Monday, July 25, 2022

Justin Martyr, First Apology 14: The Father as "the only unbegotten God"

In First Apology 14, Justin speaks of following “the only unbegotten God through His Son (Gk: θεῷ δὲ μόνῳ τῷ ἀγεννήτῳ διὰ τοῦ υἱοῦ)" (ANF 1:167). Leslie William Barnard, in a note to her translation of this text, notes that

 

Justin, with other second-century Christian writers, consistently uses agennētos, (“unbegotten”) to describe the transcendence of God, rather than agenētos (“uncreated”), which he nowhere uses. In Dial. 5 Justin states “for God alone is unbegotten (agennētos) and incorruptible, and therefore He is God; but all other things after Him are created (gennētos) and corruptible.” It would then seem that for Justin agennētos means “underived,” “ultimate,” and that gennētos means “derived.” He is using these terms in a sense that would later have been expressed by agenētos and genētos. In the second century the denotations “unbegotten” and “uncreated” were virtually identical. But when the main interest of theology turned from monotheism to Christology, the spelling agennētos raised agonizing difficulties and proved a cornerstone of the Arian system. If Christ was not agennētos, but begotten, then was He to be reckoned with created things? The solution for Christian orthodoxy lay in making a firm distinction between agennētos and agenētos and by placing most stress on the latter as describing uncaused Being. But in the second century such fine distinctions were not needed. The view that God is transcendent, separated from matter, uncaused and unbegotten is ultimately Platonic. A full discussion in given by G. L. Prestige, God in Patristic Thought (London, 1936), 39–43. For the classical background in Plato and Aristotle, see Wartelle, 250. (St. Justin Martyr: The First and Second Apologies [trans. Leslie William Barnard; New York: Paulist Press, 1997], Logos Edition)

 

On the term “τῷ ἀγεννήτῳ,” Gildersleeve notes that

 

Otto would now read everywhere with Ashton and Waterland ἀγένητος, ‘unoriginated,’ instead of ἀγέννητος, ‘unbegotten,’ and cites a large number of passages to show that at this period God was called ἀγένητος, not ἀγέννητος. See Athenag. Suppl. 4, 15. Böhringer (ap. Ott.) says that Justin calls God the unbegotten, partly in contrast to the begetting of gods which went on so freely in polytheistic Paganism (c. 25), partly by way of distinction from the begotten Son, the Logos. (Basil L. Gildersleeve, The Apologies of Justin Martyr, to Which is Appended the Epistle to Diognetus [New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1877], 132)