The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 3Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Religion
The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 3
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Literature -- History and criticism
So in the beginning, Nestorius did not err, touching the unity of
Christ's person in the diversity of the natures of God and man; but
only disliked that Mary should be called the mother of God: which form
of speaking when some demonstrated to be very fitting and unavoidable,
if Christ were God and man in the unity of the same person, he chose
rather to deny the unity of Christ's person than to acknowledge his
temerity and rashness in reproving that form of speech, which the use
of the church had anciently received and allowed.
A false charge grounded on a misconception of the Syriac terms.
Nestorius was perfectly justifiable in his rejection of the epithet
[Greek: theotókos], as applied to the mother of Jesus. The Church was
even then only too ripe for the idolatrous 'hyper-dulia' of the
Virgin. Not less weak is Field's defence of the propriety of the term.
Set aside all reference to this holy mystery, and let me ask, I trust
without offence, whether by the same logic a mule's dam might not be
called [Greek: hippotókos], because the horse and ass were united in one
and the same subject. The difference in the perfect God and perfect man
does not remove the objection: for an epithet, which conceals half of a
truth, the power and special concerningness of which, relatively to our
redemption by Christ, depends on our knowledge of the whole, is a
deceptive and a dangerously deceptive epithet.
Ib. c.20. p.110.
Thus, then, the Fathers did sometimes, when they had particular
occasions to remember the Saints, and to speak of them, by way of
'apostrophe', turn themselves unto them, and use words of
doubtful compellation, praying them, if they have any sense of these
inferior things, to be remembrancers to God for them.
The distinct gradations of the process, by which commemoration and
rhetorical apostrophes passed finally into idolatry, supply an analogy
of mighty force against the heretical 'hypothesis 'of the modern
Unitarians. Were it true, they would have been able to have traced the
progress of the Christolatry from the lowest sort of 'Christodulia'
with the same historical distinctness against the universal Church, that
the Protestants have that of hierolatry against the Romanists. The
gentle and soft censures which our divines during the reign of the
Stuarts pass on the Roman Saint worship, or hieroduly, as an
inconvenient superstition, must needs have alarmed the faithful
adherents to the Protestantism of Edward VI. and the surviving exiles of
bloody Queen Mary's times, and their disciples.
Ib. p.111.
The miracles that God wrought in times past by them made many to
attribute more to them than was fit, as if they had a generality of
presence, knowledge, and working; but the wisest and best advised
never durst attribute any such thing unto them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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