A. K. Chidgzey

Nestorius was born in Syria in the year 386CE and became patriarch of Constantinople in 428. This was an important and much envied position, particularly for those in the east. Where the bishop of Rome, who would become the pope, had precedence over the west, the patriarch of Constantinople would have precedence over the east, though still technically under the pope, at least until the Great Schism later on, and so there was a lot of political maneuvering to attain that position or to get someone who was in your party into that position. But when you got that position, it wasn’t secure and people were always trying to knock you off your seat. Like a constant game of king of the hill where nobody wins and everyone goes home crying with bruised elbows and egos. And this is what would happen to Nestorius.

He had studied in a monastery in Antioch under Theodore of Mopsuestia – an ancient city in modern Turkey. Theodore had taught a very distinct separation between the human and divine natures in Jesus, but not to the extent that it would cause problems. This is what Nestorius brought with him to Constantinople.

He was, perhaps ironically, adamantly opposed to heresy. In fact one of his first acts as patriarch was to burn an Arian chapel, one of the few that still existed around the place.

But one of his main theological gripes had to do with a term that was becoming increasingly popular. That was the title theotokos which had been connected to the Virgin Mary and meant ‘mother of God’. As in, Jesus was God, Mary was the mother of Jesus, Mary was the mother of God. A fine example of inductive reasoning. Nestorius didn’t like it.

The debate here has less to do with Mary herself and more to do with Jesus. Nestorius felt this was inappropriately mixing the human and divine natures in Jesus. Elevating Mary in this way could be seen to both be taking away from his humanity or from his divinity. The title mother of God emphasizes the divine, and so the title, argued Nestorius, neglects the human, but on the other hand, emphasizing the role of Mary, a human, could potentially detract from Jesus’ divinity or suggest that he was a bit of divinity from God the Father and a bit of humanity from Mary, his mother. So instead he suggested ‘Christokos’ Christ bearer. She bore the Christ, but she did not bear God.

So for Nestorius, you could separate and make clear demarcations between the human and the divine natures of Jesus. One of Nestorius’ main concerns was that Jesus’ humanity would be lost to, or overwhelmed by Jesus’ divinity. He insisted that it was of utmost importance that while we declare Jesus’ divinity, we cannot lose sight of his humanity.

And so in light of this, Nestorius rejected the term hypostasis, the term that was used in the Nicene Creed to refer to the union of the divine and human in Jesus. This is called the hypostatic union. Jesus is both God and human, two distinct natures but in the one person of Jesus.

Nestorius thought this was too ambiguous and that there was inevitably a mixture of the two natures and so both would be compromised so that there is neither divine or human, but something completely new, or that divine would just overtake the human and so there’s no humanity in Jesus.

But he was also concerned that by being human, Jesus would also be sinful, and he didn’t like that idea, so it was necessary to ensure this separation between the divine Logos and the human Christ so that the human didn’t corrupt the divine.

Essentially he was affirming two persons, rather than a single unified being. His is what’s called a radical dyophysitism which is the coexistence of the two natures within the one Jesus, but what makes Nestorius’ position radical is in his rejection of the hypostatic union and his adoption of a prosopic union of the two natures.

Prosopon was the Greek word for mask and was used in theatre and the prosopic union is a less technical way of speaking about the unification of the divine and human in Jesus than the term hypostatic union. Hypostasis has the more generic meaning of being, whereas prosopon is more specifically to do with person or substance. In a hypostatic union, the unity between divine and human is deliberately ambiguous, whereas a prosopic union implies that the two natures are united but remain distinct, like two housemates living in a cramped apartment which technically belongs to one of them and who pays the bills but the other is the one who brings the party.

Nestorius argued that in Jesus there is a unity of wills, not essence. They both agreed to the party, but one of them was an introvert and so could go to bed early.

Some people did not like this, such as Cyril of Alexandria. To him, Nestorianism seemed too much like a form of adoptionism, that God adopted a human to be his son and in so doing, that human became divine.

Cyril happened to be a much better politician than Nestorius and chummed up with the Pope. The Pope gave Nestorius an ultimatum: he had 10 days to recant or he would be excommunicated. With this notice, Cyril sent Nestorius a letter, which he also sent all over the eastern empire, which included what is known as the Twelve Anathemas, basically twelve statements of doctrinal error that Nestorius had committed. Cyril threatened to excommunicate anyone who supported Nestorius or agreed with his views. This included refusing to call Mary theotokos, mother of God.

Despite friends telling him to do so, Nestorius stubbornly refused to recant. One of his friends even said to him, paraphrasing, “Mate, you’re literally risking your life over a single word. Just chill out and come eat some hummus.”

