20. Yet many, with the art by which they
seek to prove their heresy, are wont to delude the ears of the
unlearned with the error, that as the body and soul of Adam both
sinned, so the Lord must have taken the soul and body of Adam from the
Virgin, and that it was not the whole Man that she conceived from the
Holy Ghost Apollinaris argued
that if Christ were perfect God and perfect man, there would be two
Christs, the Son of God by nature and the Son of God by adoption.
Hence He taught that Christ was partly God and partly man; that He
received from the Virgin His body and the lower, irrational soul which
is the condition of bodily life; while His rational Spirit was
Divine. On this theory the ‘whole man,’ as Hilary
says, was not born of the Virgin. Hilary denies the threefold
division. The soul in every case, Christ’s included, is, he
says, the immediate work of God.. If they
had understood the mystery
of the Incarnation, these men would have understood at the same time
the mystery that the Son of Man is also Son of God. As if in
receiving so much from the Virgin, He received from her His soul also;
whereas though flesh is always born of flesh, every soul is the direct
work of God.