THE CHURCH IN CRISIS: A History of the General Councils: 325-1870

Msgr. Philip Hughes

Nihil Obstat: 
James A. Reynolds, Ph.D.
Censor Deputatus  

Imprimatur:
+ Francis Cardinal Spellman
Archbishop of New York
September 28, 1960  

The nihil obstat and imprimatur are official declarations that a book or 
pamphlet is free of doctrinal or moral error. No implication is contained 
therein that those who have granted the nihil obstat and imprimatur agree 
with the contents, opinions, or statements expressed.  

REVERENDISSIMO IOANNI K. CARTWRIGPT ET SUIS
AUCTOR AMICUS PLENO CORDE

Salve, Umbria verde, e tu del puro fonte
nume Clitumno! Sento in cuor l'antica
patria e aleggiarmi su l'accesa fronte
gl'itali iddii.  

             *    *    *

Tutto ora tace. Nel sereno gorgo
la tenue miro saliente vena: 
rema, e d'un lieve pullular lo specchio
segna de l'acque.  

Ride sepolta a l'imo una foresta
breve, e ramaggia immobile: il diaspro
par che si mischi in flessuosi amori
con l'amestista.  

E di zaffiro i fior paiono, ed hanno
de l'adamante rigido i riflessi,
e splendon freddi e chiamano a i silenzi
del verde fondo.
                            Carducci.  

Notre Dame du Lac
April 26, 1960


CONTENTS:

Introduction: On Councils and General Councils

1. The First General Council of Nicaea, 325

2. The First General Council of Constantinople, 381

3. The General Council of Ephesus, 431

4. The General Council of Chalcedon, 451

5. The Second General Council of Constantinople, 553

6. The Third General Council of Constantinople, 680-81

7. The Second General Council of Nicaea, 787

8. The Fourth General Council of Constantinople, 869-70

9. The First General Council of the Lateran, 1123

10. The Second General Council of the Lateran, 1139

11. The Third General Council of the Lateran, 1179

12. The Fourth General Council of the Lateran, 1215

13. The First General Council of Lyons, 1245

14. The Second General Council of Lyons, 1274

15. The General Council of Vienne, 1311-12

16. The General Council of Constance, 1414-18

17. The General Council of Basel-Ferrara-Florence, 1431-45

18. The Fifth General Council of the Lateran, 1512-17

19. The General Council of Trent, 1545-63

20. The First General Council of the Vatican, 1869-70

Appendix

Index


Introduction: On Councils and General Councils

The history of the General Councils of the Church is a fascinating subject, 
and to those unfamiliar with the history of the Church a subject which 
bristles with difficulties of all kinds. This, I think, ought to be 
understood from the beginning. Some of the problems raised by this or that 
particular council will be considered in the chapter devoted to it. About 
difficulties general to the subject I would like to say something in this 
Introduction.

It is hardly possible to write the history of these twenty General Councils 
as though they were sections hewn from the one same log. They are not a 
unity in the sense in which successive sessions of Congress are a unity. 
Each of the twenty councils is an individual reality, each has its own 
special personality. This is partly due to the fact that each had its 
origin in a particular crisis of Church affairs, partly to the fact that 
they are strung out over fifteen hundred years of history, and that, for 
example, the human beings who constitute the council can be as remote from 
each other as the victims of the persecution of Diocletian in the fourth 
century from the victims of Bismarck in the nineteenth. It is not through 
any mechanical, material similarity of action, then, that the history of 
such an institution, and its significance, can be understood. Where the 
total action is spread over such vast spaces of time, and is discontinuous, 
whoever attempts to relate the whole of the action is faced with problems 
of a very special kind. And this speciality is, of course, bound up with 
the fact that the body which threw up this device called the General 
Council--the Church of Christ-- is itself unique in this, viz., its 
possession of a recorded, continuous activity of nearly two thousand years.

Some, perhaps superficial, consideration of this vast timetable, 325-1870, 
may be helpful at the outset, even to the reader who is not, by nature, 
chronologically minded. Reading the list of the General Councils we can see 
immediately two obvious groupings: the first eight were all held in eastern 
Europe or in Asia Minor; all the rest in western Europe, in Italy, France, 
and Germany. The eastern councils were Greek-speaking, the others Latin. 
General Councils are frequent in some ages, and in others the centuries go 
by without a single one. Thus, for the seventy years 381-451 there are 
three General Councils, then one every hundred years down to 869. For 254 
years there is now not a single General Council; then, in 190 years there 
are seven (1123-1311). Another century goes by without a council, and in 
the next hundred years (1414-1512) three are summoned. The Council of Trent 
is called less than thirty years after the last of these three, and then 
306 years go by before the twentieth council meets in 1869 ninety-two years 
ago nearly.

Each of these councils has a history and a character all its own. The 
history of the next council--how matters will go once the bishops meet--can 
never be foretold from the history of the last. The powers and the 
authority of the new council are, it is recognised, the same as its 
predecessors possessed. The procedure may, and will, vary. One thing is 
never constant: the human reaction of the council's component parts.

The first General Council met in 325. The Church had then been an 
established fact for nearly three hundred years. How did councils begin--
i.e., meetings of bishops to discuss matters of common interest? When and 
where did the first church councils take place? And what about the 
beginnings of the "prestige" of these councils? That is, of the idea that 
what bishops collectively agree is law has a binding force that is greater 
than any of their individual instructions to their own see.

To begin with the last point, it is a safe statement that from the moment 
when history first shows us the Church of Christ as an institution, the 
exclusive right of the Church to state with finality what should be 
believed as Christ's teaching is manifestly taken for granted. To bring out 
a theory of belief, or to propose a change in morals which conflicts with 
what the Church universally holds is, from the very beginning, to put 
oneself fatally in the wrong. The immediate, spontaneous reaction of the 
Church to condemn thinkers with new and original views of this kind is 
perhaps the most general, as it is the most striking, of all the phenomena 
of the Church's early history, so far back as the record goes.[1]

When it was that bishops first formed the habit of coming together in 
council, we do not know. It is such an obvious act, on the part of 
officials with like problems and responsibilities and authority, that to do 
this was second nature surely. What we do know is that as early as the 
second century (100-200 A.D.) it was the custom for the bishops who came 
together for a bishop's funeral to take charge of the election of his 
successor. Here is one likely source, it is suggested, from which came the 
council of bishops as a recurring feature of ordinary Christian life.

About the year 190 a furious controversy as to the date at which the feast 
of Easter should be kept, shook the whole Church, and the pope, St. Victor 
I, sent orders to the places most troubled that the bishops should meet and 
report to him their findings. And a series of councils were then held, in 
Palestine, in Asia Minor, and in Gaul. Sixty years later when, with the 
great career of St. Cyprian, the mists clear away from Roman Africa, we 
perceive that the bishops' council is already a long-established practice 
there. The bishops of Africa meet in council, indeed, twice every year. 
What they decreed on these occasions was law for the whole of Christian 
Africa. These councils were well attended; in 220 there were seventy-one 
bishops present, and at another council, ninety. At St. Cyprian's council 
of Carthage in 256, there were eighty-seven. There was a similar, 
systematic conciliar action in Egypt and in Syria and Palestine.

In the early years of the next century we have records of councils in Spain 
(Elvira, 300) and in France (Arles, 314) with the names of bishops present 
and a list of the laws they enacted. The Catholic Church may, indeed, be a 
Church made up of churches (i.e., dioceses) but never, so this history 
seems to show, of dioceses where each bishop acts without any reference to 
the rest.

When the emperor Constantine publicly became a follower of Christ (312) he 
was immediately faced with the grave African problem known to history as 
the Donatist Schism. Necessarily, and in a very brief space of time, he was 
familiarised with the function of the council of the bishops, as an 
instrument of church government. It was natural, inevitable indeed, that 
when a few years later the Arian crisis arose, all concerned, the emperor 
and the bishops, should think of a great council as the first move in the 
restoration of order. The novel feature in 325 was that not only the 
bishops of the locality affected were convoked, but the bishops of the 
whole Catholic world.[2] This was to be not a regional or provincial 
council, but a council for the church in general--a General Council.

The universal belief that the Church of Christ, in its day-to-day business 
of teaching the doctrine of Christ, is divinely preserved from teaching 
erroneously, entailed the consequence that (to use a modern terminology) 
the General Council is considered infallible in its decisions about belief. 
If the official teachers as a body are infallible as they teach, scattered 
about the world in their hundreds of sees, they do not lose the promised, 
divine, preserving guidance once they have come together in a General 
Council. And once General Councils have taken place we begin to meet 
explicit statements of this truth. The councils themselves are explicitly 
conscious of it when, making their statement of the truth denied by the 
innovator, they bluntly say of those who will not accept their decision, 
Let him be anathema. St. Athanasius, who as a young cleric was present at 
Nicaea, can refer to its decree about Arianism as something final, the last 
all-decisive word: "The word of the Lord, put forth by the Oecumenical 
Council at Nicaea is an eternal word, enduring for ever."[3] Eighty years 
or so later than this the pope, St. Leo I, warning the bishops assembled at 
the General Council of Chalcedon to leave untouched the decisions of Nicaea 
about the rank of the great sees of the East, speaks of Nicaea as "having 
fixed these arrangements by decrees that are inviolable," and says, "These 
arrangements were made by the bishops at Nicaea under divine 
inspiration."[4] This was in the year 451. His successor, St. Gregory the 
Great, writing about 594 to the patriarch of Constantinople, has a
reference to the special prestige of the first, doctrine-defining General 
Councils which equates their work with that of Holy Scripture: "I profess 
that as I receive and venerate the four books of the Gospels, so I do the 
four councils," which he proceeds to list: Nicaea in 325, Constantinople in 
381, Ephesus 431, Chalcedon 451. These, he says, "are the four squared 
stone on which the structure of the holy faith arises."[5]

Nowhere in these early centuries, in fact, do we find any member of the 
Church questioning the truth as the General Councils have defined it. What 
they teach as the truth is taken to be as true as though it were a 
statement of Scripture itself. The question was never raised, seemingly, 
that the greater or smaller number of bishops who in response to the 
summons attended, in any way affected the peculiar authority of the General 
Council; nor the fact that all but all of these bishops were from the 
Greek-speaking East.

How these fundamental, primitive notions developed, how all that they 
seminally contained matured and expanded through the centuries, this is the 
very subject-matter of the chapters that follow. And here will be found, in 
its due place, some account of the controversies that later arose as to the 
relation (the constitutional relation, so to speak) of the General Council 
to its president the pope. What the role of the pope has been in the 
General Council is, necessarily, a main topic of all these chapters. But it 
may be useful to say a word about this here, and something also about the 
nature of the bishops' role.

The General Council is then a purely human arrangement whereby a divinely 
founded institution functions in a particular way for a particular purpose. 
That divinely founded thing is the teaching Church, i.e., the pope and the 
diocesan bishops of the Church of Christ. The teaching is an activity of 
the Church that is continuous, never ceasing. The General Council of the 
teaching Church, in all the sessions of the occasions on which it has met, 
in the nineteen hundred years and more of the Church's history, has sat for 
perhaps thirty years in all, at most. It is an exceptional phenomenon in 
the life of the Church, and usually it appears in connection with some 
great crisis of that life.

Ever since the popes were first articulate about the General Council, they 
have claimed the right to control its action and, to take their place in it 
(whether personally or by legates sent in their name) or by their 
subsequent acceptance of the council, to give or withhold an approbation of 
its decisions, which stamps them as the authentic teaching of the Church of 
Christ. Only through their summoning it, or through their consenting to 
take their place at it, does the assembly of bishops become a General 
Council. No member of the Church has ever proposed that a General Council 
shall be summoned and the pope be left out, nor that the pope should take 
any other position at the General Council but as its president. The history 
of the twenty General Councils shows that the bishops--a section of them--
not infrequently fought at the council the policies of the popes who had 
summoned the council, and fought even bitterly. But in no council has it 
been moved that the bishop of X be promoted to the place of the Bishop of 
Rome, or that the Bishop of Rome's views be disregarded, and held of no 
more account than those of the bishop of any other major see. There are, 
indeed, gaps in our knowledge of the detail of all these events; the mist 
of antiquity, at times, no doubt obscures our view, but through the mist at 
its worst the general shape is ever discernible of a Roman Primacy 
universally recognised, and submitted to, albeit (at times) unwillingly--
recognised and submitted to because, so the bishops believed, it was set up 
by God Himself.

