Psilanthropism
JOHN A. MCGUCKIN
From the Greek meaning “Merely a Man.” It signifies the heretical doctrine that Jesus was a human being who was highly graced by God, as a Prophet, or Spirit-bearer (pneumatophoros), or even the greatest of all the saints; but was not, in the proper sense of the term, “divine.” The heresy has appeared in numerous forms throughout church history, associated first with the Judeo-Christian Ebionite sect, and the 2nd-century “Modalists” who approached Christology in terms of a holy servant of God, Jesus, being caught up in the energy and work of the Spirit, and “manifested” as the Son of God in this sense, though not being divine in anything other than an exemplarist sense, a matter of honorific association of words. Paul of Samosata made this view notorious, and was one of the first public dissident bishops to be censured by a formal council of the church. In patristic times, however, the position was most closely associated with the person and teachings of Photinos, bishop of Sirmium (d. ca. 376), who was deposed for his christological views at the Council of Sirmium in 351 (Socrates, Church History 2.18, 29–30; Sozomen, Church History 4.6; Epiphanius, Heresies 71), and once more symbolically censured at the Council of Constantinople in 381, and yet again by the imperial decree of Theodosius II in 428. The heresy is thus also known in the Orthodox Church as “Photinianism.” Origen had partly clarified the Modalist problem, but also confused the matter for the 4th-century theologians, by his earlier and peculiar Christology that Jesus had to be distinguished from the Divine Logos, as being the bearer of the Logos, not synonymous with him. Origen, however, cannot rightly be classed as a Psilanthropist because his understanding of the “Preexistent Soul Jesus” belongs more to a category of Angelic Christology fused with a theology of the Incarnation of the Divine Logos. The Christology of Arius is more confused still, but it is clear enough that though he leaned away from seeing Jesus as the Divine Logos he nevertheless did not see him as “merely a man.” Many of the ancient Orthodox polemicists were less careful in their analysis, and often fathered Psilanthropism onto their heterodox opponents in the course of the centuries when it seemed that they were advocating less than the full Nicene Chris- tology (manifested in the Nicene Creed, St. Athanasius, St. Gregory the Theologian, and St. Cyril of Alexandria, for example): namely, that Jesus was synonymous with the Eternal and Divine Logos himself, as incarnated within history. For polemical reasons, therefore, several heterodox theologians of Antiquity such as Theodore Mopsuestia and Nestorius were erroneously accused of
Psilanthropism. The heresy has been seen as a fundamental one, attacking the central and basic faith of the Orthodox Church that in the person of Christ Jesus we were “not saved by an angel, or a servant, but by God himself.” Psilanthropism has been on the Christian horizons for a very long time, and its reappearance as widespread phenomenon in many parts of the modern world is nothing new, although the extent to which forms of Psilanthropism are now sustained among many western academic theologians (such as parts of the “Jesus of History” Movement, or aspects of the Liberation Christology movement) is unusual.
SEE ALSO: Christ; Council of Nicea I (325); Incarnation (of the Logos); Logos Theology; St. Athanasius of Alexandria (ca. 293–373); St. Cyril of Alexandria (ca. 378–444)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS
Bardy, G. (1935) “Photine,” in Dictionnaire de theologie catholique, vol. 12, pt. 2. Paris: Letouzey et Ane.
Hanson, R. P. C. (1988) The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. McGuckin, J. A. (2000) “Quest for the Historical Jesus,” in A. Hastings (ed.) The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 587–9.
Petavius, D. (1636) De Photino Haeretico eiusque Damnatione. Paris.
Simonetti, M. (1965) “Studi sull’Arianesimo,” Verba Seniorum 5: 135–59.