By explaining the concept of the Logos, St. Gregory was able to bring as close as possible to human understanding the incomprehensible act of the birth of the Son of God from God the Father. But in this case it is necessary to note the same thing that was already noted by St. Irenaeus of Lyons, namely, that the analogy between the divine Logos and the human word is very inaccurate. It has a certain meaning and significance when applied only to one and only moment in the concept of Divine birth – to the moment of the birth of the Son of God, consubstantial with the Father – but it does not depict the process of birth itself, and we cannot think of such a process in an absolutely simple Divine essence. The human word is undoubtedly produced by thought, so that if there were no thought, there would be no word; by analogy with this relation of the human word to human thought, Holy Scripture also defines the incomprehensible relation of the Son of God to God the Father, as the divine Logos to the personal divine Reason: the Son has existence from the Father and is inconceivable without the Father. But just as the word produced by thought is nothing else than the very thought that produces it, so, by analogy with this relationship between word and thought, the Son of God, although He has a special personal being from the Father, yet has no other being (ουσια), but the same as the Father who produces Him. This alone is the real analogy between the ordinary human word and the personal divine Logos, whereas the Arians carried it so far as to separate the being of the Father and hence the Logos from each other by a temporal interval, i.e., they thought of the origin of the Son of God in time, and consequently of necessity through creation, because everything temporal is absolutely alien to the divine essence. Eunomius in his "Exposition of the Faith" expounds this teaching in the following way: "We believe also in the Son of God... not without birth, which precedes being, called the Son, begotten before all creation, not uncreated (ουκ ακτιστον)" [432]. As soon as temporality is admitted, the concept of birth from the divine essence immediately disappears and gives way to the concept of creation out of nothing, so that from the formal point of view Eunomius' conclusion was correct. But it is completely wrong in its essence, because it was brought out of the wrong position. The Divine Logos is not any spoken word, but an independent Divine Person, standing in unity of essence with God the Father. Therefore, He does not begin His existence like the word of man, but eternally exists as God. In order to clarify this idea, St. Gregory considered it necessary to expel from theology the ancient teaching of λόγος προφορικός and λόγος ενδιαθετος, because these concepts, in his opinion, do not so much clarify the matter as confuse it, and moreover contradict the clear teaching of the Evangelist John. "Lest we think," says St. Gregory, "that there was once a time when the Son did not exist as an independent Person, and did not imagine the Logos to be carried out and hidden within, for this reason John said: and the Word is not in God, but in God, thereby designating in the Logos an independent hypostasis, proceeding from the essence of the Father" (433). According to St. Gregory, the divine Logos cannot be recognized as the inner Word of the Father, because such a Word has only potential existence in thought, and it cannot be recognized as the spoken Word of the Father, because such a word has real existence only in literacy; whereas the divine Logos does not exist in God, like the word existing in thought and having only the possibility of becoming a real word, but in God, i.e. as an independent Divine Person, and at the same time not outside of God, like the word written on paper and existing outside of man, but inseparably with God, as having a single and indivisible paternal essence. Hence, the divine Logos, existing as a Person, without pronouncement prior to His existence, is the eternal Logos and therefore necessarily uncreated, since the concept of eternity destroys the concept of creation, replacing it with the concept of originality.

But in spite of all the correctness of this conclusion and its most exact agreement with the teaching of the Evangelist John, Eunomius nevertheless did not agree with it. In his polemics with Gregory of Nyssa, he argued this disagreement by the logical impossibility of conceiving such an act of birth that would never begin. "Whoever," he says, "is characterized by being through the act of birth (εκ τον γεννηθηναι), did not exist before birth" (434). Therefore, the Son of God, as having existence through birth from the Father, has it only from the moment of birth, that is, in time, and if in time, then through creation.

