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Updated: June 11, 2025
It supplies no motive for that finer piety which manifests itself in ethical endeavour and practical philanthropy. His Christ had not partaken of the cup of suffering. His Christ's advance to human perfection was illusory. So the monophysite could not look for the sympathy of Christ in his own struggles, nor could he appeal to Christ's example in respect of works of human charity.
The Saracen army was hailed as the deliverer of the Jacobite Church; the Monophysite Christians of Egypt, that is, they who, in the language of the Athanasian Creed, confounded the substance of the Son, proclaimed, through their leader, Mokaukas, that they desired no communion with the Greeks, either in this world or the next, that they abjured forever the Byzantine tyrant and his synod of Chalcedon.
Aristotle allows immortality only to the universal reason. The psychic elements are condemned to perish with the body. There is no hope for the parts of the soul which are most intimately connected with the individual's experience. Monophysite Christology shares this fundamental defect. The monophysite thinker attempted to express the union of two natures within one experience.
Now, it is impossible to say whether our Church acknowledges or not Lutheranism in Germany, Calvinism in Switzerland, the Nestorian and Monophysite bodies in the East. Nor does it clearly tell us what view it takes of the Church of Rome. The only place where it recognizes its existence is in the Homilies, and there it speaks of it as Antichrist.
The Nestorians were far more active propagandists. Worship is a very high type of service; but worship becomes selfish and sickens into sentiment, if it neglects the inspiring tonic of contact with human need. The monophysite Christology encouraged that form of self-sacrifice, whose goal is Nirvana, which lapses lazily into the cosmic soul and loses itself there in contemplation and ecstasy.
It offers to Christians a Christ who is not sufficiently above man to be able to help them by His power, nor sufficiently man to be able to help them by His sympathy. The monophysite Christ is neither very God nor very man, but a composition in which all traces of the original entities are lost to view. "The Chronicle of Zachariah of Mitylene," translated by Hamilton and Brooks, chap. iii. p. 46.
The doctrine that rules out the human nature of Christ rules out the divine nature also, by confusing it with the personality. The monophysite affirms the divine nature while denying the human. Such affirmation is purely verbal. It is completely void of significance. The contrast between the divine and human natures is needed to throw personality into relief.
Only by coming to grips with this psychological problem is it possible to appreciate the points at issue in the Christological question and to judge between catholic and monophysite. Kant distinguished the noumenal from the phenomenal ego. The former he regarded as an idea, the latter as a reality in time. The distinction corresponds roughly to that between person and nature.
In the absence of such teaching the spread of false, unbalanced or inadequate conceptions of what Christ was and of what He is is inevitable. Our concern here is to exhibit those of a monophysite character. Monophysite tendencies of the present day may be grouped according as they affect Christ's being or His work or Christian practice. We propose to take them in that order.
Spiritual men are naturally monophysite in their thinking. They shrink from the mental effort that diphysitism demands. Their attention is focussed on Christ's superiority to human limitations. They scarcely see the miracle of the human, and thus they miss the import of the divine miracle. In the atmosphere of monophysitism mysticism thrives, but devotion decays.
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