On the Incarnation of the Lord, against Nestorius 7.6–7.18

But it is time at last that we should uncover your remaining blasphemies too, more hidden and more insidious, since, as we would have preferred, we can no longer be ignorant of them, at least so that they may not catch the ignorant. You set down in a certain pestilent treatise of yours, saying: “Since man is the image of the divine nature, and the devil cast this down into corruption, God grieved for his image as an emperor for his statue, and restores the corrupted image; and without seed he formed from the virgin a nature like that of Adam, who was born without seed, and through a man he raises human nature: for since through a man came death, therefore through a man also the resurrection of the dead.” It is the custom, they say, of certain poisoners to mix honey with the poisons in the cups they prepare, so that harmful things may be hidden by sweet ones, and while someone is caught by the sweetness of the honey he is killed by the plague of the poison. So you too, saying, “Man is the image of the divine nature, and the devil cast this down into corruption, God grieved for his image as an emperor for his statue,” smear the rims of your pestilent cup, as it were, with a certain sweetness and as with honey, so that men drinking the cup offered, while they taste the alluring things, may not perceive the ruinous ones. You put forward the name of God so as to lie in the name of religion; you set holy things first so as to persuade perverse ones; and by confessing God you bring it about that you deny the very one you confess. For who does not see where you are going, what you are contriving? For you say: “God grieved for his image as an emperor for his statue, and restores the corrupted image; and without seed he formed from the virgin a nature like that of Adam, who is born without seed, and through a man he raises human nature: for since through a man came death, therefore through a man also the resurrection of the dead.” This, then, you have done with so much zeal, with so much effort, with flattering preambles, deceitful plotter: that, naming God in what comes first, you might arrive at a man in what follows, and afterwards fasten the insult of a mere man on the very one to whom you first gave the honor of God by a show of crafty humility. You say, then, that the divine goodness restored the image of God which the devil cast down into corruption: for “he restores,” you say, “the corrupted image.” How cunning already is this saying, “he restores the corrupted image,” namely, to persuade that there was nothing more in him in whom the image was restored than in the image itself to which the restoration was given! And so you want the Lord to be only the same as Adam, the restorer of the image nothing more than the falling image itself. Finally you prove by what follows what you are doing, what you are contriving, saying: “Without seed he formed a nature like that of Adam, who is born without seed, and through a man he raises human nature.” You assert that the Lord Jesus was like Adam in all things and his equal: that one, of course, without seed, and this one without seed; that one a man only, and this one a mere man. And so you see that you have carefully taken precautions and seen to it that the Lord Jesus Christ should not be thought greater in anything than Adam or perhaps better, since you have compared them with equal measures, so that you would think you were taking something from Adam if you had set God before him in anything.

“For since,” you say, “through a man came death, therefore through a man also the resurrection of the dead.” Do you try to prove your perversity and crime even by the apostle’s testimony, and defame the vessel of election with the contagion of your impiety, so that, because the author of your salvation is not understood by you, the apostle too should seem to have denied God? And yet, if you were pleased to use apostolic testimonies, why were you content with one of his and silent about all the rest, and did not at once add this: “Paul, an apostle, not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ”; or this: “We speak wisdom among the perfect,” and after other things, “which none of the rulers of this world knew; for if they had known it, they would never have crucified the Lord of majesty”; or this: “For in him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily”; and: “One Lord Jesus Christ, through whom are all things”? Or do you, approving the apostle in part and rejecting him in part, receive him only where, according to the dispensation, he names Christ a man, and reject him where he names him God? For Paul does not deny that Jesus is a man, but he confesses the same man to be God, and so proclaims that resurrection came to the human race through a man as to affirm that in the man himself it was God who rose. For see whether he does not proclaim the one who rose to be God, who testifies that the one who was crucified is the God of majesty.

