What is monophysitism? What is Eutychianism?

On the other hand, Monophysite doctrine, as put forth by Eutyches, while not denying the manhood of Christ in so many words, held that "the two natures of Christ, after the union, did not remain two natures, but constituted one nature." This was the error most prominent at the close of the century. The Nicene creed was a great guard as to the divinity of Christ, if the natural meaning of the words were honestly received and believed; not that any formal creed is needed where the teaching of scripture is implicitly believed. Scripture is quite plain that our Lord was really a man, He ate and drank, He slept and He suffered. And He was really God: He raised the dead and did miracles which no mere power of man could do; and the voice from heaven proclaimed, "This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased." By Him all things were created, and the angels of heaven are called upon to worship Him. To Him be glory for ever and ever.

I am aware that an author, whom I will not name, tells us that this type of Leviticus 2 cannot be applied to the human nature of the Lord Jesus without dangerous error. For the Holy Ghost, he says, was not commingled with the human nature of the Lord, as the oil was commingled with the flour. Divine and human elements were not commingled in either of His two distinct natures, And then, in a note, Hooker's reference to certain heresies is cited in his well-known comment on the ancient formulary ὰληθῶς, τελέως, ἀδιαιρέτως, ἀσυγχύτως (i.e. truly, perfectly, indivisibly. distinctly, in opposition to Arians, Apollinarians, Nestorians, and Eutychians respectively). — Now it is evident that this fear of dangerous error is due to his own absolute blindness respecting Christ's person. For the Eutychian error did not consist in affirming the real operation of the Holy Ghost in the conception of the Virgin's Son (which is a truth essential to the faith of God's elect), but in a monstrous blending of the Word with the flesh of Christ. Eutyches, in effect, reversed the momentous words of St. John (chap. 1:14); for, were his doctrine true, we ought to read (not "the Word ἐγένετο flesh," but) the flesh became the Word. This fatal error (which confounded Deity and humanity, and made a new thing which was neither) has not one point of contact with the revealed truth of the Holy Ghost's action in counteracting fallen humanity from the outset of the Virgin's conception, and in so securing by divine power that the fruit of her womb should be holy (not fallen). No sober Christian ever admitted the strange delusion which seems to have originated with certain fathers, as it has been since adopted by some Socinians, that one part of Christ's human nature was framed by the Spirit and joined with another part received from the Virgin. This device was merely to cover their exclusion of the truth of His eternal Sonship, by construing one part of His humanity, thus imagined, as the Son of God and the other as the Son of man. What can one think of the spirit which compares with this Socinian dream the faith that maintains Christ's holy humanity against those who hold it to be fallen? And what can one think of the chief evangelical organ going lately out of its way to commend a doctrinal tract of this man? They used to denounce the same root of evil in Edward Irving, but alas! some of their own friends are now infected with it; and then again zeal for law, and over-strong feeling against some who condemn them ecclesiastically, lead them to welcome the most heterodox of adversaries.

Failure to confess a human spirit in Christ may be due to an unwitting belief in another form of error entirely. It may be admitted that a human spirit is an essential part of humanity, but some may feel that one cannot be sure what was the product when full humanity and full deity came together in union in Christ. When two things fuse together they may become something different. It is not therefore ‘safe' they will say, to affirm that Christ has a human spirit. Here there is a lapse into the error of the Monophysites, i.e., the confusion of the substance of the Lord's humanity and deity — another of the four main heresies that disturbed the church in the Pergamos period. (The word ‘substance' is used for want of a better one in the English language.) Sound doctrine is that the Lord Jesus Christ is God and Man; God of the substance of the Father; and Man of the substance of His mother born in the world (apart from sin). He is God and Man—one Christ. The unity of the Godhead and Manhood is not in confusion or fusion of substance, else the substance of manhood would be raised to something more than true humanity. (In all things it behoved Him to be made like unto His brethren. Heb. 2:17). This spurious explanation of the Incarnation, attempted by human intellect, that the union of Godhead and Manhood in Christ is by confusion of substance, must be rejected. We can say that the union of the natures consists in the Unity of the Person Who possesses both, this being in no sense an attempted explanation or complete definition of the unknowable mystery of the Incarnation. That is impossible.

While the Arabs under Abou Beker and Omar were overrunning the Greek countries, and wresting province after province from the empire, the Emperor contented himself by sending out armies to repel them, and remained in his capital for the discussion of theological questions. From the conclusion of his successful wars with Persia, religion had become almost the exclusive object of his solicitude. Two great controversies were at that moment agitating the whole of the christian world. The first of these, the so-called Monothelite controversy, may be described generally as a revival, under a somewhat different form, of the old Monophysite, or Eutychian, heresy. Under the general name of Monophysites are comprehended the four main branches of separatists from the Eastern church, namely, the Syrian Jacobites, the Copts, the Abyssinians, and the Armenians. The originator of this numerous and powerful christian community was Eutyches, abbot of a convent of monks at Constantinople in the fifth century. The Monophysites denied the distinction of the two natures in Christ; the Monothelites, on the other hand, denied the distinction of the will, divine and human, in the blessed Lord. A well-meant but unsuccessful attempt was made by the Emperor Heraclius to reconcile the Monophysites to the Greek church. But as the sound of controversy is seldom heard among the Eastern sectaries after this period, and as a detailed account of their disputes would possess no interest to our readers, we leave them on the pages of ecclesiastical history.

