Do You Know How to Bring Gainsayers to Faith?

THE GREEK , because of common notions, and the Jew likewise, because of the Scriptures, will not contradict the existence of a Word of God and a Spirit; but each of them will equally reject the economy of the Word of God as man as both unbelievable and not fitting to be said about God. Accordingly, from a different beginning we will bring gainsayers even to faith in this.

Either they believe that all things have come into being by Reason and by Wisdom from Him who constituted all, or they stubbornly hold their supposition even about this. But if they do not grant Reason and Wisdom to be the guiding constitution of existing things, they will set up both irrationality and lack of skill as the beginning of all. And if this is both absurd and impious, they will altogether agree that both Reason and Wisdom guide existing things. But indeed it has been demonstrated in the previous arguments that the Word of God is not the same as this saying, or the possession of some knowledge or wisdom, but it is a kind of power subsisting by essence, both capable of deciding all good and having everything in His strength in accordance with His decision; and it was demonstrated that since the world is good, its cause is a power that is both able to decide and able to make all good things. And if the substance of all the world depends on the power of the Word, as the order of the argument demonstrated, it is by all means necessary to conceive of no other cause of the constitution of the parts of the cosmos than the Word Himself, through whom all things had their passage into being.

And this, whether someone should want to name it Word, or Wisdom, or Power, or God, or any other one of the lofty and honorable names, we will not quarrel; for whatever saying or name is discovered that can demonstrate the subject, one thing is signified by the different expressions: the eternal power of God, the maker of existing things, the inventor of things that do not exist, the sustainer of things that have come into being, the foreseer of things to come. This one therefore is God the Word, the Wisdom, the Power demonstrated according to the order of the argument as the maker of human nature, not led by some necessity of the fashioning of man, but rather crafting the genesis of such a living thing out of an excess of love. For it was necessary that the light not be unseen, nor the glory be without witness, nor His goodness be unenjoyed, nor for all the other things seen about the divine nature to lie idle, there being no one partaking of or enjoying them.

~St Gregory of Nyssa, Catechetical Discourse 5.1-3

Feast of St Cosmas the Hagiopolite
Anno Domini 2019, October 14