This example being understood, it is time to go on to the thing which it illustrates. This much we comprehend, that the First Cause has His existence from no antecedent one. Accordingly, we call God ungenerate as existing ungenerately, reducing this notion of ungeneracy into verbal form. That He is without origin or beginning we show by the force of the term. But what that Being is which exists ungenerately, this appellation does not lead us to discern. Nor was it to be supposed that the processes of conception could avail to raise us above the limits of our nature, and open up the incomprehensible to our view, and enable us to compass the knowledge of that which no knowledge can approach38    Cf. Origen c. Celsum, vi. 65. Celsus had said, “God cannot be named.” “This requires a distinction to be made. If Celsus means that there is nothing in the signification of words that can express the qualities of God, what he says is true, seeing that there are many other qualities that cannot be named. Who, for instance, can express in words the difference of quality between the sweetness of a date and that of a fig? Peculiar individual qualities cannot be expressed in a word. No wonder, then, that in this absolute sense God cannot be named. But if by ‘name’ we only mean the possible expression of some one thing about God, by way of leading on the listener, and producing in him such a notion about God as human faculties can reach to, then there is nothing strange in saying, that God can have a name.”. Nevertheless, our adversary storms at our Master, and tries to tear to pieces his teaching respecting the faculty of thought and conception, and derides what has been said, revelling as usual in the rattle of his jingling phraseology, and saying that he (Basil) shrinks from adducing evidence respecting those things of which he presumes to be the interpreter. For, quoting certain of the Master’s speculations on the faculty of conception, in which he shows that its exercise finds place, not only in reference to vain and trivial objects, but that it is competent to deal also with weightier matters, he, by means of his speculation about the corn, and seed, and other food (in Genesis), brings Basil into court with the charge, that his language is a following of pagan philosophy39    τῃ ἔξωθεν φιλοσοφί& 139·. Eunomius, in this accusation, must have been thinking, in the θέσει and φύσει controversy on the origin of language, of Democritus, who called words “statues in sound,” i.e. ascribed to them a certain amount of artificiality. But it is doubtful whether the opinion of the purely human origin of language can be ascribed to him, when we consider another expression of his, that “words were statues in sound, but statues not made by the hands of men, but by the gods themselves.” Language with him was conventional, but it was not arbitrary. Again, Plato defines a word, an imitation in sound of that which it imitates (Cratylus, 423 B), and Aristotle calls words imitations (Rhet. iii. 1). But both of them were very far indeed from tracing language back to mere onamatopœia, i.e. ascribing it to θέσις (agreement), as opposed to φύσις in the sense of the earlier Greek philosophy, the “essence” of the thing named, rather than the “nature” of the names. Long before them Pythagoras had said, “the wisest of all things is Number, and next to Number, that which gives names.” These oracular words do not countenance the idea that the origin of language was purely human. Perhaps Epicurus more definitely than any taught that in the first formation of language men acted unconsciously, moved by nature (in the modern sense), and that then as a second stage there was an agreement or understanding to use a certain sound for a certain conception. Against this Heraclitus (b.c. 503) had taught that words exist φύσει. “Words are like the shadows of things, like the pictures of trees and mountains reflected in the river, like our own images when we look into a mirror.” We know at all events here what he did not mean, viz., that man imposed what names he pleased on the objects round him. Heraclitus’ “nature” is a very different thing from the Darwinian Nature; it is the inherent fitness between the object and name. Eunomius, then, was hardly justified in calling the Greek philosophy, as a whole, atheistical in this matter, and “against Providence.” This φύσις, the impalpable force in the things named, could still be represented as the will of the Deity. Eunomius outdoes Origen even, or any Christian writer, in contending for the sacredness of names. He makes the Deity the name-giver, but with the sole object of deifying his “Ungenerate.” Perhaps Basil’s teaching of the human faculty of ᾽Επίνοια working under God as the name-giver is the truest statement of all, and harmonizes most with modern thought., and that he is circumscribing Divine Providence, as not allowing that words were given to things by God, and that he is fighting in the ranks of the Atheists, and taking arms against Providence, and that he admires the doctrines of the profane rather than the laws of God, and ascribes to them the palm of wisdom, not having observed in the earliest of the sacred records, that before the creation of man, the naming of fruit and seed are mentioned in Holy Writ.

