Transcript

Welcome to The Way of the Fathers.

I'm Jim Papandrea.

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Today we continue our series on the heresies with episode 15, Nestorius and Nestorianism.

In the last episode, I talked about Apollinarius, who had tried to describe Jesus Christ in such a way as to argue that Jesus could not have sinned because he had no free will.

In other words, his human nature was a nature without a will.

And so Apollinarius proposed a Christ who was less than fully human.

Naturally, this could not be acceptable, and it was declared a heresy.

But the swinging of the pendulum continued, as there were those who not only responded to Apollinarius, but overreacted and tried to avoid or prevent one heresy by falling into another one.

Of course, I'm talking about Nestorius and his followers.

Nestorius rightly saw the problems with Apollinarius' Christology because it diminished the humanity in Christ.

Apollinarius described a Jesus in which the divinity overshadowed the humanity and replaced or canceled out part of the humanity, specifically the human mind and will.

But Nestorius said, in trying to correct Apollinarius' blurring of the line between Christ's divinity and humanity, he overcorrected and went to the other extreme, proposing a radical separation between Christ's two natures, to the point where he seemed to be talking about two Christs, a divine one and a human one.

Now, just like Apollinarius, Nestorius was himself a supporter of Nicene orthodoxy against Arianism.

And just as Apollinarius had been so disturbed by Arianism that he invented a new heresy of his own, well, in the same way, Nestorius was so disturbed by Apollinarianism that he invented a new heresy as well.

And in the year 428 AD, Nestorius became the Bishop of Constantinople.

For Nestorius, the problem with what Apollinarius was saying was not only that it made Jesus less than fully human.

Nestorius also worried that by describing the incarnation as a union of the human with the divine, that might somehow imply that the divine had changed.

In other words, Nestorius was trying to avoid anything that might compromise the immutability or unchangeability of the divine nature.

And it sounded like he was trying to protect Christ's divine nature from too much contact with humanity.

And so he talked about the two natures of Christ in language that emphasized the separation of the natures, even to the point of saying that one could go through the Gospels and assign everything Jesus did and said to one nature or the other.

Things that seemed human got assigned to his human nature, and things that seemed miraculous got assigned to his divine nature.

Apollinarius was seen as blurring the line between the divine and human in Christ, with the divine overlapping and overshadowing the human, resulting in a diminished human nature.

You might say too much unity between the human and the divine, and not enough distinction to preserve the integrity of each nature.

Well, Nestorianism reacted against that, and rightfully so, but Nestorius went to the other extreme, proposing what will come to be seen as too much separation between the two natures.

He went beyond distinction to the point of separation, and so he diminished the union of the two natures.

And in doing that, he actually did something similar to what Arius had done.

Arius had diminished the unity of the Father and Son, saying that the union of the Father and Son was only a union of wills.

As long as the Son submits to the will of the Father, they are united.

Nestorius did that same thing, but with the two natures.

He diminished the unity of the divine and human within the Son, saying that the union of the divine and human was only a union of wills.

As long as the human will submits to the divine will, they are united.

But in the end, it makes the unity of Christ's very personhood dependent on a cooperation of wills.

Well, Nestorius was not an Arian.

He did believe in the full divinity of the Son, and he believed in the full humanity of the Son against Apollinarius.

But when it came to the union of the divine and the human in the incarnation, he emphasized distinction over unity, as if he had to protect divinity from humanity.

Now, it's not entirely clear just how far Nestorius took this, and his followers after him may have pushed it farther than he ever did.

And on top of all of that, there was also some confusion at the time over terminology.

The problem is Nestorius had never gotten on board with the Greek technical terms that the Cappadocians had clarified, that is, the Greek equivalence of the Latin terms for substance and persons.

And even St. Augustine had remarked that it was difficult to translate between Greek and Latin on these issues.

And that's partly because Greek is a more nuanced language in the sense that Greek words often have a narrower range of meaning, but there are more Greek words to choose from when you translate.

So it would be true to say that it's harder to do all this in Greek than it is in Latin.

