The Second Council of Constantinople

By the middle of the sixth century, the Christological settlement reached at Chalcedon in 451 had failed to hold the church together. Miaphysite Christians, concentrated in Egypt, Syria and Armenia, rejected Chalcedon's formula of two natures in one person as a concession to Nestorianism, the condemned teaching that divided Christ into two separate persons, divine and human. Justinian, ruling an empire that still contained large Miaphysite populations he needed to reconcile, sought a way to affirm Chalcedon while distancing it from anything that could be read as Nestorian.

His solution was to condemn three specific bodies of writing, the so called Three Chapters: the person and work of Theodore of Mopsuestia, a theologian whose language on Christ's two natures Miaphysites read as crypto-Nestorian; certain polemical writings of Theodoret of Cyrus directed against Cyril of Alexandria, the Miaphysites' own theological authority; and a letter attributed to Ibas of Edessa that likewise drew Miaphysite objection. None of the three had been condemned at Chalcedon itself, so Justinian reasoned that removing them would strip away exactly the material Miaphysites found objectionable without touching Chalcedon's own decrees.

Pope Vigilius had been summoned, in effect brought under guard, to Constantinople years before the council met, and his relationship with Justinian through the whole affair was one of pressure rather than partnership. Vigilius resisted condemning the Three Chapters for years, worried that doing so would look like a retroactive attack on Chalcedon itself and would alienate Western bishops who saw no need to revisit a settlement they considered closed, and he was not present at the council's sessions when it finally opened in 553. Under continued pressure from Justinian after the council concluded its work, he eventually issued his own condemnation of the Three Chapters and accepted the council's decisions, a reversal that cost him support among Western bishops, some of whom broke communion with Rome over it in a schism that lingered in parts of northern Italy for more than a century.

The reconciliation with the Miaphysites that Justinian had hoped the council would produce did not materialize. Miaphysite church leadership in Egypt and Syria had by this point developed its own independent hierarchy and had little incentive to accept a settlement engineered from Constantinople, and the same churches, now generally called Oriental Orthodox, remain out of communion with the churches that accept Chalcedon and this council to the present day.