The Sessions and the Deposition of Dioscorus

Chalcedon was the largest and best documented of the ancient councils: some five hundred bishops, seventeen sessions between 8 October and 1 November 451, imperial commissioners in the chair, and acts preserved in extraordinary fullness. Its first business was to annul the latrocinium of 449 and to try the man who had presided over it. Dioscorus of Alexandria was deposed at the third session — and the exact grounds of that deposition, which were canonical and not formally christological, are a fact this collection states plainly because honesty requires it and because the Orthodox case does not depend on obscuring it.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Marcian, Pulcheria, and the Summons

The council was the work of a new regime. Pulcheria, sister of the dead Theodosius II and Augusta since 414, had long opposed Chrysaphius and Eutyches; the soldier Marcian, whom she married on her accession, became emperor on 25 August 450. Both were committed to the dyophysite cause and in accord with Rome. Chrysaphius was executed, Eutyches banished, Flavian’s body brought home for burial among the patriarchs, and the bishops deposed in 449 restored (Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972, 43–46; Price and Gaddis, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005, vol. 1, 38–60).

Marcian then summoned the general council Leo had demanded. Leo, who by now would have preferred no new council at all — holding that the Tome had settled the question and the East need only subscribe it — accepted the summons but was disappointed twice over: the council met in the East, not Italy, and under close imperial supervision (Leo, Epp. 89–90; trans. Hunt, FOTC 34). It was first called to Nicaea; the bishops assembled there in September 451, and Marcian, detained by a Hunnic threat on the Danube, moved it to Chalcedon, directly across the Bosphorus from the capital, so that he could attend without leaving Constantinople (Price and Gaddis, vol. 1, 38–60; Davis, The First Seven Ecumenical Councils, Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1990).

The imperial role must be stated honestly. The government wanted a specific outcome: a formula acceptable to Rome that would end the Eutychian question and restore religious peace. Imperial commissioners and senators presided over the sessions, kept order, put the questions, and at the decisive moment applied direct pressure to produce a written definition the bishops did not want to write (Price and Gaddis, vol. 1, 38–75, on the commissioners’ management of the council). Chalcedon was, in its procedure, an imperial council. The Orthodox Church has never claimed otherwise, and the claim she does make — that the Holy Spirit spoke through this assembly, as the Church’s reception attests — has never rested on the purity of Byzantine court politics. On the ancient reasoning, see Ecumenicity and Reception.

The Numbers and the Sessions

Chalcedon was the largest of the ancient councils. The traditional figure is 630 bishops; the attested subscriptions and attendance lists point to something over five hundred, with perhaps 370 present at the opening session — an assembly overwhelmingly Eastern, with the West represented by Leo’s legates and two African bishops (Price and Gaddis, vol. 1, 38–75, on the numbers; Davis, The First Seven Ecumenical Councils, 1990). [Disputed: the total attendance. The traditional 630 is a round conventional figure; Price and Gaddis, working from the subscription lists, estimate roughly 520 participants overall, with attendance varying session by session (Price and Gaddis, *The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon*, vol. 1, 38–75).]

The council sat from 8 October to 1 November 451. The acts are preserved in Greek and in a Latin version, and are the fullest documentation of any ancient council; the modern edition and commentary is Price and Gaddis. [Disputed: the numbering of the sessions. The Greek acts number sixteen sessions; the Latin version and Price and Gaddis number seventeen, dividing what the Greek treats as one. This collection therefore identifies sessions by date rather than by number wherever the number is not needed (Price and Gaddis, vol. 1, introduction).]

Annulling 449

The council’s first act was to undo the latrocinium. At the opening session on 8 October the acts of Ephesus II were read out in full — an extraordinary procedure that put the whole robbery on the record, including the testimony of bishops who now said they had signed under duress or had signed blank sheets. The assembly repudiated the proceedings of 449, restored the memory of Flavian, and reinstated Eusebius of Dorylaeum (Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum II.1.1; Price and Gaddis, vol. 1, 38–130).

Over the following weeks it also restored Theodoret of Cyrrhus and Ibas of Edessa, the two leading Antiochenes deposed in 449 — Theodoret only after he was made, under loud pressure from the floor, to anathematize Nestorius by name (Price and Gaddis, vol. 2, on the sessions concerning Theodoret and Ibas). Both restorations were bitterly resented by the Cyrillian party, and both would become the occasion of the Three Chapters controversy a century later (see The Three Chapters and Constantinople II). It is a genuine grievance of the anti-Chalcedonian tradition, and it should be reported as such: to their eyes, a council that restored the men who had written against Cyril’s Anathemas had already shown its hand.

