Chapter XIX. That Matter is Not Uncreated

[DIONYSIUS ALEXANDRINUS] [1] ‘NOR are they free from impiety who regarding matter as unoriginate give it over into the hand of God for orderly arrangement, inasmuch as being originally passible and changeable it yields to the alterations impressed upon it by God.

‘For let them explain clearly from what source like and unlike originally subsist in God and in matter. For then we must further think of some higher than each of them, a thought which it is not lawful to entertain concerning God. For whence came it that they are unoriginate, a property said to be alike in both, and whence a third conceived to be higher than either of them?

‘For if God is the absolutely unoriginate, and if the being unoriginate is, as one might say, His very essence, matter cannot be unoriginate; for matter and God are not the same: but if each is what it properly is, namely matter and God, while the unoriginate is attached to both, this manifestly is different from each of them, and earlier and higher than both.

‘The idea however that these subsist together from the beginning, or rather that this one of them, the matter, subsists of itself, is utterly overthrown by the difference of their opposite conditions.

‘For let them tell us the cause for which, though both be unoriginate, God on the one hand is impassible, unchangeable, immovable, actively operative, while the other is on the contrary passible, changeable, unstable, transformable.

‘How then could they harmonize and agree in their course? Did God adapt Himself to the nature of matter, and so work it artistically? But this surely is absurd, that God should work like men, as a goldsmith, and a stonecutter, and in all the other handicrafts in which materials can be shaped and modelled.

‘But if He gave to matter such qualities as He chose according to His own wisdom, and set His seal upon it in the manifold forms and varieties of shape and pattern of His own workmanship, then this is both a reverent and true account, and gives additional confirmation to the belief that God the real substance of the universe is unoriginate,

‘For together with the being unoriginate He also combined His proper mode of existence. There is much then to be said against these men also, but it does not lie in our way now: yet in comparison with the most atheistical polytheists these are the more reverent.’

Such are the extracts from Dionysius: but listen also to what Origen says.