ds. Only in the north was Catholicism
supreme, and thence came in later days the reconquest. But Catholics
lived on all over Spain under their conquerors in comparative peace.

[Sidenote: The Adoptianist heresy.]

The Church survived. Persecution made its life strong and vigorous,
and that life found outlet in new varieties of theological expression.
Elipandus, Archbishop of Toledo, within seventy years of the Saracen
conquest, became known outside his own land, with Felix, bishop of the
northern see of Urgel, for his advocacy of the statement that {79}
Christ's Sonship was that of adoption. Asserting the two Natures and
the two Wills of the Lord, the Adoptianists regarded Christ as only in
His divine nature truly the Son of God. Eager to assert the full
Humanity and to rebut the Muhammadan charges of idolatry, the Spanish
theologians taught that "one and the same Person was in two aspects a
Son, in virtue of His relation to two different natures," and that "the
Divine Son of God, begotten from all eternity of the Father, not by
adoption but by birth, not by grace but by nature--that He, when made
of a woman, made under the law, was Son of God, not by origin but by
adoption, not by nature but by grace." [4] It was an attempt to carry
further the decisions adopted at Chalcedon and to account for the
origin of the two Natures, their completeness in distinction, and their
union together.

[Sidenote: Its condemnation.]

Adoptianism was condemned at Regensburg in 792, and at Frankfort in
794, and, under the influence of Alcuin, Felix made submission at
Aachen in 799. Elipandus, safe among the Saracens, held out in his
opinions. It would seem that the discussion represented the
eighth-century expression of the age-long conflict between logic and
mystery, the desire for exact definition, and the sense of something
beyond human understanding in what belongs to the nature of God, and to
the divine action in the Incarnation, the union of God and man.

[Sidenote: Adoptianism in the East.]

Adoptianism had in the East a greater success and a longer history than
in the West. In Syria and Armenia vast numbers joined the sect
founded, or revived, by one {80} Constantine in the middle of the
seventh century. He lived near Samosata, and probably inherited the
teaching of the earlier heretic, Paul of that place. The sect came to
be called Paulicians. They rejected the real divinity of Christ and
placed themselves in op