HOME | contents | 4 heresies | Arius | Apollinarius | Marcellus
The four great heresies about the doctrine of the Incarnation form a historical
and logical series.
Each arose from particular historical conditions.
Each was a reaction
against the last.
Each was championed by a heresiarch,
defeated by a great
Father of the Church,
and condemned by a General Council.
The following
scheme will make this plain:
Heretic |
Denied |
Defeated by |
Condemned by |
Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Arius |
Godhead of Christ |
Athanasius |
Nicea |
325 |
Apollinarius |
Manhood of Christ |
Basil |
Constantinople |
381 |
Nestorius |
One Person |
Cyril |
Ephesus |
431 |
Eutyches |
Two Natures |
Leo |
Chalcedon |
451 |
These theories did not arise without a cause.
They cannot be understood without some knowledge of their intellectual background
and even of the politics of the time.
For at that period theology was closely connected with secular history,
and national movements took for themselves a theological basis,
as they did 1200 years later in the period of the Reformation.
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When the Arian movement began, the persecutions were just over.
Constantine had begun a new epoch by two great changes.
His predecessors had tried to unite their Empire on the basis of some pagan
religion, first the worship of Rome, later the worship of the Sun.
All
these efforts had been wrecked by the increasing power of the Christian Church.
Constantine
was the first Emperor who came to terms with the Church and tried to unite
his Empire on the basis, not of pagan worship, but of Christian belief.
But he was at once faced by this difficulty.
Paganism had no dogmas.
It was entirely a matter of worship.
But Christianity required a fixed dogmatic belief, and the Christians did
not all believe the same things.
If Christianity was to be the basis of the Empire, all citizens of the empire
must agree about what Christianity was.
Therefore the Imperial Government's interest was that Christians should agree.
It was not concerned with truth but with unity.
For this reason the Emperors summoned General Councils that the disputing
theologians might be brought to agreement and the Empire might be at peace.
They
were not concerned with those parts of the Church that were outside the Empire.
The "Oecumenical Council" [Hereafter spelled "Ecumenical"] was
in theory an assembly of all the bishops of the οἰκουμένη (oikoumene),
the civilized world that is, the Roman Empire.
The churches of the "barbarians" were ignored.
The second great change made by Constantine was the transfer of the capital
from Rome with its pagan traditions to "New Rome", Constantinople,
which all through this period was the real centre of the Empire.
After Rome and Constantinople, the two most important cities of the Empire
were Alexandria and Antioch.
Both were Greek cities.
They had been the capitals of two of the generals who had carved kingdoms
for themselves out of the conquests of Alexander the Great 600 years before.
But
each was also the centre of a reviving native culture with its own language
and its own distinctive form of Christianity.
Each had its own theological school, which represented one permanent tendency
in human thought.
The rivalry between these schools, carried to its extreme point, produced
opposite heresies.
They are of permanent importance because there will always be critical minds
like those of Antioch and mystical minds like those of Alexandria.
The theologians of Antioch,
of whom the most famous and the most orthodox was St. John Chrysostom,
were interested in men and in human affairs.
Their tendency was to emphasize the Manhood of Christ even at the expense
of His Godhead.
Though the language of Antioch was Greek,
there was behind it a great region reaching up to and beyond the Euphrates,
of which the language was Syriac.
After 363, when the Emperor Jovian ceded the provinces beyond the Euphrates
to Persia, that river was the boundary of the Roman Empire.
Beyond
it was the Persian Kingdom, the government of which was not Christian but
Zoroastrian.
The Church there was independent with its own Patriarch, and its theological
language was not Greek but Syriac.
The theologians of Alexandria, on the other hand, interpreted the Bible
allegorically.
They had a great theological school famous since the second century.
Alexandria with its Museum and Library had been for many centuries the greatest
intellectual centre of the Greek world.
