Answer to Eunomius' Second Book
Answer to Eunomius’ Second Book1066. CCL ———————————— The first part of my contentions against Eunomius has with God’s help been sufficiently established in the preceding work, as all who will may see from what I have…
§1 (¶1)
essence (of the Father), and not that He has His substance without origin, what term will they use to denote the Father’s being without origin, when they have set aside the term ungenerate to indicate His essence?
§2 (¶2)
God the Only-begotten as being very God, and honour not the Son as the Father is honoured, but regard Him as by nature a created being, not Lord and Master, but slave and subject.” For this is the aim and object of…
§3 (¶3)
from the harmony of things which do appear, and from the works of Providence. But what He is and how—leaving this as a useless and unprofitable speculation, such a disciple will open no door to falsehood against truth.
§4 (¶4)
to the Divine nature, as well as all that may fittingly be conjectured respecting it). Not that it has been able to gain full knowledge of that nature itself about which it reasons, but from the knowledge of those…
§5 (¶5)
what perfection of logical refinement! Who that has not been initiated in the mysteries of the awful craft may venture to look it in the face?
§6 (¶6)
dissolution, as the notion implies, is the same thing as destruction. This, then, is the upshot of our controversialist’s victory over us; to show us the God of his imagining whom he has fashioned by the name…
§7 (¶7)
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…
§8 (¶8)
in order that what we teach may be more firmly established, no point in controversy being left without due examination. “God called,” he says, “the firmament Heaven, and He called the dry land Earth, and the light Day,…
§9 (¶9)
us the cesspool of his abuse. And verily it is weak-minded to let ourselves be irritated by childish absurdities. We will therefore allow our insolent adversary full liberty to indulge in his method as he will.
§10 (¶10)
shepherding, or as a Shepherd? And again, “With Thee is the Well of life1154.” Does he deny that our Lord is called a “Well”? And again, “The Stone which the builders rejected1155.” And John, too,—where, representing…
§11 (¶11)
our new God-maker is clearly convicted of regarding the Son created by Him as destructible, by his not regarding Him as ungenerate, and not only so, but altogether without being, through his inability to see Him in the…
§12 (¶12)
uprightly and strictly may yet more adorn their life with virtue, as knowing that by their own life they rejoice Him Whose eyes are over the righteous.
§13 (¶13)
and indestructible, is a bestowing or lending on our part, and other nonsense of the kind. Moreover, he says that we divide the ages into two parts, as if he had not read the words he quoted, or as if he were addressing…
§14 (¶14)
But if he should still answer with regard to this opposition (of the Divine names), that it is only the term Father, and the term Creator, that are applied to God as expressing production, both words being so applied,…
§15 (¶15)
without end also he sees that which is without beginning. For otherwise he would not have made the terms wholly convertible. But God, he says, is ungenerate by nature, and not by contrast with the ages.
§16 (¶16)
such low scurrility, and such tasteless buffoonery, can be called argument, by which he thinks he impugns our cause, I pass it all over, for I deem it an abominable and ungracious thing to soil our treatise with such…
§17 (¶17)
presence of death in Him, and so deny any immortality in the case of the universal Deity. But perhaps some one will say that we fix unfairly on his words; for that no one is so mad as to affirm that God is not immortal.
§18 (¶18)