講道與書信 第 175 章 第 1/4 段

CHAPTER I. — I remember that I promised, venerable Emperor, in the cause of the faith, concerning which I know your clemency to be piously solicitous, that a fuller discourse of my humility should be directed to you; which now, with the Lord's help, I discharge on a faithful occasion, so that instruction useful to the holy zeal of your piety may not, so far as I judge, be wanting. For although I know that your clemency has no need of human instructions, and has drawn a most sincere doctrine from the abundance of the Holy Spirit, yet it is my office both to make plain what you understand and to proclaim what you believe: so that that fire which the Lord, coming, cast upon the earth (Luke 12:49), stirred by the movement of frequent meditation, may so grow warm that it burns, and so be kindled that it gives light.

For the Eutychian heresy has striven to bring great darkness upon the regions of the East, and has attempted to turn away the eyes of the unlearned from that light which, as the Gospel says, shines in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not (John 1:5). And although it has fallen back into its own blindness, now in its disciples it breaks out afresh what failed in its author. CHAPTER II. — For at no long interval of time was the catholic faith, which is singular and true, and to which nothing can be added, nothing taken away, assailed by two enemies: of whom the former, Nestorius, and the latter, Eutyches, emerged, who wished to bring upon the Church of God two heresies contrary to one another:

so that each was justly condemned by the preachers of truth, because what both held in their various falsehood was exceedingly mad and sacrilegious. Let Nestorius therefore be anathematized, who believed the blessed Virgin Mary to be the mother not of God but only of a man, so as to make one person of the flesh, another of the Deity; and did not perceive one Christ in the Word of God and the flesh, but separately and disjointedly proclaimed one Son of God, another son of man;

whereas, while that immutable essence of the Word remained, which is timeless and coeternal to Him with the Father and with the Holy Spirit, the Word so became flesh within the virginal womb that, through an ineffable mystery, by one conception and one birth, according to the truth of each nature, the same Virgin was both the handmaid and the mother of the Lord. Which Elizabeth also, as Luke the evangelist declares, understood and said: 'Whence is this to me, that the Mother of my Lord should come to me' (Luke 1:43)? Let Eutyches also be smitten with the same anathema, who, rolled about through the impious errors of the ancient heretics, chose the third dogma of Apollinaris:

so that, denying the truth of human flesh and soul, he asserted that our whole Lord Jesus Christ was of one nature, as though the Deity of the Word had itself converted itself into flesh and soul; and that to be conceived and born, to be nourished and to grow, to be crucified and to die, to be buried and to rise again, and to ascend into heaven, and to sit at the right hand of the Father, whence He shall come to judge the living and the dead, belonged to the divine essence alone, which receives none of these things in itself without the truth of flesh: since the nature of the Only-begotten is the nature of the Father, is the nature of the Holy Spirit, and is at once impassible, at once immutable — the undivided unity and consubstantial equality of the everlasting Trinity.

Whence, if any Eutychian departs from the perversity of Apollinaris, lest he be convicted of holding the Deity to be passible and mortal — and yet dares to pronounce one nature of the incarnate Word, that is, of the Word and the flesh — he manifestly passes over into the madness of Valentinus and Manichaeus, and believes that the mediator of God and men, the man Jesus Christ, did all things in mere semblance, and that not a human body in Him, but a phantom appearance of a body, appeared to the eyes of the beholders. CHAPTER III.

— Since the catholic faith has long detested these lies of impiety, and the sacrileges of such assertions were long ago condemned throughout the whole world by the concordant judgments of the blessed Fathers, there is no doubt that it preaches and defends this faith which the holy Synod of Nicaea confirmed, saying: 'We believe in one God the Father almighty, maker of things visible and invisible. And in one Lord our Jesus Christ, the Son of God, born the Only-begotten of the Father, that is, of the substance of the Father, God of God, light of light, true God of true God, born, not made, of one substance with the Father (which the Greeks call homoousion), through whom all things were made, both those which are in heaven and those which are on earth.'

'Who for us and for our salvation came down, was made incarnate, and was made man, suffered, and rose again on the third day. He ascended into heaven, and is to come to judge the living and the dead. And in the Holy Spirit.' In which profession there is most evidently contained what we too confess and believe concerning the incarnation of the Lord, who, in order to reform the salvation of the human race, did not bring down with Him from heaven the true flesh of our frailty, but assumed it in the womb of the Virgin mother. CHAPTER IV.

