6. That the influence of the Areopagite and of Maximus was brought mightily to bear upon the orthodoxy of the East is manifest in the Fountain of Knowledge of John of Damascus (d. about 754), who yet uncompromisingly maintained the per- sistence of two wills in the Person of Christ (Chi'ist unitedly willing in correspondence with each of the two natures), and the freedom of His human will. The pseudo - Dionysian formula, ' Divine - human energy,' he understood to imj)ly a Divine and a human activity each permanently differentiated from the other ; yet he w.as at great jmins to show the unity of the two natures (cf. Dorner, II. i. 210). The permeation of the human nature by the Divine involved in his conception the deification of the human. He illustrates the relation of the Divine and the human in Christ by the permeation of iron by heat. The human intellect of Christ, by virtue of this permeation, participated in the all- comprehending Divine knowledge from the begin- ning. He takes a Docetic view of the NT re))re- sentation that Jesus grew in wisdom and favour. So also he regards Docetically tlie praj'ers of Christ. God constituting the personality in Christ, there
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CHRIST m THE MIDDLE AGES
was no occasion for prayer except to furnish an example to us and to do honour to God. Yet he was very far from accepting the Eutychian idea that Divine attributes were communicated to the human nature. While the flesh became the flesh of the Word, and the soul of Jesus the soul of the Word, the human nature remained unaltered in essence. Solely on the ground of the fellowship of the Divine and the human was the flesh of the Lord enriched by the Divine activities. It is evi- dent that this great thinker, whose Fountain of Knoioledge is still normative in the Greek Church, failed to gain a perfectly consistent view of the re- lations of the Divine and the human in the Person of Christ.
7. The views of the pseudo - Dionysius and Maximus reappeared among the monks of Mount Atiios about the middle of the 14th cent. (Hesy- chasts, Quietists), and occasioned the Hesychastic controversy, the chief opponents being the leaders of the party that was promoting union with the Latin Church. The cause of the Hesychasts was ably defended by Nicolaus Cabasilas, bishop of Thessalonica, and by Marcus Eugenicus, arch- bishop of Ephesus. The Christology of Cabasilas is highly transcendental. He regarded Christ as the resting-place of those human yearnings that are directed towards the highest good, as the laxuriant pasture of the thoughts, as the eternal good incorporated Avith time. Although he held fast to the Chalcedonian doctrine of two natures and two wills, he yet regarded the Word as super- essential even in the Incarnation, and the humanity of Christ as superhuman and deified though of like substance with us. The sacraments of the Church he regarded as the channels through which life streams forth from Christ to us. Baptism represents the generation in us of the new Christ- life. Everything pertaining to man's salvation was accomplished by the death and resurrection of Christ. Baptism simply transfers the saving efficacy to the individual. The purification of human nature ac- complished in the Incarnation in Christ is accom- plished in the individual Christian by his partaking of the Divine-human nature present in the Euchar- ist. Appropriating Christ in this feast, we enter into a blood-relationship with God and Christ ; and as Christ's humanity became deified in the Incarna- tion, so do believers by partaking of Him.
8. In the West, John Scotus Erigena (d. about 880) translated, under the ijatronage of Charles the Bald, the pseudo-Dionysian writings, by which, as well as by the writings of Maximus, he had been profoundly influenced. Through him the Neo- Platonic mysticism was transplanted to the West, and came to exert a marked influence on later Christological thought. His teachings were even more openly imntheistic than those of his Oriental masters, and his denial of the reality of derived existence and his thoroughgoing Docetism make it extremely difficult to interpret much of the language in which he strives to give a certain value to the historical facts of redemption. While asserting that Christ took upon Him the form of a servant and human nature in its entirety, he shows at once how little his language accords with common - sense usage by saying that the human nature that the Word assumed contains in itself the entire visible and invisible creation. Christ's mission was to call back effects into causes, and thus to prevent causality itself from perishing. Thus in assuming and renovating human nature He renovated the whole of the creation visible and invisible. In assuming and renovating human nature thus with its universal contents, Christ raised it in Himself above all that is visible, and converted it into His Deity. He saved the entire human nature which He entirely assumed entirely
in itself and entirely in the entire race. Entire humanity is exalted in Him and sits at the right hand of God, having become God in Him. It is manifest that such conceptions of incarnation leave no place for evangelical views of sin or redemption. By his seeming recognition of the historical life of Christ he can have meant only to set forth belief in a theophany which had the ett'ect of furthering and facilitating the rise of men above theophanies to the archetypal (cf . Dorner, II. ii. 294 fF. ).