Page:Nestorius and his place in the history of Christian doctrine.djvu/73

Rh of events. But no hero of a tragedy is quite guiltless. And we Christians know that we all have the old Adam in us as long as we live.

Only by understanding the word "guiltless" in a broader sense I am able to say that Nestorius was guiltless. His guilt was very slight in comparison with the heavy weight of his sufferings.

Socrates, the church historian, regarded, as we saw, the dogmatic charges against Nestorius as essentially unfounded. He thought the fault of Nestorius was his lack of knowledge. But I must decline to accept for Nestorius this privilegium ignorantiae. It is true that Nestorius at first did not know that the term was used by some of the orthodox Fathers of the fourth century. But this lack of knowledge is not a sign of ignorance. I won't say that Nestorius was a learned man. Neither the fragments of his works nor his Treatise of Heraclides show patristic or philosophical erudition. But his education was not in any way a merely rhetorical one. The Treatise of Heraclides and many of the earlier known fragments of Nestorius prove that, in spite of some inaccuracies in his terminology, he was a theologian well educated in dogmatics.

Luther thought that, besides his want of learning, it was fatal for Nestorius that he was a boorish and proud