A.D. 381 heretics, pagans, and the dawn of the monotheistic state ( PDFDrive )

of Megara, Simonides, and Pindar, author of victory hymns to the winners of the
Olympics and other games. The two great historians of the fifth century,
Herodotus and Thucydides, were both cited, and Gregory also drew, inevitably,
on the works of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Plato was perhaps the single most
important classical influence on Gregory, and it is clear that he also read widely
in the Neoplatonism of his own day. There were examples of the great
rhetoricians such as Isocrates and Demosthenes, whose speeches rallied the
Athenians against the looming power of Philip of Macedon. From the first
century AD, Gregory had read the works of the Jewish philosopher Philo, and
from the second, Plutarch, whose Lives of famous Greek and Romans was one
among a mass of works on moral philosophy and history. (By Gregory’s time,
Plutarch had become a classic, and one list of his works includes 227 items, the
vast majority now lost to us.) In addition to all these ‘pagan’ authors, Gregory
was also well versed in the Bible, and in the works of Origen, his theological
mentor. 19
This impressive education, in both pagan and Christian texts, gave the
Cappadocian Fathers the intellectual capacity to devise a formula to express the
distinction between God the Father and Jesus the Son within a single Godhead.
Basil, for instance, argued that there was a divine essence shared by God the
Father and Jesus that could be adequately described by the word homoousios and
understood through an analogy with light. As he put it in a letter of circa 370,
‘Since therefore the Father is light without beginning, and the Son is begotten
light, yet one is light and the other is light, they [the fathers of Nicaea] rightly
declared them homoousios.’ 20 To strengthen his argument, he drew on an
Aristotelian idea of distinguishing between the substance of a thing and its
individual properties. You might divide a single piece of wood into two and paint
one part red and the other blue. The two pieces would share the same substance,
the wood, but would appear differently due to their paint; so God the Father and
Jesus the begotten Son could share a substance while being different in
appearance. To give added sophistication to his argument, Basil adapted a
terminology, probably originated in the works of the great Neoplatonist
philosopher Plotinus, in which he used the word homoousios to describe the
single Godhead, in which he included the Holy Spirit (developing his thoughts
on the divinity of the Spirit in his On the Holy Spirit of 375), and hypostasis,
personality, to express the distinct identity of each of the three within this single
Godhead. None of this offered any kind of rational proof for the Nicene view. In