First Cause (Prime Mover)

3. Not only would affection to a private system, unsubordinate to a regard to being in general, have a tendency to oppose the supreme object of virtuous affection, as its effect and consequence, but w

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For I challenge him to say why a believer in the Son as having come into being from the Father must advance to the opinion that there are two First Causes; and let him tell us who is most guilty of th

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We hear our Lord saying. “I and My Father are one,” and we are taught in that utterance the dependence of our Lord on a cause, and yet the absolute identity of the Son’s and the Father’s nature; we do

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arbitrary distribution, ἀποκληρώσεως: κατ᾽ ἀποκλήρωσιν “at random,” is also used by Sextus Empiric. (a.d. 200), Clem. Alex., and Greg Naz. How, too, will it be true that “all things were made by Him,

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I will now once more subjoin the actual language of my opponent, word for word. It runs thus:—“While there are,” he says, “two statements which we have made, the one, that the essence of the Only-bego

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1. They proceed to tell us that the Propator of their scheme was known only to Monogenes, who sprang from him; in other words, only to Nous, while to all the others he was invisible and incomprehensib

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1. While the Demiurge was thus ignorant of all things, they tell us that the Saviour conferred honour upon the Pleroma by the creation [which he summoned into existence] through means of his Mother, i

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But that we might gain some sort of comprehension of what with reverence may be thought respecting Him, we have stamped our different ideas with certain words and syllables, labelling, as it were, our

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For it is not the case that, while the intelligence implanted in us by the Giver is fully competent to conjure up non-realities, it is endowed with no faculty at all for providing us with things that

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Eunomius arrived at the same conclusions as Arius, but by a different path. “The true name of God is ᾽Αγέννητος, and this name is incommunicable to other essences.” He attacked both the Arians and the

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I have said, then (for I make my master’s words my own), that reason supplies us with but a dim and imperfect comprehension of the Divine nature; nevertheless, the knowledge that we gather from the te

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While, however, we strenuously avoid all concurrence with absurd notions in our thoughts of God, we allow ourselves in the use of many diverse appellations in regard to Him, adapting them to our point

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Chapter VI.—Cerdo, Marcion, Lucan, Apelles. To this is added one Cerdo. He introduces two first causes,nay, really not to have been born at all. A resurrection of the soul merely does he approve, den

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5. But after the Lord has withdrawn the sinner from the abyss of perdition, and set him apart for himself by means of adoption, having begotten him again and formed him to newness of life, he embraces

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Sect. XCI. — BUT let us also look into Paul, who takes up this passage of Moses, Rom. ix. How miserably is the Diatribe tortured with that part of the Scripture! Lest it should lose its hold of “Freew

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Another part of God’s fulness which he communicates, is his happiness. This happiness consists in enjoying and rejoicing in himself; and so does also the creature’s happiness. It is a participation of

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The Scriptures represent God as making himself his own last end in the creation of the world. It is manifest, that the Scriptures speak, on all occasions, as though God made himself his end in all hi

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Let us then run over, if you choose, the opinions of the philosophers, to which they give boastful utterance, respecting the gods; that we may discover philosophy itself, through its conceit making an

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Further; having closely urged these converse arguments in the former verses, he tries it again in another way, calling Him the “first-fruits,” and pointing to His “abolishing all rule and authority an

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5. You, however, in order to avoid doing what I had asked, have devised a new argument against the view proposed; maintaining that the Gentiles who had believed in Christ were free from the burden of

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