From Monophysitism

to Nestorianism
From Monophysitism
to Nestorianism:

AD 431-681

By

Theodore Sabo
From Monophysitism to Nestorianism: AD 431-681

By Theodore Sabo

This book first published 2018

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2018 by Theodore Sabo

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-5275-0412-3

ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-0412-7
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface .............................................................................................vii

Chapter One ....................................................................................... 1

Apollinarius, a Proto-Monophysite

Chapter Two ...................................................................................... 7

The School of Antioch

Chapter Three .................................................................................. 23

Cyril of Alexandria

Chapter Four .................................................................................... 41

The Defeat of Nestorius at Ephesus

Chapter Five .................................................................................... 59

The Formulary Compromise

Chapter Six ...................................................................................... 71

Eutychianism Triumphant

Chapter Seven.................................................................................. 85
Chalcedon: Nestorianism Almost Rehabilitated

Chapter Eight ................................................................................. 101

Justinian’s Concessions to the Monophysites

Chapter Nine.................................................................................. 111

The Significance of Monothelitism

Chapter Ten ................................................................................... 115

The Docetism of Constantine Copronymus
vi Table of Contents

Chronology .................................................................................... 119

Bibliography .................................................................................. 121

 PREFACE

In this book we will suggest that the Third, Fourth, Fifth, and
Sixth Ecumenical Councils, when the most important Christological
controversies were waged, can all be characterized, with only the
slightest exaggeration, by the labels Nestorian, Monophysite, or
proto-Monophysite. In the Third and Fourth Councils a Nestorian,
or at least an Antiochene, victory followed a Monophysite one, and
the pattern was repeated identically with the Fifth and Sixth
Councils. If this seems to damage the religious interpretation of the
councils as the slow hammering out of orthodoxy, or to gainsay the
current interpretation of the councils as Cyrillian, Theodoretian,
conciliatory, and anti-Monothelite, it is not meant to. This study
finds itself at odds with R. V. Sellers for whom there was no real
divide between the Alexandrian and Antiochene approaches to
Christology. Sellers’ contention that the Christology of Cyril was
not essentially different from that of Theodore is given some
discredit when one observes his attempts to exonerate Apollinarius
and Paul of Samosata. Sellers does admit the failure of the
Antiochenes to adequately convey the unity of Christ and states that
none of them was as theologically astute as Cyril, a fact that must
be taken to heart in light of recent attempts to proclaim Theodoret
of Cyrrhus the greatest theologian of his age.
Sellers’ main thesis, however, is flawed. I believe the distinctions
between the Alexandrian and Antiochene approaches to Christology,
even if they are sometimes slight, should be maintained and that
each council should be labeled as coming down on one or the other
of the two sides. The book’s weakest point may be the scant
attention it gives to the Nestorians’ passing out of the orthodox
compass after the Council of Ephesus; but it must be remembered
that Patriarch Sergius’ Psephos was written with their occasional
monothelitism in mind and that, regardless, we are concerned more
with Nestorian and Antiochene trends of thought than with the
viii Preface

Assyrian Church per se.

The first chapter is largely introductory and deals with the figure
of Apollinarius who was, in a real sense, the first proto-
Monophysite, albeit more radical than any of his mainstream
successors. Chapters Two through Nine form the heart of the essay
and are devoted to the two Councils of Ephesus, the Council of
Chalcedon, and the Second and Third Councils of Constantinople.
The ninth chapter shows that the defeat of Monothelitism
represented the defeat of Monophysitism in its most overt aspects,
but the last chapter reveals that Monophysitism left a permanent
mark on Eastern Orthodoxy even after it had been permanently
defeated by the council convened by the empress Irene.
The theological conflict between the two Christological trends in
the early church will unavoidably be presented in terms of
individuals: Apollinarius versus Gregory of Nazianzus, Cyril versus
Nestorius, Eutyches versus Flavian, Dioscorus versus Theodoret,
Justinian versus Pope Vigilius, Constans II versus Maximus the
Confessor, Constantine Copronymus versus John of Damascus.
More attention will be given to the earliest phases of the
controversy, when the main battle lines were drawn, than to the
later phases. This will involve us in a discussion of the writings of
Cyril, Theodoret, and Leo. The study’s title reflects a half-truth:
orthodox Christology, at least until the outbreak of the Iconoclastic
crisis, was characterized by a progression from the deifying and
unifying impulse of the Alexandrian school in favor of the
humanizing and dichotomizing tendency of the Antiochene. In the
figure of Pope Leo the West firmly joined the side of the
Antiochenes, not that it was not to a degree already on their side.
(The case of John Cassian was an anomaly based on his sojourn
with Egyptian and Palestinian monks.) The book’s approach is only
slightly more overt than McGuckin’s in that it tends to lump the
Antiochenes and the Latins into one camp and Cyril and the
Monophysites into another.
Yet nothing in the following pages is meant to affirm anything
other than that early orthodoxy, for all its shortcomings, successfully
navigated the often narrow strait between Nestorianism and
Monophysitism. By continually changing sides, and by declaring the
decrees of all previous councils binding, it found itself outwitting
 From Monophysitism to Nestorianism: AD 431-681 ix

both the Monophysites and the Nestorians.

I have employed three new terms throughout: Neo-Nestorian for
Chalcedonian; Monophysitic Chalcedonian for Neo-Chalcedonian;
and Apollinarian, Cyrillian, and Eutychian proto-Monophysitism
for three varieties of pre-Chalcedonian Alexandrian theology.
When I speak only of proto-Monophysitism I generally refer to
Cyrillian proto-Monophysitism. I have, in addition, called
Nestorius’ early Constantinopolitan opponents Theotokosians. For
the purposes of this study Monophysitism will be viewed as
nonexistent until the close of the Council of Chalcedon, and
Patriarch Dioscorus will be viewed as its first codifier, especially in
his letters written from exile. Neo-Nestorianism will likewise be
viewed as emerging after Chalcedon. Because of the new terms I
have avoided the current designation Miaphysite which seems to
me to take the sting out of the tail of the Monophysite slogan mia
physis tou Theou Logou sesarkǀmenƝ. One should no more call a
Monophysite a Miaphysite than to designate a Monothelite by the
more accurate but less pithy Henothelite.
This book was originally my Master of Ministry thesis and aims
to reach both academic and general readers. For the historical
background, though not for my main argument, I have relied
especially on The Church in Ancient Society by Henry Chadwick,
From Nicaea to Chalcedon by Frances Young, The Rise of the
Monophysite Movement by W. H. C. Frend, and Byzantium in the
Seventh Century by J. F. Haldon. For their help with my revision I
would like to thank Mark Edwards, Brenda Llewellyn Ihssen,
Roger Schlesinger, and Svetla Slaveva-Griffin. The egregious
errors that remain are my own.

2017
 CHAPTER ONE

APOLLINARIUS, A PROTO-MONOPHYSITE

Arius was the first to get the church to think seriously about
Christology. It is true that there were the heresies of Modal and
Adoptionist Monarchianism which exercised Dionysius of
Alexandria as they had his teacher Origen, but Arius almost
single-handedly ushered in an era in which the church was well-nigh
intoxicated with Christology, though he did so from a Trinitarian
perspective and did not waste much time on the articulation between
Christ’s disparate natures. For Arius Christ was a creature, generated
by the Father from nothing, but a creature who acted as a mediator
between God and the sensible world, the latter of which He was the
fashioner. Arius went so far as to imitate the Platonists by calling the
Father Monad and the Son Dyad. He equated the Son with the
anthropomorphic Wisdom of Proverbs who aids God in His creation
of the world but who is clearly inferior to Him.1 Christ was capable
of change and even sin, but God, foreknowing His goodness, gave
Him grace so that He would not sin. Arius called Christ the created
Logos, and he distinguished this from the Logos proper, the reason
immanent in God. The incarnate Christ had a human body, but in
place of the rational human soul was the created Logos.
While Arius denied that Jesus Christ was God, the orthodox, the
Monophysites, and the Nestorians were all agreed that He was both
God and man. The only question was whether His deity or His
humanity was to be emphasized, and how separate these two entities
were to be kept. Apollinarius of Syrian Laodicea, with whom we
begin our study, favored Christ’s deity. Apollinarius was a staunch
opponent of Arianism so it is unfair to deduce his thought, as some
have, from that of Arius which it was in many ways the exact

1
Proverbs 8:22-31.
2 Chapter One

opposite of. Much has been made in recent years of his relationship
with Antioch as over against Egypt, but this only serves to muddy the
waters as to his true theological affiliations. There was undeniably
something Antiochene and semi-Jewish about him. He knew
Hebrew, as was rare among Christians in those days, and wanted to
restore the Old Testament practices, including circumcision, the
Sabbath, the abstinence from prohibited meats, the sacrificial
ceremony, cleansing for leprosy, tests for unfaithful wives,
showbread, and the burning of lamps.2
Apollinarius was both intellectual and aristocratic; he had studied
in Athens alongside Julian the Apostate and was an ally of
Athanasius. He wrote against Julian and against the Neoplatonist
Porphyry. Though little of what he wrote has survived he was a
prolific writer, so much so that Basil the Great saw him as violating
the scriptural mandate against the making of many books.
Apollinarius’ father, who shared his name, was the author of a
well-known grammar, and together the two published a version of
the Bible in classical forms after Julian banned the teaching of pagan
literature by Christians. The production seems to have set a trend,
and something similar to it would be indulged in by the empress
Eudocia. Apollinarius also wrote hymns which men sang at their
work and women at their loom. The church historian Sozomen is our
source for this, and although he is anti-Apollinarian he is unable to
disguise his delight in these hymns which “were all alike to the
praise and glory of God.”3
Apollinarius the Elder had come from Alexandria and once
entertained Athanasius when he stopped in Laodicea. Later, when
the father was a priest and the son a lector, the Homoean bishop of
Laodicea reprimanded the Apollinarii for attending the recital of a
hymn to Dionysus, apparently as a token of their friendship for the
pagan sophist Epiphanius. The two would later be excommunicated,
with undue harshness, by the bishop George. The son eventually
became the Homoousian bishop of Laodicea, opposed to Pelagius
the Homoean bishop, but he spent more time in Antioch than in

2
Basil the Great, Eps. 263, 265; Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers,
II,8:302, 304.
3
Hist. Eccl. 6.25; ibid, II,2:362.
 Apollinarius, a Proto-Monophysite 3

Laodicea. There Jerome studied under him and concluded that his
writings, like Origen’s, should be read with caution.
Eventually Apollinarius left the catholic church and organized his
own. One of his earliest followers was the priest Vitalius who was
admired for the sanctity of his life and who gave the sect its name for
a time. Theodoret of Cyrrhus would maintain that Apollinarius
assumed a mask of piety and appeared to defend apostolic doctrines
while being an open foe. It was perhaps this mask that later impelled
Theodotus of Antioch, otherwise “the pearl of purity,” to allow the
Apollinarians back into the orthodox fold.4
Sozomen tells us that Apollinarius developed his Christological
views in later life, but some scholars allege that he always held them.
He stated that the Son, while He had a human body and a lower soul,
did not have a rational soul. Rather, the Logos functioned in the
capacity of a rational soul, merging Christ’s human and divine
natures into a new nature, more divine than human. Following Plato,
Apollinarius taught that a man was essentially only his soul, and in
Jesus’ case this was the divine Logos. Therefore Jesus, even more
than most men, did not suffer, only His body did. It was untrue that
Apollinarius viewed Christ’s body as being derived from heaven;
this was a misconception of Gregory of Nyssa’s that would be
embraced by some of his own followers. Pope Leo grouped the
Apollinarians into three parties (Apollinaristarum tres partes) which
sometimes overlapped: those who denied Christ a soul, those who
granted Him a soul in the form of the Logos but no rational mind, and
those who insisted that a portion of the Logos had divinized Christ’s
human flesh. Thereby, according to Leo, “not only the nature of the
flesh and of the soul but also the essence of the Word Itself is
dissolved.”5
Apollinarius probably thought of Christ as preexisting in a
spiritual form of His later physical form, a not unorthodox concept.
His Christology depended on a trichotomous view of man which he
believed was held by the apostle Paul who had written to the
Thessalonians, “I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be

4
Theodoret, Hist. Eccl. 5.37; ibid, II,3:157.
5
Ep. 59; Serm. 28; ibid, II,12:60, 143.
4 Chapter One

preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.”6

This approach was not only Pauline but Platonic. Plato’s view of
man is sometimes described as dichotomous, with man having a
body and a soul, but his division of the soul into a higher and lower
level, the higher level amounting to a spirit, proves otherwise.
Origen also held to the trichotomous nature of man. It perplexed him,
as much it did the Middle Platonists, how the higher soul could have
been prevailed upon to adopt a fleshly existence; regardless, the
lower soul acted as a mediator between it and the body.7
Apollinarius’ belief in trichotomy would be vigorously attacked
in the next century by Theodoret whose main problem with him,
however, was that he denied that Christ had a rational soul. Arius had
also denied Christ’s soul, but he did so only to establish His
creatureliness and changeableness (treptotƝs) as intermediary
between God and man, not His surpassing divinity. Apollinarius, on
the contrary, emphasized that Christ was changeless (atreptǀs).
According to him, Christ was not strictly speaking a man though He
was very much like a man. Did not Paul speak of God sending His
Son “in the likeness of sinful flesh”?8
In his Epistle to Jovian Apollinarius pioneered in the use of a
phrase that would be much used by Cyril of Alexandria: mia physis
tou Theou Logou sesarkǀmenƝ, “one nature of God the Word
incarnate.” By that Cyril would mean that the Logos took on a new
existence, but Apollinarius meant that Christ became a mixture
(mixis or synkrasis) of God and man. Cyril appears to have picked up
on another element of Apollinarius’ thought, namely that Christ, far
from being merely a particular man, represented the human race.
This, at least, can be inferred from his talk of Christ showing men
what it was to be truly human.
We can see from all this that Apollinarius set the stage for many
of the same issues the Monophysites would be obsessed with,
although in their case it was with a less extreme emphasis on Christ’s
deity. He was not a Docetic, but his critics could be excused for
thinking him so, and for charging him with creating a monstrous

6
1 Thessalonians 5:23.
7
Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, II,5:18.
8
Romans 8:3.
 Apollinarius, a Proto-Monophysite 5

being, neither God nor man. Apollinarius’ solution to the

Christological problem was, according to Quasten, an easy answer to
a difficult question, which is precisely why it was to prove so
unsatisfactory. 9 His overly divine Son did not square with the
Gospels’ portrait of Jesus growing in knowledge, praying in the
Garden, and crying out on the cross. He appears to have been
motivated by nothing so much as the impossibility of a Savior
possessing a mind “prey to filthy thoughts.”10 Here again we find
hints of Platonism and even Gnosticism.
Yet Apollinarius’ critics were equally motivated by the question
of salvation: if the rational soul of man was to be saved the Savior
must possess just such an entity. “What has not been assumed cannot
be restored; it is what is united with God that is saved,” Gregory of
Nazianzus wrote in his Letter to Cledonius which has become a locus
classicus in the orthodox fight against Apollinarianism.11 Gregory
was vexed that the Apollinarians called Christ the Lordly Man and
that they hoped for the restoration of the Jerusalem Temple.12 In a
subsequent letter to Cledonius he discerns in Apollinarius tendencies
towards both Judaism and Docetism, a similar phenomenon to what
one encounters in the earliest Gnostics. 13 Gregory wanted the
secular authorities to mildly punish the Apollinarians and obviously
thought Theodosius I was the ideal man for this.14
The Letter to Cledonius was received in part at the Council of
Ephesus and in full at the Council of Chalcedon. Both it and
Athanasius’ Letter to Epictetus anticipated the Christological
controversies of the fifth century. It is of some question whether
Athanasius’ letter was directed against Apollinarius since he is not
alluded to; Apollinarius, sincerely or as a smokescreen, praised it to
Serapion of Thmuis. It takes a middle ground between the positions
of Apollinarius and his opponent Diodore of Tarsus and thinks in
terms of Christ’s two natures though without using such an

9
Quasten, Patrology, 3:382.
10
Ep. ad Diocaes. 2; Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 293.
11
Ep. 101; ibid, 297.
12
Ep. 101; Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, II,7:439, 442.
13
Ep. 102; ibid, 444.
14
Ep. 102; ibid, 445.
6 Chapter One

expression. Pope Leo would see it as taking the middle ground

between Eutychianism and Nestorianism.15
At any rate the battle against the Apollinarians was waged more
by the Cappadocians than by Athanasius. Basil of Caesarea was
ashamed of having been Apollinarius’ friend and correspondent, and
Gregory of Nyssa wrote his imposing Antirrheticus against him. In
speaking of the Cappadocian opposition to Apollinarius, Brown well
observes that orthodoxy, for the first time in two centuries, was
forced to defend Christ’s full humanity.16 At a council in Rome in
377 Pope Damasus condemned Apollinarian proto-Monophysitism,
and he was followed by various other councils, culminating in the
First Council of Constantinople which denounced Apollinarianism
in company with Anomoeanism, Homoeanism, and Macedonianism.

15
Ep. 109; ibid, II,12:81.
16
Brown, Heresies, 164-165.
 CHAPTER TWO

THE SCHOOL OF ANTIOCH

The second phase of the Christological conflict was inaugurated

by the patriarch Nestorius. It is not difficult to understand why his
enemies the Theotokosians found him, and the whole Antiochene
milieu, suspect. Nestorius, together with his masters Diodore of
Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia, uttered statements that,
regardless of their protestations of orthodoxy, could easily be
caricatured as Adoptionist. In other words, they could be accused of
beginning their Christology with a man being made God. Christ
might seem possessed by God in the same way in which Judas was
said to be temporarily possessed by Satan.
The relationships between Judaism, Arianism, and Antiochene
theology cannot here be explored. Suffice it to say that Arius’ teacher
Lucian, the editor of what would become the basis for the Byzantine
Text of the New Testament, was from Antioch and that Antiochene
theology was heavily indebted to Judaism. This was not, of course, a
complete antidote for anti-Jewish feeling. The sermons of John
Chrysostom and Theodoret’s exultation that the Jewish temple was
in ruins in response to Christ’s prophecy are evidence to the contrary.
Antioch’s Jewishness can also be overplayed. Despite its Ancient
Near Eastern feel it was still a sophisticated city, so much so that in
the fourth century its slaves wore gold and slept on beds of ivory
inlaid with silver and gold.1 It was also a Greek city and as such was
imbued with ideologies like Middle and Neoplatonism, a fact that
should be kept in mind even when dealing with so biblical a thinker
as Theodore of Mopsuestia. There was also the not minor influence
of Aristotle. The school of Antioch had a liking for the Stagirite’s
analyses and distinctions, the dictum of no nature without

1
Neander, The Life of St. Chrysostom, 2.
8 Chapter Two

personhood looming particularly large in its consciousness.

Fundamentally, however, the Antiochenes breathed the same
theological atmosphere as the Jews around them. For them the God
of Israel had, with the coming of the New Testament, been made
known in three persons. It is not insignificant, in connection with
this, to observe that the Third Council of Constantinople would refer
to Nestorius as Nestorius the Judaizer. 2 We also know that the
Nestorians allied with the Jews against the Monophysites in the sixth
century. In the Book of the Himyarites the Monophysite heroine
Habsa tells the Jews, and presumably the Nestorians, that she
believes that Christ is God, not a man, the latter being an
oversimplification of the Antiochene view. 3 Sellers traces the
thought of the Antiochenes to Theophilus of Antioch and Paul of
Samosata, the latter of whom was essentially a Jew but for the unique
prominence he gave to Jesus Christ. Paul and Theophilus were
encouraged in their Adoptionism by such Logos passages as Psalm
45:1 and Wisdom 18:15.
Eustathius of Antioch has, perhaps fancifully, been seen as a link
between Paul of Samosata and Diodore of Tarsus. He was a
confessor of the Diocletian persecution and a determined opponent
of Arianism. He wrote a work on the title verses of the Psalms. His
only completely extant treatise, On the Witch of Endor Against
Origen, stressed, in common with Lucian of Antioch, the literal
interpretation of Scripture. Eustathius believed the apparition of
Samuel was a deception by the demon indwelling the witch of Endor.
In this he took issue with Origen who held it to be a true appearance
of Samuel and who was, in this one irritating way, a literalist in his
interpretation of Scripture. Elsewhere Eustathius criticized Arius for
denying that Christ had a human soul. He believed the inference of a
human soul in Christ could explain the weakness apparently
experienced by the Logos; the human soul was to be thought of as the
meeting place between the Son’s divine and human natures.
Eustathius spoke of the Logos dwelling in Christ’s humanity as in a
temple and called Him an anthrǀpos Theophoros, a God-bearing
man. In his mind the speaker of Proverbs 8:22—“The Lord

2
Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, II,14:344.
3
Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement, 137.
 The School of Antioch 9

possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of

old”—was Christ’s human body.
Eustathius’ mantle was taken up by Diodore of Tarsus. It is
unfortunate that more of Diodore’s writings have not survived since
he appears to have had a nonpareil education. He first studied under
Silvanus of Tarsus and Eusebius, the Homoean bishop of Emesa
whose learning was so great he was rumored to be a sorcerer. He
then went to Athens, which was still a philosophical mecca, and
studied Plato, Aristotle, and Neoplatonism. Lastly, in harmony with
both Christianity and Neoplatonism, he embraced the life of a lay
ascetic in Antioch. This he did with his friend Flavian who, together
with him, made things hot for the Homoean bishop of Antioch. Both
men had a formidable influence on the young Chrysostom.
Diodore was ordained a priest by the Homoiousian bishop
Melitius and followed him into his second exile in Armenia. After
the death of the Homoean emperor Valens, Melitius returned to
Antioch and ordained Diodore bishop of Tarsus. Diodore was known
for his opposition to the pagan reforms of Julian the Apostate and
earned the latter’s reproach that his emaciated appearance was not
the result of asceticism but judgment from the gods. Cyril of
Alexandria would accuse Diodore of having once been a
Macedonian, that is a denier of the divinity of the Holy Spirit, but
that is unlikely. Diodore wrote against the Manichaeans and
especially Mani’s disciple Adda. This work was entitled Bushel,
referring to Christ’s words in the Gospel of Mark that no one keeps a
candle hidden under a bushel.4 Diodore was an expert in astronomy
and a foe of astrology, a fact which may explain his dislike of the
Syrian Gnostic Bardaisan, author of the Laws of the Countries.
Diodore believed it was permissible to use theǀria but not allegory in
the exposition of Scripture. Theǀria was the contemplation of
Scripture’s deeper meaning, as when Chrysostom said that the five
foolish virgins of Christ’s parable sinned by lacking the oil of charity
and almsgiving. For Diodore allƝgoria was a dismissal of the literal
whereas theǀria went beyond the literal without rejecting it.
Diodore distinguished between the divine and human natures of
Christ with the phrases Son of God and Son of David. The

4
Mark 4:21.
10 Chapter Two

relationship between the former and the latter was similar to that
between God and the prophets except that it was a permanent and
complete union. He found proof of the separateness of the man Jesus
from the Trinity by remembering that it was permissible to
blaspheme the Son but not the Holy Spirit. Worst of all, he averred
that the Son of David shared in the devotion offered to the Son of
God just as a monarch’s robe shares in the devotion offered to the
monarch. Between the two Sons, for all his wishing, he had a
mechanical and artificial union that would be inherited by Nestorius.
Drobner, unlike Cyril of Alexandria, maintains that it is unfair to
judge Diodore and his successor Theodore by the more sophisticated
Christological understanding of a later time. He therefore praises the
Second Council of Constantinople for refusing to condemn Diodore.5
One might plausibly argue, against Drobner, that Diodore’s opponent
Apollinarius had already made it imperative to think in sophisticated
terms about Christology.
The Jewish heritage of the Antiochenes is nowhere more evident
than in Theodore of Mopsuestia who built his theology on the Shema
Yishrael. He probably grew up in a religious home since both he and
his brother Polychronius became bishops. Polychronius was a mass
of contradictions who objected to allegorical interpretation, had a
higher opinion of the book of Job than Theodore, and in his biblical
interpretation approached the extreme rationalism of the Neoplatonist
and onetime Christian Porphyry. According to Theodoret of
Cyrrhus, Polychronius was eloquent and illustrious, but he is almost
completely sidelined today in favor of his more famous brother.
Theodore of Mopsuestia was a student, with John Chrysostom, of
the pagan sophist Libanius and Diodore of Tarsus. Chrysostom was,
of all the Antiochenes, the furthest from the heart and soul of
Antiochene Christology, except for his avoidance of the word
Theotokos, his dislike of the Virgin Mary’s pushiness towards her
Son, and his comparison of the two natures joining in Christ to a man
stretching out both of his hands to join two people on either side of
him.
Theodore had spent three months at Diodore’s askƝtƝrion or
ascetic school when he decided to become a lawyer and marry the

5
Drobner, The Fathers of the Church, 320.
 The School of Antioch 11

young Hermione; Chrysostom attempted to dissuade him in two

letters. A sample will do to illustrate both their intemperance and
their reflection of Theodore’s past life in asceticism: “Do not be
deceived by anyone’s saying, ‘God has not forbidden marriage.’ I
know that as well as you. He has not forbidden marriage; but He has
forbidden adultery, which is what you are contemplating.” 6
Hermione must have contributed to Theodore’s literal interpretation
of Scripture, at least of the Song of Solomon which he viewed as a
love paean between Solomon and his Egyptian princess, an
interpretation that would be vilified by Theodoret of Cyrrhus as unfit
even for the mouth of a crazy woman. But Chrysostom’s letters were
successful, and Theodore was ordained a priest and later a bishop.
The Assyrian Church has preserved two catalogs of Theodore’s
writings. All of them were consigned to burning by the emperor
Justinian and therefore survive more in Syriac and Latin translations
than in the original Greek; an exception is his commentary on the
Minor Prophets. Augustine’s enemy Julian of Eclanum translated
Theodore’s commentary on the Psalms, written when he was twenty,
into Latin, and until the twentieth century it was thought that this
commentary was the work of Julian. At one time Theodore received
Julian and some of his Pelagian friends, but he later had them
condemned by a synod in Cilicia, proving that he was more cautious
about the heretics than Nestorius would be.
As a commentator Theodore did not believe that the apostle
Paul’s allegory about Sarah and Hagar justified approaching the Old
Testament as though it were fiction that needed to be demythologized.
His rejection of allegory was typically Jewish, as was his refusal to
find Christ everywhere in the Old Testament as all the Christians
since Justin and Irenaeus had done. 7 His most blatantly literal
commentary was his commentary on the Psalms. There he found
only one unmistakable reference to Christ: “for thou wilt not leave
my soul in hell; neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see
corruption.” 8 Theodore was moved not so much by his Jewish
milieu as by an attempt to emphasize the distinction between the Old

6
Ep. ad Theod. 2.3; Jurgens, The Faith of the Early Fathers, 2:87.
7
Irenaeus of Lyons, On the Apostolic Preaching, 8-14.
8
Psalm 16:10.
12 Chapter Two

and New Testaments, specifically the oldness of the Old Testament

and the newness of the New Testament; he spoke, like the psalmist,
of singing unto the Lord a new song.9
For Theodore not all the Psalms were written by David, and their
prophetic horizon generally stretched no further than the time of the
Maccabees. Yet he admitted to four messianic psalms, one more than
his master Diodore had admitted, and his view of the prophetic scope
of the Minor Prophets was even broader. He recognized in the career
of Jonah, and in the blood sprinkled in the Passover, prefigurements of
Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection.10 Typology—the interpretation
of Old Testament persons and events as types of or as pointing to
Christ—was all-important in early Christian exegesis. One finds it
pervading theological pronouncements like the Chalcedonian
Definition: “even as the prophets from of old taught us about Him”
(kathaper anǀthen hoi prophƝtai peri autou). It was more restrained
than allegorism, but, as Christopher Hall points out, there was no
early Christian literalist who was not sometimes allegorical or
allegorist who was not sometimes literal.11
Theodore wrote an almost Pauline commentary on the Gospel of
John. It was dedicated to Porphyrius of Antioch, a fellow student
with him and Chrysostom at Diodore’s askƝtƝrion, and stressed both
the humanity and deity of Christ, the former of which was alone
recognized by the Jews in the Gospel. In harmony with what we have
noted about Antioch’s Jewishness, he points out that the Jews began
the day at sundown. Somewhat at odds with his time he alleges that
the prophecy of the death of John at the end of the Gospel was not
written by John himself.12
Theodore was never enthusiastic in his commentaries, but the
same could not be said of his writings on the Eucharist which view
the rite as a reenactment of events in heaven, specifically the Son’s
sacrifice to the Father. In Theodore’s liturgy the two elements
become the body and blood of the Lord. This had before been hinted
by both Cyril of Jerusalem and the Apostolic Constitutions, and as it

