CHAPTER 9

Christology: A Tale of
Three Cities

(FIFTH CENTURY)

Yet this I can say of my native city – that it is the fairest thing in the fairest
land under heaven. We have … experienced not merely the best of kings but
also the best of queens. … Our council is the greatest and the finest in the
world … in the expensive duties of state they are most lavish, and in their care
and provision they avoid poverty.¹

When you wish to praise the city, don’t tell me about its suburb, Daphne, nor
about the number and height of its cypress trees, nor the numerous people who
live in the city, nor that its marketplace is frequented with great freedom right
into the evening, nor of the abundance of market goods. … But if you can call
on virtue, gentleness, almsgiving, vigils, prayers, common sense and wisdom of
spirit – adorn the city with these qualities. To those who live in the desert,
the presence of these qualities makes Antioch more splendid than any city.²

Antioch’s finest orators, the pagan Libanius and the Christian Chrysostom, were of course exaggerating for rhetorical effect when they praised their city’s physical and moral virtues. However, the citizens of Antioch had good reason for native pride. Antioch had long been a hub of commerce, military power and Hellenic culture in the eastern Mediterranean. It was placed in a fertile valley on the Orontes river leading to the sea, which was so close that ‘a fit man setting off from the coast at sunrise [could] carry goods from there and arrive [at Antioch] by noon’.³ It was frequently used by emperors as a base in the east during their campaigns on the Persian frontier and as a result it boasted a fine imperial palace. In the fifth century Antioch had a population to rival that of Alexandria and Constantinople, although its influence in the region was threatened both by the power of the bishops of Alexandria and by the steadily increasing growth of Constantinople as the eastern imperial capital.⁴

Antioch had had a Christian community from the first century – as Chrysostom boasted, ‘ “It was in Antioch that the disciples were first called Christians.” None of the cities in the world has this claim, not even the city of Romulus itself.’ ⁵ Christians continued to grow in number until by the mid-fifth century they probably formed a majority of the population. But Antioch had always had a very mixed society. Literary evidence and archaeological remains reveal the presence, for example, of a large flourishing Jewish community: in Chrysostom’s day it was common practice for townspeople, Jews, Christians or pagans, to seal business contracts by swearing an oath in the local synagogue.⁶ Although most of the city’s population were Greek-speaking, the rural peasants spoke Syriac. Out of this population came many of the ascetics for which the region was famed. While the ascetic discipline of Chrysostom and his contemporaries was somewhat less strange than that of some of the Syrian desert saints, many of them (including Chrysostom himself) spent periods of retreat outside the city. Furthermore, the enormous popular devotion which the rural ascetics inspired undoubtedly influenced events in the city. Most famously, the monks descended on Antioch after the notorious occasion when the statues of the Emperor Theodosius were overturned during riots in 387, precipitated by the imposition of a new tax. Their intention was to protect the city and its inhabitants from the severe imperial reprisals which were being rumoured:

Although they had been shut up for so many years in their [hermits’] cells, when they saw such a great cloud encompassing the city, at nobody’s behest and on nobody’s advice, they left their tents and their caves and flowed together from every direction, just like angels arriving from heaven.⁷

On the other hand, Jerome’s experience of the harsh isolation of the desert and the lack of education of his fellow hermits must have seemed all the more hard to bear by contrast with the sophisticated atmosphere of Antioch, where his close friend and correspondent Evagrius lived. The city was famous for its dozens of elegant colonnades, it boasted an impressive hippodrome and theatre, numerous baths (some built for summer and others for winter use) and an elegant quarter, Daphne, where the rich built luxurious villas. Antioch enjoyed a fine cultural reputation, in particular boasting the rhetorical school of Libanius himself, where young men would learn the art of public speaking, preparing them for life either as a wealthy landowner and politician, or perhaps as a lawyer, civil servant or – increasingly – a priest.

Naturally it was not Libanius’ intention to prepare priests for preaching, although he did in fact teach John Chrysostom, whose verbal elegance earned him his nickname ‘Golden mouth’ (chrysostomos in Greek). Libanius was a determined and vocal pagan, who perceived Christianity as a threat to civilized classical Hellenic values. Famously he ignored any Christian building or indeed any Christian influence in his eulogy of Antioch’s charms. Despite this (or perhaps as a sign of his studied pursuit of civilized qualities) he remained on good terms with several prominent Christians, corresponding, for example, with Gregory of Nyssa and Basil of Caesarea. Libanius supported the brief but energetic campaign of Julian the Apostate to ban Christians as teachers of classical literature. Although this threatened the careers of many intelligent Christians (for example, that of Gregory of Nyssa), Julian’s early death meant that its impact was not as dramatic as he intended or Christians feared.

Libanius’ other Christian pupils included Basil, Chrysostom’s closest friend, and Theodore, later Bishop of Mopsuestia. Initially, Chrysostom appears to have toyed with the idea of living together with Basil in a small monastic cell in the city; apparently his mother dissuaded him. He later chose, with Theodore and several others, to place himself under the instruction of a Christian teacher of asceticism, Diodore (later Bishop of Tarsus). Although sometimes described as a ‘monastery’, Diodore’s asketerion was apparently not a residential community (Chrysostom probably continued to live at home with his mother). In its gathering of a group of pupils around a master it was analogous both to a pagan philosophical school and to various forms of Christian ascetic teaching. The young men in Antioch considered themselves part of a community which was defined both by formal registration on a membership list and by swearing an oath of allegiance to Christ, in which they ‘joined [themselves] to the heavenly bridegroom’: this language is reminiscent of the covenant made by the members of Syrian communities of ‘sons and daughters of the covenant’, described in the previous chapter.⁸ Diodore’s community is another example of how fluid and various were Christian experiments in asceticism at this stage.⁹

