APOLLINARIANS, or APOLLINARISTS, in church-history, a sect of heretics who maintained, that Jesus Christ had neither a rational human soul, nor a true body.—Apollinaris of Loadicea, their leader, invested Christ with a fanciful kind of flesh, which he supposed to have existed with the Son from all eternity.—He also distinguished between the soul of Christ, and what the Greeks call vis, mind or understanding; and from this distinction took occasion to assert, that Christ assumed a soul without its understanding, and that this defect was supplied by the Word: tho' some of his followers held that Christ had no human soul at all.—Apollinaris further taught, that the souls of men were propagated by other souls, as well as their bodies.—Theodoret charges him with confounding the persons of the Godhead, and with giving into the errors of Sabellius; and Basil accuses him of abandoning the literal sense of scripture, and taking up wholly with the allegorical sense. The heresy was very subtle, and overspread most of the churches of the east; it was condemned in a synod of Alexandria, under St. Athanasius, in the year 362. It was subdivided into several different heresies, the chief whereof were the Dimoerites.