of antagonism towards Cyril and his creed, and were not pacified until an understanding was reached in 433 on the basis of a new formula involving some material concessions by him. The union even then met with resistance from a number of bishops, who, rather than accede to it, submitted to deposition and expulsion from their sees; and it was not until these had all died out that, as the result of stringent imperial edicts, Nestorianism may be said to have become extinct throughout the Roman empire. Their school at Edessa was closed by Zeno in 489. As for Nestorius himself, immediately after his deposition he withdrew into private life in his old monastery of Euprepius, Antioch, until 435, when the emperor ordered his banishment to Petra. in Arabia. A second decree, it would seem, sent him to Oasis, probably the city of the Great Oasis, in Upper Egypt, where he was still living in 439, at the time when Socrates wrote his Church History. He was taken prisoner by the Blemmyes, a nomad tribe that gave much trouble to the empire in Africa, and when they set him free in the Thebaid near Panopolis (Akhmim) c. 450, they exposed him to further persecution from Schenute the great hero of the Egyptian monks. There is some evidence that he was summoned to the Council of Chalcedon,[1] though he could not attend it, and the concluding portion of his book known as The Bazaar of Heraclides not only gives a full account of the “Robber Synod” of Ephesus 449, but knows that Theodosius is dead (July 450) and seems aware of the proceedings of Chalcedon and the flight of Dioscurus the unscrupulous successor of Cyril at Alexandria. Nestorius was already old and ailing and must have died very soon after.
The Nestorian Heresy.—What is technically and conventionally meant in dogmatic theology by “the Nestorian heresy” must now be noticed. As Eutychianism is the doctrine that the God-man has only one nature, so Nestorianism is the doctrine that He has two complete persons. So far as Nestorius himself is concerned, however, it is certain that he never formulated any such doctrine;[2] nor does any recorded utterance of his, however casual, come so near the heresy called by his name as Cyril’s deliberately framed third anathema (that regarding the “physical union” of the two hypostases or natures) approaches Eutychianism. It must be remembered that Nestorius was as orthodox at all events as Athanasius on the subject of the incarnation, and sincerely, even fanatically, held every article of the Nicene creed. Hefele himself, one of the most learned and acute of Cyril’s partisans, is compelled to admit that Nestorius accurately held the duality of the two natures and the integrity of each, was equally explicitly opposed to Arianism and Apollinarianism, and was perfectly correct in his assertion that the Godhead can neither be born nor suffer; all that he can allege against him is that “the fear of the communicatio idiomatum pursued him like a spectre." But in reality the question raised by Nestorius was not one as to the communicatio idiomatum, but simply as to the proprieties of language. “I cannot speak of God,” he said, “as being two or three months old,” a remark which was twisted to his disadvantage. He did not refuse to speak of Mary as being the mother of Christ or as being the mother of Emmanuel, but he thought it improper to speak of her as the mother of God, and Leo in the Letter to Flavian which was endorsed at Chalcedon uses the term “Mother of the Lord” which was exactly what Nestorius wished. And there is at least this to be said for him that even the most zealous desire to frustrate the Arian had never made it a part of orthodoxy to speak of David as θεοπάτωρ or of James as ἀδελφόθεος. The secret of the enthusiasm of the masses for the analogous expression Theotokos is to be sought not so much in the Nicene doctrine of the incarnation as in the recent growth in the popular mind of notions as to the dignity of the Virgin Mary, which were entirely unheard of (except in heretical circles) for nearly three centuries of the Christian era. That the Virgin should be given a title that was quasi-divine mattered little. The danger was that under cover of such a title an unhistorical conception of the facts of the Gospel should grow up, and a false doctrine of the relations between the human and the Divine be encouraged, and this was to Nestorius a double danger that needed to be exposed. He was thus forced into the position of one who brings technical objections against a popular term.
The fact that Nestorius was trained at Antioch and inherited the Antiochene zeal for exact biblical exegesis and insistence upon the recognition of the full manhood of Christ, is of the first importance in understanding his position. From the days of Ignatius, down through Paul of Samosata and Lucian to the great controversies of the 5th century which began with the theories of Apollinarius, the theologians of Antioch started from the one sure fact, that Christ lived on earth the life of man, and without questioning the equally genuine Divine element laid stress on this genuine human consciousness. There is no reason to suppose that Nestorius intended to introduce any innovations in doctrine, and in any estimate of him his strong religious interest and his fervent pastoral spirit must have due weight. He was a great extempore preacher and exposed to the peril of the unconsidered “telling” phrase. That a man of such conspicuous ability, who impressed himself at the outset on the people of Constantinople as an uncompromising opponent of heresy should within a few short years be an excommunicated fugitive, sacrificed to save the face of Cyril and the Alexandrians, is indeed, as Duchesne says, a tragedy. No successor of Chrysostom was likely to receive much good-will from the nephew and successor of Theophilus of Alexandria.
