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

sunlight when they first come out into the open air, and have to find temporary
ways of dealing with it, looking at reflections or coming to terms with moonlight
before experiencing the full glare of the sun. Gregory uses other analogies taken
from the mysteries of everyday life. One of these is the nature of the mind.
‘What makes the mind both confined and boundless, both at home in us and
touring the universe in flowing rapid course? In what way is mind conveyed and
communicated by speech? What makes it share in sense-perception, while
isolating itself from self-perception?’ What is it that draws parents and children
to each other? How is sound produced by the vocal organs and received by the
ears? How are ‘sounds and ears knit together by the imprinted impulse
transmitted by the intervening air?’ If there are such mysteries that cannot be
perceived by the reasoning mind in the material world, how much more difficult
is it to grasp the mystery of God? All one can expect is ‘a slight glimmer, a small
beam from the Great Light’, but ultimately God is ‘incomprehensible to the
human mind and of an unimaginably glorious grandeur’. By believing that they
could understand God, Gregory argued, his opponents would invariably get a
false and limited perception of the Almighty, and it was not surprising, therefore,
that they came up with false doctrines - such as that Jesus is not fully God but a
later creation.
This is powerful rhetoric and a fine demonstration of the breadth of Gregory’s
mind. In the next three orations, Gregory defended the Nicene interpretation of
the Trinity as he perceived it. It was a daunting task because the issues seemed
far beyond human grasp. Understandably, the Sirmium Creed of 357 had
declared that the homoousion (the ‘one in substance’ of the Nicene Creed) ‘is
beyond man’s knowledge nor can anyone declare the birth of the Son ... for it is
clear that only the Father knows how he begot his Son and his Son how he was
begotten by the Father’. In the third of the orations (Oration 29), Gregory dealt
with the common substance of Father and Son and the co-eternity they enjoy. He
bravely set out ten objections to the Nicene formulation, each of which he
attempted to answer. A central issue was that if one describes the Son as
begotten from the Father, this must imply a moment when he was not begotten.
The subordinationists argued that the act of begetting must have involved the
will of the Father and the formulation of that will must have preceded the act
itself. In other words, the pre-existence of the Father to the Son must be
assumed. Gregory tries hard to combat this, but in the end he has to accept that
the begetting is a mystery. He describes how even the act of human begetting,
‘the principles involved from conception through formation to birth and the