A. A. Luce

“ Man is an inhabitant of the earth, of earthly descent and finite destiny; yet the divine is not totally foreign to him. He has hopes of heaven, moments of supraconsciousness, at times vision, resolve and emotion that are supra-normal. The divine is an element in him. It is more than an aspect of his nature. Its influence operates often in opposition to the human element. He is, as Bergson puts it, at the meeting-point of the upward and the downward currents. He can know God, can do the will of God, can be filled with the love of God. ”

“ The recognition of Christ as God represents a great intellectual and moral advance, and is the first essential step in religion; but to rest content with the taking of that step is to remain on the lowest rung of the ladder of faith. It is little use to form a lofty conception of Christ, if in doing so we insulate Him from the world of things and souls. That is what monophysitism does, and because disguised monophysitism is prevalent in the church to-day, Christianity's grip is weak and the fire of devotion low.
We may picture faith as a battlefield. Doubt is the enemy entrenched in depth. ”

“ The contrasts bring home to a man the fact that his spirit is a synthesis of heterogeneous elements. They force him back on himself. They rouse in him the dormant sense of personal being. It is the apprehension of strong contrast in his experience of himself, the apprehension of the plurality of his being, that accentuates the deep-lying unity. The more violent the change in the walks of life, the clearer becomes the concept of the continuity. Civilian or soldier, the man, the person is the same.
Personality is thrown into relief not only by change of occupation, but also by moral contrasts. ”

“ NEO-PLATONIST PSYCHOLOGY
Human souls are at an intermediate stage of this cosmic process. Like the ray of light which touches both sun and earth, they have contact with God and with matter. They stand midway in creation. They are attracted upwards and downwards. Reason draws them to God; sense chains them to earth. Their position decides their duty. (Here the philosophy becomes a religion) . The duty of man is to break the sensuous chains and set the soul free to return to its home in God. This return of the soul to God is attained by the path of knowledge. ”

“ The contrast between the divine and human natures is needed to throw personality into relief. Take away the human nature, and that contrast disappears, and with it goes the distinction between divine person and divine nature. Then, instead of a transcendent personality in whose portrait divine and human features are distinctly limned, we have a blur. ”

“ In worship union with God is sought, a union so close that the personality of the worshipper is absorbed into the being of the worshipped. His experience of God is so intimate that his experience of the world is reduced to insignificance. As an overpowering human love welds two beings into one, and identifies their thoughts, wills, springs of action and even feelings, so the amor dei identifies man with God and makes possible a deification of humanity. ”

“ Human nature involves feeling, and two natures involve two universes of feeling. Divine personality cannot be conceived as devoid of feeling. With men feeling lies in the depths of being; it is the dynamic of life. Feeling is the inner reflex of acts of thought and will. It invariably accompanies cognition and volition. If thought and will be attributed to the supreme being, the attribute of feeling cannot be left out. ”

“ The Church teaches that there is somewhere, in some transcendent form of existence, a being with perfect human mind, whose will in strength and scope is perfectly proportioned to His knowledge, whose feelings are in perfect mutual harmony, whose psychic nature finds outward expression in a glorified body; that this perfect being once walked this earth, and yet had and has the ground of His being in a divine personality. Such a Christ the latent monophysitism of our thinking hides from our view. ”

“ The soul views itself as a member of a world of souls estranged from God, and for its own peace and welfare seeks to effect a union between God and the world. Such a union, to be effective, must preserve the being and value of the world. If there were no world or only a valueless world, there would be nothing to redeem, or nothing worth redeeming. Seeking that union in personality, and in the most marvellous personality of history, the orthodox theologians by a true instinct ascribed to Him both divine and human natures. He is the cosmic unity of opposites. His person is the cosmic relation. ”

“ Ascending the scale of being at last we reach pure form. Thus the ladder of development is constructed by which the world rises to its realisation in God. Aristotle gave to humanity the conception of a God who transcends the world, and yet is immanent in it, as form is in matter. Thus Greek philosophy in Aristotle attained that spiritual monotheism which supplied the foundation for the edifice of Christian doctrine. ”

