Against the Same

speaking of the flesh to men, that "I and the Father are one." O the folly of imagining a proof that His manifestation in human form would occur after this, because the Lord said, while speaking through the flesh, that He is one with the Father! ^A Does he not then, by this statement, absolutely establish that the Father also lives precisely in the flesh? For if he who said that he is one with the Father intends for the unity to be understood not in a spiritual sense, but in a human one, as Apollinaris thinks, then the Father is that same thing which the Son was then seen to be according to man. But since the Divine is outside of all bodily concepts, the union of the Son with the Father was not, therefore, according to a human form, but according to the communion of the divine nature and power. And that these things are in this state is most clearly shown from those words which He says to Philip: "He who has seen me has seen the Father." For the precise understanding of the Son's majesty prepares one to see the archetype ^B as in an image.

As for the things that follow, because of their incoherence and unintelligibility, I shall pass over them, so that I may not spend my time in vain on foolish things; for through them he does not even make clear what he wishes to say to those who carefully follow his writing. For I cannot see what it contributes to his argument for him to say that no one snatches the sheep given to Him by the Father out of His hand, and that by the Father’s divinity He draws the sheep to Himself, and, "If Christ," he says, "is united with the Father ^C before the resurrection, how is He not united with the God who is in Him?" For this, as if he intentionally wanted to refute his own fabulations, he inserts into his own arguments, through which the separation and union of the human with the Divine is demonstrated. For he who says, "If Christ is united with the Father, how is He not united with the God in Him?"—thus also the man in Christ, being another, is united with the God in Him. These things, therefore, as they refute the error and instability of his doctrine by their very reading, I shall pass over in my discourse; but I will mention only this one thing. ^D "The Savior," he says, "suffered hunger, and thirst, and fatigue, and anguish, and sorrow." Who is this Savior? He is God, he says in the previous parts, not two Persons, as if one Person were God and another were man. Therefore, God has suffered those things which he said He suffered; and He suffers what is in no way capable of suffering, not by the necessity of a nature that is forced—as is the case with man—but by the consistency of His nature. Indeed, who will be sufficient to refute such vain notions? In what does he see a difference between the necessity of nature and the consistency of nature? For truth sees the same meaning in each; for example, what I am saying,

that it follows that one who is not healthy in his eyes should have weak vision. And again I say the same thing, that it is necessary, if one is not healthy in his eyes, that he should have weak vision. Is the sense of both statements not the same? For he who speaks of necessity indicates what happens as a consequence; and he who mentions what follows indicates what is necessary. Why, then, does the wisdom of our writer wish to attribute the passions of our nature to the Savior, ^B not by the necessity of nature, but by the consistency and accompaniment of nature? "It was necessary," he says, "that the passions be stirred according to the likeness of men." He who said "it was necessary," has he not clearly pronounced that it is a necessity? Is this not the usage of Scripture? Indeed, from the Gospels themselves it is easy to take proofs of this locution: "It is necessary that scandals come," for "these things must also happen." Is the meaning of both expressions not one and the same? For he who said that it is necessary that scandals come, indicated by those words that it must be that scandals come; and he who said, "These things must happen," indicated what necessarily must be brought to effect.

LIX.

it mingles itself with men. But as for the things which he breathes out like souls at the end of his treatise, as if they were certain mere gasps, he entangles them with bodiless concepts, which I think should be passed by without examination; for where he is pressed, he calls upon the Greeks to defend his own fables. And regarding all other things similar to these, whoever loves to discern the weakness of this heresy throughout its entire length should proceed to the things written. We, however, do not have so much leisure as to delve into such words, which of themselves manifestly carry the evidence of their own absurdity, and possess the refutation of their strangeness even before they are examined; whoever desires to have the futility of this heresy thoroughly recognized and perceived, let him run through his writings; for we do not have enough leisure to be able to spend much time discussing discourses of this kind, which obviously carry in themselves the cause from which one may, without any examination, refute their ineptitudes and errors. ^A

