Saturday, October 23, 2021

Vigilius vs. Theodore of Mopsuestia on Allowance of True Believers Entertaining a Lower Christology Before the Resurrection

From “Theodore of Mopsuestia’s third book against the impious Apollinarius,” as found in the Acta of the fourth session of the Second Council of Constantinople (553):

 

31. (XXV/XXVI) Likewise by the same Theodore from Book I on the incarnation, interpreting the profession of Peter in which he said, ‘You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God’:

 

[55] Therefore just as Nathanael is not showing to have had knowledge of His godhead by this profession—Jews and Samaritans in having this hope were as far as it is possible from a knowledge of God the word--, so too Martha is not proved by her profession to have had knowledge of his Godhead at that time, and nor clearly is the blessed Peter. For up to this point it was sufficient for those receiving this revelation at that time to accept something special and superior about him that exceeded the imagination of other men; but after the resurrection they were then led to knowledge by the Spirit and received a perfect knowledge of the revelation, with the result that they knew that something special, beyond other men, had come to him from God, not merely as an honour as in the case of other men but through union with God the Word, through which he shares with him in every honour after his ascension into heaven. (Richard Price, The Acts of the Council of Constantinople of 553, 2 vols. [Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009, 2012], 1:248)

 

Vigilius, in the First Constitutum, repeated the following, and then added a rebuttal with an anathema attached:

 

(111) In the above-written twenty-sixth chapter Peter is denied to have recognized the divinity of Christ before his resurrection, and is said to have received a notional understanding beyond other men, and again a duality of sons is introduced, when it says that the man shared in God the Word after he ascended into heaven. Who therefore holds, teaches, believes or preaches this accordingly, and does not understand that there is one and the same Christ our Lord, Son of God and son of man, while the difference between the natures united in him remains, let him be anathema. (Ibid., 2:169)