Against the Monophysites

When the Council of Chalcedon (451) defined Christ as one person in two natures, much of Palestinian monasticism rose against it as a betrayal of Cyril of Alexandria, and a monk named Theodosius seized the see of Jerusalem in the absence of Patriarch Juvenal. Against this revolt St. Euthymius the Great threw the weight of an authority that was already legendary in the desert: he refused communion with the usurper, withdrew into the deep wilderness rather than be drawn into schism, and held to the two-natures confession — a stand that Cyril of Scythopolis presents as decisive for the eventual restoration of Chalcedonian order in Palestine. This file sets out the council, the revolt, and Euthymius’s part in it, distinguishing what the Life claims from what the conciliar and imperial record confirms.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; father of Palestinian monasticism)

The Council of Chalcedon and Its Definition

The Fourth Ecumenical Council met at Chalcedon, across the Bosphorus from Constantinople, in the autumn of 451, summoned by the Emperor Marcian and his consort the Empress Pulcheria (Chalcedon 451; cf. Price and Gaddis, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, 2005, vol. 1, introduction). It was called to undo the work of a council held two years earlier — the Second Council of Ephesus of 449, presided over by Dioscorus of Alexandria, which had acquitted and restored the archimandrite Eutyches and deposed his accusers, and which Pope Leo of Rome famously branded a latrocinium, a “robber-synod” or Latrocinium (Leo, Ep. 95; cf. the conciliar record). At Chalcedon the proceedings of 449 were overturned, Dioscorus was deposed (for contumacy and his conduct at Ephesus rather than on a strict charge of heresy), and the Council issued its Definition of the faith — the Horos (Chalcedon 451, Definition).

The Chalcedonian Definition confessed “one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ … acknowledged in two natures (en dyo physesin), without confusion, without change, without division, without separation (asynchytōs, atreptōs, adiairetōs, achōristōs); the distinction of natures being in no way annulled by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved and concurring into one person (prosōpon) and one hypostasis (hypostasis)” (Chalcedon 451, Definition; trans. in Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 1990, vol. 1). The formula was framed against two opposite errors: the teaching associated with Nestorius, which the Council took to divide the one Christ into two subjects; and the teaching of Eutyches, who had confessed that after the union there was but “one nature (mia physis),” the humanity of Christ being absorbed into the divinity “like a drop of honey in the sea” — so that, in the eyes of his opponents, Christ’s manhood ceased to be consubstantial with ours (Chalcedon 451, Acts, session 1, the examination of Eutyches; cf. the Tome of Leo, Ep. 28). The Council received the Tome of Leo and the Cyrillian letters as the standard of its faith, presenting itself not as an innovation but as the guardian of the confession of Nicaea, Constantinople, and Ephesus (431).

It is essential, for an accurate and non-polemical account, to grasp why this Definition provoked so violent a reaction in the East. To its defenders Chalcedon was simply the faith of Cyril of Alexandria made precise. To its opponents — who would later be called Monophysites or, in their own self-understanding, miaphysites — the language of “two natures” sounded like the very Nestorianism that Cyril and the Council of Ephesus (431) had condemned. They were loyal above all to Cyril’s formula “one incarnate nature of God the Word” (mia physis tou Theou Logou sesarkōmenē) and feared that to speak of “two natures” after the union was to split the one Christ. Their resistance, especially among the monks, was not the cynicism of heretics but the alarm of men who believed they were defending the integrity of the Incarnation against a relapse into the error of Nestorius (see Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement, 1972; Perrone, La chiesa di Palestina e le controversie cristologiche, 1980). This concern must be stated fairly: the controversy belonged to the one undivided Church before the schisms, and the non-Chalcedonian side held its position out of fidelity to Cyril and dread of dividing the Lord.

