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# Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: Series II/Volume XI/John Cassian/Against Nestorius/Book VII/Chapter 23

Chapter XXIII.
He continues the same argument to show that Christ had no need of another’s glory as He had a glory of His own.
But to end let us see the addition with which you sum up your preceding blasphemies. Your words are, “Who gave such glory to Christ?” You name glory in order to degrade Him. For by the assertion that the Lord was endowed with glory, in saying that He received it you blasphemously imply that He stood in need of it. For your perverse notion suggests that the generosity of the giver shows the need of the receiver. O miserable impiety of yours! and where is that which Divinity itself once foretold of the Lord Jesus Christ ascending into heaven? Saying: “Lift up your heads, and the King of glory
shall come in.” And when He (after the fashion of Divine utterances) had made answer to Himself as if in the character of an inquirer: “Who is the King of glory?” at once He adds: “The Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle:” showing under the figure of a battle fought, the victory of the Lord in His triumph. Then when, to complete the exposition of it, He had repeated the words of the utterance quoted above, He showed by the following conclusion the majesty of the Lord as He entered heaven, saying “The Lord of hosts, He is the King of glory.” On purpose that the fact of His taking a body might not interfere with the glory of His mighty Divinity, He taught that the same Person was Lord of hosts and King of heavenly glory, whom He had previously proclaimed Victor in the battle below. Go now and say that the glory was given to the Lord, when both prophecy has said that He was the King of glory, and He Himself also has testified of Himself as follows: “When the Son of man shall come in His glory.” Refute it, if you can, and contradict this; viz., that whereas He testifies that He has glory of His own, you say that He has received Another’s. Although we maintain that He has His own glory, in such a way that we do not deny that His very property of glory is common to Him with the Father and the Holy Ghost. For whatever God possesses belongs to the Godhead: and the kingdom of glory belongs to the Son of God in such a way that it is not kept back from belonging to the entire Godhead.

## Footnotes

* ↑ Tantam Petschenig. Tamen Gazæus.
* ↑ Ps. xxiii. (xxiv.) 7.
* ↑ I nunc Petschenig. The text is however doubtful. One ms. reading is In hunc, and another jam nunc.
* ↑ S. Matt. xxv. 31.
# Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: Series II/Volume XI/John Cassian/Against Nestorius/Book VII/Chapter 25

Chapter XXV.
He shows that Ambrose agrees with S. Hilary.
Ambrose, that illustrious priest of God, who never leaving the Lord’s hand, ever shone like a jewel upon the finger of God, thus speaks in his book to the Virgins: “My brother is white and ruddy. White because He is the glory of the Father: ruddy because He was born of the Virgin. But remember that in Him the tokens of Divinity are of longer standing than the mysteries of the body. For He did not
begin to exist from the Virgin, but He who was already in existence, came into the Virgin.” Again on Christmas Day: “See the miracle of the mother of the Lord: A Virgin conceived, a Virgin brought forth. She was a Virgin when she conceived, a Virgin when with child, a Virgin after the birth. As is said in Ezekiel: “And the gate was shut and not opened, because the Lord passed through it.” A splendid Virginity, and wondrous fruitfulness! The Lord of the world is born: and there are no cries from her who brought Him forth. The womb is left empty, and a true child is born, and yet the Virginity is not destroyed. It was right that when God was born the power of chastity should become greater, and that her purity should not be violated by the going forth of Him who had come to heal what was corrupt.” Again in his exposition of the gospel according to Luke he says that “one was especially chosen, to bring forth God, who was espoused to an husband.” He certainly declares that God was born of the Virgin. He calls Mary the mother of God. And where is that awful and execrable utterance of yours asking how can she be the mother of one of a different nature from her own. But if she is called mother by them, it is the human nature which was born not the Godhead. So, that illustrious teacher of the faith says both that she who bare Him was human, and that He who was born is God: and yet that this is no reason for unbelief, but only a miracle of faith.

