Monophysitism Past and Present: A Study in Christology

by A. A. Luce

CHAPTER III

MONOPHYSITE DOCTRINE

The distinctive doctrine of monophysitism, that from which the name of the heresy is taken, is the assertion that there is but one nature, the divine nature, in Christ. There existed some difference of opinion among the monophysites as to whether any degree of reality might be ascribed to the human nature. Some were prepared to allow it conceptual reality; they would grant that Christ had been diphysite momentarily, that He was "out of two natures." But that admission is quite inadequate. It amounts to no more than the paltry concession that Christ's human nature before the incarnation is conceivable as a separate entity. All monophysites united in condemning the diphysite doctrine that after the incarnation Christ was and is "in two natures." Such a Christ they would not worship. It was "the image with two faces that the Council of Chalcedon had set up."[[1]] They adopted the Athanasian phrase, "One incarnate nature of God the Word," as their battle-cry.

Monophysitism can make out a strong prima facie case. It is attractive at first sight. The heretical formula seems simpler and more natural than the catholic. The unity of nature appears a corollary of the unity of person. Human personality is ordinarily assumed to be monophysite; so it is natural to make the same assumption as to divine personality. The simplicity of the doctrine is, however, all on the surface. It will not bear examination. As a definition of Christian faith it is useless. It cannot account for the recorded facts of Christ's life. The facts of His body, of His mind, of His sufferings refuse to fit into it. It affords no foundation for belief in His transcendent work. No intelligible doctrine of redemption can be built upon it. It contains no germ of hope for mankind. Therefore the Church in the name of Christ and on behalf of humanity rejected it.

Although the heresy has been officially condemned, it should none the less be studied. It is improbable that any one in our time will defend the formula, or openly profess the doctrines that follow from it. But, though not recognised as such, it is an ever-present and instant menace to the Faith. Monophysite tendencies are inherent in religious thought. The metaphysical idea, on which it rests, still has a powerful hold over the human mind. Spiritually-minded men are especially liable to this form of error. It is a mistake to think that Christological questions were settled once and for all in the fifth century. Each generation has to settle them afresh. Accordingly, to exhibit the consequences of the monophysite formula, to show how wrong abstract ideas develop into wrong concrete ideas and falsify Christian practice, is a task of practical and present-day importance.

CLASSIFICATION OF MONOPHYSITE ERRORS

Two classes of erroneous beliefs result from a misconception of the relation between God and man in Christ. There arise, on the one hand, false opinions about the deity of Christ, and on the other, false opinions as to His manhood. We shall adopt this classification as we investigate the doctrinal consequences of the monophysite formula. It is the method followed in one of the earliest systematic criticisms of the heresy. Leo's Tome, or letter to Flavian, contains a lucid statement of the catholic doctrine of the incarnation, and an acute analysis of the system of Eutyches, the heresiarch. He summarises the errors of Eutyches under two heads; there are two main counts in his indictment of the heresy. Eutyches, he contends, makes Jesus Christ "deus passibilis et homo falsus." Eutyches and his followers compromised both deity and humanity. The deity becomes passible, the humanity unreal. All the monophysite misbeliefs can be classified under one or other of these two heads.

THE CONCEPT "IMPASSIBILITY" AS APPLIED TO DEITY

We shall take first those errors that compromise the nature of the deity, and shall preface our analysis by an explanation of the meaning of the term "deus impassibilis." The impassibility of God is the corner-stone of spiritual monotheism. Christianity owes it, as a philosophic doctrine, largely to Aristotle. He conceived deity as "actus purus," as the One who moves without being moved, a "causa sui." The popular gods of Greece were passible; they were possible objects of sense; they were acted on largely as man is acted on. They had a beginning, and were subject to many of the processes of time. They were swayed by human motives. They were, at times, angry, afraid, unsatisfied, ambitious, jealous. Aristotle gave to the world the conception of a transcendent God, a being who is real and yet is "without body, parts and passions," who cannot receive idolatrous worship, and is not an object of sense. Impassibility was one of the highest attributes of this being. The attribute does not involve or imply absence of feeling. Originally it had no reference to feeling, in the psychological sense of that word. It certainly excludes incidentally the lower, specifically human feelings, feelings caused by external stimuli, feelings due to want or to lack of power. It does not exclude the higher affections from the deity. Even in the nóêsis noêseôs of Aristotle, there is room for the transcendent bliss of divine self-contemplation. Much more in the Christian God is there room for spontaneous feeling, springing from His own nature, the necessary concomitant of thought and will. Impassibility is a comprehensive attribute. Originally negative, it soon acquired a rich positive connotation. An impassible God is one who is outside space and time. The attribute connotes creative power, eternity, infinity, permanence. A passible God is corruptible, i.e. susceptible to the processes of becoming, change, and decay. If to-day theists have to be on their guard against debased conceptions of deity, in the plausible garb of an "invisible king," of a finite or suffering God, much more was such caution necessary in the early centuries of the Christian era. Christians who came daily and hourly into contact with polytheistic beliefs and practices had to be very jealous for the concept of impassibility. It represented to them all that was distinctive in the highest region of their Faith.

