Why isn’t the phrase “eternally begotten” a contradiction?

[anon90190422]

The Son is in no way caused by the father. I know the term beget implies precedence of the begetter, but this is not so with the Trinity. Remember that God is one essence, nature, eternity, immensity. God is his Intellect and his Will. In other words, his nature is identical to his Intellect/Will. Since each divine person is the divine essence, each is the Intellect/Will. People explain the generation of the son a thinker generating his thought, but we must admit that this is an imperfect analogy. This nature of Father and Son are the same. They both exist eternally. This Father does not cause the Son or vice versa. That is not how they are distinct. They are distinct, as the Council of Florence teaches, because of their relations of opposition. Although Intellect and Will are the divine essence, because there is a true intellect and will implies relation between them. A divine person is defined as relation subsisting in the divine nature. Therefore, the Father is the same nature as the Son, yet they are called son because Father signifies paternity, and son filiation. The father is paternity, the Son filiation, and the Spirit spiration. The generation of the Son is the procession of the Intellect. The term begetting or generation is used because the Father eternally generates, (is related to) the Son, also named Word or Image, in his perfect likeness and nature. It does not follow from these relations that the Son does no have intellect Remember, both the Father and Son are the Intellect and Will, as in God person and essence are identical.

 

[Maximian]

I suggest you read up on the Arian Controversy and especially the life of St Athanasius who did more than anyone to defeat it.

 

[mdgspencer]

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Many have the misconception that eternal means endless continuance. When God is eternal he is outside time. God created time when He created the universe. Eternity is a condition of perfect and infinite realization. God cannot change, which means something exists in time, because any change of One who is absolutely perfect would be in the direction of imperfection.
To say the Son is eternally begotten does not mean that the Son once didn’t exist and then came into being. This is to speak of something in time. The begetting of the Son speaks of something outside time, in a timeless realization. From our human and limited view. for the Son to be eternally begotten is for the Son being begotten always and forever.

 

[MNathaniel]

Aside from those things, the phrase still seems contradictory.

The thing that leaps to my mind is that the way humans beget offspring (within time) is only a pale shadow of whatever it means that the Father begets the Son.

So whatever ‘begetting’ means in its most fundamental sense clearly doesn’t require time. It’s just that God chose to make humans within time and make our version of begetting a sequential time based-thing. But always we have to remember that we’re the pale imitation and we have to try to understand ourselves in the light of God – rather than trying to understand God in terms of humans.

Just my thoughts.

 

[Richca]

St Thomas Aquinas’ second proof for the existence of God concerns the nature of the efficient cause. Here he establishes that there is a first efficient cause which we call God. God as the first efficient cause concerns the whole trinity for God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The whole trinity was involved in creation as well as any works that are extraneous to the trinity or God. For everything originates in the Father through the Son and by the Holy Spirit. So we are not talking about God the Father only when we consider God as the first efficient cause but all of God, i.e., the whole trinity for the Son and the Holy Spirit are God just as the Father is.

 

[Usagi]

“Begotten” is the term for the nature of the relationship between the Father and the Son. It’s somehow analogous to a human parent and child (or rather, the human parent-child relationship is analogous to the one within the Trinity) and it’s not perfectly symmetrical – the Father begets, the Son is begotten.

But it doesn’t mean “there was a time when the Son was not.” The Nicene Creed was explicitly created to refute that possibility. So that relationship between them, which is somehow one of begetting (but not in the sense of an earlier being producing a later one), is their eternal relationship. For all eternity the Father begets the Son and the Son is begotten of the Father.

Of course, the current (and apparently more accurate) translation is “born of the Father before all ages,” which I’ve gotta say, with all respect to the Council Fathers at Nicaea, doesn’t seem like the best phrasing when you’re trying to assert that the Son did not have a beginning.

 

[JimG]

God exiats in eternity, not in time, as three persons in one essence. There is no time lapse–not even a nanosecond–between the Father’s knowing and the Son begotten as the Divine Logos. Nor is there any time lapse between the Father and Son and the spiration of the Holy Spirit. It is all eternal, and eternal does not mean endless time. It means possessing the totality of one’s existence as ‘now’ not as spread out over a temporal continuum.

Also, first cause does not necessarily mean within time; it means first cause ontologically.