教宗書信集 第 1 章 第 22/50 段

Acknowledging that the same one is consubstantial with the Father according to his deity and consubstantial with us according to his humanity, and acknowledging his miracles and the sufferings which he willingly endured in the flesh; we moreover receive the four holy councils, that is, of the three hundred and eighteen holy fathers who were gathered at Nicaea, and of the one hundred and fifty holy fathers who assembled in this royal city, and of the holy fathers who first gathered at Ephesus, and of the holy fathers who assembled at Chalcedon, even as your Apostolic See teaches and proclaims. All the priests, therefore, following the teaching of your Apostolic See, thus believe and confess and proclaim.

Wherefore we have hastened to bring these things to the notice of your Holiness through the most blessed bishops Hypatius and Demetrius, that it may not be hidden from your Holiness what has been evilly and in Jewish fashion denied by certain few monks according to the perfidy of Nestorius. We ask, therefore, of your fatherly affection, that by your letters directed to us and to the most holy bishop and patriarch of this nurturing city—your brother, since he too has written to your Holiness through the same men, hastening in all things to follow the Apostolic See of your Beatitude—you make manifest to us that your Holiness receives all who rightly confess the aforesaid, and condemns the perfidy of those who in Jewish fashion have dared to deny the right faith.

For thus all the more will the love of all men towards you and the authority of your See increase, and the unity of the holy churches with us will be preserved undisturbed, when through you all the most blessed bishops shall have learned the sincere teaching of your Holiness concerning those matters which have been reported to you. And we ask your Beatitude to pray for us and to obtain for us the providence of God. Copy of the subscription: May the Divinity preserve you through many years, holy and most religious father. Given on the eighth day before the Ides of June at Constantinople, in the third consulship of our lord Justinian, perpetual Augustus.

For which reason we ask your Holiness that you confirm the aforementioned letter by your authority, and that you hold Cyrus and those like him as excluded from communion until they submit to the decrees of your Holiness. Copy of the subscription: May the Divinity preserve you through many years, holy and most religious father. Given on the day before the Ides of March at Constantinople, after the consulship of Belisarius, most distinguished man. Whosoever, therefore, as has been said, shall presume to contradict this confession and this faith, let him know that he is excluded from catholic communion. Given on the fifteenth day before the Kalends of April at Constantinople, after the consulship of Belisarius, most distinguished man. (92.) To the most glorious and most clement son Justinian Augustus, Bishop Vigilius.

Having received with accustomed veneration the letters of your Clemency, delivered by our son the glorious man Domnicus, former consul and patrician, we have perceived with manifold gladness that the universal Church must rejoice, because you permit the Christian faith, by which the divine Trinity is honoured and worshipped, to be in nothing dissimilar, in nothing discordant; and because under your most clement rule you heap up unwearied works of grace toward God, in serving whom you reign and in reigning you serve, so that in those things which the Lord has granted to your singular piety for the integrity and devotion of your faith, they may be seen to be justly and fittingly fulfilled which the preaching of the Apostle teaches, namely that the saints through faith overcame kingdoms.

For the vast multitude of subjected nations shows what kind of kingdoms you have overcome more by the arms of faith than by bodily might; and the greater the number by which that multitude rises up, the more it is overcome by the perfect working of the sole mystical miracle.

Wherefore it befits us greatly to glory in the Lord, that in his mercy he has deigned to grant you not only an imperial but also a priestly mind, so that what all bishops in offering sacrifice beseech according to ancient tradition—entreating that the Lord may deign to unite, govern, and guard the catholic faith throughout the whole world—your piety may be seen to have accomplished with utmost strength; since throughout all parts of your kingdom and all the ends of the earth you command that this faith be preserved in unshaken peace—the faith which, through the venerable synods of Nicaea, Constantinople, the first of Ephesus, and also of Chalcedon (ever to be embraced by the judgment of Christian confession), is established as irreproachably grounded—and command that no one be called by the Christian name who separates himself from the unity of the aforesaid synods, and that whoever does not with all his strength and all his effort defend their faith you deem not one still to be judged, but rather one already judged.

