Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/42

 philosophical theory formulated by Alexander of Aphrodisias and the neo-Platonists and then accepted as unassailable. The other solution, which found its chief advocates at Antioch, laid stress on the completeness of the humanity of Christ so that the body, animal soul, and spirit were necessarily complete in the humanity and the Logos dwelt in the human frame without subtracting the spirit which was one of the essentials of humanity, and so there could have been no fusion because this would have implied the return of the spirit to its source and consequently its subtraction from the humanity of Christ. This solution, it will be observed, postulates the same psychology as the other, and whichever view prevailed the Church would be irrevocably committed to the current psychology by this definition of its doctrine.

Both solutions offered perfectly logical deductions from the postulates assumed and it only wanted the advocates of one or the other to over-state the case so as to transgress against the teachings of philosophy or of traditional religion. The first false move came from Antioch. Laying great stress on the completeness of the humanity of Christ so that body, soul, and spirit were necessarily connected in the human frame, the view was so expressed as to describe the Virgin Mary as the mother of the human Christ, body, soul, and spirit alone, which implied, or seemed to imply, that at birth Christ was man only and afterwards became God by the Logos entering into the human