§ 137. THE NE8T0RIAN CONTROVERSY 711
blasphemy ; but the expression was intended oi ]y to denote the indissohible union of the divine and human natures in Christ, and the veritable incarnation of the Logcs, who took the human nature from the body of Mary, came forth God-Man from her womb, and as God-Man suffered on the cross. For Christ was borne as a, person, and suffered as a person; and the personality in Christ resided in his divinity, not in his humanit}'". So, in fact, the reasonable soul of man, which is the centre of the human personality, participates in the suffering and the death-struggle of the body, though the soul itself does not and cannot die.
The Antiochian theology, however, could not conceive a human nature without a human personality, and this it strictly separated from the divine Logos. Therefore Theodore of Mopsuestia had already disputed the term theoiokos with all earnestness. " Mary," says he, " bore Jesus, not the Logos, for the Logos was, and continues to be, omnipresent, though he dwelt in Jesus in a special manner from the beginning. Therefore Mary is strictly the mother of Christ, not the mother of God. Only in a figure, per anaphoram, can she be called also the mother of God, because God was in a peculiar sense in Christ. Properly speaking, she gave birth to a man in whom the union with the Logos had begun, but was still so incomplete that he could not yet (till after his baptism) be called the Son of God." He even declared it " insane " to say that God was born of the Yirgin; "not God, but the temple in which God dwelt, was born of Mary."
In a similar strain T'Testorius, and his friend Anastasius, a priest whom he had brought with him from Antioch, argued from the pulpit against the theotoTcon. ISTestorius claimed that he found the controversy already existing in Constantinople, because some were calling Mary mother of God i^eojcKoi)^ 3thers, mother of Man {dv^pcoiroroKo^). He proposed the middle expression, mother of Christ {Xpta-TOT6Ko<;), because Christ was at the same time God and man. He delivered several discourses on this disputed point. " You ask," says he in his first sermon, " whether Mary may be called mother of God. Has God then a mother ? If so, heathenism itself ii
71 S TIIIKD PLKIOD. A.D. 311-590,
excusable in assigning mothers to its gods ; Lut then Paul is a liar, for he said of the deity of Christ that it ^vas without father, without mother, and without descent.' ]So, my dear sir, Mary did not bear God ; - . . the creature bore not the uncreated Creator, but the man who is the instrument of the Godhead ; the Holy Ghost conceived not the Logos, but formed for him, out of the virgin, a temple which he might inhabit (John ii. 21). The incarnate God did not die, but quickened him in whom he was made flesh. . . . This garment, which he used, I honor on account of the God which was covered therein and inseparable therefrom; . . . I separate the natures^ hut I unite the worship. Consider what tliis nnist mean. He who was formed in the womb of Mary, was not himself God, but God assumed him [assumsit, i. e., clothed himself with humanity], and on account of Him who assumed, he who was assumed is also called GodP *
From this word the ITestorian controversy took its rise ; but this word represented, at the same time, a theological idea and a mighty religious sentiment ; it was intimately connected with the growing veneration of Mary ; it therefore struck into the field of devotion, wliich lies mucli nearer the people than that of speculative theology; and thus it touclied the most vehement passions. The word theotokos was the watcliword of the orthodox party in the Kestorian controversy, as the term homoousios had been in the Arian ; and opposition to this word meant denial of the mystery of the incarnation, or of the true union of the divine and human natures in Christ.
And unquestionably the Antiochian Christology, which was represented by "N"estorius, did not make the Logos truly heoome man. It asserted indeed, rightly, the duality of the natures. and the continued distinction between them ; it denied, with equal correctness, that God, as such, could either be born, or Buffer and die ; but it pressed the distinction of the two natures to double personality. It substituted for the idea of the incar-
' Ileb. vii. 3 : aTrarwp, auTjTop, iviv yevtaKoyias.
' In the original in Mansi, iv. 1197 ; in a Latin translation in Marius Mercator ed. Gamier, Migne, p. 757 ff. Corap. this and similar passages also in Hefele, ii. p. 137, and Giesclcr, i. 2, 139.