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“One Nature of the Word Enfleshed”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 April 2015

Mark Edwards
Mark Edwards*
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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Extract

According to the least charitable view of Cyril's part in the “Nestorian controversy,” it was for him nothing more than that—a political scheme to eject a man whose scrutiny he had come to fear from a see whose power he had always envied. This account suggests that his apparent tergiversations tell us nothing of his theology: as a Christian he believed what the rest of Christendom believed, but as a prince of the church he turned his coat whenever this would serve to disguise his malice or change the wind. The more generous account reproaches Cyril not with bad faith but with bad logic: throughout his work, he oscillates between conflicting paradigms, in one of which the true subject of Christology is the Word who assumes the flesh, while in the other Christ has only the “compositional” unity that results from the coming together of two natures. The first prefigures the Chalcedonian shibboleth “one person in two natures”; the second Cyril himself encapsulated in the formula “from two natures,” which can be taken to entail that after the union there were no longer two natures but one. That Cyril himself drew this conclusion, contradicting the Chalcedonian Definition before he had heard it, is put beyond doubt for many by his defiant reiteration of a formula that he derived without knowing it from Apollinarius: “one nature [phusis] of the Word enfleshed.”

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Harvard Theological Review , Volume 108 , Issue 2 , April 2015 , pp. 289 - 306
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Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 2015 

According to the least charitable view of Cyril's part in the “Nestorian controversy,” it was for him nothing more than that—a political scheme to eject a man whose scrutiny he had come to fear from a see whose power he had always envied.Footnote 1 This account suggests that his apparent tergiversations tell us nothing of his theology: as a Christian he believed what the rest of Christendom believed, but as a prince of the church he turned his coat whenever this would serve to disguise his malice or change the wind. The more generous account reproaches Cyril not with bad faith but with bad logic: throughout his work, he oscillates between conflicting paradigms, in one of which the true subject of Christology is the Word who assumes the flesh, while in the other Christ has only the “compositional” unity that results from the coming together of two natures. The first prefigures the Chalcedonian shibboleth “one person in two natures”; the second Cyril himself encapsulated in the formula “from two natures,” which can be taken to entail that after the union there were no longer two natures but one. That Cyril himself drew this conclusion, contradicting the Chalcedonian Definition before he had heard it, is put beyond doubt for many by his defiant reiteration of a formula that he derived without knowing it from Apollinarius: “one nature [phusis] of the Word enfleshed.”Footnote 2

Richard Norris, perhaps the first to maintain that Cyril held conflicting paradigms,Footnote 3 does not in fact read the “compositional” model into this dictum. He notes that Cyril shows a partiality for the narrative pattern of the Nicene Creed, according to which the proper subject of incarnation is the Logos, taking flesh in the latter days for our salvation.Footnote 4 Frequent allusions to Paul's Philippian hymn,Footnote 5 in which the “form of God” is hidden beneath the “form of a slave,” reveal a similar preference for historical, as opposed to metaphysical, affirmations of the unity of Christ.Footnote 6 It is chiefly in works that take their color from the Nestorian controversy that Cyril speaks of Christ as “one from two,” or of the attributes that pertain to him after the union.Footnote 7 This compositional model, in Norris's view, is seldom used without ambiguity, and even the comparison of the union of Word and flesh to that of soul and body,Footnote 8 which seems to favor the notion of a coalescence of natures, can also be put at the service of the “subject-attribute” paradigm that Cyril inherited from the Nicene fathers. This analysis could be said to imply that the “subject-attribute” model preponderates, logically if not statistically, in the writings of Cyril; certainly it is this, and not the compositional model, that Norris believes to be represented by the phrase “one nature of the Word enfleshed.”Footnote 9

Norris writes as an impartial critic; apologists for Cyril, on the other hand, have found some difficulty in reconciling this locution with the “subject-attribute” model. Thus Thomas Weinandy, taking Norris as his interlocutor, feels obliged to refute the equation of the one nature with the sum of the elements brought together in the union—a sum that includes the flesh that he assumed, as well as the indefeasible attributes of the Godhead.Footnote 10 His remedy is to argue that the phrase “one nature” indicates not that the human and divine became “one quiddity,”Footnote 11 but that the Word incarnate was a single person and not two even after the union. For him, therefore, the “subject-attribute” model and the compositional model are two different formulations of the same model. John McGuckin, another admirer of Cyril, opines that he was “attributing the person of the Word as the single subject of the incarnate event.”Footnote 12 The less indulgent Susan Wessel appears to sympathize with a late compiler who was “troubled by the interchangeability” of hypostasis and phusis in Cyril's writings.Footnote 13 There would indeed be reason to question either Cyril's intelligence or his probity if he used the term phusis at his own discretion to denote sometimes one of two elements in Christ and sometimes the indissoluble combination of these elements: Nestorius was facing an inquisitor who could make the world hear “black” when he said “white.”

In this paper I shall agree with Norris in taking the phrase “one nature of the Word enfleshed” as an attestation of the “subject-attribute” model. With Weinandy and McGuckin, I am inclined to think that this is the only model, Norris's second, “compositional” model being no more than an alternative formulation.Footnote 14 I shall disagree with the last two, however, in maintaining that Cyril's usage of the term phusis is univocal, and that in his Christology, as in that of Nestorius, the flesh is never absorbed into the nature of the Word.Footnote 15 In order to demonstrate this I shall defend three propositions, which, if true, would suggest that Cyril admits of a Chalcedonian reading even where he has been supposed to be at his most monophysitic,Footnote 16 which is not to say (as I note in the conclusion) that he would have subscribed without demur to the Chalcedonian doctrine of two natures in the one person of the Word.

I shall argue, therefore: (1) that the formula “from two natures” was a late and reluctant accretion to Cyril's Christology; (2) that when he affirms “one nature of the Word enfleshed” he does not lapse into Apollinarianism, but is choosing a form of words that appears to him to preclude this heresy; and (3) that he was misunderstood in one respect by Eutyches and in another by Pope Leo, but not by Eutyches's judges at the Home Synod of 448.

Cyril being no more immune than anyone else to the judgment of his peers or the pronouncements of ecclesiastical councils, I shall take rather more account of the chronology of his writings than has hitherto been customary.Footnote 17 At the same time, I shall take it as a working premise that he always wrote with circumspection and that when he took a stand on a point of dogma he would not have fallen into willful illogicality or contradicted his own words on a previous occasion. I assume this not because I believe that a saint cannot err (or even that Cyril was more of a saint than other Christians), but because intellectual history is governed by the hermeneutic of charity, which prescribes that we stick to our wager on the good faith and good sense of an author until the final chip has been laid down on his or her behalf.