The Trial and Deposition of Dioscorus

Dioscorus of Alexandria was tried at the session of 13 October 451. He was summoned three times to appear before the assembly and answer; three times he refused. On his contumacy, and on the canonical charges brought against him by Eusebius of Dorylaeum and by a delegation of Alexandrian clergy and laity — charges of violence, extortion, and misgovernment in Egypt, together with his responsibility for the proceedings of 449 and for having presumed to excommunicate the bishop of Rome — the council deposed him from the episcopate and the priesthood (ACO II.1.2; Price and Gaddis, vol. 1, 131–180, and vol. 2, on the third session).

Here a fact must be stated plainly, because it is true, because it is well known to every scholar of the council, and because the Orthodox case does not need it suppressed. The sentence of deposition against Dioscorus did not condemn him for heresy. It cited his disobedience to canonical summons, his canonical crimes, and his acts at Ephesus II. He was never asked to abjure a christological formula, and the acts contain no finding that he taught that Christ’s humanity is not consubstantial with ours (Price and Gaddis, vol. 1, 131–180, and vol. 2, on the sentence; Sellers, The Council of Chalcedon, London: SPCK, 1953, on the grounds of the deposition; Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition, vol. 1, 2nd ed., London: Mowbray, 1975, on Dioscorus’ Christology).

What follows from that, and what does not, needs care in both directions.

It does not follow that Dioscorus was orthodox and unjustly treated. He had restored a man condemned for denying the double consubstantiality, suppressed the dogmatic letter of the Apostolic See, and presided over the deposition of the patriarch of Constantinople and of the leading two-natures bishops of the East. He then refused the Definition, and died in exile at Gangra in 454 unreconciled (Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement, 1972, 46–49). The Church’s tradition, following Chalcedon’s sentence and sustained by every council that received Chalcedon, holds him to be separated from her communion and his condemnation to stand; that judgment has never been revisited, and this collection confesses it. Chalcedon deposed him on the counts it tried; the Church has held him ever since among the authors of the schism.

Nor does it follow that Chalcedon was merely a political tribunal. The council’s dogmatic act — the Definition — condemns the doctrine of “one nature after the union” as decisively as any anathema could, and the anti-Chalcedonian churches’ own resistance was to that Definition, not to the sentence on a bishop.

But it does follow that a particular polemical shortcut is closed. One cannot say that Chalcedon convicted Dioscorus of Eutychian heresy on the evidence, because it did not try him for it. The Orthodox objection to Dioscorus and his successors is the objection stated throughout this collection: they rejected the Definition of an Ecumenical Council and broke communion with the Church over it. That is a sufficient and a serious charge, and it is the true one.

The Reading of the Tome and the Scrutiny Against Cyril

At the session of 10 October the Tome of Leo was read. Most of the assembly acclaimed it: “Peter has spoken through Leo; this is the faith of the Fathers; Leo and Cyril teach alike.” But a group of bishops from Palestine and Illyricum hesitated over three passages — above all “each form does what is proper to it in communion with the other,” which sounded to Cyrillian ears like two operating agents. The council did not overrule them. It appointed a committee, adjourned, and had the disputed passages of the Tome set beside the letters of Cyril and shown to agree with them; only then was the Tome ratified (ACO II.1.2; Price and Gaddis, vol. 2, 9–25; see The Tome of Leo).

This episode is dogmatically important in two directions at once. It shows that Chalcedon did not simply impose a Roman text on the East by authority: the Tome was received because it was demonstrated to be Cyrillian. And it shows that the council knew exactly where the difficulty lay, and answered it — which is why the later charge that Chalcedon thoughtlessly adopted crypto-Nestorian language cannot be sustained from the acts.

The Council’s Own Sense of What It Was Doing

Running through the acts is the bishops’ insistence that they were defining nothing new. They repeatedly declared that the faith of Nicaea sufficed, that Cyril’s letters and the Tome expressed it, and that a fresh formula was neither needed nor desirable — a reluctance that had to be overcome by the imperial commissioners before the Definition could be drafted at all (Price and Gaddis, vol. 2, on the fifth session; see Drafting the Definition and Canon 28). Whatever else Chalcedon was, it was not an assembly eager to innovate. It understood itself to be stating, under compulsion of a heresy, what the Church had always confessed.

References

Council of Chalcedon (451). Acts, in Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum II.1.1–3, ed. Eduard Schwartz (Berlin–Leipzig, 1932–1938); trans. and commentary in Price and Gaddis (below).
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. Christ in Christian Tradition. Vol. 1, 2nd ed. Trans. John Bowden. London: Mowbray, 1975.
Frend, W. H. C. The Rise of the Monophysite Movement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972.
Leo the Great. Epistles 89–90. Trans. Edmund Hunt, FOTC 34.
Davis, Leo Donald. The First Seven Ecumenical Councils. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1990.