and to show how things contrary to health may be avoided, so it belongs to the pastoral office to provide that heretical malignity may not harm the Lord's flock, and to demonstrate how the wickedness of wolves and robbers is to be guarded against: because heretical impiety could never so lurk that it was not both ever detected and justly condemned by our holy fathers. Our solicitude, therefore, which we bestow upon your charity, could not fail to note that certain Egyptians, especially merchants, had come to the City, and were defending those things which at Alexandria have been wickedly perpetrated by heretics, asserting that in Christ there was the nature of the deity alone, and that He had utterly nothing of the truth of the human flesh which He took from the blessed Virgin Mary:
quaeimpietas, etfalsumhominem, etDeumdicitessepassibilem.Quodquoaudeantanimoquoveconciliodubitarenonpossumus; quiaenimipsiaveritateEvangeliirecesseruntetmendaciadiabolisuntsecuti,aliosqnoquevoluntsociossuaeperditioniseffioere; etideopaternavosetfraternasollicitudinecommonemusutinimicoscathoHemfidei,hostesEcclesiae, incarnationisDominicenegatores, etinstitutoasanctisapostolisSymbolorepugnantes,innullumrecipiatisconsensionisaffeCtum, dicenteApostolo: Hæreticumhominempostunametsecundamcorreptionemdevita,sciensquiaquihujusmodiest, subversusest, etdelinquitpropriojudiciocondemnatus (Tit. III, 10, 11). CAP. II.
which impiety declares both a false man and a passible God. With what mind or by what counsel they dare to doubt, we cannot doubt; for because they themselves have departed from the truth of the Gospel and have followed the lies of the devil, they wish to make others also partners of their perdition; and therefore we admonish you with fatherly and brotherly solicitude that you receive into no affection of agreement the enemies of the catholic faith, the foes of the Church, the deniers of the Lord's incarnation, and those who fight against the Creed established by the holy apostles, the Apostle saying: A heretical man, after a first and a second correction, avoid, knowing that he who is such is subverted, and sinneth, being condemned by his own judgment (Titus iii, 10, 11). Chapter II.
— For he perishes by his own obstinacy, and by his own emptiness departs from Christ, who follows after that impiety through which he knows that many before him have perished, and who reckons it religious and catholic to himself, that which by the judgment of the holy Fathers is established to have been condemned both in the faithlessness of Photinus, and in the madness of Manichaeus, and in the insanity of Apollinaris: so that, to the destruction of their own souls, they consent to a depravity as though it were new and not yet condemned, who deny the sacrament of the Lord's incarnation. As though by the whole reading of the Gospel we were taught anything other than this: that by this one sacrament of divine mercy the human race is saved in those who believe:
namely, that the only-begotten Son of God, equal in all things to the Father, by the assumption of our substance, remaining what He was, deigned to be what He was not, that is, true man, true God, who without any sin of the heart united to Himself our whole and perfect nature in the truth both of flesh and of soul, and, conceived within the womb of the blessed Virgin mother by the power of the Holy Spirit, disdained neither the bringing forth of birth nor the beginnings of infancy: so that the Word of God the Father might speak the human substance as being in Himself, both by the power of the deity and by the infirmity of the flesh, having from the body bodily actions, and spiritual powers from the deity. For it is human to hunger, and to thirst, and to sleep;
it is human to fear, to weep, to be sorrowful; it is human, finally, to be crucified, to die, and to be buried: but it is divine to walk upon the sea, to turn water into wine, to raise the dead, to make the world tremble by His own death, and, with flesh made alive, to ascend above all the height of the heavens: so that those who believe this cannot doubt what they ought to ascribe to the humanity, what to assign to the deity: since in both is one Christ, who both did not lose the power of His deity, and by being born took up the truth of perfect man. Chapter III. — These, therefore, most beloved, of whom we speak, flee as a deadly poison, execrate them, turn away, and, if when rebuked by you they will not be corrected, abstain from their conversation:
since, as it is written, Their word spreadeth like a cancer (2 Timothy ii, 17). For to those rightly rejected from the unity of the Church by just judgment, no communion is to be granted, which they have lost not by our hatreds but by their own crimes. You, therefore, beloved of God and approved by apostolic testimony, to whom the blessed apostle Paul, the teacher of the Gentiles, says: Because your faith is proclaimed in the whole world, guard within yourselves that which you recognize so great a preacher to have thought concerning you. Let none of you be made a stranger to this praise, so that those whom, through so many ages with the Holy Spirit teaching, no heresy has violated, not even the contagions of the Eutychian impiety may be able to stain. And we trust that the protection of God guards your hearts and your faith:
that Him whom hitherto you have faithfully obeyed, you may please forever by a persevering observance of the catholic faith, through Christ our Lord. Amen. Quesnel [notes that] two prefaces, one for the consecration of a bishop, the other for the ordination of a presbyter, and the address of the archdeacon to the bishop, which are set forth in the Roman Pontifical, since from the similarity of style [they seem to be of St. Leo] …
He judged that they should be attributed to Leo, and then appended to his Sermons. But we, although as regards the author we do not entirely disagree with Quesnel's opinion, nevertheless do not here attach those prefaces and the address, for this reason: that in the second volume we intend to reprint the most ancient Roman Sacramentary from the Verona manuscript, edited some years ago by Giuseppe Bianchini and by him ascribed to our author, in which those two prefaces are contained. There, moreover, much will be discussed on this matter, and the address also, which is missing in that mutilated Sacramentary, we shall add at its end.
This treatise, first edited from the Vatican codex 2346 by Gerard Vossius of Tongeren, and inserted among the Miscellanea of certain holy Fathers appended to the edition of St. Gregory Thaumaturgus (Mainz, 1604), found a place also in other subsequent editions of St. Leo. Now Vossius noted that in that manuscript this less fitting title was displayed: 'Leo, pope, bishop of the first see, to Flavian, concerning the errors of Eutyches'; as though it were the very letter directed to Flavian, bishop of Constantinople. We ourselves found the same treatise in another codex, of Queen Christina of Sweden's Vatican collection, no. 139, of about the fourteenth century, which contains the Works of Leo. And in it this inscription stands on page 460: 'The Faith of Pope Leo, which St. [Gregory...]'.
'Gregory in his letters wondrously praises it, saying thus: "Whosoever adds to or diminishes the faith of St. Leo the pope, or does not fully embrace it down to the smallest jot, is in no way to be called a bishop, but is to be struck with anathema."' Yet St. Gregory wrote this not concerning this treatise, but concerning the famous letter to Flavian. Likewise, after that treatise, this annotation is placed in the same manuscript: 'The canons prescribe that in the first synod the letters of blessed Leo the pope be read, which he wrote to Flavian concerning the error of Eutyches.' We have also come upon the same treatise in the Vatican manuscript 551, which will prove to be different from the codex of Vossius by certain variant readings, and especially by the final note.
It is a codex of about the twelfth century, and contains the Letters of Jerome, before which this treatise is placed with this title: 'Leo, pope, bishop of the first see, to (the word "and" added by a later hand) Flavian', where the writing of the first hand had been deleted. There is afterwards subjoined the note: 'This is that faith which St. Gregory...' etc., and then: 'The canons prescribe...' etc., as in the Vatican Reginensis. Quesnel believed that this treatise, as certainly spurious, ought to be relegated to the appendix, on the ground that it constituted a cento stitched together from the writings of Leo. For everything in it, taken here and there from various texts of the holy Pontiff, copied word for word, is drawn now from the Sermons, now from the Letters, and these are indicated in the margin.
Vossius, after indicating the sources from which this treatise was compiled, adds the following: 'These passages compared by us we thought fit to adduce here, that it might be established that this is the true doctrine of St. Leo. But whether this present treatise was thus written by St. Leo himself, or was composed by others out of his doctrine, does not seem here to require curious investigation. This one thing indeed we have ascertained from the Letters of St. Leo, namely that the same things are often repeated in various places:'
But the falsity of the inscription first arouses suspicion; then a difficulty is caused by certain passages which seem to present a rationale of what precedes, yet do not cohere sufficiently with what precedes, as will most clearly appear from note 38. Therefore, concerning the cento which someone less skilfully compiled, we believe there can be no doubt; and accordingly we have judged that this treatise should be left in the appendix into which it had been cast by Quesnel. But we have given this cento the first place, because works of this kind are of a certain middle condition between the genuine and the supposititious; for what is composed of Leo's own words and sentences is not altogether foreign to Leo; nor again is it altogether proper to him, since it was put together by another.
