its thought, and come to the front, uncalled-for and sometimes not even perceived, in all its studies. But the three Christian solutions predetermined by the three landscapes of East, West, and South were all present from the first, implicit already in the main tendencies of Gnosticism, which we may indicate by the names of Bardesanes, Basilides, and Valentinus. Their meeting-point was Edessa, where the streets rang with the battle-cries of the Nestorians against the victors of Ephesus and, anon, with the εἷς θεός shout of the Monophysites, demanding that Bishop Ibas should be thrown to the wild beasts of the circus. The great question was formulated by Athanasius, whose intellectual origins lay in the Pseudomorphosis and who had many affinities with his Pagan contemporary Iamblichus. Against Arius, who saw in Christ a demigod, merely _like_ in substance to the Father, he maintained that Father and Son were of _the same_ substance (θεότης) which in Christ had assumed a human σῶμα. “The Word became Flesh”--this formula of the West depends upon visible facts of the cult-Churches, and the understanding of the Word upon constant contemplation of the picturable. Here in the iconodule West, where in these very times Iamblichus wrote his book concerning God-statues in which the divine was substantially present and worked miracles,[452] the abstraction of the Triunity was always effectively accompanied by the sensuous-human relation of Mother and Son, and it is the latter which it is impossible to eliminate from the thought-processes of Athanasius. With the recognition of the homoousia of Father and Son the real problem was for the first time posed--namely, the attitude of the Magian dualism to the historical phenomenon of the Son himself. In the world-cavern there was divine and human substance, in man a part in divine Pneuma and the individual soul somehow related to the “flesh.” But what of Christ?