Nestorius

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In the winter of 428 a new archbishop took the pulpit at Constantinople and told the capital that a word in common use was a word too large for what it named. The word was Theotokos — God-bearer, the Mother of God — and the archbishop was Nestorius, a monk from the Syrian frontier who had been brought to the imperial city to set its preaching in order. He had no quarrel with the reverence behind the title. His quarrel was with its precision. A woman, he argued, gives birth to a person of her own kind; she does not give birth to the eternal Godhead, which has no birth. To say that Mary bore God was, on his reading, to say something the grammar of the faith could not support. What he proposed instead — Christotokos, Christ-bearer — was meant as a correction, not a demotion. Within three years it had cost him his see, his name, and his place in the church that condemned him.

The Antiochene formation

Nestorius (c. 386 – c. 450) was born at Germanicia in Syria Euphratensis, the hill country of the eastern Roman frontier, and was formed as a monk at the monastery of Euprepius outside the walls of Antioch. There he absorbed the distinctive theology of the Antiochene school, the tradition descending from Diodore of Tarsus to Theodore of Mopsuestia, whose pupil he is reckoned to have been. That school read scripture for its plain historical sense rather than its allegorical depths, and it read the person of Christ with a matching instinct: keep the divine and the human clearly apart, so that neither dissolves into the other. The full reality of the man Jesus had to be guarded against any account in which his humanity was a costume the Word merely wore. This was, in Theodore’s lifetime, a respected and ordinary position. Nestorius carried it north as a famous preacher, and on 10 April 428 the emperor Theodosius II had him consecrated archbishop of the imperial capital.

He came to a chair already marked by Antioch’s reputation for plain and combative preaching — the same chair that John Chrysostom, another Antiochene, had held and lost a generation before. Nestorius arrived a reformer, zealous against heresy and quick to use the authority of his office; one of his first acts was to move against the Arians and other dissenters in the capital. The Theotokos controversy began almost at once. The title was no novelty — it had deep roots in popular devotion and in the Alexandrian tradition, and was cherished by the monks and laity of Constantinople. Preaching against it, Nestorius offered alternatives: Christotokos, Christ-bearer, and the rarer Theodochos, God-receiver — Mary as the one in whom the Word came to dwell, rather than the one who gave the Word its being. Behind the verbal dispute lay a whole way of describing the incarnation. The divine and the human in Christ were, for Nestorius, two complete and distinct natures, each keeping its own properties, joined not by a fusion of their substance but by a synapheia — a conjunction, a junction — in a single prosopon, a single presented person who could be worshipped as one. He held the union real and indissoluble. What he would not say was that the two had become one hypostasis, one concrete subject; that, to his ear, threatened to make the unchangeable God subject to birth, hunger, suffering, and death.

The quarrel with Cyril

The collision came from Alexandria. Its archbishop, Cyril, defended the opposite emphasis — the older Alexandrian conviction that the one who acts and suffers in the Gospels is a single subject, the Word himself, made flesh. Cyril spoke of a hypostatic union, a real unity at the level of the person, and favored the formula he took to be his predecessors’ — one incarnate nature of God the Word. To him, Nestorius’s two-nature language sounded like two Christs loosely tied together, a Word who dwelt alongside a man rather than becoming one. If Mary did not bear God, then the child she bore was not God, and the incarnation had not happened. The title was the test case, and Cyril made it the fault line.

The exchange hardened into formal accusation. Cyril drew up twelve anathemas, propositions Nestorius was required to condemn — each a sharpened statement of the single-subject Christology, each framed so that to reject it was to convict oneself. Nestorius did reject them, and answered with twelve counter-anathemas of his own, defending the integrity of the two natures against what he saw as a confusion of God with the flesh. The two archbishops now stood at opposite poles of a question the church had not yet found language to settle, each certain the other had betrayed the same Christ.

Ephesus, 431

Theodosius II convened a general council at Ephesus in the summer of 431 to resolve it. The council that met was not the council the emperor had summoned. Cyril, with the bishops of Egypt and the support of Memnon of Ephesus, opened the proceedings before John of Antioch and the Syrian bishops — Nestorius’s natural allies — had arrived, and over the protest of the imperial commissioner. With his accusers absent, the assembly heard the case against Nestorius, read his sermons against Cyril’s letters, and on 22 June condemned and deposed him, denouncing him in the language of the council acts as a new Judas. When John of Antioch reached the city days later he convened a rival synod that vindicated Nestorius and deposed Cyril in turn. For a season there were two councils, two depositions, and a capital unsure which to enforce.

The emperor at first arrested both archbishops, then released Cyril and let the verdict against Nestorius stand. By 433 John of Antioch had come to terms with Cyril over a compromise statement of faith, and Nestorius was left without a party. The condemnation held. The First Council of Ephesus entered the record as the third ecumenical council, Theotokos was vindicated as the church’s word, and Nestorius’s name was fixed to a heresy.

Exile and the Bazaar

Deposed, Nestorius withdrew first to his old monastery near Antioch. In 435 Theodosius II ended that quiet by edict, ordering his writings burned and the man himself banished — eventually to the Great Oasis of Hibis, the Kharga depression in the Egyptian desert, about as far from the courts and councils of empire as the administration could send him. There, an old man among the sands of Upper Egypt, he wrote his long apologia, the work known as the Bazaar — or Book — of Heracleides (Liber Heraclidis), issued under a pseudonym, a sustained defense of his theology and his conduct cast partly as dialogue. He lived to hear that a new dispute had broken out, this time over a Constantinopolitan monk, Eutyches, who pressed the single-nature emphasis so hard — the humanity of Christ swallowed in his divinity — that the council called to judge him would be the one to define the faith afresh. The Western statement that emerged from that quarrel, the Tome of Pope Leo to Flavian of Constantinople, set out two natures in one person in language that later readers have found strikingly close to what Nestorius claimed to have meant — a measure of how far the verdict against him and the position the church finally settled on had drifted apart. He died around 450, in exile, shortly before that council met.

