Apollinaris, Bishop of Laodicea

APOLLINARIS, Bishop of Laodicea. - Son of the Alexandrian grammarian of the same name, he was born at Laodicea in Syria around 310. He was already ordained a lector when, around 330-35, he was teaching rhetoric in his native city. Solid studies and exceptional qualities soon made A. one of the most distinguished personalities of the Eastern clergy. Friends and enemies alike paid tribute to his vast knowledge in sacred and profane matters and to his piety. A man of letters, theologian, exegete and polemicist, he was one of the principal ecclesiastical writers of his time. Before becoming a heresiarch, he served for many years in the ranks of orthodoxy. A friend and guest of St. Athanasius, he was his comrade-in-arms in the defense of the Nicene dogma, and this stance earned him the open hostility of the Arians and of their bishop George of Laodicea. To evade the laws of Julian the Apostate, which forbade Christians to teach the pagan classics (362), he composed together with his father a series of works modeled on Homer, Euripides, Menander. They were much admired at the time, but judging by the only one that survives, 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 qualities of a correct versification. While he took his stand, in order to defend Christianity against Julian the Apostate, with a book On Truth and refuted Porphyry, A. defended orthodoxy against the Manicheans, the Arians, Marcellus of Ancyra, Eunomius and other heretics, commented on the Bible and wrote other works of which only fragments remain today. Around 360-61 the party of the defenders of Nicaea elected him bishop of Laodicea against Pelagius, in circumstances and for reasons that are still not entirely clear. From that moment A.'s 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 turned to the Trinitarian dogma, to this problem. In his zeal to save the divinity of Jesus and, on the other hand, worried about seeing his personal unity compromised by the dualism of the Antiochene school of Diodore of Tarsus - which, by insisting on the human perfection of the Savior, led to Nestorianism (v.) and by roundabout ways 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, of sensitive soul (common to man and animals) and of rational soul (proper to man alone), and appealing to the scriptural principle that "the Word was made flesh," that "God was manifested in the flesh," etc., he ended by acknowledging in the Savior a body and a sensitive soul, but not the rational soul, because 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 whole human nature with the divine nature in the same person was for him an absurdity. In this way, however, he believed the organic unity of the two elements, humanity and divinity, in Jesus to be assured; but he saved it at the expense of the most important constituent of man: the rational part. Once this principle was posited, 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 own merit (since it is neither free nor capable of virtue); nor is it then comprehensible 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 whole system: the expression one nature of God the Word incarnate, later adopted by Cyril of Alexandria (who attributed it to St. Athanasius) and which became the watchword of the Monophysites, is A.'s creation, because the humanity that according to him is united to 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 which previously was without flesh and then took flesh. Hence the comparison familiar to A. that the Word is united to the flesh as the soul to the body, because evidently from the union of the soul with the body only one nature can result; 4) from this A. deduced a single will and a single principle of operation in Jesus, which was later the doctrine of Monophysitism. Many other errors were attributed to him, without serious foundation, except perhaps millenarianism.

The Church reacted against this mutilated conception of the Savior's humanity, which limited man's redemption, and immediately affirmed that the Incarnation was a complete assumption of human nature except for sin. In order to redeem completely, Jesus had to be a perfect man because "what was not assumed was not healed."

Although the Council of Alexandria had in 362 condemned the Apollinarian thesis (without naming the author, who still passed for orthodox), A.'s position became difficult only later, when the controversy took on wide proportions (370). Now 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. Vitalis at first succeeded in deceiving St. Damasus, who, better informed, imposed on the priest of Antioch the formal condemnation of Apollinarianism. He refused and formed the schismatic community of Antioch, over which A. placed him by ordaining him bishop. A. in the meantime defined his ideas in a great work, Demonstration of the Divine Incarnation (376), while the propaganda of the heresy, until then conducted in secret, was stepped up. At Berytus he installed as bishop another of his adherents named Timothy, and intervened with the Egyptian bishops exiled by Valens at Diocaesarea to win them over to his cause.

At the Roman Synod of 377 Damasus condemned the heresy, and A. together with the bishops, his partisans, was deposed. The Roman sentence was also promulgated in the Councils of Alexandria (378), of Antioch (379), and of Constantinople (381). Shortly afterward Theodosius, with a series of decrees of 383, 384, 388, put the Apollinarians outside the law, forbade their assemblies and deposed the bishops with the prohibition of ordaining others. After the death of A., who died at an advanced age around 390, his disciples split into two currents: one of the intransigents called synusiasts, precursors of Monophysitism, the other moderate led by Valentinus and later reabsorbed by the Church.

To preserve the works of A., his disciples resorted to the tactic of transcribing a certain number of them under the name of orthodox writers, such as St. Athanasius, St. Gregory Thaumaturgus, and Pope St. Julius. But even so they have for the most part been lost, and only fragments remain in the works of St. Gregory of Nyssa, Theodoret, Leontius of Byzantium, and in the "catenae." Of the numerous exegetical writings, in which A. followed the school of Antioch because of his devotion to the literal sense, fragments remain in the "catenae." The apologetic works against Porphyry, Julian the Apostate, the Arians and Marcellus of Ancyra have completely disappeared. His principal work on Christology, however, Demonstratio divinae incarnationis secundum similitudinem hominis, can to a great extent be reconstructed with the Antirheticus adversus Apollinarem of St. Gregory of Nyssa (PG 45, 1123-1270). Following recent studies and research, criticism attributes to A.: 1) a writing on the true faith, inserted among the works of St. Gregory Thaumaturgus (PG 10, 1103-1124); 2) three writings among the works of St. Athanasius: Quod Christus unus sit; De incarnatione Dei Verbi; a profession of faith to the emperor Jovian; 3) the following, hitherto attributed to Pope Julius I: De unione corporis et divinitatis in Christo; De fide et Incarnatione; a letter to the priest Dionysius.

Mario Scaduto

APOLLINARE, PONTIFICAL ROMAN SEMINARY FOR LEGAL STUDIES: V. ISTITUTI ECCLESIASTICI.