Ephesus 431 and the Twelve Anathemas

The quarrel that produced Chalcedon began over a word. When Nestorius of Constantinople objected around 428 to calling the Virgin Theotokos, St. Cyril of Alexandria answered with a theology of the one incarnate Word and, in his Third Letter, with Twelve Anathemas of uncompromising sharpness. The Council of Ephesus of 431 met in disorder, deposed Nestorius, and endorsed Cyril’s Second Letter as the authentic reading of Nicaea — fixing the unity of Christ’s person in the Church’s confession forever, and leaving the vocabulary of the two natures still to be settled.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Why This Belongs to the Chalcedonian Story

Nothing at Chalcedon can be read rightly without Ephesus behind it. The Fourth Council did not begin from a blank page; it began from a dogmatic settlement already made — one Christ, one subject, the Virgin truly Theotokos — and from a vocabulary crisis that settlement had left unresolved. The whole later schism turns on the claim, made by those who rejected Chalcedon, that the Fourth Council betrayed the Third. Whether that claim is true is the question of Section 04; that it is a claim about Ephesus is why Ephesus is treated here.

Nestorius and the Theotokos

Nestorius, a monk and celebrated preacher of the Antiochene school, became Patriarch of Constantinople in 428. The flashpoint was the title Theotokos — “God-bearer,” “Mother of God” — long used in Alexandrian devotion and by the Fathers. Nestorius, or a priest of his circle, preached against it: to call Mary “Mother of God” seemed to make the Godhead itself have a beginning, as though the Virgin bore the divine nature. Better, he urged, Christotokos, “Mother of Christ,” or at most Theotokos balanced by anthropotokos (Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 5th ed., London: A&C Black, 1977, on Nestorius; McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy, Leiden: Brill, 1994).

Modern study has stressed that Nestorius’ own intention was not the crude heresy his enemies painted: he wished to protect the immutability of the Godhead and the reality of Christ’s human experiences, and he confessed one prosōpon of union (McGuckin, St. Cyril, 1994, weighing the twentieth-century reassessment; Nestorius, The Bazaar of Heracleides, trans. Driver and Hodgson, Oxford, 1925, his own later apology). But his language of two natures each with its own concrete subsistence, joined in a shared “person of union,” sounded to his opponents like two Sons — a divine Word and a human Jesus side by side — with Theotokos refused precisely because it would attribute a human birth to the divine subject. That was the fatal point, and the Church judged it so.

The deepest thing to grasp is that the fight over Theotokos was never chiefly about Mary; it was about Christ. If Mary is truly Theotokos, then the one she bore is truly God — the same single subject, the eternal Word, carried in her womb and born of her according to his humanity. To deny the title implies that what was born of her was a man distinct from the Word, and so two subjects rather than one incarnate Lord (Cyril, Second Letter to Nestorius [Ep. 4], PG 77:44–49; McGuckin, St. Cyril, 1994; see Theotokos).

Cyril’s Second Letter

St. Cyril, Patriarch of Alexandria from 412, was a formidable theologian and an equally formidable ecclesiastical politician, and both faculties were engaged. His Second Letter to Nestorius (Ep. 4, early 430) is the irenic classic of his Christology, and it is the document that matters most for Chalcedon, because both Ephesus and Chalcedon solemnly approved it. Cyril there teaches that the Word did not become man by a change into flesh, nor by mere indwelling, but by uniting to himself “hypostatically” (kath’ hypostasin) human nature, so that there is one Christ and one Son in whom the distinction of the natures is not abolished; and Mary is therefore rightly called Theotokos (Cyril, Ep. 4; trans. in Percival, ed., NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14, and in McGuckin, St. Cyril, 1994, appendix). Both Cyril and Nestorius appealed to Pope Celestine of Rome, who at a synod in 430 found for Cyril and commissioned him to execute the sentence (Davis, The First Seven Ecumenical Councils, Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1990).

The Twelve Anathemas

Cyril then pressed the matter to an edge. His Third Letter to Nestorius (Ep. 17, late 430), written on the authority of the Alexandrian synod, closed with Twelve Anathemas (the “Twelve Chapters”) demanding that Nestorius condemn a series of propositions on pain of deposition (Cyril, Third Letter to Nestorius, with the Twelve Anathemas; trans. Percival, NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14).

The Anathemas are the most uncompromising expression of Cyril’s one-subject Christology. The first sets the tone: “If anyone will not confess that the Emmanuel is very God, and that therefore the Holy Virgin is the Mother of God (Theotokos), inasmuch as in the flesh she bore the Word of God made flesh… let him be anathema” (Cyril, Third Letter, Anathema 1; trans. Percival, NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14). Others condemn dividing the sayings of the Gospels between two subjects (Anathema 4) and refusing to confess that the Word of God suffered in the flesh (Anathema 12) — the language of the one incarnate subject who is himself the sufferer, impassible in his Godhead.

