Event · 431

Council of Ephesus

The third ecumenical council, called by Emperor Theodosius II at Ephesus in 431 over the teaching of Nestorius.

History

Causes

The Council of Nicaea (325) and the Council of Constantinople (381) settled that the Son is fully God. That left a harder question: how God and a human being are one in Jesus. Two schools answered it differently. Antioch stressed that Christ’s humanity is complete and real, and kept it carefully distinct from his divinity, so that God is never said to suffer or be born. Alexandria stressed that there is only one subject in Christ, the eternal Word, who made a human life his own.

The fight broke out in Constantinople. Nestorius, an Antiochene monk made bishop of the capital in 428, backed his chaplain Anastasius, who preached: “Let no one call Mary Theotocos: for Mary was but a woman; and it is impossible that God should be born of a woman” (Socrates Scholasticus, Church History 7.32, New Advent). Nestorius then preached against the title himself and proposed Christotokos, “Christ-bearer,” instead. In his second letter to Cyril he wrote that “the holy virgin is more accurately termed mother of Christ than mother of God” (text). Theotokos, “God-bearer,” was already old and loved in popular devotion, and to many listeners the change sounded like a denial that Jesus was God.

Cyril of Alexandria answered at once. His second letter to Nestorius (early 430) argued that the Word “united to himself hypostatically flesh enlivened by a rational soul,” and that for this reason the fathers “dared to call the holy virgin, mother of God” (text). Cyril also wrote to Pope Celestine I. A Roman synod in August 430 condemned Nestorius and gave him ten days to recant. Cyril then sent a third letter in November 430 with twelve anathemas for Nestorius to sign. The first read: “If anyone does not confess that Emmanuel is God in truth, and therefore that the holy virgin is the mother of God … let him be anathema” (text). Nestorius refused, and the Antiochene bishops read the anathemas as a denial of Christ’s real humanity. Rivalry between the sees of Alexandria and Constantinople sharpened everything.

Proceedings

Theodosius II, with his co-emperor Valentinian III and Celestine’s agreement, summoned the bishops to Ephesus for Pentecost, 7 June 431. Cyril arrived with a large party; John of Antioch and the eastern bishops were delayed. On 22 June, over the protest of the imperial commissioner and before either the easterners or the Roman legates had arrived, Cyril opened the council. Nestorius was summoned three times and did not come. The bishops read the Nicene Creed, judged Cyril’s second letter to agree with it and Nestorius’s reply to contradict it, and deposed Nestorius the same day. According to the introduction to the decrees, 197 bishops signed at once (Tanner translation). The townspeople of Ephesus, whose city was a center of devotion to Mary, celebrated with a torchlight procession, escorting the bishops to their lodgings (Coptic Synaxarium, “Saint Cyril I”, secondary).

A few days later John of Antioch arrived, refused communion with Cyril, and held a rival council of about forty bishops that deposed Cyril and Memnon, the bishop of Ephesus. The Roman legates then arrived and joined Cyril’s assembly, confirming the sentence against Nestorius. In later sessions Cyril’s council excommunicated John and his party, condemned the teaching of Caelestius (the disciple of Pelagius), ruled on the autonomy of the church of Cyprus from Antioch, and on 22 July issued a decree forbidding anyone “to produce or write or compose any other creed except the one which was defined by the holy fathers … at Nicaea” (text). The full acts in the Victorian translation are at New Advent.

Theodosius at first approved neither assembly. He had Cyril, Memnon and Nestorius all placed under arrest, then dismissed the bishops. Nestorius was allowed to retire to his monastery near Antioch, and a new bishop of Constantinople, Maximian, was ordained in October 431. Pope Sixtus III confirmed the council’s decrees in 432.

Aftermath

The split between Alexandria and Antioch was healed, on paper, in April 433. John of Antioch sent a confession, the Formula of Reunion, which spoke of “a union of two natures” and confessed “the holy virgin to be the mother of God”; Cyril accepted it in his letter Laetentur caeli, “Let the heavens rejoice” (both texts). In exchange, the Antiochenes accepted Nestorius’s deposition. Nestorius was exiled, probably in 436, first to Petra and then to the Egyptian desert, where he wrote a defense of himself later known as The Bazaar of Heracleides (1925 translation, Archive.org).

Influence

The peace did not last. Cyril’s followers read the 433 formula as a concession, and after his death in 444 the monk Eutyches pressed Cyril’s language toward a single nature after the union. A second council at Ephesus in 449, which Pope Leo I called a “robber synod,” backed Eutyches (summary, secondary). The Council of Chalcedon (451) reversed it, cited Cyril’s second letter and his letter to John as standards of faith, and defined Christ as one person “in two natures.” That definition, the basis of Chalcedonian Christology, was itself rejected by the churches that held to Cyril’s “one nature” phrasing, the root of Miaphysitism and the Oriental Orthodox communion.

