24 Witness of the Church to Christ's true Manhood. This reality and perfection of our Lord's Manhood has been not less jealously maintained by the Church than it is clearly asserted in the pages of Scripture. From the first the Church has taught that Jesus Christ is 'Perfect Man, of a reasonable Soul and Human Flesh subsisting m.' It is sometimes hinted that believers in our Saviour's Godhead must necessarily entertain some prejudice against those passages of Scripture which expressly assert the truth of His Manhood. It is presumed that such passages must be regarded by them as so many difficulties to be surmounted or evaded by a theory which is supposed to be conscious of their hostility to itself. Whereas, in truth, to a Catholic instinct, each declaration of Scripture, whatever be its apparent bearing, is welcome as being an unveiling of the Mind of God, and therefore as certainly reconcileable with other sides of truth, whether or no the method of such reconciliation be immediately obvious. As a matter of fact, our Lord's Humanity has been insisted upon by the great Church teachers of antiquity not less earnestly than His Godhead. They habitually argue that it belonged to His essential Truth to be in reality what He seemed to be. He seemed to be human; therefore He was Human ". Yet His Manhood, so they proceed to maintain, would have been fictitious, if any one faculty or element of human nature had been wanting to It. Therefore His Reasonable Soul was as essential as His Bodily Frame o. Without a Reasonable Soul His Humanity would have been but an animal existence P; and the intellectual side of man's nature would have been unredeemed q Nor did the Church in her collective capacity ever so insist on Christ's Godhead as to lose sight of the m Athanasian Creed. n St. Irenæus, Adv. Hær. v. I. 2 : εἰ δὲ μὴ ὢν ἄνθρωπος ἐφαίνετο ἄνθρωπος, οὔτε ὃ ἦν ἐπ ̓ ἀληθείας, ἔμεινε πνεῦμα Θεοῦ, ἐπεὶ ἀόρατον τὸ πνεῦμα, οὔτε ἀλή θειά τις ἦν ἐν αὐτῷ, οὐ γὰρ ἦν ἐκεῖνα ἅπερ ἐφαίνετο. Tert. De Carne Christi, cap. 5: Si caro cum passionibus ficta, et spiritus ergo cum virtutibus falsus. Quid dimidias mendacio Christum? Totus Veritas est. Maluit crede [non] nasci quam ex aliquâ parte mentiri, et quidem in Semet ipsum, ut carnem gestaret sine ossibus duram, sine musculis solidam, sine sanguine cruentam, sine tunicâ vestitam, sine fame esurientem, sine dentibus edentem, sine linguâ loquentem, ut phantasma auribus fuit sermo ejus per imaginem vocis.' St. Aug. De Div. Qu. 83. qu. 14: 'Si phantasma fuit corpus Christi, fefellit Christus, et si fefellit, Veritas non est. Est autem Veritas Christus. Non ergo phantasma fuit Corpus Ejus.' Docetism struck at the very basis of truth, by sanctioning Pyrrhonism. St. Iren. Adv. Hær. iv. 33. St. Aug. Ep. 187, ad Dardan. n. 4: Non est anima carni, vel animæ ipsi mens humana defuerit.' P St. Aug. De Div. Qu. 83, qu. 8o. n. I. 9 St. Cyr. Alex. De Inc. c. 15. Homo Perfectus, si vel Importance of this truth to the life of the Soul. 25 truth of His Perfect Manhood. Whether by the silent force of the belief of her children, or by her representative writers on behalf of the faith, or by the formal decisions of her councils, she has ever resisted the disposition to sacrifice the confession of Christ's created nature to that of His uncreated Godhead r. She kept at bay intellectual temptations and impulses which might have easily overmastered the mind of a merely human society. When Ebionites were abroad, she maintained against the Docetæ that our Saviour's body was not fictitious or apparitional. When the mutterings of that Humanitarian movement which culminated in the great scandal of Paulus of Samosata were distinctly audible, she asserted the truth of our Lord's Human Soul against Beryllus of Bostras. When Arianism had not as yet ceased to be formidable, she was not tempted by Apollinaris to admit that the Logos in Christ took the place of the rational element in man. While Nestorianism was still vigorous, she condemned the Monophysite formula which practically made Christ an unincarnate God: nor did she rest until the Monothelite echo of the more signal error had been silenced by her assertion of the reality of His Human Will. Nor is the Manhood of our Saviour prized by the Church only as a revealed dogma intellectually essential to the formal integrity of the Creed. Every believing Christian knows that it touches the very heart of his inner life. What becomes of the one Mediator between God and man, if the Manhood whereby He places Himself in contact with us men is but