Their conciliar standing is delicate and worth stating precisely, because it becomes load-bearing later. The Anathemas alarmed the Antiochenes: even the moderate Theodoret of Cyrrhus wrote against them as verging on Apollinarianism and confusion of the natures. They were approved at Ephesus within the general endorsement of Cyril’s letters, but they were never promulgated by that council as a separate, free-standing rule of faith, and Chalcedon would balance their language with the Antiochene concern for the integrity of the two natures (Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 1977, on the reception of the Anathemas; McGuckin, St. Cyril, 1994). The party that later rejected Chalcedon read the Twelve Anathemas as the touchstone of orthodoxy and Chalcedon’s silence about them as an evasion; the Fifth Council would answer that reading by taking the Anathemas up explicitly (see The Three Chapters and Constantinople II).

A Council in Disorder

Theodosius II summoned the bishops to Ephesus for Pentecost (7 June) 431. What followed is a study in how the Church’s truth can be defined amid thoroughly human disorder. Cyril arrived with a large body of Egyptian bishops and the support of Memnon, bishop of Ephesus, and of a city devoted to the Virgin. The Roman legates had not yet come; more importantly, John of Antioch and the Syrian bishops were delayed. After waiting some two weeks, and over the protest of the imperial commissioner and of sixty-eight bishops who wished to wait, Cyril opened the council on 22 June without the Antiochenes and without Nestorius, who refused to attend a session he regarded as illegitimate (McGuckin, St. Cyril, 1994, on the sequence; Davis, The First Seven Ecumenical Councils, 1990). In a single day, with about 200 bishops, the council read Cyril’s Second Letter and judged it in accord with Nicaea, read Nestorius’ reply and condemned it, and deposed Nestorius (Acts of Ephesus, Session 1; in Percival, NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14).

Four days later John of Antioch arrived, convened a rival synod of some forty-three bishops, and deposed Cyril and Memnon. When the Roman legates came in July they sided with Cyril. The emperor, receiving contradictory reports, at first ratified the depositions of all three and had them arrested, before releasing Cyril and Memnon and confirming only the deposition of Nestorius, who retired to his monastery and later to exile in Egypt (Davis, 1990; McGuckin, 1994).

That the Church nonetheless received the Cyrillian council as the Third Ecumenical Council, and its condemnation of Nestorius as true, is an instance of the principle set out in the councils collection: ecumenicity is conferred by the Church’s reception, not manufactured by orderly procedure (see Ecumenicity and Reception). It is also, honestly stated, a precedent the anti-Chalcedonians would later invoke on their own behalf — and the answer to that invocation is not that Ephesus was procedurally clean, but that the Church received Ephesus and did not receive 449.

What Ephesus Defined, and What It Left Open

Ephesus produced no new creed; its seventh canon forbade the composition of “a different faith” as a rival to Nicaea (Council of Ephesus, canon 7; trans. Percival, NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14). Its dogmatic act was to endorse Cyril’s Second Letter as the authentic interpretation of the Nicene faith and to confirm the title Theotokos. The abiding content of the Third Council is therefore Cyril’s Christology of the one incarnate Word: the Word did not unite to himself a distinct human person but became man, so that there is one Christ and one Son, the same eternally begotten of the Father and born in time of the Virgin.

What Ephesus did not do was fix a vocabulary for the duality. Cyril’s own governing formula — “one incarnate nature of God the Word” (mia physis tou Theou Logou sesarkōmenē) — he believed to come from St. Athanasius; it in fact derives from Apollinaris, transmitted under Athanasius’ name, as Cyril did not know (McGuckin, St. Cyril, 1994, on the misattribution). In that formula physis names the one concrete living reality of the incarnate Christ, close to what Chalcedon would call hypostasis. Cyril also used hypostasis and physis near-interchangeably. Ephesus canonized his doctrine without disambiguating his terms — and the whole subsequent tragedy grew in that gap. The Formula of Reunion of 433 was the first attempt to close it; Chalcedon was the second and definitive one.

See Also

References

  • Cyril of Alexandria. Second Letter to Nestorius (Ep. 4), PG 77:44–49; Third Letter to Nestorius (Ep. 17), with the Twelve Anathemas. Trans. in Percival, ed., NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14; and in McGuckin (below).
  • Council of Ephesus (431). Acts, Session 1; Canon 7. In Percival, ed., NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14.
  • Nestorius. The Bazaar of Heracleides. Trans. G. R. Driver and Leonard Hodgson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925.
  • McGuckin, John A. St. Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy. Leiden: Brill, 1994; repr. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004.
  • Kelly, J. N. D. Early Christian Doctrines. 5th ed. London: A&C Black, 1977.
  • Davis, Leo Donald. The First Seven Ecumenical Councils. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1990.
  • Percival, Henry R., ed. The Seven Ecumenical Councils (NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14). Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1900.