III. At the risk of partial repetition, but for the sake of

clearness, let us here pause to make two observations respecting that complete assertion of the Divinity of our Lord for which His Church is responsible at the bar of human opinion.
1. The Catholic doctrine, then, of Christ’s Divinity in no degree interferes with or overshadows the complemental truth of His perfect Manhood. It is perhaps natural that a greater emphasis should be laid upon the higher truth which could be apprehended only by faith than on the lower one which, during the years of our Lord’s earthly Life, was patent to the senses of men. And Holy Scripture might antecedently be supposed to take for granted the reality of Christ’s Manhood, on the ground of there being no adequate occasion for full, precise, and reiterated assertions of so obvious a fact. But nothing is more remarkable in Scripture than its provision for the moral and intellectual needs of ages far removed from those which are traversed by the books included in the Sacred
considered.” Mahomed had done so: Rodwell’s Koran, p. 541. On the ‘precarious’ existence of God the Son, according to the Arian hypothesis, see Waterland’s Farther Vindication of Christ’s Divinity, ch. iii. sect. 19. ® See Lect. VIL. [ LECT.
Reality of our Lord’s Humanity. 19
Canon. In the present instance, by a series of incidental although most significant statements, the Gospels guard us with nothing less than an exhaustive precaution against the fictious of a Docetic or of an Apollinarian Christ. We are told that the Eternal Word σὰρξ ἐγένετο X, that He took human nature upon Him in its reality and completeness¥. The Gospel narrative, after the pattern of His own words in the text, exhibits Jesus as the Son of Man, while yet it draws us on by an irresistible attraction to contemplate that Higher Nature which was the seat of His eternal Personality. The superhuman character of some most important details of the Gospel history does not disturb the broad scope of that history as being the record of a Human Life, with Its physical and mental affinities to our own daily experience.
The great Subject of the Gospel narratives has a true human Body. He is conceived in the womb of a human Mother% He is by her brought forth into the world®; He is fed at her breast during infancy>, As an Infant, He is made to undergo the painful rite of circumcision®. He is a Babe in swaddling- clothes lying in a manger¢4. He is nursed in the arms of the aged Simeon®. His bodily growth is traced up to His attaining the age of twelve ἢ and from that point to manhood 8. His presence at the marriage-feast in Canah, at the great entertainment in the house of Levii, and at the table of Simon the Pharisee*; the supper which He shared at Bethany with the friend whom He had raised from the grave], the Paschal festival which He desired so earnestly to eat before He suf-
x St. John i. 14. Cf. Meyer in loc. for a refutation of Zeller’s attempt to limit σὰρξ in this passage to the bodily organism, as exclusive of the anima rationalis.
y St. John viii. 40; 1 Tim. ii. 5.
5 συλλήψῃ ἐν γαστρὶ, St. Luke i, 31. πρὸ τοῦ συλληφθῆναι αὑτὸν ἐν τῇ κοιλίᾳ, Ibid. ii, 21. εὐρέθη ἐν γαστρὶ ἔχουσα ἐκ Πνεύματός “ΑὙίου, St. Matt. 1. 18. τὸ γὰρ ἐν αὐτῇ γεννηθὲν ἐκ Πνεύματός ἐστιν ᾿Αγίου, Ibid. i, 20; Isa. vii. 14.
® St. Matt. i. 25; St. Luke ii. 7, 11; Gal. iv. 4: ἐξαπέστειλεν ὁ Θεὸς τὸν Tidy αὑτοῦ, γενόμενον éx γυναικός.
> St. Luke xi. 27: μάστοι ods ἐθήλασας. ° Ibid. ii, 21.
ἃ Tbid. ii. 12: Βρέφος ἐσπαργανωμένον, κείμενον ἐν τῇ φάτνῃ.
© Thid, ii. 28: καὶ αὐτὸς ἐδέξατο αὐτὸ εἰς τὰς ἀγκάλας αὑτοῦ.
Thid. ii. 40: τὸ δὲ παιδίον ηὔξανε.
8 Thid. ii. 52: Ἰησοῦς mpoéxomre .. . ἡλικίᾳ,
h St. John ii. 2.
