The Reality of Christ's Sacred Humanity, Against the Docetae

In the course of the first four centuries of the Christian era, sundry heretics asserted that our Blessed Redeemer was not a real man but merely bore the semblance of a man, and that His body was a mere phantasm. Against this heresy the Church vigorously upheld the true and genuine character of Christ’s humanity.

1. Docetism and the Teaching of the Church

The Docetae — the name comes from the Greek for “appearance” or “semblance,” since they taught that Christ only seemed to be a man, to be born, to live, and to suffer — were recruited partly from the Gnostics of the second century (Valentinus, Saturninus, Basilides, Marcion, and others) and partly from the Manichaeans and Priscillianists of the third and fourth. These heretics agreed in holding that matter itself is the seat of evil, and that God could not have subjected Himself to contamination by assuming a material body.¹ “Docetae” was never the name of one sect properly speaking; it covered every group that denied the reality of Christ’s material body — the Valentinians, Basilidians, Ophites, Marcionites, and other Gnostics alike.²

In the earliest days the Church simply bound her children to the baptismal creed (now called the Apostles’ Creed), whose articles on Christ’s conception, birth, and crucifixion already plainly exclude the illusionist theory. We have no record of any formal definition specifically against the Priscillianists, though a profession of faith once wrongly attributed to a Council of Toledo (A.D. 447) — actually the work of an anonymous Spanish bishop — declares: “We believe that the body of Christ was not imaginary, nor a mere phantasm, but real and substantial, and that He experienced hunger, and thirst, and pain, and grief, and all the sufferings of the body.”³

The Docetic heresy was repeatedly condemned by the wider Church. At the Second Council of Lyons (A.D. 1274), bishops representing the Greek Emperor Michael Palaeologus submitted a profession of faith declaring belief that the Son of God is “true God and true man, proper and perfect in both natures, not an adoptive or fantastic [son], but the one and only-begotten Son of God.”⁴ More important still is the Decretum pro Iacobitis promulgated by Pope Eugene IV at the Council of Florence (A.D. 1439), which condemns Christological heresies in sequence, from Ebion, Cerinthus, and Marcion down to the Monothelite errors of Macarius of Antioch. Against Docetism specifically, it anathematizes “Mani, together with his followers, who, imagining that the Son of God assumed not a true but an apparitional body, utterly deny Christ’s manhood,” together with “Valentinus, who asserts that the Son of God took naught from the Virgin Mary, but assumed a celestial body and passed through the Virgin’s womb as water flows through an aqueduct.”⁵

2. The Teaching of Divine Revelation

The ecclesiastical definitions just quoted are firmly grounded in Sacred Scripture and Tradition.

The Scriptural Argument

Christ’s manhood is so manifestly in evidence throughout the Synoptic Gospels that a few texts suffice. Again and again He speaks of Himself as “the Son of Man” — a title that means far more than a bare assertion of His humanity, but which certainly cannot be reconciled with a merely fictitious or apparitional body, since on that same authority He tells the Jews: “Now you seek to kill me, a man who have spoken the truth to you” (John 8:40). Appearing to the two disciples at Emmaus after the Resurrection, He showed them His glorified body, still bearing the marks of the Crucifixion, saying: “See my hands and feet, that it is I myself; handle, and see: for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as you see me to have” (Luke 24:39). A visible and tangible body of flesh and bone cannot be a phantasm. And in perfect consonance with this realism is Scripture’s own choice of the word “flesh”: St. John does not say “the Word was made man,” but the far more graphic “the Word was made flesh” (John 1:14).

The Docetae appealed in vain to Romans 8:3, where God is said to have sent “his own Son, in the likeness of sinful flesh.” “Likeness” here is not synonymous with “semblance,” but denotes identity of nature — St. Paul means that the flesh of Christ was consubstantial with ours, sin alone excepted (cf. Hebrews 4:15). Nor does Philippians 2:7, where St. Paul says the Son of God took “the form of a servant,” help their case: “form of a servant” can no more mean “semblance of man” than “form of God” in the preceding verse means “semblance of God.”

The Patristic Argument

The Fathers rigorously maintained the reality of Christ’s manhood, evident throughout the sharply anti-Docetic tenor of the seven genuine Epistles of St. Ignatius of Antioch. “He suffered truly,” Ignatius writes, “even as He truly raised Himself up, not as some unbelievers say, that He suffered in appearance — existing themselves in appearance. And as they believe, so shall it happen to them, when they shall be divested of their bodies and become mere phantasms.”⁶ In the West, Tertullian pressed the Docetic heretics on the absurd consequences of their own position: how could the sufferings of Christ’s Passion be real, he asks, if Christ Himself was not real — if He did not truly have flesh suffused with blood, built of bones, woven with sinews, threaded with veins — flesh capable of being born and of dying?⁷

Beyond the bare statement of the dogma, the Fathers pressed the point theologically, favoring the method of reductio ad absurdum. Docetism, they argued, is subversive of the very foundation of Christianity: if Christ had no genuine human body, the whole work of Redemption is nugatory. “It follows,” Tertullian writes, “that everything done through the flesh of Christ was done as a lie… The whole work of God is overthrown, the whole weight and fruit of the Christian name; the death of Christ is denied — and once His death is denied, nothing certain remains of the Resurrection either.”⁸ Docetism undermines Christ’s Divinity as well, on the same author’s logic: what only seemed to be, and lied about what it was, would make the flesh no flesh, the man no man, and consequently the Christ no God — for why would God not equally have worn a phantasm of Himself?⁹ St. Augustine puts the same argument more compactly: “If the body of Christ was a mere phantasm, Christ was a deceiver; and if He was a deceiver, He is not the truth. But Christ is the truth; therefore His body was not a phantasm.”¹⁰

Nor, the Fathers observed, was Docetism a doctrine capable of inspiring martyrs. “If all this was a mere semblance,” St. Ignatius asks pointedly of his own approaching death, “my handcuffs, too, are an illusion. Why, then, did I give myself up to death, to fire, to the sword, to wild beasts?”¹¹ And the Docetic hypothesis is destructive of natural certitude generally, since to hold that Christ and His Apostles were either fools or impostors flies in the face of both historical evidence and common sense — a line St. Irenaeus pressed with some irony: how can the Docetists imagine they are even engaged in a real controversy, he asks, if their own master had merely an imaginary existence? On their own premise, everything they say and do is imaginary too — and since they are not, on their own account, even truly men, one might well ask whether they are not simply brute beasts parading in the guise of human beings.¹²

Further Reading

G. R. S. Mead, Fragments of a Faith Forgotten, London 1906 — J. H. Blunt, Dictionary of Sects, Heresies, etc., London 1874 — J. P. Arendzen, art. “Docetae” in the Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. V.

Notes