THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST

What is the relationship between the divine and human natures in Christ? Augustine's thinking on this essential Christological problem underwent a considerable amount of change. As a Manichaean, he believed that Christ was divine and only appeared to become human. His rejection of Manichaeism then led him in the opposite direction: stressing Christ's humanity, he fell into the Photinian heresy according to which Christ was a pre-eminent wise man, participating perfectly in divine wisdom but ultimately distinct from that wisdom. He eventually rectified this error as well and arrived at his mature understanding of Christ as fully human and fully God: ‘True man, true God: God and man the whole Christ. This is the Catholic faith. Whoever denies that Christ is God is Photinian; whoever denies that Christ is man is Manichaean.’ When did Augustine arrive at this understanding? In this chapter, I will argue that the evidence points to c. 395.

The classic statement on the relationship of the two natures was formulated at the Council of Chalcedon (451): Christ, as to his deity ‘consubstantial with the Father’, as to his humanity ‘consubstantial with us’, is one person (prosōpon) and one substance (hypostasis), uniting the two natures ‘without confusion, without change, without division, without separation’. The later Augustine was an important influence upon the Chalcedonian formulation, which is clearly anticipated in such statements as the following: ‘the same God who is man, and the same man who is God, not by a confusion of nature but by a unity of person’.