On the Incarnation of the Lord, against Nestorius 0.1–1.6

When I had lately finished the little books of the spiritual Conferences, which are notable for their thought rather than their style (since the speech of my inexperience was unequal to the lofty thought of the holy men), I had thought, and had almost decided, after the shame of having exposed my ignorance, to settle myself in the harbor of silence in such a way that, as far as lay in me, I might atone by the modesty of saying nothing for the boldness of my talkativeness. But you have overcome my purpose and resolve by your praiseworthy zeal and your most commanding affection, my Leo, my venerable and admired dear friend, ornament of the Roman church and of the divine ministry. You draw me out of that retreat of silence I had planned into a public and fearful judgment, and you compel me, while I still blush for what is past, to undertake new things; and though I have been unequal even to lesser tasks, I am forced by you to be equal to greater ones.

For even in those little works by which, through the small offering of my poor talent, we sacrificed to God, I would not have attempted to undertake or take upon myself anything unless I had been drawn by the command of a bishop. And so through you the dignity of my speech and pen has grown. For we who earlier, under orders, spoke of the Lord’s pursuits, are now required by you to speak of the very incarnation of the Lord and of his majesty. Thus we who earlier were brought into the holy place of the temple as if by the hand of a priest, now under your leading and with your help penetrate, as it were, into the holy of holies.

A great honor, but a perilous undertaking, since the palm of entering the inner sanctuary and of the divine reward cannot be won unless the enemy is overcome. So you require and command me to join my feeble hands in battle against a new heresy and a new enemy of the faith, and to stand, as they say, with open mouth against the heavy jaws of a deadly serpent: namely, so that the prophetic power and the divine strength of the gospel word, with me as its charmer, may burst asunder the dragon that rises with winding coils against the churches of God. I obey your entreaty, I obey your command.

For I prefer to trust you about myself rather than myself, especially since the love of Jesus Christ my Lord, who commands this very thing in you also, enjoins it on me along with you. It remains that you ask the accomplishment of the task you have ordered from him through whom you gave the order. For now it is your cause rather than mine that is at stake here; it is your judgment rather than my service that is in danger. For whether I am equal to your command or not, the very principle of obedience and humility excuses me to some degree, except that there is all the more merit in my compliance if there is less in my ability.

For we easily satisfy anyone’s command out of abundance; but great and wonderful is the service of one who has in his wish what he does not have in his strength. So this matter is yours, the business is yours, the work concerns your honor. Pray and entreat that your choice may not be put in danger by my lack of skill, and that, if we do not answer to so great an expectation, you may not seem to have commanded badly through lack of judgment, even though I obey well through the indulgence granted to obedience.

The tales of the poets relate that the hydra once, when its heads were cut off, grew back more numerous and grew through its own losses, so that by a new and unheard-of wonder, as the monster multiplied through its own deaths, loss was a kind of gain: whatever the sword of the one cutting it severed, a monstrous fruitfulness doubled. At last the energetic attacker who had begun that cutting, laboring and sweating, after his strength had so often been spent in vain, armed the force of war with the skill of counsel: bringing fire, as they say, he cut off with a burning sword the manifold brood of that portentous body, and so, when its marrow had been burned within and he had seared the rebellious veins of its wicked fertility, the monstrous births at last ceased. In the same way heresies in the churches bear the likeness of that hydra which the inventions of the poets devised. For these too hiss against us with deadly tongues, these too cast lethal venom, and these too grow again when their heads are cut off. But because the medicine must not cease while the disease rises again, and the greater the sickness, the more urgent must be the cure, the Lord our God is able to bring it about that what the falsehood of the pagans invented about the death of that hydra, the truth should accomplish in the battles of the churches, and that the fiery sword of the Holy Spirit should so burn out all the marrow of this pernicious brood in extinguishing the new heresy that at last its monstrous fruitfulness may cease to give birth, as its veins die.

