Epistola De Fide Ad Beatum Hieronymum [Incertus]

A Letter on the Faith To the Blessed Hieronymus the Presbyter. Apostolic authority relates: Without faith it is impossible for anyone to please God. We therefore faithfully believe the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit to be one true sole God in essential substance, and a holy and undivided personal eternity. For the divinity of Christ is equal in all things and consubstantial with the Father, and the power of the begetter and the begotten is everlasting and timelessly one and the same. Indeed, the Creator of all natures—since through him all things were made, and without him nothing was made—is superior to all that he created, and those things which he established were never not subject to their creator: to whom it is proper and everlasting that he is neither from elsewhere than from the Father, nor other than what the Father is. If power had been added to him, if dignity had been enhanced, if sublimity had been exalted, he would have been lesser than the one who advanced him and created him, nor would he have possessed the riches of that nature whose bounty he required.

In that fullness of time which had been appointed by eternal counsel and promised by the prophetic signification of words and deeds, the Son of Man was made, not by a conversion of his own substance, but by an assumption of our nature, to seek and to save what had perished. He came, moreover, not by a local approach nor by a bodily motion, as if about to be present where he had not been, or to depart from where he had come, but he came through that which was to be visible and to be declared to all who beheld him: namely, by receiving human flesh and soul in the womb of the virgin mother, so that, remaining in the form of God, he might assume the form of a servant, and in the likeness of the flesh of sinners he might come, through which he would not diminish the divine by the human, but would augment the human by the divine. For such was the cause of all mortals, traced from the first progenitors, that, with original sin passing through their descendants, no one would escape the penalty of damnation unless the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. What belongs to divinity, the flesh does not diminish; what belongs to the flesh, divinity does not destroy. For he is both eternal from the Father and temporal from the mother, inviolable in his own power, passible in our weakness. In his divinity alone he is of one and the same nature both with the Father and with the Holy Spirit; in his assumption of humanity, however, he is not of one substance, but of one and the same person: so that the same one would be rich in poverty, omnipotent in submission, impassible in suffering, immortal in death.

Nor did the Word turn into flesh or into soul by any part of itself, since the simple and immutable nature of the divinity always remains wholly in its own essence, neither receiving loss nor increase into itself; and it so beatifies the assumed nature that, once glorified, it abides in the one who glorifies. But why should it seem unfitting or impossible that the Word and flesh and soul should be one man Christ and one Son of both God and man, if flesh and soul, which are of dissimilar natures, make one person even without the incarnation of the Word? Since it is far easier for the power of the divinity to bestow this unity of itself and of man than for the weakness of humanity alone to obtain it in its own substances. Therefore neither did the Word change into flesh, nor flesh into the Word; but each abides in the one, and the one is in each: not divided by diversity, not confused by mixture, nor one from the Father and another from the mother; but the same from the Father before every beginning, and the same at the end of the ages, so that he might be the mediator of God and men, the man Jesus Christ in whom the fullness of divinity dwells.

For the Lord's birth in the flesh, although it has certain properties by which it transcends the beginnings of the human condition—whether because he alone was conceived and born from an inviolate virgin without lust, or because he was brought forth from his mother's womb in such a way that fertility gave birth and virginity remained—nevertheless, his flesh was not of a different nature than ours; nor was a soul inspired into him from a different principle than into other men, one which would excel not by a diversity of kind but by the sublimity of virtue. For his flesh had nothing contrary to it; no discord of desires produced a conflict of pleasures; his bodily senses were vigorous without the blemish of sin, and the truth of his affections was under the governance of the divinity and the mind; he was neither tempted by allurements nor yielded to vices. He was a true man truly united to God: not brought down from heaven according to a pre-existing soul, nor created from nothing according to the flesh; bearing the same person in the divinity of the Word, and holding in common with us a nature in body and soul. For he would not be the mediator between God and men unless he were both God and the same man, and were one and true in each.

The magnitude of the subject indeed invites us to a breadth of discussion; but before your learning there is no need for copious labor. With you is Bethlehem, where the life-giving birth of the Virgin shone forth, whom, wrapped in swaddling clothes, amid the narrow confines of an inn, a manger received. With you is the infancy of the Savior, proclaimed by angels, adored by the Magi, and persecuted after the death of many infants by Herod. With you, I say, is the place where boyhood grew, where adolescence matured, and through bodily increases the nature of a true man advanced into a perfect man, not without the food of hunger, not without the sleep of rest, not without the tears of compassion, nor without the fear of dread. For one and the same is he who works miracles of great power in the form of God. But in order to restore the life of all, he took upon himself the cause of all: and he voided the force of the old bond, which he alone among all did not owe, by paying it for all: so that just as through the guilt of one all had been made sinners, so through the innocence of one all might become innocent: with the justice remaining in the man where human nature was assumed. For there is no reason outside the truth of our body.

Because the original bonds of our captivity could not be loosed unless there existed a man of our kind and our nature, whom the primordial prejudices did not hold, and who would wash away the lethal bond with his immaculate blood, just as it had been divinely preordained from the beginning; so it was done in the fullness of the preordained time, that the promise, signified in many ways, would come to its long-awaited fulfillment; nor could it be ambiguous what had always been announced through continuous signs. In great sacrilege, the diverse impiety of heretics is manifested, when, under the guise of honoring the divinity, they detract from the truth of the human flesh in Christ; and they piously think it is believed if it is said that in our Savior there is not true what saves; since, according to the promise that preceded all ages, the world has been reconciled to God in Christ, so that unless the Word deigned to become flesh, no flesh could be saved. But to set forth the sacrament of the faith more clearly, and to confound heretical depravity, is your task, best father Jerome. This one thing I ask and pray, that you remember me more often, most invincible soldier of Christ. Amen.