The answer to this objection was the teaching of St. Gregory of Nyssa about the beginningless birth of the Son of God. The main foundation of this teaching was pointed out by St. Gregory in the property of divine immutability, which concerns not only the essence of the Godhead, but also His way of life. "The Godhead," he says, "by nature (τη φυσει — by nature, i.e., by the divine law of His being), always exists as it is and as it is: it has never had anything that is now, and will never be something that is not now" (435). By virtue of this eternal identity, Eunomius, who calls the supreme God Father, must necessarily agree that if God really is a Father, then He is always the Father, i.e., He never began and will never cease to be one. "If He was not the Father in the beginning, He did not become Father afterwards; but if we confess that He is the Father, then I repeat the same word again: that if He is now the Father, He has always been the Father, and as He has always been, so will He always be" [436]. But in order to be an eternal Father, one must have an eternal Son, because as long as there is no Son, the Father is not the Father, but can only be one; but if there is no time for God, and He exists as a Father from eternity, then it is clear that He also has a Son from eternity, in relation to whom He is called Father. This teaching about the eternal patronymic of God the Father was a favorite argument of all Orthodox theologians who refuted the Arian teaching about the temporal existence of the Son of God. It was cited in various forms by St. Athanasius of Alexandria, St. Basil the Great, and St. Gregory the Theologian, who alike looked upon it as the strongest proof in favor of the eternal existence of the Son of God. St. Basil the Great, for example, considered the Arian teaching that the Father was not once the Father to be the most obvious blasphemy, because in the patronymic he saw the special glory of God the Father. If, he reasoned, it is good for God to be a Father, then He must possess this good from eternity; but if, as the Arians say, He has not possessed it from eternity, then either through undesire for good, or through impotence to acquire it, both are equally absurd; therefore, God is the Father from eternity, and, as the Father, has His Son from eternity [437]. St. Gregory of Nyssa replaced this purely moral foundation of the eternity of the Son with a purely metaphysical one: God is recognized by him as the eternal Father, not because the patronymic is good for Him, but because His immutability demands it. If the argument does not change in its essence from this substitution, it greatly gains in its solidity. St. Basil the Great could always be asked the question: what is it that being a Father is good for God? For it is also good for Him to be the Creator, because otherwise He could not be the Creator, and yet it does not in the least follow from this that God is the Creator from eternity; why is it necessary that He be the Father from eternity? Yet it was absolutely impossible to turn this objection against the argument of St. Gregory, because creation, as external to God, cannot touch His inner life, and, consequently, cannot change this life; sonship and patronymics, touching the Divinity's own life, would radically change this life, if they appeared in time. Hence, the conclusion of St. Gregory was made quite correctly, only, it should be noted, not for the Arians. The fact is that Eunomius never even thought of calling God in the proper sense Father; on the contrary, for him the patronymic of God was completely and unconditionally identical with His creativity — and only, adhering to the biblical usage, he considered it necessary to speak of God the Father, always understanding by the Father the Creator. Therefore, the arguments of St. Gregory were as unconvincing to him as the arguments of St. Basil the Great.

Nor could Eunomius be convinced of the truth of Orthodox teaching from the Biblical arguments of Orthodox theologians, who with special love developed the Biblical concepts of the Son of God as God's power and wisdom. "If," says St. Gregory, "the Father of all is unbegotten and eternal, all-wise and omnipotent, but the Apostle, preaching faith in Him, preaches to all Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God; then how do they dare to subordinate His birth to time and recognize Him as neither eternal nor beginningless" [438]? If the heretical opinion is correct, then God did not have power and wisdom before the birth of the Son, i.e. He was not God; and since no one will agree to accept this absurd conclusion as the truth, it is necessary that "one must believe that He eternally had wisdom and power, that is, Christ." But with regard to this argumentation, it is enough to note that the concepts of wisdom and power, when applied to the Son of God, are metaphorical concepts, which do not point to the peculiarity of filial existence in the Godhead, but only to the external relationship of the Son of God to God the Father in Their common divine activity. God acts omnipotently and wisely through His Son, therefore—the Son in the proper sense is a revelation of divine omnipotence and wisdom—or, metaphorically speaking, is God's very wisdom and power. He, Eunomius might have said, is not a property of the Father's essence, but only an exponent of the divine attributes, and therefore it is absolutely impossible to conclude from this that He is co-eternal with God the Father.