— Whoever therefore are so blinded and so alien from the light of truth as to deny to the Word of God, from the time of the incarnation, the truth of human flesh, let them show in what they claim for themselves the Christian name, and by what reasoning they agree with the Gospel of truth, if either flesh without Deity or Deity without flesh arose from the birth of the blessed Virgin. For just as it cannot be denied, since the evangelist says, that the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14), so it cannot be denied, since Paul the apostle preaches, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself (2 Cor. 5:19). But what reconciliation could there be, by which God might be made propitious to the human race, unless the mediator of God and men took up the cause of all?

But by what reasoning could He fulfill the truth of a mediator, unless He who in the form of God is equal to the Father were in the form of a servant also a partaker of us: so that the bond of death, contracted by the transgression of one, might be loosed by the death of one who alone owed nothing to death? For the shedding of the blood of Christ for the unjust was so rich in ransom that, if the whole company of the captives should believe in their redeemer, no chains of the devil would retain any of them: since, as the Apostle says, where sin abounded, grace did much more abound (Rom. 5:20). And when those born under the prejudgment of sin received the power of being reborn to righteousness, the gift of liberty was made stronger than the debt of servitude. CHAPTER V.

— What hope, then, do they leave for themselves in the safeguard of this mystery, who deny the truth of a human body in our Savior? Let them say by what sacrifice they were reconciled; let them say by what blood they were redeemed. Who is it, as the Apostle says, that gave Himself for you, an oblation and a victim to God for an odor of sweetness (Eph. 5:2)? Or what sacrifice was ever more holy than that which the true and eternal High Priest laid upon the altar of the cross by the immolation of His own flesh? For although the death of many saints was precious in the sight of the Lord (Ps. 116:15), yet the slaying of no innocent one was the redemption of the world.

The just received crowns, they did not give them; and from the fortitude of the faithful were born examples of patience, not gifts of righteousness. For single deaths were suffered by single men, nor did any one pay another's debt by his own end: since among the sons of men one alone, our Lord Jesus Christ, stood forth, who was truly the immaculate Lamb, in whom all were crucified, all died, all were buried, all were also raised up. Of whom He Himself said: 'When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all things to myself' (John 12:32). For true faith, which justifies the impious and creates the just, drawn to a partaker of His humanity, acquires salvation in Him in whom alone man finds himself innocent:

having it free, through the grace of God, to glory in the power of Him who, engaging in the humility of our flesh against the enemy of the human race, bestowed His victory upon those in whose body He triumphed. CHAPTER VI. — Although therefore in the one Lord Jesus Christ, the true Son of God and of man, there is one person of the Word and of the flesh, which inseparably and undividedly has its common actions, yet the qualities of the works themselves are to be understood; and it must be discerned, by the contemplation of sincere faith, to what things the humility of the flesh is advanced, and to what the loftiness of the Deity inclines: what it is that the flesh does not do without the Word, and what the Word does not effect without the flesh.

For without the power of the Word the Virgin would neither conceive nor bring forth, and without the truth of the flesh the infant would not lie wrapped in swaddling clothes. Without the power of the Word the Magi would not adore the child, declared by the guiding star; and without the truth of the flesh the child would not be commanded to be carried into Egypt and withdrawn from the persecution of Herod. Without the power of the Word the voice of the Father sent from heaven would not say: 'This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased' (Matt. 3:17); and without the truth of the flesh John would not testify: 'Behold the Lamb of God, behold Him who takes away the sins of the world' (John 1:29). Without the power of the Word there would be no restoration of the weak and quickening of the dead, and without the truth of the flesh neither would food be necessary for the fasting, nor sleep for the weary.