“From Two Natures”

The dominance—the ubiquity, we might fairly say—of the “subject-attribute” model in Cyril requires no illustration, as there is no one who denies it. Norris contends, however, that it coexists throughout his work with the compositional model, of which the dialogue On the Incarnation of the Only Begotten affords an early specimen:

We affirm that the mediator of God and human beings according to the scriptures [1 Tim 2:5] is compounded of the humanity that pertains to us, this being perfect according to its own principle, and the Son who has appeared from God in accordance with his nature, that is the Only Begotten.Footnote 18

It might be urged that the Son retains his primacy here as the subject of the union, but there is at least one passage in which the elements of the union appear to be equipollent:

His unity as Christ and Lord and Son is not a synthesis merely of divinity with the flesh, but a paradoxical coupling of two perfect things, I mean humanity and divinity, into one and the same.Footnote 19

For all that, one would search this text in vain for the tenet that Christ is “from two natures,” or for evidence of caprice in Cyril's usage of the term phusis. In the singular it can be applied to flesh, but only generically, not to the flesh that the Word has made his own.Footnote 20 While it would be a heresy to dissolve Christ into two natures, the complementary inference that two natures were present in him is never drawn.

Before the Council of Ephesus Cyril issued a prolonged invective against Nestorius, On the Unity of Christ. Here he contends repeatedly that, while Christ made the flesh his own,Footnote 21 made the body his own,Footnote 22 and even made our humanity his own,Footnote 23 he did not acquire a second nature. The goodness, the glory, the excellence, and the divinity of that nature that was properly hisFootnote 24 were not impaired when he took on the sinful nature of his creatures.Footnote 25 The Philippian hymn that declares that he was God by nature never says that he became man by nature, but rather that he assumed—or, as Cyril prefers to say, made his ownFootnote 26—the form of a slave. Cyril's admonition that it was not the one “in flesh and blood according to his own nature” who partook of flesh and blood for our sakes is designed to expose the absurdity of imagining Christ as a man distinct from the Word who assumed his flesh.Footnote 27 When this union of Word and flesh is likened to that of soul and body, Cyril's interlocutor grasps at once that the key to this analogy lies in the primacy of the inner man, who waxes daily, according to Paul, as the outer man wastes away.Footnote 28

Cyril's Scholia on the Incarnation are of uncertain date, and survive now largely in Latin. While they make no mention of Nestorius by name, they seem to exhibit some acquaintance with his doctrines.Footnote 29 The distinction between the natures (once “the natures or hypostases”Footnote 30) is repeatedly affirmed,Footnote 31 but we do not hear of a henôsis of the natures. The true subject of henôsis is Emmanuel, Footnote 32 though there are passages in which the Word is said to have been united to the human, the humanity, the body, or the flesh.Footnote 33 The soul, by a similar principle, is united to the body or the flesh.Footnote 34 Although it is said that human nature shone forth in Christ,Footnote 35 Christ is nowhere said to have made this nature his own. As in On the Unity of Christ, we can say that two natures precede the union, and that the union does not annul their properties; for all that, there are not two natures in the Christ of Cyril, but one nature—his own, divine nature—and the flesh.

Addressing members of the imperial family on the eve of the Council of Ephesus, Cyril diplomatically permits himself to say that, having assumed a nature like ours, the Word was manifest in this nature.Footnote 36 Nevertheless, he does not deduce that the Word acquired two natures or that he made our nature his own. Even the Second Letter to Nestorius, where the distinction between the two natures is asserted with some force, does not say either that Christ is “from two natures” or that two natures coexisted in his person. Nestorius, if the Bazaar of Heraclides can be taken as an index of his earlier teachings, posits a coalescence of the two prosôpa without the miscegenation of natures that he attributes to Cyril. Cyril's task is therefore to demonstrate that no such miscegenation occurred when the flesh was united to the Word, and hence to the nature of the Word, to form one prosôpon:

For we do not say that the nature of the Word became flesh by transmutation, and certainly not that it was transformed into the whole man who is from flesh and soul; rather, what we say is this, that the Word, having hypostatically united [hênôsas] to himself flesh ensouled with a rational soul, became man in an ineffable and inconceivable manner, and was called the Son of Man. [We say that] this was not only by will or good pleasure,Footnote 37 and certainly not by the assumption of a prosôpon, and that the natures which were brought together into a true union were distinct, though one Christ and Son is from both. It is not that the distinction between the natures has been annihilated on account of the union, but rather that divinity and humanity have produced for us the one Lord, Christ and Son through the inexpressible and ineffable concurrence into unity.Footnote 38

Cyril does not expressly say that the natures are the subject of henôsis; the subjects of the cognate verb (henôsas) are the Word and “flesh ensouled with a rational soul.” While this last proviso refutes the Nestorian caricature of Cyril as an Apollinarian, the term henôsis functions as a corrective echo to Theodore of Mopsuestia, a silent interlocutor in many of Cyril's christological writings.Footnote 39 Theodore's henôsis is the conjunction of the veritable Son of God with the one who is called “son” by association;Footnote 40 for Cyril there can be only one Son, and therefore that which was joined to him, though it necessarily differed from him in its natural composition, could no more be another person than the human body can be another person than the soul.

This comparison was adumbrated in On the Incarnation of the Only Begotten; in the third, most belligerent, letter to Nestorius, it furnishes Cyril with a model for the incarnation that allows him to dispense with talk of natures and thereby circumvent his rival's argument for two prosôpa:

For the one and only Christ is not double, even if he is understood to have been brought together into an indivisible unity from things that are two and distinct, just as a human being too (for instance) is understood to be from soul and body, yet not so much double as one from two.Footnote 41

To Norris the union of soul and body is a paradigmatic case of composition or synthesis.Footnote 42 Few Christians of Cyril's day, however, would have held that the human person is simply a diptych of soul and body. What are we, said the Platonists, but a soul making use of a body? Paul seems to concur when he describes the first man as a “living soul,” though “of the earth, earthy” (see 1 Cor 15:45–47). Aristotle, Gregory of Nyssa, and Augustine had all maintained that, while the body is the indispensable armature of the soul, it is in the latter that we find an enduring image of the divine, by virtue of which, as individuals and a species, we are most truly what we are.Footnote 43 The soul is the seat of virtue, and at times the proper object of Christ's mission, in Athanasius's treatise On the Incarnation of the Word; Cyril himself had argued that to deny a soul to Christ would be to leave the better portion of our humanity unredeemed.Footnote 44 It is likely that the simile commended itself to him because he accorded to the human soul the same primacy that he accorded to the Word in the incarnation. He was also aware that the correspondence is inexact, precisely because a human is a compound of two moieties, soul and body, which cannot subsist alone, whereas Christ was at the same time perfect God and perfect man.

In framing this analogy, Cyril embraced the logic of Apollinarius.Footnote 45 Whatever befalls or pertains to the soul can be said to befall or pertain to the human being whose soul it is, and the same is true of whatever befalls or pertains to the body. By the same principle, all that is truly said of the Word incarnate, and all that is truly said of the flesh of his incarnation, is equally predicable of the one person or hypostasis who is Christ the Son of God. What the flesh suffers the Son of God suffers; when the Word is worshipped we are worshipping Christ the man. Whether or not the comparison is in all respects judicious, it would not have been used at all by one who thought of Christ as the product of two natures. Soul and body in Cyril's metaphysics are concrete entities; their equivalents in Christology are likewise not abstractions but real subjects, the divine Word and his flesh.

