Nestorius did not want to see Christian doctrine contaminated by alien practices, especially through popular devotions, the expressions of faith that often drew on pagan precedents. In his era, devotion to the Virgin Mary was becoming an ever-larger part of popular Christian practice, as Mary became almost a divine figure parallel to Christ. Already from the second century, apocryphal gospels were putting forth an exalted image of Mary, who was perpetually virgin and whose own life paralleled that of her son. By the fourth century, we find the idea that she had not suffered an ordinary death, but was instead assumed into heaven. Images of the Virgin and Child—portraits and statues—were now a commonplace of religious art, and these imitated ancient pagan figures of the goddess and her divine son, of Isis and Horus. The fourth-century bishop Epiphanius warned his readers to draw a careful distinction between the worship (latreia) due to God, and the veneration (proskunesis) rightly given to Mary. The fact he had to make the point suggests that at least some Christians were already crossing the line to Mary worship.10
Whatever its origins, Nestorius’s sermons infuriated his listeners, who saw him as a bold heresiarch. Making matters worse, his preaching took place around Christmas, the feast of the birth of Christ. It appeared that Nestorius was underplaying the status of Christ and of Mary and thus—in the popular mind—insulting their honor. Devaluing Christ was a particularly sensitive theme for the monks, who saw themselves as heavenly warriors on the front lines of spiritual combat against the forces of evil. Such a struggle demanded constant nourishment in the form of the Eucharist, the Body of Christ; and suddenly the doctrine of the Two Natures threatened to make that sacrament less holy, less divine, and more of a symbolic recollection of Christ. Two Nature theory was a form of unilateral spiritual disarmament.11
The more Nestorius’s enemies explored his ideas, the more alarming their implications. If, in fact, Christ had two natures, then both should be worshipped, both Jesus and Christ, so that the deity came to look more like the pagan assembly of gods on Mount Olympus. Or perhaps Nestorius was suggesting a cluster or consortium of divine personalities, recalling the Gnostic vision of the heavenly pleroma, the Fullness. The sixth-century historian Evagrius saw Nestorius as quite literally the agent of a diabolical conspiracy to subvert the church. The archbishop must also be a Judaizer, who presented Christ the man as a great prophet like Moses but one who fell short of true divine status. Nestorius was reviving the old heresy of the Ebionites, the Jewish-Christians.12
Nestorius was wandering into deep waters, and floundering. He won little support for giving Mary the compromise term of Christotokos, Christ-Bearer or Mother of Christ, because it suggested “Mother of a child who was born, and who would someday become Christ.” (And when did that happen, exactly?) And once you admitted the idea of birth or bearing, a whole new set of theological problems arose. The gospel of John taught that the Logos existed from the beginning of time, but Nestorius’s language suggested that Christ was somehow born again when he emerged from the womb. During one of Nestorius’s sermons, Bishop Eusebius interrupted him to protest that if Nestorius were right, then “the eternal Word had undergone a second generation.” Was Nestorius suggesting a dual creation?13
In fact, Nestorius’s own view fell far short of such radicalism. Later historians have been much kinder to the patriarch and have argued that his views were quite mainstream in terms of Antiochene belief and were not too far removed from the interpretation that would win the day at Chalcedon. However badly he expressed himself, Nestorius was, in fact, fighting a worthy battle in his attempt to preserve a human image in Christ, to keep Christ’s feet planted on the earth. In later centuries, too, Protestant writers found much to admire in Nestorius’s resistance to what they saw as a superstitious worship of Mary, and they praised the Nestorians as precursors of rationalism and scientific inquiry. The praise is as ill-placed as the earlier criticisms, but the embattled patriarch was asking some excellent questions.
