The Tome, to Flavian

We have read your letter, beloved, and we are surprised that it came so late; and we have gone through the detailed record of the bishops’ proceedings. Now at last we have found out what the scandal was that had arisen among you against the purity of the faith, and what before seemed hidden has now been unlocked and laid open to our view. From it Eutyches, who used to seem worthy of every respect because of his priestly office, is shown to be very unwary and exceedingly ignorant, so that the prophet’s words were spoken even of him: “He refused to understand so as to do well; he thought up wickedness on his bed.” But what is more wicked than to hold blasphemous opinions, and not to give way to those who are wiser and more learned than ourselves? Into this folly fall those who, finding themselves kept from knowing the truth by some obscurity, turn not to the words of the prophets, not to the letters of the apostles, nor to the commands of the Gospel, but to themselves. And so they stand out as masters of error, because they were never disciples of truth. For what learning has he gained from the pages of the New and Old Testaments, who has not even grasped the first elements of the creed? And what is professed throughout the world by the mouth of everyone who is to be born again has not yet been taken into the heart of this old man. [a]

So, not knowing what he ought to think about the incarnation of the Word of God, and not wishing to gain the light of knowledge by searching through the length and breadth of the Holy Scriptures, he might at least have listened carefully to that common and uniform confession by which the whole body of the faithful confess that they believe in God the Father Almighty, and in Jesus Christ his only Son, our Lord, who was born of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary. By these three statements the schemes of almost all heretics are overthrown. For not only is God believed to be both Almighty and Father, but the Son is shown to be co-eternal with him, differing in nothing from the Father, because he is God from God, Almighty from Almighty, and, being born of the Eternal, is co-eternal with him: not later in time, not lower in power, not unlike in glory, not divided in essence. And yet this same eternal only Son of the eternal Father was born of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary. This birth in time took nothing from that divine and eternal birth and added nothing to it, but spent itself wholly on restoring man, who had been deceived, so that he might both conquer death and by his power overthrow the devil, who held the power of death. For we could not now overcome the author of sin and death unless he had taken our nature on himself and made it his own, he whom sin could not defile nor death hold. So, without any doubt, he was conceived of the Holy Spirit in the womb of his virgin mother, who gave birth to him without losing her virginity, just as she conceived him without losing it. [d]

But if he could not draw a right understanding of the matter from this pure spring of Christian belief, because he had darkened the brightness of the plain truth with a veil of blindness all his own, he might have submitted himself to the teaching of the Gospels. When Matthew speaks of “the book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham,” he might also have looked for the instruction that the apostles’ statements give. And reading in the letter to the Romans, “Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which he had promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scripture concerning his Son, who was made to him of the seed of David according to the flesh,” he might have given loyal care to the pages of the prophets. And finding God’s promise to Abraham, “In your seed all nations will be blessed,” he might, to avoid all doubt about whom this seed means, have followed the apostle when he says, “The promises were made to Abraham and to his seed. He does not say ‘and to seeds,’ as of many, but as of one, ‘and to your seed,’ which is Christ.” He might also have grasped Isaiah’s prophecy by paying closer attention to what he says: “Behold, a virgin will conceive and bear a son, and they will call his name Immanuel,” which is interpreted “God with us.” And he might have read faithfully the same prophet’s words: “A child is born to us, a son is given to us, whose power is on his shoulder, and they will call his name the Angel of the Great Counsel, Wonderful, Counselor, the Mighty God, the Prince of Peace, the Father of the age to come.” Then he would not speak so wrongly as to say that the Word became flesh in such a way that Christ, born of the Virgin’s womb, had the form of a man but did not have the reality of his mother’s body. Or did he perhaps think that our Lord Jesus Christ was not of our nature for this reason: that the angel who was sent to blessed Mary, ever virgin, says, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; and therefore that holy thing also that will be born of you will be called the Son of God”? Did he suppose that, since the Virgin’s conception was a divine act, the flesh of the one conceived did not share the nature of the one who conceived him? But that birth, so uniquely wonderful and so wonderfully unique, is not to be understood in such a way that the properties of his kind were removed by the newness of his creation. For though the Holy Spirit gave the Virgin fruitfulness, a real body was received from her body. And, “Wisdom building herself a house,” “the Word became flesh and dwelt in us,” that is, in that flesh which he took from man and which he brought to life with the breath of a higher life. [f]

So, without harm to the properties of either nature and substance, which then came together in one person, majesty took on humility, strength took on weakness, eternity took on mortality. And to pay off the debt that belongs to our condition, the nature that cannot be harmed was united with the nature that can suffer, so that, as our healing required, one and the same Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, could both die in the one and not die in the other. So true God was born in the whole and perfect nature of a true man, complete in what was his own, complete in what was ours. By “ours” we mean what the Creator formed in us from the beginning and what he took on himself to repair. For what the deceiver brought in, and deceived man committed, left no trace in the Savior. Nor, because he shared in human weaknesses, did he therefore share our faults. He took the form of a slave without the stain of sin, increasing the human and not lessening the divine. For that emptying of himself, by which the Invisible made himself visible, and the Creator and Lord of all things willed to be a mortal, was the stooping down of pity, not the failing of power. So he who, while remaining in the form of God, made man, was also made man in the form of a slave. For each nature keeps its own proper character without loss; and as the form of God did not do away with the form of a slave, so the form of a slave did not impair the form of God. For the devil used to boast that man had been cheated by his cunning into losing the gifts of God; that, stripped of the gift of immortality, man had come under the sentence of death; that he himself had found some comfort in his troubles from having a partner in his wrongdoing; and that God too, as the principle of justice demanded, had changed his own purpose toward man, whom he had created in such honor. So there was need for a secret plan to be carried out, so that the unchangeable God, whose will cannot be robbed of its own kindness, might fulfill the first design of his fatherly care toward us by a more hidden mystery; and so that man, who had been driven into his fault by the treacherous cunning of the devil, might not perish contrary to the purpose of God. [m]

So the Son of God enters these lower parts of the world, coming down from his heavenly home and yet not leaving his Father’s glory, begotten in a new order by a new birth. In a new order, because, invisible in his own nature, he became visible in ours; he whom nothing could contain was willing to be contained; existing before all time, he began to be in time; the Lord of all things veiled his immeasurable majesty and took on himself the form of a servant; being God who cannot suffer, he did not disdain to be man who can, and, immortal as he is, to subject himself to the laws of death. The Lord took on his mother’s nature without her faultiness. Nor, in the Lord Jesus Christ, born of the Virgin’s womb, does the wonder of his birth make his nature unlike ours. For he who is true God is also true man, and there is no lie in this union, since the lowliness of manhood and the loftiness of the Godhead both meet there. For as God is not changed by his showing of pity, so man is not swallowed up by the dignity. For each form does what is proper to it, in cooperation with the other: the Word doing what belongs to the Word, and the flesh carrying out what belongs to the flesh. One of them shines out in miracles; the other gives way under injuries. And as the Word does not cease to be equal with his Father’s glory, so the flesh does not give up the nature of our race. For it must be said again and again that one and the same is truly Son of God and truly son of man. God, in that “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”; man, in that “the Word became flesh and dwelt in us.” God, in that “all things were made by him, and without him nothing was made”; man, in that “he was made of a woman, made under the law.” The birth of the flesh was the showing of human nature; the Virgin’s giving birth is the proof of divine power. The infancy of a baby is shown in the lowliness of its cradle; the greatness of the Most High is proclaimed by the voices of angels. He whom Herod treacherously tries to destroy is like us in our earliest beginnings; but he whom the Magi delight to worship on their knees is the Lord of all. So too, when he came to the baptism of John, his forerunner, so that he would not go unrecognized behind the veil of flesh that covered his divinity, the Father’s voice thundered from the sky and said, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” And so the one whom the devil’s craftiness attacks as man, the angels serve as God. To be hungry and thirsty, to be tired, and to sleep, is clearly human. But to satisfy five thousand men with five loaves; to give the woman of Samaria living water, a drink of which can keep the one who drinks it from ever being thirsty again; to walk on the surface of the sea with feet that do not sink; and to calm the swelling waves by rebuking the winds, is without any doubt divine. So, to pass over many other examples, it does not belong to the same nature to be moved to tears of pity for a dead friend, and, when the stone was removed from the grave where he had lain four days, to raise that same friend to life with a word of command; or to hang on the cross, and, turning day into night, to make all the elements tremble; or to be pierced with nails, and yet to open the gates of paradise to the robber’s faith. In the same way, it does not belong to the same nature to say, “I and the Father are one,” and to say, “The Father is greater than I.” For although in the Lord Jesus Christ God and man are one person, the source of the humiliation that both share is one, and the source of the glory that both share is another. For his manhood, which is less than the Father, comes from our side; his Godhead, which is equal to the Father, comes from the Father. [n]

