From Monophysitism

to Nestorianism
From Monophysitism
to Nestorianism:

AD 431-681

By

Theodore Sabo
From Monophysitism to Nestorianism: AD 431-681

By Theodore Sabo

This book first published 2018

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2018 by Theodore Sabo

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-5275-0412-3

ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-0412-7
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface .............................................................................................vii

Chapter One ....................................................................................... 1

Apollinarius, a Proto-Monophysite

Chapter Two ...................................................................................... 7

The School of Antioch

Chapter Three .................................................................................. 23

Cyril of Alexandria

Chapter Four .................................................................................... 41

The Defeat of Nestorius at Ephesus

Chapter Five .................................................................................... 59

The Formulary Compromise

Chapter Six ...................................................................................... 71

Eutychianism Triumphant

Chapter Seven.................................................................................. 85
Chalcedon: Nestorianism Almost Rehabilitated

Chapter Eight ................................................................................. 101

Justinian’s Concessions to the Monophysites

Chapter Nine.................................................................................. 111

The Significance of Monothelitism

Chapter Ten ................................................................................... 115

The Docetism of Constantine Copronymus
vi Table of Contents

Chronology .................................................................................... 119

Bibliography .................................................................................. 121

 PREFACE

In this book we will suggest that the Third, Fourth, Fifth, and
Sixth Ecumenical Councils, when the most important Christological
controversies were waged, can all be characterized, with only the
slightest exaggeration, by the labels Nestorian, Monophysite, or
proto-Monophysite. In the Third and Fourth Councils a Nestorian,
or at least an Antiochene, victory followed a Monophysite one, and
the pattern was repeated identically with the Fifth and Sixth
Councils. If this seems to damage the religious interpretation of the
councils as the slow hammering out of orthodoxy, or to gainsay the
current interpretation of the councils as Cyrillian, Theodoretian,
conciliatory, and anti-Monothelite, it is not meant to. This study
finds itself at odds with R. V. Sellers for whom there was no real
divide between the Alexandrian and Antiochene approaches to
Christology. Sellers’ contention that the Christology of Cyril was
not essentially different from that of Theodore is given some
discredit when one observes his attempts to exonerate Apollinarius
and Paul of Samosata. Sellers does admit the failure of the
Antiochenes to adequately convey the unity of Christ and states that
none of them was as theologically astute as Cyril, a fact that must
be taken to heart in light of recent attempts to proclaim Theodoret
of Cyrrhus the greatest theologian of his age.
Sellers’ main thesis, however, is flawed. I believe the distinctions
between the Alexandrian and Antiochene approaches to Christology,
even if they are sometimes slight, should be maintained and that
each council should be labeled as coming down on one or the other
of the two sides. The book’s weakest point may be the scant
attention it gives to the Nestorians’ passing out of the orthodox
compass after the Council of Ephesus; but it must be remembered
that Patriarch Sergius’ Psephos was written with their occasional
monothelitism in mind and that, regardless, we are concerned more
with Nestorian and Antiochene trends of thought than with the
viii Preface

Assyrian Church per se.

The first chapter is largely introductory and deals with the figure
of Apollinarius who was, in a real sense, the first proto-
Monophysite, albeit more radical than any of his mainstream
successors. Chapters Two through Nine form the heart of the essay
and are devoted to the two Councils of Ephesus, the Council of
Chalcedon, and the Second and Third Councils of Constantinople.
The ninth chapter shows that the defeat of Monothelitism
represented the defeat of Monophysitism in its most overt aspects,
but the last chapter reveals that Monophysitism left a permanent
mark on Eastern Orthodoxy even after it had been permanently
defeated by the council convened by the empress Irene.
The theological conflict between the two Christological trends in
the early church will unavoidably be presented in terms of
individuals: Apollinarius versus Gregory of Nazianzus, Cyril versus
Nestorius, Eutyches versus Flavian, Dioscorus versus Theodoret,
Justinian versus Pope Vigilius, Constans II versus Maximus the
Confessor, Constantine Copronymus versus John of Damascus.
More attention will be given to the earliest phases of the
controversy, when the main battle lines were drawn, than to the
later phases. This will involve us in a discussion of the writings of
Cyril, Theodoret, and Leo. The study’s title reflects a half-truth:
orthodox Christology, at least until the outbreak of the Iconoclastic
crisis, was characterized by a progression from the deifying and
unifying impulse of the Alexandrian school in favor of the
humanizing and dichotomizing tendency of the Antiochene. In the
figure of Pope Leo the West firmly joined the side of the
Antiochenes, not that it was not to a degree already on their side.
(The case of John Cassian was an anomaly based on his sojourn
with Egyptian and Palestinian monks.) The book’s approach is only
slightly more overt than McGuckin’s in that it tends to lump the
Antiochenes and the Latins into one camp and Cyril and the
Monophysites into another.
Yet nothing in the following pages is meant to affirm anything
other than that early orthodoxy, for all its shortcomings, successfully
navigated the often narrow strait between Nestorianism and
Monophysitism. By continually changing sides, and by declaring the
decrees of all previous councils binding, it found itself outwitting
 From Monophysitism to Nestorianism: AD 431-681 ix

both the Monophysites and the Nestorians.

I have employed three new terms throughout: Neo-Nestorian for
Chalcedonian; Monophysitic Chalcedonian for Neo-Chalcedonian;
and Apollinarian, Cyrillian, and Eutychian proto-Monophysitism
for three varieties of pre-Chalcedonian Alexandrian theology.
When I speak only of proto-Monophysitism I generally refer to
Cyrillian proto-Monophysitism. I have, in addition, called
Nestorius’ early Constantinopolitan opponents Theotokosians. For
the purposes of this study Monophysitism will be viewed as
nonexistent until the close of the Council of Chalcedon, and
Patriarch Dioscorus will be viewed as its first codifier, especially in
his letters written from exile. Neo-Nestorianism will likewise be
viewed as emerging after Chalcedon. Because of the new terms I
have avoided the current designation Miaphysite which seems to
me to take the sting out of the tail of the Monophysite slogan mia
physis tou Theou Logou sesarkōmenē. One should no more call a
Monophysite a Miaphysite than to designate a Monothelite by the
more accurate but less pithy Henothelite.
This book was originally my Master of Ministry thesis and aims
to reach both academic and general readers. For the historical
background, though not for my main argument, I have relied
especially on The Church in Ancient Society by Henry Chadwick,
From Nicaea to Chalcedon by Frances Young, The Rise of the
Monophysite Movement by W. H. C. Frend, and Byzantium in the
Seventh Century by J. F. Haldon. For their help with my revision I
would like to thank Mark Edwards, Brenda Llewellyn Ihssen,
Roger Schlesinger, and Svetla Slaveva-Griffin. The egregious
errors that remain are my own.

2017
 CHAPTER ONE

APOLLINARIUS, A PROTO-MONOPHYSITE

Arius was the first to get the church to think seriously about
Christology. It is true that there were the heresies of Modal and
Adoptionist Monarchianism which exercised Dionysius of
Alexandria as they had his teacher Origen, but Arius almost
single-handedly ushered in an era in which the church was well-nigh
intoxicated with Christology, though he did so from a Trinitarian
perspective and did not waste much time on the articulation between
Christ’s disparate natures. For Arius Christ was a creature, generated
by the Father from nothing, but a creature who acted as a mediator
between God and the sensible world, the latter of which He was the
fashioner. Arius went so far as to imitate the Platonists by calling the
Father Monad and the Son Dyad. He equated the Son with the
anthropomorphic Wisdom of Proverbs who aids God in His creation
of the world but who is clearly inferior to Him.1 Christ was capable
of change and even sin, but God, foreknowing His goodness, gave
Him grace so that He would not sin. Arius called Christ the created
Logos, and he distinguished this from the Logos proper, the reason
immanent in God. The incarnate Christ had a human body, but in
place of the rational human soul was the created Logos.
While Arius denied that Jesus Christ was God, the orthodox, the
Monophysites, and the Nestorians were all agreed that He was both
God and man. The only question was whether His deity or His
humanity was to be emphasized, and how separate these two entities
were to be kept. Apollinarius of Syrian Laodicea, with whom we
begin our study, favored Christ’s deity. Apollinarius was a staunch
opponent of Arianism so it is unfair to deduce his thought, as some
have, from that of Arius which it was in many ways the exact

1
Proverbs 8:22-31.
2 Chapter One

opposite of. Much has been made in recent years of his relationship
with Antioch as over against Egypt, but this only serves to muddy the
waters as to his true theological affiliations. There was undeniably
something Antiochene and semi-Jewish about him. He knew
Hebrew, as was rare among Christians in those days, and wanted to
restore the Old Testament practices, including circumcision, the
Sabbath, the abstinence from prohibited meats, the sacrificial
ceremony, cleansing for leprosy, tests for unfaithful wives,
showbread, and the burning of lamps.2
Apollinarius was both intellectual and aristocratic; he had studied
in Athens alongside Julian the Apostate and was an ally of
Athanasius. He wrote against Julian and against the Neoplatonist
Porphyry. Though little of what he wrote has survived he was a
prolific writer, so much so that Basil the Great saw him as violating
the scriptural mandate against the making of many books.
Apollinarius’ father, who shared his name, was the author of a
well-known grammar, and together the two published a version of
the Bible in classical forms after Julian banned the teaching of pagan
literature by Christians. The production seems to have set a trend,
and something similar to it would be indulged in by the empress
Eudocia. Apollinarius also wrote hymns which men sang at their
work and women at their loom. The church historian Sozomen is our
source for this, and although he is anti-Apollinarian he is unable to
disguise his delight in these hymns which “were all alike to the
praise and glory of God.”3
Apollinarius the Elder had come from Alexandria and once
entertained Athanasius when he stopped in Laodicea. Later, when
the father was a priest and the son a lector, the Homoean bishop of
Laodicea reprimanded the Apollinarii for attending the recital of a
hymn to Dionysus, apparently as a token of their friendship for the
pagan sophist Epiphanius. The two would later be excommunicated,
with undue harshness, by the bishop George. The son eventually
became the Homoousian bishop of Laodicea, opposed to Pelagius
the Homoean bishop, but he spent more time in Antioch than in

2
Basil the Great, Eps. 263, 265; Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers,
II,8:302, 304.
3
Hist. Eccl. 6.25; ibid, II,2:362.
 Apollinarius, a Proto-Monophysite 3

Laodicea. There Jerome studied under him and concluded that his
writings, like Origen’s, should be read with caution.
Eventually Apollinarius left the catholic church and organized his
own. One of his earliest followers was the priest Vitalius who was
admired for the sanctity of his life and who gave the sect its name for
a time. Theodoret of Cyrrhus would maintain that Apollinarius
assumed a mask of piety and appeared to defend apostolic doctrines
while being an open foe. It was perhaps this mask that later impelled
Theodotus of Antioch, otherwise “the pearl of purity,” to allow the
Apollinarians back into the orthodox fold.4
Sozomen tells us that Apollinarius developed his Christological
views in later life, but some scholars allege that he always held them.
He stated that the Son, while He had a human body and a lower soul,
did not have a rational soul. Rather, the Logos functioned in the
capacity of a rational soul, merging Christ’s human and divine
natures into a new nature, more divine than human. Following Plato,
Apollinarius taught that a man was essentially only his soul, and in
Jesus’ case this was the divine Logos. Therefore Jesus, even more
than most men, did not suffer, only His body did. It was untrue that
Apollinarius viewed Christ’s body as being derived from heaven;
this was a misconception of Gregory of Nyssa’s that would be
embraced by some of his own followers. Pope Leo grouped the
Apollinarians into three parties (Apollinaristarum tres partes) which
sometimes overlapped: those who denied Christ a soul, those who
granted Him a soul in the form of the Logos but no rational mind, and
those who insisted that a portion of the Logos had divinized Christ’s
human flesh. Thereby, according to Leo, “not only the nature of the
flesh and of the soul but also the essence of the Word Itself is
dissolved.”5
Apollinarius probably thought of Christ as preexisting in a
spiritual form of His later physical form, a not unorthodox concept.
His Christology depended on a trichotomous view of man which he
believed was held by the apostle Paul who had written to the
Thessalonians, “I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be

4
Theodoret, Hist. Eccl. 5.37; ibid, II,3:157.
5
Ep. 59; Serm. 28; ibid, II,12:60, 143.
4 Chapter One

preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.”6

This approach was not only Pauline but Platonic. Plato’s view of
man is sometimes described as dichotomous, with man having a
body and a soul, but his division of the soul into a higher and lower
level, the higher level amounting to a spirit, proves otherwise.
Origen also held to the trichotomous nature of man. It perplexed him,
as much it did the Middle Platonists, how the higher soul could have
been prevailed upon to adopt a fleshly existence; regardless, the
lower soul acted as a mediator between it and the body.7
Apollinarius’ belief in trichotomy would be vigorously attacked
in the next century by Theodoret whose main problem with him,
however, was that he denied that Christ had a rational soul. Arius had
also denied Christ’s soul, but he did so only to establish His
creatureliness and changeableness (treptotēs) as intermediary
between God and man, not His surpassing divinity. Apollinarius, on
the contrary, emphasized that Christ was changeless (atreptōs).
According to him, Christ was not strictly speaking a man though He
was very much like a man. Did not Paul speak of God sending His
Son “in the likeness of sinful flesh”?8
In his Epistle to Jovian Apollinarius pioneered in the use of a
phrase that would be much used by Cyril of Alexandria: mia physis
tou Theou Logou sesarkōmenē, “one nature of God the Word
incarnate.” By that Cyril would mean that the Logos took on a new
existence, but Apollinarius meant that Christ became a mixture
(mixis or synkrasis) of God and man. Cyril appears to have picked up
on another element of Apollinarius’ thought, namely that Christ, far
from being merely a particular man, represented the human race.
This, at least, can be inferred from his talk of Christ showing men
what it was to be truly human.
We can see from all this that Apollinarius set the stage for many
of the same issues the Monophysites would be obsessed with,
although in their case it was with a less extreme emphasis on Christ’s
deity. He was not a Docetic, but his critics could be excused for
thinking him so, and for charging him with creating a monstrous

6
1 Thessalonians 5:23.
7
Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, II,5:18.
8
Romans 8:3.
 Apollinarius, a Proto-Monophysite 5

being, neither God nor man. Apollinarius’ solution to the

Christological problem was, according to Quasten, an easy answer to
a difficult question, which is precisely why it was to prove so
unsatisfactory. 9 His overly divine Son did not square with the
Gospels’ portrait of Jesus growing in knowledge, praying in the
Garden, and crying out on the cross. He appears to have been
motivated by nothing so much as the impossibility of a Savior
possessing a mind “prey to filthy thoughts.”10 Here again we find
hints of Platonism and even Gnosticism.
Yet Apollinarius’ critics were equally motivated by the question
of salvation: if the rational soul of man was to be saved the Savior
must possess just such an entity. “What has not been assumed cannot
be restored; it is what is united with God that is saved,” Gregory of
Nazianzus wrote in his Letter to Cledonius which has become a locus
classicus in the orthodox fight against Apollinarianism.11 Gregory
was vexed that the Apollinarians called Christ the Lordly Man and
that they hoped for the restoration of the Jerusalem Temple.12 In a
subsequent letter to Cledonius he discerns in Apollinarius tendencies
towards both Judaism and Docetism, a similar phenomenon to what
one encounters in the earliest Gnostics. 13 Gregory wanted the
secular authorities to mildly punish the Apollinarians and obviously
thought Theodosius I was the ideal man for this.14
The Letter to Cledonius was received in part at the Council of
Ephesus and in full at the Council of Chalcedon. Both it and
Athanasius’ Letter to Epictetus anticipated the Christological
controversies of the fifth century. It is of some question whether
Athanasius’ letter was directed against Apollinarius since he is not
alluded to; Apollinarius, sincerely or as a smokescreen, praised it to
Serapion of Thmuis. It takes a middle ground between the positions
of Apollinarius and his opponent Diodore of Tarsus and thinks in
terms of Christ’s two natures though without using such an

9
Quasten, Patrology, 3:382.
10
Ep. ad Diocaes. 2; Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 293.
11
Ep. 101; ibid, 297.
12
Ep. 101; Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, II,7:439, 442.
13
Ep. 102; ibid, 444.
14
Ep. 102; ibid, 445.
6 Chapter One

expression. Pope Leo would see it as taking the middle ground

between Eutychianism and Nestorianism.15
At any rate the battle against the Apollinarians was waged more
by the Cappadocians than by Athanasius. Basil of Caesarea was
ashamed of having been Apollinarius’ friend and correspondent, and
Gregory of Nyssa wrote his imposing Antirrheticus against him. In
speaking of the Cappadocian opposition to Apollinarius, Brown well
observes that orthodoxy, for the first time in two centuries, was
forced to defend Christ’s full humanity.16 At a council in Rome in
377 Pope Damasus condemned Apollinarian proto-Monophysitism,
and he was followed by various other councils, culminating in the
First Council of Constantinople which denounced Apollinarianism
in company with Anomoeanism, Homoeanism, and Macedonianism.