The Palestinian Revolt of Theodosius

When the Definition was published, the shock in Palestine was immediate and severe. Patriarch Juvenal of Jerusalem had been one of the great figures at Chalcedon; at the council he had abandoned the side of Dioscorus, with whom he had stood at the latrocinium of 449, and had subscribed the Definition. In the same context the Council recognized for the see of Jerusalem a patriarchal jurisdiction over the three Palestines, the long-sought elevation of Jerusalem from the metropolitanate of Caesarea — a settlement that bound Juvenal’s prestige to the council he had endorsed (Chalcedon 451, Acts, the agreement between Juvenal and Maximus of Antioch; cf. Honigmann, “Juvenal of Jerusalem,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 5, 1950). To the monks of Palestine, many of whom regarded Juvenal as having betrayed Cyril and gone over to the enemy, his subscription was an apostasy.

While Juvenal was still absent in the capital, a revolt broke out. According to Cyril of Scythopolis and the independent record alike, a monk named Theodosius — a man Cyril describes with sharp hostility — put himself at the head of the anti-Chalcedonian monks, raised the Palestinian desert and the holy city against the council, and had himself installed as patriarch of Jerusalem in Juvenal’s place (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 27; cf. Evagrius Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History 2.5; Zachariah Rhetor, HE 3.3–9). The usurpation was bloody: Cyril and Evagrius report violence against Chalcedonian clergy, the consecration of bishops loyal to the rebel party, and the persecution of those who would not repudiate the council. The historical Theodosius is thus rightly called “Theodosius the False” — a usurper who held the see by force for some twenty months, roughly 451 to 453, until imperial troops sent by Marcian restored Juvenal in 453 (cf. Honigmann 1950; Binns, Ascetics and Ambassadors of Christ, 1994, ch. on the Christological crisis). [Disputed: the precise duration of Theodosius's usurpation is given variously in the sources; Cyril is vague on chronology here, and modern reconstructions (Honigmann 1950; Binns 1994) place the seizure in late 451 and the restoration of Juvenal in 453, a span of roughly twenty months, but the exact months are not fixed by an unambiguous document.]

The Empress Eudocia, widow of Theodosius II and then resident in Jerusalem, lent her support to the rebel party for a time — a circumstance treated in its own file (see The Empress Eudocia). For the present, the point is that the revolt was not a fringe disturbance but a near-universal movement of the Palestinian monks, with imperial-family patronage, that for a season made the holy places themselves a stronghold of resistance to the Fourth Ecumenical Council.

Euthymius’s Refusal and Withdrawal into the Desert

Into this crisis Cyril sets the figure of Euthymius, already an old man — born, by Cyril’s reckoning, in 377, and so in his middle seventies in 451 — and by then the most venerated monastic father of the Judean desert (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 27; on the date of birth, Cyril, Life of Euthymius 3, 60). Cyril’s account is unambiguous: when nearly the whole desert went over to Theodosius, Euthymius alone among the great fathers refused to receive him or to enter into communion with the rebels, and held fast to the council and to the lawful patriarch Juvenal (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 27).

The form Euthymius’s refusal took was characteristic of the man and of the desert tradition: not a counter-mobilization but a withdrawal. Rather than commune with the usurper or be drawn into the violence, Euthymius left the neighborhood of his lavra and went off into the inner wilderness — into the deep desert toward the Dead Sea, the region of Rouba and the utter solitude beyond the cultivated edge — there to wait out the schism in stillness (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 27; on the geography of the deep desert and Euthymius’s Lenten withdrawals into it, see The Ascetic and the Solitary). This was the same flight into the deep desert that marked his whole ascetic life — the love of hesychia turned, in a moment of ecclesiastical crisis, into a public refusal. By withdrawing rather than communing, Euthymius made his stand legible to the whole monastic world: the greatest of the fathers would not touch the rebellion.

The effect, in Cyril’s telling, was decisive. Because Euthymius would not receive Theodosius, “many” of the anchorites and monks of the desert followed his example and likewise refused communion with the usurper (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 27). Among those Cyril names as standing with Euthymius is the recluse Gerasimus of the Jordan, who had at first inclined to the anti-Chalcedonian side and was reclaimed to the council through Euthymius’s example and counsel (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 27; cf. Cyril, Life of Gerasimus, the brief notice; Chitty, The Desert a City, 1966). The moral weight of one old hermit, in a world where the monks were the conscience of the Church, proved heavier than the armed usurpation. When imperial authority at length restored Juvenal in 453, the desert had already, through Euthymius, a nucleus of Chalcedonian fidelity around which order could re-form.