It is probably from associations like this that there emerged what has been described as the ‘Antiochene school’ of theology. (As with many Christian groupings in this period, ‘school’ indicates an intellectual and religious network rather than a formal institution.) Although attempts have been made to trace it back earlier, it is with Diodore and especially with Theodore of Mopsuestia that one finds a style of theology that can be identified as distinctively ‘Antiochene’. One of its features was a reaction against the kind of allegorical interpretation used by many followers of Origen. Already in the Cappadocians there was a clear recognition that such interpretation was becoming controversial: Basil of Caesarea boldly asserted in his sermons on the six days of creation that ‘for me, grass is grass’ – despite the fact that his interpretation in fact contained not a few allegorical readings.¹⁰ In Diodore and Theodore this anxiety was heightened into a systematic rejection of allegorical interpretation, even of the Old Testament. Unfortunately, partly because they were later suspected of having been ‘on the wrong side’ in the later Christological controversies, the full writings of these two men have not survived in anything like a representative quantity. We can, however, get an indication of their approach from Theodore’s comments on the Lord’s prayer. Where Origen puzzles over the meaning of ‘our daily bread’, and suggests that it might mean spiritual nourishment instead of plain human food, Theodore simply suggests, ‘It is as if [Jesus] had said: “… As to the things of this world, I allow you to make use of such of them as are necessary; and you should not ask nor strive to have more than this use.” ’ ¹¹ A second feature is opposition to Apollinarius’ Christology.¹²

In the past it has sometimes been claimed that the Antiochene tradition of theology was particularly influenced by Aristotelian philosophy, while in Alexandria Platonism was the dominant Hellenic influence. However, this analysis now hardly ever appears in scholarly accounts of the fifth-century controversies, it being recognized that theologians’ use of pagan philosophical sources in this period was in fact very complex. In any case, the essence of the claim that Antiochene theologians used Aristotelian philosophy and Alexandrians used Platonism was linked to their supposed views of human nature (specifically the relation of body and soul and/or mind). Even if that view was correct it should not be broadened out to a more general claim about the philosophical direction of either ‘school’. The main differences between the Antiochene and Alexandrian positions were created by a variety of rather complex factors and cannot be reduced to the influence of different Greek philosophical schools – or indeed merely to the use of different approaches to exegesis.

Despite the glowing picture of Antioch given by both Libanius and Chrysostom, it underwent several crises in the late fourth century. The city faced several periods of famine, and there were frequent earthquakes. After the incident of the overturning of the imperial statues, the population apparently feared the razing of their city. In the end – perhaps partly owing to the monks’ intervention – they suffered a milder fate: the public facilities (baths, theatre, hippodrome) were closed for a period, and members of the town council exiled or sentenced to execution. For the Christians there were particular trials, not least during the period of Julian’s emperorship. Even under Christian emperors, however, the situation of the church in Antioch was extremely complex owing to the presence of both ‘Arian’ and ‘orthodox’ Christian communities. At times there were as many as three clerics in Antioch simultaneously claiming to be the rightful bishop.¹³

Paulinus (ordained c.362) represented a long-established community known as the Eustathians, after Eustathius, Bishop of Antioch, who had been ejected from his see in 331 for his support for the Nicene homoousios formula. The ousted Eustathius was officially succeeded by a series of bishops who took the position that one should describe the Son as being ‘like’ (homoios) the Father. They generally had imperial support and in the meantime Eustathius’ loyal followers worshipped apart. On one occasion, however, the appointment of an apparently homoian bishop seems to have been misjudged: a certain Meletius, who had appeared happy to use homoios language, emerged as a rather more enthusiastic supporter of the Nicene formula, especially when homoousios was qualified (as by the Cappadocians) with the concept of the Trinity being one ousia and three hypostases. When this became apparent, Meletius was exiled to Armenia and replaced with a genuinely homoian bishop, Euzoius.

As imperial support for the homoians waxed and waned, Meletius was exiled, returned, was exiled and returned again. It was cruelly ironic that he died at the Council of Constantinople in 381 – that is, the council which reestablished the Nicene position and of which Meletius had been the short-lived president. In Antioch, his Nicene successor was Bishop Flavian. For some of this period, then, not only did the Christians of Antioch have three bishops to choose from – Euzoius, Meletius (later Flavian) and Paulinus – but pro-Nicene opposition to the homoian camp was divided between the latter two, thus weakening their influence.¹⁴ The situation caused waves far outside Antioch: up to 381 the emperors and bishops of Constantinople tended to support the homoian bishop; the Eustathians enjoyed the support of the see of Alexandria and (sometimes) of Rome; Meletius and his successor Flavian were supported by the Cappadocians and eventually by Emperor Theodosius.

The importance of this episode is that it sheds light on the Church’s political alliances underlying the theological controversies which were to follow. Diodore and his pupils Chrysostom and Theodore were firmly in the Meletian camp. In 398 Chrysostom was consecrated Bishop of Constantinople, but was exiled in 403 after an upsurge of mistrust against him in the capital. Partly responsible for his exile was the involvement of Theophilus, Bishop of Alexandria, whose see had been supporters of the Eustathian rather than the Meletian faction in Antioch, and whose hostility had been further provoked by Chrysostom’s apparent involvement in a dispute between a party of Egyptian ascetics and their bishop.¹⁵ The monks were accused, amongst other things, of a form of Origenism influenced by the ascetic and philosopher Evagrius of Pontus. When the Christological controversies broke out in the late 420s, precipitated by the preaching of Nestorius (Bishop of Constantinople and former Antiochene presbyter) and by the reaction of Cyril (Bishop of Alexandria), there was already a long history of tension between Antioch and Alexandria. Partly this tension was due to different loyalties within the pro-Nicene camp; partly it was due to sensitivities over how much influence any of the major sees had outside their own region (accusations of meddling were rife) and over the relative importance of each of the sees to the bishopric of Constantinople.

Nestorius was an inheritor of the Antiochene tradition stemming from such men as Diodore, Theodore of Mopsuestia and Chrysostom. He was probably taught by Theodore, although that claim has sometimes been disputed in an effort to dissociate Theodore from his much more controversial pupil.¹⁶ The difficulty of tracing the theological influence of one on the other has been exacerbated by the fact that many of their works were destroyed or simply not preserved by copying when Nestorius was anathematized. However, there is a clear similarity between their teaching, evident, for example, in the surviving extracts of Theodore’s On the Incarnation and the works of Nestorius produced before the Council of Ephesus (and even more so with Nestorius’ somewhat more considered Book of Heraclides, which he wrote in exile).¹⁷ Like Diodore, Theodore and Chrysostom, Nestorius was an ascetic, being a member of a monastery near Antioch. He was a long-standing friend of John of Antioch (who had been appointed its bishop succeeding Flavian) and of another prominent theologian of the Antiochene school, Theodoret, Bishop of the city of Cyrrhus.

