文集 第 3 章 第 1/8 段

BOOK ONE. I. We have learned that a great and grave peril of the faith—one which can neither easily be perceived nor easily avoided by most (since it is overshadowed by an appearance of piety)—rages through many Churches of the East with domestic strife; and is defended with so stubborn an obstinacy of minds that it neither could nor can be cut away either by the traditions of the ancient Fathers or by the severe sanctions of religious princes. For human hearing, forestalled by the error of a false opinion, is found hard and most difficult for perceiving the reason of truth, with however many witnesses it be pressed.

For he prefers more perversely to vindicate the sentence of the depraved dogma with which he was once infected, rather than to change this same opinion, refuted by so many authorities of divine and human laws, for the better and more salutary course. This deadly and death-bringing plague, then, of a pernicious crisis, so fiercely ravages everything within the venerable approaches of the Church that it harms the more, the less it is understood to harm. For thus, taught by the mastery of the foulest serpent, it has stretched out the ambiguous snares of its ambushes on right and left, so that it has left a most narrow and exceedingly arduous path of the way for travelers. For if you should wish to set wavering footsteps a little to either side, you will at once be caught. II.

Between, then, the sacrilegious dogma of Nestorius, once of the Church of Constantinople—not its governor but its destroyer, not its shepherd but its plunderer—and the nefarious and detestable sect of Eutyches, the craftiness of the serpentine assault has so tempered itself that most cannot avoid the one without peril of the other; for if anyone condemns the perfidy of Nestorius, he is thought to succumb to the error of Eutyches. Again, while he destroys the impiety of the Eutychian heresy, he is accused of setting up the dogma of Nestorius. But these clouds of empty accusations are cast forth especially by those who are sick either with the vice of ignorance or with the disease of contention.

And while they are puffed up with the haughtiness of a petulant mind, they despise the rules of faith handed down of old by the Fathers for this reason alone: that they may introduce into the Church the ill-conceived opinions of their own novelties. On this account too, to us, like masters of the dialectical art rather than truly disciples of Christ, they stretch out the inescapable syllogism of an ambiguous response, judging that they can ensnare Christian souls with these snares of propositions. But the fortitude of the Church experiences nothing new, nothing foreign, having been agitated by such whirlwinds of questions from nearly all heretics; obtaining a triumph from things contrary, and immovability from adversities.

For when she fits herself in armed contest against Sabellius, she vindicates the existences of the persons of the Son and the Holy Spirit; that he is one who begets, and another who is begotten; and one is the proceeding, another from whom he proceeds; one the sender, another the sent; one is God the Word who is born of the Virgin, another the Father who remains ever unborn; one who through the dispensation of the flesh fulfills all the offices of our frailty, another the Father who remains without all these. You may at once see Arius, as if seizing the material of a triumphal victory, more loftily exult, and under the detestable yoke of his perfidy wish to subjugate the necks of the faithful. 'Know,' he says, 'that he who sends is greater than he who is sent;'

'he who obeys is inferior, he to whom the bounty is shown is more worthy.' III. Likewise, when I beat back the Manichaean concerning the truth of the Lord's body—that it was not assumed by a deceptive pretense and by certain juggleries of illusions—I allege the swelling womb of the Virgin; I urge the delays of the awaited time, which he passed for a long while within the lodging of the maternal womb, even to the lawful day of birth; the cradle of childbirth, the wailing of the infant, the progress of age, at the last the mockeries of the passion, the gibbet of the cross, the fastenings of the nails, the blood together with the water of his opened side, the descent, the burial, the resurrection; and that which the Lord himself also says: 'Do you wish to kill me, a man who has spoken the truth to you?' (John

8:40). And the Apostle: 'As by one man came death, so also by one man the resurrection of the dead' (1 Cor. 15:21). And: 'There is one mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus' (1 Tim. 2:5). When I plead these things against the Manichaean, Photinus strives to swallow the whole, as it were a prepared food, with the greedier jaws of his perfidy. Again, when I have armed myself against him with the weapons of the life-giving reading, and have brandished many darts of testimonies attesting that the Son of God is true God, I needs must among the rest also bring forward this: that he was 'made in the likeness of men, and in habit found as a man' (Phil. 2:7).

