Christ Truly Man, Not in Appearance Only

But when we use the word “Person,” and say that God became man by means of a Person, there is reason to fear that we may be taken to mean that God the Word took our nature only in imitation, and did the actions of a man while being a man not in reality but only in appearance. That is what happens in a theater, where one man plays several persons in a short space of time, and is none of them himself. For when someone takes on another’s part, he carries out the duties or does the acts of the person whose part he plays, but he is not himself that person. To take an example from secular life, and one the Manichaeans are very fond of: when a tragic actor plays a priest or a king, he is not really a priest or a king. As soon as the play is over, the person or character he played ceases to be. God forbid that we should have anything to do with such wicked and impious mockery. Leave that to the folly of the Manichaeans, those preachers of illusion, who say that the Son of God, who is God, was not really and truly a human person, but counterfeited the person of a man in a pretended way of living and behaving. [a]

But the catholic faith teaches that the Word of God became man in such a way that he took our nature on himself, not in pretense and appearance but in reality and truth. He did human actions, not as though imitating someone else’s actions, but as doing his own, and as truly being the person whose part he played. It is just as with us: when we speak, reason, live and exist, we do not imitate men, we are men. Peter and John, for instance, were men, not by imitation, but by really being men. Paul did not counterfeit an apostle or pretend to be Paul; he was an apostle, he was Paul. So too, what God the Word did in stooping down to us, in taking and having flesh, in speaking, acting and suffering through the flesh, yet without any marring of his own divine nature, came in a word to this: he did not imitate or pretend to be perfect man, but showed himself to be true man in reality and truth. The soul united to the flesh, yet not changed into flesh, does not imitate man but is man, and man not in pretense but in substance. In the same way God the Word, without any change in himself, by uniting himself to man became man, not by confusion, not by imitation, but by actually being and existing. Away, then, once and for all, with the idea of his Person as a fictitious character put on for a part, where what is real is always one thing and what is pretended another, and where the man who acts is never the man whose part he acts. God forbid that we should believe God the Word took on himself the person of a man in this deceptive way. Rather let us acknowledge that, while his own unchangeable substance remained, and while he took on himself the nature of perfect man, he himself actually was flesh, he himself actually was man, he himself actually was man in person: not in pretense but in truth, not in imitation but in substance, and not so as to cease to be when the performance was over, but so as to be, and to go on being, in substance and permanently.