chistory_christ1b
CHRISTOLOGY
X. PROPOSED SOLUTIONS
During the greater part of the Trinitarian controversy, the specifically Christological issue was left on one side. The Council of Nicaea certainly ignored it, although producing a creed containing the emphatic statement that the Son “was made flesh, becoming man.” These words were later interpreted by Theodore of Mopsuestia as designed to correct the Arian attribution of a defective humanity to the Redeemer, but it is much more likely that the intention behind them was to stress the reality of His incarnation against Gnosticism and Docetism. The Nicenes, in affirming the homoousion of the Son, inevitably confronted themselves with the problem of combining deity and manhood in the Saviour. Hence, although the matters were only brought to a head with the outbreak of Apollinarianism shortly after the middle of fourth century, the Christological implications of the Nicene debate had been lurking not far below the surface right from the start. In the early half of the fourth century, there were two types of Christology in the Eastern Church.
1. The Christology that has been called “Word-flesh” type came to dominate the Eastern Church in the later half of the third century. As we have just seen, this is the Christology of the theologians who reacted against Origen‘s special teaching in the early third century that Christ’s human soul was the point of union between the eternal Word and the humanity. This type of Christology, making no allowance for a human soul in Christ, viewed the incarnation as the union of the Word with human flesh, and took as its premise the Platonic conception of man as a body animated by a rational soul or mind which was essentially alien from it. This “Word-flesh” type of Christology has also been designated “Alexandrian” because of its Platonic conception of man.
2. In rivalry with this, in the latter half of the fourth century, a Christology was developed that has been called a “Word-man” type of Christology. The basic idea of this Christology was that the Word united Himself with a complete humanity, including a soul as well as a body. Behind this laid the Aristotelian theory of man as a psycho-physical unity, and also the determination to do justice to the genuinely human character of the Person set forth in the Gospels. This “Word-man” type of Christology has also been designated “Antiochene” because of its Aristotelian conception of man.
The clash between these two types of Christology, designated “Alexandrian” and “Antiochene”, respectively, took place in the early decades of the fourth century before Apollinarianism entered upon the scene. This clash can be studied by contrasting the teaching of the left-wing Alexandrianism, as represented by the Arians, with the teaching put forward in opposition to it by Eustathius of Antioch (died in A.D. 336), who was a keen champion of the Nicene settlement.
The Arians taught that in Christ the Word had united Himself to a human body lacking a rational soul, Himself taking the place of one. As a result, they had a straightforward, naturalistic conception of the unity in Christ, as was expressed in the creed ascribed to Eudoxius, who was successively bishop of Antioch and Constantinople:
“We believe … in one Lord … Who was made flesh but not man. For He did not take a human soul, but became flesh so that God might have dealings with us men through flesh as through a veil. [He was] not two natures [ou duo phuseis], for He was not complete man, but God in place of a soul in flesh. The whole is one nature resulting from composition [mia … kata sunthesin phusis].” [1]
So far there is nothing unusual about their position, which reproduced that outlined by Malchion at Antioch in A.D. 268, especially in its insistence on the metaphysical unity formed by the Word and the flesh. What apparently shocked the earlier critics of the Arians was not so much their Word-flesh Christology as the fact that they exploited it in the interests of their general theology. Thus it was to the Logos that they referred the difficult passages John 12:27 (“Now is my soul troubled”), John 13:21 (“Jesus was troubled in spirit”), etc., as well as the Gospel passages attributing to the Lord ignorance, growth in wisdom, and the need for help in temptation since His status on their theory was that of a creature, superior to all others, but none the less passible and susceptible of change, as one Who was God by nature manifestly could not be. Further, one of the points that the Arians pressed home against the orthodox was the difficulty of explaining His relationship to the flesh on the assumption that He was God. That concrete metaphysical unity, which the facts of the case demanded, could not, they insinuated, be established between a Logos Who was truly transcendent and human flesh.
