[ Mia physis ]  ( of our Lord's Godhead and of His Manhood ).

 TWO natures are united in One Christ, but it does not follow that their union is like any other union of which we have cognisance, such, for instance, as the union of body and soul. Beyond the general fact, that both the Incarnation and other unions are of substances not homogeneous, there is no likeness between it and them. The characteristics and circumstances of the Incarnation are determined by its history. The One Self-existing Personal God created, moulded, assumed, a manhood truly such. He, being from eternity, was in possession and in the fulness of His Godhead before mankind had being. Much more was He already in existence, and in all His attributes, when He became man, and He lost nothing by becoming. All that He ever had continued to be His; what He took on Himself was only an addition. There was no change; in His Incarnation, He did but put on a garment. That garment was not He, or, as Athan. speaks, [ autos ], or, as the next century worded it, "His Person." That [ autos ] was, as it had ever been, one and the same with His Divinity, [ ousia ], or [ physis ]; it was this [ physis ], as one with His Person, which took to Itself a manhood. He had no other Person than He had had from the beginning; His manhood had no Personality of its own; it was a second [ physis ], but not a second Person; it never existed till it was His; for its integrity and completeness it depended on Him, the Divine Word. It was one with Him, and, through and in Him, the Divine Word, it was one with the Divine Nature; it was but indirectly united to It, for the medium of union was the Person of the Word. And thus being without personality of its own, His human nature was relatively to Himself really what the Arians falsely said that His divinity was relatively to the Father, a [ peri auton ], a [ peribole ], a [ sumbebekos ], a "something else besides His substance," Orat. ii. § 45, e.g. an [ organon ]. Such was His human nature; it might be called an additional attribute; the Word was "made man," not was made a man.

 Thus Athanasius almost confines the word [ ousia ] to denote the Word, and seldom speaks of His manhood as a nature; and Cyril, to denote the dependence of the manhood upon His Divine Nature, has even used of the Incarnate Lord the celebrated dictum, [ mia physis tou theou logou sesarkomene ]. This was Cyril's s strong form of protesting against Nestorianism, which maintained that our Lord's humanity had a person as well as the Divine Word, who assumed it.

 Athan.'s language is remarkable: he says, Orat. ii. § 45, that our Lord is not a creature, though God, in Prov. viii. 22, is said to have created Him, because to be a creature, He ought to have taken a created substance, which He did not. Does not this imply that he did not consider His manhood an [ ousia ] or [ physis ]? He says that He who is said to be created, is not at once in His  Nature and Substance a creature: [ he lexis ti heteron deloi peri ekeinon, kai ou to legomenon ktizesthai ede tei physei kai tei ousiai ktisma ]. As the complement of this peculiarity, vid. his constant use of the [ ousia tou logou ], when we should use the word "Person." Does not this corroborate St. Cyril in his statement that the saying, "[ mia physis sesarkomene ]" belongs to Athanasius? for whether we say one [ physis ] or one [ ousia ] does not seem to matter. Observe, too, he speaks of something taking place in Him, [ peri ekeinon ], i.e. some adjunct or accident, (vid. art. [ peribole ] and [ sumbebekos ],) or, as he says, Orat. ii. § 8, envelopment or dress. In like manner he presently, ii. § 46, speaks of the creation of the Word as like the new-creation of the soul, which is a creation not in substance but in qualities, etc. And ibid. § 51, he contrasts the [ ousia ] and the [ he anthropinon ] of the Word; as in Orat. i. 41, [ ousia ] and [ he anthropotes ]; and [ physis ] with [ sarx ], iii. 34, init.; and [ logos ] with [ sarx ], 38, init. And he speaks of the Son "taking on Him the economy," ii. § 76, and of the [ hypostasis tou logou ] being one with [ ho anthropos ], iv. 35; why does he not, instead of [ anthropinon ], use the word [ physis ]?

 It is plain that this line of teaching might be wrested to the purposes of the Apollinarian and Eutychian heresies; but, considering Athan.'s most emphatic protests against those errors in his later works, as well as his strong statements in Orat. iii., there is no hazard in this admission. We thus understand how Eutyches came to deny the "two natures." He said that such a doctrine was a new one; this is not true, for, not to mention other Fathers, Athan. Orat. iv. fin, speaks of our Lord's "invisible nature and visible," (vid. also contr. Apoll. ii. 11, Orat. ii. 70, iii. 43,) and his ordinary use of [ anthropos ] for the manhood might quite as plausibly be perverted on the other hand into a defence of Nestorianism; but still the above peculiarities in his style may be taken to account for the heresy, though they do not excuse the heretic. Vid. also the Ed. Ben. on S. Hilary (præf. p. xliii.), who uses natura absolutely for our Lord's Divinity, as contrasted to the dispensatio, and divides His titles into naturalia and assumpta .

 St. Leo secured at Chalcedon this definition of the "Two Natures" of Christ, instead of the Alexandrian "One Nature Incarnate." In this he did but follow the precedent of the Nicene Fathers, who recalled the dogmatic authority of the [ homoousion ], which in the preceding century had been superseded at Antioch.