Chrysostom, Cyril, and the Antiochenes

The golden age’s second act is the story of two schools: Antioch, whose exegesis honored the letter of Scripture and the full humanity of Christ, and Alexandria, whose theology guarded the unity of his person. This file surveys John Chrysostom — the Antiochene school’s saint and the Church’s greatest preacher; Theodore of Mopsuestia — its problem case, condemned in 553; Theodoret of Cyrrhus on the boundary; and Cyril of Alexandria, whose victory at Ephesus fixed the grammar of Orthodox Christology, including the honest history of his most famous formula.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Two Schools, One Scripture

“School” here means a culture of reading, not an institution. The Antiochene tradition — Diodore of Tarsus and his pupils — reacted against allegorical excess with a disciplined attention to the historical and literal sense, allowing typology (theoria) but refusing to dissolve the text’s plain meaning; the Alexandrian tradition, heir of Origen, read the whole of Scripture as a single divine allegory converging on Christ (on the two exegetical cultures, Quasten, Patrology, vol. 3, Utrecht/Westminster: Spectrum/Newman, 1960; Young, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, who complicates the neat opposition). The exegetical temperaments carried Christological instincts: Antioch, guarding the completeness and moral reality of Christ’s manhood, spoke of Word and assumed Man with a dangerous duality; Alexandria, guarding the single divine subject — the Word who was born, suffered, died — spoke of union with a dangerous absorption. The fifth century is the collision of the instincts; Orthodoxy needed, and eventually confessed, what was true in both (McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004; Meyendorff, Christ in Eastern Christian Thought, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1975).

Chrysostom: The School’s Saint

John of Antioch (c. 347–407), called from the sixth century “Chrysostomos,” Golden-mouth, is the Antiochene school’s vindication: its method producing not heresy but the most-read biblical commentary in Christian history. Formed under the rhetor Libanius and the exegete Diodore, nearly destroyed by immoderate asceticism in the Syrian mountains, presbyter of Antioch from 386 — the decade of the great homily series on Matthew, John, Romans, and the rest, and of On the Priesthood — he was taken to Constantinople as archbishop in 398, and his reforming severity, his preaching against the luxury of court and clergy, and the machinations of Theophilus of Alexandria and the empress Eudoxia procured his deposition at the Synod of the Oak (403) and final exile (404); he died at Comana in Pontus on 14 September 407, his last words, per his biographer, “Glory to God for all things” (Palladius, Dialogue on the Life of St. John Chrysostom; trans. Meyer, ACW 45, New York: Newman, 1985; Kelly, Golden Mouth: The Story of John Chrysostom, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995; Quasten, Patrology, vol. 3). Thirty-one years later the relics were returned in penance to Constantinople (438), and the Church has never stopped talking to him: the Liturgy most often served in Orthodoxy bears his name, his Paschal homily is appointed to be read in every church each Pascha, and he is one of the Three Great Hierarchs (Quasten, Patrology, vol. 3; on the liturgical attributions’ complexity, Taft, The Byzantine Rite: A Short History, Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1992). Doctrinally he is the school at its safest: no speculative system, but exegesis, moral theology, and an unmatched insistence — “sacrament of the brother” — that the Christ of the altar is denied when the Christ in the poor is neglected (Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew 50.3–4 on Matthew 25; trans. NPNF I/10). Full treatment: St. John Chrysostom.

Theodore of Mopsuestia: The School’s Problem Case

Theodore (c. 350–428), Chrysostom’s fellow pupil under Diodore and bishop of Mopsuestia for thirty-six years, was the school’s systematic doctor — and he is the proof that this guide’s category of “problem case” does not end in the third century. He died in the Church’s peace, esteemed; but his Christology divided Word and Man so sharply — two natures so complete as to verge on two subjects, united by “good pleasure” — that when his pupil’s pupil Nestorius refused the title Theotokos to the Virgin, the trail led back to Theodore. The Fifth Ecumenical Council (553), in the affair of the “Three Chapters,” anathematized Theodore in person along with his writings — a unique severity against a man dead in communion for over a century — while condemning only the anti-Cyrillian writings of Theodoret of Cyrrhus and the letter of Ibas, sparing their persons (Constantinople II 553, anathemas 12–14; Price, The Acts of the Council of Constantinople of 553, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009; on the legitimacy debates around posthumous condemnation, Price’s introduction). The Church of the East, meanwhile, canonized him as “the Interpreter” par excellence — a divergence that still marks the Assyrian–Orthodox dialogue (on Theodore’s reputation in the East Syriac tradition, Brock, “The Christology of the Church of the East,” in Studies in Syriac Christianity, Aldershot: Variorum, 1992). The Orthodox verdict is thus double, like Origen’s: an exegete of real service (his method flows into the Church through Chrysostom), and a condemned teacher whose system the Church weighed and rejected — the consensus patrum again working as a sieve, not a rubber stamp (see The Problem Cases; Theodoret, restored at Chalcedon after anathematizing Nestorius, remains in the Church’s calendar of blessed teachers, his anti-Cyrillian writings alone condemned — Price and Gaddis, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005, session 8).

