This week, we will continue looking at who the Son of God is.

begotten, not made, (Genitum, non factum)

Two weeks ago, we looked at the difference between being begotten and being made, but there is more to say about this challenging concept. Saying that someone is begotten establishes a relationship as between a father and a son. When we say that “Isaac was begotten by Abraham” we are saying that Abraham is the father of Isaac. When we are dealing with humans, this also implies that Abraham was a partial cause of the creation of Isaac. (Human parents are co-creators of new life with God when they conceive children.)

When we then say that he was not made, we are saying that this is different from normal human begetting. The creed uses the word “begotten” to establish a relationship between the Father and Son, and that is all it is using this word to do. The Father does not make or create the Son. This is because the Father and the Son exist differently than us humans. The persons of the Holy Trinity, unlike us humans, are not created beings. This makes it challenging to talk correctly about the Trinitarian Persons, because we comprehend things based on our human understanding of things.

This phrase, like many in the Creed, aim to refute several heresies, Arianism being the most prominent. Arius said, “If the Father begat the Son, then he who was begotten had a beginning in existence, and from this it follows there was a time when the Son was not.” To rephrase, this means that Arianism teaches that the Son was created. (This statement is also refuted in by saying born of the Father before all ages)

consubstantial with the Father; (consubstantialem Patri)

I’ll do my best to explain this: It is a very complicated claim to explain. (I apologize to any philosophy professors in advance if I mess this up. I really did try to pay attention in metaphysics!)

I will spare you the rabbit-hole about why this English translation changed in 2011 (which I find fascinating). In short: the Creed was written in Greek, and the original Greek word homoousios doesn’t translate well into Latin. When we try to translate it into English it is even more challenging. In the original Greek, the term “homoousios” is used. Homo means “same”. Ousios, though, doesn’t translate well into Latin, so they translated it consubstantialitas: “of the same substance”; however, conessentialis is also a valid translation of the Greek. The terms continued to diverge in meaning through time, and these Latin terms are where we get the English words “substance” and “essence.”

I’ll start with the English/Latin words. The essence of a thing can be understood as what makes a thing what it is. For example, a dog would have the essence of dogness in order to be a dog. The meaning of substance emphasizes a thing’s existence strongly. Anna, my dog growing up, was a substance: she was an integral and existing being. The Greek term ousios means both of these at the same time, which implies that the what-ness of a thing and the existence of a thing are intimately and inseperably related. To say, then, that the Son and the Father are homoousios in Greek, that they are consubstantial in the Latin translation, or that they are of the same substance/essence/ousios in the English translation is to say that the Father and Son both have the same existence and they are the same sort of thing. So, the Father and Son are both God and they both share their existence eternally from before all creation, and that this shared and eternal existence as God is essential to who the Father and the Son are.

If this all makes your brain hurt, I apologize. Mine hurts too.

through him all things were made. (per quem omnia facta sunt)

This statement teaches us that the Son co-creates with the Father. The Father creates all things through the Son. In fact, the three persons of the Trinity all act in concert when God acts. When God creates, the Father, Son, and Spirit all act together to bring about creation. This belief is beautifully illustrated in the prologue to St. John’s Gospel (1:1-3):

In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.
He was in the beginning with God.
All things came to be through him,
and without him nothing came to be

Next week

Next week, humanity enters the creed: the Son takes on human flesh.