Although Vossius used but one codex in editing this treatise, he nevertheless noted certain variants in the margin, which he took from the reading of the Sermons or of the Letters, and these alone the later editions exhibit. We, from the two manuscripts cited a little before, the Vatican and the Reginensis, shall subjoin others, or where it may be opportune we shall transfer them into the text, the old reading being indicated. CHAPTER I. — To the instruction of the children of the Church the service of our sermon must be added. For we do not fear that the spiritual and learned will scorn as beneath their notice what pertains to the profit of others, namely to impart to others what they themselves have learned to their great advantage. Let there be therefore, throughout the hearts of all, a dispensing of the divine gifts, and let both learned and unlearned not despise the servitude of our mouth.
Let there also be present to our faith the bounty of Him of whose majesty we attempt to speak, so that unto the profit of His whole Church He may make both you capable and us abundant. When therefore we direct the eyes of the mind to understand the dignity of the Holy Spirit, let us think nothing different from the excellence of the Father and the Son: for in no respect does the essence of the divine Trinity differ from its own unity. It is everlasting to the Father to be the begetter of the Son coeternal with Him. It is everlasting to the Son to have been begotten timelessly from the Father. It is everlasting also to the Holy Spirit to be the Spirit of the Father and of the Son: so that never was the Father without the Son, never the Son without the Father, never the Father and the Son without the Holy Spirit;
and, all gradations of existence being excluded, no Person there is prior, none posterior. For the immutable Divinity of this blessed Trinity is one in substance, undivided in operation, of one accord in will, equal in omnipotence, equal in glory. And when holy Scripture so speaks of it that it designates something either in deeds or in words, the catholic faith is not disturbed as to what may seem to befit the individual Persons, but is instructed: so that through the property either of word or of work the truth of the Trinity may be conveyed to us, and the understanding may not divide what the hearing distinguishes. For on this account certain things are uttered under the appellation now of the Father, now of the Son, now of the Holy Spirit, that the confession of the faithful may not err concerning the Trinity.
Since it is inseparable, it would never be understood to be a Trinity, if it were always spoken of inseparably. Well, therefore, does the very difficulty of speaking draw our heart to understanding, and through our weakness the heavenly doctrine assists us: so that, because in the deity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit neither singularity nor diversity is to be conceived, the true unity and the true Trinity can indeed be perceived by the mind at once, but cannot at once be uttered with the mouth. Founded therefore, dearly beloved, in our hearts upon this faith, we savingly believe that the whole Trinity together is one power, one majesty, one substance, an undivided operation, an inseparable love, an undifferentiated authority, together filling all things, together containing the universe.
For what the Father is, this also is the Son, this also is the Holy Spirit; and the true Deity can be neither less nor greater in any one of them. It is so to be confessed in the three Persons, that the Trinity may not admit of solitude, and equality may preserve unity. CHAPTER II. — For never is the majesty separate from the omnipotence of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. And whatever the divine governance does in the disposition of all things comes from the providence of the whole Trinity. There is there one kindness of mercy, one severity of justice; nor is anything divided in the action, where nothing is diverse in the will. What therefore the Father illumines, the Son illumines, the Holy Spirit illumines.
And although the Person of the one sent is one, of the one sending another, of the one promising another, at once both unity and Trinity are made manifest to us; so that He may be understood as having an essence that possesses equality and admits no solitude, and as being of the same substance yet not of the same Person. So that what, with the cooperation of the inseparable Deity being preserved, the Father performs in certain things, the Son in certain things, the Holy Spirit properly in certain things, is the disposition of our redemption, is the plan of our salvation. For if man, made to the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1), had remained in the honour of his nature, and, not deceived by the fraud of the devil, had not through concupiscence deviated from the law set for him, the Creator of the world would not become a creature:
nor would He who is eternal undergo temporality, nor would the Son, God equal to God the Father, take on the form of a servant and the likeness of sinful flesh. But because by the envy of the devil death entered into the world (Wisdom 2), and human captivity could not otherwise be loosed, unless He should take up our cause without loss of His majesty, and become true man, and He alone have no taint of sin: the mercy of the Trinity divided among itself the work of our restoration, so that the Father should be propitiated, the Son should propitiate, the Holy Spirit should enkindle.