“ Pain, not sin, is the great modern problem. The Cross is made to stand for sympathy, not for satisfaction. Salvation, achieved at a definite moment of history and conferred on believers of subsequent generations, rests for its foundations on the objective assumption of human nature by a divine person. If the foundations be undermined, as monophysitism undermines them, the superstructure crumbles. Redemption becomes improvement by effort and self-help, or a constant endeavour after a private ideal of conduct. ”

“ Monism abandons the universal relation by abandoning one or other of the terms to be related. Monophysitism cuts a similar knot in a similar fashion. It jettisons redemption by excluding from the Redeemer all kinship with that which He came to redeem. Nominally admitting human nature into union with deity, it destroys the reality of that transaction at a stroke by making the two natures identical. So the incarnation, for the monophysite, becomes a myth; no change in the nature of the Logos took place at it, and, consequently, no change in the nature of the Man Christ Jesus. ”

“ Explain it as we may, the craving for unity, for synthesis, for mediation is radical in human thought. The mind cannot rest at anything short of it. God and the world, held asunder conceptually or only nominally united, constitute a contradiction in excelsis, and, as such, provide an irresistible motive for further and deeper thought.
As is natural, the swing of the pendulum carries the mind to the opposite extreme. Co-existence failing to supply the required solution, the key is sought in identity. God and the world are thought as identical. ”

“ The determination to keep God a reality and the world a reality and yet relate the two became the controlling motive of their thinking.
Aristotle in theory and application of theory has always a feeling for fact. The individual thing and the world of individual things are, for him, never negligible. Realised matter, life, the human spirit, human nature, are actualities and have their value as such. They are not all on the same level of being; they do not occupy the same rank; and it is the philosopher's business to determine their respective positions in the scale of being and value. ”

“ It was in the prominence given to this concept that Aristotle's system made a great advance on that of his predecessor. Plato had established a world of ideas with the idea of the Good as its centre, but he left it unrelated to the world of experience. Aristotle insisted on relating the ideal and the real. His concept of relation was that of form and matter. The world apart from God is matter apart from form. It has only potential reality. When it becomes united to its form, it becomes actual. ”

“ Without much artificiality, without forcing the facts, a rational scheme of the Christological heresies might be drawn up. They might be pictorially represented as the rungs of a ladder, which the truth-seeking mind scales rung by rung, pausing at the lower phases of Christological thought, and then resuming the ascent till the highest truth is attained. The instrument of thought is much the same in all centuries ”

“ What is human personality? It is a psychic entity whose most important function is to unify the parts of a man's nature. It is the principle of unity and the instrument of unity. A man's thought, will and feeling are distinct and real entities. His intelligence takes various forms from perception to abstract thought; it may be directed to outward things, to thoughts of things, or to pure idea. He wills many things, and wills them in different modes and with varying degrees of intensity. A wide range of feeling is found in him, from physical to mental, from organic to ideal feeling. ”

“ Man is an epitome of these processes. The various parts of his nature are arranged in an ascending scale; form is the only cohesive force. The animal soul is the form of the body, born with it, growing with it, dying with it; the two are one in the closest union conceivable. Besides the soul of the body, there is, says Aristotle, a soul of the soul. This is reason, essentially different from animal and sensitive soul. It is not connected with organic function. It is pure intellectual principle. It is immaterial, immortal, the divine element in man. This reason is not a bare unity. ”

“ The association of Christ with matter through His body and through His human nature was, in their eyes, a degradation of deity. That Christ took matter up into His being as a permanent element, that He dignified the body and glorified human faculties, these facts seemed to the monophysite mind improbable, and, if true, devoid of religious significance. It came natural to him to explain Christ's body as a phantom. He was prepared to regard the human nature as unsubstantial. The mystic's view of matter, of sense and human existence characterises the whole monophysite outlook. ”

“ To the monophysite the major part of the gospels is a sealed book, because the major part of the facts there recorded about Christ could not possibly have happened to a one-natured Christ. His human knowledge, normal, limited, progressive, His human will, natural, adequate to the human, inadequate to the superhuman task, his human feelings, his body consubstantial with ours are to the monophysite merely shadows or symbols or aspects of something greater. They are dwarfed into nothingness. They are lost in the divine omniscience, omnipotence and transcendent love. ”

