ere is
composition when, from the association of two whole and entire things,
a third whole and entire compound thing is formed without loss to the
components. They illustrated the third mode of composition by the
union in man of soul and body. The pre-Eutychian monophysites regarded
the hypostatic union as a composition in the first sense of the word.
They spoke of Christ's human nature as absorbed in the divine, as is "a
drop of vinegar in the ocean." Eutyches adopted the term in its second
sense. He taught that the Word became flesh[3] "as the atmosphere
assumes bodily form and becomes rain or snow under the influence of the
wind, and as water becomes ice by reason of the cold air." Philoxenus
in a later generation saw that both these positions were wrong and the
similes misleading. He taught a hypostatic union totally devoid of
confusion or loss or commutation of the elements of the two natures.
To illustrate his meaning he used the simile supplied by the
"Athanasian" creed, "as the reasonable soul and flesh is one man, so
God and Man is one Christ." This position is a vast improvement on
that of the original monophysites. It was ground gained to secure the
admission that in any sense Christ was very man. But the monophysites
never learned the true manner of the union, namely, that Christ was
"one; not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by taking of the
Manhood into God; one altogether; not by confusion of Substance but by
unity of Person."

Read in this connection the assertion that God and man is one Christ,
"as the reasonable soul and flesh is one man," is orthodox; read apart
from this context, it is ambiguous. If the simile be kept as a simile,
as a mere suggestion or hint as to how, in general, two may compose one
and yet remain two, then no exception can be taken to it. If, however,
the clause be interpreted as a proportion sum, assigning corresponding
values to the different terms, then it savours strongly of
Apollinarianism. Most monophysites, like many moderns, probably
understood it in the mathematical sense. Christ, they argued, was God
and man, just as man is rational soul and body; the terms are in
proportion; therefore the divine nature was the rational soul, and the
human nature was the body. They forgot that the free act of the whole
divine person in assuming man underlies the union and makes it
efficacious; they gave _sarx_; the narrow meaning of _soma_, they set
before the