"Shade of Ananias! What might not this 'unrivaled ' leader of Christian thought have discovered, if he had just kept on traveling south!"

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CHAPTER 28

THE NESTORIAN HERESY AND THE THIRD COUNCIL

AND now," continued Granger, "we come to the third council.

"The history of the third and fourth ecumenical councils, those of Ephesus in 431 and Chalcedon in 451, covering a period of twenty years, forms a somewhat connected narrative which to me is even more interesting and significant than that of the council of Nice. Its bearing on the questions we are considering is so important that I am going to give it to you somewhat in detail, in order to show you the more clearly the character and methods of the men who fixed the leading dogmas of the creed that fetter the thought of Christendom to this day. In general it may be said that the council of Nice formulated the creed, the council of Constantinople revised and extended it, and the councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon interpreted it; and the dogmas were more or less elaborated during succeeding centuries.

In the third and fourth councils, as in the first two, Arianism was at the bottom of much or most of the trouble. It was still the great question of the nature of Jesus; the question whether, though called the Son of God, he was practically the equal of God in point of age, power, and all essential attributes. To go back a little, Nestorius-the notable character in the era of the third and fourth councils-became bishop of Constantinople in 428, having been called from Antioch by the Emperor Theodosius II. The Roman Empire, you will remember, had been permanently divided in 395, and Theodosius was now Emperor of the East, with Constantinople as his capital, while Valentinian III ruled the West, with Ravenna, not Rome, as his capital. Nestorius was an inveterate hater of heretics. In one of his first sermons as bishop he exhorted Theodosius to support him in stamping out heresy, promising in return to give the Emperor heaven and to stand by him in his contest with the Persians.

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"Nestorius was especially bitter against the Arians. But in his zeal he overshot his mark and soon found himself charged with heresy. One of his favorite priests preached a sermon in which he declared that no one should presume to call Mary the Mother of God, for Mary was but a human being, and that God should be born of a human being is impossible.'

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This statement was promptly endorsed by Nestorius and boldly preached as the true doctrine. Nestorius affirmed that to call Mary the mother of God was 'to justify the follies of the pagans, who attribute mothers to their gods'; and that Jesus was really two persons, one divine and the other human, and that the Virgin was the mother of the man Jesus merely, in whom the son of God dwelt. Such doctrine as this was, in the eyes of many, insolent impiety, and roused the faithful to wrath and consternation. Bishop Saint Cyril of Alexandria held a council and called upon Nestorius to anathematize his late teachings; whereupon Nestorius replied by anathematizing Cyril. When some of the monks and other clergy at Constantinople questioned Nestorius about his orthodoxy, he is said to have had them beaten and imprisoned.

"The following of Nestorius grew rapidly, chiefly through his own writings. Secure in the favor of the Emperor, he fearlessly pursued his vigorous onslaught on the current interpretation of the orthodox creed, notwithstanding the condemnation of his views by councils at Rome and Alexandria. Finally the dispute waxed so fierce that both parties besought the Emperor to call a general council to settle it. The result was the council at Ephesus in 431, with more than two hundred bishops in attendance. Theodosius wrote a special letter to Augustine, urging him to come, but Augustine was dead before the letter reached him. Before the sessions of the council began Nestorius is reported to have said that he 'could not call an infant two or three months old God, or bring himself to adore a sucking-child.'

"Remember that it was the bishop of Constantinople, 'the New Rome,' the rival of old Rome for supremacy in the Christian world, who four hundred years after Christ held and taught these views of Jesus's nature and ridiculed the now current and orthodox doctrine, and that he had a large, highly respectable, and influential following.

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Against the protests of Nestorius and sixty-eight bishops, the council went into session while yet Bishop John of Antioch-near Palestine again, you see-with a large party of Nestorians had not arrived. When the council convened, 'the holy Gospels were placed in the midst of the assembly, signifying the presence of Christ himself."' Nestorius, summoned by the council to appear before it, sent word that he 'would come if he judged it necessary'; but he did not come. Passages from his works were read before the assembly, and were declared by the fathers to be 'horrible blasphemies,' and they cried out 'anathema to the heretic Nestorius and to all who refuse to anathematize him.' Thereupon the council passed sentence upon him in these words:

"Our Lord Jesus Christ, whom Nestorius hath blasphemed, hath declared by this holy synod that he is deprived of all episcopal dignity, and cut off from all part in the priesthood and from every ecclesiastical assembly.'

"You see the bishops were not at all backward about claiming divine authority; no more so, indeed, than later prelates, both Catholic and Protestant, the claim of exclusive truth being, of course, then as now, in every case the absolutely necessary basis of action.

