Commonitory 12–21

Here perhaps I may be asked to set out the heresies of those I have mentioned above, namely Nestorius, Apollinaris, and Photinus. This does not belong to the matter we are now treating; for our purpose is not to pursue the errors of each, but to bring forward the examples of a few, by which may be shown clearly and plainly what Moses says: that if ever some teacher of the church, himself a prophet in interpreting the mysteries of the prophets, tries to bring something new into the church of God, divine Providence permits it for our testing. It will be useful, then, by way of digression, to set out briefly what the heretics mentioned above hold, that is, Photinus, Apollinaris, Nestorius. This, then, is the sect of Photinus. He says that God is single and solitary, and is to be confessed in the Jewish manner. He denies the fullness of the Trinity, and thinks there is no person of God the Word or of the Holy Spirit. Christ he asserts to be only a solitary man, to whom he ascribes a beginning from Mary; and he dogmatizes in every way that we ought to worship only the person of God the Father and Christ only as a man. So much for Photinus. Apollinaris boasts that he agrees, as it were, on the unity of the Trinity, and even this not with full soundness of faith; but on the Lord's incarnation he blasphemes by open profession. For he says that in the very flesh of our Saviour there was no human soul at all, or at least one that had no mind and reason. And he said that the Lord's flesh itself was not taken from the flesh of the holy Virgin Mary but came down from heaven into the Virgin; and, always wavering and doubtful, he preached it now as coeternal with God the Word, now as made from the divinity of the Word. For he would not have two substances in Christ, one divine, the other human, one from the Father, the other from the mother; but he thought that the very nature of the Word was divided, as if part of it remained in God and part had been turned into flesh; so that whereas the truth says that one Christ is of two substances, he, contrary to the truth, asserts that from the one divinity of Christ two substances were made. So much for Apollinaris. Nestorius, with a disease contrary to that of Apollinaris, while he pretends to distinguish two substances in Christ, suddenly introduces two persons, and by an unheard-of crime wants there to be two sons of God, two Christs, one God, the other man, one begotten of the Father, the other of the mother. And so he asserts that holy Mary is to be called not Theotokos but Christotokos, because, namely, there was born of her not that Christ who is God but that one who was man. If anyone thinks that in his writings he speaks of one Christ and preaches one person of Christ, let him not believe it rashly. For either he contrived this by the art of deceiving, so as more easily to persuade evil things through good, as the Apostle says, "Through what is good it worked death in me"; or, as we said, for the sake of fraud he boasts in certain places of his writings that he believes one Christ and one person of Christ; or at least he holds that after the Virgin had given birth the two persons came together into one Christ, yet in such a way that he contends that at the time of the conception or birth from the Virgin, and for some time afterwards, there were two Christs; so that Christ, born first as an ordinary and solitary man, not yet joined to God the Word in unity of person, the person of the assuming Word afterwards came down upon him; and though he now remains assumed in the glory of God, yet for some time there seems to have been no difference between him and other men.

