These different influences shaped Antioch’s role in the debates that followed Nicea. The founder of the great scholarly tradition was Diodore, from St. Paul’s home city of Tarsus. Diodore attracted churchwide attention as a leading critic of Apollinarius, and in these debates he formulated his own Two Nature position.
Diodore’s most important successor was Theodore of Mopsuestia (350–428), who held controversial views on many topics. Like Diodore, he was a universalist, believing that all would ultimately be saved, so that damnation was not eternal.31 On the question of the natures, Theodore believed that human and divine were united in a single prosopon, a personality, but the union was like that of body and soul, or indeed of man and wife: although united, the two always remained recognizable. The presence of the Logos in Christ was like that of grace within the ordinary human being. While the Logos was an undoubted presence, it did not destroy the free will. The contact between the natures in Christ grew progressively as the man grew and matured. So willing was Theodore to stress the human component that he explicitly said that Christ must have been open to temptation as well as suffering. Long before Nestorius, he attacked the practice of calling Mary Theotokos, as that implied mingling and confusing the divine and human natures.32
Antioch’s Christians held firmly to the distinctive ideas pioneered by Diodore and Theodore, however comprehensively these notions were denounced at successive councils. Even when Nestorius’ name had become notorious, many Antiochenes were still reluctant to join in the required ritual condemnations. Well into the fifth century, Theodoret of Cyrrhus kept alive versions of Two Nature thought. Although he acknowledged a union of divinity and humanity, he still held that two natures existed after the Incarnation. Christ had one prosopon, but within that united personality, two natures remained.
Far from agreeing to disagree amiably, the two great churches of Antioch and Alexandria fought a generations-long war of attrition, seeking to destroy the evil ideologies of their opponents. When we realize that Nestorius was so closely associated with Antioch—that he had allegedly met Theodore shortly before taking up his bishopric at Constantinople—we appreciate just why every one of that school’s many enemies had him in their sights. Not only was Nestorius destroyed politically, his name poisoned for all future eras, but the enemies of the Antiochene school were still pursuing its thinkers long after their deaths. Although Diodore died in 390, a council formally declared his Christology heretical over a century later, in 499. As late as the 550s, a fifth Ecumenical Council met with the goal of condemning Theodore of Mopsuestia (who died in 428), together with his Antiochene allies. This was not so much a theological war as a multigenerational vendetta.33
Slogans and Stereotypes
The debates that raged over Christ’s nature involved highly technical distinctions. Surely ordinary believers, men and women in the street or the village, did not really appreciate the subtle differences between ousia and hypostasis or what such terminology implied for the shape of the church? Did the mobs baying for or against the Monophysite or Nestorian causes have the slightest idea of the theologies at stake? Some writers suggest they might have. In the 380s St. Gregory of Nyssa was appalled by the spread of theological discourse to every Constantinople shopkeeper:
Every part of the city is filled with such talk; the alleys, the crossroads, the squares, the avenues. It comes from those who sell clothes, moneychangers, grocers. If you ask a money-changer what the exchange rate is, he will reply with a dissertation on the Begotten and Unbegotten. If you enquire about the quality and the price of bread, the baker will reply: “The Father is greatest and the Son subject to him.” When you ask at the baths whether the water is ready, the manager will declare that ‘“the Son came forth from nothing.”34
Popular enthusiasm was just as obvious in the mid-fifth century, although the substance of debate would have moved on from the Trinity to Christology.
People knew the slogans, but did they really understand them? Actually, an excellent case can be made that such distinctions were beyond the reach not just of ordinary believers but of many church leaders. And understanding how they responded to debate offers some depressing lessons about the character of religious argument in other faith traditions and in other historical periods, including our own.
Historian Ramsay MacMullen rightly says that the theological texts of the time are often marked by “complicated thought, strange vocabulary, drawn out proofs, the multiplication of provisos and conditions.” To take an example almost at random, this passage is from the third letter of Cyril of Alexandria to Nestorius, a critical document in the controversy leading up to the First Council of Ephesus:
Besides what the Gospels say our Savior said of himself, we do not divide between two hypostases or persons. For neither is he, the one and only Christ, to be thought of as double, although of two (ek duo) and they diverse, yet he has joined them in an indivisible union, just as everyone knows a man is not double although made up of soul and body, but is one of both…. Therefore all the words which are read in the Gospels are to be applied to One Person, to One hypostasis of the Word Incarnate.
This is dense stuff in translation, and it accurately conveys the convoluted structure of the Greek. That is anything but an extreme example of its kind. Such texts became a verbal minefield for contemporaries, who had to be desperately careful not to confound words with very similar meanings. Cities fell apart in violent conflicts over a single letter: was Christ of the same being with the Father, or of like being, homoousios or homoiousios? Was he from two natures (ek duo), or in two (en duo)?35
Such language is seriously off-putting for most modern readers, including many educated Christians. And it uses so many technical terms that almost seem to the uninitiated like secret codes. Person? Subsistence? Nature? A critic could be forgiven for comparing the straightforward words of Jesus, with all the everyday analogies and images—sheep and harvests, the sparrows and the lilies of the field, the erring brother and the widow’s penny—to the arcane philosophical language used here. Jesus spoke of love; his church spoke in riddles. I may not be the only modern reader who hears the language of Chalcedon—two but not one—and finds his thoughts occasionally straying to the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. A monk offers instructions for the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, in a deliberate parody of the Athanasian Creed:
First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin, then shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shalt be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, nor either count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out.