15
Ep. 109; ibid, II,12:81.
16
Brown, Heresies, 164-165.
 CHAPTER TWO

THE SCHOOL OF ANTIOCH

The second phase of the Christological conflict was inaugurated

by the patriarch Nestorius. It is not difficult to understand why his
enemies the Theotokosians found him, and the whole Antiochene
milieu, suspect. Nestorius, together with his masters Diodore of
Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia, uttered statements that,
regardless of their protestations of orthodoxy, could easily be
caricatured as Adoptionist. In other words, they could be accused of
beginning their Christology with a man being made God. Christ
might seem possessed by God in the same way in which Judas was
said to be temporarily possessed by Satan.
The relationships between Judaism, Arianism, and Antiochene
theology cannot here be explored. Suffice it to say that Arius’ teacher
Lucian, the editor of what would become the basis for the Byzantine
Text of the New Testament, was from Antioch and that Antiochene
theology was heavily indebted to Judaism. This was not, of course, a
complete antidote for anti-Jewish feeling. The sermons of John
Chrysostom and Theodoret’s exultation that the Jewish temple was
in ruins in response to Christ’s prophecy are evidence to the contrary.
Antioch’s Jewishness can also be overplayed. Despite its Ancient
Near Eastern feel it was still a sophisticated city, so much so that in
the fourth century its slaves wore gold and slept on beds of ivory
inlaid with silver and gold.1 It was also a Greek city and as such was
imbued with ideologies like Middle and Neoplatonism, a fact that
should be kept in mind even when dealing with so biblical a thinker
as Theodore of Mopsuestia. There was also the not minor influence
of Aristotle. The school of Antioch had a liking for the Stagirite’s
analyses and distinctions, the dictum of no nature without

1
Neander, The Life of St. Chrysostom, 2.
8 Chapter Two

personhood looming particularly large in its consciousness.

Fundamentally, however, the Antiochenes breathed the same
theological atmosphere as the Jews around them. For them the God
of Israel had, with the coming of the New Testament, been made
known in three persons. It is not insignificant, in connection with
this, to observe that the Third Council of Constantinople would refer
to Nestorius as Nestorius the Judaizer. 2 We also know that the
Nestorians allied with the Jews against the Monophysites in the sixth
century. In the Book of the Himyarites the Monophysite heroine
Habsa tells the Jews, and presumably the Nestorians, that she
believes that Christ is God, not a man, the latter being an
oversimplification of the Antiochene view. 3 Sellers traces the
thought of the Antiochenes to Theophilus of Antioch and Paul of
Samosata, the latter of whom was essentially a Jew but for the unique
prominence he gave to Jesus Christ. Paul and Theophilus were
encouraged in their Adoptionism by such Logos passages as Psalm
45:1 and Wisdom 18:15.
Eustathius of Antioch has, perhaps fancifully, been seen as a link
between Paul of Samosata and Diodore of Tarsus. He was a
confessor of the Diocletian persecution and a determined opponent
of Arianism. He wrote a work on the title verses of the Psalms. His
only completely extant treatise, On the Witch of Endor Against
Origen, stressed, in common with Lucian of Antioch, the literal
interpretation of Scripture. Eustathius believed the apparition of
Samuel was a deception by the demon indwelling the witch of Endor.
In this he took issue with Origen who held it to be a true appearance
of Samuel and who was, in this one irritating way, a literalist in his
interpretation of Scripture. Elsewhere Eustathius criticized Arius for
denying that Christ had a human soul. He believed the inference of a
human soul in Christ could explain the weakness apparently
experienced by the Logos; the human soul was to be thought of as the
meeting place between the Son’s divine and human natures.
Eustathius spoke of the Logos dwelling in Christ’s humanity as in a
temple and called Him an anthrōpos Theophoros, a God-bearing
man. In his mind the speaker of Proverbs 8:22—“The Lord

2
Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, II,14:344.
3
Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement, 137.
 The School of Antioch 9

possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of

old”—was Christ’s human body.
Eustathius’ mantle was taken up by Diodore of Tarsus. It is
unfortunate that more of Diodore’s writings have not survived since
he appears to have had a nonpareil education. He first studied under
Silvanus of Tarsus and Eusebius, the Homoean bishop of Emesa
whose learning was so great he was rumored to be a sorcerer. He
then went to Athens, which was still a philosophical mecca, and
studied Plato, Aristotle, and Neoplatonism. Lastly, in harmony with
both Christianity and Neoplatonism, he embraced the life of a lay
ascetic in Antioch. This he did with his friend Flavian who, together
with him, made things hot for the Homoean bishop of Antioch. Both
men had a formidable influence on the young Chrysostom.
Diodore was ordained a priest by the Homoiousian bishop
Melitius and followed him into his second exile in Armenia. After
the death of the Homoean emperor Valens, Melitius returned to
Antioch and ordained Diodore bishop of Tarsus. Diodore was known
for his opposition to the pagan reforms of Julian the Apostate and
earned the latter’s reproach that his emaciated appearance was not
the result of asceticism but judgment from the gods. Cyril of
Alexandria would accuse Diodore of having once been a
Macedonian, that is a denier of the divinity of the Holy Spirit, but
that is unlikely. Diodore wrote against the Manichaeans and
especially Mani’s disciple Adda. This work was entitled Bushel,
referring to Christ’s words in the Gospel of Mark that no one keeps a
candle hidden under a bushel.4 Diodore was an expert in astronomy
and a foe of astrology, a fact which may explain his dislike of the
Syrian Gnostic Bardaisan, author of the Laws of the Countries.
Diodore believed it was permissible to use theōria but not allegory in
the exposition of Scripture. Theōria was the contemplation of
Scripture’s deeper meaning, as when Chrysostom said that the five
foolish virgins of Christ’s parable sinned by lacking the oil of charity
and almsgiving. For Diodore allēgoria was a dismissal of the literal
whereas theōria went beyond the literal without rejecting it.
Diodore distinguished between the divine and human natures of
Christ with the phrases Son of God and Son of David. The