On the premise of the Word-flesh Christology, these considerations were not without force; it was the realization of this that prompted the reaction of which Eustathius was one of the pioneers. Although tradition reckoned him as an out-and-out Antiochene, his thought prior to the Nicene struggle exhibited some markedly un-Antiochene traits. Thus, while always admitting a human soul in the God-man, he regarded it as having been in some measure deified by its association with the divine Logos. Christ’s body, also, was “holy”, so that His divinity was reflected in His countenance. At this stage, Eustathius was even prepared to accept the typically Alexandrian communicatio idiomatum (transference of characterists), speaking of John the Baptist embracing the Word and the Jews crucifying Him, and of the Blessed Virgin as “God-bearing” [theotokos]. But Eustathius was one of the first to detect the real drift of the Arian Christology. He asked,
“Why are they so set on demonstrating that Christ took a body without a soul, grossly deceiving their followers? In order that, if only they can induce some to believe this false theory, they may then attribute the changes due to the passions to the divine Spirit, and thus easily persuade them that what is so changeable could not have been begotten from the unchanging nature [i.e., from the Father]”. [2]
Hence, we find Eustathius insisting not only that Christ had a rational soul or mind as well as a body, but that this was the subject of His sufferings. In this state of mind, Eustathius rejected the communicatio idiomatum, declaring it misleading to say that God was led like a lamb to the slaughter or that the Word died on the cross.
The Christology implied in Eustathius’ developed doctrine was clearly of the Word-man type. In expounding it, Eustathius was led to distinguish a duality of natures in the God-man, and this has often been pointed to as anticipation of Nestorianism. Thus he speaks of “the man” and “the God”, writing in Antiochene vein,
“The sentence, ‘I have not yet ascended to my Father’, was not uttered by the Logos, the God Who comes down from heaven and abides in the Father’s bosom, nor by the Wisdom which embraces all created things. It was spoken by the man made up of diverse limbs, Who had risen from the dead but had not yet ascended after His death to the Father.” [3]
Theories of this type are always faced with the problem of explaining how the Word and “the man” formed a real unity, and Eustathius’ was no exception. His most frequent suggestion was that the Word “dwelt in” the humanity, which served as His temple, His house, His tent. This indwelling was analogous to the Word’s indwelling in prophets and inspired men, but differed, it would seem, in being continuous. The meeting-point was the Lord’s human soul, which according to Eustathius “cohabits with [sundiaitomene] God the Word”, so that the Incarnate can be described as “a God-bearing man [anthropos theophoros]”. Language like this lent itself to misinterpretation, but it is clear that, although he could give no satisfactory account of it, Eustathius was deeply concerned for the unity.
If the Arian Christology, with its premise that the status of the Word was a creature, was the extreme left wing of the Alexandrianism, the Christology of Athanasius was its classic representative. Athanasius was bishop of Alexandria from A.D. 328 to 373, a span of 46 years, 17 years of which he spent in exile. In A.D. 339, he was forced to flee to Rome, but although he was not there for very long, the journey proved to be highly fruitful. In Rome, Athanasius met Western theologians and their ideas, which were remarkably like his own. The West had played little part in the Christological debate until then, but after A.D. 339 it became Athanasian to a man.
Athanasius had begun the counter-attack against Arius in a famous book On the Incarnation, which is still in print. This treatise is really the second part of a longer work which deals with the fall of man and his need for a saviour. Arius is nowhere mentioned in the book, and the whole book is cast as evangelistic tract designed to win over pagans. But although he does not say so explicitly, it is clear that Athanasius was trying to present orthododox Christianity in a way which would make it a convincing altenative to the subtle Arian heresy which was threatening the Church. Instead of arguing against the proof-texts of Arius, Athanasius sought to show that the logic of the Scriptures as a whole made the incarnation of the Word of God inevitable. God did not become man because some philosopher thought it would be a good idea, but because God created man in His own image. It was because man was uniquely related to God that only God could make good the result of Adam’s disobedience and restore the human race to fellowship with Himself.
Athanasius’ starting-point is John 1:14, which he interpreted as meaning that “the Logos has become man, and has not just entered into a man”. [C. Ar. 3, 30]. With his strongly soteriological emphasis, Athanasius claims that only God can save the fallen race, and for him the Word is of course fully divine. He says,
“We ourselves were the motive of His incarnation; it was for our salvation that He loved man to the point of being born and of appearing in a human body.” [De incarn., 4] [4]
The incarnation, it should be noted, did not seem to Athanasius to have altered His transcendent status in any way, for “in taking flesh He does not become different, but remains the same”. Indeed, while encompassed in a human body, He continued to exercise sovereignty over the universe [kai exo ton holon en][De incarn. 17].
