Apollinarianism
Despite the undivided church coming together at the Council of Nicaea to lay out the basics of its understanding of the Trinity in the year AD325, the heresy of Arianism continued to flourish. If you’ll recall, Arianism posits that Jesus was not eternally present with God the Father but was rather a created being. That is why the Nicaean Creed [1] states of Jesus;
the only-begotten Son of God,
Begotten of his Father before all worlds,
God of God, Light of Light,
Very God of very God,
Begotten, not made,
Being of one substance with the Father,
By whom all things were made;
Eager to counter Arianism and trying to maintain adherence to what was the received view of the church in the Creed, Apollinaris of Laodicea argued that Jesus had a human body (σάρξ, sarx “flesh,” or σῶμα, soma “body”), a human soul (ψυχή psyche), but that the human spirit (πνεῦμα, pneuma) had been replaced by the divine spirit (λόγος, logos). It should be noted that this concept of what makes a human, flesh, soul, and spirit, is taken from Plato. In the Church’s understanding, it has drawn more from Aristotle’s understanding of simply soul and body. As such, it is better to understand Apollinaris of arguing that Jesus did not possess a human soul.
But in his attempt to guard Jesus’s divinity from Arianism, he fell into the heresy of Apollinarianism (yes, that’s eight syllables!) and sacrificed the humanity of Christ. For as the early church fathers pointed out:
Scripture holds that the Logos assumed all that is human — therefore the pneuma also — sin alone excepted; that Jesus experienced joy and sadness, both being properties of the rational soul.
Christ without a rational soul is not a man; such an incongruous compound, as that imagined by Apollinaris, can neither be called God-man nor stand as the model of Christian life.
What Christ has not assumed He has not healed; thus the noblest portion of man is excluded from Redemption [2].
So in our discussion of heresies, we have been dancing around the elephant in the room (if I can be permitted to mix my metaphors) in that all these heresies attempt to understand who Jesus is, how can he be God and Man at the same time. The creeds attempt to lay the borders of what we know and where we should be wary of crossing, but the question remains, has the church ever attempted to answer the question that all these heresies are asking, or has it simply shrugged its shoulders and declared it a mystery and moved on?
The answer is that the church has made the attempt, but the answer will open up into even more mysterious vistas than you can possibly imagine. We’ll get our heads spun around together when we wrap up with our final installment of this series next time when we move away from heresies and look at the Hypostatic Union [3].
[1] Or “or the Creed commonly known as Nicene” as it reads in the BCP
[2] Sollier, J. (1907). Apollinarianism. In The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01615b.htm
[3] A good name for a band, by the way