1 St. Luke v. 29: δοχὴν μεγάλην.
Κ St. Luke vii. 36. 1 St. John xii. 2
17 Ο 2
20 Witness of Scripture to Christ's LTuman Body.
fered™, the bread and fish of which He partook before the eyes of His disciples in the early dawn on the shore of the Lake of Galilee, even after His Resurrection ",—are witnesses that He came, like one of ourselves, ‘eating and drinking °%’ When He is recorded to have taken no food during the forty days of the Temptation, this implies the contrast presented by His ordinary habitP. Indeed, He seemed to the men of His day much more dependent on the physical supports of life than the great ascetic who had preceded Hima. He knew, by experience, what are the pangs of hunger, after the forty days’ fast in the wilderness’, and in a lesser degree, as may be supposed, when walking into Jerusalem on the Monday before His Passion*, The profound spiritual sense of His redemptive cry, ‘I thirst,’ uttered while He was hanging on the Cross, is not obscured, when its primary literal meaning, that while dying He actually endured that wellnigh sharpest form of bodily suffering, is explicitly recognisedt. His deep sleep on the Sea of Galilee in a little bark which the waves threatened momentarily to engulf¥, and His sitting down at the well of Jacob, through great exhaustion produced by a long journey on foot from Judea *, proved that He was subject at times to the depression of extreme fatigue. And, not to dwell at length upon those particular references to the several parts of His bodily frame which occur in Holy Scripture Y, it is obvious to note that the evangelical account of His physical Sufferings, of His Death%, of His Burial®, and of the Wounds in His Hands and Feet and Side after His Resur-
τὰ St. Luke xxii. 8, 15. » St. John xxi. 12, 13.
ο St. Luke vii, 34: ἐλήλυθεν 6 Υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου ἐσθίων καὶ πίνων,
P Ibid. iv. 2: οὐκ ἔφαγεν οὐδὲν ἐν ταῖς ἡμέραις ἐκείναις.
4 Ibid. vii. 34: ἰδοὺ, ἄνθρωπος φάγος καὶ οἰνοπότηΞ.
τ St. Matt. iv. a: ὕστερον ἐπείνασε.
8 Ibid. xxi. 18: ἐπανάγων eis τὴν πόλιν, ἐπείνασε.
t St. John xix. 28: διψῶ.
u St. Matt. vill. 24: αὐτὸς δὲ ἐκάθευδε.
χ St.John iv. 6: ὁ οὖν ᾿Ιησοῦς κεκοπιακὼς ἐκ τῆς ὁδοιπορίας ἐκαθέζετο οὕτως ἐπὶ τῇ πηγῇ.
Υ τὴν κεφαλὴν, St. Luke vii. 46; St. Matt. xxvii. 29, 30; St. John xix. 30; τοὺς πόδας, St. Luke vii. 38; τὰς χεῖρας, St. Luke xxiv. 40; τῷ δακ- τύλῳ, St. John viii. 6; τὰ σκέλη, St. John xix. 33; τὰ γόνατα, St. Luke xxli. 41; τὴν πλευρὰν, St. John xix. 34; τὸ σῶμα, St. Luke xxii. 19, &e.
* St. Luke xxii. 44, &c., xxiii. ; St. Matt. xxvi., xxvii.; St. Mark xiv. 32, seq., XV.
« St.John xix. 39, 40: ἔλαβον οὖν τὸ σῶμα Tod Ἰησοῦ καὶ ἔδησαν αὐτὸ ὀθονίοις μετὰ τῶν ἀρωμάτων : cf. ver. 42.
[ LECT.
Witness of Scripture to Christ’s Human Soul. 21
rection», are so many emphatic attestations to the fact of His true and full participation in the material side of our common nature.
Equally explicit and vivid is the witness which Scripture affords to the true Human Soul of our Blessed Lord. Its general movements are not less spontaneous, nor do Its affections flow less freely, because no sinful impulse finds a place in It, and each pulse of Its moral and mental Life is in conscious harmony with, and subjection to, an all-holy Will. Jesus rejoices in spirit on hearing of the spread of the kingdom of heaven among the simple and the poor4: He beholds the young ruler, and forth- with loves hime®. He loves Martha and her sister and Lazarus with a common, yet, as seems to be implied, with a discriminating affection f. His Eye on one occasion betrays a sudden movement of deliberate anger at the hardness of heart which could steel itself against truth by maintaining a dogged silences. The scattered and fainting multitude melts Him to compassion}: He sheds tears of sorrow at the grave of Lazarusi, and at the sight of the city which has rejected His Love*. In contem- plating His approaching Passion! and the ingratitude of the traitor-Apostle™, His Soul is shaken by a vehement agitation which He does not conceal from His disciples. In the garden of Gethsemane He wills to enter into an agony of amazement and dejection. His mental sufferings are so keen and piercing that His tender frame gives way beneath the trial, and He sheds
> St. John xx. 27; St. Luke xxiv. 39: ἴδετε τὰς χεῖράς μου καὶ τοὺς πόδας μου, ὅτι αὐτὸς ἐγώ εἰμι’ ψηλαφήσατέ με καὶ ἴδετε" ὅτι πνεῦμα σάρκα καὶ ὀστέα οὐκ ἔχει καθὼς ἐμὲ θεωρεῖτε ἔχοντα.