To whom, then, of the priests would it not procure joyful exultation and boundless gladness, that the light of the gospel truth, implanted in your heart through the grace of our God, now shines forth upon the universal Church, the night of pernicious and heretical dogmas being dispelled? Far be it, then, from us, that what we profess to beget joy for all our brothers and fellow bishops should not either be shared with all, or—what is more fitting—stand out above all. From which matter, venerable emperor, we have received with devout congratulation the fact that, kindled with the ardour of faith and the stirring of a sweet indignation, you have directed to us…

…even directed pious addresses, in which with praiseworthy affection you called to mind Celestine and Leo of blessed memory, prelates of the Apostolic See, who, condemning each several heresy with synodal assembly according to the divine dispensation committed to them, sanctioned by a law abiding for ever what all Christians ought generally to follow. Their approved decrees our predecessors of holy memory Hormisdas and John the elder, and also Agapitus, preserving in all things, struck down with the sword of a just sentence all the followers of the Nestorian and Eutychian heresy. Let the clemency of your piety unhesitatingly recognize that we follow this with utmost strength and defend it with utmost effort.

Moreover, the letters of blessed Leo directed to Flavian of holy memory, then bishop of the city of Constantinople, and also to the emperor Leo of most clement memory—in which, by God's inspiration, he confounded with reasoned argument the perfidy of the heretics, that is, of Nestorius and Eutyches—we wholly embrace and defend with the charity that is fitting. And although the sincerity of our mind and of our faith, with God guarding it, in no way permits us to go against these things, yet the admirable prudence of your piety ought to weigh well that those bishops are not deemed worthy who have in the least failed to keep inviolably the decrees of the aforesaid prelates of the Apostolic See.

Therefore these things, which concerning the faith were venerably defined by the fathers of the four holy synods and by the appointed letters of Pope Leo of blessed memory, and by the decrees of our above-written predecessors, we, following in all things, and condemning by the approved authority of the Apostolic See those contrary to their teaching, anathematize all whosoever shall attempt either perversely to dispute or faithlessly to doubt concerning the exposition or rectitude of that faith, and who hold contrary opinions to those things which concerning the faith are defined in the most holy synods of Nicaea, Constantinople, and the first of Ephesus, and also of Chalcedon, and in the letters of our predecessor of blessed memory Leo.

…which we have mentioned, or in all the things which its authority sanctioned—we separate them from the unity of the catholic faith; and embracing and in all things approving the booklet of your faith, which by the service of our obedience your piety, with orthodox devotion, then delivered to our predecessor of blessed memory Agapitus—in which you have declared, by the testimony of Scripture also, for the instruction of the age to come, those things which you bear in mind—we keep, deviating in nothing under any occasion from the faith of our oft-named predecessors, unless perchance, the darkness of the heresy in which they wallow being cut away, they should be willing to follow the truth of the above-written faith by the correction of a fitting penance, and, condemning all the things which with most depraved impiety they have said against those things which we have set forth, and with their own subscriptions and their own voices rejecting all the errors of the heretics, they shall have been converted by canonical severity, so that then they may merit the mystery of holy communion, once they shall have fulfilled all the things which we have set forth, canonical and apostolic…

…severity, since it does not befit us to cut off the place of penance from any who corrects himself. But in those matters wherein our brother and fellow bishop Menas, mindful of his own booklet which he had presented to our predecessor of blessed memory Agapitus at the time of his ordination, with the assent of your Clemency, truly follows the discipline of the Apostolic See against the heretics named below—that is, Severus of Antioch, Peter of Apamea…

…Anthimus, who by wicked ambition had also usurped the church of Constantinople, Zoras, and also Theodosius of Alexandria, and Constantine of Laodicea, and Antoninus of Verset[a], defenders and followers of the Eutychian heresy and also of Dioscorus (who at the synod of Chalcedon is read to have been condemned among others)—your piety has commanded that anathema be pronounced. In this the condemnation pronounced against the heretics by our aforesaid brother, or by any other, is in no way received grievously by us; but we both gladly embrace it and confirm it by the authority of the Apostolic See, striking the accomplices of the condemned with the like vengeance of anathema.

…on this condition, namely, that (as we mentioned above) according to the decrees of the prelates of the Apostolic See, we open the way of penance and communion to those who shall have come to their senses and have accepted the decrees of the preceding synods or of the above-written pontiffs of the Apostolic See. But since we know that those who destroy the heretical perfidy rather profit themselves the more by avoiding the fellowship of those who err, than they add anything of firmness to the manifoldly established sentence of the above-written fathers—which sentence, it is agreed, subsists undoubtedly by its own strength, God being its author—therefore hitherto we have deemed that a condemnation, as being not newly delivered, in no way needs a new response.