Lastly, without the power of the Word the Lord would not profess Himself equal to the Father, and without the truth of the flesh the same would not say that the Father was greater than He (John 14:28): whereas the catholic faith receives both, defends both, which, according to the confession of blessed the apostle Peter, believes the one Christ, the Son of the living God (Matt. 16:16), to be both man and the Word. Although therefore from that beginning in which the Word was made flesh in the womb of the Virgin (John 1:14), no division at any time existed between the two forms, 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 in no way confound by any mingling, but we discern of which form each thing is from the quality of the works. CHAPTER VII. — Let the hypocrites therefore sing forth — those who with blind minds will not receive the light of truth — in what form of the cross Christ, the Lord of majesty, was affixed to the wood, what lay in the tomb, and, the stone of the monument being rolled away, what flesh rose again on the third day, and in whom, after His resurrection, He rebuked certain disbelieving disciples and refuted the hesitation of the doubting, when He said: 'Handle and see, for a spirit has not flesh and bones, as you see me to have' (Luke 24:39): and to the apostle Thomas:

'Put your hand into my side, and see my hands and feet, and be not unbelieving, but believing' (John 20:27)? By which manifestation of His body He was even then destroying the lies of the heretics: that the whole Church of Christ, to be imbued with doctrines, might not doubt that this was to be believed by itself, which the apostles had undertaken to preach. But if in so great a light of truth heretical obduracy does not relinquish its darkness, let them show whence they promise themselves the hope of eternal life, to which it cannot be attained except through the mediator of God and men, the man Jesus Christ. For as blessed Peter the apostle says, 'There is no other name given to men under heaven, in which we must be saved' (Acts 4:12);

nor is there redemption of human captivity except in His blood, who gave Himself a redemption for all (1 Tim. 2:6), and who, as the blessed apostle Paul preaches, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, made in the likeness of men, and found in fashion as a man. He humbled Himself, becoming obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. Wherefore God also has exalted Him, and given Him a name which is above every name: that in the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, on earth, and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that the Lord Jesus Christ is in the glory of God the Father (Phil. 2:6-11).

CHAPTER VIII. — Since therefore the Lord Jesus Christ is one, and in Him there is wholly one and the same person of true Deity and true humanity, yet the exaltation by which, as the teacher of the Gentiles says, God exalted Him and gave Him a name which excels 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 discretion in essence, no diversity in majesty, nor had anything departed from the Word through the mystery of the incarnation which might be restored to Him by the Father's gift.

But the form of a servant, through which the impassible Deity fulfilled the mystery of great piety, is the human humility which, raised into the glory of the divine power, is from the very conception of the Virgin so joined together in such unity of Deity and humanity, that neither were the divine things done without the man, nor the human things without God. Wherefore, just as the Lord of majesty is said to be crucified, so He who from everlastingness is equal to God is said to be exalted: because inseparably, the unity of person remaining, one and the same is both wholly son of man on account of the flesh, and wholly Son of God on account of the one Deity with the Father. Whatever therefore Christ received in time, He received according to the man, to whom the things He did not have were conferred.

For according to the power of the Deity the Son too has indifferently all things which the Father has, and the things which He received from the Father in the form of a servant, the same He also gave in the form of God. For according to the form of God, He and the Father are one (John 10:30); but according to the form of a servant, 'He came not to do His own will, but the will of Him who sent Him' (John 5:30). According to the form of God, 'As the Father has life in Himself, so He gave to the Son also to have life in Himself' (ibid. 26); according to the form of a servant, 'His soul is sorrowful even unto death' (Matt. 26:38). And the same is He, as the Apostle preaches, both rich and poor. Rich, because, as the evangelist says:

'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God: the same was in the beginning with God: all things were made through Him, and without Him was made nothing' (John 1:1-3). But poor, because for our sakes the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (ibid. 14). But what is His self-emptying, or what His poverty, save the acceptance of the servile form? through which, the majesty of the Word being veiled, the dispensation of human redemption was fulfilled. CHAPTER IX.

— For since the original bonds of our captivity could not be loosed unless there existed a man of our race and of our nature, whom the prejudgments of sin did not hold, and who might blot out with His own immaculate blood the deadly handwriting, so — as had been from the beginning divinely foreordained — it was accomplished in the fullness of the appointed time: that the promise signified in many ways might come to the long-awaited effect, nor could there be any ambiguity in what had ever been announced by continual testifications. But the impiety of the heretics shows itself to be engaged in a great sacrilege, when, under the appearance of honoring the Deity, they deny the truth of human flesh in Christ;

and they think it is piously to be believed, if it be said that in our Savior that which saves is not true, whereas thus, according to the promise running through all the ages, the world is reconciled to God in Christ, so that unless the Word deigned to become flesh, no flesh could be saved. For the whole mystery of the Christian faith is discolored with great obscurity (as the heretics would have it), if the light of truth is thought to have lain hidden beneath the falsehood of a phantasm. Let no Christian therefore think it a thing to be blushed at, concerning the truth of our body in Christ:

because all the apostles and disciples of the apostles, and all the illustrious doctors of the Churches who deserved to attain to the crown of martyrdom or to the glory of confession, shone in the light of this faith, thundering everywhere with concordant judgments that in the Lord Jesus Christ one person of the Deity and of the flesh is to be confessed. But by what likeness of reason, by what portion of the divine volumes, does heretical impiety think itself to be aided, which denies the truth of Christ's body, since neither does the law testify to this, nor prophecy foresing it, nor the Gospels teach it, nor has Christ Himself ceased to show it?

