A seminary History of Christianity professor had just concluded the description of the complex and conflicted events of the Council of Chalcedon 451. He paused, and then with a smile said, “The amazing thing is that in the end the right decision was made.” Patrick T. R. Gray observes that this has been the accepted assessment of the Council for several centuries—an inevitable decision that had finally found its way home. Gray is here to tell us that there was nothing obvious and straightforward about the road to Chalcedon. Sometimes prior councils had engineered pre-planned decisions and indictments, yet there were many occasions in which significantly different roads would have been taken if the synod attendees had spoken or acted differently.
Gray slows down the story and presents a detailed and lively narrative of every step along the way, beginning with the theotokos controversy of 428 involving Nestorius and Cyril of Alexandria. Drawing upon a voluminous number of council reports, doctrinal statements, letters and responses to those letters, Gray connects the personalities, motives, controversies, and conniving on the long and winding road of twenty-three years. The companion along the road is Cyril of Alexandria, both in person and later through his theological spirit. Cyril was considered the standard-bearer of orthodoxy, so that everyone, no matter which side of an issue, wanted to appear to think like and agree with Cyril. Bearing “the mantle of Cyril” was coveted as the marker of authentic Christian faith and thought.
Gray perceives Cyril as a conservative and traditionalist whose pastoral concern for the church faithful, local and universal, directed the focus of his theology. Cyril perceived himself as a humble devotee of Nicene spirituality, to which he frequently returned as the measure of any theological endeavor. The classic prohibitions against any “innovations,” or new ideas, governed Cyril's assessments of new initiatives and declarations.
Three theological-political wings or factions were at play on the road to Chalcedon. The so-called Antiochenes insisted upon theological “precision” in their analyses, which Gray sees developing out of an arrogant sense of intellectual superiority. Centering around the patriarch of Constantinople, Nestorius, the definition of Christ in two natures after the incarnation impelled Cyril to respond, first not to Nestorius, but to monks in Egyptian monasteries who were disturbed by the reduction of the Theotokos of the Virgin to Christotokos. Cyril's subsequent letters to Nestorius insisted that Christ lived in one nature after the incarnation.
The third wing evolved from the desire of Emperors Theodosius and Marcian to press for unity among the churches, an important measure to undergird the empire's stability. That meant Rome needed to be included in this unity. Pope Leo had written and promoted his Tome, which clearly expressed a two-nature bias. The emperors insisted that the Tome be part of the Christological deliberations, inferring that Cyril and the Tome had to be read considering each other's position, an improbable requirement. Curiously, earlier treatises of Cyril were utilized by the Antiochenes to counter his later mature writings. In the end, the two-natures side outnumbered the one-nature side at Chalcedon.
The challenge with telling such an engaging and much bigger story is keeping track of all the characters, periods of times, and locations of the debates. It is almost too much information, but recognizing this concern, Gray added a short Chapter 18, “Putting Together a Road-Map,” which from a birds-eye view offers a narrative summary of the major movements, people, and issues involved in the march from Ephesus to Chalcedon. This summary enables the reader to see more clearly how these back-and-forth debates progressed toward Chalcedon. Progression is perhaps not the best description for what developed at times idiosyncratically. This shorter road-map, however, is impoverished unless one first reads the long story. The reverse problem for the reader is the case here: not enough information.
After a conclusion chapter, Gray comments that the conversations and conflicts did not end at Chalcedon and offers a quick peek at the sixth-century status of the questions. Church unity did not turn out the way the emperors had attempted to construct. The One Nature/Monophysite/Miaphysite faction eventually did separate from Constantinople and Rome—Syrian, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, and Ethiopian Orthodox Churches. The persistent theological complaint of these churches was that Chalcedon and its supporters were really Nestorians since their emphasis was on the physically illogical two-natured Christ.
The Islamic movement in the mid-seventh century created a political and geographical divide from the West, further isolating those of the One Nature of Christ. The Church of the East, a Syriac-speaking wing of two-nature “Nestorian” Christians, for whom Chalcedon did not go far enough, flourished and flourishes still in modern Northern Arabia, Iraq, and Iran.
The mantle of Cyril is seldom claimed anymore, yet there is still conversation and debate about the nature of Jesus Christ. Thus, Patrick Gray's final sentence in his monograph, “So it continues.”