Steve Martin used to do a bit where he said, "Well, it wouldn't be too much of an exaggeration to say," so there was an element of things getting lost in translation here.

But at the end of the day, when Nestorius talked about the two natures in Christ, it sounded like he was saying Christ was two persons.

His way of writing about the two natures in Christ made people scratch their heads and ask, is he trying to make a four-person Trinity?

Father, divine Son, human Son, and Spirit?

Well, I don't think he was, but it sounded like it.

And in the end, he seemed to be splitting Jesus in two.

What's at stake here is that it sounded like Nestorius was saying Christ would have two personalities, a kind of double subjectivity in which the divine and human interacted in ways that, on the one hand, implied that the two natures could be at odds with each other, but on the other hand made the very union of the two natures rely on the submission of the human will to the divine will.

So just as Arianism had done with the Father and Son, so now Nestorius did to the person of the Son.

He made the union of the two natures seem fragile and tentative.

And ironically, he ended up doing exactly what he had criticized Apollinarius of doing.

That is, he diminished the free will of Jesus, or at least the human Jesus.

So, to summarize a bit, if the Trinitarian heresies like modalism and Arianism failed to correctly clarify the balance of unity and distinction between the persons of the Trinity, modalism had too much unity and not enough distinction, adoptionism and Arianism had too much distinction to the point of separation and not enough unity, well, now the Christological heresies had the same problem, but with the two natures within the person of Christ.

Apollinarianism did not have enough distinction between the two natures and therefore lost the integrity of the human nature.

Nestorianism tried to protect the integrity of the natures by proposing too much distinction between the two natures to the point of a separation, making it sound like Jesus Christ had multiple personalities.

Now, in case you're tempted to think that no layperson would care about this debate, it actually had very practical implications for the devotional life of every Christian.

You see, the Church had a long-standing tradition of praying for the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary under the title of Mother of God.

Now, the fancy Greek compound word for this, you may have heard it, is Theotokos, the God-bearer, that is, the one who bears or gives birth to God, or more precisely, the one who carried God in her womb.

It probably originally comes from Elizabeth's greeting to Mary when Mary came to visit her.

In Luke chapter 1, Elizabeth says to Mary, "And how does this happen to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?"

And we have a written prayer to Mary in which she is called the Mother of God that goes back at least to the middle of the third century.

It's called the Subtuum Praesidium, which means "under your protection."

So the tradition of referring to Mary as the Mother of God was already an ancient tradition in the time of Nestorius in the 5th century.

And yet, Nestorius, as the Bishop of Constantinople, tried to prevent the faithful from using this title.

He suggested an alternate title, Christotokos, the Christ-bearer.

And his stated reason for this was that he thought the title Theotokos, Mother of God, sounded like it implied that God had a beginning.

But of course, no one really thought that's what it meant.

Everyone knew what it means, that Mary is the mother of Jesus' divine nature as well as his human nature.

But Nestorius could not accept this mystery, the mystery of what we might call circumscribed divinity, that is, the divine nature of Christ, which is omnipresent, but paradoxically also contained within the womb of Mary.

This is, in my opinion, one of the greatest mysteries of our faith.

But Nestorius could not accept it.

And again, he was thinking that he had to protect the divine nature from any suggestion of change or limitation.

And so Nestorius taught that only the human nature of Christ was in Mary's womb.

He said that the divine nature of Christ was never in Mary's womb.

And there you have it, this separation between the divine and the human.

Nestorius claiming that the two natures were so separate that they were not united in the womb of Mary, that only the human nature was ever in Mary's womb, not the divine nature.

You can also see from this how the title Mother of God, like all the Marian doctrines, is at least as much about Christ as it is about Mary.

In this case, it's about the unity of the divine and human in Christ.

The divine Word acquired a human nature, and this happened in the womb of Mary.

And the divine nature came to live a true and fully human life, beginning with his conception in Mary's womb.

Because from the moment of the incarnation, which is his conception, the two natures are inseparable.

The divine nature really comes to live in a human life.

