[Vide ante, p. 415 note.]

ON THE LETTER TO CÆSARIUS (Chrys. Op. vol. iii. p. 755).

The history of this letter, and the controversy connected with it, are curious and interesting. Peter Martyr transcribed a Latin translation of it, which he found in a manuscript at Florence, carried it with him to England, and deposited it in the library of Archbishop Cranmer. After Cranmer’s death, and the dispersion of his library, the letter disappeared. Peter Martyr had not stated the source from which he had derived it, and, therefore, when the assailants of the doctrine of Transubstantiation wished to make use of it, their opponents always maintained that it did not exist. In 1680, however, Emericus Bigotius discovered a copy in the library of St. Mark’s Convent, at Florence, probably the same which Peter Martyr, himself a Florentine, had transcribed. Emericus appended it to his edition of Palladius’s “Life of Chrysostom,” and in his preface endeavoured to vindicate its authenticity; but the Doctors of the Sorbonne suppressed the letter, and such portions of the preface as related to it. Emericus, however, had retained in his own possession some of the entire copies after they were printed, before they came into the licenser’s hands. The translation was published by Stephanus Le Moyne in 1685, by Jacob Basnage in 1687, and in 1689 by Harduin, a Jesuit, who strenuously maintained the Roman Catholic interpretation of the passage on the Eucharist. Montfaucon adopted Harduin’s version of it, annexing a few fragments in the Greek, picked out of Anastasius and John Damascene.

John Damascene, Anastasius, and Nicephorus refer to the letter as authentic, nor does Harduin venture to dispute it; but there are several points of evidence which seem to mark it as belonging to a later age than that of Chrysostom. It is not quoted before Leontius, in the latter part of the sixth century, although it might usefully have been employed against the Eutychians. There are expressions in it which were not in common use till after Cyril of Alexandria had employed them against Nestorius. The language generally is that of one who had lived in the midst of the Nestorian and Eutychian controversies, and the style of the Greek fragments, as well as the tone of the Latin translation, are extremely unlike Chrysostom’s manner: the sentences are abrupt and rugged, and a kind of scholastic, dogmatic tone pervades the whole composition. The general scope of the letter is clear: it is to maintain the doctrine of the two natures under one person in Jesus Christ, against the heresy of the Apollinarians; or, if we accept the theory of Montfaucon, the intention of the author, living in the time of the Eutychian heresy, was to strike a blow at that by forging a letter supposed to be addressed by Chrysostom to a friend, warning him against Apollinarian errors, which had much in common with the Eutychian. The passage in which the writer illustrates his position by a reference to the Holy Eucharist has been construed by Roman Catholics and Protestants in a sense agreeable to their own views on the subject. The writer has been labouring to prove that there were two distinct natures in the one person of God the Son Incarnate, and he proceeds as follows:—“Just as the bread before consecration is called bread, but when the Divine grace sanctifies it through the agency of the priest it is liberated from the appellation of bread, and is regarded as worthy of the appellation of the Lord’s body, although the nature of bread remains in it, and we speak not of two bodies, but one body of the Son; so here, the Divine nature being seated in the human body, the two together make up but one Son, one Person.”