Up to now we have looked mostly at differing teachings about the human person and especially tendencies to separate it into warring factions. When this fractured view of humanity is taken into the Christological arena it becomes heresy; the conflicts or divisions between component parts within the human person present no major doctrinal problems until ecclesiastical debates about original sin begin to be formulated. If, as Nicaea and Chalcedon insist, Christ’s humanity must be full and entire, then his fleshly body must be combined with the soul, mind and spirit, since all these are part of the make-up of the human person. The Christological heresies which led to the doctrine of the dual nature variously undermined the full humanity of Christ, and, in so doing, denigrated those parts of humanity which they attempted to exclude from Christ’s humanity. The teachings of the desert urged spiritual athletes to ‘fight[ing] manfully against the passions of both body and soul’, according to Cyril’s Letter to the Monks of Egypt.1 The same author was to crystallise the integration of body and soul in Christ, through his operations in the public arena of Ecumenical Councils.
Christological formulations from the first four Ecumenical Councils in particular floundered when it came to maintaining the unity of Christ’s dual nature at the same time as insisting on His full humanity. And, whilst each of the Ecumenical Councils focused on specific heresies, attributed by name to individual fathers, the situation was complicated by the heresiarchs themselves refuting other heresies such that a hierarchy of heresies was implicit, with Arianism as the chief threat to the nascent Christian church. A double standard arose: the desert insisted on the subjugation of the flesh, and tolerated the body as the vehicle of the soul, with varying degrees of willingness to see humanity as an integrated whole. But this fracturing of human nature, or subordination of its materiality, could not be extended to the person of Christ without breaching the doctrine of the dual nature, and falling into docetism. As the iconoclastic debate was to show, it was the quintessentially material aspects of Christ which proved his humanity and only through this could his divinity save mortal humans. Constantine’s edict of toleration indicated a plurality of religious belief in the fourth century; this diversity continued within the emergent Christian church through a range of beliefs which synthesised some Christian teachings with other elements. There was mutual borrowing of and attribution of ideas, and the strength of heterodox variants to Catholic doctrine is shown by the number and scale of Councils which were required to pin down the most basic of Christian tenets: that Christ was fully man, and fully divine at one and the same time. Certain sectors of the church proved more resistant to orthodoxy than others; equally, the perpetuation and validation of alternative ‘readings’ of Christ’s two natures owed much to differences in interpretation, cultural nuances, linguistic subtlety, political expediency and sheer brute force. A large body of divergent thought falls under the portmanteau concept of Gnosticism; others are more clearly identified by individual Fathers of the church who fell out of favour with the Catholic majority. Some teaching was condemned as heretical even though it did not aspire to orthodoxy; Celsus is a case in point. Origen (himself viewed by some as on the cusp of heterodoxy) devoted considerable effort to disproving Celsus’ teachings, but Celsus did not set himself up as an orthodox Christian. A Middle Platonist philosopher, he dismissed the gospels of Matthew and Luke as ‘feeble stories for the credulity of women and slaves’ and allied himself with Gnostics and Marcionites.2 Celsus’ True Doctrine (Alethes Logos) only exists through Origen’s Contra Celsum; in this he presents Celsus’ view of Christ as a goes or magician. But Celsus was the first critic of Christianity to give real attention to the person of Christ; this, at a time when the doctrines about Christ were still being evolved, merited refutation.3
Chapters 7–9 show the ‘heretical’ tendencies in some Syrian and Antiochene environments; whilst remembering it was often victorious Alexandrians who condemned and anathematised such teachings, the situation in Mesopotamia in late antiquity was ‘a veritable playground for extremely radical ascetic ideologies’.4 It is a curious conundrum that Christian asceticism risked pollution by fanatical extremism which, ironically, erodes the central tenet of Christianity – that God’s loving mercy towards human creation is articulated through the gift of his human/divine son, who lived in the world and acted through its means, and according to the laws of physical existence. From the outset some calling themselves Christians sought an elite status by adopting and encouraging practices which, in refuting the world and its fleshly temptations, threatened to undermine the belief that creation is intrinsically good. This was manifest in different ways according to geographical and intellectual contexts – from Montanism (also known as ‘New Prophecy’ among North African Latin Christians, which some see as exemplified by Tertullian),5 to Syrian Stylites whose approach was one of ‘such deep enmity toward the world, life, and the body as to make faith in God the Creator himself questionable’.6
With Syrian ascetic movements, there is considerable fluidity and nuance about the boundaries; this is true also for mainstream Christological divisions, where the largely Antiochene ‘Nestorians’ would see the heretical tag attached to that title as deeply offensive to their authentic response to the decision of the Council of Chalcedon.7 There was not, however, a simple geographical split. Take the example of Monophysitism: essentially a ‘conservative movement’,8 it affected the jurisdictions of both Antioch and Alexandria. Much variety of opinion existed within Syrian Christianity, which was divided between Nestorian and Monophysite bishops.9
Many Western Patristic writers found their faith was stimulated by the rigour of ascetic and intellectual groups or sects whilst rejecting their worst extremes of negativity about the human person and material creation. Such heresies focused on two problematic areas – a negativity about material creation which militates against acceptance of God’s creation, and specific Christological heresies which in denying Christ the full range of human attributes erode his dual nature. But dualism and absence of a holistic understanding of the human person do not necessarily go hand in hand – and some of the sects labelled subsequently, perhaps for ecclesiological and political reasons, as heretical, lend useful insights to authentic early Christian spirituality. The Mandeans are one example of an ambiguously positioned sect. A possibly pre-Christian religious Gnostic sect (their name derives from the Aramaic for ‘knowledge’, they were (and still are) a baptising sect with monotheistic dualist teachings, who revere John the Baptist as their key prophet, focusing on his baptising in the River Jordan.10 Although somewhat dualist they do not reject marriage but focus on other aspects of ascetic living, with the material sacrament of baptism as a recurring source of purification. As noted in Chapter 10, some of the images of being clothed in the body concern the dipping in the river Jordan or the ‘robe of glory’, and texts such as Ephrem’s Epiphany Hymn 4 (19–20) indicate at least a common spiritual thread:
whosoever puts on the robe of glory
From the water and the spirit,
Will destroy with its burning
The thorny growth of his sins.
At the same time, Ephrem was at the forefront of promoting orthodoxy, composing Prose Refutations against Mani, Marcion and Bardaisan.11
Other heretical groups, such as Marcionites, Manicheans and Gnostics, who found a place within Syrian and other milieus, shared a dualistic approach to the spiritual and physical realms, combining this with a valorisation of celibacy.12 It seemed that embracing such dualistic tendencies allowed for nothing between the extreme of losing oneself in the fleshpots of the world or rejecting it so comprehensively as to completely reject the possibility of marriage and human procreation.13 These are not the only heretical belief systems around at the time, and some are shared throughout the early Christian world; Keith Elliott’s translations of apocrypha include a caveat about not only Manichean but Priscillianist tendencies.14
Moving to Western Christendom, other tensions are apparent. Along with racist assumptions (for example, the common desert image of ‘the Ethiopian’ as representing demonic forces), anti-Semitism is sometimes employed to justify teachings about the human body. Athanasius, the ‘Father of Orthodoxy’ who was exiled five times, condemned ‘the Jews’ as equivalent to ‘flesh’ in contradistinction to the ‘spirit’ represented by Catholicism.15
A degree of religious contamination is evident in the key players in the Conciliar arena. Whilst some of those who were ultimately condemned held positions of high authority in churches or dioceses that were part of the Christian communion prior to their excommunication, the victors in the Ecumenical debates not infrequently had murky pasts and went to some lengths to explain away their shift in allegiance. ‘Heresies, like Christian orthodoxy, must have their Fathers’,16 and contemporary and modern commentators pay tribute to the clarity of thought and expression of some of the heterodox thinkers, whose skills sometimes exceed those of the orthodox writers.
And there were hierarchies within the heresies; Arianism is normally seen as the most dangerous and reviled heresy. Apollinarius continued to minister to a congregation of the faithful who would not accept their Arian bishop even after his excommunication in 346.17 Eunomius was appointed Bishop of Cyzicus from a standpoint of the most extreme form of Arianism, the Anomoean position,18 but stood condemned by the mainstream Cappadocians not for his Arianism but his teaching about the divine nature. In the case of Apollinarius, it was only particular parts or certain periods of his teachings that came to be seen as heresy. As Cyril of Alexandria admitted (when accused in his turn of being Apollinarist), ‘Not everything a heretic says is necessarily heretical’.19 So, Apollinarius was ‘orthodox enough in his doctrines of kenosis, of the Communicatio Idiomatum and the eternal nature of the Incarnation’. The more problematic aspect of his teaching, problematic not least because of the engagement with it by the Cappadocian Fathers, was his understanding of the divinity of Christ.20 There is only a slim gap between his understanding and Basil’s and, later, Cyril’s.
It was not until Apollinarius turned sixty that he began to be accused of heresy, by which time he had been teaching and preaching for many years.21 Until this point he had been viewed as ‘a theological luminary and a pillar of orthodoxy’,22 and this by the ‘Father of Orthodoxy’ himself, the oft-exiled Athanasius who saw him as a ‘staunch supporter of Nicene orthodoxy’.23 Writing about the extent to which Basil was tainted by Apollinarianism, Prestige debunks the issue nicely by presenting Eustace’s accusation as: ‘So and so in Syria has composed some writings in an unorthodox vein; you wrote him a letter 20 or more years ago; therefore you are the man’s accomplice.’24 As with Origen, a degree of ‘guilt by association’ took place retrospectively; Apollinarius ended up being seen as ‘the Father of the Eutychian error generally’ and became blamed for ‘anti-Chalecdonian offshoots which still used the Apollinarian forgeries’.25 Cyril’s reputation, however, managed to survive the taint of Apollinarianism.
Much of the namecalling and anathematising which came to the fore in the public debates derived from what were primarily non-theological issues. The interplay of Hellenistic philosophy and biblical teachings, the choice of Greek, Syriac or Latin to express ideas, and some prevailing differences in authority and perspective between the schools of Alexandria and Antioch, all have been mentioned as factors. As with the interpretation of New Testament teachings, so with the defining of doctrine in the fourth century onwards, there are complex social and political prompts, As Raven put it, ‘cultus and organisation, creed and philosophy, grew slowly and with countless ramifications’.26 The snobbery expressed against Eunomius by the Cappadiocians is a case in point.
In a shift from the wisdom of the desert, the advent of Ecumenical Councils marked the rise of polemical writings which grew from early apologetic into something altogether more vigorous and aggressive in its scope for refutation. Polemic lent itself to a process whereby heterodox phraseology helped forge orthodox doctrine. Eunomius of Cyzicus (325–95) in particular proved a very effective catalyst to his upper-class Cappadocian neighbours,27 whose scorn for his humble origins clearly rankled those who were inspired by his ideas. The chronology shows the interplay between Eunomius and his refuters; it is outlined in Chapter 12.
Gnosticism is a modern term used to collect together a range of teachings which, in their day, would have been distinguished according to specific thinkers,28 such as Marcion, Valentinus, Ptolemy and Basilides. Alistair Logan gives an extremely useful timechart and diagram of the transmission of the Gnostic myths from the 120s to the 330s.29 It has become almost a truism to say that we know most about the Gnostics from their detractors. More curious is the motivation for such wholesale and thorough destruction of their texts; were they destroyed in a fervent backlash of righteous indignation, or as a guilty clearing of the decks to disassociate from early infatuations, as might be imagined in the case of Augustine and the Manichees? Random loss of such influential texts seems unlikely.30 Just as Christian philosophers such as Clement appear to hold ‘dual nationality’, so in some very influential religious leaders in the first three centuries of the Christian era, Gnostic elements within Christian teaching were commonly found. Logan argues against Pétrement that rather than understanding Gnosticism in terms of Christianity we should see it as the other way round; Gnosticism informed Christianity.31 This position is endorsed by Mark Edwards, who contends that much Catholic teaching is embedded in the teachings of ‘heretics’ whose works were quarried by the orthodox.
Here we are mostly concerned with those aspects of Gnostic teaching which pertain to the integrity of human nature at an existential level, rather than their cosmological teaching. If Gnostics fostered a sense of an elect within society, did they not also foster a sense of anthropological hierarchies within the human person? It was certainly very important to Gnostics to understand the place of human nature, and human bodies; the ‘elect’ are part of humanity (albeit rarified) and they cannot entirely escape that context in their search for salvation. Religious anthropology therefore ‘forms the heart and pivot of Gnostic theology’.32 Whilst there is much diversity in gnostic thought, a chief concern is the relationship between anthropology and soteriology. Gnostics see the possibility of redemption only for an elect who share consubstantiality with the Redeemer in the form of a ‘divine spark, spirit, intelligence or seed’33 sometimes even expressed in the (very Pauline sounding) ‘inner man’. They lack the mainstream Christian emphasis on the possibility of the body being the ‘temple of the Holy Spirit’, showing instead ‘resentment of the body and the material world’.34 Gnosticism shares much of the dualism of the more negative teaching of Plato, but is far more pessimistic than Platonism as it asserts the corruption of not only the human bodily form but also the soul because of creation by a demi-urge.35
As we have seen, Syria was particularly active in producing heterodox teachings as Christian doctrine began to be formulated. One figure who recurs, both as influential and much refuted, is Marcion (c.85–160), condemned by Frend as the ‘arch-heretic’ of the second and third centuries.36 He fostered the Platonic distinction between a ‘highest God’ and a demiurge, and is known to us largely through the writings of Bardaisan.37 Like many of the Christological ‘heretics’ up to the sixth century, he was actively involved in the church, but was excommunicated in 144 for Gnostic teachings.38 His Antitheses (which have not survived) were written in response to this and are refuted vigorously by more orthodox writers, including the Odes of Solomon and Acts of Judas Thomas (discussed in Chapter 8, see pp. 116–20). Drijvers goes as far as to argue that anti-Marcionite polemic united the fragmented Syrian contexts.39 The attraction of Marcionism lay in the rejection of marriage in favour of a ‘pure’ life. Modern opinion varies about the significance of Marcion for the Syrian context: Vööbus argues that the existence of anti-Marcionite texts by Bardaisan suggests that Marcionism was seen as a threat to Mesopotamia at the time.40 Harvey describes it as the most pervasive form of early Christianity in the Syrian Orient;41 whilst this may be true of the area as a whole, this view is at odds with the findings of Murray, who thinks that Bauer and Drijvers exaggerate the influence of Marcionism on Edessa.42 Whatever the extent of its influence, the response to it in key Syriac sources is crucial, and as we have seen in the case of Ephrem, it was entirely possible to combine ascetic teachings with a positive view of the human body.
At around the same time, and also featuring in Syrian refutations, is Valentinus, who is referred to by name in the Liber Graduum.43 Flourishing around 120–160, he was a leading Christian Gnostic teacher, and an example of a highly persuasive and charismatic Father, possessing ‘brilliant intellectual and rhetorical skills’44 which made him ‘the greatest of Christian gnostics’.45 Valentinus was born in Alexandria and taught in Rome between 136 and 140, but was rejected by the orthodox church; his writings provided the catalyst to the distinction between orthodox and gnostic thought, and indeed even the concept of tradition and catholicity. Few manuscripts were available until the Nag Hammadi discovery; it is possible that the recently discovered Gospel of Truth is from his hand.46 His teachings mostly survive from the attack on him by Irenaeus, in Adversus haereses, such as 1.1.1. where Irenaeus details how the Word is descended from Sige.47 His theology is mostly to do with a complicated, layered cosmology in which the pleroma of the world produces a male-female syzygy from which descend other sets of beings. This culminates in the creation of Sophia and a demi-urge who created the demonic state of the material world. In order to save the world from this entrapment in materiality, a Christ figure was sent down as a Saviour to redeem the elite of believers – the Spiritual ones – who come above the Materials and Psychics in the created order. This is a heavily Platonised expression of the problem of the one and the many.48 Much Valentinian teaching is concerned with such cosmological issues; however, the negativity about the created world is usually taken to extend to that of the human person’s physicality.49 Valentinus’ detractors focus on his abhorrence of corruptibility; Clement presents him as suggesting Christ is not fully human because of this, giving as an example Valentinus’ assertion that Christ did not share normal excretory functions with the rest of humanity, hence: ‘Having endured everything he was continent; thus Jesus exercised his divinity. He ate and drank in a peculiar manner, not evacuating his food. So much power of continence was in food was not corrupted, since he himself had no corruptibility’.50 However, Clement’s methods should be borne in mind when evaluating such evidence.
Basilides is the earliest recorded Gnostic, flourishing between c.120–40. Also born in Alexandria, his teachings which drew on philosophical as well as Gnostic ideas are mediated mostly through Irenaeus’ Adversus haereses 1.24. Irenaeus’ depiction may be the most authentic, and is certainly extensive: Clement, on the other hand, suggests a more damningly dualistic worldview.51 The impact of Irenaeus’ version of his teachings was instrumental in his condemnation; as Edwards puts it, as one of ‘the pioneers of Christian speculation’, together with Valentinus and Marcion he was ‘relegated to the hinterland of ecclesiastical history because they appear in the guise of heretics even in our earliest testimonies’.52 In common with other Gnostic writings, he conceived of the universe as created through a series of emanations from a deity, with angels in the lowest rank, led by ‘the rebellious one the Jewish Scripture proclaimed as God’ who was responsible for the creation of the evil material world.53 Like Saturnius, he is concerned to establish the separate identity of Christianity from its Jewish ancestry, this making him, according to Pétrement, ‘above all a Christian theologian’, deriving his ideas from Saturnius and Menander.54 Christ, as an embodied Nous, sent to liberate the souls, swaps shapes with Simon of Cyrene in order to ascend freely.55 An alternative representation of Basilides may be found in the Refutation of All Heresies by Hippolytus,56 which features Jesus as an enlightened one who draws the elect back to God. His teachings are probably derived from Menander, who in turn drew on Simon Magus for inspiration.57 Hippolytus’ account critiques what may possibly be the first commentary on John’s gospel, in which Basilides explained the Logos through a series of sonships. The focus in the biblical text on the logos as light shed in a dark world fits well with this system.58 Humanity’s part in the cosmic cycle is seen as a potential sonship, for an elect, which recapitulates the ascent and descent of Christ. In Basilides’ version of redemption, only the soul can be saved; the corrupt body is doomed and good works do not help as only faith can save the ‘elect’.59 No connection seems possible between the redeeming Christ and humanity in terms of a common corporeality, which suggests his version of Christ is no more than docetic.
One of the key catalysts to Irenaeus, Saturnius attempted to resolve the paradox of the need for all humanity to have within it the divine spark, being achieved only in the elect in conjunction with faith which was not shared by those lower down the scale.60 His sense that Adam ‘lost’ the divine spark through the Fall was partially derived from Philo (and shared with Valentinus).61 Irenaeus’ ‘divine spark’ (Adv. haer. 1.24.1) is the first recorded mention of the concept placed in its Christian context. In common with other Gnostic writers Saturnius is concerned with establishing how Adam was created in a way which maintained God as transcendent; he put forward various alternative means by which Adam was created, involving angelic interaction and the ‘Golem’ of Jewish legend, displaying an anti-Semitism sadly too common in the ancient writers.62 The prime concern was man as part of the cosmos; how a redeeming Christ fitted in was subservient to this: his cosmology, in common with other Gnostics’, featured a multiplicity of creations with ‘a divine spirit trapped in a body with a soul, governed by demonically inspired passions and fate and buried in matter’. The revelation which could redeem this fated being was not a permanent change but ‘a gracious gift or series of gifts’.63 The concept of the divine spark which is shared by humanity and the redeemer imputes a consubstantiality between the two, which offered potential for a Christian interpretation of the holistic nature of humanity. Indeed, it has been argued that Saturnius’ version of the Christian Gnostic myth was the fullest one apart from the Apocryphon of John and the Gospel of the Egyptians.64 Irenaeus blames Saturnius for doctrine which combines docetism with an ugly gloss of anti-Semetism, when he suggests that Christ is sent by the Father to destroy ‘the Jewish God and the evil section of humanity’, appearing in the semblance of a man in order to save those who believe in him.65
Mani was born in the first half of the third century, became the first Bishop of Edessa c.31266 and wrote in Syriac.67 Mani achieved a huge following, setting himself out as having quasi-prophetic status due to having been the recipient of wisdom from one of the divine syzygoi which form the basis of Valentinian and other Gnostic teachings about emanations from a divine pleroma; he saw himself as ‘an apostle’ of Jesus Christ.68 Whereas some religious movements might have asceticism as one possible mode of expression, Manichaeism has asceticism as a core value,69 and this is demonstrated by the ubiquity of manuscripts of the text most devoted to ‘the battle for the body’. Known mostly from a Chinese version, it is extant in manuscripts in five different languages dating from six centuries.70
Manichaeism borrows from the Christian trichotomy of man as body, soul and spirit, and modifies this by dividing these parts into a dualistic cosmology, with two kingdoms of light and darkness, suggesting the body is formed from ‘the dirt of the demons and the faeces of the demonesses’.71 Its world-rejecting philosophy promoted an elite whose perfection is demonstrated by their renunciation of the world; the non-spiritual elite are dismissed as being no more than ‘hearers’, whose distinction from ‘the righteous ones’ is noted by the contemporary Patriarch Timothy.72 The title of saddikeni is reminiscent of the Qumran tradition, and the Patriarch’s knowledge of them, as evidence of discussions held with Didymus the Blind,73 shows how in common with other fringe ascetic movements heterodox teaching was intriguing to more mainstream Christian thinkers. Indeed, at the time Mani’s writings were first circulating, the Christian canon was still ‘open’. The existence of such writings prompted the formation of a canon; Gardner and Lieu suggest this situation resembles Marcion’s role in the concept of the New Testament as a discrete entity.74
It is in its attitudes to the body that Manichean thought is most allied to other Gnostic texts.75 Within Manichaeism Jesus is described as ‘a Splendour’ who approaches Adam to assist in the process of releasing the light particles trapped in matter. He is presented as a ghostly figure without human form, achieving only docetic suffering; and in this travesty of orthodox Christology, Mani’s teachings resemble Marcion.76 Their teachings about Christ are vigorously laid out and contextualised within their Gnostic cosmological viewpoint; the body is seen as a microcosm of the ‘first world’, with the upper parts ruling the higher elements of humanity and so on down the hierarchy. Evidently, Manichean writers not only had access to Christian texts but understood the theological interpretations which were being developed about them, as shown by this extract from a letter, which must have delighted the monophysites who followed them:
The Galileans affirm that Christ has two natures but we pour rude laughter on them. For they do not know that the substance of light is not mixed with another matter but is pure, and cannot be united with another substance even if they seem to be joined.77
