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| Against Apollinarius; The Second Letter to Cledonius.
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Against Apollinarius; The
Second Letter to Cledonius. (Ep. CII.)
Forasmuch as many persons have come to your Reverence
seeking confirmation of their faith, and therefore you have
affectionately asked me to put forth a brief definition and rule of my
opinion, I therefore write to your Reverence, what indeed you knew
before, that I never have and never can honour anything above the
Nicene Faith, that of the Holy Fathers who met there to destroy the
Arian heresy; but am, and by God’s help ever will be, of that
faith; completing in detail that which was incompletely said by them
concerning the Holy Ghost; for that question had not then been mooted,
namely, that we are to believe that the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are
of one Godhead, thus confessing the Spirit also to be God.
Receive then to communion those who think and teach thus, as I also do;
but those who are otherwise minded refuse, and hold them as strangers
to God and the Catholic Church. And since a question has also
been mooted concerning the Divine Assumption of humanity, or
Incarnation, state this also clearly to all concerning me, that I join
in One the Son, who was begotten of the Father, and afterward of the
Virgin Mary, and that I do not call Him two Sons, but worship Him as
One and the same in undivided Godhead and honour. But if anyone
does not assent to this statement, either now or hereafter, he shall
give account to God at the day of judgment.
Now, what we object and oppose to their mindless
opinion about His Mind is this, to put it shortly; for they are almost
alone in the condition which they lay down, as it is through want of
mind that they mutilate His mind. But, that they may not accuse
us of having once accepted but of now repudiating the faith of their
beloved Vitalius4723
| 4723 Vitalius or Vitalis
was one of the principal followers of Apollinarius, and by him was
consecrated schismatical Bishop of Antioch, where, while yet orthodox,
he had been ordained a priest by Meletius. But he quarrelled with
his Bishop through jealousy of another priest, and then fell under the
influence of Apollinarius. He was summoned to Rome to clear
himself of the charge of heresy; and by a clever manipulation of
language he produced a confession which the Pope, Damasus, accepted as
orthodox; but the Pope remitted the whole case to Paulinus, who was at
that time recognized by the Western Church as rightful Bishop.
Vitalius, however, was unable to accept the test required, and
seceded. On his return from Rome he had visited Nazianzus, where
S. Gregory received him as a brother in the faith, though further
acquaintance compelled him to withdraw from this position.
Vitalius, while admitting that our Lord had both a human body and a
human soul, denied Him a human mind; whose place, according to his
teaching, was supplied by Divinity. | which he handed in
in writing at the request of the blessed Bishop Damasus of Rome, I will
give a short explanation on this point also. For these men, when
they are theologizing among their genuine disciples, and those who are
initiated into their secrets, like the Manichæans among those whom
they call the “Elect,” expose the full extent of their
disease, and scarcely allow flesh at all to the Saviour. But when
they are refuted and pressed with the common answers about the
Incarnation which the Scripture presents, they confess indeed the
orthodox words, but they do violence to the sense; for they acknowledge
the Manhood to be neither without soul nor without reason nor without
mind, nor imperfect, but they bring in the Godhead to supply the soul
and reason and mind, as though It had mingled Itself only with His
flesh, and not with the other properties belonging to us men; although
His sinlessness was far above us, and was the cleansing of our
passions.
Thus, then, they interpret wrongly the words, But
we have the Mind of Christ,4724
and very absurdly,
when they say that His Godhead is the mind of Christ, and not
understanding the passage as we do, namely, that they who have purified
their mind by the imitation of the mind which the Saviour took of us,
and, as far as may be, have attained conformity with it, are said to
have the mind of Christ; just as they might be testified to have the
flesh of Christ who have trained their flesh, and in this respect have
become of the same body and partakers of Christ; and so he says
“As we have borne the image of the earth4725
we
shall also bear the image of the heavenly.” And so they
declare that the Perfect Man is not He who was in all points tempted like as
we are yet without sin;4726
but the mixture of
God and Flesh. For what, say they, can be more perfect than
this?
