Apollinaris of Laodicea

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Begin where the fight was sharpest: with a single faculty, the human mind. The Christological controversy of the fourth century turned again and again on small distinctions with vast consequences, and Apollinaris of Laodicea fixed his whole account of the saviour on the question of whether Christ possessed a mind like other men’s, or whether the place of that mind was held by something greater. His answer secured the unity and the sinlessness he was determined to protect. It also, in the judgment of his opponents, cut away the one thing the incarnation existed to save.

The First Council of Constantinople (381), which condemned the Apollinarians, imagined by Vasily Surikov, 1876 — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Apollinaris (c. 310 – c. 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.

A defender before he was a heretic

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 Arius and those who made the Son a lesser thing than the One who begot him, Apollinaris insisted on the full divinity of the Word. His learning was admired across the Greek church. When the emperor Julian, in 362, forbade Christians to teach the classical authors — a measure aimed at starving the church of the rhetorical culture that gave it standing — Apollinaris and his father, Apollinaris the Elder, set about recasting scripture into the very forms the edict would have denied to Christian schools: the books of the Old Testament reworked as Homeric and Pindaric verse, the Gospels and their teaching after the manner of Plato’s dialogues, so that Christian children could be schooled in their own books and in the meters of the schools at once. A hexameter paraphrase of the Psalter, the Metaphrasis Psalmorum, carries his name in some manuscripts; whether that surviving poem is genuinely his is a question modern scholarship has reopened rather than closed (the Oxford editor Andrew Faulkner argues, against a long preference for a fifth- century date, that it is authentically Apollinaris’s). His standing within the church was, for a time, very high. The man later filed under heresy was first a champion of the faith the councils were busy defining.

Athanasius of Alexandria, the great anti-Arian to whom Apollinaris was allied before his condemnation, in an Eastern Orthodox icon — via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The problem he could not leave alone

The trouble lay in his solution to a single question: if the divine Word truly became human, what exactly did it join itself to? Behind that question sat the deepest worry of fourth-century theology — how the one Christ could be at once fully God and genuinely a man without splitting into two subjects, two sons, two acting selves housed under one name.

Apollinaris reasoned that a complete man — body, animating soul, and rational mind — united to the Word would amount to two persons sharing one frame: a divine person and a human person, each with its own governing intellect, each a center of will and choice. And he held a second conviction as firmly. A human mind is mutable; it deliberates, wavers, is drawn toward and away; it is by its nature capable of sin. A saviour seated on so unstable a faculty could not be guaranteed sinless, and a saviour who might sin could save no one. Both worries pressed toward the same exit.

His answer was that in Christ the divine Word, the Logos, itself took the place of the human rational mind. On the threefold scheme he worked with — body, lower animating soul, governing intellect — Christ possessed the first two and not the third. He had a true human body and the lower soul that animates flesh and feels and moves it; what he did not have was a human nous, the rational, self-determining mind. That seat was occupied by the Word. The governing intellect of the God-man was divine, not created — and so the unity was absolute (there was only ever one ruling self, the Logos, directing a body it had made its own) and the sinlessness was secured (no mutable human mind stood between God and the flesh he wore). Apollinaris pressed this into a slogan that would have a long and strange afterlife: one incarnate nature of the divine Word — a single nature, divine, made flesh.

He believed he had given the church the unity it kept fumbling toward against the Arians, and a guarantee against the wavering will that other accounts of Christ seemed to leave open. He had paid for it with a piece of the humanity. His opponents thought the price was the whole transaction.

What the Word did not assume

That price was the completeness of Christ’s humanity, and the objection to it became one of the most quoted sentences in Christian theology. The Cappadocian theologians pressed it — Gregory of Nazianzus above all, with Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa at his side. In a letter written about 382 to the priest Cledonius, Gregory of Nazianzus set down the principle that would outlive the quarrel that produced it: “For that which He has not assumed He has not healed; but that which is united to His Godhead is also saved.” The logic is soteriological, a logic of rescue. The incarnation heals human nature by taking it on; whatever the Word leaves unassumed is left untouched, unredeemed, outside the saving contact. And of all that a human being is, it is precisely the mind — the rational, willing, errant intellect — that most needs the healing. The mind is where sin takes root; the mind is what falls. A Christ without a human mind would have come to save everything in a person except the very faculty that goes wrong. On this reasoning a maimed humanity could redeem nothing, and the unity Apollinaris had bought so dearly turned out to ransom the wrong thing.

Gregory of Nazianzus, whose maxim that “what He has not assumed He has not healed” became the standard answer to Apollinaris, in a fourteenth-century fresco at the Chora Church, Constantinople — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Gregory of Nyssa carried the attack further into the text, writing a long refutation — the Antirrheticus, the counter-statement against Apollinaris — that survives as a running, hostile commentary on Apollinaris’s lost Demonstration of the Divine Enfleshment. Much of what is known of Apollinaris’s own argument is known because Gregory quoted it in order to demolish it; the attacker became, against his intention, the preserver.

