Therefore, if actions and words are divided according to natures and forms, and it belongs to the divine nature and form of the Word to say and do the things proper to the Word, such as saying, "I and the Father are one," while again it belongs to the human nature and form, or body, to act in human ways, to suffer injuries and passions, to speak humanly, and to say, "The Father is greater than I," then not by the same nature—as one who exists as God and acts and speaks as God, and as one who immutably became man and at the same time exists as God and speaks and suffers humanly according to the flesh, which is capable of suffering—against these we will also whisper those words of Saint Cyril, which were whispered to Theodoret, who blocks the ears of his impiety like a deaf asp (cf. Ps 57:5), and which we just now recalled: CYRIL: "Therefore, all things are of the one Christ, both divine and human. For if the Word, which is from God the Father, was not made man, let Him not speak humanly as we do. But if it is true that He partook of blood and flesh like us and was made like His brothers in all things (cf. Heb 2:14,17), why do they foolishly object to the wise dispensation, unable to bear a human voice, and attempt to refer what is humble in His speech, due to the dispensation, to another Son existing separately, to the form of a servant, as they say? It is altogether foolish to pretend fear of the madness of heretics, and yet by their own reasoning depart from the tradition of the true faith. Rather, I would say it is better and far more learned to refer human words not to another person, understood properly and separately as the Son, to the form of a servant, as they are accustomed to say, but rather to assign them to the measures of His incarnation. For since He is both God and man, He ought to speak in both ways." And again: "So, he who swims in such adulterous thoughts will also hear from us: Since it seems to you that such words must be removed from the Word of God and referred only to the form of a servant, do you not once again divide the one Son into two? And who among the rightly believing does not see this clearly?" And again, in the defense of the tenth chapter or anathematism: "For He who did not reject being made like us, how would He reject the things by which He could be seen truly made for our sake according to us? Therefore, when we remove from Him human deeds and words, we are in no way different from those who, if it were possible, would even strip Him of the flesh and do not accept the God-inspired Scripture as true, but utterly overturn the mystery of the incarnation, the salvation of the world, hope, faith, and resurrection."
CHAPTER—THIRTY-SEVEN
The name of communion and familiarity is handed down in a completely different manner by those who confess the hypostatic and natural union, not as those who invent a union of habit or will and posit two forms or two natures acting and divide them properly, attributing sufferings and miracles separately.
But even to the saying in Leo's Tome, "Each of the forms acts with communion of the other," a criticism from the wise Cyril is opposed, who detects and depicts such cunning artifices; written against the criticisms of Andrew, in defense of the third anathema: CYRIL: "What is common is not common to one, but properly and separately to two or more considered." And this communion, as Leo himself confessed, is an affection of mind and will, and a relation and habitual familiarity, dividing into separate operations what seemed common to the forms; and he said: LEO: "The Word performs what is of the Word, the body executes what is of the body; the one shines with miracles, the other succumbs to injuries." Therefore, where there are not two forms and natures, but Christ is acknowledged as one from both according to the union of natural union, there is one person and one hypostasis and one incarnate nature of the Word, just as man, like us, is recognized as one from two, from soul and body. Then these things also come to be through natural and true communion, not through the union of affections, since the one is, that is, the incarnate Word of God, who performs what is worthy of God and human acts, with flesh not alien to divine action, because the Word did not perform divine signs apart from the flesh, nor was the Word apart from bodily and human operations and sufferings, for he was incarnate (Jh 1:14); and he who is by nature incorporeal became corporeal by dispensation, having been hypostatically united to flesh possessing a rational soul.
