The Imperial Church Era · c. 360-430 · Laodicea, Syria, Asia Minor
Historians and Christians themselves are divided on whether this group's core beliefs fall inside the historic Christian creeds.
Apollinaris of Laodicea was on the right side of the Arian controversy - a friend of Athanasius, a defender of Nicaea, and by all accounts a formidable scholar. The position that took his name came from pressing the unity of Christ harder than anyone else dared. If Christ is one, Apollinaris reasoned, then there cannot be two minds in him competing; so the divine Word must occupy the place a human rational soul would hold, and Christ has a human body and its animating life but not a human mind. It was condemned at Rome in 377 and again by name at Constantinople in 381. Gregory of Nazianzus wrote the reply that stuck, in a letter to a priest named Cledonius: what is not assumed is not healed. If Christ did not take a human mind, then the human mind - the part that most needs it - is not saved. Apollinaris' followers kept his works in circulation under other men's names, which is why some of them survive at all.
No sources recorded.