Friedrich Loofs

“ Nestorius then sent for Cyril's clerical agents and asked them to explain the situation. But these, to use Nestorius' own words, were annoyed and said to me: What, you admit an accusation against the patriarch of Alexandria and do not at once condemn the accusers as calumniators without trial? ... We contest your right and with good ground; for that would be a dangerous encouragement of accusers, while it will be a profit to you to keep him (Cyril) as your good friend and not to turn him, who is famous because of his importance and who is among the great, into an enemy. ”

“ And now I am already on the point to depart, and daily I pray to God to dismiss me—me whose eyes have seen his salvation. Farewell Desert, my friend, mine upbringer and my place of sojourning, and thou Exile, my mother, who after my death shalt keep my body until the resurrection comes in the time of God's pleasure! Amen.
We knew previously that Nestorius had to endure many sufferings during his exile. Evagrius, as I said above, hands down to us fragments of two letters of Nestorius to the governor of Thebais [34] . ”

“ Nestorius knew of course that Apollinaris, differing from the Arians, regarded the pre-existent Son of God, following the decree of the Nicene synod, as ὁμοούσιος τῷ πατρί, and, at least in the second period of his development, conceded that this λόγος took on a human body with a soul [23] ; but he was right in minimising this difference. Here and there, he argued, the peculiar human nature of Christ became perfect only when the Logos was added to it, neither here nor there is Christ a real man as we [24] ; and with acute perception he brings to light the weakness of Apollinaris' theory. ”

“ But if one keeps in mind that Nestorius rejected the idea of a substantial union which would include an alteration of the Logos, then one must say that he came as near as possible to the idea of a union. Where a substantial union is excluded, there the union can only come about on a spiritual plane. ”

“ But how can the Logos himself have the form of a servant if he did not have the human nature? An answer may be found in the following words of Nestorius: God the Logos is said to have become flesh and son of man as regards the form and the πρόσωπον of the flesh and of the man, of which he made use in order to make himself known to the world [94] . ”

“ Thus, if we are interested by what the Treatise of Heraclides teaches us about the life of Nestorius, in no less a degree ought our interest to be awakened by what we learn about his doctrine.
As early as about 440 Socrates the church-historian defended, with the impartiality which distinguished him, his contemporary Nestorius against the grave misrepresentation to which his doctrine was exposed. People, as he says [39] , thought that Nestorius regarded the Lord as a mere human being, as did Paul of Samosata and Photinus. ”

“ And is it still possible to say that Christ was a man as we are, if the human nature existed in him only as assumed in the ὑπόστασις of the Logos and as having become his human nature? Nestorius is quite right in reproaching Cyril that his doctrine resulted in a suppression of the manhood of Christ, for, according to Cyril's doctrine, the human intellect of Christ cannot be realised as operating in him [38] . The Christ of Cyril, as Nestorius rightly observed, did not think with the intellect of manhood, but with the intellect of the God-Logos ”

“ But after the incarnation, the Trinity is the triad of the merely spiritual Father, of the crucified (i.e. the Logos united with human flesh, soul and intellect) , and of the Spirit [134] . This understanding of the Trinity is represented by the terrible mediaeval pictures of the Trinity which show an old man holding tip the Crucifix by the arms of the cross with a dove hovering above. That is certainly not the one God of the Christian belief! Nestorius, like Augustine, was convinced that the opera trinitatis sunt indivisa [135] . ”

“ Here, I am afraid, I cannot agree with Professor Bethune-Baker, however much I sympathise with him in his doing justice to the miserable exile of Oasis.
First, it must be emphasised that πρόσωπον is for Nestorius not the same as what we call person. For our notion of person the main thing is the oneness of the subject or of the internal self. We can, therefore, use the term person only for rational beings or at least those living beings, in which—as in the case of the higher animals—we see some analogy to human thinking, feeling and willing. ”

“ From that time forth one could speak in ecclesiastical phraseology of the holy ecumenical council of Ephesus, which had condemned Nestorius. Nestorius could have accepted the confession of faith on which the union was based. It was, therefore, really tragic that the anathema against him was the price of the peace. He was now also robbed of his former friends, and there cannot be the least doubt that for this painful experience, too, he had to thank Saint Cyril.
5
The last act of our tragedy may be treated shortly, but it stretches over a much longer period than any of the others. ”