To the General Councils of the Church there have been summoned, in the last 
850 years, as well as the bishops, other ecclesiastics of importance, the 
General Superiors of religious orders, for example, and abbots of 
particular monasteries. But these are present by concession. The essential 
elements of the General Council are, in addition to the pope, the bishops 
ruling their sees. And the bishops are present as the accredited witnesses 
of what is believed throughout the Church. This is the traditional, 
standard conception of their role on these occasions. And for typical 
modern statements, contained in well-known textbooks used throughout the 
Church today in hundreds of theological classrooms, this from Christian 
Pesch, S.J.,[6] may be quoted: "The bishops do not come together in order 
to think up something new out of their own minds, but in order to be 
witnesses of the teaching received from Christ and handed out by the 
Church"; and this too from Fr. Dominic Prummer, O.P.: The bishops gathered 
in a General Council are not mere counsellors of the pope, but real 
legislators; which is why each bishop signs the acta of the council as 
follows: 'I, James, bishop of X, defining have subscribed my name.'"[7]

As to the role of the General Council vis-a-vis any controversy about the 
Christian Faith, in connection with which it may have been summoned, this 
has never been more luminously stated, in a single sentence, than by John 
Henry Newman, with reference, indeed, to the first council of the great 
series, but, as history alone would show, a statement true of them all. ". 
. . it must be borne in mind that the great Council at Nicaea was summoned, 
not to decide for the first time what was to be held concerning our Lord's 
divine nature, but, as far as inquiry came into its work, to determine the 
fact whether Arius did or did not contradict the Church's teaching, and, if 
he did, by what sufficient tessera[8] he and his party could be excluded 
from the communion of the faithful."[9] And Newman's own great hero, St. 
Athanasius, writing only thirty-four years after Nicaea, has a similar 
thought when he draws attention to the different way the Council of Nicaea 
spoke when it was making laws about ecclesiastical discipline and when it 
was facing the problem of Arius. "The fathers at Nicaea speaking of the 
Easter feast say 'We have decided as follows.' But about the faith they do 
not say 'We have decided,' but 'This is what the Catholic Church believes.' 
And immediately they proclaim how they believe, in order to declare, not 
some novelty, but that their belief is apostolic, and that what they write 
down is not something they have discovered, but those very things which the 
Apostles taught."[10]

This little book of mine--"little," surely, for it surveys twenty General 
Councils and fifteen hundred years of history--has no claim on the reader's 
notice beyond its purpose to say how each of these councils came to be, and 
what each achieved. Many questions about General Councils as such, and 
about particular General Councils, are inevitably not even alluded to. I 
have no ambition to write a survey course in which everything is mentioned 
and nothing taught. Nevertheless there are some serious matters that cannot 
be omitted, and yet can only be dealt with summarily--the new theories 
which became heresies, for example, and the orthodox statements of the 
truth which the theories perverted. In summary accounts of such things the 
impression is easily conveyed that these disputes are a mere war of words. 
Actually, what any study of the voluminous writings on both sides reveals 
is that the conflicting minds are of the first order, that the points at 
issue are the fundamentals of revealed truth, and (a very important 
circumstance that often has escaped the historian's notice) that the 
contestants are passionately in earnest, not as rivals in scholarship or 
philosophy, but as pastoral-minded bishops, anxious about the salvation of 
men's souls. A master mind, reviewing a situation we shall shortly be 
studying, affords an illustration of this.

"Cyril, it may be, was overharsh in the words he used, words used without 
enough reflexion. Deep within him his passionate attachment to the truth 
that Christ is a single being was intertwined with the innermost strands of 
the mysticism of the East. For the disciple of Theodore of Mopsuestia, as 
for the disciple of Pelagius, the question of the relations between man and 
God is, above all, a question of merit and no-merit. In the great book of 
deserts each man's account is kept in two columns, debit and credit. As a 
man's merits pile up, as he lessens his faults, so does his situation 
improve. At the end God balances the account, and places us according to 
the excess of credit over debit. Moralism pure and simple, this way of 
looking at things, and not religion at all. Where, in such a system, does 
the Incarnation come in? or the cross of Christ? Here, Jesus Christ is our 
model, nothing more. Here we never meet our true saviour, our redeemer, He 
who by His divine presence purifies everything, lifts all to a higher 
plane, consecrates all, makes divine beings of us so far as the limits of 
our nature allow this communication of divinity.

"Very, very different is the spirit that gives life to the theology of St. 
Cyril. Here, Jesus Christ is truly God-within-us. The Christian makes a 
direct contact with Him, by a union of natures, a mysterious union indeed, 
under the sacramental veil of the Eucharist. Through this body and this 
blood he comes to make the contact with God, for these have, in Jesus 
Christ, a union (equally a union of natures ) with divinity. . . . To the 
poor peasant working in the fields of the Delta, to the dock labourer at 
the port of Pharos, Cyril gives the message that, in this world, he can 
touch God. And that through this contact, whence springs a mystical 
kinship, he can receive an assurance about the life hereafter; not only the 
guarantee that he is immortal, but that he will be immortal joined with 
God."[11] Such can be the practical importance of "abstract theological 
thought."

And, with reference to the stormy history of the first eight councils, 
events of a thousand to sixteen hundred years ago, we may remind ourselves 
that the actors here are Greeks, Egyptians, Syrians; their natural 
temperament and sense of nationality was not a whit less ardent than it can 
show itself to be in their descendants of this mid-twentieth century.

And now, to bring these introductory remarks to an end, it will perhaps be 
helpful to draw attention to one feature particularly of the history of the 
first seven councils. This is not so much the serious differences of 
opinion as to the interpretation of the basic mysteries of the Christian 
religion, which is their main concern, but rather the way these 
differences, at times, seem to turn so largely on different ways of 
understanding the terms used to express or explain the doctrine. Since all 
this is likely to be unfamiliar to the general reader, to him I would say 
some words of the great authority I have already made use of, a writer who 
all his life was ever conscious that the course of true historical study is 
strewn with difficulties.

"First of all," says Newman, "and in as few words as possible, and ex 
abundanti cautela: Every Catholic holds that the Christian dogmas were in 
the Church from the time of the Apostles; that they were ever in their 
substance what they are now; that they existed before the formulas were 
publicly adopted, in which, as time went on, they were defined and 
recorded, and that such formulas, when sanctioned by the due ecclesiastical 
acts, are binding on the faith of Catholics, and have a dogmatic 
authority....

"Even before we take into account the effect which would naturally be 
produced on the first Christians by the novelty and mysteriousness of 
doctrines which depend for their reception simply upon Revelation, we have 
reason to anticipate that there would be difficulties and mistakes in 
expressing them, when they first came to be set forth by unauthoritative 
writers. Even in secular sciences, inaccuracy of thought and language is 
but gradually corrected; that is, in proportion as their subject-matter is 
thoroughly scrutinized and mastered by the co-operation of many independent 
intellects, successively engaged upon it. Thus, for instance, the word 
Person requires the rejection of various popular senses, and a careful 
definition, before it can serve for philosophical uses. We sometimes use it 
for an individual as contrasted with a class or multitude, as when we speak 
of having 'personal objections' to another; sometimes for the body, in 
contrast to the soul, as when we speak of 'beauty of person.' We sometimes 
use it in the abstract, as when we speak of another as 'insignificant in 
person.' How divergent in meaning are the derivatives, personable, 
personalities, personify, personation, personage, parsonage! This variety 
arises partly from our own carelessness, partly from the necessary 
developments of language, partly from the defects of our vernacular tongue.

"Language then requires to be refashioned even for sciences which are based 
on the senses and the reason; but much more will this be the case, when we 
are concerned with subject-matters, of which, in our present state, we 
cannot possibly form any complete or consistent conception, such as the 
Catholic doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation. Since they are from the 
nature of the case above our intellectual reach, and were unknown till the 
preaching of Christianity, they required on their first promulgation new 
words, or words used in new senses, for their due enunciation; and, since 
these were not definitely supplied by Scripture or by tradition, nor for 
centuries by ecclesiastical authority, variety in the use, and confusion in 
the apprehension of them, were unavoidable in the interval.... Not only had 
the words to be adjusted and explained which were peculiar to different 
schools or traditional in different places, but there was the formidable 
necessity of creating a common measure between two, or rather three 
languages--Latin, Greek, and Syriac."[12]

NOTES

1. For a succinct, popular account of which cf. my own History of the 
Church, vol. I, chaps. III, IV, passim. For an authoritative, documented 
account cf. Pierre Batiffol, L'Eglise Naissante (the whole book). This has 
been translated into English as Primitive Christianity.

2. The Greek word for "the whole world" is oikoumene, whence our modem 
adjective "oecumenical," which is used with reference to councils of the 
Church as an equivalent for "general."

3. Letter to the Africans, in Rouet de Journel S.J., Enchiridion 
Patristicum, no. 792. The full titles of all books quoted will be found in 
Appendix II.

4. Ibid., no. 2185.

5. Ibid., no. 2291.

6. Praelectiones Dogmaticae (5th ed., 1915) vol. 1, p. 313. The footnotes 
in this book do not give the authorities for the statements in the text, 
but only the source of the quotations.

7. Definiens subscripsi. The passage I have translated is in Prummer, 
Manuale Theologiae Moralis, 5th ed., 1928, I, 119.

8. Testing token.

9. "Apostolical Tradition," an article in the British Critic, July 1836, 
reprinted (1871, and many times since) in Essays, Critical and Historical, 
vol. I, 125.

10. Epistola de Synodis, par. 5, in Rouet de Journel, S.J., Enchiridion 
Patristicum, no. 785.

11 Monseigneur Louis Duchesne, Les Eglises separees, 38-40. I came across 
this passage in Bardy, Les Luttes Christologiques apres le Concile de 
Chalcedoine, i.e., Fliche and Martin, vol. 5, 273, n. 1.

12. J.H. Newman, On St. Cyril's Formula (1858), reprinted in Tracts, 
Theological and Ecclesiastical (1874), pp. 287-90.


CHAPTER 1. The First General Council of Nicaea, 325

It is more than sixteen hundred years since the first of the General 
Councils of the Church met. This is so long ago that the very names of the 
places connected with its history have quite disappeared from common 
knowledge and the atlases. They have about them an air of the fabulous; 
Nicaea, Bithynia, Nicomedia, and the rest. The very unfamiliarity of the 
sounds is a reminder that even for the purpose of the slight consideration 
which is all that these pages allow, a considerable adjustment of the mind 
is called for. We must, somehow, revive the memory of a world that has 
wholly passed away, that had disappeared, indeed, well nigh a thousand 
years already when Columbus and his ships first sighted the coasts of the 
new continent.

The business that brought the three hundred or so bishops to Nicaea in 325 
from all over the Christian world was to find a remedy for the disturbances 
that had seriously troubled the East for now nearly two years. The cause of 
these disturbances was a new teaching about the basic mystery of the 
Christian religion.

Let our expert summarise the position, and say what it was that the new 
leader, Arius by name, had lately been popularising, through sermons, 
writings, and popular hymns and songs. "It was the doctrine of Arianism 
that our Lord was a pure creature, made out of nothing, liable to fall, the 
Son of God by adoption, not by nature, and called God in Scripture, not as 
being really such, but only in name. At the same time [Arius] would not 
have denied that the Son and the Holy Ghost were creatures transcendently 
near to God, and immeasurably distant from the rest of creation.

"Now, by contrast, how does the teaching of the Fathers who preceded Arius, 
stand relatively to such a representation of the Christian Creed? Is it 
such, or how far is it such, as to bear Arius out in so representing it? 
This is the first point to inquire about.

"First of all, the teaching of the Fathers was necessarily directed by the 
form of Baptism, as given by our Lord Himself to His disciples after His 
resurrection. To become one of His disciples was, according to His own 
words, to be baptized 'into the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of 
the Holy Ghost'; that is, into the profession, into the service, of a 
Triad. Such was our Lord's injunction: and ever since, before Arianism and 
after, down to this day, the initial lesson in religion taught to every 
Christian, on his being made a Christian, is that he thereby belongs to a 
certain Three, whatever more, or whether anything more, is revealed to us 
in Christianity about that Three.

"The doctrine then of a Supreme Triad is the elementary truth of 
Christianity; and accordingly, as might have been expected, its recognition 
is a sort of key-note, on which centre the thoughts and language of all 
theologians, from which they start, with which they end."[1]

Examination of a chain of pre-Arian writers, from every part of 
Christendom, reveals that "there was during the second and third centuries 
a profession and teaching concerning the Holy Trinity, not vague and 
cloudy, but of a certain determinate character," and that this teaching 
"was contradictory and destructive of the Arian hypothesis."[2] And from 
all this literature the fact emerges that, from the beginning, "some 
doctrine or other of a Trinity lies at the very root of the Christian 
conception of the Supreme Being, and of his worship and service": and that 
"it is impossible to view historical Christianity apart from the doctrine 
of the Trinity."[3]

It was round about the year 323 that the Arian crisis developed. The 
struggle between the advocates of the new theory and the Church authorities 
who stood by the tradition was to continue thence onward for a good fifty 
years and more. And now, for the first time in the history of the Church, 
the State intervened in what was, of itself, a dispute about belief. A 
second point to note is that the State, on the whole, sided with the 
innovators, and was hostile to the defenders of the traditional truth.

The history of those fifty-six years (325-41), that followed the Council of 
Nicaea and closed with the next General Council (Constantinople I), is part 
of the history of both these councils. And its complexity defies any 
summary simplification. If we turn to Newman for a clue to the meaning of 
it all, he will tell us that this long and stubborn struggle is nothing 
else than a particular passage in the conflict that never ceases between 
the Church and the secular power. "The same principle of government which 
led the emperors to denounce Christianity while they were pagans, led them 
to dictate to its bishops, when they had become Christians." Such an idea 
as that "religion should be independent of state authority" was, in the 
eyes of all these princes, contrary to the nature of things. And not only 
was this conflict "inevitable," but, Newman continues, it might have been 
foreseen as probable that the occasion of the conflict would be a 
controversy within the Church about some fundamental doctrine. Newman's 
last remarkable words may usefully warn us that in Church History things 
are not always so simple as we expect.[4]

Even the full history of a General (i.e., world-wide) Council called in 
such circumstances, the first council of its kind--which had no precedents 
to guide its procedure, or to instruct the generality about the special 
value attaching to its decisions--even this would inevitably present 
difficulties to minds sixteen hundred years later; minds bred in a 
detailed, centuries-old tradition about the kind of thing General Councils 
are, and furnished with definite ideas about their nature, procedure, and 
authority.

