Exposition of the Faith 1 part 3/15

More fittingly, then, will He be named sun and light rather than darkness, day rather than night, life rather than death, fire and spirit and water as life-giving rather than earth; and above all and most of all, goodness rather than evil—which is the same as to say, being rather than non-being.

For the good is existence and the cause of existence, but evil is the privation of the good, that is, of existence.

These, then, are the negations.

But sweetest of all is the joining of the two together, such as the super-essential essence, the super-divine Godhead, the super-original origin, and the like.

There are also certain things spoken affirmatively of God which have the force of a transcendent negation, such as darkness;

not that God is darkness, but that He is not light, but above light.

God is therefore called mind and reason and spirit, wisdom and power, as being the cause of these, and as immaterial, and as maker of all things and almighty.

And these things, both those spoken negatively and those spoken affirmatively, are said in common of the whole Godhead.

And they are said of each of the hypostases of the Holy Trinity in like manner and equally and without exception;

for when I consider one of the hypostases, I know it to be perfect God, perfect being.

And when I join and number the three together, I know one perfect God;

for the Godhead is not composite, but in three perfect ones is one perfect, indivisible and uncompounded.

And when I consider the relation of the hypostases to one another, I know that the Father is the super-essential sun, the fountain of goodness, the abyss of being, of reason, of wisdom, of power, of light, of Godhead—the generating and emitting fountain of the good hidden within Him.

He, then, is mind, the abyss of reason, the begetter of the Word, and through the Word the emitter of the revealing Spirit; and—not to say much—

the Father has no Word, wisdom, power, or will except the Son, who is the sole power of the Father, the prior originating cause of the making of all things.

He, as a perfect hypostasis begotten, in a manner He Himself knows, is and is called Son.

And the Holy Spirit is the revealing power of the Father's hidden Godhead, proceeding from the Father through the Son, in a manner He knows, not by way of begetting;

wherefore also the Holy Spirit is the perfecter of the making of all things.

Whatever, then, befits the Father as cause, fountain, begetter, is to be attributed to the Father alone;

whatever befits the caused, the begotten Son, the Word, the prior originating power, the will, the wisdom, to the Son;

and whatever befits the caused, the one who proceeds, the revealing, the perfecting power, to the Holy Spirit.

The Father is fountain and cause of the Son and the Spirit—Father of the Son alone, and emitter of the Spirit.

The Son is Son, Word, wisdom and power, image, radiance, and impress of the Father, and from the Father; but He is not Son of the Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the Father, as proceeding from the Father (for there is no impulse without the Spirit); and He is the Spirit of the Son too, not as from Him, but as proceeding from the Father through Him.

On the place of God, and that the Divine alone is uncircumscribed. A bodily place is the limit of that which contains, by which the contained is contained—as the air contains this body.

It is not the whole containing air that is the place of the contained body, but the boundary of the containing air which touches the contained body;

for in every case the container is not within the contained.

There is also an intelligible place, where the intelligible and bodiless nature is conceived and exists, where it is present and

operates, and is not contained bodily but intelligibly;

for it has no shape, that it should be contained bodily.

God, then, being immaterial and uncircumscribed, is not in a place;

for He is Himself His own place, filling all things and being above all things, and Himself holding all things together.

And that is called the place of God where His operation becomes manifest.

For He Himself pervades all things without mingling, and imparts to all His own operation according to the fitness and receptive capacity of each—I mean both natural and chosen purity;

for immaterial things are purer than material, and virtuous things than those yoked with evil.

That, then, is called the place of God which partakes more of His operation and grace.

For this reason heaven is His throne (for in it are the angels who do His will and ever glorify Him;

for this is His rest), and the earth is the footstool of His feet (for in it He sojourned among men through the flesh).

And the foot of God, His holy flesh, has been named in various ways.

The Church too is called the place of God;

for we have set it apart as a kind of sacred precinct for His glorification, in which we also make our intercessions to Him.

Likewise the places in which His operation has become manifest to us, whether through the flesh or apart from a body, are called places of God.

It should be known that the Divine is without parts, being wholly and entirely everywhere, and not divided part in part after a bodily manner, but wholly in all things and wholly above all.

The angel, on the other hand, is not bodily contained in a place so as to be formed and shaped; yet he is said to be in a place because he is present intelligibly and operates according to his own nature and is not elsewhere, but is intelligibly circumscribed there where he also operates;

for he cannot operate at the same time in different places, since it belongs to God alone to operate everywhere at the same time.

