Page:Nestorius and his place in the history of Christian doctrine.djvu/80

68 conceded that this took on a human body with a soul ; but he was right in minimising this difference. Here and there, he argued, the peculiar human nature of Christ became perfect only when the Logos was added to it, neither here nor there is Christ a real man as we ; and with acute perception he brings to light the weakness of Apollinaris' theory. Even if, he says, the incarnation was thought by Apollinaris to be a voluntary action of the Logos, nevertheless as soon as the unity between the Logos and the body with human soul was perfected, the union was after the manner of a substantial one, not voluntary: the Logos was forced nolens volens to suffer what his body and soul suffered. And a second difficulty, too, is seen by Nestorius, a difficulty which afterwards gave trouble to the scholastics. If the Son, so Nestorius argues, was united substantially with the human nature, the same must be assumed also of the Father and the Holy Spirit because of the unity of substance in the Godhead, but if the Father and the Spirit had not, in the same measure as the Son, partaken in the sufferings of the historic Jesus, then the unity of substance with the Father and the Spirit is taken from the Son.

But these difficulties of thinking are not the chief stumbling-block for Nestorius as regards the