To describe what happened in His becoming man, Athanasius says that He took flesh or a body [De incarn. 8; 9; 10; etc.], or that He fashioned a body for Himself in the Virgin’s womb [De incarn. 18]. In this body, He dwells as in a temple [De incarn. 8; 9; 20] (the use of this symbolism, suggested by John 2:19f., was not confined to the Antiochenes), making use of it as His instrument [organon][C. Ar. 3, 35]. But His relationship to it is no casual or accidental one, for He “appropriates” [idiopoieitai] it to Himself [De incarn. 8]; it is not another’s body, but His very own [De incarn. 18]; if it were another’s, His redemptive purpose could not have been accomplished. Hence it is a true incarnation, or “becoming man” [enenthropesis], of the Logos [De incarn. 4; 16; 54], and it can be said that
“He became flesh, not that He has been changed into flesh, but that He has taken living flesh on our behalf and has become man”. [5]
Therefore Athanasius has no use for Christologies of the Word-man type. He asks: how can they be called Christians who say the Word entered into a holy man, just as He entered into the prophets, and not that He became man, taking His body from Mary, and who dare to assert that Christ is “one” and the divine Logos “another”? The Stoics had conceived of the Logos as the soul of the universe, and Athanasius borrows this idea, with the difference that for him the Logos is of course personal. On his view, the Logos is the animating, governing principle of the cosmos, and the rational soul of man, which fulfills an identical role in relation to its body, is a close copy of Him, in fact a Logos in miniature. Christ’s human nature was, as it were, a part of the vast body of the cosmos, and there was no incongruity in the Logos, Who animates the whole, animating this special portion of it. The paradox was rather that, while present in the body of the Incarnate, animating and moving it, He was simultaneously present everywhere else in the universe, vivifying and directing it with His life-giving power [De incarn. 17].
From this account, it follows that the Word for Athanasius was the governing principle, or hegemon, in Jesus Christ, the subject of all the sayings, experiences and actions attributed to the Gospel Figure [C. Ar. 3,35]. It was, for example, one and the same Word Who performed the miracles and Who wept and was hungry, prayed in Gethsemane and uttered the cry from the cross, and admitted ignorance of the date of the last day [C. Ar. 3, 43; 3, 54]. Experiences like these might be thought hard to reconcile with His deity and impassibility, and indeed the Arians argued that they were. But Athanasius draws a careful distinction between what belonged to the Word in His eternal being and what belonged to Him as incarnate. Athanasius reminds us [C. Ar. 3, 34] that the Apostle Peter himself (compare I Pet. 4:1) made the point that Christ “suffered for us in the flesh”, the hint being that it is to His fleshly nature that we should attribute these human weaknesses and sufferings. Athanasius explains,
“These things were not proper to the nature of the Word as Word, but the Word … was subject of the flesh which suffered them.”
[C. Ar. 3, 55] [6]
His treatment of the Lord’s emotional experiences and apparent mental limitations (for example, His distress of spirit, His prayer for the removal of the cup, His cry of abandonment, His confessions of ignorance) is in line with this principle. As far as possible, for example, Athanasius gives [C. Ar. 3, 54-58] a purely physical explanation of His distress, fear, etc.; these traits were sufferings of the flesh [pathemata tes sarkon]. If Scripture says that Jesus advanced in wisdom and grace, its real meaning [C. Ar. 3, 51-53] is that there was a parallel and progressive development of His body and disclosure of His deity. When He is reported to have professed ignorance, it was a case of feigned, not genuine, ignorance. Being Word, He knew all things; but since He had become flesh, and flesh is naturally ignorant, it was fitting that He should make a show of ignorance. [C. Ar. 3, 42-46]
Athanasius sums up his position by saying [C. Ar. 3. 35] that we are correct in our theology if, while distinguishing two sets of actions which Christ performs as God and as God-made-man respectively, we also perceive that both sets issue from one and same Person [amphotera ex henos prattomena]. This brings us face to face with the central problem of his Christology, namely, whether Athanasius envisaged Christ’s humanity as including a human rational soul, or whether he regarded the Logos as taking the place of one. His anthropology, it should be pointed out, which was thoroughly Platonic and treated the soul as having no necessary connection with the body, was perfectly consistent with the latter hypothesis. And indeed the alternative view, natural enough while the two pseudonymous treatises C. Apollinarium were assumed to come from his pen, is exposed to serious objections, at any rate so far as his attitude down to A.D. 362 is concerned.
