Page:The Greek and Eastern churches.djvu/129

Rh monk Eutyches, a man of no breadth of mind or depth of insight. The Monophysites were more refined and metaphysical in their thinking. While they insisted on the oneness of our Lord's nature in opposition to the Chalcedonian dogma of the continuance of two natures in the one person, they were willing to admit that He came to be the incarnate Christ by the union, the fusing together, of two natures. Thus they would allow that He was "of two natures," though they denied that He existed "in two natures" and while with Eutyches the human nature was so absorbed that it virtually vanished, according to the Monophysites Christ had a composite nature. Moreover, they admitted the continuance of the two sets of attributes—the human and the Divine—although only as qualities of one substance. The union of the natures, however, could not be justly compared to a mere amalgam for two reasons. In the first place, each nature underwent change, the human taking on Divine properties and the Divine taking on human characteristics. There was this difference, that change in the Divine nature was only " by grace," an effect of an act of will done for the sake of the redemption of the world, while full freedom remained to abstain from it. There was no kenosis, no actual selfemptying, but only a condescending to the forms and modes of a human life, while the Divine remained in essence unchanged. Then, in the second place, the Divine nature so completely dominated the human element that, except in the outward appearance of a man's form and an earthly life, this human element really counted for nothing. We might state it thus. The fractional existence of the human nature being a finite numerator with an infinite denominator, it was really equivalent to zero. If f stands for a finite and ∞ for infinity we might express the doctrine by the formula $$\tfrac{f}{\infty} = 0.$$

When we endeavour to trace out the course of the