Thoughts on Bulgakov, Apollinarius, and Ourselves

In his The Lamb of God Fr. Sergius Bulgakov writes about Apollinarius with great sympathy. It is Fr. Srgius’ contention that Apollinarius is the driving force behind orthodox (I am using small ‘o’ to distinguish it from Eastern Orthodoxy) christology. As far as Fr. Sergius is concerned Apollinarius is in fact the first one to develop an actual christology:

In the history of dogma, Apollinarius was the first to pose the problem of the divine-humanity, or the so-called christological problem. and he put the stamp of his thought upon the entire Christology of the Church (The Lamb of God, p. 3).

This is an interesting position to take, for Fr. Sergius is clearly suggesting that both orthodoxy and heresy has a positive role to play in the Church’s understanding of Christian Truth:

… all of these authors, irrespective of their destinies in the Church, were accomplishing a single common task, the task of creating the theology of the epoch; and their influence upon one another was so great that it is impossible to understand the theological doctrines or the council definitions without taking into account this unity and interconnectedness (The Lamb of God, p. 1).

Elsewhere Fr. Sergius has written that heretics can be considered to live within the boundaries of the Church with the orthodox (By Jacob’s Well) and here he even suggests that heretics are necessary for the synthesis which constitutes the theology of the Church. A very bold position indeed! Radical thought his may be, it does not extend to all heretics. Fr. Sergius clearly rejects the idea that Arius’ theology has the same positive value as does that of Apollinarius:

Although Arius did awaken the dogmatic consciousness, gave rise to the homoousion movement, and was indirectly responsible for the Nicene Creed (and one can only regret that not all of his questions were heard and answered at the council, in particular, the sophiological and cosmological ones), his proper doctrine represents a direct rejection of the truth, pure falsehood without any ambiguity. In contrast, in Apollinarius’ s doctrine everything has a double meaning; everything is a mixture of truth and error. In this respect he does not greatly differ from certain Fathers of the Church, for they too, are usually able to express the truth of the Church only antithetically, in a dialectical process, and thus one-sidedly (The Lamb of God, p. 18).

It must be said here that for Fr. Sergius Apollinarius is not the heretic he is understood to be by some of his contemporaries. Fr. Sergius contends that Apollinarius de facto expressed Chalcedonian orthodoxy before the terminology of Chalcedon had become available to the christological debate. It is that which allows Fr. Sergius to consider Apollinarius as positively as he does. The heresy of Apollinarius does not consist – for Fr. Sergius – in Apollinarius rejecting the truth of the Church and countering it with an opposing doctrine ( as did Arius as far as Fr. Sergius is concerned) but in the incompleteness and one-sidedness of his terminology. This is partly inevitable because the terminological development had not yet evolved to the clarity it would post Chalcedon. It is than Appolinarius’ inability to resolve the tension between heresy and orthodoxy which distinguishes him from the Church Fathers. The latter are also ridden with tensions, but they are not so severe as to elad to heresy.

It is – I would argue – questionable whether Fr. Sergius suggestions can entirely stand the test of criticism. For one thing he assumes a later christological terminology as the standard to measure a theology and therefore is putting a question to the latter which it can only answer inadequately. This not necessarily because it is itself inadequate but because an inadequate question is asked of it. Also Fr. Sergius’s reading of Apollinarius seems strongly coloured by Fr. Sergius’s own ideas concerning the divine-humanity which he is able to latch onto certain expressions of Apollinarius – not unlike St. Cyril who he seems to criticize for doing much the same thing (The Lamb of God, p. 19-33). And yet it seems that Fr. Sergius has given us a very great insight here. It seems that heresy is a term too hastily used in much of the Church’s history and of the Church’s present.

All of us – great theologians and smaller ones – are one-sided. We are inevitably so because of our human limitations. We cannot encompass the entire truth in our small minds as has been brilliantly observed by G. K. Chesterton:

The general fact is simple. Poetry is sane because it easily floats in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion, like the physical exhaustion of Mr. Holbein. To accept everything is an excercise, to understand everything a strain The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits (Orthodoxy, p. 29).

So that to fault someone for not having had a head big enough to fit the heavens really is non-sensical. The truth abides higher than an individual mind can conceive and contain. Insofar Fr. Sergius is right – and it might inspire us to embrace epistemic humility and more compassion toward the failures of others and ourselves to know the truth in full. The truth can be accepted as Chesterton suggests which requires an act of faith – and it may well seek understanding – not blind faith but a faith which does not reduce orthodoxy to mere cerebral correctness. To desire to live in the truth as revealed in and by Jesus Christ as it is lived in the Church is orthodox even if one should discover along the way some opinion of ours is in fact heretical. The life of faith ought to have the breadth for growth without cerebral, dogmatic asphixiation. This does not mean that we are to water down the truth, but rather teach it in love with an eye toward our human limitidness – or we may find – as did Apollinarius that our rigidity as respected teachers becomes our weakness.

Our lives are a mixture of sin and holiness but equally a mixture of truth and heresy. Both are a human condition which needs healing. Origen had already spoken of saving doctrines in his On First Principles (refering to scriptural doctrines concerning Jesus Christ) because he understood that as sin is a result of a sickness in our soul so is heresy – and we all of us have it. What we need is a healer and a place of healing – the Church. What we don’t need is more temptation and more accusation. This is why Jesus Christ is both the Healer and the Medicine for sin and heresy alike. If we can only restrain our desire for self-justification by accusing the other so that our own shortcomings are less noticable. Self-justification suffocates and it turns the Church into a Cardassian court of law (if you missed that reference click here and scroll down to philosophy).

To conclude with Fr. Sergius:

The truth abides above personal opinions (hairesis). But the access into historical dialectical Christology lies through Apollianarius’s theological doctrine, and this constitutes his enduring historical significance and, of course, his great achievement in behalf of the Church (The Lamb of God, p. 19).

What is true for Apollinarius is true for us. The truth abides above our personal opinion, and if the we as the community of Jesus Christ – the Church – adopt Fr. Sergius’s generosity of spirit we are more likely to create a space for orthodoxy to develop in us. The way we treat and look at heretics could almost be said to be a good indicator of our spiritual health. For the heretic and the orthodox both find a home in us as much as do the sinner and the saint.

Fr. Gregory +