[255] apeithein. Bengel and Hoeschelius read apelthein, withdraw.
[256] haplous ara tis einai nenomistai andri prophete. Migne refers us to Ps. xvii.
[257] Ps. cxxxvii.
[258] 2 Kings xxiv.; xxv.
[259] theologous, used probably of the prophets here--namely of Ezekiel, Daniel, and others carried into exile with the people. On this usage, see Suicer's Thesaurus, under the word theologos, where from the pseudo-Areopagite Dionysius he cites the sentence, ton theologon heis, ho Zacharias, and again, heteros ton theologon 'Iezekiel.
[260] The text is, kai phos to heliakon kai to dienekes, hemeras huper hemon prosomilounton tois theios musteriois kai nuktos hon en hemera eide te kai epraxen he psuche tais phantasiais katechomenon . Bengel proposes hupar for huper, so as to keep the antithesis between hemeras hupar and nuktos phantasiais; and taking hemeras and nuktos as temporal genitives, he renders the whole thus: cum interdiu, per visa, divinis aderamus sacramentis: et noctu earum rerum, quas viderat de die atque egerat anima, imaginibus detinebamur.
[261] ["In dreams I still renew the rites," etc.--William Croswell.]
[262] aulein. The Jews had the harp, and so the word psallein is used of them in the preceding. But here, in speaking of himself, Gregory adopts the term oute aulein, ne tibia quidem canere. Bengel supposes that the verb is changed in order to convey the idea, that while the Jews only had to give up the use of instruments expressive of joyful feeling, Gregory feared he would himself be unable to play even on those of a mournful tone,--for in ancient times the pipe or flute was chiefly appropriated to strains of grief and sadness.
Argument XVII.--Gregory Consoles Himself.
But why should I utter such lamentations? There lives still the Saviour of all men, even of the half-dead and the despoiled, the Protector and Physician for all, the Word, that sleepless Keeper of all. We have also seeds of truth which thou hast made us know as our possession, and all that we have received from thee,--those noble deposits of instruction, with which we take our course; and though we weep, indeed, as those who go forth from home, we yet carry those seeds with us. It may be, then, that the Keeper who presides over us will bear us in safety through all that shall befall as; and it may be that we shall come yet again to thee, bringing with us the fruits and handfuls yielded by these seeds, far from perfect truly, for how could they be so? but still such as a life spent in civil business [263] makes it possible for us to rear, though marred indeed by a kind of faculty that is either unapt to bear fruit altogether, or prone to bear bad fruit, but which, I trust, is one not destined to be further misused by us, if God grants us grace.
[263] [He was still proposing for himself a life of worldly occupation. Here turn to Origen's counsel,--a sort of reply to this Oration,--vol. iv. p. 393, and Cave's Lives, etc., vol. i. p. 400.]
[264] The text is, diephtharmenas men te dunamei, e akarpo e kakokarpo tini, me kai prosdiaphtharesomene de par' hemon, etc. Bengel reads men toi for men te, and takes me kai as = utinam ne.
Argument XVIII.-- Peroration, and Apology for the Oration.
Wherefore let me now have done with this address, which I have had the boldness to deliver in a presence wherein boldness least became me. Yet this address is one which, I think, has aimed heartily at signifying our thanks to the best of our ability,--for though we have had nothing to say worthy of the subject, we could not be altogether silent,--and one, too, which has given expression to our regrets, as those are wont to do who go abroad in separation from friends. And whether this speech of mine may not have contained things puerile or bordering on flattery, or things offending by excess of simplicity on the one hand, or of elaboration on the other, I know not. Of this, however, I am clearly conscious, that at least there is in it nothing unreal, but all that is true and genuine, in sincerity of opinion, and in purity and integrity of judgment.
Argument XIX.--Apostrophe to Origen, and Therewith the Leave-Taking, and the Urgent Utterance of Prayer.
