Without claiming finality for the findings of modern psychology, we can consider some results of the science as established. They are sufficiently well established, at any rate, to provide a starting-point for our investigation. In particular the brilliant observations and theories of M. Bergson throw, so it seems to the writer, a flood of light on Christology. We propose to outline the two key doctrines of the Bergsonian psychology and show how they confirm the truth of the orthodox formula and expose the monophysite fallacy. These key doctrines are, first, the interpenetration of psychic states, and, second, the distinction between deep-seated and superficial consciousness.
It is, says Bergson, characteristic of psychic states that they do not, like material things remain external to one another. They inter-penetrate. Cut up by human intelligence into discrete elements, in their own nature they remain a continuum. States of mind appear successive and external to one another, because age-long association with matter has accustomed men to material modes of thought. Man's intelligence is a by-product of activity. For purposes of action it is the externality of things that matters. The inner connection is relatively unimportant. Men act with precision on matter, because perception cuts up the continuum of matter into bodies, defined bodies no two of which can occupy the same space. Intelligence originating thus by contact with matter naturally prefers mechanical categories. These categories applicable to matter when applied to higher forms of existence mislead. We naturally conceive psychic states as external to one another, and their interpenetration seems an abnormality. At this stage of thought experience is pictured as a line of indefinite length, infinitely divisible, whose divisions correspond to the moments of consciousness. This spatial picture of mind is misleading in many ways, not the least in that it can offer no reasonable theory of the subconscious. Thinkers who materialise mental experience have no room in their theory for the sub-conscious. It is for them bare non-consciousness, a psychic vacuum. When, however, we start from this unique characteristic, that mind possesses, of remaining one and indivisible throughout the greatest appearance of diversity, the sub-conscious falls naturally into the scheme. No part of our experience perishes. It is essentially self-perpetuating memory. The needs of action relegate the greater portion of it to the sub-conscious, but it is there, always linked to our conscious experience, and only awaiting the occasion to emerge into the full light of consciousness. Past penetrates into the present. One portion of our present penetrates into the other portions. Conscious and unconscious, past and present, combine to form one wonderful whole.
Such in outline is Bergson's theory of the interpenetration of psychic states. If this psychology be adopted, the abstract character of the catholic doctrine of Christ's being in large measure disappears. It becomes easy to conceive the interpenetration of two natures in one Christ. Further, the Bergsonian psychology furnishes a standpoint from which criticism of monophysitism is easy. Psychology at the monophysite stage of thought conceives the moments of Christ's consciousness in their mutual externality; they follow each other as do the ticks of a clock. They are discrete elements strung along on a hypothetical ego. Christ's experience is conceived as unilinear. All that He did, suffered and thought is regarded as having taken place on one and the same plane of experience. This psychology has no room for another plane of experience. It has no room for a positive sub-consciousness. Consequently that one plane must be the one divine nature, which, as the monophysites taught, absorbed the human.
The one-nature theory is not true to the facts. It overlooks the complexity of Christ's experience. His experiences lie on two different planes. He has different universes of thought, different actuating wills and sets of feelings. Christ is not in one nature. The phases of His consciousness are twofold. His experiences fall naturally into two groups. While one group is in consciousness, the other is below the level of consciousness. Now the human experiences, now the divine, are uppermost. Both are always present. Life under such conditions is inconceivable, unless full recognition be accorded to the fact that conscious states interpermeate. If each state fall outside the other, and consciousness be a chain of successive ideas or emotions, a twofold nature within the one experience is meaningless. The view of conscious states as discrete leads inevitably to determinism. The place of one state in the chain is conditioned by its predecessor. There is no room for the spontaneity and the creative power which characterise conscious life. Associationism cannot countenance the unforeseen and incalculable. So it is out of sympathy with Christian psychology. A function of the divine in Christ is to introduce the element of the unforeseen and incalculable into His normal and human experience. The Bergsonian psychology thus supplies an intellectual basis for belief in the possibility of two natures in Christ. When ideas are regarded as psychic entities whose essential property is mutual penetration, the ground is prepared for the catholic formula. Where this truth is not recognised, there arises inevitably the tendency to assert that Christ had and must have had but one uniform level of experience, and that assertion is the essence of monophysitism.