In 428, Nestorius was consecrated Bishop of Constantinople; his appointment was probably partly due to the influence of John of Antioch. As in most cities of the Empire, Constantinople was by no means a haven of uniform belief; being the capital, it attracted an unusual number of immigrants and visitors who not only added to the religious mix but provided instant publicity to any controversial expression or action of its bishop. Added to this were the inevitable rivalries and ambitions caused by the presence of the imperial court. Nestorius himself seems to have come to office with the intention of sweeping out heresies, and he did so with apparently little sensitivity to the limits of Constantinople’s jurisdiction with regard to other sees.¹⁸ In this atmosphere, Nestorius’ choice to preach on the use of the title of Theotokos (‘God-bearer’) for the Virgin Mary was provocative, to say the least. He claimed – wrongly as it turned out – that the term had enjoyed no tradition of theological use.¹⁹ He appeared to regard it as a piece of misguided and unbiblical terminology from popular piety, which blasphemously implied that Mary had given birth to God and which denied Christ’s full humanity:

Does God have a mother? … Is Paul then a liar when he says of the deity of Christ, ‘without father, without mother, without genealogy’ (Heb. 7.3)? Mary, my friend, did not give birth to the Godhead (for ‘what is born of the flesh is flesh’, John 3.6). A creature did not produce the Creator, rather she gave birth to the human being, the instrument of the Godhead.²⁰

The way Nestorius introduced the question suggested that the issue was a topic of current theological debate – they ‘are always enquiring among us now this way and now that: “Is Mary Theotokos,” they say, or is she on the contrary anthropotokos?” ’ (That is, is Mary the ‘mother of God’ or ‘mother of a human being’?²¹) Theodore had raised the same question in his writings on the Incarnation. Theodore’s even tone contrasted with Nestorius’ emotional delivery:

When they ask whether Mary is a man’s mother or God’s mother, we must say, ‘Both’, the one by the nature of the thing, the other in virtue of a relation. Mary was a man’s mother by nature, since what was in her womb was a man, just as it was also a man who came forth from her womb. But she is God’s mother, since God was in the man who was fashioned – not circumscribed in him by nature by existing in him according to the disposition of his will. Therefore it is right to say both, but not in the same sense.²²

In contrast to this irenic response, Nestorius in his sermon asserted that the term Theotokos should not be used at all; in doing so he must have known that he would be seen as attacking important interests. The term was especially valued in Egypt, particularly among the monks.²³ Furthermore, the veneration of Mary as Theotokos was also popular with some powerful people in Constantinople, not least the emperor’s sister Pulcheria, a dedicated virgin who regarded Mary as her patroness.²⁴

It is not surprising then that Nestorius’ sermon caused a stir, provoking various parties in Constantinople against him. The most significant response to Nestorius, however, came in a series of letters from Cyril, Bishop of Alexandria. Cyril had been ordained presbyter, and no doubt ‘groomed for office’,²⁵ by his uncle, Bishop Theophilus, the enemy of Chrysostom. When Cyril was consecrated in 412 he swiftly established himself as an influential manager of his Egyptian see, having to deal with a crisis caused by his own contested election and the continued presence of various heretical and schismatic groups he felt bound to oppose.²⁶ The city had a very large Christian population given to being swayed by popular forces and was threatened with deep tensions between Christians and other religious communities. For example, Cyril, like Chrysostom in Antioch, revealed in his sermons his anxieties about Christians apparently taking on Jewish traditional prac-tices in a city with a prominent Jewish population.²⁷ As for pagans, while Theodosius II’s anti-pagan legislation of 437 perhaps encouraged the local monks’ enthusiasm for attacking Egyptian pagan shrines, it certainly did not lead to the immediate cessation of pagan practice, nor to the end of the long Alexandrian tradition of pagan philosophy. It did, however, raise tensions. Although Cyril was probably not directly involved in the notorious murder of the pagan philosopher Hypatia in 415, he certainly found himself dealing with the consequences of her death; these included increasingly difficult relations between the ecclesiastical and imperial authorities, the latter being always more preoccupied with preserving peace, despite the imperial policy of promoting Christianity. Nevertheless, Cyril emerged with his head above water, and by the time of the newly consecrated Nestorius’ sermons on the Theotokos, he was an experienced Church politician. As his modern biographer remarks, ‘the difference in political acumen between the two men is obvious from the outset’.²⁸

In 429, in response to Nestorius’ sermon, Cyril wrote to him demanding that he must calm the uproar he had caused and accept the title Theotokos for Mary. Nestorius’ reply was uncooperative, objecting to Cyril’s lack of ‘brotherly love’.²⁹ Cyril replied early in 430 with a longer and carefully argued text, his famous Second Letter to Nestorius, which later was received as a canonical expression of orthodoxy by the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon. Although for the most part it focused on the theological issues, it did not shrink from accusing Nestorius of causing a scandal which was likely to trip up those in his congregations who had no understanding of the theological niceties in Nestorius’ subtle arguments.³⁰ Cyril ostentatiously claimed to have the plain meaning of the Nicene Creed on his side. His high-handed tone is that of an older, more experienced, but somewhat tactless churchman giving advice to a younger, idealistic, but rather rash colleague. Cyril had also by this stage successfully appealed to Bishop Celestine of Rome for a theological judgement on Nestorius’ position, and Nestorius’ teachings were condemned at a synod in Rome. In response, fearing a serious breach between Rome and Constantinople, Theodosius II summoned a council to be held at Ephesus.