The yoking together of body and soul in the human person presented as much offence to Manicheans as did the idea of a dual nature in Christ. They therefore borrowed the Chrysippean notion of krasis (blending of two different substances but in a manner to retain their separate identity) in order to account for the way in which the spirit engages with the body.78 The process of procreation was especially repugnant as this was seen as a ‘miscarriage’ which could only lead to producing a ‘garment for Az’ (a female personification of greed and desire) which would further entrap the soul.79
Augustine, who in his youth was much attracted by the teachings of Mani,80 remains one of our most reliable sources of information about the reception of the teachings; one-sixth of his treatise on heresies is devoted to the matter and Mani he is the only heretic Augustine actually names.81 Although Augustine’s juvenile flirtation with the Manichees is well known,82 correspondence from later in his life suggests a continuing dialogue with the sect; a letter from ‘the Manichaean Secundinus’ to Augustine from c.405/6 urges rejection of the orthodox teaching of the Incarnation, on the basis of millenarianism: ‘Stop, I beg you, enclosing Christ within a womb, lest you yourself be enclosed once again within a womb. Stop making two natures into one, because the judgment of the lord is approaching’.83 Other mainstream Fathers who were associated with the sect include Jerome, whose ascetical practices were attacked by Jovinian as being Manichean.84
Taken to its logical conclusion, Mani’s teaching states that only those who adopt extreme asceticism or encratism are worthy of salvation, and those who are less spiritually gifted are relegated to providing the children who would become converts to the faith. In condemning sexual activity, even within marriage, such sects suggest a millenarian approach – if the end of the world is close there would be no need for more people, even to spread the gospel message.85 The fourth-century Coptic translation of the Manichean Psalm Book contains many of the themes and terminology of early Syriac spirituality;86 one of the Manichean psalms contrasts two ways of salvation – virginity and enkrateia – with marriage, making it clear that the former is the only route to salvation.87 Resonances with the apocryphal Acts of Thomas give a very Syrian flavour to the texts, but in terms of the imagery employed, in contrast to the Syrian use of the body as clothing, the second of the Psalms of Thomas from the Manichean Psalm Book describes the soul as a light-bearing robe, from which went out (the language recalls the emanations of Valentinian emanation of sige) light and fragrance to sweeten the stench of evil.88 In the Second Psalm of Thomas the descent of Jesus is explicitly denoted in terms of clothing images: ‘the fourth [vehicle] is the summons that he clothed upon his body’.89
Close reading of Allberry’s edition of the Manichean psalms reveals copious citation from the New Testament, and echoes of the Hebrew psalms in addition to the elitist teaching and dark/light dualism.90 It is not hard to see why these texts would have been attractive and they bear strong resemblances to non-canonical and apocryphal texts of the period.91 Manicheans also treasured the Hymn of the Pearl found within the apocryphal Acts of Judas Thomas92 which is strongly Syrian in flavour.
Although Manichaeism had adherents throughout the ancient world, it does seem to have a particular affinity to the Syrian milieu, and the attraction was to some extent mutual. Extreme hatred of sexual activity is a dominant feature of the encratic movement. In addition, certain themes and modes of exegesis are adopted by some Syrian writers. Bianchi argues that the existing ‘encratite aspirations’ were ‘pressed into service in the Biblical exegesis of the Church’. As in Ephrem’s writings, images of the Bride, Bridegroom and the Wedding Feast (especially drawn from Matt. 25.44) feature frequently in Manichean literature; whereas in Ephrem they represent Christ, for the Manicheans they signify the church. Flowing in the other direction, key apocryphal texts including some Syrian ones, such as the Acts of John, Paul, Peter, Andrew and Thomas, were popular among Manicheans up to end of the fourth century.93 As suggested earlier, the boundaries between such alternative or heretical sects were somewhat elastic.
The enduring popularity of Mani’s teachings is demonstrated by the emergence of sects as divergent in geography and history as the Bogomils, who flooded the Bulgarian orthodox church from the tenth century onwards with neo-Manichean practices, and the whole Cathar movement, in particular the Albigensians in twelfth- and thirteenth-century France. The orthodox response included insistence on the dual nature of Christ as a mirror image of the integrated body and soul in human beings, something derived in part from Apollinarian thought. Acknowledging the conflict between body and soul, and owing something to the Orphic myth, Gregory Nazianzus, like his Syrian near contemporary, Ephrem, employs poetry to address this type of heresy:
I am a soul and body: the one, an efflux of divinity,
Of infinite light; the other was formed for you
From a murky root. But these which were far apart
You’ve gathered in me.
If I am a common nature, I end the battle. If the battle is grim,
Continual, then I am no longer a nature woven of them both.94
Alluring though some aspects of Gnostic and Manichean thought were to the early church, their separateness from ecclesial structures enforced a cordon sanitaire around their teachings. Far more troubling to the Catholic church were those heretics who were additionally Fathers within the church. Of these, Apollinarius was the most dangerous, both for the depth and breadth of his influence on the established church but also for the specific nature of his anthropological teachings, which were in many ways so plausible. But first we need to consider the ‘neo-Arian’ Eunomius,95 whose opponents also took issue with Apollinarius.
The context of Eunomius’ exchanges with the Cappadocians is outlined in Chapter 12.96 Gregory of Nyssa argues against him using a metaphor which suggests the integrity of the human person; he takes an image from Luke of the Good Shepherd coming to seek and save those who were lost, carrying home on his shoulders not the fleece only but the entire sheep.97 Like Apollinarius, his teachings were a powerful catalyst to the formation of Catholic doctrine; like Apollinarius, he fell into error through a genuine attempt to expound one aspect of Christian doctrine (the unity of God) at the cost of the concept of consubstantiality. For Eunomius, God was knowable to man, and knowable as and through a unity (by contrast to any Gnostic sense of a demi-urge who created the bad, material world). But the only way he could find of protecting such supreme and absolute unity was by insisting on the other persons of the Trinity being ‘inferior and derivative’.98 For him, the titles of ‘Father’ and ‘Son’ referred not only to different persons within the Trinity, but different essences.99 This concept of Anomoeanism was seen by his detractors as an extreme form of Arianism.100 It also had overtones of adoptionism; if the divine nature did not exist ‘prior to the divine persons’, it could only be passed on by God the Father ‘as a sort of possession’ rather than an inherent essential nature in Christ.101 According to Eunomius, Christ’s dual nature separated him from the Father whose nature is wholly divine; from this followed the assertion that as God (the Father) is unbegotten and Christ is begotten, they must be of different substances.102 Basil of Caesarea and the two Gregories engaged in vigorous debate about this, whilst also becoming increasingly concerned with what they understood Apollinarius to have taught.
Researching Apollinarius today brings one into contact with some of the most engaging and quixotic of twentieth-century scholars; Raven’s opinion that ‘Apollinarius is at least large and dignified. Gregory [of Nyssa] is noisy and self-satisfied, pettifogging and vulgar’,103 whilst lacking a modicum of objectivity, is actually also based on thorough reading of the extant fragments of the heresiarch’s works; his work and that of Prestige a quarter of a century later have proved invaluable as well as extremely entertaining. Whilst we remain indebted to Lietzmann’s edition of fragments of Apollinarius’ writings, little has been written about him in recent years and there is the danger that a brief survey here will do what Raven accused the Cappadocians of doing – focusing on individual words at the cost of the overarching theories.
As we have already noted, Apollinarius was for much of his life revered and followed eagerly. Athanasius’ respect for him is demonstrated by their extensive correspondence, extending even to the discussion of a draft of his Epistle to Epictetus.104 Father and Son were both key players in Laodicea in Syria where they were employed to get round an edict from Emperor Julian, in 362, which was designed to prevent Christians from teaching in the Law School there. Apollinarius used his ‘brilliant and subtle mind’105 to redraft gospel materials in classical style, thus smuggling into the secular academy much Christian teaching. It was here that Jerome heard Apollinarius lecture in 373.106 His writings were vast in number and varied, ranging from commentaries, a thirty-volume work against Porphyry, critique of Origen, Marcellus and Macedonius, Eunomius, and Diadore of Tarsus – a striking focus on heresies of his day.107 Few of these have survived independently of their polemical handling by his detractors.