οα St. Pet. iii. 18: θανατωθεὶς μὲν σαρκὶ, ζωοποιηθεὶς δὲ πνεύματι ἐν ᾧ καὶ τοῖς ἐν φυλακῇ πνεύμασιν πορευθεὶς ἐκήρυξεν. The τῷ before πνεύματι in the Textus Receptus being only an insertion by a copyist, πνεῦμα here means our Lord’s Human Soul. The clause ἐν 6... ἐκήρυξεν forbids here the sense of πνεῦμα at Rom. i, 3. Cf. p. 317, note *; p. 334, note 5.
ἃ St. Luke x. 21: ἠγαλλιάσατο τῷ πνεύματι.
ὁ St. Mark x. 21: 6 δὲ Ἰησοῦς ἐμβλέψας αὐτῷ ἠγάπησεν αὐτόν.
1 St. Mark xi. 5.
8 St. Mark iii. 5: περιβλεψάμενος αὐτοὺς μετ᾽ ὀργῆς, συλλυπούμενος ἐπὶ TH πωρώσει τῆς καρδίας αὐτῶν.
h St. Matt. ix. 36: ἐσπλαγχνίσθη περὶ αὐτῶν.
1 St. John xi. 33-35: Ἰησοῦς οὖν ὡς εἶδεν αὐτὴν κλαίουσαν καὶ τοὺς συνελ" θόντας αὐτῇ ᾿Ιουδαίους κλαίοντας, ἐνεβριμήσατο τῷ πνεύματι, καὶ ἐτάραξεν ἑαυτόν... ᾿Ἐδάκρυσεν ὃ ᾿Ιησοῦς.
K St. Luke xix. 41: Ἰδὼν τὴν πόλιν, ἔκλαυσεν ἐπ᾽ αὐτῇ.
1 St. John xii. 27: νῦν ἡ ψυχή μου τετάρακται.
m Ibid. xiii, 21: ὁ Ἰησοῦς ἐταράχθη τῷ πνεύματι καὶ ἐμαρτύρησε.
1]
22 Reality of Christ’s Manhood not
His Blood before they nail Him to the Cross". His Humaa Will consciously submits itself to a Higher Will 9, and He learns obedience by the discipline of pain?. He carries His dependence still further, He is habitually subject to His parents4; He recog- nises the fiscal regulations of a pagan statet; He places Himself in the hands of His enemies*; He is crucified through weak- nesst. If an Apostle teaches that all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in Him 4, an Evangelist records that He increases in wisdom as He increases in stature *. Conform- ably with these representations, we find Him as Man expressing creaturely dependence upon God by prayer. He rises up a great while before day at Capernaum, and departs into a solitary place, that He may pass the hours in uninterrupted devotionY. He makes intercession for His whole redeemed Church in the Paschal supper-room2; He offers to Heaven strong crying with tears in Gethsemane®; He asks pardon for His Jewish and Gentile murderers at the very moment of His Crucifixion»; He resigns His departing Spirit into His Father’s Hands 9,
Thus, as one Apostle teaches, He took a Body of Flesh 4, and His whole Humanity both of Soul and Body shared in the sin- less infirmities which belong to our common nature®. To deny
Ὁ St. Mark xiv. 33: ἤρξατο ἐκθαμβεῖσθαι καὶ ἀδημονεῖν, καὶ λέγει αὐτοῖς, “Περίλυπός ἐστιν ἣ ψυχή μου ἕως θανάτου. St. Luke xxii. 44: γενόμενος ἐν ἀγωνίᾳ ἐκτενέστερον προσηύχετο, ἐγένετο δὲ ὁ ἱδρῶς αὐτοῦ ὡσεὶ θρόμβοι αἵ- ματος καταβαίνοντες ἐπὶ τὴν γῆν. Cf. Heb. v. 7.
© St. Luke xxii. 42: μὴ τὸ θέλημά μου, ἀλλὰ τὸ σὸν γενέσθω.
P Heb. v. 8: ἔμαθεν ap’ ὧν ἔπαθε τὴν ὑπακοήν. Of. especially St. Matt. xxvii. 46. @ St. Luke ii. 51: ἦν ὑποτασσόμενος αὐτοῖς.
τ St. Matt. xxii. 21. For our Lord’s payment of the Temple tribute, cf, Tbid. xvii. 25, 27.
8 Ibid, xvii. 22; St. John x. 18: οὐδεὶς αἴρει αὐτὴν [sc. τὴν ψυχήν μου ἀπ᾿ ἐμοῦ, GAN ἐγὼ τίθημι αὐτὴν ἀπ᾽ ἐμαυτοῦ,
ὁ 2 ,Gor,:xiii, 4: ἐσταυρώθη ἐξ ἀσθενείας.
® Col. ii. 3: ἐν ᾧ εἰσι πάντες οἱ θησαυροὶ τῆς σοφίας καὶ τῆς γνώσεως ἀπόκρυφοι.
x St. Luke ii. 40: ἐκραταιοῦτο πνεύματι. ver. 52: προέκοπτε σοφίᾳ. See Lect. VIII. Υ St. Mark i. 35.
