The Lives of the Saints Volume 1 - St. Patrick's Basilica

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by the elders, in order to help their gross minds in the continual
practice of the presence of God, to represent him to themselves under a
corporeal human figure, by which they at length really believed him to
be not a pure spirit, but corporeal, like a man; because man was created
to his image. Theophilus immediately condemned, and the whole church
exploded, this monstrous absurdity. St. Cyril wrote a letter to confute
it to Calosyrius, bishop of Arsinoe, showing that man is framed
according to the Divine image, not in his body, for God being the most
pure Spirit, can have no sensible figure, but in being endued with
reason, and capable of virtue. In the same letter he rejects a second
error of other ignorant monks, who imagined that the blessed Eucharist
lost its consecration if kept to the following day. He reprehends other
anchorets, who, upon a pretence of continual prayer, did not work at
certain hours of the day, making it a cloak of gluttony and laziness.
The saint has left us another book against the Anthropomorphites, in
which he proves that man is made to God's image, by bearing the
resemblance of his sanctity, by grace and virtue. So he says the angels
are likewise made to his likeness. He answers in this book twenty-seven
dogmatical questions put to him by the same monks.
He wrote, in the years 437 and 438, two Dogmatical Letters (pp. 51 and
52) against certain propositions of Theodorus of Mopsuestia, the
forerunner of Nestorius, though he had died in the communion of the
church.
The book on the Trinity cannot be St. Cyril's; for it refutes the
Monothelite heresy, not known before the year 620.
Julian the Apostate, while he was preparing for the Persian war, had,
with the assistance of Maximus and his other impious philosophers,
published three books against the holy gospels, which were very
prejudicial to weak minds; though nothing was advanced in them that had
not been said by Celsus, and fully answered by Origen in his books
against that philosopher, and by Eusebius in his Evangelical
Preparation. St. Cyril, out of zeal, composed ten books against Julian,
which he dedicated to the emperor Theodosius; and also sent to John of
Antioch to show the sincerity of his reconciliation. In this work he has
preserved us Julian's words, omitting only his frequent repetitions and
puerilities. Nor have we any thing else of that work of the Apostate,
but what is preserved here by St. Cyril. He begins by warning the
emperor against bad company, by which Julian fell into such extravagant
impieties. In the first book he justifies Moses's history of the world,
and proves with great erudition from profane history that its events are
posterior, and the heathen sages and historians younger than that divine
lawgiver, from whom they all borrowed many things. In the second, he
compares the sacred history of the creation, which Julian had pretended