He did not understand the minefield he was entering. The historian Socrates offered a defense for Nestorius that is all the more convincing, given the otherwise hostile source. Socrates thought Nestorius was stupid and reckless, but he also argues that the archbishop was innocent of the worst charges of heresy raised against him. He certainly was proposing nothing as radical as Paul of Samosata had done in suggesting that Godhood had suddenly descended on Jesus when he entered the Jordan river. In Socrates’s view, Nestorius was orthodox on key points of belief and his worst flaws arose from a lack of any real sense of the scriptural or patristic literature that he should have known. Far from denying the divinity of Christ, Nestorius’s major problem was a misunderstanding of the buzzword Theotokos, which he feared “as though it were some terrible phantom.”14
Enemies
Constantinople’s clergy united to defend the Mother of God. Bishop Proclus justified the word Theotokos in an extravagant sermon that would endure through the centuries as a classic text of Marian devotion. No praise was high enough for the Mother. Mary was “the untarnished vessel of virginity, the spiritual paradise of the second Adam, the workshop of the union of the natures, the market place of the contract of salvation, the bride-chamber where the Word took the flesh in marriage…handmaid and mother, maiden and heaven, only bridge to mankind.” Inextricably linked to such Marian doctrine was Proclus’s high view of the Incarnation: “We do not preach a deified man,” he protested. “We confess an incarnate God.” Such sentiments appealed mightily to a community still muttering against Anastasius. Adding to the force of the reaction was Proclus’s position as a former disciple of the beloved Chrysostom, still venerated in the city he had led as archbishop. He also had a close relationship with Pulcheria. A few years earlier, he had celebrated her devotion in panegyric verses that sound worryingly like hymns to the empress herself.15
Constantinople’s monks and lower clergy united against their patriarch. They denounced Nestorius as a heretic unworthy to be bishop, challenging him directly, and loudly, during church services. When a monk tried to prevent him entering the church during the liturgy, Nestorius had him handed over to the secular authorities to be beaten and publicly paraded; he then had the monk sent into exile.16
Nestorius responded with the tactics he had already used against heretics and rivals. One prestigious victim, Archimandrite Basil, recorded his punishment in a petition to the emperor: “Immediately he had us seized, and thence, beaten by the crowd of the officers, we were led to the prison, and there they stripped us naked as prisoners and subject to punishment, bound us to pillars, threw us down and kicked us.” This treatment seemed all the worse because clergy were used to immunity or mild treatment in the civil courts, but Nestorius knew no such restraints. “Oppressed, famished, we remained a long time under guard…. Loaded with irons we were led back to the prison, and afterwards were brought up in the Praetorium in the same way with chains. Since there was no accuser, we were again led back by the guard in the prison, and thus he again chastised us smiting us on the face.”
Given the turbulent reputation of the city’s monks and their popularity with the masses, this massive disaffection was a serious warning sign for the imperial court. Basil even told the emperor that Nestorius’s misdeeds arose directly from the patriarch’s powerful connections. Nestorius was “confident in his wrath, and in the might of some who have been corrupted, and (to speak fearlessly) in your Majesty.” That was as close as a Roman subject could safely get to accusing the emperor of allowing a functionary to get away with gross oppression.17
But Nestorius faced still more powerful enemies, among the imperial women. He had already annoyed Pulcheria by preventing her from taking communion alongside the emperor within the sanctuary of the church. Although this right strictly belonged to the emperor alone, Pulcheria had previously insisted on it by right of her vow of virginity and, presumably, her special holy status. Nestorius also attacked the woman-oriented devotional life she had constructed. He removed Pulcheria’s imag
e from its place of honor above the altar in the great church and tried to limit women’s participation in night services, seeing them as an excuse for immorality. He would also later charge that Pulcheria’s much-vaunted virginity was a sham.18
The Theotokos debacle was the last straw for Pulcheria, who viewed such a denigration of the Virgin Mary as a personal attack on herself. In his autobiography, Nestorius laid many of his problems at her feet. He had no need to name the person he was denouncing,
a contentious woman, a princess, a young maiden, a virgin, who fought against me because I was not willing to be persuaded by her demand that I should compare a woman corrupted of men to the Bride of Christ. This I have done because I had pity on her soul and that I might not be the chief celebrant of the sacrifice among those whom she had unrighteously chosen. Of her I have spoken only to mention her, for she was my friend; and therefore I keep silence about and hide everything else about her own little self, seeing that she was but a young maiden; and for that reason she fought against me.19
