鲍默《东方教会：亚述基督教图史》第三章：从多样到统一：教父与异端（中英文对照版）

From Diversity to Unity:

Church Fathers and Heretics III

The concept of the Trinity and the question of the nature of Christ

‘For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part.’

Metaphorically speaking, at the start of the second century the edifice of Christianity stood as little more than a great scaffolding, having neither a structured clergy, nor defined symbols, nor a generally accepted canon of the teachings of Jesus, nor a common understanding of God. Most of the construction remained to be done. Numerous architects, with varied visions and blueprints, contributed to the work. In contrast to Manichaeism, in which the religion’s founder himself recorded the fundamentals of his doctrine, and Islam, in which the text of the divine revelation was put in its definitive form about twenty years after the death of the prophet, the corresponding process in Christianity, in which the ‘discovery of the truth’ drew on the work of the Church Fathers, synods, councils and excommunications, lasted for nearly half a millennium. [^1] As a consequence of this slow development of Christian orthodoxy, many divergent doctrines emerged and were declared heresies. Without orthodoxy, no heresy could arise.

St Paul, First Letter to the Corinthians 13:9

The nucleus of fission within the Christian faith community lay in the concept of the Trinity, which signified a watering down of strict Hebrew monotheism.2 In light of the fundamental importance of the saving work of Christ and his central position in early Christian worship,

Jesus is foremost man, not God

Christians could not fall back on the Hebrew transcendence of God but, rather, had to reconsider the relationship of Christ to the God of the Bible. Is there one God – or three? How were the relationships of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit to one another to be understood? Was there a hierarchy within the Trinity?

In the struggle over the understanding of the Trinity, one group of theologians feared that a Trinitarian belief in Father, Son and Holy Spirit would necessarily lead to tritheism, the belief in three subjects, each with its own consciousness and will. Beginning in the second century, the Monarchianists, who were very concerned about monotheism, represented the doctrine of the sole sovereignty (monarchy) of the one God. They incorporated Christ in two different ways, both of which were deemed heretical because they denied the independence of the Son. Dynamic Monarchianism proceeded from the assumption that the man Jesus was first filled with divine power (Dynamis), in the form of a dove, at his baptism in the Jordan, at which point God adopted the man Jesus as Christ. Appealing to Jesus’s exclamation while on the cross, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’,4 proponents of Adoptionism, such as Paul of Samosata (†272), taught that the human Jesus suffered and died on the cross, but the divinity of Christ did not. Since Theodore of Mopsuestia and Nestorius also taught that the human body of Christ, not God, died on the cross, both of these East Syrian Church Fathers were condemned as heretical Adoptionists – an accusation against which Nestorius resolutely defended himself.5 A view similar to dynamic Monarchianism was propounded by the ascetic Jewish-Christian sect called the Ebionites. For them, Jesus was the human son of Mary and Joseph and was made divine only by the pouring out of the Holy Spirit at his baptism in the Jordan. Modalistic Monarchianism, however, declared that both Christ and the Holy Spirit were modalities of God, which essentially eliminated the humanity of Jesus. This will be clarified in the next section.

These Trinitarian questions led, necessarily, to questions of Christology, the centrifugal force which broke Christian unity into three mutually antagonistic ecclesiastical organizations and pushed the Church of the East, in the view of the West, into the realm of heresy. At the heart of the matter lay the question of the nature of Christ: was he God or man or both? In the last case, how were the two natures connected? Did both suffer and die on the cross? Equally hotly disputed was the evaluation of the Jewish Bible, to whose prophecies Christianity appealed but whose Jewish interpretation it rejected. Was the spirit of the Jewish Bible at all compatible with the teachings of Jesus?

In the following section, we will discuss only those divergent doctrines relevant to understanding the East Syrian creeds. Since the questions of the Trinity and of the nature of Christ are so closely related to each other, we will consider them together until the moment of the Council of Constantinople. The doctrine of Theodore of Mopsuestia, the outstanding Church Father of the Church of the East, and Manichaeism will be handled separately. 3

The path to the creed of Chalcedon shows the discovery of the permanent compromise between the two Christological extremes. One extreme overemphasizes the humanity of Christ and led towards the end of the fourth century to the Antiochene school of thought. The other extreme tends to exaggerate the divinity of Christ and neglect the human dimension, and it spawned the Alexandrian theology.

Much more important than these trends was Arianism, which enjoyed great popularity in the

From Diversity to Unity: Church Fathers and Heretics | 33 fourth century and nearly destroyed the unity of the Church. The priest Arius (c.250–336), who was active in Alexandria, was a student of Lucian of Antioch (†312), one of the fathers of the historical biblical exegesis of the school of Antioch. The starting point of Arius’s doctrine was belief in the absolute transcendence of God and the Neo-Platonic principle that there must be a substantive and hierarchical distinction between a begetter, God the Father, and the begotten, Christ. God the Father and Christ are not alike in essence. Christ is not, in essence, God, but rather he is called divine only on account of his unconditional obedience to the Father and is subordinate to him. In a letter, Arius maintained: ‘The Son had a beginning, but God is without beginning.’6 Since there could not be two uncreated first principles – this would require the acknowledgement of two Gods – Christ was part of temporal creation, the most perfect creature. And so Arius reached his famous formula: ‘There was a time when he was not.’7 This statement diminishing the status of Christ had been anticipated by Bishop Dionysius of Alexandria (c.200–265) when he wrote, ‘Before he came to be, he was not.’8 Like Arius, Dionysius wanted to preserve both the transcendence of God and the independence of Christ. Like the later Theodore of Mopsuestia, Arius was convinced of the free will of Christ, which theoretically included the possibility of sin.9 However, since Arius taught neither the full divinity nor the full humanity of Christ – Christ appears as a sort of subordinate demigod – Nestorius strongly opposed him. restrictive concept of a ‘similar substance’ (homoiusios). The Gothic bishop Wulfila (311–382) adopted this position and said of the Trinity: ‘The Holy Spirit is neither God nor Lord, but rather the loyal servant of Christ, not equal to him but rather subject and obedient to him in all things; and the Son is likewise in all things subject and obedient to his God, the Father.’10 This formula was affirmed at the Councils of Rimini and Seleucia in 359/60, but again rejected at the Second Ecumenical Council of Constantinople. The orthodoxy of Nicea was taken up in the formulation of the three Cappadocian Fathers. They attributed an equality of substance to Christ and God the Father and defined God as one substance in three hypostases.11

Despite this renewed condemnation of Arianism, it had adherents in the Eastern Roman Empire until the fifth century. It was for Nestorius, of all people, that this state of affairs had particularly bitter consequences. In his sermon on the occasion of his consecration as patriarch of Constantinople on 10 April 428, he threw down the gauntlet before the Arians by addressing Emperor Theodosius II with these words: ‘Emperor, give me your kingdom purified of the [Arian] heretics, and I will give you in return the Kingdom of Heaven.’12 The Arian partisans, thus provoked, preferred to burn down their own church rather than to hand it over to the new patriarch. The fire spread to neighbouring houses, and an entire quarter of Constantinople went up in flames, leading to great unrest. Nestorius’s inaugural sermon literally turned into an inflammatory oration. The situation was that much more explosive because all the Gothic soldiers stationed in Constantinople were Arian. Although the soldiers remained in their barracks, Nestorius had on his very first day in office incurred the anger of the Byzantine military leadership and a segment of the nobility.

