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The Undivided Light: The Holy Trinity (Part 3 of 7)

ByJobin

The Eternal Son, Begotten Not Made (Nicene Faith in Oriental Orthodox Reception)

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ

There is a phrase in the Nicene Creed that most of us have said so many times that we have stopped hearing it. We say it every Sunday. We say it in the Qurbana, in our private prayers, in the great confessional moments of the liturgical year. And yet it contains within it one of the most consequential theological statements ever written.

The phrase is this: begotten, not made.

Two words in Greek. Two words in Syriac. A few syllables that passed through one of the most turbulent periods in the history of the Church and came out the other side carrying the weight of the entire Gospel.

This third post in The Undivided Light series is about the second person of the Trinity, the eternal Son. We are going to ask what it means to say that the Son is begotten from the Father and not made, why this distinction was worth a century of controversy, and how the Oriental Orthodox tradition, particularly through its Syriac and Alexandrian voices, received and expressed the Nicene faith in the Son. Three fathers guide the reading: St. Athanasius of Alexandria, whose life was defined by the defence of this confession; St. Cyril of Alexandria, who received and deepened it in the following generation; and St. Jacob of Serugh, who expressed it in the Syriac poetic tradition in a voice unlike anything else in Christian literature.

Before we get to the fathers, though, we need to understand what the controversy was actually about. Because unless we understand what was at stake, the phrase begotten not made will remain exactly what it has perhaps already become for most of us: a familiar sound without a living meaning.

The Controversy that Gave us the Creed

In the early fourth century, a priest in Alexandria named Arius began teaching something that seemed, on the surface, like a reasonable and even reverent thing to say about God. He argued that the Son of God, the Word who became flesh in Jesus Christ, was not eternal in the same sense as the Father. The Father alone, Arius said, is truly eternal, truly without beginning, truly divine in the fullest sense. The Son is the highest and most exalted of all created beings, brought into existence by the Father before all other things, the instrument through whom the Father created everything else. But the Son had a beginning. There was, Arius famously said, a time when the Son was not.1

This teaching spread rapidly. It was simple. It was logical. It had a surface plausibility. And it was, the Church eventually concluded at the Council of Nicaea in 325, a catastrophic error.

Why? Not because the Church was committed to winning an abstract philosophical argument. But because if Arius was right, the entire Gospel collapsed.

Here is why. The Gospel says that in Jesus Christ, God Himself entered human life, bore the full weight of human sin and suffering, died on a cross, and rose from the dead, so that human beings could be drawn into the life of God. The Gospel says that what happened at Calvary and in the garden tomb was God’s own act, God’s own self-giving, God’s own death and resurrection in human flesh. It says that the gift of eternal life offered to believers is not a created benefit dispensed from a distance but a genuine participation in the uncreated life of God.

All of that requires the Son to be fully and truly God, not the highest of creatures but the eternal Son of the eternal Father, sharing one divine nature with the Father completely and without diminishment. If the Son is a creature, then what died on the cross was a creature. And the death of a creature, however magnificent, cannot bridge the infinite distance between God and a fallen creation. A creature cannot give us the life of God because a creature does not have the life of God to give. As Athanasius put it, with characteristic directness: only God can save. If the Son is not God, we are not saved.2

The Council of Nicaea in 325 responded to Arius with a single, carefully chosen word: “homoousios,” (from Greek homós, meaning “same,” and ousía, meaning “essence” or “substance”) meaning of the same substance or of the same being.3 The Son, the Council declared, is of the same divine being as the Father. Not similar, not like, not the highest approximation of divinity, but the same. One divine being, shared completely by Father and Son. And then the Creed added the phrase that is our focus in this post: begotten, not made. The Son is from the Father, but not in the way a created thing is from its creator. The Son is from the Father in the way that light is from the sun: not made, not manufactured, not brought into existence at a point in time, but eternally and necessarily flowing from the source that is the Father.

This is the faith the Oriental Orthodox tradition received and has held ever since. Not because it was imposed from outside, but because it was recognised from within as the only account of the Gospel that actually saves.