But it was also the capital of Egypt, the home and source of Christian monasticism;
and the native Egyptians had their own language Coptic (the later form of
the language of the Pharohs)
and their own ideal of Christianity, which was monastic.
This ideal profoundly influenced the theology of Alexandria.
The monk in the desert,
alone with God beneath the changeless blue sky,
had given up his part in the affairs of men to spend his life contemplating
the majesty of God.
He found it difficult, therefore, to believe in the Manhood of Christ.
He preferred to think of Him as God only.
Therefore the tendency of Alexandria was always to emphasize the Godhead
of Christ even at the expense of His Manhood.
There will always be the Antiochene and the Alexandrian types of mind,
and the Church needs them both.
It was the great failure of Greek Christianity that they were allowed to
develop into rival heresies.
That failure was largely the result of another characteristic of that age,
the confusion of theology with politics.
Alexandria, which had been the second city of the Empire, was intensely
jealous of the "upstart"
see of Constantinople.
In every controversy in the fourth and fifth centuries we find Alexandria
opposing Constantinople,
and the opposition at last became a national movement,
a revolt of the Egyptians against the Greeks.
Constantinople was the seat of the court, and the interest of the court was
to unite the Empire.
Therefore Constantinople supported whatever theological policy might suit
the immediate interest of the Emperor.
If this be borne in mind, much will become clear which would otherwise have
been obscure.
Arianism and Nestorianism were products of the school of Antioch,
which was inclined to emphasize the Manhood of Christ at the expense of His
Godhead.
Apollinarianism and Eutychianism belonged to the school of Alexandria,
which was inclined to emphasize the Godhead of Christ at the expense of His
Manhood.
Arianism was a heresy against the doctrine of the Trinity rather than against
the doctrine of the Incarnation.
Arius taught that the Father alone is God in the full sense (ὁ Θεός),
and that the Son was a created being who might be called God ( Θεός),
and worshiped as God.
Arius was the heir of Paul of Samosata who taught that Christ was a man adopted
into the Godhead.
His teaching passed to Arius through Lucian who suffered martyrdom in the persecution
of Diocletian.
Arius (Ἄρειος ) was a priest
from Antioch who settled at Alexandria and became a popular preacher and
parish priest of Baucalis, the oldest parish in Alexandria.
In 319
he began to teach that the Son of God was a created being and persuaded many
of his parishioners to accept his teaching.
Alexander, the Archbishop
of Alexandria, after arguing with him privately and addressing the clergy
of his diocese on the subject, was told by Arius that his doctrine of the
Trinity was Sabellian.
Alexander then summoned a local council of the
Egyptian bishops, nearly a hundred in number.
Arius was present and was asked what his exact teaching was.
He explained that he held that God was not always Father, but only became so
when He created the Son;
that the Son was created, that once He did not exist, and that He was therefore
unlike the Father in essence;
that He was not the true Word of Wisdom of the Father;
that He was created for the purpose of producing mankind;
that He did not know perfectly either the Father or Himself; and that, unlike
the Father, He was liable to change.
As Arius refused to give up his teaching, he and his friends (two bishops, six priests, and six deacons) were excommunicated.
He took refuge with Eusebius, Bishop of Nicomedia in Bithynia [In
the northwest corner of Asia Minor.], which was then the seat of
the Emperor's Court (Constantinople was not yet founded).
The controversy
spread through all the Greek churches; and Arius wrote a number of popular
ballads set to tunes associated with low music-hall songs to popularize
his teaching among "sailors, millers, and travelers".
In 323 the Emperor Constantine intervened, urging the bishops to stop disputing
about unimportant questions that the Empire might be at peace.
As his
letter had no effect, he summoned all the bishops of the Empire to meet in
council at Nicea [Older writers call it "Nice";
it was not Nice in France, but in N.W. Anatolia (now Turkey).] to
decide the question.
In 325 the Council assembled.
Its president was Hosius, Bishop of Cordova in Spain.
According to one of the later writings of St. Athanasius, 318 bishops were
present.
