Page:Lesser Eastern Churches.djvu/81

Rh brutes and plants), and then spirit (, our special prerogative, which gives us intellect and will), he explained that in Christ there are a human body and soul, but that the divinity takes the place of the spirit. Nearly all the Fathers of the 4th century enter the lists against this theory. Apart from its questionable basis of three principles in man, it denies to our Lord an element of perfect human nature. But he was like us in all things, except sin; perfect God and perfect man. St. Athanasius († 373) wrote a treatise against Apollinaris. A phrase attributed to him, but apparently really of Apollinaris himself, "One nature incarnate of the Word of God," afterwards became a kind of watchword, first to St. Cyril of Alexandria, then to Monophysites. Its orthodoxy depends, of course (as in so many of these declarations), on the sense in which "nature" is used.

In Syria there was also a great opposition to Apollinarism. This took the form of insisting on our Lord's humanity. He is perfect man, has all that we have, except sin. Now it seems that the remote origin of Nestorianism is to be found in anti-Apollinarist zeal in Syria. Such an insistence might easily become an assertion that Christ had a human personality as well as his divine personality—was two persons, a man and the Son of God joined in some kind of moral union, the Son of God dwelling in a man. At any rate, the Nestorians, constantly reproach their opponents with being Apollinarists, and the opposite heresy, Monophysism, really is a kind of Apollinarism. It gathered up what was left of the Apollinarist sect.

Two Syrian doctors, masters of Nestorius, are always quoted as the remote source of his heresy. They are Diodore of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia. Diodore, founder of the Antiochene dogmatic school, was a contempory of Apollinaris and one of his chief opponents. First priest at Antioch, then Bishop and Metro-