To John, Bishop of Antioch, after the Reconciliation

God, who governs all things in wisdom, who provides for our harmony and cares for the salvation of his people, has brought us together and has shown us that the views of all of us agree with one another. We have assembled and read the Egyptian letter. We have carefully examined what it means, and we have found that its contents fully agree with our own statements and are entirely opposed to the Twelve Chapters, against which we have gone on waging war up to the present as contrary to true religion. Their teaching was that God the Word was made flesh in a fleshly way; that there was a union of hypostasis; that the coming together in union was a union of nature; and that God the Word was the firstborn from the dead. They forbade any distinction in the terms used of our Lord, and they contained other doctrines too, at odds with the seed sown by the apostles and grown from heretical weeds. The present document, however, is adorned with the nobility of an apostolic origin. For in it our Lord Jesus Christ is shown as perfect God and perfect man. It shows two natures and the distinction between them. It shows a union without confusion, made not by mixing and blending but in a way that is divine and beyond words, and that clearly keeps the properties of the natures. It shows that God the Word cannot suffer and cannot die; that the temple could suffer, gave itself up to death for a time, and was raised by the power of the God united to it; and that the Holy Spirit is not from the Son and does not have his existence from the Son, but proceeds from the Father, and is rightly said to be the Son’s, as being of one substance. Seeing this orthodoxy in the letter, we have sung hymns to the one who heals our stammering tongues and turns our discordant noises into the harmony of sweet music. [a]