LII. It is not in man’s ability either to express perfectly or conceive the manner how this was brought to pass. But the strength of our faith is tried by those things wherein our wits and capacities are not strong. Howbeit because this divine mystery is more true than plain, divers having framed the same to their own conceits and fancies are found in their expositions thereof more plain than true. Insomuch that by the space of five hundred years after Christ, the Church was almost troubled with nothing else saving only with care and travail to preserve this article from the sinister construction of heretics. Whose first mists when the light of the Nicene council1 had dispelled, it was not long ere Macedonius transferred unto God’s most Holy Spirit the same blasphemy wherewith Arius had already dishonoured his co-eternally begotten Son; not long ere Apollinarius2 began to pare away from Christ’s humanity. In refutation of which impieties when the Fathers of the Church, Athanasius, Basil, and the two Gregories, had by their painful travails sufficiently cleared the truth, no less for the Deity of the Holy Ghost than for the complete humanity of Christ, there followed hereupon a final conclusion, whereby those controversies, as also the rest which Paulus Samosatenus, Sabellius, Photinus, Aëtius, Eunomius, together with the whole swarm of pestilent Demi-Arians had from time to time stirred up sithence the council of Nice, were both privately first at Rome in a smaller synod3, and then at Constantinople4, in a general famous assembly brought to a peaceable and quiet end, seven-score bishops and ten agreeing in that confession which by them set down remaineth at this present hour a part of our church liturgy, a memorial of their fidelity and zeal, a sovereign preservative of God’s people from the venomous infection of heresy.
Thus in Christ the verity of God and the complete substance of man were with full agreement established throughout the world, till such time as the heresy of Nestorius broached itself, “5dividing Christ into two persons the Son of God and the Son of man, the one a person begotten of God before all worlds, the other also a person born of the Virgin Mary, and in special favour chosen to be made entire to the Son of God above all men, so that whosoever will honour God must together honour Christ, with whose person God hath vouchsafed to join himself in so high a degree of gracious respect and favour.” But that the selfsame person which verily is man should properly be God also, and that, by reason not of two persons linked in amity but of two natures human and divine conjoined in one and the same person, the God of glory may be said as well to have suffered death as to have raised the dead from their graves, the Son of man as well to have made as to have redeemed the world, Nestorius in no case would admit.
That which deceived him was want of heed to the first beginning of that admirable combination of God with man. “The Word (saith St. John) was made flesh and dwelt in us6.” The Evangelist useth the plural number, men for manhood, us for the nature whereof we consist, even as the Apostle denying the assumption of angelical nature, saith likewise in the plural number, “He took not Angels but the seed of Abraham7.” It pleased not the Word or Wisdom of God to take to itself some one person amongst men, for then should that one have been advanced which was assumed and no more, but Wisdom to the end she might save many built her house of that nature which is common unto all, she made not this or that man her habitation, but dwelt in us. The seeds of herbs and plants at the first are not in act but in possibility that which they afterwards grow to be. If the Son of God had taken to himself a man now made and already perfected, it would of necessity follow that there are in Christ two persons, the one assuming and the other assumed; whereas the Son of God did not assume a man’s person unto his own, but a man’s nature to his own Person, and therefore took semen, the seed of Abraham, the very first original element of our nature8, before it was come to have any personal human subsistence. The flesh and the conjunction of the flesh with God began both at one instant; his making and taking to himself our flesh, was but one act, so that in Christ there is no personal subsistence but one, and that from everlasting. By taking only the nature of man he still continueth one person, and changeth but the manner of his subsisting, which was before in the mere glory of the Son of God, and is now in the habit of our flesh.
Forasmuch therefore as Christ hath no personal subsistence but one whereby we acknowledge him to have been eternally the Son of God, we must of necessity apply to the person of the Son of God even that which is spoken of Christ according to his human nature. For example, according to the flesh he was born of the Virgin Mary, baptized of John in the river Jordan, by Pilate adjudged to die, and executed by the Jews. We cannot say properly that the Virgin bore, or John did baptize, or Pilate condemn, or the Jews crucify the Nature of man, because these all are personal attributes; his Person is the subject which receiveth them, his Nature that which maketh his person capable or apt to receive. If we should say that the person of a man in our Saviour Christ was the subject of these things, this were plainly to entrap ourselves in the very snare of the Nestorians’ heresy, between whom and the Church of God there was no difference, saving only that Nestorius imagined in Christ as well a personal human subsistence as a divine, the Church acknowledging a substance both divine and human, but no other personal subsistence than divine, because the Son of God took not to himself a man’s person, but the nature only of a man.
Christ is a Person both divine and human, howbeit not therefore two persons in one, neither both these in one sense, but a person divine, because he is personally the Son of God, human, because he hath really the nature of the children of men. In Christ therefore God and man “There is (saith Paschasius9) a twofold substance, not a twofold person, because one person extinguisheth another, whereas one nature cannot in another become extinct.” For the personal being which the Son of God already had, suffered not the substance to be personal which he took, although together with the nature which he had the nature also which he took continueth. Whereupon it followeth against Nestorius, that no person was born of the Virgin but the Son of God, no person but the Son of God baptized, the Son of God condemned, the Son of God and no other person crucified; which one only point of Christian belief, the infinite worth of the Son of God, is the very ground of all things believed concerning life and salvation by that which Christ either did or suffered as man in our behalf.
But forasmuch as St. Cyril, the chiefest of those two hundred bishops assembled in the council of Ephesus10, where the heresy of Nestorius was condemned, had in his writings11 against the Arians avouched that the Word or Wisdom of God hath but one nature which is eternal, and whereunto he assumed flesh (for the Arians were of opinion12 that besides God’s own eternal wisdom, there is a wisdom which God created before all things, to the end he might thereby create all things else, and that this created wisdom was the Word which took flesh:) again, forasmuch as the same Cyril13 had given instance in the body and the soul of man no farther than only to enforce by example against Nestorius, that a visible and an invisible, a mortal and an immortal substance may united make one person: the words of Cyril were in process of time so taken as though it had been his drift to teach, that even as in us the body and the soul, so in Christ God and man make but one nature. Of which error, six hundred and thirty fathers in the council of Chalcedon condemned Eutyches14. For as Nestorius teaching rightly that God and man are distinct natures, did thereupon misinfer that in Christ those natures can by no conjunction make one person; so Eutyches, of sound belief as touching their true personal copulation, became unsound by denying the difference which still continueth between the one and the other Nature. We must therefore keep warily a middle course, shunning both that distraction of Persons wherein Nestorius went awry, and also this later confusion of Natures which deceived Eutyches.
These natures from the moment of their first combination have been and are for ever inseparable15. For even when his soul forsook the tabernacle of his body, his Deity forsook neither body nor soul. If it had, then could we not truly hold either that the person of Christ was buried, or that the person of Christ did raise up itself from the dead. For the body separated from the Word can in no true sense be termed the person of Christ; nor is it true to say that the Son of God in raising up that body did raise up himself, if the body were not both with him and of him even during the time it lay in the sepulchre. The like is also to be said of the soul, otherwise we are plainly and inevitably Nestorians. The very person of Christ therefore for ever one and the selfsame was only touching bodily substance concluded within the grave, his soul only from thence severed, but by personal union his Deity still unseparably joined with both.
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Footnotes
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An. Dom. 325. ↩
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Μηδὲ γὰρ δεηθη̑ναι ϕησὶ τὴν σάρκα ἐκείνην ἀνθρωπίνου νοὸς ἡγεμονευομένην ὑπὸ του̑ αὐτὴν ἐνδεδυκότος θεου̑. Suid. [sub voc. Ἀπολλινάριος.] ↩
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[ad 378, a synod of ninety-three bishops was held at Rome, in which Damasus presided; by authority of which a Synodical Epistle, probably the document known by the name of τόμος τω̑ν δυτικω̑ν, and adopted in the fifth canon of Constantinople, was sent to a council then sitting at Antioch under Meletius, and approved there. See Theodoret, E. H. v. 10. p. 211 A. and c. ii. p. 213-16. and Valesius’ Notes, p. 41, 44; Conc. ii. 899-904, 908, 9, 10; Cave, Hist. Lit. ii. 123, 127; Bevereg. Synod. ii. 89; Routh, Opusc. 449.] ↩
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An. Dom. 381. ↩
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Οὐκ ἔτι τὴν ἕνωσιν ὁμολογει̑ μεθ’ ἡμω̑ν. Cyril. (Alex. † 444.) Epist. ad Eulog. [p. 133 A. ed. Par. 1638. t. vi.] Οὐκ ἔλεγε γὰρ ἕνωσιν του̑ Λόγου του̑ Θεου̑ πρὸς ἄνθρωπον, ἀλλὰ δύο ὑποστάσεις ἔλεγε καὶ διαίρεσιν … Εἰ δὲ καὶ ἄνθρωπον καὶ Θεὸν ἀπεκάλει τὸν Χριστὸν, ἀλλ’ οὐκ ἔτι ὡς ἡμει̑ς, ἀλλὰ τῃ̑ σχέσει καὶ τῃ̑ οἰκειώσει … κατὰ τὸ ταὐτὰ ἀλλήλοις ἀρέσκειν διὰ τὴν ὑπερβολὴν τη̑ς ϕιλίας. Leont. (Byzant. c. 610-620.) de Sect. [Act. 4. p. 508. t. i. Biblioth. Patr. Gr. ed. Par. 1624.] ↩
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John i. 14. ↩
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Heb. ii. 16. ↩
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Ἡ ληϕθει̑σα ϕύσις οὐ προϋπη̑ρχε τη̑ς λήψεως. Theod. Dial. Ἄτρεπτος. [Dial. ii. p. 101. t. iv. pars i. ed. Schulze.] ↩
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Paschas. (786-865.) lib. de Spir. Sanct. [lib. ii. c. 4. “In Deo et homine, gemina quidem substantia, sed non gemina persona est, quia persona personam consumere potest, substantia vero substantiam consumere non potest.” In Biblioth. Patr. Colon. viii. 331.] ↩
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An. Dom. 431. ↩
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[Vid. Cyril. de Recta Fide, t. vi. 48. (ex Athanas.) et Ep. ad Eulog. vi. 133.] ↩
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[Vid. e. g. Alexand. Alexandrin. ap. Socr. i. 6. p. 11. A. ed. Vales.] ↩
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[Cyr. t. vi. Epist. p. 8, 133.] ↩
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An. Dom. 451. ↩
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Ἀχώριστον προσήκει τη̑ς σαρκὸς εἰ̑ναι τὴν θείαν ϕύσιν ὁμολογει̑ν, κᾀν τῳ̑ σταυρῳ̑ κᾀν τῳ̑ τάϕῳ. Theod. Dial. Ἀπαθής. [Dial. iii. t. iv. p. 227.] ↩