5 St. John xvii. 1: ἐπῆρε τοὺς ; ὀφθαλμοὺς αὐτοῦ εἰς τὸν οὐρανὸν, καὶ εἶπε.
® Heb. v. 7: ἐν ταῖς ἡμέραις τῆς σαρκὸς αὐτοῦ, δεήσεις τε καὶ ἱκετηρίας...» Μετὰ κραυγῆς ἰσχυρᾶς καὶ δακρύων προσενέγκας. St. Luke xxii. 42 -44.
Ὁ St. Luke xxiii. 34: πάτερ, ἄφες αὐτοῖς" οὐ γὰρ οἴδασι τί ποιοῦσι. That this prayer referred to the Jews, as well as the Roman soldiers, i is clear from Acts 111, 17. ο St. Luke xxiii. 46.
4 Col. i. 22: σώματι τῆς σαρκός.
9 Heb. ii. 11: 8 τε γὰρ ἁγιάζων καὶ of ἁγιαζόμενοι ἐξ ἑνὸς πάντες. Ver. 143 μετέσχε σαρκὸς καὶ αἵματος. Ver. 17: Speirs κατὰ πάντα τοῖς ἀδελφοῖς ὁμοιω- θῆναι. Ibid. iv. 15: πεπειρασμένον δὲ κατὰ πάντα κάθ᾽ ὁμοιότητα.
[ LECT.
Jorfeted by Its prerogative graces. 23
this fundamental truth, ‘that Jesus Christ is come in the Flesh,’ is, in the judgment of another Apostle, the mark of the Deceiver, of the Antichristf. Nor do the prerogatives of our Lord’s Manhood destroy Its perfection and reality, although they do undoubtedly invest It with a robe of mystery, which Faith must acknowledge, but which she cannot hope to penetrate. Christ’s Manhood is not unreal because It is impersonal ; because in Him the place of any created individuality at the root of thought and feeling and will is supplied by the Person of the Eternal Word, Who has wrapped around His Being a created Nature through which, in its unmutilated perfection, He acts upon humankind 8. Christ’s Manhood is not unreal, because It is sinless; because the entail of any taint of transmitted sin is in Him cut off by a supernatural birth of a Virgin Mother; and because His whole life of thought, feeling, will, and action is in unfaltering harmony with the law of absolute Truth». Nor is the reality of His Manhood impaired by any exceptional beauty whether of out- ward form or of mental endowment, such as might become One ‘fairer than the children of meni,’ and taking precedence of them in all things*; since in Him our nature does but resume
τα St. John iv. 2: πᾶν πνεῦμα ὃ ὁμολογεῖ Ἰησοῦν Χριστὸν ἐν σαρκὶ ἐληλυ- θότα, ἐκ τοῦ Θεοῦ ἐστι. 2 ὅδ. John-7: πολλοὶ πλάνοι εἰσῆλθον εἰς τὸν κόσμον, οἱ μὴ ὁμολογοῦντες ᾿Ιησοῦν Χριστὸν ἐρχόμενον ἐν σαρκί οὗτος ἐστιν ὃ πλάνος καὶ ὁ ᾽᾿Αντίχριστος.
& The ἀνυποστασία of our Lord’s Humanity is a result of the Hypostatic Union. To deny it is to assert that there are Two Persons in Christ, or else it is to deny that He is more that Man. Compare Hooker, Eccl. Pol. v. 52. 3, who appeals against Nestorius to Heb. ii. 16, οὐ yap δήπου ἀγγέλων ἐπι- λαμβάνεται, ἀλλὰ σπέρματος ᾿Αβραὰμ ἐπιλαμβάνεται At His Incarnation the Eternal Word took on Him Human Nature, not a Human Personality. Luther appears to have denied the Impersonality of our Lord’s Manhood. But see Dorner, Person Christi, Bd. ii. p. 540.
h The Sinlessness of our Lord’s Manhood is implied in St. Luke i. 35. Thus He is ὃν 6 Πατὴρ ἡγίασε καὶ ἀπέστειλεν εἰς τὸν κόσμον, St. John x. 36; and He could challenge His enemies to convict Him of sin, St. John viii. 46. In St. Mark x. 18, St. Luke xviii. 19, He is not denying that He is good; but He insists that none should call Him so who did not believe Him to be God. St. Paul describes Him as τὸν μὴ γνόντα ἁμαρτίαν, 2 Cor. v. 21; and Christ is expressly said to be χωρὶς ἁμαρτίας, Heb. iv. 15; ὕσιος, ἄκακος, ἀμίαντος, κεχωρισμένος ἀπὸ τῶν ἁμαρτωλῶν, Heb. vii. 26; ἀμνὸς ἄμωμος καὶ ἄσπιλος, I St. Pet. i. 19; ὁ ἅγιος καὶ δίκαιος, Acts iii. 14. Still more em- phatically we are told that ἁμαρτία ἐν αὐτῷ οὐκ ἔστι, 1 St. John iii. 5; while the same truth is indirectly taught, when St. Paul speaks of our Lord as sent ἐν ὁμοιώματι σαρκὺς ἁμαρτίας, Rom. viii. 3. Mr. F. W. Newman does justice to the significance of a Sinless Manhood, although, unhappily, he disbelieves in It; Phases of Faith, p. 141, sqq. Cf. Lect IV. p. 167.