Athanasius of Alexandria: the Defender of the Begotten Son

The first father who guides this post is Athanasius of Alexandria, the fourth-century Archbishop of Alexandria who spent most of his life defending the Nicene faith against overwhelming political and theological pressure. His story is one of the most remarkable in the history of the Church. He was exiled five times by four different emperors for refusing to compromise on the homoousios, and he spent seventeen years of his episcopate in exile. The Latin phrase that later generations coined for him, “Athanasius contra mundum,” Athanasius against the world, captures something real about the man and his moment.

Athanasius is not technically an Oriental Orthodox father in the precise denominational sense. He died in 373, before the Chalcedonian controversy of the fifth century that resulted in the separation of Oriental Orthodox and Chalcedonian churches. But he is received and venerated in the Oriental Orthodox tradition as a pillar of the faith, and his theology of the Son is foundational for everything that Cyril of Alexandria and the later Oriental Orthodox tradition built upon. We cannot understand Cyril without Athanasius. We cannot understand the Oriental Orthodox confession of the Son without both of them.

His most concentrated and accessible work is a short treatise called “On the Incarnation,” written when he was probably still a young man, before the Arian controversy had reached its full intensity. It is a book worth reading in full, and there are excellent modern translations available. In it, Athanasius works out in careful detail why the salvation of humanity required the eternal Son of God to become human, and why only the eternal Son, truly God and not a creature, could accomplish what needed to be accomplished.

Athanasius begins from the problem of humanity. Human beings were created by God in His image, with a natural orientation toward God as the source of their life and being. But they turned away from God, toward the created and the perishable, and in doing so, they set themselves on a course toward dissolution and death. Not death as a punishment arbitrarily imposed from outside, but death as the natural consequence of turning away from the only source of life there is. If we disconnect a plant from the soil, it withers. If humanity disconnects itself from God, it moves toward corruption. That is the situation Athanasius is describing.

How can this be reversed? Athanasius asks the question methodically. Could God simply forgive, by an act of divine will, without anything further needing to happen? Athanasius says no, not without compromising the truth of what God had said about the consequences of turning away from Him. Could a prophet or an angel come and call humanity back? Athanasius says no, because the problem is not merely that humanity needs information or exhortation. The problem is that humanity has become oriented toward corruption and death, and what is needed is a renewal of the divine image within human nature itself, from the inside. Only the One Who is the image of the Father, only the eternal Son Who is the source of the divine image in which humanity was created, can renew that image within human nature. And to do this from the inside, the eternal Son must Himself become human.

This is why the incarnation, for Athanasius, is not a contingency plan or a rescue operation mounted in response to an unexpected crisis. It is the act of the eternal Son of God entering human nature in order to give human nature what it cannot give itself: the renewed presence of the divine image, the restoration of the orientation toward God, the beginning of the deification of human nature from within.

And this, Athanasius says, requires the Son to be fully and truly God. Not the highest of creatures standing in as a proxy for God. But God Himself, the eternal Son, the One Who is of the same divine being as the Father, entering human nature and bearing within that human nature the uncreated life of God. The resurrection of Christ is, for Athanasius, the proof that this has happened: death, which is the consequence of corruption and the turning away from God, could not hold the One Who is Himself the Source of life. The resurrection is the eternal life of the Son breaking through the death that humanity had accumulated, and offering itself as the new beginning for all who are united to the risen Christ.

The phrase begotten not made, in Athanasius’s hands, is not an abstraction. It is a statement about whether the Gospel can deliver what it promises. If the Son is made, He is a creature, and the Gospel cannot deliver. If the Son is begotten, truly and eternally from the being of the Father, then the Gospel can and does deliver everything it promises, because what is offered to us in Christ is the life of God himself.

Cyril of Alexandria: the Eternal Son and the Logic of Participation

Cyril of Alexandria, who has already appeared in the first two posts of this series, returns here because his contribution to the Oriental Orthodox understanding of the Son is too significant to pass over. Cyril stands in direct theological succession to Athanasius, and he received the Nicene faith in the Son not simply as a formula to be defended but as a living framework through which to understand every aspect of the Christian life.