OF THE SAME GREGORY AGAINST APOLLINARIUS TO THEOPHILUS BISHOP OF ALEXANDRIA

The great city of the Alexandrians is prolific not only in secular wisdom, but the fountains of true and genuine wisdom have flowed from the beginning among you. For this reason it seems right to me, as it appears to my judgment, that if to those who have the greater power for the promotion of what is right, more support should be contributed to them for the defense of the mystery of the truth; for as the sublime Gospel says somewhere, "To whom much is given, from him the more shall be required." ^B Therefore you would be just, if you were to oppose with all the power that is in you—by divine grace and in your Church—the falsely named knowledge of those who are always inventing something new against the truth, by which the harmony according to God is severed, the great and venerable name of the Christians is shrouded in silence, and the Church is divided into human appellations; and what is most terrible of all, that men rejoice to be named after those who lead them into error. If, indeed, it were possible for the prophetic prayer to come to its fulfillment at all, and for sinners and the lawless to vanish from the earth, so that ^C

they no longer existed, that would be a thing to be preferred above all else. But since the words of the wicked prevail, strengthened by the cooperation of the adversary to gain power against the truth, it ought to be welcomed if we can at least diminish and hinder these evils, lest the augmentation of worse things, which is produced day by day, be carried too far.

What, however, do these words imply? ^A For those who favor the dogmas of Apollinaris, because of the censures prepared against us, attempt to establish their own cause by making the Word a creature of flesh, the maker of the ages the Son of man, and the divinity of the Son mortal. For they pretend, as if there were some in the Catholic Church who worship two sons in their creed—one, indeed, according to nature, and another subsequently acquired according to adoption. I know not from whom they have heard such things, nor against what person they are contending; for I have yet to meet one who has uttered such things.

Nevertheless, since they set forth this charge against us, and by seeming to impugn such an impiety they corroborate their own opinions, it is well that your perfection in Christ, as the Holy Spirit may put it into your mind, should cut off the pretexts of those who seek pretexts against us, and persuade those who calumniously attribute these things to the Church of God that no such dogma exists among Christians, nor is it preached. For it is not because the Maker of the ages was seen on earth in the last days, and conversed with men, that therefore two sons are numbered in the Church: the one the Maker of the ages, ^B and the other he who appeared in the flesh to the human race at the consummation of the ages.

For if anyone, from the appearance of the only-begotten Son of God in the flesh, which was effected for the sake of the dispensation, concludes that another son has been produced, he must, if he also counts up all the theophanies that were offered to holy men before the manifestation of the only-begotten Son of God in the flesh, and those which were offered to the saints again after that, set down a multitude of sons in proportion to the number of the divine manifestation. And there will be for him one son, he who conversed with Abraham; another, the one who appeared to Isaac; another, he who wrestled with Jacob; another, different still, who showed himself to Moses in various apparitions—in the light, in the darkness, in the pillar of cloud, in the vision face to face, and in the hindermost parts; another son, again, who stood in the battle line with the successor of Moses; and another who spoke to Job through the whirlwind; and he who appeared to Isaiah on a high throne, and he who was described by Ezekiel in human form by his narrative; and he who later flashed around Paul in the light; and before that, he who appeared to those with Peter upon the mountain in higher glory.

^{C D} If then it is absurd and utterly impious to divide the various theophanies of the only-begotten Son of God into a number of sons, it involves an equal absurdity to consider the appearance through the flesh as a pretext for

