The Confession of Leporius

We have thought it well to quote some part of his confession, or rather his lament, for two reasons: that their recantation might be a testimony for us and an example to those who are weak, so that the weak would not be ashamed to follow in their amendment the men they were not ashamed to follow in their error; and that, as they suffered from a like disease, they might be cured by a like remedy. So, acknowledging the perverseness of his views and seeing the light of faith, he wrote to the bishops of Gaul, and began like this: “I hardly know, my most reverend lords and blessed priests, what to accuse myself of first, and what to excuse myself for first. Clumsiness and pride and foolish ignorance, together with wrong notions, zeal joined with indiscretion, and, to speak truly, a weak faith that was little by little failing: all these I let in, and they flourished in me to such an extent that I am ashamed to have given way to so many and such great sins, while at the same time I am deeply thankful to have been able to cast them out of my soul.” [a]

A little further on he adds: “If, then, not understanding this power of God, and wise in our own conceits and opinions, for fear that God should seem to play a part beneath him, we suppose that a man was born joined with God in such a way that we ascribe to God alone what belongs to God separately, and attribute to man alone what belongs to man separately, we clearly add a fourth Person to the Trinity, and out of the one God the Son we begin to make not one Christ but two. May our Lord and God Jesus Christ himself keep us from that! “Therefore we confess that our Lord and God Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, who for his own sake was begotten of the Father before all ages, and who in time was made man for our sakes of the Holy Spirit and the ever-virgin Mary, was God at his birth. And while we confess the two substances of the flesh and the Word, we always acknowledge, with devout belief and faith, one and the same Person to be indivisibly God and man. We say that from the time he took flesh, all that belonged to God was given to man, just as all that belonged to man was joined to God. “In this sense ‘the Word was made flesh’: not that he began, by any conversion or change, to be what he was not, but that by God’s ‘economy’ the Word of the Father never left the Father, and yet graciously consented to become truly man. The only Son took flesh through that hidden mystery which he alone understands; for it is ours to believe, and his to understand. “And so God the Word himself, receiving everything that belongs to man, is made man; and the humanity that is taken up, receiving everything that belongs to God, cannot but be God. But although he is said to have taken flesh and yet to be unmixed, we must not hold that his substance is in any way lessened. For God knows how to share himself without suffering any corruption, and yet truly to share himself. He knows how to receive into himself without being increased by it, just as he knows how to impart himself in such a way that he suffers no loss. “We should not, then, with our feeble minds, make guesses from visible proofs and experiments, from the case of creatures that are equal and that pass into one another. Nor should we think that God and man are mixed together, and that out of such a fusion of flesh and the Word, that is, of the Godhead and the humanity, some sort of body is produced. God forbid that we should imagine the two natures somehow molded together to become one substance! For a mixture of that kind destroys both parts. God, who contains and is not himself contained, who enters into things and is not himself entered, who fills things and is not himself filled, who is everywhere at once in his completeness and is spread through all things, graciously shares himself with human nature by pouring in his power.”

And a little further on: “Therefore the God-man, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is truly born for us of the Holy Spirit and the ever-virgin Mary. And so in the two natures the Word and the flesh become one, so that, while each substance remains naturally complete in itself, what is divine imparts itself to the humanity without suffering any loss, and what is human shares in the divine. There is not one person who is God and another person who is man; the same person is God who is also man. And again, the man who is also God is called, and truly is, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God. “So we must always take care, and believe, so as not to deny that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, true God, whom we confess as existing always with the Father and equal to the Father before all ages, became the God-man from the moment he took flesh. Nor may we imagine that he became God gradually as time went on, and that he was in one condition before the resurrection and in another after it. He was always of the same fullness and power.”

And again, a little later: “But because the Word of God graciously came down upon humanity by taking humanity, and humanity was taken up into the Word by being taken by God, God the Word in his completeness became complete man. For it was not God the Father who was made man, nor the Holy Spirit, but the only Son of the Father. And so we must hold that there is one Person of the flesh and the Word. In this way we are to believe faithfully and without any doubt that one and the same Son of God, who can never be divided, existing in two natures (who was also spoken of as a ‘giant’), in the days of his flesh truly took on himself all that belongs to man, and always truly had as his own what belongs to God. For even though he was crucified in weakness, yet he lives by the power of God.”