εἰ δὴ νενόηται τὸ ὑπόδειγμα, καιρὸς ἂν εἴη μεταβιβάσαι τὸν λόγον ἐπὶ τὸ πρᾶγμα οὗ τὸ ὑπόδειγμα. τὸ πρῶτον αἴτιον ἐξ οὐδεμιᾶς ὑπερκειμένης αἰτίας ἔχειν τὸ εἶναι κατελαβόμεθα. τὸν οὖν ἀγεννήτως ὄντα θεὸν εἰς ὀνόματος τύπον τὴν ἔννοιαν ταύτην παράγοντες ἀγέννητον ὠνομάσαμεν. ὅτι μὲν οὖν οὐ διὰ γενέσεώς ἐστιν, ἐκ τῆς τοῦ ὀνόματος ἐμφάσεως ἐδηλώσαμεν, αὐτὴ δὲ ἡ οὐσία ἡ ἀγεννήτως οὖσα τίς κατὰ τὴν ἰδίαν φύσιν ἐστίν, οὐδὲν ἐκ τῆς ἐπωνυμίας ταύτης πρὸς τὸ κατιδεῖν ὡδηγήθημεν. οὐδὲ γὰρ ἦν εἰκὸς μέχρι τοσούτου τὴν τῶν λογισμῶν ἐπίνοιαν ἰσχύειν, ὥστε ὑπεραίρειν ἡμᾶς τῶν μέτρων τῆς φύσεως καὶ τοῖς ἀλήπτοις ἐπιβιβάζειν καί, ὧν οὐκ ἔστιν ἔφοδος εἰς κατανόησιν, ταῦτα τῇ ἡμετέρᾳ γνώσει περιλαμβάνειν.
Ἀλλὰ διασαλεύει τὸν διδάσκαλον ἡμῶν καὶ περισύρει τὸν λόγον, ὃν περὶ τῆς ἐπινοίας ἐκεῖνός φησι καὶ κατορχεῖται τῶν εἰρημένων, πάλιν συνήθως τῷ κρότῳ τῶν λεξειδίων ἐνσατυρίζων τοῖς ῥήμασι, καί φησιν: « ὧν σφετερίζεται τὴν ἑρμηνείαν, τούτων ἐπαισχύνεται τὴν μαρτυρίαν ». ἀπαγγείλας γάρ τι μέρος τῶν κατ' ἐπίνοιαν θεωρηθέντων τῷ διδασκάλῳ, ἐν οἷς ἐκεῖνος οὐ μόνον ἐπὶ τῶν ματαίων ἐνεργὸν ἔφασκε τῆς ἐπινοίας εἶναι τὴν χρῆσιν, ἀλλ' ἔχειν τινὰ καὶ πρὸς τὰ μείζω δύναμιν, « διὰ τοῦ κατὰ τὸν σῖτον καὶ τὸ σπέρμα καὶ τὴν τροφὴν θεωρήματος ἐπάγει τὰ εἰρημένα, τῇ ἔξωθεν αὐτὸν φιλοσοφίᾳ κατακολουθεῖν αἰτιώμενος, καὶ περικόπτειν τὴν τοῦ θεοῦ κηδεμονίαν φησί, μὴ ὁμολογοῦντα παρ' ἐκείνου τὰς ὀνομασίας τεθεῖσθαι τοῖς πράγμασι, καὶ συμμαχεῖν αὐτὸν τοῖς ἀθέοις καὶ κατὰ τῆς προνοίας ὁπλίζεσθαι, καὶ τὴν ἐκείνων γνώμην πρὸ τῶν νόμων θαυμάζειν κἀκείνοις πλεῖον εἰς σοφίαν νέμειν, οὐκ ἐπεσκεμμένον τοὺς πρώτους τῶν λόγων, ὅτι μήπω παραχθέντων τῶν ἀνθρώπων εἰς γένεσιν ἡ τοῦ καρποῦ καὶ τοῦ σπέρματος ἐπωνυμία παρὰ τῆς γραφῆς ὠνομάσθη ».