Zenith to us and our antipodes,
Humbled below us? or that blood, which is
The seat of all our souls, if not of His,
Made dirt of dust, or that flesh which was worn
By God for His apparel, ragg’d and torn? 2
Nobody can look God in the face and live, says Donne, so what dreadful fate must befall me if I witness the crucifixion—that is, if I saw the death of the God who created the heavens and still sustains them? God died. What if I actually saw the damage inflicted on the human flesh that God wore as his costume, his “apparel,” on this earth? This is all very close to the standard Monophysite version of the Thrice Holy hymn: Holy God, Holy and Mighty, Holy Immortal, Who was Crucified for Us, have mercy on us! God the Word has died!
No one has suggested that John Donne was radically unorthodox in his belief or that he had any doubts about the Chalcedonian statements he was required to agree with as a faithful clergyman of the Church of England. No secret Monophysite cells operated underground in Jacobean London, no Coptic agents. Donne had, quite independently, pursued the logic of a quite common devotion, contemplating the sufferings of Christ, to the point where his ideas and images would have gladdened the heart of Eutyches—assuming that anything ever gladdened the stern Eutyches.
Long after the fifth century, other thinkers would pursue similar courses, leading them to extreme versions of One Nature or Two Nature thought. Through the Middle Ages and beyond, the old heresies of Adoptionism and Docetism continued to thrive across Europe and the Near East. At one extreme, Dualists constituted a whole alternative church complete with a separate hierarchy. At real risk to their lives, many ordinary Christians found they could no longer accept the church’s teaching that Christ had a human nature, as matter was so evidently evil and soiled. Nor, obviously, could Mary have given birth to God. Christ had one nature, which was purely divine, and his human image was a mere semblance. At most, the power of Christ visited the man Jesus and left him when he had served the higher purpose.
During the religious turmoil of the sixteenth century, new controversies revived ancient christological feuds. Martin Luther and his successors leaned toward an Alexandrian interpretation of Christ’s role. Luther taught that Christ’s divine and human natures experienced an interchange of divine and human qualities, a “communication of attributes,” which mingled the two natures in a way that Chalcedonians forbade. Calvin, in contrast, was much more Antiochene in insisting on the reality of both natures, human as well as divine. Even more extreme ideas flourished among the extreme wing of the so-called Radical Reformation. Early Anabaptists preached that Jesus did not inherit his human flesh from Mary, but represented a body custom built by the Logos.3
With greater religious diversity, thinkers again explored theological paths that might once have been closed to them in order to answer the central question of Christianity: who do you say that I am? And once again, they reached answers that would have been familiar long centuries before. As believers read the New Testament, they wrestled with the apparent contradictions. If Jesus was fully God, how could his knowledge of God be limited? How could he seem to draw such distinctions between himself and the Father? Particularly in the nineteenth century, some Protestant thinkers found an explanation for this in the letter to the Philippians, and their insights continued to find followers.