Yet, so as not to make the Lord Jesus one of the common people, as it were, you gave him some dignity, granting him honor as to a holy man, not Godhead as to true man and true God. For what do you say? “God formed the Lord’s incarnation: let us honor the theodochos form together with God as one form of the Godhead, as the inseparable statue of the divine will, as the image of the hidden God.” Above you said that Adam was the image of God; here you call Christ an image: that one a statue and this one a statue. But we must of course give you thanks for the honor of God, since you grant that the theodochos form is to be honored together with God! In this there is not so much honor as injury: for in this very thing you do not grant the Lord Jesus Christ the honor of the Godhead but deny it. For with the subtle art of impiety you say he is to be honored with God so as not to confess that he is God, and by this very thing by which you seem to have joined him you deceitfully separate him. For since you blaspheme that he is to be worshiped not as God but as it were honored together with God, you give him a joining of divine neighborhood so as to take away the reality of the Godhead. Most impious and most cunning enemy of God, you want to carry out the crime of one who denies under the name of one who confesses. “Let us honor him,” you say, “as the inseparable statue of the divine will, as the image of the hidden God.” The honor of our Creator and Redeemer, the Lord Jesus Christ, has made great progress among us, no doubt, by his benefits! If we were redeemed by him from eternal destruction so that we might call our Redeemer a statue, we are surely striving to answer his kindness and goodness with worthy obedience and worthy worship, if we try even to take away the majesty which he did not refuse to humble for our sake.

But of course you excuse the insult done to the Lord by a show of honor added after, saying: “as the image of the hidden God.” In calling him an image you compare him to the human condition; in saying “of the hidden God” you take away from his most certain dignity. For “God,” says David, “will come openly, our God, and will not keep silent.” And he surely came and did not keep silent, who, before he himself said anything after his rising, declared his coming by earthly and divine witnesses alike, as the star points him out, as the Magi adore, as the angels announce. What more do you ask? His voice was still silent on earth and his honor was already crying out in heaven. Do you, then, say that God was hidden in him and is hidden? But the prophets did not foretell this, nor the patriarchs, nor finally the whole law. For they who foretold to all that he would come did not say that he would hide. You err, unhappy blindness, seeking grounds for blasphemy and not finding them. You say that he was hidden even after his coming; I prove that he was not hidden even before he came. For was the sacrament of God to be born of the virgin hidden from that outstanding patriarch, to whom a name meaning “the vision of God present” was given, who rose from the name of supplanter to the name of Israel? When he had recognized the mystery of the future incarnation from the struggle of the man wrestling with him, he said: “I have seen God face to face, and my soul has been saved.” What, I ask, had he seen, that he should believe he had seen God? Did God show himself to him among lightnings and thunders, or did the face of the Godhead show itself to him flashing from an opened heaven? None of these; on the contrary, he saw a man and recognized God. O truly worthy of the name he obtained, who by inner rather than outer eyes earned the dignity of the name given him by God! He saw a human form wrestling with him and declared that he saw God. He knew, of course, that that form of a man was the reality of God, because in the form in which God was then seen, in that form he would afterwards come in the reality of the form itself. Yet why should we wonder if so great a patriarch believed without doubt what God himself showed him so plainly by himself, as he says, “I have seen God face to face, and my soul has been saved”? What had God shown him of present Godhead so great that he should say the face of God had been shown him? For only a man, as it seemed, had appeared to him, whom he had even overcome in the struggle. But God was surely doing this through forerunning signs of things, so that there might be no one who would not believe that God was born of man, since the patriarch had already seen God in human form.

But why do I linger so long on one example, as if many were lacking? Could God, who was to come in the flesh, be hidden from men even then, when the prophet said of him openly, as it were to the whole human race, “Behold your God,” and elsewhere, “This is our God,” and that, “Mighty God, Father of the world to come, Prince of peace, and of his kingdom there will be no end”? And when he had already come, was it hidden that he had come from those who openly confessed that he had come? Was Peter ignorant of the coming of God when he said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God”? Did Martha not know what she was saying or whom she believed, when she said, “Yes, Lord, I have believed that you are the Christ, the Son of the living God, who have come into this world”? Finally, did all who sought from him remedies for diseases or restoration of limbs or life for the dead ask it from the weakness of a man or from the omnipotence of God?