In the first place, his regular description of Christ’s human nature as “flesh” or “body” seems to point in this direction, as does his failure to make any unambiguously clear mention of a soul. In reply, it has been urged that such language was traditional, reflecting New Testament usage, and that Athanasius himself drew attention to the Biblical equation of “man” with “flesh”. Even if the linguistic argument is inconclusive, the fact must be faced that his thought simply allowed no room for a human mind. As we have noticed, he represented the Word as the unique subject of all Christ’s experiences, human as well as divine. So much was this the case that he regarded His death as the separation of the Word from His body, and spoke of the descent of the Word to hell. His attitude was revealed in a very striking way when he came to deal with the Arians‘ contention that the Savior’s ignorance, sufferings, etc., should properly be attributed to the Word, Who on their view was a creature. Had Athanasius admitted a human soul, here surely was a golden opportunity for him to point to it, rather than the divine, impassible Word, as the true subject of these experiences. But this obvious solution, as we have seen, never apparently occurred to him; instead he attempts to attribute them to the flesh.
Athanasius’ Christology, therefore, just as much as that of the Arians, conformed to the Word-flesh type; Athanasius differed from them only in his estimate of the status of the Word. Some scholars, while conceding his lack of overt interest in Christ’s human soul, have pointed to the fact that he nowhere expressly denies the existence of one, and have concluded that he may well have tacitly presupposed it. In view of what we know of the Alexandrianism, this seems an improbable theory. It remains a question, however, whether his attitude underwent a change about A.D. 362. At the synod of Alexandria held in that year, agreement was reached to the effect that
“the Savior did not have a body lacking soul, sensibility or intelligence [ou soma apsuchon oud’ anaistheton oud’ anoeton eichen]. For it was impossible that, the Lord having become a man on our behalf, His body should have been without intelligence [anoeton], and the salvation not only of the body but of the soul as well was accomplished through the Word Himself.” [7]
Athanasius was chairman of the synod and, since he endorsed this formula, it has usually been inferred that from A.D. 362 at any rate he recognized a normal human psychology in Christ. Among the delegates present at Alexandria was an Antiochene group, the Paulinians, devoted to the memory of Eustathius and his belief in Christ’s human soul; their argument that, if the Redeemer was to save men’s soul as well as their bodies, He must have assumed a created soul Himself, may have impressed Athanasius. Shortly afterwards, we find him making precisely the same soteriological point, namely, that our salvation embraces “the whole man, body and soul”, in as much as “the Savior really and in very truth became man”.
This conclusion may well be correct; but, on the evidence of his later writings, Athanasius’ acknowledgment of a human soul may have been purely formal, for he never succeeded in assigning to it any theological significance. It is also possible that he may have understood the crucial words quoted above as meaning, not that the Lord possessed a created soul, but that the Logos Himself was the vivifying principle of His body and served as the soul of the God-man. The formula may have been put forward at Alexandria by adherents of the Word-flesh Christology in order to counter objections to it, presumably along the lines that it presupposed a defective humanity. Their natural rejoinder was that it was misleading to represent Christ’s humanity as being on their theory incomplete, since the Word, the archetype of the soul, had united Himself with His flesh. This surely was the true import of the sentence which followed,
“It was impossible that His body should have been without an intelligence, seeing that it was the Lord Who became man on our behalf”, [8]
where the accent should be placed on “the Lord” rather than, as it is commonly placed, on “man”. Apollinarius understood these words in this sense; and this interpretataion of the whole difficult passage accords much better than the conventional one both with the Alexandrian Christology in general and with the Alexandrian conception of the mind or nous as the image of the divine Word. On the whole, the case for the view that Athanasius did not modify his Christology about the time of the synod of A.D. 362 must be reckoned the more weighty.
