another general assembly to revise the proceedings at Ephesus. Marcian, however, who was soon after called to the throne, with greater zeal complied with the Papal requisition, and summoned around him the fourth ecumenical council in the church of St. Euphemia, at Chalcedon.
In this assembly, which convened on the 8th of October, 457, and consisted of six hundred and thirty bishops, the acts of the Ephesian synod were rescinded, the teaching of Eutyches formally condemned, and a symbolical declaration of the true doctrine on the subject in question set forth for the use of the church.
Yet these decisions were far from giving universal satisfaction. There was a numerous party in the East, not unaptly characterized as Demi-Eutychians, who, while they did not agree with that doctor in one of his errors, that the flesh of Jesus Christ was not consubstantial with our own, held fast, nevertheless, his primary idea of the one nature; and on this account they soon obtained the name of Monophysites.[1]
The principal seat of the agitation which succeeded the council of Chalcedon was the church of Alexandria. There the deposition of the patriarch Dioscorus, on account of the part he had taken with Eutyches, was followed by a train of proceedings which have dishonoured the annals of that communion with treachery, violence, and bloodshed. And as it regards the Oriental church at large, it may be said, that the discussions and turbulencies of this, along with the yet unsubsided Nestorian, controversy, convulsed it in its length and breadth, and produced disruptions and schisms that have never been repaired.
The Monophysites not only waged a strife with the catholic, or orthodox, on the great topic of this contro-
- ↑ From μονος, "single," and φυσις, "nature."