Monophysitism, as we proceed to show, compromised this article of the Faith. Its adherents did not, perhaps, do so intentionally. In fact, the first generation of monophysites maintained that their definition safeguarded the impassibility. It was zeal for the honour of the Son of God that induced them to deny Him all contact with humanity. Their good intentions, however, could not permanently counteract the evil inherent in their system. In later generations the evil came to the surface. Theopaschitism, the doctrine that openly denies the impassibility of the godhead, flourished in the monophysite churches.

MONISM ENTAILS A DEBASED CONCEPTION OF DEITY

The metaphysical basis of monophysitism made this result inevitable. Extremes meet. Extreme spirituality readily passes into its opposite. It cuts the ground from under its own feet. It soars beyond its powers, and falls into the mire of materialism. Illustrations of this fact can be found in the history of philosophy. The Stoics, for instance, contrived to be both pantheists and materialists. Coming nearer to our own time, we find Hegelianism explained in diametrically opposite ways. After Hegel's death his disciples split into opposing camps; one party maintained that the real was spirit, the other that it was matter. Each party claimed the authority of the master for their view. The divergence is easy to explain. From spiritual monism it is a short step to materialistic monism. For the monist, all is on one level of being. He may by constant effort keep that level high. But gravity will act. We are more prone to degrade God to our level, than to rise to His. The same truth can be put in abstracto. Unless the relation between God and the world be preserved as a true relation, the higher term will sooner or later fall to the level of the lower, and be lost in it. This rule holds as well in movements of religious thought. The monophysite strove for a lofty conception of deity but achieved a low one. He undermined the doctrine of impassibility by the very measures he took to secure it.

In the technical language of Christology the monophysites' debased conception of deity was a consequence of "confounding the natures." Attributes and actions, belonging properly only to Christ's humanity, were ascribed recklessly to His divinity. The test phrase "theotokos," invaluable as a protest against Nestorianism, became a precedent for all sorts of doctrinal extravagancies. The famous addition to the Trisagion, "who wast crucified for us," which for a time won recognition as sound and catholic, was first made by the monophysite Bishop of Antioch.[[2]] Both these phrases have scriptural authority, and they are justified by the communicatio idiomatum. But they are liable to misuse and misinterpretation. All depended on how they were said and who said them. The monophysite meant one thing by them, the catholic another. The arrière pensée of the monophysite gave them a wrong turn. He was always on the look-out for paradox in Christ's life. He emphasised such phrases as appeared to detract from the reality of His human experiences. He spoke of Christ as "ruling the universe when He lay in the manger," or as "directing the affairs of nations from the Cross." The catholic can approve these phrases; in the mouth of a monophysite they have a heretical sound. They suggest a passible God; they degrade the infinite to the level of the finite. The monophysite confounds the natures, and so he has no right to appeal to the communicatio idiomatum. Unless the idiomata are admitted as such, unless they are preserved in their distinctness, there can be no communicatio between them. If they are fused, they cannot act and react upon each other. The monophysite, by identifying the natures, forfeits the right to use the term "Theotokos" and the Trisagion addition. On his lips their inevitable implication is a finite suffering God.

MONOPHYSITISM AND THE DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY

Monophysitism was not originally or per se a Trinitarian heresy. Equally with catholics and Nestorians its adherents accepted the Nicene definition. They professed to believe in one God in three co-equal persons. This belief, firmly held in all that it involves, would have kept them from attributing passibility to the Godhead, and ultimately have neutralised the errors of their Christology. But their Christology corrupted their theology. Abandoning all vital relation between God and man in Christ, they abandoned the relation in the Godhead. The internal and external relations of the Godhead are mutually dependent. If there be no trinity of persons, the incarnation is impossible. Were God a bare monad, He could not impart Himself and remain Himself. The fact that there are related persons in the deity is the only justification for the use of the phrases discussed in the previous paragraph. When the catholic says, "God was born, suffered, died," he is right, because his presupposition is right. When the monophysite uses the same words, he is wrong, because his presupposition is wrong. The catholic preserves in the background of his thought the distinction between the ousía and the threefold hypóstasis, between the essential godhead and the three persons. So he is in no danger of ascribing passion to the essence or to the persons of Father or Holy Spirit. When he says "God was born," he is compressing two statements into one. He means "Christ was born, and Christ was God." Not in respect of what He has in common with the other persons of the Trinity, but in respect of His property of sonship did He lower Himself to the plane of suffering. The catholic holds not a suffering God, but a suffering divine person. He maintains an impassible God, but a passible Christ. A dead God is a contradiction in terms; a Christ who died is the hope of humanity.