ΕΒ, xlv. 3. K Col. i. 18: ἐν πᾶσι πρωτεύων.
17
24 Witness of the Church to Christ’s true Manhood.
its true and typical excellence as the crowning glory of the visible creation of God}.
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. It is sometimes hinted that believers in our Saviour’s Godhead must necessarily enter- tain 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 hostilty 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,
1 Ps. viii. 6-8. Cp. Heb. ii. 6-10.
m Thus ‘Examination of Bampton Lectures,’ p. 250. The writer thinks that our Lord’s words in St. Luke iv. 18, 19; St. Matt. xx. 23; xxiii. 53; St. John xiv. 28, etc., are as little to be reconciled with our Lord’s true Godhead, as are the passages in which He claims to have existed before Abraham or to be the Judge of all men, with true human goodness, if, after all, He be only Man. (See Lect. IV.) Yet surely a discussion of the pro- perties or liabilities of the human body, which should take no account of the endowments of the human mind, does not necessarily deny their exist- ence. Nor is it to be placed on the same moral level with the language of an adventurer, who should claim rights by hinting that he possessed powers and accomplishments, to which nothing corresponded in sober fact.
π $+. Irenzeus, Adv. Heer. v. 1. 2: εἰ δὲ μὴ ὧν ἄνθρωπος ἐφαίνετο ἄνθρωπος, οὔτε ὃ ἣν ἐπ᾽ ἀληθείας, ἔμεινε πνεῦμα Θεοῦ, ἐπεὶ ἀόρατον τὸ πνεῦμα, οὔτε ἀλή- θεία τις ἦν ἐν αὐτῷ, οὐ γὰρ ἦν ἐκεῖνα ἅπερ ἐφαίνετο. Tert. De Carne Christi, cap. 5: ‘Sicaro cum passionibus ficta, et spiritus ergo cum virtutibus falsus. Quid dimidias mendacio Christum? Totus Veritas est. Maluit crede [non] nasci quam ex aliqua parte mentiri, et quidem in Semet ipsum, ut carnem gestaret sine ossibus duram, sine musculis solidam, sine sanguine cruentam, sine tunica vestitam, sine fame esurientem, sine dentibus edentem, sine lingua 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.
[ LECT.
Importance of this truth to the life of the soul, 25
would have been fictitious, if any one faculty or element of human nature had been wanting to It. Therefore His Reason- able Soul was as essential as His Bodily Frame®. Without a Reasonable Soul His Humanity would have been but an animal existenceP; and the intellectual side of man’s nature would have been unredeemed 4. Nor did the Church in her collective ca- pacity ever so insist on Christ’s Godhead as to lose sight of the 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. She kept at bay intellectual temptations and impulses which . might Jhave easily overmastered the mind of a merely human society. When Ebionites were abroad, she maintained against the Docete that our Saviour’s body was not fictitious or appari- tional. 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 Bostra’, 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 prac- tically 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
Non ergo phantasma fuit Corpus Ejus.” Docetism struck at the very basis of truth, by sanctioning Pyrrhonism. St. Iren. Adv. Her. iv. 33. ©
ο St. Aug. Ep. 187, ad Dardan. n. 4: ‘Non est Homo Perfectus, si vel anima carni, vel anime ipsi mens humana defuerit.’ Confess, vii. ὁ. 19.
' P St. Aug. De Div. Qu. 83, qu. 80. n, I.
4 St. Cyr. Alex. De Inc. 6. 15.
τ 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 ὕμοιον ἡμῖν χωρὶς ἁμαρτίας. Routh, Opuse. 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.
5 Socr. H. ΕΝ iii. 7: ἔμψυχον εἶναι τὸν ἐνανμθρωπήσαντα. Syn. Bost. anno 244.
1)
26 Fesus Christ ts God in no equivocal sense.
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 world- redeeming 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 inference is no exaggeration: ‘Cum mendacium deprehenditur Christi Caro.... omnia que per Carnem Christi gesta sunt, mendacio gesta sunt..... Eversum est totum Dei opust.’ Or, as St. Cyril of Jerusalem tersely presses the solemn argument: εἰ φάντασμα ἦν ἡ ἐνανθρώπησις, φάντασμα καὶ ἡ σωτηρία ἃ,
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 con- fession involves nothing more emphatic than an acknowledge- ment 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 uni- verse. 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 recog- nised 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
t Adv. Mare, iii, 8, ἃ Catech., iv. 7 LECT.
