Tag Archives: Chalcedon 451

The Aftermath of Chalcedon

20 Saturday May 2017

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The dispute over Canon 28, although not pushed at the time, can be taken as a marker for the slow shift of the tectonic plates between East and West, but more immediately, there was resistance to the whole Chalcedonian definition of the two natures of Christ back in Alexandria. Although Dioscorus had been deposed because of his conduct at Ephesus rather than for heresy, those of the Alexandrian school who distrusted the language of Leo’s Tome, conflated the two things and on his death in 457 elected their own Patriarch, Timothy, to oppose Proterius who had been chosen by the Emperor. Thenceforth there was hostility between Alexandria and Constantinople.

The results of Chalcedon were, then, long-lasting and far from positive. Alexandria and Syria were alienated politically, and were deeply suspicious of the language of Leo’s Tome, whilst Constantinople sought to coerce them into line. The violence used simply begat violence and deepened the split, and by the time Justinian tried to find a formula for reunion in the late 530s, it was too late. The long and bitter disputes weakened the authority of the Empire in the region, and helped pave the way of the Islamic invasions in the 630s. The See of St Mark fell under Islamic rule in 639 – and remains under it to this day. The Copts have shown huge bravery in confessing to the Faith once received from that time to this, though the numbers have fallen cruelly. Constantinople and Rome fell out firnally in 1054, with the Imperial capital falling to the Muslims in 1453; Of the 5 great patriarchies, that left only Rome free of Muslim rule.

The descendants of the non-Chalcedonians, like those who rejected Ephesus, the Nestorians, are still with us, but in their ancestral lands they are a persecuted minority.  The Chalcedonians who later rejected Rome make up a good number of the world’s Christians, but they have never called another Council. Those who adhere still to the Bishop of Rome make up a majority of the world’s Christians.

In our age we have a chance to repair the ravages of time and circumstance. The Schism which began at Chalcedon led to the ruin of the idea of Christendom, and countless men and women have paid a price for the pride of their ancestors. The post-Reformation Churches are, none of them, what they were, and who can tell how many generations they have left? The Evangelical churches wax and wane. Between them they all do good work, and no Catholic should ever ignore that, even though he or she might lament that they have not the fullness of the Faith; God and God alone decides who will be saved (despite the very large number of people who, like Bosco, make that claim for themselves). The Orthodox Churches command respect for their martyrs and their faithful witness in the direst of circumstances; who can withhold admiration for their fidelity? Meanwhile, the Roman Catholic Church, the largest in the world, has its own problems as it always has. But our Popes have all, since Paul VI, looked to reunify Christendom should that be possible.

Jesus willed that His followers should be one; our fallen nature has warred against that command. In this short series we have traced the paths by which the first of the great Schisms opened up, and seen how the seeds for further schism were planted. In our time we can pray for and work for unity.

 

The authority of the Bishop of Rome

19 Friday May 2017

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Before Leo had rejected the canon, both the Emperor Marcion, and the Patriarch of Constantinople, Anatolius, had written to him in conciliatory tones. Marcion hoped (Leo, Epistles CII) that now Rome’s doctrinal position had triumphed, Chalcedon could be ratified. Anatolius went along the same line in another December letter (Price III pp. 138-142) in which he tried to convince Leo that his delegates had reported things incorrectly and stated clearly they had not simply sent him the canon as a conciliatory measure but for his approval:

This decree has been transmitted to your sacredness by the holy council and by us in order to receive from you approval and confirmation.
He went on the ‘beg’ him to do so so that ‘everything that was transacted in writing at this holy and ecumenical council’ could then be enacted. This was not the language even of primus inter pares – it was language used to a primus. But as we have seen, Leo was not mollified and would not give his approval. He told the Empress Pulcheria that delighted though he was that the Council had proclaimed orthodoxy, he was saddened that an attempt had been made to add to the canons of Nicaea for no aim higher than political advantage.

Leo’s claims were based on Tradition and Apostolicity, he could not, and did not yield them.  On 21 March 453, with parts of Palestine claiming Chalcedon was not legitimate because Leo had not ratified it, Leo confirmed (Ep. 114.2) that he agreed to everything at Chalcedon which did not contravene Nicaea. Letter 116 to the empress makes the same point, adding:

Let vicious ambition covet nothing belonging to another, nor let anyone seek his own increase through injuring another, for however much vainglorious pride builds on extorted assent and thinks that its depredations can be strengthened through talking of councils, whatever differs from the canons of the aforesaid fathers [Nicaea] will be null and void.