Condemnation

The verdict came from synod after synod and then from a council. Apollinaris’s teaching was condemned at Rome under Pope Damasus in 377, at Alexandria in 378, and at Antioch in 379; the breach hardened when his disciple Vitalis set up a rival Apollinarian community at Antioch and Apollinaris consecrated him its bishop. The condemnation was made conciliar at the Council of Constantinople in 381, whose canons listed the Apollinarians among the parties cast out. The movement did not vanish at once — after Apollinaris died his followers split into factions and held on in pockets, the strongest at Antioch, before drifting back into the wider church or merging into the movements that came after, with the last sizeable group reconciled in the 420s. As a church, Apollinarianism was finished within a few generations of its founder.

The teaching that survived its condemnation

What did not finish was the writing. A condemned author’s books are dangerous to own under his own name, and Apollinaris’s disciples solved the problem by detaching the texts from the man. His formulas went into circulation dressed in more respectable attributions — a detailed confession of faith passed off as the work of Gregory Thaumaturgus, a letter fathered on Pope Julius, treatises slipped under the name of Athanasius himself. The disguise worked almost too well. The slogan one incarnate nature of the divine Word, traveling under Athanasius’s authority, was taken up in good faith by later orthodox writers who had no idea they were quoting the heresiarch; it became a watchword in the fifth-century campaign against Nestorius, and only the patient detective work of modern editors — Hans Lietzmann’s 1904 reconstruction of the fragments above all — sorted the genuine Athanasius from the Apollinarian forgery wearing his name. Some of Apollinaris’s most characteristic phrases thus passed, unacknowledged and uncondemned, into the very tradition that had cast their author out.

Reading him through his enemies and his editors

Apollinaris is among the more difficult patristic figures to read at first hand, for the simple reason that the church which condemned him did not preserve him intact. No work circulates securely under his own name as a continuous text; the Demonstration of the Divine Enfleshment — his Apodeixis, the fullest statement of his system — is lost as a book, and is reconstructed almost entirely from the verbatim slabs his opponents quoted in order to refute them. The deepest of those refutations is Gregory of Nyssa’s Antirrheticus, a clause-by-clause counter-attack; its first complete English translation, with the companion letter To Theophilus Against the Apollinarians, is Robin Orton’s Anti-Apollinarian Writings (Fathers of the Church 131, Catholic University of America Press, 2015), the natural entry point for the lost Apodeixis read through hostile eyes. The companion attack from the Cappadocian side, Gregory of Nazianzus’s letters to Cledonius, stands in the nineteenth-century Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers collection (Series II, vol. VII) as the public-domain source of the axiom that fixed his condemnation.

The decisive modern labor was Hans Lietzmann’s, who in 1904 disentangled the genuine fragments from the mass of pseudonymous survivals and reassembled Apollinaris and his school as a body of texts: Apollinaris von Laodicea und seine Schule: Texte und Untersuchungen (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1904), still the standard collection (digitized edition). Lietzmann’s sorting of authentic Apollinarian writing from the works wrongly worn under the names of Athanasius, Gregory Thaumaturgus, and Pope Julius is what made it possible to say, with evidence, that orthodox tradition had been quoting the heresiarch unawares. The handbook synthesis of his place in the controversy is set out in J. N. D. Kelly’s Early Christian Doctrines (1977) and Aloys Grillmeier’s Christ in Christian Tradition, vol. 1 (English ed. 1975), which trace the line from the Logos-flesh Christology of Athanasius through Apollinaris’s hardening of it to the Cappadocian correction. A separate strand of recent scholarship concerns the Metaphrasis Psalmorum: Andrew Faulkner’s critical edition (Oxford, 2020) revives the case that the hexameter Psalter is genuinely Apollinaris’s rather than a later poet’s, as reviewed in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review — a reminder that the same man condemned for his Christology was, on the other side of his life, one of the more ambitious Christian poets of his century.

The mark on the creed

The doctrine left a second, deeper mark, and this one was openly owned. By forcing the church to say why a Christ lacking a human mind could not save the human mind, the controversy fixed a rule that governed everything after it: whatever else was true of the saviour, his humanity had to be whole — body, soul, and rational mind, nothing subtracted. That principle armed both sides of the next century’s quarrel. It stood behind the insistence, against Nestorius, that the one Christ was a single acting subject; and it stood behind the insistence, against Eutyches, that the human nature was not swallowed up or thinned out by the divine. Apollinaris had tried to protect the oneness of Christ and had been judged to have done it by amputation. The settlement that answered him kept the oneness and kept the humanity entire, and made the measure of one against the measure of the other the discipline of every account that followed: a Christ whole in his manhood, undivided in his person, with no faculty of a human being left outside the reach of the God who had become one. The man who would have spared the saviour a human mind is remembered for the rule his error wrote into the creed — that the Word came down to the bottom of what we are, mind and all, because nothing it did not touch could be made well.

→ Related: Eutyches · Logos · Nous · Athanasius · Arius · Gregory Of Nazianzus · Basil Of Caesarea · Gregory Of Nyssa · Nestorius · Heresy · Soul · Christianity