The Nestorian Controversy

When Nestorius, Patriarch of Constantinople, objected around 428 to calling the Virgin Theotokos (“God-bearer”), preferring Christotokos, he touched off a Christological crisis: behind the title lay the question whether the one Christ is a single subject who is at once God and man, or two subjects — the Word and the man Jesus — merely conjoined. Cyril of Alexandria answered with a theology of the one incarnate Word and the Twelve Anathemas.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Two Schools of Christology

The controversy grew from a long-standing difference of theological instinct between two great centers. The school of Alexandria, heir to Athanasius and Cyril, emphasized the unity of Christ: the eternal Word is the one subject of everything predicated of the Saviour, so that it is the same Word who is eternally begotten of the Father and born in time of the Virgin, the same who works miracles and who suffers and dies “in the flesh.” Its watchword was a phrase Cyril believed to be from Athanasius (in fact from Apollinarius, though Cyril did not know this): “one incarnate nature of God the Word” (mia physis tou Theou Logou sesarkōmenē) (McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy, 1994, on the Alexandrian tradition and the origin of the mia physis formula; Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 5th ed., 1977). The school of Antioch, heir to Diodore of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia, emphasized instead the completeness and distinctness of Christ’s two natures, guarding the full reality of his humanity against any suggestion that the Word simply replaced a human mind or that the divinity was mingled with the flesh; it preferred to speak of the Word “assuming” or “indwelling” the man, of a union of “good pleasure” or conjunction (synapheia) (Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 1977, on the Antiochene tradition). Each school guarded a real truth — the one Christ, and the full humanity — and each, pressed to an extreme, risked a characteristic error: Alexandria toward confusing the natures (the road to Eutyches), Antioch toward dividing the person (the road, its opponents charged, that Nestorius took).

Nestorius and the Word Theotokos

Nestorius, a monk and celebrated preacher from Antioch, became Patriarch of Constantinople in 428. He was a man of the Antiochene school, zealous against heresy and, as it proved, tactless. The flashpoint was the title Theotokos — “God-bearer,” “Mother of God” — long used in popular devotion and by the Fathers of Alexandria. Nestorius, or a priest in his circle, preached against it: to call Mary “Mother of God” seemed to him to make the Godhead itself have a beginning, as though the Virgin bore the divine nature; better, he said, to call her Christotokos, “Mother of Christ,” or at most to balance Theotokos with anthropotokos, “man-bearer” (Nestorius’s sermons, preserved in fragments and in his own later apology, the Bazaar of Heracleides; Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 1977; McGuckin, St. Cyril, 1994). Nestorius’s own intention, as modern study has stressed, was not the crude heresy his enemies painted; he wanted to protect the immutability of the Godhead and the reality of the human experiences of Christ, and he confessed one prosōpon (“person,” in a sense) of union (Anastos and others, in the twentieth-century reassessment; McGuckin, St. Cyril, 1994, weighing the rehabilitation). But his language of two natures each with its own concrete subsistence, united in a shared “person of union,” sounded to his opponents like two Sons, two subjects — a divine Word and a human Jesus side by side — with the title Theotokos denied precisely because it would attribute a human birth to the divine subject. And that, the Church judged, was the fatal point.

Why the Title Is Christological, Not Merely Marian

The deepest thing to grasp about Ephesus is that the fight over Theotokos was never chiefly about Mary; it was about Christ. The title is a test of the unity of his person. If Mary is truly Theotokos, then the one she bore is truly God — the same single subject, the eternal Word, is the one who was carried in her womb and born of her according to his humanity. To deny her the title is, by that logic, to deny that the one born of her is God; it implies that what was born of Mary was a man distinct from the Word, so that there are two subjects and not one incarnate Lord (Cyril, Second Letter to Nestorius [Epistle 4]; McGuckin, St. Cyril, 1994, on the Christological logic of Theotokos; see Theotokos and the Council). The confession “Mary is the Mother of God” is thus a compressed confession of the Incarnation itself: that God the Word truly became man, truly took flesh and was born, without ceasing to be God. This is why the Church fought for a word, and why the word has stood ever since (cf. Orthodoxy: Theotokos).

Cyril’s Intervention

The champion of the unity of Christ was St. Cyril, Patriarch of Alexandria (see St. Cyril of Alexandria). Cyril was a formidable theologian and an equally formidable ecclesiastical politician, and both faculties were fully engaged. When word of Nestorius’s preaching reached him, he wrote a series of letters of increasing gravity. His Second Letter to Nestorius (Epistle 4, early 430) is the classic, irenic statement of his Christology and would later be solemnly approved at both Ephesus and Chalcedon: the Word did not become man by a change into flesh, nor by mere indwelling, but “hypostatically united to himself” human nature, so that there is one Christ, one Son, in whom the distinction of the natures is not abolished but who is nonetheless a single subject — and Mary is therefore rightly called Theotokos (Cyril, Second Letter to Nestorius [Ep. 4]; trans. in Percival, NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14, and in McGuckin, St. Cyril, 1994). Both Cyril and Nestorius appealed to Pope Celestine of Rome, who, at a synod in 430, found for Cyril and against Nestorius, and commissioned Cyril to execute the sentence (Celestine’s letters; Davis, The First Seven Ecumenical Councils, 1990).

The Twelve Anathemas

Cyril then pressed the matter to a sharp edge. His Third Letter to Nestorius (Epistle 17, late 430), written on the authority of the Alexandrian synod, closed with Twelve Anathemas (Twelve Chapters) demanding that Nestorius condemn a series of propositions on pain of deposition (Cyril, Third Letter to Nestorius, with the Twelve Anathemas; trans. in Percival, NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14). The anathemas are the most uncompromising expression of Cyril’s one-subject Christology. The first sets the tone: “If anyone will not confess that the Emmanuel is very God, and that therefore the Holy Virgin is the Mother of God (Theotokos), inasmuch as in the flesh she bore the Word of God made flesh… let him be anathema” (Cyril, Third Letter, Anathema 1). Others condemn dividing the sayings of the Gospels between two subjects (Anathema 4), or refusing to confess that “the Word of God suffered in the flesh” (Anathema 12) — the language of the “one incarnate nature” and of a real, if impassible-in-Godhead, suffering of the one Christ. The Anathemas alarmed the Antiochenes — even the moderate Theodoret of Cyrrhus wrote against them as verging on Apollinarianism and confusion of the natures — and their status would remain delicate: approved at Ephesus in the general endorsement of Cyril’s letters, they were never formally made a separate rule of faith, and Chalcedon would balance Cyril’s language with the Antiochene concern for the two natures (Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 1977, on the reception of the Anathemas; McGuckin, St. Cyril, 1994). The stage was thus set, by late 430, for a general council — with two patriarchs, two theologies, and two anathematizing parties converging on Ephesus. What happened there is the subject of the next file.

References

Cyril of Alexandria. Second Letter to Nestorius (Ep. 4); Third Letter to Nestorius (Ep. 17), with the Twelve Anathemas. Trans. in Percival, ed., NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14; and in McGuckin (below).
Nestorius. The Bazaar of Heracleides. Trans. Driver and Hodgson. Oxford, 1925 (Nestorius’s own later apology).
Davis, Leo Donald. The First Seven Ecumenical Councils. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1990.
Kelly, J. N. D. Early Christian Doctrines. 5th ed. London: A&C Black, 1977.
McGuckin, John A. St. Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy. Leiden: Brill, 1994; repr. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2004.
Percival, Henry R., ed. The Seven Ecumenical Councils (NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14). Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1900.