On the Incarnation of the Lord, against Nestorius 3.12–3.16

But if perhaps the authority of a greater person pleases you (though neither the person nor the sex of anyone whose confession of the sacrament gives authority ought to displease, because, however lowly someone’s condition or rank, the strength of faith knows no lessening), let us question not some beginner, a little boy whose training is raw, or a woman whose faith may perhaps seem a beginner’s, but that highest one, disciple among the disciples and teacher among the teachers, who, steering the helm of the Roman church, held the primacy of the priesthood as he did of faith. Tell us, then, tell us, we beg, Peter, prince of the apostles, tell how the churches ought to believe in God. For it is right that you, taught by the Lord, should teach us and open to us the door whose key you received. Shut out all who are digging under the heavenly house, and turn away those who try to enter through counterfeit holes and unlawful approaches, because it is certain that no one can enter the door of the kingdom except one for whom the key placed by you in the churches has unlocked it. Tell us, then, how we ought to believe in Jesus Christ and to confess the Lord of all. You will answer, no doubt: “Why do you consult me about how the Lord should be confessed, when you have how I myself confessed him? Read the Gospel, and you will not look for my person, since you have my confession; or rather you have my person there where you have my confession, because, since my person would have no authority without the confession, the confession itself is the authority of my person.” Tell us, then, evangelist, tell us the confession; tell the faith of the chief apostle: did he confess Jesus as a man only or as God, did he say there was only flesh in him or did he proclaim the Son of God? When the Lord Jesus Christ asked whom the disciples believed and confessed him to be, Peter, first of the apostles, answered, one for all; for the answer of one held what the faith of all held; but it was fitting that the first should answer, so that the order of answering might be the same as the order of honor, and that he who came first in age might come first in confession. What then does he say? “You are,” he says, “the Christ, the Son of the living God.” I must use a simple and rustic question to refute you, heretic. Tell me, I ask, who was that one to whom Peter answered so? You cannot deny it was Christ. I ask, then: the Christ whom you name, is he man or God? Man, no doubt, you say. For your whole heresy comes from this, that you deny Christ is the Son of God. And therefore you also say that Mary is Christotokos and not Theotokos, because she is mother of Christ and not of God. You assert, then, that Christ is only man, not God, and therefore son of man, not of God. What then did Peter answer to this? “You are,” he says, “the Christ, the Son of the living God.” This Christ whom you assert to be only son of man, he testifies to be Son of God. Whom do you want us to believe, you or Peter? I suppose you are not so shameless as to dare to put yourself before the first of the apostles, although what is there that you would not dare? Or how would you not despise an apostle, you who could deny God? “You are,” then, he says, “the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Has this anything ambiguous or obscure in it? It is a simple and open confession only: it proclaims Christ the Son of God. Perhaps you deny that it was said? But the evangelist testifies to it. Or do you say that the apostle lies? But it is an abominable falsehood to accuse an apostle of falsehood. Or do you perhaps contend that this was said of some other Christ? But that is a new kind of monstrous invention. What remains, then? One thing only: that, since what is written is read and what is read is true, at last, constrained by force or by necessity, since you cannot build up falsehood, you should stop attacking the truth.

Yet since I have used the testimony of the chief apostle, by which he himself confessed the Lord Jesus Christ as God in his presence, let us see how the one whom he confessed approved his confession; for it is much more than what the apostle said if God himself praised his saying. When the apostle said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” what did the Lord and Savior answer? “Blessed are you,” he says, “Simon Bar-Jona, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but the Spirit of my Father who is in heaven.” If you dislike using an apostle’s testimony, use God’s. For by praising what was said, God added his own authority to the apostle’s saying, so that, though that saying came from the apostle’s mouth, God, who approved it, made it his own. “Blessed are you,” he says, “Simon Bar-Jona, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but the Spirit of my Father who is in heaven.” So in the apostle’s saying you see the testimony of the Holy Spirit, of the Son who was present, and of God the Father. What more, then, or what like it do you seek? The Son praised it, the Father was present, the Holy Spirit revealed it. The apostle’s saying, then, is the testimony of the whole Godhead, because a saying must have the authority of the one from whom it came. “Blessed,” then, he says, “are you, Simon Bar-Jona, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but the Spirit of my Father who is in heaven.” If, then, flesh and blood did not reveal or inspire these things to Peter, you now understand who has inspired you. If the Spirit of God taught him who confessed Christ to be God, you see that you, who could deny it, have been taught by the spirit of a demon.

