書信集（CSEL） 第 1 章 第 44/85 段

It has been overwhelmed by his authority and eloquence, and after the manner of demonic spirits it speaks from the earth. For it does not know Him who, coming from above, speaks the things that are above. And would that the serpent-brood might either simply confess our doctrine or steadfastly defend its own, so that we might be able to know who are to be loved by us, who to be guarded against! But now—a new kind of penance—they hate us as enemies, whose faith they do not dare publicly to deny. I ask, what is this grief that is cured neither by time nor by reason? Amid flashing swords, lying corpses, and flowing streams of blood, hostile right hands are often joined, and a sudden peace exchanges the madness of war:

they alone are the followers of this heresy, who cannot be leagued with the churchmen, because what they are compelled to say in words, they condemn in mind. And if ever open blasphemy is revealed to public ears and they see the audience murmuring around them against them, then with feigned simplicity they say that they have heard for the first time what they were not unaware their master had said. And though their writings are held in hand, with their voice they deny what by their letters they confess. What need is there to besiege the Propontis, to change places, to roam through diverse regions, and to tear with rabid mouth the most illustrious pontiff of Christ and his disciples? If you speak the truth, exchange your former ardor of error for the ardor of faith.

Why do you stitch together patches of curses from here and there and carp at the life of those whose faith you cannot resist? Are you therefore not heretics, if some believe us to be sinners on your assertion, and will you not have a mouth foul with impiety, if you can point out a scar on our ear? What does your treachery gain, or what profit is the Ethiopian's skin and the leopard's spots, if a mole should appear on our body? Behold, Pope Theophilus with all liberty proves Origen to be a heretic; nor do they defend his sayings or pretend they were changed by heretics, and they say that the books of many were likewise corrupted, so that they may defend him not by his own faith but by the errors of others.

But let these things be said against the heretics, who, raging against us with unjust hatred, in their minds confess the secret and by an incurable grief bear witness to the poisons of their breast. But you, lights of the Christian senate, receive both the Greek and this year also the Latin letter—lest again the heretics falsely claim that much has been either added or changed by us—in which I confess I have labored to preserve the elegance of the words with equal grace of translation, and, running within the defined lines and nowhere exceeding my place, not to lose the streams of his eloquence, and to render the same matters in the same style—whether or not I have achieved this, I leave to your judgment; which letter you may know to be divided into four parts:

And in the preface he exhorts believers to celebrate the Lord's Pasch; in the second and third place he slays Apollinaris and Origen; in the fourth, that is, the last, he exhorts the heretics to penitence. But if anything less has here been said against Origen, it is both contained in last year's letter, and this letter, which we have just now translated, striving for brevity, ought not to say more. Furthermore, against Apollinaris a concise faith and a pure profession does not lack dialectical subtlety, which stabs its adversary with the dagger wrested from his hands.

Pray therefore the Lord, that what pleases in Greek may not displease in Latin, and that what the whole East admires and proclaims, Rome may receive with a glad bosom, and that the chair of the Apostle Peter may confirm by its own preaching the preaching of the chair of Mark the Evangelist—although it has been divulged in widespread report that the blessed Pope Anastasius also, with the same fervor, because he is of the same Spirit, has persecuted the heretics lurking in their dens, and that his letters teach that what was condemned in the East has been condemned in the West. To whom we implore many years, that through his zeal the reviving seedlings of the heresy, long withered, may die. XCVIII. THE PASCHAL LETTER OF THEOPHILUS, BISHOP OF THE CITY OF ALEXANDRIA, TO THE BISHOPS OF ALL EGYPT.

The divine word of the august solemnity, flashing from the regions of the heavens and surpassing the radiance of the sun by its own splendor, pours the clearest light into the souls of those who desire it; and when with the full gaze of the heart they have been able to sustain its rays, it draws them to the very inner recesses of the heavenly Jerusalem and, so to speak, to the Holy of Holies.

Wherefore, if we wish to be partakers of salvation and, cleaving to the pursuit of virtues, to purge the vices of our souls and to wash away by constant meditation on the Scriptures whatever filth is in us, then, contemplating the doctrine's knowledge laid open as it were under a clear sky, let us hasten to celebrate the feasts of the heavenly gladness and to join ourselves to the choirs of the angels, where there are crowns and rewards and certain victory, and the longed-for palm is set before those who triumph. Nor let us delay, being freed from the swelling waves of the flesh, to hold the rudder of the virtues amid the diverse shipwrecks of pleasures on every side, and, after the great perils of the sea, to enter the safest harbor of the heavens.

