When Christology intersects with embryology: the viewpoints of Nestorian, Monophysite and Chalcedonian authors of the sixth to tenth centuries

Abstract

Abstract The notion that the soul comes into existence simultaneously with the body at the moment of conception was originally introduced into the Patristic discourse as an alternative to the Origenist notion of a pre-existing soul. Yet from the sixth century onwards it was itself regarded as an Origenist tenet. Now it was claimed that only those who believed the soul to be created after the body were truly orthodox. The present article examines the links between this development and the Christological conversies.