These, then, are the things that Nestorius, Apollinaris, and Photinus bark like mad dogs against the catholic faith: Photinus by not confessing the Trinity; Apollinaris by saying that the nature of the Word is changeable, by not confessing two substances in Christ, and by denying either the whole soul of Christ or at least the mind and reason in his soul, and asserting that the Word of God took the place of the mind; Nestorius by asserting that there are always, or were for a time, two Christs. But the catholic church, thinking rightly both about God and about our Saviour, blasphemes neither in the mystery of the Trinity nor in the incarnation of Christ. For it worships both one Godhead in the fullness of the Trinity and the equality of the Trinity in one and the same majesty; and it confesses one Christ Jesus, not two, the same both God and man. It believes in him one person but two substances; two substances but one person: two substances because the Word of God is not changeable so as to be turned into flesh; one person lest, by professing two sons, it should seem to worship a quaternity, not a Trinity. But it is worth while to unfold this again and again, more distinctly and expressly. In God there is one substance but three persons; in Christ two substances but one person. In the Trinity there is another and another (alius), not another thing and another thing (aliud); in the Saviour another thing and another thing, not another and another. How in the Trinity another and another, not another thing and another thing? Because the person of the Father is one, of the Son another, of the Holy Spirit another; yet of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit the nature is not one and another, but one and the same. How in the Saviour another thing and another thing, not another and another? Because the substance of the divinity is one, of the humanity another; yet the Godhead and the humanity are not one and another, but one and the same Christ, one and the same Son of God, and of one and the same Christ and Son of God there is one and the same person; just as in a man the flesh is one thing and the soul another, yet the man, soul and flesh, is one and the same. In Peter and Paul the soul is one thing, the flesh another; yet there are not two Peters, flesh and soul, nor is one Paul soul and another flesh; but there is one and the same Peter, one and the same Paul, subsisting of the twofold and different nature of soul and body. So then in one and the same Christ there are two substances, but one divine, the other human; one from God the Father, the other from the Virgin mother; one coeternal and equal with the Father, the other in time and less than the Father; one consubstantial with the Father, the other consubstantial with the mother; yet one and the same Christ in both substances. Not, then, one Christ God and another man; not one uncreated and another created; not one impassible and another passible; not one equal to the Father and another less than the Father; not one from the Father and another from the mother; but one and the same Christ, God and man, the same uncreated and created, the same unchangeable and impassible, the same changed and having suffered, the same both equal to and less than the Father, the same begotten of the Father before the ages, the same born of the mother in the age, perfect God, perfect man. In God the highest divinity, in man full humanity. Full humanity, I say, since it has both soul and flesh: but true flesh, ours, from his mother; and a soul endowed with intellect, possessed of mind and reason. There is, then, in Christ the Word, a soul, and flesh; but this whole is one Christ, one Son of God, and one our Saviour and Redeemer. One, however, not by some corruptible confusion of divinity and humanity, but by a complete and singular unity of person. For that union did not convert and change one into the other (which is the error proper to the Arians), but rather so joined both into one that, while the singleness of one and the same person always remains in Christ, the property of each nature also remains for ever; so that neither does God ever begin to be body, nor does the body ever cease to be body. This is also shown by the example of the human condition. For not only in the present but also in the future each human being will consist of soul and body, and yet neither will the body ever be turned into soul nor the soul into body; but since each human being will live without end, in each human being the difference of both substances will necessarily remain without end. So in Christ also each substance's own property is to be kept for ever, the unity of the person, however, being preserved.

But since we often name the person, and say that God became man through the person, we must greatly beware lest we seem to say that God the Word took on what is ours only by imitating actions, and did whatever belongs to human life as a man in appearance, not as a true man; as usually happens in theatres, where one man suddenly represents several persons, none of whom he is himself. For whenever an imitation of another's actions is taken up, the duties or deeds of others are performed in such a way that those who act are not themselves those whom they act. For (to use, for example, instances from the world and from the Manichees) when a tragic actor represents a priest or a king, he is not a priest or a king. For when the performance ends, the person he had assumed ends with it. Far from us be this impious and wicked mockery. Let that be the madness of the Manichees, who, preachers of phantasm, say that the Son of God, God, existed as the person of a man not in substance but feigned it by a kind of supposed acting and way of life. But the catholic faith says that the Word of God became man in such a way that he took what is ours not deceptively and in appearance but truly and really, and did not imitate human things as another's but rather performed them as his own; and what he acted, that he also was. Just as we ourselves, in that we speak, think, live, and subsist, do not imitate men but are men. For Peter and John, to name them above all, were men not by imitating but by subsisting. Nor did Paul pretend to be an apostle or feign to be Paul; but he was an apostle and subsisted as Paul. So too God the Word, by assuming and having flesh, by speaking, acting, and suffering through the flesh, yet without any corruption of his own nature, deigned to bring it about entirely that he did not imitate or feign a perfect man but showed one forth, so that he did not seem or was not supposed to be a true man, but was one and subsisted as one. Therefore, just as the soul, joined to the flesh yet not turned into flesh, does not imitate man but is man, and man not by pretence but by substance, so also God the Word, without any change of himself, by uniting himself to man, not by confusion, not by imitation, became man, but by subsisting. Let us, then, wholly cast away the whole understanding of 'person' that is taken up in feigned imitation, where one thing always is and another is pretended, where the one who acts is never the one whom he acts. Far be it that God the Word should be believed to have taken the person of man in this deceptive way; but rather in such a way that, his own substance remaining unchangeable, and taking into himself the nature of perfect man, he himself became flesh, himself man, himself the person of a man: not a pretended but a true one, not imitative but substantial, not one that would cease with the action but one that would remain absolutely in substance.