Later in 430 Nestorius replied to Cyril with a discussion of the key theological issues: it did recognize the points on which they were in agreement and made a small concession on the issue of the Theotokos, arguing that Christotokos (‘bearer of Christ’) was preferable to Theotokos, because it was more ‘exact’.³¹ This perhaps suggests that Nestorius thought that Theotokos was merely in danger of being misunderstood, rather than that it was heretical in itself. But Nestorius also accused Cyril of misunderstanding the Creed and insinuated that Cyril’s supporters were Manichaean. This was probably not a good way to win Cyril over. Cyril issued a Third Letter in which his claims to authority were even more pronounced. First, he referred repeatedly to Celestine’s support for the Alexandrian position and spoke in effect as Celestine’s representative in the east, conveying the Bishop of Rome’s bald request that Nestorius should ‘dissociate [himself] from the utterly mischievous and distorted doctrines … by the date appointed’.³² Secondly, Cyril demanded that Nestorius should not only be able to declare the words of the Nicene Creed, but that he should agree to its correct (i.e. Cyril’s) interpretation. Finally, to make his views quite clear, Cyril attached a list of 12 bluntly expressed anathemas (sometimes referred to as ‘the 12 chapters’).

This phase of their correspondence was important for three reasons. First, the debate broadened out beyond the term Theotokos and the exchange of accusations of heresies to a more close discussion of some underlying issues, especially the problem of unity in Christ. Secondly, by 431 there was a definite acknowledgement by both sides that a mere repetition of the formula of Nicaea was not enough: it needed to be interpreted and it needed to be interpreted authoritatively.³³ Thirdly, it seems to have been the anathemas in particular that provoked the ire of Nestorius and his supporters, including John of Antioch and the Antiochene theologian Theodoret. One scholar has suggested that Cyril’s motive in issuing the anathemas was ‘to force Nestorius to abandon the provisos and nuances he had expressed hitherto and either accept [Cyril’s] Christological position … and thus bring an end to the controversy or else reject it and prove himself a heretic’.³⁴ However, Nestorius refused to back down, there was by no means a consensus that his theology was heretical and the divisions between Antioch and Alexandria were only deepened.

At the council, convened at Ephesus in 431, Nestorius was condemned and deposed, but this was largely due to the late arrival of the delegation from Antioch. When Bishop John arrived, he met with those who supported Nestorius and they in turn declared Cyril to be deposed. After a short period of uncertainty, Cyril’s party gained the upper hand, not least because Cyril wrote a more conciliatory document defending the 12 anathemas in terms which some of those who had previously supported Nestorius could accept. Nestorius lost the trust of the emperor, who until that point had been inclined to support him.

Ephesus was undoubtedly an important moment, both in the east and west. Crucially the council condemned the idea that Jesus Christ could be described as being ‘two Sons’ (an idea which was in fact an exaggeration of Nestorius’ position, but which was one of Cyril’s main concerns) and accepted the title Theotokos. It was partly in response to this council that Bishop Sixtus II of Rome ordered the refashioning of the Liberian basilica in Rome into the new church of Santa Maria Maggiore, including the commissioning of a series of mosaics commemorating Mary as Theotokos, the mother of God. From this point, depictions of the Virgin – especially those of the annunciation – assumed a particular importance in Christian art, because with the title Theotokos the council had agreed that Jesus Christ was fully God and fully human from the moment of his conception, that is from the moment of Gabriel’s annunciation to Mary.

Another important consequence of Ephesus concerned the Creed. In expressing their judgement, the fathers at the Council of Ephesus claimed that the Nicene Creed was ‘pious and sufficient for the whole world’. Nevertheless, they added:

Since some pretend to confess and accept it, while at the same time distorting the force of its expressions to their own opinion and so evading the truth … it has proved necessary to add testimonies from the holy and orthodox fathers that can fill out the meaning they have given to the words and their courage in proclaiming it. All those who have a clear and blameless faith will understand, interpret and proclaim it in this way.³⁵

Besides receiving the second and third letters of Cyril (together with the 12 anathemas), the council also appended a collection of quotes from select Fathers to back up their judgement. This practice was followed in very many latter councils and was of enormous significance for the way in which the Church operated and for how Christians viewed their tradition: the Fathers cited in this way were given an official authority which went beyond any intellectual or charismatic authority they might previously have enjoyed.³⁶

The removal of Nestorius greatly alleviated relations between Antioch and Alexandria. He stayed in his monastery near Antioch for a while, but was later exiled, first to Petra and then to the colony of the Great Oasis in Egypt, where those who presented a problem to imperial authority were sent to be isolated from the outside world by the vast tracts of desert.³⁷ With Nestorius out of the way, there was a period of relatively constructive diplomacy, and in 433 Cyril and John of Antioch agreed on the wording of a document known as the ‘Formula of Union’.³⁸ In this, John acknowledged the use of Theotokos and the deposition of Nestorius; Cyril accepted that one could talk of ‘two natures’ in Christ, whereas previously his theology had seemed to assume that in Christ there was ‘one incarnate nature of the Word’.³⁹

The Formula of Union raises the question, however, of whether Cyril of Alexandria changed his mind, compromised or came to a recognition that part of the problem was that he and Nestorius were using some words (particularly ‘nature’ and ‘person’) in different ways. More acutely, it forces one to examine the question of what theological issues were really at stake.

Nestorius and Cyril were united in their rejection of Arianism (which denied Jesus Christ’s full divinity) and their denial of Apollinarius’ Christology (which rejected the idea that Jesus had a human mind). Thus they both thought that the Saviour was fully human and fully divine. However, each theologian alleged that the other did not give enough place to one or other of these aspects.

Nestorius suspected that Cyril’s Christology so stressed the intense union of the human and the divine that it in effect implied that the human was changed into the divine. He felt that this jeopardized Jesus Christ’s true humanity (thus some Antiochenes tried to accuse Cyril of Apollinarianism). Because Nestorius feared that ‘the Word became flesh’ (John 1.1) might be taken to imply that the divine nature changed into human nature, he understood the phrase ‘became flesh’ as if it were qualified by the next few words, ‘and dwelt among us’. Antiochene theology before Nestorius had developed a particular interpretation of those words which tried to explain how that kind of indwelling was particular to Christ. For example, Theodore of Mopsuestia wrote that ‘God’s indwelling is not in everyone’ and, furthermore, that God’s indwelling in Christ was unique in that ‘the indwelling took place in him as a son’.⁴⁰ In fact the theology of indwelling seems to have been expressed rather more subtly by Theodore than by Nestorius.

