CPG 3655
Author Apollinaris
Greek Text Lietzmann, Apollinaris von Laodicea und seine Schule: Texte und Untersuchungen, 233-235.

Fragment 112: If the Word is consubstantial with the body, it is not united to itself. It was united to the body, therefore it is not consubstantial with it. If the body is consubstantial with the Word, it was not beheld and touched. For it would be both invisible and untouchable if consubstantial. John says, “We have seen and touched” (Jn 1:14). Therefore the spirit of the Lord and the body are not consubstantial. But the invisible and the untouchable was joined to the visible and touchable for a union. Therefore also he became visible and touchable in it. The one who says the body is consubstantial with God blasphemes the bodiless as having a body. For the Son, consubstantial with the Father, has his own properties even after being united to the flesh. And he has not been divided from his own body because he is consubstantial with God, not that the body is considered consubstantial.

Fragment 113: They become a middle for diverse qualities coming together into on, like in a mule is produced the quality of a donkey and of a horse, and in the color gray the quality of white and black, and in the air the quality of winter and summer—spring. No middle has each of the extremes mixed in entirely but partially. The middle of God and men is in Christ. Therefore he is neither whole man nor God but a mixing of God and man.

Fragment 114: How is he not true God who says, “This much time I have been with you and you do not know me, Philip?” (Jn 14:9)? He signifies his time spent as a man with men by “This much time” and points out that the man is God such that it is not shameful to say that such a man is consubstantial with God since he is known by the Father’s form of deity as matter is by the body.

Fragment 115: So he does not make the divine human by a division which is in keeping with the body in equality with God in making and renewing. It is impossible that another nature, the humanity of Christ, be defined by the boundary of a man as the body of a man and not of God, in keeping with the body in equality with God.

Fragment 116: His flesh makes us alive because of the deity which accompanies it. The divine is what gives life. Therefore the flesh is divine because it was joined together to God. And it saves, and we are saved by partaking of it like nourishment. If that which nourishes and is at work in the nourished, is consubstantial with it, it is not likewise nourished. And if that which gives life is not given life like that which is given life it is not consubstantial with it. For then it would be a body of death such as ours, which needed to be made alive. The body of Christ is not a body of death but of life. Therefore the divine is not consubstantial with the human.

Translated by AMJ

Last updated: 6-13-2013

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