First Theological Oration (Oration 27): An Introductory Sermon Against the Eumonians

• Theology should be done by those who have good character, unlike [the Eumonians]. We should be commending hospitality, virginity, wifely affection, feeding the poor, night-long vigils, mortifying the body, abiding with God through prayer, etc.
• You say that there are many patterns of life and avocations (“ways”) and that we should live in as many as possible, or at the very least, live one well. So then why do you reject our way as “poverty” and insist on studying only your way?
• If you are so fond of dialectic and Reason, then instead of trying to explore things that are too high for you, as if you were a second Moses or Paul, why not do something useful? You could attack Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, the Cynics, etc., or if those are boring and frequently refuted, then speculate on the Universe(s), Matter, Soul, Resurrection, judgement, reward and punishment, Christ’s Sufferings, etc. “In these questions, to hit the mark is not useless and to miss it is not dangerous.”
• (A footnote says that “Christ’s Sufferings” is probably theories on Christ’s sufferings in other worlds.)

Second Theological Oration (Oration 28): On the Doctrine of God

• I ascended the mountain like Moses, and saw God’s averted figure from the rock. I did not see the nature of God behind the first veil and the cherubim, but I saw his shadow, that is, his Creation. In fact, that’s all that anyone can see, not Paul in the third heaven or even the cherubim. It is not possible to understand God, and even less to know him. So if you rely on rational argument to understand the divine, what poor divinity you are apprehending.
• God clearly cannot have a body. God is infinite, and no body can possibly be infinite. How could God fill the universe if he had a body? Either there would be some part of the universe without him (since bodies are finite), or he would have to contain the universe in his body, which is not something bodies can do. [Gregory did not know about bodies containing cells and cells containing mitochondria bacteria.] Maybe if God were a liquid, “which is a more absurd old wives’ tale than even Epicurus’ atoms”... There is also the problem of where God was before he created the universe.
• There is a difference between knowing that something exists and knowing what its nature is.
• Saying only what God is not is as helpful as saying that 2 * 5 is not less than 10 and not greater than 10.
• God is not unknowable because “he treasures his own fullness of glory, keeping his majesty costly by inaccessibility”, that is, being senior by keeping others out, which is inappropriate even in humans. Rather we are unable to comprehend or even imagine his fullness. One reason for this might be to avoid us valuing this knowledge lightly, if it were easily obtained. But everything requires a medium to perceive, and our material medium interposes between us and God. You cannot cross your shadow no matter how fast you run,
• “[E]very thinking being longs for God, the First Cause”, but because it gets tired of not perceiving him, it either treats what is visible as God (which is idolatry) or it is “the beauty and order of things seen, using sight as a guide to what transcends sight, without losing God through the grandeur of what it sees.”
• Some worshiped the sun, moon, and stars. Others worshiped the four elements. Starting with memorials for the departed, or men of physical strength and beauty, they became gods. Some people even made gods of the passions.
• God is the one with the power and the wisdom to be able to create and combine the four elements into something complex. “Clearly something beyond chance” is required to have this power.
• Enoch, Abraham, Jacob, Elijah taken up in a chariot of fire, and Ezekiel seeing God amid the angels, all had experiences of God, but none of them could say that they “had taken in the nature, the total vision of God”. Even Paul, who had been to the third heaven, said that “all knowledge in this world [counts] as nothing more than ‘puzzling reflections in mirrors’ because it has its basis in small-scale images of reality.”
• Even if we only look at ourselves, how does the soul mix with the material? How does it give life but experience pain? How can it “share in sense-perception” while not perceiving the sense? For that matter, how is intelligible speech understood? How do we even perceive light and sound? How is a new human constructed? “What is nature’s spell, binding parents and children together?” [Since we do not understand basic things about ourselves, how could we understand God?]
• Why is there such variation among animals? Why do some eat grass and others eat other animals? Why are some are aggressive and some are mild-tempered? Why are some strong, weak, beautiful, or ugly? Why are some industrious and others lazy? Why are some very concerned about their appearance while others do not care at all? Why are some communal and others solitary? Why are some close to intelligence while others are stupid?
• We see huge variation among all the creatures. Somehow a cicada got a sounding board inside it and makes loud chirping when the sun is warm. The swam turns its hissing into a song when it flies. How are birds able to make their nests in rocks and trees? How are bees able to make straight lines and angles into perfect hexagons in the dark of their hive? How do spiders make their webs that even Euclid with his lines without thickness cannot make?
• Even the plants have a myriad of fruits and roots all with different tastes and uses, and flowers with different scents. The purpose is to show you that God cares enough for you to have provided a banquet.
• How do the hot springs push out from the ground? How is it that rivers are always draining water into the sea, but the rivers stay full and the sea does not get higher? How better can we answer that than God fixed its limits, as it says in Scripture?
• Where does the air come from? Where do thunderstorms come from? Philosopher, are you trying to tell me that clouds form from vapors from the ground, or water condensing from air? Will you say that lightning is cause by friction between clouds, which causes explosions of lightning from the pressure of the friction? Surely faith is a better guide than reason here. [Ironically, that more or less is how clouds and lightning form.]
• But even if we pass through the first veil, how can we understand anything? “He makes his servants flames of fire”, and angels must be incorporeal, but how can we possibly understand how that would be?
• Thus, how can we possibly understand God’s nature?

