The Christological Teaching Of The Council Of Chalcedon, A.d. 451

The Christological teaching of the Council of Chalcedon of A.D. 451

The Chalcedonian formula of 451 provided no point of agreement for those entrenched in prior commitments to the divergent doctrines of Alexandrian and Antiochene Christology. Far from presenting a higher vantage of resolution, the definition attempted to "force together the [Antiochene and Alexandrian] theological antitheses on their own plane". Chalcedon was therefore unacceptable to many on both sides. Antiochene 'Nestorians' saw in it a "threat to the real humanity of Jesus", while to the 'Monophysite' followers of Cyril it was held to sacrifice Jesus' unity with God, [Pannenburg'68:330]. Rather than answering the needs of the immediate situation, Chalcedon can be seen with hindsight to have established the parameters within which any Christological thought that is to be considered orthodox can move. Chalcedon's amalgamation of two mutually contradictory accounts is useful as a framework within which to conduct further thinking, as it preserves and brings together into an inclusive statement those aspects of truth which were dispersed and separated from one another in two incompatible schools of thought: that God and man, fully human and fully divine, are fully united in the concrete person of Jesus, without the reality of either Godhead or manhood being compromised, [Pannenburg'68:330]. Chalcedon's paradoxical symmetry thus stands as the correct definition of a problem rather than its solution.

In order to understand the issues involved in fifth century Christology, it has to be understood that both interpretations of the Incarnation were rooted in the context of fourth century debates on immanent relations within the Godhead, and were thus bound up with the Nicene theology's understanding of, (a), the consubstantiality of the Father and the Logos and, (b), the necessity of asserting this consubstantiality in the light of soteriological considerations [Young'83:178].

The Nicene theology was based on a presumption of divine impassibility that derived from a Classical intellectual worldview that had been 'baptised' by Gentile Christianity. This assumption was shared by all theologians, whether orthodox or otherwise, and although Christians confessed that God was uniquely revealed in Christ, the Christian picture of God was governed by Platonic assumptions about the identity of timelessness, truth and divinity on the one hand, and an equation of temporality with illusion, error, and death on the other. Christ's revelation of God and the redemption of man had to be fitted within the parameters of a pre-conceived philosophical framework, a basic axiom of which was the impassibility of God, [Pelikan'74:229]. For theologians of both schools, this meant that the idea of kenosis, God's ability to share in the limitation of the created condition, present in the work of Ignatius and Irenaeus, was not given prominence [Williams'90:36]. It would take the intervention of Pope Leo, for positive use to be made of this factor.

Before the Arian crisis, the Logos was seen as an indefinite dyad, [Young'83:178-82], the ordering unity of all multiplicity, and active in the world as the intrinsic principle enabling and informing all plurality. The Logos served to connect material contingence in the created world with divine simplicity: a means of communication between the material and the spiritual, and as such God's creative instrument. The quarrel between Arians and the Nicene theology was based on whether the Logos belonged on the eternal or the contingent side of the divide. Nicene orthodoxy asserted that the Logos was eternal, of the same substance as the father, while Arius considered it to be the highest creature, or first born of creation, God not by nature but by the grace of a derivative and emulative intimacy with the unknowable Father. The victory of the Nicene thinking, that culminated in a Trinitarian conception of God as a differentiated unity of being, swept away the previous image of God's relation to the world as conducted through a mediating filter. Nicaea placed the Logos firmly on the eternal side of the Platonic divide. Immutable and impassible, the Logos was incapable of existing as a creature since 'becoming' was alien to his being. Herein lay the problem for Christology.

Athanasius had argued against the Arian position primarily for soteriological reasons. Nothing less than God had to be present in human flesh, redeeming it from the inside [Williams'90:50-1], in order for salvation to be possible. For salvation to be real, created human being has to be transformed by a true presence of God within the limitations of its finite perspective. If the Logos were a creature as Arius contended, sharing the transient finitude of creation, he could not restore creation to an infinite relation with God.

The soteriological basis of Athansius' thinking followed in the tradition of Irenaeus' Doctrine of Recapitulation [Williams'90:26-33], formulated to guard the reality of the Incarnation against a Gnostic separation of Godhead and matter. Irenaeus, fighting against Gnostic docetism, had protected the true manhood of Christ as needful for salvation. However, Athanasius' use of the soteriological argument in his account of the Doctrine of God was designed to protect the full divinity of the Logos against an Arian attempt to reduce it to a created status, the opposite of the Gnostic threat. Ironically, (and owing to the problems for the Incarnation inherent in Nicaea's non-mediatorial conception of the Logos), Athanasius' soteriological correlation of Nicene Doctrine with the traditional word-flesh Alexandrian Christology forced him towards the very docetism against which the Irenaean soteriology had originally been turned. Since Athanasius maintained that the Logos was impassible by nature, he could only be called the subject of passion in an inexact manner of speaking, the real subject being the finitude of the flesh which he had informed, (without even a human mind in the Appolinarian sequel). Because of the basic philosophical axiom of divine impassibility, God in his own nature could not be said to have suffered. In Athanasius' words, 'he imitated our condition'. Cyril speaks of the sufferings of the Logos's 'own flesh', so that the Logos could be said to suffer impassively, not according to his nature: the sufferings of his flesh were only a compromise, a sort of real appearance. [Young'83:77;179]

Alexandrian tradition affirmed that salvation was deification, or participation in God. In Christ the Logos informed and made his own a non-personal, generalised human nature, on account of which a literal transformation was made possible for all partakers in human nature. Such thinking was consistent with belief about the transformation of the bread and wine in Eucharistic theology, (the 'medicine of immortality'), as it envisaged the salvation of man as a reversal from a state of mortality and passibility into one of immortality and impassibility [Pelikan'74:233-34]. In its eagerness to see human nature overcome, post-Nicene Alexandrian Christological thinking neglected Christ's full humanity, suggesting that impersonal flesh was overpowered and saturated with the full divinity of the Logos. Sin-enfeebled humanity was merged like a drop of vinegar into a limitless sea of divinity, according to the analogy of Gregory of Nyssa [Stevenson/Frend'89:93].

The strength of the Alexandrian tradition was to preserve one half of the truth by identifying the Logos as the direct subject of the person of Christ [Young'83:180]. It's weakness was that it neglected the other half of the truth, preserved by the Antiochene position, that the subject of Christology was also Jesus of Nazareth, a concrete and individual human being [Young'83:181]. Chalcedon sought to bring the two positions together in a statement including all elements that have to be present if Christological investigation is not to be partial or one sided. Chalcedon's definition is a failure from the perspective of one seeking to find in it an explanation of how Christ is a divine-human unity, but if looked at simply as a document which seeks to ensure that none of the constituent factors of that salvific unity are neglected, it is a true statement of Christian faith, and has been of lasting value.

Like the Alexandrian, the Antiochene approach emerged out of the effort to combat Arius in the fourth century. It is possible that Eustathius of Antioch could stand in a tradition of Syrian theology connecting the dynamic monarchianism of Paul of Samosata with the Christology of the later Antiochene school. Although not a dynamic monarchian himself, (standing in the same position as Athanasius over Trinitarian theology), he stresses the presence of two natures in Christ, that of the Logos and that of Jesus' complete manhood. Intent on preserving the impassibility of the Logos, Eustathius realised that Arius, himself an Alexandrian, exploited the word-flesh Christology to prove those biblical texts suggesting the creatureliness of the logos, (Proverbs 8. 22, for example). Against this, Eustathius asserted that 'not in appearance and supposition but in very reality God was clothed with a whole man, assuming him perfectly'.[Young'83:180-1] Unlike Athanasius, Eustathius rightly asserted the full manhood of Christ, but primarily as an anti-Arian measure. Like Athanasius, his Christology was a by-product of his desire to preserve the status of the Logos as homoousios to patri. The first intention of both men was to protect the impassibility of the logos for Trinitarian orthodoxy with the result that each surrendered different halves of the full soteriological and christological picture. By insisting that Jesus's manhood was the true subject of Christ's passion, Eustathius and his Antiochene followers, Diodore and Theodore, aroused suspicions of adoptionism [Hall'91:213], by failing to maintain the Alexandrian portion of the full truth: that God as Logos was the subject of Christ's life. The two rival interpretative traditions that had been propelled into being by these two men were to confront one another in the persons of Nestorius and Cyril [Young'83:181], although in forms distorted by the venom of political caricature on the one hand, and by the influence of pseudepigraphical fraud on the other.

