The Controversy and the Tome of Leo

After Cyril’s death the Alexandrian emphasis on the one Christ hardened, in Eutyches, into the denial of Christ’s full humanity — “one nature after the union.” A packed council at Ephesus in 449, dominated by Dioscorus, vindicated Eutyches and refused to read Pope Leo’s Tome; Leo branded it the Latrocinium, a “robbery.” The Tome of Leo, a masterly statement of the two natures in one person, became a founding document of the council that overturned 449.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Eutyches and the Monophysite Reaction

The Formula of Reunion of 433 had balanced Cyril’s one-subject Christology with the Antiochene confession of two natures (see Theotokos and the Council). But Cyril’s more zealous followers had never been comfortable with the concession, and after his death in 444 the Alexandrian party, now led by his successor Dioscorus, pressed the “one incarnate nature” (mia physis) formula in a rigid and exclusive way. The reaction found an incautious champion in Eutyches, an aged and influential archimandrite of a large monastery in Constantinople. Eutyches taught that before the union there were two natures, but “after the union” (meta tēn henōsin) there is only one nature — the humanity of Christ being, as it were, absorbed into or overwhelmed by the divinity, “like a drop of honey in the sea,” so that Christ’s flesh is not consubstantial with ours (Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 5th ed., 1977, on Eutyches; Davis, The First Seven Ecumenical Councils, 1990). This is Monophysitism in the strict and heretical sense — the position later Orthodoxy calls Eutychianism — and it is as dangerous as Nestorianism at the opposite pole: where Nestorius divided the one Christ into two, Eutyches so merged the natures that Christ’s true and complete humanity, the humanity in which our salvation is worked, is lost. “What is not assumed is not healed,” the Cappadocian principle, condemns Eutyches as surely as it condemns any denial of the Incarnation (Gregory of Nazianzus, Epistle 101, To Cledonius; cf. Constantinople III: Monothelitism).

It is essential — and this is the whole burden of the later dialogues — to distinguish this Eutychian Monophysitism from the position of the Churches now called Oriental Orthodox. Eutyches denied that Christ’s humanity is consubstantial with ours; the Oriental Orthodox emphatically affirm it, holding Cyril’s “one incarnate nature” as a union of full divinity and full humanity without confusion — a position they call Miaphysite precisely to distinguish it from Eutyches, whom they too condemn (see The Definition and the Non-Chalcedonians). At the moment of the controversy, however, these distinctions were not yet drawn, and the terminological weapon “one nature” was wielded by Eutyches in a genuinely heretical sense.

The Home Synod of 448 and the Latrocinium of 449

Eutyches was accused of heresy and brought before a standing synod (the synodos endēmousa) at Constantinople under Patriarch Flavian in November 448. Examined, he refused to confess “two natures after the union” and would not say that Christ is consubstantial with us according to the flesh; the synod condemned and deposed him (Acts, in Price and Gaddis, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, 2005, vol. 1, on the 448 synod). Eutyches appealed — to the monks, to the court, and above all to Dioscorus of Alexandria, who saw an opportunity to break the Antiochene-leaning party at Constantinople and to reassert Alexandrian primacy.

Dioscorus persuaded the emperor Theodosius II to summon a general council, which met at Ephesus in August 449 with Dioscorus presiding by imperial appointment. It was, on the Chalcedonian and Roman reading, a travesty of a council: Flavian and the anti-Eutychian bishops were intimidated, the reading of Pope Leo’s dogmatic letter (the Tome, below) was refused, Eutyches was rehabilitated, and Flavian, Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Ibas of Edessa, and other leading two-natures bishops were deposed — Flavian being so roughly handled that he died of his injuries shortly after (Davis, The First Seven Ecumenical Councils, 1990; Price and Gaddis, Acts of Chalcedon, 2005, introduction). When Leo’s legates reported what had happened, the Pope denounced the assembly in a phrase that stuck: “non iudicium, sed latrocinium” — “not a judgment but a robbery” (Leo, Epistle 95, to the Empress Pulcheria; trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 12). Ephesus 449 is the paradigm “robber council” (latrocinium): imperially convened, numerically substantial, and utterly rejected by the Church — the negative case that most sharply illustrates that ecumenicity is not manufactured by convocation but conferred by reception (see Ecumenicity and Reception).

The Tome of Leo

The document that would answer Eutyches and anchor the coming council was already written. In June 449, in response to Flavian’s appeal, Pope Leo the Great of Rome had sent his celebrated dogmatic letter, the Tome (Tomus ad Flavianum, Epistle 28), setting out the Western, two-natures Christology with a lucidity and balance that would prove decisive (Leo, Tome, Ep. 28; trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 12; see St. Leo the Great). The Tome confesses one person, the eternal Son, in whom two complete and unconfused natures are united: “the proper character of both natures being preserved and coming together in one person” (salva proprietate utriusque naturae et in unam coeunte personam). Each nature, Leo writes, “does what is proper to it in communion with the other” — the Word working miracles, the flesh subject to suffering and death — yet both are the actions of the one Christ, so that “the Son of God is said to have been crucified and buried” though he suffered in his humanity alone (Leo, Tome 3–4). This is the Western tradition of Tertullian and Augustine — one person, two natures, each keeping its properties — expressed with Roman legal precision, and it converges remarkably with the Antiochene concern for the integrity of the two natures and with the Cyril of the Formula of Reunion.

The Tome is not without its own delicacy. Some of its formulations — the language of each nature “doing what is proper to it” — sounded, to Cyrillian ears, dangerously close to splitting the one subject, and at Chalcedon a group of bishops from Palestine and Illyricum hesitated until the Tome was shown, phrase by phrase, to agree with Cyril’s letters (Acts of Chalcedon, Session 2 and 4, on the examination of the Tome against Cyril; Price and Gaddis, Acts of Chalcedon, 2005; Meyendorff, Christ in Eastern Christian Thought, 1975, on the Cyrillian scrutiny of the Tome). That the council received the Tome only after checking it against Cyril is itself important: Chalcedon did not simply impose a Roman document but received it as agreeing with the Alexandrian father whom the whole East revered — a point the later dialogues with the Oriental Orthodox would revisit (see The Definition and the Non-Chalcedonians).

The Turn of Events

The whole situation was reversed by two deaths and an accession. Theodosius II died in a riding accident in July 450; his sister Pulcheria and her new husband Marcian, both firmly anti-Eutychian and in accord with Rome, took the throne. Flavian’s body was brought back to Constantinople in honor; the exiled bishops were recalled; and Marcian summoned a new general council to undo the work of 449 and settle the faith. It met — after being moved from Nicaea for the emperor’s convenience — at Chalcedon, across the Bosphorus from Constantinople, in October 451, the largest of the ancient councils with something over 500 bishops (Davis, The First Seven Ecumenical Councils, 1990; Price and Gaddis, Acts of Chalcedon, 2005). Its first business was to condemn the Latrocinium, depose Dioscorus, and rehabilitate the memory of Flavian; its central and lasting business was the Definition of the faith, treated in the next file.

References

Leo the Great. Tome to Flavian (Epistle 28); Epistle 95 (to Pulcheria, the latrocinium). Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 12.
Council of Chalcedon (451). Acts, Sessions 1–4. In Price, Richard, and Michael Gaddis, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, 3 vols. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005; and in Percival, ed., NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14.
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.
Meyendorff, John. Christ in Eastern Christian Thought. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1975.
Gregory of Nazianzus. Epistle 101 (To Cledonius). Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 7.