MONOPHYSITISM IN THE PRESENT DAY
"To believe rightly the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ" is an
ideal that the thoughtful Christian strives to attain. He expects to
find the solution of high moral and speculative problems in that union
of divine and human. The right faith is not easily reached. It is an
elusive prize. There are conditions moral and intellectual attaching
to its possession. The moral conditions may take a lifetime to fulfil.
Even on its intellectual side faith is a long process. No sudden
mental grasp of the whole truth can be attained. It dawns on the mind
gradually. The discipline of faith in the incarnation consists in a
gradual and laborious advance from stage to stage. The various stages
are half-truths or inadequate conceptions of Christ. They are
objectified in the Christological heresies. These heresies arrange
themselves in a sequence so strict and so logical that one could almost
say that they are deducible _a priori_ from the concept "divine-human."
Certainly the subjective fancies of the heresiarchs do not provide the
whole account. There is something of the universal in these heresies.
They are in the main current of religious thought. As the chief
historic systems of philosophy repeat themselves in each generation and
in the intellectual development of individual thinkers, so do the
Christological heresies recur. There is considerable truth in Hegel's
contentions that the development of a man's mind is one with that of
the general consciousness, that the individual reason is a miniature of
the universal reason, that in fact the history of a philosopher's
thinking is an abstract of the history of philosophy. The same holds
good in the field of religious thought. Without much artificiality,
without forcing the facts, a rational scheme of the Christological
heresies might be drawn up. They might be pictorially represented as
the rungs of a ladder, which the truth-seeking mind scales rung by
rung, pausing at the lower phases of Christological thought, and then
resuming the ascent till the highest truth is attained. The instrument
of thought is much the same in all centuries; the objects of thought
vary very little; so it is intelligible that the products of
speculative and religious thought should remain the same to-day as in
the fifth century.
THE EXISTENCE OF MODERN MONOPHYSITISM
Is there such a thing as modern monophysitism? To this question the
preceding paragraph supplies the answer, "There must be." Heretical
tendencies will be found in the Christian community in every
generation, and the religious thought of individual Christians will
pass through heretical phases. Such heresy is rather an intellectual
than a moral fault; but the possibility of being the heirs, without
knowing it, of the opinions of Nestorius and Eutyches throws on
thinkers to-day the responsibility of examining their Christological
beliefs and of testing them by the canon of orthodoxy. Not a few
leaders of religious thought, in intention orthodox, in fact remain
monophysites, through inability to analyse their beliefs or through a
false sense of security, founded on the opinion that the age of heresy
is past.
It is commonly supposed that belief in the deity of Christ constitutes
Christianity. That supposition is wrong. Arius was not the only
heresiarch. To transcend the Arian standpoint is only the first step
in the long discipline of faith. There are other heresies, other
half-truths scarcely less pernicious than the Arian. The recognition
of Christ as God represents a great intellectual and moral advance, and
is the first essential step in religion; but to rest content with the
taking of that step is to remain on the lowest rung of the ladder of
faith. It is little use to form a lofty conception of Christ, if in
doing so we insulate Him from the world of things and souls. That is
what monophysitism does, and because disguised monophysitism is
prevalent in the church to-day, Christianity's grip is weak and the
fire of devotion low.
We may picture faith as a battlefield. Doubt is the enemy entrenched
in depth. Arianism holds the first line of trenches. Echeloned behind
Arianism are the other heresies in a network of fortified redoubts,
strong points and support trenches. The church militant must make the
furthest line her objective. If her advance stays at an intermediate
point, she is exposed to cross-fire from the support trenches of the
subsidiary heresies. The ground gained by the first assault proves
untenable. The position won can only be secured by pushing home the
attack to the final objective and consolidating her line there in the
might of full catholic doctrine.
A thorough and systematic advance of this sort was made by the orthodox
Christologians of the fifth century. The campaign was fought and won
then. It has, however, to be fought anew in each generation and in the
experience of individual thinkers. Monophysitism is commonly regarded
as a vagary of oriental thought, killed once and for all by a church
council in the fifth century. That is a superficial view.
