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Throughout his career, Aquinas spoke about the hypostatic union against the backdrop of two major

Christological heresies, an historianism that the union in Christ is between two subjects or two persons,

and monophysitism that the human nature of Christ does not remain distinct from the divine nature.

We've already been talking about that, so I'm not going to say much more about those.

But there are some lesser-known Christological errors that were live options in the

generation before Aquinas, and we don't usually talk about those.

They set the immediate theological context for Aquinas' thought, and I think that will turn out to be very important.

The first of these Christological errors goes by the name Christological nihilianism.

This error was twice condemned by Pope Alexander III, first in 1170 and again in 1177.

It was associated with the third opinion about the hyposetic union

in Christ, often called the Havitus theory, that you find in the sentences of Peter Lombard,

which was then the standard medieval text for the study of theology. This third opinion of Lombard

tried to avoid the Nestorian heresy

by saying that the divinity was joined to Christ's body and also to Christ's soul, but that Christ's

soul and body were not united to each other. And therefore, there's no new person in Christ. But this theory only got to

this anti-Nistorian conclusion by saying, in effect, that there's also no complete human nature

in Christ. Pope Alexander called this, and this is text B on your handout, quote,

the false doctrine of Peter, sometime Bishop of Paris,

...