Antirrheticus Against Apollinarius 1 part 4/7

Does the pamphleteer know what he is uttering? God, having come down from heaven, disowns his own proper will as deity, and does not wish to bring into effect what he wills!

Therefore the wills of the Son and of the Father have been divided.

And how then could the will be common to both? And how could the identity of nature be manifested through a difference of wills? For it is altogether necessary that the will run together with the nature, as the Lord says somewhere:

"A good tree cannot bear evil fruit, nor can a rotten tree bear good fruit" —

and the fruit of nature would be the choice [of will], so that of a good [nature] the choice is good, and of a bad [nature] such [is the choice] —

if then the fruit of the will differs in the case of Father and Son, they will of necessity have to confess that the nature of each is also different.

Why then is Arius fought against? Why do they not desert to Eunomius, who, by dividing the nature of Father and Son, cuts asunder the will together with the nature, and for this reason especially establishes the estrangement of essence, splitting the very account of the Godhead between the one that is inferior and the one that surpasses it? But let us take up again what was said by him.

"They do not remember," he says, "that this will is said to be one's own — not the will of the man from earth, as they suppose, but of the God who came down from heaven."

What will is the writer speaking of? Clearly the one which the Lord wishes not to come to pass, when he says to the Father, "Not my will, but yours be done."

Does he then understand into what contradiction his argument has fallen? The Passion draws near, the betrayer is at any moment about to appear with the crowd, and it is then that such a prayer is made.

Is the one praying man or God? If he supposes the one praying to be God, then he beholds in him a weakness equal to that of men.

How then is he God, who has no good of his own but needs an alliance from above? And again, how does the Godhead condemn its own will? Was what it willed good or bad? For if good, why is what it willed not brought to its end? But if bad, what kinship has the Godhead with evil? But, as I said, he does not understand — he turns his argument into its very opposite.

For if the voice that says, "Let not my will, but yours be done," belongs to the Only-begotten God, then his own argument constantly turns upon itself through some contradiction, and nowhere does it come to rest.

For he who does not wish his own will to come to pass wills, precisely by this, one thing absolutely: that what he wills should not come to pass.

How then will the prayer be brought to its end, if he says, "This I will, that what I will may not come to pass"? It will surely be turned into the very opposite of what is sought, and whoever attends to such a prayer will be at a loss on both counts.

For whatever he does, he turns the outcome into what the one praying does not wish.

Will he do the will of the one praying? But the prayer is that what he wills should not happen.

Will he not do what he wills? But the one praying wills that what he does not will should come to pass for him.

So that in every way, however one takes it, the notion will be unstable, contradicting itself and being overthrown by itself.

For such helplessness in the argument, one consolation alone would there be: the true confession of the mystery — that to fear the Passion belongs to human weakness, even as the Lord himself says, calling the spirit willing but the flesh weak;

but to endure the Passion that comes from the [saving] dispensation belongs to the divine will and power.

There is a human will, and the divine [will] is another; he who has made our sufferings his own utters, as from the man, what is fitting to the weakness of [our] nature;

then he adds the second utterance, so that the lofty and God-befitting will might be established as ratified above the human will, for the sake of the salvation of mankind.

For he who said "not mine" thereby signified, by that word, the human [will];

and by adding "yours" he showed the conjunction of his own Godhead with the Father, of which there is no difference of will, because of the communion of nature;

for in saying "the will of the Father," he indicated also that of the Son.

And this is the will: that all men should be saved and come to the full knowledge of the truth;

which could not otherwise come to pass unless death, which stands in the way of life, were swallowed up.

The Lord makes his own the lowly words and the suffering of human timidity, showing that what is ours truly was present in him, confirming his nature by the communion of sufferings.

"But it was not," says Apollinarius, "[the will] of the man from earth, as they suppose, but of the God who came down from heaven, that which was assumed into union with him."