Apollinarianism is the heresy associated with the name of Athanasius‘ friend and coadjutor, Apollinarius of Laodicea (c.310-c.390 A.D.). It was an attempt in the fourth century to work out a theory of Christ’s Person, that carried the tendencies long accepted in the Alexandrian school to their logical conclusion. Its salient feature was the rejection of a human soul or mind in Jesus. Because of this rejection of a human mind in Jesus was a salient feature of the Alexandrian school, some scholars have sometimes been tempted to trace its ancestry to Arianism. They point out that Apollinarius himself had served as a reader under Theolotus, the Arian bishop of Laodicea, so that the intellectual atmosphere he breathed as a young man may well have been impregnated with Arian ideas. Yet it is paradoxial that so stout an anagonist of the Arians in the matter of the Godhead should have succombed to their influence in Christology, and the hypothesis is in fact unnecessary. As we saw above, the Alexandrian theologians refusal to admit, or at any rate to take practical account of a human soul or rational mind in the God-man, was a permanent feature in the Alexandrian tradition and of the Word-flesh type of Christology generally. Apollinarius himself, as reported by Gregory of Nyssa, regarded his teaching as a restatement of the position of the fathers who condemned Paul of Samosata in A.D. 268.
According to Gregory of Nazianzus, the Apollinarian heresy began about A.D. 352, but it was not until the council of Alexandria (A.D. 362) that its teaching became a public issue, and only a decade later did it stir up serious controversy. Apollinarius, who was enthusiastic homoousion of the Son, was a life-long opponent of the dualist, later called “dyophysite”, strain in the Antiochene approach to Christology. Apollinarius thought that this reflected the baneful influence of Paul of Samosata, whose doctrines were, he believed, being revived by teachers like Eustathius, the Paulinians, Flavian and Diodore of Tarsus. Apollinarius wrote,
“I am atonished to find people confessing the Lord as God incarnate, and yet falling into the separation (te diairesei) wickedly introduced by the Paul-imitators. For they slavishly follow Paul of Samosata, differentiating between Him from heaven, Whom they declare to be God, and the man derived from the earth.” [9]
He protests against those who “confess, not God incarnate, but a man conjoined (anthropon theo sunaphthenta) with God”, that is, in a merely external union, and against the misleading distinction between “two Sons”, the Son of God and the son of Mary. Such distinction imply that Christ is “two”, whereas the Scripture is emphatic that He is an unity (hen, mia phusis); and in any case, Scripture apart, such a duality is inconceivable. That Apollinarius was deeply influenced by soteriological motives is apparent. He was convined that, if the divine is separated from the human in the Savior, our redemption is imperilled. Considered merely as man, Christ had no saving life to bestow. He would not redeem us from our sins, revivify us, or raise us from the dead. How could we worship Him, or be baptized into His death, if He was only an ordinary man indwelt by the Godhead? As such, He must have been fallible, a prey like the rest of mankind to corrupt imaginings, and consequently unable to save us.
In the attempt to eliminate the dualism, which he considered so disastrous, Apollinarius put forward an extreme version of the Word-flesh Christology. He spoke of Christ as “God incarnate” [theos ensarkos], “flesh-bearing God” [theos sarkophoros], or “God born of a woman”. By such phrases, he did not mean that the flesh was simply an outward covering which the Word had donned, but rather that it was joined in absolute oneness of being with the God-head [pros hensteta theo suneptai] from the moment of its conception. He states,
“The flesh is not something superadded to the Godhead for well-doing, but constitutes one reality or nature (sunousiomene kai sumphutos) with it.”
