Section II

CHAPTER FIRST.

. THE CHRISTOLOGY OF THE CHURCH TEACHERS PRIOR TO APOLLINARIS. .

We have already had frequent occasion to remark, how the activity of the Church in connection with Christology abated during the century to which may be given the title of the Trinitarian Century. Indeed, the Christian conception of God was to furnish the groundwork for the construction of a doctrine of the Person of Christ. How this foundation was laid, we have described in the preceding section. We should be very greatly mistaken, however, if we were to suppose that Christological labours had meanwhile been totally suspended: on the contrary, in the case of the thinkers of the Church, Christology was the perennial motive of their trinitarian efforts. These inquiries, however, took precisely the form which they alone could take, and which corresponded to the position held by Christology as the mainspring of the trinitarian movement; they related, to wit, not to the individual momenta of the Person of Christ in their relation to, and movement towards, each other; nor to the question, What are the fundamental elements of this person? but the Person of Christ, in its entirety, was the object of the attention of the Church. What we have in the first instance to recount is not, points which became matter of clear consciousness, in consequence of the solicitations of heretics; not the settlement and defence of a single point, in opposition to single attacks; not the analysis of the momenta of Christology as a whole; but the utterances which proceeded from the Church concerning the Person of Christ, when it gave free and unreserved expression to the impression once and constantly made upon it by this person in its entirety. The grand total image of the living Person of the God-man, who includes heaven and earth in Himself,¹ hovered before the eyes of the greatest teachers of the Church, especially in flourishing periods, as, for example, in the time of Irenaeus and Tertullian, or at the epoch now under consideration, when the Christian mind gathered up its powers for a full or new exercise on the work set before it. They were not able, it is true, to set forth the entire fulness of that image in a scientific form; but still we have numerous scattered utterances of theirs, which indicate its nature, and show that the fixed logical forms which they adopted did but faintly reveal the substance that occupied their hearts and minds—a substance which science could only slowly, and perhaps by long roundabout methods, reproduce. As the immediate and original outflow of the Christian mind, this total image of the living Person of Christ deserves special consideration in the present connection; especially as it throws the true light on the attempts made during the following period, to construct the unity of the person on the basis of two distinct natures. For, on the one hand, it will show us clearly that the existence of this mystical intuition of the Person of Christ, in which the conjunction of the divine and human aspects to personal unity is immediately posited and intentionally anticipated by faith, does not render unnecessary, but rather requires, that full justice be done to the distinctions between the two aspects, in order that an unity may be arrived at based on the recognition and conciliation of the distinctions. It further, also, shows us, that even when the work of discrimination was carried too far, or scientific thought remained entangled in the distinctions drawn, the total Christological possession of, at all events, the better teachers of the Church was not absorbed by such imperfect attempts; on the contrary, that unity of the person or conjunction of the widely separated distinctions, which they had not been able scientifically to establish, was certified to them in the sphere of faith by the immediate intuition of the image of Christ in its totality. That immediate intuition accompanied their mind in its dialectic activity; and as it could not be replaced, so neither was it supplanted, by the scientific process.

¹ ytQvpol, compare the Homil. on the Theophan. in the Opp. Greg. Thaum.; dvxxtQuhxieivrxi, after Paul.

This primitive Christian intuition of the Person of Christ, of which we discover frequent traces even in the New Testament, and which is of the highest significance relatively to His redemptive work, to baptism, to the Eucharist, and to the right view of the idea of the Christian Church, we have found repeatedly expressed, in the most fully developed form, however, by Ignatius and the Ep. ad Diognet., by Irenaeus and Tertullian. The same remark holds good of the Fathers of the third century also, as we have seen, for example, in the case of Hippolytus, Cyprian, and others.¹ Origen especially lived in it, though it took in his mind a distinct and peculiar character.

The First-born of all creation, says he, the noblest nature, is designated King and Son of the King; the man whom He assumed, was formed by Him in righteousness, and so they are one. For the Redeemer made of two one, in that He united the first fruits of both in Himself.² If God has made Him, who knew no sin, sin for us, we can no longer say that there was no darkness in Him (as there is none in the Father). But He took our weakness upon Himself, our sin did He bear; and the sickness of the soul, the pains of the hidden man of the heart, lay upon Him. On their account, in order to carry them away, He confessed that His soul was troubled and shaken, and, according to Zechariah, put on unclean garments. Because He took upon Himself the sins of the people which believeth in Him, therefore saith He so frequently, as though speaking in our name,—" The account of my sins is far from salvation; Thou knowest my folly, and my sins are not hidden before Thee." No one can suppose that we thus blaspheme against the Anointed of God.

¹ See Vol. i. 103 ff., 259 ff., 313, 316 ff.; ii. 65 ff., 96 ff., 101 ff.

² Ad Bom. i. 5. Origen designates the Logos "promiscue" Only-begotten and First-born. During the Arian controversy (compare Ath. c. Ar. or. 2, 663), these ideas were more precisely denned as follows: " Onlybegotten" refers to the eternity and singularity of His Sonship; whereas "First-born" has reference also to the many brethren, whom He does not lack notwithstanding His own pre-eminence, nay more, whom He gains through it. The designations, therefore, are taken as mutually complementary. The former is the absolute expression for Christ; the latter, the relative, which refers back to the former.

For as the Father alone has immortality, whereas the Lord took our death upon Himself, out of pure love to men, we can only say of the Father, " In Him is no darkness." If God has made Him, who knew no sin, sin for us, we cannot say of Him, " In Him is no darkness." For Christ, in His love for men, took our darknesses upon Himself, in order that by His power He might kill our death, and dissipate the darkness of our soul, as Isaiah saith, "The people which sat in darkness, hath seen a great light (tov Kvpiov rjficov Sia <pCkaOpunriav Bdvarov Tov inrep f)fimv avei\.rj<f>6ro<;,—e'(/>' avrov T^s qfi&v ateorias avaSeBeyfievov, etc. In Joh. T. ii. 21). His flesh also is termed "sin;" for He came in the form of sinful flesh. It is called sin, because it is a sacrifice for sin; through this sacrifice, which is termed sin, He has put sin to flight and destroyed it (ad Rom. iv. 12; T. iv. 589). Life is stronger than death; righteousness is stronger than sin; the grace is greater than the mischief. For the grace of Christ is more richly and widely poured out than the death of Adam; seeing that it has not merely driven away death, but brought life to dominion; nay more, it has even brought us to dominion through Christ (ad Rom. v. 2). He is the tree of life, into whom we must be implanted. His death becomes the tree of life to us. In this way we can imitate Him in holiness. And the Church is His body (in Joh. T. x. 23, 27); so that the resurrection of Christ embraces the mystery of the resurrection of the entire body of Christ (in Joh. T. i. 34, x. 20). This is the deeper reason why, in all the principal momenta of the history of Christ, Origen sees our history, the history of individuals or of the Church. In this aspect, his allegorical interpretation is not a play with coincidences; Christ he viewed, not as a naked symbol, but as the principle of the process through which the Church must pass in imitation of its Head. For this reason, the thought recurs in the greatest variety of expressions,—His history is our history, and our history is His. The anointing of the Son, the union of the Spirit and of man in Him, denotes the marriage, the commingling, of the believing soul with the Holy Ghost (in Joh. T. i. 30). He gives a similar turn to our crucifixion with Christ (in Joh. T. i. 34), and to the sufferings of believers (ibid., and in Jerem. Hom. 14, 7 ; 18,12). In every martyr, Christ is condemned. For if a Christian is condemned, not because of a sin, but because he is a Christian, Christ is coudemned in him. Throughout the whole earth, Christ is constantly suffering from unbelievers and sceptics, who divide Him in sunder. It is foolish to suppose that Christ has been only once scourged, by Pilate. As often as unbelievers persecute Christians, Christ presents His back to the smiters. When Paul, in 1 Cor. xv. 28, speaks of the subjection of the Son under the Father, he shows us that all that he means thereby is, the subjection of believers, whom He comprises in Himself.¹ Because Christ is the life in each, the life multiplies itself; for Christ is found in every saint, and for the sake of the one Christ there are born many christs, His imitators, formed after Him, who is the image of God (AiA ydp Tov iv licdarcp Xpiarbv ovra £corjv ifXrjOwovrcu al %coal—olovel ydp Kaff eiccurrov ayiov Xpurros evpUricerai, Koi yivovrai Sia Tov eva Xpiarov TroXXol Xpurrol, oi eKeivoi fJUfirjral Kul Kavr avrbv, elicova ovra Qeov jiejiop(pcofievoi; in Joh. T. vi. 3). Between this birth of Christians from God, which he conceived to be mediated by Christ, and the birth of the Son from the Father, he finds also a resemblance (in Jerem. Hom. ix. 4). As the Father did not generate the Son once for all, and then send Him forth from Himself, ceasing therewith any longer to generate, but begets Him eternally; so also, if thou hast the spirit of sonship, God begets thee continually in Him, in every work and every thought; and thus begotten, thou becomest a continually begotten son of God in Christ Jesus.

That which gives the humanity of Christ this universal significance, is simply and solely the Logos, who united Himself with it in vital unity. The Logos illuminates everything, even the ideal world, and the logical souls in the real world (in Joh. T. i. 24). As wisdom, He is the beginning and the end; in Him is included the idea of the entire world, so far as He is wisdom in God (i. 22, 34). He is the light for all men and all rational beings, the source of all pure life (i. 28, 29). Christ, the only-begotten One, is all in all, beginning and end.

¹ n. dpx- L. iii, 5, 6: Quid non solum regnandi, verum etiam obediendi venerat reparare disciplinam, in semet ipso prius complens, quod ab aliis volebat impleri, iccirco non solum ad mortem crucis Patri obediens factus est, verum etiam in consummatione seculi in semet ipso complectens omnes, quos subjicit Patri, et qui per eum veniunt ad salutem, cum ipsis et in ipsis quoque subjectus dicitur Patri: dum omnia in ipso constant, et ipse est caput omnium, et in ipso est salus et salutem consequentium plenitudo. Compare above, pp. 134-138.

As the beginning, He is in the man whom He assumed; as the end, in the last of the saints. Or otherwise put,—Even in those who are in the middle (between the beginning and the end of the world) is He: as the beginning in Adam; as the end in the Son of man, the second and last Adam (i. 34). Christ is Alpha and Omega. No one knows the Father save through Him; no one can stand connected with the Father save through Him. And perhaps, as in the temple the steps were many which led to the sanctuary, so is the First-born of God all steps to us; as reckoning downwards, He is the first and the second, so also the last. His humanity is the first and lowest step. Beginning with it, we pass on through the entire series of steps, so that we ascend through Him, who is also angel and the rest of the powers. Above all, however, He must be to us the Lamb, which takes away our sins (in Joh. xix. 1). In a much diviner way than Paul He became all things to all, passing through all stages, from the angels down to the beings in the nether world, in order to win all. To the angels He became an angel, to men a-man. If there exist letters of God, after the reading of which, the saints say that they have read in the tables of heaven, elements through which heavenly things can be read, these are the ideas, which are, as it were, broken into small fragments, to wit, into the Alpha and the following letters to Omega, which is the Son of God. Again, regarded from another point of view, the same Son is as Logos, simultaneously, both beginning and end (in Joh. T. i. 34).

In passages like that just adduced, and in similar ones, the distinction between the first and second creation is not always thoroughly maintained. Sometimes the Logos is represented as the soul of the world, which is broken up into a plurality of beings (Xoyoi). This by itself would not sufficiently explain why the Logos should become man, angel, and so forth; for in a certain sense He became man and angel by the creation of these beings: why, then, was a further special act of union with them necessary? From our previous exposition of Origen's system, however, we know that he considered the participation in the Logos involved in the creation to have been but imperfect, so far as free beings were brought into existence, to whom an abiding and indissoluble connection with the Logos was primarily a task to be accomplished. This is the point at which

VOL. II. T

his theory, that the Logos must take His place in history, and undergo a regular process of development on behalf of all rational creatures, finds application. He must become all rational beings, in order that, as one of them, He may be near to all, may be laid hold of by them as the atoning principle in its totality, and may lead them to the Father. He is able to assume all, because all are created by Him; and in them all is but one generic substance of different grades, for there is but one Logos. For this reason, He pervades all the genera of beings as different stages of the Xvyiicov. But believing as he did, that all rational beings are, as such, inwardly connected with the Logos, and that He, as their common principle of unity, assumed them all, and exhibited all in Himself in their perfection, the way was paved to his doctrine of the airoicaraaraais of all things (c. Oels. 8, 12). He set forth all in their perfection by becoming all; but He returned out of them to Himself, by deifying them in Himself. As He passed through all stages, even so must we, strengthened by His power, and, in imitation of His example, advance from stage to stage, till we become one spirit with Him.

In this aspect also, therefore, Origen's Christology may be said to have a somewhat Docetical character. Not because of the universality lent to his view of redemption, by his doctrine of the assumption of all classes of beings; for, as we have remarked, he looked upon angels, not as a different genus of beings, but merely as a different grade of one and the same logical genus. Nor because the historical life of the Logos was blended with and dissipated into His life in eternity, by the doctrine of His assumption of all beings; for He was actually of opinion, that the Logos showed Himself to angels as an angel, and as a man to men, and that men, at a higher stage, will become angels, in consequence of the Logos having first become man for them. Finally, the Docetical element does not lie in his notion, that whilst the Logos was man, He was also the light and vital principle of the entire world; for Origen appears to have connected the two things as follows,—the soul of Christ being indissolubly united with, and fired throughout by, the Logos, was one spirit with Him, and the centre whence He, unhindered by body and space, was universally active. We have seen above, that he regarded the sacrifice of Christ on the cross as the sacrifice offered in the centre of the world on behalf of the entire world; and to those who expressed surprise that the Pneuma (that is, the Logos) should be sent into a corner, instead of filling all bodies in the entire world, he replied,—"We have enough with one sun; it is for all. This Anointed One made many anointed; Christ is the head; He and the Church are one body. If thou desirest to see many bodies full of the Divine Spirit, look at the Church (c. Cels. 6, 78, 79)." The Docetical element rather consists in his denying to the humanity of Christ constitutive and permanent significance in itself (for example, ad Kom. i. 6, compare Thomasius, pp. 213, 214), even as he denied it to the other forms which he assumed; attributing to them, on the contrary, a merely paedagogical or anagogical significance, as guides to the pure and naked deity. Our perfection, too, will be the termination of our personal existence; and thus the system which made so strictly ethical a beginning, ends by being physical. The utmost that remains is, that a new world may arise through a new apostasy; which, however, must be represented as running through the same course, unless the ideas, respectively, of God and the world, are stripped of their mutually exclusive character.¹

How important was the position held by that image of Christ in His totality, in the system of Athanasius, prior to the Arian controversy, we have seen above (pp. 249 ff.). Arianism necessarily felt inwardly estranged from it; all that it sought in Christ was a teacher and pattern of virtue. Only men like Eusebius of Caesarea endeavoured to retain their hold on it; in the sense, however, that the Logos in and by Himself, and not first the Logos incarnate, or the God-man, was the First-born of creation, the Head of humanity and of the world (see above, pp. 221 ff.).

¹ The ideas of Irenaeus and Tertullian, 'which belong to this connection, have been treated above. The important thought, that Christ was the archetype even for the creation of Adam, appears to have been contained also in Methodius' Ivpiroai»v 'jraptiinxiu, where he remarked,—ixofatt» i Ql&( To» A»tpuiro» xxr tlxiv»t ofiolx» riif tixivos xirov, Tovt tari X«t tixo»x Xpitrrov. The word Xpiaros might refer, it is true, merely to the Son of God in Himself, for Methodius goes on to say,—\bris yuf «t/ ri dirxiyxo,fiu xxl o xupuxriip riis iirwrauiius uvrov. Compare Gregory of Nyssa,

'Ktpl xovz*<jx. xvipuirov, C. 16.

When the office of mediator or substitute for humanity is conferred on a creature, such as the one proposed by Arianism, it becomes ethnic and unethical; for only on the ground of an act of deification, and of the curtailment both of our personality and of the task assigned to us, can a mere creature be represented as taking our place, and as holding the position of our representative before God. In the works directed against Arianism, Athanasius constantly recurs to this idea, whenever his object is to confront the entire fulness and weight of true Christianity with the scanty view of it taken by Arianism. It was that intuitional image of the Redeemer in His totality that marked out for Athanasius, during all his controversies, the direction which he ought to pursue; like a never-erring compass, it enabled him to steer safely between heresies wearing the appearance of the full truth, like those of Marcellus and Apollinaris. He employed it against Arianism, not merely when his purpose was to establish the Christian idea of atonement, in opposition to the false deification of man, on the one hand, and his false humiliation and separation from God, on the other; but both he and his friends used the idea principally in order to turn aside Arian objections, which deduced the lowness of Christ's higher nature from the lowness of the declarations concerning Him contained in the New Testament. To a whole series of passages of this nature in the New Testament they applied the canon,—When Christ was troubled unto death, and cried out, "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" He spake in our name, because He had put himself into our place, and had taken upon Himself our guilt and abasement.¹ Against Sabellianism they argued, on the basis of this intuition of theirs, that Christianity was not a mere transitory theophany, or an ivepyeia of God; but that its aim was the perfection of humanity.

¹ Athan. c. Ar. i. 48; Greg. Naz. or. 29, 18: "Count up, unthankful man, the words, <My God and your God,' <greater,' <created,' <made,' <sanctified,' <servant,' <obedience,' <He learned,' <He was commissioned,' < He was sent,' < Of myself I can do, speak, judge, give, will nothing.' Add thereto His ignorance, His subjection, His prayer, His questions, His progress, His being perfected. Add, further, His sleeping, being hungry and weary, His weeping, His trembling and shuddering. Perhaps thou wilt reproach Him also (0 Arian) with His death and His cross." Let the answer serve: 'Evl xtQxhultp rd fit» fyviXartpx irpiaxyt rfi itirvrri xxl Tji xpiirroai Qvaii ir,uiuv Xmi aufixros, rx ie txirtmurtpx T£ Avyihtu, Xxi r£ 8«i « xwutirri Ti Kxl aaptuiii»ri, Kxl dvipuxtaii»ri. Compare 30, 1, 21.

Now the perfection of humanity requires that it be constituted the Church, the body of the Lord, of which He is the Head.¹ How, in the last place, Apollinarism was combated by the aid of this image, we shall shortly see.

Let us now specify a few of the more important passages. In becoming a man Himself, says Athanasius repeatedly, the eternal Son constituted mankind sons and gods; for He set forth in Himself, in the first instance, a man who was God, and now He draws us into fellowship with Him (vloiroirjae, ical iOeoiroirjae Tow dvOpa>irov<; yevofievos auros avOpcoiros, c. Ar. or. 1, 38).2 Neither the Logos was exalted by becoming man and displaying virtue, as the Arians suppose, nor was He humbled (rjkarribOri) by the assumption of a body; but deification became the portion of the body which He assumed (c. Ar. 1, 40, 42). As humanity is worshipped in Him, the heavenly powers can no longer wonder when they see us, who wear His nature, entering into heaven (c. 42). His humiliation is a fact; but it produced no change in Him. For not physical defect, but the riches of His love, was the cause of His humiliation, and therefore He remained the same, though we were savingly altered (c. Ar. or. 1, 48). He first sanctified Himself in order that He might sanctify us all. "I, the Logos of the Father, give even the spirit to Myself, the Incarnate One, and thus sanctify Myself, the Incarnate One, in order that all may be at once sanctified in Me, who am the truth." Accordingly, He gives as God; He receives as man; but in His person we have made a beginning of receiving. From Him streams forth the Spirit as a precious ointment over tne whole of humanity (or. c. Ar. 1, 46—48). C. Ar. 4, 33 :—" He wrapped Himself in our first fruits, and married Himself therewith. Taking this perishing man into Himself, He renews him by a stable renewal unto eternal duration."

¹ Compare c. Ar. 4,12, 25. The question with which we have to do, is not something epideictical, a iratiid., but the Axbitix, which is contained in Christ for the individual and the Church.

² Compare 39, 1, 48. 0/ xvipuiroi liaiv Apyn» lytnrtH Tos Xxpfix»ii» ir xirip xxl $i xirrov' Xvtov ydp Vv» hiyoftivov dtifWrlmf xpluixt, ifitis eafiit ol i» xini? xpUfitvoi' e-i/vtj xul iScfsri^ofAiuov xiiroi ilfius iofiw oi h xinp fiximfyfit»oi. 3,34.

(Hvarai <ptXavOpamcos fjiuv, Ttjv dirapyrp) I'i/icov irepiOefievos, Kal ravrp dvcucpaOek.—El Toivvv (tov uvOpanrov) aaBpmOevra

et? eavrbv Xafiofievos irakiv avaicaivi^ei Bui rfjs fiefiala<; avrov avavecoaew; rrpb<; Biafiovrjv dreXevrrjrov ical But rovff evovrai el<s Oeiorepav airrbv dvdymv Xrj^iv—7rw? olov re—roil dirocrr6Xoi<;— awapiOfielv rov r&v diroarokcov icvpiov;) "The Word became flesh, in order that, as the Logos is Son, God might be termed our Father for the sake of the Son dwelling in us. Whoso, therefore, has not the Son in his heart, of him God cannot be termed the Father" (Aih rovno yap 6 X6yo<; yeyove aap\, Xv, iireiBtj 6 X07o? eo~riv vlbs, Sia rov ivoucovvra ev r)fiiv vlov Xeyrrrcu K<n I)i,lmv rrarrjp.—OiKovv 6 ev fjfilv vibs rov XBiov irarepa hrvKa\ovfievo<; ical r)fi£>v avrcov rroiel rrarepa KaXelaOai. 'AfieKei S>v Ovk eariv et? ra<; KapBlas 6 vlbs, rovrcov ovBe rrarrjp o Qebs av ~Kej(Oehj, 4, 22). "When the Spirit descended on Him in the Jordan, He descended upon us, whose body Christ bore. When He was washed in the Jordan, we were washed in and by Him (EvBrjXov, ori ical r) eis airrbv hi rm 'IopBdvy rov irvevfiaros yevofievtj KaOoBos eh ^uts f)v yivofievrj, Bio. rb fopeiv airrbv To f)fierepov adfia.—Tov yap icvpiov &>? dvOpcoirov Xovofievov—J?/i«? rjfiev 0i ev airc o mil irap' avrov Xov6fievot, etc., 1, 47). "God calls men, who are created, sons, as though they had been begotten. As they are created natures, they can only become sons by receiving the Spirit of Him who is by nature and truly Son. He who was our Creator becomes our Father, from which it is clear that we are not by nature sons, but the Son who is in us. Nor is God by nature our Father, but the Father of the Word, which is in us. But the Father designates those sons in whom He sees His Son" (2, 59). "Man united with a mere creature could not have been deified, nor could he have ventured to present himself to the Father, had not Christ been the essential Word of God. As man, He is become the beginning of the new creation (dp%fj Kaivfj^'; Krlaecosi); for He is the man created for us. For this reason, this union of the divine and human (awa<prj) took place in Him, in order that, with that which is by nature divine, He might unite that which is by nature human, and the salvation and deification of the human (Oeoiroirjais) might be firmly established" (2, 70). "As a wise builder does not merely think how to build a house, but also arranges it so that it can be restored if it should receive damage, so the basis of our renewal was laid in Christ ere we existed, in order that we might be created again in Him" (2, 77). This passage appears to represent the connection of our nature with Christ as so essential, that it must have subsisted even if sin had not entered the world.¹ "We must not be surprised, therefore, to find Christ speaking of His image (two?), which is in us, as of Himself; for when Saul persecuted the Church, in which was His image and likeness, He said, as though He Himself were the object of the persecution,—Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou Me?" Similar also is the import of the passage, Prov. viii. 22 :—He speaks of the creation as of Himself. After explaining in c. Ar. or. 3, 32 f. that the grand thing is, that whatever sufferings are undergone, or works are performed, by a man in Christ, do not concern this man alone, but the Logos also, who makes all things His own (pliceioi, IBumoiel), he goes on to say,—Inasmuch as the flesh was born of the Virgin (Mapla OeoroKos), He Himself was said to have been born, who is the principle of the birth of others, namely, that He might transfer our birth to Himself, and thus obtain the mastery over the principle of death in us.^a He regarded the work of redemption, therefore, as already begun with the act of incarnation; the entire finitude to which He subjected Himself, and of which that act formed the beginning, finds its explanation, not in His nature, but in His substitutionary love. (Note 55.) This leads us to notice a particular class of passages which relate to the sufferings of Christ. (Note 56.) C. Ar. 1, 41: "As man He endured death for us, that so He might present Himself to the Father for us. As He died for us, so also has He been exalted on our behalf, in order that, like as we all died in the death of Christ, even so we might all be unutterably exalted in Him."

¹ His meaning can, however, also be,—The possibility of the incarnation was grounded in the creation itself, because the Logos or the Wisdom of God was informed in the world (compare c. 79); but still merely typically, in comparison with the archetype, wisdom itself.

2 "I»« rij» iifiuv tis ix c» fitrxtri yi»iai», xxl fwixiri if yjj fiirn Sines els yjj» dxe"htufiit, dMC us r£/ e\ oiipxtov "hltyov avvxQiemts els oipxtovs dvxx^fiⁱt ^ap xirrov. Ovxavt Ovtu xxl td u/.'f.x crxdn mv ouft,xros ovx d^tixirus tls iuvro» y.ir'iinxi»' Ivx finxtri us dvipuitoi, oiAX' us f&Io! rav hoyov r)jf xlunlov £uijf fitrxaxufiiu. Tijf yitiaeus iifiuv xxl irxons rijf aapxixiis doie»elxs fttrxreairrua lis To» 'hoyat (cf. 2, 69) eyetpiy-etu diri ytjf, 'hvitians "if oV xfiaprixv xxripxs, etc. Oiixiri us yntvns, dKhd 'hotxot hoyuiuans rijf aapxos 3/x rot rav ©eov Xo'yo», of It %fi&s iyivtro aap%.

"He takes our sufferings upon Himself and presents them to the Father, interceding for us, that they may be destroyed in Him" (4, 6). "Although not weak, He took upon Himself our weakness; although not hungering, He hungered; He sacrifices that which is ours, in order to extinguish it; but instead of weaknesses (which were laid on Him, and through His bearing of them were extinguished), He receives gifts from God, of which those will become partakers who are united with Him" (c. 7). "The death, which is termed His, the death of the Logos, was a ransom for the sins of men, and a death of death" (1, 45). "Laden with guilt, the world lay under the condemnation of the law; but the Logos took the judgment (Kpifia) up into Himself, and suffering in the flesh for all, He bestowed salvation on all" (compare Ar. or. 1, 51, 60; 2, 69).

Similar expressions occur repeatedly in the works of the two Gregories and of Basilius. Gregory Nazianzen, after saying, in Hom. 30,—the ranruvwrepai and avOpwrriicdrrepai (pcoval which are recorded respecting Christ, are to be referred to the veos oY 37/ta? avOpamos; he proceeds (c. 3),—rco 8vri eSovXeiwe aapicl h-al yeveaei teal irdOeai Tok fjpxripoi s Sicb rtjv fjfierepav iXevOeplav, icaj iraxriv dls aeamicev imb Tt)? upaprias Kareypfiivois. Ti Se p.eVjov dvOpdnrov raireivortyri, fi 6em ifKakrjvai Kox yeveaOai Qebv iic Ttj<; fit^eas; The Oela elicav is commingled with the BovXiKt) fu>pcf>r). On 1 Cor. xv. 28 (c. 5), he remarks,—Is He not now subject? Did He need, as God, to be subjected to God, like a rebel 1 'AW? ovrm aKo-rrei, 6Vi &<rrrep icardpa fjKOvae oV ifie, 6 Ttjv ifiijv Xvcov Kardpav, Kal dfiapria 6 aipcov Ttjv afiapriav Tov Koafiov, KaX 'ABafi dvr\ Tov iraXaiov ylverai veo<;' Ovtq> Kcii To efiuv dwrroraicrov eavrov iroieurai d>? Ke<paXrj Tov 7raiT0s cnu/iaro?. "jeo>s fiev ovv awrroraicros eyc o Kox OtoaiG>Zrj<;_} awn-oratcro? To Kclt ifih Kox 6 Xpioro? Xeyerar orav Be inrorarffl avrco To. iravra (yrrorarfjaerai Sk Kal rrj emr/vdiaei Kox rrj f&ercnroitfaei), rore Kcu ai/rO<; Tjjv virora/yrjv irerrXrfpaice, irpoadycov ifie Tov aeacoapAvov. The Father subjects all things to the Son, the Son to the Father; the former by His decree, the latter by His deed. Thus, He who subjected it sets forth before God that which belongs to us, as subjected, by appropriating to Himself that which belongs to us (eavrov iroiovfievos To rjp&repov). In like manner, he then further explains the desertion of Christ. He was not left in Himself, either by the Father or by

Specially rich in passages of this kind are the works of Gregory of Nyssa. According to him, God, in uniting Himself with one man, united Himself with the whole of humanity, assumed the entire race, because the one man whom He assumed was the airapyj), in which all men are potentially or principially included. Humanity is, in his view, one living being, h/ £coov; hence the divine power of the Head, which is at the same time an integral member of the great body of humanity, diffused itself through the whole race. And so, in this One all died; and the resurrection and exaltation of this One is the resurrection and exaltation of all. This fact is brought also into the most intimate connection with baptism and the Eucharist. (Note 58.)

CHAPTER SECOND.

THE CHRISTOLOGY OF THE ASIANS AND OF MARCELLU8, AND ITS REDARGUTION BY THE TEACHEES OF THE CHURCH.

Reference has been already made to the Christology of Arius and of the Sabellianism revived by Marcellus; but we have only given closer attention to it, so far as the view to be taken of one aspect of the Person of Christ depended on the form assumed by the doctrine of the Trinity. We have therefore still a word to say regarding their view of the human aspect, and of the unity of the person.

The First-born of creation, whom the Arians say became man, is a being of another genus than man :—still, however, a creature, which, on the ground of its mutability (rpeirrbv), of its, in the first instance, merely growing, unestablished virtue, of its imperfect knowledge, and above all, of the freedom of choice attributed to it in common with all finite rational beings, may be described as possessing all the elements strictly constitutive of the spiritual aspect of the humanity of Christ. Arianism was therefore unable to concede to Christ a human soul: for how could two finite beings, two free wills and so forth, be conceived to be conjoined in one and the same person? It consequently attached equal importance to the two principles;— 1. Whenever the spiritual aspect of Christ is spoken of as having humbled itself, it must be referred to the Logos; 2. Christ had no human soul; but the bright lucific substance assumed a human body, partially in order to veil itself, partially in order to become visible to men.

The latter principle evidently renders it impossible that Christ should have been the subject of an actual development from youth upwards. The higher, premundane, lucific spirit must have attained to a high degree of virtue, of ripeness in general, ere He became man. Accordingly, it was impossible that He should learn and grow after a human fashion, beginning at the lowest stage; and the entire process through which Christ is said to have passed, becomes Docetical, unless we resort to the monstrous supposition, that this highest creature reduced itself again to the level of a potence, plunged into Lethe after the manner of the Platonic souls, and metamorphosed itself to an earlier stage of its existence, in order to be able to become man. But if Christ's growth were a mere appearance, His conflicts, His temptations also, were an appearance; and one cannot understand why He should be rewarded for them. Moreover, what reward could be conferred on Him? All that Arians could do at this point, was to represent that higher spirit, whom even prior to His incarnation they designate Creator and First-born, as returning to the position He occupied before; for, as He had no human soul, they could not fairly speak of His humanity being exalted and becoming eternal. But the body by itself could only, strictly speaking, be the instrument of a momentary theophany; it could not have an eternal significance. We see, therefore, that the Christ of Arianism, who is a higher spirit, walking upon earth, and apparently undergoing a development in a human body, was really a completely mythical shape. At this point, Arianism, which commenced with being jejune and coldly logical, assumes a fantastical character, and reveals an affinity with Gnosticism; which also we have found to combine within itself the opposite elements of Ebionism and Docetism. In order to reduce the miracle of the incarnation to as low a level as possible, Arianism began with referring all the defects that are attributed to the human nature of Christ to His higher nature; and now, as though by way of punishment, instead of a miraculous person, it was compelled to adopt a monstrosity, and the veritable humanity, for which it apparently took up arms, was dissipated into a Docetical seeming. In one word, as frequently occurs elsewhere, Arianism preferred the marvellous to the miraculous, taught by the Church.

This aspect of the Arian system did not remain entirely unnoticed even at an earlier period; but all eyes were at first so completely occupied with its trinitarian aspect, that neither Arians themselves further developed the Christological principles of their system, nor did the Church teachers recognise the real significance of this point. In Antioch alone, soon after the close of the Nicene Council, was a protesting voice raised against the Arian principle, that Christ assumed a body without soul, by the Bishop Eusebius. It would appeal', however, that the Arians themselves, in laying down and frequently referring to the principle, were led, not so much by a conviction of its indispensableness to the complete construction of their Christology, as by a feeling that it was a convenient and near-lying middle idea. For, had it once been decided that Christ assumed, not a human soul, but merely a human body, then the conclusion was inevitable, that the lower utterances regarding Christ contained in the Scriptures, referring, as they unquestionably do, to a spiritual, and not to a merely corporeal element, must hold good of His higher nature, which was in reality the only spiritual element in Him. (Note 59.)

"We should have expected that, in order to refute this line of argumentation, the Church would have at once fallen back on the ancient doctrine of the soul of Christ, which had never been retracted. So far as we know, however, the only teacher in the East who did so prior to Apollinaris, was Eustathius in Antioch. According to Epiphanius (de Ancorat. c. 33), the doctrine, that the Son of God assumed, not a human soul, but merely a human body, had long been held by the school of Lucian. Although Lucian's motive in laying down the principle was probably different from that which influenced his followers,¹—for neither he, nor, at first, Arius, had been specially concerned to represent the Logos as mutable,—still, we must conclude it to have been ventilated for the first time in Antioch, especially as the Arians appealed very readily to Lucian, and applied to the purposes of their doctrine of the Trinity that which in his hands had probably related solely to Christology.

¹ Without distinguishing between Lucian and the Arians, between Lucian and Lucianists, Epiphanius (1. c.) attributes the Arian motive to both the latter.

We know not merely that Eustathius disapproved of the Arian denial of the human soul of Christ, but also how far he succeeded in securing to the doctrine thereof a positive and independent significance. (Note 60.)

Marcellus, as we know, conceived the divine in Christ to be the active principle, the human the passive: the human by itself he represented as completely will-less, as a mere organ of the divine evepyeia, as passive in the manner in which the prophets were held to have been passive during their ecstasies. He was unable to conceive the human consciousness as awake and alive; indeed, he scarcely conceded it an existence, and therefore stood in the same relation to the question of the human soul of Christ as did the Arians.

Now, the Church teachers refused to content themselves with the doctrine of a divine ray, or of an operation of the Logos from the distance, in the man Jesus (see Note 58; Basilius, Hom. 25), whether supposed to constitute Christ a theophany, or to produce a holy man whom it unites with God. If it were not the Logos Himself who became man; if the incarnation were not that of the Logos; if the doings and sufferings of Christ did not in some way pertain to the Logos as His own; they saw clearly that they were deprived of that which they believed highest and best. Theophanies belong to the Old Testament; under the New, they are Docetical: but if Christ is a mere man, who, although He already existed apart from, was assumed by, the Logos, the saying holds true,—" Cursed is he who putteth his trust in men." On innumerable occasions, therefore, does Athanasius say,—Our redemption consists in His making His own that which belongs to us. He not merely had, but was, man. Even the Jews would allow us a theophany; that would be no stumblingblock to them; even to an indwelling little objection would be raised, for the Logos came in former days to the saints who received Him worthily. But concerning none of them was it said, when they were born,— The Logos Himself is born; or, when they suffered,—The Logos Himself suffered. Precisely this, however, must be said of Christ. That He made His own that which was low,—this, the point of the whole matter, without which the very soul of Christianity is lost—this offends them. Only on that supposition, however, can humanity be said to have been exalted to God in Christ. (Note 61.) Had not the opinion of Athanasius been, that humanity was completely assumed, and that what the Logos assumed He constituted part of Himself, how could he have taught that our entire nature, of which the soul surely forms an essential feature, was redeemed and established in the divine by the Logos?¹

More indefinite descriptions of the mode of being of God in Christ are the following:—The ahp^ was His olicos, vaos (c. Ar. 3, 52, 53); which passage, however, is to be supplemented by 3, 30 (see Note 61). So also the expression,—Humanity was the organ of the Logos, by which He revealed Himself ever more completely,—is merely a relative description. It expresses the relation of the God-man to His work, and the fact that the impulse proceeded from the Logos. This comparison, by itself, however, would reduce the humanity of Christ to a passive, lifeless accident. Hence, the most perfect expression attained by Athanasius is,—The Word did not progress; and, on the other hand, the humanity (aap^) was not Wisdom (to the dvOpdrmvov pertains dyvoelv); but it was made the body of Wisdom; that is, it set forth Wisdom in the sphere of actuality (c. Ar. 3, 53. T?}? Hollas cr&fia yeyovev rj aap^ = avOpcoiro<; in 3;~"30). The aap^ was not Wisdom; so far as it was Wisdom, Wisdom did not progress in wisdom; it did not suffer, and so forth, in itself.

¹ We might arrive at a different conclusion if we assumed that Athanasius recognised no other evil than corporeal death, from which men needed deliverance. But, however important the r61e played in his system by such ideas as i£vxros, tHu»owlu, etc., he does not limit redemption solely to them; for he knows something also of guilt and sin. How could he further say, C. Ar. 3, 53:—'E» uvrtji ydp iv Si oxp% i irpoxonrowx, xau uirrov \iytrxi, xxl roiiff hx iri.hir r) Tu» dtipuiru» irpoxojrii Utttutcs Oix To» ovtiinu >.iyan liufitirii? Indeed, it is altogether very clear that Athanasius cannot have referred Christ's progress in wisdom to His body (c. Ar. 3, 52, 63), any more than in our case; but it is quite as impossible that he should have referred it to the Logos (c. 51). There is, therefore, no alternative but to say that he presupposed the existence of a soul in the <rxp £, in the i.»ipuirifn Q!>ai(, etc (c. Ar. 3, 30): without, however, giving special prominence to it as a constituent element of the complete human nature.

But it was so one with humanity, that we may fairly say, it progressed aapKl; for the human in it (rb avOparmvov iv ry Soipt'a) advanced, gradually transcended human nature, and was deified (inrepavafiaivov Kwr oklrjov Ttjv avOpcoirivrpi <pvaiv ical Oeorroiovfievov Kcll opyavov avrrjs irp6<; Ttjv ivepyeiav r17s Oeorrjros ical Ttjv eKkaptyi v avrr)s yivopxvov ical (paiv6fievov iraai (compare c. 52). Ibid.: Av^o.vovto<; iv fjXucia rov au>tiaros oweireDiSorO iv avrm ical rj T^s Oeort)rO<; (pavepa<«?, ical eZeikwrO irapa iraaiv, Oti vab<; Oeov icrri, ical Oefa r)v iv Tg3 acopan). The true sense of the words, "He grew in grace and wisdom," is consequently this,—He progressed in and through Himself (ovtb<; iv iavrat irpoeKonrrev, c. 52), for rj Xocpia <pKoS6firjaev eavrfj Oikov, ical iv eavrfj Tov Olkov irpoKoirreiv liroUi. Athanasius can scarcely have meant that the body of Christ grew in wisdom; he must therefore have included the soul of Christ in the avOpaymvov.

But, however many hints of the doctrine of a human soul of Christ may be found in the works of Athanasius, one thing is lacking—freedom of choice. He lays great stress on it for men, but he never attributes it to Christ. This is perhaps the reason why he, whose system, as a whole, insists on the full and entire humanity of Christ in general, and on a human soul in particular, who, as it would at first sight appear, must have been driven, even by his opponents, to set that forth which would have disarmed them, yet hesitated to give special prominence to freedom of choice. Freedom of choice and mutability occupied so large a place in the system of Arius, that the appearance of Christ bore rather the character of the deed of a finite spirit than of a deed of God. The rpemov ascribed to even this person made the decree of redemption and the certainty of its accomplishment doubtful; nay more, it reduced the divine redemption to a self-redemption. Athanasius feared, and not without reason, being compelled to admit of freedom of choice in this sense, if he should give special prominence to the full human soul. In one word, the entire danger to which the stability of the faith and the divine-human Unio were exposed by the Arian rpeirrov, threatened to break forth from the system of the Church itself at another point, if the doctrine of the human soul of Christ were allowed that integral significance which it had in the form in which it last appeared, to wit, in the systems of Origen and Paul of Samosata; unless, indeed, such a conception was formed of it, as should prevent its freedom of choice from undermining the certainty of the divine decrees and of their accomplishment. (Note 62.)

On the other hand, however, it is quite as evident that the incarnation must remain Docetical as to its main feature, so long as Sabellianism and Arianism had not been confuted in this point also. The great progress made in the doctrine of the divine aspect, or in that of the Trinity, must remain completely without that influence on Christology which it ought to have, if a representation were adopted of human nature, such as rendered it impossible that the hypostasis of the Son, which is of like substance with God, should be conjoined in vital unity with a complete humanity; or, otherwise expressed, Christology would derive no advantage from the labours of the Trinitarian Period, notwithstanding that it gave them their impulse, if decided progress were not made, above all, in relation to the human aspect. To the required advance, the Church was, as it were, driven by Apollinarism.

CHAPTER THIRD.

APOLLINABISM AND ITS OVERTHROW BY THE CHURCH.

Amongst the most interesting systems occurring in the History of Dogmas, is undoubtedly that of the younger Apollinaris of Laodicea, a man who was distinguished for comprehensive culture, intellectual power and depth, and who enjoyed the reputation of devotedness to the Church and sincere piety. Not only did Athanasius therefore hold him in high esteem, but even Epiphanius treated him with respect and consideration.

He was a remarkable man, if only on one account, namely, that he himself was the turning-point at which the Church ceased to devote that exclusive attention to the doctrine of the Trinity which it had for a considerable time devoted, and began those Christological investigations which engaged its powers unremittedly, especially in the East, during centuries to come. He was, in particular, the occasion of the Church's decidedly affirming the existence of that feature of the humanity of Christ which had hitherto held a precarious position, to wit, His true human soul. But the question regarding the human soul of Christ at once gives rise to a new problem, that of the unity of the two natures; indeed, the theory of Apollinaris may be regarded as a premature attempt at the solution of the problem. This is, at the same time, the point which gradually compelled the Church to investigate the question,—whether the human nature of Christ is to be conceived as impersonal or personal. In denying the existence of a human soul of Christ, Apollinaris meant to represent His human nature as impersonal; and in this respect, we may fairly assert that the Church, in its later doctrinal inquiries, arrived at the very goal towards which Apollinaris, actuated by regard for the unity of the divinehuman person, believed it necessary to strive; with the difference, however, that the coarser form of a denial of the human soul of Christ adopted by the latter, in order to avoid the assumption of a double personality, was exchanged by the former, for the finer form of teaching, that Christ had a human soul, but an impersonal human nature.

The sources of information respecting Apollinarism are pretty copious (Note 63); but it has been hitherto impossible to make clearly out what Apollinaris' own opinions were, in several important respects. That the school of Apollinaris fell into inconsistency with themselves, and became untrue to their master, in some points, is certain. But it is less certain whether Apollinaris was always self-consistent in his teachings. There will be no reason, however, for doubting the matter, if it can be shown, that those who charge him with changing his views, as, for example, Theodoret, were unable to perceive that opinions which seemed self-contradictory, and to belong to different stages in his intellectual history, are really very compatible with each other. Confusion seems to have been introduced into the view taken of the principles of Apollinaris, specially through the unhesitating ascription to him of ideas, which bore a distant or closer family resemblance to his system, notwithstanding they made their appearance prior to, and in total independence of him. By Apollinaris himself they were probably never adopted; but first by a portion of his school, which appears unquestionably to have identified itself with these earlier tendencies, in consequence of a certain affinity with them. These tendencies were in part of a patripassian character; though the doctrine VOL. II. Z

of a suffering or a change, undergone by God, had been meanwhile modified by the doctrine of the Trinity, and had been restricted in its application to the Son: connected therewith, however, was a partial revival of Gnostic elements, such as the doctrines of a heavenly humanity of Christ, of a merely apparent birth, and so forth. These reviving tendencies might derive a certain support from the great stress laid by Apollinaris on the unity of Christ, and his decided antagonism to the duality of the natures: and so, vice versa, they afforded a certain support to the idea of Apollinaris. For both the one and the other of these suppositions—both the supposition that the divine nature became human, and consequently underwent conversion; and the supposition that the human nature was derived from the divine, and the humanity was a heavenly one—appeared favourable to the doctrine of the unity of the two natures. Our object, however, must be to separate Apollinaris from those tendencies, and to view him simply as he was in himself. For, in the nature of the case, greater weight must be laid on the distinct hints given by ancient writers, that Apollinaris taught an actual birth from Mary, and repudiated the notion of a conversion of God into humanity,—hints which Epiphanius in particular repeats (1. a),—than upon the confusion of the view really entertained by Apollinaris with theorems set forth by his school, and by men who were totally independent of him—a confusion so very possible, where the acquaintance with his system was but superficial. (Note 64.)

Athanasius (Ep. ad Epict. 2) gives the following account of the views pertinent to this matter, which were at that time entertained in Corinth, and which he drew from a work written by a member of the party, apparently under the title of xmofirrjfiara. In order to retain the unity of the Person of Christ (this question was really the motive principle of their inquiries), whilst conceding to Him a specific dignity, they derived His humanity from the essence of the Logos; and in so far entertained the notion of a heavenly humanity. The body born of Mary was ofioovaiov rfj Tov X6yov Oeorqri; consequently, in their view, there was no duality of natures in Christ. The body, say they, is not younger than the deity of the Logos, but coeternal with it (owatSwv avr£> Bui iravros yeyevrjaOai, erreiBrj !/ c Tt}? ovaias rrjs Ho<pla.s <nwe<rrq). If the humanity of Christ be regarded as an independent whole, instead of being derived from the Logos, His exaltation would be the introduction of a Tetrad, instead of a Trinity, into God; inasmuch as the human also is represented as raised to God in Him. But, however decidedly they asserted that the humanity of Christ was derived from the essence of the Logos, they could not immediately identify it with His deity; for then the humanity would have had no existence at all, and the Docetism to which they in other respects tended would have gained the upper hand. For this reason, by way of more carefully defining the notion of the heavenly humanity, which is derived from the Logos, they supplemented it as follows,—The Logos formed a body capable of suffering, out of His own substance, by conversion (p£r<nroirjae); as to one aspect of His essence, He renounced His immutability, fell away from His own nature (fiWarp<j T?)? ISlas ^vaeca?), and thus converted Himself into flesh, bones, and an entire body. In this way, the deity of the Son, which is of the same substance with the Father, curtailed itself and reduced itself from perfection to imperfection (areX^? yeyovev etc reXelov).¹ Accordingly, they were able to say both, that which was nailed to the cross was not so much a body like ours, as the Sr)fuovf>yb<; ovala of Wisdom itself, that is, the nature in God the Logos, by which He also created the world: and, that Christ who suffered in the flesh, and was crucified, was not the Lord and God, not the Son of God; for that in Him which, in the stricter sense, was divine and unchangeable, could not become man and suffer, but merely that which, in one aspect of His being, He became and set forth, to which He humbled Himself, into which He converted Himself. It cannot be denied, that, on this supposition, apart from all other considerations, precisely that which was, in the strict sense, divine in the Logos did not become man: or, to use the words of the teachers of the Church, such a view would throw us back on the Gnostic duality of Christ.

¹ Besides the forerunners of Apollinaris, with whose names we are not acquainted, mention should here be made of a part of his school, which Theodoret (haer. fab. 4, 9, ell. 8) is candid enough to distinguish from the master himself. 4, 9 :—Tlohifuos (elsewhere also called Polemo) xxl arwov

aiwim "hiy%t yeytviiadut xul xpAoiv rri$ dtvrirrros xcil Tow auficttof. (Hence the name Synousiasts given them by Diodorus and Theodoret.) K«J SXhoi U rivtf ix riis 'Airohmuplov ov»uyuyris ix ruv oipxvuv 'i^xatv xx.riihvihxi Tow xvplov To aup.u. Ai&Qopx oe iipoPrts "-'-' rtii( ixeltov ovyypxy.fJ.xai ioyfiu.rx ol fih Tovto/j, o/ it ixttvois npltsdwuv.

Inconsistent with the theory just set forth seems the last feature thereof, as reported by Athanasius:—The Word entered into a holy man, as into one of the prophets; He Himself, however, did not become man when He assumed the body from Mary, but Christ was one; another, the Logos of God, who existed before Mary and before the .35ons, and who was the Son of the Father. For whence the holy man, into whom the Word entered, if the said man was nothing more than the Logos, who had converted Himself into a man, as to the one aspect of Hia being? The explanation of the discrepancy appears to be the following:—That that which we may designate nature in the Logos is first distinguished from, and then again combined with, that in Him which, in the strict sense, was deity and spirit. In the view of the advocates of this theory, the fact of its derivation from the Logos seemed to secure the unity of the entire Person of Christ; but it is derived from Him in different ways. Its physical aspect was the nature of the Logos, converted, transformed into a man; the proper deity of the Logos did not become man. On the other hand, it gave this man a share in itself, in that it animated him spiritually after the manner of the prophets. Thus the elements contained in the Logos may, in a certain sense, be said to have been in the man Jesus, though in a reverse order;—namely, on the one hand, that which in the Logos was merely a potence, to wit, the capability of converting Himself into a man, had become in Jesus an actuality, and formed the basis of further developments; and, on the other hand, that in the Son of God which was an actuality, to wit, the deity, was in Jesus a mere potence or power. In a word, the poles in the conception of the Son changed places, as it were, and the result of this change was the incarnation.

With this theory the assumption of an actual body derived from Mary would seem to be incompatible. And, in point of fact, the heretics whom Athanasius had in view, notwithstanding the stress they laid on the concrete humanity of Christ, probably did not themselves teach that Jesus had a body derived from the substance of Mary.¹

¹ Ad Episfc. 2 :—Ovx ix M«o/«,-, dM? I* rns ixvrov ovalxs fiirtiroiriat»

The same remark may, in all probability, be made regarding the heretics whom Basilius attacks.¹ But that such a view must necessarily lead back to the long-repudiated Docetism is so very self-evident,² that ,we can understand how efforts might, nay more, must be made, to combine the theory referred to with the idea of Christ's deriving His humanity from the substance of Mary. And this we find in some of the heretics mentioned by Hilary (see Note 64). According to the eleventh canon of the Synod of Sirmium, besides the form referred to above, according to which, the Word converted Himself into flesh, and set forth this flesh out of Himself, there existed another, according to which, already existing flesh was received or assumed by the Word, in the sense, namely, that He converted Himself into the material which He found already existing (the Son "demutationem sustinentem camera accepisse"). In a similar manner, Tertullian speaks of a twofold possibility in relation to the bodies of the angels who appeared in Old Testament times, to wit, that they either gave themselves bodies out of themselves, or took them from the aether. The latter also may be termed a conversion, in so far as the angels constituted the, in itself, foreign material, a form of manifestation of themselves, and thus a mode of their own existence. Such a doctrine of conversion, however, necessitated the giving up of the notion of a humanity whose substance was heavenly. This latter theory approached considerably nearer the doctrine of the Church; for the Church also held that the Logos appropriated from Mary a substance essentially foreign to Him, and constituted it a form of His self-manifestation. Its advocates, however, probably meant to go further; at all events, if their prime aim was to preserve the unity of Christ. That they should consent to representing the material taken from Mary a.s something foreign to the Logos, was impossible; their only course, therefore, was to lessen the distance between the Logos and the humanity, into which He converted Himself, either by the enhancement of the human, on the ground of the divinity of human nature in general, and consequently of the nature of Mary and the material taken from her; or by the depreciation of the Logos.

¹ Oipxviov aufiu ixfimu To» Kvpiov iru.pxytytnfltiu. Further, they Bay:— It' xiiTrfj rrit itornrx rx oLvipuirxv iixfixtvtiv irciin. Basil. Ep. 65, T. 3, 104 f.

^* As is remarked by Athanasius in the Epistle above referred to, and by Basilins.

As they do not appear to have adopted the former plan, like some later writers, for example, in the period of the Reformation, nor to have derived the material in Mary, along with the whole of external nature, from the nature of the creative Logos, there only remained to them the latter alternative—the alternative of approximating the Logos to the flesh, on whose full humanity, derived from Mary, they were resolved to insist. And accordingly they said, —The Logos converted Himself into a form which rendered it possible for the growth and sufferings of humanity to pass over and pertain to Him without hindrance; and thus what belonged to the flesh was able to become in a fuller sense His. When He abased Himself, and renounced divine glory and immutability, He acquired the capability of taking up humanity with its affections into Himself, and constituting it a part of His own being. On this view of the matter, the body must evidently be regarded as the main feature of the humanity of Christ; and the divine Logos alone is the soul or centre; as Apollinaris taught afterwards. Another vie.w of the matter of a more Ebionitical character we have already noticed above (see Note G4; Hilarius, de Trin. 10, 18, 20, 21). It also takes its start with the idea of the conversion of the Logos, in its endeavours to diminish the distance between the divine and human natures; but succeeds better in showing that Christ's body and soul were of like substance with us, than in demonstrating the unity of the two natures. The reason whereof was, that they derived the body and soul of Christ from the Adamitic humanity, and reduced the Logos to the rank of a potence animating the man Jesus. But, as Athanasius frequently remarked, every theory of conversion must end in Ebionism, if it follow out its principles to their legitimate results, and say,—The Logos who converted Himself into man ceased thereby to be Logos, ceased to be what He was. For then, in fact, nothing remains but the holy man Jesus; and instead of an union of the divine and human natures in the incarnation, we have the absorption of the former in the latter. The Ebionism thus arrived at is different indeed from the old, rigid, dialectical form thereof; it brings the divine and human aspects into flux, but without being able to combine their unity with their distinction. The man who was brought into existence by the conversion of the Logos into a man, may be converted again into God; in such a manner, however, that the humanity then ceases to exist. In each we discover the presentiment of its union with the other, but not of that unity which, by preserving the distinctive characteristics of each aspect, does equal justice to both. On the contrary, it is such, that now the one and then the other aspect suffers. When it was the turn of the humanity, the deity was excluded; and when it was the turn of the deity, the humanity was excluded. The aspect which at one time excludes, is afterwards punished by being itself excluded; but this punishment of error is not identical with the truth. A system which does nothing but alternate between two extremes, inclining first to Ebionism, and then to Docetism, cannot lay claim to being the truth, which is fixed and abiding; for truth, instead of substituting the one error for the other, must exclude hoth, and this is only possible if the truth contained in the two extremes is combined to form a higher unity. It is this higher unity which minds that had arrived at the stage of vacillation just mentioned were already seeking; and this is the explanation of the frequent occurrence at this time of theories which had had a partial existence before; for now the day was approaching when the intellect of the Church must apply itself to the task of combining in unity the two aspects of the Person of Christ. (Note 65.)

The theories just considered, which, as in the third century, were only set forth in rough outline, and which inclined backwards, now to Ebionism, and then to Gnosticism, acquired in the hands of Apollinaris a new form, characterized by greater refinement and greater freedom from the old heretical excrescences.

To take our start with the antagonistic element which determined the form of his system :—it was not the doctrine of the Church with which he felt himself in conflict; but, from the state of the Church's Christology in his day, there is every reason for judging that he believed himself to be in harmony with its spirit and meaning, and desired to express himself as it required. The element to which he felt himself in antagonism was rather, in the first instance, Arianism; and Arianism conditioned the form assumed by his ideas and expressions. We know what a high significance Arianism attached to the position,—The Son of God is mutable, is a rpeirrov, which was able to be either good or evil, and which decided for the good by a free act of will. This position, ascribing as it did freedom of choice to the Logos also, and thus subjecting Him to the laws of a finite development, set the seal to His finitude, and gave such predominance to the moral over the religious point of view, that we may fairly regard it as the central feature of the Arian polemic against the doctrine of the Church. We can, therefore, easily understand that the speculative mind and religious soul of a man like Apolliuaris, must feel itself intensely revolted thereby.

Still, the objection felt to the position by ApoUinaris must have been of quite a different character from that felt by those Church teachers who devoted almost exclusive attention to the doctrine of the Trinity, and little or none to Christology. Not that the principle was more objectionable in his eyes than in the eyes of the other teachers of the Church, because it endangered the doctrine of the Trinity, which he also entertained; but he saw more clearly than the rest its Christological consequences. If in Christ everything depended on the free will of a finite being, redemption is not a divine work at all, but a finite being made himself redeemer by his own free act. On this supposition, He who is termed Redeemer rather shows us how it is possible for a finite being to redeem himself than redeems us; the redemption of Christ Himself becomes vacillating and uncertain; nay more, no such thing as a Christology can exist, for a Christology necessarily presupposes the presence and action of God in Christ.

Hence the point against which Apollinaris directed his chief arguments was the rpeirrov, or the idea of freedom of choice in Christology. One might readily suppose that he must exclude freedom of choice from the higher nature of Christ; but why did he not concede it to His humanity? The other teachers of the Church, also, were reserved in relation to this, as yet little considered, point (see above, pages 350 f.); the more naturally, therefore, could Apollinaris follow out the inclination he felt, to exclude every trace of the rpeirrbv from this person. He had, moreover, really the strongest occasion for doing so in the circumstance, that his aim was to construct a Christology on the basis of the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity. He was the first who endeavoured to turn to account for Christology the results attained in connection with the doctrine of the Trinity.

With the greatest decision he takes his start from the principle, that the higher element in Christ must be conceived, not as a mere power, but as an hypostasis, as an independent vrroKelpevov. An incarnation has not taken place at all, if the Logos was present in Jesus merely in the form of an animating power, as in the prophets, or if He merely joined Himself on to a perfect and personal man. For, on the former supposition, He merely worked, He did not personally dwell, in the man Jesus; on the second supposition, the Logos can, it is true, be more correctly said to have been present in Jesus. At the same time, inasmuch as He is omnipresent, and we live and move in Him, nothing specific is left for Christ; and we can no more speak of an incarnation in this case, than we can describe His omnipresence as an incarnation. (Note 66.)

Christ must be one person; He cannot have merely assumed, He must have become, man. If the divine, the Logos, dwelt personally in Him, there cannot have been a second human person in Him; for in that case Christ must have been a monstrosity, rather than an unity.¹ If the humanity of Christ also possessed its own living, spiritual centre, we should have to attribute to Him two wills; and as freedom of choice pertains essentially to the human centre, we should be driven to assume the existence of an immutable will (that of the Logos) and a mutable will (that of the man Jesus), in one and the same subject. Such a result can only be avoided by denying to Christ the human i/o£>? or the human irvevfia, in which freedom of choice has its seat; not, however, as though this person had no vow whatever, but the Logos constituted Himself the human vow in Him. By thus excluding vow and the rpe-rrrov, he supposed that he had not merely laid a firm basis for the unity of Christ's person, but also that the way was cleared for a specific and personal indwelling of the Logos, and, as a natural consequence, for the acknowledgment of the full reality of the incarnation.

The principle that, on the assumption of an usual human vow, the incarnation would be an impossibility; and that, on the other hand, if we deny a human vow to Christ, the Logos

¹ L. c. c. 49, p. 257: E/ le nutis fih U rpiu» (compare c. 35, 46, p. 248; c. 48, pp. 254 f.) xvros Ie tx ruraipuv, ot>x A»tlpuiros tlKh xvipxiroitof. Unless, says he, this person is half man and half God, which would be no unity, but a monster, like a r^«yeA«ipof, fimxruvpos, xivrxvpos, liriri>.u(pos.

God into himself is very God, there must be many Gods, for many receive God into themselves;" consequently, no specific dignity can be assigned to Christ. If the perfect God was united with a perfect man, there must have been two. Wherefore, the human race could not be saved by the assumption of the vork and of the whole man, but solely by the assumption of the aap^ (ovk apa ado^erai ro avOpdmivov yevos 6V awzXif<Jrea>? vov Kal oXov avOpumov, dXXa Bia irpo&Xrfi^,ew; aapicos. Kal yap el avOpdnrc o reXeia> avvi)<pOrj Qeb<; reXeios, &vo av Tjaav. Compare c. 34, 35). Gregory of Nyssa replied, indeed (c. 39), How can the imperfect, the aapt;, combine with its antithesis (the Logos) to form an unity? For the perfect in union with the imperfect rather forms a Dyad, a Dualism. Why does the divine vov? shut out the human? But Apollinaris had already given a reply (c. 40). Because the human is a vow rpeirr6s, mutable in virtue of its freedom of choice; whereas the divine is immutable. But the work of redemption demanded for its accomplishment an immutable spirit, which would not succumb to the flesh, by reason of the weakness of its knowledge; but which would be able harmoniously to accommodate and annex the flesh to itself without violence. He cannot save the world who is himself subject to the universal corruption of men; no one can break the curse of sin who is not essentially a sinless man (c. 51). Now, men generally, and angels, are free to choose; and for beings endowed with freedom of choice to be no longer free to choose, is destruction. The Redeemer, therefore, could not share freedom of choice, accessible as it is to evil; nay more, this freedom of choice must not be supposed to have existed, and to have then been annihilated by the Logos, for no nature is destroyed by Him who created it. This man was rather destitute of freedom of choice from the very beginning. And, notwithstanding this lack, He was man. Man consists of three elements,—flesh, soul, and spirit (vow, c. 8, p. 141; c. 46, p. 248); in proof of which, he appeals to 1 Thess. v. 23. But Christ also consisted of three elements,—irvevfia, yfruyrj, and a&fia (Note 67). He did not, of course, derive His 'nvevfia from men; nor was it fitting that He should do so; for then He would not have been the second Adam from heaven, but like the earthly Adam. If the man from heaven had been in all things like us who arc earthly, even to the possession of the same irvtvfia as we the yaiicol, He would not have been the heavenly man, but rather the mere lodging-place, the receptacle (Boyefov) of the heavenly God. Of the Church teachers, some supposed the souls of men to be a direct creation, and not to be derived from the race (compare Hilarius, de Trin. 10, 20). Were this to be accepted as true, connection of blood with the race must be concluded to be unnecessary to the truth of the humanity of the soul; all that is necessary is, that it should proceed from God. Taking his stand on this principle, Apollinaris might have argued,—Christ cannot be fairly said to belong to a different genus from other men, because the Logos became His vow; for all souls proceed directly forth from God, and are not derived from the race. He does not appear, however, to have adopted this course (compare Hilar. ed. Maurin. p. 1047, Not. e). According to Nemesius, he held that souls are generated by souls, as bodies are generated by bodies. But this idea also presented to him a new outlet, nay more, a new argument for his theory. That which arises in the way of propagation, is not in the full sense irvevfia, but merely soul; Adam became a living soul, but he lacked irvevfia, which was first brought to him by Christ, the Man from heaven. What Adam did not possess, he was naturally unable to propagate. Now, although the creation of man did not attain completion till the divine irvevfia assumed the highest place, the hegemony in him,—for the first time in Christ, through the incarnation, when the Logos became the vovs or wevfia of the individual man Jesus; afterwards in believers, who become by grace what He was by birth;—Jesus, possessed as He was of body and soul, was a man, even apart from the irveufjM.; for no one hesitates to call Adam a man, notwithstanding he was not yet endowed with spirit, but was merely a living soul i^vyrj tyaa, c. 12). Apollinaris appears to have thought that, with the incarnation and regeneration, a new third element was superadded, without which man is not quite complete; for, to the full idea of man belong three elements, although it is right to term him man even before the addition of the third element. According to this theory, therefore, those who lived prior to Christ, or who now live out of Him, are not yet actual persons, but mere generic beings, individuals who stand in the relation of accidents to the genus that produces them. First, when a higher element than that which the kind can bestow unites itself with them, and constitutes itself the central-point of their essence, do they become persons; and then every other part of their being stands in the relation to the higher element (the eaa avOpcoiros) of the subject to the ruler. The inner* man becomes the kernel of the essence; the outward man, on the contrary, is something almost accidental, merely determined by the inner man. In Christ, the Logos assumed the place of the inner man.¹ Whereas in Adam there was at the very utmost a vov<;, which was the servant of the aap^, and was compelled to make the flesh its content, but never passed out of its potential and impotent existence to actuality and dominion; in Christ, on the contrary, because the Logos was His vovs, there came an all-prevailing holy principle. No evil thought could arise in the inner being of Christ; however seductive the flesh might be, it found a ruler instead of a response, in the vov<; of Christ. But if Christ never had even an evil thought, and if His spirit never carried an evil thought into execution by means of the body, sin found no place in Him, however strongly the flesh, with its i^vyi?, may have been opposed to the vovs. For only that can be called evil in which the vow takes part (Athan. c. Ap. 1, 2).²

From what has been advanced, we may see that Apollinaris might without hesitation have designated Christ a composite person (avvOerov), after the example of the Church ;⁸ save that he most decidedly protested against representing the factors as anything else but elements of the one, indivisible person: a composition of the person out of two persons, to which the opinion of many of the teachers of the Church seemed to lead, he felt compelled entirely to repudiate. To his mind also, the duality of the (pvaeis,—if the <f>vaeis are to be conceived as complete,— was equivalent to a duality of irpoaayira. For if Christ's human nature had a vow and an avre^ovaiov like other men from Adam, according to Apollinaris, it was an independent irpo aomov.

¹ At,li. C. A poll. 1, 2: 'Avtj Tos iaudt» it iifilr Anipuirov »ovs tirovpi»ios i» Xpurrji' us yup ipyxmxiji xiyptmci axifixr i rip irtpii^flvri' oil yoip oiivri %» -xiKii<yj dvipxiro» Xvrov yi»taim. Alio Ti'f.im h yivtodxi oil bimxrxi.

² Compare Gregor. 1. c. p. 273, c. 55; Athan. c. Ap. 1, 2.

³ But still he only believed in fiiu Qiais vi»ttras. Compare A. Mai 7,

For this reason, he deemed it necessary to refuse conceding even a duality of <pvael<;. We see, therefore, that the favourite phrase of the later Synousiasts, fua (pvaa Qeov X6yov aeaapKcofievrj, belonged to him also as to its sense. On the other 'hand, the preceding exposition shows that it could occasion him no difficulty to represent the humanity of Christ (acofia and yfn^rj without vow) as something appropriated from Mary, to designate it errUrrjrov.¹ To teach a conversion of the deity into humanity and its rpeirrov, could by no means be his intention ; for the very obvious reason, that in order to avoid the rpenrbv, and to secure unalterable virtue and wisdom ($>vauirj) for this man, he represented the Logos as his vow. By doing so, he would unnecessarily have posited the very thing which he had made every effort to avoid. Without giving up His being and undergoing conversion, God cannot become man, says he, save in the sense of His taking the place of the vov<; in the man (Jesus).2

The features hitherto mentioned, give us, however, but a superficial view of the theory of Apollinaris. Were that all, the charge of teaching a Christ who does not at all belong to our genus or class of beings, repeatedly brought against him by Gregory of Nyssa, would be, without any restriction, well founded. For in the case of men, the new divine principle connects itself with a vovs which is human, although it may be merely an impotent or subject potence until the irvevfia comes, which proceeds from Christ: in the case of Christ, on the contrary, no trace whatever of vovs would appear to have been derived from the humanity. On this supposition, the charge of positing as one, things which are two and cannot be one, brought by Apollinaris against the doctrine of the Church, would recoil upon himself; for the humanity which he attributes to Christ is something external to the personal centre therein, like a garment, or like the house in which any one dwells.

¹ Compare Gregor. 1. c. p. 230; p. 222, c. 29; p. 207, c. 34; p. 240, c. 44.

2 IlSf, Qrrni, ®eos clvipuiros yfatrui, fivj firruiihnttis diri Tow thxt Qtis, tl fiil »ovs i» Attfitxf xxrirrn, 1. c. c. 56, p. 277. Both Theodoret (see above, page 355, note) and Epiphanius discharge him of intending to teach such a conversion, as also of the doctrine of a heavenly <nxa J. Athanasius also (c. Apol. 1, 2) speaks of the different theories which had been worked out relatively to this point.

In point of fact, although he saw that to represent the human as the mere oV^ewv of the Logos did not exhaust the idea of the incarnation; notwithstanding, further, that he frequently condemns the avOpairo<; evOeos as a meagre representation, the propositions adduced above do not give us anything more than the notion of a God present in a human shell, unquestionably impersonal; which is very far from an incarnation, and is rather a mere theophany. We must, however, at the same time, not forget to mention that the Church teachers of his day had not really advanced any further.¹ They were even undecided whether the man Jesus, so far as a human soul is to be attributed to Him, ought not to be conceived as personal by Himself; in which case, seeing that the Logos could only influence Jesus from without, either Christ must have been a double person (whose unity falls more into the subject and its presuppositions than into the object),² or God was not present in Him in any specific sense; and consistently they ought to have gone back from the idea of a theophany as far as Ebionism (compare A. Mai, Coll. Nov. 7, 20 a).

But what makes the theory of Apollinaris specially interesting, is the mode in which he overcomes this difficulty, in which he represents the composite person as an indivisible unity, and in which he aims at assigning to the Logos, as the substitute for the human vovs, not an external and foreign position, but one which constitutes Him the truth of the humanity, and gives His incarnation its reality.

"The humanity of Christ," says he, " is that which is moved, the deity is the mover; the former, which was not a perfect living being by itself, in order that it might be a complete being, was compounded to an unity, was conjoined with its hegemonical principle. It was united with, and made part of, the hegemonical principle from heaven, as to lis passivity; and it in turn received the divine, which was constituted its own, as to its

¹ The less can we be surprised to find Apollinaris sometimes using also the simile—Humanity was tie temple of the Logos. A. Mai, Coll. Nov. 7, 203. John does not say that the Logos became <n*o£ and ipvxti, xiitxroo yxp ivo votpx, xxl iihnrlxd it rip xpcx Kxtoikiin, hx pt.rj To tripw xxrx Tow irtpov dtnicnpxreiifirxi iix rijf olxtixf iO^notxf xxl ieepytlxs. The Logos, therefore, assumed, not a human soul, but merely Abraham's seed, To» yxp roy aufixras 'Irpov vxo» irpohiypxi^m 6 dij/vxos, xxl Atovf, xxl Hihfa Tov "2o"Kofiuvros vxo$.

² Deren Einheit schon mehr in das Subject und seine Voraussetzungen, als in das Object fallt.

position, with which the incarnation is as good as incompatible, are chargeable with entertaining ante-Christian views, either of an heathanish or of a Jewish kind. But such a position is taken up by those who teach two self-moving (<xi/rota'i/7rra) beings, a twofold vow, a twofold will; for these can never be made one. (Note 68.) The human aspect of Christ must rather be so conceived, that it shall of itself point to the divine as its complement, and not be represented as a perfect thing, standing side by side with another perfect thing. Consequently, the only satisfactory course is to represent the divine as the active element, the human as that which is moved by the hegemonic divine principle, not as moving itself. In this way, he considered, we can understand that the two together first constituted the one person. For that which is moved presupposes, and of itself suggests, that which moves; and, on the other hand, the divine that moves would continue shut up in itself, a lifeless principle, if it did not display its motive power on something that is moved; indeed, without an object moved, the Logos would have no organ by which to manifest Himself.¹ Mover and moved are correlative ideas: a mover is inconceivable without a moved; and vice versa, a moved is inconceivable without a mover; and so, deity and humanity, as belonging in this respect inwardly to each other, combined to constitute one actual, indivisible divine-human life.

Apollinaris, however, endeavoured to gain a still more complete conception of this personal unity. It is true, he represented the humanity of Christ, considered by itself and apart from the Unio, as an imperfect being; but the deity which took the place of the soul and of the human vows, was not something alien to the human essence; but the human essence, which tends, as it were, towards the perfection of itself in the form of a person, acquired it for its own: and, in like manner, the Logos made the human His own, constituted it a determination of Himself. As it is an imperfect description to say,—I have, or am the vehicle and bearer of a body or a soul, seeing that the connection of the two with my essence is not accurately expressed till having is supplanted by being; Apollinaris felt that merely to speak of God bearing a man in Himself, or of God having a man as His organ or husk, was not to do justice to the idea of the incarnation.

¹ He designates humanity an organ, A. Mai 1. c. 302, and p. 20 b. :—

'Opyuno» xxl To xoitovr (1. xiijov») y.ix» mfvxet Knftiij Tij» hipyiixn u oi fitu 7\ iAfytix, fiix Kui .i oialef fJ,lu Apu ylyoviv twin rov '/.iyov xxl rns

oxpxis. (From his work against Diodorus.)

Accordingly, his aim was to show that each of the two, humanity and deity, stood in the position of a determination of the being of the other, both belonging together. In these genuinely speculative efforts, he was guided by the most important practical and religious interests. "If there was in Christ one being and another being, unity and sameness of worship must be condemned; for the Creator and the creature, God and man, may not be worshipped after the like fashion. But the worship paid to Christ is one, and therefore God and man are included under one and the same name. Consequently, we must not say that in Christ there were two essences, God and man; but one undivided being, constituted by God's conjunction of Himself with an human body.¹ And as it would involve the division and destruction of the object of Christianity, the Person of Christ, to maintain that He ought to be worshipped as to one aspect of His being, and not as to the other (which we certainly must maintain, if the humanity were not in some way or other a momentum of the deity); so also would it involve the breaking up of the unity of His own consciousness (A. Mai 7, 301). 'ABvvarov, rbv avrbv Kal rrpoaKwryrbv eavrbv elBivai Kal Fu). 'ABvvarov apa rbv avrbv elvai Qeov re teal avOparrov ef 6\oKXrjpov, aXfC iv fiovornn avyicpdrov <pvo~e(os Oeikfis aeo~apiccoiJLevn<;. Further, the idea of the incarnation is weakened, and we fall back into long-repudiated heresies, if we teach merely an activity (evepyeia) of the Logos in a complete man, instead of teaching that an human element formed part of the Logos Himself.²

¹ A. Mar. 1. C. 16:—*ATiA»f *«i uM.n; ovatu.s ."/«» ihxi xxi rp uvri» tpt>axv»YKriu uilfiirov, rovriartv iroitrrov xxl 'a,orjifiuros, &eov xxl xtipuirw. Mix oe i) lrpooxiutnais rtiv Xpiarci xxl xxru Tovto i» To hi ovofixri votirxi Qtis xxl xvvpuiros. Ovx dpu x?iX*i xul x>.?.,/7 owriu 0eof xxl Avfipxxos' «AAc2 fitx xxrx av»itait ®iov irpis uufiu xvtpu—ita,/. Compare ibid. the fragment from the letter to Jovian.

2 A. Mai 1. c. p. 20 :—Tol auQus i\*ihtyfilvx xxl ir,uyxoafitus ixxtxnpvyfiivx uVn iruhin dtx»eovaixi ritis inxixiipiixxti, xxl Tov e£ ovpxyov itirtpo» dtipuirat irupxb'eo'oftivou v~o T«» u-mar&bMv ex yiis Avipuvov thxi oiot Tok irpinpa» fi>.CtaQrifiovai, To i»ipuirivo» rov "h6y<>v tls itipytiu.n rij» iu d»ipuiru y.trufixKhoin<if. (From the work of Apollinaris entitled, irtpl Txh htus aup xuaius, c. 12.)

Finally—and this he deemed of chief importance—a perfect union of the divine and human appeared to him indispensably necessary to the accomplishment of the redemptive work of Christ.¹ Against the doctrine of the Church he brought the charge of having merely human sufferings in the sufferings of Christ; remarking, that the death of a man could not be the death of death (Greg. Antirrhet. c. 51, pp. 263 ff.). Gregory saw clearly enough the importance of the objection, and sought to show that the Logos was truly humbled and truly took part in sufferings; but all he really succeeded in doing, was to represent Christ as reckoning to Himself the sufferings which, strictly speaking, belonged solely to His humanity, on the ground of the humanity belonging to His person. Apollinaris, on the contrary, maintained that the unity of the Person of Christ was not secured, unless we can say,—Our God was crucified, and man is exalted to the right hand of God: the Son of Man was from heaven, and the Son of God was born of a woman (Greg. Nyss. Antirrh. c. 6; A. Mai 7, p. 73 :—'IovSaioi To acofia aravpcoOevres (leg. o~ravpfixTcunes) ©ebv iaravpcoaav). And the work of uniting God and man is first accomplished when God puts Himself completely in the place of humanity, and man is exalted to God. But how does he bring the two together? We have already remarked, that whilst representing the humanity of Christ as imperfect apart from the incarnation, he refuses to allow that, on this ground, the humanity contained in the Person of Christ was imperfect; for the Logos, so far from being foreign to, constitutes rather the proper perfection of, the humanity. This he expresses as follows,—The rrvevpu in Christ was human irvevfia, although divine (c. 27). Nay more, he says also, the divine irveDfia or the Logos, which in Christ was human irvevfia, was eternal, and existed before the incarnation. The Logos must therefore have existed as man also, prior to the incarnation, and His deity was in itself man from the very beginning.

¹ Greg. Nyss. Antirrhet. p. 131 ff., c. 5. His entire aim in the Aoyoypcfptx on the incarnation is to show,—To ivrrrip Tos fio»oyivovs vlov «)» h&rrrrx, Km oi^' r$ Aviptnrlttp To iniios hi%xatui, i&KXcl rrj» d—ui>r, xa\ x.vuKXoiWav Qiam fpos irxiovs fitrovalun ctKhomtii»tu.—C. 27: The doctrine of the Church allows Him who was crucified nothing divine in His own nature, not even the beat, that is, imtvfiu. C. 26, p. 185; c. 54, p. 271.

Gregory took the words to mean, that Apollinaris held the flesh of Christ to be eternal; and inasmuch as he, notwithstanding, represented Mary as the mother of Christ, therefore, concludes Gregory, he must have conceived Mary also to be eternal. He posits coarse composite matter as eternal. But Apollinaris never taught this; nowhere did he assume an heavenly humanity in this sense. But he viewed the irvevfia or the Logos in Christ as the eternal humanity j¹ probably on the ground of His being the archetype of universal humanity. To him the Logos was both God and archetypal man; and that in the sense of His having been eternally destined to become man, in an historical form. The Logos thus revealed that which had been latent in His nature from the very beginning.² It is possible that, in his mind, he connected therewith the Platonic doctrine of a icoafios vorjros, in which the archetypes (etS\j) of all things are ideally or potentially contained, though as yet by no means possessed of phaenomenal, external actuality; hence also the incarnation of the Logos. Of this tendency are undoubtedly the words attributed to him by Gregory, ovpdvtov Tl aapKos etSo? avaifko.rrei irepl To Oelov (c. 42, p. 234, compare c. 6); which, however, cannot by any means have been already the principle of the material element of the humanity of Christ, but merely the form or plastic power. At all events, regarding the Logos as he did, not as something foreign to, but as the truth of, the humanity itself, he was able to say,—The primal grounds of the incarnation lay, not in the Virgin,⁸ but in the eternal Logos Himself, who, by His essential nature, is the eternal archetype of humanity, and bears within Himself the potence of a real incarnation.

¹ P. 149, c. 13 :—Upovircipxti, Qwh, 6 Avfyxiros Xpttrro;, oix us Mpov ovros irxp uvrov rov irvtvfixros, Towv tart Tow 0*ov, Xaa us rov Kvptov ev Tn rov iix»ipuirov Qiati iiiov iwevfotros avros- He existed as a man irpo rajf (Dxvtpuaius, to wit, xjnif rov viov itirnrx i£ eLpyihs avipuiro» thxi, that is, in Himself, in essence, but not in appearance.

² C. 14 :—"Oirep tjv rvi (fvati, Tovth iQxvipuir i vv». C. 15, p. 164: To ha.viu»ov Qiiov xxru Qvuiv ot, rovro -a rris hxvipuirnotus iQxvtpuin xx,ipi. Compare below, page 372, and notes.

³ 'H ttlu ai.pxxais ov riv Apxil» xxo rijf irxpiitov eaxw, C. 15, p. 153. But he cannot have added,—the humanity of Christ, which existed from the beginning, before Abraham and the creation roixvrn ^xrrus i», o?« rols fixirrrxis iupuro orttftk. However strongly Apollinaris may have expressed the identity of the eternal ethos of Christ, in the central-point of the xoo/tof »oiiro'f, he cannot have transferred the earthly corporeality of Christ to heaven; for otherwise the xoo-fios Voiitov would have been x,iainros and not tonrof. That he did not hold the humanity out of Mary to be eternal, we shall show hereafter (see page 373 ff.).

The divine nature is humanity (17 Oela </>vat ? o~ap^ iari, c. 18, p. 163); of the man in Christ, he says—He was the brightness of the Father's glory, and in Him the essence of God acquired a form.¹ His humanity was of one substance with God (6fioovaio<;, avfMpvrcx;)* prior to the birth on earth, yea, prior to the universe, and was the companion of God (c. 28). Now, although, fixing our eye on the latent potence of incarnation, humanity was far from being something merely accessory in relation to God (errifcrrjrov, errvyivofievov), seeing that it belonged to the eternal idea of the Logos; and although, further, humanity, as realized in the unity of the Person of Christ, cannot be termed accessory, and is therefore avvovaimfiivrj, crvf/s<f>vro<; (c. 17, p. 160) with the deity; we may still say, the equality of Jesus Christ with the Father was eternal, and preceded the incarnation, but His resemblance to men is something superadded.⁸ For the rest, believing as he did the humanity of Christ to be essentially one with the Logos, Apollinaris was in a far different position from the Church teachers of his time for providing for the eternal continuance of the humanity; and of his superior facilities in this respect, he was well aware. For him there was no necessity, indeed no reason, for allowing the humanity to disappear in the Logos, whether by conversion or absorption into the divine glory; for he deemed it to be a determination of the Logos coeternal with the Logos Himself.

¹ C. 19, p. 164 :—To» olvGpuirov tivxi rris rov Qtov 00^fsj xxxvyxafix, xxl i» T£ seifixivu ©eifi T)j» Tow 0tov vieiarxam xapxxrnpiQiadxi.

'C. 18:—God designates (Zech. liii. 7) the Shepherd whom the sword strikes, Atbpx aifiipvhcu fiov; which Apollinaris refers to the humanity of Christ. P. 161 :—,"est/ it i» Tovtois xxrxQx»is, ori xirris 6 dvipxiros 6 AxX»iaxs iifiit rx Tow irxrpis, &i6s itrri -n,oir_l-r_ls ru» xiuvuv, xirxvyxafix io%ns, xxpx»rJip Tt}s Viroorxatu; xiirov, xri ar i Tu Ufx wivfixrt ©tos uv Kxi Ov Qeot ixxr i» ixvrql Urtpo» irap xvri», xinos 0 oV ixvrov, roirrtmi iix rijf aapxos xxiapitxs xiuiiv« xfiaprixv. Compare c. 28.

⁸ C. 17, p. 160 :—Qvx eirlxrnros (as, for example, Eustathius had said) ixi i-ii evep-ytaif yi»trxi i oap% rri ttirrm, dXhu. avvovatufihn Kxl oifitpvtos. C. 21:—'l8o£ Tow xirtov 'Inaov X/notow i) irpis irxripx iamns irpovirapxovax, i) irpil xvipuirovs ifioiirns criyitofiitn. Compare p. 231, c. 41.

On the other hand, the more strongly the Church teachers were compelled to feel that they had not taken sufficient care to secure the unity of the Person of Christ prior to His exaltation, the greater prominence they gave it at the termination; so that, in fact, they frequently fell out of Dualism into a false identification (Note 69). They regarded Christ, indeed, as a man, but neither before nor subsequently to the time of His earthly sojourn: consequently, the incarnation was reduced, in their hands, to a theophany of a somewhat longer continuance. It is true, the God-manhood is represented as continuing in that glorifying consummation of humanity which took place at the end of the theophany; but sufficient grounds are not assigned for the representation. Apollinaris, from his point of view, was far better able to assign an eternal place for the humanity, by the adoption, namely, of a reverse method;—in order to be able to conceive the humanity as eternally united with the Logos a parte post, he persists in asserting that, although in a latent state, it pertained to the essence of the Logos a parte ante.¹

Gregory of Nyssa, it is true, looked upon Apollinaris as teaching the existence in Christ of an eternal, realized humanity, or, vovv evaapicov ovra Tov vlov he ywaiKcx; reyOrjvai, Ovk iv Tt} irap9ev<p adpica yevofievov, aWct irapoSiicco<; oV avrrj<; Bue^ekOovra, 0I09 irpo T5>v auovcov ryv, rare (fxivepaOrjvcu avrb To (f>aivop.evov, aapiavbv 6vra Qebv, '?) Kobw; ai/ros 6vofid£ei, evaapicov vow (c. 24, p. 180). In the latter clause, however, Gregory himself says that he has not quoted the exact expressions of Apollinaris, but merely given his own impression of his real doctrine. Had he attributed to Christ real flesh prior to His birth from Mary, and merely represented Mary as the channel through which the already complete Christ passed into visibility (after the manner of the Valentinians), how would it be reconcilable with the statement of Gregory, that Apollinaris deemed the incarnation to form a highly important event in the history of Christ's person? For he did not ascribe to Him suffering and toil (tco7To?) prior to the incarnation, but He became incarnate that He might undergo suffering and toil.

¹ He objects to the doctrine of the Church,—^tij iJ dpx&C *it*i fiv XpiOtov, irxf iifiit "hiywixi umi riv Xoyo» that Qtiv, that is, undoubtedly, SO that the dtipuiritot Tos "hiyov (A. Mai 7, 20) was excluded, and the Logos was altogether indistinguishable from God, because His eternal and essential relation to the incarnation remained unnoticed.

Nay more, Gregory himself had previously (c. 13) so distinctly recognised that Apollinaris believed Christ to have been born of Mary, that he could hit upon no other method of reconciling therewith his doctrine of an eternal humanity, than by fastening upon him the notion, that the Virgin also had existed in eternity. But this latter charge must free him from the earlier. He could not have attached so great importance to the earthly birth from Mary, if he had conceived the humanity of Christ to have been complete even prior to the incarnation. How very differently, too, would the teachers of the Church have treated him, had they really been able to point out Valentinian passages in his writings! Further, where does Apollinaris speak of a double body of Christ? And yet without a double body he could not have attributed to Him a real body prior to, and have represented Him as acquiring a body capable of suffering by means of, the incarnation. Not only, therefore, must the view taken by Gregory undoubtedly be pronounced incorrect, but we can very easily explain how he came to entertain it. For when Apollinaris regarded humanity as an essential and eternal determination of the Logos, and taught that the historical incarnation brought to light simply and solely what the Logos had always been in Himself, nothing could seem more natural than to suppose that Apollinaris held the notion of an eternal, real body. From which it followed at once, that the birth from Mary was merely an apparent one. The true opinion of Apollinaris, however, probably was,—In Himself, or latently, Christ, it is true, had always been man, for the Logos was the archetype of humanity in general, and the primal man; moreover, He had always carried within Himself the potence, or even the destiny to become flesh; that is, besides the eternal humanity, which is attributable to Him as the archetype, to assume that form thereof which is like us; but His historical humanification first became a reality (irelpa) when He was actually born of Mary.¹

¹ C. 25:— 0«o» inrapxot irpi uiutuv Snrx fitrd Txvtx hx yvvxixis rVrixtxi xxl irpis rtj» Tu» irxinfixru» iriipx», xxl irpis rrj» ri/s Qivti*s tlvxyxw i'Kiih. Apollinaris did not say, hx yvvxixis (compare c. 25, p. 183), but that is Gregory's own view of the matter; the position of Apollinaris rather was, To» @tiu Ik. y»vxixis rtxfi'rrru. For this reason, also, he cannot have designated Him Qtis iwupxos -api Xoi»u», or, at all events, only in the sense, that that which first became a reality through the birth from Mary, pertained to Him eternally, in so far as the destiny to incarnation by birth from Mary formed part of His full idea; an idea which was intended to be realized in time.

After this explanation, it will be clear how Apollinaris was necessitated to refer the humiliation of Christ to His humanity, agreeably to the charge brought against him by Gregory.¹ If the Logos Himself was the eternal archetype of humanity; if He sets forth humanity as to its principal part and centre, the irvevfia; and if the humanity accordingly was the airavyacrfia of the divine Soija; the birth from Mary, the assumption of our form, of the form of a servant, must be regarded as an act of condescension, as an humiliation of His humanity (aap^, c. 23); having for its object the making of the new humanity, which eternally existed in the Logos, a reality on earth, and a common possession of the race.² Full light is thus thrown on the title of the treatise by Apollinaris, 'AiroSetft? irepl Ttj? Oe{a<; aapKcoaeco<; Ttjs icaff ofioicoaiv avOpdmov, and it now becomes quite intelligible. If the creation of man was completed, and the idea of humanity realized, in Christ, we should have expected that Apollinaris would describe the incarnation as the realization of this archetype, as the quadration of the humanity to its archetype (after the manner of Irenaeus and Tertullian). Instead thereof, he describes it as an assimilation of Christ to men, by which he means the form of our humanity. This now acquires a meaning when he asserts Christ to have been a man even in eternity, Karh irvevfia, or as the archetype; for, in that case, the historical incarnation, and the becoming like men in their actual state, was an act of condescension on the part of that humanity, which in itself is Logos.

¹ C. 23, p. 178: Apollinaris teaches that the xliw/f related to the »«?£, that is, to the humanity. Ho said, Through the «-«//£ He humbled Himself, rxirtivuaurru. (-Bivrii) axpx), imipv^/utirrx le vlei Qtov (consequently as to His humanity) i-ti» ttiu» vipuoiv. 0. 24, p. 179: Aogxfrri*/ yclp, Qmrir, us xvipuiros, t£ «3o£/«f dvxfixiinn/ (p. 183) 8o'£«» S« ixfi lepo rov xoa;Mv us Qtis irp»vtapxuv ru» uluvuv.

² C. 22, p. 174: Kvpiov it lov"hixZ Qxvirrx axifiuri, and rriu ruv ci»ipuTM» <Bo£o» ipopiaxvrx fiopQri». Compare the passage quoted in Note 1, p. 371. C. 13, p. 149: Tlpovxxpxiii Qnoiv, i d»ipuiros Xpirrof oiix xs iripnv orras 'sxp xvriu Tob ir»ivp.xros,—«tXA' is roi xvptov . . . dtlov 'arvtvfi.xros oVrof.

But in becoming like, He did not become identical with us; for as He remained the Logos, so also did He remain the archetype of humanity, though He assumed our form of humanity in order to exalt it and to transform us.¹ This He was able to do, because, as irvevfiia or avOpanroi; eirovpdvios, He was in Himself also Divine Logos. Hence, too, the condescension of His eternal humanity to our form was a divine deed (Oeia o~dpKaais). A further evidence of the correctness of the view we have presented, is in particular the circumstance, that whereas the theories of a heavenly humanity of Christ were strongly marked by Manichsean or Docetical features, and aimed, on the one hand, at raising Christ as much as possible above earthly lowness, and, on the other hand, at reducing His earthly humanity to a non-essential, transitory thing, with the design, as they fancied, of thus giving a worthier representation of Him; the tendency of Apollinaris was precisely the contrary one,—to use the expression employed by Gregory, the ultimate purpose of all his writings was to represent the divine nature as mortal, that is, to vindicate for it as complete a participation in suffering as possible. This leads us to the other aspect of the matter. In the foregoing, we have seen how he endeavoured to conjoin deity and humanity to a perfect unity, by maintaining at all events the Kvpidnarov of man, his irvevfia, to be an eternal determination of the Logos Himself; nay more, by positing the incarnation as a latent potence of the Logos. In addition to this, it must also be mentioned, that he tried to bring the deity as near as possible to humanity; and that not merely to the eternal humanity which he asserts the Logos Himself to be (for therein would merely be involved the immediate or essential unity of the two), nor merely by means of the Platonic eloo? of the aap^, but also to humanity in its temporal form.

¹ So is it also clear that Apollinaris says,—nix dttpxiros,—x**' us A»ipu—<is, iiori avx ofioova<t>s T£ dripvirx Xxtx To xvpiurxro». C. 35, p. 212 :— 'A**' oix xvfauirov uvrov u»u.l. Qmiv, uTAtii xuixirip A»ipuira t (that is, Only like, not identical with, a man of the same nature as ourselves ;—as to His inner essence, setting forth the true idea of man, the hu Avipuiros, which is to become our true personality also; as to His appearance in time, on the contrary, like, but not equal to, our present humanity, as it exists apart from Him) A»av», fooupxov Outx. His favourite expression was,— Christ is »oSj inrxpxos, not \iyos i»aupxos- For uottf seemed to him to express the eternal point of unity of the divine and human; and this »ws became Ivaupxos.

To take note hereof was the more necessary, as at this point a gap, or, if we will, a break, was discoverable in the system of Apollinaris. The Logos, or the eternal irvevfia, which he also designates the eternal man Christ, is supposed to contain the potence of an incarnation in time. This thought appears to require that the historical humanity of Christ be regarded as the exposition of the eternal potence contained in the Logos. But how can His assumption of a a&fia, and of the yfrvyrj gamterj from Mary, be reconciled therewith? According to the former idea, consistency would appear to necessitate him to derive the earthly humanity of Christ also from the essence of the Logos or the irvevfia; according to the latter, the earthly humanity was derived to Him from Adam through Mary. In the former case, the Logos is conceived as productive; but what becomes, then, of the birth from Mary t In the latter case, He is conceived as receiving, assuming (avaXa&cov); but what becomes, then, of the unity, the identity of the Logos with Himself in the earthly humanity of Christ, which is not derived from His own essence? In point of fact, Apollinaris betrays here a certain degree of uncertainty. He frequently condemns the notion of a mere "assumption" of humanity; for he desired to advance beyond the category of "having" to that of "being," and to regard the Person of Christ as a veritable unity, of which humanity as well as deity was an integral, constitutive element, and not a mere external addition. But, on the other hand, unless he were prepared to give up the doctrine of the birth of Christ from Mary, he must allow the presence in His person of something received, appropriated from without (an iiriicrryrov, eirvyevofievov)} For he is far from adopting the principle referred to above, and which may be termed pantheistic, to wit, that human nature generally, acbfia and "ty,vyrj, pertained to and was the external realization of the <f>vai<; of the Logos.

¹ As he also does; see note 1, p. 365; cf. note 3, p. 372. According to a fragment preserved by Theodoret, Dialog. 1, p. 70, he said;—E/ o" irpoa'kufi/ix»ti ris, oi rpeirtrxi els Tojto, rrpoathxfit ii o-xpxx 6 Xpi<rris, Apu oix trpxirn tis axpxx.—Kccl yxp hxvrot iifiit its uvyyimix» ixxpittxno \ix Tow aufixroS, tvx auar_;. Mxxp^» oV xuhhiou rov ax^ofiluov To auZftf fixxpZ xpx xxMio» tifiu» xxi ill vri aufixrusil' oix xv Si n» kxh'hiv« tls axpxx rpxm'is (-i»). P. 71:—Xlpoaxvtovfim ii ©to» oapxx, Ik rijf xytxs irxpiivov -apoahxfiirrx, xxl "iix Tovto u»ipuirov fih omx xx.rx rw axpxx, ©eo» oi xxru To iwtvfix.—' OfiohoyoZfu» To» vio» Tod ©eov vli» dtipuxov ytyeviiaixt, oix iuofixri a"h"h' uhniiix irpoa'hxlSirrx tx Mxptxs rijf irxpHtov axpxx.

How then does he combine the two? In one way alone;—not indeed byasserting the Logos to be eternally auifia and ^vyrj, in the same sense as he asserted Him to be essentially and eternally irvevfia; but by regarding it as an essential and eternal determination of His being, to yearn for the assumption of both, to be susceptible of that which meets and is offered to it by the already existing humanity. If, then, there was in Him an essential and eternal inclination to this humanity, we are warranted in saying, that in receiving and assuming the human element from Mary, He was receiving that which belongs to His own complete idea, or, in other words, the potence of incarnation contained in Him is capable of becoming an actual, visible reality. What He thus received was something lower, something suffering, not something higher: the receptivity which thus appropriated the lower was therefore in reality an act, an act of love; or, regarded from another point of view, He gave far more than He received, when human nature was given to Him; for, through being assumed by the Logos, the human nature became participant in divine nature. Still, this deed is not a deed of productive or creative power or majesty; but being an act of condescending love, it implies that the Logos by love had constituted Himself susceptible of the lower element from Adam's stem, and to His humiliation or condescension belonged His actual assumption of that humanity from Mary. Inasmuch, therefore, as He lovingly assumed our lower humanity, instead of creating a humanity afresh, or setting it forth and producing it out of Himself, the real earthly incarnation is converted from a physical into an ethical process undergone by God the Logos. For this reason, it was possible for two things which, prior to the act of incarnation, were separate, to wit, the Logos and the Adamitic nature, to coalesce to a personal unity, provided only, that on the part of the Logos, there was a susceptibility to that in respect to which the humanity was, as it were, a giver and actor; and that, therefore, the presentation to the Logos of the human elements of Jesus, by the Adamitic nature, was simply as it were the fulfilment of His eternal yearning to become man. Humanity and deity are perfectly capable of combining to form a personal unity, because the idea of each points to the other from the very beginning. We have seen above, that, according to Apollinaris, when the Adamitic humanity received the divine vow, it received its true ruler, the ruler which its very </>«5cr« compelled it to demand, in order that it might pass from an imperfect to a perfect form (which vow, however, it could not beget out of itself); and that the two in combination set forth the unity of the moving principle and the object moved, or, in other words, the movement of life in its normal state. Even so, do we find on the part of the Logos a susceptibility to that which the humanity has to communicate to Him,—a susceptibility resting, however, on an ethical basis;—accordingly, in this aspect also, it is clear both that the conjunction of humanity and deity to a complete personal unity was a possibility, and that that which the Logos in the first instance received from without, might become verily His own and a momentum of His being. It is therefore possible that Apollinaris himself may have taught, what his school certainly taught, that through its union with the uncreated, the flesh also became uncreated; that is, the idea of creation passed in this instance into that of being (compare Ath. c. Apoll. 1, 4). For it not merely became the property of the Logos by the Unio, but was brought to sameness of nature (c. 5), and was made coeternal with the nature of God;—naturally, not in the sense of eternal pre-existence, but of post-existence.

These observations will throw light on that which Apollinaris says regarding the participation of the Logos in human, particularly in suffering, conditions. He maintains that we ought not to teach merely that Jesus was born as to His humanity; and characterizes it as an Hellenic and Jewish error to form so incorrect a conception of that unity of the divine-human person, which first gave the incarnation its truth, as not to admit of God being represented as born of a woman.¹

¹ C. 25, p. 183:—"EXXij«iej yxp, fnai, xx.1 'lovoxloi irpoQcwZs diriarovai firi xurxiexofiwm ®eiv dxovtm ri» ix yv»uixos trxfiiirrx. C. 36, p. 215:— Ei fj.ii n>is, Qnoiv, itaupxcs laTiv 6 xvpio;, J.oipiu. xv um, Qxrl^ovax toE» d»tpuirov, etc. (see Note 66); but then oix riv iiribnfiix ®tov r i Xpiorov 'jrxpovaiu clAX oLvdoxirov yittniats.

As far as concerns the suffering in particular, according to Gregory, his intention was to teach, not merely that the deity of the Onlybegotten took suffering upon itself in its humanity, but also that the divine nature converted itself to participation in suffering.¹ Gregory's account would lead us to believe that he made the Logos Himself die. But that this cannot have been his meaning is plain, even from the observation directed against him by Gregory,—" One cannot say that He died as to one part of Himself, and therefore not as to the other, for He was without parts, and uncompounded; what He is termed He was entirely, not this to one part and that to another." Apollinaris himself grants that the Son is the Father's wisdom, power, and so forth (p. 133); but if He is such, and yet, on the other hand, ceases (in death) to be what He was, everything dies with Him. Being indivisible, He must either die entirely or live entirely: if He die, everything dies, for everything depends on His deity, which is supposed to have died. From this it is clear, as Gregory himself also acknowledges afterwards, that Apollinaris had no intention of absolutely representing the Logos as dying; but he distinguished in the one Logos two aspects (Gregory says "parts "), as to one of which He was susceptible of receiving what humanity was able to communicate, whilst as to the other He was and continued immortal.² It must be possible to refer sufferings to the divine nature of the Logos; otherwise Christ did not really put Himself in our place, and could not have conquered sin, for then it would have been a mere man that suffered (c. 51, 54). "If Christ were united with the Father even prior to the resurrection, why can He not have been united with the God in Him? The Redeemer suffered hunger, thirst, weariness, conflicts, and sadness. But how could He be at the same time God? He is not two persons, as though God were one, man another.

¹ C. 5 :—Q»nrtj» Tow fio»oywovs vlov Tij» itarrrrx, xxl oity) T£ A»tfwiri»tp To irxfos 'il^xaiut,uAAur^» &irui% xill dvxAAolurov ifvait irpis irxiovf furovaiXv uAAoiudiivut.

² Gregory (ibid.) brings against him the charge,—xvuirAxrzti xAArm iv»xfim (along with the aspect which was susceptible of receiving the communication of the human, of the passible) xyxzuAovfii»r/j rximnv ix, Tow Iunxtov, that is, in the aspect which was and continued immortal, was contained, according to Apollinaris, the power to overcome death, and to reunite with itself, the aspect of His essence, which had as it were been given up to death along with the body.

Accordingly, God suffered; and that suffered, which, properly speaking, admits no suffering into itself, not by a necessity of its nature altogether independent of the will, but in agreement with the arrangement of its own substance; that is, the deity did not suffer immediately or by physical necessity, but in consequence of a free impulse given it by the Logos, who willed to sympathize with, or participate in, the sufferings of men.¹ From the words of Christ concerning the corn of wheat that dies (John xii. 24), Apollinaris concluded,—Christ's dying could not have brought so much fruit if it had been the death of a mere man, instead of the suffering of the deity. But the Church, in its doctrine, does not leave to Him who was crucified anything divine in His own nature; not even in His noblest part, in the irvevfia, was the human at the same time also divine.²

If, in the view of Apollinaris, the Logos did not, properly speaking, take the place of the usual human i/oi)s, as something foreign to humanity; and if, on the contrary, He who became flesh (evaapKos) set forth true humanity, and was the irvevfia in Christ, he had no alternative but to represent this human irvevfia, which was at the same time Logos, as actually man, and as participating in all human qualities. We discover at once, however, that this irvevfia presents two aspects: one, as to which it is Logos or God, and absolutely immutable; the other, as to which it is finite, and is able really to humble itself and sympathize with our sufferings and conflicts. This duality of aspects in the one Logos necessarily leads to a distinction being drawn between the Logos and the Father (see Note 1, page 373); and, in fact, he consistently persisted in referring the words ifibv OiXrjfia, which occur in Luke xxii. 42 (" not My will, but Thine be done "), not merely to the human will of Christ, but also to the Logos,—that is, so far as the Logos was united with the man.⁸

¹ C. 58, p. 283:—E/ irpis rou Tlxripx ri»urxi 6 Xowtov irpo x»xorxatus, 'zrus irpis T&» iu xirrtp @ti» oiix ivxrxi; 0 Hurnp iriro»it Turxn, ol,J/xv xxl xxfixrot Kxl Aymix; xu1 Avir»». Tie uv i "S.uriip; o ©to'f, Iprflir, (;) oil d»o irpiauirx, us iripov fih oVrof, Mpov hi To5 xtipuirov. Ovkovn i ©to'f iriirwit») xu1 irxayji To dirxpxhlxrov irxiovs, ovx dnxyxi< (fvatus e!/3of?iiJrow, xxdonrtp dufyuiros, xXX' xxo\oviix $vaius.

^* C. 27. Compare c. 51, 52 :—Ahixrxi Tou ixxAx<w«oT«o» Ao'yo», or/ irtpl A»ipxir0» itxpovfitr To irxias' xvtpuirov hi Vxvxtos Ov xxrapyu To» Ix»x

roII, oilhi xtlotxtxI 6 fitj u.170^u'JC.)U.

C 31:—Oi fi»yificwtvovai, Qmatv, Oti To ii>.r,u.u Tosto ihio» iiprrzxi oiix xvlpuirov Tos ix yijf, xxius xvrol tofit^oMiv, xXXd Toc ©eov Tow xx,zx^ximn >«£ ovpx»ov, To' lis iruam xvrav irpoatiXnp.fiimu. A. Mai 7, 203:—E< Se laondtviis *«( nomniis rijf irxrpixiis ovalxs 6 *""( To Irxios xxl ti» orxvpiv epxofitvos J5», ir«f h xyxvlx ymific»os irpoorivxtro irapihWit xjrro» To irtrripiw, xxl y.y. yivkadxi xvrcv To d-hr.y,ce, «A>. x y.uXhav To Tow irxrpos J T/ oe xxl irpooxyopevtiu ixpriv To Tow tvyflfiivov ii'hny.x, £Kh' ij dnCfiputoy Gtov xxl ivxmrlou;

The will of the Logos in the man, says he, did not therefore come into conflict with that of the Father; for, even when He was not heard, not to be heard was His will, and consequently, in any case, His will was done. Accordingly, the Logos and His will were rendered by His humanity different from, but not antagonistic to, the Father: the truth of the humanity of Christ manifested itself in this difference (to avOpanrivov Xpurrov eSelKwro OeXrjfui). One can easily understand how, with such principles, he came to be charged with Arianism; for Arius also taught that there was a rpeirrov in Christ different from the will of the Father. But apart from the consideration that the rpenrov posited by Arius involved the possibility of sin, whereas Apollinaris represented it as an outflow of the unchangeable love and essential sinlessness of Christ, those who brought this charge forgot that Arius attributed immutability to the Father alone, and mutability alone to the Son. Apollinaris was far from intending to do this: he represented the Son also as unchangeable as to His deity, but believed, notwithstanding, that by His incarnation the Logos made Himself unequal to Himself, though He restores Himself again to His original equality with Himself,¹—an equality which always continued to be potentially His. He is much rather chargeable, therefore, with entertaining patripassian principles in relation to the deity of the Son, than with Arianism. But even this would not be correct, for he totally repudiates the idea of a conversion, nay more, of a passibility of the Logos ;2 on the contrary, he regards His suffering, as in the last instance an act of love, as evepyeia. Not merely the adjustment of the Biaipeais, but even the submission thereto, the Kevaais, was an act of the eternal and ever self-identical love of the Logos.

¹ C. 29 :—Aixipuv fifo (x/i/oto'j) Tr)» hipyuxu xur-X aapxx, if-iout 11 xxrt* mtvfix, oirtp lyji rw h ivvxfitl lrahiv horrrrx, xxl rijv Xxtx aapxx tits impyeixs hxiptaW xxtf n», (friait, ov 7tx»txs ttuvxoiinaw, xKhx rmxs, ovs

'Compare c. 56, p. 277:—Tlus, Qwt, @tos &»ipums ylvtrxi, fir i fitrxfihnitU Oeto To! thxi ©to'f, tl fir i »ovs it xviputrtp xxriarn;

It is true, the first product of this love was suffering, was a feeling of pain, resulting from the conjunction of the Logos with the suffering Jesus; but if the Logos could not lovingly have sympathized with humanity, even whilst in the humanity of Christ, His divine nature would not have been in harmony with, but would have stood in the way of, His love; and therefore the physical categories in the conception of the Logos, instead of being subject to, would set a limit and restraint to the ethical, or, in other words, to His love.

Gregory Nazianzen directs special attention to this inequality of the Logos, who is at the same time the archetypal man, with Himself.¹ He says,—The words, He was begotten, tempted, He hungered, thirsted, slept, was weary, they (that is, the Apollinarists) refer to the human aspect; but that He was glorified by the angels, that He conquered the tempter, and wrought miracles, they attribute to the deity. The question, "Where have you laid Lazarus!" belonged to our weak nature; but when He cried, "Lazarus, come forth," and raised hiin from the dead, that belonged to the nature which is higher than ours.² When He struggled with distress, was nailed to the cross, and buried, it affected the outward husk; that He rose again and ascended to heaven, was due to the inner treasure.⁹ But when Gregory Nazianzen asserts, that thus the very fault is committed which was charged upon the doctrine of the Church, and that it involves the assumption of two mutually conflicting natures, he overlooks, in the first place, that at that time the Church had not seen as clearly as did Apollinaris, that Christ must be regarded as one indivisible person, and that we must not take such a view of His humanity as would constitute it a second person; and, in the second place, that, as we have shown, Apollinaris believed the human and divine aspects, which he never describes as natures, to be contained in each other. The inequality of Christ to Himself, referred to above, did not affect merely one of the two aspects, but both, each by and in itself.

¹ Ep. ad. Cledon. 2, 7, or Or. 62.

^* Compare Athan. Tom. ad Antioch. 7. But see also Note 65.

⁸ Compare Athan. c. Apoll. 1,3, where the same is designated by wxier Avipuxof. He Bpeaks also, in c. Ap. 1, 12, of men who say,—"Or i £Murs iar'm 6 irxtut vios and clhhos 6 ft.vj x«A»».

In the first place, humanity was present in Christ in its complete form; the archetype, the eternal 'rrvevfia was there; but it passed into inequality with itself, by assuming the form of our humanity. That eternal irvevfia in Him was, further, and at the same time, the deity of the Logos; consequently, the deity also passed into inequality with itself, in the suffering God-man. (Note 70.)

In that Apollinaris thus represented the divinity of the Logos as having, in itself, an aspect turned towards, yea, even appertaining to, the humanity (even as humanity has an aspect turned towards the divine), we can understand how it was possible for Gregory Nazianzen further to charge him with introducing a "scala" into the divine (Ad Cledon. 1, 16). He constructs the Trinity, says Gregory, by representing it as compounded of a great, a greater, and a greatest.¹ This can only refer to the circumstance of his attributing to the Logos, besides His perfect deity, an aspect turned towards finitude; and of his using similar words respecting the Holy Spirit, so far as He dwells in believers, groans in them, as Paul teaches, is grieved, and so forth. But this oeconomic Subordinatianism is as widely removed as possible from Arianism; for it might very easily have the doctrine of the Council of Nicaea, the ontological Trinity, for its presupposition (Mansi 3, 461). Furthermore, on the basis thereof, by the application of ethical principles, it was possible for him to teach an humiliation, that is, a self-emptying of the Son and the Spirit, in the sense, namely, both of their making themselves unequal to the Father, and, as we have shown above, of their making themselves each unequal to Himself. This, however, must be evident from what has preceded. We have also express testimony to the effect that he adhered firmly to the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity. (Greg. Nyss. 1. c. c. 52, p. 264, says,—" He established filav rtj<; TpidSos Oeori)ra, in opposition to the Arians;" Theodoret himself (1. c.) was compelled to testify,—"In some of his writings we find also the Church doctrine of the Trinity, iv eVot? airfypdfifiaaiv—o/io/w? rjfuv Km Ttjv filav rrj<; fleorr/rO? ovatav Kcu ra? rpels viroordaeis iicijpv^ev.) Apollinaris believed, further, that the power to adjust that Siaipeai<; was always inherent in Christ; and that the perfect adjustment would take place in the thousand years' kingdom, when the glorified person of the Redeemer, having attained to complete unity, will dwell and walk among men on earth, in a form which shall be at once adequate to the deity, and perfectly human. (Note 71.)

¹ Compare also Theodoret, Haer. Fab. 4, 8: Avrot yxp urn ilp,nfiu To fiiyx, fiel^o», puyurro», or the (iuiy.ot d^iuuonuv' xj fiiyoiXw fih oWof Tov n»tifiuros, Tos ie vlov fielfy»os, fieyiarov li rov Tlxrpof. Then we should have the reproach of Sabellianism. .. -''-' Stl.^

VOL. II. 2 B

The remarks just made throw light on an expression of Apollinaris which has occasioned much surprise. The man Jesus Christ, says he, is one, as God the Father is one; this belongs to the idea of an essence. This same unity is, in like manner, predicable of the compound being which stands in the middle between God and man (coore Km Tovto <f>vaea<; crvvOerov fiera^v ovar)<; Qeov ical avOpdrTrcov). In his Syllogisms, Apollinaris had said,—If different qualities concentre in one, there arises a kind of middle thing; for example, spring is a middle thing between winter and summer. No middle thing, however, includes within itself the points of both extremes in completeness, but merely partially. Wherefore, the middle between God and men, in the Person of Christ, is neither completely man nor completely God, but a commixture of God and man.¹ At first sight, this passage does not at all seem to fit into Apollinaris' system; this fiea6rrj<; appears to merit being charged with the same fault as he himself had brought against the doctrine of the Church (see Note 1, p. 360). Indeed, Gregory of Nyssa already makes the same observation (c. 49, p. 257). The doctrine of the Church does not desire a half, but reXeiov &ebv and reXeiov avOpanrov in Christ; Apollinaris, on the contrary, presents us with a mutilated man. But that he omits the one aKporrjs, the human irpoaipeai<;, the human vo0s from his conception of Christ, is certain; and equally certain, that he allows the X6yos during Christ's life on earth to become unequal to Himself, and does not allow Him to exhibit His proper dicporrjs. The fieao-ny; resulting herefrom fits perfectly into his system, provided it remains eternally; the more so, as with this "temperamentum," which the God-man sets

¹ A. Mai 7, 310: Mtrirrrrtg yixmau 'Cbimrrru» liu$ipuv tU h av»foHovaur, xs iv tifiiivip Ihiarns Stov xut Itirov, xxl h yAxvxp xpufictti Hi6tris Xefxott xxX /Mhxms, xxl i» xipi ^tifiuuof xxX itpovs iZiorms txp lpyu^ofiim' aiihfiice it faoorns ixmipus fan rds xxp6rrrrus ij &k**ipw, xKhx fitpixZs iirifitfuy. Umus. Mtaorns 0e 0toi7 xxl ivipLxut i» X/worf, oix Apx ovrt xvtpu^os oAof, ovrt ©tof, <x?iA.<* Qtov xxl clvipiiirov fit^is.

forth on earth, well consists an idea to which Apollinaris attached great importance,—the idea, namely, that the Logos, or the eternal irveOfia, was a determination of humanity, and that, on the other hand, the aap^ was a determination of the deity thus approximated to it.

Christ therefore is fila ^>vcrt?, one essence; by which he understood both the unity of the person and the essential unity of the two aspects, the divine and the human. To the unity of the person corresponds unity of volition and of thought.¹ The hegemony in this unity is constantly in the hands of the Logos who became vow ivaapKos. For this reason, Christ was raised above all necessity of practice (aaKrjais); and only on the condition that He was raised above practice, both as to knowledge and virtue, could He be the Redeemer. Without learning, He must needs be wise and holy from His very birth.² He worked His miracles, not like a prophet by the power of God, but by His own power (Cat. Cord. p. 255; Greg. Antirrh. c. 29, p. 196.—Cat. Cord. pp. 384, 329). He spake not by revelation, but was Himself the lawgiver. Consequently, the inmost core of His personality remained untouched by that inequality or diremption (Biaipeatsi); this core was not merely a principle, but the complete inner man, the perfect irvevfia or the Logos.

It is, further, particularly interesting to bring under consideration the relation of believers to Christ. The principal term employed by Apollinaris to designate it is fufirjcris. Mohler has coarsely interpreted the word to denote a mechanical copying or mimicking.

¹ Compare A. Mai 7, 70. The passages from Apollinaris, Polemon, and others, p. 20: filcc hipyiiu, filu Qiais. P. 16 :—fiiu Cfiais ai»ttros, avyxpuros, acipxixil xxl itixii. ^rO. xat»r i erlarie, exclaimed Apollinaris, xxi fiifys iiaittalu, Qlos xxl aci,pi fitciu direrrthtat tpvau.

³ Greg. Nyss. c. 38. E7 ii ir"htot htpas hipov xofit^*rui, raZro if daxnaiu 'ylmrui' oiilfil'u 0e xaxnais iv Xpiarft oix Apx »0Vs iari» u»dpuinvos. C. 28, p. 192:—T/f (Pnam, 6 asy/of 'tx yittrns; (Therefore, in order that it might be sinless, it was necessary for Christ's humanity to be deity: thus was it equal to the enemy.) Tls iilicuvns aoQcs; Compare especially c. 51. A man subject to the common corruption of men, even to the rpiini», could not help. Only a perfectly sinless being could take away the curse of sin. Compare Cat. Cord. in Joh. 8, 38, where he designates this essential knowledge of Christ y»uais Qvtixi.

With a Protestant colouring, this is repeated also by Baur (pp. 635 ff.), who finds in the word a species of Pelagian idea of imitation, which would involve the laying of a false stress on the moral example of Christ. Against such a supposition, his antagonism to the Antiocheians, especially to Diodorus of Tarsus, ought alone to have protected him.¹ Still more, the importance he attached to the death of Christ (compare, for example, the Cat. Cord. on Joh. xix. 17). Apollinaris' fault was rather that of allowing the ethical to fall into the background, as compared with the religious. The passage quoted by Athanasius (c. Apoll. 1, 2), indeed, of which the men abovementioned seem alone to have taken notice, does not show us clearly what Apollinaris' real opinion was. All it reports is,— aapKos fiev Kaivorrjra Xpurro<; emBiSeiKrai Kaff ofioicoaiv (that is, Christ exhibited the new humanity in likeness to us) Tov Bk (ppovovmos iv fjfiiv Ttjv Kaivorrjra, Sui fufifoeas Kcu Ofiouoaeas real airoyf}<; T?}? af/-aprias Ekooto<; iv iavrm hriBeiKwrai (that is, the novelty of him who thinks in us, each one shows by imitation, resemblance and abstinence from sin). More light is thrown on the matter by Ep. ad Cledon. 2, 3, where the complaint is made against the school of Apollinaris (Gregory alludes particularly in the letters to Vitalis, for whom, in other respects like Epiphanius, he entertained a very high regard, Ep. ad Cled. 2, 5), that it gives a different explanation of the words, "We have the spirit of Christ" (1 Cor. xi. 16), from the Church, understanding by the spirit of Christ, His deity. This, however, first becomes quite clear from several passages preserved in a Catena to the Gospel of John.^*

How far removed he was from Pelagianism, we may Judge from his remarks on John iii. 5 :—The Lord leads Nicodemus to true knowledge by attributing regeneration to grace, which is accomplished by the service, indeed, of water, which cleanses the body, but by the energy of the Spirit sanctifying the soul and filling it with deity. If He dwell in us as a pledge and first fruit, the perfect kingdom of God will come, and the fulness of the deity fill us.³

¹ Compare p. 232, c. 42, where he protests against the Antiocheian distinction between vlof Qiaa QUs and vlis &tov (see Note 63).

2 Compare Cat. Corder. 1630, p. 89, on John iii. 5,; on vi. 27, p. 180; ver. 28, p. 181.

⁸ 'Avxfiifii^ei irpis rtj» ciKnl>ivf.» I»voixv, rri -frxpm rw dvxyiimnai» «>«riMf, iris 'fxnO.iirxt 3<' Virovpytxs fii» vZurof, 81' impyiixs it 'MVfixros, rnt yfjv^» dyixgorrcs xx.1 irftH/iowirof itorrrri, ov hr i xxroix*iuurro! »v» ir ilfiiu uairtp dpfixfiuvos xai urrxpxjns i) rihtlus K'l [Sxaihttx Tov Qtov, ir'hiipxals ovax itvmrros i» ifii»

On vi. 27, he remarks,—The eternally enduring food is the faith that makes alive, by which we are assimilated to the body (the humanity) of Christ, and are sealed by the Father with the power of God.¹ On vers. 28 f.:—Faith is a holy, perfect work; for which reason, it both justifies and sanctifies without human works, seeing that it contains within itself the noblest energy, and is not slothful and inactive.² On viii. 56 :—What day did Abraham see? Christ, the true light, the Sun of righteousness, appeared to Abraham, in that He illuminated him with His rays in virtue of his faith. This faith was counted to him for righteousness, and so he exulted with joy to have seen the day of God in the ideal world (jrjv vorjrtjv Qeov fjpApav). (Note 72.) These passages show that Apollinaris had attained a deeper insight into the nature of faith. Through faith we are made partakers of the deity of Christ, which is at the same time humanity (irveOfia); in other words, we are made partakers of the principle of the divine-human life. Hence righteousness does not come from works, but through God, and becomes the portion of faith, which is not merely passive, inactive, but the highest energy. Christ works faith, in that He sets forth virtue and wisdom through the medium of His humanity as an organ; through His meekness and humility He attracts us to Himself, and works upon us until we decide either for or against Him—in the latter case, the decision is a rejection, not excusable on the ground of passion, but conscious.⁸

¹ AiVd ii (the true rpoQil) $» ii irtoril i ^uoiroiis, xxt it i%ofioiovrrxt irp&s Tii» axpitx Tow xvpiov, Tri» iiro Tow Ilxrpos euQpxyiuftivrj» rrj ittx ivvxfiti.

² "Epyo» rti» irttrrir ctxoQxt»u» ie pi» rt xxi Tky.tiav. Aio xxi dvtv ru» d»dpxirlvx» ipyut iixirus lixxiol rt xxl xyix^tl, Ati xxKKlornt hipyeixt exi i rijf ^"'X'if, oix xpyix» rirx xxl dirpxilxr. This reminds one of Luther's preface to the Epistle to the Romans.

⁸ On John xii. 36 :—'EpvAxrre 8« xvrov To irpuov xxl irxrrihus xQtarnxAs ipxovrrrros, dxpi 'roaoiiov ^xpiu» tis ftiaot, u,/.pt Tob iixfixprvprjoxi T«)» uhr^iix». Ov yxp ipyiis rohfinfix xxrx rov axr^pos ipyot xinuu till yhntiat, x'hhcl xxxlxs fiovhtvfix' ehxrro» yxp eis xxrxxpiam xirx» To C£ opyns Tohfllfitvw ctxptm Ze i» xxxlx To fitrx /iw't.ris irotmpiveoaat. Verse 40:—But the hardness brought on by God is not therefore the work of holy power, but a permjssion of the divine judgment and the work of the evil, hostile power. For (Bee on xiii. 21) evil also continues subject to God, and must serve the good; and the devil has power only through the evil that already is in men (compare on xiv. 30).

In another passage still extant, he expressly explains ,what he understands by that /ai/iij*tm?. His unity with the Father is an unity of nature ($>vaiKrj); His unity with the Apostles is a matter of grace. Nevertheless the latter resembles the former, and that which is natural is imitated by that which is the work of grace (ofioUofia eicelvov Kaj fup.ijai<; rov Kcnh <f>vaiv To Karh. yapiv),—to wit, by means of faith. Christ accomplished His miracles by a natural power, not by faith in the Father; the Apostles, through faith in the Son; wherefore also the Son is worshipped, the Apostles not. We owe to the Lord what He demands, says he in another place; but He gives what He claims. (Note 73.) We are to love Him, because He loved us. As I, says Christ, belong to the Father as to My deity, and yet am at the same time loved by Him as one who has raised Himself out of the circle of men (ef avOpurn,cov avcurra<;), so are you, who belong to Me after the flesh, loved by Me (on John xv. 8). By His ascension to the Father, He set forth the righteousness which pertains to believers. For it is this that justifies men, to wit, that our flesh and the human form ascended in Him the throne of heaven, sat down at the right hand of the Father, and was exalted higher than the human eye can reach.¹ Although we are called upon to imitate Him in thought and deed, to be in harmony with Him, as His spirit and will are in harmony with the Father, we can do nothing without Him; separated from Him, we dry up like branches cut off from the vine. In our own firmness (avSeia) we cannot confide; for in us there is nothing solid, nothing unchangeably good (areppov, arpeirrov ar/aObv): He, on the contrary, says,—My invincible power is a sure source of courage for all those who participate in Me (in John xvi. 33; xv. 7). All human virtue and perfection prior to Christ remained imperfect for lack of Him; but, on the other hand, the divine deeds and care for men first attained completeness through the redemption in Christ. In Christ, therefore, both humanity and the revelation of God were perfected."

¹ To&ro ydp rove dvipiiirovs ihxxiune To acipxX i% iifiuv xxl elios x»ipuirtuov iiriiOjvui ipitov oipx»lov Kxl xxituiii»xi irxpd Xlxrpl, X.t.a. Compare on xx. 18, p. 455. "Through Me, God will be your Father, brx» d»xfiu tn» e* ifiuv d»iyuv dirxpxnv."

2 On John xix. 30. He says, "It is finished," and justly, iriuns fth Tsf t» dvipuiroie xptrns -n,potipyxafihns dre'hove fitvoiirns dvtv Xo/orov, rrxans ii vow, in which the powers were conjoined to unity. But this was not yet the true vovs; for, inas

Vto Qtov irtpl x»ipirrovs yixifiirns rrpwoixs i» zrt xapd Xpiirrci uurnptx To reAtov xira\xfifixtovanf.

Man was both raised above himself, and made like Christ, and thus perfected.¹ A new and wonderful birth was introduced by Christ: it is attended by inexpressible pains; but the suffering is followed by the resurrection, and brings a joy which will no more change, and which cannot be taken away; for through the resurrection of the new man ye stand as new men, and obtain free access to God. Ye will rejoice when ye shall witness the birth of the child which was unknown to the world, and which is exalted above death and corruption; and that is He in you.² These propositions are plainly fitted to establish the ofioovcrla of Christ, if not with the human race in general, at all events with perfected men, with Christians.

It cannot be denied that Apollinaris* doctrine of faith is a logical development of his Christology; and that, on the whole, his system is governed by one principle. Faith corresponds to the fact of the incarnation: by the incarnation Christ became like us; by faith we become like Christ. As the divine vovs was the hegemonic principle in Christ, so is the Spirit of Christ in us. And as that divine vow? was not something foreign to humanity, but rather the true, the eternal man, the eaa avOpco7ro9; even so are we perfected by our reception of the vovs of Christ, although we are thereby at the same time exalted above ourselves. Prior to the coming of Christ also, it is true, human nature appeared as a relatively independent being: it had a relative centre of unity.

¹ On John xvii. 13 :—" These things speak I in the world." IxQug it roinx iixipii To xxrd Qvam xxl xx8 ofiotuait. He, namely, is not of the world; His disciples also are not of the world: the former is clear, for He did not descend from heaven. 0/ ii diroaroXoi Xxtx rijv ofiotxam Tii» Xptarov fj.irtiiliiiK.tax» dro Tow xoafiov. They became strangers to me, oix Tii» iirip x»tpuir<it dpernr. Through their olxtiorris with Him also, they were estranged from the world.

^* On John xvi. 21 :—Ovtus xirofinairxi ifii» iirl Tow Xxivov xxl ixvfix070w Towtow roxtrow. Nw» yxp us x"hntZ>s d»ipuiros tls ro» xoafiw ytwxrxi ix irxpxoo^u» os'oi»w«, xxl "hv-mp fiiv ifii» xi iripl To' Txdos uiims irpoooiaovai, xxpx» ii ij fiiral To ^xios dvxarxoif—ore ili rits dvxmxatus Tow Mow dvtpuTov »ioi xxrxarxinis iis T»i» irpo\ Qii» jIjrre irx^vrlxu. TLapriauie yxp Ot«» fUnre (l'h.) £evo» TM xiafiu Kxioiov x%ttrixftu x^ixpri» rt xxl xvihtipw, ixmi» ij Or/Ao»or i ipwiv.