Let them search through the whole series of the Scriptures, to find whither they may flee from their darkness, not whereby they may obscure the true light, and through all the ages they will thus find the truth flashing forth, that they may see this great and wondrous mystery believed from the beginning, which was completed in the end. And since no part of the holy writings is silent about it, it is enough to have set down certain good signs of the truth, by which the diligence of faith may be directed into a most splendid breadth, and by the sincere light of understanding may perceive that in the Son of God, who unceasingly professes Himself the son of man and man, it is a thing not to be blushed at for Christians, but most constantly to be gloried in. CHAPTER X.

— But that your piety may recognize that they do not agree with the preachings of the venerable Fathers, I have believed that some of their judgments should be subjoined to this discourse. If you deign to review them, you will find that we preach nothing other than what our holy Fathers throughout the whole world have taught: nor that anyone differs from them, save only the impious heretics.

These things therefore, most glorious and venerable Emperor, having been touched upon with as much brevity as I could, you will recognize that our preaching also is united with the faith divinely inspired in you, and that we differ in nothing from the evangelical and apostolic doctrine, or from the symbol of the catholic profession; since, as the blessed apostle Paul teaches, 'Great is the mystery of piety, which was manifested in the flesh, justified in the spirit, appeared to angels, was preached to the nations, was believed in the world, was received up in glory' (1 Tim. 3:16). What therefore is more useful to your salvation? what more befitting your power? than that you should provide by your constitution for the peace of the Churches of the Lord,

and defend God's gifts among all who are subject to you, nor by any reasoning suffer, through the envy of the devil, his ministers to rage to the destruction of anyone: so that you who in this temporal world are eminent in reign, may in eternity deserve to reign with Christ. Given on the sixteenth day before the Kalends of September, in the consulship of the Augusti Leo and Majorian. CHAPTER III. — This therefore is the one immovable foundation, this the one blessed rock of faith, confessed by the mouth of Peter: 'You are,' he says, 'the Christ, the Son of the living God' (Matt. 16:16); sustaining in itself as many arguments of truth as the questions of perversities and the calumnies of infidelity shall be moved. Now in the rest is the dispensation of the paternal will:

the Virgin, the birth, and the body, and after these the flesh, death, the underworld — these are our salvation. For on account of the human race the Son of God was born of the Virgin and of the Holy Spirit, He Himself serving Himself in this operation, and His own power — that is, God's — overshadowing, He sowed for Himself the beginnings of a body, and established the origins of flesh: that, made man of the Virgin, He might receive in Himself the nature of the flesh, and through the fellowship of this admixture the body of the whole human race might exist sanctified in Him: that, just as all might be founded in Him through that whereby He willed Himself to be corporeal, so again He Himself might be referred into all through that which is His invisible.

The invisible image of God therefore did not refuse the purer beginning of a human origin, and through conception, birth, wailing and the cradle, He passed through all the contumelies of our nature. What worthy thing at last shall be repaid by us for the affection of so great a condescension? The one only-begotten God, unspeakable from His divine origin, inserted into the form of a little human body in the womb of the holy Virgin, grows. He who contains all things, and within whom and through whom are all things, is brought forth by the law of human birth; and He at whose voice the archangels and angels tremble, at which heaven and earth and all the elements of this world shall be dissolved, is heard in the wailing of infancy. He who is invisible and incomprehensible is now wrapped in the cradle-clothes of mortals, to be seen, felt, and touched.

