sages. It comes out clearly in 1 Thess. v.
23--'your whole spirit, and soul, and body be preserved blameless unto
the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.' Here the division is threefold.
The body we know pretty well, as far as concerns its material form. The
soul however, is not the 'soul' of common language. It is only the seat
of the animal life which we share with the beasts. Above the soul,
beyond the ken of Aristotle, Scripture reveals the spirit as the seat of
the immortal life which is to pass the gate of death unharmed. Now it is
one chief merit of Apollinarius (and herein he has the advantage over
Athanasius) that he based his system on the true psychology of
Scripture. He argued that sin reaches man through the will, whose seat
is in the spirit. Choice for good or for evil is in the will. Hence Adam
fell through the weakness of the spirit. Had that been stronger, he
would have been able to resist temptation. So it is with the rest of us:
we all sin through the weakness of the spirit. If then the Lord was a
man in whom the mutable human spirit was replaced by the immutable
Divine Word, there will be no difficulty in understanding how he could
be free from sin. Apollinarius, however, rightly chose to state his
theory the other way--that the Divine Word assumed a human body and a
human soul, and himself took the place of a human spirit. So far we see
no great advance on the Arian theory of the incarnation. If the Lord had
no true human spirit, he is no more true man than if he had nothing
human but the body. We get a better explanation of his sinlessness, but
we still get it at the expense of his humanity. In one respect the
Arians had the advantage. Their created Word is easier joined with human
flesh than the Divine Word with a human body and a human soul. At this
point, however, Apollinarius introduced a thought of deep
significance--that the spirit in Christ was human spirit, although
divine. If man was made in the image of God, the Divine Word is not
foreign to that human spirit which is in his likeness, but is rather the
true perfection of its image. If, therefore, the Lord had the divine
Word instead of the human spirit of other men, he is not the less human,
but the more so for the difference. Furthermore, the Word which in
Christ was human spirit was eternal. Apart then from the incarnation,
the Word was archetypal man as well as God. Thus we reach the still more
solemn thought that the incarnation is not a m