Christ ἐς not the god of an Apotheosis. 27
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 mul- titude 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, ex- panded, spiritualized man’s idea of the Being 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 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 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 Cesarsy. The Church, with her eye upon the King Eternal, Immortal, Invisible 2, 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 to the Greek world; while half-mimicries
x Vorlesungen tiber N. T. Theologie, p. 354.
¥ See Déllinger, Heidenthum und Judenthum, bk. viii. pt. 2. § 2. The city of Cyzicus was deprived of its freedom for being unwilling to worship Augustus (Tac. Ann. iv, 36). Thrasea Petus was held guilty of treason for refusing to believe in the deification of Poppwa (Tac. Ann. xvi. 22). Caligula insisted on being worshipped as a god during his lifetime (Sue- tonius, 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. Déllinger reckons fifty-three apotheoses between Cesar and Diocletian, fifteen of which were of ladies belonging to the Imperial family. For the discredit into which the Imperial apotheosis fell among the literary classes, see Boissier, Religion Romaine, i. 175, sqq.
+E dim. i. 17.
1]
28 Christ ἐς not God in
of the Incarnation are characteristically oriental. Speaking phi- losophically, 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 pro- portioned 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?
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 phantom- divinity with the universe, nay with the agencies of moral evil itself. In truth, our God does not exist in the appre- hension 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 nr thus
LECT.
the sense of Pantheism. 29
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 pro- ceed 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 im- perfect, 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 brain under the presidency of one central and unifying idea, which you call God. You are careful to insist that this god is not a real but an ideal being; indeed it appears that he is so ideal, that he would cease to be god if he could be supposed to become real. God, you say, is the ‘Idea’ of the universe ; the universe is the ‘realization’ of God. The god who is enthroned in your thought must have abandoned all contact with reality; let him re-enter but for a moment upon the domain of reality, and, such are the exigencies of your doctrine, that he must forthwith be compelled to abdicate his throne ἃ. But meanwhile, as you contend, he is logically distinct from the universe; and you repel with some warmth the orthodox allegation, that to identify him substantially with the universe, amounts to a practical denial of his existence.
Yet after all, let us ask what is really gained by thus distinguishing between a logical and a substantial identity ? What is this god, who is to be thus rescued from the religious ruins which mark the track of Pantheistic thought ? Is he, by the terms of your own distinction, anything more than an ‘Idea’; and must he not vary in point of perfection with the accuracy and exhaustiveness of those processes of abstraction and synthesis by which you undertake to construct him? And if this be so, is it worth our while to discuss the question whether or not so precarious an ‘Idea’ was or was not incarnate in Jesus Christ? Upon the terms of the theory, would not an incarnation of God be fatal to His
* Cf. M. Caro’s notice of Vacherot’s La Métaphysique et la Science, “a de Dieu, p. 265, sqq.; especially p. 289, sqq.
I
30 Christ ἐς not merely divine
‘logical, that is to His only admitted mode of existence ἢ or would such divinity, if we could ascribe it to Jesus Christ, be anything higher than the fleeting and more or less imperfect speculation of a finite brain ?
Certainly Pantheism would never have attained to so strong a position as that which it actually holds in European as well as in Asiatic thought, unless it had embodied a great element of truth, which is too often ignored by some arid Theistic systems. To that element of truth we Christians do justice, when we confess the Omnipresence and Incomprehensibility of God; and still more, when we trace the gracious con- sequences of His actual Incarnation in Jesus Christ. But we Christians know also that the Great Creator is essentially distinct from the work of His Hands, and that He is What He is, in utter independence of the feeble thought whereby He enables us to apprehend His Existence. We know that all which is not Himself, is upheld in being from moment to moment by the fiat of His Almighty Will. We know that His Existence is, strictly and in the highest sense, Personal. Could we deny these truths, it would be as easy to confess the Divinity of Christ, as it would be impossible to deny the divinity of any created being. If we are asked to believe in an impersonal God, who has no real existence apart from creation or from created thought, in order that we may expe- rience fewer philosophical difficulties in acknowledging our’ Lord’s Divinity, we reply that our faith cannot consent thus ‘propter vitam vivendi perdere causas. We cannot thus sacri- fice the substance of the first truth of the Creed that we may retain the phraseology of the second. We dare not thus degrade, or rather annihilate, the very idea of God, even for the sake of securing a semblance (more it could not be) of those precious consolations which the Christian heart seeks and finds at the Manger of the Divine Child in Bethlehem, or before the Cross of the Lord of Glory on Mount Calvary.
