Heresies

 HERESIES are partial views of the truth, starting from some truth which they exaggerate, and disowning and protesting against other truth, which they fancy inconsistent with it.

 All heresies are partial views of the truth, and are wrong, not so much in what they directly say as in what they deny.

 All heresies seem connected together and to run into each other. When the mind has embraced one, it is almost certain to run into others, apparently the most opposite, it is quite uncertain which. Thus Arians were a reaction from Sabellians, yet did not the less consider than they that God was but one Person, and that Christ was a creature. Apollinaris was betrayed into his heresy by opposing the Arians, yet his heresy started with the tenet in which the Arians ended, that Christ had no human soul. His disciples became, and even naturally, some of them Sabellians, some Arians. Again, beginning with denying our Lord a soul, Apollinaris came to deny Him a body, like the Manichees and Docetæ. The same passages from Athanasius will be found to refute both Eutychians and Nestorians, though diametrically opposed to each other: and these agreed together, not only in considering nature and person identical, but, strange to say, in holding (and the Apollinarians too,) that our Lord's manhood existed before its union with Him, which is the special heresy of Nestorius. Again, the Nestorians were closely connected with the Sabellians and Samosatenes, and the latter with the Photinians and modern Socinians. And the Nestorians were connected with the Pelagians; and Aerius, who denied Episcopacy and prayers for the dead, with the Arians; and his opponent the Semi-Arian Eustathius with the Encratites. One reason of course of this peculiarity of heresy is, that when the mind is once unsettled, it may fall into any error. Another is that it is heresy; all heresies being secretly connected, as in temper, so in certain primary principles. And lastly, the Truth only is a real doctrine, and therefore stable; everything false is of a transitory nature and has no stay, like reflections in a stream, one opinion continually passing into another, and creations being but the first stages of dissolution. Hence so much is said in the Fathers of orthodoxy being a narrow way. Thus S. Gregory speaks of the middle and "royal" way. Orat. 32, 6, also Damasc. contr. Jacob. iii. t. 1, p. 398; vid. also Leon. Ep. 85, 1, p. 1051; Ep. 129, p. 1254, "brevissimâ adjectione corrumpitur;" also Serm. 25, 1, p. 83; also Vigil. in Eutych. i. init. "Quasi inter duos latrones crucifigitur Dominus," etc. Novat. Trin. 30. vid. the promise, "Thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, This is the way, walk ye in it, and go not aside either to the right hand, or to the left." Is. xxx. 21.

 Heresies run into each other, (one may even say,) logically. No doctrines were apparently more opposed, whether historically or ethically, than the Arian and the Apollinarian or the Monophysite; nay, in statement, so far as the former denied that our Lord was God, the latter that He was man. But their agreement lay in this compromise, that strictly speaking He was neither God nor man. Thus in Orat. ii. § 8, Athan. hints that if the Arians gave the titles (such as Priest) which really belonged to our Lord's manhood, to His pre-existent nature, what were they doing but removing the evidences of His manhood, and so far denying it? Vid. the remarkable passage of the Council of Sardica against Valens and Ursacius quoted supr. vol. i. p. 116. In the Arian Creed No. vii. or second Sirmian, it is implied that the Divine Son is passible, the very doctrine against which Theodoret writes one of his Anti-monophysite Dialogues called Eranistes. He writes another on the [ atrepton ] of Christ, a doctrine which was also formally denied by Arius, and is defended by Athan. Orat. i. § 35. Vid. art. Eusebius, who speaks of our Lord's taking a body, almost to the prejudice of the doctrine of His taking a perfect manhood ; [ ei men psuches diken ], etc., supr. p. 106. Hence it is that Gibbon throws out (ch. 47, note 34), after La Croze, Hist. Christ. des Indes, p. 11, that the Arians invented the term [ theotokos ], which the Monophysites, in their own sense strenuously held, vid. Garner in Mar. Merc. t. 2, p. 299. If the opposites of connected heresies are in fact themselves connected together, then the doctrinal connection of Arianism and Apollinarianism is shown in their respective opposition to the heresies of Sabellius and Nestorius. Salig (Eutych. ant. Eut. 10) denies the connection, but with very little show of reason. La Croze calls Apollinarianism "Arianismi tradux," Thes. Ep. Lacroz. t. 3, p. 276.

 It was the tendency of all the heresies concerning the Person of Christ to explain away or deny the Atonement. The Arians, after the Platonists, insisted on the pre-existing Priesthood, as if the incarnation and crucifixion were not of its essence. The Apollinarians resolved the Incarnation into a manifestation, Theod. Eran. i. The Nestorians denied the Atonement, Procl. ad Armen. p. 615. And the Eutychians, Leon. Ep. 28, 5.

