Apollinaris of Laodicea

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Apollinaris of Laodicea (c. 310–390) was a Syrian bishop, biblical scholar, and theologian whose account of how divinity and humanity met in Christ was judged to have gone too far and was condemned as heresy in his own lifetime. He gave his name to Apollinarianism, one of the first sustained attempts to explain the inner constitution of Christ — and one of the first to be ruled out of bounds.

For most of his career Apollinaris stood among the defenders of Nicene orthodoxy. He was a friend of Athanasius and an ally against the Arians, who held the Son to be a created being lesser than the Father; against them Apollinaris insisted on the full divinity of the Word. He was admired as a learned man, and when the emperor Julian barred Christians from teaching the classics, Apollinaris and his father were said to have recast scripture in classical forms so that Christian schooling could continue. His standing within the church was, for a time, high.

The trouble lay in his solution to a single question: if the divine Word truly became human, what exactly did it join itself to? Apollinaris reasoned that a complete man — body, animal soul, and rational mind — united to the Word would amount to two persons sharing one frame, and that a human mind, being mutable and capable of sin, could not be the seat of a sinless saviour. His answer was that in Christ the divine Word, the Logos, itself took the place of the human rational mind. Christ on this account had a human body and its lower animating soul, but no human nous; the governing intellect was divine. The proposal secured the unity he wanted and a guarantee against sin, at a price his opponents found fatal.

That price was the completeness of Christ’s humanity. The Cappadocian theologians — Gregory of Nazianzus above all — pressed the objection that became the standing refutation: what the Word did not assume, it did not heal; a Christ lacking a human mind could not redeem the human mind. On this reasoning a maimed humanity could save nothing. Apollinaris’s teaching was condemned at several synods and then at the Council of Constantinople in 381, and his followers gradually rejoined the wider church or merged into other movements.

Historically, the episode marks a turning point. The argument over Apollinaris forced the church to state that whatever else was true of Christ, his humanity had to be whole — a principle that shaped the Christological debates of the next century, against Nestorius on one side and Eutyches on the other. Much of Apollinaris’s own writing survives only because later admirers preserved it under more respectable names, which is how some of his formulas passed, unacknowledged, into the very tradition that had rejected him. The heresy was condemned; the questions it raised were not so easily set aside.

→ Related: Eutyches · Logos · Nous