Jesus Wars

by John Philip Jenkins

  NICEA’S NEW WARS

  The question of how fully Christ was united with God the Father provoked the so-called Arian crisis. Arius was a priest who agreed that Christ was an immensely powerful and holy figure of supernatural dimensions, but as the Father had created him at a specific moment, we could not regard him as equally divine. Others, led by the Egyptian Athanasius, believed just as passionately that Christ was fully equal with the Father, entirely part of a God who was Three-in-One, and he had always held that status. The orthodox position was neatly summarized in a slogan that roughly translates as “There never was a was when He wasn’t.”12 As so often occurs in such philosophical battles, the differences between the two sides were actually not huge. Arians and Athanasians both held that Christ was intimately close to the Father and existed before the created universe. Athanasians believed that Christ was the same being (homoousios) with the Father; Arians thought that he was “of like being” (homoiousios)—similar, just not the same. The one letter made all the difference.

  Athanasius scored a massive victory in this conflict, but in so doing, he also opened the door to One Nature understandings of Christ. In 325, the Council of Nicea condemned the Arian view as heretical. The council asserted its belief in

  one Lord Jesus Christ, only-begotten Son of God, begotten from the Father, that is from the substance [ousia] of the Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of the same being or substance [homoousios] with the Father, through whom all things came to be, both those in heaven and those in earth; for us humans and for our salvation he came down and became incarnate [enfleshed, sarkothenta], became human [was “manned,” enanthropesanta].13

  The Council of Nicea became one of the legendary moments in the church’s history, marking the triumph of a newly declared orthodoxy. And although enforcing this view over the whole church took centuries (Arian Goths and Lombards still ruled large portions of western Europe in the sixth century), Athanasian doctrines eventually prevailed. Even today, hundreds of millions who attend liturgically oriented churches echo the doctrine every week when they recite a creed declaring, in whatever language, that Christ is of one being with the Father. But far from ending theological debate, Nicea actually opened whole new battlefronts. By the end of the fourth century, the mainstream church had reached fair agreement on the nature of God and the Trinity, but debate now shifted to the nature of Christ. Those christological debates dominated the fifth century.14

  The Nicene definition itself posed real problems for ideas of Christ’s humanity. The text does indeed assert a belief in the human Christ. Not only did Jesus become incarnate, but he also became human, anthropos. But people might disagree over what those terms might mean, and this debate opened a gulf between the churches of Alexandria and Antioch. John’s gospel talked about the Logos “becoming flesh” (sarx), and later thinkers viewed the Logos as the principle guiding Christ’s flesh or body. This Logos-sarx (Word-flesh) approach appealed to Alexandrian thinkers like Athanasius. But it would be possible to understand this as seeing God inhabiting a human body without any real identity of its own: Jesus in that sense would just be a generic representative of the human species. Antiochenes on the other hand worried that this approach underplayed Jesus’ full humanity. He was not just a body; he was a real individual man with a particular background and life story, with the human mind, will, and desires that this implied—he wept. Antioch’s thinkers accordingly put more emphasis on the human Christ, the anthropos, so that we speak of a Logos-anthropos (Word-man) view. Taking humanity, becoming anthropos, had to imply fully human status.15

  And then there was that loaded word homoousios, which now gained almost scriptural status in its own right as a concept that could not be safely challenged. But it could very easily be used to support One Nature theories. If in fact Christ shared a common substance with the Father, what then became of the man Jesus? Significantly, the Nicene Creed says literally nothing about what Jesus did between his incarnation and his crucifixion under Pontius Pilate. We hear not a word about his miracles or parables, his sermons or teachings, or anything at all in his earthly human life: it is almost as if none of his intervening life or career mattered in the slightest. However hard he tried, even Athanasius could not make a convincing case for the human nature of his Christ. In fact, critics of Nicea had solid grounds for claiming that the great council had just reinstated the old Sabellian doctrines in a new guise, the idea that Christ was just a form or mode of one divine being. Ironically, the same church gathering that had denounced Paul of Samosata back in 268 had explicitly condemned the term homoousios, which that earlier council had regarded as one of Paul’s heretical innovations. In 268, the church dismissed the word as heretical nonsense; sixty years later, it was the watchword for unifying orthodoxy.16