And the human nature is elevated and glorified by the union with the divine.

Now, there's yet another doctrine here called the communicatio idiomatum, which describes the ways in which each of the two natures receives something from the other.

And we won't take the time to unpack all of that in detail, except to say that Nestorius rejected that too.

So, who were the Church Fathers who responded to Nestorianism, this separation of the two natures that compromised the integrity of Christ's personhood?

There were two main Church Fathers who weighed in on this controversy, at least in terms of documents we still have, one in the West and one in the East.

In the West, there was John Cassian, and he was actually called upon by the Bishop of Rome, by Pope Celestine, to refute Nestorius.

The Pope commissioned him to write a document called Seven Books on the Incarnation of the Lord Against Nestorius.

But, like the Arian controversy, most of this controversy was going on in the East.

The West had Tertullian, with his clarification of the Latin terms, the West had Novation, who also clarified the relationship of the divine and human in Christ and the doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum.

And by this time, the West also had St. Augustine.

And to be fair, the West was also working in Latin, which is an easier and less confusing language.

But in the East, there was the great theologian Cyril of Alexandria.

He was Bishop of Alexandria from 412 to 444 AD. And he championed the title Mother of God for the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Because, as he pointed out, Mary is the mother of the whole person of Christ, including his divine nature.

She is not the mother of half of Christ only.

And so, Cyril of Alexandria wrote his famous treatise on the unity of Christ.

And there he clarifies that the union of the divine and human in Christ must be a unity on the level of his very personhood, resulting in a singular person.

And we call that the hypostatic union, which just means a personal union.

The point being that Jesus Christ must be one person with a single personality.

Otherwise, the Word never really did become flesh.

So if Apollinarianism is not really an incarnation, but more of an indwelling, Nestorianism is also not really an incarnation, but some kind of juxtaposition, like oil and vinegar in a salad dressing jar.

You can put them in the same jar and even shake them up, but leave them on the counter and eventually they will separate out because they just can't stay together.

But the incarnation, the Word become flesh, is the real union of two natures.

The divine Word truly acquires and comes to live a real human life in a complete human nature.

Apollinarianism blurred the two natures and diminished the humanity.

Nestorianism kept the two separate, which never allowed a permanent union.

But the point is that if this is not an incarnation, then the Word never really became one of us.

But he has to be one of us to save us, because as we already know, what is not assumed is not saved.

So, of course, Pope Celestine agreed with Cyril of Alexandria because the concept of the hypostatic union was consistent with what was being taught in the West.

And in fact, I should mention that often when you hear about differences between the West and the East in the early Church, most of the time, Alexandria actually leans more toward the West.

Now, in the earliest centuries of the Church, the apologists and early theologians sometimes talked about the two natures by saying that the title Son of God is the name for the divine nature and Son of Man is the name for the human nature.

But by the third century in the West, Novation had corrected this.

He said you can't do that because actually both titles must refer to the whole person.

And now we see why that was important to clarify.

Because whatever Jesus did and said, the whole person of Christ did that and said that.

To be fair to Nestorius, in his critique of Apollinarius, he was right about two things.

The incarnation is not just the divine Word putting on a human suit.

And he was right that the person of Christ must have two wills.

Two natures means two wills.

But Nestorius was wrong to reduce the union of the two natures to just a cooperation of the two wills.

The correct understanding of the two natures in Christ is that they are united in a way that is inseparable.

They are united in a way that does not diminish the integrity of either nature, and yet the union does not result in a Jesus with two personalities.

The hypostatic union is a union on the level of his very personhood.

It is a personal union.

He is a single person with a single subjectivity.

And, although it will seem like a paradox, the hypostatic union results in the fact that the whole person of Christ, both natures, including his omnipresent divinity, were contained within the womb of his Blessed Mother Mary.

Eventually, this controversy over the two natures of Christ and Nestorius' objection to the title Mother of God led to the Third Ecumenical Council, the Council of Ephesus, in the year 431, only about a year after the death of St. Augustine.

Pope Celestine gave Cyril of Alexandria the authority to chair the council, and John Cassian attended as the representative of the pope.