For these shoots of monstrous seed are not new in the churches. The crop of the Lord’s field has always put up with these burrs and briars, and in it there has constantly sprung up the shoot of the choking tares. From here sprang the Ebionites, from here the Sabellians, from here the Arians, from here finally the Eunomians and Macedonians, from here the Photinians and Apollinarians, and the other thorns of the churches and the thistles that choke the good crop. The first of them, Ebion, by asserting the Lord’s incarnation too strongly, stripped it of union with the Godhead. After him Sabellius, bursting out into schism from the opposite of the earlier heresy, by contending that there is no distinction between the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, mixed together, as far as lay in him, the holy and ineffable Trinity in a blasphemous confusion. Then followed the impiety of the Arian perversity which we mentioned, which, so as not to seem to mix the holy persons, said that there are different and unlike substances in the Trinity. Eunomius, after him but of very much the same wickedness, though he asserted that the divine Trinity is like itself, still contended that it is different from itself, admitting likeness but excluding equality. Macedonius too, blaspheming with irremediable impiety against the Holy Spirit, though he said that the Father and the Son are of the same substance, yet by calling the Holy Spirit a creature became guilty against the whole Godhead, because nothing in the Trinity can be wronged without injury to the whole Trinity. Photinus, though he called Jesus, who was born of the virgin, God, wrongly invented that the beginning of God was the same as the beginning of the man. Apollinaris, understanding without due thought the man united to God, wrongly believed that he did not have a human soul, because it is no smaller error to add to the Lord Jesus Christ what does not belong to him than to take away what does. For whatever is said of him otherwise than as it is, even if it seems an honor, is an injury. So each of them, producing a heresy out of the opposite of a heresy, held things all different from one another, but all opposed to the faith. Lately too, that is, in our own days, we have seen a poisonous heresy spring up from the greatest city of the Belgae, of certain error but uncertain name, because, having arisen with a new head from the ancient stock of the Ebionites, it is very doubtful whether it ought to be called old or new. For it was new in its defenders but old in its errors. It blasphemously claimed that our Lord Jesus Christ was born a mere man, and that his coming afterwards to the honor and power of God belonged to human merit, not to divine nature; and that therefore he did not always have Godhead itself by the property of the divinity united to him, but earned it afterwards as the reward of his labor and suffering. Since it blasphemed that our Lord and Savior was not born God but was taken up by God, it was of course a neighbor to this heresy that has now appeared, its sister, as it were, and of the same blood: in time it stood midway between the two, agreeing both with the Ebionites and with these recent ones, but joined to both by its perversity. There may be some other things in it like those we have already mentioned, but it would be long to recount them all. For we have taken up now not a recital of things past but a refutation of new ones.

One thing, however, we think must not be passed over, which was peculiar and proper to that heresy just mentioned, which had descended from the Pelagian error. Certain people, saying that Jesus Christ, a mere man, lived without any contagion of sin, went so far as to assert that men can be without sin if they wish. (For they thought it followed that, if Jesus Christ as a mere man had been without sin, all men too could be without God’s help whatever that man, being a mere man, could be without fellowship with God.) And so they made no difference between any man and our Lord Jesus Christ, since any man by his own effort and industry could earn what Christ had earned by zeal and toil. The result was that, bursting out into a greater and more monstrous madness, they said that our Lord Jesus Christ came into this world not to bring redemption to the human race but to give examples of good actions, so that men, following his discipline and walking by the same road of virtue, might arrive at the same rewards of virtue. As far as lay in them, they emptied out the whole gift of the holy coming, the whole grace of the divine redemption, since they said that men could obtain by living what God had brought about for human salvation by dying. They added also that our Lord and Savior became Christ after his baptism and God after his resurrection, assigning the one to the mystery of the anointing and the other to the merit of the passion. Hence the author of this heresy, which is now no longer new, who contends that our Lord and Savior was born a mere man, notices that he is saying exactly what the Pelagians said before, and that it follows from his error that, since he asserts that Jesus Christ lived without sin as a mere man, he blasphemes that all men too can be without sin by themselves, and, following that example, says that the Lord’s redemption was not necessary, since men can reach the heavenly kingdom, as they say, by their own effort alone. Nor is this doubtful: the thing itself declares it plainly. For this is why he fosters the complaints of the Pelagians by his intercessions and asserts their cause in his writings, why he subtly, or to speak more truly, craftily, acts as their patron and supports a wickedness akin to his own with wicked affection: he knows of course that he is of the same mind and the same spirit, and therefore he grieves that the heresy akin to him has been cut off from the church, knowing it to be joined to him in perversity.

Yet since those who had descended from that stock of pestilent thorns have by God’s help and goodness already been healed, we must pray the Lord our God now also that, since that former heresy and this new one agree with each other in some things, he may grant a like good outcome to like evil beginnings. For Leporius, then a monk and now a presbyter, who, descending as we said from the teaching, or rather the depravity, of Pelagius, was in Gaul among the first or among the greatest defenders of the said heresy, was admonished by us and corrected by God, and so splendidly condemned the persuasion he had wrongly conceived that his correction is almost no less admirable than the unharmed faith of many, since the first thing is not to fall into error at all, the second to renounce it well. Coming to himself, then, he not only confessed his error, with grief but without shame, in Africa, where he was then and is now, but also sent letters of his confession and lament to practically all the cities of Gaul, so that where his straying had first been known his correction might also be known, and those who had earlier been witnesses of his error might afterwards be the same witnesses of his correction.

