This book cannot be recommended as a useful introduction or guide to the Nestorian controversy, or Cyril's part in it. Wessel's intention is to ‘tell the story of how one bishop rose to prominence and another was sent into exile’. At a basic level, then, we are dealing with church history. But although there is an historical narrative here, there seems very little engagement with historical problems, and I found myself wondering if I had learnt anything more from it than I had from B. J. Kidd's narrative, published more than eighty years ago.
The second section of the book is entitled ‘The Rhetoric of the Nestorian Debates’, and a short answer to the author's question how Cyril became a saint and Nestorius a heretic might be that the former was better at appropriating rhetorical method. There is certainly more than theology at issue in this controversy, and an author is entitled to explore other issues at the expense of the theological ones. But the theological issues are, nevertheless, of central importance, and Wessel lacks sureness of touch in dealing with them. This is the source of my major misgiving about this book. For example, on page 44 we read that ‘the immolated ram signified that Christ did not himself suffer death because by his very nature it was not possible for him to suffer: he was impassive (apathes) … By claiming that the Word suffered in his own body, not in that of another, Cyril constructed a vision of Christ that was singular and undifferentiated. By assuring his congregations that the essence of Christ's incorporeal deity did not suffer on the cross, only the temple born of the Virgin, Cyril carefully avoided attributing to Christ a dual nature’. This seems to betray a very confused understanding of what Cyril is actually saying in this passage from his Fifth Festal Letter.
On p. 288 the four privative adverbs of the Chalcedonian Definition of the Faith are ascribed to Leo, and we are told that ‘For the strict Cyrillians of Egypt, Leo had not spoken like Cyril’. But a standard handbook would reveal that Cyril was comfortable with at least three of these adjectives, and all four of them are sometimes said to have been drawn from his works.
Nestorius is variously said to have held that the two natures of Christ were ‘loosely connected by the prosopon’(p. 1), ‘linked … by a single prosopon’(p. 133) or ‘intimately and definitively joined together through the single prosopon’(p. 276). I think Nestorius likely to have been as surprised at this instrumental role of the prosopon of the union as he is to have been startled by the advice offered here that ‘he would have been far more effective … if he had said that Cyril's Christology made Christ no better than an ordinary man’. It is surely not the case that ‘his listeners would have recognised that he was using the same rhetorical manoeuvre that Cyril and his party had used so often’(p. 248). It is much more likely that they would have supposed that the strain had become too much for him, and that it was time for him to be found secure lodging in a compassionate monastery.
There is a similar fuzziness about the Arians. On page 132 we read that they ‘had claimed that Christ was an exalted man, promoted from his inherently lower status’; but on p. 221 that they ‘believed in a pre-existent Son of God who changed into a man, taking his body from the Virgin while simultaneously substituting his own essence for the human soul’.
The Christological debates of the fifth century are sufficiently complicated as they are. Only books likely to shed some genuine light upon them are deserving of welcome.
