Vigilius of Thapsus, Against Eutyches, Book I, Sec. XI-XV

 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 XI-XV 

XI.  For also in man, if we wish to dispute more subtly, thou shalt find most things so by a certain property separated out more distinctly, that if even there should shouldst wish to find fault, thou mightest make from one man many men.  Therefore, there is no one who does not know man to consist in five senses through the ordered distinctions of bodily members; which senses thus naturally obtain the property of their own office, to have nothing in common with them, they are able to vindicate nothing for themselves concerning the property of another.  And that I may specially recall all things, sight thus properly performs the office of its own ministry, so that it is able neither to hear, nor to smell, nor to taste, nor to touch anything.  Hearing thus administers the office of its own nature, so that it endures the office of neither seeing, nor of smelling, nor of tasking, nor of touching.  Smell also thus executes in obedience of its own servitude, so that it neither hears, nor sees, nor tastes anything, nor touches.  Taste also neither sees, nor smells, nor hears, nor touches.  Touch, lastly, which is the final sense, neither enjoys vision, nor perceives hearing, nor captures smell, nor discerns taste.  And since all these species of the members are so diverse, so discrete, so established by natural properties, that they have nothing of communion, nothing of society to themselves reciprocally, but by a certain private and solitary right they fulfill the ministry of the proper function; nevertheless, one and the same is man, who, since he consists in five bodily senses, differing from one another by a five-fold property, he ought to have, according to the ravings of these men, five persons, so that as many are the properties of the senses, so great also might be the number of persons.  Then to be affected by hunger and to eat, to thirst and to drink, to sit and to walk, to go to bed and to rise from sleep, to endure cold and to be burned by fires, although the body either suffers or does these things, not without the compassion of the soul, yet these are proper of the flesh.  Likewise, to be wise, to understand, to forget, to recall in memory, to be raised in joy, to be dejected in sorrow, to tame with gentleness, to grow wild with fury and anger, and many other things similar to these, which to pursue it is long, although they are not done without the body, nevertheless they are proper of the soul.  Yes not anyone has dared or dares to say the man has two persons, in whom he discerns such great differences of properties. 

XII.  But the rashness of these men, which, according to the number of natures, inflicts a diversity of persons, by Apostolic Authority must be broken, and thoroughly destroyed.  The Apostle certainly knew Christ to be of Each Nature, while he preaches Him both Man and God, and the Same One.  Man, indeed, while he saith: "One Mediator of God and men, the Man Christ Jesus." (1 Tim. 2:5)  And again: "Just as through one man death, so through One Man the Resurrection of the dead." (1 Cor. 15:21)  And concerning His Own Son, he saith: "Who was made to Him from the seed of David according to the Flesh." (Rom. 1:3) And: "Be mindful that Jesus Christ, of the seed of David according to the Flesh, Rose from the dead." (2 Tim. 2:8)  But when God saith: "From whom is Christ, Who is over all God blessed unto the ages." (Rom. 9:5) And very many similar things to these, which it is long to commemorate.  Therefore, he who was preaching This Same One Both God and Man, so that he might show One Christ from Both Natures; I wonder how he did not fear these 'excellent' calumniators of our time, so that he might ascribe One Person to Christ, saying: "And if I have forgiven anything, [I did it] in the Person of Christ." (2 Cor. 2:10)   

XIII.  They are also accustomed to reprehend that with the audacity of the usual rashness, when they hear Catholics to say: "God and Man"; judging two persons to be able to be signified by the interposition of this syllable; but, hear thou how much more ineptly they hold this opinion.  For what is "God and Man," except He Who is God, and was also made Man; not losing what He was, but taking up what was ours.  For when we send forth first in the confession "God", and we follow up saying "and Man", we assert not only God remaining, but also the Same Man subsisting, so that neither might the Divinity depart from Itself, nor might the Humanity perish in the Divinity.  Let us see, however, lest perhaps this syllable might have been interposed by Divine Authority.  For thus we read: "And He is Man, and who shall know Him?" (Jer. 17:9, LXX) And again David: "Mother Syon will say, 'A Man', and a Man was made in her, and the Most High Himself hath founded her." (Ps. 86:5)  Why therefore did he not say simply without the placement of this verse: "A Man was made in her," but place before it saying: "And a Man was made in her"?  Or in another Prophecy why did he place "and" before it? For he ought, according to these man, to say: "A Man He is, and who shall know Him?"  unless the sense is such that, whom thou confessest God, thou not deny  the Man also was made by a similar confession.  