## Footnotes

* ↑ Cf. Cant. v. 10 (LXX.).
* ↑ S. Ambrose. De Virg. Lib. i. xlvi.
* ↑ Ezek. xliv. 2.
* ↑ These words are not found in any extant writings of S. Ambrose, but something very like them occurs in S. Augustine’s Sixth Sermon in Natali Domini.
* ↑ In Lucam II. i.
# Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: Series II/Volume XI/John Cassian/Against Nestorius/Book VII/Chapter 26

Chapter XXVI.
He adds to the foregoing the testimony of S. Jerome.
Jerome, the Teacher of the Catholics, whose writings shine like divine lamps throughout the whole world, says in his book to Eustochium: “The Son of God for our salvation was made the Son of man. He waits ten months in the womb to be born: and He, in whose hand the world is held, is contained in a narrow manger.” Again in his commentary on Isaiah: “For the Lord of hosts, who is the King of glory, Himself descended into the Virgin’s womb, and entered in and went forth from the East Gate which is ever shut.” Of whom Gabriel says to the Virgin: “The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee. Wherefore that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.” And in Proverbs: “Wisdom hath builded herself an house.” Compare this if you please with your doctrine or rather your blasphemy, in which you assert that God is the Creator of the months, and was not an offspring of months. For lo, Jerome, a man of the greatest knowledge and also of the most pure and approved doctrine testifies almost in the very words in which you deny that the Son of God was an offspring of months, that He was an offspring of months. For he says that He waits ten months in the womb to be born. But perhaps the authority of this man seems a mere nothing to you. You may take it that every one says the same and in the same words, for whoever does not deny that the Son of God is the offspring of the Virgin, admits that He is the offspring of months.

## Footnotes

* ↑ Ep. xxii. Ad Eustochium.
* ↑ Cf. Ezek. xliv. 2.
* ↑ Book III. c. vii.
# Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: Series II/Volume XI/John Cassian/Against Nestorius/Book VII/Chapter 20

Chapter XX.
He tries by stronger and weightier arguments to destroy that notion.
But why are we so long dealing with your wild blasphemy, with arguments that are plain indeed but still slight? Let us hear God Himself speaking to His disciples: “Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out devils.” And again: “In My name,” He says, “ye shall cast out devils.” Had He any need of Another’s name for the exercise of His power, who made His own name to be a power? But what is still added? “Behold,” He says, “I have given you power to tread upon serpents and scorpions and upon all the power of the enemy.” He Himself says that He was gentle, as indeed He was, and humble in heart. And how was it that as regards the greatest possible power, He commanded others to work in His own name, if He Himself worked in Another’s name? Or did He give to others, as if it were His own, what He Himself, according to you, did not possess, unless He received it from Another? But tell me, which of the saints receiving power from God, so worked? Or would not Peter have been thought a lunatic, or John a madman, or Paul out of his mind, if they had said to any sick folk: “In our name arise;” or to the lame: “In our name walk;” or to the dead: “In our name live;” or this to some: “We give you power to tread upon serpents and scorpions and upon all the power of the enemy”? You see then from this your madness: for just as these words are mad if they spring from man’s assurance, so are you utterly mad if you do not see that they come from Divine power. For you must admit one of two alternatives; either that man could possess and give Divine power, or at any rate if no man can do this, that He who could do it, was God. For no one can grant of His liberality Divine power, except Him who possesses it by nature.