But we are very far from possessing anything like a full history of this 
first Council of Nicaea. Of any official record of the day-today 
proceedings--the acta of the council--there is no trace. The earliest 
historians, from whose accounts our knowledge must derive, were in large 
measure partisan writers. And of the two writers who were present at the 
council, the one who was a historian[5] was an ally of the heretics and the 
quasi-official panegyrist of the emperor Constantine who called the 
council; and the other,[6] though he has much indeed to say about the 
council, does not anywhere profess to be writing a record of its acts.

Nowhere, of course, is our knowledge of the history of these first 
centuries of the Church anything like so complete as is our knowledge of, 
let us say, any part of it during the last eight or nine hundred years. In 
the matter of Nicaea, as in other questions, scholars are still disputing--
and not on religious grounds--whether, for example, certain key documents 
were really written by the personages whose names they bear. About the 
details of the history of all these early councils, because of the 
insufficiency of our information, there is inevitably much confusion, great 
obscurity. Yet there are compensations for those who study it. "History 
does not bring clearly upon the canvas the details which were familiar to 
the ten thousand minds of whose combined movements and fortunes it treats. 
Such is it from its very nature; nor can the defect ever fully be remedied. 
This must be admitted . . . still no one can mistake its general teaching 
in this matter, whether he accept it or stumble at it. Bold outlines, which 
cannot be disregarded, rise out of the records of the past, when we look to 
see what it will give up to us: they may be dim, they may be incomplete, 
but they are definite; there is that which they are not, which they cannot 
be."[7]

The state, or political society, in which the Arian troubles arose and 
developed was that which we know as the Roman Empire. This state, for its 
inhabitants, was one and the same thing as civilisation, and not 
surprisingly. As the accession of Constantine to the sole rulership, in 
324, found the empire, so it had endured for three hundred years and more. 
History does not record any political achievement even remotely parallel to 
this. For the empire took in, besides Italy, the whole of Europe west of 
the Rhine and south of the Danube and also the southern half of the island 
of Britain. In the east it included the whole of the modern state we call 
Turkey, with Syria also, Palestine, and Egypt, and the lands on the 
southern shore of the Mediterranean westward thence to the Atlantic.

Races as varied as the peoples who today inhabit these lands, with just as 
little to unite them naturally, lived then for some four hundred years 
under the rule of the emperors, with a minimum of internal disturbance and 
in almost entire freedom from foreign war. The stresses and strains of the 
internal life of the empire were, of course, a constant menace to this 
marvellous unity. The supreme ruler, with whom lay the fullness of 
legislative power, who was the final judge in all lawsuits, and the head of 
the national religion, was the ruler because he was the commander in chief 
of the army: his very title imperator, which we translate "emperor," means 
just this.[8] And for the imperator, it was one of the chief problems of 
government to maintain his military prestige with the vast armies. No man 
could long rule the Roman world who did not first hold the legions true to 
himself by his own professional worth. All the great rulers who, in the 
course of these four centuries, developed and adapted and reformed the 
complex life of the state, its finances, its law, its administration, were 
in the first place great soldiers, highly successful generals: Trajan, for 
example, Hadrian, Septimius Severus, Decius, Diocletian.

And Constantine, the first emperor to abandon the pagan religion and to 
profess himself a Christian, stood out to his own generation primarily as a 
highly successful soldier, triumphant in a series of contests with rivals 
for the supreme place. Such wars, fights between rival generals for the 
imperial throne, were the chief curse of Roman political life, and 
especially so in what we reckon as the third century, the century in the 
last quarter of which Constantine himself was born. He would have been a 
little boy of nine or ten when the great Diocletian became emperor in 284, 
who, to put an end to these suicidal wars, immediately associated another 
soldier with himself, as joint emperor, the one to rule the East, the other 
the West. In 293 Diocletian took this devolution of power a step further 
With each emperor there was now associated a kind of assistant emperor, 
with the title of Caesar, the actual ruler of allotted territories and 
destined to be, in time, his principal's successor. The soldier chosen in 
293 as the first western Caesar was Constantine's father, Constantius, 
commonly called Chlorus (the Pale) from his complexion. His territory was 
the modern countries of Portugal, Spain, France, Belgium, and England.

These details of political reorganisation have a direct connection with our 
story. The reader knows--who does not?--that one feature of the history of 
this Roman state was its hostility to the Christian religion Scarcely a 
generation went by without some serious persecution. And Diocletian ended 
his reign with the most dreadful persecution of all (303). This was largely 
due to the influence of his colleague, the Caesar, Galerius who, in 305, 
was to succeed him as emperor in the East. And of all the territories, it 
was Egypt that provided most of the victims in the eight years the terror 
lasted--Egypt which was to be the principal scene of the Arian troubles 
and, par excellence, of the Catholic resistance to them. In the West the 
persecution was, by comparison, mild, and in the domains of Constantius 
Chlorus there was no persecution at all. This emperor's personal religious 
history, and his attitude towards the Christian religion, is full of 
interest. His views were also the views of his son Constantine, and they 
perhaps provide a clue to the strange and baffling story, not only of the 
long successful Arian defiance of the decisions of the Council of Nicaea, 
but of that first Christian emperor's seeming unawareness of the defiance.

Constantine's own character is, of course, an element of the first 
importance in the history of the council he convoked; and so also is the 
kind of thing which his "conversion" to Christianity was, some twelve years 
before the Arian problem arose. At the time of the council he was nearing 
his fiftieth year, and he had been emperor for almost twenty. History seems 
to reveal him as intelligent indeed, but passionate and headstrong; a bold 
campaigner and, as an administrator, "magnificent" in the Aristotelian 
sense. That is to say, he loved great schemes, supported them always with 
princely generosity, improvised readily, and delighted to dazzle by the 
scale of his successes. It was a natural part of the character that he was 
ambitious, confident of success, and--a less obvious trait--his ambition 
was linked with a "mystical" belief that he was destined to succeed, and a 
sure, if confused, notion that the heavenly powers were on his side. Be it 
remembered here, once more, that this man was omnipotent in public affairs, 
as no ruler has been even in the recent revolutions of our own time; for 
the Roman emperor's omnipotence was universally accepted by his millions of 
subjects as his right, as something belonging to the very nature of things.

It is less easy to say exactly what Constantine knew or believed about the 
religion of Christ, twelve years after he had, as emperor, publicly made it 
his own. Certainly it would be a gross error to consider the business of 
his mystical dream on the eve of his victory at the Milvian Bridge (312), 
that made him supreme master of the West, as parallel to what happened to 
St. Paul on the road to Damascus. His own personal religion at the time was 
that of his pagan father, the cult suddenly promoted to the supreme place 
as the official religion about the time that Constantine was born, by the 
then emperor, Aurelian (269-75). This was the cult of Sol Invictus (the 
Unconquered Sun), the worship of the divine spirit by whom the whole 
universe is ruled, the spirit whose symbol is the sun; a symbol in which 
this spirit in some way specially manifests itself. Under Aurelian this 
cult was organised with great splendour. The temple of the Sun which he 
built at Rome must have been one of the wonders of the world. Aurelian's 
coins bear the inscription The Sun is the Lord of the Roman Empire. The 
whole cult is penetrated with the idea that there is a single spirit who is 
supreme, with the idea of an overruling divine monarchy. Moreover, the cult 
was in harmony with a philosophical religion steadily growing, in the high 
places of the administration, throughout this same century, the cult of 
Summus Deus--the God who is supreme.

Constantine's father remained faithful to this cult of Sol Invictus even 
when his seniors, Diocletian and Maximian, reverted to the old cults of 
Jupiter and Hercules. And once Constantine--no more than Caesar on his 
father's death (306)--felt himself really master in the West, Hercules and 
Jupiter disappeared from his coinage, and Sol Invictus was restored, while 
the official panegyrics laud "that divine spirit which governs this whole 
world." This in 311.

What Constantine gathered from his famous dream in September 312 was that 
this supreme divinity was promising him salvation in this military crisis, 
had despatched a messenger to assure him of it and to tell him how to act, 
and that this messenger was Christ, the God whom the Christians worshipped, 
and that the badge his soldiers must wear was the sign of Christ, the 
cross. He did not, on the morrow of his victory, ask for baptism, nor even 
to be enrolled as a catechumen. Constantine was never so much as even this. 
And not until he lay dying, twenty-five years later, was he baptised.

It was, then, an all but uninstructed, if enthusiastic, convert who now, 
with all the caution of an experienced politician, set his name to the 
Edict of Milan ( 313 ), set up the Christian religion as a thing legally 
permissible, endowed its chief shrines with regal munificence, showered 
civic privileges, honours, and jurisdiction on its bishops, and even began 
the delicate task of introducing Christian ideas into the fabric of the 
law. It was an all but uninstructed convert who, also, in these next ten 
years--and in the turbulent province of Africa--plunged boldly into the 
heat of a religious war, the Donatist Schism, with the instinctive 
confidence that his mere intervention would settle all problems. Between 
the truce with the Donatists, 321, and the appearance of Arius in Egypt the 
interval is short indeed. What had Constantine learned from the Donatist 
experience? What had it taught him about the kind of thing the divine 
society was in which he so truly believed? Very little, it would seem.

The great see of Alexandria in Egypt, of which Arius was a priest had for 
many years before his appearance as a heretic been troubled by schism. One 
of the suffragan bishops--Meletius by name--had accused his principal of 
giving way during the persecution; and, declaring all the bishop of 
Alexandria's acts invalid, had proceeded to consecrate bishops in one place 
after another, in opposition to him. Nor did Meletius cease his activities 
when this particular bishop of Alexandria died. In many places there were 
soon two sets of Catholic clergy, the traditional line and the "Meletian"; 
the confusion was great and the contest bitter everywhere, the faithful 
people as active as their pastors. "It was out of the Meletian schism that 
Arianism was born and developed," one historian[9] will tell us. Arius had 
been a "Meletian" in his time, but the new bishop, Alexander, had received 
him back and had promoted him to an important church. And here his learned 
eloquence and ascetic life soon gave his novel teaching as wide publicity 
as he could desire.

The bishop's first act, as the news spread, was to arrange a public 
disputation. In this Arius was worsted. He next disobeyed the bishop's 
natural injunction to be silent, and began to look for support outside 
Egypt. Meanwhile the bishop called a council of the hundred bishops subject 
to his see; ninety-eight voted to condemn Arius; and his two supporters, 
along with a handful of other clerics were deposed. Arius fled to 
Palestine, to an old friend generally regarded as the greatest scholar of 
the day, Eusebius, the bishop of Caesarea. And from Caesarea the two began 
a vast correspondence to engage the support of bishops expected to be 
friendly to the cause, as far away as the imperial capital, Nicomedia.

Already there was a bond between Arius and many of those to whom he wrote. 
They like himself were pupils of the same famous teacher of the last 
generation, Lucian of Antioch, whose school--and not Alexandria--was the 
real birthplace of this new theological development. And Arius could 
address such prelates as "Dear Fellow-Lucianist." Of all those to whom he 
now wrote, none was so important as a second Eusebius, the bishop of the 
imperial city itself, and a possible power with the emperor through his 
friendship with Constantine's sister, the empress Constantia, consort of 
the eastern emperor, Licinius. The Lucianist bishop of Nicomedia rose to 
the occasion, "as though upon him the whole fate of the Church depended," 
the bishop of Alexandria complained. For Eusebius, too, circularised the 
episcopate generally and summoned a council of bishops, and they voted that 
Arius should be reinstated, and wrote to beg this of the bishop of 
Alexandria.

Arius' bishop, meanwhile, had been active also. We know of seventy letters 
which he wrote to bishops all over the Christian world; amongst others to 
whom he wrote was the pope. And since all these episcopal letters were 
copied and passed round, made up into collections and, as we should say, 
published, the whole of the East was soon aflame, fighting and rioting in 
one city after another. Few indeed of these enthusiasts could have 
understood the discussions of the theologians, but all grasped that what 
Arius was saying was that Christ was not God. And if this were so, what 
about the saving death on the Cross? And what was sinful man to hope for 
when he died? When the bishop of Alexandria stigmatised his rebellious 
priest as Christomachos (fighter against Christ), he clinched the matter in 
such a way that all, from the Christian emperor to the meanest dock hand in 
the port, must be personally interested, and passionately.

During these first months of agitation Constantine had, however, other 
matters to occupy him, and, to begin with, the agitation was none of his 
business. At the moment when the great movement began, none of the lands 
affected came under his jurisdiction. But in that same year, 323, war broke 
out between himself and his eastern colleague, his brother-in-law, 
Licinius. In July 324 Constantine, invader of Licinius territory, defeated 
him heavily at Adrianople, and in September he gained a second victory at 
Chrysopolis.[10] Later Licinius was put to death. When the victor entered 
his new capital in the ensuing weeks, there was in his household a Spanish 
prelate who had dwelt with Constantine for some years now, Hosius, bishop 
of Cordova. It was to him that Constantine, with the new Arian crisis 
confronting him, now turned.