In which passage the Manichaean strangles me, and with all the exultation of a triumphing mind cries out that he has made me run back to him. But it is a great labor, and exceedingly toilsome, to unravel such little nooses of sentences, by which the fraudulent stealth of heretical machination strives to take captive the liberty of the catholic faith. IV.

And since against all these pests of heretics it has been most fully disputed by our forebears (so that, even if no books were composed for the destruction of their error, this very thing alone—that they have been pronounced heretics—would suffice for the security of the orthodox), let us now look at those whose mind that foulest serpent has so corrupted from the chastity of the faith which is in Christ Jesus, that he has armed the forehead of their shamelessness, hardened with a callus, into open adultery of nefarious preaching, so that that prophetic oracle may justly redound upon them: 'Thou hast had a harlot's forehead' (Jer. 3:3).

For if it is not so, what then does it mean that they yield neither to so many decrees of councils nor to so very many sentences of the ancient Fathers? They accuse us, therefore, while we confess Christ of both natures, as though we asserted two Christs—one God, the other man—and seemed, according to the unspeakable error of Nestorius, to assert a duality of nature. But we profess one God, the same Son of God and Son of man, not two; and that the Word so sowed for itself the beginnings of flesh within the secret recesses of the virginal womb, that is, was incarnate, that nevertheless the nature of the Word was not changed into flesh. And likewise that the nature of the flesh so passed, through the commixture of the one assuming, into the person of the Word, that it was nevertheless not consumed in the Word.

For each remains, that is, the nature of the Word and of the flesh, and from these two, which remain even today, there is one Christ and one person. For who, clothed with a sacrilegious opinion, would be so far out of his senses? Who would cast himself into so abrupt an abyss of error as to deny that the Son of God—without his own proper flesh, which he so united to himself from the womb of the holy Virgin by an ineffable commingling of fellowship, that the Word became man, and man God, and the same one, with the kinds of the natures unchanged, became one—sits today at the right hand of the Father and is to come to judge the living and the dead; when he is not ignorant that the Lord himself said: 'When the Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father' (Matt. 16:27)?

Not that, as we have often said, the Son of man is one and the Son of God another; but He willed to show to such a degree that the nature of our kind was not consumed through the undivided unity of the commingling, that He even calls Himself the Son of man while set in heaven, so that by the title of a true name you may recognize the truth of the abiding nature. If therefore the inviolate nature of the Word still abides even now, there abides also, undiminished, the nature of the humanity which the same Word took up without any change of Himself. V. How is it defended today that Christ has only one single nature? If it be so, then surely one nature also was abolished out of two. Which one, then?

If the human nature is abolished, then the nature of the Word alone remains, and it will be false that Christ Jesus shall come in the same manner as He was seen to go into heaven. For that same Lord appeared to the eyes of the beholders as bodily, under the form of our kind; just as again, in the same bodily form, He shall show Himself at the consummation of time to the eyes of those who pierced Him. For if of these two one is extinguished, or rather consumed, and one is left, the consequence will be that the Lord Jesus Christ must most impiously be proclaimed either only God and not also man, or only man and not also God. We ought not, therefore, through this madness of foolish preaching, to make void the mystery of His condescension and of His dignity.

Of His condescension, namely, because God condescended to become man; but of His dignity, because, the nature of the Word abiding immutably in the union with the flesh, the same man is God through the hidden secret of one person. And this catholic understanding admits a uniting of the natures coming together in themselves, not a unifying into one nature; for from the two united, while they remain the same, one Christ is believed to be at once God and man. For according to those who contend that there is only one nature, either the Word was changed into flesh, that it might become one; or the flesh was consumed in the Word, so that, losing its own subsistence through its own abolition, it can be no longer at all, that the one nature of the Word alone may remain.

How impious and how sacrilegious this is appears most plainly, it seems to me, to anyone who follows apostolic doctrines and not human inventions. But because the same God is man, and the same man is God, subsisting of both and lacking neither, it is evident that He is of both natures, since He can lose neither. VI. But why these men, or in what manner, shun the name of property in both natures, I know not; unless they are so far covered with the veil of faithlessness that they do not see, nor understand, that in Christ one thing befits His divinity and another His humanity, though both be common to Him. For He says to His disciples: If you loved me, you would rejoice, because I go to the Father, for the Father is greater than I (John 14:28). And again:

It is expedient for you that I go away; for if I do not go away, the Paraclete will not come to you (John 16:7). And surely the Word of God, the power of God, the wisdom of God, was always with the Father and in the Father, even when He was among us with us. For when He mercifully dwelt among earthly things, He did not depart from His heavenly habitation. For He is wholly with you and with the Father in equal divinity, which no place contains. Indeed all things are full of the Son, nor is there any place void of the presence of His divinity. Whence then, and whither, does He say that He will go? Or how does He assert that He will go forth to the Father, from whom He never, without doubt, departed? But this was to go to the Father and to depart from us, namely to take away from this world the nature which He had taken up from us.

