasphemy carefully collected in his word, in the following words I found this blasphemy stated in open terms. And, if you wish, along with my words, I will offer what he wrote of this kind: “if, he says, he can prove that God, who exists above all, who is the unapproachable light, was or could be in the flesh, come under power, obey commands, obey human law, bear the cross, then let him say that light is equal to light.” So who is ashamed of the cross? Is it the one who, even after suffering, worships the Son on an equal basis with the Father, or the one who, even before suffering, insults Him not only by equating His honor with the creature, but by asserting that he is of a passionate nature and could not experience suffering if he did not have a nature capable of accepting it? Therefore, everyone who preaches the Word points out the miracle of the sacrament, that “God appeared in the flesh, that the Word became flesh,” that the light shone in the darkness, life tasted death, and everything like this is proclaimed by the preachers, which increases the surprise at the one who showed the excess of his power outside of nature. But even if this seemed blasphemy to them, and even if, through the economy of the cross, they separated the Son from equality with the Father, we, as the self-seers and servants of the Word conveyed to us from the beginning in the sacred Scriptures, believe that in the beginning this God “therefore, as Baruch says, appeared on earth and lived with men” (Bar. 3:38), that He, having become a ransom for our death, allowed by His own resurrection the bonds of death and by His resurrection paved the way for all flesh, and, being co-throne and equal in honor with His Father, on the day of judgment, according to the dignity of life, He will pronounce judgment on the judged. We believe this about the Crucified One, and therefore, to the best of our ability, we will not cease to exalt Him because, incomprehensible to anyone because of his ineffable and inaccessible greatness, except Himself, the Father and the Holy Spirit, He was able to condescend to communicate with our weakness. They prove the otherness of the nature of the Son from the Father by the fact that the Lord revealed Himself through the flesh and the cross, because the nature of the Father remains in dispassionateness, and in the nature of the Son, through its change into a more humiliated one and through the opportunity to experience incarnation and death, a small change took place: in some way it passed from similar to similar and homogeneous; hence, on the basis of the fact that human nature was created, they assumed that the nature of the Only Begotten was also created. So who should rightly be accused of being ashamed of the cross? Is it the one who says low things about him, or the one who strives for his greatness? I don’t know whether this accuser, who so humiliates the known God on the cross, heard the great word of Paul, how and how much he speaks about the cross with exalted lips, for, having the opportunity to give himself fame with so many and such miracles, he says: “Let me not boast except about the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Gal. 6:14) and to the Corinthians: “For the word of the cross is to those who are perishing.” there is foolishness, but to us who are saved the power of God is” (1 Cor. 1:18); To the Ephesians, he describes the power that possesses and sustains everything in the image of the cross - that to which he wants to rise in order to know the advancing glory of this power, calling it height, and depth, and breadth, and longitude; and each spur of what is seen in the image of the cross, calling it by special names, so that the upper part is called height, depth - that which lies under the crossbar, and the diameter between one and the other extremity is designated by the name of longitude and latitude, so that through this great mystery it will be revealed that the heavenly and the underground, and all the ends of existence are contained and supported by the one who has shown this ineffable and great power in image of the cross. But I think that there is no longer any need to fight these accusations, considering it unnecessary to intensify the denunciation of slander when the truth has been proven to little; therefore, we will move on to another charge. He says that we are slandering the saints. But if he himself heard it, then let him say the words of which he accuses, but if he claims that we told others, then let him prove the truth of guilt through witnesses, but if he proves it from our writings, then let him read what we said and we will take the blame upon ourselves. But he could not have imagined anything like this, for what we have written is available to anyone who wishes to study it. If neither he was told, nor heard from others, nor can anything written incriminate us, then, I think, the one defending himself against these accusations should remain silent. For against an unproven accusation, silence is the most decent defense. For it also happens in material mixtures that when one part is excessively abundant over another, then the smaller part must completely transform into the predominant one; We are clearly taught the same thing by the mysterious word of Peter about the humiliation of the Crucified through weakness, weakness here means the flesh, as we heard about the Lord; This weak thing, through the merger with the infinity and unlimitedness of good, no longer remained in its own measure and qualities, but was lifted up by the right hand of God and became instead of the subject Christ, the King, instead of the humble - the highest, instead of man - God. So, showing the appearance that he fights with us for the apostles, what did he find in what was written (by us) against the saints? But let this accusation also be silent, for I consider it petty and ignoble to rebel against false and unproven speeches. Let's move on to a stronger accusation. 4. He says that we affirm that man became exhausted (into man) and out of obedience, he who humbled himself in the form of a servant was like people even before the perception of this form. Nothing in the speech has been replaced; we have given the very words from his composition; if there is anything like this in our writings (I call ours the writings of the mentor (Basily the Great), then let no one accuse the rhetorician of slander; calling on all our care for the truth, we will testify to the same. If there is nothing of the kind in our writings, and his word does not bring up empty guilt, if, as if all this is clearly proven, he is indignant and angry, calling our imaginary words monstrosity, nonsense, full of vagueness and inconsistency and the like, then I don’t see what needs to be done. Just as those who are confused by the unexpected rage of the insane do not know what to decide on, so I myself cannot find anything to come up with in this difficulty. But just as we, accused of being ashamed of the cross, have proven in our study that the accusation is directed, on the contrary, to the accuser, so we will show that this guilt is also directed to the accuser, that he, and not we, teaches the change of the Son in the economy of