Justified True Belief

(●) The bishop of Constantinople who would not call Mary the Mother of God, and lost a church over one word. + In the spring of 428 the emperor Theodosius II went shopping for a preacher. The clergy of Constantinople had fallen out among themselves over who should have the see, which is the old word for a bishop’s chair and for the district he governs from it, and in this case it meant the church of the empire’s capital. Rather than let the local factions settle it, the emperor sent to Antioch for a monk with a famous voice, and got Nestorius. Three years later Nestorius was deposed by a council he refused to attend, and within a decade his books were being burned by imperial order. The word at the centre of it all was a single Greek title, Theotokos, "God-bearer," which Christians had been giving to Mary for a century or more. He thought it was dangerous. He suggested Christotokos, "Christ-bearer," instead, and the suggestion cost him everything. He belongs on a Christian apologetics site for a reason that has nothing to do with sympathy. The controversy he started forced the church to say, with a precision it had not needed before, how the eternal Son of God can also be a baby in a manger, hungry in a wilderness, and dead on a cross. That joining of God and a human life in Jesus is what Christians mean by the incarnation, from the Latin for taking flesh, and until Nestorius it had been confessed far more often than it had been analysed. The Council of Ephesus in 431 and the Council of Chalcedon in 451 are the answer, and Chalcedon’s formula (one person, two natures, "without confusion, without change, without division, without separation") is still the rule by which Christians of every tradition test what they say about Christ. That formula was hammered out against him, and, as his strange afterlife turned out, partly in words he would have recognised. Here is the fact that makes him harder to write about than his reputation suggests. For fourteen centuries the church knew Nestorius almost entirely through the quotations his enemies chose. Then, at the end of the nineteenth century, a Syriac manuscript turned up in the mountains of Kurdistan containing his own long defence, written in exile under a borrowed name, a book he had called the Bazaar of Heracleides. Since it was translated, scholars have argued in every direction about what he actually held. The councils are not in doubt. The man is.

(●) c. 386 AD: Born on the Syrian frontier, and formed by the school of Antioch. + No ancient writer troubled to record the year Nestorius was born. The handbooks print anything from about 381 to about 386, and that spread is why a "c.", short for the Latin circa, "around," stands in front of the date. The far end of his life is reckoned rather than reported as well. Nobody wrote down the year he died either, and what we have instead is a remark of Evagrius that he had already departed from the world when the Council of Chalcedon met in the autumn of 451. What is certain is the place. Socrates Scholasticus, a lawyer in Constantinople who was writing while Nestorius was still alive, calls him "a native of Germanicia." That was a town in the Roman province of Syria Euphratensis, out on the eastern edge of the empire where Greek gave way to Syriac. He went to Antioch, and Antioch made him. The city had a way of reading the Bible and a way of talking about Christ that were both its own. Where the teachers of Alexandria loved to read the Old Testament for hidden spiritual meanings, the Antiochenes kept their eyes on the plain sense and the history. And where Alexandria loved to say that God the Word had become flesh and leave the mystery whole, Antioch kept insisting that the manhood of Jesus was a real, complete human life: a mind that learned, a will that chose, a body that grew tired. Behind that insistence was a live fear. Apollinarius, a bishop in the previous generation, had taught that in Christ the divine Word simply took the place of a human mind, and the church had condemned him for it in 381. An Antiochene heard that error waiting in every loose sentence. Nestorius took vows at the monastery of Euprepius, just outside the walls of Antioch, was ordained priest, and became known for his preaching. It was the preaching, in the end, that carried his name to the capital. Later writers add that he sat at the feet of Theodore of Mopsuestia, the greatest of the Antiochene teachers, and his theology certainly runs on Theodore’s rails. Whether he was ever Theodore’s pupil in the ordinary sense is a looser matter, since the claim comes from a later generation rather than from anyone who recorded it at the time.

