Apollinaris Relation To God

The development of Christology in the patristic period of Christianity was formed out of two main arguments, the logos’ relation with God and the logos’ relation with the human Jesus. It was of agreement that Jesus the Christ was on earth and that he was the logos, i.e. “Word of God” or “Son of God”. Two orators in particular drew the proverbial line in the sand between homoousios and homoiousios, of the same and of similar substance as the Father. This division was later coined the Arian Controversy after Arius failed to convince the Council of Nicaea (325 CE) of his position. Arius felt that the logos could not be of the same substance as God, but merely of similar substance. One of his most famous statements was “there was a time when he …show more content…
These viewpoints were encompassed under two schools of thought, Alexandrian and Antiochene. In the first school, Apollinaris of Laodicea and Cyril of Alexandria set to the task of presenting the logos as being of one united nature, i.e. Jesus’ human nature was assumed by the divine nature through incarnation. Apollinaris’ stance was that Jesus’ human mind and soul was fully replaced by the divine logos. With soteriological implications being of great import in the Alexandrian school, Apollinaris surmised that if Jesus human mind been allowed to stay, the logos would be trapped in human sin, therefore salvation would be unattainable. This entangled union of divine and human into one nature led both Apollinaris and Cyril to subscribe to an aspect of Christology known as communicatio idiomatum or communication of attributes. In other words, what can be said about the divine logos can also be said about the human logos and vice versa. For if the logos was both divine and human in one united nature, then any statement regarding the attributes of Jesus would be absolutely