Now, the fact that ancient christological ideas are complex does not mean that the authors were dealing in empty verbiage. Theologians at the time were trying to explore and express difficult and daring ideas as precisely as possible, avoiding possible ambiguity, and the results could be brilliantly concise and effective. But the writings were often inaccessible to lesser minds than Cyril’s, which meant most of his contemporaries.
Worse, words shifted their meanings quite rapidly over time. A modern reader might feel abashed at not understanding a term as hypostasis, which was so readily thrown around in the fifth-century debates; but a hundred years earlier, even that weighty word had nothing of the same significance that it did in Cyril’s time. In the religious struggles of the 320s, some informed scholars used the word ousia (being) interchangeably with hypostasis. By the 420s, such a confusion could at a minimum provoke fistfights between clergy and conceivably could attract an official persecution, at least in some parts of the world: the Latin West was much less sensitive to these nuances. St. Augustine himself claimed to see no real distinction between ousia and hypostasis.36
As theological debate continued, participants created and reinterpreted words for new purposes, to the utter confusion of the uninitiated. To use a modern parallel, Christian theological language was developing rather like cultural theory and postmodern literary crit
icism have in the last few decades, with the constant invention of puzzling new words like othering and in-betweenness, phallocratic and scopophilic. Bemused observers readily mock such PoMo-speak, especially when scholars invent or reshape words for their own idiosyncratic purposes; but that is close to what some of the greatest church fathers were doing in the christological debates.
Just as nonspecialists find such modern terms baffling, so many of those drawn into the religious wars of the fifth century had at best a shaky grip on the issues involved. That is worth stressing, as we might otherwise assume that Christians of this era operated at a stratospheric intellectual or philosophical level many leagues above what later generations might achieve. We need not be so pessimistic. Some of the fifth-century participants were authentically brilliant, and they boldly pursued the implications of their insights for church life and doctrine. Yet some of the best known champions on the various sides often found themselves out of their depth. Even friendly critics suggested that Nestorius himself had very little idea of the theological swamp he was entering when he first became engaged in christological controversy, and his later writings make it clear that he simply was not a “Nestorian” in the sense in which that term emerged. A far greater intellectual figure was Pope Leo the Great, whose Tome made him the primary shaper of Chalcedonian thought. Yet modern scholarship suggests that at the time of Chalcedon he was confused about what Nestorius had actually argued and that only some years afterward did he really grasp what the different sides were contending.37
If the bishops of Rome and Constantinople could go so wrong, what hope was there for ordinary clerics, and still less for humble believers? How could they judge the merits of the arguments put forward? Neither did such conflicts have any necessary ending in that all would ultimately agree that the church had arrived at a definitively correct answer. Theology is not and never has been a science in the sense that it forms testable hypotheses. Ancient audiences would have disagreed radically with that statement, as they believed that theological orientation had practical consequences for state and society. A state that practiced an incorrect form of Christianity would be punished in the form of invasion, plague, or famine. But if we do not accept that providential view, we really have no way of knowing which theological approach was closer to expressing and understanding the divine reality.
So if they did not understand the issues, how did people decide which side to support, which cause to see as God’s? Issues of identity and culture played a major role. Egyptians (for instance) followed the kind of religious approach that was familiar and customary in their church, which found a face in successive patriarchs of Alexandria. Rather than thinking through the implications of the theology, they followed personalities and names: they were of Cyril’s party, or Dioscuros’s. Theological ideas were commonly presented in packages epitomized by simple phrases or slogans, and arguments revolved around such buzzwords. We will not divide Christ! God the Word died! Mary is the Theotokos, the God-Bearer! Christ is God! That, probably, was the level at which the baker and the money changer carried on their debates.
In the most literal sense, too, participants also operated in highly theatrical ways. Although Christians despised and feared drama and theater, they lived in a society thoroughly accustomed to the styles and conventions of the theater, which shaped their behavior. Bishops appealed to crowds through dramatic oratory, and supporters applauded or booed according to their sympathies. Significantly, the two great religious factions, the Blues and the Greens, traced their origins to rival theatrical cliques as well as circus fans. Church debates became a matter of dueling slogans, phrases shouted at councils and synods, or recited antiphonally in a precursor of modern rap, in order to drown out opponents. The church’s battles continued through slogan, symbol, and stereotype rather than through any kind of convincing intellectual discourse.38
But if they did not fully understand the theology they believed, Christians knew passionately the kinds of religious thought that they loathed. They knew what they were against. Much of the debate at the time consisted of identifying sets of theological ideas and giving them the name of some unpopular leader, so that believers could unite against a despised and demonized ism. And once something was an ism, it presumably represented that person’s twisted and peculiar view of church teaching, rather than the pure serene of authentic Christianity. Whatever he actually preached, Nestorius became the central figure in Nestorianism, a theological trend that supposedly divided Christ’s natures. Once this stereotype was established, it could be used to taint any theological approach with which the speaker disagreed.
