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| Chapter LXIV
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Chapter
LXIV.
Celsus, again, brings together a number of
statements, which he gives as admissions on our part, but which no
intelligent Christian would allow. For not one of us asserts that
“God partakes of form or colour.” Nor does He even
partake of “motion,” because He stands firm, and His nature
is permanent, and He invites the righteous man also to do the same,
saying: “But as for thee, stand thou here by
Me.”4612
And if
certain expressions indicate a kind of motion, as it were, on His part,
such as this, “They heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the
day,”4613
we must understand
them in this way, that it is by sinners that God is understood as
moving, or as we understand the “sleep” of God, which is
taken in a figurative sense, or His “anger,” or any other
similar attribute. But “God does not partake even of
substance.”4614
For He is
partaken of (by others) rather than that Himself partakes of them, and
He is partaken of by those who have the Spirit of God. Our
Saviour, also, does not partake of righteousness; but being Himself
“righteousness,” He is partaken of by the
righteous. A discussion about “substance” would be
protracted and difficult, and especially if it were a question whether
that which is permanent and immaterial be “substance” properly so called, so that
it would be found that God is beyond “substance,”
communicating of His “substance,” by means of office and
power,4615
| 4615 πρεσβείᾳ
καὶ
δυνάμει. | to those to whom He
communicates Himself by His Word, as He does to the Word Himself; or
even if He is “substance,” yet He is said be in His
nature “invisible,” in these words respecting our Saviour,
who is said to be “the image of the invisible
God,”4616
while from the term
“invisible” it is indicated that He is
“immaterial.” It is also a question for
investigation, whether the “only-begotten” and
“first-born of every creature” is to be called
“substance of substances,” and “idea of ideas,”
and the “principle of all things,” while above all there is
His Father and God.4617
| 4617 [“It is a
remarkable fact, that it was Origen who discerned the heresy outside
the Church on its first rise, and actually gave the alarm, sixty years
before Arius’s day. See Athanasius, De Decret. Nic.,
§ 27; also the περὶ ἀρχῶν
(if Rufinus may be trusted), for Origen’s denouncement of the
still more characteristic Arianism of the ἠν
ὅτε οὐκ ἦν and the
ἐξ οὐκ
ὄντων.”—Newman’s The Arians of the Fourth Century, p.
97. See also Hagenbach’s History of Doctrines, vol.
i. pp. 130–133. S.] | E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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