Bergson's psychology throws further light on a central doctrine of catholic Christology. It not only makes conceivable, as we have shown above, the co-existence of the two natures, but it lends support to the belief in the independent reality of His personality. Person and nature of Christology find their modern equivalents in the Bergsonian "deep-seated" and "superficial" states of consciousness. Bergson draws a sharp line of distinction between these two. The deep-seated states constitute the kernel of being. They are the man's existence turned inwards. They are independent, free, creative. They are a unifying force. Always present, they only rarely make their presence felt. Only at moments of deep experience do they interfere with the surface self. The superficial states form the outward-regarding existence of man. They represent consciousness relaxed into moments of clock-time, moments more or less external to one another. They are not truly free. They are conditioned by the material environment. Whatever be thought of the metaphysic of this system, recognition cannot be refused to that part of it which rests on the solid foundation of psychological fact. Self-analysis discloses a two-fold experience in man. The stream of his life contains both current and undercurrent. The current is nature, the under-current personality.
This distinction is of paramount importance in Christology. Diphysites hold fast to the distinction. They maintain a human nature in Christ, but they do not humanise His person. The person cannot be humanised. It remained divine after the incarnation, as it was before. Though He became man, the depth of His being was unchanged. The rain from heaven and the waters from the earthly spring mingle in one stream, but beneath the surface the deep undercurrent of being flows on unchanged. The monophysite in effect abandons this distinction. This is where his psychology is most seriously at fault. He confuses person and nature. Deep-seated and superficial states of soul are all one to him. He does not see the duality in the being of his fellow-men; so he cannot see it in the ideal man. This is a consequence of monophysitism which has not attracted the attention of theologians, and which the monophysite himself did not intend. The doctrine that rules out the human nature of Christ rules out the divine nature also, by confusing it with the personality. The monophysite affirms the divine nature while denying the human. Such affirmation is purely verbal. It is completely void of significance. The contrast between the divine and human natures is needed to throw personality into relief. Take away the human nature, and that contrast disappears, and with it goes the distinction between divine person and divine nature. Then, instead of a transcendent personality in whose portrait divine and human features are distinctly limned, we have a blur. Where God planned a unique though intelligible psychic harmony, we find a psychic medley.
This assertion is justified by an appeal to human experience. Men become sure of their own or of other people's personality by experiencing strong contrasts of natures in themselves or by observing them in others. For instance, a sudden and violent change of occupation establishes personality as a distinct entity. The civilian turns soldier. Almost immediately all parts of his nature are affected. He feels the development, as it were, of a second nature within him. His faculties are transformed. He enters a new universe of thought. His range of knowledge narrows in one direction, widens in another. His volitional nature is altered. His will narrows in scope, but increases in intensity. Nor does his emotional nature escape the change. Aesthetic values are reversed. He no longer feels pleasure and pain at the old objects. Physical desires play a much larger part in his life, and he loses taste for intellectual pleasures. The soldier returns to civilian life and, as it were, with his civilian attire he resumes his former nature, and all his old thoughts and feelings and impulses come flooding back. Such an experience is of considerable psychological interest. It exemplifies the interpenetration of different states of thought and activity. The contrasts bring home to a man the fact that his spirit is a synthesis of heterogeneous elements. They force him back on himself. They rouse in him the dormant sense of personal being. It is the apprehension of strong contrast in his experience of himself, the apprehension of the plurality of his being, that accentuates the deep-lying unity. The more violent the change in the walks of life, the clearer becomes the concept of the continuity. Civilian or soldier, the man, the person is the same.
Personality is thrown into relief not only by change of occupation, but also by moral contrasts. Conflicting passions, opposing motives and internal debate serve to make a man realise himself. Strong personalities are often those in whom the conflict between good and evil is most acute. It is the very opposition of natures which brings out the personal element into the full light of conscious recognition.
We must now examine human personality in greater detail; we must indicate its functions and show how it differs from human nature. Only by coming to grips with this psychological problem is it possible to appreciate the points at issue in the Christological question and to judge between catholic and monophysite.
