Nestorianism

TENNY THOMAS

The doctrine that emerged from the christo- logical controversies of the 5th century, ascribed to Nestorius of Constantinople, that there were two separate persons in Christ, one human and one divine: the man Jesus and the divine Logos. Nestorianism grew out of the Christology developed at the school of Antioch by Diodore of Tarsus (d. before 394) and Theodore of Mopsuestia (ca. 350–428). Nestorius himself, arguably, did not actually teach a two separate person Christology as much as he was “heard” to teach one by the Alexandrian theologians. He himself was under the impression that he was representing the traditional Christol- ogy of Syria as exemplified in Diodore’s and Theodore’s Christologies, which stressed the need to preserve the distinct integrity of the two natures (divine and human) in Christ. One of the critical issues of the era was the lack of a distinct terminology for “Person,” which was to be worked out in this dispute for the benefit of the wider church, introduc­ing technical terms into the Christian theo­logical vocabulary such as persona, prosopon, hypostasis, and physis.

Diodore and Theodore followed a tradi­tion of historical exegesis very different from the allegorical tradition of the School of Alexandria. Diodore presented Christ as subsisting in two natures, human and divine. The images of temple and priest were central to this school’s Christology. In the womb of Mary, the Logos had fashioned a temple for himself, in which he dwelt. This temple, the man Jesus, was the subject reference of Christ’s human experiences of suffering. The full divinity of the Logos, he thought, was thus protected from any hint of dimin- ishment. This idea was first developed by the Syrians against the heresies of Arius and Apollinaris. In refuting the christological monism that was Apollinarism, Diodore leaned heavily towards an opposing empha­sis that at the time of the incarnation and after it, the divine and human natures of Jesus Christ were distinctly separate to such an extent that there was never an admixture or a union possible. This was meant to stress that the natures, created and uncreated, could not be confused, but it tended to underplay the sense in which the two natures dynamically interacted in the Lord’s incarna­tion, and left unsaid in what medium they interacted.

Diodore prepared the way for the work of his student Theodore, who taught that there were two clearly defined natures of Christ: the assumed Man, perfect and complete in his humanity, and the Logos, the Son, true God of true God and consubstantial, com­plete, and perfect in his divinity. These two natures (physeis) were united by God in grace in one person (prosopon). The unity did not produce a “mixture” of the two natures but an equality in which each was left whole and intact. The older Syrian scheme of using the “Assumed Man” to refer to the human nature, here starts to be mixed with a newer attempt to conceive of the “person as a medium of interaction.” This scheme has been known in shorthand as “Two Sons” Christology. Physis in the older sense meant not necessarily a nature (human or divine) as such, but also a con­crete representation of something. The ter­minology was thus set on a course that was to cause much confusion as it negotiated the new theological waters of distinction of natures and singleness of personhood.

Theodore, horrified by the concept of “confusion” and “mixture that destroyed integrity,” taught that the human and divine natures of Christ were so separate that there was only correspondence (synapheia) between them, but not union. In developing his ideas he wrote that the Man Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary completely naturally and with all faults of men, and that God the Word (Logos), having fore­known the Man’s triumph over sin, chose to redeem the human race through him by becoming united with him through grace (kata charin) from the time of his concep­tion. Because of his triumph over sin, the Man Jesus was made worthy of being called Son of God at the time of the theophany. Then, after his complete triumph over sin during his Passion, he was united even more closely with the Divine Logos, becoming God’s medium for the salvation of human­kind. Theodore also stressed the theological significance of history as a progressive enactment of God’s purpose and thereby justified theologically the Antiochene exegetical methods.

Based on these ideas, Theodore was one of the first to be opposed to the use of theo­logical language that strictly applies to God, being affirmed as a description of things that apply to the human life of Jesus Christ. Thus, he was passionately opposed to the terms “God was crucified,” “God suffered,” or “God was born,” because, he believed, only the Man Jesus was born and God dwelt in the Man Jesus. God could not die, only the human could die, and so on. For this reason, Theodore called Jesus the Theophoros (Bearer of God). Syrian thought after him referred commonly to the idea of “Two Sons,” the divine Son of God and the human Son of Man. The idea of Jesus as High Priest was also used as a way of connoting how the human realities were “lifted up” so as to become redemptively significant.

the early 5th century it seemed to many Alexandrian thinkers, especially St. Cyril of Alexandria, that this was not so much a legitimate traditional way of Syrian theo­logians speaking about the diversity of the natures, as rather a novel form of teaching that a simple man, Jesus (Son of Man or Son of God understood merely honorifically) was associated in the work of salvation along with the Logos (Son of God). If there are two Sons, Cyril thought, there must be two subject centers in Christ: and who then is the human son? Cyril castigated the theo­logical language of two persons in Christ as a betrayal of the fundamental belief in the union of Godhead and humanity in the single Christ: a union which was not a confusion of natures, but a dynamic com­ing together in the crucible of one single divine person (the Logos) who was the per­sonal subject of both natures, and who, in that single personhood, united them both in a mystically dynamic synthesis. For Cyril, therefore, the Eternal Word was actually Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus’ body was thus the body of God; and therefore statements like “the Sufferings of God” were not only admissible but expressed exactly what the incarnation achieved, the union (henosis) of God and humanity in the single person of the God-Man.