4
Mark 4:21.
10 Chapter Two

relationship between the former and the latter was similar to that
between God and the prophets except that it was a permanent and
complete union. He found proof of the separateness of the man Jesus
from the Trinity by remembering that it was permissible to
blaspheme the Son but not the Holy Spirit. Worst of all, he averred
that the Son of David shared in the devotion offered to the Son of
God just as a monarch’s robe shares in the devotion offered to the
monarch. Between the two Sons, for all his wishing, he had a
mechanical and artificial union that would be inherited by Nestorius.
Drobner, unlike Cyril of Alexandria, maintains that it is unfair to
judge Diodore and his successor Theodore by the more sophisticated
Christological understanding of a later time. He therefore praises the
Second Council of Constantinople for refusing to condemn Diodore.5
One might plausibly argue, against Drobner, that Diodore’s opponent
Apollinarius had already made it imperative to think in sophisticated
terms about Christology.
The Jewish heritage of the Antiochenes is nowhere more evident
than in Theodore of Mopsuestia who built his theology on the Shema
Yishrael. He probably grew up in a religious home since both he and
his brother Polychronius became bishops. Polychronius was a mass
of contradictions who objected to allegorical interpretation, had a
higher opinion of the book of Job than Theodore, and in his biblical
interpretation approached the extreme rationalism of the Neoplatonist
and onetime Christian Porphyry. According to Theodoret of
Cyrrhus, Polychronius was eloquent and illustrious, but he is almost
completely sidelined today in favor of his more famous brother.
Theodore of Mopsuestia was a student, with John Chrysostom, of
the pagan sophist Libanius and Diodore of Tarsus. Chrysostom was,
of all the Antiochenes, the furthest from the heart and soul of
Antiochene Christology, except for his avoidance of the word
Theotokos, his dislike of the Virgin Mary’s pushiness towards her
Son, and his comparison of the two natures joining in Christ to a man
stretching out both of his hands to join two people on either side of
him.
Theodore had spent three months at Diodore’s askētērion or
ascetic school when he decided to become a lawyer and marry the

5
Drobner, The Fathers of the Church, 320.
 The School of Antioch 11

young Hermione; Chrysostom attempted to dissuade him in two

letters. A sample will do to illustrate both their intemperance and
their reflection of Theodore’s past life in asceticism: “Do not be
deceived by anyone’s saying, ‘God has not forbidden marriage.’ I
know that as well as you. He has not forbidden marriage; but He has
forbidden adultery, which is what you are contemplating.” 6
Hermione must have contributed to Theodore’s literal interpretation
of Scripture, at least of the Song of Solomon which he viewed as a
love paean between Solomon and his Egyptian princess, an
interpretation that would be vilified by Theodoret of Cyrrhus as unfit
even for the mouth of a crazy woman. But Chrysostom’s letters were
successful, and Theodore was ordained a priest and later a bishop.
The Assyrian Church has preserved two catalogs of Theodore’s
writings. All of them were consigned to burning by the emperor
Justinian and therefore survive more in Syriac and Latin translations
than in the original Greek; an exception is his commentary on the
Minor Prophets. Augustine’s enemy Julian of Eclanum translated
Theodore’s commentary on the Psalms, written when he was twenty,
into Latin, and until the twentieth century it was thought that this
commentary was the work of Julian. At one time Theodore received
Julian and some of his Pelagian friends, but he later had them
condemned by a synod in Cilicia, proving that he was more cautious
about the heretics than Nestorius would be.
As a commentator Theodore did not believe that the apostle
Paul’s allegory about Sarah and Hagar justified approaching the Old
Testament as though it were fiction that needed to be demythologized.
His rejection of allegory was typically Jewish, as was his refusal to
find Christ everywhere in the Old Testament as all the Christians
since Justin and Irenaeus had done. 7 His most blatantly literal
commentary was his commentary on the Psalms. There he found
only one unmistakable reference to Christ: “for thou wilt not leave
my soul in hell; neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see
corruption.” 8 Theodore was moved not so much by his Jewish
milieu as by an attempt to emphasize the distinction between the Old

6
Ep. ad Theod. 2.3; Jurgens, The Faith of the Early Fathers, 2:87.
7
Irenaeus of Lyons, On the Apostolic Preaching, 8-14.
8
Psalm 16:10.
12 Chapter Two

and New Testaments, specifically the oldness of the Old Testament

and the newness of the New Testament; he spoke, like the psalmist,
of singing unto the Lord a new song.9
For Theodore not all the Psalms were written by David, and their
prophetic horizon generally stretched no further than the time of the
Maccabees. Yet he admitted to four messianic psalms, one more than
his master Diodore had admitted, and his view of the prophetic scope
of the Minor Prophets was even broader. He recognized in the career
of Jonah, and in the blood sprinkled in the Passover, prefigurements of
Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection.10 Typology—the interpretation
of Old Testament persons and events as types of or as pointing to
Christ—was all-important in early Christian exegesis. One finds it
pervading theological pronouncements like the Chalcedonian
Definition: “even as the prophets from of old taught us about Him”
(kathaper anōthen hoi prophētai peri autou). It was more restrained
than allegorism, but, as Christopher Hall points out, there was no
early Christian literalist who was not sometimes allegorical or
allegorist who was not sometimes literal.11
Theodore wrote an almost Pauline commentary on the Gospel of
John. It was dedicated to Porphyrius of Antioch, a fellow student
with him and Chrysostom at Diodore’s askētērion, and stressed both
the humanity and deity of Christ, the former of which was alone
recognized by the Jews in the Gospel. In harmony with what we have
noted about Antioch’s Jewishness, he points out that the Jews began
the day at sundown. Somewhat at odds with his time he alleges that
the prophecy of the death of John at the end of the Gospel was not
written by John himself.12
Theodore was never enthusiastic in his commentaries, but the
same could not be said of his writings on the Eucharist which view
the rite as a reenactment of events in heaven, specifically the Son’s
sacrifice to the Father. In Theodore’s liturgy the two elements
become the body and blood of the Lord. This had before been hinted
by both Cyril of Jerusalem and the Apostolic Constitutions, and as it

