Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/39

 slightingly about how Christians quarrelled over words, forgetting what these words represented and how they stood for the established conclusions of philosophy as then understood.

This comes out very plainly in the Arian controversy. Both sides agreed that Christ was the Son of God, the relation of Father and Son being, of course, not that of human parentage but rather by way of emanation: both agreed that Christ was God, as the emanation necessarily had the same nature as the source from which it proceeded: both agreed that the Son proceeded from the Father in eternity and before the worlds were created, the Son or Logos being the intermediary of creation. But some, and these, it would seem, mainly associated with the school of Antioch, so spoke of the Son proceeding from the Father as an event which had taken place far before all time in the remoteness of eternity, it is true, but so that there was when the Father had not yet begotten the Son, for, they argued, the Father must have preceded the Son as the cause precedes the effect, and so the Son was, as it were, less eternal than the Father. At once the Alexandrians corrected them. To begin with there are no degrees in eternity: but, most serious error of all, this idea made God liable to variation, at one period of eternity he had been alone, and then he had become a father: philosophy taught that the First Cause, the True God, is liable to no change, if he is Father now, he must have been so from all eternity: we must understand the Son as