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Updated: May 19, 2025
Whether Sabellianism made the heretics monophysites, or monophysitism made them Sabellians, we need not inquire. The two creeds are bound up in the same bundle by the tie of monism. The relation of the Son to the Father and the relation of the Son to humanity are vitally connected. Misconception of the one relation entails misconception of the other.
His ardent but unbalanced utterances bequeathed to the Church a legacy of strife. His writings, particularly the earlier ones, furnished the monophysites with an armoury of weapons. His teaching could not with justice be styled docetic or Apollinarian, but its mystic tone was so pronounced that it proved a propaedeutic for monophysitism.
He confuses person and nature. Deep-seated and superficial states of soul are all one to him. He does not see the duality in the being of his fellow-men; so he cannot see it in the ideal man. This is a consequence of monophysitism which has not attracted the attention of theologians, and which the monophysite himself did not intend.
The Christian enterprise is not merely to believe in the divine, but to believe in the divine manifested in the human. There are two divergent, almost opposing, schools of sacramental teaching, both of which have inherited the spirit of monophysitism. Both are instances of sacramental monism.
A man's convictions are settled for him partly by acceptance, partly by rejection of what tradition offers or his mind evolves. The mass mind works similarly. It accepts and rejects, approves and disallows. The stabilisation of a body of mass opinions, such as a heresy, is thus determined by opposite forces. It was so with monophysitism.
The different formulae represented attitudes of mind fundamentally opposed. No peace between catholic and monophysite was possible. They had conflicting conceptions of ultimate truth. We mentioned above the two other chief Christological systems, the Nestorian and the catholic. No analysis of monophysitism which omitted a reference to these systems would be complete.
Intellectualism and mysticism are closely allied; the two are complementary; they are as mutually dependent as are head and heart. It is not then surprising that monophysitism should possess the characteristics of both these schools of thought.
He assumed human nature in its entirety, thought, will, feeling and body; therefore not one of those elements of human nature lies outside the scope of redemption. Monophysitism excludes some or all of those elements from the being of the incarnate Christ, and by so doing deprives the corresponding elements in man's nature of their rightful share in the benefit of redemption.
The three persons, for him, were only aspects of the one indivisible deity. There are no distinct entities corresponding to the names of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Sabellianism is intimately associated with monism in all its phases. Monophysitism being essentially monist could not escape the taint.
It reappears in each succeeding age, in West as well as East. The structure of the human intellect is such that, whenever men begin to investigate the being of Christ, the tendency to regard Him as one-natured is present. The church of the fifth century exposed that doctrine; it was beyond her power to kill it. Monophysitism is in our midst undetected to-day.
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