The Integrity of Christ's Sacred Humanity, Against Arianism and Apollinarianism

The dogmatic definition of Christ’s humanity against the Docetae clearly implied that the manhood of our Blessed Redeemer was essentially composed of a material body and a spiritual soul. Arius, however, declared Christ to be a synthesis of the Logos with inanimate flesh, while Apollinaris argued that, though our Lord had a soul, He lacked reason.

1. The Heresy and Its Condemnation by the Church

The Arians were at least consistent with themselves: believing Christ to be a synthesis of the Logos with soulless flesh, they held He had no human soul at all — the Logos simply supplying and exercising the functions of one. Arianism was Christological, Pohle notes, only indirectly and by implication; it was primarily a denial of the Logos’s Divinity, which is why St. Athanasius could remark that “the Arians vainly have recourse to subtleties, saying that the Saviour assumed mere flesh, and impiously ascribing the passion to the impassible Godhead.”¹

Apollinarianism attacked the integrity of Christ’s manhood directly. Apollinaris, Bishop of Laodicea in Syria (d. 390), had valiantly supported St. Athanasius in the defense of the homoousion before falling into error himself: he taught that Christ’s body was animated by an inferior life-principle, but had no rational soul — the place of the missing reason being supplied by the Divine Logos itself.² The error rested on two mistakes: a wrong notion of human nature as composed of three separate elements (flesh, soul, and reason, a Platonic division), and a misunderstanding of the Hypostatic Union itself. If Christ were a perfect man, Apollinaris reasoned, He would have two complete natures — and since two complete beings can never be united into a real unity, this would yield two Sons of God, one begotten and one adopted.³

In condemning Apollinarianism the Church simultaneously struck at the Arian error. St. Athanasius, despite his earlier friendship with Apollinaris, persuaded the Council of Alexandria (A.D. 362) to anathematize his errors. More significant still is the seventh anathema of Pope Damasus at the Council of Rome (A.D. 380): “We pronounce anathema against those who say that the Word of God is in the human flesh in lieu and place of the human, rational, and intellective soul.” The phrase “of a rational soul and body” recurs in many subsequent councils, notably Chalcedon (A.D. 451) and Constantinople (A.D. 381), and becomes a technical term — the Athanasian Creed itself, modeled on Chalcedon, declares Christ “perfect God and perfect man, of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting.”⁴ Eugene IV’s Decretum pro Iacobitis, at the Council of Florence in the fifteenth century, condemns both errors together: Arius, “who, asserting that the body [which Jesus] assumed from the Virgin lacked a soul, held that the Godhead took the place of the soul,” and Apollinaris, “who … taught that Jesus had only a sensitive soul and that the Godhead of the Logos supplied the place of the rational soul.”⁵

Of special importance is a decree of the Council of Vienne (A.D. 1311), which not only asserts the co-existence in Christ of a body and rational soul, but defines their mutual relation: the only-begotten Son of God, eternally subsisting with the Father, assumed in time, in the Virgin’s womb, “a passible human body and an intellective or rational soul informing that body truly per se and essentially,” taking them into the unity of His own Hypostasis and Person.⁶

2. The Teaching of Revelation

The Church’s dogmatic teaching on the integrity of Christ’s human nature is simply the technical formulation of a truth plainly contained in Scripture and Tradition.

The Scriptural Argument

The New Testament writings, especially the Gospels, portray Jesus Christ in His daily intercourse with men, in His joys and sorrows — hungry, thirsty, weary, exhausted. It is difficult to imagine that One who conversed as a man among men, sharing their sentiments, had no human, rational soul. That Christ Himself expressly claimed such a soul is evidenced by several texts. “I lay down my life [animam meam], that I may take it again” (John 10:17) — even if “life” is the intended sense here, life and death both presuppose a soul to lay down and take up. On the Cross He cries, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46), and St. Luke immediately adds, “And saying this, he gave up the ghost” — Scripture using “spirit” and “soul” interchangeably here, giving solid warrant for reading “spirit” as the human, spiritual soul about to leave His body. Perhaps the text most fatal to both Arianism and Apollinarianism is Matthew 26:38: “My soul is sorrowful even unto death” — Christ unequivocally asserting a soul capable of the properly spiritual affection of sorrow, which cannot belong to a merely sensitive or animal soul.

The mutual relation of body and soul defined at Vienne rests on solid Scriptural ground in the Bible’s repeated description of Jesus as “true man,” “the Son of man,” “Son of Adam” — most pointedly in 1 Timothy 2:5: “There is one God, and one mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus.” Christ could not truly be man, nor mediate between God and men, unless body and soul were united in Him as they are united in us, rather than existing separately alongside His Divinity. Nor does John 1:14 — “the Word was made flesh” — count against this: the use of “flesh” for the whole man, body and soul together, is common biblical synecdoche.

