Drafting the Definition and Canon 28

The bishops of Chalcedon did not want to write a definition; they had to be pressed into it by the imperial commissioners, and the first draft they produced was rejected by the Roman legates because it said Christ is “out of two natures.” The final Horos, adopted on 22 October 451, says “in two natures” — the two-letter change on which fifteen centuries of separation turn. This file traces the drafting, and then treats canon 28 and the Roman objection to it, keeping that question strictly apart from the christological one, as the history itself does.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Bishops Did Not Want a New Definition

The most striking thing about the drafting of the most famous doctrinal text of the ancient Church is how hard it was to get the council to write it. Repeatedly through the sessions the bishops declared that the faith of Nicaea was sufficient, that Cyril’s letters and Leo’s Tome expressed it adequately, and that no fresh formula should be composed — appealing, among other things, to the seventh canon of Ephesus forbidding the composition of “a different faith” (Council of Ephesus, canon 7; trans. Percival, NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14; Price and Gaddis, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005, vol. 2, on the fifth session).

The pressure to define came from the imperial commissioners, who wanted a written text that could be enforced, and from the Roman legates, who wanted the Tome’s precision embedded in it (Price and Gaddis, vol. 2, on the fifth session; Sellers, The Council of Chalcedon, London: SPCK, 1953, on the drafting). The Definition is therefore, in its immediate genesis, a document the episcopate produced under duress. This is not a scandal; it is the ordinary way conciliar dogma is made. Nicaea’s homoousios was pressed on a reluctant assembly in much the same way. The Church’s judgment is not on how a text came to be drafted but on whether it says the faith.

The Lost Draft and the Fight over Two Words

A committee produced a first draft, which was read to the assembly and approved by most of the bishops. The Roman legates objected and refused it, declaring that it did not agree with the Tome and threatening to leave and have the council transferred to Italy; a number of Eastern bishops supported them. The imperial commissioners then put the question in the sharpest possible form: does this council follow Leo or Dioscorus? The answer came back for Leo. A new committee — the bishops of the principal sees with the legates and the commissioners — withdrew to the oratory of St. Euphemia, and produced the text that was adopted and subscribed at the session of 22 October 451 (Price and Gaddis, vol. 2, on the fifth session; Sellers, The Council of Chalcedon, 1953; Davis, The First Seven Ecumenical Councils, Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1990).

[Disputed: the wording of the rejected first draft. The draft itself is not preserved. The debate recorded in the acts implies that it confessed Christ "out of two natures" (ἐκ δύο φύσεων), the formula Dioscorus was willing to accept and Eutyches had used of the state before the union, and that the Roman legates' objection secured its replacement by "in two natures" (ἐν δύο φύσεσιν). This reconstruction is the consensus of the modern editors (Price and Gaddis, *The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon*, vol. 2, on the fifth session; Sellers, *The Council of Chalcedon*, 1953), but it is a reconstruction from the surrounding debate and not a quotation of a surviving text.]

A related textual point belongs here because it is often raised in the modern discussion. Some later Greek manuscripts and some ancient versions of the Definition read “out of two natures” at the crucial place, and this variant circulated in the sixth century among those seeking a Cyrillian reading of the council. The reading of the critical text, and of the acts as a whole, is “in two natures”; the variant is a secondary alteration and not the council’s word (Price and Gaddis, vol. 2, on the text of the Definition; Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition, vol. 2 pt. 1, trans. Allen and Cawte, London: Mowbray, 1987, on the sixth-century textual dispute). What the council meant by the preposition it chose is the subject of In Two Natures.

What the Definition Did

The Horos first ratifies the Creed of Nicaea and that of the 150 Fathers of Constantinople, quoting both; it then receives the synodical letters of Cyril to Nestorius and to the Easterns, and the Tome of Leo, as their authentic interpretation, naming them as the standards against which the new formula is to be read; and then it defines. The Definition condemns by name those “who divide the mystery of the economy into a duality of sons” and those “who imagine a mixture or confusion of the two natures,” and it condemns those who fable that the form of a servant was “of heavenly or of some other substance” and those who invent two natures before the union and one after it (Council of Chalcedon, Definition of Faith; trans. Percival, NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14; text in Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1). The last of these is Eutyches, named by his doctrine.

