I think it now of no small worth of effort if, by mention in the present little page, I touch upon the occasion which at the present time has burst forth into the exultant venom of an abrupt divergence. There had, then, subsided — after the death of Acacius, once priest of Constantinople — the sprouting persuasion, issuing from Eutyches, of that evil which we have undertaken to overthrow. Of which Eutyches this same Acacius, as your Highness can have ascertained, was a lover more timid than a public defender: praising indeed what he had found from him, but not presuming then to preach these things to a people at that time devoted and thus unpolluted. On account of the shrouding of which simulated fiction, through the favour of the emperor of his age, he perished not only unpunished but even unexamined.
Hence, concerning the communion to be bestowed upon the deceased, the zeal of the common people — nay, what was harsher, of the priests too — divided into opposing parties. And as each had conceived rightly or wrongly concerning the account of the faith, so also did he feel concerning the memory of the past preacher. Meanwhile a dissension was drawn out, not by open but by sudden means, and not so much by separation as by rivalry. It was arranged, therefore, with the king of the East last year, that he should confer on this matter with the bishop of his city, as if by gentle conversation and soothing deliberation. There is, moreover, there a custom in the churches of noble cities, that a supplication with divine praise be celebrated at the beginning of the Mass:
which the shout of the harmonious people raises with such devotion and eagerness that they believe, not undeservedly, that every favour of the sacrifice that follows will be pleasing only when the homage of this devotion has been sent before. But the lowest part of this same supplication — though most well known to your Piety — I have thought I ought to set forth in its place, as the matter demands. And so, as it had been whispered to the prince, and he himself intimates it to the bishop, that nothing would come into complaint and no mention be made of the schism, if that which in the prayer itself was moving the minds of some few, the bishop, entreated by the prince, should either order or permit to be abolished. Namely, that certain persons bear it ill that in the lowest part of that same proclamation there is shouted — what you understand is said in Latin:
O you who were crucified for us, have mercy on us. The bishop — being negligent, and led thus far in the manner befitting the patriarch of so great a city and likewise of the whole East — is persuaded. He conceives, therefore, and disposes himself, about to make incautiously a new definition of this solemn proclamation, with this effect chiefly: that a thing neither handed down from the canonical Scriptures nor instituted in the times of the apostles might seem able to be changed easily, even against the wishes of the peoples. But as soon as the hymn wont to be sung in the Church, truncated in the last part of the prayer, satisfied the hearers less, all that was thought to be devised by the Eutychian heretics became evident to be preached by the bishop.
For what faithful person would not rightly be moved, on hearing that the One crucified for us must by no means be supplicated to have mercy? Why say more? As the storm of sedition grew, while the populace rushed in, and neither the Augustus resisted, nor the aged priest, and — what is more to be lamented — the innocent one himself is driven from his see: as we read in a certain place of Scripture, 'If a man sins against a man, the priest shall pray for him; but if the priest sins against God, who shall entreat for him?' (1 Sam. 2:25). But above all offenses he sins more especially against God who, contradicting the apostolic teaching, strays from the rule of truth: just as nothing is graver than if a blind man, presuming to lead, should begin to be a destroyer of the faith rather than its preacher.
Now weigh the madness of the whole heresy in its rejection of a single word. In this, little indeed seems taken away from the ears: yet with that word the whole meaning of catholic truth is excluded. For they refuse that He who was crucified be supplicated by us, so that the person of the man may seem able to offer as little as the substance of the majesty could suffer no punishment: which is nothing else than to repay hatred for love, and to return insults for benefits. For the dignity of the heavenly beings has been implanted into the human body. God indeed is not subject to torment, yet the divinity is present at the passion. At the time of the cross the world, darkened with daytime shadows, trembled in dread at the injury done to God:
the earth, which trembled, bore witness that the Jews sinned against heaven. That which shines forth by necessity has no need of conjecture; truth shines, nor does it wait to be affirmed by us, since it suffices of itself with its authority intact. Let us hear the Apostle testifying among these things: 'For if,' he says, 'they had known, they would never have crucified the Lord of majesty' (1 Cor. 2:8). But even before this that prophet had said it, who because of his foreknowledge of things to come is surnamed the Angel: 'Shall a man fasten his own God, since you crucify me?' (Mal. 3:8). I ask, who by an obstacle of contention would so bar such plain things against himself? If the Lord of majesty hung, or was fastened to the gibbet, let the adversary say why we should not entreat the man in heaven.
