without qualification. While the popes were the chief champions of the Church's independence, the spirit of the Teuton in the West was very different from the spirit of the Eastern Greek and Armenian. Luther would have been equal to defying an imperial pope in his palace by the Bosphorus.
II. The Monothelete controversy, even more wearisome and unprofitable than the Monophysite discussions, of which it was a continuation and a new refinement, belongs chronologically to the second division of the history, that which opens with the advent of Mohammedanism and other factors of mediævalism. Nevertheless, it is essentially a patristic subject; its roots are altogether in the past; it has no relations with the special problems of the new age. Logically, therefore, and in the classification of subjects, it must have its place in this first division as the last flickering flame of theological thought lingering after the blaze of light that distinguished the age of the great Fathers had faded away. Since here at length the long series of discussions about the nature of Christ comes to an end, it will be most fitting to see this conclusion of patristic Christology before passing on to other subjects.
The Monophysites had contended that there was only one nature in Christ, the human and the Divine being fused together. Practically this meant that there was only the Divine nature, because the two did not meet on equal terms, and the overwhelming of the Finite by the Infinite left for our contemplation only the Infinite. Thus the Monophysite Christ was an Infinite Divine Person, who had drawn into His being our human nature, when He condescended to be born of Mary, and who had appeared under this veil of humanity, but who in His own consciousness and activity possessed and exercised all the faculties and powers of Divinity, and these only, not any borrowed from the human nature which He had completely absorbed and assimilated. This in fact, if not in verbal statement, was the ultimate issue of the Monophysite position.