9
Young, From Nicaea to Chalcedon, 199.
10
Ibid, 206.
11
Hall, Reading Scripture with the Church Fathers, 157.
12
Elowsky, John 11-21, 397.
 The School of Antioch 13

caught on it led to awe and sometimes reluctance on the part of the

communicants.13
In addition to his commentaries and his works on the liturgy
Theodore wrote against Eunomius, Apollinarius, and the Macedonians.
There remains a transcript of a dispute he conducted in Syriac with
Macedonian heretics in Anazarbus, something like Origen had done
with the Monarchian Heraclides. He was impelled to write against
Julian the Apostate by Julian’s criticisms of Diodore. It makes sense
that the first Christian to write against Julian’s Against the Galileans
was from Antioch, considering the emperor’s tumultuous relationship
with that city. Theodore’s work, like Cyril of Alexandria’s after him,
was a continuation of the acrimonious pagan-Christian dialogue
represented by Celsus and Origen. Julian had produced some of the
most salient anti-Christian literature since Porphyry and wrote from
a more religious perspective than Celsus did. He particularly
delighted in the contradictions in the Gospels, but Theodore
countered that these were only minor details and that if the overall
story had been fictitious the compilers would have purposely
avoided all contradiction.14
Theodore emerges more suspect as a theologian than as an
apologist, although there are parallels between his treatise on the
Incarnation and Augustine’s theology. According to Photius, for
whom Theodore vomited up Nestorianism by anticipation, Theodore
rejected the doctrine of original sin and believed in the final
forgiveness of all men, hence his initially lenient attitude toward the
Pelagians. He avoided the dual Sonship language of Diodore but
stated that the Son’s humanity was of a different hypostasis than His
divinity because only a divine hypostasis could be of the same
substance as the Father. He also seemed to suggest that the Logos
took up an already existing human being, an entity which he called
“the man assumed” (analƝphthenta). The man assumed was like a
temple or a garment indwelt by the Logos, but the relationship
between the Logos and the man assumed was different from that
between God and the prophets because the Logos dwelled in Him as

13
Chadwick, The Church in Ancient Society, 522.
14
Moreschini and Norelli, Early Christian Greek and Latin Literature,
2:145.
14 Chapter Two

in a son (hǀs en huiǀ). Theodore further covered his Adoptionist

tracks by saying that the Logos and the man assumed shared one
person (prosǀpon) in a continuous and indissoluble union. Like
Nestorius he used prosǀpon for each of Christ’s natures and for the
union itself.
Theodore’s protestations that he was not an Adoptionist are often
merely puzzling and his attempts at emphasizing the unity of Christ
fall disquietingly flat: “We do not assert that the Sons are two . . . but
one Son is rightly confessed since there is one Son according to
essence (eis huios kat’ ousian), God the Word, the only begotten Son
of the Father to whom is conjoined he who participates in the
Godhead, and shares the common name and honour of the Son.”15
As for the Virgin Mary, she was the mother of God only in the sense
that God was in the man who was born to her. Cyril of Alexandria’s
outburst to the long-dead Theodore—“Sodom has been more
justified than you”—was not as groundless as it at first appeared.16
Theodore died the same year Nestorius was installed as patriarch
of Constantinople. The appointment was suggested by John of
Antioch, Nestorius’ childhood friend, and got Theodosius II’s
religious policy off on the wrong footing. Theodosius was a saintly
emperor who wore a hair shirt next to his skin but whose goodwill
was not up to the challenge of tackling the increasingly complex
nature of Christological disputes. Theodosius’ saintliness is not to be
mistaken for the spinelessness that used to be attributed to him; his
delegation of his imperial responsibilities seems to have been
dictated by a sincere political aloofness, and Frend has shown that he
was not incapable of decisive action. Theodosius studied the
classics, theology, and the natural sciences but more often painted
and carved or copied out religious manuscripts in his fine hand. He
was fond of hunting and the Persian game of polo which he is
thought to have introduced to Byzantium.
The decision to install Nestorius as patriarch of Constantinople
was a bad one, but it was complicated by the growing bellicosity of
the Alexandrian see, already illustrated by Theophilus’ destruction
of John Chrysostom and Cyril’s indirect role in the murder of the

15
Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement, 128.
16
Ibid, 135.
 The School of Antioch 15

lady philosopher Hypatia. Nestorius may not have been as

uneducated as the church historian Socrates made it out, but his
speech was more bombastic than Cyril’s and he refused to ponder
Cyril’s writings as thoroughly as Cyril, with some concern for the
unity of Christ and as much malice, pondered his. Nestorius was
born in Germanicia in Syrian Euphratensis of Persian descent and
studied under Theodore of Mopsuestia. He entered the monastery of
St. Euprepius and eventually became presbyter of the church of
Antioch. He shared Chrysostom’s zeal and rhetorical skill but little
of his compassion for the downtrodden. At his installation ceremony
in Constantinople he addressed the emperor with these words,
famous even when Socrates wrote: “Give me the earth purified of
heretics, and I will give you heaven for it; help me to fight the
heretics, and I will help you fight the Persians.”17
Socrates said that John Chrysostom was unbendingly rigid, like a
man without knees, but the statement was even more apt about
Nestorius. The new patriarch persuaded Theodosius to restrict the
number of races and dancing girls at the hippodrome and so earned
the hatred of the crowds. He earned the enmity of the monks by
criticizing their habit of living in the city and dabbling in politics.
Asceticism in his homeland of Syria, it would not be too much to say,
was more authentic than it was in Constantinople. Monkish
opposition to Nestorius may have commenced even before his
criticism of the monks, if one can believe the testimony of Hypatius
who dreamed that he saw Nestorius being consecrated by laymen.
Nestorius also passed severe measures against the Novatians, the
Quartodecimans, and the Macedonians, and ordered that the last
surviving chapel of the Arians be shut down, a foolish act since the
German soldiers who helped defend the city were Arians. Equally
imprudently he alienated the imperial sister Pulcheria, the real power
behind the Constantinopolitan throne.
The emperor was the only layman who was allowed to enter the
sanctuary for the Eucharist, but Pulcheria had done so under
previous patriarchs. Nestorius now refused her admittance, and when
Pulcheria assured him that she was a virgin he asked her what kind of

17
Hist. Eccl. 7.29; Schaff, History of the Christian Church, 3:716.
16 Chapter Two

virginity she practiced. 18 Pulcheria was not the only woman the
patriarch alienated by trying to impose inapposite Syrian customs on
the capital. He attempted to stop women from going to night vespers
in the cathedral. In the Book of Heraclides, written long afterwards,
he seems to defend himself against the charge of misogyny by saying
that what he objected to about Pulcheria was not that she was a
woman but rather an aggressive woman, and that the ladies who went
to night vespers could not have been, by virtue of the case, anything
but indecent women.19 If he were alive today he would claim not to
dislike women, only feminists. It is fair to deduce that not every
woman of Constantinople was affronted by him, only a certain type
of woman, as for instance the senator’s wife who shouted at him
while he took part in a church procession. The empress Eudocia was
said to be one of the patriarch’s admirers.
Nestorius further antagonized Pulcheria by removing a robe she
had donated as an altar covering; he thought of it less as the gift of a
virgin than as the gift of a political woman.20 Nestorius’ dislike of
the imperial sister was unwise but forgivable since she had already
aided monks who were rebelling against his predecessor Sisinnius.
He also wanted the emperor to think for himself rather than for him
to let Pulcheria, or even himself, do his thinking for him. In other
words this forthright but essentially unlikable man aspired to be the
young emperor’s mentor.
In view of the Chalcedonian aftermath of the Nestorian and
Eutychian controversies it cannot be stated forcefully enough that
Pulcheria’s reasons for disliking Nestorius were personal and
political rather than theological. It is nonetheless ironic that she
became Jezebel to the Assyrian Church and a saint to the
Neo-Nestorians. Nestorius’ relationship with her probably seemed to
him a repeat of Chrysostom’s troubled relationship with the empress
Eudoxia. But, as in the case of Chrysostom, his end was to come not
through politics but theology.

18
McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy,
25.
19
Ibid.
20
Ibid, 26.
 The School of Antioch 17

Nestorius’ presbyters preached Antiochene theology as represented

by Diodore and Theodore who did not possess the international
reputation of the Cappadocians. One of the presbyters, Anastasius,
attacked the use of the word Theotokos and was defended by
Nestorius. The patriarch disliked Theotokos, “God-bearing,” when
used to describe the Virgin Mary, or at least exclusive of
Anthrǀpotokos, “man-bearing.” He was, according to Socrates, afraid
of the word as though it were a hobgoblin (mormolykion). 21 A
sounder word to him was Christotokos, “Christ-bearing,” or even
Theodochos, “God-receiving.” He argued that we should not call
Mary the mother of God any more than we call James the brother of
God. 22 He did not deny either Christ’s deity or humanity but
separated His two natures so rigorously that he was able to make the
dangerous claim that the two or three-month-old Jesus could not be
called God, meaning merely that human qualities could not properly
be applied to the divinity of Christ.
Nestorius viewed the Theotokosians as heretics who merged
Christ’s deity and humanity in an Apollinarian manner. Yet it would
be a mistake to think of the Nestorians, as they would become known
as in Syria and Persia, as having a low opinion of the Virgin Mary.
Sebastian Brock remarks that in practice the orthodox, the
Monophysites, and the Nestorians had an equally deferential attitude
towards her.23 Nonetheless Nestorius felt that some of the veneration
paid her was excessive. The bishop Proclus played only a minor role
in the Theotokosian controversy, but he preached a sermon in
Nestorius’ presence which should be partly quoted as it contains
some of the enthusiastic spirit against which the patriarch was
fighting: “The holy Mary has called us here together, the stainless
jewel of virginity, the rational paradise of the second Adam, the
workshop of the unity of the natures, the festival of the saving
covenant, the bridal chamber in which the Word espoused the flesh,
the living bush which the fire of the divine birth did not burn . . .
slave and mother, virgin and heaven, the only bridge between God

21
Hist. Eccl. 7.32; Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, II,2:171.
22
Price and Gaddis, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, 1:333.
23
Jacob of Serug, On the Mother of God, 2.
18 Chapter Two

and man.”24
Nestorius followed Proclus’ sermon with a homily urging restraint
in describing the Virgin. In some ways he had a point against the
Theotokosians, but in other ways he did not. In the Gospel of Luke
Elizabeth had called Mary “the mother of my Lord” (hƝ mƝtƝr tou
kyriou mou) which meant essentially the same thing as Theotokos.25
Pope Leo seems to have been one of the few ancients to have noticed
this passage with reference to the Nestorian controversy. Theotokos
had been prized among the Alexandrians since the time of Origen, and
Athanasius’ predecessor Alexander had spoken of “Mary the Mother
of God” (tƝs Theotokou Marias) in a letter from the Alexandrian
synod of 320 that condemned Arius;26 even Eustathius of Antioch
employed the word. Cyril of Alexandria, who used both Theotokos
and its synonym Mater Theou, did not hesitate to side with Nestorius’
enemies and accused him of heresy. He began an in-depth study of
patristic Christology, something that would not bode well for
Nestorius, and addressed a circular letter to the Egyptian monks.
These were not naturally inclined to honor the Virgin so it was with
some effort that Cyril argued for the validity of the Theotokos title.
Firstly, Athanasius, a folk hero to the monks, used it in his anti-Arian
writings. Secondly, it was possible for certain Christian women to be
mothers of Christ, but only one could be the mother of God.27
It could be said that the Antiochene theologians who influenced
Nestorius were unnecessarily pedantic; their rigorous two-natures
Christology at least suggests this; but none was more pedantic than
Nestorius himself. One of his favorite words (akribǀs) could be
translated by the English phrase “strictly speaking.” In 429, in a public
display against Nestorius in Constantinople, the protestors mocked his
theology and manner of speech. If Mary was not, strictly speaking, the
mother of God, they alleged, then her Son was not, strictly speaking,
God. 28 The lawyer Eusebius, later of Dorylaeum, arranged for a

24
Gregory, Vox Populi, 91.
25
Luke 1:43.
26
Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, II,14:208.
27
Ep. 1; McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological
Controversy, 247, 251.
28
Cyril of Alexandria, On the Unity of Christ, 19.
 The School of Antioch 19

placard to be carried through the city which accused Nestorius of

being a follower of the Adoptionism of Paul of Samosata.
It was not so much the patriarch’s Christology that the
Constantinopolitans objected to as his callous attitude toward a
popular epithet. A Theotokosian monk forbade him from
approaching his altar, and we get some measure of the nature of the
man when we learn that Nestorius gave orders for him to be
flogged.29 Other monks continually disrupted his sermons. He was
able to pacify at least one group of them by inviting them to his
episcopal palace the next day for a talk. They took him at his word
and received a beating instead.30
Nestorius’ Christology owed much to Diodore and Theodore.
Like the former he believed that God dwelled in the Son in a similar
way that He dwelled in the prophets, and like the latter he stressed
that the union was continuous. In one of his sermons he spoke about
the Logos and His relationship to the Christ child thusly: “the same
was Infant and Inhabitant of the Infant.” 31 He shared the whole
Antiochene revulsion to any talk of God suffering in the life of
Christ. The Logos suffered when Jesus suffered only in the sense that
an emperor suffers when his statue is dishonored. The Antiochene
war against the passibility of the Logos was a reaction to the Arians’
attempt to make Him similar to God rather than equal with Him.
Nestorius attacked Apollinarianism as almost Docetic, and like
Gregory of Nazianzus he noted that its tendency to minimize the
humanity of Christ had grave soteriological implications. He could
not have been accused of doing the same. He wanted Christ to be
fully human in every sense of the term with the exception of sin, and
he took the Savior’s ignorance of the coming of the day of the Lord
more seriously than Cyril did. Cyril went so far, in his emphasis on
Christ’s single subjectivity, as to say that He prayed only to give us
an example. Something similar would be maintained, regarding
Christ’s will, by the Monothelite pope Honorius. Monothelitism, of
course, was cut out of the same philosophical cloth as Cyrillian

29
McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy,
32.
30
Ibid, 33.
31
Serm. 15; Jurgens, The Faith of the Early Fathers, 3:204.
20 Chapter Two

proto-Monophysitism.
For Nestorius the Son possessed two natures (physeis) and two
persons (prosǀpa), but by persons he did not mean their separate
entity, only their objective reality. He was crippled by the
Aristotelian notion that there can be no nature without personhood.
Nestorius was something of a stickler regarding Christological titles:
he wanted Jesus used only when describing His human actions;
Logos only when describing His divine actions; and Christ, Son, or
Lord when speaking of the whole union.32
Yet union (henǀsis) was not the word Nestorius used to define the
relationship between Christ’s two natures. He preferred conjunction
(synapheia), association (koinǀnia), appropriation (oikeǀsis),
indwelling (kat’ enoikesin), or habituated possession (schesis). 33
Synapheia was the term he most commonly employed. It was far less
strong than henǀsis, but he chose it to avoid the Apollinarian
admixture of the two natures and attempted to buttress it with such
adjectives as perfect, exact, continuous, inseparable, and interrelated
(akra, akribƝs, diƝnekƝs, achǀristƝ, schetikƝ).34
Nestorius’ two natures were less prosopic than those of Theodore
and can be considered an improvement on the latter’s Christology.
He used the analogy of the burning bush, in typically rhetorical
manner, to describe their relationship: “The fire was in the bush and
the bush was fire and the fire bush, each of them was bush and fire,”
but there “were not two bushes nor two fires.”35 Yet he could not
resist the temptation to think of the two natures in prosopic terms.
The Logos’ association with Jesus was for Nestorius an
association of grace (synapheia kat’ eudokian). This is related to
Origen’s idea, in his exposition of Christ’s words on marriage in
Mark 10, that because of love the soul of Jesus becomes “as it were”
one with the Logos.36 This is the reverse of the love felt for the Nous

32
McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy,
156.
33
Ibid, 161.
34
Ibid, 162.
35
Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement, 131.
36
De Prin. 2.6; McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological
Controversy, 163.
 The School of Antioch 21

by the World Soul, and for the World Soul by the material world, in
Plotinus’ system.37 Nestorius was influenced by Origen through the
intermediacy of the Cappadocians. Origen, in his different ways,
shaped the Christological understanding of Arius, Athanasius, and
Nestorius.
Nestorius’ most developed thought is reflected in the Book of
Heraclides or, by a scribal mistranslation, the Bazaar of Heraclides.
A twelfth-century copy of it was rediscovered in 1889, and several
copies were made of the copy before it perished during the First
World War. It was highly revered among the Nestorians, Ebedjesu
mentioning it as among their writings and the Nestorian monk Bar
Edta having memorized it. The Book of Heraclides probably
contains interpolations but is thought to be overall authentic. It is
meandering even for its time, and its logic is sometimes difficult to
trace; despite Nestorius’ philosophical education his mind was not as
disciplined as it could have been.
Heraclides appears to have been a pseudonym used by Nestorius
or his copyist to enable the work’s survival. Nestorius, together with
a certain Sophronius, is a speaker in the dialogue that begins the
book, but the dialogue form is soon dropped and the book continues
as a history of the two Councils of Ephesus. In it Nestorius accepts
one prosǀpon along with the Alexandrian interpretation of the word.
He writes that just as there is one substance (ousia) of three persons
in the Trinity so there is one person (prosǀpon) of two substances in
the Son. He uses hypostasis sometimes for ousia and sometimes for
prosǀpon, the idea of the exclusive interchangeability of hypostasis
with prosǀpon, clearly set forth by his eventual successor Flavian,
not having touched him to the quick. Expressions about Jesus in the
New Testament, he believes, can be applied either to His single
prosopon or to one of His two natures. Even so Nestorius cannot
refrain from speaking of two prosopa which, it should be noted, are
to be distinguished from the single prosopon of the union. In this
prosopon the two natural prosopa, the divine and the human,
interpenetrate and inform one another.38

37
Plotinus, The Enneads, xcii.
38
Young, From Nicaea to Chalcedon, 238.
 CHAPTER THREE

CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA

It is ironic that what we now call orthodoxy is really

Neo-Nestorianism, that is Nestorianism purged of all its potential
Adoptionist tendencies. Cyril’s horror of Antiochene Christology
was forgivable, yet the gap that separated him from Nestorius was
one of emphasis, an emphasis that would be exaggerated by the
Eutychian proto-Monophysites. The Alexandrians worked with what
has been called a Word-Flesh (Logos-Sarx) scheme while the
Antiochenes used a Word-Man (Logos-Anthrǀpos) scheme. It is only
fair to say that McGuckin rejects this construct as artificial. There is
a sense in which both schools inherited Plato’s deprecation of matter:
the Alexandrians wanted to elevate Christ by making Him as least a
man as allowable whereas the Antiochenes, somewhat like the
Arians, wanted to ensure that the Father had as little to do with man
as possible by stressing Christ’s humanity—“There is a great
difference,” Theodore wrote, “between us and God.”1 One should
not belittle Frances Young’s emphasis on the Platonic thought world
with which all Christian theologians worked at this time. Yet there is
a sense in which neither school was Platonic: Cyril’s accentuation of
Christ’s deity was designed to exclude all vestiges of Adoptionism in
Christology, and the Antiochenes’ concern with the suffering of only
Christ’s human nature owed not so much from revulsion to matter as
from a desire to honor the essence of God and from a careful
interpretation of Psalm 102:26-27 and Isaiah 40:6-8.
McGuckin attempts to exonerate Cyril the man since in recent
years he has been attacked on that score just as Nestorius has been
largely vindicated as a theologian, though not, as McGuckin alleges,
because of any renewed interest in pluralism. A pluralistic scholar

1
Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement, 126.
24 Chapter Three

would concentrate more on defending Gnosticism or Arianism than

Nestorianism which would have little to offer him, though one must
remark the contemporary enthusiasm for Antiochene biblical
interpretation as over against Alexandrian interpretation; Nestorius’
role as an underdog would also make him sympathetic to pluralists.
Cyril was born in the Egyptian town of Theodosios. His mother
came from Memphis and was the younger sister of the patriarch
Theophilus who had a formative and partially evil influence on him.
Cyril read Christian writings and only those pagan writings that were
suggested by Eusebius of Caesarea. He seems to have frequented the
monasteries without ever becoming a monk; perhaps Theophilus was
already grooming him to be his successor. At the age of twenty-five
Cyril was ordained lector and in the same year accompanied his
uncle to the Synod of the Oak which deposed John Chrysostom, an
act which he never officially criticized. He succeeded Theophilus as
patriarch nine years later, after two days of violent fighting between
his supporters and those of Theophilus’ archdeacon Timothy.2
In his new capacity Cyril persecuted the Novatians and the Jews.
Socrates of Constantinople tells us that he stripped the Novatian
bishop Theopemptus of all that he had.3 The Novatians had done
nothing to deserve such treatment, but the same could not be said of
the Jews. The Jews had the ears and heart of the prefect Orestes. One
day Orestes was delivering edicts in the predominantly Jewish
theater when Hierax, a parishioner of Cyril’s, was discovered there.
Hierax led the applause in Cyril’s sermons; that Cyril tolerated such
applause shows the moral difference between him and Chrysostom
who continually took his parishioners to task for such outbursts. The
Jews, thinking Hierax a spy, beat him, and Orestes further ordered
that he be tortured, both to please the Jews and to show his contempt
for Cyril. Subsequently Cyril warned the Jews to cease harming
Christians. When the Jews responded with a murderous night attack
on the Christians, the Christians, with Cyril’s approval, destroyed
and looted their synagogues and expelled many of them from the
city. Cyril and Orestes each sent a defense of his own actions to the
emperor.

2
Socrates, Hist. Eccl. 7.7; Cyril of Alexandria, On the Unity of Christ, 12.
3
Hist. Eccl. 7.7; Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, II,2:156.
 Cyril of Alexandria 25

Orestes, for being a Christian, was strangely unsympathetic to the

religion and resisted Cyril’s attempt, by the symbolic extension of
the Gospel book, at pacification.4 Later some five hundred monks
came from Nitria to fight on Cyril’s behalf, as Socrates somewhat
wryly puts it.5 They heckled Orestes while he rode in his chariot, and
one of them, Ammonius, threw a stone which struck him on the head
and drew blood. Ammonius was apprehended, tortured in prison, and
died of the injuries he had sustained. Cyril commemorated him as the
martyr Thaumasius (Wonderful), and he and Orestes again issued
statements to the emperor. Despite Socrates’ qualms, Cyril’s
honoring of the monk makes more sense than his refusal to honor
Chrysostom; but the patriarch would eventually drop the issue of
Ammonius’ alleged martyrdom.
It was popularly thought that Orestes’ refusal to make peace with
Cyril was due to the influence of the lady philosopher Hypatia.
Hypatia was the daughter of the astronomer Theon and was
renowned for her knowledge of mathematics. Like all serious
Christians and Neoplatonists of her time she was a practitioner of
sǀphrosynƝ or self-control. When one of her students declared his
love for her Hypatia showed him her menstrual rag with the words,
“This is what you really love, but you do not love beauty for its own
sake.” One assumes she was thereby offering a visual aid to Plotinus’
observation, in his first Ennead: “One that is held by material beauty
and will not break free shall be precipitated, not in body but in Soul,
down to the dark depths loathed of the Intellective Being where,
blind even in the Lower World, he shall have commerce only with
shadows.” 6 Because Hypatia was the adviser of Orestes, Cyril
spread the rumor that she was a practitioner of black magic, an
accusation that ultimately led to her savage murder by the
parabalans, a group of young men who were half male nurses and
half thugs.
McGuckin claims the murder of Hypatia illustrates that Cyril was
not yet in complete control of the volatile Alexandrian mob. In
reality he used the unstable political situation to the best of his

4
Hist. Eccl. 7.13; ibid, 159-160.
5
Hist. Eccl. 7.14; ibid, 160.
6
Enn. 1.6.8; Plotinus, The Enneads, 53-54.
26 Chapter Three

advantage, an accomplishment also reflected in the careers of

Athanasius and Timothy Ailouros. The Antiochenes routinely called
Cyril, and his successor Dioscorus, pharaoh; others have gone
further and compared the Alexandrian patriarchs to modern-day
ayatollahs which is too extreme a view.
The murder of Hypatia resulted in an imperial rebuke which
reminded Cyril of the limits of his authority, and although his
bodyguard was increased within a few years, the rebuke, together
with the friendly reprimand of the ascetic Isidore of Pelusium, made
him more amenable to compromise after the discreditable events of
the Council of Ephesus. The losers in that affair spoke of Cyril as a
man “bent on pursuing his private animosities, not as one who seeks
in correct belief the things of Jesus Christ.”7 He was, Isidore quoted,
his uncle’s nephew. The conflicted nature of Cyril’s personality can
be seen in two letters he wrote around the time of the Nestorian
controversy. The first reads, “I love peace; there is nothing that I
detest more than quarrels and disputes. I love everybody, and if I
could heal one of the brethren by losing all my possessions and
goods, I am willing to do so joyfully.”8 The second, about Nestorius,
reads, “Let not this poor creature imagine that I shall allow myself to
be tried by him. . . . The roles will be reversed; I shall refuse to
recognize his jurisdiction, and I shall know well enough how to
compel him to make his own defense.”9
Cyril’s conflict with paganism was generally more irenic than his
conflict with Judaism, and before the outbreak of the Nestorian
controversy he scored a nonviolent and considerable victory against
it. The temple of Isis in Menouthis, some twelve miles northeast of
Alexandria along the Taenia Ridge, was a healing center which had
replaced in the pagan mind the Serapeum that had been destroyed by
monkish ruffians incited by Cyril’s uncle. The temple seems to have
been a kind of ancient sleep clinic, albeit with occult overtones.
Cyril, despite his knowledge of church politics, had been raised in a
sheltered environment and did not know about the existence of the
temple. When he was told that it was leading even Christians astray

7
Young, From Nicaea to Chalcedon, 241.
8
Ibid, 240-241.
9
Davis, The First Seven Ecumenical Councils, 148.
 Cyril of Alexandria 27

he prayed for a way to overthrow the demon who was overseeing its
goings-on.
Cyril’s take on the pagan twilight as represented by the temple of
Isis is, it need hardly be said, different from the approach one
encounters in the nearly contemporaneous Philosophical History of
the Neoplatonist Damascius. Neoplatonism was a strong force
behind paganism in late antique Egypt and a moderate force behind
Christian thought of its day, in part because it operated within the
same ethos as early Christianity. The Neoplatonic thaumaturge,
dimly descried in Plotinus and more potently in the lesser thinkers
Porphyry and Iamblichus, had replaced the ancient Egyptian priest,
and in a figure such as Shenoute of Atripe, who is said to have
traveled through the air to visit the monastery of Macarius the Great,
one encounters a Christian version of the thaumaturge.10
Cyril’s prayers were answered by a night vision of an angel
telling him to bring the relics of the martyr Cyrus to Menouthis. This
appears to have been the only time he personally rubbed shoulders
with the supernatural, although the dream may well have been the
result of his mental preoccupation with the temple. The tomb of
Cyrus, a victim of Diocletian’s persecution, was duly opened and
was found to bear both his body and that of his fellow martyr John.
Without any evidence Cyril pronounced the two men virgins as well
as martyrs. Since it was impossible to know which of the bodies was
Cyrus’s, both were brought to Menouthis. The relics were anointed
with myrrh, wrapped in linen, and placed in a golden casket.
Pachomian monks oversaw the devotions at the martyrium which,
unlike the sleep center it had replaced, was free to all visitors.11 It
quickly gained fame for curing ophthalmia which was endemic in the
Near East, and although the Isis cult survived in the vicinity for
another sixty years the martyrium outlasted it.12
The theologians who most influenced Cyril’s thought were
Athanasius, Chrysostom, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Apollinarius,
whose writings were then being circulated under the names of other

10
Virt. Mac. 32; Vivian, Saint Macarius the Spiritbearer, 109-110.
11
McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy,
18-19.
12
Chadwick, The Church in Ancient Society, 626.
28 Chapter Three

theologians, especially Athanasius, Gregory Thaumaturgus, and

certain popes.13 This last fact was not universally known until the
time of Leontius of Byzantium; the Neo-Nestorian monks of East
Syria were the first to puncture this bubble.14
Cyril inherited his uncle’s ambiguous attitude towards Origen. In
common with the Anthropomorphites he believed that Origen
thought like a Hellene rather than a Christian, and he sought to
counter his influence by relying on uneducated Coptic monks which
was sometimes risky. He himself was not an Anthropomorphite, that
is he did not think of God in naively anthropomorphic terms as the
anti-Origenist monks did. There exists a letter of his to Kalosyrius, a
bishop of Middle Egypt, complaining that the latter had monks in his
diocese who were too anthropomorphic in their language about God.
Worse than that they argued that since Scripture affirms that man is
created in God’s image God must be corporeal, and some of them
had gone so far as to say that Christ was able to sin after His
incarnation. In general the monks caused Cyril no small concern.
The Apophthegmata Patrum preserves a story about his distress over
a desert father who thought Melchizedek was the Son of God.15
Cyril brought into vogue the practice of quoting the church
fathers for authority. Many of his writings have survived; two of
them, on the Trinity, were dedicated to his brother Nemesinus. The
high repute in which he was held can be shown by the fact that his
works were early translated into such diverse languages as Syriac,
Armenian, and Ethiopic. His style was ornate and inelegant but not
illogical; he resembled Athanasius in knowing more about
philosophy than literature. Like Theodore he wrote against Julian the
Apostate, but he was careful not to include attacks against Christ by
Julian that might harm the faith of his readers. He dedicated the work
to Theodosius II who stood in marked contrast to Julian as a
Christian emperor.
Cyril’s biblical commentaries represent a modified allegorism; in
his Old Testament commentaries he strove to prove that the books
were the property of the Christians rather than the Jews. His

