Letter to Jerome on the Faith

The apostolic authority relates: Without faith it is impossible that anyone should please God. We therefore faithfully believe the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, one true and only God in essential substance, and a holy and undivided personal eternity. For the deity of Christ is equal in all things and consubstantial with the Father, and is one and the same everlasting and timeless power of begetter and begotten. Being indeed the creator of all natures—since through him all things were made, and without him nothing was made—he is superior to all that he created, nor were the things he formed ever not subject to their creator: to whom it is proper and everlasting to be, not from elsewhere than from the Father, nor to be anything other than the Father is. If power had been added to him, if dignity had been made brighter, if sublimity had been exalted, he would have been lesser than the one advancing him who created him; nor would he possess the riches of that nature whose bounty he had needed.

In that fullness of time, which had been foreordained by everlasting counsel, and promised by the prophetic significance of things said and done, having become the Son of man not by a change of his own substance but by the assumption of our nature, he came to seek and to save that which had perished. But he came not by local approach nor bodily motion, as if he were to be present where he had not been before, or about to withdraw thence whence he had come; but he came through this, that he was made visible and to be manifested to all who beheld him—taking, that is, 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 come in the likeness of sinful flesh; through which he did not diminish the divine by the human, but increased the human by the divine.

For such was the state of all mortals, derived from the first parents, that, original sin passing through to their descendants, no one could escape the penalty of damnation, unless the Word were made flesh and dwelt among us. What belongs to the deity, the flesh did not diminish; what belongs to the flesh, the deity did not destroy. For he is the same, both eternal from the Father, and temporal from the mother; inviolable in his own power, passible in our weakness. In deity, of one and the same nature with the Father and the Holy Spirit alone; but in the assumption of man, not of one substance, but of one and the same person: so that the same one was rich in poverty, omnipotent in submission, impassible in suffering, immortal in death.

For the Word was not converted, in any part of itself, into flesh or into soul; since the simple and unchangeable nature of the deity is always whole in its own essence, receiving neither loss nor increase to itself; and thus blessing the nature assumed, so that the glorified remains in the glorifying one. But why should it seem unfitting or impossible that the Word and flesh and soul should be one man, Christ, and one Son both of God and of man, if flesh and soul, which are of dissimilar natures, make one person even without the incarnation of the Word? Since it is much easier that the power of the deity should furnish this union of itself and man, than that the weakness of humanity alone should maintain it in its own substances.

Neither, therefore, was the Word changed into flesh, nor the flesh into the Word: but each remains in the one, and the one is in each: not divided by diversity, not confused by commingling, nor is one from the Father and another from the mother; but the same is from the Father before every beginning, and the same at the end of the ages, that he might be mediator of God and man—but truly there are two natures or substances in man; the spiritual, the soul; the material, the flesh. the man Jesus Christ, in whom the fullness of divinity might dwell.

For the birth of the Lord according to the flesh, although it has certain properties of its own by which it transcends the beginnings of the human condition—whether that he alone was conceived and born of an inviolate virgin without concupiscence; or that he was so brought forth from the mother's womb, that fecundity might bring forth, and virginity remain—yet his flesh was not of another nature than ours is; nor was a soul breathed into him from any other beginning than into other men, a soul that excelled not by diversity of kind but by sublimity of virtue.

For he had nothing of his flesh contrary to him; no discord of desires bred conflict of pleasures: the bodily senses were vigorous without the law of sin, and the truth of affections was under the governance of the deity and the mind, and he was neither tempted by allurements nor did he yield in vices: a true man was truly united to God: neither led down from heaven according to a soul existing beforehand, nor created according to flesh out of nothing: bearing the same person in the deity of the Word, and holding a nature common with us in body and soul. For he would not be the mediator of God and men, unless the same one, being both God and man in each, were both one and true. The greatness of the matter indeed invites us to a breadth of discourse; but for your learning there is no need of laboring at length.

With you is Bethlehem, in which the saving birth of the Virgin shone forth, whom, wrapped in swaddling clothes, amid the narrow straits of the inn, the manger received. With you is the infancy of the Savior, declared by angels, adored by the magi, pursued after the death of many infants by Herod. With you, I say, is the place where his childhood grew, where his adolescence matured, and through bodily increase 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 weeping of pity, nor without the fear of dread. For he is one and the same who, in the form of God, works miracles of great power.

But that he might restore the life of all, he took up the cause of all: and the force of the old handwriting, which alone among all he did not owe, he emptied by paying it for all: so that, as through the guilt of one all had been made sinners, so through the innocence of one all might be made innocent: hence righteousness remains in man, where human nature has been assumed. For by no reasoning is it outside the reality of our body. For since the original bonds of our captivity could not be loosed, unless there existed a man of our race and our nature, whom the prejudgments of the first man did not hold, and who by his own unstained blood might wash away the deadly handwriting, as had been divinely foreordained from the beginning; so it was done in the fullness of the appointed time, that the promise, signified in many ways, might come to the long-awaited effect; nor could that be doubtful which had always been announced by continuous signs.

But in a great sacrilege the diverse impiety of heretics is manifested, when, under the appearance of honoring the deity, they detract from the truth of human flesh in Christ; and they think it religiously believed, if it be said that in our Savior that is not true which saves; whereas, according to the promise running before all ages, the world is so reconciled to God in Christ, that unless the Word had deigned to become flesh, no flesh could be saved. But to declare more clearly the sacrament of faith, and to confound heretical depravity, is your task, best father Jerome. This one thing I ask and beseech, that you be mindful of me more often, most invincible soldier of Christ. Amen.