Arius, by now, had returned to Alexandria, fortified with the vote of the 
council at Nicomedia and of a second (more peremptory) council at Caesarea, 
to demand the decreed reinstatement. His arrival, and the campaign of 
propaganda now launched, set the whole city ablaze. And Constantine 
despatched Hosius to make a personal investigation of the affair. When he 
returned to make his report, Alexander and Arius soon followed. The crisis 
next moved to the third great city of the empire, Antioch. The bishop there 
had recently died, and when the fifty-six bishops subject to Antioch came 
in from Palestine, Arabia, Syria, and elsewhere to elect a successor 
(January 325, probably), they took the opportunity to notice the Arian 
development. All but unanimously (53-3) they condemned the new teaching, 
and excommunicated--provisionally--the three dissidents. One of these was 
the bishop of Caesarea.

And now, sometime in the early spring of 325, it was decided to summon a 
council representative of all the bishops in the world. Who was it that 
first put out this grandiose, if simple, plan? We do not know. Within a 
matter of months--not indeed simultaneously, but with impressive nearness 
in time--councils had been held at Alexandria, Antioch, Caesarea, 
Nicomedia, in which a good half of the bishops of the East must have taken 
part, i.e., a good proportion of the vastly more numerous half of the 
entire episcopate. Whoever it was to whom the idea of a council of the 
Christian universe first occurred, it was Constantine who decided it should 
be held, and who chose the place and sent out the invitations to the 
bishops, offering to all free passage in the imperial transportation 
service.

The council opened, in the imperial summer palace at Nicaea,[11] May 20, 
325, with something over three hundred bishops present, the vast bulk of 
them from the Greek-speaking lands where the trouble was raging, Egypt, 
Palestine, Syria, and Asia Minor. But there were bishops also from Persia 
and the Caucasus, from the lands between the Danube and the Aegean, and 
from Greece. There was one from Africa and one from Spain, one from Gaul 
and one from Italy, and since the great age of the Bishop of Rome forbade 
his making the journey he was represented by two of his priests.

Eusebius of Caesarea who has described the great moments of the council was 
evidently moved, as we too may be, by his recollection of the scene when, 
the bishops all assembled in the great hall of the palace, some of them 
lame and blind from the tortures undergone in the persecutions, the 
Christian master of the whole Roman world entered, robed in scarlet and 
gold, and before taking his place at the throne, bade them be seated. 
Constantine came with a minimum of pomp, and in his brief address he did no 
more than welcome the bishops, exhort them to peaceful conference, and 
admit that the spectacle of "sedition" within the Church caused him more 
anxiety than any battle.

The little we know of the actual history of the council is soon told. The 
theology of Arius was condemned unanimously--though he is said to have had 
twenty-two supporters among the bishops. But if it was a simple matter for 
the episcopate to testify to its belief that the Divine Word was truly God, 
it was less easy to agree about the best way to phrase a declaration of 
this faith, i.e., to construct a statement to which no subtlety could give 
a heretical Arian meaning also. One section of the bishops was anxious that 
no terms should be used which were not already used in Scripture. But the 
Scriptures had not been written for the purpose of confuting 
philosophically minded heretics. It was now necessary to say that the 
accepted Scripture meant just "this" and not "that" as well. And if this 
were to be accomplished, the technique must be adopted of coining a special 
word for the purpose.

The statement as the council finally passed it--the creed of the council of 
Nicaea--states: "We believe . . . in one Lord Jesus Christ, the son of God, 
born of the Father, the sole-begotten; that is to say, of the substance of 
the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God; born, 
not made, consubstantial with the Father [in the Greek original, homo-
ousion toi patri],
through whom all things were made, which are in heaven and on earth . . 
."[11a] The word homo-ousion is the special non-Scriptural word which the 
council adopted to characterise the true, traditional belief, a word it was 
impossible to square with any kind of Arian theory, a test word that would 
always make it clear that any Arian theory was incompatible with the 
Christian tradition, and which would serve the practical purpose of 
preventing any further infiltration of these enemies of Christ within the 
Church, and defeat any endeavour to change the belief from within.

Who it was that proposed to the council this precise word, we do not know. 
An Arian historian says it was the bishop of Alexandria and Hosius of 
Cordova. St. Athanasius, who was present at the council, says it was 
Hosius. What seems clearer is that the bishops, solidly determined that the 
heresy should be rooted out, were yet by no means happy about the means 
chosen. The word homoousion was known to them already. Since long before 
the time of Arius and Lucian it had a bad history in the East, as will be 
explained. But Constantine definitely declared himself in favour of the 
uniquely useful instrument, and the council accepted it, each bishop rising 
in his place and giving his vote. Two bishops only refused their assent. 
With Arius, and a few priest supporters, they were promptly sent into exile 
by the emperor's command.

The bishops then passed to other problems. In the first place the twenty-
year-old Meletian schism. Its leaders had appealed to Constantine, and the 
emperor left it to the council to judge. The bishops supported their 
brother of Alexandria, but offered the schismatics very easy terms, 
restoring Meletius himself to his see of Lycopolis. But he was not, ever 
again, to confer Holy Orders, and all those whom he had unlawfully ordained 
were to be reordained before again officiating. Moreover they were to be 
subject henceforward to the true, i.e., Catholic, bishop of the place. 
Those whom Meletius had made bishops might be elected to sees in the 
future, as vacancies arose--always with the consent of the bishop of 
Alexandria, the traditional head of this extensive episcopate.

A second practical problem, that had teased the eastern churches for 
generations, was now finally solved, viz., how the date of the Easter feast 
should be calculated. "All our good brothers of the East[12] who until now 
have been used to keep Easter at the Jewish Passover, will henceforward 
keep it at the same time as the Romans and you," so the bishops of Egypt 
announced in a letter to their people.

Finally the bishops promulgated twenty laws--canons--for general 
observance. Like the solution proposed for the Meletians they are notable 
for a new mildness of tone, a quality more Roman than Oriental, it may be 
said. They are, in great part, a repetition of measures enacted eleven 
years earlier in the Latin council held at Arles, in Gaul.[13] Five canons 
deal with those who fell away in the recent persecution. If any such have 
since been admitted to ordination they are to be deposed. Those who 
apostatised freely--that is, without the compulsion of fear--are to do 
twelve years' penance before being admitted to Holy Communion. If, before 
the penance is completed, they fall sick and are in danger of death they 
may receive Holy Viaticum. Should they then recover they are to take place 
with the highest class of the penitents--those who are allowed to hear 
mass, though not to receive Holy Communion. Catechumens who fell away--
i.e., Christians not yet baptised--are to do three years' penance and then 
resume their place as catechumens. Finally, the Christians who, having once 
left the army, had re-enlisted in the army of the persecutor, the lately 
destroyed emperor Licinius, are to do thirteen years' penance, or less if 
the bishop is satisfied of the reality of their repentance, but always 
three years' penance at least.

There are two canons about the readmission of heretical schismatics. First 
of all there are the remnants of the schism begun in Rome by the antipope 
Novatian, some seventy-five years before the council. Novatian was one of 
that fairly numerous class for whom the rulers of the Church deal far too 
mildly with repentant sinners. He ended by denying that the Church had the 
power to absolve those who fell away in times of persecution; and his 
followers, self-styled "the Pure," extended this disability to all sins of 
idolatry, sex sins, and murder. They also regarded second marriage as a sex 
sin. At this time there were many Novatians in Asia Minor, and the council 
offered generous terms to those who wished to be reconciled, recognising 
the orders of their clergy, and the dignity of their bishops, but exacting 
written declarations that they will regard as fellow Catholics those who 
have contracted a second marriage and those doing penance for apostasy.

To a second class of schismatics the same generosity was shown. These were 
the sect that descended from the notorious bishop of Antioch, Paul of 
Samosata, deposed in 268 by a council of bishops, for various crimes and 
for his heretical teaching that there is no distinction between the three 
persons of the Holy Trinity. But these "Paulinians," so to call them, are 
to be rebaptised. Those who had functioned as clergy may be reordained if 
the Catholic bishop to whom they are now subject thinks fit.

On various aspects of clerical life there are as many as ten canons. No one 
is to be ordained who has had himself castrated, nor anyone only recently 
converted to the faith. "Yesterday a catechumen, today a bishop," says St. 
Jerome; "in the evening at the circus and next morning at the altar; just 
lately a patron of comedians, now busy consecrating virgins." It is the 
canon itself which speaks of ordination, and episcopal consecration, 
following immediately on baptism. Bishops are not to ordain another 
bishop's subject without his consent. No clerics--bishops, priests, or 
deacons--are to move from one diocese to another. Clerics are forbidden to 
take interest for money loans, and for this offence they must be deposed.

Finally there are two canons regarding three famous sees: Alexandria, 
Antioch, Jerusalem. The council confirms the ancient custom that gives the 
bishop of Alexandria jurisdiction over the bishops of the civil provinces 
of Egypt, Libya, and Pentapolis. And likewise the ancient privileges of the 
see of Antioch and of [the chief sees] of the other provinces. Jerusalem is 
a city apart, the Holy City par excellence, and although its bishop remains 
as much as ever the subject of the metropolitan bishop at Caesarea, he is 
allowed what canon 7 calls a precedence of honour, without a hint to say in 
what this consists.

All this variety of business was rapidly despatched, for the council held 
its final session barely four weeks after it opened, June 19, 325.

As the date all but coincided with the celebrations that marked the 
twentieth year of Constantine's reign, the emperor entertained the prelates 
at a banquet in full imperial style, and as they passed before the guards, 
presenting arms in salute, they asked themselves, says Eusebius, if the 
Kingdom of Heaven on earth had not finally come to pass.

Save for the letter of the bishops of Egypt, mentioned already, and two 
letters of the emperor, the one general, announcing the new rule about 
Easter, the other telling the people of Egypt that the bishops had 
confirmed the traditional belief and that Arius was the tool of the devil, 
we know nought of what might be called "the promulgation" of the council's 
decisions. But the breakup of the great gathering was by no means followed 
by the silence that accompanies peace perfectly attained. The real troubles 
had not yet begun.

NOTES

1. Newman, Causes of the Rise and Successes of Arianism (February 1872) in 
Tracts, Theological and Ecclesiastical, pp. 103-4.

2. Ibid., 116. For Newman's "examination," 103-11.

3. Ibid., 112.

4. Ibid., 96, 97 for the passages quoted.

5. Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea (?265-338).

6. St. Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria ( 328-73); born ?295.

7. Newman, The Development of Christian Doctrine, 1st ed., 1845, pp. 7, 5; 
with one sentence ("Still no one," etc.) from ibid., rev. ed., p. 7.

8 A standard Latin dictionary will give as a first basic equivalent, 
"commander in chief."

9. J. Lebreton, S.J., Histoire de Eglise, edited by A. Fliche and Msgr. V. 
Martin (henceforward referred to as F. and M.), vol. 2, p. 343.

10. The modern Scutari, on the Asiatic shore of the Bosporus.

11. A city 60 to 70 miles from Constantinople, on the Asiatic shore of the 
Bosporus, at the head of Lake Iznik. It was about 25 miles south from the 
then capital, Nicomedia.

11a. Denzinger, Enchiridion, no. 54, prints the Greek text; Barry, Readings 
in Church History, p. 85, gives a translation.

12. The word has here a special meaning as the name of the (civil) diocese 
of which Antioch was the chief city, Oriens: the modern Lebanon, Israel, 
Jordan, Syria, the coast of Turkey thence north and west for a good 200 
miles with a vast territory in the interior that went beyond the Euphrates.

13. Schroeder, Disciplinary Decrees of the General Councils (1937), prints 
the text and a translation. This note serves for all the councils down to 
the Fifth Lateran of 1512-17. Barry, no 16, gives a translation.


CHAPTER 2. The First General Council of Constantinople, 381

The second General Council of the Church, which met at Constantinople in 
the year 381, was summoned primarily as a solemn demonstration of the 
unshaken loyalty of the eastern bishops to the faith as set forth at 
Nicaea, a demonstration that the church of the East had never gone over to 
Arianism, that the Arians were no more than a heretical faction--had never 
been anything more, despite their power--and were now finally discredited. 
Why was such a declaration necessary, fifty-six years after the bishops of 
the East, with the enthusiastic support of the all-powerful emperor, had 
condemned Arius as a falsifier of the truth and had provided, in the homo-
ousion, a sure touchstone to test the orthodoxy of future bishops? The 
answer to this question is one of the strangest an most involved chapters 
in all Church History. The simplest way perhaps, to set out as much of it 
as is essential to the story of the General Council of 381, will be to list 
the turning points of the story, and then attempt some explanation of the 
"why" of it all.

On the morrow of the Council of Nicaea three bishops revoked their 
signatures to the condemnation of Arius--the bishops of the neighbouring 
sees of Nicaea, Nicomedia, and Chalcedon. They were promptly banished by 
the emperor, and others elected in their stead (325). In 328 the bishop of 
Alexandria died, and the young deacon Athanasius, who had been his main 
advisor at the great council, was chosen to succeed him, and despite the 
active hostility of the Meletian faction, he was consecrated. That same 
year Constantine recalled the exiled bishops and reinstated them--why, we 
do not know; it may have been for personal reasons only. From the moment, 
until his death in 341, the ex-Lucianist, Eusebius of Nicomedia, becomes 
the leading figure in the movement to undo
the work of Nicaea. After the emperor founded his new capital city, 
Constantinople, Eusebius became its bishop.