But what other words follow that saying of the Lord by which he praised Peter? “And I tell you,” he says, “that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.” You see that Peter’s saying is the faith of the church. Therefore one who is not held by the faith of the church must be outside the church. “And to you,” says the Lord, “I will give the keys of the kingdom of heaven.” This faith earned heaven; this faith received the keys of the heavenly kingdom. Understand what awaits you: you will not be able to enter the door of this key, you who have denied the faith of this key. “And the gates of hell,” he says, “will not prevail against you.” The gates of hell are the faith, or rather the faithlessness, of heretics. For as far as hell is from heaven, so far is the one who denies from the one who has confessed Christ as God. “Whatever you bind,” he says, “on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven also.” The perfect faith of the apostle received in a way a power of the Godhead, so that what he bound or loosed on earth would be bound or loosed in heaven. You, then, who come against the faith of the apostle, since you see that you are already bound on earth, it remains that you know you are bound in heaven too. But it would be long to go through each of these things, which by their number make a very long and copious discussion, even if they are mentioned briefly and concisely.

But I want to add to you one more testimony of an apostle, so that you may understand that what followed after the passion agrees with what was done before the Lord’s passion. When the Lord had come in among the gathering of his disciples through closed doors and wished to make the reality of his body plain to the apostles, the apostle Thomas touched his flesh, handled his side, examined the wounds, and found out fully the reality of the body that was shown him: and what did he cry out? “My Lord and my God.” Did he say what you say: a man and not God, Christ and not the Godhead? He surely touched the body of his Lord, and answered that he was God. Did he bring in any distinction of man and God, or did he call that flesh theodochos, as you say, that is, an image receiving the Godhead, or, after the manner of your impiety, say that the one he touched was to be worshiped not for his own sake but for the sake of the one he had received into himself? But perhaps the apostle of God did not know this subtlety of your distinction and lacked the elegance and difference of your judgment, being, of course, a rustic and inexperienced man, unacquainted with the art of dialectic, ignorant of philosophical disputation, one for whom the teaching of his Lord was abundantly enough and who knew nothing at all except what he had learned from the Lord’s teaching. And therefore his speech was heavenly doctrine, his faith a divine instruction: he had not learned, as you do, to separate the Lord from his body, and he did not know at all how to tear God away from himself; holy, sincere, pious, having a skilled innocence, an unharmed faith, an uncorrupted knowledge, a mind simple yet shrewd, a wisdom with perfect simplicity, free of all evil, ignorant of all corruption, immune from all heretical perversity, and one who expressed in himself the form of the divine teaching, all that he had learned and held. So he, rustic and unskilled as you perhaps think, now shuts you in with a short answer and crushes you with a few words. What, then, did the apostle Thomas touch when he came to handle God? Christ, no doubt. And what did he cry out? “My Lord and my God.” Go now, if you can, and separate Christ from God; change this saying, if you are able; bring dialectical disputation, bring worldly prudence and that foolish wisdom with its wordy cunning; turn yourself into every shape and draw in whatever you can by wit or by art. Say what you like, do what you like: you can find no way out of here unless you confess that what the apostle touched is God. And indeed, if you could in any way, you would perhaps like to change the telling of the gospel story, so that Thomas the apostle would not be read to have touched the Lord’s body nor to have called Christ the Lord God. But what is written in the gospel of God can in no way be changed. For “heaven and earth will pass away, but the words of God will not pass away.” For see, even now that Thomas the apostle, who then bore witness, cries out to you: “Jesus whom I touched is God; he whose limbs I handled is God. I did not hold something bodiless, or feel something that cannot be touched; I did not touch a spirit with my hand, so that I could be believed to have said only of that, ‘He is God.’ For a spirit, according to my Lord’s word, does not have flesh and bones. I touched the body of my Lord, I handled flesh and bones, I put my fingers into the place of the wounds, and of Christ my Lord whom I had handled I cried out: My Lord and my God. For I do not know how to make a difference between Christ and God; I will not put sacrilegious opinions between Jesus and God; I do not know how to tear my God away from himself. Away from me, whoever thinks otherwise, whoever speaks otherwise. I have known Christ to be nothing other than God. This I held with my fellow apostles, this I handed on to the churches, this I preached to the nations, this I cry out to you too: Christ is God, Christ is God.” A sound mind thinks nothing else, a sound faith says nothing else; the Godhead cannot be torn from itself. And since whatever Christ is, is God, nothing can be found in God but God.