Monophysite theology became involved in further embarrassments. Unwillingness to attribute passibility to God, coupled with the desire to remain in some sort trinitarians, forced many of the monophysites into the Sabellian position. Deity, they said in effect, did not suffer in the second person of the trinity, because there is no such person. The persons of the trinity are simply characters assumed by the monadic essence, or aspects under which men view it. On this showing, the Logos, who was incarnate, had no personal subsistence. The relation between God and man ever remains impersonal. Christ, qua divine, was only an aspect or effluence of deity. This, for the monophysite, was the one alternative to the doctrine of a passible God. He was faced with a desperate dilemma. If he retained his belief in a transcendent God, he must surrender belief in a triune God. He could choose between the two; but his Christology permitted no third choice. For him, the only alternative to a finite God was a lone God. As a result monophysite theology oscillated between denial of the impassibility of God and denial of his three-fold personality. In either case the orthodox doctrine of the godhead was abandoned.

One of the stock questions propounded by the catholics to the monophysites was, "Was the trinity incomplete when the Son of God was on earth?" The question is crudely expressed, as it ignores the type of existence proper to spiritual personality; but it contains a sufficiently sound ad hominem argument. The monophysite could not say "yes," or he would then be driven to assert a passible God. If he said "no," his reply was tantamount to the assertion that the whole essence of the Godhead was incarnate. The logic of this dilemma was so cogent that not a few monophysites succumbed to it, and adopted a position similar to that of the earlier Patripassianists. These seceded from the monophysite church, and founded an independent sect, called the Theopaschites. As often happens, the sect is, doctrinally, more representative than the parent body. The Theopaschites were the thinkers who had the courage to push the monophysite doctrines to their logical conclusions. Those who did not secede, unable to defend their own doctrinal position, retaliated with the counter-charge of tetratheism. This stroke was simply a confession of weakness. Monism was strangling their Christianity at every turn. Instead of breaking free from it, they pretended that their opponents were polytheists. The catholic, however, was neither monist nor pluralist. The incarnation was not the addition of a fourth divine being to the trinity. The essence of the godhead remained complete, unchanged and impassible; while the hypostatic union of God and man in Christ made possible the assumption of a passible nature by the person of the Son of God.

MONOPHYSITISM AND ISLAM—SABELLIANISM THE CONNECTING LINK

It is in place here to point out the somewhat intimate connection that existed between monophysitism and Islam. The monophysites held the outposts of the Empire. Mahomet came into contact with them, and it was probably from them that he formed his conception of Christian doctrine. The later history of the monophysite churches shows that they often secured a large measure of toleration at the hands of the Caliphs, while the diphysites were being rigorously persecuted. Lapses to Islam were not infrequent, and in some periods apostasy on a large scale occurred. Cases are on record even of monophysite patriarchs who abjured their faith and joined the followers of the Prophet. The connection between monophysitism and Islam was not fortuitous. There was a doctrinal affinity between them. Both systems were rigidly monotheistic. Both degraded the notion of deity by a perverse attempt to exalt it. Both cut redemption and mediation out of their religion.

The family likeness between the two systems does not extend beyond the realm of the doctrine of supreme deity. In other respects the religion of the sword and the religion of love have little or nothing in common. Crescent and Cross are poles asunder. The monophysites as a body remained nominally and in intention Christians and trinitarians. But in the doctrinal area specified the resemblance holds. It could hardly be otherwise. Sabellian tendencies were always present and powerful in the monophysite communion, and Sabellianism is a long step in the direction of Islam. Sabellius taught in effect, "Allah is one." The three persons, for him, were only aspects of the one indivisible deity. There are no distinct entities corresponding to the names of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Sabellianism is intimately associated with monism in all its phases. Monophysitism being essentially monist could not escape the taint. Whether Sabellianism made the heretics monophysites, or monophysitism made them Sabellians, we need not inquire. The two creeds are bound up in the same bundle by the tie of monism. The relation of the Son to the Father and the relation of the Son to humanity are vitally connected. Misconception of the one relation entails misconception of the other. Denial of relation in the godhead goes hand in hand with denial of relation in Christ. If the theologian reduces the latter to bare unity, he does the same for the former. Catholic Christology is thus a necessary deduction from trinitarian dogma. Nicaea necessitated Chalcedon. To safeguard the distinction of persons in the godhead, a distinction in the natures of Christ was essential. To preserve intact the latter distinction, the proprium of the Son and His personal subsistence had to be kept distinct from the proprium and subsistence of the Father.

