On the Incarnation of Our Lord Jesus Christ, against Apollinaris (two books) 1.1–1.13

The way of piety that costs no toil, beloved, is to reverence the whole in silence and to praise God our benefactor with thankful cries, according to the saying of Scripture: “He will sit alone, and keep silent, and be quiet, and do his own things.” “Alone” and “his own things” mean placing one’s own conduct under judgment and keeping God’s commandment in one’s care. But you, knowing the very heavy weariness caused by those who seem to say the same things as we do, have asked about our faith and what the charge is against those who suppose that they think rightly: men who, uttering lawless things without any measure, are not afraid; and those who are unsteady in the faith, led away by them, wander and do not understand. For if they had been established in the faith, they would not have been persuaded by such words. But because their mind was idle, they became receptive of such traditions, from which spring the conceit of excess and a multitude of wickedness. Blinded by hatred, they pass by the messages of the prophets, the teachings of the apostles, the precepts of the Fathers, and the very words of the Master, which need no proof. It is necessary to bring the refutation against them as far as we are able, so that either some of them may come to their senses and see clearly, or they may be unable to deceive others by promising a most distinct comprehension concerning Christ, “understanding neither what they say nor the things about which they make confident assertions.”

For the Fathers said that the Son is consubstantial with the Father, true God from true God, and perfect from perfect; then that he came down for … [and became] man, and so suffered and rose. And so that no one, hearing of suffering and resurrection, should think that God the Word had been altered, they defined with judgment the unchangeableness and unalterableness of the Son. But these people either imagine an alteration of the Word or take the dispensation of the passion to be a mere appearance, saying at one time that Christ’s flesh is uncreated and heavenly, at another that it is consubstantial with the Godhead. Then, they say, in Christ a heavenly mind takes the place of the inner man that is in us. For he used the form that enclosed it as an instrument, since it was not possible for him to become a perfect man. “For where there is a perfect man, there is also sin”; and “two perfect things cannot become one”; otherwise the battle against sin that is in us will be in Christ too, and he will need the cleansing that we need, if, on becoming man, he displayed in himself the part that thinks and leads the flesh in us. “But,” they say, “he took what is without mind, so that he himself might be the mind in it, and be entirely untouched by sin, in respect of the divine element and the mindless element of the flesh. For the flesh would not sin of itself: it is the leader that decides on the act of sin and works through the body to accomplish the sin. Hence Christ displayed newness of flesh by likeness, while each person displays in himself the newness of the part that thinks in us through imitation, likeness, and abstaining from sin. And thus Christ is understood to be without sin …”

These are their sophistries and the notions of their deviation; and their account is not one, for the deviations of unbelief are many. [We] therefore [set] against them the will of God’s good pleasure, the completion of the most true dispensation, and the grace of the most perfect benefaction, questioning their notions in turn: whether they follow the apostolic teachings, whether they keep in line with the precepts of the Fathers, whether they do not set aside the words of the Master that need no proof; so that from the prophetic messages, the apostolic teachings, and the things fulfilled by the Lord may come the confession of the truth and the refutation of error. Tell us, then, you inventors of the new gospel of your own, “which is not another”: from where was it proclaimed to you to call the flesh uncreated, so as either to imagine the Godhead of the Word changing into flesh, or to regard the dispensation of the passion, the death, and the resurrection as an appearance? For only the holy Trinity of the Godhead has been shown to be uncreated, eternal, unchangeable, and unalterable. But since Christ according to the flesh is raised up from among men, “from our brothers,” as it is written, and is passible and firstborn from … [the dead], how do you call the uncreated passible, or how do you name the passible uncreated? For in calling the uncreated essence of the Word passible you blaspheme against the Godhead; and in calling uncreated the passible flesh, fitted together with bones and blood and soul and the whole of a body like ours, made touchable and visible, you fall into two falls: either you take the display and endurance of the passion to be an illusion, after the impiety of the Manichaeans, or you suppose the essence of the uncreated Godhead to be of such a kind. And why do you still blame those who imagine God in human form according to the flesh …

