One Person from the Womb, and Mary the Mother of God

This unity of Person in Christ, then, was not brought about after his birth from the Virgin, but was formed and completed in her very womb. For we must take the greatest care to confess Christ not only as one, but as always one. It would be intolerable blasphemy for you to confess him one now, while maintaining that once he was not one but two: one, if you please, since his baptism, but two at his birth. We will certainly not escape this monstrous sacrilege unless we acknowledge that the manhood was united to the Godhead (but by unity of Person) not from the ascension, or the resurrection, or the baptism, but already in his mother, already in the womb, already in the Virgin’s very conception. [a]

Because of this unity of Person, the qualities that belong to God are ascribed to the man, and those that belong to the flesh are ascribed to God, without distinction and interchangeably. That is why it is written, under divine guidance, on the one hand that the Son of Man came down from heaven, and on the other that the Lord of glory was crucified on earth. It is also why, since the Lord’s flesh was made, since the Lord’s flesh was created, the very Word of God is said to have been made, and the all-knowing Wisdom of God to have been created; just as, in prophecy, his hands and his feet are described as pierced.

From this unity of Person it follows, by a like mystery, that since the flesh of the Word was born of an undefiled mother, it is the most catholic of beliefs that God the Word himself was born of the Virgin, and the most impious of denials to deny it. That being so, God forbid that anyone should try to rob holy Mary of her privilege of divine grace and her special glory. For by the unique gift of him who is our Lord and God, and her own son as well, she is to be confessed most truly and most blessedly as the Mother of God, Theotokos. But she is not so called in the sense imagined by a certain impious heresy, which holds that she is to be called the Mother of God for no other reason than that she gave birth to the man who afterward became God. In that sense we speak of a woman as the mother of a priest or the mother of a bishop, meaning that she is such not by giving birth to one who was already a priest or a bishop, but by giving birth to one who afterward became a priest or a bishop. Not in this way, I say, was holy Mary Theotokos, the Mother of God. Rather, as was said before, she is so because in her sacred womb was wrought that most sacred mystery by which, on account of the singular and unique unity of Person, as the Word in flesh is flesh, so man in God is God.