Event · 451

Council of Chalcedon

The fourth ecumenical council, called by Emperor Marcian at Chalcedon, near Constantinople, in 451.

History

Causes

Chalcedon was the second round of a fight that the Council of Ephesus (431) had not settled. At Ephesus, Cyril of Alexandria had secured the condemnation of Nestorius, who was accused of splitting Christ into two subjects, a divine Son and a human Jesus. Cyril’s own language stressed unity: he spoke of “one incarnate nature of God the Word.” In 433 he made peace with the bishops of Antioch through the Formula of Reunion, which confessed a “union of two natures” (Cyril’s letter to John of Antioch, read again at Chalcedon). The truce held while Cyril lived. He died in 444, and both sides kept reading him in their own direction.

The spark was Eutyches, an elderly archimandrite in Constantinople and a fierce opponent of anything that sounded Nestorian. In November 448 a home synod under Patriarch Flavian condemned him for teaching that Christ was “of two natures” before the union but only one after it, and for refusing to say that Christ’s humanity was of one substance with ours (acts excerpted in the Fordham Sourcebook). Eutyches appealed to Rome and to Alexandria. Pope Leo I answered with a long letter to Flavian, dated 13 June 449, known as the Tome (Letter 28, CCEL). Dioscorus, Cyril’s successor at Alexandria, backed Eutyches.

In August 449 Emperor Theodosius II called a council at Ephesus and gave Dioscorus control of it. The Second Council of Ephesus (secondary) restored Eutyches, deposed Flavian, who died soon after, and also deposed the leading Antiochene bishops, Theodoret of Cyrrhus and Ibas of Edessa. Leo’s Tome was never read. Leo called the meeting a latrocinium, a “robber synod,” and the name stuck in the West.

The politics changed overnight in July 450, when Theodosius died after a riding accident. His sister Pulcheria married the general Marcian and made him emperor. Both supported Leo’s position, and Marcian summoned a new council, first to Nicaea and then to Chalcedon, across the Bosporus from the capital, so that he could keep an eye on it.

Proceedings

The council opened on 8 October 451 with several hundred bishops, nearly all of them Greek-speaking easterners; Rome sent legates. Imperial officials chaired the sessions and kept order, which mattered, since the first session was loud. The council reviewed the acts of Ephesus II, and many bishops who had voted for Dioscorus two years earlier now said they had acted under pressure. The schedule and session numbering vary between the Greek and Latin acts; the dates below follow the standard reconstruction (the full acts are in Richard Price and Michael Gaddis, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, Liverpool University Press, 2005; extracts in English are at CCEL and Fordham).

In the session of 13 October, held without the imperial officials, the bishops deposed Dioscorus. The stated grounds were procedural: he had refused three summonses and had excommunicated Leo. He was not formally condemned as a heretic, a detail his supporters have never let go.

The bishops at first wanted no new creed. They held that Nicaea was enough, and they received the Tome together with Cyril’s letters as its correct interpretation; the acts record the acclamation “Peter has spoken thus through Leo… so taught Cyril.” But Marcian and the Roman legates insisted on a definition. A committee draft that said Christ was “of two natures,” a phrase Dioscorus could have signed, was rejected after the legates threatened to leave. The final Definition of Faith, approved on 22 October and proclaimed before Marcian and Pulcheria on 25 October, said “in two natures” instead.

Later sessions restored Theodoret and Ibas once they anathematized Nestorius, settled disputes between sees, and passed disciplinary canons. On 31 October, after the Roman legates had left, the remaining bishops passed what became Canon 28, giving Constantinople “equal privileges” with Rome (text). The legates protested the next day (acts of that session), but the imperial officials let the canon stand.

Influence

Leo confirmed the doctrinal decisions in 453 and rejected Canon 28. The Definition became the boundary of Christology for the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, and the Reformers kept it: Martin Luther and John Calvin both accepted the first four councils, and the major Protestant confessions repeat Chalcedon’s language. See Chalcedonian Christology.

In the East it caused the first lasting split among churches that all accepted Nicaea. Alexandria rioted; the bishop installed in place of Dioscorus, Proterius, was lynched in 457. Monks in Palestine rose against their bishop, Juvenal, who had changed sides. Emperors spent a century trying to repair the breach. Zeno’s Henotikon (482, secondary) tried to bypass Chalcedon altogether, and Rome answered by breaking communion with Constantinople in the Acacian schism (484–519, secondary). Justinian’s Second Council of Constantinople (553) condemned the “Three Chapters,” writings by Theodoret, Ibas and Theodore of Mopsuestia, to show that Chalcedon was not Nestorian (secondary). It did not win back the opponents.

By the late sixth century the anti-Chalcedonians had their own bishops, ordained in large numbers by Jacob Baradaeus in Syria, and their own great theologian in Severus of Antioch. The Armenian church rejected the council at synods held at Dvin in the sixth century. These churches became the Oriental Orthodox family: the Coptic Orthodox, Syriac Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic and Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo churches, whose Christology is Miaphysitism. The Arab conquests of the seventh century froze the division along political lines. Canon 28, meanwhile, became one of the long fuses of the Great Schism between Rome and Constantinople.

