On the Incarnation of the Lord, against Nestorius 6.6–6.18

The creed, then, heretic, whose text we gave above, though it belongs to all the churches, because the faith of all is one, still belongs in a special way to the city and church of Antioch, that is, to the one in which you were born, in which you were instructed, in which you were reborn. The faith of this creed led you to the fountain of life, to the regeneration of salvation, to the grace of the Eucharist, to the communion of the Lord, and — why say more? O too grievous and mournful complaint! — to the office of the ministry also, to the height of the presbyterate, to the dignity of the episcopate. Do you think this, unhappy madness, a light or easy thing? Do you not see what you have done, into what abyss you have thrown yourself? Losing the faith of the creed, you have lost all that you had been: for the sacraments of your priesthood and of your salvation stood on the truth of the creed. Do you think that you have denied only it? You, you yourself, I say, you have denied. But perhaps you do not think you have denied. Let us look at the text of the creed, so that if you say what you said before you may not be refuted; but if things very different and contrary, you need not wait to be refuted by me, since you have condemned yourself. For if you now assert something other than is in the creed and other than you yourself said before, what remains but that you blame no one but yourself for your punishment, since you see that the sentence of all upon you is the same as your own? “I believe,” then, says the creed, “in one God, the Father almighty, creator of all creatures visible and invisible; and in the Lord Jesus Christ, his only-begotten Son and firstborn of all creation, born of him before all ages and not made.” First of all you must answer to these words: do you confess this of Jesus Christ the Son of God or deny it? If you confess it, all is sound; if not, how do you now deny what you yourself confessed before? Choose, then, what you prefer; for one of the two must happen: either your own confession alone frees you, if it stands, or, if it is denied, your first confession condemns you. For you said in the creed, “I believe in our Lord Jesus Christ, his only-begotten Son and firstborn of all creation.” If the Lord Jesus Christ is the only-begotten and firstborn of all creation, then by your own confession he is without doubt God; for no other is only-begotten and firstborn of all creation but the only-begotten Son of God, who, as he is the firstborn of creatures, is also God the creator of all. And how do you assert that a mere man was born of the virgin, whom you confessed to have been God before the ages? Next, the creed says, “born of him,” that is, of the Father, “before all ages and not made.” The creed said this through you; you said this through the creed: that Jesus Christ was born of God the Father before the ages and not made. Does the creed say anything about these fantasies with which you now rave? Did you yourself say anything of them? Where here is the statue, where your instrument? Yours, I say: far be it that it should belong to anyone but you. Where is that view by which, affirming that the Lord Jesus Christ is like a statue, you think he is to be adored not because he is God but because he is an image of God, and, making the Lord of majesty an instrument, you blaspheme that he is to be honored not for his own sake but for the sake of the one who as it were breathes and sounds in him? You said in the creed that the Lord Jesus Christ was born of God the Father before all ages and not made. This surely fits only the only-begotten Son of God: that his birth is not a making, and that he is said to be only born, not made; because it is against the reason and honor of the thing itself that the maker of all should be believed to be a thing made, and so that the author of all things begun should himself have begun as all things began from him. And therefore he is said to be born, not made, because his birth is unique to him, not a common making; and since he is God born of God, the Godhead of the one begotten must have all that the greatness of the one begetting has.

And there follows in the creed: “true God of true God, homoousios with the Father, through whom the ages were framed and all things made.” And when you have said all this, remember that you have said all of it of the Lord Jesus Christ. For you have this in the creed: that you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God and firstborn of all creation, and after this and other things, “true God of true God, homoousios with the Father, through whom the ages were framed.” How, then, is the same one God and not God, the same God and the same a statue, the same God and the same an instrument? These things do not agree or fit together in any way, heretic, so that you may call the same one God when you please and think him a figment when you please. You said in the creed “true God”; now you say “a mere man.” How can these suit and fit together, that the same should be supreme power and the same mere weakness, the same supreme majesty and the same mere mortality? These things do not agree in one and the same Lord, so that, dividing him between worship and insult, you honor him in the part you please and wrong him in the part you please. You said in the creed, when you received the sacrament of true salvation, that the Lord Jesus Christ is true God of true God, homoousios with the Father, creator of the ages, maker of all things. Where are you, alas, where are you who were then? Where is that faith? Where that confession? To what portents now, to what prodigies have you fallen back? What follies, what madness have ruined you? You have transferred the God of all power and majesty to lifeless matter and senseless figments. Your faith has made progress, no doubt, with time, progress with age, progress with priesthood! You have become worse as an old man than once as a little child, worse as a veteran than as a recruit, worse as a bishop than as a beginner; and you are not even a disciple since you began to be a teacher.