"Both Nestorius and his opponents sent accounts of the doings of the council to the Emperor, who at first sided with Nestorius, but afterwards against him. Meantime John and twenty-seven other bishops arrived, and the friends of Nestorius thereupon held a 'pseudo '-councilthat is, a bolting' council whose acts were not afterwards ratified and incorporated in the church code. The 'pseudo'council, numbering about forty members-quite a large minority-condemned the proceedings of the regular council, deposed Saint Cyril and Memnon, the chief opponents of Nestorius, and cut off the remaining two hundred bishops from communion. Then the two hundred got together again and cut off John and the rest of the pseudos. Next, the representative of the Emperor took both Saint Cyril and Nestorius into custody and vainly strove to reconcile the two wrathful factions.

"A remarkable performance this the secular power stepping in and arresting the leaders of these two parties, comprising the chief bishops of Christendom, while they were endeavoring, by the then current modes of theological

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argument and persuasion, to discover and formulate the divine, eternal truth about the nature of Jesus, and to decide the abstruse theologico-metaphysical question whether the God-nature as well as the, apparently, human body of Jesus, was born of a virgin who had been 'overshadowed' by the Holy Ghost merely;—a performance the more remarkable because, according to the express declaration of the two hundred, it was Christ himself who was settling these questions, using the council simply as a mouthpiece.

"Thus the two parties wrangled and see-sawed for over two months. At last, seeing that the bishops, with all their Apostolic succession, their divine guidance, and their theological lore, were drifting farther and farther apart and into deeper and deeper depths of religious wrath and frenzy, the Emperor felt compelled to interfere again. So he called a delegation of each faction to meet him at Chalcedon, and the result of the five days' conference, and of the influence of his sister, was that he decided to sustain the majority. Nestorius was deposed and sent back to his monastery at Antioch; and Bishop John and the other Nestorians, seeing the strong arm of secular power lifted against them, speedily abjured their heresy. The Nestorian heresy, however, proved as tenacious of life as its Arian predecessor, and led indirectly to the summoning of the fourth great council at Chalcedon in 451.

But that is rather a long story itself, so we will leave it till another time.

"Let me add here, however, a few more words about the later history of Nestorianism. It has a bearing on the main question, the truth of Christian doctrine. After its condemnation and attempted suppression in the Roman Empire, Nestorianism continued to flourish and spread to the east. Successful missionary work was carried on in Persia, Syria, Arabia, India, and even China. The Mongolians and Arabs treated the banished heretics with great favor. Under Mohammedan rule-among the followers of the False Prophet'-the Nestorians enjoyed not merely freedom of worship but civil and political rights, including appointment to high political offices-freedom and human rights denied them by the 'orthodox' church and the 'most Christian' rulers of Europe. Nestorianism was made the national religion of Persia. In the twelfth century the sect

numbered about 150 bishops, but it has been greatly reduced by destructive wars and by a great schism in the sixteenth century-the same century that witnessed the 'Reformation' schism in the Roman church.

"Now, reasoning from their later history, what ground is there for supposing that there is anything inherently weak or false in the Nestorianism' more than in the Catholic and Protestant orthodox'ism'? Each flourished under the fostering care of secular power, and each was subject to disruption and decline.

"See what 'orthodox' Christianity has suffered at the hands of its great rival, the religion founded by the 'False Prophet' Mohammed. Springing up in the seventh century, Islam rapidly conquered a great part of Christendom. Allen speaks of the 'powerful and superb ... Moorish kingdom of Granada, which for about four centuries was far in advance of Christian Europe in science and refinement.' And Seebohm says that at the time of the Protestant Reformation the Mohammedan religion, though only half as old Christianity, was thought to number many times as many adherents as there were Christians, and covered a much larger area than Christendom.' Indeed, at the time of the Reformation the area which the Mohammedan power had conquered from Christendom was nearly if not quite equal to the area still left to Roman Christendom; and in the area that had succumbed to the 'False Prophet' were included the two great early rivals of Rome for supremacy in the Christian world, Alexandria and Constantinople.'

CHAPTER 29

THE EUTYCHEAN HERESY AND THE FOURTH COUNCIL

"EUTYCHES," Granger resumed upon the next Sunday evening, "the aged abbot of a large monastery near Constantinople, whom Pope Leo the Great, his contemporary, calls 'equally imprudent and ignorant,' undertook to refute the Nestorian heresy, which asserted two natures for Jesus. But in his zeal Eutyches too, like Nestorius, overleaped the bounds, and tumbled headlong into the heretical notion that Jesus had but one nature; that God and man were