Letter 214

214. To Count Terentius.

When we heard that your Excellency had again been forced into the management of public affairs, we were at once troubled (for the truth shall be told), reflecting how contrary it is to your wish, after having once been released from public cares and given leisure to the care of your own soul, to be compelled again to return to the same things. Then, coming to the thought that perhaps the Lord, wishing to grant this one consolation amid the countless griefs which now beset our churches, has ordered that your Dignity should again appear in affairs, we became even more cheerful, as men who were going to meet your Honor at least once more before departing this life.

But again another report took hold of us, that you were residing at Antioch and administering, together with the great authorities, the business in hand. And besides this report, there came to our hearing that the brethren of the party of Paulinus are discoursing with your Uprightness about union with us — I mean us, those of the portion of the man of God, Bishop Meletius. They, I hear, now carry about letters of the Westerners, entrusting to them the episcopate of the church at Antioch, and misrepresenting the most admirable bishop of the true Church of God, Meletius. And I do not wonder at this. For some are wholly ignorant of the affairs here; and others, though they seem to know them, expound them more from contentiousness than from truth. But of those men it is nothing strange either to be ignorant of the truth, or even to conceal the cause for which the most blessed bishop Athanasius came to write to Paulinus. But your Perfection, having with you those able to recount exactly the things that passed between the bishops in the reign of Jovian, we beseech to be fully informed by them. But since we accuse no one, and pray to have love toward all, and especially toward those of the household of the faith, we rejoice with those who have received the letters from Rome. And if those letters bear some grand and great testimony to them, we pray that this may be true and confirmed by the very deeds. Yet not for this reason can we ever persuade ourselves either to ignore Meletius, or to forget the church under him, or to count as small the questions over which the division arose from the beginning, and to suppose them to have little bearing on the aim of piety. For I — not only would I never consent to draw back because some man, having received a letter from men, prides himself on it; but not even if one came from the very heavens, yet did not walk in step with the sound word of the faith, could I count him a partaker with the saints.

For consider, O admirable man, that the falsifiers of the truth, who brought the Arian schism in upon the sound faith of the fathers, put forward no other cause for not accepting the pious doctrine of the fathers than the meaning of the term "of one essence," which they themselves wickedly and for the slander of the whole faith interpret, saying that the Son is called by us "of one essence" according to hypostasis. If we give them any occasion for this, by the bandying about of those who, through simplicity rather than malice, say these things or things like them, nothing prevents us too from giving against ourselves indisputable handles, and from establishing the heresy strongly for those whose one study it is, in their discourses before the church, not to establish their own positions, but to slander ours.

And what could be harder than this slander, and more able to unsettle the many, than if some of us should appear saying that of Father and Son and Holy Spirit there is one hypostasis — even though they should very clearly teach the distinction of the persons? For by the fact that Sabellius anticipated the saying of this same thing — that God is one in hypostasis, but is given different persons by Scripture according to the peculiarity of the need that underlies each occasion: now investing himself with the fatherly utterances, when it is the time for that person; now with those befitting the Son, when He descends to the care of us or to certain other dispensational operations; and now putting on the mask of the Spirit, when the occasion demands the utterances proper to such a person — if, then, among us too some should appear saying that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are one in substrate, while confessing three complete persons, how will they not seem to furnish a clear and indisputable proof of the truth of what is said about us?

And as to the fact that hypostasis and essence are not the same, even the brethren from the West, as I think, hinted at this, when, suspecting the poverty of their own language, they handed over the word "essence" to the Greek tongue, in order that, if there were any difference of meaning, it might be preserved in the clear and unconfused distinction of the terms. But if we too must say in brief what seems to us, we will say this: that the relation which the common has to the particular, this the essence has to the hypostasis. For each of us both partakes of being by the common account of the essence, and is this or that man by the properties belonging to him. So also there the account of the essence is common — such as goodness, or Godhead, or whatever else may be conceived — while the hypostasis is contemplated in the property of fatherhood, or of sonship, or of the sanctifying power. If, then, they say the persons are without hypostasis, the statement has its absurdity at once; but if they grant that they exist in a true hypostasis, as they confess, let them also number them, that both the account of "one essence" may be preserved in the unity of the Godhead, and the recognition of true religion concerning Father and Son and Holy Spirit may be proclaimed in the complete and entire hypostasis of each of the persons named. Nevertheless, of this I wish your Excellency to be persuaded, that both you, and everyone who like you takes thought for the truth and does not dishonor those who contend for piety, ought to await the lead in this union and peace from the leaders of the churches, whom I count as the pillars and bulwark of the truth and of the Church; and I revere them so much the more, the farther they are driven into exile, the separation being brought upon them in place of punishment. I beg you, then, keep yourself for us free of prejudice, that we may have at least you to rest upon, whom God has granted us in all things as a staff and support.