The Contested Council

The Third Ecumenical Council met at Ephesus in the summer of 431 — and almost at once split into two councils that excommunicated each other. This file follows the rival sessions: Theodosius II’s imperial summons of November 430; the gathering that delayed for the absent John of Antioch; Cyril’s decision to open on 22 June over the written protest of Count Candidian; the single-session deposition of Nestorius, with the reading and approval of the Second Letter and the patristic florilegia; the late arrival of John of Antioch and his counter-synod deposing Cyril and Memnon; the papal legates’ confirmation in July; and the imperial detention of all three principals under Count John. Both sides charged the other with acting uncanonically, and the procedural irregularity is treated here honestly, as the sources require.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Imperial Summons

The council was called not by the pope but by the emperor. On 19 November 430 Theodosius II issued a sacra — a formal imperial summons — convoking a general council of the bishops of the empire at Ephesus, to assemble at Pentecost (7 June) 431 (McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria: The Christological Controversy, 53–54; Russell, Cyril of Alexandria, 48). The choice of date and place was significant. Pentecost gave the bishops time to travel; Ephesus, with its ancient tradition of the Virgin and its great church dedicated to St. Mary, was congenial ground for the party that championed the title Theotokos. The sacra addressed the metropolitans by name and directed each to bring a modest delegation of his suffragans, so that the council should represent the whole episcopate without becoming an ungovernable crowd.

The emperor’s intention, at least on paper, was to adjudicate impartially between Cyril and Nestorius. To that end he appointed the comes (count) Candidian, captain of the imperial guard (comes domesticorum), as his commissioner, with a body of soldiers to keep order. Candidian’s commission was explicitly procedural: he was to secure the peace, exclude unauthorized monks and laity from the city, and prevent the bishops from dispersing before a verdict was reached — but he was forbidden to take any part in the doctrinal debates themselves (ACO I.1.1, the council acts; McGuckin, 54–55; Russell, 48–49). In practice Candidian’s neutrality leaned toward Nestorius, who was a Constantinopolitan prelate enjoying the emperor’s confidence, and the count’s later conduct made that sympathy plain.

The Gathering and the Delay

The bishops converged on Ephesus through the late spring. Cyril of Alexandria arrived with a large and disciplined Egyptian contingent; Memnon, bishop of Ephesus, the local metropolitan, brought the bishops of Asia and Pamphylia and threw the resources of his see behind Cyril. Nestorius came from Constantinople with his own supporters and lodged in the city under Candidian’s protection. The aged Nestorian sympathizer Theodoret of Cyrrhus and others of the Antiochene party were expected with John of Antioch, the patriarch whose suffragans formed the core of the Eastern (Syrian) episcopate (McGuckin, 55–58; Russell, 49–50).

But John and the Easterners did not come. Pentecost passed; the bishops waited. More than two weeks elapsed beyond the appointed date, and still the long road from Antioch yielded no patriarch. Letters arrived from John urging the assembly to begin without him if his journey was further delayed — a message Cyril’s party would later read as a license to proceed, and the Antiochenes would later insist had meant no such thing. The causes of the delay are disputed: distance and the difficulty of the route are sufficient explanation, but Cyril’s supporters suspected deliberate stalling to protect Nestorius, while the Antiochenes blamed the hardships of travel and the press of famine and unrest in the Syrian provinces (McGuckin, 58–60; Russell, 50). With the summer heat rising and provisions strained, the assembled bishops — many of them elderly, far from home, and falling ill — grew restless.

Cyril Opens the Council, 22 June 431

On Monday, 22 June 431, Cyril opened the council in the church of St. Mary (the Theotokos church) at Ephesus, sixteen days after the appointed Pentecost and without waiting further for John of Antioch and the Eastern bishops (ACO I.1.2; McGuckin, 60–63; Russell, 50–51). The decision was deliberate and contested. Candidian appeared in person and lodged a formal written protest, reading out the emperor’s instruction that no business be transacted until the full council had assembled; he was joined by some sixty-eight bishops who likewise objected that opening the session in the absence of so large a body — the patriarch of Antioch chief among them — was premature and uncanonical (ACO I.1.1; McGuckin, 61–62). Cyril’s council overrode the protest: it held that the bishops present constituted a quorum, that the emperor’s summons named a date which had long passed, that John’s own letters had authorized proceeding, and that the council, once convened, answered to canon law and not to the imperial commissioner. Candidian withdrew under protest.

Nestorius was lodged nearby under guard and refused to attend. He was summoned three times by formal deputation — and three times declined, insisting he would appear only when all the bishops, including the Easterners, had gathered (ACO I.1.1; McGuckin, 62–63). His refusal allowed the council to proceed against him in absentia, treating his non-appearance after triple citation as canonical contumacy.

The Single-Session Deposition

In this single session of 22 June the council did its decisive work. The Nicene Creed was read first, as the standard of orthodoxy. Then Cyril’s Second Letter to Nestorius (Ep. 4; PG 77, 44–49) was read aloud, and the assembled bishops voted that it was consonant with Nicaea — orthodox, and the measure against which Nestorius would be judged (ACO I.1.2; McGuckin, 63–67; Russell, 51–52). Next, Nestorius’s reply to that letter was read and was judged contrary to Nicaea and condemned. To this were added a florilegium of patristic testimonies — selected passages from earlier Fathers marshalled to show that the Cyrilline confession stood in the tradition — and a dossier of Nestorius’s own sermons, read out so that he might be condemned from his own words (ACO I.1.2; McGuckin, 64–67). It is worth marking what the council did not formally enact here: Cyril’s Third Letter with the Twelve Anathemas was entered into the acts of the council but was not made the test of orthodoxy that the Second Letter was, and the freestanding conciliar status of the Anathemas remains debated (see the-twelve-anathemas.md).