But you say that it became uncreated by its union with the uncreated. From this your error will be shown to refute itself. For the union of the flesh with the Godhead of the Word took place from the womb; from there the Word, coming from heaven, raised it up. It did not exist before the coming of the Word, nor before Mary the Theotokos, who alone descends from Adam and is traced in genealogy from Abraham and from David, together with Joseph, who was betrothed to her, both being “into one flesh,” as it is written, not by union with each other but by existing from one origin; for it is attested that they remained untouched. So Christ is born in Bethlehem of Judea, calling Joseph father, who was of David just as Mary was … laid in swaddling clothes, carried by Simeon in the temple, brought for the circumcision of the flesh according to the law, and growing in stature. If, then, he became uncreated by the union, how was it that he was not seen complete in himself, but the growth of the body took place as the Word willed? Yet it is impious to attribute growth to the uncreated. For what is uncreated is called uncreated by nature, admitting neither growth nor diminution. But what has shared in the uncreated or been united to it is called the uncreated’s own, not itself uncreated; otherwise the benefit of the union would be forgotten, the debt owed for the benefit cancelled, the nature that is in weakness would fall into hopelessness, thinking it has no kinship with God, and grace would be darkened. For who, hearing that the Lord’s body is uncreated, and knowing that he himself was made and created, will not think that the holy Scriptures are false and that he himself has no communion with Christ? If the uncreated took up an uncreated body, then the first formation has been annulled and the archetypal Adam has perished, whose descendants we are to this day by the succession of the flesh. How then did Christ make us sharers in himself? And how does the Apostle say, “For the one who sanctifies and those who are sanctified are all from one”?

Let no one dare to think concerning the Godhead of the Son that, as it is from God, so are we, as the most impious Arians dare to say; or rather, [we are like him] only in respect of the display of the flesh and the form of the servant, that is, of the first-formed Adam, which God, existing in the form of God, took. Generally, among things made, “uncreated” is said of what has not yet come to exist, because it has not come to be. Do you, then, supposing that no flesh at all came to be in the Word, intend at once a denial dressed in a fair-sounding word, so that you may confess nothing [created] in the uncreated? For the existence of the Godhead alone is understood as uncreated; so it is impious both to call the uncreated passible and to name the passible uncreated. For [to say] that the made nature of humanity is not the Word’s own by union but coeternal with him, and … to the nature of God … For the Lord gave proof of flesh and blood and bones, and of a soul grieving, troubled, and distressed. No one would say these are the nature of the Godhead; but they became God’s own by nature, since the Word was pleased to endure human birth and to restore in himself, in the image of newness, his own creation that had been dissolved in sin, corruption, and death. Therefore he made the condemnation of sin on earth, the removal of the curse on the tree, the redemption from corruption in the tomb, and the destruction of death in Hades, setting foot in every place in order to accomplish the salvation of the whole man, displaying in himself the form of our image. Otherwise what need had God to endure birth from a woman, and growth in stature and the counting of years, he the maker of the ages; or again a cross, a tomb, Hades, to which we have become subject, if he were not seeking us, giving us life through a form like ours, and calling us to the likeness and imitation of a perfect image? And how could imitation lead to perfection, unless the perfection that lacks nothing existed first? As the Apostle says: “Having put off the old man and put on the new, created according to God in holiness and righteousness of the truth.”

From where, then, were you taught to say “uncreated”? If a nature becomes uncreated by transformation, then it is also invisible, and immortal not as risen from death but as incapable of receiving death. How then did the Lord die, if the uncreated came to dwell on earth in an uncreated way? Or how did he become visible and touchable? As it is written: “What we have seen, and our hands have touched.” How then do you say what is not written and what it is not lawful even to think? For you will hand [license] to all heretics, after the most impious notion of the Rhetorius who was once spoken of, whose impiety it is frightful even to tell. Either, then, deny the divine Scriptures, or, if you confess them, do not devise to speak, beyond what is written, words of incurable deceit. But again you say: “We do not worship a creature.” Senseless people, why do you not reckon that the Lord’s body, though made, does not receive the worship given to a creature? For it became the body of the uncreated Word; and you bring the worship to him whose body it became. So it is worshipped as is due, and worshipped as divine; for the Word, whose own the body is, is God. For when the women came to the Lord, he said, forbidding them, “Do not touch me, for I have not yet ascended to my Father,” signifying that the ascent was needed and that there will be one … his feet, and worshipped. They took hold of feet; they worshipped God. Feet of bones and flesh, that could be touched, yet God’s feet, they took hold of; God they worshipped. And elsewhere the Lord said, “Touch me and know that a spirit does not have flesh and bones, as you see that I have,” though he himself is spirit, for “God is spirit.” And while saying that he has them and giving proof of it, why did he say, “A spirit does not have flesh and bones, as you see me”—not “being,” he says, but “having”—unless to teach this: that the nature of spirit is ineffable, whereas what is touched here belongs to a body like ours, which he acquired for himself from the Virgin, not by way of an operation but by natural birth, so that the body might be natural and again inseparable by nature from the Godhead of the Word. For so too the death took place: the body receiving it according to nature, and the Word enduring it by will and with authority giving up his own body to death, so that he might both suffer naturally for us and rise divinely for us. And the whole work of the birth and of the death is seen to be directed to seeking and recovering us.