The transition to “from two natures” occurs in a letter, written after the Council of Ephesus to Succensus, a sympathizer who wondered “whether or not one ought to affirm two natures with regard to Christ.” Having protested in his Second Letter to Nestorius that the difference between the natures is not abolished, Cyril finds himself obliged to assure this new correspondent that he does not divide the natures—that is to say, he does not assign them to different subjects, thereby stumbling into the heresy of two sons. He proceeds to explain that in positing a “concurrence into union” (henotêta) of two natures, he is forestalling the blasphemous inference that the flesh that the Word assumed was consubstantial with his divinity:

For the flesh is flesh and not Godhead, even if it has become the flesh of God; and likewise the Word is God and not flesh, even if by economy he has made the flesh his own. Once, then, we understand this, we do not wrong the concurrence into unity by saying that it came to be from two natures; after the union, however, we do not divide the natures from one another, nor do we cleave him who is one and indivisible into two sons, but we affirm one Son, and as the fathers contrived to say it, one enfleshed nature of the Word.Footnote 46

Cyril does not say expressly that the Son himself is a composite of the two natures, but only that this henôsis of the natures has taken place. A similar locution occurs in his letter to Acacius, a strenuous ally in the deposition of Nestorius, who had also begun to doubt whether he and Cyril were of the same party:

For we do not, like certain heretics of older times, suppose that the Son of God fashioned the body for himself by taking it from his own nature—that is, from the divine one—but following the inspired scriptures in all respects, we asseverate that he took it from the Holy Virgin. Accordingly, when we entertain a notion of the elements from which the one and only Son and Lord Jesus Christ took his being, we say that two natures have been united.Footnote 47

The provenance of the phrase “union of two natures” explains the scruples of Acacius and Succensus. It was not devised by Cyril himself, but submitted to him in the Formula of Reunion, which he accepted in 433 as a condition of restoration to his bishopric, two years after John of Antioch had deposed him in the wake of his proceedings against Nestorius at the Council of Ephesus in 431. Cyril's “from two natures” was a periphrastic variant of the assertion in this Formula of a “henôsis of two natures,” and may therefore be regarded as an accommodation to the language of his interlocutor. It is not a presupposition of his theology but a statement that his theology equipped him to defend.

Thus it appears that Cyril, having spoken (not very frequently) of humanity and divinity as constituents of Christ, began to style these two abstractions phuseis or “natures” only in imitation of Nestorius, and did not describe their union as a henôsis until the Formula of Reunion had given an ecumenical currency to this nomenclature. The Formula of Reunion is Cyrilline because Cyril made it so, but we shall hardly surmise that “out of” or “from two natures” was a mode of speaking that he would have defended with his last breath.

Mia phusis: Cyril vs. Apollinarius

By contrast the Apollinarian formula “one nature of the Word enfleshed” would seem to have become dearer to Cyril the more it was impugned. He adopted it first in the course of the Nestorian controversy, attributing it to Athanasius in his speech to his royal mistresses before the Council of Ephesus:

For we confess, [Athanasius] says, that he is both Son of God and God in spirit yet Son of Man in flesh; not two natures constituting the one Son, one to be worshipped and one not to be worshipped, but one enfleshed nature of God the Word, worshipped with one flesh in a single worship.Footnote 48

Here we note, in anticipation of the following argument, that the “one nature” does not subsume the flesh, though the flesh is its inseparable companion. Yet these are not Cyril's own words, nor are they taken (as he thought) from Athanasius. Posterity traced them to Apollinarius,Footnote 49 who was generally accused both of having compromised the divinity of the Word and of having deified his flesh. Both charges are no doubt calumnious, but Cyril had no reason to question either; he would have known that to deny the earthly provenance of Christ's flesh was an ancient heresy, and that Athanasius had been at pains to show that the consubstantiality of the Father and Son did not entail that the flesh was a fourth hypostasis in the Godhead.Footnote 50 In his letter to John of Antioch extolling the recent formula of reunion that had put an end to the discord between the two prelates, Cyril first addresses the accusation that he had fallen into this heresy of heresies. In his own vindication—though he might have been speaking for Apollinarius, had he known it—he protests that he means no more than Christ himself meant in the Fourth Gospel when he speaks of himself as one who came down from heaven:

We recall that the Savior himself said None has ascended to heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man [John 3:13]. He was indeed born, as I have just said, from the Holy Virgin. But since God the Word, the one who descended from above and from heaven, emptied himself, assuming the form of a slave [Phil 2:7], he was also called Son of Man, while remaining what he was, namely God. For by nature he is changeless and unalterable. Understood as one with his own flesh, he is said to have come down from heaven, and has been called the man from heaven, being the same one perfect in divinity and in humanity, and understood as being in one prosôpon. For there is one lord Jesus Christ, without ignoring the distinction of the natures from which we say the ineffable union was effected.Footnote 51

When Cyril states that the difference between the two natures is not ignored, he is echoing both the Formula of Reunion and the second of his own letters to Nestorius. His usage changes, however, as he cuts away the second limb of the heresy that was imputed to him. To admit only one prosôpon or hypostasis in the incarnate Christ is not to embrace an Apollinarian miscegenation of opposites:Footnote 52

Furthermore, we confess that God the Word subsists impassibly, even if in the all-wise dispensation of the mystery, he is seen to have taken to himself the sufferings that befall his own flesh. This indeed is what the all-wise Peter says: Christ, then, having suffered for us in flesh, and not in the nature of the ineffable Godhead.Footnote 53

Here the physical suffering of Christ is assigned to his flesh, in contradistinction to the “nature of the ineffable Godhead.” Flesh stands in an adjectival rather than equipollent, or contradictory, relation to God the Logos. Here, as elsewhere, the one nature ascribed to Christ is not the composite—half-divine, half-human—that bristles like a Gorgon's head in all polemics against Apollinarius; it is the simple and immutable nature that belongs to the Word as second person of the Trinity, and that, as Cyril holds in common with the rest of Christendom, suffered no change or accretion when he made our flesh his own.

The formula “one nature of the Word enfleshed” is defended at length in the letters to Succensus. It enters the first in the sentence that immediately succeeds the passage quoted above to illustrate the “concurrence” of the two natures. The natures have been united, he concedes, but:

after the union, the cleavage between the two having been abolished, we believe that the nature of the Son is one, since he is one, though made man and enfleshed.Footnote 54

It will be seen that, like the expression “from two natures” that immediately precedes it in this letter, “one enfleshed nature of the Word” is not Cyril's own coining, but a hallowed expression that he is not free to disown. It is of course highly improbable that, having incurred the charge of Apollinarianism, he would deliberately have espoused a watchword that would have added weight to this charge in the eyes of his critics. Believing it as he did to be Athanasian, he would have construed it according to the Athanasian rule that differentiates the works of Christ according to his divinity from the things that he does or undergoes as man.

