1

given straight off the place of a doctrinal ordinance, but the Conciliar-decree had proceeded from this letter; his dogmatic teaching was acknowledged, and in his address to the Council Marcian had given expression to this fact. The truth is that without the help of the Papal legates Marcian could not have effected anything. But the Church of the East had been deprived of its faith. The varig Quix, the natural union, was not mentioned; no one could any longer unhesitatingly teach that the God-Logos had taken up the human nature into the unity of his unique substance and made it the perfect organ of His deity. The construction of a Christology based on the God-Logos was severely shaken; the "two hypostases (dúo STOSTάGE) were not expressly condemned. In the "coming together" (Tρéxen) each nature continues to exist in its own mode of being; the divinity has not absorbed the humanity nor has the humanity been exalted to the height of the divinity, but the human and divine natures are simply united in the person of the Redeemer, and therefore only mediately and in an individual (individuum). No pious Greek who had had Athanasius and Cyril for his teachers could acknowledge that to be "the right mean"; it was not even a formula of compromise like that of the year 433; it was the abandonment of the work of developing the Christological formula strictly in accordance with soteriology. The latter itself now became uncertain. If humanity was not deified in Christ, but if in His case His humanity was merely united with the divinity by the prosopon or person, then what effect can a union such as that have for us? That formula can only be of advantage either to the detested "moralism" of the Antiochians, or to mysticism, which bases its hope of redemption on the idea that the God-Logos continually unites Himself anew with each individual soul so as to form a union. The four bald negative terms (arvyxúтws etc.,) which are supposed to express the whole truth, are in the view of the classical theologians amongst the Greeks, profoundly

In respect of its relation to the orthodox faith and of the fact that it owed its origin to the Emperor, the Chalcedonian Creed may be compared with the decrees of the last Councils of Constantius. It is true that orthodoxy afterwards found it easier to reconcile itself to the two natures than to the "likeness". Still perhaps it might have come to terms with the latter also.

irreligious. They are wanting in warm, concrete substance; of the bridge which his faith is to the believer, the bridge from earth to heaven, they make a line which is finer than the hair upon which the adherents of Islam one day hope to enter Paradise. One may indeed say that the Chalcedonian Creed preserved for the East the minimum of historical conception which the Church still possessed regarding the person of Christ, by cutting short the logical results of the doctrine of redemption, which threatened completely to destroy the Christ of the Gospels. But the Fathers who accepted the Creed did not think of that. They in fact accepted it under compulsion, and if they had thought of this, the price which they paid would have been too dear; for a theology which, in what is for it the most important of all questions, has recourse to mere negatives, is selfcondemned. Nor is it of any use to point to the fact that the Council merely gave the mystery a definite standing and thereby furthered the interests of the Greek Church and the Greek theology. The true mystery on the contrary was contained in the substantial union of the two natures themselves. It was seriously damaged by being banished from its place here, and when in place of it the conception of the union, a conception which was supposed at the same time to involve a state of separation, was raised to the position of the secret of faith. The real mystery was thus shoved aside by a pseudo-mystery which in truth no longer permitted theology to advance to the thought of the actual and perfect union. Monophysitism which holds to the statement that, without prejudice to the homoousia of the body of Christ with our body, the God-Logos made this body His own body and for this reason took it up into the unity of His substance, is without doubt the legitimate heir of the theology of Athanasius and the fitting expression of Greek Christianity. The proposition, however, which was

1

1 We can only adduce one consideration here, namely, that it was essential to this Christianity which had the New Testament beside it, that it should never, just because of this, develop in a logical way as a mystical doctrine of redemption. Understood in this sense no objection can be taken to the statement that the logical development of the monophysite faith even in its least extravagant form, was bound to come into conflict with certain elements of the ecclesiastical tradition, or with certain New Testament passages which could not be given up.

now to pass for orthodox, "each nature in communion with the other does what is proper to it," (agit utraque forma cum alterius communione, quod proprium est) actually makes two subjects out of one and betokens a lapse from the ancient faith. That the view we have here expressed is correct is attested by the previous history of the formula of the two natures and the one person. Up to this time scarcely anything had been known in the East of a "nature without hypostasis" (PSIS ÅVUTÓOTATOS), although the Antiochians had distinguished between us and pów. It is attested further by the melancholy proceedings at the Council itself, and, as will be shewn, it is attested above all by the history which follows. A formula was now introduced which could ultimately be traced to a legal source and which for that reason could be transformed into a philosophical-theological formula only by a scholastic.

At Chalcedon only a part of the deputation of monks who had approached the Council with the prayer that the ancient faith might not suffer harm, and also the majority of the Egyptian monks, remained firm. We cannot say, however, whether the action of the latter was an instance of the courage of faith. Their request that the Council should not compel them to accept the formula since in this case they would be killed after their return to Egypt, their despairing cry, "We shall be killed, if we subscribe Leo's epistle; we would rather be put to death here by you than there; have pity on us: we would rather die at the hands of the Emperor and at your hands than at home," proves that they were still more afraid of Coptic fanaticism than of the Emperor's police. They were allowed to postpone their subscription til a new bishop should be appointed to Alexandria, since they had explained that without a new bishop they could do nothing. They were not, however, to stir from Constantinople till then.

