If anyone does not confess that the Word from God the Father has been united by hypostasis with the flesh and is one Christ with his own flesh, and is therefore God and man together, let him be anathema.
If anyone divides in the one Christ the hypostases after the union, joining them only by a conjunction of dignity or authority or power, and not rather by a coming together in a union by nature, let him be anathema.
If anyone distributes between the two persons or hypostases the expressions used either in the Gospels or in the apostolic writings, whether they are used by the holy writers of Christ or by him about himself, and ascribes some to him as to a man, thought of separately from the Word from God, and others, as befitting God, to him as to the Word from God the Father, let him be anathema.
If anyone dares to say that Christ was a God-bearing man and not rather God in truth, being by nature one Son, even as “the Word became flesh,” and is made partaker of blood and flesh precisely like us, let him be anathema.
If anyone says that the Word from God the Father was the God or master of Christ, and does not rather confess the same both God and man, the Word having become flesh, according to the scriptures, let him be anathema.
If anyone says that as man Jesus was activated by the Word of God and was clothed with the glory of the Only-begotten, as a being separate from him, let him be anathema.
If anyone dares to say that the man who was assumed ought to be worshipped and glorified together with the divine Word and be called God along with him, while being separate from him, (for the addition of “with” must always compel us to think in this way), and will not rather worship Emmanuel with one veneration and send up to him one doxology, even as “the Word became flesh,” let him be anathema.
If anyone says that the one Lord Jesus Christ was glorified by the Spirit, as making use of an alien power that worked through him and as having received from him the power to master unclean spirits and to work divine wonders among people, and does not rather say that it was his own proper Spirit through whom he worked the divine wonders, let him be anathema.
The divine scripture says Christ became “the high priest and apostle of our confession” he offered himself to God the Father in an odor of sweetness for our sake. If anyone, therefore, says that it was not the very Word from God who became our high priest and apostle, when he became flesh and a man like us, but as it were another who was separate from him, in particular a man from a woman, or if anyone says that he offered the sacrifice also for himself and not rather for us alone (for he who knew no sin needed no offering), let him be anathema.
If anyone does not confess that the flesh of the Lord is life-giving and belongs to the Word from God the Father, but maintains that it belongs to another besides him, united with him in dignity or as enjoying a mere divine indwelling, and is not rather life-giving, as we said, since it became the flesh belonging to the Word who has power to bring all things to life, let him be anathema.
If anyone does not confess that the Word of God suffered in the flesh and was crucified in the flesh and tasted death in the flesh and became the first born of the dead, although as God he is life and life-giving, let him be anathema.
SOURCE: E. B. Pusey, preface to E. B. Pusey and P. E. Pusey, eds., St. Cyril of Alexandria: Five Tomes Against Nestorius (Oxford: James Parker, 1881), xi–xiii.
6
The Death of God
There is many a Nestorius!
Dioscuros of Alexandria
In August 449 the ghosts of the earlier council gathered once more at Ephesus. Once again, a patriarch of Alexandria brought his followers to confront heresy by any means necessary. And once again, there were winners and losers. A patriarch of Constantinople was deposed, and a new definitive statement of church doctrine proclaimed. But in terms of its impact on the future of the church, the participants of this council might well have been ghosts. In most accounts of church history, which give such prominence to earlier gatherings like Nicea, we look in vain for a Second Council of Ephesus. For all the numbers and prestige of those attending, all the weighty issues discussed, Second Ephesus—the Gangster Synod—became The Council That Never Was.1
At the time, though, the council seemed like a revolutionary event, building aggressively on the victories of 431. It marked the high-water mark of Alexandrian influence in the church. For a few years, it also seemed likely to uproot any form of Two Nature teaching within the empire as thoroughly as the Arians had been defeated in earlier decades. And condemned as heretical would have been the whole structure of what would ultimately become Christian orthodoxy.
The Last Romans?