(●) 428 AD: Made bishop of the capital as an outsider, he opened by asking the emperor for a purge. + The bishop of Constantinople, Sisinnius, died at the end of 427, and the contest to replace him turned ugly enough that the court decided no local man would get it. So they sent to Antioch, and on 10 April 428 Nestorius was consecrated bishop of the imperial city. A generation earlier they had done the same thing with another Antiochene preacher, John, the one the church remembers as Chrysostom, the golden-mouthed, and the memory of that voice probably helped. What happened next is the sentence everyone remembers. Turning to the emperor in his very first sermon, in front of the whole congregation, the new bishop said: "Give me, my prince, the earth purged of heretics, and I will give you heaven as a recompense. Assist me in destroying heretics, and I will assist you in vanquishing the Persians." Socrates, who reports it, says that the crowd loved it and that anyone who could read a man from his words heard something else: "his levity of mind, and violent and vainglorious temperament." It was not talk. Within five days he moved to pull down a chapel where the Arians met privately. The Arians were the party that had followed Arius in holding the Son to be the highest of God’s creatures rather than God himself, a teaching the church had condemned at Nicaea a century earlier, and they were used to being unwelcome. When they saw the demolition starting they set fire to the building themselves rather than let him have it. The blaze spread, burned out the buildings next door, and the city took to calling its new bishop "the incendiary." He did not stop with the Arians, and the others on his list were a mixed bag. Some of them held views a council had already condemned. One of them differed from the rest of the church about the date of a feast and very little else. He harried the Novatians, a strict old body that had broken away in the third century because it would not readmit Christians who cracked under persecution and denied the faith, and he kept at them until the emperor told him to stop. He pressed the Quartodecimans of Asia Minor, the "fourteenthers," who kept Easter on the fourteenth day of the Jewish month of Nisan whatever day of the week that fell on rather than always on a Sunday, and he pressed them hard enough that Socrates says people died in riots at Miletus and Sardis. Later, after a bishop who had copied his methods was murdered by Macedonians, he had their churches seized in Constantinople, at Cyzicus and around the Hellespont, the narrow strait between Europe and Asia; the Macedonians confessed the Son as fully God and then balked at saying the same of the Holy Spirit. Three years later he would be the one appealing for a fair hearing.

(●) c. 429 AD: His own chaplain told the city to stop calling Mary the Mother of God, and he backed him. + Nestorius had brought a priest named Anastasius with him from Antioch and trusted him with everything. Preaching in the great church, Anastasius said: "Let no one call Mary Theotocos: for Mary was but a woman; and it is impossible that God should be born of a woman." To understand the reaction you have to know what the word was doing there. Theotokos means "God-bearer," and it had grown up in the prayers of ordinary Christians long before the theologians examined it. It was not primarily a statement about Mary. It was a statement about her son: that the one she carried was not a man whom God later adopted or inhabited, but God himself come among us. Take the word away and people heard you taking the baby’s divinity away with it. Nestorius could have distanced himself from his chaplain. Instead he preached a series of sermons defending him and attacking the word, and the city split. A layman named Eusebius, later bishop of Dorylaeum, stood up and publicly accused him of heresy. Proclus, a rival for the see, preached a famous sermon in Mary’s honour with Nestorius sitting in front of him, and Nestorius answered it on the spot. Socrates, who had no love for the man, still refused to join the mob: "I cannot then concede that he was either a follower of Paul of Samosata or of Photinus, or that he denied the Divinity of Christ: but he seemed scared at the term Theotocos, as though it were some terrible phantom." Paul of Samosata and Photinus were third and fourth century bishops condemned for teaching that Jesus was a man raised to divine status, so the charge Socrates is refusing is the charge of denying that Christ is God at all.

(●) 430 AD: Cyril of Alexandria, with Rome behind him, gave him twelve anathemas and ten days. + Cyril, bishop of Alexandria, was the most formidable theologian of the age and the head of a see that had been quarrelling with Constantinople for decades. He wrote three letters, and the order of them tells you how he thought: first to the monks of Egypt, warning them against the new teaching, then to Nestorius directly, then to Rome. The second letter to Nestorius, written early in 430, is a masterpiece of compressed doctrine, and the church kept it. It was read out and approved at two ecumenical councils, meaning the councils the whole church, east and west, came to accept as binding on everyone rather than on one province. What the letter says is that the Word "personally united to himself flesh animated by a rational soul," so that the one who was born, suffered and rose is one and the same Son, and not a man standing alongside God. Nestorius replied, politely and at length, and conceded nothing. Pope Celestine held a synod at Rome in August 430, a synod being simply a gathering of bishops met to settle something, and it condemned the teaching. Then Celestine did an unusual thing and handed the execution of the sentence to Cyril. So the document that reached Constantinople at the start of December was an ultimatum from Alexandria carrying Roman authority: recant within ten days or be deposed. Attached to it were twelve short condemnations, Cyril’s Twelve Anathemas, each beginning "If anyone..." and ending "let him be anathema." To anathematise someone was to put him formally outside the fellowship of the church, and the form is blunt by design: it states an error in one sentence, and then states the penalty for holding it. The first ran: "If anyone will not confess that the Emmanuel is very God, and that therefore the Holy Virgin is the Mother of God (Theotokos), inasmuch as in the flesh she bore the Word of God made flesh, let him be anathema." Nestorius answered with twelve counter-anathemas of his own and asked the emperor for a general council, which had already been summoned on 19 November. He wanted the whole church to judge between them. He got a council, and it judged.