If therefore, under the guidance of grace, dearly beloved, we faithfully and wisely acknowledge what is proper to the Father, what to the Son, what to the Holy Spirit in our restoration, and what is common; then those things which were humbly and bodily done for us we shall without doubt so receive, that we may perceive nothing unworthy concerning the one and the same glory of the Trinity.
For although no mind suffices to think of God, and no tongue to speak of Him, nevertheless, however much it is that is attained by human understanding concerning the essence of the Father's Deity, unless it be one and the same when either His Only-begotten or the Holy Spirit is thought of, it is not piously discerned, but too carnally beclouded, and even that which seemed to be fittingly perceived concerning the Father is lost: because one withdraws from the whole Trinity, if in it unity be not held fast. But by no reasoning is that truly one, which is in any inequality diverse.
When therefore we direct the keen edge of the mind to confessing the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, let us drive far from the soul the forms of visible things, and the ages of temporal natures, far the bodies of places, and the places of bodies. Let there depart from the heart whatever is extended in space, whatever is enclosed by a boundary, and whatever is not everywhere always, nor wholly. Let the thought conceived concerning the Deity of the Trinity understand nothing by distance, seek nothing by degrees; or if it perceive anything worthy of God, let it dare to deny this to no Person there. CHAPTER III. — This faith, however, no earthly wisdom discovered, nor human opinion persuaded;
but the Only-begotten Son Himself taught it, the Holy Spirit Himself established it: of whom nothing is to be thought otherwise than of the Father and of the Son: because, although He is not the Father, nor the Son, yet He is not divided from the Father and the Son. And just as He has His own proper Person in the Trinity, so He has one substance in the Deity of the Father and of the Son, filling all things, containing all things, and with the Father and the Son governing the universe unto the ages. For what is so opposed to the prophets, so repugnant to the Gospels, so in fine rebellious to the apostolic teachings, as to preach one single nature in the Lord Jesus Christ, born of the Virgin Mary and timelessly coeternal with the everlasting Father?
For if He is to be understood as of man only, where is the Deity that saves? If only of God, where is the humanity that is saved? But the catholic faith, which resists all errors, refutes likewise these two impieties together, condemning Nestorius, who divides the divine from the man, and detesting Eutyches, who empties out the human in the divine: for the Son of the true God, true God, having unity and equality with the Father and with the Holy Spirit, deigned also to be the same true man, neither separated from the flesh in the conception of His Virgin Mother, nor in the birth: so uniting to Himself the humanity that He remained immutably God: so imparting the Deity to the man, that He did not consume him by glorification, but increased him.
For He who was made in the form of a servant did not cease to be in the form of God; nor was He one in the one and another in the other, but one in both. Let not our faith be disturbed by any varieties of the dispensations, but whether in the miracles of His powers or in the reproaches of His sufferings, let us believe both that He who is man is God, and that He who is God is man. Thus true God and true man is the one Christ, rich in what is His own, poor in what is ours; receiving gifts and pouring forth gifts; a partaker of mortal men and the giver of life to the dead: so that in the name of Jesus Christ every knee should bow. CHAPTER IV.
— Eutyches, therefore, not knowing what he ought to feel concerning the incarnation of the Word of God, and being unwilling to labour in the breadth of the holy Scriptures, might at least have received with attentive hearing that common confession by which the whole company of the faithful professes that they believe in God the Father Almighty, and in Jesus Christ His only Son our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit and of the Virgin Mary. By these three clauses the engines of almost all heretics are destroyed. For when God the Father Almighty is believed, the Son is shown to be coeternal with Him, differing in nothing from the Father: because from God, God; from the Almighty, the Almighty; from the Eternal, was born the Coeternal:
not later in time, not inferior in power, not unlike in glory, not divided in essence. The same, the Only-begotten Everlasting of the everlasting Begetter, was born of the Holy Spirit, of the Virgin Mary. This temporal nativity took nothing from, added nothing to, that divine and everlasting nativity; but expended itself wholly in restoring man, who had been deceived, both that He might conquer death, and by His own power destroy the devil who held the dominion of death. CHAPTER V.
— In which conflict undertaken for us, the contest was waged by a great and wonderful law of equity, while Almighty God engaged with the most savage foe not in His own majesty, but in our lowliness, opposing to him the same form and the same nature which was indeed a partaker of our mortality, but free from all sin. For we could not overcome the author of sin and death, unless He took up our nature and made it His own, whom neither could sin defile, nor death detain.
For He was conceived of the Holy Spirit within the womb of the Virgin His Mother, who brought Him forth with her virginity as inviolate as she had conceived Him with her virginity inviolate. Or did that heretic perhaps for this reason suppose that our Lord Jesus Christ was not of our nature, because the angel sent to the Virgin said: And the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee; and therefore also that which shall be born of thee holy shall be called the Son of God (Luke 1): as though, because the conception of the Virgin was of a divine work, the flesh of the conceived was not of the nature of her who conceived?
But that generation, singularly wonderful and wonderfully singular, is not so to be understood as though by the novelty of the creation the property of the kind were removed. For the Holy Spirit gave fecundity to the Virgin, but the truth of the body was taken from her body, and, wisdom building herself a house (Proverbs 9), the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us (John 1), that is, in that flesh which He took from man, and which the spirit of a rational life animated.
The Word of God therefore, God, the Son of God, who in the beginning was with God, through whom all things were made, without whom was made nothing, for the sake of delivering man from eternal death was made man, so inclining Himself to the assumption of our lowliness without diminution of His majesty, that, remaining what He was and assuming what He was not, He might unite the true form of a servant to that form in which He is equal to God the Father, and might so join together each nature by so great a bond, that neither should glorification consume the lower, nor should the assumption diminish the higher. CHAPTER VI.
— The property of each nature therefore being preserved, and coming together into one Person, lowliness was assumed by majesty, weakness by power, mortality by eternity; and to discharge the debt of our condition, the inviolable nature was united to a passible nature, so that, as befitted our remedies, one and the same mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus, might both be able to die from the one and not be able to die from the other. In the entire perfection therefore of true man, and with a nature made perfect, true God was born, whole in what is His and whole in what is ours. But by 'ours' we mean what the Creator founded in us from the beginning, and what He took up to be restored.
For those things which the deceiver brought in and deceived man admitted, had no trace in the Saviour. Nor, because He underwent the fellowship of human infirmities, was He on that account a partaker of our transgressions. He assumed the form of a servant without the heart of sin, increasing the human, not diminishing the divine, because that self-emptying whereby the Invisible offered Himself visible, and the Creator and Lord of all willed to be one among mortals, was a stooping of compassion, not a failure of power. Accordingly, He who, remaining in the form of God, made man, the same in the form of a servant was made man. For each nature holds its own property without defect. And just as the form of a servant does not take away the form of God, so the form of God does not diminish the form of a servant.
For because the devil boasted that man, deceived by his fraud, had been deprived of divine gifts, and, stripped of the endowment of immortality, had undergone the harsh sentence of death, and that he had found in his own evils a certain solace from the fellowship of the transgressor; and that God too, by the demand of justice's reckoning, had changed His own sentence toward man, whom He had founded in so great an honour: there was need for the dispensation of a hidden counsel, that the immutable God (whose will cannot be deprived of its own benignity) might fulfil His first dispensation of loving-kindness toward us by a more secret mystery, and that man, driven into guilt by the craft of diabolical iniquity, might not perish against God's purpose. CHAPTER [VII].