THE CHRISTOLOGICAL ERRORS OF MONOPHYSITISM

We leave here the area of theology and come to that of Christology. We have exhibited the monophysite errors with respect to the doctrine of primal deity; we now proceed to analyse their views with respect to the incarnate Christ. The former subject leads the thinker into deep water; the layman is out of his depth in it; so it does not furnish material for a popular controversy. It is otherwise with the latter subject. Here the issue is narrowed to a point. It becomes a question of fact, namely, "Was Christ a real man?" The question and most of the answers given to it are readily intelligible, and they naturally gave rise to heated controversy. Theopaschitism is, as we have shown, a tendency inherent in the heresy, but one slow to come to the surface, and one easily counter-acted and suppressed by the personal piety of the monophysite. Its docetism, the assertion of the unreality of Christ's human nature, lies on the surface. No amount of personal piety can neutralise it. It has had, and still has, a crippling effect on the faith of devout Christians. Even where it is not carried to the length of formal heresy, it spreads a haze of unreality over the gospel story, and dulls the edge of belief.

The second count of Leo's charge against the monophysites was, it will be remembered, that their presentation of Christ made Him "homo falsus." Under this heading "homo falsus" may be classed a wide group of erroneous tenets, ranging from the crudities of early docetism to the subtleties of Apollinarianism. We propose to sketch those of major importance. No attempt will be made to take them in their historical order or historical setting. Further, it is not implied that they all formed part of the official doctrine of the monophysite church. The standard of belief in that communion was constantly varying, and the history of its dogma would need a work to itself. We shall deal with those Christological errors, which, whether part of the official monophysite creed or not, are logical results of the monophysite formula.

Unreality may be predicated of Christ's human nature as a whole, or in respect of its parts. Consubstantiality with humanity may be denied of the whole of his human nature; or deficiency in one or other of the essential constituents of human nature may be alleged. We shall deal first with those errors that concern the entire nature, coming later to the errors in respect of one or more of its several parts.

Suspicion of the reality of Christ's human nature as a whole is characteristic of all monophysite thought. This suspicion, not always formulated or expressed, is everywhere present. If the monophysites admitted the fact of His true manhood, they denied or neglected the religious value of that fact. Their spurious spirituality rebelled against a dogma which seemed to tie the infinite down to a point in history. The fact that the Son of God lived a perfect human life contained no inspiration for them. They idealised the incarnation. It was not for them a historical event. This is a corollary to the proposition, maintained by their great champion, Philoxenus, that "no addition to His person took place." It is tantamount to saying that the union of divine and human in Christ is purely conceptual. When the monophysite faced the question, "What change in Christ did the incarnation effect?" his formula constrained him to reply, "It made no change." The deity of the person was not denied. The pre-existent Logos and the Christ who walked in Galilee were admittedly one and the same. The second person of the trinity and Jesus of Nazareth were one personality. If Bethlehem made no change in that personality, it was purposeless, and the import of the incarnation disappears.

THE MONOPHYSITE THEORY OF A COMPOSITION OF NATURES

For the consistent monophysites, then, the human nature, as a psychic entity with peculiar properties, did not survive the incarnation. They did, however, allow it a verbal reality. They admitted a composition of natures, and this composition provided for them whatever degree of reality the incarnation possessed. On this point their Christology passed through several stages of development, the later stages showing progressive improvement on the earlier. They distinguished three senses of the word "composition." First, they said, it might mean "absorption," as when a drop of water is absorbed in a jar of wine. Second, it might imply the transmutation of constituent particles, as when a third unlike thing is formed from two. Thirdly, there is composition when, from the association of two whole and entire things, a third whole and entire compound thing is formed without loss to the components. They illustrated the third mode of composition by the union in man of soul and body. The pre-Eutychian monophysites regarded the hypostatic union as a composition in the first sense of the word. They spoke of Christ's human nature as absorbed in the divine, as is "a drop of vinegar in the ocean." Eutyches adopted the term in its second sense. He taught that the Word became flesh[[3]] "as the atmosphere assumes bodily form and becomes rain or snow under the influence of the wind, and as water becomes ice by reason of the cold air." Philoxenus in a later generation saw that both these positions were wrong and the similes misleading. He taught a hypostatic union totally devoid of confusion or loss or commutation of the elements of the two natures. To illustrate his meaning he used the simile supplied by the "Athanasian" creed, "as the reasonable soul and flesh is one man, so God and Man is one Christ." This position is a vast improvement on that of the original monophysites. It was ground gained to secure the admission that in any sense Christ was very man. But the monophysites never learned the true manner of the union, namely, that Christ was "one; not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by taking of the Manhood into God; one altogether; not by confusion of Substance but by unity of Person."