The verdict followed the same day: Nestorius was deposed and excommunicated, declared deprived of his episcopal rank and stripped of communion. The numbers attached to the sentence vary in the sources and should be stated with care. Roughly 160 bishops were present at the session itself; 198 subscribed the verdict, a handful adding their names afterward; the figure of “about 250” sometimes cited refers to the broader eventual attendance at Ephesus over the weeks that followed, not to the subscribers of 22 June (McGuckin, 63, 81–82; Russell, 51). The bishops emerged that evening to find the populace of Ephesus waiting; the crowds reportedly escorted them home with torches and incense, acclaiming the Mother of God whose title the council had just vindicated (McGuckin, 67–68).

John of Antioch and the Counter-Synod

Five days later the situation reversed. John of Antioch arrived on 26 or 27 June 431 — the council’s own record gives the day with that very hesitation, “the twenty-sixth or twenty-seventh” [Disputed: the primary-source account itself reports the date as uncertain, “the 26th or 27th”] (ACO I.1.5; McGuckin, 68–70; Russell, 52). Informed that Cyril had already deposed Nestorius without him, John refused to recognize the proceedings. The same day he convened a rival counter-synod — the conciliabulum — of some forty-three bishops, and in it deposed and excommunicated Cyril and Memnon of Ephesus (ACO I.1.5; McGuckin, 69–71; Russell, 52–53). The charges were procedural and doctrinal at once: Cyril and Memnon had opened the council uncanonically and prematurely, in defiance of the imperial commissioner and the absent patriarchs; and Cyril’s Twelve Anathemas were denounced as Apollinarian, reviving the Antiochene charge that the Alexandrian formula compromised the full humanity of Christ.

Here the council’s contested character stands fully exposed. Two assemblies, each claiming to be the legitimate Ecumenical Council, had now passed sentence of deposition on the other’s leaders. Cyril’s party held that John’s late arrival could not undo a verdict already lawfully reached; John’s party held that a verdict reached before the council was complete was no verdict at all. The historian must record that both sides charged the other with acting uncanonically, and that on the bare question of procedure the Antiochene complaint was not frivolous — the haste of 22 June was real, and Cyril had every motive to act before the Easterners could shield Nestorius (McGuckin, 70–73; Russell, 52–54; Wessel, Cyril of Alexandria and the Nestorian Controversy, 152–158).

The Papal Legates and the Imperial Detention

The deadlock broke partly through Rome. The papal legates — the bishops Arcadius and Projectus and the priest Philip — reached Ephesus around 10 July 431, bearing Pope Celestine’s instructions to support Cyril (Celestine having already condemned Nestorius in 430). In renewed sessions of Cyril’s council they confirmed the deposition of Nestorius and ratified the proceedings; the legate Philip made the famous declaration of Rome’s concurrence, naming the apostle Peter and the Roman see’s assent to the council’s act (ACO I.1.3; McGuckin, 73–76; Russell, 54–55). Pope Celestine himself died on 27 July 431; his successor Sixtus III confirmed the council.

The emperor, receiving contradictory reports, at first ratified both depositions. A point of precision is needed here, because the sources distinguish two lists. The imperial deposition decree named Cyril, Memnon, and John of Antioch; but the three principals actually taken into physical custody and detention at Ephesus were Cyril, Memnon, and Nestorius (McGuckin, 76–80; Russell, 55–57). Theodosius dispatched a senior official, the comes John (Comes Iohannes), to take charge of the city, restore order, and hold the principals under guard while the court considered the matter; an attempt to hear the parties before the imperial court at Chalcedon followed. Candidian, for his part, had done what he could for Nestorius throughout — he had tried to halt the early opening, and later had the notices of Nestorius’s deposition torn down (McGuckin, 62, 78).

What the summer of 431 had produced, then, was not a clean conciliar triumph but a contested, irregular, and bitterly disputed council whose verdict would have to be vindicated after the fact — by Rome, by the emperor’s eventual decision, and ultimately by the settlement of 433. The work of untangling it belongs to the-aftermath.md.

See Also

• The Aftermath — the settlement of late 431, Nestorius’s exile, and what Ephesus did and did not decide.
• The Twelve Anathemas — the document the Antiochenes branded Apollinarian at the counter-synod.
• Theotokos and the Dispute — the question the council was convened to decide.
• Reconciliation with Antioch — how the schism the council left open was finally healed.
• Ecumenical Councils — the place of Ephesus among the seven.
• The Pre-Schism Church — the imperial-conciliar setting of the fifth century.

References

Primary sources for the council are the acts edited by Eduard Schwartz, Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum, tome 1, Concilium Universale Ephesenum (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1922–29), cited as ACO I.1 (sessions in I.1.1–I.1.7), with Cyril’s Second Letter to Nestorius (Ep. 4; PG 77, 44–49) read and approved in the session of 22 June, and the Third Letter with the Twelve Anathemas (Ep. 17; PG 77, 105–121) entered into the acts. English translations of the canons and key acts appear in NPNF Series 2, Vol. 14, The Seven Ecumenical Councils. The standard modern narrative is John A. McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria: The Christological Controversy (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2004), 53–82; with Norman Russell, Cyril of Alexandria (London: Routledge, 2000), 48–57, and Susan Wessel, Cyril of Alexandria and the Nestorian Controversy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 152–180. Dates follow the verified chronology: the sacra of 19 November 430; the opening of 22 June 431; John of Antioch’s arrival on 26/27 June; the legates around 10 July; Celestine’s death on 27 July 431.