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 On those occasions divine intuition superseded in Him the slow and faulty methods of human intelligence; thought was vision, intellect intuition, knowledge omniscience.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.