Kant distinguished the noumenal from the phenomenal ego. The former he regarded as an idea, the latter as a reality in time. The distinction corresponds roughly to that between person and nature. The phenomenal ego is the nature of man. It bears the brunt of the struggle of life. The noumenal ego is the transcendent personality of the individual—an idea which pure reason necessarily forms and which practical reason establishes. Though the Kantian philosophy no longer carries conviction, it is interesting to see that Kant felt and admitted a double current in man's being. He recognised that the superficial self is not the true being of the man. It is not necessary, however, to go as far as Kant went. We need not with him relegate the core of personal being to the realm of idea. Granted that personality is not part of our normal experience as nature is, there are times when the depths of being are stirred. Moments of crisis drive a man deeper than will and thought and even feeling, and make him conscious of himself as a psychic unity, permanent and of infinite value. Personality normally remains in the recesses of the subconscious. It is the hidden basis of life. It is active, though its activities are for the most part underground. It does not, however, lie altogether outside the ken of consciousness. It may be experienced; it is experienced when great emotion rends the surface fabric of the man and discloses the true self.
What is human personality? It is a psychic entity whose most important function is to unify the parts of a man's nature. It is the principle of unity and the instrument of unity. A man's thought, will and feeling are distinct and real entities. His intelligence takes various forms from perception to abstract thought; it may be directed to outward things, to thoughts of things, or to pure idea. He wills many things, and wills them in different modes and with varying degrees of intensity. A wide range of feeling is found in him, from physical to mental, from organic to ideal feeling. His nature is tripartite. Each part admits of variation in itself and in its interaction with the other parts. Each of the three expresses the man at the moment. No one of the three gives the whole account of his being. Nor do the three taken together. Though his nature is tripartite the man himself cannot be resolved into component parts. He has his faculties and states, but he is more than their sum. He may lose himself in thought or activity, or abandon himself to feeling, but when he is fulfilling his true function, when he is most himself, all parts of his nature are concentrated to a point. Partial activity of thought, will, or feeling is then replaced by activity of the personality. Personality is the synthetic unity of all parts of a man's nature. It has the wonderful power of compressing to a point a medley of psychic elements. Moods and memories, perceptions and ideas, wishes and purposes, it tensions them all up, merges them and expresses them in characteristic acts representative of the man.
Personality differs from nature also in respect of relation to environment. It is relatively independent of circumstances. Habit and education mould the nature, but if they touch the person they do so only indirectly. The nature must be deeply affected before a change in the person is registered. Personality is not synonomous with inherited disposition; but it bears a similar relation to nature as inherited disposition does to acquired habit. It is to nature what character is to action. It is to nature what in Weismann's theory the germ plasm is to the somatic cell. Changes in it are mediated by nature and are almost imperceptible in a life time.
Again, nature is the superficies of the soul. It is the part that comes in contact with the world of things and people. A man's nature is what he is for other people; what he is in and for himself alone is personality. There is a substance or self-existence of the psychic states. Thought, will and feeling have all and each an external reference. The internal reference of the whole is the core of being. Our perception of personality in other people is a subtle thing. In the ordinary give and take of life we are not aware of it. It is when we realise the subject as a self-existent unity that we recognise personality. We judge a man's nature by his thought or will or feelings as conveyed through the ordinary channels of communication. Personality is felt. It is a magnetism that influences, but remains inarticulate.
Person and nature differ also in respect of relation to the body. The co-existence of heterogeneous natures in the same body is a fact of experience. Different universes of thought, different levels of will and feeling can be lodged in one organism. The higher the development of the individual, the more clearly marked is the duality or plurality of nature. It is otherwise with personality. In normal cases no two personalities can tenant the one body. The unity of the organism is the outward expression and guarantee of the unity of the person. There are of course pathological cases which form exceptions to this rule. Such cases, however, only serve to emphasise the distinction between person and nature. In cases of dual personality the occupancy of the one body is not simultaneous. Jekyll alternates with Hyde. Dual personality is a totally different phenomenon from duality of nature. Duality of nature is relatively superficial. In dual personality the divergence in mental and moral outlook is so radical that responsibility for the acts of the one entity cannot attach to the other entity.
