Nicene and Post-Nicene Church Fathers Series 2 - The Still Small ...

Chapter XVII.
Against those who say that the Holy Ghost is not to be numbered with, but numbered under,
the Father and the Son. Wherein moreover there is a summary notice of the faith concerning
right sub-numeration.
41. What, however, they call sub-numeration, 1077 and in what sense they use this word,
cannot even be imagined without difficulty. It is well known that it was imported into our
language from the “wisdom of the world;” 1078 but a point for our present consideration will
be whether it has any immediate relation to the subject under discussion. Those who are
adepts in vain investigations tell us that, while some nouns are common and of widely extended
denotation, others are more specific, and that the force of some is more limited than
that of others. Essence, for instance, is a common noun, predicable of all things both animate
and inanimate; while animal is more specific, being predicated of fewer subjects than the
former, though of more than those which are considered under it, as it embraces both rational
and irrational nature. Again, human is more specific than animal, and man than
human, and than man the individual Peter, Paul, or John. 1079 Do they then mean by subnumeration
the division of the common into its subordinate parts? But I should hesitate
to believe they have reached such a pitch of infatuation as to assert that the God of the universe,
like some common quality conceivable only by reason and without actual existence
in any hypostasis, is divided into subordinate divisions, and that then this subdivision is
called sub-numeration. This would hardly be said even by men melancholy mad, for, besides
its impiety, they are establishing the very opposite argument to their own contention. For
1077 “The word was used as a quasi philosophical term to express the doctrine quoted by St. Basil, in § 13:
it does not occur in the confession of Eunomius, which was prepared after this book, a.d. 382; but it was used
by him in his Liber Apologeticus (before a.d. 365) against which St. Basil wrote.” Rev. C.F.H. Johnston. For
“ὑπαρίθμησις” the only authorities given by the lexicons are “ecclesiastical.” But the importation from the
“wisdom of the world” implies use in heathen philosophy.
1078 cf. 1 Cor. i. 20.
Against those who say that the Holy Ghost is not to be numbered with, but…
1079 “This portion of the theory of general language is the subject of what is termed the doctrine of the Pre-
dicables; a set of distinctions handed down from Aristotle, and his follower Porphyry, many of which have taken
a firm root in scientific, and some of them even in popular, phraseology. The predicables are a five-fold division
of General Names, not grounded as usual on a difference in their meaning, that is, in the attribute which they
connote, but on a difference in the kind of class which they denote. We may predicate of a thing five different
varieties of class-name: A genus of the thing (γένος). A species (εἶδος). A differentia (διαφορα). A proprium
(ἰδιόν). An accidens (συμβεβηκός). It is to be remarked of these distinctions, that they express, not what the
predicate is in its own meaning, but what relation it bears to the subject of which it happens on the particular
occasion to be predicated.” J. S. Mill, System of Logic, i. 133.
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