Theodore offers “that [God’s] indwelling” in the human Jesus “has taken place by good pleasure. Good pleasure is said to be God’s most excellent and noblest desire to benefit those who are pleasing to him because of their effort to be devoted to him. For those deeds that are [done] well in a noble way are seen to be pleasing to him, [a view] usually taken for granted by the scriptures and found in them, as the blessed David says, ‘His will does not [rely] on the strength of a horse, nor is he well pleased about a one’s speed. The Lord takes pleasure in those who fear him and hope in his mercy’ [Psalms 147:10-11].”1 So, Theodore says, “[i]n this way, then, it is fitting to speak of an indwelling. For, being infinite and unlimited in his nature, [God] is present to all. Bu by his good pleasure he is thus distant from some and near to others.” Indeed, “[h]e is not limiting his substance or operation in these instances, because he exists apart from all others. Rather, he is present to all in a substantial way, but separated from the unworthy by how he is now disposed [toward them]. For in this way his unlimited [existence] is better preserved, since he is unlimited nature appears to be essentially restrained.” So the only differentiation one can make in the presence of God is by his good pleasure; moreover, one can differentiate “mode of indwelling” with respect to God’s good pleasure. “For what,” he says, “prompts God to dwell in some, and to reveal to them that he is present everywhere by reason of [his] substance, and dwells in even the most unlikely beings—I am speaking here about [his] good pleasure—[this is what] conditions the mode of [God’s] indwelling in all cases.” The mode of divine indwelling present in Christ is not that of apostles or the just, but “as in [his] Son. For, since [God] was well pleased [with him], he dwelt [within him] in this way.” Theodore clarifies: “[It should be understood] in the sense that, when [the Word] dwells [within his humanity], he has united himself wholly to the assumed one and made him share in every honor that [the Son] shares, because he is the one in whom [God’s] Son dwells by nature, to such an extent that he is accounted to be one person (prosopon) because of his union with him. [God], therefore, shares all this power with [his humanity], so that all things will be accomplished by means of him and [the Father] will pass judgment on all, by examining through him when [Christ] will come [at the end of time], but with the clear understanding that [the Father and Jesus] differ [from each other] in accordance with what correctly pertains to their natures.”
Theodore’s point in the larger work that now only survives in these fragments was most clearly grasped by Babai the Great (d. 628), the East Syrian monastic of the Great Monastery of Abraham of Kashkar. His Book of the Union is the Christological classic of the Church of the East. In Theodore’s Greek, ousia, hypostasis, and prosopon are all distinct from one another, but do not receive in the fragments total elaboration; in Babai’s Syriac, “nature” (kyana), “hypostasis” (qnoma), and “person” (parsopa) play the explicit roles implicitly at work in the use of this language among Theodore and other Greek-speaking Nicenes. A hypostasis is always the hypostasis of a paritcular nature (kyana is thus also functioning as the equivalent of ousia, not just physis); but a hypostasis has a prosopon or parsopa, which is its principle of distinction from other hypostases. Hence: “A unique essence is termed hypostasis, subsisting in its sole being, in number just one, and separate from the many, but not in that it is something combined together,” and receptive to accidents possible for that nature that it instantiates. Yet “hypostasis is firmly fixed in the disposition of its nature, and a hypostasis is contained under its own species and nature together with any number of its co-hypostases by the unique property it possesses in its person”—the Syriac parsopa, borrowed from Greek prosopon, again, the word for “mask” or “face”—“for example, of Gabriel and not Michael, of Paul and not Peter. Yet the whole common nature is recognizable in each and every hypostasis, and what the one nature that contains the hypostases in common is can be recognized conceptually, whether of human beings or something else, but hypostasis does not contain what is common.” More specifically, “Person is also a property of any hypostasis that distinguishes it from others, as Paul’s hypostasis is not Peter’s, even though they are equal in terms of nature and hypostasis, since both of them possess bodies and a soul, are living, rational, and corporeal, but in person each is distinct from the other in the unique individuality that each one possesses, whether in age, appearance, temperament,” and so on. Prosopon or parsopa “distinguishes and demonstrates the unique, individual property of this one as opposed to that one, and that one as opposed to this one, even if they are equal in terms of nature, since the category ‘person’ makes a distinction by virtue of the unique property that this hypostasis, which is not that one, possesses.” Personhood is therefore the way a hypostasis expresses itself outwardly and in distinction from other hypostases, while nature names that which hypostases share in common and make concrete collectively and individually.
So, with this in mind, Babai thinks it obvious that it is not possible that the divine and human natures, which are distinct qua nature, could be hypostatically united, since to every hypostasis a single nature is appropriate. Instead, where divinity and humanity in Christ can be united is in “this unity of the single person of Christ, which is in the single connection of divinity and humanity.” That is to say, Babai contends that the idiomata of the divine hypostasis of the Word and the human hypostasis of the man Jesus are unified, such that “this one person is common to two combined hypostases—that is, that of God the Word and of his temple—but not of the whole trinity, even if they are one in nature, will, power, authority, and lordship. For God the Word, it is said, became flesh, and God sent his Son in the image of flesh and the image of God: that is, God the Word, one of the hypostases of the Trinity, assumed the image of a slave, one of the hypostases of human beings, the human Jesus Christ.” As a result, “God the Word with his temple, in the single unity in one common person…give and take names mutually, which is why the fathers called this unity of person natural and hypostatic, so we can say that the natures [that is, of divinity and humanity] in their hypostases [that is, of God the Word and the human Jesus]—and not the natures apart from their hypostases [that is, considered in the abstract from that which concretizes them] are recognized in this single person of Christ, the Son of God.” And, Babai argues, “actually, using the names Christ and Son, from their unity and beyond, makes known two natures and two hypostases in one person, since natures are recognizable in the hypostases that are under them, as we have said in the previous sections.” The prosopic union is one “in a single name, in a single power, in single reverence, with the two properties of the hypostases kept without mixture, that of the divinity of Christ and that of his humanity, in the person of being a Son.”
Babai admits that this is a great mystery: “how the limitless is in the limited, the forever with the temporal, and one whom no one has ever seen nor is able to see, and dwells in blissful light that no one can approach, has come to this wonderful descent, that he might be a single Son in a single connection and unity distinct in kind, together with his humanity, which is a nature that feels, is created, and made, which he exalted and applied to his person, so that we might be honored, worshipped, and praised along with him, and possess everything of divinity except his nature! Who knows all this as it really is?…this mystery is ungraspable and impossible to reason out.” But he also affirms in no uncertain terms: “God the Word does not, in terms of nature, have two natural persons, so that there are two sons, so that a human is not said to be two animals. It is impossible for a hypostasis to have two natural persons in terms of nature, as nasty people nonsensically say.” And, logically, one can see how this follows from Babai’s previous points: “it has been demonstrated that one person can belong to two hypoastes, but that two natural and hypostatic persons can belong to one natural hypostasis? That is impossible, that the hypostasis of God the Word togetherw ith its person should be one hypostasis with the human hypostasis and its person. Divinity is in this: three hypostases in one nature. Many human beings, too, are one nature. Further, Christ is of two natures and two hypostases in one person: this is God’s plan and true, as has been demonstrated.” How does this avoid the charge of two Sons? Simply: “sonship belongs to the humanity of the Son together with God the Word, who is the forever Son, who exalted and applied the human Son to his person: they have a connection and partnership together, in a single unity, in a single name of being a Son, in single praise and authority, never combined with the Father and never combined with the Holy Spirit. And there are not two sons, as the human Son, too, is not two, with two persons: one who is named in terms of unity and, in his natural limitlessness, is in heaven, and one who is a descendant of David and Abraham, who was handed over to the nations, who treated him derisively, crucified him, and he died in weakness, and rose with God’s power that was in him, as it is said, ‘to hand over the human Son’ and ‘destroy this temple, and I will raise it back up in three days.’” In sum, “[t]he person of Christ, Son of God, is one in his divinity and his humanity, and he is one person, the Son of the most high, the Lord, Jesus, the unique, firstborn human Son, Christ. The two natures are recognizable in this one person, which is the one Christ, Son of God, and the names, while distinguished by the properties of their hypostases are combined with no mix-up, and while combined with no mix-up, are distinguished in their properties, in the single unity of the one person of Christ, Son of God forever.” The East Syriac Christological tradition is predicated on this insistence: given what a nature is, and what a hypostasis is, the only meaningful locus of divinity and humanity’s union in Christ is his prosopon, where the idioms of both divinity and humanity can be meaningfully exchanged and what is naturally proper to the hypostases of God the Word and the human Jesus can be exchanged, each applied to the other. That is to say, the Word’s assumption of Jesus, culminating in his glorification of Jesus, is the Word’s identification of the human Jesus with his divine self, the conformity of Jesus’s prosopon to that of God the Word, and in exchange, the identification of God the Word with those qualities manifest in Jesus, including his very name, Jesus Christ, Son of God.