Finally, when the devil himself was tempting him with every round of enticements, every art of his wickedness, what did he suspect without knowing it, or what did he desire to know by tempting? Or what had moved him so much that he was looking for God in the lowliness of a man? Had he learned this from earlier proofs, or had he ever known God truly to have come in a human body? Surely not; but he was driven to suspicion and inquiry into this by great signs, great experiences of things and the voices of truth itself, as one who had once heard from John, “Behold the Lamb of God, behold him who takes away the sin of the world,” and again from the same, “I ought to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” The dove too, coming down from heaven and standing over the Lord’s head, had given itself as a plain and manifest pointer to God declared. A voice too, sent by God not in riddles or figures, had stirred him, saying: “You are my beloved Son; in you I am well pleased.” And therefore, though he saw a man outwardly in Jesus, he was searching out the Son of God, saying: “If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread.” Did the sight of a man take away from the devil the suspicion of Godhead, so that because he saw a man he believed he could not be God? Surely not: but what does he say? “If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread.” He did not doubt that what he was searching out could be; his concern was about the truth, not a sense of security about its impossibility.

And yet he knew, of course, that the Lord Jesus Christ was born of Mary; he knew that he was wrapped in cloths and laid in a manger, that his littleness among human beginnings was poor and his infancy needy even of the usual services of the cradle; he did not doubt either that he had true flesh and was truly born a man. And why did this seem too little to him for security? Why did he believe that one whom he knew to be truly man could be God? Learn, then, unhappy madness, learn, insane and cruel impiety, learn at last even from the devil to be less faithless. He said, “If you are the Son of God”; you say, “You are not the Son of God.” What he asked, you deny. No one has yet been found except you who has gone beyond the impiety of the devil. What he confessed could be in the Lord, you do not believe could have been.

But perhaps he afterwards stopped and rested, and, his temptations having come to nothing, laid aside his suspicion because he did not find the result? On the contrary, it always remained in him, and even up to the Lord’s very cross the suspicion in him grew, heaped up by his own fears. Why say more? Not even then did he stop thinking him the Son of God, after he knew that so much was permitted to his persecutors against him. But the cunning enemy, seeing signs of the Godhead even amid the bodily sufferings themselves, was compelled to suspect God, even though he would rather he were a man; because, though he would rather believe what he wished, he was still driven by sure signs of things to what he feared. Nor is it surprising. For though he saw him spat upon and scourged and insulted and driven to the cross, he still saw divine powers abounding amid the very indignities of the insults, as the veil of the temple is torn, as the sun flees, as the day is darkened, as all things feel the power of the passion and even all things that do not know God recognize the work of the Godhead. And therefore the devil, seeing this and trembling, tried in every way to come to the knowledge of God even in the very consummation of the man, saying through those who had crucified him: “If he is the Son of God, let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe him.” He perceived, of course, that our Lord God was working the redemption of human salvation through the passion of his body, and that through it he himself was being destroyed and subjugated and we redeemed and saved; and therefore the enemy of the human race wanted by every means and every trick to bring to nothing what he knew was being done for the redemption of all. “If he is the Son of God,” he says, “let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe him”: so that the Lord, moved by the insult of words, might abandon the sacrament while avenging the injury. You see, then, that the Lord, even placed on the cross, is called Son of God; you see that they suspect what they name. Learn, then, as I said above, even from the persecutors themselves or from the devil to believe in the Son of God. Who has ever equaled demonic unbelief? Who has gone beyond it? He suspected him to be the Son of God even when he endured death; you deny it even when he has risen. He suspected him to be God, from whom he hid himself; you deny him to whom he proved himself.