Cyril, however, chose to ignore the subtleties of the Antiochene notion of indwelling and asserted that Nestorius and his supporters thought that the Word of God dwelt in a human, like one of the saints.⁴¹ He feared that, in asserting that Mary gave birth to ‘the human being … the instrument of Godhead’ and that in describing Christ’s human nature as God-receiver (theodochos), Nestorius was guilty of asserting adoptionism – the idea that God chose (‘adopted’) the human Jesus at some time after his birth and then imparted divinity to him. This idea had for long been regarded as heretical in Christian communities because it suggested that Christ’s divinity was an afterthought and it was difficult to explain in what respect he differed from a prophet or other holy man. Cyril’s reply was uncompromising:

For the God of all things dwells in us through the Holy Spirit. … But God does not dwell in Christ in the same way as he does in us. For Christ was God by nature, who became like us. He was the one and only Son even when he became flesh. They who have the temerity to say that he was a God-bearing (theodochos) man instead of saying that he was God made man inevitably incur this anathema.⁴²

Cyril insisted that human and divine were united in Mary’s womb right from the moment of the annunciation: Theotokos was thus not merely allowable but it expressed the full truth of the Incarnation.

Thus the controversy over the title Theotokos was fundamentally not about how to address Mary but about what could be properly said about Jesus Christ. In particular, Nestorius and Cyril disagreed about how Christians should describe the birth and death of Jesus Christ. As we saw above, Nestorius insisted that Mary ‘did not give birth to the Godhead … [but] the instrument of the Godhead’, a ‘temple for God the Logos, a temple in which he dwelt’. Similarly, ‘the incarnate God did not die, he raised up the one in whom he was incarnate’. Nestorius was insistent that Christians should be clear about the distinction between the divine and human natures in Christ, but he argued that ‘since God is within the one who was assumed, the one who was assumed is styled God because of the one who assumed him’. Consequently he believed that, although God alone was the true object of worship, ‘we confess both and adore [the two natures] as one, for the duality of the natures is one on account of the unity’. He turned this point into a slogan: ‘I divide the natures but I unite the worship’.⁴³

Cyril ridiculed Nestorius’ suggestion that the Alexandrian view entailed that the Logos ‘found the beginning of his existence inside the holy virgin’ or needed a ‘second birth’. He argued that ‘since … the Logos was born of a woman after he had … united human reality hypostatically to himself, he is said on this ground to have had a fleshly birth’. Consequently, Mary could be said to have given birth to the Logos; in other words she was Theotokos.⁴⁴ Cyril’s thought on the crucifixion followed a similar logic:

It is not that the Logos of God suffered in his own nature … for the divine, since it is incorporeal, is impassible. Since, however, the body that had become his own underwent suffering, he is … said to have suffered these things for our sakes, for the impassible One was within the suffering body.⁴⁵

Finally, while Nestorius was happy to worship ‘this one together with the Godhead because he is a sharer in the divine authority … I adore him as an instrument of the Lord’s goodness’, Cyril thought these phrases implied a dangerous duality, tantamount to asserting that there were ‘two Sons’ in Christ – Son of God, and Son of Man. Against this, he argued that ‘we worship one and the same, because the body of the Logos is not alien to him but accompanies him even as he is enthroned with the Father’.⁴⁶

Cyril argued, then, that the Logos could be said to have been born; Nestorius (rather reluctantly) admitted that the human whom God assumed could be styled God: the argument centred on what could appropriately or piously be said about Jesus Christ. Nestorius’ problem was that for generations Christians had acknowledged the mystery of the God-man Jesus Christ, by asserting – usually in the context of the liturgy – that Mary was the ‘mother of God’, or that the Word ‘died for all’. There was a recognition in most theologians that this was stretching the limits of language, but in Nestorius there seemed to be a strong reluctance to tolerate that stretching, because he thought such phrases were in danger of being taken to mean that God could suffer in God’s own nature. Consequently, he read the Nicene Creed in a particular way. It began, he said, with four titles, ‘Lord’, ‘Jesus’, ‘Christ’, ‘Only Begotten’, which were ‘common names for both the Godhead and the manhood’ – titles which belonged to the one person.⁴⁷ He argued that the Creed then proceeded with a series of phrases which could be attributed to either the Godhead or the manhood in Christ. He had a similar way of reading the New Testament. One could say of Christ that he had been born (hence Christotokos), or that he died, or was God; one could not say, strictly speaking, that God had been born or died, or that Jesus was God. Cyril, on the other hand, was completely opposed to this way of proceeding: according to his reading of the Creed the one subject of all the phrases was the Word:

We declare that the only-begotten Word of God, begotten from the very substance of the Father … who came down for our salvation emptying himself, he it is who was incarnate and made man, and underwent our human birth and came forth as man from woman without abandoning what he was but remaining, even when he had assumed flesh and blood, what he was, God, that is, in nature and in truth.⁴⁸

As Nestorius saw it, Cyril was seriously in danger of endangering both Christ’s humanity and his impassible divinity by suggesting that the divine Word was the subject of all Christ’s experiences. On the other hand, Nestorius needed to explain: if the human nature was properly the subject of human experiences and the divine nature the subject of divine experiences, what was the mysterious commonality that the term ‘Christ’ described? Thus the disagreement over what could appropriately be said about Jesus Christ pointed to a second, more fundamental disagreement over the nature of the relation of the human and the divine in Christ. Consequently, a lot of the debate became focused on the terminology of union (in what way and when were the divine and human united in Jesus Christ?), of nature (did he consist of one nature or of two?) and of person (in what sense was Jesus Christ one person?).

Nestorius wrote of two natures, human and divine, but he often expressed their coming together in terms which Cyril found unsatisfactory. He tended to speak of the ‘joining’ or ‘conjunction’ of the two natures rather than their union, for example.⁴⁹ Because the divine ‘assumed’ the human nature, the human was the ‘instrument’, ‘temple’ or ‘receiver’ of the divine. Most of this language was traditional: Athanasius had written of Christ’s human body as an instrument; Gregory of Nazianzus’ famous dictum ‘the unassumed is the unhealed’ stated that the divine had assumed the human nature. Furthermore, Christians were united in agreeing that Christ’s human nature was his ‘temple’, because of their reading of Mark 14.58 (‘I will destroy this temple that is made with hands and in three days I will build another, not made with hands’) to refer to the resurrection. However, Cyril rejected such expressions unless they were accompanied by some language which very strongly asserted the union of the human and divine: his second letter is scattered with the words ‘union’ and ‘unity’ – or, more pointedly, a ‘true unity’.⁵⁰ The Logos did not merely join human nature to himself, but he ‘made it his own’.⁵¹ Underlying this language seems to be the assumption that there was one nature in Christ – ‘one incarnate nature of the Word’. In fact, Cyril used that exact phrase rarely, possibly because he realized that it was contentious. One of the few examples comes in a letter where he seeks to explain and qualify it.⁵² It is possible that the Antiochenes used it as an over-simplified label for Cyril’s theology because it echoed Apollinarian theology.

