However, the Byzantine Christology of the Justinian era is criticized for "leaving in the shadow the reality of the psychological life of the soul of the Saviour" and modifying the properties of human nature as such. Since this judgment extends to the subsequent history of Eastern Christianity, the question is of no small importance.

In order to answer this question, it must be remembered that the decisions of the Fifth Ecumenical Council do not represent the final result, but only an intermediate stage in the development of Christology. Their dogmatic content should be viewed through the prism of the later stages, first of all, the teaching of St. Maxim on the Two Wills and His Concept of Deification. One gets the impression that the critics of the Christology of the Fifth Council base their argument on the Thomistic concept of "pure nature", which is incompatible with the patristic teaching on sin and deification. Deified human nature, humanity that has become a partaker of the Divine nature, is not nature "with modified natural properties," but restored to the divine glory for which it was intended from creation. Human nature, in contact with the Divine, does not disappear, but, on the contrary, becomes truly human, for God cannot destroy what He Himself created. The fact that the humanity of Jesus was hypostasized in the Word does not exclude His humanity, but, on the contrary, conditions His human perfection and, consequently, consubstantiality with the entire human race. By the deed of St. Maxim was the development of this cosmic dimension of salvation.

However, even before the seventh century, Byzantine theologians, such as the author of De sectis (a treatise written between 581 and 607 and previously attributed to Leontius of Byzantium), were fully aware of the significance of Christ's consubstantiality with all mankind, in particular, the unknown author just mentioned admitted that Christ did indeed possess a certain ignorance. He writes: "Most of the Fathers recognized that Christ did not know certain things; since He is of the same essence with us in all things, and since we ourselves do not know certain things, it is evident that Christ also had ignorance. Scripture says of Christ: "But Jesus increased in wisdom and stature" (Luke 2:52); it means that He knew what He did not know before."

This thought of the author of De sectis, which was borrowed and used by Orthodox writers of the eighth and ninth centuries in polemics against iconoclasm, testifies to the fact that the Christology formulated at the Council of 553 in no way excludes in Christ a perfect human consciousness; moreover, it shows that the concept of hypostasis, which in Christ is the hypostasis of the Logos, cannot be identified with the concept of consciousness, which is one of the natural phenomena.

Most Byzantine writers, however, refused to admit any ignorance in Christ and explained passages such as Lk. 2:52, a kind of pedagogical tactic on the part of Christ. Perhaps this stemmed not so much from their Christology as from the concept of ignorance, which for the Greek mind was automatically associated with sin. This is especially evident in the theology of Evagrius. Leontius of Byzantium, for example, was not a neo-Chalcedonian, and while not acknowledging, as we have seen, the hypostatic unity in the Logos, refused to accept that Christ could be "ignorant" because He was sinless.

The concept of hypostatic unity, which presupposes the absence of a human "I" in Christ, since the only subject in Christ is the Logos, could not have been the essential reason that led the Byzantine authors to deny ignorance in Christ. There was also a certain philosophy of gnosis, in which knowledge was considered as a sign of the natural perfection of unfallen nature. Christ could not have been unaware of something, because He was the New Adam. To assert such a thing, it was not necessary to be a neo-Chalcedonian.

The author of De Sectis did not share such philosophical views, and his position in the Byzantine Church remained very stable even after 553, especially since St. Cyril (who was also not a supporter of Evagrius) recognized that it was in the nature of mankind, united to the Word, which had accepted a state of slavery out of obedience, to worship the Father and to remain in ignorance. Of course, for St. Cyril this was ignorance, voluntarily accepted in the order of oikonomia, but it was quite real, and the author of De Sectis could thus refer to the authority of the great Alexandrian teacher.

Characteristically, this remarkable passage on ignorance in De Sectis forms part of the chapter in which the author refutes the so-called Aphthartodocetes, who asserted that the body of Christ, born of the Virgin Mary, was the body of the New Adam and thus had no sin, and was therefore incorruptible (ajqartos). In fact, it is a problem of the same kind as the question of Christ's ignorance, and a problem that is anthropological rather than Christological. R. Draghe clearly showed that "the doctrine of the incorruptibility [of the Body of Christ] agrees equally well with the formula of the two natures and with Monophysite Christology; this is confirmed by the fact that it had followers both among the supporters of the Council of Chalcedon and among the Monophysites: the Jacobites and the Severians." Did not the Emperor Justinian himself, who professed the Chalcedonian faith all his life, succumb to the temptation of Julian's "Aphthartodocetism"?

The problem was to find out whether man is corruptible by nature, for if he is corruptible, then the Word, taking on human nature, inevitably perceives both corruption (and ignorance).

We have already seen that St. Cyril included ignorance among the properties (idiwmata) of human nature perceived by the Word. Severus of Antioch, who agrees with the Orthodox in this, also asserted, contrary to Julian, that corruption belongs to the properties of human nature proper, that Adam before the Fall was incorruptible only insofar as he participated in divine incorruption, and only the Resurrection of Christ imparts incorruptibility to human nature.

The controversy over the Aphthartodocetism of Julian of Halicarnassus and its condemnation not only by the Orthodox Church, but also by moderate Monophysites, shows, as has been noted more than once, that the Christian East as a whole rejected the doctrine of original sin as a "natural" category. Since Julian shared the concept that the corruption of human nature is the result of Adam's transgression, he wanted to protect Christ from this. Severus called him a Manichaean and vehemently rejected the doctrine of original sin as the hereditary transmission of guilt. Rather, it is natural mortality, transmitted from generation to generation, as a result of man's falling away from God after Adam's sin. This is not a state of sin as such, but a "condition" of the existence of human nature, which was received by the Word through the Incarnation and restored to the grace of immortality through His Resurrection.

This controversy shows that sixth-century Christology, and especially the Theopaschist formulas, did not dispute the perfect reality of Christ's human nature, which is also our human nature, limited, ignorant, perishable. When we say "God suffered in the flesh," we confess precisely the corruption of human nature, which the Word came to save, taking it in the very state in which it was after Adam's sin.

Thus, the era of Justinian showed real progress in the development of Christology. Moreover, by clarifying the Chalcedonian point of view in the interests of Christian unity, the Fifth Ecumenical Council put forward the only possible basis for reconciliation between the Monophysites and the Orthodox: a common fidelity to the teaching of St. Cyril of Alexandria.

Pseudo-Dionysius