Monophysitism Past and Present: A Study in Christology

by A. A. Luce

CHAPTER V

MONOPHYSITISM AND MODERN PSYCHOLOGY

Christology divorced from empirical psychology is a barren science. Abstract discussions about person, nature and union of natures soon degenerate into logomachies. If personality is a psychic entity, and nature another distinct psychic entity, then the question at issue between diphysite and monophysite is worth debating. If they are concepts merely, the debate is hollow and of purely academic interest. A study of psychology clothes the dry bones with flesh. It puts life and meaning into these abstractions. It shows that they represent entities, that something corresponding to the terms "person" and "nature" is actually part of the being of every man, and that therefore their existence in Christ is a proper and practical subject for investigation. In so doing psychology provides the rationale of the Christological controversies. It justifies the church in her determined adherence to the precise expression of the truth. No Christian with powers of introspection, who can distinguish in his own being personality and nature, can be indifferent to the Christological problem. The problem is one of fact, not theory. The terms and the formula are only of importance as expressing or failing to express the true facts of Christ's being. In a word, the psychology of the central figure of human history is the matter at issue.

Reference to psychological fact is what one misses in the records of the old controversies. The disputes read as if they were about shadows. No doubt that was often the case. Catholics and non-Catholics were often agreed as to the substance of belief, while owing to their devotion to words and formulae the agreement went unrecognised. Had the disputants made clear to themselves and to each other what they meant by their abstract terms, had they translated them into their concrete psychological equivalents, heresy and schism would have been less frequent. It was, however, almost impossible for them to do so, because in their day theology was far more highly developed than psychology. Systematic observation of the workings of spirit was almost unknown. There existed no science of psychology as we know it. No clear notions attached to the terms "person" and "nature." They represented abstractions necessary to discursive reason rather than concrete psychic facts. All parties shared this defect. Among catholics and Nestorians as well as among monophysites knowledge of the constituents of human nature was of the most rudimentary character. The catholic party, however, by keeping close to the facts recorded in the gospels, achieved a Christological formula that is psychologically intelligible; while the heretical parties were led by their preconceived opinions to fashion a Christ, whose features are unrecognisable as God or man, a psychological monstrosity.

BERGSON'S THEORIES THROW LIGHT ON CHRISTOLOGY

Without claiming finality for the findings of modern psychology, we can consider some results of the science as established. They are sufficiently well established, at any rate, to provide a starting-point for our investigation. In particular the brilliant observations and theories of M. Bergson throw, so it seems to the writer, a flood of light on Christology. We propose to outline the two key doctrines of the Bergsonian psychology and show how they confirm the truth of the orthodox formula and expose the monophysite fallacy. These key doctrines are, first, the interpenetration of psychic states, and, second, the distinction between deep-seated and superficial consciousness.

BERGSON'S THEORY OF THE INTERPENETRATION OF PSYCHIC STATES

It is, says Bergson, characteristic of psychic states that they do not, like material things remain external to one another. They inter-penetrate. Cut up by human intelligence into discrete elements, in their own nature they remain a continuum. States of mind appear successive and external to one another, because age-long association with matter has accustomed men to material modes of thought. Man's intelligence is a by-product of activity. For purposes of action it is the externality of things that matters. The inner connection is relatively unimportant. Men act with precision on matter, because perception cuts up the continuum of matter into bodies, defined bodies no two of which can occupy the same space. Intelligence originating thus by contact with matter naturally prefers mechanical categories. These categories applicable to matter when applied to higher forms of existence mislead. We naturally conceive psychic states as external to one another, and their interpenetration seems an abnormality. At this stage of thought experience is pictured as a line of indefinite length, infinitely divisible, whose divisions correspond to the moments of consciousness. This spatial picture of mind is misleading in many ways, not the least in that it can offer no reasonable theory of the subconscious. Thinkers who materialise mental experience have no room in their theory for the sub-conscious. It is for them bare non-consciousness, a psychic vacuum. When, however, we start from this unique characteristic, that mind possesses, of remaining one and indivisible throughout the greatest appearance of diversity, the sub-conscious falls naturally into the scheme. No part of our experience perishes. It is essentially self-perpetuating memory. The needs of action relegate the greater portion of it to the sub-conscious, but it is there, always linked to our conscious experience, and only awaiting the occasion to emerge into the full light of consciousness. Past penetrates into the present. One portion of our present penetrates into the other portions. Conscious and unconscious, past and present, combine to form one wonderful whole.