13
Young, From Nicaea to Chalcedon, 259.
14
Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement, 140.
15
Apoph. Patr., Daniel 8; Ward, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, 54.
 Cyril of Alexandria 29

commentary on the Gospel of John is relevant for our present

purpose because of its not tangential relationship to Christology. He
wrote no commentary on the Gospel of Mark, which tended to be
sidelined in the early church, perhaps as not challenging enough
because of its size, but produced commentaries on Matthew and John
and one hundred fifty homilies on Luke. The homilies resemble
Jewish midrashim more than Greek orations, no doubt an accurate
reflection of his own preaching style.16 His commentary on John
was one of five major commentaries or serial homilies on the Gospel
in the patristic age. 17 Like Julian the Apostate, who thought that
John invented the concept, Cyril recognizes that the Gospel stresses
the deity of Christ, a useful foil to Trinitarian heresies, especially the
moderate and radical Arianism represented by Homoeanism and
Anomoeanism.18 As a result he often has recourse to the Nicene
Creed and its description of the Logos as God of God and Light of
Light.
Cyril wrote his commentary before the outbreak of the Nestorian
controversy, and it gave him much needed preparation for it. He does
not worry about harmonizing John with the Synoptics but
concentrates solely on interpretation; his approach is appropriately
theological and even philosophical.19 Out of humility the evangelist
does not name himself whom he merely styles the disciple whom
Jesus loved. (An ante-Nicene tradition said this was because John
alone of the disciples was a virgin.) The past tense in the first verse of
the Gospel Cyril takes to indicate the Son’s eternal existence. “If he
was in the beginning,” he asks, “what mind, tell me, can leap over the
force of that word was?”20 Subsequent Byzantine theologians would
duly note this. He also writes that the Logos “shines upon all things
that are receptive to his radiance and illumines without exception
things that have a nature that is receptive to being illumined.”21 Here
he is not far from Plotinus whose World Soul makes beautiful to the

16
Just, Luke, xxiii-xxiv.
17
Elowsky, John 1-10, xxxvi.
18
Ibid, xxxiv.
19
Ibid.
20
Ibid, 3.
21
Ibid, 28.
30 Chapter Three

fullness of their capacity everything it molds, though the difference

is between radiance and beauty on the one hand and on the other
Plotinus’ entity is far less selective about what it fastens on. In
equating Christ with God Cyril does not fail to differentiate between
the Father and the Son: no catholic with the Arian controversy in his
background could do otherwise. The Father, invisible to the rest of
creation, is visible to the Son.
The commentary shows that Cyril was never at a loss for a
memorable phrase. When John the Baptist bears witness of Jesus,
Cyril says it is not only John the Baptist who bears witness of Him
but John the Evangelist. He calls the pair two “Spirit-clad and
notable men, foster brothers in truth who do not know how to lie.”22
The marriage feast at Cana, he tells us, was beyond the periphery of
Judea in order to show that the Jews rejected the Bridegroom while
the Gentiles received Him. Cyril claims that Christ honored marriage
at the feast in order to ease the pain of childbearing for women. In
speaking of Nicodemus, who initially resisted God in the person of
Christ and was therefore fighting with God, he states that we should
provide simple arguments to those who have become Christians
rather than elaborate explanations. This attitude would set him apart
from Nestorius during the Nestorian controversy and give him a
more popular following.
Cyril’s concern with Christ’s deity is prominent throughout the
commentary. When Jesus tells the Jews that He can do nothing of
Himself but only what He sees the Father do, Cyril takes this to mean
not that He is inferior to the Father but rather that He shares the
Father’s will. On the passage that all should honor the Son as
(kathǀs) they honor the Father, he takes kathǀs not to convey
inferiority, as in the phrase “silver as bright as the sun,” but rather
identical likeness, as in the sentence, “Let John be honored by all,
even as Peter.”23 Christ’s claim to be able to do nothing on His own
means in His virtue as a man, specifically a law-abiding man.
Cyril often emphasizes that Jesus did not leave His enemies
because of self-protection or even reclusiveness but as an act of love
for them which allowed their anger towards Him to cool. Frequently

22
Ibid, 49.
23
Ibid, 194-195.
 Cyril of Alexandria 31

he indulges in allegorism. The miracle of the five loaves and the two
fishes he believes represents the five books of Moses which provide
coarse food while the fish signify good food, namely the preaching
of the apostles and the proclamation of the evangelists. He uses the
terms disciple and apostle synonymously and sometimes calls the
whole entity the choir of the holy disciples.
Cyril, living in Alexandria between the Mediterranean and the
Mareotic Lake, was familiar with the sea and skillfully sets the stage
for Christ walking on the water, with “the fierce winds riding on the
waves with a rushing sound that raises the billows high above [the
disciples’] heads.”24 As in our daily lives Jesus does not help the
disciples immediately but waits until the danger is about to engulf
them before He comes to their aid. In John 6 Jesus prophecies that
one of His disciples will betray Him without specifying who so that
all of them would be filled with the fear of hell and therefore
circumspect. In the following chapter Nicodemus requests of the
Pharisees that Jesus be given a fair hearing but does so only
moderately since he is “sick with a terrible sickness,” namely fear.25
The disciples themselves suffer from fear because of “native
weakness” and because they have not yet received the Holy Spirit.
On the man born blind in chapter 9, Cyril believes it is wise to shy
away from the question of theodicy, in other words the reason for the
existence of evil in the world. Plato had spoken of evil as necessary
because it was the contrary of good, and many Christian philosophers
had attempted to broach this difficult subject. When Christ’s
disciples asked Him why the man was born blind, He replied that it
was so the works of God might be made manifest in him. Cyril does
not believe this was a dogmatic answer. Rather Christ uttered an
almost commonplace statement in order to direct their minds away
from the question of why God permits suffering. This is not an issue
on which one’s mind should dwell, Cyril warns, and his least of all. It
is enough to know that God will never do anything unjust or contrary
to His nature.
Cyril paints capable nature portraits which are sometimes thought
of as the exclusive property of the Cappadocians. The blind man, on

24
Ibid, 219.
25
Ibid, 271.
32 Chapter Three

being healed of his blindness, sees hills and trees, “the beauty of the
nighttime sky, the brilliant company of the stars, and the golden light
of the moon.”26 Earlier, in speaking of the Father and the Son, Cyril,
a celibate, imagines what it would be like for a father to love his
child. He writes approvingly of Mary of Bethany’s close relationship
with Jesus. The commentary as a whole should be closely inquired
into by those who stereotype the church fathers as either
misogynistic or anti-Jewish; one tends to read things into the fathers
that are not there, such as racial anti-Semitism. For Cyril the
ubiquitous “Jews” of the Gospel do not signify all the Jews, only
those who had been corrupted by the scribes and the Pharisees, the
real villains of the book. He emphasizes the evangel being taken to
the Gentiles but alleges that God has not forgotten either the
patriarchs of the Old Testament or the unbelieving Jews of Jesus’
time.
When Jesus sets out for Bethany to heal the sick but actually
dying Lazarus, Thomas pessimistically invites his fellow disciples to
die with Him. Cyril considers the possibility that his statement did
not rule out being resurrected by Jesus afterwards, although this is
unlikely in view of Thomas’ later disbelief in Christ’s resurrection.
Before Lazarus is raised from the dead his sister Martha utters a
simple confession of faith—“I believe that thou art the Christ, the
Son of God, which should come into the world”—a confession Cyril
thinks was for Lazarus’ sake just as the parent says “Amen” on
behalf of a baptized baby who cannot speak. She therefore exercises
faith so that Lazarus can be raised. Jesus weeps at His friend’s tomb,
not for Lazarus but for all humanity, and His groans are not only
because of grief but from a self-controlled attempt to check further
tears.
When Jesus feasts in Bethany, Mary anoints His feet with nard
and wipes them with her hair. After Judas’ sanctimonious objection
about the nard being sold and its money given to the poor instead,
Jesus comments that the disciples would always have the poor with
them. Remembering the poor of his own diocese, Cyril removes any
construal of antagonism towards them in Christ’s pronouncement.
Jesus later enters Jerusalem hymned by babes, and he finds in this a

26
Ibid, 329.
 Cyril of Alexandria 33

prefigurement of the Christian entering “the Jerusalem above”

hymned by angels.27 He tells us that Judas did not betray Jesus only
so that Scripture might be fulfilled; the Holy Spirit spoke rather
through foreknowledge. Judas by his free will could have saved
himself from the sin into which he had sunk and therefore Christ
cannot be accused of having set him up when He chose him for a
disciple.
The Garden of Gethsemane is a return to the Garden of Eden. At
Gethsemane “all places were recapitulated and our return to
humanity’s ancient condition was consummated”;28 in other words,
all of humanity’s troubles began in Eden and began to be resolved at
Gethsemane. Those who came to the garden to arrest Jesus brought
torches, cautious of physical night but giving no thought to the
endless night of hell. Cyril has an eye, as did Theodore of
Mopsuestia, for the “new song” of the New Testament: Peter’s
severing of Malchus’ ear is lawful according to the old covenant but
not according to the new because perfect virtue lies not in retaliation
but in forbearance. According to Cyril, Peter had brought this fateful
sword because of attacks from wild animals in Judea. We learn from
Luke that in the Upper Room Christ had desired His disciples to
carry swords only to fulfill Isaiah’s prophecy that the Messiah would
be numbered with the transgressors.29
Cyril might have profitably followed his own advice on Jesus’
mild rebuke of the officer who struck Him in the presence of the high
priest: “When a brother happens to have words with us and lets fall
some troublesome expression, we often think that we are justified to
be enraged with the fury of dragons and ceaselessly pelt him with a
storm of words in return for one. We neglect to grant forgiveness to
human littleness, or to consider the frailty of our common humanity,
or to bury the passions that arise in brotherly love.”30
The custom of the Jews in releasing a criminal every year Cyril,
like most commentators, has difficulty accounting for. It is not in the
Old Testament or in Josephus, but he believes he can find a parallel

27
Elowsky, John 11-21, 55.
28
Ibid, 265.
29
Luke 22:36-37; Isaiah 53:12.
30
Elowsky, John 11-21, 281.
34 Chapter Three

to it in the cities of refuge in the Pentateuch. In commenting on the

Jews’ preference of Barabbas to Jesus, Cyril, alluding to his favorite
Christological passage in Philippians, notes that the Jews “preferred
a robber to him who did not regard his equality with God the Father
as robbery.” 31 The two criminals who were crucified with Jesus
represent the Jews and the Gentiles, condemned respectively for
transgressing the law and for idolatry. In being crucified with Him
they bid farewell to worldly pleasures, “refusing any longer to live
after the flesh and preferring to live with their Lord.”32
Unlike Augustine Cyril holds that the apostle John believed in
Jesus’ resurrection on seeing His empty tomb. The reason for his and
Peter’s presence at the tomb was because of the Law’s need for two
witnesses to establish anything. Cyril presents both disciples as
immediately believing in the resurrection, unlike Mary Magdalene
who wept when she should have been celebrating. When Mary at last
sees Jesus, Jesus tells her not to touch Him, and not because He could
be corrupted by her touch. Here Cyril shockingly compares Mary’s
touching of her Savior to a manure pile receiving the sun’s rays.
Even when trying not to deplore matter Cyril, like many of his time,
could not do otherwise, but he attempts to find a way out of his
Platonic predicament. Christ allowed His followers to touch Him
before His resurrection because the “providential scheme” had not
yet been worked out, but afterwards He was superior to death. He did
not want Mary, who was impure, to come into contact with His
purity; she would remain impure until He returned to heaven and she
received the Holy Spirit.33
Cyril is not completely clear on when the Holy Spirit was
received by Jesus’ followers. Mary appears to have received Him
after the ascension, but when Christ breathes on His disciples they
receive the Holy Spirit, along with Thomas who is not present. Cyril
finds this astonishing fact possible because of a story in the book of
Numbers where the Holy Spirit descends on an assembly of
seventy-two elders, two of whom are absent but who nonetheless

31
Philippians 2:6-7; Elowsky, John 11-21, 295.
32
Ibid, 310.
33
Ibid, 351.
 Cyril of Alexandria 35

receive Him. 34 He concludes by saying that John and the other

evangelists recorded only the most remarkable and edifying of
Christ’s miracles so that through their good deeds “they might meet
at the very gates of the city above.”35
If Christ was central to Cyril’s thought he did not cease to
venerate the Virgin Mary; the Marian homilies he delivered at
Ephesus are proof of this; but his name has become inextricably
linked with Christology. He did not do any original Christological
thinking for his Gospel commentaries but remained faithful to the
Alexandrian tradition. His main contribution to the subject is to be
found more in his letters and polemical writings.
Cyril usually thought of the Son as possessing one physis. By
physis he meant a hypostasis, an individual existent rather than a
conglomerate of attributes. What the Antiochenes meant by physis
he meant by such periphrastic phrases as natural property, natural
quality, or manner of being (idiotƝs kata physin, poiotƝs physikƝ,
phǀs einai logos).36 While Nestorius’ prosopic union described his
uneasy union of the two natures of Christ, Cyril spoke of the Son’s
hypostatic union (henǀsis kath’ hypostasin) or sometimes of His
natural or substantial union (henǀsis kata physin, henǀsis kat’
ousian); but by whatever term he referred to it he meant it to be,
against Apollinarius, a union without mixture (asynchytǀs). Cyril
used Neoplatonic language to describe the undivided distinctness of
the divine and human natures in Christ. Neoplatonism was in the air
during his time as Middle Platonism had been during Origen’s.
Roberta Chesnut sees it at work even in Nestorius’ Book of
Heraclides whose understanding of Christ’s natures is derived from
the dynamic relationship between the ultimate principles of reality in
Plotinus’ system.37
Cyril was strongly opposed to the two-natures Christology of
Theodore of Mopsuestia and was attracted to Pseudo-Athanasius’
phrase mia physis tou Theou Logou sesarkǀmenƝ. McGuckin

34
Numbers 11:25-26; Elowsky, John 11-21, 367.
35
Ibid, 398.
36
Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 318.
37
McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy,
129.
36 Chapter Three

suggests that he intended this phrase not to mean, as it did for

Apollinarius, “one nature of God the Word incarnate” but “one
incarnate nature of God the Word.” Unlike his most extreme
followers he eventually abandoned it because of Antiochene
misunderstanding. He made ample use of Apollinarian literature,
declaring that not everything a heretic says is heretical otherwise one
would be unable to accept, with Arius, the deity of God the Father.
The Antiochene idea of Christ as an anthrǀpos Theophoros, a
God-bearing man, was repugnant to Cyril, and he frequently repaired
to Philippians 2 to point out the Savior’s unmitigated divinity: “who,
being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with
God: but made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form
of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men.”38 He also used
John 1:14 in which the Word was made flesh and dwelt among men
and had the same glory as the Father. Nestorius, for his part, was
using weaker passages from the Epistle to the Hebrews which
compared Christ to a high priest.
Cyrillian proto-Monophysitism was more restrained than the
Apollinarian variety and did not deny that Christ had a rational
human soul (psychƝ logikƝ). Cyril in fact saw two main problems
with Apollinarianism, namely its denial of Christ’s soul and its
avowal that His flesh was heavenly. Though this latter doctrine was
never taught by Apollinarius himself it followed logically from his
teachings and was accepted by some of his followers who found
evidence for it in 1 Corinthians 15:47 where Christ is said to be from
heaven.
Before the Nestorian controversy Cyril had spoken, like
Athanasius before him, of Christ taking on flesh, but afterwards he
realized, as Athanasius himself did, that it was imprecise to neglect
the Savior’s possession of a human soul. Yet against the Antiochenes
he no longer spoke, as he once had, of the Logos’ relationship to
Christ as an indwelling. Christ was the same person before and after
the Incarnation except for the fact that He received a human body
and soul which, it must be pointed out, never for a moment belonged
to anyone but the Logos. It was the preexistent Logos who was
incarnate, and it was the preexistent Logos who, for all the revulsion

38
Philippians 2:6-7.
 Cyril of Alexandria 37

of the Antiochenes, suffered on the cross. Cyril was no more

ashamed of attributing suffering to the Son than was John the
Evangelist who recorded Jesus weeping before Lazarus’ tomb.
Christ, according to Cyril, chose to suffer in His flesh but not in His
Godhead.
He made ample use of paradoxes in the attempt to convey his
identification of Christ with the Logos: Christ suffered without
suffering (apathǀs epathen) or, more radically, God wept, God died,
God sat upon the Virgin’s lap.39 He explained the divine and human
relationship in Christ by the illustrations of the soul and the body, of
the lily and its perfume, of the fire and the coal, of a jewel and its
radiance.40 He also used the analogy of the burning bush. Somehow
the humanity of Christ, like the burning bush, was supported by His
divinity without being overwhelmed by it. One of his happiest
metaphors was of the Ark of the Covenant which was wooden but
covered with gold; the wood was still wood just as Christ, being
God, was still man. Yet throughout Cyril’s writings one senses that
the human side of Christ was not as important as the divine side, and
this would lead, in the Aphthartodocetist Monophysites, to a certain
hatred of the body that was more in keeping with Platonism than
Christianity.
McGuckin well emphasizes the theotic bent of Cyril’s writings.
Christ could heal by His touch because His hand was the hand of
God, but the apostles were able to heal by their touches because they
were being made like God. This concept was found in Athanasius
and a host of other fathers and ultimately stemmed from St. Peter
who had written, “that by these ye might be partakers of the divine
nature.”41 Theophilus of Antioch put it in a more extreme manner:
“If man should incline to the things of immortality, keeping the
commandment of God, he should receive as reward from Him
immortality, and should become God.”42 Men, at least Christians,
were being made like God because the Logos had already showed
them what it was to be truly man in the unfallen sense. It is important

39
Cyril of Alexandria, On the Unity of Christ, 44-45.
40
Ibid, 38.
41
2 Peter 1:4.
42
Ad Autolycus 2.27; Roberts and Donaldson, Ante-Nicene Fathers, 2:105.
38 Chapter Three

not to misinterpret this idea. The church fathers believed that the
Christian could attain unity with God but could not share His nature.
Symeon the New Theologian would contrast God’s uniting with man
essentially with His remaining God superessentially.43
Cyril was an enthusiastic follower of the theotic tradition. In a
festal letter he said that the Logos became like us so that we might
become like Him. Commenting on John 17 he stated that in His
person Christ “united totally disparate natures to make us sharers in
the divine nature.” 44 On the true light that enlightens every man
coming into the world he wrote that the creature is light by virtue of
its participation with the Son who is Light. It “mounts up to what is
above its nature by the kindness of him who glorified it and who
crowns it with diverse honors.” 45 Cyril’s theoticism led into his
theory of the Eucharist which he was adamant, like the Kollyvades of
the eighteenth century, that his parishioners not shy away from.
Through His incarnation Christ united men with the Godhead and
thereby divinized them, just as the elements at the Eucharist become
filled with divine energy if they are to convey salvation. As two
pieces of wax become one when they are joined together, so the one
who receives the flesh and blood of Christ at the Eucharist will
become one with Him.
Frend gives a more Western and perhaps too harsh assessment of
Cyril’s theoticism than McGuckin. “Cyril’s Christ,” he avers,
“remains an abstraction, his humanity so much part of the divine
world as to be unrecognisable in human terms, and the salvation
offered to man only intelligible in a pantheistic setting in which the
destiny of the soul was reabsorption into the source of life whence it
had come.” 46 Yet, while understanding the danger of Nestorius’
semi-Adoptionism, one also recognizes the danger, especially if he
views the situation from a Western perspective, of the divinizing
tendency of the Alexandrian school. The absorption theory of the
Alexandrians naturally led to transformation theory, in other words
to the deification of Christ’s flesh. The Antiochenes, while being

43
Elwell, Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, 1102.
44
Elowsky, John 11-21, 257.
45
Elowsky, John 1-10, 32.
46
Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement, 125.
 Cyril of Alexandria 39

more Adoptionistic than the Alexandrians, were also less mystical.

For them the goal of man was not reabsorption into the divine but
rather the harmonization of man’s will with God’s.
Despite Cyril’s quasi-mysticism one can see why his overall
Christological viewpoint, so easy to grasp compared to the
Antiochene, was popular with the monks and the masses. The
Nestorian and Neo-Nestorian views would never become popular to
such an extent, although there were groups like the Akoimetai, the
Sleepless Monks of Constantinople, who would be fanatical about
Antiochene theology, interpreted as it had been by Constantinopolitan
patriarchs like Proclus and Flavian.
 CHAPTER FOUR

THE DEFEAT OF NESTORIUS AT EPHESUS

As the Nestorian controversy spread each protagonist, digging in

his heels, emphasized the extremes of his position. Socrates
compared the whole affair to the confusion of a night battle.1 Cyril,
for his part, attempted to shove his very terminology down
Nestorius’ throat. He wrote to Pope Celestine of the latter’s
cacodoxy. Nestorius had already endangered his relationship with
Rome by receiving Pelagian refugees, among them Julian of
Eclanum, and asking the pope if there was anything wrong with
them. In point of sober fact, Pelagianism would have been
considered a serious heresy by very few in the East. Also working to
Nestorius’ disadvantage was that he did not include, like Cyril,
obsequious expressions in his letters to the pope or, even more
importantly, Latin translations. Significantly Rome did not reply to
any of Nestorius’ letters.
The pope’s Constantinopolitan adviser, Marius Mercator, was no
help to the Antiochene side since he thought that Nestorius was a
follower of Photinus who had denied the preexistence of Christ.
Marius translated Nestorius’ works in an extremely literal manner to
put as sinister a slant on them as possible. He accused Theodore of
Mopsuestia of Nestorianism, and Nestorius of complicity with the
Adoptionism of Paul of Samosata.
John Cassian was another Western churchman who was prevailed
upon, by the archdeacon and later pope Leo, to write against
Nestorius. In view of Cassian’s lackluster performance the request

1
Hist. Eccl. 7.32; Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, II,2:171; cf.
Gregory of Nyssa, Contra Eun. 2.492; ibid, II,5:299. Mark Edwards
reminds me of Arnold’s words: “a darkling plain / Swept with confused
alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night.”
42 Chapter Four

almost seems a prank on the part of Leo, but nothing we know about
this supremely serious churchman suggests this. Cassian undertook
the commission reluctantly and mainly for theotic reasons. If Christ
was not both fully divine and fully human, Cassian believed, the
monk would never be able to reach deification. Cassian’s work, The
Incarnation of the Lord Against Nestorius, in seven books, was his
last and was dedicated to Leo. It betrays both the author’s age and
reluctance, and the whole production is saturated with a weary
belligerence.
Cassian was the most Cyrillian of the Western writers on
Christology. His time in the East had made him receptive to
Alexandrian theology, and his less than fiery attack against
Pelagianism was typically Eastern. He could also write admirably on
the Egyptian and Palestinian monks and knew Greek better than
many of his compeers. Yet few would argue that he was at his best in
the area of Greek theology. It must be kept in mind that
Nestorianism, despite its similarity to certain aspects of Western
theology, was an Eastern heresy and that Cassian’s soul was largely
Western. The Incarnation of the Lord Against Nestorius is a
perplexing work; it does not sparkle like nearly all Eastern theology
does, and it is sloppy in a way that Latin theology rarely was.
Cassian wrongly thought of Pelagianism as the mother of
Nestorianism since Pelagius taught that man could achieve
righteousness by his own efforts and Nestorius ostensibly said that
Jesus by the righteousness of His life was found worthy of divinity. It
is true that Nestorius had a “wicked liking” for the Pelagians, but the
two systems operated from different principles and Cassian’s
insistence that they did not seriously distorted his work. Cassian
found a connecting link between the heresies in Leporius of Treves
who was later converted to orthodoxy through the efficacy of
Augustine. Leporius took Pelagius’ emphasis on man’s self-sufficiency
to the point that he made Jesus a man who had so admirably
exercised His free will that He lived without sin. Jesus was made
Christ at His baptism, and thereafter His human and divine
properties operated in such a way that it could be said there were two
Christs. Augustine’s Letter 219 reveals the Antiochene nature of
Leporius’ mind: he did not want to affirm that God could have
suffered in the person of Christ because he feared to change God into
 The Defeat of Nestorius at Ephesus 43

a human or to corrupt Him by admixture with a human.2

Throughout his argument Cassian calls Christ only recently born,
a fact that often escapes us: Christ antedated the Nestorian
controversy by a mere four hundred years. He approves the sobriquet
Theotokos on the basis of Gabriel’s words to Mary in the Gospel of
Luke—“That holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called
the Son of God”3—no doubt remembering that to the Jews sonship
conveyed identity more than subservience. He also found support for
the term in the prophet Isaiah where the virgin’s son is named
Immanuel, meaning God with us. 4 He finds arguments against
Nestorius in the Gospels, the Old Testament, and the Pauline
epistles, and he subjects the patriarch to some heavy and repetitive
browbeating. At times he unfairly attributes to him the blank
assertion that Christ was a mere man, but at other times he
recognizes that Nestorianism falls into the danger of positing four
persons of the Trinity, itself an admission of Christ’s deity. He seems
to suggest that Nestorius is not as heretical as Arius because he is a
disciple and a catholic when he pleases and, when he pleases, the
church’s enemy and an apostate.
Cassian is brutal, but to the point, when he says that if Nestorius
were given a vision of Christ, unlike Saul of Tarsus he would not call
Him Lord but would regard Him as a man while paying Him some
divine honors. For Cassian, Nestorius was no better than the Jews
who rejected Christ and no better than the Gentiles (one imagines
especially Platonist Gentiles) who “shudder” at hearing talk of God
suffering. One could not imagine Yaldabaoth or the Platonic
Demiurge suffering.
Nestorius’ insistence that Mary be called Christotokos rather than
Theotokos is for Cassian an outright denial that Jesus is the Son of
God. This he alleges in his discussion of Peter’s confession of Christ,
a confession which he quotes four times on the same page. (Christ’s
rejoinder is quoted three times.) The apostle Thomas’ confession of
Christ—“My Lord and my God”—he duly observes does not
separate Christ’s deity and humanity. He further notes that Thomas

2
Ibid, I,1:572.
3
Luke 1:35.
4
Isaiah 7:14.
44 Chapter Four

did not worship Christ because He had received the Father upon Him
but for who He was, namely God. With biting sarcasm, and some
knowledge of the Aristotelian tendencies of the Antiochene school,
Cassian states that Thomas knew nothing of “that subtle separation
of yours, and had no experience of the fine distinctions of your
judgment, as he was a rude countryman, ignorant of the dialectic art,
and of the method of philosophic disputation.”5
Cassian is quite Cyrillian when he makes Thomas’ say, “It is God
whose limbs I handled.”6 In stressing, later on, the Son’s role in His
own birth as a man and His identity with that man, Cassian catches
something dear to the heart of Cyril: the humanity of Christ never for
a moment belonged to anyone but the Logos. Nestorius would have
objected, had he read Cassian’s work, not so much to its affirmations
of Christ’s deity but to their uncompromising directness. Even Leo
would have objected to Cassian’s statement that although claiming
Jesus is only God is wrong, it is worse to say that He is only man.
The Nestorian controversy had Cassian turning to innumerable
passages to find support for Christ’s deity. He finds evidence of the
Savior’s two natures, with no denial of His unity, in a faulty
translation, contained in the Septuagint but not the Vulgate, from
Isaiah: “In thee is God, and there is no God beside thee.”7 There is
the same kind of duality yet unity in Paul’s Epistle to the Colossians
where Christ is called the image of the invisible God and yet a few
verses later is spoken of as having died, namely as having been “the
firstborn from the dead.”8 He gives the Antiochenes no quarter in
their attempt to skirt around the issue of Christ’s divinity, as in their
comparison of Christ to a statue of the emperor. One of Nestorius’
solutions to the Theotokos controversy, the word Theodochos or
“God-receiving,” strikes him as particularly unsound. Every
Christian is God-receiving, and if Christ is Theodochos He is no
different from any other holy man.

