Eutherius, bishop of Tyana, found himself on the wrong side of history. A devoted friend of Nestorius, and a theologian of no mean ability, Eutherius consistently opposed Cyril of Alexandria and his Christological doctrine during the 430s. Refusing to accept Cyril's Ephesine assembly as legitimate, he had joined John of Antioch's rival conciliabulum, and maintained his stance throughout the long hot summer of 431. He was equally unyielding in his hostility to the peace eventually forged between John and Cyril in 433, and was rewarded for his intransigence by banishment to Scythopolis. There, Eutherius languished until John's more sympathetic successor Domnus (441/442) allowed him to see out his last days in Tyre, where another old comrade, Irenaeus, had been recently installed as bishop.

This latest volume of Sources Chrétiennes helpfully brings together Eutherius' surviving works: five letters from 432 to 434, which reflect on the peace negotiations with Cyril in terms that rarely transcend the splenetic; and the much more substantial Protestation (Antilogia), which mounts a full-blooded attack on Cyril's ‘theopaschite’ theology. Tetz's 1964 edition of the Protestation has been corrected in a number of (relatively minor) places, and a French translation has been provided of the entire text. A clear and judicious introduction sketches out the main contours of Eutherius' life and doctrine, and a relatively meagre bibliography reminds the reader how little-studied Eutherius remains. This is much to be lamented, for Eutherius' writings shed light on a number of intruiging aspects of this crucial period. Two such aspects can be briefly highlighted.

Firstly, Eutherius' writings demonstrate that the reception of Cyril's Ephesine council was far from straightforward. John's attempt to build bridges in the aftermath of 431 met with fierce resistance from many of his former allies, who continued to regard Cyril's Twelve chapters as blatantly heretical, and Nestorius as wrongfully deposed. Eutherius poured scorn on Cyril's conciliar acta as falsified nonsense, and even wrote to the pope, Sixtus iii, beseeching him to intervene to defend the true faith from the blasphemy of ‘the Egyptian’. The very fact that Eutherius (and a dozen other like-minded bishops) were prepared to be exiled rather than submit to the terms of the peace and enter into communion with Cyril is a reminder of how deeply controversial the decisions of Ephesus I remained, and how profound were the divisions within the Antiochene camp. It is striking that the depth of Eutherius' hatred for Cyril, the heretic, is matched only by the depth of his hatred for John, the traitor.

Secondly, Eutherius' writings demonstrate how Nestorius' particular doctrinal emphases continued ably to be defended by his supporters after Ephesus. Eutherius scores some palpable hits against Cyril's use of Scripture during the course of the Protestation, and nicely redeploys Nestorius' strategy of appealing to the clear wording of the Nicene Creed regarding the ‘one Lord Jesus Christ’. Eutherius may ultimately have been pursuing, in the discernment of later centuries, something of a Christological dead end, but, if so, it was a dead end that he explored with vitality and vigour. Eutherius is already aware, however, that the odds seem stacked against him: one of the most interesting chapters in the Protestation is its opening salvo against ‘those who judge truth only after the greatest number’. Developing the tradition of Athanasius contra mundum, Eutherius constructs a narrative of orthodoxy whereby true doctrine is preserved and passed on not via the consensus of great councils, but via the faithful minority, who stand, like St Stephen, alone against their foes. In this way, Eutherius' writings illustrate the remarkable plasticity of orthodox discourse in the era of Ephesus I and Chalcedon: that what it meant to be faithful to the Fathers, and to the ‘Nicene faith’, was by no means clear, or in any sense a foregone conclusion.

In short, this new edition of Eutherius' corpus helps to open up afresh the controversies and complexities of the mid fifth-century Church and, in doing so, is much to be welcomed.