The Christological Controversies

Between roughly 380 and 680, the Christian east conducted an argument about the person of Christ that produced four ecumenical councils, three permanent schisms, several riots, a number of murders, and the political alienation of Egypt and Syria from the Roman state. Modern readers frequently find the terms of the argument obscure and the passion inexplicable, and it is worth setting out why it mattered.

The stakes were soteriological. If Christ is not fully God, he cannot save; if he is not fully human, humanity is not saved in him. The formulations were not word games. They were attempts to say something about the mechanism of salvation in a philosophical vocabulary — Greek terms like ousia, physis, hypostasis, prosopon — that had not been designed for the job and whose meanings were themselves unstable.

The Vocabulary Problem

A large part of the difficulty is linguistic. Greek theological terms were being defined in the course of the argument, and Latin and Syriac translations did not map cleanly.

• Ousia — substance, essence, what a thing is
• Physis — nature
• Hypostasis — originally almost a synonym for ousia, eventually settled as “concrete individual existence”
• Prosopon — person, originally “face” or “mask”

The Trinitarian settlement of the fourth century fixed the formula “one ousia, three hypostases.” That left physis and hypostasis to do the work in Christology, and the two great schools of the east used them differently.

Alexandria and Antioch

Alexandria emphasised unity. Its theologians began from the single subject of the gospel narratives — one Christ who is the Word made flesh — and were suspicious of any language that seemed to divide him. Their characteristic formula was the “one incarnate nature of God the Word,” a phrase which they believed came from Athanasius but which in fact came from a document of the heretic Apollinaris circulating under Athanasius’s name.

Antioch emphasised the full reality of the humanity. Its theologians insisted that Christ hungered, wept, learned and died as a man, and that these were not divine experiences. They were suspicious of any language that seemed to absorb the human into the divine.

Each school was guarding something essential, and each could see the other’s error more easily than its own.

Apollinaris

The first significant casualty was Apollinaris of Laodicea, in the 370s, who proposed that in Christ the divine Word replaced the human rational soul. This preserved unity at the cost of a full humanity, and Gregory of Nazianzus disposed of it with a sentence that became the standard test for every later formula: “That which is not assumed is not healed.”

Apollinarianism was condemned in 381, but its formulas survived under forged attributions and contaminated the next two centuries of debate.

Nestorius and Ephesus, 431

Nestorius, an Antiochene appointed patriarch of Constantinople in 428, objected to calling Mary Theotokos, God-bearer, preferring Christotokos. His concern was to avoid suggesting that the divine nature had a beginning.

Cyril of Alexandria attacked him with ferocity, political skill and considerable money distributed at court. The Council of Ephesus in 431, which Cyril opened before the Antiochene delegation arrived, condemned and deposed Nestorius. A separate council of the Antiochenes condemned Cyril. A compromise, the Formula of Reunion of 433, patched things over.

Whether Nestorius actually taught what he was condemned for is doubted by many modern scholars; a work of his discovered in Syriac in 1895, the Bazaar of Heracleides, shows a position much closer to Chalcedon than to the caricature. Whatever the truth, the Church of the East — historically mislabelled “Nestorian,” and the most successful missionary church of the Middle Ages, reaching India and China — dates its separation from this point.

Eutyches and Chalcedon, 451

The pendulum swung back. Eutyches, an elderly archimandrite in Constantinople, taught that after the union there was only one nature, and that Christ’s humanity was not consubstantial with ours. This was condemned locally in 448, upheld at the violent “Robber Council” of Ephesus in 449, and finally rejected at Chalcedon in 451.

The Chalcedonian Definition says that Christ is one hypostasis in two physeis, divine and human, “without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.” Rome’s contribution, the Tome of Pope Leo I, was read out and acclaimed. The details are set out in the Council of Chalcedon.

It should have ended the matter. Instead it created the largest schism in Christian history to that date.

The Miaphysites

Those who rejected Chalcedon did so because “in two natures” sounded to them like Nestorianism in disguise. Their own position — usually called Miaphysite, from mia physis, “one nature,” and better distinguished from the Monophysitism of Eutyches — held that Christ has one nature, at once divine and human, united without confusion.

The distinction is real. Severus of Antioch, the ablest Miaphysite theologian, affirms everything Chalcedon meant to affirm about Christ’s full humanity while refusing the Chalcedonian formula. Modern bilateral dialogues between the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox churches have concluded that the two traditions hold the same faith in different terminology — a conclusion that took fifteen centuries to reach and that has not yet produced formal communion.

The churches that rejected Chalcedon are the Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Ethiopian, Eritrean and Indian Orthodox churches, and they were then the majority in Egypt, much of Syria and Armenia.

The Imperial Attempts at Reunion

Four emperors tried to repair the breach, and all four failed in ways that made things worse.

Zeno’s Henotikon (482) evaded the question by affirming the first three councils and ignoring Chalcedon. It produced the Acacian schism with Rome, lasting thirty-five years.