Nor, of course, is it probable that Cyril would have given two senses to the same word in the same sentence of this careful essay in self-exoneration. His object, as we have seen, was to preserve the impassibility of the Word, to demonstrate that he is God and not flesh, when he has made the flesh his own. The second sentence of our quotation seems to be a chiastic echo of its predecessor: having heard first of a union of two natures, then of a single nature enfleshed, we now hear first of the Only Begotten becoming man and then of a unification of the natures. If the two propositions are semantically, as they are structurally, homologous, we may reasonably conjecture that to be “enfleshed” is synonymous with “becoming man,” and the “single nature” with the “Only Begotten.” In other words, the one nature is the nature of the Word.

In his Second Letter to Succensus, Cyril is asked how, if “one nature enfleshed” supervenes upon the union of two natures, the conclusion that the Word suffers in his own nature can be avoided. The premise of the question would appear to be that the nature that is enfleshed is the one that is proper to the Son. Cyril's response is not to deny this premise, but to argue that this nature is not the true subject of the suffering because it is enfleshed:

If in the account of the dispensation there was no place for that which is naturally apt to undergo suffering, they would have been right to say that, since that which is apt to suffer is not present, it is absolutely necessary that the suffering should fall on the nature of the Word. But if the whole account of the dispensation involving the flesh has the term “enfleshed” as a concomitant. . . those who say that it necessarily follows that he suffered in his own nature are talking nonsense. The flesh is the substrate, and suffering is naturally understood to fall on this while the Logos remains impassible.Footnote 55

How can “that which is apt to suffer” be present if the Word is the one who suffers, yet remains by nature impassible? The shibboleth is the term “enfleshed” (sesarkômenê), and, since no other nature is mentioned here, we can hardly fail to infer that the nature “enfleshed” is the one that the flesh protects from suffering, that is to say the proper nature of the Word. “Flesh,” not “human nature,” is the term that is handed down to us by the Scriptures:

Thus even if they predicate a humanity and divinity of Emmanuel, the humanity has still become proper to the Word, and one Son is understood along with it. But, since the inspired scripture says that he suffered in flesh, it is better that we too should speak in this way, rather than of his suffering in the nature of his humanity—albeit, if this also were not said in a perverse sense by some, they would be doing no wrong to the expression of the mystery.Footnote 56

Cyril's scruples are no doubt reinforced by his awareness that there is no allusion to human nature anywhere in the Scriptures; on the other hand, the one reference in the Scriptures to “divine nature” (theia phusis), at 2 Pet 1:4, is quoted by Cyril more frequently than by any theologian before him.Footnote 57 This is not to deny that humans have a nature, but only that what is nature in us can be allotted as a nature to the Word. We are what we are by analogy to the Word, as Cyril urges in his Letter to Eulogius, once again flourishing the Apollinarian formula as a diagnostic of orthodoxy to which Nestorius cannot subscribe:

He does not go so far, however, as to confess the union with us. For we, having united these, confess one Christ, one Son, the same one Lord, and further one enfleshed nature of the Word. The like can be said of a common human being, who is from distinct natures, I mean from body and soul. Reason and contemplation are aware of the distinction, but when we unite them we produce one nature in the human being.Footnote 58

The final sentence might be taken to show that “nature” and “person” are equivalent, at least for human beings. Cyril, however, is here appealing to antecedent usage, and we have noted that for many of Cyril's predecessors the human being is properly identical with the soul.Footnote 59 If soul in us is the counterpart of divinity in Christ, which we know to be infinitely superior to his humanity, the reader of Cyril cannot assume that, even where soul and body are grammatically symmetrical, they are deemed to be equal in the scale of being. Anti-Chalcedonians of the sixth century, who regarded themselves as uncorrupted followers of Cyril, did not hesitate to assign an ontological hegemony to the soul when they spoke in “compositional” terms:

In this way, just as an ordinary person who is comprised of different natures—soul, body and the rest—is not divided into two natures because his soul is joined in composition, but rather he is one nature and [one] human hypostasis, so too God the Word, who was united hypostatically and joined in composition with an ensouled flesh, is not divided into or in two natures because of his union and composition with the body.Footnote 60

For such readers the “compositional” model is another form of the “subject-attribute” model in which the Word presides over his flesh. Human beings are “one nature” because they are properly their souls, and the soul and its nature are one if we follow Aristotle's dictum that “soul and to be soul are the same thing, though man and to be man are not the same thing.”Footnote 61 The premise that Aristotle shares with Plato—that in incorporeal entities there is nothing but form, and hence a perfect identity of essence and existence—may also account for Cyril's substitution of hypostasis for “nature” when he is speaking of the enfleshment of the Word in his Apology for the Twelve Chapters.Footnote 62 Here the manuscripts offer a choice of readings: “one enfleshed hypostasis of the Word” or “one hypostasis of the enfleshed Word.”Footnote 63 Cyril prefers the former in his Third Letter to Nestorius, which received the seal of an ecumenical council:

All the utterances in the gospels are to be assigned to one prosôpon, the one enfleshed hypostasis of the Word. For according to the scriptures there is one Lord Jesus Christ.Footnote 64

The substitution of “nature” for “hypostasis” in the formula does not prove that these terms are generic equivalents for Cyril, since it was common for ancient philosophers to argue that an incorporeal being must be identical with its nature, since the attributes of that which has no matter cannot be taken away without destroying the subject. Scripture itself declares that God does not merely love, but is love (1 John 4:8), that Christ is not merely wise, but is wisdom (1 Cor 1:24). Tertullian represents the divine substantia both as that which the Godhead possesses and that which the Father is;Footnote 65 his Latin successors say expressly that God is his own divinity,Footnote 66 though the logical embarrassments that result from identifying the persons severally with the one God who is also the common essence were fully canvassed only in the Middle Ages.Footnote 67 Wary of the consequences that Eunomius drew from the axiom of divine simplicity, Cyril stops short of equating any of the three persons with the common divinity; he does assert, however, in his dialogue On the Trinity, that the Father is not only good (Mark 10:18) but is “the Good.”Footnote 68 We see an approximation of nature to person in the same work when we read that “only the highest and ineffable nature knows itself.”Footnote 69 Thus, without treating phusis and hypostasis as coextensive terms, he may have held that the hypostasis of the Word and his divine nature are “interchangeable” (to use Wessel's term), so long as they are considered in opposition to his flesh.

Eutyches vs. Cyril

The decrees of an ecumenical council are binding as soon as they are promulgated. Theodoret might have contested the outcome of the Council of Ephesus with eloquence and rancor, but the rest of the world received Cyril—after his death, “the blessed Cyril”—as its doctor in orthodoxy. Of course the interpretation of his writings might be open to dispute, and the matter to be interpreted includes not only his acerbic letters to Nestorius but the more pacific Formula of Reunion and the gloss that he supplies to this in his Letter to John of Antioch. When the Chalcedonian fathers canonized this document and at least one of the letters to Nestorius in 451, they were vindicating Cyril against Nestorius, on whom they heaped new anathemas. They did not congratulate themselves on the modification of a lopsidedly “Alexandrian” teaching or on the rehabilitation of some insight that was peculiar to the “Antiochene” school—though both results have been laid at their door from their own generation to ours.

The Chalcedonian fathers had convened to set right what had been ill done by a second council at Ephesus in 449. This turbulent assembly had overruled the deposition of the archimandrite Eutyches at a synod held in the previous year by Bishop Flavian of Constantinople. Eutyches was accused of denying that the incarnate Christ possessed two natures, one from above and consubstantial with God the Father, one from below and consubstantial with the human race. Both tenets were asserted, or at least implied, by the Formula of Reunion; both, therefore, could be enforced with absolute loyalty to Cyril. The conflict was between two versions of Cyrilline Christology, not between the disgruntled myrmidons of Cyril and Nestorius, or between Alexandria and Antioch.

Eutyches was induced, after long resistance, to confess that Christ was consubstantial at once with the Father according to his divinity and with the human race according to his manhood. Since it is the linchpin of the Formula of Reunion, which Cyril had endorsed with jubilation, this tenet is as Cyrilline, and as orthodox, as any that Eutyches might have culled from the letters to Nestorius. Scholars have represented it as an Antiochene corrective to Cyril's doctrine,Footnote 70 yet have not produced any instance of it in an Antiochene writer before the Council of Ephesus in 431. Theodore of Mopsuestia quotes it, and condemns it, as an Apollinarian dictum; John Cassian regards it as a truth that only opponents of Nestorius can affirm.Footnote 71 Theodoret, whom some credit with the drafting of the Formula of Reunion, follows Cyril in citing Athanasius as his sole authority for the doctrine of double consubstantiality.Footnote 72 No one who denied it in 448 could hope to be orthodox in Alexandria, any more than in Antioch or Rome.

The Home Synod of this year could not extort from Eutyches the confession that Christ possessed two natures after the union. That Christ was from two natures before the union he was ready to admit, in deference to the Formula of Reunion and to one construction of Cyril's Second Letter to Nestorius. The synod acquiesced, but to Leo of Rome it seemed as impious to assert the second proposition as to deny the first:

I marvel that such an absurd and perverse pronouncement on his part was not reprimanded by any censure of the judges, and that an utterance so exceedingly foolish, so exceedingly blasphemous, was passed over as though nothing had been heard that might give offense; in fact it is no less impious to say that before the incarnation the Only Begotten Son of God was of two natures [duarum naturarum fuisse]Footnote 73 as it is nefarious to assert that after the Word was made flesh [John 1:14] there was only one nature in him.Footnote 74

It is not clear which of two misreadings has enraged the pontiff. He may have taken Eutyches for an adoptionist who supposed that Christ existed as a man before the Word descended upon him; or, more probably—to judge by the substitution of the genitive for the prepositional clause in his translation—his bugbear was the Apollinarian notion that the Word brought down his own flesh from heaven into Mary's womb. In either case he was wrong, as the affirmation of two natures before the union signifies only that the nature assumed by the Word was not a new creation but the same one that all human beings shared before the nativity. While Leo would not have challenged the outcome of the Council of Ephesus,Footnote 75 there is nothing in his Tome that bespeaks a close study of Cyril's letters. Faith for the Greeks, however, could only mean faithfulness to Cyril, and one of the judges of Eutyches in 448 recalled that he had censured him, not for quoting the victor of Ephesus, but for dropping a salient word from his quotation:

When the monk said, “I say that the Lord Jesus Christ is from two natures, but after the union I affirm one nature”—without the addition of “enfleshed and made man”—I remember that I said, “If you say ‘from two natures’ but after the union say ‘one nature,’ you incur the suspicion of implying confusion and mixture; but if you add ‘enfleshed and made man’ you say the same as our fathers, for it is clear that according to the teaching of the fathers his Godhead, that is, of the one Lord Jesus Christ, is one thing and his flesh from his mother another.”Footnote 76

To Basil of Seleucia “one nature enfleshed” was orthodox, while “one nature” alone was heresy, because only the first of these locutions recognizes the simultaneous presence in Christ of creature and Creator. For him the phrase “one nature enfleshed” was a talisman against the Apollinarian creed that he then ascribed to Eutyches, because in these words Cyril testified that the second person of the Trinity put on a mortal robe of flesh without adulterating or relinquishing that nature that belonged to him eternally as God.

Epilogue

It would not be too polemical to say that the result of this inquiry is to vindicate the Home Synod against the strictures of Pope Leo. “From two natures before the union, one nature after the union” is an incomplete, but not unfaithful, paraphrase of Cyril's position after the Council of Ephesus. His reluctance to speak of two natures after the union is too tenacious to be blamed on a casual shift in the meaning of “nature” when it is predicated of the incarnate Christ. The error of Eutyches was not to attach a univocal sense to Cyril's term but to forget that when he affirmed “one nature” he always added the rider that this nature had been enfleshed. This is not to say that there is any change or adulteration of natures, or that “nature” can serve generically as a synonym for hypostasis; the one nature is the divine one, and in God alone hypostasis and nature coincide. “Flesh” is for Cyril the biblical term for the nature that is common to human beings as a species; that which is nature in us, however, does not become Christ's own nature when he assumes it, though it becomes his own flesh, his own body, his own humanity. It is not subsumed, as Eutyches may have imagined, but retains its difference as a temporal adjunct to that nature that is changelessly and inalienably “proper” to him as God.

Would Cyril have assented at Chalcedon? He might not have been put to the question, since we have seen that he did not espouse the locution “from two natures” with the zeal of his successor Dioscorus, who as lord of misrule at the Latrocinium forced the emperors to convene a new ecumenical council. Perhaps we should pose a different question: had the chair been his at Ephesus in 449, would he have complied with Leo's request to have his Tome to Bishop Flavian read aloud? If the question is whether he would have granted that the assertion “from two natures before the union” is as impious as the denial of two natures after the union, the answer must be no. If the question is whether he would have wished to publish a form of words that seemed to imply a double agency in Christ, the Word performing that which was proper to God and the flesh that which was proper to manhood, the answer must be that he would have been as loath as the Illyrians at Chalcedon to lend his voice to any such notion.Footnote 77 Even though he might have forgiven the Tome this infelicity in the light of its general argument, he would surely have found the Christology of Leo too fissiparous: his own practice, as he frequently avers, was not to set one nature in Christ against the other but to distinguish his “proper nature” as the Word of God from the “flesh” that he assumed.

There is room for accord, so long as the good faith of Leo is acknowledged, and he is not deemed to be one of those who perversely misconstrued the human nature of Christ. The condemnation of Eutyches would have been ratified, so long as he continued to affirm one nature in Christ without the caveat that this nature had been enfleshed. The phrase “one nature of the Word enfleshed” was not condemned in Leo's Tome and offered no affront to the Formula of Reunion; the Council of Chalcedon was a corrective to the Latrocinium, not a court of appeal from the ecumenical Council of Ephesus. It did not set out to propound a new Christology, and for the most part was content to publish the Formula of Reunion, which sufficed to prove the incompetence of Eutyches as an interpreter of Cyril. When it also canonized the Tome of Leo it taxed the consciences of those who regarded Cyril as the sole touchstone of orthodoxy; it did not, however, proscribe or render obsolete the formula “one nature of the Word enfleshed,” in which Cyril's faith in the intimacy of the union was balanced by his determination not to compromise either the divine attributes of the Word or the reality of his flesh.