This unity of person in Christ, then, was joined and completed not at all after the Virgin's giving birth, but in the very womb of the Virgin. For we must take great care to confess Christ not only one but always one; since it is an intolerable blasphemy, even if you grant that he is now one, to contend that he was once not one but two: one, namely, after the time of his baptism, but two at the time of his birth. This immense sacrilege we can surely avoid only by confessing that the man was united to God, but by unity of person, not from the ascension, or the resurrection, or the baptism, but already in the mother, already in the womb, already, indeed, in the very virginal conception. Because of this unity of person, both what is proper to God is attributed to man and what is proper to the flesh is ascribed to God, indifferently and interchangeably. Hence it is that it is written by God both that the Son of Man came down from heaven, and that the Lord of glory was crucified on earth. Hence too, the Lord's flesh having been made, the Lord's flesh created, the Word of God himself is said to have been made, the Wisdom of God herself filled, knowledge created; just as in prophecy his hands and his feet are said to have been pierced. Through this unity of person, I say, it was also brought about, by the reason of a like mystery, that, since the flesh of the Word was born of an inviolate mother, God the Word himself is believed most catholicly, and denied most impiously, to have been born of the Virgin. Since this is so, far be it that anyone should try to defraud holy Mary of the privileges of divine grace and her special glory. For by a singular gift of our Lord and God, and her Son, she is most truly and most blessedly to be confessed Theotokos: but not Theotokos in the way that a certain impious heresy supposes, which asserts that she is to be called Mother of God by name only, because she bore that man who afterwards became God; as we say the mother of a presbyter or the mother of a bishop, not because she bore a presbyter or bishop, but because she bore a man who afterwards became a presbyter or bishop. Not so, I say, is holy Mary Theotokos; but rather because, as was said above, already in her sacred womb that most holy mystery was accomplished whereby, because of a certain singular and unique unity of person, just as the Word in the flesh is flesh, so the man in God is God.

But now let us repeat more briefly and concisely, to refresh the memory, what was said above briefly about the heresies mentioned and about the catholic faith, so that, repeated, they may be understood more fully, and, driven home, held more firmly. Anathema, then, to Photinus, who does not receive the fullness of the Trinity and preaches that Christ is merely a solitary man. Anathema to Apollinaris, who asserts in Christ the corruption of a changed divinity and takes away the property of a perfect humanity. Anathema to Nestorius, who denies that God was born of the Virgin, asserts two Christs, and, having thrown out faith in the Trinity, brings in a quaternity on us. But blessed is the catholic church, which worships one God in the fullness of the Trinity, and likewise the equality of the Trinity in one Godhead; so that neither does the singleness of substance confuse the property of the persons, nor does the distinction of the Trinity separate the unity of the Godhead. Blessed, I say, is the church, which believes that in Christ there are two true and perfect substances but one person of Christ, so that neither does the distinction of the natures divide the unity of the person, nor does the unity of the person confuse the difference of the substances. Blessed, I say, is the church, which, in order to confess that Christ always is and was one, confesses that the man was united to God not after the birth but already in the mother's very womb. Blessed, I say, is the church, which understands that God was made man not by change of nature but by way of person, and of a person not pretended and passing but substantial and permanent. Blessed, I say, is the church, which proclaims that this unity of person has such force that because of it, by a wonderful and ineffable mystery, it ascribes divine things to man and human things to God. For because of it, it does not deny that man, according to God, came down from heaven, and believes that God, according to man, was made, suffered, and was crucified on earth. Because of it, finally, it confesses man to be the Son of God and God to be the son of the Virgin. Blessed, then, and venerable, blessed and most holy, and altogether comparable to that heavenly praise of the angels, is the confession which glorifies the one Lord God with a threefold "Holy". For it proclaims the unity of Christ above all for this reason, so as not to go beyond the mystery of the Trinity. Let this have been said by way of digression; it is to be treated and explained more fully elsewhere, if it please God. Now let us return to our subject.

