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To the Gnostics, Jesus was an æon that had never been. To the Docetists, he was a phantasm. There are always brutes that can believe but in the reality of things. There are others to whom the symbolic is dumb. In the Gospels there is much that is figurative, there is more that is ineffable, there are suggestions sheerly ideal. "In my Father's house are many mansions," the Saviour declared.
Even in apostolic days those who held this heresy were found. They denied that Christ had come in the flesh. They were styled docetists or phantasiasts. According to them the body had no objective reality. It was a phantom. Its reality was entirely subjective. It was the effect produced on the perceptions of those who associated with the mysterious spirit-being.
In ascribing imperfection to the human nature of Christ it eo ipso denied its reality. Apollinaris, in fact, said of Christ's reason what the early docetists said of His body. The system is more ingenious than convincing. It is highly artificial. It provides no intellectual basis for a living faith in an incarnate Christ.
These were the Docetists or Phantasiasts, so well described by Longfellow: "Ah, to how many faith has been No evidence of things unseen, But a dim shadow, which recasts The creed of the Phantasiasts, For whom no man of sorrows died: For whom the tragedy divine Was but a symbol and a sign, And Christ a phantom crucified."
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.
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