Austin Dominic Litke, OP: The Anthropological Analogy for the Incarnation according to Pope Gelasius I

Many patristic writers utilized the union of the human body and soul as an analogy for the union of humanity and divinity in Christ, named by modern commentators as the “anthropological analogy” for the Incarnation. The majority of theologians who used the analogy wrote in Greek and operated in a Greek thought world, using the vocabulary and concepts of Greek philosophy. Accordingly, to date it is largely only Greek writers who have been studied as instances of the analogy. Pope Gelasius I (492-496), in the doctrinal letter De duabus naturis, however, also makes use of the analogy in a unique way over and against what he saw as the twin errant Christologies of his day: Nestorianism and Eutychianism/Monophysitism.In this communication, I will draw out Gelasius’s use of the analogy in the De duabus naturisand contrast it with uses previous and contemporary to Gelasius—including other Latin uses, Augustine principal among them (cf. ep. 137)— showing the uniqueness of Gelasius’s argumentation, and then point out its insufficiencies, resulting mostly from his inadequate philosophical anthropology, but also from a failure to see the undesired consequences of his vocabulary. In this way, we will be able to have a more complete portrait of a long-used analogy in Patristic literature for one of the central mysteries of Christian theology.