Surprised as we were at the late arrival of your charity's letter, we read
it and examined the account of what the bishops had done. We now see what
scandal against the integrity of the faith had reared its head among you. What
had previously been kept secret now became clearly revealed to us. Eutyches,
who was considered a man of honour because he had the title of priest, is
shown to be very rash and extremely ignorant. What the prophet said can be applied
to him: He did not want to understand and do good: he plotted evil in his bed.
What can be worse than to have an irreligious mind and to pay no heed to those
who are wiser and more learned? The people who fall into this folly are those
in whom knowledge of the truth is blocked by a kind of dimness. They do not
refer to
but to themselves. By not being
pupils of the truth, they turn out to be masters of error. A man who has not
the most elementary understanding even of the creed itself can have learnt
nothing from the sacred texts of the New and Old Testaments. This old man has
not yet taken to heart what is pronounced by every baptismal candidate the
world over!
He had no idea how he ought to think about the incarnation of the
Word of God; and he had no desire to acquire the light of understanding by
working through the length and breadth of the holy scriptures. So at least he
should have listened carefully and accepted the common and undivided creed by
which the whole body of the faithful confess that they believe in
These three statements wreck the
tricks of nearly every heretic. When God is believed to be both almighty and
Father, the Son is clearly proved to be co-eternal with him, in no way
different from the Father, since he was born God from God, almighty from the
Almighty, co-eternal from the Eternal, not later in time, not lower in power,
not unlike in glory, not distinct in being. The same eternal, only-begotten of
the eternal begetter was born of the holy Spirit and the virgin Mary. His birth
in time in no way subtracts from or adds to that divine and eternal birth of
his: but its whole purpose is to restore humanity, who had been deceived, so
that it might defeat death and, by its power, destroy the devil who held the
power of death. Overcoming the originator of sin and death would be beyond
us, had not he whom sin could not defile, nor could death hold down, taken up
our nature and made it his own. He was conceived from the holy Spirit inside
the womb of the virgin mother. Her virginity was as untouched in giving
him birth as it was in conceiving him.
But if it was beyond Eutyches to derive sound understanding from this, the
purest source of the christian faith, because the brightness of manifest
truth had been darkened by his own peculiar blindness, then he should have
subjected himself to the teaching of the gospels. When Matthew says, The book
of the generation of Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham, Eutyches
should have looked up the further development in the apostolic
preaching. When he read in the letter to the Romans, Paul, the servant of
Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for God's gospel, which he had
formerly promised through his prophets in the holy writings which refer to his
Son, who was made for him of David's seed according to the flesh, he should
have paid deep and devout attention to the prophetic texts. And when he
discovered God making the promise to Abraham that in your seed shall all
nations be blessed, he should have followed the apostle, in order to eliminate
any doubt about the identity of this seed, when he says, The promises were
spoken to Abraham and his seed . He does not say "to his seeds"--as
if referring to a multiplicity--but to a single one, "and to thy seed
" which is Christ. His inward ear should also have heard Isaiah preaching Behold,
a virgin will receive in the womb and will bear a son, and they will call
his name Emmanuel, which is translated "God is with us". With faith
he should have read the same prophet's words, A child is born to us, a son is
given to us. His power is on his shoulders. They will call his name "Angel
of great counsel, mighty God, prince of peace, father of the world to
come". Then he would not deceive people by saying that the Word was made
flesh in the sense that he emerged from the virgin's womb having a human form
but not having the reality of his mother's body.
Or was it perhaps that he thought that our lord Jesus Christ did not have
our nature because the angel who was sent to the blessed Mary said, The holy
Spirit will come upon you and the power of the most High will overshadow you,
and so that which will be born holy out of you will be called Son of God, as if
it was because the conception by the virgin was worked by God that the flesh of
the one conceived did not share the nature of her who conceived it? But
uniquely wondrous and wondrously unique as that act of generation was, it is
not to be understood as though the proper character of its kind was taken away
by the sheer novelty of its creation. It was the holy Spirit that made the
virgin pregnant, but the reality of the body derived from body. As
Wisdom built a house for herself, the Word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us:
that is, in that flesh which he derived from human kind and which he animated
with the spirit of a rational life.
So the proper character of both natures was maintained and came together
in a single person. Lowliness was taken up by majesty, weakness by
strength, mortality by eternity. To pay off the debt of our state,
invulnerable nature was united to a nature that could suffer; so that in a way
that corresponded to the remedies we needed, one and the same mediator between
God and humanity the man Christ Jesus, could both on the one hand die and on
the other be incapable of death. Thus was true God born in the undiminished and
perfect nature of a true man, complete in what is his and complete in what is
ours. By "ours" we mean what the Creator established in us from the
beginning and what he took upon himself to restore. There was in the Saviour no
trace of the things which the Deceiver brought upon us, and to which deceived
humanity gave admittance. His subjection to human weaknesses in common with
us did not mean that he shared our sins. He took on the form of a servant
without the defilement of sin, thereby enhancing the human and not diminishing
the divine. For that self-emptying whereby the Invisible rendered himself
visible, and the Creator and Lord of all things chose to join the ranks of
mortals, spelled no failure of power: it was an act of merciful favour. So the
one who retained the form of God when he made humanity, was made man in the
form of a servant. Each nature kept its proper character without loss; and just
as the form of God does not take away the form of a servant, so the form of a
servant does not detract from the form of God.
It was the devil's boast that humanity had been deceived by his trickery and
so had lost the gifts God had given it; and that it had been stripped of
the endowment of immortality and so was subject to the harsh sentence of death.
He also boasted that, sunk as he was in evil, he himself derived some
consolation from having a partner in crime; and that God had been forced by the
principle of justice to alter his verdict on humanity, which he had created in such
an honourable state. All this called for the realisation of a secret plan
whereby the unalterable God, whose will is indistinguishable from his
goodness, might bring the original realisation of his kindness towards us to
completion by means of a more hidden mystery, and whereby humanity, which had
been led into a state of sin by the craftiness of the devil, might be prevented
from perishing contrary to the purpose of God.
So without leaving his Father's glory behind, the Son of God comes down from
his heavenly throne and enters the depths of our world, born in an
unprecedented order by an unprecedented kind of birth. In an unprecedented
order, because one who is invisible at his own level was made visible at ours.
The ungraspable willed to be grasped. Whilst remaining pre-existent, he begins
to exist in time. The Lord of the universe veiled his measureless majesty and
took on a servant's form. The God who knew no suffering did not despise
becoming a suffering man, and, deathless as he is, to be subject to the laws of
death. By an unprecedented kind of birth, because it was inviolable virginity
which supplied the material flesh without experiencing sexual desire.
What was taken from the mother of the Lord was the nature without the guilt.
And the fact that the birth was miraculous does not imply that in the lord
Jesus Christ, born from the virgin's womb, the nature is different from ours.
The same one is true God and true man.
There is nothing unreal about this oneness, since both the lowliness of the man
and the grandeur of the divinity are in mutual relation. As God is not changed
by showing mercy, neither is humanity devoured by the dignity received. The
activity of each form is what is proper to it in communion with the other: that
is, the Word performs what belongs to the Word, and the flesh accomplishes what
belongs to the flesh. One of these performs brilliant miracles the other
sustains acts of violence. As the Word does not lose its glory which is
equal to that of the Father, so neither does the flesh leave the nature of its
kind behind. We must say this again and again: one and the same is truly Son
of God and truly son of man. God, by the fact that in the beginning was the
Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God; man, by the fact that
the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. God, by the fact that all things
were made through him, and nothing was made without him, man, by the
fact that he was made of a woman, made under the law. The birth of flesh
reveals human nature; birth from a virgin is a proof of divine power. A lowly
cradle manifests the infancy of the child; angels' voices announce the
greatness of the most High. Herod evilly strives to kill one who was like a
human being at the earliest stage the Magi rejoice to adore on bended knee one
who is the Lord of all. And when he came to be baptised by his precursor John,
the Father's voice spoke thunder from heaven, to ensure that he did not go
unnoticed because the divinity was concealed by the veil of flesh: This is my
beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Accordingly, the same one whom the
devil craftily tempts as a man, the angels dutifully wait on as God. Hunger,
thirst, weariness, sleep are patently human. But to satisfy five thousand
people with five loaves; to dispense living water to the Samaritan woman, a
drink of which will stop her being thirsty ever again; to walk on the surface
of the sea with feet that do not sink; to rebuke the storm and level the
mounting waves; there can be no doubt these are divine.
So, if I may pass over many instances, it does not belong to the same nature
to weep out of deep-felt pity for a dead friend, and to call him back to life
again at the word of command, once the mound had been removed from the
four-dayold grave; or to hang on the cross and, with day changed into night, to
make the elements tremble; or to be pierced by nails and to open the gates of
paradise for the believing thief. Likewise, it does not belong to the same
nature to say I and the Father are one, and to say The Father is greater than
I. For although there is in the Lord Jesus Christ a single person who is of God
and of man, the insults shared by both have their source in one thing, and the
glory that is shared in another. For it is from us that he gets a humanity
which is less than the Father; it is from the Father that he gets a divinity
which is equal to the Father.
So it is on account of this oneness of the person, which must be understood
in both natures, that we both read that the son of man came down from heaven, when
the Son of God took flesh from the virgin from whom he was born, and again that
the Son of God is said to have been crucified and buried, since he suffered
these things not in the divinity itself whereby the Only-begotten is co-eternal
and consubstantial with the Father, but in the weakness of the human nature.
That is why in the creed, too, we all confess that the only-begotten Son of God
was crucified and was buried, following what the apostle said, If they had
known, they would never have crucified the Lord of majesty. And when our Lord
and Saviour himself was questioning his disciples and instructing their faith,
he says, Who do people say 1, the son of man, am? And when they had displayed a
variety of other people's opinions, he says, Who do you say I am ? --in other
words, I who am the son of man and whom you behold in the form of a servant and
in real flesh: Who do you say I am? Whereupon the blessed Peter, inspired by
God and making a confession that would benefit all future peoples, says, You are
the Christ, the Son of the living God. He thoroughly deserved to be declared
"blessed" by the Lord. He derived the stability of both his goodness
and his name from the original Rock, for when the Father revealed it to him, he
confessed that the same one is both the Son of God and also the Christ.
Accepting one of these truths without the other was no help to salvation; and
to have believed that the Lord Jesus Christ was either only God and not man, or
solely man and not God, was equally dangerous.
After the Lord's resurrection--which was certainly the resurrection of a real
body, since the one brought back to life is none other than the one who had
been crucified and had died--the whole point of the forty-day delay was to make
our faith completely sound and to cleanse it of all darkness. Hence he talked
to his disciples and lived and ate with them, and let himself be touched
attentively and carefully by those who were in the grip of doubt; he would go
in among his disciples when the doors were locked, and impart the holy Spirit
by breathing on them, and open up the secrets of the holy scriptures after
enlightening their understanding; again, he would point out the wound in his
side, the holes made by the nails, and all the signs of the suffering he had
just recently undergone, saying, Look at my hands and feet--it is I. Feel and
see, because a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have. All
this was so that it would be recognised that the proper character of the divine
and of the human nature went on existing inseparable in him; and so that we
would realise that the Word is not the same thing as the flesh, but in such a
way that we would confess belief in the one Son of God as being both Word and
flesh.
This Eutyches must be judged to be extremely destitute of this mystery of
the faith. Neither the humility of the mortal life nor the glory of the
resurrection has made him recognise our nature in the only-begotten of God. Nor
has even the statement of the blessed apostle and evangelist John put fear into
him: Every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ came in the flesh is from
God, and every spirit which puts Jesus asunder is not from God, and this is Antichrist.
But what does putting Jesus as under consist in if not in separating his
human nature from him, and in voiding, through the most barefaced fictions, the
one mystery by which we have been saved? Once in the dark about the nature of
Christ's body, it follows that the same blindness leads him into raving folly
about his suffering too. If he does not think that the Lord's cross was unreal
and if he has no doubt that the suffering undergone for the world's salvation
was real, then let him acknowledge the flesh of the one whose death he believes
in. And let him not deny that a man whom he knows to have been subject to
suffering had our kind of body, for to deny the reality of the flesh is also to
deny the bodily suffering. So if he accepts the christian faith and does not
turn a deaf ear to the preaching of the gospel, let him consider what nature it
was that hung, pierced with nails, on the wood of the cross. With the side of
the crucified one laid open by the soldier's spear, let him identify the source
from which blood and water flowed, to bathe the church of God with both font
and cup.
Let him heed what the blessed apostle Peter preaches, that sanctification by
the Spirit is effected by the sprinkling of Christ's blood; and let him not
skip over the same apostle's words, knowing that you have been redeemed from
the empty way of life you inherited from your fathers, not with corruptible
gold and silver but by the precious blood of Jesus Christ, as of a lamb without
stain or spot. Nor should he withstand the testimony of blessed John the
apostle: and the blood of Jesus, the Son of God, purifies us from every sin;
and again, This is the victory which conquers the world, our faith. Who is
there who conquers the world save one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God
? It is he, Jesus Christ who has come through water and blood, not in water only,
but in water and blood. And because the Spirit is truth, it is the Spirit who
testifies. For there are three who give testimony--Spirit and water and blood.
And the three are one. In other words, the Spirit of sanctification and the
blood of redemption and the water of baptism. These three are one and remain
indivisible. None of them is separable from its link with the others. The
reason is that it is by this faith that the catholic church lives and grows,
by believing that neither the humanity is without true divinity nor the
divinity without true humanity.
When you cross-examined Eutyches and he replied, "I confess that our
Lord was of two natures before the union, but I confess one nature after the
union", I am amazed that such an absurd and corrupt declaration of faith
was not very severely censured by the judges; and that an extremely foolish
statement was disregarded, as if nothing whatever offensive had been heard. It
is just as wicked to say that the only-begotten Son of God was of two natures before
the incarnation as it is abominable to claim that there was a single nature in
him after the Word was made flesh. Eutyches must not suppose that what he said
was either correct or tolerable just because no clear statement of yours
refuted it. So we remind you, dearest brother, of your charity's
responsibility to see to it that if through God's merciful inspiration the
case is ever settled, the rash and ignorant fellow is also purged of what is
blighting his mind. As the minutes have made clear, he made a good start at
abandoning his opinion when, under pressure from your statement, he professed
to say what he had not previously said, and to find satisfaction in the faith
to which he had previously been a stranger. But when he had refused to be party
to the anathematising of his wicked doctrine, your fraternity would have
realised that he was persisting in his false belief and that he deserved a
verdict of condemnation. If he is honestly and suitably sorry about this, and
acknowledges even at this late stage how rightly episcopal authority was set in
motion, or if, to make full amends, he condemns every wrong thought he had by
word of mouth and by his actual signature, then no amount of mercy towards one
who has reformed is excessive. Our Lord, the true and good shepherd who laid
down his life for his sheep, and who came not to destroy but to save the souls
of men and women, wants us to be imitators of his goodness, so that whilst
justice represses sinners, mercy does not reject the converted. The defence of
the true faith is never so productive as when false opinion is condemned even
by its adherents.
In place of ourself, we have arranged for our brothers, Bishop Julius and
the priest Renatus of the church of St Clement, and also my son, the deacon
Hilary, to ensure a good and faithful conclusion to the whole case. To their
company we have added our notary Dulcitius, of proven loyalty to us. We trust
that with God's help he who has fallen into error might condemn the wickedness
of his own mind and find salvation.
God keep you safe, dearest brother.