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THE GREEK AND EASTERN CHURCHES

opinions. These turned in one or other of two directions according as the mind was directed to the distinction of the natures in Christ or to the unity of the Person. Emphasis on the distinction between the Divine and human natures in our Lord issued in Nestorianism. Insistence on the unity of His person pushed to an extreme led to the heresy known at the time as Eutychianism. In point of fact, however, another and a deeper tendency may be traced through each of these movements when we consider the motives that inspired them. The underlying motive of Nestorianism was interest in our Lord's humanity, His earthly life, His brotherly relations with mankind; the motive prompting to Eutychianism was the aim of exalting the Divinity of Christ in which the human nature was quite swallowed up and assimilated to the infinite, allcontrolling Divine. Nestorianism took its origin in the school of Antioch, where the Gospels were studied historically and the earthly life of Jesus Christ highly valued. Antioch was in close touch with Constantinople, and thus the influence of the Syrian city was readily felt in the great metropolis. The opposition to Nestorianism—which ultimately came over the fine edge of orthodoxy on the other side, in the form of Eutychianism—sprang from Alexandria, the home of Athanasius a century before, famed as the stronghold of the doctrine of the Divinity of Christ. But immediately we name these cities we are prepared to see how the age-long jealousies of the patriarchates of which they were the seats were roused to range themselves on one side or the other of the discussions, which thus obtained local colour and excited partisan passions quite irrespective of the claims of truth or the honour of Him about whose nature the rival disputants professed to be so deeply concerned.

The originator of the Nestorian line of thought was Theodore of Mopsuestia, and his mind was set going in this direction in opposition to the Apollinarians. He urged that for the restoration of the shattered unity of the cosmos it was necessary that God the Word should become