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Translated by P. E. Pusey
St Cyril of Alexandria Resources Online and in Print
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This Part: 115 Pages
Page 15
It is clear that no serious objection could be founded on a treatise or Confession of Faith being short, and that the fact of one's opponent passing over an objection would be no proof that the objection, which is confessedly there, was not made. The remainder of Leontius' objection lies in the, "perhaps Dioscorus added something."
This confession was very well known by S. Cyril; for besides citing it here, he cites (as Montfaucon observes) almost the whole of it in the beginning of his Treatise de recta Fide to the Princesses Arcadia and Marina, to shew that S. Athanasius used the term, Mother of God; S. Cyril also cited two pieces of it, to shew that in his eighth chapter in which he says, that 'Emmanuel must be worshipped with one worship, he had but said what S. Athanasius too had said [64]. In all three citations occur the words, One Nature Incarnate of the Word, and in the case of S. Cyril's defence of his eighth chapter, the whole passage is extant in the latin translation (believed to be by S. Cyril's contemporary, Marius Mercator) which leaves no room for possible monophysite insertion: besides that the citation forms an integral part of S. Cyril's Defence of his chapter.
It is then proved that the words were cited as S. Athanasius' by S. Cyril, the same S. Cyril who had had his own mind moulded and taught by the writings of S. Athanasius, and who in A. D. 431, produced from the archives, probably of his own Church of S. Mark, an authentic copy of S. Athanasius' Letter to Epictetus.
If this Confession is not genuine, it is but an illustration of how, being but men, we make mistakes in what we know best.
Montfaucon sums up, "I would not venture to say whether the extracts were added in the writings of Cyril after his decease or whether before Cyril a little book of this sort was made up and ascribed to Athanasius."
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[My son had had these fragments of a preface to the volume printed, before he was so suddenly called away. They seemed to me manifestly fragments of a larger whole. But there were no indications, how they were to be filled up. I have thought it might be useful to put together as a supplement, some notices of the course of the heresy of Nestorius, and of the character of S. Cyril as illustrating his controversy against him. E. B. P.]
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THE special form of the disease, to which the name of Nestorius became attached, was hereditary in the great Province of Antioch. It is the sadder, because it came to him, lurking in the writings of men of even great name, commentators on large parts of Holy Scripture, who seem to have inherited it unawares; Diodore of Tarsus, and Theodore of Mopsuestia. Both had fallen asleep in the peace of the Church. Diodore, of the very highest reputation, had shared in the persecution of S. Meletius by the Arians, had been one of the Bishops of the Second General Council, and had helped to form the mind of S. Chrysostom [65]. Theodore, in whom the heresy appears more copiously yet incidentally, had, during the thirty-eight years of his Episcopate, written against other heretics, Arians, Eunomians, Origen, Apollinarius, and was intimate with S. Chrysostom and with S. Gregory of Nazianzus. The way of truth as well as the way of life is narrow.
Reference address : https://www.elpenor.org/cyril-alexandria/against-nestorius.asp?pg=15