— The Son of God therefore enters these lowly things of the world, descending from the heavenly seat and not withdrawing from the paternal glory, begotten by a new order, by a new nativity. By a new order, because invisible in His own things, He was made visible in ours. The Incomprehensible willed to be comprehended. Abiding before all times, He began to be in time. The Lord of the universe assumed the servile form, the immensity of His majesty being overshadowed. The impassible God did not disdain to be a passible man, and the Immortal to submit to the laws of death. But begotten by a new nativity, because inviolate virginity, which knew not concupiscence, furnished the matter of the flesh. From the Mother of the Lord was assumed nature, not fault:
nor in the Lord Jesus Christ, begotten from the womb of the Virgin, is it, because the nativity is wonderful, therefore unlike our nature. For He who is true God, the same is true man. And there is no falsehood in this unity, while both the lowliness of man and the loftiness of the Deity are mutually present. For just as God is not changed by compassion, so man is not consumed by dignity: for each form performs, in communion with the other, what is proper to it, namely the Word working what belongs to the Word, and the flesh carrying out what belongs to the flesh. The one of these flashes forth in miracles, the other succumbs to injuries. And just as the Word does not withdraw from equality with the paternal glory, so the flesh does not forsake the nature of our race.
For one and the same is He (which must often be said) truly the Son of God, and truly the Son of man. God by that in that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God; man by that in that the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (John 1). Whom, assuredly, as man diabolical cunning tempts, so to Him, as to God, angelic services minister. To hunger, to thirst, to grow weary, and to sleep, is evidently human. But to satisfy five thousand men with five loaves, to bestow upon the Samaritan woman living water, a draught of which grants to the drinker that he thirst no more, to walk upon the surface of the sea with feet not sinking, and by rebuking the storm to lay low the heavings of the waves, is without ambiguity divine.
Just as therefore (to pass over many things) it is not of the same nature to weep, moved by compassion, for the dead friend Lazarus, and to raise the same man, the mound of the four-days' burial being removed, to life again at the command of His voice; or to hang upon the cross and, the light being turned into night, to make all the elements tremble, or to be pierced with nails and to open the gate of paradise to the faith of the thief; so it is not of the same nature to say: I and the Father are one (John 10); and to say: The Father is greater than I (John 14). For although in the Lord Jesus Christ there is one Person of God and of man, yet that whereby the contumely is common to both is one thing, and that whereby the glory is common is another. For from what is ours His humanity is less than the Father; from the Father His Divinity is equal to the Father. CHAPTER [VIII].
— On account therefore of this unity of Person to be understood in each nature, both the Son of man is read to have descended from heaven, when the Son of God took flesh from that Virgin of whom He was born; and again the Son of God is said to have been crucified and buried, since these things were suffered not in the Divinity itself, whereby He is the Only-begotten, coeternal and consubstantial with the Father, but in the infirmity of the human nature. Whence we all confess also in the Creed the Only-begotten Son of God crucified and buried, according to that saying of the Apostle: For if they had known it, they would never have crucified the Lord of majesty (1 Corinthians 2):
because the catholic Church lives by this faith and advances by this, that in the Lord Jesus Christ neither is the humanity believed without true Divinity, nor the Divinity without true humanity. But when in the Council Eutyches professed that our Lord was of two natures before the union, but after the union confessed one nature; I marvel that so absurd and so perverse a profession of his was rebuked by no reproof of the judges; and that a discourse so exceedingly foolish, so exceedingly blasphemous, was so passed over, as though nothing offensive had been heard: since it is as impious to say that before the incarnation the Only-begotten Son of God was of two natures, as it is nefarious to assert that, after the Word was made flesh, the nature in Him was single.
Let not Eutyches on that account esteem this to have been rightly or tolerably said, because it was refuted by no sentence. For then most fruitfully is the true faith defended, when a false opinion is condemned even by its own followers. CHAPTER IX. — Amid these things therefore, by however much Nestorius deviated from the truth, separating the Deity of the Word from the substance of the assumed man, by so much did this man also depart from the right path, who so preaches the Only-begotten Son of God to be born from the womb of the blessed Virgin, that He bore indeed the appearance of a human body, but the truth of human flesh was not united to the Word. Of which prodigy of falsehood, who does not see what monsters of opinions are born?