The quality and incisiveness of his thought is notable; he produced ‘a noble list of long-perished works, a list in which those devoted to the heresy called by his name supply but a small proportion of the total’.108 Early twentieth-century commentators present him as an exceptionally persuasive and insightful writer, Prestige claiming that: ‘Nowhere in patristic literature is there any document to compare with his “Detailed Confession” (Kata Meros Pistis) for terse expression, penetrating thought, understanding of the truth, and grasp of the reasons why the falsehoods are wrong.’109 Yet both his method and the content of his teaching was ultimately flawed; blessed (or perhaps cursed) with a ‘fatal fluency’ (this is Basil’s feeble defence against the enthusiasm he expressed earlier in his career for the teachings of Apollinarius)110 he wrote large numbers of texts which used human premises rather than scriptural proof, an apparent version of Millenarianism, as well as the suspect version of the Incarnation so vigorously refuted by the Cappadocians.111
His influence was hugely significant, not just in the range of writers who shared some of his ideas, but in the high status of those most under his sway. If we accept as genuine the correspondence between Apollinarius and Basil of Caesarea (of which more later), we can attribute to him Basil’s decision to use the homoousion, in preference to the formula homoios kat’ ousian, as ‘his canon of orthodoxy’.112 Much of the condemnation of Apollinarius by the Orthodox church stemmed from references to a correspondence between him and Basil which did not survive; the mantle was taken up by Gregory of Nazianzus after Basil’s death, in his letters to Cledonius (discussed more fully in Chapter 12). Apollinarius was a prolific letter writer; it is likely that he engaged in correspondence with the shortlived Jovian, successor to Emperor Julian, who spent time in Antioch not far from Laodicea where Apollinarius was bishop in 363. This correspondence was possibly shared with Athanasius, resulting in the attribution of at least one of the letters to the Archbishop of Alexandria.113 Other ‘orthodox’ names who may have circulated his letters included Pope Julius of Rome,114 and Gregory the Wonder-worker, whose input into the Kata Meros Pistis ‘render[ed] the book suitable for issue as a handbook of Alexandrine orthodoxy’.115 This complex pattern of circulation and attribution makes it difficult to reconstruct what his teachings actually were.116 Further witnesses to Apollinarius, or at least his reputation, include the historian Rufinus, who, like Socrates, makes some mention of him. Rufinus contradicts himself, saying both that Apollinarius denied that Christ had a human soul, and also that (a more nuanced reading) ‘that he did possess a soul, but only its animating and not its rational side, and that to supply the place of a rational soul there was the Word of God’.117 He was also a catalyst to Didymus the Blind, who does not cite him by name but refutes Apollinarian-sounding teaching.118
It is when we turn to the Cappadocians that we see the fullest extent of Apollinarius’ influence, demonstrated by the fact that the Cappadocians felt the need to reconstruct his writings in order to condemn them.119 Despite Basil’s later assertions that there had been no friendship between them, it is clear from Basil’s own reliably authentic letters that there had been a correspondence, though opinion about the authenticity of Basil’s letters 361–4 is divided. Cotelier thinks they are forgeries circulated by Eustathius of Sebaste, but in the nineteenth century this view was challenged, above all by Dräseke; Prestige’s belief that they are genuine120 is followed by other modern scholars, such as Meredith.121 It is sometimes said that Apollinarianism predated Apollinarius.122 Indeed, Justin Martyr’s Apology ii (10) expressly states that Christ was ‘body and Logos and soul’, ‘that is, that the Logos in Him took the place of the highest element, the logikon (in Greek) in us’.123 This shows how Christian philosophers used the Hellenistic teachings; if the soul in man was divided, it was perhaps only the higher, more spiritual part that was at issue in determining the extent to which Christ shared a ‘soul’ with humans. Clearly as an animate being he would have to have the ‘lower’ part of the soul which engendered life itself at an animal level.
The afterlife of his thought reached its culmination in the discussions at the Council of Chalcedon in 451; some of his favourite terminology was adopted by Cyril of Alexandria, prompting accusations that the great Alexandrian was tainted with his heresy: in particular, the catchphrase that Christ was ‘one enfleshed nature of the God-Word’, shared by several deemed orthodox writers of the time, was taken from Apollinarius and assumed to suggest a monophysite understanding of the Divine person.124 But Apollinarius was innocent of this charge; indeed he adapted an image from Origen’s De Prin. 2.6.6. of the human soul of Christ being like a lump of iron, with the Godhead being fire, to such good effect that ‘from his time it becomes a theological commonplace in refutation of Monophysitism’.125 In other words, he was as much a preacher against heresy as a heretic. Similarly, although he states that the Son of Man did descend from heaven in order to become incarnate, he does not see this as an adoptionist activity; Apollinarius cites the kenotic hymn to prove that Christ is exalted at the Ascension and therefore must logically have descended.126
So what were the problems in his Christology and what were the attitudes to the humanity of Christ which produced such reaction? As suggested above, parts of his theology were acceptable, for example, his assertion that ‘Christ is fully divine: he is not a god by adoption (fr. 81, Lietzmann, 224.15) or by participation (kata meros pistis 25, Lietzmann, 176.9)’. So far, so good; but the second principle is more problematic: ‘Christ is a single subject: he is one nature because he is one person. (Ep. Ad Dion. 1, Lietzmann, 257. 15–16).’127 The irony is that, whilst he thus excludes adoptionism (such as propounded by the school of Diodore of Tarsus), his attempt to refute the subordinationism of Arius looks similar to Monophysitism. Apollinarius’ desire to distance himself from Arius was partially responsible for the alternative heresy; while Arius denied Christ a soul in order to highlight his humanity, Apollinarius appeared to replace his soul ‘in order to avoid any possibility of making Him a creature’.128
The single-subject Christology that he advocated assumed that the single Logos which formed part of Christ was that of its pre-existent state, and therefore impassible and immortal. From this was derived the interpretation that ‘if the Logos is the archetype of all human spiritual intellects, or souls, then in the case of the divine incarnation the archetype simply replaced the soul of Jesus, it did not unite with it’.129
Apollinarius is commonly represented as replacing the soul of Christ with the Divine Logos (and thus fracturing the unity of the fully human element of Christ). But in fact when we look in more detail at the terms used, it is the mind rather than the soul that is being addressed, in accordance with the ‘rational soul’ conceived of in Greek philosophical thought. Apollinarius did not deny that Christ possessed a human body, which could be both sarx and sōma together with the psychē or soul. It was the nous, or pneuma being the highest part of the soul which was divine rather than human.130 He seems therefore to be following Philo’s interpretation of his classical forebears in dividing the soul into two; an animal one which confers existence, and a rational soul which grants reason.131 From this, Apollinarius’ detractors insist that he argues against Christ having a human soul, the implications of this being that he promoted only a partial humanity in the person of Christ. However, his argument is far more subtle than this and ‘in no single passage early or late does Apollinarius say that Christ did not assume a human soul’.132 The implication of his writings is rather that Christ’s mind, or spirit, that being the highest part of the soul according to Platonic thought, was divine. Fragments from the Apodeixis133 discuss the essence of mind as being to do with self-determination of freedom of will.134 If together with the Godhead (which is itself