MODERN PRESENTATIONS OF CHRIST ESOTERIC
AND DEFICIENT IN PERSONAL APPEAL
Monophysitism in respect of Christ's being shows itself to-day in negative rather than positive ways. To its subtle influence is traceable the capital defect of modern presentations of Christ, namely, that they make no appeal to the outsider. Christ is proclaimed as the solution of moral, social and industrial problems. As a rule in such cases the name "Christ" is used as a synonym for Christian principles. Such appeals are addressed to the head; they do not touch the heart and fire the imagination; they do not kindle that personal devotion to the Man Christ Jesus which has always been the dynamic of the faith. The historic Christ is not presented in a way that would appeal to the unconvinced. Christian teaching is becoming more and more esoteric. In the language of Christology, a diphysite Christ is not preached. His human nature is kept in the background. It is not portrayed in arresting colours. If the apostles and apostolic men had preached the impersonal redeemer of modern religious thought, they would never have won the world for Christ. Their imaginations and lives were fired by contact with a Man of flesh and blood. So they presented a Christ whose true humanity appealed to His fellow-men. They showed the gospel picture to an unbelieving world, and the world responded to its appeal.
It is not easy to bridge the centuries and regain the apostles' standpoint, but until it is done the church's message will lack inspiration. The phrase "the historic Christ" is commonly used, as if it covered the whole ground. It is certainly serviceable as a protest against a bare logos theory of the incarnation, but in itself it is not adequate. What requires emphasis is the humanity of the historic Christ. Many Christian teachers purposely withhold this emphasis from fear of playing into the hands of Arians and Nestorians. No doubt if pressed they would give intellectual assent to the dogma of the two natures, but they shrink from following it out to its consequences. There is a widespread feeling that it is irreverent to dwell on the fact that Christ was a real man. A firm grasp of catholic Christology in its entirety is the cure for this squeamishness. To obscure the fact of His Manhood is not the true reply to a denial of His Deity. A true presentation of Christ must give full weight to the facts that He had a human body, human mind, human feelings and human will, that His body was in space normally subject to physical law, that His consciousness and subconsciousness conformed to psychic law. Wherever a denial of these facts is found, there is monophysitism. Wherever they are obscured or neglected, there are monophysite tendencies.
INDIFFERENCE TO CHRIST'S SUFFERINGS—A CLASSICAL COMPARISON
Failure to appreciate the real humanity of Christ's life results in comparative indifference to the tragedy of His death. Monophysitism in undermining belief in the reality of Christ's manhood is weakening sympathy with His sufferings. Calvary like Bethlehem has lost much of its appeal. A classical comparison will illustrate this fact. Plato's account of Socrates' last hour in the prison and of his drinking the hemlock is, I imagine, to many educated men far more moving than the story of the Passion and Death of Christ. There is a curious similarity in the two tragedies that invites attention and comparison. Both sufferers were heroes and moral reformers, the victims of mistaken zeal on the part of religious authority. Socrates died in a ripe age with his life work accomplished. Jesus was cut off in His prime. Socrates' last hours were tranquil and his passing quick and easy. Jesus after shame and torture died a lingering death. The dysthanasia of Jesus should, one would opine, make a stronger appeal to men's sympathies than does the euthanasia of Socrates. Yet on the whole the reverse is the case. The difference in the respective styles of the two narratives does not give the whole explanation. It is true that the Phaedo is a work of fine art while the gospel story is a plain statement of fact. The reason, however, for the difference in appeal goes deeper than literary style. The reader of the Phaedo puts himself into the place of Socrates and suffers with him. As we read the Passion of Christ there rises a barrier between us and the divine sufferer. Unconsciously we say to ourselves, "Christ suffered, of course, but He did not suffer as we should have suffered in His place. His were not the real sufferings of a real man."