For if the man Jesus Christ, the mediator of God and men, is denied, it is necessary that it be filled with many impieties, and that either Apollinaris claim Him for himself, or Valentinus usurp Him, or Manichaeus lay hold of Him, none of whom believed in the truth of human flesh in Christ Jesus. Which not being received, not only is it denied that He who was in the form of God, remaining the same in the form of a servant, was born a man according to flesh and rational soul, but also it is refused that He was crucified, and died, and was buried, and that on the third day He rose from the dead, and that, sitting at the right hand of God the Father, He is to come to judge the living and the dead in that same body in which He was judged:
because these mysteries of our redemption are made void, if Christ is not believed to have assumed the true and whole nature of true man. Or shall the divine signs, because they were manifest, cause the bodily evidences to be called false? And shall the testimonies of each nature avail that the Creator be understood, but not avail that the creature be saved? What is of the Deity did not diminish the flesh, what is of the flesh the Deity did not destroy. For the same is both everlasting from the Father, and temporal from the Mother: inviolable in His own power, passible in our infirmity; in the Deity of the Trinity, with the Father and with the Holy Spirit, of one and the same nature; but in the assumption of the man, not of one substance, but of one and the same Person:
so that the same was rich in poverty, omnipotent in abjection, impassible in torment, immortal in death. For neither was the Word converted, in any part of itself, either into flesh or into soul, since the simple and immutable nature of the Deity is whole always in its own essence, receiving neither loss nor increase of itself;
and so blessing the assumed nature, that the glorified nature abides in the glorifying. But why should it seem unfitting or impossible that the Word and flesh and soul should be one Jesus Christ and one Son of God and of man, if flesh and soul, which are of dissimilar natures, make one Person even without the incarnation of the Word, since it is much easier that the power of the Deity should effect this unity of itself and of man, than that the infirmity of humanity alone should obtain it in its own substances? Neither therefore was the Word changed into flesh, nor the flesh into the Word, but each abides in the one, and one is in each, neither divided by diversity, nor confused by commingling.
Nor is one from the Father and another from the Mother, but the same in one manner from the Father before all beginning, in another manner from the Mother at the end of the ages: so that He might be the mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus (1 Timothy 2), in whom the fullness of the Divinity dwelt bodily (Colossians 2): because it is the advancement of the assumed, not of the assuming, that God exalted Him, and gave Him a name which is above every name (Philippians 2). CHAPTER X.
For the Lord's birth according to the flesh, although it has certain properties by which it transcends the beginnings of the human condition — whether that He alone was conceived and born of an inviolate Virgin without carnal desire, or that He was brought forth from His mother's womb in such a way that fruitfulness gave birth yet virginity remained — nevertheless His flesh was not of another nature than ours, nor was a soul breathed into Him by any other principle than into the rest of men, a soul which excelled not by diversity of kind but by loftiness of virtue. For He had nothing in His flesh opposed to Himself, nor did discord of desires beget a conflict of wills.
His bodily senses flourished without the law of sin, and the truth of His affections was under the governance of the Godhead and of the mind; He was neither tempted by allurements nor did He yield to injuries. True man was united to true God; He was not brought down from heaven according to a soul existing beforehand, nor created out of nothing according to the flesh, bearing one and the same Person in the Godhead of the Word, and holding a nature common with us in body and soul. For He would not be the Mediator of God and men unless the same One were both God and man, and in each nature both one and true. Furthermore, we do not call Christ God only, as the Manichaean heretics do, nor man only, as the Photinian heretics do;
nor do we call Him man in such a way that something is lacking to Him which certainly belongs to human nature — whether a soul, or a rational mind, or flesh which was not taken from a woman but made from the Word converted and changed into flesh: which three false and empty errors the three various sects of the Apollinarist heretics have brought forth. Nor do we say that the blessed Virgin Mary conceived a man without the Godhead, who, created by the Holy Spirit, was afterward taken up by the Word — a doctrine which we have rightly and justly condemned in Nestorius who preached it; but we say that Christ the Son of God, true God, was born of God the Father without any beginning of time, and that the same, true man, was born of a human mother in the fixed fullness of time;
nor does His humanity, in respect of which the Father is greater, take anything away from that nature which is equal to the Father. Now both of these together are the one Christ, who most truly said, according to His Godhead: 'I and the Father are one' (John 10), and according to His manhood: 'The Father is greater than I' (John 14). Therefore, although in our one Lord Jesus Christ, the true Son of God and of man, there is one Person of the Word and of the flesh, and both essences have common operations, yet the qualities of their several works are to be understood, and by the contemplation of sincere faith it must be discerned to what things the lowliness of weakness is raised, and to what things the loftiness of power is bowed down: what it is that the flesh does not do without the Word, and what it is that the Word does not accomplish without the flesh.
