Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 19, 2025
The incarnation was not the addition of a fourth divine being to the trinity. The essence of the godhead remained complete, unchanged and impassible; while the hypostatic union of God and man in Christ made possible the assumption of a passible nature by the person of the Son of God. It is in place here to point out the somewhat intimate connection that existed between monophysitism and Islam.
Contemplation and self-hypnotism were widely practised. In ecstasy the mystic found a foretaste of that blissful loss of being, which is the goal and crown of philosophic thought. When we compare monophysitism with the system of Plotinus, several points of resemblance appear. There is first the impersonal character of the deity.
They further suggest that Neo-Platonism was the connecting link. Such in fact it was. Monophysitism, we might almost say, was Neo-Platonism in Christian dress. The ethos of the two systems is the same, and the doctrinal resemblance is marked. It was natural that the home of pagan mysticism should cradle the kindred system of heretical Christian mysticism.
It is scarcely possible to realise the present existence of a human Christ, unless the fact of His actual human existence in the first century of our era be grasped. If He had but one nature on earth, He has but one nature now in heaven. If the historic Christ was monophysite, so also is the Christ to whom we pray. In this consequence consists the seriousness of modern monophysitism.
Thus Greek philosophy in Aristotle attained that spiritual monotheism which supplied the foundation for the edifice of Christian doctrine. The effect of Aristotle's teaching was felt by all the ecclesiastical parties in the fifth century. As we shall see in a later chapter, some of the subsidiary elements of his philosophy are reflected in monophysitism.
The essential doctrine of monophysitism is the assertion of the absolute numerical unity of the person of Christ. It carries to extremes its denial of the dual personality maintained by the Nestorians. All vestiges of duality were banished from His being; there were not two persons: there were not even two natures. There was in Christ only the one nature of God the Word.
Monophysitism was a Christological heresy of the fifth century. It was condemned by the church in the middle of that century at the council of Chalcedon. Surviving its condemnation it flourished in the East for several centuries. Its adherents formed themselves into a powerful church with orders and succession of their own.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking