Works 3 part 5/8

because Christ, subsisting from both, is one in each: it seemed good to you to object that in one person 'one thing and another, and in common' cannot be said. 'Because no one,' you say, 'receives in one man the communion of suffering flesh, since the flesh is according to nature a man.' Let us inquire who in this agrees with apostolic understandings — whether you, or Leo, who follows the apostolic words just as he follows the rule of faith. The Apostle therefore says to the Romans: 'As in one body there are many members, but all the members have not the same operation' (Rom. 12:4). Which, explaining more fully to the Corinthians, he says: 'For the body also is not one member, but many. If the foot shall say:

"Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body" — is it therefore not of the body? If the ear shall say, "Because I am not the eye, I am not of the body" — is it therefore not of the body? If the whole body were the eye, where would be the hearing? If the whole were hearing, where would be the smelling?' (1 Cor. 12:14). And below: 'The eye cannot say to the hand, "I have no need of thy work"; or again the head to the feet, "You are not necessary to me"' (ibid. 21). Behold, the Apostle, in one man, in one person, says that there are operations one and another, and greatly diverse from one another — yet so separate and proper to each member, that nevertheless they are held in common with another member.

For not because it is a diverse thing to see with the eyes and to hear with the ears, is therefore each not of one man; nor because it is a diverse thing for the head and the feet to walk, is it therefore not a common work. As therefore the head and the feet have diverse operations in one man, and yet the man is one — nor is one man in the head, another in the feet — so the operations of the Word and of the flesh in Christ are diverse: nor yet is one in the Word, another in the flesh; but from both, and in both, one and the same is Christ. XVII. To die certainly and not to die are far diverse, and yet we ourselves are those who die, and we ourselves are those who cannot die. For the Savior says to his disciples: 'Then they shall deliver you up into tribulation, and shall kill you' (Matt.

24:9). But see what he again says elsewhere: 'Fear not them who kill the body, but cannot kill the soul' (Matt. 10:28) — showing that in each one of us there is one thing mortal and another immortal. For the flesh in us dies, but the soul does not die; whence also in the Creed we confess the resurrection of the flesh, not of the soul, which we are commanded to believe is immortal. Because, therefore, the Savior divided these two things in one man, to which he assigned the property of their quality, he is not on that account to be thought to have divided one man into two men. As therefore the man is one who dies in respect of the one and does not die in respect of the other, so Christ is one, who died in the flesh and did not die in respect of the Word.

Because according to the nature which in him was mortal, he could die; but according to that which in him could not die, he ever remained immortal. Therefore you, who confess that he had or has only one nature, show us how the same one could die, and how the same one could not die. For one nature cannot, being the same, both die and not die; because if it is immortal, by that very fact whereby it is immortal it does not die; and if it is mortal, by that same condition of death it dies. There cannot be both in one nature. And because Christ had both, he was surely of each nature, from which both are found in him:

or if he did not have both, that is, both life and death in himself, but only either life or death (since the nature of death is one, the nature of life another; yet you say that Christ is of one nature), tell us more evidently which one of these two natures was the one nature in him. If of life, that is, of the Word (because the Word is life), then the Word, that is, life, died in itself. But because it is the Word, that is, life, it cannot die; yet Christ died — nothing else remains, according to you, except that Christ either was not at all dead, having only the one nature of the Word, that is, of life, which could not die:

or if he truly died — which cannot be denied — he had only the nature of death, that is, of the flesh, which could die. Acknowledge therefore, O wretched ones, of how great perfidy, of how great impiety it is, to confess one nature in Christ — through which you are convicted of either believing him to be dead [in his Godhead], or of holding a false opinion about him, by not confessing that he could die there where he was able to die. XVIII. Or is perhaps this nature of yours, I know not what, so concreted and compacted from the Word and the flesh, that, subsisting from both, it lost each in the other, and was neither from both — that is, that the Word neither retained its own nature, by the commixture of human flesh, nor the flesh the property of its own nature, by the commixture of the divine nature;

and so Christ is neither man nor God, defrauded of each between the two? With how great sacrilege this is conceived, I beg you to remember. For the profession of one nature forces this to be understood. But if, according to what you yourselves also confess, the Word was so made flesh that it was nevertheless not changed and converted into flesh, retaining and not losing the property of its own nature, in the union of its own flesh, which by a wondrous and ineffable manner it wrought in the womb of its mother; and again, his flesh did not lose nor forfeit the property of its own nature and kind in the union of the divine Word — who does not see that this uniting of the Word and the flesh tended not to the abolition of each nature, but to the union of a single person?

