Word-man activist Nestorius of Constantinople (428 A.D.) was a feisty foe of the Alexandrian alliance. Nonetheless, there was little in his writings suggesting that he went very far afield of his Antiochene predecessors, despite his condemnation as a heretic by his arch-enemy Cyril of Alexandria (d. 444 A.D.). In fact, documents that appeared near the turn of the twentieth century seem to have vindicated Nestorius as a man of his times faithfully espousing the theology widely accepted by his Antiochene colleagues. Of course, this alone would be enough to raise the ire of his opponents to the south. Add to this his combative nature, and we have a recipe for all out conflagration, which is exactly what happened.

Therefore, according to Nestorius, the Alexandrian emphasis confused the distinction in natures and hence diminished the deity of the God-man. As a result, he contended for a view of Mary as Christotokos, the “Christ-bearer,” rather than the “God-bearer.” The response from Alexandria, led by Cyril, was swift and sharp. They heard Nestorius suggesting that Mary gave birth to a mere man.

But Nestorius did not stop here. He went on to articulate the Word-man view in a way that riled Cyril and his Alexandrian colleagues even more. He argued that each individual nature of the incarnate Christ had its own prosopon. David Wells points out that Nestorius was using this term “imprecisely and elastically. What he had in mind was ‘appearance.’ As the face reveals the mood and character of the person, so Christ, in what he said and did, revealed both his humanity and his divinity” (The Person of Christ: A Biblical and Historical Analysis of the Incarnation, 1984, 107). Yet in the heat of the battle, it was easy to see how his opponents construed Nestorius as claiming that the incarnation consisted of two distinct persons, that is, two Sons. Cyril, for his part, argued that the divine and the human in Christ were “one after union” (Wells, 107). What Cyril was saying was that the two natures expressed themselves only within their union. What Nestorius heard was Cyril suggesting that Christ’s two natures were fused into one nature.

In essence, both parties were talking past each other, using language that supported their respective positions, blind to their own weaknesses, and amplifying the weaknesses of the other. The spirit of the debate was to win rather than to seek resolution. In reality, both emphases needed to be conceptually preserved in a robust definition of the incarnation. The truth lay somewhere in the middle. The incarnation was not an “either-or,” but a “both-and” proposition. As a result of this impasse, the Eastern churches looked west to Rome for a second opinion. Enter Pope Leo. We will take a close look at the important contribution Pope Leo made to this debate and how it was received by the combatants in our next post.

Blessings,

Arnie Gentile