Cyril’s most important contribution to the theology of the Son, beyond his Christological work for which he is most famous, is his development of what we might call the logic of participation. This is the idea that when we receive the Son, when we are united to Christ in baptism and nourished by Him in the Eucharist, we genuinely receive the divine life, not a symbol of it or a representation of it, but the actual uncreated life of God. And this is possible, Cyril argues, precisely and only because the Son is truly and fully God, begotten from the Father’s own being and not made.4

Cyril develops this most fully in his Commentary on John, which we have already drawn on in previous posts, but it runs through everything he wrote. He is particularly interested in the Gospel of John’s language of the Son as the life: “I am the resurrection and the life,” “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” “in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.” For Cyril, this language is not metaphorical. The Son is the life in a literal and ontological sense. The Son possesses the divine life because He is from the Father’s own being, and therefore when the Son gives Himself to us, what we receive is the divine life itself.

Cyril makes this argument most sharply in his commentary on the sixth chapter of John, which contains the Bread of Life discourse. Jesus says: “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day.” Cyril reads this with great seriousness and asks: what kind of life is the eternal life that Jesus promises? It is not simply extended human existence. It is the uncreated life of God, the life that the Son has from the Father, now shared with the believer through the gift of the Son’s own flesh in the Eucharist.5

But this only works, Cyril insists, if the Son is truly God. If the Son is a creature, then what the believer receives in the Eucharist is the life of a creature, however exalted. And the life of a creature is not the eternal life of God. It is bounded, perishable, and incapable of raising anyone from the dead. The promise Jesus makes in John 6 is only a real promise if the Son who makes it is Himself the uncreated life of God, begotten from the Father and sharing the Father’s eternal being.6

For the Malankara Orthodox faithful, this has immediate and practical implications for how the Qurbana is understood. When we receive the body and blood of Christ in the Qurbana, what we receive is the gift of the eternal Son, who is truly God, truly begotten from the Father’s being. What enters us is not a symbol or a memorial of something distant. What enters us is the life of the eternal Son, the very life that is begotten from the Father before all ages. The Qurbana is not simply a commemoration. It is a participation. And participation is only possible because the Son is truly what the Creed says He is: begotten, not made, of one being with the Father.

Cyril also reflects carefully on the title that John gives the Son at the opening of his Gospel: the Word, or in Greek, the Logos. For Cyril, this title is not simply a way of saying that Jesus communicated God’s message to humanity. The Word is the eternal self-expression of the Father, the one in whom the Father’s whole being and life finds expression, the one through whom the Father speaks not just words but his own self. The Son as Word is the Father’s own self-giving, eternally enacted within the life of the Trinity. When the Word became flesh, what entered human history was not a message from God but God’s own self-expression, the eternal Son, taking human nature into the life that he shares with the Father.7

This is what the Oriental Orthodox tradition means when it confesses the Nicene faith. Not a historical formula preserved out of reverence for the past. But a living recognition that the Gospel stands or falls with the eternal Sonship of Christ.

Jacob of Serugh: Singing the Mystery of the Begotten Son

The third father who guides this post takes us from the careful philosophical theology of Alexandria to the very different world of Syriac hymnody and poetry. Jacob of Serugh, the fifth and sixth-century Syriac bishop and poet whom we met briefly in the first post of this series, brings to the theology of the Son a voice that is at once deeply orthodox and distinctively Syriac. He is not writing systematic theology. He is writing poetry that carries systematic theology within it, which is perhaps a more honest way of approaching a mystery that exceeds any system.

Jacob wrote several memre, homiletic poems, on the person of the Son and on the mystery of the Incarnation. In these poems, he works with a set of images and paradoxes that are characteristic of the Syriac theological tradition and that illuminate the theology of the begotten Son in ways that pure argument cannot quite reach.

One of Jacob’s most recurring images for the eternal generation of the Son from the Father is the image of light from light. This is in fact a phrase that appears in the Nicene Creed itself, and it was drawn partly from the Syriac theological tradition that preceded Nicaea. Jacob develops it with great richness. He asks his listeners to think about what it means for light to come from light. When a flame lights another candle, the first flame is not diminished. The light of the second candle is genuinely from the first, genuinely light in every sense, and yet the giving of it has cost the first flame nothing. The second light is not a copy or a lesser version of the first light. It is light, in exactly the same sense as the first.8

For Jacob, the eternal generation of the Son from the Father is like this, but infinitely more so. The Son is the light that streams eternally from the Father who is light. Not after the Father, not below the Father, not a lesser brightness. The same light, the same divine radiance, eternally given and eternally received in the relationship of Father and Son. The generation of the Son costs the Father nothing, diminishes the Father not at all, and produces not a second and lesser deity but the same divine life in the person of the Son.

Jacob also meditates with great depth on the mystery of the Son becoming human while remaining what He always was. He uses the image of the sun and its rays. The sun sends its rays to earth, and the rays genuinely reach the earth, genuinely warm the soil and light the fields, and yet the sun itself remains what it always was, unchanged and undiminished in the heavens. For Jacob, the Incarnation is something like this: the eternal Son genuinely entered human life, genuinely became a human child in Mary’s womb, genuinely suffered and died, and yet the divine nature of the Son was not changed, diminished, or confused by this. He who is eternally begotten from the Father took upon Himself a human nature without ceasing to be what He eternally is.9

Jacob is always careful to hold both sides of this together. He does not allow the divine nature of the Son to overwhelm or absorb the human nature, nor does he allow the human nature to diminish or compromise the divine. This is the miaphysite Christological instinct, shaped by Cyril’s theology and expressed through Syriac poetic imagination, and it flows directly from the Nicene confession of the Son. Because the Son is truly and fully God, begotten not made, his taking of human nature is not a descent into something alien to Himself but the free act of the One who created human nature and Who now enters it to renew it from within.

There is one more dimension of Jacob’s poetry on the Son that deserves mention here, because it connects the theology of this post to the life of prayer and worship in a very direct way. Jacob frequently describes the relationship between the eternal Son and the worshipping community in terms of recognition. The Son is the light we were made to see by. The Son is the Word we were made to hear. When the community gathers for worship, when the prayers are offered and the scriptures read and the mysteries of the altar celebrated, what is happening is not a human community reaching upward toward a distant divine reality. It is a community made in the image of the eternal Son recognising, in worship, the one from whom it came and toward whom it moves.

The phrase begotten not made, in Jacob’s hands, becomes not just a doctrinal statement but a love song. The Son is from the Father as light is from light, as a word is from the mind that thinks it, as a breath is from the life that breathes it. And we, created through the Son and redeemed by the Son and nourished by the Son in the Eucharist, are caught up into that same eternal movement, returning to the Father in the Son, carried by the Spirit, in the undivided life of the Trinity.

The Oriental Orthodox Reception of Nicea: Confession of the Creed and Singing of Shehimo

It is worth pausing here to say something directly about how the Oriental Orthodox tradition has received the Nicene faith, because there are sometimes misunderstandings about this that need to be addressed honestly.

The Oriental Orthodox churches, which separated from the Chalcedonian churches after the Council of Chalcedon in 451, are sometimes mistakenly described as if they departed from Nicene orthodoxy, or as if their Christological position implies a different or diminished understanding of the Son. This is a misunderstanding that the Oriental Orthodox tradition has had to address repeatedly over the centuries, and it is worth being clear about it here.

The Oriental Orthodox churches, including the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church, fully and unreservedly confess the Nicene and Constantinopolitan faith. They confess one God in three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. They confess the Son as eternally begotten from the Father, of one being with the Father, truly God and truly human in the Incarnation. They confess the resurrection and the ascension and the coming again in glory. Everything that Nicaea and Constantinople declared is confessed fully and without reservation.

