CHALCEDON, COUNCIL OF

CHALCEDON, COUNCIL OF. Fourth of the Ecumenical Councils (q.v.), the synod at Chalcedon-an ancient city that had become and remains a suburb of Constantinople-was convoked by the Emperor Marcion in 451 to deal with the heresy (q.v.) of Eutychius and the machinations of the Patriarch Dioscurus of Alexandria. The definition of the union between God (q.v.) and man in Christ promulgated by the council led to the permanent rupture in communion between the Churches of Rome and Constantinople (qq.v.), on the one hand, and the local Churches of Alexandria, Armenia, Ethiopia, and much of Antioch (qq.v.), on the other. Debate centered over a single phrase in Christology (q.v.): Christ is one person (hypostasis) in two natures (en dyo physesin). The difficulty lay in the “in.” To the dissidents, this preposition sounded like the affirmation of two Christs, one God and the other man. They held instead to the formula dear to Cyril of Alexandria (q.v.), “one nature of God the Word incarnate,” i.e., Christ, though human and divine, is yet one, truly God become human. This formula led to the epithet “monophysite” (mia physis, one nature), not of their choosing, by which they have usually been known.

The troublesome phrase had been received by the council fathers in a letter from Pope Leo I (q.v.), and the latter had been strikingly preemptory in his insistence on its adoption. The Church of Rome would afterward be consistent in its sensitivity to any possible threat to the council with which it saw its prestige identified. This double dilemma, Roman intransigence on the one side and stubborn loyalty to the older formula of Cyril on the other, explains much about the 230-year debate that followed this council, punctuated by the Fifth Ecumenical Council at Constantinople in 553, and concluding with the Sixth, again at the capital, in 681. The emperors, in particular Justinian (q.v.) and Heraclius, sought consistently to bring the dissidents back into communion with the Church of Constantinople, and thus with the Empire, while at the same time trying to keep the nervous authorities in Rome content, keeping open the possibility of reconquest in the West. The task proved impossible and, with the rise of Islam (q.v.) and the ensuing loss of the Roman Near East, the efforts came to an end. The schism in the East, however, remains to the present day, although talks between the Chalcedonian and Oriental Orthodox (q.v.) over the past thirty years lend some substance to the hope that it might come to an end in the foreseeable future.