For as yet He had laid up His heavenly power in the secret of the body, as yet He owed His death to the womb; as yet, for our instruction, He practiced the exercises of humility even in the work of His glory. When a certain Canaanite woman — of Israelite faith indeed, but of an alien race — with manly virtue, with praiseworthy petition, with victorious persistence, supplicated Christ on behalf of her daughter, saying, 'Have mercy on me, O Son of David' (Matt. 15:22), here her understanding, by an inner wisdom, overcame the sex of the flesh, and perceived in the man something above the human. The Eutychian teachers refuse to supplicate Him who was crucified for us. She, even in the One about to be crucified, prayed both to the divinity that could not die, and to the humanity that could be raised up.
'Son of David' resounds the flesh; 'have mercy on me' declares God. The Lord of heaven was invoked in His power; the author of man was called upon in His lineage. Long already, as I think, after the death of David — from whose seed Christ shone forth upon the earth through Mary — the descent of the royal pedigree was traced through a series of ages. I now ask: through these successions of forefathers and descendants, from the aforesaid father down to the virginal offspring, along the whole course of the derived inheritance, whether the line be drawn of a phantasm or of true propagation. Moreover it is beyond doubt both that true flesh proceeded from that lineage, and that a phantasm could not have had a lineage. Let us test, however, whether Christ scorned the words of the aforesaid Canaanite woman in her prayer, or perhaps was exasperated by the folly of the supplicant.
'O woman,' He says, 'great is your faith: be it done to you as you will.' If this is faith — surely great if it is well-founded — it would not be right [were it otherwise]; a different response certainly had been given to His mother, when, invited with the accompanying band of disciples to a wedding feast, He was asked, the wine having failed, to perform a miracle; and He said: 'What is that to me and to you, woman? My hour has not yet come' (John 2:4). As if He were to say: Why do you believe me to be only that which you bore? If you think that only what belongs to the flesh is established in me, I cannot fulfill what you demand. These sublime things which you require of me I brought from the Father, I did not receive in a mother: to the body formed in you, with the due condition of infirmity, you are enjoining works of power.
You rightly believe me able to do what you ask, if you understand yourself to be the mother of your Creator just as you are of my body. But if you would have it that you brought forth only a man, my hour has not yet come. Yet no one is to be reckoned so foolish as to wish to apply that saying, 'my hour has not yet come,' as by pagan error, to fixed fates. To understand the mystery of that hour, discernment rather than decree is fitting to be required: since even the condition of our own mortality is not chosen [by us], but the whole necessity of our state is the will of the eternal Governor; how much more Christ, who had the power of laying down His life, and of taking it up again (John
10:18), willed to entangle Himself in no prescription of fate. But when the hour of undergoing the gibbet shall have come, there will appear the heavenly things which the Father begot, and the bodily things which the womb poured forth. Therefore, since the Lord Himself here, in completing the miracle of a divine act, did not repel His mother but instructed her in her ignorance, let us see what He conferred upon this matter with His Apostles in a more earnest discussion. For He was asking them, in a certain place of the Gospel, what opinion the varying crowd held concerning His person. And when, by the diversity of opinion, they had suggested that the people believed Him to be either one of the ancient prophets, or Moses, or certainly Elijah: 'But you,' He said, 'whom do you say that I am?' (Matt. 16:15)
Then the chief of the fellow-disciples, taking up the beginning of the answer, said, 'You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.' What Peter here confesses could plainly have sufficed, even had Christ not confirmed it with so manifest a response. 'Blessed are you,' He said, 'Simon Bar-Jona, because flesh and blood has not revealed it to you, but my Father who is in heaven' (ibid.). Blessed are you, I say, because to perceive God you esteemed not only the flesh but also the blood: nor did the features of the sacred body present my glory to be revealed to you. You did not turn away the gaze of your noble mind from that which was also brought forth in flesh. But my Father, who is in heaven, revealed to you the Son to whom He cleaves even on earth:
whose glory is now covered by poverty, whose honor is now hidden by insults. For the body of our Mediator, lifted up on the lofty triumphal preeminence of the saving wood, hung there, and the power of the saving stake demanded from the inmost heart the sentence of each one. The one mocked the injury. 'Behold,' he said, 'the one who destroyed the temple of God, to raise it in three days'; another held out, on a sponge-cup, a drink of vinegar corrupted with wild gall (Matt. 27). Yet He Himself, preserving amid the punishments of the man the mercy of the Creator, grieving that those for whom He had come were still erring even at the time of their redemption, cried out: 'Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do' (Luke 23:34).