The usual picture of 'Nestorianism' is more a product of Cyril's polemical imagination than the position actually adopted by Nestorius. Later on, Nestorius maintained that the Tome of Leo, embraced at Chalcedon itself, was an adequate encapsulation of his own theology [Young'83:230]. In the early Byzantine Empire, the extent to which theology was enmeshed with the realities of daily life at both the popular level and that of big power politics cannot be exaggerated [Norwich'90:146]. In the case of the fifth century Christological dispute, Kelly writes: 'at no stage in the evolution of the church's theology have the fundamental issues been so mixed up with the clash of politics and personalities'. [Kelly'77:310] There was traditional rivalry between the sees of Constantinople and Alexandria, a competition for the Imperial ear. Cyril used spies and underhand diplomacy, addressing treatises caricaturing Nestorius' position to members of the Imperial household [Chadwick'93:194-6], 'less probably for doctrinal reasons than because of personal jealousy and his own long-cherished ambition to establish the primacy of the ancient Alexandrian see over that of upstart Constantinople' [Norwich'90:147].

However, the Episcopal faults did not lie solely in Alexandria's court. Nestorius was politically rash, to some extent re-igniting the rivalry that had existed between Cyril's uncle Bishop Theophilus and the Constantinopolitan see, in that his anti-heretical moves 'transgressed the lines of independent church jurisdiction' [Hall'91:213]. Constantinople did not have 'rights of civil foundation' [Hall'91:213] in Thrace and Asia such as Rome enjoyed over Italy or Alexandria over Egypt. Cyril may in fact have justifiably feared that Nestorius condemnation of the term theotokos, combined with the power he wielded through the emperor, who 'always believed those nearest to him' [Norwich'90:147], might lead to his own condemnation and excommunication for upholding the usage [Hall'91:213]. Cyril was angered by Nestorius' dismissal of charges brought against Alexandrian refugees, and Cyril turned to his own advantage Nestorius' communion with Pelagian refugees from Rome, earning himself an ally in Pope Caelestine [Chadwick'93:195-6]. Cyril used all this to make a pre-emptive strike, unjustifiably attacking Nestorius' Christology [Young'83:230] as (1), preaching two Sons of God ~ 'If we reject this personal union as either impossible or unseemly, we fall into the error of making two Sons. For in that case we must speak of the man in his own person as dignified by the appellation of Son, and again the word which is of God in his own person possessing the nature of Son.'[Stevenson/Frend'89: 297]; (2), dividing the Christ ~ '.we do not distribute the words of our saviour in the gospels to two several subsistences or persons. For the one and sole Christ is not twofold.'[Stevenson/Frend'89:305]; and (3) treating Christ as a mere man~ 'if then anyone say that it was not the very Word of God himself who became our high priest and apostle.but another than he, and distinct from him, a man born of a woman.let him be anathema' [Stevenson/Frend'89:308].

Nestorius true position is made evident in The Bazaar of Heraclides. He put forward the idea of a prosopic union, making use of three metaphysical terms: ousia, (what a thing is essentially, in itself), phusis, (the things qualities and characteristics), and prosopon, (the concrete external manifestation of the being in question). Nestorius held that divine and human essences or ousiai cannot mix, the impassible cannot be one with the passible. A union at the level of characteristic qualities would produce an Appolinarian tertium quid, neither one thing nor another. Therefore the union had to be prosopic [Young'83:236-7].