By the 440s, the generation that had dealt with the Nestorian crisis was fading away. New leaders were in power in Rome, where Pope Leo succeeded in 440, and in Alexandria, where Dioscuros followed Cyril in 444. In each case, though, the rising men had served long apprenticeships under their predecessors and had full access to older memories. And just as Cyril had accompanied Theophilus to overthrow John Chrysostom in 403, so Dioscuros had been present at the fall of Nestorius in 431. A rising young cleric could have no better form of on-the-job training than witnessing his mentor overthrow a patriarch.
Other new men had risen to power elsewhere. The new bishop of Antioch was Domnus, who in 440 succeeded his uncle John. This was an unfortunate inheritance, as Domnus was a peaceable character who wanted nothing more than a quiet life and was ill-suited to deal with the kind of enemies he would soon face. The emerging dangers were nowhere clearer than in Constantinople, where (also in 440) Eutyches succeeded the abbot Dalmatius, who had played such a key role in shaping the emperor’s religious policies. Both had been violent opponents of Nestorius, and both were willing to resort to aggressive political activism.
The most significant shift in power was at the imperial court, where the augusta Pulcheria was driven from favor and withdrew from public life. Partly, this followed a long-running feud with her sister-in-law, Eudocia, who was herself forced into holy exile in Jerusalem. In theory, this should have meant that the emperor Theodosius might have exercised some independence, but he now turned his favor to the eunuch Chrysaphius. Unlike the other transfers of power, that change marked a real change in policy and ideology.2
Just as significant for religious debates were changes in secular politics, as the empire moved into new and deeply dangerous territory. At the time of First Ephesus, in 431, the Roman world was enjoying a breathing spell of relative stability. The empire was recovering slowly from the shocks of barbarian invasions that had overrun whole provinces and learning to live with a drastically changed political landscape. Through the 440s, though, the situation had become massively more dangerous, to the point that one or more centers of power, Rome or Constantinople, would probably fall wholly under foreign rule, and it was an open question which part might be lost first.3
Living in an era of perpetual military danger had practical effects for debates within the churches, in making travel and communication much more difficult, and making it harder for particular bishops to participate in wider gatherings. But the crisis also raised the stakes of debate. Every month, it seemed, brought new evidence of the failure of Roman power, of defeats and massacres, of the defeat of orthodox Nicene Christianity. All were evidence of God’s anger with his people, for their lack of faith and drift into heresy, and the church could only find peace by driving out error.
Much of the old empire was slipping into chaos. Romanized society in Britain was wiped out following a barbarian revolt in the 440s, and old-style civilization—Romanitas—was eroding along other frontiers, in the provinces along the Danube and Rhine. Gaul was torn asunder by class warfare, as the wealthy so manipulated the taxation system that ordinary people were driven to ruin. In retaliation, bands of peasant rebels, Bagaudae, devastated the countryside. But the greatest danger was not so much the collapse of authority as the replacement of Roman rule by a new barbarian empire, a new kind of regime, at least as brutal as the old order
at its worst. Modern stereotypes of ancient barbarians imagine mobile raiders, perhaps causing much damage, but moving on swiftly. By the 440s, the Roman Empire’s worst barbarian nightmares found their focus in two individuals who had evidently come to stay. Both were kings or emperors in their own right and might well succeed in carving out vast and permanent new realms out of Roman territory.4