But let us see the rest that follows. The creed, having said that the Lord Jesus Christ is true God of true God, homoousios with the Father, through whom the ages were framed and all things made, at once added this with an inseparable connection: “who for our sake,” it says, “came and was born of the virgin Mary.” He, then, who is true God, who is homoousios with the Father, who is creator of the ages, who is maker of all things, he, I say, came into the world and was born of the virgin Mary; according, of course, to that word of the apostle Paul: “But when the fullness of time came, God sent his Son, made of a woman, made under the law.” You see how the sacraments of the creed agree with the holy Scriptures. The apostle proclaims that the Son of God was sent by the Father; the creed affirms that he came. For this followed: that our faith should confess that he came whom the apostle had taught was sent. Then the apostle says “made of a woman,” the creed “begotten of Mary.” You notice, then, that Scripture itself speaks in the creed, from which the creed testifies that it descended. And rightly the apostle, saying “made of a woman,” put “made” for “born,” by the custom of divine speech, in which “made” is put for “born,” according to that word: “In place of your fathers sons have been made to you”; or that: “Before Abraham was made, I am”; in which he is plainly known to have said, “before Abraham was born, I am,” showing the matter of birth by the name of making, because whatever no longer needs to be made has the effect of being made. “Who for our sake,” then, it says, “came and was born of the virgin Mary.” If a mere man was born of Mary, why is he said to have come? For no one comes except one who has in his being the ability to come. But one who had not yet received even being, how could he have the power to come? You see, then, that by the very word “coming” the one who comes is shown to have existed before, because no one would have had the power of coming except one for whom, from the very fact that he was, it could be possible to come. But the man did not exist at all before the conception: therefore he did not have it in himself to be able to come. It is certain, then, that God came, who, all-powerful in both respects, is able both to be and to come; who surely both came because he was, and always was because he could always come.

But why do we argue about a word when the things themselves shine out, and why do we look for indications of things in the text of the creed when the speech of things itself is in it? Let us repeat the confession of the creed and your own (for yours is the same as its, since by confessing it you made its confession yours), so that you may understand that you have transgressed not only against the creed but also against yourself. “I believe,” then, says the creed, “in one and only true God, the Father almighty, creator of all creatures visible and invisible; and in the Lord Jesus Christ, his only-begotten Son and firstborn of all creation, born of him before all ages and not made, true God of true God, homoousios with the Father, through whom the ages were framed and all things made; who for our sake came and was born of the virgin Mary.” For our sake, then, says the creed, our Lord Jesus Christ came and was born of the virgin Mary, and was crucified under Pontius Pilate and was buried, and rose again according to the Scriptures. The churches are not ashamed to confess this; the apostles were not ashamed to preach it. You yourself, you yourself, I say, every word of whose is now sacrilege, who deny almost everything, did not deny all these things: that God was born, that God suffered, that God rose again. And what after this? Where have you rolled down to, what have you become, to what have you been reduced? What do you say, what do you vomit up? Something that, as someone says, “mad Orestes would swear was not the act of a sane man.” For what do you say? “Who, then, is the Son of God who was born of the Christotokos? For example, if we say, ‘I believe in God the Word, the only-begotten Son of God, born of the Father, homoousios with the Father, who came down and was buried,’ does not the hearing itself at once receive a wound? God dead?” And again: “Can it be,” you say, “that one who was born before all ages should be born a second time, and that God?” If all these things could not happen at all, how does the creed of the churches say they happened? How did you yourself say so? Let us compare what you said before with what you say now. You said before: “I believe in God the Father almighty, and in Jesus Christ his Son, true God of true God, homoousios with the Father, who for our sake came and was born of the virgin Mary, and was crucified under Pontius Pilate and was buried.” But now what do you say? “If we say, ‘I believe in God the Word, the only-begotten Son of God, born of the Father, homoousios with the Father, who came down and was buried,’ does not the hearing itself at once receive a wound?” The harshness and impiety of your saying could drive us to an unrestrained and heated rush of answering; but the reins of pious grief must be drawn in a little.

