Libellus Emendationis Sive Satisfactionis

The Little Book of Emendation, or Satisfaction, of the Presbyter Leporius, Containing a Confession of the Catholic Faith concerning the Mystery of the Incarnation of Christ, with a Detestation of His Former Error, To the Bishops of Gaul. To the most blessed and most venerable lords, the priests of God, Proculus and Quillenus, Leporius, a humble man. What I should first accuse in myself, O my lords, venerable and most blessed priests, I do not know; what I should excuse in myself, I do not find. Thus pride of inexperience, thus foolish simplicity with harmful persuasion, thus fervor with intemperance, thus, to speak more truly, a weak faith with its own diminution, all took root and flourished in me at once, so that it is at once a confusion to have obeyed so many and such great things, and a stupendous congratulation to me that I was able to reject these same things from my mind. I therefore acknowledge my fault, and I willingly stand as my own accuser. But I hope for mercy, because I acted in ignorance; for my cause of sin would be inexcusable if, knowing perfectly, I had acted with some deliberate intention. I call God as witness to my soul: I believed my error to be truth, and I counted obscure darkness as the most sincere light. Zeal for God, but not according to knowledge, deceived me, unwary. But now, which we believed would be pleasing to your Beatitude, His mercy has recalled me, wandering on rough and thorny paths, to the straight way.

And so the crooked have become straight for me, and the rough have become smooth paths; and now that the fog has been cleared away, instructed by all my fellow priests and your brothers, I understand in what part I was blind. And therefore, the recognition of truth itself renders me a suppliant. I confess that I erred ignorantly and, while I seemed to hold to the rule of truth in its entirety, I exceeded it in certain points. My inexperience has been made manifest, and this is more burdensome to me because I tried to defend, to the scandal of many, what, as is now clearer than light, I had presumed to defend by the reasoning of human sense rather than by the reason of faith. But since it could not be otherwise than that my own folly would live in me when I had taken myself as a disciple and myself as a master—and would that humility had broken my presumption, which ignorance had animated! But alas for me, because I am found to be both rash and proud in both respects. But now, with your pardon, I pass over these things and will not delay in doing what is now urgent. I will hasten to heal the wounds I have inflicted, I who have pierced the healthy. There will be no shame in receiving medicine, where there was no cautious provision in preserving health. Whence discord arose, let peace be born from it.

And so the letter, a source of scandal and an obstacle to charity, once written by me simply enough, but in certain parts, as I now recognize, unfaithfully arranged, I beg, in accordance with the profession of this letter and the authority of your holiness, that it be determined in which part or cause of that page it is to be led into abolition and trampled underfoot, where it is proven to have been published against the truth through ignorance: so that it may become known and clear to all, by a just judgment, that which was hostile to the faith, contrary to truth, has been cut away from the body of that same letter with condemnation. I cry out, I confess the truth, O my lords: certain brothers, seeing the inner things better, but we have groped much at the outer things; and, placed in our own darkness, we imputed blindness to those who looked more closely. But now, with the Lord's favor, our eyes once opened, we look upon the true light together with them, and in the same grace of light, with the salve of health placed upon our eyes by the true physician, we recall our sight; and we behold Jesus Christ the Lord, not as we were formerly deceived, but as the truth is, with the most sincere gaze: and according to the truth of the creed, that which according to our earlier definition, where we were led astray not by any impiety but by error, we were afraid to say about Mary giving birth to God, we now most steadfastly confess.

Nevertheless, that we then denied that Christ the Son of God was born of holy Mary, and, as you yourselves recall, but paying little attention to the mystery of the faith, we said not that God Himself was born as man, but that a perfect man was born together with God—fearing, of course, lest we assign a human condition to the divinity: O foolish wisdom! as if, if God did not disdain to be born with man, He Himself would disdain to be born as man to the prejudice of His own status: or that was possible, but this perhaps was not. I clearly believe that God cannot do what He does not will. If He willed to be born, what God willed, I most certainly believe He could do: because the status of God can suffer no danger. Nor did it seem unworthy for Him to be made man for our sake, to be born from a man: because He did not even consider it unworthy to make the woman herself from whom the man would be born. If, therefore, understanding this power of God but little, wise in our own sense and by our own reasoning, and as if God seemed to do things beneath Himself, we say that man was born together with God, so that we give separately to God alone what is God's, and separately attribute to man alone what is man's, we most manifestly introduce a fourth person into the Trinity and begin to make not one Son of God, but two Christs: which may the Lord and God Christ Himself now avert from us.

