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Updated: May 19, 2025
An undiscriminating craving for unity among the phenomena of psychic life prevents any recognition of the dual character of experience. Monophysitism is blind to the difference between person and nature because it places all psychic experiences on the one level. Determined to find unity in its ideal, it seeks an inappropriate unity, the mathematical unity, the unity that excludes plurality.
The Stoic was nominally a pantheist, but he seems to have oscillated between a spiritual and a materialist explanation of the universal being. The monist system that prepared the soil for monophysitism and constantly fostered its growth was Neo-Platonism.
Similarly monophysitism had to try to explain those facts of Christ's life which on the face of the Gospel narrative are human and normal. The explanation offered is essentially the same in both systems. The monist asserts that the world exists only in the mind of the thinker. It is an illusion of the senses.
A docetic interpretation of the human nature entails a docetic view of redemption. Monophysitism, as we have seen, casts doubts upon the reality of the sufferings and humanity of Christ; in so doing it compromises the work He accomplished. Atonement ceases to be a cosmic transaction completed on Calvary, and becomes a subjective process.
It was a semi-pagan theosophy, a product of Greek and oriental, as well as of purely Christian speculation; therefore it was anathema to the orthodox. We propose to begin the study of the antecedents of monophysitism by examining those of a Christian or semi-Christian character.
Harnack, "History of Dogma," vol. iv. chap. ii. p. 160. The distinctive doctrine of monophysitism, that from which the name of the heresy is taken, is the assertion that there is but one nature, the divine nature, in Christ. There existed some difference of opinion among the monophysites as to whether any degree of reality might be ascribed to the human nature.
The monophysite would modify his opinions and approach the catholic position on other doctrinal points, but never on this. He might be persuaded to admit that Christ's body and "animal soul" were real and human, but to the consubstantiality of Christ's mind with man's he would not subscribe. The Apollinarian strain in monophysitism was persistent.
This doctrine was not part of the official monophysite creed; but, as pointed out in the previous chapter, monophysitism was a lineal descendant of docetism, and always showed traces of its lineage. The saying that, "Christ brought His body from heaven," was commonly attributed to Eutyches.
Where this truth is not recognised, there arises inevitably the tendency to assert that Christ had and must have had but one uniform level of experience, and that assertion is the essence of monophysitism. Bergson's psychology throws further light on a central doctrine of catholic Christology.
We leave here the subject of the influence of other heresies on monophysitism, and proceed to exhibit its affinities with non-Christian thought. At Alexandria, the home of the heresy, two systems of philosophy, the Aristotelian and the Neo-Platonist, were strongly represented.
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