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Updated: May 11, 2025
On this showing, the Logos, who was incarnate, had no personal subsistence. The relation between God and man ever remains impersonal. Christ, qua divine, was only an aspect or effluence of deity. This, for the monophysite, was the one alternative to the doctrine of a passible God. He was faced with a desperate dilemma.
The Nestorian formula, in effect, juxtaposed the ideal Christ and the real Jesus, and left the two unrelated. This was Platonism in Christology. Aristotle's attack on Plato's system provided a radical criticism of Nestorianism. The monophysite theologians were blind to the difference between the Nestorian position and that of the orthodox.
In his universal ideal, as manifested in time, the human elements were sublimated into the divine. Consequently his ideal of conduct imposed a negative attitude towards the world and a merging of his ego in the universal spirit. These are the ruling elements in the spirit of the cloister, and these are the characteristics of the monophysite ethos.
A perpetual succession of patriarchs arose from the ashes of Theodosius; and the Monophysite churches of Syria and Egypt were united by the name of Jacobites and the communion of the faith.
Fasting and self-denial were essential preliminaries to the higher mystic practices. Ecstasy could not be reached until body and sense had been starved into complete submission. Monophysitism adopted this tradition, and made ascesis the central duty of the Christian life. The monophysite church became celebrated for the length and rigidity of its fasts.
If Islam, for instance, were to-day a serious menace to the Faith, Christians would automatically stiffen their attitude towards monophysite doctrines. Toleration of the false Christology would, under those circumstances, be treason to the true. The Church of the fifth century was menaced from many sides. Monophysitism was the foe at her gates. That heresy was not a variety of Christianity.
My stronghold was Antiquity; now here, in the middle of the fifth century, I found, as it seemed to me, Christendom of the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries reflected. I saw my face in that mirror, and I was a Monophysite. The Church of the Via Media was in the position of the Oriental communion, Rome was, where she now is; and the Protestants were the Eutychians.
Eutyches and his followers compromised both deity and humanity. The deity becomes passible, the humanity unreal. All the monophysite misbeliefs can be classified under one or other of these two heads. We shall take first those errors that compromise the nature of the deity, and shall preface our analysis by an explanation of the meaning of the term "deus impassibilis."
Monophysite tendencies are inherent in religious thought. The metaphysical idea, on which it rests, still has a powerful hold over the human mind. Spiritually-minded men are especially liable to this form of error. It is a mistake to think that Christological questions were settled once and for all in the fifth century. Each generation has to settle them afresh.
This rule holds as well in movements of religious thought. The monophysite strove for a lofty conception of deity but achieved a low one. He undermined the doctrine of impassibility by the very measures he took to secure it. In the technical language of Christology the monophysites' debased conception of deity was a consequence of "confounding the natures."
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