What do you say now, heretic? Are these testimonies of faith enough even for supreme unbelief, or must something more be added? And what can be added after the prophets and the apostles, unless perhaps, as the Jews once demanded, you too demand that a sign from heaven be given you? But to you who ask this, the answer then given to them must be given: “An evil and adulterous generation seeks a sign, and no sign will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah.” And surely this sign could have sufficed you, even along with the Jews who crucified him, so that you might believe in our Lord God taught by this one thing, by which even those who had persecuted him came to believe. Yet since we have mentioned a heavenly sign, I will show you from heaven a sign such that not even the demons ever contradicted it, when, compelled by the very necessity of the truth, though they saw that Jesus was in a body, they still cried out that he was what he was, God. What, then, does the evangelist say of the Lord Jesus Christ? “When he had been baptized,” he says, “he went up at once from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit coming down like a dove and coming upon him. And behold, a voice from heaven, saying: This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” What do you say to this now, heretic? Does the saying displease you, or the person of the speaker? The meaning of the address certainly needs no interpretation, nor does the dignity of the one speaking need any commending of the words: it is God the Father who spoke; what was said is plain. Will you be able to utter so shameless or so sacrilegious a word as to say that God the Father is not to be believed even about his only-begotten Son? “This,” then, he says, “is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” But perhaps you will try to say, such is your madness, that this was said of the Word, not of Christ. Tell me, then, who was it that was being baptized? The Word or Christ? Flesh or spirit? You certainly cannot deny that it was Christ. That man, then, born of man and God, conceived when the Holy Spirit came down into the virgin and the power of the Most High overshadowed her, and so son of man and of God: he, as you cannot deny, was baptized. If, then, he was baptized, he was also the one named, because the one named was surely the one who was baptized. “This,” he says, “is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” Can anything be said more meaningfully or more expressly? Christ was baptized, Christ went up from the water, when Christ was baptized the heavens were opened, for Christ the dove came down, upon Christ the Holy Spirit stood in bodily form, Christ the Father named. If you dare deny that this was said of Christ, it remains for you to contend that Christ was not baptized, nor did the Spirit come down, nor did the Father speak. But the truth itself presses and bears down on you, so that, even if you will not confess it, you still cannot deny it. For what does the evangelist say? “When he had been baptized he went up at once from the water.” Who was baptized? Christ, surely. “And behold,” he says, “the heavens were opened to him.” To whom but the one who was baptized? To Christ, surely. “And he saw the Spirit of God coming down like a dove and coming upon him.” Who saw? Christ, of course. On whom did it come down? On Christ, surely. “And a voice came from heaven, saying.” About whom? About Christ, of course. For what follows? “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” So that it might be shown for whom all those things had been done, the voice followed, saying: “This is my beloved Son.” That is to say: this is the one for whom all these things were done; for this is my Son. For him the heavens were opened, for him my Spirit came, for him my voice was uttered: for this is my Son. In saying, then, “This is my Son,” whom did he mean? Surely the one whom the dove touched. Whom, then, did the dove touch? Christ, of course. Therefore Christ is the Son of God. I have kept my promise, I think. You see, then, heretic, a sign given you from heaven, indeed not one but many, each unique. For you have one in the opening of heaven, another in the descent of the Spirit, a third in the voice of the Father. All of these most plainly declare Christ to be God, because the unbarring of the heavens shows him God, the descent upon him of the Holy Spirit proves him God, and the Father’s address confirms him God. For heaven would not have opened except in honor of its Lord, nor would the Spirit have come down in bodily form except upon the Son of God, nor would the Father have declared him Son unless he were truly Son; especially with these signs of divine birth, which not only confirm the truth of pious faith but also exclude the depravity of impious opinion. For with the ineffable magnificence of the divine saying, when the Father had expressly and meaningfully said “This is my Son,” he added also what followed, namely “beloved” and “in whom I am well pleased.” Surely, as through prophecy he had already proclaimed him Mighty God and great God, so here, saying “my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased,” he added to the name of his own Son the name also of a Son beloved and well-pleasing to him, so that the addition of the names might signify the property of the divine nature and that this might belong in a special way to the honor of the Son of God which had befallen no man at all. And so, just as these things were proper and peculiar in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ, that the heavens were opened, that God the Father in the sight of all touched him, as it were with his own hand, through the dove that came and stood by him, and pointed him out, as it were with his finger, saying “This is my Son,” so this too was proper and unique to him, that he is named in a special way beloved and in a special way well-pleasing to the Father, so that special additions might show the special meaning of his nature, and the property of the names might confirm the property of the only-begotten Son, which the honor of the signs before it had already proved. But let this now be the end of this book. For this saying of God the Father cannot be increased or equaled by human words. For us God the Father himself is by himself a fit enough witness of our Lord Jesus Christ his Son, saying: “This is my Son.” If you think these words of God the Father are to be contradicted, you must be contradicted by him who, by the plainest declaration, made him known to the whole world as his Son.