 It is remarkable that the Monophysites should have been forced into their circumscription of the Divine Nature by the limits of the human, considering that Eutyches their Patriarch began with asserting for reverence-sake that the Incarnate Word was not under the laws of human nature, vid. infra art. Specialties, etc. This is another instance of the running of opposite heresies into each other. Another remarkable instance will be found in art. Ignorance, viz. the AgnStæ, a sect of those very Eutychians, who denied or tended to deny our Lord's manhood with a view of preserving His Divinity, yet who were characterised by holding that He was ignorant as man.

 "This passage of the Apostle," Rom. i. 1, "[Marcellus] I know not why perverts, instead of declared, [ horisthentos ], making it predestined, [ prooristhentos ], that the Son may be such as they who are predestined according to foreknowledge." Euseb. contr. Marc. i. 2. Paul of Samosata also considered our Lord Son by foreknowledge, [ prognosei ]. vid. Routh, Reliqu. t. 2, p. 466; and Eunomius, Apol. 24.

 In spite of their differing diametrically from each other in their respective heresies about the Holy Trinity, that our Lord was not really the Divine Word was a point in which Arians and Sabellians agreed. vid. infr. Orat. iv. init.; also ii. § 22, 40, also Sent. D. 25. Ep. Æg. 14 fin. Epiph. Hær. 72, p. 835.

 Heretics have frequently assigned reverence as the cause of their opposition to the doctrine of the Church; and if even Arius was obliged to affect it, the plea may be expected in any others. "O stultos et impios metus," says S. Hilary, "et irreligiosam de Deo sollicitudinem." de Trin. iv. 6. It was still more commonly professed in regard to the Catholic doctrine of the Incarnation. Thus Manes, "Absit ut Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum per naturalia mulieris descendisse confitear; ipse enim testimonium dat, quia de sinibus Patris descendit." Archel. Disp. t. iii. p. 601. "We, as saying that the Word of God is incapable of defilement, even by the assumption of mortal and vulnerable flesh, fear not to believe that He is born of a Virgin; ye," Manichees, "because with impious perverseness ye believe the Son of God to be capable of it, dread to commit Him to the flesh." August. contr. Secund. 9. Faustus "is neither willing to receive Jesus of the seed of David, nor made of a woman ... nor the death of Christ itself, and burial, and resurrection," etc. August. contr. Faust xi. 3. As the Manichees denied our Lord a body, so the Apollinarians denied Him a rational soul, still under pretence of reverence, because, as they said, the soul was necessarily sinful. Leontius makes this their main argument, [ ho nous hamartetikos esti ], de Sect. iv. p. 507; vid. also Greg. Naz. Ep. 101, ad Cledon. p. 89; Athan. in Apoll. i. 2, 14; Epiph. Ancor. 79, 80. Athan. and others call the Apollinarian doctrine Manichean in consequence. vid. in Apoll. ii. 8, 9, etc. Again, the Eranistes in Theodoret, who advocates a similar doctrine, will not call our Lord man . "I consider it important to acknowledge an assumed nature, but to call the Saviour of the world man is to impair our Lord's glory." Eranist. ii. p. 83. Eutyches, on the other hand, would call our Lord man, but refused to admit His human nature, and still with the same profession. "Ego," he says, "sciens sanctos et beatos patres nostros refutantes duarum naturarum vocabulum, et non audens de naturâ tractare Dei Verbi, qui in carnem venit, in veritate non in phantasmate homo factus," etc. Leon. Ep. 21, 1 fin. "Forbid it," he says at Constantinople, "that I should say that the Christ was of two natures, or should discuss the nature, [ physiologein ], of my God." Concil. t. 2, p. 157. And so in this day popular Tracts have been published, ridiculing St. Luke's account of our Lord's nativity under pretence of reverence towards the God of all, and interpreting Scripture allegorically on Pantheistic principles. A modern argument for Universal Restitution takes the same form: "Do not we shrink from the notion of another's being sentenced to eternal punishment; are we more merciful than God ?" vid. Matt. xvi. 22, 23.

 That heresies before the Arian appealed to Scripture we learn from Tertullian, de Præscr. 42, who warns Catholics against indulging themselves in their own view of isolated texts against the voice of the Catholic Church. vid. also Vincentius, who specifies obiter Sabellius and Novatian. Commonit. 2. Still Arianism was contrasted with other heresies on this point, as in these two respects: (1.) they appealed to a secret tradition, unknown even to most of the Apostles, as the Gnostics, Iren. Hær. iii. 1; or they professed a gift of prophecy introducing fresh revelations, as Montanists, Syn. § 4, and Manichees, Aug. contr. Faust. xxxii. 6. (2.) The Arians availed themselves of certain texts as objections, argued keenly and plausibly from them, and would not be driven from them. Orat. ii. § 18, c.; Epiph. Hær. 69, 15. Or rather they took some words of Scripture, and made their own deductions from them; viz. "Son," "made," "exalted," etc.