References

1 See Schwartz, Eduard, Cyrill und der Mönch Viktor (Vienna: Akademie der Wissenchaft, 1928)Google Scholar with the criticisms of Chadwick, Henry, “Eucharist and Christology in the Nestorian Controversy,” JTS 2 (1951) 145–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Cyril employs two variants, in one of which the participle that means “enfleshed” is sesarkômenê, qualifying phusis (nature), while in the other it is sesarkômenou, qualifying Logos (Word). The former is the more widely quoted in antiquity (as by John of Damascus and Leontius of Jerusalem, cited in n. 16 below), but my argument will suggest that they are convergent, if not identical, in meaning.

3 Norris, R. A., “Christological Models in Cyril of Alexandria,” in Papers Presented to the Sixth International Conference on Patristic Studies Held in Oxford, 1971 (ed. Livingstone, Elizabeth A.; 3 vols.; StPatr 12–14; TUGAL 115–17; Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1975) 2:255–68Google Scholar.

4 Norris, “Christological Models,” 2:258, citing letters 4.3 and 45.4.

5 Philippians 2:5–12. For the “form of God” see 2:6 and for the “form of a slave” 2:7.

6 Norris, “Christological Models,” 2:259. In the following notes Cyril's works On the Unity of Christ and On the Incarnation of the Only Begotten will be cited from two sources: Cyrille d'Alexandrie. Deux dialogues christologiques (ed. and trans. Georges-Matthieu de Durand; SC 97; Paris: Cerf, 1964) 188–301 (henceforth: SC 97) and S. P. N. Cyrilli Alexandriæ archiepiscopi opera quæ reperiri potuerunt omnia (ed. J.-P. Migne; PG 68–77; Paris: Imprimerie catholique, 1863–1864) 1190–1254 (henceforth: PG). The Scholia on the Incarnation will be cited from the same volume of Migne, 1363–1412 and from Sancti Patris nostri Cyrilli archiepiscopi Alexandrini. Epistolae tres oecumenicae . . . (ed. Philip Edward Pusey; Oxford: Clarendon, 1875) 498–579.

7 Norris, “Christological Models,” 2:262 on “coming together” in Cyril, On the Incarnation of the Only Begotten, at PG 75, 1208c–d (SC 97, 220–21) and Scholia on the Incarnation, at PG 75, 1377b–c (Cyrilli epistolae tres [ed. Pusey], 512–15). See Norris, “Christological Models,” 2:263 on the aftermath of union.

8 Norris, “Christological Models,” 2:264 and 267.

9 See below, esp. nn. 16 and 48.

10 Weinandy, Thomas G., “Cyril and the Mystery of the Incarnation,” in The Theology of St Cyril of Alexandria (ed. Weinandy, Thomas G. and Keating, Daniel A.; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2003) 23–54Google Scholar.

11 Weinandy, “Cyril and the Mystery,” 38.

12 McGuckin, John, Saint Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy (2nd ed.; Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir's Seminary, 2004) 208Google Scholar. Petavius held a similar position: see de Juaye, Hubert du Manoir, Dogme et spiritualité chez Saint Cyrille d'Alexandrie (Études de théologie et d'histoire de la spiritualité 2; Paris: Vrin, 1944) 126Google Scholar.

13 Wessel, Susan, Cyril of Alexandria and the Nestorian Controversy: The Making of a Saint and of a Heretic (Oxford Early Christian Studies; New York: Oxford University Press, 2004) 298CrossRefGoogle Scholar, citing Doctrina patrum de incarnatione verbi (ed. Franz Diekamp; Münster: Aschendorff, 1907) 141–44, 151–53.

14 Weinandy, “Cyril and the Mystery,” 38.

15 McGuckin, Saint Cyril of Alexandria, 140 expressly states that Cyril's usage is equivocal: “In the hands of Cyril the word is used in two senses, one in what might be called the standard ‘physical’ usage where it connotes the constituent elements of a thing, and the other in which it serves to delineate the notion of individual existent—or in other words, individual subject.” See Weinandy, “Cyril and the Mystery,” 38: “it is equally clear that he used the term phusis in two different senses.”

16 The term “monophysite” has been applied pejoratively to any opponents of the Chalcedonian formula “two natures in one person.” According to the more discriminating nomenclature of Sebastian Brock, the formula “one nature enfleshed” was understood in a “henophysitic” sense by Severus of Antioch and in a truly “monophysitic” sense by the Acephali, who rejected both the Council of Chalcedon and the later Henoticon of the Emperor Zeno (Sebastian Brock, “The Christology of the Church of the East,” in idem, Fire from Heaven: Studies in Syriac Theology and Liturgy [Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2006] 159–79, at 179). In response, the Chalcedonian John of Damascus proposes a reading not unlike the one for which I argue (Against the Acephali 3, in Liber de haeresibus. Opera polemica [ed. Bonifatius Kotter; vol. 4 of Die Schriften des Johannes von Damaskos; PTS 22; Berlin: De Gruyter, 1981] 411–12). Writing against Severus, Leontius of Jerusalem (Testimonies of the Saints 1808A) holds that the formula is aimed only against Nestorians who understand the two natures as two entities: see Testimonies of the Saints in Leontius of Jerusalem: Against the Monophysites; “Testimonies of the Saints” and “Aporiae” (ed. and trans. Patrick T. R. Gray; OECT; Oxford: Clarendon, 2006) 40–161, at 48–49.

17 van Loon, Hans, The Dyophysite Christology of Cyril of Alexandria (VCSup 96; Leiden: Brill, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar is a monumental exception, but I cannot endorse his conclusion on p. 568 that Cyril employs the mia phusis formula, while perceiving its inadequacy, merely because he believes in its Athanasian provenance.

18 Cyril, On the Incarnation of the Only Begotten, at PG 75, 1208c12–d12, cited by Norris, “Christological Models,” 2:262.

19 Cyril, On the Incarnation of the Only Begotten, at PG 75, 1220b6–10 (SC 97, 240).

20 See Cyril, On the Incarnation of the Only Begotten, at PG 75, 1213b7 (SC 97, 230) on the soul's transcendence of its own nature in Christ; PG 75, 1213d10 (SC 97, 232) on the flesh that he made his own; PG 75, 1212c5 (SC 97, 228) on the invisibility of his own nature; and PG 75, 1220a15 (SC 97, 238) on the Word as life according to his own hypostasis.