In the east, the bishops of the Persian empire never received Ephesus. Antiochene theology, especially that of Theodore of Mopsuestia, Nestorius’s teacher, became the standard of what is now the Church of the East, which grew under a separate state from the churches of Rome and Byzantium. The label “Nestorian” was applied to it by outsiders and is rejected by that church today (see Church of the East Christology).

Ephesus also shaped devotion. By making Theotokos a test of orthodoxy, it gave Marian titles a doctrinal anchor that Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox piety built on for centuries.

Key ideas and contributors

One subject in Christ. The council’s central claim, taken from Cyril’s second letter, is that the eternal Word is the single subject of everything Jesus did and suffered. The Word did not change into flesh, and the divine nature did not suffer, but the body that suffered was “his own,” so the Word “is said to have suffered” for us (text). This rule, later called the “communication of idioms,” lets Christians say that God was born and that God died on the cross, while denying that the divine nature itself was born or died (John 1:14).

Theotokos as a confession about Christ. The title is first a claim about the Son, not about Mary. Since the one born of Mary is God the Word in the flesh, she is God-bearer (Luke 1:43, “the mother of my Lord”). Cyril made the point repeatedly: Mary is not the source of the Word’s divinity, but the mother of the one person who is God.

Hypostatic union. Cyril described the union of God and man in Christ as “hypostatic,” a union in the one concrete subject, against Nestorius’s language of a “conjunction” (synapheia) of two natures. The word became the technical term that Chalcedon kept.

Nicaea as the measure. The council did not issue a new creed. It judged rival letters by the Nicene Creed and forbade new creeds altogether. That ruling became a weapon in the Filioque dispute, when eastern critics argued that adding a clause to the creed broke it.

Other contributors: Celestine I, whose Roman synod first condemned Nestorius; John of Antioch, whose Formula of Reunion set out the two-natures language Chalcedon later used; and Theodoret of Cyrrhus, who wrote the Antiochene replies to Cyril’s anathemas.

Key controversies

Was Nestorius a Nestorian? The council condemned the teaching that Christ is two persons, a man joined to God. Whether Nestorius taught that is disputed. Socrates, writing a few years later, judged that Nestorius did not deny Christ’s divinity but “seemed scared at the term Theotocos, as though it were some terrible phantom,” and called him “an unlearned man” (Church History 7.32). After a Syriac version of his apology, the Bazaar of Heracleides, came to light (edited by Paul Bedjan in 1910), Friedrich Loofs and others defended Nestorius, pointing to his willingness to accept Theotokos and his claim that his faith was that of Leo’s Tome. Others reply that his refusal to call the Word the subject of Christ’s birth and death still divides Christ (Catholic Encyclopedia, “Nestorius and Nestorianism”, secondary).

Was the council fair? Cyril opened it before the eastern bishops and the Roman legates arrived and against the emperor’s commissioner. His critics, then and now, call it a packed assembly and point to Alexandrian money and crowds. Defenders answer that Nestorius had been summoned and refused, and that Rome’s legates and later the whole church ratified the result. The question of what makes a council binding, its procedure or its reception, runs through debates over Conciliarity and Papal Primacy.

Cyril’s language. Cyril sometimes used the phrase “one incarnate nature of God the Word,” which he believed came from Athanasius (it actually came from Apollinarius). The Oriental Orthodox churches treat that phrase as the true heart of Ephesus and see Chalcedon’s “two natures” as a step back toward Nestorius. Chalcedonians read the Formula of Reunion as Cyril’s own permission for two-natures language. Both sides claim Cyril.

The Church of the East. For the Church of the East, Ephesus condemned a teacher they honor and a theology they never held as two persons. The Common Christological Declaration (1994) between Pope John Paul II and Patriarch Mar Dinkha IV accepted that the Assyrian prayer to Mary as “the Mother of Christ our God and Saviour” and the Catholic “Mother of God” are “expressions of the same faith,” and said the old divisions “were due in large part to misunderstandings.” It did not lift the condemnation of Nestorius.

What remains unresolved

Every church that accepts Ephesus agrees that Christ is one person who is truly God and truly man. What remains open is historical and practical: whether Nestorius meant what he was condemned for, whether a council run as this one was can still bind, and whether the Church of the East’s refusal of the word Theotokos is a different faith or the same faith in other words. The 1994 declaration answered the last question for Rome; the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox churches have not made a similar statement.