Bad Advertisement?
Are you a Christian?
Online Store:Visit Our Store
| Chapter XV. The Union of the Divine with the Human Nature took place in the very Conception of the Virgin. The appellation “The Mother of God.”
PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP 
Chapter XV.
The Union of the Divine with the Human Nature took place
in the very Conception of the Virgin. The appellation “The Mother
of God.”
[40.] This unity of
Person, then, in Christ was not effected after His birth of the Virgin,
but was compacted and perfected in her very womb. For we must take most
especial heed that we confess Christ not only one, but always one. For
it were intolerable blasphemy, if while thou dost confess Him one now,
thou shouldst maintain that once He was not one, but two; one forsooth
since His baptism, but two at His birth. Which monstrous sacrilege we
shall assuredly in no wise avoid unless we acknowledge the manhood
united to the Godhead (but by unity of Person), not from the ascension,
or the resurrection, or the baptism, but even in His mother, even in
the womb, even in the Virgin’s very conception.474
| 474 If the Son of
God had taken to Himself a man now made and already perfected, it would
of necessity follow that there are in Christ two persons, the one
assuming and the other assumed; whereas, the Son of God did not assume
a man’s person unto His own, but a man’s
nature to His own person, and therefore took semen, the
seed of Abraham, the very first original element of our nature, before
it was come to have any personal human subsistence. The flesh, and the
conjunction of the flesh with God, began both in one instant. His
making and taking to Himself our flesh was but one act, so that in
Christ there is no personal subsistence but one, and that from
everlasting. By taking only the nature of man He still continueth one
person, and changeth but the manner of His subsisting, which was before
in the mere glory of the Son of God and is now in the habit of our
flesh.—Hooker, Eccl. Pol. v. 52, § 3. | In consequence of which unity of Person,
both those attributes which are proper to God are ascribed to man, and
those which are proper to the flesh to God, indifferently and
promiscuously.475
| 475 “A kind
of mutual commutation there is, whereby those concrete names, God and
man, when we speak of Christ, do take interchangeably one
another’s room, so that for truth of speech, it skilleth not,
whether we say that the Son of God hath created the world, and the Son
of man by His death hath saved it, or else, that the Son of man did
create, and the Son of God die to save the world. Howbeit, as oft as we
attribute to God what the manhood of Christ claimeth, or to man what
His Deity hath right unto, we understand by the name of God and the
name of man neither the one nor the other nature, but the whole person
of Christ, in whom both natures are.”—Hooker, Eccl.
Polity, v. 53, § 4. This is technically called “The
Communication of Properties,” Communicatio
idiomatum. | For hence it is
written by divine guidance, on the one hand, that the Son of man came
down from heaven;476
and on the other,
that the Lord of glory was crucified on earth.477
Hence it is also that since the Lord’s flesh was made, since the
Lord’s flesh was created, the very Word of God is said to have
been made, the very omniscient Wisdom of God to have been created, just
as prophetically His hands and His feet are described as having been
pierced.478
From this unity
of Person it follows, by reason of a like mystery, that, since the
flesh of the Word was born of an undefiled mother, God the Word Himself
is most Catholicly believed, most impiously denied, to have been born
of the Virgin; which being the case, God forbid that any one should
seek to defraud Holy Mary of her prerogative of divine grace and her
special glory. For by the singular gift of Him who is our Lord and God,
and withal, her own son, she is to be confessed most truly and most
blessedly—The mother of God
“Theotocos,” but not in the
sense in which it is imagined by a certain impious heresy which
maintains, that she is to be called the Mother of God for no other
reason than because she gave birth to that man who afterwards became
God, just as we speak of a woman as the mother of a priest, or the
mother of a bishop, meaning that she was such, not by giving birth to
one already a priest or a bishop, but by giving birth to one who
afterwards became a priest or a bishop. Not thus, I say, was the holy
Mary “Theotocos,” the mother of God, but rather, as was
said before, because in her sacred womb was wrought that most sacred
mystery whereby, on account of the singular and unique unity of Person,
as the Word in flesh is flesh, so Man in God is God.479
| 479 Sicut Verbum in
carne caro, ita Homo in Deo Deus est. Compare the Athanasian Creed, v.
33, in what is probably the true reading, “Unus autem, non
conversione Divinitatis in carne, sed assumptione Humanitatis in
Deo.” | E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
|