unreal and fictitious? What becomes of His Human Example, of His genuine Sympathy, of His agonizing and worldredeeming Death, of His plenary representation of our race in heaven, of the recreative virtue of His Sacraments, of the 'touch of nature' which makes Him, most holy as He is, in very deed kin with us? All is forthwith uncertain, evanescent, unreal. If Christ be not truly Man, the chasm which parted earth and heaven has not been bridged over. God, as before the Incarnation, is still awful, remote, inaccessible. Tertullian's It may suffice to quote the language of the Council of Chalcedon, A.D. 451: τέλειον τὸν αὐτὸν ἐν Θεότητι καὶ τέλειον τὸν αὐτὸν ἐν ἀνθρωπότητι, Θεὸν ἀληθῶς καὶ ἄνθρωπον ἀληθῶς, τὸν αὐτὸν ἐκ ψυχῆς λογικῆς καὶ σώματος, ὁμοούσιον τῷ Πατρὶ κατὰ τὴν Θεότητα καὶ ὁμοούσιον τὸν αὐτὸν ἡμῖν κατὰ τὴν ἀνθρωπότητα, κατὰ πάντα ὅμοιον ἡμῖν χωρὶς ἁμαρτίας. Routh. Οpusc. ii. 78. When these words were spoken, the cycle of possible controversy on the subject was complete. The Monothelite question had virtually been settled by anticipation. Socr. H. E. iii. 7: ěμfvxov elvai тdv évaν0рwπhσavтa. Syn. Bost. anno 244. レ 26 Jesus Christ is God in no equivocal sense. inference is no exaggeration: Cum mendacium deprehenditur Christi Caro. . . . omnia quæ per Carnem Christi gesta sunt, mendacio gesta sunt. . . . . Eversum est totum Dei opus.' Or, as St. Cyril of Jerusalem tersely presses the solemn argument: εἰ φάντασμα ἦν ἡ ἐνανθρώπησις, φάντασμα καὶ ἡ σωτηρία. 2. Let it be observed, on the other hand, that the Nicene' assertion of our Blessed Lord's Divinity does not involve any tacit mutilation or degradation of the idea conveyed by the sacred Name of God. When Jesus Christ is said by His Church to be God, that word is used in its natural, its absolute, its incommunicable sense. This must be constantly borne in mind, if we would escape from equivocations which might again and again obscure the true point before us. For Arianism will confess Christ's Divinity, if, when it terms Him God, it may really mean that He is only a being of an inferior and created nature. Socinianism will confess Christ's Divinity, if this confession involves nothing more emphatic than an acknowledgement of the fact that certain moral features of God's character shone forth from the Human Life of Christ with an absolutely unrivalled splendour. Pantheism will confess Christ's Divinity, but then it is a Divinity which He must share with the universe. Christ may well be divine, when all is divine, although Pantheism too may admit that Christ is divine in a higher sense than any other man, because He has more clearly recognised or exhibited 'the eternal oneness of the finite and the Infinite, of God and humanity.' The coarsest forms of unbelief will confess our Lord's Divinity, if they may proceed to add, by way of explanation, that such language is but the echo of an apotheosis, informally decreed to the prophet of Nazareth by the fervid but uncritical enthusiasm of His Church. No the Divinity of Jesus Christ is not to be thus emptied of its most solemn and true significance. It is no mere titular distinction, such as the hollow or unthinking flattery of a multitude might yield to a political chief, or to a distinguished philanthropist. Indeed Jesus Christ Himself, by His own teaching, had made such an apotheosis of Himself morally impossible. He had, as no teacher before Him, raised, expanded, spiritualized man's idea of the Life and Nature of the Great Creator. Baur has remarked that this higher exhibition of the solitary and incommunicable Life of God is nowhere so apparent as in that very Gospel the special object of which is to t Adv. Marc. iii. 8. u Catech. iv. 9. Christ is not the god of an Apotheosis. 27 exhibit Christ Himself as the eternal Word made Flesh*. Indeed God was too vividly felt to be a living Presence by the early Christians, to be transformed by them upon occasion into 1 a decoration which might wreathe the brow of any, though it were the highest human virtue. In heathendom this was naturally otherwise. Yet animal indulgence and intellectual scepticism must have killed out the sense of primary truths which nature and conscience had originally taught, before imperial Rome could feel no difficulty in decreeing temples and altars to such samples of our race as were not a few of the men who successively filled the throne of the Cæsarsy. The Church, with her eye upon the King Eternal, Immortal, Invisiblez, could never have raised Jesus to the full honours of Divinity, had He been merely Man. And