suffering from a similar state to a similar one. We explore, offering for mutual comparison what is said by them and by us. We say that the Only Begotten God, through Himself brought everything into existence, one of the things that happened through Him is human nature, which fell into sin and through that was subjected to the corruption of death; again through Himself He drew Him to immortal life through man, in whom He indwelled, taking upon Himself the whole human nature, and He mixed His life-giving power with mortal and corruptible nature, and through merging with Himself, He transformed our deadness into life-giving grace and strength. We call it the mystery of the Lord according to the flesh that the unchangeable appears in the changeable, so that by changing and transforming into better from worse the evil that has invaded the changeable nature, we can destroy sin from nature, destroying it in Himself; “For our God is a consuming fire” (Heb. 12:29), by which all the substance of evil is destroyed. This is our word. What does the prosecutor say? “The unchangeable and uncreated one did not mix with the one who came into being through creation, and therefore changed to evil (i.e. with man), but the one who, having himself been created, came to be related and homogeneous to himself, not from a superior nature, out of love for mankind, putting on a lower one, but what he was, that is what he became.” The general generic name for everything created out of nothing is the name of creation, but the particular differences seen in creation differ from one another by differences in properties; so if He (i.e., the Son) was created and man was also created, then the Son, according to Eunomius, diminished into Himself and passed not from the highest state to the humble, but from similar to similar, excluding the properties of corporeality and incorporeality. So, on whom will the just verdict of the judges fall? Who will be guilty of these charges? Is it the one who says that creation was saved by the uncreated God, or the one who attributes the cause of our salvation to creation? For whoever does not assert anything on the basis of what he has heard, but invents anything out of his own impulse, let him not spare such accusations against us, because it makes no difference whether we are accused of this or that, since neither one nor the other has any basis in our words. For he who asserts that the true Son has his being in the glory of the Father, can he insult the eternal glory of the Only Begotten by attributing to it the form of a servant? Since this writer likes to slander, and he seems to care about inventing plausible accusations, it would not be unnecessary or useless to enter into a fight against unfounded accusations. But at the same time, we again need to cite the words of the prosecutor, which speak in favor of our defense. So, we will literally express his position, by which our word is confirmed, of this kind: “Blessed John,” he says, “teaches that God the Word, “In Him were all things,” appeared in the flesh, saying: “And the Word became flesh.” Does he understand what he writes, adding it to his own speech? I don’t think that one and the same person could know the meaning of these words and fight against our word. For if someone carefully considered what was said, he would not find a mutual contradiction between what we said and what he said, because we “especially” consider the matter of economy in the flesh and understand the Divine power in itself. He, like us, says that the Word, which was in the beginning, appeared in the flesh, but neither anyone nor he himself ever accused him, as if he preached two Words: one, which existed in the beginning, and the other, made flesh. And without explanation it is clear that blows refer to the servant, in whom the Lord is, and honors - to the Lord, in whom the slave; but through union and affinity, both become common, so that the Master takes upon himself the wounds of slavery, and the slave is glorified with “Master” honor, which is why the cross of the Lord of glory is spoken of and every tongue confesses that “Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil. 2:11). If we need to distinguish the rest in the same way, then let us consider what dies and what death destroys, what is renewed and what is exhausted. The Divinity is exhausted so that it can be perceived by human nature, but human nature is renewed, becoming Divine through union with the Divine. For just as air, compressed by something heavier and confined in the depths of water, does not remain in the water, but flows to what is akin to it, and water, by the ascent of air, often rises with it, bending around the air circle in the form of some thin membranous circle, so true life, covered with flesh, after suffering flowed to itself, and the flesh surrounding it was lifted up with it by Divine immortality, having ascended from corruption to incorruption. And just as in a tree fire, often hidden under the surface, is inaccessible to the senses of those who see or touch, but when ignited it becomes obvious, so in death, which one who has separated the soul from the body has accepted at his own will. He said to His Father: “Father, in Your hands I commend My spirit” (Luke 23:46), which has “the area (as he says) to receive again” (Jn. 10:18), despising shame among people (since he was the Lord of glory), as if hiding the spark of life in the nature of the body in the economy of death, he again kindled and ignited it with the power of his own Divinity, “warming up” the mortified and thus pouring into the infinity of the Divine power this small firstfruits of our nature. What he himself was, that he also made - the form of a servant - by the Lord, a man from Mary - by Christ, crucified from weakness - by life and strength; and everything that is piously contemplated in God the Word, he did also in the one who was received by the Word, so that not all of this appears to us separately in each “especially”, but the corruptible nature, through the merging with the Divine, having become predominant, became a participant in the power of the Divine, just as, one might say, how a drop of vinegar mixed with the sea, from mixing becomes a sea, and natural the quality of this liquid is no longer preserved in the infinity of the predominant substance. Thus, our word does not affirm the number of Christ, as Eunomius accuses us, but the unity of man with the Divine, mortal with immortal, slave with the Lord, sin with righteousness, curse with blessing - the “transformation” of man into Christ, calling creation. So, what else is left to say to the slanderers? That in our teaching we do not preach two Christs and do not say that the uncreated being from the beginning is from the Father - both the Lord, and Christ, and the Word, and God are created, but we affirm that blessed Peter speaks briefly, casually pointing out the mystery of being in the flesh according to the understanding we have previously proven (his words), that crucified from weakness by the predominant power of the One who dwelt in him and himself became what he is and what He who dwelt in him is called, as we said, Christ and Lord. You might be interested in: