APOLLINARIS, bishop of Laodicea. — Son of the Alexandrian grammarian of the same name, he was born at Laodicea in Syria about 310. He was already ordained a reader when, around 330–35, he taught rhetoric in his native city. His solid studies and exceptional qualities soon made A. one of the most distinguished figures in the Eastern clergy. Both friends and enemies paid tribute to his vast knowledge of sacred and profane matters and to his piety. A man of letters, theologian, exegete, and polemicist, he was one of the leading ecclesiastical writers of his time. Before completing his career, he spent many years in the ranks of orthodoxy. A friend and host of St. Athanasius, he was his comrade in arms in defending the Nicene dogma, and this stance earned him the open hostility of the Arians and their bishop George of Laodicea. To evade the laws of Julian the Apostate, who prohibited Christians from teaching classical pagan works (362), he composed, together with his father, a series of works in the style of Homer, Euripides, and Menander. These were highly admired at the time, but judging from the sole surviving work, a Paraphrase of the Psalms in hexameters (PG 33, 1313–38; new ed. by A. Ludwick, Leipzig 1912), they must have had little personal inspiration and shone only for the skill of their correct versification.
While defending Christianity against Julian the Apostate with a book *On the Truth* and refuting Porphyry, A. also defended orthodoxy against the Manichees, Arians, Marcellus of Ancyra, Eunomius, and other heretics, commented on Scripture, and wrote other works of which only fragments remain today. Around 360–61, the party defending Nicaea elected him bishop of Laodicea in place of Pelagius, under circumstances and for reasons still not entirely clear. From that moment, his doctrinal position began to arouse suspicion, until in the following years he left the Church.
The stumbling block to his orthodoxy was the mystery of the union of the two natures, human and divine, in the person of Jesus Christ. A. was the first to apply the results of the Nicene dogma to Christology and to draw the Church’s attention—until then focused on the Trinitarian dogma—to this problem. In his zeal to safeguard the divinity of Jesus and, on the other hand, concerned that the personal unity might be compromised by the dualism of the Antiochene school of Diodorus of Tarsus—which, by insisting on the perfect humanity of the Savior, led to Nestorianism (v.) and, by indirect paths, to Arianism (v.)—A. fell into the opposite error of a partial denial of the humanity of Jesus. Starting from the Platonic principle that man is composed of body, sensitive soul (common to man and animals), and rational soul (proper only to man), and appealing to the scriptural principle that “the Word became flesh,” that “God was manifested in the flesh,” etc., he ended by recognizing in the Savior only a body and a sensitive soul, but not a rational soul, since the Word would have taken its place.
Lacking an exact notion of the idea of “person,” the Catholic thesis of an intimate union of the entire human nature with the divine nature in the same person seemed to him an absurdity. In this way, however, he believed he had secured the organic unity of the two elements, humanity and divinity, in Jesus; but he secured it at the expense of the most important constituent of man: the rational part. From this principle it followed that: 1) the Word did not become man but was incarnate in the primary sense of the word; 2) man is saved by the flesh of Jesus united to the Word, but without his merit (since it was neither free nor capable of virtue); it is then incomprehensible how the rational soul, which is the most important part of man, can be saved if it is not assumed by the Word, since even A. admitted that only what is assumed is redeemed; 3) Monophysitism is the consequence, even if unintended, of the entire system: the expression “one nature of the incarnate Word of God,” later adopted by Cyril of Alexandria (who attributed it to St. Athanasius) and becoming the watchword of the Monophysites, is A.’s creation, because the humanity that, according to him, unites with the Word is not a human nature, being deprived of what is characteristic of man (rationality); therefore one can speak only of one nature of the Word that was formerly without flesh and then took on flesh. From this comes the comparison familiar to A. that the Word unites with flesh as the soul unites with the body, because clearly from the union of soul with body there can result only one nature; 4) from this A. deduced a single will and a single principle of operation in Jesus, which later became the doctrine of Monothelitism. Many other errors were attributed to him without solid foundation, except perhaps Millenarianism.
The Church reacted against this mutilated conception of the Savior’s humanity, which limited the redemption of man, and immediately affirmed that the Incarnation was a complete assumption of human nature except sin. To redeem man completely, Jesus had to be a perfect man, for “what was not assumed was not healed.”
Although the Council of Alexandria had in 362 condemned the Apollinarian thesis (without naming the author, who was still considered orthodox), A.’s position became difficult only later, when the controversy took on wider proportions (370). By then suspected for his ideas, he was definitively compromised during the schism of Antioch (375) by his disciple Vitalis. The latter had formed an Apollinarian party, to which St. Basil drew Rome’s attention. At first Vitalis managed to deceive St. Damasus, but when better informed, the pope imposed formal condemnation of Apollinarianism on the Antiochene priest. Vitalis refused and formed the schismatic community of Antioch, to which A. joined him by quickly ordaining him. Meanwhile, A. was defining his ideas in a major work, *Proof of the Divine Incarnation* (376), while the propaganda of the heresy, until then conducted in secret, was stepped up. A man from Beirut pursued as bishop another of his followers named Timothy and intervened with the Egyptian bishops exiled by Valens at Diocesarea to win them over to his cause.
In the Roman Synod of 377, Damasus condemned the heresy, and A. along with the bishops who were his partisans was deposed. The Roman sentence was also promulgated in the councils of Alexandria (378), Antioch (379), and Constantinople (381). Soon after, Theodosius, with a series of decrees in 383, 384, and 388, outlawed the Apollinarians, forbade their assemblies, and deposed their bishops with the prohibition of ordaining others. After A.’s death, which occurred in advanced old age about 390, his disciples split into two currents: one of the intransigents called the *Synusiasts*, precursors of Monophysitism, and the other moderate, led by Valentine, which was later reabsorbed into the Church.