Eusebius never openly attacked the achievement of 325. His line was to work 
for the destruction of the leading bishops who had supported the homo-
ousion, on the plea that they were heretics, but of a different kind, i.e., 
men who did not really believe in the Trinity, who by the word homo-ousion 
meant that the Father and the Logos were one. The first victim of this 
campaign was the second greatest prelate in the empire of the East, the 
bishop of Antioch, Eustathius by name. It was, possibly, he who had 
presided at Nicaea. A carefully chosen council of bishops now met at 
Antioch, condemned and deposed him. And, once again, the emperor followed 
up the ecclesiastical judgment by a sentence of exile. Nine other leading 
bishops were similarly removed in the course of the next year or so (330-
32). In 332 the intrigue to remove Athanasius began. The agents of this 
were the Meletians of Alexandria. The point of attack was not the orthodoxy 
of his belief but his loyalty to the emperor. Athanasius was summoned to 
the court, and cleared himself easily, returning home with a letter of high 
commendation from Constantine. Two further attempts to disgrace him, in the 
next two years, also failed.

Then, in 334, Constantine did the most astonishing thing of all--
astonishing to us who know, really, so very little of the day-to-day 
history of these events. He recalled Arius from banishment, and received 
him at court. And while a council was ordered to "investigate" what we may 
call "the Athanasius problem"--why it was that the greatest city of the 
eastern world had never known peace since this young prelate had been its 
bishop--Arius persuaded the emperor that he was as orthodox as the best, 
and on the strength of a formula drawn up by himself (in which the homo-
ousion did not appear) he was received back into the church, 335. As to the 
council, it was held at Tyre, and it deposed Athanasius; and the emperor, 
after a personal hearing, banished him to Trier, in Germany, as far almost 
as a man could travel from Alexandria and still be in the emperor's 
territory. It was now ten years since the farewell ceremonies at Nicaea.

In 336 Arius died, on the eve of a solemn ceremony of rehabilitation 
prepared in the cathedral of Constantinople, and in 337 Constantine, too, 
died.

Constantine's death brought the Arian party a still greater freedom of 
action. He was succeeded by his three young sons as joint emperors, and to 
none of these could the upholding of Nicaea be the matter of personal 
prestige it was to him. Certain it is that it is from this time that the 
party begins to propose alternatives to, or substitutes for, the Nicaean 
formula; more or less innocuous substitutes in the first years--had they 
not been put out by known opponents of the homo-ousion, and by men who were 
the declared foes of the bishop, Athanasius, who had become the very symbol 
of all that the categorical test word stood for.

And here it needs to be said that there were many bishops, as little Arian 
as Athanasius himself, who, nevertheless, had no love for the famous 
Nicaean word--as there had been many such bishops at Nicaea. These Catholic 
bishops, supporting the various alternatives of the kind described, played 
the Arian game of course, albeit unconsciously. Their dislike of the test 
word arose from the fact that, in the East, as has been said already, the 
word homo-ousion had a bad history. Its first use, by Clement of Alexandria 
and by Origen too (around 230-50), was seemingly in the Nicaean sense; and 
when a bishop of Alexandria, answering heretics, seemed to critics so to 
defend the distinction of persons in the Holy Trinity, that he obscured the 
truth that there is only one God, it was made a point against him that he 
had not explicitly said the Logos was homo-ousion with the Father. And this 
bishop, Denis, explains to his namesake, the pope, in his defence, why he 
had not used the useful word: it was a word nowhere found in Holy 
Scripture. This was about the year 257, nearly seventy years earlier than 
Nicaea. But eleven years only after this interchange between the two 
Denises, when the bishop of Antioch, Paul of Samosata, was condemned (268) 
for the heresy of teaching that the Father and the Logos are one person, he 
actually used the word homo-ousion to express this oneness, and so his 
condemnation gave the word an ill sound in the East.

Whoever first proposed the use of the term at Nicaea, it was surely not any 
bishop from the East. To these it stank of heresy, ever since the council 
of 268, even when it had, so to speak, been disinfected by the Council of 
Nicaea, and given an undoubtedly orthodox employment. Sabellianism, the 
denial that there is a Trinity, was the great scare heresy of the East to 
the generation upon which Arianism came, and homo-ousion had been the 
heresy's shibboleth, in eastern ears.[1]

Again, there is latent a first class difficulty in the Nicaean council's 
formal condemnation[2] of those "who say that the Son is of another 
hypostasis or ousia [substantia, in Latin] than the Father"; and this was 
fully exploited in the troublous years after Constantine's death. The 
latent difficulty is that to Greeks these two terms did not necessarily and 
always mean exactly the same thing, as they did to Latins. Hypostasis to 
the Greeks came to mean what the Latin call "person"; ousia meant "nature" 
rather. The sentence "The Son is not of another hypostasis than the 
Father," a Greek might take to mean, "Father and Son are one person"; while 
the Latin understood by it, "are of the same nature."

All this is set down to convey something of the causes that held quite 
orthodox minds in doubt about their practical action during these 
controversies--a state of doubt which for years played into the hands of 
the radically unorthodox. This was an especially dangerous condition of 
things, seeing that it was these radicals--the real Arians--who had the ear 
of the court, and who stood to the world of officials and administrators 
for the ideal type of Christian believer, the kind that should be 
officially supported. For in this first generation that followed the 
personal conversion of Constantine, the official world was very far from 
being Christianised in belief. Though the emperor, especially after he had 
become sole emperor, turned his back very definitely on the pagan rites, 
these were by no means forbidden. The whole life of official paganism went 
on as before. And the cult of Sol Invictus and Summus Deus still held very 
many of its adherents. To these enlightened monotheistic foes of 
polytheism, the Arian version of the Christian idea of God naturally 
appealed. On a first view it was simpler, more logical--terms meaning just 
what they appeared to mean--its language non-mysterious, rational.[3]

It is not, of course, suggested that there was a carefully worked out plan, 
in all this, on the part of high officials. But the two tendencies existed 
side by side in these years, and it was this accidental coincidence that 
did much, so it is suggested,[4] to make Arianism the highly dangerous 
threat it proved to be, and to give it a toughness out of all proportion to 
the number of its real adherents.

As to its quality as a danger to Catholicism, let Harnack's judgment be 
recalled, that Arianism, had it been victorious, must have ruined 
Christianity completely, emptying it of all religious content, leaving it a 
mere system of cosmology and ethics. It was, in the circumstances, one of 
the greatest dangers that true religion has ever had to face, and this 
despite the fact that, in the critical fourth century, Arianism was never a 
popular thing. "The laity, as a whole, revolted from it in every part of 
Christendom. It was an epidemic of the schools and of theologians, and to 
them it was mainly confined.... The classes which had furnished martyrs in 
the persecutions were in no sense the seat of the heresy."[5]

The only one of Constantine's sons who really favoured the anti-Nicaean 
party was Constantius II, and once he became sole master of the empire 
(350) the Radicals really threw off the mask, and Arianism proper--the 
explicit renunciation of the doctrine that the Logos is truly God--was now 
propounded in councils and, with great violence and persecution, imposed by 
the emperor. And it was in these years (350-61) that the heresy was first 
thrust upon the bishops of the still largely pagan West, of Illyricum, 
Italy, and Gaul. In council after council, in the west and in the east, 
whether perplexed by the confusion of the issues, whether terrified by the 
threats of the emperor and the knowledge that bishops had been murdered who 
opposed him, whether overcome by the specious argument that it was all, in 
reality, a matter of ridding the Church of Athanasius, "whom they were 
taught to consider a restless, violent, party-spirited man, and of his 
arbitrary formula"[6]--in council after council the bishops gave way 
wholesale, at Arles (353), Milan (355), Sirmium (357), and, most 
spectacularly, at the simultaneous councils of Rimini-Seleucia[7] (359) 
about the morrow of which St. Jerome wrote a celebrated phrase, that the 
whole world woke up one morning, lamenting and marvelling to find itself 
Arian.

In 361 Constantius disappeared, baptised (just in time) by an Arian. He was 
followed by Julian the Apostate, who set about a systematic revival of 
Paganism. Then came Jovian, a Catholic, and after him Valentinian, a 
"liberal," with Valens, his brother, co-emperor for the East. Valens (365-
78) a true Arian, of the political type, returned to the policy of 
Constantius, and a real persecution of Catholics followed. But the 
cloudiness of the early period had been dissipated. The issue was now clear 
to the bishops, that only by insistence on the homo-ousion could the Church 
rid itself of the crypto-Arians whose influence meant death. And when to 
Valens, killed in a war with the Goths (378), a Catholic general, from 
Spain, succeeded--Theodosius--the way was at last open to a real 
restoration of the traditional belief. Nicaea, for the first time in fifty 
years, was to come into full operation in all the sees of the East.

The General Council of 381 is an epilogue to a drama just concluded. It 
does little more than register a fait accompli, and its essential 
importance is its demonstration to the world that the Christians of the 
"East," after more than fifty years of continuous disturbance and of 
oppression on the part of their rulers, remain Catholics, are not Arians; 
it is a demonstration that the council of Nicaea was no mere ecclesiastical 
pageant, but a source of strong and unfailing leadership.

No two general councils follow the same historical pattern--not even when a 
bare fifty years separates them, and when the matter of their discussions 
is the same. In this council Rome, the West, was not represented at all--
was not so much as invited. The same problems had for years now vexed the 
churches of the West. The same political revolution--the appearance of 
sovereigns who were wholeheartedly Catholic--was to be their salvation 
also. And they, too, demanded a council, and it took place, at Aquileia 
some weeks after the council we are dealing with. And why the council which 
met at Constantinople came, in after years, to be regarded as a General 
Council is something that may puzzle the legists and the theologians.[8]

The bishops who sat in the council were 150 in all. There were none from 
Egypt, only half of them from Thrace and Asia. Almost one half of the 
bishops came from the vast (civil) diocese called the East, Oriens, whose 
chief see was Antioch. And it was the bishop of Antioch, Meletius, who 
presided at the council.

Once again the crosscurrents and misunderstandings of these much troubled 
years had borne strange fruit. At Antioch there was a rival claimant to the 
see, Paulinus. And it was Paulinus whom Rome (and Alexandria also) 
recognised as the lawful bishop. But the Catholic East was solidly behind 
Meletius, and this meant the support (among others) of the three great 
Cappadocian bishops, St. Basil, St. Gregory of Nyssa, his brother, and St. 
Gregory of Nazianzen, the greatest theologian of the day and one of the 
greatest preachers of all time.[8a]

Meletius died before the council had been long in session, and it was the 
last named Gregory who was elected president in his place. The actual 
business before the council was slight, and now, with the see of Antioch 
vacant and seventy-one bishops of its "jurisdiction" already assembled (to 
say nothing of the no less interested eighty bishops from other provinces 
), it is not surprising that the question of the successor of Meletius took 
the first place in the minds of all. The president of the council had the 
happy idea that the bishop whom Rome and Alexandria recognised, Paulinus, 
should be chosen, and so the schism be ended. But of this the bishops would 
not hear. And then there arrived the bishop of Alexandria himself, the 
successor of Athanasius, with some of his suffragans, and he made such a 
bitter attack on the president because he had consented, being already 
bishop of Sasima, to become bishop of Constantinople,[9] that Gregory, 
already discouraged by the revelation of what ecclesiastical politics could 
be at a high level, resigned both his see and his presidency.

The council closed on July 9. What it had accomplished was, first, to issue 
a statement of belief which explicitly renewed the homo-ousion definition 
of Nicaea, and then, naming the many varieties of Arianism, to condemn each 
and every one of them as heretical. The bishops next published (what has 
long been lost) a detailed statement of their faith in the 
consubstantiality of the Divine Logos with the Father, in the distinctness 
of the three Persons of the Holy Trinity, and in the reality of the 
Incarnation of the Second Person. These statements about belief involved 
the condemnation of two other theories related to Arianism, namely, the 
denial, by Macedonius and his followers, that the Holy Ghost is really God, 
and the theory of Apollinaris, bishop of Laodicaea, that in the Logos 
Incarnate--in the God-man, Jesus Christ--the Divine Logos functions in 
place of a human soul: Christ, who is truly God, is not truly a man. This 
last heresy was to have a famous history in the next seventy years, to be 
the occasion of two later General Councils, and, ultimately, in one form or 
another, so to divide the Catholics of the East as to paralyse their 
resistance to the assault of Islam.

There are four canons enacted by this council.[10] The first is the 
declaration renewing the work of Nicaea, and condemning these various 
heresies. The second, between the lines of which can be read much of the 
history since that council, forbids bishops to cross the frontiers of 
another [civil] diocese, or to interfere in another bishop's 
administration. The bishop of Alexandria, it is explicitly laid down, is to 
confine himself to Egypt; the bishops of the East (i.e., Oriens) shall 
confine their joint action to the East, with the reservation that the 
bishop of Antioch keeps the rights acknowledged at Nicaea; and statements 
no less explicit restrict the bishops of Asia, Pontus, and Thrace to those 
three [civil] dioceses, respectively. The bishops are reminded of the 
Nicaean rule that the affairs of the sees of any given province are to be 
regulated by a twice-yearly meeting of the bishops.

About the time that St. Gregory Nazianzen was invited to become bishop of 
Constantinople, the efforts of the bishop of Alexandria, Peter II, had 
brought about the "election" of an Alexandrian philosopher, Maximus, and 
his unlawful, clandestine consecration. The council (canon 4) now declared 
that Maximus was not a bishop, and that whatever ordinations he had ever 
performed were worthless, and the candidates "in truth not ordained at 
all."

There remains the third canon, the most famous action, in its historical 
effects, of this council: "The bishop of Constantinople shall have the 
primacy of honour after the bishop of Rome, because [Constantinople] is New 
Rome."

