A Source Book for Ancient Church History - Mirrors

541many of them to the priesthood, and by this crime saddeningwith no slight grief that man of God, Epiphanius, of blessedmemory, who has shone throughout all the world a bright staramong bishops, deserved to hear the words, “Babylon is fallen,is fallen.”§ 88. The Christological Problem and the TheologicalTendenciesThe Arian controversy in bringing about the affirmation of thetrue deity of the Son, or Logos, left the Church with the problemof the unity of the divine and human natures in the personalityof Jesus. It seemed to not a few that to combine perfect deitywith perfect humanity would result in two personalities. Holdingfast, therefore, to the reality of the human nature, a solution wasattempted by Apollinarius, or Apollinaris, by making the divineLogos take the place of the human logos or reason. Mankindconsisted of three parts: a body, an animal soul, and a rationalspirit. The Logos was thus united to humanity by substitutingthe divine for the human logos. But this did violence to the [494]integrity of the human nature of Christ. This attempt on the partof Apollinaris was rejected at Constantinople, but also by theChurch generally. The human natures must be complete if humannature was deified by the assumption of man in the incarnation.On this basis two tendencies showed themselves quite early: thehuman nature might be lost in the divinity, or the human and thedivine natures might be kept distinct and parallel or in such away that certain acts might be assigned to the divine and certainto the human nature. The former line of thought, adopted by theCappadocians, tended toward the position assumed by Cyril ofAlexandria and in a more extreme form by the Monophysites.The latter line of thought tended toward what was regarded asthe position of Nestorius. In this position there was such a sharpcleavage between the divine and the human natures as apparently