You use the holy Scriptures against God, then, and try to make his own witnesses act against him. But how? Truly so that you become a transgressor not only against God but also against the testimonies themselves. Nor is it surprising if, since you cannot do what you want, you do the only thing you can: because you cannot turn the holy testimonies against God, you do what you can: you pervert them. For you say: “Then Paul too lies about Christ when he says, without mother, without genealogy.” I ask you, of whom do you want Paul to have said this? Of the Son and Word of God, or of Christ, whom you separate from the Son of God and blaspheme to be only a man? If of Christ, whom you call a mere man, how could a man be born without mother, without the genealogy of a mother’s origin? But if of the Word of God and Son of God, what are we to make of the fact that the same apostle, your witness, as you think, sacrilegious man, in the same place and the same testimony testifies that the one you assert to be without mother is also without father, saying: “without father, without mother, without genealogy”? It remains, then, that, using the apostle’s testimony, because you assert that the Son of God is without mother, you blaspheme that he is without father too. You see, then, into what precipice of impiety you have thrown yourself by your zeal for perversity and wickedness, so that, as no one has yet said from the ages except perhaps a madman, while you say that the Son of God had no mother you deny his Father too. And I do not know whether this is greater impiety or folly; for what is more stupid, what more foolish, than to put the name of son and want to keep silent about the name of father? But you say: “I neither keep silent about it nor deny it.” What madness, then, compelled you to put forward that testimony, where, while you say he had no mother, you seem to have denied his Father too? For since in the same testimony he is said to be without father as well as without mother, it must be that, if “without mother” can be understood there, he is believed to be without father in the same way in which he is understood there to be without mother. But that headlong madness for denying God did not understand this, which, when it put forward maimed what was written whole, did not see that, when the series of the holy volume was opened, its shameless and open lie could be refuted. O stupid madness of blasphemy, which, while it does not itself see what ought to follow, did not consider what could be read; as if, because it took away understanding from itself, it could take away reading from all, or as if all would lose the eyes of their heads for reading because it had already lost the eyes of the mind! Hear, then, heretic, what you have stolen; hear full and whole what you put forward weak and maimed. The apostle, wishing to make known to all the twofold birth of God, so as to show the Lord born both in Godhead and in the flesh, says: “without father, without mother.” For the one belongs properly to the birth of the Godhead, the other to that of the flesh; and as in the Godhead he is begotten without mother, so in the body without father. And so, though he is neither without father nor without mother, he is still to be believed without father and without mother, because if you look at his being born of the Father, he is without mother; if of his mother, without father. And so, in each birth having one and not having the other, he did not have both in either; because neither did the birth of the Godhead need a mother, and for the birth of the body he was sufficient to himself. “Without father,” then, says the apostle, “without mother, without genealogy.”

How does he say that the Lord was without genealogy, when the Gospel of Matthew began with the Savior’s genealogy, saying: “The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham”? So according to the evangelist he has a genealogy, and according to the apostle he has none; because according to the gospel he has one from his mother, according to the apostle he has none from his Father. And therefore the apostle, saying “without father, without mother, without genealogy,” rightly said, where he set down that he was begotten without mother, that he was also without genealogy. And so in each birth of the Lord the writings of the gospel and of the apostle agree together, because according to the evangelist he has a genealogy, incarnate without father, and according to the apostle he has none, begotten Lord in the Godhead without mother; as Isaiah says: “But who will tell his generation?”

Why, then, heretic, did you not set down in this way, whole and uncorrupted, what you had read? You see, then, that the apostle set down that the Lord was born without mother in the same way as he set down that he was born without father, so that in the way in which he would be understood to be without father he would be known to be without mother, and as he certainly could not be believed to be without father, so he could not be understood to be without mother either. Why, then, heretic, did you not set down safe and unharmed what you had read in the apostle, but thrust in part and take away part, and steal the words of truth so that you could build up falsehood by crime? I see by whom you were led. For you must be believed to have the training of the one whose example you follow. For so the devil, tempting the Lord in the gospel, says: “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down. For it is written: He will command his angels concerning you, to guard you in all your ways.” And when he had said this, he took away what is joined and follows, that is: “You will walk upon the asp and the basilisk, and you will trample the lion and the dragon.” Cunningly, of course, he set down the earlier words and took away the later: he set down the one to deceive, kept silent about the other so as not to condemn himself. For he knew that he himself was signified by the prophetic voice as the asp and the basilisk, the lion and the dragon. So you too, putting forward part and taking away part, set down the one, of course, to deceive, and take away the other, lest, if you set down the whole, you should yourself condemn your deceit. But it is time at last to pass on to further matters. For lingering too long on each point, while led by the desire for a copious answer, we exceed the measure even of a longer book.