5
Inc. Dom. Contra Nest. 3.15; Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers,
II,11:571.
6
Ibid.
7
Isaiah 45:14.
8
Colossians 1:15, 18.
 The Defeat of Nestorius at Ephesus 45

Sometimes Cassian’s arguments are forced. In the Gospel of

John, Christ theoretically conveys both His humanity and His
divinity when He tells the Jews that He is a man and that He was sent
from God. 9 The humanity in the first phrase is obvious, but the
divinity in the second is less so. Nonetheless, a few verses down,
Jesus says, “Before Abraham was, I am.”10 Further, when the apostle
Paul writes that the man cleaving to his wife and becoming one flesh
with her refers to Christ and the church,11 Cassian stretches this to
mean that the man is God, the wife is the human soul, and the two are
united in the flesh of Christ which, according to some rather labored
exegesis, means the flesh of the church. It would have been simpler
and more correct to say that Paul’s intention was that the man and his
wife portray Christ and the church.
In the sixth book Cassian uses Nestorius’ own creed, the creed of
Antioch, against him. He is one of our only sources, besides
Chrysostom and Eusebius of Dorylaeum, for reconstructing the
creed though he appears to have touched it up in places.12 Cassian
could quote the creed with some justification since he had been
ordained a deacon by Chrysostom; but he cannot help interrupting
his discussion of it with impertinent asides. He wishes that Nestorius
were an old heretic instead of a fresh apostate. How, he asks, can the
patriarch stand at the altar and mount the pulpit, showing his
“impudent and treacherous face to God’s people—to occupy the
bishop’s throne, to exercise the priesthood, to set yourself up as a
teacher? To teach the Christians what? Not to believe in Christ.”13
Nestorius, he alleges, is worse than the Jews because they persecuted
Christ only on the earth while he does so in heaven; and he is worse
than Pelagius because Pelagius granted Christ deity after His death
but he denies it to Him even after His ascension. He bitterly urges the
patriarch to return to his senses if he ever had any and to come to
himself if there ever was a self to come back to. He ends his work, as

9
John 8:40, 42.
10
John 8:58.
11
Ephesians 5:31-32.
12
Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, 185-186.
13
Inc. Dom. Contra Nest. 6.10; Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers,
II,11:596.
46 Chapter Four

was becoming the fashion, with a florilegium of the fathers, first of

the West and then, to be impartial, of the East. Then he urges
Nestorius, and Constantinople, to emulate Chrysostom, their mutual
teacher.14
With all the anti-Nestorian propaganda in the air it is not difficult
to understand why Pope Celestine sided with Cyril. According to
Nestorius’ friend Count Irenaeus, the pope was too simple to
understand the theological intricacies of the controversy. It is true
that Leo, Celestine’s eventual successor, would have been more
sympathetic to the Antiochene side, but Leo was more restrained in
his Christological dualism than Nestorius who may have been more
restrained than Theodore.
In addition to his dialogue with Celestine, Cyril insisted on an
exchange of letters with Nestorius, an exchange that would prove
damaging to both parties. His first letter darkly hinted of the spies
employed by each of the patriarchs to monitor the other’s activities.
His second letter began with a show of humility—“I must not stretch
the measure of my littleness above my Master and Teacher, or indeed
the Fathers” 15 —while simultaneously complaining that Nestorius
was giving aid and comfort to three Alexandrians whom he had
punished. He gives us their portraits: one had wronged the blind and
the poor, another had drawn his sword against his mother, and the
third had not only helped a maidservant commit a robbery but had “a
permanent reputation of a kind that one would not pray to see
attached even to one’s worst enemies.”16 Elsewhere he described
these malcontents as “the offal of the city.”17 It is noteworthy that
there were originally four malcontents, but now there were only
three since Cyril was resolving as many differences as he had in
order to broaden his political base against Nestorius. He was
satisfied that the remaining malcontents, wickedly perverse and with
their mouths “full of cursing and bitterness,” would answer to “the
Judge of all.”18

14
Inc. Dom. Contra Nest. 7.31; ibid, 620-621.
15
Price and Gaddis, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, 1:174.
16
Ibid.
17
Cyril of Alexandria, Letters, 1:57.
18
Price and Gaddis, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, 1:174.
 The Defeat of Nestorius at Ephesus 47

Having gotten this off his chest Cyril turned to the doctrinal
quarrel: Nestorius was leading the children of God into sin through
false doctrine. The remedy, and the way to true doctrine, was to hold
the fathers in high regard. He first turns to a digest and interpretation
of the Nicene Creed. In the creed the Son of God was enfleshed and
made man. This does not mean that He was transformed into a man
but that He became a man by uniting Himself to a human body and
soul, though not in such a way that he “assumed” a human entity.
The Godhead and the humanity are distinct but are nonetheless
united in “the one Lord and Christ and Son.”19 Therefore it is correct
to say both that the Son was begotten from the Father before the ages
and that He was begotten from a woman according to the flesh. This
second begetting was of course unnecessary and added nothing to the
Savior’s identity, but He can still be said to be born in the flesh. Jesus
of Nazareth was not a man on whom the Son descended; rather the
Son was united with Jesus from His mother’s womb. He is therefore
said to have undergone a fleshly birth, “as making his own the birth
of his own flesh.”20 Although as God the Son was impassible, He
nonetheless suffered at His passion, “for the impassible one was in
the suffering body.” 21 He experienced death and resurrection
because His body died and was raised, but in His divine nature He
did not die.
Against Nestorius, Cyril will not worship the Logos alongside
Christ but one entity whose body is not alien to the Logos. The Son is
seated at the right hand of God the Father, and there are not two
Sons: the Son of God and a man honored with the title of Sonship.
When we say that the Logos became flesh it means, according to
Cyril, “nothing other than that he partook of blood and flesh like us
and made our body his own.”22 In taking up flesh He did not lay
aside His being God or His generation from the Father. A true
understanding of Theotokos (and here Nestorius probably winced)
lay not in viewing Mary as the mother of the eternality of God but as
the mother of God united with a human body and experiencing a

19
Ibid, 1:175.
20
Ibid.
21
Ibid, 176.
22
Ibid.
48 Chapter Four

human birth. Cyril concluded his letter by charging Nestorius,

“before Christ and the elect angels,” to believe and teach these
things.23
In his reply to Cyril’s letter Nestorius, hinting that his opponent
was uneducated, wrote that he wished to spare Cyril any nausea “in
the face of an over-long, obscure, and indigestible tract.” 24 He
provisionally accepted two natures and one person, but he did not
accept the Godhead participating in the suffering of the man: Christ
was pathƝtos in His body and apathƝs in His Godhead. Nestorius’
letter showed how important it was for him to preserve God’s
impassibility, but he was unwilling to engage with Cyril on Cyril’s
main concern, namely the Son’s single subjectivity.
In August 430 Nestorius was condemned by a synod in Rome.
Pope Celestine had found Cyril’s theology in harmony with the
Western Christology of Hilary, Damasus, and Ambrose. In
November Cyril held his own anti-Nestorian synod and officiously
sent a delegation of four bishops to Nestorius with the documents of
the synod and the demand for an immediate reply. Nestorius was
sitting in his episcopal chair during the liturgy when the bishops
arrived and characteristically told them to visit him at his episcopal
palace the next day. But the next day, having already read the
documents, he refused to receive them. 25 From his pulpit the
following week he compared himself to Chrysostom as Chrysostom
had earlier compared himself to John the Baptist. “Isn’t the Egyptian
the eternal enemy of Constantinople and Asia?” he asked. 26
Nonetheless he began to publicly accept the bugbear Theotokos
provided it was not interpreted in an Apollinarian manner. He
expressed his continuing preference for Christotokos, but his
concession to the theology of the proto-Monophysites was loudly
applauded in his church.
The Alexandrian synod had rubber-stamped Cyril’s third letter to

23
1 Timothy 5:21; Price and Gaddis, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon,
1:177.
24
McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy,
364.
25
Ibid, 46.
26
Ibid.
 The Defeat of Nestorius at Ephesus 49

Nestorius which accused the latter of casting among the people “the
leaven of a strange and new heresy”;27 from an Antiochene point of
view this was nonsensical. To the letter Cyril had appended twelve
anathemas which affirmed that the Son was one in nature and almost
averred that His humanity was swallowed up by His deity. Theodoret
of Cyrrhus was shocked that they came from the hand of Cyril or
indeed from the hand of any Christian cleric, but they were seen by
the proto-Monophysites, as they can still be today, as a refreshing
check to any trend towards Adoptionism in the Antiochene school.
The Anathemas stated (1) that Mary was the Mother of God
because she brought forth the Logos, (2) that the Logos was
personally united to the flesh, (3) that the divine and human natures
of Christ could not be divided, (4) that one could not attribute the
expressions of Scripture to Christ’s human or divine natures
separately, (5) that Christ was not a man bearing God within Him,
(6) that the Logos was not the master of Christ but both God and
man, (7) that Christ was not a man energized by the Logos, (8) that
the Logos and the man assumed (analƝphthenta) were not to be
accorded separate worship, (9) that Christ’s power in working
miracles was His own and not merely the Holy Spirit’s, (10) that the
Logos and not the man separate from Him is our high priest, (11) that
Christ’s flesh is life-giving, and (12) that the Logos suffered and was
crucified.
Nestorius distributed the Anathemas among his appalled
colleagues and accused Cyril of Apollinarianism. Andrew of
Samosata and Theodoret of Cyrrhus, the main thinkers among the
Antiochenes, published refutations of the Anathemas, but in the
process they distanced themselves from Theodore of Mopsuestia.
Andrew agreed with Cyril that Jesus should not be viewed as a
preeminent saint, and Theodoret reinterpreted “the man assumed” to
mean one who had assumed manhood rather than an individual
humanity. McGuckin calls this concessionary Syrian theology
Neo-Antiochenism.28 It was an important transitional development
from Nestorianism to Neo-Nestorianism.

27
Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, II,14:201.
28
McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy,
48.
50 Chapter Four

Thanks to the destructive work of the emperor Justinian,

Theodoret’s refutation of the Anathemas is preserved only in Cyril’s
letter to Euoptius. In it he brings out some salient points against the
proto-Monophysites. Was not Cyril taking the easy way out as
Apollinarius had? Wasn’t he ignoring too much in the Gospel
narratives? In his refutation of the fourth anathema he writes, “To
whom shall we apply the weariness and the sleep? To whom the
ignorance and the fear? Who was it who stood in need of angelic
succour? If these belong to God the Word, how was wisdom
ignorant? How could it be called wisdom when affected by the sense
of ignorance?” 29 As this refutation reveals, the Antiochenes’
emphasis on the Son’s two natures led them to stress His humanity.
They delighted to talk about the hunger, thirst, weariness, sleep, fear,
prayer, and ignorance of Jesus.
In his eleventh refutation Theodoret sees the Logos-Sarx
structure of Apollinarius at work in Cyril: “In the first place he has
nowhere made mention of intelligent flesh, nor confessed that the
assumed man was perfect, but everywhere in accordance with the
teaching of Apollinarius he speaks of flesh. Secondly, after
introducing the conception of the mixture under other terms, he
brings it into his arguments; for there he clearly states the flesh of the
Lord to be soulless.”30 It is surprising that Cyril affixed a copy of
Theodoret’s refutations in his letter to Euoptius, but they after all
contained traces of Adoptionism, as in the fourth counter-statement:
“Not then to God the Word does the ignorance belong, but to the
form of the servant who at that time knew as much as the indwelling
Godhead revealed.”31
While the Antiochenes were milking the Anathemas for all they
were worth, Cyril was bribing prominent Constantinopolitan
officials so they would come around to his point of view, hence
Nestorius’ complaint, in one of his sermons, that he was being
wounded with golden arrows. 32 The next summer, at Nestorius’
request, the emperor convened the First Council of Ephesus which

29
Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, II,3:28.
30
Ibid, 31.
31
Ibid, 28.
32
Chadwick, The Church in Ancient Society, 531.
 The Defeat of Nestorius at Ephesus 51

was governed by an almost unprecedented spirit of ill will. Cyril

knew the council would be a trial of Nestorius’ theology whereas
Nestorius quixotically hoped it would stand in judgment of Cyril’s
canonical irregularities.
Each patriarch brought his own mob to the city. In addition to the
escort of Count Candidian, Nestorius had taken with him a band of
ruffians from the Baths of Zeuxippus in Constantinople; but these
were nothing compared to Cyril’s sailors, parabalans, and monks.
The sailors had of course conveyed the bishops to Ephesus. The
monks were led by Shenoute of Atripe, the fanatical abbot of the
White Monastery in Middle Egypt who illustrates the fact that the
Egyptian monks, at least the more disreputable of them, were the
Alexandrian patriarch’s shock troops.
Shenoute had destroyed pagan shrines and was rumored to have
killed a monk while disciplining him. He had also threatened
Pachomian monks of Gnostic leanings with exile and death, a
possible reason for the hiding of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts. In
some circles he had a reputation for the saintly and the miraculous.
The desert father Abba Cyrus was given divine knowledge that
Shenoute had died a day before he himself did. 33 What is most
paradoxical about the presence of Shenoute at Ephesus is that his
Christology was closer to Nestorius than to Cyril. Shenoute was
influenced by the Logos-Anthrǀpos Christology of the
anti-Manichaean Acta Archelai and was no worshipper of the Virgin
Mary. He had come out for Cyril because he was under the
impression that Nestorius preached that Christ was a man like
Moses.34
Besides his sailors and monks Cyril brought more bishops than he
had been instructed to. Theodoret remarked, with not much
exaggeration, that he had set out to capture Ephesus as though it were
a fortress. The patriarch also boasted the friendship of Memnon, the
bishop of Ephesus whose city stood solidly behind him. The
turbulent anti-Nestorian bias of the Ephesians was reminiscent of the
Diana riots at the time of St. Paul. Ephesus then housed the largest
Christian shrine to the Virgin Mary. The populace believed Mary

33
Budge, Coptic Texts in the Dialect of Upper Egypt, 4:387.
34
Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement, 138.
52 Chapter Four

had died in their city even though the received tradition has placed
her death in the Holy Land; but the Ephesian tradition suits her
supposed discovery, in the company of the apostle John, of Mount
Athos which she prayed God would give as a refuge to those seeking
salvation.
The emperor declined to attend the council and commissioned
Candidian to ensure that no information about its decisions was
leaked to the unstable populace of Constantinople. Candidian’s inept
blockade of Ephesus led to some starvation in the city, but the
Cyrillians managed to smuggle an important communication from
Ephesus in a beggar’s reed.
Cyril did not meet with Nestorius but was fairly certain that the
latter was, Satan-like, “plotting against the glory of Christ.” 35
Nestorius was indeed holding a series of talks at his lodgings in
which he indulged in his usual propensity for hyperbole and so
alienated at least two of his followers. He said that if the second
person of the Trinity was made flesh both the first and third persons
of the Trinity must have also been made flesh since the Trinity is one
in substance. This, together with the fact that Nestorius’ crony
Dorotheus of Marcianopolis favored Diodore’s language of dual
Sonship, resulted in the defection of Acacius of Melitene. 36
Nestorius also estranged Theodotus of Ancyra with his outlandish
comment about the two or three-month-old Jesus. 37 The loss of
Acacius was the more significant of the two defections. Acacius’
career would be from a cautious supporter of Nestorius to a zealous
proto-Monophysite.
Theodoret of Cyrrhus had already arrived in Ephesus, but the
council could not commence until the appearance of John of
Antioch’s party which was delayed by floods and torrential rains.
The staunch Nestorian Alexander of Hierapolis, together with
Alexander of Apamea, came ahead of John’s party conveying the
patriarch’s instructions that Cyril should begin the council without
him if he did not arrive within the week. John did arrive within the

35
Ep. 21; McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological
Controversy, 59.
36
Ibid, 62, 64.
37
Ibid, 64.
 The Defeat of Nestorius at Ephesus 53

week to find that Cyril had already held his council, to the wrath of
the two Alexanders. Cyril knew, or thought he knew, the real reason
for John’s delay. He wrote to Pope Celestine that John had not
delayed because of rains or flooding but because “he concealed in his
heart a plan and an intention that was not of God,”38 in other words
he did not want to personally condemn Nestorius. Somehow John’s
refusal to condemn Nestorius and, according to Cyril, his tacit
approval of that condemnation was an act of hubris against the
council. John could give good reason for his delay in the fact that
there had been fatalities on his journey, and Cyril could give good
reason for going ahead with the council because some of his bishops
were ill from the summer heat.
Theodoret registered an ineffectual protest against Cyril’s
decision to begin the council without John. Count Candidian
appeared in the Church of St. Mary where Cyril’s bishops were
gathered and declared that the council should be delayed because the
imperial sacra demanded that all the bishops be assembled. The
bishops asked Candidian to read the sacra, and when he had done so,
perhaps even before he had finished reading it, he realized he had
been tricked: only the reading of the imperial sacra could legally
begin the council.
Cyril’s synod wasted no time in condemning Nestorius. The
latter’s claim that the current teachers of the church did not often
give precise instruction on theology to the laity was interpreted, by
the presbyter Peter, to mean that he rejected all previous teachers of
the church, the implication being that he also rejected the church
fathers. 39 The bishops said nothing about Theotokos but were
primarily concerned with Christology. Nestorius had refused to
answer Cyril’s three canonical summonses since his accuser was
also his judge. The soldiers guarding him were somewhat rough with
the bishops who brought the summonses; neither of the patriarchs
was apparently eager to give a demonstration of the meekness of
Christ. The synod finally sent the following missive to Nestorius
whom it styled the new Judas: “Know that because of your wicked
preaching and your disobedience of the canons, on this

38
Ibid, 68.
39
Price and Gaddis, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, 1:333.
54 Chapter Four

twenty-second day of the present month of June in accordance with

the ecclesiastical prescripts you have been deposed by the holy
synod and excluded from all ecclesiastical dignity.” 40 Nestorius
would later complain, and with good reason, “I was summoned by
Cyril who assembled the council, by Cyril who presided. Who was
judge? Cyril. Who was accuser? Cyril. Who was bishop of Rome?
Cyril. Cyril was everything.”41
The Ephesians, however, were on Cyril’s side, and after the close
of the council the townspeople joyfully proceeded the bishops from
the Church of St. Mary to their lodgings. It was as though the
wronged spirit of the Virgin Mary had sought out and destroyed
Nestorius at the place of her greatest reverence. Cyril’s council was
soon afterwards followed by a rival synod presided over by John of
Antioch whose group convened immediately on arriving in Ephesus,
the dust of the journey still on their feet. This second synod, which
followed imperial protocol more closely than the first, castigated the
Cyrillian proto-Monophysites as Apollinarians, Arians, and
Eunomians. The proto-Monophysites reassembled, declared that
John was deposed, and referred to his synod as an apostasias
synedrion, a conventicle of apostasy.42 McGuckin, who finds Cyril
an authentic representative of Eastern Orthodoxy and compares
Nestorius unfavorably to Anglican and Reformed theologians,
describes the pronouncements of the Antiochene synod as
tendentious but praises the violent statements of the Cyrillian synod
for not mincing words.
After the council Cyril prevailed upon the Constantinopolitan
archimandrite Dalmatius to leave his monastery for the first time in
forty-eight years in order to gain an audience with the emperor.
Theodosius, we are told, was so surprised to see him that he shook
his head and raised his hands. Cyril hoped that the visit of Dalmatius
would turn the tide against Nestorius. He had good reason for
thinking so: Theodosius’ respect for the monks was so profound that
when an ascetic had once excommunicated him for refusing to grant

40
McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy,
378.
41
Davis, The First Seven Ecumenical Councils, 156.
42
L’Huillier, The Church of the Ancient Councils, 150.
 The Defeat of Nestorius at Ephesus 55

his petition he refused to eat until the ban was lifted despite a
bishop’s informing him that not all such bans were valid.43
The emperor had commanded Candidian that the bishops were
not to leave Ephesus until he himself had reached a decision on the
impasse, and a few of them died in the summer heat, a possibility that
Cyril had warned him about. Theodosius sent the formidable Count
John to relieve Candidian, and John put both Cyril and Nestorius
under house arrest after a meeting in which the two patriarchs saw
but did not speak to each other.44
Cyril meanwhile attempted to sway imperial policy by sending
his personal physician to distribute bribes of one thousand eighty
pounds of gold among the court; the bribes almost bankrupted his
see. It is unfair to the imperial sister to say that these bribes turned
her against Nestorius who had already antagonized her, but they
were so effective among the other members of the court that Count
Irenaeus, Nestorius’ chief secular supporter and eventual bishop of
Tyre, found he was not welcome there.45 To further consolidate his
position Cyril wrote a defense of the Twelve Anathemas and bitingly
compared Nestorius to the Jews who threatened to stone Christ
because “thou, being a man, makest thyself God.”46
Nestorius had asked for permission to retire to his monastery in
Antioch and was taken at his word. The prefect Antiochus, who
sympathized with the defrocked patriarch, conveyed the emperor’s
permission in September.47 That same month Theodosius received
eight spokesmen from each party at the Villa Rufiniana in
Chalcedon, ominously the site where Theophilus had defrocked
Chrysostom thirty years before. The main theologians were Acacius
of Melitene and Theodoret of Cyrrhus who seems to have come out
better in the arguments. At one interval, when Acacius proclaimed or

43
Theodoret, Hist. Eccl. 5.36; Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers,
II,3:155-156.
44
McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy,
102.
45
Ibid, 103.
46
John 10:33; McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological
Controversy, 283.
47
Ibid, 104.
56 Chapter Four

seemed to proclaim a passible Godhead, the emperor flung off his

purple robe in anger.48 Theodosius’ antipathy to language about God
suffering may explain his fairness in granting a hearing to the
Oriental (that is, Antiochene) bishops who numbered fifty-three in
distinction to Cyril’s one hundred fifty-four bishops.
At Chalcedon John of Antioch, who had already abandoned
Nestorius, produced a mildly Nestorian document written by
Theodoret of Cyrrhus, a document that, with a few changes, would
be called the Formulary of Reunion. It stated that the Virgin Mary
was the Theotokos and that Jesus Christ was perfect God and perfect
man, one with God in His divinity, one with us in His humanity, and
possessing a union (henǀsis) from two natures.
The main accomplishment of the Chalcedonian colloquy was its
understanding that neither Cyril’s Anathemas nor John’s synod
would be condemned. There were many Chalcedonians who showed
support for the Antiochene bishops who wisely restrained them in
order to prevent an imperial backlash. The bishops and their
supporters were everywhere opposed by the people Theodoret
termed slaves dressed up as monks. Thanks to the proto-Monophysite
clergy, the Antiochenes were not allowed to use the churches of
Chalcedon and so hired a private house which served as a church, the
galleries being a kind of pulpit with the courtyard for an
auditorium.49
Despite the tense atmosphere in the city Theodoret enjoyed his
time there. He swore on oath to the emperor that it was impossible
for him to be reconciled with Cyril, the sticking point being the
Twelve Anathemas. He wrote with alarm to his Nestorian colleague
Alexander of Hierapolis that whenever he spoke about Nestorius he
was called a rebel. More than once the emperor said, “Let no one
speak to me of this man.”50 When proto-Monophysite monks threw
stones at Theodoret and his friends, the emperor sought out
Theodoret alone and told him that the Antiochenes were assembling
improperly. Theodoret asked why heretics could assemble in

48
Theodoret, Ep. 164; Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers,
II,3:336-337.
49
Ep. 169; ibid, 341.
50
Ep. 169; ibid.
 The Defeat of Nestorius at Ephesus 57

churches but not he. “What am I to do?” was the emperor’s hopeless
reply. Theodoret recommended that those who assembled peaceably
should be allowed to do so, especially since the assemblies consisted
only of prayer and pious conversation.51 The emperor agreed but
later gave orders that the Antiochenes return to Syria, and it was with
the proto-Monophysites alone that he witnessed the consecration of
Nestorius’ successor Maximian.
Shortly afterwards Cyril defied Count John’s order for his house
arrest and returned to Alexandria. McGuckin notes that he wrote the
emperor a letter apologizing for having gone over his head in writing
to the imperial sister, which considerably distressed Theodosius, but
not for leaving Ephesus. He believes this proves that Cyril was
innocent of the latter indiscretion. In reality the same fact could be
used to show that Cyril did not want to draw the emperor’s attention
to what he had done. Almost certainly he left Ephesus before word
arrived that he could do so, and not because he had superior
intelligence than the imperial commissioners as McGuckin suggests.
Legal propriety, in any case, would have demanded that he stay in
Ephesus until he had received clear permission to leave. Back in
Egypt he wrote the new patriarch a congratulatory letter and, almost
as though trying to find as obscure a passage as he could, compared
him to Eliakim who replaced Shebna whom God had rejected.52 It is
amusing that “God” here acts as a euphemism for Cyril himself. The
following year he wrote to Acacius of Beroea that Nestorius had
been removed from the priesthood as one who had an incurable
disease.53
Nestorius’ view of all these events, in his Book of Heraclides, is
predictably biblical: his enemies appear as angels of light and take
counsel against him; Theodosius declares Nestorius blameless and
his deposition an impiety; the archimandrite Dalmatius replies by
saying that the impiety, if such it was, should rest on his own head. It
is hard not to sympathize with Theodoret for later suggesting that a
large slab be placed over Cyril’s tomb to prevent him from coming

51
Ep. 169; ibid, 341-342.
52
Isaiah 22:15-25; Ep. 30; McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria and the
Christological Controversy, 109.
53
Ep. 33; ibid, 338.
58 Chapter Four

back to life after the dead had thrust him from their midst.
Nevertheless, in the First Council of Ephesus and its aftermath, Cyril
effectively turned the empire’s theological policy against Nestorius
and the Antiochenes and in favor of proto-Monophysitism.
Some months after Nestorius’ deposition the emperor sent word
to the pillar saint Simeon to pray for ecclesiastical unity and,
apparently in harmony with this, exiled Nestorius to the red city of
Petra. He later removed him to the Great Oasis, the most remote of
the three oases in the archipelago of the Libyan desert, and
commanded that his writings be burned and his followers be called
Simonians after Simon Magus. McGuckin speaks harshly of
Nestorius’ ineffectual agitation against the emperor’s religious
policy in the Oasis, a place generally reserved for traitors and fallen
courtesans. 54 There Nestorius was captured by bedouins, was
released, and surrendered to the Roman governor who rewarded him
by keeping him constantly on the move despite the fact that he had
severely injured his hand and side. He lived to see the partial triumph
of his views in the Tome of Leo, but he refused to associate the new
orthodoxy with his blackened name. “As for Nestorius,” he wrote,
“let him be anathema; only let men speak of God as I pray for them
that they may speak. For I am with those who are for God, and not
with those who are against God.”55
The Monophysites alleged that in his final illness Nestorius’
blasphemous tongue was eaten by worms, and they held that his
tomb was never watered by the rain of heaven which Christ claimed
fell on the righteous and the unrighteous alike. But Nestorius’
reputation for heresy should be balanced by the prayer included in
the Book of Heraclides: “Rejoice with me, desert, thou my friend, my
nurse, my home; and thou exile, my mother, who after my death will
keep my body until the resurrection by the grace of God.”56

54
Ibid, 117.
55
Young, From Nicaea to Chalcedon, 229.
56
Ibid, 240.
 CHAPTER FIVE

THE FORMULARY COMPROMISE

Cyril had achieved an overwhelming victory at Ephesus, but the

pro-Nestorian Syrian bishops refused to communicate with him until
he withdrew the Twelve Anathemas and accepted the Formulary of
Reunion, the Antiochene document drawn up at Chalcedon with an
additional sentence stating that the expressions about Christ in the
New Testament could be distinguished as stemming from either His
single person or His divine nature or His human nature.
The role of Pope Sixtus III in bringing about a reconciliation
should not be overlooked, but the most visible peacemaker was the
aged Paul of Emesa who had been an Antiochene representative at
the Chalcedonian colloquy and whose courtesy seems to have
bowled over Cyril who was recovering from a long illness.
Displaying his political skill Paul anathematized Nestorius and
preached a sermon in Cyril’s church in which he described Mary as
the Theotokos, to the riotous applause of Cyril’s congregants. Cyril’s
letter to John of Antioch was enthusiastic about the copy of the
Formulary he had received from Paul: “Let the heavens rejoice and
the earth be glad, for the middle wall of division has been broken
down and an end has been put to grieving and the mode of all
dissension removed.”1 But at the end of the letter he lapsed into his
usual abrasiveness,2 and he explained to his more extreme supporters
that he accepted two natures only before the Incarnation and even
then only in detached mental contemplation (theǀria or epinoia), a
point that Theodoret of Cyrrhus was begrudgingly ready to concede.
The Formulary compromise was painful not only for the
proto-Monophysites but for the Syrian bishops who were initially

1
Price and Gaddis, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, 1:178.
2
Ibid, 182-183.
60 Chapter Five

told to condemn Nestorius. Andrew of Samosata had a nightmare in

which he was blessed by Apollinarius.3 He and Theodoret held out
for as long as they could, and Theodoret became the leader of the
Syrian alternative to the Formulary compromise which he had
ironically helped to create. 4 Eventually the two came around to
John’s viewpoint and made their peace with Cyril, Theodoret
agreeing to do so only when the demand for Nestorius’ condemnation
was dropped. Theodoret’s acceptance of the compromise, three years
after Cyril accepted it, was less because of inner conviction than
because of the pleading of the Syrian hermits who were worried that
he would be replaced by an inferior clergyman.
Theodoret and John were derided as chameleons by the
increasingly isolated Alexander of Hierapolis5 who declared that he
would rather lose his see and his right hand than enter into
communion with Cyril. Possibly exaggerating he claimed that his
need to remain as a witness to the truth alone prevented him from
forming his own church. At the unwitting but ultimate instigation of
John, Alexander was deposed, and when his parishioners rioted he
was sent to the metal mines where he died after only a few days.6 His
fate shows the great political threat that lay behind Cyril’s decision
to accept the Formulary.
Towards the end of his life Cyril launched a campaign against the
theology of Diodore of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia and
would receive a rebuttal from Theodoret. He gave a copy of his
treatise against Julian to the latter as a reconciliation present.7 It is
unlikely that he was trying to send him a message about it
superseding Theodore’s groundbreaking work on the subject; the
early Cyril tends to make one unduly suspicious of the motives of the
later Cyril.