But this was not yet the true vous ; for, inasmuch as it lacked a divine content, its content was sensuous, and thus all was disfigured. The vovs in Christ ruled, and was no longer merely mutable, elective, or psychical (1 Cor. ii. 14); it wats the hegemonical spirit; and through faith the same thing takes place by grace in us. We also need the arperrrov for our perfection, the "nvevfiia as a new principle, which must be our essential righteousness; we, however, attain to it by grace. This, like many other ideas of Apollinaris, reminds us strongly of the system of Andreas Osiander, of his "justitia essentialis." Apollinaris has, notwithstanding, left a discrepancy in his system. Men, even apart from Christ, have vovs in themselves; but it is, as it were, merely the form or the possibility thereof, it is Se/cr«o? for good and evil, r^enro?, and so forth; in reality, however, the servant of sin. Christ, on the contrary, has no vovs at all which is derived from the Adamitic nature; and, therefore, His equality of essence with men suffers. Had Apollinaris been minded to carry out the parallel between Christ and men strictly, he must have maintained, either that believers have no you?, no irvevfiia, before they believe; and that it is first created in them by Christ. But although Apollinaris sometimes inclined thereto, he could not be prepared to carry the notion out strictly; because men prior to Christ would thus be degraded almost to the rank of beasts, and redemption and completion would be a new creation, instead of a renovation; especially as the new element superadded by creation, the nvevfia, constituted, in the view of Apollinaris, the inmost centre, the very kernel of the human personality itself. Or, on the other hand, as it was impossible to carry this out, he must have attributed a vow, a human soul, to Christ as to His human nature, the nature assumed from Mary; at all events, in the sense that this voxk, so far as it owed its existence to the first creation, was a vow SeteTikos, neither filled with the sensuous nor with the divine, but still endowed with the possibility of both. In the incarnation itself, however, he must have conceived it filled and appropriated by the divine vou? or Logos, as was required by the idea of a true incarnation and a true development. At the same time, justice would thus be done to the deep, speculative insight of Apollinaris into the fact, that the Logos who fills this human soul, and conjoins it with Himself, is not a something foreign to its essence, but that which it had, as it were, yearned for and expected, because it could not attain to its true shape and form until it had been filled with its true content;—in other words, it was compatible with the view in question, to hold the Logos to be the truth of human nature. We have found previously that Irenaeus, pursuing a course of thought similar to that of Apollinaris, endeavoured to avoid the fault just mentioned, by distinguishing in the human soul between possibility or susceptibility, and realization or fulfilment: attributing the former to the human aspect of Christ derived from the Adamitic nature, which the Holy Ghost had prepared and consecrated for the scene of the incarnation; the latter to the Logos;—and believing, on the one hand, that the human nature, because pure, tended towards union with the Logos; on the other hand, that the Logos, out of love, strove towards an incarnation. Apollinaris, however, did not do this, because he reckoned to the Adamitic nature, not merely opposed possibilities in the form of a double susceptibility, but also an independent power to take opposite resolutions, the avre^ovaiov. If he necessarily regarded an human vow, possessed of independence, as an hindrance to the incarnation, it was still more the case, because he appears to have attributed to the soul derived from Adam's race, as others had done to the body, a natural bias to evil, and because he deemed it impossible that a human being with freedom of choice should remain without sin. His only resource, therefore, was to shut out this human vow; which he then f utilely endeavoured to make good by designating the vow errovpdvio<; or X070?, also dvOpcoiro<; iirovpavtos.

However greatly, then, the Church teachers may have misunderstood Apollinaris, and however lightly they may have estimated the elements of his system which were speculatively of main importance, they were justified in charging him with a curtailment in Christ Himself of the human nature, which He came to heal and perfect; supposing that the only way to secure the unity of the divine-human person was to let fall the truly human soul, instead of so defining it that it should be able to be conjoined in unity with the Logos, without being tainted with sin, and without having a separate personality of its own. A God in a human body with animal life (^vy^j fomtc^), they say to him therefore, is a mask, but not a God-man. Apollinaris, it is true, constantly exclaims afresh,—Christ cannot have so entirely become that which we are as to have lost the ability to make out of us that which He is. He says, in particular, influenced by his antagonism to Arianism, a human vow of the first creation must necessarily possess freedom of choice, and thus an uncertainty and an impotence against sin would have attached to Christ, that must have rendered it impossible for Him to fulfil His vocation of Redeemer. But they replied,— That which was not assumed by Him remained unhealed (to airpoaXvlirrov Ko.1 dOepdirevrov). They asked,—Is not the soul precisely the highest in man? and would not, therefore, an incarnation without soul be Docetical in the main point!¹ Or, did the body alone stand under sin and condemnation? and did the soul need no redemption?

To this he might indeed have answered,—The work of redemption consisted precisely in the perfection brought by Christ, or in the completion of the creation of our nature; and it becomes unnecessary to lay special emphasis on the redemption. For if through faith the vow of Christ enters into us and becomes our hegemonical principle, we become thereby new persons, pleasing to God, sinless. Plainly, however, the second creation thus comes into conflict with the first, inasmuch as the second neither recognises nor seeks a living link of connection in the first. And even if he recognised the existence of such a point of union in believers, and thus escaped a magical creation of a new constituent of human nature, he did not acknowledge its existence in Christ; otherwise, as we have just shown, he must have attributed to Him a human "^u^, which was susceptible to the active divine vow. This also floated before the minds of the teachers of the Church when they remarked,—His theory renders the incarnation more difficult, instead of explaining it. For, through denying the human soul, he lost that middle link, by means of which it was possible for the deity to appropriate the body and its sufferings.²

¹ Greg. Nyss. 1. c. c. 33, p. 204, charges him with teaching a rootless man, Avipxxo» dp^i^o», xxl xavvxfi: irpis rriv nfuripx» (Pvair. 212 :—ix/pv"ho» Tris ifitripus Qvnxs. He teaches strictly two species of men :—an earthly, consisting of body, soul, reason; and an heavenly, consisting of body, soul, God. Christ, therefore, stands over against us as trepaoiaios, and is not ofioovaiof xxroi To xvpiiiricro», in relation to the highest element of the Adamitic humanity.

* L. c. p. 256, c. 48:—He proceeds us oUe lorjpxs irupd To» mv» ris «up~ xil ovcrns irpos Tii» Tyis ttvrrrros »»««». C. 41, p. 239: The assumption of the a^S by the Logos becomes more intelligible, if the »ovs formed the transition to the God Aoyoj,.

It is true, Apollinaris professes that it was necessary for Christ, in order to exhibit virtue, to walk among men as a man. But if His humanity was a body without rational soul, His virtue was not human virtue. Nay more, says Gregory of Nyssa, if He had no freedom (avrel-ovaiov), His virtue was no virtue.¹

This curtailment of the human nature in itself has a Docetical character; but that Apollinaris was tainted with Docetism, shows itself still more clearly in the circumstance, that (as, indeed, might consistently be expected) he was unable to attribute growth in wisdom and grace, learning, exercise, temptation, to the human soul of Christ. But if He was not the subject of actual growth, and merely revealed to others in ever increasing measure the inner treasures of His being, which remained in themselves ever the same, and, being complete and closed, were susceptible neither of enlargement nor diminution, He did not pass through a truly human course of life. The cause of this fault, was his assuming the human irvevfia of Christ to be immediately of like nature with the eternal Logos. Instead of positing merely the possibility of the incarnation in the eternal Logos, distinguishing therefrom every actualization of this possibility, and representing the possibility as becoming an actuality, by an ethical process (that is, through the love of the Logos, which impelled Him to the act of Kevoktim, and by the ethical process which Christ underwent), he posits the humanity as eternally complete, Kara To Kvpwnarov; he represents it as the Logos Himself. Prior to the incarnation, it is latent merely in relation to men; in itself, it is eternally complete. On this view, however, the childhood of Christ was necessarily mere appearance. He cannot be a moral example, but the physical or metaphysical process of the incarnation of God, begun in Him, is simply continued in believers, who receive, in the place of their earthly vovs, His irvevfia, or the victorious principle of that union of the divine with the flesh which was archetypally realized in Christ.

¹ Ibidem:—How can the aiip% have virtue without the Ikovaiov? And the exova/o» is impossible without a »oSf. C. 41:—-r i 'spoxiptais oilier tripot tI tovs r/f Eot/». How, then, could Apollinaris say,—Man, in whom is no tovs, y.trn"hxfilii»ii ris xxixpxs dptriis? To u-rpoxiptro» can neither be «i/3(Wro» nor praiseworthy, although it may be without sin.

Apollinaris seems to have had not the slightest notion, that even if the Redeemer did assume a human soul, and with it subject Himself to a process of development through freedom of choice, His victory and work of redemption were notwithstanding sure; and, besides, that only on this supposition could His virtue be human virtue and be tested. Freedom he believed to involve sin, at all events for a soul of Adam's race. Such notions may not be directly branded Manichaean; but, at all events, the notion that freedom of choice is not fit for appropriation by the Logos, whilst at the same time it is an essential constituent of the nature of men and angels, involves a complaint against the first creation. This complaint is the more unjustifiable, as, in the further course of his system, a representation is given of the essential nature of man, according to which freedom of choice by no means forms part of its eternal idea, but merely appertains to man at a lower stage; for he maintains that Christ was the perfect man, and the process of the " Unio" of the 'nvevfia with the ahpi-, undergone by Him, is continued also in those who believe on Him. To Christ, however, he ascribes no freedom of choice; and so likewise believers, in his view, are first raised by the Christian principle above mutability. In accordance herewith, therefore, instead of saying, the first creation was not suitable in its completeness for appropriation by the Logos, he ought rather to have expressed himself as follows:—The first creation itself was still imperfect; it was marked by unfixity and mutability: the true idea of creation was first realized in the man, who was raised above all freedom of choice. It would thus have appeared as a mere defect or transition-stage, as the not yet existent divine fixity. But this he did not wish to teach; he regarded freedom of choice as something positive, which, though derived from God, was incompatible with the full goodness of the world, seeing that it was not even capable of aiding in the realization of this goodness. Accordingly, Apollinaris is undoubtedly chargeable to a certain extent with Manichaeism. On such a theory, redemption must of course consist, above all, in deliverance from that freedom of will which naturally tends to evil, and in the informing of the fleshly man with a higher principle, with the third factor of the true human essence. This leads us to the other aspect of the matter. Apollinaris had no conception of an historical mediation, of an historical process, but believed that the whole result was brought into existence at one stroke. His strength lay alone in describing magnitudes already complete, in their mutual connection and simultaneous existence. Accordingly, the idea of perfection predominates over that of reconciliation and redemption; and, strictly speaking, he can only attribute activity to the divine aspect;—for the human aspect he has no essential place, no mediatory significance. The human aspect, selfless in itself, has the office of showing, of revealing, the divine—nothing more; it is simply the organ moved by the divine.

The preliminary decision arrived at by the Synod of Alexandria, in relation to the question of the human soul of Christ, in the year 362 (see above, pp. 985 ff.), was adhered to by the Church teachers, Athanasius, the Gregories, Basilius the Great, Amphilochius Damasus (Mansi 1. c. 488 f.), and others. That they also justly regarded the incarnation, in and by itself, as the principial completion of the reconciliation between heaven and earth, we have shown above (Chapter I.). But precisely on that account, Apollinaris was unable to satisfy them. For, although he appeared to be able to charge the Church with arriving rather at an avOpayrro<; evOeos, or a double person, that is, at a monstrosity, than at an incarnation, if a complete man and complete deity are to be supposed to have met in Christ; they in return might justly reply, that precisely he, with his repudiation of a human vow, could never show the possibility of an incarnation. For -tyv)(rj and ahp^ do not constitute, they are merely momenta of, a man: they could only form the oV^etbv or temple in which the Logos dwelt. On the other hand, vow forms part of man; but He is not supposed to have become an human vow; consequently, He did not become man. It is true, he maintains that the Logos was eternally man in Himself, Karci To Kvpuorarov, rb irvevfia; but inasmuch as aapf? and yfri^rj belong as essentially to the idea of man as the irvevfia, both which he is supposed to derive from Mary, Christ, as mere irvevfia, was not yet a complete man. One might suppose, indeed, that He found His complement, and became a complete man, through the appropriation of '^v^ and aap^; but the irvevfjia or vow differed too widely from these two to be able to constitute with them one living unity. The vovs was complete, eternally perfect, identical with the Logos, so that a divine person appeared and dwelt in an human living body; but to represent this as the accomplishment of an incarnation is inadmissible, for the simple reason, that a complete and perfect vovs can only stand in a purely external relation to a body that must grow ere attaining to completion. And if, for the purpose of avoiding this fault, Apollinaris had posited the vovs, which connected itself with the actp^, as imperfect, inasmuch as the vovs was at the same time the Logos becoming incarnate, he would have fallen out of Docetism into Arianism or Ebionism. If, further, the work of redemption could not be accomplished unless Christ passed through all the stadia of human development, sanctifying and honouring them all, it must necessarily be mutilated by a theory which does not allow of such a development of the human soul in the case of Christ, and represents Him as commencing His career with a complete spirit (yovs), which was also the Logos.¹

The Church teachers must be allowed to have rightly perceived that the first and most important thing to be done, was to lay the foundations completely, prior to thinking of further tasks. What profit would be the appearance of bringing out the unity of the Person of Christ more completely with Apollinaris, if it were purchased at the price of the completeness of the incarnation? First of all, it was necessary to recognise the elements constitutive of incarnation in their completeness, and then it might be permissible to ask how they could be united in the Person of Christ. The Fathers, therefore, acted rightly in decidedly affirming that Christ had a human soul; and that in defiance of the great difficulties pointed out by Apollinaris—difficulties which they thus took upon themselves, and which he had pronounced insoluble.

¹ Compare Theodoret, H. E. 5, 3:—Tn» Xoy/xij» ifjv%jj» iartpwfai riis -/syitnfti»ns e(f)we aumptxs. Ovx tfariQus yxp rxvrmr xccrd Tov txtivov ?io'yo» i 0tof Xo'yo. aCre lonptixs ii%tuat», ovre rifiiis fitriiuxir. 'A'h'hx To fii» a fix To yihw (man) viro Tuv doponu» irpauxv»tirxi iv»ufitu» (that is, in Christ); i) H ipvxij (ours) ii Kut tlxi»u htxv ytyonfti»n xx.ru fitfti»nkt

Tij» rijf dfixprrlxs drifiix» ^,tpixtifiiini. lb. 1018: Flavian's expression,—r£» uov» To'k ifitrtpo» rijf aurnptxs cCtoareptif.

The problem of reducing two complete magnitudes, the Logos and man, to unity, may be much more difficult than that of uniting two magnitudes which are incomplete and tempered; but faith demands that the humanity be complete, because, otherwise, the work which it feels to be complete, must be confessed to be incomplete; and because Christ could not work upon us at all, if He were not of like substance with us. Accordingly, the alternative lay before them, either to let fall the incarnation itself, or to take up the more difficult problem, which faith assured them must be soluble. In connection herewith, it is deserving of special remark, that they did not allow themselves to be driven to the opposite extreme by their opposition to Apollinaris. Because they assumed that Jesus had a human soul along with His body, they were by no means disposed to reduce the incarnation to a besouling or bespiriting (Beseelung, Begeistung) of this man: they repudiated the notion that Christ was merely an avOpcoiros evOeos; they refuse to hear anything of such a predominance of the human aspect as would reduce the divine aspect to an accident of the human hypostasis. Their wish rather was, that the Logos in hypostatical form should be there, as a perfect man. With equal firmness also, they rejected an error nearly allied to the truth just set forth, to wit, the doctrine of a double personality, of the v/o? Oerbs side by side with the vlb<; Qeov <f>vaei. The two complete aspects of the nature of Christ must constitute, they taught, a living personal unity. In this respect, they approved of and directed their own efforts to the same goal as Apollinaris; and they were far from falling into the mistake of later Christian thinkers, who laid great stress on the distinction between the two natures, but did not bestow equal care on showing how they could be united in one person.

When we review more carefully the attempts made plainly to set forth the union of the two complete natures, our attention is above all attracted to Hilarius of Pictavium, who flourished about A.d. 350:—we feel the more drawn to him, because he does not appear hitherto to have met with the consideration he deserves.

Hilarius is one of the most difficult Church teachers to understand, but also one of the most original and profound. His view of Christology is one of the most interesting in the whole of Christian antiquity. But in order to form a proper estimate }f this theory, we must bring to mind the tendencies to which it was opposed. In the first place, Sabellianism had been revived in a new form; and the older patripassian doctrine of conversion had also been resuscitated, with the difference that now—at all events by some—it was referred to the trinitarian Son. The former (compare Hilar. Comm. in Matt. xi. c. 9, De Trin. 10, 50 ff. 18 ff.) regarded the incarnation of the Logos as a mere operation of the divine power and wisdom, not as a personal existence thereof in a man, and thus naturally fell into Ebionism; for the obvious reason, that the incarnation was unavoidably reduced to the level of a mere extension or continuation of the divine power of the Logos into the man Jesus: the latter also arrived at an Ebionitic result; for if the Logos so far fell away from, as to lose Himself, and if, in particular, by emptying itself and submitting to weakness, the Word became a human soul, then there remained nothing but the man in Christ.¹ We have seen above, that even Arianism, which as to its inmost essence was Ebionitical, by availing itself of the Platonic doctrine of the pre-existence of spirits, and of the forgetfulness which resulted from their earthly birth, was able to arrive at the same result, as this latter view. In opposition to these errors, it was necessary to demonstrate the existence of a truly divine and a truly human aspect, or, if one will, the duality of the natures in the. Person of Christ; in other words, it was necessary to draw as clear a distinction as possible between the divine and the human.

¹ De Trin. 10, 50, 52:—Plures eludere dictum apostolicum, quo ait Christum Dei Sapientiam et Dei virtutem, his modis solent: quod in eo ex virgine creando efficai Dei sapientia et Virtus exstiterit, et in nativitate ejus divinae prudentiae et potestatis opus intelligatur, sitque in eo efficientia potius, quam natura Sapientiae. De Trin. 10, 50:—Per quod etiam illud vitii adjungitur, ut Deus Verbum tanquam pars aliqua virtutum Dei quodam se tractu continuationis extendens liominem illum, qui a Maria esse coepit, habitaveritetvirtutibus divinae operationis instruxerit, animae tamen suse motu naturaque viventem. C. 51:—The power of the Word who thus extended Himself from without unto Jesus, strengthened him to perform deeds of power after the manner of the prophets: thus also may be explained the words, "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" Jesus, namely, was again also a Dei Verbo contractu rursum protensione desertus. De Trin. 10, 50:—defecisse omnino Deum Verbum in animam corporis volunt, ut—de se defecerit Deus Verbum, dum corpus officio animas vivificat.—51: ut Deus Verbum anima corporis per demutationem natures se infirmitatis exstiterit, et Verbum Deus essa defecerit.

In the second place, there were not wanting men who, it is true, took their start from this duality, and thus left room for an act of grace, nay, even for a personal appearance of the Son of God in the sphere of Adamitic humanity; but, through resting in the duality, did not attain to a living unity of the person. To this class belonged that part of the Arians which did not accept the idea of a conversion of the Logos into the soul of Christ, nor of a substitution of the Logos in the place of the human soul; but taught that there was an human soul, nay more, an human Ego alongside of that of the Logos.¹ Further, all those who, in the predominance they gave to the bare understanding, were the forerunners of the school of Antioch, and believed it necessary to be more on their guard against commixture than against separation, and objected less strongly to a double Christ than to theories like that of Apollinaris and his predecessors. In opposition to these separators, it was necessary, on the contrary, to make every effort to point out the solid unity of the person. For', independently of these, the doctrine of the Church itself, as we have seen in the case of Apollinaris, was threatened with the danger of the God-man being reduced to an avOpcoiro<; evOeo<;. But if this task presented great difficulties for Apollinaris, whose doctrine of the divine vow, which took the place of the soul of Christ, appeared to lessen it; stilf more difficult must it appear, when a human soul also was reckoned to the humanity of Christ. It deserves remark, that even jirior to the public appearance of Apollinaris, Hilarius had most decidedly upheld the true human soul of Christ; and that he had continued both the doctrine of Tertullian (with whom he had otherwise many points of affinity) and that of IrenaGus in Gaul. A denial of the human soul of Christ would have appeared to him a Docetic confusion of the human and the divine. So much the more desirous, therefore, must we be to learn what he had further to say. The more widely he separated the two aspects, above all, the more distinctly he affirmed, and the more sharply he defined, the completeness of the human nature, whilst at the same time quite as jealously asserting for the divine aspect, everything that pertains to its full idea; the more interesting is it to observe, that he displayed quite as intense an anxiety to demonstrate the unity of the clearly discriminated aspects. By the combination of these two tendencies, Hilarius evinced himself to be, in the true sense, a teacher of the Church.

¹ Valens and Ursacius (compare Hilar. de syn. 79 f.) assumed a compassio Filii Dei, which involves the duality.

As to the former:—Hilarius, who was one of the most resolute defenders of the cause of Athanasius, developed the doctrine of the eternal divine Son, who exists alongside of the human aspect, by, above all things, bringing more decidedly into play than others the creative activity which pertains to the Son of God, in connection also with the act of incarnation, though, as we shall soon see, only in order afterwards to convert the category of creation more completely into that of incarnation. It was not the human race or Mary that gave body and soul to the Person of Christ; but if we distinguish accurately, the creation of the human soul of Christ was a deed of the Logos. In the view of Hilarius (Tract. on Ps. cxviii., Lit. x. pp. 298 ff.), it is an error to suppose that the souls of men spring from Adam in the way of propagation. They have a higher nobility, a worthier origin; they are of a heavenly, God-related nature, and their nature in itself is not stained with earthly material. In the case of Adam, indeed, we know that his soul was created before the body, which is of the dust. The dust, when reduced to form, was not yet man, but matter; the giving a form to the rough matter was not a creation, but a moulding of the already existent dust. It was fitting that a creative hand should show itself in connection with this highest work, and that it should not be a mere forming of what already existed. Hence the origin of man is divided into several acts. The first is indicated by the words, "Let Us make an image, which shall be like Ourselves." This refers to the creation of the soul, which was called into existence to be an image of the First-born. The second was the formation of the earthly image out of the dust. Whereupon followed, as the third act, the conjunction of that soul with this material, by the Spirit of God, in consequence of which the soul acquired a body, the matter was animated, and the unity, the living man, became an actuality. However strange this theory may appear at first sight, Hilarius seems to have regarded it as typically teaching what takes place at a higher stage in connection with the incarnation. In the case of Adam, he fixes the material and spiritual aspects each by itself, and separates them as widely as possible from each other, in order then to conjoin them the more firmly to an unity in man; and such also is his course of procedure with the total humanity of Christ, on the one hand, and the deity, on the other. The theory described has also a further significance for him: by its means, the share taken by Mary in the work of incarnation is reduced to its proper limits. She did not give Jesus His soul, otherwise His soul would have been sinful, like that of Adam; and yet His soul was of like substance with the souls of men, for they also are created immediately by the Logos. Nor, further, did she give Jesus His body, if we speak strictly; for a body is first formed out of the material by the accession of the enlivening, animating soul, which she did not give. Not by themselves, but through the soul, have the members of our body their sensations. As soon as the soul ceases to have anything further to do with the body, as soon as it ceases to feel the body with its sensations, it has already become alien from it, and, properly speaking, no longer belongs to it. As a consequence, the body soon corrupts, and must be cast aside. If, then, the soul first constitutes the material a body, and if the material without soul is an unformed mass, we can only partially say,—Christ derived His body from Mary; for, strictly speaking, Christ's body first became a body through the soul, and His soul He did not derive from Mary. For this reason the Son of God, or the "Spiritus Dei," is termed the "conditor" of the body.¹ The God-man derived His origin from Himself, and not from Mary, even as to the corporeal aspect of His being. Hence also was His body consecrated and pure from the beginning, through His God-descended soul. And as His soul was most intimately united with the heavenly Son, Hilarius did not hesitate to use even the expression,—The body of Christ was of heavenly origin.'

¹ De Trin. 2, 5:—Human! generis caussa Dei Filius natus ex virgine est et spiritu sancto, ipso sibi in hac operatione famulante, et sua, Dei videlicet inumbrante virtute, corporis sibi initia consevit et exordia carnis instituit. 10, 16:—Non enim corpori Maria originem dedit,—inasmuch as without the Spiritum Sanctum and the Verbum Dei no man would have been brought into existence. By the potestas Verbi is the caro initiata et condita. C. 18 :—Ipse corporis sui origo est. C. 22:—Si conceptum carnis, nisi ex Deo, virgo non habuit, longe rangis neces.se est, anima corporis, nisi ex Deo aliunde non fuerit. C. 25:—Ipse quidem per virginem ex se natus homo. To exactly the same purpose, Gregor. Nyss. Antirrhet. c. 64, pp. 271 ff.

^* De Trin. 10, 73:—Caro ilia de coelis est. C. 15:—Corpus coeleste.