Nestorius's vagueness over terms at the time of the arguments with Cyril does not make this picture clear, but he did affirm that Cyril's phrase, (and that of the later Chalcedonian definition), 'hypostatic union' could be correct if interpreted as applying to a unity of person. Such a conception of the union avoided the difficulties of Alexandrian natural union, since the unity and duality belong to 'two different metaphysical levels. There are 'two grounds of being' for one Christ [Young'83:236-7].

Theodore of Mopsuestia had maintained the Antiochene distinction between two natures, but had made them factors acting directly in the world in separation, like two individual people. Consequently he had distinguished the human actions of Jesus in the Gospels from the divine ones. Nestorius however usually attributed the Gospel actions to the person, rather than directly to either of the natures. In the sphere of Jesus' ministry, his person was therefore a concrete functional centre manifesting united activity. In this light, Nestorius' suggestion that Christotokos be used as a term preferable to either anthropotokos or theotokos makes sense. Nestorius held onto the insights of the Antiochene school about the necessity of Christ's full manhood for salvation, while affirming that the human and divine, though separate at the natural level, were a unity in the person of Christ, whose concrete sayings and doing were at the same time divine and human [Young'83:236-7].

The actually manifested unity of Christ on Earth was maintained by a mutual interchange of properties at the level of the person, corresponding to the Chalcedonian idea of perichoresis. Before Nestorius, Antiochene Christology had divided the activities of Christ, portioning them out to God and man. Since the separation of natures was effective at a more rarefied metaphysical level for Nestorius, a unity of action could be maintained on a more earthly plain [Young'83:236-7]. Such thinking seems reminiscent of, (although unrelated to), Augustine's idea that real distinctions existing in the inner life of the Trinity do not prevent divine activity ad extra, (on the created level), from belonging to the unity of the one Godhead.

It could be argued that Nestorius' actual Christology, (just as much as that of Chalcedon), held onto the Alexandrian angle on the truth, (that the Word of God must be the subject of Christ's person), while insisting as an Antiochene that this same subject was a real and complete human being: '.it was evident that Leo's Tome was a vindication of what [Nestorius] himself stood for.he was thoroughly misrepresented by his enemies' [Young'83:240;239]. he maintained 'the traditional Antiochene insights while rediscovering the one saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ'[Young'83:240].

The object of Alexandrian attack in the fifth century dispute was a general and exaggerated caricature of Antiochene Christology. Using his poltical acumen, Cyril constructed an obviously heretical position, and his successful engineering of the Council of Ephesus in 431 ensured that it was falsely attributed to Nestorius. Nestorius later protested of Cyril's role at that Council: 'Why do I say "among the judges"? He was the whole tribunal.he did everything with arbitrary authority.I was summoned by Cyril, who assembled the Council, by Cyril, who, presided. Who was the judge? Cyril!! Who was the bishop of Rome? Cyril!!! Cyril was everything.'[Stevenson/Frend'89:312-13].

Cyril was himself the unwitting dupe of heresy, since his own position had been constructed on the basis of Appolinarian texts falsely attributed to Athanasius. This is especially clear in the anathemas subjoining his third letter to Nestorius [Young'83:259]. Yet it is also true that Nestorius' replies to Cyril do not make clear enough that he intended the Logos, just as much as the humanity of Jesus, to be seen as the subject of Christ's person [Young'83:236-7]. Fifth century Christological debate was characterised by misunderstandings and 'unChristian' motivations.

In his intervention over Eutyches, Pope Leo was able to clear up the mess, thanks to a soteriologically based western theology of kenosis [Pelikan'74: 256] recognising that for Christ to be saviour he must be 'both divine and human, so that he could effect the interchange between himself and the sinner by which he assumed the sins of the world and the sinner became holy. The kenosis of Christ established a new covenant between God and man'[Pelikan'74:257]. While the Alexandrian component of the Chalcedonian settlement focused on Christ's divine nature, and the traditional Antiochene element on his humanity, the Western contribution enabled a c