One was Gaiseric, the Vandal king, who ruled his people for what was by the standards of a violent age an incredibly long time, from 428 to 477. For decades, Vandal pirates and raiders marauded over the Mediterranean, ruining trade routes and disrupting communications. But Gaiseric had higher aspirations and built up an impressive Vandal kingdom in North Africa. When St. Augustine died in 430, his city of Hippo was under Vandal siege, and shortly after its capture, it became Gaiseric’s capital. The seat of the new kingdom moved only in 439, when Gaiseric’s forces captured Carthage. The city had been a heartland of the Western empire, not to mention the breadbasket of Rome itself, but now it was under the heel of Arian Christians, anti-Trinitarians who persecuted Catholic Romans. As Gaiseric was known to have ambitions on the city of Rome, a wider Vandal empire spanning the western Mediterranean—Arian in religious loyalties—might easily lie on the horizon. Egyptians thought that it was only a matter of time before Vandal ambitions turned to Alexandria itself.5
The empire’s other persistent bad dream was Attila the Hun. Through the 440s, both the Eastern and Western empires struggled to deal with the Hunnish threat, which was all the more serious because the Huns were not even heretical Christians, but aggressively pagan. Worse, the Huns represented a racial threat. Although many of their forces were Germanic subject peoples, the Huns themselves were of Central Asian origin, and Roman writers offer stereotypes of sadistic Orientals, slant-eyed and misshaped, and scarcely human. Huns sacked the Balkan provinces in 441, inflicting destruction that was astonishing even for an age not known for restraint in warfare. The great city of Aquileia, for instance, was one of the glories of late Roman Italy. After Attila’s forces left it in 452, it literally ceased to exist, leaving only some confused survivors who sought a new protected site, in what would someday become the city of Venice.6
Attila was so dangerous that he forced the Romans to take steps that would once have been inconceivable. The Eastern empire recognized the independent Hunnish kingdom in 442 and in 443 began paying Attila huge regular sums of gold as the price of peace and survival. In 447, the Eastern empire experienced a disaster that became one of the great might-have-beens of history, when an earthquake breached Constantinople’s legendary defensive walls. If Attila’s forces had been closer to hand, the story of Christian Byzantium might have ended right then, a thousand years earlier than it actually did. Only desperate efforts by the city’s population—soldiers, clergy, circus factions, and street gangs—rebuilt the wall to withstand any possible threat. This crisis passed, but both Eastern and Western empires knew that Attila’s forces were biding their time before striking again.7
By the late 440s, the Roman Empire was facing enemies almost too many to count. As the historian Priscus remarks, apart from Attila,
They also feared the Parthians who were, it chanced, making preparations for war; the Vandals who were troubling the sea coasts; the Isaurians who had set out on banditry; the Saracens who were overrunning the eastern part of their empire; and the united Ethiopian races.8
The cumulative impact of these wars and natural disasters was overwhelming. As Nestorius described,
They had been worn out with pestilences and famines, and failure of rains, and hail, and heat, and marvelous earthquakes, and captivity, and fear and flight, and all kind of ills, but they did not perceive the cause…and there was no place of refuge. A twofold upheaval on the part of the barbarians and the Scythians [Huns], who were destroying and taking every one captive, had shaken them and there was not even a single hope of rescue; and hitherto they understood not that all this was not simply human.9
The great earthquake happened right in the middle of the theological wars that split the city in 447–48:
And some things appeared openly in one part of the city in one way, and others in another part otherwise, and things had not been shaken by a common earthquake but to convince men that He who was doing these things was immortal and had authority over them.10
Any rational person should see that God was angry with his church, and it was up to his true followers to seek out and purge the errors that threatened Roman survival.
