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 MONOTHELITISM

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MONOTHELITISM

sometimes entitled intt. It is an integral part of human nature, and therefore exists in the perfect human nature of Jesus Christ, but without any of the imperfection induced by original or actual sin: He can have no passions (in that sense of the word which im- plies a revolt against the reason), no concupiscence, no "will of the flesh". Therefore this "lower will" is to be denied in Christ, in so far as it is called a will, because it resists the rational will (it was in this sense that Honorius was said by John IV to have denied that Christ had a lower will) ; but it is to be asserted in Him so- far as it is called will, because it obeys the rational will, and so is volunlas per participationem: in fact in this latter sense the sensual appetite is less improperly called ivill in Christ than in us, for quo perfecHor est voleiis, eo magis sensualitas in eo de volunlale hahct. But the strict sense of the word ivill {voluntaa, ffiX-qiia) is always the rational will, the free will. It is therefore correct to say that in Christ there are but two wills : the Divine will, which is the Divine nature, and the human rational will, which always acts in harmony with and in free subjection to the Divine will. The denial of more than one will in Christ by the heretics necessarily involved the incompleteness of His human nature. They confounded the will as faculty with the decision of the faculty. They argued that two wills must mean contrary wills, which shows that they could not concei\'e of two distinct faculties having the same object. Further, they saw rightly that the Divine will is the ultimate governing princi- ple, t6 Ttyeixoviicbv, but a free human will acting under its leadership seemed to them to be otiose. Yet this omission prevents our Lord's actions from being free, from being human actions, from being meritorious, in- deed makes His human nature nothing but an irra- tional, irresponsible instrument of the Divinity — a machine, of which the Divinity is the motive power. To Severus our Lord's knowledge was similarly of one kind — He had only Divine knowledge and no human cognitive faculty. Such thoroughgoing conclusions were not contemplated by the inventors of Mono- thelitisra, and Sergius merely denied two wills in order to assert that there was no repugnance in Christ's human nature to the promptings of the Di- vine, and he certainly did not see the consequences of his own disastrous teaching.

B. The two operations. — Operation or energy, activ- ity {iflpfd-a, operatio), is parallel to will, in that there is but one activity of God, ad extra, common to all the three Persons; whereas there are two operations of Christ, on account of His two natures. The word ivipyaa. is not here employed in the Aristotclean sense (actus, as opposed to potentia, Suyap-is), for this would be practically identical with esse (exislentia), and it is an open question amongst Catholic theolo- gians whether there is one es.se in Christ or two. Nor does ipipyeia. here mean simply the action (as Vaaquez, followed by de Lugo and others, wrongly held) but th(^ faculty of action, including the act of lh<' faculty. Petavius has no difficulty in refuting \'asqucz, by re- ferring to the writers of the seventh century; but he himself speaks of duo genera operationum as equiva- lent to duo operationes, which introduces an unfortu- nate confusion between Mpyeui and irpi^as or (vtpyfi- pmra, that is between faculty of action and the multiple actions produced by the faculty. This con- fusion of terms is frequent in modern theologians, and occurs in the ancients, e. g. St. Sophronius. The actions of God are innumerable in Creation and Provi- den<'e, but His iu^pyeia is one, for He has one nature of the three Persons. The various actions of the in- carnate Son proceed from two distinct and uncon- fused ifipyuai, because \lv has two natures. All are the actions of one subject (agent or principium quod), but are either divine or human according to the nature {prinri/num quo) from which they are elicited. The Monophysites were therefore quite right in say-

ing that all the actions, human and divine, of the in- carnate Son are to be referred to one agent, who is the God-man; but they were wrong in inferring that con- sequently His actions, both the human and the Divine, must all be called "theandric" or "divino-human", and must proceed from a single divino-human ivipyeia. St. Sophronius, and after him St. Maximus and St. John Damascene, showed that the two ^vipyetcu pro- duce three classes of actions, since actions are complex, and some are therefore mingled of the human and the divine. (1) There are Divine actions exercisetl by God the Son in common with the Father and the Holy Ghost (e. g. the creation of souls or the con- servation of the universe) in which His human nature bears no part whatever, and these cannot be called divino-human, for they are purely Divine. It is true that it is correct to say that a child ruled the universe (by the cornmunicatio idiomalum), but this is a matter of words, and is an accidental, not a formal predication — He who became a child ruled the universe as God, not as a child, and by an acti\'ity that is wholly Di\-ine, not di\ano-human. (2) There are other Divine actions which the Word Incarnate exercised in and through His human nature, as to raise the dead by a word, to heal the sick by a touch. Here the Divine action is distinguished from the human actions of touching or speaking, though it uses them, but through this close connexion the word theandric is not out of place for the whole complex act, while the Divine action as exercised through the human may be called formally theandric, or divino-human. (3) Again, there are purely human actions of Christ, such as walking or eating, but these are due to the free human will, acting in response to a motion of the Divine will. These are elicited from a human poten- tia, but under the direction of the Divine. Therefore they are also called theandric, but in a different sense — they are materially theandric, humano-divine. We have seen therefore that to some of our Lord's actions the word theandric cannot be applied at all; to some it can be applied in one sense, to others in a different sense. "The Lateran Council of 049 anathe- matized the expression una deivirilis operatio, p-ta Beav- SpiKT) ivtpyeia, by which all the actions divine and human are performed. It is unfortunate that the re- spect felt for the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius Areo- pagita has prevented theologians from proscribing the expression deivirilis operatio altogether. It has been shown above that it is correct to speak of diiririles actus or actiones or ivepyfip-ara. The Kaiv/j tiinvSpiKi) ivipyaa, of Pseudo-Dionysius was defended by So- phronius and Maximus as referring to the Divine ivipyeia. when producing the mixed (formally thean- dric) acts; theandric thus becomes a correct epithet of the Divine operation under certain circumstances, and that is all.

Though the Monophysites in general spoke of "one theandric operation, yet a speech of St. Martin at the Lateran Council tells us that a certain Colluthus would not go ev(m so far as this, for he feared lest "theandric" might leave some operation to the hu- man nature; he preferred the word fltKOTrp^irij!, Deo decibilis (Mansi, X, 982). The denial of two opera- tions, even more tluiii the denial of two wills, makes the human nature of Christ an inanimate iiLstrument of the Divine will. St . Thomas points out that though an instrument participates in the action of the agent who uses it, yet even an inanimate instruuH'nt has an activity of its own; much more the rational human nature of Christ h:is an opi^ration of its own under the higher motion it receives from the divinity. But by means of this higher motion, the two natures act in concert, according to the famous words of St. Leo's Tome: ".\gitenim utraque forma cum alterius com- munione quod proprium est; Verbo scilicet operante quod Verbi est, et carne exsequente quod carnis est. Unum horum coruscat aiiraculis, aliud succumbit in-