Now, in jumping from Theodore to Babai I have purposely skipped the most infamous person of the Christological Controversy, Nestorius, the archbishop of Constantinople. That is because Nestorius’s Christology is in essence just that of Theodore and later of Babai. Nestorius follows the logic of the Nicene Fathers fairly closely: to every hypostasis there is an ousia or physis that it concretizes; for Jesus Christ to be homoousios with God the Father implies that he hypostatizes the divine essence just as the Father does, albeit in a mode distinct from the Father. But for Christ to be consubstantial with us as well must logically imply that he also hypostatizes human nature; and for Nestorius, the logical ergo is that Christ is two hypostases. Where are those hypostases unified? In the common prosopon, the “face” or “personal” manifestation of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, where the idioms of divinity and humanity are exchanged and mutually predicable of divine and human hypostases. So, just like for Theodore and Babai, Nestorius holds that God the Word has assumed the human Jesus and thus assimilated the humanity of Jesus to his divinity in terms of its outward quality (but without eliminating Jesus’s human nature or underlying reality), and conversely, the Word has become identifiable with the human Jesus in this act by their common prosopon.
I have fronted the Syriac tradition which looks to Diodore, Theodore, and Nestorius as the three doctores ecclesiae before outlining the Cyrillian tradition or its miaphysitic and Chalcedonian/dyophysitic interpretations both to look at the issue from a different angle and to make a series of closely related points. First, the Christological Controversy arose, as I argued in the last post in the series, from real and original pluralism in how to think about Christ. Second, it was perpetuated by the linguistic and philological capacity of the terms in question to shift meaning over time, place, language, and usage depending on the ideas and needs of the writer in question. And third, the Controversy was inflamed by politics which often favored culture, geography, and prestige over cool intellectual reflection. In the end, the Schools of Antioch, Edessa, and Nisibis and the Constantinopolitan archbishopric connected to them lost to Alexandria at Ephesus, won at Chalcedon (more on this in a moment), and remained objects of imperial concern for centuries afterward despite their formal anathematization more for reasons of imperial politics than because of the obvious superiority in coherence or persuasion of the Alexandrian view.
Still, it is worth trying to understand what exactly Cyril objected to in Nestorius on his own terms and why “Nestorianism” is, from the Miaphysitic perspective, the arch-heresy and the signature problem with Chalcedon and Neo-Chalcedonianism (and, notably, Maximus the Confessor). The context of Cyril’s objection to Nestorius is Nestorius’s preaching against the title Theotokos in connection to the Virgin Mary. “Does God have a mother?” asked Nestorius. “A Greek without reproach introducing mothers for the gods! Is Paul then a liar when he says of the deity of Christ, ‘without father, without mother, without genealogy’ [Hcb. 7:3]? Mary, my friend, did not give birth to the Godhead (‘for what is born of flesh is flesh’ (John 3:6]). A creature did not produce him who is uncreatable. The Father has not just recently generated God the Logos from the Virgin (for ‘in the beginning was the Logos,’ as John [John 1:1] says). A creature did not produce the Creator, rather she gave birth to the human being, the instrument of the Godhead. The Holy Spirit did not create God the Logos (for ‘what is born of her is of the Holy Spirit’ [Matt 1:20]). Rather, he formed out of the Virgin a temple for God the Logos, a temple in which he dwelt.”2 Nestorius takes this logic further: “the incarnate God did not die; he raised up the one in whom he was incarnate. He stooped down to raise up what had collapsed, but he did not fall (‘The Lord looked down from heaven over the sons of men’ ([Ps 14:2]). Nor, because he stooped to lift the guilty who had fallen, may he be disparaged as if he himself had sunk to the ground. God saw the ruined nature, and the power of the Godhead took hold of it in its shattered state. God held on to it while himself remaining what he had been, and lifted it up high.” Nestorius takes up similar language to what we have seen in Theodore and Babai to express the differentiation of the Logos and the human Jesus: interpreting Paul, Nestorius claims that “he takes the term Christ to be an expression which signifies the two natures, and without risk he applies to him both the style ‘form of a slave,’ which he took, and that of God. The descriptions are different from each other by reason of the mysterious fact that the natures are two in number.” Nestorius insists that this is how Christ describes himself: “Does he not call himself both a destroyable temple and God who raises it up? And if it was God who was destroyed—and let that blasphemy be shifted to the head of Arius!