Sect. 170The Human Element in Christ, According to the Tradition of the First Four CenturiesThe Human Element in Christ, According to the Tradition of the First Four Centuries

1. The heresies against the constitution of Christ succeeded one another in perfect logical order. During the first four centuries the Arians impugned the Divine nature, the Apollinarists the human nature: the form of the union was not called in question until the Church had defined the reality of the two natures. We dealt with the Divinity of Christ in our Treatise on the Trinity; here we notice only the heresies against His humanity.

1. The heresy of the Gnostics, starting from the false principle that human nature is essentially bad, refused to acknowledge it in Christ. Marcion, the author of Docetism, denied the reality of the body of Christ, asserting it to be a mere phantasma; while Valentinus admitted a real body but of celestial nature, and entirely unlike the human body.

2. The Arians taught that in Christ the Logos acted as human soul, and was subject to all the imperfections natural to the soul of man, especially to passibility.

3. This doctrine, which entirely destroyed the Divinity of Christ, was modified by the Apollinarists, who held that the Logos took the place of the human soul only in as far as this could be done without debasing His Divinity. Hence they ascribed to the Logos the intellectual functions of the soul. Arius had lowered the Divine Nature to the level of humanity; the Apollinarists raised Christ’s humanity to the level of His Divinity, thus once more falling back into the errors of the Gnostics.

II. The earliest Fathers, Ignatius, Irenæus, and Tertullian, opposed Docetism; Athanasius, Gregory of Nazianzum, and Gregory of Nyssa, the Valentinian heresies. Their arguments for the reality of the body of Christ and its similarity in substance with ours, may be summed up as follows: If the body and soul of Christ had only been apparent, and not real, like every other human body and soul, the Gospels would be reduced to a set of fables; the whole public life of the Saviour would have been a deception practised by God and by Christ as God, on mankind: whence Christ would no more be really God than really man; Redemption itself would be real no longer, because the whole economy of salvation is dependent on the Redeemer’s real humanity (1 Tim. 2:5, and 1 Cor. 15:14). These arguments are strengthened by the fact that the human nature which was made subject to sin by the first Adam, had to be redeemed, and therefore assumed by the second. The acts of obedience and sacrifice through which the redemption was accomplished, could only be performed by a Being endowed with a human soul and body. Apollinarism was first condemned in the Council of Alexandria (A.D. 362) in the Epistola Synodalis of St. Athanasius (Hardouin, i. 731). Pope Damasus (Anath. vii.) condemns it thus: “We anathematize those who say that the Word of God was in the human flesh in the room of a human, rational, and intellectual soul: for the Divine Word was not in His body as its rational and intellectual soul, but He took unto Him our intellectual (intelligibilis) soul without sin and saved it.”

III. The Son of God, having assumed our humanity, is consubstantial with us in the sense that He has our essence. The fact that Christ was born of a human mother not only proves His consubstantiality with man, but also His membership of the human race. His consubstantiality with man thus assumes the same form as His consubstantiality with God, both being founded upon origin by generation. The Council of Chalcedon, in the first part of its definition, expressly puts both consubstantialities side by side, thus showing that it conceives them both as equally perfect. Holy Scripture insists upon Christ’s kinship with man: He is promised as the seed of the woman, as the seed of Abraham and of David; He calls Himself by preference the Son of Man; Evangelists and Apostles continually speak of His human origin. In the corporate and organic unity of the human race, with the God-Man as second and higher Head, the Fathers see the foundation and the pledge of the union of mankind with God in supernatural life. By reason of this kinship the flesh of Christ is the property of mankind, and when offered in sacrifice, it has the nature of a gift from man to God. Lastly, only by reason of His kinship with man, Christ, as Mediator and Priest, is the natural and perfect representative of man before God. That the Saviour was born without a human father does not destroy His consubstantiality with man: it has only the effect of freeing the bodily organization of Christ from all defects incidental to generation by man, and to give Him a body at least as perfect as that of Adam issuing from the hands of God. The relation of dependence between progeny and progenitor, in virtue of which the progeny becomes a branch of, and is subordinate to, mankind as a whole, is indeed limited and modified; but this is necessary in order that Christ, as the second and more excellent Father of mankind, may be superior to the first Adam. See Petavius, De Incarn., lib. i.; Thomassin, l. iv., c. 1–11.