You see, therefore, that it was proper to that same nature that it should be taken away and depart from us — the nature which is to be restored to us at the end of time, according to the voice of the angels who testify: This Jesus who is received from you, shall so come, as you have seen Him going into heaven (Acts 1:11). For behold the marvel, behold the mystery of the property of each nature. The Son of God according to His humanity departed from us; according to His divinity He says to us: Behold, I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world (Matt. 28:20). If He is with us, how did He depart? If He is with us, how does He say: The days will come when you shall desire to see one day of the Son of man, and you shall not see it (Luke 17:22)?

But He is both with us and not with us. For those whom He left and from whom He departed in His humanity, He did not leave nor forsake in His divinity. For through the form of a servant, which He carried up from us into heaven, He is absent from us; through the form of God, by which He does not depart from us, He is present to us on earth: yet both present and absent He is one and the same to us. VII. Hear also another property of each nature. That the Son of God was buried we all read, we all believe, we all alike proclaim, nor does any Christian dare to doubt it. Now here, if you please, let us treat with peaceful moderation: what of Him could have been buried — the Word, or the soul, or the body, or all of them together?

But it is utterly absurd to say that either the Word or the soul was wrapped in linen cloths. It remains, therefore, that only the body, which was lifeless, and which was also borne by the hands of those who buried it, was enwrapped in a shroud and laid in the bosom of the tomb. For here there is no need to argue, where the truth itself manifests itself most clearly. The Word of God needed no funeral rites; the soul could not be buried; therefore the flesh alone underwent the office of burial. And yet apostolic authority taught that the Lord Jesus Christ was buried. You see, then, that there is something proper to the flesh which cannot belong to the Word; but that it is nevertheless also of the Word, because that flesh is the Word's, to which all these things can more fittingly be applied. VIII.

The Gospels record that the Lord Jesus Christ grew through the courses of age, and reached even to the sturdy limbs of a youthful body. O you who would have nothing be proper to the flesh, do you suppose that the Word, together with that flesh in which He was born of the Virgin, grew equally through the successions of the ages and through the increase of the limbs, and was consolidated into a greater bulk of His own body? Do not, I beg you, quibble; choose the one you will. This growing and increasing of the Lord Jesus Christ, and His reaching even to perfect youthful age — whose is it? Of the Word, or of the flesh? I know what straits you suffer, with what heats you pant. If you say it is proper to the flesh, you confess the property of nature.

If you say it belongs both to the flesh and to the Word (which indeed is true through the unity of person, not through the property of nature) — if, I say, you say that this growth of stature belongs to the Word, you introduce a mutable and convertible Word of God. For perhaps some portion of Him had filled the virginal womb; and therefore this small portion together with its body felt increase; while that greater portion which remained, and which had not filled the womb of the Virgin, gradually mingled itself with its own portion, which it had in the man, through the increase of that body itself; and in this way, according to you, God was born not whole, nor perfect, but small, and through the fitting proportions of age was made great.

But if it is impious and detestable either to speak of a portion of the Word, or to believe that the Word felt any increase in its own nature — while it is nevertheless clear that the Lord Jesus Christ had advancement in age — who does not see that this growing is proper to the flesh, not to God, who took flesh from our kind? If in that most glorious passion the Lord Jesus Christ were either beheaded, or punished by any cuttings-off of His other members, do we suppose these men would say that a part of the Word was lopped off with the head, and another part cut away with the hands? And because He was circumcised, one must beware lest they imagine that a part of the Word was likewise cut off with that despoiling of the member;

for not even today would anyone who is more soundly and rightly wise say this truly of men who have been mutilated. For it is not lawful to suppose that, when a man's hands are cut off, a portion of his soul is likewise severed. That visible light too is taken away from a man through any affections of the eyes; yet that light by which it is able to discern between justice and iniquity is not taken away from the soul. For one thing is proper to the body, another to the soul. IX. Meanwhile, this above all is to be contemplated by the mind: that if the nature of God were of such a condition as to be subjected, of itself and in itself, to some kinds of sufferings, there would surely be no necessity of taking up a human body.

