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

To his Brother Gregory, concerning the difference between and …
him on the one His own Father, and on the other His own Spirit. For He who eternally exists
in the Father can never be cut off from the Father, nor can He who worketh all things by
the Spirit ever be disjoined from His own Spirit. Likewise moreover he who receives the
Father virtually receives at the same time both the Son and the Spirit; for it is in no wise
possible to entertain the idea of severance or division, in such a way as that the Son should
be thought of apart from the Father, or the Spirit be disjoined from the Son. But the communion
and the distinction apprehended in Them are, in a certain sense, ineffable and inconceivable,
the continuity of nature being never rent asunder by the distinction of the hypostases,
nor the notes of proper distinction confounded in the community of essence.
Marvel not then at my speaking of the same thing as being both conjoined and parted, and
thinking as it were darkly in a riddle, of a certain 2040 new and strange conjoined separation
and separated conjunction. Indeed, even in objects perceptible to the senses, any one who
approaches the subject in a candid and uncontentious spirit, may find similar conditions
of things.
5. Yet receive what I say as at best a token and reflexion of the truth; not as the actual
truth itself. For it is not possible that there should be complete correspondence between
what is seen in the tokens and the objects in reference to which the use of tokens is adopted.
Why then do I say that an analogy of the separate and the conjoined is found in objects
perceptible to the senses? You have before now, in springtime, beheld the brightness of the
bow in the cloud; the bow, I mean, which, in our common parlance, is called Iris, and is said
by persons skilled in such matters to be formed when a certain moisture is mingled with
the air, and the force of the winds expresses what is dense and moist in the vapour, after it
has become cloudy, into rain. The bow is said to be formed as follows. When the sunbeam,
after traversing obliquely the dense and darkened portion of the cloud-formation, has directly
cast its own orb on some cloud, the radiance is then reflected back from what is moist and
shining, and the result is a bending and return, as it were, of the light upon itself. For flamelike
flashings are so constituted that if they fall on any smooth surface they are refracted on
themselves; and the shape of the sun, which by means of the beam is formed on the moist
and smooth part of the air, is round. The necessary consequence therefore is that the air
adjacent to the cloud is marked out by means of the radiant brilliance in conformity with
the shape of the sun’s disc. Now this brilliance is both continuous and divided. It is of many
colours; it is of many forms; it is insensibly steeped in the variegated bright tints of its dye;
imperceptibly abstracting from our vision the combination of many coloured things, with
the result that no space, mixing or paring within itself the difference of colour, can be dis-
2040 ὥσπερ ἐκ αἰνίγματι. cf. 1 Cor. xiii. 12. ἐν αἰνίγματι or ἐξ αἰνιγμάτων, as in Æsch., Ag. 1113=by dark
hints. The bold oxymoron concluding this sentence is illustrated by Ovid’s “impietate pia” (Met. viii. 477), Lucan’s
“concordia discors” (Phars. i. 98), or Tennyson’s “faith unfaithful.”
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