For since you also say — as indeed must truly be said — that the same is perfect God, perfect man, the same true God, true man, whence will he be perfect and true in each, except through the truth and property of each nature? But lest we be thought to calumniate you, by saying that you believe thus, as perhaps you do not believe, let us set down your own words, which, if you bear any sense of shame, you ought not to resist. For thus it is expressly contained in that book which you composed against the Council of Chalcedon with vain labor: 'For thus,

he who was born of Mary, the Savior, incarnate unchangeably, while he was God, was made man, and was called the Son of man, he who before the ages is God the Word, remaining immutable in the nature of God. Whence also one Son of God, in one person, is worthily and piously to be confessed. For without God the Word, the separated nature of the flesh does not subsist in the Virgin, and thus ineffably was God the Word united to flesh, that, incarnate and immutably made flesh, he truly and without confusion became perfect man: whence we confess him to be at once man and God — man indeed in that from us is the true incarnation; but God, the same, on account of his immutable nature from God the Father even after the incarnation. XIX.

Behold, you say that the Word was unchangeably incarnate and made man; you say that the Word was united to flesh; you say that he was made man without confusion; you say that the same is at once man and God: man indeed because from us is the true incarnation, but the same God because even after the incarnation his nature from God the Father remained immutable. Who is so stupid and of so scant sense as ever to fight against his own words? Who is foolish enough to slip so far as to indict his own faith by the very defense whereby he vindicates it? You say that in Christ there is one nature, and behold, with how many words do you destroy that very thing?

For to confess that the Word was unchangeably made man, and united with the flesh without confusion, most plainly destroys the profession of one nature — since uniting is wont to belong not to one but to two, and since by this very union, not being changed nor confused, it indicates the integrity and property of each nature. Likewise, when you say 'the same is at once man and God,' what else do you show but, as it were, two in one? For no one would rightly say 'at once' of any single thing. Likewise, when you say that on this account the Word is man — on account of his true incarnation from us;

and on this account, again, true God, on account of the immutability of the divine nature from the Father even after the incarnation — you surely confess that the natures of the Word and of the flesh are twofold, whole, unchanged, unconfused. For if the nature of the Word is not changed nor confused in the flesh, and again the nature of the flesh is not changed nor confused in the Word, but each holds the whole and incorrupt property of its own truth, the two cannot be called one. But if they are so called, it follows at once that they have undergone their own corruption, and have been changed into that which is so one that it cannot be both. Which, since you rightly flee it, because it is impious and detestable, why do you, by one word, fall into that which by many words you detest?

Why do you destroy, by this one unspeakable profession, the pious and catholic understanding which you hold concerning the immutability of the Word and the truth of his flesh? Believe therefore your very selves, and with the orthodox, by equal confession, confess that God the Word was so united to his flesh in the virginal womb — which is to be made flesh — that he himself is one in each, having in himself each, both the nature of the Word, whereby he is God, and the nature of the flesh, whereby the same God is man. For otherwise that cannot stand which you believe along with us: that he was so made what he was not, that he did not lose what he was. But what he was, and what he was not, is not of one nature; and thereby the Son of God is of each nature, by not losing either.

For just as he cannot be called the Son of God except from the truth of the nature of the Word, which is his from God the Father, so the same cannot be called the Son of man except from the truth of the nature of the flesh, which is his from his human mother. XX. But what so great a variety of your profession means — that what you build with one hand, you again destroy with the other — I do not understand, except that you elude the truth of religion with the gain of lies, bearing one thing in the mouth, another in the heart. For you who a little before confessed God the Word to be unchangeable, again wish to assert him changed by I know not what conversion. For thus you said of him:

'God the Word, willing to free the human race, as the creator of his own fashioning, re-fashioned himself, being incarnate of our substance.' Who does not behold the lurking — nay rather the open — deceit of so impious an opinion? Did God the Word, then, re-fashion himself, and not rather create flesh for himself in the womb? — to which he united himself in an ineffable manner, according to the words of Solomon, who says: 'Wisdom has built herself a house' (Prov. 9:1), which could be destroyed by death, as he himself says in the Gospel: 'Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up' (John 2:19). 'This,' he says, 'he spoke of the temple of his body.' If, then, he re-fashioned himself, he was therefore fashioned beforehand, not begotten.

