Heresies:

APOLLINARIANISM

Apollinarianism was a heresy of the fourth century bearing the name of its originator, Apollinaris (or Apollinarius) the Younger. Apollinaris was born sometime between 300 and 315 and died shortly before 392. He apparently lived out his entire lifetime in Laodicea, which is southwest of Antioch. He was a man of such unusual ability and gracious saintliness that even his staunchest opponents paid tribute to his sterling character. As a young man he became a reader in the church of Laodicea under Bishop Theodotus and ca. 332 was briefly excommunicated for attending a pagan function. In 346 he was excommunicated a second time by the Arian Bishop George. However, the Nicene congregation of Laodicea selected him bishop sometime around 361.

Evidence would suggest that Apollinaris put more time into teaching and writing in nearby Antioch than in ecclesiastical administration. As a revered teacher he was the friend of Athanasius, consultant by correspondence to Basil the Great, and numbered among his pupils Jerome in 373 or 374.

Apollinarianism seemed to have emerged gradually as an independent strand of Christianity as its opponents succeeded in getting it condemned. A synod at Alexandria in 362 condemned the teaching but not the teacher. Basil the Great moved Pope Damasus I to censure it ca. 376, and in 377 Apollinaris and Apollinarianism both were condemned by a Roman synod. The general Council of Constantinople in 381 anathematized Apollinaris and his doctrine. Emperor Theodosius I then issued a series of decrees against Apollinarianism in 383, 384, and 388. But the elderly heretic apparently continued serenely writing and teaching in Antioch and laodicea, pursuing his scholar's passion for truth with a saint's serene confidence in his own rightness.

Apollinarianism had become a definite schism by 373, for when the Emperor Valens deported certain Egyptian bishops to Diocaesarea, Apollinaris approached them with greetings and an invitation to enter into communion. They in turn rejected his overtures. By 375 Vitalis, a disciple of Apollinaris, had founded a congregation in Antioch. Vitalis was consecrated bishop by Apolinaris, who also engineered his friend Timothy's election to the bishopric of Berytus. Apollinarians held at least one synod in 378, and there is evidence that there may have been a second Apollinarian synod subsequently. After Apollinaris's death his followers split into two parties, the Vitalians and the Polemeans or Sinusiati. By 420 the Vitalians had been reunited with the Greek Church. Somewhat later the Sinusiati merged into the monophysite schism.

Apollinarianism was the harbinger of the great Christological battles which pitted Antioch against Alexandria, with Rome as referee, and finally issued in Christendom's permanent monophysite schism after the Council of Chalcedon in 451.

Diodore of Tarsus, leader of the Antiochene school from ca. 378 to his death ca. 392, typified the Christology of that literalist school of Bible interpretation. To defend the immutability and eternity of the Logos he spoke of Christ as Son of God and Son of Mary by nature and grace respectively. Their union was a moral one. If this was not Christological dualism, it was perilously close.

In contrast the Alexandrian school approached Christology in a word-flesh manner. The Word or Logos assumed human flesh at the incarnation, and Alexandrians were apt to deny or ignore Christ's possession of a human soul or mind.

It was undoubtedly as a representative of Alexandrian thinking countering the trend in Antioch that Apollinaris began to teach and write Christology and to move toward his own extreme.

The central deviation of Apollinarianism from the later Chalcedonian orthodoxy began in a Platonic trichtomy. Man was seen to be body, sensitive soul, and rational soul. Apollinaris felt that if one failed to diminish the human nature of Jesus in some way, a dualism had to result. Furthermore, if one taught that Christ was a complete man, then Jesus had a human rational soul in which free will resided; and wherever there was free will, there was sin. Therefore it followed that the Logos assumed only a body and its closely connected sensitive soul. The Logos or Word himself took the place of the rational soul (or spirit or nous) in the manhood of Jesus. Thus one can speak of "the one sole nature incarnate of the Word of God." This doctrine was developed by Apollinaris in his Demonstration of the Divine Incarnation, which was written in 376 in response to the initial papal condemnation.

Apollinaris was a prolific writer, but following his anathematization in 381 his works were assiduously sought out and burned. Thus Apollinarianism leaves little literature except as cited in the works of its critics. The general principle on which Apollinarianism was condemned was the Eastern perception that "that which is not assumed is not healed." If the Logos did not assume the rational soul of the man Jesus, then the death of Christ could not heal or redeem the rational souls of men. And as the church wrestled with this perception it rejected Apollinarianism and moved toward the Chalcedonian Definition, which rebuked and corrected both Antioch and Alexandria in their extremes: "This selfsame one is perfect both in deity and also in humanness; this selfsame one is also actually God and actually man, with a rational soul and a body."