Since these things are so, and are confessed in God’s catholic Church, how do you say again that the body is from heaven? And why did Christ do this? Tell us: was it so that from heaven … he might make … and the one beyond insult capable of receiving insult, and the impassible and immortal mortal and passible? And what benefit was there in this, you vain people, if you say that the things which happened in the first-formed Adam happened in Christ? Unless Christ raised up the fall of Adam to an incomparable rising, appearing “in the likeness of sinful flesh” and “condemning sin in the flesh,” so as both to live his life on earth in the flesh and to show the flesh incapable of sin—the flesh which Adam had sinless from the first formation but through transgression made capable of sin, and so fell into corruption and death. This flesh he raises up sinless by nature, to show that the Creator is not responsible for sin, … he established, so that he himself might be the demonstration of sinlessness. In vain, then, do those who wander imagine things, saying that the Lord’s body is from heaven. Yet Adam brought it down from heaven to the earth, while Christ brought it up from the earth to the heavens; and what Adam brought down to corruption and the condemnation of death, Christ showed to be incorruptible and a release from death, so as to have “authority on earth to forgive sins,” to show incorruption from the tomb, to undo death by setting foot in Hades, and to proclaim the resurrection to all. For “God created man for incorruption and made him an image of his own eternity; but through the envy of the devil death entered the world.” Man, then, ruled by death to corruption, he did not overlook, himself becoming man—not changed into the form of a man, nor disregarding man’s existence and making a shadowy show; but he who is God by nature is born man, so that the one might be both, perfect in all respects, [having] a natural and most true birth … “the name that is above every name,” to reign over the heavens, and to have “authority to execute judgment.”

For the Word, the Creator of all things, appeared as son of man, not becoming someone else but a second Adam, so that from the name too we may know the truth. And the Apostle shows that the first-formed came earlier, showing first what is natural, then what is spiritual. In saying “natural” and “spiritual” he shows not one body and another, but the same body: the first in the power and nature of soul, hence “natural”; the second in the power and nature of Spirit, hence “spiritual”—for God the Word is Spirit. So too one can understand what is said of us, when he says, “The spiritual man judges all things; but the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit.” Yet although the body is one in each case, he shows that the one who shares in the Spirit is to be considered spiritual, and the one who has remained in the power of the soul alone is shown to be natural. And why, if it is as you say, is Christ not called simply “a man,” as someone new who came from heaven, but became “son of man”? If he became son of man on earth, though not born from a man’s seed but from the Holy Spirit, since the first-formed Adam is one, [whose] son … existing in heaven apart from the Adam from the earth, so that he might both have his body from heaven and be son of man apart from Adam. That is why Matthew records him according to the flesh as son of Abraham and of David, while Luke traces his genealogy as son of Adam and of God. If then you are disciples of the Gospels, “do not speak unrighteousness against God,” but keep in line with what is written and what took place. But if you wish to speak other things beyond what is written, why do you fight with us, who are persuaded neither to hear nor to speak beyond what is written? For the Lord says, “If you abide in my word, you will truly be free.”