We were saying, then, above, that in the church of God the error of a teacher is a test of the people, and the greater test the more learned the one who errs. This we showed first by the authority of Scripture, then by examples from the church, namely by recalling those who, though for some time held to be of sound faith, at last either fell into another's sect or founded their own heresy. A great matter indeed, useful to learn and necessary to remember, which we ought to illustrate and press home again and again with a mass of examples, so that all true catholics may know that they ought to receive the teachers with the church, not abandon the faith of the church with the teachers. But I think that, though we could bring forward many in this kind of testing, there is hardly anyone who can be compared with the test of Origen. In him there were so many things so outstanding, so singular, so wonderful, that at first anyone would readily judge that faith was to be given to all his assertions. For if life makes authority, his was great industry, great chastity, patience, endurance. If family or learning, who was nobler than he, who was born first in a house made famous by martyrdom, and then, deprived for Christ not only of his father but also of all his means, advanced so far amid the straits of holy poverty that he was often, as they say, afflicted for confessing the Lord's name? Nor were these the only things in him which were all afterwards to become a test; but there was such power of mind, so deep, so keen, so elegant, that he far surpassed almost everyone; such magnificence of learning and of all erudition that there were few parts of divine, and perhaps none of human, philosophy that he did not master thoroughly; and when Greek learning yielded to him, he worked at Hebrew too. What shall I say of his eloquence? His speech was so pleasant, so milky, so sweet, that it seems to me not so much words as a kind of honey flowed from his mouth. What things hard to persuade did he not make clear by the force of his argument? What things hard to do did he not make seem very easy? But perhaps he wove his assertions only out of chains of arguments? On the contrary, there was never any teacher who used more examples from the divine law. But, I suppose, he wrote little? No mortal wrote more, so that it seems to me that all his works could not only not be read through, but could not even be found. And so that he should lack nothing for the tools of knowledge, he had an abundance of years as well. But perhaps he was not fortunate in his disciples? Who was ever more fortunate? From his bosom came countless teachers, countless bishops, confessors and martyrs. And who could describe how great was the admiration for him among all, how great the glory, how great the favour? Who, a little more religious than others, did not hasten to him from the farthest parts of the world? What Christian did not revere him almost as a prophet, what philosopher as a master? How much he was revered not only by private persons but by the imperial power itself the histories declare, which say that he was summoned by the mother of the emperor Alexander, because of his heavenly wisdom, by the grace of which he, and with love of which she, was aflame. His letters also bear witness, which, with the authority of a Christian teacher, he wrote to the emperor Philip, the first of the Roman emperors to be a Christian. If anyone does not accept the Christian testimony from us about his incredible knowledge, let him at least receive the pagan acknowledgment from the testimony of the philosophers. For the impious Porphyry says that, stirred by his fame, he went to Alexandria when almost a boy and saw him there already an old man, but plainly such and so great a man as had built a citadel of all knowledge. The day would fail me sooner than I could touch on even the smallest part of the outstanding things in that man; all of which, however, belonged not only to the glory of religion but also to the greatness of the test. For how many would readily give up a man of such genius, such learning, such grace, and would not rather adopt that saying, that