Out of Egypt
Nestorius’s sermons traveled far and fast. Cyril of Alexandria was soon writing that “There is no one from any city or country, who does not say that these things are in every one’s mouth, and, What new learning is being brought into the churches?” By the start of 429, they were being read and debated in the Egyptian monasteries. Alarmed by the spread of deviant thinking on such a critical subject, Cyril of Alexandria promptly wrote to the monastic communities, reaffirming his view of orthodoxy. He was sincerely shocked by Nestorius’s ideas as they apparently created two gods in one person and moved to a kind of polytheism. Or perhaps Nestorius was saying that Jesus was a mere prophet, who should yet be worshipped, just as the pagans of old had worshipped god-men. This was no less troubling an idea, and one equally far from anything Nestorius had suggested.20
Cyril also had his own agendas for being outraged, as he was involved in a bitter fight within his own church. The immediate circumstance involved a group of Egyptian bishops whom he had disciplined, and who sought help from the emperor. Cyril protested that these were men of obvious bad character—one had wronged the blind, he claimed; another had drawn a sword against his mother. Still, Nestorius refused to support Cyril’s plea to dismiss the case. The refusal aggravated Cyril and gave him a motive to create a new legal case that would divert attention from his own difficulties. That was exactly how the Egyptian assault on John Chrysostom had started thirty years before.21
Discrediting Nestorius worked for the long-term good of Alexandria over Constantinople. Legally, Cyril was in a weak situation, because emerging church law and custom limited the right of even the most senior bishops to operate outside their correct jurisdictions, and Alexandria had no power over Constantinople. Intervention could only be justified in situations of extreme emergency—if, say, a powerful bishop suddenly proclaimed some extreme heresy that threatened the survival of Christian orthodoxy. It was politically essential to make Nestorius’s errors as outrageous as possible. Alexandria might be far from the imperial court, but at least, Cyril would show, it did a far better job of maintaining orthodoxy. As a bonus, destroying Nestorius would also blow back on his mother church at Antioch, so that two rivals could be taken out with one coup. Cyril’s campaign against Nestorius was partly directed against better-known Antiochene thinkers, namely the disciples of Theodore of Mopsuestia.22
Whatever he thought at the time, Nestorius had plenty of leisure in later years to think over the crisis. Looking back, he complained that Cyril had created a strong party within Constantinople itself, and through a network of agents and legates—we would say lobbyists—he was undermining Nestorius within the church and the court. In fact, claimed Nestorius, Cyril’s motives were based on a personal quest for power. He blamed Cyril for the resistance to his efforts at compromise:
Now the clergy of Alexandria, who were in favor of his deeds, persuaded those of Constantinople as persons deceived that they should not accept the word “Mother of Christ,” and they were stirring up and making trouble, and going around in every place and making use of everything to help them; for his clergy were sending word to him.23
Nestorius believed that Cyril was only looking for an excuse to target him, because Constantinople had failed to supply the bribes that would have prevented the furor from arising. Cyril, in effect, was levying protection money to avoid the kind of crisis that had taken out John Chrysostom, and when the money was not forthcoming, the trouble began in earnest.
Cyril vs. Nestorius
The conflict escalated, as Nestorius read Cyril’s letter to the monks, with its frank attack on his own views. Nestorius complained, and Cyril replied, ostensibly as a brother and fellow-minister seeking to correct a mistake, but in confrontational terms. Nestorius replied in kind. He began one response, “I pass over the insults against us contained in your extraordinary letter!” Seemingly unable to bear the mention of Cyril’s name, Nestorius’s reports to his friends thereafter usually speak only of what “the Egyptian” has done. From mid-429, the two began a correspondence that would have vast implications for later Christian thought.24
Cyril expressed his views most thoroughly in his second letter, which acquired an authoritative status almost equal to that of the great councils themselves. He stated his doctrine of the hypostatic union and powerfully reasserted the idea of incarnation in such a way that justified the word Theotokos.
This expression, “the Word was made flesh,” can mean nothing else but that he partook of flesh and blood like us; he made our body his own, and came forth man from a woman, not casting off his existence as God, or his generation of God the Father, but even in taking to himself flesh, remaining what he was.