NOTES

1. Cf. Newman, Tracts (as before), p. 100 "We cannot be surprised then that 
the homoousion, which perplexed the Western bishops, should have irritated 
the Orientals, the only wonder is, that East and West had concurred in 
accepting it at Nicea."

2. As a conclusion to the creed.

3. See Newman, Tracts (as before), p. 102: "It must be added that to 
statesmen, lawyers and military chiefs, who had lately been Pagans, a 
religious teaching such as Arianism, which was clear and intelligible, was 
more acceptable than doctrines which described the Divine Being in 
language, self-contradictory in its letter, and which exacted a belief in 
truths which were absolutely above their comprehension."

4. See Msgr. Pierre Batiffol, La Paix Constantinienne et le Catholicisme 
(1914), p. 310.

5. Newman, as before, pp. 97-98.

6. Newman, as before, p. 100.

7. Rimini, on the Adriatic coast of Italy, for the bishops of the West; 
Seleucia, then the chief city of Isauria, is the modern Turkish port of 
Silifke on the Mediterranean.

8. The first stage in the development of its recognition as oecumenical was 
the unanimous vote of the General Council of Chalcedon, 4th session (451), 
taking as the rule of faith, "that fixed by the council of Nicaea, and 
which the 150 bishops of the council assembled at Constantinople by 
Theodosius the Great confirmed."

8a. Barry, no. 17, prints a translation of his speech to the council.

9. A breach of the law enacted at Nicaea.

10 Schroeder, op. cit., prints the text and a translation.


CHAPTER 3. The General Council of Ephesus, 431

One of the minor activities of the General Council of 381 was to provide a 
new bishop for the see it thought worthy of the second place in the Church, 
in place of Gregory of Nazianzen who had been forced out. The bishops chose 
an old retired veteran of the high places of the imperial administration--
Nectarius. He ruled for sixteen years, and gave general satisfaction. And 
it is recorded that, in his quiet and peaceful way, this practiced 
administrator began to turn the new primacy of honour into something very 
like a primacy of fact. It gradually became the fashion to send appeals of 
various kinds to Constantinople, and for the bishop there to deal with them 
as though to do so were part of his jurisdiction. When Nectarius died, in 
397, the question who should succeed him was, then, something to interest 
the whole East.

The personage who moved immediately was the bishop of Alexandria, 
Theophilus. He had a candidate, one of his own priests, one of his chief 
confidants in fact. But the court had a candidate also--the court being no 
longer the emperor who had called the council in 381, Theodosius,[1] but 
the minister Eutropius who governed in the name of Theodosius' youthful 
successor, Arcadius. The court had its way, and brought from Antioch an 
ascetic personage, the monk John, famed as the great preacher of the day, 
known to later ages thereby as Chrysostom, the man with the tongue of gold. 
He was consecrated, by Theophilus, in February 398. But Theophilus went 
home bitter, it is thought. Alexandria had failed to place its man in 397, 
as it had failed on the like occasion in 381, in the time of its late 
bishop Timothy; and it was only the threats of Eutropius--that there were 
serious charges on file against Theophilus--that had brought that bishop to 
accept the appointment of the monk from Antioch.

A few words about the actual power of the bishop of Alexandria will revive 
some of the faded colour of the tragic history that is to follow. He was, 
first of all, more absolutely lord, in all matters of daily life, of the 
bishops dependent on him than was, at that time, any other bishop in the 
Church; and of these dependent bishops there were something like one 
hundred. He chose them all, and he personally consecrated them, the 
metropolitans no less than their suffragans. He was also, whether himself a 
monk or not, a kind of supreme patriarch of the monks, in this country 
where the monastic life had begun--and he thereby enjoyed unique prestige 
in the whole monastic world. He was immensely wealthy, with revenues coming 
from such extraordinary sources as his see's monopoly of the right to sell 
salt, and nitrates and papyrus, and all the various lugubrious 
paraphernalia needed in funerals. Alexandria, until Constantinople rose to 
the fullness of its promise, was the wonder city of the whole Roman world, 
the greatest of all trade centres, the queen of the Mediterranean. And of 
nothing was the great city prouder than of its see. The bishop of 
Alexandria moved in an habitual popularity and power that made of him a 
kind of native king, with mobs willing to demonstrate in his favour at a 
moment's notice. For forty-five years the see had had in Athanasius a saint 
for its bishop, a saint whose endless contests with the never much loved 
imperial government, whose many exiles, and inflexible fidelity to Nicaea, 
had achieved for his successors a position the like of which has probably 
never been known. This, in the hands of a saint! But Theophilus was far 
from being a saint. The saint, now, was at Constantinople, and in a world 
of Theophilus' kind he was soon to be hopelessly lost.

These considerations, the space given to them, rather--and to the story of 
St. John Chrysostom--in a study of the councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon, 
is due to the simple facts that rivalry between the two sees, Alexandria 
and Constantinople, ceaseless after 381, mattered very greatly in the 
history of these councils; that Alexandria sought endlessly to control 
Constantinople; that at Ephesus in 431 and again in 449 a bishop of 
Alexandria was the very willing agent of the deposition and excommunication 
of a bishop of Constantinople; and that at Chalcedon, in 451, the all but 
impossible happened and a bishop of Alexandria was deposed and 
excommunicated; and Alexandria--civic, popular Alexandria no less than the 
clerical world and the monks--never forgot this, and never forgave it. And 
it being the fifth century and not the twentieth, the more human side of 
these grave ecclesiastical contentions ultimately brought down to ruin the 
wealthiest province of the empire.

Chrysostom, as he is commonly called, the first effective bishop his see 
had known for many years, found abundance of employment for his zeal, and 
inevitably made as many enemies as friends; wealthy enemies and highly 
placed, clergy among them, and even the young empress. The first occasion 
of his clash with the bishop of Alexandria was the kind reception he gave 
to alleged victims of Theophilus' harsh rule. This was some three years 
after his appointment. On the heels of these fugitives there came other 
monks, sent by Theophilus, with counter-accusations of heresy. But they 
failed to prove their case, before the emperor, and were themselves 
condemned. And the fugitives brought it about that Theophilus was summoned 
to answer their charges in person. He arrived (403 ) with a cohort of 
twenty-nine of his bishops in attendance, blaming Chrysostom for all that 
had happened, and swearing openly that he had come to the capital "to 
depose John."

And this is what his familiarity with the great world, his political skill 
and his lavish expenditure, actually achieved. John, when bidden by the 
emperor to summon a council for the trial of Theophilus had refused: 
Alexandria lay outside his jurisdiction. He now, in turn, was bidden by the 
emperor to take his trial, Theophilus his judge with his twenty-nine 
suffragans and a chance half-dozen visiting bishops picked up in the 
capital--the group called the "Synod of The Oak," from the country seat at 
Chalcedon where these bishops met.

John again refused to acknowledge an uncanonical jurisdiction. Whereupon, 
for his refusal to appear, he was condemned and deposed. The ultimate 
outcome of these proceedings was his exile to the farthest limits of the 
empire; and his treatment was so harsh that he died of it (407). Theophilus 
celebrated his victory by composing a book against John filled, it would 
seem, with all manner of hideous calumnies. And in John's place there ruled 
one of the priests of Constantinople whom the saint had had to censure.

These bare facts, which seemingly all writers accept, are sufficient 
witness to the existence of malevolence at Alexandria, and to the 
corruption of life at the court of a Christian emperor. The other feature 
of this story is the action of the pope,[2] when the full account of these 
deeds reached him--letters from Theophilus (wholly misleading), from John 
(a full account, down to the day he wrote) and the minutes of the Synod of 
The Oak. This last the pope refused to accept as a council at all. Its 
sentence on John was mere words. He took John to be still the lawful bishop 
of Constantinople, and when he was asked to recognise Atticus, put in 
John's place, he refused, and broke off relations with both Alexandria and 
Antioch who had recognised him.

Theophilus was still out of communion when he died (412). His successor, a 
nephew, Cyril, began his long career as bishop equally under the ban. 
Antioch was the first see to surrender and make the symbolic submission, by 
restoring John's name "to the diptychs"-placing him in the list of deceased 
bishops officially prayed for. Then Atticus did the same, explaining 
fearfully to Alexandria that he really had no choice but to do this. Cyril, 
very young, as self-confident and absolute as was ever his uncle, 
stubbornly--even passionately?--refused. "You might as well ask to put 
Judas back in the company of the Apostles," he wrote. Cyril had been with 
his uncle at The Oak. But in the end, he too restored John's name. It was 
fifteen years or so since these terrible scenes of episcopal 
vindictiveness. But the saint's body had now been brought back with honour 
to his cathedral, and in a kind of public "amende" for the crime of the 
emperor Arcadius in banishing him, his son, Theodosius II, knelt before the 
coffin and kissed it. And between Rome and all the major sees of the East 
there was communion and peace.

The new troubles came then, as it were, out of a blue sky. Alexandria and 
Constantinople had long made their peace with Rome. And when Atticus died 
in 424 the new bishop, an elderly civil servant, managed the affairs of the 
turbulent capital so as to please all parties, his clergy, the monks, and 
the court. But with the appointment of Nestorius as his successor, in April 
428, the peace was suddenly, and very rudely, broken. Like St. John 
Chrysostom the new bishop was a monk from Antioch. There he, too, had been 
a famous preacher, whose appointed task was the public explanation of the 
Scriptures. And he began his new career with a great oration, in which he 
called on the emperor to root out the remnants of the many heresies, 
pockets of which still existed in Constantinople.

In the new controversy which this sermon heralded, the natural characters 
of Nestorius and of Cyril of Alexandria play a great part--not more so 
perhaps than the personalities of such chiefs always play, but for once we 
are well supplied with evidence about this. As to the precise point on 
which Nestorius soon fell foul of all his world, he is himself our earliest 
witness--in two letters to the pope, Celestine I (422-31), written in the 
early months of his administration. He is explaining to the pope the 
difficulties he has to face in his war against the heretics, and he 
proceeds to say that one very serious matter is the unconscious heresy of 
good Catholics, of monks and even some of his clergy, about the meaning of 
the belief that Christ is God. They are confused in their minds about the 
great mystery that Christ is both God and man, and they speak as though 
what is human in Christ was divine. They talk, for example, of God having 
been born, and of God being buried, and invoke the most holy virgin Mary as 
the "God-bringing-forth," the mother of God (using the Greek word that 
expresses this so succinctly, Theotokos). They should, of course, be more 
careful in their speech, and say she is Christotokos--the one who brought 
forth Christ, the mother of Christ. "The Virgin," he told the pope, "is 
certainly Christotokos: she is not Theotokos." In speaking and acting as 
they do these Catholics are reviving, says Nestorius, "the corruption of 
Arius and Apollinaris," heretics notoriously condemned long ago. And 
Nestorius speaks feelingly of "the fight which I have to put up over 
this."[3]

By the time Nestorius had written these letters, his public support of 
preachers whom he brought in to "correct" his ignorant clergy, and his own 
sermons, his prohibition of the use of the word Theotokos and the 
punishments he meted out to the disobedient, had set the capital in an 
uproar. And the trouble was crossing the seas. For the news of his ill 
treatment of the monks had spread to the land which was the centre of the 
monastic movement, Egypt, and when the Egyptian monks laid the theological 
problem before their bishop, Cyril--the accusation that the traditional 
Catholic piety towards the God-man and his mother was heretical--there 
entered the field the very unusual combination of a first-rate theologian 
who was also a finished man of affairs and an experienced politician. Cyril 
wrote, for his monks, a theological defence of the tradition which was 
necessarily a severe denunciation of Nestorius.[4] This was sometime after 
the Easter of 429, and the "reply" was presently circulating in 
Constantinople. And Cyril also wrote to Nestorius.

In the events of the next two years the natural man in Cyril was to reveal 
itself fairly often. What of the same in Nestorius? What was it that so 
suddenly moved him to attack what was not a local piety peculiar to the 
city where he had just begun to live but, as the event showed (and as 
Nestorius must have known), a general, traditional way of regarding this 
doctrine? His own first letters on the subject are a curious mixture of 
orthodoxy and of novel statements, "startling to pious ears," as a later 
day would have said; statements capable indeed of being explained as in 
harmony with the tradition, but until so explained, and especially when set 
out in criticism of current practice, justifiably causing real suspicion 
that the speaker was himself a heretic--a man, that is to say, out to 
propagate a new, personal, antitraditional version of fundamental belief. 
What prompted all this? The vanity of the learned man who has found out 
something the generality do not know? the possession of key-knowledge that 
will "make all the difference"? the desire of a gifted man, promoted 
suddenly from obscurity to one of the highest places in the world of his 
time, to make his mark, to set all things right? For his point that, 
although Theotokos, rightly understood, is perfectly orthodox, it is better 
to use his own new word Christotokos, the suitable place to air this--a 
first time--might have been a conference of theologians or bishops. But 
Nestorius chose to do it in sermons to the multitudes that filled his 
cathedral, and not in terms of learned, anxious speculation, but in blood-
and-thunder denunciation of universally practiced piety. There is a levity 
about the action which, given the gravity of the issue, is itself surely 
scandalous. And was Nestorius a really honest, straightforward type? In his 
first correspondence with the pope, when he tells of his problem with 
Pelagian refugees from Italy, he is even naively devious, and the pope in 
his reply points this out very bluntly. And once the major forces had been 
brought in against him, Cyril of Alexandria and the verdict of Rome, he 
certainly shows himself, in his manoeuvres with the court, a twister of the 
first order: Trop habile Nestorius.[6]

When Cyril wrote directly to Nestorius, in February 430, seemingly, he said 
how surprised he was that he should disturb the peace of mind of the 
faithful by such very controvertible statements. Nestorius in return 
attacked the explanation Cyril had given the monks, called it 
untraditional, and said explicitly that it was the Apollinarian heresy all 
over again. Cyril had given him the news that Rome considered his views 
scandalous, and Nestorius ended his letter with a hint that the court was 
on his side. Cyril was not unaware that at Constantinople there were 
clerics from Egypt, gone there with a case against their chief bishop, and 
that Nestorius was taking care of these enemies. It was with reference to 
this situation that Cyril wrote to his agents in the capital, about this 
time: "This poor fellow does not imagine, surely, that I am going to allow 
myself to be judged by him, whoever the accusers are that he can stir up 
against me! It will be the other way round. I shall know well enough how to 
force him back to the defensive."[6] The temperature is rising rapidly, on 
both shores of the Mediterranean.

