Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/291

 Jesus, consubstantial with us according to his manhood, is like us in all but sin. This sinlessness of Christ the Saviour the church has since antiquity understood not merely in the sense that he is free from the original and all voluntary sin, but also in the sense that he cannot even sin and that he is free from all sensuous desires or propensities to sin, free from all inward temptation. Therefore, when Theodore of Mopsuestia took the liberty to assert, among other things, that our Lord Jesus was not exempt from inward temptations and the struggle of the passions, the fifth Ecumenical Council (in the year 553) condemned this heresy as one of the most important ones.” (pp. 77 and 78.)

II. On the unity of the hypostasis in Jesus Christ.

137. The actuality of the union in Christ of two natures in one hypostasis. “In professing two natures, a divine and a human, in Jesus Christ our Lord, we at the same time profess that there is in him but one person and that the two natures are in him combined into one hypostasis of God the Word, for we believe that the Son of God assumed in his own hypostasis the human flesh which was conceived in the womb of the Virgin Mary from the Holy Ghost and became incarnate (Epistle of the Eastern Patriarchs on the Orthodox Faith, section 7), and that, consequently, his humanity has in him no especial personality and does not form a separate hypostasis, but was accepted by his divinity into a union with his divine hypostasis. Or, let us say with the words of St. John Damascene, The hypostasis of God the Word became incarnate, having received from the Virgin the beginning of our composition, the flesh animated by a reasoning and rational soul, so that it itself became a hypostasis of flesh One and the same hypostasis of the Word, having become a hypostasis of two essences, does not permit any one of them to be anhypostatic, nor does it permit them to be variously hypostatic among themselves; nor is it the hypostasis