Apollinarianism

A Greek scholar turned champion of Nicaea

Apollinarius — in Latin Apolinaris, called the Younger to distinguish him from his father — was born c. 310 at Laodicea in Syria, the great port on the Syrian coast^[6]. His father, a grammarian from Alexandria, gave him an exceptional classical education: the son remained all his life a man of letters as much as a bishop, at ease in exegesis as in controversy^[7]. Having become bishop of Laodicea c. 360, he placed this talent at the service of the Nicene faith: he refuted the radical Arians — including Eunomius — and defended Christianity against cultivated pagans, notably Porphyry and the emperor Julian himself^[8].

It is this past that explains the esteem he first enjoyed among the greatest: Saint Athanasius, Saint Basil and Saint Jerome each in turn praise his classical culture, his biblical learning and his loyalty to the Nicene symbol^[9]. Saint Jerome attributes to him innumerable volumes on Scripture, two apologies for Christianity — one against Porphyry, the other against Julian — and a refutation of Eunomius; almost all of this work is lost^[10]. The future heresiarch was then, in everyone's eyes, a bulwark of orthodoxy: his notice in Jerome's De viris illustribus, chapter 104, still presents him as a leading ecclesiastical author^[11].

Under Julian the Apostate: saving Christian letters

In June 362, the emperor Julian forbade Christian masters to teach the classical authors: deprived of their literary tools, Christians found themselves condemned to silence in the schools^[12]. Father and son took up the challenge with an energy that has remained legendary: they transposed Scripture onto classical models, to give Christians a substitute literature — the father worked on grammar and poetry, the son tackled the sacred texts themselves^[13].

The episode matters for understanding the man: Apollinarius is a systematic mind, confident in reason, accustomed to resolving difficulties by elegant constructions. That same confidence — resolving the mystery of Christ by an ingenious contrivance rather than stopping before it — would bring about his dogmatic downfall ten years later, as his adversaries would note^[14].

From Athanasius's ally to condemned schismatic

As long as it was only a matter of defending Nicaea against the Arians, Apollinarius marched with Athanasius. The turning point came in the mid-370s: his theses on the soul of Christ, at first whispered, became public, and his old friends broke with him one after another^[15]. Saint Basil, who had esteemed him, distanced himself; Saint Epiphanius of Salamis devoted to him, c. 376-377, the whole of chapter 77 of his Panarion, the great repertory of heresies^[16]. Apollinarius, instead of submitting, organised his party: he had a bishop of his own consecrated for Antioch, Vitalis, the first name history retains among his disciples^[17].

From then on it was open war. After a council of Alexandria which, in 362, had targeted his doctrine without naming its author — Athanasius still wanted to spare him — two Roman councils under Pope Damasus, in 377 and then in 381, denounced and condemned him by name^[18]. He refused to submit, even after the solemn condemnation of the ecumenical council of Constantinople in 381, and died in his error c. 390 — the 1907 Catholic Encyclopedia gives, as a variant, c. 392^[19]. His party, for a time considerable at Constantinople, in Syria and in Phoenicia, barely survived him^[20].

The construction: a body, an animal soul, and the Logos in place of the mind

To build his Christology, Apollinarius took up the threefold division of man familiar to Platonism: the body (sarx, soma), the soul as principle of animal life (psyche alogos, without reason), and the mind (nous, pneuma, or rational soul)^[29]. His construction is simple and, at first sight, elegant: Christ assumed the human body and the animal soul, but not the human mind — it is the divine Logos Himself who stands in for it, becoming in Jesus the rational centre, the seat of self-consciousness and self-determination^[30].

In other words: in Jesus of Nazareth, what thinks, wills and decides is not a human intelligence — it is the second Person of the Trinity Himself. Apollinarius's imagination gains from it a flawless unity: a single subject, a single principle of decision, no possible hesitation between two wills^[31]. In support, he cites Scripture: "And the Word became flesh" (Jn 1:14) — flesh, then, and not the whole man; "taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men" (Phil 2:7); "the second man is from heaven" (1 Cor 15:47)^[32].

Why Apollinarius thought he was saving Christ

Apollinarius must be taken seriously: he did not see himself as a destroyer, but as the defender of Christ's unity and of the Nicene faith. His reasoning rests on two principles, one ontological, the other psychological^[33].