## Footnotes

* ↑ S. Matt. x. 8.
* ↑ S. Mark xvi. 17.
* ↑ S. Luke x. 19.
# Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: Series II/Volume XI/John Cassian/Against Nestorius/Book VII/Chapter 21

Chapter XXI.
That it must be ascribed equally to Christ and the Holy Ghost that His flesh and Humanity became the temple of God.
But there follows in your blasphemy that His flesh was made a temple of the Holy Ghost, for this reason, that John has said: “For I saw the Spirit descending from heaven and abiding upon Him.” For you try to support even this wild statement of yours by Scriptural authority: wherefore let us see whether this sacred authority has said that which you say. “For I saw,” it says, “the Spirit descending like a dove, and abiding upon Him.” Discern here, if you can, which is the more powerful, which greater, which more to be honoured? He who descended, or He to whom the descent was made? He who brought down the honour, or He to whom the honour was brought? Where do you find in this passage that the Spirit made His flesh a temple? or wherein does it lessen the honour of God, if God Himself descended to show God to mankind? For certainly we ought not to think that He is less whose high estate was pointed out, than He who pointed out His high estate. But away with the thought of believing or making any separation in the Godhead: for one and the same Godhead
and equal power shut out altogether the wicked notion of inequality. And so in this matter, where there is the Person of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, and where it is the Son of God to whom the descent is made, the Spirit who descends, the Father who gives His witness, no one had more honour, and no one received any slight, but it all redounds equally to the fulness of the Godhead, for each Person of the Trinity contains within Himself the glory of the whole Trinity. And so nothing further needs to be said, except only to show the rise and origin of your blasphemy. For thorns and thistles springing up from the roots produce shoots of their own nature, and from their character show their origin. So then you also, a thorny offshoot of the Pelagian heresy, show in germ just the same that your father is said to have had in the root. For he (as Leporius his follower said) declared that our Lord was made the Christ by His baptism: you say that at His baptism He was made the temple of God by the Spirit. The words are not altogether identical: but the wrong-headedness is altogether the same.

## Footnotes

* ↑ S. John i. 32.
* ↑ Ille enim; viz., Pelagius. This appears to be the true reading, though one ms. followed by Gazæus has Leporius ille enim; a reading which would involve the supposition that there were two persons of the name of Leporius, master and scholar.
# Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: Series II/Volume XI/John Cassian/Against Nestorius/Book VII/Chapter 22

Chapter XXII.
That the raising up of Christ into heaven is not to be ascribed to the Spirit alone.
But you add this also to those impieties of yours mentioned above; viz., that the Spirit granted to the Lord His ascension into heaven: showing by this blasphemous notion of yours that you believe that the Lord Jesus Christ was so weak and powerless that had not the Spirit raised Him up to heaven, you fancy that He would still at this day have been on earth. But to prove this assertion you bring forward a passage of Scripture: for you say “Giving commands to the apostles whom He had chosen, by the Holy Ghost He was raised up.” What am I to call you? What am I to think of you who by corrupting the sacred writings contrive that their evidences should not have the force of evidences? A new kind of audacity, which strives by its impious arguments to manage that truth may seem to confirm falsehood. For the Acts of the Apostles does not say what you make out. For what says the Scripture? “What Jesus began to do and to teach until the day in which giving charge to the apostles whom He had chosen by the Holy Ghost, He was taken up.” Which is an instance of Hyperbaton, and must be understood in this way: what Jesus began to do and to teach until the day in which he was taken up, giving charge to the apostles whom He had chosen by the Holy Ghost; so that we ought not perhaps to have to give you any further answer in this matter than that of the passage itself, for the entire passage ought to be sufficient for the full truth, if the mutilation of it was available for your falsehood. But still, you, who think that our Lord Jesus Christ could not have ascended into heaven, unless He had been raised up by the Spirit; tell me how is it that He Himself says “No one hath ascended into heaven but He who came down from heaven, even the Son of man who is in heaven”? Confess then how foolish and absurd your notion is that He could not ascend into heaven, who is said, although He had descended into earth, never to have been absent from heaven: and say whether to leave the regions below and ascend into heaven was possible for Him to whom it was easy when still on earth, ever to continue in heaven. But what is that which He Himself says: “I ascend unto my Father.” Did He imply that in this ascension there would be the intervention of Another’s help, who by the very fact that He said He would ascend, shows the efficacy of His own power? David also says of the Ascension of the Lord: “God ascended with a merry noise, the Lord with the sound of the trumpet:” He clearly explained the glory of Him who ascends by the power of the ascension.