How then could you still be thought faithful or Christians, … neither persuaded by what took place but daring to define things beyond nature? “Is it a small thing for you to give men trouble? And how do you give the Lord trouble?” For if those who disbelieved the prophets were condemned, how much more those who do not obey the Master himself? What he himself willed and was pleased to do for the abolition of sin and death, how do you dare to say or think other things in place of it? “If we confess, he too will confess us; if we deny, he too will deny us; if we are faithless, he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself.” What, then, is this great madness of your excess, to speak what is not written and to think what is foreign to piety? For you even attempt to call the flesh consubstantial with the Godhead, not seeing that the outcome of your impiety is double. For you have devised these words so that either you deny the flesh or you blaspheme the Godhead, saying—so it is reported—“We say that the one from Mary is consubstantial with the Father.” But this supposed reverence of yours will be shown to be either meddlesome or senseless. For which of the faithful would not confess that the God Word who came to dwell among us, and who came forth as man from the holy Virgin Mary, being consubstantial with the Father, became man from the seed of Abraham, whose son he is recorded to be, and that the Word consubstantial with God became son of David according to the flesh? That is why prophets and apostles [proclaim his] flesh from the seed of David. How then are you not ashamed to say these things, declaring the flesh, whose genealogy is traced from the seed of David, consubstantial with the Word? Or again, persuaded, as we said, neither by what is written nor by what took place, you say these things senselessly, not understanding that “consubstantial” holds identity of nature, while each displays its own perfection in itself. For as the Son is consubstantial with the Father, so also is the Holy Spirit; for the Trinity is consubstantial. You will then also give the consubstantial flesh its own perfection in addition to the perfection of the Word; and by your account a tetrad will be proclaimed instead of a Trinity. And what is this great invention of impiety?

But you say: “The flesh became consubstantial with the Word.” How did it become consubstantial? Tell us. Did it become Word, and also become Spirit? If a Godhead comes to be at all by transformation, one that is not Godhead by nature, why then do you blame the Arians, who put forward this notion about the Word? Yet when Scripture says, “The Word became flesh”—not “The flesh became Word,” but “The Word became flesh”—it is said that the flesh became the Word’s, and not some man’s; that is, God became man. And it says “became flesh” so that you may not pass over the name of the flesh. If, then, you are not content with the unconfused natural union of the Word with the flesh that became his own, and that God became man, now you neither hear nor are willing to believe, not content to hear of the body of God, which is beyond every conception of reverence, as the one says: “Who will transform the body of our humiliation, so that it may be conformed to the body of his glory”—which signifies the age to come, and still it is called the body of his glory. And the Lord says, “When the Son of Man comes”: he calls the Son of God, who became son of man, judge of the living and the dead, King and Master, and true God. But you want to abolish the name of the body, or that Christ should still be called man. How can you still read the divine Scriptures? Matthew writes, “The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham”; and John, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” … If you wish to see … by your account they would be called two; but if you believe, taught by the divine Scriptures, that the Word, being God, became son of man, you will know that Christ is one, the same both God and man, so that the twofold proclamation of his coming may have a well-demonstrated persuasion of both suffering and impassibility. As when the Apostle says, “The man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for us,” “who is over all …”; and writing to Timothy he said, “Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, of the seed of David”; and again the same, “We proclaim his death until he comes.”

If, then, by confessing the “consubstantial” you abolish the name of the flesh and Christ’s being called man, either you no longer proclaim his death until he comes, abolishing the Scriptures; or, proclaiming the death, by your account, of the one consubstantial with the Father and the Holy Spirit, and not confessing that Christ suffered in the flesh, you will say that the very Godhead of the Father and of the Holy Spirit is capable of receiving death; and you have become more impious than all the heretics. For the death of the flesh became the death of the consubstantial Word. Neither the Father nor the Holy Spirit wore flesh, as the impious followers of Valentinus imagine; but the Word became flesh. That is why we, confessing Christ as God and man, do not say this for the sake of division—far from it!—but again according to the Scriptures, so that, since suffering and death took place and are proclaimed until he comes, we may confess the suffering and the death in respect of the flesh of the Word, but believe the Word himself to be unchangeable and unalterable. So he is the one who suffered and did not suffer: impassible, unchangeable, and unalterable in the divine nature, but having suffered in the flesh, as Peter said, and having willed to taste death, because he became mediator of God and men, the man Christ, who gave himself as a ransom for us. … [as Pe]ter [said]: “Christ therefore having suffered for us in the flesh”; and that he became mediator of God and men. And again: “that he became mediator of God and men.” “But a mediator is not of one; but God is one.”