Cyril: The Single Christ

Cyril, archbishop of Alexandria 412–444, is the Father of the unity of Christ. When Nestorius of Constantinople preached against calling Mary Theotokos, Cyril saw at stake not a Marian courtesy but the whole logic of salvation: if the one born of the Virgin is not God the Word himself in the flesh, then it was not God who suffered our death and the Eucharist is not the flesh of the Word — the argument of his letters to Nestorius, the Twelve Anathemas, and On the Unity of Christ (Cyril, Second and Third Letters to Nestorius; That Christ Is One, trans. McGuckin, PPS 13, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995; McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy, 2004). The Council of Ephesus (431), which he dominated, approved his second letter and deposed Nestorius; the Virgin is Theotokos because her Son is one, the Word incarnate (see The Seven Ecumenical Councils).

Honesty requires the famous complication. Cyril’s beloved formula — mia physis tou Theou Logou sesarkomene, “one incarnate nature of God the Word” — he believed to be Athanasius’; it is in fact from Apollinarius’ Letter to Jovian, circulating under Athanasius’ name: an Apollinarian forgery baptized in good faith (McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria, 2004, on the pseudo-Athanasian florilegium; Quasten, Patrology, vol. 3). The Church’s resolution was not to cancel Cyril but to interpret him: the Formulary of Reunion with the Antiochenes (433), which Cyril signed, confessed two natures united in one Christ; Chalcedon (451) canonized Cyril’s letters and the two-natures confession together; Constantinople II (553) read Chalcedon through Cyril again. Orthodox Christology simply is this double reception — the single divine subject of Alexandria in the unconfused two natures of Antioch — and Cyril, forgery and temper and all, is its principal Father (Meyendorff, Christ in Eastern Christian Thought, 1975, chs. 1–2; the sequel is The Christological Centuries). His long exegetical labor — commentaries on John, Luke, the Pentateuch’s typology, the Thesaurus on the Trinity — is less read and equally patristic (Quasten, Patrology, vol. 3). The 415 murder of the philosopher Hypatia by an Alexandrian mob during his episcopate remains a historiographical controversy concerning his responsibility [Disputed: the principal source, Socrates Scholasticus (Ecclesiastical History VII.15), reports the murder by a mob under the lector Peter and frames it amid Cyril’s feud with the prefect Orestes without asserting Cyril ordered it; assessments of his culpability range from instigation to indirect moral responsibility to none — see the sober discussion in Wessel, Cyril of Alexandria and the Nestorian Controversy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004]. Full treatment: St. Cyril of Alexandria.

What the Collision Teaches

For the doctrine of the Fathers, this generation adds a lesson the fourth century only implied: the Fathers correct one another, and the Church’s confession emerges from their tested convergence, not from any one school’s triumph. Antioch without Alexandria drifted toward two sons; Alexandria without Antioch toward one nature; the Church kept Chrysostom and Cyril and let Theodore and Eutyches go. When Orthodox theology speaks of the consensus patrum, it means exactly this refining process — which the councils then sealed with the Fathers’ own words, as the next section shows (see The Fathers in the Councils; Florovsky, The Byzantine Fathers of the Fifth Century, Collected Works vol. 8, Vaduz: Büchervertriebsanstalt, 1987, whose narrative of the era this paragraph condenses).

See Also

References

  • Quasten, Johannes. Patrology. Vol. 3: The Golden Age of Greek Patristic Literature. Utrecht/Westminster, MD: Spectrum/Newman Press, 1960. (Chrysostom, Diodore, Theodore, Theodoret, Cyril: lives and works.)
  • Young, Frances. Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. (The two exegetical cultures reassessed.)
  • Kelly, J. N. D. Golden Mouth: The Story of John Chrysostom — Ascetic, Preacher, Bishop. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995.
  • Palladius. Dialogue on the Life of St. John Chrysostom. Trans. Robert T. Meyer. ACW 45. New York: Newman Press, 1985. (The exile and death; “Glory to God for all things.”)
  • Chrysostom, John. Homilies on Matthew 50.3–4. Trans. NPNF I/10. (The “sacrament of the brother.”)
  • Taft, Robert F. The Byzantine Rite: A Short History. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1992. (The liturgy bearing Chrysostom’s name.)
  • McGuckin, John A. St. Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy: Its History, Theology, and Texts. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004. (The controversy; the Apollinarian pedigree of the mia physis formula.)
  • Cyril of Alexandria. On the Unity of Christ (That Christ Is One). Trans. John A. McGuckin. PPS 13. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995. Second and Third Letters to Nestorius; Twelve Anathemas.
  • Wessel, Susan. Cyril of Alexandria and the Nestorian Controversy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (The Hypatia question.)
  • Socrates Scholasticus. Ecclesiastical History VII.15. Trans. NPNF II/2. (The primary account of Hypatia’s murder.)
  • Price, Richard, and Michael Gaddis, trans. The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon. 2 vols. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005. (Session 8: Theodoret’s restoration.)
  • Price, Richard, trans. The Acts of the Council of Constantinople of 553. 2 vols. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009. (The Three Chapters; anathemas 12–14.)
  • Brock, Sebastian. “The Christology of the Church of the East.” In Studies in Syriac Christianity. Aldershot: Variorum, 1992. (Theodore as “the Interpreter.”)
  • Meyendorff, John. Christ in Eastern Christian Thought. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1975. (Chs. 1–2: the double reception.)
  • Florovsky, Georges. The Byzantine Fathers of the Fifth Century. Collected Works vol. 8. Vaduz: Büchervertriebsanstalt, 1987.