As a result of this difficulty, and even, perhaps, the complete impossibility of proving to the Arians in a positive way the eternity of the only-begotten Son of God, St. Gregory still tried to prove his idea by means of an ad absurdum deduction, by means of a critical analysis of the Arian teaching on the temporal existence of the Son of God. Eunomius in his "Εκθεσις πίστεως" confessed faith in the Son of God "truly begotten before the ages, but not without beginning" [439]. In this confession two concepts are affirmed about the Son of God, which are completely opposite to each other and therefore mutually exclusive: on the one hand, it is recognized that He exists before the temporal ages, and on the other hand, a temporal principle is ascribed to Him. Orthodox theologians drew attention to this contradiction from the very beginning of the appearance of Arianism. St. Athanasius of Alexandria, analyzing the well-known Arian proposition: ην ποτέ, οτε ουκ ην ό Υιός του Θεόυ, was the first to point out that the implied subject of the main proposition, χρονος, makes all the efforts of the Arians to separate the Son of God as the Creator from the creatures created by Him at all costs, because the unity of the way of being in time does not allow any boundary line to be drawn between them. Therefore, if the Arians want to assert that the Son has a real advantage over all His creatures, as having a pre-temporal existence over those who appeared in time, then they must no longer teach about the temporal beginning of filial existence, consequently they must confess Him to be eternal. If they do not recognize such a confession, then they contradict themselves, and they also contradict the clear teaching of the Bible, which speaks of the birth of the Son of God not at a certain temporal moment, but before the age. This is how St. Athanasius of Alexandria reasoned, and so did St. Gregory of Nyssa. "The expression before," he says in his critical analysis of the teaching of Eunomius, "contains a certain indication of time and is opposed to the expressions after and after; if there was no time, then at the same time the names of the distances of time disappear completely; but the Lord is before time and ages, consequently for the rational the question of before and after in relation to the Creator of the ages is superfluous, because such expressions, since they do not speak of time, are devoid of any meaning" [440]. If Eunomius does not confess in vain that "the Lord has existence before eternal times," then he himself fully confirms the Orthodox teaching, which he unwisely opposes, contradicting himself, because before time there is only eternity, and if the Lord really exists before time, then it is clear that He exists from eternity. Consequently, the Orthodox teaching about the co-eternal existence of the Son of God with God the Father does not contain any contradictions on the basis of which it could be legitimately condemned and rejected. "In this," says St. Gregorius, "that we call one and the same thing both eternal and begotten (ουκ αγεννητον), there is no temptation (ουδείς επεστι φόβος), because the existence of the Son is not limited to any interval of time; on the contrary, the infinity of His life flows everywhere, both before and after the ages, and (the Son) in the proper sense is called by the name of the eternal" [442].

But if the Son of God, having in birth from God the Father the beginning of His being, is nevertheless recognized as eternal, then the question naturally arises: is it possible and how exactly can this beginningless birth be conceived? According to our human considerations, "everything without beginning must also be unbegotten—how is it now possible to correctly call the Son, whose very name indicates the beginning, beginningless? For He is called the Son because He is begotten, and that birth presupposes the thought of a beginning, no one will deny." [443] And yet, in relation to the Son of God, every Orthodox Christian affirms that His birth is without beginning. How should we imagine such a birth? Is it at least possible to think of it without an internal contradiction?

