Ante-Nicene Fathers/Volume VI/Anatolius and Minor Writers/Malchion/From the Acts of the Disputation 1

by Malchion

III.—From the Acts of the Disputation Conducted by Malchion Against Paul of Samosata.^[1]

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The compound is surely made up of the simple elements,^[2] even as in the instance of Jesus Christ, who was made one (person), constituted by God the Word, and a human body which is of the seed of David, and who subsists without having any manner of division between the two, but in unity. You, however, appear to me to decline to admit a constitution^[3] after this fashion: to the effect that there is not in this person, the Son of God according to substance, but only the Wisdom according to participation. For you made this assertion, that the Wisdom bears dispensing, and therefore cannot be compounded;^[4] and you do not consider that the divine Wisdom remained undiminished, even as it was before it evacuated itself;^[5] and thus in this self-evacuation, which it took upon itself in compassion (for us), it continued undiminished and unchangeable. And this assertion you also make, that the Wisdom dwelt in Him, just as we also dwell in houses, the one in the other,^[6] and yet not as if we formed a part of the house, or the house a part of us.

Footnotes

1. In Petrus Diaconus, De Incarnat. ad Fulgentium, ch. 6. Among the works of Fulgentius, Epistle 16.
2. Ex simplicibus fit certe compositum.
3. Compositionem.
4. Quia sapientia dispendium patiatur et ideo composita esse non possit—the sense intended being perhaps just that Paul alleged that the divine Wisdom admitted of being dispensed or imparted to another, but not of being substantially united with him.—Tr.
5. Exinanisset.
6. Some read alter in altero, others alter in altera.