Adozianism

ADOZIANISMO. —

I. GENERAL NOTION

The term “a.” is nevertheless used chiefly to designate Spanish a. (verbal), and only since the publication of A. Harnack’s History of Dogma (Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, I, Freiburg im Breisgau 1886) has it become customary to call the early heretics mentioned above adoptionists, instead of making them a special category of monarchians: the dynamic monarchians (v. MONARCHIANISMO). Between the early a. and Spanish a. there is also the Nestorian a. of Diodoro of Tarsus, Teodoro of Mopsuestia, and Nestorio. For this a., which, while having many points in common with the two typical forms of a., represents an original form, see the entries DIODORO DI TARSO; NESTORIO and NESTORIANISMO; TEODORO DI MOPSUESTIA.

A. considered in itself is a Christological error and concerns the problem of the union of the divinity and humanity of Jesus Christ. Real a. is the rationalist solution to the problem.
II. THE PRIMITIVE A. AND ITS PRINCIPAL REPRESENTATIVES. — Already at the end of the 1st century, Cerinthus (v.) denied the divinity of Jesus and his virginal conception, and saw in him nothing more than a man, superior to others in justice and wisdom. In his system, Christ is distinct from Jesus. Somewhat later, the Judaeo-Christians of Syria, distinguished by the name of Ebionites (v.), or Ebionians, spoke of Jesus as Cerinthus did. Nevertheless, as Eusebius of Caesarea testifies (Hist. eccl., III, 27, 2), some of them admitted his miraculous birth. At the end of the 2nd century, the rationalist adoptionists properly so called appeared, with Theodotus of Byzantium, called the Cobbler, and his namesake Theodotus the Banker. Traces of A. are indeed found in the Shepherd of Hermas; but if Hermas speaks incorrectly about the person of Jesus and his relations with God, this is not at all due to a rationalist tendency, but simply to ignorance.

Theodotus the Cobbler, originally from Byzantium, a wealthy and learned man, had apostatized during a persecution. To conceal his fault, he took refuge in Rome under Pope Victor (193–203). According to a somewhat unreliable anecdote reported by St. Hippolytus, when a fellow countryman reproached him for his apostasy, he is said to have replied: « I have not denied God, but a man ». What is certain is that Theodotus denied the divinity of Jesus Christ and, although he admitted his miraculous birth from a virgin, saw in him nothing more than a man of superior holiness, to whom God had entrusted the mission of saving mankind. At his baptism on the

banks of the Jordan, Christ — in other words, the Holy Spirit — had descended upon him in the form of a dove and had communicated to him the power to perform miracles. But he had not thereby become God.

Theodotus and his followers sought to prove their doctrine from Sacred Scripture: they were men of letters and scholars, who argued according to the rules of Aristotle. Excommunicated by Pope Victor, Theodotus organized a small schismatic community in Rome, more like a school than a Church. Among the disciples of Theodotus the Byzantine, St. Hippolytus, who had combated the sect in many of his works, mentioned another Theodotus, a banker by profession, a certain Asclepiodotus, and a Roman confessor named Natalis, who agreed, in return for a stipend, to serve as bishop of the sect. But, following terrifying visions, he did not persevere in error and went to ask Pope Zephyrinus for forgiveness. Theodotus the Banker added to his master’s doctrine bizarre speculations about Melchizedek, whom he declared superior to Jesus and whom he seemed to confuse with the Holy Spirit, calling him the great power (Δύναμιν τινε μεγίστην), the heavenly virtue of the principal grace, mediator between God and the angels and also men, spiritual and son of God (ενεμιστικὸς καὶ υἱὸς Θεοῦ).

The last distinguished Theodotian in the West was Artemon or Artemas, a contemporary of St. Hippolytus (d. in 235), whom he probably outlived. His relations with the sect are obscure, if they are judged from the anonymous treatise directed against him, which Eusebius quotes at length (Hist. eccl., V, 28, 3), which Theodoret (Haer. fab., III, 4, 5) calls the Little Labyrinth, and which various authors attribute to St. Hippolytus (cf. Adhémar d’Alès, La théologie de saint Hippolyte, Paris 1906, pp. XXXII–IV). According to this treatise, Artemon claimed that his doctrine had been that of the Roman Church before Zephyrinus (202–18). Was he unaware of Pope Victor’s condemnation of Theodotus, or did he formulate his doctrine independently, without any particular connection with the Theodotians? What is known is that the Council of Antioch of 268, which condemned Paul of Samosata, regarded Artemon as Paul’s precursor and the father of his heresy, which consisted essentially in the denial of the divinity of Jesus Christ. Paul of Samosata, in fact, was the archetype of the rationalist adoptionist, who lowers Christian dogma to the level of pure reason and interprets the data of Revelation accordingly.