N*. Well, we will go on with Dr. Milner. He quotes Pope Stephen as referring to tradition. But this is just the tradition on which St. Cyprian opposed him; and all the African churches and Firmilian and those of Asia Minor opposed him, saying his tradition was false. It is just an additional proof of the uncertainty of tradition, and it is the very case which makes Augustine say that, if the doctors of the church go wrong, he is not bound by them. Dr. Milner's statement as to the agreement of the Greek, Nestorian, Eutychian, and other bodies in the East along with Romanists (save on the pope's supremacy — a pretty important point when infallibility is in question) is simply untrue. They are corrupt enough, God knows; but they reject a quantity of Romanist doctrine and discipline too: as, to name no others, purgatory is wholly rejected in the Greek church, and the procession of the Holy Ghost from the Son. And as to Eutychians, they held that Christ had not really two distinct natures, but that the Godhead was as the soul of Christ; the Nestorians, on the other hand, divided the Person, though at first it was merely a very just refusal to call Mary the mother of God. Nestorius wished to say the mother of Him who is God. However, intrigues had the upper hand.

At length he appeared at the synod, bringing a letter from the emperor, who had sent a representative to be present. The discussion then took place. Eutyches stated his belief, but he was questioned again and again as to how he defined the Person of Christ. At length he said he believed our Lord, before the union of the Godhead and manhood, had two natures; but after the union only one. He was condemned. The sentence ran, "Eutyches, formerly priest and archimandrite, hath proved himself affected by the heresy of Valentinus and Apollinaris, and hath refused, in spite of our admonition, to accept the true faith. Therefore we, lamenting his perverseness, have decreed, through our Lord Jesus Christ, blasphemed by him, that he be excluded from all priestly functions, from our communion, and from his primacy in his monastery." It was signed by about thirty bishops and twenty-three archimandrites.

Eutyches had for seventy years lived a monastic life, and for thirty years had presided over some three hundred monks. He had hitherto been supposed to be orthodox, and the accusation took his friends quite by surprise. Eutyches had strongly opposed Nestorius, but now he was said to be in error himself, and this, too, touching the Person of our Lord.

Two messengers were despatched to Eutyches to ask him to attend the synod. But he said he had vowed not to leave the cloister. He said he held with the Nicene creed, but they discovered that he had his own way of explaining his belief. He believed that Christ, who was born of the Virgin Mary, was very God and very man, but His body was not of like substance with ours. This was no sooner repeated to the synod than Eusebius exclaimed, "This is quite enough to enable us to take action against Eutyches; but let him be summoned a second time."

Of Kenoticism as a theory to account for the relation between the two natures in the one person of Christ it may quite safely be predicted that it shall only have its day. The face of things is in fact undergoing a change even now, and this fashionable theory is now beginning to be tainted and tinctured with new and ever newer ideas. This is not the first attempt by any means to construe into intelligibility the question of how Christ could be God and man in one person, and to set out in rational fashion how the two natures were related. To take what are generally regarded as the most conspicuous points in the history of Christology, there was in Apollinarianism a sort of pruning away of the humanity of Christ, excluding a rational human soul, principally with the idea of maintaining intact the singleness of His personality. Nestorianism, again, brought the two natures into no more than sympathetic harmony with one another, and by holding them too far apart the person was no longer an irrefragible unity. Eutychianism, in the very opposite direction, merged the two natures into one compound, a confusion not at all counterbalanced by the singleness of personality still retained. The statement of the Council of Chalcedon propounds no theory; but merely asserts the unity of personality and duality of natures. Not so the next landmark, Lutheran doctrine, which by almost a deification of His humanity approximates to Eutychianism. After all these comes Kenoticism, with its attempt to adjust the relation between the two natures, as we have seen, by the idea of a kenosis or self-emptying on Christ's part in the sphere of His divinity, not in the relative way legitimately following from the scripture supplying the term, but in an absolute and universal fashion unsupported by it, and inconsistent with all that otherwise scripture reveals of Him.

It is to join Apollinarius of Antioch (the son). He too made the Logos simply form Christ's Person, as F.E.R. does, and was therefore justly branded as an antichrist; so Nestorius was for dividing the Person, and Eutyches for confusing it: all of them, strict Trinitarians. For if the Logos had not been united to the soul as to spirit and body in the Christ, Christ was not and is not very Man as well as very God. Without that union there must have been two distinct personalities, the divine and the human. It is the union of both in one Person which alone secures the truth according to scripture. F.E.R. with shameless self-confidence vaunts his idea, which is plain heterodoxy. He does not "bring the doctrine" of Christ. The Son did not change His Person, but took up manhood into unity, and this in soul as in body.

139 Nor was this council held then for an ecumenical council. No Western was there unless a deacon from Africa, and the pope's legates, after Nestorius was condemned. Gennadius, patriarch of Constantinople, wrote against the twelve anathemas. The Eutychians always appealed to Cyril's famous sentence, 'The union was made out of two natures; but after the union there was one nature of the word incarnate in Christ.' I give it as Petavius states it. I have already given the words from Cyril. No one can doubt that Eutychianism (the doctrine of one nature in Christ) and the Jacobite church of Alexandria were the fruit of Cyril's doctrine. He says positively that Athanasius stated expressly (and quotes it), that there was only one nature after incarnation. A century afterwards this was denied and is still uncertain. But that Cyril does not really deserve confidence, it would be hard to refuse his testimony.