Although the First Ecumenical Council of Nicea condemned Arianism in 325, it spread throughout the empire, not least in the patriarchate of Antioch and among the Goths. While the council, under pressure from the emperor, defined the relationship of Christ to God the Father as ‘of the same substance’ (homousios), many bishops preferred the less

Jesus is foremost God, not man offices of priest and bishop were open to women.16 This rival Church remained active in the West until the end of the fourth century and east of the Euphrates until the seventh/eighth centuries, as one can see in the attacks of Nestorian theologians from this time.

Like dynamic Monarchianism, modalistic Monarchianism was concerned about a strict monotheism. At the start of the second century Sabellius developed this position and taught that the one God acted in different ways (modalities): as Father he was Creator; as Son he was Redeemer; and as Holy Spirit he inspired humanity. This doctrine of Sabellianism, which Tertullian fought and Pope Callixtus (in office 217–222) condemned, led to Patripassianism, according to which the one God necessarily suffered and died on the cross – a heresy fiercely condemned by the theology of the Church of the East. A comparable view, closer to that of the Church of the East, is represented by Tertullian (160–225) when he wrote about the divine and the human in Jesus: ‘We see a doubled nature, not mixed, but connected in one person, God and the human being Jesus.’ According to this formulation, the suffering on the cross affected only the human nature of Jesus, not the divine, since ‘God cannot suffer’.13

Marcionism resolved the dilemma of evil in the world by means of a divine dualism and considered the Good News of Jesus a radical re-evaluation of all Jewish values. The Christian God of love could never be identified with the angry and punitive God of the law. The God of the Jews created the evil world and ruled it with his unmerciful law. The Good News, by contrast, teaches the distant God of love and mercy, who revealed himself in Jesus Christ. Jesus put on a subtle, apparent body and allowed himself to be put on the cross by the evil demiurge, thus redeeming humanity from the grasp of this demiurge. Since Marcion read the Jewish Bible from a strict historical perspective and rejected allegorical exegesis, he reached the conclusion that it was comprehensible only in a Jewish context and thus meaningless for a Christian. Since Jesus prevailed over Mosaic Law, the Jewish scriptures have become irrelevant. Thus Marcion dismissed the Jewish Bible as the Old Testament and replaced it with his New Testament. This included the Gospel of Luke, as well as ten Pauline letters, which he purified of supposed Jewish adulterations. Acting out of his funda- mental Docetism, he also expunged references to Jesus’s youth, baptism and resurrection.

A more or less clear tendency towards Docetism is shared by those doctrines that exaggerate the divine nature of Christ to the detriment of his humanity. Docetism is understood as the view that the human dimension of Christ and his suffering were merely apparent, not real, and he possessed only the appearance of a body.

In 144 the bishop’s son Marcion was summoned before the presbyterium of Rome – the association of priests – in order to clarify his interpretation of the parable of the old wineskins.14 Instead of the usual moral interpretation, Marcion presented a historical one: the new wine symbolizes the teachings of Jesus, the old wineskins the teachings of the Jews and Jewish scripture.15 At the con- clusion of this confrontation the presbyterium expelled Marcion from the Christian community, whereupon he founded his own, ascetically oriented Church, which spread like wildfire. He created a strictly organized clergy, in which the

With his theses, Marcion forced the orthodox Church to take a position and define itself in a corpus of its own. The flood of anti-Marcion writings is evidence not only of the danger this rival Church represented but also of the relevance of his theological discourse. Among these ‘orthodox’ fundamental decisions were the identification of God the Father with the Creator God, the recognition of the Jewish heritage of Christianity and thus of the Jewish scriptures, the

256.18 The Diatessaron was very popular among Syrian Christians and so also in the Church of the East, in which it made an essential contribution to the spread of Christianity. It was only finally superseded at the beginning of the fifth century by the Tetragospels of the Peshitta.19 rejection of dualism, the concept of one canon in two testaments, and, most importantly, the development of its own New Testament.17 This last was brought about first by Tatian.

The church of Dehez in Syria may be one of the extremely rare Marcionite churches left. On the basis of an inscription found on the lintel of the baptistery, the philologist and diplomat Henri Pognon believed that the nave and the baptistery belonged to a Marcionite church, which was converted into a Christian church in the fifth century.16

Tatian (c.110–180) faced the same task as Marcion: he needed to select orthodox works from the various gospels and letters of apostles then in circulation. He chose a method of reduction and around the year 170 assembled from the parallel works of the four Evangelists a Gospel harmony in the form of a running narrative of the life of Jesus, the Diatessaron. The Greek word means ‘from four’, indicating that he based his harmony exclusively on the four canonical gospels. The Syriac or Greek original has been lost. The oldest extant fragment, in Greek, came from Dura Europas and thus must be dated earlier than

It is not without irony that the editor of the Diatessaron, some two years after the completion of his work, was condemned as a heretic. The cause of this was the strict asceticism, called Encratism, which he promoted. According to Tatian’s view, for instance, marriage was incompatible with the attainment of eternal life; only chaste Christians were true Christians.20 Independent of the question of whether the Encratites were heretical or orthodox Christians, they stood as the model for Syrian monasticism.

Much evidence supports the claim that Christian asceticism arose not in Egypt – St Anthony re- nounced the world only around 285 – but rather an entire century earlier, in northern Mesopotamia.21 resurrection of the body, and his dualism made him a Docetist, since he taught that Jesus had no true body, as such a body would have been impure. Although Bardaisan adopted essential elements of Zoroastrianism, he, unlike Marcion, maintained belief in one God, as well as in the Trinity, which he understood as God the Father, Christ the Saviour and the Holy Spirit.28

Like his contemporary Tatian, Bardaisan (154–222), who was active in Edessa (one of the strongholds of Marcionism) battled the heresy of Marcion and likewise ended up a heretic. He emphasized the unity of the Christian God with the Creator God and that creation was good, that no taint of evil was inherent in matter. In contrast to Tatian, he rejected radical asceticism and acknowledged human free will.22 For Bardaisan, human beings, created in the image of God, possess a free will, which distinguishes them from the sun, moon and stars, as these are necessarily beholden to the laws of nature. Human beings can also overcome the influence of the stars – Bardaisan was very interested in astrological matters – and of fate. ‘If he [the human being] were so created that he could do no evil and thus could not receive blame, then the good that he did would also not be his own. For if he cannot do good or evil out of his own will, innocence or blame belongs to the fate that controls him.’23 Bardaisan denied the position that human beings were sinful by nature and thus anticipated a central aspect of East Syrian anthropology. ‘It follows, then, that we human beings are governed by nature in the same way and by fate in various ways, but, by means of our free will, each does as he chooses.’24

