"Heavenly Man" and "Eternal Christ": Apollinarius and Gregory of Nyssa on the Personal Identity of the Savior

Abstract

Although the opposition of the Cappadocian Fathers, on church-political as well as theological grounds, to Apollinarius of Laodicaea and his followers is well known, it is more difficult to see precisely what their objections were to his conception of Christ, particularly since their own christologies seem, in many respects, quite similar to his. This essay argues that Gregory of Nazianzus and particularly Gregory of Nyssa saw in the christology of Apollinarius a soteriology radically different from their own: while he regarded Christ's role as savior as resting on his natural difference from our own fallen constitution, they understood the mystery of salvation as the incipient transformation of all humanity through the communication, by God the Word, of divine virtue and life to a complete and normal human being united personally to himself. This soteriological difference, in turn, had important implications for the differing anthropologies, eschatologies, and conceptions of God that one finds in the works of these authors.

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