That is why those also err who say that the Son who suffered is one and the Son who did not suffer is another. For it is not someone else than the Word who received death and suffering; but the impassible and incorporeal Word himself, enduring the birth of human flesh, fulfilled all things, so that he might have something to offer for us. And when he is said to have become “better than the angels,” it is not the Word himself, the maker of the angels, who became better, as though he had once been less; but the form of the servant, which the Word himself made his own by natural birth, rose up better than the origin of the first-formed, and makes us his own, who have become, as it is said, “fellow citizens of the saints and members of God’s household.” And it became God’s own by nature: the flesh is his own, not consubstantial with the Godhead of the Word as though coeternal with it, but become his own by nature and inseparable by union, from the seed of David, of Abraham, and of Adam, from whom we too have been born. But if the flesh is consubstantial with the Word and coeternal, you will say from this that all created things too are coeternal with God who created all things. And how are they still Christians who are entangled in such twisted knots? For what is consubstantial, impassible, and incapable of death does not admit union with what is consubstantial with it by hypostasis, but by nature; by hypostasis it displays its own perfection. So by your supposedly reverent invention you either deny the flesh from the Virgin Theotokos or you blaspheme the Godhead. But if you confess the Son consubstantial with the Father, and the Holy Spirit, in the same way as the flesh that suffered … and why do you still blame us as saying a tetrad instead of a Trinity, when you yourselves, even against your will, confess a tetrad instead of a Trinity in saying that the flesh is consubstantial with the Trinity? Then your faith is vain; for you think the same as the impious Arians, wrongly taking “The Word became flesh.” The Word became flesh not so that the Word should no longer be Word, but so that the Word might be in flesh; he became flesh so that the Word might always be Word and the Word might have flesh, in which he received suffering and death in human form, setting foot as far as the tomb and Hades, and in which he also accomplished the resurrection from the dead, giving proof of flesh and blood and soul … flesh, as it is written, “from the seed of David.” For what else than you did Marcion say? Was it not that the body appeared from heaven, in human likeness and not in truth? And what else did the Manichaean say? Was it not that the body was godlike, in likeness only to ours, but foreign to human flesh, whose nature, not its action, he impiously calls sin? Such is the impiety of these men.

Therefore the pious man must not use such inventions, but [must confess] that Christ is said to be the one who is consubstantial before the ages, and Christ is called God, and … from the Virgin he raised up the formation of Adam as a new making, making it his own by union; and thus Christ, God before the ages, appeared as man. And we are members of Christ, as it is written, “of his flesh and of his bones.” What, then, is this great contentiousness of your inventions, that by human wisdom you define things beyond human understanding, saying, “In Christ a heavenly mind takes the place of the inner man that is in us”? What a lawless opinion, what weak and unseemly words, from men who do not understand this first: that Christ is not spoken of in one way only, but in the very name, which is one, the meaning of both realities is shown, of Godhead and of humanity. That is why Christ is God and man, and Christ is one. Vain, then, is your sophism, when you attempt to see in him something other than Christ. Those who are called “christs” loosely might perhaps be seen your way; but the only true Christ by nature will not be sketched by human reasoning, as you dare to do, and have become self-willed. For neither prophet nor apostle nor any of the evangelists uttered the things you attempt to say, having become shameless in soul. For if Christ is other than the heavenly mind that came to be in him, and the mind too is perfect, then by your account there are two. And what … but the prophets too had a heavenly mind, … Why do you devise saying these things at all, as though the inner man of ours were not confessed in Christ? What then will you say about the soul? That both the body and the soul are the outer man …, as one might say, the blood and the flesh? But as the body and the blood, being visible, do not escape touching and wounding, show us that the soul too does not escape these and is visible. Or if you cannot show it, the account is plain: the soul is neither seen nor killed by man, as the body is, as the Lord said. Be persuaded, then, that the inner man of ours is the soul. The first formation shows this and the second, the dissolution, makes it plain: this is shown not only in us but was shown also in the very death of Christ: the one, the body, reached as far as the tomb; the other, the soul, passed over as far as Hades. The places being separated by a great distance, and the tomb admitting a bodily entrance, the body was present there; but Hades [admitted] an incorporeal [entrance].