But, O dear soul, arise thou and offer prayer, and now dismiss us; and as by thy holy instructions thou hast been our rescuer when we enjoyed thy fellowship, so save us still by thy prayers in our separation. Commend us and set us constantly [265] before thee in prayer. Or rather commend us continually to that God who brought us to thee, giving thanks for all that has been granted us in the past, and imploring Him still to lead us by the hand in the future, and to stand ever by us, filling our mind with the understanding of His precepts, inspiring us with the godly fear of Himself, and vouchsafing us henceforward His choicest guidance. [266] For when we are gone from thee, we shall not have the same liberty for obeying Him as was ours when we were with thee. [267] Pray, therefore, that some encouragement may be conveyed to us from Him when we lose thy presence, and that He may send us a good conductor, some angel to be our comrade on the way. And entreat Him also to turn our course, for that is the one thing which above all else will effectually comfort us, and bring us back to thee again.
[265] paradidou kai paratitheso.
[266] emballonta hemin ton theion phobon autou, paidagogon ariston esomenon. The Latin version makes the esomenon refer to the phobon: divinumque nobis timorem suum, optimum pædagogum immittens, = and inspiring with the godly fear of Himself as our choicest guide.
[267] ou gar en te meta sou eleutheria kai apelthontes hupakousomen auto. Bengel paraphrases it thus: hac libertate quæ tecum est carebo digressus; quare vereor ut Deo posthac paream, ni timore saltem munitus fuero.[He may probably have been only a catechumen at this period. This peroration favours the suspicion.]
Elucidations.
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Neale, in his valuable work, [268] does full justice to Dionysius, whose life is twinned with Gregory's; but he seems to me most unaccountably to slight the truly great and commanding genius of Gregory. I take opportunity, then, to direct attention to Neale's candid, and, on the whole, favourable view of Origen; but it grieves me whenever I see in critics a manifest inability to put themselves back into the times of which they write, as I think is the case, not infrequently, even with Dr. Neale. The figure of this grand ornament of the mighty patriarchate and school of Alexandria is colossal. [269] His genius is Titanic, and has left all Christendom profoundly his debtor to this day, by the variety of his work and the versatility of his speech and pen. Doubtless the youthful Gregory's panegyric does contain, as he himself suggests, much that is "puerile or bordering on flattery;" but, as he protests with transparent truthfulness, "there is nothing in it unreal." It shines with "sincerity of thought and integrity of judgment." And as such, what a portrait it presents us of the love and patient effort of this lifelong confessor! Let me commend this example to professors of theology generally. All can learn from it the power of sweetness and love, united with holiness of purpose, to stamp the minds and the characters of youth with the divine "image and superscription."
But, as to the sharpness of modern censures upon Origen's conspicuous faults, I must suggest three important considerations, which should be applied to all the Ante-Nicene doctors: (1) How could they who were working out the formulas of orthodoxy, be expected to use phrases with the skill and precision which became necessary only after the great Synodical period had embodied them in clear, dogmatic statements? (2) How could the active intellect of an Origen have failed to make great mistakes in such an immensity of labours and such a variety of works? (3) If, in our own day, we indulge speculative minds in large liberties so long as they never make shipwreck of the faith, how much more should we deem them excusable who were unable to consult libraries of well-digested thought, and to employ, as we do, the accumulated wealth of fifty generations of believers, whenever we are called to the solemn responsibility of impressing our convictions upon others? The conclusion of Dr. Neale's review of Origen balances the praise and blame accorded to him by those nearest to his times; [270] but let us reflect upon the painful conflicts of those times, and upon the pressure under which, to justify their own positions, they were often forced to object to any error glorified by even the apparent patronage of Origen.
[268] The Patriarchate of Alexandria, London, 1847.
[269] The ultimate influence of the school itself, Neale pronounces "an enigma" (vol. i. p. 38).
[270] Vol. i. p. 33.
gregory_thau dubious_writings anf06 gregory_thau-dubious_writings Dubious or Spurious Writings of Gregory Thaumaturgus /ccel/schaff/anf06.iii.iv.html
Dubious or Spurious Writings
Part II.--Dubious or Spurious Writings.
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A Sectional Confession of Faith. [271]
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I.