First stirred up by Elipando around 782, this heresy was embraced and developed by Felice, who became the sect’s true theologian. Both of them intended to remain within orthodoxy and not only fully admitted the dogma of the Trinity—which distinguished them from primitive a.—but also rejected the Nestorian heresy and proclaimed that the Word had united himself hypostatically to human nature, remaining one person.

In reality, and almost against their will, they taught Nestorian hypostatic dualism by the way in which they expressed themselves. By admitting two filiations in Jesus, they were led to distinguish in him the Son of God by nature, who was the Word, and the son by adoption through grace, who was the man Jesus. Like the Nestorians, they indeed affirmed that there was only one Son of God, but, with their terminology, they declared equivalently that there were two. One almost seems to hear Theodore of Mopsuestia, the father of Nestorianism, when reading Elipando’s profession of faith: « Quia non per illum qui natus est de Virgine visibilia [Deus] condidit, sed per illum qui non est adoptione sed genere, neque gratia sed natura » (in PL. 16, 917). Felice likewise writes: « Qui susceptus est cum eo qui suscepit conuncupatur Deus - impassibilia in suo, passibilia in alieno » (a passage reported by Alcuino, in Adverius Felices, VII; VIII, 3; V, 2).

The adoptionists, like the Nestorians, forgot that the idea of filiation and of son is inseparably linked to the idea of person and not to that of nature and, by failing to distinguish clearly between the notions of nature and person, formed a heretical conception of the hypostatic union, which, against their will, became apparent in the way they spoke of the two natures. The Church therefore rightly condemned them as heretics, notwithstanding what certain Protestant historians of dogma, such as Walch and Baur, and the Jesuit theologian Gabriele Vázquez, have said.

The history of the adoptionist controversy is highly complicated. Much has been debated regarding its origins. It may be supposed that Nestorian books entered Spain translated into Arabic; in any case, the first germs of the error can be discerned in a letter written before 782 by Elipando to the bishop Migezio, an unknown man who seemed steeped in Sabellianism. In the following years, the theory of the two filiations spread both in the part of Spain subject to the Moors and in that subject to Charlemagne, where Felice of Urgel, questioned by Elipando around 790–91, became its defender. As early as 783, Pope Adrian I had sent the Spanish bishops a doctrinal letter to refute it (PL. 138, 373-486). Having learned of the new heresy, Charlemagne resolved to eradicate it from his States, and as early as 792 had a council convened at Ratisbon, where Felice had to appear as the accused. After making his recantation, he went to Rome, and renewed it there. He was not sincere, however, for, on returning to Spain, he left his diocese and went to Saracen territory, probably Toledo, where, in agreement with Elipando and other bishops who were his partisans, he organized the struggle against orthodoxy. One letter was addressed to the bishops of Gaul and another to Charlemagne. The latter informed the Pope and convened a great council at Frankfurt, where Adrian I was represented by several legates. The Italian bishops refuted a. by appealing to Sacred Scripture, while the bishops of Gaul, Aquitaine, and Germany presented the proof from tradition in separate writings. Adrian I’s letter to Charlemagne was then added; in the form of an exhortation, it masterfully summarized the two writings of the council’s members (794).

All these documents were sent to the Spaniards, who nevertheless still did not yield. Felice of Urgel continued to polemicize with Alcuino until a Roman Council in 799 excommunicated him. Paolino, patriarch of Aquileia, did likewise at the Synod he held in Friuli (796) and wrote three books against him. The heresiarch finally yielded to the appeals of Charlemagne’s envoys and, appearing before the Synod convened at Aachen in the autumn of 799, made his third abjuration, after which he was no longer permitted to return to his diocese. He withdrew to Lyon under the supervision of Leidrado, bishop of the city, and died there in 818, after addressing the priests of Urgel and his former partisans with a profession of faith in which he repudiated his former conduct. A writing found among his papers after his death would, however, cast doubt on the sincerity of his recantation. As for Elipando, he appears to have persevered in his ideas until his death, which occurred in 809.

The heresy did not long survive the Council of Aachen, at least in the Spanish March, which formed part of the Frankish Empire. In 800 Alcuino wrote to Arno of Salzburg that 20,000 clerics and laypeople had been restored to orthodoxy by the delegation Charlemagne had sent to that region (in PL. 100, 329). Some adoptionists are nevertheless found in Saracen Spain even around the middle of the ninth century.

A. is an error destined to reappear periodically. Abelard and his school revived it in the thirteenth century in a new form; in the fourteenth, certain subtle theologians wished to make Jesus Christ, considered as man, the adopted son of the Most Holy Trinity, and certain modern theologians sometimes speak of Jesus Christ as though he possessed a human personality.

Martino Jugie