PREFACE.

Severus; Xenaias.

The preceding text discusses the nature of Christ. The author here provides a quote from a patristic source to illustrate the Monophysite position being critiqued.
...posited, yet entirely devoid of change, confusion, and commingling. For thus he speaks regarding the mystery of the incarnation: "The Son, he says, who is one from the Trinity, united to himself personally a body endowed with a rational soul and mind, in the womb of the Mother of God. The body was not formed before it was united to the Word, but in a point of time it was both formed and united. In this Christ was born, in this he was nourished, in this he suffered, in this he died. The divinity of the Son neither suffered nor died. However, all these things were not done in appearance, nor fantastically, but truly and naturally. Finally, the Word was not turned into flesh, or commingled or confused with it, nor divided from it and vice versa; but united to humanity in that way in which a rational soul is united to the body: and just as a single human nature is formed from a rational soul and body, so from the humanity of Christ and his divinity ONE NATURE ARISES, not indeed simple but COMPOSITE." He then abuses the expression of St. Cyril to Succensus: "after the union in Christ THERE IS ONE INCARNATE NATURE of the Word."

We have proven elsewhereSee below, pp. 441, sqq. how undeservedly Philoxenus and the Jacobites after him drag this diction of Cyril into their patronage, showing that the term nature was said by the Holy Doctor in the Catholic sense for a subsistent nature or person. It is truly strange that a sharp-sighted man, who openly teaches that divinity is united with humanity in Christ after the union without division, without confusion, and without change, should soon, forgetful of his own words, confuse those two natures and gather them into I know not what composite nature, which, since it is said to be composite, can be neither human nor divine, but is necessarily a certain mixture of both. For St. ThomasSumma theol., part III, q. II, a. 1. — Cf. Petavius, De Incarnat., l. III, cap. 10. excellently shows that no composition of natures can be admitted in Christ. Indeed, a soul and body are joined in man to constitute one human nature, because each nature is imperfect; in Christ, however, since the two natures are perfect, they cannot convene into one. They do, however, convene well in the divine person of the Word, just as...