Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/294

 of Christ, of the sacrament of communion, have agitated the church in proportion as they were removed from any possibility of a moral application. After that follows:

138. The manner of the hypostatic union in Christ of the two natures. “In what manner the two essences in Jesus Christ, the divine and the human, in spite of their difference, were united into one hypostasis; how he, being perfect God and perfect man, is only one person,—all that, according to the Word of God, is a great mystery of godliness (1 Tim. iii. 16), and, consequently, inaccessible to our reason. But in so far as this mystery is accessible for our faith, the holy church teaches us, on the basis of the same Word of God, that the two essences have united in our Saviour, (1) on the one hand, without blending (ἀσυγχύτως) and unchangeably, or immovably (ἀτρέπτως), in spite of the heresy of the Monophysites, who blended the two essences in Christ, or who assumed in him the transformation of the divinity into flesh; (2) on the other hand, inseparably (ἀχωρίστως), in spite of the error of the Nestorians, who separated the essences in Christ, and of other heretics, who denied that they had been united constantly and uninterruptedly; cf. the Dogma of the Council of Chalcedon.” (p. 86.)

This is proved besides from Scripture:

“(3) Finally, also from considerations of common sense, which, on the basis of its natural principles, cannot in any way admit: (a) that the divine and human essences should have blended or mingled in Christ and formed a new, third essence, having lost their attributes, for the Godhead is unchangeable, and the blending or mingling of two quite simple essences, of the human soul and of the divinity, is impossible, and so much the more physically impossible is the blending of the coarse human flesh with the simplest divinity; (b) nor that the divine essence should have changed into a human, or the human into a divine essence: the first is contrary to the un-