—the Lord would have said, ‘Destroy this God and in three days I will raise him up.’ If God died when consigned to the grave, the Gospel saying ‘Why do you seek to kill me, a man, who have spoken the truth to you?’ [John 8:40] is meaningless.” Yet Nestorius still finds cause to worship Christ in the adoration of the Godhead: “I worship this one together with the Godhead because he is a sharer in the divine authority; ‘for let it be apparent, men and brothers,’ says the Scripture, ‘that the remission of sins is preached to us through Christ’ [Acts 13:38].” For Nestorius, Jesus is “the instrument of the Lord’s goodness,” “the meeting place of God’s counsels,” “‘the form’ which makes promise on God’s behalf for us,” “the pledge of peace,” “the expiation of divine wrath,” “the beginning of immortality for mortals,” “the mirror of the resplendent deity,” “the living glory of the King,” “the hand of God which snatches me out of the hand of death for life,” “the faithful scribe,” “the door through which one enters upon divine things,” “the image of the all-sovereign deity.” In sum: “the one who is borne because of the one who carries him, and I worship the one I see because of the one who is hidden. God is undivided from the one who appears, and therefore I do not divide the honor of that which is not divided. I divide the natures, but I unite the worship.” Ergo, “That which was formed in the womb is not in itself God. That which was created by the Spirit in was not in itself God. That which was buried in the tomb was not in itself God. If that were the case, we should manifestly be worshipers of a human being and worshipers of the dead. But since God is within the one who was assumed, the one who was assumed is styled God because of the one who assumed him…God has been joined to the crucified flesh, even though he has not shared its suffering.”
In his extant epistolary exchange with Nestorius, Cyril takes issue with this Christology. Beginning from the Creed, in his second epistle sent probably in 429 CE, Cyril contends that “the great and holy synod [of Nicaea] stated that the unique Son himself—naturally begotten out of God the Father, true God out of true God, light out of light, through whom the Father made everything that exists—descended, was enfleshed, became human, rose on the third day, and ascended into the heavens.” Hence, when we interrogate “what is meant by saying that the Logos from God took flesh and became human,” we should understand that this does not mean that “the Logos became flesh by having his nature changed, nor for that matter that he was transformed into a complete human being composed out of soul and body,” but instead that “in an unspeakable and incomprehensible way, the Logos united to himself, in his hypostasis, flesh enlivened by a rational soul, and in this way he became a human being and has been designated ‘Son of man.’ He did not become a human being simply by an act of will or ‘good pleasure,’ any more than he did so by merely taking a person [the word here is prosopon again].” He goes on: “we say that while the natures which were brought together into a true unity were different, there is nevertheless, because of the unsepeakable and unutterable convergence into unity, one Christ and one Son out of the two.” It is in this sense that Christ is said “to have had a fleshly birth.” “It is not the case,” says Cyril, “that first of all an ordinary human being was born of the holy Virgin and that the Logos descended upon him subsequently. On the contrary, since the union took place in the very womb, he is said to have undergone a fleshly birth by making his own the birth of the flesh which belonged to him.” (Interestingly, Cyril is here contradicting the distinct sense of John itself, where the concept of the Logos’s descent in, as, or on Jesus, is first found in the Gospels, but which as I noted last time, lacks a virginal conception or birth, and the first event after the Prologue is in fact Jesus’s baptism.) Indeed, “We do not worship a human being in conjunction with the Logos, lest the appearance of a division creep in by reason of that phrase ‘in conjunction with.’ No we worship one and the same, because the body of the Logos is not alien to him but accompanies him even as he is enthroned with the Father.”
