Monophysitism Past and Present: A Study in Christology

by A. A. Luce

This metaphysical idea survived Plato and Plato's system, and passed into common currency. It found and still finds expression in numerous speculative and practical systems. In religious ontology we find it in deism. According to the deist there was once at a definite point of time a relation between God and the world, the relation of creation. But, creation finished, the relation ceased. In other words, God created the world, and then withdrew into Himself, leaving the world to work out its own salvation. The deist believes in God; but his is a self-contained God, who does not interfere in the course of things or continue creating. Such a conception of God is useless for religious purposes, because it represents Him as out of all relation with the world.

CHRISTOLOGICAL DUALISM—NESTORIANISM

The Christological counterpart of dualism and of deism is Nestorianism. The Nestorians halt at the lowest stage of Christological thought. They admit Christ to be the meeting-point of God and man, but they nullify the admission by introducing dualism into the person of Christ. They set out to find the solution of the cosmic problem in Christ; they endeavour to express the relation between God and the world in terms of His personality. They bring the two concepts together, but they do not weld them. Faith and courage fail them at the critical moment. They substitute an association for a union. They leave God and man co-existing in Christ, but not united there.

Nestorianism is a halfway house on the road from Arianism to Christianity. It is a weak compromise. The deity in Christ is admitted, but its unity with humanity denied. The divine remains external to the human nature. According to the doctrine ascribed to Nestorius two persons, the son of God and the son of Mary, at the Baptism were mysteriously associated. The union consists partly in identity of name, partly in the gradual deepening of the association. As Jesus grew in spiritual power and knowledge and obedience to the divine will, the union which at first was relative gradually deepened towards an absolute union. Divinity was not His birthright, but acquired. Thus throughout His life the two personalities remained external to one another. The divine worked miracles; the human suffered. The Nestorian could pride himself on having preserved the reality of the divine and the reality of the human; he could worship the one and imitate the other. But his system was non-Christian, because it excludes the element of mediation. A dual personality could never make atonement or redeem humanity. God and man in Christ were brought into nominal contact, but there was provided no channel by which the divine virtue might pass into the human. The Nestorian remains content with his solution, because the background of his thought is dualist. The thinker's attitude to the cosmic problem decides his attitude to the Christological problem. Content to couple God and the world by an "and," he similarly couples by an "and" the Logos and Jesus Christ. Dividing God from the world, he divides Christ. Abandoning metaphysical relation between the cosmic principles, he despairs of finding, or, rather, has no motive for seeking a personal relation between God and man in the being of Christ.

SECOND SOLUTION OF THE COSMIC PROBLEM—MONISM

The second solution given to the cosmic problem is of special importance for our thesis. It had a direct influence on monophysitism, and may be regarded as supplying the metaphysical basis for that heresy. It represents an advance to a higher stage of thought, just as monophysitism, which depends on it, is an advance on Nestorianism, and has always been regarded as a more venial heresy.

The mind finding no satisfaction in dualism advances to monism. The spectacle of two unrelated ultimate principles impels it to seek and, if necessary, to invent some mode of reconciling them. Explain it as we may, the craving for unity, for synthesis, for mediation is radical in human thought. The mind cannot rest at anything short of it. God and the world, held asunder conceptually or only nominally united, constitute a contradiction in excelsis, and, as such, provide an irresistible motive for further and deeper thought.

As is natural, the swing of the pendulum carries the mind to the opposite extreme. Co-existence failing to supply the required solution, the key is sought in identity. God and the world are thought as identical. The terms are connected by the copula. God is the world, and the world is God. This is the truth of being, for the monist. The two principles are merged in one, and the contradiction solved by an assertion of the identity of the contradictories. Monism takes two forms. It may be either materialist or spiritual. One term must be selected as the reality, and the other written off as an illusion. If the thinker's bent of mind be scientific, he is disposed to make the material world the only objective reality, and God becomes simply a working hypothesis or a creation of the subjective mind. It would be beside our purpose to do more than mention this phase of monism. Spiritual monism, however, requires lengthier treatment; it is of vital importance to our subject. In this case the mind takes sides with God as against the world. God is the reality and the world the illusion. The world is God, in spite of appearances to the contrary. As world it has no substantive reality; it has no existence for self. It is the shadow of God, an emanation from Him, or an aspect of Him. Like dualism, monism is only a sham solution of the cosmic problem. It fails to keep prominent the idea of relation. A relation must relate. If its terms are merged, the relation falls to the ground. A relation must be such that, while the terms are unified, they are preserved as realities. It must both unify and keep distinct. To abandon either God or the world is a counsel of despair. To detract from the reality of either is treason to fact and tantamount to a shelving of the cosmic problem.

PHILOSOPHICAL AND THEOLOGICAL MONISM

The systems that identify God and the world range from the crude materialism of Democritus to the lofty spiritualism of Plotinus. Stoic cosmology occupies an intermediate position. The Stoic was nominally a pantheist, but he seems to have oscillated between a spiritual and a materialist explanation of the universal being. The monist system that prepared the soil for monophysitism and constantly fostered its growth was Neo-Platonism. In the hands of Plotinus all the main elements of spiritual monism were worked up into a speculative philosophy with a profound bearing on practical life. The world and the human spirit, for Plotinus, were simply manifestations of God. He taught that, as light issues from the sun and proceeds forth on its way, growing gradually dimmer till it passes into darkness, so the world of thought and thing has no true being apart from God, from whom it proceeded and to whom it returns. Spiritual monism found in Alexandria a congenial home. Blending there with oriental mysticism it produced a crop of gnostic speculative systems, in all of which Acosmism or a denial of the world was the keynote. Whether the problem was conceived in terms of being or of value, the result was the same. The world has no true being. Its appearance of solidity is a sham. It has no value. Compared with God, it is negligible. It is but the shadow cast by the eternal sun.