Neochalcedonian Christology

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In October 451, the bishops gathered at Chalcedon, across the water from Constantinople, set their names to a definition that was meant to end a quarrel and instead opened a wider one. Christ, they declared, is one person made known in two natures, divine and human, united without confusion, without change, without division, without separation — each nature keeping its own properties and concurring in one person and one subsistence. The formula was a masterpiece of balance. To a large part of the Greek East it read as a catastrophe. Neochalcedonian Christology is the modern name historians give to the sixth-century effort to rescue that formula by reading it through the words of the one father both sides revered.

That father was Cyril of Alexandria (d. 444), the patriarch whose campaign against Nestorius had carried the previous council, Ephesus in 431, and whose watchword was the single Christ. Cyril had written of “one incarnate nature of God the Word” — mia physis tou theou logou sesarkomene — a phrase he had taken, in good faith, for a saying of Athanasius, though it descended in fact from the heretic Apollinaris. For Cyril the word physis, nature, did duty for the concrete individual: the one nature was the one Christ, God the Word now made flesh, the same who was begotten of the Father before the ages and born of Mary in time. To speak after the union of two natures sounded, in that idiom, like speaking of two Christs.

The fracture

Chalcedon spoke exactly that way. It said in two natures, and to Cyril’s heirs in Egypt, Syria, and Armenia the preposition was a wound. These were the Miaphysites — from mia physis, one nature — and they held that the council had betrayed Cyril, dissolving the one incarnate Lord back into the two whom Nestorius was condemned for parting: a man Jesus and the divine Word laid side by side, joined in dignity and will but not in being. Their leader through the early sixth century, Severus of Antioch, was no crude monophysite who melted the humanity into the godhead; he confessed Christ truly human, truly divine, but insisted that after the union one speaks of a single composite nature, since nature and concrete reality are the same thing and Christ is one reality. Against “in two natures” he set Cyril’s “out of two, one.”

The split was not a debate that cooled. It hardened into rival hierarchies, each with its own bishops, its own monks, its own claim to be the catholic Christianity of the apostles. For a century the eastern provinces tore along this line; emperors tried suppression, then the conciliatory Henotikon of Zeno in 482, which papered over Chalcedon and earned a thirty-five-year schism with Rome instead. Egypt was effectively lost to the imperial church. The question was no longer only what was true about Christ but whether the empire’s faith could be one — and a creed that one half of the East heard as heresy could not bind a single church together.

Two natures, one who acts

The Neochalcedonian writers worked the seam between the two vocabularies. Their wager was that Chalcedon and Cyril said the same thing in different registers, and that the apparent contradiction lay in a confusion of two terms the earlier debates had used loosely — physis, nature, and hypostasis, the concrete individual subject. Keep those apart, they argued, and the wound closes. Nature names what a thing is, the full set of properties of a kind; hypostasis names who or which one, the particular that bears them. Christ is one hypostasis — one who — in and out of two natures, two complete whats. “Two natures” does not count two acting subjects; it counts two real and entire realities, godhead and manhood, belonging undivided to a single person. And that person is not a third thing assembled from the two. He is the divine Word himself, the second of the Trinity, who has taken a complete humanity as his own.

The first to argue this at length was John the Grammarian of Caesarea, who early in the sixth century composed an Apology for the Council of Chalcedon and a polemic against Severus. John pressed the Cyrilline objectors with their own master: Cyril too had distinguished, when it suited the argument, between nature and hypostasis; Chalcedon’s “two natures” need mean no more than Cyril’s “of two natures.” Severus answered him point by point, and the bulk of John’s work survives only because Severus quoted it to refute it. A generation later Leontius of Jerusalem carried the logic to its sharpest edge. The one hypostasis of Christ, he held, is not some neutral subject in which two natures meet; it is identical with one of the hypostases of the Trinity — the Word. The humanity of Christ is real and complete, but it never existed on its own as a separate human person; it has its subsistence in the Word, who is its hypostasis. From this came the term the tradition would carry forward, enhypostaton: the human nature is not impersonal and not a person in its own right, but personalized, made concrete, in the person of the Word.

This was the Cappadocian instinct turned to a new use. The fourth-century fathers had taught the church to say one ousia and three hypostaseis of God, one what and three whos. The Neochalcedonians ran the grammar the other way for the incarnation: two natures, one hypostasis, the same hypostasis as the divine Son. The cost was a deliberate asymmetry. The two natures are not balanced partners; the human nature is owned, taken up, hypostasized by a person who is divine and who existed before it. Chalcedon’s even-handed cadence was kept, but its center of gravity was pulled decisively toward the Word.

One of the Trinity suffered

The test of the program was suffering. If the single subject of Christ is the divine Word, then the Word is the one who was born, hungered, was scourged, and died. The Miaphysites had long pressed this as a reproach: your two-nature talk, they told the Chalcedonians, lets you keep God clean of the cross, assigning the passion to “the man” while the Word looks on. The Neochalcedonian answer was to embrace the scandal. A community of monks from Scythia, at Constantinople in 519, pressed a formula on the church and on Rome: unus ex Trinitate passus est — one of the Trinity suffered in the flesh. It was orthodox, on their reading, precisely because the one who suffered was a divine person, in a humanity that was truly and inseparably his own. The Word did not suffer in his divine nature, which cannot suffer; he suffered in the flesh, but the he was God.

