Poems & Letters 2

A gift at once single and manifold has been granted to our age by the nod of the Godhead: that amid the royal ordinances of your most glorious sovereignty you should chiefly take care for the defence of the truth of the Catholic party. From the piety of which zeal it came about that lately, having set forth the authority of a clement command, you ordered that against the revived fury of the Eutychian dogma — sprouting as if from the extinguished tinder of a fire rising again — rivers of examples should be drawn from the sacred fount of the heavenly Scriptures. O most worthy matter, that so great a prelate should command — if only one were chosen who was worthy to receive the command, if the power of eloquence answered to the author of the theme;

if only our tongue could avail to speak forth for the multiplying of the salvation of the peoples as abundantly as your kindness suffices to command; since you love the country and person of the emperor bound to you, not — as is the custom with other kings — merely for the advantage of worldly peace, but, while you fear that error should forestall him before you, you wish all the friendship that exists between you to profit him in this: that he sin not — him indeed whom you both extol with praise and laud as faithful and devoted to God. From which friendship especially, may those come to the pardon of triumphal fullness who worthily deserve it.

Yet I pray God with all my strength that this very one of whom we speak, the Caesar of the Greeks — if he be faithful to you and honourable to us also — may be persuaded by our prince to persuade his own people likewise; and when he has rendered himself docile to you for holding the truth, may he rejoice to have become a helper of your preaching for driving out the contagions of his own region. Eutyches, then, the deadly kindler of the ruin of which mention is made, was indeed a presbyter of the Church of Constantinople, but was set over a numerous multitude of monks; the persons of which office the eastern bishops call archimandrites.

He, then, greedily burning with zeal to procure the highest priesthood by the favour of reputation and to introduce any novelty whatever, is said to have brought in that which we shudder at in his followers rather by whispers than by writings. For there existed in the man nothing of clear erudition which might build up the sense of his conceived animosity into any semblance of rectitude. The minds of the monks having first been infected with this poison — whom, teaching wickedly under the guise of governance, he exposed to shipwrecks — and, being made heresiarch of a numerous following, as we said above, he was, by the judgment of a council of many bishops, and with presbyters of the city of Rome directed for that very purpose, examined, exposed, and condemned.

But because no schism could ever be so abolished together with its author as to drive out entirely the ruin of its teaching, soon the evil which had been cut down by the worthy provision of the bishops — keeping the seeds long since sown by the contagion of those who had received it — rose up again as if from a soil infected with tares. Hence now hear the proposition of the heresy against which we speak. They deny that the Son of God, abiding with the Father before the ages — whom right faith confesses to have descended from heaven for our salvation in order to take a body — could have been thrust into a woman's womb; whereas the Son of God, God assuredly, who had said through the prophet: I fill heaven and earth (Jer.

— 23:24), could not have come to the place where he already was, unless by the assumption of flesh he consented to be what he was not. Fearing which conclusion, that Eutyches of whom we speak, when in the synod designated above he was earnestly pressed by the hearers to pronounce and subscribe that the virgin Mary — that is, she who had given birth to God — [was Theotokos], turning by fraud to the wickedness of his wit, confessed her as one who would seem to have brought forth Christ only; so that, namely, the person which keeps the nature of the divinity is believed to be divided from that which sustained the injury of the passion.

You would flee the left hand, which must be curbed from the doubtful precipice, not presuming upon the right, and so dreading both sides; there is a safer way under the mean of temperance, in which we say the twofold substance of the Redeemer can be distinguished, not divided. Nor do we strive to have it believed that the inviolable Divinity suffered bodily pains, since all pain of all bodies precedes, by a certain natural office, the death that follows. Hence, just as our own flesh too, by the gift of resurrection, is to be incapable of suffering after death, so God, who cannot feel death, suffering-with the assumed body to which, being united, he clung — without the bitterness of suffering — neither failed in the glorious contest of our salvation, nor grieved with pain.

The opposing heresy, rearing itself against the sense of this distinction, does not even suffer Christ to be bowed down by true torments; whereas in the very Divinity, in which bodily affliction cannot be found, there is nevertheless sometimes found an affection of tenderness — as we read said of the Israelites: They cried out to God, who grieved over their miseries (Judg. 10:15-16); and the Apostle commands that we grieve not the Holy Spirit of God (Eph. 4:30); and if any sentence like these is recorded in the sacred volumes, it is rather the goodness of mercy than a necessity of nature. Meanwhile, the assertion of the two natures being deferred to what follows, the unity of a twofold substance in Christ will be established for me.