In these words, the following of what is written produces an interpretation feeble and without meaning as regards coherence of sense; yet the meaning is not entirely hidden by the confusion of the wording.

"Those passionate utterances," he says, "are not of the man from earth, but of the God who came down from heaven."

Up to this point it is clear from what has been said what his intention is: that he is contriving the Godhead to be subject to suffering.

Then he confuses the sense by the absurdity of his wording.

For having said "of the God who came down from heaven," he adds "that which was assumed into union with him" — as if someone, turning the statement into clearer terms, would say that it was not a man who spoke, but God who uttered speech through the man, having taken up into union with himself that which appeared.

From where, then, was that man assumed? From earth? He says, no.

But there is no race of men in the heavens.

It remains to say [that he came] from nowhere — by which it is jointly established that what appeared was an appearance and not the truth;

for that which comes from nowhere does not exist at all.

But from the words he has cited, he says that the man has come down from heaven.

And yet Mary is on earth, the cave is on earth, and the manger is earthly.

How then does this man resettle for us a man from heaven onto the earth? For while all Scripture confesses with one voice the virgin, the birth, the flesh, the swaddling-clothes, the breast, the manger, the whole human equipage, this man, abandoning all these, fashions in his account another man, rootless and unconnected to our nature.

But as for the abuse which he weaves throughout his words, by which he thinks to strengthen the absurdity of his teaching, and by which he assails us the more violently with slanders — I think a man of sense ought to disregard it, and to entrust to the hearing of his readers the judgment as to who the counterfeiters of the apostolic faith are: we, who, according to Paul's word, "once knew Christ according to the flesh, but now know him so no longer," or he who, both always and before the dispensation according to man, and after it, carries about in his account his own "fleshly God."

He adds also the blasphemy which the Jews uttered against him — that they called him a glutton and a wine-drinker — and he says these things are necessary [to attribute] to the man.

Who then is the man reproached by the Jews for eating and drinking — one who partook of these, or one who had no part in them? But if he did not partake, it was an appearance;

but if he did partake, that which was partaken of was earthly;

but the heavenly is not nourished by earthly things.

Oh, the contradiction of these absurdities!

How he falls, in the very same matter, into opposite collapses!

At one moment he says that the one who appeared bodily is superior to human nature, but again he shows him to be inferior even to men, mutilated with respect to that superior [element].

"—he says—" in which God was manifested;

and this he clearly establishes through the contests that follow, concerning which — unless one should think a careful examination of vain matters superfluous — we shall run briefly over what has been said.

For again, having poured out a multitude of insults upon his treatise, he sets forth against us this argument: he says that those who claim the union of flesh and the assumption of man to be the same thing act unjustly.

But I, even if what I say should seem rather blunt, will not conceal the truth: that our own common usage does not, with precision, establish either of the two statements.

For what difference there is between "union of flesh" and "assumption of man" is not easy to explain offhand in this manner, since "union" is understood in many ways — in number, in species, in nature, in pursuits, in fields of learning, and in the properties and pursuits that come of vice or of virtue.

What, then, is the "union of the flesh" — whether the flesh is united with itself or with another — we are in need of those who can interpret the term.

And how the "assumption of man" comes about — of what sort, and from where, and how, and by whom, and in what manner the one assumed is assumed — is likewise, along with the former question, among the things unknown to us.

For so long as one does not season and put forward the doctrine concerning the mystery with the divine salt of Scripture, we shall leave the tasteless salt of outside wisdom to be disregarded by the faithful.

Which of the evangelists narrated a "union of flesh"? Which of the apostolic accounts taught the "assumption of man" precisely in these words? What law, what prophets, what God-inspired word, what conciliar decree entrusted anything of this kind to us? From these two expressions, then, he attributes the one to us, and declares the other to be his own;

but which of these two he himself makes his own, we remain uncertain up to now.

For we ourselves make our own either neither, or both, since we can find no difference of the one from the other.

