Eutyches

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Eutyches (c. 380 – after 451) was the elderly archimandrite of a large monastery outside Constantinople, remembered now less for anything he wrote than for the doctrine that bears his name — the conviction that in Christ the human nature was so absorbed into the divine that, after their union, only one nature remained. The position was condemned at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, and “Eutychianism” became the standard heresiological label for the extreme form of what later writers called monophysitism, the teaching of a single nature in the incarnate Word.

His significance is best understood against the quarrel that preceded it. The previous generation had condemned Nestorius for so dividing Christ into two persons, divine and human, that the unity of the one Lord seemed to dissolve. Eutyches pressed the opposite alarm. To guard that unity he held, in the formula attributed 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. To his accusers this made the humanity a kind of drop swallowed in the sea of the divine; the man Jesus, on such a reading, no longer shared the substance of the rest of humankind.

The events moved fast. In 448 a synod at Constantinople under the patriarch Flavian examined Eutyches, found his answers evasive, and deposed him. The following year his powerful ally Dioscorus of Alexandria reversed the verdict at a council at Ephesus so violent in its proceedings that Pope Leo of Rome branded it a latrocinium, a den of robbers — the name it has carried since. Leo’s letter to Flavian, the Tome, set out the Western insistence that the one Christ subsists in two natures, divine and human, each keeping its own properties. When the Council of Chalcedon met in 451 it received the Tome, restored the condemnation of Eutyches, and issued the definition that the later Catholic, Orthodox, and most Protestant churches still hold: one person in two natures, unconfused and undivided.

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 largely that of his opponents and the conciliar acts, and several scholars read him as a confused and stubborn old monk defending the language of Cyril of Alexandria past the point where it could bear the weight, rather than as the author of a worked-out system. The churches that rejected Chalcedon — the so-called Oriental Orthodox — have long objected that “monophysite,” and Eutyches with it, became a smear attached to positions their own theologians never held, preferring the term miaphysite for the single united nature they did confess. What is not in doubt is the function the name came to serve: in the vocabulary of the councils, Eutyches stands at one pole of the Christological question, the warning of what it costs to defend the oneness of Christ too far, as Nestorius stood at the other.

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