Personality then is the synthetic principle in man's being. Psychology reveals it as unifying the parts of a man's soul and welding into an indivisible whole the various elements of conscious and subconscious experience. The student of Christology welcomes this account of personality, but he requires more. He seeks a parallel for the union of two whole and perfect natures. He demands some reason for holding the central dogma of the incarnation to be intelligible and probable. The next step in the argument accordingly is to ask, "Why limit the synthetic power of personality?" If personality can synthesise parts of a nature, why should it not also synthesise natures? If human personality can unify such heterogeneous psychic elements as thought, will and feeling, and present them as a harmonious whole, is it not credible that divine personality should carry the synthesis a step further and harmonise in one being the thoughts, wills and feelings of God and man? The hypostatic union of natures in Christ is a phenomenon not psychologically improbable, and one which can be paralleled from human experience. There is in man what is tantamount to a conjunction of the two natures. Man is rather diphysite than monophysite. We pointed out above the extensive modifications that can be produced in a man's nature by environment. There is in him a deeper duality which we can only characterise as an association of divine and human. Man is an inhabitant of the earth, of earthly descent and finite destiny; yet the divine is not totally foreign to him. He has hopes of heaven, moments of supraconsciousness, at times vision, resolve and emotion that are supra-normal. The divine is an element in him. It is more than an aspect of his nature. Its influence operates often in opposition to the human element. He is, as Bergson puts it, at the meeting-point of the upward and the downward currents. He can know God, can do the will of God, can be filled with the love of God. Here are the three factors of his nature, raised to a higher power. His experience may lie and often does lie on two planes. He is "double lived in regions new."
In applying this human analogy to the ideal man caution is necessary. The duality of natures is a fact in both cases, but there is one essential difference. The personal substratum of the natures in one case is human, in the other case divine. In man the divine element is part of his nature, but not part of his person. The ego remains human through all spiritual development. "The best of saints is a saint at the best." The secondary element in him is a fact, but it is part of his nature, not of his person. It is otherwise in the case of Christ. He came from the ideal world and returned there. The background of his experience was and is divine. The secondary element in Him was the human, the primary the divine. He shared man's experience and shared it really, but it did not form part of the core of His being. When He thought or willed or felt as a man, it was akénôsis, a limiting of his natural mode of self-expression. Divine and human are both present in the experience of Christ and of mankind, but with this difference—man rises to the divine; Christ condescended to the human.
Person and nature are then real and distinct psychic entities. They are real alike in God and man. The distinction between them is not artificial or verbal; it is perhaps elusive, but it is genuine and capable of proof from experience. The synthetic faculty of personality manifests itself in uniting without confusing, first, parts of the nature, second, entire natures. These theses supply what is requisite for an intelligent appreciation of Christology. Without them Christology is a battle of shadows; with them it becomes a practical problem of first importance for religious minds. The psychology which justifies orthodox Christology is that which proclaims the interpenetration of psychic states, and which distinguishes between the surface states of a relaxed consciousness, and the deep-seated states which are ever present, but of which we are conscious only at moments of tension.
The catholic mind conceives the person of Christ as an eternal self-existent synthetic unity that has combined in an indissoluble union the natures of God and man. Human parallels make intelligible the co-existence of the two natures in the one person and the one body. What is normal in man is surely possible in the ideal man. Heretical Christologies err in their psychology. In Nestorian Christology Christ is presented as a dual personality, an abnormal association in one body of two distinct self-existent beings. Thus a pathological case would be elevated to the rank of mankind's ideal. The monophysite psychology plunges men into the opposite error. An undiscriminating craving for unity among the phenomena of psychic life prevents any recognition of the dual character of experience. Monophysitism is blind to the difference between person and nature because it places all psychic experiences on the one level. Determined to find unity in its ideal, it seeks an inappropriate unity, the mathematical unity, the unity that excludes plurality. To the monophysite the major part of the gospels is a sealed book, because the major part of the facts there recorded about Christ could not possibly have happened to a one-natured Christ. His human knowledge, normal, limited, progressive, His human will, natural, adequate to the human, inadequate to the superhuman task, his human feelings, his body consubstantial with ours are to the monophysite merely shadows or symbols or aspects of something greater. They are dwarfed into nothingness. They are lost in the divine omniscience, omnipotence and transcendent love.
"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 deduciblea priorifrom 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 thingsrhêidíôslike 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."
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 owndicta, 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, weipso factodehumanise 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 thecommunicatio 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 beidiomatafirst, or thecommunicatiois meaningless.
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 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.