For union comes to be in relation to something, and assumption is always the assumption of something;

each of the two signifies a relation to another — the one who has assumed is united with the one assumed, and that which is united has been united through assumption.

But he says that we speak of two persons — God, and the man assumed by God;

but he himself, he says, does not hold it so, but affirms that the one who was made flesh and who exists is not other than the incorporeal one, but the very same, in the likeness of our life in the flesh.

He proceeds further to relate to us his incoherent nonsense.

His "fleshly God" does not have a simple nature;

for no one could observe simplicity in the flesh;

and what is not simple cannot be uncompounded.

But this man says that it is "one," just as each of us [is one] — being, as he says, [made up] of spirit and soul and body.

Now for the first time we have been taught the novel kind of number — learning that what is divided into three things of different kinds is a unit.

But let the argument concerning the "spirit" he has fabricated for himself be set aside for now;

but according to the coarser division of man, as most of us have been taught to divide him — confessing that the constitution of man consists of a rational soul and body — how shall we say that the two are one, when the Apostle clearly sees two men in each person, where he says, "Even though our outward man is decaying" — meaning the body — "yet the inward man is being renewed day by day," hinting at the soul?

And yet, if there were three men according to Apollinarius, he would certainly have made two of them invisible and one visible — so that even though he reinforces his own argument by our human example, calling the two one, Paul disqualifies him by dividing man according to a twofold designation.

Since, then, he establishes the argument of his own doctrine by means of the human example, by the overturning of this the other point is also altogether refuted along with it.

What he says is this: 'Just as man is one, composed of spirit and soul and body...'

he supposes that one to be man, and then in this way he inserts 'the rational element', which he says is something other than 'the spirit' — naming it 'mind' in our case, but 'God' in that one's case.

For if a formation of a heavenly man, made in the likeness of the earthy one, had first been demonstrated by him, we would have been led on by logical consequence into the myth, learning from this new wisdom of his that the earthly race of men has its constitution from a rational soul and body, but that there is a certain race of heavenly men, for whom the soul is irrational, the body human, and God is mingled in place of mind with the reason of the body and the soul — a race from which Apollinarius supposes the one who appeared on earth to be.

But since that heavenly man has neither been demonstrated nor exists, and the one born through the Virgin is set aside as not even partaking of our nature, I consider it alien and inconsistent that what is not a body should be called a body, and that what is not a human soul should be called the soul of man.

For if one should not confess it to be rational, one will not at all compose it as the soul of a man either.

But since these things are not so, what occasion is there for that threefold division of man, of which two parts are man but the third part is God? 'For he would not,' he says, 'have come to be in the likeness of man, unless he happened, like man, to be a mind enfleshed.'

But I am not able to say whether that man, in whom God reconciled the world to himself, was without a mind;

but that the one writing these things was out of his mind at the time he wrote them, even if I do not say so, the writings themselves cry out.

How does he who is something other than man, and wholly without part in our nature, come to be in the likeness of man? For if the human compound is a rational soul and a body, and neither this body nor that soul is present in the one refashioned by him, how does that which is estranged from our nature receive the likeness of man? But he says that he is not man, but, like a man, is a mind enfleshed.

These are the things that persuade me that the writer was out of his mind.

How is that which does not partake of nature made like to nature? And who is that enfleshed mind, connatural with the flesh and inseparable from it, always being such? Then is it not altogether from such flesh? For flesh could not be begotten unless it came to be from flesh, just as the Lord somewhere says, 'That which is born of the flesh is flesh.'

[But it comes to be afterward.] What flesh, then, does he put on to become enfleshed? The flesh that already exists? <But it comes to be afterward

or the flesh that does not exist?> But it must be from the same [flesh]

[or the flesh that does not exist?] Therefore he is not called 'enfleshed';

for one could not be named after that which does not exist.