For the angel operates in different places by swiftness of nature and by readily, that is, swiftly, passing from one to another; but the Divine, being everywhere and above all, operates everywhere at the same time in diverse ways by one simple operation.

The soul is bound to the body, whole to whole and not part to part, and is not contained by it but contains it, as fire contains iron; and being in it, it performs its own operations.

That is circumscribed which is comprehended by place or time or apprehension; but that is uncircumscribed which is contained by none of these.

The Divine alone, then, is uncircumscribed, being without beginning and without end, containing all things and contained by no apprehension;

for It alone is incomprehensible and undefinable, known by none, and It alone contemplates Itself.

The angel is circumscribed both by time (for he had a beginning of being) and by place, even if intelligibly, as we said before, and by apprehension (for they know one another's nature, and are in some measure bounded, and are wholly defined by the Creator); but bodies are circumscribed by beginning and end, by bodily place, and by apprehension.

The Divine is altogether unchangeable and unalterable;

for by His foreknowledge He has predestined all things that are not in our power, each according to its own proper time and place.

And accordingly the Father judges no one, but has given all judgement to the Son;

for the Father judged—that is, the Son also as God and the Holy Spirit—but the Son Himself, as man, will descend bodily and sit upon the throne of glory (for descent and sitting belong to a circumscribed body), and will judge the whole world in righteousness.

All things are distant from God, not in place but by nature.

In our case, prudence and wisdom and counsel come and go as a habitual state; but not so in God's case.

For in Him nothing comes to be or passes away;

for He is unalterable and unchangeable, and one must not speak of any accident in Him.

God has the good as concurrent with His essence.

He who ever desires God, this one sees Him.

For God is in all things;

for the things that exist depend upon Him who is, and it is not possible for anything to be unless it have its being in Him who is, because God is mingled with all things as the One who holds nature together; but with His holy flesh God the Word was united according to hypostasis and was commingled with our nature without confusion.

No one sees the Father except the Son and the [Spirit].

Will and wisdom and power is the Son of the Father;

for one must not speak of quality in God's case, lest we call Him composite of essence and quality.

The Son is from the Father, and all that He has, He has from Him.

Therefore He can do nothing of Himself;

for He has no operation peculiar to Himself apart from the Father.

That God, being by nature invisible, becomes visible by His operations, being known from the constitution and governance of the world.

The Son is the image of the Father, and the Spirit is the image of the Son, through whom Christ, dwelling in man, gives him that which is according to the image.

God is the Holy Spirit, the mean between the unbegotten and the begotten, and joined to the Father through the Son;

He is called the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ, the mind of Christ, the Spirit of the Lord, the very Lord, the Spirit of adoption, of truth, of freedom, of wisdom (for He is the maker of all these), filling all things by His essence, holding all things together, filling the world according to His essence, yet uncontained by the world according to His power.

God is eternal and unalterable essence, creative of all that exists, worshipped with a devout conscience.

God and Father is He who ever is unbegotten, as not begotten from anyone, but who begot a co-eternal Son.

God and Son is He who ever is together with the Father, begotten from Him timelessly, eternally, without flux, without passion, and without separation.

God is the Holy Spirit, a sanctifying power, self-subsistent, proceeding from the Father without separation and resting in the Son, consubstantial with the Father and the Son.

The Word is He who essentially is ever present with the Father.

Word again is also the natural movement of the mind, by which it moves and thinks and reasons, being as it were its light and radiance.

Word again is the inward word spoken in the heart.

And again, word is the messenger of thought.

God the Word, then, is both essential and self-subsistent, but the other three words are powers of the soul, not contemplated in a hypostasis of their own; of these the first is the natural offspring of the mind, ever flowing forth from it naturally; the second is called the inward word; and the third the uttered word.

Spirit is understood in many senses.

The powers of the Holy Spirit are also called spirits;

the good angel too is a spirit;

and there are times when the mind too is called spirit;

the wind too and the air are spirit.

The properties of the divine nature: the uncreated, the without-beginning, the immortal and unbounded and eternal, the immaterial, the good, the creative, the just, the illuminating, the unchangeable, the impassible, the uncircumscribed, the uncontainable, the unbounded, the indeterminate, the bodiless, the invisible, the inconceivable, the in-need-of-nothing, the self-ruling and self-determining, the all-ruling, the life-giving, the all-powerful, the infinite in power, the sanctifying and imparting, the containing and holding together of all things and providing for all;

all these and such like It has by nature, not having received them from elsewhere, but Itself imparting every good thing to Its own creatures according to the receptive capacity of each.

