faith of the Catholic Church.[1] This exposition of the principle should be a useful reminder that after the bitter controversies of the 5th century, after all the mutual accusations, the unholy violence and unchristian methods of that time, the Catholic Church finally settled down in possession of the obviously right solution, the one to which a reasonable man must come in any case. Unhappily, the issue did not seem so clear then. Greek philosophical terms—essence, hypostasis, person—are hurled about by people who use them in different meanings; the confusion becomes still greater when even more difficult Syriac words take their place; we have the spectacle of a vast amount of energy (which might have been so much better spent) used in deposing bishops, appealing to Cæsar, raising an appalling turmoil with anathemas and counter-anathemas, all about an issue that ought not really to have caused any trouble at all.
The question of Nestorianism and Monophysism is often represented as one between the schools of Antioch and Alexandria. Antioch was the school of literal interpretation of the Bible;[2] so, naturally, it insisted on our Lord's real humanity. This would perhaps lead to making him a merely human person, in whom the Word of God dwelt; that is Nestorianism. Alexandria was the centre of the defence of his divinity (St. Athanasius); so at Alexandria the divinity would be insisted on, till at last his humanity would be conceived as lost in it; so we have Monophysism.[3] The beginning of the whole question is in the heresy of Apollinaris of Laodicea († c. 390). He is the first cause of all these Christological speculations. It was almost inevitable that during the Arian controversy people should begin to ask how we are to conceive God the Son as being both God and man. Apollinaris imagined an ingenious answer. Starting from the Platonic idea that man consists of three elements, body (σῶμα), soul (ψυχή which gives us life and all we have in common with
- ↑ Harnack thinks that "the conception of a divine nature in Christ leads either to Docetism or to a double personality" (Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, Tübingen, 1910; iii. p. 277, n. 3). Nineteen centuries of Christian theology have not yet felt the force of this dilemma.
- ↑ Orth. Eastern Church, p. 18.
- ↑ So, e.g., Dr. W. F. Adeney: The Greek and Eastern Churches, p. 94, and many others.