Key ideas and contributors

One person in two natures. The Definition confesses one and the same Son, “perfect in Godhead and also perfect in manhood,” of one substance with the Father in his divinity and of one substance with us in his humanity, “in all things like unto us, without sin” (Hebrews 4:15). He is “to be acknowledged in two natures,” and the natures come together “in one Person and one Subsistence” (CCEL). The Greek terms are physis (nature), and prosopon and hypostasis (person, subsistence). Chalcedon used hypostasis for what is one in Christ and physis for what is two, a vocabulary its opponents did not share.

The four adverbs. The natures are united “unconfusedly, immutably, indivisibly, inseparably.” The first two are aimed at Eutyches, who seemed to let the humanity dissolve into the divinity. The last two are aimed at Nestorius. The Definition also confirms that Mary is Theotokos, “Mother of God,” the title Ephesus had defended. The council did not explain how the union works. It marked off what must not be said on either side, which is why it is often described as a fence and not a theory.

Leo’s Tome. Leo gave the West’s account: each nature keeps its own properties, and “each form does what is proper to it with the co-operation of the other” (Letter 28). The Word works miracles; the flesh suffers. The Son of God became visible by taking “the form of a servant” (Philippians 2:6–7). The Tome’s clarity made it the council’s main text and also its main target.

Cyril as the shared authority. The council read Cyril’s synodical letters as authoritative alongside the Tome, claiming that Leo and Cyril taught the same faith. Every later Chalcedonian defense, especially the “neo-Chalcedonian” theology of Justinian’s era, worked to show the Definition was Cyrilline (Cyril of Alexandria).

Church order. Canon 28 ranked Constantinople second only to Rome on the ground that it was the imperial city, “New Rome,” and gave it authority to ordain metropolitans in Pontus, Asia and Thrace. Other canons governed monks, clergy discipline and appeals. The council also recognized Jerusalem as a patriarchate, creating the five-see arrangement later called the pentarchy (Episcopal Polity, Conciliarity).

Other figures: Flavian of Constantinople, whose death made him a martyr to the Chalcedonian side; Anatolius of Constantinople, who chaired the drafting; Theodoret of Cyrrhus, the leading Antiochene theologian, restored at the council; and Marcian and Pulcheria, whose backing made the outcome possible.

Key controversies

Did Chalcedon revive Nestorius? This is the objection that split the church. For Dioscorus and later Severus of Antioch, Cyril’s formula “one incarnate nature of God the Word” was the test of orthodoxy, and “two natures” after the union meant two acting subjects. They read the Tome’s “each form does what is proper to it” as exactly the division Ephesus condemned. They also pointed out that the council restored Theodoret and Ibas, who had attacked Cyril. Chalcedonians replied that “nature” in the Definition does not mean a person, and that the “one person” clause excludes any division. The Church of the East, which honored Nestorius, did not accept Chalcedon either, for its own reasons (Church of the East Christology).

“In two natures” or “of two natures.” The fight over a single preposition carried the whole dispute. “Of two natures” allowed that Christ came from two but is now one; “in two natures” insisted the two remain. Even the text is disputed: the surviving Greek of the Definition reads “of two,” while the Latin and later Greek citations read “in two,” and most scholars think “in two” is the original (note in the CCEL edition).

Was Dioscorus treated fairly? Oriental Orthodox historians stress that he was deposed for discipline, not doctrine, in a session the imperial officials did not attend, and that the council’s reversal followed a change of emperor. On this reading Chalcedon was decided by politics. Chalcedonian historians answer that Ephesus II had been far more violent and coercive. Both councils show how much the emperor shaped outcomes, which is one reason the question of who confirms a council remains contested.

Canon 28 and Rome. The legates protested and Leo refused to accept the canon, insisting that Rome’s primacy came from Peter and not from Rome’s status as a capital (acts of the protest). The East kept the canon in its collections and applied it. The two readings of the same council, one grounding rank in apostolic foundation and one in imperial geography, fed the later quarrel over Papal Primacy.

Modern reassessment. Since the 1960s many theologians have argued that the split was largely about words. The unofficial Vienna consultations of the 1970s and the official dialogue between the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox produced agreed statements in 1989 and 1990 (Anba Bishoy and Chambésy) saying both families hold the same faith in different terms (cited by title; no verified link). In 1973 Pope Paul VI and the Coptic Pope Shenouda III confessed together a union “without mingling, without commixtion, without confusion, without alteration, without division, without separation,” borrowing Chalcedon’s negatives without naming Chalcedon (Vatican). Full communion has not followed. The sticking points are the status of Chalcedon and later councils, and the anathemas each side pronounced on the other’s saints, Leo and Dioscorus among them.

A different criticism. Some modern Western theologians criticize Chalcedon from another angle: that its language of natures is too static to describe a living, historical Jesus. Adolf von Harnack judged it a Hellenizing of the gospel, and Karl Rahner’s 1954 essay “Chalkedon: Ende oder Anfang?” (“Chalcedon: End or Beginning?”) treated it as a starting point to be thought through again, not a final word (both cited by title). Defenders reply that the Definition never claimed to explain the incarnation, only to rule out the two ways of losing it.

What remains unresolved

The churches that accept and reject Chalcedon now largely agree that they confess the same Christ: fully God, fully human, one Lord, with no mixing and no division. What they have not settled is whether a council can be accepted for its intent while its wording and its condemnations are set aside. That question touches every church’s view of Holy Tradition and of what makes a council ecumenical.