Therefore we confess our Lord and God Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, who was born of the Father before the ages, in the most recent time was born as man and God from the Holy Spirit and Mary the perpetual virgin; and acknowledging both substances, God and man, inseparable, we embrace them with pious faith, and from the time of the assumed flesh, we say that all things which were of God passed into man, so that all things which were of man came into God; and by this understanding the Word became flesh, not that by any conversion or change it began to be what it was not, but that by the power of divine dispensation the Word of the Father, never departing from the Father, deigned to become properly man, and the only-begotten was incarnate by that secret mystery which He Himself knows: for it is ours to believe, His to know. And thus, as God the Word Himself, taking up everything that is of man, is man; and the assumed man, receiving everything that is of God, cannot be other than God. Yet, because He is said to be incarnate and mixed, no diminution of His substance is to be understood. For God knows how to be mixed without corruption of Himself, and yet to be mixed in truth: He knows how to receive into Himself so that nothing of increase accrues to Him, who knows how to infuse Himself entirely so that nothing of detriment occurs.

Therefore we should not, on account of the weakness of our understanding, making conjecture from visible examples of equal creatures that enter into one another, think that God and man were mixed together, and that by such a confusion of flesh and Word they were formed into some kind of body. Far be it from us to believe this: that we should suppose two natures were reduced into one substance by some kind of fusion. For a mixture of this sort is a corruption of each part. For God, who is capable of being contained but not containable, penetrating but not penetrable, filling but not fillable, who is everywhere simultaneously whole and everywhere diffused through the infusion of his power, was mercifully mixed with human nature, not that human nature was mixed with divine nature. Therefore flesh advances into the Word, not the Word advanced into flesh: and yet most truly the Word became flesh. But, as we have said, this happened only properly and personally, not naturally with the Father or with the Holy Spirit: because the only-begotten God, true God, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit is one in nature, is another in person.

For we do not say that the Father is the same as the Son; nor again do we say that the Son is the same as the Father; nor do we call the Holy Spirit the Father or the Son. But, distinguishing the persons in their own properties, we properly name the Father God the Father, and we properly say the Son God the Son, and we properly confess the Holy Spirit God the Holy Spirit. And when we say God, and God, and God three times in number, we do not believe in three Gods, but in one God perfect in the Trinity of His omnipotence. Therefore, from the Holy Spirit and Mary always virgin, God the man Jesus Christ the Son of God is properly born to us. And thus, into one another, the Word and flesh become one, so that, with each substance naturally remaining in its own perfection, without prejudice to itself, the divine communicates with the humanity, and the human participates in the divinity. Nor is one God and another man; but the same one who is God is also man, and conversely the man who is also God, Jesus Christ, one Son of God, is both named and truly is. And therefore we must always act and believe that the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, true God, whom we confess as always with the Father and equal to the Father before the ages, we do not deny that the same one, from the time of the assumed flesh, became God man. Nor should we believe that he, as if progressing through stages and times into God, was of one status before the resurrection and of another after the resurrection; but that he was always of the same fullness and power.

And because he bore all our weaknesses, that is, of our nature, and truly, by taking upon himself in the flesh our affections, for the proof of true man, while in the same the course of our mortality was running, by power, of course, not by necessity, in age and wisdom, as the Evangelist says (Luke 2:52): he advanced, he hungered, he thirsted, he was wearied, he was scourged, he was crucified, he died, he rose again. He was not thereby changed from the nature of his divinity; for we have already professed above the inconvertible, immutable, and impassible nature of the divinity. But because the Word God, by condescendingly taking up man into man, descended, and through the assumption of man, man ascended into the Word God; the whole Word God became whole man. For God the Father did not become man, nor the Holy Spirit, but the only-begotten of the Father. Therefore one person of flesh and Word is to be understood, so that we may faithfully, without any doubt, believe that one and the same Son of God, always inseparable, of a twin substance also named the giant, in the days of his flesh, truly always bore all things that are of man, and truly always possessed what are of God: since even if he was crucified from weakness, he lived from the power of God (2 Cor. 13:4). Wherefore we no longer fear to say, according to God, and from man born God, according to man, God suffered, God died, and so forth.

But we glory in saying that God was born, and that the same God, as man, suffered. For I am not ashamed of the Gospel. The Apostle says: "For the power of God is in the salvation of every believer" (Rom. 1:16). Indeed, the power of God is in salvation, to believe that God suffered as a man. But for the unbeliever, it is considered the weakness of God, to perdition, not to believe that God was crucified in the flesh. Whence again the same Apostle: "But we proclaim Christ, and him crucified" — indeed, the power of God and the wisdom of God; because what is foolish in God is wiser than men; and what is weak in God is stronger than men (1 Cor. 1:23-25). For what seems so foolish and so weak to unbelieving men, as when they hear that God the Son of God was crucified? But it pleased God to save believers through the foolishness of preaching (Ibid., 21): because in this especially our faith consists, that we believe the only Son of God — not adoptive, but proper; not phantasmal, but true; not temporary, but eternal — suffered everything for us in the flesh: and that he did not struggle for himself, but for us; not on account of himself, but on account of us, because we lay prostrate, he mercifully came from the heights to the depths; because, as the Apostle says: "When he was in the form of God, he did not consider it a usurpation to be equal to God, but he emptied himself, taking the form of a servant," and so on (Phil. 2:6, etc.).