The Incarnate is “a compound unity in human form” [sunthesis anthropoeides], and there is “one nature [mian . . . phusin] composed of impassible divinity and passible flesh”. [10] The frankly acknowledged presupposition of this argument is that the divine Word was substituted for the normal human psychology in Christ. According to Apollinarius’ anthropology, man was “spirit united with flesh”. So in the God-man, as he expressed it, “the divine energy fulfils the role of the animating soul (psuches) and of the human mind (noos)”. Linked with this is the problem whether he was a dichotomist (that is, the human nature consisted of body and soul) or a trichotomist (that is, the human nature consisted of body, animal soul or psuche, and rational soul or nous). But what is important, is that on his interpretation the Word was both the directive, intelligent principle in Jesus Christ, and also the vivifying principle of His flesh. The common account of his Christology, that is, that it represented the Word as performing the function usually exercised by the will and the intellect, does not do justice to what was in fact its most distinctive feature. This was his theory that the Word was the sole life of the God-man, infusing vital energy and movement into Him even at the purely physical and biological levels. If it is objected that this makes Him different from ordinary men, Apollinarius had no hesitation in agreeing. He found confirmation of the difference in the wording of such texts as “Found as a man”, and, “In the likeness of men”; and he suggested that the theological significance of the virgin birth lay precisely in the fact that the divine spirit replace the spermatic matter which gives life to ordinary men. From his point of view, the elimination of a human psychology had the advantage of excluding the possibility of there being two contradictory wills and intelligences in Christ. It also ensured the sinlessness of the Savior. A human mind, he explained, is “fallible and enslaved to filthy thoughts”, whereas the Word is immutable. But, further, having a divine life pulsing through Him, the Incarnate was made immune from psychic and fleshly passions, and became not only Himself invincible to death, but also was able to destroy death. It was because the Word was, biologically and physically, the vivtal force and energy in Him that He was able to raise the dead and bestow life. Thus Christ, on this theory, is an organic, vital unity, just as a man compounded of soul and body is a unity; there is a “unity of nature” [henosis phusike] between the Word and His body. As Apollinarius expressed it,
“He is one nature [mia phusis] since He is a simple, undivided Person [prosopon]; for His body is not a nature by itself, nor is the divinity in virtue of the incarnation a nature by Itself; but just as a man is one nature, so is Christ Who has come in the likeness of men”. [11]
Note that his term for the God-man, considered as a Person, is prosopon. He also on occasions uses hupostasis, being the first to introduce it into the vocabulary of Christology; it connotes for him a self-determining reality. His regular description of the Incarnate was “one nature” [mia phusis], and he never ceased to protest against the doctrine of “two natures” taught by the Antiochenes. In a phrase that was to become famous, he declared that there was “one incarnate nature of the divine Word” [mian phusin tou theou logou sesarkomenen]. Neither are the terms “nature” and “Person” synonymous in his vocabulary, as the use of the two terms in same context might suggest. If to do so, there is the danger of missing the special significance of his theology and attributing to it ideas that are really alien to it. If the Person of the Incarnate is constituted by the Word, the description of Him as “one incarnate nature” connotes an organic unity, on the biological, physical and spiritual levels, constituted by the fusion of the divine and human in Him. He explains his position clearly in one important passage.
“The body is not of itself a nature, because it is neither vivifying in itself nor capable of being singled out from that which vivifies it. Nor is the Word, on the other hand, to be distinguished as a separate nature apart from His incarnate state, since it was in the flesh, and not apart from the flesh, that the Lord dwelt on earth.” [12]
This close connection of the flesh with the Godhead, their fusion “into a single life and hypostasis” (to quote one of his disciples, Timothy of Berytus), represents the distinctive core of the thought of Apollinarius. Certain important features of his Christology flow logically from it, and can only be appreciated in light of it.
1. First, as a result of its fusion with the Godhead, he regarded Christ’s flesh as being glorified. It has become “divine flesh”, or “the flesh of God”. Christ Himself can be properly described as “the heavenly man” because of the union in Him of flesh with heavenly spirit. Doctrines like these caused Apollinarius to be accused of teaching that the Lord’s flesh was heavenly in origin and pre-existent. His authentic doctrine, however, is the that the body was derived from the Blessed Virgin; if it is a divine body, that is because it has never existed apart from the Word. So he remarks,
“It is plain from all we have written that we do not say that the Savior’s flesh has come down from heaven, nor that His flesh is consubstamtial with God, inasmuch as it is flesh and not God; but it is God in so far as it is united with the Godhead so as to form one Person.” [13]
2. Secondly, as a corollary of this, he affirms that Christ’s flesh is a proper object of worship. The reason for this is, of course, that it cannot be seperated from the adorable Word, to Whom it belongs and Whose divine qualities it consequently shares.
