Unsurpassable word

Gregory charges Eunomius (10.2) with believing he can climb past the word to a direct encounter with the Ungenerate Father.  As Gregory sees it, Eunomius is saying that “the human mind, scrutinizing the knowledge of real existence, and lifting itself above the sensible and intelligible creation, will leave God the Word, Who was in the beginning, below itself, just as it has left below it all other things, and itself comes to be in Him in Whom God the Word was not, treading, by mental activity, regions which lie beyond the life of the Son, there searching for eternal life, where the Only-Begotten God is not.”

Powerful stuff.  In response, Gregory points to the Johannine claim that the Word is eternal life, and that life is in Him.  Why then seek eternal life by leaping over the word.  To that we may add: As Gregory shows, Arianism dissolved into mysticism, as the Arian climbs past the eternal Expression of the Father to gain access to the now-wordless Father.  Arianism is also a kind of gnosticism, not only because it’s claiming an extra-human degree of knowledge but also because it is leaving time and matter behind.  In leaping over the Son to get to the Father, Arians inevitably also leap over redemptive history, where the Word is made flesh.

Gregory’s got it right: We need nor should we want anything beyond the Word, beyond the incarnate Word in whom we have seen the indwelling Father, beyond the words that the Word speaks and inspires to be write, beyond the visible words by which He comes near to us.  There are no side or back doors to the Father, for Jesus and Jesus alone is the door.