In Philippians, we may recall, an ancient hymn tells how Christ, being equal with God, voluntarily emptied himself to assume human form. Since the sixteenth century, theologians have explored that idea of emptying, kenosis, to suggest that the Son of God deliberately gave up many of his divine attributes in order to live among us. Jesus would thus have been divine from the moment of conception, but only in his later life would he fully realize the fact. A Christ limited in that way would truthfully admit to not knowing the time of the end of the world, knowledge available only to his Father. Such a kenotic approach might even mean, as early Two Nature thinkers held, that Jesus gradually realized his true divine identity, that in a sense his Godhood really did appear in him in stages. In that way, we could vindicate the arguments of early believers like Paul of Samosata, who were long condemned as heretics but who now edge back into the Christian mainstream. We might even speculate that Christ’s full divine consciousness burst upon him at the moment of his baptism in the Jordan, which the Gospels present as such a turning point in his career. As a means of interpreting Christ’s identity, ideas of kenosis remain controversial, as some churches regard them as a betrayal of Chalcedonian orthodoxy; but once again, they show the stubborn persistence of subterranean currents in Christian thought.4
Christ Today
In modern times, too, ancient debates and creeds are much in evidence, despite the official victory of Chalcedon. The most successful of these new-old theologies is technically called Theopaschitism, the idea that one of the Trinity suffered for us (Unus ex Trinitate passus est). This idea surfaced early in the sixth century, as a compromise attempt to bridge the gulf separating Chalcedonians and their enemies. The formula was vindicated at the fifth council, held at Constantinople in 553, but it long remained suspect because of its suggestion that God could or did suffer, that he was passible. In the twentieth century, though, the theory went from strength to strength. In the words of one modern commentator,
The age-old dogma that God is impassible and immutable, incapable of suffering, is for many no longer tenable. The ancient Theopaschite heresy that God suffers has, in fact, become the new orthodoxy. A list of modern Theopaschite thinkers would include Barth, Berdyaev, Bonhoeffer, Brunner, Cobb, Cone and liberation theologians generally, Küng, Moltmann, Reinhold Niebuhr, Pannenberg, Ruether and feminist theologians generally, Temple, Teilhard and Unamuno.5
As Christian triumphalism has foundered, as visions of Christendom faded, so Christian scholars turned increasingly to a God who suffered alongside his creation. For liberation theologians and feminists, for Christian thinkers who identify Jesus as the brother of the oppressed, the idea of a God who really suffers alongside the poor and marginalized is fundamental.
Looking at popular versions of Christianity also induces a sense of déjà vu, or rather, déjà cru—already believed. Many ordinary Christians, and cultural Christians, pay little attention to Chalcedon’s subtle distinctions. Near-Monophysite views are most strongly in evidence around Christmastime. The churches officially follow Chalcedon in preaching a Christ in two natures, without confusion, change, division, or separation; but popular devotion unabashedly worships God lying in the manger. If a sixth-century Chalcedonian bishop returned to the modern world, he would devote himself to searching through the hymnbooks of most churches and tearing out the many pages in which lyrics expressed overtly One Nature ideas. For many modern believers, Christ was obviously never human enough to doubt his own credentials or mission, to fear the cross, or to fantasize, however briefly, about pursuing a quiet existence with a wife and family.
In other ways, too, modern Christians take their own sides in those bygone debates. In the ancient world, the greatest difficulty lay in persuading ordinary believers that Christ might be anything less than purely divine. In contrast, many modern believers struggle with contemplating a Jesus who is more than human. They do their best to reconcile the moral insights of the wise teacher Jesus with what they see as the supernatural encumbrances that have over time been built upon his memory. For two centuries, after all, successive modern “quests” for Jesus have sought this human reality, trying to place the figure of the Gospels ever more firmly in the historical context of Jesus’ time and, by implication, with all its constraints and limitations. If Christ was divine, many feel, then this was through the man Jesus progressively developing a divine consciousness. And that process might be available to human beings who follow Christ in their own moral struggles. The One Nature principles of Eutyches and Apollinarius survive today, through the beliefs of millions who never heard their names; and so do the views of a human Jesus proposed
by the Ebionites and by Paul of Samosata.
Creed or Chaos
But if the same problems recur endlessly through history, so, in theory, should the same solutions. However much we may think that modern controversies are new and unprecedented, they rarely are, and that means that looking back to past debates might well provide a mine of useful insights for the present day.6
This point may seem strange when past theological debates seem so abstruse that their memory can be embarrassing to modern churches. Did churches in the distant past really tear themselves apart over what today seem such verbal minutiae? We live in an age when the term theological has implications of irrelevant hairsplitting: “It’s just a theological quibble.” Still more poisonous is a word like dogma. Such objections to theological enterprise are not new. Do churches today fall into internecine conflict over issues of biblical authority and sexual regulations while millions of Christians starve? In the 1930s, some Anglican thinkers urged that the churches should put aside matters of technical theology, as of interest only to cloistered academics. And their proposal received a devastating answer from Dorothy Sayers, one of the great lay theologians of the age.
