In Two Natures

The Church confesses one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, “to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably” — ἐν δύο φύσεσιν, ἀσυγχύτως, ἀτρέπτως, ἀδιαιρέτως, ἀχωρίστως. This file quotes the Definition exactly, expounds the four adverbs and the preposition on which the whole controversy turns, and shows why Chalcedon completes St. Cyril rather than contradicting him.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Text

The Definition of Faith (Horos) was adopted at the fifth session of the Council of Chalcedon on 22 October 451. Its dogmatic paragraph, in the standard English of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, runs:

“Following the holy Fathers we teach with one voice that the Son [of God] and our Lord Jesus Christ is to be confessed as one and the same [Person], that he is perfect in Godhead and perfect in manhood, very God and very man, of a reasonable soul and [human] body consisting, consubstantial with the Father as touching his Godhead, and consubstantial with us as touching his manhood; made in all things like us, sin only excepted; begotten of his Father before the worlds according to his Godhead; but in these last days for us men and for our salvation born [into the world] of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God according to his manhood. This one and the same Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son [of God] must be confessed to be in two natures, unconfusedly, immutably, indivisibly, inseparably [united], and that without the distinction of natures being taken away by such union, but rather the peculiar property of each nature being preserved and being united in one Person and subsistence, not separated or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son and only-begotten, God the Word, our Lord Jesus Christ, as the Prophets of old time have spoken concerning him, and as the Lord Jesus Christ has taught us, and as the Creed of the Fathers has delivered to us.”
(Council of Chalcedon, Definition of Faith, 22 October 451; trans. Percival, ed., The Seven Ecumenical Councils, NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14. Greek text in Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum II.1.2, ed. Schwartz.)

The Greek of the load-bearing clause is ἐν δύο φύσεσιν ἀσυγχύτως, ἀτρέπτως, ἀδιαιρέτως, ἀχωρίστως — “in two natures, unconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably” — and the clause that follows it, εἰς ἓν πρόσωπον καὶ μίαν ὑπόστασιν, “into one Person and one Hypostasis” (ACO II.1.2).

English versions render the four adverbs differently — Percival’s NPNF text above has “unconfusedly, immutably, indivisibly, inseparably,” while Tanner’s Decrees has “which undergo no confusion, no change, no division, no separation,” and other renderings in this repository have “without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.” All translate the same four Greek words; nothing dogmatic hangs on the choice, and the reader who wants the council’s word should go to the Greek.

The Definition does not stand alone. It opens by ratifying the Creed of Nicaea and the Creed of the 150 Fathers of Constantinople, both quoted in full; it then receives St. Cyril’s synodical letters to Nestorius and to the Easterns and the Tome of St. Leo as the authentic interpretation of those creeds; and only then does it define. The dogmatic paragraph is therefore explicitly framed as a reading of Cyril and Leo together, not as a new departure (Definition of Faith, preamble; Price and Gaddis, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005, vol. 2).

The Four Adverbs

The four negative adverbs are the boundary-stones of Christology. They fall into two pairs, and each pair excludes one of the two errors.

Without confusion (ἀσυγχύτως) and without change (ἀτρέπτως) exclude the mingling or alteration of the natures. The Godhead is not converted into flesh; the manhood is not absorbed, evaporated, or so transformed by union that it ceases to be genuinely human. Christ’s flesh remains consubstantial with ours. This is the exclusion of Eutyches (see The Formula of Reunion and the Rise of Eutyches) — and it is also the exclusion of every subtler tendency to treat Christ’s humanity as a costume, a passivity, or an appearance.

Without division (ἀδιαιρέτως) and without separation (ἀχωρίστως) exclude the splitting of Christ into two subjects. There are not two Sons, not a Word alongside a man, not an indwelling and a conjunction, not one who does the miracles and another who suffers. This is the exclusion of Nestorius, and behind him of every Christology that makes the union moral, relational, or honorific.

The adverbs are all negative, and deliberately so. The Church does not define how the union is; she marks out the ground on which the confession must stand and refuses the four ways of falling off it. The mystery is not explained. It is protected.

Why “In Two Natures” and Not “Out of Two”

Everything turned, in 451 and after, on a preposition.

“Out of two natures” (ἐκ δύο φύσεων) was the formula Dioscorus was willing to sign and the one the rejected first draft appears to have used (see Drafting the Definition and Canon 28). Its natural reading is that two natures were the material of the union — the ingredients from which the one incarnate reality came to be. On that reading the duality belongs to the past tense. Eutyches had said precisely this: “of two natures before the union, one nature after it.”

“In two natures” (ἐν δύο φύσεσιν) places the duality in the present and permanent tense. It says that the one Christ, now and forever, is in two natures — that the Godhead and the manhood are both actual, both entire, and both his, after the union no less than before it. And it locates them where they belong: not as two things standing side by side, but in the one who is acknowledged in them.

Why does this matter enough to divide the Church? Because a nature that has ceased to be is not a nature that saves. The whole soteriological weight of the Incarnation rests on the humanity of Christ being real, entire, and permanent: he did not borrow a manhood for thirty-three years and lay it down, but assumed it, deified it, raised it, and seated it at the right hand of the Father. “That which is not assumed is not healed” (Gregory the Theologian, Epistle 101, To Cledonius; trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 7) — and what is assumed and then dissolved is not healed either. The Church’s confession of our salvation requires the present tense of ἐν.

