The Second Council of Constantinople

A hundred years after Chalcedon, the Church was still bleeding from that council’s wound. Egypt, Syria and Armenia had not accepted it; the empire was divided in a way no army could mend. The Fifth Council was the attempt of an emperor who was also a theologian to show that Chalcedon had never meant what its opponents feared — and it teaches something a modern reader easily misses: orthodox words can be read in a heretical sense, and the Church claims the right to say how her own definitions must be understood.

An empire that would not knit together

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The Definition of Chalcedon had been received with joy in Rome, Constantinople and much of Asia Minor and Greece, and rejected in Alexandria, in much of Syria and in Armenia. Emperors tried to paper over the crack — Zeno’s Henotikon of 482 said as little as possible about the disputed point and succeeded chiefly in provoking a thirty-five-year schism with Rome. By the sixth century the Christological quarrel had become a political fault line running through the richest provinces of the empire.

The objection of the anti-Chalcedonians was not stupid, and it is worth stating fairly. They said: your council used a phrase, “in two natures,” which the Nestorians also use; it received into communion bishops who had written against St Cyril; and its Definition never explicitly says the crucified one is God the Word Himself. How do we know it is not Nestorianism in respectable clothes?

A theologian on the throne

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Justinian ruled from 527 to 565: the emperor of the great legal codification, of the reconquest of Italy and Africa, and of Hagia Sophia. He was also, unusually, a serious theologian who wrote treatises of his own. His wife Theodora had sympathies among the anti-Chalcedonians, and Justinian pursued for decades a single project — to demonstrate that Chalcedon, rightly read, says exactly what St Cyril said, so that the separated churches could come back without either side pretending.

The Three Chapters

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His chosen instrument was the condemnation of three items, together called the Three Chapters: the person and writings of Theodore of Mopsuestia, the Antiochene teacher whom Nestorius had followed; the writings of Theodoret of Cyrus against St Cyril; and a letter of Ibas of Edessa which spoke slightingly of Cyril. These were the texts the opponents of Chalcedon pointed to as proof of the council’s Nestorian sympathies.

The difficulty was that Theodoret and Ibas themselves had been received at Chalcedon after anathematising Nestorius, and both had died in the peace of the Church. To condemn their writings looked, to many Western bishops, like reopening a settled case and attacking Chalcedon from behind. The Council was careful to distinguish: the men were not condemned, the texts were — and Theodore, who had died unrepentant and whose works were the root of Nestorius’ error, was condemned by name.

The unhappy story of Pope Vigilius

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Pope Vigilius of Rome was brought to Constantinople and spent eight years there under heavy imperial pressure. He condemned the Three Chapters, then withdrew the condemnation when the Western bishops protested, then refused to attend the Council at all, and at one point fled to a church and clung to the columns of the altar while officials tried to drag him away — the columns, the story says, came down on top of him. After the Council he assented to its decrees; he died on the journey home. In northern Italy the affair caused a schism that lasted for generations. The Church numbers this Council among the seven not because its proceedings were dignified, but because what it confessed is true.

What the Council taught

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Beneath the disputes about texts lies a genuine theological gain. The Council explained the Chalcedonian Definition in Cyrilline terms, and its key point can be put like this: in Christ there is no second person. The humanity He assumed is complete and real — a true human body, soul, mind and will — but it does not exist as a separate man alongside the Word. It exists as His humanity, having its personal existence in the Word who assumed it. Chalcedon had said two natures, one Person; the Fifth Council spelled out that this one Person is none other than the eternal Son, the second Person of the Trinity.

From this follows the phrase the Council defended, sometimes called the theopaschite formula, which sounds shocking until you see why it matters.

“One of the Holy Trinity suffered in the flesh.”The formula upheld by the Fifth Council

Not the divine nature — God cannot suffer as God. But the one who suffered on the Cross is a who, and that Who is God the Word. The Cross is not something that happened to a man attached to God; it is what God did, in our flesh, for us. Everything the Church sings on Holy Friday depends on it: “Today He who hung the earth upon the waters is hung upon the Cross.”

