Begotten, Not Made (2 of 4)

The eternally begotten Son of God

This is a continuation of a previous post. You can read Part 1 here.

While the following is not technically a letter, it began as one. A dear friend and colleague expressed to me his reservations about the doctrine of eternal generation, specifically his inclination to think that the begotten-not-made distinction is philosophically indefensible. He wanted to know my thoughts on the distinction and whether I think it’s cogent. I began a reply, but that letter quickly morphed into a journal article. Hence, what I sent him was the final manuscript. The piece is now published in Religion Studies, vol. 55 (2019), pp. 503-535. As for whether my friend was persuaded, well, he's now an Orthodox convert. Please subscribe and consider supporting my work.

* NOTE: With footnotes, the article exceeded Substack word limits, requiring it to be broken into seven posts. I have thus remove the majority of footnotes and trimmed some text in order to make it more accessible for Substack readers. For those who wish to see the article in full, you can find it here.

The Eternally Begotten Son of God

We saw above the specifics of what Eternal Generation (EG) is not and the rationale for these apophatic claims. But can anything positive be said about EG? The Eastern fathers do offer positive assertions about EG, but before we look at these claims, we must discuss how they understand concept-forming about things divine.

Amid the Eunomian dispute, we find heated disagreement over what can be known of God. The Eunomians sought to exposit the essential properties of the divine essence in defence of their brand of Arianism. In response, the Cappadocian fathers insist that no such exposition is possible, since God’s essence is ‘above intelligence’ (hyper dianoian).¹ To see what this means, we must grasp (i) their distinction between noēsis and epinoia and (ii) their insistence that God is hyperousios.

Beginning with (i), noēsis constitutes the direct apprehension of a form. Here we must contrast the realism of these ancient writers with the nominalism of the modern empiricists. In modern empiricism, such as John Locke’s, the object outside the mind is one thing and the mental replica of the object is a second thing. Ancient realists, by contrast, see the properties of an object and the mental abstraction of these properties as isomorphic: the property, or form, in the object and the property apprehended by the mind is the same property. As per realism, a single form can reside in multiple objects. The singularity of the form red, for example, includes not only red in object p and q but also red abstracted in the mind in the act of perception: the red in the object and the red in the mind when perceiving the object is the same property. Such direct apprehension of form constitutes empirical knowledge, or noēsis.

The difficulty is that objects consist of more than just form. There is, for example, the enduring subject that sits beneath these forms (hypostasis), as well as the substratum of matter in which forms come to be. When thinking on such things, the mind finds itself at a loss; it gropes for something in its catalogue of forms but comes up empty. Hence, it must rely on comparisons for understanding. For example, prime matter is like a shapeless bit of fabric that receives shape from objects around which it is draped. But it is unlike fabric insofar as fabric has definite properties, while prime matter has no properties of its own. Such concept-forming is called epinoia.²

The Eastern patristic insistence that God is above intelligence is an assertion that God is never an object of noēsis, nor can he be. This assertion brings us to the second point noted, namely that God is hyperousios. To explain, we will track with Platonism for a moment. In Platonic realism, the forms provide intelligibility to things by grounding both unity (genera and species) and delineation (specific difference). Form thus supplies intelligibility by circumscribing an entity. But, as Aristotle would press, what unifies the forms? Plato and later Platonists locate the answer in The Good. For form not only tells us what a thing is but its quality: good/bad, healthy/unhealthy, well-formed/malformed are qualitative assessments based on likeness or unlikeness to a form. Plato thus sees The Good as the source of being and, not surprisingly, treats The Good interchangeably with God. All of this, however, raises the question: Is The Good, and thus God, merely one of the forms that The Good is meant to explain? An affirmative reply yields an infinite regress: The forms are unified by a common form (viz., The Good), but The Good, being a form, must also share a common property (say, form p) with the other forms; but this common form (form p), itself being a form, must also share a common property (form q) with the rest of the forms, and so on ad infinitum. Therefore, in later Platonic accounts, the answer is No, God transcends form. God is beyond being (epekeina tēs ousias) and The Good is not an intelligible attribute of God (i.e., a form) but something grasped indirectly by the many articulations of goodness in creation.

We find similar accounts amongst the Eastern fathers, who affirm both the existence of archetypal Ideas in the mind of God and God’s transcendence of those Ideas.³ Moreover, though the Eastern fathers identify The Good with God, they resist the notion that God is, or has, a form. Per the metaphysical commitments of the previous section, their insistence on divine immutability entails a rejection of finitude and thus of a circumscribed nature (perigraptos physis) from amongst the forms. Whatever the divine nature is, it must be above form. Hence, God is hyperousios.

When considering divine transcendence, we can see why the Eastern fathers insist that God is beyond intelligence. Noēsis, as an apprehension of form, can never grasp that which has no form. This is true of prime matter, of hypostases, and of the divine essence. The divine essence, being hyperousios, has no defined or delineated content on which our rational faculties might lay hold, such as colour, shape, or numerated appendages. For the Eastern fathers, this means that God cannot be an object of noēsis, since the divine nature is not of such a kind that mind can abstract and circumscribe. All God-talk, therefore, falls to the concept-forming process of epinoia. Such talk is thus either a positive (kataphatic) or negative (apophatic) comparison with that which the mind can grasp.