of a man to the dignity of being the God-Man. In all these cases, only the second part of the hymn was taken seriously. Against this tripartite heretical front, orthodoxy had the advantage in the fray that it took the text á la lettre, the intrinsic difficulty of its particular interpretation notwithstanding. It was necessary to steer a narrow course. On the one hand, God’s changelessness must not be defended in such a manner that in the pre-mundane Logos nothing real took place. On the other hand,