9. A far more evangelical type of mystical Christology is found in the writings of Hugo of St. Victor (d. 1114) and Richard of St. Victor (d. 1173). In them the theosophy of Erigena was transformed into ecstatic enjoyment of God Him- self. They were unable to find satisfaction in the Church doctrine of the transubstantiation of the bread and the wine into the body and the blood of Christ as the form in which Christ may be enjoyed, but yearned for a spiritual union with Christ, the transubstantiation of the believer by an ecstatic exaltation into a mystical union with Christ. The Christology of Hugo and Richard was clearly that of the pseudo-Dionysius and of Erigena ; but with them the Incarnation was conceived of more dis- tinctly as a historical fact, and the ecstatic union of the Ijcliever with Christ did not so clearly in- volve loss of individual consciousness and virtual absorption.
10. The pantheistic features of the teaching of Erigena found their most extreme development in Amalric of Bena (d. 1204), who identified God with the world and with man. Yet he did not "wholly ignore the historical, and maintained that God revealed Himself as Father in Abraham, as Son in Mary, and as Holy Spirit daily in us. He declared that we are the natural members of Christ, because the identical soul of Christ dwells in all good men. Spiritual exaltation from Christ dwelling in us emancipates us from all moral obligation, and makes sins of the flesh a matter of inditterence.
11. More profoundly philosophical but scarcely less destructive to the Christology of the NT and to true religion was the mysticism of Master Eck- hart (d. c. 1327). He refused to recognize any distinction between man and God, in nature or in persons. All creatures he regarded as a ' pure nothing.' Every believer is God's only-begotten son in the same sense in which this is true of Christ. ' Whatever God the Father has given to His only-begotten Son in human nature. He has given wholly to me. Here I except nothing, neither union nor sanctity. ' ' Whatever the Sacred Scripture says concerning Christ is also absolutely true of every good man.' Eternal generation applies to every good man as fully as to Christ. In fact, man as well as God may be said to have created the heaven and the earth, and to have generated the eternal Word.
12. In John Tauler (d. 1361) we have a highly Neo- Platonic mode of thought combined with the most devout and heartfelt recognition of the In- carnation and the propitiatory suflerings of Christ as absolutely necessary for our salvation. Christ's being is cause, essence, and beginning in relation to all things. He is the life of the living, the resurrection of the dead, the restorer of the de- formed and disordered who have corrupted and spoiled themselves by sin, the beginning of all light, the illumination of all those avIio are illumi- nated, the revealer of obscurity according to what it is proper for us to know, and the beginning of all beginning. His being is inconceivable and unspeakable, and without names. In becoming flesh and making atonement for the guilt of humanity He is its Redeemer. The Holy Spirit took of the most pure blood of the virginal heart of INIarj', which was glowing with the powerful
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flame of love, and created of it a perfectly pure little body with all its members, and a pure clean soul, and united these together. Tliis soul and body, the Person of the Son of God, who is the eternal Word and the reflexion of tlie Father's glory, from genuine love and mercy, for the sake of our blessedness, took upon Himself and united with Himself into the unity of the Person. Thus the Word became flesh and dwelt with us. The humanity of Christ he regarded as even in the humiliation permeated by the Divine, and sharing in the possession and use of the Divine attributes. The same was true even when He suttered and died on the cross. According to its lower powers Christ's soul was subject to needs. From this point of view he could say that not a drop of His Deity came for one moment to the help of His poor agonizing humanity in all its needs and in its un- speakable sufl'erings. Tauler is never weary of emphasizing the importance of the death of Christ. He speaks of the whole human race as fallen into eternal death and the eternal wrath of God, with the loss of the Holy Spirit, the Comforter. Christ broke the bauds of etei-nal death in His death on the cross, and made a complete jieace and recon- ciliation between man and the Heavenly Father. This reconciliation is confirmed by the gift of the Holy Spirit. The sufterings and death of Christ he regarded as an equivalent for man's guilt, as a fulfilling of the Law which we were under obliga- tion to fulfil, in that He suffered in our place and on our behalf. Tauler dwelt with great persistence and with remarkable pathos on the details of the sufl'erings of Christ and His infinite love for the souls of men. It will not be practicable to give here any further phases of mystical Christological thought.
13. Scholastic Christology next demands atten- tion. Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109), in some respects the most important of the mediaeval theologians, wrought out no new theory of the Person of Christ ; but his satisfaction theory of the Atonement, involving the abandonment of the supposition that the death of Christ was a ransom paid to the devil, and basing the necessity of the death of the God-man on the infinite weight of sin and its infinite oflence to the honour of God, was an important contribution to soteriology. Satis- faction to the Divine majesty could not be made by man, seeing that he is finite, or by the Son of God alone, seeing that He owed no satisfaction ; but it must be made by the God-man. While perpetuating the Augustinian modes of thought as they had been modified by Gregory the Great, Alcuin, etc., Anselm was also greatly influenced by the Neo-Platonic semi-pantheism of Erigena. In ojjposition to the tritheism of Roscellinus, which seemed to him to require the Incarnation of Father, Son, and Spirit, and not of the Son alone, as the means of man's redemption, he insisted that it was impossible for Father and Spirit to become man. The Incarnation merely accomplished the union of the Divine and human personalities, and not the union of the Divine and liuman natures. Tlie Divine Person became man and formed one Person with the humanity assumed, but not the nature. There was no transformation of Deity into hu- manity or of humanity into Deity. Not the Divine nature but the Person of the Son became man. If the Divine Person alone and not the Divine nature took part in the Incarnation, it is plain that we cannot speak of tlie three Persons having become man in Christ, unless we hold that several persons could become one person (Dorner, II. i. p. 442 ff.). Anselm as a Realist insisted that in the Incarnation the Logos united Himself not with an individual man, hut with impersonal humanity, in this opposing the Nominalists, who