In response to these questions, St. Gregory of Nyssa tried, as far as possible, to illuminate and bring closer to human consciousness the mystery of the beginningless birth of the Son of God, frankly confessing, however, that the most reliable means of resolving perplexities was the "stronghold of faith" [444]. Only by relying on this stronghold can the human mind comprehend the mysterious relationship between the Father and the Son, and this is not clear, but ώσπερ δι έσοτρόπον, as if in a mirror. Such a mirror for the believing mind is indicated by St. Gregory first of all in the manifestation of light from the sun. "How He can be called the Son and the begotten, who is eternally co-existent with the Father, an example of this," says St. Gregory, "I will show you in a ray of sunshine, although the word does not touch their very nature" (445). The ray does not come into being from itself, but from the sun: therefore it comes from the sun, and for the sake of analogy it may even be said to be born from the sun, but is not born after it, but with it, because as soon as the sun appeared, the ray also appeared, and as long as the sun exists, the ray will invariably exist with it. Similar to this simultaneous existence of cause and effect in the phenomena of the physical world, the Son of God, although He does not exist from Himself, but from His Father, is not after Him, but together with Him, so that if the Father exists without beginning, then the Son is co-beginning with Him. This illustrative example from the phenomena of visible nature sufficiently clarifies the question of the conceivability of the beginningless birth of the Son of God, and at the same time the perplexity aroused by it is quite satisfactorily resolved. In the first book against Eunomius, St. Gregory considers it necessary only to add to this that the analogy he adduced has its proper meaning only in relation to the question of the co-origin of the Son of God with God the Father; but for the solution of the general question of the relationship of the Divine Persons, it is not entirely satisfactory, and therefore must be somewhat changed. In this case, "let us imagine," he says, "not a ray from the sun, but from the unborn sun, another sun, which together with the idea of the first is born of it, shining from it, and is the same with it in everything: in beauty, in strength, in brightness, in size, in clarity, in a word, in everything that is only seen in relation to the first sun," so that both the Beginningless and the Co-Beginningless are completely equal to each other and identical with each other in everything. except for the separate existence of hypostases [446].

But even if the beginningless birth of the Son of God can be thought of without an internal contradiction, this conceivability of His is, of course, not yet a proof of its reality. In the opinion of Eunomius, the freedom of God the Father speaks most clearly against the reality of beginningless birth.

It is true that the appearance of the ray is contemporary with the appearance of the sun, but it must also be taken into account that this modernity is necessarily determined by the nature of the sun, depends on the fact that the sun cannot but emit rays, and therefore necessarily emits them. Yet we cannot think of any necessity in God, on the contrary, we confess Him to be absolutely free. If it is certain that God is absolutely free, then it is clear that He begat the Son not out of necessity, but freely; but if he is free, then, of course, when he wills. "The highest good, God," says Eunomius, "encountering neither obstacles in (His) nature, nor compulsion in any (external) cause, nor the urgency of need, begets and creates according to the superiority of His own power, having in His will a sufficient reason for the organization of existence. Hence, if every good happens according to His will, then He not only determines how to be beautiful, but also when it should be, because to do what you do not want is a sign of powerlessness." If this is true of God's work in general, it must be true of His birth of the Son. For God, "then it was good and proper to bring forth a Son, when He willed; hence the rational do not have any question as to why not before. This objection was a favorite Arian objection to the Orthodox teaching about the Son during all the dogmatic disputes of the fourth century, because the Orthodox teachers who fought against Arianism were apparently hampered by its solution. Thus, for example, St. Athanasius of Alexandria, deciding whether the Father gave birth to His Son by His will or by necessity, replied that God begat the Son not by His will or by necessity, but κατά φυσιν, by nature. But, firstly, this is not an answer to a question; The Arian dilemma was perfectly correct both in form and in substance, and therefore there is no reason to evade a direct solution to it; and, secondly, this is the most uncertain answer. St. Athanasius, obviously, did not want to say that the Son of God was born by the will of God the Father, because the Arians were only waiting for such an answer in order to turn it against Orthodoxy; at the same time, he did not want to say directly that the Son is necessarily eternally begotten of the Father, because there is not and cannot be any need for God; and so, avoiding the two extremes, he invented a special birth, κατα φυσιν, of course, understanding by it eternal birth, determined by the nature of God and yet in accordance with his will. It goes without saying that the Arians could not agree with this opinion of St. Athanasius. They demanded a direct, clear answer to the question: Did God give birth to His Son by will or by necessity, and since they did not receive the desired answer, they made of their question one of the most important objections to the Orthodox teaching on the eternal birth of the Son of God. In the middle of the fourth century, the theologizing sophists constructed a special syllogism out of this objection, on the basis of which they tried to prove the created origin of the Son of God. If, they reasoned, the Son is begotten by the will of the Father, then He is actually the Son not of the Father, but of the father's will, i.e., in other words: He was brought out of non-existence into being by the omnipotent will of God, which is therefore the direct cause of His being; but if He is born of necessity, how is any necessity possible in relation to God? This sophistic objection was spread to the people, and became the most popular argument in favor of the Arian doctrine. St. St. Gregory the Theologian called this argument "clingy and shameless," but nevertheless considered it necessary to expose its inconsistency. In this revelation, however, he very briefly and only in passing touched upon the positive solution of the question of the arbitrariness or involuntariness of the Divine birth. He only remarked that the Son is not the Son of willing, but of Him who wills, whose will may be birth itself. A more serious and firm solution to this question was given by St. Gregory of Nyssa, who had to deal not with a current sophism, but with the serious objection of Eunomius.