9
Young, From Nicaea to Chalcedon, 199.
10
Ibid, 206.
11
Hall, Reading Scripture with the Church Fathers, 157.
12
Elowsky, John 11-21, 397.
 The School of Antioch 13

caught on it led to awe and sometimes reluctance on the part of the

communicants.13
In addition to his commentaries and his works on the liturgy
Theodore wrote against Eunomius, Apollinarius, and the Macedonians.
There remains a transcript of a dispute he conducted in Syriac with
Macedonian heretics in Anazarbus, something like Origen had done
with the Monarchian Heraclides. He was impelled to write against
Julian the Apostate by Julian’s criticisms of Diodore. It makes sense
that the first Christian to write against Julian’s Against the Galileans
was from Antioch, considering the emperor’s tumultuous relationship
with that city. Theodore’s work, like Cyril of Alexandria’s after him,
was a continuation of the acrimonious pagan-Christian dialogue
represented by Celsus and Origen. Julian had produced some of the
most salient anti-Christian literature since Porphyry and wrote from
a more religious perspective than Celsus did. He particularly
delighted in the contradictions in the Gospels, but Theodore
countered that these were only minor details and that if the overall
story had been fictitious the compilers would have purposely
avoided all contradiction.14
Theodore emerges more suspect as a theologian than as an
apologist, although there are parallels between his treatise on the
Incarnation and Augustine’s theology. According to Photius, for
whom Theodore vomited up Nestorianism by anticipation, Theodore
rejected the doctrine of original sin and believed in the final
forgiveness of all men, hence his initially lenient attitude toward the
Pelagians. He avoided the dual Sonship language of Diodore but
stated that the Son’s humanity was of a different hypostasis than His
divinity because only a divine hypostasis could be of the same
substance as the Father. He also seemed to suggest that the Logos
took up an already existing human being, an entity which he called
“the man assumed” (analēphthenta). The man assumed was like a
temple or a garment indwelt by the Logos, but the relationship
between the Logos and the man assumed was different from that
between God and the prophets because the Logos dwelled in Him as

13
Chadwick, The Church in Ancient Society, 522.
14
Moreschini and Norelli, Early Christian Greek and Latin Literature,
2:145.
14 Chapter Two

in a son (hōs en huiō). Theodore further covered his Adoptionist

tracks by saying that the Logos and the man assumed shared one
person (prosōpon) in a continuous and indissoluble union. Like
Nestorius he used prosōpon for each of Christ’s natures and for the
union itself.
Theodore’s protestations that he was not an Adoptionist are often
merely puzzling and his attempts at emphasizing the unity of Christ
fall disquietingly flat: “We do not assert that the Sons are two . . . but
one Son is rightly confessed since there is one Son according to
essence (eis huios kat’ ousian), God the Word, the only begotten Son
of the Father to whom is conjoined he who participates in the
Godhead, and shares the common name and honour of the Son.”15
As for the Virgin Mary, she was the mother of God only in the sense
that God was in the man who was born to her. Cyril of Alexandria’s
outburst to the long-dead Theodore—“Sodom has been more
justified than you”—was not as groundless as it at first appeared.16
Theodore died the same year Nestorius was installed as patriarch
of Constantinople. The appointment was suggested by John of
Antioch, Nestorius’ childhood friend, and got Theodosius II’s
religious policy off on the wrong footing. Theodosius was a saintly
emperor who wore a hair shirt next to his skin but whose goodwill
was not up to the challenge of tackling the increasingly complex
nature of Christological disputes. Theodosius’ saintliness is not to be
mistaken for the spinelessness that used to be attributed to him; his
delegation of his imperial responsibilities seems to have been
dictated by a sincere political aloofness, and Frend has shown that he
was not incapable of decisive action. Theodosius studied the
classics, theology, and the natural sciences but more often painted
and carved or copied out religious manuscripts in his fine hand. He
was fond of hunting and the Persian game of polo which he is
thought to have introduced to Byzantium.
The decision to install Nestorius as patriarch of Constantinople
was a bad one, but it was complicated by the growing bellicosity of
the Alexandrian see, already illustrated by Theophilus’ destruction
of John Chrysostom and Cyril’s indirect role in the murder of the

