III. — RELATIONS WITH NESTORIUS AND NESTORIANISM.

Nestorius, the Patriarch of Constantinople, was bound by ties of close friendship to both Theodoret and John, the Patriarch of Antioch. In August 430, the Western bishops, under the presidency of Pope Celestine, assembled in a council at Rome, condemned Nestorius, and threatened him with excommunication. Shortly afterwards, a council of Eastern bishops in Alexandria, summoned by Cyril, endorsed this condemnation and dispatched it to Constantinople. John subsequently received letters from Celestine and Cyril announcing their joint action. When the couriers carrying these communications reached Antioch, they found John surrounded by Theodoret and other bishops, who were gathered, perhaps, for the ordination of Macarius, the new bishop of Laodicea. John consulted with his fellow bishops, and a letter was sent in their collective name to Nestorius, urging him to accept the term Theotokos (Mother of God), around which the entire conflict revolved. They pointed out the sense in which it could not fail to be accepted by every loyal Christian and implored him not to embroil Christendom over a single word.

This letter has generally been attributed to Theodoret. But while the conciliatory sage of Cyrus was endeavoring to formulate an Eirenicon (a peace proposal), the ardent Egyptian made peace almost impossible by publishing his famous "anathematisms" (formal condemnations). John and his friends were distressed at the perceived unorthodoxy of Cyril's condemnation of Nestorius and asked Theodoret to refute Cyril.1 The strong language used in Letter CL conveys an idea of the intense enthusiasm with which Theodoret undertook this task, as well as his profound conviction that Cyril, in his blind zeal against imaginary errors on the part of Nestorius, was himself falling headlong into the "Apollinarian pit" (the heresy that Christ lacked a human soul).Note: Apollinarianism is a 4th-century heresy that denied the full humanity of Christ.

An eager war of words now waged over Nestorius between Cyril and Theodoret, with each denouncing the other for supposed heresy regarding the Incarnation. While maintaining deep respect for Theodoret’s learning and motives, we may find a solution to much of what he said and did in the fact that he misunderstood Nestorius just as completely as he misunderstood Cyril.2 Cyril, raised on the synthetic principles of the Alexandrian school, could see only the unity of the two natures in the one Person. To him, distinguishing between God the Word and Christ the Man—as Theodoret’s analysis did—was to come perilously close to acknowledging two separate Christs, keeping up a sort of mutual dialogue of speech and action. However, Cyril’s unqualified assertion that there is one Christ, and that Christ is God, really provided no grounds for the accusation that he viewed Christ’s manhood as unreal. Yet, he and Theodoret were substantially in agreement. Theodoret’s failure to understand Cyril’s position was likely due less to a lack of intelligence on the Syrian’s part than to the overbearing bitterness of the fierce Egyptian.

On the other hand, Theodoret’s loyal love for Nestorius led him to give his friend the benefit of the doubt, assuming he meant what he himself meant. While he was driven to contemplate Cyril’s doctrines in their most dangerous exaggerations, he shrank from seeing how the Nestorian counter-argument might also be dangerously exaggerated. As Dr. Bright remarks,3 Theodoret “uses a good deal of language which is prima facie (at first glance) Nestorian; his objections are permeated by a logical fallacy (ignoratio elenchi), and his language is repeatedly inconsistent. But he and Cyril were essentially nearer to each other in belief than they would have admitted at the time, for Theodoret virtually acknowledges the personal oneness and explains the phrase ‘God assumed man’ as ‘He assumed manhood.’” Cyril, in his letter to Euoptius, earnestly disclaims both forms of Apollinarianism—the notion of a mindless manhood in Christ and the notion of a body formed out of Godhead. In his reply (on Art iv.), he admits the language appropriate to each nature.

Probably both the Egyptian and the Syrian would have found no difficulty in subscribing to the language of our own judicious divine [Richard Hooker]: “A kind of mutual exchange exists whereby those concrete names, God and Man, when we speak of Christ, interchangeably take one another's place. For the sake of truthful speech, it does not matter whether we say that the Son of God created the world and the Son of Man saved it by his death, or that the Son of Man created it and the Son of God died to save it. However, whenever we attribute to God what the manhood of Christ claims, or to man what his Deity has a right to, we do not understand by the names 'God' and 'Man' one nature or the other, but the whole person of Christ, in whom both natures dwell. When the Apostle says of the Jews that they crucified the Lord of Glory, and when the Son of Man, being on earth, affirms that the Son of Man was in heaven at...