I have brought forward witnesses from Asia and Europe; I shall also bring forward one from Africa. I have brought forward witnesses from the continent; I shall bring forward one from the island of Sardinia. For this judgment has penetrated and prevailed through all parts of the world, through land and sea.
Liberatus the African, in the Breviary concerning the Nestorian and Eutychian cause, chapter 10, wrote thus:
“Cyril wrote four books, three against Theodore and Diodorus, as authors, so to speak, of the Nestorian dogma, and another book On the Incarnation. In these books are contained the incorrupt testimonies of the ancient Fathers: of Felix, Pope of Rome; of Dionysius the Areopagite, Bishop of the Corinthians; and of Gregory the Wonder-worker, surnamed Thaumaturgus.”
Against this testimony two things could be objected by the adversaries. First, that certain Catholics have denied that these books are by Saint Cyril, being led by this reason: because Cyril had not produced these testimonies against living men, therefore this work does not seem to be Cyril’s. It can be answered that he produced them only then because he had not remembered them before and afterward they came into his mind. Likewise, he may have composed this work after those men had died, against whom, while they were alive, he had not yet disputed, being still younger. But he did dispute against their disciples, Nestorius and Theodoret.
Second, it can be objected that the passage is corrupt, and that the word “Areopagite” should be deleted. I should like the ancient copies to be consulted. For it can happen that the passage is not at all corrupt, but that Liberatus was in the error of those who thought that Dionysius the Areopagite, after the Athenian chair, was transferred to the Corinthian chair before he migrated into Gaul.
Adeodatus, or Deusdedit, the venerable Bishop of the Church of Cagliari on the island of Sardinia, spoke thus in the Lateran Synod under Martin I, consultation 3:
“Your venerable blessedness, receiving from the Lord the completed and shortened word, has concisely and at the same time diligently shown us, by what he has most prudently spoken at present, both the falsehood and the novelty which Cyrus and Sergius have most openly worked against the holy Fathers and dogmas of the Catholic Church. He has shown that they are entangled in the confession of heretics, by this: that according to the execrable Themistius and Severus they declare that there is one God-manly operation, and not one marvelous and wonderful in this respect, because in the indivisible union it shows without confusion two natural operations of one and the same Christ God, that is, the divine and the human, in the most true proof that the same one is naturally God and man. This, indeed, as blessed Dionysius says, is the new thing surpassing all novelties.
“For by this composite word of his the aforesaid Father taught, not the destruction of either, but the indivisible unity. He wished to show true union, but not any diminution of the natures, which are substantially preserved in the one Christ God, or of his natural operations. Cyrus and Sergius, denying these operations by their own writings, which have been reread at present, and for this reason also adulterating the testimonies of the holy Fathers, have deservedly been condemned by your pious apostolic sentence. We also, in agreement with it, condemn them for that reason; and also Pyrrhus, the successor of Sergius, because he too is known no less to have received Cyrus together with Sergius, and he took pains to advocate for him in the aforesaid seventh chapter.
“And this, although in writing he bears witness against him, because he changed the expression of blessed Dionysius and because he was justly rebuked for this kind of change by Sophronius of blessed memory. For Pyrrhus writes thus into one dogmatic volume of his: ‘The most reverend Sophronius criticized only one chapter, namely because it falsified the testimony of Dionysius of blessed memory by the substitution of one word. In this the aforesaid man said fitting and cautious things, in which he asserts: But with God made man, he brought forth to us a certain new God-manly operation. The volume, indeed, contained “one” named according to truth in place of “new”; but not maliciously, far be it, according to my word. Rather, because “new” cannot be understood otherwise than as “one,” this word was put by the most holy Cyrus. For since the blessed Doctor, through the denial of exalted things, constructed one confession and expressed this individually, what else did he disclose more clearly by a certain word than that one operation should be confessed, because Christ is one?’”
Behold, by his own words Pyrrhus has professed most openly both that the expression of blessed Dionysius was falsified by Cyrus, and that Cyrus was deservedly rebuked on that account, and so forth.
He is treating that passage of Dionysius from the fourth Letter to Gaius, which the Monothelites, after corrupting it and citing it badly, were misusing against the truth of the twofold will in Christ.