For without the power of the Word the Virgin would not conceive nor bring forth, and without the reality of the flesh His infancy would not lie wrapped in swaddling clothes. Without the power of the Word there would be no restoration of the weak and no giving of life to the dead, and without the reality of the flesh food would not be needful for one fasting nor sleep for one wearied. Finally, without the power of the Word the Lord would not profess Himself equal to the Father, and without the reality of the flesh the same One would not say that the Father was greater — since the catholic faith receives both and defends both, which, according to the property of the divine and human substance, believes the one Son of God to be both man and Word.
Therefore, although from that beginning in which the Word was made flesh in the Virgin's womb (John 1) no division ever existed between the divine and human substance, and through all the bodily increases the actions of the whole time were of one Person, yet those very things which were done inseparably we do not confound by any commingling, but we perceive from the quality of the works what belongs to each form. For neither do the divine acts prejudice the human, nor the human the divine: since both concur in one and the same so that in them neither is the property consumed nor the Person doubled.
Therefore, although the Lord Jesus Christ is one, and in Him there is one and altogether the same Person of the true Godhead and the true manhood, and the solidity of this union can be sundered by no division;
yet the exaltation — because God exalted Him and gave Him a name which is above every name — we understand to pertain to that form which was to be enriched by the increase of so great a glorification. For in the form of God the Son was equal to the Father, and between the Begetter and the Only-begotten there was no distinction in essence, no diversity in majesty, nor had anything departed from the Word through the mystery of the Incarnation which needed to be restored by the gift of God the Father. But the form of the servant, through which the impassible Godhead fulfilled the sacrament of great piety, is the human lowliness which was raised by the glory of divine power into so great a unity, being joined in Godhead and manhood from the very conception of the Virgin, that neither were the divine acts done without the man, nor the human without God.
Wherefore, just as the Lord of majesty is said to be crucified, so He who from eternity is equal to God is said to be exalted. Nor does it matter from which substance Christ is named; since, with the unity of Person remaining inseparably, the same One is both wholly Son of man on account of the flesh, and wholly Son of God on account of the one Godhead with the Father. Whatever therefore Christ received in time, He received according to His manhood, to which are conferred the things which it did not have. For according to the power of the Word, the Son also has indifferently all things which the Father has: and the things which in the form of the servant He received from the Father, the same things in the form of the Father He Himself also gave.
That faith, when very many of the heretics assailed it, Nestorius and Eutyches attempted to break in upon — with different assertion indeed, but with like impiety. Let Nestorius therefore be anathematized, who believed the blessed Virgin to be the mother of a man only, so that he made one Person of the flesh and another of the Godhead: whereas the Word was so made flesh within the virginal womb that, through an unspeakable sacrament, in one conception and one birth, according to the truth and union of both natures, the same Virgin was both the handmaid of the Lord and His mother.
Let Eutyches also be smitten with the same anathema, who, denying the truth of human flesh and soul, asserted that our whole Lord Jesus Christ was of one nature, as though the Godhead of the Word had itself converted itself into flesh and soul. Such sacrilegious falsehoods have been condemned throughout the whole world by the sentences of the holy Fathers. But the catholic faith, singular and true, justifying the ungodly and creating the just, drawing men to participation in its own humanity, acquires salvation in Him in whom alone man has found One innocent.
That faith, according to the prophetic, evangelical, and apostolic teaching, and the saving doctrine of the Creed, the Council of Nicaea established, the examination of Chalcedon confirmed, and the whole world celebrates and venerates. Defend this same faith, most beloved, with a pious and praiseworthy love; nay, hold it faithfully and firmly, and steadfastly assert it. For, as the blessed Apostle Paul says, great is the sacrament of piety, which was manifested in the flesh, justified in the spirit, appeared to angels, was preached to the nations, was believed in this world, was taken up in glory (1 Timothy 3:16).