3
Chadwick, The Church in Ancient Society, 542.
4
McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy,
119.
5
Chadwick, The Church in Ancient Society, 544.
6
Ibid, 547-548.
7
McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy,
121.
 The Formulary Compromise 61

Cyril’s final work on Christology, On the Unity of Christ, was

written in dialogue form. As was his custom he employs A and B for
his interlocutors rather than, as was common, proper names. This
may show the keen bent of his mind in that he did not feel the need to
make his dialogue more accessible by using clearly defined
personalities. On the Unity of Christ contains strong language
against the Nestorians, language that was typical of its time. Alberto
Ferreiro, who finds this language Jewish in origin, writes, “For
centuries . . . the use of sharp imagery, metaphors, allegory and other
literary devices was the normal way of expression, intended to drive
a major point home through striking forms of communication. . . .
Even Jesus, who expressed himself in rather strident ways, manifests
this Jewish way of teaching.”8 One finds it also in John the Baptist’s
words to the Pharisees. Cyril is well up to emulating his worthy
forebears. Heretics are “ferocious wolves” that ravage Christ’s flock.
The Nestorians inject “their frigid, perverted, and idiotic notions like
venom into the souls of the simple.” Theodore’s doctrine of the
assumed man is a “disgusting mess spewed forth” by the Antiochenes.
As far as Diodore is concerned, his recognition of Christ as the Son
of David went no further than the recognition of the Pharisees who
did not know that He was the Son of God.
In The Unity of Christ Cyril almost goes against the Formulary’s
distinguishing between the words and works of Christ’s divine and
human natures, but he saves himself by stating that one must refrain
from this “at least not as referring to two persons or two hypostases
divided from one another.” He was less compromising to Acacius of
Melitene to whom he wrote that he would not go back on his fourth
anathema to Nestorius. Yet he has learned something from his
Antiochene opponents and agrees that Christ suffered only in His
flesh, not in His divine nature.
It is possible that Cyril wanted to launch a further offensive
against Antiochene theology. This would explain the fears
Theodoret expressed to Domnus of Antioch, in his letter on the death
of Cyril, that Cyril planned to “throw the imperial city into confusion
by attacking true doctrines a second time, and to charge your

8
Ferreiro, The Twelve Prophets, xx-xxi.
62 Chapter Five

holiness with supporting them.”9 If Frend is correct, Cyril’s struggle

was more with Theodore, whom he viewed as the source of the
Antiochene heresy, than with Nestorius who was only a temporary
nuisance, but he knew that the terms of the Formulary of Reunion
could not be trifled with.
Two of the most vocal proto-Monophysites during this period
were Acacius of Melitene and Rabbula of Edessa. They watched
with suspicion as the Armenian church tacitly embraced the writings
of Theodore of Mopsuestia, and sent admonitory letters to the
Armenians. The perplexed Armenian clergy dispatched two priests
to Constantinople, and the patriarch Proclus replied with his Tome to
the Armenians. In his diplomacy and learning Proclus brings to mind
the later and more renowned Photius. His Tome was mildly
anti-Antiochene and yet foreshadowed Neo-Nestorianism by
distinguishing between physis and hypostasis: the Son did not have
two hypostases but rather two natures united in one hypostasis.
Proclus insisted that the Oriental bishops sign the condemnation of
the writings of Theodore which he appended to the Tome. When this
resulted in widespread dissatisfaction, Cyril asked Proclus to
withdraw his request. Irenical influence was reciprocal, as Proclus
advised Cyril to discontinue his attack on at least the names of
Nestorius’ predecessors.10
On his deathbed Cyril is said to have spoken against the
proto-Monophysite crusade to have Theodore excommunicated, but
his successor Dioscorus was of a different mind. McGuckin
fancifully but plausibly suggests that Cyril was disturbed by the
growing restlessness of his archdeacon. If Christ’s words about the
violent taking the kingdom of heaven by force could be applied to
Cyril, they could with more justification be applied to Dioscorus, one
of those Cyrillian proto-Monophysites who felt betrayed by the
moderate Cyril of the Formulary. Pope Leo wrote a congratulatory
but fussy letter to Dioscorus on his accession, not knowing the bad
blood that would soon arise between them.

9
Ep. 180; Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, II,3:347.
10
McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy,
120.
 The Formulary Compromise 63

Almost immediately upon taking charge of the patriarchate

Dioscorus purged Cyril’s relatives of their positions in the
Alexandrian church and stripped them of their wealth. He ruled with
unrestrained tyranny and, his enemies alleged, did not stop short of
murder. And yet Dioscorus had many defenders among the
Monophysites, including the deacon Theopistus who wrote a
legendary account of his life. Pseudo-Zacharias called him “the
apostolic preacher and Christ’s true martyr.”11 Severus of Antioch
stated that he refused “to bow the knee to Baal in the assembly of
schism,” by which he meant the Council of Chalcedon. 12 And
Timothy Ailouros was so confident of his fate in the afterlife that he
was able to quote the apostle Paul with reference to Dioscorus:
“Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which
the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at that day: and not to me
only, but unto all them also that love his appearing.”13
Dioscorus was jealous of Domnus, John’s successor at Antioch,
and even more of Theodoret who was the theological force behind
his patriarchate. Theodoret was one of the most outstanding men of
his day. He was born in Antioch to a wealthy Christian couple. His
mother had an eye disease from which she was cured by going to a
hermit, Peter of Galatia, who convinced her to give up the use of
cosmetics she was accustomed to heavily apply. She was also barren,
and it was the prayers of another hermit, Macedonius, that granted
her a son. This is the same Macedonius who had convinced
Theodosius I to refrain from punishing the citizens of Antioch for
tearing down statues of the imperial family by reminding him that
men were of more value than statues.
As a boy Theodoret often visited Peter of Galatia who gave him
half his girdle, an object which his family treasured and held useful
in curing various illnesses until it was stolen by an acquaintance.
Theodoret’s first language was Syriac. This we can infer from his
statement that the Greek language was “in a sense” his, and indeed
he learned to write elegant Greek. As was befitting a Syriac speaker
he was thoroughly imbued with the spirit of Antiochene Christianity.

11
Sellers, The Council of Chalcedon, 30.
12
Ibid.
13
2 Timothy 4:8.
64 Chapter Five

He learned the theology of Diodore and Theodore, though not in the

flesh, and struck up a friendship with Nestorius while the latter was a
monk at St. Euprepius. After the death of his parents he was free to
commence the ascetic life and took up at the monastery of Nicerte
three miles from Apamea. As a monk he visited Jerusalem whose
ruins thrilled him by their fulfillment of Christ’s prophecy that no
stone of the city would be left unturned.
At the age of thirty Theodoret was consecrated bishop of Cyrrhus,
a Syrian town two days from Antioch and one affected by Judaism,
Marcionism, and Arianism. The consecration was against his will,
but he stood out among the bishops of his time in the impeccability
of his ecclesiastical record. He also helped beautify the city of
Cyrrhus. He replaced the Gospel harmony of the Gnostic Tatian in
his diocese with the four Gospels and was responsible for the
conversion of a thousand Marcionites. His later boast that he had
never appeared in court either as a prosecutor or a defendant sounds
curiously similar to something that was said of Plotinus; but his
virtue should not be mistaken for weakness. His refusal to make
peace with Cyril until the demand for Nestorius’ condemnation was
dropped is proof of the contrary.
Theodoret’s faults were the faults of his time. He was given to
hyperbole just as much as Cyril, and whenever anything unfortunate
happened to his clerical friends he called them the victims of a
massacre. He termed the Twelve Anathemas the vile children of a
vile father, and he could out-Cyril Cyril in demonstrativeness, as
when he wrote that Apollinarius valued drivel more than the truth.
The viciously humorous epistle which exults that in Cyril’s death
God had taken away the reproach from Israel and recommends that
the undertakers of Alexandria place a heavy stone on Cyril’s grave to
prevent him from coming back to life is correctly attributed to him.14
Theodoret was a skillful writer of letters. Many of them were
written to complain of persecution or to console widows and
widowers. Once he thanked a correspondent for giving him white
wine from Lesbos and sent a pot of honey in return.15 He wrote
many books that are now lost, among them one on the mysteries and

14
Ep. 180; Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, II,3:347.
15
Ep. 13; ibid, 253.
 The Formulary Compromise 65

another on the questions of the Magi. He wrote a work against

heresies which surprisingly did not make use of the Panarion of the
eminent heresiologist Epiphanius of Salamis. It is of some dispute
whether the last chapter, against Nestorius, is from his pen. It is
unfortunate if it is, not for any doctrinal reason but because it smacks
of disloyalty. 16 Another of Theodoret’s polemical works was his
Cure for the Hellenic Sickness which reflected the importance that
was increasingly being attached to relics. The author did not look
down on these relics. He slept with a bottle of oil burned at the
martyrs’ graves and used the cloak of a Syrian hermit for a pillow. In
his later years he prepared a sepulchral urn for the ascetic Jacob, but
he predeceased the ascetic who was buried in it.17 The Cure for the
Hellenic Sickness included numerous quotations from Plotinus but
paired them with faulty interpretations, proving that a stellar
theologian need not always be a good philosopher.
Theodoret produced an ecclesiastical history from the emergence
of the Arian heresy to the death of Theodore of Mopsuestia. The
Ecclesiastical History is sometimes inaccurate but makes use of
otherwise unattested documents. It is really a history of Arianism,
but it gives some hints of the Nestorian controversy and concludes
with a panegyric of Theodore of Mopsuestia who is described as “a
successful combatant against every heretical phalanx,” specifically
against “the piratical band” of the Apollinarian proto-Monophysites.18
Not to be confused with the Ecclesiastical History is a religious
history chronicling the lives of over thirty Syrian ascetics, three of
them women. In the latter Theodoret included a curious story about
the monk Avitos who once visited his fellow monk Marcian. Upon
Avitos’ arrival Marcian invited his guest to eat with him, but Avitos
replied that he never ate until evening. Marcian urged him to change
his custom since he himself was weak, but since Avitos was
unrelenting in his refusal to eat, Marcian mourned that the traveling
monk had come to meet a true ascetic only to be disappointed. It was
then that Avitos changed his mind, and during the meal Marcian
observed that though the monks prided themselves on work and

16
Ibid, 20.
17
Ibid, 12.
18
Hist. Eccl. 5.39; ibid, 159.
66 Chapter Five

fasting more than on pleasure and food the Christian love exhibited
by Avitos’ change of heart was worth more than work and fasting.19
Along with the Religious History should be mentioned
Theodoret’s treatise on divine love which he maintained was the
bulwark of the ascetic’s life. He himself did not fear going to hell
with it and refused to go to heaven without it. The treatise contains
some novel scriptural exegesis, for instance its claim that Peter’s
denial was because of his love for Jesus; if he had not lied to those
asking him about his relationship with his Lord, Theodoret said, he
would not have been able to be near Him.
In his biblical commentaries Theodoret attempted to steer a
middle course between the prosaic literalism of the Antiochenes and
the fanciful allegorism of the Alexandrians, an aspiration he had in
common with Cyril. He may have been a better exegete than
Theodore and always began his exegesis with a comparison of the
various versions of the Septuagint and the Syriac Peshitta. In his
commentaries there is less tension between the Old and New
Testaments than there was for Theodore who called the New
Testament a new song. He believed that Ezra divinely rewrote the
whole of the Old Testament. He found many passages in the Psalms
pointing to Christ, but not as many as Cyril did. His paraphrase of
Hosea 7:11-16 is worth quoting for what it reads into the text without
contradicting it: “‘First I [God] will educate them through the threat
of sufferings. Then I will catch all of them like birds, placing around
them a cloud of enemies like a net.’ And having said that, he does not
forget his love for mankind but offers a dirge from fatherly love for
them.”20
Despite Theodoret’s reputation he was, in Dioscorus’ eyes,
unfaithful to the Antiochene compromise with the proto-
Monophysites. To put it more bluntly he was returning to his vomit, a
favorite phrase of the fathers since it allowed them to be vulgar
without being unbiblical. He was also nettled by Theodoret’s
(actually Theodore’s) quotation about St. Thomas, a quotation which
he put in the worst possible light: “Thomas touched him who rose

19
Hist. Rel. 3.12; Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, 265-266.
20
Ferreiro, The Twelve Prophets, 33.
 The Formulary Compromise 67

from the dead but worshipped him who raised him.”21 Dioscorus’
hatred of Theodoret was not completely unprovoked. During the
former’s patriarchate Theodoret was engaged in considerable
anti-Alexandrian propaganda. He was vigorous in urging the
Antiochenes, and especially the patriarch Domnus, to follow the
example of Naboth and not surrender the inheritance of their fathers
to wicked men.22
Theodoret’s major anti-Alexandrian work of this time was his
Eranistes, or Beggar. In it he has come round to Cyril’s view of one
hypostasis in Christ but otherwise offers the proto-Monophysites a
bitter pill. He was writing in response to the resurgence of
proto-Monophysitism represented by Eutyches, but the
proto-Monophysitism he attacks is Cyrillian. He compares the
Cyrillians to Alexander the Coppersmith, Shimei, and Mani. He
claims that they have begged much from Apollinarius, Arius, and
Eunomius, the identical claim of John of Antioch’s synod, and he is
confident that the Antiochenes, and not they, are the true inheritors
of the apostolic doctrines. The Eranistes consists of three dialogues,
each followed by a florilegium of the fathers which may have been
drawn up as early as the Council of Ephesus and which showed, as in
Cyril’s writings, their increasing relevance. The first dialogue seeks
to prove that the Godhead of the Son is immutable, the second that
the Godhead and manhood of Christ are without confusion, and the
third that the divinity of Christ is impassible, something of an
Antiochene obsession. The three dialogues and florilegia are
followed by a forgettable demonstration by syllogisms.
Orthodoxus is the Antiochene of the dialogues and Eranistes the
Cyrillian. Orthodoxus begins with a definition of terms. Upon
Eranistes’ insistence that the Antiochenes proclaim two Sons he
replies that the proto-Monophysites do not even proclaim one Son
because they insist that the Word was changed into flesh and flesh by
itself is not a Son. Eranistes remarks that He who was born in
Bethlehem was God, and Orthodoxus replies not only God but also
man. Basing his words on John’s statement that no one has seen God
at any time, Orthodoxus says that in Christ God used the flesh as a

21
Sellers, The Council of Chalcedon, 43.
22
Ibid, 42.
68 Chapter Five

screen. Eranistes objects to the novelty of the word “screen,” but

Orthodoxus finds Christ’s flesh referred to as a veil in Hebrews.23
Orthodoxus’ florilegium from the fathers strategically does not quote
Diodore or Theodore who would have affronted the
proto-Monophysites. This irked Irenaeus of Tyre, but he would have
been heartened by the inclusion of Eustathius. Even Apollinarius
finds his way into the florilegium for saying that the Word was not
turned into flesh but assumed flesh. 24 In this way, Theodoret
thought, the Apollinarian proto-Monophysites were less radical than
the Cyrillian proto-Monophysites.
In the second dialogue Orthodoxus attacks Apollinarius’ belief in
the trichotomous nature of man. Man, he is quite confident, is
composed only of body and soul. Against Eranistes’ allegation that
he who affirms two natures in Christ affirms two Sons he asks
whether he who says that Paul is both soul and body makes two
Pauls. Although Theodoret allows Eranistes to defend himself
manfully he is often unfair to the proto-Monophysites throughout the
dialogue, as when he makes Eranistes say that the Godhead absorbed
the manhood “like the sea receiving a drop of honey.” The word
Eranistes uses for “absorb” is katapothƝnai which includes the idea
of disappearing, a doctrine the proto-Monophysites would not have
countenanced. Orthodoxus compares this to Saturn swallowing his
children.25 He also attacks the phrase “one nature after the union,”
apparently failing to realize that the proto-Monophysites meant by
this not that there were two natures before the union but that two
natures came together at the union. Pope Leo also misunderstood this
phrase.
The second florilegium quotes both Cyril and Apollinarius.
Apollinarius comes out sounding almost Antiochene, though his
imagery is Neoplatonic: “Let us not be humiliated as thinking the
worship of the Son of God humiliation, even in His human likeness,
but as though honouring some king appearing in poor raiment with
his royal glory, and above all seeing that the very garb in which He is
clad is glorified, as became the body of God and of the world’s

23
Hebrews 10:19-20; Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, II,3:167.
24
Ibid, 182.
25
Ibid, 197.
 The Formulary Compromise 69

Saviour which is seed of eternal life.”26

In the third dialogue Orthodoxus seems to go against the words of
Jesus Christ by showing that some things are impossible for God. He
gives examples: sin, darkness, visibility, comprehensibility,
nonexistence, begottenness, and, most importantly, passibility. Since
it is impossible for God to suffer one must acknowledge that only the
humanity of Christ suffered. Passages which seem to imply that the
Godhead suffered in Christ can be explained by the soul-body
analogy. The Antiochenes loved to split things, but even so
Orthodoxus says that the splitting is done in the reason alone, in
other words half consciously. Like us the Bible does not go through
the trouble of explaining what is self-evident. It says that Isaac was
blind without specifying that only his body was. It says that the
prophets saw without saying that it was their souls rather than their
bodies that saw. When the paralytic was brought to Jesus the
paralysis was only in his body, but as a person he was still referred to
as a paralytic.
Then Orthodoxus comes to the crux of the quarrel between the
proto-Monophysites and the Antiochenes. He asks when Jesus was
weary whether it was His deity or His humanity that was weary.
Eranistes, backed into a corner, replies, “I cannot bear to divide what
is united” and attributes weariness to the divine nature. 27
Orthodoxus immediately refers him to Isaiah 40:28: “The Lord
fainteth not, neither is he weary.” Eranistes is forced to admit God’s
impassibility, but only before the Incarnation. Orthodoxus counters
that passibility is never connected with God in Scripture, and one
should strictly follow Scripture’s usage. It might be possible to call
the Holy Spirit unbegotten, but since Scripture does not we should
not. Eranistes falls back on Cyril’s idea of apathǀs epathen: Christ
suffered without suffering. Orthodoxus ridicules this as an
oxymoron like immortal mortality. Eranistes, having the
proto-Monophysite reluctance to divide, does not give up and says
that the divine shared with the human in suffering.
Orthodoxus admits that Christ’s human soul may have suffered
but not His divinity; but this admission is begrudgingly given. So

26
Ibid, 216.
27
Ibid, 221-222.
70 Chapter Five

rigid was the Antiochene distinction between body and soul that the
Antiochenes sometimes appeared Platonic. One is strongly reminded
of Plotinus’ saying that while not all of the person is aware of the
pain part of his body experiences all of him is aware of what his soul
experiences.28 With Orthodoxus’ subsequent nitpicking exegesis we
begin to see why the proto-Monophysites found the Antiochenes so
irritating: When Paul writes, “They crucified the Lord of glory,” he
meant, “They crucified the humanity of the Lord of glory.” When
James is called the brother of the Lord it means he is the brother of
the humanity of the Lord.29
The florilegium that concludes the third dialogue is rather
unfortunate. The Antiochene revulsion to God’s passibility is given
all too eloquent testimony by Eustathius: “Can we suppose the
incorporeal Wisdom to be defiled and to change its nature because its
temple is nailed to the cross or destroyed or wounded or corrupted?
The temple suffers, but the substance abides without spot, and
preserves its entire dignity without defilement.” 30 Orthodoxus’
recourse to Apollinarius to support his distancing God from
passibility is wise, but when he goes to Eusebius of Emesa he ruins
his case. The Arians were notorious for their Platonic separation of
God from passibility and indeed from everything fleshly. In the
Arian Opus Imperfectum in Matthaeum, once thought the work of
Chrysostom, the supreme God, not deigning to stoop to mortality,
impels the lesser God to become man.
The Antiochenes had at least two things in common with the
Arians: their war against the passibility of the divine and their
emphasis on Christ’s humanity, although in the case of the Arians it
was a humanity without a human soul. The proto-Monophysites, for
their part, were not completely immune to Arius’ denial of Christ’s
soul. The Eranistes makes one thing palpably clear: in their different
ways the Antiochenes and the proto-Monophysites had not fully
freed themselves from the specters of either Platonism or Arianism.

28
Mayhall, On Plotinus, 43.
29
1 Corinthians 2:8; Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, II,3:
232-233.
30
Ibid, 236.
 CHAPTER SIX

EUTYCHIANISM TRIUMPHANT

If the Eranistes made the proto-Monophysites rage fruitlessly, as

it was no doubt intended to, Ibas, Rabbula’s successor at Edessa, was
proving a useful figure for the Alexandrians. In 449 Ibas faced
charges at Berytus (Beirut) and Tyre that he had wasted church
money on his profligate nephew Daniel, that he kept an expensive
chalice for his own use, that he provided inferior wine at the
Eucharist, that he was uncanonically accumulating money, and that
he was ordaining men unworthy of the ministry. Ibas’ accumulation
of money was meant to ransom captives from Arab overlords who
were forcing monks to worship idols and nuns to work as prostitutes;
but the fact that some of the money was being siphoned off for his
relatives meant that not all the captives could be freed.1
Ibas’ outspokenness did not help his case. He claimed that Cyril
was an Apollinarian, that hell was only a threat, and that the Jews
crucified a man. He was reported as making the fatally Antiochene
comment, “If God were dead, who was there to raise Him to life?”
and as saying, “I do not envy Christ that He became God, for I have
become that, for He is of my own nature.” This last report was likely
untrue since Ibas maintained it was a blasphemy even the demons
would not utter. Some of Ibas’ enemies belonged to the ascetic group
the Sons of the Covenant.2 Others of them were not guiltless. One of
them, the deacon Maras, had assaulted a presbyter, and the priest
Samuel’s strong Alexandrian leanings showed him to be a far from
unbiased plaintiff.
Ibas’ manifold indiscretions helped the proto-Monophysite
cause, but the affair of Eutyches of Constantinople was a godsend.

1
Chadwick, The Church in Ancient Society, 563-564.
2
Ibid, 563.
72 Chapter Six

The position of Flavian, the third successor to Nestorius as patriarch

of Constantinople, was shaky from the start. Byzantium was required
to pay a yearly tribute to the Huns, and the eunuch Chrysaphius, the
current power behind Theodosius’ throne, demanded that Flavian
supply the government with a token of gratitude for his consecration.
Flavian sent holy bread, but it was returned with a demand for gold.
Even more ominously, Chrysaphius was the godson of the
archimandrite Eutyches, the successor of Dalmatius. Jülicher
hypothesizes that Eutyches may have been a monk from childhood,
somewhat like the biblical Samuel, but he does not appear to have
had much else in common with him. 3 Church historians have
generally accepted Pope Leo’s verdict of Eutyches as “someone
extremely unintelligent and utterly uneducated, with the consequence
that the saying of the prophet applies to him, ‘He refused to
understand doing good; he meditated unrighteousness on his bed.’”4
Eutyches owed much to the theology of Apollinarius and developed
a Christology which fused Christ’s divine and human natures after
His incarnation so that the human was all but deified by the divine.
Using an analogy from the faulty meteorology of his day Eutyches
said that Christ’s two natures had solidified as rain or snow solidifies
from the atmosphere through the action of wind. Like Cyril he
affirmed one nature after the Incarnation, but he denied that the Son
was of the same substance with us. His divinization of Christ’s
humanity has been exaggerated, but it was transparent enough to
pose theological dangers Eutyches himself did not recognize.
That there was tension between Flavian and Eutyches is proven
by the fact that when Theodosius visited Flavian in his church he was
angered by Flavian’s feigned ignorance of the gathering storm. In
448 the patriarch called a meeting of the standing synod (endƝmousa
synodos), a permanent council of Constantinopolitan bishops who
assembled to deal with Christological emergencies. As in the case of
Nestorius, and in accordance with Roman legal proceedings,
Eutyches was given three summonses. After the first he alleged he
had taken a vow to never leave his monastery (he had actually left it

3
Gregory, Vox Populi, 155.
4
Psalm 36:3-4; Price and Gaddis, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon,
2:15.
 Eutychianism Triumphant 73

during the Nestorian controversy). After the second he claimed he

was ill. After the third he appeared with a crowd of monks and
soldiers and the patrician Florentius who was a friend of the emperor.
Florentius was instrumental in getting Eutyches condemned only so
that the tables could be turned against Flavian later. Flavian foolishly
told an imperial silentiary that the patrician’s presence was not
needed since Eutyches’ condemnation had been decided upon in
advance.5 This was not completely true since the archimandrite was
given ample opportunity to recant; his obstinacy, therefore, must
have been well-known.
The chaos of Eutyches’ thinking came out at the trial. He saw
Christ as a perfect man but not as one who shared in our flesh. He
had emerged from His mother’s womb not in the Gnostic way (in
other words not like water from a pipe), but at the same time He was
not of the same substance with her or with us. He had a human body,
but it was not a man’s body, yet He was still perfect man. Perhaps the
morass could have been cleared up by saying that a perfect man has a
human body but a body that is not of the same substance with us. But
even this explanation, which the befuddled bishops did not stop to
consider, was heretical.
Orthodoxy for the standing synod consisted of the Formulary of
Reunion, Cyril’s Second Letter to Nestorius, and the Nicene Creed, a
document too primitive to speak to the current Christological issues.6
The synod categorically condemned Eutyches. Flavian’s irenicism
and, notwithstanding the allegation of Nestorius, eloquence are
borne out by his closing statement at the fourth session of the synod.
The statement was uttered with reference to Eutyches’ accuser
Eusebius of Dorylaeum who had accused Eutyches of being a
blasphemer and a madman: “You know the zeal of the accuser; even
fire seems cold to him because of his zeal for religion. God knows
how I urged and begged him not to: ‘I implore you, drop the matter.’
But when he insisted, what could I do? Is my present desire to cause
divisions among you? God forbid! Is it not rather to reconcile you? It
is enemies who divide, and fathers who unite.” 7 Even Flavian’s

5
Chadwick, The Church in Ancient Society, 555.
6
Drobner, The Fathers of the Church, 480.
7
Price and Gaddis, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, 1:208.
74 Chapter Six

enemies, Theodoret wrote, sang his praises; but Flavian’s refusal to

disassociate himself from Eusebius, who had already agitated
against Nestorius and would play a part in the deposition of
Dioscorus, was to bring about his downfall. Eusebius’ machinations,
however, were paralleled by those of Eutyches who already pictured
Eusebius in the Great Oasis with Nestorius.
The words of Flavian’s condemnation of Eutyches would have
delighted Eusebius, if it was not indeed written by him: the patriarch
found Eutyches incorrigible and “riddled with the heresies of
Valentinus and Apollinarius.” 8 The archimandrite retaliated by
appealing to the sees of Rome, Alexandria, Jerusalem, and
Thessalonica but significantly not Antioch.
The emperor was tacitly siding with Eutyches. Irenaeus of Tyre
had already been defrocked on the grounds that he had been married
twice, though the real reason was his Antiochene inclinations.
Weeks after the meeting of the standing synod Theodosius
insultingly asked Flavian for a creedal statement. Flavian,
recognizing the strength of the proto-Monophysites, replied that
Christ is perfect God and perfect man, one hypostasis and one
prosopon out of two natures and yet, to quote Pseudo-Athanasius,
one nature of the divine Word incarnate.
Four months later the count Rufus delivered an imperial edict to
Theodoret of Cyrrhus, commanding him not to leave Cyrrhus. The
charge was not heresy but rather assembling frequent synods. Rufus
was followed by another official who demanded that Theodoret
acknowledge in writing the fact that he had received the edict,
probably so he could be punished severely if he violated it.
Theodoret was fortunate he had not been sentenced to house arrest or
worse. Perhaps the emperor’s personal dealings with him during the
First Council of Ephesus militated against such an outcome. In a
letter to the prefect Eutrechius, Theodoret complained that the
emperor was treating him as a plaything of calamity and declared
that he was ready for more trouble; obviously the fate of Alexander
of Hierapolis was still fresh in his mind. Though his language had
mellowed since Cyril’s time, Theodoret could still not refrain from
remarking to his friends that the Egyptian clergymen were harlots

8
Ibid, 225.
 Eutychianism Triumphant 75

and that their victories proved the horn of the Jews was exalted.
Eutyches had already written to Pope Leo and had portrayed
himself as a valiant but persecuted enemy of Nestorianism, and the
pope replied with the customary “God keep you safe, my beloved
son.” 9 In a subsequent letter to the pope, Eutyches alleged that
Athanasius, Gregory, and Leo’s own predecessors Julius and Felix
rejected the doctrine of the two natures. He further anathematized
those who said that Christ’s flesh descended from heaven, widely
held to be an Apollinarian teaching, and presented a tolerable
confession of faith which read in part, “He who is the Word of God
came down from heaven without flesh. . . . And He who was always
perfect God before the ages, was also made perfect man in the end of
the days for us and for our salvation.” 10 Eutyches wrote to the
Western orator Peter Chrysologus who replied sympathetically but
deferred to Leo.11 Chrysologus knew the pope would say nothing in
approval to the archimandrite until he had heard from the
Constantinopolitan patriarch.
Eutyches was also alleging that the minutes of Flavian’s synod
were inaccurate, a largely specious claim that led to a time-wasting
inquiry where one of the notaries dangerously accused a colleague of
falsifying the documents.12 In May 449 Leo received Flavian’s letter
which, in one of those quirks of history, had been months in transit
and which had led to some unpontifical impatience on the part of Leo
who supposed that Flavian had been remiss. Flavian’s letter, and
especially the minutes of the synod he forwarded, turned Leo firmly
against Eutyches. He addressed to Flavian a Tome which affirmed
that while there could be one person after the union there could not
be one nature. Many in the Eastern church found the Tome too
rigidly dichotomous to their liking, and Timothy Ailouros would
suggest that it be called Tomos rather than Tome because it divided
the East in two.
Hitherto no pope had interacted so vigorously with
Constantinopolitan theology, and none is so highly regarded in the