^A another son’s construction. For we consider that, in proportion to the capacity of the powers of those who received the divine manifestation, the vision of the super-eminent nature has always occurred—greater and more worthy of God to those capable of attaining that height, but lesser and more humble to those unable to contain the greater. ^B For this reason, He does not offer Himself to human life in the dispensation through the flesh in the same way as in previous manifestations. But since all, as the Prophet says, have turned aside and together become unprofitable, and there was not, as it is written, anyone who could understand and seek out the height of the Godhead, for this reason the only-begotten Son, appearing to a more carnal generation, becomes flesh, contracting Himself according to the smallness of the one receiving Him; or rather, as the Scripture says, emptying Himself, so that as much as the nature contains, so much it might receive. For that we have learned clearly from the Lord’s voice that that generation was, beyond those which had preceded it, liable to condemnation, in that He says the Sodomites and Ninevites were more tolerable than they, and the Lord decreed that that generation would be condemned in the resurrection by the Queen of the South. If, indeed, all had been able, like Moses, to enter into the darkness in which Moses saw the things that cannot be seen; or, like the sublime Paul, to be caught up above the three heavens, and in paradise to be taught the ineffable things regarding matters beyond reason; or, like the zealous Elijah, to be caught up by fire to the ethereal region, and not be burdened by the weight of the body; or, like Ezekiel and Isaiah, to behold Him sitting upon the throne of glory, or being exalted by the Cherubim, or being glorified by the Seraphim, there would have been no need at all for this manifestation of our God through the flesh, if all had been such. But since, as the Lord says, that generation was an ^C evil and adulterous generation—evil, because, as the Gospel says, the whole world at that time lay in wickedness; and adulterous, because it had abandoned its good bridegroom and had been mingled with the one who through wickedness defiles souls with adultery—for this reason, the true physician, healing those who were ill, applied his care to the sufferer just as the disease required the cure, and in a way, He Himself conformed to the sickness of our nature, and became flesh, which in its own nature has inherent weakness, as the divine voice teaches, that “the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.” If, therefore, the divine, having been placed in the human, and the immortal in the mortal, and the powerful in the weak, and the unchangeable and incorruptible in the changeable and corruptible, had allowed the mortal to remain in mortality, or the corruptible in corruption, and the rest in like manner to the others, one might reasonably have perceived a duality in the Son of God, numbering each of the things viewed as opposites separately by itself. But if the mortal, having become in the immortal,

^A has become immortality, and the corruptible has likewise changed into incorruption, and all other things have similarly been transformed into that which is impassible and divine, what reasoning remains for those who divide the One into a dual distinction? For the Word was the Word both before the flesh and after the dispensation in the flesh, and is so; and God was God both before the form of a servant and after it, and is God; and the true light, both before it shone in the darkness and after these things, is the true light.

^B If, therefore, every concept befitting to God concerning the Only-Begotten is seen to be immutable and unchangeable throughout, and He is ever the same, subsisting in the same way in Himself, how does anyone compel us to call the manifestation of Him that took place through the flesh a duality of sons, as if there were one Son, He who was before the ages, and another Son who came into the light when He was born of God through the flesh? For we have learned from the mystery and we believe that the human nature, being united to the Word, has been saved; but that a carnal Son of God is viewed privately by Himself, we have neither learned, nor do we understand from what logical ^C consequence this could be gathered. For when He became sin and a curse for our sake, as the Apostle says, and took upon Himself our infirmities, as Isaiah bears witness, He did not leave the sin, and the curse, and the infirmity unhealed in His own person; but the mortal was swallowed up by life, and He who was crucified through weakness now lives by the power of God; and the curse has been transformed into a blessing; and whatever was weak and transient in our nature, once it was mingled with the Godhead, became that which the Godhead is itself. How then could anyone conceive of a duality of sons, as if led by some necessity through the dispensation in the flesh to such an assumption? For He who is always in the Father, and always has the Father in Himself, and is united to Him—as He was formerly, so He is now, and shall be—neither was, nor ^D became, nor shall be any Son other than Him. But the firstfruits of human nature which have been taken up by the omnipotent Godhead are—if one were to use a fitting comparison—like a drop of vinegar mingled in an immense ocean: they are indeed in the Godhead, but not in their own peculiar properties. For in this way a duality of sons would consistently be suspected if, within the ineffable Godhead of the Son, a nature of a different kind were recognized by its own peculiar signs, such that one part were weak, or small, or corruptible, or transient, while the other were powerful, and great, and incorruptible, and eternal. But since all things viewed along with the mortal in the state of mortality have been transformed into the properties of the Godhead, such that no difference is discovered in any respect—for whatever one sees of the Son is Godhead, wisdom, power, sanctification, impassibility—how could the One be divided into