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Articles: Philosophy | The Incarnation
- Mr. KALIDASU D
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II. The Nature of the Incarnation
Now we deal with the question of the nature of this fact, the manner of this tremendous miracle, the way of uniting the Divine with the human nature in one and the same Person. First I will point out several heresies that pertain to the nature of the Incarnation and how the Church dealt with them.
(1) Heresies
A. Gnostic Docetism
This first heresy denied not so much Christ's divinity as his true humanity. From apostolic times the Christian faith has insisted on the true incarnation of God's Son 'come in the flesh'. In the third century, the Church in a council at Antioch had to affirm against Paul of Samosata that Jesus Christ is Son of God by nature and not by adoption.
B. Arianism
The first ecumenical council of Nicaea in 325 confessed in its Creed that the Son of God is 'begotten, not made, of the same substance (homoousios) as the Father', and condemned Arius, who had affirmed that the Son of God 'came to be from things that were not' and that he was 'from another substance' than that of the Father.
C. Nestorianism
Nestorius, Patriarch of Constantinople in 428 A.D., called the union of the two natures a mysterious and an inseparable joining (symapheian), but would admit no unity (enosin) in the strict sense of the word to be the result of this joining. As is usual in these Oriental heresies, the metaphysical refinement is faulty, and leads to a practical denial of the mystery. The oneness of the Person was percieved as only moral, and not at all physical - which denies the Hypostatic Union. St. Athanasius in about 350 A.D. said: 'They err who say that it is one person who is the Son that suffered, and another person who did not suffer...'. The Council of Ephesus in 431 A.D. condemned the heresy of Nestorius.
D. Monophysitism
Nestorius had postulated two persons in Jesus Christ. A new heresy soon began. It postulated only one Person in Jesus, the Divine Person. The new heresy defended only one nature, as well as one Person in Jesus. The leader of this heresy was Eutyches. His followers were called Monophysites. They varied in their ways of explanation. Some thought the two natures were intermingled into one. Others are said to have worked out some sort of a conversion of the human into the Divine. All were condemned by the Council of Chalcedon in 451 A.D. This Fourth General Council of the Church defined that Jesus Christ remained, after the Incarnation, 'perfect in Divinity and perfect in humanity . . . consubstantial with the Father according to His Divinity, consubstantial with us according to His humanity . . . one and the same Christ, the Son, the Lord, the Only begotten, to be acknowledged in two natures not intermingled, not changed, not divisible, not separable'
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