The disagreement at Chalcedon was not about whether the Son is truly God. It was about the precise language to be used for the relationship between the divine and human natures in the one person of Christ after the Incarnation. The Oriental Orthodox tradition, following Cyril of Alexandria, preferred to speak of one united nature in Christ after the union, understanding nature in Cyril’s specific sense. The Chalcedonian tradition, following a different reading, preferred to speak of two natures in one person. This is a real disagreement, and it has real theological significance, but it is a disagreement about Christological formulation, not about the Nicene faith in the eternal Son.

What makes this more than an abstract historical point is the fact that this same Christological confession is not merely stated in doctrinal documents. It is prayed, sung, and breathed into the life of the faithful every day through the Shehimo, the book of common prayer used in the Syriac Orthodox tradition and in the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church. The Shehimo is one of the oldest continuous prayer traditions in Christianity, its structure rooted in the ancient cathedral offices of Antioch, and its content shaped by the same Syriac theological tradition we have been drawing on throughout this series. For those of us who use it, the Shehimo is not a supplement to Nicene faith. It is one of the primary ways that Nicene faith lives in us from day to day.

The Wednesday morning office of the Shehimo opens with prayers of praise that immediately establish the Christological frame. Christ is addressed directly as Lord, as the Son of God, as the one who took human flesh while remaining what he eternally is. The language throughout is miaphysite in its instinct: not two subjects, one divine and one human, but one Lord in whom the divine and human are inseparably united after the Incarnation. The prayers do not allow the worshipper to hold the divine and human in Christ at a comfortable distance from one another. They press them together, because the tradition understands that the salvation accomplished on the Cross requires them to be together.

One of the qolo hymns, addresses Christ in terms that echo Jacob of Serugh’s light imagery: the one who is the brightness of the Father’s glory, who descended into the darkness of human suffering and death without that brightness being extinguished. The light that could not be put out is the same light that Jacob writes about when he describes the eternal Son as light from light. What the Wednesday Shehimo does is bring that theological affirmation into contact with the specific and costly reality of the Cross. The begotten Son, light from light, true God from true God, is also the one who hung on the wood and cried out from the darkness. The Shehimo does not soften either side of that. It holds both, because the Nicene faith requires both to be held.

The sedro, the long intercessory prayer offered with incense during the morning office, carries the most concentrated Christological content of the Wednesday prayers. It holds together in a single act of confession the eternal Sonship of Christ and his earthly suffering, death, and resurrection, refusing to separate the one who is begotten not made from the one who was crucified under Pontius Pilate. One of the Wednesday morning verses addresses Christ as one with the Father in divinity and one with us in humanity, language of striking theological precision that reflects the Nicene faith prayed so deeply it has become inseparable from how the tradition speaks to God on an ordinary morning. For those who have grown up with the Shehimo as part of daily life, this is worth pausing over. Every Wednesday, without perhaps having names for it, we have been praying the theology of Athanasius, Cyril, and Jacob of Serugh. The Shehimo is not a devotional supplement to the theological tradition. It is one of the primary vessels through which that tradition has been carried across the centuries and placed, week after week, on the lips of the faithful.

Athanasius, Cyril, and Jacob of Serugh all speak with one voice on the question that is the focus of this post: the Son is truly and eternally God, begotten not made, of one being with the Father, and the salvation of humanity depends on this being true. That is the Nicene faith. That is the Oriental Orthodox faith. That is the faith the Shehimo prays. And it is the faith that the Malankara Orthodox Church has carried and will carry.

What Begotten, Not Made means for how we live

This is the question that every theological discussion in this series must eventually come back to. What difference does it make? Why should someone sitting in the Qurbana on a Sunday morning, or praying quietly at home in the evening, care whether the Son is begotten or made?

Here is one way to think about it.

If the Son is made, a creature however exalted, then the relationship between God and humanity is always a relationship mediated through a third party. God is there, humanity is here, and the Son is a bridge or a messenger between two parties who remain, at the end of it all, fundamentally separate. The most we can hope for, in that scenario, is that God looks favourably on us because of what the Son has done. But we ourselves remain on our side of the distance. The distance is never actually crossed.

