HistoricalChristian.Faith

Cyril of Alexandria and Nestorius: the road to Ephesus

This is the story of how a quarrel over one word — whether Mary may be called Theotokos, “God-bearer” — became the bitterest collision of two sees, two temperaments, and two theologies in the fifth-century Church. Nestorius (c. 386–451), an Antiochene preacher brought to Constantinople for his eloquence, opened his episcopate by promising the emperor a purge of heretics and closed it, three years later, a deposed and exiled man. Cyril of Alexandria (patriarch 412–444), nephew and heir of the Theophilus who had destroyed John Chrysostom, ran the campaign against him with the same weapons his uncle had used — open letters, court lobbying, a synod convened before the other side could arrive, and a treasury of gold spent at the palace. Both men deposed the other at Ephesus in the summer of 431; only one of them went home.

Unlike the belief-timelines elsewhere on this site, this page is a relationship told through its dated moments: the sermons, letters, anathemas, synods, and imperial edicts of an enmity, set down earliest first, each footnoted to its source. It runs from Nestorius's consecration in 428 and the sermons against Theotokos that lit the fuse, through the exchange of letters and the appeals to Rome, Cyril's Twelve Anathemas and the rival councils at Ephesus that deposed each leader in turn, the imperial commissioner Candidian and the gold spent to break the deadlock, to the Formula of Reunion that healed the breach with Antioch (433), Nestorius's exile to the Egyptian desert, and the long argument — reopened when Nestorius's own defence was recovered in the twentieth century — over whether the man was ever really the heretic the council condemned.

The doctrine at issue — the person of Christ, the hypostatic union, the title Theotokos — is weighed on the christology timeline and the Theotokos timeline, where both men have detail pages and the question “Was Nestorius misrepresented?” is argued out. This page tells the quarrel itself.

Related doctrines: Controversies among the Fathers — see also Theophilus of Alexandria and John Chrysostom · the Origenist controversy (Jerome and Rufinus) · Jerome and Augustine: a correspondence across the Mediterranean · the condemnation of Origen · was Tertullian a heretic?.

Timeline

Nestorius is consecrated at Constantinople and promises a purge of heretics (10 April 428)

Nestorius, a presbyter of Antioch famous as a preacher, was fetched to the capital and consecrated bishop of Constantinople on 10 April 428. His first sermon, delivered before the emperor, set the tone of the reign that was to end so badly:

Give me, my prince, the earth purged of heretics, and I will give you heaven as a recompense. Assist me in destroying heretics, and I will assist you in vanquishing the Persians.

— Socrates, Church History VII.29. The historian, no friend to him, adds that “although his discourse was extremely gratifying to some of the multitude, who cherished a senseless antipathy to even the name of heretic,” those who could read a man saw “his levity of mind, and violent and vainglorious temperament.”¹

The sermons against “Theotokos” light the fuse (428)

The spark was a single title. Nestorius's own chaplain, a presbyter named Anastasius he had brought from Antioch, preached against calling the Virgin Theotokos, and Nestorius defended him from the pulpit:

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, Church History VII.32, reporting Anastasius. Nestorius pressed the same point in his own harsher words, recorded by another historian: “I could never be induced to call that God which admitted of being two months old or three months old.” Socrates, who thought Nestorius neither learned nor a heretic but merely rash and ignorant of the fathers, judged that he had “drawn upon himself… the reputation among the ignorant” of denying Christ's divinity, though “from mere boyish folly.”²

Cyril intervenes: the Second Letter to Nestorius (early 430)

Word reached Alexandria, and Cyril took up the case first in his paschal letter and a warning of his own, then in the measured, decisive Second Letter to Nestorius that would later be read at Ephesus as the standard of orthodoxy. Against Nestorius's language of two who are merely joined, Cyril set the word the whole later Church would keep:

Rather do we claim that the Word in an unspeakable, inconceivable manner united to himself hypostatically flesh enlivened by a rational soul, and so became man and was called son of man, not by God's will alone or good pleasure, nor by the assumption of a person alone.

— Cyril, Second Letter to Nestorius (Ep. 4). Because the union is at the level of the person, he argued, to deny Mary the title “Mother of God” is to deny that her child is God — “not as though the nature of the Word… received the origin of their being from the holy virgin, but because there was born from her his holy body rationally ensouled, with which the Word was hypostatically united.”³

Nestorius answers: “mother of Christ” is the more accurate word (430)

Nestorius replied in kind. He would attribute the birth and the suffering to the humanity, not the Godhead, and so preferred a title that named the united Christ rather than a single nature:

Holy scripture, wherever it recalls the Lord's economy, speaks of the birth and suffering not of the godhead but of the humanity of Christ, so that the holy virgin is more accurately termed mother of Christ than mother of God.

