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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 19
Lastly he mentions the preaching of Nestorius, that in the Church of the orthodox he shouted out many such words as 'Mary, my good man, did not bear God; she bore a man the instrument of God;' 'and again among other follies,' 'The Gentile is blameless, when he gives a mother to the gods.'
Such is the outline of his teaching at Constantinople. His efforts were concentrated on the substitution of Christotocos for Theotocos; for 'God made Man,' a human Christ connected with God, corrupting by flippant sayings the minds which he could influence.
He gained favour with Theodosius who leaned on those around him. His elevation to the Patriarchate was a marked distinction, as being a call from a different Patriarchate, at the nomination of the Emperor Theodosius, and the people received him with joy. He seemed to himself called to great things. 'He had not,' Socrates says [80] , 'tasted, according to the proverb, the waters of the city,' when in an inaugural oration before the Emperor and a large concourse of people, he apostrophised the Emperor, "Give me, O king, the land clear from heretics and I in turn will give thee heaven. Destroy the heretics with me, and I will destroy the Persians with thee." He must have meant, of course, that he could promise victory over the Persians in the name of God. Men noticed, we are told [80] , the vanity and passionateness and vainglory of the speech. It was, at the least, a calling in of the civil sword against those, of whom he himself knew nothing, and for whose conversion his predecessors had waited patiently, and promising victory over a warlike people, not upon self-humiliation before God, but upon the extirpation of men who had not the same errors with himself. An Arian congregation, seeing their church destroyed, in desperation fired it and threw themselves into the flames. This gained to Nestorius, with all the faithful as well as heretics, the title of 'the Incendiary.' The persecution occasioned much bloodshed at Miletus and Sardis. The Emperor had to repress his violence against the Novatians. The Macedonians [81] and the Quartodecimans in Asia, Lydia, Caria, were also persecuted. He had conferred with Theodore of Mopsuestia in his way from Antioch to his See; so that it was even thought that he had imbibed his heresy then [82]. Those whom he brought with him were of the same school [83].
He began at first warily. He used ambiguous language, but all directed against the one crucial term Theotocos. Unless the blessed Virgin 'bare God,' i. e. Him Who was at once both God and Man, our Lord plainly would not have been God. And therewith would have perished the doctrine of the Atonement too, which also Nestorius did not believe. For a "brother cannot redeem a man; he cannot give to God [84] a ransom for him. Too dear is the redemption of their souls, and it ceaseth for ever."
He used what terms he could, to eke out the poverty of his conception. He could think of our Lord as a man, an instrument of Deity;' '[85][ ]a temple created of the Virgin for God the Word to inhabit,' and haying a close or continual or the highest connection with God; but still the 'connection' was different in degree, not in kind, from that with any Saint.
82. [m] Evagrius says this on the authority of Theodulus [a presbyter of Coelesyria about A.D. 480.] i. 2.
83. [n] S. Cyril Ep. 9 ad S. Celestin. p. 37.
85. [p] Expressions of Nestorius, while denying the Theotocos. Serm. 1. ap. Mercator.
Reference address : https://www.elpenor.org/cyril-alexandria/against-nestorius.asp?pg=19
