ed the
truth. Their presuppositions misled them. As monists they were
inclined to regard matter as sinful. They could not conceive the
infinite donning a soiled robe. "Our body with its hateful wants"
could not, they thought, be a tabernacle for the Logos. The idea of
the native dignity of the human frame and of its being ennobled by the
King's indwelling was completely foreign to the monophysites' ways of
thinking.

Since such was the background of their thought it was inevitable that
definitely heretical doctrines should result. In the first place we
meet the flat denial of the reality of Christ's body. Even in
apostolic days those who held this heresy were found. They denied that
Christ had come in the flesh. They were styled docetists or
phantasiasts. According to them the body had no objective reality. It
was a phantom. Its reality was entirely subjective. It was the effect
produced on the perceptions of those who associated with the mysterious
spirit-being. The Logos, as viewed by the phantasiasts, at the
incarnation struck His being into the bounds of time, but not of space.
Divine personality, they thought, did not require and could not use a
material medium. This doctrine was not part of the official
monophysite creed; but, as pointed out in the previous chapter,
monophysitism was a lineal descendant of docetism, and always showed
traces of its lineage. The saying that, "Christ brought His body from
heaven," was commonly attributed to Eutyches. He denied having said
it, but, at any rate, the general feeling of his followers was that
Christ's physical nature was divine and therefore not consubstantial
with ours.

Such doctrines destroy the discipline of faith in the resurrection.
The radical difference between the natural and the resurrection body is
blurred by them. The immense change is abolished. The resurrection
becomes purely a spiritual change, which even a non-Christian could
accept. The body, according to the tenor of monophysite teaching, was
spirit before the resurrection and spirit after it. Thus the ascension
too becomes purely spiritual. It is shorn of half its significance.
The Christian's hope for the human body rests on the fact that Christ
returned to heaven with something that He did not bring from heaven,
namely, a glorified human body. If He brought that body with Him from
heaven, the main significance of His human dispensation falls to the
ground. The incarnation b