For what need was there for God to take to Himself the nature of mortals, if His own nature could lie subject to the laws of death? But because death, which had crept in through the transgression of the Fall, had to be destroyed by death, just as the Lord Himself had foretold, saying: I will be thy death, O death (Hosea 13:14), the Son of God found it necessary, by the higher and deeper counsel of His dispensation, that — since He Himself is of an impassible nature — He should take up a body of passible nature, in which He might be afflicted with injuries and sufferings even to such a degree that, coming through a nature liable to death even to the loss of death, He might destroy death in its own seat, and, plundering all the rights of hell by the triumph of His victorious encounter, might return to the regions above.

You see, therefore, that for no other reason did God permit Himself to die, in the nature He assumed, except because His own nature is in no wise held by the condition of mortality; and that thus there is something proper to Christ which befits His divinity, and something else which befits His humanity — although, on account of the unity of person, both death is referred to the divinity, and immortality to the humanity of the same God. X. We must indeed beware lest these men, who through a most empty fear refuse on that account to accept the property of each nature — lest they seem to introduce two Christs — should similarly raise some question against us also concerning the Trinity; namely, that because there are certain things proper to the Father, which pertain neither to the Son nor to the Holy Spirit;

and there are certain things proper to the Son, which pertain neither to the Father nor to the Holy Spirit; and there are also some things proper to the Holy Spirit, which are shown to pertain neither to the Father nor to the Son — they might charge that we Catholics worship three gods separated from one another. But lest perhaps you be troubled by an unexpected question, attend to these things one by one. The dispensation of the assumed flesh pertains neither to the Father nor to the Holy Spirit, but to the Son alone: for properly the Son, not the Father, was born of the Virgin. Again, that voice which was heard over Him: This is my beloved Son (Matt. 3:17 and 17:5), pertains neither to the Son nor to the Holy Spirit, but to the Father alone.

Likewise the form of the dove which appeared at the Jordan, and the manifold distribution of the fiery tongues, is shown to pertain properly to the person of the Holy Spirit. But lest you still doubt concerning these properties, hear more plainly. It is proper to the Father to have begotten, and proper to the Son to have been born; but it is proper to the Holy Spirit to proceed. Nor does that which is specially proper to each person at all pass over into another person. If, then, these three persons, each having their own properties, by which they are more significantly distinguished — not by which they are separated — are one God; how is the Son, the property of each nature being preserved, not one Christ? XI.

For in man too, if we would dispute more subtly, you will find very many things so distinguished apart by a certain property that, if you wished there also to cavil, you might make many men out of one man. That man therefore consists of five senses, through the ordered distinctions of the bodily members, no one is who does not know: which senses so hold by nature the property of their own office that they can have nothing in common with one another, nor claim for themselves anything of another's property. And, to mention all in particular, sight so performs the proper office of its ministry that it can neither hear, nor smell, nor taste, nor touch anything.

Hearing so administers the office of its nature that it undertakes neither the office of seeing, nor of smelling, nor of tasting, nor of touching. Smell too discharges the service of its function in such a way that it neither hears, nor sees, nor tastes anything, nor touches. Taste likewise neither sees, nor smells, nor hears, nor touches. Touch, finally, which is the last sense, neither enjoys sight, nor perceives hearing, nor takes in odor, nor discerns taste. And although all these kinds of members are so diverse, so distinct, so set apart by their natural properties that they have nothing of communion, nothing of fellowship with one another, but fulfill the ministry of their own function by a certain private and solitary right;

yet it is one and the same man who, since he consists of five bodily senses differing from one another by a fivefold property, ought, according to the ravings of these men, to have five persons, so that there should be as great a number of persons as there are properties of the senses. Furthermore, to be afflicted with hunger and to eat, to thirst and to drink, to sit and to walk, to go to bed and to rise from sleep, to suffer cold and to be parched with heat — although the body neither suffers nor does these things without the soul's fellow-feeling, yet these are proper to the flesh.