mind), there was in Christ also a human mind, the first purpose of the Incarnation (to overthrow sin) cannot be achieved.135 The corollaries of this and the extent to which this teaching was central are difficult to determine.136 His heresy lay solely in the affirmation that ‘the divine spirit of God the Son was substituted in the Redeemer for a human mind’. His use of the Bible complicates the matter, with a literal interpretation of John 1.14; only flesh is mentioned here, not soul.137 Another contentious text was 1 Cor. 15.47, which gave rise to accusations that Apollinarius was teaching a doctrine of the heavenly man.138 Apollinarius used the Pauline terminology of sarx and pneuma which leads to the issue of ‘the heavenly man’, a phrase much used in the Apodeixis. But Apollinarius was not attempting an anthropological system; rather, his chief concern was ‘to contrast his view of God enfleshed with the more generally acceptable idea of a man inspired’.139 Elsewhere, Apollinarius presents Christ as having so pure a substance that it was incapable of the sin to which humanity was prone through misuse of free will. It was not that the Divine Logos ‘sojourned in a holy man as happened to the prophets’ but that ‘the very Logos became flesh, not assuming a human mind, a mind changeable and the prey of filthy thoughts but being Himself divine mind, changeless, heavenly’.140 It was because he insisted upon the redemptive power of the Incarnation that he stressed the need to maintain Christ’s ‘purity’.141 Apollinarius’ Ep ad Dioces 2 spells this out: ‘The Word became flesh without assuming a human mind; a human mind is subject to change and is the captive of filthy imaginations; but He was a divine mind, changeless and heavenly.’142 Christ’s impeccability is the focus, rather than the absence of a soul: to quote from the fid. Sec. part 30, ‘God incarnate in human flesh retains His own activity pure; He is a mind unvanquished by sensible and physical passions, and governs the flesh and its physical impulses Godwise and without sin.’143 Apollinarius emphasised the immutability of divinity as the only way of explaining the role of the mind within Christ; the sense that this might detract from a complete integrated humanity was of less importance as we can see from Fragment 76: ‘The Human race is not saved by an assumption of a mind and a whole man, but by the taking of flesh … An immutable mind was needed which would not fail through weakness of understanding.’144
In the defence of the unity of persons in Christ or a parallel sense of the integrity of human nature, Apollinarius is a poor witness. His teachings were ill-used and his reputation abused by the orthodox Fathers of his day, who became ashamed of their association with a man whose intellectual powers challenged their own. Modern commentators have been more generous, as well as comparing him favourably to the arch-heresiarch Arius:
Apart from his one peculiar tenet, his teaching was clear and strong and good. It probably exercised a very powerful and wholly beneficial influence on Christian thought. And when he went astray, he did so not, like Arius, by weaving every pre-existent strand of heresy into one vast system of theological depravity, but partly through misinterpretation of language that had hitherto been commonly employed without unorthodox intention, partly through ill-considered zeal for certain genuine aspects of evangelical truth.145
Whether such tolerant praise is merited depends on how persuaded one is by the Catholic theologians who succeeded in anathematising him. Chapter 12 turns to the doctrinal evidence for the unity of the dual natures, and how such teaching reflects an integrated view of humanity.
1 Cyril of Alexandria’s Letter to the Monks of Egypt in John McGuckin, Cyril of Alexandria: The Christological Controversy (Crestwood, 2004), p. 246.
2 John A. McGuckin, The Westminster Handbook to Patristic Theology, (Louisville, 2004), p. 58.
3 James A. Francis, Subversive Virtue – Asceticism and Authority in the Second-Century Pagan World (Pennsylvania, 1995), pp. 132–7.
4 A. Vööbus, Literary Critical and Historical Studies in Ephrem the Syrian (Stockholm, 1958), p. 161. Susan A. Harvey echoes this in her statement that the Syrian Orient ‘is notorious as a hotbed of dualism’ spawning especially Gnosticism, Marcionism and Manichaeism. ‘Embodiment in Time and Eternity: A Syriac Perspective’, SVTQ, vol. 43, no. 2 (1999): pp. 105–30, at p. 107.
5 See, among others, Louis Bouyer, The Spirituality of the New Testament and the Fathers (New York, 1982), p. 453. John McGuckin notes that Tertullian ‘passed from being a critic to an enthusiastic adherent late in his life’. Westminster, pp. 230–31.
6 A. Vööbus, A History of Asceticism in the Syrian Orient (2 vols, Louvain, 1958), vol. 1, p. 157.
7 Syrian Christology suffers from a complex relationship to Alexandrian orthodoxy; the Council of Nicaea failed to outlaw Arianism, which continued to flourish alongside ‘orthodox’ doctrine. Indeed, in some areas up to and beyond the date of the Council of Chalcedon, which was bruited as having affirmed Nicene orthodoxy, the dominant parties in Syria were not ‘orthodox’ in Cyrilian terms, but were what became to be regarded as heretical. As Harvey explains, Ephrem complained bitterly that the Nicene ‘party’ of his day (mid-fourth century) was a minority group called ‘Palutians’ after the late second-century bishop Palut, while the more numerous Marcionites (among others) claimed the name ‘Christian’. ‘Embodiment’, p. 107. Robert Murray notes that Palut was a disciple of Addai. Symbols of Church and Kingdom: A Study in Early Syriac Tradition (London, 2006), p. 4.
8 John Meyendorff, ‘Continuities and Discontinuities in Byzantine Religious Thought’, DOP, vol. 47 (1993): pp. 69–81, p. 71.
9 Frances Young (with Andrew Teal), From Nicaea to Chalcedon (2nd edn, London, 2010), p. 245.
10 The Mandeans and Manicheans share the Syrian reading of the garment of skin being a garment of light, found by all parties in the Targum. Sebastian Brock, The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World of Saint Ephrem (Kalamazoo, 1992), p. 86. See also J. Bowker (ed.), The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (Oxford, 1997), p. 611.
11 These texts, taken from the Palimpsest BM Add. 14623 were translated by C.W. Mitchell (2 vols, 1921). This is available on-line as S. Ephrem’s Prose Refutations of Mani, Marcion and Bardaisan at http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/ephraim2_0_intro.htm. The refutations deal mostly with cosmological rather than anthropological matters.
12 Susan A. Harvey, Asceticism and Society in Crisis: John of Ephesus and the Lives of the Eastern Saints (Berkeley, 1990), p. 7.
13 Bouyer, writing of Augustine’s conversion, notes that the heritage of Manichaeism was ‘a dualism of substantial oppositions, hence an all-or-nothing spirituality: to yield to the attractions of the flesh, or else completely to exclude them’. Spirituality, p. 469.
14 J. Keith Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament: A Collection of Apocryphal Christian Literature in an English translation (Oxford, 1993), p. 439.
15 David Brakke, ‘Jewish Flesh and Christian Spirit in Athanasius of Alexandria’, JECS, vol. 8 (Winter 2001): pp. 453–81. This relates to the Jewish practice of physical circumscision in contradistinction to the Pauline advice for spiritual circumscision.
16 Aloys Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition: vol. 1, From the Apostolic Age to Chalcedon (Oxford, 1975), p. 78.
17 Charles E. Raven, Apollinarianism: An Essay on the Christology of the Early Church (Cambridge, 1923), p. 131.
18 John D. Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness (London, 2006), p. 160.
19 Letter to Eulogius, para. 1, cited McGuckin, Cyril, p. 183.
20 Raven, Apollinarianism, p. 231.
21 G.L. Prestige, Fathers and Heretics (London, 1968), p. 96.
22 Ibid., p. 100.
23 Young, Nicaea, p. 245.
24 G.L. Prestige, St Basil the Great and Apollinaris of Laodicea (London, 1956), p. 29.
25 Paul Rorem and John C. Lamoreaux, ‘John of Scythopolis on Apollinarian Christology and the Pseudo-Areopagite’s True Identity’, CH, vol. 62, no. 4 (Dec. 1993): pp. 469–82, at p. 479.
26 Raven, Apollinarianism, p. 3.
27 McGuckin, Handbook, p. 127.
28 A key text on the subject is Simone Pétrement, A Separate God: The Christian Origins of Gnosticism, trans. Carol Harrison, (San Francisco: Harper, 1984).
