E DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY

Monophysitism was not originally or _per se_ a Trinitarian heresy.
Equally with catholics and Nestorians its adherents accepted the Nicene
definition. They professed to believe in one God in three co-equal
persons. This belief, firmly held in all that it involves, would have
kept them from attributing passibility to the Godhead, and ultimately
have neutralised the errors of their Christology. But their
Christology corrupted their theology. Abandoning all vital relation
between God and man in Christ, they abandoned the relation in the
Godhead. The internal and external relations of the Godhead are
mutually dependent. If there be no trinity of persons, the incarnation
is impossible. Were God a bare monad, He could not impart Himself and
remain Himself. The fact that there are related persons in the deity
is the only justification for the use of the phrases discussed in the
previous paragraph. When the catholic says, "God was born, suffered,
died," he is right, because his presupposition is right. When the
monophysite uses the same words, he is wrong, because his
presupposition is wrong. The catholic preserves in the background of
his thought the distinction between the _ousia_ and the threefold
_hypostasis_, between the essential godhead and the three persons. So
he is in no danger of ascribing passion to the essence or to the
persons of Father or Holy Spirit. When he says "God was born," he is
compressing two statements into one. He means "Christ was born, and
Christ was God." Not in respect of what He has in common with the
other persons of the Trinity, but in respect of His property of sonship
did He lower Himself to the plane of suffering. The catholic holds not
a suffering God, but a suffering divine person. He maintains an
impassible God, but a passible Christ. A dead God is a contradiction
in terms; a Christ who died is the hope of humanity.

Monophysite theology became involved in further embarrassments.
Unwillingness to attribute passibility to God, coupled with the desire
to remain in some sort trinitarians, forced many of the monophysites
into the Sabellian position. Deity, they said in effect, did not
suffer in the second person of the trinity, because there is no such
person. The persons of the trinity are simply characters assumed by
the monadic essence, or aspects under which men view it. On this
showing, the Logos, who was incarnate, had no personal subsiste