Cyril ends his letter effectively demanding that Nestorius concede his point. Nestorius’s reply is a refusal: “The rebukes which your astonishing letter brings against us,” he opens, “I forgive. What it deserves is a healing generosity of spirit and the reply which comes to it at the proper time by way of actual deeds. This, though does not permit silence, for if silence be kept, great danger is involved.” Nestorius attempts to set the record straight: his contention is that “the divine chorus of the Fathers did not say that the coessential Godhead is passible or that the Godhead which is coeternal with the Father has only just been born, or that he who has raised up the temple which was destroyed has [himself] risen. And if you will give me your attention for the sake of brotherly correction, I will explain to you the utterances of those holy men and deliver you from calumnies against them and, through them, against the Holy Scriptures.” Nestorius’s argument that “those holy fathers spoke not of birth when they were thinking of God’s saving dispensation but of coming to be in a human being” is the basis on which he “commended the distinction of natures in accordance with the special character of humanity and deity, the conjunction of these natures in one person [prosopon/parsopa], the denial that the Logos has need of a second birth from a woman, and the confession that the Godhead is not susceptible to passion.” Hence, “Everywhere in Holy Scripture, whenever mention is made of the saving dispensation of the Lord, what is conveyed to us is the birth and suffering not of the deity but of the humanity of Christ, so that by a more exact manner of speech the holy Virgin is called Mother of Christ, not Mother of God." And, at least in terms of the scriptural litany that Nestorius summons in his defense on this score, he’s completely correct that Theotokos is not a scriptural title, whether one is thinking about the person of Jesus from the perspective of his conception and birth or that of his death and resurrection. (A broader point that I will revisit below: Nestorius in general quotes far more scripture than Cyril does in their epistolary exchanges.)
Nestorius shares Cyril’s Nicene Christology that Christ is homoousios with God the Father; the dispute is about whether Nicaea requires Cyril’s hypostatic union at the expense of a prosopic union in which what is divine in Jesus and what is human is distinguished while united. “The body” of Jesus, says Nestorius, “therefore is the temple of the Son’s deity, and a temple united to it by a complete and divine conjunction, so that the nature of the deity associates itself with the things belonging to the body, and the body is acknowledged to be noble and worthy of the wonders related in the Gospels.” In a nutshell, when Nestorius initially refused the title Theotokos to Mary, preferring Christotokos, his goal was not to demote Mary or Christ, her Son; his point was that Christ is the common prosopon in which the Son of God and the human Jesus, the two hypostases of the distinct natures of divinity and humanity, find their unity.
The story, of course, does not go Nestorius’s way. In November of 430, Theodosius II and Valentinian III convoked a synod for Pentecost of 431, partly in response to Nestorius’s desire to be exonerated in the wake of Cyril’s pursuit of his condemnation through Pope Celestine of Rome, which in turn commissioned Alexandria to try and bring Nestorius into line. Cyril at the time ruled one of the most powerful patriarchates in the Roman Empire: the archbishop of the Alexandrian Church wielded more power and influence over more territory at this point in time than the majority of Egyptian pharaohs ever had, whose mantle they claimed, and they were each of them jockeys for ecclesiastical and imperial power, especially in the face of the new rival see of Constantinople. The politics and power at play in Cyril’s life and career are on open display in the crisis around Nestorius. When Nestorius did not sign Cyril’s twelve anathemata, and John the patriarch of Antioch was late to the synod in 431, Cyril decided to open the council early to ensure that his view would be enforced. No fewer than 68 bishops and imperial officials opposed Cyril; Cyril’s supporters, in turn, threw out Nestorius’s episcopal delegates and the imperial comes. Nestorius himself was condemned by Cyril’s council while absent. In reply, John hosted his own council on 26 June, which deposed Cyril and Memnon deposed, on the grounds that Cyril’s own anathemata were heretical, pointing to the Nicene Creed as the exclusive ground of Christian orthodoxy, and also noting that Cyril’s usurpation