Page:The Greek and Eastern churches.djvu/106

80 crisp logic worked out definite conclusions without regard to side issues. Accepting the tripartite division of man into body or flesh, soul, and mind or spirit, he ascribed to our Lord only the first two, and taught that the spirit or higher consciousness of Christ was purely of Divine Nature, the Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity. He thought that you must sacrifice the personality on one side or the other. had sacrificed it on the Divine side; with him Christ was only a man completely influenced by God, the ego, the centre of personality and self-consciousness being human. To allow of two spirits or minds is to admit two wills—which the Church did actually admit and even affirm on peril of excommunication at a later time,—and so two persons. Then the human mind is naturally changeable, owing to its possession of free will; but to say that Christ was changeable was Arian, the Nicene party denying this. Further, Apollinaris thought that the usual way of representing the nature of Christ was inconsistent with the doctrine of redemption, since it only allowed the man Jesus, not the Divine Christ, to have suffered for us.

Apollinaris was vehemently assailed for the denial of the incarnation these ideas were supposed to involve. But he endeavoured to save that mystery in another region. Since man was made in the image of God, there must be something in God which is like man. In other words, there must be an inherent humanity in God. Now it was that man-like element in God which entered into earthly human nature in the incarnation of Jesus. Therefore it would exactly correspond to a perfect human spirit. We might compare this view to the Semi-Arian, by applying to the human nature of Christ the watchword that the Semi-Arians used to describe His Divine Nature, and say that, while the Athanasian party regarded Christ as homoousios with us in His humanity, Apollinaris considered Him to be only homoiousios with us. It will be found that most