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Updated: May 11, 2025
The catholic holds not a suffering God, but a suffering divine person. He maintains an impassible God, but a passible Christ. A dead God is a contradiction in terms; a Christ who died is the hope of humanity. Monophysite theology became involved in further embarrassments.
But the vows which pain had extorted were forsworn on the return of health. The Abyssinians still adhered with unshaken constancy to the Monophysite faith; their languid belief was inflamed by the exercise of dispute; they branded the Latins with the names of Arians and Nestorians, and imputed the adoration of four gods to those who separated the two natures of Christ.
There is the peaked hood of the Armenian priest, for instance; the stately survival of that strange Monophysite heresy which perpetuated itself in pomp and pride mainly through the sublime accident of the Crusades.
Dogmatic reasons apart, the monophysite is motived by a repugnance to physical pain and by a wish to exclude it from the experience of the human ideal. To this motive we can trace the modern tendency to transfer the doctrinal centre of gravity from the Passion to the incarnation.
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.
Piety used to consist in personal loyalty to the Founder of a universal religion; it is now considered synonymous with obedience to the "golden rule." Within recent times the question as to the limitation of Christ's knowledge was hotly debated. That debate showed how much uncertainty on Christological questions exists and how strong monophysite opinion still is.
In the summer of 1839, he had set himself to study the history of the Monophysite controversy. "I have no reason," he writes, "to suppose that the thought of Rome came across my mind at all.... It was during this course of reading that for the first time a doubt came across me of the tenableness of Anglicanism. I had seen the shadow of a hand on the wall.
I do not forget that before the time of the Mohammedan invasion the Vandals had done their work of devastation, or that the African Church had been woefully weakened and rent by wild heresies and schisms, or that the defection of the Monophysite or Coptic Church of Egypt was one of the influences which facilitated the Mohammedan success.
A thousand times had he witnessed the contempt heaped on the Egyptians by the Greeks, and the loathing and hatred of the Orthodox for the Monophysite creed of his fellow-countrymen.
Although the monophysite church has long since lost all influence, it is still in being. The Coptic and Jacobite churches of Egypt and Mesopotamia, respectively, preserve to this day the doctrines and traditions of the primitive monophysites. The history of the sect, however, does not concern us here. The writer's purpose is to review its doctrine.
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