Third Theological Oration (Oration 29): On the Son

• Atheism has no governing principle, and thus is disorder. Polytheism has factions [among the gods], and thus disorder. Disorder leads to dis-integration. Monotheism is order not because of one sovereign (a faction could also become the most prominent), but because of the unity of will and action springing from unity. “[O]ne eternally changes to two, which stops at three.”
• “When has the Son been begotten” is not meaningful, because it presupposes time. The Son and Holy Spirit are from the Father, but not after the Father. However, they are all three eternal. The Son and the Spirit are not un-originate like the Father, but that does not preclude them from being eternal. Although the Father is the Cause, it does not follow that there is a temporal delay; the sun is the cause of light, but the light and the sun are together [from our perspective].
• “How can begetting not involve change?” Because God does not have a body.
• “You cannot be a father without beginning to be one.” You can if you are uncreated. The Father is father because he is only father, unlike us, who are both sons and fathers. And for that matter, if you call the Son created, how can he be God, since created things obviously are not God?
• “If the Father begot the Son voluntarily then the Son is son to a will, but if involuntarily, then there is a power greater than God.” They think this a strong argument, but this is silly, because they conflate will and belonging: just because something willed it does mean it belongs to the willer. They could ask the same question of themselves, did their father beget them willingly or unwillingly? If unwillingly, then they were begotten through violence, but if willingly, then they were only begotten of a will.
• “How was the Son begotten, then?” How am I supposed to tell you? We do not even know how we ourselves come into being (and if we could it would take a long time to understand the whole process), how can I possibly tell you about how the Son was begotten?! And even if we did know how we came into being, that does not imply that we necessarily understand how the Son was begotten.
• “He must have either existed or not existed when the Father begat him.” This is sophistry, and nonsense, like “This statement is false.” Were you present or not present when you were begotten? Your error is that “present” is used of relationships with others, not oneself.
• “Something cannot be both generate and ingenerate.” This statement must exclude either the Son or the Father from the Godhead. You mistake the property for the being. God is immortal, innocent, unchanging, but those are properties and does not imply that there are either three Gods or that God is a composite of three things. You will agree that Adam was the only man God created directly [the closest human thing to “ingenerate”], but certainly men descended from him [“generate”] are also men.
• The Son shares the glory of the Uncaused, because he stems from the Uncaused.
• “But if they are the same substance, then the Son must be unbegotten as well.” That is true only if ingeneracy is God’s substance, which it is not. You do not need to be your father’s father to have received your father’s substance.
• “If begetting started, it must at some point stop.” You are slaves to material thinking! Do angels or the soul end just because they started? No. It is possible to start but not end.
• Gregory then argues against the Eunomians, who apparently argue that the Son is God when the Bible requires it but not otherwise, and are okay with doing this because, for example, the Greek word for dog also refers to shark. But dogs and sharks are on the same level, but if you say that the Father and the Son are not on the same level, then they cannot share the same word.
• “‘Father’ describes either the substance or the activity, right?” False dilemma; ‘father’ describes the relationship.
• When the Son is described by terms like “Word”, “God”, “way”, “truth”, “life”, “wisdom”, “the Image of God”, etc., they are referring to the Godhead. When Jesus is described like “my God and your God”, “he was commanded”, “he could do nothing apart from God”, “praying”, “sleeping”, “in agony”, etc., they are referring to the God-Man composite. He was “made man"—for your salvation—but was also exalted, so silence arguments like yours.
• “[The Son] remained what he was; what he was not [human], he assumed. ... Through the medium of the mind he had dealings with the flesh, being made that God on earth,which is Man: Man and God blended. They became a single whole, the stronger side predominating, in order that I might be made God to the same extant that he was made man.”
• “He had ‘no form or beauty’ for the Jews, but for David he was ‘fairer than the children of men’” and shone with light on the mountain. He was baptized as a man, but forgave sins as God. He was tired, but gives rest for the weary. He hungered, yet fed thousands and is the bread of life. He thirsted, but is the water of life. He prays, and yet hears prayer. He pays tax, but does so with a fish. He is sold for 30 pieces of silver, but bought back the world with his blood. He is led like a sheep, but shepherds Israel. He is dumb (does not cry out) like a lamb, but is the Word.