V L Walter
Elwell Evangelical Dictionary

Bibliography
C. E. Raven, Apollinarianism; G. L. Prestige, Fathers and Heretics; B. Altaner, Patrology; P. A. Norris, Manhood and Christ; J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines.

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Apollinarianism, Apollinarians, Apollinarists. [APOLLINARIS THE YOUNGER.]

Apollinaris, St. and Mart., first bp. or archbp. of Ravenna, perhaps from 50-78. According to the Life written by Agnellus in 9th cent. (Liber Pontificalis, ap. Muratori, Rer. It. Script. ii. part i.), St. Apollinaris was a native of Antioch, well instructed in Gk. and Lat. literature, who followed St. Peter to Rome, and was sent by him to Ravenna. On his way he healed the son of Irenaesus who was blind, and did other miracles. At Ravenna he baptized in the river Bidens, and raised the daughter of the patrician Rufus to life; imprisoned by the heathen near the capitol, he was there fed by angels. Afterwards, being expelled from the city, he preached in Dalmatia, Pannonia, Thrace, and Corinth. After three years he returned, suffered new persecutions, and did new miracles, destroying a statue and temple of Apollo by his prayers. He was martyred under Vespasian, after an episcopate of over 28 years.

Other lives, such as that in the Acta Sanctorum, are more full of miracles, but do not add anything else of importance. The day of his death is agreed upon as July 23; the year may have been 78. From a sermon of St. Peter Chrysologus in 5th cent. (No. 128, pp. 552 seq. ed. Migne), it appears that St. Apollinaris was the only bp. of Ravenna who suffered martyrdom, and that he, strictly speaking, can only be called a confessor. He did not die, it would seem, a violent death, though it may have been hastened by the persecutions he underwent. Probably, like his successor Aderitus, he died in the port town Classis, where he was buried. A new church, still existing, was built about the same time as that of St. Vitale, and into this his body was translated by St. Maximianus c. 552. The mosaic over the apse seems to realize the words of St. Peter Chrysologus (u.s.), "Ecce vivit, ecce ut bonus pastor suo medius assistit in grege." As early as 575 it was the custom to take solemn oaths upon his relics (St. Greg. Magn. Ep. vi. 61). His body was taken to Ravenna in 1515 for safety, but restored in 1655 (see authorities in Acta Sanctor. for July 23). This most interesting basilica, with the vacant monastery adjoining, is now the only remnant of the town of Classis.

[J.W.]

Apollinaris (or, according to Greek orthography, Apollinarius) the Elder, of Alexandria, was born about the beginning of the 4th cent. After teaching grammar for some time at Berytus in Phoenicea, he removed, A.D. 335, to Laodicea, of which church he was made presbyter. Here he married and had a son, afterwards the bp. of Laodicea. [APOLLINARIS THE YOUNGER.] Both father and son were on intimate terms with the heathen sophists Libanius and Epiphanius of Petra, frequenting the lecture-room of the latter, on which account they were admonished and, upon their venturing to sit out the recitation of a hymn to Bacchus, excommunicated by Theodotus, bp. of Laodicea, but restored upon their subsequent repentance (Socr. Eccl. Hist. iii. 16; Soz. vi. 25).

The elder Apollinaris is chiefly noted for his literary labours. When the edict of Julian, A.D. 362, forbade the Christians to read Greek literature, he undertook with the aid of his son to supply the void by reconstructing the Scriptures on the classical models. Thus the whole Biblical history down to Saul's accession was turned into 24 books of Homeric hexameters, each superscribed, like those of the Iliad, by a letter of the alphabet. Lyrics, tragedies, and comedies, after the manner of Pindar, Euripides, and Menander, followed. Even the Gospels and Epistles were adapted to the form of Socratic disputation. Two works alone remain as samples of their indomitable zeal: a tragedy entitled Christus Patiens, in 2601 lines, which has been edited among the works of Gregory Nazianzen; and a version of the Psalms, in Homeric hexameters. The most that can be said of this Psalter is that it is better than the tragedy, and that as a whole it fully bears out the reputation of the poet (Basil. Ep. 273, 406) that he was never at a loss for an expression. Socrates, who is more trustworthy than Sozomen (v. 18), ascribes the O.T. poems to the father (iii. 16), and adds that the son as the greater rhetorician devoted his energies to converting the Gospels and Epistles into Platonic dialogues. He likewise mentions a treatise on grammar compiled by the elder Apollinaris, cristianikw tupw. For different opinions as to the authorship of father and son, cf. Vossius, de Hist. Graec. ii. 18; de Poet. Graec. c. 9; Duport, Praef. ad Metaph. Psalm. (Lond. 1674).

The Metaphrasis Psalmorum was published at Paris 1552; by Sylburg, at Heidelberg, 1596; and subsequently in various collections of the Fathers. The latest edition is that in Migne's Patr. Gk. xxiii.

[E.M.Y.]

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