The Aftermath

Ephesus deposed Nestorius and vindicated the title Theotokos, but it ended in deadlock, custody, and schism rather than in clean victory. This file follows the settlement of late 431: the emperor’s dissolution of the council; Nestorius’s return to his monastery and his later exile to Petra and the Great Oasis; the Bazaar of Heracleides and his disputed death; Cyril’s release and triumphal return to Alexandria around 30 October 431; and the two-year schism between Alexandria-with-Rome and the Antiochenes that the council left unresolved. It closes by weighing what Ephesus did and did not settle — Theotokos and the Second Letter ratified, no new Definition issued, the Anathemas’ status contested — and the seeds it left for the later Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian division.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Settlement of Late 431

The council had collapsed into two mutually excommunicating synods, and for some weeks the emperor’s commissioner held Cyril, Memnon, and Nestorius under detention at Ephesus while the court at Constantinople weighed the contradictory verdicts (see the-contested-council.md). Theodosius II’s first instinct — to ratify both depositions and start afresh — proved unworkable, and after an attempted hearing of the parties (the court receiving delegations at Chalcedon) the emperor moved toward a settlement that preserved Cyril’s verdict against Nestorius while quietly abandoning the symmetrical charges against Cyril and Memnon (McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria: The Christological Controversy, 76–86; Russell, Cyril of Alexandria, 55–58).

The decisive development was Nestorius himself. Worn down and seeing no prospect of vindication, Nestorius asked to be allowed to retire, and at his own request he was permitted to return to his old monastery of Euprepius near Antioch, where he had lived before his elevation to Constantinople (McGuckin, 84–85; Russell, 57). In effect he had resigned. With the chief defendant withdrawn from the field, the basis for the rival deposition of Cyril dissolved. The emperor dissolved the council and dismissed the bishops to their sees, and a new bishop, Maximian, was installed at Constantinople in Nestorius’s place in the autumn of 431 (McGuckin, 85; Russell, 57–58).

Cyril’s Release and Triumphal Return

Cyril did not wait to test the emperor’s patience. Released from detention, he left Ephesus and made his way back to Egypt, arriving in Alexandria around 30 October 431 to a triumphal reception, welcomed as the champion of orthodoxy and of the Mother of God (McGuckin, 85–86; Russell, 58). [Disputed: a Coptic source gives 31 October, which may instead record the date of his departure from Ephesus rather than his arrival home.] The return was a vindication staged as festival, and it confirmed the practical outcome of the council: whatever procedural complaints the Antiochenes pressed, Cyril had emerged with his see intact, his rival removed, and his Second Letter conciliarly endorsed.

How freely he emerged is a point the sources let us see honestly. Cyril’s departure was eased by the lavish distribution of gifts to influential figures at the imperial court — the so-called eulogiai, documented in a later Alexandrian memorandum — a reminder that the council’s resolution owed something to Alexandrian money and influence as well as to doctrine (McGuckin, 86; Russell, 58; Wessel, Cyril of Alexandria and the Nestorian Controversy, 159–161). The Church remembers Ephesus as a triumph of the Theotokos; the historian records that the triumph was also a hard-fought and expensive political settlement.

Nestorius: Exile, the Bazaar, and a Disputed Death

Nestorius’s retirement to Euprepius did not prove the end of his troubles. For three years he lived quietly near Antioch, but as the Antiochene party gradually made peace with Cyril (see below), the deposed patriarch became an obstacle and an embarrassment. By an imperial edict of 3 August 435 Nestorius was formally condemned and sentenced to exile, his writings ordered burned and his followers branded “Simonians” (McGuckin, 86–87; Russell, 58–59). He was banished first toward Petra in Arabia, and then to the Great Oasis (Hibis, modern al-Kharga) in the Egyptian Thebaid — a remote desert exile from which he never returned.

In that exile Nestorius wrote his great apologia, the Bazaar (Book) of Heracleides, a long defense of his own orthodoxy composed under a pseudonym and surviving only in a later Syriac translation (the Greek original is lost). In it the aged exile argued that his Christology had been misunderstood, that he had never taught “two sons,” and that the faith of Chalcedon — which he lived to hear something of — vindicated his concern to safeguard the distinct natures (McGuckin, 87; Russell, 59; the Bazaar is the basis of much twentieth-century reassessment of Nestorius, discussed in theotokos-and-the-dispute.md). Nestorius died around 450/451 [Disputed: the exact date is unknown, and whether he died shortly before or shortly after the Council of Chalcedon (October 451) is unsettled]. The desert in which he ended his days had not silenced him; through the Bazaar his case continued to be argued long after his death, and continues to be argued still.