MONOPHYSITISM IGNORES THE DUALITY IN CHRIST'S EXPERIENCE

Such in outline is Bergson's theory of the interpenetration of psychic states. If this psychology be adopted, the abstract character of the catholic doctrine of Christ's being in large measure disappears. It becomes easy to conceive the interpenetration of two natures in one Christ. Further, the Bergsonian psychology furnishes a standpoint from which criticism of monophysitism is easy. Psychology at the monophysite stage of thought conceives the moments of Christ's consciousness in their mutual externality; they follow each other as do the ticks of a clock. They are discrete elements strung along on a hypothetical ego. Christ's experience is conceived as unilinear. All that He did, suffered and thought is regarded as having taken place on one and the same plane of experience. This psychology has no room for another plane of experience. It has no room for a positive sub-consciousness. Consequently that one plane must be the one divine nature, which, as the monophysites taught, absorbed the human.

The one-nature theory is not true to the facts. It overlooks the complexity of Christ's experience. His experiences lie on two different planes. He has different universes of thought, different actuating wills and sets of feelings. Christ is not in one nature. The phases of His consciousness are twofold. His experiences fall naturally into two groups. While one group is in consciousness, the other is below the level of consciousness. Now the human experiences, now the divine, are uppermost. Both are always present. Life under such conditions is inconceivable, unless full recognition be accorded to the fact that conscious states interpermeate. If each state fall outside the other, and consciousness be a chain of successive ideas or emotions, a twofold nature within the one experience is meaningless. The view of conscious states as discrete leads inevitably to determinism. The place of one state in the chain is conditioned by its predecessor. There is no room for the spontaneity and the creative power which characterise conscious life. Associationism cannot countenance the unforeseen and incalculable. So it is out of sympathy with Christian psychology. A function of the divine in Christ is to introduce the element of the unforeseen and incalculable into His normal and human experience. The Bergsonian psychology thus supplies an intellectual basis for belief in the possibility of two natures in Christ. When ideas are regarded as psychic entities whose essential property is mutual penetration, the ground is prepared for the catholic formula. Where this truth is not recognised, there arises inevitably the tendency to assert that Christ had and must have had but one uniform level of experience, and that assertion is the essence of monophysitism.

BERGSON'S THEORY OF DEEP-SEATED AND SUPERFICIAL STATES

Bergson's psychology throws further light on a central doctrine of catholic Christology. It not only makes conceivable, as we have shown above, the co-existence of the two natures, but it lends support to the belief in the independent reality of His personality. Person and nature of Christology find their modern equivalents in the Bergsonian "deep-seated" and "superficial" states of consciousness. Bergson draws a sharp line of distinction between these two. The deep-seated states constitute the kernel of being. They are the man's existence turned inwards. They are independent, free, creative. They are a unifying force. Always present, they only rarely make their presence felt. Only at moments of deep experience do they interfere with the surface self. The superficial states form the outward-regarding existence of man. They represent consciousness relaxed into moments of clock-time, moments more or less external to one another. They are not truly free. They are conditioned by the material environment. Whatever be thought of the metaphysic of this system, recognition cannot be refused to that part of it which rests on the solid foundation of psychological fact. Self-analysis discloses a two-fold experience in man. The stream of his life contains both current and undercurrent. The current is nature, the under-current personality.