So, because of this unity of person, which is to be understood in both natures, we read that the Son of Man came down from heaven, when the Son of God took flesh from the Virgin who bore him. And again, the Son of God is said to have been crucified and buried, though it was not in his divinity itself, in which the only Son is co-eternal and of one substance with the Father, but in his weak human nature that he suffered these things. And so in the creed too we all confess that the only Son of God was crucified and buried, in keeping with the apostle’s saying: “For if they had known, they would never have crucified the Lord of glory.” But when our Lord and Savior himself wished to instruct his disciples’ faith by his questions, he said, “Who do people say that I, the Son of Man, am?” And when they had set out the various opinions of others, he said, “But you, who do you say that I am?” That is: I, who am the Son of Man, whom you see in the form of a slave and in true flesh, who do you say that I am? Then blessed Peter, whose divinely inspired confession was to benefit all nations, said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” And not undeservedly was he declared blessed by the Lord. From the chief cornerstone he drew the solid strength that his name also expresses, he who through the Father’s revelation confessed him to be at once Christ and Son of God. For to receive one of these without the other was of no use for salvation, and it was equally dangerous to believe the Lord Jesus Christ to be only God without man, or only man without God. But after the Lord’s resurrection (which was, of course, the resurrection of his true body, since he was raised the same as he had died and been buried), what else was accomplished by the forty days’ delay than to cleanse the purity of our faith from all darkness? For that purpose he talked with his disciples, and stayed and ate with them. He let himself be handled with careful and searching touch by those who were troubled by doubt. He came in to the apostles when the doors were shut, gave them the Holy Spirit by breathing on them, and, giving them the light of understanding, opened the secrets of the Holy Scriptures. So too he showed the wound in his side, the marks of the nails, and all the signs of his very recent suffering, saying, “See my hands and feet, that it is I. Handle me and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones, as you see that I have.” He did this so that the properties of his divine and human nature might be acknowledged to remain still inseparable, and so that we might know the Word not to be different from the flesh, in such a sense that we also confess the one Son of God to be both Word and flesh. Your opponent Eutyches must be judged to have very little grasp of this mystery of the faith, if he has recognized our nature in the only Son of God neither through the humiliation of his death nor through the glory of his rising again. Nor does he fear the declaration of the blessed apostle and evangelist John, when he says, “Every spirit that confesses Jesus Christ to have come in the flesh is of God; and every spirit that destroys Jesus is not of God, and this is Antichrist.” But what is “to destroy Jesus,” except to take human nature away from him, and to make void, by the most shameless fictions, the mystery by which alone we were saved? The truth is that, being in the dark about the nature of Christ’s body, he must also be made a fool of by the same blindness about his sufferings. For if he does not think the cross of the Lord a fiction, and does not doubt that the punishment he underwent to save the world was just as real, let him acknowledge the flesh of the one whose death he already believes. And let him not disbelieve that he was a man with a body like ours, since he acknowledges that he was able to suffer; for to deny his true flesh is also to deny his bodily suffering. If, then, he accepts the Christian faith and does not turn his ears away from the preaching of the Gospel, let him see what nature it was that hung, pierced with nails, on the wooden cross. And when the side of the Crucified was opened by the soldier’s spear, let him understand where the blood and water came from that flowed out, so that the church of God might be watered both from the font and from the cup. Let him also hear the blessed apostle Peter declaring that the sanctification of the Spirit takes place through the sprinkling of Christ’s blood. And let him not read in passing the same apostle’s words when he says, “Knowing that it was not with perishable things like silver and gold that you were redeemed from your empty way of life, handed down from your fathers, but with the precious blood of Jesus Christ, as of a lamb without spot or blemish.” Nor let him resist the witness of the blessed apostle John, who says, “And the blood of Jesus the Son of God cleanses us from all sin.” And again: “This is the victory that overcomes the world, our faith.” And: “Who is he that overcomes the world but he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God? This is he who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ; not by water only, but by water and blood. And it is the Spirit that testifies, because the Spirit is the truth; for there are three that bear witness, the Spirit, the water and the blood, and the three are one.” That is, the Spirit of sanctification, the blood of redemption, and the water of baptism; for the three are one and remain undivided, and none of them is separated from this union. For the catholic church lives and grows by this faith, so that in Christ Jesus neither the manhood is believed in without the true Godhead, nor the Godhead without the true manhood. [r]

But when, during your examination of him, Eutyches answered and said, “I confess that our Lord had two natures before the union, but after the union I confess only one,” I am surprised that so absurd and mistaken a statement of his was not criticized and rebuked by his judges, and that an utterance which reaches the height of stupidity and blasphemy was let pass as if nothing offensive had been heard. For it is as impious to say that the Son of God was of two natures before his incarnation as it is wicked to assert that there was only one nature in him after “the Word became flesh.” And so that Eutyches may not think this a right or defensible opinion because none of you contradicted it, we warn you, beloved brother, to take anxious care that, if ever through the inspiration of God’s mercy the case is brought to a good conclusion, his ignorant mind is cleansed of this harmful idea as well as of the others. He was indeed just beginning to retreat from his mistaken conviction, as the record of the proceedings shows, in that, hemmed in by your arguments, he agreed to say what he had not said before and to accept the belief he had opposed before. But when he refused to consent to anathematizing his blasphemous teaching, you understood, brother, that he was holding fast to his treachery and deserved to receive a sentence of condemnation. And yet, if he grieves over it faithfully and to good purpose, and, late though it is, recognizes how rightly the bishops’ authority was set in motion; or if, in your presence, with his own mouth and hand he renounces his wrong opinions, no mercy shown to him in his repentance can be faulted. For our Lord, that true and “good shepherd” who laid down his life for his sheep, and who came to save people’s souls, not to destroy them, wishes us to imitate his kindness, so that while justice constrains us when we sin, mercy may keep us from being rejected when we have come back. For the true faith is defended most profitably when a false belief is condemned even by those who held it. [y]

Now, to carry out the whole matter loyally and faithfully, we have appointed our brothers Julius the bishop and Renatus the priest, of the Title of Saint Clement, as well as my son Hilary the deacon, to represent us. With them we have joined Dulcitius our notary, whose faith is well proven. We are sure that God’s help will be given us, so that the one who has gone astray may be saved once the wrongness of his view has been condemned. God keep you safe, beloved brother. [z] Dated the 13th of June, in the consulship of the most illustrious Asturius and Protogenes (in the year 449).