For where else are there such heavenly mysteries of truth in the Scriptures, which strive at nothing else than to persuade us of the incarnation of the Word together with the divinity of the man? In the beginning, he says, was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God (John 1:1). Behold, we have recognized what that was which had no beginning; now let us be eager to see what began and followed. And the Word, he says, was made flesh. That God in the beginning was with God lacks both beginning and end; that the Word is clothed with flesh lacks an end, but has a starting-point from its head. Let there now be present to our discourse that Emmanuel foretold by the ancient voice of the prophetic oracle, who — that he might be God with us, as Isaiah said: A child is born and given to us, the Son of God (Isa.

— 9:6). In vain is bodiliness divided from the sacrament of divinity, if the prophet truly affirms that the Son of God came forth in a child. And he shall be called, he says, that very child, Wonderful, Counsellor, Mighty God, Father of the age to come, Prince of Peace. As far as pertains to the propriety of the name, it suffices that Emmanuel be called a child. But when he says, he shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, Mighty God, and the rest that follow — what, I ask, is the reason found for so many names, unless that we may recognize the truthful seer, expressing in one and the same person the things that would belong both to divinity and to humanity, to have enumerated from the works to follow the benefits of the Mediator rather than his names?

Yet here I will compel the heretic to answer: who can be understood to be called Mighty God, Father of the age to come, Prince of Peace? If it is the Son of God abiding before the ages, why will he who has always been this still be so called in the future? If it is the son of man who shall be born, the fullness of times keeps the mystery of the diversity to be joined. Which the Apostle, of course, consequently repeated: But after, he says, the fullness of time came, God sent his Son, born of a woman (Gal. 4:4). What the mother bore, the Father sent; that is, the bodily thing is to be born, the divine thing is to come. God willed not to hide him whom he appoints: let the world grasp the signs of the Lord's coming.

Him whom the Father begot without a mother, the mother conceived without a father: he shall be equally the Son of God and of man. Yet concerning this sacrament let us consult the archangel Gabriel — the prince, that is, of the ministering spirits, to whom the ineffable secrets of the manifest majesty, inasmuch as he stands by with the ministry of unwearied obedience before the sight of perpetual brightness, are shown not only to be understood but to be contemplated. For he first brought the embassy of the heavens to the earth; he endowed the virgin, made fruitful by his word, with the promise of the divine seed; he filled the whole world with salvation by the salutation of one woman. The Holy Spirit, he says, shall come upon you, and the power of the Most High shall overshadow you;

and therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of you shall be called the Son of God (Luke 1:35). Since no reasoning can find that a mere man should be believed conceived of the Holy Spirit — since the Psalmist asserts that every man is conceived in iniquity and born in sin (Ps. 51:5) — it is here shown by the angel that, because of the power of the Holy Spirit poured into the woman's members, that which was to be born of such a ministry was to be called holy; which the Apostle now understands with a connected distinction, and defines that for our redemption God was in Christ. But a crafty gainsayer might perhaps wish so to abuse the testimony of this apostolic word as to concede that God is in Christ, but by grace, not by nature:

as he is in the heart of the saints, whose minds, being free from sin, the indwelling of the Divinity illumines. Let us now see whether the invention holds, if the sentence be completed: God, he says, was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself (2 Cor. 5:19). Let this adverse teacher choose who it is that reconciles to himself, at the end of the ages, the world which — almost amid the very first rudiments of its beginning — had offended its most kindly Creator by the sin of the first parent. If God alone, what does it profit him to excuse to himself what it suffices to have remitted? But if a mere man, by what effect does a mortal reconcile to himself what the Divinity does not release? He is, therefore, one God and man, who himself commends the world to himself; who, for the life of the age, being the son of the mother, supplicates himself as the son of the Father.

Hence the Apostle said not, reconciling the world to God, but to himself: lest perchance you should think that for the redemption of the human race a mere man had prayed — who assuredly, unless as one assumed he passed over into the nature of divinity, would not only fail to dissolve the liability of the human race by any intercession, but would himself bear the burden of the common debt by the parental bond. This remedy, then, the same Apostle says (Gal. 3:19) was arranged through angels in the hand of a Mediator. And showing the cause for which he offered himself as a middle term — assumed by the lowest, bowed down by the highest: A mediator, he says, is not of one; but God is one (ibid. 20). Which being so, just as, unless he act between two, mediation is inappropriately named,

so he whom we call mediator, if he received only whichever of the two substances you please, would have nothing wherewith to undergo the middle office. Which truth indeed he concludes with a single word, and such a one as is coloured by no craftiness, saying: For he himself is our peace, who made both one (Eph. 2:14). He, namely, being the peace of the lowly and the exalted, made one out of both, rendered one out of the two. Certainly, as we set forth above, either the testimony seems to need exposition, or the example to need an argument. What indeed is clearer than that word of the Apostle, in which, adapting himself to the different kinds of men, he reported that he had become all things to all, that, as a covetous doubler of the heavenly talents, he might acquire the souls of all:

I became, he said, to those who were without law as if I were without law, though I am not without the law of God, but am in the law of Christ (1 Cor. 9:21)? Is there anyone so plunged into the depths as to judge that this needs explaining — namely, whether one is in the law of Christ without the divine law? For the Father, in that he is the one giver of the law — who, one and the same, as the psalm signifies (Ps. 84:7), embracing things past and future, will give a blessing in baptism, he who had given the law in the commandment. Indeed, the property of so great a disparity, forced into one, offends minds depressed by carnality and dulled by the conjectures of human custom:

so that, namely, the divine fullness and the human condition, the lowliness of a servant and the majesty of the Lord, the power of the Creator and the servitude of the creature, seem to have rendered one person out of all these. But neither is the reasoning of this solidity far from the solidity of the wise, which seems to hold the greatest place among heirs: namely, that he alone could reform the state of man from its lost condition who had formed him from the clay. Hence most blessed Paul: The first man, he says, was of the earth, earthly; the second, from heaven, heavenly (1 Cor. 15:47). He called him truly man, but earthly with the contagion of pollution, heavenly with the fellowship of divinity.

I ask now, since the Apostle says that a man descended from the heavens, who is there who would dare deny that God returned from the earth? If still it is too little, what the vessel of election asserted, let us consult him who filled the mind of the elect and most precious vessel: No one, he says, ascends into heaven, save he who descended from heaven, the Son of man who is in heaven (John 3:13). If God the very Truth thus accords with his own incarnation, so that before every age he united by foreknowledge what at the end of the ages he had arranged to assume in his nature — see whether he be God who ascends after the triumph of the resurrection, if he is said to have been the Son with the Father before the beginning of the flesh;

or how great the solidity has been in things past, whose so great unity is proclaimed in things to come. But that we may not hesitate at all about this immutability, the Apostle still adds, setting down a testimony from the psalm: Wherefore he says: Ascending on high, he led captivity captive, he gave gifts to men. But that he ascended, he says, what is it save that he also descended into the lower parts of the earth (Eph. 4:8-9)? It is too little that he says God came to earth, unless he confirm that he, on account of the unity of the person which he had assumed, descended into the lower regions. Certainly, when the Jews were murmuring round about and brandishing the darts of blasphemies against our Lord, what do we believe he answered:

Amen I say to you, before Abraham was, I am (John 8:58) — unless because, through the concord of begetter and begotten, he himself, through the succession of maternal forebears, descended from the seed of Abraham, he who without number of years preceded Abraham in eternity? He, the greatest of the patriarchs, though he saw that day in which God abides without end, nevertheless desired to see that day in which man was united to God. He saw, he says, and rejoiced (ibid. 56): because, just as he beheld him in whom was native majesty, so also he had conceived by desire that other in whom the adopted humility was made illustrious: They took up therefore, he says, stones to cast at him (ibid. 59).

Why, further, do we wonder that the Eutychians rage against the Catholic faith, when we see that our Head endured such things from his own to whom he had come, and will requite their perfidy with indignation together with the end? With the same sense of insult this Jew rages with which this heretic is envious. Parricidal indeed there was the casting of stones against the Lord of heaven; but you might think that these heretics too, in their time, hurl rocks with hard minds against the manifest truth. Lest God and man be believed one, the fury of the two conspires. Let it be permitted, I pray, that what we have been made be advanced to something better; let it be permitted that matter compacted of clay be raised aloft with the honour of the heavenly. Why, O man, do you strive so much against yourself, that you be not believed able to pass over into God? The heavenly majesty calls you to a participation of itself: why do you refuse it as it offers itself?

why do you despise him as he presses it upon you? I cultivate the truth for the attaining of likeness; I love the doctrine for the pursuing of imitation. If our Head is Christ, in his exaltation the members will take from the summit a fellowship of however small a sublimity. Let other destroyers, then, demand from the body of both Testaments a likeness of examples by which they may defend their propositions: but it is established that, striving thus at this task of the double library of Scripture, if we wished to confirm what we say with corroborating testimony, all the oracles of the canonical volumes would seem to need to be heaped into one work. From the multitude of which, justly, to avoid prolixity, select and choicest passages are set down.