MONOPHYSITISM ANNULS THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN
DIVINE PERSON AND DIVINE NATURE

This distinction is of paramount importance in Christology. Diphysites hold fast to the distinction. They maintain a human nature in Christ, but they do not humanise His person. The person cannot be humanised. It remained divine after the incarnation, as it was before. Though He became man, the depth of His being was unchanged. The rain from heaven and the waters from the earthly spring mingle in one stream, but beneath the surface the deep undercurrent of being flows on unchanged. The monophysite in effect abandons this distinction. This is where his psychology is most seriously at fault. He confuses person and nature. Deep-seated and superficial states of soul are all one to him. He does not see the duality in the being of his fellow-men; so he cannot see it in the ideal man. This is a consequence of monophysitism which has not attracted the attention of theologians, and which the monophysite himself did not intend. The doctrine that rules out the human nature of Christ rules out the divine nature also, by confusing it with the personality. The monophysite affirms the divine nature while denying the human. Such affirmation is purely verbal. It is completely void of significance. The contrast between the divine and human natures is needed to throw personality into relief. Take away the human nature, and that contrast disappears, and with it goes the distinction between divine person and divine nature. Then, instead of a transcendent personality in whose portrait divine and human features are distinctly limned, we have a blur. Where God planned a unique though intelligible psychic harmony, we find a psychic medley.

CONSCIOUSNESS OF PERSONALITY PRODUCED
BY A VIOLENT CHANGE OF OCCUPATION

This assertion is justified by an appeal to human experience. Men become sure of their own or of other people's personality by experiencing strong contrasts of natures in themselves or by observing them in others. For instance, a sudden and violent change of occupation establishes personality as a distinct entity. The civilian turns soldier. Almost immediately all parts of his nature are affected. He feels the development, as it were, of a second nature within him. His faculties are transformed. He enters a new universe of thought. His range of knowledge narrows in one direction, widens in another. His volitional nature is altered. His will narrows in scope, but increases in intensity. Nor does his emotional nature escape the change. Aesthetic values are reversed. He no longer feels pleasure and pain at the old objects. Physical desires play a much larger part in his life, and he loses taste for intellectual pleasures. The soldier returns to civilian life and, as it were, with his civilian attire he resumes his former nature, and all his old thoughts and feelings and impulses come flooding back. Such an experience is of considerable psychological interest. It exemplifies the interpenetration of different states of thought and activity. The contrasts bring home to a man the fact that his spirit is a synthesis of heterogeneous elements. They force him back on himself. They rouse in him the dormant sense of personal being. It is the apprehension of strong contrast in his experience of himself, the apprehension of the plurality of his being, that accentuates the deep-lying unity. The more violent the change in the walks of life, the clearer becomes the concept of the continuity. Civilian or soldier, the man, the person is the same.

Personality is thrown into relief not only by change of occupation, but also by moral contrasts. Conflicting passions, opposing motives and internal debate serve to make a man realise himself. Strong personalities are often those in whom the conflict between good and evil is most acute. It is the very opposition of natures which brings out the personal element into the full light of conscious recognition.

We must now examine human personality in greater detail; we must indicate its functions and show how it differs from human nature. Only by coming to grips with this psychological problem is it possible to appreciate the points at issue in the Christological question and to judge between catholic and monophysite.

KANT AND THE DUAL CHARACTER OF THE EGO

Kant distinguished the noumenal from the phenomenal ego. The former he regarded as an idea, the latter as a reality in time. The distinction corresponds roughly to that between person and nature. The phenomenal ego is the nature of man. It bears the brunt of the struggle of life. The noumenal ego is the transcendent personality of the individual—an idea which pure reason necessarily forms and which practical reason establishes. Though the Kantian philosophy no longer carries conviction, it is interesting to see that Kant felt and admitted a double current in man's being. He recognised that the superficial self is not the true being of the man. It is not necessary, however, to go as far as Kant went. We need not with him relegate the core of personal being to the realm of idea. Granted that personality is not part of our normal experience as nature is, there are times when the depths of being are stirred. Moments of crisis drive a man deeper than will and thought and even feeling, and make him conscious of himself as a psychic unity, permanent and of infinite value. Personality normally remains in the recesses of the subconscious. It is the hidden basis of life. It is active, though its activities are for the most part underground. It does not, however, lie altogether outside the ken of consciousness. It may be experienced; it is experienced when great emotion rends the surface fabric of the man and discloses the true self.