In her 1940 essay Creed or Chaos, Sayers tried to explain just why such theological debates and questioning should not be set aside, but rather should remain central to what the church did. For one thing, she argued, the fact that we today regard all these great issues of Christology as trivial or technical means that all these questions have been settled through the strivings of earlier generations. We live on the accumulated cultural and intellectual capital of those earlier thinkers—of Athanasius, Cyril, Leo and the rest—without whom the church would have fallen into moral and spiritual chaos far worse than anything recorded in historical times. The orthodoxy they established is the firm foundation of all modern churches, which we ignore at our peril.7
But Sayers also pointed out that, however much moderns might despise theology, ordinary people actually devoted a great deal of effort to theological speculation, and the conclusions they reached usually reproduced the very ideas that had been confronted in the fifth and sixth centuries. Far from sidelining theology, modern churches needed constantly to reexamine and restate the grounds of their belief.
Christology was central to Sayers’ argument. The church proclaimed Christ as God and man, but what did that mean to many ordinary believers “except that God the Creator (the irritable old gentleman with the beard) in some mysterious manner fathered upon the Virgin Mary something amphibious, neither one thing nor t’other, like a merman?”8 Sayers cites several popular views of Christ’s nature and shows how faithfully they reproduce ideas like Nestorianism or Eutychianism. For the latter case, she plausibly imagines a modern Everyman objecting that “it can’t have mattered very much to Him if he was God. A god can’t really suffer like you and me. Besides the parson says we are to try and be like Christ; but that’s all nonsense—we can’t be God, and it’s silly to ask us to try.”9
Or modern believers might easily adopt Apollinarian views. If Christ was God, they might object, then he knew everything that was going to happen, so that his sufferings were really no more than a kind of playacting. And if he was God, he couldn’t actually be tempted in any real sense, could he? What kind of example can an ordinary Christian find in stories like that? As Sayers says, this view makes it all but impossible to speak of “Christian principles” as vaguely practical or achievable. The debates continue until, “Complicated as the theology is, the average man has walked straight into the heart of the Athanasian Creed, and we are bound to follow.”10 For Sayers, a different Christology leads to a different approach to ethics, to Christian behavior, and to the possibility of “following Christ.”
Sayers was not of course suggesting any kind of suppression of these ancient/modern heresies, even if such a thing were vaguely conceivable in a twentieth-century context. Rather, she made a profound observation about the development of Christian thought over time. Theophanes might be granted absolute certainty about the truth of doctrine, but he was in a tiny and miraculous minority. Whatever councils achieved, however successfully churches defeated rival interpretations of faith, those alternative ideas were and are structural parts of the Christian faith and are perhaps integral to human religious psychology. Such beliefs always would reappear and would always need to be engaged and confronted. In an ideal world, free of the power struggles of antiquity, that dialogue can itself be a positive thing, a way in which Christian thought develops its own self-understanding. A religion that is not constantly spawning alternatives and heresies has ceased to think and has achieved only the peace of the grave.
Appendix: The Main Figures in the Story
Acacius: patriarch of Constantinople (471–89). In 482, Acacius persuaded the emperor to issue the Henoticon, a document aimed at winning over both supporters and opponents of the Council of Chalcedon. The ensuing controversy resulted in a decades-long split between the churches of Rome and Alexandria.
Aelia Eudoxia (died 404): empress, wife of the emperor Arcadius, and deadly enemy of John Chrysostom.
Aetius (396–454): Flavius Aetius, Roman general who dominated the Western Roman Empire (c.433–54) and defeated Attila the Hun. He was murdered by the emperor Valentinian III in a court intrigue.
Ambrose (c.340–97): born in Gaul, bishop of Milan from 374, and a dominant voice in the Western church. He established the prestige and independence of the church in the face of Roman imperial authority.