(●) 431 AD: At Ephesus a council he refused to attend deposed him in a single day. + The bishops were told to gather at Ephesus by Pentecost, which fell on 7 June that year. Nestorius arrived early with a crowd of supporters; Cyril arrived with his Egyptians; John of Antioch and the Syrian bishops, who were Nestorius’s natural allies and had the farthest to come, did not. After sixteen days of waiting, with bishops falling ill and running out of money, Cyril opened the council on 22 June in the church at Ephesus that bore Mary’s name. Nestorius was summoned three times and three times refused, saying he would appear when the Easterns arrived, meaning John and the Syrian bishops still on the road. The synod’s own letter complains that he surrounded his house with soldiers. So they read Cyril’s second letter, approved it, read Nestorius’s reply, condemned it, and deposed him before the day was out. The sentence is brief and does not pretend to be cheerful: "we have come, with many tears, to this sorrowful sentence against him, namely, that our Lord Jesus Christ, whom he has blasphemed, decrees by the holy Synod that Nestorius be excluded from the episcopal dignity, and from all priestly communion." John of Antioch arrived four days later, heard what had happened, convened his own forty-odd bishops and deposed Cyril and Memnon of Ephesus in return. For a few weeks there were two councils sitting in the same town, each excommunicating the other, with rival delegations racing to the emperor. Theodosius hesitated. When he finally moved he confirmed everything at once, both sets of depositions together, so that for a short while Cyril, Memnon and Nestorius all stood condemned. Then he let the Alexandrian verdict stand alone. Nestorius asked to go back to his monastery, and went. Maximian was consecrated in his place in October. The one detail Socrates adds is worth keeping, whether or not it is true: he says that when Nestorius saw where it was all going he gave way, and said, "Let Mary be called Theotocos, if you will, and let all disputing cease," and that nobody took the slightest notice.

(●) 435 AD: Four quiet years in his old monastery ended with an edict burning his books. + The monastery of Euprepius stood about two stadia outside Antioch, a quarter of a mile, and Nestorius went back to it as a private monk. By his own account in the Bazaar he was treated with every courtesy there for four years, which is more than most deposed patriarchs, the bishops of the handful of greatest sees, could say. Meanwhile the peace was being made without him. In 433 Cyril and John of Antioch agreed a short statement now called the Formula of Reunion: Christ is "perfect God, and perfect Man," "there became a union of two natures," and Mary is Theotokos. Cyril accepted language about two natures that his Twelve Anathemas had seemed to exclude; John accepted the word Nestorius had refused; and the price of the settlement was that John abandoned Nestorius. Nestorius never forgave it, and in the Bazaar he calls it a tyranny of agreement, made by frightened men who told themselves it was better that one man suffer injury so that the faith might prevail. He adds, with a bleakness that is hard to read past, that he would gladly have been the one man injured if the faith had really been served by it. Then the protection ran out. In 435 an edict of Theodosius II ordered that the writings of Nestorius be burned wherever they were found and that his followers be called not by his name but by the name of Simon Magus, the sorcerer in the book of Acts who offered the apostles money for the power to give the Holy Spirit and had been the church’s byword for a fraud ever since. It was a piece of deliberate erasure: a man whose name is not allowed to be spoken cannot be argued with either. He was taken from Antioch and banished to the Great Oasis, the string of springs in the Egyptian desert west of the Nile that Rome used for prisoners it wanted forgotten.

