Apollinaris of Laodicea

This view came to be called Apollinarism. It was condemned by the First Council of Constantinople in 381.

He collaborated with his father, Apollinaris the Elder, in reproducing the Old Testament in the form of Homeric and Pindaric poetry and the New Testament after the fashion of Platonic dialogues, when the emperor, Julian, had forbidden Christians to teach the classics. He is best known, however, as a noted opponent of Arianism. Apollinaris's eagerness to emphasize the deity of Jesus and the unity of his person led him so far as to deny the existence of a rational human soul (νοῦς, nous) in Christ's human nature, replaced in him by the Logos, and so his body was a glorified and spiritualized form of humanity. The orthodox position (maintained by Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, the Church of the East, Oriental Orthodoxy, Anglicanism, and most churches within Protestantism) is that God as his Logos assumed human nature in its entirety, including the νοῦς, as only thus could he be humanity's perfect redeemer and prototype. It was alleged that the Apollinarian approach implied docetism: if the Godhead without constraint swayed the manhood, there was no possibility of a real human probation or of a real advance in Christ's manhood. The position was accordingly condemned by several synods, in particular by the First Council of Constantinople, in 381. That did not prevent it from having a considerable following. After Apollinaris's death, it divided into two sects, the more conservative taking its name (Vitalians) from Vitalis, the Apollinarist claimant to the see of Antioch. The other (Polemeans) added the further assertion that the two natures were so blended that even the body of Christ was a fit object of adoration. The Apollinarian emphasis on the unity of human and divine in Christ and on the divine element in that unity was later restated in the form of Eutychianism and persisted in what was later the radically anti-Nestorian monophysite school.

The authorities additionally record the headings Apollinarius of Laodicea and Apollinaris. His recorded language was Ancient Greek. His recorded confession was Apollinarism. He was the child of Apollinaris.