Eutyches
These international events provided the setting for a new religious conflict that, as in 431, began in Constantinople itself. In reaction to the Nestorian crisis, One Nature thought was moving in radical directions, more extreme in fact than the theories prevailing in Alexandria itself. The main advocate for these ideas was the archimandrite Eutyches, who believed that Cyril had made too many concessions to reach peace with Antioch in 433. Eutyches rejected any attempt to separate the divine Son of God from the human son of Mary. After the Incarnation, he thought, Christ had only one nature, one physis, in one person. For Eutyches, “God is born; God suffered; God was crucified.” If so, what became of the human Christ? Eutyches said that after the union of human and divine, Christ contained no ousia [being] except the divine. Nor did he concede “that our Lord, who is our Lord and our God, is consubstantial with us; but he is consubstantial with the Father in the divinity.” Whatever the Gospels might say, Christ could have felt no human pains or temptations, no hunger or thirst. God was emphatically not one of us.11
If Eutyches were an isolated cleric, his ideas would not have drawn much attention, but he was much more than that. He held a powerful church rank, and he gained new political clout as his godson and disciple, Chrysaphius, rose at court. Chrysaphius himself had strong One Nature views, and so, by this stage, did the emperor. In fact, we may ask whether the writers at the time were correct to put so much weight on the sinister role of Chrysaphius. Conceivably Theodosius II himself was more significant in the One Nature reaction than commentators dared say at the time, especially as this would have placed him on what would become the losing side.12
Within Constantinople’s church, formal power rested in the hands of Flavian, who became archbishop in 446; but Eutyches was the power behind the throne, as Flavian himself became a docile cipher. Flavian suffered from multiple disadvantages. As he was not an effective speaker, he used the archimandrite as his public face. In the secular world, too, he blundered repeatedly. Even when first taking office, he made a disastrous mistake when he ignored Chrysaphius’s request for a substantial gift or bribe. Flavian was too honest, or else too piously naive, to realize the importance of placating the royal favorite. And in the circumstances, he could not try and get around Chrysaphius by turning to Pulcheria, who was herself discredited. Flavian was in a dangerously exposed position, and, worse, he did not realize the fact.13
Eutyches, like Dalmatius before him, had a powerful influence in the city’s monasteries, which might have served as a solid political power base. As the hot summer of 431 had shown, bringing monks onto the streets could potentially bring an emperor to heel. Quite possibly, Eutyches had looked enviously at how Cyril had used his monks to overawe Alexandria’s civil authorities and establish a church hegemony over a great city. Certainly, Constantinople and Alexandria enjoyed close and frequent contacts.
Pushing Forward
Eutyches owed his prominence in the church partly to his speaking ability, but that fluency could be a mixed blessing. He also suffered from a take-no-prisoners style of debate, a sharp temper, and a tendency to see all critics as malicious or even demonic. He had a familiar academic tendency to pursue arguments to their logical conclusions, however risky or unsettling the consequences. The more Eutyches spoke and wrote, the more other church leaders were concerned at his proclamation of what appeared to be a dangerous new doctrine.
Eutyches found his deadliest enemy in a man who had been a firm ally in the earli
er campaign against Nestorius, when bishop Eusebius had denounced the error of the Two Natures. Eusebius, though, was an ally of Pulcheria, and had no sympathy for extremism on the other side of the spectrum. As he talked with Eutyches, Eusebius became alarmed at the implications of his teaching. Was Eutyches really daring to deny the human nature of Christ? If so, that would mean that Christ was not consubstantial, of the same being, with us: “the very ousia [substance] of the flesh has thereby been suppressed.” What should have been a rational discussion between the two degenerated into an embarrassing fit of name-calling, with Eutyches denouncing Eusebius for his lying and impious views, for hypocrisy, and adding for good measure that “all hypocrites ought to be extirpated!” Eusebius, though, was not to be bullied. A powerful and well-connected figure, his complaints carried weight, and he now called for a special council to investigate Eutyches.14
Flavian himself was frightened. He knew “that the churches were disturbed anew over these things, and the monasteries were divided and the people were rising up in parties, and that already the fire was kindling in all the world owing to those who were going and coming and were preaching various things that were full of impiety.”15 But even Flavian’s timid protests became too much for Eutyches. No doubt thinking back to the fall of Nestorius, Eutyches thought it intolerable that a heretic should occupy a great see, but above all that of the holy city of Constantine’s Christian empire. Flavian had to go; and if he did, then Eutyches himself was the natural successor.
Eutyches and his monks struck back against any and all critics, in ways that often recalled Cyril’s campaigns in Alexandria. By 447–48, they had created a police-state atmosphere in Constantinople. They
were carrying off men, some from the ships and others from the streets and others from the houses, and others while praying from the churches, and were pursuing others that they fled; and with all zeal, they were searching out and digging after those who were hiding in caves and in holes in the earth. And it was a matter of great fear and of danger for a man to speak with the adherents of Flavian, on account of those who were dwelling in the neighborhood and keeping watch, and were as spies to see who entered in unto Flavian.16
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