It was now that Cyril first approached the court on the matter of 
Nestorius, sending explanations of the point at issue to the emperor, his 
wife and sisters.

The next move was a council in Egypt, sometime after Easter 430, and an 
elaborate report to the pope on the part of Cyril--his answer to the Roman 
query whether certain sermons that have come to the pope were really 
Nestorius' sermons.[7] Cyril's reply was a "skilfully written letter"[8] 
describing the situation at Constantinople, saying that all the bishops of 
the East are united in their anxiety about these errors of Nestorius. He is 
quite isolated in his denial that the Virgin is Theotokos, but flatters 
himself that he will bring the rest round, "so greatly has the power[9] of 
his see infatuated him." The bishops will not publicly break off relations 
with Nestorius without consulting the pope. "Deign then to make known to us 
what seems good to you, and whether we ought either to remain in communion 
with him or to declare publicly that no one should remain in communion with 
a man who thinks and teaches so erroneously." The pope's reply, Cyril 
recommends, should be sent to all the bishops of the East.

With this letter went copies of Nestorius' sermons (and a Latin translation 
of them ), then the Cyril-Nestorius correspondence, then a list drawn up by 
Cyril of the errors said to be taught by Nestorius, and a compendium of 
texts from the classic theologians of the past on the doctrine called in 
question.

When this dossier reached Rome, Pope Celestine set it before a specially 
summoned gathering of bishops, and on August 11, 430, he wrote his 
judgment. This he sent, in the first place, to Cyril. In this letter the 
pope speaks of Cyril's communication as a consolation amid his grief at the 
sermons Nestorius had been preaching. Already, that is, before receiving 
Cyril's letter, the pope had handed over these sermons to one of the great 
scholars of the day, the bilingual John Cassian, to be the basis of a book 
against Nestorius. But Cyril's letter, the pope continues, suggests how to 
cure this terrible evil. To the question about remaining in communion with 
the bishop of Constantinople, the pope replies that those whom Nestorius 
had excommunicated because they opposed him remain, nevertheless, in full 
communion, and those who obstinately follow the path that leads away from 
the apostolic teaching cannot be "in communion with us," i.e., the pope. 
Nestorius, he instructs Cyril, is to be summoned to make a written 
recantation of his errors, and to declare that his belief about the birth 
of Christ is what the church of Rome believes, the church of Alexandria, 
and the universal church. And Cyril is charged with the execution of this 
decision. He is to act in the pope's place, and, speaking with all the 
authority of the pope's see, is to demand this retraction of Nestorius, to 
be made in writing, within ten days of the notice given. If within this 
time Nestorius has not complied he is to be declared expelled from the 
church.

To the bishops of Antioch, Jerusalem, Thessalonica, and Philippi[10] the 
pope also wrote letters which follow the same line as that to Cyril, but 
make no mention of the commission to act which the pope had sent him. The 
pope merely says, with great gravity, "The sentence we pronounce, which is 
even more the sentence of our master Christ who is God, is..." and so on, 
as in the letter to Cyril.

We possess, besides the letter to Cyril, the letter which the pope wrote, 
that same day, to Nestorius. In this Celestine explains that lack of 
scholars who could translate the bishop's letters and sermons had delayed 
his reply, then came the dossier sent from Alexandria, which has been 
studied. The pope tells the bishop of Constantinople that his letters are 
"full of evident blasphemies." The sermons, for all their obscurity, 
plainly teach heresy. What a dreadful mistake it was to make Nestorius a 
bishop! The sheep have, indeed, been handed over to the wolf. And now, 
those whose lack of foresight brought this about are calling on the pope to 
help them out of the difficulty. The pope does not point out to Nestorius 
the particular places where he has gone astray, list any of "your many 
impious declarations, which the whole church rejects." But, as he tells 
him, this present letter is a final warning. The bishop of Alexandria is in 
the right, in this controversy. "Brother, if you wish to be with us... 
openly show that you think as we think." "Our sentence is this," and the 
letter ends with a demand for a written declaration that Nestorius believes 
the very thing he has repudiated, with a notice of be ten days allowed, and 
a warning that noncompliance means immediate excommunication. Celestine 
then tells him that all the papers concerning the process have been sent to 
Alexandria, that he has commissioned Cyril to act in his name and to inform 
him, Nestorius, and the other bishops what the pope has decided.

A letter, in much the same terms, also went from the pope to the clergy and 
faithful people of the capital. But the pope did not write to the emperor.

What the normal time was for a public letter to go from Rome to Alexandria, 
in the fifth century, and thence on to Constantinople, a business involving 
sea-journeys of something like a thousand miles, it is not easy to say. But 
it is surprising that not until December 7 was Nestorius officially 
summoned by Cyril to recant. And the bishop of Alexandria did not carry out 
his task in person--as, presumably, the pope designed. He sent the 
ultimatum by four of his suffragan bishops. Nor did he content himself with 
sending the pope's letters of commission, his own credentials in the 
matter. Before moving, he had called a synod of the bishops of Egypt, and 
he now sent on to Nestorius their synodal letter condemning his teaching. 
Finally, to make the expected retractation doubly sure, Cyril had drafted 
twelve statements about the heresies Nestorius was alleged to support, 
statements all of which ended: "Whoever believes this, may he be anathema," 
i.e., accursed.[10a] These Nestorius was to sign.

But in the long interval between August 11 and December 7 much had happened 
at Constantinople and elsewhere. Nestorius had had a correspondence with 
the bishop of Antioch, who urged him, in very plain language, to do as he 
was asked, and not to cause trouble merely about a word he disliked 
(Theotokos) but which he admitted could bear an orthodox meaning, and to 
which many saints and doctors of the past had given sanction by themselves 
using it. "Don't lose your head," wrote the Antiochean. Ten days! "It will 
not take you twenty-four hours to give the needed answer.... Ask advice of 
men you can trust. Ask them to tell you the facts, not just what they think 
will please you.... You have the whole of the East against you, as well as 
Egypt." Nestorius, in his reply to this surely good friend, hedged. He gave 
no explicit answer, merely saying he had not been rightly understood, that 
if his book forbade the use of the famous word it was because heretics were 
using it, with an heretical meaning. And that now he will just wait for the 
council,[11] which will settle this, and all other problems. As to Cyril, 
it is he who is the troublemaker. "As to the Egyptian's insolence, it will 
scarcely surprise you, for you have many evidences of it, old and new."[12]

On November 19, the emperor had summoned a General Council of the Church, 
for certain vaguely described purposes, the summons said, but actually, no 
one doubted, to settle this controversy between Constantinople and 
Alexandria and--in the expectation of Nestorius--to be the scene of the 
trial for heresy (Apollinarianism) of Cyril. The council was to meet at 
Ephesus, at Pentecost (June 7) 431.

When Cyril's four bishops reached Constantinople, December 7, Nestorius 
refused to receive them. John of Antioch, in the letter just mentioned, had 
passed on to Nestorius copies of the pope's letter condemning him, and also 
of a letter he (John) had received from Cyril. Long before Cyril's four 
bishops walked into the sanctuary of the cathedral at Constantinople, that 
December Sunday, to hand over the ultimatum, Nestorius had known all about 
it. And he had not been idle. It was from Nestorius, it is often said, that 
the council idea had come. And in the emperor's letter inviting Cyril to 
the council there was much to make it evident that the glorification of 
Alexandria was no part of the programme. Cyril's writing separate letters 
to the emperor, the empress, and the princesses was here declared to be an 
attempt to divide the imperial family, and the bishop was ordered--not 
invited--to attend the council, under severe penalties.[13] On the other 
hand, the emperor's act had changed the whole situation for Nestorius. In 
summoning the council Theodosius had forbidden all and every ecclesiastical 
change, no matter by whom, until the council had concluded. And when 
Nestorius now wrote to the pope of the crimes that were to be brought 
against Cyril when the council met, he made light of the theological 
controversy, gave not a hint that he knew of the pope's judgment, but wrote 
that Cyril, he hears, is preparing a "Faith in danger" campaign, in the 
hope of distracting the council from his own anxieties.

The pope made no difficulty about the emperor's plan to call a council, nor 
about the prohibition which--in fact--had called a halt to the summons to 
Nestorius. And when Cyril wrote to ask whether Nestorius was now to be 
treated as excommunicated, for the ten days had long since gone by, the 
pope in reply quoted the Scripture that God wills not the death of a 
sinner, but rather that he be converted and live. And Cyril is exhorted to 
work for peace with the rest of the bishops.

The date of this letter is May 7, 431--one month before the day appointed 
for the council, five months from the day Cyril's deputation tried to 
deliver the ultimatum to Nestorius. And in those five months the twelve 
anathemas of Cyril, so to call them, had time to circulate; and--in the 
vast territories where the influence of Antioch was strong--they had raised 
issues which now quite overshadowed the differences between Cyril and 
Nestorius, or between Rome and Nestorius even. In the eyes of these 
Antiochean theologians the language in which the bishop of Alexandria had 
framed his statements revealed him as a pure Apollinarian. And John of 
Antioch had organised a party to make this clear at the council, and had in 
the meantime induced two bishops--one of them held to be Cyril's equal as a 
scholarly writer, Theodoret of Cyrrhus[14]--to come out with public 
refutations of the Alexandrian's "heresies." And this group wrote to the 
bishops of the West for support, to Milan, for example, to Aquileia, and to 
Ravenna.

How much of this was known to Pope Celestine, when he wrote his letter of 
May 7, we do not know. But he surely knew that minds were inflamed, and as 
he gave Cyril the news that he was not himself able to make the journey to 
Ephesus, he urged "the Egyptian" to be moderate, to remember that what the 
pope wanted was that Nestorius should be won back. We must not, said the 
pope, again scripturally, be of those "swift to shed blood."

The day after this letter was written the pope signed the instructions for 
the three legates who were to represent him at the council. They were told 
to act throughout with Cyril and to watch carefully that the authority of 
the Apostolic See was duly respected. And, finally, the pope sent a letter 
to the council. It is a moving document, in which Celestine reminds the 
bishops of the beloved apostle St. John, whose remains lie in the church at 
Ephesus where they are meeting, and reminds them that they are the 
successors of the twelve apostles, privileged to preserve what their 
labours had established. The pope speaks plainly about the Nestorian 
novelties: they are treason to the faith. He exhorts the bishops to 
unanimity, and to be courageous in act. Then he presents his legates, who 
will take part in the council and will tell the bishops, "the things which 
we decided at Rome were to be done." "Nor do we doubt your assent to all 
this," the pope goes on, "when it is seen how all that is done has been 
ordered for the security of the whole church."[14a]

To the legates the pope entrusted a letter for the emperor, announcing that 
he would be represented at the council by legates, and praying he would 
give no encouragement to these novel ideas now causing such trouble, the 
work of men who would reduce the idea of God to the limits of what a finite 
intelligence could explore. The pope leaves it in no doubt, in this as in 
the other letter, that Nestorius is already condemned; if the pope consents 
to the case being discussed once more, this is in the hope that the 
unfortunate man will retract.

The emperor had not convoked every single bishop of the empire to the 
council, but only a certain number from each of the fifty-nine provinces of 
his own jurisdiction, the choice being left to the metropolitans. In all, 
something like 230 or 250 ultimately arrived at Ephesus. Cyril came in a 
few days before the appointed date. He found Nestorius already established. 
He had been at Ephesus since Easter, with a small group of sympathetic 
prelates. Cyril had brought with him fifty Egyptian bishops. Sometime after 
Pentecost the (anti-Nestorius) bishop of Jerusalem arrived with fifteen 
supporters, and later came news from the Antiocheans, forty-six in all, 
that they had been delayed by accidents. This last group had chosen to 
travel by the land route, a thousand miles and more of difficult and--as it 
happened--famine-stricken country.

The most numerous group at the council was the bishops of what we, today, 
call Asia Minor, the nineteen provinces that then made up the (civil) 
dioceses of Asia and Pontus, and the district called Proconsular Asia which 
was subject to the emperor's direct rule. It was in this last that Ephesus 
itself was situated. In Asia Minor there were, in all, something like three 
hundred sees. It was the most Catholicized territory of all the empire. 
Something like a hundred of these bishops came to the council. The bishop 
of Ephesus, Memnon, acted as their leader, and they were to a man anti-
Constantinople--the question of the Theotokos apart. The repeated attempts

14a. These three letters are in Jaffe, nos. 377, 378, 379.