But let us look at the inescapable necessities of his syllogisms, by which he compels us to concede that the Only-begotten God is an enfleshed mind.

'If the Lord,' he says, 'is not an enfleshed mind, he would be wisdom.'

He supposes that the Lord must altogether be one or the other of the two, either an enfleshed mind or wisdom;

and for this reason he says that it is the one if it is not the other — that is, whenever it is not an enfleshed mind, whatever is not an enfleshed mind is wisdom.

What then is a stone? What is a beetle? What are the rest of visible things? For by his logic he must surely grant that these too are altogether one or the other of the two — either an enfleshed mind or wisdom;

and yet none of these is either mind or wisdom.

Therefore the premise has collapsed for this speech-writer, and the whole contrivance has fallen apart, the argument having collapsed together with the dissolution of its starting-point.

For it has not been shown that these stand in mutual opposition to one another, such that, if one of them should be, the other should not be — or conversely, that if the one should not exist, the remaining one must altogether exist.

But nothing prevents both from being present at once, and likewise neither.

But let us also see the incoherence of the premise from its converse.

For if it is proposed as true that 'if he is not an enfleshed mind, he would be wisdom,' then also true is what appears from the converse, that 'if he is wisdom, he is not an enfleshed mind.'

But indeed, everyone who has received the faith agrees that Christ is wisdom;

so the speech-writer, by the very arguments through which he tries to establish what he wants, ends up proving that the Lord is not an enfleshed mind.

Such is the premise, and such also is the intervening construction of the argument.

The conclusion is worthy of them both.

What does he say? 'The coming of Christ was not a sojourn of God, but the birth of a man.'

Let all who are arrogant laugh at what has been said;

but we, judging it more fitting to weep over the deceit and vanity of what has been said, decline to refute the argument any further, lest we seem to be jesting.

For who would not reasonably laugh at the incoherent weaving-together of this syllogism? I will set out the very wording itself, in its proper sequence, as follows:

'If the Lord is not an enfleshed mind, he would be wisdom, illuminating the mind of man;'

'and this is that wisdom which is in all men.'

'And if this is so, the coming of Christ was not a sojourn of God, but the birth of a man.'

That the Lord is wisdom surpassing every mind, none of the devout would deny, being guided to this by the voices of the holy fathers and apostles.

For indeed Paul cries out explicitly that he became wisdom for us from God;

and that 'the saving grace has appeared to us, training us to renounce impiety and, through holiness and righteousness, to await the blessed hope.'

and we have heard the apostle relate these things at length;

But that the Only-begotten God — who is over all and through all and in all — is an enfleshed mind, we have heard from none of the saints; nor do we accept the insertion of this bizarre new coinage into the divine sayings, especially when we look to the purpose of this novel speech-writer, who wishes, through this frigid contrivance of sophistry, to expel from the Lord the confession of wisdom, by which we have believed that every mind is illuminated, and to substitute in its place this absurd new coinage, so that the Only-begotten might be named an enfleshed mind, and not wisdom.

'For if the Lord,' he says, 'is believed to be wisdom — namely, that wisdom which comes to be in all who receive grace — we shall no longer confess the coming of Christ to be a sojourn of God, since wisdom would be estranged from God.'

Who would not pity the man for this melancholy delusion? 'If we believe him to be wisdom,' he says, 'the coming of Christ — who was made for us wisdom from God — will not be a sojourn of God, but the birth of a man.'

If he is wisdom, does that mean he was not born? Have you not heard the prophet crying out that 'the virgin shall conceive in the womb and bear a son'? And that 'a child is born to us'? And that 'the Son has government upon his shoulder, being mighty and powerful, and father not only of the age that has passed but also of the age to come'? But let us leave aside this dreamlike nonsense, by which he declared that one must say he is an enfleshed mind, and neither wisdom illuminating all, nor the passage into our life through birth.

'If the Word,' he says, 'did not become an enfleshed mind, but wisdom...'