9
Ep. 20; Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, II,12:32.
10
Ep. 21; ibid, 34.
11
Ep. 25; ibid, 36.
12
Chadwick, The Church in Ancient Society, 555.
76 Chapter Six

Orthodox Church today. It is significant that Leo, like so many

Orthodox theologians, eschewed theological originality. He also
tried not to interfere in the affairs of the Eastern church, an exception
being his notorious opposition to the twenty-eighth canon of the
Council of Chalcedon. In addition he recognized that the Eastern
emperor had a certain priestly function in ensuring the unity of the
catholic church. One imagines that he would have been, at least on
the ecclesiastical plane, in luxuriant ease with Eastern Rite
Catholicism. With regard to Protestantism, Leo has long been a
favorite whipping boy thanks to his strengthening of the papacy, his
endorsement of the perpetual virginity of Mary, and his quoting from
the Apocrypha as scriptural, a growing trend also reflected in the
writings of Cyril; but Protestants have been duly thankful for his role
in upholding the Council of Chalcedon.
Leo is one of the four Doctors of the Western church, and he was
the only pope besides Gregory I to have been labeled the Great.
Drobner claims he was the strongest leader of his time,13 but in the
East he was on less steady ground, being overpowered first by
Dioscorus and then by the emperor Marcian and the patriarch
Anatolius. Even before he was elected to the papacy Leo was an
active and conscientious churchman. As an acolyte he was entrusted
by the future Sixtus III to transmit a letter to Augustine of Hippo.14
We have already noted that he commissioned John Cassian to write
against Nestorius, another salvo in the already daunting offensive
against Nestorianism in the West. That he did this more because of
Nestorius’ philo-Pelagianism than because of his Christology is
proven by a work he himself penned not long afterwards in defense
of Augustine’s teaching on grace. In the same vein he prevailed upon
Pope Sixtus to prevent Julian of Eclanum, the friend of Theodore and
Nestorius, from being restored to his see. In 440 he successfully
brokered a reconciliation between two powerful generals, Aetius and
Albinus, when word came to him that he had been elected Sixtus’
successor. One of the first challenges of his pontificate was the affair
of Hilary of Arles whom he reprimanded for deposing a bishop on
technical (Gallican) grounds. Though Hilary made a winter journey

13
Drobner, The Fathers of the Church, 480.
14
Augustine, Ep. 191; Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, I,1:555.
 Eutychianism Triumphant 77

on foot to Rome the pope was unyielding in his judgment against

him.15 The whole affair strongly prefigured Gregory VII’s behavior
in the investiture conflict of the eleventh century.
As pontiff Leo struggled against Pelagianism but more against
Manichaeanism, Eutychian proto-Monophysitism, and Monophysitism.
His sermons are arranged seasonally from Christmas to Pentecost,
but within them the chronological order of each sermon is observed.
Predictably the earlier ones confront Manichaeanism and the later
ones Eutychianism. Leo seems to have delivered few sermons after
the Council of Chalcedon though his letter writing did not cease. A
year after Chalcedon he sent, and was himself a member, of a
delegation that successfully persuaded Attila the Hun to refrain from
invading Italy. He could do nothing to stop the sack of Rome by
Gaiseric, but he prevailed upon the Vandal king to spare the city
from fire, torture, and massacre.
Leo was arrogant but in an aloof, regal way, and his writings
reveal almost no facts about him. He certainly did not breathe a word
about his minor triumphs against the Huns and the Vandals. He was
arrogant more for the sake of his see, which he firmly believed was
St. Peter’s, than for himself. Culturally he did not have the broad
education of an Ambrose or an Augustine, a fact which illustrates the
oft-repeated truism that he stood on the bridge between late antiquity
and the Western Middle Ages; his education was Christian Latin
rather than Latin Christian.
What Leo lacked in culture he made up for by the solemn and
eloquent style of his letters which would set the standard for future
papal declarations. His letters, as opposed to his sermons, are not
overly weighed down with scriptural quotations and contain a
plethora of well-considered ecclesiastical advice. To the bishops of
Mauritania, then under the brutal sway of the Vandals, he writes that
virgins dishonored by barbarians should not be viewed as completely
virginal but should be honored as virgins in soul.16 To Nicetas of
Aquileia he says that if a husband is taken prisoner and supposed
dead his wife may remarry but that if the husband reappears and still

15
Ibid, II,12:vi.
16
Ep. 12; ibid, 15.
78 Chapter Six

desires his wife she is to return to him or face excommunication.17

To a bishop in Gaul, harassed by rival bishops, he delivers a
powerful diatribe for wanting to throw in the towel, and he also takes
the hapless man to task for a lengthy series of questions he addressed
to Leo which the pope felt would have been better answered in
person than in a letter.18
In his theological as opposed to his ecclesiastical utterances Leo
shared the Easterns’ fascination with Christology, albeit from a
Western and specifically soteriological point of view which makes
him easily accessible to Catholic and Protestant readers. His
fifty-fourth sermon well illustrates his soteriological preoccupations,
namely in his description of Christ’s self-sacrificial bargain for men,
“receiving ours and giving His: honour for insults, salvation for pain,
life for death.”19 Feltoe is probably right in saying that Christ was
the Alpha and Omega of all of Leo’s thoughts and exhortations.20
For Leo Christ was born of God and the Virgin Mary (consubstantialis
patri, consubstantialis matri).21 As the Son of His Father He reveals
God to man. As the son of His mother He suffers for man. No one
can therefore obtain salvation who does not believe in the
consubstantialis patri, consubstantialis matri formula, although Leo
does not disavow the basic unity of the Son. Christ had to be born
both of God and of Mary in order that through Him man could die
and rise again. His ascension is the pledge of the Christian’s future
glorification. This glorification is available to all men because of
Christ’s identification with man as the son of His mother, but it is
obtained only by Christians. Leo is far removed from the theoticism
of Cyril in that he does not envision temporal prefigurements of the
Christian’s glorification. The power that is given to the Christian is
the power to return to his maker, to recognize his Father, to become
free from the slavery of sin, to be made a child rather than an
outsider.

17
Ep. 159; ibid, 102-103.
18
Ep. 167; ibid, 109-110.
19
Ibid, 166.
20
Ibid, xiii.
21
Quasten, Patrology, 4:603.
 Eutychianism Triumphant 79

In yet another way Leo’s mind ran in a different direction than

Cyril’s: in the Tome consubstantialis matri loomed larger than
consubstantialis patri. The opportunity to write Patriarch Flavian
this Christological pronouncement was a godsend for Leo since he
eagerly began answering his letters the day they were received.
Subsequently he would rank the Tome the most important event in
world history since the Incarnation. To the irrepressible McGuckin it
embodies Augustine’s less than focused Christology, a Christology
which lies at the heart of all Western Christianity. For the Tome Leo
used the Apostles’ Creed, his own Tractatus, and the writings of
Gaudentius of Brescia and Augustine.22 Prosper of Aquitaine helped
in the compiling of the florilegium of Greek and Latin fathers which
accompanied it and may have had a hand in the actual wording of the
document, but this does not downplay Leo’s strengths as a
theologian or stylist.
The involvement of Prosper should not be overstated for several
reasons. The Tome quotes seven of Leo’s own anti-Manichaean
sermons. Despite his opposition to Pelagianism, Leo’s two main
theological enemies throughout his career were the Manichaeans on
the one hand and the Monophysites and the Eutychian
proto-Monophysites on the other. His opposition to the Priscillianist
sect was really an extension of his opposition to the Manichaeans.
Despite their essential orthodoxy the Priscillianists were fascinated
with the same Gnostic Gospels and Acts which informed the
Manichaeans, and certain similarities between Priscillianism and
Chinese Manichaenism have been discovered.23
Cassian, in his monumental but slipshod work against Nestorius,
had described Christological heresy as stemming from either
Manichaeanism or Ebionitism, by which he meant its emphasis on
Christ’s deity or humanity. Leo’s chief enemies, the Manichaeans
and the Monophysites, each had a tendency to overstress Christ’s
deity, although in the case of the Manichaeans the tendency was
Docetic in nature. It might almost be said that Leo had made one of
the slogans of his papacy the words of the apostle John, which he
disastrously applied to Eutyches, “Every spirit that confesseth not

22
Drobner, The Fathers of the Church, 483-484.
23
Chadwick, The Church in Ancient Society, 634.
80 Chapter Six

that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is . . . the spirit of antichrist.”24

At the time of Leo the Vandals had caused the Manichaeans to
flee North Africa, where Augustine had once been a Hearer, to Italy.
The religion itself meant little to the Italians other than an emphasis
on Docetism and a corresponding denial of the Resurrection and the
efficacy of baptism. On the first score there was a spurious link with
Eutychian proto-Monophysitism; but the Eutychians clearly did not
deny the Resurrection. As for the Manichaean contempt of baptism,
also not shared by the Eutychians, one has only to remember the
young Mani’s dream of the drowning of one of his Elchaisaite
teachers.
Leo’s hostility to overemphasizing Christ’s deity was very much
at home in Western Christology, but the pope had a more subjective
motive in a story he had heard about the Manichaeans which
involved a young girl and a “stripling,” the scandalous act being
presided over by a Manichaean bishop. Leo rises to, for him,
uncharacteristically vehement language in his denunciation of
Manichaeanism. In the Manichaeans, he writes, Satan has found “the
most spacious court in which to strut and boast himself. . . . All that is
idolatrous in the heathen, all that is blind in carnal Jews, all that is
unlawful in the secrets of the magic art, all finally that is profane and
blasphemous in all the heresies is gathered together with all manner
of filth in these men as if in a cesspool.”25 In the same vein he urged
that knowledge of the Manichaeans be given to the authorities. (An
acceptance of the Eucharistic bread and a rejection of the chalice was
a good means of ascertaining who was or was not a Manichaean.)26
The immorality illustrated by the above story was rare among the
Manichaeans, except in their mythology, but it must be remembered
that the Manichaeans in the West were far removed from the lifeline
of Manichaeanism in Persia. Taking it as an accurate reflection of
Manichaeanism in general would be like holding out the Irish
monastics before the eighth century as normative Catholic monks. It
seems clear, at any rate, that the pope’s natural bent towards
emphasizing Christ’s humanity was given added impetus by disturbing

24
1 John 4:3; Price and Gaddis, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, 2:22.
25
Serm. 17; Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, II,12:124.
26
Chadwick, The Church in Ancient Society, 634.
 Eutychianism Triumphant 81

stories he heard about the Manichaeans, and this would explain some
of the harsh language he directed against Eutyches. Sometimes, in
his letters, Eutyches is merely ignorant; at other times he is willfully
perverse. But it is instructive that forgiveness is consistently offered
to the repentant archimandrite, a largely fictitious character.
In the Tome Leo concerns himself more with theology than
morality, although some ad hominem remarks are allowed to
penetrate the document. Eutyches is labeled a master of error since
he was never a disciple of the truth. As to the archimandrite’s
seemingly honorable appeal to Scripture at the standing synod, Leo
asks what learning can one get from the Old and New Testaments
who has never grasped the rudiments of the creed. In the
Christological area he states that each of Christ’s natures “performs
what is proper to it in communion with the other, the Word achieving
what is the Word’s while the body accomplishes what is the body’s;
the one shines with miracles while the other has succumbed to
outrages.”27 The Evangelists fluctuated between the two natures. As
threatened by Herod, Christ was a human baby; as worshiped by the
Magi, He was the master of the universe. Like Theodoret, he states
that the flesh of Christ is the veil of the Logos, and, not forgetting in
whose see he sat, he quotes Peter’s confession of Christ. In a section
that would have pleased the Antiochenes he urges Eutyches to
realize that it was the human rather than the divine nature that was
pierced by nails and hung on the cross, and that it was the human
body from which blood and water, representing the chalice and
baptism, flowed.28
One senses that for Leo the two natures operated more
harmoniously during Christ’s post-resurrection appearances to His
disciples than they did before. Paradoxically these appearances
verified Christ’s possession of both a divine and a human nature: He
bestowed the light of knowledge and revealed the secrets of
Scripture, but, simultaneously, He assured His disciples that He had
flesh and bones.29 Throughout the Tome Leo falls victim, as was
well-nigh inescapable for his time, to the Platonic disparagement of

27
Price and Gaddis, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, 2:19.
28
Ibid, 22.
29
Ibid, 21.
82 Chapter Six

matter. The glorified Christ “condescends” to go in and visit His

disciples behind closed doors and allows Himself to be handled “in a
somewhat punctilious and intrusive way by the touch of those
stricken by doubt.”30
Soon after the penning of the Tome the emperor convened a
second council at Ephesus which, like the previous one, met in the
Church of St. Mary. The council, chaired by Cyril’s successor
Dioscorus, proved to be a violent affair, so much so that Leo termed
it the Latrocinium, or Robber Synod, an obvious reference to
Christ’s designation of the Jerusalem Temple as a den of thieves.
Theodoret, whose eloquence Dioscorus feared, was debarred from
attending, as were Eusebius of Dorylaeum and Ibas of Edessa. An
accurate reading of the council’s temperature can be gathered from
the fact that when the stenographers of Stephen of Ephesus were
found taking notes their tablets were snatched from them with such
violence that their fingers were almost broken.
Dioscorus began the council with an awful warning to Flavian
and his supporters: “If one man sin against another, the judge shall
judge him: but if a man sin against the Lord, who shall entreat for
him?”31 Pope Leo had sent three legates to the synod—Julius of
Puteoli, Renatus, and Hilary—as well as the notary Dulcitius. To
their distress neither the pope’s letter to the synod nor the Tome was
read, and they themselves were deemed tainted by their friendly
relations with Flavian. During a reading from the minutes of the
synod which had condemned Eutyches, the chairman asked,
rhetorically, “Why do we blame Nestorius alone? There are many
Nestorii (Polloi Nestorioi eisin).”32 Subsequently there was a call
from the proto-Monophysite bishops for Eusebius of Dorylaeum to
be cut in two as he had cut Christ in two, a clear allusion to his
perceived Nestorian sympathies, though it should be noted that his
enemies were not certain of the exact fate they wished for him:
“Destroy and burn Eusebius. Let him be burned alive. Let him be cut

30
Ibid.
31
1 Samuel 2:25; Price and Gaddis, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon,
1:155.
32
Ibid, 191.
 Eutychianism Triumphant 83

in two. As he has divided, let him be divided.”33

Dioscorus ordered that those bishops incapable of raising their
voices against the doctrine of two natures after the union should
stretch forth their hands in imprecation. 34 Throughout the tense
proceedings Flavian refused to withdraw his condemnation of
Eutyches, and Dioscorus sought recourse in his ultimate weapon: the
proto-Monophysite mantra of Nicaea plus nothing, that is the Nicene
Creed without any further Christological explanations. He reminded
the assembly that it was forbidden, by the seventh canon of the
Council of Ephesus, to teach another creed (heteran pistin) than that
of Nicaea and that Flavian and Eusebius were impinging upon this
precept. Seeing the trap sprung Flavian appealed to the pope through
the legate Hilary, and Hilary, forgetting himself in the Greek-speaking
assembly, cried out, “Contradicitur!” (“An objection is lodged”). 35
Upon appeals by the bishops to the chairman himself, Dioscorus
asked, with what one is tempted to think was a coded phrase, “Where
are the officers?” and soldiers with drawn swords, together with
three hundred Eutychian monks, entered the church. The monks
forced the bishops to sign blank pages which would later be filled in
by whatever Dioscorus decreed. Flavian, protected by an armed
guard, wrote an appeal to the pope for a new synod and entrusted it to
Hilary. He appears to have been physically assaulted at the council
by the monk Barsumas and Dioscorus’ deacons Peter Mongos and
Harpocration.36 He was sentenced to exile, but he had been treated
so harshly that he died after four days of the enforced march.
Two weeks after its turbulent first session the Robber Synod
reconvened. The legate and future pope Hilary was threatened with
terrors by Dioscorus if he did not yield to his authority, but he
managed to flee to a shrine dedicated to John the Evangelist, a mile
from St. Mary’s, and make his way to Rome, the only of the papal
legates to have done so.37 At this session Dioscorus passed judgment
against Flavian, Eusebius, Ibas, Theodoret, Domnus, and Irenaeus of

33
Ibid, 219.
34
Ibid.
35
Ibid, 344.
36
Sellers, The Council of Chalcedon, 82.
37
Chadwick, The Church in Ancient Society, 563.
84 Chapter Six

Tyre. Ibas was declared more immodest than a demon and was
incarcerated in the first of what he would later claim to be twenty
prisons. Theodoret was condemned as a blasphemer who had spent
his life damning souls and one who had been trained from childhood
to old age in Nestorianism, a strange allegation since he was not
much younger than Nestorius.
Domnus’ willingness to accept the depositions of his colleagues
did nothing to help his own case. In an action that tells us much about
proto-Monophysite spite at this time, he was criticized for saying
that when Stephen prayed for his enemies he was made like Jesus
Christ, a statement more Cyrillian than Nestorian. When Domnus’
attacks against Dioscorus were read the assembled bishops cried,
“He who calumniates you is a calumniator of Cyril and a blasphemer
of God.” 38 Ultimately Domnus was condemned for rejecting the
Twelve Anathemas, and the council ended with the acceptance of the
Anathemas. It was followed by the election of Dioscorus’
apocrisiary Anatolius to the patriarchate of Constantinople. The
permanent victory of the proto-Monophysites, and the corresponding
defeat of the Antiochenes and the Nestorians, seemed assured.

38
Sellers, The Council of Chalcedon, 86.
 CHAPTER SEVEN

CHALCEDON: NESTORIANISM ALMOST

REHABILITATED

Pope Leo was presiding over a minor council in Rome when news
of the Robber Synod reached him, and he immediately sent out a
flurry of letters: to Flavian, who never read his; to the archimandrites
of Constantinople; to Julian of Cos; to Anastasius of Thessalonica;
and to members of the royal family. To the emperor’s sister he
blamed the whole debacle on the frenzy of one man, namely
Dioscorus. 1 He approached Galla Placidia, the mother of the
Western emperor, after a church service and urged her to write her
imperial nephew.2 He addressed a cogent letter to the clergy and
people of Constantinople which anticipated the compromise of
Chalcedon: the Godhead did not suffer in Christ, but neither did
Christ lessen the divine by the human.3
Theodoret of Cyrrhus wrote Leo a sympathetic letter, and one
cannot even mildly doubt the sincerity of its approval of the Tome.
Theodoret, gentle in deed but hyperbolic in word, claimed that the
Robber Synod had been a massacre and that he himself had been
murdered by Dioscorus in absentia. The patriarch Anatolius also
wrote Leo, announcing his new position but without asking the
pope’s customary consent. Leo demanded that the emperor, in letters
and through papal ambassadors, ensure that Anatolius make some
proof of his orthodoxy in words similar to the Tome. Theodosius
remained obstinate but seems to have regretted at least some of the
events of the Robber Synod, perhaps because of Leo’s letters, and
exiled the eunuch Chrysaphius who had engineered it.
1
Ep. 45; Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, II,12:54-55.
2
Ep. 56; ibid, 58.
3
Ep. 59; ibid, 59-60.
86 Chapter Seven

At the age of forty-nine Theodosius fell from his horse while

hunting and died after two days of suffering. Some have felt that his
death was providential; it was certainly well timed for the
Antiochenes. Not having a son the emperor suggested that Marcian
succeed him since the most logical choice, the general Aspar, was an
Arian. Marcian was a new Constantine, a soldier who was not
ignorant of theology and who married Theodosius’ sister Pulcheria,
in name only, in order to share the emperorship with her. He ceased
Byzantine payoffs to the Huns with the comment that he had iron for
Attila but not gold, and his integrity can be gauged by the fact that it
became a tradition after his death for the crowds to shout at the
installation of a new emperor, “Reign like Marcian.” Pulcheria’s role
in the emperorship was more pronounced at the beginning than later.
We probably have her to thank for the order for Chrysaphius’ recall
from exile and execution; she hated the eunuch because he had been
her rival for her brother’s ear and because she had been forced into a
nunnery when his star was in the ascendant.
Marcian, as strongly dyophysitic as the empress, was insistent
that there be a new council to overturn the Robber Synod. Pope Leo,
who had pestered Theodosius with requests for a council that would
overrule both the Robber Synod and, perplexingly, the synod that
had condemned Eutyches, no longer believed a council was
necessary. It is not hard to determine why. Flavian’s body had been
brought from Lydia where he died and was interred with all
solemnity at the Church of the Apostles, and Patriarch Anatolius,
along with the other Eastern bishops, had signed the Tome.
Nonetheless Leo bowed to Marcian’s wishes.
The emperor’s initial choice for the ecumenical council was
Nicaea. There five hundred bishops gathered in September 451, and
there Dioscorus inserted the last nail in his coffin by excommunicating
Leo. The following month the emperor gave orders that the bishops
move to Chalcedon since trouble with the Huns required him to be
near Constantinople which was only across the Bosphorus.
The Council of Chalcedon was held at the idyllic Church of St.
Euphemia. As at the Church of St. Mary the Gospels were enthroned
in the center, but the secular authorities, having learned much from
the previous synods, officiated. There was a row on either side of the
officials: to their left, in the place of honor, were the supporters of
 Chalcedon: Nestorianism Almost Rehabilitated 87

Leo, and to their right were Dioscorus and his supporters. Leo’s
representatives tried to have Dioscorus ejected but only got him
placed in the center with his accusers Eusebius and Theodoret.4 As
the first session of the council progressed most of Dioscorus’
supporters walked over from what had been his row to Leo’s row.
During this session the acts of the Robber Synod were read, a task
which took so long that the lamps were lit towards nightfall.5
At the second session Leo’s Tome was received, but it was
proven too dyophysitic for the Illyrian and Palestinian bishops. At
the third session the case of Dioscorus was taken up. The patriarch,
who had endangered his already precarious defense by
excommunicating Leo, refused to answer the three summonses sent
him. His excuses were that the soldiers would not let him come and
that those who were standing in judgment on him were bishops and
not senators. Then, between the first and second summonses, in what
was probably only a matter of minutes, he claimed to have fallen ill.
The bishops heard accusations that Dioscorus persecuted the
family of his predecessor Cyril, that he sold corn intended for the
hungry for his own profit, that he spent gold for monasteries on the
theater, that he hired female dancers, and that he kept his bath open
to prostitutes, among them the notorious Oreine (Mountain Girl)
who was the cause of his parishioners’ irony whenever he began his
sermons by saying, “EirƝnƝ pantessin,” “Peace to all.” The deacon
Ischyrion was so certain of the presence of Oreine in the patriarch’s
bath that he recommended the council to interrogate Dioscorus’ bath
keeper. 6 Two hundred sixty-five bishops or their representatives
unbegrudgingly signed the patriarch’s deposition. Echoing Cyril’s
words to Acacius of Beroea they wrote to Marcian that he had been
amputated as a diseased limb,7 and to Pulcheria that he had been cast
out as the Savior cast out the man in the filthy garment.8

4
Price and Gaddis, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, 1:130.
5
Ibid, 340.
6
Ibid, 2:57.
7
Ibid, 112.
8
Matthew 22:11-13; Price and Gaddis, The Acts of the Council of
Chalcedon, 2:115.
88 Chapter Seven

Dioscorus was wise enough not to hope for pardon and

courageous enough not to ask for it. He was exiled to Gangra on the
Black Sea where he wrote a formula that signaled the full
development of Monophysitism but which modified the Eutychian
position by affirming that Christ was of the same substance with His
mother. He died after three years in exile. The Coptic Monophysites,
who took him for a saint, held that he had been beaten up at
Chalcedon and that in exile he was given the gift of miracles. His
Letter to Secundinus should be excerpted as illustrating his essential
orthodoxy. The parallels between this and a section of Leo’s Tome
(and forty-sixth sermon) are unmistakable: “See him walking on the
sea as man and Creator of the heavenly hosts as God; see him
sleeping in the boat as man and walking on the seas as God; see him
hungry as man and bestowing nourishment as God; see him thirsty as
man and giving drink as God; see him stoned [or threatened with
stoning] by the Jews as man and worshipped by angels as God; see
him tempted as man and driving away the demons as God.”9
The Monophysite Macarius of Tkou preserves a story about
Dioscorus arguing at Chalcedon in which he anticipates Monophysitic
Chalcedonianism. He asked the bishops, “When our Saviour Jesus
Christ was invited to the marriage feast at Cana, was it in his quality
as God or in his quality as man?” On being told that it was in His
quality as man he asked, “When he changed the water into wine, did
he do that as God or as man?” On being told that it was as God
Dioscorus claimed that the Savior’s divinity was therefore never
separated from His humanity.10
At the fourth session of the council the emperor allowed
rabble-rousing Eutychian monks to confront the bishops so they
would see the need for a strong anti-Eutychian confession. The
monks, one of whom was a former bear-keeper, wanted to reinstate
Dioscorus and were unwilling to anathematize Eutyches. They
would end their careers agitating against the decisions of Chalcedon
and being shut up by the emperor in hostile Neo-Nestorian
monasteries. At the following session the reluctant bishops were
prevailed upon to draft a definition of the faith. The first version was

9
Sellers, The Council of Chalcedon, 32.
10
Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement, 141-142.
 Chalcedon: Nestorianism Almost Rehabilitated 89

insufficiently dyophysitic for the papal legates and the Antiochene

bishop John of Germanicia. When these dissenters were stigmatized
by some of the bishops as Nestorians, the secular officials asked the
powerful rhetorical question whether they were for Leo or
Dioscorus, and a revision of the definition was agreed upon.
The final version, produced at a private meeting of the patriarch
Anatolius, the papal legates, and eighteen Eastern bishops, pronounced
Christ as possessing two natures in one person and was signed by all
the delegates, although Amphilochius of Side and Eustathius of
Berytus did so only under pressure. Its most relevant section reads,
“This one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only begotten, is
acknowledged in two natures without confusion, change, division, or
separation (hena kai ton auton Christon huion kyrion monogenƝ, en
dyo physesin asynchytǀs atreptǀs adiairetǀs achǀristǀs gnǀrizomenon),
the difference of the natures (physeǀn) being in no way destroyed by
the union but rather the distinctive character of each nature being
preserved and coming together into one person and one hypostasis
(eis hen prosǀpon kai mian hypostasin syntrechousƝs), not separated
or divided into two persons (prosǀpa), but one and the same Son,
only begotten, God, Word, Lord, Jesus Christ, even as the prophets
from of old and Jesus Christ Himself taught us about Him and the
symbol of the fathers has handed down to us.”11 (Symbol was the
technical name for creed.)
The Definition was a patchwork of quotations from Theodoret,
Leo, Cyril, and Flavian.12 The fateful phrase “acknowledged in two
natures” and the alpha privatives (“without confusion, change,
division, or separation”) were from Basil of Seleucia. Despite the
anti-Nestorian bias of the word achoristǀs, the Definition was closer
to Nestorius than it was to Cyril. Physis was, in a way that went
against Alexandrian tradition, defined in a different manner from
hypostasis. Ek dyo physeǀn, though it had not been anathematized,
had lost out to en dyo physesin which had been labeled unacceptable
by Dioscorus at the first session.13 Most damning of all in the eyes of
the Cyrillian proto-Monophysites, the Definition did not clearly

11
Price and Gaddis, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, 2:204.
12
Drobner, The Fathers of the Church, 487.
13
Price and Gaddis, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, 1:194.
90 Chapter Seven

equate the person of Christ with the Logos.

