Section 715

With the explanation thus given, we proceed to re- mark that the earliest controversies of the Church re- volved around the physical nature of Christ. The result of those contests established the essential oneness of Christ's body with ours. The pungency of the argu- ments employed may be illustrated in the words of Ire- nneus (ciuoted by Hooker, Eccl. PoHff/, v, sec. 53) : " If Christ had not taken flesh from the very earth, he would not have coveted those earthly nourishments wherewith bodies taken from thence are fed. This was the nature which felt hunger after long fasting, was desirous of rest after travel, testified compassion, and love by tears, groaned in heaviness, and with extremity of grief melt- ed away itself into bloody sweats." The eai'liest fa- thers, with the exception of Justin Martyr, held the opinion that Christ assumed only a human body, or, if he had a soid, it was animal, or, which was more com- mon, they ijuite ignored the question of his human soul. The \-iews of Justin, however, were colored l)y the Pla- tonic philosophy, which led him to attribute to Christ boily, soul, and spirit, but in such a mode of union with the Logos as to furnish the germs of the future error of ApoUinaris the younger. Tcrtullian, about the end of the 2d century, first ascribed to Christ a proper human soul, and thus met and disposed of the difliculties which had arisen from the teaching that connected the Logos immediately with the body of Christ. The doctrine of the human soul of Christ was more fully developed and illustrated by Origen. But, in comparing the connec- tion between the Logos and the human nature in Christ to the union of believers with Christ, he drew upon himself the objection that he made Christ a mere man. (See further, Knapp, Lectures on Christian Theology, sec. cii, note by the translator.) Ambrose (i)e Incaniatione, p. 7G) may more properly serve as the connecting link between TertuUian and the Athanasian Creed, the latter setting forth the doctrine to which the Church was slowly attaining in the following words: "Perfectus Deus, perfectus homo, ex anima rationali et huraana carne subsistens." Thus Ambrose reasons: "Do we also infer division when we affirm that he took on him a reasonable soul, and one endowed with intellectual ca- pacity? For God himself, the Word, was not to the flesh as the reasonable intellectual soul; but God the Word, taking upon him a reasonable intellectual soul, human, and of the same substance with our souls, the flesh also like our own, and of the same substance with that of which our flesh is formed, was also perfect man, but without any taint of sin. . . . Wherefore his flesh and his soid were of the same substance with our souls and our flesh." Questions in connection with the na- tiure of the human soul of Christ came into greater prominence towards the close of the 4th century than ever before in the history of the Church. ApoUinaris the younger revived the opinion which extensively pre- vailed in the primitive Church, that Christ connected himself only with a human body and an animal soul (Hasc, Ch. Hist. sec. 104). "Two beings persisting in their completeness, he conceived, coidd not be united into one whole. Out of the union of the perfect human nature with the Deity one person never could proceed; and, more particularly, the rational soul of the man could not be assumed into union with the divine Logos so as to form one person" (Neander, iv, 119, Clarke's edition). Fronr an early part of the 9th century, when the Adop- tian tenets sank into oblivion, the Church enjoyed com- parative rest. But, as might have been presumed, the era of scholastic theology, which was inaugurated at about the commencement of the 12th centur\', and con- tinued into the loth, although the attentii)n of the schoolmen was more directed to other subjects, did not pass by one that so readily admitted the exercise of di- alectic subtlety. The nominalism of Roscelinus, " which regarded the appellation God, that is common to the three persons, as a vafxi rarar, i. e. as the abstract idea of a genus" (Hagenbach), had perverted the true idea of Father, Son, and Spirit into that of three individuals