Alexander Schmemann

3. The Age Of The Ecumenical Councils (50 pages)

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 16

Reaction to Chalcedon — the Road to Division.

The proclamation of Chalcedonian dogma, like that of Nicaea before it, long preceded its actual acceptance by the mind of the Church. While Nicaea triumphed in the end over the whole Church, Chalcedon unfortunately led to a separation of the churches on the historical plane that continues to the present day.

We have seen earlier the psychological and religious roots of Monophysitism. For the overwhelming majority of Christians today the doctrines of the Trinity and of two natures in Christ remain abstract formulas which do not play a significant role in personal belief; at the time, however, the Chalcedonian definition seemed to many a real apostasy from earlier religious experience. When one adds that it was composed in the sober language of the Antiochenes, that the council acquitted and received into communion the chief enemy of Eutyches and the former friend of Nestorius, Theodoret of Cyrrhus, and that it solemnly condemned the Alexandrian archbishop Dioscurus, one can understand why it inevitably provoked historic reactions.
Actually the decisions of the council rejoiced only a small handful of Antiochenes and the Roman legates. It was accepted by the moderates in Constantinople. In Egypt, however, it seemed a betrayal of the precepts of the great Cyril.
Now the Syrian monks joined the Egyptians. Chalcedon was a rehabilitation of Nestorius! Under this slogan the monastic movement against the council, pulling with it the mass of believers, immediately assumed threatening proportions.

The echoes and tragic consequences of this reaction cannot be explained by theological and psychological causes alone.
Behind the Monophysite crisis lay something more than a mere relapse into the more extreme delusions of the Alexandrians. Its importance in the history of Orthodoxy was great because it revealed all the contradictions and — to speak frankly — the temptations inherent in the union of the Church with the Roman Empire under Constantine. While Chalcedon was spiritually and theologically indeed a miracle, an inexhaustible source of theological inspiration, it marked a sharp break in the relations between Church and state and in the history of the Christian world.

All this must be kept in mind in order to understand the significance of the reaction against it in the East. The council represented a triumph, not only of absolute, objective, timeless truth, but also of the faith of the empire, the faith of Constantinople. If the empire had really been what it proclaimed itself to be — what the best men of the time envisioned it to be, a universal, supranational Christian state — this triumph of imperial orthodoxy and of Constantinople would have been thoroughly justified, both historically and ecclesiastically. But unfortunately here, too, the discrepancy between theory and practice was fairly acute. The unity of the empire, culturally and psychologically, must not be exaggerated. Official documents have preserved for us its concept of itself, but if we depart from them the picture is completely different and, to be candid, a sad one. Beneath a thin layer of Hellenism and Hellenistic culture, established in the cities and among intellectuals, the old national passions continued to seethe and ancient traditions lived on. In the outskirts of Antioch, John Chrysostom was obliged to preach in Syrian; Greek was no longer understood there. Modern research demonstrates with increasing clarity that the Syrian and Coptic masses felt the power of the empire to be a hated yoke. Moreover, in the eastern part of it an output of Syrian Christian writings appeared, stemming of course from the Greek but showing the possibility of independent development. One need mention only the name of St. Ephraim the Syrian in the fourth century to feel the depth and potential of this “Eastern” version of Christianity.

 

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