  APOLLINARIUS

  In its drift to One Nature theories, the church was dabbling with dangerous ideas. If Christ was really one with God, that would mean that God himself was carried in the Virgin’s womb, was born, was destined to suffer and die. Historian Edward Gibbon rightly suggests the consequences of Nicea for doctrine: “The faith of the Catholics trembled on the edge of a precipice where it was impossible to recede, dangerous to stand, dreadful to fall.”17 It was left to one of Athanasius’s closest disciples to carry his logic to its natural conclusion. As a fierce enemy of Arianism, Apollinarius of Laodicea in Syria wanted to stress the divine nature of Christ, and he did so in a brilliant series of essays and letters in the 360s and 370s. But in reacting against the Arians, who underplayed the divinity of Christ, he went so far in the opposite direction that he all but removed the human nature, in an extreme form of Word/flesh Christology. He became the ancestor of all later One Nature or Monophysite theologies.

  Apollinarius rejected any suggestion that Christ could have a human mind. Like most thinkers of his age, he followed Plato in seeing human beings as possessing a body (soma), soul ( psyche), and mind (nous). The psyche controlled animal functions, but the nous was the rational higher mind that made us human. Apollinarius argued like this: if Christ was of the same nature (homoousios) as God the Father, he was therefore divine. But surely a divine being could not so debase itself as to share human nature, and so could not have a human mind, nous, “a mind changeable and enslaved to filthy thoughts.” If Christ had a human mind, that would have meant that he possessed a dual personality, what we would today call schizophrenia—literally, a split mind.18

  Although the Incarnation involved a merger of human and divine elements, Apollinarius thought that the divine so dominated as to leave virtually nothing of the human in Christ except soma and psyche—the fleshly body, and the animal soul. Christ, said Apollinarius, contained no human mind (nous) or rational soul (psyche logike), but the divine Word supplied this role. “The Word of God has not descended upon a holy man, a thing which happened in the case of the prophets, but the Word himself has become flesh without having assumed a human mind…but existing as a divine mind immutable and heavenly.” Christ shared human nature, but in no sense could he be a human individual. In Christ, Apollinarius argued, the divine nature so prevailed that he became “God born of a woman,” a “flesh-bearing God.” “There is no distinction in Holy Scripture between the word and his flesh: he is one nature, one energy, one person, one hypostasis, at once wholly God and wholly man.”19

  However logical his argument, Apollinarius attracted massive criticism. If he was right, and Christ had no human mind, what exactly was salvation all about? Had Christ come to save and redeem just the flesh? As the nineteenth-century commentator Philip Schaff wrote, “the rational spirit of man requires salvation as much as the body.” At worst, Apollinarius seemed to be denying the real humanity of Jesus and reverting to a kind of Docetism. Several synods denounced his ideas, which were definitively condemned at the Council of Constantinople in 381, the so-called Second Ecumenical Council (Nicea was the first). Pope Damasus concurred: “If any one speaks of Christ as havin
g had less of manhood or of Godhead, he is full of devils’ spirits, and proclaims himself a child of hell.”20 The Roman church anathematized “all who maintain that the Word of God moved in human flesh instead of a reasonable soul. For this Word of God Himself was not in His own body instead of a reasonable and intellectual soul, but assumed and saved our soul, both reasonable and intellectual, without sin.”21

  But taking Apollinarius’s own work off the table did not solve the dilemmas concerning the Natures, or end argument. If he was wrong, and the One Nature idea was false, did that now mean that the Two Nature theory was correct? So was Cerinthus the Gnostic right after all? The Apollinarian affair launched the long wars that erupted into open conflict at Ephesus and Chalcedon, and beyond.