If the passion of Christ and that of Socrates were weighed in the same balances, there would be less indifference to-day to the gospel story. Were Christ the Man realised as such, visualised, as other great men of history are visualised, among his followers, the hero worship that inspired the early church would revive. What makes Christians indifferent to Christ's sufferings is not the lapse of centuries nor weakness of imagination but a subconscious monophysitism. There is to most minds a haze of unreality overhanging the accounts of His life and death. They forget that He shared human experience to the full. They think of Him as doing things rhêidíôs like the Homeric gods. In point of fact, His great results were achieved only after long laborious exertion. His was a life of strenuous human activity, physical and mental. Even His miracles were accompanied by a physical throb of sympathy; virtue went out of Him. Redemption made it necessary. Enthusiastic devotion to a person must be grounded in community of experience. It is the human touches in the drama of Christ's life that make the most powerful appeal to mankind. Yet the human element is obscured, as a rule, in modern presentations of the gospel. For spiritual minds it is comparatively easy to apprehend a divine Christ. To apprehend a human Christ makes a larger call on their imagination and their sympathy. Spiritual men are naturally monophysite in their thinking. They shrink from the mental effort that diphysitism demands. Their attention is focussed on Christ's superiority to human limitations. They scarcely see the miracle of the human, and thus they miss the import of the divine miracle. In the atmosphere of monophysitism mysticism thrives, but devotion decays. We may instance the almost total disappearance of the crusading spirit. The Christ to whom our thoughts usually turn is an omnipresent ideal with no historical or local associations. His birth-place and His country evoke only a lukewarm sentiment. The church's year is neglected. The historical facts of Christ's life are often regarded as of only minor importance. Piety used to consist in personal loyalty to the Founder of a universal religion; it is now considered synonymous with obedience to the "golden rule."
TO ATTRIBUTE OMNISCIENCE TO CHRIST'S HUMAN NATURE IS MONOPHYSITISM
Within recent times the question as to the limitation of Christ's knowledge was hotly debated. That debate showed how much uncertainty on Christological questions exists and how strong monophysite opinion still is. In spite of Christ's own dicta, in spite of the dogma of two natures, denial of the limitation was widespread and persistent. To many devout minds it seems impious to speak of Christ's ignorance. This is a case in which the Chalcedonian definition is an invaluable guide. If one brings to an examination of Christ's nature the preconceived notion of His omniscience, the doctrine of the limitation of His knowledge seems an outrage on belief; but if one approaches the question with the orthodox formula in mind, one is prepared to find that His cognitive faculties were perfectly human and humanly perfect. So we find it. His knowledge and His faculties of knowledge on the lower plane of His experience were essentially the same as ours. He thought in our categories. He used our organon, perfect of its kind, but still a human organon. As man, inevitably, He had thoughts uncognised; and such a mental state we call "ignorance." His mind passed through stages of development as ours does. Education widened His horizon, strengthened His faculties, and increased His knowledge. Advance in knowledge implies a prior state of relative ignorance. The word "ignorance" as applied to Christ sounds very terrible; but investigation of its meaning robs it of its terrors. We use the word in two senses. On the one hand it may mean the absence of a thought, its absolute non-presence in consciousness. On the other it may mean thought unrelated to experience, one whose implications are not or cannot be fully deduced, in fact, the incomplete cognition of an idea. In neither case does it involve imperfection in the instrument or moral fault. On the contrary ignorance is a mark of the normal in cognition. If ignorance and limitation of knowledge were not found in Christ, we should be forced to agree with Apollinaris that the divine Logos had superseded His human intellect.
Ignorance in so far as it is a positive attribute is far from being a mark of imperfection. It is a true paradox that ignorance like obliviscence forms part of the process of human cognising. Probably in the truth of things memory is of the essence of mind. Thoughts naturally and spontaneously reproduce themselves. The past of experience tends automatically to carry forward into the present. The function of the brain then, or of a mental faculty intimately co-operating with the brain is to discriminate, to sift and select, to prolong into present consciousness what is of importance for action and to relegate the irrelevant to partial or total oblivion. From this psychological standpoint ignorance and obliviscence are seen to be achievements of the intellect. The presence of all facts in a human consciousness is unthinkable. If it were possible, it would paralyse action. If we exempt Christ from the law of ignorance and obliviscence, we ipso facto dehumanise his cognition. When we say that Jesus was ignorant of much scientific truth, or that his prescience was limited, we do not compromise His dignity. We simply assert the naturalness of His intellect and the true humanity of that element of His nature. To do otherwise, to claim omniscience for His human intellect is gross monophysitism. His knowledge was deeper, surer, more penetrating than ours, because the light of His divine intuition streamed through the veil of sense and illumined the lower phases of intelligence. This is an instance of the communicatio idiomatum. The properties of the two natures act and react upon one another. But we must make the distinction of natures our starting-point, or fusion will take place. There must be idiomata first, or the communicatio is meaningless.