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Such heresy is rather an intellectual than a moral fault; but the possibility of being the heirs, without knowing it, of the opinions of Nestorius and Eutyches throws on thinkers to-day the responsibility of examining their Christological beliefs and of testing them by the canon of orthodoxy.
We shall proceed to sketch the cosmic problem, and to indicate the three main types of answers given to it. It will then be evident that these three answers find their respective counterparts in the Nestorian, monophysite and the catholic solutions of the Christological problem. As man's intellectual powers mature, two supreme generalisations force themselves on his consciousness.
The uncompromisingly Christian character of the text, the discrepancy between Origen and Eusebius, and the notorious aptitude of early Christian scribes for interpolating manuscripts, and especially the manuscripts of Hellenistic Jewish writers, with Christological passages make it well nigh certain that the paragraph was foisted in between the second and third century.
The probability is then that different Christological insertions were made in the manuscripts of Josephus according to the leaning of the scribe, but that none of the supposed evidences are genuine, or based on a genuine narrative.
In the service for the Queen's Accession the Christological psalms are boldly transferred to the Sovereign by the calm substitution of "her" for "Him." A few years back I do not know if it is so now I noticed that in the prayer-books in St.
Without much artificiality, without forcing the facts, a rational scheme of the Christological heresies might be drawn up. They might be pictorially represented as the rungs of a ladder, which the truth-seeking mind scales rung by rung, pausing at the lower phases of Christological thought, and then resuming the ascent till the highest truth is attained.
God and man in Christ were brought into nominal contact, but there was provided no channel by which the divine virtue might pass into the human. The Nestorian remains content with his solution, because the background of his thought is dualist. The thinker's attitude to the cosmic problem decides his attitude to the Christological problem.
They constitute the extremes of Christological thought: between them runs the via media of orthodoxy. Each of the two sees but one aspect of the two-fold life of Christ. Docetism lays an exclusive emphasis on His real divinity, ebionitism on His real humanity. Each mistakes a half truth for a whole truth. The docetists denied that Jesus Christ had come in the flesh.
So the incarnation, for the monophysite, becomes a myth; no change in the nature of the Logos took place at it, and, consequently, no change in the nature of the Man Christ Jesus. We may trace the likeness between the cosmic and the Christological problems still further. Monism is forced to attempt to give some account of the world's apparent reality.
Similarly the transubstantiation theory conceives the mutation of the substance of the material elements and the loss of their proper nature; the appearance of reality that the accidents possess is an illusion of the senses. We may note in passing that the opposite error to transubstantiation finds its Christological parallel in Nestorianism.
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