This has been understood as though he denied Mary to have been the actual mother of Christ Karh adpica; as though he left her merely the function of the bringing forth, or of the nourishment and reception in her womb, of an human germ, implanted into her from without,—a germ which was derived, as to soul and body, from the essence, or, at all events, from the creative power, of the Logos; and to which Mary, therefore, stood, as it were, in the relation of foster-mother.¹ This view, however, notwithstanding many passages appear to justify it, is incorrect. Rather did the Son of God, by becoming incarnate, appropriate something which was foreign to Him (quod alienum a se erat), even as Adam's body also was not created, but was formed out of a substance that already existed. From God the soul, from the Virgin the earthly material of the body. Whatever a child derives from its mother from the beginning, that Christ's humanity derived from Mary. (Note 74.) If Hilarius derived the body of Christ from the essence of the Logos, or even, as to material, from the creative power of the Logos, how could he have conceived the God-man to be so completely united and interwoven with collective humanity as he evidently did? His entire doctrine of the "evacuatio," for the sake of assuming the "forma servilis," would then be useless, unintelligible. For if the Logos had produced the " forma servilis" out of His own substance, or had lowered Himself thereto, the "evacuatio" would be identical with the "forma servilis;" whereas he draws a clear distinction between the two. And if He did not derive His body from Mary, He was a stranger in the human race, and was neither born into humanity nor rebare humanity in Himself. The Son of God, considered in Himself, had no " caro," although He possessed the power to acquire "caro." He did acquire it, in that He " se ex alto defixit in limo profundi" (in Ps. Ixviii. 4). Rather by His human birth, therefore, was "nova natura in Deum illata" (de Trin. 9, 54), which previously was not in God.

¹ Baur 1. c. p. 686, says:—" The Divine Logos became man by creating out of Himself the human nature which consists of body and soul." Even the writer of the very thorough treatise prefixed to the Benedictine edition of the works of Hilarius, and which Dr Baur does not take the trouble to favour with a refutation, took a more correct view of the matter.

The Son really received something from humanity, which He previously had not, to wit, the "forma servilis," and what pertained thereto. Nevertheless, His birth and rise were not like those of other men: without the divine act of the Son, who united Himself with the soul, which He created, and who by this soul animated the material which became the body of Christ, that material would not have become a body, much less would a man have been produced. The grounds or causal principles of this origin lay not in humanity; the stamina or elementa of this person lay in God alone; for without the divine act, Mary would not have given birth to anything at all.¹ If we ask after that which was originally active in connection with the generation of Christ, we must go back, not to Mary, but to the Son and to the Holy Ghost.² The material contained in Mary was but the means employed by the Logos for the realization of His will of incarnation. What Mary gave, was simply the mass susceptible to the divine act of appropriation through the Logos. Substantially she gave the same for the generation of the second Adam, as the earth gave for the first Adam, with the sole difference, that the second was born into our race.⁸ The ^u caro" thus acquired by Christ was able to experience pain and change; the divine aspect, on the contrary, is "indemutabilis;" it can neither lose its dominion, its omniscience, and so forth, nor fall away from, nor lose itself.

The parts taken by the human and the divine in the work of incarnation having been thus set as far apart from each other as possible, the second problem presented itself for solution; and to this Hilarius devoted himself with equal earnestness. The Person of Christ is of the earth, of the "limus" of Adam; but it is also from heaven.

¹ De Triii. 10, 35 :—Maria licet sexus sui officio genuerit, tauten non terrenae conceptionis suscepit elementis. Genuit enim ex so corpus, Bed quod couccptum esset ex Spiritu.

² De Trin. 2, 27 :—Initia nascendi Spiritua sauctus supervenienB (cf. 2, 26) et inumbrans Virtus Altissimi moliuntur. 10, 35 :—Corpus illud Bpiritalis conceptionis sumsit exordium.

* Compare HO. ou Ps. lxviii. c. 4 :—Ineuntium passionum non aliunde, quam ex assumtione carnis et virtus est, et potestas. Non enim incidere in Deum hie infirmitatum nostrarum terror valebat, aut exserere se nisi in carne corporis nostri tanquam in subjacente materia, potuerant passiones.— Primus homo de terra limo: et secundus Adam in hujus limi profundum de coalis descendens se ipsum tanquam ex alto veniens defixit.

How are the two things compatible? How can heaven enter into such close union with earth, and earth with heaven? Hilarius found means to combine the two, on the one hand, by venturing to attribute to humanity a great capability of being exalted; and, on the other hand, by forming a full enough conception of the loving condescension of the Son. The second point claims our attention first, as the motive power of the entire process lies on the side of the divine. At the same time, we may precursorily remark, that Hilarius shows peculiar skill in setting forth the factors in the act of undergoing their process, and declines accepting any unity until justice has been done to the distinctions, and the distinctions have been conciliated by the process

Hilarius frequently makes the remark, that if in Christ the Son had still retained His divine form, He could not at the same time have had a truly human form, for the humanity which He had to assume was in the form of a servant. The divine form and the servant's form cannot subsist together in one and the same person, at one and the same time.¹ In addition to this, it must be remembered that the Logos was necessitated to take the servant's form into Himself; only thus could a personal unity of the divine and human be brought to pass, and the weakness of humanity be converted into divine power. To his mind, the incarnation had accomplished nothing, unless the entire person was as truly God the Word as the man Jesus; that is, unless God was also man, and man was God.² If, then, he were compelled to demand such an intimate "intussusceptio" of the human into the divine, and of the divine into the human, that each belongs to the other, and is necessary to its completeness; we see also that it devolved on him to show that the introduction of the servant's form was compatible with the idea of the divine nature, and that the latter does not by its inherent glory and majesty exclude the former.

¹ On Pa. lxviii. c 25:—In forma hominis existere, martens in Dei formil qui poterat. De Trin. 9,14 :—The " concureus utriusque form® "— that is, "et Dei et servi"—became Him not; not merely because it would have been a logical contradiction, but because the reality of the state of humiliation would thus have been done away with, the divine condescension would have been reduced to a mere show, or else the Person of Christ would have been split up into a duality.

² In De Trin. 10, 52 ff., he speaks against the division of the one Christ. C. 52 :—Totuin ei (ecclesiae) Deus Verbum est, totum ei homo Christus est retiuens hoc in Sacramento confessionis suae unum, nee Christum aliud credere, quam Jesum, nee Jesum aliud preedicare, quam Christum. C. 22: —Ut totus hominis Alius sit. C. 54, 55.

At this point Hilarius brings forward his doctrine of the "evacuatio format Dei." The Son of God emptied Himself of the divine form, in order that He might exist in the servant's form of men.¹

Now, wherein consisted this self-renunciation or self-evacuation of the divine nature? He resigned the "forma Dei;" but the "forma Dei" is identical with countenance. By the " forma Dei," in the case of the Son, therefore, we may understand the full actuality or personality, as stamped in the countenance, and by which the Spirit appears for others.² Consequently, the subject of the " exinanitio" or "evacuatio" was the form of the Son which shone in eternal glory. He renounced His own countenance, His "substantia" (hypostasis ?), in order that, during the period of His earthly humiliation, the "forma servilis" might be His countenance, until, by glorifying humanity and its "forma servilis," the Logos should have restored the glory of His countenance in the perfected God-man. This implies, therefore, regarded from another point of view, that the incarnation was not complete from the very beginning; that the Logos did not all at once enter into humanity with His entire essence, but kept back His majesty in Himself, and perfectly exhibited His countenance or His personality in the man Jesus, for the first time, at His exaltation. In his view, then, the human countenance, the servant's form, occupied the foreground during the earthly life of Christ; this, however, must not be confounded with the human Ego, for to the Ego he never alludes. On the contrary, the deity of the Son, which, having renounced its glory, had been able to unite itself perfectly with the servant's form, continued to be the ruling power in Christ and His soul.

¹ On Ps. lxviii. c. 25:—In forma servi veniens evacuavit se a Dei forma. Nam in forma hominis existere raanens in Dei forma qui poterat? De Trin. 10, 60:—Erat enim (sc. Christo) nature proprietas, sed Dei forma jam non erat, quia per ejus exinanitionem servi erat forma Buscepta. On Ps. liii. c. 8, 14:—Cumque accipere formam servi nisi per evacuationem suam non potuerit, etc.

2 On Ps. lxviii. c. 25 :—Forma et vultus et fades et imago non differunt. C. 4:—The divine nature semet ipsam exinaniens transit, ut ex Dei forma in formam servi decideret. This is also described as follows:— Substantia ei non fuit, infixo in limo profundi. The substantia existed qnae assumta habebatur; that existed no longer nee jam videbatur restare, qua in aliud se evacuando concesserat.

At the same time, he constantly repeats, that the Son Himself remained the same even in the "exinanitio;" that He was constantly, by His own deed, by His own will, in "exinanitio;" which, of course, implies, that the same will which maintains the "exinanitio" so long as it is necessary, possesses in itself the latent power to return to full and entire actuality.¹ This he often expresses as follows:—The divine natura, although not the "substantia" (that is, probably, vrroaroat?), not the " forma (or " facies ") Dei," remained unalterably His. The limit of the "exinanitio" was, that it could never advance to a renunciation of the "divina natura," or to the point when the " forma servi" alone would remain in Christ without the "divina natura." That would be Ebionism; nay more, on that supposition, inasmuch as the Son would have lost Himself and disappeared in the servant's form, the very purpose of His self-abasement would have been frustrated. Moreover, to the attainment of the end in view, it was necessary that the divine should be introduced right into the servant's form, or into the humanity, in order then to accomplish, its work of exaltation as from within.² Besides, the "exinanitio" could not then be regarded as a continuous deed, as an expression of might or power, but solely as a suffering.

¹ De Trin. 11, 18 :—In forma enim Dei manens formam Bervi assumsit, non demutatus, sed se ipsum exinaniens et intra se latent (sc. in Dei forma) et intra suam ip6e vacuefactus potestatem, dum se usque ad formam temperat habitus humani, ne potentem immensamque naturam assumtse humilitatis non ferret infirmitas, sed in tantum se virtus incircumscripta moderaretur, in quantum oporteret eam usque ad patientiam connexi sibi corporis obedire. Tract. in Ps. lxviii. 4.

² On Ps. lxviii. 25 :—Aboleri autem Dei forma, ut tantum servi esset forma, non potuit. Ipse enim est et se ex forma Dei inaniens et formam hominis assumens. Evacuatio non eat divinae naturae interitus. Fragm. ex opere hist. c. 32 :—Iccireo immutabilis et inconvertibilis filius Dei, ut in assumtione hominis corruptioni potius gloriam intulerit, quam labem aeternitati. De Trin. 9, 14 :—Obedientia mortis non est in Dei forma, sicut nec Dei forma inest in forma servi. Per sacramentum autem evangelical dispensationis non alius est in forma servi, quam qui in forma Dei est although the evacuatio takes place. It does not abolish the identity of the subject: non alius atque divereus est, qui se exinanivit et qui formam servi accepit. Accepisse enim non potest ejus esse qui non Bit.—Ergo evacuatio formae non est abolitio naturae, quia, qui se evacuat, non caret sese, et qui accipit, manet.

Had He lost Himself, He would not have been able to assume humanity. For the assumption of humanity must also be considered as a deed following upon the " evacuatio."

We now come to the second momentum, the "assumtio formae servilis." In the view of Hilarius, the "evacuatio," so far from being identical with, was merely the condition of, the incarnation, on the part of God, to which corresponds a further condition on the part of man. The Son of God laid aside His divine form so far as He did, in order that in Him there might be no obstacle in the way of His making the servant's form to such a degree His own, that it might be counted as forming part of His own existence. For the same reason the humanity was not swallowed up through its union with the Logos, or its essence done away with (de Trin. 11, 48; see Note 1, page 407). But as the divine nature, on the one hand, rendered itself, as it were, susceptible of the "intus-susceptio" of the humanity, which, though originally a foreign element, it was the divine will should be appropriated; even so was it necessary that humanity should possess a capability of being exalted to unity with the Son of God. How Hilarius conceives this to have been brought about we shall shortly see. As far as relates to the divine aspect, he makes the "assumtio formae servilis" follow upon the "evacuatio," as the second momentum in the act of incarnation. The "evacuatio" proceeded so far that the. way was prepared for the "assumtio formoe servilis," but by no means so far as in itself to constitute the servile form. That would have been a falling away of the Logos from Himself, a conversion; suffering would thus have been introduced into the Logos. We can only avoid this passivity, this self-losing, of the Logos in the servant's form, by supposing the assumption thereof to be a new, distinct act of the Son, who thus showed that even in the "evacuatio," He had maintained and had retained power over Himself. (Note 75.)

That which belonged to the divine Natura could not be lost by the Son: the "potestas generis sui" He retained (9, 51; 11, 48). The divine essence is not something void and indeterminate; but contains a fulness of attributes: these attributes, therefore, pertained to the Son whilst He was in the "forma servilis," because the "natura Dei" remained His. Nor did they lie inactive; but were operative and benefited humanity, which was to be raised to God. (Note 76.) This leads us to notice Hilarius' doctrine of the susceptibility of human nature for God.

We have, in the first place, to remark in general, the high estimate he formed of the nobility of the human soul. It is not of foreign substance, like the body, which is taken from the earth; but springs from God, and is a likeness of the image of God (imaginis Dei exemplum), of the First-born of creation. By its thoughts and their infinite speed, the spirit imitates the omnipresence of God. It is true, the souls of men have laden themselves with guilt; but when they proceed forth from God, they are pure, and so also continued the soul of Christ. It was therefore spiritual, and of heavenly, yea, of divine origin, shining with its natural brightness. The body, on the contrary, is not directly from God, but "ex aliena substantia." The souls of men are all defiled by their entrance into the body. So also must it have happened to the soul of Christ, if His body had not been conceived of the Holy Ghost. He sanctified the inner being of the Virgin, and, breathing therein, united Himself with the nature of the human flesh. And iu order that no discrepance might remain by reason of the weakness of the human body, through which the "Unio" would have been rendered impossible, the power of the Highest over. shadowed the Virgin and strengthened her weakness. In this manner, her corporeal substance was prepared for the implanting activity of that Spirit, which was to enter into her (of the Son).2 His body thus became, indeed, different from ours,— that is, as to its attributes, not as to its substance. So far is the integrity and excellence of the body of Christ from being opposed to the idea of the human body, that we rather are to participate in its glory: and first, when we are conformed to the glory of the body of God (that is, of Christ), will that image of God be completely formed in us, to which regard was had from the beginning. (Note 77.)

¹ Although Hilarius speaks of different kinds of souls, he has laid down nothing particular relative to the "species" of the soul of Christ. On Ps. cxli. (c. 4), he says,—" Anima Christi signis et factis Deum se probaverat."

² De Trin. 2, 26. For the commencement of this passage, see Note 74. It proceeds as follows:—Atque ut ne quid per imbecillitatem humani corporis dissideret, Virtus altissimi virginem obumbravit, infirmitatem ejus vcluti per umbram circumfusa confirmans, ut ad sementivam ineuntis Spiritus efficaciam substantiam corporalem di vinae virtutis inumbratio temperaret.

The advantages which accrued to the humanity of Christ from the consecrating and sanctifying power of the Divine Spirit, who prepared it for assumption by the Logos, are still further enhanced by the assumption itself, or by the activity of the incarnate San of God. According to Hilarius, to Christ pertained corporeally also, natural immortality, freedom from pain, from want, etc. This must not indeed be understood to signify that He was incapable of dying, of suffering, of hungering, etc. His history shows the possibility thereof, by the actuality; and He also grew, passing through the different ages (de Trin. 2, 24; see Note 78). On the other hand, we should not quite hit the view entertained by Hilarius, were we to suppose that the divine Sonship of Christ, and the union of humanity therewith, merely gave Him the power at every moment to rise even physically above all suffering and need, if such were but His will. For that would be to represent the humanity of Christ as in itself needy, mortal, and so forth, even subsequently to its assumption by the Son of God; out of which passive condition it could only be raised by a particular act of will in each particular instance. Indeed, on the contrary, by the incarnation, the humanity of Christ was, strictly speaking, so completely raised above everything of the kind just mentioned, that no assaults of hostile powers could harm it or involve it in actual suffering, save when, by a special act of will, He laid Himself open to their operation, and voluntarily submitted Himself to suffering. Hilarius' great aim was totally to avoid representing the weakness or the perfection of Christ as a physical determination and necessity; and, on the contrary, to view all His sufferings as deeds, that is, as ethical. As he refused to allow that the Son of God, by His act of self-abasement, as it were, lost Himself and reduced Himself to a fixed condition of humiliation, the necessary and physical consequence of that act (for, on the contrary, His self-abasement was the effect of continuous loving acts of will, and He remained at every moment in possession of power over Himself); so neither, on the other hand, did the humanity assumed by Him, ever in any instance impose on Him the necessity of suffering or dying. Far from that, conceived as it was by the Holy Ghost, and personally united with the Son of God, it was in itself raised above every necessity of the kind. Indeed, in the view of Hilarius, such a necessity never did pertain to the true idea of humanity in itself, but merely to the form of humanity embodied in us. But, on the other hand, the same free will of love, which was the cause of the "evacuatio" of the Son of God, and which went through the entire period of Christ's earthly existence, must then have become the will of the entire God-man; consequently it must have gone on to the more concrete determination, that the Godman should freely will that which, because of the perfection of His humanity, was not a matter of necessity, to wit, the keeping back of the deification and the laying Himself open to suffering and need. That this was Hilarius' meaning, is most apparent where the sufferings of Christ attained their climax. For Christ not to have been able to suffer at all, would have been an imperfection, would have been a limit imposed on His love; His ethical would have been restrained by His physical nature. On the other hand, the necessity for His death must not be sought in His own spiritual or physical nature; the ground thereof lay outside His perfect nature, in us, to whom it was His will, and it was necessary, He should become like, if He were purposed to redeem us,—like, not merely in general, as a man, but also as a man in the servile form, in the present form of our humanity. For this reason He gave Himself up, by a free act of will, to suffering and death: His very death was an act.¹ He who in Himself was exalted above all subjection to hostile powers from without, allowed them to force their way to Him, conceded them power, in order to conquer them, in order that they might, as it were, exhaust themselves on His person. In this way He demonstrated, even in suffering, His power and dominion;—primarily, His power over His own nature, which He constituted passible, that is, accessible by suffering (for thereto also was His i%ovala necessary, John x. 18); and then in the triumph which He gained over the hostile powers by His patient endurance of suffering. But if every part of the suffering of the God-man was, in the full sense, an ethical deed, He must at every moment have had power over Himself and over His sufferings, and never have been passively lost therein.

¹ De Trin. 10, 57, 61, 62; specially c. 11. Hilarius was therefore able to say,—In the mystery of the Son of man, who is also the Son of God, we have this, that He ruled even whilst dying; and, although ruling, died (De Trin. 10, 62, 48). It is self-evident that, as Hilarius held the suffering of Christ in its inner essence to be a deed, he was able to concede to the divine nature also a participation therein; and even in regard to this matter, to uphold the unity of the divine and human aspects. His suffering was not merely voluntary; it was His joy: it pertained to His blessedness, for the head loves the members.¹ This delight in suffering love passes over also to His members: through love, the pain which is undergone for the honour of God or for the brethren, is scarcely felt, but is forgotten ;—the less felt and the more forgotten, the more completely love in all its fulness enters into the very depths of suffering for others (De Trin. 10, 44).

We find also in the writings of other teachers of the Church —for example, Epiphanius, Athanasius, etc.—substantially the same notion of the glorification or deification of human nature in Christ, resulting from the "assumtio," which was a reality from the very beginning. And even if they did not all agree in teaching that the humanity in union with the Logos experienced no needs, but went, in this respect, some farther than others, they were all one in the conviction that the humanity of Christ by itself was subject to the necessity of death, even as is ours. Death does not belong to the idea, but merely to the present form, of humanity. Had death been a physical necessity for Christ, He would not have been the perfect man, and His death could not have had redeeming efficacy. They therefore assert merely the ethical necessity, as of the birth, so also of the suffering and death of Christ; and persist in maintaining, that, even after the act of incarnation had taken place, it lay at every moment in the power of Christ, in virtue of the indwelling of the Logos, the advantage of which felt to the humanity also, to rise above sickness and death, suffering and sorrow; in other words, His servile form was at every moment the work of His free will.

¹ Tract. in Ps. cxxxviii. c. 26:—Domino itaque passio ista delicise sunt, dum portas a>reas confringit, dum vectes ferreos content, dum omnem potestatem despoliat, dum de his in ae triumphat dum eum, quem ad imaginem suam fecerat, redimit, dum deliciis paradisi restituit. In his igitur passi onis oblectamentis atque deliciis nox ei illuminatio est.

Hilarius carried out this thought further, not merely in an anti-Arian interest, but also in order that the unity of the Logos with the humanity thus assimilated to Him might be at every moment a present fact. Whatever judgment may be pronounced on his manner of carrying it out, the rigidness with which he adhered to the ethical point of view deserves so much recognition, that we ought not to be too ready with the charge of Docetism, especially as the ethical basis on which he stood enabled him to acknowledge that Christ truly suffered and really died;—the only difference between Him and us being, that in His case they were free acts, whereas in our case they are the result of a necessity of nature. As is evident from his doctrine of the "evacuatio," and from his frequent use of expressions like "God was born; God died," he was so far from shrinking, after the manner of Docetists, at the idea of the incarnation of the Logos and of the closest unity of the two natures, that he might rather be charged with adopting the idea of God-manhood too quickly, and without the necessary intermediate steps. For one might undoubtedly ask,—Why is the glorificatory influence of the Logos on the humanity with which He was united conceived to have been from the very beginning so great, that it could in no instance undergo suffering without a special act of self-abasement, if this same glorification had to be immediately resumed again for the sake of the work of redemption? To posit a thing which must immediately afterwards be done away with, seems to be an useless labour; and the view laid down by Hilarius comes into conflict, not merely with the passages in which Christ declares Himself to be ignorant,¹ but quite as much with all true development on the part of His humanity; which he persists indeed in attributing to it, though he fails to find a fit place either for it or freedom.²

¹ "Non sibi nescivit (horam), sed nobis" (9, 51, 71); such is the turn which he found himself compelled to adopt.

2 De Trin. 2, 24:—Dei imago invisibilis pudorem humani exordii non recusavit, et per conceptionem, partum, vagitum, cunas, omnes nature nostras contumelias transcucurrit; in de Trin. 9, 50, he speaks of the "libera voluntas" of Christ, but understands thereby merely will and power, like other Church teachers of this period—for example, Gregory Nazianzen.

The more does it deserve mention, that Hilarius himself also recognised this defect, and endeavoured to solve the problem. He sought, namely, to show not merely that there were moments of "exinanitio," by which the "exaltatio" of humanity, which began with the "assumtio," was interrupted, but also that there was a "status exinanitionis," a "servilis habitus;" at the same time avoiding all curtailment of the idea of the God-manhood. In attaining this end, all depended on the incarnation being conceived, not as absolutely completed in one act, but as undergoing a process. This process, again, required to be so viewed that space was left for a stadium during which the idea of Godmanhood came into inequality with itself, only, however, to restore itself from the inequality to the true equipollence of the ideal and factual. It is at this point that Hilarius displayed in a particular manner the speculative character of his mind.

He by no means wished to represent the idea of the Godmanhood as adequately realized all at once, but demanded for that purpose a longer process. Nor does he refer the process to the human aspect alone, but also to the divine, which submitted itself to the "evacuatio" and fell into inequality with itself, in order afterwards to restore itself to itself, in unity with humanity. Humanity in itself, in its idea, is not inadequate to the divine: had it been possible for a perfect humanity to have been at once assumed, the "evacuatio" of the divine nature would have been unnecessary. Inasmuch, therefore, as he asserts that the "evacuatio," which ceased at the end, was necessary at the beginning, he must have regarded the status of the humanity assumed by Him as really imperfect at first, and therefore have intended to restrict the afore-noticed glorifying influence of the Logos within certain limits. The real purpose of the idea of the "evacuatio Verbi" was to enable him to conceive the Logos as so intimately united with the man Jesus, even whilst He was in the "forma servilis," that the progress of the man might appear as an ever increasing return of the Logos into equality with Himself, even as the humiliation attendant on the servant's form was a lagging behind His true reality and glory on the part of the Logos. We see that on this view everything was common to the entire person at every moment, though to each aspect in its own distinctive manner. The entire person entered into inequality with itself: the actuality of each aspect, during the state of humiliation, fell short of its idea—of the idea of the Son, of the idea of the perfect man, of the idea of the God-man. It was not merely the human aspect that was at first inadequate to the divine; for, through the medium of the voluntary "evacuatio," it dragged down the divine nature also, so far as it permitted it, into its own inequality. "Non conveniebat forma? utriusque (Dei et servi) concursus" (de Trin. 9, 14). As room was to be left for the "forma servilis," the "forma Dei" must needs become latent. "Decedere ex Deo in hominem nisi ex forma Dei Deus evacuans non potuit" (de Trin. 12, 6). Seeing, then, that by means of the "evacuatio" the Son of God appropriated to Himself the "forma servilis," a diremption, a disturbance of the unity (amissio, offensio unitatis) with the divine nature, found its way into this person. (Note 79.) Not, indeed, in the sense that the unity of the Son with the Father was entirely done away with, or even interrupted; for otherwise the Word could not have attained the end for which He emptied Himself. He entered into humanity in its low estate, in order that God might be born into humanity i¹ consequently He must have retained within Himself the potence of that which He was to bring and to bestow. Only, however, by becoming like us, and unlike or unequal to Himself, that is, by entering into a state inadequate to Himself, into the "forma servilis," was it possible for the Word to do away with the inequality of humanity with itself and its idea, to make it like Himself, in the glory to which the Son should restore Himself. To this glory, however, He returned not merely as the Logos, but as the God-man; that is, created humanity was in Him and through Him translated into the sphere of the divine essence. Christ, therefore, in the state of humiliation, was "dividuus a se;" He had taken up into Himself the inadequate element humanity, in order that it might be reborn in Him; but, notwithstanding all these "sacramentorum diversitates," He never so far fell away from Himself as no longer to be the Son and Christ, possessed of power over Himself.²

¹ Do Trin. 10, 7:—Namque cum in hominem Deus natus sit, non idcirco natus est, ne non Deus maneret, sed ut manente Deo homo natus in Deum sit. Nam et Emanuel nomen ejus est, quod est,—nobiscum Dominus; ut non defectio Dei ad hominem sit, sed hominis profectus ad Deum sit. Vel cum glorificari se rogat, non utique naturae Dei, sed assumtioni humilitatis hoc proficit. (But to this belonged also the evacuatio formm Dei.) Nam hanc gloriam postulat, quam ante constitutionem mundi apud Deum habuit.

