Jesus Wars by John Philip Jenkins

Author:John Philip Jenkins [Jenkins, John Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-02-11T23:00:00+00:00

SOURCE: E. B. Pusey, preface to E. B. Pusey and P. E. Pusey, eds., St. Cyril of Alexandria: Five Tomes Against Nestorius (Oxford: James Parker, 1881), xi–xiii.

6

The Death of God

There is many a Nestorius!

Dioscuros of Alexandria

In August 449 the ghosts of the earlier council gathered once more at Ephesus. Once again, a patriarch of Alexandria brought his followers to confront heresy by any means necessary. And once again, there were winners and losers. A patriarch of Constantinople was deposed, and a new definitive statement of church doctrine proclaimed. But in terms of its impact on the future of the church, the participants of this council might well have been ghosts. In most accounts of church history, which give such prominence to earlier gatherings like Nicea, we look in vain for a Second Council of Ephesus. For all the numbers and prestige of those attending, all the weighty issues discussed, Second Ephesus—the Gangster Synod—became The Council That Never Was.1

At the time, though, the council seemed like a revolutionary event, building aggressively on the victories of 431. It marked the high-water mark of Alexandrian influence in the church. For a few years, it also seemed likely to uproot any form of Two Nature teaching within the empire as thoroughly as the Arians had been defeated in earlier decades. And condemned as heretical would have been the whole structure of what would ultimately become Christian orthodoxy.

The Last Romans?

By the 440s, the generation that had dealt with the Nestorian crisis was fading away. New leaders were in power in Rome, where Pope Leo succeeded in 440, and in Alexandria, where Dioscuros followed Cyril in 444. In each case, though, the rising men had served long apprenticeships under their predecessors and had full access to older memories. And just as Cyril had accompanied Theophilus to overthrow John Chrysostom in 403, so Dioscuros had been present at the fall of Nestorius in 431. A rising young cleric could have no better form of on-the-job training than witnessing his mentor overthrow a patriarch.

Other new men had risen to power elsewhere. The new bishop of Antioch was Domnus, who in 440 succeeded his uncle John. This was an unfortunate inheritance, as Domnus was a peaceable character who wanted nothing more than a quiet life and was ill-suited to deal with the kind of enemies he would soon face. The emerging dangers were nowhere clearer than in Constantinople, where (also in 440) Eutyches succeeded the abbot Dalmatius, who had played such a key role in shaping the emperor’s religious policies. Both had been violent opponents of Nestorius, and both were willing to resort to aggressive political activism.

The most significant shift in power was at the imperial court, where the augusta Pulcheria was driven from favor and withdrew from public life. Partly, this followed a long-running feud with her sister-in-law, Eudocia, who was herself forced into holy exile in Jerusalem. In theory, this should have meant that the emperor Theodosius might have exercised some independence, but he now turned his favor to the eunuch Chrysaphius.

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