"We believe ... in one Lord ... Who was made flesh but not man.So far there is nothing unusual about their position, which reproduced that outlined by Malchion at Antioch in A.D. 268, especially in its insistence on the metaphysical unity formed by the Word and the flesh. What apparently shocked the earlier critics of the Arians was not so much their Word-flesh Christology as the fact that they exploited it in the interests of their general theology. Thus it was to the Logos that they referred the difficult passages
For He did not take a human soul, but became flesh
so that God might have dealings with us men through flesh as through a veil.
[He was] not two natures [ou duo phuseis],
for He was not complete man, but God in place of a soul in flesh.
The whole is one nature resulting from composition
[mia ... kata sunthesin phusis]." [1]
"Why are they so set on demonstrating that Christ took a body without a soul,Hence, we find Eustathius insisting not only that Christ had a rational soul or mind as well as a body, but that this was the subject of His sufferings. In this state of mind, Eustathius rejected the communicatio idiomatum, declaring it misleading to say that God was led like a lamb to the slaughter or that the Word died on the cross.
grossly deceiving their followers?
In order that, if only they can induce some to believe this false theory,
they may then attribute the changes due to the passions to the divine Spirit,
and thus easily persuade them that what is so changeable
could not have been begotten from the unchanging nature
[i.e., from the Father]". [2]
The Christology implied in Eustathius' developed doctrine was clearly of the Word-man type. In expounding it, Eustathius was led to distinguish a duality of natures in the God-man, and this has often been pointed to as anticipation of Nestorianism. Thus he speaks of "the man" and "the God", writing in Antiochene vein,
"The sentence, 'I have not yet ascended to my Father',Theories of this type are always faced with the problem of explaining how the Word and "the man" formed a real unity, and Eustathius' was no exception. His most frequent suggestion was that the Word "dwelt in" the humanity, which served as His temple, His house, His tent. This indwelling was analogous to the Word's indwelling in prophets and inspired men, but differed, it would seem, in being continuous. The meeting-point was the Lord's human soul, which according to Eustathius "cohabits with [sundiaitomene] God the Word", so that the Incarnate can be described as "a God-bearing man [anthropos theophoros]". Language like this lent itself to misinterpretation, but it is clear that, although he could give no satisfactory account of it, Eustathius was deeply concerned for the unity.
was not uttered by the Logos,
the God Who comes down from heaven and abides in the Father's bosom,
nor by the Wisdom which embraces all created things.
It was spoken by the man made up of diverse limbs,
Who had risen from the dead but had not yet ascended after His death to the Father." [3]
Athanasius had begun the counter-attack against Arius in a famous book On the Incarnation, which is still in print. This treatise is really the second part of a longer work which deals with the fall of man and his need for a saviour. Arius is nowhere mentioned in the book, and the whole book is cast as evangelistic tract designed to win over pagans. But although he does not say so explicitly, it is clear that Athanasius was trying to present orthododox Christianity in a way which would make it a convincing altenative to the subtle Arian heresy which was threatening the Church. Instead of arguing against the proof-texts of Arius, Athanasius sought to show that the logic of the Scriptures as a whole made the incarnation of the Word of God inevitable. God did not become man because some philosopher thought it would be a good idea, but because God created man in His own image. It was because man was uniquely related to God that only God could make good the result of Adam's disobedience and restore the human race to fellowship with Himself.
Athanasius' starting-point is John 1:14, which he interpreted as meaning that
"the Logos has become man, and has not just entered into a man".
[C. Ar. 3, 30].
With his strongly soteriological emphasis, Athanasius claims that only God
can save the fallen race, and for him the Word is of course fully divine.
He says,
"We ourselves were the motive of His incarnation;The incarnation, it should be noted, did not seem to Athanasius to have altered His transcendent status in any way, for
it was for our salvation that He loved man to the point
of being born and of appearing in a human body."
[De incarn., 4] [4]
"He became flesh, not that He has been changed into flesh,
but that He has taken living flesh on our behalf and has become man". [5]
Therefore Athanasius has no use for Christologies of the Word-man type. He asks: how can they be called Christians who say the Word entered into a holy man, just as He entered into the prophets, and not that He became man, taking His body from Mary, and who dare to assert that Christ is "one" and the divine Logos "another"? The Stoics had conceived of the Logos as the soul of the universe, and Athanasius borrows this idea, with the difference that for him the Logos is of course personal. On his view, the Logos is the animating, governing principle of the cosmos, and the rational soul of man, which fulfills an identical role in relation to its body, is a close copy of Him, in fact a Logos in miniature. Christ's human nature was, as it were, a part of the vast body of the cosmos, and there was no incongruity in the Logos, Who animates the whole, animating this special portion of it. The paradox was rather that, while present in the body of the Incarnate, animating and moving it, He was simultaneously present everywhere else in the universe, vivifying and directing it with His life-giving power [De incarn. 17].
