Hymns on Faith

Notes

1. p. 223, d.
2. Rom. 1, 25.
3. See p. 272, n. g.
4. Here Adam is spoken of as giving the creatures names ‘from the depths of his own skill.’ As the whole discussion about names is of much importance in the controversy with the Anomeans, it will be right to mention here some similar statements in other writers, to endeavour to ascertain the sense in which they are to be taken, and to bring forward any passages or principles which may serve to modify them. S. Gregory Nyssen has been alleged by Father Simon (in his Crit. Hist. of O. T. i. 14.) and others after him as calling it a folly and ridiculous vanity of the Jews ‘to affirm that God was the Author of the language which Adam and Eve spoke.’ St. Greg. ii. p. 761, a. says, “We say that names declarative of entities were invented subsequently to these by human skill;” and p. 768, d. “we refer the invention of words to the rational power implanted by God in man’s nature; and this is the most weighty of crimes, on account of which the master of orthodoxy (St. Basil) is accused of going over to the atheists, and of being the inheritor and advocate of a lawless way of life, and is called all sorts of hard names. Well! let the corrector of our blunders say, ‘It was God that gave the appellations to entities.’ For this is what this novel expounder of the mysterious writings does say, to wit, that to plants, herbs, grass, wood, and the like, God did give names before the formation of man, as He brought into being the things which were made by His command.” p. 778, c. “The power of discourse is the work of Him who made our nature what it is, but the invention of individual words for the purpose of indicating their objects, is quite of our own devising; and a proof of this is that many of the things which are spoken of are allowed on all hands to be base and indecorous, which no one with any sense would suppose God to be the inventor of.” p. 813, b. “Things being what they are by nature, it was the reasoning power implanted in us by God which invented the words explanatory of them; and if any one refers the authorship of these to Him, who gave the power, neither do we object—as we say that moving and seeing and energizing according to the other senses, comes from Him from whom we have this power”—a parallel which he pursues in the next page. See also p. 847, c. Id. c. Apoll. §. x. “No small intellectual grace is it that Scripture beareth witness to Adam’s having had; for there were brought to him by God the animals, but the invention of the names he had full power over, devising for each that which was meet and suitable.” We see in the expression ‘intellectual grace’ what will prove a clue to St. G.’s meaning in the other passages. He views the discourse of reason as a gift of God, and the particular state of illumination in which it was in Paradise, as a grace. This wisdom, supernatural as it would be in relation to man’s fallen state, and in that state, the result of gradual development, was in Adam from his birth (so to call it) what gave him the power of making and choosing particular names; much as in the gift of miracles (which of course is not without God’s agency, comp. p. 68, n. r.) the recipient is not tied down to determinate acts of miraculous power, but uses or even abuses that power in particular acts. Eunomius, on the other hand, spoke as if God had Himself uttered certain words and syllables, i. e. assumed that the phrase ‘God said, &c.’ was not in any sense an accommodation to man’s notions, but a literal fact. St. Chrysostom in Gen. Hom. xiv. p. 124, b. speaks in a like way with St. Gr. of Adam’s great wisdom being displayed in giving the names; and so Basil of Seleucia, p. 8. (ed. Dausq.) “Go thou up Adam to thy dignity and confirm thy lordship by the names given to the animals; imitate the Creator’s dignity! He creates natures, do you give the appellations! And one might see a secret watchword carried orderly through all the animals, and they all flowed together to Adam confessing their subservience to him by their passing before him. For God, it says, brought all the animals, &c. Be thou a creator of names, Adam, since of creatures thou canst not be, and let them be formed by Me, but when formed be named by thee! Let us share the glory of creative wisdom! Me let them recognise as Creator by the law of nature, thee as master by the word of naming! give the appellation to those, to which I have given the substance. I subvert not the name; I reshape not the gift.” St. Austin Op. imp. in Julian. P. lib. v. init. notices that Adam’s giving ‘the names to all kinds of creatures was a proof of most excellent wisdom;’ it being so held even by Gentiles, (see Plato’s Cratylus, §. 8. §. 