3. Thirdly, like all Alexandrians thinkers, he accepts and exploits the communicato idiomatum, stating that
“the flesh of the Lord, while remaining flesh even in the union (its nature being neither changed nor lost) shares in the names and properties of the Word; and the Word, while remaining Word and God, in the incarnation shares the name and properties of the flesh.” [14]
But as employed by Apollinarius, this is not merely an external interchange of words and titles made possible by the fact that only one Person is subject. As the fact that worship may be offered to the flesh reveals, it involves a real exhange of attributes since both flesh and Word , while remaining distinct, are conceived of as being fused in “one nature”.
4. Lastly, inasmuch as the flesh actually participates in the properties of the Word, Apollinarius draws the inference that the divine nature is imparted to the faithful when they consume the Lord’s body at the eucharist. He remarks,
“The holy flesh is one nature (sumphues) with the Godhead, and infuses divinity into those who partake of it”; and as result, “we are saved by partaking of it as food.” [15]
In other words, the believer is deified by assimilating the deified flesh of the Redeemer, and so Appollinarius’ Christology is logically linked with his soteriology.
The brilliance and thoroughgoing logic of Apollinarius‘ Christology are undeniable. But certain features of it were bound to raise questions. At first there seems to have been a reluctance, partly in view of the respect and affection in which he was personally held, to raise a controversy. But in the early seventies of the fourth century, churchmen were becoming alive to the implications of his position, and in A.D. 377 the storm broke. In that year, a council held at Rome under Pope Damasus condemned him. Its sentence was confirmed by synods at Alexandria and Antioch in A.D. 378 and 379 respectively, and by the Council of Constantinople in A.D. 381. The Cappadocian fathers, led by Basil, had built the case against Apollinarianism, and by a series of decrees issued in A.D. 383, 384 and 388, Emperor Theodosius brought it under the censure of the State and outlawed its adherents.
1. The chief objection was that Apollinarianism, by the divinization of Christ’s flesh, which Apollinarius taught, was virtually docetic, implying that the Savior was not a real man but only “appeared as a man”. The libellous, but none the less effective, suggestion that He brought His flesh from heaven, as we have seen, a misrepresentation which is closely connected with this.
2. The second objection was that the underlying assumption of the whole theory was questioned. That is, was it necessarily the case that two complete entities, divinity and humanity, could not coalesce so as to form an unity? Or that the coexistence of two distinct volitional principles in one individual was inconceibable? Or that the presence of human free-will in the God-man must have resulted in His being sinful?
3. The third objection asked. if it is assumed that Christ lacked the most characteristic element in man’s makeup, a rational mind and will, His alleged manhood was not in the strict sense human, but must have been something monstrous; it would then be absurd to call Him a man at all, since He was not a man according to the accepted definition.
The fourth objection to Apollinarianism was that rejection of normal human psychology clashes with the Gospel record of a Savior Who developed, exhibited signs of ignorance, suffered and underwent all sorts of human experiences.
4. The last and most improtant objection and most frequently recurring objection to Aollinarianism was that for all its concern with salvation the Apollinarian Christology, in the opinion of its critics, failed to meet the essential conditions of redemption. It was man’s rational soul, with its power of choice, which was the seat of sin; if the Word did not unite such a soul with Himself, the salvation of mankind could not have been achieved. In the famous phrase of Gregory Nazianzen, “What has not been assumed cannot be restored; it is what is united with God that is saved.” It was Adam’s nous, he points out, which originally violated the commandment, so that it becane imperative that the Redeemer should possess one too. According to Gregory of Nyssa,
“By becoming exactly what we are, He united the human race through Himself to God.” [16]
And according to an unknown critic in C. Apollinarium, Christ used His incorruptible body to save men’s corruptible bodies, His immortal soul to save souls doomed to death. It was necessary for Him to have both, for
“it was impossible for Him to give one in exchange for the other; and so He gave His body for men’s bodies, and His soul for men’s souls.” [17]
As the new Adam enabling us to participate in His divinity, Christ necessarily possessed human nature in its completeness.