The Council was to be a Council of peace after the downfall of Dioscurus. All were pardoned, even Ibas himself, and on the other hand, the traitorous associates of Dioscurus at whose head stood Juvenal of Jerusalem. All were restored to their bishoprics so far as that was at all feasible. A series of Canons 1 See the proceedings of the fourth sitting.

was then issued dealing with the regulation of ecclesiastical matters. The seventeenth Canon asserted in a blunt fashion what was a fundamental Byzantine principle: "let the arrangement also of the ecclesiastical districts follow that of the civil and state places.” (τοῖς πολιτικοῖς καὶ δημοσίοις τόποις καὶ τῶν ἐκκλησιαστικῶν παροικιῶν ἡ τάξις ἀκολουθείτω). The twenty-eighth, under cover of an appeal to the third Canon' of 381, struck a blow at Rome by ordaining that the patriarch of Constantinople was to enjoy similar privileges to those possessed by the bishop of Rome, was to be second to him in rank, and was to get an enormous extension of his diocese-namely, over Pontus, Asia, and Thrace. The proceedings in connection with this matter do not belong to the history of dogma, although Leo combated the resolution with dogmatic arguments drawn from tradition. The Roman legates, we may note, entered their protest. The Emperor once more created for himself a patriarch primi ordinis, after that the patriarch of Alexandria had had to be overthrown, and it was the bishop of his own capital whom he put alongside of the Roman bishop. The Council had to ask the Pope to confirm the twenty-eighth Canon by way of return, as it was openly put, for the acknowledgment of his dogmatic letter in the East. But the Pope remained firm; his letters 104-107 prove that he had no intention of surrendering the grand success he had secured just in the East. A primacy of the East in Constantinople was the greatest possible danger, and for this reason Leo at once again took up the cause of the chairs of Alexandria and Antioch. In fact he now even shewed some hesitation in giving his approval of the resolutions of the great Councils generally, so that the Monophysites came to be

2

The Romans before this had no official knowledge whatever of this Canon, and in praxi it had not been entirely enforced, even in the East itself, as the Robber-Synod shews.

2 Leo, ep. 98. The letter is full of flattery of the Pope; see c. I. It follows too from the formally very submissive epistle of Anatolius to Leo (ep. 101) that an attempt had been made to induce Leo by flattery to acknowledge the 28th Canon. We gather from Marcian's epistle to Leo (ep. 100) that the Emperor considered that Canon as the most important ordinance of the Council together with the doctrinal decision. For details see Kattenbusch, op. cit. I., p. 87 ff., where the Canons 9 and 17 are discussed.

under the pleasing delusion that he was inclined to side with them. (!) He soon entirely broke with Anatolius and entered into negotiations with the new bishop of Alexandria (ep. 129) and with the bishop of Antioch (ep. 119) whose position in their patriarchates he sought to strengthen, and whom he begged to send him more frequently information regarding their affairs that he might be able to render them assistance. Soon, however, the Constantinopolitan bishop Anatolius found himself in such a difficult position owing to the new dogmatic controversies, that he preferred to shelve the Canon complained of and once more to seek the friendship of Leo which he did indeed

secure.

§3. The Monophysite Controversies and the Fifth Council.

2

1. The severest condemnation of the Chalcedonian Creed as decree wrung from the Eastern Churches, is to be found in the history of the next 68 years. These years are not only marked by the most frightful revolts on the part of the populace and the monks, particularly in Egypt, Palestine, and a part of Syria, but also by the attempts of the Emperors to get rid of the decree which had been issued with a definite end in view, and which was a source of difficulty and threatened the security

1 See ep. 110; the approval followed in ep. 114, with certain reservations because of Canon 28; see ep. 115-117.

2 The enormous and varied documentary material is given only in part in Mansi VII-IX. The Pope's letters are in Thiel, 1867. Much new in Mai's Script. Vet. Nova Coll.; Joh. of Ephesus (Monophysite) hist. eccl., German translation by Schönfelder, 1862, something different in Land, Anecd. Syr. Information regarding further sources in Möller, Monophysiten (R.-Encykl. X.) and Loofs, Leontius, 1887, (Texte u. Unters. III. 1, 2). Accounts by Tillemont, Gibbon, Walch, Schröckh, Hefele, Dorner, Baur, cf. the articles on the subject by Möller, Gass, and Hauck in the R.-Encykl.: in the same place the special literature in connection with the Theopaschitian, Tritheistic, and Origenist controversies and that of the Three Chapters. The special investigations, however, which had been carried on up till the beginning of the 18th century have rarely been resumed in recent times, but see Gieseler, Comment., qua Monophys. opin. illustr., 2 parts, 1835, 1838; Krüger, Monophys. Streitigkeiten, 1884 and Loofs, op. cit.; Kleyn, Bijdrage tot de Kerkgeschiedenis van het Oosten gedurende de zesde Eeuw, 1891 (from the chronicle of Dionysius of Tellmahre, who made extracts from the Church History of John of Ephesus. Kleyn gives the portions referring to the 6th century; they are identical with the