The Council of Ephesus

In 428 a newly appointed archbishop of Constantinople told his people that they should stop calling the Virgin Mary Theotokos — “the one who gives birth to God.” It sounded like a small matter of vocabulary and modesty. Within three years the whole Church had convulsed, an Ecumenical Council had met in the city where tradition says the Virgin ended her earthly life, and the crowds of Ephesus were carrying the bishops home by torchlight, shouting that one word in the streets. The reason is simple: what you call the mother is a statement about the Son.

Two schools, two instincts

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By the fifth century the earlier battles had been won: Christ is God (Nicaea), and He took a complete humanity (Constantinople). The remaining question was how to hold those two truths together. Two great centres of Christian learning had two different instincts about it.

The theologians of Antioch were careful readers of the Gospels, and they insisted on the reality of Christ’s human life: He grew, He was hungry, He wept, He learned obedience, He was tempted, He died. They were anxious never to let the divinity swallow up that humanity. The theologians of Alexandria began from the other end: the Gospel is the story of one subject, one “He,” the Word who was in the beginning with God and who was born, walked, suffered and rose. Each instinct guarded something true. Each, pressed too far, produced a heresy.

The sermon that lit the fire

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Nestorius, a monk and famous preacher from Antioch, became archbishop of Constantinople in 428. He arrived determined to clean up the capital and, before long, took up a controversy about the ancient title given to the Virgin: Theotokos, Birth-giver of God. To Nestorius the word sounded impossible. God has no mother; God cannot be born; a woman cannot be the source of divinity. He proposed instead Christotokos — “birth-giver of Christ.”

But the objection concealed a whole Christology. If Mary cannot be called the mother of God, then the one she bore is not God. Nestorius spoke of the Word and the man as two united in a perfect harmony of will and honour — dwelling together, sharing a single name and a single face, but each remaining his own subject. Then it is not God who lies in the manger, but a man in whom God dwells; not God who hangs on the Cross, but a man to whom God is joined; and there are, in the end, two sons — one by nature and one by grace.

Why the title matters

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The Church had used Theotokos for generations before anyone argued about it, and she used it precisely because of what it says about Christ. Mothers do not give birth to natures; they give birth to persons. If the person born of Mary is the eternal Son of God — living now a real human life, from an embryo in the womb to a body in the tomb — then she is the mother of that Person, and He is God. To say less is not humility about the Virgin; it is a doubt about the Incarnation.

“It was not that an ordinary man was born first of the holy Virgin, and afterwards the Word descended upon him; but the Word, being united with the flesh from the womb, is said to have undergone birth in the flesh.”St Cyril of Alexandria, Second Letter to Nestorius

Cyril of Alexandria

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The defence was led by St Cyril, Archbishop of Alexandria — a theologian of the first rank and a formidable, sometimes ruthless, ecclesiastical politician. Orthodox tradition has never pretended he was a gentle man. It has judged that on the question at issue he was right, and that the Church owes to his stubbornness the confession that the One who was born, suffered and rose is one and the same Son of God.

Cyril wrote to Nestorius twice, patiently and then sharply; he wrote to the monks of Egypt; he wrote to the emperor and to the emperor’s sisters. Both men appealed to Rome, and Pope St Celestine, having examined the case, ruled for Cyril and instructed him to demand a retraction. Cyril attached to that demand twelve anathemas — twelve sharp statements Nestorius was to accept — which frightened even some who agreed with him, because they were written in Alexandrian language that could be misread as blurring Christ’s humanity. The emperor, seeing the Church heading for a rupture, summoned a council at Ephesus for Pentecost 431.

A council that began in disorder

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Ephesus was a fitting place: the city of St Paul’s long ministry, where tradition holds the Virgin lived with St John and fell asleep, and whose great church was dedicated to her. Some two hundred bishops gathered. But John of Antioch and his Syrian bishops — Nestorius’ natural supporters — were delayed on the road, and after two weeks of waiting Cyril opened the Council without them on 22 June. In a single session the bishops read Cyril’s letter, judged it to agree with Nicaea, read Nestorius’ letter, judged that it did not, and deposed him.

Four days later John of Antioch arrived, held a rival session with his own bishops, and deposed Cyril. When the Roman legates finally reached the city they confirmed the first council’s acts. The exasperated emperor had both Cyril and Nestorius arrested; Cyril was released, Nestorius retired to his monastery and later to exile in Egypt. Reading the minutes is a lesson in how the Holy Spirit works through, and in spite of, very human proceedings — the Church has never claimed that a council’s procedure was faultless, only that its confession was true.

