44. I pray your sacred Majesty to suffer me,
if for a little while I address myself particularly to these men.
But whom shall I choose out to cite? Eunomius? Eunomius, at
one time Bishop of Cyzicus, came into prominence about 355 a.d. Like Arius, he taught that the Son was a
creature, though the first and most perfect of God’s creatures;
His office being to guide other creatures to knowledge of the source of
their existence. Religion then in his view consisted in a right
and complete intellectual apprehension of a metaphysical principle, and
no more. The generation of the Son he regarded as an event in
time, not supra-temporal. The point where Eunomius went beyond
Arius was the assertion of the comprehensibility for the human mind of
the Divine Essence. Those, he said, who declared God to be in His
Essence incomprehensible, who taught that He could only know in part
and by token, preached an unknown God, and denied all possible
knowledge of God, and therefore, since without knowledge of God there
could be no Christianity, did not even deserve the name of
Christians. or Arius and Aëtius, Aëtius
was Eunomius’ teacher. He became Bishop of Antioch, the see
of which was secured for him by the Arian Eudoxius, who obtained
Cyzicus for Eunomius. Aëtius and Eunomius were, however,
deposed about a.d. 360. his instructors? For there are many
names, but one unbelief, constant in wickedness, but in conversation
divided against itself; without difference in respect of deceit, but in
common enterprise breeding dissent. But wherefore they will not
agree together I understand not.