Jesus Wars

by John Philip Jenkins

  This sounds just like Cyril’s intelligence system in Alexandria.

  The War of the World

  But Eutyches had plenty of other enemies, especially in Syria and the East, and events here turned the local dispute into a matter for the worldwide church. These regions had not forgiven the old campaign against Nestorius, and many Easterners insisted that the former patriarch’s ideas were, for the most past, orthodox. But now, Eutyches was preaching a far worse and more extreme heresy, and because of his court connections, he seemed to have imperial support. Hence, “all the East was disturbed at these things, and there was no place that had not been stirred up.”17

  But while Easterners had their grievances, the fact that they were so tolerant of Nestorius’s ideas further angered One Nature believers, in Constantinople and elsewhere. In theory, the Formula of 433 should have brought peace between Antioch and Alexandria, but new conflicts continued to arise. With Nestorius out of the way, Cyrillian followers turned their wrath against his teachers, to the now-dead theologians who had created and formed his thinking. They targeted the legendary Antiochene teachers, Diodore of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia, and tried to anathematize them. But such attacks threatened chaos. In order to challenge the legitimacy of the Eastern churches, they were seeking to condemn men who could not defend themselves. The attack on Nestorianism turned into a crusade against Antiochism.18

  The war against Theodore’s memory began very shortly after the Formula of Reunion. One early skirmish came in Edessa, where Bishop Rabboula tried to condemn Theodore, and in so doing, he created a deep division in his diocese. The move was reversed by his successor, Ibas, who thought that Cyril himself was a much more pernicious heretic than Theodore had ever been and probably should have been condemned alongside Nestorius. In 437, Proclus of Constantinople convicted a number of statements associated with Theodore, but he phrased his declaration in such a way that it targeted no specific individual.19

  By the 440s, Alexandrians were campaigning for an explicit condemnation of Theodore. As at First Ephesus, Egyptians found their main villains in the Orient, that is, the empire’s eastern regions, and in the churches that looked to Antioch. John of Antioch had refused to comply with these demands, and so (more timidly) did his successor Domnus. Domnus also supported or defended several bishops who infuriated the Alexandrians. Ibas of Edessa was the most provocative example but not the only one. Irenaeus, for instance, was the secular official who had helped see fair play at First Ephesus, and the Alexandrians saw him as too friendly to Nestorius. But despite those worrying Nestorian associations, he was consecrated as bishop of Tyre in 447. If the East was not actually rehabilitating Nestorius, Syrians at least were not condemning him as zealously as they should.20

  The most influential thinker in the Antiochene church was Theodoret of Cyrrhus, who served as the main theological adviser to the successive patriarchs. Theodoret was not easily bullied, an essential quality when dealing with Dioscuros and the Alexandrians. Indeed, we can usually tell when Theodoret was advising Domnus, because those were the moments at which Antioch’s patriarch showed unusual backbone. One letter plausibly attributed to Theodoret shows his reaction to the death of Cyril, at an advanced age. Cyril’s case, wrote Theodoret to Domnus, just proved the saying that the good die young. “At last, and with difficulty, the villain is gone!” The main danger, thought Theodoret, was that the inhabitants of the underworld would be so appalled to have Cyril in residence that they would send him back to the living. It would do no harm to lay a particularly heavy stone on his grave to keep him down.21

  Theodoret never doubted the divine nature of Christ. But he argued, against Eutyches, that Christ still had two natures after the Incarnation, united in one divine person (prosopon). In 447, Theodoret presented these ideas in his tract Eranistes—loosely, the Beggar’s Banquet. The name is meant to suggest intellectual beggars or ragpickers, those who clothed themselves by patching together whatever fragments they could find of forgotten heresies that denied the humanity of Christ. In the context of the time, that had to be a not so veiled reference to Eutyches. If so, then Theodoret was denouncing the powerful archimandrite as a gross heretic, the heir of every Gnostic error through the centuries. To argue that

  God the Word took nothing of the Virgin’s nature, is stolen from [the Gnostics] Valentinus and Bardesanes, and the adherents of their fables. To call the godhead and the manhood of the Lord Christ one Nature is the error filched from the follies of Apollinarius. Again, the attribution of capacity of suffering to the divinity of the Christ is a theft from the blasphemy of Arius and Eunomius.

