How did He stand related to God? The orthodox were content to affirm His full Divinity and also to assert the fact of the incarnation; but they made no attempt to correlate these two truths. They had no theory as to how the Divine and the human could subsist together, how there could be such a fact as an incarnation at all. The full discussion of this most difficult problem belongs to the controversies of later times—those of the fifth and sixth centuries. But before the end of the fourth century there had emerged a burning question as to the actual presence of complete human and Divine natures in the Person of Jesus Christ. Now both the Gregories, but Gregory of Nyssa the more emphatically of the two, followed Origen in pronouncing for a real human soul in Christ. According to Gregory of Nyssa, this was transformed under the influence of the Divine Nature after the resurrection and ascension. The very body of Christ was then sublimated into the essence of the Divine Nature, so that it has laid aside the attributes of gravity, shape, colour, and all limitation. Thus we have the omnipresence of that glorified body, for the body of Christ was transmute to the flesh of God by the indwelling word.[1] It is easy to see how readily such a theory would agree with the doctrine of transubstantiation, a doctrine which Gregory did more than anybody else of his period to advance.[2]
On the other hand, Apollinaris the younger, of Hierapolis, took the opposite line. A man of great intellectual power, he made an original attempt to shape an intelligible conception of the incarnation. But by abolishing its mystery he virtually denied the fact. His motif was opposition to Arianism. Nevertheless, he shared with Arius a view which the Church always rejected as false and fatal to the central idea of the gospel, the coming of the Divine into the human; for he too denied to Christ a complete human nature. Like Arius, he was Aristotelian in temper of mind and method of thought. His clear,
- ↑ Oratio catechetica magna, 37.
- ↑ See Hebert, The Lord's Supper, vol. i. pp. 202–209.