No: the Divinity of Jesus is not divinity in the sense of Socinianism. It is no mere manifestation whether of the highest human goodness, or of the noblest of divine gifts. It is not merely a divine presence vouchsafed to the soul; it is not merely an intercommunion of the soul and God, albeit main- tained even ceaselessly—maintained in its fulness from moment to moment. Such indeed was the high grace of our Lord’s sinless Humanity, but that grace was not itself His Divinity. For a work of grace, however beautiful and perfect, is one ee
LECT.
zn the sense of Socinianism. 31
an Uncreated Divine Essence is another. In the Socinian sense of the term, you all, my Christian brethren, are, or may be, divine; you may shew forth God’s moral glory, if less fully, yet not less truly, than did Jesus. By adoption, you too are sons of God; and the Church teaches that each of you was made a partaker of the Divine Nature at his baptism. But suppose that neither by act, nor word, nor thought, you have done aught to forfeit that blessed gift, do I forthwith proceed to profess my belief in your divinity? And why not? Is it not because I may not thus risk a perilous confusion of thought, issuing in a degradation of the Most Holy Name? Your life of grace is as much a gift as your natural life; but however glorious may be the gift, aye, though it raise you from the dust to the - very steps of God’s Throne, the gift is a free gift after all, and its greatness does but suggest the interval which parts the reci- pient from the inexhaustible and boundless Life of the Giver. Most true indeed it is that the perfect holiness which shone forth from our Lord’s Human Life has led thousands of souls to perceive the truth of His essential Godhead. When once it is seen that His moral greatness is really unique, it is natural to seek and to accept, as a basis of this greatness, His possession of a unique relationship to the Fountain of all goodness». Thus the Sermon on the Mount leads us naturally on to those dis-
b «Je mehr sich so dem erkennenden Glauben die Ueberzeugung von der Einzigkeit der sittlichen Hoheit Christi erschliesst, desto natiirlicher ja nothwendiger muss es nun auch von diesem festen Punkte aus demselben Glauben werden, mit Verstindniss Christo in das Gebiet Seiner Redén zu folgen, wo Er Seiner eigenthiimlichen und einzigen Beziehung zu dem Vater gedenkt. Jesu Heiligkeit und Weisheit, durch die Er unter den siindigen, vielirrenden Menschen einzig dasteht, weiset so, da sie nicht kann noch will als rein subjektives, menschliches Produkt angesehen werden, auf einen tibernatiirlichen Ursprung Seiner Person, Diese muss, um inmitten der Siinderwelt begreiflich zu sein, aus einer eigenthiimlichen und wunderbar schépferischen That Gottes abgeleitet, ja es muss in Christus, wenn doch Gott nicht deistisch von der Welt getrennt sondern in Liebe ihr nahe und wesentlich als Liebe zu denken ist, von Gott aus betrachtet eine Incarnation gottlicher Liebe, also gittlichen Wesens gesehen werden, was Ihn als den Punkt erscheinen lisst, wo Gott und die Menscheit einzig und innigst geeinigt sind. Freilich, man lisst sich in diesem Stiicke noch so oft durch einen abstracten, subjectiven Moralismus irre machen, der die Tiefe des Ethischen nicht erfasst. Aber wer tiefer blickend auch von einer ontologischen und metaphysischen Bedeutung des Ethischen weiss, dem muss die Einzigkeit der Heiligkeit und Liebe Christi ihren Grund in einer Hinzigkeit auch Seines Wesens haben, diese aber in Gottes Sich mittheil- ender, offenbarender Liebe.’ (Dorner, Person Christi, Bd. ii. pp. 1211, 1212.)
=
32 Christ ἐς not the ‘inferior god’ of Arianism.
courses in St. John’s Gospel in which Christ unveils His Essential Oneness with the Father. But the ethical premiss is not to be confused with the ontological conclusion. It is true that a boundless love of man shone forth from the Life of Christ; it is true that each of the Divine attributes is com- mensurate with the Divine Essence. It is true that ‘he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him, But it is not true that every moral being which God blesses by His Presence is God. The Divine Presence, as vouchsafed to Chris- tian men, is a gift superadded to and distinct from the created personality to which it is accorded: there was a time when it had not been given, and a time may come when it will be withdrawn. Such a Presence may indeed in a certain secondary sense ‘divinize’ a created person 5, robing him with so much of moral beauty and force of deity as a creature can bear. But this blessed gift does not justify us in treating the creature to whom it is vouchsafed as the Infinite and Eternal God. When Socinianism deliberately names God, it means equally with ourselves, not merely a Perfect Moral Being, not merely Perfect Love and Perfect Justice, but One Whose Knowledge and Whose Power are as boundless as His Love. It does not mean that Christ is God in this, the natural sense of the word, when it confesses His moral divinity; yet, beyond all controversy, this full and natural sense of the term is the sense of the Nicene Creed.