## Footnotes

* ↑ Acts i. 2.
* ↑ S. John iii. 13.
* ↑ S. John xx. 17.
* ↑ Ps. xlvi. (xlvii.) 6.
# Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: Series II/Volume XI/John Cassian/Against Nestorius/Book VII/Chapter 24

Chapter XXIV.
He supports this doctrine by the authority of the blessed Hilary.
But it is quite time to finish the book, aye and the whole work, if I may however add the sayings of a few saintly men and illustrious priests, to support by the faith of the present day what we have already proved by the authority of holy Scripture. Hilary, a man endowed with all virtues and graces, and famous for his life as well as for his eloquence, who also, as a teacher of the churches and a priest, advanced not only by his own merits but also by the progress of others, and remained so steadfast during the storms of persecution that through the fortitude of his unconquered faith he attained the dignity of being a Confessor,—he testifies in the First book on the faith that the Lord Jesus Christ, Very God of Very God, was both begotten before the world, and afterwards born as man. Again in the Second book: “One only Begotten God grew in the womb of the holy Virgin into the form of a human body; He who contains all things, and in whose power all things are, is brought forth according to the law of human birth.” Again in the same book: “An angel is witness that He who is born is God with us.” Again in the Tenth book: “We have taught the mystery of God born as man by the birth from the Virgin.” Again in the same book: “For when God was born as man, He was not born on purpose not to remain God.” Again in the same writer’s preface to his exposition of the gospel according to Matthew: “For to begin with it was needful for us that for our sakes the only Begotten God should be known to be born as man.” Again in what follows: “that besides being God, He should be born as man, which He was not yet.” Again in the same place: “Then this third matter was fitting: that as God was born as man in the world” etc.: Here are a few passages out of any number. But still you see even from these which we have quoted, how clearly and plainly he asserts that God was born of Mary. And where then is this saying of yours: “The creature could not bring forth the Creator: and that which is born of the flesh, is flesh.” It would take too long to quote passages bearing on this point from each separate writer. I must try to enumerate them rather than to explain them: for they will sufficiently explain themselves.

## Footnotes

* ↑ S. Hilary of Poictiers (ob. a.d. 368). The reference is of course to his banishment to Phrygia by the Emperor Constantius in 356, because of his resolute defense of the Nicene faith against Arianism.
* ↑ De Trinitate II. xxv., xxvii.; X. vii.
* ↑ This preface to Hilary’s work on S. Matthew is now lost, though the commentary itself still exists. See Opera S. Hilarii Pictav: (Verona, 1730). Vol. i. 658.
# Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: Series II/Volume XI/John Cassian/Against Nestorius/Book VII/Chapter 27

Chapter XXVII.
To the foregoing he adds Rufinus and the blessed Augustine.
Rufinus also, a Christian philosopher, with no mean place among Ecclesiastical Doctors testifies as follows of the Lord’s Nativity in his Exposition of the Creed. “For the Son of God,” he says, “is born of a Virgin, not chiefly allied to the flesh alone, but generated in the soul which is the medium between the flesh and God.” Does he witness obscurely that God was born of man? Augustine the priest of Hippo Regiensis says: “That men might be born of God, God was first born of them: for Christ is God. And Christ when born of men only required a mother on earth, because He always had a Father in heaven, being born of God through whom we are made, and also born of a woman, through whom we might be re-created.” Again, in this place: “And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. Why then need you wonder that men are born of God? Notice how God Himself was born of men.” Again in his Epistle to Volusianus: “But Moses himself and the rest of the prophets most truly prophesied of Christ the Lord, and gave Him great glory: they declared that He would come not as one like themselves, nor merely greater in the same sort of power of working miracles, but clearly as the Lord God of all, and as made man for men. Who therefore Himself also willed to do such things as they
did to prevent the absurdity of His not doing Himself those things which He did through them. But still it was right also for Him to do something special; viz., to be born of a Virgin, to rise from the dead, to ascend into heaven. And if anyone thinks that this is too little for God, I know not what more he can look for.

