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Updated: May 19, 2025
The metaphysical basis of monophysitism made this result inevitable. Extremes meet. Extreme spirituality readily passes into its opposite. It cuts the ground from under its own feet. It soars beyond its powers, and falls into the mire of materialism. The Stoics, for instance, contrived to be both pantheists and materialists.
Salvation, achieved at a definite moment of history and conferred on believers of subsequent generations, rests for its foundations on the objective assumption of human nature by a divine person. If the foundations be undermined, as monophysitism undermines them, the superstructure crumbles.
We simply assert the naturalness of His intellect and the true humanity of that element of His nature. To do otherwise, to claim omniscience for His human intellect is gross monophysitism. His knowledge was deeper, surer, more penetrating than ours, because the light of His divine intuition streamed through the veil of sense and illumined the lower phases of intelligence.
The second solution given to the cosmic problem is of special importance for our thesis. It had a direct influence on monophysitism, and may be regarded as supplying the metaphysical basis for that heresy. It represents an advance to a higher stage of thought, just as monophysitism, which depends on it, is an advance on Nestorianism, and has always been regarded as a more venial heresy.
This tendency to spiritualise everything is a phase of monophysitism. It results from losing sight of the person of the historic Christ, and resolving His assumption of human nature into the assumption of a title. Errors in sacramental teaching necessarily accompany misconceptions of the person of Christ.
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.
No heresy came merely as an abstract theory, but every one was a dramatic movement, an organisation, a camp, a deed and not merely a word. That made the struggle against it more difficult. Docetism, Nicolaism, Gnosticism, Chiliasm, Manichaism, Monatism, Monarchism, Monophysitism, Monotheletism, Arianism, Nestorianism every one of these terms means both a theory and a drama.
Personality was to the monophysites a terra incognita; and it was in large measure their devotion to Aristotle's system that made them deaf to the teaching of the catholic church. After this sketch of the Aristotelian features recognisable in monophysitism, we turn to the other great pagan philosophy that assisted in the shaping of the heresy.
Monophysitism was not a Trinitarian heresy, and the Catholic doctrine of the three persons in the godhead was the official creed of the heretical church. But their theologians refrained from laying emphasis upon the distinct personalities of Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Their sympathies were Sabellian to the core, and Sabellian heresies were constantly recurring within their communion.
By comparison the essential features, functions and properties of the specimen under examination are elucidated. It is by isolating the three germinal ideas of these three Christological systems and comparing them, that a full comprehension of monophysitism in all its stages, from seed to flower, is reached.
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