21 Cyril's treatise On the Unity of Christ is found in PG 75, 1253–1362 and SC 97, 302–514. For this reference see PG 75, 1261a9 (SC 97, 314); PG 75, 1265a10 (SC 97, 322); PG 75, 1328d5 (SC 97, 448); PG 75, 1337b7 (SC 97, 464); PG 75, 1337c7 (SC 97, 464); PG 75, 1341c6 (SC 97, 474); PG 75, 1356b10 (SC 97, 500); PG 75, 1357c1 (SC 97, 504); PG 75, 1357c12 (SC 97, 506); PG 75, 1360a2ff (SC 97, 506); PG 75, 1360d7 (SC 97, 510); and PG 75, 1361a5–6 (SC 97, 510).

22 Cyril, On the Unity of Christ, at PG 75, 1273a8 (SC 97, 336); PG 75, 1352b13 (SC 97, 494); PG 75, 1361a10 (SC 97, 510); and PG 75, 1353a12 (SC 97, 496). He sheds his own blood at PG 75, 1333b2 (SC 97, 458); PG 75, 1336b3 (SC 97, 462); PG 75, 1336c4 (SC 97, 462); PG 75, 1336c14 (SC 97, 464); PG 75, 1356a5 (SC 97, 500); and PG 75, 1356b4 and b10 (SC 97, 500).

23 Cyril, On the Unity of Christ, at PG 75, 1261a3 (SC 97, 314).

24 See Cyril, On the Unity of Christ, at PG 75, 1277c1 (SC 97, 346) on goodness; PG 75, 1313a12 (SC 97, 418) on excellence; PG 75, 1313b2 (SC 97, 418) and PG 75, 1341c1 (SC 97, 474) on glory; and PG 75, 1349b10 (SC 97, 490) on divinity. At PG 75, 1332a13–14 (SC 97, 454), his own nature and his own flesh are juxtaposed. See also PG 75, 1277c6 (SC 97, 448); PG 75, 1333c5 (SC 97, 460); PG 75, 1345d1 (SC 97, 482) for other allusions to his own nature; and PG 75, 1267a1 (SC 97, 324) on his natural invisibility.

25 On the mortality of our nature see Cyril, On the Unity of Christ, at PG 75, 1353a12 (SC 97, 496).

26 Cyril, On the Unity of Christ, at PG 75, 1280c9 (SC 97, 352); see PG 75, 1281a (SC 97, 354); PG 75, 1288b3–5 (SC 97, 366); and PG 75, 1360d3 (SC 97, 510).

27 Cyril, On the Unity of Christ, at PG 75, 1305a5–13 (SC 97, 400), deriding those who characterize the union as a sunapheia (conjunction) of two individuals.

28 Cyril, On the Incarnation of the Only Begotten, at PG 75, 1202b 3–9 (SC 97, 208), citing 2 Cor 4:16.

29 See especially Scholium 35, in PG 75, 1408c–1409b (Cyrilli epistolae tres [ed. Pusey], 563–64).

30 Cyril, Scholia on the Incarnation, at PG 75, 1381b1 (Cyrilli epistolae tres [ed. Pusey], 520). See du Manoir de Juaye, Dogme et spiritualité, 129 on the “concurrence of hypostases” in Cyril's Apology for the Twelve Anathemas against Theodoret, at PG 76, 396c, which can also be found at Cyrilli epistolae tres (ed. Pusey), 366. Cyril also divides the attributes of Christ between two prosôpa in On the Trinity, at PG 75, 880c12–d5, as well as at Cyrille d'Alexandrie. Dialogues sur la Trinité (ed. and trans. Georges-Matthieu Durand; 3 vols.; SC 237; Paris: Cerf, 1976–1978) 1:170 (henceforth: SC 237). The Nestorian controversy produced a change, but not a chronic inconsistency, in his usage of these terms.

31 Cyril, Scholia on the Incarnation, at PG 75, 1386c4–5 (Cyrilli epistolae tres [ed. Pusey], 528); PG 75, 1386d10 (Cyrilli epistolae tres [ed. Pusey], 530).

32 Cyril, Scholia on the Incarnation, at PG 75, 1377a1 and a14 (Cyrilli epistolae tres [ed. Pusey], 512).

33 Cyril, Scholia on the Incarnation, at PG 75, 1377b5 (Cyrilli epistolae tres [ed. Pusey], 512) on flesh; PG 75, 1377b12 (Cyrilli epistolae tres [ed. Pusey], 514) on the human; PG 75, 1376c9 (Cyrilli epistolae tres [ed. Pusey], 510) on our nature; and PG 75, 380b2 (Cyrilli epistolae tres [ed. Pusey], 516) on humanity.

34 Cyril, Scholia on the Incarnation, at PG 75, 1377a3 and b1 (Cyrilli epistolae tres [ed. Pusey], 512).

35 Cyril, Scholia on the Incarnation, at PG 75, 1372b2 (Cyrilli epistolae tres [ed. Pusey], 502).

36 Cyril, To Pulcheria and Eudocia on the True Faith, in PG 76, 1380–1420 at 1400b; also Sancti patris nostri Cyrilli archieposcopi Alexandrini de recta fide ad imperatorem . . . (ed. Philip Edward Pusey; Oxford: Clarendon, 1877) 263–333, at 316. See further du Manoir de Juaye, Dogme et spiritualité, 127.

37 For this term in Theodore see, for example, Theodor von Mopsuestia, “De Incarnatione.” Überlieferung und Christologie der griechischen und lateinischen Fragmente einschliesslich Textausgabe (ed. Till Jansen; PTS 65; Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009) 238, line 49.

38 Cyril, Second Letter to Nestorius, in Cyril: Select Letters (ed. Lionel R. Wickham; Oxford: Clarendon, 1983) 3–11, at 4 and 6 of the Greek text (chapter 3).

39 Thus in Cyril, Commentary on John, at PG 73, 237b; see also Sancti patris nostri Cyrilli archiepiscopi Alexandrini in D. Joannis Evangelium . . . (ed. Philip Edward Pusey; 3 vols.; Oxford: Clarendon, 1872) 1:212, where he argues that if the Word dwells in the body as his temple (John 2:21), he is not present in the man Jesus in the same sense as he is present in the saints.

40 Cyril, On the Incarnation of the Only Begotten, frg. 21 in Theodor von Mopsuestia (ed. Jansen), 253.

41 Cyril, Third Letter to Nestorius, in Cyril: Select Letters (ed. Wickham), 12–33, at 22 (chapter 8).

42 Norris, “Christological Models,” 2:264, but cf. 2:267.

43 See Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man 16. See also [Plato], Greater Alcibiades 129e. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1178b, and Augustine, On the Way of Life of the Manichaeans 2.52 (both cited by Mark Julian Edwards, Origen against Plato [Ashgate Studies in Philosophy and Theology in Late Antiquity; Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2002] 116), attempt to reconcile Origen's statement that all rational beings are properly incorporeal (First Principles 1.7.1) with his demonstration in the previous chapter that no creature can subsist without a body (1.6.4).

44 Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word 9.1, 11.4, 14.4, 29.4, and 43.7. For text with translation see Athanasius: “Contra gentes” and “De incarnatione” (ed. Robert W. Thomson; OECT; Oxford: Clarendon, 1971). Cf. Cyril, On the Incarnation of the Only Begotten, at PG 75, 1213d6–7 (SC 97, 232).

