enturies. His works were
translated into Syriac in the Jacobite schools. The West owes much to
these translations. For it was largely by this agency that his
metaphysic reached the Arabs, who transmitted it to the West in the
Middle Ages.

The Aristotelian logic was widely known among the monophysites. It
seems to have formed part of their educational curriculum. Taken apart
from the rest of the system, the logic produces a type of mind that
revels in subtle argumentation. It exalts the form of thought at the
expense of the matter. It had this effect on the monophysite
theologians. They were trained dialecticians. They were noted for
their controversial powers, for their constant appeal to definition,
for the mechanical precision of their arguments. These mental
qualities, excellent in themselves, do not conduce to sound theology.
Formal logic effects clarity of thought often at the expense of depth.
It treats thoughts as things. Procedure, that is proper in the sphere
of logic, is out of place in psychology and theology. Concepts such as
person and nature must be kept fluid, if they are not to mislead. If
they are made into hard and fast ideas, into sharply defined
abstractions, they will be taken to represent discrete psychic
entities, external to one another as numbers are. The elusive, Protean
character of the inter-penetrating realities behind them will be lost
to view. The most signal defect of monophysite method is its
unquestioning submission to the Aristotelian law of contradiction. The
intellectual training that makes men acute logicians disqualifies them
for dealing with the living subject. The monophysite Christologians
were subtle dialecticians, but the psychology of Christ's being lay
outside their competence.

ARISTOTLE'S CRITICISM OF DUALISM--A WEAPON IN THE HANDS OF THE
MONOPHYSITES

Leaving the formal element in Aristotle's system, we come to its
material content. Some of the prominent ideas of the Aristotelian
cosmology and psychology reappear in the heresy we are studying. We
shall take first the rejection of the Platonic dualism. Aristotle's
repeated criticism of his master's theory of ideas is not merely
destructive. It formed the starting-point for his own metaphysic. The
ideas, he says, simply duplicate the world of existent things. They do
not create things or move them; they do not explain genesis or process;
they merely co-exist with the ideates. The participati