15
Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement, 128.
16
Ibid, 135.
 The School of Antioch 15

lady philosopher Hypatia. Nestorius may not have been as

uneducated as the church historian Socrates made it out, but his
speech was more bombastic than Cyril’s and he refused to ponder
Cyril’s writings as thoroughly as Cyril, with some concern for the
unity of Christ and as much malice, pondered his. Nestorius was
born in Germanicia in Syrian Euphratensis of Persian descent and
studied under Theodore of Mopsuestia. He entered the monastery of
St. Euprepius and eventually became presbyter of the church of
Antioch. He shared Chrysostom’s zeal and rhetorical skill but little
of his compassion for the downtrodden. At his installation ceremony
in Constantinople he addressed the emperor with these words,
famous even when Socrates wrote: “Give me the earth purified of
heretics, and I will give you heaven for it; help me to fight the
heretics, and I will help you fight the Persians.”17
Socrates said that John Chrysostom was unbendingly rigid, like a
man without knees, but the statement was even more apt about
Nestorius. The new patriarch persuaded Theodosius to restrict the
number of races and dancing girls at the hippodrome and so earned
the hatred of the crowds. He earned the enmity of the monks by
criticizing their habit of living in the city and dabbling in politics.
Asceticism in his homeland of Syria, it would not be too much to say,
was more authentic than it was in Constantinople. Monkish
opposition to Nestorius may have commenced even before his
criticism of the monks, if one can believe the testimony of Hypatius
who dreamed that he saw Nestorius being consecrated by laymen.
Nestorius also passed severe measures against the Novatians, the
Quartodecimans, and the Macedonians, and ordered that the last
surviving chapel of the Arians be shut down, a foolish act since the
German soldiers who helped defend the city were Arians. Equally
imprudently he alienated the imperial sister Pulcheria, the real power
behind the Constantinopolitan throne.
The emperor was the only layman who was allowed to enter the
sanctuary for the Eucharist, but Pulcheria had done so under
previous patriarchs. Nestorius now refused her admittance, and when
Pulcheria assured him that she was a virgin he asked her what kind of

17
Hist. Eccl. 7.29; Schaff, History of the Christian Church, 3:716.
16 Chapter Two

virginity she practiced. 18 Pulcheria was not the only woman the
patriarch alienated by trying to impose inapposite Syrian customs on
the capital. He attempted to stop women from going to night vespers
in the cathedral. In the Book of Heraclides, written long afterwards,
he seems to defend himself against the charge of misogyny by saying
that what he objected to about Pulcheria was not that she was a
woman but rather an aggressive woman, and that the ladies who went
to night vespers could not have been, by virtue of the case, anything
but indecent women.19 If he were alive today he would claim not to
dislike women, only feminists. It is fair to deduce that not every
woman of Constantinople was affronted by him, only a certain type
of woman, as for instance the senator’s wife who shouted at him
while he took part in a church procession. The empress Eudocia was
said to be one of the patriarch’s admirers.
Nestorius further antagonized Pulcheria by removing a robe she
had donated as an altar covering; he thought of it less as the gift of a
virgin than as the gift of a political woman.20 Nestorius’ dislike of
the imperial sister was unwise but forgivable since she had already
aided monks who were rebelling against his predecessor Sisinnius.
He also wanted the emperor to think for himself rather than for him
to let Pulcheria, or even himself, do his thinking for him. In other
words this forthright but essentially unlikable man aspired to be the
young emperor’s mentor.
In view of the Chalcedonian aftermath of the Nestorian and
Eutychian controversies it cannot be stated forcefully enough that
Pulcheria’s reasons for disliking Nestorius were personal and
political rather than theological. It is nonetheless ironic that she
became Jezebel to the Assyrian Church and a saint to the
Neo-Nestorians. Nestorius’ relationship with her probably seemed to
him a repeat of Chrysostom’s troubled relationship with the empress
Eudoxia. But, as in the case of Chrysostom, his end was to come not
through politics but theology.

18
McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy,
25.
19
Ibid.
20
Ibid, 26.
 The School of Antioch 17

Nestorius’ presbyters preached Antiochene theology as represented

by Diodore and Theodore who did not possess the international
reputation of the Cappadocians. One of the presbyters, Anastasius,
attacked the use of the word Theotokos and was defended by
Nestorius. The patriarch disliked Theotokos, “God-bearing,” when
used to describe the Virgin Mary, or at least exclusive of
Anthrōpotokos, “man-bearing.” He was, according to Socrates, afraid
of the word as though it were a hobgoblin (mormolykion). 21 A
sounder word to him was Christotokos, “Christ-bearing,” or even
Theodochos, “God-receiving.” He argued that we should not call
Mary the mother of God any more than we call James the brother of
God. 22 He did not deny either Christ’s deity or humanity but
separated His two natures so rigorously that he was able to make the
dangerous claim that the two or three-month-old Jesus could not be
called God, meaning merely that human qualities could not properly
be applied to the divinity of Christ.
Nestorius viewed the Theotokosians as heretics who merged
Christ’s deity and humanity in an Apollinarian manner. Yet it would
be a mistake to think of the Nestorians, as they would become known
as in Syria and Persia, as having a low opinion of the Virgin Mary.
Sebastian Brock remarks that in practice the orthodox, the
Monophysites, and the Nestorians had an equally deferential attitude
towards her.23 Nonetheless Nestorius felt that some of the veneration
paid her was excessive. The bishop Proclus played only a minor role
in the Theotokosian controversy, but he preached a sermon in
Nestorius’ presence which should be partly quoted as it contains
some of the enthusiastic spirit against which the patriarch was
fighting: “The holy Mary has called us here together, the stainless
jewel of virginity, the rational paradise of the second Adam, the
workshop of the unity of the natures, the festival of the saving
covenant, the bridal chamber in which the Word espoused the flesh,
the living bush which the fire of the divine birth did not burn . . .
slave and mother, virgin and heaven, the only bridge between God