But we confess the Son of God, before the ages, not fashioned of the Father, but begotten; who, if (as you assert) in the last times he re-fashioned himself in the womb of the Virgin, was therefore, as I said, fashioned — that is, made or created — not begotten. And thus, according to this impious notion, the Arian dogma prevails, asserting the Son of God to be a creature. Then, if he re-fashioned himself, he therefore destroyed himself, that is, that which he was before, and re-fashioned himself into that which he was not before. For a re-fashioning cannot be understood without the destruction of the former form. And hear Jeremiah: 'The Lord,' he says, 'said to me: Go down into the potter's house, and there you shall hear my words:

and I went down into the potter's house, and behold, he was doing his work upon the wheel, and the vessel that he was making was marred in his hands; and turning, he re-fashioned it into another, as it seemed good in his eyes' (Jer. 18:2). Do you see, then, that the re-fashioning of the last work demonstrates the destruction of the former? So therefore the Word of God could not, without the abolition and destruction of his former state, re-fashion himself in the womb of his mother. But even granting — what the condition of this proposition does not allow — that he re-fashioned himself without his own abolition, nothing is then found that he took from the Virgin. And what did he seek to re-fashion himself there, from which he could receive nothing? But if he received (because the Apostle says: 'Taking the form of a servant' [Phil.

2:7]), he undoubtedly fashioned that which was not, by uniting it to himself. As also the Father speaks to him through Isaiah, saying: 'And I have fashioned you, and given you for a covenant of the nations' (Isa. 49:8); and he himself, in the same prophet, testifies with like voice: 'And now the Lord says, who formed me from the womb to be his servant' (ibid.). Whence, with wondrous impudence and a detestable error of depravity, you dare to assert the Word of God to be re-fashioned, when you can nowhere show this written in the divine Scriptures. XXI. And because it would be long, if I should wish to constrain this impious notion of yours with more subtle questions, and to show how great absurdities follow it together with how great abominations;

let us now look at this, which it is manifest that you have said with an Arian understanding — that there cannot be understood in Christ anything 'greater and lesser' — desiring, by your usual argumentation of cunning, to take from him the human nature, through which he could be found inferior. Finally, these are your words: 'But how there can be understood in Christ nothing great, nothing least — even though he condescended to our measures by his own will — the divine deliberation of the three hundred and eighteen Fathers also makes manifest, containing the belief in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, whom they acknowledge to be both incarnate and of one substance with the Father; not dividing in Christ a lesser humanity and again a deity equal to the Father.'

Would that you knew that you alone err in this, and that you did not, by sacrilegious rashness, summon even the Fathers into the charge of a like error! For the Nicene synod said that the Lord Jesus Christ, according to that whereby he was begotten before the ages of God the Father, is of one substance with him; because the Arians, in respect of this, were unwilling to confess him to be of one nature. For of what nature do they seem to you to have said, or to say: 'There was a time when he was not, and before he was born he was not'? Without doubt, of the nature of the Word. Concerning that very nature, therefore, they received the answer that he always was, and had no beginning, and was not from nothing. For the Arians did not assert the nature of Christ's flesh to be made from nothing, which they certainly were not ignorant was procreated from the Virgin.

Finally, after the most religious Fathers had sufficiently disputed concerning this divine nature of the Son of God, in what follows they also made mention of the nature of his flesh, saying that he descended and was made incarnate. Therefore they did not, as you wished to accuse them, set things down in a reversed order, so as first to say 'incarnate' and afterward 'of one substance with the Father'; rather, they first set down the term 'of one substance,' which pertains to that nature of the Word about which the question was being debated, and afterward they said 'incarnate,' which pertains to the nature of his flesh, concerning which nothing had been mutilated. They, therefore, who preserved both the time and the order and the distinction between the Essence (Usia) and the incarnation:

calling the Essence coeternal with the Father, but the incarnation as taking place in time, they plainly confessed that there are two natures in one and the same Son of God: one by which he is begotten of the Father before all ages, and another by which he was made of a woman at the end of the ages; one by which he is coeternal with the Father, another by which he is found later in time; one which shows him equal to the Father, another which teaches him to be less than the Father. Since this is so, by what authority do you dare to assert that nothing greater and lesser can be found in Christ, when he himself says: The Father is greater than I (John XIV, 28); and: I and the Father are one (John X, 30)? And the evangelist Luke relates concerning him: But the child grew and waxed strong (Luke I, 80):