I consult you, then, I say, you yourself. Tell me, I ask, if any of the Jews or pagans denies the creed of the catholic faith, do you think he should be heard? Surely not. What if a heretic or apostate does the same? Much less, certainly, because it is more intolerable to abandon known truth than to deny it unknown. We see two persons, then, in you, a catholic and an apostate: first a catholic, now an apostate. Decide yourself which you think we should follow; for you cannot prefer one in yourself unless you yourself have condemned the other in yourself. You say, then, that the one you were before is condemned by you, that the catholic creed is condemned by you, that the confession of all is condemned, that the faith is condemned. And what then — O unworthy deed, O intolerable grief! — what are you doing in the catholic church, betrayer of catholics? Why do you pollute the assembly of the people, you who have denied the faith of the people? Besides this you have dared to stand at the altar, to mount the tribunal, to present your most shameless and most faithless mouth to the people of God, to occupy the chair, to take upon yourself the priesthood, to profess yourself a teacher. To teach Christians what? Not to believe Christ; to deny that he is God in whose temple they are. And after all this — O insanity, O madness! — you think yourself a teacher and a bishop, when you deny — O unhappy blindness! — that very one, I say, to be God whose priest you claim to be. But we are carried away by grief. What, then, does the creed say, or what did you yourself say in the creed? That the Lord Jesus Christ, true God of true God, homoousios with the Father, through whom the ages were created and all things made, this same one for our sake came and was born of the virgin Mary. Since, then, you said that God was born of Mary, how do you deny that Mary is the Mother of God? Since you said that God came, how do you now deny that the one who came is God? You said in the creed: “I believe in Jesus Christ the Son of God, I believe in true God of true God, homoousios with the Father, who for our sake came and was born of the virgin Mary, and was crucified under Pontius Pilate and was buried.” But now you say: “If we say, ‘I believe in God the Word, the only-begotten Son of God, born of the Father, homoousios with the Father, who came down and was buried,’ does not the hearing itself at once receive a wound?” You see, then, that you utterly destroy and uproot the whole faith of the catholic creed, the whole faith of the catholic sacrament. O crime, O portent, as someone says, to be carried off to the ends of the earth! For this is said more rightly of you: that you should go to those wastes where you can find no one to destroy. Do you, then, think the faith of our salvation, the sacrament of the church’s hope, a wound to your hearing and your ears? And how was it that once, when you ran to baptism, you heard these sacraments with sound ears? How was it that, when the teachers of the churches taught you, your ears were not wounded? Then, surely, without any wound you performed the double office of mouth and ears, when you both spoke what you heard from them and heard yourself speaking. Where were these wounds of your ears then, where this wound of your hearing? Why did you not contradict and protest? But of course, at your choice and pleasure, you are a disciple of the church when you please, an enemy when you please; a catholic when you please, an apostate when you please. A worthy authority, no doubt, to drag the churches after you to whatever side you turn, whose will should be the law of our life, who should change the human race by your changeableness, so that, because you will not be what all are, all should be what you wish! An excellent authority, of course: because you are not what you were, the world should cease to be what it was!

But perhaps you say that you were a little child when you were reborn, and so could neither understand nor protest then. True: infancy prevented you from contradicting, you who as a man could have died for contradicting. For what if in that most faithful and devoted church of Christ, when the bishop was handing over the creed to the people of God, who responded and acclaimed, you had tried to mutter anything or protest? Would you perhaps have been heard, and not at once sent off to some destruction and extermination as a new kind of portent and monster? Not that that most pious and devout people of God would wish to be stained by the blood even of the most impious man, but because in great cities the people, burning with the love of God, when they see anyone rising against their God, usually cannot hold back the heat of their faith. But let it be so: as an infant, if indeed that is so, you could not contradict and protest against the creed. Why were you silent when you were older and stronger? You certainly grew and became a man and were placed in the church’s ministry. Through so many ages, then, through so many grades of office and dignity, the faith which you taught so long before was never understood by you. You know that you were certainly its deacon and presbyter: if the rule of salvation displeased you, why did you take the honor of a thing whose faith you did not approve? But, a provident man no doubt and a simple religious, you wished to steer between the two so as to keep both the faithlessness of a sacrilegious man and the dignity of a catholic.