What could be clearer than to recognize from this testimony the mystery of such a great dispensation? For in the form of God, who but God exists? And let us see how the fountain of fullness emptied itself. Did it not do so when the form of God took on the form of a servant? When the Lord, who is principal, deigned to assume the things of a servant? And when, out of indulgence and compassion for us, by bearing or acting in things inferior to himself, the Word made flesh evacuated in his person what he possesses in his nature, and in the true habit of humanity, made obedient in man, he restored in himself through humility and obedience of our nature what had perished through disobedience in Adam, and, dead in the flesh, always lives, in the spirit giving life together with the Father to all things: never again to die, raised by the same Father in the flesh. And he becomes for us the firstborn from the dead (Col. 1:18), who is the only-begotten of the living God, and living before the ages: for us poor in time, and in need in man, he took for us what he always has abundantly for himself in the Father. O the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How inscrutable are his judgments, and how unsearchable his ways (Rom. 11:33)!

It is granted to him on our account that he receives the name; but he bestows upon all, because the bestower of all, God, knows himself as God in giving, knows himself as man in receiving: so that in the name of Jesus every knee of the celestial, terrestrial, and infernal beings is bent, and every tongue confesses that the Lord Jesus is in the glory of God the Father (Philippians 2:10-11). This is our faith, and this is the change of the right hand of the Most High (Psalm 76:11), for a better correction. Thus we believe, thus we hold; and this is not from ourselves (Ephesians 2:8); for it is a gift of God: not from the merit of our own wisdom, so that we do not glory in ourselves: for we are his creation, indeed already created long ago in Christ (Ibid., 10): but now, with apostolic men giving birth to us anew into the light, we are restored in the same. Therefore to them always honor and glory. Concerning that which we most foolishly proposed in that letter, but ignorantly, and which we now abominably confess, that is, applying to Christ labor, devotion, merit, faith, we judge these things to be so unsuitable for the Son of God that, recalling what was said by us, we consider it the utmost blindness of our folly, and we clearly perceive how truly certain men were moved with reason against us; who, as if to any one of the saints, although we never had this in our heart, made Christ almost similar, and to him who is God over all (Romans

(IX, 5), these things which simple and bare mortality possesses, we have in a certain way placed him among the rest as one of their number. Although he is called the head of the body (Ephes. V, 23; Coloss. I, 18), and truly is the head of the body of the Church, and is known to have come without sin from the same mass from which the whole human race descends according to the flesh, yet he who is singular is not to be counted among the rest; nor are those things which can have measure to be referred to him, because it was said to him: For God does not give the spirit by measure (John II, 34). For where the fullness of divinity is, there is neither measure nor limit. He who is infinite and acts with all power without boundaries does not know how to grasp the end of merits by labor, devotion, faith, or merit. He is born a man by faith, and truly is born a man according to the flesh; but he does not cease to be God: he is nourished, advances, grows, matures, and like a lamb mute before the shearer (Isaiah LIII, 7), he endures insults, is scourged, and does not reject the accursed death which the author of life, coming into the flesh, undergoes. But all these things he does not complete as one of us out of necessity: but having the power to lay down his soul, and having the power to take it up again, he willingly undertook them (John X, 18).

I also think that this should by no means be passed over in silence: that in the same letter, straying with a similar error, I added that our Lord Christ fulfilled all the things that were of the passions in such a way that he was in no respect, as it were, a perfect man aided by the help of the divinity: wishing, of course, to assign in Christ a perfect man in such a way that I might both assert that the Word of the Father was alien to these passions, and I tried to prove that man alone, by himself, performed all these things through the possibility of mortal nature, without any assistance from the deity: truly blind, I who confessed the man taken up in God, yet refused to accept that those things which belonged to that man himself were taken up in God. In this, undoubtedly, God had without doubt taken up the whole man in himself, so that these things which we think unworthy of God, man would not perform alone by natural judgment, but God, through man and in man, himself made man for us, would fulfill them by the power and mystery of the divine dispensation. Then, lest any folly be lacking to mine, the most learned scribe, confirming things not understood from things not understood, thought that these things which we placed above ought to be understood in such a way that I would strive to assign that very thing by that testimony where it is written, "God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Ps. 21:1): and that therefore the Lord of glory sent forth this utterance of a cry on the cross, because the perfect patience of man, with the Deity not at all assisting, was being tested in such great sufferings.