The image of a female Holy Spirit was not uncommon in early Eastern Christian com- munities; we find this, for instance, in the Odes of Solomon in a Christian Gnostic hymnbook from the early third century and in the work of Aphrahat. In relation to the question of whether a man can serve two masters, namely God and wife, he concluded, ‘As long as a man has taken no wife, he loves and honours God his Father and the Holy Spirit his Mother and has no other attachment.’29

Besides the Marcionites, Apollinarius of Laodicea and Christian Gnosticism were important exponents of Docetic theology. Gnosticism was not a unified doctrine but, rather, more like an eclectic world-view that appeared in the guise of various religions. Its philosophical kernel is found in Plato’s Phaidon and Politeia, according to which our earthly world represents merely the shadowy reflection of the real world of ideas.30 As a consequence of their disagreement with Zoroastrianism and Jewish apocalypticism, Gnostic thinkers radicalized the dualism implicit in Plato’s approach into the maximum alienation of the human being from the world and from him- or herself. The world and the human body no longer represented ‘only’ a false reflection of true reality but rather were both the wretched work of an evil and inferior demiurge. Only the pneuma, the spark of the soul, has the desire and also the possibility to leave the world of darkness and rise up to the highest God. Here knowledge of one’s own nature, gnosis, serves as the means of salvation; in Christian Gnosticism, Christ takes on the task of calling the chosen and leading them

Bardaisan, who likewise had his own edition of the Gospel text, which cannot be reconstructed today,25 took an interest in Chaldean astrology and its dualistic cosmogony. Like the later Mani, Bardaisan saw creation as the result of a mixing of good with evil. The path to freeing the soul from the prison of the body – that is, the sifting out of the good from the impure – passes over observ- ance of God’s law.26 As a sign supporting the principle of the good, Bardaisan’s followers wore white.27 Bardaisan’s plan for salvation excluded the

to the saving knowledge. Christian Gnostics of the second century, such as, e.g., Satoril, Carpocrates, Cerdon and, above all, Cerinth, distinguished not only between the inferior Creator God and the distant, highest God, but also between the mortal Jesus and the impassible Christ.31 As has been mentioned, East Syrian Christology reaches a comparable conclusion, although it begins with entirely different assumptions and uses different concepts. While it emphasizes the ontological unity of Christ, it also states, like Greek Orthodoxy, that he suffered and died as man, not as God. a two-nature doctrine of Christ, called dyophysit- ism, since this threatened the conceptual unity of Christ, so he suggested a new way. Like most theologians of his time, Apollinarius subscribed to the Platonic view that the human being consisted of body, soul and spirit (will). Applying this model to Jesus, Apollinarius objected above all to Arius’s opinion that Jesus’s will would have been able to sin. In order to protect the fundamental sinless- ness of Jesus, he declared that in Jesus the divine Logos took the place of a human will. Thus Apollinarius denied Jesus the experience of moral development, since the Word-made-flesh was perfect and unchangeable.32

Christian theologians such as Tertullian (c.160–225), Irenaeus (c.140–202) and Hippolytus (c.170–236) argued against the Gnostics as follows. There is only one God, who created the world, which is inherently good, so the acceptance of a second, inferior, demiurge is absurd. Yet more absurd are the cosmological speculations of the Gnostics and their conviction that the path of salvation led not over the redeeming work of Christ carried out on the cross but rather over a secret knowledge accessible to only a small elite. The salvation of Christ is not restricted to an elite but, rather, is open to all people who believe in him and his message. It should also be noted that, although early Christianity overcame Gnosticism, it was nonetheless influenced by its disparagement of and contempt for the material and corporeal. Like numerous adherents of Marcion and Bardaisan, many Gnostics found a new home in Manichaeism from the mid-third century onwards.

As will be explained below,33 the Asian Greeks Diodore of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia, who are recognized as Church Fathers by the East Syrians, opposed this approach, since in it the human nature of Christ all but withered away. If one followed Apollinarian doctrine, Christ possessed only a human body and a human soul, but no human spirit. In this case, Jesus had no authentic human nature, which called into question his saving work, since the salvation of humanity presumed the full acceptance of human nature by Christ. Although the Second Ecumenical Council of Constantinople con- demned the teaching of Apollinarius in 381, the Miaphysite (one-nature) formula of the bishop of Laodicea remained in circulation and laid the groundwork in the middle of the next century for the extreme monophysitism of Eutyches (378–454).

Since Christianity was, by 381/392 at the latest, the state religion of the Roman Empire, conciliar decisions served as civil laws, as soon as the emperor ratified them. Local bishops were the first to perceive this, as they were obligated to uphold the opinions declared orthodox by the councils. Opposition to conciliar pronounce- ments led to civil sanctions; dissenting bishops were sent into exile and replaced with orthodox ones. However, since the bishops often had at their disposal a strong following, dismissal by force could not be carried out immediately, for

The doctrine of Apollinarius of Laodicea (c.310–390), which was directed against Arianism, had significant consequences for the history of early Christianity and for the patriarchate of Antioch. Bishop Apollinarius, together with his theological opponent, the Church Father Diodore of Tarsus (†392), was one of the first to shift the focus of the theological debate on the Trinity to the understanding of the nature(s) of Christ. He was concerned about the Diodoran approach of

the threat of revolt was too great. This was all the truer when, in the traditional hotbeds of unrest in the patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch, an anti-Byzantine nationalistic reflex arose. During the tumult of that time there were many casual- ties, and, in the case of the Melkite patriarch of Alexandria, Proterios, even murder: an angry mob killed the unfortunate patriarch in 457 in the baptistery of his cathedral.34 Other prominent victims were Flavian, the deposed archbishop of Constantinople, who was so badly injured by monks and soldiers at the so-called ‘Robber Synod’ of 449 that he died of his wounds three days later; and Bishop Severian of Scythopolis, who was murdered in 451 on the return from Chalcedon.35 For these reasons, in the large cities communities often remained divided, each with their own clergy and their own churches. Although canon law assigned only one bishop per city, for a time Antioch had four vying for power! It was in this patriarchate that the battles between Miaphysites, Dyophysites and Melkites loyal to the emperor raged most fiercely. and Christianity. A critical retrospective of two millennia of Christology also reminds us that it always remains ‘Christo-Logy’, human talk about Jesus Christ, which is embedded in the social, cultural and political context of its time.