Monophysitism is a hydra growth, and no Hercules can be found to
exterminate it. It reappears in each succeeding age, in West as well
as East. The structure of the human intellect is such that, whenever
men begin to investigate the being of Christ, the tendency to regard
Him as one-natured is present. The church of the fifth century exposed
that doctrine; it was beyond her power to kill it.
REASONS FOR THE PREVALENCE OF MONOPHYSITISM
Monophysitism is in our midst undetected to-day. It is not hard to
account for its prevalence. The clergy are for the most part unable to
expound Christology, and the laity are impatient of exposition.
Anything savouring of precise theology is at a discount. So pulpit and
pew conspire to foster the growth of the tares. The "Athanasian" creed
is in disrepute, and its statement of dogmatic Christology is involved
in the discredit attaching to the damnatory clauses. The clergy are
perhaps rather glad to leave the subject alone. They know it is a
difficult subject, and they are afraid of burning their fingers. The
laity rarely hear any reference to the two natures of Christ. If they
do, they are not interested; they do not think that the question makes
any difference to faith or practice. The whole extent of the
Christological knowledge possessed by the average churchman is
comprised in the formula, "Christ is God and man." He cannot apply the
formula nor reconcile it with common sense. He occasionally hears from
the pulpit the phrase "God-man"; but it is a mere phrase to him; it is
not translated for him into a language that he can understand. So he
registers the doctrine mentally as an impenetrable mystery and gives it
no further attention, or perhaps turns away in disgust from the system
whose central figure is so unintelligibly presented by its authorised
exponents. The bare statement that Christ is God and man, though true,
is not adequate. It carries no conviction to thinking minds to-day.
The full definition of the council of Chalcedon should be published
broadcast, and so studied by theologians in the light of modern
psychology that they can present it as a reasonable dogma, intelligible
to-day and touching modern life.
In the absence of such teaching the spread of false, unbalanced or
inadequate conceptions of what Christ was and of what He is is
inevitable. Our concern here is to exhibit those of a monophysite
character. Monophysite tendencies of the present day may be grouped
according as they affect Christ's being or His work or Christian
practice. We propose to take them in that order.
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 _rheidios_ 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.
THE PRESENT EXISTENCE OF CHRIST'S HUMAN NATURE
The view taken of the Christ of the past necessarily affects belief in
the Christ of the present. It is scarcely possible to realise the
present existence of a human Christ, unless the fact of His actual
human existence in the first century of our era be grasped. If He had
but one nature on earth, He has but one nature now in heaven. If the
historic Christ was monophysite, so also is the Christ to whom we pray.
In this consequence consists the seriousness of modern monophysitism.
The present reality of His human nature is to-day even among His
followers doubted, obscured, or forgotten. Christ is to many spiritual
minds merely an ideal personality, a summary of their own ethical
ideals. They perhaps regard Him as a disembodied spirit or mysterious
influence. They rarely attain the catholic standpoint and see the
human nature as a psychic entity actually existent to-day. At any rate
the doctrine is not thought out to its consequences. The "perpetual
intercession" is, it is feared, little more than a phrase. That Christ
as man still intercedes for men is a verity not understood and only
half appreciated. Yet the official doctrine of orthodoxy teaches that
there is a full and true continuity of existence between the Christ of
Galilee and the Christ to whom we pray. The Church teaches that there
is somewhere, in some transcendent form of existence, a being with
perfect human mind, whose will in strength and scope is perfectly
proportioned to His knowledge, whose feelings are in perfect mutual
harmony, whose psychic nature finds outward expression in a glorified
body; that this perfect being once walked this earth, and yet had and
has the ground of His being in a divine personality. Such a Christ the
latent monophysitism of our thinking hides from our view.
