We leave here the area of theology and come to that of Christology. We have exhibited the monophysite errors with respect to the doctrine of primal deity; we now proceed to analyse their views with respect to the incarnate Christ. The former subject leads the thinker into deep water; the layman is out of his depth in it; so it does not furnish material for a popular controversy. It is otherwise with the latter subject. Here the issue is narrowed to a point. It becomes a question of fact, namely, "Was Christ a real man?" The question and most of the answers given to it are readily intelligible, and they naturally gave rise to heated controversy. Theopaschitism is, as we have shown, a tendency inherent in the heresy, but one slow to come to the surface, and one easily counter-acted and suppressed by the personal piety of the monophysite. Its docetism, the assertion of the unreality of Christ's human nature, lies on the surface. No amount of personal piety can neutralise it. It has had, and still has, a crippling effect on the faith of devout Christians. Even where it is not carried to the length of formal heresy, it spreads a haze of unreality over the gospel story, and dulls the edge of belief.
The second count of Leo's charge against the monophysites was, it will be remembered, that their presentation of Christ made Him "homo falsus." Under this heading "homo falsus" may be classed a wide group of erroneous tenets, ranging from the crudities of early docetism to the subtleties of Apollinarianism. We propose to sketch those of major importance. No attempt will be made to take them in their historical order or historical setting. Further, it is not implied that they all formed part of the official doctrine of the monophysite church. The standard of belief in that communion was constantly varying, and the history of its dogma would need a work to itself. We shall deal with those Christological errors, which, whether part of the official monophysite creed or not, are logical results of the monophysite formula.
Unreality may be predicated of Christ's human nature as a whole, or in respect of its parts. Consubstantiality with humanity may be denied of the whole of his human nature; or deficiency in one or other of the essential constituents of human nature may be alleged. We shall deal first with those errors that concern the entire nature, coming later to the errors in respect of one or more of its several parts.
Suspicion of the reality of Christ's human nature as a whole is characteristic of all monophysite thought. This suspicion, not always formulated or expressed, is everywhere present. If the monophysites admitted the fact of His true manhood, they denied or neglected the religious value of that fact. Their spurious spirituality rebelled against a dogma which seemed to tie the infinite down to a point in history. The fact that the Son of God lived a perfect human life contained no inspiration for them. They idealised the incarnation. It was not for them a historical event. This is a corollary to the proposition, maintained by their great champion, Philoxenus, that "no addition to His person took place." It is tantamount to saying that the union of divine and human in Christ is purely conceptual. When the monophysite faced the question, "What change in Christ did the incarnation effect?" his formula constrained him to reply, "It made no change." The deity of the person was not denied. The pre-existent Logos and the Christ who walked in Galilee were admittedly one and the same. The second person of the trinity and Jesus of Nazareth were one personality. If Bethlehem made no change in that personality, it was purposeless, and the import of the incarnation disappears.
For the consistent monophysites, then, the human nature, as a psychic entity 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 passed 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 transmutation of constituent particles, as when a third unlike thing is formed from two. Thirdly, there is composition when, from the association of two whole and entire things, a third whole and entire compound thing is formed without loss to the components. They illustrated 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 assumes 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 illustrate his meaning he used the simile supplied by the "Athanasian" creed, "as the reasonable soul and flesh is one man, so God 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 Godhead into flesh, but by taking of the Manhood into God; one altogether; not by confusion of Substance but by unity of Person."
Read in this connection the assertion that God 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, assigning 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 God 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 assuming man underlies the union and makes it efficacious; they gavesárx; the narrow meaning ofsôma, 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 assuming, 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 assumption 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 passing 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 entity. 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 analysis 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 pass on now to review the human nature in its constituent parts, and it will be seen that the heretical formula undermines faith in respect of each several part.
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 discretequanta. The division is rather a classification of psychic states according to predominating features. The classification 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 constituents of human nature. There may be other elements as yet unanalysed; 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.
