Monophysitism Past and Present Part 4

THE MONOPHYSITE THEORY OF A COMPOSITION OF NATURES

For the consistent monophysites, then, the human nature, as a psychic ent.i.ty with peculiar properties, did not survive the incarnation. They did, however, allow it a verbal reality. They admitted a composition of natures, and this composition provided for them whatever degree of reality the incarnation possessed. On this point their Christology pa.s.sed through several stages of development, the later stages showing progressive improvement on the earlier. They distinguished three senses of the word "composition." First, they said, it might mean "absorption," as when a drop of water is absorbed in a jar of wine.

Second, it might imply the trans.m.u.tation of const.i.tuent particles, as when a third unlike thing is formed from two. Thirdly, there is composition when, from the a.s.sociation of two whole and entire things, a third whole and entire compound thing is formed without loss to the components. They ill.u.s.trated the third mode of composition by the union in man of soul and body. The pre-Eutychian monophysites regarded the hypostatic union as a composition in the first sense of the word.

They spoke of Christ's human nature as absorbed in the divine, as is "a drop of vinegar in the ocean." Eutyches adopted the term in its second sense. He taught that the Word became flesh[3] "as the atmosphere a.s.sumes bodily form and becomes rain or snow under the influence of the wind, and as water becomes ice by reason of the cold air." Philoxenus in a later generation saw that both these positions were wrong and the similes misleading. He taught a hypostatic union totally devoid of confusion or loss or commutation of the elements of the two natures.

To ill.u.s.trate his meaning he used the simile supplied by the "Athanasian" creed, "as the reasonable soul and flesh is one man, so G.o.d and Man is one Christ." This position is a vast improvement on that of the original monophysites. It was ground gained to secure the admission that in any sense Christ was very man. But the monophysites never learned the true manner of the union, namely, that Christ was "one; not by conversion of the G.o.dhead into flesh, but by taking of the Manhood into G.o.d; one altogether; not by confusion of Substance but by unity of Person."

Read in this connection the a.s.sertion that G.o.d and man is one Christ, "as the reasonable soul and flesh is one man," is orthodox; read apart from this context, it is ambiguous. If the simile be kept as a simile, as a mere suggestion or hint as to how, in general, two may compose one and yet remain two, then no exception can be taken to it. If, however, the clause be interpreted as a proportion sum, a.s.signing corresponding values to the different terms, then it savours strongly of Apollinarianism. Most monophysites, like many moderns, probably understood it in the mathematical sense. Christ, they argued, was G.o.d and man, just as man is rational soul and body; the terms are in proportion; therefore the divine nature was the rational soul, and the human nature was the body. They forgot that the free act of the whole divine person in a.s.suming man underlies the union and makes it efficacious; they gave _sarx_; the narrow meaning of _soma_, they set before themselves the picture, not of the infinite robing in the finite, but of the union of mind and matter. Consequently they habitually spoke of the Logos, as a.s.suming, not man or a human nature, but a body.

Such in its varying phases was the monophysite doctrine of composition.

At its worst, it contained a direct denial of the real humanity of Christ. At its best, it falls far short of the catholic doctrine of His real, perfect and complete humanity. The permanent a.s.sumption of human nature into the transcendent personality had no meaning for the heretic party. If it had taken place, it was, they thought, merely momentary, with no after-effects, the pa.s.sing of a summer cloud across the face of the sun.

We have considered the monophysites' view of Christ's human nature, regarded as an integral psychic ent.i.ty. It is evident that they either undervalued it or denied its existence. The more consistent thinkers of their party maintained that the incarnation had made no difference in the being of Christ, and that therefore His human nature had no objective reality. Those who shrank from carrying the doctrine to that length conceded to the orthodox that the incarnation had to some extent modified the being of Christ, that its net result was a composition.

Further a.n.a.lysis showed that this concession was rendered nugatory; that in whatever sense the word "composition" was taken, it was inadequate to express the hypostatic union; that the composition proved in its first significance illusory, in its second, hybridous, in its third, Apollinarianist. We pa.s.s on now to review the human nature in its const.i.tuent parts, and it will be seen that the heretical formula undermines faith in respect of each several part.

THE "PARTS" OF HUMAN NATURE

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 cla.s.sification of psychic states according to predominating features.

The cla.s.sification 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 const.i.tuents of human nature. There may be other elements as yet una.n.a.lysed; 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 const.i.tution and structure as ours. It occupied s.p.a.ce, and was ordinarily subject to the laws of s.p.a.ce. 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 enn.o.bled 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 a.s.sociated 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 s.p.a.ce.

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 a.s.serted 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 a.s.sociates 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 wors.h.i.+p.

They called the orthodox Ctistolatrae or Phthartolatrae, wors.h.i.+ppers of the created or corruptible.

Monophysites of all shades of opinion united in condemning the practice of wors.h.i.+pping 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 ent.i.ty; injurious, because it fixed the mind of the wors.h.i.+pper 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 a.s.sertion, 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.

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 const.i.tuent 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 Agnoetae; they were unbelievers who a.s.serted 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 banis.h.i.+ng 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 a.s.sumed was an animated body. His theory is like an ingenious system of ca.n.a.l locks for letting divine personality descend from the upper to the lower waters. The ingenuity displayed in it condemns it. It is an artificial makes.h.i.+ft. 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.su_, 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 a.n.a.lysis, 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.

THE DUALITY OF CHRIST'S EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE

We come now to the third element in the human spirit. It is only in modern psychology that feeling has secured recognition as a distinct const.i.tuent of man's nature; so it is not surprising that the question as to its position in the incarnate Christ was not raised in former days. Now, however, the psychology of feeling has come into its own, and it has become important to consider whether in this particular, too, Christ shared our human experience. Here, again, the argument for maintaining the duality of Christ's emotional experience is twofold.

It follows, on the one hand, from the duality of the other parts of His nature; and, on the other hand, it is proved by the facts of His life as recorded in the gospels.

Human nature involves feeling, and two natures involve two universes of feeling. Divine personality cannot be conceived as devoid of feeling.

With men feeling lies in the depths of being; it is the dynamic of life. Feeling is the inner reflex of acts of thought and will. It invariably accompanies cognition and volition. If thought and will be attributed to the supreme being, the attribute of feeling cannot be left out. When the G.o.d in Christ acted, divine feeling accompanied the act.

This surmise is proved correct on reference to the records of His life.

We find there two distinct emotional zones. Christ has all the blameless feelings natural to man. There are in Him the feelings accompanying sensation; physical pleasure and pain, hunger, thirst, weariness, and, in addition, the higher grades of feeling, aesthetic, sympathetic, and ethical. He experienced wonder, surprise, righteous anger, the sublime, joy and love. A life rich in emotion was the life of the Man Christ Jesus. When, however, we look more closely into His experience, we catch glimpses of feeling such as no man could know. We see there transcendent pa.s.sion, great sorrow, great joy, so great that they would break a human heart. We may instance the deep emotion accompanying His resolve to go to meet His fate at Jerusalem, the rejoicing in spirit at the success of the apostles' mission, His Agony and His universal love.

The monophysites could not recognise this duality in Christ's emotional nature. Hunger and thirst, and even the higher human feelings they considered derogatory to the Son of G.o.d. Even when they admitted that He suffered, they threw a veil of mystery over His sufferings. They idealised the Pa.s.sion. They made it seem as if His flesh was privileged, as if His omnipotence excused Him from the emotional experiences of humanity.