THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
tial greatness; and this remained the established view. Athanasius, in opposition to the Arians, who made the Son of God mutable in nature and immediately subject to human development, necessities, troubles, and sufferings, fights for the unehangeableness of the Logos as the palladium of orthodoxy; the Logos does not increase in wisdom (Luke ii. 52), is not hungry or troubled even unto death (John xii. 27), is not in ignorance of the day of judgment, does not suffer or die — all these things happen only to his " flesh," to his human nature. And after Athanasius not only the Antiochian school but even Apollinaris and Cyril make similarly strong assertions of the unchangeableness of the Godhead of the Logos, such things as ignorance, sleeping, being troubled, and still more suffering and death being referred only in a derived or loose sense to the Logos proper. By a corresponding train of thought, the " exaltation " of Phil. ii. 9 is always in patristic theology referred exclusively to the human nature of Christ. In all this there is no room for such a theory as that of Thomasius; in fact, it is more than once expressly opposed. Hilary mentions something not dissimilar as one of the views on the Incarnation to be avoided, and Cyril of Alexandria controverts two different kenotic theories, the exact meaning of the more important of which is disputable and obscure — but Cyril's attitude is unmistakable; he rejects both with equal firmness, and insists again on the way in which the Godhead fills all in all; a limitation of the Godhead in Christ is essentially unthinkable on account of his unity with the Father. But the very energy with which the Fathers reject any mutability of the Godhead, as much in relation to the Incarnation as anywhere else, would, taken by itself, make the whole conception of the Incarnation practically unsustainable. Its immense importance to early Christian thought would be unintelligible if this were all we knew about primitive Christological development.
But this is not all. It must be borne in mind that the idea of the Incarnation is older than any realization of the difficulties which beset it. It springs not only from the passage in Philippians, but also from such thoughts as those of II Cor. iv. 4; John i. 14; I John i. 1. It appears definitely in Ignatius, in a form as far 4. Con- as possible removed from Docetic creteness imaginings. With almost paradoxof Early ical sharpness he contrasts the God- Christology. head and the passible manhood of Christ, in a way that by no means suggests what would now be called kenosis; he is rather filled with the conception that the invisible, incomprehensible, impassible God became visible, tangible, passible in the historical person of Jesus. How the revelation of the invisible God in the historic Christ came to pass, he does not undertake to say; he merely asserts the fact with firm conviction, dealing with a condescension of the revelation of God to our level, in a " simple modalistic " manner. Ideas of this kind did not die out with Ignatius, but through the theology of Asia Minor leavened the later development. Irenaeus, although he does not quote the ekenosen, obviously connects them with
the thought of the passage. With him, however it is clear that the basis is not a metaphysical kenosistheory of the self-transformation of the Logos but the " simple modalistic " conviction that " the man without beauty and subject to suffering," the historic Christ, was, "in a different way from all men who then lived, God and Lord and King eternal, the only-begotten, the incarnate Word proclaimed by all the prophets and apostles " (Haer. IV., xx. 2). The faith in " God manifest in the flesh," centering around the indivisible historic personality of Jesus, is what carries the belief in the Incarnation through all the difficulties which arose as soon as men began to attempt to define the manner of the Incarnation. It is this unquestioning belief in " God in man " (Ignatius, Ephesians, vii. 2), not any formal theory of a kenosis or anything else, which forms the real basis of the primitive doctrine on the subject.
Nor, when theories begin to appear, are they kenotic, at least not in the sense of Thomasius. The oldest occurs in Irenaeus — the same Irenaeus who speaks of " the impassible becoming passible " and of " the very Word of God incarnate 5. Fore- suspended on the tree," and who veshadow- hemently opposes the Gnostic disings of tinction between " Jesus who suffered " Kenoticism. and " Christ who departed before the Passion." In so far, however, as he had a theory, he distinguished in the historic Christ the Logos and the homo ejus, and, quite in accord with the later development, regarded the man as the object of temptation, suffering, death, in which the Logos had no part, being, on the other hand, " with " " the man " in victory, resurrection, and ascension. Here is the source of the appearance of kenotic ideas, in this doctrine of the Logos taking into himself a part of his creation. He who " according to his invisible nature contains all things " came " to us not as he was able to come, but as we were able to receive him." Here is indeed a selflimitation of the Logos; but it is a progressively less and less self-limited communication of himself on the part of a Logos remaining all the while in undiminished majesty, to man who progressively responds more and more to the approach; it is the sort of self-limitation asserted, not of the Logos but of the " One God," by dynamic Monarchianism. This conception of the dynamic indwelling of the Logos in the man Jesus is not peculiar to Irenaeus, but is to be perceived down to the final disappearance of the Antiochian tradition in the reign of Justinian. Origen is the special representative of this view. In his controversy with Celsus, who had objected that if God came down in person to men he must have left his throne and suffered change, Origen replies that Celsus knows not the power of God nor that " the Spirit of the Lord filleth the earth" (Wisd. i. 7); that even if the God of all, according to his power, came down to take part with Jesus in earthly life, if the Logos who in the beginning was with God and was God came to us, it did not mean that he lost or left his throne, or that he quitted one place to fill another which before had not contained him. That m some of Origen's expressions there is room for *n