The Hypostatic Union: Nestorianism and the Church

The Nestorian heresy, which denied the personal unity of Christ, grew out of the Christological teaching of Diodorus of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia — the latter sometimes called “a Nestorius before Nestorius.” Nestorianism was anathematized by the Third Ecumenical Council held at Ephesus, A.D. 431. Among its most prominent champions were Theodoret of Cyrus and Ibas of Edessa, whose writings, together with excerpts from Theodore of Mopsuestia, were later condemned by the Fifth Ecumenical Council of Constantinople (A.D. 553) under the name of the “Three Chapters.”

Nestorius’s Teaching

Nestorius, a Syrian by birth, became Patriarch of Constantinople in 428 and at once began to disseminate, with great obstinacy, the Christological heresies of his master Theodore. The teaching can be summarized in four claims. First, Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of Mary, is a different person from the Divine Logos or Son of God — as there are two distinct natures in Christ, so, on this view, there are two distinct persons, one divine, one human. Second, these two persons are nonetheless intimately united, the Logos indwelling the man Jesus as in a temple; by this indwelling the man Jesus becomes a “God-bearer” (theophoros), or God only in a figurative sense — much as Moses was called “the god of Pharaoh.” Third, it follows that the Logos is united to the man Jesus not by a real, physical union, but by a merely external, accidental, moral union — so that the Incarnation must be understood not as God assuming manhood, but simply as the Logos indwelling the man Jesus. Fourth, it follows further that Mary is not “Mother of God” (theotokos) but merely mother of a man (anthropotokos), properly called “Mother of Christ” (christotokos); the title “Mother of God” applies to her, if at all, only metaphorically, insofar as she is “God-receiving” — mother of the theophoros. Nestorius did speak of this synthesis as “one person” (hen prosopon), but meant by it one merely moral or juridical person composed of two distinct hypostases — as is clear from his consistent rejection of the phrase “one hypostasis.”¹

St. Cyril’s Response and the Council of Ephesus

As St. Athanasius had defended orthodoxy against Arianism, and St. Augustine against Pelagianism, so St. Cyril of Alexandria waged the Church’s battle against Nestorius. Bardenhewer judges that “if we except Athanasius, none of the other Greek Fathers exercised so far-reaching an influence on ecclesiastical doctrine as Cyril; and if we except Augustine, there is none among all the other Fathers whose works have been adopted so extensively by ecumenical councils as a standard expression of Christian faith.”² Commissioned by Pope Celestine I to preside over the Third General Council of Ephesus (A.D. 431), Cyril saw his twelve anathematisms against Nestorius approved by the Council as articles of faith; Nestorius himself was deposed and excommunicated.³

The word theotokos, so bitterly opposed by the Nestorians, became the watchword of orthodoxy — expressing the true doctrine of Christ’s Person as pregnantly as the Nicene homoousion had expressed the true doctrine of His Divinity. Cyril’s first anathematism reads: “If any one do not confess that Emmanuel is truly God and that, therefore, the Holy Virgin is the Mother of God — for she gave birth, according to the flesh, to the Word of God made flesh — let him be anathema.” The second, without formally defining the union’s mode, already describes it as hypostatic: “If any one do not confess that the Word of God the Father is hypostatically united to the flesh, and that Christ is one with His own flesh, alike God and man, let him be anathema.” The remaining ten anathematisms condemn the Nestorian errors in further detail.

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