On the Faith
For For anyone who wants the divinity of the Son and the Spirit argued in a few pages for a soldier; the shortest of his dogmatic works and the easiest.
Length About 2,000 words, under an hour.
This is a short dogmatic treatise in Greek, written by Gregory of Nyssa to a correspondent named Simplicius about whom little else is recorded. It belongs to the body of brief trinitarian writings Gregory produced in the decade after the Council of Constantinople, in the same vein as his letter to Ablabius on why the three persons are not three gods — works meant to settle, in compact form, questions that the longer anti-Eunomian treatises had already argued at length.
The treatise takes up the claim, associated with Eunomian subordinationism, that Scripture's varied language about Father, Son, and Spirit implies gradations of divine rank or nature. Gregory answers by insisting that whatever can be said of the Father's nature must be said identically of the Son and the Spirit, since nature is not a quantity that can be parceled into degrees. He leans on the now-standard Cappadocian distinction between ousia and hypostasis to show how personal distinction is compatible with undivided nature, and he treats the shared operation (energeia) of the three persons in creation and providence as evidence of their shared nature — the same move he develops more fully elsewhere. The argument is terse and logical rather than exegetical in the expansive sense, aimed at closing off a specific misreading rather than building a full theology of God.
The work matters as a distilled statement of the Nicene-Cappadocian settlement at a moment when that settlement was still being defended line by line against a sophisticated Arian alternative. It is useful precisely because it is short: a reader can see Gregory's central move — unity of operation entailing unity of nature — without wading through the polemical bulk of Contra Eunomium. Scholars of fourth-century trinitarian controversy and students wanting a compact example of Cappadocian method will find it rewarding. Readers looking for devotional or ascetical writing, or for Gregory's mystical theology as found in the Life of Moses or the Homilies on the Song of Songs, should look elsewhere; this is doctrinal argument, addressed to a doctrinal dispute, and reads as such.
Editions
External off-site sources
Free downloads
- OTHER Ad Simplicium de fide (New Advent) PDTrans. H. A. Wilson · 1893H. A. Wilson's translation from the Greek, as printed in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume 5 (1893), on New Advent, with the NPNF headings for the letter and some of its notes. A clear Victorian rendering; for any reader.
- OTHER Ad Simplicium de fide (CCEL) PDTrans. H. A. Wilson · 1893H. A. Wilson's 1893 translation on the Christian Classics Ethereal Library's reading pages for volume 5 of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, with the headings for the letter and the NPNF footnotes kept. The same text as New Advent's, free of its revisions; for any reader.
- OTHER Ad Simplicium de fide (Wikisource) PDTrans. H. A. Wilson · 1893H. A. Wilson's 1893 translation in Wikisource's transcription of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume 5: one page for the text, footnotes kept, plain text that reads well on a phone. For any reader.
- PDF Ad Simplicium de fide (Internet Archive (NPNF2-05 scan)) PDTrans. William Moore and Henry Austin Wilson · 1893A scan of the 1893 volume of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers devoted to Gregory of Nyssa (University of Toronto copy), with Moore and Wilson's translations, the prolegomena and the notes as printed. Page images of the whole book; this work is in it, for readers who want the text as published.
- 🎧 AUDIO Ad Simplicium de fide (LibriVox — Early Church Collection vol. 1 (section 7))Trans. H. A. Wilson · 2015A free audio reading of H. A. Wilson's 1893 translation, section 7 of LibriVox's Early Church Collection, volume 1 (eleven minutes, read by InTheDesert). The section plays from the collection page; complete.
- PDF Ad Simplicium de fide (lectio-divina.org (McCambly))Trans. Richard (Casimir) McCamblyRichard McCambly's translation from the Greek, a typed PDF on his own site (lectio-divina.org), which says its material is not subject to copyright. A few pages, with a short introduction. Plain modern English; for any reader.
- PDF Ad Simplicium de fide (Internet Archive (Migne PG 45)) PD Greek and Latin1863The Greek text with Migne's Latin translation in parallel columns, in volume 45 of the Patrologia Graeca (Paris, 1863), scanned whole on the Internet Archive; this work is at columns 135-146. For readers of Greek or Latin.Much harder than the work: Greek and Latin only, no English translation