Christianity from the first has proclaimed herself, not the authoress of an apotheosis, but the child and the product of an Incarnation. She could not have been both. Speaking historically, an apotheosis belongs strictly to the Greek world; while a mimicry of the Incarnation is characteristically oriental. Speaking philosophically, the god of an apotheosis is a creation of human thought or of human fancy; the God of an incarnation is presupposed as an objectively existing Being, Who manifests Himself by it in the sphere of sense. Speaking religiously, belief in an apotheosis must be fatal to the primary movements of piety towards its object, whenever men are capable of earnest and honest reflection; while it is incontestable that the doctrine of an incarnation stimulates piety in a degree precisely proportioned to the sincerity of the faith which welcomes it. Thus the ideas of an apotheosis and an incarnation stand towards each other in historical, philosophical, and religious contrast. Need I add that religiously, philosophically, and historically, Christianity is linked to the one, and is simply incompatible with the other? * Vorlesungen über N. T. Theologie, p. 354. On this subject see Döllinger, Heidenthum und Judenthum, bk. viii. pt. 2. § 2 (apotheosis). The city of Cyzicus was deprived of its freedom for being unwilling to worship Augustus (Tac. Ann. iv. 36). Thrasea Pætus was held guilty of treason for refusing to believe in the deification of Poppaa (Tac. Ann. xvi. 22). Caligula insisted on being worshipped as a god during {{ his lifetime (Suetonius, Caius, xxi. 22). On the number of cattle sacrificed to Domitian, see Pliny, Panegyr. xi. The worship of Antinous, who had lived on terms of criminal intercourse with Hadrian, was earnestly promoted by that Emperor. Döllinger reckons fifty-three apotheoses between that of Cæsar and that of Diocletian, fifteen of which were those of ladies belonging to the Imperial family. z 1 Tim. i. 17. 28 Christ is not God in No the Divinity of Jesus is not such divinity as Pantheism might ascribe to Him. In the belief of the Church Jesus stands alone among the sons of men as He of Whom it can be said without impiety, that He is not merely divine, but God. Such a restriction in favour of a Single Personality, contradicts the very vital principle of Pantheistic thought. Schelling appropriately contends that the Indians with their many incarnations shew more intelligence respecting the real relations of God and the world than is implied by the doctrine of a solitary incarnation, as taught in the Creed of Christendom. Upon Pantheistic grounds, this is perfectly reasonable; although it might be added that any limited number of incarnations, however considerable, would only approximate to the real demands of the theory which teaches that God is incarnate in everything. But then, such divinity as Pantheism can ascribe to Christ is, in point of fact, no divinity at all. When God is nature, and nature is God, everything indeed is divine, but also nothing is Divine; and Christ shares this phantomdivinity with the universe, nay with the agencies of moral evil itself. In truth, our God does not exist in the apprehension of Pantheistic thinkers; since, when such truths as creation and personality are denied, the very idea of God is fundamentally sapped, and although the prevailing belief of mankind may still be humoured by a discreet retention of its conventional language, the broad practical result is in reality neither more nor less than Atheism. You may indeed remind me of an ingenious distinction, by which it is suggested that the idea of God is not thus sacrificed in Pantheistic systems, and on the ground that although God and the universe are substantially identical, they are not logically so. Logically speaking, then, you proceed to distinguish between God and the universe. You look out upon the universe, and you arrive at the idea of God by a double process, by a process of abstraction, and by a process of synthesis. In the visible world you come into sensible contact with the finite, the contingent, the relative, the imperfect, the individual. Then, by a necessary operation of your reason, you disengage from these ideas their correlatives; you ascend to a contemplation of infinity, of necessity, of the absolute, the perfect, the universal. Here abstraction has done its work, and synthesis begins. By synthesis you combine the general ideas which have been previously reached through abstraction. These general ideas are made to converge in your |