(●) c. 451 AD: Carried off by desert raiders and broken on the roads of his exile, he died in Egypt with a book nobody would read. + What we know of the last years comes from letters he wrote to the governor of the Thebaid, the southern province of Egypt named after the old city of Thebes, and those letters survive only because the historian Evagrius, who despised him, quoted them as evidence of divine judgement. Raiders out of the desert overran the oasis and carried Nestorius off. For reasons nobody recorded they let him go again, and an old man who had just been handed his freedom did the strangest thing available to him: he presented himself to the Roman authorities, so that no one could accuse him of having escaped. What followed was worse than the oasis. He was marched under guard from Panopolis to Elephantine, at the southern edge of the province, then turned around by an unwritten order and marched back. He describes himself arriving "miserably worn with the casualties of the road, with a body afflicted by disease and age, and a mangled hand and side." What had mangled the hand and the side he does not say, and the injuries never healed. In those years he wrote the book. It is a long, circling, argumentative defence of everything he had said and done, and because his own name was poison he published it as the work of a certain Heracleides of Damascus. He lived long enough to hear that the church had torn itself apart again over a monk named Eutyches who taught that after the incarnation there was only one nature in Christ, and long enough to read Pope Leo’s letter to Flavian of Constantinople answering him. Leo’s letter said that each nature keeps its own properties and acts in communion with the other, and Nestorius, reading it in the desert, said that God had raised up a preacher no one could accuse of partiality to him, "Leo, who used to preach the truth undaunted." He did not live to see what came of it. When the Council of Chalcedon met in October 451 and received Leo’s letter as the faith of the church, Nestorius was already dead. Evagrius, tidying up a rumour that the old man had been fetched from exile to attend, remarks drily that he cannot say how Nestorius was summoned when he had departed from the world. Where he was buried nobody recorded, and the last line of his book asks the land of his exile to keep his body until the resurrection.

What He Taught

(T1) God the Word did not turn into a man; he took a complete manhood, and both remain what they are. + Put two things together and you can get three different results. Stir sugar into water and the sugar is gone, changed into something else. Pour oil and water into the same jar and you have two things sharing a jar and nothing more. Or take a man and a trade: the carpenter is wholly a man and wholly a carpenter, and neither is diluted by the other. Nestorius spent his life insisting that the incarnation is nothing like the first and much more than the second, and he was terrified that the language his opponents used amounted to the first. The word doing the work is nature, and in the fifth century it meant what a thing is, the full set of properties that make it the kind of thing it is. Divine nature is eternal, unlimited, unable to suffer or die. Human nature is created, born, hungry, mortal. Nestorius held that in Christ both are present whole and unmixed, and that any formula which let one absorb the other was a step back toward errors the church had already refused: toward Arius, who had made the Son a creature, or toward Apollinarius, who had made him a divine mind in a human body with no human mind of its own. He was right about the danger and the church agreed with him about it. Twenty years after his deposition, Chalcedon would confess one Christ "in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation." What Chalcedon would not grant was the conclusion he drew next (T3), and that is where the whole quarrel turns.

(Q) "I do not separate the natures that have been united by removal or isolation; nor yet do I speak of a conjunction of love and proximity... nor again do I say that the union is one of equality of honour and authority, but of natures, and of complete natures; and by a bringing together of the ousias I posit a union without confusion." + Source: Nestorius, The Bazaar of Heracleides; English in J. F. Bethune-Baker, Nestorius and His Teaching (Cambridge, 1908), p. 168. Ousia is simply the Greek for a thing’s being or substance, what it actually is rather than how it appears. Nestorius is answering the charge that he had reduced the incarnation to two parties standing very close together, a friendship rather than a union, and the denial is as flat as he could make it.

(T2) The two natures meet in one presented person, and that one Christ receives one worship. + Nestorius’s word for the meeting place is prosopon. In ordinary Greek it meant a face, and then the face a person shows to the world: the mask an actor wore, the figure a man cuts in public, the one somebody whom others address. In Christ, he taught, there is one prosopon. You do not meet two people when you meet Jesus. You do not pray to a divine Word over here and a human Jesus over there. There is one who says "I," and he is worshipped once. This is the point where readers, then and now, have to slow down and ask what exactly is being claimed, because his opponents were using a different word for the meeting place. Cyril said the union is kath’ hypostasin, according to the hypostasis. A hypostasis is the particular someone who exists and acts, the one you could point at and call by name, as against the nature, which is what that someone is. Your neighbour has a human nature; your neighbour is a hypostasis. Cyril was claiming that the two natures in Christ are joined at exactly that level, in the identity of the one who exists, so that the Word himself is the subject of everything Jesus does and undergoes. It is the Son of God who falls asleep in the boat, and the Son of God who dies. Set beside that, Nestorius’s prosopon is a thinner word, and the thinness is the whole trouble. It can mean the presented unity of two things that remain, underneath, two. Whether he meant something thinner by it, or was reaching with an inadequate vocabulary for what Chalcedon would later say with a better one, is precisely the question his recovered book has not settled. What can be said is that he never allowed the practical conclusion his enemies drew. He did not teach two Sons, he said so repeatedly and in writing, and he anathematised anyone who did.