Ontological principle: the union of a complete God with a complete man can only be, in his eyes, a juxtaposition — two perfect beings, with all their attributes, could not make a single being; at most an incongruous compound, "not very different from the monsters of mythology". Yet the Nicene faith forbids lowering the Logos, as Arius had done: Apollinarius therefore chose the other term and amputated Christ's humanity of its noblest attribute — and he claimed to do so for true unity and the true Incarnation^[34].

Psychological principle: the rational soul appeared to him essentially exposed to sin, capable at best of precarious efforts. How then to guarantee Christ's impeccability and the infinite value of the Redemption? By removing the fragile part: without a fallible human mind, Christ can neither sin nor hesitate, and His sacrifice is of infinite worth^[35]. The device is of implacable logic — and that is precisely what makes it dangerous: it buys the safety of the dogma at the price of the man.

What Apollinarianism is not

The word sometimes covers, in ordinary language, everything touching Christ: confusions with neighbouring errors must be cleared up, each of which has its own article.

Neighbouring error	Thesis	Difference from Apollinarianism
Docetism (2nd century)	Christ would have had only an appearance of flesh	Error on the body: Apollinarius, for his part, affirmed a real flesh and opposed the Docetists — his amputation bears on the mind, not on the flesh[36]
Arianism (4th century)	The Son would be a creature, not true God	Error on divinity: Apollinarius was anti-Arian and proclaimed the Logos true God — his error is exactly the reverse, on humanity[37]
Sabellianism and Modalism (3rd century)	Father, Son and Spirit: three masks of a single God	Error on the Persons: it confuses who is who in God, whereas Apollinarius mutilates what the Son assumes of man
Adoptionism (8th century)	The man Jesus would have been adopted as Son	Error on the union eight centuries later, in Spain: it separates where Apollinarius fuses — two symmetrical counter-senses of the one Incarnation
Semi-Arianism (4th century)	The Son would be similar in substance to the Father	Trinitarian quarrel over consubstantiality: Apollinarianism shifts the debate from the Father and the Son to Christ and His soul

The reading sentence is simple: where Arianism trims God and Docetism spirits away the flesh, Apollinarianism trims the inner man — intelligence and will. It is the heresy of the Christ diminished from within, all the more seductive for presenting itself as a defence of His greatness^[38].

Gregory of Nazianzus's decisive argument

The most famous refutation comes from Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, who addressed to the priest Cledonius in 382 two letters — Letters 101 and 102 — entirely devoted to the Apollinarian controversy^[39]. In them Gregory turns Apollinarius's own concern for salvation against him: if Christ did not take our intelligence, then our intelligence is not saved. The formula, of formidable density, would travel through the whole tradition:

"For that which He has not assumed He has not healed; but that which is united to His Godhead is also saved." — Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, Letter 101 to the priest Cledonius^[40]

The reasoning unfolds in three steps. If only half of Adam had fallen, Christ could save only half of man; but since the whole nature fell, it is the whole nature that must be united to the Word to be saved as a whole^[41]. Next, a Christ without human intelligence is quite simply not a man: man is not an animal without a mind, and to clothe the Saviour in bones and flesh without a rational soul is — Gregory writes with biting irony — to give Him only "a portraiture of humanity"^[42]. Finally, to believe in such a Christ is to deprive oneself of spiritual intelligence:

"If anyone has put his trust in Him as a Man without a human mind, he is really bereft of mind, and quite unworthy of salvation." — Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, Letter 101 to the priest Cledonius^[43]

"Let them not, then, begrudge us our complete salvation, or clothe the Saviour only with bones and nerves and the portraiture of humanity." — Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, Letter 101 to the priest Cledonius^[44]

Scripture assumes all, save sin

The Fathers then answered point by point the texts alleged by Apollinarius. First, when Saint John writes that the Word became flesh, the word flesh designates by synecdoche the whole human nature — as everywhere else in Scripture — and not the bodily envelope alone^[45]. Next, the true sense of Saint Paul is fixed by the pastoral epistles, whose clear teaching on the complete man determines the interpretation of the more compressed passages^[46].

Above all, the Gospel shows in Jesus the affections proper to the rational soul: He experiences joy and sorrow, and sorrow unto death — "My soul is sorrowful even unto death" (Mt 26:38) — and tears — "Jesus wept" (Jn 11:35) — are not the movements of an animal soul, but those of a human mind^[47]. An incongruous compound such as Apollinarius imagines could moreover neither be called God-man nor proposed as a model of the Christian life: how imitate the obedience of a being who never had to choose with a human will^[48]?

