§ 136. THE APOLLINAKIAN HERESl. 711
Epiphanius expresses liimself concerning the beginning of the controversy in these unusually lenient and respectful terms ■ " Some of our brethren, who are in high position, and who are held in great esteem with us and all the orthodox, have thought that the spirit (6 vov<;) should be excluded from the manifestation of Christ in the flesh, and have preferred to hold that out Lord Christ assumed flesh and soul, but not our spirit, and therefore not a perfect man. The aged and venerable Apolli naris of Laodicea, dear even to the blessed father Athanasius, and in fact to all the orthodox, has been the first to frame and pronmlgate this doctrine. At first, when some of his disciples communicated it to us, we were unwilling to believe that such a man would put this doctrine in circulation. We supposed that the disciples had not understood the deep thoughts of so learned and so discerning a man, and had themselves fabricated things which he did not teach," &c.
So early as 362, a council at Alexandria rejected this doctrine (though without naming tlu; author), and asserted that Christ possessed a reasonable soul. But Apollinaris did not secede from the communion of the Church, and begin to form a sect of his own, till 375. He died in 390. His writings, except numerous fragments in the M'orks of his opponents, are lost.
Apollinaris, therefore, taught the deity of Christ, but denied the completeness {reXetoTr]^) of his humanity, and, taking his departure from the Nicene postulate of the homoousicn^ ran into the Arian heresy, which likewise put the divine Logos in the place of the human spirit in Christ, bat which asserted besides this the changeableness {rperrroTri';) of Christ ; while Apollinaris, on the contrary, aimed to establish more firmly the unchangeableness of Christ, to beat the Arians with their own weapons, and provide a better vindication of the Nicene dogma. He held the union of full divinity with full humanity m one person, therefore, of two wholes in one whole, to be impossible.' He supposed the unity of the person of Christ, and
spring in distinction from winter and summer. Christ, says he, is ovts ivStponrot i^\os, ovre 3ei)?, aWa i&eoi"; Ka\ ai'S/puirov mi|is.
' The result of this construction he called avbpanrS^eos, a sort of monstrosity
712 TnmD period, a.d. 311-590.
at the same time his sinlessness, could be saved only by the excision of the human spirit ; since sin has its seat, not in the will-less soul, nor in the body, but in the intelligent, free, and therefore changeable will or spirit of man. He also charged the Church doctrine of the full humanity of Clirist with limiting the atoning suffering of Christ to the liumau nature, and BO detracting from the atoning virtue of the work of Christ ; for the death of a man could not destroy death. The divine nature must ^participate in the suffering throughout. His opponents, for this reason, charged him with making deity suiter and die. He made, however, a distinction between two sides of the Logos, the one allied to man and capable of suffering, and the other allied to God and exalted above all sufferins:. The relation of the divine ])neumatic nature i^a Christ to the human psychical and bodily nature Apollinaris illustrated by the mingling of wine and water, the glowing lire in the iron, and the union of soul and body in man, which, though distinct, interpenetrate and form one thing.
His doctrine, however, in particulars, is variouslj'^ represented, and there arose among his disci|)les a complex mass of opinions, some of them differing strongly from one another. According to one statement Apollinaris asserted that Christ brought even his human nature from heaven, and was from eternity evaapKo<i ; accordmg to another this was merely an opinion of his disciples, or an unwarranted inference of opponents from his assertion of an eternal determination to incarnation, and from his strong emphasizing of the union of the Logos with the flesh of Christ, which allowed that even the flesh might be worshipped without idolatry,'
which he put in the same category with the mythological figures of the minotaur, the well-known Cretan monster with human body and bull's head, or the body of a bull and the head of a man. But the Apollinarian idea of the union of the Logos with a truncated human nature might be itself more justly compared with this (Bonster.
' Dorner, who has treated th!3 section of the history of Christology, as well as others, with great thoroughness, says, i. 977: "That the school of Apollinaris did not remain in all points consistent with itself, nor true to its founder, is certain ; but It is less certain whether Apollinaris himself always taught the same thing." Theodoret charges him with a change of opinion, which Dorner attributes to different ■tages of the development of bis system.