(Q) "I separate the natures and I unite the worship." + Source: Nestorius, The Bazaar of Heracleides, quoting his own preaching at Constantinople; English in J. F. Bethune-Baker, Nestorius and His Teaching (Cambridge, 1908), p. 169. The sentence became the tag by which friends and enemies alike summarised him. Cyril read it as an admission: a man who has to unite the worship has already divided the one worshipped. Nestorius, taking it up again in exile, says he never meant "a separation of removal, that I should put the natures apart one from another," and that "on account of God who is not separated (from the man), neither do I separate the honour." One honour, he insists, given to one person in two natures.

(T3) Mary gave birth to the manhood in which God dwelt, so "Mother of Christ" is the safer title. + This is the claim that ended his career, and it follows from the two before it the way a conclusion follows from premises. If the divine nature cannot begin, and if the natures do not blend, then whatever it was that began in Mary’s womb was the manhood. Nobody, he liked to say, gives birth to someone older than herself. So he proposed a third word. Not Theotokos, God-bearer, which he thought invited people to imagine the divine nature itself being produced by a woman, the very caricature pagan critics had always thrown at Christians. Not Anthropotokos, man-bearer, which was worse, since it said nothing of who the child was. But Christotokos, Christ-bearer, a title that names the whole person, God and man together, and cannot be pulled apart in either direction. The trouble is that the proposal does not do what he wanted it to do. Titles like these are not chiefly about natures. They are about who, and the Bible uses them that way without any of his caution. Elizabeth, greeting the pregnant Mary, does not say that a nature has arrived at her door: "And why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me?" (Luke 1:43). The angel over Bethlehem does not announce a nature either, but somebody with a name and a rank: "For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord" (Luke 2:11). And when Paul reaches for the plainest sentence he can find about the same event, he writes that "when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law" (Galatians 4:4). Not a nature born of woman. His Son. Scripture, in other words, is content to say that the one born of Mary is the Son of God, and the church heard in Theotokos nothing more than that. Which is what makes his case a sad one rather than a wicked one. Nestorius agreed with every one of those sentences. He could not bring himself to say the single word that carried them.

(Q) "My good Sirs, Mary did not give birth to Godhead, but she gave birth to a man, the inseparable instrument of the Divinity." + Source: Nestorius, The Tragedy, fragment in F. Loofs, Nestoriana (Halle, 1905), p. 205; English in J. F. Bethune-Baker, Nestorius and His Teaching (Cambridge, 1908), pp. 65 to 66. He is recalling a sermon preached against pagan critics who mocked Christians for saying that God’s own being had been manufactured out of a virgin. In the same passage he complains that Cyril quoted him with one word changed, "God" for "Godhead," which turned a defence of the faith into a denial of it. Whether the change was deliberate or careless, the difference is real: "Godhead" means the divine nature, and "God" is a name you can properly give to the person born in Bethlehem.

(Q) "I cannot term him God who was two and three months old. I am therefore clear of your blood, and shall in future come no more among you." + Source: Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History VII.34 (Zenos translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume 2). This is the one sentence for which he has never been forgiven, and he spoke it at Ephesus in the days before the council opened. Socrates sets it in a gathering where many had declared that Christ was God, and it has the sound of a man losing his temper and walking out of a room. There is a complication here, and it is worth having. Two bishops went to talk Nestorius round in those days of waiting, Theodotus of Ancyra and Acacius of Melitene, and both of them gave evidence at the council afterwards about what he had said. Theodotus testified that Nestorius had repeated the words often, and the form Theodotus reported is not quite the form Socrates gives. Quoting that testimony back in the Bazaar, Nestorius has Theodotus report that he had often repeated the words: "I do not say that God is two or three months old" (Bethune-Baker, pp. 71 to 72). That is a denial about the divine nature, which nobody imagined had a birthday, rather than a denial about the child. Bethune-Baker, working through the Syriac, adds that the translator plainly read the sentence that way too. Even so, the ordinary believer’s instinct was the church’s instinct, and it is not difficult to see why. You cannot look into the manger and say that the one lying there is not God. Christian piety would not learn a way of speaking that made it possible to say so.