21
Hist. Eccl. 7.32; Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, II,2:171.
22
Price and Gaddis, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, 1:333.
23
Jacob of Serug, On the Mother of God, 2.
18 Chapter Two

and man.”24
Nestorius followed Proclus’ sermon with a homily urging restraint
in describing the Virgin. In some ways he had a point against the
Theotokosians, but in other ways he did not. In the Gospel of Luke
Elizabeth had called Mary “the mother of my Lord” (hē mētēr tou
kyriou mou) which meant essentially the same thing as Theotokos.25
Pope Leo seems to have been one of the few ancients to have noticed
this passage with reference to the Nestorian controversy. Theotokos
had been prized among the Alexandrians since the time of Origen, and
Athanasius’ predecessor Alexander had spoken of “Mary the Mother
of God” (tēs Theotokou Marias) in a letter from the Alexandrian
synod of 320 that condemned Arius;26 even Eustathius of Antioch
employed the word. Cyril of Alexandria, who used both Theotokos
and its synonym Mater Theou, did not hesitate to side with Nestorius’
enemies and accused him of heresy. He began an in-depth study of
patristic Christology, something that would not bode well for
Nestorius, and addressed a circular letter to the Egyptian monks.
These were not naturally inclined to honor the Virgin so it was with
some effort that Cyril argued for the validity of the Theotokos title.
Firstly, Athanasius, a folk hero to the monks, used it in his anti-Arian
writings. Secondly, it was possible for certain Christian women to be
mothers of Christ, but only one could be the mother of God.27
It could be said that the Antiochene theologians who influenced
Nestorius were unnecessarily pedantic; their rigorous two-natures
Christology at least suggests this; but none was more pedantic than
Nestorius himself. One of his favorite words (akribōs) could be
translated by the English phrase “strictly speaking.” In 429, in a public
display against Nestorius in Constantinople, the protestors mocked his
theology and manner of speech. If Mary was not, strictly speaking, the
mother of God, they alleged, then her Son was not, strictly speaking,
God. 28 The lawyer Eusebius, later of Dorylaeum, arranged for a

24
Gregory, Vox Populi, 91.
25
Luke 1:43.
26
Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, II,14:208.
27
Ep. 1; McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological
Controversy, 247, 251.
28
Cyril of Alexandria, On the Unity of Christ, 19.
 The School of Antioch 19

placard to be carried through the city which accused Nestorius of

being a follower of the Adoptionism of Paul of Samosata.
It was not so much the patriarch’s Christology that the
Constantinopolitans objected to as his callous attitude toward a
popular epithet. A Theotokosian monk forbade him from
approaching his altar, and we get some measure of the nature of the
man when we learn that Nestorius gave orders for him to be
flogged.29 Other monks continually disrupted his sermons. He was
able to pacify at least one group of them by inviting them to his
episcopal palace the next day for a talk. They took him at his word
and received a beating instead.30
Nestorius’ Christology owed much to Diodore and Theodore.
Like the former he believed that God dwelled in the Son in a similar
way that He dwelled in the prophets, and like the latter he stressed
that the union was continuous. In one of his sermons he spoke about
the Logos and His relationship to the Christ child thusly: “the same
was Infant and Inhabitant of the Infant.” 31 He shared the whole
Antiochene revulsion to any talk of God suffering in the life of
Christ. The Logos suffered when Jesus suffered only in the sense that
an emperor suffers when his statue is dishonored. The Antiochene
war against the passibility of the Logos was a reaction to the Arians’
attempt to make Him similar to God rather than equal with Him.
Nestorius attacked Apollinarianism as almost Docetic, and like
Gregory of Nazianzus he noted that its tendency to minimize the
humanity of Christ had grave soteriological implications. He could
not have been accused of doing the same. He wanted Christ to be
fully human in every sense of the term with the exception of sin, and
he took the Savior’s ignorance of the coming of the day of the Lord
more seriously than Cyril did. Cyril went so far, in his emphasis on
Christ’s single subjectivity, as to say that He prayed only to give us
an example. Something similar would be maintained, regarding
Christ’s will, by the Monothelite pope Honorius. Monothelitism, of
course, was cut out of the same philosophical cloth as Cyrillian

29
McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy,
32.
30
Ibid, 33.
31
Serm. 15; Jurgens, The Faith of the Early Fathers, 3:204.
20 Chapter Two

proto-Monophysitism.
For Nestorius the Son possessed two natures (physeis) and two
persons (prosōpa), but by persons he did not mean their separate
entity, only their objective reality. He was crippled by the
Aristotelian notion that there can be no nature without personhood.
Nestorius was something of a stickler regarding Christological titles:
he wanted Jesus used only when describing His human actions;
Logos only when describing His divine actions; and Christ, Son, or
Lord when speaking of the whole union.32
Yet union (henōsis) was not the word Nestorius used to define the
relationship between Christ’s two natures. He preferred conjunction
(synapheia), association (koinōnia), appropriation (oikeōsis),
indwelling (kat’ enoikesin), or habituated possession (schesis). 33
Synapheia was the term he most commonly employed. It was far less
strong than henōsis, but he chose it to avoid the Apollinarian
admixture of the two natures and attempted to buttress it with such
adjectives as perfect, exact, continuous, inseparable, and interrelated
(akra, akribēs, diēnekēs, achōristē, schetikē).34
Nestorius’ two natures were less prosopic than those of Theodore
and can be considered an improvement on the latter’s Christology.
He used the analogy of the burning bush, in typically rhetorical
manner, to describe their relationship: “The fire was in the bush and
the bush was fire and the fire bush, each of them was bush and fire,”
but there “were not two bushes nor two fires.”35 Yet he could not
resist the temptation to think of the two natures in prosopic terms.
The Logos’ association with Jesus was for Nestorius an
association of grace (synapheia kat’ eudokian). This is related to
Origen’s idea, in his exposition of Christ’s words on marriage in
Mark 10, that because of love the soul of Jesus becomes “as it were”
one with the Logos.36 This is the reverse of the love felt for the Nous

32
McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy,
156.
33
Ibid, 161.
34
Ibid, 162.
35
Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement, 131.
36
De Prin. 2.6; McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological
Controversy, 163.