Almost everything else he wrote was destroyed after his condemnation, so that for fourteen centuries he was known chiefly through the hostile witness of his opponents — through Cyril’s letters, the conciliar acts, and the heresiologists. The Bazaar changed that. The Greek original was lost, but a Syriac translation survived in the libraries of the Church of the East, was rediscovered in 1889, and was published in 1910, with an English rendering following in 1925. Reading Nestorius in his own extended words, modern scholars have argued at length over whether the man taught the heresy named for him at all — whether he meant by prosopon something far closer to the orthodox single person than his enemies allowed, and whether much of the quarrel was a collision of vocabularies, the Antiochene and Alexandrian schools using physis, hypostasis, and prosopon in incompatible senses. The verdict is not unanimous, but the recovered text made the question unavoidable.

Chalcedon and the two heresies

The council Nestorius did not live to see met at Chalcedon in 451 and produced the definition that the Greek, Latin, and most Western churches still confess: one Christ in two natures, divine and human, without confusion and without change, without division and without separation, the two coming together in one prosopon and one hypostasis. The phrasing was a deliberate balance. Its first pair of negations — without confusion, without change — was aimed at Eutyches and the single-nature extreme, the swallowing of the humanity in the divine. Its second pair — without division, without separation — was aimed at the error read out of Nestorius, the loosening of the one Christ into two. The Council of Chalcedon thus condemned both poles at once, and the definition can be read as conceding, in its own terms, something each side had been defending: it kept the two natures Nestorius insisted on, and it placed them in the single subject Cyril insisted on. The later Byzantine work of harmonizing Chalcedon with Cyril’s language would carry that balance further still.

Where Nestorius stands in this geometry is exactly the difficulty. Chalcedon honored Cyril and condemned the position labeled with Nestorius’s name; yet its own formula, two natures in one person, lies close to what Nestorius claimed to have meant. He sits at one boundary of the Christological question much as Eutyches sits at the other and Arius sits at the boundary of the prior controversy over the Son’s divinity — the figures by whom the church marked the edges it would not cross, each known largely through the verdict against him.

The label and the living church

“Nestorianism” became the standard heresiological term for any Christology that divides the one Christ — but the doctrine and the church most often called by that name did not, in fact, descend from the person of Nestorius. The Church of the East, the East-Syrian church centered in Persia beyond the Roman frontier, kept the diophysite Antiochene tradition that Nestorius came from, and held Theodore of Mopsuestia, not Nestorius, as its supreme doctor — “the Interpreter.” It never accepted the condemnations of Ephesus, and it carried its two-nature confession east along the trade routes, into Central Asia, India, and Tang China, a whole branch of Christianity developing in languages the Greek and Latin councils never heard. From this church came the seventh-century mystical tradition of Syriac writers — its theology of all-embracing divine mercy received, with a long irony, far beyond its own communion. The Assyrian Church of the East has historically venerated Nestorius among its teachers, and to use “Nestorian” of that living tradition as a slur is to mistake a polemical label for a self-description.

The label did real work as a tool of definition: like the heresy attached to the name of the dualist prophet Mani, or to that of Arius, “Nestorianism” named a position by naming a man, fixed the boundary of orthodoxy by marking who had crossed it, and outlived the particulars of what its namesake actually held. The man and the movement came apart almost from the start.

The long division narrowed in the modern period. In 1994 a Common Christological Declaration between the Catholic Church and the Assyrian Church of the East, signed by Pope John Paul II and the Catholicos-Patriarch Mar Dinkha IV, affirmed that the two churches confess the same faith in the one Christ, true God and true man, and recognized as legitimate both the Assyrian devotion to Mary as Mother of Christ and the Catholic devotion to her as Mother of God — judging that the ancient division had arisen in large part from a misunderstanding of each other’s words. The dispute that began in a Constantinopolitan pulpit over the right name for the mother of Jesus had turned, fifteen centuries later, on the admission that the two sides had been confessing one Christ in two vocabularies.

Texts and scholarship

Most of what Nestorius wrote perished with his condemnation. The surviving primary text is the Bazaar (Book) of Heracleides, lost in its Greek original and preserved in Syriac by the Church of the East; the Syriac was edited by Paul Bedjan as the Liber Heraclidis (Paris and Leipzig, 1910), the same scholar who edited the East-Syrian ascetical corpus. The standard English translation, The Bazaar of Heracleides, was made by G. R. Driver and Leonard Hodgson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925); the long introduction to that edition sets out the manuscript’s nineteenth-century rediscovery and the case for reassessing his thought. Fragments of his other works and sermons survive in Latin in the Loofs collection (Nestoriana, Halle, 1905) and embedded in the conciliar acts of his opponents.

The hostile primary record is fuller than the friendly one: Cyril of Alexandria’s letters and twelve anathemas, the acts of the First Council of Ephesus, and the heresiological tradition. A nineteenth-century English gathering of the principal documents remains accessible in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series. On the modern reassessment, the classic argument that the Bazaar shows Nestorius to have been substantially orthodox runs from Friedrich Loofs through J. F. Bethune-Baker’s Nestorius and His Teaching (Cambridge, 1908) to Milton Anastos’s influential 1962 study; J. N. D. Kelly’s Early Christian Doctrines gives the balanced textbook account of the controversy and its terminology. The reconciliation between Rome and the Assyrian Church rests on the 1994 Common Christological Declaration, which states the shared confession in full.

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