Certainly Nestorius thought the idea of one nature in Christ was a step too far, whether it was an implicit or explicit part of Alexandrian theology. Nestorius seems to have been driven by the anxiety that such a view would imply that the uncreated divine nature had changed into or become mixed with part of his creation. Thus Cyril was forced to reiterate that ‘we unite the word of God the Father to the holy flesh endowed with a rational soul, in an ineffable way that transcends understanding, without confusion, without change, and without alteration’.⁵³ Indeed, he was willing to state that in the Incarnation, ‘two natures [came] together with one another, without confusion or change’ or that ‘the union took place out of two natures’.⁵⁴ The Formula of Union acknowledges a ‘union of the two natures’. What Cyril was unwilling to admit, however, was the concept of a union in two natures, which is what Antiochene theologians preferred, but which to Cyril was a contradiction in terms: for him, the continued existence of two natures entailed that no true union had taken place.⁵⁵ Consequently he developed his own way of expressing the nature of that true union: the hypostatic union, or a union at the level of the Word’s hypostasis:

We say that in an unspeakable and incomprehensible way, the Logos united to himself, according to his hypostasis (kath’ hypostasin), flesh enlivened by a rational soul, and in this way became a human being (anthrōpos) and has been designated ‘Son of man’. He did not become a human being simply by an act of will or ‘good pleasure’, any more than he did so by merely taking on a person (prosōpon).⁵⁶

What did Cyril mean by a union at the level of the hypostasis? Very generally expressed, hypostasis meant ‘individual reality’. Cyril’s concept of hypostatic union understood this in two ways. Above all, hypostatic union stressed that Christ was ‘individual reality’: it seems to have been an attempt to preserve the Word as the single subject of all the experiences attributed to Jesus Christ: ‘for Cyril, the union of two distinct levels of reality, Godhead and manhood, takes place dynamically because there is only one individual subject presiding over both, the one person of the incarnate deity’.⁵⁷ The thing that made Jesus Christ one was the single active agency of the Word: divine and human natures were not united like water and wine passively subjected to being mixed in a cup; they were united as body and soul are united through the agency of one individual. However, Cyril also exploited the meaning of hypostasis in another way: for him it indicated that the union in Christ was ‘individual reality’ (as opposed to a fiction, or a mere appearance): he exploited this in his writings against Nestorius to drive home the point that in his Christology ‘the union is a real and concrete event’, whereas in Nestorius’ thought it was allegedly ‘a cosmetic exercise’.

In the passage quoted above, Cyril contrasted his concept of union ‘according to the hypostasis’ with his caricature of Nestorius’ concept of union: ‘by an act of will or “good pleasure” … merely taking on a person (prosōpon)’. In order to preserve what he thought was a proper boundary between the two natures, Nestorius seems to have asserted that they were each bound to their own hypostasis – in Cyril’s terms they were two ‘individual actualities’. Nestorius meant that Christ’s humanity and his divinity were real and that they were ‘individual’ insofar as they remained unmixed even when brought together. They were united in what Nestorius termed a prosōpon of union. The key question is what prosōpon means: often translated as ‘person’, it could also mean ‘persona’ (in the English sense), and originally derived from the word for a face or a mask. Nestorius thought that it was this single prosōpon to which the Creed referred with the titles ‘Lord’, Jesus’, ‘Christ’ and ‘Only Begotten’. Nestorius probably chose the word to suggest a single agent, in a sense that was basically very similar to Cyril’s use of hypostasis. But because of the range of the word’s meanings it was easy for Cyril to imply that Christ’s unity in Nestorius’ theology was only an appearance and thus that the mysterious prosōpon of union was not a very secure basis for the unity of the Saviour.

When one looks behind the emotional subject of the Theotokos, the accusations of heresy and the claims to be reading the Bible or the Creed ‘properly’, one basic question faced Nestorius and Cyril: ‘Who is Jesus Christ?’ Cyril’s strongest and most valuable contribution to the debate was to argue that Nestorius had no clear answer to that question (despite all Nestorius’ claims to precision, his final conclusions were fuzzy). On the other hand, Nestorius was able to show that although Cyril’s answer was clear, it carried implications which were unwelcome, even dangerous. Although there is a danger in caricaturing their theological styles, there is some truth in the argument that Nestorius’ talent for sharp analysis and criticism of other people’s positions was not matched by skill in constructive theology.⁵⁸ Conversely, Cyril, while a much better creator of theological systems, somewhat lacked the intellectual imagination which would enable him to see the weaknesses of his own theology as they might appear from another perspective.

What can one learn from this controversy, which seems so technical and alien from a modern perspective? First, the argument over the nature of the unity of Christ revealed that Cyril and Nestorius understood words like hypostasis and prosōpon in significantly different ways. In the background of the debates about Christ were dimmer and more confused arguments over the meaning of such words. Often one side assumed that their meaning of a word was correct, without appearing to realize that it was precisely that meaning which was being contested. (The same had happened in debates over the Trinity over the correct meaning of ousia and hypostasis.) In the Christological controversy, however, there were not only contested words but more general contested ideas. For example, although Cyril used the terms ‘union’ and ‘unity’ and Nestorius tended to write of ‘conjunction’, they both used the analogy of body and soul in human beings to describe the coming together of human and divine in Christ. There was much argument in late antiquity over the basic question of anthropology: how material and immaterial aspects of human nature were related in each individual. There was, however, agreement that each human being was basically one individual reality. The problem of the relation of the human and divine in Jesus Christ was more complex and there was more at stake. Nevertheless, it was possible that Christology might have followed anthropology’s pattern – a basic agreement that Christ was one underlying any disagreements as to how that was possible. However, with Nestorius’ claim that Cyril’s Christ was a mixed unity, and Cyril’s counter-claim that Nestorius’ Christ was two, it became very difficult to find any common ground. The significance of the body–soul analogy became contested along with everything else.