The abiding and indwelling of the hypostases in one another;

for they are without separation and do not depart from one another, having an unconfused interpenetration in one another—not so as to be blended or confounded, but so as to cleave to one another.

For the Son is in the Father and the Spirit, and the Spirit is in the Father and the Son, and the Father is in the Son and the Spirit, with no blending or commingling or confusion taking place.

And there is one and the same movement;

for there is one impulse and one movement of the three hypostases, which is impossible to be observed in created nature.

And the divine illumination and operation, being one and simple and indivisible, and diversified in a manner befitting goodness among divided things, and distributing to all of them the constituents of their own nature, remains simple; being multiplied among divided things without division, and gathering and turning the divided things back toward its own simplicity (for all things long for it and have their existence in it);

and it gives being to all things as each one has of nature.

And it is the being of things that exist, the life of living things, the reason of rationally existing things, and the intellection of intellectually existing things, being itself above mind and above reason and above life and above being.

Further, also its pervading all things without mingling, but nothing pervading it.

Further also its knowing all things by a simple knowledge, and beholding all things simply with its divine, all-seeing, and immaterial eye—both the present and the past and the things to come before their coming to be;

its sinlessness and its forgiving of sins and its saving;

and that all things, as many as it wills, it can do, but not all that it can do, does it will;

for it can destroy the world, but does not will to.

On the age (aeon). He Himself made the ages, who exists before the ages, to whom the divine David says:

"From everlasting You are"; and the divine Apostle:

"Through whom also He made the ages."

It must therefore be known that the name "age" has many meanings, for it signifies a great many things;

for the life of each man is also called an age.

Again, the period of a thousand years is also called an age.

Again, the whole present life is called an age, and the age to come, the endless one after the resurrection, is called an age.

Again, age is called that which is not time nor any part of time measured by the course and movement of the sun, that is, made up of days and nights, but that which is co-extended with eternal things, like a kind of temporal movement and interval;

for what time is to things under time, that age is to eternal things.

There are said, then, to be seven ages of this world, that is, from the creation of heaven and earth until the common end and resurrection of men.

For there is a partial end, the death of each individual;

but there is also a common and total end, when the common resurrection of men is to take place.

But before the constitution of the world, when there was not even a sun dividing day from night, there was no measurable age, but that which is co-extended with eternal things, like a kind of temporal movement and interval;

and in this respect there is one age, in which sense God is also called eternal, and indeed pre-eternal.

For He Himself also made the age itself;

for God alone, being without beginning, is Himself the maker of all things, both of the ages and of all that exists.

And when I say God, it is clear that I mean the Father and His only-begotten Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, and His all-holy Spirit, the one our God.

They are called ages of ages, inasmuch as the seven ages of the present world contain many ages, that is, lives of men, and the one age is comprehensive of all the ages.

And the present and the age to come are called the age of the age.

Eternal life and eternal punishment signify the endlessness of the age to come.

For after the resurrection time will no longer be numbered by days and nights;

rather there will be one day without evening, the Sun of righteousness shining brightly upon the righteous, but for sinners a deep, endless night.

How then will the time of the thousand years of the Origenistic restoration be numbered? There is, then, one maker of all the ages, God, who also created the universe, who exists before the ages.

On creation. Since, then, the good and more-than-good God was not content with the contemplation of Himself, but in the overflow of His goodness was pleased that there should come to be certain things to be benefited and to share in His goodness, He brings into being from non-being and creates the universe, both invisible and visible, and man, who is composed of the visible and the invisible.

He creates by thinking, and the thought becomes a work subsisting, completed by the Word and perfected by the Spirit.

On angels. He Himself is the maker and creator of the angels, having brought them into being from non-being, having created them after His own image, a nature

bodiless, like a kind of spirit or immaterial fire, as the divine David says:

"Who makes His angels spirits, and His ministers a flame of fire," depicting their lightness and fiery, warm, most piercing and keen ardour for the divine longing and ministry, and their upward-tending nature, freed from every material conception.

An angel, then, is a rational substance, ever-moving, self-determining, bodiless, ministering to God, having received immortality in its nature by grace; the form and limit of whose substance the Creator alone knows.