Most hostile and alien to the Apostolic Confession are those who speak of the Son as assumed to Himself by the Father out of nothing, and from an emanational origin; [272] and those who hold the same sentiments with respect to the Holy Spirit; those who say that the Son is constituted divine by gift and grace, and that the Holy Spirit is made holy; those who regard the name of the Son as one common to servants, and assert that thus He is the first-born of the creature, as becoming, like the creature, existent out of non-existence, and as being first made, and who refuse to admit that He is the only-begotten Son,--the only One that the Father has, and that He has given Himself to be reckoned in the number of mortals, and is thus reckoned first-born; those who circumscribe the generation of the Son by the Father with a measured interval after the fashion of man, and refuse to acknowledge that the æon of the Begetter and that of the Begotten are without beginning; those who introduce three separate and diverse systems of divine worship, [273] whereas there is but one form of legitimate service which we have received of old from the law and the prophets, and which has been confirmed by the Lord and preached by the apostles. Nor less alienated from the true confession are those who hold not the doctrine of the Trinity according to truth, as a relation consisting of three persons, but impiously conceive it as implying a triple being in a unity (Monad), formed in the way of synthesis [274] and think that the Son is the wisdom in God, in the same manner as the human wisdom subsists in man whereby the man is wise, and represent the Word as being simply like the word which we utter or conceive, without any hypostasis whatever.
[271] Edited in Latin by Gerardus Vossius, Opp. Greg. Thaum., Paris, 1662, in fol.; given in Greek from the Codex Vaticanus by Cardinal Mai, Script. Vet., vii. p. 170. Vossius has the following argument: This is a second Confession of Faith, and one widely different from the former, which this great Gregory of ours received by revelation. This seems, however, to be designated an ekthesis tes kata meros pisteos, either because it records and expounds the matters of the faith only in part, or because the Creed is explained in it by parts. The Jesuit theologian Franc. Torrensis (the interpreter and scholiast of this ekthesis) has, however, rendered the phrase he kata meros pistis, by the Latin fides non universa sed in parte. And here we have a fides non universa sed in parte, according to him,--a creed not of all the dogmas of the Church, but only of some in opposition to the heretics who deny them. [The better view.]
[272] hoi ton Huion ex ouk onton kai apostellomenes arches einai epikteton legontes to Patri. [Note, Exucontians = Arians.]
[273] akoinonetous kai xenas eisagontes latreias.
[274] en monadi to triploun asebos kata sunthesin.
II.
But the Church's Confession, and the Creed that brings salvation to the world, is that which deals with the incarnation of the Word, and bears that He gave Himself over to the flesh of man which He acquired of Mary, while yet He conserved His own identity, and sustained no divine transposition or mutation, but was brought into conjunction with the flesh after the similitude of man; so that the flesh was made one with the divinity, the divinity having assumed the capacity of receiving the flesh in the fulfilling of the mystery. And after the dissolution of death there remained to the holy flesh a perpetual impassibility and a changeless immortality, man's original glory being taken up into it again by the power of the divinity, and being ministered then to all men by the appropriation of faith. [275]
[275] en te pisteos oikeiosei.
III.
If, then, there are any here, too, who falsify the holy faith, either by attributing to the divinity as its own what belongs to the humanity--progressions, [276] and passions, and a glory coming with accession [277] --or by separating from the divinity the progressive and passible body, as if subsisted of itself apart,--these persons also are outside the confession of the Church and of salvation. No one, therefore, can know God unless he apprehends the Son; for the Son is the wisdom by whose instrumentality all things have been created; and these created objects declare this wisdom, and God is recognised in the wisdom. But the wisdom of God is not anything similar to the wisdom which man possesses, but it is the perfect wisdom which proceeds from the perfect God, and abides for ever, not like the thought of man, which passes from him in the word that is spoken and (straightway) ceases to be. Wherefore it is not wisdom only, but also God; nor is it Word only, but also Son. And whether, then, one discerns God through creation, or is taught to know Him by the Holy Scriptures, it is impossible either to apprehend Him or to learn of Him apart from His wisdom. And he who calls upon God rightly, calls on Him through the Son; and he who approaches Him in a true fellowship, comes to Him through Christ. Moreover, the Son Himself cannot be approached apart from the Spirit. For the Spirit is both the life and the holy formation of all things; [278] and God sending forth this Spirit through the Son makes the creature [279] like Himself.