Read in this connection the assertion that God and man is one Christ, "as the reasonable soul and flesh is one man," is orthodox; read apart from this context, it is ambiguous. If the simile be kept as a simile, as a mere suggestion or hint as to how, in general, two may compose one and yet remain two, then no exception can be taken to it. If, however, the clause be interpreted as a proportion sum, assigning corresponding values to the different terms, then it savours strongly of Apollinarianism. Most monophysites, like many moderns, probably understood it in the mathematical sense. Christ, they argued, was God and man, just as man is rational soul and body; the terms are in proportion; therefore the divine nature was the rational soul, and the human nature was the body. They forgot that the free act of the whole divine person in assuming man underlies the union and makes it efficacious; they gave sárx; the narrow meaning of sôma, they set before themselves the picture, not of the infinite robing in the finite, but of the union of mind and matter. Consequently they habitually spoke of the Logos, as assuming, not man or a human nature, but a body.

Such in its varying phases was the monophysite doctrine of composition. At its worst, it contained a direct denial of the real humanity of Christ. At its best, it falls far short of the catholic doctrine of His real, perfect and complete humanity. The permanent assumption of human nature into the transcendent personality had no meaning for the heretic party. If it had taken place, it was, they thought, merely momentary, with no after-effects, the passing of a summer cloud across the face of the sun.

We have considered the monophysites' view of Christ's human nature, regarded as an integral psychic entity. It is evident that they either undervalued it or denied its existence. The more consistent thinkers of their party maintained that the incarnation had made no difference in the being of Christ, and that therefore His human nature had no objective reality. Those who shrank from carrying the doctrine to that length conceded to the orthodox that the incarnation had to some extent modified the being of Christ, that its net result was a composition. Further analysis showed that this concession was rendered nugatory; that in whatever sense the word "composition" was taken, it was inadequate to express the hypostatic union; that the composition proved in its first significance illusory, in its second, hybridous, in its third, Apollinarianist. We pass on now to review the human nature in its constituent parts, and it will be seen that the heretical formula undermines faith in respect of each several part.

THE "PARTS" OF HUMAN NATURE

From the standpoint of psychology human nature is divisible into parts. The division must not be taken as absolute; for the whole is a unity, and the parts are not discrete quanta. The division is rather a classification of psychic states according to predominating features. The classification corresponds, however, to the facts of experience, and so psychology is justified in making use of it. We shall adopt it in our investigation of the psychology of Christ. The sharpest dividing line is that between immaterial and material, between soul and body. The states of the soul fall into three well-marked groups, thought, will, and feeling. The physical and the psychic are not always distinguishable. Still more uncertain and tentative is the identification in the psychic of cognitive, volitional, and emotional faculties. But in every man these parts are found. They are constituents of human nature. There may be other elements as yet unanalysed; but there can be no complete humanity that is deficient in respect of any of these parts. We propose to take them singly in the above order, to show their existence in the historic Christ, and to expose the monophysite attempts to explain them away.

CHRIST'S BODY

It is obvious to an unprejudiced reader of the gospels that Christ's pre-resurrection body was real and normal. It was an organism of flesh and blood, of the same constitution and structure as ours. It occupied space, and was ordinarily subject to the laws of space. It was visible and tangible. It shared the natural processes of birth, growth, and metabolism. At the resurrection a catastrophic change took place in it. It was still a body. It was still Christ's body. Continuity was preserved. The evidences of continuity were external, and so strong as to convince doubters. We cannot fathom either the change or the continuity. What we know is that after the resurrection the body was not so subject as before to the laws of space. It was, it would seem, of finer atoms and subtler texture. It had reached the height of physical being, and development apparently had ceased. It was the entelechy of the human body. It was still real, though no longer normal. To employ paradox, it was natural of the species "supernatural." It was the natural body raised to a higher power. It was natural to human denizens of a higher world. Body's function is two-fold. It both limits the soul and expresses it. It narrows the activity of the person to a point, and thus serves as a fine instrument for action upon matter. At the same time it draws out the potentialities of the soul and fixes its development. The post-resurrection body was apparently less limitative and more expressive.

The foregoing considerations may be summed up in the form of three dogmata, all of which orthodox Christianity teaches. These are, first, that Christ's pre-resurrection body was real and natural; second, that His resurrected and ascended body is real and supernatural; third, that there was a real continuity, whether by development or by epigenesis between the two. In all these points the monophysites missed the truth. Their presuppositions misled them. As monists they were inclined to regard matter as sinful. They could not conceive the infinite donning a soiled robe. "Our body with its hateful wants" could not, they thought, be a tabernacle for the Logos. The idea of the native dignity of the human frame and of its being ennobled by the King's indwelling was completely foreign to the monophysites' ways of thinking.