A note of source-criticism is owed here. Cyril of Scythopolis is, by broad scholarly consensus, the most reliable hagiographer of the Christian East — he wrote within a century of these events, inside the very communities Euthymius founded, naming his informants and dating by consul and indiction (Flusin, Miracle et histoire dans l’œuvre de Cyrille de Scythopolis, 1983; Binns 1994; see Cyril of Scythopolis’s Life of Euthymius). But Cyril is also a partisan: he writes from within the victorious Chalcedonian and Sabaite tradition, for whom Euthymius is the great patron of orthodoxy, and his portrait of Theodosius is correspondingly black. The bare facts of the revolt — a monk named Theodosius, a violent usurpation of the see of Jerusalem in Juvenal’s absence, an imperial restoration — are confirmed by the independent Greek and Syriac record (Evagrius, HE 2.5; Zachariah Rhetor, HE 3; Honigmann 1950). What belongs more particularly to the Life, and is harder to corroborate independently, is the precise scale of Euthymius’s personal influence — that it was his refusal above all that turned the desert. This is Cyril’s claim, made plausible by Euthymius’s known standing, and it should be read as the testimony of a well-placed but interested witness rather than as a fact established by neutral documents (Flusin 1983; Perrone 1980).

The Two-Natures Christology Euthymius Confessed

Cyril does not present Euthymius as a theologian who argued the Christological question in technical terms; he presents him as a father whose confession was simple, conciliar, and firm. The content of that confession, as Cyril gives it, is straight Chalcedonian: that the one Lord Jesus Christ is acknowledged in two natures, the divine and the human, united without confusion and without division in the one hypostasis of the Word (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 27; cf. Chalcedon 451, Definition). When, years later, the usurper Basiliscus issued his anti-Chalcedonian Encyclical (475) and pressed the bishops to repudiate the council, Cyril again sets Euthymius firmly on the side of Chalcedon and against the Encyclical, and reports that the saint’s stand helped steady the Palestinian church and even moved the bishops who had wavered (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 27, 43; on the Encyclical of Basiliscus, 475, and its later reversal, cf. Evagrius, HE 3.4–7). Euthymius is thus made the constant of Palestinian orthodoxy across two reigns of pressure — the revolt of 451–453 and the Basiliscan crisis of the 470s.

The theology Euthymius held is the faith the Orthodox Church confesses as the Fourth Ecumenical Council: that in the Incarnation the eternal Son took a complete human nature, body and rational soul, consubstantial with us; that this manhood was neither swallowed up in the Godhead (against Eutyches) nor united to it as to a separate person (against the Nestorian construction the council feared); and that the two natures subsist in the one person of the Word, each retaining its full properties (Chalcedon 451, Definition; see The Ecumenical Councils). For the desert, this was not abstract: it was the confession that the One who suffered for them was truly God and truly man, and that to compromise either nature was to lose the salvation worked in the flesh of Christ.

It is worth restating, in fairness, that the monks who followed Theodosius were not consciously denying Christ’s humanity; they were defending, as they saw it, the unity of His person against a formula that sounded Nestorian to ears trained on Cyril. The tragedy of the fifth-century crisis is in part a tragedy of language — of the word physis used in two different senses by men of comparable piety (Frend 1972; Perrone 1980; on the wider controversy, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem). Euthymius’s greatness, in Cyril’s portrait, lay not in out-arguing the rebels but in holding the conciliar confession steadily and refusing the schism, until the storm passed and the desert could be reconciled to the council it had at first rejected.