Hence he is said to suffer in his own flesh capable of suffering, because he appropriated to himself the sufferings of that flesh to which he was naturally united, and thus, though as God he is impassible, it was not possible that sufferings and death reach beyond what was capable of suffering, that is, the rationally animated body, for they were restrained by the impassibility of the Word's divinity. These truths are confirmed and attested by the sacred voice of the eminent Cyril, who wrote in the Scholia, in the scholium titled "What kind of union do we speak of?" thus: CYRIL: "Let the humanity be not inappropriately compared to our realities. For just as the body is by nature different from the soul, yet from both one man is completed and said to be: so from the perfect hypostasis of the Word of God, and again from the humanity perfectly existing according to its own reason, one Christ is the same, being both God and man in the same. The Word, as I said before, appropriates to himself the things that belong to his own flesh, because it is his own body, not another's; but he also communicates, so to speak, to his own flesh the efficacy of the divine power which he possesses, so that this flesh can raise the dead and heal the sick (Mt 11:5). And shortly after: 'We say the Word of God united indeed to the humanity, not because he ceased to be what he is, but rather because he transformed what was assumed or united into his glory and efficacy. Just as fire fixed to wood and penetrating it, seizes it without removing its being wood, but rather transforms it into the appearance and power of fire and performs all its properties in it, and now is regarded as one with it: so understand of Christ. For when God is ineffably united to humanity, we say he preserved it as what it was, and he himself remained what he was; but once united, he is regarded as one with it, doing its things as his own, and imparting also into it the efficacy of his own nature.'" Behold, this is the communion of efficacy arising from natural and true union, when from two there is one hypostasis and one operation; for even the coal from wood both burns and shines, and no one properly and separately setting them apart can divide them. So also the flesh of the Word of God, the intellectual coal, both raises the dead and heals those who are sick (Lk 7:22), and it is impossible to divide that divine operation and to say that the Word performed it properly and separately. Again, when walking on earth and taking five loaves and breaking them in his hands (Mt 14:19), he performed the operation not of someone else, but of his own body.
And similarly, he who said it signified this—that the body, certainly rationally animated, emitted the voice, not, as they say who divide, the form of a servant: for the incarnate Word also performed that. And he is the same who accomplishes divine things divinely and human things humanly. And indeed the effects are different, inasmuch as some are worthy of God, others are dispensatory and human; but the efficiency is one, because the one who operates is one—God, incarnate without change and perfectly made man. Nor, on account of the diversity of the things that are done or completed, should we establish division and separation and foolishly invent two natures that operate, saying: the Word performs what is of the Word, the body accomplishes what is of the body—so that now communion is held by likeness of nature and by union and familiarity of affection from the will. And readily one hears the impious Nestorius writing and saying in a sermon entitled On the Divine Incarnation, delivered when another had spoken before him, because "the crowds had gathered": NESTORIUS: "The divinity is not one part and the humanity another; there is no separation of divinity and flesh. The divinity does not know anything apart from the body, nor does it will to create anything apart from the flesh." This foolish communion and conjunction—which plausibly or rather implausibly introduces a duality of sons, for one cannot speak of concord in a single hypostasis, since no one is said to be of one mind and one will with himself, but rather, will and actions are shared and are said to be of one mind and one work, and rightly so, by those who are separated according to hypostases—is wisely refuted by the venerable Cyril in the second tome against the blasphemies of the impious Nestorius, as follows: CYRIL: "But he himself interprets for us the force of the union: 'For it is not possible,' he says, 'for the Word of God to do anything without the humanity.' Therefore, they are of the same will and mind between themselves, according to you, and we will believe that that pair of sons you speak of proceeds from shared counsels to perform individual actions; and having granted this, how are there not two sons and christs and lords?"
But also in the dispensatory sufferings, which for our salvation the Word of God immutably incarnate voluntarily bore in the flesh, not receiving the impulse of passions naturally and thus remaining impassible by nature, since the efficacy arose only up to the body capable of suffering, we find Nestorius and his imitators dividing Emmanuel into two natures and forms, while they impiously transfer that communion and familiarity which is held from true and natural union into affection of the will and familiarity, and by that relation which arises from habitual affection, they [....] God, and are the cause of such madness of fear—the very celebrated theopaschism—namely, that which by nature God cannot suffer, who therefore was united to a passible body to blunt the sting of death and sufferings; for God acts, and himself suffers nothing of these things against his nature, though he is involved in sufferings through the flesh. Therefore, they fail to realize that by removing him from sufferings and saying: "One indeed shines with miracles, the other succumbs to injuries," they also remove him from victory over the passions and their complete destruction, and they fear lest he be overcome or suffer anything while fighting against the passions—he who conquers all. And with this theopaschism, for which they reproach us, they themselves are afflicted; and so far as it lies in them, they present the impassible one as fleeing sufferings, indeed as one forced by another and by no means willingly taking on the dispensation and his coming to us in the flesh, and fulfilling that dispensation "unto death, even death on a cross" (Phil 2:8), as the Apostle said. But let us see even in this error the impious Nestorius, who plainly wrote to Alexander, who at that time was bishop of the city of Mabbug: NESTORIUS: "I think there are two modes of familiarity: one, of natural affection in sufferings, such as exists between soul and body; the other, which takes place impassibly according to an affectionate mind toward something, on account of a certain love, such as kings have toward their images. If therefore we say the Word suffered through familiarity such as exists between soul and body, co-suffering will happen through the conjunction of the Word and the flesh.
