Alexander Schmemann

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

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 7

Nestorius wanted to purify the great city of heresies. He took up arms in particular against calling the Virgin Mary Theotokos, or “Birth-Giver of God,” a term which had long since come into liturgical use.
Theodore of Mopsuestia had also rejected it: “It is madness to say that God was born of a virgin,” he said. “He who had the nature of the virgin was born of the Virgin, not God the Word. . . He who was of the seed of David was born of a Virgin.” By this term, however, even before any more precise theological definition, the Church had expressed its faith in the absolute union of God and man in Christ. All that was said of the Man was said of God, too, and vice versa; this was the meaning of the evangelical assertion: “And the Word was made flesh.”

Nestorius was opposed by Cyril, archbishop of Alexandria. Representing the Alexandrian theological tendency in his habits and methods, Cyril also inherited the theological clear-sightedness so forcefully revealed in Athanasius. He continued the tradition stemming from Ignatius of Antioch and Irenaeus of Lyons, according to which the inner standard and criterion of theology was recognized to be the Church’s experience of salvation by Christ and in Christ. In the same way every theological construction, inevitably abstract to the extent that it used words and concepts, should be checked by its “existential” importance as by a tuning fork in order to discover whether it revealed or in any way diminished the salvation (not the knowledge) the Gospel proclaimed.

Cyril was a passionate man, a fighter. He did not always discriminate in his means of combat, and frequently did not find the right words, but he always had a true sense of the danger in the issue and gave himself wholly to defense of the truth. In the preaching of Nestorius he immediately discerned a basic distortion of the meaning of Christianity. Cyril felt that the whole essence of salvation lay in the unity of God and man in Christ, that unique Personality in whom all men come in touch with the Father, and He perceived a diminution and denial of this in the Nestorian rejection of Theotokos. He immediately took up a defense of the term in his Epistle to the Monks and later in a direct appeal to Nestorius, begging him to put a stop to the “universal scandal” he had caused.

Constantinople greeted this protest with displeasure. There the sad case of Chrysostom was still well remembered; the bishop of Constantinople had been condemned unjustly and without a hearing by a council under the chairmanship of Theophilus of Alexandria, Cyril’s uncle, and Cyril himself had taken part in the condemnation. Those were the years when the bishops of Alexandria had tried to put a limit to the uninterrupted growth of Constantinople’s ecclesiastical influence. The capital had reason to fear the powerful, abrupt, and influential Cyril. Theological dispute was again complicated by Church politics.

 

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