For whoever shall be found to be followers of the heresies which we mentioned above, or of all the others which have been condemned by apostolic definition and decree, have been struck down not only by a new law, but by the very condemnation of their own authors long since pronounced.

And although some malicious interpreter may have wished to suspect or understand otherwise concerning our silence toward your piety, yet we—whom the blessed apostle Peter appointed by pious tradition to render a reason to everyone who asks—have judged with willing mind that satisfaction must be given to your Christianity, humbly hoping that by the snares of none who surreptitiously creeps in will you permit the privileges of the See of the blessed apostle Peter to be in any way diminished in your most Christian times; which, if they be disturbed—which we do not believe—or diminished in any respect, exhibit the likeness of a violated faith. For the singular piety of your wisdom knows that it will by all means merit that authority of the blessed apostle himself by his recompense.

…which authority you shall have preserved, whether in his privileges or in the person of us, your humble servant, God inspiring you. Yet, that all things may inform your piety and nothing further be left ambiguous through the cunning of the crafty schemer, we have appended, as many of the decrees of our predecessor of blessed memory Pope Leo—those which were directed at various times to the East—as out of the many we believed necessary at present; beseeching, through him whose causes you hasten and desire to conduct entirely with the affection of Christianity, that your piety deign to read the whole, and that nothing remain which is in the least not perused.

For I know that, if God shall have given you the will to read, you so dispose all things—handling them with the wisdom singularly granted you by God—that no faithful priest can be vexed in any part concerning either religion or any prejudgment. Let it therefore suffice that we have rendered a reason, as the merit of your Christianity demanded, in as far as we were able; although no one, however crafty and subtle, will find that we have either committed or attempted anything against the synodal decrees or the decrees of our predecessors, prelates of the Apostolic See. But those things…

…which are of profit to the catholic faith or to your soul—concerning which, as your piety knows, both for the sake of the priestly office and for the manifold benefits bestowed by your Clemency, I have more reason than others to take thought—I do not omit to suggest: first of all beseeching, and asking through the interceding suffrage of the blessed apostle Peter himself, whom you love, that you may ever deign to send here to the Apostolic See, for the ordering of the advantages of your commonwealth, persons who are orthodox and pleasing to God and having no wrinkle or spot of faith.

…through whom both the things that pertain to your public good may be wholesomely ordered, and, for the reward of your soul, the integrity of catholic discipline may in nothing be disturbed; so that all may truly acknowledge your piety already to have—as indeed we believe—that gift of heavenly grace which Solomon was still asking of the Lord, saying: 'You shall give to your servant a heart to hear and to judge your people in righteousness, and to discern between evil and good.'

And since through our son Domnicus, the bearer of the present letter, we have committed certain things to be suggested by word of mouth, we hope that, the Lord inspiring you, you may deign both to hear them willingly, and especially those which shall be profitable to ecclesiastical peace and thereafter to the tranquillity of all, and that you may dispose them with your accustomed Christianity and providence. (93.) To our most beloved brother Menas, Vigilius. Although our word of communication has suggested to our lord, our son the most serene and most Christian emperor, all that concerning ecclesiastical causes we were able and believed expedient, with God's help, we have nevertheless judged it necessary to direct writings also to your Charity through the person of our most Christian son, the patrician Domnicus.

By which writings know that we have received with great exultation and joy the fact that you assert that you inviolably keep the most holy synods of Nicaea, Constantinople, the first of Ephesus, and Chalcedon—in which the foundations of the orthodox and apostolic faith are shown—just as the reading of your promise, then given to our predecessor of holy memory Agapitus, testifies, and that you especially follow in all things the decrees of blessed Leo our predecessor. For what could be more worthy of your Charity and more befitting your honour than not to deviate from the teaching of the prelates of the Romans?

Or what could be more delightful or more pleasing to us than to embrace, in the love of Christ our Lord and Saviour, those who keep the deeds of our elders and predecessors? Wherefore, spiritually greeting you, we both exhort you and, with the affection that befits us, unceasingly address you, that you may follow in all things the rule, the admonition, and the decrees of that man—just as you have promised and declare. For the archives of your Fraternity are full of the writings of our aforesaid predecessor of holy and venerable memory Leo, which are read to have been directed by that same pontiff to your predecessors; and likewise the things which your predecessors promised are re-read to our predecessors. But let it suffice to have said these things.

For the word of the Apostle is before our eyes, who says: 'We speak wisdom among the perfect.'