Christianity becomes the Roman state Church

There are various dates that could mark the start of Christianity as the Roman state Church. In 312, after his victory in the battle of the Milvian Bridge, Emperor Constantine I (ruled 312–337) declared himself a Christian; in the following year he proclaimed the Edict of Milan, which guaranteed religious freedom.37 Since the emperor pronounced the Christian god as his god, this god was elevated, eo ipso, to the god of the empire. With Emperor Theodosius I (ruled 379–395), the process of the Christianization of the Roman state, begun with Emperor Constantine, led to a nationalization of the Church when, in 381, he forbade the conversion from Christianity to another religion and then, ten years later, put an end to all pagan worship within the empire and had the pagan temples destroyed or turned into churches. However, Constantine’s successors had already banned pagan sacrifices in 341, and in 346 had decreed the closing of pagan temples, although in 361 Emperor Julian the Apostate (ruled 361–363) undertook the last, unsuccessful, attempt to create a Christian–pagan synthesis and had the closed temples reopened.38

However, the intensity of these theological disputes – unimaginable to us in the twenty-first century – cannot be explained just on the basis of political circumstances. As W. Klein has aptly stated, at that time ‘dogma was not yet the specialized science of a few theologians, but rather the stuff of everyday conversation, and it resembled modern disputes over party politics’.36 Finally, the question arose of whether Christian dogma could be brought into agreement with the scholarship of the time – that is, Hellenistic philosophy. Of concern was the project of describing and clarifying Christian doctrine, particularly the incarnation of Christ, with the help of philosophical concepts. The solutions worked out in this formative period remained valid in their important characteristics until the early Renaissance, when the redefinition of the parameters of scholarship radically called into question the alleged compatibility of scholarship

It is hardly surprising that the Christian Church first expressed thanks for its sudden recognition as the state religion with a certain submissive- ness and gladly accepted ‘golden chains’ in the form of financial support from the state. Because Constantine wanted to defend the threatened unity of the empire with a common religion, he laid great importance on the unity of doctrine within the Church – thus setting an example for

his successors. For this reason, he convened the Synod of Rome in 313 to resolve the problem of the North African Donatists and the Council of Nicea in 325 to stem the tide of Arianism. The extent to which the ecclesiastical leadership made concessions to the emperor is shown by the following decision of the Council of Arles from 314: ‘Those who surrender their weapons in peacetime shall not take communion.’39 Official Christianity had deviated so significantly from the radical pacifism of Jesus that it excluded from the Eucharist those who refused military service! valid. Now theological discourse was subject to state censorship. The closing of the school of philosophers in Athens in 529 further reduced freedom of opinion, and as a consequence the West gradually lost its Hellenistic heritage. Heterodox Christians and pagans were from then on abominable criminals, who had to be dealt with by civil justice. The persecution of heterodox Christians began on a large scale in 431 with the oppression of the followers of Nestorius in the patriarchate of Antioch, and reached a tragic zenith with the Inquisition. It was again the Nestorians who, towards the end of the Inquisition, fell victim to it; in 1599 the Nestorian Thomas Christians of Kerala were forcibly converted to Catholicism by the Inquisition and had their entire written heritage burned.

The Council of Nicea also established the division of the Church into metropolitan sees, which assigned the bishops of their respective provinces. Rome was the metropolitan see for the West, Alexandria for Egypt and Libya, and Antioch for the parts of Asia belonging to the Roman Empire. The Council of Constantinople of 381 granted the metropolitan see of Constantinople precedence over those of Antioch and Alexandria, since Constantinople was the ‘new Rome’.40 The primacy of the bishop of Rome, however, estab- lished under Pope Damasus (in office 366–384), remained unchanged.41 Finally, in 451, the Council of Chalcedon elevated Jerusalem to a patriarchal see as well, thus creating the so-called pentarchy. It was made up of five patriarchates, listed here by rank: Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem.42 However, the pentarchy applied only to the Christian world within the empire and pertained to neither the autonomous Churches beyond the imperial borders, such as, e.g., that of Armenia or the Church of the East, nor the Arian Churches of the Germanic peoples, such as, e.g., the Goths and Vandals. With the Arab conquest of Egypt and the Middle East in the seventh century, the patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem lost most of their importance.

A jubilee address of the church historian Eusebius of Caesarea reveals the emperor’s vision of close ties between the Church and the civil power structure. In it Eusebius lauds the emperor as the earthly likeness of the heavenly ruler, on whose behalf he rules.43 He thus anti- cipated the instrumentalization of Buddhism practised by several dynasties in ancient China, according to which the emperor was the likeness of the Buddha Vairocana or Maitreya and his representative on Earth.44 This vision of Emperor Constantine also explains his personal interest in the defeat of Arianism, since it threatened his position as the divinely blessed emperor. If Jesus was, in the end, merely a human being adopted by God, what special claim could the emperor make? Despite its proximity to worldly power, the Church did not allow itself to be reduced to a handmaiden of the state. The institution of the papacy prevented a union of personnel of ecclesiastical and civil power and established an unstable balance between the two authorities, which was continually being redefined. Thanks to this relative independence and the fact that the emperor no longer lived in Rome, the Church was barely affected by the collapse of the Western

The decrees of Theodosius brought an end to religious freedom in the Roman Empire, and the Council of Constantinople, which he convened, established the creed of Nicea as universally

were called Monophysites (‘one’ and ‘nature’) or Miaphysites, since they taught a union of the two natures.47 Because the non-Chalcedonian churches, such as the Syrian Orthodox and Coptic Church, reject the description ‘monophysite’, as it more accurately suits the one-nature doctrine of Eutyches, we will use the term ‘miaphysite’, which they adopted from the Mia-Physis formula used by Patriarch Cyril of Alexandria.48 The Western patriarch of Rome finally referred to Tertullian, who spoke of two natures in one person of Christ and thus stood close to the Antiochene position.

Roman Empire. The shift of the imperial capital to Constantinople in 330 freed the bishop of Rome from the threat of state control.

In short order, Christianity’s elevation to Roman state religion brought to the fore the explosive question of the status of those Christians who lived outside the imperial borders, especially if they belonged to states hostile to Rome. The Christians east of the Euphrates soon learned the painful answer.45

The foundations of East Syrian theology

The term ‘School of Antioch’ ought not be understood as designating an unchanging doctrinal position but rather a certain method of biblical interpretation, strongly marked by reflections on the nature of Jesus. The school of thought of Antioch proceeded along text-critical and historical lines, paying close attention to the literal words of Scripture, in contrast to the School of Alexandria, which interpreted the Bible allegorically. The exegetes of Antioch were influenced by the Greek bishops Diodore of Tarsus (†392) and Theodore of Mopsuestia (352–428), who both belonged to the patriarchate of Antioch and wrote in the struggle against the Miaphysite position of Apollinarius. Diodore’s first principle was: ‘We strongly prefer the his- torical to the allegorical.’49 By contrast, allegorical exegesis, developed by Clement (c.150–215) and Origen (c.185–254), looked behind the biblical text for another, second, sense, which had no inherent connection to the literal content, as is the case with symbols. Roughly speaking, the exegesis of Antioch is rational, synoptic and Aristotelian, and that of Alexandria is mystical- allegorical, Platonic and Johannine.

The Church Fathers Diodore of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia

The attempt to define the nature of Jesus Christ is a truly Herculean labour, for it requires finding a common denominator between the mutually exclusive concepts of complete God and complete man. In addressing this question, the choice of starting point has a decisive effect on the chain of reasoning. At that time, as Nestorius noted, the theologians of the Eastern patriarchates, who argued about a Christological creed, were adherents of either the School of Antioch or the School of Alexandria. Supporters of the former proceeded from the historical person of Jesus, as he is portrayed in the Synoptic Gospels, and then tried to understand how this man Jesus could simultaneously be God. The latter group, by contrast, began with the Word of God from the prologue of the Gospel of John and tried to understand what it meant that the Word became flesh.46 The former laid the greatest significance on the wholeness of the human dimension of Jesus, while the latter emphasized his divinity. Because the Antiochenes spoke of two complete natures of Christ, they were called Dyophysites (from the Greek ‘dyo’ and ‘physis’, two and natures); the Alexandrians, on the other hand,

As far as Christology is concerned, it is obvious that historical exegesis emphasizes the human dimension of Christ and thus favours a sharp distinction between the divine and human natures. It was necessary to avoid the later Miaphysite position, the belief that, in Christ,

‘the humanity was absorbed by the divinity, like a drop of honey dissolved in the sea’.50 Eustathius of Antioch (†337) stands as founder of the historical Christological approach. He character- ized Christ as a ‘God-bearing man’, who freely decided to obey the wish of God the Father and take upon himself death on the cross.51 Thus, as the human being, acting out of free will, either obeys the law of God or turns away from Him and commits sin, Jesus Christ took upon himself the work of salvation. subject to the human being’s own limits and weaknesses, he redeemed them with the resur- rection and granted to them the attributes of divinity. He thus opened the way for human beings to do like him.

Even though Diodore underlined the whole- ness of the humanity of Jesus and his soul, he also maintained his complete divinity; for him, the two natures exist side by side, without mixing. As a consequence of the presumed separation, Diodore could attribute a moral development to the human soul of Jesus, which attained perfection by means of the action of the Holy Spirit in his baptism in the Jordan, and could, at the same time, avoid ascribing suffering and death to the divinity. He thus opposed the so- called Theopaschites, who attributed suffering and death to the Son of God. ‘We will not allow ourselves to be misled into believing that the God Logos suffered. It was rather the child of Mary, to whom sonship was granted, the temple of the God-Logos, who was destroyed by the Jews, from which, however, the one who lived therein arose.’54 It is clear from this statement that, for Diodore, one suffered death and another rose from it – an idea which runs as a leitmotif through Nestorian Christology. On this matter he could rely on Athanasius, the leading Church Father at the Council of Nicea. Since ‘it was impossible for the Word to suffer death, being immortal, the Son of the Father takes to himself a body capable of death’.55 The image of the indwelling of the divine nature in the visible person of Jesus was very popular among the Nestorians. As the fourteenth-century Book of the Tower maintained, ‘The divinity and the humanity were united in the visible temple [Jesus].’ In another passage we can read the following poetic metaphor: ‘God sent his Word in a paper wrapping, which was the human being [Jesus], to show humanity the path of faith.’56 The crux of this approach is found in the definition of how the two natures, the Son of God and the

That the salvation of humanity is impossible without Christ’s full possession of human nature and the simultaneous preservation of his full divinity was also the conviction of the power- fully eloquent bishop of Constantinople, John Chrysostom (347–407). ‘Hell will spit out those who assert that our Lord Jesus Christ [after the union of the two natures] has only one nature. Now, which nature do they destroy? If the divine, then there is no salvation. If the human, then humanity loses all hope of eternal life.’52 The significance of the absolute wholeness of both natures in Christ is evident when seen against the background of belief in bodily salvation, which plays a central role in the Syrian Churches in general and in the Church of the East in particular. Its essence consists in the human being approaching and approximating the divine, a concept which unimaginably raises the value of humanity. St Athanasius (292–373) neatly expressed the idea that God’s becoming flesh implied the divinization of human beings: ‘He [the Word of God] became man, so that we might become God.’53

For the teachers of the School of Antioch, the wholeness of the two natures represented the fundamental assumption for the work of salvation. As John Chrysostom had stated, only the complete, unmixed divinity possessed the power to save, and only the complete humanity enabled the divinization of human beings. Although the humanity of Christ was for a time

human Jesus, relate to one another, insofar as they remain whole and unmixed, for here lies the danger of a loss of the ontological unity of Christ. of the natures must remain necessary and the union of the prosopon [person] must be preserved without confusion.’60 Although, shortly after the Council of Ephesus in 431, the teachings of Diodore and Theodore fell under suspicion of containing heretical ideas, both ‘Nestorian’ Church Fathers were regarded as orthodox in their own day. More than a century later, in 553, the Fifth Ecumenical Council, acting for political reasons and under pressure from Emperor Justinian, declared as heretical the person and writings of Theodore, which amounted to a condemnation of the entire Church of the East.

Diodore’s student Theodore of Mopsuestia further developed the Christology of Antioch and stands as father of East Syrian dogma. Following his teacher, Theodore tried to under- stand the unity of Christ as an indwelling of the Word of God. ‘God wanted to clothe himself in humanity, which was fallen, and raise it up again – he, made up of a body and an immortal and rational soul. He took this on for the sake of our salvation and in this way effected salvation for our life.’57 Like Diodore, Theodore distinguished between the second Person of the Trinity, Christ, the only-begotten Son of God the Father, and the son of Mary, Jesus of the House of David. As a consequence of this distinction, the discussion of the definition of Mary flared up, contributing decisively to Nestorius’s unfortunate fate.

Nestorius and the

Council of Ephesus

Nestorius as patriarch of Constantinople

With Theodore, the foundations of East Syrian theology were laid. First, the conviction that Christ is the Second Adam, who, by taking on a complete human nature, overcame death for all human beings. Like Paul, Theodore and Nestorius derived from this the obligation on the part of Christians to imitate the perfect life of the historical Jesus. This view led to the question of which criteria true Christians must fulfil in order to receive the sacraments. For instance, is celibacy required, since Jesus had lived chastely?58 Second, such human qualities as suffering and death could not be ascribed to the divine nature of Christ, and, third, the full humanity of Jesus Christ was emphasized.59

In 428, with his appointment as patriarch of Constantinople, the monk Nestorius stepped onto the world stage. As a consequence of his pointed exegesis and ascetic manner, he behaved in Byzantine court politics like the proverbial bull in a china shop. Three years later he was deposed and sent into exile. How did this personal tragedy come to pass, and why did he confer his name upon the Church of the East, of which he was never a member? The main reasons for the failure of his patriarchate lie, on the one hand, in certain character traits of Nestorius – in his uncompromising zeal for orthodoxy as he understood it – and, on the other, in theological formulas that offered opponents room for misunderstanding and opportunities for attack.