Anastasius (430–518): born in what is now Albania, Roman emperor (491–518), he supported the Monophysite party and was out of communion with the Roman papacy.
Anatolius: representative of Dioscuros of Alexandria in the imperial capital, Constantinople. Following the murder of Flavian of Constantinople in 449, Dioscuros helped place Anatolius in the patriarchate. Despite his early connections, Anatolius turned against the Alexandrian party and allied with the Roman pope. He died violently, probably at the hands of Dioscuros’s followers.
Anthimus: patriarch of Constantinople (535–36). The Roman pope forced his deposition, and he spent years in hiding, protected by the empress Theodora.
Aspar (c.400–471): from the barbarian people of the Alans, Aspar was the leading military figure in the Eastern Roman Empire (c.430–70). The emperor Leo eventually murdered him.
Athanasius of Alexandria (293–373): as secretary to Bishop Alexander of Alexandria, he became a leading spokesman for the Trinitarian position at the Council of Nicea (325). He became bishop himself in 328, but his repeated political battles meant that he would spend much of his time in office in exile.
Babai the Great (551–628): leading scholar and reformer of the Church of the East, the “Nestorian” Church. He gave a sound systematic basis to Two Nature Christology.
Barsaumas: leading Syrian monk and an aggressive supporter of One Nature teachings. His monks provided a frightening armed force that supported Dioscuros at the Second Council of Ephesus.
Basiliscus: Roman emperor (475–76), Basiliscus was the brother-in-law of the emperor Leo. After Leo died, Basiliscus organized a coup d’état against the new emperor, Zeno, and ruled briefly. He tried to place the Monophysite party in power throughout the church.
Benjamin of Alexandria (590–661): a Monophysite, whose brother Mennas was martyred by the Byzantine government, Benjamin served as pope of the Coptic church from 622 until his death in 661.
Candidian: imperial count (senior official) charged to maintain order at the Council of Ephesus in 431. The enemies of Nestorius criticized him as being too favorable to the accused heretic.
Celestine I: Roman pope (422–32), and an important player at the First Council of Ephesus (431).
Chrysaphius: eunuch official who held power at the court of Theodosius II through the 440s; a strong supporter of One Nature theories of Christ and a supporter of Eutyches. He was executed or lynched when the regime changed in 450.
Constans II (630–668): Roman emperor (64
1–68), Constans tried to settle the continuing debate over the natures of Christ by creating a common position on which they could unite, the idea of the One Will, Monotheletism.
Cyril of Alexandria (378–444): nephew of Theophilus, bishop of Alexandria, Cyril succeeded him as bishop in 412. He was an aggressive critic of Nestorius of Constantinople, whom he confronted and defeated at the First Council of Ephesus (431).
Damasus (305–384): born in Spain, he became Roman pope in 366 and greatly expanded the prestige and self-confidence of the papacy.
Diodore of Tarsus: founder of the great Christian school of Antioch, who died around 390.
Dioscuros of Alexandria: personal secretary to Cyril of Alexandria, who in 444 succeeded Cyril as patriarch. Dioscuros was the leading figure at the Second Council of Ephesus (449), the “Gangster Synod,” and he was deposed at the Council of Chalcedon (451). He died in 454.
Domnus of Antioch: nephew of John, patriarch of Antioch, Domnus succeeded him in that office in 441. He tried to defend other bishops who were under attack for being too sympathetic to Two Nature views, so that he himself was deposed at the Second Council of Ephesus (449). He retired to a monastery and made no further claim to his see.
Eudocia (Aelia Eudocia) (401–60): wife of the emperor Theodosius II and a scholar and philosopher in her own right. She long remained a rival at court to her sister-in-law Pulcheria. She was sympathetic to the Monophysites.
Eudoxia (Licinia Eudoxia) (422–62): daughter of Emperor Theodosius II, she married Emperor Valentinian III. She reportedly invited the Vandal king Gaiseric to sack Rome in 455.
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