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Translated by W. Moore and H. A. Wilson
St Gregory of Nyssa Resources Online and in Print
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This Part: 128 Pages
Page 30
ยง3. He then shows the eternity of the Son's generation, and the inseparable identity of His essence with Him that begat Him, and likens the folly of Eunomius to children playing with sand.
But since, in what follows, he is active in stirring up the ill savour of his disgusting attempts, whereby he tries to make out that the Only-begotten God "once was not," it will be well, as our mind on this head has been made pretty clear by our previous arguments, no longer to plunge our argument also in what is likewise bad, except perhaps that it is not unseasonable to add this one point, having selected it from the multitude. He says (some one having remarked that "the property of not being begotten is equally associated with the essence of the Father [950] "), "The argument proceeds by like steps to those by which it came to a conclusion in the case of the Son." The orthodox doctrine is clearly strengthened by the attack of its adversaries, the doctrine, namely, that we ought not to think that not to be begotten or to be begotten are identical with the essence [951] , but that these should be contemplated, it is true, in the subject, while the subject in its proper definition is something else beyond these, and since no difference is found in the subject, because the difference of "begotten" and "unbegotten" is apart from the essence, and does not affect it, it necessarily follows that the essence must be allowed to be in both Persons without variation. Let us moreover inquire, over and above what has been already said, into this point, in what sense he says that "generation" is alien from the Father,--whether he does so conceiving of it as an essence or an operation. If he conceives it to be an operation, it is clearly equally connected with its result and with its author, as in every kind of production one may see the operation alike in the product and the producer, appearing in the production of the effects and not separated from their artificer. But if he terms "generation" an essence separate from the essence of the Father, admitting that the Lord came into being therefrom, then he plainly puts this in the place of the Father as regards the Only-begotten, so that two Fathers are conceived in the case of the Son, one a Father in name alone, Whom he calls "the Ungenerate," Who has nothing to do with generation, and the other, which he calls "generation," performing the part of a Father to the Only-begotten.
And this is brought home even more by the statements of Eunomius himself than by our own arguments. For in what follows, he says:--"God, being without generation, is also prior to that which is generate," and a little further on, "for He Whose existence arises from being generated did not exist before He was generated."
[950] Presumably the quotation from the unknown author, if completed, would run, "as that of being begotten is associated with the essence of the Son."
[951] If the property of not being begotten is "associated with" the essence, it clearly cannot be the essence, as Eunomius elsewhere maintains it to be: hence the phrase which he here adopts concedes S. Gregory's position on this point.
Reference address : https://www.elpenor.org/nyssa/against-eunomius-3.asp?pg=30