Theological debate became a game of guilt by association. Reading the denunciations of the time, we need to remember that each faction tended to caricature and exaggerate the positions of its enemies. After Chalcedon had issued its diplomatic and elaborately considered analysis of the divinity, some critics returned to their Palestinian homeland with the alarming news that the Nestorians had triumphed, so that now believers would be required to worship two Christs and two Sons. Furious listeners launched a bloody revolt against the triumph of the Two Nature heresy, Dyophysitism. On the other side of the contest, Christians knew that Apollinarius had taught the single nature in Christ, so that any later belief that erred too far in the direction of stressing the One Nature must be Apollinarian, however significant the distinctions with that older creed. The commonest reason to denounce doctrine X was that it could somehow be linked to doctrine Y.39
Understanding the war of isms also helps us trace the course of theological development through these centuries, as each great movement emerged as a reaction, and commonly an overreaction, to some earlier trend that had found itself dismissed as heresy. In the fourth century, the Arian movement preached a less than fully divine Christ, driving Apollinarius to stress Christ’s absolute unity with the Father. Reacting against that idea led Nestorius to teach a separation of the natures. And angry rejection of Nestorius encouraged the belief in the dominance of one divine nature of Christ, a belief that others denounced as the Monophysite heresy. In each case, advocates were reacting as much to the stereotype of the enemy movement prevailing at the time rather than to any rational analysis of its teachings.
It would be cheering to think that all these struggling contraries culminated in a harmonious and balanced synthesis that we know as orthodoxy, which Chalcedon declared to the world. But Chalcedon itself became for millions of Christians a nightmare stereotype in its own right, a symbol of the enforcement of false and anti-Christian teaching by an evil secular regime.
Appendix to Chapter Two: Some Early Interpretations of Christ
During the first centuries of Christianity, various thinkers tried to explain the role of Christ and the relationship between his human and divine natures. Some leaned toward a One Nature approach, emphasizing his divinity. Others stressed that his humanity existed alongside his divinity: this view can be categorized as a Two Nature approach. Some key movements and thinkers included:
Adoptionists A Two Nature approach that saw Christ as a man filled with the spirit of God, but that divinity descended on him only at a moment during or after his earthly lifetime. Human and divine natures existed separately.
Apollinarius A fourth-century bishop, Apollinarius stressed Christ’s divinity so absolutely that he denied the presence of any rational human soul in Christ. In his view, Christ had a single nature, and it was divine. The First Council of Constantinople (381) condemned his views as heretical.
Arians Arians denied the full equality of God the Son with the Father and thus denied the Trinity.
Basilides Gnostic Christian thinker of the second century, active in Egypt. He taught a complex mythology, in which Christ came to liberate the forces of light from the material realm of ignorance and evil. Christ was the Mind (nous) of God, who descended upon Jesus at his baptism.
Cerinthus Gnostic Christian thinker (c.100) who argued that the spiritual being of Christ descended on the man Jes
us during his baptism in the Jordan; this was an early (and radical) form of Two Nature Christology.
Chalcedonian The position that became the orthodoxy of the mainstream church after the Council of Chalcedon (451). This approach holds that Two Natures are united in the one person of Christ, without confusion, change, division, or separation. Christ exists in two Natures.
Docetists Early belief that Christ represented only an illusory shape taken by a purely divine being: he had no real human nature. Christ’s sufferings on the cross were illusory.
Ebionites Early Jewish-Christian movement following Christ as a human being, the son of Joseph and Mary; although he was the Messiah, he had no divine nature.
Eutyches A Monophysite thinker active in the 440s, Eutyches saw Christ as a fusion of divine and human elements, but critics believed he left little room for Christ’s human identity.
Gnostics Gnostics saw Christ as a divine being come to redeem believers from the evil and contaminated material world. Christ’s true identity or nature was always divine, and while on earth, he occupied a supernatural body quite distinct from humanity.
Manicheans Originating in the third century, this movement became an independent world religion. Its founder, Mani, taught an absolute and eternal war between forces of light and darkness. Christ was a liberator come to redeem the elements of light trapped in the material world. He was thus a purely supernatural or divine being and any human or material elements must be illusory. This view overlaps closely with Gnostic and Docetic ideas.
Marcion (c.85–160). Important early Christian thinker who argued for a radical distinction between the flawed God of the Old Testament and the true God of the New. Jesus Christ was the Son and representative of this greater God, who sent him to save the world from the old spiritual regime. Marcion was condemned for heresy.
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