But though distinctions may be drawn, and though for the sake of emphasis and brevity Christ may be called by the name of one only of His two natures, the essential fact is never forgotten that He is God and man, one Person in two forms, God’s and the servant’s. And these two natures do not stand isolated and apart, merely contained within the limits of one personality. Just as we saw that Hilary recognises a complete mutual indwelling and interpenetration of Father and Son, so he teaches that in the narrower sphere of the Incarnation there is an equally exact and comprehensive union of the Godhead and Manhood in Christ. Jesus is Christ, and Christ is Jesus. Not merely is the one Christ perfect Man and perfect God, but the whole Son of Man is the whole Son of God.
So far is His manhood from being merged and lost in
His Divinity, that the extent of the one is the measure of the other. We must
not imagine that, simultaneously with the incarnate, there existed a
non-incarnate Christ, respectively submitting to humiliation and ruling the
worlds; nor yet must we conceive of one Christ in two unconnected states of
being, as though the assumption of humanity were merely a function analogous to
the guiding of the stars. On the contrary, the one Person is co-extensive with
all infinity, and all action lies within His scope. Whatever He does, whether
it be, or be not, in relation to humanity, and in the former case whether it be
the exaltation of man-hood or the self-emptying of Godhead, is done ‘within the
sphere of the Incarnation,’ the sphere which embraces His whole being and
His whole action. The self-emptying itself was not a self-determination,
instant and complete, made before the Incarnation, but, as we saw, a process
which continued throughout Christ’s life on earth and was active to the end.
For as He hung, deliberately self-emptied of His glory, on the Cross, He
manifested His normal powers by the earthquake shock. His submission to death
was the last of a consistent series of exertions of His will, which began with
the Annunciation and culminated in the Crucifixion.
lxxixHilary estimates the cost of the Incarnation not by any episodes of Christ’s life on earth, but by the fact that it brought about a real, though partial, separation or breach within the Godhead. Henceforward there was in Christ the nature of the creature as well as that of the Creator; and this second nature, though it had been assumed in its most perfect form, was sundered by an infinite distance from God the Father, though indissolubly united with the Divinity of his Son. A barrier therefore was raised between them, to be overcome in due time by the elevation of manhood in and through the Son. When this elevation was complete within the Person of Christ, then the separation between Him and His Father would be at an end. He would still have true humanity, but this humanity would be raised to the level of association with the Father.
In Hilary’s doctrine the submission of Christ to this isolation is the central fact of Christianity, the supreme evidence of His love for men. Not only did it thus isolate Him, truly though partially, from the Father, but it introduced a strain, a ‘division’ within His now incarnate Person. The union of natures was real, but in order that it might become perfect the two needed to be adjusted; and the humiliation involved in this adjustment is a great part of the sacrifice made by Christ. There was conflict, in a certain sense, within Himself, repression and concealment of His powers. But finally the barrier was to be removed, the loss regained, by the exaltation of the manhood into harmonious association with the Godhead of Father and of Son. Then He Who had become in one Person God and Man would become for ever fully God and fully Man. The humanity would gain, the Divinity regain, its appropriate dignity305, while each retained the reality it had had on earth. Thus Christ’s life in the world was a period of transition. He had descended; this was the time of preparation for an equal, and even loftier, ascent. We must now consider in what the preparation consisted; and here, at first sight, Hilary has involved himself in a grave difficulty.
For it is manifest that his theory of Christ’s life as one lived without effort, spiritual or physical, or rather as a life whose exertion consisted in a steady self accommodation to the infirmities of men, varied by occasional and special acts of condescension to suffering, excludes the possibility of an advance, a growth in grace as well as in stature, such as Athanasius scripturally taught306. We might say of Hilary, as has been said of another Father, ‘under his treatment the Divine history seems to be dissolved into a docetic drama.’ In such a life it might seem that there was not merely no possibility of progress, but even an absence of identity, in the sense of continuity. The phenomena of Christ’s life, therefore, are not manifestations of the disturbance and strain on which Hilary insists, for they are, when, rightly considered, proofs of His union with God and of His Divine power, not of weakness or of partial separation. It would, indeed, be vain for us to seek for sensible evidence of the process of adjustment, for it went on within the inmost being of the one Person. It did not affect the Godhead or the Manhood, both visibly revealed as aspects of the Person, but the hidden relation between the two. Our knowledge assures us that the process took place, but it is a knowledge attained by inference from what He was before and after the state of transition, not by observation of His action in that state.
Both natures of the one Person were affected; ‘everything’—glory as well as humiliation—‘was common to the entire Person at every moment, though to each aspect in its own distinctive manner.’ The entire Person entered into inequality with Himself; the actuality of each aspect, during the state of humiliation, fell short of its idea—of the idea of the Son, of the idea of the perfect man, of the idea of the God-man. It was lxxxnot merely the human aspect that was at first inadequate to the Divine; for, through the medium of the voluntary ‘evacuatio,’ it dragged down the Divine nature also, so far as is permitted it, to its own inequality.’ Such is the only explanation which will reconcile Hilary’s various, and sometimes obscure, utterances on this great subject. It is open to the obvious and fatal objection that it cuts, instead of loosening, the knot. For it denies any connection between the dispensation of Christ’s life on earth and the mystery of His assumption and exaltation of humanity; the one becomes somewhat purposeless, and the other remains unverified. But it is at least a bold and reverent speculation, not inconsistent with the Faith as a system of thought, though no place can be found for it in the Faith, regarded as a revelation of fact.