From his confession, or rather lament, we have thought it right to insert some passages for a twofold reason: that the correction of these people might be both a testimony for us and an example for those who waver, and that those who had not blushed to follow their error might not blush to follow their amendment, and, as they were sick with a like sickness, so they might be healed with a like remedy. Having recognized the perversity of his opinion and seen the light of the faith, he began thus, writing to the bishops of Gaul: “I do not know, my venerable lords and most blessed bishops, what I should first accuse in myself, and I do not find what I should first excuse in myself. Inexperience and pride, foolish simplicity together with harmful persuasion, zeal with lack of restraint, and, to speak more truly, a faith weak through its own diminishing, were all so received and strong in me at once, that it is a confusion to me to have obeyed so many and such great things, and an amazing cause of thanks that I have been able to cast these same things out of my mind.” And after a little he adds: “If then, not grasping this power of God and wise in our own sense and reasoning, as though God seemed to be doing things beneath him, we say that the man was born with God in such a way that we give separately to God alone the things that are God’s and separately assign to the man alone the things that are man’s, we most plainly introduce a fourth person into the Trinity and begin to make of the one Son of God not one but two Christs, which may our Lord and God Christ himself avert from us. Therefore we confess our Lord and God Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, who was begotten of the Father for himself before the ages, and who in time was made man for us of the Holy Spirit and Mary ever virgin, God born. And confessing both substances, of the flesh and of the Word, we always receive with the pious belief of faith one and the same God and man, inseparable; and from the time he took flesh we say that all things that were God’s passed over to the man, so that all things that were the man’s came to God. In this sense the Word was made flesh: not that by conversion or any change he began to be what he was not, but that by the power of the divine dispensation the Word of the Father, never departing from the Father, deigned to become properly man, and the Only-begotten was incarnate by that secret mystery which he himself knows (for it is ours to believe, his to know). And so God the Word himself, receiving all that belongs to man, is man, and the man assumed, receiving all that belongs to God, cannot be anything other than God. Yet because he is said to be incarnate and mixed, no lessening of his substance is to be understood. God knows how to be mixed without corruption of himself and yet to be truly mixed, and to receive in such a way that no increase is added to him, just as he knows how to pour himself in whole so that no loss befalls him. Let us not then, by conjecture after the visible proofs of experience suited to the understanding of our weakness, as with equal creatures entering into one another, think that God and man were blended and that out of such a confusion of flesh and Word some sort of body was made. Far be it from us to believe that, by a kind of fusion, as in a smelting, the two natures were reduced into one substance; for a blending of that kind is the corruption of both parts. For God, who contains and is not contained, penetrates and is not penetrated, fills and is not filled, who is everywhere at once whole and everywhere diffused, by the inpouring of his power has mercifully mingled with human nature.” And after a little: “There is born for us, then, properly of the Holy Spirit and Mary ever virgin, God and man, Jesus Christ the Son of God; and so the Word and the flesh become one in each other, such that, while each substance remains naturally in its own perfection, without prejudice to itself the divine things communicate with the humanity and the human things share in the divinity; and he is not God one and man another, but the same one who is God is also man, and in turn the man who is also God, Jesus Christ, is named and truly is the one Son of God. And so we must always hold and believe that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, true God, whom we confess always with the Father and equal to the Father before the ages, became from the time he took flesh God and man, and we must not deny it; nor may we say that, as if advancing toward God by stages and times, he was of one condition before the resurrection and of another after it, but that he was always of the same fullness and power.” And again a little later: “But because the Word of God, graciously taking up man, came down into man, and through the taking up by God the man went up into the Word, the whole God the Word was made whole man. For it was not God the Father who was made man, nor the Holy Spirit, but the Only-begotten of the Father. And therefore one person is to be understood of the flesh and the Word, so that we may believe faithfully and without any doubt that one and the same Son of God, always inseparable, of twin substance, also called a giant, in the days of his flesh both truly did always all the things that are man’s and truly possessed always the things that are God’s; for even though he was crucified out of weakness, yet he lives by the power of God.”

This confession of his, then, which is the faith of all catholics, was approved by all the bishops of Africa, from where he was writing, and by all those of Gaul, to whom he was writing; and no one at all has yet appeared who disliked this faith without the charge of unbelief, because it is a mark of avowed impiety to deny proven piety. The consent of all alone, then, ought now to suffice to refute the heresy, because the authority of all is the manifestation of undoubted truth, and the reasoning is complete where no one dissents. So if anyone tries to think against this, his assertion is not so much to be heard at first sight as his perversity condemned, because one who attacks the judgment of all carries with him a prejudgment of condemnation, and one who overturns what all have established has no right to a hearing. For once the truth has been confirmed by all, whatever comes against it must by that very fact be known at once to be falsehood, because it dissents from the truth; and therefore this alone is fitting and sufficient for a sentence of condemnation against it, that it disagrees with the judgment of the truth. Yet since the speech of reason does no harm to reason, and truth always shines the more for being sifted, and it is better for those in error to be corrected by the healing of discussion than condemned by the severity of censure, the old heresy in the new heretics must be cured, as far as lies in us, with God’s help, so that, health being restored by the holy mercy, their healing may give testimony to the holy faith rather than their condemnation an example of just severity. Only may the Truth itself be present to the discussion and the speech about itself, and by that goodness by which God deigned to come to men may it help human errors; for it was above all for this that he willed to be born on earth and in man, so that there might no longer be room for falsehood.