HUMAN PERSONALITY AND HUMAN NATURE

What is human personality? It is a psychic entity whose most important function is to unify the parts of a man's nature. It is the principle of unity and the instrument of unity. A man's thought, will and feeling are distinct and real entities. His intelligence takes various forms from perception to abstract thought; it may be directed to outward things, to thoughts of things, or to pure idea. He wills many things, and wills them in different modes and with varying degrees of intensity. A wide range of feeling is found in him, from physical to mental, from organic to ideal feeling. His nature is tripartite. Each part admits of variation in itself and in its interaction with the other parts. Each of the three expresses the man at the moment. No one of the three gives the whole account of his being. Nor do the three taken together. Though his nature is tripartite the man himself cannot be resolved into component parts. He has his faculties and states, but he is more than their sum. He may lose himself in thought or activity, or abandon himself to feeling, but when he is fulfilling his true function, when he is most himself, all parts of his nature are concentrated to a point. Partial activity of thought, will, or feeling is then replaced by activity of the personality. Personality is the synthetic unity of all parts of a man's nature. It has the wonderful power of compressing to a point a medley of psychic elements. Moods and memories, perceptions and ideas, wishes and purposes, it tensions them all up, merges them and expresses them in characteristic acts representative of the man.

Personality differs from nature also in respect of relation to environment. It is relatively independent of circumstances. Habit and education mould the nature, but if they touch the person they do so only indirectly. The nature must be deeply affected before a change in the person is registered. Personality is not synonomous with inherited disposition; but it bears a similar relation to nature as inherited disposition does to acquired habit. It is to nature what character is to action. It is to nature what in Weismann's theory the germ plasm is to the somatic cell. Changes in it are mediated by nature and are almost imperceptible in a life time.

Again, nature is the superficies of the soul. It is the part that comes in contact with the world of things and people. A man's nature is what he is for other people; what he is in and for himself alone is personality. There is a substance or self-existence of the psychic states. Thought, will and feeling have all and each an external reference. The internal reference of the whole is the core of being. Our perception of personality in other people is a subtle thing. In the ordinary give and take of life we are not aware of it. It is when we realise the subject as a self-existent unity that we recognise personality. We judge a man's nature by his thought or will or feelings as conveyed through the ordinary channels of communication. Personality is felt. It is a magnetism that influences, but remains inarticulate.

Person and nature differ also in respect of relation to the body. The co-existence of heterogeneous natures in the same body is a fact of experience. Different universes of thought, different levels of will and feeling can be lodged in one organism. The higher the development of the individual, the more clearly marked is the duality or plurality of nature. It is otherwise with personality. In normal cases no two personalities can tenant the one body. The unity of the organism is the outward expression and guarantee of the unity of the person. There are of course pathological cases which form exceptions to this rule. Such cases, however, only serve to emphasise the distinction between person and nature. In cases of dual personality the occupancy of the one body is not simultaneous. Jekyll alternates with Hyde. Dual personality is a totally different phenomenon from duality of nature. Duality of nature is relatively superficial. In dual personality the divergence in mental and moral outlook is so radical that responsibility for the acts of the one entity cannot attach to the other entity.

