The Council of Ephesus

The council of 431 is the least edifying of the ancient councils and among the most consequential. Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople, had objected to calling Mary Theotokos, God-bearer, preferring Christotokos, on the ground that a creature cannot be the source of divinity. Cyril of Alexandria read this as dividing Christ into two subjects, a man in whom God dwelt rather than God made flesh, and pressed the case at Rome and at court.

When the bishops assembled at Ephesus, Cyril did not wait. The Syrian bishops sympathetic to Nestorius were delayed on the road, and Cyril opened the council without them, over the protest of the imperial commissioner, condemned and deposed Nestorius within a day. The Syrians arrived, constituted a council of their own, and deposed Cyril in turn. Both parties appealed to the emperor, who initially arrested both and eventually confirmed Cyril's side, partly through the persuasion of substantial gifts distributed at court, which Cyril's own correspondence records.

The doctrinal outcome was the confirmation of Theotokos and the deposition of Nestorius, and two years later a Formula of Reunion patched up relations between Cyril and the Syrian bishops on wording that conceded something to each. The procedural outcome was a demonstration that a council could be won by arriving first, which the next generation did not forget.

The churches of the Persian empire never accepted the condemnation of Nestorius. Lying outside Roman territory and under a rival power, they were not bound by an imperial confirmation and had reason not to appear to be. The Church of the East honours Nestorius among its teachers, uses a Christological vocabulary of two natures and two hypostases in one person, and has been called Nestorian by outsiders for fifteen centuries.

The label is one this atlas avoids as a name for the church, and the reason is not politeness. Modern study of the actual writings, including a work of Nestorius recovered in Syriac in the twentieth century, has substantially complicated the picture of what he taught, and the Christology of the Church of the East developed on its own lines rather than as an elaboration of his. Members of that church do not use the term of themselves.

The point is more general and it applies across this atlas. Councils name their opponents, and the names stick to communities that had no part in choosing them. Monophysite, Nestorian and heretic are all conciliar vocabulary, all describe living churches, and none of them is neutral. A Common Christological Declaration signed in 1994 between the Catholic Church and the Assyrian Church of the East states that both confess the same faith in Christ, which is a substantial judgment on how much of the original quarrel was about words.