2. All this is indeed as it is: He,
Who is by nature God of God, must possess the nature of His origin,
which God possesses, and the indistinguishable unity of a living nature
cannot be divided by the birth of a living nature. Yet
nevertheless the heretics, under cover of the saving confession of the
Gospel faith, are stealing on to the subversion of the truth: for
by forcing their own interpretations on words uttered with other
meanings and intentions, they are robbing the Son of His natural
unity. Thus to deny the Son of God, they quote the authority of
His own words, Why callest thou Me good? None is good, save
one, God St. Mark x. 18 (cf. St. Matt. xix. 17, St. Luke
xviii. 19). The Greek
is οὐδεὶς
ἀγαθὸς, εἰ μὴ
εἷς ὁ θεός,
‘save one, even God’ (R.V.). The application of this
text by the Arians depends upon the omission of the article ὁ.. These words,
they say, proclaim the Oneness of God: anything else, therefore,
which shares the name of God, cannot possess the nature of God, for God
is One. And from His words, This is life eternal, that they
should know Thee the only true God St. John xvii. 3.,
they attempt to establish the theory that Christ is called God by a
mere title, not as being very God. Further, to exclude Him from
the proper nature of
the true God, they quote, The Son can do nothing of Himself except
that which He hath seen the Father do St. John v. 19.. They use also the text, The
Father is greater than I. Ib. xiv.
28.
Finally, when they repeat the words, Of that day and that hour
knoweth no one, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but the
Father only St. Mark xiii. 32; cf. St. Matt. xxiv.
36., as though they
were the absolute renunciation of His claim to divinity, they boast
that they have overthrown the faith of the Church. The birth,
they say, cannot raise to equality the nature which the limitation of
ignorance degrades. The Father’s omniscience and the
Son’s ignorance reveal unlikeness in the Divinity, for God must
be ignorant of nothing, and the ignorant cannot be compared with the
omniscient. All these passages they neither understand
rationally, nor distinguish as to their occasions, nor apprehend in the
light of the Gospel mysteries, nor realize in the strict meaning of the
words and so they impugn the divine nature of Christ with crude and
insensate rashness, quoting single detached utterances to catch the
ears of the unwary, and keeping back either the sequel which explains
or the incidents which prompted them, though the meaning of words must
be sought in the context before or after them.