— Nestorius, Second Letter to Cyril. He never claimed the title was simply false — only that “God-bearer” risked either making the eternal Godhead take its origin from a creature or fusing the natures the way Apollinaris had; “Christ-bearer,” he thought, kept both parties to their proper limits. Whether his “conjunction” language really split Christ into two sons, or was a clumsy word for the right doctrine, is the question weighed at “Was Nestorius misrepresented?”⁴

Both sides appeal to Rome (430)

Each man wrote to Pope Celestine. Nestorius's letters were cool and self-assured — he raised the case of Pelagian refugees he was sheltering, ranked Christotokos above Theotokos (“the latter is mentioned by the angels and the gospels”), and charged that Cyril was manufacturing the whole dispute to escape charges pending against himself:

I have learned that Cyril… has become worried about reports against him that we received, and is now hunting for subterfuges to avoid a holy synod taking place due to these reports. In the meantime he is devising some other disturbances over terms…

— Nestorius, third letter to Pope Celestine. It was a serious misreading of where the power lay: Cyril had already sent Rome a dossier of Nestorius's sermons, in Latin, and Celestine read Alexandria's brief, not Constantinople's.⁵

Rome condemns Nestorius and deputes Cyril to execute the sentence (August 430)

A Roman synod under Celestine condemned Nestorius's teaching, gave him ten days from notice to recant, and — fatefully — committed the carrying-out of the sentence to Cyril of Alexandria, making the prosecutor also the judge's agent. The union of Roman authority with Alexandrian zeal decided the shape of everything that followed.⁶

The Twelve Anathemas: Cyril's Third Letter (30 November 430)

Armed with Rome's mandate, an Alexandrian synod sent Nestorius Cyril's Third Letter, closing with twelve anathemas that turned the doctrine into a set of pass-or-fail tests — the sharpest and most polemical demand of the whole quarrel. The first struck at the title itself:

If any one confess not that Emmanuel is in truth God and that the holy Virgin is therefore Mother of God, for she bare after the flesh the Word of God made Flesh, be he anathema.

The third forbade even Nestorius's language of a “connection” of the natures (“If any one sever the Persons of the One Christ after the Union… be he anathema”), and the twelfth confessed that “the Word of God suffered in the Flesh and hath been crucified in the Flesh and tasted death in the Flesh.” — Cyril, Third Letter to Nestorius, the Twelve Anathemas. The Antiochenes found the twelfth close to Apollinarian passibility, and the anathemas would remain contested long after Nestorius was gone.⁷

The Council of Ephesus opens without the Syrians — Cyril presiding (22 June 431)

Theodosius II summoned a general council to Ephesus for Pentecost 431. Nestorius came early; so did Cyril, with a large Egyptian contingent; but John of Antioch and the Syrian bishops — Nestorius's natural allies — were still on the road. After a fortnight's wait, Cyril opened the council anyway, over the protest of the imperial commissioner and some sixty-eight bishops:

This great and holy Council has been patient enough, waiting for the coming of the godly bishops, who are expected to come.

— Cyril's own words at the opening, quoted back at him by Nestorius, whose colleague Memnon added that “the period which was fixed in the letters of the pious and most Christian Emperor” had passed — “sixteen days have passed.” Nestorius refused to attend a council convened by his prosecutor before his defenders had arrived, and said the guard at his door was for his own safety: “Thou accusest me of posting soldiers around my house: [it was] not that they might do any wrong unto you but that they might hinder you from doing wrong unto me.”⁸

Nestorius is deposed (22 June 431)

Summoned three times and three times refusing, Nestorius was condemned in a single day's session by the Cyrilline majority — “in all over two hundred bishops”:

…we have come, with many tears, to this sorrowful sentence against him, namely, that our Lord Jesus Christ, whom he has blasphemed, decrees by the holy Synod that Nestorius be excluded from the episcopal dignity, and from all priestly communion.