Likewise to be wise, to understand, to forget, to recall to memory, to be uplifted by joy, to be cast down by sadness, to grow gentle through mildness, to wax fierce through rage and wrath, and very many things similar to these, which it would be long to pursue — although they are not done in the soul without the body, yet they are proper to the soul. Nor yet has anyone presumed, or dares, to say that a man has two persons, in whom he discerns such great differences of properties to exist. XII. But the rashness of these men, which, according to the number of natures, foists in a diversity of persons, must be shattered by apostolic authority and utterly crushed. The Apostle certainly knew Christ to be of both natures, since he proclaims Him both man and God, and yet the same one. As man indeed when he says:

There is one mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus (1 Tim. 2:5). And again: As by one man came death, so by one man the resurrection of the dead (1 Cor. 15:21). And of His Son he says: Who was made to Him of the seed of David according to the flesh (Rom. 1:3). And: Be mindful that Jesus Christ rose again from the dead, of the seed of David according to the flesh (2 Tim. 2:8). But as God when he says: Of whom is Christ, who is over all things, God blessed forever (Rom. 9:5). And very many things similar to these, which it would be long to recount.

He, therefore, who proclaimed this same one as both God and man, so as to show from both natures one Christ, I marvel how he did not fear these distinguished slanderers of our time when he ascribed one person to Christ, saying: And if I have forgiven anything, it was in the person of Christ (2 Cor. 2:10). XIII. They are also wont, with their accustomed boldness of rashness, to find fault with this also, when they hear Catholics say: God and man; supposing that by the interposition of this syllable two persons can be signified: but how foolishly they think this, listen. For what is God and man, except He who is God, and was also made man — not losing what He was, but taking up what was ours?

For when in our confession we put first God, and follow by saying and man, we assert not only that God remains, but also that the same one subsists as man, so that neither does the deity depart from itself, nor does the humanity perish in the deity. Yet let us see whether perhaps by divine authority this syllable was interposed. For thus we read: And He is man, and who shall know Him (Jer. 17:9, according to the Septuagint)? And again David: The mother Sion shall say, A man, even a man is made in her, and the Most High Himself hath founded her (Ps. 87:5). Why then did he not simply, without the prefixing of this syllable, say: A man is made in her, but prefaced it, saying: And a man is made in her? Or in the other prophecy, why did he prefix the 'and'?

For according to these men he ought to have said: He is man, and who shall know Him? — unless the sense be such that Him whom you confess to be God, you should not, by a like confession, deny to have been made man also. XIV. These men are indeed said — if it is true — to confess that Christ is of two natures up to His resurrection; but after the resurrection they declare Him to be of one. How absurd and how foolish this is, the very truth of things shows. For after the resurrection, to demonstrate the truth of His body, He both ate and drank, and offered Himself to be touched by the disciples, saying: Handle me and see, for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as you see me to have (Luke 24:39).

But perhaps while He was still set on earth He was of each nature; but afterward, when He ascended the heavens, He began to be of the divine nature alone. And what then does the name 'Son of man' do there, if the nature of humanity is not there? How is an empty name ascribed to a thing that does not exist? How does the truth of the name remain, if the property of the nature is absent? Finally He says: When the Son of man shall come in the glory of His Father. And again: As lightning comes out of the East and appears even unto the West, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be (Matt. 24:27). And again: When the Son of man comes, do you suppose He shall find faith on earth (Luke 18:8)? Daniel too says: Behold, in the clouds of heaven the Son of man was coming (Dan. 7:13).

If, therefore, the nature of humanity is lost, why is its appellation retained? Or is it because the name was needed, while the reality of the name, as being unnecessary, was to be repudiated? So let them play the fool who are ashamed of nothing of their own error and folly. But the Lord Jesus Christ, in order to show that the nature of our kind was not consumed, truly calls Himself the Son of man. According to this same nature He also intercedes with the Father for us, according to the words of the apostle John, who says: If we have sinned, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus. He Himself intercedes for our sins (1 John 2:1).

Tell us therefore, O distinguished teachers, when the Son intercedes today with the Father, does He make request according to His deity, or according to the dispensation of His humanity? But as far as the bent of your faithlessness shows (you who, destroying the human nature, assert that the divine alone exists), He intercedes according to His deity, He discharges the office of advocate according to His deity, He fulfills the ministry of priest according to His deity; according to His deity also He shall in the end be subject to the Father, when all things shall have been made subject to the same Son. XV. Long did we wait, long did we look out, whence the rivulet of your error draws its source, and whither it runs its course.