Page:Nestorius and his place in the history of Christian doctrine.djvu/88

76 without much discussion of the term —some remarks are given —he arrives at the conclusion that Nestorius "used the term person to express that in which both the Godhead and manhood of our Lord were one" ; and his final judgment is, that Nestorius, though not sharing the later orthodox phraseology which declares the human nature of the Lord impersonal in itself but personal in him only, nevertheless seems to have made an attempt to express the same conception in other terms.

Here, I am afraid, I cannot agree with Professor r, however much I sympathise with him in his doing justice to the miserable exile of Oasis.

First, it must be emphasised that is for Nestorius not the same as what we call person. For our notion of person the main thing is the oneness of the subject or of the internal self. We can, therefore, use the term person only for rational beings or at least those living beings, in which—as in the case of the higher animals—we see some analogy to human thinking, feeling and willing. For Nestorius, who in this respect was influenced by the manner of speaking common at that time, the main thing in his notion of, according to the etymology of the word and to the earlier history of its meaning , was the