The proto-Monophysites had a point. Scholarly attempts to stress
the Cyrillian nature of the council, as do McGuckin and Price, are
misguided. McGuckin alleges that Chalcedon was Cyrillian while
being unable to disguise either his love for Cyril or his preference of
the Second Council of Constantinople to Chalcedon. The acceptance
by the Chalcedonian bishops of Leo’s nearly Nestorian Tome, their
rejection of the Twelve Anathemas, and their overwhelming
indebtedness to the Antiochene Formulary of Reunion were enough
to tip the scales in favor of Christ’s humanity. Even Price perforce
acknowledges the Antiochene nature of the council when he
applauds Eustathius of Berytus, who had cast a work of Cyril’s at the
bishops’ feet, for warning them that they were foolhardy in insisting
on two natures after the union.14 The anathema pronounced at the
conclusion of the sixth session was telling: the delegates condemned
Nestorius, Eutyches, and Dioscorus, a triad two-thirds Alexandrian.15
Nor is there reason to doubt the sincerity of the Chalcedonian
bishops’ enthusiasm for the Tome. After a play on the Platonic
concept of the golden chain (to describe Leo’s reception of divine
knowledge), they wrote to the pope: “We exulted together,
delighting as at a royal banquet in the spiritual nourishment that
Christ provided in your letter for those feasting, and we seemed to
see the heavenly bridegroom sojourning with us.” 16 Nonetheless
they sensed the audacity of their acceptance of the Tome which
would incidentally give Chalcedon its blackest mark in the eyes of
the Monophysites. Leo would write to Dioscorus’ successor that
condemnation of Nestorius needed to be indulged in in order to
pacify the enemy. The Chalcedonian bishops themselves knew that it
was imperative for them to denounce Nestorius to whose “madness”
the Definition referred. This task fell to those bishops most suspected
of Nestorian sympathies: Sophronius of Constantia, John of
Germanicia, and Theodoret of Cyrrhus.
Theodoret’s appearance at the first session of the council had
caused dismay among the proto-Monophysites who stigmatized him

14
Ibid, 121.
15
Ibid, 2:241.
16
Ibid, 3:121.
 Chalcedon: Nestorianism Almost Rehabilitated 91

as the teacher of Nestorius.17 Before the fourth session he penned an

allocution to the emperor which was uncompromisingly dyophysitic
and brazenly quoted Chrysostom’s comparison of the two natures
joining in Christ to a man stretching out both of his hands to join two
people on either side of him, though he at least had the foresight to
place this quote last.18 Now, at the eighth session, he was forced to
condemn Nestorius. When asked by the assembled bishops to
disown his former friend he replied that his own views were
orthodox and well known. Again he was asked to anathematize
Nestorius and answered that if Nestorius was unorthodox he counted
him an alien. A third time he was asked and responded by
anathematizing Nestorius in conjunction with Eutyches. A fourth
time he was asked and attempted to vindicate himself, but since he
was interrupted with accusations of heresy he replied, “Anathema to
Nestorius and to whoever denies that the Holy Virgin Mary is the
parent of God and who divides the only begotten Son into two
Sons.”19
The Christological decisions of the Council of Chalcedon were
wholly pleasing to Pope Leo, but he was distressed by its
twenty-eighth canon, an interpretation of the third canon of the First
Council of Constantinople. The bishops informed the pope of the
twenty-eighth canon only at the end of their laudatory letter to him. It
gave a special prominence to the see of Constantinople over the other
Eastern sees, a prominence that Leo felt should have been reserved
for his own see. He claimed the canon was in direct contravention to
the canons of Nicaea, but in reality it was in contravention only to a
corrupt Latin version of the sixth canon of Nicaea as well as to the
canons of Sardica that were often appended to the Nicene canons. He
was also irked that the bishops were officially recognizing the
sixty-year-long tradition of granting the Constantinopolitan see
authority over the Asian, Pontic, Thracian, and (Eastern) barbarian
dioceses.
Leo threatened to excommunicate Anatolius, a bluff that neither
Anatolius nor the emperor took seriously. The arrogance of the papal

17
Ibid, 1:134.
18
Ibid, 3:120.
19
Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, II,3:11.
92 Chapter Seven

see was slowly preparing the way for the events of 1054. Yet it was
with great understanding of the dignity of his office that Leo wrote
with such restraint to Julian of Cos, saying merely that Anatolius did
not wish to be reformed. Though the patriarch eventually offered
some verbal concession that pleased Leo, the canon was not
withdrawn. It was the greatest failure of Leo’s pontificate, but he
could have reflected that the Chalcedonian bishops had shown him
more honor than a pope had ever before been accorded by an
ecumenical synod.
The bulk of the criticism of Chalcedon would come, of course,
not from Leo but from the Monophysites. The Monophysites were
indebted to Cyril’s attribution of one nature to Christ but were not so
radical as Eutyches in their absorption of Christ’s human nature into
His divine, and they differed from the Apollinarians in that they
viewed the two natures as interwoven but not intermixed. The
Council of Chalcedon led almost immediately to violent fighting
between them and the orthodox, as the Egyptian representatives at
the council feared. The orthodox called the Monophysites
Eutychians while the Monophysites labeled the orthodox Nestorians
and spoke of the Chalcedonian Christ as an idol with two faces.
The imperial court had exiled Dioscorus not for his theology but
for failing to answer the three summonses sent him by the Council of
Chalcedon. Patriarch Anatolius had expressed this, or something
very similar to it, at the council’s fifth session: “Dioscorus was
deposed . . . because he broke off communion with the lord
Archbishop Leo and was summoned a third time and did not
come.”20 The court’s refusal to criticize Dioscorus on grounds of
faith alienated hard-core Nestorians, a fact which worked to the
Neo-Nestorians’ advantage. Nonetheless this concession underestimated
the loyalty of the Egyptians who viewed Dioscorus’ successor, the
Neo-Nestorian Proterius, as a parricide. In 451 the Alexandrian mob,
inspired by some casualties inflicted on them, crowded imperial
soldiers and officers into the Church of Arcadius, formerly the
Serapeum, and burned it to the ground. Marcian sent two thousand
soldiers to Egypt who arrived in less than a week and who hardly

20
Price and Gaddis, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, 2:198.
 Chalcedon: Nestorianism Almost Rehabilitated 93

pacified the Alexandrians by molesting their wives and daughters.21

The Monophysite historian Pseudo-Zacharias is almost apocalyptic
in his description of the persecution ushered in by Proterius: “He
gave gifts into the hands of the Romans, and he armed them against
the people and he filled their hands with the blood of believers who
were slain, for they also strengthened themselves and made war. And
many died at the very altar and in the baptistry who had fled and
taken refuge there.”22 In fact both parties were to be blamed for the
violence. The Egyptians were well known for their lack of
self-control, as a letter of Theodoret reveals. One might also
remember Socrates of Constantinople’s comment that the
Alexandrians were more delighted with tumult than any other
people. Marcian eventually felt impelled to issue a letter to the
monks of Alexandria in which he wrote, “To persist in error, to strive
on its behalf, and to endeavour to pile evil upon evil is the mark of
someone wholly wicked and utterly insane.”23 When Marcian wrote
to the Alexandrians he, like Leo, disingenuously hinted that Cyril
and his predecessor Theophilus would have approved of Chalcedon.
He also sent the silentiary John to Alexandria to explain the rationale
behind Chalcedon. John was unable to reconcile the Alexandrians to
their new patriarch and agreed to deliver their complaints to the
emperor who was displeased with his handling of the situation.24
Opposition to Chalcedon was not restricted to Egypt. There were
riots against Neo-Nestorianism in Palestine, Cappadocia, and even
Constantinople, thanks largely to the malcontents Atticus and
Andrew whom the Constantinopolitan patriarch, brought up in the
school of Cyril and Dioscorus, was not rebuking. Palestine was a
particularly vexing problem. The pope sent an admonitory letter to
murderous Palestinian monks whom he termed, to Julian of Cos,
sons of darkness and soldiers of the Antichrist. The monks seem to
have been given a faulty translation of the Tome, and Leo laid great
stress on the fact that he had nothing in common with the
phantom-mongers (phantasmatici), a word which made the

21
Gregory, Vox Populi, 183-184.
22
Ibid, 185.
23
Price and Gaddis, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, 3:154.
24
Ibid, 155-156.
94 Chapter Seven

Monophysites out to be little better than Docetists.25 He also wrote

to the empress Eudocia, Theodosius II’s estranged wife and current
widow, who lived in Jerusalem and was now suspected of being
sympathetic to Monophysitism, possibly because her enemy
Pulcheria was anti-Monophysite.26
But Egypt remained the focal point of anti-Neo-Nestorian
feeling, and its monks were the most conspicuous rabble-rousers.
The Nestorian and Monophysite controversies, unlike the Arian
controversy, had excited the nerves of more than just the bishops.
The monasteries southwest of Alexandria along the Taenia Ridge
were a breeding ground of Monophysite extremists.27 The city itself
was divided along class and racial lines: the Greeks tended to be
Neo-Nestorian and wealthy, the Copts Monophysite and poor.28 It
almost makes sense that the former would accept a philosophically
more abstruse Christology than the Copts.
On the news of the emperor’s death in 457 the patriarch Proterius
was murdered in his church and his body was dragged through the
streets of Alexandria and burned. He was succeeded by the
Monophysite presbyter Timothy, called Ailouros or the Weasel from
his emaciated appearance. While the Alexandrians had thought of
Proterius as a parricide, Leo, in a vigorous series of letters, used the
same word for Timothy. Impelled by the pope, the government
exiled Timothy first to Gangra and then to Chersonesus where he
strove to distinguish his theology from both the orthodox and
Eutychian positions, emphasizing the Monophysitic tendencies of
Cyril and claiming that Christ’s true nature lay not in His humanity
but in His divinity.
Timothy’s successor was the Neo-Nestorian monk Timothy
Salofakiolos who put Dioscorus’ name in the diptychs in order to
appease his rabid Monophysite congregants. Fifteen years later,
during the emperorship of the pretender Basiliscus, Timothy
Ailouros was released from exile. Ecstatic Alexandrian seamen
lifted the patriarch on their shoulders, and he messianically rode to

25
Ep. 124; Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, II,12:93.
26
Ep. 123; ibid, 90-91.
27
Finneran, Alexandria, 112.
28
Ibid.
 Chalcedon: Nestorianism Almost Rehabilitated 95

the Great Church of Constantinople on a donkey. The biased

historian Theodore the Lector reports that Timothy fell from the
beast and hurt his foot, but he was regardless welcomed by
Basiliscus though he was forbidden to enter the church by the
patriarch Acacius, who had draped the altar and pulpit in black and
had enlisted a throng of Pachomian monks to bar the entrance to the
church. 29 Despite his Cyrillian sympathies Acacius opposed the
Monophysites because they rejected the Council of Chalcedon whose
twenty-eighth canon, as we have seen, gave the Constantinopolitan
patriarchate a supremacy nearly equal to that of Rome. Basiliscus,
encouraged by Timothy, issued an encyclical which anathematized
Chalcedon and Leo’s Tome and reaffirmed all the decisions of the
Robber Synod but for its vindication of Eutyches. Acacius promptly
sought the aid of Daniel the Stylite who was induced to come down
from his holy pillar on the Bosphorus in order to confront the
pretender. When he entered the imperial palace a Gothic guard who
mocked him as the new consul fell dead. The stylite, for his part,
asked Basiliscus why he was behaving like a new Diocletian, and
Basiliscus was prevailed upon to withdraw his encyclical.30
Timothy Ailouros was triumphantly received in Alexandria, the
crowds chanting, “Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the
Lord.” Timothy Salofakiolos retired to a Pachomian monastery, the
only kind to have been alienated by Dioscorus, and wove baskets
with a pension of one denarius a day;31 but his nemesis did not have
much longer to live. Timothy’s dead hand was placed on the head of
Peter Mongos, the Stammerer, who had possibly played a role in the
murder of the patriarch Flavian.32 There were now two patriarchs in
Alexandria: Peter Mongos and Timothy Salofakiolos who had
immediately returned from his monastery. The situation there
convinced the emperor Zeno to effect a compromise.
There had already been one such compromise in Palestine. The
Palestinian clergy was Neo-Nestorian but the monks Monophysite.
In 479 the Jerusalem patriarch issued an encyclical which received

29
Sellers, The Council of Chalcedon, 275.
30
Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement, 172.
31
Chadwick, The Church in Ancient Society, 595.
32
Ibid.
96 Chapter Seven

the first three councils but condemned all innovators, even at

Chalcedon, as teachers of false doctrine. Perrone has called this
compromise minimal Chalcedonianism. 33 In Alexandria Timothy
Salofakiolos was already proclaiming the holiness of only the first
three councils. When Timothy died his successor John Talaia
alienated the emperor who threw in his lot with Peter Mongos and
promulgated the Henotikon, an edict of unification which was
drafted by Acacius and which stated as its aim the cessation of the
innumerable murders that had been committed since Chalcedon. The
Henotikon condemned Eutychianism and Nestorianism, accepted
Cyril’s Twelve Anathemas, and set aside but did not anathematize
the Chalcedonian Definition. Peter Mongos accepted the Henotikon
and was disowned by the radical Monophysites who henceforth
called themselves Akephaloi or Headless. The Akephaloi refused the
Eucharist if it was administered by Neo-Nestorians, and their priests
carried the host in a pyx on their journeys. 34 Peter’s position in
Alexandria was untenable. His acceptance of the Henotikon allowed
him to speak to Acacius of the holiness of Chalcedon and to
denounce the council to his own bishops.35
The Henotikon was obtaining less peace than had been hoped.
During the reign of Zeno’s successor Anastasius there were three
religious parties existing side by side: the Neo-Nestorians, the
Monophysites, and the Henoticists. The age of the Henotikon
nonetheless witnessed the birth of Monophysitic Chalcedonianism,
if “Monophysitic” is here understood as meaning “like the
Monophysites.” Monophysitic Chalcedonianism was nothing more
or less than the attempt to interpret the Chalcedonian Definition
through Cyril rather than vice versa. It could be argued that it was the
Cyrillian face of Neo-Nestorianism which is not to deny that
Neo-Nestorianism, except in Rome and pre-Monophysite Syria, was
moderately Cyrillian. Prominent Monophysitic Chalcedonians were
Heracleon of Chalcedon, the patriarch Macedonius, and Nephalius
the Nubian who had at one time been a Monophysite extremist.

33
Moreschini and Norelli, Early Christian Greek and Latin Literature,
2:575.
34
Chadwick, The Church in Ancient Society, 596.
35
Ibid, 597.
 Chalcedon: Nestorianism Almost Rehabilitated 97

None of these men was of the caliber of Severus of Antioch, an

Akephaloic clergyman and the greatest theologian of his day. Frend
goes further and calls him one of the greatest figures of the religious
history of the Levant.36 There exist three biographies of Severus:
one in Ethiopic, one by John of Beit-Aphthonia, and one by
Zacharias of Mitylene, a student of the Neoplatonist Ammonius.
Severus was born in Sozopolis around 465. It may be going too far to
emphasize that Sozopolis had been a center of the Synousiasts who
believed that Christ’s body came from heaven, but it is significant
that Severus’ grandfather had been among the two hundred bishops
who condemned Nestorius at Ephesus. 37 Severus, along with his
older brother, went to Alexandria to learn Greek and Latin grammar
and subsequently studied law in Berytus. When pressured by
enthusiasts to become a monk he said that nothing could sway him
from a legal path, a statement that does not impress one as to his
aesthetic sensibilities. For the rest of his life Severus would face
allegations that he had not been zealous about Christianity in his
student days. He was even accused of having sacrificed to the gods in
Alexandria. We know that the buried temple of Isis in Alexandria
was still powerful at this time and that sacrifices were clandestinely
performed there. Severus came out better at Berytus where a treasure
hunt abetted by magic was foiled and he was on the side of the
students who condemned the attempt. Not long afterwards he
became a monk and eventually a presbyter. He made his way to the
capital where he began his literary career by writing against the
Eutychians and the Apollinarians, attempting, it seems, to blow
Neo-Nestorian misconceptions about the Monophysites out of the
water.
Severus did not disown Dioscorus though he censured him for
being contentious. He accepted the Robber Synod not because it
exonerated Eutyches but because it endorsed the Twelve Anathemas.
Against those who argued that Christ could be both God and man
only by possessing two natures or by undergoing an Apollinarian
admixture of natures, he argued for synthesis rather than mixture.
When Sergius the Grammarian asked how Christ could have two

36
Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement, 201.
37
Ibid, 202.
98 Chapter Seven

properties but not two natures Severus replied, like Cyril, that the
properties were to be distinguished tƝ theǀria, that is in detached
mental contemplation.38
If Severus was intellectual and shrewd, Philoxenus of Mabbug
was tactlessly vicious. He hated Chalcedon, Leo, and the theological
heritage of Syria, tainted as it was with Nestorianism. Together he
and Severus set about to destroy the Henoticist compromise. Severus
established himself as spiritual adviser to the emperor Anastasius
while Philoxenus actively campaigned against Flavian of Antioch
whom he accused of being a Nestorian. Flavian’s condemnation of
the Antiochene theologians Diodore, Theodore, Ibas, and Theodoret
did not assuage Philoxenus’ bloodthirstiness, even after Flavian
anathematized en dyo physesin. 39 Both Flavian and Philoxenus
appealed to the emperor who handed the matter over to Severus.
Severus drafted a formula which denounced en dyo physesin,
endorsed the Henotikon, and accepted the Chalcedonian Definition
only in its rejection of “the madness of Nestorius” and “the
perversity of Eutyches.” Flavian refused to sign the formula, and he
was supported by Elias of Jerusalem and the patriarch Macedonius.
At the instigation of Severus, Macedonius was promptly deposed,
but his successor was only slightly more favorable to the formula.
Even some of the Monophysites thought that Severus was going too
far. John of Alexandria, for one, was distressed that a presbyter was
taking control of his movement, but Severus would not be presbyter
for long. Shortly after Macedonius’ deposition Philoxenus withdrew
from communion with Flavian who was deposed and exiled to Petra.
Philoxenus’ energetic vindictiveness had given Severus the
patriarchate of Antioch, but the latter’s role as plotter should not be
minimized. His first sermon on his election was as theotic as
anything in Cyril and used the analogy of Jacob’s ladder to show
how the Christian could move upwards through Christ. 40 The
imperial governor of Antioch expressed the mood of the
Neo-Nestorians when he wrote that winter had descended upon the

38
Ibid, 212.
39
Ibid, 217.
40
Ibid, 214.
 Chalcedon: Nestorianism Almost Rehabilitated 99

empire.41 But Severus and Philoxenus had dug their own graves. In
eliminating Henoticist moderates like Macedonius and Flavian they
now had to face unappeasable Neo-Nestorians such as the
Palestinian monk Theodosius who came up with the motto, almost as
if to compete with the mia physis slogan, “the four councils even as
the four Gospels.” 42 Other Neo-Nestorians characterized them as
Manichaeans and Separatists. There was something to be said for the
latter allegation; certain scholars have viewed Monophysitic
aspirations as primarily political, a view that disregards the intensity
with which the simple Christians of that time held to their
Christological beliefs.
Severus also had to deal with radical Eutychians in eastern
Cappadocia and with Syrian bishops who commemorated Nestorius
as a martyr. He followed Timothy Ailouros in not rebaptizing or
reordaining Neo-Nestorians who converted to Monophysitism, but
this did not prevent him from occasionally resorting to violence. The
blackest mark on his career was his authorization of a massacre of
three hundred fifty Neo-Nestorian monks.43 Even theologically he
was more ruthless than Dioscorus II of Alexandria who did not insist
that acceptance of the Henotikon be coupled with the denunciation of
Chalcedon and Leo.44
Events in the capital swiftly doomed Severus. The Monophysite
patriarch Peter the Fuller had added to the Trisagion—“Holy God,
holy mighty, holy immortal”—the line “who has been crucified for
us.” The Monophysites employed the augmented Trisagion in a
street procession in Constantinople, and the orthodox replied by
singing the unpolluted Trisagion. When the two came to blows the
emperor sided with the Monophysites while the orthodox worked up
the Constantinopolitans to such a pitch that Anastasius found himself
faced with open rebellion and came to the circus without his diadem
to sue for the mercy of his populace. He made further concessions to
the orthodox, including the reinstatement of Macedonius and
Flavian, but it was the ascension of Justin I to the Byzantine throne

41
Ibid, 220.
42
Ibid, 230-231.
43
Ibid, 229.
44
Ibid, 229-230.
100 Chapter Seven

that forced Severus to flee to Alexandria and caused morality to part

company with the Neo-Nestorians and join their enemies.
 CHAPTER EIGHT

JUSTINIAN’S CONCESSIONS TO THE

MONOPHYSITES

Justin’s religious policy was wholly dominated by his unstable

nephew Justinian who would never, even in his final apostasy,
abandon Chalcedon. Justinian’s Neo-Nestorianism was influenced
by Scythian monks led by a certain Maxentius. These monks, in a
embassy to Rome, had brought with them Cyril’s letters, the Tome of
Proclus, and condemnations of Theodore, Nestorius, Eutyches,
Dioscorus, Timothy Ailouros, Peter Mongos, and Acacius. The
monks’ Theopaschite formula (“one of the Trinity suffered for us”)
was accepted by the Roman monk Dionysius Exiguus, himself of
Scythian extraction, but was rejected by Pope Hormisdas who found
it novel rather than heretical. Justinian effected peace with the
Roman church by agreeing to the pope’s insistence that the
Henotikon be annulled and Acacius’ name removed from the
diptychs. The uneasiness of the truce was reflected by the impression
Hormisdas’ emissaries made in Constantinople where they refused
to call Mary Theotokos and refrained from anathematizing
Nestorius.
Justinian succeeded his uncle in 527. He is perhaps best known
for his temporary cowardice during the Nika revolt and for the
devastating series of wars Belisarius fought in his name. According
to the Anecdota or Secret History of Procopius, a monk once fled
before he entered his palace because he saw the king of demons there
enthroned. Procopius also included the testimony of an acquaintance
of Justinian’s that he had observed, during one of Justinian’s
nocturnal wanderings in the palace, the emperor’s head disappear
and after awhile reassert itself. Procopius’ terrible portrait of the
emperor is vindicated by the church historian Evagrius. His days
102 Chapter Eight

were spent in administration, his nights in prayer, fasting, and

theological discussion with Byzantine clerics. He began, like
Nestorius, as a heresy hunter and ended as a heretic himself.
Justinian’s persecutions of the Montanists and the Samaritans
were disgracefully violent, but his attitude toward the Monophysites
was more ambiguous, in part because of the influence of his empress
Theodora. Theodora had once been a courtesan but had been rescued
by a Monophysite priest and now protected the Monophysites in the
Church of Sergius and Bacchus which had been built by her
husband.1 Justinian was present at a colloquy in 532 between five
Neo-Nestorian bishops and six Monophysite bishops. The
Monophysites were asked why they defended Dioscorus when he
had proclaimed Eutyches’ orthodoxy, and the Neo-Nestorians were
asked why they revered Theodoret of Cyrrhus and Ibas of Edessa
who had been critical of the Twelve Anathemas. The Monophysites
announced that they would view Neo-Nestorian ordinations as valid
if the Neo-Nestorians communicated with the followers of Severus.
Justinian announced that the Neo-Nestorians were willing to accept
the Twelve Anathemas and to censure Diodore, Theodore, and
Theodoret if the Monophysites did not anathematize the doctrine of
the two natures of Christ and if they also rejected the Henotikon as
the church of Rome demanded.
Three years later Anthimus of Trebizond, a Neo-Nestorian
representative at the debate, was ordained patriarch of Constantinople.
Theodora brought him into contact with Severus who convinced him
that he was a Monophysite or at least the most Monophysitic of
Chalcedonians. He accepted the Twelve Anathemas, the Henotikon,
and the Theopaschite formula, and he was willing to anathematize
Ibas, Theodore, Theodoret, and en dyo physesin. Anthimus
communicated with Severus on the strength of the Henotikon, but he
was exposed and forced to seek refuge with the empress. Severus
derided Monophysitic Chalcedonianism as “womanish fables and
absurdities,” but the gap that separated him from Neo-Nestorianism
was in some ways not far since by physis he meant the same thing as
the Neo-Nestorians meant by hypostasis.

1
Chadwick, The Church in Ancient Society, 613.
 Justinian’s Concessions to the Monophysites 103

In an imperial edict in 536 Severus was declared a magician and

his writings were compared to those of the anti-Christian Porphyry.
His followers in Syria were hunted down and burned at the stake, an
act that reveals the emperor’s theological propensity less than it does
his unappeasable bent towards cruelty. The Syrians responded by
permanently shutting themselves off from the Neo-Nestorians,
though it is unclear how clearly either side understood the finality of
this separation.
In the latter part of Justinian’s reign Jacob of Edessa embarked
upon a vigorous campaign of Monophysite ordinations in Syria and
Asia Minor. He went around disguised as a beggar, hence his
cognomen Baradaeus from the Syriac burd‘ana, “horse cloth.” 2
Thanks to him the Syrian Monophysites were designated Jacobites.
The Jacobites in their turn would call the Neo-Nestorians Melchites
or King’s Men while the Nestorians remained Nestorians.
McGuckin, a staunch Cyrillian and admirer of Monophysitism,
claims that the Monophysites, unlike the Nestorians, survived the
eventual onslaught of Islam. It is true that the Arabs preferred the
Monophysite Copts to the Melchites and gave them the important
Church of Boucalis, the site of St. Mark’s martyrdom and the church
of Arius before his apostasy; 3 but one should remember the
Nestorian renaissance in the Abbasid Empire and continuance up to
the present day. It is more accurate to remark, as Frend does, that
when the Monophysites and the Nestorians passed out of the
Neo-Nestorian orbit they alike lost an interactive and philosophically
vibrant Christianity.4
A decade after his edict against Severus, Justinian began to make
concessions to the Monophysites, pursuing, in effect, a
Monophysitic Chalcedonian policy. When he felt obligated to
condemn the doctrines of Origen he threw a sop to the Monophysites
by censuring the Three Chapters: the person and writings of
Theodore, the writings of Theodoret against Cyril and in defense of
Theodore and Nestorius, and the letter of Ibas of Edessa to Mari of
Hardascir. The condemnation of the Three Chapters was instigated

2
Ibid, 626.
3
Finneran, Alexandria, 104-105.
4
Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement, 354-359.
104 Chapter Eight

by Theodore Askidas, the emperor’s current religious adviser and a

former Origenist who hated Antiochene theology, a hatred made
more believable if one remembers the differences between
Alexandrian and Antiochene biblical interpretation.
The Constantinopolitan patriarch, like his predecessors, was a
Monophysite sympathizer, but Pope Vigilius saw Justinian’s
condemnation of the Three Chapters as an attack on the
Neo-Nestorian faith and refused to endorse it. In retaliation the
emperor had him brought to Constantinople. Vigilius, who had either
murdered or connived at the murder of his rival Silverius, had been
installed at the recommendation of Theodora and was therefore
understood to be pro-Monophysite. He acceded to the emperor’s
demands in his Iudicatum. The Iudicatum was less than forceful, but
it caused an uproar in the West: the African bishops, that is western
North African in distinction to Egyptian, withdrew from communion
with him. So did two of Vigilius’ own deacons: Sebastian and the
pope’s nephew Rusticus who circulated copies of the document to
discredit it. Vigilius publicly retracted the Iudicatum though he
swore to Justinian on the Gospels, and in the presence of Theodore
Askidas and the patrician Cethegus, that he would uphold it in
secret.5 Doubting Vigilius’ good faith the emperor kept him a virtual
prisoner in Constantinople.
The pope’s nephew wrote a treatise against the Monophysites
whom he called Acephali.6 He and his African sympathizers showed
that the Neo-Nestorians in the West understood Justinian’s
condemnation of the Three Chapters as a betrayal of Chalcedon.
They also did not take kindly to Justinian’s enlargement of the cult of
the Theotokos, another blatant concession to the Monophysites.
Facundus of Hermiane, who has been called the last great theologian
of the patristic age in the West, wrote against Justinian and, though
he lived in Byzacena, was forced to go into hiding, a small but telling
fact. 7 Of similar mettle was Verecundus of Junca who was
summoned by the emperor to Constantinople but appropriately fled

5
Chadwick, The Church in Ancient Society, 620.
6
Moreschini and Norelli, Early Christian Greek and Latin Literature,
2:497.
7
Ibid, 478.
 Justinian’s Concessions to the Monophysites 105

to Chalcedon.8
In 551 Justinian issued an edict which endorsed both the
Chalcedonian Definition and the Theopaschite formula. This he did
by employing the insights of the Neo-Nestorian scholastic Leontius
of Byzantium. Leontius was originally sympathetic to Nestorianism
but had fallen under the spell of Alexandrian theology and was leery
of the Adoptionist tendencies of the Antiochene school. Like
Theodore Askidas he was an Origenist monk. In 514 he was expelled
from the Palestinian monastery of the New Lavra by the hegumen
Agapetos, but he was readmitted by Agapetos’ successor Cyril of
Scythopolis. Later he led an armed but fortunately unsuccessful
attack against the anti-Origenist Great Lavra. 9 This was all a
dramatic turnaround from the days of Patriarch Theophilus when it
was the Origenists who were persecuted and forced to seek refuge in
Constantinople.
Leontius is no longer regarded as a Monophysitic Chalcedonian
after the writings of Leontius of Jerusalem have been distinguished
from his, but this view of his theology is difficult to accept. His most
monumental work was Against the Nestorians and the Eutychians
which was originally three separate treatises. The first showed that
Nestorius and Eutyches, though beginning from similar premises,
reached different conclusions. The second was formally directed
against the Eutychians but was in reality directed against the
Monophysites called Aphthartodocetists. The third condemned the
proto-Nestorianism of Theodore of Mopsuestia.
In Against the Nestorians and the Eutychians Leontius
maintained that the human nature of Christ, though real, was an
enhypostaton, that is it existed not on its own but in the divine
hypostasis. This had been intimated by Cyril of Alexandria for
whom the Logos united manhood to Himself, but it would not have
been countenanced by the Western church which was often more
solicitous of Christ’s full humanity than the Eastern church. In
addition to his Monophysitic Chalcedonianism Leontius owed much
to the theology of the Origenist Evagrius. Jurgens’ comment is apt if
harsh: “Leontius simply translates the heretical Christology of