Personality then is the synthetic principle in man's being. Psychology reveals it as unifying the parts of a man's soul and welding into an indivisible whole the various elements of conscious and subconscious experience. The student of Christology welcomes this account of personality, but he requires more. He seeks a parallel for the union of two whole and perfect natures. He demands some reason for holding the central dogma of the incarnation to be intelligible and probable. The next step in the argument accordingly is to ask, "Why limit the synthetic power of personality?" If personality can synthesise parts of a nature, why should it not also synthesise natures? If human personality can unify such heterogeneous psychic elements as thought, will and feeling, and present them as a harmonious whole, is it not credible that divine personality should carry the synthesis a step further and harmonise in one being the thoughts, wills and feelings of God and man? The hypostatic union of natures in Christ is a phenomenon not psychologically improbable, and one which can be paralleled from human experience. There is in man what is tantamount to a conjunction of the two natures. Man is rather diphysite than monophysite. We pointed out above the extensive modifications that can be produced in a man's nature by environment. There is in him a deeper duality which we can only characterise as an association of divine and human. Man is an inhabitant of the earth, of earthly descent and finite destiny; yet the divine is not totally foreign to him. He has hopes of heaven, moments of supraconsciousness, at times vision, resolve and emotion that are supra-normal. The divine is an element in him. It is more than an aspect of his nature. Its influence operates often in opposition to the human element. He is, as Bergson puts it, at the meeting-point of the upward and the downward currents. He can know God, can do the will of God, can be filled with the love of God. Here are the three factors of his nature, raised to a higher power. His experience may lie and often does lie on two planes. He is "double lived in regions new."

In applying this human analogy to the ideal man caution is necessary. The duality of natures is a fact in both cases, but there is one essential difference. The personal substratum of the natures in one case is human, in the other case divine. In man the divine element is part of his nature, but not part of his person. The ego remains human through all spiritual development. "The best of saints is a saint at the best." The secondary element in him is a fact, but it is part of his nature, not of his person. It is otherwise in the case of Christ. He came from the ideal world and returned there. The background of his experience was and is divine. The secondary element in Him was the human, the primary the divine. He shared man's experience and shared it really, but it did not form part of the core of His being. When He thought or willed or felt as a man, it was a kénôsis, a limiting of his natural mode of self-expression. Divine and human are both present in the experience of Christ and of mankind, but with this difference—man rises to the divine; Christ condescended to the human.

VALUE OF BERGSON'S PSYCHOLOGY TO ORTHODOX CHRISTOLOGY

Person and nature are then real and distinct psychic entities. They are real alike in God and man. The distinction between them is not artificial or verbal; it is perhaps elusive, but it is genuine and capable of proof from experience. The synthetic faculty of personality manifests itself in uniting without confusing, first, parts of the nature, second, entire natures. These theses supply what is requisite for an intelligent appreciation of Christology. Without them Christology is a battle of shadows; with them it becomes a practical problem of first importance for religious minds. The psychology which justifies orthodox Christology is that which proclaims the interpenetration of psychic states, and which distinguishes between the surface states of a relaxed consciousness, and the deep-seated states which are ever present, but of which we are conscious only at moments of tension.

The catholic mind conceives the person of Christ as an eternal self-existent synthetic unity that has combined in an indissoluble union the natures of God and man. Human parallels make intelligible the co-existence of the two natures in the one person and the one body. What is normal in man is surely possible in the ideal man. Heretical Christologies err in their psychology. In Nestorian Christology Christ is presented as a dual personality, an abnormal association in one body of two distinct self-existent beings. Thus a pathological case would be elevated to the rank of mankind's ideal. The monophysite psychology plunges men into the opposite error. An undiscriminating craving for unity among the phenomena of psychic life prevents any recognition of the dual character of experience. Monophysitism is blind to the difference between person and nature because it places all psychic experiences on the one level. Determined to find unity in its ideal, it seeks an inappropriate unity, the mathematical unity, the unity that excludes plurality. To the monophysite the major part of the gospels is a sealed book, because the major part of the facts there recorded about Christ could not possibly have happened to a one-natured Christ. His human knowledge, normal, limited, progressive, His human will, natural, adequate to the human, inadequate to the superhuman task, his human feelings, his body consubstantial with ours are to the monophysite merely shadows or symbols or aspects of something greater. They are dwarfed into nothingness. They are lost in the divine omniscience, omnipotence and transcendent love.