Wherefore let us summon to the gains of wisdom, as though rousing from a heavy sleep, those whom the empty care of this life disturbs and around whom the depths of tumults resound like roaring floods; and let us show them the true riches of divine meanings and the unhoped-for joys of holy festivity, for whose sake let every present labor be undertaken, that we may prepare both those who are somewhat careless and our very selves for eternal glory. Whence also in the Proverbs, Wisdom, summoning to her banquet those who lack understanding, cries aloud: 'Come, eat of my bread, and drink the wine which I have mingled for you.'

For this heaven which we behold is not so illumined by the choirs of the stars, nor do the sun and moon, those two most brilliant eyes of the world, as it were, by whose course the year is unrolled and by whose alternation the seasons are changed, pour so bright a light upon the earth, as our solemnity shines and gleams with the choir of virtues. Longing for its treasures and riches, they sing in harmony with the voice of David: 'Who will give me wings like a dove, that I may fly away and be at rest?' And exulting, leaping as in a kind of triumphal dance, and, according to what is written, their hearts flooded with unspeakable joy, they cry again: 'We have here no abiding city, but we seek one to come, whose maker and builder is God.'

For they know that of all their labors, by which they fight and run in this world, this is the hope laid up and these the rewards appointed in the world to come; for whose sake, fearing no dangers, they daily direct the course of their life, avoiding above all the impiety and snares of the heretics, by which the blind lead the blind into the pit, and, as with a kind of sluggish stupor and most foul rot, they defile the hearts of the deceived. Nor content with this lime-trap, they drink the inmost marrow of the Scriptures, condemning by the truth of doctrines the knowledge that is falsely so called.

Understanding this, the patriarch Jacob too beholds in his dreams a ladder whose top reached even to heaven, by which, through the diverse steps of the virtues, one ascends to the things above, and men are summoned, forsaking the lowly things of earth, to celebrate with the church of the firstborn the feasts of the Lord's Passion. 'This is nothing else,' he said, 'but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.' Gazing on it more keenly, and seeking it with all the longing of his mind, and pondering in his thoughts the reasons of this journey, and, as it were, more forcefully grinding and pulverizing precious spices so that they might spread abroad the fragrance of their far-reaching sweet odor, David summons those who hasten to the solemnity, saying: 'Open to me the gates of righteousness, and having entered into them I will confess to the Lord.'

'This is the gate of the Lord; the righteous shall enter through it.' There is not, therefore, there is no solemnity of the heretics, nor can those who have been deceived by error rejoice in its communion. For it is written: 'If a beast touch the mountain, it shall be stoned.' Nor can those who contradict the divine doctrines of the church receive the sacraments of the heavenly words. And so, with all our strength cleansing our souls from every defilement, let us prepare them worthy of the festivity which is at hand, that we may be able to sing with the saints: 'God is the Lord, and he hath shone upon us.' Of which another prophet also, aware of things to come, testifies with mystic voice:

'The Lord shall appear among them, and shall destroy all the gods of the nations,' when words were changed into works, and the truth of things was displayed to the eyes of the doubting, so that through the accomplishment of what had been foretold the truth of the words might be proved, God making us partakers of his victory, that we might both be able to have fellowship with the saints in the solemnity and frequently celebrate the heralding of his glorious coming. For indeed, because all the earth had been corrupted by various allurements, esteeming vices as virtues and, on the contrary, virtues as vices, while, as time inbred custom, tyrannical pride reckons habit to be the law of nature, those who had gone before and had strengthened falsehood by time were thought to be the fathers and masters of truth;

whence it had come to pass that the error of men increased, and, ignorant of what was profitable, in the manner of brute animals they despised the true Shepherd, the Lord, and, carried away by frenzy, worshipped tyrants and princes as gods, consecrating their own weakness in men of the same nature. By which it came about that they might escape the present danger of death and win over to themselves those whose clemency was crueler than cruelty. Therefore, when all were seduced by error, the living Word of God came for our aid to the lands which knew not the worship of God and endured the desolation of truth. Of which thing he is a witness who says: 'All have gone astray, together they are become unprofitable'; and the prophets, imploring the aid of Christ:

'Lord, bow down thy heavens and come down' — not that he might change the place in which all things are, but that for the sake of our salvation he might take on the flesh of human frailty, Paul singing the same: 'Though he was rich, for our sakes he became poor, that we by his poverty might be rich.' And he came to earth, and going forth from the virginal womb which he had sanctified, confirming by his dispensation the interpretation of his own name, Emmanuel, that is, 'God with us,' in a wondrous manner he began to be what we are, and did not cease to be what he had been, so taking on our nature that he did not lose what he himself was. For although John writes:

'The Word was made flesh' — that is, in other words, 'man' — yet he was not turned into flesh, because he never ceased to be God, to whom also the holy one speaks: 'But thou art the same'; and the Father testifies from heaven and says: 'This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased,' so that, being made man too, he is said to remain by our confession what he was before he became man, Paul proclaiming the same with us: 'Jesus Christ, the same yesterday and today, and forever.' For in that he says 'the same,' he shows that he did not change his former nature nor diminish the riches of his divinity, who, having become poor for our sakes, had taken on the full likeness of our condition.

From such and so great things did he take on a man — save only from sin — as those from which and of what kind we all were created: not in part, but wholly, the Mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus; and he lacked nothing of what belongs to our likeness except sin alone, which has no substance. For neither did he have flesh without a soul, and in place of a rational soul was God the Word himself in it, as the drowsy disciples of Apollinaris suppose; nor, in saying that word in the Gospel:

'Now is my soul troubled,' does he testify that his divinity was subject to disturbance — which follows for those to say who contend that in place of a soul the divinity was in his body. Nor again, joining to himself the soul alone, did he complete the man he had taken on, lest, from the likeness of flesh and the unlikeness of soul, he be believed to have fulfilled the dispensation of a half-assumption, existing like us in flesh but in soul like the irrational beasts of burden — if indeed, according to them, the soul of the Savior is irrational and without mind or sense, which is impious to believe and far from the faith of the church — lest he be at once struck by that reproach with which the prophet rebukes the offender, saying:

'Ephraim is like a senseless dove that has no heart,' and lest, as one irrational, he hear: 'He is compared to the senseless beasts of burden, and is become like unto them.' For it is doubtful to none that an irrational soul, without sense or mind, is compared to the senseless beasts of burden; whence Moses too writes: 'Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treads out the corn'; and Paul, expounding what is written, says: 'Doth God take care for oxen? Or saith he it altogether for our sakes?' For our sake, therefore, was the Savior made man, not for the sake of brutes and irrational beasts of burden, that he should take on the likeness of a beast's soul, without sense and reason.

But neither does the church accept that at which the followers of the same heresy quibble and prate — namely, that the soul of the Savior should be thought to be called 'the prudence of the flesh' — since the Apostle plainly calls the prudence of the flesh an enemy to God and death, which it is wicked to say of the Lord, that his soul should be believed to be death and an enemy of God. For if he commands us: 'Fear not them that can kill the body and are not able to kill the soul,' they will be forced by their foolish argument to admit that our souls are better than the soul of the Savior, since that is asserted to be the prudence of the flesh, which is death and an enemy of God, while ours cannot die.

But this is by no means to be so understood, dearest brethren, since even the prudence of the soul cannot be called the soul, and they differ greatly from each other. For although the prudence of the soul is in that whose prudence it is, yet the one is the possessor and the other the possessed, and the soul is prior, while what follows is exercised in the soul. But if the prudence of the soul is not the soul, how much more can the prudence of the flesh not be called a soul!

Let them stretch out as far as they please the nets of their syllogisms and, setting up the snares of their sophisms, entangle their own selves in the nooses, not even knowing that of which they boast a vain knowledge; and let them learn from us — whom they thanklessly compel to take up a disputation of this kind — that one thing is that which is wise, another wisdom, and another again that which is understood, and that these differ from one another not only in words but also in meanings. For that which is wise is the rational soul; further, that which comes from it and is of it and is not itself, is called wisdom; but that which is understood is the thing which it regards, and it is begotten by the wise wisdom, and is not the wise one himself nor wisdom itself.

And let them at last cease by the twistings of the dialectic art to pervert the simple decrees of the church's faith, so as to call the soul of the Savior the prudence of the flesh, which the Apostle asserts to be death and an enemy of God. But in this way too it seems we must argue against them: it is written of the Word of God, 'All things were made by him.' Is it then credible that even the wisdom or prudence of the flesh — which they understand to be the soul of the Savior — was fashioned by the Word of God, so that he himself should be the author of death and enmity against God, and, which is impious to say, should join them to himself?