In this, what has again come over our sage, that he sets mind over against wisdom as though they were opposites? Those who divide realities with precision say that terms set in opposition to one another withdraw before each other's presence — as life withdraws before death, and death again before life, vice before virtue and virtue before vice, and whatever else is spoken of in the same manner.

How then does this man, on an equal footing with such opposites, set wisdom over against mind, as though it were impossible for both to be present in the same subject and about the same subject? Wherefore he says: 'If he was not an enfleshed mind, he was wisdom.'

as if someone were to say, 'if it is not health, it is disease.'

What then is the construction of his argument? 'If wisdom,' he says, 'was in the mind, the Lord did not descend, nor did he empty himself.'

O the irresistible necessity of this logic!

How does he establish that the Lord did not descend, from showing that he was wisdom? If, then, the descent is annulled by his being wisdom, then whoever confesses the descent necessarily establishes that he is not wisdom.

But indeed the descent is confessed by Apollinarius himself.

Therefore it is agreed by him that the one who descended is not wisdom.

Such are the noble fellow's clever arguments against the truth.

Then, by an incoherent train of consequence, he adds to this premise a construction built from what was never granted, running thus:

'For man, according to Paul, is mind in flesh.'

But I beg the readers not to suppose that such things are being fabricated by us, in some sort of jest for the sake of ridicule, as though spoken in the person of Apollinarius;

for it is possible to learn, from his own written words themselves, that the statement has been put forward by him verbatim, running as follows:

According to which Paul, then, is man said to be an enfleshed mind? Let him say what other, secret Paul he has! For the servant of Jesus Christ, the called apostle, in all that he has written, said nothing of the sort.

If, then, neither logical consequence nor testimony supports the statement, from where does this bizarre dogma-making derive its credibility? Again he adduces another notion to what has been said.

'Since,' he says, 'he was man and also heavenly, this earthy one...'

Again I say that he has forgotten Mary, to whom Gabriel brings the good tidings, upon whom the Holy Spirit is believed to have come, whom the power of the Most High overshadows, from whom Jesus is born — he who has the government upon his shoulder, that is, who bears the government upon himself.

And this government is assuredly God the Word, who is in the beginning and is the beginning, just as the word of Scripture somewhere says, 'I am the Beginning.'

Let him, then, either show that the virgin was not on earth, or else let him stop fabricating a heavenly man, and stop frightening the more unlearned as though they were sinning against the divine by accepting the human without also confessing the divine.

For the birth from a woman displays what is human, while the virginity that served the birth showed what is above man.

So that what was born is man, but the power that acted toward the birth was not from men, but through the Holy Spirit and the power of the Most High.

Therefore, according to the true account, he is both man and God: man in what is seen, God in what is understood.

But he does not actually say this — he defines the divine merely by the apparent conclusion, not by what is intelligible.

But let us proceed in our discourse to the argument that follows.

"If," he says, "since God is mind, there was also a human mind in Christ..."

But we, in response to what has been said, put forward this counter-proposal:

Which of the saints ever defined the divine as mind? By what Scriptures were we taught that God is identical with mind, so as to accept the claim that the man in Christ is without mind, while God becomes mind for the mindless one? Must we then also set down in writing the entire reproach of this argument?

But I fear that we may seem to our readers to be mockers, publicizing this writer's unseemliness as if for the sake of laughter.

Nevertheless, lest the premise remain incomplete, since it is necessary only to bring forward the conclusion, I shall pass over the rubbish that lies in between.

"If," he says, "since God is mind, there was also a human mind in Christ—"

"then the work of the incarnation is not accomplished in him."

"But if the work of the incarnation is not accomplished in the self-moved and unconstrained mind, then the work — which is the dissolution of sin — is accomplished in the flesh, which is moved by another and energized by the divine mind;"

"and the self-moved mind in us partakes of this dissolution, insofar as it appropriates itself to Christ."