14. &c. from whom Nyssen, p. 815, a. says Eunomius borrowed ‘the nonsense which he through poverty of ideas tacked on to his own trash’)—St. A. adds, “that we might have most reasonably conjectured, (even if we had learnt nothing of the sort about Adam,) what kind of nature was created in that man in whom there was absolutely no fault; which any one can see.....slowness of intellect or memory to be.” Severian of Gabala, a less saintly author, in the Σεῖρα on the place, p. 75. on the other hand speaks as follows: “Since God made him after His Image, He wished also to bring his honour out to view, and to shew verily that he beareth the Image of Wisdom. And see what a marvel! God prefigured (προετύπωσεν ἑαυτῷ τὰ ὀνόματα) to Himself the names, and wished it to be shewn by the image that Adam’s decisions agreed with the acts of God’s will. So Scripture then being minded to shew that God had also foreordained the names which he gave, says, ‘and every thing that he called it, that was the name of it’—i. e. this was foreordained, God had decided it.” So Eusebius, (whose heretical bias is thought plain by many great divines,) P. E. p. 516, a. where he also is commending Plato, says of the same text, “What else does this prove, than that the names were given according to nature? for the name which was now given, this (it says) was long before comprised in nature, that to each of the things named there should be and preexist this name which the man aforesaid, inspired by a power above him, had given it.” To which view Origen also strongly inclines, contr. Cels. (i. §. 24.) p. 18. Spenser, (see his notes) as does Mahomet, Coran ii. 31.) and perhaps others referred to (anonymously) by Moses Bar. Cephas de Parad. i. p. 477. B. P. Max. vol. xvii. It is not meant that there is any Catholic doctrine upon the subject known to the writer, but that the opinions of orthodox writers on the whole run one way; as they did hold Adam to be possessed of supernatural grace and knowledge, so they seem to hold the need of believing a freedom in the use of the latter, as well as of the former, as if guarding against any depreciation of Adam’s supernatural state,—the belief in which the heterodox in all ages seem by some instinct, as it were, led to attempt to obliterate. A supernatural gift of knowledge then freely used in cooperation with the external circumstances in which, by bringing the creatures wonderfully to him, God had placed Adam, seems to be that which originated language. As such a view does not preclude a belief in the continuity of God’s enlightenment of the soul, (comp. p. 209, n. b.) during the process, it is not in any way connected with a heathen notion, that men began with being a ‘mutum et turpe pecus.’ (See Horace, Sat. i. 3. 100. and Lucret. v. 1027. whom Simon quotes.) It also falls in with the following other passages from St. E.; vol. i. p. 24, d. on the place. “His saying that He brought them to Adam is to shew his wisdom, and what peace there was betwixt the beasts and Adam before he transgressed the commandment. For they came to him as to a much loved shepherd......Not only the power over every thing which He had promised did God give to Adam, but He added moreover the right of giving the names which He had not promised. Now if He did for him somewhat over and above, which he asked not, how, without Adam’s having sinned, could He withdraw what He had promised? For if a man were to impose names few in number, for them to be kept in the memory is no great thing. But an excellent thing it is, and greater than man can attain to, when in a single hour a man imposed thousands of names without giving the latter the names of the former. For for a man to put forth a multitude of names for a multitude of tribes of creeping things, beasts, and cattle, and fowl, is possible, but to do it so as not to give the names of one tribe to its fellow, this is of God, or of that man to whom this is given by God. If He gave him power and associated him in the creation, (comp. Bas. Sel. above, which forms a scholion upon this seeming misprint for [Syriac] which occurs in p. 24, f.) and clothed him with glory, what was there more that He could do unto him to make him mindful of the commandment, which He did not do for him?” Here the whole drift of the passage is the same as it is in St. Chrysostom, viz. to shew that the fall was not from any want of wisdom in Adam, and St. E. minds not what view is taken of giving the names provided that is admitted; though he seems plainly from the second of the alternatives (of that man, &c.) which he gives, to prefer referring it to the supernatural state of glory in which Adam then was; as he says in p. 22, c. “He clothed him with glory, and gave him his discourse and intelligence and perception of God.” p. 27, c. “He was more subtle than all who had given the names to all; for as the children of Israel without a veil were not able to look upon the face of Moses, so neither were the beasts able to look upon the glory of Adam. With downcast eyes did they pass before him what time they received their names from him.” Here again he is arguing to the same purpose, viz. to shew the serpent’s own subtlety was not greater nor as great as Adam’s. So in vol. ii. p. 455, f. speaking of the diverse races of men, he says, “From the wonderful fountain of Adam the common stream of words and of forms