Felix, bishop, to Peter, bishop of Antioch.1

Lamentation: What the Church Nourished, Peter Has Destroyed in a Moment

Who shall give water to my head, and a fountain of tears to my eyes? (Jer. 9:1) What worthy weeping shall I bring to my soul, grieving with the holy Catholic and apostolic Church of our Lord and Savior Christ? For she, weeping, has wept over her sons and her daughters, and there is none to console her from all who love her (Lam. 1:2). All the tyrants and heresiarchs persecuting her have laid hold of her through you, most honored brother, and, afflicting her, have become at her head (cf. Lam. 1:5). All her beauty, so far as is in you, has been reduced to nothing; and her enemies, seeing, have rejoiced over the ruin of her sons. For those whom she had cherished, whom she had nourished, whom she had brought to the measure of their age and fed with milk by prophetic and apostolic doctrines — those you have killed with poison in a single moment.

For just as fishermen cover the hook with bait and catch the fish unawares, so you have introduced an addition into the angelic praise, and have contrived a dire impiety into the Trisagion supplication under pretext of piety.

The Catalog of Heresies Revived

For We have received letters from several Eastern provinces, signifying to Us how your veneration has taken up again the long-dormant dogma of Valentinus, and how the incarnation of the Savior is mocked by you; and that you have fallen into the dogmas of the Manichaeans, of Arius, of Apollinaris, and of Paul of Samosata. For to say that the only-begotten Son and Our Lord Jesus Christ is not perfect in deity and perfect in humanity, nor that He Himself underwent the passion of the cross, but [to teach instead] one incarnate nature of the Word of God and a body of the Lord without soul and without mind — strengthens the heresy of Apollinaris.

For he [Apollinaris] was ignorant that from the very beginnings of the world’s birth, first the soul of our first parent died — or was cast into death — and only then the body. For it was said to him by God: On whatever day you eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall die the death (Gen. 2:17). Accordingly, by the sentence pronounced against him by God, on that very [day] he died according to the soul; for the death of his body came only after nine hundred and thirty years. Therefore [Christ] did not take up the gift in half, but took all Adam at once from the womb of the Virgin — so that even the whole [Adam] that had been lost He might save whole.2 For this reason the Lord Himself said: I lay down My soul for the sheep (John 10:15).

The Trisagion Addition Entails Tritheism; Scripture Preaches One God

You wish, likewise, to renew the dogmas of Valentinus and of Marcion, and of the Manichaeans, and of the pagans. For if there is a God who has died divisibly and substantially, then the Holy Spirit likewise will be found God divisibly and substantially; and so, by your reasoning and theirs, there will be three gods, and by this the error of many gods will prevail — and, so far as is in you, that [word] will be emptied: Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one Lord (Deut. 6:4). Likewise what Jeremiah says: This is our God; none other shall be reckoned beside Him (Bar. 3:36). Likewise the Lord: That they may know You the only true God (John 17:3).

And while Scripture preaches one God — the holy and indivisible Trinity — you and those heresiarchs who were before you have dared to dogmatize three gods: saying that there is another God the Father apart from the Son, and another God the Son apart from the Father, and again another God the Holy Spirit apart from the Father and the Son; and that one is mortal and newly born, but another eternal and immortal. By these noxious words of yours, you would think contrary to the Fathers who came together at Nicaea and at Constantinople and at Chalcedon, who strengthened [the doctrine of] the consubstantial and preached one deity of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and confounded the madness of Arius.

If One of the Trinity Suffered: The Consubstantial Is Dissolved

But you have dared to say, in church, that one of the uncreated and indivisible Trinity underwent the passion3; and by this you also strive to dissolve the consubstantial and to subject God to number. For if the one of the holy and coeternal Trinity who was crucified is God — this is the Son — but there are two others of the holy Trinity, the Father and the Holy Spirit; and if [then] they are called gods and not (as true reasoning has it) God, as those who themselves looked upon and were ministers of the Word have handed down to us (cf. Luke 1:2) — you are found to dissolve the consubstantial also; for mortal and immortal can no longer be consubstantial. And so the plurality of gods will be strengthened, while three gods are injected into Christian ears.

The Word’s Impassibility; The Animated Body’s Passion

Since, therefore, it is written: The Word was made flesh, and The Word was God (John 1:14, 1:1); no other God the Word besides the Father shall be found — Word not simply, but the substantial Word; and He shall be found God the Son, that from our own lowliness we may recognize the identity of substance of the Father and of the Word and of the Holy Spirit. For we ourselves, likewise, are only known to others through our own word.

Since, therefore, the only-begotten Son of God, in the respect in which He is Word, cannot suffer in His own substance — lest the passion be referred back to the substance of the Almighty God the Father (for the deity of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit is one) — but suffers in His own animated body, which the substantial Word of God Himself, joining [it] to Himself from the very womb of the holy and undefiled Virgin, brought forth from a woman. Concerning whom the prophets, breathed upon by the Holy Spirit, sang: God of hosts, turn back; look from heaven and see, and visit this vine; and perfect it, which Your right hand has planted; and upon the Son of man, whom You have confirmed for Yourself (Ps. 80:14–15) — calling the vine and the Son of man whom the Word has confirmed the salvific incarnation of the Word, that He might shatter the bars of hell and give life to those who from the [beginning of the] age lay dead. Therefore the Lord Himself was saying to His disciples: I am the vine, you are the branches, and My Father is the vinedresser (John 15:5, 15:1); and The Son of man shall be betrayed into the hands of sinners (Matt. 26:45). For the Father’s most intimate substantial Word and God, descending through the hearing of the holy Virgin, worked ineffably the conception.

