the whole is only glass, no longer sand: thus, the divine nature of Christ has absorbed the human, so as that the two are become one."
There have been those among them, indeed, who have pursued a kind of middle path between Eutychianism and orthodoxy. Of this school was the celebrated Xenayas, or Philoxenus, bishop of Mabug, whose name has been given to the later Syriac version of the New Testament. Xenayas, in a book ܥܰܠ ܡܶܬܓܰܫܡܳܢܽܘܬܳܐ Al Methgashmonutho, "On the Incarnation," maintains the existence in Christ of one nature, composed of the divinity and humanity, but without conversion, confusion, or commixture. He teaches that the Son, one of the Trinity, united himself with a human body and a rational soul, in the womb of the virgin. His body had no being before this union. In this he was born, in it he was nourished, in it he suffered and died. Yet the divine nature of the Son did not suffer or die. Nor was his human nature, or his agency, or death, merely visionary, as the Phantasmists taught, but actual and real. Moreover, the divine nature was not changed or transmuted into the human, or commixed or confused therewith; neither was the human nature converted into the divine, nor commixed or confused with it; but an adunation of the two natures took place, of a mode equivalent to that which, by the union of body and soul, makes a human being: for as the soul and body are united in one human nature, so, from the union of the Godhead and manhood of our Lord Jesus Christ, there has arisen a nature peculiar to itself; not simple, but complex; ܚܰܕ ܟܝܳܢܳܐ ܥܦܺܝܦܳܐ chad kyono ephipho, "one double nature," which he designates by employing a (perhaps ill-judged) phrase of St. Cyril's, "the one only nature of the Word Incarnate."
Xenayas, therefore, and a numerous class of the