Fourth Theological Oration (Oration 30): On the Son

• We wrecked havoc of your arguments last time, so this time we will concern ourselves with Scripture.
• “The Lord created me [Wisdom] at the beginning of his ways for his works.” This is obviously personification, but since others have noted that, we will not use that argument. Let’s assume that Wisdom is actually the Savior. Well, we take the parts with temporal implications as referring to the human aspect of Jesus. But also, he was created for his works, that is, truth and judgment (Ps 111:7) and there is no temporal implication for that.
• He was a slave and rendered service to many: the Son was made a slave to the form of the flesh and our experience, but by blending Man with Himself, he made us God. And in in case, what about all the verses that talk about everyone bowing the knee to this one who had been emptied? Surely that is referring to God.
• “He must reign until...; he will possess until ...”. You think this a grand, irresistible argument, but you ignore that “until” does not imply that the action stops. “I will be with you until the end of the world.” Do you think he stops being with us afterwards? Likewise, he does not stop reigning.
• Why would the Son need to be made subordinate to God? Isn’t he already? No. As Head, the new Adam, my insubordination is referred to him. “But when all things are put in submission under him, when transformed they obediently acknowledge him, then will Christ bring me forward, me who have been saved, and make his subjection complete. In my view Christ’s submission is the fulfillment of God’s will. As we said before, the Son actively produces submission to the Father, while the Father wills and approves submission to the Son. Thus it is that he effects our submission, makes it his own, and submits it to God.” When the Son said “my God, my God, why you forsake me?”, he was not forsaken, but rather he made our waywardness his own and is expressing our condition.
• As Word, obedience is an irrelevant concept, but being made obedient and as fellow slaves to ourselves, he came to consume the meaner element of ourselves within himself. “For this reason he honors obedience in practice and puts it to the proof by suffering.” Our external deeds give substance to our internal disposition. “God will be ‘all in all’ when we are no longer what we are now, a multiplicity of impulses and emotions, with little or nothing of God in us, but are fully like God, with room for God and God alone.”
• What leads heretics astray is the coupling of titles, titles which, because of the intermingling [of God and Man], overlap. But when the natures are distinguished, the titles in the Bible are distinct. So when Paul says “that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, Father of Glory”, “God” is paired with “Christ” and “Father” with “Glory”.
• He receives “life”, “power”, “judgement”, etc.: the Son receives this as Man, although it is not incorrect to say he receives it as God, since he it is a property of God.
• “The Son can do nothing of himself, but only what he sees the Father doing”: there are different meanings of “cannot”. One is lack of capacity (a newborn puppy cannot see). Another is a general rule (a city on a hill cannot be hid, since nothing can block the light). Yet another is moral unsuitability (the friends of the bridegroom cannot fast while he is with them). Still another is refusal of the will [by a required party] (Christ could do few miracles in his hometown, because the miracle requires power from the doer and faith from the receiver, and the receivers had no faith) and similarly “how can you who are evil, do good?” Finally, as is the case here, there is the inconceivable. It is inconceivable for the Son to do something that Father is not doing, because they are one. “Nothing belongs to just one, even existence”. “Clearly the Father indicates the outline, whilst the Son makes a finished product, of the same realities.” Similarly, the angels are being made servants of fire, and “the earth being established on its foundations”: “Their principle was laid down once for all, but their activity is present and continuous.”
• Similarly for “the Son came down from heaven not to do his will”.
• “That they may know you, the one true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” and “No one is good except only for God”: these are referring to the Son as Man, clearly.
• “Ever living, to appeal for us”: this is Jesus as Mediator (and also as the Spirit is described), not as a prostrate slave (which is an unbecoming thought). “Even at this moment he is, as man, making representation for my salvation, until he makes me divine by the power of his incarnate manhood. ... [i]t is by what he suffered as man that that he persuades us, as Word and Encourager, to endure. That, for me, is the meaning of his ‘advocacy'.”
• “no one knows the hour except the Father”: obviously Wisdom knows everything, just as the spirit of a man knows the heart of the man. The title indicates that he is referring to the human aspect. Another explanation is that this information cannot be understood except by “the primal nature”.
• We need to discuss the titles of God. We start with the assumption that God cannot be named: the ancient Hebrews thought this, and such is the name God gives himself in answer to Moses, simply “I am”. The other titles of God are in two categories: referring to his power (“Almighty”, “King”, “Lord Sabaoth [Lord of the armies]”) , and to his ordering of the world in involving and not-involving incarnation.
• “The names of the deity are shared. The personal name of the unoriginate is ‘Father'; of the eternally begotten, ‘Son'; of what has issued, or proceeds, without generation, ‘the Holy Spirit'.
• “The Son is the concise and simple revelation of the Father’s nature—everything born is a tacit definition of its parent.” (In Greek, “word” also means “definition”.)
• “You would not be wrong, were you to explain the name [“Word”] from the fact that he exists inherently in real things.” How could Wisdom not be in everything, which are held together by reason? How could the maker not understand the created, the power sustaining the creates (and giving them the power to sustain themselves) not be in the created? He is “Life”, “Light”, “Righteousness”, etc. These titles belong to both his natures.
• His human titles are “Man”, “Son of Man” (born of a human, virgin mother), “Christ” (“anointed”; the anointing is of the human aspect), “Way” (he takes us with him), “Door”, “Shepherd”, “Lamb”, “High Priest”, and “Melchizedek” (he has no divine mother, no earthly father, no genealogy).