Origen and the shape of the world to come

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The same emperor and the same bishops also condemned a set of teachings then current among some educated monks, associated with the name of Origen — the brilliant third-century Alexandrian whose speculative writings had been read and reworked for three hundred years. The condemned propositions were that souls existed before their bodies and fell into them; that the material world and the body are a punishment to be escaped rather than a good creation to be redeemed; and that in the end all rational beings, including the demons, will be restored to their original state, so that repentance in this life ultimately makes no difference.

The Church’s answer was that matter is good, that human beings are body-and-soul creatures by God’s design and will rise as such, and that our freedom is real — real enough that our choices matter eternally. We may and should pray and hope, as the saints did, for the salvation of all; we may not turn that hope into a doctrine that empties the Gospel’s urgency.

A council that sings

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The Fifth Council left no new creed, and most Orthodox Christians could not name a single one of its anathemas. Yet they confess its faith every Sunday. The hymn Only-begotten Son and Word of God, sung near the beginning of every Divine Liturgy and traditionally ascribed to Justinian himself, is this council in miniature: the immortal One who took flesh of the Theotokos, unchangeably became man, was crucified and trampled down death — one and the same, glorified with the Father and the Holy Spirit.

Did it work?

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As a peace plan, no. The Egyptian and Syrian churches were not reconciled, and the West was scandalised. As theology, it stands: the Sixth Council would build directly on its foundation, and the modern discussions with the Oriental Orthodox turn on precisely the Cyrilline reading of Chalcedon that this council secured. It is a reminder that the Church’s definitions are not always followed by the results we would like, and that faithfulness is measured by truth rather than by outcome.

Origen himself

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A word of fairness about the man whose name is attached to the condemned opinions. Origen of Alexandria (c. 185–254) was the son of a martyr and very nearly a martyr himself; he was arrested and tortured in the Decian persecution and died of the effects. He was the first great biblical scholar of the Church, who produced a six-column comparative edition of the Old Testament, wrote commentaries on almost every book of Scripture, and taught generations of Christians how to read the Bible. St Basil and St Gregory the Theologian compiled an anthology of his writings. Much of what the Council condemned was not his settled teaching but the system built out of his speculations by later enthusiasts, who took the questions he had raised tentatively and turned them into a doctrine of the cosmos. It is possible to be grateful to a teacher and to refuse what his disciples made of him.

The Council and the West

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The West received the Fifth Council slowly and painfully. To many Latin bishops the condemnation of the Three Chapters looked like an insult to Chalcedon, and the sees of Milan and Aquileia broke communion with Rome over it — the schism in Aquileia lasted about 150 years. Within a generation, however, St Gregory the Great could write that he venerated the fifth council equally with the first four, “because on it, as on a four-square stone, rises the structure of the holy faith.” The whole affair is a case study in how long it can take for a true decision to be received, and in how much damage is done when doctrine is pursued by imperial pressure rather than persuasion.

Justinian

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The emperor who drove all this is himself a complicated figure. He codified Roman law in a form that still underlies much of European jurisprudence; he built Hagia Sophia, the greatest church in Christendom for nine hundred years; he wrote theology, legislated on the liturgy, and closed the last pagan academy in Athens. He also crushed a riot in the hippodrome with tens of thousands dead, exhausted the empire with his wars of reconquest, and used the machinery of the state on bishops in a way the Church has never held up as a model. The Orthodox Church commemorates him and the Empress Theodora as saints on 14 November — a reminder that the calendar is not a list of blameless men but of those who, with everything else in them, served the Church of God.

Why it still matters

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Two lessons keep their edge. First, quoting the right words proves nothing: the Church, not the individual, decides in what sense her formulas are to be read — which is why Orthodox Christians read Scripture and the councils within the mind of the Fathers rather than by private ingenuity. Second, the Cross is God’s own act. When you stand before the crucifix, you are not looking at a good man whom God permitted to die. You are looking at what One of the Holy Trinity was willing to endure in the flesh He took from us.