— Decree of the Council against Nestorius. When the sentence was published the people of Ephesus, who had waited outside all day, escorted the bishops home with torches; the city was Cyril's. Nestorius, for his part, had told the synod's messengers, in Socrates's report, “I cannot term him God who was two and three months old… I am therefore clear of your blood, and shall in future come no more among you.”⁹

John of Antioch arrives and deposes Cyril and Memnon (26–27 June 431)

Five days after the deposition the Syrians reached Ephesus, learned what had been done in their absence, and, under the protection of the imperial count Candidian, held a counter-council of their own that deposed Cyril and Memnon of Ephesus in turn. Now each side had condemned the other:

the most illustrious count Candidianus, who was sent by your most Christian authority, testified unto them in writing and without writing that they should await the coming of all the holy bishops… For this reason we have caused the deposition of those two who have been mentioned above, of Cyril and of Memnon, and interdicted them from every spiritual ministration.

— John of Antioch's report to the emperor, preserved in Nestorius's Bazaar of Heracleides. A second historian sets the sequence down flatly: “John, the bishop of Antioch, arrives with his associate priests, five days after the act of deposition; and having convened all his company, he deposes Cyril and Memnon.” Theodosius, receiving both sets of acts, at first confirmed both depositions.¹⁰

The gold of the palace (431–432)

The deadlock was broken not in synod but at court. Cyril's agents in Constantinople distributed an extraordinary volume of gifts and gold to the officials and eunuchs around the emperor, itemized in a surviving memorandum of the patriarch's own chancery — carpets, ivory chairs and stools, ostriches, and, to one official alone, “fifty pounds of gold… in order that he would help us in the cause.” By one reckoning the disbursements ran to more than a thousand pounds of gold; on a fuller count of the sums promised, far more. Nestorius, in exile, named the whole transaction without euphemism:

both he who sold the truth, that is John, and he who [did] more than he, that is Cyril, when the gold of iniquity was exacted…

— Nestorius, Bazaar of Heracleides. That the gifts were real is not in dispute — the list is Cyril's own; what they bought was the palace's acquiescence in the verdict already passed.¹¹

Cyril goes home in triumph; Nestorius retires to his monastery (autumn 431)

Cyril and Memnon were held under guard for a time, but the pressure told: Cyril left Ephesus without leave and was back in Alexandria before any authority could stop him, received as a conqueror. Nestorius, his cause abandoned at court, asked to be allowed to return to his old monastery near Antioch, and was:

Cyril on the other hand was kept under guard for a while; but he who was being guarded with all caution hid himself from them that were guarding him in Ephesus… and set out from Ephesus and gained his [own] city without being hindered by any one.

— Nestorius, Bazaar of Heracleides, describing his rival's escape. The council was dissolved; the two men would never meet again.¹²

The Formula of Reunion heals the breach with Antioch (433)

The schism between Alexandria and Antioch that the council had opened was closed two years later. Through the imperial envoy Aristolaus, Cyril and John of Antioch agreed a joint confession — the Formula of Reunion — that affirmed Theotokos yet used the “two natures” language Cyril had resisted in the heat of the fight, and abandoned Nestorius. Cyril announced the peace in a letter whose opening became famous:

Let the heavens rejoice and the earth be glad, for the middle wall of partition is broken down, exasperation is stilled, and all occasion for dissension utterly removed…

— Cyril, Letter 39 (to John of Antioch), quoted by Evagrius. Its body confessed “a union of two natures… one Christ, one Son, one Lord,” and the holy Virgin “Mother of God.” The price of the reconciliation was paid by Nestorius, whose deposition both sides now accepted.¹³

Nestorius is exiled to the Egyptian desert (435/436)

A first edict banished Nestorius to his monastery at Antioch; a second, in 435, sent him far into Upper Egypt, to the Great Oasis of the western desert:

by a second edict of Theodosius, he is banished to the place called Oasis.

— Evagrius, Church History I.7. Socrates, writing while Nestorius still lived, ends the story “he was banished to the Oasis, where he still remains.” He was carried off in a desert raid and released, moved from place to place under guard, and died in the Thebaid about 451 — long enough to write, in the Bazaar of Heracleides, the defence that no council ever heard.¹⁴

Cyril dies; and the long reopening of the verdict (444 — twentieth century)

Cyril held Alexandria until his death on 27 June 444, honoured as the doctor of the Incarnation — and remembered, even by admirers, for the ferocity with which he had fought. Nestorius's memory stayed under the council's anathema for fifteen centuries. Then, in 1910, the Syriac text of his own Bazaar of Heracleides was published, and a run of scholars — Bethune-Baker, Loofs, and later J. A. McGuckin — asked whether the man had held the heresy named for him, or had been condemned for a Christology he did not teach. The question is genuinely open and is weighed on its own page; what is not in doubt is that the quarrel was, from the first sermon to the last edict, an Alexandria-and- Antioch power struggle as much as a search for the truth about Christ.¹⁵

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