  THE NEW LANGUAGE OF GOD

  The Apollinarian crisis also showed how much of the controversy in the church arose from disputes over shades of language. By the end of the fourth century, theologians drew subtle yet critical differences between a number of words that earlier had been thrown around in far vaguer terms. The most significant thinkers were the so-called Cappadocian Fathers: Basil of Caesarea, Gregory Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa. Through their work, the church developed a whole new Christian philosophical system, complete with a terminology that would allow for greater precision in argument. This allowed Christology to be discussed in terms of levels or degrees of union, in a way that avoided a simple equation of Christ = God. The vocabulary they created shapes all the controversies of the fifth century.22

  The most important of these terms are ousia, physis, hypostasis, and prosopon. (See Table 2.)

  TABLE 2

  SOME KEY TERMS IN

  THE CHRISTOLOGICAL DEBATES

  Greek: ousia

  Latin: essentia

  English: being

  Greek: physis

  Latin: natura

  English: nature

  Greek: hypostasis

  Latin: substantia

  English: individual reality

  Greek: prosopon

  Latin: persona

  English: personality

  Physis meant nature, in the sense of “one’s true nature.” Hypostasis is a complex word but can be translated as “individual reality.” The word suggests “underlying” and could have an architectural sense, implying the foundations of a house. Prosopon implied personality. The word originally implies mask, as in a theatrical performance, and the Latin equivalent would be persona. In terms of modern psychology, it is fitting to think that what we call our “person” or personality is in fact a mask that we show to the outside world; but in a theological sense, it had no such sense of deception or illusion.23

  The distinctions are important. In terms of the Trinity, the Cappadocians imagined three individual beings—Father, Son, and Spirit—each with its own identity, hypostasis, but sharing a common being or ousia. God the Son is indeed of the same being, ousia, with the Father, as Nicea had declared, but that does not take us back to the Sabellian debates. As a human being, I share a common ousia with other humans, so we are of the same sort, but that does not mean that we are all identical. I have my individual identity, which differs from that of John Smith or Mary Jones. Christ could thus be homoousios with God without being identical to God.24

  But other key questions proliferated. If Christ had both a human and a divine nature ( physis), what was their relationship? At what stage did they come together? Did this happen from the conception of Christ, from his birth, or from some other time? And what happened to the human nature after that union? Did the human nature survive the Incarnation? Did it exist after the Resurrection? Just how human was the Christ who walked in Galilee was a knotty question.

  What did Christ know, and when did he know it? Presumably Christ had knowledge that fell short of that of God the Father, but how constrained was he? We might agree that the infant Jesus in the manger did not have total awareness of the inner workings of the universe, but did the adult man? Jesus’ degree of knowledge might in theory have developed gradually, as the man grew, matured, and suffered. But could we identify a specific point at which Jesus gained awareness of his divine identity, rather than a gradual realization?

  3. Declaring the Jesus Wars: The Fifth Century

  ALEXANDRIA

  Much of the debate leading up to Chalcedon involved a decades-long war between two major intellectual centers, the twin hearts of Christianity: Alexandria and Antioch. Each was among the most ancient centers of the faith, with an overwhelming sense of continuity and tradition. Both cities grew mightily in power and prestige as the fifth century went on. The harder the barbarians struck in the west, against Gaul and Spain and Africa, the more the shrunken empire came to rely politically and economically on Syria and Egypt—that is, on Antioch and Alexandria. Each city, also, came to represent a particular interpretation of the Natures controversy, with Alexandria holding firmly to One Nature doctrine, and Antioch being open to Two Nature ideas. Nestorius himself was very much a product of Antioch, and the Alexandrians were his deadliest enemies.