Like the later Nestorius and Nestorian Christology in general, Theodore appeared vulnerable to the accusation of supporting a two-son doctrine. ‘But they [Theodore’s opponents] invent charges that, if we speak of two complete entities, we must also speak of two sons. But we do not speak of two sons, one son is properly recognized, as the separation

Nestorius, born around 382, was of Mesopotamian origin.61 He studied under the East Syrian Church Father Theodore of Mopsuestia and then entered the nearby monastery of Euprepius, where he received ordination to the priesthood. He soon won a reputation for great eloquence, theological

acuity and ascetic living, which inspired Emperor Theodosius II (ruled 408–450) to summon him to Constantinople as successor to the late Patriarch Sisinnius. Although Theodore cautioned Nestorius about his zeal upon his departure for Constantinople and advised him that the common theological views of Constantinople differed in important respects from those of Antioch, Nestorius attempted, immediately upon his assumption of the office, simultaneously to solve all the problems he discovered. The patriarchate of Constantinople did, in fact, need reform. The upper clergy suffered from internal estrangements, the capital teemed with real and alleged heretics, and the monks, who held ominous political power, led dissipated lives in Constantinople. To make matters worse, the most powerful figure behind the throne was the emperor’s sister Pulcheria, who controlled her weak younger brother. However, Pulcheria, of all people, was the patroness of the monks and of Proclus, the candidate Nestorius had defeated. It may be assumed that Theodosius hoped his appoint- ment of the outsider Nestorius would subdue the monks and get him out from under his sister’s thumb. which also served, in some cases, as striptease clubs and bordellos. Nestorius then tackled the overdue reform of the monks. This was directed at limiting the activities of the monks to their monasteries, breaking their influence over state and Church and forcing them to adopt an ascetic lifestyle. For the monks were hanging around the streets at night, frequenting dives and associating with prostitutes. In this way he not only brought upon himself the hostility of the monks but also got in the sights of Augusta Pulcheria, patroness of the monks. He increased her disapproval by restricting the liturgical prerogatives of women of high standing, which were typical of Byzantium. Among these was the right of these women to participate in vigils held in the churches and in common meals with priests and monks. Finally, he personally insulted the emperor’s sister on more than one occasion. Among other offences, he refused to give her Holy Communion within the choir, since only clergy and the emperor were permitted inside it. Her vanity wounded, Pulcheria swore revenge.

The next Pandora’s box Nestorius opened was the question of the status of Mary. This was a function of the definition of the nature(s) of Christ. If the accent was placed on the divine nature, the term Theotokos, God-bearer, would be proper, but, if it was placed on the human dimension, the characterization Anthropotokos, human-bearer, would be more appropriate. In his apologia written during his Egyptian exile, he described how he found this dispute upon his arrival in Constantinople: ‘Representatives of both sides came together to the episcopal palace. They sought a resolution of their debate to which both sides could agree. One side acknowledged the term Theotokos, the other Anthropotokos.’ Once Nestorius had determined that both parties confessed the divine as well as the human nature of Christ – that is, that their problem was semantic in nature – he proposed: ‘Let us hold fast to the Gospel, which states that Christ

With no power base at his disposal, Nestorius set to work immediately and incautiously. As has already been mentioned, in his inaugural sermon he sharply attacked the supporters of Arius, leading to turmoil in the capital and almost provoking the intervention of the Arian Gothic soldiers. He thus made an enemy of the military leadership. Despite this setback, a month later he compelled the emperor to revoke the freedom of worship for such dissenters as the Arians, Apollinarians, Novatians, Montanists, etc., and to expel the Manichaeans from the cities, which broadened his circle of foes. Next, the new patriarch raised the ire of the local citizenry by banning from the city the theatres, which were as numerous as they were popular – and

Emperor Theodosius II (ruled

408–450) condemns Patriarch Nestorius (382–451), shown in the lower right, as a heretic. On the emperor’s right sits Patriarch Cyril of Alexandria, to his right Bishop Memnon of Ephesus (far left of picture from viewer’s perspective); on the emperor’s left is Pope Celestine I of Rome, to his left Patriarch John of Antioch (far right of picture from viewer’s perspective). Post-Byzantine mural in the St Sozomenos Church in Galata, Cyprus, from 1513. is born, and use the term Christotokos, Christ- bearer.’62 It is clear from Nestorius’s remarks that he considered both terms, Theotokos and Anthropotokos, equally legitimate, insofar as they were correctly understood. At the same time, however, the patriarch’s chaplain and confidante Anastasius poured oil on the fire by openly attacking the term ‘Theotokos’ in a sermon on 22 November 428. Since Nestorius failed to correct Anastasius’s statement in his advent sermons, the clergy and monks got the impression that Nestorius wanted to impose

Antiochene ideas on Constantinople. difficult to comprehend intellectually, into the idea, congenial to popular piety, of a familiar trio of gods – God the Father, Mary the Mother, and Jesus as their shared Son – presented a genuine danger in the Mediterranean region, which featured several pagan divine triads.

Mary enjoyed a widespread and popular cult, which had first arisen in Egypt. It developed there out of the cult of the goddess Isis and her divine son Horus, which had been extremely popular in the Roman period. In many portrayals of the Madonna, the resemblance to images of Isis, with the infant Horus at her breast, is striking. The highly emotional veneration of the Mother of God represents a Christianization of the Isis cult. This particular form of popular piety was also present in the patriarchate of Constantinople, not only in the capital but also in Ephesus, where it was heir to the ancient cult of Artemis and assimilated the figures of ancient mother goddesses into Christianity.63 Thus, when Anastasius appeared to attack the cult of the Mother of God and deny the divinity of Christ, indignation raged, and violent unrest again racked the capital. Startled, Nestorius tried to calm things down with a sermon he gave in early 430: ‘I have already declared several times that when one of you or someone of a simple [nature] prefers the term Theotokos, I will say nothing against this. Just don’t make a goddess out of the Virgin.’64 Nestorius did not oppose the veneration of Mary but rather the worship of her.

With regard to theology, Nestorius was less willing to compromise. ‘Mary bore a human being, the mediator of divinity, but not God.’ 68 In the end, Nestorius could not accept the term ‘Theotokos’, since it implied a Theopaschite Christology, according to which God was subject to the natural conditions of birth, suffering and death. Beginning with Theodore of Mopsuestia, rejection of the designation ‘Theotokos’ remained a constant of East Syrian theology. The last great theologian of the Church of the East, the metro- politan of Nisibis Mar Odisho (c.1250–1318), argued rather polemically against this concept. First, if Mary is the mother of God, and this term refers to the Trinity, then Mary is the mother of the Trinity. Second, if Mary is the God-bearer, and Christ is the Son of God, then Mary is the mother of God the Father, and Christ is her grandson.69

Nestorius’s attempts at appeasement came too late, for he was isolated and opposed by a hostile alliance made up of Pulcheria, the courtiers, the military leadership, the monks and the rabble of the city. This faction sought the lever with which they could prise their disliked bishop from the patriarchal throne. They found it in Cyril, the patriarch of Alexandria, who, for his part, sought a pretext for bringing down Nestorius. More than a year before the Council of Ephesus in the summer of 431, the fate of Patriarch Nestorius was sealed.