But for some reason, the supporters of Nestorius were delayed in getting to Ephesus.

And although Cyril waited as long as he could, many days in fact, they did eventually start without Nestorius' supporters.

So Nestorius refused to defend himself, trying in vain to delay the process, but eventually Nestorius walked out.

And it may be that in his absence the charges against him were exaggerated a bit, but when his supporters finally arrived in Ephesus, they had a separate meeting, calling that a council, and they excommunicated Cyril of Alexandria.

Well, it was then up to the emperor to decide which meeting was the real council.

And for a short time, he had both Cyril and Nestorius arrested and in custody.

But it was obvious that the Pope sided with Cyril, and so he was released, and Nestorius was exiled.

The true council of Ephesus reconvened and condemned as heresies both Apollinarianism and Nestorianism.

The council affirmed the hypostatic union, that Jesus Christ is one person with two natures and two wills, and it affirmed the title Mother of God for Our Lady.

And it was at about this time that the great basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore was built in Rome.

Mary Major, the largest and greatest church dedicated to Our Lady.

So are there modern versions of Nestorianism?

Well, some scholars will make connections with Islam, which came along only about 200 years after the Council of Ephesus.

And there are some geographical affinities since certain areas outside of the Roman Empire did become places of refuge for Nestorians, and those same places would also become predominantly Muslim.

But to be honest, I'm not an expert on Islam, so I can't say for sure whether Nestorianism directly influenced Islam.

I'll leave that up to others to try to sort that out.

But I do think that there are modern Nestorians, not so much as a specific religious group, but rather as a collection of scholars who use, or at least used to use, a methodology known as the quest for the historical Jesus.

This was a misguided attempt to separate out from the Gospels the material that was historical from that which supposedly wasn't. And a group of scholars calling themselves the Jesus Seminar actually tried to create a list of the true or historical sayings of Jesus by voting on passages in the Gospels and assigning probabilities to each of them as to whether they thought Jesus actually said and did these things.

It is a supremely flawed methodology, but the point is what makes it Nestorian was the assumption that you could separate the so-called historical Jesus from the so-called Christ of faith, as if those are two different entities.

And I've already called this out for having an element of Gnosticism in it, but it's also very Nestorian, in the sense that there is this assumption that there are two Christs.

In this case, the human Jesus is the real one, and the divine Christ is somehow a different one, less historically verifiable and accessible only by faith.

The point being that, like Nestorianism, the quest for the historical Jesus assumes that there are really two Christs, a human one and a divine one.

When I was working on my PhD and going over all of this material, my professor used to say, "Apollinarianism proposed a Christ who was the divine Word in a skin suit."

And that would be like putting a Corvette engine into a Ford Fiesta.

This was before all the Fast and the Furious movies.

Nestorianism proposed a Christ who was really two Christs.

That would be like two guys in a horse costume.

But of course, neither one is a good description of who Jesus Christ really is.

And if you're following along with my superhero analogies, we could say that while Apollinarianism was like Iron Man, Nestorianism is like the Incredible Hulk, making Jesus into a kind of Jekyll and Hyde, two men in the same body.

But more important than that, are two very crucial implications for our faith today.

The first is to reiterate the point that all of the Marian doctrines say at least as much about Christ and Christology as they do about Mary.

For the present case, the doctrine of Mary's role and title as Mother of God affirms the divinity of Christ as well as the unity of Christ's two natures.

She did not just bring the humanity of Jesus into the world.

She brought his divinity into the world.

She brought the divine Word into the world.

And finally, all of this has clear implications for how we understand the beginning of human life.

For since the Word became flesh at his conception, and therefore the life of Jesus was a human life from conception, can we say any less of any other human?

We have to recognize the humanity of every person from the moment of conception, because if we don't, what would that say about the Incarnation?

To argue that a person is not a person from the moment of conception would be to imply that Christ was not a human from the moment of the Incarnation.

Next time on The Way of the Fathers, Eutyches and the Monophysites.

Thanks for listening.

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