Eutyches

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The doctrine came first, and the man’s name was fastened to it afterward. Eutychianism — the teaching that in the incarnate Word a single nature remained once the divine and human were joined — is the heresiological label under which the fifth-century councils filed the extreme of christological unity, and the elderly archimandrite to whom it was attributed wrote almost nothing that survives to ground it. What survives is the verdict, the acts of his trials, and the formula put in his mouth: of two natures before the union, one nature after. Eutyches (c. 380 – after 451) is remembered less for a worked-out system than for marking a boundary the Church drew through him — the warning of what it costs to defend the oneness of Christ too far.

The monk at court

In 448 he was about seventy years old and had governed for some thirty years a large monastery outside the walls of Constantinople, where he ruled over roughly three hundred monks. He was a presbyter of long standing and considerable reputation for austerity, and — decisively for what followed — godfather to Chrysaphius, the eunuch who served as grand chamberlain to the emperor Theodosius II from 441 and effectively governed the eastern court. The archimandrite was therefore not an isolated ascetic but a man with a thread running directly into the palace, and the speed and reach of his rise and fall are unintelligible without it. His theology was forged in the long quarrel of the preceding generation. He had stood with Cyril of Alexandria against Nestorius at the first Council of Ephesus in 431, and he carried the Cyrillian watchword — the one incarnate nature of the Word made flesh — with a literalism that its author had hedged with qualifications Eutyches did not keep.

One nature after the union

His significance is best read against the alarm that came before it. The archbishop Nestorius, condemned at Ephesus, had so distinguished the divine and the human in Christ — to the point of refusing the Virgin the title Theotokos, God-bearer — that to his accusers the one Lord seemed to fracture into two subjects loosely conjoined. Eutyches pressed the opposite fear. To safeguard the unity that Nestorius appeared to dissolve, he held, in the formula attached to him, that Christ was of two natures before the union, one nature after — and, more sharply, that the flesh of Christ was not of one substance with ordinary human flesh. He would confess the Lord consubstantial with the Father; he would not confess him consubstantial with us. On that reading the humanity was a kind of drop swallowed in the sea of the divine, the human transmuted and absorbed until only the single nature of the incarnate God remained. The image his opponents reached for was elemental: the ocean consuming a drop of vinegar, the body of Christ so deified that it no longer shared the substance of the rest of humankind.

The quarrel turned on the smallest of prepositions and the loading of a single verb. To say that Christ is of two natures (ek duo physeon) was a phrase Eutyches would grant — it described the components that came together in the union. To say that Christ is in two natures (en duo physesin), or that two natures remain after the union, was the formula he refused, because to his ear it kept the human standing alongside the divine as a second thing, and so let the unity slip back toward the division Nestorius was condemned for. His judges heard the refusal as the denial of a complete and abiding humanity. The counting of natures was never arithmetic; physis in fifth-century usage slid between the abstract essence shared by a class and the concrete individual reality of a single subject, and much of the heat of the controversy was the same word carrying different freight on the two sides. Eutyches, with no training to separate the senses, held to the word and let the senses fall where they would.

The position has two ancestries the councils were quick to name. It restated, in christological terms, the structure of Apollinaris of Laodicea, who a century earlier had let the divine Logos take the place of the human mind in Christ, leaving a humanity short of a complete man; where Apollinaris truncated the human element, Eutyches dissolved it. And behind both stood the older instinct of docetism — that Christ’s flesh only seemed to be ours, that the body which suffered was not a body like other bodies. A Christ whose flesh is not consubstantial with humankind is a Christ whose Incarnation grazes the human without fully entering it; the soteriological objection, sharpened in the same generation, was that what the Word did not assume he did not heal — a humanity not truly shared could not truly be redeemed. Eutyches almost certainly intended none of the crude consequence his accusers drew. But the language he refused to qualify left the door open, and the open door was what the councils condemned.

The trial, the robber council, and Chalcedon

The events moved with the velocity that his court connections both enabled and provoked. The charge was laid by Eusebius, bishop of Dorylaeum, an old adversary, and in November 448 a resident synod at Constantinople — the synodos endemousa, the standing body of bishops in the capital — sat under the patriarch Flavian to examine him. Pressed repeatedly to confess two natures after the union and to grant that Christ’s flesh was of one substance with ours, Eutyches gave answers his judges found evasive: he would acknowledge two natures only before the union, and pleaded the authority of Cyril and the fathers against any further formula. The synod deposed and excommunicated him.

He appealed past the verdict to the palace, and the palace answered. The following August his powerful ally Dioscorus of Alexandria convened a council at Ephesus that reversed the judgment, restored Eutyches as orthodox, and deposed Flavian — who died soon after, his end widely blamed on the violence of the proceedings. The papal legates were shouted down; the letter the bishop of Rome, Leo, had sent to be read was suppressed; the assembly was managed from the chair to a foregone result. Leo branded the gathering a latrocinium — a den of robbers — and the name has clung to the Second Council of Ephesus ever since. For a season the single-nature party held the field, with the emperor and the chamberlain behind it.

