Δημόφιλος

Bishop of Constantinople, he was a man inclined to mix everything together in a disorderly rush like a wild torrent, gathering a great heap of rubbish in his words,¹ as one will know at any rate from the public speech which appears among his extant memoirs: there it seems that he took more thought for accuracy, as he revised his spoken words in making written records. In these [spoken words] at any rate he said many disjointed things, and particularly in his discourses on the Father and the Son. For he says: the Son is born by the will of the Father alone, timelessly, without intermediary, so that he might become the minister and servant of the Father’s intentions. For since God who foreknew what he would do + was impossible of the uncontrolled order of God who was going to make them in their coming-to-be.+² For either they would all have had to become gods according to the rank of the one who made them, and therefore they would be gods, or else they would have had to be destroyed as they came into being, like wax brought near to a hot fire. So the Son became an intermediary between those who would come to be and the God who had begotten him, so that subjecting himself and condescending to those who were coming to be he might accomplish the intention of the Father. And he has become an intermediary between God and us who have come to be through him. In saying these things [Demophilos] did not recognize that he was falsely attributing weakness and malice to the God of all and declaring the Son inferior to all the creation. For [the Father] was weak according to Demophilos, if when he desired he was unable to give being to all things; and he would not be acquitted of malice, if although it was possible for him to make everything gods he was obviously devising a way to keep the things which would come to be from attaining this rank. And of the creatures there was not one who was not shown to be better than the Son, since he did not happen to have come into being through himself, but through the purpose and need of their coming-to-be. For it must be the case that whatever comes to be for the need of others is inferior to those for the benefit of which it obtains its being. And he spoke a lot more nonsense too.³