Alexandria: A History and a GuideForster, E. M. (Edward Morgan)
History
Alexandria: A History and a Guide
Forster, E. M. (Edward Morgan)
Alexandria (Egypt) -- Guidebooks; Alexandria (Egypt) -- History
As the minds of the Alexandrians decayed, their heresies became more and
more technical. Arianism enshrines a real problem which the layman as
well as the cleric can apprehend. Monophysism is more remote. And
Monothelism is difficult to state in the language of theology, and
almost impossible to state in the language of common sense. Perhaps it
bears in it the signs of carelessness, for as we have seen (p. 54) it
was the invention of the Emperor Heraclius in the last desperate days
when he was trying to conciliate Egypt.
If Christ has one Nature he has of course one will. But suppose he has
two Natures. How many wills has he then? The Monothelites said “One.”
The orthodox view—the one we hold—is “Two, one human the other divine,
but both operating in unison.” Obscure indeed is the problem, and we can
well believe that the Alexandrians, against whom the Arabs were then
marching, did not understand Monothelism when it was hurriedly explained
to them by a preoccupied general. But it was not without a future. It
failed as a compromise but survived as a heresy, and long after the
Imperial Government had disowned it and Egypt had fallen to Islam, it
was cherished in the uplands of Syria by the Maronite Church.
MARONITE CHURCH: p. 140, 213.
CONCLUSION: ISLAM.
We have now seen Alexandria handle one after another the systems that
entered her walls. The ancient religion of the Hebrews, the philosophy
of Plato, the new faith out of Galilee—taking each in turn she has left
her impress upon it, and extracted some answer to her question, “How can
the human be linked to the divine?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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