(T4) A congregation that cannot say who Christ is has no defence against whoever speaks next. + Underneath the technical vocabulary was a pastor with a pastor’s fear, and it is worth hearing because it explains why he would not back down over a word. He had come from Antioch to a city where he believed people were repeating pious phrases without knowing what they meant, and where the phrases, if pressed, would turn out to say that God had changed into a man. He did not think that was a small matter, and he did not think ignorance was innocent. So he preached the same points over and over, with little worry about whether the congregation had heard them the week before. The sermons that survive show him doing exactly that, walking his congregation line by line through the creed they recited every week, stopping at "one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God," making them notice that a birth before all ages is already confessed there and asking what a second birth of the divine nature could possibly mean. He was not a subtle preacher. He was a repetitive and rather anxious one, and the anxiety was about them. There is a passage of his on the Lord’s Supper that shows the same man from a different angle. It is the complaint of someone watching the mysteries set out and the church walk away, and it has nothing to do with natures at all.

(Q) "Terrible is this fault, a betrayal of Christ when there is no persecution, a desertion by the faithful of their Master’s Body when there is no war." + Source: Nestorius, homily fragment in F. Loofs, Nestoriana (Halle, 1905), p. 341; English in the Catholic Encyclopedia (1911), article "Nestorius and Nestorianism," and in J. F. Bethune-Baker, Nestorius and His Teaching (Cambridge, 1908), p. 112. He has just described the communion being brought out like a meal a king sets before his soldiers, and then the congregation drifting for the doors along with the catechumens, the enquirers not yet baptised who were dismissed before the sacrament. His point is that Christ is offered in the sign and finds, as on Good Friday, that his disciples have already left. It is a hard thing to say to a congregation and a strange thing to find in the works of a man remembered only as a heretic.

(Q) "For who is Nestorius? Or what is his life? Or what is his death in the world?" + Source: Nestorius, The Bazaar of Heracleides, Book II (Driver and Hodgson translation, Oxford, 1925), p. 374. Near the end of the book, deposed, exiled and injured, he is arguing that the truth he cares about is being confessed by other men now, men no one can accuse of friendship toward him, and that this is enough. God did not do it on his account, he says, and then asks the question. Whatever else the sentence is, it is not the self-defence of a man chiefly interested in his own name.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) Ephesus condemned him and made the word he refused the property of the whole church. + Before 431 Theotokos was a widely loved word with a respectable pedigree and no formal standing. Socrates could already point to Eusebius of Caesarea using it in his Life of Constantine, and to Origen expounding it nearly two centuries before the quarrel. After 431 it was the church’s word, and the Council of Ephesus stands in the list of ecumenical councils as the third, between Constantinople and Chalcedon. What Ephesus settled was not really a question about Mary. It settled that the subject of the gospel story is one person, the eternal Son, and that everything said of Jesus is said of him. That is why Christians can read "the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood" (Acts 20:28) without flinching, and why Paul can write of Israel that "from their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ, who is God over all, blessed forever" (Romans 9:5). Theologians call this the communication of properties: because the person is one, what belongs to either nature can be said of him, so that God is born and the carpenter’s son upholds the world. Nestorius could not make that grammar work, and Ephesus made it law. Cyril won, and won completely, and he did not win prettily. He arrived with his own bishops, opened before the Syrians could reach the city, sat as accuser and judge at once, and spent freely at court afterwards to keep the verdict. That the verdict was right is the church’s settled judgement; that the trial was fair is not something anyone has to pretend.