“ Afterwards in a sermon, which cannot be dated, but was certainly delivered before the spring of 430, he was able to say: I have already repeatedly declared that if any one of you or any one else be simple and has a preference for the term θεοτόκος, then I have nothing to say against it—only do not make a Goddess of the virgin [20] . And even before the letter of John of Antioch mentioned above Nestorius came to an understanding with his clergy about the necessary use and meaning of the term θεοτόκος [21] . ”

“ He himself thought that the union of the Godhead and manhood will become intelligible if understood as a reciprocity of two personal actions, viz. a creative action on the part of the eternal Godhead and a receiving action on the part of the developing manhood [145] . If thus justice is done to the idea of the unity of the natures in one person, then Nestorius, too, made it intelligible, even where he, dealing with the Logos on the one side and the man on the other, tries to understand the union as the result of the incarnation. ”

“ But even if the ground of his misfortune were to be found here, his life should nevertheless be called a tragedy, for his sufferings would have been too harsh a punishment. We can, however, hardly assume that the characteristics we discussed were the cause of Nestorius' unhappy fate. For he enjoyed the favour of the court as long as he lived in Constantinople and even longer, and his enemies never pretended, as far as I know, that his guilt rested in his personal character.
His enemies condemned him for his teaching. It is, therefore, his teaching that we must examine. ”

“ One place in the Treatise of Heraclides is very characteristic in this respect. Here Nestorius is asking Cyril: Which of the natures do you think is without πρόσωπον, that of the Godhead or that of the manhood? Then you will no longer be able to say that the God-Logos was flesh and that the flesh was Son [62] . That is: if you think the Godhead without πρόσωπον then there will be lacking the form of appearance which the manhood could take on, and if the manhood, then the form of appearance of the flesh which the Logos could take on. ”

“ As a shibboleth of their Cyrillian-Chalcedonian orthodoxy, the Scythian monks used the phrase: ἕνα τῆς ἁγίας τριάδος πέπονθε σαρκί, and this phrase was really characteristic. For, like Cyril, it makes the Logos the subject even of the sufferings, while by the addition of σαρκί, which naturally was not uncyrillian, it was asserted, that the natures were not mixed through the union; and to some extent justice was done also to Leo's letter, which contended that it was the human nature which suffered. The Antiochian tradition naturally was considered to be insupportable by this new orthodoxy. ”

“ Often the providence of the Saviour brings it about that little things cause a synod to be held, through which His church is purified. But even if others and honourable men should accuse me on his instigation—that wretched man shall not hope that he can be my judge. I will withstand him, if I come thither, and it is he who shall answer for error [28] . Nevertheless Cyril says in a following section of this letter preserved only in its Latin text: If he professes the right faith, then shall be made the most perfect and firmest peace. ”

“ Apollinaris of Laodicea is well known to have taught that a real incarnation and a real unity of the historical person of Christ was only intelligible, if the Logos took on himself not a perfect man, that is body and animal soul and intellectual soul or intellect, but joined himself with a human body and a human soul in such a manner that he himself became the intellect, the moving principle, in the new and united being. ”

“ The divine Logos, he thinks, who naturally has his ὑπόστασις or is an ὑπόστασις, remained the one and the same that he was before the incarnation, also after having assumed human nature. He took in his ὑπόστασις a human body, soul and intellect as his own body, soul and intellect, so that his human nature had, therefore, no ὑπόστασις. Christ's human nature was, according to Cyril, nothing more than all the human characteristics taken as a whole, which the λόγος σεσαρκωμένος had as such. It existed, so to speak, before the incarnation as the nature or substance of the human race ”

“ Like Marcell us, the Sardicense declares that the term πρωτότοκος, if used of Christ, is applied to him as to the new creature, i.e. as to the beginner of the new humanity [106] . Like Marcellus, it understands the eternity of the Logos, not as Origen did as an eternal existence beside God the Father, but as the eternal existence in him up to the time when he issued from God [107] . Like Marcellus, the Sardicense contends that God and his Logos have one ὑπόστασις [108] . Like Marcellus, it identifies the λόγος ἄσαρκος and the Spirit of God [109] ”

“ May we now realise that, nevertheless, in the personal character of Nestorius are to be found the grounds for the tragic course of his life? It is intelligible that a man with such characteristics was not exactly suited to the taste of the court and especially of the circle of that most pious lady, the Augusta Pulcheria ”

“ He thinks it must suffice to group together what is homogeneous [84] . I cannot share this sceptical attitude—in the course of my research into the history of dogma I have become increasingly more convinced of the influence of tradition—, and the very kinships assumed here by my honoured teacher and friend do not seem to me to be the right ones [85] . In my opinion the supposition that there was a kinship in tradition between the Antiochian and the western christology seems to be unavoidable because of the close resemblance of the views and the formulas. ”