For the soul and the body both suffer through each other and with each other: for the soul does not grieve for the body's pains without the body, nor does the body suffer without the soul, because their co-suffering is natural for both through both. Thus also the flesh itself through the soul's anguish with which it is familiar wastes away, and the soul grieves with the body's pains. But if we refer the humiliation of the flesh on the cross to the Word of God as through the image of a king, it remains that we say the humiliation of the flesh belongs to the divinity by voluntary affection—which is true and destructive of all the heretical loquacity that mingles things that cannot be mingled. For these men want by natural familiarity, as I said, to affix the sufferings of the temple to God—not that through voluntary affection for his own temple he made those sufferings his own through the relation of all the natural properties of the flesh to the Word of God, so that henceforth the natural properties of the flesh and of the divinity can no longer be separated." [...] the Judaic mystagogues held and taught a familiarity according to natural union, not voluntary, as Nestorius said, and the impassible Word of God, and thus he himself. For behold how Athanasius, who weighed the divine doctrine of sound faith on the apostolic scale, wrote in his sermon on faith, which was in fact written against the plague of the unspeakable Apollinaris; when he began to accuse these men, he wrote this: ATHANASIUS: "And elsewhere the Lord said: 'Touch me and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see me to have' (Lk 24:39), teaching by this that the nature of the spirit is indescribable, but that the contact pertained to the body similar to ours, which he took to himself from the Virgin—not by some mode of operation, but by natural generation, so that the body might be by nature, and again by nature be indivisible from the divinity of the Word. For thus also death came about, the body by nature receiving it, and the Word accepting it by his own will and with power handing over his own body to death, so that he might both suffer for us by nature and rise again for us by divinity. And the whole matter of generation and death regards our restoration." And since these things are so and are confessed in the Catholic Church of God, how do you say that the body is from heaven? And Gregory the Theologian, in the second oration on the Son, wrote: GREGORY: "But as the form of a servant, he humbles himself to his fellow servants and is fashioned as that alien thing, having me wholly with mine in himself, so that what is worse might be consumed in him, like wax by fire and like vapor from earth by the sun."
A–FRAGMENT 40
It is added from codex D, a fragment of the second oration found nowhere else:
AGAIN, he says: "When he mentioned 'union' three times in his Tome, he nowhere placed 'union of natural union' of divinity and humanity, or 'hypostatic union,' or 'one thing out of two things,' or 'one nature or one incarnate hypostasis out of two natures,' or 'the Son or God or the Word incarnate,' or 'one Christ, who is understood from two natures,' according to the words of Saint Cyril; neither he himself nor the Council of Chalcedon put it thus, but instead of those phrases said 'unity of the person,' and 'Christ who is understood in two natures after union,' and 'the hypostasis of the person congruent,' according to the explanation of Theodoret, who said the Council of Chalcedon understood 'hypostasis' to mean 'person,' and according to Leo's exposition 'the unity of the person is in him,' as it is understood by him. Now indeed, if you truly say 'hypostasis,' what is this hypostasis to which you did not add that it is 'incarnate,' nor anything of those things which make up a composite hypostasis? What is this one hypostasis of flesh and divinity? Is it simple or composite? Visible or invisible? Of the same nature or another? Or is it composite and composed of natures dissimilar to one another? But in those things which proceed into one hypostasis, in those the incarnate nature is also held as one. If two natures are there after the union, then two hypostases are also there after the union. And if it is 'incarnate,' then there are also two sons and christs and lords, etc."
HERE ENDS THE SECOND ORATION
It appears to be taken from chapter fifty. – 2 That is, Severus, as is clear from the heading of the preceding fragment. – 3 Compare the words of Theodoret, in a letter supporting the Council of Chalcedon against John of Agae, which were cited by Severus in The Philalethes (edition SANDA, p. 30). – 4 Compare Patrologia Latina, volume 54, page 771.