viz. a creative action on the part of the eternal Godhead and a receiving action on the part of the developing manhood[1]. If thus justice is done to the idea of the unity of the natures in one person, then Nestorius, too, made it intelligible, even where he, dealing with the Logos on the one side and the man on the other, tries to understand the union as the result of the incarnation. His understanding of , it is true, does not coincide with what we mean by "person"—we cannot free ourselves from metaphysics—but we, too, can sympathise with him when he took the incarnation as meaning this, that in the person of Jesus the Logos revealed himself in human form so that the Logos exhibited himself as man and that the man of history was the manifestation of the Logos in such a way that he exhibited himself to us as the eternal Logos[2]. We, too, therefore, understand what Nestorius means when he said that the of the one is also that of the other.
Still more intelligible does the christology of Nestorius become to us, if, following his advice, we start from the one of the union, i.e. from the one Jesus Christ of history[3]. As regards him we are
- ↑ l.c.
- ↑ Comp. Liber Heracl. B. 362 = N. 233: l'incarnation est conçue comme l'usage mutuel des deux (prosôpons) par prise et don.
- ↑ Liber Heracl. B. 230 = N. 139 and in many other places the prosôpon of the union evidently is the prosôpon of the flesh. Comp. B. 304 f. = N. 193 (above p. 90, note 1): On ne conçoit pas deux