What is 'they know not what they do,' except that they believe they have brought only a man to judgment? He does not know what he does, who does not perceive the majesty in the tortured body. And if those men, believing themselves to be killing only a mother's son, were ignorant of what they did, why does Eutyches even today feign ignorance of the fact that, had they then known — as Christ and the Apostle testify — they would never have crucified the Lord of glory? Whence, since the Lord here wishes forgiveness for those who did not know, it is clear that it cannot be granted to the conscience of those who do know [by experience]. Or do we perhaps wonder that Christ so evidently deigns to expound the mystery of His passion? I would dare to say, we have here still more to wonder at.
As you read, the Lord's death was accompanied by the joined crucifixion of the thieves hanging round about; whom, however, the rashness of a cruel judgment, not the desert of servile guilt, had made equal to the Innocent One. For the horror of a neighboring pollution could not sprinkle the incorrupt splendor of the holy Offspring: just as the sun, if it sends its ray into filth, knows not at all to feel the contagion, remaining wholly untouched. Therefore one of these thieves, exchanging a life of long crime for the end of a brief reckoning — from a murderer becoming a healer, a martyr from a criminal, bound in limbs yet absolved of crimes, fixed with a nail yet free in affection — said: 'Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom.' O blessedness of a happy testimony! O ineffable strength of believing!
Signs had not overcome this man, so that he should perceive the divinity in the man; but he gathered the love of [His] power by the token of [His] infirmities. He longed to invoke one likewise bound; and yet Eutyches disdains to pray to one exalted. The thief trembled at Him as He was dying; Eutyches scorns Him as He reigns. The thief did not fear death from the One about to judge, whereas Eutyches seeks life from a dead man. But that sharer of the punishment, having compassion on his Redeemer through the mortification of his own squalid decay, joined his own cross to the Lord's. A partaker of the penalty, he adored the One free from guilt: lately eager to plunder, he changed the vows of his plundering; armed with the beam-nails, he did violence to the kingdom of heaven.
He understood in Christ that the poor man was rich; he found his neighbor to be one who, though naked, could take away [his burden]; he took the fullness of pardon, he seized a portion of innocence. Beholding God on the wood, he attained the man in heaven. Now further, since the accomplished passion teaches Him to be a true man — tortured with pains, ranked with thieves, consumed by torment, buried in a tomb — through all these things the truth of the assumed body contradicts the assertors of a phantasm. And when the unity of both substances in Christ convicts them by the clear light of the testimonies, that heresy disturbs the whole sequence of the Lord's passion unfolded in what follows, by an insolent scheming of dishonor toward a phantom nature: asserting that a certain fiction of a cloudy body existed, which
seemed to be set forth on behalf of our Redeemer against the injuries of punishments and pains, and that, through the likeness of an empty man delivered over to punishments which majesty could not incur, there existed no true flesh either — the flesh which the people curse, the judge tortures, the scourges beat, which insults mock, thorns pierce through, on which the reed is struck, which is fixed with nails, whose blood is drawn out. And yet, since we place all our hope in the sole mystery of our redemption, and our coming to life again is nothing other than that the Lord endured death, it is false that He saves us by His incarnation, if this too be called into doubt — that He had taken on, to be endured for us, [suffering] in the flesh. Come rather, holy Isaiah, a prophet of your own time indeed, but an evangelist of ours:
come quickly to defend the salvation of Christians against the lies of Eutyches. Let it not irk you to say, nay even to swear, concerning Christ: 'Truly He Himself bore our infirmities, and He Himself carried our sorrows' (Isa. 53:4). And, 'By His stripes we are healed' — not by a secure power of healing, but by the truth of voluntarily suffering for us. If He truly carried our sorrows, then we too are now assured that a fabricated phantasm did not endure true sorrows; and if by His stripe we are healed, in vain does a false-speaking bruise begrudge me the health conferred on me. Moreover, it is rightly concluded by every definition that, if it could have been fabricated, a feigned thing could not have been bruised.