If anyone regards these things as unworthy of God, he will confess himself bound by so much the greater a benefit, in proportion as these things less befit the majesty of God. He who was made man had no need of the man; but we had need that God should become flesh and dwell in us, that is, that by the assumption of one flesh He might inhabit the whole of flesh from within. His humility is our nobility; His reproach is our honour. What He, God, is while abiding in flesh, that we in turn become, renewed from flesh into God. He knows nothing at all, he knows not his own life, who is ignorant that Christ Jesus is both true God and also true man; and it is a matter of equal peril to deny that Christ Jesus is either the Divine Spirit or the flesh of our body.

'Everyone therefore,' He says, 'who shall confess Me before men, I also will confess him before My Father who is in heaven. But whosoever shall deny Me before men, him will I also deny before My Father who is in heaven' (Matt. x, 32). These things the Word made flesh was speaking, and the man Jesus Christ, the Lord of majesty, was teaching: He Himself the mediator, constituted in Himself for the salvation of the Church, and by that very mystery of a mediator between God and men existing as one being who is both, since, the natures being united in Him into one selfsame, in Him the reality of each nature is the same: yet so that He lacked neither in the other; lest perchance by being born He should cease to be God as man, and again as man He should not be God while abiding.

This, then, is the true faith of human blessedness: to proclaim God and man, to confess the Word and the flesh; neither to be ignorant that God is man, nor to fail to recognise that the flesh is the Word. The only-begotten God, therefore, having been born man of a Virgin, and according to the fulness of times about to advance in Himself the man into God, held to this manner throughout the whole of the Gospel discourse: that He should teach Himself to be believed the Son of God, and admonish that He be proclaimed the son of man; speaking and doing as man all things that are God's, then speaking and doing as God all things that are man's; yet so that in that very discourse of both kinds He never spoke except with signification both of the man and of God.

From this, then, arises for heretics an occasion of deceiving the simple and the ignorant, so that what was said by Him according to the man they falsely allege to have been said according to the weakness of the divine nature; and because it is one and the same who speaks, they contend that all He was speaking about Himself He spoke as God. Nor indeed do we deny that the whole of that discourse belongs to Him who remains of His own nature. But if Jesus Christ is both man and God, and neither was He God only when He first became man, nor when He was man was He not also God, nor after being man was He not wholly man in God, wholly God, then it is necessary that the mystery of His sayings, which is that of their kind, be one and the same. And when you distinguish in Him the man from God according to time, then distinguish also the speech of God and of the man.

And when you confess God and man in time, discern the sayings of God and of the man in time. But when you understand it from man and God, then again perceive the time of the wholly man, the wholly God already. If anything was said for the demonstration of that time, fitting to the time the things that were said—so that one thing is God before the man, another is man and God, another is after the man and God wholly man and wholly God—do not confound by times and kinds the mystery of the dispensation, since according to the quality of the kinds and the natures it was necessary that His speech in the mystery of the man was one thing when not yet born, another while still to die, another now eternal.

For our sake, therefore, Jesus Christ, remaining all these things and born as man of our body, spoke according to the custom of our nature; yet not omitting to be what is of His own nature, that is, God. For although in His birth, and passion, and death He performed the things of our nature, yet He accomplished all those very things by the power of His own nature; and so forth. Do you see how God and man are so proclaimed that death is reckoned to the man, but the raising of the flesh to God? (Yet not so that He who died is one, and He through whom the dead One rises again is another.

For the flesh despoiled is the dead Christ, and again the Christ who raises Christ from the dead is the same Christ divesting Himself of the flesh.) Understand the nature of God in the power of the resurrection; recognise the dispensation of the man in death. And though both were wrought by their own natures, yet remember that Christ Jesus is one, He who is both. These things, then, had to be demonstrated by me in a few words, that we might remember that the form of each nature is treated in the Lord Jesus Christ: for He who was in the form of God took the form of a servant. Chapter.

IV.—But how have they, who are called Christians, dared even to doubt whether the Lord, who came forth from Mary, is indeed the Son of God in substance and nature, while that which is according to the flesh is of the seed of David and of the flesh of holy Mary? CHAPTER V.—Hence that which was read, that the Lord of majesty was crucified, we are not to suppose was crucified as it were in His majesty; but because the same is God, the same is man—God through the Divinity, man through the assumption of flesh—Christ Jesus the Lord of majesty is said to be crucified, because, being a partaker of each nature, that is, of the human and the divine, He underwent the passion in the nature of the man; so that without distinction both He who suffered is called the Lord of majesty, and the son of man, as it is written, who descended from heaven (John.