CHRISTOLOGY

CHRISTOLOGY. Literally, this term means the doctrine of the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth. The question that Jesus directed to his disciples in all three of the Synoptic Gospels, “Who do you say I am?” drew the response from Peter, “You are the Messiah, the Son of God.” The full implications of Peter’s reply remained to be worked out. “Messiah,” “Son of God,” and so on, were all different appellations that could mean much less than a divine and preexistent being. Other New Testament texts, however, the earliest being Philp 2:5–11 and a later one the prologue from Jn (1:1–18), taught the preexistence of the divine Son. Just how, though, humanity and divinity coexist in Christ, and the meaning of each in relation both to the Father and to the rest of humankind, were the subjects of fierce debate throughout most of the first Christian millennium. Orthodox Christology, as it emerges in Joh n of Damascus (q.v.) in the 8th c., is the product of that long debate. The key refrain or leitmotiv throughout the centuries of argument in Eastern Christendom is the notion of deification, theosis (q.v.). Christology is always linked to and expressive of an understanding of salvation that is articulated as early as 2Pet 1:4, that in Christ human beings become “partakers of the divine nature”-which the Orthodox see as at least implicit in other New Testament documents. (For example, the “glory” shared by the Son and the Father is from eternity, and is given by Christ to his followers, Jn 17:5, 22–24.) With this reading of the Christian Scriptures (q.v.), the struggle over Christology may be viewed as an attempt to keep in balance Christ’s humanity and divinity in such a way as to preserve both the paradox of their union in his person (so toward the “hypostatic union” of Chalcedon [q.v.]) and the possibility of human communion in the divine life.

The battle had obviously been joined by the time of the earliest Christian writings: Paul struggles in his letters to the Corinthians against what appears to be a nascent Christian gnosticism (q.v.). The Johannine works are clearly directed in part against a popular docetism, i.e., the notion that Christ’s flesh or humanity was a mere seeming or phantom. In the 2nd c. dualism was very prevalent in the ancient world, whether in the sophisticated version of Plato’s (q.v.) divide between sensible and intelligible worlds or in the popular equation of matter with evil and the immaterial with good (which would show up with especial force in 3rd-c. Manichaeism). Dualism took shape in the gnostic movement. The dualistic portrait of Christ as the manifestation, in the appearance of flesh, of the realm of pure spirit found vigorous opponents in, among others, Irenaeus of Lyons and Tertullian of Carthage (qq.v.). Irenaeus insisted upon the full reality of the Word’s coming in the flesh, his incarnation, and thus that Jesus, as the second Adam and model-as divine Son-of the first, accomplished the recapitulation of all creation and its redemption from the powers of sin (q.v.) and death. This triumph, he continued, would become manifest at the Second Coming or Parousia. (See Millennialism.)

The 3rd c. saw the Church Fathers (q.v.) struggling with adoptionism, a doctrine associated particularly with Bishop Paul of Samosata, and modalism, linked especially with the Roman presbyters, Praxeas and Sabellius. Adoptionists argued that the man, Jesus, had been adopted by God (q.v.) the Father at the moment of the former’s baptism (cf. Mk 1:9–12). Modalists saw the three persons of the Trinity (q.v.) as three moments in the revelation of the one divine person. On occasion both adoptionism and modalism were combined, as in the case of Paul of Samosata. Tertullian wrote extensively, particularly in his Against Praxeas, in answer to the modalists, while Dionysius of Alexandria chaired a local synod at Antioch (qq.v.) in 261 that deposed Paul of Samosata. Of note for the future was the latter council’s explicit condemnation of the term “homoousios” (of the same substance), which Paul had used in order to explain that the Word of God, as a mere aspect or power of the Father and not as a separate person in his own right, had been bestowed upon Jesus of Nazareth at his messianic anointing.

This early condemnation of homoousios would play a significant role in the controversy of the 4th c. regarding the Alexandrian presbyter, Arius, and the struggle over the Nicene Creed (qq.v.). Arius had proposed that the Word of God incarnate in Christ was less than divine, a creature of the one God and Father. His understanding of salvation seems in consequence to have been based upon a “heroic” model of Christ as trailblazer and exemplar. Against this view, first Alexander and then Athanasius of Alexandria (q.v.) championed the teaching of Irenaeus: that God himself had taken on humanity in order to make his creatures participants in his divinity. The First Ecumenical Council (q.v.) at Nicaea in 325 endorsed a creed that incorporated the word homoousios in order to underline the Word’s co-divinity or consubstantiality with the Father and so retain the traditional doctrine of theosis. Due to the term’s prior association with modalism, however, it was not accepted readily by the Eastern bishops.

Athanasius was quite wrong to brand all of his opponents with the label, “Arians.” Most of the educated, Greek-speaking episcopacy were theological followers of Origen (q.v.) and embraced the latter’s use of hypostasis (usually translated now as “person,” but more literally meaning something closer to “substance”) for the three persons of the Trinity. In consequence, though, they were obliged to assume Origen’s subordinationism as well, that is, the notion that Son and Spirit stand in a lesser, subordinate relationship to God the Father. It was this tendency in Origen’s thought that contributed substantially to Arius’s initial success in persuading some-scarcely all-of the Eastern bishops to approve his program. Most disliked both him and Athanasius, and with some justice. It required the singular genius of the Cappadocian Fathers (q.v.) to find a solution incorporating both Athanasius’s insistence on the full divinity of the Son and Origen’s terminology, an accomplishment sealed by the endorsement of the expanded Nicene Creed at the Second Ecumenical Council at Constantinople (q.v.) in 381. Counter-Arian arguments continued to play an important role in the Christian West; and following the fall of the Western Empire its Gothic and Visigothic masters were Arians. It is against this background, the need to insist on Christ’s divinity, that we are to understand the introduction of the filioque (q.v.) clause into the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed at the Council of Toledo in 589.