But even in this saying of the prophet the evident property of a twofold substance is found. 'Truly,' he says, 'He Himself bore our infirmities, and He Himself carried our sorrows.' These are two things, of which neither God alone nor man alone would have done both, but the one God could do, the other man. Now by saying, 'He bore infirmities, He carried sorrows,' the prophet evidently expressed one who consisted of both divinity and body. For the infirmities which Adam's wounded offspring drew from the wound of its corrupt origin, He alone healed who had before created it sound. But our sorrows He carried, who could not sweat through the battles of the passion except by torments and toil. Wherefore the evil we had in our nature, God bore:
the evil we suffer in the body, Christ endured. Hence it must here be considered how much deeper into the abyss the Eutychians are plunged than the Bonosiacs. The latter take away from Christ only the honor of divinity; the former the truth of the body as well. Photinus mocks us for adoring the person of a man; this one, for adoring a cloud. Or perhaps these heretics begin the very outset of this delusion from the very cradle-rattles of the sacred nativity in Christ, so that it will be false that He lay in swaddling clothes, that He appeared to the Magi, that He wailed in the cradle? I pass over the rest of the advances of His growing age, in which, embracing equally the divine and human nature, refreshment endured weariness, consolation poured out tears, the Light slept, the Bread hungered, the Fountain thirsted.
I pass over that weeping which He had over the dead Lazarus (John 11:35), before by the effect of raising him He showed that God had first put forth the affection of the human condition. But if He who bestowed such great things is called into doubt, then the things He did must begin to be doubtful: and thus the paralytic falsely thinks himself healed, the lame man falsely set upright, and the sun's ray must be explained away, which one blind from the womb beholds after the darkness of his native prison; or by this phantasm Lazarus himself was deluded, so that, while he slept among the dead, he already believed himself to have risen. But if they accept all these things to be true, and contradict only the injuries of the passion,
let them answer where then was the Son of the Virgin, when, offering in His place a shadow deceiving with a thin cloud — He whom we suppose offered for us — He would by a vain appearance of Himself deceive both His persecutors and the faithful. He would also, by this illusion, make the Father a liar, of whom the Apostle says that He did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us (Rom. 8:32). What Son, if not a true one? How did He deliver Him up, if He colluded? How did He not spare, if He shielded Him from pain? Or by what death was our Lord ended — He who could not but owe some little death for His mother's mortality, being about to pay the lawful condition of dying, yet not about to see corruption because of the imminence of rising again?
This law of both natures that gall signified, which, having tasted, He would not drink — since the death which we all owe from our parent Adam, He would not, by reason of the divinity, drink, but had, by reason of the dispensation, to taste. But indeed, when that came to pass which the Apostle said, that Christ rising again dies no more, and death shall no longer have dominion over Him (Rom. 6:9), let the heretic now dare, if he has any strength, to confess either a Christ without God, or a God without man. Holy Thomas had been absent (John 20:24ff.), when the Savior, returned from the dead, restored by His visible presence the longings of the awaiting disciples, and, growing strong again, composed by His life-from-the-dead the somewhat wavering faith of His own. The disciples therefore report that they had seen the Lord.
He denies that he believes, and promises that he will by no means give faith, unless perception be received. When an interval of time had passed, Jesus came a second time, but now to all together, and, sending the greeting of peace before Him, He reproved with the gentlest rebuke the tardiness of the hesitating Apostle: and at the Lord's command, lest what sight judges be still too little, touch tests the faith. 'Put in,' He said, 'your finger into my side, and be not doubting, but believing' (John 20:27): you who would surely now persevere inexcusably unbelieving, if only by touching you were rendered convinced. He searches with his finger the traces of the passion. The healing wound remained as it had been inflicted, and the life-giving wound preserved, by a happy token, the gaping entrance of the pierced side.
Then at last, returned to himself and enlightened by the holy body, he said, 'My God and my Lord.' What, I ask, did the holy Apostle understand of heavenly things in the flesh? What divine thing did he perceive in the wound by the touch of his inquisitive hand? Except that he had long ago learned that Christ could not be without God, and that these very wounds which he touched had indeed prevailed over the man but had yielded to the Victor: yet they could neither afflict with death anyone but the man, nor be conquered by God except by His raising Himself again.
Here therefore, shut in by the great astonishment of the miracles, when they hear that our Lord, in the state of the body He had taken up — visible to the eyes and palpable to the fingers — entered through closed doors the place where the Apostles were accustomed to gather, they resort to their familiar device of asserting a phantasm, and complain that the gaze of human dimness was deluded by deceptive tricks through the fraud of empty mists. For they perceive in the greatness of the deed something divine, and the vigor of that subtlety by which, the doors being barred, His body entered the secret inner chamber without an entrance; and lest they be forced to acknowledge it miraculous, they contrive that it be uncertain.
