became later the Monophysite creed. This is of great importance. Most modern Monophysites (e.g. the Armenians) will deny that they hold Eutyches' doctrine. They are generally as ready to condemn him as we are. People think that this proves them to be innocent of the heresy with which they are charged. It does not do so at all. A man may be as pure a Monophysite as was Dioscor, and may yet disagree with Eutyches on several points. For he evolved the extraordinary idea that our Lord has two natures before the hypostatic union, but that then (presumably at his incarnation) these two natures were fused into one.[1] There are other altogether wild ideas in Eutyches's system. Christ's body was not formed of his mother. It was created by the Logos long before his birth; the Logos assumed this body, fusing it with the Divinity, in the womb of the blessed Virgin. She was thus only the channel through which her so-called son passed.[2] Thus Eutyches arrived at a curious conclusion. Starting as the great champion of Ephesine doctrine, of which the dogma that Mary is Mother of God is the very essence, he came to a conclusion which (were he logical) denied that dogma. A channel through which a totally disconnected being passes, a person who is merely the place in which a pre-existent body is combined with the eternal nature of that being, is in no possible sense his mother.[3]
Now, much of this goes far beyond mere Monophysism. A Monophysite is a man who believes in the identity of the human nature and the Divine nature in Christ.[4] It is quite possible to hold this heresy without accepting Eutyches' further wild theories about a pre-existing body of Christ, and so on. Hence, almost from the beginning of the dispute many Monophysites were quite
- ↑ St. Leo I points out that the exact contrary is true. "Eutyches says I confess that our Lord was in two natures before their union; but after the union I confess one nature … he says that the only-begotten Son of God had two natures before the incarnation, as impiously as he wickedly asserts one nature in him after the Word had become flesh." Ep. xxviii. cap. 6 (P.L. liv. 777).
- ↑ This revives a very common idea of the old Docetes; see Docetism in Dr. J. Hastings' Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1911), iv. 832–835.
- ↑ A statement of Eutyches' strange system will be found in Hefele-Leclercq: op. cit. ii. (1), p. 515.
- ↑ Practically, as we shall see, a Monophysite is a man who rejects the dogmatic decree of the Council of Chalcedon.
