|
HOME | GREEK LANGUAGE |
LIBRARIES |
BLOG | HELP | SEARCH | BOOKSTORE | FREEWARE |
|
|
Translated by W. Moore and H. A. Wilson
St Gregory of Nyssa Resources Online and in Print
|
This Part: 128 Pages
Page 92
He says that God was what He is, before the creation of man. Nor do we deny it. For whatsoever we conceive of God existed before the creation of the world. But we maintain that it received its name after the namer came into being. For if we use words for this purpose, that they may supply us with teaching about the things which they signify, and it is ignorance alone that requires teaching, while the Divine Nature, as comprehending all knowledge, is above all teaching, it follows that names were invented to denote the Supreme Being, not for His sake, but for our own. For He did not attach the term ungeneracy to His nature in order that He Himself might be instructed. For He Who knoweth all things has no need of syllables and words to instruct Him as to His own nature and majesty.
But that we might gain some sort of comprehension of what with reverence may be thought respecting Him, we have stamped our different ideas with certain words and syllables, labelling, as it were, our mental processes with verbal formulae to serve as characteristic notes and indications, with the object of giving a clear and simple declaration of our mental processes by means of words attached to, and expressive of, our ideas. Why, then, does he find fault with our contention that the term ungeneracy was devised to indicate the existence of God without origin or beginning, and that, independently of all exercise of speech, or silence, or thought, and before the very idea of creation, God was and remains ungenerate? If, indeed, any one should argue that God was not ungenerate till the name ungeneracy had been found, the man might be pardonable for writing as he has written, in contravention of such an absurdity. But if no one denies that He existed before speech and reason, whereas, while the form of words by which the meaning is expressed is said by us to have been devised by mental conception, the end and aim of his controversy with us is to show that the name is not of man's device, but that it existed before our creation, though by whom it was spoken I do not know [1099] , what has the assertion that God existed ungenerately before all things, and the contention that [1100] mental conception is posterior to God, got to do with this aim of his? For that God is not a conception has been fully demonstrated, so that we may press him with the same sort of argument, and reply, so to say, in his own words, e.g. "It is utter folly to regard understanding as of earlier birth than those who exercise it"; or again, as he proceeds a little below, "Nor as though we intended this, i.e. to make men, the latest of God's works of creation, anterior to the conceptions of their own understanding." Great indeed would be the force of the argument, if any one of us, out of sheer folly and madness, should argue that God was a conception of the mind. But if this is not so, nor ever has been, (for who would go to such a pitch of folly as to assert that He Who alone is, and Who brought all else whatsoever into being, has no substantial existence of His own, and to make Him out to be a mere conception of a name?) why does he fight with shadows, contending with imaginary propositions?
[1099] Oehler's reading and stopping are both faulty here, viz., ouk oida peri tinos legomenon ti koinon echei k.t.l. Manifestly the stop should be at legomenon, and the reading of the editt. para tinos is right.
[1100] It is not necessary to change the to here to to as Oehler suggests. The Munich Cod. omits it altogether. But he has done good service to the text, by supplying from his Codices all that follows, down to "the same sort of argument" (except that the first diagonizesthai is probably a gloss).
Reference address : https://www.elpenor.org/nyssa/against-eunomius-3.asp?pg=92
