Theotokos and the Council

Ephesus met in disorder in 431 — Cyril opened the council before the Antiochene bishops arrived, condemned and deposed Nestorius, and confirmed the confession of Mary as Theotokos; the Antiochenes, arriving, held a counter-council and deposed Cyril. Two years later the rupture was healed by the Formula of Reunion of 433, which held together Cyril’s one Christ and the Antiochene two natures. The council also forbade, in its seventh canon, any alteration of the Nicene Creed.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

A Council in Disorder

Theodosius II summoned the bishops to Ephesus for Pentecost (7 June) 431. The gathering was a study in how the Church’s truth can be defined amid thoroughly human disorder. Cyril of Alexandria arrived with a large body of Egyptian bishops and the support of Memnon, the local bishop of Ephesus, and of the crowds of a city devoted to the Virgin. The Roman legates had not yet come; more importantly, John of Antioch and the Syrian bishops — Nestorius’s natural allies — were delayed on the road. After waiting some two weeks, and over the protest of the imperial commissioner and of sixty-eight bishops who wished to wait, Cyril opened the council on 22 June without the Antiochenes and without Nestorius, who refused to attend a session he regarded as illegitimate (McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy, 1994, on the sequence of events; Davis, The First Seven Ecumenical Councils, 1990). In a single day, with about 200 bishops, the council read Cyril’s Second Letter to Nestorius and judged it in accord with Nicaea, read Nestorius’s reply and condemned it, and deposed Nestorius as “the new Judas,” to the acclamation of the Ephesian crowd who escorted the Fathers home with torches (Acts of Ephesus, Session 1; in Percival, NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14).

Four days later John of Antioch arrived, learned what had been done, and convened a rival synod of some forty-three bishops which deposed Cyril and Memnon and denounced the Cyrillian proceedings as an outrage. When the Roman legates at last arrived in July, they sided with Cyril and confirmed the deposition of Nestorius. The emperor, receiving contradictory reports, at first ratified the depositions of all three — Nestorius, Cyril, and Memnon — and had them arrested, before eventually releasing Cyril and Memnon and confirming only the deposition of Nestorius, who retired to his monastery and later to exile in Egypt (Davis, The First Seven Ecumenical Councils, 1990; McGuckin, St. Cyril, 1994). The council thus ended in confusion, with two rival sentences, imperial vacillation, and a bitter schism between Alexandria and Antioch. That the Church nonetheless received the Cyrillian council as the Third Ecumenical Council, and its condemnation of Nestorius as true, is another instance of ecumenicity established by reception rather than by orderly procedure (see Ecumenicity and Reception).

The Definition

Ephesus produced no new creed — indeed it forbade one (below) — and no long doctrinal horos of its own; its dogmatic act was to endorse Cyril’s Second Letter to Nestorius as the authentic interpretation of the Nicene faith and to confirm the title Theotokos against Nestorius’s objection (Acts of Ephesus, Session 1; Percival, NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14). The council’s teaching is therefore Cyril’s Christology of the one incarnate Word: the Word did not unite to himself a distinct human person but became man, so that there is one Christ and one Son, the same eternally begotten of the Father and born in time of the Virgin; and Mary, having borne this one Lord according to the flesh, is truly Theotokos. The confession of the Theotokos is the seal of the unity of Christ’s person — the point developed in The Nestorian Controversy. This is the abiding dogmatic content of the Third Council, and it stands behind every later Marian feast and hymn of the Orthodox Church, in which Mary is honored not for her own sake in isolation but as the one through whom God became man (see Orthodoxy: Theotokos).

The Formula of Reunion (433)

The schism between Cyril and John of Antioch could not be left to fester, and after two years of negotiation the two were reconciled in 433 on the basis of a doctrinal statement — the Formula of Reunion — probably drafted by the Antiochene party (Theodoret is often credited) and accepted by Cyril in his letter Laetentur caeli (“Let the heavens rejoice”) (Cyril, Letter 39, to John of Antioch; text of the Formula in the Acts; McGuckin, St. Cyril, 1994; Davis, The First Seven Ecumenical Councils, 1990). The Formula is a landmark because in it Cyril, without retracting his one-subject Christology, accepted explicitly Antiochene language: it confesses Christ as “perfect God and perfect man… consubstantial with the Father as to his Godhead and consubstantial with us as to his manhood,” professes “a union of two natures” (henōsis dyo physeōn), and — decisively — endorses the title Theotokos while also distributing the scriptural sayings of Christ in a way that respects both natures (Formula of Reunion, 433; in McGuckin, St. Cyril, 1994, appendix; Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 1977). Cyril’s acceptance of “two natures” language in the Formula is of the greatest importance: it shows that the mature Cyril could speak of Christ “in two natures” and not only of “one incarnate nature,” and it provided the bridge on which the Definition of Chalcedon would be built eighteen years later (McGuckin, St. Cyril, 1994, on the Formula as the seed of Chalcedon; see The Definition and the Non-Chalcedonians). The reunion also cost Cyril the support of his more extreme followers, who thought he had conceded too much to Antioch — a foreshadowing of the party that, after his death, would harden into the Monophysite reaction.

Canon 7 and the Inviolability of the Creed

Among the canons of Ephesus, the seventh has had an outsized later history. The council decreed that “it is unlawful for any man to bring forward, or to write, or to compose a different (heteran) faith as a rival to that established by the holy Fathers assembled with the Holy Spirit at Nicaea,” and that anyone doing so, if a cleric, should be deposed (Council of Ephesus, canon 7; trans. Percival, NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14). In its immediate context the canon guarded against rival creeds being imposed on converts. But its principle — that the creed of the ecumenical Church may not be altered or supplemented by any lesser authority — became, centuries later, a chief Orthodox argument against the Western insertion of the Filioque into the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed: whatever one thinks of the doctrine, the unilateral change of the ecumenical creed by one part of the Church violates the conciliar rule of Ephesus (see The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed; The Photian Council 879–880). The canons of Ephesus also, in canon 8, affirmed the autonomy of the Church of Cyprus against the jurisdictional claims of Antioch — an early and enduring charter of ecclesial autocephaly.

Legacy

Ephesus fixed Theotokos in the Church’s confession forever, and with it the unity of Christ’s person; the Formula of Reunion supplied the vocabulary that would balance that unity with the full duality of the natures. But the settlement was fragile. Cyril’s most zealous partisans read his “one incarnate nature” formula in a way that would, after his death in 444, produce the Monophysite reaction of Eutyches and Dioscorus; the Antiochene emphasis, in its extreme, remained tarred with Nestorius. The Church had confessed the what — one Christ, truly God and truly man, born of the Theotokos — but the precise how, the terminology adequate to hold unity and duality together, awaited Chalcedon (see Chalcedon (451)).

See Also

References

  • Council of Ephesus (431). Acts, Session 1; Canons 1–8 (esp. 7 and 8). In Percival, ed., NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14.
  • Cyril of Alexandria. Letter 39 (Laetentur caeli, to John of Antioch), with the Formula of Reunion (433). Trans. in McGuckin (below).
  • 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.
  • Percival, Henry R., ed. The Seven Ecumenical Councils (NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14). Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1900.