(37) Three bishops in Syria,
ordained I know not how, are fanning the flames by sharing their views; may
judgment on them fall to your scrutiny. They have in mind the sayings that
related to the Saviour’s sufferings, humiliation, self-emptying, and so-called
poverty and whatever else the Saviour accepted on our behalf, and present them
in disproof of his exalted godhead from the beginning, while they have
forgotten the words that express the glory and nobility of his nature and his
abiding with the Father, such as ‘I and the Father are one’. (38) In saying
this, the Lord was not calling himself the Father nor expounding that the two
natures are one in subsistence, but stating that the Son naturally preserved
exactly the paternal likeness, bore the impress of a total similarity of
nature, and was the perfect image of the Father and the express imprint of the
original. (39) This is why, when Philip desired to see him, saying ‘Show us the
Father,’ the Lord revealed himself without stinting by saying to him, ‘He who
has seen me has seen the Father’, with the Father himself being perceived as if
by a mirror, namely his spotless and living divine image. (40) The saints say
the same in the Psalms: ‘In your light we shall see light.’ Consequently ‘whoever
honours the Son honours the Father,’ and quite rightly: for every impious statement
that is uttered about the Son has reference also to the Father. (“Letter of
Alexander of Alexandra to Alexander of Byzantium,” in Documents of the Early
‘Arian’ Controversy and the Council of Nicaea [trans. David M. Gwynn, Richard
Price, Michael Whitby, and Philip Michael Forness; Translated Texts for
Historians 91; Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2025], 127-28)