St. Gregory fully agrees with Eunomius that the Son is begotten by the will of God the Father and precisely when the Father willed, but in complete contrast to Eunomius, he asserts that this will of the Father is an eternal will, and therefore it is realized from eternity. True, going into dialectical subtleties, one could say that between the beginninglessness of the Father and the birth of the Son there is a small interval, which constitutes the father's will for the birth of the Son; but St. Gregory hastened to forestall this objection by remarking that in God the will does not precede action, but is completely simultaneous with it, so that the birth of the Son of God did not begin after the father's will, but together with it, i.e. from eternity. This idea, supposedly expressed by St. Gregory the Theologian, is considered by St. Gregory of Nyssa to be absolutely true, because "it is only characteristic of our heavy and inflexible nature that we do not have much at the same time, both to want and to have something, while in a simple and omnipotent nature everything is thought together and at the same time, and the desire for good, and the possession of what he desires." [449] Therefore, the birth of the Son of God by the will of the Father does not in the least limit His eternity. In order to make his thought more comprehensible and to impart to his teaching, so to speak, visual certainty, St. Gregory turns to various examples from the field of natural phenomena. "If," he says, "it is necessary that our word should be confirmed in another way, then the teaching on this subject could be made intelligible with the help of certain phenomena accessible to our sensory knowledge, only let no one blame our word for not being able to find in the existing such an image of the sought-after as would be fully sufficient in resemblance and likeness to represent the object" (450). This reservation proved to be essential, because St. Gregory presents examples that are not actually real, but, so to speak, semi-real, and moreover, not entirely successful. He points to the flame, and "presumably" puts the will to shine into it. If, he argues, the flame had such a will, it would certainly wish to shine at the very moment of its appearance, so that the kindling of the fire would coincide with the desire to shine it, and the desire to shine would coincide with the very work of light. Just as in this example the work of light is not late against the desire of the fire to shine, but appears simultaneously with it, so the birth of the Son of God must be accurately imagined. The Father without beginning expresses the will to have the Son without beginning and has Him without beginning, so that the Father's will does not serve as a kind of mediastinum between the unborn being of the Father and the begotten being of the Son, but is the birth itself.