Fifth Theological Oration (Oration 31): On the Holy Spirit

• Unlike the heretics who, slaves to the letter, consider the Holy Spirit to be not God, we shall proudly extol the Spirit. We shall climb a high mountain and shout it out, if the people below do not listen.
• If there was a “when” when the Holy Spirit did not exist, then there was also a “when” when the Father and the Son did not exist. Or, how could the deity be holy if it did not have holiness, that is, the Holy Spirit? And if the Holy Spirit was created, the it has a similar rank as me (separated from God by time), just more priority, but in that case, how can the Holy Spirit link me with deity?
• Either the Holy Spirit is a substance or and property of something else (Aristotle’s “accidents”). But the Holy Spirit is described doing actions: speaks, decrees, is vexed, etc. Properties cannot act on their own. And even you “baptize in” the Holy Spirit; believing in is not the same as believing facts about. Just admit that he is God.
• The Holy Spirit must be either ingenerate, and therefore there are two Gods or generate in which case he is either from the Son or the Father: false dilemma to assume that there are only two possibilities. There is a third, that the Spirit proceeds from the Father (John 15:26). And don’t ask what that is supposed to look like, because how can we know divinity when we know so little about earthly things.
• “If you have two consubstantial things that are unlike each other, then you have 1 + 1 = 2 Gods”: this is nonsense. Adam was created by God from earth. Eve was created from Adam. And Seth was begotten by Adam and Eve. Three different means of coming into existence, but clearly all are human.
• “There isn’t any example of people worshiping the Spirit”: we worship in Spirit and in Truth; we do not know how to pray but the Spirit intercedes for us. It seems to me that praying and worshiping is the Spirit offering prayer and worship to himself. And since the Spirit is equal in rank and divinity and substance, worshiping one is worshiping the others.
• “If you use ‘God’ three times, there must be three Gods”: well, in that case, don’t you have two Gods, since you revere the Father and the Son? “[T]he Godhead exists undivided in beings divided.”
• “But don’t even the pagans say there is a single Godhead, and everyone say there is a single humanity?” That is only a theoretical unity. In both cases there is substantial disunity. Even within ourselves we are inconsistent and opposed to ourselves. The gods are quarrelsome and not only opposed to each other, but even to their first causes, such as one god who ate all his children be get all the power for himself (and then threw up his meal).
• “Consubstantial things are counted together so you have three Gods, non-consubstantial things are not, and since we say they are non-consubstantial, there is no problem here.” Your argument is like hanging yourself because you are afraid of death. You have denied the Godhead, and so defeated your own argument.
