Since the integrity of the faith—which, O religious prince, is common to me with your piety—I judge to have been both sufficiently declared and defended; and nothing is left to the calumnies of the heretics whereby they might defame either us, as thinking ill concerning the mystery of the divine incarnation, or the great Synod of Chalcedon, with whose decrees we have shown this our same faith to be consonant: we now proceed in security to ventilate their hidden frauds and execrable lies, by which, through their satellites and abettors, they have endeavoured to assail the aforesaid Synod under the pretext of defending it. For I am confident that not only to your Serenity, but to everyone reading this who is not such a one as the prophetic word notes, saying, "He would not understand that he might do well" (Psalm
35:3-4)—it will appear clearer than light that the things which are boasted to have been written for the purgation of the aforesaid Synod were done for its abolition. One thing only do we ask of your clemency, with whose name you are adorned: that since, to the prejudice of the Church, many things have been both enacted and written by the surreptitious dealing of the heretics—which the zeal of God impels us to refute—our reply may in no way offend you. For the adversaries have acted craftily through their accomplices, as is their wont, that those very things which they caused to be written should be prefaced even with the title of your name: supposing that, by the terror of your person being held forth, they might escape the condemnation, or even the conviction, of their own rashness and falsehood.
But we are unwilling that those writings be called yours, which we know to be contrary to your faith as it is known to us. For if by your laws you have well and usefully decreed that whatever rescripts of yours, against the very laws which you have promulgated—in which you are served, and which it is lawful for you to override—have been elicited by surreptitious dealing, shall be voided, and shall not be said to have been given by you, since they are found contrary to your general constitutions: how shall we not by right and merit say that those things are not yours which are contrary to the constitutions of your fathers, which you, as a religious man, must needs serve, and which it is lawful neither for you nor for all men in common with you to override? Therefore, obedient to Peter the Apostle, who says:
"Fear God, honour the king" (1 Pet. 2:17); and out of the fear of God, we refute the things that are contrary to the Church of Christ; and out of honour for the king, the things that ought to be refuted we do not call yours. Let them therefore belong to those who vainly supposed that things which cannot stand by reason might be fortified by the false title of your name; and let them rather be imputed to those by whose fraudulent contrivances we know them to have been devised, and by whose long nightly labours composed against the holy Synod of Chalcedon. For what need was there, I beseech you, to trouble the quiet of the Church with collisions of superfluous—not to say harmful—questions?
What need was there to reopen the decrees of the same Synod—not only against the reverence due to religion, but even against the very modesty of humanity—decrees which, by the consent of the whole Church for nearly a hundred years, with you as their guardian, have hitherto remained inviolate? Or what need was there to sift the calumniously alleged sayings of Theodore, bishop of Mopsuestia, long ago deceased in the peace of the Church, and thus, where he is thought to have slipped—or even by a word of human frailty did slip—to rage against him with such great insult as it would not be fitting to inflict upon him even were he still living in the body, unless, first reproved and convicted, after a first and second admonition he were obstinately to resist the truth?
But because the same Theodore is praised in the letter of the venerable Ibas, which the aforementioned Synod pronounced orthodox, the heretics believed that through this the authority of that Synod must be undone, if now—more than a hundred years after his death—they should cause him to be condemned as the author and teacher of Nestorius, and consequently the letter itself also, as praising a heretic.
But what will they do, seeing that not only in that letter is Theodore, bishop of Mopsuestia, praised, but even while he yet lived he is shown to have been both approved and proclaimed with great praise by the holy Fathers who lived with him in the preaching of the word—as by John of Constantinople and Gregory of Nazianzus, and after his death by John and Domnus of Antioch, and by the whole Synod of the East gathered at Antioch? Will they then cause all these venerable doctors of the Church of Christ, or their sayings, to be anathematized?
For otherwise the letter of Ibas cannot be seen to have been justly condemned under anathema for its praise of Theodore, unless all these most blessed Fathers also, or at least their writings, be likewise repudiated, in which we shall show that the same Theodore was praised much more than in it. But neither were those things which are said to have been written—I know not when—by Theodoret, bishop of Cyrus, against blessed Cyril condemned now for any other reason than that through this too the Synod of Chalcedon might seem reprehensible, in that the same Theodoret took part in its deliberation and definition, and there defended the letter of Pope Leo confuting the madness of Eutyches, and showed it to be correct to certain less intelligent persons.
For, as will be shown below, others also whose memory we hold in communion wrote against the same blessed Cyril; nevertheless they were not named in this anathema, since they were not present at the Council of Chalcedon. Concerning all of whom, about to speak, I have arranged to treat the whole matter in this order. First, by the production of evident documents, to demonstrate that the abettors of the heretics did these things for the abolition of the aforesaid great Council and of the decrees of Pope Leo. Then, since it is vainly feigned that the aforesaid letter of the venerable Ibas was not received by the same Council of Chalcedon—but since it cannot be shown to be so, they wished by such a lie to draw us into its condemnation.
But lastly I shall prove that the holy Synod cannot justly be blamed for having pronounced it orthodox. Where at the same time something unexpected, and which you will scarcely believe, O Augustus, shall be shown. For whereas the Eutychians charge the said Synod with having, as it were in approving that letter, affirmed that blessed Cyril was a heretic, and with having received the excusing of Nestorius and the reproach of the Council of Ephesus: I, on the contrary, shall teach that if it had disapproved the aforesaid letter as heretical, hence rather it would seem to have believed blessed Cyril a heretic, and to have excused Nestorius and reproached the Council of Ephesus.