Arianism is called by Dorner a reaction from Sabellianism. Sabellius had reduced the incarnation of Christ to a temporary phenomenon. Arius thought to lay stress on the hypostasis of the Son, and to give it fixity and substance. But, to his mind, the reality of Sonship seemed to require subordination to the Father. Origen had taught the subordination of the Son to the Father, in connection with his doctrine of eternal generation. Arius held to the subordination, and also to the generation, but this last, he declared, could not be eternal, but must be in time. See Dorner, Person Christ, A.2:227-244, and Glaubenslehre, 2:307, 312, 313 (Syst. Doct., 3:203, 207-210); Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Arianismus. See also this Compendium, Vol. I:328-330.
4. The Apollinarians (Apollinaris, condemned at Constantinople, 381) denied the integrity of Christ's human nature. According to this view, Christ had no human νοῦς or πνεῦμα, other than that which was furnished by [pg 671] the divine nature. Christ had only the human σῶμα and ψυχή; the place of the human νοῦς or πνεῦμα was filled by the divine Logos. Apollinarism is an attempt to construe the doctrine of Christ's person in the forms of the Platonic trichotomy.
Lest divinity should seem a foreign element, when added to this curtailed manhood, Apollinaris said that there was an eternal tendency to the human in the Logos himself; that in God was the true manhood; that the Logos is the eternal, archetypal man. But here is no becoming man—only a manifestation in flesh of what the Logos already was. So we have a Christ of great head and dwarfed body. Justin Martyr preceded Apollinaris in this view. In opposing it, the church Fathers said that “what the Son of God has not taken to himself, he has not sanctified”—τὸ ἀπρόσληπτον καὶ ἀθεράπευτον. See Dorner, Jahrbuch f. d. Theol., 1:397-408—“The impossibility, on the Arian theory, of making two finite souls into one, finally led to the [Apollinarian] denial of any human soul in Christ”; see also, Dorner, Person Christ, A.2:352-399, and Glaubenslehre, 2:310 (Syst. Doct., 3:206, 207); Shedd, Hist. Doctrine, 1:394.
Apollinaris taught that the eternal Word took into union with himself, not a complete human nature, but an irrational human animal. Simon, Reconciliation, 329, comes near to being an Apollinarian, when he maintains that the incarnate Logos was human, but was not a man. He is the constituter of man, self-limited, in order that he may save that to which he has given life. Gore, Incarnation, 93—“Apollinaris suggested that the archetype of manhood exists in God, who made man in his own image, so that man's nature in some sense preëxisted in God. The Son of God was eternally human, and he could fill the place of the human mind in Christ without his ceasing to be in some sense divine.... This the church negatived,—man is not God, nor God man. The first principle of theism is that manhood at the bottom is not the same thing as Godhead. This is a principle intimately bound up with man's responsibility and the reality of sin. The interests of theism were at stake.”
5. The Nestorians (Nestorius, removed from the Patriarchate of Constantinople, 431) denied the real union between the divine and the human natures in Christ, making it rather a moral than an organic one. They refused therefore to attribute to the resultant unity the attributes of each nature, and regarded Christ as a man in very near relation to God. Thus they virtually held to two natures and two persons, instead of two natures in one person.
Nestorius disliked the phrase: “Mary, mother of God.” The Chalcedon statement asserted its truth, with the significant addition: “as to his humanity.” Nestorius made Christ a peculiar temple of God. He believed in συνάφεια, not ἕνωσις,—junction and indwelling, but not absolute union. He made too much of the analogy of the union of the believer with Christ, and separated as much as possible the divine and the human. The two natures were, in his view, ἄλλος καὶ ἄλλος, instead of being ἄλλο καὶ ἄλλο, which together constitute εἶς—one personality. The union which he accepted was a moral union, which makes Christ simply God and man, instead of the God-man.
John of Damascus compared the passion of Christ to the felling of a tree on which the sun shines. The axe fells the tree, but does no harm to the sunbeams. So the blows which struck Christ's humanity caused no harm to his deity; while the flesh suffered, the deity remained impassible. This leaves, however, no divine efficacy of the human sufferings, and no personal union of the human with the divine. The error of Nestorius arose from a philosophic nominalism, which refused to conceive of nature without personality. He believed in nothing more than a local or moral union, like the marriage union, in which two become one; or like the state, which is sometimes called a moral person, because having a unity composed of many persons. See Dorner, Person Christ, B.1:53-79, and Glaubenslehre, 2:315, 316 (Syst. Doct., 3:211-213); Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:210; Wilberforce, Incarnation, 152-154.
“There was no need here of the virgin-birth,—to secure a sinless father as well as mother would have been enough. Nestorianism holds to no real incarnation—only to an alliance between God and man. After the fashion of the Siamese twins, Chang and Eng, man and God are joined together. But the incarnation is not merely a higher degree of the mystical union.” Gore, Incarnation, 94—“Nestorius adopted and popularized [pg 672]the doctrine of the famous commentator, Theodore of Mopsuestia. But the Christ of Nestorius was simply a deified man, not God incarnate,—he was from below, not from above. If he was exalted to union with the divine essence, his exaltation was only that of one individual man.”
6. The Eutychians (condemned at Chalcedon, 451) denied the distinction and coëxistence of the two natures, and held to a mingling of both into one, which constituted a tertium quid, or third nature. Since in this case the divine must overpower the human, it follows that the human was really absorbed into or transmuted into the divine, although the divine was not in all respects the same, after the union, that it was before. Hence the Eutychians were often called Monophysites, because they virtually reduced the two natures to one.
They were an Alexandrian school, which included monks of Constantinople and Egypt. They used the words σύγχυσις, μεταβολή—confounding, transformation—to describe the union of the two natures in Christ. Humanity joined to deity was as a drop of honey mingled with the ocean. There was a change in either element, but as when a stone attracts the earth, or a meteorite the sun, or when a small boat pulls a ship, all the movement was virtually on the part of the smaller object. Humanity was so absorbed in deity, as to be altogether lost. The union was illustrated by electron, a metal compounded of silver and gold. A more modern illustration would be that of the chemical union of an acid and an alkali, to form a salt unlike either of the constituents.