B. Then Emmanuel must not be divided into a distinct man on the one hand and God the Word on the other?
A. Certainly not. I say that we must call Him God who became man, and that He is at once both God and man. For by becoming man He did not cease to be God, nor did He reject the dispensation by disdaining the measure of self-emptying.
B. Then, they say, His body must have been consubstantial with the Word. For only in this way, and no other, could He be understood as one and only Son.
A. But how is this not nonsense and a clear proof of a mind gone astray? How could anyone regard as identical in essence things whose natural properties are so far removed from one another? Godhead is one thing and humanity another. Otherwise, of what do we say the union took place? No one would say that the things being united were already one in number, but rather two, or perhaps even more.
B. Then the things you have named must be divided, they say.
A. They must not be divided, as I said, into a separate otherness in which each exists apart and on its own. Rather, they must be brought together into an indivisible union. For ‘the Word became flesh,’ according to John.
B. Then have the two natures been confused and become one?
A. Who could be so senseless and ignorant as to suppose either that the divine nature of the Word was changed into something it was not, or that the flesh passed by transformation into the nature of the Word Himself? That is impossible. Yet we say that there is one Son and that His nature is one, even though He is understood to have assumed flesh endowed with a rational soul. For the human reality became His own, as I have said, and we understand Him in no other way than this: He is at once God and man.
B. Then are there not two natures, one of God and one of man?
A. Godhead and humanity are indeed one thing and another according to the properties inherent in each. Yet in Christ, in a strange manner beyond understanding, they came together into unity without confusion or change. The manner of the union is altogether incomprehensible.
B. And how can one Christ be understood as coming from two—Godhead and humanity?
A. I think in no other way than that the realities brought together with one another in an indivisible union—one that is beyond understanding, as I said—are understood as one.
B. For example?
A. Do we not say that a human being like us is one and that his nature is one, even though he is not simple in kind but is composed of two realities—I mean soul and body?
B. We do.
A. If someone takes the flesh separately and sets apart from it the soul united to it, does he not cut the one human being into two and destroy the correct account of what he is?
B. Yet the all-wise Paul writes, ‘Even if our outward man is being corrupted, the inward man is renewed day by day.’
A. You are right. Paul knew—and knew clearly—the elements from which the one human being exists, and he makes their distinction something grasped only in contemplation. He calls the soul the ‘inward man’ and the flesh the ‘outward man.’ He remembers that holy Scripture sometimes uses one part to signify the whole living human being, as when God says, ‘I will pour out My Spirit upon all flesh,’ and when Moses says to Israel, ‘Your fathers went down into Egypt with seventy-five souls.’ We find the same thing with Emmanuel Himself. After the union, I mean the union with the flesh, if someone calls Him Only-Begotten and God from God, he does not understand Him as existing without flesh or humanity. And if someone calls Him man, he does not thereby exclude Him from being God and Lord.
B. But if we say that the nature of the Son is one even when He is understood as incarnate, are we not forced to confess confusion and mixture, as though human nature were somehow swallowed up in Him? For what is human nature compared with the excellence of the Godhead?
A. My friend, anyone who says that confusion and mixture must follow if we confess one nature of the Son incarnate and made man is simply talking without proof. No one can demonstrate such a conclusion by necessary and true reasoning. If they set their own will up as a law for us, they have devised a plan they will not be able to establish. We must listen not to them but to God-inspired Scripture. And if they think human nature must be swallowed up and consumed, as they say, because it is nothing compared with the divine excellence, then we shall again say: ‘You are mistaken, not knowing the Scriptures nor the power of God.’ It was not impossible for God, who loves humanity, to make Himself bearable within the measures of human nature. He foreshadowed this for us in a mystery when He initiated Moses and depicted beforehand in types the manner of His becoming man. He came upon the bush in the wilderness in the appearance of fire. The fire flashed in the shrub, yet the bush was not consumed, and Moses marveled at the sight. Wood and fire are certainly unlike one another; and how could material so easily burned endure the assault of flame? Yet this, as I said, was a type of the mystery, showing that the divine nature of the Word could, by His own will, make itself bearable within the measures of humanity. Nothing at all is impossible for Him.
B. Be sure of this: they will not choose to think the same way.