29 Alistair H.B. Logan, Gnostic Truth and Christian Heresy: A Study in the History of Gnosticism (Edinburgh, 1996), p. 55.
30 Similarly, Prestige believed that the vast majority of Apollinarius’ works were deliberately destroyed. Fathers, pp. 102–3.
31 Logan, Gnostic, pp. xix–xx.
32 Ibid., p. 167.
33 Ibid., p. 172.
34 Robert Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge, 1990), p. 82, cites Paulinus Ep. 24.6 Inter multa and Ep. 16.13 as images of slavery to and rebellion against God.
35 Logan, Gnostic, p. 168.
36 W.H.C. Frend, The Early Church (London, 1991), p. 55.
37 Hans J.W. Drijvers, History and Religion in late Antique Syria (Aldershot, 1994), p. 131.
38 J. Quasten, Patrology (3 vols, Westminster, MD, 1950– ), vol. 1, p. 269. Some commentators defend Marcion against the charge of Gnosticism but, as Quasten points out, he shares with Gnostics a rejection of the Hebrew Scriptures and a cosmology which does not allow for the accepted view of Christ as saviour. Murray, Symbols, p. 4.
39 Chapter 1 of Hans Drijvers’ East of Antioch: Studies in Early Syriac Christianity (Aldershot, 1984) discusses this and suggests that the popularity of Tatian’s Diatessaron likewise created cohesion.
40 Vööbus, History, p. 46; and see p. 52 for apparent evidence of anti-Marcionite teaching in Ephrem.
41 Harvey, Asceticism, p. 113.
42 Murray, Symbols, p. 6.
43 C.S. Beggiani, Introduction to Eastern Christian Spirituality (London, 1991), p. 29.
44 McGuckin, Handbook, p. 345, and see also Vööbus, History, pp. 54–61.
45 Logan, Gnostic, pp. xix–xx; much the same is argued by McGuckin, Handbook, p. 345.
46 For a translation of this, see H. Attridge and G. Macrae, in J.M. Robinson, The Coptic Gnostic Library (5 vols, Leiden, 2000) vol. 1, pp. 55–122.
47 J. Stevenson (trans.), A New Eusebius: Documents Illustrating the History of the Church to AD 337 (London, 1987), pp. 79–80.
48 For more detail about Valentinus’ cosmological and anthropological understanding of the world, see McGuckin, Handbook, pp. 345–6, and Mark Edwards, Catholicity and Heresy in the Early Church, (Farnham, 2009), esp. pp. 23–9.
49 Edwards, Catholicity, p. 32, cautions against seeing Gnostics in general (he excepts Marcion) as suggesting a crude divorce between material and spiritual.
50 Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis, III. 7. 59.3, Stevenson, New, p. 85.
51 Pétrement, Separate, p. 336.
52 Edwards, Catholicity, p. 7.
53 McGuckin, Handbook, p. 45.
54 Separate, p. 345.
55 McGuckin, Handbook, p. 45. A translation of this passage of Adv. haer. 1.19.1–4 may be found in Stevenson, New, p. 77.
56 Extracts from this text may be found in translation in Stevenson, New, pp. 73–6.
57 Young, Nicaea, p. 197.
58 Mark Edwards sees Basilides as a key example of an original source of doctrines which were later officially rejected by the Catholic Church although they inspired what evolved as acceptable doctrine. Catholicity, pp. 20–23.
59 Adv. haer. 1.19.3, Stevenson, New, p. 77, and see Pétrement, Separate, p. 342.
60 Logan, Gnostic, p. 169. Irenaeus treats of this in Adv. haer. 1.29–30.
61 Pétrement, Separate, p. 332.
62 Logan, Gnostic, esp. pp. 169 and 183, and see also pp. 170–76.
63 Ibid., p. 196.
64 Ibid., p. 41.
65 Ibid., p. 41.
66 Murray, Symbols, p. 4, gives 240 as his date of birth; this conflicts with Vööbus, History, vol. 1, p. 109, where he claims Mani first preached on 20 March 242. This dating adds plausibility to a date of birth of 14 April 216, as given by Iain Gardner and Samuel N.C. Lieu (eds), Manichaean Texts from the Roman Empire (Cambridge, 2004), p. 4.
67 Vööbus notes that he used the term zaddiqa (righteous) to denote monks. History, vol. 1, p. 112. For a very detailed account of the teachings and the synthesis within Manichean teaching of Christian, Zoroastrian and Buddhist insights, see Jason David BeDuhn, The Manichaean Body in Discipline and Ritual (Baltimore, 2000). His concern, however, is less to examine the influence of Manichaeism on contemporary religious thought than to attempt to ‘recover’ how they envisaged salvation and the modern manifestations of their teachings.
68 Gardner and Lieu, Manichaean, p. 159.
69 Jason BeDuhn, ‘The Battle for the Body in Manichaean Asceticism’ in Asceticism, pp. 513–19.
70 Ibid., p. 513. The text is known as the Chinese Tractate/Treatise (Canjing, in Chinese). BeDuhn gives a series of charts to illustrate how this text outlines the ‘battle’ in a hierarchy of renunciations.
71 Vööbus is quoting here from the Manichean Hymn book. History, vol. 1, p. 111.
72 Gardner and Lieu, Manichean, p. 122.
73 Ibid., pp. 119–20.
74 Ibid., p. 151.
75 Ibid., p. 2; for specific links to the Syriac Hymn of the Pearl, see pp. 10–11.
76 Ibid., pp. 17–18.
77 Spurious fragment of a Letter to Addas, cited in Gardner and Lieu, Manichaean, pp. 174–5.
78 Jason BeDuhn, ‘The Metabolism of Salvation: Manichaean Concepts of Human Physiology’, in Paul Mirecki and Jason BeDuhn (eds), The Light and the Darkness: Studies in Manichaeism and its world (Leiden, 2001), pp. 5–38, at p. 9.
79 This idea is found, for example, in one of Mani’s writings from the Middle Persian Šābuhragān, cited in Mirecki and BeDuhn, Light, p. 6.
80 Confessions, esp. III.VI.10 and III. XII. 21; see also V.VII.12–13 for Augustine’s disillusionment with Faustus, a Manichean Bishop. Timothy of Alexander (sedit 380–85) believed most Egyptian bishops were Manicheans. Gardner and Lieu, Manichaean, p. 121. See also Jason BeDuhn, Augustine’s Manichaean Dilemma (2 vols, Philadelphia, 2010).
81 Johannes van Oort, ‘Mani and Manichaeism in Augustine’s De Haeresibus: an analysis of haer 46.1’, in Ronald E. Emmerick, Werner Sundermann and Peter Zieme (eds), Studia Manichaica IV (1997) (Berlin, 2000): pp. 451–63, esp. p. 453. Van Oort explores the issue of some of Mani’s followers referring to him as Manni, suggesting he disseminated manna; it is clear from the energy with which Augustine refuted this heresy that the teachings were revered widely.
82 Augustine’s De Haeresibus XLVI.11–19, gives the most extensive account. See Gardner and Lieu, Manichaean, p. 187, and Elizabeth A. Clark, ‘Theory and Practice in Late Antique Asceticism: Jerome, Chrysostom, and Augustine’, JFSR, vol. 5, no. 2, (Fall 1989): pp. 25–46, esp. pp. 31–5, for the influence on Augustine’s views of marriage, an important marker for asceticism.
83 Letter of the Manichaean Secundinus to Augustine, from Rome, AD 405/6. Secundinus, epistula ad Augustinum in J. Zycha (ed.), CSEL XXXV/2, 893–901, English translation by M. Vermes, cited in Garnder and Lieu, Manichaean, pp. 136–40.
84 Jerome, Adversus Jovinianum 1.3,5, PL 23.223, 225–7. See Clark, ‘Theory’, for a fascinating and detailed analysis of the influences on and circumstances surrounding these ascetic practitioners.