The opposition to Apollinarianism obliged churchmen to consider the Christological problem. As instructive examples, consider the two Cappadocians: Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa. Gregory of Nazianzus teaches that the Logos
“comes to His own image, and bears flesh for the sake of my flesh, and cojoins Himself with an intelligent soul for my soul’s sake, cleansing like by like, and at all points, sin excepted, become man.” [18]
Thus there are “two natures (duo phuseis) concurring in unity” in the God-man, and He is “twofold (diplous)”, “not two, but one from two”; and of course there are not “two Sons”. His two natures are distinguishable in thought, and can be referred to as “the one (allo)” and the “the other (allo)”, but there are not two Persons (allos kai allos); rather “they form a unity (hen) by their commingling, God having become man and man God.” So far from conceiving of this union as a moral one, or as a union of “grace” like that between God and His prophets and saints, Gregory states that the two natures “have been substantially (kat’ ousian) conjoined and knit together”. To explain this union he propounds the theory, reminiscent of Origen’s, that the Lord’s rational soul provides the meeting-place for them; because of His natural affinity to the soul, the Word can “mingle” with it. Notice his predilection for terms like “fusion” and “mixture” which later generations were to avoid as savoring Eutychianism. But his conception of union permitted him to exploit the communicatio idomatum to the full, and to speak, for example, of the birth of God from the Virgin and of “God crucified”, as well as to insist on the propriety of calling Mary “the mother of God (theotokos). But a marked weakness of his theory was its failure, despite its recognition of a human mind in Christ, to make adequate use of it in understanding such experiences as His growth in knowledge, His ignorance of the last day, His agony in Gethsemane and His cry of dereliction. The first he interpreted as the gradual disclosure of the omniscience of the Logos, while in explanation of the second he suggested either that Christ as man posed as being ignorant or, strictly speaking, the Son could be said to be ignorant since He derived His knowledge from the Father. The other experiences he explained away, clearly regarding the Logos and not the human mind as their subject.
The Savior’s human experience received a much more realistic treatment from Gregory of Nyssa, whose Christology owed much to both Origen and to the Antiochene school. In contrast to Nazianzen, who thought of divinity and humanity as substantially united in the God-man, Nyssa conceived of the God-head entering into and controlling the manhood, so that Jesus could be called “the God-receiving man (theodochos anthropos)”, “the man in whom He tabernacled”. According to his account, the Holy Spirit at the incarnation first prepared a body and soul as a special receptacle (oikeion skeuos) for the divinity, and the heavenly Son then “mingled Himself” with them, the divine nature thereby becoming “present in them both”. Thus “God came to be in human nature”, but the manner of the union is a mysterious and inexplicable as the union between body and soul in man. In this “mingling” (anakrases was his faviourite term) the flesh was passive, the Logos is active, element, and a transformation (compare metastoicheioun, metapepoiesthai) of the human nature into the divine was initiated. But in the historical Jesus, the characteristics of the two natures remainded distinguishable. Consequently, when Christ endured suffering or other human experiences, it was not His divinity which endured them, but “the man attached by the union to the divinity”; they belonged “to the human part of Christ”. The Godhead, being impassible, remained unaffected, although through its concrete oneness with the humanity it indirectly participated in its limitations and weaknesses. In the same way, Gregory could recognize in Christ a real human will, although the divine will always prevailed. Similarly, he took the meaning of Luke 2:52 to be that Christ’s soul, through its union with the divine Wisdom, itself gradually developed in wisdom and knowledge, in much the same way as His body grew as a result of the nourishment it consumed from day to day.
Gregory of Nyssa thus tended to hold the two natures apart, regarding the Logos as the active principle and the manhood as a passive one, and strongly emphasizing the independent character of the latter. Yet the union between them, effected at Christ’s conception, was, on his view, unbreakable, designed to last forever. The God-man was “one Person (hen prosopon)”; and because of the close conjunction and fusion (dia ten sunapheian te kai sumphuian) between the Lord and “the servant in whom the Lord is”, the attributes and experiences properly belonging to the one could correctly be ascribed to the other. Even so, when Gregory called the Virgin “Theotokos”, he seems to have been making a concession to popular usage, and the customary language of the communicatio idiomatum about God’s suffering, dying, etc., clearly did not come naturally to his lips. On the other hand, if he allows full play to the human nature during Christ’s earthly life, the situation changes with His resurrection and glorification. Then begins “the transformation of the lowly into the lofty”. The immaterial essence of the Logos “transelements” the material body born of the Virgin into the divine, immutable nature; the flesh which suffered becomes then, as a result of the union, identical with the nature which assumed it. Like a drop of vingear which falls into the sea and is wholly absorbed, the humanity loses all its proper qualities and is changed into divinity.
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