From this account, it follows that the Word for Athanasius was the governing principle, or hegemon, in Jesus Christ, the subject of all the sayings, experiences and actions attributed to the Gospel Figure [C. Ar. 3,35]. It was, for example, one and the same Word Who performed the miracles and Who wept and was hungry, prayed in Gethsemane and uttered the cry from the cross, and admitted ignorance of the date of the last day [C. Ar. 3, 43; 3, 54]. Experiences like these might be thought hard to reconcile with His deity and impassibility, and indeed the Arians argued that they were. But Athanasius draws a careful distinction between what belonged to the Word in His eternal being and what belonged to Him as incarnate. Athanasius reminds us [C. Ar. 3, 34] that the Apostle Peter himself (compare I Pet. 4:1) made the point that Christ "suffered for us in the flesh", the hint being that it is to His fleshly nature that we should attribute these human weaknesses and sufferings. Athanasius explains,
"These things were not proper to the nature of the Word as Word,His treatment of the Lord's emotional experiences and apparent mental limitations (for example, His distress of spirit, His prayer for the removal of the cup, His cry of abandonment, His confessions of ignorance) is in line with this principle. As far as possible, for example, Athanasius gives [C. Ar. 3, 54-58] a purely physical explanation of His distress, fear, etc.; these traits were sufferings of the flesh [pathemata tes sarkon]. If Scripture says that Jesus advanced in wisdom and grace, its real meaning [C. Ar. 3, 51-53] is that there was a parallel and progressive development of His body and disclosure of His deity. When He is reported to have professed ignorance, it was a case of feigned, not genuine, ignorance. Being Word, He knew all things; but since He had become flesh, and flesh is naturally ignorant, it was fitting that He should make a show of ignorance. [C. Ar. 3, 42-46]
but the Word ... was subject of the flesh which suffered them."
[C. Ar. 3, 55] [6]
Athanasius sums up his position by saying [C. Ar. 3. 35]
that we are correct in our theology if, while distinguishing two sets of
actions which Christ performs as God and as God-made-man respectively,
we also perceive that both sets issue from one and same Person
[amphotera ex henos prattomena]. This brings us face to face with
the central problem of his Christology, namely, whether Athanasius envisaged
Christ's humanity as including a human rational soul, or whether he regarded
the Logos as taking the place of one. His anthropology, it should
be pointed out, which was thoroughly Platonic and treated the
soul as having no necessary connection with the body, was perfectly
consistent with the latter hypothesis. And indeed the alternative
view, natural enough while the two pseudonymous treatises
C. Apollinarium were assumed to come from his pen,
is exposed to serious objections, at any rate so far as his attitude down
to A.D. 362 is concerned.
In the first place, his regular description
of Christ's human nature as "flesh" or "body"
seems to point in this direction, as does his failure to make
any unambiguously clear mention of a soul. In reply, it has been
urged that such language was traditional, reflecting New Testament
usage, and that Athanasius himself drew attention to the Biblical
equation of "man" with "flesh". Even if the linguistic argument
is inconclusive, the fact must be faced that his thought simply
allowed no room for a human mind. As we have noticed,
he represented the Word as the unique subject of all
Christ's experiences, human as well as divine. So much was this
the case that he regarded His death as the separation of the Word
from His body, and spoke of the descent of the Word to hell.
His attitude was revealed in a very striking way when he came
to deal with the
Arians'
contention that the Savior's ignorance, sufferings, etc.,
should properly be attributed to the Word,
Who on their view was a creature. Had Athanasius admitted a human
soul, here surely was a golden opportunity for him to point to it,
rather than the divine, impassible Word, as the true subject
of these experiences. But this obvious solution, as we have seen,
never apparently occurred to him; instead he attempts to attribute
them to the flesh.