See to how great an injury of the Divinity this pertains, if the Master of truth, who forbids us even lies of words, should Himself be believed able to have lied by His deeds. For without doubt it would be a kind of lie, if He should wish to be believed by His own to be what He was not, and if that were thought done by Christ which is not permitted to a Christian. He was instructed both by sight, which suffices for the healthy, and convinced by touch, which is added for the blind. But a weakness sought of one's own accord lacks remedy: whatever medicine one pleases be applied to bleary eyes, he cannot be cured who delights to go about blinded. Or who in such obstinacy has the use of his eyes, who refuses that to be true which his sight assents to?
as though it were no less [wonderful] for God to have penetrated enclosed places than for heavenly things to have lain open to man: He who nevertheless often testified to His own after the resurrection: 'Handle and see, for a spirit has not flesh and bones, as you see me to have' (Luke 24:39). What is so closed to Eutyches? what so open against phantasms? as though He were to say, a coming apparition does not admit a mass of bones and flesh. He would not have Himself called merely any man, that is, a spirit without a body: but that you may recognize Him in the judgment such as you behold to have returned from the sepulcher. Whence now, after the contests of the passion, the Triumphant One had indeed nothing worldly which the need of a revived body would demand.
For neither did hunger demand food of Him, nor thirst drink, nor toil rest, nor labor sleep. All these things, not only in our Head, who is Christ, were boiled away by that brief death of a short time, but also in us will hold force even until death, in such a way that they will be ended by the resurrection: and yet, as I had begun to say, since those Lord's members were now held subject to no need, in order to remove from the hearts of His own the suspicion of a phantasm, when He was seen with the apostles He commanded food to be set out, with whom, the blessing being pronounced, He deigned to eat together. What they still did for the restoration of the body, the good Master did for the testimony of the truth.
Unless perhaps the preacher of the phantasm should say that that mist, the seductive appearance of members, took up what was set before it, and that that food — a pledge of holiness — entered the Lord's body without the burden of corruption, but weighed down an empty stomach with the burdens of an uncertain eating. As for that food, a deceiving image either is bound to become substantial if it snatched it away, or is not aerial if it truly ate. Yet I know that none other than Christ testifies, among the last memorials of that meal: 'That all things must be fulfilled which are written in the law and the prophets and the psalms concerning me' (ibid., 44). And we seek but few examples, since He says that Scripture is altogether fulfilled in its unity. And after these things, he says, while He was blessing His own, He was carried up into heaven (ibid., 51).
Depart far off, Eutyches, with the tricks you have conceived in your mind. Let him alone lack this blessing, who rejoices to be blessed or redeemed by a phantasm. Meanwhile the Son of Man was being carried up into heaven — He who had long been in heaven by foreknowledge, now by nature. Nor did He need any aid of an angelic hand, although He is said to be carried; but the Son of the Father was carrying the Son of the mother; what was God went, what was man was carried. The heavenly gate lay open to Him returning, and the splendor of His original homeland invited its own God returning with the addition of a body. When He had been received, 'Two angels,' he says, 'stood by, thus speaking to the Apostles: Men of Galilee, this Jesus who has been taken up from you (Acts
1:11), that is, He whom the Father received upon His throne, or whom you received in faith, will so come, in the manner in which you saw Him going into heaven. Therefore those to whom what was done seems to be a phantasm have in this saying something to hope for, if He will come here in the way you saw Him going into heaven. There the catholics will see Him whom they long for, the adversaries Him whom they transfixed; there, at the very marks of the nails which they behold, let Eutyches cease to think those fires feigned, in which, after the smoke of the phantasm, he shall burn forever as a firebrand in belated repentance. To brand his old dogma, or to correct his followers for a while, as is to be desired, let it suffice to have said these few things:
so that, from the likeness of the testimonies which we have set forth, they too may of necessity seek out for themselves more numerous ones. But if perhaps, for the old crime of their dogma, they keep either the perseverance of unbelief, or heap up something of new contrivance — since it is a peculiar custom of those who err always to wish to say, in their perverse obstinacy, that by which they perish — God will grant that, at your command and by my service, the depravity by which the heresy is still kindled to increase may be driven off by the one and ever-equal teaching authority of the heavenly Scriptures.