• “Consubstantial things are counted together, but non-consubstantial things are counted individually.” That is a stupid idea. Counting indicates number, not nature. Proverbs says three things have a stately walk: a lion, and goat, and a rooster. Clearly these three things are not consubstantial. Moses counts two cherubim, which are consubstantial, as one. And of course it would be silly to count the two masters, God and Mammon, together as one.
• “But we are talking about counting nouns”: well then, John says there are three witnesses, the Spirit, the water, and the blood, which are obviously different substances.
• You keep saying “but this isn’t in the Bible”.
• The Bible says lots of things that are not factual, such as God sleeping and having emotions. Obviously God does not sleep or have emotions. How can he sit on a throne of cherubim, since he has no body? The Bible is using visual things to explain invisible realities.
• Where do you get your fortresses, “generate” and “ingenerate”, from? Those aren’t in the Bible.
• The Bible does not say some non-factual things like “God is evil”.
• The Bible says some things about factual things like “man”, “angels”.
• There were two covenants, two “shakings of the earth” in how God related to us, and the Gospels mention a third. The first was the removal of idols but keeping of sacrifices. This created Jews from Gentiles. The second is the removal of sacrifices but allowing circumcision, which created Christians from Jews, and gradually they became okay with removing circumcision. Paul is a good example of this process. God deals with humanity where we are, and does not go faster than we can accept, but he is moving us to full truth. In the third shaking he will make us into “what lies unmoved, unshaken, beyond.” The same is with doctrine, except in addition not subtraction. The first covenant proclaimed the Father and in a vague way, the Son. The second covenant revealed the Son clearly. Currently the Spirit is making himself known more fully. It would be dangerous to reveal the son if people did not even acknowledge the Father, likewise the Spirit revealed when people have not acknowledged the Son. Hence why the Spirit is given to the disciples first as the capacity to do miracles, then breathed into them after the Resurrection, and then in tongues of fire at Pentecost. Similarly, Jesus changes how he refers to the Spirit: “I will ask and the Father will send” (indicating that the Spirit is not in competition with the Father), then “he will send”, and then “he will come”.
• But now, a swarm of proof-texts: “Christ is born, the Spirit is his forerunner; Christ is baptized, the Spirit bears him witness; Christ is tempted, the Spirit leads him up; Christ performs miracles, the Spirit accompanies [is with?] him; Christ ascends, the Spirit fills his place.” Everything Christ does, the Spirit is there doing. But there are also titles: “Spirit of God”, “Mind of Christ”, “Spirit of Truth”, “Lord”, “Spirit of Adoption”, “Spirit of Wisdom”, etc. He fills the world, is our inheritance, is the finger of God, etc. He reveals, illumines, gives life (is Life), and makes us his temple. He performs what God does: divides into tongues, is the Spirit of prophecy, distributes graces, makes Apostles, prophets, preachers, teachers, and evangelists, etc.
• I would like to give an example from the natural world, but everything I can think of is only partially suitable.

