Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 5.djvu/712

 EUTYCHIANISM

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EUTYCHIANISM

in these two phrases the word consubstantinl ap- pears in different senses; for the Father and the Son have one substance numero, whereas the Incarnate Son is of one substance with us xpecie (not inimero, of course). It is therefore not to be wondered at. if the expression "consubstantial with us" was avoided in the fourtli century. In like manner the word (piia-is has its full meaning when apjilied to the Divine Nature of Christ, but a restricted meaning (as has been just ex- plained) when applied to His Human Nature.

In St. CjTil's use of the formula its signification is plain. "It means", says Newman (loc. cit., p. 316), " (<i1, that when the Divine Word became man, He re- mained one and the same in essence, attributes and personality; in all respects the same as before, and therefore ixla (pviris. It means (b), that the manhood, on the contrary, which He assumed, was not in all re- spects the same nature as that massa, iisia, physis, etc., out of which it was taken; (1) from the very cir- cumstance that it was only an addition or supplement to what He was already, not a being complete in itself; (2) because in the act of assuming it, He changed it in its qualities. This addeii nature, then, was best ex- pressed, not by a second substantive, as if collateral in its position, but by an adjective or participle, as aecapKa/i^inj. The tliree words answered to St. John's 6 \6yos trdp^ iy^vero^ i. e. irecrapKojix^vo^ ^v." Thus St. Cyril intendeil to safeguard the teaching of the Council of Antiocli (against Paul of Samosata, 264- 72) that the Word is unchanged by the Incarnation, "that He is f^ Kal t6 aiW-6 ry ouo-Ipfrom first to last, on earth and in heaven " (p. 317). He intended by his one nature of God, " with the council of Antioch, a pro- test against that alterableness and imperfection, which the anti-Catholic schools affixed to their notion of the Word. The council says ' one and the same in vsia': it is not speaking of a human nsia in Christ, but of the divine. The case is the same in Cyril's Formula; he speaks of a /da 6ela (pi<ns in the Word. He has in like manner written a treatise entitled ' quod unus sit Christus'; and, in one of his Paschal Epistles, he enlarges on the text ' Jesus Christ, yesterday, and to-day, the same, and for ever.' His great theme in these words is not the coalescing of the two natures into one, but the error of making two sons, one before and one upon the Incarnation, one divine, one iiuman, or again of degrading the divine ■usia by making it subject to the humanity" (pp. 321-2). It has been necessary thus to explain at length St. Cyril's meaning in order to be able to enumerate the more briefly and clearly, the various phases of the Eutychian doctrine.

1. 'The Cyrillian party before Chalcedon did not put forward any doctrine of their own; they only de- nounced as Nestorians any who taught Sio jiva-eis, two natures, which they made equal to two hj-pos- tases, and two Sons. They usually admitted that Christ was ix 5vo <pva-euv "of two natures", but this meant that the Humanity before (that is, logically before) it was assumed was a complete <pvcn!\ it was no longer a ^i/o-is (subsistent) after its union to the Divine nature. It was natural that those of them who were consistent should reject the teaching of St. Leo, that there were two natures: "Tenet enim sine defectu proprietatem suam utraque natura", "As- sumpsit formam scrvi sine sorde peccati, humana au- gens, divina nonminuens",and if they chose to under- stand "nature" to mean a subsistent nature, they were even bound to reject such language as Nestorian. Their fault in itself was not necessarily that they were Monophysites at heart, but that they would not stop to listen to the six hundred bishojis of Clialcc<lon, to the pope, and to the entire Western Church. Those who were ready to hear explanations and to realize that words may have more than one meaning (follow- ing the admirable example set by St. Cyril himself), were abU- to remain in the unity of the Clnircli. The rest were rebels, antl whether orthodo.x in belief or not,

well deserved to find themselves in the same ranks as the real heretics.

2. Eutyches himself was not a Cyrillian. He was not a Eutyctiian in the ordinary sense of that word. His mind was not clear enough to be definitely Mono- physite, and St. Leo was apparently right in thinking him ignorant. He was with the Cyrillians in denounc- ing as Nestorians all who spoke of two natures. But he had never adopted the " consubstantial with us" of the " creed of the union ", nor St. Cyril's admissions, in accepting that creed, as to the two natures. He was willing to accept St. CjtH's letters and the decisions of Ephesus and Nica?a only in a general way, in so far as they contained no error. His disciple, the monk Con- stantine, at the revision, in April, 449, of the condem- nation of Eutyches, explained that he did not accept the Fathers as a canon of faith. In fact Eutyches simply upheld the ultra-Protestant view that nothing can be imposed as of faith which is not verbally to be found in Scripture. This, together with an exagger- ated horror of Nestorianism, appears to describe his whole theological position.

3. Dioscurus and the party which followed him seem to have been pure Cyrillians, who by an excessive dis- like of Nestorianism. fell into excess in minimizing the completeness of the Humanity, and exaggerating the effects upon it of the union. We have not documents enough to tell us how far their error went. A frag- ment of Dioscurus is preserved in the "Antirrhetica" of Nicephorus (Spieil. Solesm., IV, 380) which asks: " If the Blood of Christ is not by nature (kclto. v(nv) God's and not a man's, how does it differ from the blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer? For this is earthly and corruptible, and the blood of man according to nature is earthly and corruptible. But God forbid that we should say the Blood of Christ is consubstantial with one of those things which are ac- cording to nature (evos tCiv KarcL (pOtrLv opLoovalup)." If this is really, as it purports to be, from a letter writr- ten by Dioscurus from his exile at Gangra, we shall have to class him with the extreme Monophysite " In- corrupticolaj", in that he rejects the "consubstantial with us" and makes the Blood of Christ incorruptible of its own nature. But the passage may conceivably be a Julianist forgery.

4. Timothy ^lurus, the first Monophysite Patriarch of Alexandria, was on the contrary nearly orthodox in his views, as has been clearly shown by the extracts published by Lebon from his works, extant in Syriac in a MS. in the British Museum (.\ddit. 121.S6). He de- nies that (pvcTLS, nature, can be taken in an abstract sense. Hence he makes extracts from St. Leo, and mocks the pope as a pure Nestorian. He does not even accept ^k Sto (piKreav, and declares there can be no question of two natures, either before or after the Incarnation. " There is no nature which is not a hypostasis, nor hj-postasis which is not a person." So far we have, not lieresy, but only a term defined con- trary to the Chalcedonian and Western usage. A second point is the w-ay ..■Elurus understands i(m to mean that which is "by nature". Christ, he says, is by nature God, not man; He became man only by " oUovofila" (economy or Incarnation); conse- quently His Humanity is not His (piffn. Taken thus, the formula fi-la 0uiris was intended hy ^lin-us in an orthodox sense. Thirdly, the actions of Christ are at- tributed to His Divine Person, to the one Christ. Here ^Elurus seems to be unorthodox. For the es- sence of Monotlielism is the refusal to apportion the actions {4p^pyeiai) between the two natures, but to insist that they are all the actions of the one Person- ality. How far ^F^lurus was in reality a Monolhelite cannot be judged until his works are before us in full. He is, at all events in the main, a schismatic, full of h.atred and cinitcmpt for the Catholic Church outside Egypt, for the tidil liishops of Chalcedon, for the 1000 of the Encyclia, for Rome and the whole West. But