234 The Evolution of Transcendence [CH. 



Now another point looms up and apparently leads us 

 away from our argument concerning the dual conscious- 

 ness. We shall find, however, that so far from leading 

 us away, it is immediately seen as another road of ap- 

 proach. 



If union between God and men is to be complete, God 

 must as we have so often said experience the same 

 as men 1 . For Him, too, there must be experience of con- 

 ditions where the stress is on the temporal series. To 

 this end God becomes Incarnate, as true Man. For 

 Christ, as for other men, eternal and temporal are both 

 present, in their differing degrees of reality. 



None the less, the question of dual consciousness 

 reaches its acutest form in the Incarnation. Christ was 

 man. We have argued that unless His experience of 

 manhood was identical with ours the Incarnation and 

 Atonement would seem to be pointless, because not ful- 

 filling the only condition that could make them valid 

 for their purpose. God must have divested Himself of 

 Godhead's powers when He became Incarnate. Yet 

 Christ was God, we say, and God remained Transcendent 

 and Immanent apart from Christhood. If Christ had no 

 knowledge of His self-identity with Godhead how could 

 He be God at all? We lately dismissed the theory of 



1 Even, as the Man Christ Jesus, to the possibility of sin. The 

 struggle, the possibility of limiting divine immanence by an ill 

 will, must have been actual for Him. The distinction which Platt 

 appears to draw (Immanence and Christian Thought, in. 6) between 

 human and divine immanence cannot be maintained in the ulti- 

 mate resort, for God, as Christ, must experience the full nature 

 of humanity's limitations, yet Christ must be God. This same 

 error becomes very prominent where Platt by implication iso- 

 lates the creation of the physical universe from the creation of 

 man, distinguishing between the types of immanence that they 

 involve (ibid., p. 243). Any loss of touch with the Wholeness of 

 Reality must be fatal to our thought. 



