The Nestorian Elements in the Theory
“From the time of Athanasius, and even
earlier, the doctrine of the Two Natures was no understood as to imply that the
God-Logos is the Subject, and he takes the human nature into the unity
of His Divine Being.” (Harwick, VI. 73) This led to such expressions as θεοτοκος, “the Word of God died,” etc. But in Anselm
the Divine and human are separated, so that it was the Man Jeus who died
and became our Mediator, and even the Godhead is referred to only as
determining the worth of the human Person in His actions. The Man obeyed, and
the God claimed the merit. He says indeed that the Logos and the man are one
Person: “was it not equally clear, from what was said, that the Son of God and
the Man taken by Him [notice, “hominin”] are one person, so that the
same being may be both God and man?” (ii. 16 b, 16) “Whence it was necessary
that God should take man into the unity of His person, so that he who in his
own nature ought to pay and could not, might be in a Person who could” (ii. 17,
38). The following also has an orthodox sound: “For this object the diversity
of natures and unity of person in Christ were of value; that whatever needed to
be done for the restoration of men, if the human nature could not do it, the
Divine nature might, and if there were anything incongruous to the Divine
nature, the human nature might manifest it. And yet it would not be sometimes
one person and sometimes another, but the very same person, who existing
perfectly in both natures, through the human might pay what it owed, and
through the Divine [might pay] what was expedient” (ii. 17, 18).
But this is not the Athanasian
teaching of the Divine as the Subject of all the theanthropic actions. The
emphasis here is upon the natures in such a manner as to leave the impression,
“this He did as God, that He did as Man.” He appears to juggle with the word
“nature,” as in i. 9. 4: “That man, therefore, owed this obedience to God the
Father, and the human nature to the Divine [humanitas divinitati]”; and in ii.
17, 38: “So that he who in his own nature ought to pay and could not, might be
in a Person who could.” But he who ought to pay was man, not a man’s human
nature; and the human nature of Christ does not satisfy, but the Person of
Christ by means of that nature which could die. Where the Greeks laid stress on
the God-Logos as “the Subject of the redeeming personality,” Anselm really
makes Christ as man the subject. (Harnack, VI. 74) He admits the Godhead, but
does not make it more than the means of giving value to the acts of the
Manhood: it is not the Subject, the Person who achieves salvation through
Incarnation, obedience and death. This is a “quite Nestorian diremption of the
Person,” “such as had regularly occurred in the West from the time of Augustin.”
(Ibid.) In order to preserve the theanthropic unity, not only the
Godhead of Christ must be asserted, but His “God-manhood” must be established. (George
Cadwalader Foley, Anselm’s Theory of the Atonement: The Bohlen Lectures,
1908 [New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1909], 179-81)