He is called bodiless and immaterial only in relation to us;

for everything compared with God, who alone is incomparable, is found to be coarse and material, since the Divine alone is truly immaterial and bodiless.

It is, then, a rational and intellectual and self-determining nature, changeable in will, that is, voluntarily mutable;

for everything created is also changeable, and only the uncreated is unchangeable, and every rational thing is self-determining.

As, then, it is rational and intellectual, it is self-determining; but as created, it is changeable, having power both to remain and to advance in the good, and to turn toward the worse.

It is incapable of repentance, because it is also bodiless;

for man obtained repentance on account of the weakness of his body.

It is immortal, not by nature, but by grace;

for everything that has begun also comes to an end according to nature.

But God alone ever is, or rather is even above the "ever";

for the maker of times is not under time, but above time.

They are second intellectual lights, having their illumination from the first and beginningless Light, needing neither tongue nor hearing, but without uttered speech communicating to one another their own thoughts and counsels.

Through the Word, then, all the angels were created, and by the Holy Spirit they were perfected through sanctification, partaking of illumination and grace in proportion to their worth and rank.

For when they are in heaven, they are not on earth, and when sent by God to the earth, they do not remain in heaven.

They are not confined by walls and doors and bolts and seals;

for they do not appear to the worthy—those to whom God wills them to appear—as they are in themselves, but in a transformed shape, according as those who behold are able to see.

For only the uncreated is unbounded by nature and properly so;

for every creature is bounded by God who created it.

Having their sanctification from outside their substance, from the Holy Spirit; prophesying by the divine grace; having no need of marriage, inasmuch as they are not mortal.

Being minds, they are also in intelligible places, not bodily circumscribed (for they are not bodily shaped according to nature, nor are they extended in three dimensions), but by being present and operating intelligibly wherever they may be commanded, and by being unable to be and operate at the same time both here and there.

Whether they are equal in substance or differ from one another, we do not know.

But only God who made them knows, who also knows all things.

They differ from one another in illumination and station—whether having their station in respect of illumination, or partaking of illumination in respect of their station—and they illuminate one another because of the superiority of rank or nature.

And it is clear that the superior impart to the inferior both illumination and knowledge.

They are strong and ready for the fulfilment of the divine will, and are found at once everywhere the divine nod commands, by swiftness of nature; and they guard regions of the earth, and preside over nations and places, as they were appointed by the Creator, and administer our affairs and help us;

and certainly because, being above us according to the divine will and ordinance, they are ever in God's presence.

They are hard to move toward evil, but not immovable; yet now they are even immovable, not by nature but by grace and by their adherence to the only Good.

They behold God so far as is possible for them, and they have this as their food.

Being above us as bodiless, and freed from every bodily passion, yet not impassible;

for the Divine alone is impassible.

They transform themselves into whatever shape the Lord God may command, and thus they appear to men and reveal the divine things to them.

They dwell in heaven and have one work, to hymn God and to minister to His divine will.

And as the most holy and most sacred and most theological Dionysius the Areopagite says:

All theology, that is, the divine Scripture, has called the heavenly beings nine; these the divine hierarch divides into three triadic orderings.

And he says that the first is that which is ever about God and has been handed down as being united to Him closely and immediately—the order of the six-winged Seraphim and the many-eyed Cherubim and the most holy Thrones; the second is that of the Dominions and the Powers and the Authorities; and the third and last is that of the Principalities and Archangels and Angels.

Some, then, say that they came into being before all creation, as the theologian Gregory says:

"First He conceived the angelic and heavenly powers, and the thought was a work";

but others say that they came into being after the first heaven was made.

But that they came to be before the formation of man, all confess.

And I agree with the theologian Gregory;

for it was fitting that the intellectual substance should be created first, and then the sensible, and finally man, who is from both.

But those who say that the angels are creators of any substance whatsoever, these are the mouth of their father, the devil;

for being creatures, they are not creators.

But the maker and provider and sustainer of all things is God, the only uncreated, who is hymned and glorified in Father and Son and Holy Spirit.

On the devil and demons. Of these angelic powers, the foremost of the earthly order, who was entrusted by God with the guardianship of the earth, was not made wicked by nature, but was good and made for good, having no trace whatsoever of evil in himself from the Creator; but not enduring the illumination and the honour which the Creator had bestowed on him, by his own free choice he turned from what is according to nature to what is contrary to nature, and was lifted up against God who had made him, willing to rise in revolt against Him; and being the first to fall away from the good, he came to be in evil;

for evil is nothing else than the privation of good, just as darkness too is the privation of light.

