What Photinus, Apollinaris, and Nestorius Taught

Here, perhaps, I may be asked for some account of the heresies just mentioned, those of Nestorius, Apollinaris, and Photinus. This does not, in fact, belong to the matter at hand. Our aim is not to enlarge on the errors of individuals, but to bring forward the examples of a few in whom the truth of Moses’ words can be plainly and clearly seen. That is to say: if at any time some master in the church, himself also a prophet in interpreting the mysteries of the prophets, should try to bring some new doctrine into the church of God, divine Providence permits this to happen in order to test us. It will be useful, therefore, to turn aside briefly and give a short account of the opinions of the heretics just named: Photinus, Apollinaris, and Nestorius.

The heresy of Photinus, then, is this. He says that God is single and alone, and is to be regarded as the Jews regarded him. He denies the fullness of the Trinity, and does not believe that there is any Person of God the Word or any Person of the Holy Spirit. He declares that Christ is a mere man, whose origin was from Mary. So he insists with the utmost stubbornness that we are to give worship to the Person of God the Father alone, and are to honor Christ only as a man. This is the doctrine of Photinus.

Apollinaris claims to agree with the church about the unity of the Trinity, though not even this with entire soundness of belief; but about the incarnation of the Lord he blasphemes openly. He says that the flesh of our Savior either had no human soul at all, or at any rate had no rational soul. He says, moreover, that this same flesh of the Lord was not taken from the flesh of the holy Virgin Mary, but came down from heaven into the Virgin. And, always wavering and undecided, he preaches at one time that it was coeternal with God the Word, at another that it was made of the divine nature of the Word. For he denies that there are two substances in Christ, one divine and the other human, one from the Father and the other from his mother. He holds that the very nature of the Word was divided, as though one part of it remained in God and the other was turned into flesh. So, whereas the truth says that from two substances there is one Christ, he declares, against the truth, that from the one divinity of Christ two substances have come to be. This, then, is the doctrine of Apollinaris. [a]

Nestorius, whose disease is of the opposite kind, pretends to hold two distinct substances in Christ, but suddenly brings in two Persons. With unheard-of wickedness he would have two sons of God, two Christs: one God, the other man; one begotten of his Father, the other born of his mother. For this reason he maintains that Saint Mary should be called not Theotokos, the Mother of God, but Christotokos, the Mother of Christ, since she gave birth not to the Christ who is God but to the Christ who is man. But if anyone supposes that in his writings he speaks of one Christ and preaches one Person of Christ, let him not believe it lightly. For either this is a crafty device, so that by means of good he may more easily win people over to evil, as the apostle says, “That which is good was made death to me.” Either, I say, he craftily pretends in some places in his writings to believe in one Christ and one Person of Christ, or else he says that after the Virgin had given birth, the two Persons were united into one Christ, though at the time of her conception or of the birth, and for some short time afterward, there were two Christs. So, if you please, Christ was born at first an ordinary man and nothing more, not yet joined in unity of Person with the Word of God; but afterward the Person of the Word, taking him up, came down upon him. And though the Person taken up now remains in the glory of God, yet once, it would seem, there was no difference between him and all other men. [b]