3 De Trin. 10, 22:—Cum Jesus Christus et natus, et passus, et mortuus et sepultus sit: et resurrexit (that is, by His resurrection He manifested the divine Natura which had ever remained His). Nbn potest in his sacramentorum diversitatibus ita ab se dividuus esse, ne Christus sit.

For this reason, also, it was possible for Him finally to restore Himself to equality with Himself (agqualitas); into which equality human nature, too, is taken up.¹

The distinction between the last and the preceding stadium becomes especially clear, when we consider that Hilarius designates the third again a birth.² The first birth of the Son was the eternal one out of the Father, on the ground of which He was equal to Him in all things, even in glory. The second is His birth into humanity, and into the humble form of a servant, through which, by a free act of love, He acquired a different mode of existence; He sunk Himself into humanity, in order to raise it up out of its depths into Himself. And yet, even during this relative separation from the divine unity, to which He subjected Himself by His union with humanity, He retained sure hold upon Himself. The overreaching power of the divine essence perfected the humanity, created a "forma Dei" out of the "forma servilis;" and so, with the perfection of the humanity, the Son was again restored to Himself. (Note 80.) And that was the third birth. The day of resurrection was the birth-day of His humanity to glory; and thenceforth He was, as a whole (as the God-man), that which He had been before time as Logos. Although He was born to that which He had been before time, still, He was born in time to be that which He previously was not: henceforth, however, the Son of man is to be seen at the right hand of power; for humanity having been made partaker of glory after the resurrection, advanced onwards to the brightness which the Logos had previously enjoyed; and the Son of man, enthroned at the Father's side, the mortality of the flesh having been swallowed up in immortality, celebrated His birth as the living, neverdying Son of God,

¹ De Trin. 9, 64:—Si nativitas hominis naturam novam intulit, et humilitas formam demutavit sub assumtione servili; nunc donatio nomjnia (Phil. ii. 10) forma reddit aqualitatem.

^* De Trin. 9, 6, and Ps. cixxviii. 19, he distinguishes a threefold state of Christ: ante hominem, in homine, post hominem.

Taking a survey of the whole, we find that Hilarius considered the eternal Son, who created the souls of men as images of Himself, to be naturally the archetype of these souls, and, therefore, to stand in an original relationship to them; hence the possibility of the incarnation. Because of the entrance of sin, the Son, the archetype, manifested His love by being born into the servile form of the image: our archetype made itself like us. This is his predominant mode of looking at the matter. But, as Hilarius was as far as possible from regarding the assumption of humanity as a mere transitory theophany, or as a mere means of redemption, but believed humanity to have attained to eternal and permanent perfection in the glorified God-man; he arrives, at the close of the process, to the conviction, that in the God-manhood the full idea of humanity was first realized, and in Christ the creation of our race fully accomplished. The necessity for the God-man, previously demonstrated from the existence and nature of sin, was now traced back absolutely, and for all stadia, to the idea of our nature. Henceforth, not the Logos alone by Himself is our archetype, but the entire God-man, with body and soul,—He who took upon Himself the likeness of our servile form, in order that we might bear the likeness of His divine form. Into that divine form were swallowed up primarily, in His person, the mortality and weakness of humanity, to the end that we also might be converted into the image of the Creator, agreeably to the idea which God had even at the creation of the first man.¹ Believers also participate in this divine-human life. By faith they become, not merely morally like or one with Him, but essentially.²

¹ Compare de Trin. 11, 49 (see Note 77) ; specially the words,—"Consummatur itaque homo imago Dei. Namque conformis effectus glome corporis Dei, in imaginem Creatoris excedit secundum disposition primi hominis Jigurationem." According to this, even the first man was created under the idea of the God-man; and the idea of the "imago Dei" is first completely realized ,when man becomes conformed to the God-man. Comment. in Matt. c. 3, § 2:—" Exspectatum Deo Patri manus hominem, quem assumserat, reportavit."

^* De Trin. 8, 7, 9, 12; 11, 19. Compare, in connection with what follows, the Praefatio (pp. 24 ff.) to the Opp. Hilar. ed. Maur.; de Trin. 8, 13:—" Eos qui inter Patrem et Filium voluntatis ingerunt unitatem, interrogo, utrumne per nature veritatem hodie Christus in nobis sit, aut per concordiam voluntatis? Si enim vere Verbum caro factum est, et vere nos Verbum carnem cibo dominico sumimus, quomodo non naturaliter manere in nobis eiistimandus est qui et naturam carnis nostrse, jam inseparabilem sibi, homo natus assumsit, et naturam carnis suae ad naturam aeternitatis sub Sacramento nobis communicandae carnis admiscuit? Ita enim omnes unum sumus, quia et in Christo Pater est, et Christus in nobis est. Quisquis ergo naturalitcr Fatrem in Christo negabit, neget prius naturaliter rel se in Christo, vel Christum sibi inesse." C. 15.

All believers have put on the one< Christ, and have become the same. We put Him on in baptism; but the holy Eucharist is of special significance to Hilarius, in this respect.

Christ is in the Father through His divine nature; we, on the contrary, are in Him through His corporeal birth, and He is in us through the sacraments. In this way, a gradually ascending, perfect unity is brought about. We remain in Him, He in the Father; but, remaining in the Father, He remains also in us, so that we also advance onwards to unity with the Father; for in Him, who by His nature, on the ground of birth, is in the Father, we also dwell by our nature, even as He dwells in us by His nature. Hilarius employs the strongest and boldest expressions to designate the universal significance of the incarnation of Christ, in relation to our entire race, maintaining that therewith something was potentially done, not merely for, but to us all; because human nature, in its entirety, was reborn and united with God in Him. Tract. in Ps. li. c. 16: "Ut et Filius hominis esset Filius Dei, naturam in se universal carnis assumsit, per quam effectus vera vitis genus in se universae propagationis tenet." (Note 81.) His humanity is the city on the hill; in Him, as in a city, the human race is gathered together; accordingly, He who thus gathers us together in Himself is the unity of many, the "civitas;" we, bound together in Him, participating in His body, are the inhabitants of the city, we are one in Him. For our sake the Son of God Himself laid the foundation of His humanity, in order that, having become man, He might take to Himself, out of the Virgin, the nature of the flesh, and that, by means of this marriage and union, the body of the entire human race might be sanctified in Him. As His will in assuming a body was to see all rooted in Himself, so was it His will to give Himself back to Himself in all, by means of His invisible nature. Not that He, through whom man was created, needed to become man; but we needed that God should become flesh and dwell in us, that is, that He should take up His abode in the inmost essence of humanity in general, by the assumption of one man (carnis unius).

As might be anticipated, we find Hilarius taking a corresponding view of the work of redemption. Having assumed our sinful body, Christ bore our sin (de Trin. 10, 47). All the weakness which He took upon Himself, He bore voluntarily, translating Himself into our nature and its weaknesses. This weakness, therefore, can only be understood when its substitutionary significance is recognised. We have previously referred to this point. But He did not merely wish to stand in our stead; no, we died in Him; in Him humanity as a whole sits at the right hand of the Father; in Him all peoples behold their own resurrection and perfection; every momentum of His history becomes, as it were, an active potence to reproduce the same history in men. (Note 82.)

It is evident, therefore, that Hilarius, equally with Apollinaris, aimed at showing the union of the two aspects of Christ to be so intimate, that one should be warranted in saying,— "totus hominis filius totus est Dei filius," and vice versi; that is, this person is entirely man, or the perfect man, and it belongs to His perfection to be also God; and vice versS,—this person is entirely God; in other words, His humanity was not a mere possession or dwelling-place of the Logos, but a momentum of Himself, apart from which no complete and exhaustive conception could be formed of Him. At this point we see very clearly that his aim almost coincided with that of Apollinaris, only that he goes to work more carefully, and does justice to the distinction, ere attempting the union of the two aspects, as, in fact, an union is nothing, if it be not the union of elements that are distinct. Quite as clear is it also, that there is a very wide difference between the Christology of Hilarius and that of a later period, when, on the one hand, the distinction between the two aspects was exaggerated, and, on the other hand, their union was effected solely by the subjection of the human aspect; that is, by curtailing it relatively to the divine. In short, Hilarius had not yet, like a later age, repudiated the truth lying at the basis of Monophysitism. Having the same object in view as Apollinaris, to wit, the unity of the person, he showed his superiority to him particularly by attaining it in more complete measure, and without the sacrifice of the human soul. On the contrary, he employed the soul for the purpose of denoting the personal unity of Christ. Furthermore, he did not, for the sake of the unity, resort to the representation of the humanity of Christ, that is, the 'nvevfia, as eternal, complete, and immediately identical with the Logos. He maintained that the human created nature was susceptible of being so appropriated by the Logos, that creation might pass over into the incarnation of the Logos. The Logos, however, brought this to pass, in that He stripped Himself of His actual glory by an act of His loving will; having done which, He became capable of incarnation—a work which was demanded indeed by love, but was not physically, immediately, eternally accomplished.

Undoubtedly, however, the unity of the Person of Christ, as delineated by him, although settled as to its main outlines, bore no reference to the question raised in connection with Apollinaris,—Can the human soul of Christ be conceived without freedom of will? And if not, how can the unity of the person be preserved, if a human will, possessed of freedom of choice, existed alongside of the divine hypostasis 1¹

This question was taken into partial consideration by the other Church teachers of this age, though hesitatingly. We do not find in their writings the doctrine of the two natures in its later form; for they also demanded that the human aspect of the Person of Christ should be regarded as a determination of the Logos Himself.2

Athanasius demands neither freedom of choice nor a duality of wills for the God-man (compare c. Ar. 4, 30-34; see above, p. 350). He says,—Christ appeared in order that the flesh averrtBacrov dfiapruv; Sel^ai, which Adam, from being innocent, had made BeKriid) dfiaprlas. Tavrrjv avurrrjai Kara <j>vaiv dvafidp rqrov, tva Sel^i) Tov Srjfuovpybv avai-riov T/}? afiapria<;, /eal Kara Ttjv apyeTwrov Itxcutiv rrj<; ISias <pvae(os KarearrjaarO iva avrbs jj r?j? dvafiaprr)alas 17 eWSetft?.

¹ Ililarius speaks, indeed, in de Trin. 9, 50, of Christ's free will, but only as in opposition to constraint. In his view, Christ had freedom of will, even as the Father has it. Of a " dissentire " between the "voluntas" of Christ and that of the Father, there was no trace, for the Son was " sic liber in voluntate, ut, quod volens agit, factum sit patemae voluntatis.— Et cum Filius voluntatem Patris facit, docet per naturae indifferentiam, naturalem sibi voluntatem esse cum Pat re, cum voluntate ejus sit omne quod faciat." He regards, therefore, the volitional unity of the God-man with the Father as immediate, as grounded in the very " natura," whereas other men have the capability of choosing between good and evil. Compare Tract. in Ps. cxviii.; lit. 22, 4, in Ps. ii. 16.

^* Athan. c. Apollin. 1, 8-12, and above, Chapter Second, pp. 349 ff. Greg. Naz. ad Cledon. 1, 9.

Here the Logos is represented as the archetype of human nature: the archetype, which could not sin, entered into its production, in order to exhibit Himself in actuality, and thus to complete His work. On this view, Adam is the not yet completed creation; the archetype was necessary to the completion, to the definite and stable perfection of creation. The humanity of the first Adam was not indeed merely animal life, but was also soul; and the Logos was in Christ not as a mere power, but as a person. And yet there were not two persons in Christ; for, even in Christ, the soul, considered in relation to what was below it, was power,—in relation to what was above, was void form or susceptibility, which acquired its determinate actuality through the incarnation. The first Adam stood under the power and nature of the soul, and was therefore psychical; but the body of the second Adam stands with its soul under the power and nature of the irveDfia, and is therefore pneumatical. For God the Logos is irvevfia (c. 8). That a duality of wills, etc., would not fit in with this view, seems to me evident. Athanasius speaks much also of an evcoais <f>vaiKtj of the divine and human in Christ (c. 10, 12,— aavyyyros <f>vo~ucj) h/nens Tov "Xoyov 7T/30? Ttjv ISlav avrov yevofievrjv adpica. The aap% Koto. <pvaiv ISla eyevero, and so forth). Never, indeed, can the flesh become equally eternal with the deity, opaovaios; never substantially one therewith, Kaff vrroaraaiv: that would be a commixture, a confusion (c. 10), which would border on the heathenish. Undoubtedly, however, the divine nature made the human its own, and a physical union took place; by which he appears to understand that they met in one being, in which they were indissolubly conjoined, though they continued to be two distinct momenta (St^co? voovfieva, c. Ar. 4, 31), and were never commingled. The (f>vais through which they were indissolubly one can neither be merely divine nor merely human, consequently, in particular, not merely the divine Ego as such. It can only be the divine Ego so far as the divine Ego was the archetype of, and therefore could at the same time be reckoned to, the human. To say that an union Kara tpvaiv is equivalent to an union in the person, is a too superficial solution of the question. Why should not Athanasius, then, have used the term irpoaairovl On the contrary, we ought rather to say,—Our idea of person had no existence at all in his day, and first arose out of the ideas, being, essence, substance; and the bridge between the two was the use of these latter terms to designate a single or individual being, essence and the like, and not merely in abstracto. Whereof the natural consequence was, vagueness or even confusion of usage, until a distinct expression had been formed for the idea of the Ego, and thus the meaning of ovala, (f>vai<;₎ substantia, essentia, natura, had been more accurately defined. At the time at which Athanasius wrote, this had not yet taken place; for example, he opposes <}yv<ri<; to ovaia; nor, further, did the word virocrraais denote to him quite as much as our word hypostasis. In his usage it still signified the nature (c. Apoll. 1, 12), that is, the particular divine nature of the Son.

With this particular divine nature now, he supposed the humanity to be united; but he neither represents it as imperfect, nor ever directly terms it impersonal. At the same time, he neither wished to confound the two natures, nor to place them unconnectedly outside, and alongside, of each other, as though they were two persons. What, then, could be more natural for him than to leave the question of the personality for the time on one side, and to devote attention exclusively to the essence, that is, to the idea of the Logos and of humanity, endeavouring to demonstrate that as to essence each belonged to, and required, the other? Accordingly, the import of the expression <f>vcwcr) ivaeris probably was,—the human <f>vai<;, even apart from the incarnation, is, it is true, a rational unity, which governs the powers subordinated to it; but that which, relatively to what is below it, is power and rule, relatively to what is above it, is simply susceptibility. Bearing the image of the Logos and destined for Him, humanity arrives at the actuality of its possibility, at the substance of its form, in a word, at its perfection, when the Logos enters into vital unity with it. And so, on the other hand, we have found Athanasius, even prior to the Nicene Council, treading in the footsteps of Irenaeus and Tertullian, and teaching that, as its archetype (dpyerinro^), one aspect of the Logos' own essence stood in affinity with humanity, and that the archetype called for manifestation (CTrtoetfi?) in actuality. This momentum of actuality was acquired by the Logos when, having connected Himself with the man Jesus, He set forth in him the perfected humanity. Accordingly, the evmais tpvaikrj is that union which is demanded by the essence or conception of both, and in which the idea of both first attains realization;— humanity, because its nature remained imperfect, its creation as it were incomplete, without the incarnation; deity, because even its nature, to wit, its ethical nature, could not satisfy itself till it became man. For the rest, we see clearly that Atbanasius thus approximated very closely, without therefore denying the human soul of Christ, to that which was the great aim of Apollinaris' efforts. For it was the notion of the inner or essential connection of the two natures which mainly decided Apollinaris to abide constantly by the fila <pvais, and to reduce the two natures to two momenta or aspects of the one nature of the God-man, that is, of His essence or idea. They are one nature as to their idea; for no perfect conception can be formed of either of them, save in essential connection with the other. That Apollinaris left out the human soul was a mistake, and involved him in misunderstandings; his system did not require him to do so, although he fancied it did. He supposed this, because he could form no conception of a human soul without attributing to it such a degree of freedom of choice as would have co-ordinated the humanity to the Logos as a second completely independent potence, as a second irpoaayrrov. The Church teachers also, as we may well imagine, had no intention of teaching that there were two persons in Christ; but they did not therefore let fall His human soul: the one, because they did not consider freedom of choice to be necessary to the truth of the human soul (freedom of choice they would undoubtedly have held to involve a second Ego, co-ordinate with the divine); the other, because they believed it possible to attribute to Christ a free human will, without a particular human Ego. Thus Gregory of Nyssa, who understood by the free will of Christ mainly the rpeirrbv, that is, mutability, but not the power of self-determination. But capability of development belongs also to the rpembv. Had Apollinaris, like the above-mentioned teachers of the Church, been able to conceive of freedom of choice without an human Ego, or of a soul which had no power of choice, and was yet human, pertaining to the first creation, he would not have resorted to the second and completing creation in the manner in which he did, nor have found himself compelled to substitute the eternal archetype, the Hvevfut, in the place of the human soul, whose actual existence and susceptibility are the necessary presupposition to the manifestation and realization of the eternal idea of humanity or of the IIvevfj,a.

Taking this as the basis of the difference between Apollinaris and the doctrine of the Church, we see also, that although the unanimous assertion of the true human soul of Christ, by all the more prominent Church teachers, was perfectly right, the question which must necessarily arise, after the completeness of the two aspects—the divine as well as the human—had been recognised, still remained unanswered. The teachers of this period thought it possible to avoid all dissonance, and to secure the unity, by assigning to the divine aspect overpowering and sole-dominating power. Above the lower, the human, above soul and body, stands the hegemonic divine and encompasses it. Against this course of procedure, the school of Apollinaris continued to protest, saying:—If you assume the existence of a true human soul, derived from the first creation, you must also allow it freedom of choice, and therewith such a degree of independence over against the Logos as to render impossible that encompassing, and as it were overpowering of the human, as the lower, by the hegemonical, the higher, as to cause the unity of the person at once to disappear. And from an entirely different direction, another important theological power in the Church, to wit, the school of Antioch, concurred in this same protest. This school opposed Apollinaris and agreed with the Church, in so far as they assumed the existence of a truly human soul in Christ; they opposed the Church, however, in so far as they asserted for the human soul, freedom of choice.

The view which we have set forth as that of Athanasius, was further developed by Gregory of Nazianzen (ad Cled. 1, 19) as follows :—When we teach that both, to wit, the humanity and the deity, are complete or perfect in Christ, we do not mean to say that two absolutely perfect beings are united in one, for then one of them must inevitably give way to the other. Because a thing is perfect in its kind, it is not therefore perfect as compared with other things, for example, a hill as compared with a mountain, a mustard-seed as compared with a bean. The former are respectively less than the latter, even though they may be greater than other hills and mustard-seeds, and may be perfect in their kind. So likewise is our spirit (relatively) perfect, and has dominion, that is, over body and soul: but it is not therefore perfect in an absolute sense; for it serves God, is subjected to Him, and is not the sharer of His rule and majesty. Even as Moses also was termed Pharaoh's God, whilst at the same time he was God's servant. The stars brighten the night, but disappear before the sun, so that by day we do not even know that they exist. When a little torch is thrown on a great burning pile, it is not extinguished, nor does it give light, nor does it remain separate; the whole forms one pile, one flame, in that that which is the stronger overpowers the rest. To similar purpose, he uses the image of a ray and of the sun, of moisture and a river:—it is not necessary that the rays should give way, in order that there may be room for the light of the sun; the separate rays remain, although they are as it were absorbed in the entire light of the sun, and can scarcely any longer be said to exist; that is, they become momenta of the whole.¹ This passage, taken together with similar words of Athanasius, throws a very instructive light on the conception, still formed at that day, of the relation between God and humanity. They were by no means considered to be two essentially different natures, as at a later period by the Dyophysites; and this was undoubtedly an advantage of the earlier over the latter time, which materially facilitated the construction of a Christology. On the other hand, however, the distinction between the two was very imperfectly defined. According to the images above referred to, the human is a part, the divine is the whole; the distinction between the two, therefore, is simply a quantitative one. The Christian mind, therefore, had arrived at a point, in relation to Christology, identical with that at which it had previously stood for a time, in relation to the doctrine of the Trinity. But as the Church found itself compelled to desist from applying the merely physical category of the whole and part to the relation between God the Father and the Son, and to advance to more spiritual determinations; so also was it unable to rest satisfied with a Christology based on a mere Unio of the whole and the part.

¹ Compare Ullmann, "Gregor v. Naz. der Theologe," 1825, pp. 396 ff., 410 ff.

If the Logos in Himself is the whole, humanity in its positive aspect is in no respect distinguishable from the deity. The latter, therefore, has, from the very outset, such a predominance in the person, that the human, if not exactly a mere "accidens," can only be regarded as a gradually disappearing momentum of the divine: a foundation was thus laid for a Docetical predominance of the divine. If, further, the Logos in Himself is the whole, to what purpose an incarnation besides? What can He gain by an incarnation? Or regarded from another point of view:—if a part of the Logos was brought to view in humanity, and the entire Logos in the incarnation; then human nature in general must be a part of the Logos. In which case, the creation of man is not specifically distinguishable from the incarnation, but was itself a commencement thereof as to body and soul. In conflict therewith, however, was the doctrine of the Trinity which had been arrived at; for it secured the idea of God against every species of immediate identification with the world.

In point of fact, also, the Church teachers did not lose sight of the distinction between creation and incarnation; and, as is evident from their polemic against the Apollinaristic predicate aKriarrov, given to the human nature, they demanded that in Christ, the first creation should be presupposed instead of being negatived, and now be appropriated by the Logos as His own. They were of opinion, that, along with the unity of the person, there was a subordination of the human aspect; in other words, whilst believing human nature to have been appropriated by, and raised to a participation in, the Logos, they allowed it a certain independence of existence. Whereas, if the category of part and whole had been strictly adhered to, the homogeneous part must have been held to disappear with the introduction of the whole, although its relative independence is imperiously required by the state of humiliation, as indeed, in general, by the idea of a truly human development.

Hilarius, as we found, devoted his attention principally to the state of humiliation. In connection therewith, he arrived in one instance at the idea of an incarnation which first reached completion when Christ rose from the dead, and was consequently able, like Athanasius, to leave room for a truly human development (p. 349). Furthermore, he advanced far beyond the mere Unio of the part and the whole, in that, unlike most others, he did not endeavour to describe the humanity as a momentum of the Logos Himself, as the Logos Himself existing in outward actuality, by adopting the principle,—" totus Christus filius Dei est;" but ventured to lay down the reverse principle,—" totus hominis filius totus est Dei filius." At the same time, it must be remarked that the process of the union of the two aspects advances according to his representation much too rapidly, as is clear from his expressions regarding the earthly body of Christ and His knowledge, but especially from his inability to assign to the free will of Christ any mediatory significance in connection with the advancing incarnation of the Logos. He thus curtails the human aspect also, and, contrary to his own intention, leaves room for Docetical elements. He resorts to the boldest measures for showing that the Son of God really united Himself with the servile form, that is, with that which did not form an essential part even of the idea of human nature in itself, but pertained solely to humanity in its fallen state: he takes far less notice of those momenta which are really constitutive of humanity in general. By his doctrine of the " evacuatio formae divinae," he left room for a truly human development: he never used it, however, for this purpose, but merely for the appropriation of the "forma servilis." Had merely an incarnation in general been required, and not a "forma servilis," no place would be left for the "evacuatio," or for that temporary "cohibere formam divinam intra semet ipsum:" humanity would have been at once deified, and in total independence both of a "forma servilis" and of growth, would have at once in itself set forth the "forma or facies divina," the full actuality of the Logos under a mundane shape. The principle, that the entire Son of man is the entire Son of God, which could not acquire its full truth till the Godman had attained completion, he really applies, with the aid of his doctrine of the "evacuatio divinae formae," to every stage of the divine-human life, from its commencement onwards; not sufficiently considering that the Son of man Himself could not be completely Himself from the beginning, and attributing to the glorifying divine nature, even whilst on earth, too great an influence,—an influence which interfered with the relative independence of the humanity and of its development.

We see accordingly, that precisely at the moment when the Church took a great step in advance, as regards the human aspect of the Person of Christ, by expressly repudiating Apollinaris at the Synod of Constantinople in the year 381, and thus recognising the existence of an human soul, it became more clearly than ever absolutely necessary to assign to the entire human aspect a position of relatively greater independence and certainty than it had hitherto occupied within the one Person of Christ. (Note 83.) Attention having been engaged on the Person of Christ in its relation to the Trinity or to God, the turn came for considering its relation to man; and the conflict with Apollinarism formed the transition thereto. We are thus set into the midst of the questions which stirred the Christian mind during the fifth century. It deserves remark, that just about this time the Western Church, in consequence of the struggle between Pelagianism. and Augustinianism, began to apply itself vigorously to the consideration of anthropological questions. In harmony with its entire character and tendencies, the Eastern Church arrived at anthropological questions through the medium of Christology, and therefore also contented itself, in a narrower circle of view, with the dogmas objectively laid down, and with more indeterminate utterances relatively thereto. The vocation of the West, which had adopted as its own the Eastern inheritance of dogmas, was, after passing through a long intermediate and preparatory course, the independent development of anthropology to a point of clearness and fixity, at which it should react on the doctrine of the Trinity and of the Person of Christ, and contribute specially to the completeness of the latter. To follow the further course of Christology in this direction, will be the task of the Second Part of this work.