For the good is intelligible light, and likewise evil is intelligible darkness.

Having been created light, then, by the Creator and having become good—for God saw all things that He had made, and behold, they were very good—by his own free will he became darkness.

And there was dragged down with him and followed him and fell along with him an infinite multitude of the angels ranged under him.

Being therefore of the same nature as the angels, they became evil, voluntarily inclining their will from the good toward the evil.

They have, then, no authority or power against anyone except as it is permitted them by God in His dispensation, as in the case of Job, and as is written in the Gospel concerning the swine.

But when God's permission is given, they both have power and change and transform themselves into whatever shape they wish according to appearance.

And the things to come neither the angels nor the demons know, yet they foretell them—the angels when God reveals them and commands them to foretell;

whence whatever they say comes to pass.

The demons also foretell, sometimes seeing things happening far off, sometimes by conjecture; whence also they lie in many things;

and they are not to be believed, even if they often speak truth, in the manner we have said.

All wickedness, then, was devised by them, and the unclean passions.

And while they have been permitted to assail man, they have no power to compel anyone;

for it is in our power to receive the assault or not to receive it.

Wherefore for the devil and his demons, and for those who follow him, the unquenchable fire has been prepared, the eternal punishment.

And it must be known that what death is to men, the fall is to the angels;

for after the fall there is no repentance for them, just as there is none for men after death.

On visible creation. Our God Himself, who is glorified in Trinity and in Unity, made heaven and earth and all that is in them, having brought the universe into being from non-being—some things not from any pre-existing matter, such as heaven, earth, air, fire, water; but others from these things made by Him, such as animals, plants, seeds;

for these came to be from earth and water, air and fire, by the command of the Creator.

On heaven. Heaven is the encompassing of visible and invisible creatures;

for within it both the intellectual powers of the angels and all sensible things are enclosed and bounded.

But the Divine alone is uncircumscribed, filling all things and containing all things and bounding all things, as being above all things and having created all things.

Since, then, Scripture speaks of heaven and of the heaven of heaven and of heavens of heavens, and the blessed Paul says that he was caught up to the third heaven, we say that in the account of the genesis of the universe we received the making of the heaven which the wise men of the heathen, appropriating the doctrines of Moses, call the starless sphere.

Further, God also called the firmament heaven, which He commanded to come to be in the midst of the water, appointing it to divide between the water that is above the firmament and the water that is below the firmament.

The divine Basil, being instructed from the divine Scripture, says that its nature is fine, like smoke.

But others say it is watery, as having come to be in the midst of the waters; others, that it is of the four elements; others, a fifth body, distinct from the four.

Some, then, have held that heaven encircles the universe and is spherical, and is in every direction the uppermost part, while the very middle of the place contained by it is the lowest part; and that the light and buoyant bodies obtained the upper rank from the Creator, but the heavy and downward-tending the lower region, which is the middle.

Now the lightest and most upward-tending element is fire, which indeed they say is ranked immediately after heaven;

and this they call ether, after which, lower down, the air.

And earth and water, as heavier and more downward-tending, hang in the very middle;

so that on the contrary side, below, are earth and water (the water being lighter than the earth, whence it is also more easily moved than it); and above, on every side, like a covering all around, the air; and around the air, on every side, the ether; and outside all, all around, the heaven.

And they say that heaven moves in a circle and compresses the things within, and thus they remain firm and unfailing.

And they say there are seven zones of heaven, one higher than another.

And they say it is of a very fine nature, like smoke, and that in each zone there is one of the planets;

for they affirmed there are seven planets: Sun, Moon, Zeus (Jupiter), Hermes (Mercury), Ares (Mars), Aphrodite (Venus), and Cronos (Saturn).

And they say that Aphrodite (Venus) is the one that at times becomes the Morning Star, and at times the Evening Star.

And they called these planets, because they make their movement contrary to that of heaven;

for while heaven and the rest of the stars move from east to west, these alone have their movement from west to east.

And we shall know this from the moon, which recedes a little each evening.

Those, then, who said that heaven is spherical, say that it stands apart and is equidistant from the earth—above and from the sides and below.

And I say "below and from the sides" only with respect to our perception, since by the logic of consistency heaven occupies the upper place on every side, and the earth the lower.