THE DOCTRINE OF SUBJECTIVE REDEMPTION DUE TO MONOPHYSITISM
The doctrines of Christ's person and of His work are intimately
associated. What He did depended on what He was. Christology and
Soteriology act and react upon each other. If Christology is crippled,
Soteriology goes lame. Christ takes His stand in the centre of the
cosmic process in virtue of His unique being. In that He unites deity
and humanity in His own person, He brought redemption within the reach
of mankind. His redemption of humanity was as definite a fact as His
assumption of human nature. Both to the Christian are objective
historical facts; if either of them falls to the ground, so does the
other; and with that collapse goes the purpose of creation and
humanity's hope. A docetic interpretation of the human nature entails
a docetic view of redemption. Monophysitism, as we have seen, casts
doubts upon the reality of the sufferings and humanity of Christ; in so
doing it compromises the work He accomplished. Atonement ceases to be
a cosmic transaction completed on Calvary, and becomes a subjective
process. Redemption is made into an attitude, or rather a change of
attitude, on the part of the individual. That Christ wrought a power
and hope for man which man could not achieve for himself is not a
familiar doctrine to-day. Pain, not sin, is the great modern problem.
The Cross is made to stand for sympathy, not for satisfaction.
Salvation, achieved at a definite moment of history and conferred on
believers of subsequent generations, rests for its foundations on the
objective assumption of human nature by a divine person. If the
foundations be undermined, as monophysitism undermines them, the
superstructure crumbles. Redemption becomes improvement by effort and
self-help, or a constant endeavour after a private ideal of conduct.
MONOPHYSITISM LIMITS THE SCOPE OF REDEMPTION
Monophysitism shows itself also in the modern tendency to narrow the
scope of redemption. Partial salvation is offered as a substitute for
the salvation of the entire man. This tendency is a natural result of
narrowing the import of the incarnation. It runs counter to orthodox
Christology and the derivate doctrines. A divine economy is traceable
in God's dealings with men; there is nothing purposeless, nothing
otiose in God's dispensation. The Church's invariable answer to the
Apollinarians was grounded in belief in this economy. She argued that
Christ could not redeem what He did not assume, and, conversely, that
what He assumed He redeemed. He assumed human nature in its entirety,
thought, will, feeling and body; therefore not one of those elements of
human nature lies outside the scope of redemption. Monophysitism
excludes some or all of those elements from the being of the incarnate
Christ, and by so doing deprives the corresponding elements in man's
nature of their rightful share in the benefit of redemption.
The feeling that some parts of human nature are more fitted to survive
than others is wide-spread to-day. It is found within as well as
without the Church. We constantly read of the "survival factor." The
term implies the belief that at death part of the man's nature survives
and part perishes. There is, however, no general agreement as to which
part constitutes the "survival factor." The intellectualist pins his
faith to the immortality of the reason. He is content to let death
deprive him of everything except the logical faculty. For the aesthete
beauty alone is eternal, and his hope for the future lies in the
continuance of his aesthetic sense. The materialist sees permanence
only in the indestructibility of the ultimate physical constituents of
his body. The epigenesis of a spiritual body lies outside his horizon.
The volitionist finds all the value of life in the moral nature. For
him the good will persists when all else is resolved into nothingness.
Character alone, he says, survives the shock of death. All these
limited views of survival are symptoms of monophysite ways of thinking.
The Christian, on the contrary, holds that what is redeemed _eo ipso_
survives. Whatever else is involved in redemption persistence
certainly is included. Monophysitism stands for a partial redemption;
but to the orthodox who believe that Christ assumed human nature in its
entirety, each part and the whole are of infinite value. He holds that
the strengthening, purifying, and perfecting that salvation brings
apply to the psychic and the physical natures, that no part is exempt,
that neither intellect nor will nor feeling ceases with death, that the
range of reason will be increased, and its operation made more sure,
that lofty and sustained endeavour will replace the transient energy of
the earthly will, that feeling will be enhanced, harmonised, and
purified, that a spiritual body continuous with the body of the flesh
will express man's heavenly experience. These high far-reaching hopes
rest on the doctrines of catholic Christology. Christ assumed our
nature complete in body and psychic parts. He did so with a purpose,
and that purpose could be none other than the redemption of the body
and of all the psychic elements. To the mystic, body and human
activities may seem only transient and unworthy of a place in heaven.