It is only within recent years that an attempt has been made to judge Nestorius from some other evidence than that afforded by the accusations of Cyril and the inferences drawn therefrom. This other evidence consists partly of letters from Nestorius, preserved among the works of those to whom they were written, some sermons collected in a Latin translation by Marius Mercator, an African merchant who was doing business in Constantinople at the time of the dispute, and other material gathered from Syriac manuscripts. Since the helpful collection of Nestoriana published by Dr F. Loofs in 1905 there has also come to our knowledge the most valuable evidence of all, Nestorius’s own account of the whole difficulty, viz. The Bazaar[3] of Heraclides of Damascus. This pseudonym served to protect the book against the fate that overtook the writings of heretics, and in a Syriac version it was preserved in the Euphrates valley where the followers of Nestorius settled. Ebed Jesu in the 14th century mentions it together with Letters and Homilies, as well as the Tragedy, or a Letters to Cosmas, the Theopaschites (of which some fragments are still extant) and the Liturgy, which is still used by the Nestorian Church. The discovery of The Bazaar, which is the Apologia of Nestorius, was made public by Dr H. Goussen (though members of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Mission to the Assyrian Christians had previously been acquainted with the book). The text has been edited by P. Paul Bedjan (Leipzig, 1910) and a French translation has been made by M. l’abbé F. Nau. A representative selection of extracts has been given to English readers in J. F. Bethune-Baker’s Nestorius and his Teaching (Cambridge, 1908), chapter ii. of which describes the MS. and its accounts. Much of the argument is thrown into the form of a dialogue between (1) Nestorius and an imaginary opponent Superianus, (2) Nestorius and Cyril. The book reveals a strong personality and helps us to know the man and his teaching, even though we have to gather his own views largely from his criticism of his antagonists. He is throughout more concerned for the wrong done to the faith at Ephesus than to himself, saying that if he held the views attributed to him by Cyril he would be the first to condemn himself without mercy. All through the years of conflict he had “but one end in view, that no one should call the Word of God a creature, or the Manhood which was assumed incomplete.” In his letters to Celestine he had laid stress on the point that the teaching he attacked was derogatory to the Godhead and so he called its champions Arians. “If the Godhead of the Son had its origin in the womb of the Virgin it was not Godhead as the Father’s, and He who was born could not be homoousios with God, and that was what the Arians denied Him to be.” It is thus increasingly difficult to believe that Nestorius was a “Nestorian.” Père J. Mahé has shown (Revue d’Inst. ecclés. July, 1906) that in spite of notable differences of terminology and form the chronologies of Antioch and Alexandria were in essence the same. Personal rather than doctrinal reasons had by far the larger part in determining the fate of Nestorius, who was sacrificed to the agreement between the two great schools. This view is confirmed by the evidence of the Synodicon Orientale (the collection of the canons of Nestorian Councils and Synods), which shows that the Great Syriac Church built up by the adherents of Nestorius and ever memorable for its zeal in carrying the Gospel into Central Asia, China and India cannot, from its inception, be rightly described as other than orthodox. The “attenuated” (i.e. un-“Nestorian”) form which some historians have noted in the early centuries of Persian Nestorianism was really there from the beginning. The Nestorian Church, following its leader, formally recognizes the Letter of Leo to Flavian and the decrees of the Council of Chalcedon. “When I came,” said Nestorius (Baz. Herac.), “upon that exposition and read it, I gave thanks to God that the Church of Rome was rightly and blamelessly making confession, even though they happened to be against me personally.” His aim, he tells us, had been to maintain the distinct continuance of the two natures of Christ when united through the Incarnation into one Person. “In the Person the natures use their properties mutually. . . . The manhood is the person of the Godhead and the Godhead is the person of the manhood.” The ultimate union of these two natures appears to lie in the will—“For there was one and the same will and mind in the union of the natures, so that both should will or not will exactly the same things. The natures have, moreover, a