You say, then, in another disputation, or rather in another blasphemy of yours: “And he separated the Spirit from the divine nature, who created his humanity. For it says that what was born of Mary is of the Holy Spirit. Who also filled with righteousness what was created; for it says: He appeared in the flesh, was justified in the Spirit. Likewise the one who made him to be feared by demons; for he says: I cast out demons by the Spirit of God. Who also made his flesh a temple; for I saw the Spirit descending like a dove and remaining on him. Likewise who granted him his lifting up into heaven; for it says: giving command to the apostles whom he chose, he was lifted up through the Holy Spirit. Finally, this one who granted such great glory to Christ …” Your whole blasphemy in these words, then, is this: that Christ had nothing of himself, and that not even he, as you say, a mere man, received anything from the Word, that is, from the Son of God, but that all in him was the gift of the Spirit. If, then, we show that all that you refer to the Spirit is his own, what remains but that the one whom you want understood to be a man because, as you say, he had everything from another, we should prove to be God because he had everything as his own? And we shall prove this not only by disputations or arguments but by the voice of the Godhead itself, because nothing testifies of God more rightly than divine things, and since nothing knows itself better than the majesty of God itself, nothing about God is more worthily believed than those things in which God himself is his own witness. First, then, what you say, that the Holy Spirit created his humanity, we could understand simply if we knew that you did not put it forward unfaithfully. For we do not deny that the Lord’s flesh was conceived of the Holy Spirit; but we say that the body was conceived with the cooperation of the Spirit in such a way that we still say that his man was created for himself by the Son of God, as the Holy Spirit himself says and testifies in the holy writings: “Wisdom has built herself a house.” You see, then, that what was conceived by the Holy Spirit was built and completed by the Son of God: not because the work of the Son of God is one thing and that of the Holy Spirit another, but because, through the unity of Godhead and majesty, the working of the Spirit is the building of the Son of God, and the building of the Son of God the cooperation of the Holy Spirit. And therefore we read not only that the Holy Spirit came upon the virgin but also that the power of the Most High overshadowed the virgin, so that, since Wisdom itself is the fullness of the Godhead, no one should doubt that, when Wisdom built herself a house, the whole fullness of the Godhead was present. But the unhappy madness of blasphemy, while it tries to separate Christ from the Son of God, does not see that it separates the nature of the Godhead wholly from itself; unless perhaps it believes that a house was built for him by the Holy Spirit because he himself was not fit and able to build a house for himself. But this is as ridiculous as it is mad: that one who is believed to have created by his nod the whole universe of heavenly and earthly things should be believed unable to build himself a body; especially since the power of the Holy Spirit is his power, and the Godhead and majesty of the Trinity is so united and inseparable that nothing at all can be understood in one person of the Godhead that could be separated from the fullness of the Godhead. This being laid down and understood, then, that according to the faith of holy Scripture, when the Holy Spirit came upon her and the power of the Most High overshadowed her, Wisdom built herself a house, the remaining blasphemies of your cavils are nothing. For there is no doubt that he did all things through himself and in himself, in whose name and faith the faith of believers too could do everything; for he did not need another’s help, when not even those who believed in his power needed it. And therefore what you say, that he was justified by the Spirit, and that the Holy Spirit made him to be feared by demons, and that his flesh was made a temple by the Spirit, and that he was lifted up into heaven by the Spirit, is all sacrilegious and mad: not because the unity and cooperation of the Spirit is to be believed absent from all these things that he did, since the Godhead is never absent from itself and the power of the Trinity was always in the Savior’s works, but because you want the Holy Spirit to have helped the Lord Jesus Christ as one needy and weak, granting him what he could not provide for himself. Learn, then, from the holy testimonies to believe in God and not to mix falsehood with truth, because the matter does not admit it and reason shudders at it, that the understanding of a demonic spirit should be mixed with divine testimonies.

First, then, what you say, that he filled with righteousness what was created, and what you want to prove by the apostolic testimony in which he says, “He appeared in the flesh, was justified in the Spirit”: you say both with an insane mind and a raging spirit; because you put forward that he was filled with righteousness by the Spirit in order to show the emptiness of the one to whom you assert that the filling with righteousness was given, and in using the apostolic testimony on this matter you steal the order and reason of the divine testimony. For it was not set down by the apostle as you have set it down, maimed and spoiled. For what does the apostle say? “And manifestly great is the sacrament of godliness, which was manifested in the flesh, was justified in the Spirit.” You see, then, that the apostle proclaimed that the mystery or sacrament of godliness was justified. For he was not so forgetful of his own words and teaching as to say that he lacked righteousness whom he himself always proclaimed to be righteousness, saying, “who became for us righteousness and sanctification and redemption”; and elsewhere: “But you were washed, but you were justified, but you were sanctified in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” How far, then, is it from him that he needed filling with righteousness who filled all things with righteousness, and that his majesty should have lacked righteousness, whose very name justifies all things! You see, then, how foolish or how mad your blasphemy is, since you try to take away from the Lord our God what is always so largely poured out by him on all believers that it is never lessened in him by his constant bounty.