  Invoking Valentinus was doubly effective, as he was not only a notorious heretic but also an Egyptian, so that bringing him into the picture served to discredit Alexandrian thinkers.22

  Early in 448, the different controversies began to merge into a general churchwide war. Irenaeus was deposed as bishop of Tyre. Meanwhile, Dioscuros complained about Theodoret’s seemingly Nestorian doctrines. He began with a protest directed personally to Theodoret himself and then followed up with an indictment addressed to Domnus, as Theodoret’s superior. For the historically inclined—and most church leaders in that age had a weighty sense of precedent—Dioscuros’s correspondence with Domnus was bringing back uncomfortable memories of Cyril’s interchanges with Nestorius twenty years earlier. And everyone knew how that story had played out.23

  Eutyches Fights Back

  The main question now was which of the two sides would first find itself facing charges at a council. Although Eutyches was facing his own problems, he tried to invoke Roman assistance against his enemies. He wrote to Pope Leo, warning of the revival of Nestorian influence. Leo’s reply was polite but cautious. Beloved son, he wrote, how wonderful to know that you are so vigilant against a revival of the awful heresy of Nestorianism and this pernicious belief in the Two Natures! “And when we have been able to ascertain more fully by whose wickedness this happens, we must make provision—with the help of God—for the complete uprooting of this poisonous growth which has long ago been condemned.” A wise reader would have noted the critical clause—I will indeed do something, once I have carried out my own investigation. I’m not just going to take your word for it.24

  In November 448, Constantinople’s archbishop Flavian convened the so-called Home Synod, with the goal of settling several pending disputes in the Eastern churches. Comprising over thirty bishops and eighteen archimandrites, this was a heavyweight body. Among its other tasks, the group heard Eusebius’s indictment of Eutyches. Eutyches followed the earlier example of Nestorius in refusing to appear personally for most of the sessions, and when he did appear, it was with the backing of a mob of monks and soldiers. He also brought a patrician ally, one Florentius, who was to be seated as the representative of the emperor or, more accurately, of Chrysaphius.25

  But even with so much support, Eutyches could not save himself from himself. Under examination, he admitted his belief that Christ, after the Incarnation, had just one nature, and he even failed to make clear that at some point this divine being had become incarnate. “The Lord Jesus Christ,” he declared, “is from two Natures, but after the union I affirm one Nature.”26 Like Nestorius before him, then, he was condemned. Flavian called him an Apollinarian and a Valentinian Gnostic.

  But rather than ending the matter, Eutyches now sought churchwide help as he appealed to the bishops of Rome, Alexandria, and Jerusalem. He presented himself as the victim of the case, old and frail, and suffering for his defense of ancient Christian orthodoxy. He appealed to Leo, “defender of religion and abhorrer of factions.” Surely, he pleaded, the popes who had condemned the awful heretics of the past would see his point of view? Like them, he anathematized “Apollinarius, Valentinus, Mani, and Nestorius, and those who say that the flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Savior, descended from heaven and not from the Holy Ghost and from the holy Virgin, along with all heresies down to Simon Magus. Yet nevertheless I stand in jeopardy of my l
ife as a heretic!” And whatever his theology, Eutyches did have technical grounds for protest, because the record keeping at the synod had violated established standards, and in those narrow terms, he received a vindication of sorts in April 449.27

  But matters were also developing their own momentum. Chrysaphius persuaded the emperor to send his own supportive letter to Leo, while Dioscuros asked Theodosius to call a general council. In March, Theodosius agreed. The new council was to meet in August, and as before, Ephesus was the chosen venue.

