Nestorius

Nestorius came out of the Antiochene school, a monk and celebrated preacher, and was plucked from Antioch by the emperor Theodosius II in 428 to be Archbishop of Constantinople. Within months he had made the quarrel that consumed him. His chaplain, and then Nestorius himself, preached against the popular title Theotokos, Bearer of God, for the Virgin Mary: God, he argued, was not born, did not nurse and did not die, and the title confused the divine nature with the human; better to say Christotokos, Bearer of Christ, naming the one person in whom both natures met. Constantinople's monks and people, devoted to the title, heard blasphemy, and Cyril, the formidable Patriarch of Alexandria, heard opportunity.

The paper war that followed drew in Rome and ended at the Council of Ephesus in 431. Cyril opened proceedings before the Antiochene bishops arrived; Nestorius, deposed and anathematized by a council he refused to attend, was returned first to his monastery and then exiled to the Great Oasis of the Egyptian desert. He lived long enough to read the Tome of Leo and to believe, bitterly, that the council of Chalcedon in 451 had vindicated much of what he meant, and died about that year, the first great heresiarch of the imperial church whose fall was engineered as much by politics as by doctrine.

The doctrine condemned under Nestorius's name holds that in Christ two natures, divine and human, subsist so distinctly as to verge on two persons or two sons joined by conjunction rather than union. Whether Nestorius taught that is a separate question. His slogans were harsher than his theology; his concern, inherited from the Antiochene school of Theodore of Mopsuestia, was to keep the sufferings of the man Jesus from being predicated crudely of God. In 1889 his own late apologia, hidden for centuries under the pseudonym Heracleides and preserved in Syriac, was rediscovered, and its publication launched a scholarly rehabilitation: many modern readers find in the Bazaar a Christology reconcilable with Chalcedon's two natures in one person, and conclude that Nestorius was condemned for a doctrine more extreme than his own.

The condemnation had one vast institutional consequence. The Church of the East, centered in the Persian empire beyond Roman reach, honored the Antiochene teachers, Theodore above all, refused the anathemas of Ephesus, and was branded Nestorian by its western rivals, a label it wore through its medieval expansion along the Silk Road to India and China and never chose for itself. Its modern successor, the Assyrian Church of the East, venerates Nestorius among its Greek teachers while insisting, with most modern scholarship, that its faith is not the two sons caricature the name came to mean.