Do you see how well the conclusions match the premise? Perhaps we need some enchanter and Chaldean soothsayer to interpret for us the riddles of dreams, so as to tell us what this strange jargon of words means:

"the mind that is self-moved yet moved-by-another"; "the flesh that accomplishes the work of dissolution."

But let these things too be left to be mocked by the insolence of the young; let us proceed to what follows in the discourse.

"If," he says, "one person gains anything more than another, this comes about through ascetic exercise;"

"but there is no ascetic exercise in Christ;"

"therefore there is no human mind [in him]."

"...of the things that have been said: he has come down from heaven — he who was neither in the beginning nor was equal to God."

But let this argument too be passed over in silence, especially because of the fitting conclusion set before it, which runs, word for word, as follows:

"Therefore the human race is not saved by the taking-up of a mind and of a whole human being, but by the assuming of flesh."

This, then, is the conclusion.

Let those versed in the frigid subtleties of grammar explain the difference between "taking up" and "assuming," so as to give schoolboys a technical lesson on the slight discrepancy between such parts of speech as are called prepositions.

For we hold that what has been assumed has also been taken up, and we do not doubt that what has been taken up has also been assumed, having learned this usage of the word from Scripture.

Thus he who was assumed with glory was also taken up, and he who was taken up from the sheepfolds was also assumed;

for Scripture speaks two ways about the same thing, so that not even he himself could perhaps say what he means by asserting that the mystery concerning the man was administered by the Only-begotten not by "taking up" but by "assuming."

But I, avoiding dragging my discourse down with him into the mire of his incoherent words, leave aside most of his nonsense, thinking that the mere reading of his own written words, word for word, is a sufficient refutation of the absurdity of what is said — so that not even one who wished to attack this heresy most vehemently could, by his own reasonings, expose its absurdity as effectively as [Apollinarius'] own words do.

For by the very means he uses to construct his falsehood, in the feebleness of his defense he lays bare his impiety.

"For indeed," he says, "if a perfect God had been united to a perfect man, there would have been two."

Therefore, according to him, the imperfect combined with the perfect is not seen to constitute a duality.

Has this brilliant fellow never even seen children counting the fingers on the palm of their hand? Whoever counts the small together with the great calls the lesser one one, and the greater one one, yet still says there are two, if he reckons both together.

For every number is a composition of units, signifying in sum the total gathered from them.

And if the thing being counted, whatever it may be, when set alongside what is counted with it, exceeds the lesser in bulk according to size, the lesser will nonetheless still be one, even though it falls short in magnitude.

So then, whenever we distinguish two things equal in magnitude by number, we call them two complete/perfect things;

but whenever we number the deficient thing together with the perfect one, we still say "two" even so — only, the one is deficient, the other perfect.

But this great expert in the science of arithmetic says that, if each of the two is perfect according to its own nature, the things so spoken of are called two;

but if the one falls short while the other is perfect, then both become one — I do not know how, blending the imperfect with what exceeds it, and by means of opposites contriving a union of things that are incompatible.

For the perfect is fitted rather to the perfect, and the imperfect to the imperfect, by likeness;

but as for the union of opposite with opposite — I mean, of the imperfect with the perfect — let the lawgiver of this new arithmetic tell us the manner of it.

But he does not think it fitting for a human mind to entertain thoughts concerning the Only-begotten God, and he states the reason: that the human mind is mutable.

Then let this same reasoning refuse to grant the flesh to God as well.

For not even the writer himself would deny that the flesh is mutable — changing, from youth to maturity, through the successive ages as though changing garments.

Or how was he not mutable, who was first carried on his mother's arm, then became a small child, then a youth, and thus advanced little by little toward maturity, until he came to the full measure of human age? If, then, the mind is rejected because of its mutability, then for the same reason let him not concede the flesh either — and thus, on his own showing, the whole gospel will be proven false, the preaching empty, and the faith vain.