The wound of your hearing, then, and the injury of your ears is God born and God suffering. And where is that saying of yours, apostle Paul: “But we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles, but to those who are called, Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God”? What is the wisdom and power of God? God, surely. And he proclaims Christ, who was crucified, the power and wisdom of God. So if Christ is without doubt the wisdom of God, then Christ is without doubt God. “We preach,” then, he says, “Christ crucified, a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles.” So the Lord’s cross, which was foolishness to the Gentiles and a stumbling block to the Jews, is both to you. For there is no greater foolishness than not to believe, nor a greater stumbling block than to refuse to hear. Their ears, then, were wounded at the preaching and passion of God, as yours are wounded now; they thought it a wound to their hearing, as you think; and this is why, when the apostle Paul preached Christ as God, at the name of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ they shut the ears of their heads, as you shut the ears of your mind. The impiety of both of you might seem equal in this respect, except that your crime is greater in this: they denied one in whom the passion still showed a man; you deny one whom the resurrection has already proved God. And therefore they persecuted him on earth; you persecute him even in heaven. Not only that, but this is more cruel and wicked: they denied through ignorance, you after faith; they not knowing the Lord, you having confessed him God; they in zeal for the law, you in the profession of a bishop; they him from whom they thought themselves strangers, you him whose priest you are. Shameful and unheard-of deed! You persecute with attacks the very one whose dignity you still use.

But you use, of course, a great argument of your faithlessness and impiety to deny and persecute the Lord God, saying: “The offspring must be homoousios with the one who bears it.” I do not yet say fully and declare that this need not be observed at all in the birth of God, because the birth itself belonged not to the one bearing but to the one born, and he was born as he willed, to whom it belonged that he should be born at all. Meanwhile, since you say that the offspring must be homoousios with the one who bears it, I say that the Lord Jesus Christ was homoousios with both his Father and his mother alike. For according to the difference of persons he gave back to each parent its own likeness. For according to the Godhead he was homoousios with the Father, but according to the flesh homoousios with his mother: not that the one who was homoousios with the Father is one and the one homoousios with the mother another, but that the same Lord Jesus Christ, born both man and God, had in himself the property of each parent, since in that he is man he gave back the likeness of his human mother, and in that he is God he had the reality of God the Father.

Otherwise, if the same Christ is not from Mary who was born from God, you without doubt make two Christs, according, of course, to that crime of Pelagian impiety which, asserting that a mere man was born of the virgin, said that he was the instructor of the human race rather than its redeemer, because he gave men not the redemption of life but an example of living, so that men following him, while doing similar things, might arrive at similar things. One, then, is the origin of your impiety, the same the root of your errors. They assert that a mere man was born of Mary, and you the same; they separate the son of man from the Son of God, and you the same. They say that the Savior became Christ through baptism, you that in baptism he was made a temple of God; they do not deny that he was made God after the passion, you deny it even after the ascension. In one thing only, then, does your perversity differ: that they seem to blaspheme the Lord on earth, you in heaven too. You have outdone those whom you imitate, we do not deny it, and gone beyond them: they at some point, as it were, stop denying God, you never. Although not even theirs is to be held a fully true confession, who give the Savior the honor of Godhead only after the passion, and, denying him God before, confess him afterwards; because, as it seems to me, whoever denies a part in God denies the whole, and whoever has not confessed that he always was denies always: as you too, even if today you called the Lord Jesus Christ, who was born of the virgin Mary, true God in heaven, yet unless you called him God always you would not truly confess him. But of course you do not want to change or vary your view in anything: the one you say was born a mere man you contend is not God even today. O new and unheard-of impiety! The one whom with the heretics you assert to be a man you do not even, with the heretics, confess to be God.

But still, as I had begun to say, this very point must be made clear: that two Christs are without doubt made by you. Tell me, I ask, you who separate Christ from the Son of God, how do you confess in the creed that Christ was born of God? For you say: “I believe in God the Father and in Jesus Christ his Son.” You have here, then, Jesus Christ the Son of God. But you say that it was not the same Son of God who was born of Mary. Therefore one Christ is from God, another from Mary. There are, then, two Christs in your view, since, not denying Christ in the creed, you assert that the Christ from Mary is other than the one you confess in the creed. But perhaps you say that Christ was not born of God. And how do you say in the creed: “I believe in Jesus Christ the Son of God”? Either, then, you will deny the creed or confess Christ the Son of God. But if you confess in the creed Christ the Son of God, you must confess the same Christ from Mary to be the Son of God; or if you assert another Christ from Mary, you surely blaspheme that there are two Christs.

