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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 7
In A.D. 428, Nestorius was brought from Antioch to be Archbishop of Constantinople. From the circumstance that S. Cyril's celebrated Paschal homily for the next year, A.D. 429, was on the subject of the Incarnation, it has been supposed that rumours of the denial of that Faith in Constantinople had already reached him. But the Paschal homilies for A.D. 420 and 423, shew that the Incarnation, the foundation and stay of our souls, was a subject, which S. Cyril loved to dwell on. In the course of the year 429, however, even Egypt was troubled by the false teaching of Nestorius. Some of Nestorius' sermons [21] passed into Egypt, and were read and pondered over in the Monasteries. This occasioned so much disturbance in the minds [22] of some of the Monks, that S. Cyril wrote a Letter to them, pointing out that the Incarnation means, that God the Son united to Him His own human nature which He took, as completely as soul and body are united in each of us, and in this way His Passion and Death were His own, though He, as God, could not suffer. This Letter had an extended circulation and reached Constantinople. It vexed [23] Nestorius. There was still a traditional soreness towards Alexandria, from the behaviour of Theophilus to S. Chrysostom [24]. Besides this, the Catholic doctrine of the Incarnation, the manhood united by God the Son to His own self, was to Nestorius, Apollinarianism or mixture. Nestorius says so [25]. In his letter to S. Celestine he tells of the 'corruption of orthodoxy among some' and thus describes it,
'It is a sickness not small, but akin to the putrid sore of Apollinarius and Arius. For they mingle the Lord's union in man to a confusion of some sort of mixture, insomuch that even certain clerks among us, of whom some from lack of understanding, some from heretical guile of old time concealed within them . . are sick as heretics, and openly blaspheme God the Word Consubstantial with the Father, as though He had taken beginning of His Being of the Virgin mother of Christ, and had been built up with His Temple and buried with His flesh, and say that the flesh after the resurrection did not remain [miscuisse seems an error for mansisse] flesh but passed into the Nature of Godhead, and they refer the Godhead of the Only-Begotten to the beginning of the flesh which was connected with It, and they put It to death with the flesh, and blasphemously say that the flesh connected with Godhead passed into Godhead, using the very word deifying, which is nothing else than to corrupt both [26].'
21. [x] Ep. 1 ad Nest. Epp. 20 b.
22. [y] Ep. 1 ad Monach. Epp. 3. a b.
23. [z] See S. Cyril's first letter to Nestorius, Epp. pp. 19 e 20 a.
24. [a] Nestorius alludes to this, in the sermon which he preached on the Saturday after he had received S. Celestine's final Letter. Mercat. Opp. p. 76 Bal.
Reference address : https://www.elpenor.org/cyril-alexandria/against-nestorius.asp?pg=7
