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Updated: June 22, 2025
Any reading of the Gospels compelled the recognition of divine and human elements in Christ; but speculative theology found it difficult to reconcile that fact with the equally important fact of the unity of person. The theologians of the previous century had bequeathed little or no guidance. The fifth-century Christologians were pioneers in an unmapped region.
The monophysite Christologians were subtle dialecticians, but the psychology of Christ's being lay outside their competence. Leaving the formal element in Aristotle's system, we come to its material content. Some of the prominent ideas of the Aristotelian cosmology and psychology reappear in the heresy we are studying. We shall take first the rejection of the Platonic dualism.
Whether as God or man, He is never out of character. Hence the unity of the person also was established a posteriori. Thus, to the orthodox Christologians, the expectation that the human Ideal would be a unity, comprising divinity and humanity, was justified by historical fact. They found a further verification on applying the test of practice.
The position won can only be secured by pushing home the attack to the final objective and consolidating her line there in the might of full catholic doctrine. A thorough and systematic advance of this sort was made by the orthodox Christologians of the fifth century. The campaign was fought and won then.
Thinkers such as the Christologians of Alexandria, imbued with the spirit of Neo-Platonism, had no motive for preserving the distinct subsistence of Christ's human nature. It was their boast that their Ideal had faced and overcome and trampled on the lower elements of His being.
Unfriendly critics usually portray the Christologians as narrow-minded and audacious. So, no doubt, they were, but they were not wrong-headed. If the matters in dispute between theist, deist, and pantheist are trivialities, then and then only can we regard the enterprise of the Christologians as chimerical and their achievements as futile.
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