Athanasius' Christology, therefore, just as much as that of the Arians, conformed to the Word-flesh type; Athanasius differed from them only in his estimate of the status of the Word. Some scholars, while conceding his lack of overt interest in Christ's human soul, have pointed to the fact that he nowhere expressly denies the existence of one, and have concluded that he may well have tacitly presupposed it. In view of what we know of the Alexandrianism, this seems an improbable theory. It remains a question, however, whether his attitude underwent a change about A.D. 362. At the synod of Alexandria held in that year, agreement was reached to the effect that
"the Savior did not have a body lacking soul, sensibility or intelligenceAthanasius was chairman of the synod and, since he endorsed this formula, it has usually been inferred that from A.D. 362 at any rate he recognized a normal human psychology in Christ. Among the delegates present at Alexandria was an Antiochene group, the Paulinians, devoted to the memory of Eustathius and his belief in Christ's human soul; their argument that, if the Redeemer was to save men's soul as well as their bodies, He must have assumed a created soul Himself, may have impressed Athanasius. Shortly afterwards, we find him making precisely the same soteriological point, namely, that our salvation embraces "the whole man, body and soul", in as much as "the Savior really and in very truth became man".
[ou soma apsuchon oud' anaistheton oud' anoeton eichen].
For it was impossible that, the Lord having become a man on our behalf,
His body should have been without intelligence [anoeton],
and the salvation not only of the body but of the soul as well
was accomplished through the Word Himself." [7]
This conclusion may well be correct; but, on the evidence of his later writings, Athanasius' acknowledgment of a human soul may have been purely formal, for he never succeeded in assigning to it any theological significance. It is also possible that he may have understood the crucial words quoted above as meaning, not that the Lord possessed a created soul, but that the Logos Himself was the vivifying principle of His body and served as the soul of the God-man. The formula may have been put forward at Alexandria by adherents of the Word-flesh Christology in order to counter objections to it, presumably along the lines that it presupposed a defective humanity. Their natural rejoinder was that it was misleading to represent Christ's humanity as being on their theory incomplete, since the Word, the archetype of the soul, had united Himself with His flesh. This surely was the true import of the sentence which followed,
"It was impossible that His body should have been without an intelligence,where the accent should be placed on "the Lord" rather than, as it is commonly placed, on "man". Apollinarius understood these words in this sense; and this interpretataion of the whole difficult passage accords much better than the conventional one both with the Alexandrian Christology in general and with the Alexandrian conception of the mind or nous as the image of the divine Word. On the whole, the case for the view that Athanasius did not modify his Christology about the time of the synod of A.D. 362 must be reckoned the more weighty.
seeing that it was the Lord Who became man on our behalf", [8]
According to Gregory of Nazianzus, the Apollinarian heresy began about A.D. 352, but it was not until the council of Alexandria (A.D. 362) that its teaching became a public issue, and only a decade later did it stir up serious controversy. Apollinarius, who was enthusiastic homoousion of the Son, was a life-long opponent of the dualist, later called "dyophysite", strain in the Antiochene approach to Christology. Apollinarius thought that this reflected the baneful influence of Paul of Samosata, whose doctrines were, he believed, being revived by teachers like Eustathius, the Paulinians, Flavian and Diodore of Tarsus. Apollinarius wrote,
"I am atonished to find people confessing the Lord as God incarnate,He protests against those who "confess, not God incarnate, but a man conjoined (anthropon theo sunaphthenta) with God", that is, in a merely external union, and against the misleading distinction between "two Sons", the Son of God and the son of Mary. Such distinction imply that Christ is "two", whereas the Scripture is emphatic that He is an unity (hen, mia phusis); and in any case, Scripture apart, such a duality is inconceivable. That Apollinarius was deeply influenced by soteriological motives is apparent. He was convined that, if the divine is separated from the human in the Savior, our redemption is imperilled. Considered merely as man, Christ had no saving life to bestow. He would not redeem us from our sins, revivify us, or raise us from the dead. How could we worship Him, or be baptized into His death, if He was only an ordinary man indwelt by the Godhead? As such, He must have been fallible, a prey like the rest of mankind to corrupt imaginings, and consequently unable to save us.
and yet falling into the separation (te diairesei) wickedly introduced by the Paul-imitators.
For they slavishly follow Paul of Samosata,
differentiating between Him from heaven,
Whom they declare to be God, and the man derived from the earth." [9]
In the attempt to eliminate the dualism, which he considered so disastrous, Apollinarius put forward an extreme version of the Word-flesh Christology. He spoke of Christ as "God incarnate" [theos ensarkos], "flesh-bearing God" [theos sarkophoros], or "God born of a woman". By such phrases, he did not mean that the flesh was simply an outward covering which the Word had donned, but rather that it was joined in absolute oneness of being with the God-head [pros hensteta theo suneptai] from the moment of its conception. He states,
"The flesh is not something superadded to the Godhead for well-doing,The Incarnate is "a compound unity in human form"
but constitutes one reality or nature
(sunousiomene kai sumphutos) with it."
