Now no one to-day disputes that He was truly man. Is it true that He was very God? It is either true or false. As to the fact there are only the two alternatives. And between the two the gulf is impassable. If it is not false, it is true. If it is not absolutely true, it is absolutely false. According to the faith of the Catholic Church it is absolutely true. According to the highest form of Arianism, not less than according to the barest Socinianism, it is (however you may try to gloss it over) absolutely false.
Once more, it is quite beyond our province to marshal or press argumentatively the proofs that He was indeed God. But it is necessary to see with perfect clearness, how the question must have been raised, and being raised must have been answered. The very life of the Church was belief in Him; and she could not remain fundamentally uncertain as to who or what He was in whom she believed. This was the one thing which had never been allowed to those who drew near Christ. All through His ministry those who came near Him, and felt the spell of His presence, His holiness, His power, were undergoing a training and a sifting. Moment by moment, step by step, the accumulating evidence of His transcendently perfect humanity kept forcing more and more upon them all the question which He would never let them escape, the question by which they were to be tested and judged; 'What think ye of Christ?' 'If ye believe not that I am He, ye shall die in your sins.'
If there is a true historical sense in which the clear definition of the doctrine of the Divinity of Jesus Christ must be assigned to the Councils of the fourth and fifth centuries, yet it would be a great historical blunder to state or imagine, as inference, that till then the doctrine was only held partially or with imperfect consciousness in the Catholic Church. The Church did not, as a result of those controversies, develop the consciousness of any new doctrine: the development of her consciousness was rather in respect of the shallow but tempting logic which would deform, or the delusions which might counterfeit, her doctrine, and of the perils to which these must lead. It may be a question, indeed, how far the words implicit and explicit do, or do not, represent the distinction between the dogmatic consciousness of the Apostolic and the Conciliar ages. The difficulty in determining depends solely on this, that the words themselves are used with different meanings. Thus, sometimes men are said to hold implicitly what they never perhaps suspected themselves of holding, if it can be shewn to be a more or less legitimate outcome, or logical development, of their belief. If such men advance inferentially from point to point, their explicit belief at a later time may be, in many particulars, materially different from what it had been at an earlier; even though it might be logically shewn that the earlier thought was, more or less directly, the parent of the later. Now in any such sense as this we shall stoutly maintain that, from the beginning, the Church held dogmatic truths not implicitly, but explicitly and positively. They who baptized into the threefold Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost; whose blessing was 'The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost;' who, living in the Spirit, lived in Christ; whose highest worship was the Communion of the Body and the Blood of Christ, and whose perfectness of life was Christ; they, so living and worshipping, did not hold the Godhead of Jesus Christ implicitly; they did not hold something out of which the doctrine of the Trinity might come to be unfolded. On the other hand, you may use the same contrast of words, meaning merely that you have, through cross-questioning or otherwise, obtained a power which you did not possess, of defining, in thought and in words, the limits of your belief, and distinguishing it precisely from whatever does not belong to it. You hold still what you always meant to hold. You say still what you always meant to say. But it is your intellectual mastery over your own meaning which is altered. Like a person fresh from the encounter of a keen cross-examination, you are furnished now, as you were not before, with distinctions and comparisons, with definitions and measurements,—in a word, with all that intellectual equipment, that furniture of alert perception and exact language, by which you are able to realize for yourself, as well as to define to others, what that meaning exactly is, and what it is not, which itself was before, as truly as it is now, the very thing that you meant.
In this sense, no doubt, the definitions of councils did make Christian consciousness more explicit in relation to positive truth. They acquired, indeed, no new truth. Primarily they were rather, on this side or on that, a blocking off of such false forms of thought or avenues of unbalanced inference, as forced themselves forward, one by one, amidst the intellectual efforts of the time, to challenge the acceptance of Christian people. Primarily they are not the Church saying 'yes' to fresh truths, or developments, or forms of consciousness; but rather saying 'no' to untrue and misleading modes of shaping and stating her truth. Only indirectly, in that effort, the Church acquires through them a new definiteness of mastery for the intellect in reference to the exactness of her own meaning.
