BOOK I CHAPTER II
Concerning things utterable and things unutterable, and things knowable and
things unknowable.
It is necessary, therefore, that one who wishes to speak or to hear of God should understand clearly that alike in the doctrine of Deity and in that of the Incarnation, neither are all things unutterable nor all utterable; neither all unknowable nor all knowable. But the knowable belongs to one order, and the utterable to another; just as it is one thing to speak and another thing to know. Many of the things relating to God, therefore, that are dimly understood cannot be put into fitting terms, but on things above us we cannot do else than express ourselves according to our limited capacity; as, for instance, when we speak of God we use the terms sleep, and wrath, and regardlessness, hands, too, and feet, land such like expressions.
We,
therefore, both know and confess that God is without beginning, without end,
eternal and everlasting, uncreate, unchangeable, invariable, simple,
uncompound, incorporeal, invisible, impalpable, uncircumscribed, infinite,
incognisable, indefinable, incomprehensible, good, just, maker of all things
created, almighty, all-ruling, all-surveying, of all overseer, sovereign,
judge; and that God is One, that is to say, one essences; and that He is
known, and has His being in three subsistences, in Father, I say, and Son
and Holy Spirit; and that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are one in
all respects, except in that of not being begotten, that of being begotten, and
that of procession; and that the Only-begotten Son and Word of God and God, in
His bowels of mercy, for our salvation, by the good pleasure of God and the
co-operation of the Holy Spirit, being conceived without seed, was born
uncorruptedly of the Holy Virgin and Mother of God, Mary, by the Holy Spirit,
and became of her perfect Man; and that the Same is at once perfect God and
perfect Man, of two natures, Godhead and Manhood, and in two natures possessing
intelligence, will and energy, and freedom, and, in a word, perfect according
to the measure and proportion proper to each, at once to the divinity, I say,
and to the humanity, yet to one composite persons; and that He suffered
hunger and thirst and weariness, and was crucified, and for three days
submitted to the experience of death and burial, and ascended to heaven, from
which also He came to us, and shall come again. And the Holy Scripture is
witness to this and the whole choir of the Saints.
But neither
do we know, nor can we tell, what the essence of God is, or how it is
in all, or how the Only-begotten Son and God, having emptied Himself, became
Man of virgin blood, made by another law contrary to nature, or how He walked
with dry feet upon the waters. It is not within our capacity, therefore, to
say anything about God or even to think of Him, beyond the things which have
been divinely revealed to us, whether by word or by manifestation, by the
divine oracles at once of the Old Testament and of the New.
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