No: Jesus Christ is not divine in the sense of Arius. He is not the most eminent and ancient of the creatures, decorated by the necessities of a theological controversy with That Name which a serious piety can dare to yield to One Being alone. Ascribe to the Christ of Arius an antiquity as remote as you will from the age of the Incarnation, place him at a height as high as any you can conceive, above the highest archangel ; still what, after all, is this ancient, this super-angelic being but a creature who had a beginning, and who, if the Author of his existence should so will, may yet cease to be? Such a being, however exalted, is parted from the Divine Essence by ἃ fathomless chasm; whereas the Christ of Catholic Christendom is internal to That Essence; He is of one Substance with the Father— any other, He is properly and literally Divine.
This assertion of the Divinity of Jesus Christ depends on
¢ 2 St. Peter i. 4: ἵνα διὰ τούτων [sc. ἐπαγγελμάτων] γένησθε θείας
κοινωνοὶ φύσεως, [τεοτ.
Lhedoctrinetmples Hypostatic distinctionsin Gon. 33
a truth beyond itself. It postulates the existence in God of certain real distinctions having their necessary basis in the Essence of the Godhead. That Three such distinctions exist is a matter of Revelation. In the common language of the Western Church these distinct forms of Being are named Per- sons. Yet that term cannot be employed to denote Them, without considerable intellectual caution. As applied to men, Person implies the antecedent conception of a species, which is determined for the moment, and by the force of the expression, into a single incommunicable modification of being4. But the conception of species is utterly inapplicable to That One Supreme Essence Which we name God; and, according to the terms of the Catholic doctrine, the same Essence belongs to Each of the Divine Persons. Not however that we are therefore to suppose nothing more to be intended by the revealed doctrine than three varying relations of God in His dealings with the world. On the contrary, His Self-Revelation has for its basis certain eternal dis- tinctions in His Nature, which are themselves altogether anterior to and independent of any relation to created life. Apart from
4 So runs the definition of Boethius, ‘Persona est nature rationalis individua substantia.’ (De Pers. et Duabus Naturis, c. 3.) Upon which St. Thomas observes: ‘Conveniens est ut hoc nomen (persona) de Deo dicatur; non tamen eodem modo quo dicitur de creaturis, sed excellentiori modo.” (Sum. Th., 1". qu. 29. a. 3.) When the present use of οὐσία and ὑπόστασις had become fixed in the East, St. Gregory Nazianzen tells us that in the formula ‘ula οὐσία, τρεῖς ὑποστάσεις,᾽ οὐσία signifies τὴν φύσιν τῆς θειότητος, while ὑποστάσεις points to τὰς τῶν τριῶν ἰδιότητας. He observes that with this sense the Westerns were in perfect agreement ; but he deplores the poverty of their theological language. They had no expression really equivalent to ὑπόστασις, as contrasted with οὐσία, and they were therefore obliged to employ the Latin translation of πρόσωπον that they might avoid the appearance of believing in three οὐσίαι. (Orat. xxi. 46.) St. Augustine laments the necessity of having to say ‘quid Tria sint, Que Tria esse fides vera pronuntiat.’ (De Trin. vii. n. 7.) ‘Cum ergo queritur quid Tria, vel quid Tres, conferimus nos ad inveniendum aliquod speciale vel generale nomen, quo complectamur hee Tria: neque occurrit animo, quia excedit supereminentia Divinitatis usitati eloquii facultatem.’ (Ibid.) ‘Cum co- naretur humana inopia loquendo proferre ad hominum sensus, quod in secretario mentis pro captu tenet de Domino Deo Creatore suo, sive per piam fidem, sive per qualemcunque intelligentiam, timuit diccre tres essen- tias, ne intelligeretur in Ill4 Summa Aiqualitate ulla diversitas. Rursus non esse tria quedam non poterat dicere, quod Sabellius quia dixit, in heresim lapsus est... . Quesivit quid Tria diceret, et dixit substantias sive personas, quibus nominibus non diversitatem intelligi voluit, sed singu- laritatem noluit’ (De Trin. vii. n. 9.) Cf. Serm. exvii. 7, ccexv. 3, cexliv. 4. On the term Person, see further St. Athan. Treatises, i. 155, note ἢ, (Lib, Fath.) D
34 Objectors. (1) The esthetic historians.
these distinctions, the Christian Revelation of an Eternal Father- hood, of a true Incarnation of God, and of a real communication of His Spirit, is but the baseless fabric of a dream’. These three distinct ‘Subsistences f? which we name Father, Son, and Spirit, while they enable us the better to understand the mystery of the Self-sufficing and Blessed Life of God before He sur- rounded Himself with created beings, are also strictly compatible with the truth of the Divine Unity 8. And when we say that Jesus Christ is God, we mean that in the Man Christ Jesus, the second of these Persons or Subsistences, One in Essence with the First and with the Third, vouchsafed to become Incarnate.