Keeping the Two Distinct

Antiochene exegesis grew up arguing against Alexandria's allegory, and its preferred method stayed close to a text's plain historical sense: what did this passage mean to the people who first wrote and first heard it, before asking what it might mean spiritually for a later reader. Diodore of Tarsus and his student Theodore of Mopsuestia built a substantial body of commentary and catechetical teaching on that discipline, treating scripture's literal, historical meaning as the secure foundation any further theological reading had to respect rather than pass over.

That same instinct for keeping things properly distinct carried into Antiochene Christology. Where Alexandria stressed the single united reality of the incarnate Christ, Antiochene theologians worried that too tight a union risked blurring exactly what needed to stay distinct, the full and unimpaired divinity and the full and unimpaired humanity, each preserved in its own integrity rather than dissolved into an undifferentiated mixture. Theodore's language for the union, though debated in its precise meaning ever since, leaned toward describing two complete natures joined in a single prosopon, a single presented reality, without allowing either nature to lose what made it what it was. It was this same concern for preserving the distinction that Theodore's own student, Nestorius, would carry into Constantinople and into the controversy that made his name a byword for the position Ephesus condemned.