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The Council of Chalcedon, 451

Chalcedon defined Christ as one person in two natures and split the church permanently. The council, Leo's Tome, canon 28, and the Miaphysite churches that rejected it.

The fourth ecumenical council met in October 451 at Chalcedon, across the Bosphorus from Constantinople, and was the largest church assembly held to that date — something between five and six hundred bishops. It produced a definition of the person of Christ that is still recited as normative by the Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican and most Protestant churches, and it caused a schism that has lasted more than fifteen hundred years.

Both of those outcomes were foreseeable, and the second was foreseen.

The Road to the Council

The argument is set out in full in the Christological controversies. In brief: the Council of Ephesus in 431 had condemned Nestorius for dividing Christ into two subjects, and had vindicated Cyril of Alexandria’s insistence on a single subject. The pendulum then swung.

In 448 an elderly archimandrite of Constantinople named Eutyches was accused of teaching that after the union there was only one nature in Christ and that Christ’s humanity was not of the same substance as ours. A local synod condemned him. He appealed, and the emperor Theodosius II called a council at Ephesus in 449.

That council, presided over by Dioscorus of Alexandria, acquitted Eutyches, deposed his accusers, and refused to allow the reading of a letter from Pope Leo I. The patriarch of Constantinople, Flavian, was manhandled and died a few days later. Leo called the proceedings a latrocinium — a robbery — and the name has stuck.

Theodosius II supported the outcome. Then, in July 450, he fell from his horse and died. His sister Pulcheria and her new husband Marcian reversed the policy immediately and summoned a new council.

The Council

It met first at Nicaea and was moved to Chalcedon so that the emperor could attend. Imperial commissioners, not bishops, presided over procedure — a fact that irritated some participants and kept the sessions orderly.

Dioscorus was deposed and exiled. The acts of 449 were annulled. Eutyches was condemned.

The difficult part was the positive definition. Many eastern bishops wanted no new formula at all, on the grounds that Nicaea and Ephesus were sufficient; the imperial commissioners insisted, and a drafting committee produced a text.

Leo’s Tome

The decisive western contribution was the letter Pope Leo I had written to Flavian in 449 — the Tome — which the robber council had refused to read. At Chalcedon it was read out, and the bishops acclaimed it: “Peter has spoken through Leo.”

The acclamation is frequently quoted in Catholic apologetics as recognition of papal authority, and equally frequently qualified in Orthodox responses by the observation that the bishops examined the Tome against Cyril’s writings before accepting it, and accepted it because it agreed with Cyril. Both observations are accurate.

Leo’s formulation — that Christ has two natures, each acting in communion with the other, in one person — supplied the shape of the definition.

The Definition

The core sentence, in the usual English rendering, declares one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten,

made known in two natures without confusion, without change, without division, without separation; the distinction of natures being in no way annulled by the union, but rather the characteristics of each nature being preserved and coming together to form one person and one hypostasis.

The four adverbs are the point. Two of them (“without confusion, without change”) are aimed at Eutyches, who merged the natures; two (“without division, without separation”) are aimed at Nestorius, who divided them. The definition rules out both errors without explaining positively how the union works — which was deliberate. It marks the boundaries of orthodox speech rather than describing the mechanism.

Canon 28

The council also passed a canon that caused almost as much trouble as the definition.

Canon 28 confirmed the second-place rank of Constantinople after Rome and extended the see’s jurisdiction over the dioceses of Pontus, Asia and Thrace. It repeated the reasoning of 381: Constantinople ranks high because it is the city of the emperor and the senate.

The Roman legates, who had absented themselves from the session, protested. Leo accepted the doctrinal work of Chalcedon and rejected canon 28 outright, and Rome maintained that rejection. The canon is one of the structural causes of the long divergence described in the Great Schism.

The Rejection

Egypt refused the definition almost unanimously. So did much of Syria, and Armenia — which had not attended, being at war with Persia — rejected it subsequently.

The objection was not that these churches held Eutyches’s view; they condemned him too. It was that the phrase “in two natures” sounded like Nestorianism, and that Cyril’s formula, “one incarnate nature of the Word,” had been abandoned. To Alexandrian ears, counting natures after the union was precisely the error Ephesus had condemned.

The resulting churches — Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Ethiopian, Eritrean, and later Indian — are properly called Miaphysite or Oriental Orthodox. Calling them Monophysite conflates them with Eutyches, which their theologians have objected to for fifteen centuries.