Pope Hormisdas and the patriarch of Constantinople first balked, hearing in it an echo of the older Theopaschites who seemed to make the godhead itself passible. But the phrase did what its framers wanted: it made the single subject unmistakable. The crucified one is true God and one of the holy Trinity, or the confession of the incarnation collapses. The same conviction is folded into the hymn Ho monogenes — “Only-begotten Son and Word of God” — that entered the Byzantine liturgy in this period and is still sung, carrying the affirmation that the immortal Word was crucified for us and trampled death by death.

Justinian and the council of 553

What had been the labor of theologians became, under Justinian I, the policy of an empire. Justinian (r. 527–565) wanted the eastern provinces back in one church under one creed as he wanted the lost western provinces back under one law, and he pursued reunion with the Miaphysites by every means short of surrendering Chalcedon. He endorsed the Theopaschite formula by edict in 533. He staged formal conversations between Chalcedonian and Severan bishops. He legislated theology in his own name. And in 553 he convened at Constantinople the council later numbered the fifth of the ecumenical councils, the Second Council of Constantinople, to set the seal on the Cyrilline reading.

Its instrument was the condemnation of the Three Chapters — three targets drawn from the Antiochene past that the Miaphysites pointed to as proof that Chalcedon sheltered Nestorianism. The first was the person and writings of Theodore of Mopsuestia, the great teacher of the school that had nurtured Nestorius; the second, the writings of Theodoret of Cyrrhus against Cyril; the third, a letter ascribed to Ibas of Edessa that praised the Antiochene cause. By anathematizing these, the council declared that Chalcedon, rightly read, had never meant what the Miaphysites feared. Its canons confessed the single subject in Cyril’s own language, affirmed that one of the holy Trinity was crucified in the flesh, and ruled out reading the two natures as two who’s. The hundred and sixty-five bishops who signed on 2 June 553 did so under the eye of an emperor who had already decided the outcome. Pope Vigilius, held in the capital for years and pressured without relent, resisted, then capitulated, condemning the Three Chapters at the end of the year.

The double verdict

The political hope failed completely. The Miaphysite churches were not won. By condemning revered Antiochene teachers the council looked, to them, less like a correction of Chalcedon than a confession that Chalcedon needed correcting — and if it needed correcting, why hold it at all? In the West the condemnation of the Three Chapters was read as an insult to Chalcedon’s own honored defenders, and it opened a schism in northern Italy and Africa that took a century and a half to heal. The separate Miaphysite communions — the Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, and Ethiopian churches, the family now called Oriental Orthodox — consolidated their own hierarchies and have remained distinct from the Eastern Orthodox and Roman communions to the present day. At the far opposite pole, the Church of the East beyond the imperial frontier, heir to the same Antiochene tradition the council had just anathematized, was confirmed in its own two-nature confession and its own separation; for it the Cyrilline maximalism of 553 was the error, not the cure. The empire had set out to make the faith one and had instead drawn the lines of three enduring families of churches.

The doctrinal settlement, for all that, held and spread. The distinction between nature and hypostasis, the single divine subject of the incarnate acts, the humanity that subsists in the person of the Word — this became the shared grammar of Greek and Latin Christology, the frame inside which the next century fought its battles over whether the one Christ had one will or two, and the bedrock on which the later Byzantine theologians built, down to the essence-and-energies synthesis of Palamism. When Maximus the Confessor in the seventh century worked out the doctrine of the two wills, he worked entirely within this inheritance: a single person willing in two complete natures. The Logos made flesh whom Chalcedon had defined was now spoken of in terms that no longer made “two natures” sound like “two sons.”

The name and the scholarship

“Neochalcedonian” is a word the sixth century never used. It was coined in 1909 by Joseph Lebon and developed by Charles Moeller, whose 1951 study traced the movement of Chalcedonism into neo-Chalcedonism across the century after 451 and recovered fragments of John the Grammarian’s Apology from Severus’ rebuttal. Whether the label names a coherent party with a program or a tendency that historians have grouped after the fact has been argued since. Patrick Gray’s study of the defense of Chalcedon in the East distinguished a “strict” Chalcedonism that wanted the council read by itself from the Cyrilline maximalism that wanted it read through Cyril, and located the sixth-century achievement in the second. The standard reference treatment is the second volume of Aloys Grillmeier and Theresia Hainthaler’s Christ in Christian Tradition (English ed., Westminster John Knox, 1995), whose second part follows the Church of Constantinople through exactly this century — the reception of Chalcedon, the Scythian monks, John and Leontius, Justinian, and the council of 553.

The primary sources sit at uneven distances from the modern reader. John the Grammarian’s Apology is itself a reconstruction, pieced together from the long quotations Severus of Antioch made in order to demolish it; Charles Moeller’s recovery of three Greek fragments appeared in the Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique in 1951. Leontius of Jerusalem’s Against the Nestorians and Against the Monophysites, the fullest sixth-century statement of the enhypostatic Christology, survive whole and remain the object of close study; the precise weight of his terms — whether the human nature carries its own “hypostatic idioms” — is still debated in the technical literature, as in a 2019 analysis in Scrinium. The acts and canons of the Second Council of Constantinople are extant in Latin, the Greek text largely lost, and it is in canon ten that the Theopaschite confession — the crucified one is true God and one of the holy Trinity — stands ratified as a measure of orthodoxy. The terms the controversy minted — hypostasis against nature, the enhypostaton — passed from these polemics into the common stock of Christian doctrine, where they still do the work of holding the divine and the human together in a single Christ.

Beneath the labels lies a single move. It is a reading of Chalcedon that kept its two natures while answering, in Cyril’s own terms, the charge that two natures meant two Christs.

→ In the library: The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite (Parker, 1899)

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