In the times of Honorius and John IV, Roman Pontiffs, there lived a certain Sophronius of Jerusalem, almost the first to oppose himself to the Monothelites, author of the Spiritual Meadow, around the year of the Lord 638. In his letter to Sergius, Patriarch of Constantinople, he writes as follows:
“We assert that there is also in Christ that power which is called the new and God-manly operation, not existing as one operation, but of different kind and distinction, which Dionysius, divinely caught up from the Areopagus by the eminent Paul, asserted.”
Does he not point to the passage in the Letter to Gaius, at the end of the tenth section, page 435, concerning Jesus? “For the rest, neither performing divine things according to God alone, nor human things according to man alone, but, God having become man, showing us by his life among us a certain new God-manly operation.” This passage the most crafty heretics of that time were producing on their own behalf, agreeing with Catholics that the author of the letter was the Areopagite. If the authority of Catholic monks has no weight with Scaliger, at least the opinion of heretics should have weight. It would have weight, if it did not harm Calvinism.
Nevertheless I shall enumerate those heretics, so that the agreement of the world at that time concerning the writer of that letter may be clear. In volume 3 of the Councils, in the synod held at Rome under Pope Martin I, session 3, page 121, there is extant the letter of that Monothelite Sergius to Cyrus, Patriarch of Alexandria. In that letter he receives the seventh chapter of Cyrus, in which Cyrus was attributing this passage to Dionysius the Areopagite. On page 123, Themistius the heretic says in a letter to Marcellinus the presbyter and Stephen the deacon, concerning the operation of Christ: “Therefore Dionysius the Areopagite named it God-manly.”
The same thing was asserted by Macarius, the heretical Patriarch of Antioch, in the synod held at Constantinople in Trullo in the time of the Emperor Pogonatus, act 2, at the end: “I,” he says, “do not speak of number, but of his God-manly operation, according to Saint Dionysius.” Cyrus the heretic, in the said seventh chapter, had said that he believed “the same one Christ and one Son to operate things proper to God and human things by one operation of God and man, according to blessed Dionysius,” in the same volume 3, page 120.
In these words Cyrus was convicted by blessed Sophronius of having corrupted the context of Dionysius and put “one” in place of “new,” as Pyrrhus himself, while still a heretic, admits in the book against the dogmatic volume of Cyrus, in these words:
“The most reverend Sophronius censured only one chapter, as falsifying the testimony of Dionysius of blessed memory by the alteration of one word. In this the aforesaid man spoke fittingly and cautiously, in the passages in which he asserts, ‘but, God having become man, bringing forth for us a certain new and God-manly operation.’ For in truth the named volume contained ‘one’; but not maliciously, far be it, according to my statement. Rather, because ‘new’ cannot be understood otherwise than as ‘one,’ this word was put by the most holy Cyrus; because, by the denial of the higher things, the blessed Doctor constructs one confession and expresses it singly. What else did he hand down more plainly by a certain word than that one operation is to be confessed, since Christ is one?”
Thus far Pyrrhus, that torpid serpent. Having been convicted, he admits the corruption, which he could not deny, but seeks praise from the crime. The same Pyrrhus, in the disputation with blessed Maximus, monk and martyr, near the end, says, as Torres translates it: “What, moreover, shall we say about Saint Dionysius, who in the Letter to Gaius the devotee said of Christ that he exercised a certain new God-manly operation?”
You have five Monothelites. Consider for me that, in that seventh century, this opinion concerning the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite was undoubted in all the patriarchal sees, that is, in the whole Church. For at Rome Martin, Honorius, and John asserted it; at Alexandria, Cyrus; at Antioch, Macarius; at Constantinople, Sergius; at Jerusalem, Sophronius.
See also in what way, even today, in this matter, I mean concerning the books of the Areopagite, the schismatic Greeks agree with the Roman Church. When Stephen Gerlach, Martin Crusius, and other Lutheran Ubiquitarians of Wittenberg and Tubingen, against the Catholics of Germany, the Jesuits and others, were seeking everywhere supporters of their own sect, according to that verse of Virgil, “If I cannot bend the powers above, I shall stir Acheron,” they sent an embassy to Jeremiah, Patriarch of Constantinople. Afterwards by letter they asked him what the opinion of all Greece was concerning that Dionysius and his works, about whom Scaliger disputes.
He replied through Theodore Zygomalas, his secretary, in these words, which, taken from the first book of Turco-Graecia, column 97, our Petrus Duiarricius of Aquitaine sent to me:
“I wrote a life of the Areopagite and sent it to you, as I remember well. You too will find it there, provided you look for it. Know that this man is held divine by us, and is honored by the Church next after the Apostles of Christ; and that his book is approved by us, and the things written in it are considered worthy of trust.”
What will Scaliger say to these things? He will laugh at the Lutherans because they consulted Jeremiah rather than the Genevans and himself. But I return to our own witnesses, that is, to the earlier Fathers.