Since such was the background of their thought it was inevitable that definitely heretical doctrines should result. In the first place we meet the flat denial of the reality of Christ's body. Even in apostolic days those who held this heresy were found. They denied that Christ had come in the flesh. They were styled docetists or phantasiasts. According to them the body had no objective reality. It was a phantom. Its reality was entirely subjective. It was the effect produced on the perceptions of those who associated with the mysterious spirit-being. The Logos, as viewed by the phantasiasts, at the incarnation struck His being into the bounds of time, but not of space. Divine personality, they thought, did not require and could not use a material medium. This doctrine was not part of the official monophysite creed; but, as pointed out in the previous chapter, monophysitism was a lineal descendant of docetism, and always showed traces of its lineage. The saying that, "Christ brought His body from heaven," was commonly attributed to Eutyches. He denied having said it, but, at any rate, the general feeling of his followers was that Christ's physical nature was divine and therefore not consubstantial with ours.

Such doctrines destroy the discipline of faith in the resurrection. The radical difference between the natural and the resurrection body is blurred by them. The immense change is abolished. The resurrection becomes purely a spiritual change, which even a non-Christian could accept. The body, according to the tenor of monophysite teaching, was spirit before the resurrection and spirit after it. Thus the ascension too becomes purely spiritual. It is shorn of half its significance. The Christian's hope for the human body rests on the fact that Christ returned to heaven with something that He did not bring from heaven, namely, a glorified human body. If He brought that body with Him from heaven, the main significance of His human dispensation falls to the ground. The incarnation becomes unreal, illusory, impotent.

An offshoot of docetism that flourished among the monophysites is the aphthartodocetic heresy. This is of considerable historical importance. Large numbers of the Syrian and Egyptian monophysites embraced it, and seceded from the parent church. It became part of the official creed of Armenian Christianity, and that church has not repudiated it to this day. There are good, though hardly conclusive, grounds for holding that the emperor Justinian, profound theologian and life-long champion of orthodoxy, was converted to the heretical theory in the last few months of his life.[[4]] Aphthartodocetism, affirming the reality of Christ's body, denies that it was subject to the wear and tear of life. The body, as this heresy taught, was superior to natural process; it was neither corrupted nor corruptible. The term "corruptibility" has the wide significance of organic process, that is the lot of all created living things. A milder form of the heresy asserted that Christ's body was corruptible but was not corrupted. Aphthartodocetism springs from a spurious spirituality, from a fastidiousness that has no place in true religion. It is symptomatic of Manicheanism, which associates matter with sin. Christians affirm sinlessness of Christ's humanity; they do not affirm immateriality of His body. The monophysites, in abandoning the true Christology, were predisposed to the infection of this heresy. A being in whom organic process was present seemed to these heretics no fit object of worship. They called the orthodox Ctistolatrae or Phthartolatrae, worshippers of the created or corruptible.

Monophysites of all shades of opinion united in condemning the practice of worshipping Christ's human nature. That practice was in their eyes both idle and injurious; idle, because the human nature did not exist as a separate entity; injurious, because it fixed the mind of the worshipper on the finite. In consequence they were much opposed to all observances based on a belief in His humanity. Images or other representations of Him in human form seemed to them idolatrous. The monophysite church was not directly concerned in the iconoclastic controversy, but their doctrines were indirectly responsible for it. In fact the great monophysites, Severus and Philoxenus, have been styled "the fathers of the iconoclasts."

MONOPHYSITISM BLIND TO THE DUAL CHARACTER OF CHRIST'S EXPERIENCE

Such were the difficulties and errors into which their Christology forced the monophysites with respect to Christ's body. Difficulties equally great and errors equally fatal attended their attempt to conceive the conjunction of psychic elements with the divine person. Their formula was too narrow. It compelled them to shut their eyes to one outstanding fact, namely, the duality of Christ's earthly experience. This fact confronts the reader on every page of the gospels. The duality is deep-seated; it extends to each psychic element, yet stops short of the personality. In the world of Christ's nature there are two hemispheres. His experiences are on two planes. In both of these hemispheres or planes we find thought, will, and feeling. His thought on the higher plane is radically different in mode and scope from His thought on the lower plane. The two are of a different order. The same difference holds with respect to the other two psychic elements. We propose to exemplify this assertion, first, in the case of cognition, and then in the case of will and feeling. This procedure will simplify the task of exposing the further consequences of the monophysite Christology.

THE DUALITY OF CHRIST'S COGNITION

The duality of Christ's intellectual experience is evident to a New Testament student who has any acquaintance with psychology. We find in Christ two cognitive faculties with two dominant universes of thought and knowledge. On occasions He speaks and acts as if He read at a glance all the secrets of nature and the human heart, as if all time past, present, and future was an open book to him, as if He were in the counsels of the Most High. On those occasions divine intuition superseded in Him the slow and faulty methods of human intelligence; thought was vision, intellect intuition, knowledge omniscience. Thus His divine nature cognised and knew. That, however, is only one half of the picture. On other occasions his mind appears to have been perfectly human. His intelligence and perceptive faculties differed not essentially from ours. He asked questions and sought information. He used human categories. He progressed in wisdom. The development of His mind was gradual. His knowledge was relative to His age and surroundings. Memory and obliviscence, those complementary and perhaps constituent elements of soul-being, attention, sensation, recognition, and discursive reasoning, all these exhibitions of the workings of the normal mind appeared in Christ. In this manner His human nature cognised and knew.