flowed;” which implies that he draws a parallel between language and other natural gifts. The sense then in which such passages are to be taken is to be estimated in part by the heresies the Fathers were opposing. When Eunomius wanted to shew an inherent connection between words and the things signified by them, he is plainly talking of words as they now exist: and therefore it is to the purpose to urge against him, as St. G. does, the endless variety of languages as proof that there is now no such connection. When he or others represent Adam as a mere material instrument in God’s hand, it is important to insist on his supernatural state of knowledge and grace, and maintain the existence and free operation of created wisdom. This of course is quite another thing from denying, as Eunomius implies St. B. does, all interference of God or dependence of man in such matters. A portion of a fragment of St. Athanasius ap. Leont. in Mai’s Coll. N. vii. p. 86. will fitly conclude this note. “Thus did God make man, and God as being good made man so great and goodly. Do not then consider his present contemptibleness, but imagine to thyself his first constitution, seeing that it was in God’s Image that He made him, &c. &c.”
5. Gen. 1, 20.
6. R. lxi. §. 2. R. lxv. §. 4.
7. Vol. i. p. 286, f. In one way of interpretation, “the drink that came from the Rock, (Deut. 31, 13.) was according to each man’s desire; it was as honey to him that desired honey, and as oil to another, and as butter, and as the fat of wheat; and this is a type of Christ that true Rock, the Head of the Everlasting Building and the Fountain of Life. To every one that draweth near to Him, is He according to his desire: to one He is the River, to another the Gate, to another the Way, and to this one Wisdom, and all things becometh He to all that He may gain every man.” The Anomeans, as it would appear from Gr. Nyssen, p. 525. when told by the orthodox that the Son could not be made son in the sense in which men are called sons of light, without making Him capable of moral advance, urged that the Son had a number of other titles, as Stone, Axe, Foundation, &c. which plainly were not names which really agreed with His Nature; therefore neither does the Name ‘Son’ do so. To this St. G. replies, p. 526, c. ‘that though the names which are given by Scripture to the Son are, as they say, many, there is none which we say implies by its relativeness a connaturalness with the Generator. For we do not, as in the case of the Father’s Son, so also in that of Stone, Resurrection, Shepherd, or Light, or any of the other names, use the term to imply a relation to the God of all: but one may as if by some artificial rule make a twofold division in the meaning of God’s names. For some of them contain a setting forth of His high and unspeakable glory, and others set forth the manifoldness of His providential dispensations.’ Comp. p. 672, d. p. 792, c. Epiphan. Hær. lxix. §. 35. and see on Athan. p. 25. &c. p. 153, n. d. and above, p. 29, n. g.
8. John 1, 36.
9. R. lxi. §. 3.
10. n. c. R. lxi. §. 3.
11. c. Scrut. i. 12.
12. R. lx. §. 3. p. 307, n. b.
13. S. it is the requisition of fitness
14. Vol. i. p. 334, c. “The gods of the Gentiles are names without meaning.” The argument in this §. is, that relatives imply their correlatives. See Aristot. Categ. §. 7. p. 6. l. 27. Bekk. St. Bas. c. Eun. ii. 9. “Who doth not know, that of words some absolutely pronounced, and by themselves are significative of their subject matters; but others being used relatively indicate only the bearing they have to their correlatives, ‘Man,’ e. g. and ‘horse,’ and ‘ox,’ brings before us each of the things mentioned; but ‘son,’ or ‘servant,’ or ‘friend,’ are merely indicative of the connection with the cognate word. Whenever, at this rate, a man has heard a generate thing mentioned, it is not to some essence that he is carried in mind, but its connection with another is what he thinks of. For a thing generate is an expression used of that which is generate from some thing.” And his brother, vol. ii. p. 403, d. “God is called both Father and King, and by countless other names, by Holy Writ. Now out of these names some are used in this single way, thus absolutely I mean, e. g. ‘Incorruptible,’ ‘Eternal,’ ‘Immortal,’ and the like. For these, even if no other conception be understood along with them, in themselves comprise a kind of perfect notion of God. But there are other names which only signify a relative bearing, as ‘helper,’ ‘shielder,’ ‘protector,’ and as many of this signification as may be met with: from which if you take away that which needs assistance, then the power indicated by the word comes to naught. But some there are used both of themselves and with correlatives —as ‘God,’ ‘good,’ and such like........ There is no reason why a person, who sets before us the Father and Him who is from Him,.....should not at the same time by the appellation ‘Father’ signify to us that He begat the Son, and also explain by the same word His own Unoriginateness.” Comp. the next note.