85 Marriage is condemned by Manichaean teaching because procreation prolongs the imprisonment of the soul in the body. Gardner and Lieu, Manichaean, p. 22.
86 Murray, ‘The Characteristics of the Earliest Syriac Christianity’ in Nina Garsoïan et al. (eds), East of Byzantium: Syria and Armenia in the Formative Period (Washington, 1982), p. 3.
87 Murray feels this begs the question: ‘What sense of being in a way of salvation was available to ordinary married people in any religion other than Judaism?’, ‘Characteristics’, p. 7.
88 As in the Hymn of the Pearl in the Acts of Thomas, the soul speaks with a regretful voice of its battle against the powers of darkness and corruption. Text 62. Concerning the Coming of the Soul, in Gardner and Lieu, Manichaean, pp. 196–9.
89 Kephalion 8. 36.27–37.27, cited Gardner and Lieu, Manichean, p. 218.
90 Manichean soteriology is based on the assumption that particles of light trapped in the physical body will ultimately be released. See Johan Ferreira (ed.), The Hymn of the Pearl: The Syriac and Greek Texts (Sydney, 2002), pp. 26–7.
91 See C.R.C. Allberry, A Manichaean Psalm Book Part II (Stuttgart, 1938).
92 Ferreira, Hymn, p. 2. As noted in Chapter 8, Ferriera argues for this section of the Acts of Thomas being ‘owned by the Manichaeans’. Johan Ferreira, ‘A Comparison of the Clothing Metaphor in the Hymn of the Pearl and the Chinese Manichaean Hymnscroll’, in Emmerick et al., Studia Manichaica IV (1997) (Berlin, 2000): pp. 207–19, at p. 208.
93 H.-J. Klauck, The Apochryphal Acts of the Apostles, trans. B. McNeil (Waco, TX, 2008), p. 3, and for fuller notes see pp. 148–9.
94 Gregory Nazianzus, Poem 1.1.4, Concerning the World, PG 37, pp. 415–23; this translation is taken from Peter Gilbert, On God and Man – the Theological Poetry of St. Gregory Nazianzus (Crestwood, 2001), p. 49.
95 Young, Nicaea, p. 156.
96 Young suggests that Eunomius was regarded ‘with considerable disdain’ by the Annesi household because he did not come from the same social strata. Nicaea, p. 156. The same point is made by Meredith, Gregory, pp. 27–8.
97 Eunon 2 (vulgo) 175, PG 45, cited Prestige, Fathers, p. 113.
98 Young, Nicaea, p. 157.
99 McGuckin, Handbook, p. 127; see also Richard P.C. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Understanding of God (Edinburgh, 1968), pp. 598–636.
100 The epithet may derive from Alexander of Alexandria’s assertion that the Son is not anomios to the Father, according to Socrates, Church History 1. 6. 16, suggests Mark Edwards, Catholicity, p. 124.
101 Zizioulas, Communion, p. 140
102 Ibid., p. 160.
103 Raven, Apollinarianism, p. 265.
104 Young, Nicaea, p. 245.
105 Meredith, Gregory, p. 46.
106 Young, Nicaea, p. 245.
107 Prestige, Fathers, p. 100. Raven notes specifically that his writings include ‘expositions of Trinitarian and christological doctrine’ and the extensive range of his correspondents. Apollinarianism, p. 152.
108 Raven, Apollinarianism, p. 127.
109 Prestige, Fathers, p. 102.
110 Ibid., p. 95.
111 Ibid., p. 96.
112 Edwards, Catholicity, p. 152.
113 See Hans Lietzmann, Apollinaris von Laodicea und seine Schule (Tübingen, 1904), pp. 119–22, and pp. 250–53 for the text.
114 Prestige, Fathers, p. 99.
115 Prestige, Basil, p. 62. Prestige believes a similar process of extrapolation and smuggling under the heresiological radar may have occurred with others works written by Apollinarius. The Kata Meros Pistis largely deals with Trinitarian teachings but in so doing throws light on Apollinarius’ understanding of Christ’s nature. Young, Nicaea, p. 247. The text may be found in Lietzmann, Apollinaris, pp. 167–85.
116 Young, Nicaea, p. 246, notes the great utility of Lietzmann’s edition of fragments of his texts. To my great delight when I accessed this volume in the Brotherton Library in Leeds, June 2011, I found that the owner prior to the library’s acquisition of the volume had been Bethune-Baker, who in addition to writing his name in the front of the book, had left a page of notes – and the receipt from a Tübingen bookstore as a bookmark!
117 Rufinus, HE ii.20, cf Socrates HE ii.46, according to Young, Nicaea, p. 249.
118 Young, Nicaea, p. 99.
119 Meredith, Gregory, pp. 47–8, on the correspondence.
120 See also Raven, Apollinarianism, 136.
121 Prestige, Basil, and Meredith, Gregory, pp. 146–7, believe that it was authentic. Sister Agnes Clare Way, on the other hand, argues strongly for their being forgeries, on the basis of unfamiliar language being used. ‘On the Authenticity of the Letters Attributed to Saint Basil in the So-Called Basil–Apollinaris Correspondence’, The American Journal of Philology, vol. 52, no. 1 (1931): pp. 57–65. She refers to previous studies conducted by J. Dräseke, whose Apollinarios von Laodicea: sein Leben und seine Schriffen, Texte und Untersuchungen, VII (Leipzig, 1892), pp. 100–112, gives the detail. See also Adolf Jülicher, Göttingische gelehrte Anzeigen (1893) p. 85.
122 See the comment that Athanasius was ‘Apollinarian before Apollinarius’ because of his Word-flesh Christology in Young, Nicaea, p. 63.
123 Raven, Apollinarianism, p. 12, n. 6.
124 Young, Nicaea, p. 246, citing his Letter to the Bishops of Diocaesarea 1, Lietzmann, Apollinaris, p. 255.
125 Prestige, Fathers, p. 107.
126 Ibid., p. 109.
127 Norman Russell, The Doctrine of Deification in The Greek Patristic Tradition (Oxford, 2004), p. 188.
128 Prestige, Fathers, pp. 114–15.
129 McGuckin, Cyril, p. 180. For a detailed breakdown of this point, see ibid., pp. 178–83.
130 Raven, Apollinarianism, p. 170.
131 Ibid., p. 196.
132 Ibid., p. 173.
133 Frag. 107, Lietzmann, Apollinaris, p. 232.
134 See also Frag. 150, Lietzmann, Apollianaris, p. 247.
135 Apod, Frag. 74, Lietzmann, Apollianaris, p. 222, trans. in Raven, Apollinarianism, p. 184.
136 Young, Nicaea, p. 246.
137 Prestige, Fathers, p. 109.
138 Meredith, Gregory, p. 150. See also J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines (London, 1977), p. 294.
139 Young, Nicaea, pp. 249–50.
140 Ad Diocaes 2, Lieztmann, Apollianaris, p. 256, trans. Raven, Apollinarianism, p. 184.
141 In his inimitable style, Prestige phrases it thus: ‘Apollinaris, it might be said, is so keen to make certain of the redeeming activity of God that he will not give the flesh a chance to find redemption under a soul of its own; the deity has got the flesh in Chancery and means to keep it there.’ Prestige, Fathers, p. 112.
142 Ep. ad Diocaes. 2, written c. 375 when Apollinarius was about to split with the church. Cited Prestige, Fathers, p. 111; in Lieztmann, Apollinaris, pp. 255–6.
143 Apollinarius, fid. sec. part. 30. cited Prestige, Fathers, p. 112.
144 Lietzmann, Apollinaris, p. 222, trans. Young, Nicaea, p. 249. See also Edwards, Catholicity, p. 152.
145 Prestige, Fathers, p. 94.