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Updated: June 4, 2025
The monastic element dominated its communion. Indeed, it is hardly too much to say that the monophysite movement, on its external side, was an attempt to capture the Church for monastic principles. The heresy drew its inspiration from the cloister. The Christ of the monophysites had withdrawn from the market to the wilderness; so His followers must needs go out of the world to follow in His steps.
About the middle of June I began to study and master the history of the Monophysites. I was absorbed in the doctrinal question. This was from about June 13th to August 30th. It was during this course of reading that for the first time a doubt came upon me of the tenableness of Anglicanism.
The monophysites, without formally denying its real existence, nursed a Manichean suspicion of it. It was, to them, the seat of illusion; it was an obstacle to spirit, the enemy of spiritual development. If not unreal, it was at any rate unworthy. The association of Christ with matter through His body and through His human nature was, in their eyes, a degradation of deity.
The later monophysites never succeeded in banishing it from their system. By Apollinarianism the humanity of Christ is crippled in its highest member. It is a realm shorn of its fairest province. According to Apollinaris, all that Christ assumed was an animated body. His theory is like an ingenious system of canal locks for letting divine personality descend from the upper to the lower waters.
If it had taken place, it was, they thought, merely momentary, with no after-effects, the passing of a summer cloud across the face of the sun. We have considered the monophysites' view of Christ's human nature, regarded as an integral psychic entity. It is evident that they either undervalued it or denied its existence.
How little the patriarch Mennas could there represent the Church's independence is shown by his words to the bishops in the fourth session: "Your charity knows that nothing of what is mooted in the Church should take place contrary to the decision and order of our emperor, zealous for the faith," while of their relation to the Pope he said: "You know that we follow and obey the Apostolic See; those who are in communion with it we hold in communion; those whom it condemns we also condemn". Justinian, irritated by the boldness of the Monophysites, added the sanction of law to the decrees of this council, which deposed men who had occupied patriarchal sees.
The mystic's view of matter, of sense and human existence characterises the whole monophysite outlook. In the spirit of Plotinus the monophysites conceived the incarnation as the supreme example of the unio mystica. The unio mystica was a state of rapture, abnormal and temporary in earthly experience, in which the identity of the mystic was actually merged in the cosmic reason.
Accordingly, in July 1841, full of the Anglican difficulty on the question of Catholicity, I thus spoke of the Jerusalem scheme in an Article in the British Critic: "When our thoughts turn to the East, instead of recollecting that there are Christian Churches there, we leave it to the Russians to take care of the Greeks, and the French to take care of the Romans, and we content ourselves with erecting a Protestant Church at Jerusalem, or with helping the Jews to rebuild their Temple there, or with becoming the august protectors of Nestorians, Monophysites, and all the heretics we can hear of, or with forming a league with the Mussulman against Greeks and Romans together."
The Nestorians composed a large majority of the clergy and people: they were encouraged by the smile, and armed with the sword, of despotism; yet many of their weaker brethren were startled at the thought of breaking loose from the communion of the Christian world, and the blood of seven thousand seven hundred Monophysites, or Catholics, confirmed the uniformity of faith and discipline in the churches of Persia.
Not all monophysites have consciously adopted that basis; many, had they recognised its presence, would have rejected it. But it was present as a tendency. A tendency may be neutralised by counteracting causes; but it has its effect, and sooner or later it will produce positive results. The same truth holds of the other Christological systems.
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