45 Apollinarius, On the Union in Christ of the Body with the Godhead, in Lietzmann, Hans, Apollinaris von Laodicea und seine Schule (Tübingen: Mohr, 1904) 185–93Google Scholar, at 187.

46 Cyril, First Letter to Succensus, in Cyril: Select Letters (ed. Wickham), 70–83, at 74 and 76 of the Greek text (chapter 7).

47 Cyril, Third Letter to Nestorius 8, in Cyril: Select Letters (ed. Wickham), 22.

48 Cyril, To Arcadia and Mariana, at PG 76, 1212a5–6 (Cyrilli de recta fide [ed. Pusey], 161).

49 See Cyril: Select Letters (ed. Wickham), 63.

50 See Tertullian, On the Flesh of Christ (in Tertullian's Treatise on the Incarnation [ed. Ernest Evans; London: SPCK, 1956]); Gregory of Nazianzus, letters 101 and 102; and Athanasius, Letter to Epictetus (in Sancti Athanasii archiepiscopi Alexandrini. Opera dogmatica selecta [ed. Johann Karl Thilo; Leipzig: Weiger, 1853] 820–43).

51 Cyril, Letter to John of Antioch, in The Oecumenical Documents of the Faith (ed. T. Herbert Bindley; London: Methuen, 1899) 166–72, at 169–70; Acta conciliorum oecumenicorum (ed. Eduard Schwartz; 14 vols.; Berlin: De Gruyter, 1914) 1:17.

52 Cyril, Letter to John of Antioch, at Oecumenical Documents (ed. Bindley), 170; ACO (ed. Schwartz), 1:17.

53 Cyril, Letter to John of Antioch, at Oecumenical Documents (ed. Bindley), 170; ACO (ed. Schwartz), 1:17.

54 Cyril, First Letter to Succensus 7, at Cyril: Select Letters (ed. Wickham), 76.

55 Cyril, Second Letter to Succensus, in Cyril: Select Letters (ed. Wickham), 84–93, at 86 of the Greek text (chapter 2).

56 Cyril, Second Letter to Succensus 5, in Cyril: Select Letters (ed. Wickham), 92.

57 See Russell, Norman, “‘Partakers of the Divine Nature’ (2 Peter 1:4) in the Byzantine Tradition,” in ΚΑΘΝΓΝΤΡΙΑ: Essays Presented to Joan Hussey for her 80th Birthday (ed. Chrysostomides, Julian; Camberley, U.K.: Porphyrogenitus, 1988) 51–67Google Scholar.

58 Cyril, Letter to Eulogius, in Cyril: Select Letters (ed. Wickham) 62–69, at 62 and 64.

59 See n. 43 above.

60 Pseudo-Zacharias, Chronicle 9.15g, in The Chronicle of Pseudo-Zacharias Rhetor: Church and War in Late Antiquity (ed. Geoffrey Greatrex; trans. Robert R. Phenix and Cornelia B. Horn; Translated Texts for Historians 55; Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011) 351 [italics added].

61 Aristotle, Metaphysics 1043b2. For a bilingual text see Hugh Tredennick, Aristotle: Metaphysics (2 vols.; LCL 271, 287; New York: Heinemann, 1933–1935) 1:410–11.

62 On Cyril's acquaintance with Aristotelian logic see Dialogues on the Trinity, book 2, and Ruth Siddals, “Logic and Christology in Cyril of Alexandria,” JTS 38 (1987) 341–67.

63 Cyril, Apology for the Twelve Chapters, in PG 76, 315–86, at 340c2 (Cyrilli epistolae tres [ed. Pusey], 300). Weinandy detects some difference in semantic import (“Cyril and the Mystery,” 39). See n. 2 above.

64 Cyril, Third Letter to Nestorius 8, in Cyril: Select Letters (ed. Wickham), 24.

65 See Tertullian, Against Praxeas 9.2 (in Gegen Praxeas [ed. Hermann-Josef Sieben; Fontes christiani 34; Basel: Herder, 2001] 130) (“tota substantia pater est”), with George Christopher Stead, “Divine Substance in Tertullian,” JTS 14 (1963) 46–66.

66 Marius Victorinus, Against the Arians 1.29 (in Marii Victorini Afri. Opera theologica [ed. Albrecht Locher; Leipzig: Teubner, 1976] 36): “Non quod ista quasi in aliud quod in ipso sint, aut ut accidentia, sed istum ipsum deum esse”; Augustine, On the Trinity 5.11.12 (in De Trinitate [ed. W. J. Mountain; CCSL: 50; Turnhout: Brepols, 1968] 218–20): “ipsa sua potest dici deitas.”

67 See, e.g., Paasch, J. T., Divine Production in Late Medieval Trinitarian Theology: Henry of Ghent, Duns Scotus, and William Ockham (Oxford Theological Monographs; Oxford: Clarendon, 2012) 29–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

68 Cyril, Dialogues on the Trinity, at PG 75, 893d8 (SC 237, 2:200).

69 Cyril, Dialogues on the Trinity, at PG 75, 872d6–7 (SC 237, 2:160). See likewise ibid., 901c4–5 (SC 237, 2:212), where the nations have turned “to God, or indeed the nature of divinity”; and 928d13–14 (SC 237, 2:258).

70 Chadwick, Henry, The Church in Ancient Society: From Galilee to Gregory the Great (Oxford History of the Christian Church; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) 540CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

71 Theodore, On the Incarnation, frg. 2, in Theodor von Mopsuestia (ed. Jansen), 234; Cassian, Against Nestorius on the Incarnation 6.13, in De incarnatione contra Nestorium (ed. Michael Petschenig; CSEL 17; Vienna: Akademie Verlag, 2004) 360–61.

72 Theodoret, Eranistes 1, florilegium, in Theodoret of Cyrus, “Eranistes”: Critical Text and Prolegomena (ed. Gérard H. Ettlinger; Oxford: Clarendon, 1975) 102–3, citing Athanasius, Letter to Epictetus 2.

73 A more accurate translation of the Greek would be “ex duabus naturis.”

74 Leo I of Rome, letter 128 (Tome to Flavian) 6.282–89, in Bindley, Oecumenical Documents, 195–204, at 204.

75 See Green, Bernard, The Soteriology of Leo the Great (Oxford Theological Monographs; Oxford: Clarendon, 2008) 35–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

76 Basil of Seleucia, speaking in 449 at the Latrocinium, as reported in The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon (ed. and trans. Michael Gaddis and Richard Price; 3 vols.; Translated Texts for Historians 45; Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005) 1:224 (session 1, 546) and 1:261 (session 1, 791). See 1:221 (session 1, 519) for Basil's endorsement of double consubstantiality, and Grillmeier, Alois, From the Apostolic Age to Chalcedon (451) (vol. 1 of Christ in Christian Tradition; London: Mowbray, 1975) 525–26Google Scholar on his alleged tergiversation.

77 Council of Chalcedon (ed. and trans. Gaddis and Prince), 2:25–26 (session 2, 25).