The Definition’s own text is treated, and quoted exactly, in Section 04.

Canon 28

Chalcedon also issued disciplinary canons. The twenty-eighth — passed at the sixteenth session, on 31 October 451, at which the Roman legates were not present — is the most consequential and the most contested.

Canon 28 renewed canon 3 of Constantinople I and granted the see of Constantinople “equal privileges” (isa presbeia) with Old Rome, ranking second after it, and gave Constantinople the right to ordain the metropolitans of the civil dioceses of Pontus, Asia, and Thrace — on the stated ground that Constantinople is New Rome, the city of the emperor and senate (Council of Chalcedon, canon 28; trans. Percival, NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14).

The legates protested the next day and demanded that the canon be struck; the council upheld it. Pope Leo refused to confirm it, insisting that the order of sees rests on Petrine apostolicity — Rome, Alexandria, Antioch as sees connected with Peter — and not on imperial standing, and that canon 28 violated the canons of Nicaea and the rights of the other patriarchates (Leo, Epp. 104–106, May 452; trans. Feltoe, NPNF, Second Series, vol. 12). Marcian and Anatolius pressed Leo for confirmation of the council; on 21 March 453 Leo confirmed the council’s doctrinal decrees while continuing to reject canon 28 (Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1, introduction to Chalcedon; Leo, Epp. 104–106, 114; trans. Feltoe, NPNF, Second Series, vol. 12).

Canon 28 thus crystallizes the ecclesiological fault line between East and West: primacy grounded in imperial-conciliar order against primacy grounded in the Petrine apostolate. The Orthodox Church received the canon and holds it as authoritative. Rome refused it for centuries, and did not acknowledge Constantinople’s second rank until the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, in the wholly different circumstances of the Latin occupation of Constantinople. The Petrine theory of universal primacy on which Leo’s refusal rested is a doctrine the Church has examined and not received; that argument belongs to The Great Schism and to Filioque and Papal Primacy, not here.

Why Canon 28 Must Not Be Confused with the Christological Question

Two facts settle this, and both are worth holding.

First: those who rejected Chalcedon did not reject it over canon 28. The Egyptian, Syrian, and Armenian resistance was to the Definition and to the Tome. The jurisdictional canon was a quarrel between Constantinople and Rome — between two churches that both received the Definition and remained in communion for another six centuries.

Second: Rome, which fought canon 28 for seven hundred years, never wavered on the Definition. Leo’s refusal of the canon and his confirmation of the faith were issued in the same season by the same pope. He could distinguish them, and so must we.

The confusion is nonetheless worth naming, because it recurs in popular argument: a council’s disciplinary canons and its dogmatic definition are acts of different kinds, receive different receptions, and can be separated without incoherence. On the general principle, see The Conciliar Canons.

See Also

References

  • Council of Chalcedon (451). Definition of Faith; Canon 28. In Percival, ed., The Seven Ecumenical Councils (NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14); and Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1.
  • Council of Chalcedon (451). Acts, in Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum II.1.1–3, ed. Eduard Schwartz; trans. and commentary in Price and Gaddis (below).
  • Leo the Great. Epistles 104, 105, 106 (against canon 28); 114 (of 453). Trans. Charles Lett Feltoe, NPNF, Second Series, vol. 12.
  • Council of Ephesus (431). Canon 7. In Percival, ed., NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14.
  • Price, Richard, and Michael Gaddis. The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon. 3 vols. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005.
  • Sellers, Robert V. The Council of Chalcedon: A Historical and Doctrinal Survey. London: SPCK, 1953.
  • Grillmeier, Aloys, with Theresia Hainthaler. Christ in Christian Tradition. Vol. 2 pt. 1. Trans. Pauline Allen and John Cawte. London: Mowbray, 1987.
  • Tanner, Norman P., ed. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils. 2 vols. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990.
  • Davis, Leo Donald. The First Seven Ecumenical Councils. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1990.