Yet even if your faithlessness and perversity is not shut in by this faith of the creed, are you not, I ask, overwhelmed by reason itself and the light of truth? Tell me, I ask, heretic, whoever you are — it is certainly a Trinity that we believe and confess, Father and Son and Holy Spirit. About the majesty of the Father and the Spirit there is no question; you cavil against the Son, in that you say that the one born of Mary is not the same as the one begotten of God the Father — tell me, then, since you do not deny that the only-begotten Son of God was born of God, whom do you want this one to be who was born of Mary? You say a mere man, according to what he himself said: “What is born of the flesh is flesh.” But one cannot be called a mere man who was not begotten by the law of human generation alone: for “what is born in her,” says the angel, “is of the Holy Spirit.” And this, though you deny practically all the sacraments of salvation, even you do not dare to deny. Since, then, he was born of the Holy Spirit, and one conceived by God’s inbreathing cannot be called a mere man, if he is not the one who, according to the apostle, emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, and the Word made flesh, and humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, and who for our sake became poor, though he was rich, tell me then: who is the one both born of the Holy Spirit and conceived under God’s overshadowing? You say without doubt that he is another. There are two, then: the one begotten of God the Father in heaven, and the one conceived of Mary by God’s inbreathing. And so this one whom you bring in is a fourth, whom, though in words you call a mere man, you in fact confirm was not a mere man, so far as to confess, even if not as you ought, that he is honorable and venerable and to be adored. Since, then, both the Son of God who was born of the Father is to be adored and the one begotten of Mary through the Holy Spirit is to be adored, you make two to be honored and venerated, whom you divide from each other so far as to venerate each with his own honor. And by this you understand that, by denying and separating the Son of God from himself, you overturn, as far as lies in you, the whole sacrament of the Godhead. For while you try to insert a fourth person into the Trinity, you see that you have wholly denied the whole Trinity.

Since this is so, by denying the one Jesus Christ, the Son of God, you have denied everything. For this is the reckoning of the church’s sacrament and of the catholic faith, that one who denies part of the sacrament cannot confess part of it. For all things are so bound together and incorporated with each other that one cannot stand without another, and one who has denied one out of all gains nothing from having believed all the others. So if you deny that the Lord Jesus Christ is God, you must, by denying the Son of God, deny the Father too; because, according to the word of God himself, “one who does not have the Son does not have the Father, but one who has the Son has the Father also.” Denying the begotten, then, you deny the begetter too. And denying that the Son of God was born in the flesh, it follows that you deny that he was born in the spirit too, because the same one was born in the flesh who was first born in the spirit. Not believing, then, that he was brought forth in the flesh, you must not believe that he suffered either. And not believing his passion, what remains but that you deny his resurrection too, because faith in one raised comes from faith in one dead, and the reckoning of resurrection cannot stand unless faith in death has gone before? Denying, then, that he suffered and died, denying too that he rose from the underworld, it surely follows that you deny that he ascended, because the ascension could not be without the resurrection, and one who is not believed to have risen must not be believed to have ascended either, as the apostle says: “For he who descended is the same who ascended.” So, as far as lies in you, the Lord Jesus Christ neither rose from the underworld nor ascended into heaven, nor sat at the right hand of God the Father, nor will come at that awaited day of final examination, nor will judge the living and the dead.

You understand, then, unhappy and raging perversity, that you have wholly emptied out the whole faith of the creed, the whole force of hope and of the sacrament. And do you dare besides to stand in the church and think yourself a bishop, when you have denied all those things through which you began to be a bishop? Return, then, to the right way, take back your former mind, come to your senses at last if you were ever sensible, go back to yourself, if indeed there was once anything in you to which you may now return. Recognize the sacraments of your salvation, by which you were renewed, by which you were reborn. You need them no less now than you did then, so that through repentance they may now regenerate you, they that formerly begot you through the font. Hold the full order of the creed, hold the perfect truth of the faith: believe in God the Father, believe in God the Son, in one begetter and one begotten, the Lord of all, Jesus Christ, homoousios with the Father, born in the Godhead, born in the body, of a twofold birth but of one majesty, who, creator of all creatures, was the same born of the Father who was afterwards born of the virgin.