Arius was summoned before the Council and explained his position passionately.
Eusebius of Caesarea in Palestine, the famous Church historian, proposed
as a compromise the baptismal creed of his own church.
Athanasius, a deacon who had come with Alexander of Alexandria and who as
a deacon had the right to speak but not to vote, proposed that this creed
should be accepted with the addition of the words ὁμοούσιον
τῷ Πατρί (being of one substance
with the Father).
This was accepted by the Council, which added five "anathemas",
or condemnations of the special doctrines of Arius.
Only five bishops opposed the decision of the majority Eusebius of Nicomedia
and four others.
They, with Arius himself, were condemned and excommunicated.
Unfortunately this was not the end of the controversy.
The great majority of the bishops, though quite orthodox, felt that they had
been pressed farther than they were ready to go.
Many were afraid of Sabellianism and disliked the new word "homoousion" which
had been made the test of orthodoxy.
The friends of Arius were active and influential at Court.
They persuaded the Emperor that Arius had been unfairly treated.
Arius died in 336, still excommunicated, and Constantine in the following year
(after being baptized on his death-bed by the Arian bishop, Eusebius of Nicomedia).
The Empire was divided among his three sons,
and Constantius who received Constantinople was entirely devoted to the Arian
party.
Arianism became the religion of the Court,
and the struggle continued until the death of the Emperor Valens in 378.
He was succeeded by the orthodox Theodosius, and Arianism,
when it had lost the support of the Government, rapidly disappeared.
The story shows that the Council of Nicea was not regarded as infallible.
The whole Church had to be convinced that Athanasius was right and Arius wrong,
and this took fifty years.
The final decision lay not with the Council but with the whole Church.
The Arian party after the death of its leader broke up into three sections:
After Arianism had collapsed in the Empire, it continued among the German
tribes.
During the period when Constantinople was Arian,
a devoted missionary called Ulfilas had gone to convert the Goths,
and his success was so great that all the barbarian conquerors of the Empire
Goths, Vandals, Burgundians, Lombards, etc.,
accepted Arianism as the true Christian doctrine
and continued to maintain it as a national religion superior to that of the
Romans.
Arianism did not come to an end among the Goths until it was abolished by
King Reccared and the Third Council of Toledo in 589.
What was it that made Arianism so popular and so dangerous?
It sprang up just at the moment when,
because Christianity had become the religion of the Emperor,
crowds of pagans were pressing into the Church.
It was a simplified Christianity.
People whose traditions were pagan did not object to worshiping a demigod,
and that was what Christ was in the Arian system.
It appealed to Constantine and his successors because it provided a moral
basis for their government without insisting on the necessity of dogma and
because they honestly could not see the contention of Athanasius and his
friends was of any real importance. [A point of view only
too familiar today!]
Athanasius, on the other hand, saw clearly that to admit the doctrine of Arius even as a possible interpretation of Christianity was to destroy the Gospel. The Christ of Arius who was only a created being could not have saved mankind.
The answer to Arius was, first, an appeal to Scripture.
Quoting St. John 8.58-59 ("Before Abraham was, I am"),
St. Athanasius
dryly commented:
"The Jews understood what the Arians do not understand."
To Arius' claim that the Father must be older than the Son,
it was replied that the Son is also the Word who was in the beginning with
the Father (St. John 1.2),
and that the use of the word Son implies identity of essence.
The son of a man is a man.
The Son of God must be God.
The Arians were confronted with the question, "Is Christ to be adored?"
If they said "Yes", the answer was "Then either He is God,
or you are breaking the first Commandment".
If they said "No", the reply was "Then you are obviously not
Christians".
Against the word Homoousion three objections have been raised:
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there was a revival of Arianism
in England.
John Milton was an Arian.
In Paradise Lost the Father exalts His Son to sit at His right hand;
this is the cause of the rebellion of Satan who had hoped for that place
himself.