8
Ibid, 479.
9
Ibid, 577.
106 Chapter Eight

Evagrius of Pontus into Chalcedonian terminology without

understanding Chalcedonian thought. Leontius can say with
Chalcedon that Jesus Christ has two natures in one hypostasis or
person; but for Leontius as also for Evagrius, this Christ is the
solitary Spirit or Mind (nous) of the intellectual world who did not
fall from grace, and so remains united to the Word of God. In the
Incarnation this Mind joins Himself to a body in such a way that two
natures, the Word and Man, are united in one person.”10
None of this stopped Justinian from employing Leontius’
enhypostatic language. The emperor’s edict also distinguished the
two natures of Christ only in thought and approved the Monophysite
slogan mia physis tou Theou Logou sesarkǀmenƝ, physis being
understood to have the same intent as prosǀpon. Pope Vigilius
criticized the edict and was forced to seek refuge at a church.
Imperial soldiers were sent to arrest him, but he clung firmly to the
altar from which the soldiers could not drag him by his legs, hair, or
beard.11 A mob which had become attracted to the scene rescued the
pope who was allowed to return to his lodging only to flee, four
months later, across city rooftops at night to the Bosphorus and
thence to St. Euphemia’s in Chalcedon.
Justinian was leaning more and more towards Monophysitism
and often visited the Monophysites in the Palace of Hormisdas in
order to gain their blessing. 12 In 553 he convened the Second
Council of Constantinople which condemned the Three Chapters,
exonerated the Twelve Anathemas, employed the Severian phrase
“union by synthesis,” and reinstated Monophysitism insofar as it
could be reconciled with the Chalcedonian Definition. Under the
emperor’s directive to uphold the Council of Chalcedon the bishops
paid lip service to Leo’s Tome which it had received. They issued
fifteen anathemas against Origen and, more to our point, fourteen
general anathemas that revealed the Monophysitic soul that lay
beneath the council’s Neo-Nestorian exterior.
The anathemas condemned (1) those who denied the Trinity, (2)
those who denied either the eternal or physical birth of Christ, (3)

10
Jurgens, The Faith of the Early Fathers, 3:303.
11
Norwich, A Short History of Byzantium, 80.
12
Chadwick, The Church in Ancient Society, 621.
 Justinian’s Concessions to the Monophysites 107

those who denied that the Logos worked miracles and suffered in the
flesh, (4) those who denied the “synthetic union” of the Logos with
the soul and body of Christ, (5) those who denied that the Logos was
hypostatically united to the flesh, (6) those who refused the Virgin
Mary the epithet Theotokos, (7) those who did not understand en dyo
physesin in a theoretical manner (tƝ theǀria monƝ), (8) those who
understood mia physis tou Theou Logou sesarkǀmenƝ in an
Apollinarian manner, (9) those who worshipped the Logos alongside
the man Christ, (10) those who denied that the man Christ was God,
(11) those who did not anathematize the heretics condemned by the
four preceding councils, and (12-14) those who defended the Three
Chapters. The anathematization of the Chapters demonstrates less
that the Eastern church had come round to Cyril’s view than that it
had allowed his position to be forced on it by the Monophysites.
During the first session of the council the emperor’s letter, falsely
ascribing a “Jewish creed” to Theodore, was read.13 In their formal
sentence against the Three Chapters the bishops spoke disparagingly
of “the defenders of Theodore and Nestorius,” by which they meant
the more traditional of the Neo-Nestorians who were not fully in line
with their own Monophysitic Chalcedonianism. 14 They seem to
have accepted Cyril’s verdict that Sodom had been more justified
than Theodore. They wrote, “When all the blasphemies contained in
his writings were made manifest, we marveled at the long-suffering
of God, that the tongue and mind which had framed such
blasphemies were not immediately consumed by the divine fire.”15
The illustrations given in the twelfth anathema of the alleged
blasphemies “vomited” by Theodore, even if textually suspect, were
cogent. He had compared the union of the divine and the human in
Christ to the less than complete union between a man and his wife.
He had said that when Christ breathed on His disciples and said,
“Receive the Holy Spirit,” He did not give them the Holy Spirit but
only breathed on them for a sign. (Theodore’s interpretation could be
maintained on exegetical grounds, but it was damaging for one
already viewed as minimizing Christ’s divinity.) Theodore also held

13
Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, II,14:303.
14
Ibid, 309-310.
15
Ibid, 307.
108 Chapter Eight

that when Thomas said, “My Lord and my God,” he was addressing
God the Father who had raised Christ up, and in commenting on the
Acts of the Apostles he unwisely compared Christ to Plato, Mani,
Epicurus, and Marcion who each had religions named after them.
Theodoret came out better than Theodore, but Ibas did so only by
default. Theodore Askidas had persuaded the bishops to condemn
Ibas’ letter to Mari of Hardascir by devising the fiction that it was not
the same letter as that approved at Chalcedon and by preparing a
paper which contrasted statements from his letter with the
Chalcedonian Definition. Ibas’ letter came under fire especially for
attacking Cyril as a heretic and an Apollinarian, for claiming that his
Anathemas were impious, and for declaring Nestorius’ deposition a
miscarriage of justice.
A week into the council Pope Vigilius issued his first Constitutum
which condemned only certain statements of Theodore and
Theodoret and affirmed that Ibas’ letter had been received at
Chalcedon. His second Constitutum, written after the close of the
council, was more conciliatory. The pope admitted that he had been
remiss in his charity towards the Eastern church and, clearly working
with a copy of the fourteen anathemas before him, rubber-stamped
its decisions. He died in Syracuse before he could make his probably
unpopular return to Rome. His clergymen were satisfied with the
Neo-Nestorianism of Chalcedon and saw no need to embrace the
Monophysitic Chalcedonianism of Justinian’s council.
The Monophysites proved more intransigent than the pope, and a
decade later the emperor made them the supreme sacrifice of his own
orthodoxy. In an imperial edict in 565 he sanctioned the doctrine of
the incorruptibility of Christ’s body even before His resurrection.
This edict, which he meant to enforce with persecution, was intended
as a concession to the radical Aphthartodocetist Monophysites of
Alexandria, followers of Severus’ enemy Julian of Halicarnassus
who coupled Christ’s incorruptibility with His exemption from
original sin. The bishop of Trier wrote the emperor a dramatic letter
which read in part, “Unless you exclaim with a loud voice, ‘I have
erred, I have sinned, anathema to Nestorius, anathema to Eutyches,’
you deliver your soul to the same flames in which they will eternally
 Justinian’s Concessions to the Monophysites 109

burn.”16 Eutychius, the Neo-Nestorian patriarch of Constantinople,

resisted Justinian and was deposed, but only the emperor’s death
prevented full-scale violence.

16
Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 2:841.
 CHAPTER NINE

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MONOTHELITISM

Justinian died during an age of unique theological chaos for

which the Monophysites more than the Neo-Nestorians were to
blame. There were twenty Monophysite sects, including the
Tritheists and the Halacephalites, the latter of whom thought that by
hanging head downwards for certain hours every day one could
become sinless. The patriarch Eutychius was restored upon
Justinian’s demise, but he now denied the resurrection of the body.1
Justinian’s nephew and successor Justin II, influenced by his
empress Sophia, a niece of Theodora’s, recalled the Monophysite
bishops exiled by his uncle and issued a second and third Henotikon
which aimed at abandoning Justinian’s Neo-Nestorian policies. The
latter document began, like the Chalcedonian Definition, by quoting
Christ’s words to His disciples: “Peace I leave with you, my peace I
give unto you.” As the Monophysites did not have the grace to accept
these compromises Justin turned on them with persecution. His
successors, Tiberius II and Maurice, respectively reflected the
contrasting attitudes of his reign. Despite persecution under Maurice
and Phocas the Monophysites held their own and were still a force to
be reckoned with in 633 when the emperor Heraclius, hoping to meet
the encroaching Arabs with a unified front, sought to win them with
a formula created by the Monenergistic patriarch Sergius. Similar to
Monophysitism, which claimed that Christ had only one nature,
Monenergism averred that Christ had one energeia or activity. As an
organized system Monenergism went back to Theodore of Pharan in
the sixth century, but Pope Vigilius and Dionysius the
Pseudo-Areopagite had each expressed monenergistic views.

1
Davis, The First Seven Ecumenical Councils, 249-251.
112 Chapter Nine

Sergius’ formula temporarily converted thousands of Monophysites

in Egypt, then under the sway of the brutal patriarch Cyrus, but
Sophronius of Jerusalem revealed Monenergism’s heretical workings
from a Neo-Nestorian standpoint. Sergius responded with the
Psephos which stated, in passing, that Christ had one thelƝma or will,
and Pope Honorius provided the biblical apology for Monothelitism.
Passages in the New Testament which suggested that Christ had a
different will from the Father, such as Matthew 26:39 and John 6:38,
were to be interpreted as Christ’s offering to men a humble example
on which to model their own wills. Monothelitism deemphasized
Christ’s humanity no less than Monenergism and clashed with the
Neo-Nestorian insistence that He had two natures, but Sergius and
the emperor felt that if even the Nestorians were monothelites, as
they sometimes were, the Monophysites could accept a faith that
proclaimed one will though not one nature. The Monophysites and
the Neo-Nestorians alike rejected Monothelitism, and in 638
Heraclius was forced to issue his Ekthesis which was set in the
narthex of the Church of Holy Wisdom and which commanded
silence on the question of energies but clearly promulgated
Monothelitism.
Maximus the Confessor was the driving force behind the
Dyothelite movement. He was initially chief secretary to the emperor
Heraclius, but while still a young man he renounced his secretariat
for the monastic life, entering the monastery of Chrysopolis across
the Bosphorus from Constantinople. He remained there for six years
before moving to the monastery of St. George at Cyzicus. When the
Persian threat became more pronounced he and his fellow monastics
traveled first to Cyprus, then to Crete, and lastly to North Africa
which was as strongly anti-Monothelite as it had once been
anti-Monophysite. In Carthage Maximus engaged in a public debate
with Pyrrhus, the exiled patriarch of Constantinople whom he
temporarily converted to Dyothelitism.
Maximus was no narrow Neo-Nestorian of the pre-Justinian
variety. In his theology one remarks an emphasis on the theotic
mysticism of Cyril and the Monophysites, but it is a mysticism that
places a greater emphasis on Christ’s possession of a full human
nature, including a will. Maximus leads into the Eastern Orthodox
type of mysticism, the mysticism of the Hesychasts who were not
 The Significance of Monothelitism 113

against the body. He accepted the doctrine of the enhypostaton and

owed much to the Alexandrian hermeneutical tradition, hence his
acknowledgment of the skandala or obstacles in Scripture and the
need to see Scripture’s deeper mysteries.2 This outlook went back to
Origen and before him Philo, both of whom had been embarrassed
by portions of the Old Testament. Maximus interpreted the “neither
male nor female” of Galatians 3:28 as neither anger nor concupiscence,
and equated the coat Elijah gave Elisha with the mortification of the
flesh that is the ground of all true morality.
In 649 Maximus urged Pope Martin I to convene the
anti-Monothelite Lateran Synod. The synod defied Constans II’s
Typos which commanded silence on the question of Christ’s wills
and anathematized Theodore of Pharan, Cyrus of Alexandria, and
the Constantinopolitan patriarchs Sergius, Pyrrhus, and Paul.
Constans was exempted from the anathematizations for political
reasons and told that his clerics had deceived him. Nonetheless the
emperor had Martin and Maximus imprisoned. The pope was treated
so cruelly that the floor of his cell was stained with blood.3 The
dying patriarch Paul persuaded Constans to commute Martin’s death
sentence, but Martin perished six months later in exile on the Black
Sea. Maximus was put on a trial which, as the patrician Epiphanius
realized, made extensive use of false testimony.4 He was exiled to
Thrace, but since he did not keep a prudent silence on the two wills
of Christ he was retried seven years later. Along with his disciple
Anastasius his tongue and right hand were cut off, and he died
shortly thereafter in the fortress of Schemarum. Constans himself
was murdered in his bath in Syracuse and was succeeded by his son
Constantine IV who convened, along with Pope Agatho, the Third
Council of Constantinople which condemned Monothelitism as an
Apollinarian heresy and reestablished Neo-Nestorianism in the form
of Dyothelitism.
The council excommunicated the clerics previously condemned
by Martin, adding to their roster Peter of Constantinople, Pope
Honorius, Macarius of Antioch, his disciple Stephen, Polychronius,

2
Maximus the Confessor, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ, 23.
3
Norwich, A Short History of Byzantium, 100.
4
Trial of Maximus 2; Maximus the Confessor, Selected Writings, 18-19.
114 Chapter Nine

and Apergius of Pergamum. Polychronius had further antagonized

the delegates against Monothelitism by his unsuccessful attempt to
raise a dead man. Macarius, who claimed he would rather be torn
piecemeal and cast into the sea than accept Dyothelitism, was
deposed, and the imperial edict against Monothelitism was posted in
the third atrium of the Church of Holy Wisdom. More unfortunate
than Macarius were the emperor’s own brothers whose supporters
had asked for them to share his throne by an appeal to the analogy of
the Trinity and who were deprived of their noses in the presence of
the assembled bishops, an act which far exceeded the irregularities of
the Robber Synod and showed the increasing depravity of the
Byzantine Empire.
Thirty years after the council the pretender Philippicus reinstituted
Monothelitism and restored the names of Sergius and Honorius to
the diptychs. He deposed the patriarch of Constantinople and
replaced him with his deacon John. A new council overturned the
decisions of the Dyothelite council and defrocked the Dyothelite
prelates, but Philippicus was apprehended, blinded, and removed,
and his successor, Anastasius II, reestablished Dyothelitism,
allowing John to remain patriarch after he had written an apology to
the Roman pontiff.5 With the reconfirmation of the Third Council of
Constantinople Monothelitism, and with it Monophysitism, had to
all appearances been routed by the Nestorianizing elements in the
empire.

5
Schaff, History of the Christian Church, 4:511.
 CHAPTER TEN

THE DOCETISM OF CONSTANTINE

COPRONYMUS

The Iconoclastic controversy forms an epilogue to the

Christological controversies that preceded it. It was instigated by the
emperor Leo III who believed that icons were a new form of idolatry.
Iconoclasm was essentially a religiously-motivated court movement
and did not enjoy wide support among the monks or the people.1 The
intensity of the Iconoclastic persecution of the image venerators, or
Iconodules, increased after the ascension of Constantine V,
Copronymus, to the Byzantine throne. In a work ascribed to
Constantine, Christ was described as one prosopon out of two
natures, almost as if to confute en dyo physesin and showing, at the
very least, the Monophysitic bent of his mind. The Monophysite
historian Michael the Syrian recognized the emperor as one of his
own, and others have gone further and proclaimed him an adherent
of the Docetic sect of the Paulicians.2
In 754 Constantine convened an ecumenical council in
Constantinople, called by the Iconodules the Pseudosyllogus or
Pseudo-synod. Jesus Christ, the council affirmed, was one person in
two natures, but attempts to depict His body emphasized His
humanity at the expense of His deity. The bishops stressed Christ’s
divinity to the point of Docetism and lashed out against the use of
“common dead matter” in artistic representations.3 They attempted
to cover their tracks by stating that icons also ran the dangers of
mingling Christ’s natures and of separating them. Constantine’s son
Leo IV continued his persecution of the Iconodules, although with
1
Gutmann, The Image and the Word, 53.
2
Douglas, The New International Dictionary of the Christian Church, 755.
3
Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, II,14:544.
116 Chapter Ten

less vigor. Leo’s widow Irene, acting as regent for her son
Constantine VI, turned the tables on the Iconoclasts. She first granted
toleration to both factions and then removed it from the Iconoclasts
who also lost control of the imperial guard. In 787 she convened the
Second Council of Nicaea which was attended by three hundred fifty
bishops presided over by the patriarch Tarasius. Gregory, the bishop
of Neocaesarea, read the epitome of the Council of 754, and the
deacon John read the Iconodule refutation.4
The new council interpreted the second commandment forbidding
representational art as being directed against idols. The covering of
the Ark of the Covenant was noted to have had representations of
angels, and Ezekiel’s prophetic temple was likewise filled with
carvings of cherubim. There was also the testimony of Gregory of
Nyssa that he had read the story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac
many times without weeping but wept when he saw the story
painted.5 Against this was the condemnation of the apocryphal Acts
of John. In the Acts the apostle heals the wife of the praetor
Lycomedes. The grateful man commissions a friend to paint a
colored portrait of the apostle from memory. Lycomedes puts
candles before the portrait and reverences it, but when John sees him
before the portrait he reprimands him for worshipping a pagan god.
A mirror is brought to John and he realizes the portrait is of himself,
but he nonetheless commands its destruction because it is the dead
picture of a dead man. Instead he commissions Lycomedes to paint a
picture of his soul and use for his colors faith, meekness, love, and
chastity.
The Nicene bishops denounced the Iconoclasts as wolves in
sheep’s clothing. They claimed that Iconoclasm was the worst of all
heresies since it subverted the incarnation of Christ, and they noted
that it ran the danger of falling into Docetism. By refusing to allow
pictures of Christ the Iconoclasts thought of matter as a garment
Christ put on for a brief time, while all the orthodox knew that Christ
still had a resurrection body.
Iconodulism triumphed at the Second Council of Nicaea and at a
subsequent synod convened by Theodora, the widow of the emperor

4
Ibid, 542.
5
Ibid, 539.
 The Docetism of Constantine Copronymus 117

Theophilus. In a treatise on the holy icons that predated Theodora,

Theodore of Studium argued that it was Christ’s hypostasis, not His
divine or human natures, that was intended in iconic representations.
He went further and insisted that Iconoclasm stemmed from either a
Docetic or a Monophysitic source. If the Iconoclast denied that
Christ had a human nature he was a Docetic, and if he said that
Christ’s human nature was absorbed by His divine he was a
Monophysite.6 But the Iconoclastic impulse was far from spent and
had already influenced the subsequent, more stylized way in which
icons were produced. J. F. Haldon, speaking of certain seventh-century
icons and coins writes, “It was . . . just this abstract and hieratic style,
even if tempered by many illusionist [that is, Hellenistic] elements,
which was adopted by the artists of the post-iconoclastic era for
devotional portraits.”7 Sometimes the Iconoclasts alleged that icons
mingled Christ’s two natures, but more often they said that by
portraying only the human side of Christ icons separated His natures
somewhat like the Nestorians had done and therefore made four
persons of the Trinity. The post-Nicene icons stressed Christ’s deity
and steered the Orthodox Church closer to Monophysitism than
Nestorianism, emphasizing His single person over His divine and
human natures and imbuing it with more divinity than humanity.
The new Monophysitism was not restricted to iconography. Even
the theology of John of Damascus, who had derided Constantine
Copronymus as New Muhammad, Christ-fighter, and Hater of the
Holy, placed more weight on Christ’s deity than His humanity, and
the theotic mysticism of Symeon the New Theologian would have
been impossible had it not focused so strongly on the divine aspect of
the Savior’s personality. Symeon did not minimize the humanity of
the Son, but it was the transfigured Christ on Mount Tabor and the
resurrected Christ who walked through walls that was foremost in his
mind. Justinian’s conciliatory council of 553 had also done its work.
Few Orthodox theologians now denied that Christ’s human nature
was an enhypostaton existing solely in His divine nature. Officially
the Neo-Nestorian line had triumphed, but practically it was the
Monophysitic tendency which won the day.

6
Theodore the Studite, On the Holy Icons, 11-12.
7
Haldon, Byzantium in the Seventh Century, 415-418.
118 Chapter Ten

Yet there is a sense in which neither side won and in which

Eastern Orthodoxy would deftly combine the disparate impulses of
Monophysitism and Neo-Nestorianism. In the writings of Gregory
Palamas, Nicephorus the Solitary, and the other Hesychasts, the
divinized, otherworldly mysticism of Symeon the New Theologian
and the material-conscious Neo-Nestorian mysticism of Maximus
the Confessor coalesced and came together. It would thus be more
proper to allege that Orthodoxy, from the First Council of Ephesus to
the consolidation of Hesychasm, passed from Monophysitism to
Monophysitic Chalcedonianism, than it would be to say that it
journeyed from Monophysitism to Nestorianism.
 CHRONOLOGY

Arius (260-336)
Constantine I (272-337)
Eustathius of Antioch (fl. 324-327)
Athanasius (296-373)
Apollinarius (310-390)
First Council of Nicaea (325)
Gregory of Nazianzus (329-389)
Diodore of Tarsus (fl. 372-390)
Theodore of Mopsuestia (350-428)
John Cassian (360-430)
Cyril of Alexandria (378-444)
Eutyches (378-454)
First Council of Constantinople (381)
Nestorius (381-453)
Theodoret of Cyrrhus (393-460)
Pope Leo I (fl. 440-461)
Theodosius II (401-450)
Dioscorus (fl. 444-454)
Timothy Ailouros (fl. 457-477)
Council of Ephesus (431)
Formulary of Reunion (433)
Robber Synod of Ephesus (449)
Council of Chalcedon (451)
Severus of Antioch (465-538)
Henotikon (482)
Justinian I (483-565)
Leontius of Byzantium (fl. 543)
Second Council of Constantinople (553)
Heraclius (575-641)
Maximus the Confessor (580-662)
Ekthesis (638)
120 Chronology

Typos (648)
John of Damascus (660-750)
Leo III (675-741)
Third Council of Constantinople (680-681)
Constantine V (718-775)
Iconoclastic Pseudosyllogus (754)
Second Council of Nicaea (787)
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aland, Barbara, et al, eds. The Greek New Testament. Stuttgart:

Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2001.
Barnes, Timothy D. Athanasius and Constantius: Theology and
Politics in the Constantinian Empire. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1993.
Brenton, Lancelot, tr. The Septuagint with Apocrypha: Greek and
English. Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, 2003.
Brown, Harold O. J. Heresies: The Image of Christ in the Mirror of
Heresy and Orthodoxy from the Apostles to the Present. Garden
City: Doubleday, 1984.
Budge, E. A. Wallis, ed. Coptic Texts in the Dialect of Upper Egypt.
5 vols. New York: AMS Press, 1977.
Campenhausen, Hans von. The Fathers of the Church. Peabody:
Hendrickson Publishers, 2000.
Chadwick, Henry. The Church in Ancient Society: From Galilee to
Gregory the Great. Oxford University Press, 2001.
Cross, F. L., and Livingstone, E. A., eds. The Oxford Dictionary of
the Christian Church. Oxford University Press, 2005.
Cyril of Alexandria. Letters. 2 vols. Translated by John I.
McEnerney. Washington: Catholic University of America Press,
1987.
Cyril of Alexandria. On the Unity of Christ. Translated by John
Anthony McGuckin. Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press,
1995.
Damascius. The Philosophical History. Translated by Polymnia
Athanassiadi. Athens: Apamea Cultural Association, 1999.
Davis, Leo Donald. The First Seven Ecumenical Councils: Their
History and Theology. Wilmington: Michael Glazier, 1990.
Douglas, J. D., ed. The New International Dictionary of the
Christian Church. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1978.
Drobner, Hubertus R. The Fathers of the Church: A Comprehensive
122 Bibliography

Introduction. Translated by Siegfried S. Schatzmann. Peabody:

Hendrickson Publishers, 2007.
Dzielska, Maria. Hypatia of Alexandria. Translated by F. Lyra.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995.
Edwards, Mark, ed. Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians. Ancient
Christian Commentary on Scripture; New Testament. Volume 8.
Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1999.
Elowsky, Joel C., ed. John 1-10. Ancient Christian Commentary on
Scripture; New Testament. Volume 4a. Downers Grove:
InterVarsity Press, 2006.
Elowsky, Joel C., ed. John 11-21. Ancient Christian Commentary on
Scripture; New Testament. Volume 4b. Downers Grove:
InterVarsity Press, 2007.
Elwell, Walter A., ed. Evangelical Dictionary of Theology. Grand
Rapids: Baker Book House, 2001.
Ferreiro, Alberto, ed. The Twelve Prophets. Ancient Christian
Commentary on Scripture; Old Testament. Volume 14. Downers
Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2003.
Finneran, Niall. Alexandria: A City and Myth. Stroud: Tempus,
2005.
Frend, W. H. C. The Rise of the Monophysite Movement: Chapters in
the History of the Church in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries.
Cambridge University Press, 1972.
Gibbon, Edward. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. 3 vols.
New York: Random House, 1932.
Grant, Michael. The Roman Emperors: A Biographical Guide to the
Rulers of Imperial Rome. New York: Scribner’s, 1985.
Gregory, Timothy E. Vox Populi: Popular Opinion and Violence in
the Religious Controversies of the Fifth Century AD. Columbus:
Ohio State University Press, 1979.
Gutmann, Joseph, ed. The Image and the Word: Confrontations in
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Missoula: Scholars Press,
1977.
Haldon, J. F. Byzantium in the Seventh Century: The Transformation
of a Culture. Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Hall, Christopher A. Learning Theology with the Church Fathers.
Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2002.
Hall, Christopher A. Reading Scripture with the Church Fathers.
 From Monophysitism to Nestorianism: AD 431-681 123

Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1998.

Hill, Jonathan. The History of Christian Thought. Downers Grove:
InterVarsity Press, 2003.
Irenaeus of Lyons. On the Apostolic Preaching. Translated by John
Behr. Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997.
Jacob of Serug. On the Mother of God. Translated by Mary
Hansbury. Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1998.
Jurgens, W. A., ed. The Faith of the Early Fathers. 3 vols.
Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1970-79.
Just, Arthur A., Jr., ed. Luke. Ancient Christian Commentary on
Scripture; New Testament. Volume 3. Downers Grove:
InterVarsity Press, 2003.
Kelly, J. N. D. Early Christian Creeds. London: Continuum, 2006.
Kelly, J. N. D. Early Christian Doctrines. Peabody: Hendrickson
Publishers, 2004.
Kopecek, Thomas A. A History of Neo-Arianism. 2 vols. Cambridge:
Philadelphia Patristic Foundation, 1979.
L’Huillier, Peter. The Church of the Ancient Councils: The
Disciplinary Work of the First Four Ecumenical Councils.
Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000.
Liddell, H. G., ed. An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon Founded
upon the Seventh Edition of Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English
Lexicon. Oxford University Press, 1889.
Maximus the Confessor. On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ.
Translated by Paul M. Blowers and Robert Louis Wilken.
Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003.
Maximus the Confessor. Selected Writings. Translated by George C.
Berthold. New York: Paulist Press, 1985.
Mayhall, C. Wayne. On Plotinus. Belmont: Wadsworth, 2004.
McGuckin, John Anthony. St. Cyril of Alexandria and the
Christological Controversy: Its History, Theology, and Texts.
Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004.
Moreschini, Claudio, and Norelli, Enrico. Early Christian Greek and
Latin Literature: A Literary History. 2 vols. Translated by
Matthew J. O’Connell. Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, 2005.
Neander, Johann August Wilhelm. The Life of St. Chrysostom.
Volume 1. Translated by J. C. Stapleton. London: Seeley and
Burnside, 1845.
124 Bibliography

Nicodemos of the Holy Mountain. A Handbook of Spiritual Counsel.

Translated by Peter A. Chamberas. New York: Paulist Press,
1989.
Norwich, John Julius. A Short History of Byzantium. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.
Plotinus. The Enneads. Translated by Stephen MacKenna. Abridged
by John Dillon. London: Penguin, 1991.
Price, Richard, and Gaddis, Michael, trs. The Acts of the Council of
Chalcedon. 3 vols. Liverpool University Press, 2005.
Proclus. On the Existence of Evils. Translated by Jan Opsomer and
Carlos Steel. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003.
Procopius. The Secret History. Translated by G. A. Williamson.
London: Penguin, 1966.
Quasten, Johannes. Patrology. 4 vols. Notre Dame: Ave Maria Press,
1986.
Roberts, Alexander, and Donaldson, James, eds. Ante-Nicene
Fathers. 10 vols. Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, 2004.
Robinson, James M., ed. The Nag Hammadi Library in English.
Translated by Members of the Coptic Gnostic Library Project of
the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity. New York: Harper
and Row, 1977.
Sabo, Theodore. From Monophysitism to Nestorianism: AD
431-681. M.Min. thesis, Newburgh, Theological Education
Center, 2008.
Schaff, Philip. History of the Christian Church. Volume 3. Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 1968.
Schaff, Philip. History of the Christian Church. Volume 4. Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 1968.
Schaff, Philip, ed. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers. 28 vols.
Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, 2004.
Sellers, R. V. The Council of Chalcedon: A Historical and Doctrinal
Survey. London: SPCK, 1961.
Simonetti, Manlio, ed. Matthew 1-13. Ancient Christian
Commentary on Scripture; New Testament. Volume 1a. Downers
Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2001.
Symeon the New Theologian. On the Mystical Life: The Ethical
Discourses. 3 vols. Translated by Alexander Golitzin.
Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995-97.
 From Monophysitism to Nestorianism: AD 431-681 125

Theodore the Studite. On the Holy Icons. Translated by Catharine P.

Roth. Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001.
Vivian, Tim, tr. Saint Macarius the Spiritbearer: Coptic Texts
Related to Saint Macarius the Great. Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s
Seminary Press, 2004.
Walsh, Michael. A New Dictionary of Saints: East and West.
Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2007.
Ward, Benedicta, tr. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The
Alphabetical Collection. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications,
1984.
Weber, Robert, and Gryson, Roger, eds. Biblia Sacra Iuxta
Vulgatam Versionem. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft,
2007.
Wilken, Robert Louis. The Spirit of Early Christian Thought:
Seeking the Face of God. New Haven: Yale University Press,
2003.
Young, Frances. From Nicaea to Chalcedon: A Guide to the
Literature and Its Background. London: SCM Press, 1983.
Young, Frances; Ayres, Lewis; and Louth, Andrew, eds. The
Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature. Cambridge
University Press, 2004.