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 constitution and structure as ours. It occupied space, and was ordinarily subject to the laws of space. 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 space. 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 ennobled 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 associated 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 space. 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 asserted 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 associates 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 worship. They called the orthodox Ctistolatrae or Phthartolatrae, worshippers of the created or corruptible.
Monophysites of all shades of opinion united in condemning the practice of worshipping 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 entity; injurious, because it fixed the mind of the worshipper 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."
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 assertion, 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 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 constituent 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.
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 Agnoëtae; they were unbelievers who asserted 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 banishing 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 assumed was an animated body. His theory is like an ingenious system of canal locks for letting divine personality descend from the upper to the lower waters. The ingenuity displayed in it condemns it. It is an artificial makeshift. 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.
We here leave the subject of cognition and pass 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 thea prioriargument. 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 developpari passu, 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 botha prioriand 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 analysis, 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.
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 constituent 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 God 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 passion, 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 God. Even when they admitted that He suffered, they threw a veil of mystery over His sufferings. They idealised the Passion. They made it seem as if His flesh was privileged, as if His omnipotence excused Him from the emotional experiences of humanity.
We have examined the doctrine of one nature, and exposed its chief consequences. We have considered its effects in respect of the deity of Christ and in respect of His manhood. We have applied the doctrine to the human nature as a whole, and to the several parts that compose it. The result of the examination may be summarised in brief. Monophysitism destroys what is divine in the deity and what is human in the humanity. It offers to Christians a Christ who is not sufficiently above man to be able to help them by His power, nor sufficiently man to be able to help them by His sympathy. The monophysite Christ is neither very God nor very man, but a composition in which all traces of the original entities are lost to view.
[1] "The Chronicle of Zachariah of Mitylene," translated by Hamilton and Brooks, chap. iii. p. 46.
[2] This addition to the Trisagion was officially condemned at the close of the 7th century owing to its monophysite associations.
[3] "Chronicle of Zachariah of Mitylene," translated by Hamilton and Brooks, ii. 2, p. 21.
[4] The question of Justinian's orthodoxy has been debated by Bury and Hutton. SeeGuardian, March 4th and April 15th, 1896.
Monophysitism originated in a monastery. Eutyches, "the father of the monophysites," was a monk. The monastic temperament is peculiarly susceptible to this heresy, and the monastic element has always been dominant in the monophysite churches. The cloister is the natural habitat of the doctrine of the one nature. Monasticism is applied monism. If the world's existence be a sham, if its value compared with God be negligible, it becomes a religious duty to avoid all influences that heighten the illusion of the world's real existence and intrinsic value. The monist, like the monk, must renounce all secular interests and "go out of the world." The path of renunciation had an additional claim on the Christological monist. In his universal ideal, as manifested in time, the human elements were sublimated into the divine. Consequently his ideal of conduct imposed a negative attitude towards the world and a merging of his ego in the universal spirit. These are the ruling elements in the spirit of the cloister, and these are the characteristics of the monophysite ethos.
Those men, to whom God is the sum of all reality and the world merely a cosmic shadow, regard worship as the sole worthy activity of the human spirit. In worship union with God is sought, a union so close that the personality of the worshipper is absorbed into the being of the worshipped. His experience of God is so intimate that his experience of the world is reduced to insignificance. As an overpowering human love welds two beings into one, and identifies their thoughts, wills, springs of action and even feelings, so theamor deiidentifies man with God and makes possible a deification of humanity. Deeply religious natures in all ages have heard this mystic call. To lose their ego in the divine spirit is the height of their religious ambition. The conception is lofty, but it is not the Christian ideal of life and duty.
Mysticism and monophysitism are twin systems. Both are religious phases of pantheism. As, to the intellect, acosmism is the corollary of pantheism, so, to the heart, asceticism follows from mysticism. Whether conceived in terms of existence or of value, the world for the mystic is an obstacle to theunio mystica. It snares the mind through the senses and creates a fictitious -appearance of solid reality in sensuous objects. It makes pretensions to goodness and attaches to itself a spurious value. The only remedy is self-denial, denial of existence to the world, denial of credence to the senses, denial of gratification to the passions, desires, and inclinations. The monophysites were mystics. They were the rigorists of the eastern church. They formed the "no compromise" party. They stood for a thorough-going renunciation of the world and the flesh. Though they did not officially lay down the inherent evil of matter, Manicheanism is latent in their system. They did not explicitly identify matter with the spirit of evil, but they had the spiritual man's suspicion of matter and his contempt for the body of the flesh. Abstinence, mortification of the flesh, and all ascetic practices flourished in their communion. Art and culture were suspect; they had no eye for natural beauty. Some of their hymn-writers possessed considerable poetic taste; but poetry was discouraged by their leaders. Several of the extant letters of Severus of Antioch show that that patriarch did his best to banish that art from his church. His attitude may be gathered from the following quotation.[1] "As to Martyrius, the poet, ... I wish you to know that he is a trouble to me and a nuisance. Indeed in the case of the others also who follow the same profession, and were enrolled in the holy clergy of the Church that is with us, I have debarred them from practising such poetry; and I am taking much trouble to sever this theatrical pursuit from ecclesiastical gravity and modesty, a pursuit that is the mother of laxity and is also capable of causing youthful souls to relax and casting them into the mire of fornication, and carrying them to bestial passions." The result of this asceticism was a jaundiced and inhuman outlook on life. There was much piety among the monophysites, but it was confined to a narrow channel. Their zeal for purity of doctrine amounted to fanaticism; their hatred of the Nestorian and of the Melchite at times reached a white heat. Toleration was almost unknown in their communion.
The claims of humanity appeal less to a monophysite than to other Christians. He places all life's values in the other world. He has no motive for trying to ameliorate the lot of his fellow-men. Social service has to him little or no divine sanction or religious value. We are speaking only of general tendencies. No follower of Christ, however perverted his views, could be totally indifferent to the welfare of other men; but it came natural to the monophysite to think that it does not matter much how a man lives in this world of shadows, provided he holds communion with the world of unseen realities. The same motive accounts for the rapid decline of missionary activity in their communion. The Nestorians were far more active propagandists. Worship is a very high type of service; but worship becomes selfish and sickens into sentiment, if it neglects the inspiring tonic of contact with human need. The monophysite Christology encouraged that form of self-sacrifice, whose goal is Nirvana, which lapses lazily into the cosmic soul and loses itself there in contemplation and ecstasy. It supplies no motive for that finer piety which manifests itself in ethical endeavour and practical philanthropy. His Christ had not partaken of the cup of suffering. His Christ's advance to human perfection was illusory. So the monophysite could not look for the sympathy of Christ in his own struggles, nor could he appeal to Christ's example in respect of works of human charity. Monophysitism considers only the religious nature of man, and takes no account of his other needs. We must therefore characterise the system as unsocial, unlovely, unsympathetic.
The uncompromising attitude of the individual monophysites was reflected in their ecclesiastical polity. We cannot but admire their sturdy independence. The monophysite church stood for freedom from state control. Her principles were the traditional principles of the Alexandrian see. Alexandria would not truckle to Constantinople, nor let religion subserve imperial policy. She would allow the catholic party to be Melchites (King's men) and to reap all the temporal advantages accruing to the established church. In this matter the monophysites took a narrow view; but their narrowness evinces their piety. They felt the evils attendant on Constantine's grand settlement, and they made their ill-judged protest. They made it for no unworthy motive. There are always such thinkers in the church. A spiritual enthusiast despises the outward dignity that the church gains from an alliance with the State, and is often blind to the spiritual benefits conferred on the nation by that alliance, while he concentrates his gaze on incidental evils. To connect with Christology such an attitude towards the principle of Establishment may seem forced at first sight. The connection, however, exists. Independence of the temporal power is symptomatic with that unworldliness which, as we have shown above, characterises monophysitism. Its adherents paid no respect to the human as such. They attached no value to merely human institutions, and made no attempt to see or foster the divine that is in them. The argument that because the State is a human institution it should have no voice in ecclesiastical policy is typically monophysite; it is the argument of one who could draw no inspiration from the human life of the Son of God.