That Nestorius’s warning not to idolize Mary was not unjustified is demonstrated by the examples of a Christian nomadic tribe from the Syrian desert, which worshipped Mary as a goddess,65 and the apocryphal Gospel of the Hebrews, where the following statement of Jesus is found: ‘The Saviour said, “Immediately my mother, the Holy Spirit, seized me”’.66 From the independent cult of Mary and the equating of her with the Holy Spirit, it was but a short step to tritheism, the belief in three gods. Bishop Maruta (†419) referred to a group of Montanists as an example. ‘These call the blessed Mary a goddess and say that a heavenly being joined with her and the Son of God was borne by her.’67 The devolution of the concept of the Trinity,

The theological dispute with Patriarch Cyril of Alexandria understood as substance – in three hypostases – understood as persons. We can translate the Greek words usia and physis as ‘nature’, a universal category, a general and immutable type in the sense of a species. So there is the usia of God or the general species of human being. The Syriac word kyana corresponds to the Greek usia. The difficulty began with the term ‘hypostasis’. Cyril and most non-Antiochene theologians interpreted the Greek word in the Neo-Platonic sense as a concrete realization of the usia, corresponding to the concrete person. Nestorius, however, when referring to a concrete person, used the term prosopon, in Syriac parsopa, and inserted the term ‘hypostasis’, Syriac qnoma, in between ‘usia’ and ‘person’. Nestorius and the Church of the East understood the designation ‘hypostasis’ or ‘qnoma’ in the Aristotelian sense, as a material reality bound up with its species. The qnoma is an individual, representative realization of its nature, but does not necessarily exist for itself. The qnoma – that is – the hypostasis, is not yet the person, the prosopon. The prosopon is defined as the sum of accidental qualities that make the appearances of two hypostases different. Such qualities are, for instance, sex, hair colour, character traits, degree of intelligence, talents, etc. These qualities distinguish Peter from Paul or John from James. Applied to the example of the human being, usia/kyana refers to the general species of human, hypostasis/qnoma to a real, existing realization, and prosopon/parsopa to the appearance of the actual person.70 In brief, ‘person’ denotes the external appearance and ‘hypostasis’ the inner reality.

In 412 Cyril (c.375–444) succeeded his uncle Theophilus as patriarch of Alexandria. His character was in direct contrast to Nestorius’s. Cyril was ambitious and power-hungry, politically savvy and a master schemer, who did not hesitate knowingly to misquote his opponent Nestorius to the pope. Cyril’s motivations for using the alliance hostile to Nestorius as an instrument to effect his fall were threefold. First, in 381 the patriarchate of Alexandria was demoted from its position as the second most important patriarchate after Rome to the third, in favour of Constantinople, which aroused great resentment in Alexandria. Second, Cyril strived either to become patriarch of Constantinople or to re-establish Alexandria’s former place in the hierarchy. Third, Nestorius’s rejection of the term ‘Theotokos’ represented a provocation for Alexandrians and Egyptians.

Cyril chose the argument that Nestorius’s rejection of the designation of the Mother of God showed that he – like Paul of Samosata, who had been condemned as a heretic in 268 – maintained that Jesus was merely a man, whom God later adopted on account of his moral development. On the occasion of the Easter sermon of 429 he publicly charged Nestorius with denying the divinity of Christ. At the same time, an increasingly aggressive correspondence began between the two patriarchs, culminating in twelve extraordinarily sharply formulated anathemas by Cyril against Nestorius. Before we briefly sketch out the relevant arguments, three important philosophical terms – ‘nature’, ‘hypostasis’, and ‘person’ – need to be clarified. Doing so will show that the two adversaries sometimes interpreted the same terms differently.

Both Cyril and Nestorius spoke of a divine and a human nature in Christ, but they differed from one another in the determination of the modality of unity. In his second letter to Nestorius, Cyril wrote, ‘Two different natures came together [in Christ] in a hypostatic union, in order to form a unity.’71 But, because Nestorius defined the term

The fundamental basis is the definition of the Trinity from 381, which speaks of one usia –

‘hypostasis’ as a pre-personal reality, the concept of a hypostatic union was unacceptable to him, since he saw this as a mixing of the two natures. Such a mixing endangered the integrity of the human nature and led to the idea that the divine in Christ was subject to such earthly phenomena as birth, suffering and death.72 For Nestorius it was unthinkable that a usia (nature) could exist in a prosopon without a corresponding hypostasis. He countered Cyril’s hypostatic union with the union in the prosopon: ‘In Christ two natures and two hypostases are united in the prosopon.’ He expanded this formula, which was adopted by the Church of the East, as follows: ‘I confess in One Christ two natures without mixing. In his divinity he was brought forth by the Father, in his humanity by the Holy Virgin.’73

Patriarch Cyril of Alexandria (375–444). Mural in the Syrian Orthodox monastery of Mar Musa, Syria, twelfth century.

In the formulation of Babai the Great (551–628), still recognized today, the creed of the Church of the East reads: ‘One is Christ, the Son of God, glorified by all in two natures; begotten by the Father without beginning before time; born of Mary in his humanity, united in the fullness of time in one body. His divinity is not of the nature of the mother, nor is his humanity of the nature of the Father. The natures are preserved in their qnome [hypostases] in one person of the one sonship.’74

Nestorius did not give up, Cyril resorted to a ruse and turned to Pope Celestine I (†432). In his writings he did not hesitate to distort citations from Nestorius’s sermons and writings, in order to make them appear as heretical as possible.78 These libels found in the pope a sympathetic audience; for he was angry that Nestorius had welcomed the condemned adherents of Pelagius in Constantinople.79 In August 430 Celestine convened a synod in Rome, which condemned Nestorius as a heretical follower of Paul of Samosata and conclusively prescribed use of the term ‘Theotokos’. Nestorius had to correct his errors or face deposition.

Cyril opposed the formulation of Nestorius: ‘He who rejects the hypostatic union commits the error of two Sons.’75 Since Cyril equated the term ‘hypostasis’ with the term ‘person’, the phrase ‘in two hypostases’ in Nestorius’s formulation must have meant, to his mind, ‘in two persons’, which is heretical. Although the noose slowly tightened around Nestorius, he refused to heed the advice of his mentor, Patriarch John of Antioch, and accept the term ‘Theotokos’.76 By doing so, he could have pulled the rug out from under Cyril’s reasoning. Instead, in his second letter to Cyril, he reiterated that ‘the Holy Virgin is more properly called Christotokos than Theotokos’.77 Since

The synod authorized Cyril to settle the matter. He seized the opportunity and confronted Nestorius with twelve anathemas, which he had ten days to sign or else he would be condemned. These anathemas were so pointedly formulated

that Nestorius could not submit to them without losing his credibility. This is clear from the first two and the final threatened condemnations: these circumstances, Nestorius, who was present in Ephesus, refused to participate in this biased council. The correspondence between the two opponents was read aloud, and within days, and without discussion, Nestorius was condemned in absentia as a heretic and relieved of his office.81 The decision was made known to Nestorius in writing. ‘The holy council, meeting in Ephesus by the grace of God and at the behest of our pious and Christ- loving emperor, informs Nestorius, the new Judas: know that, on account of your impious doctrines and disobedience to the canons, you have been condemned by the holy synod after the findings of the ecclesiastical determinations on 22 June of the current month of June, and you have forfeited all ecclesiastical titles.’82

One who does not confess Immanuel as the true God and thus the Holy Virgin as God- bearer, because she bore in the flesh the God Logos born of the flesh, is condemned. 2. One who does not confess that the Logos, begotten of God the Father, is hypostatically united with the flesh is condemned. 12. One who does not confess that the Logos

God suffered in the flesh and was crucified in the flesh and tasted death in the flesh is condemned.80

Nestorius rejected the anathemas as the monstrous product of the condemned doctrine of Apollinarius and demanded that the emperor call a general council, which he did, inviting all the bishops on 7 June 431 to Ephesus. The selection of Ephesus as the location of the council, presumably suggested by Pulcheria, was a bad omen for Nestorius. The city lived from the veneration of the Mother of God, which was heir to the pagan cult of Artemis. For this reason, the local bishop Memnon was an ardent supporter of the term ‘Theotokos’ and a bitter opponent of his patriarch.

