An Introduction to the Orations of St Gregory the Theologian

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17 Pages

Page 14

Its first care was to sanction the translation of Gregory from the See of Sasima to that of the Metropolis of the Empire, and to enthrone him in S. Sophia, and thus he became the recognised Archbishop of the Imperial City. Meletius shortly afterwards died, and Gregory assumed the Presidency of the Council. He failed in his endeavours to heal the schism which was troubling the Church of Antioch, and when the Egyptian Bishops on their arrival shewed a disposition to take up the case of Maximus, and were determined at any rate to oust Gregory from the Patriarchal Throne on the ground of a Nicene canon forbidding translations, which had virtually been rescinded by the act of the Council, he made up his mind to resign. He obtained a reluctant assent to this course from the Emperor, and then took leave of the Synod in one of the most magnificent of all his Orations, in which he gives a graphic account of his work in the Metropolis. Nectarius, Prefect of the City, who was only a catechumen, was elected in his place, and Gregory went home to Nazianzus. He administered the affairs of the Church there for a little while, and then, having procured the election of Eulalius as Bishop, he retired to Arianzus, where he passed the few remaining years of his life in seclusion, but still continued to take an active interest in the affairs of the Church. His own city was greatly disturbed by Apollinarian teachers, whose efforts to establish themselves within the Church were very persevering. Apollinarius, or as he is frequently called in the West, Apollinaris, was a Bishop of Laodicea in the latter half of the Fourth Century, and was at one time greatly respected for his learning and orthodoxy by S. Athanasius and S. Basil. He was even an instructor of S. Jerome in 374, but he seceded from the Church in the next year, owing to views which he had come to hold about the nature of our Lord; these really prepared the way for various forms of the Monophysite heresy. He fell into the error of a partial denial of our Lord's true Humanity, attributing to Christ a human body and a human soul, but not a reasoning spirit, whose place, according to him, was supplied by the Divine Logos. This view had first appeared in 362, when it came before a Council at Alexandria. Those who were accused of holding it denied it, and expressed their sense of the absurdity of such a view, pointing out that our Lord could not be said to be really incarnate if He had no human mind; but about 369 it assumed a definite form (though even then it was not known to be the teaching of Apollinarius). Arguing from the Divinity of Christ that He cannot have had a human mind, for if He had He would have had sinful inclinations, and the one Christ would have been two persons, Apollinarius and his followers went on to maintain that the Incarnation only meant a certain converse between God and Man; and that Christ's Body was not really born of Mary, but was a part of the Godhead converted into flesh. S. Athanasius wrote two Books against these two propositions, but did not name Apollinarius, most probably because he did not believe him to be committed to them. The fundamental error of the system was the idea that the Incarnation was, not the Union of the two Natures, but only a blending so close, that in the mind of these teachers all the Divine Attributes were transferred to the human nature, and all the human ones to the Divine, and the two were merged in one compound being.

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