  Back to Ephesus

  What did the different parties expect from this new meeting, and what lessons had they learned from the previous event? Theodosius himself should have greeted the forthcoming event with dread, remembering the largely unnecessary division and violence incited before. Yet by 448 he was clearly sympathetic to Eutyches and became a strong partisan of his against Flavian and Eusebius. According to Nestorius, Theodosius enthusiastically allowed Eutyches to deploy the full imperial power against his personal enemies. He encouraged clergy to secede from Flavian and reinforced this policy through financial pressure. The emperor reinstituted taxes and charges on the churches, burdens that he had relaxed in easier-going times, and demanded that these be paid, with arrears.

  Prelates were openly seized and rebuked before the crowds, and every bishop who was not of the party of Eutyches was seized; and he commanded every tax upon the possessions of their churches which had been remitted to them by him and by the emperors before him, even the tax of all these years, to be exacted of them at one time…. He commanded vengeance to be exacted of Eusebius, the accuser of Eutyches, without mercy.

  Using “the assaults of hunger and of usury and of captivity…he made the Roman nobility fall at his knees and groan.” Even when Flavian prostrated himself before the emperor at an Easter service, pleading for reconciliation, the emperor scorned and insulted him. Theodosius had become a violent partisan, who called the council to depose Flavian and to restore Eutyches. As Nestorius wrote from personal experience, “Ephesus…is appointed and destined for the deposition of the bishops of Constantinople.”28

  Dioscuros hoped for a more comprehensive victory, certainly the defeat of Flavian and (for the third time in half a century) the humbling of Constantinople. But he also wanted a reaffirmation of Alexandria’s leading role as the center shaping Christian thought and belief. He wanted a world in which Alexandria decided what Christians everywhere would think and where Rome used Peter’s authority to rubber-stamp what Egyptians decided. Dioscuros had also learned other lessons from Ephesus, especially concerning the role of the secular power. The Alexandrians bitterly recalled the role of Candidian and his military forces. Expecting the worst, they came prepared, with Dioscuros’s thuggish parabolani, who intervened at will, bullying and beating.

  We might be making a mistake in judging what Dioscuros wanted in terms of his memories or of rational self-interest. Like any good machine politician, he wanted to help his friends and harm his enemies, but such politicians usually have a sense of the limits of what they can reasonably get away with. They also know that any enemies who are not absolutely destroyed have powerful friends who might help them stage a comeback. It rarely pays, then, to unleash total war against all enemies at once, which is roughly what Dioscuros did at Second Ephesus. It almost seems as if he deliberately went out of his way to infuriate or alienate virtually every other church leader, who was then forced either to accept defeat at his hands or fall into some subordinate position.29

  Why did he act like this? Almost certainly, he was misled by the absolute support he seemed to be getting from the emperor, who was in a position to overawe any opposition. Or perhaps he was just Alexandrian, in that he came from a church that had over a century’s history of trampling all opposition, using a mixture of intimidation, manipulated piety, and the invocation of martyrdom. On the international scene, too, the Alexandrian patriarchate had long succeeded in getting virtually everything it wanted, running rings around its opponents and exercising power at the heart of empire. As Nestorius remarks, “Dioscorus had received from Cyril the primacy, and a hatred for the bishop of Constantinople.”30 If Dioscuros had witnessed what Cyril achieved, he might have felt that only a little more effort would be needed to make the whole empire as docile and compliant as the more distant regions of Egypt. What he failed to register was the sophisticated court politics and coalition building with which Cyril had operated, or Theophilus or Athanasius before them.

  But one final possibility, not to be dismissed, is that he really was suffering from some kind of personality disorder, which drove him to extremes of paranoia and uncontrollable rage. Historians are justifiably shy about undertaking psychiatric diagnoses on the long dead, if only because the track record of such postmortem analyses is so dismal, but we should at least consider the possibility. There is such a thing as bullying, and then there is what Dioscuros did on a regular basis.

