Against Apollinaris

Contra Apollinarem is a treatise by Theodore of Mopsuestia (c. 350–428), the leading exegete and theologian of the Antiochene school, directed against the christology of Apollinaris of Laodicea. Apollinaris had defended Nicene orthodoxy against the Arians, but in doing so taught that in Christ the divine Word took the place of the human mind or rational soul. Christ, on this account, was God united to a human body and animal life, with no human intellect of his own. The work was written in Greek, and its date is not known. It survives only in fragments, preserved mostly through quotations in later authors and in the florilegia assembled during the christological controversies of the fifth and sixth centuries, and the treatise is therefore known chiefly through what those compilers chose to cite.

Theodore's central concern is soteriological and moral. If the Word merely assumed flesh and not a full human nature, then the humanity Christ bore was incomplete, and what was not assumed was not healed. Theodore insists that the Word assumed a complete human being, body and rational soul together, because it was the whole human person that had sinned and died and needed redeeming. He presses the point through the Gospel narratives. Christ grows in wisdom, learns obedience through what he suffers, is tempted, prays, and struggles in Gethsemane. For Theodore these are the acts of a genuine human mind and will, not the staged gestures of a divine Word wearing a body. A human nature that truly faced temptation and truly obeyed can truly be the pattern and first fruits of a renewed humanity. At the same time he holds to the one Christ and the real union of the two natures, though his manner of distinguishing divine and human in Christ later drew suspicion, and his writings were condemned at the Second Council of Constantinople in 553.

The treatise matters for the questions it fixes in place. It stands among the early arguments for the integrity of Christ's humanity, a conviction the church later confirmed against Apollinarianism at the Council of Constantinople in 381 and developed at Chalcedon. It also shows the Antiochene method at work, reasoning from the concrete details of the biblical narrative to the shape of the incarnation rather than from philosophical abstraction downward.

Who should read this: readers of historical theology and the christological controversies who are willing to work from fragments and to read a contested figure on his own terms. It is not for those seeking a complete, continuous text or a devotional introduction to the incarnation, and it will frustrate anyone who wants a settled verdict on Theodore's orthodoxy rather than the evidence from which that debate proceeds.