What undid that settlement was a change of régime and a document. The letter Leo had written to Flavian, the Tome, set out with Roman precision the position the robber council had buried: the one Christ subsists in two natures, divine and human, each retaining its own properties and its own proper operations, so that each nature does what is proper to it in communion with the other — the Word what belongs to the Word, the flesh what belongs to the flesh. When Theodosius II died in 450 and the new rulers Marcian and Pulcheria called a fresh council, the balance reversed. The Council of Chalcedon met in October 451, received the Tome — the acclamation recorded in its acts hailed it as the voice of Peter speaking through Leo — annulled the acts of Ephesus, restored the condemnation of Eutyches, and issued the definition that the Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and most Protestant churches still hold. Christ is acknowledged in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation, the distinction of the natures in no way abolished by the union but the property of each preserved and concurring in one person and one hypostasis. The formula was built to fence out both extremes at once: against Nestorius, one person and one subsistence; against Eutyches, two natures undiminished. Its four adverbs are a wall with a heretic posted at either end.

A scholarship of doubt

How far the historical Eutyches actually taught the crude doctrine named after him is harder to establish than the verdict against it. The surviving record is almost entirely that of his opponents and the conciliar acts, and the man who speaks in those acts is an old monk insisting on the language of Cyril and the councils and declining to be moved off it, not a builder of the system later ascribed to him. One long-standing reading takes him at his accusers’ estimate: a figure of little theological training, careless with words, defending a formula past the point where it could bear the weight, who blundered into heresy more than he constructed it. A reassessment by George Bevan and Patrick Gray reads the 448 proceedings instead as something closer to an imperial show trial aimed at the radical Cyrillian wing, in which Eutyches’ own statements give no warrant for seeing him as anything more than a vigorous, if maladroit, champion of a late-Cyrillian position. On both readings the worked-out Eutychianism of the textbooks is largely the inference his enemies drew from what he would not say, rather than a doctrine he set out to teach. He is, in this respect, a heresiarch made as much by the procedure that condemned him as by his own pen.

The afterlife of the label compounds the difficulty. The churches that rejected Chalcedon — the communions later grouped as Oriental Orthodox, the Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Ethiopian, and other non-Chalcedonian traditions, the kin of the contemplative Syriac Christian mysticism that grew within them and of earlier Edessan figures such as Bardaisan — have long objected that monophysite, and Eutyches with it, became a polemical brush with which their own position was tarred. They confess one united nature of the incarnate Word in Cyril’s sense — miaphysite, a single nature out of two, the divine and human neither confused nor divided — and they too anathematize the absorption attributed to Eutyches. Their quarrel with Chalcedon is over its two-natures grammar, not in defense of the drop lost in the sea. The terminological distance between monophysite and miaphysite carries, on their account, the whole weight of the misunderstanding that has shadowed the Eastern churches since 451. To read the dispute fairly is to hold the conciliar heresy and the living confession apart, and to grant that the name on the heresy may fit its eponym only loosely.

The dossier and its editions

Nearly everything that can be known about Eutyches passes through the records of the councils that tried him, and those records are unusually full. The minutes of the 448 synod under Flavian were themselves read back into evidence at the robber council of 449 and again, with the rival versions collated and disputed, at Chalcedon in 451 — so that the trial survives embedded in the acts of the trial of the trial, a litigation of the transcript layered three deep. The standard critical edition of this Greek and Latin material is Eduard Schwartz’s monumental Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum, whose first series, second tome, gathers the Chalcedonian acts (Berlin and Leipzig, 1932–38) and remains the text behind all serious modern study. The full English rendering, with introduction and annotation that reconstruct the procedural maneuvering session by session, is the three-volume translation by Richard Price and Michael Gaddis, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon (Translated Texts for Historians 45, Liverpool, 2005). Leo’s intervention is preserved as his Letter 28, the Tome to Flavian, transmitted in the papal correspondence and printed among the conciliar documents; an accessible public-domain English version sits in the nineteenth-century Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume 12, alongside Leo’s other letters on the case.

The modern reassessment that most directly bears on the man rather than the verdict is George Bevan and Patrick Gray’s The Trial of Eutyches: A New Interpretation (Byzantinische Zeitschrift 101, 2008), which works through the procedural anomalies of 448 to argue that the case was steered against the radical Cyrillian party and that Eutyches’ own words will not support the system fastened to his name. For the doctrine in its long arc, Aloys Grillmeier’s Christ in Christian Tradition (volume 1 in its second English edition, 1975; the Chalcedonian sequel completed with Theresia Hainthaler) is the standard history of christological development, setting Eutyches within the Cyrillian inheritance he overpressed; Leo Donald Davis’s The First Seven Ecumenical Councils (325–787) (Liturgical Press, 1990) narrates the conciliar sequence for the general reader, and Henry Chadwick’s The Early Church (1967) places it within the longer unraveling of the imperial church. The shape these works share is a caution: that the heresiarch of the handbooks and the archimandrite of the acts are not quite the same person, and that the gap between them is itself part of the history.

What is not in doubt is the office the name came to fill. In the geometry the councils drew, where the balance of Chalcedonian and later Neochalcedonian Christology was plotted as the mean between two errors, Eutyches marks one limit and Nestorius the other — the single nature that swallows the man set against the two persons that lose the one Lord. Whatever the elderly archimandrite meant in the synod hall in 448, the formula carved from his refusals fixed the eastern edge of orthodox speech about Christ: the point past which the unity of God and man, pressed for the sake of its own integrity, consumes the humanity it was meant to save. Eutyches stands at that pole, as Nestorius stood at the other.

→ Related: Apollinaris Of Laodicea · Nestorius · Neochalcedonian Christology · Docetism · Logos · Heresy · Alexandria · Syriac Christian Mysticism · Bardaisan