"... They say," expounds Justinian, "that there were originally an innumerable host of minds united in contemplation and love of God. But, being subdued by satiety, their devotion cooled, and hence they became associated with bodies and names of a higher or lower nature in proportion to the degree of their falling off. Those who were least deteriorated passed into the sun, moon, and stars; a lower class into gross bodies like our own; whilst those affected with the greatest perversity coalesced with the frigid and fuliginous matter of which demons are constituted. One only remained unchanged in love and contemplation of the Deity, and that one was Christ. But all bodies are liable to perish utterly; and he, becoming at once God and man, first threw off his body; and all bodies will ultimately do likewise, returning into unity and again becoming minds. Hence impious men and demons will at last attain to the same celestial state as the divine and saintly. Thus Christ differs in no manner from other living beings. But Pythagoras said that unity was the beginning of all things; and Plato taught similarly, and asserted that souls were sent into bodies as a punishment. Wherefore he called the body a sepulchre and a chain, as being that wherein the soul was buried and bound. And the soul of a philosopher which pollutes itself with paederasty and iniquity performs a triple circuit of chastisement in a millennium, and in the thousandth year becomes winged and takes its flight.... Therefore I exhort you, holy fathers, to examine and condemn in general synod all who think like Origen."
The next extract I draw from his lengthy exposition of the principles of Catholicism with a view to the condemnation of the Three Chapters. In this document he relies mainly on the interpretation of Scripture by Athanasius, Cyril of Alexandria, Basil the Great, Gregory Nazianzen, and Gregory of Nyssa[767]:
"... And when we say that Christ is God, we do not deny him to be man; and when we say that he is man we do not deny him to be God. For should he be only God, how should he suffer, be crucified, and die? For such is alien to God. Wherefore when we say that Christ is composed of both natures, divine and human, we introduce no confusion in the union, but in the two natures we confess Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Word. When we say that there is a composition, we must allow there to be parts in the whole, and the whole to consist in its parts. The divine nature is not transmuted into the human, nor the human into the divine. Rather is it to be understood that, each nature abiding within its own limits and faculties, a union has been made according to the substance. The union according to the substance signifies that God the Word, that is, one substance of the three substances of the Deity, was not united to a previously formed human body, but created for Himself in the womb of the Holy Virgin from her substance the living flesh, which is human nature."
He then drew up a number of canons against the Three Chapters and heretics generally, to which he appended a diffuse argument to prove the necessity for their being anathematized. These canons are virtually the same as the fourteen adopted by the Fifth Oecumenical Council.[768]
[625] The gist of the Henoticon was that all being devoted adherents of the Nicene Council, they repudiated anything which was in conflict with its decisions, whether promulgated "at Chalcedon or elsewhere"; Evagrius, iii, 14.
[626] Concil. (Labbe, Mansi, 1759, etc.), vii, 1053; Theophanes, an. 5980.
[627] The correspondence between Justin and Justinian and the Holy See of Rome (Baronius, Concil., Migne) has lately been re-edited in Script. Eccles. Lat., Vienna, 1895, xxxv, from the Avellana Collection.
[628] John Ephes. Comm. de Beat. Or. (Laud, etc.), pp. 127, 154.
[629] Concil., viii, 818 et seq. The Collatio consisted of five or six bishops of each side. They were convened by Strategius, Count of the Sacred Largesses, who said they were called together, not under Imperial compulsion, but as in response to a "paternal and priestly exhortation." Afterwards they were met by Justinian, who invited them into Hormisdas, where he addressed them "with Davidian kindness, Mosaic patience, and Apostolic clemency."
[630] Cod. I, i, 6; cf. Facundus Defens, i, 1.