Justinian condemned the Three Chapters at the Fifth Council in 553, hoping a Cyrillian reading of Chalcedon would satisfy the Miaphysites. It did not, and it alienated the west. His wife Theodora meanwhile protected Miaphysite clergy and helped establish a separate Miaphysite hierarchy — the two of them running opposite policies, which some historians read as deliberate.

Heraclius promoted Monoenergism and then Monothelitism — one energy, then one will, in Christ — in the 630s, at precisely the moment Syria and Egypt were being lost to the Arabs. Maximus the Confessor and Pope Martin I resisted; both were tried and mutilated or exiled and died in captivity.

Constantine IV abandoned the attempt at the Sixth Council in 680–681, condemning Monothelitism and making peace with Rome. By then the provinces the policy had been designed to retain were gone.

The Political Cost

The conventional account is that Chalcedon lost the empire Egypt and Syria. That is too simple — the evidence that Miaphysite populations actively welcomed the Arab conquest is thin, and the immediate causes of the collapse were military. But two centuries of coercion, deposed bishops, exiled monks and periodic persecution produced provinces with no strong attachment to Constantinople, and light Arab taxation plus toleration of their church gave them no reason to develop one.

The result, after the 640s, was a Byzantine Empire that was religiously homogeneous for the first time in its history, and a third of its former size. The relationship between the empire and the churches under Islamic rule is treated in Byzantium and the Islamic world.

The Vocabulary in Practice

Because everything turns on four Greek words, it helps to see how they behave in an actual formula rather than in a glossary.

Take the Chalcedonian sentence: one hypostasis in two physeis.

• Physis here means “nature” in the sense of what kind of thing something is. Christ is fully divine in kind and fully human in kind.
• Hypostasis means the concrete individual who exists — the who, not the what. There is one who.

Now take the Cyrillian formula the Miaphysites defended: one incarnate physis of God the Word.

Cyril is using physis to mean roughly what Chalcedon means by hypostasis — the concrete single subject. Read that way, the two formulas say the same thing.

This is the whole tragedy in miniature. Two traditions, using one word in two senses, each hearing the other assert something monstrous: the Chalcedonians hearing “one nature” as the abolition of Christ’s humanity, the Miaphysites hearing “two natures” as the splitting of Christ into two persons.

The modern dialogues that concluded both sides confess the same faith reached that conclusion by doing precisely this: agreeing what each tradition means by its terms before comparing the claims.

The Severan Position

Severus of Antioch (c. 465–538) deserves separate treatment because he is the ablest theologian on the non-Chalcedonian side, and because the usual label misrepresents him.

He condemned Eutyches explicitly and repeatedly. He affirmed that Christ is consubstantial with the Father in divinity and consubstantial with us in humanity. He held that the properties of both remain intact after the union, unconfused and unmixed. He affirmed everything Chalcedon set out to protect.

What he would not accept was the phrase “in two natures,” which he read as necessarily dividing the subject, and he would not accept the deposition of Dioscorus or the Tome of Leo.

Severus was patriarch of Antioch from 512 to 518, exiled to Egypt when the imperial policy changed, and wrote voluminously; most of his work survives only in Syriac translation because the Greek originals were destroyed.

He is the reason the term “Monophysite” is inadequate. A theologian who explicitly rejects the doctrine the label names should not be filed under it, and Miaphysite — mia physis, one composite nature, not monos, one alone — is the term his tradition uses.

The Modern Dialogues

The formal reconciliation process is recent enough that many older accounts predate it, and the results are worth stating.

Unofficial consultations between Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox theologians began at Aarhus in 1964 and continued through the 1960s and 1970s. Official joint commissions met from 1985, and produced agreed statements at Chambésy in 1989 and 1990.

The 1990 statement concludes that both families have always loyally maintained the same authentic Orthodox Christological faith, and that the divisions arose from differences in terminology and in the historical circumstances of the fifth century.

Parallel agreements were reached between the Catholic Church and several Oriental Orthodox churches — the common declaration between Paul VI and the Coptic Pope Shenouda III in 1973, and others since — and, remarkably, between the Catholic Church and the Assyrian Church of the East in 1994, closing the breach that dates from Ephesus in 431.

Communion has not followed in most cases. The remaining obstacles are canonical and jurisdictional — the status of councils each side accepts and the other does not, the lifting of anathemas against named fathers, and the practical question of overlapping hierarchies — rather than Christological. Fifteen centuries after the fact, the argument the councils were about has largely been settled; the institutional consequences have not.

• The Council of Chalcedon — the definition and its aftermath
• The Seven Ecumenical Councils — the full sequence
• Maximus the Confessor — the last act of the controversy
• The Church Fathers of Byzantium — the theologians who framed the terms
• The Heraclian Dynasty — the political context of Monothelitism
• Byzantium and the Islamic World — the provinces after the conquest
• Byzantine Legacy and Influence — the churches that still exist