MONOPHYSITISM ENTAILS THE APOLLINARIAN VIEW OF CHRIST'S
HUMAN NATURE AS MERELY AN ANIMATED BODY

The Catholic welcomes these evidences of the duality of Christ's intellectual life. On the theoretical side, they confirm the central dogma of orthodox Christology. On the practical side, they give him authority for seeking Christ's sympathy in matters intellectual. He realises that since Christ understands the education of the mind and can share his intellectual difficulties, there is hope for the redemption and regeneration of the highest part of his nature. The monophysite finds neither support for his dogma, nor inspiration for life, in the fact that Christ had a human mind. He is blind to the fact. He has seen half the picture and regards it as the whole. His ideal is a being in whom intuition supersedes intellect, whose knowledge is immediate, absolute, and complete. The orthodox who held that Christ had and, at ordinary times, used a human reason, perfect of its kind, but still human in all the implications of the word, were in his eyes Agnoëtae; they were unbelievers who asserted the ignorance of Christ and set bounds to the vision and knowledge of the infinite. The monophysite would modify his opinions and approach the catholic position on other doctrinal points, but never on this. He might be persuaded to admit that Christ's body and "animal soul" were real and human, but to the consubstantiality of Christ's mind with man's he would not subscribe. The Apollinarian strain in monophysitism was persistent. The later monophysites never succeeded in banishing it from their system. By Apollinarianism the humanity of Christ is crippled in its highest member. It is a realm shorn of its fairest province. According to Apollinaris, all that Christ assumed was an animated body. His theory is like an ingenious system of canal locks for letting divine personality descend from the upper to the lower waters. The ingenuity displayed in it condemns it. It is an artificial makeshift. The psychology on which it rests is antiquated. The picture of Christ it presents does not correspond to the recorded facts of His life. Christ's human nature, as chiselled by the Apollinarian sculptor, is a torso. Such an image fails to satisfy the demands of religious feeling, and the doctrines, Apollinarian and monophysite, that enshrine it are therefore valueless.

TWO WILLS IN CHRIST

We here leave the subject of cognition and pass to that of volition. Orthodoxy teaches that Christ had two wills. This doctrine has a double basis. In the first place, it is a corollary of the doctrine of two natures. In the second, it is established by the recorded facts of the gospel narrative. To take first the a priori argument. A nature without a will is inconceivable. A cognitive faculty without the dynamic of the volitional would be a machine without driving force. The absurdity of the supposition, indeed, is not fully brought out by the simile. For we can consider the machine at rest; it would then have existence and potential activity. Will, however, is essential to the existence as well as to the activity of thought. The connection between them is vital to both. The psychologist distinguishes the respective parts each plays in life and marks off faculties to correspond to each. But his distinction is only provisional. The two develop pari passu, they are never separable; they act and re-act on one another. Without some degree of attention there is no thought, not even perception of external objects. Attention is as much an act of will as of thought. Man does not first evolve ideas and then summon will to actuate them. In the very formation of ideas will is present and active. Accordingly from the duality of Christ's cognitive nature the psychologist would infer that He had two wills. There is in Christ the divine will that controlled the forces of nature and could suspend their normal workings, the will that wrought miracle, the eternal will, infinite in scope and power, that was objectified in His age-long universal purpose, in a word, the will that undertook the superhuman task of cosmic reconstruction and achieved it.

It is not easy for us to conceive the co-existence of two wills in one person. The difficulty is part of the discipline of faith. Christ's human will is no less a fact than His divine will. The former played as large a part in His earthly experience as the latter. It was present in all its normal phases, ranging from motor will to psychic resolve. The lower forms of volition, motor impulse, desire and wish, the higher forms, deliberation, choice, purpose and resolve. He shared them all with humanity. There is in Him a human will, limited in scope, varying in intensity, developing with the growth of His human experience, a will like ours in everything, except that it was free from moral imperfection. It was a finite will, inasmuch as the conditioning cognition was finite, perfect of its kind, adequate to its task, never faltering, yet of finite strength. The two wills have each their own sphere. They operate in perfect harmony. Only at crises, such as the Agony, is there any appearance of discord. The opposition there is only apparent. The human will reaches its limit, and the superhuman will interposes to perform the superhuman task.

