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| Relations with Nestorius and to Nestorianism.
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III.—Relations with Nestorius and to
Nestorianism.
Nestorius, patriarch of
Constantinople, was bound by ties of close friendship both to Theodoret
and to John, patriarch of Antioch. In August, 430, the western bishops,
under the presidency of the Pope Celestine, assembled in council at
Rome, condemned Nestorius, and threatened him with excommunication.
Shortly afterwards a council of Orientals at Alexandria, summoned by
Cyril, endorsed this condemnation and despatched it to Constantinople.
Then John received from Celestine and Cyril letters announcing their
common action. When the couriers conveying these communications reached
Antioch they found John surrounded by Theodoret and other bishops who
were assembled possibly for the ordination of Macarius, the new bishop
of Laodicea. John took counsel with his brother bishops, and a letter
was despatched in their common name to Nestorius, exhorting him to
accept the term θεοτόκος, round which the whole war waged; pointing out the sense in
which it could not but be accepted by every loyal Christian, and
imploring him not to embroil Christendom for a word. This letter has
been generally attributed to Theodoret. But while the conciliatory sage
of Cyrus was endeavouring to formulate an Eirenicon, the ardent
Egyptian made peace almost impossible by the publication of his famous
anathematisms. John and his friends were distressed at the apparent
unorthodoxy of Cyril’s condemnation of Nestorius, and asked
Theodoret to refute Cyril.48
| 48 Vide
the Anathematisms and Theodoret’s refutation in the
Prolegomena. | The strong language
employed in Letter CL. conveys an idea of the heat of the enthusiasm
with which Theodoret entered on the task, and his profound conviction
that Cyril, in blind zeal against imaginary error on the part of
Nestorius, was himself falling headlong into the Apollinarian pit. An
eager war of words now waged over Nestorius between Cyril and
Theodoret, each denouncing the other for supposed heresy on the subject
of the incarnation; and, with deep respect for the learning and motives
of Theodoret, we may probably find a solution of much that he said and
did in the fact that he misunderstood Nestorius as completely as he did
Cyril.49
| 49 cf.
Glubokowski p. 98. | Cyril, nursed in the synthetic principles of
the Alexandrian school, could see only the unity of the two natures in
the one Person. To him, to distinguish, as the analysis of Theodoret
distinguished, between God the Word and Christ the Man, was to come
perilously near a recognition of two Christs, keeping up as it were a
mutual dialogue of speech and action. But Cyril’s unqualified
assertion that there is one Christ, and that Christ is God, really gave
no ground for the accusation that to him the manhood was an unreality.
Yet he and Theodoret were substantially at one. Theodoret’s
failure to apprehend Cyril’s drift was no doubt due less to any
want of intelligence on the part of the Syrian than to the overbearing
bitterness of the fierce Egyptian.
On the other hand
Theodoret’s loyal love for Nestorius led him to give his friend
credit for meaning what he himself meant. While he was driven to
contemplate the doctrines of Cyril in their most dangerous
exaggeration, he shrank from seeing how the Nestorian counter statement
might be dangerously exaggerated. Theodoret, as Dr. Bright remarks,50
“uses a good deal of language which is
prima facie Nestorian; his objections are pervaded by an
ignoratio elenchi, and his language is repeatedly illogical and
inconsistent; but he and Cyril were essentially nearer to each other in
belief than at the time they would have admitted, for Theodoret
virtually owns the personal oneness and explains the phrase ‘God
assumed man’ by ‘He assumed manhood.’” Cyril
“in his letter to Euoptius earnestly disclaims both forms of
Apollinarianism—the notion of a mindless manhood in Christ and
the notion of a body formed out of Godhead. In his reply (on Art iv.)
he admits the language appropriate to each nature.”
Probably both the Egyptian and
the Syrian would have found no difficulty in subscribing the language
of our own judicious divine; “a kind of mutual commutation there
is whereby those concrete names, God and Man, when we speak of
Christ, do take interchangeably one another’s room, so that for
truth of speech it skilleth not whether we say that the Son of God hath
created the world and the Son of Man by his death hath saved it or else
that the Son of Man did create, and the Son of God died to save the
world. Howbeit, as oft as we attribute to God what the manhood of
Christ claimeth, or to man what his Deity hath right unto, we
understand by the name of God and the name of Man neither the one nor
the other nature, but the whole person of Christ, in whom both natures
are. When the Apostle saith of the Jews that they crucified the Lord of
Glory, and when the Son of Man being on earth affirmeth that the Son of
Man was in heaven at the same instant, there is in these two speeches that mutual
circulation before mentioned. In the one there is attributed to God or
the Lord of Glory death, whereof divine nature is not capable; in the
other ubiquity unto man, which human nature admitteth not. Therefore by
the Lord of Glory we must needs understand the whole person of Christ,
who being Lord of Glory, was indeed crucified, but not in that nature
for which he is termed the Lord of Glory. In like manner by the Son of
Man the whole person of Christ must necessarily be meant, who being man
upon earth, filled heaven with his glorious presence, but not according
to that nature for which the title of Man is given him. Without this
caution the Fathers whose belief was divine and their meaning most
sound, shall seem in their writing one to deny what another constantly
doth affirm. Theodoret disputeth with great earnestness that God
cannot be said to suffer. But he thereby meaneth Christ’s
divine nature against Apollinarius, which held even Deity itself
passible. Cyril on the other side against Nestorius as much contendeth
that whosoever will deny very God to have suffered death doth
forsake the faith. Which notwithstanding to hold were heresy, if the
name of God in this assertion did not import as it doth the person of
Christ, who being verily God suffered death, but in the flesh, and not
in that substance for which the name of God is given him.”51
| 51 Hooker.