Secondly, both Cyril and Nestorius recognized the importance of being able to say that in becoming incarnate the Word was in some sense related to all of humanity. Discussions of Nestorius’ theology often ignore the fact that much of his writing is taken up with basic doctrine of salvation, which assumes that the Incarnation allowed Christ to die for all humans and which repeatedly asserts that Christ shares human nature.⁵⁹ This is not the clichéd Nestorius for whom Christ’s human nature is an isolated human individual.

Finally, both Nestorius and Cyril were concerned with the implications that Christology had for everyday piety, liturgy and human behaviour. They may have followed these implications in rather different ways, but neither thought that theology was an armchair profession. In particular Cyril was concerned, as we have seen, to maintain the traditional veneration of the Virgin Mary as Theotokos. His insistence on the idea that the Logos was the subject in Jesus Christ tended to emphasize the traditional Alexandrian idea of the divinization of the human being in the Incarnation (but not in a way which jeopardized the continued existence of that human nature as fully human). Because of Christ and through participating in Christ, for example, in the Eucharist, Christians were enabled to participate in that divinization: ‘they envisaged assimilation to the Logos as the proper destiny of a human being’.⁶⁰ Antiochene theologians agreed on the question of the goal of becoming more like Christ, but their emphasis on Jesus’ real humanity meant more of a focus on Jesus’ obedience, his moral struggle, his growth in virtue. This was not, however, dissociated from an emphasis on the sacraments, which are the means by which Christians are brought into their own conjunction with the divine.⁶¹

Cyril of Alexandria died in 444; Nestorius remained in permanent exile. But the controversies did not end there. As Cyril had succeeded his uncle, Theophilus, so he was succeeded by his nephew, Dioscoros. Unfortunately Dioscoros was not in favour of the Formula of Union, particularly its admission of ‘two natures’. There was increasing tension between him and theologians of the Antiochene school, especially Theodoret of Cyrrhus (who had earlier objected forcefully to Cyril’s 12 anathemas) and Domnus, who had succeeded his uncle, John, as Bishop of Antioch in 441. The situation became complicated by a controversy surrounding Ibas, Bishop of Edessa: his theology was broadly of the Antiochene school, although he appears to have accepted the deposition of Nestorius. Despite this, some in his congregations who were much more sympathetic to the Alexandrian position tried to engineer his deposition on the grounds that he was Nestorian. The episode is a useful reminder of the high emotions still being roused by the controversy and that fact that a Syrian see (which might on the face of it be expected to have followed the Antiochene or ‘Oriental’ Christology) was split into ‘Antiochene’ and ‘Alexandrian’ camps.

In Constantinople, Nestorius had been succeeded by Proclus and then by Flavian, who was a supporter of the Formula of Union. Flavian’s authority, however, was considerably undermined by the influence of Eutyches, who was a fierce opponent of the Formula of Union and a proponent of the view that Christ was of one nature. Despite being an ‘aged and muddleheaded archimandrite’,⁶² he had considerable capacity to rock the ecclesiastical boat: it seems to have been he who inflamed the situation. In 448, Flavian summoned a council at Constantinople which condemned Eutyches, but, side-stepping that authority, Eutyches wrote to Dioscoros of Alexandria and Bishop Leo of Rome in order to explain his case and plead for help. In the meantime, Flavian had also written to Leo to defend his course of action.

As archdeacon to Bishop Celestine of Rome, Leo had been involved in the first phase of the Christological controversies. In June 449 Leo sent his reply to Flavian: as might be expected, it upheld the Formula of Union and its deposition of Nestorius, but it also condemned Eutyches and the extreme Alexandrian position that he and Dioscoros held. This might have been the end of the matter were it not for the fact that the Emperor Theodosius II had more sympathy for the Alexandrians and had already called a council to be held at Ephesus in 449. Dioscoros presided over the council, which restored Eutyches, canonized Cyril’s 12 anathemas and deposed Flavian, along with Theodoret, Domnus and Ibas. He and his party either ignored or were completely unaware of Leo’s letter to Flavian.

After the council both Flavian and Theodoret wrote to Leo, begging him to intervene and claiming that Dioscorus had achieved victory only by fraud and violence. Indeed the exiled Flavian was said to have died of injuries sustained at the council. The Bishop of Rome took up the challenge but the emperor’s support for what Leo called the ‘Robber Council’ was a seemingly insuperable obstacle.⁶³

Matters were resolved in a matter completely unrelated to theology and Church politics, when in July 450 the emperor fell off his horse and died. His sister Pulcheria, always of great influence in Constantinople, renounced her status as a dedicated virgin and married a senior soldier, Marcian, who became emperor. Marcian showed where his loyalties lay by exiling Eutyches and bringing Flavian’s relics to Constantinople, where he was venerated as a martyr. He called a council at Chalcedon for the following year.

With the backing of the new emperor and leaning on the theology of Leo’s letter, the Council of Chalcedon followed the kind of line aimed at by the Formula of Union, clearly ruling out extreme versions of both Alexandrian and Antiochene theologies and seeking to mark out some common ground on which all could agree. (Whether this amounted to a Christological ‘definition’ is a moot point.) The council reaffirmed the Creed of Nicaea, and officially accepted the texts of Cyril’s Second Letter to Nestorius and Leo’s Letter to Flavian (commonly known as the Tome of Leo). It did not, however, receive as canonical Cyril’s Third Letter and its 12 anathemas. It condemned an exaggerated version of Nestorius’ views – the doctrine of ‘two sons’ – and an equally exaggerated version of Cyril’s: that ‘the deity of the Only-Begotten is passible’, that there is ‘a confusion or mixture of the two natures of Christ’. It explicitly condemned Eutyches and his followers who have ‘made up’ the belief that ‘before the union there are two natures of the Lord, but imagine that after the union there is one’.⁶⁴