These things you see to be contrary to the profession of one nature; because one nature, and most of all a divine nature, cannot receive decrease and increase, nor be alike called greater or lesser. With open shamelessness you have chosen to lie about Christ against the faith of the Scriptures, rather than to confess in catholic fashion that he has two natures, by which the same one cannot be denied to be both great and lesser. XXII. It also pleases me to examine that chapter in which the whole madness of your unbridled fury has broken out, in which you strive to assert that the Word of God deigned to show himself palpable and visible through the nature of his divinity, not through the nature of his incarnation. For these are your words:

That he who in the beginning was the Word, who was announced through the prophets, was made flesh, was seen upon the earth and conversed with men, made visible and palpable, is eternal life and is God by nature, the blessed John attests, saying: That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life (1 John I). As far as I have been able to understand in these words, you seem to me to wish to build up this: that the nature of the Trinity, since it is the nature of the Word, which always remains invisible and untouchable, presented itself in itself as the visible and palpable Word of God, not in the nature of the flesh which it joined to itself in the womb of the mother.

Since this is so, what in this profession will be impious, what sacrilegious, whereby we, detesting the error of so great a perfidy and rashness, should treat the words of the apostle John, which these men so wickedly abuse to the patronage of their depravity, in no other than the same apostle's sense, first binding and constraining the inexperience of these men, that they may answer how, if the Son of God was seen and handled in the nature of his divinity, why only the apostles are to be believed to have seen and handled him; whereas with an equal seeing and handling the soldiers too who crucified him touched and saw him: and through this they too could see the Father; for he himself says: He who sees me sees also the Father (John XIV, 9)?

What in this profession will be impious? Then, what need was there for the Apostle to say: That which we have seen we declare, when all those who were then present and had believed in him likewise saw him? Since to think thus is absurd and full of emptiness, let us spiritually attend to the spiritual words of the Apostle, by which he testifies that he saw and handled the Word of God not with bodily eyes and hands, but with the members of the inner man. For with whatever nostrils his fragrance is drawn in, and with whatever mouth his sweetness is tasted, with those same the eyes and ears and hands touch him. Indeed the Church says to him: Thy name is as ointment poured out (Cant. I, 2); and: We will run after thee to the odor of thy ointments (Cant. I, 3). And Paul:

We are, he says, the good odor of Christ (2 Cor. II, 15). And David: Taste and see that the Lord is sweet (Ps. XXXIII, 9). Therefore for you to believe in the Son of God, this is to see, this is to hear, this is to smell, this is to taste, this is to handle him. But in the touch the firmness of belief is conveyed, the sense to which greater faith is given before the other senses. For both the eyes are often deceived by a phantasm, and the ears by a falsehood. With this sense, therefore, the Apostle had so touched him, that is, had so most firmly believed in him, that he could never at any time doubt concerning him. And therefore he says: That which we have seen with our eyes, and our hands have handled (1 John I, 1).

For indeed even the unbelieving saw and touched the Son of God, through the nature of his flesh; but the apostles alone recognized also the nature of his divinity. XXIII. That you may know the apostle John to have used 'touch' or 'seeing' in place of the mind's belief, hear what he says in what follows: Little children, it does not yet appear what we shall be; but when he shall appear, we shall be like to him, because we shall see him as he is (1 John III, 2). Surely he had handled, surely he had seen him. Why then does he long, as for a great gift of blessedness, that he shall see him, and there places the whole reward of his labor, if he sees him? (For he does not say 'we have seen,' but 'we shall see him as he is':

nor does he say 'he has appeared,' but 'when he shall appear') unless because the Son did not appear as he is, but as he was made; and therefore he was not seen in this world as he is, but as he was made, to be seen in the future as he is. By believing, therefore, not by seeing, the Apostle says that he saw that which is from the beginning. He saw through the mirror of faith in a riddle, about to see more manifestly when the veil is cast off; concerning which manifestation of the vision, which is reserved for the faithful alone, the Lord himself said in the Gospel: He who loves me shall be loved by my Father, and I will show myself to him (John XIV, 21). If the apostles saw him, how did he promise that, on account of the merit of their love, he would show himself to them in the future, unless because they saw and yet did not see him?

