By Water & Blood

Chapter 6: How the Church theologizes the Son

But the Church of God both recognizes the indivisible Monad, confessing one first principle (ἀρχή), the one, unbegotten, and unoriginate God; and she inscribes as Saviour the only-begotten Son begotten from him, who truly exists and lives and subsists—not as being without beginning nor unbegotten, lest she posit two first principles and two gods, but as begotten from the Father himself and having as his beginning the one who begot him.

Wherefore she has received the faith to believe in one God, the Father Almighty, and in our Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God; and this holy and mystical faith furnishes the new birth in Christ to those who are enlightened through it. But Marcellus says that the Monad is expanded by activity—a thing which has place in the case of bodies, but no longer in the case of the incorporeal, unspeakable, and inexpressible essence (οὐσία). For it is neither expanded in acting nor contracted in not acting; nor does it act at all in the manner of men, nor is it moved in the manner of men. Rather, God, being an indivisible Monad, begot his only-begotten Son from himself, not being divided, nor undergoing alteration or change or flux or any passion. For neither when he commands, nor when he enjoins, nor when he gives law, does he do these things by speaking with tongue and lips in the manner of men; nor, when he looks upon the ordering of the universe, does he gaze upon it using eyes as we do, since by an ineffable and divine power he foresees even “the things which be not,” and beholds them as already existing and subsisting.

Nor again, when he makes and fashions, does he, like the craftsmen among us, take pre-existing matter and work it with hands and fingers; rather, again by an ineffable and incomprehensible power, he brought the essence of all things that have come into being out of things that are not into being. If, then, he made all things by reasons (λόγοι) ineffable and incalculable to us, why need one be anxious lest we should say that some passion, as with mortal animals, befell him in the generation of the Son—a generation which he brought to subsist above all things and before all things, not according to any of the modes known to the nature of mortals, but according to the mode known to him alone?