VERSES IN THE POLITICAL METER BY THE SUPREME PHILOSOPHER, LORD MICHAEL PSELLUS, TO THE EMPEROR, LORD MICHAEL DUCAS, CONCERNING DOGMA.
A Accept the foundation of our dogmas, Concise, and synoptic, and circumscribed. Know God, O master, as the contemporary Of incorporeal bodies, the infinite creator of all things, Incorporeal, indefinite, by nature invisible, Free, incomprehensible in essence, but knowable by His works. One and three at once; one in essence, Three in substrata, or, if you prefer, in persons. For God is named a Trinity of persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, consubstantial. The Father is alone, and the Father is without beginning, and crowned with glory; The Son is alone, and He is not without beginning, according to His flesh. The beginning of Him is the Father; but if you should wish To trace the beginning from the perspective of time, He also lacks a beginning. The Spirit, the Holy Spirit, is truly God in essence; He has received His procession from the Father above nature; A procession not of filiation, even if the mode is unknown; Each is a subsistence, yet the three are one God. The Son alone was incarnate at the end of the ages, And took our nature from the Virgin, Essential, not figurative; by nature, not by appearance; From the venerable blood of the most holy Virgin. B Another is subsistence, and another is essence. The essence, indeed, is the common species of the subsistence,
identifying the nature and essence. The Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit are persons, and indeed subsistences as well. The Son, therefore, having become incarnate, was so immutably and inconfuse A. Not figuratively, as we have said, nor yet according to nature—as that clever villain Nestorius impiously blathered—was He united in substance to the nature already assumed; remaining one subsistence, B divine and perfect, and existing essentially in two natures. Thus indeed we decree, thus we confess the two natures truly, divine and human, united to one another in substance immutably; each remaining unchangeable in the union, and from both natures one is consummated: a composite subsistence; such is the boundary of the faith. We confess, therefore, one Son of the Father, according to the ineffable incarnation of the Word, and that the same Son has clearly become man, one Christ and Lord and only-begotten Word, C whole God and man in one subsistence. The natures of Christ are united, then, yet inconfuse; united according to subsistence, but divided again by the mode of difference; for the nature of God is one thing, and that of humanity another, but the Word is one in both. Therefore, Christ is one, but the same is also two: for He is one according to subsistence, but twofold according to nature. Just as we rightly decree two natures of Christ, so we also speak of two natural operations, and two wills naturally operating. Essence, indeed, and form, and nature are in the Word, but there is one indivisible person with the subsistence. Do not call the flesh of God a subsistence, but call it "ensubsistent," for that is the precise dogma. But the term "ensubsistent," O King, is manifold in meaning. For "ensubsistent" is that which truly exists, and again "ensubsistent" is the common element of essence—that is to say, the species, O master, which has subsisted factually in the individuals, not by mere mental conception. But "ensubsistent" is also something more to be considered: that which is combined with another that is different according to essence, O master, toward the composition of one person and the generation of D one subsistence, O King; for thus "ensubsistent" has its definition. Subsistence, however, is properly spoken of as a thing subsisting by itself, and rather as one person. "Enousion" (essential), however, is the common element of essence: a habit, a quality immanent and somehow difficult to change. Otherwise, habit is the number of each according to nature.
A The entire energy is in both soul and body, And habit is the energy of the common nature, in some way. Moreover, listen to all this: the Word became flesh, Taking on our flesh in being incarnated; He became a curse, although He was a blessing, And He died as a man, being immortal by nature, Willingly undergoing death upon the cross. He rose on the third day, having dissolved Hades, Then also ascended into the heavens in glory, And He shall come again with the Father and the Holy Spirit To judge all people justly and with humanity. This is the summary of the things which the theologians teach, And which are said, my lord, concerning the incarnation; For the doctrine of the dogmas is long and difficult to understand. But I, having collected for your benefit the clearer points, Have spoken to you both fully and concisely. B For it behooves the one who reigns to know other things, But above all, the truth of our dogmas, For this existence is the beginning and foundation of an empire.
Receive also the number of the holy synods, How many have been assembled against the impious, O king; Seven in all they are: the first is in Nicaea, When the divine emperor, my lord, Constantine was reigning, And Metrophanes, most reverend in both soul and intellect, Was holding the episcopal office in Constantinople. This synod cut out the tongue of the raving Arius, Who was severing the consubstantiality of the Trinity, And impiously calling the Creator a creature in his misery, And inferior to the Father, though equal in honor by nature. The second of the holy synods took place, As everyone records, in Constantinople, Over which the great Theodosius ruled well, And Nectarius was performing the duty of patriarch at that time. C This synod plucked out Macedonius from the roots, Who was vainly separating the all-holy Spirit From the high Godhead and blasphemously calling Him a creature. And the third synod took place in Ephesus, When Theodosius the Younger was ruling the empire worthily, Against the vain-minded and terrible Nestorius, Who was not accepting the incarnation of God in any way at all, But was blaspheming, calling Christ a mere man, D And calling the Virgin Mary the Mother of Christ, but not the Mother of God, the Lady Theotokos. The fourth synod stood in Chalcedon, When Marcian the emperor held the scepters of Rome. The number of the holy and venerable Fathers Was two hundred and thirty, Against the impious Eutyches and Dioscorus, Who impiously contended that the body of the Lord was merely a phantom. The fifth synod took place in Constantinople: One hundred and sixty-five Fathers Gathered in this, and they recognized the synod in Chalcedon As most godly.
They piously cast out from the divine precincts Evagrius and Didymus, along with Origen, men who had passed away before them but who had written spurious dogmas alien to the Church of God. A For a while they utterly denied the resurrection of bodies, yet then they invented a resuscitation of others, interpreting Adam and Paradise incorrectly as incorporeal; and finally, they concluded that punishment exists within time, and, alas! they taught the restitution of demons to their former state.
They removed Theodore of Mopsuestia, who had been the tutor of the wretched Nestorius, as well as the initial letter of Ibas to Maris, and everything that Theodoret of Cyrus—himself no less hypocritical—had once written against Cyril. The Sixth Synod gathered again at Constantinople and destroyed the dogmas of the fighters against God, whose leaders were learned, many, and various: Theodore of Pharan, Honorius of Rome, B Cyrus of Alexandria, Sergius and Pyrrhus, as well as Paul of Samosata, and in addition to them Peter, the wretched Macarius, and Stephen, who did not declare two natures of the incarnate Word, but a certain single composition and a single operation. Together with them, they completely suppressed Polychronium, and they decreed the two natures of the incarnate Word, as being pious, just as they did the two wills. The Seventh Synod was held finally at Nicaea. Fifty were gathered there in addition to the three hundred, a choice company of pious and God-bearing Fathers, at the time when the Empress Irene was governing C with her son, the newly crowned Constantine. And they decreed that the holy images should be honored, and righteously anathematized those who were impious at that time—Basil, who was bishop of Pisidia, Theodosius of Ephesus, Sisinnium of Perge, and many others who did not honor the holy images.
MICHAEL PSELLUS DIALOGUE ON THE OPERATION OF DEMONS
GAULMINI PREFATIO
Kind reader, we now give you for the first time Psellus, never before published in Greek; in addition, the notes which we wrote each day as a task of our labors. You yourself, for your sincerity, will judge what I have accomplished in them, while I, for my modesty, will...