For just as those proofs are of least effect which, brought forth only from our own resources, are propped by no support of the heavenly Scriptures, so he who disdains to receive a few proofs weighs the matter not by force but by mass; since, fearing to be conquered, unwilling to be instructed, desiring — so as to abandon the knowledge of truth — a volume rather than proofs, he thinks that the causes of things consist not in their greatness but in their pages. Our Lord, therefore, and Redeemer, manifesting the coming of his glory to the disciples more especially among all his precepts, When, he says, the Son of man shall come in his majesty, and all the angels with him, then shall all the nations be gathered before him, and he shall separate them from one another, and shall set the just as lambs on the right, but the impious as goats on the left.

Then shall the king say to them: Come, blessed of my Father, possess the kingdom which has been prepared for you from the foundation of the world; and to those who are on the left, that they depart from him into the eternal fire, which God the Father prepared for the devil and his angels (Matt. 25:31, 34, 41). What here, I ask, that is contemptible in Christ would human pride disdain? What is so worthy of fear, so conspicuous with honour, so to be venerated with awe? Let the heretic devise whether he joins this to the glory of the Father or of the Son. For the business we are conducting, it suffices me to hear: When the Son of man shall come in his majesty. In the present age: Learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart (Matt. 11:29).

In the future, foreknow that he shall come lofty and terrible in brightness in his glory with his holy angels. Let the divider of the united mediator now say whence there is any majesty at all in a body bowed down with insults, if there is no divinity in it — to say nothing of the fact that judgment is appointed by the Father, whether over kingdoms or over nations, according to the merits of individuals. It can seem more to be dreaded that a man, by judging, decrees fitting retributions, than that one should suppose that God the Father has prepared the instruments of judgment for the Son of man. For the Son of man is to come in the majesty of his Father with his holy angels, and then he shall render to each according to his works (Matt. 16:27). He said not, he shall come with the Father's angels, but with his own:

because whatever the Father has are his own too. Hence, since the son of the mother receives in exaltation what the son of the Father was despised as in humility, what heretic would ever be so rebellious that he himself, a mortal, dead in death, would refuse to be bent toward God — to whom he sees the immortal substance of the angels made subject? That Abraham of whom we made mention above said in a certain place of the Gospel (Luke 16:31), when he was entreated by a certain one with vain and too-late prayers as a remedy for the burning fire, that if anyone had refused to receive Moses or the prophets, assuredly he would not even hear one coming from the dead.

But who is the preacher raised from the dead, save Christ Jesus, into whose twofold substance — of which we speak — the unity of the double Testament is gathered from its diversity? For those things are reported in the Gospels which were foretold in the prophets, and it comes about, by the powers of the Testament, not by diversity but by time. For that is recent which today is fulfilled; but that which was long awaited is Ancient. For since the occasion of discourse has arisen concerning Abraham — who is read to have been appointed author of both Testaments, namely by bringing in circumcision for the Old, but by pleasing through faith for the New, being in the former the father of the Jews only, but in the latter of many nations —

let us try whether he agrees with the Gospels concerning the generation of Christ, in respect of the one in whom he recognizes himself the father of the nations, or whether he understands the eternity of that very offspring whom he was to beget. Whether he acknowledges himself younger than his own descendant; whether he himself also consents to the Redeemer in that Christ places himself before Abraham; whether without parental haughtiness he reverently rendered a ministry to the Creator sprung from his own bodily seed. Let there insert itself for a little into the present passage that adjuration, demanding an oath of the same Abraham but disclosing the sacraments, by which, adjuring the steward of his house not without the mystery of the grace that followed, Put, he says, your hand under my thigh, and swear to me by the Lord of heaven that you take not a wife for my son from the daughters of Canaan (Gen. 24:2).

Let him tell me, I pray, what reverence of an oath is supposed to lie in the thigh. For if it were done only in a personal reference, the one adjured would more easily touch the head. Or what is the reason of the thigh, with mention of God and the Lord interposed for swearing, unless because it was sworn by that God and Lord of heaven whom the ages seemed about to bring forth from thence? He knows, then, doubtless, to what lineage he himself is not so much preeminent as he is a servant. For he knows what in his own body he ought to adore; he understands the members which, against human custom, he venerates with special honour.

After these signs of those who went before and the miracles of those who followed — although we bring forth very many of the testimonies from the Gospels and the apostles — I fear in the end that, since the Eutychians are stirred neither by patriarchal deeds nor by prophetic sayings, if they have not heard Moses and the prophets, neither will they believe him who has returned from the dead.