they would rather err with Origen than think truly with others? What more? It came to this, that the test of so great a person, so great a teacher, so great a prophet, not a human test but, as the outcome showed, an all too dangerous one, led very many away from the integrity of the faith. So this Origen, so great and such a man, while he abused the grace of God too insolently, indulged his own genius too much, and trusted himself enough, while he thought little of the ancient simplicity of the Christian religion, presumed that he was wiser than all, and, despising the church's traditions and the teachings of the ancients, interpreted certain chapters of the Scriptures in a new way, deserved that of him too it should be said to the church of God: "If a prophet rises in your midst", and a little later: "You shall not hear," he says, "the words of that prophet", and again: "Because," he says, "the Lord your God is testing you, whether you love him or not." Truly not only a test but a great test, for the church devoted to him and hanging on him in admiration of his genius, knowledge, eloquence, life, and grace, suspecting nothing of him, fearing nothing, to be led suddenly, gently and gradually, from the old religion into a new profanity. But someone will say that Origen's books have been corrupted. I do not resist; indeed I would prefer it. For this has been both handed down and written by some, not catholics only but heretics too. But what we must now notice is this: that even if not he himself, yet the books published under his name are a great test; which, teeming with many wounds of blasphemy, are read and loved not as another's but as his own; so that even if Origen's mind was not in the conceiving of the error, yet Origen's authority seems to prevail in persuading men to the error.

The case of Tertullian is the same. For as Origen among the Greeks, so he among the Latins must easily be judged the foremost of all of ours. For who was more learned than this man, who more practised in things divine and human? He embraced, with a wonderful capacity of mind, all philosophy and all the sects of philosophers, the founders and defenders of the sects and all their teachings, and every variety of histories and studies. And did he not excel in a mind so weighty and vehement that he set himself almost nothing to overthrow which he did not either break through by acuteness or crush by weight? Who could recount the praises of his speech, which is knit together with such a compelling force of reasoning that those whom it could not persuade it drives to agreement; whose words are almost as many sentences, whose meanings so many victories? The Marcions, Apelleses, Praxeases, Hermogeneses, Jews, pagans, Gnostics and the rest know this, whose blasphemies he overthrew with the many great masses of his volumes as with thunderbolts. And yet he too, after all this, this Tertullian, I say, holding too little to catholic dogma, that is, to the universal and ancient faith, and much more eloquent than fortunate, afterwards changed his opinion and did at last what blessed Hilary the confessor writes of him in a certain place: "By his later error," he says, "he took away authority from his approved writings." And he too was a great test in the church. But I do not wish to say more about him. I will mention only this: that, by asserting, against the precept of Moses, that the new furies of Montanus rising up in the church and those mad dreams of a new dogma of mad women were true prophecies, he deserved that it should be said of him too and of his writings: "If a prophet rises in your midst", and soon after: "You shall not hear the words of that prophet." Why? "Because," he says, "the Lord your God is testing you, whether you love him or not."

From these many great masses of examples from the church, then, and others of the kind, we ought to observe clearly, and to understand more clearly than light according to the laws of Deuteronomy, that if ever some teacher of the church strays from the faith, divine Providence permits it for our testing, whether we love God or not with all our heart and with all our soul.