The reality of the two wills, established for the orthodox both a priori and by an appeal to fact, is denied by the monophysite. He regards will as the fundamental psychic state and makes it an attribute of personality. Two wills, he says, would necessitate two persons. He does not see that personality lies deeper than will, and that will and cognition are co-ordinate attributes of nature. If Christ had but one nature, it follows that He had but one will and operation. The monophysite thinks of two wills as necessarily antagonistic, as are conflicting motives in man; so he sees no ethical value in dithelite doctrine. As a matter of fact the moral influence of Christianity would be much weakened by an abandonment of the doctrine of two wills. The belief in Christ's human will prevents men from despairing of their will. Human will cannot be wholly warped, or wholly misdirected, or utterly powerless, since Christ in His life has shown that it can work along the same lines as the divine will, that the two can co-operate, and that where the lower reaches its limit, the higher can step in and perfect the work.

From the historian's point of view the monothelite controversy is quite distinct from the monophysite. So we need only take a glance at it here. It originated in an attempt to win back the monophysites to the orthodox communion by a doctrinal compromise. The emperor Heraclius endeavoured to unite catholic and monophysite on the basis of the formula, "two natures with one will and operation." That formula will not bear analysis, and the emperor's attempt to use it as an eirenicon was a complete failure. Imperial pressure induced a few monophysites to modify their doctrine so far as to admit "one theandric operation;" but the concession of "one will" from the orthodox side failed to win from the monophysites the expected concession of "two natures." The monophysites were quite consistent here. To deny will of nature is an elementary mistake in psychology. Only a tyro in introspection will ascribe will directly to personality. A one-willed two-natured personality is little short of a psychological monstrosity. An attempt to rally Christendom round such a figure was bound to fail. The only lasting result of the emperor's activity was the formation of a new sect, the Maronites.

THE DUALITY OF CHRIST'S EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE

We come now to the third element in the human spirit. It is only in modern psychology that feeling has secured recognition as a distinct constituent of man's nature; so it is not surprising that the question as to its position in the incarnate Christ was not raised in former days. Now, however, the psychology of feeling has come into its own, and it has become important to consider whether in this particular, too, Christ shared our human experience. Here, again, the argument for maintaining the duality of Christ's emotional experience is twofold. It follows, on the one hand, from the duality of the other parts of His nature; and, on the other hand, it is proved by the facts of His life as recorded in the gospels.

Human nature involves feeling, and two natures involve two universes of feeling. Divine personality cannot be conceived as devoid of feeling. With men feeling lies in the depths of being; it is the dynamic of life. Feeling is the inner reflex of acts of thought and will. It invariably accompanies cognition and volition. If thought and will be attributed to the supreme being, the attribute of feeling cannot be left out. When the God in Christ acted, divine feeling accompanied the act.

This surmise is proved correct on reference to the records of His life. We find there two distinct emotional zones. Christ has all the blameless feelings natural to man. There are in Him the feelings accompanying sensation; physical pleasure and pain, hunger, thirst, weariness, and, in addition, the higher grades of feeling, aesthetic, sympathetic, and ethical. He experienced wonder, surprise, righteous anger, the sublime, joy and love. A life rich in emotion was the life of the Man Christ Jesus. When, however, we look more closely into His experience, we catch glimpses of feeling such as no man could know. We see there transcendent passion, great sorrow, great joy, so great that they would break a human heart. We may instance the deep emotion accompanying His resolve to go to meet His fate at Jerusalem, the rejoicing in spirit at the success of the apostles' mission, His Agony and His universal love.

The monophysites could not recognise this duality in Christ's emotional nature. Hunger and thirst, and even the higher human feelings they considered derogatory to the Son of God. Even when they admitted that He suffered, they threw a veil of mystery over His sufferings. They idealised the Passion. They made it seem as if His flesh was privileged, as if His omnipotence excused Him from the emotional experiences of humanity.

SUMMARY OF THE CHAPTER

We have examined the doctrine of one nature, and exposed its chief consequences. We have considered its effects in respect of the deity of Christ and in respect of His manhood. We have applied the doctrine to the human nature as a whole, and to the several parts that compose it. The result of the examination may be summarised in brief. Monophysitism destroys what is divine in the deity and what is human in the humanity. It offers to Christians a Christ who is not sufficiently above man to be able to help them by His power, nor sufficiently man to be able to help them by His sympathy. The monophysite Christ is neither very God nor very man, but a composition in which all traces of the original entities are lost to view.

[[1]] "The Chronicle of Zachariah of Mitylene," translated by Hamilton and Brooks, chap. iii. p. 46.

[[2]] This addition to the Trisagion was officially condemned at the close of the 7th century owing to its monophysite associations.

[[3]] "Chronicle of Zachariah of Mitylene," translated by Hamilton and Brooks, ii. 2, p. 21.

[[4]] The question of Justinian's orthodoxy has been debated by Bury and Hutton. See Guardian, March 4th and April 15th, 1896.