Genitive God

Gregory of Nazianzus again. He argues that “unbegotten-begotten” point to personal characteristics rather than substance, what Augustine later distinguishes with “substance” and “relation.” In the course of the argument, he makes two puzzling provocative observations.

Twice times (Third Theological Oration, section 12) he states that God is necessarily a God of : “since God is somebody’s God”; and, “God is somebody’s – he is God of all.” But this doesn’t seem to be the case. Why can we not think simply “God is”? Why must He be a genitive God? Perhaps Gregory has something like this in mind: To be God is to possess authority, to be good, to be merciful. But authority without anyone to exercise authority over is either nonsensical or a statement of sheer potentiality. If God is wholly realized, however, then He has no potentiality, and that means He must have authority over , must be good and merciful to . Without spelling out the argument, Gregory gestures toward the conclusion that the Trinity is the only coherent form of monotheism.

The other curious, clever argument is this: Arians say that ingenerate and generate are opposed as “privation and condition.” Ingeneration is the privation of generation. But if they are opposed properties, then Scripture seems to introduce opposed properties in God, “which is impossible.” Or, more cleverly, “since conditions are prior to privations, and privations take away conditions,” then the Son’s “condition” of generacy must be prior to the Father’s “privative” ingeneracy; on Arian premises, the Son is father of the Ingenerate. Or, the Father’s privative ingeneracy is an assault on the Son’s condition of generacy and the Son’s substance “must also be in a process of destruction by the Father on your presuppositions.”