First Letter to Cledonius the Presbyter

• The Apollinarians should have debated us if they thought we were innovating theologically, and if they are really Nicene as they claim, let them produce certificates. Otherwise, instruct people to ignore them.
• There are not two Sons (one God, one Man), but rather one Son, who is God eternally, and who assumed humanity. The divine part is impassible, but the human part is passible, etc.
• The Virgin Mary must be accepted as Mother of God. Christ was not “channeled” through the Virgin, nor did he “put on” humanity like a garment. “[T]his is not God’s birth but the avoidance of birth.”
• There are not two Sons; the divinity and human parts of Christ are different things, but not different persons (which is the reverse of the Trinity).
• Jesus was not “activated by grace” as a prophet, rather he was “joined” [to humanity?].
• The Crucified is to be worshiped.
• Jesus was not perfect as a result of his works, or his baptism, “even though he is spoken of this way due to his gradual self-disclosure.”
• Jesus body was not discarded; it is with him now because he assumed humanity. Otherwise, how can we say that the disciples touched it after the Resurrection?
• It is wrong to say that Jesus’ flesh came from heaven and had no earthly source. The people saying this are taking titular descriptions literally.
• Jesus was not a human without a mind. Adam did not half fall, so humanity needs full redemption, and thus Jesus needs to have been fully Man. A human without a mind is nonsense anyway; how can a person have a soul without a consciousness? If Jesus did not have a mind, he had some other consciousness (a cow’s?! a horse’s?!) and what that was, that consciousness is what is being saved [so if you want to be saved you’d better hope that consciousness is human].
• They say the Godhead made up for the lack of mind. But then Jesus was not Man, if he did not have Man’s better part. Well, they say, there is not room for two complete things. They only say that because they are thinking bodily, and certainly a pint does not have room for a quart. But there is plenty of room for “ideal and incorporeal” things to coexist: I have a soul, mind, reason, and Holy Spirit all sharing me right now. Similarly we can hear multiple sounds at once and see multiple things at once.
• They say the mind is damned. Well, in that case, people who sin in the mind have an excuse: even God thought it was unredeemable. And was the flesh not damned, just the mind? How could God heal the whole of humanity if he did not assume the most important part of it? That would be like a physician only healing half a patient’s maladies. The mind was the very thing that produced the malady/sin in the first place.
• They take some verses literally to insist that Jesus had no mind, but they don’t take similar verses like “75 souls went to Egypt” in Genesis literally to mean that Jacob and his family did not bodily go to Egypt.
• [Alluding to something the translator does not know about] they open the possibility of Christ being betrayed and crucified again, like the pagan cycles.
• They lie and say that they are Catholic, but let me inform you that they consider that the Son is lesser than the Father, and the Spirit lesser than the Son, while we say that the Trinity are all equal.
• Tell the ordinary people all this, so that we will not be negligent of letting heresy foster in our pasture.

Second Letter to Cledonius the Presbyter

• Declare to everyone that “we treat the Son of Gpd begotten of the Father and thereafter the Virgin Mary as a single item” and we do not worship two Sons.
• We did not vacillate on accepting Vitalus, but rather accepted his initial creedal statement at face value, and when it became obvious that he meant different things by the words, be rejected his statement.
• They misinterpret “but we have the mind of Christ”. It is not that we have the mind of the Godhead, but rather we have a mind conformed to Christs through the purging [of sinfulness, presumably] of their own. It is not that Christ wore the earthly; that makes him an amalgam, not a perfect mixture as they claim.
• They also misinterpret “inmanning”, not as taking the characteristics of man, but simply interacting with men. They also have a luxurious millenial paradise, and repeating of events, and an illusory humanity.
• But since this these phrases also are in true religion, it is not surprising that we accepted Vitalus and then rejected him after we found out their deceit.
• They say that the faith started the past few decades with this hidden and now revealed wisdom; in that case that faith of everyone for nearly four hundred years, including martyrs, etc. has been worthless.
• They have all sorts of contradictory opinions, like “where have you put Lazarus” is on our level but “Lazarus, come forth!” is above our level.
• It gives us no pleasure to say these things, for we desire peace, even though they are insolent towards us an make peace impossible.