NOTE: — 35 —

Do you see, fair-minded orthodox readers, how daringly these [men] conform according to their own errant mind the word of the sound doctrine of our holy Patriarch, Nersēs the Graceful? And this: having removed the period of an entire stanza, they write only a single part as a testimony for their deceitful confession. For the entire word of the same Graceful [Patriarch] is this: “He is proclaimed through miracles, God crucified in the flesh for my sake; by our nature He dies, [yet] is confessed [as] immortal God. By the double-streaming fountain from [His] side His church is established; with the water it is cleansed, the blood it drinks, and glorifies the Son with the Father.” With wondrous words of sound doctrine, our graceful holy Patriarch did not intend to establish a distinct recognition of two natures in Christ, but rather hastened to reject and refute the sects of the vile Nestorius and the pernicious Eutyches. For the errant Nestorius raved concerning Christ, calling [Him] one Son by grace from Mary, and another Son from the Father beforehand; so that there were two Sons—whereby the Trinity became a Quaternity—and the holy Virgin *Theotokos* [Mother of God] he called *anthropotokos* [mother of man]. Wherefore the holy Fathers, assembled in the holy Council of Ephesus, refuted with anathemas the vile Nestorius and his demonic sect, confessing our Lord Jesus Christ [as] one Son of God, and the all-holy Virgin Mary [as] *Theotokos*. (See in Khorenats‘i, Book III, ch. 61). And our holy Patriarch, Nersēs the Graceful, writes in the epistle which is to the priests of the province of Yamayk‘: “Nestorius and his partisans divided the one Christ into two sons and two natures, and called the flesh a temple of the Word of God as [though it were that] of one of the spirit-bearing men; and [they held] the same to be dissolved by the sufferings and death, and did not ascribe to God the cross and death whereby [there is] salvation, but to a mere man.” Again, our same holy Patriarch writes: “Put to shame be Nestorius and those like unto him, who once called Mary *anthropotokos* and not *Theotokos*” (in the *Commentary on the Elevation*). And again (in the *Epistle to Yamayk‘*): “Eutyches, against the same (that is, Nestorius), asserted one nature not by union, but by confusion and alteration; that is to say, that the Word God took only a form and semblance from the holy Virgin, and did not truly become man.” He writes also in the words of faith in metered discourse thus: