By Water & Blood

On Nestorius

When the world was gradually flowing away and hastening toward the dissolution of this universe, and each thought himself a competent teacher of piety—because of the arrogance from ignorance, no one enduring to learn—the man-slaying demon, the father of the lie, the sower of weeds, no longer armed himself against the Church with those outside and openly enemies; but finding an instrument that received, so to speak, all his craft at once, under the pretext of orthodoxy he introduces the denial of both the divinity and the philanthropy of the Only-begotten, confusing the simple and untechnical character of our faith with Hellenic sophisms.

You have certainly heard of Nestorius somewhere; for the man is notable. This man, coming from the little town of the Germanicians, nurtured from the first in I know not what pursuits, changing one land for another, like some Egyptian plague fell upon the great city of the Antiochenes. There, having moderately shared in liberal learning, and having practiced a voice most beautiful and great, he advanced and slipped into the Church of God; and being numbered in the roll of priests and entrusted with teaching the people of God, he showed at once in the preliminaries what he would be throughout his whole life. For he did not emulate the noble and fertile character of words, able to cultivate human souls; but leaning toward what pleases the crowd, and becoming a hunter of applause dissolving into air if ever anyone was, he summoned the rabble and unstable multitude to his own desire—clad in a gray cloak, walking gloomily, shunning the market’s tumults, hunting by paleness of body the appearance of being continent, at home mostly devoted to books and associating with himself in quiet.

With such figures and fabrications baiting the many, he advanced far in age, pursuing the seeming to be a Christian before being one, and preferring his own glory to the glory of Christ. But when, according to what was said by the Master—“Nothing is hidden that will not be known, nor secret that will not come to light,” and “Good works are evident, and those otherwise cannot be hidden”—according to the unsearchable abyss of God’s judgments, Nestorius too by the vote of those about the palace and the thrones, and of him who then held the scepters of the inhabited world, was entrusted with the presidency of the orthodox catholic Church at Constantinople, and no less of the whole inhabited world.

Here then for me also the dramas, of which nearly all land and sea is full. For when he took that greatest throne, seizing the presidency of the high priesthood like some tyranny, he was no longer able to contain in himself the labor-pains of impiety; but receiving from the authority an ignorant boldness of speech, he brings into the midst and sets before all the blasphemy he had long conceived against the Only-begotten. And he chooses open war against the apostolic doctrines and the holy Fathers; from the time the Gospel of the faith of those who guided the orthodox was proclaimed, he tries to cast out their words, disturbing the Church of the imperial city, and disturbing the whole inhabited world as well—turning aside at none of the god-inspired Paul’s cry: “But the one who disturbs you will bear the judgment, whoever he may be.” But on the lampstand of the divine platform of the high priests he sets not the lamp of truth but the gloom of impiety.

His first attempt at innovation is that one must not confess the holy Virgin, who bore the Word of God taking flesh from her, as Theotokos, but only Christotokos—although the heralds of the orthodox faith of old and long ago, according to the apostolic tradition, taught naming and believing the Lord’s mother Theotokos. Come then, let us bring into the midst the blasphemous technicality and observation known to no one before. The designation “Christ,” he says, is significant of the two natures, both of the divinity of the Only-begotten and of the humanity; but the word “God” said absolutely presents the simple and incorporeal essence of the God Word; and that of “man” indicates the human nature alone. Therefore, he says, it is necessary to confess the Virgin Christotokos but not Theotokos, lest we somehow say unawares that the God Word took the beginning of being from the holy Virgin, and thus be forced consequently to confess the mother older than the one begotten from her.

And that I may not seem to accuse the man of these things with empty abuse, I will make that man himself a witness of his own impiety by what he said. For banishing the apostolic teachings and the memory of every saint from his mind, in the Church of the orthodox he cried out many such voices: “Mary did not bear God, O good sir, but bore a man, an instrument of divinity.” And again in other nonsense: “A Greek is blameless who introduces a mother for gods.” Let these few from many of his be said for now, as the account hastens to what follows. Whence, since lawless ones will perish by an extraordinary death, he was cast out of the high priesthood by the divine verdict through the holy ones gathered at Ephesus, and condemned by imperial nod to dwell in Oasis; and from there he received the preliminaries of the coming punishment of the impious, becoming a waste of his own madness of mind, and fulfilling upon himself that apostolic saying, that “The sins of some men are evident, going before to judgment.” But these things, as examined also by many others, it is necessary to pass by; let us go on to what follows of the history.