Gregory of Nyssa on Apollinarius

Few have done a deep dive into the early theological controversies and many more tend to consider these not to be relevant to our practice of spirituality as Christians. I have found that to be quite inaccurate and naive. Thus I have been doing more reading about the major Church leaders and thinkers from the 3rd and 4th centuries of the Christian era. I share this as it is an accessible summary of very important ideas which since shaped how Christians think theologically and implement their faith in Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God. This quote is taken from a book by John Behr. It is part of a series he did on the Early Church Fathers, specific to the question of who is Jesus Christ and how Christians wrestled through how to speak of him accurately and reverently. 

Gregory of Nyssa’s critique of the teaching of Apollinarius:

“In his Antirrheticus against Apollinarius, Gregory laboriously, and rather tediously, refutes Apollinarius’ Exposition concerning the Incarnation of God in the Likeness of Man (the Apodeixis). . . . Apollinarius, therefore, according to Gregory, considers the Word of God, who was in the beginning with God, as ‘a God incarnate before the ages, with bones and hair, distinguished by skin, sinews, flesh and fat,’ composed of differences, rather than being simple and incomposite. Such things clearly belong to the temporal and material world of the flesh; they are what Gregory elsewhere refers to as the ‘garments of skin.’ Although the flesh provides the arena in which we contemplate the divine activity of the Word, its natural properties are not thereby the definition of divinity. Rather, as we have seen, the divine power of the Word is a transformative power, making the one united to him, through the event of the Passion, to be what he himself is, such that we no longer perceive the flesh ‘in its own measures and properties’ or ‘in its own particular properties.’ . . . Gregory now specifies what he means by such expressions: . . .

“. . . as is the case with the sea: if someone puts a drop of vinegar in the sea, the drop becomes seawater, being transformed by the quality of the sea-water. So also the true Son and only-begotten God, the unapproachable Light and absolute Life, Wisdom, Sanctification, Power, and every exalted name and thought—these things the one who appeared to men in the flesh is; but flesh, being flesh by its own nature, was transformed into the sea of immortality, as the Apostle says that ‘mortality was swallowed up by Life’ [2 Cor 5.4], and all the phenomenal [properties] of the flesh were transformed into the divine and uncompounded nature: no weight, no form, no color, no firmness, no softness, no circumscription by quantity, no other quality that is observable remains, the mixture with the divine assimilating the lowliness of fleshly nature into the divine properties. (Antirrh. 201.6-24)

“. . . The disciples were persuaded of his divinity by witnessing the transformation wrought through the Passion, the particular properties of human flesh being transformed by divine power into divine properties, and it is this transformative economy that is now the lens for our contemplation of ‘the God revealed through the Cross.’ Thus, unlike Apollinarius, for whom there appeared to be no continuity between Christ’s humanity, as having been brought down from heaven, and our own, for Gregory, there is emphatically a continuity, even if the result of the transformation appears foreign to us. . . .

“The Christ confessed by the Christian faith exists eternally, one and the same both before and after the economy. That he abides eternally is, as it were, the content of the claim that divinity is not subject to change, unable to become either better or worse. ‘The man,’ on the other hand, exists neither before nor after, but only during the period of the economy, for we no longer know him in the flesh. Human nature, because it is able to change, is transformed through the Passion, so that the one confessed in this manner, the very same one that is, is the pre-eternal Lord. The flesh of Christ no longer exists in its particular properties but as the flesh of Christ, possessing his divine properties. The glory of the Spirit, which beautified the one who was crucified, making him Christ, is also the same glory of the pre-eternal Spirit. Finally, this pre-eternal reality is only revealed at the end of days, when human evil has reached its zenith. At this point, he ‘receives the man in himself and himself comes to be in the man,’ referring not straightforwardly to the birth of his flesh in this world but—following the words of Christ, who said to his disciples, ‘I am in you and you are in me’—his presence in those who are born again in him, as his body. . . .

“In his birth from the Virgin, ‘a truly new man was created, the first and only to demonstrate such a mode of substance . . ., created according to God, not according to man” . . . The power of God extended equally through both elements of his compound nature, body and soul, so that when his death resulted in the separation of body and soul, the divine nature was inseparably present in each, demonstrated by the fact that his body did not see corruption and his soul opened up paradise for the thief . . . . Gregory brings together, in a quite startling manner, Christ’s Resurrection from the dead, as the first-fruits of human nature, with his birth from the Virgin. The ‘mode of subsistence’ demonstrated by ‘the truly new man’ is also to be our own, as we are born again in his body by undergoing a death like his. . . . So also, the union of body and soul that occurred in Christ at the Resurrection ‘brings all human nature, by its continuity, when it has been separated by death into body and soul, to [their] natural union . . . by the hope of the Resurrection, effecting the concurrence of what had been separated.”

The Nicene Faith, Part 2 (Formation of Christian Theology, Volume 2), John Behr (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press:2004), p. 451, 452-453, 455, 456, 457.

*Note: The Formation of Christian Theology series by John Behr includes The Way to Nicaea, Volume 1 and The Nicene Faith, Volume 2, Part 1 & 2