Therefore, if he uttered this cry while in the throes of pain for the sake of demonstrating human patience, he ought also to have cried out with the same words at that time for the demonstration of that same patience, when he was beaten; he ought then to have uttered the same words when he received that crown of many wounds, where there were as many torments as the thorns he endured in mockery. Or perhaps for Christ those things were lighter, these heavier. I think that he who deigned to have one will for undertaking all these things had one and the same strength for enduring all these things. Therefore he cried out, as it is written, and hanging on the cross he first uttered this cry to death: not to demonstrate in himself a human and perfect patience, which would be proven by the very causes and evident things themselves without the testimony of a voice, but to show truly and manifestly that he, the Son of God according to the flesh, was about to die, and, as if using the voice of the flesh itself, putting the past for the future because through the death of the cross the earthly body was necessarily to be abandoned by God for a time, not only by God but also by his own soul, which was united with God, he would testify this to us, dying, before it happened. For the dead flesh could not cry this out after the spirit was given up; otherwise, who would believe that Christ truly died?

God did not abandon the man in his sufferings—the man whom he deigned to suffer in according to the flesh—but rather the body in death, and according to the law of human departure, the divinity, together with the soul united to it, did not leave the crucified man in punishment, but deserted the lifeless flesh for a time: and Christ the Son of God then lay dead in the tomb just as the same Christ the Son of God descended into the underworld; as the blessed Apostle says: “What is it that he ascended, except that he first descended into the lower parts of the earth? He who descended is the same who ascended above all the heavens” (Ephesians 4:9-10). That same Lord and God of ours, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, who descended with his soul into the underworld, he himself ascended with soul and body into heaven; wherefore both here and in the future we venerate him as God and perfect man, and the same Son of God, true God, in the eternal age. Therefore, I believe and confess this Lord, my God, according to the great sacrament of piety, just as he was born in the flesh, suffered in the flesh, died in the flesh, was raised in the flesh, was lifted up in the flesh, was glorified in the flesh: so I believe that he himself will come in that same flesh to render judgment upon the living and the dead; and that from him, according to each one’s own merit, each will have an eternal reward. But so that I may leave no one in any suspicion on this point, I then said—indeed, I replied to the objections—that our Lord Jesus Christ, according to his human nature, was ignorant.

But now I not only do not presume to speak, but I also anathematize the earlier opinion I put forth on this point: because it is not permissible to say that the Lord of the prophets was ignorant even according to his human nature. As for the other questions of causes, we have set them forth either by intention, or by exhortation, or in fraternal discussion. If there we have differed more in expression than in faith—since it is tedious to go through each one—according to the faith of this letter, we testify that we either accept or reject all of them just as the order of the Catholic Church holds, professing the Lord Christ not as one thing and holding another in our hearts, with utmost sincerity. To be sure, to condemn the infamy of all heresy on our part—because we know ourselves always to be Catholics from Catholics according to a pure conscience—we say anathema to all heretics: Photinus, Arius, Sabellius, Eunomius, Valentinus, Apollinaris, Manichaeus, and all who come against sound doctrine. For even if we have slipped in tongue or understanding, we have not done so in will or heart, as it is written: "He who slips in tongue, but not from the heart: for who is there who does not sin in his tongue?" (Sirach 19:16-17). Indeed, my most venerable and most blessed lords and priests, as far as I was able, a son of peace according to the Apostle saying: "He who has observed the whole law, but offends in one point, has become guilty of all" (James 2:10); offending not in small matters but in great ones, I have made myself guilty in all things from the bottom of my heart.

But in this I have proven the perfect charity of those who persecuted me, yet not without cause: that I was received with full love and corrected as swiftly as they, with perfect intention and zeal, pursued me when I was in error. For myself—and I speak with God as my witness—peace, which is desirable and welcome to all, is what I seek. What remains, we now beg again and again: grant pardon by forgiving us, and obtain pardon by praying for us. I wish you, fathers, to live in God. I, Leporius, have dictated a booklet according to my own understanding, in which I will hold to my faith, God willing, to the very end, and wishing to express it from the depths of my heart, I have subscribed to it after it was read aloud before the holy bishops in the Church of Carthage. I, Domninus, hold this faith, confess it, and have subscribed to it. I, Bonus, hold this faith, confess it, and have subscribed to it. I, Aurelius, bishop of the Church of Carthage, have subscribed to the booklet presented by Leporius and read aloud.

Augustine, bishop of the region of Hippo Regius, have subscribed to the little book offered to us by Leporius. Florentius, bishop of the Hipponians of the Diarrhyti, have subscribed to the little book offered to us by Leporius. Secundus, bishop of the church of Aquae, or of Megarmitana, have subscribed to the little book offered to us by Leporius.