So in the year 430, convinced by Cyril that Nestorius was dangerous, the Pope condemned Nestorius. Cyril also managed to charm the emperors, Valentinian III in the west and Theodosius II in the east, who convoked another great ecumenical council to sort all of this out. This was the Council of Ephesus, which was in a sense a prelude to the Council of Chalcedon.

Now Nestorius had anticipated this and was convinced that, at such a council, he could convince everyone of his position and even turn everyone against Cyril. Kind of like the Arians at the Council of Nicea, about a hundred years earlier. So he was confident, but like the Arians, he probably shouldn’t have been.

The council was set for 7^th June 431, in Ephesus. But it took too long for Nestorius’ supporters to organize themselves and get to Ephesus on time. When the Antiochene delegate was two weeks late, the council convened without Nestorius’ key supporters.

Nestorius was not allowed to defend himself and he was declared a heretic and was deposed. His supporters finally arrived only days later. And they thought, ‘well then, we’re gonna have our own council and it’s gonna be better than yours.’ It was small but it was a rager and they declared Cyril a heretic.

Cyril threw another heretic party and called all of them heretics. At this point I think almost everyone’s a heretic…? And…like…5 years old?

Big old emperor Theodosius steps in, pulls them away by their ears and says they’re both being silly. None of you are heretics. Except for Nestorius who is still a heretic.

He also sent Nestorius back to the monastery he had come from. 5 years later, everyone was embarrassed about his presence and so he was banished to Egypt, within Cyril’s own diocese, where he was injured by desert bandits and eventually died 20 years later.

This was a win for the Alexandrian school, but it wouldn’t be long before another Christological crisis emerged, but we’ll look at that one in a later episode.

The debate between Nestorius and Cyril had to do with the two natures of Christ – the divine and the human. This would be one of the defining distinctions between the Antiochene and Alexandrian schools; the Antiochene emphasizing Jesus’ humanity, the Alexandrian emphasizing Jesus’ divinity.

Not all who followed the Alexandrian school were from Alexandria and not all who followed the Antiochene school were from Antioch. Both sides agreed that Jesus was both human and divine, but the question was how to understand this union. The Antiochene position could be rather crudely characterized as saying that the two natures could not really be united in one, while the Alexandrian position could be characterized, again rather crudely, as saying that the divine would overwhelm or even replace the human. The answer that the Council of Chalcedon would provide, called the Chalcedonian definition, was an attempt to find a middle ground.

Of course, this was predominantly an issue in the east, the West was preoccupied with things like…well…plague and invasion and the Goths and no money and stuff like that. Things weren’t going great in the West, and so they were just happy to be alive but also to just accept that old formula that Jesus was both human and divine in the one person and they didn’t really care how. So when Cyril approached Pope Celestine, Celestine, who of course had an interest in correct theology, did not have serious theological allegiances either way, and so could be swayed by Cyril.

At the Council of Chalcedon in 451, a year after Nestorius had died, Nestorianism was declared heretical a second time. Nevertheless, some followers of Nestorianism moved east to the Persian Sasanian Empire, which is roughly modern Iran. There they assimilated with the Church of the East, which according to tradition was founded by the Apostle Thomas, but was probably more likely founded by these Nestorians who provided the theological scaffolding and ecclesiastical leadership to the local Christians. It’s sometimes referred to as the Nestorian Church and they revered Nestorius as a saint, and this tradition existed for a 1000 years despite Muslim invasion, but then had a number of their own schisms and evolved into or merged with a variety of other traditions.   

Some others thought that the formulation that the Chalcedonian Council came up with sounded too similar to Nestorianism and so rejected the Chalcedonian definition, such as the Armenian Church. But there’s a lot going on at the Council of Chalcedon and we’ll get into that later.

All of these debates about the nature of Jesus might seem pedantic or even petty. Quibbles over semantics. But at the time, this was all ground breaking and of absolute importance, not for the sake of obscure theological doctrine, but in clarifying and determining the very identity of the church. And the mainstream orthodox views of Jesus that are still held by most Christians today find their origins in these debates. As with Arius, I think exiling Nestorius as a heretic is way too harsh, but this only demonstrates just how significant these issues really were at the time.

But another thing I find interesting is how these theological doctrines, either about Jesus or the Trinity, or the Holy Spirit, or any other doctrine, took literally centuries to develop. These are not ideas that were thought up over night, but took a long time to clarify. And I think we’re still clarifying things today. And we’ll still be clarifying things in another thousand years. Because that’s the nature of theology. If we’re able to distill God into a something manageable and human sized, if we can dissect God and separate him into different neat little categories, then he’s not really God. By virtue of God’s very infinite, eternal nature, our knowledge of God, and our knowledge of ourselves and of the world around us, of history itself, even of the bible, will continue to grow.

Nestorianism was one of the key early debates that lead to the orthodox understanding of Jesus, and we’re going to explore that a little bit more in the next episode.