The Patristic Argument

It helps to consider the Fathers first as simple witnesses to Tradition, and second as theologians reasoning speculatively about the dogma.

As witnesses, the Fathers who wrote after the Arian and Apollinarist controversies had run their course express themselves with complete clarity. Certain earlier Fathers have been accused by some Protestant writers of holding Arian or Apollinarist views themselves, but the charge does not hold up: where these early writers speak of Christ as constituted of “flesh” and “spirit,” they mean by “spirit” His Divinity, and use “flesh” in the ordinary Biblical sense of “man.” St. Ignatius of Antioch, often numbered among the accused, repeatedly calls the Savior “flesh-bearer” but is careful to add that Christ was a “perfect man.”⁷ St. Irenaeus uses “flesh” and “man” interchangeably — “The Word of God was made flesh … because the Word of God was also true man”⁸ — and elsewhere, borrowing a phrase from St. Clement of Rome, explicitly names Christ’s soul: “The mighty Word was also true man … since He redeemed us with His blood and gave up His soul for our souls, and His flesh for our flesh.”⁹ Even Tertullian, whose views on the metaphysical nature of spirit are elsewhere unorthodox, clearly distinguishes body and soul in Christ, indignantly opposes Marcion’s claim that Christ was merely a soul clothed in the semblance of flesh, and sums up his own position: “As flesh and soul, He was a man, and the Son of man; but as the Spirit of God and the Power of the Most High, He is God and the Son of God.”¹⁰

As theologians, several Fathers argue for the necessity of a rational soul in Christ from the soteriological axiom, “What was not assumed was not healed” — as St. Gregory of Nazianzus put it, our own souls would remain unredeemed had the Son of God not assumed a human soul to redeem them. “If any one put his hope in a man destitute of reason,” Gregory writes, “he is indeed unreasonable and unworthy of being wholly redeemed. For that which has not been assumed is not cured; but that which is united with God partakes of salvation. If only half of Adam fell, let but half of him be assumed and saved. But if the whole sinned, He is united with the whole, and the whole attains to salvation.”¹¹ A related principle, later absorbed into Scholastic terminology, holds that “the Word assumed flesh through the mediation of the [rational] soul” — meaning not that the Logos assumed a soul first and flesh second, but that the only flesh capable of union with the Godhead was flesh already animated by a truly human, rational soul as its substantial form; it would have been unbecoming for God to unite Himself hypostatically to a body animated by a merely animal soul.¹² St. Athanasius accordingly insists that “the Saviour having become man, it is impossible that His body should lack reason,”¹³ and St. Cyril of Alexandria that Christ was made flesh, “i.e., a man animated by a rational soul.”¹⁴

3. The Theological Formula of the “Three Substances”

Apollinarianism raised a further technical question: should Christ be conceived dichotomously, as Divinity and humanity, or trichotomously, as “three substances” — Logos, soul, and body? A working compromise settled on the Scholastic formula “two natures and three substances”: by insisting on two natures, the formula guarded against mistaking body and soul for complete natures or substances in their own right, when in fact they are merely component parts of Christ’s one human nature. The phrase’s sole legitimate purpose was to safeguard the integrity of Christ’s humanity against Arianism and especially Apollinarianism — this is the sense in which Justin Martyr lists “body, Logos, and soul” as Christ’s three constitutive elements,¹⁵ and in which St. Augustine writes more precisely still: “Man consists of a soul and flesh, and consequently Christ consists of the Logos, a soul, and flesh.”¹⁶

The phrase did not always find favor with the Church, however. The Eleventh Council of Toledo (A.D. 675) taught that “Christ exists in two natures, but in three substances,”¹⁷ but when the Fourteenth Council of Toledo repeated the phrase nine years later, Pope Sergius I demanded an explanation, which St. Julian of Toledo duly supplied to the Pope’s satisfaction. A century later (A.D. 794), a provincial council at Frankfurt, held against the Adoptionists and formally approved by Pope Hadrian I, expressly disapproved the formula: “We do not find it said, in the profession of the Nicene Creed, that in Christ there are ‘two natures and three substances.’ … What is the nature of man but soul and body? … Ecclesiastical custom is accustomed to name two substances in Christ, namely of God and of man.”¹⁸ Despite this rebuke, the “three substances” formula persisted and eventually became part of approved Scholastic terminology: St. Bonaventure speaks without hesitation of a “threefold substance” in Christ, and St. Thomas Aquinas teaches that the name “man,” applied to Christ, also signifies His Divine Person, “and thus implies three substances.”¹⁹ Understood in the sense explained above, the formula’s orthodoxy cannot be questioned.

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