Vigilius of Thapsus, Against Eutyches, Book I, Sections 1-5

 

Against Eutyches, or Against Nestorius and Eutyches in Five Books for the Defense of the Synod of Chalcedon  

[Rough draft translation]

Vigilius, Bishop of Thapsus (+500)   

First Book, Sections I-V 

https://la.wikisource.org/wiki/Contra_Eutychetem 

 I.  We learn a great and grave danger to the Faith, which is neither easily to be perceived, nor easily to be able to be avoided by many (because it is overshadowed by the appearance of piety), through the many Churches of the East to rage in domestic strife; and it has come to be defended by the obstinate animosity of minds, that neither the Traditions of the Ancient Fathers, nor the sever sanctions of Religious Princes can it or may it be amputated.  For prejudiced by the error of false opinion, human hearing, is found  to be hard and very difficult to perceive the rationale of Truth, however many witnesses is pressed [upon it].  For it prefers the sentence of perverse dogma, with which once it was infected, more perversely to vindicate, than to more healthfully change this same one, refuted by so many authorities of Divine and human laws.  Therefore this lethal and deadly plague of pernicious danger, within the venerable entrances of the Church, thus fiercely ravages everything,  that it harms the more, the less it is understood to harm.  For thus having been taught by the mastery of the most terrible serpent [the devil], it has stretched out the two-edged snares of its own traps, on the right hand and on the left hand, so that it has left a very narrow and exceedingly arduous path of journey for those travelling.  For if thou dost wish a little to bring wavering footsteps in either part, immediately thou wilt be captured.  

   II. Therefore between the sacrilegious dogma of Nestorius, once of the Church of Constantinople, not of a ruler but of a destroyer, not of a shepherd but of a predator, and the nefarious and detestable sect of Eutyches, thus the cunning of the serpentine aggression has so tempered itself, that most [people] may not be able to avoid both without the danger of both; while if anyone damns the perfidy of Nestorius, he is thought to succumb to the error of Eutyches.  Again, while he destroys the impiety of the Eutychian heresy, he is accused to raise the dogma of Nestorius.  But those who especially spread these clouds of inane accusations, they who either are sick by the fault of ignorance or with the disease of contention; and while they are raised with the pride of a petulant mind, they despise the Rules of Faith anciently handed down by the Fathers for this alone, that they may introduce badly conceived opinions of their own novelties into the Church.  For this also to us, as it were, masters of the art of dialectics, not as true disciples of Christ, they aim the inevitable syllogism of a double-headed response, judging themselves to be able by these snares of propositions to hunt Christian souls.  But the Strength of the Church experiences nothing new, nothing strange, agitated by such whirlwinds of questions from almost all heretics; she [the Church] has obtained Triumph over enemies and Steadfastness over adversaries.  For while she was preparing herself against Sabellius by an armed struggled, she [the Church] vindicates the Existence of the Persons of the Son and of the Holy Ghost; that One is He Who Begets, and Another Who is Begotten; and Another Who Proceeds, Another from Whom He Proceeds; Another Sending, Another Sent; Another God the Word Who from the Virgin is Born, Another the Father Who Remains Ever Unbegotten; Another Who through the Dispensation of the Flesh, Fulfills All Offices of our frailty, Another the Father Who Remains without all these.  Thou mayest immediately see Arius, having received the material as of a triumphal victory, to insult more arrogantly, and under the yoke of his own detestable perfidy, to wish to subject the necks of the faithful.  [Arius] saying, "Know ye He Who sends to be greater than He Who is sent; that He Who obeys to be inferior, more dignity to Whom munificence is exhibited."   

  III. In the same way, when I strike at Manichaeus with the Truth of the Body of the Lord, that not by deceptive simulation and some tricks of illusions was It Received, I bring forth the swelling Womb of the Virgin; I bring forth the delays of the awaited time, which for a longer time within the hospitality of the Maternal Womb, all the way to the legitimate Day of Birth, He [Christ] spent; the cradles of childbirth, the cries of the Infant, the progress of age, to the Ultimate Mockeries of the Passion, the Yoke of the Cross, the Fastening of the Nails, the simultaneous Blood and Water of the Open Side, the Descent [Deposition], the Burial, the Resurrection, and what the Lord Himself  also said: "Ye seek to kill Me, a Man Who hath told you the Truth." (John 8:40)  And the Apostle: "As by one man came death, so by One Man came the Resurrection of the dead." (1 Cor. 15:21)  And: "There is One Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus." (1 Tim. 2:5)  While I am arguing these things against Manicheus, Photinus, as if he had prepared the whole meal, strives to devour with the more avid jaws of perfidy.  Again, when I have armed myself against him with the arms of a lively reading, and I have thrown many javelins of testimonies, with proofs that the Son of God is True God, I have a necessity, among other things also, to oppose it, that He was made in the likeness of men, and was found in the fashion as a Man (Phil. 2:7).  In which place Manichaeus strangles me, and he cries out with all the exaltation off a celebrating mind that I have resorted to him.  But it is a great and exceedingly laborious task, to unroll such tendrils of opinions, by which the fraudulent theft of heretical machination strives to capture the Liberty of the Catholic Faith.  