15. §. 7. R. lx. §. 1.
16. R. lx. §. 3.
17. S. are heard pervertedly. R. lxv. §. 1.
18. R. lii. §. 1.
19. S. being clad with fixed names of p. 316, ref. 3. R. lxiii. §. 4.
20. p. 122, n. i.
21. R. xlvi. §. 4.
22. Ps. 110.
23. p. 133. R. lxv. §. 1.
24. Of this passage I am unable to give any satisfactory explanation: perhaps St. E. means, that the heretics allow ‘Angel’ and ‘man’ to be names which have a reality answering to them, but that they deny this of’ Son,’ and contend that generation merely means creation. Consequently, the title instead of giving the Son any pre-eminence, expresses no more of Him than what might be said of the brutes, i. e. only expresses that He is a creature as well as they. Nyssen, ii. p. 558. “If the Son be a creature, then the Heaven is a son, and each of the things that are made is, according to this fiction-writer, with propriety called by the name of ‘son.’ For if it is not by sharing the nature of Him who begot Him that He hath the name of Son, but He is called so just because He is created, then this same argument will make a lamb and a dog and a frog, and all things that subsist at the will of the Creator, to have the appellation of ‘son.’” St. Austin c. Maxim. lib. i. 6. “In order to shew that the Son is of the same Nature as the Father, I opposed to the monstrousness of your error the progeny even of animals that die, to reprove the heart of you who deny that God the Son is of the same Nature as the Father, though you do not deny that He is a true Son. For God Himself gave to animals the power of generating that which themselves are; in which case I called not only man man’s son, but a dog a dog’s son, not for their likeness to God, but for the confusion of those who detract from the Son of God; who when they see natures corruptible and mortal, which yet have a unity of nature from their parents, are still unwilling to allow to the Son of God a participation of One Nature from the Father, though He be inseparable from the Father, and incorruptible and eternal with the Father. Whence also I said that, on your theory, the estate of man, in which such growth is possible that at least thereby the sons may arrive at the parents’ strength, is the better: but the Son of God, as ye say and teach, being born less than the Father in such way continued so, that He could not come up to the form of the Father, and did not grow.” The heretics of the Arian school generally asserted, that Son had unalterable relations to the Father, as St. A. here assumes. See St. Greg. Nyss. ii. p. 369, c. and p. 639-40. (ab. p. 175, n. a.) in which latter place he contrasts as was commonly done the Angels’ natural capability of moral advancement with the unchangeableness of the Son. This then will throw a light on the word ‘Angel;’ and the passage from St. A. on the word ‘man.’ Angels are capable by nature of continual approximation to God, as man is to his parents, or indeed to God: but the Son in the Arian view not being really a true Son, and yet being fixed to one unalterable state as they allow, is rather like brutes than rational beings, has a title which, with the heretical explanation of it, concedes to Him whom God bare from all eternity, not so much real advantage as attaches to the nature of man or Angel, to wit, a capacity for indefinite progression towards their Creator.
25. R. lx. §. 1.
26. §. 4. ref. 4.
27. S. by mixture comp. Athan. p. 286-7.
28. p. 316, ref. 1.
29. §. 4. R. lxiii. §. 4.
30. p. 315, ref. 4.
31. R. lxxi. §. 1. c. Scrut. i.
32. §. 4. ref. 5.