A. No one who is truly sound in mind and has gathered life-giving knowledge into the understanding could ever become weary of holy teaching. For it is written: ‘A person shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes through the mouth of God.’ For the word that comes from God is nourishment for the mind and spiritual bread that strengthens the human heart, as is sung in the book of Psalms.
B. You are right.
A. The wise and eloquent among the Greeks admire elegance of speech. Speaking well is among their greatest concerns; they boast in mere refinements of words and delight in the pomp of language. Falsehood is the material of their poets, fashioned by rhythm and meter into something pleasing and melodious, while they care very little for the truth. They suffer from a lack of sound and profitable teaching concerning the God who exists by nature and in truth. Or rather, as the most holy Paul says: ‘They became futile in their reasonings, and their senseless heart was darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and they exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for the likeness of an image of corruptible man, and of birds, four-footed animals, and creeping things.’
B. True. Indeed, God said of them through the voice of Isaiah: ‘Know that their heart is ashes, and they are deceived.’
A. But enough about them. Those who have become inventors of unholy heresies—profane apostates who open their unrestrained mouths against the divine glory and speak perverse things—would be found, through their madness, to have fallen into charges no less serious than the folly of the Greeks, or perhaps even worse. For it would have been better for them not to have known the way of truth than, after knowing it, to turn back from the holy commandment given to them. The true proverb has happened to them: ‘A dog returned to its own vomit,’ and, ‘A sow, after being washed, returned to wallowing in the mud.’ For they have divided among themselves the charges of blasphemy against Christ, and like fierce and savage wolves they ravage the flocks for which Christ died. They plunder what belongs to Him, ‘multiplying for themselves what is not theirs,’ as it is written, and loading their yoke heavily. Of them it may very rightly be said: ‘They went out from us, but they were not of us.’
B. Certainly.
A. Our discussion of such people is timely. Some, in their lack of understanding, bring the Only-Begotten Word of God down from His supreme excellence and lower Him from equality with God the Father. They say that He is not consubstantial with the Father and are unwilling to acknowledge His natural and unvarying identity with the Father. Others tread, as it were, the same path as these and slide into the snare of death and the trap of Hades. They distort the mystery of the Only-Begotten’s dispensation in the flesh and pursue a folly akin to that of the first group. The first may be convicted of dragging down, so far as they can, the Word born from God the Father from the heights of His Godhead even before He became flesh. The others have chosen to make war on Him after He became flesh, almost finding fault—bold men!—with His loving grace, as though claiming that He did not choose wisely when He accepted flesh and the measures of self-emptying; that is, when He became man, appeared on earth, and lived among human beings, although He is God by nature and sits with the Father.
B. You have spoken rightly.
A. God-inspired Scripture, then, will cry out against the ignorance found in both groups. It champions the truth, shows their argument to be powerless and worthless, and sets upon the paths of the Godhead those who are accustomed to contemplate the mystery concerning Him with a keen and precise eye of understanding. But who are those who have impiously corrupted so august and ineffable a dispensation of the Savior? You seem deeply troubled about this very matter, and I would like to ask you.
B. You judge correctly. ‘I have been very zealous for the Lord,’ and I am deeply stirred by this and greatly distressed. I am afraid when I consider where their arguments will finally lead. They corrupt the faith handed down to us, using the inventions of a newly appeared dragon and pouring into the souls of simpler people, like venom, teachings that are cold, perverse, and full of folly.
A. Then tell me, since I ask: who is this newly appeared dragon, and what are the things he has babbled against the doctrines of the truth?
B. The newly appeared dragon is this crooked man whose tongue is drunk with venom. He has all but cast aside the tradition of the teachers of the whole world—or rather, all God-inspired Scripture—and has introduced innovations according to whatever seems good to him. He says that the holy Virgin is not the Mother of God, but rather the mother of Christ and the mother of a man, and he has brought other discordant and senseless teachings into the sound and sincere doctrines of the catholic Church.
A. You mean Nestorius, I suppose. I understand now, but, my friend, I do not yet grasp exactly what he is saying. How does he say that the holy Virgin is not the Mother of God?
B. ‘She did not give birth to God,’ he says. ‘For the Word existed before her—indeed, before every age and every time—being coeternal with God the Father.’
A. Then they will openly deny this as well: that Emmanuel is God. And apparently the Evangelist explains the name in vain when he says, ‘which is translated, God with us.’ For God the Father clearly declared through the voice of the prophet that the One born according to the flesh from the holy Virgin was to be called this, because He is God who became man.
B. Yet they do not think the matter stands this way. They would say instead that God—that is, the Word from God—came to be ‘with us’ in the sense of helping us, for He saved everything under heaven through the one who was born of a woman.
A. Tell me, then: was He not also with Moses when He freed Israel from the land of the Egyptians and from the oppression there, ‘with a mighty hand and an uplifted arm,’ as it is written? And afterward do we not find Him saying clearly to Joshua, ‘As I was with Moses, so I will also be with you’?
B. True.
A. Why, then, was none of these called Emmanuel? Why did the name belong only to the One who, in the last times of the age, was wondrously born according to the flesh from a woman?
B. How, then, are we to understand God as having been born from a woman? Are we to suppose that the Word received His existence in her and from her?