XIV. These men are said, indeed, if however it is true, to confess Christ from Two Natures up to His Resurrection; but after the Resurrection, they declare Him to be of One [Nature].  This, how absurd it is, and how inept, is demonstrated by the very truth of things.  For after the Resurrection, to demonstrate the Truth of His Own Body, He both ate and drank, and He Offered Himself to be touched by the Disciples, saying: "Touch ye and see yee, for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see Me to have." (Lk. 24:39)  But, perhaps, still placed on Earth He was of Each Nature; but afterwards when He Ascended to the Heavens, He began to be of the One Divine.  And what, therefore, does the Name of the Son of Man do there, if the Nature of Humanity is not there? How is an empty name ascribed to a non existing thing?  How does the truth of the name remain, if the Property of the Nature is absent?  Finally, He saith: "When the Son of Man shall come in the Glory of His Own Father."  And again: "Just as lightning goes from the East and appears even to the West, and thus shall be the Advent of the Son of Man." (Mark 8:38)  And again: "The Son of Man coming, dost thou think He will find Faith on the Earth?" (Lk. 18:8) Daniel also: "Behold," he says, "in the clouds of heaven the Son of Man was coming." (Dan. 7:13) If, therefore, the Nature of Humanity has been lost, why has its name been retained?  Or because the Name was necessary, and the matter of the Name as not necessary had to be repudiated?  Thus may they be foolish whom nothing of their own error and folly shames.  But the Lord Jesus Christ, so that He might show the Nature of our race not to have been consumed, truly calleth Himself the Son of Man.  According to which also He Intercedes [to] the Father for us, according to the words of the Apostle John, saying: "If we shall have sinned, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus.  He Intercedes for our sins." (1 John 2:1)  Tell ye, therefore to us, O "excellent doctors", when the Son Intercedeth with the Father today, according to His Own Divinity, or does He plead according to the Dispensation of Humanity?  But as much as the intention of your perfidy demonstrates (ye who destroy the Human Nature, and ye assert the Divine alone to be), He intercedes according to Divinity, He performs the office of Advocate according to the Divinity, He fulfilleth the Ministry of Priest according to the Divinity; according to the Divinity also He will be subject in the end to the Father, when all things shall have been subjected to the Same Son! 

XV.   Once we were waiting, we have awaited for a longer time where the stream of your error might take origen, and which might make a running about to; finally we find that the Eutychian heresy derived from the most bitter source of Apollinaris, even to the filthy abyss of Arius with the turbulent movements of iron; by which things into so much a bond of treachery is joined, so that he refers all things to the insult of Divinity, which Christ either spake or accomplished according to the Dispensation of the Flesh, while he contends to be merely the One Nature of Divinity.  Wherefore we exhort all men who are followers of this nefarious perfidy, while life remains, while it is permissible to repent, to change the sentiment of their own error.  And rather the Doctrine, upon the Property of Each Nature is to be followed, of Gregory, and Basil, Theophilus also, and John, the most esteemed Bishop of the City of Constantinople, and also of Cyril, Bishop of Alexandria, and of very many others indeed, who anciently flourished in the Church, whose opinions on this matter we offer seperately to be reviewed. I ask, meanwhile, the reader, may he not entirely despise the poverty of our language; for perhaps also the speech could be more eloquently adorned, but we so tempered the style, that we might commend the matter rather than the words to readers.  And especially, this work ought not to have been inflated with the boot of swelling eloquence, lest there should be any necessity of translating into Greek.  For it is more difficult to preserver the integrity of the senses in another language with equal beauty of speech. 

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. 

Images from Late 10th Century Sacramentary of Bishop Warmund of Ivrea

 Here are some of the images you can find via google images from the Sacramentary of Warmund, Bishop of Ivrea, circa 1000 AD.  Ivrea is in the extreme north-western part of modern Italy.  The first image is the Coronation of a King by a Bishop, the second is the Consecration of a Bishop by a Metropolitan with other Bishops participating, and the third is the Consecration of Christ on Holy Thursday by a Bishop. 

 

Gennadius of Massalia on the Holy Trinity

 "We believe (there) to be One God, the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost: the Father Him Which has the Son, the Son Him Which has the Father, the Holy Ghost Him Which is from the Father Proceeding, Co-Eternal to the Father and the Son.  The Father therefore is the Origin of Divinity, Who just as at no time was not God thus at no time was not the Father; from Whom the Son is Begotten; from Whom the Holy Ghost, not Begotten (for He is not the Son) neither Unbegotten (for He is not the Father), nor made, but from God the Father Proceeding.  The Father Eternal, Him that has the Eternal Son is that which is the Eternal Father; the Eternal Son, Him that is Co-Eternal to the Father; the Eternal Holy Ghost, Him that is Co-Eternal to the Father and Son: not a confused Trinity in one person, as Sabellius says, neither a Divinity separated or divided in nature, as Arius blasphemed, but the Father in one Person, the Son in another Person, and the Holy Ghost in a Third Person, One Nature in the Holy Trinity, God, Father and Son and Holy Ghost.”

[Gennadius, Presbyter of Marseille (+496), Chapter 1,  Liber Sive DefinitioEcclesiasticorum Dogmatum]

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