The Definition immediately guards the preposition against misuse: “the difference of the natures being in no way removed because of the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring into one Person and one Hypostasis; not parted or divided into two Persons.” Two natures does not mean two Christs. It means the one Christ is God and man, and is both fully.

What a Physis Is at Chalcedon

The word physis is where the tragedy lies, and precision here is worth more than argument.

Chalcedon uses physis in the Cappadocian sense that St. Basil and St. Gregory the Theologian had fixed in the Trinitarian controversy: physis / ousia names what a thing is, the common nature; hypostasis / prosōpon names who or which one it is, the particular concrete subject. On that grammar, to say “two natures” is to say “Godhead and manhood, both entire”; it is a statement about what Christ is, and it says nothing at all about how many whos there are — which the same sentence settles by saying “one Person and one Hypostasis.”

St. Cyril, writing before this distinction had been carried into Christology, used physis and hypostasis nearly interchangeably, both naming the one concrete incarnate subject. In that usage “one nature of God the Word incarnate” says exactly what Chalcedon says with “one hypostasis” (McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy, Leiden: Brill, 1994; van Loon, The Dyophysite Christology of Cyril of Alexandria, Leiden: Brill, 2009; Meyendorff, Christ in Eastern Christian Thought, Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1975, 23–46).

This is the terminological fact from which the whole modern discussion proceeds, and Section 08 of this collection treats it at length. It is stated here because it belongs to the exposition of the Definition itself: Chalcedon did not choose “two natures” against Cyril’s “one nature”; it disambiguated a word Cyril had used in two senses, and then said, with the newly precise word, what Cyril had always meant.

How Chalcedon Completes Cyril

The charge that Chalcedon betrayed Cyril is answerable point by point, and the answer is not a diplomatic concession but the Church’s own reading of her council.

Cyril himself signed “two natures.” In the Formula of Reunion of 433 he accepted a text confessing “a union of two natures” and Christ consubstantial with the Father in Godhead and with us in manhood (Cyril, Ep. 39 with the Formula; McGuckin, St. Cyril, 1994; see The Formula of Reunion and the Rise of Eutyches). He defended the concession in the Letters to Succensus, teaching that the duality is real and may be affirmed while the incarnate Word remains one (Cyril, Epp. 45–46 to Succensus; van Loon, 2009).

Chalcedon received Cyril’s letters into its own text. The Definition names the synodical letters of Cyril as authoritative before it defines. The council was not choosing between Cyril and Leo; it was declaring that they teach one faith, and it tested the Tome against Cyril’s letters before ratifying it (ACO II.1.2; Price and Gaddis, vol. 2, 9–25).

Chalcedon’s “one hypostasis” is Cyril’s one subject. The clause “concurring into one Person and one Hypostasis; not parted or divided into two Persons” is the hypostatic union of Cyril’s Second Letter to Nestorius, in Cyril’s own conceptual content, expressed with the Cappadocian vocabulary. The single subject Cyril fought Nestorius to defend is the single subject Chalcedon defines.

And the Fifth Council said so explicitly. Constantinople II in 553 defined that the hypostasis of the union is none other than the pre-existent hypostasis of the Word, endorsed the theopaschite confession that “one of the Holy Trinity suffered in the flesh,” and affirmed that “one incarnate nature of God the Word” may rightly be said when rightly understood, as may “two natures” (Council of Constantinople II, Anathemas; trans. Percival, NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14; Tanner, ed., Decrees, vol. 1; see The Three Chapters and Constantinople II). The Church has therefore not merely asserted that Chalcedon is Cyrillian; she has defined it conciliarly.

Chalcedon is thus best understood not as a correction of Ephesus but as its completion. Ephesus won the who: one Christ, one subject, the Virgin truly Theotokos. Chalcedon added the what: that one is God and man, and remains both. Constantinople III would add the how of acting: that one wills and works in two natural wills and two natural energies (see Sophronius and Maximus). The four councils are one Christology, unfolded under successive pressures.

See Also

References

  • Council of Chalcedon (451). Definition of Faith. Greek text in Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum II.1.2, ed. Eduard Schwartz (Berlin–Leipzig, 1932–1938); English in Henry R. Percival, ed., The Seven Ecumenical Councils (NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14), and Norman P. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990).
  • Cyril of Alexandria. Letter 39 (Laetentur caeli), with the Formula of Reunion; Letters 45–46 (to Succensus). Trans. in McGuckin (below).
  • Council of Constantinople II (553). Anathemas. In Percival, ed., NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14; Tanner, ed., Decrees, vol. 1.
  • Gregory the Theologian (of Nazianzus). Epistle 101 (To Cledonius). Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 7.
  • Price, Richard, and Michael Gaddis. The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon. 3 vols. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005.
  • McGuckin, John A. St. Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy. Leiden: Brill, 1994.
  • van Loon, Hans. The Dyophysite Christology of Cyril of Alexandria. Leiden: Brill, 2009.
  • Meyendorff, John. Christ in Eastern Christian Thought. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1975.
  • Sellers, Robert V. The Council of Chalcedon: A Historical and Doctrinal Survey. London: SPCK, 1953.