Nestorius, Photinus, and Apollinaris

Here perhaps someone will ask us to illustrate the words of holy Moses with examples from the history of the church. The demand is a fair one, and it will not wait long to be met. To take first a very recent and very plain case: what sort of trial, do we think, did the church experience the other day, when that unhappy Nestorius, suddenly changed from a sheep into a wolf, began to ravage the flock of Christ, while a large part of those he was devouring still believed him a sheep, and so were all the more exposed to his attacks? For who would readily suppose that a man was in error who was known to have been chosen by the high choice of the emperor, and to be held in the greatest esteem by the priesthood? Who would readily suppose that a man was in error who, much loved by the holy brothers and in high favor with the people, explained the Scriptures in public every day and refuted the deadly errors of both Jews and pagans? Who could help believing that his teaching was orthodox, his preaching orthodox, his belief orthodox, when, to open the way for one heresy of his own, he was zealously attacking the blasphemies of all heresies? But this was the very thing Moses says: “The Lord your God is testing you, to know whether you love him or not.” [a]

Let us leave Nestorius, in whom there was always more for people to admire than to profit from, more show than substance, a man whom natural ability rather than divine grace made great for a time in the opinion of the common people. Let us go on to speak of those who, being men of great attainments and much industry, proved no small trial to catholics. Such, for instance, was Photinus in Pannonia. In our fathers’ memory he is said to have been a trial to the church of Sirmium. He had been raised to the priesthood there with everyone’s approval, and had carried out the office for some time as a catholic. Then all of a sudden, like that evil prophet or dreamer of dreams whom Moses speaks of, he began to persuade the people God had entrusted to his care to follow “strange gods,” that is, strange errors that they had not known before. But there was nothing unusual in this. What made the matter so harmful was that he used no ordinary means to carry out so great a wickedness. He had great natural ability, powerful eloquence, and a wealth of learning, and he argued and wrote abundantly and forcefully in both languages, as his surviving books show, written partly in Greek and partly in Latin. But happily the sheep of Christ committed to him, watchful and wary for the catholic faith, quickly turned their eyes to the warning words of Moses. Though they admired the eloquence of their prophet and pastor, they were not blind to the trial. From then on they began to flee from him as a wolf, whom they had formerly followed as the ram of the flock. [b]

Nor is it only in the case of Photinus that we learn the danger of this trial to the church and are warned of the need for double care in guarding the faith. Apollinaris gives a similar warning. He stirred up great burning questions and painful perplexities among his disciples, the church’s authority pulling them one way and their master’s influence the other, so that, wavering and tossed back and forth between the two, they did not know what course to take. But perhaps he was a man of no weight? On the contrary, he was so eminent and so highly esteemed that his word would be taken all too readily on any subject whatever. For what could surpass his sharpness, his skill, his learning? How many heresies he demolished in many volumes! How many errors hostile to the faith he refuted! Proof of this is that most noble and vast work, of no fewer than thirty books, in which he drove back the mad slanders of Porphyry with a great mass of arguments. It would take a long time to list all his works. They would surely have put him on a level with the very chief builders of the church, if that profane lust of heretical curiosity had not led him to devise some novelty or other. Like the contagion of a kind of leprosy, it both defiled all his labors and caused his teaching to be declared the church’s trial instead of the church’s building up. [c]