of the Ephesian council meant that discussion of the formula had been impossible. In the end, Nestorius, Cyril, and Memnon were all put under custody by the emperor; delegations from both sides were commissioned to Chalcedon for discussions, which were fruitless; Nestorius was granted the right to return to Antioch; Cyril used bribery to escape back to Alexandria; the emperor, in view of the irreconcilable positions of the two parties, nullified the council at Ephesus and revoked condemnations against Eastern bishops in support of Nestorius (and the theological tradition he represented). Peace was not attained until 433, when John successfully attained Cyril’s submission to his own Christological confession in exchange for Cyril’s demand to anathematize Nestorius. John’s symbol of union included the Theotokos moniker, which Nestorius himself had employed in a sermon in 430 by John’s urging. Nestorius, in other words, would have reconciled along with Cyril and John. But for the rest of his life, until 450, he was repeatedly exiled and moved, living to see his theology but not his person vindicated by the Tome of Leo which was received at the Council of Chalcedon the following year.3
That Nestorius was a victim of ecclesiastical politics seems indisputable: Cyril’s prosecution against him at Ephesus was done without his presence, without that of any to advocate for him, and Cyril ultimately conceded to a formula that reflected the same Christological tradition to which Nestorius himself subscribed exclusively on the grounds that his anathametization of Nestorius was accepted by John of Antioch. But this treaty of peace, which would lead to the Council of Chalcedon in 451, did not successfully resolve the issues at stake with its Definition. Before interrogating that Definition, it will be useful to get the lay of the land. As Sebastian Brock summarizes,
[T]he Assyrian Church of the East has never accepted the Council of Ephesus, and the Oriental Orthodox churches have, in their turn, rejected the doctrinal definition of the Council of Chalcedon, each had perfectly sound reasons for doing so. In the case of the Council of Ephesus, it was not to any doctrinal decision (the Council issued no definition of faith) but to its irregular procedure to which the Church of the East has always—and not without some good reason—objected. The Council of Chalcedon, too, is seen from a quite different perspective: whereas from the standpoint of what one may call the Latin and Greek church this council brought about a reconciliation between the Antiochene and Alexandrian traditions of christology and the conclusion of the christological controversy, from an Eastern Mediterranean perspective, Chalcedon was certainly not experienced as putting an end to controversy: rather, it was the cause of much further controversy which continued on till the seventh century, when the Arab conquests effectively fossilized the different ecclesiastical positions that had emerged, and it is these positions which are still reflected today in the various Christian churches of the Middle East.4
Chalcedon—which speaks of Jesus Christ as one hypostasis, one prosopon, in two natures (Grk: physeis), without confusion, change, separation, or division—fails to resolve the matter because its compromise is potentially, depending on how it is parsed, unintelligible. “[T]he Chalcedonian Definition of Faith,” Brock continues, “was seen by many as an unsatisfactory compromise, and one which was illogical to boot, since (many people argued, if one is to speak of two natures, this implies two hypostaseis, and if one is to speak of one hypostasis, this implies one nature.”5 Miaphysites and dyophysites alike beyond imperial boundaries felt this way. Brock’s translation of Ishoyahb II (628-46 CE) is instructive here: “Although those who gathered at the Synod of Chalcedon were clothed with the intention of restoring the faith,” he says,
yet they too slid away from the true faith: owing to their feeble phraseology, wrapped in an obscure meaning, they provided a stumbling block to many. Although, in accordance with the opinion of their own minds, they preserved the true faith with the confession of the two natures, yet by their formula of one qnoma (= hypostasis), it seems, they tempted weak minds. As an outcome of the affair a contradiction occurred, for with the formula ‘one qnoma’ they corrupted the confession of ‘two natures’; while with the ‘two natures’ they rebuked and refuted the ‘one qnoma’…On what side they should number them [between orthodox and heretics] I do not know, for their terminology cannot stand up, as Nature and Scripture testify: for in these, many qnome can be found in a single ‘nature’, but that there should be various ‘natures’ in a single qnoma has never been the case and has not been heard of.6