Leo’s ratification of the Council was thought necessary by all concerned, and given the nature of the crisis in Egypt and Palestine, no one mentioned Canon 28, although clearly Leo was not ratifying it; Rome did not do so until the thirteenth century.

Leo’s claims were well-known and public; they were not contested by Constantinople. All men knew what it meant for Peter to speak through Leo. He spoke through no other Bishop. No other Bishop stood at the head of the others. No other Bishop’s ratification was sought in the way Leo’s was. Once can debate until well after the cows have come home what later men later claimed these things meant; contemporaries seem to have been clear enough. Lack of clarity came only when men desired it – as is so often the case.

Loose talk about Caesaro-Papism conceals a harsh reality. In Constantinople the Patriarch owed the claims he made in 451 to the fact he was the Imperial Patriarch; Church and State were one. The Roman Empire was effectively a theocracy – at Constantinople. Rome, deserted by the imperial bureaucracy, threatened by Huns, and already much reduced in population, owed its claims solely to Apostolicity. The odd thing about the anti-Catholic charge that Catholicism is a ‘Roman State religion’ is its historical ignorance. Imperial authority lay at Constantinople from the mid fourth century to the fifteenth century, and Rome, otherwise a political backwater, owed its authority not to the State, but to its Apostolic foundation on St Peter. Far from being s ‘State run’ religion, Roman Catholicism resisted all attempts by the Empire, and later by kingdoms in the West, to assert State power over the Church. A little historical knowledge would not come amiss in those who level the charge that the Catholic Church is a ‘Roman state run religion’; nothing could be further from the truth.

The practicalities of resisting State power were never less than problematic. It might have been Stalin who famously asked ‘how many divisions has the Pope?’, but he was hardly the first. From Justinian through to Hitler, powerful men would threaten the Pope, even hold him hostage. The Popes would create their own State for safety and invent Western diplomacy to protect it. Whatever the modalities, the reasoning was consistent – Peter spoke through the Pope and against that Rock not even the Gates of Hell would prevail. Nor have they, and nor will they. Empires rise and fall, Great Powers wax and wane, powerful men strut and fret their hour upon the stage, and Schisms come and multiply; but in the Eternal City, on the Rock of Peter, his successor remains; history affords no other example of such longevity. The works of human hand do not endure in this fashion; the work of God does.

Rome vs Constantinople

18 Thursday May 2017

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The Chalcedonian Fathers explained Canon 28 to Leo as follows:

And we further inform you that we have decided on other things also for the good management and stability of church matters, being persuaded that your holiness will accept and ratify them, when you are told. The long prevailing custom, which the holy Church of God at Constantinople had of ordaining metropolitans for the provinces of Asia, Pontus and Thrace, we have now ratified by the votes of the Synod, not so much by way of conferring a privilege on the See of Constantinople as to provide for the good government of those cities, because of the frequent disorders that arise on the death of their bishops, both clergy and laity being then without a leader and disturbing church order. …

We have ratified also the canon of the 150 holy Fathers who met at Constantinople in the time of the great Theodosius of holy memory, which ordains that after your most holy and Apostolic See, the See of Constantinople shall take precedence, being placed second: for we are persuaded that with your usual care for others you have often extended that Apostolic prestige which belongs to you, to the church in Constantinople also, by virtue of your great disinterestedness in sharing all your own good things with your spiritual kinsfolk. Accordingly vouchsafe most holy and blessed father to accept as your own wish, and as conducing to good government the things which we have resolved on for the removal of all confusion and the confirmation of church order

If this sounds as though the assembled Fathers were nervous about Leo’s reaction, it was because they were. His delegates at Chalcedon had opposed the canon, saying that only the Pope could confer such precedence. The Fathers were, they told Leo, confident that they were acting as he would have wanted. They could not have been more mistaken. Leo’s reaction, a letter to the Emperor Marcian, written on 22 May 452 may be seen in full here. The parts most relevant to our argument are as follows:

Let the city of Constantinople have, as we desire, its high rank, and under the protection of God’s right hand, long enjoy your clemency’s rule. Yet things secular stand on a different basis from things divine: and there can be no sure building save on that rock which the Lord has laid for a foundation.  …….

For the privileges of the churches determined by the canons of the holy Fathers, and fixed by the decrees of the Nicene Synod, cannot be overthrown by any unscrupulous act, nor disturbed by any innovation. And in the faithful execution of this task by the aid of Christ I am bound to display an unflinching devotion; for it is a charge entrusted to me, and it tends to my condemnation if the rules sanctioned by the Fathers and drawn up under the guidance of God’s Spirit at the Synod of Nicæa for the government of the whole Church are violated with my connivance (which God forbid), and if the wishes of a single brother have more weight with me than the common good of the Lord’s whole house.