But concerning those matters wherein we have learned that you, mindful of the booklet which you had delivered to our above-written predecessor, and following the decrees of the apostolic teaching, have pronounced anathema against the heretics named below—that is, against Severus of Antioch, Peter of Apamea, Anthimus also, the usurper of the church of Constantinople, Zoras, and also Theodosius of the city of Alexandria, and likewise Constantine and Antoninus of Bessenta, defenders and followers of the Eutychian heresy and also of Dioscorus (who at the synod of Chalcedon is read to have been condemned among others)—wherein you joined nothing to the sentence of old decreed by the fathers (and against such prelates, vicars of blessed Peter, a sentence already given against the very authors of the heresies utterly did not need it, since he who is recognized as a follower of a condemned heresy has been struck down not only by a new law but by the very condemnation of his own author)—yet we gratefully and gladly embrace it and confirm it by the interposition of the authority of the Apostolic See, over which God willed us to preside; and all their accomplices, or all heretics, shall lie subject to the like sentence of condemnation:

reserving only this in all respects, as befits apostolic moderation: that if any of them, or of any who err, having come to know the truth of the catholic faith, doing penance shall wish to return, and, by profession in writing also, shall have condemned the whole depravity of his errors and of his accomplices, together with the error conceived of the heresy in which he wallows, and, following the institutes of the apostolic teaching, shall have pronounced anathema against him who either does not follow the aforesaid four synods in the cause of the faith, or does not confess in all things the venerable decrees of our predecessor of blessed memory Leo and does not follow them with all his strength and all purity of mind—then let him by all means be gathered into our communion, which it does not befit us to deny to any who repents, under apostolic and canonical satisfaction, as we have aforesaid; for our Redeemer came not to destroy anyone, but in his mercy to save all.

And by the hand of the lord Pope: With God's help, through his grace, I, Vigilius, bishop of the holy catholic Church of the city of Rome, have with his aid reviewed and subscribed these sheets of the above-written letters, which with God's help I dictated. And in another hand, the subscription of the patrician Domnicus: I, Flavius Domnicus, most distinguished man, count of the domestics, former consul and patrician, reading over, comparing, and consenting, have subscribed these sheets, made by the most blessed and apostolic Pope Vigilius in the cause of faith, addressed to our lord Justinian, most pious and most Christian prince, and also to Menas, most blessed man, archbishop of the city of Constantinople, on the fifteenth day before the Kalends of October, in the consulship of Justin, most distinguished man. (94.) Of Pope Gelasius, against the Pelagian heresy.

Gelasius, bishop, to all the bishops throughout Picenum, greeting in the Lord. Hitherto we grieved that the provinces nearest the City especially were being laid waste by barbarian incursions and by the savage tempest of wars; but, as far as we have learned amid the very ferment of recent calamities and perils, the devil has inflicted a more pernicious ruin upon the minds of Christians than the hostile ferocity has upon their bodies.

This evil chiefly regards the priests of those regions, who, undertaken with such sloth and such dissimulation of their ministry, neglect the governance of the souls committed to them, so that they suffer them even to be torn by any petty little beasts under their very eyes with impunity; nay rather, by fostering the wickednesses that creep in and by acquiescing to the corrupters, they not only in the least draw back the faithful, but themselves rather furnish the nourishments of perdition by their own example.

But what would such pontiffs be likely to do if—which God forbid—either some new and hitherto unknown pestilence should break out, or sacrilegious utterances of blasphemies should be produced by keener wits and craftier minds, or by men made cunning through some expertise in secular learning? These men who do not recall nor refute the worn-out fabrications of so old an error—refuted both by the great masters of the churches and even in our own age—and who do not reject them when uttered by the unlearned and foolish? Thanks be to almighty God, since through persons of this sort he examines the hearts of his own, men who know not this very poison which they speak.

For what would the rulers of the peoples do against more cunning enemies, they who willingly subject themselves to the unlearned—since assuredly, even if there was in the rulers of the Lord's flock such utter cowardice that they could neither understand nor rein in even so vile and dull a person, they ought by pastoral care to have sought out from us the things to be learned, rather than inconsiderately to submit a compliant will to absurd persuasions?

