CHRISTMAS and Epiphany are two occasions in the year when the Prayer Book requires C of E folk to recite or sing the Athanasian Creed, a summary of the Catholic faith which goes back to the sixth century and focuses on the Trinity and the Person of Christ. The creed insists that we are to understand our Lord Jesus Christ as being “Perfect God and Perfect Man: of a reasonable [rational] soul and human flesh subsisting; Equal to the Father, as touching his Godhead: and inferior to the Father, as touching his Manhood. Who although he be both God and Man: yet he is not two, but one Christ.”

I used to teach Cambridge ordinands about all this, and how the fifth-century controversies about the person of Christ led to the Chalcedonian definition of 451, on which the Christological clauses of the Athanasian Creed depend. The distinction of Christ’s natures is not compromised by the unity of his person. The Chalcedonian definition of 451 came to be accepted by almost all Christians, except a group of ancient dissenters whom we used to call Monophysites: “one-nature” Christians.

I had met some of the descendants of these Christians on visits that I had made to Egyptian monasteries in the 1980s. I was assured by the Coptic monks that they did not understand themselves as Monophysites at all. “You”, they said, pointing at me in a friendly but accusing way, and meaning not me personally but all Western and Orthodox Christians, “misunderstood us at the Council of Chalcedon.” The person of Christ was, as they explained to me, a “confection”, the coming together of two realities into one divine and human nature. To their way of thinking, our insistence on the dual nature of Christ compromised the oneness of his person.

Later, in my classes, I developed a daring analogy in an attempt to clarify this. Two-nature, one-person Christians understood Christ as we might experience whisky and water: a combination in which the distinctiveness of the two components remains apparent to the taste. One-nature Christians, on the other hand, thought the person of Christ to be more like gin and tonic: the ingredients, once mixed, can no longer be distinguished. I realise now that this was entirely inappropriate on a whole number of grounds, not least because you have to risk intoxication to appreciate the doctrinal subtleties — which is surely a safeguarding issue.

These days, I prefer wine. But it is edifying and instructive to meditate on the Athanasian Creed, which explains all this with elegant simplicity, and which, as I said at the start, we should all be saying or singing at morning prayer on Christmas Day and Epiphany. Perhaps someone should commission Bob Chilcott or Philip Stopford to compose a cheerful, up-tempo congregational setting for next year.