Such is false spirituality. It is contrary to the tenor of catholic
teaching. The incarnation brought divine and human together on earth.
The resurrection fixed their union. The ascension gave humanity an
eternal place among eternal things.
MONOPHYSITISM SHOWN IN THE MODERN TENDENCY TO MAKE THE DEATH OF CHRIST
A SECONDARY FACTOR IN THE SCHEME OF REDEMPTION
We have seen above that monophysitism discredits the reality of
Christ's sufferings. Dogmatic reasons apart, the monophysite is
motived by a repugnance to physical pain and by a wish to exclude it
from the experience of the human ideal. To this motive we can trace
the modern tendency to transfer the doctrinal centre of gravity from
the Passion to the incarnation. The Passion and Death used to occupy
the first place in the thoughts of Christians and formed the foundation
for all theories of atonement. The incarnation was regarded as, for
the purposes of dogma, subsidiary. Within recent times the position
has been reversed. The main stress falls now on the incarnation. The
Passion seems of secondary importance, if, as modern theology often
teaches, all purposes of redemption were secured prior to it. In thus
changing the venue of redemption modern theology is wrong. The mistake
is prompted largely, so it seems to the writer, by monophysitism latent
in modern religious thought; at any rate strict adherence to the
catholic doctrine of two natures would have prevented it. The human
nature that Christ assumed had to be perfected through suffering;
otherwise it could not attain that universality and representative
character which enabled it to become the medium of universal salvation.
If it had been enough for the divine spirit to mingle with men, to show
them a pattern life, and to touch them to higher things, an apparition
would have been adequate, and no community of suffering would have been
necessary. Since Christ not only appeared as man, but experienced in
His flesh all man's experiences, death which is the climax of human
experience fell to His lot and set the seal to the divine enterprise.
Since He who died was the flesh and blood embodiment of the cosmic
relation. His death has cosmic significance. The doctrinal edifice in
which Calvary is of ornamental and not of structural value has
monophysitism for its foundation.
HISTORICAL CHARACTER OF CHRISTIANITY OBSCURED
Christ's mission is misunderstood to-day as well as His cosmic work.
In certain religious quarters where zeal is not balanced by learning,
His mission as the founder of a religious society is forgotten. To
those who are deficient in historic sense the continuity of the Church
down the centuries seems unimportant, and institutional religion a
hindrance rather than a help to the spiritual life of the individual
Christian. Pietism of this kind has always been present in the church;
to-day it is prevalent. It nominally associates its piety with the
historic Christ, but actually it worships an ideal constructed by its
own ethical imagination. Such pietists spiritualise the faith. The
facts of the historic creed are to them little more than symbols of
religious truth. Spiritual resurrection, spiritual ascension are the
only miracles for them. This tendency to spiritualise everything is a
phase of monophysitism. It results from losing sight of the person of
the historic Christ, and resolving His assumption of human nature into
the assumption of a title.
CHRISTOLOGY A DETERMINANT OF SACRAMENTAL THOUGHT
Errors in sacramental teaching necessarily accompany misconceptions of
the person of Christ. The incarnation is a cosmic sacrament, the
meeting-point of divine and human, and the sacraments of the church are
types of the vaster mystery. In both type and antitype it is all
important to give due weight to divine and human, and not to exalt one
element at the expense of the other. Those who undervalue the human
nature of Christ are disposed to undervalue the outward sign in the
sacraments. Not appreciating the hypostatic union of divine with
human, they misunderstand the sacramental union of the same elements.
Blind to the significance of Christ's humanity in the economy of
redemption, they fail to see how matter can be the channel of
sacramental grace. Yet the discipline of faith is the same in both
cases. The Christian enterprise is not merely to believe in the
divine, but to believe in the divine manifested in the human.
There are two divergent, almost opposing, schools of sacramental
teaching, both of which have inherited the spirit of monophysitism.
Both are instances of sacramental monism. First, there are those who
identify the outward signs and the inward grace; second, those to whom
the inward grace is everything and the outward sign nothing. Both
schools of thought destroy the nature of a sacrament. The radical
error of both consists in undervaluing the human and material. In the
first case the error takes the form of the transubstantiation doctrine,
which is exactly parallel to the extreme form of Eutychianism.