But even after this explanation, the dispute between St. Gregory and Eunomius on the question of the beginningless birth of the Son of God was not yet over, because Eunomius raised another objection to this point of Orthodox teaching, an objection based on the understanding of the Divine birth in the image of human birth. Although Eunomius often denounced Orthodox theologians for the forced transfer of certain human ideas to divine life, he himself never denied himself this transference, never, however, confessing to it. He enclosed the act of divine birth in the temporal conditions of earthly existence and tried to convince everyone that such was the law of all existence, and at the same time the law of divine life. Since every birth, he says, does not extend into infinity, but reaches an end, it is quite necessary for those who receive the birth of the Son that He has now ceased to be begotten, and (as a consequence) not to be suspicious of the fact that that which has ceased to be born had its beginning, because the cessation testifies to the beginning, both of birth (γεννησεως) and of birth (του γεννασθαι); it is impossible not to recognize this on the basis of nature itself, and moreover on the basis of divine laws" [452]. What these divine laws to which Eunomius refers, he himself explains by his reference to the beginning and end of creation: God "added one day to the end of creation, precisely as a witness to its beginning, because He gave in remembrance of creation (δημιουργίας) not the first day of creation (γεννήσεως), but the seventh, on which He rested from His works" (453). By this reference Eunomius wanted to prove first of all that even for the Divine reason the end is an irrefutable proof of the beginning, so that in order that we should not recognize creation as coming about from eternity, God determined that it was sufficient to indicate only the cessation of His creative activity, and from this indication its temporal beginning becomes clear of itself. But Eunomius wanted to prove even more by this reference the correctness of his opinion about the termination of the birth of the Son of God. He deliberately confused the concepts δημιουργια and γεννησις in order to identify them and by means of this identification to prove that if on the seventh day God rested from all His works, then He rested absolutely, and not only from the external manifestation of His creative activity, but also from the internal activity, and therefore with the end of the creation of the world the birth of the Son also ended. But if, according to the clear teaching of the Bible. God Himself recognizes the end of the work as a natural proof of its beginning, then it goes without saying that, in obedience to the voice of God, we are obliged to think of the cessed birth of the Son as having a temporary beginning. Such was the essence of Eunomius' objection.

In response to this objection, St. Gregory of Nyssa briefly expounded the teaching about the continuous birth of the Son of God, and drew from this a conclusion opposite to that of Eunomius: that which has no end has no beginning. The whole argumentation of this conclusion is very simple. It rests on the already proven necessity to distinguish the image of the birth of the Son of God from the image of the origin of creatures. "From the fact that," says St. Gregory, "every creation and birth reaches an end, it is not at all necessary, as Eunomius asserts, that those who receive the birth of the Son should limit it to two limits, admitting in it a beginning and an end, because only that has a beginning of being and ceases with its end, which is determined by a certain quantity" (454). For example, it may be said of every work of art that it is then begun and then finished, because it is accomplished by the combined action of matter, art, and the power of the artist, and consequently necessarily requires a certain length of time for its execution. In absolutely simple nature, which does not admit of any quantity and no extension, there are no distances along which it would be possible to limit it to the beginning and the end, and therefore there is no reason to speak of the beginning and end of the birth of the Son of God. "That which begins and ceases is, of course, represented by us in a certain continuation, and every continuation is measured by time: but when there is no time by which we can designate the end and the beginning of birth, it would be in vain to think of a beginning and an end in a continuous (άδιάστατος) birth, since no concept can be found which is able to designate how it begins and ends" (455).

Summarizing the revelation by Gregory of Nyssa of the Orthodox teaching about the co-origination of the Son of God with God the Father, we can express the essence of this revelation in the following brief definition of the relationship between begotten and co-beginning: "The Son, eternally abiding with His Father, is begotten, and at the same time is without beginning; is without beginning by eternal abiding with the Father, but is born because he received existence from the Father" [456].

This abbreviated formula of the Orthodox teaching about the Son of God gave Eunomius a reason to raise a new objection to this teaching: if the Father is beginningless and the Son is beginningless, then there are two beginningless ones. "Acknowledging," he says, "that these essences (i.e., the Father and the Son) are without beginning separated from each other (i.e., coexisting with each other from eternity as independent Persons), and then elevating one of them through birth to the rank of Son, and insistently proving that from the Eternal was born the one who exists without beginning, you are subject to your own reproaches," i.e., you pronounce a proper sentence on yourself. The recognition of two beginningless ones is the same as the recognition of two gods; if bitheism is unconditionally condemned by Christianity as pagan superstition, then it is self-evident that the teaching about the two beginningless Persons in the Godhead must also be condemned as an anti-Christian teaching.