The Legacy of the Stand

The line that runs from Euthymius’s refusal in 451 to the classical Chalcedonian monasticism of the sixth century is, in Cyril’s narrative and in the judgment of modern historians, a direct one. The great pillars of the Judean desert in the next generation — above all Sabas, Euthymius’s spiritual heir, and Theodosius the Cenobiarch — were defenders of Chalcedon to a man, and the Sabaite lavras became the bastion of the council in the East through the renewed Christological battles of the age of Justinian (Cyril, Life of Sabas, the chapters on Sabas’s embassies to Constantinople; Binns 1994; Perrone 1980; see Sabas and the Next Generation and The Palestinian Monastic Trinity). That the Palestinian desert, which in 451 had nearly all gone over to Theodosius, became within two generations the firmest stronghold of Chalcedon, is owed in no small part — so Cyril insists, and the later history bears him out — to the old hermit who in the year of the council refused to commune with the rebels and went off into the deep desert to wait.

In the Orthodox memory Euthymius is therefore venerated not only as a father of monks but as a confessor of the faith of Chalcedon, set beside the later confessors of the two natures and the two wills — Maximus the Confessor above all — in the unbroken line of those who defended the integrity of Christ’s two natures (see St. Maximus the Confessor; on his place in the patristic tradition, The Church Fathers). His feast on 20 January keeps the memory of a man whose monastic stillness was, at the crisis of his age, an act of public confession (see Feast and Cult).

References

Cyril of Scythopolis. Life of Euthymius. In R. M. Price, trans., Cyril of Scythopolis: The Lives of the Monks of Palestine (Cistercian Studies 114; Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1991), cited by the section numbering of E. Schwartz, Kyrillos von Skythopolis (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1939). (The revolt of Theodosius, Euthymius’s refusal and withdrawal, and the reclaiming of Gerasimus at §27; the stand against the Encyclical of Basiliscus at §43; the date of birth at §§3, 60.)
The Council of Chalcedon (451), Definition of the Faith (Horos). In Norman P. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils (London/Washington: Sheed & Ward/Georgetown University Press, 1990), vol. 1; and Richard Price and Michael Gaddis, trans., The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon (Translated Texts for Historians 45; Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005), 3 vols. (The two-natures Definition; the deposition of Dioscorus; the examination of Eutyches; the recognition of the patriarchal jurisdiction of Jerusalem.)
The Second Council of Ephesus (449) — the “Robber Synod” / Latrocinium. As reported in the Acts of Chalcedon (Price and Gaddis 2005, vol. 1) and in Leo of Rome, Letters 95 and 98. (The acquittal of Eutyches and deposition of his accusers under Dioscorus; Leo’s term latrocinium.)
Leo of Rome (Pope Leo I). Tome to Flavian (Ep. 28) and Letters. (The two-natures Christology received at Chalcedon; the condemnation of the latrocinium.)
Evagrius Scholasticus. Ecclesiastical History 2.5; 3.4–7. Trans. Michael Whitby (Translated Texts for Historians 33; Liverpool, 2000). (The Palestinian revolt and the usurpation of Theodosius; the Encyclical of Basiliscus.)
Zachariah Rhetor (Pseudo-Zachariah). Ecclesiastical History 3.3–9. (The anti-Chalcedonian account of the revolt; a counter-perspective to Cyril.)
Honigmann, Ernest. “Juvenal of Jerusalem.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 5 (1950): 209–279. (The chronology of Juvenal, the revolt of Theodosius, and the imperial restoration of 453.)
Binns, John. Ascetics and Ambassadors of Christ: The Monasteries of Palestine 314–631. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. (The Christological crisis in the Judean desert; Cyril as its historian; Euthymius’s role.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City: An Introduction to the Study of Egyptian and Palestinian Monasticism under the Christian Empire. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (The narrative setting of Euthymius and the desert in the Chalcedonian crisis.)
Perrone, Lorenzo. La chiesa di Palestina e le controversie cristologiche. Brescia: Paideia, 1980. (The Palestinian church in the Christological controversies; the monks’ fear of Nestorianism and loyalty to Cyril.)
Flusin, Bernard. Miracle et histoire dans l’œuvre de Cyrille de Scythopolis. Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1983. (Cyril’s method, reliability, and partisanship.)
Frend, W. H. C. The Rise of the Monophysite Movement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972. (The anti-Chalcedonian movement and its motives, treated on its own terms.)