Since this is so, he is the true and genuine catholic who loves the truth of God, the church, the body of Christ; who puts nothing before the divine religion and the catholic faith, not the authority of any man, not love, not genius, not eloquence, not philosophy; but, despising all these, and fixed, stable, and abiding in the faith, resolves that he must hold and believe only what he knows the catholic church has held universally from antiquity; but whatever new and unheard-of thing he perceives to be brought in afterwards by someone apart from all or against all the saints, he understands to belong not to religion but rather to testing; being taught above all by the words of the blessed apostle Paul. For this is what he writes in the first letter to the Corinthians: "There must also be heresies, so that those who are approved may be made manifest among you"; as if he said: the authors of heresies are not at once rooted out by God for this reason, that those who are approved may be made manifest, that is, that it may appear how firm, faithful, and fixed a lover of the catholic faith each one is. And indeed, whenever any novelty bubbles up, at once the weight of the grain and the lightness of the chaff are seen; then what was held on the threshing floor by no weight is shaken off it without great effort. For some fly off at once altogether; others, only shaken loose, both fear to perish and are ashamed to return, wounded, half dead and half alive, since they have drunk such a quantity of poison as neither kills nor is digested, neither forces them to die nor lets them live. O pitiable condition! With what surges of cares, with what whirlwinds are they tossed! Now they are carried off by their error, driven wherever the wind has pushed; now, coming back to themselves, they are dashed back like opposing waves; now with rash presumption they approve even what seems uncertain; now with irrational fear they dread even what is certain; uncertain which way to go, which way to return, what to seek, what to flee, what to hold, what to let go. This affliction of a doubtful and badly wavering heart is the medicine of divine mercy towards them, if they are wise. For they are shaken, beaten, and almost killed by various storms of thoughts outside the safest harbour of the catholic faith for this reason: that they may lower the sails of a proud mind, stretched high, which they had wrongly spread to the winds of novelty, and may bring themselves back into, and keep themselves within, the most faithful anchorage of their gentle and good mother; and may first vomit up those bitter and turbulent waves of errors, so that they may thereafter drink the streams of living and springing water. Let them unlearn well what they had learned not well; and of the whole dogma of the church let them grasp what can be grasped by understanding, and believe what cannot.

Since this is so, turning these things over and over in my mind, I cannot sufficiently wonder at the great madness of certain people, the great impiety of a blinded mind, the great lust, finally, for error, that they are not content with the rule of belief once handed down and received from antiquity, but seek new things and newer every day, and are always eager to add something to religion, to change it, to take something away; as if it were not a heavenly doctrine which it is enough to have been revealed once, but an earthly institution which could not be perfected except by constant correction, or rather fault-finding; when the divine oracles cry out: "Do not remove the landmarks which your fathers set"; and "Do not judge over a judge"; and "Whoever breaks through a hedge, a serpent will bite him"; and that saying of the Apostle by which all the wicked novelties of all heresies have often been cut down, and must always be cut down, as by a spiritual sword: "O Timothy, guard the deposit, avoiding profane novelties of words and oppositions of knowledge falsely so called, which some, professing, have fallen away concerning the faith." And after this are some found with such hardness of a brazen brow, such an anvil of impudence, such adamant of obstinacy, that they do not give way under such masses of heavenly oracles, do not tire under such weights, are not shattered by such hammers, are not, finally, crushed by such thunderbolts? "Avoid," he says, "profane novelties of words." He did not say antiquities; he did not say ancient things; rather he showed plainly what follows from the contrary. For if novelty is to be avoided, antiquity is to be held; and if novelty is profane, antiquity is sacred. "And oppositions," he says, "of knowledge falsely so called." Truly a false name in the doctrines of heretics, where ignorance is painted with the name of knowledge, fog with that of clear sky, darkness with that of light. "Which some," he says, "professing, have fallen away concerning the faith." Professing what did they fall away, but some new and unknown doctrine? For you may hear some of them say: "Come, you foolish and wretched people who are commonly called catholics, and learn the true faith, which no one understands but us, which lay hidden for many ages but has lately been revealed and shown; but learn it by stealth and in secret, for it will delight you." And again: "When you have learned it, teach it secretly, so that the world may not hear and the church may not know; for it is granted to few to grasp the secret of so great a mystery." Are not these the words of that harlot who in the Proverbs of Solomon calls to herself those passing by, who are going straight on their way? "Whoever of you is most foolish," she says, "let him turn aside to me." And she exhorts those lacking sense, saying: "Take hidden bread gladly, and drink sweet stolen water." What then? "But he does not know," it says, "that the earth-born perish with her." Who are these earth-born? Let the Apostle explain: "Those who," he says, "have fallen away concerning the faith."