 IV.  And forasmuch most fully, by our Ancestors [the Fathers], all these plagues of the heretics have been fully argued against (for even if no books were composed unto the destruction of their error, this itself alone, that they were pronounced heretics might suffice for the security of the Orthodox), let us now see those whose mind that terrible serpent hath corrupted from the chastity of the Faith, which is in Christ Jesus; that unto the open adultery of nefarious preaching, hath it armed their forehead covered with calluses of impudence, so that by right in them that Prophetic Oracle might redound: "The face of an harlot is become to thee." (Jer. 3:3)  For if it is not so, what to them therefore would it mean that neither do they yield to so many Decrees of Councils, nor to so many Sentences of the Ancient Fathers?  Therefore, they accuse us, while we both confess Christ of Both Natures, as if we might seem to assert two Christs, One God, the Other Man, according to the monstrous error of Nestrious, through the Duality of Nature.  But we profess One God, the Same Son of God, and Son of Man, not Two; and thus the Word within the secrets of the Virginal Womb, to have sown the beginning of the Flesh for Himself, that is, He was Incarnate, so that yet the Nature of the Word was not changed into Flesh.  And likewise, thus the Nature of the Flesh to have passed through Commixture into the Person of the Word of the One Taking, so not yet was consumed in the Word.  For Both Remain, that is, the Nature of the Word and of the Flesh, and from These Two Which Remain today, there is One Christ, and One Person.  For who, clothed in sacrilegious opinion, would go so far as to be foolish? Who would throw himself into such a deep precipice of error, as to deny that the Son of God, without His Own Proper Flesh, Which in the Womb of the Sacred Virgin He thus United to Himself by an Ineffable Mixing of Union, so that the Word became Man, and Man became God, and the Self-Same One, not changing the 'kinds' of the Natures,  today to Sit at the Right Hand of the Father, and will come again to judge the quick and the dead; since he doth not know that the Lord Himself said: "When the Son of Man shall come in the Glory of His Father"(Matt. 16:27)?  Not that, as we have often said, one be the Son of Man, another be the Son of God: but He wished so far to show that the Nature of our kind was not consumed through the Undivided Unity of the Commixture, so that He also calleth Himself the Son of Man placed in Heaven, so that through the appellation of the true name, that thou mayest acknowledge the Truth of the Nature.   If therefore the Undefiled Nature of the Word remaineth even until now, remaineth also the Pure Nature of the Humanity, which the Selfsame One Received of His own, without change.

 V. How is it defended today that there is only one Nature of Christ? If thus it is: truly therefore One from the Two has been abolished.  Which one therefore?  If the Human, alone therefore is the Nature of the Word, and it will be false because Christ Jesus thus will come just as He was seen to go into Heaven. Forsooth, through the Bodily Form of our Race the Same Lord appeared to eyes of those observing, just as He will show Himself again in the Same Form of the Body to the eyes of those piercing in the consummation of time. For if One of These Two [Natures] is extinguished or rather consumed, One is left; the consequence will be that the Lord Jesus Christ, either Only God, and not the Same Man, or Only Man, and not the Same God is most impiously preached. Therefore, we must not through this madness of foolish preaching undermine the Mystery of Honour and Dignity. Honour namely, for God Deigned to become Man.  Dignity, however, for the Nature of the Word, in the Union of the Flesh, Immutably Remaneth, through the Mystery of the One Person, the Same Man is God. And this Catholic Sense admits the Union of Natures Co-Existing in Themselves, not the union of nature; while from the Two [Natures] United, and Remaining the Same, One Christ is believed, the Same God and Man.  For according to those who contend there to be only One Nature, either of the Word which was changed into Flesh, that they might be One; or of the Flesh which was consumed in Word, so that, losing the existence of itself through the abolition of itself, at all to be it is not able, so that the Word alone remaineth One. How impious and sacrilegious this appears to me, it is most clearly known, whoever follows the Apostolic Doctrines, not human inventions. For in truth the Same God is Man, and the Same Man is God, Subsisting from Both, not lacking in Both, it manifests Him to be of the Nature of Both, for neither is He able to lose.