Though the Son is called the Word and Wisdom of the Father,
such a scheme is contrary to the Catholic doctrine that the Father eternally
begets the Son
whereas Satan is only a created being.
That the Arianism of Paradise Lost is not accidental but was Milton,s
deliberate belief is clearly shown by his prose works.
In the eighteenth century there was an organized Arian movement led by Samuel
Clarke with the object of relaxing the subscription to the formularies of
the English Church.
Clarke was invited to argue his case before Queen
Caroline, the wife of George II, with a priest of the Roman Communion called
Hawarden.
The latter asked Clarke to answer the question "Can
the Father annihilate the Son?"
Clarke, seeing that to answer "Yes" would
turn all Christians against him, and to answer "No" would destroy
his position, said he could not answer.
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The second of the four great heresies was Apollinarianism.
Its founder, Apollinarius, Bishop of Laodicea, was one of the supporters
of St. Athanasius in the struggle against Arianism.
According to the theory held by the Fathers, each human being consists of
three parts:
body ( σῶμα), soul (ψυχή),
and spirit (πνεῦμα).
The body is the visible and material part of man.
The soul is the invisible but mortal part,
the principle of life which animals also possess and which disappears at death.
The spirit is the invisible and immortal part which is peculiar to man
and which includes the will and the spiritual and intellectual capacities.
All the Greek and Latin Fathers accepted this distinction.
We find it in the New Testament in I Cor.15 .44 where
St. Paul contrasts the "soulish" body (ψυχικὸν
σῶμα) with the spiritual body (πνευματικὸν
σῶμα).
The orthodox doctrine is that the Word of God became truly and completely
Man with a human body, soul, and spirit.
His Person, His Self, is Divine.
When He says "I", He speaks of Himself as eternal: "Before
Abraham was, I am" (St. John 8.58);
but He possesses a complete human nature.
Apollinarius, however, taught that He had no human spirit,
but that in Him His Godhead took its place.
He gave two reasons for this.
He held that the human spirit was necessarily evil (which was a false premise),
and therefore that the Son of God, who is perfectly good, could not have
a human spirit.
And he thought that the spirit is the person, the soul and body being, as
it were, its clothes (a thoroughly Greek view);
and that therefore, if our Lord had had a human spirit, He either would not
have been God, or else would have been two persons associated together.
The orthodox reply to this argument was that if Christ had no human spirit,
He would not be completely Man and therefore could not have redeemed the
whole of man.
He must have possessed a human spirit in order to redeem the human spirit.
The soul and the body are not appendages to the spirit, but necessary parts
of the person.
Christ has a human spirit, soul, and body, for He is truly and perfectly
human.
It can be shown from the New Testament that in Him the three ways in which
human beings act
the will, the mind, and the feelings,
which are called in the Bible the heart, the mind, and the soul (or bowels),
and by modern psychologists the conative, cognitive, and affective powers
were all human.
His will (St. Mark 14.56, "Not My Will but Thine be done"),
His mind (St. Luke 2.52, "Jesus increased in wisdom"),
His feelings (St. John 11.36, "Behold how He loved him"),
are all human.
But the Self that possesses them is the eternal Word of God.
The Council of Constantinople, the Second Ecumenical Council, condemned
Apollinarianism in AD 381.
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A few words must be said about Marcellus of Ancyra who was one of the most
ardent supporters of St. Athanasius.
He taught that the Son was only potentially (δυνάμει)
eternal,
though actual in creation and redemption.
He denied, therefore, that the kingdom of Christ as mediator is eternal.
The answer to this was that God cannot be anything "potentially".
Whatever He is, He is absolutely and actually.
Besides, if the Word is only eternal "potentially",
how can He be "with God" (πρὸς τὸν Θεόν),
St. John 1.1, eternally, or "in the beginning"?
Marcellus of Ancyra was therefore condemned,
and the clause "Whose kingdom shall have no end" was placed in
the Creed in order to exclude his teaching.
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