(†) Twenty years later Chalcedon anathematised him and then defined the faith in language he recognised. + The danger Nestorius had shouted about arrived on schedule. In 448 an elderly monk in Constantinople named Eutyches was teaching that after the union there was only one nature in Christ, the manhood swallowed by the Godhead like a drop of honey in the sea. A council at Ephesus in 449 acquitted him by force and battered the bishops who objected, which is why Pope Leo called it a robbers’ council and the name stuck. Chalcedon, in 451, cleaned it up: one and the same Christ, made known "in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation," the difference of the natures in no way taken away by the union, each keeping its own properties and coming together into one person and one hypostasis. In the same breath the council anathematised Nestorius by name and restored Theodoret of Cyrus only after he had said the words aloud: "Anathema to Nestorius and to whoever denies that the Holy Virgin Mary is the Parent of God, and who divides the only begotten Son into two Sons." So Chalcedon is not a posthumous acquittal, and anyone who reads it that way is reading badly. But the exile in the Thebaid had read Leo’s letter, the letter Chalcedon received, and had recognised his own faith in it. Historians have argued ever since about what to make of that. The generous reading, taken by Bethune-Baker in 1908 and by Loofs after him, is that Nestorius was a clumsy man with a poor vocabulary who wanted what Chalcedon wanted; the sterner reading is that prosopon was never going to bear the weight Chalcedon put on hypostasis, and that recognising a formula is not the same as having held it. Both readings have to account for the same awkward fact: the council that damned him defended, in better words, much of what he had been trying to protect.

(†) His name travelled east with a church he never governed and reached the Chinese capital. + The bishops who would not accept the condemnation mostly lived outside the empire, in Persia, where Rome’s councils had no force and where being suspected of loyalty to Rome was dangerous. The Church of the East, centred on Seleucia-Ctesiphon, took its theology chiefly from Theodore of Mopsuestia rather than from Nestorius, honoured Nestorius as a wronged man, and became known to outsiders as the Nestorian church, a label its members did not choose and their descendants reject. It was the most adventurous missionary church in the world for six hundred years. Its monks followed the caravan roads into central Asia and India, and in 635 a monk the Chinese sources call Alopen reached Chang’an, the Tang capital, and was received at the imperial court. A limestone stele cut in 781 and dug up in the seventeenth century still records, in Chinese and Syriac, the arrival of "the luminous religion" and a century and a half of imperial favour. Whatever Nestorius meant by prosopon, the congregations that carried his name preached Christ in Persian, Sogdian, Turkish and Chinese while western Europe was still catching up with its own alphabet. In 1994 Pope John Paul II and Mar Dinkha IV, patriarch of the Assyrian Church of the East, signed a common declaration confessing one faith in Christ, "true God and true man," and recognising both traditions’ ways of addressing his mother: the Assyrian "Mother of Christ our God and Saviour" alongside the Catholic "Mother of God." The declaration says that the divisions "were due in large part to misunderstandings." A fifteen-hundred-year quarrel did not exactly end that day, but the two churches stopped calling each other heretics over it.

(†) Where he fell short: a persecutor’s zeal, a refusal to appear, and a way of speaking that could not say God was born. + The kindest possible reading of his theology still leaves a ledger, and the entries are things he did and said, not things later men did with his books. - He asked for the purge and he carried it out. "Give me, my prince, the earth purged of heretics, and I will give you heaven as a recompense." The demolished chapel, the seized Macedonian churches, the riots at Miletus and Sardis with a body count Socrates declines to give, and the harrying of the Novatians until an emperor restrained him: all of that happened in his first two years, and none of it can be laid at Cyril’s door. A man who spent three years teaching the state to break its dissenters had no reserves of goodwill left when the state came for him. - He would not walk into the room. Ephesus was not a fair trial, and he was entitled to say so. He was not entitled to answer three canonical summonses with soldiers around his house. His own book concedes how much the empty chair cost him: the council read his letters and sermons and never once heard him explain a sentence. - He would not take the peace when it came. The Formula of Reunion of 433 confessed two natures, which is what he said he cared about most. He judged it a surrender bought with his own hide and refused it, and the refusal is of a piece with everything else. There is a stubbornness in him that is hard to tell apart from integrity, and he could not tell them apart either. - He could not say the thing Scripture says. This is the real fault, and it is a fault of the heart as much as the head. "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14). "Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things" (Hebrews 2:14). The gospel is not that God arranged a perfect man and moved in; it is that God himself came down to be born, to be hungry, and to die, and that the one who did it is one Lord. Every guard Nestorius put up against confusing the natures ended by putting a distance between the Word and the manger, and a faith that cannot point at the child and say "that is God" has given away more than it saved. None of which requires the verdict the sixth century settled on, that he was a monster. Socrates, who watched him and disliked him, thought him vain, badly read and frightened of a word, and said in the same breath that he never denied the divinity of Christ. That is probably about right, and it is a sadder story than heresy.