Богословие

Our affairs once flourished and went well: then this excessive, sweet-tongued and cunning theology did not have access to the courts of God. On the contrary, to say or hear something new about God and satisfying one’s curiosity meant the same as playing with stones and deceiving the eyes with the speed of throwing them or amusing the audience with various and effeminate movements of the body. Simplicity and nobility of speech were considered piety. But after Sextus and Pyrrhon 28 and the desire for verbal disputes, like some serious and malignant disease, invaded our churches, idle talk began to be considered learning, and, as the book of Acts says about the Athenians (see Acts 17:21), we did not spend our time more willingly than in speaking or listening to new things; from now on, what Jeremiah, who alone knows how to compose a lament equal to suffering, will weep for our shame and darkness! The beginning of this frenzy was laid by Arius 29, the same name as madness, who suffered punishment for the unbridled tongue through the action of prayer, and not through illness, accepting the end of his life in an unclean place and being seated, like Judas, for his equal betrayal of the Word. And others, having inherited this illness, made a science out of wickedness; they, having limited the Divinity to the Unborn, expelled from the Divinity not only the Born, but also the Coming, honoring the Trinity with one communion of the name, or even without observing that. But this is not how this blessed man, truly God, 30 and the great trumpet of truth taught. Knowing that reducing the Three into one number is godless and is an innovation of Sabellius, who was the first to come up with such a reduction of the Divinity, and also dividing the Three by nature means introducing a strange section into the Divinity, he perfectly preserved the unity in relation to the Divinity, and piously taught to recognize the Three in relation to personal properties, without merging Them into one and without dividing them into Three, but remaining within the limits of piety through avoiding as an excessive inclination to that or the other, and excessive resistance to both. And with this, firstly, at the holy Council in Nicaea, among this number of chosen men whom the Holy Spirit gathered together, he, as far as depended on him, stopped the illness. And although he had not yet been elevated to the rank of bishop, he was nevertheless awarded primacy among those gathered; for virtue was respected no less than degrees (1). Sextus is a Greek physician and philosopher of the 2nd century, a representative of the empirical school in medicine and the skeptical school in philosophy. He disputed the possibility of knowing the truth, did not believe in the existence of God and the soul. Pyrrho - ancient Greek philosopher of the 3rd century. BC, founder of skepticism. – Approx. ed. Bseipzh - Arius - in Greek can mean “fury”, “frenzy”. This refers to Athanasius the Great. You might be interested in: