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

1. An. Dom. 325. ↩

2. Μηδὲ γὰρ δεηθη̑ναι ϕησὶ τὴν σάρκα ἐκείνην ἀνθρωπίνου νοὸς ἡγεμονευομένην ὑπὸ του̑ αὐτὴν ἐνδεδυκότος θεου̑. Suid. [sub voc. Ἀπολλινάριος.] ↩

3. [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.] ↩

4. An. Dom. 381. ↩

5. 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.] ↩

6. John i. 14. ↩

7. Heb. ii. 16. ↩

8. Ἡ ληϕθει̑σα ϕύσις οὐ προϋπη̑ρχε τη̑ς λήψεως. Theod. Dial. Ἄτρεπτος. [Dial. ii. p. 101. t. iv. pars i. ed. Schulze.] ↩

9. 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.] ↩

10. An. Dom. 431. ↩

11. [Vid. Cyril. de Recta Fide, t. vi. 48. (ex Athanas.) et Ep. ad Eulog. vi. 133.] ↩

12. [Vid. e. g. Alexand. Alexandrin. ap. Socr. i. 6. p. 11. A. ed. Vales.] ↩

13. [Cyr. t. vi. Epist. p. 8, 133.] ↩

14. An. Dom. 451. ↩

15. Ἀχώριστον προσήκει τη̑ς σαρκὸς εἰ̑ναι τὴν θείαν ϕύσιν ὁμολογει̑ν, κᾀν τῳ̑ σταυρῳ̑ κᾀν τῳ̑ τάϕῳ. Theod. Dial. Ἀπαθής. [Dial. iii. t. iv. p. 227.] ↩