The Council of Chalcedon

Every heresy about Christ is a refusal of one half of an impossible truth. Nestorius had pulled the two natures so far apart that they became two persons. Twenty years later the pendulum swung violently back, and the Church had to say — against men who thought they were only defending St Cyril — that the humanity Christ took from His mother was not swallowed up by His divinity, then or ever.

The pendulum swings back

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After Ephesus, St Cyril’s language ruled the East, and one of his favourite formulas — “one incarnate nature of God the Word” — was repeated everywhere. Cyril had used it to insist that Christ is one, and he had also signed the Formula of Reunion, which speaks plainly of two natures. But a formula outlives the man who coined it, and there were those who took “one nature” to mean that after the union there is simply nothing left in Christ that is like us.

Eutyches

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Eutyches was an elderly and much-respected archimandrite in Constantinople, head of a monastery of three hundred monks, godfather to the powerful imperial chamberlain, and a veteran opponent of Nestorius. He was not a subtle thinker. Summoned before a synod of his own city in 448 under Archbishop St Flavian, he conceded that Christ was “of two natures” before the union but insisted that after it there is one, and — the sentence that decided the matter — he refused to confess that Christ’s flesh is of one essence with ours.

That refusal exposed the danger. If Christ’s humanity is not the same humanity we have, then He has not touched what needed touching. The Incarnation becomes an appearance of a man rather than the assumption of a man; the Cross becomes a divine performance; and we are not saved, because it was not our nature that was carried through death. The synod deposed Eutyches. He appealed — to the emperor, to the monks, and to Alexandria.

The Robber Council

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Dioscorus, who had succeeded Cyril in Alexandria, took up the appeal and persuaded Theodosius II to call a council at Ephesus in 449. What followed was the ugliest episode in the conciliar history of the Church. Dioscorus presided with imperial troops and a crowd of partisan monks in the building; Eutyches was restored; Flavian was condemned without a hearing; the letter sent by the Pope of Rome was never read aloud. In the uproar Flavian was manhandled so badly that he died of his injuries a few days later, on the road into exile. When the news reached Rome, Pope St Leo gave the assembly the name that stuck: not a council, but a latrocinium — a gang of robbers.

The Tome of Leo

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The letter that had gone unread was Leo’s Tome, addressed to Flavian: a short, lucid statement in Latin of what the Western Church had long held. In Christ, Leo wrote, two natures come together in one Person without either losing what belongs to it.

“Each nature performs what is proper to it in communion with the other: the Word doing what belongs to the Word, and the flesh what belongs to the flesh. The one shines out in miracles; the other submits to injuries.”St Leo the Great, Tome to Flavian

A fall from a horse, and a new council

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In July 450 Theodosius II was thrown from his horse and killed. His sister St Pulcheria, a woman of deep piety who had governed in his name for years, married the soldier Marcian, and together they summoned a new council — at Nicaea first, then moved across the strait to Chalcedon, in sight of the capital, so that the emperor could keep order. It met in October 451 in the great basilica of the martyr St Euphemia, and around 520 bishops attended: the largest gathering of the ancient Church.

The Tome of Leo was read at last. According to the acts, the fathers responded with an acclamation that has echoed ever since: “Peter has spoken through Leo!” But they did not simply defer to Rome. A commission spent days comparing the Tome line by line with the letters of St Cyril, to be sure that the Latin bishop and the Alexandrian saint were saying the same thing. Only when that was established did the Council proceed.

The Definition

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The emperor pressed for a written definition. The bishops resisted at first — Ephesus had forbidden new creeds — and then produced not a creed but a horos, a boundary marker: a statement of where the faith ends and error begins. It is the most carefully weighed sentence in Christian theology.

The four adverbs are the whole council. Without confusion, without change — against Eutyches: the two natures are not blended into a third thing, and the humanity is not evaporated by contact with divinity. Without division, without separation — against Nestorius: they are not two persons collaborating, but one and the same Son. And notice what the Definition does not do. It does not explain how. It draws four lines and leaves the mystery standing inside them, which is what good theology does.

Why this is not abstract

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Chalcedon is the charter of everything Orthodoxy says about grace and human beings. Because the humanity of Christ was not abolished by union with God, our humanity is not abolished when God unites Himself to us. Grace does not overwrite nature; sanctity does not make a person less himself; the saints are the most human people who have ever lived. Deification, theosis, is not absorption into a divine ocean. It is the whole man — body, mind, will, personality — filled with God and still himself, exactly as the flesh Christ took from the Virgin remained real flesh in the arms of the Godhead.

Canon 28, and Rome’s objection

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The Council also issued thirty canons on church order, including rules on monastic obedience to the local bishop, the property of the Church, and clergy discipline. The twenty-eighth granted the see of Constantinople privileges equal to those of Rome, second in honour, on the ground that it is the city of the emperor and the senate. Leo, whose Tome the Council had just acclaimed, accepted the doctrine and refused to confirm that canon. The disagreement about how primacy is grounded — in the apostolic dignity of a see, or in the standing of a city and the consensus of the Church — remained unresolved and grew for six hundred years.

The great division

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The heaviest consequence was not in Rome but in Egypt and Syria. Large parts of the Church there, who venerated Cyril and heard in “in two natures” the very Nestorianism Ephesus had condemned, refused the Definition. From that refusal come the churches called Oriental Orthodox — the Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Ethiopian and Malankara Churches — which honour the first three councils and not the fourth. They are not Eutychians; they condemned Eutyches too.

For fifteen centuries the two families of churches were separated by an anathema. In our own time the joint theological commissions of the Eastern Orthodox and the Oriental Orthodox have agreed — at Chambésy in 1989 and 1990 — that both sides confess the same faith in Christ in different technical vocabularies. Full communion has not followed, because a division that old touches liturgy, canon law and the memory of condemned saints on both sides. But an Orthodox Christian should speak of these churches with sorrow rather than suspicion, and should pray for what the theologians have already recognised.

St Euphemia’s tomb

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One tradition attached to this Council deserves mention because the Church keeps it in her calendar. It is said that, unable to agree, both parties wrote their confessions on scrolls and placed them in the tomb of St Euphemia, sealed it, and prayed and fasted; and that when it was opened, the martyr held the Orthodox confession in her hand and the other lay at her feet. Orthodox Christians commemorate the miracle on 11 July. Whatever a historian makes of it, the instinct behind the story is sound: the faith of the councils is the faith of the martyrs, and the Church tested her definitions at the tombs of those who had died for the One being defined.

The canons, and the ordinary life of the Church

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Chalcedon’s thirty canons shaped church order for centuries. Monasteries were placed under the authority of the local bishop, ending the situation in which crowds of unaccountable monks could be used as a private army in a theological quarrel — the fathers had just watched that happen. Clergy were forbidden to be ordained “absolutely,” without an assignment to a particular church, so that no one is a priest in the abstract. Bishops were made accountable for the Church’s property, and clergy were forbidden to enrol in the army or take on secular business. There are canons on the settlement of disputes between clerics, on the reception of clergy from other dioceses, and — a humane provision — protections for consecrated widows and virgins. Doctrine and daily order were treated as one fabric, which is how the Church has always treated them.

How to read the Definition

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Newcomers sometimes find the four adverbs cold. It helps to read them as a description of a person rather than a formula: this is what it looks like when God lives a human life. He is tired at a well at noon and He knows the woman’s whole history. He weeps at a grave and He calls the dead man out. He sleeps in the stern of a boat and He is what the wind obeys. Chalcedon is not an explanation of that; it is a fence around it, put up by men who had seen what happens when one side of it is quietly dropped.

Why it still matters

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The two errors Chalcedon fenced off are perennial. One dissolves Christ’s humanity into a kind of divine costume — a Jesus who only seemed to be tired, only seemed to be afraid, whose obedience cost Him nothing. The other keeps Him at arm’s length from God — an inspired man we admire. Orthodoxy holds the harder and richer thing: that the carpenter of Nazareth who slept in a boat is one and the same as the Word by whom the world was made, and that in Him our whole nature, without being diminished by a single degree, has been taken into the life of God.