Homilies and Songs, Volume 1

From the aforesaid, which substantially and amply manifest the Nestorian doctrine, and from many others which it would be too long to recount, one can extract, above all, the Doctor’s ignorance of Catholic dogmas, having nothing precise, nothing clear, and confusingly intermixing the true and the false. He rails, indeed, quite rightly against the Eutychians, by eroding the absurd consequences of their doctrine, namely the doctrine of the confusion of the divine and human natures in Christ. For those heretics profess, in equivalent terms, for example, that the human nature was made divine and vice versa; that the divine nature or even the Most Holy Trinity suffered and was crucified; that the Blessed Virgin Mary gave birth to the divine nature, etc. But less correctly, not to say insipidly, the Doctor reproaches the same things to Catholics, whom he likens to Eutychians, and likewise calls them Theopaschites because they teach that God suffered, was crucified, that Mary gave birth to God, etc. He does not see or understand what the difference is between this and that manner of speaking; concerning which matter, he treats Saint Cyril of Alexandria most poorly, calling him in mockery Metsraya Egyptian — Ligiona Legion — Yadua Ignorant — Kalba harsha Mute dog — Dabba Wicked(1), etc. In a general way, it is clear from Narsai's writings on the Incarnation that he gratuitously assumed the possibility of the Theandric Union could be conceived in only two ways: either from nature to nature immediately, intrinsically, and physically, in the manner of Eutyches, which he rightly repudiates; or from nature to nature morally only, through accession, extrinsic adaptation, by the force of love, and this he defends, in such a way that the human nature does not lack its own subsistence, because, in the author's sense, a rational nature is necessarily inseparable from its own subsistence, with which it exhibits one simple and undivided concept. Hence, he barely mentions subsistence abstracted from nature. He predicates the word Knoma concrete person of the three persons of the Most Holy Trinity, but not of the person of the Incarnate Word, except in text No. 1 cited above, and he uses the word Kiana concrete nature regarding the Incarnation for each subsisting nature. According to the Doctor's mind, therefore, the human nature, and indeed an integral one, is so united to the Word that from both a single moral thing, or a moral person, results, commonly called by the word Parsopa person/appearance, and the Son of God by name...

(1) Saint Cyril is also, according to Narsai, the leader of the Theopaschites: "He who is the head of all the errors of all the evil and corrupting leaders: to that true power of the Church of God, which is Saint Cyril the head of the Egyptians and of all the errors of the evil and corrupting ones...."