What the Council confessed

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Ephesus wrote no new creed. It received St Cyril’s Second Letter to Nestorius as the standard of the faith and condemned the opposite teaching. Its confession can be put in three sentences. There is one Christ, one Person, one “He,” and He is the eternal Son of God. That one Person truly became man, so that everything human in the Gospel is genuinely His — the hunger, the tears, the death. Therefore the Virgin who bore Him is truly Theotokos, and we may say the astonishing things Christian hymns have always said: that God was carried in a womb, laid in a manger, and crucified in the flesh.

The Council also issued a canon (the seventh) forbidding anyone “to bring forward, or to write, or to compose a different faith” than that of Nicaea. Orthodox Christians have appealed to this canon ever since — most importantly against the later Western addition of the filioque to the Creed.

Torches in the streets

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The people of Ephesus had waited outside the church all day. When word came that the Council had upheld the title of the Theotokos, they escorted the bishops back to their lodgings through the summer night with torches and incense, shouting her name. It is worth remembering that this doctrine was not experienced as a technicality. Ordinary Christians understood exactly what was at stake, and they were defending the One their mothers had taught them to pray to.

The reconciliation of 433 — and the wound that stayed

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Two years later Cyril and John of Antioch signed the Formula of Reunion, a short confession drafted by the Antiochenes and accepted by Cyril: Christ is “perfect God and perfect man… of one essence with the Father in His divinity and of one essence with us in His humanity,” and “on account of this union without confusion, we confess the holy Virgin to be Theotokos.” Each side had said what the other needed to hear. Cyril, who had written the twelve anathemas, was willing to accept language stressing the two natures; the Antiochenes accepted the title they had resisted. It remains one of the better models in Christian history for ending a quarrel.

Not everyone followed. Christians further east, beyond the Roman frontier in Persia, kept Nestorius’ memory and the Antiochene formulas, and became the separate Church of the East — the missionary church that would carry the Gospel along the Silk Road as far as India and China. Modern conversations between Orthodox and Assyrian theologians have found that a great part of the ancient quarrel was a matter of the same word meaning different things in Greek and in Syriac. That does not undo the separation, but it should temper the way we speak of it.

How the Church remembers Ephesus

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Every Orthodox service is full of Ephesus. “Most holy Theotokos, save us.” “More honourable than the cherubim and beyond compare more glorious than the seraphim.” The Akathist sung in Lent, the feasts of her Nativity, Entrance, Annunciation and Dormition, the icon of the Mother of God in every church and in most Orthodox homes — all of it rests on the confession made in that church by the Aegean. When we honour her, we are confessing who her Son is.

Nestorius afterwards

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There is a postscript worth knowing. Late in life, in exile in Egypt, Nestorius wrote a long defence of himself, the Bazaar of Heracleides, which was lost for fourteen centuries and rediscovered in a Syriac translation in 1895. In it he declares that he agrees with the Tome of St Leo — that he had never meant two persons, only two natures. Scholars still argue about how much of his own earlier teaching he was rewriting. The Church did not reverse her judgement, because what was condemned at Ephesus was a doctrine, not a private state of mind, and that doctrine had been preached in the capital and had to be answered. But it is a reminder to be careful, in our own disputes, that we are answering what a person actually holds rather than the worst version of it we can construct.

Councils and their reception

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Ephesus also shows how the Church settles things over time. The Council of 431 had a disputed opening, a rival session and an emperor arresting bishops; two years later came the Formula of Reunion; and only gradually did the whole Church come to speak of it as the third Ecumenical Council. Orthodoxy has never located conciliar authority in the moment of voting. A council is verified as the Church receives it — in her hymns, her preaching and her prayer — which is why the surest sign that Ephesus was right is not a signature on a document but a congregation in Orlando in the twenty-first century singing “Most holy Theotokos, save us.”

Why it still matters

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Nestorianism is alive wherever people speak of Jesus as a man specially filled with God, or of “the divine Christ” as something that came upon the human Jesus and left him at the Cross. The Council answers: there is one Christ, and He is God with us — not God near us, not God working through a good man, but God in a human life, from conception to grave to glory. And because He took His humanity from a real woman who said yes, the Church will not let go of her title. It is the shortest confession of the Incarnation she possesses.