“ Likewise, however, as the Logos did not become man by nature, so also the manhood in Christ is not deified by nature. He who had a beginning, grew and was made perfect, so Nestorius often declares with Gregory of Nazianzen, is not God by nature, although he is called so on account of the manifestation which took place gradually [103] . He is God by manifestation because he was man by nature [104] . As regards the manhood he is not divine by nature but by manifestation [105] . ”

“ The second side of the idea we are discussing, viz. that the manhood in Christ shows itself in the form of God, is already partly explained by the preceding quotations, as they assert that it was the Logos who was to be seen in the man. But we need to have a clearer understanding of this second side of the idea also. Because the Logos manifested himself in the form of servant, the man appeared in the form of God. No one ever saw before that a man in his own πρόσωπον made use of the πρόσωπον of God [98] . ”

“ But already before the end of Nestorius' first year of office, the controversy began. Nestorius asserts in the Treatise of Heraclides in just the same manner as in a letter of December 430 to John of Antioch and in his Tragedy, that he was not its beginner—he had found a quarrel over the question as to whether Mary was to be called θεοτόκος or ἀνθρωποτόκος, when he arrived at Constantinople, and in order to settle it, he had suggested the term χριστοτόκος [7] . ”

“ Hence it may be explained, that in some places he says: the Logos took on flesh, and in others: God joined a man to his Logos. This latter phrase, it is true, is less often used than the other, but nevertheless it does occur [87] . And it is not this phrase alone which shows resemblance to Nestorius' doctrine; it is also said by Marcellus, that the man joined to the Logos became son of God by adoption (θέσει) [88] , and we even find in him the idea, that this man joined to the Logos [89] , after having been exalted, became σύνθρονος τῷ θεῷ [90] . ”

“ The christology of Paul of Samosata, as to itself, is considered by him to be an advanced form of the christology of Hermas and the so-called Monarchians of Rome [82] . Between Tertullian's doctrine of two natures in Christ, however, and the doctrine of the Monarchians he sees no connection; he looks upon Tertullian's doctrine, in so far as it goes farther than Irenaeus on whose works Tertullian was dependent, as formulated by Tertullian himself and influenced by Gnostic ideas [83] . ”

“ The Syriac translator remarks in his preface that Heraclides was a noble and educated man living in the neighbourhood of Damascus, and that Nestorius puts this name in the title of his book because he feared that his own name would prevent people from reading it [24] . The Syriac translator therefore had already found the title Treatise of Heraclides in his Greek original. He does not seem to have known anything about the meaning of this title. The vague remarks he makes about Heraclides tell nothing more than anyone might guess without his help. ”

“ La divinité se sert du prosôpon de l'humanité et l'humanité de celui de la divinité; de cette manière nous disons un seul prosôpon pour les deux.—B. 340 = N. 218: Ne comprends tu pas, comment les pères confessent un prosôpon de deux natures? et que les différences des natures ne sont pas supprimées à cause de l'union parce qu'elles se réunissent en un seul prosôpon, qui appartient aux natures et aux prosôpons.—We need however, a more exhaustive examination of Nestorius' terminology, especially of the meaning of πρόσωπον in his works. ”

“ Also in the Treatise of Heraclides Nestorius writes as one who is conscious of being unjustly condemned and wrongly delivered over to the intrigues of the unscrupulous Cyril. But he does not make pretentious claims for his person or hope for another turn of his fortune. He has no more interest in the world. ”

“ Cyril's letter to the Egyptian monks in which, about Easter 429, without mentioning Nestorius, he began to oppose his doctrine, really may have been brought forth by the party-difference alone. In Constantinople, too, in the very beginnings of Nestorius' time as bishop, there certainly were theologians and laymen who opposed his teaching for no other reason than because they were adherents of a different theological tradition. I leave, therefore, the question undecided as to whether the supplement-letter of Cyril to his agents was earlier than his first letter to Nestorius or not. ”

“ Even if some other parts were added to the apparatus of flesh, soul, intellect, energy, will, which was regarded as composing the human nature, it would not have mattered, since the Cyrillian doctrine had won the victory, and since there existed now in the East a theology which was able to master difficult formulas by means of scholastic distinctions and arguments.
Also the Occident, as far as it belonged to the East-Roman Empire, Rome included, had had to accept the Cyrillian-Chalcedonian orthodoxy of the council of 553 ”