Ecc. Pol. v. liii. 4. |
As to the part played by
Theodoret throughout the whole controversy we may conclude that though
he had to own himself beaten intellectually, yet the honours of the
moral victory remain with him rather than with his illustrious
opponent. Not for the last time in the history of the Church a great
duel of dialectic issued in a conclusion wherein of the champion who
was driven to say, “I was wrong,” the congregation of the
faithful has yet perforce felt that he was right.
The end is well known.
Theodosius summoned the bishops to Ephesus at the Pentecost of 431.
There arrived Cyril with fifty supporters early in June; there arrived
Theodoret with his Metropolitan Alexander of Hierapolis, in advance of
the rest of the Orientals. The Cyrillians were vainly entreated to wait
for John of Antioch and his party, and opened the Council without them.
When they arrived they would not join the Council, and set up their own
“Conciliabulum” apart. Under the hot Levantine sun of July
and August the two parties denounced one another on the one side for
not accepting the condemnation of Nestorius, which the Cyrillians had
passed in the beginning of their proceedings, on the other for the
informality and injustice of the condemnation. Then deputies from the
Orientals, of whom Theodoret was one, hurried to Constantinople, but
were allowed to proceed no further than Chalcedon. The letters written
by Theodoret at this time to his friends among the bishops and at the
court, and his petitions to the Emperor,52
| 52 Epp.,
clvii., clviii., clxvii,, clxviii., clxix., clxx. | leave a
vivid impression of the zeal, vigour and industry of the writer, as
well as of the extraordinary literary readiness which could pour out
letter after letter, memorial after memorial, amid all the excitement
of controversy, the weariness of travel, the sojourning in strange and
uncomfortable quarters, and the tension of anxiety as to an uncertain
future.
Though Nestorius was deposed his
friends protested that they would continue true to him, and Theodoret
was one of the synod held at Tarsus, and of another at Antioch, in
which the protest against Cyril’s action was renewed. But the
oriental bishops were now themselves undergoing a process of
scission,53
| 53 Hefele.
Hist. Consc. iii. 127. Can. Venables. Dict. Christ. Biog. iv.
910. | John of Antioch and Acacius of Berœa
heading the peacemakers who were anxious to come to terms with Cyril,
while Alexander of Hierapolis led the irreconcilables. Intellectually
Theodoret shrank from concession, but his moral instincts were all in
favour of peace. He himself drew up a declaration of faith which was
presented by Paul of Emesa to Cyril, which Cyril accepted. But still
true to his friend, Theodoret refused to accept the deposition of
Nestorius and his individual condemnation, and it was not till several
years had elapsed that, moved less by the threat of exile and
forfeiture, as the imperial penalty for refusing to accept the
position, than by the entreaties of his beloved flock and of his
favourite ascetic solitaries that he would not leave them, Theodoret
found means of attaching a meaning to the current anathemas on
Nestorianism, not, as he said, on Nestorius, which allowed him to
submit. He even entered into friendly correspondence with Cyril.54
But the truce was hollow. Cyril was indignant
to find that Theodoret still maintained his old opinions. At last the
protracted quarrel was ended by Cyril’s death in June,
444.
On the famous letter over which
so many battles of criticism have been fought we have already spoken. If it was
really written by Theodoret, to which opinion my own view inclines,55
| 55 Glubokowski p. 163 thinks it spurious. | there is no reason why we should damn it as
“a coarse and ferocious invective.” If genuine, it was
clearly a piece of grim pleasantry dashed off in a moment of excitement
to a personal friend, and never intended for the publicity which has
drawn such severe blame upon its writer.
But though the death of Cyril
might appear to bring relief to the Church and Empire as well as to his
individual opponents, it was by no means a ground of unmixed
gratification to Theodoret.56
Dioscorus, who
succeeded to the Patriarchate of Alexandria, however Theodoret in the
language of conventional courtesy may speak of the new bishop’s
humble mindedness,57
inherited none of the
good qualities of Cyril and most of his faults. Theodoret, naturally
viewed with suspicion and dislike as the friend and supporter of
Nestorius, gave additional ground for ill-will and hostility by action
which brought him into individual conflict with Dioscorus. He accepted
the synodical letters issued at Constantinople at the time of Proclus,
and so seemed to lower the dignity of the apostolic sees of Antioch and
Alexandria;58
he also warmly resented the
tyrannical treatment of his friend Irenæus, bishop of Tyre.59
| 59 Epp.
III. XII. XVI. XXXV. | Irenæus had indeed in the earlier days
of his banishment to Petra after his first condemnation in 435 attacked
Theodoret for not being thoroughly Nestorian, but Theodoret was able to
claim Irenæus as not objecting to the crucial term θεοτόκος,60
reasonably understood, and accepted him
as unquestionably orthodox. When therefore Dioscorus, the Archimandrite
Eutyches, and his godson the eunuch Chrysaphius attacked Domnus for
consecrating Irenæus to the Metropolitan see of Tyre, Theodoret
indignantly protested and counselled Domnus as to how he had best
reply.61
But Dioscorus and his party had now the ear,
and guided the fingers, of the imperial weakling at Constantinople, and
the deposition of Irenæus (Feb. 17, 448) was followed after a
year’s successful intrigues by the autograph edict of Theodosius
confining Theodoret within the limits of his own diocese as a vexatious
and turbulent busybody.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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