St. Peter had founded Rome and Antioch, St. Mark, Alexandria; Constantinople owed its foundation to the Emperor, no Apostle had founded it, and any priority it claimed could not be justified on the grounds the other Sees used. Leo’s own representatives, who had not been present when the canon was passed, had protested:

The apostolic see ought not to be humiliated in our presence, and therefore we ask your sublimity to order that whatever was transacted yesterday in our absence in prejudice of the canons or rules be nullified. But if otherwise, let our formal objection be recorded in the minutes, so that we may know what we ought to report to the apostolic man the pope of the universal church, so that he may pass sentence on either the insult to his see or the overturning of the canon. (Price and Gaddis, Acts of Chalcedon, III, p. 91]

Neither tradition, nor apostolic authority sanctioned the novelty that was Canon 28. Its sole basis in ‘tradition’ was canon 8 of Constantinople 381. But this canon was controversial at Rome, and in the form it was recorded at Chalcedon in canon 28 it was also inaccurate, as the Pope’s delegate, Paschasinus pointed out in the sixteenth session. There is a difference between the Greek and Latin versions of the Acta, and since the original is no longer extant, we cannot tell which version is more accurate.

The Latin version asserts Roman primacy, the Greek version omits this. In contemporary terms this did not matter since what was actually at issue was not the relative standing of the two sees but Constantinople’s jurisdiction in the east. It was only later that this difference was elevated to one of importance

But, as we have seen, it did not matter which version was advanced, the one in the canon itself or the conciliatory one put to Leo, he was having none of it because it infringed his unique apostolic privilege. There is no hyperbole, no poetic language – and no chance of misunderstanding. Leo was not having the ancient tradition of the Church usurped by the ambitions of the Imperial city. There was no sure foundation except the rock upon which Christ had built his Church. If ‘Peter speaks through Leo’ meant anything, it meant that Leo spoke with the authority of St Peter himself; not jumped-up Patriarch at Constantinople was going to change that at the best of an Emperor. Christ had spoken, Leo was defending what he had inherited; his successors would do the same.

The Council of Chalcedon

17 Wednesday May 2017

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Thanks to Liverpool University Press we can read the full proceedings of the Council of Chalcedon.  The Council opened on 8 October, and its first job was to review what had happened at Ephesus in 449. It did so and it condemned Dioscorus and exiled him. At a stroke, Alexandria’s empire-building had collapsed.

It is important to emphasise that Dioscorus was not found guilty of heresy. He was condemned for his conduct at the 449 Council and, refusing to attend the session where he was required to explain himself at Chalcedon, he was deprived of his See and sent into exile. Quite why he did not appear is not clear, but the consequences were fatal for his tenure of the See of Alexandria. Because of what happened next, the issue of his conduct and his beliefs became intertwined, and helped create a schism which has not healed to this day. Schisms but rarely happen as a one-off event. Chalcedon would become the focal point for the eventual schism, but the main issue would become the outcome of the on-going debate over what was and was not orthodox Christology.

The central part of the Council was the consideration of the Tome of Pope Leo. It is sometimes presented as though it were a synthesis of the Alexandrian and Antiochene views. The Oriental Orthodox, the descendants of those who rejected Chalcedon, tend to make noises about Leo’s Latin not being as flexible as the Greek. Both views give Leo little credit for a formula which has endured to this day.

Leo was the first Pope to be a considerable theologian, and we see a line of thinking in his Tome which reveals that. There is, as one might expect, a decisive rejection of Nestorius by emphasising that the Son is co-eternal with the Father – he is begotten, not made. But Leo went on to deal with a question that even today causes some to err. Jesus, as Paul emphasises, emptied himself to take on our humanity, but that did not mean, Leo argued, that he ceased to be God. Leo adopted Cyril’s language about Jesus having two natures, a human and a Divine nature, and he used Cyril’s formula of two natures in one Person. But those two natures were not intermingled, they did not create some kind of hybrid God-man who was half God and half man. Christ remained fully God and fully God; the two natures retained their distinctiveness in the One Person of Jesus, and they acted ‘in communion’ in him. The Divine nature did those things appropriate to it (such as performing miracles), while the human nature did likewise – suffering as men do, and dying as men do. The fact that there was one Person meant that each nature could be spoken about in terms of the other in a sharing of qualities or an interchange of properties – a communicatio idiomatum (communion of idioms). Thus one could say that the Son of Man came down from heaven and took flesh from the Virgin Mary.

