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the unity of the person in Christ, without sacrificing His real deity; and also to guard the
sinlessness of Christ. But he did so at the expense of the complete humanity of the Saviour, and
consequently his position was explicitly condemned by the Council of Constantinople in 381.
One of the things for which Apollinaris contended was the unity of the person in Christ. That
this was really in danger became quite apparent in the position taken by the school of Antioch,
which exaggerated the distinction of the two natures in Christ. Theodore of Mopsuestia and
Nestorius stressed the complete manhood of Christ, and conceived of the indwelling of the
Logos in Him as a mere moral indwelling, such as believers also enjoy, though not to the same
degree. They saw in Christ a man side by side with God, in alliance with God, sharing the
purpose of God, but not one with Him in the oneness of a single personal life, — a Mediator
consisting of two persons. In opposition to them Cyril of Alexandria strongly emphasized the
unity of the person in Christ, and in the estimation of his opponents denied the two natures.
While they in all probability misunderstood him, Eutychus and his followers certainly appealed
to him, when they took up the position that the human nature of Christ was absorbed by the
divine, or that the two were fused into a single nature, a position involving the denial of the two
natures in Christ. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 condemned both of these views and
maintained the unity of the person as well as the duality of the natures.
2. AFTER THE COUNCIL OF CHALCEDON.
For some time the Eutychian error was continued by
the Monophysites and the Monothelites, but was finally overcome by the Church. The further
danger that the human nature of Christ would be regarded as entirely impersonal was warded
off by Leontius of Byzantium, when he pointed out that it is not impersonal but in-personal,
having its personal subsistence in the person of the Son of God. John of Damascus, in whom the
Christology of the East reached its highest development, added the idea that there is a
circumincession of the divine and the human in Christ, a communication of the divine attributes
to the human nature, so that the latter is deified and we may also say that God suffered in the
flesh. He shows a tendency to reduce the human nature to the position of a mere organ or
instrument of the Logos, yet he admits that there is a co-operation of the two natures, and that
the one person acts and wills in each nature, though the human will is always subject to the
divine.
In the Western Church Felix, bishop of Urgella, advocated adoptionism. He regarded Christ as to
His divine nature, that is, the Logos, as the onlybegotten Son of God in the natural sense, but
considered Christ on His human side as a Son of God merely by adoption. He sought to preserve
the unity of the person by stressing the fact that, from the time of His conception, the Son of
Man was taken up into the unity of the person of the Son of God. Thus a distinction was made
between a natural and an adoptive sonship, and the latter did not begin with the natural birth
of Christ, but had its inception at the time of His baptism and was consummated in the