INTRODUCTION.

The more moderate Arians, who confessed that our Lord was ὅμοιος (like) to the Father, were thrown into the arms of the Nicene school by the excessive zeal with which the Eunomians pushed their view. Eunomius and his adherents prided themselves on the strictly logical method of their teaching. Nothing was allowed to be taken for granted; nothing accepted on faith. They taught that God, as being absolutely simple, must be perfectly comprehensible to the human intellect. Everything of a mysterious nature disappeared from their system. They were unwilling to use any language about God which conveyed its meaning in a symbolical or metaphorical manner. Their arguments implied that such terms as “generation,” if applicable to Him at all, must be held to imply that all the circumstances of generation, as known to the created world, have their counterpart in the divine life also.

These doctrines they taught with the utmost assiduity. Gregory, in the third Theological Oration, shows that they used a regular method of instruction, with short textbooks for beginners, in which the main arguments were skillfully marshaled in a form which made them easy to remember. The whole atmosphere of Constantinople was full of their disputations, pressed upon all hearers, Christian and non-Christian, without reserve. “Every market-place,” Gregory says, “resounds with their words; every dinner-party is spoiled by their ill-bred talkativeness; as for festivals and funerals—all festivity is banished from the one, and the other becomes a cheerful thing in comparison with the misfortune of having to listen to their arguments; even the women’s apartments, the natural abode of what is simple and unaffected, are all made wretched and robbed of the flower of their modesty by the haste to speak. Our 'great mystery' is in danger of becoming a matter of mincing technical terms.”