Nestorius first came to Cyril’s attention because he was vehemently opposed to a term used in Alexandrian theology: Theotokos (Mary as the Birth-Giver of God). In contrast, Nestorius argued, Mary is not Theotokos because she gave birth only to the Man Jesus. Once again, and in less than careful language, he prob­ably meant to say Mary gave birth only to Jesus’ humanity, not his divinity (which has no earthly origination), but his language sounded to many ears as if Mary simply gave birth to an ordinary man, who was thereafter, somehow, “assumed” by a divine force (the old psilanthropist heresy of Paul of Samosata). Nestorius and Cyril engaged in a fierce controversy in the years leading up to the Council of Ephesus in 431 (the Third Ecumenical Council) and at that council Nestorius was condemned as a her­etic who taught that two persons coexisted in Christ, and he was deposed amid a great scandal that involved all the great sees of Christendom, and which would run on in the agendas of the next three international synods (Ephesus 449, Chalcedon 451, Constantinople 553). In 435 Emperor Theodosius II ordered his writings to be burned (only a few survived). In his post­conciliar writings Nestorius condemned the heresy that had been attributed to him – the extreme view that the human Jesus and divine Christ were two different persons. For Nestorius himself, salvation required both the human and divine natures of Christ to be complete, to guarantee the integrity of the incarnation and to protect the divine Logos from what he most feared (and paradoxically what Cyril wanted to affirm by means of the theory of hypostatic union), namely the blasphemous assertion that God could suffer pain or weakness. Nestorius’ Christology asserted that both natures were discrete and continued in the incarnation. “Two natures after the incar­nation” was elevated in Syria as a refutation of “Union” language. He asserted some­times that the natures were separate centers of operation (prosopa), a word that could hold this meaning, but also suggested “person” understood as a psychic subject (which caused the confusion). At other times, however, he went further (especially in his post-Ephesine book the Tome of Heracleides – first translated erroneously as the Bazaar), that a correlation or con­junction between the divine and human was effected in the “Prosopon of Union,” which he designated by “common terms” and titles such as Christ, or Lord. In short, for Nestorius, purely human activities (eat­ing, drinking) were to be designated by human titles (Jesus, Son of Man, and so on) and divine acts were to be attributed to the Logos, or Son of God, and “mixed activities” could be attributed to a “Prosopon of Union” (Christ, or Lord). The seeking after a more satisfactory con­cept of the christological term of associa- tion/union is marked in this late writing of the Tome of Heracleides. It was only dis­covered in the early 20th century in Syriac, and has caused much scholarly revision of what Nestorius actually held and taught as opposed to what he was heard as saying and teaching at the time.

Diodore and Theodore were considered “orthodox” during their lifetimes, indeed as normative for much of Syrian theological thought, but both of them came under post­humous suspicion during the christological controversies of the 5th century as the two who had sown the seeds for Nestorian heresy. The writings of both were also to be subse­quently condemned, by virtue of their associ­ation with Nestorius. The condemnation of Nestorius in 431 was the beginning of a sustained attack on the early Syrian Christol- ogy across the next two centuries in the ecu­menical synodical process. The great controversies that then resulted led to major disruptions in the life ofthe Eastern Churches that have still not been resolved. The strongly pro-Cyrilline Christology of Ephesus 431, Ephesus 449, and Constantinople 553 is held in some tension by the doctrine of the “two unconfused natures” of Chalcedon 451, where the di-physite language of Rome and Syria was affirmed alongside the union lan­guage of Cyril (thus “Two natures after the Union”). It is for this reason, perhaps, that Chalcedon proved to be so divisive in the later history of so many Eastern Churches.

SEE ALSO: Assyrian Apostolic Church of the East; Council of Ephesus (431); St. Cyril of Alexandria (ca. 378–444); Syrian Orthodox Churches; Theotokos, the Blessed Virgin

REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS

Abramowski, L. and Goodman, A. E. (1972) A Nestorian Collection of Christological Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bethune-Baker, J. F. (1908) Nestorius and His Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Brock, S. P. (1992) Studies in Syriac Christianity: History, Literature and Theology. Aldershot: Variorum.

Clayton, P. B. (2007) The ChristologyofTheodoretof Cyrus: Antiochene Christology from the Council of Ephesus (431) to the Council of Chalcedon (451). Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Driver, G. R. and Hodgson, L. (eds.) (1925) Nestorius: The Bazaar of Heraclides. Eugene: Wipf and Stock.

Greer, R. A. (1966) “The Antiochene Christology of Diodore of Tarsus,” Journal of Theological Studies 17,2: 327–41.

McGuckin, J. A. (2004a) “Nestorianism,” in The Westminster Handbook to Patristics Theology. London: Westminster/John Knox Press.

McGuckin, J. A. (2004b) St. Cyril of Alexandria: The Christological Controversy: Its History, Theology and Texts. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press.

McLeod, F. G. (1999) The Image of God in the Antiochene Tradition. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press.

McLeod, F. G. (2005) The Roles of Christ’s Humanity in Salvation: Insights from Theodore of Mopsuestia. Washington, DC: Catholic Univer­sity of America Press.

McLeod, F. G. (ed.) (2008) Theodore of Mopsuestia. Early Church Fathers. New York: Routledge.

Norris, R. A. (1963) Manhood and Christ: A Study in the Christology of Theodore of Mopsuestia. Oxford: Clarendon Press.