(5) And so, just as from God he
possesses existence and glory and life, and all things were entrusted to him,
so as a result God is his beginning, for as his God he is his beginning and is
before him. But if the expressions ‘from him’ and ‘from the womb’ and ‘I
came forth from the Father hand have come’ are understood by some to mean as a
part of him consubstantially, and as an emanation, this will make the Father
according to them composite, divisible, changeable, and a body; and the consequence
will be, according to them, that the bodiless God experiences what is
consequent for a body. (“Confession of Faith of Arius and his Colleagues to
Alexander of Alexandria,” 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], 69, emphasis in bold added)