Despite claiming throughout to be adding nothing to the Nicene formula, the final few phrases of the Chalcedonian statement came to have lasting influence:

Following, therefore, the holy fathers, we confess one and the same Son, who is our Lord Jesus Christ, and we all agree in teaching that this very same Son is complete in his deity and complete – the very same – in his humanity, truly God and truly as human being, this very same one being composed of a rational soul and a body, coessential [homoousios] with the Father as to his deity and coessential [homoousios] with us – the very same one – as to his humanity, being like us in every respect apart from sin. As to his deity, he was born from the Father before the ages, but as to his humanity, the very same one was born in the last days from the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God [Theotokos], for our sake and the sake of our salvation: one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only Begotten, acknowledged to be unconfusedly, unalterably, undividedly, inseparably in two natures [physesin], since the difference of the natures is not destroyed because of the union, but comes together in one person [prosōpon] and one hypostasis, not divided or torn into two persons [prosōpa] but one and the same Son and only-begotten God, Logos, Lord Jesus Christ.⁶⁵

Clearly some of this language is aimed at earlier heresies – the views which were not representative of either Cyril’s or Nestorius’ position, but which they attempted to tar each other with. So Arianism is dismissed with the assertion that the Son was ‘complete in his deity’, ‘truly God’, ‘coessential [homoousios] with the Father as to his deity’, ‘born from the Father before the ages’. The views of Apollinarius or his more extreme followers were ruled out with the affirmation that the Son was ‘complete in his humanity’, ‘truly a human being … being composed of a rational soul and a body’, ‘coessential [homoousios] with us … as to his humanity, being like us in every respect apart from sin’. Against Nestorius, the title Theotokos was affirmed. The acknowledgement of two natures is taken by some to be a vindication of the Antiochene position, by others the further following through of the implications of the Formula of Union. The way in which the statement seems to speak of Christ in one way ‘as to his deity’ and another ‘as to his humanity’ might seem to follow the Antiochene method of reading the Creed, but this is constantly qualified by the repeated emphasis on the Son’s unity: ‘we confess one and the same Son’, ‘this very same Son’, ‘the very same’, ‘this very same one’, ‘one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only Begotten’. Although numerous scholars have debated whether the Antiochene or the Alexandrian position was most vindicated by the Council of Chalcedon, in effect the council’s main aim seems to have been to rule out the negative implications of a rigid adherence to either theory: the Son is ‘unconfusedly, unalterably’ but also ‘undividedly, inseparably’ one; he is ‘two natures’ in one prosōpon and one hypostasis.

Although Leo’s letter was received with suspicion by some at Chalcedon, it seems to have played a useful role in presenting a theology which clearly acknowledged one agent in Christ whilst also arguing – with considerably more skill than Nestorius had done – for the necessity of distinguishing between the two natures after the Incarnation. The letter cleverly developed its theme, moving from sources which all Christians would acknowledge (the Scriptures, the Creed⁶⁶) to the heart of Christian theology (the doctrine of salvation) and thence to confess Jesus Christ ‘a unity of person, which must be understood to exist in a two-fold nature’.⁶⁷ It reminded the reader that the best of Nestorius’ and Cyril’s theology was also soteriologi-cal, but that it was precisely soteriology which often got lost in the heat of the debate. It was said that Nestorius read Leo’s Letter and not only agreed with it but rejoiced; at the council itself, Nestorius’ old ally Theodoret worked to show that it was consonant not with just Nestorius’ but with Cyril’s theology.⁶⁸

For these reasons, it has sometimes been argued that Leo’s letter was, as it were, more Antiochene than Alexandrian, but this would be to misunderstand both the letter and the context out of which it developed. First, it seems that one of Leo’s primary concerns with Nestorius’ theology was that it might tend to Pelagianism: it might, in other words, lead to the idea that Jesus was a perfectly virtuous man who was fore-chosen and adopted by God. Consequently, Leo was most concerned to stress Christ’s true divinity and the truth of the Virgin as Mother of God. He was less concerned to oppose any perceived duality in Nestorius’ thought, which became Cyril’s main anxiety. Secondly, despite its acknowledgement of two natures, the letter’s Christology clearly emphasized one person, which in key passages it identified with the Word: ‘it is this very same being, this only and eternal Child of the eternal Begetter, who was born of the Holy Spirit and Mary the Virgin’.⁶⁹

The theology of the letter centred on the key faith in the divine loving desire for the ‘restoration of humanity’. The Incarnation came about because ‘we would not be able to overcome the author of sin (the devil) and of death unless he whom sin could not stain nor death hold took on our nature and made it his own’.⁷⁰ Further on, Leo explained:

In this way, as our salvation requires, one and the same mediator between God and human beings, the human being who is Jesus Christ, can at one and the same time die in virtue of the one nature and, in virtue of the other, be incapable of death. That is why true God was born in the integral and complete nature of a true human being, entire in what belongs to him and entire in what belongs to us.⁷¹

The emphasis that the Word ‘took on our nature and made it his own’ would satisfy a Cyril; the careful qualification of ‘in virtue of one nature … in virtue of the other’ would please a Nestorius. To avoid the accusation of blending the natures, Leo carefully and consistently argues that ‘the characteristic properties of both natures … are kept intact and come together in one person’.⁷² This nicely reminded the reader that it was not two agents that are being kept apart. Consequently Leo was able to say, much more precisely than Nestorius, that although ‘the Word does what belongs to it and the flesh carries out what belongs to it’, strictly there is only one agent: ‘the one whom the devil’s cunning tempted as a human being is the same one to whom the angel’s services were rendered as God’.⁷³ Leo tries to express how this might be so by using the language of two ‘forms’: ‘each “form” carries on its proper activities in communion with the other’; the two forms have ‘reciprocal spheres’.⁷⁴

It is easy to be carried away with the elegance and fluid style of Leo’s letter after the angry and somewhat staccato character of the correspondence between Cyril and Nestorius. Leo’s theology was not the only factor which allowed for a settlement at Chalcedon, nor was it without its own weaknesses. Nevertheless its clear articulation of the way in which a theology of one person and two natures could make sense within the mainstream of Christian theological tradition had a significant – and lasting – impact.