They saw him as he was made, and they did not see him as he is. Yet they believed him as he is, and therefore they saw him as he is. For the reward of belief is the manifestation of the vision. But if you wish most obstinately to resist this exposition, asserting that the Word was handled by the apostles' hands in its own nature, give us the whole consequence of the words for this understanding: for the Apostle does not say, 'And our hands handled the Word of life,' but he says, they handled of the Word of life (1 John I, 1). They handled, therefore, not it itself, but of it: which is found most manifestly to pertain not to the handling of a visible touch, but to the handling of the mind.

Then, did the apostles establish the authority of the whole faith in this, that we should believe they had handled the Word of God with visible hands, whereby that doubting disciple was rebuked, who wished to test the Lord by such an experiment? Or how can we have fellowship of this grace with them, not being able to handle Christ as they handled him? That which, he says, we have seen and heard we declare unto you, that you also may have fellowship with us (1 John I, 3). But fellowship with them will be ours from this, if we believe, as they also did, in the Son of God, whom according to his divinity they understood by the faith of the heart, and according to his humanity they beheld with bodily eyes.

And since to all the chapters objected by you against Leo's letter we have met, as I judge, with a fitting reply, and have driven away the mists of empty questions with the shining light of truth; now let us also look at those things which you have panted out with contumelious voices against the Council of Chalcedon, the refutation of which we shall begin with another beginning. A DEFENSE OF THE DECREE OF THE SYNOD OF CHALCEDON. 1. The blessed apostle Paul, knowing that the profane and noxious instituting of deadly doctrine can be overshadowed by an appearance of truth, and that, by deceits lurking within, with a cunning surface of words, the venom of a serpentine assault can be overlaid:

and that a poison-bearing cup, smeared or mixed over with the sweetness of honey, is not easily perceived and discerned in the very first taste of one who sips it, gave us a great and singular sign for tracking out fraud: that from the quality of each teacher's morals the sincerity of his doctrine may be examined. For that we might be able, with an easy and ready keenness of attention, to detect the tricks of wicked doctrine, he depicted for us the vices of those very authors as to be perpetrated in shameful and unworthy habits of pleasures, saying:

In the last times perilous times shall be at hand, and men shall be lovers of themselves, covetous, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, wicked, treacherous, without faith, without affection, slanderers, not keeping peace (2 Tim. III, 1), and the rest. There is therefore no doubt that to be disobedient to parents, and to assail those same with the false darts of accusations, descends from the impiety of heretical depravity. For hence the apostolic word marked such men as treacherous and without faith, in that they exist not only disobedient to their parents, but even the bitterest accusers of them.

Since this is so, it will surely be doubtful to no one that those are heretics who reject and despise the decrees of the holy and venerable Council of Chalcedon, and with audacious rashness resist the religious constitutions of so many Fathers, accusing them with sacrilegious mouth of having deviated from the catholic faith. II. And first indeed they accuse them concerning the persons now cast out of the council, and again after intervals of time received back. As though it were not Christian and apostolic that one who perhaps on account of the vice of contention had been cast out of the council ought again, for the sake of peace and concord, to be received back.

For by this reasoning they will be able to accuse also Paul the apostle, that when he had rejected from his company John who is surnamed Mark, so that he did not even yield to the request of Barnabas to take him into equal fellowship in the ministry of the word (on which account so great a contention arose between such great and excellent men that they departed from one another); yet again Paul received back the same Mark whom he had earlier rejected, writing to Timothy: Take Mark and bring him with thee; for he is profitable to me in the ministry (2 Tim. IV, 11). So therefore also those Fathers received back, when made more corrected, into the grace of peace, those whom they had perhaps earlier cast out of the council on account of some fault (since Solomon says: Cast out the contentious man from the council, and his contention goes out with him [Prov.