We should call Mary the Mother of God “not as if the nature of the Word or his divinity had its beginning from the holy Virgin, but because of her was born that holy body with a rational soul, to which the Word being personally [hypostatically] united is said to be born according to the flesh.”25
Nestorius replied frankly, in letters that Cyril’s partisans found “full of blasphemies” but which a modern audience is likely to read rather differently. His main goal was to deny that “the consubstantial godhead was capable of suffering, or that the whole being that was coeternal with the Father was recently born, or that it rose again.” But in addition to philosophical argument, he raised vital questions about how human beings knew about God. Where his views will strike a modern audience more congenially than Cyril’s is in his approach to authority, and specifically to interpreting Scripture.26
Nestorius based his doctrine firmly on biblical texts, and as a good Antiochene, he read his New Testament historically as a work rooted in time, not as an encyclopedia of mystical symbols. His basic point was that the New Testament “speaks of the birth and suffering not of the godhead but of the humanity of Christ, so that the holy virgin is more accurately termed mother of Christ than Mother of God.”27 Throughout the Gospels, passages clearly refer to Mary as the mother of Jesus, not of Christ. It would be anachronistic to find there such later theological terms as Mother of God, or of the Logos. As the Gospels wrote, “the mother of Jesus was there” she was “Mary, the mother of Jesus.”
He believed that Cyril’s talk of hypostatic union served to undermine the humanity of Christ. Actually reading the Bible reminds us constantly of the human side of Christ and his sufferings, however much others may spiritualize them. It was a story of:
the human fear and the betrayal,…the crucifixion, the fixing of the nails, the gall which was offered unto him, the other distresses, the surrender of his spirit to the Father, the bowing down of his head, the descent of his body from the cross, the embalming thereof, his burial, the resurrection on the third day, his appearance in his body, his speaking and his teaching that they should not suppose him to be an illusion of the body, but truly body which had also flesh.28
Docetists and other heretics believed that Christ’s body and human nature were illu
sions, and according to Nestorius, Cyril was reducing Christ’s humanity in the same way. It was ludicrous for Nestorius’s critics to accuse him of “making Christ out to be a mere man, I who at the very beginning of my consecration obtained a law against those who say that Christ is a mere man and against other heresies.”29
Cyril responded with New Testament quotes but heavily weighted toward the more mystical and otherworldly passages. He shows a strong preference for two books, namely John’s gospel, and the very Platonic and symbolic letter known as Hebrews. Naturally, he stressed two key Johannine verses: “He who has seen me has seen the Father,” and “I and my Father are one.” In other writings, though, Cyril’s use of Scripture puzzles modern readers. Like all early Christians, Cyril had no hesitation in drawing doctrine from the Old Testament passages that supposedly prophesied the coming of Christ. But, as an Alexandrian, he pushed these supposed connections and parallels to the breaking point. He was particularly fond of what is called anagogical interpretation, by which a seemingly routine material object becomes a symbol or pointer through which the text reveals a spiritual reality. In his Scholia on the Incarnation, written about this time, Cyril proves his doctrines by drawing on a bewildering range of Old Testament authorities including the Pentateuch and the Psalms. In the Pentateuch, we hear how God gave specific instructions about building the ark in the wilderness, made of wood but covered with pure gold, and this text—he thinks—helped explain the Incarnation. “God the Word was united to the holy Flesh…. For the gold that was spread upon the wood, remained what it was, and the wood was rich in the glory of the gold; yet it ceased not from being wood.” “Many proofs” showed that the ark was here a type (an image or prefiguring) of Christ.30
Cyril found rich evidence for Christ’s divinity in the book of Isaiah, which Christians mined so enthusiastically that it almost enjoyed the status of a fifth gospel. In one passage, Isaiah records how an angel took a live coal from the altar and put it to the prophet’s lips. Aha, says Cyril, “one may see in the coal, as in an image, the Word of God united to the human nature, yet not losing the being that He has, but rather transforming what He had taken, or united, unto His own glory and operation.” Fire seizes hold of wood although not changing its nature of wood—and that’s how you should think of Christ.31 As mysticism or devotion, this might be inspiring; as a basis for a claim that Cyril could find biblical roots for his Christology, it is wildly unconvincing.
Jesus Wars Page 15