Apollinarianism

Apollinarianism is the teaching, named for the fourth-century bishop Apollinaris of Laodicea, that Jesus Christ had a true human body and animal soul but not a complete human mind, or rational spirit: in place of it, the divine Logos (the eternal Son, prior to his incarnation) itself supplied Christ’s intelligence.¹ It is a heresy that concedes Christ a real body while still denying him a complete human nature.

Historical Origin

Apollinarianism arose after the church had already rejected the earlier Gnostic denial that Christ had any real human nature at all. Having settled that Christ possessed a genuine body, “the next attempt was directed against the integrity of that nature”: conceding Christ a real body and animal soul, but not a complete, rational human mind.¹ Apollinaris, “a distinguished bishop of Laodicea,” taught from around the mid-fourth century and was, in Hodge’s words, of “general repute for orthodoxy and learning” before this teaching was judged an error.¹ ² The doctrine was condemned at the Council of Constantinople in AD 381, the same council that produced the Nicene-Constantinopolitan creed, and Hodge notes it “soon disappeared.”³

Core Tenets

Apollinaris adopted the Platonic division of human nature into three distinct principles: σῶμα (body), ψυχή (animal or vital soul), and πνεῦμα (rational spirit, or mind). He held that Christ possessed a true σῶμα and ψυχή, “but not a rational spirit, or mind… In Him the eternal Son, or Logos, supplied the place of the human intelligence.”¹

Apollinaris was answering a real difficulty: how can two complete natures, each with its own intelligence and will, be united in one life and one consciousness without producing two persons rather than one? He also reasoned from an assumption common among the Alexandrian, Platonizing fathers of his day, that human reason is itself a “part” of the divine Logos or universal reason; on that assumption, Christ possessing both a human “part” of the Logos and the entire Logos at the same time seemed superfluous, even incoherent.¹ By way of analogy, Apollinaris pointed to an ordinary man’s ψυχή and πνεῦμα: two distinct principles, yet united in one consciousness. He argued the divine Logos and Christ’s human σῶμα and ψυχή could unite the same way.¹

Confessional and Biblical Response

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession does not name Apollinarianism, but its statement of Christ’s person rules the teaching out directly: Christ’s “two whole, perfect, and distinct natures were inseparably joined together in one person, without conversion, composition, or confusion.”⁴ A human nature that is “whole” and “perfect” cannot be missing its rational element.

Hodge draws Scripture’s own case for Christ’s human mind together under the heading “Christ had a Rational Soul”: “He thought, reasoned, and felt; was joyful and sorrowful; He increased in wisdom; He was ignorant of the time when the day of judgment should come. He must, therefore, have had a finite human intelligence.”⁵ Jesus grew “in wisdom and in stature” (Luke 2:52); of the day of his return he said “concerning that day and hour, no one knows… nor the Son, but only the Father” (Mark 13:32); at Gethsemane he said, “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death” (Matt. 26:38).

Bavinck ties the stakes of the error to this same evidence: Apollinaris, along with the Arians and the later Monophysites, “could not accept the presence of such human knowledge in Christ,” which is why some of the fathers who opposed him were tempted to overcorrect in the other direction, treating Christ’s human knowledge as complete and unchanging from the first moment of the incarnation, rather than genuinely increasing as Luke 2:52 and similar texts describe.⁶

Modern Forms

Hodge traces a nineteenth-century kenotic Christology (associated with Thomasius, Gess, Dorner, and Ebrard) that held the divine Logos, having “emptied” itself of attributes like omniscience and omnipresence, itself became, or directly served as, Christ’s human soul, so that no separately created human soul was needed. Its proponents denied being either Apollinarian or Eutychian, but Hodge’s own verdict was that “it agrees… with the Apollinarians in saying that the Logos was the rational element in Christ,” reviving under a new name what the church had already ruled out in settling the hypostatic union.⁷

Related Doctrines

References

Charles Hodge, “Chapter III. Person of Christ,” in Systematic Theology, Volume II (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 398. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶
Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 23, “Person of Christ,” 386-387. ↩
Hodge, 399. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 8, “Of Christ the Mediator,” para. 2. ↩
Hodge, 379-380. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 14, “The Only Begotten Son of the Father.” ↩
Hodge, 436-437. ↩