The religious value of the Athanasian doctrine lies in the union of the two natures or substances; God united Himself to Humanity (the Incarnation) in order that in and through that act Humanity should be united to Him (the Atonement). "He became human that we might be made divine." 1 The effort of orthodoxy in the next epoch was to retain this fusion of natures without detriment to either of the natures so united.

But Athanasius had not explained his theory— probably he was not interested in explanations. His analogy of the King, who by living in only one house in a city does honour to the whole city, does not explain how Christ by uniting His Divine Nature to Human Nature in one instance can glorify or deify the humanity of every one else. Later on this achievement was made logically plausible by the use of complete logical Realism; the Human Nature which Christ assumed was that of all men, not only in the sense of qualities discoverable in Him and in others, but in the sense of an indivisible essence which inheres in us all. The complete formulation of this doctrine was the work of the Cappadocians and of John of Damascus.

The triumph of Athanasius raised the question how this union of Natures was to be related to the historic Jesus. Thus the Church was involved in the Christological controversies. The starting-point of all parties was the complete division between God and Man. Apollinarianism saw that, in that case, to be both God and Man in the full sense is not merely inexplicable but impossible; Christ is then a Divine Spirit in a Human Body, not a Divine Man. This doctrine, however, destroys that unity of human nature with the Divine on which the Atonement depends; it also abolishes the disappointed, suffering, historic Christ of the believer's affectionate trust. On the former ground

1 Αὐτὸς γὰρ ἐνηνθρώπησεν ἵνα ἡμεῖς θεοποιηθῶμεν. Athanasius, De Inc. LIV. 2 De Inc. IX.

it was condemned, and on both grounds it prepared for the reaction of Nestorius which virtually attributed to the historic Christ two personalities, one human and one divine. Nestorius saved the historic, human Christ but again broke up the indispensable unity of God and Man in His Person. His condemnation led to a revival of the main position of Apollinaris, with modifications, by Eutyches, in whose doctrine the Humanity of Christ was merged in His Divinity. The condemnation of this view led ultimately to the secession of the Monophysites, who would not accept the formula of Two Natures in One Person which was declared as orthodox by the Fourth Ecumenical Council.

This formula is peculiarly interesting. Cyril of Alexandria had accepted "Two Natures" in 433; but the authority of the phrase came from the West. Leo's celebrated letter became, by a chapter of accidents, the basis of subsequent orthodoxy. This was due partly to the fact that both Leo and the new Emperor Marcian wished to lower the pride and power of Dioscurus, who had succeeded Cyril as Patriarch of Alexandria, but much more to the fact that Leo was provided with a way of speaking which was legal in origin, and which to the Greek world meant nothing in particular, and therefore nothing plainly disastrous.

The formula of Chalcedon is, in fact, a confession of the bankruptcy of Greek Patristic Theology." The Fathers had done the best that could be done with the intellectual apparatus at their disposal. Their formula had the right devotional value; it excluded what was known to be fatal to the faith; but it explained nothing. To the Latin mind there was little or nothing to be explained; the same man may be both consul and augur, the same Christ may be both God and Man.

1 At Constantinople, 381. It seems doubtful whether the views actually condemned as Apollinarian really represent the deepest thought of Apollinaris himself. 2 At Ephesus, 431. The remark above applies also to Nestorius.

3 At Chalcedon, 451.

Cf. Harnack, op. cit. vol. iv. pp. 188 ff. 6 But it preserved belief in our Lord's real Humanity!

This is true if one is thinking of functions, but is irrelevant if one is thinking of substances. The formula merely stated the fact which constituted the problem it did not attempt solution. It was therefore unscientific; and as theology is the science of religion, it represented the breakdown of theology.1

That breakdown was inevitable, because the spiritual cannot be expressed in terms of substance at all. The whole of Greek Theology, noble as it is, suffers from a latent materialism; its doctrine of substance is in essence materialistic. For the root difference between matter and spirit is not that matter is extended and ponderable and impenetrable while spirit is none of these; it is that matter is dead while spirit is living, matter is only an object while spirit is subject as well, matter can only move in space or enter into new combinations while spirit thinks and feels and wills, and exists in these activities. The "substance" of the Greek Fathers, whether divine or human, has the material, not the spiritual, characteristics; it is, in fact, an intangible matter.? God consists of one sort; man of another. The Incarnation (which is also the Atonement) is found precisely in the communication of the divine substance to man through the union of the two natures. No doubt this was most fully expressed in Cyril's own original formula μία φύσις τοῦ θεοῦ λόγου σεσαρκωμένη, and it is hard to see how Cyril could accept the "Two Natures" of the Creed of Union in