According to Eutyches, the human nature of Christ was absorbed into the
divine and lost there; the truth of His being was the divine
personality; the human element was only an appearance. Similarly the
transubstantiation theory conceives the mutation of the _substance_ of
the material elements and the loss of their proper nature; the
appearance of reality that the _accidents_ possess is an illusion of
the senses. We may note in passing that the opposite error to
transubstantiation finds its Christological parallel in Nestorianism.
Socinianism which separates symbol from sacramental grace is
sacramental dualism, as Nestorianism is Christological dualism. Both
abandon a vital unity of divine and human. The pietistic or mystical
view of the sacraments does so too, but in a different way. This
second form of sacramental monism has much in common with the doctrine
of one nature. To the pietist the divine seems all important, and the
material no help, but rather a hindrance to the spiritual life. The
faith of the individual to him is the seat of the efficacy of the
sacraments; he regards matter as unreal if not sinful, and in either
case unworthy to be a channel of divine grace. Echo after echo of
monophysite thought can be caught here. The surest way to combat
sacramental errors on both sides is a clear and definite statement of
the catholic doctrine of Christology.
NEED OF A MENTAL RECONSTRUCTION OF THE HUMAN NATURE OF CHRIST
As the interval of time widens, separating Christians from the human
life of their God, the more urgent becomes the obligation to put forth
a constructive effort of the historical imagination. The attempt to
keep that memory green grows harder and harder as the centuries pass;
but Christians must make it; otherwise the historical character of
their religion will perish. There need be no fear that the interests
of spiritual religion will suffer. Amongst moderns the danger of
idealising the human is greater than that of humanising the divine. An
intelligent appreciation of Christ's human life draws out love and
kindles reverence towards the divine personality who condescended to
the level of mankind. We may point by way of illustration to the
effect of biblical criticism. Christians of a previous generation
dreaded the touch of criticism. They thought it profanation. They
refused to admit any human element in the bible. Criticism, however,
had its way. Bibliolatry had to go. The result is that the bible is a
living book to us to-day. In spite of the fears of the devout there
was little to lose and much to gain by recognising the human element in
the bible. As with the written word, so with the living Word. Without
a recognition of the human element in His being, a full assimilation of
His teaching and an intimate perception of His real presence are
unattainable. If this recognition be accorded, the great past will
live again in the present. Hostile critics study the life and
character of Christ and the records of them with a view to proving that
He was merely man. Believers may adopt their method with a different
object. They may undertake the same study in order to comprehend the
wonder of the Man, and so rise to some conception of the wonder of the
God. The gospels are read mainly as a handbook of devotion; they
should be studied as the biography of a hero. The face-value of its
incidents is often neglected, while the reader seeks allegorical and
mystical interpretations. To form a mental picture of Christ in His
environment, to read ourselves back into His world and then into His
ways of thought, such efforts are more than ever needed to-day, and
they are more than ever absent. Historic sense and imagination should
be allowed to play upon the recorded acts and sayings of Jesus, until a
great temple to His memory rises in the high places of the mind,
dominating thence the whole intellectual and moral life. Such an
enterprise would infuse life and meaning into the Christological
formula, and would effect, so to speak, a reconstruction of the human
nature of the historic Christ. The Christian's attitude towards the
Man Christ Jesus is the "acid test" of the sincerity of his faith. No
one can bring intellectual difficulties to a being to whom cognising
was a foreign process, nor moral difficulties to one who knew no
conflict of wills, nor sorrows to one "all breathing human passion far
above." If we picture the ideal of all mankind as thinking our
thoughts, willing as we will, feeling as we feel, we are united to Him
by an intellectual, moral and emotional bond of sympathy. Such a
threefold cord is not quickly broken. Communion with such a Being
leads the worshipper to the heart of the Christian religion.
THE END
PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES.
End of Project Gutenberg's Monophysitism Past and Present, by A. A. Luce