The Unresolved Schism

The most important thing Ephesus did not do was reunite the Church. Cyril’s return to Alexandria left the Eastern bishops unreconciled. John of Antioch and the Antiochene episcopate remained in schism with Alexandria and Rome — they had, after all, deposed Cyril at their counter-synod and regarded his Twelve Anathemas as Apollinarian, and they could not simply accept a council that had condemned their candidate before they arrived (McGuckin, 88–90; Russell, 59–61). For roughly two years the two communions remained out of communion with one another, each holding the other’s leaders to be uncanonically condemned.

That schism was healed only by negotiation, not by the council itself. The path ran through patient diplomacy — pressure from the emperor, the mediation of figures such as Acacius of Beroea and Paul of Emesa, and Cyril’s own willingness to clarify that his formulas did not deny the full humanity — culminating in the Formula of Reunion of 433, in which Cyril accepted an Antiochene confession of “two natures” and the Antiochenes accepted Theotokos and Nestorius’s deposition. That settlement, and the price each side paid for it, is the subject of reconciliation-with-antioch.md and the-cost-of-peace.md; for the present it is enough to say that Ephesus delivered a verdict but not a peace.

The schism mattered beyond the personalities involved. For two years two of the great apostolic sees stood out of communion, each convinced the other had betrayed the council. Hardliners on Cyril’s own side — the more uncompromising Egyptian and monastic constituencies — would later resent the very concessions that made reconciliation possible, regarding any acceptance of “two natures” language as a surrender of the council’s victory. The Antiochenes, for their part, could not lightly abandon Theodoret of Cyrrhus and the others who had defended Nestorius and refused to anathematize him. That the reunion was achieved at all owed much to John of Antioch’s eventual readiness to concede the central points and to Cyril’s willingness, in the Laetentur caeli letter of 433, to interpret his own mia physis idiom in terms an Antiochene could sign. Ephesus had won the doctrine of the Theotokos; it fell to the diplomacy of 433 to win the peace, and even that peace would prove fragile (McGuckin, 107–125; Russell, 61–66).

What Ephesus Did and Did Not Settle

It is worth being exact about the council’s achievement, because both its strength and its incompleteness mattered for everything that followed (McGuckin, 88–107; Russell, 59–61; Wessel, 180–205).

What Ephesus settled. It deposed Nestorius and rejected his Christology. It vindicated the title Theotokos as the test of orthodox confession of the one incarnate Lord. And it ratified Cyril’s Second Letter to Nestorius (Ep. 4; PG 77, 44–49) as the authoritative expression of the faith of Nicaea concerning the incarnation. These were settled permanently: no subsequent council reopened them, and Chalcedon in 451 would build upon them.

What Ephesus did not settle. It issued no new formal Christological Definition of its own. Unlike Chalcedon, which would promulgate a fresh dogmatic formula, Ephesus confined itself to ratifying Nicaea and Cyril’s letter — a crucial point, because it meant the council left the precise terms of the union (one nature or two, physis and hypostasis) verbally unfixed (McGuckin, 88–90). Nor did it clearly resolve the standing of the Twelve Anathemas: they were entered into the acts, but their freestanding conciliar authority is debated, and the council notably did not impose them as the test of orthodoxy the way it imposed the Second Letter (see the-twelve-anathemas.md).

That very incompleteness left the seeds of the next century’s division. By ratifying Cyril’s mia physis idiom without defining it against the Antiochene “two natures,” and by leaving the Anathemas in an ambiguous status, Ephesus passed on an unresolved tension. The Formula of Reunion of 433 papered over it; the Robber Synod of 449 and the Council of Chalcedon of 451 would force it open again, and the divergent readings of Cyril’s legacy would crystallize into the long division between the Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian Churches (kept forward-pointing here; see chalcedon-and-the-non-chalcedonians.md). Ephesus 431 was a real and lasting victory for the confession of the Theotokos and the single subject of the incarnate Word — and at the same time the opening, not the close, of the Christological age.

References

The course of the aftermath is reconstructed chiefly from John A. McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria: The Christological Controversy (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2004), 76–107, and Norman Russell, Cyril of Alexandria (London: Routledge, 2000), 55–61, with Susan Wessel, Cyril of Alexandria and the Nestorian Controversy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 159–205. The conciliar and imperial documents are in Eduard Schwartz, Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum, tome 1, Concilium Universale Ephesenum (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1922–29), cited ACO I.1, with English acts in NPNF Series 2, Vol. 14, The Seven Ecumenical Councils. Cyril’s Second Letter to Nestorius is Ep. 4 (PG 77, 44–49) and the Third Letter with the Twelve Anathemas is Ep. 17 (PG 77, 105–121). Nestorius’s apologia is the Bazaar (Book) of Heracleides, surviving in Syriac. Verified dates: Nestorius’s return to the monastery of Euprepius (late 431); the edict of exile of 3 August 435 (to Petra, then the Great Oasis); his death c. 450/451 [exact date and its relation to Chalcedon disputed]; Cyril’s triumphal return to Alexandria c. 30 October 431 [a Coptic source gives 31 October]; the two-year schism resolved by the Formula of Reunion of 433.