REASON FOR THE UNION OF THE WORD OF GOD. ANOTHER PROFESSION OF FAITH OF THE SAME.
God is Father, God is Son, and God is also the Holy Spirit; not three Gods, but one God, one substance or nature, one wisdom, one virtue, one dominion, one kingdom, one omnipotence, one glory, yet three subsistences or persons. Each person incommutably always possessing what is proper to it, so that neither the Father is the Son or the Holy Spirit, nor the Son is the Father or the Holy Spirit, nor the Holy Spirit is the Father or the Son. The Son, however—that is, the Word of God, the only-begotten God, consubstantial with the Father, remaining God in his own subsistence—in the last days assumed human nature from the womb of the blessed Virgin Mary and, joining flesh to himself, became man, having a rational or intellectual soul. Therefore, it must be confessed that God was born of a woman, not according to his divinity, but according to his humanity; that God lay in a cradle, wrapped in swaddling clothes, covered in filth, grew, and progressed in age and wisdom according to his humanity, not according to his divinity; that God hungered, thirsted, and rested, weary from the journey, not according to his divinity, but according to his humanity; B that God was seized by the hands of the impious, judged, condemned, crucified, and his side pierced with a lance, not according to his divinity, but according to his humanity; that God died, was buried, and rose again, not according to his divinity, but according to his humanity; that God ascended into heaven with that same flesh, sat at the right hand of the Father, and from thence will come again in that same flesh in glory to judge the living and the dead.
It must further be professed that Christ, the Son of Man or man, born of the Father before the ages as one of the Trinity—by whom all things visible and invisible were made, and without whom nothing was made—is this, not according to his humanity, but according to his divinity; that this same man is the eternal life, wisdom, and virtue of the Father, not according to his humanity, but according to his divinity; that this same man is the stamp of the substance or image of the Father and the radiance of the glory of God, not according to his humanity, but according to his divinity. It must further be said that he who is the eternal life, wisdom, and virtue of the Father, born according to the flesh from a woman, this eternal life, wisdom, and virtue of the Father, lay in a cradle wrapped in swaddling clothes; that this eternal life, wisdom, and virtue of the Father suffered, was crucified, and died according to the flesh. Since these things are so, no one can be a Catholic unless he has professed that, in the Word of God, the only-begotten Son, two natures—that is, of the Word and of the flesh, of God and of man, of divinity and of humanity—remain after the union always and indissolubly. For just as he is one of the Trinity, and in the beginning the Word is God, so also the very same is from us, a perfect and true man. For he who was given to us as a child from the loins of Abraham and from the seed of David is the God of heaven and the Prince of Peace; and therefore there are not two, but one person of Christ, because no one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of man, who is in heaven, Jesus Christ, yesterday and today, the same is for the ages. C
THE SAME MAXENTIUS'S ACCOUNT OF THE UNION OF THE WORD OF GOD TO HIS OWN FLESH.
The Son of God, the Word of the Father, one of the Trinity, consubstantial with the Father, born of God before the ages, subsisting as God in his own person, in the last times, straightway between the words of the evangelizing angel and the consenting faith of the Virgin, by the power of his own virtue, joined flesh to himself from the womb of the same Virgin without the seed of a man, remaining God in his own D nature, became man, having a rational or intellectual soul, and so, in the fullness of time, according to the law of human nature, he proceeded from the virginal chamber. For this reason, it is most rightly called a natural, not a social, union or joining in Christ, because it was not to flesh formed or animated—which the person of any given man can [already] demonstrate—