But if the Son is begotten, truly and eternally of One being with the Father, then when we are united to the Son in baptism, when we receive the Son in the Qurbana, the distance is not bridged. It is abolished. We are not being brought into contact with a messenger who will represent us to God. We are being drawn into the life of God Himself, because the One we are receiving is Himself the eternal life of God, the begotten Son who shares the one divine nature with the Father.

Theosis, the theme of this blog, depends entirely on this. The union with God that the Fathers promise, the participation in the divine nature that Peter speaks of in his second letter, the becoming by grace what God is by nature, that promise is only real if the Son through whom it is offered is truly and fully God. Begotten not made is not a doctrinal technicality. It is the difference between a Gospel that saves and one that merely encourages.

Every time we say the Creed and reach the phrase begotten not made, we are confessing that the Gospel is real. That the life offered to us in Christ is genuinely the life of God. That the One who entered our life in baptism and who meets us at the altar of the Qurbana is not a representative of God but God Himself, the eternal Son, carrying within His human nature the same uncreated life that He has from the Father before all ages.

That is worth saying carefully and slowly, at least once.

A prayer to close

Jacob of Serugh closes many of his memre with a doxology addressed directly to the Son. It seems right to follow him here.

Lord Jesus Christ, eternal Son of the eternal Father, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten and not made. You took our nature upon yourself without leaving what you are. You entered death without being held by it. You rose and carried our nature with you into the life you share with the Father and the Spirit. We confess you as the Creed has taught us to confess you. Let that confession move from our lips into our hearts, and from our hearts into the way we live. Amen.

Next Wednesday: The Holy Spirit, the Living Breath. We will draw on Ephrem the Syrian and Jacob of Serugh to explore the richness of Syriac pneumatology and what the third person of the Trinity means for the life of prayer and worship in the Oriental Orthodox tradition.

This series, The Undivided Light, is an observational study, the reflections of someone sitting with these texts and trying to share what he is finding along the way. It is offered in humility, not as finished scholarship. If you are reading this, your prayers for the completion of the series are genuinely asked and gratefully received.

References

  1. For the theological background of the Arian controversy and the Council of Nicaea: Rowan Williams, “Arius: Heresy and Tradition”. A demanding but important scholarly account of what Arius actually taught and why it mattered. ↩︎
  2. Athanasius of Alexandria: “On the Incarnation of the Word,” available in multiple English translations.
    “Orations against the Arians,” contains the four major polemical works in which Athanasius develops his arguments against the Arian account of the Son. ↩︎
  3. Thomas F. Torrance, “The Trinitarian Faith: The Evangelical Theology of the Ancient Catholic Church”, for Athanasius’s soteriological argument that only God can save, and its relationship to the homoousios. ↩︎
  4. Cyril of Alexandria: “Commentary on the Gospel of John”, particularly Books 1 and 4, this is the primary source for Cyril’s theology of the Son and the logic of participation ↩︎
  5. Daniel A. Keating, “The Appropriation of Divine Life in Cyril of Alexandria”, for Cyril’s theology of the Eucharist as participation in the divine life of the eternal Son. This is the most thorough study of Cyril’s understanding of theosis in English. ↩︎
  6. John A. McGuckin, “Saint Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy”: for Cyril’s reception of Nicene theology and its relationship to his Christology: ↩︎
  7. For Cyril’s understanding of the Logos title and its Trinitarian implications: Norman Russell, “Cyril of Alexandria,” The Early Church Fathers series, Chapter 3. ↩︎
  8. Jacob of Serugh: The primary sources for Jacob’s theology of the eternal Son and his images of light from light and the Incarnation in this post are his memre on the Nativity and on the mysteries of the faith.
    Sebastian Brock, “The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of Saint Ephrem the Syrian”: For Jacob’s use of light imagery in his Trinitarian and Christological theology. ↩︎
  9. Khalid Anatolios, “Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine”: For Jacob’s Christology in relation to the Cyrillian and miaphysite tradition. ↩︎

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