They play the same trick with the word that
describes the Incarnation, viz.: He was made Man, explaining it
to mean, not, He was in the human nature with which He surrounded
Himself, according to the Scripture, He knew what was in man;4727
but teaching that it means, He consorted and
conversed with men, and taking refuge in the expression which says that
He was seen on Earth and conversed with Men.4728
And what can anyone contend
further? They who take away the Humanity and the Interior Image
cleanse by their newly invented mask only our outside,4729
and that which is seen; so far in conflict
with themselves that at one time, for the sake of the flesh, they
explain all the rest in a gross and carnal manner (for it is from hence
that they have derived their second Judaism and their silly thousand
years delight in paradise, and almost the idea that we shall resume
again the same conditions after these same thousand years); and at
another time they bring in His flesh as a phantom rather than a
reality, as not having been subjected to any of our experiences, not
even such as are free from sin; and use for this purpose the apostolic
expression, understood and spoken in a sense which is not apostolic,
that our Saviour was made in the likeness of Men and found in fashion
as a Man,4730
as though by these
words was expressed, not the human form, but some delusive phantom and
appearance.
Since then these expressions, rightly understood, make
for orthodoxy, but wrongly interpreted are heretical, what is there to
be surprised at if we received the words of Vitalius in the more
orthodox sense; our desire that they should be so meant persuading us,
though others are angry at the intention of his writings? This
is, I think, the reason why Damasus himself, having been subsequently
better informed, and at the same time learning that they hold by their
former explanations, excommunicated them and overturned their written
confession of faith with an Anathema; as well as because he was vexed
at the deceit which he had suffered from them through simplicity.
Since, then, they have been openly convicted of
this, let them not be angry, but let them be ashamed of themselves; and
let them not slander us, but abase themselves and wipe off from their
portals that great and marvellous proclamation and boast of their
orthodoxy, meeting all who go in at once with the question and
distinction that we must worship, not a God-bearing Man, but a
flesh-bearing God. What could be more unreasonable than this,
though these new heralds of truth think a great deal of the
title? For though it has a certain sophistical grace through the
quickness of its antithesis, and a sort of juggling quackery grateful
to the uninstructed, yet it is the most absurd of absurdities and the
most foolish of follies. For if one were to change the word
Man or Flesh into God (the first would please us,
the second them), and then were to use this wonderful antithesis, so
divinely recognized, what conclusion should we arrive at? That we
must worship, not a God-bearing Flesh, but a Man-bearing God. O
monstrous absurdity! They proclaim to us to-day a wisdom hidden
ever since the time of Christ—a thing worthy of our tears.
For if the faith began thirty years ago, when nearly four hundred years
had passed since Christ was manifested, vain all that time will have
been our Gospel, and vain our faith; in vain will the Martyrs have
borne their witness, and in vain have so many and so great Prelates
presided over the people; and Grace is a matter of metres and not of
the faith.
And who will not marvel at their learning, in that
on their own authority they divide the things of Christ, and assign to
His Manhood such sayings as He was born, He was tempted, He was hungry,
He was thirsty, He was wearied, He was asleep; but reckon to His
Divinity such as these: He was glorified by Angels, He overcame
the Tempter, He fed the people in the wilderness, and He fed them in
such a manner, and He walked upon the sea; and say on the one hand that
the “Where have ye laid Lazarus?”4731
belongs to us, but the loud voice “Lazarus, Come
Forth”4732
and the raising him
that had been four days dead, is above our nature; and that while the
“He was in an Agony, He was crucified, He was buried,”
belongs to the Veil, on the other hand, “He was confident, He
rose again, He ascended,” belong to the Inner Treasure; and then
they accuse us of introducing two natures, separate or conflicting, and
of dividing the supernatural and wondrous Union. They ought,
either not to do that of which they accuse us, or not to accuse us of
that which they do; so at least if they are resolved to be consistent
and not to propound at once their own and their opponents’
principles. Such is their want of reason; it conflicts both with
itself and with the truth to
such an extent that they are neither conscious nor ashamed of it when
they fall out with themselves. Now, if anyone thinks that we
write all this willingly and not upon compulsion, and that we are
dissuading from unity, and not doing our utmost to promote it, let him
know that he is very much mistaken, and has not made at all a good
guess at our desires, for nothing is or ever has been more valuable in
our eyes than peace, as the facts themselves prove; though their
actions and brawlings against us altogether exclude
unanimity.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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