Severus of Antioch (459-538 CE), the Miaphysite patriarch of the Syriac Orthodox Church, would have concurred with this logic, but from the perspective that Christ’s singular hypostasis demands that he has a singular physis, too. At the height of the debate, Brock discerns seven positions: (1) that of Nestorius, which involves the union of two natures and their hypostaseis/qnome in one prosopon; (2) that of Diodore, Theodore, and the Church of the East, which also speaks of two natures, two hypostaseis/qnome, and one prosopon, and which therefore sanctifies Nestorius as one of its Doctors without being genuinely dependent on him in its tradition;7 (3) the Western Chalcedonian position and (4) the Neo-Chalcedonian position, both of which speak of Christ “in two natures…one prosopon and one hypostasis,” attempting to reconcile Cyril with Antioch, which is affirmed at the fifth ecumenical council and becomes the background to Maximus the Confessor’s later position; (5) a position demanding silence, professed by the Zeno’s Henotikon of 482 and possibly reflected in Ps.-Dionysius the Areopagite, who does not take up the question; (6) the Miaphysite or Henophysite position, in both its Greek and Syriac forms, holding that there is “one incarnate nature of God the Word,” with or without the qualifier that it is “from two natures” (an idea also acceptable to the Chalcedonians); and (7) the Monophysites, represented by Eutyches, who simply denied that Christ was consubstantial with humanity. Certain continuities exist across positions. (1), (2), and (3), for instance, all reject the Theopaschite formula—“One of the Trinity suffered in the flesh”—and are wary about the communicatio idiomatum, the “exchange of attributes” between divinity and humanity in Christ (though one can argue that this is more about mechanics than substance). (4), (5), and (6) accept both the Theopaschite formula and the concept of the communicatio idiomatum. All of these positions except for (7) agree that Christ is consubstantial with humanity as well as with God the Father.
No small part of the debate centers around, as I have already said and the reader may be intuiting, the fact that no common definition of these terms was in constant use in every context and language. Very generally, kyana is the Syriac equivalent of the Greek physis, which was understood synonymously with ousia; hypostasis is represented by qnoma. But Miaphysite writers speak of physis as synonymous with hypostasis; East Syriac writers use qnoma to mean “individual manifestation” of a kyana, which is the sense hypostasis holds in relation to ousia in the fourth century, but where in Trinitarian theology hypostasis relates to ousia as a “self-existence,” qnome in East Syriac Christology does not normally carry that meaning. This speaks to a broader incommensurability between the logic of Trinitarian theology and Christology that we will have to turn to later; English further obfuscates things by confusing qnome and hypostaseis alike with prosopon/persona/parsopa, which also carries different meanings dependent on context.8 The issue is further complicated by the fact that in its seven synods held between 486 and 605, the Church of the East did not typically use consistent dogmatic language to articulate its Christology even in Syriac. These synods reflect two currents: one which speaks of Christ by appeal to one qnoma-parsopa synthesis, and one which appealed to two-qnome, both looking back to Theodore of Mopsuestia as their common font.9 The language also morphed in response to the ongoing character of the Controversy in the West. The Synod of 554 under Catholicos Joseph, for example, seems to have been a reaction against Constantinople II’s condemnation of Theodore of Mopsuestia, Theodoret of Cyrus, and Ibas of Edessa, reiterating a false accusation against the Antiochene Christological tradition of asserting two “persons” in Christ, leading to “two christs,” “two sons,” or a quaternity instead of a Trinity. But as we have seen in Theodore, Nestorius, and Babai, there is only one Son of God, who is united to humanity by his assumption of the man Jesus as his perfect Temple, in the one prosopon or parsopa of Christ, such that there is but one subject of the Incarnation throughout (whether one identifies one qnoma of the Son or two qnome of the divine Son and the human Jesus, because in either stream the human qnoma is not really self-existent in the way the qnoma of the Son is) that fully possesses both divinity and humanity.