Modern dialogue has largely closed the theological gap. Joint statements between the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox churches in the 1990s, and between the Catholic Church and several Oriental Orthodox churches before that, concluded that both sides confess the same faith in Christ using different technical vocabulary. Formal communion has not followed, for reasons that are now largely canonical and jurisdictional.

The Cost to the Empire

The imperial government spent the next two centuries trying to undo the schism without repudiating the council: Zeno’s Henotikon, Justinian’s condemnation of the Three Chapters, Heraclius’s Monoenergism and Monothelitism. Each attempt failed, and the last of them produced the martyrdom of Maximus the Confessor.

By the time the empire gave up, in 681, Egypt and Syria had been under Arab rule for forty years. Whether Chalcedon cost the empire its southern provinces is a question treated in the Christological controversies and in Byzantium and the Islamic world; the short answer is that it did not cause the conquest but made the provinces much easier to hold for whoever arrived next.

Why the Definition Survives

Chalcedon has outlasted the political world that produced it because of what it does not say. It rules out four errors and declines to explain the union positively, leaving room for the theological work of the following centuries — Leontius of Byzantium, Maximus, John of Damascus — to develop within the boundary rather than against it.

That restraint is unusual in conciliar documents, and it is the reason a text drafted by committee under imperial pressure in 451 is still the shared Christological standard of most of Christianity.

The Sessions

Chalcedon met over roughly three weeks in October 451, in something between sixteen and seventeen sessions, and the shape of the proceedings is worth knowing because the acts are unusually complete.

The first session was largely a reading of the acts of the Robber Council of 449, with interruptions. As each incriminating passage was read, bishops shouted objections, and several who had signed in 449 claimed they had been coerced or had signed blank sheets. The record preserves the acclamations verbatim — hundreds of bishops chanting in unison is a recurring feature of these documents.

Dioscorus of Alexandria was deposed in the third session, on procedural and disciplinary grounds rather than for heresy: he had held a council without papal authority, had excommunicated the pope, and had refused to appear when summoned three times. The distinction was deliberate and left room for later reconciliation with Alexandria that never came.

The fifth session produced the Definition, after a drafting committee had been sent away and told to try again — the first draft was rejected as insufficiently clear on the two natures.

The later sessions dealt with jurisdiction: the status of Jerusalem, disputes between sees in Asia Minor, and, in the session the papal legates did not attend, canon 28.

Imperial commissioners presided throughout. They ruled on procedure, cut off shouting matches, and pressed for a definition when the bishops wanted to avoid one. Marcian and Pulcheria attended the sixth session in person.

Why “In” and Not “From”

One preposition in the Definition carries an unexpected weight, and the story of how it got there is documented.

The draft presented to the council said Christ was “of” or “from” (ek) two natures — a formula Dioscorus could accept, since it can mean the two natures existed before the union and one resulted from it.

The papal legates objected and demanded “in” (en) two natures, which asserts that both natures continue to exist after the union. The imperial commissioners put the question to the bishops, and the phrase was changed.

The change is the whole substance of Chalcedon. “From two natures” is compatible with Cyril’s formula and with the Miaphysite position; “in two natures” is not. A council that had been trying to find a formula everyone could sign chose, at the last stage, one that a large part of the eastern church could not.

Whether that was courage or a catastrophic failure of judgement has been argued for fifteen hundred years.

The Provinces That Left

The scale of the loss is worth putting in numbers, because it explains the political consequences.

Egypt was effectively unanimous in rejection. The Chalcedonian patriarch installed at Alexandria, Proterius, was lynched by a mob in 457; his successors were imperial appointees with a following largely confined to the Greek-speaking population of the city, while the Coptic-speaking countryside followed the rival hierarchy. Byzantine sources call the two parties Melkites — “king’s men” — and Copts.

Syria divided regionally, with the Miaphysite position dominant in the countryside and among Syriac speakers, and a separate hierarchy organised in the sixth century by Jacob Baradaeus — travelling in disguise, ordaining bishops and clergy across the east, and giving the Syriac Orthodox Church the name “Jacobite” that outsiders used for centuries.

Armenia, not represented at the council, rejected it at Dvin in 506.

By the time Heraclius reconquered these provinces from Persia in 628, the imperial church had been a minority in most of them for over a century. Eight years later they were Arab, as the Battle of Yarmouk describes, and the religious division outlasted the political one by fourteen hundred years.

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