es who, wandering from the path of primitive
doctrine, has rushed into the opposite error[70] and asserts that so far
from our having to believe in a twofold Person in Christ, we must not
even confess a double Nature; humanity, he maintains, was so assumed
that the union with Godhead involved the disappearance of the human
nature. His error springs from the same source as that of Nestorius. For
just as Nestorius deems there could not be a double Nature unless the
Person were doubled, and therefore, confessing the double Nature in
Christ, has perforce believed the Person to be double, so also Eutyches
deemed that the Nature was not double unless the Person was double, and
since he did not confess a double Person, he thought it a necessary
consequence that the Nature should be regarded as single. Thus
Nestorius, rightly holding Christ's Nature to be double, sacrilegiously
professes the Persons to be two; whereas Eutyches, rightly believing the
Person to be single, impiously believes that the Nature also is single.
And being confuted by the plain evidence of facts, since it is clear
that the Nature of God is different from that of man, he declares his
belief to be: two Natures in Christ before the union and only one after
the union. Now this statement does not express clearly what he means.
However, let us scrutinize his extravagance. It is plain that this union
took place either at the moment of conception or at the moment of
resurrection. But if it happened at the moment of conception, Eutyches
seems to think that even before conception He had human flesh, not taken
from Mary but prepared in some other way, while the Virgin Mary was
brought in to give birth to flesh that was not taken from her; that this
flesh, which already existed, was apart and separate from the substance
of divinity, but that when He was born of the Virgin it was united to
God, so that the Nature seemed to be made one. Or if this be not his
opinion, since he says that there were two Natures before the union and
one after, supposing the union to be established by conception, an
alternative view may be that Christ indeed took a body from Mary but
that before He took it the Natures of Godhead and manhood were
different: but the Nature assumed became one with that of Godhead into
which it passed. But if he thinks that this union was effected not by
conception but by resurrection, we shall h