Of successive bishops of the capital city, since 381, to turn the primacy 
of honour then voted it into an effective hold on the only territory not 
already dominated by Antioch or Alexandria, made the bishops of Ephesus 
allies of the foe of Constantinople in all these disputes.

Meanwhile the Antiocheans did not arrive, and the bishops waited, for a 
good two weeks after the appointed day, June 7, in the great city, two 
hundred of them nearly, each with his retinue, in the scorching latitude of 
38 degrees north. Disputes were frequent, fights and riots with the 
Nestorian minority, in which the town naturally took an interested 
part.[15] But Cyril made no attempt to meet Nestorius. The two prelates 
avoided each other. Each, to the other, was a wicked heretic, awaiting his 
trial and deserved condemnation. And while the bishop of Ephesus forbade 
the churches of the city to Nestorius, Cyril was free to preach on 
Nestorius as the enemy of truth, the outcast already condemned by the 
pope.[16]

On June 21 the long wait was broken. Cyril announced that the next day the 
council would hold its opening session. Immediately there were protests. 
From the imperial commissioner, in the first place, Count Candidian, who 
was charged with the safety of the council, under orders to prevent any but 
the bishops from entering the church where the meetings would take 
place,[17] and with keeping order in the council itself, i.e., to see that 
every bishop who wished to speak was allowed to speak, and to reply to 
attacks made on him; also to see that no bishop left Ephesus until the 
council had ended its business. Candidian demanded a delay until the 
Antiocheans arrived. So did no fewer than sixty-eight bishops, in a written 
protestation. And Nestorius, with his party, made their protest too, saying 
the council was no council until all the bishops were assembled. But Cyril 
stood to his announcement, and on June 22 the council opened--a memorable 
first session in which much was enacted, and in which still more lay 
mischievously latent, suppositos cineri a doloso indeed.[18]

The question has been raised by what authority Cyril thus opened the 
council, acting as though he was its acknowledged president. That the mass 
of the bishops at the time accepted the fait accompli without any sign of 
protest--even the sixty-eight signatories--is certain. It was also 
traditional that Alexandria was the first see of the East. Its bishop being 
present at a General Council, and neither pope nor emperor having named 
another to preside, he was surely its inevitable president. Nestorius, in 
the memoirs he wrote, many years later, says: "We expected that he who 
exercised authority (the emperor, through Candidian) would have chosen the 
president. No one thought you would have taken it for yourself." But from 
the 159[19] bishops who were in the church as the day's work began there 
was not a sign of objection to Cyril.

The first, unallowed-for incident was a protestation, to the council this 
time, not to Cyril, from Candidian. It was the emperor's will, he said, 
that there should not be any "fragmentary councils."[20] He was asked to 
show his instructions and did so. But the bishops stood firm, and begged 
him to leave, which he did, after a final plea to wait for the absentees, 
upon whose arrival Nestorius and his party would join the council.

The council then settled down to its business. A notary read a summary of 
the case against Nestorius, told how Cyril had intervened at 
Constantinople, and then at Rome, and how "the most holy bishop of the 
church of Rome, Celestine, has written what it behoved." And the notary 
announced that all the documents were here and at the disposition of the 
bishops.

Nestorius was then sent for. Three times--as the Law demanded--he was 
officially and personally summoned, a deputation going from the council to 
the place where he lived. He ignored all three citations, and the council 
passed to the study of his case.

The next act was the reading of the creed of Nicaea, and then of Cyril's 
letter to Nestorius. Cyril then rose, acknowledging the letter, and to put 
it to the bishops to vote whether the theology of his letter was in accord 
with the creed of Nicaea; 125 of the bishops followed him, each making 
profession of the Nicene faith, and affirming that the letter accorded with 
Nicaea. A demand was made for Nestorius' reply to the letter. When it was 
read, and the question put as to its accord with Nicaea, thirty-four 
bishops had individually answered in the negative when the patience of the 
assembly gave out. There was a call for a mass vote, and without a 
dissentient they shouted their views in a series of acclamations: "Whoever 
does not anathematize Nestorius, let him be anathema. Curses on him. The 
true faith curses him. The holy council curses him. We all say anathema, to 
his letter and his views. We all say anathema to the heretic Nestorius.... 
The whole universal church says anathema to the wicked religion taught by 
Nestorius."

The bishop of Jerusalem now asked that the pope's letter to Nestorius be 
read. So far not a word had come from the president to say that Rome had 
condemned Nestorius already, and looked to the council to ratify this. It 
was in the name of Nicaea that Nestorius had been condemned. The council--
or Cyril--had not merely begun the business before the Antiocheans had come 
in, but before the arrival of the pope's representatives also. The 
Jerusalem proposal, so to speak, was adopted and the pope's letter was 
read--and listened to as a matter of routine, one would say, without a 
single acclamation. Next was read the letter delivered to Nestorius by the 
four bishops, the letter of the Egyptian synod. But not the now famous 
twelve anathemas which Cyril had composed in order to stop every retreat 
for his wily opponent--or perhaps they were read? Historians do not agree. 
Then, after an account by one of the four bishops of their mission to 
Nestorius, the notary read out a long collection of texts from all the 
classic theologians of past days justifying the orthodoxy of the term 
Theotokos; and followed this with a long selection of passages from 
Nestorius that were evidence of his errors. Finally, in a solemn resounding 
sentence, the council deprived Nestorius of his bishopric of Constantinople 
and ejected him from the ranks of the episcopate; 198 signatures of bishops 
were attached to the sentence.

In all the day's proceedings not a single voice had been raised to say that 
the views of Nestorius were what the faith really was. All that long day 
crowds had stood round outside the great church, while the interminable 
routine had slowly worked to its inevitable end, echoes from within making 
their way to the streets, no doubt, in the more lively moments. When the 
result was known there were scenes of the wildest joy, and Cyril, in a 
pastoral letter written on his return to Alexandria, has left a vivid 
picture of it all.

"The whole population of the city, from earliest dawn until the evening 
stood around, in expectation of the council's decision. And when they heard 
that the author of the blasphemies had been stripped of his rank, they all 
began with one voice to praise and glorify God, as for the overthrow of an 
enemy of the faith. And as we [the bishops] came forth from the Church, 
they led us with torches to our lodgings, for it was now evening. 
Throughout the city there was great rejoicing, and many lighted lanterns, 
and women who walked before us swinging thuribles."[21]

The Council of Ephesus was now over? No, its history had hardly begun, 
although, without a shadow of opposition, it had carried out the task for 
which, in the eyes of all, it had been summoned; and although the justice 
of what it had done was not questioned, and no move was ever made to 
reverse the decision. These strange words promise a complicated story. 
There were to be six more sessions of the council, spread through the month 
of July, and then, for the mass of the bishops, a long dreary wait of 
weeks, while, at the capital, rival delegations argued before the emperor 
about the orthodoxy of Cyril. It was late September, three months after 
this night of triumph, before the council was dissolved, and the bishops 
free to begin the long journey back to their sees.

The morrow of the celebrations was taken up with the task of notifying the 
decision to all the interested parties: letters from Cyril and his bishops 
to the emperor, and to the clergy and people of Constantinople; a report 
from Candidian to the emperor; and from Nestorius (who had been officially 
told his sentence at the conclusion of the session) a complaint about the 
way his friends had been dealt with.

The next day, June 24, the Antiocheans arrived. They speedily learnt all 
that had happened, and were soon officially notified of the sentence 
against Nestorius and ordered, by Cyril, not to communicate with him in any 
way. Their immediate reaction was to form themselves into a council--along 
with some of the bishops who had held aloof from the great session of the 
twenty-second They gave Count Candidian audience and he, as well as 
protesting against what was then done, gave a full account of all the 
events of the week. It was then the turn of those bishops to speak, against 
whom Memnon had closed all his churches, shutting them out in this way from 
the liturgy at the great feast of Pentecost. There was speech of Cyril's 
autocratic conduct, of the heresy which his twelve anathemas contained and, 
finally, John of Antioch who presided over the gathering proposed a 
sentence that Cyril and Memnon be deposed as the authors of the heresies 
contained in the anathemas, the heresies of Arius and Apollinaris, and all 
the bishops be excommunicated who had allowed themselves to be led away by 
these chiefs. Notice of this sentence was served on all concerned, and once 
more the elaborate business gone through of officially informing the 
emperor and all the ecclesiastical world of the capital.

When these letters were despatched, whether June 26 or 28, the previous 
despatches to the emperor can hardly yet have reached Constantinople. His 
answer to Candidian's report on the session of June 22 is, in fact, dated 
June 29. It is a severe condemnation of all Cyril's proceedings. The 
emperor regards all that was done as of no effect, and orders the bishops 
to meet again, in accord, this time, with the instructions given to the 
count. None is to leave until this new discussion has taken place. And one 
of the highest officials of the court, it is announced, is on his way to 
regulate matters.

By the time this communication had reached Ephesus, something else had 
happened: the three Roman legates had arrived, the two bishops Arcadius and 
Projectus, and the priest Philip. In accord with the instructions given 
them, ten or eleven weeks before, they joined themselves to Cyril. On July 
10, all the bishops who had taken part in the act of June 22 came together 
once more in session. The difference in the procedure is evident, notable, 
significant. Cyril presided,[22] and the session opened with a demand from 
the legates that the pope's letter to the council, which they had brought 
with them, should be read. This was done, and one of the legates then said, 
"We have satisfied what custom demands, namely, that first of all, the 
letters from the Apostolic See be read in Latin." They were next read in 
Greek--a translation brought by the legates.[23]

And now there were acclamations from the council. The papal sentence had 
anticipated the bishops' own vote. The counteraction of John of Antioch 
against themselves for their support of Cyril, the emperor's gesture of 
repudiation, were, perhaps, the lighter for this wholehearted confirmation. 
"Celestine," they called, "is the new Paul. Cyril is the new Paul. 
Celestine is the guardian of the faith. Celestine agrees with the council. 
There is one Celestine, one Cyril, one faith of the council, one faith of 
the world-wide church." And then one of the papal legates intervened to 
point out that what Celestine's letter had said was that it was the 
council's business to carry out what he at Rome had decided should be done. 
And another legate, acknowledging the acclamations, said in a terse phrase, 
"The members have joined themselves to the head, for your beatitude is not 
ignorant that the head of the whole faith, and furthermore of the Apostles, 
is the blessed apostle Peter." And then this legate, the priest Philip, 
asked for the official record of what had been done on June 22, So as to be 
able to confirm the sentence passed, according to the instructions of "our 
blessed pope."

At the session of the following day the same legate pronounced that the 
judgment of June 22 had been made "canonically and in accordance with 
ecclesiastical learning"; and, "conformably with the instructions of the 
most holy pope, Celestine," the judgment was confirmed. Whereupon the 
minutes of the session and the sentence against Nestorius were read, 
following which the legate Philip made a speech in which occurs this 
passage, that has never ceased to be quoted since: "No one doubts, nay it 
is a thing known now for centuries, that the holy and most blessed Peter, 
the prince and head of the Apostles, the pillar of the faith and the 
foundation on which the Catholic Church is built, received from Our Lord, 
Jesus Christ, the saviour and redeemer of the human race, the keys of the 
kingdom, and that to him there was given the power of binding and of 
loosing from sin; who, down to this day, and for evermore, lives and 
exercises judgment in his successors."[24]

In the report of these last proceedings made by the bishops to the emperor, 
the principal part which the Roman see has played in the condemnation of 
Nestorius, "before the present council was summoned," is stressed, and the 
fact that Cyril had been charged by the pope to act in his place. But the 
bishops do not excuse themselves for--once more--ignoring the emperor's 
commands as to what they shall do and how. In their letter notifying again 
to the clergy of Constantinople the deposition of their bishop, the next 
signature, after Cyril's is that of Philip, "priest of the church of the 
Apostles,"[26] then comes that of the bishop of Jerusalem, and next of the 
other two Roman legates.

It remained to resolve the council's situation vis-a-vis the Antioch group 
who, now nearly three weeks since, had declared these two hundred or so 
bishops excommunicated, and no council. John of Antioch and his adherents 
were now, three times, formally summoned to appear before the council, and 
upon their final refusal they were all solemnly excommunicated (July 17). 
And, once again, pope and emperor were formally notified of all that had 
been done.

At Constantinople there were general rejoicings at the news that Nestorius' 
reign was over. But the emperor still refused to recognise the work done as 
it had been done. He did not reprove the bishops for ignoring his orders of 
June 29, and he wrote as though all the bishops then at Ephesus were one 
body--a single letter addressed to all.[26] But he confirmed all three 
depositions, i.e., of Nestorius and of Cyril and of the bishop of Ephesus. 
All the other acts he condemned. The faith as defined at Nicaea sufficed, 
he said. His new envoy, Count John, who brought the letter, would further 
instruct the bishops about "our divinity's plan for the faith." And the 
bishops were bidden return to their sees.

When the count arrived, with this somewhat confused, and confusing, decree, 
it must have been the beginning of August. He had all the bishops brought 
together in a single assembly to hear his news, their leaders with them. 
The effect was a general riot, Nestorius and Cyril had to be removed before 
order was restored. That evening they, with Memnon of Ephesus, were placed 
under arrest. "If I see the pious bishops to be irritable and 
irreconcilable (though what causes their rage and exasperation is a mystery 
to me), and if I find i