Monophysitism Past and Present: A Study in Christology

by A. A. Luce

This hierarchy of immaterial entities contains nothing corresponding to our idea of personality. There is in it no principle that is both individual and immortal. Aristotle allows immortality only to the universal reason. The psychic elements are condemned to perish with the body. There is no hope for the parts of the soul which are most intimately connected with the individual's experience.

Monophysite Christology shares this fundamental defect. The monophysite thinker attempted to express the union of two natures within one experience. But his psychology, not containing the notion of personality, could furnish no principle of synthesis. An agent in the background of life, to combine the multiplicity of experience, is a sine qua non of a sound Christology. Personality was to the monophysites a terra incognita; and it was in large measure their devotion to Aristotle's system that made them deaf to the teaching of the catholic church.

INTELLECTUALISM AND MYSTICISM COMPLEMENTARY SYSTEMS

After this sketch of the Aristotelian features recognisable in monophysitism, we turn to the other great pagan philosophy that assisted in the shaping of the heresy. Intellectualism and mysticism are closely allied; the two are complementary; they are as mutually dependent as are head and heart. It is not then surprising that monophysitism should possess the characteristics of both these schools of thought. The intellectualism of the heresy was largely due, as we have shown, to the Aristotelian logic and metaphysic; its mystic elements derive, as we proceed to indicate, from Neo-Platonism and kindred theosophies.

Alexandria had been for centuries the home of the mystics. The geographical position, as well as the political circumstances of its foundation, destined that city to be the meeting-place of West and East. There the wisdom of the Orient met and fought and fused with that of the Occident. There Philo taught, and bequeathed to the Neo-Platonists much of his Pythagorean system. There flourished for a while and died fantastic eclectic creeds, pagan theosophies masquerading as Christianity. Gnosticism was a typical product of the city. Valentinus and Basilides and the other gnostics made in that cosmopolitan atmosphere their attempts to reconcile Christianity with Greek and oriental thought. There Ammonius Saccas, after his lapse from the Christian faith, taught and laid the foundation of Neo-Platonism. Plotinus was the greatest of his disciples, and, though he taught at Rome for most of his life, it was in the spirit of Alexandria that he wrought his absolute philosophy, the full-orbed splendour of the setting sun of Greek thought. Neo-Platonism did not die with Plotinus. In the middle of the fifth century, when monophysitism was at its zenith, Proclus was fashioning an intellectual machinery to express the Plotinian system. The story of Hypatia evidences the dominant position of Neo-Platonism in Alexandrian culture. The violence of Cyril's measures against her shows what a menace to the Church that philosophy was. Cyril was not a monophysite, but much that he said and did promoted their cause. Dioscurus, his nephew and successor in the see of Alexandria, championed monophysitism at the council of Chalcedon. In later generations Alexandria always offered an asylum to exiled monophysite leaders.

These facts render it impossible to regard the connection between Alexandria and monophysitism as fortuitous. They further suggest that Neo-Platonism was the connecting link. Such in fact it was. Monophysitism, we might almost say, was Neo-Platonism in Christian dress. The ethos of the two systems is the same, and the doctrinal resemblance is marked. It was natural that the home of pagan mysticism should cradle the kindred system of heretical Christian mysticism.

NEO-PLATONIST ONTOLOGY

The representative figure amongst the Neo-Platonists is Plotinus. His comprehensive mind gathered up the main threads of Alexandrian thought, and wove them into the fabric of a vast speculative system. The system is as much a religion as a philosophy. It is the triumph of uncompromising monism. The last traces of dualism have been eradicated. God, for Plotinus, is true being and the only being. He is all and in all. God is an impersonal Trinity, comprising the One, the cosmic reason and the cosmic soul. The One is primal, ineffable, behind and beyond all human experience. All we know of Him is that He is the source and union of reason and soul. Creation is effected by a continuous series of emanations from God. Emanation is not an arbitrary act of divine will; it is a necessary consequence of the nature of the One. God must negate Himself, and the process is creation. The further the process of negation is carried, the less reality does the created object possess. Last in the scale comes matter, which has no self-subsistence, but is the absolute self-negation of God. We referred in the last chapter to Plotinus' favourite illustration. We may be allowed, perhaps, to repeat it here. As light, he says, issues from the sun and grows gradually dimmer, until it passes by imperceptible degrees into the dark, so reason emanates from God and, passing through the phases of nature, loses its essence gradually in its procession, until finally it is derationalised and becomes its opposite.

NEO-PLATONIST PSYCHOLOGY

Human souls are at an intermediate stage of this cosmic process. Like the ray of light which touches both sun and earth, they have contact with God and with matter. They stand midway in creation. They are attracted upwards and downwards. Reason draws them to God; sense chains them to earth. Their position decides their duty. (Here the philosophy becomes a religion). The duty of man is to break the sensuous chains and set the soul free to return to its home in God. This return of the soul to God is attained by the path of knowledge. The knowledge that frees is not speculative; for such enhances self-consciousness. It is immediate consciousness indistinguishable from unconsciousness. It is intuitive knowledge. It is vision in which the seer loses himself, and what sees is the same as what is seen. It is the absorption of the soul in the world reason, and so with God.