There remains Apollinarius's strongest objection: if Christ has a human intelligence, how does He remain without sin? The answer holds in a single clause: the Word assumed all things of man, sin alone excepted — like unto us in all things, sin excepted (cf. Heb 4:15)^[49]. Note the honesty of the Fathers, remarked by the Catholic Encyclopedia: some, to prove Christ's rational soul, insist with real imprudence on the limits of Jesus's knowledge; and when the heresiarch would draw them further into the very mystery of Christ's unity, they do not hesitate to avow their ignorance, gently mocking Apollinarius's mathematical mind and his implicit trust in human reasoning alone^[50].

The condemnations: from Rome to Constantinople

Sentence follows doctrine. The table below recapitulates the steps, from patience to anathema: each instance tightens the vice, without ever shifting the article of its doctrine — it is the same Nicene faith speaking each time.

The 7th Roman anathema of 381 deserves to be read in its text: it touches the precise point of the Apollinarian contrivance, without a word too many.

"We pronounce anathema against them who say that the Word of God is in the human flesh in lieu and place of the human rational and intellective soul. For, the Word of God is the Son Himself. He did not come in the flesh to replace, but rather to assume and preserve from sin and save the rational and intellective soul of man." — Pope Saint Damasus, 7th anathema of the Council of Rome, 381^[57]

And the first canon of Constantinople closed the crisis in the East by striking with anathema, by name, all the heresies — Eunomians, Arians, Semi-Arians, Sabellians, Marcellians, Photinians and Apollinarians^[58].

The shift from Trinity to Christology

The historical importance of the controversy goes beyond its immediate object: with Apollinarius, discussion moved from Trinitarian to Christological ground — no longer only who the Son is in relation to the Father, but what the Son took of us in becoming man^[59]. It is this new question that opened the long series of Christological debates of the following century: how Nestorius would separate the natures and how Eutyches would confuse them can only be understood by starting here — see The Nestorian crisis and The Monophysite crisis^[60].

The forgeries that poisoned the following century

Apollinarius dead, his party died out — by 416, many returned to the Church, and the rest drifted towards nascent Monophysitism^[61]. But the Apollinarians had taken a formidable precaution: to give credence to their error, they had circulated treatises under approved names — an Exposition of the Faith under the name of Gregory the Wonderworker, an On the Incarnation under the name of Athanasius, an On Unity in Christ under the name of Pope Julius^[62]. A contemporary anonymous pamphlet, Against the Frauds of the Apollinarians, raised the alarm; critics — Lequien in 1740, Caspari in 1879, Draeseke in 1892 — demonstrated that these pieces are very probably by Apollinarius himself^[63].

The trap would work beyond all hope: Apollinarian formulas, transmitted under the name of Athanasius, would be taken up in good faith by defenders of orthodoxy in the following century, singularly complicating the debates that would lead to Ephesus and Chalcedon^[64]. The extinct heresy would thus go on speaking through the mouth of the Fathers — a lasting lesson on the price of source criticism.

The lesson: good intentions are not enough

It would be easy to shelve Apollinarianism in the museum of dogmatic curiosities. That would be to miss its lesson, which is spiritual before being scholastic: God is never protected by trimming man. To want an impeccable Christ by removing inner freedom is already to no longer believe that God can assume our condition to the end without ceasing to be holy^[65]. The Catholic faith confesses the reverse, with the symbol of Constantinople itself:

"By the Holy Spirit he was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man." — Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, 381^[66]

To take flesh of Mary is to take the whole man born of Mary: a body, a sensitive soul, an intelligence, a will — all, save sin. Such is the Christ the Church adores: God enough to save us, man enough for each of us — including in his head and in his heart — to be saved^[67].

• The panorama: The heresies of the early centuries
• The heresy Apollinarius fought: Arianism, Arius (c. 256-336), The Arian controversy, Semi-Arianism
• The opposite error on the Persons: Sabellianism, Modalism
• The other errors on Christ: Docetism, Adoptionism, Gnosticism, Marcionism
• The sequel of the crises: The Nestorian crisis, The Monophysite crisis, Nicaea I (325)
• Forthcoming specialised articles: Nestorianism, Eutychianism, Monophysitism