Note 2 — THE DOGMATIC IMPORT OF THE LIFE OF JESUS.

It is true that those who, like the Ebionites, denied the Godhead, or like that sect of the Gnostics called Docetæ, the manhood of Christ, separated themselves too decidedly from the Christian community, which on her part maintained that it was necessary that the mediator of God and man should unite both in friendship and harmony by means of a proper relationship to each, and that while he represented man to God, he should reveal God to man, ἔδει τὸν μεσίτην θεοῦ τε καὶ ἀνθρώπων διὰ ἰδίας πρὸς ἑκατέρους οἰκειότητος εἰς φιλίαν καὶ ὁμόνοιαν τοὺς ἀμφοτέρους συναγαγεῖν, καὶ θεῷ μὲν παραστῆσαι τὸν ἄνθρωπον, ἀνθρώποις δὲ γνωρίσαι τὸν θεόν.2 But when it was merely the plenitude of the one nature or the other, which was contested,—as when Arius maintained that the being who became man in Christ was indeed divine, but created, and subordinate to the supreme God; when, while ascribing to Christ a human body, he held that the place of the soul was occupied by that superior being; when Apollinaris maintained that not only the body of Jesus was truly human, but his soul also, and that the divine being only served in the stead of the third principle in man, the νοῦς (understanding);—these were opinions to which it was easier to give a Christian guise. Nevertheless the Church rejected the Arian idea of a subordinate God become man in Jesus, for this reason among others less essential, that on this theory the image of the Godhead would not have been manifested in Christ;3 and she condemned the idea of Arius and Apollinaris, that the human nature of Christ had not the human ψυχὴ (soul), or the human νοῦς (understanding), for this reason chiefly, that only by the union of the divine, with an entire human nature, could the human race be redeemed.4