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 redeemedeo ipsosurvives. 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.
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.
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.
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 thesubstanceof the material elements and the loss of their proper nature; the appearance of reality that theaccidentspossess 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.
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