Debate in the 5th c. took its start from the arguments that Apollinaris of Laodicea had advanced during the counter-Arian debates of the 4th c. Apollinaris argued that the divine Word had become incarnate not in a complete humanity, but merely in a physical body. Gregory of Nazianzus (q.v.) had responded with the formula, “What is not assumed is not saved.” Christ had to have been a complete human being for theosis to be a reality. Continuing this line of thought, notable representatives of the Antiochene school such as Theodore of Mopsuestia (q.v.) and Diodore of Tarsus so emphasized the completeness of Christ’s humanity as to throw the union between the “assumed man” (Jesus) and the divine Son into some doubt. Christ, at least to the critics of this school, took on the aspect of a committee of two. A pupil of Theodore’s, Nestorius of Constantinople, was led in 428 to deny that Mary the Virgin (q.v.) could rightly be called Theotokos (“Birth-giver of God”), but could only be considered as the bearer of Christ, Christokos. This drew the formidable opposition of Cyril of Alexandria (q.v.), who saw Nestorius’s distinction as threatening the unity of the God-man and, in consequence, the believer’s hope of deification. Cyril won his case at the Third Ecumenical Council at Ephesus in 431. His often unscrupulous and violent methods, however, together with some real ambiguities in his theology, led to the secession of the whole east, Syriac-speaking Church of Persia from communion with the Church of the Byzantine Empire (qq.v.). This community, wrongly identified too strictly as adherents of “Nestorianism,” persists to the present day.

Cyril’s imprecise terminology, together with his stature as the interpreter of the incarnation, led to further difficulties following his death in 444. Later in the same decade, a Constantinopolitan archimandrite named Eutyches advocated a union of God and man in Christ, which was, in effect, a blending of the two wherein Jesus’ humanity was seen as entirely swallowed up by the glory of his godhead. The Tome of Pope Leo the Great (q.v.) was written in response to Eutyches and served as the basis for the doctrinal definition at the Fourth Ecumenical Council at Chalcedon in 451. Leo’s balanced thought and phrasing stressed the completeness of Christ’s two “natures” (q.v.), human and divine, and their union in the one person or hypostasis of the Word. Unfortunately, the pope’s insistence on the phrase, “in two natures,” led to great resistance on the part of the entire Church of Egypt and much of that of Syria (qq.v.). The latter’s standard of orthodoxy was the phrase, “one nature of the incarnate Word,” which Cyril (q.v.) had often used in the (mistaken) belief that it came from Athanasius-it was actually Apollinaris’s invention. To the “monophysites,” Leo’s phrase smacked of Nestorius. The so-called “monophysite heresy” was thus not so much a heresy as a schism (qq.v.). Monophysitism (q.v.) in fact, less the unhappy Eutyches, was nothing more or less than a dogged clinging to the thought and language of Cyril.

The schism did, however, take the local churches of Egypt, Ethiopia, Armenia, and substantial portions of Syria (qq.v.) out of communion with the imperial church. It thus constituted an internal crisis of the Eastern Empire that the latter’s emperors sought over the following two centuries to address and repair. The Emperor Justinian (q.v.) looked to assuage “monophysite” objections to Chalcedon by convoking the Fifth Ecumenical Council (Constantinople II, A.D. 553) in order to affirm the theopaschism of Cyril’s “Twelve Anathemas” of Nestorius, and thus to affirm that it is indeed the Word of God who is the subject of all attribution in the incarnate Christ. His initiative failed to solve the schism.

A later effort, sponsored by the Emperor Heraclius (610–645), and articulated by the Patriarch Sergius of Constantinople, put forward a compromise formula which, while stressing Chalcedon’s “two natures,” argued that in Christ there is only one activity and will, the divine. This, the true heresy of monotheletism (mono, same, and thelema, will), was resisted by Pope Martin I and, in particular, Maximus the Confessor (qq.v.). Maximus asserted that the compromise betrayed a defective anthropology (q.v.), leaving no room for the necessary human response to the divine initiative accomplished in Christ. Deification, in short, is not an absolutely one-sided process. The Son of God took on a complete humanity and restored the “old Adam” entirely, but this meant first of all that the human will had to have been redeemed and, secondly, that each believer is called upon to discover and exercise his or her personal will in acceptance of the salvation accomplished once and for all in Jesus. Maximus’s argument was ratified, by the Sixth Ecumenical Council (Constantinople III, 681) some nineteen years after his death in exile.

The 8th and 9th c. debate over the holy icons (q.v.) and iconoclasm might be taken as the conclusion to Christological debate in the East. The arguments in particular of Joh n of Damascus and Theodore of Studion (qq.v.) react against the iconoclasts’ implicit denigration of matter as adequate to theophany. Precisely because human and divine have been made one in Christ, icons-and by extension, of course, all the sacraments (q.v.)-are rendered not only possible, but necessary. The perfect confession of the incarnation requires them. The “energies” of God shine forth from the transfigured flesh of Christ and in that flesh, that humanity or “second Adam,” embraces the whole created universe of souls and bodies, of spirit and matter. This, the presence of the eschaton in some sense already at work among us, is made known in the Church’s sacraments and in the images she has sanctioned for veneration. Here, too, in this Christological understanding of the holy icons, we may find the seeds of the later work of Gregory Palamas in defense of the holy hesychasts of Athos (qq.v.) that concluded the theological contributions of the Byzantine era-and that continues to live at the center of Orthodox thought and piety today.