Five Tomes Against Nestorius

View again (I pray) how he every where shuns the union and fears the truth and refuses the rightness of the Divine doctrines. Not other than the worn was He who weareth, but rather the same conceived of in concurrence of Godhead and manhood, and One and Alone in truth Son of God the Father. Worship therefore the Word out of God as One with His own Flesh. For tell me, if I do not seem to thee to think aright, thrusting aside as feeble thy slow speech herein. For suppose one should choose to say of any man such as we are or of any one of the kings of the earth, Because of the king's soul I reverence his body, because of the hidden I worship him that is seen, would not one straightway chide him and say, O sir what are you doing? one man surely is the Ruler, even though he be evidently compounded of two, soul I mean and body. Why then are you idly blabbing to us, speaking of a wearer and a worn, a hidden and an apparent, and confessing that you co-worship as one with another and dishonouring the mode of union, whereas the God-inspired Scripturs reveals to us One Christ and Lord, the Word out of God the Father with His own Body? Knowest thou not that He healed in Jerusalem the blind from his birth, afterward finding him in the temple, He engrafted into him a firm and stablished faith in Himself? for He came to him and asked, Dost THOU believe on the Son of God? and when to this he cried out, Who is He, Lord, that I might believe on Him? He again said, Thou hast both seen Him and it is He that talketh with thee. Thou seest how He hath shewn him not the wearer, not the hidden within, but rather Himself as One with the flesh? And verily the wise John says, That Which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we viewed and our hands handled, of the Word of Life. Albeit the Godhead is impalpable, yet the Word has been made palpable through His own flesh; invisible by Nature, He was yet manifest through the Body; but Thou again completely severest and dealest subtilly with the truth, parting the natures, uniting (as you say) the worship. But if you part the natures, along with them will diverge the natural properties too of either, the count of their difference will speed apart: hence two are they confessedly.

But tell me who ask, what is it that severs the natures one from another and what will be the mode of their difference. You will (I suppose) surely answer that one thing by nature is man or the manhood, another God or the Godhead: and the one exalted incomparably above the other, and it as much inferior as is man less than God. How then (tell me) dost thou deem right to honour with one worship things of so unlike nature and parted, as regards their mode of being, by incomparable differences? For would you, if you put about a horse a man's glory, be doing anything praiseworthy? would you not rather be insulting the superior, dragging down the better nature into dishonour?

But he has invented something clever in his defence, for he subjoins:

"Not by itself God is that which was formed in the womb, not by itself God that which was formed forth of the Spirit, not by itself God that which was buried in the tomb; for so should we have been man-worshippers and very worshippers of the dead. But since God is in that which is assumed, from that which assumeth is the assumed co-named God, as connected with the assumer."