“ God is the world, and the world is God. This is the truth of being, for the monist. The two principles are merged in one, and the contradiction solved by an assertion of the identity of the contradictories. Monism takes two forms. It may be either materialist or spiritual. One term must be selected as the reality, and the other written off as an illusion. If the thinker's bent of mind be scientific, he is disposed to make the material world the only objective reality, and God becomes simply a working hypothesis or a creation of the subjective mind. ”

“ If the historic Christ was monophysite, so also is the Christ to whom we pray. In this consequence consists the seriousness of modern monophysitism. The present reality of His human nature is to-day even among His followers doubted, obscured, or forgotten. Christ is to many spiritual minds merely an ideal personality, a summary of their own ethical ideals. They perhaps regard Him as a disembodied spirit or mysterious influence. They rarely attain the catholic standpoint and see the human nature as a psychic entity actually existent to-day. ”

“ If ignorance and limitation of knowledge were not found in Christ, we should be forced to agree with Apollinaris that the divine Logos had superseded His human intellect.
Ignorance in so far as it is a positive attribute is far from being a mark of imperfection. It is a true paradox that ignorance like obliviscence forms part of the process of human cognising. Probably in the truth of things memory is of the essence of mind. Thoughts naturally and spontaneously reproduce themselves. The past of experience tends automatically to carry forward into the present. ”

“ His was a life of strenuous human activity, physical and mental. Even His miracles were accompanied by a physical throb of sympathy; virtue went out of Him. Redemption made it necessary. Enthusiastic devotion to a person must be grounded in community of experience. It is the human touches in the drama of Christ's life that make the most powerful appeal to mankind. Yet the human element is obscured, as a rule, in modern presentations of the gospel. For spiritual minds it is comparatively easy to apprehend a divine Christ. ”

“ The presence of all facts in a human consciousness is unthinkable. If it were possible, it would paralyse action. If we exempt Christ from the law of ignorance and obliviscence, we ipso facto dehumanise his cognition. When we say that Jesus was ignorant of much scientific truth, or that his prescience was limited, we do not compromise His dignity. We simply assert the naturalness of His intellect and the true humanity of that element of His nature. To do otherwise, to claim omniscience for His human intellect is gross monophysitism. ”

“ If it had been enough for the divine spirit to mingle with men, to show them a pattern life, and to touch them to higher things, an apparition would have been adequate, and no community of suffering would have been necessary. ”

“ BERGSON'S THEORY OF THE INTERPENETRATION OF PSYCHIC STATES
It is, says Bergson, characteristic of psychic states that they do not, like material things remain external to one another. They inter-penetrate. Cut up by human intelligence into discrete elements, in their own nature they remain a continuum. States of mind appear successive and external to one another, because age-long association with matter has accustomed men to material modes of thought. Man's intelligence is a by-product of activity. For purposes of action it is the externality of things that matters. ”

“ All we know of Him is that He is the source and union of reason and soul. Creation is effected by a continuous series of emanations from God. Emanation is not an arbitrary act of divine will; it is a necessary consequence of the nature of the One. God must negate Himself, and the process is creation. The further the process of negation is carried, the less reality does the created object possess. Last in the scale comes matter, which has no self-subsistence, but is the absolute self-negation of God. We referred in the last chapter to Plotinus' favourite illustration. ”

“ We shall proceed to sketch the cosmic problem, and to indicate the three main types of answers given to it. It will then be evident that these three answers find their respective counterparts in the Nestorian, monophysite and the catholic solutions of the Christological problem.
As man's intellectual powers mature, two supreme generalisations force themselves on his consciousness. He conceives his experience as a whole and calls it the world; he conceives the basis of his experience as a whole and calls it God. To some minds the world, to some minds God, is the greater reality ”

“ If the passion of Christ and that of Socrates were weighed in the same balances, there would be less indifference to-day to the gospel story. Were Christ the Man realised as such, visualised, as other great men of history are visualised, among his followers, the hero worship that inspired the early church would revive. What makes Christians indifferent to Christ's sufferings is not the lapse of centuries nor weakness of imagination but a subconscious monophysitism. There is to most minds a haze of unreality overhanging the accounts of His life and death. ”