It is comparatively easy for those who are convinced of a truth to struggle against its open contradiction. But false modes of stating their truth, and unbalanced inferences from their truth, are often staggering to minds which would be unperplexed by any less insidious form of error. It may be that, in all ages of the Church, even those who are born and bred in undoubting faith in the Person of Jesus, have to pass, more or less explicitly, through their own experience of hesitation and exaggeration, of reaction and counter-reaction, before they are quite in a position to define, or maintain by argument in the face of insidious alternatives, the exact proportion of their own Catholic belief.
Not unsuggestively, indeed, nor indirectly, do the oscillations of the public consciousness in the era of the councils, as to the due expression of Catholic belief, reproduce on a larger scale, and therefore with more magnified clumsiness, the alternating exaggerations of such a single struggling mind. The natural thought begins, as a matter of course, as Apostles had begun of old, with the perfect and obvious certainty that Jesus was a man. Then comes the mighty crisis to natural thought. With infinite heavings and strugglings, and every conceivable expedient of evasion, it strains to avoid the immense conclusion which challenges it, catching eagerly at every refinement, if so be it may be possible to stop short of full acceptance of a truth so staggering (when it comes to be measured intellectually) as that the Man Jesus was Himself the Eternal God. Now however grossly unjust it might be to think of Arianism as if it ever meant, or held, Jesus Christ to be merely a man; yet it is true that in respect of the one great question which is at the root of Christian faith,—is He God, or is He not?—it stands as offering alternatives and expedients, by which the plain answer 'yes' may be avoided; by which therefore the answer 'no' is in effect maintained; for between 'God' and 'not God' the distinction cannot be bridged. This, then, is the real hinge-point of the Catholic faith. But when this, the greatest of all battles of belief, is won at last, in spite of every variety of Arian and semi-Arian refining; forthwith the undisciplined mind, always ready to exaggerate, always difficult of balance, begins so to run into ardour of expression of its truth, as in effect to make unreal the other half of the doctrine of the Incarnation. The first great wonder once grasped, it is so natural, in fervour of insistance on the very Godhead, to forget or deny the simple completeness of the very Manhood! It seems so hard,—almost wanting in reverence,—still to conceive of Him then as perfectly human,—human body and human soul! What more obvious reaction in the mind of any pupil not yet perfectly steadied and balanced? Yet these few short sentences represent not untruly the real process of education, painfully accomplished by those intellectual struggles which culminated in the councils of Nicaea and Constantinople, in 325 and 381 respectively. And when the pupil is steadied from this second excess, and the Godhead and the Manhood are both grasped, each severally, each completely, there follows again a perfectly natural result in a new uncertainty about the union of the two in Jesus. Again it seems an instinct of reverence which shrinks from the truth. For the Manhood, it is urged, though complete, body, soul, and spirit, must yet remain, in Him, a thing separable and separate from His own original Divine personality. But if the human nature was not verily His own nature, if it was animated by any consciousness which was not absolutely His own consciousness, the consciousness of His one undivided personality,—what or whence in Him was this other than His own individual consciousness? Is it so, then, the mind begins necessarily to ask itself, that the mystery of the Incarnate Life was the mystery of a double consciousness, a double personality? two distinguishable existences, two selves, two identities, side by side, harmonious, allied, yet nowhere really meeting in any one underlying principle of unity? It was necessary that the doubt should be raised, that its meaning and results might be measured. But it is this which becomes the Nestorianism against which the council of Ephesus in 431 set the seal of Catholic belief. Once more, the natural reaction from Nestorianism, when the believer is keenly alert against its danger, is so to insist upon the indivisible Personal unity, as to shrink from the admission of any distinguishableness in Him, actual or possible, between the two natures or characters which He united, between the human and the Divine elements in His one consciousness. But this is either once more to curtail the true completeness of the human nature, or to fuse it with the Divine into some new thing not truly identical with either. And this is the Monophysitism of 451, the subject-matter of the fourth great general council at Chalcedon.
It is said, indeed, that the ages of councils were uncritical ages; and that their decisions are therefore not to be accepted as authoritative on questions of minute theological criticism, for which their uncritical spirit made them specially unfit. The assertion is perhaps a little beside the mark. You have not to plead that they were likely to be uncritical, but to shew that they were in fact wrong. It is clear that they were not specially unfit either to arrive at a definiteness of meaning, or to express what they meant. They were sure what they meant; and have expressed it with perfect clearness. The question is not how critical they were likely to be, but whether their meaning—which is clear—is right or wrong. Whatever antecedent probability there may be either in the minds of nineteenth century critics against their correctness, or in the minds of Churchmen accustomed to defer to them in favour of it; it is certain that no one who is really doubtful about the truth of Christianity, will be called upon to accept it in deference to the mere authority of the Councils. However much more they may be to ourselves, to such an one as this they must stand at least as witnesses of what the consciousness of the Christian community set its seal to, in the way of interpretation of its own original deposit of belief. We do not much care to argue whether they belonged to an age of criticism or not. Yet we must needs be ready to listen to anyone who can prove that their determinations were wrong. Councils, we admit, and Creeds, cannot go behind, but must wholly rest upon the history of our Lord Jesus Christ. If anyone could seriously convict the Creeds of being unscriptural, we must listen to him and bow,—as scientific men would have to bow to anyone who really could prove the fundamental propositions of their science to be wrong. But meanwhile, so complete is the historical acceptance of the Creeds, and their consecration in the consciousness of the Church; that there is at least as clear a presumption that we are uncatholic in differing from them, as there would be that we were unscientific if we dissented from the most universally accepted faiths of science.
Now even this, the most commonplace statement of the growth of Christian definitions, will serve to mark what the nature of dogma is. So far from faith without it being a thing more spiritual or pure, faith without it is a thing irrational. Faith in what? I cannot have faith without an object. Faith in Jesus Christ? But who is Jesus Christ? Is He a dead man? Is He, as a dead man, no longer in any existence? Or am I, at least, necessarily ignorant as to whether He and other dead men have any existence, actual or probable? Or is He a man indeed,—no more; and dead indeed; but, as other good men, alive after death somehow in the blessedness of God? And what then did His life mean? or His strange deliberate dying? or what connection have they of meaning or power with me? And this God that you speak of; do I know anything of Him? or what? or how? Or again, is Jesus Himself the living God? And are the things true which are handed down to me in the Church as taught by Himself about the relations of God? Is He my living Master; my very Redeemer by the Cross; my eternal Judge? and where and how have I contact in life or soul with the benefits of His Cross, or the power of His help? If indeed I have nothing to do with Him, and no interest in His history, it is possible for me to go on without caring to answer such questions. But faith in Him can have no meaning while these are ignored. The question whether He is or is not God, is one which cannot but be asked and answered.
And either answer to the question is alike dogmatic. The Arian is no less dogmatic than the Catholic. A dogmatic faith is only a definite faith; and that upon questions upon which it has become irrational to remain indefinite, after I have once been brought to a certain point of acquaintance with them. The question between the Catholic and the Arian is, not whose doctrine evades definiteness of determination, but whose dogma is in accord with the truth and its evidence. The negative answer to the question proposed would only be unjudicial, not undogmatic. Meanwhile, the affirmative answer would be so complete a concession of the whole position, that if it has once been made, as much has really been admitted, so far as any battle, about dogma goes, as if the whole formal statement of the Athanasian Creed had been expressly, as it will have been implicitly, included. There is nothing, then, really to fight against in these words, 'The right faith is, that we believe and confess that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and Man; God, of the substance of the Father, begotten before the worlds: and Man, of the substance of His mother, born in the world; perfect God, and perfect Man: of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting; equal to the Father, as touching His Godhead; and inferior to the Father, as touching His Manhood. Who although He be God and Man: yet He is not two, but one Christ; One; not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh; but by taking of the Manhood into God; One altogether; not by confusion of substance, but by unity of Person.'
Another thing which perhaps the same commonplace statement may illustrate as to the character of Christian dogma, is its largeness and equity. It is harmony; it is proportion; it is the protest of balanced completeness against all that partiality, which, by exaggerating something that is true, distorts the proportion and simplicity of truth. Every several form of error,—we admit it willingly,—grew out of, and represented, a truth. Catholic doctrine alone preserves the proportion of truth. To work and to think within the lines of dogmatic faith, is to work and to think upon the true and harmonious conception of the Person of Jesus Christ—'Quem nosse vivere, Cui servire regnare.' In this knowledge certainly there is no limitedness, and in this subordination no slavery.