title θεοτόκος. His arguments produced trouble in the city; Nestorius defended him. The title "Mother of God" was by no means new. St. Gregory of Nazianzos (†390) particularly had said: "If anyone does not receive the Holy Mary as Mother of God, he is separated from the Godhead."[1] It was well suited to be the test of belief in our Lord as one person, and it became, as everyone knows, the immediate object of this controversy. The sermons in which Nestorius attacks this word show his heresy, his assertion of two persons (the mere man Jesus who was born of Mary, and the Word of God who dwelled in him), plainly.[2]
The dispute between the attackers and defenders of the word theotókos now became the chief question at Constantinople. Soon it spread throughout the East. It came to Egypt and disturbed the peace of the Alexandrine Patriarchate. St. Cyril of Alexandria (412–444), nephew and successor of the Theophilus (385–412) who had been St. John Chrysostom's enemy, predecessor of the future Monophysite leader Dioscor (444–451), appears as the champion of the Theotókos, the chief enemy of Nestorius. In his Paschal homily of 429 he explained that the Blessed Virgin is Mother of God,[3] and then discussed the question again very clearly in a letter to the monks of the Nitrian desert. So far he refuted Nestorius's heresy without naming him. Nestorius made one of his priests answer this letter, and Cyril wrote to Nestorius blaming him for the disturbance, telling him that if only he would cease attacking our Lady's title peace would soon be restored. Nestorius answered back, and other circumstances helped to aggravate the quarrel.[4] Cyril's second letter to Nestorius (Feb. 430) is the classical statement of the Catholic attitude on this subject. Dom H. Leclercq describes it as "Saint Cyril's
- ↑ Ep. 101 (P.G. xxxvii. 177).
- ↑ Translated by Marius Mercator, P.L. xlviii. 699–862. See quotations in Hefele-Leclercq: Hist. des Conciles, ii. i. pp. 240–247.
- ↑ Hom. pasch. 13 (P.G. lxxvii. 768–790). People who think that there is some subtle difference between "θεοτόκος" and "Mother of God" should notice that at the very beginning of the controversy Cyril uses the words "μήτηρ θεοῦ" as equivalent to "θεοτόκος" (ib. 777). We may surely assume that St. Cyril of Alexandria understood these words.
- ↑ Nestorius undertook the defence of certain excommunicate Alexandrine clerks who had come to Constantinople.
