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.