When the bishops of Antioch, under the leadership of their patriarch, John, arrived in Ephesus on 26 June, they held an opposing council and, as a countermove, deposed Cyril and Memnon. This led to a stalemate, which only the emperor could resolve. First he placed all three adversaries under house arrest. But recalling the earlier popular tumult directed against the patriarch and renewed pressure on the part of the monks, he let Nestorius fall and sent him back to his monastery. By means of bribery, Cyril and Memnon succeeded in regaining their offices. While Nestorius was, on a personal level, the loser in this dispute, with regard to dogma Cyril had to submit two years later and sign a formula of reconciliation that stood closer to Nestorius’s ideas than to his own. The Church itself emerged as the true loser, as over the course of the next 20 years its unity shattered into three mutually antagonistic Churches. Looked at in the short term, the removal of Nestorius from office signified a victory for the patriarchates of Rome and Alexandria over those of Constantinople and Antioch.

Nestorius’s removal as patriarch

The Third Ecumenical Council of Ephesus was an undignified event. Egyptian monks and sailors ran wild in the streets and threatened supporters of the patriarch. An additional and, indeed, decisive misfortune for Nestorius was the late arrival of the bishops of the patriarchate of Antioch, as well as the imperial and papal delegations. Against the protest of 68 bishops, Cyril opened the council on 22 June with ‘his’ – in some cases demonstrably bribed – bishops. Since he was leader of the council, Cyril functioned simultaneously as prosecutor and judge. In light of

Ephesus placed in the stocks of heresy not only Nestorius but also the Antiochene school of

thought. More than a dozen Antiochene bishops were deposed, and adherents of the school were persecuted on behalf of the state, triggering a wave of immigration into neighbouring Persia, which culminated in the closing of the School of the Persians in Edessa. It was this development, combined with the efforts of the Church of the East to distance itself, for political reasons, as much as possible from Byzantium, that motivated the Church of the East to appropriate Theodore of Mopsuestia as their key teacher. the manuscript was the Bazaar of Heracleides, the principal work of Nestorius. In it he refuted point by point all the accusations made against him. When he completed it in 451, a few weeks before his death, he sensed his imminent end and closed with the following tranquil words: ‘The moment of my death now draws near, and every day I beg God to release me, whose eyes have seen God’s grace. Rejoice, you desert, my friend, provider, and home, and you, exile, my mother, which will keep my body after my death until resurrection, God willing. Amen.’87

Nestorius spent four years in his monastery, until, at the instigation of his one-time mentor John of Antioch, he was sent into exile in Egypt. At the same time, Emperor Theodosius ordered the burning of the collected writings of his former patriarch – a harbinger of the Inquisition. In order to expunge every memory of Nestorius, children who bore his name were rebaptized with new names.83 In exile Nestorius remained a keen observer of developments in the Church and produced numerous writings, although he harboured no illusions about a possible rehabilitation. ‘I have lost interest in human matters. I have left the world and live for Him who gave me life.’84 Although his friends pressured him repeatedly to turn to the pope and clarify his theological views in writing, he refused, for he was aware of ‘the prejudices against [his] person’.85

Did Nestorius indeed teach the heresy that bears his name? If we understand ‘Nestorianism’ as that heresy that sees in Christ two persons, which are connected to one another only in a loose moral bond (i.e. that teaches two Sons and denies the complete incarnation), then the Bazaar of Heracleides corrects this misconception. Nestorius was no Nestorian in the canonical sense; he never taught the heresy attributed to him. In his writings in his defence, he vehemently denied the accusation that he was an Adoptionist – that is, that he taught that God the Father adopted the purely human Jesus on account of his perfect morality. He emphasized again and again the complete ontological unity of Christ and the genuine incarnation of the Word in him, which did not happen only at his baptism but, rather, simultaneously with the Annunciation to Mary. He countered the charge that he implied two Sons with his concept of the union in the prosopon.88

Since his writings were burned, Nestorius is known outside the Church of the East only through the accusations and slander of Cyril, and thus the belief that he was correctly condemned as a heretic prevailed. In Kotchannes, the Nestorian patriarchal see in Kurdistan,86 a Syriac manuscript from c.1100 was preserved. When, in the 1880s, American missionaries heard the rumour that this manuscript was the translation of Nestorius’s chief work, originally written in Greek, a Syrian priest succeeded in secretly making a copy of it in 1889. The discovery was a sensation because

To understand Nestorius’s position, it is also enlightening to consider his agreement with the formula of Pope Leo I, which laid the foundation of the Chalcedonian creed in 451.89 In the Bazaar of Heracleides he declared repeatedly that ‘this creed [of the bishop of Rome] was orthodox and unobjectionable’.90 According to Jacobite authors – i.e. theological opponents of Nestorius – the deposed patriarch died one day before the arrival of the message inviting him to participate in the

The Christian necropolis of El Bagawat in the Egyptian oasis of Kharga, where Patriarch Nestorius lived in exile from 435 until his death in 451.

Council of Chalcedon.91 Even if Nestorius had attended this council and accepted its creed, it is unlikely that the council would have rehabilitated him, since he was hated by far too many bishops. Such a rehabilitation would have also called into doubt the Council of Ephesus.92 as his formula of a ‘natural union’ of the two dimensions of Christ93 was replaced by a two- nature formula. ‘We confess that our Lord Jesus Christ…is wholly God and wholly man. [He is] one in substance with the Father in his divinity and one in substance with us in his humanity. It was a union of two natures.’94 In retaliation, Cyril demanded and received confirmation of Nestorius’s condemnation. It was especially tragic for Nestorius that he was sacrificed on the altar of the formula of union, since he could have agreed to its content. Several bishops of Antioch, who did not want to subscribe to the denunciation of their intellectual forefather, fled to Iran, where they joined the Church of the East.

Although Cyril had pushed through his extreme formulations at the Council of Ephesus, the continuing opposition of the bishops of Antioch forced the emperor to seek a compromise. In 433 John of Antioch and Cyril of Alexandria signed the formula of union produced by Theodoret of Kyros (†c.466), a moderate adherent of the School of Antioch. With regard to theology Cyril had to submit,