The frankly acknowledged presupposition of this argument is that the divine Word was substituted for the normal human psychology in Christ. According to Apollinarius' anthropology, man was "spirit united with flesh". So in the God-man, as he expressed it, "the divine energy fulfils the role of the animating soul (psuches) and of the human mind (noos)". Linked with this is the problem whether he was a dichotomist (that is, the human nature consisted of body and soul) or a trichotomist (that is, the human nature consisted of body, animal soul or psuche, and rational soul or nous). But what is important, is that on his interpretation the Word was both the directive, intelligent principle in Jesus Christ, and also the vivifying principle of His flesh. The common account of his Christology, that is, that it represented the Word as performing the function usually exercised by the will and the intellect, does not do justice to what was in fact its most distinctive feature. This was his theory that the Word was the sole life of the God-man, infusing vital energy and movement into Him even at the purely physical and biological levels. If it is objected that this makes Him different from ordinary men, Apollinarius had no hesitation in agreeing. He found confirmation of the difference in the wording of such texts as "Found as a man", and, "In the likeness of men"; and he suggested that the theological significance of the virgin birth lay precisely in the fact that the divine spirit replace the spermatic matter which gives life to ordinary men. From his point of view, the elimination of a human psychology had the advantage of excluding the possibility of there being two contradictory wills and intelligences in Christ. It also ensured the sinlessness of the Savior. A human mind, he explained, is "fallible and enslaved to filthy thoughts", whereas the Word is immutable. But, further, having a divine life pulsing through Him, the Incarnate was made immune from psychic and fleshly passions, and became not only Himself invincible to death, but also was able to destroy death. It was because the Word was, biologically and physically, the vivtal force and energy in Him that He was able to raise the dead and bestow life.
Thus Christ, on this theory, is an organic, vital unity, just as a man compounded of soul and body is a unity; there is a "unity of nature" [henosis phusike] between the Word and His body. As Apollinarius expressed it,
"He is one nature [mia phusis] since He is a simple,Note that his term for the God-man, considered as a Person, is prosopon. He also on occasions uses hupostasis, being the first to introduce it into the vocabulary of Christology; it connotes for him a self-determining reality. His regular description of the Incarnate was "one nature" [mia phusis], and he never ceased to protest against the doctrine of "two natures" taught by the Antiochenes. In a phrase that was to become famous, he declared that there was
undivided Person [prosopon];
for His body is not a nature by itself,
nor is the divinity in virtue of the incarnation a nature by Itself;
but just as a man is one nature,
so is Christ Who has come in the likeness of men". [11]
"The body is not of itself a nature,This close connection of the flesh with the Godhead, their fusion "into a single life and hypostasis" (to quote one of his disciples, Timothy of Berytus), represents the distinctive core of the thought of Apollinarius. Certain important features of his Christology flow logically from it, and can only be appreciated in light of it.
because it is neither vivifying in itself
nor capable of being singled out from that which vivifies it.
Nor is the Word, on the other hand, to be distinguished
as a separate nature apart from His incarnate state,
since it was in the flesh, and not apart from the flesh,
that the Lord dwelt on earth." [12]
"It is plain from all we have written that we do not say that
the Savior's flesh has come down from heaven,
nor that His flesh is consubstamtial with God,
inasmuch as it is flesh and not God;
but it is God in so far as it is united with the Godhead
so as to form one Person." [13]
"the flesh of the Lord, while remaining flesh even in the unionBut as employed by Apollinarius, this is not merely an external interchange of words and titles made possible by the fact that only one Person is subject. As the fact that worship may be offered to the flesh reveals, it involves a real exhange of attributes since both flesh and Word , while remaining distinct, are conceived of as being fused in "one nature".
(its nature being neither changed nor lost)
shares in the names and properties of the Word;
and the Word, while remaining Word and God,
in the incarnation shares the name and properties of the flesh." [14]
"The holy flesh is one nature (sumphues) with the Godhead,In other words, the believer is deified by assimilating the deified flesh of the Redeemer, and so Appollinarius' Christology is logically linked with his soteriology.
and infuses divinity into those who partake of it"; and as result,
"we are saved by partaking of it as food." [15]
"By becoming exactly what we are,And according to an unknown critic in C. Apollinarium, Christ used His incorruptible body to save men's corruptible bodies, His immortal soul to save souls doomed to death. It was necessary for Him to have both, for
He united the human race through Himself to God." [16]
"it was impossible for Him to give one in exchange for the other;As the new Adam enabling us to participate in His divinity, Christ necessarily possessed human nature in its completeness.
