Most hostile and alien to the Apostolic Confession are those who speak of the Son as assumed to Himself by the Father out of nothing, and from an emanational origin; [272] and those who hold the same sentiments with respect to the Holy Spirit; those who say that the Son is constituted divine by gift and grace, and that the Holy Spirit is made holy; those who regard the name of the Son as one common to servants, and assert that thus He is the first-born of the creature, as becoming, like the creature, existent out of non-existence, and as being first made, and who refuse to admit that He is the only-begotten Son, -- the only One that the Father has, and that He has given Himself to be reckoned in the number of mortals, and is thus reckoned first-born; those who circumscribe the generation of the Son by the Father with a measured interval after the fashion of man, and refuse to acknowledge that the æon of the Begetter and that of the Begotten are without beginning; those who introduce three separate and diverse systems of divine worship, [273] whereas there is but one form of legitimate service which we have received of old from the law and the prophets, and which has been confirmed by the Lord and preached by the apostles. Nor less alienated from the true confession are those who hold not the doctrine of the Trinity according to truth, as a relation consisting of three persons, but impiously conceive it as implying a triple being in a unity (Monad), formed in the way of synthesis [274] and think that the Son is the wisdom in God, in the same manner as the human wisdom subsists in man whereby the man is wise, and represent the Word as being simply like the word which we utter or conceive, without any hypostasis whatever. Footnotes: [271] Edited in Latin by Gerardus Vossius, Opp. Greg. Thaum., Paris, 1662, in fol.; given in Greek from the Codex Vaticanus by Cardinal Mai, Script. Vet., vii. p. 170. Vossius has the following argument: This is a second Confession of Faith, and one widely different from the former, which this great Gregory of ours received by revelation. This seems, however, to be designated an ekthesis tes kata meros pisteos, either because it records and expounds the matters of the faith only in part, or because the Creed is explained in it by parts. The Jesuit theologian Franc. Torrensis (the interpreter and scholiast of this ekthesis) has, however, rendered the phrase he kata meros pistis, by the Latin fides non universa sed in parte. And here we have a fides non universa sed in parte, according to him,--a creed not of all the dogmas of the Church, but only of some in opposition to the heretics who deny them. [The better view.] [272] hoi ton Huion ex ouk onton kai apostellomenes arches einai epikteton legontes to Patri. [Note, Exucontians = Arians.] [273] akoinonetous kai xenas eisagontes latreias. [274] en monadi to triploun asebos kata sunthesin. |
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