Annotatio secunda Gregorii de Valentia societatis Iesu de controversia ubiquetaria

2 Corinthians 11.

or to have ascended into heaven when departing from the world; yet they profess, most emptily, that they are defending some fictitious excellence of Christ. For who among Christians is there (especially one not sufficiently learned in letters) who is not immediately moved by some specious display of Christ’s dignity? I fear, says the Apostle, lest just as the serpent seduced Eve by his cunning, so your senses may be corrupted and fall away from the simplicity that is in Christ. But in what way at last did the serpent seduce Eve? Indeed, by teaching. What did he teach? He said, You shall be like gods. He enticed and outwitted her by proposing a false nature of human dignity. By this craft, he caused her to fall miserably from that rank of truest dignity in which she was created.

The manner by which Christians are circumvented by heretics.

2 Peter 2.

Acts 17.

With not dissimilar cunning of the serpent are the senses of simple Christians corrupted, and they fall away from Christ when they fall in with such lying teachers. To lead their disciples after themselves more easily, they propose a doctrine concerning the dignity of Christ (which, as dignity, is also the dignity of Christians, since he is their head) that so far from truly adorning Christ, it strips him even of his own nature, let alone his Majesty. Thus the Dragon taught the denial of Christ through the heretic Eutyches. Yet he seemed to his followers to have exalted the dignity of Christ clearly when he judged that Christ’s human nature had been made divine by the benefit of the union.

See Council of Chalcedon, Act 1.

Thus testifies Tertullian in his book On the Flesh of Christ. Irenaeus also acts against such heretics in Book 3, Chapter 32.

In chapters to Eustathius against heretics. In Turrianus, in the epistle against the Ubiquitarians, recently published.

Likewise through Marcion, and Marcion’s disciple Apelles, and other heretics, who thought it pertained to that same dignity of Christ that he should have a body that was not at all earthy like ours, that is, made of flesh and blood, but entirely celestial. For they pretend, says Tertullian, the shame of the flesh, which they therefore bring forward as unworthy of Christ. And to draw nearer to Brentius, Schmidelin, and the remaining Ubiquitarians, the same serpent-like cunning was long ago exposed by Saint Athanasius in the Arians. After Christ had risen from the dead, they taught that he was no longer a true man, since they contended that, having put off mortality, he had transformed the form of a servant—that is, his humanity—into the glory of Lord and God.