7. My opinion is, however, that in this passage
the Apostle’s argument is directed to a different end; and it is
looking to this that he uses the terms “brightness of
glory,” and “express image of person.” Whoever
keeps this carefully in view will find nothing that clashes with what I
have said, but that the argument is conducted in a special and peculiar
sense. For the object of the apostolic argument is not the
distinction of the hypostases from one another by means of the apparent
notes; it is rather the apprehension of the natural, inseparable, and
close relationship of the Son to the Father. He does not say
“Who being the glory of the Father” (although in truth He
is); he omits this as admitted, and then in the endeavour to teach that
we must not think of one form of glory in the case of the Father and of
another in that of the Son, He defines the glory of the Only-begotten
as the brightness of the glory of the Father, and, by the use of the
example of the light, causes the Son to be thought of in
indissoluble association with
the Father. For just as the brightness is emitted by the flame,
and the brightness is not after the flame, but at one and the same
moment the flame shines and the light beams brightly, so does the
Apostle mean the Son to be thought of as deriving existence from the
Father, and yet the Only-begotten not to be divided from the existence
of the Father by any intervening extension in space, but the caused to
be always conceived of together with the cause. Precisely in the
same manner, as though by way of interpretation of the meaning of the
preceding cause, and with the object of guiding us to the conception of
the invisible by means of material examples, he speaks also of
“express image of person.” For as the body is wholly
in form, and yet the definition of the body and the definition of the
form are distinct, and no one wishing to give the definition of the one
would be found in agreement with that of the other; and yet, even if in
theory you separate the form from the body, nature does not admit of
the distinction, and both are inseparably apprehended; just so the
Apostle thinks that even if the doctrine of the faith represents the
difference of the hypostases as unconfounded and distinct, he is bound
by his language to set forth also the continuous and as it were
concrete relation of the Only-begotten to the Father. And this he
states, not as though the Only-begotten had not also a hypostatic
being, but in that the union does not admit of anything intervening
between the Son and the Father, with the result that he, who with his
soul’s eyes fixes his gaze earnestly on the express image of the
Only-begotten, is made perceptive also of the hypostasis of the
Father. Yet the proper quality contemplated in them is not
subject to change, nor yet to commixture, in such wise as that we
should attribute either an origin of generation to the Father or an
origin without generation to the Son, but so that if we could compass
the impossibility of detaching one from the other, that one might be
apprehended severally and alone, for, since the mere name implies the
Father, it is not possible that any one should even name the Son
without apprehending the Father. The simpler
explanation of the use of the word hypostasis in the passage under
discussion is that it has the earlier sense, equivalent to
οὐσία.
cf. Athan., Or. c. Ar. iii. 65, iv. 33, and
Ad. Apos. 4.