  Alexandria’s distinctive heritage can be traced to the early-third-century scholar Origen, who was the source of many of the theories and much of the vocabulary—including ousia and hypostasis—that would shape Christology. Origen also pushed Alexandrian theology in highly philosophical directions, and he pioneered the symbolic, spiritualizing approach to Scripture that so often marked Egyptian thinkers. In the decades following Nicea, Alexandria’s heroic representative was the bishop Athanasius. He had insisted absolutely on the divinity of Christ, on the doctrine of homoousios, and fought any attempt to undermine the divine nature within Christ. This tradition was kept alive by a series of Alexandrian successors. The greatest was Cyril, who was at once a brilliant thinker and—let it be said—an obnoxious bully. Cyril struggled mightily against any concession to Two Nature doctrine. He rejected the suggestion that the Word became man through a kind of joining based merely on will or pleasure. The union had to lie deeper than that.25

  Cyril’s greatest contribution to doctrine was the formula that he devised in opposition to Nestorius, that of the hypostatic union. According to this view, which the Council of Chalcedon consecrated as official doctrine, two different natures came together in a “union according to hypostasis” (henosis kath’ hypostasin), a dynamic unity, “and from both arose one Christ, one Son.”

  The Word, having united to himself hypostatically in an ineffable and inconceivable manner flesh animated by a rational soul, became man and was called son of man…. While the natures that were brought together in true union are different, yet from them both is the one Christ and Son…the Godhead and the Manhood, by their ineffable and indescribable coming together into unity, perfected for us the one Lord and Christ and Son.

  Mary was the Mother of God because she bore flesh that was indissolubly united to the divine Logos. “So we shall acknowledge one Christ and one Lord, not worshipping a man together with the Word…but worshipping him as One and the same.”26

  Also vital in terms of later Christian practice was Cyril’s proclamation of eucharistic doctrine. If Christ was God incarnate, then believers could access that divine life through the body and blood of the Eucharist. Although we have not yet quite arrived at the medieval Western idea of the Mass as an act of transubstantiation, Cyril forcefully expresses the idea that the bread and wine are utterly transformed. We receive the Eucharist, he writes, “not as the flesh of a man sanctified and associated with the Word by a unity of dignity, or as having God dwelling in him, but as Life-giving of a truth and the very own flesh of the Word himself. For being, as God, life by nature, when he became one with his own flesh, he made that flesh life-giving.” As for many other thinkers, Cyril’s very high interpretation of Christ led to an exalted view of the sacraments and the clergy who dispensed them.27

  The problem in all this was that Cyril was drawing much more heavily than he realized on extreme One Nature doctrines, and these systematically influenced his wo
rk. In forming his ideas, he was entranced by a phrase that he believed had been written by his solidly orthodox predecessor, Athanasius, who had supposedly spoken of Christ as “one Nature (mia physis) of the Logos of God Incarnate.” Through Cyril, this idea became the basis of emerging Christian orthodoxy. The problem was that the text in question was forged, and the idea actually came not from Athanasius, but from Apollinarius, the condemned heretic. Although Antiochene theologians tried to expose the forgery, few Christian leaders listened. Based on these spurious texts, the Alexandrian tradition became ever more committed to ideas of One Nature. Particularly hair-raising was Cyril’s proposition that “the Word of God suffered in the flesh, and was crucified in the flesh, and tasted death in the flesh.” Nothing in that formulation would have surprised Apollinarius. Through Cyril’s mishandling of a bogus text, the doctrines of Apollinarius left their stamp on mainstream Christology, pushing the image of Christ in much more exalted and divine directions than they might otherwise have done.28

  ANTIOCH

  The other intellectual center was Antioch, which yielded nothing to Alexandria in the depth of its Christian tradition.29 Antioch’s strong and distinctive intellectual tradition made its believers willing to explore daring interpretations of the Christian message. Paul of Samosata himself was bishop here before being deposed for alleged heresy; even Apollinarius lectured in Antioch. Long before the rise of Christianity, Antioch had flourishing schools of rhetoric and philosophy, and Christians drew on this pagan tradition, suitably modified. At the same time, they remained in dialogue with the substantial Jewish population. By the fourth century, too, Antioch was developing very differently from Alexandria in terms of its attitude toward reading and interpreting the Bible. The closer one read the Gospels as a historical text, putting passages in their context, the harder it was to get away from the presence of a very human Jesus. Hence the Antiochene taste for a Word/man Christology.30