But if it is wicked to believe this, and the soul of the Savior abounds in all virtues, then the prudence of the flesh will not be his soul, lest he himself be believed to have joined to himself death and enmity against God. Let the disciples of Apollinaris cease to defend, on account of his other writings, those things which he spoke against the rules of the church. For although he wrote against the Arians and the Eunomians and overthrew Origen and other heretics by his argument, yet he who is mindful of that precept:

'Thou shalt not accept the person in judgment,' ought always to love the truth, not persons, and to know that in the dispensation of the man whom the only-begotten Son of God deigned to take on for our salvation, he is not free from fault who has both thought and written perversely concerning his soul. For as the Apostle says: 'If I bestow all my substance and deliver my body to be burned, but have not charity, it profiteth me nothing,' so whether this man of whom we now speak, or Origen and other heretics, although they may have written some things which do not oppose the faith of the church, yet they will not be free from guilt, being opposed, in those things which are principal and pertain to the salvation of believers, to the faith of the church.

For neither, as he with his followers strives to prove, did our Lord and Savior take on a soul without sense and mind, or the middle part of it, or two of three parts, or a third, so as to save imperfectly the man he had assumed — because neither the middle nor the remaining portions will receive the name of 'perfect.' And just as what is perfect lacks the defect of the imperfect, so what is imperfect cannot be called perfect. And if he had taken on our likeness imperfectly or in part, how did he speak in the Gospel: 'No man takes my soul from me. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up'?

But that which is taken away and laid down cannot be called irrational, nor without mind and understanding, but on the contrary rational and intelligible and having mind and feeling. And thus the very order of the argument proves that nothing imperfect was assumed by the Lord, but that the man assumed by him was fully and perfectly saved. For it is doubtful to none that the souls of irrational beasts of burden are not laid down and taken up again, but perish with their bodies and are dissolved into dust. But the Savior, laying down his soul and separating it from his body at the time of the Passion, again took it up in the resurrection. And long before he did so, he spoke in the psalm:

'Thou wilt not leave my soul in hell, nor wilt thou give thy holy one to see corruption.' Nor is it credible that his flesh descended to the lower regions, or that the prudence of the flesh, which is called the soul, appeared to those below; but rather that his body was placed in the sepulcher, and that he himself said, neither of his body and the wisdom of the flesh, nor of his divinity: 'Thou wilt not leave my soul in hell,' but truly of the soul of our nature, so as to show that a perfect and rational and intelligible and sensible soul descended to the lower regions.

We exhort those who hold such views to forsake the heretical errors and acquiesce in the church's truth, and not to make the festival of the Lord's Passion imperfect, nor to deny the principal and greater part of the man in the Savior, asserting his body to be without soul and mind. For if it were so, what did he wish to be understood of himself when he said: 'The good shepherd lays down his soul for the sheep'? And if he had taken on only the flesh of a man, why did he say in the Passion: 'The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak'?

Whence it must be known that, presenting a sacrament of the human condition tempered in every part, he took on the perfect likeness of our condition — neither flesh alone, nor an irrational soul without sense, but joining to himself the whole body and the whole soul, he demonstrated a perfect man in himself, so that he might bestow perfect salvation on all men in himself and through himself; and having fellowship with us, who were formed of the earth, he neither brought down his flesh from heaven, nor joined to his body a soul which had pre-existed and had been created before his flesh, as the disciples of Origen strive to teach. For if the soul of the Savior,

before he took on a human body, was dwelling in the regions of the heavens and was not yet his soul, it is most impious to say that before his body it existed as the Lord's, doing something and being active, and afterward was changed into his soul. It is another matter if they can teach from the Scriptures that, before he was born of Mary, God the Word had this soul, and that it was called his soul before the assumption of the flesh. But if by the authority of the Scriptures and by reason itself they are compelled to admit that Christ did not have a soul before he was born of Mary — for in the assumption of the man his soul too was assumed — they are plainly convicted of saying that the same soul was both his and not his.

But let those madmen cease from the impiety of novel doctrines! Let us, following the norm of the Scriptures, proclaim with all boldness of heart that neither his flesh nor his soul existed before he was born of Mary, nor did the soul dwell in the heavens before he afterward joined it to himself; for the Lord, coming from heaven, brought down with him nothing of our condition. Whence, cutting down with the evangelical sickle whatever is contrary to the truth, he says: 'Every plant which my heavenly Father has not planted shall be rooted up,' consummating the word by the work and the threat by the end, and proving the power of his words by the accomplishment of the deeds, so that whatever the speech promised, the truth of the deeds might display.