It is worth giving the wording:

We, then, following the holy Fathers, all with one consent, teach men to confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in Godhead and also perfect in manhood; truly God and truly man, of a reasonable soul and body; consubstantial with us according to the manhood; in all things like unto us, without sin; begotten before all ages of the Father according to the Godhead, and in these latter days, for us and for our salvation, born of the virgin Mary, the mother of God, according to the manhood; one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person and one Subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son, and only begotten, God the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ, as the prophets from the beginning have declared concerning him, and the Lord Jesus Christ himself taught us, and the Creed of the holy Fathers has handed down to us.

The Creed is in line with the Nicene Creed, and affirms the pre-existence of Christ and His equality with Father; it also proclaims His perfect humanity and divinity.

The Tome was pored over and extensively discussed by the Bishops, and that needs to be noted; this was most certainly not a case of a Pope laying down the law and expecting everyone to follow suite. But then, except in anti-Catholic legend, the occasions upon which the Pope lays down the law as opposed to invites discussion, are vanishingly rare. Leo’s Tome set forth the Pope’s views, and when the Bishops finished their discussion it was clear that he agreed with Cyril’s Christology, and they were therefore happy to declare, as the record states that:‘Peter speaks through Leo.‘

Quite what that meant would be tested immediately. At the end of the Council, the Fathers had ratified a new canon, Canon 28, which, on the basis of what had been decided at the Council of Constantinople in 381, conceded to the See of Constantinople the second place in the Christian Church. This created an immediate crisis, and before returning to the more dramatic and long-term results of the Council, we must deal with the controversy caused by Canon 28.

The Road to Schism

16 Tuesday May 2017

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Diocorus had been Cyril’s secretary at Ephesus, and had been less than keen on the Formula of Union, thinking that it had conceded too much to the language of the Antiochenes.  As Theophilus and Cyril had before him, Dioscorus interfered in the affairs of the patrirch of Constantinople. In his case by supporting Eutyches, an archimandrate in Constantinople, who insisted on talking about the ‘one nature’ of Christ.

St Cyril had used the formula mia physis tou theou logou sesarkomene –  that is ‘the One nature of God the Word Incarnate’, and for Eutyches and Dioscorus what mattered was to stress the one nature of Christ. In a synod at Constantinople in 448 Eutyches was condemned for his heresy, but in 449, in at attempt to decided whether Eutyches had been wrongly condemned, Theodosius II had convened a Council at which Dioscorus had presided.

It was not, as we have seen, usual at this time for Popes either to summon or attend a Council, but, as at Ephesus, the Pope’s views had been sought, and Leo had sent a letter to the Constantinople hearing which he asked to be read at Ephesus (where the new Council was held in 449).  Leo’s Tome, to which we shall come in the final post on this subject, was an attempt by a gifted theologian to resolve the problems caused by the disputes. Dioscorus did not, however, allow Leo’s letter to be read, and concentrated on condemning the Constantinople decision. The Council found Eutyches orthodox and condemned the Patriarch, Flavian and those who had agreed with him. The Council was a resounding success for Alexandria. Dioscorus had, it seemed, succeeded beyond even the achievement of Cyril.

In fact Dioscorus had pushed matters too far. Flavian had put in an appeal to Leo, and protests against the overweening arrogance of Alexandria were now loud.  This was the third time in a century that Alexandria had asserted its ancient right to be regarded as the second patriarchate of Christendom by humiliating the upstarts of Constantinople. Theophilus had had St John Chrysostom condemned at the Synod of the Oak in 403, Cyril had done the same with Nestorius in 432, and now, it seemed, Disocorus had repeated their triumph. But where Rome had supported Theophilus and Cyril, Leo refused to recognise the results of the Council, calling it a ‘Robber Council’ . Whilst Theodosius II lived, Leo had made no headway in getting another one; that changed with his death. Pulcheria and Marcian convened a Council in Chaldedon, just across the Bosphorus from the imperial capital.

As Bishop of Rome, Leo, had been consulted by all parties, as Celestine I had been before Ephesus in 432; what did this imply in terms of the status of the Bishop of Rome? The difficulty here is the insistence of many chroniclers on interpreting it to fit their preconceived ideas: Roman Catholics would say it showed the authority of Rome was crucial; Orthodox historians would say it showed the Bishop should be consulted, but since he had not convened the Council, it showed he was not regarded as essential for its results to be accepted; and the Protestants? They have tended to ignore this period. In fact what the Council and its history showed was how the Papacy was developing. Athanasius, Theophilus and Cyril had all made sure they consulted Rome. The See of St Mark naturally looked to the See of St Peter – and beside that, both Sees had an interest in curbing the ambitions of Constinantinople. If Dioscorus thought that this would see him through, he was to find out otherwise at Chalcedon.