As they viewed the Holy Ghost as sharing the
Divine Nature in an even remoter degree, as being only the noblest
production of the Only-begotten Son, Eunomius was the first person
heretically to discontinue the practice of threefold immersion in Holy
Baptism. He also corrupted the Form of that Sacrament, by setting
aside the use of the Name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and
baptizing people “in the name of the Creator, and into the death
of Christ.” Therefore the Council of Constantinople ordered
that converts from Eunomianism should be baptized, although
those from other forms of Arianism were admitted into the Catholic
Church by simple imposition of hands. Through the influence of
the followers of Aëtius, Eunomius became, in 360, Bishop of
Cyzicus in Mysia, but he does not appear to have occupied the See very
long. At any rate when Gregory came, in 379, to Constantinople,
he was living in retirement near Chalcedon. All parties concur in
representing him as a consummate Dialectician, but the Orthodox
declared that he had turned Theology into a mere Technology.
Readiness of Dialectic was the great characteristic of his Sect, and it
was they who introduced into the Capital that bad spirit of theological
disputatiousness which Gregory deplores in the first of these famous
Orations. He also differed entirely from Gregory, not merely in
the conclusions at which he arrived, but in the method by which he
reached them; following the system of Aristotle, rather than of Plato,
and using an exclusively intellectual method, while Gregory treated
Religion as belonging to the entire man. The point at issue
between them, besides this of the Interior relations of the Three
Blessed Persons within the Godhead, was mainly the question as to the
complete comprehensibility of the Divine Nature, which the Eunomians
maintained, and Gregory denied. The latter argued that, while we
have a sure conviction that God is, we have not a full understanding of
What He is. He would not, however, exclude us from all
knowledge of God’s Nature, only he limits our capacity to so much
as God has been pleased to reveal to us of Himself. “In my
opinion,” he says (Or. xxiv. 4), “it is impossible to
express God, and yet more impossible to conceive Him—seeing that
the thick covering of the flesh is an obstacle to the understanding of
the truth.” Similarly in the Fourth of these Orations (Or.
xxx. 17) he says, “The Deity cannot be expressed in words.
And this is proved to us, not only by arguments, but by the wisest and
most ancient of the Hebrews, so far as they have given us reason for
conjecture. For they appropriated certain characters to the
honour of the Deity, and
would not even allow the name of anything inferior to God to be written
with the same letters as that of God, because to their mind it was
improper that the Deity should even to that extent admit any of His
creatures to a share with Himself. How then could they have
admitted that the indivisible and separate Nature can be explained by
divisible words?”