For there has been thrust upon us a wretched old man named Seneca, who is not only a stranger to all learning but also utterly foreign to common understanding itself, one plunged heedlessly into the mire of the Pelagian abyss, like one of the frogs of which we read in the Apocalypse, and horribly wallowing in that filth, finding no way whatever by which he might emerge from it; for, forsaking the purity of Catholic truth, the more he strives to lift himself up along the slippery ways of falsehood, the more he is hemmed in and overwhelmed in its muddy pits, being one of those of whom the apostle Peter says:

But these, like irrational beasts by nature born for capture and for destruction, blaspheming in matters of which they are ignorant, shall perish in their own corruption, receiving the wages of unrighteousness.

For indeed his mind is so dull and blunted that concerning those poisons which he has ill drunk in and vomited forth, he is altogether unable either to receive or to render any account; but, hardened by diabolical blindness and already given over to himself, he stands condemned by the deadly obstinacy of his heart, and nothing remains for him save that our God, who has said that things which seem impossible to men are easy with Him, should pierce such a mind with a mighty compunction, that, according to the blessed apostle Paul, he may come to his senses and escape the snares of the devil, by whom he is held captive by the sentence of the divine judgment. Many things which he had not attained even in a waking state concerning the Pelagian doctrines we have set forth more openly, exposing them; and we have shown that they were long ago refuted.

These very things too which he seemed to put forward, we have taught were long ago brought into the open by the Pelagian heretics and fittingly crushed by Catholic preachers. We have proved that Pelagius, Caelestius, Julian, and very many other men of rhetorical eloquence were convicted in this assertion and were struck down both by ecclesiastical decrees and by imperial commands; and accordingly we have affirmed that this man cannot bear those things in which such great men of old were laid low, since he can neither grasp with his understanding the very matters which were argued by them, nor set them forth in like speech. But, as has been said, a diabolical mind possessed by that inspiration, coming into the depth of its evils, now consents to no remedies.

Wherefore, out of the countless kinds of blasphemies which the authors of the Pelagian heresy have put forth, three which this lamentable old man has especially adopted for himself we have thought ought not to be passed over in silence, so that, being unsealed, they may be more manifestly laid open and, as God overthrows them, may be the more easily shunned once refuted. Infants, they say, are created by divine work in the wombs of their mothers: therefore they think it does not seem just that God's handiwork should be begotten bound to any sin without any actions of its own, and they make God unjust, if infants are made guilty before they are born.

This they put forth as the sharpest argument of their doctrine, not perceiving that those first parents of the human race, begotten indeed from no progenitors but from the harmless matter of clay, and framed purely and sincerely by the mighty divine art and made rational, of their own will followed the seducer, the devil, and were infected by depraved lusts through the excess of transgression. In them assuredly human nature sinned, and human nature was made faulty, a receiver without doubt of the evil which it had not known before; for that, falling away from what is good and right, it should slip back into a disposition toward evil and depravity, is plain from the very course of the consequent order of things.

Being thus made the founders of our substance, they rendered themselves passible and corruptible, violating so far the gifts of the divine condition that they were punished with the retribution of death. For that they died on that very day on which they were made mortal is held to be beyond doubt. Accordingly, whatever these progenitors brought forth from their seed is indeed the work of God according to the establishment of nature, but not without the contagion of that evil which they drew upon themselves by their transgression; and this very thing, that is, the contagion of that evil, is certainly not a divine work. Therefore the fault which nature contracted by a voluntary movement is not from God's creation.

But even concerning the nature vitiated through itself, God indeed carries out His establishment of His own creation, yet the creation brings forth the fault which it received not from the Creator's establishment but which it took upon itself through the lapse of its own transgression. For if those first men themselves, born, as has been said, from no parents and formed without any contagion, were able through the reaching-out of unlawful presumption to deprave themselves and to attach to the work of God the work of diabolical fraud, what wonder is it if, being themselves depraved, they brought forth depraved offspring? Indeed, even though God assuredly founded human substance free by His creation, yet even in human laws a servitude entering from without naturally renders it bound and liable.

They are begotten liable in respect of their origin, and are born bound over out of a servile condition, and by being born become obligated before they are begotten. If this happens in matters placed outside nature, how much more is it no wonder that it should come about in those in whom the very human substance is known to be depraved. And through this, just as the human substance, from its sincere establishment, made itself guilty and polluted in will by reprobate acts, so it produced offspring and progeny of its own nature, stained by the guilty will of its acts, because it begot such offspring as it had rendered itself by the excess of transgression; and therefore it brings forth from itself not only what God well established, but also what it inconsequently added amiss.