  Leo the Roman

  Based on his experience at First Ephesus, Dioscuros probably had little regard for Roman popes, but the new incumbent, Leo, was a very different creature from his predecessors. Like most popes, Leo wanted Constantinople kept in its proper place, but he insisted that matters proceed according to custom and legality, without the vigilantism of 431. Leo, the ultimate Roman, cared deeply about procedure and proper channels, and he was nervous about Eutyches’s action in going behind the back of his properly constituted superior, Flavian. At the same time, he was also very conscious of the dignity of his own office, which was always in peril of falling out of the loop of communication that united the Eastern churches.

  Problems of communication meant that the first news he had of proceedings in Constantinople came from the emperor himself and from Eutyches, rather than from Flavian, who should have kept him informed. Accordingly, Leo’s first responses made him sound quite sympathetic to Eutyches and angry with Flavian. When he received a full transcript of the Constantinople synod, though, his sympathies turned decisively against Eutyches. In June 449 he reaffirmed the judgment in a substantial letter that has become known as the Tome of Leo. The Tome not only showed his disgust with Eutyches (“very unwary and exceedingly ignorant”) but utterly rejected his ideas. His statements at the synod “reached the height of stupidity and blasphemy.”31

  The Tome has become a classic definition of the orthodox view of the person of Christ, and it marks a critical moment in the developing history of the papacy. Although Leo long received immense credit as the author of the Tome, it is only fair to note that it was largely drafted by one of his secretaries, drawing heavily on—some would say plagiarizing—the work of other theologians, including Augustine.32 But the exact authorship is less important than Leo’s willingness to stand behind it, to wager his safety and the fortunes of his office. The stakes were very high indeed.

  For Leo, the forthcoming council would be so vital because it would mark the destruction of a pernicious theory that challenged the full reality of Christ and of Christian doctrine. Eutyches, he said, showed his basic ignorance of Christian doctrine as exemplified in the Bible and the creeds. He should have listened to “the whole body of the faithful confess that they believe in God the Father Almighty, and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord, who was born of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary. By which three statements the devices of almost all heretics are overthrown.” The pope showed at length how all these texts could be used to prove the belief in the Two Natures.33

  Although the Tome can be discussed at book length—and often has been, through the centuries—a couple of examples will suggest its content. He used the battery of texts that clearly showed the human descent and nature of Christ. Did not two of the Gospels begin with a genealogy, stressing his human descent? And the New Testament only made sense as the fulfillment of the Old, especially of the prophecies of Isaiah. Leo denounces arguments that seem to show that Christ had but one nature. Look for instance at the words of the angel to Mary: “The Holy Ghost shall com
e upon thee and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee: and therefore that Holy Thing also that shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.” Didn’t that suggest she was going to bear the Son of God and that divine nature would overwhelm or eliminate the human? Absolutely not, says Leo:

  Though the Holy Spirit imparted fertility to the Virgin, yet a real body was received from her body; and, “Wisdom building her a house,” “the Word became flesh and dwelt in us,” that is, in that flesh which he took from man, and which he quickened with the breath of a higher life.34

  Throughout, Leo stresses the idea of balance and harmony, suggesting that any overemphasis on either aspect of Christ, either the divine or human, would produce a result that was illogical or even absurd. Humanity and divinity met in Christ: “For each form does what is proper to it with the co-operation of the other; that is the Word performing what appertains to the Word, and the flesh carrying out what appertains to the flesh. One of them sparkles with miracles, the other succumbs to injuries. And as the Word does not cease to be on an equality with His Father’s glory, so the flesh does not forego the nature of our race.”35

  Many features made Leo’s Tome such an impressive text, above all its comprehensive gathering of biblical texts and a sound, clear logic running throughout. Like an accomplished Roman rhetorician, he not only makes his own case but marshals any and all possible counterarguments and shows why they would not convince. With the Tome in hand, any opponent of One Nature theory had a readily available collection of knock-down texts and arguments ready for instant deployment. Even better, of course, was the source, the chair of Peter.