Nor was the exceeding tenuousness of the debates lost on the ancient Christians that engaged in them. No less a Miaphysitic polymath than Bar Hebraeus, a Syriac Orthodox maphrian, observed: “When I had given much thought and pondered on the matter, I became convinced that these disputes of Christians are not a matter of factual substance, but rather, one of words and terms. For they all confess Christ our Lord to be perfect God and perfect human, without any commingling, mixing or confusion of the natures. This bipinnate likeness is termed by one party a ‘nature’, by another a ‘hypostasis’, by yet another a ‘prosopon’. Thus I saw all the Christian communities, with their different Christological positions, as possessing a single common ground that is without any difference. Accordingly, I totally eradicated any hatred from the depths of my heart, and I completely renounced disputing with anyone over confessional matters” (Book of the Dove IV).10 And yet, still, one wonders if there is not something useful, perhaps, in the sixfold Christological position (all but that of Eutyches), or the threefold position (East Syrian, West Syrian, and Chalcedonian), that does not stand in want of further synthesis.
My translation for Theodore continues to be that in Michael Philip Penn et al., Invitation to Syriac Christianity: An Anthology (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2022).
The translation is Richard A. Norris Jr., trans. and ed., The Christological Controversy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1980). I would not say that this is the ultimate translation available in English, per se, but it is a solid sourcebook. Typically I will only provide my own translations when I either find that the existing ones have an issue or I cannot find an existing one.
Paraphrased from G. Alberigo et al., Conciliorum Oecumenicorum Generaliumque Decreta, Editio Critica Vol. I The Oecumenical Councils: From Nicaea I to Nicaea II (325-787) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 73-80.
See Sebastian Brock, “The ‘Nestorian’ Church: A Lamentable Misnomer,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 78, 23-24.
Brock, “The ‘Nestorian’ Church,” 24.
Brock, “The ‘Nestorian’ Church,” 24.
So notes Brock: “[I]t is very significant that, in the course of the eight synods held by the Church of the East between 486 ad 612 the name of Nestorius never once occurs, whereas Theodore is on several occasions held up as an authority on doctrinal matters and as a model for orthodox belief. This is not, of course, to deny that Nestorius is not held in respect by the Church of the East, as one of the three ‘Greek Doctors’, who are commemorated in the liturgical Calendar” (29).
Paraphrasing Brock, “The ‘Nestorian’ Church,” 26-28.
See Bishara Ebeid, “The Christology of the Church of the East: An Analysis of Christological Statements and Professions of Faith of the Official Synods of the Church of the East before A.D. 612,” Orientalia Christiana Periodica 2 (201), 353-402. As Ebeid summarizes, “In the history of Christian dogma, Trinitarian and Christological, the term ὑπόστασις did not have one significance and unique metaphysical function. If it was translated into Syriac by qnoma, it does not always mean that the meaning which the Syrian theologians gave to it was not one and unique, corresponding to the significances the Greeks gave. We agree, therefore, with those scholars who hold that qnoma, sometimes, is not absolutely identical in meaning with the Greek term ὑπόστασις, and for this reason we will leave it transliterated. The same thing one can notice regarding the Greek term πρόσωπον. It was used in different ways to explain either Trinitarian theology or the Christological doctrine. In the Syriac tradition it was transliterated by parsopa, and was used with different meanings and significances, however, only in Christological doctrine” (354-355).
The translation is Brock’s; see Brock, “Towards an Understanding of the Christology of the Non-Chalcedonian Churches,” Orthodox Theology in Dialogue 2 (2016): 70-76.
I really do appreciate this emphasis on the East Syriac thinkers! Wonderful article as always
David, I apologize for leaving this question in the comments, but I can't seem to find an email address for you and am hoping for a little guidance. Do you know of any solid resources (books, study plans, online courses, anything) that I could use to teach my children scripture in an orderly and effective manner? I'm concerned that for all their catechesis classes, and despite my well-intentioned but feeble attempts to keep them oriented in the scriptures, they're not getting a solid understanding of the over-arching narrative and history. I've been through most of your writings here, and you've stoked my desire to make sure my children aren't having to backfill their Biblical knowledge as adults (like I am). Any guidance here would be appreciated. I know there's probably no silver bullet here, so even some general guidance based on your own teaching experience would be extremely valuable to me.
Please know that your hard work on this newsletter matters very much to this reader at least. I pray it continues apace.