## Footnotes

* ↑ Rufinus in Symb. c. xiii.
* ↑ There is no authority for the reading of Cuyck and Gazæus “Magnus Sacerdos.” On the coldness with which Augustine is here spoken of see the Introduction, p. 191. Note.
* ↑ August. Tract. II. in Johan. xv.
* ↑ Ep. cxxxvii. c. 4.
# Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: Series II/Volume XII/Gregory the Great/The Book of Pastoral Rule/Part III/Chapter 39

Chapter XXXIX.
That deep things ought not to be preached at all to weak souls.
But the preacher should know how to avoid drawing the mind of his hearer beyond its strength, lest, so to speak, the string of the soul, when stretched more than it can bear, should be broken. For all deep things should be covered up before a multitude of hearers, and scarcely opened to a few. For hence the Truth in person says, Who, thinkest thou, is the faithful and wise steward, whom his Lord has appointed over his household, to give them their measure of wheat in due season? (Luke xii. 42). Now by a measure of wheat is expressed a portion of the Word, lest, when anything is given to a narrow heart beyond its capacity, it be spilt. Hence Paul says, I could
not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal. As it were to babes in Christ, I have given you milk to drink, and not meat (1 Cor. iii. 1, 2). Hence Moses, when he comes on from the sanctuary of God, veils his shining face before the people; because in truth He shews not to multitudes the secrets of inmost brightness (Exod. xxxiv. 33, 35). Hence it is enjoined on him by the Divine voice that if any one should dig a cistern, and not cover it, and an ox or ass should fall into it, he should pay the price (Exod. xxi. 33, 34), because when one who has arrived at the deep streams of knowledge covers them not up before the brutish hearts of his hearers, he is adjudged as liable to penalty, if through his words a soul, whether clean or unclean, be caught on a stumbling-stone. Hence it is said to the blessed Job, Who hath given understanding unto the cock? (Job xxxviii. 36). For a holy preacher, crying aloud in time of darkness, is as the cock crowing in the night, when he says, It is even now the hour for us to arise from sleep (Rom. xiii. 11). And again, Awake ye righteous, and sin not (1 Cor. xv. 34). But the cock is wont to utter loud chants in the deeper hours of the night; but, when the time of morning is already at hand, he frames small and slender tones; because, in fact, he who preaches aright cries aloud plainly to hearts that are still in the dark, and shews them nothing of hidden mysteries, that they may then hear the more subtle teachings concerning heavenly things, when they draw nigh to the light of truth.
# Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: Series II/Volume XII/Gregory the Great/The Book of Pastoral Rule/Part III/Chapter 5

Chapter V.
How servants and masters are to be admonished.
(Admonition 6). Differently to be admonished are servants and masters. Servants, to wit, that they ever keep in view the humility of their condition; but masters, that they lose not recollection of their nature, in which they are constituted on an equality with servants. Servants are to be admonished that they despise not their masters, lest they offend God, if by behaving themselves proudly they gainsay His ordinance: masters, too, are to be admonished, that they are proud against God with respect to His gift, if they acknowledge not those whom they hold in subjection by reason of their condition to be their equals by reason of their community of nature. The former are to be admonished to know themselves to be servants of masters; the latter are to be admonished to acknowledge themselves to be fellow-servants of servants. For to those it is said, Servants, obey your masters according to the flesh (Coloss. iii. 22); and again, Let as many servants as are under the yoke count their masters worthy of all honour (1 Tim. vi. 1); but to these it is said, And ye, masters, do the same things unto them, forbearing threatening, knowing that both their and your Master is in heaven (Ephes. vi. 9).