and so He gave His body for men's bodies, and His soul for men's souls." [17]
Gregory of Nazianzus teaches that the Logos
"comes to His own image, and bears flesh for the sake of my flesh, and cojoins Himself with an intelligent soul for my soul's sake, cleansing like by like, and at all points, sin excepted, become man." [18]Thus there are "two natures (duo phuseis) concurring in unity" in the God-man, and He is "twofold (diplous)", "not two, but one from two"; and of course there are not "two Sons". His two natures are distinguishable in thought, and can be referred to as "the one (allo)" and the "the other (allo)", but there are not two Persons (allos kai allos); rather "they form a unity (hen) by their commingling, God having become man and man God." So far from conceiving of this union as a moral one, or as a union of "grace" like that between God and His prophets and saints, Gregory states that the two natures "have been substantially (kat' ousian) conjoined and knit together". To explain this union he propounds the theory, reminiscent of Origen's, that the Lord's rational soul provides the meeting-place for them; because of His natural affinity to the soul, the Word can "mingle" with it. Notice his predilection for terms like "fusion" and "mixture" which later generations were to avoid as savoring Eutychianism. But his conception of union permitted him to exploit the communicatio idomatum to the full, and to speak, for example, of the birth of God from the Virgin and of "God crucified", as well as to insist on the propriety of calling Mary "the mother of God (theotokos). But a marked weakness of his theory was its failure, despite its recognition of a human mind in Christ, to make adequate use of it in understanding such experiences as His growth in knowledge, His ignorance of the last day, His agony in Gethsemane and His cry of dereliction. The first he interpreted as the gradual disclosure of the omniscience of the Logos, while in explanation of the second he suggested either that Christ as man posed as being ignorant or, strictly speaking, the Son could be said to be ignorant since He derived His knowledge from the Father. The other experiences he explained away, clearly regarding the Logos and not the human mind as their subject.
The Savior's human experience received a much more realistic treatment from Gregory of Nyssa, whose Christology owed much to both Origen and to the Antiochene school. In contrast to Nazianzen, who thought of divinity and humanity as substantially united in the God-man, Nyssa conceived of the God-head entering into and controlling the manhood, so that Jesus could be called "the God-receiving man (theodochos anthropos)", "the man in whom He tabernacled". According to his account, the Holy Spirit at the incarnation first prepared a body and soul as a special receptacle (oikeion skeuos) for the divinity, and the heavenly Son then "mingled Himself" with them, the divine nature thereby becoming "present in them both". Thus "God came to be in human nature", but the manner of the union is a mysterious and inexplicable as the union between body and soul in man. In this "mingling" (anakrases was his faviourite term) the flesh was passive, the Logos is active, element, and a transformation (compare metastoicheioun, metapepoiesthai) of the human nature into the divine was initiated. But in the historical Jesus, the characteristics of the two natures remainded distinguishable. Consequently, when Christ endured suffering or other human experiences, it was not His divinity which endured them, but "the man attached by the union to the divinity"; they belonged "to the human part of Christ". The Godhead, being impassible, remained unaffected, although through its concrete oneness with the humanity it indirectly participated in its limitations and weaknesses. In the same way, Gregory could recognize in Christ a real human will, although the divine will always prevailed. Similarly, he took the meaning of Luke 2:52 to be that Christ's soul, through its union with the divine Wisdom, itself gradually developed in wisdom and knowledge, in much the same way as His body grew as a result of the nourishment it consumed from day to day.
Gregory of Nyssa thus tended to hold the two natures apart, regarding the Logos as the active principle and the manhood as a passive one, and strongly emphasizing the independent character of the latter. Yet the union between them, effected at Christ's conception, was, on his view, unbreakable, designed to last forever. The God-man was "one Person (hen prosopon)"; and because of the close conjunction and fusion (dia ten sunapheian te kai sumphuian) between the Lord and "the servant in whom the Lord is", the attributes and experiences properly belonging to the one could correctly be ascribed to the other. Even so, when Gregory called the Virgin "Theotokos", he seems to have been making a concession to popular usage, and the customary language of the communicatio idiomatum about God's suffering, dying, etc., clearly did not come naturally to his lips. On the other hand, if he allows full play to the human nature during Christ's earthly life, the situation changes with His resurrection and glorification. Then begins "the transformation of the lowly into the lofty". The immaterial essence of the Logos "transelements" the material body born of the Virgin into the divine, immutable nature; the flesh which suffered becomes then, as a result of the union, identical with the nature which assumed it. Like a drop of vingear which falls into the sea and is wholly absorbed, the humanity loses all its proper qualities and is changed into divinity.
[1] J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrine, 2nd Edition,
Harper & Row, Publishers (New York, Evanston and London, 1958, 1960).,
p. 282.