3

1 To Western Theology the Incarnation was always a fact, whereas to the Greeks it was also a philosophy. When Western Theology developed a complete scheme of its own (in Anselm), the Incarnation appeared as merely the necessary preliminary to the Death of the Incarnate God which was the pivot of the new system. With the Greeks the vital point was the Incarnation of God; with the Latins it was the Death of God Incarnate.

2 It is no accident that Gregory of Nyssa should be at once the chief exponent of the conception of a single and undivided human nature which Christ took as a thing which He has and which, identically, we also have, and also the leader in the theory which makes the Eucharistic Sacrament a continuation of the Incarnation, by which the receiver takes into his own substance the divine substance. On this cf. Essay VII. pp. 343-347.

3 "One nature incarnate of the divine Word." The following words-"not as though the difference of natures were abolished on account of the union"-save the orthodoxy of the formula at the cost of its intelligibility.

433. But Cyril's phrase was not clear as to the real humanity of Christ, which was and is of vital importance for devotion; and consequently the philosophically valueless formula of Chalcedon was preferred.

The chief result of Greek theology so far was to show (not indeed to contemporaries) the impossibility of a theology in terms of substance. But in addition to this it has one great defect and one great merit. The defect is its relative neglect of the moral problem. Redemption for it is primarily not from sin but from death. The distinction between God and Man is represented, not so much as a distinction between the Holy One and sinners, but rather as between the Eternal One and the transient generations. This is part of the inevitable failure of a "substance"Theology. In emphasizing difference of substance and a change of substance as the method of redemption, it inevitably ignores the will and with it the moral problem. The Greek Fathers are not to be blamed for this; they had to use the current intellectual coin, and they did with it the best that can be done. It is true that in the two great masters of Greek thought a more perfect appreciation of spiritual facts can be found-in Plato's doctrine of the soul as the self-mover and the controller of creation and in Aristotle's doctrine of Energy or Activity, especially as combined with Plato's "self-mover"; 2 but their successors had not been able to carry on the argument at that high level. The more spiritual view appears, indeed, in the most philosophical of the Fathers, when Origen insists that Christ must have a human soul because only with the soul could the Logos be united. But this does not take us very far. Thought was still largely under the dominion of imagination-not issuing in it and controlling it, but starting from it and controlled by it -and the imagination is in its very nature static and

1 Cf. Phaedrus 245 C-246 D.

2 Cf. Eth. Nic. vii. 1154 b 26; x. 1176 a 30-1178 a 8; Met. A, 1071 b 31076 a 5.

materialistic, except when some great artist forces his images to suggest what they manifestly are are not. Hence comes the particular form of the great controversies, and hence, too, the failure of the Greeks to construct a fully satisfactory theology.

In its substance-doctrine we find the key to the chief defect of that theology-its comparative neglect of the moral problem. But this same doctrine—and that, too, in its worst form-enabled it to express with unsurpassed force the unity of the Christian with his Master and the spiritual elevation of the race accomplished by the Incarnation. If a man can really believe in a Human Nature existing as a separate and indivisible thing apart from all human beings, so that the adoption of this by the Divine Word deifies all who have that nature, by all means let him use this conception to express the central fact of Christian experience—the fact which a man of God in our own time expressed in the words, "If I did not believe that Christ had by His Incarnation raised my whole life to an entirely higher level to a level with His own-I hardly know how I should live at all." This central point-the unique. value of the appearance of the Divine in human form in the person of Jesus of Nazareth-has never been more powerfully emphasized than by the Greek Fathers; and therein lies their great service to the Church.

(b) The Theology of the Western Church

Western Theology represents a very real advance on the Eastern, because it is always consciously concerned with the moral problem, and uses relatively spiritual terms; for the juristic method of handling the matter at least recognizes that the problem concerns "persons," the subjects of rights and duties, not "substances.'

1 Memoirs of Archbishop Temple, vol. ii. p. 709. Cf. St. Paul's "To me to live is Christ"; "Christ liveth in me" (Phil. i. 21, Gal. ii. 20).