Mysticism and rationalism have much in common. They both are elements in the mental composition of almost every serious thinker. The sterility of logic often drives him to seek a higher and surer instrument of knowledge. So there is no inconsistency in further characterising the monophysites as rationalists. The intellectuals of the eastern church were found mostly in their communion. Theirs was the formal logic point of view. Christ, they urged, was one and not two; therefore His nature was one and not two. They could not see that He was both. In Bergsonian language, they used exclusively mechanical categories. Intelligence, an instrument formed by contact with matter, destined for action upon matter, they used on a supra-material subject. Their thinkers were highly trained logicians; they revelled in abstract argument; theirs was a cold intellectual metaphysic, unwarmed by flesh and blood empiricism.
Their narrow outlook on life, their religious zeal and their rationalist philosophy combined to produce in them sectarianism of an extreme type. Party spirit ran high among them. They fought the catholics; they fought the Nestorians; they fought one another. The list of schisms that occurred in their communion is of amazing length. The letters of Severus of Antioch make sad reading. They show us that the patriarch had constantly to interfere in cases of disputed succession to bishoprics. At almost every vacancy in the provincial dioceses there were parties formed each with their own nominee, ready to schismatise if they could not secure recognition and consecration for him. It is evident that monophysitism does not foster the generous, tolerant, humane virtues of Christianity. It is the creed of monks, mystics, and intellectualists.
[1] E. W. Brooks, "Select Letters of Severus of Antioch," vol. ii. pp. 88, 89.
Christology divorced from empirical psychology is a barren science. Abstract discussions about person, nature and union of natures soon degenerate into logomachies. If personality is a psychic entity, and nature another distinct psychic entity, then the question at issue between diphysite and monophysite is worth debating. If they are concepts merely, the debate is hollow and of purely academic interest. A study of psychology clothes the dry bones with flesh. It puts life and meaning into these abstractions. It shows that they represent entities, that something corresponding to the terms "person" and "nature" is actually part of the being of every man, and that therefore their existence in Christ is a proper and practical subject for investigation. In so doing psychology provides therationaleof the Christological controversies. It justifies the church in her determined adherence to the precise expression of the truth. No Christian with powers of introspection, who can distinguish in his own being personality and nature, can be indifferent to the Christological problem. The problem is one of fact, not theory. The terms and the formula are only of importance as expressing or failing to express the true facts of Christ's being. In a word, the psychology of the central figure of human history is the matter at issue.
Reference to psychological fact is what one misses in the records of the old controversies. The disputes read as if they were about shadows. No doubt that was often the case. Catholics and non-Catholics were often agreed as to the substance of belief, while owing to their devotion to words and formulae the agreement went unrecognised. Had the disputants made clear to themselves and to each other what they meant by their abstract terms, had they translated them into their concrete psychological equivalents, heresy and schism would have been less frequent. It was, however, almost impossible for them to do so, because in their day theology was far more highly developed than psychology. Systematic observation of the workings of spirit was almost unknown. There existed no science of psychology as we know it. No clear notions attached to the terms "person" and "nature." They represented abstractions necessary to discursive reason rather than concrete psychic facts. All parties shared this defect. Among catholics and Nestorians as well as among monophysites knowledge of the constituents of human nature was of the most rudimentary character. The catholic party, however, by keeping close to the facts recorded in the gospels, achieved a Christological formula that is psychologically intelligible; while the heretical parties were led by their preconceived opinions to fashion a Christ, whose features are unrecognisable as God or man, a psychological monstrosity.