Let them know, therefore, that they, being strangers to this solemnity, cannot celebrate with us the Lord's Passion, who follow Origen — that I may say something of the fables of the poets — the hydra of all heresies, and glory in having him as the master and prince of error. For although he wove innumerable books and left to the world the inheritance of his garrulity as though a ruinous possession, yet we know it commanded by the law: 'Thou shalt not be able to set over thyself a foreign man, because he is not thy brother.'

For he who by a different path has strayed from the rules of the apostles is, as one unworthy and profane, cast out from the choir of Christ and the fellowship of his mysteries, from the solemnity of Christ, and driven far off by the fathers and elders who founded the church of the Savior, striving to sew the rags of the philosophers onto the new and most firm garment of the church, and to join false things to true, so that both the weakness of the former might be shown by the nearness of the stronger, and the beauty of the latter might be violated. For what reasoning, what order of disputations, led that man to abolish the truth of the Scriptures by the shadows of allegory and empty images? What prophet taught him to hold that, on account of the fall of souls from heaven, God was compelled to fashion bodies?

Who among those, according to blessed Luke, 'who saw and were ministers of the word of God,' delivered this to him to be taught: that God, provoked by the negligence and movement and flux of the higher rational creatures, established the diversity of this world — since Moses, expounding its creation, neither said nor indicated that on account of any preceding causes sensible things were brought forth from rational, visible from invisible, worse from better, as Origen most openly proclaims? For he says that on account of the sins of the intelligible creatures the world began to be, unwilling to celebrate the Pasch with the saints, nor to say with Paul: 'The invisible things of God are clearly seen from the creation of the world, being understood by the things that are made,' nor to cry out with the prophet:

'I considered thy works and was astonished.' For otherwise the beauty of the world could not subsist, unless a varied adornment of creatures had filled it. In short, the sun and moon, the two great lights, and the rest of the stars, before they were that which the office of their daily course testifies them to have been created, were not without bodies, nor, on account of any causes, forsaking their former simplicity, were they surrounded with bodies, as that man dreams, constructing doctrines contrary to the faith. Nor did souls sin anything in the regions of the heavens and were therefore banished into bodies. For if this were so, it would have behooved the Savior not himself to take on a body and to free souls from bodies;

he ought, at the time when he forgives sins in baptism, immediately to loose the baptized from the bonds of the body, which, he recalls, were made on account of sin in the condemnation of sin. But he also promises in vain the resurrection of bodies, if it is expedient for souls to fly up to heaven without the burden of bodies. He too, rising again, ought not to have raised up his flesh, but only to have joined his soul to the divinity, if it is better to live without bodies than with bodies. But what does he mean by frequently proclaiming that souls are both bound to bodies and divided from them, and by inflicting many deaths upon us?

He is ignorant that Christ came for this purpose: not to loose souls from bodies after the resurrection, or, once freed, to clothe them again with other bodies, and to garb with blood and flesh those descending from the regions of the heavens, but to endow bodies, once raised up, with incorruption and eternity. For as Christ, having died, dies no more, and death has no more dominion over him, so neither do bodies raised up after the resurrection perish a second time or frequently, nor will death have dominion over them any longer, nor will they be dissolved into nothing, because the coming of Christ saved the whole man.

But this also makes Origen a stranger to the solemnity of Christ: that he reports the principalities, powers, mighty ones, thrones, and dominions to have been established not thus from the beginning, but that after their own creation they did some things worthy of honor, and, when others like them had slipped down to lower things through negligence, these were called by illustrious names — so that, according to his error, God did not create the principalities and powers and the rest, but the sins of others furnished them the material of their glories. And how does the Apostle Paul write:

'In Christ were all things created in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things were created through him and in him, and he is before all things.' If he understood the force of the word — 'through whom,' it is said, 'all things were created' — he would know that they were thus created from the beginning, and that the sloth of others and their lapse into lower things did not furnish God an occasion to name them principalities and powers and the rest of the mighty ones, especially since the beauty of the creatures consists in the order of their dignities. For as it is written of the sun and moon and stars: 'God made two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, the lesser light,'