The Two Senses of the Only-Begotten

Therefore, in that respect in which the only-begotten Son is consubstantial with the Father and one with the indivisible Trinity, He remained uncreated and invisible, impassible and immortal. What therefore is uncreated and immortal, do not apply to the creature; nor proceed to confirm a plurality of gods, saying that one of the Holy Trinity has died. Again, in that respect in which He was born of a woman — and is partaker of our substance and of our generation, without sin — He sustained the passion. Moreover, that the Son of God is not only consubstantial with us but also kindred according to the flesh, the Lord Himself teaches — now in the Gospel, saying to those who had believed in Him, I am the vine, you the branches (John 15:5); now in the Psalms: I will announce Your name to My brethren (Ps. 22:22).

Whence could such ruinous pride creep in upon you, that you should think yourself wiser and more intelligent than even the holy angels themselves? Over such things I groan; in these I lament the enemies of the cross of Christ, whose end is destruction, and whose god is the belly, and whose glory is in their own confusion (Phil. 3:18–19). Did you not consider what grave torment he makes himself liable to, who scandalizes even one single [soul] of those who believe in Our Lord Jesus Christ? But, incautiously, you — like the serpent [whispering] to Eve — have poured the poisons of error into the ears of the multitude of the faithful, and have corrupted the most holy form of praise handed down from the angels, inserting into it: You who were crucified for us.

The Trisagion Handed Down from the Angels: The Proclus Tradition

Have you not then noticed that you surpass in impiety Paul of Samosata, and Photinus, and Artemon, who posited two sons of God — one before the ages, the other newly born — when you yourself have introduced plurality into the Trinity, saying two sons of God, one strong [= mighty], the other crucified? And in addition to this, you contend to cast the most faithful flock of Christ into the opinion of Manichaeus, who asserts the Holy Spirit crucified. For when, after the [word] “Holy Immortal” — which is the Holy Spirit — you then insert “You who were crucified for us, have mercy on us,” you seem to insinuate to the people a quaternity, not a Trinity. Surely, if this praise had flowed from human tradition, you would not so incautiously have inserted the cross into the praise at the point where the designation of the Son — namely, “strong” — is placed. But since this praise has flowed to us from the angels — who before the cross were saying Holy, holy, holy (Isa. 6:3), as Isaiah was granted to behold; but who after the cross cried out with praise, Holy God, Holy Strong, Holy Immortal —

[thus:] when Constantinople was being shaken by an earthquake and the people were praying in the open field, a little child — the whole people looking on together with Proclus, bishop of the city — was snatched up into heaven for one hour, and there learned this hymn.4 And descending again, he announced what he had heard in the upper air, saying that from heaven, as if from a multitude of singers, such praises had sounded in his ears, and that it had been said to him that he should declare the laudation to the people. Which when the people had begun [to sing], they received the city back; and with God made propitious through this praise, they were delivered from the imminent wrath.

But you — how rashly, as with the rest of the divine Scriptures, so also with the angels’ praise — have you presumed to pervert [it]? Who, therefore, would not groan at such things? Who would not lament? What sorrow shall be found like this, like the sorrow of the Church of Our Lord and Savior Christ?

The Baptismal Pacts Betrayed

Look at yourself, appointed to be a light to those who are in darkness, and an instructor of the unwise (cf. Rom. 2:19–20): nay, you are an instructor of foolishness, turning light into darkness. See how the peoples once illuminated by you — who tasted the good things: God’s words, God’s commandments, God’s prophecies, God’s preachings, the apostolic and evangelical doctrines — are being the more perverted by you, and taught not only to crucify the Son of God [afresh] and hold Him up as a spectacle (cf. Heb. 6:6), but also to think contrary to the divine Scriptures, and to deny the pacts which they made when approaching holy baptism.

For when, in the presence of all the heavenly powers, in the presence of the apostolic and evangelical orders, at the time of holy baptism, they promised to believe in one Almighty God — you have now taught them to believe in three gods. Again, when they promised to believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God incarnate, and made man of the Holy Spirit and Mary the Virgin — you teach them not to say that the Lord Jesus Christ Son of God suffered the cross (who is God according to the eternal and impassible generation on the one side, and the same Man according to that [generation] by which He came forth in the last days from a mother, according to which also He bore the passion), but that one of the Trinity, who is the very Word of God, has died. They confessed again the Holy Spirit, life-giving and immortal, saying they believe in the Holy Spirit, Lord and Life-giver; and you posit the Holy Spirit to be mortal when you say: Holy Immortal, You who were crucified for us.

The Church Calls Peter Back; Rome Calls Him to Think With Her

Flee, I beseech, this kind of error. You have fallen — do not persist in ruin. You have sinned — sin now no longer. The holy Church of God awaits you; she longs to embrace you, repenting of your empty propositions and preaching divine things together with her concerning Christ, and not denying His ensouled incarnation — according to which also He is recorded to have suffered. And she cries out to you through Us: Come to Me all you who labor, and I will refresh you (Matt. 11:28). God does not wish, dearest brother, the death of the sinner, but that he be converted and live (cf. Ezek. 18:23).

Be mindful that Jesus Christ rose from the dead (cf. 2 Tim. 2:8), according to the Gospel. Remember the blessed Matthew writing: The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham (Matt. 1:1). Recall what Paul writes: Set apart for the gospel of God, which God Himself had promised in the holy Scriptures concerning His Son, who was made for Him from the seed of David according to the flesh, who was predestined Son of God (Rom. 1:1–4). Remember also John crying out: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God (John 1:1); and that it was made flesh, a man having been assumed; and that no one has ever seen God (John 1:18).

These things I have written to you together with the synod here present, meeting before God and the holy angels, that you may teach these things — that you may think these things with Us — so that Our unbroken faith may remain unto the glory of God.