One Person, Two Natures

Apollinarius of Laodicea, who died about 390, was a defender of Nicaea, an ally of Athanasius and a formidable scholar. That is the first thing to know about him, because heresies in textbooks are usually presented as if only careless people held them. He was neither careless nor a stranger to the faith he was accused of damaging.

Stated as he would state it, his position was this. Two complete things cannot become one thing; if you put a complete God and a complete man together you have a partnership, not a person, and a partnership cannot be the single acting subject that the Gospels describe. Further, sin arises in the human mind, in the will and reason. If Christ has a full human mind with its own deliberations, then he has the seat of sin in him and his sinlessness becomes a lucky outcome rather than a certainty. So Apollinarius proposed that in Christ the divine Logos takes the place of the human rational soul. The body and the animating life are human; the mind is the Word. One subject, one will, no possibility of sin, and a real incarnation.

The answer came from Gregory of Nazianzus in his first letter to Cledonius, written around 382, and it is one of the few patristic sentences worth memorising. In the standard English rendering: 'For that which he has not assumed he has not healed; but that which is united to his Godhead is also saved.' The logic is soteriological, not metaphysical. If the human mind is where the trouble is, and the human mind is exactly what Christ did not take, then the part of us that most needs saving is the one part he left alone. Salvation, on this reasoning, works by assumption: the Son heals what he takes into union with himself.

There is a second objection worth having. Scripture does not describe a man with a divine mind in a human body. It describes a man who grew in wisdom, who was astonished, who asked questions to which he waited for answers, who learned obedience from what he suffered. Apollinarius's Christ cannot do any of that, or can do it only as a performance. His proposal buys the unity of the person at the cost of the humanity, and the Gospels would have to be read as theatre.

Apollinarius was condemned at Rome in 377 and at the Council of Constantinople in 381. His influence outlived the condemnation in an odd way: some of his writings circulated under the names of Athanasius and other respected figures, and the formula 'one incarnate nature of God the Word', which Cyril of Alexandria used in good faith believing it to be Athanasian, in fact came from the Apollinarian forgeries. That single piece of mistaken attribution shaped the next two centuries of argument, and it is a warning about citing a source you have not traced.

Nestorius became patriarch of Constantinople in 428 and was deposed in 431. He objected to calling Mary Theotokos, God-bearer, and the objection needs to be stated as he made it rather than as his enemies reported it. He did not deny that Jesus Christ is God. His worry was that the title, unexplained, suggested that the divine nature had an origin in a human woman, which would make the Word a creature and hand the Arians their argument back. He was willing to say that Mary is Theotokos if the phrase was properly understood, and he proposed Christotokos, Christ-bearer, as a term that says everything the orthodox want to say without the ambiguity. Behind that lay the whole Antiochene instinct: keep the two natures clearly distinguished, so that the sufferings are genuinely the man's and the divine remains what it is, and so that the obedience of Jesus is a real human obedience and not a divine performance in human dress.

That instinct had a distinguished history. Diodore of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia had taught it, Theodoret of Cyrus defended it, and it was protecting something the church needed: the reality of the human life. Its characteristic danger is equally real. If the two natures are distinguished so sharply that each has its own centre of action, the union becomes a conjunction, and the question that cannot be answered is who, exactly, is the one saying I in the Gospels.

Cyril of Alexandria pressed exactly that. His concern was singleness of subject: one and the same is eternally begotten of the Father and born of Mary, works miracles and suffers and dies. For Cyril, Theotokos was not a statement about Mary at all but a test of whether you can say that the one born of her is the Son of God. He wrote twelve anathemas against Nestorius in 430, in language so strong that even some who agreed with him found them alarming, and he used the formula 'one incarnate nature of the God-Word', by which he meant one concrete subject rather than a mixture of natures. Physis for Cyril was close to what later writers would call hypostasis, and a great deal of the disaster that followed grew from that.

The Council of Ephesus in 431 deposed Nestorius, in disorderly circumstances with the parties meeting separately. Two years later something happened that is usually left out. Cyril and John of Antioch signed the Formula of Reunion in 433, which confesses Christ as consubstantial with the Father in deity and consubstantial with us in humanity, and speaks of a union of two natures. Cyril, the champion of one nature language, signed a two-natures formula, and defended his signature to critics who thought he had conceded too much. The two schools were not as far apart as their slogans.

Whether Nestorius was a Nestorian is a genuinely open historical question, and a student should know why. A Syriac translation of a work Nestorius wrote in exile, the Bazaar of Heracleides, came to light at the end of the nineteenth century and was published in 1910. In it he affirms one prosopon of union, repudiates the doctrine of two sons, and welcomes the Tome of Leo, which Chalcedon endorsed. Some scholars have concluded that he was condemned for a position he did not hold; others that the Bazaar shows a genuine development, or that his one prosopon is still not what Chalcedon meant. The Assyrian Church of the East, which honours him, was never in fact Nestorian in the textbook sense. In 1994 Pope John Paul II and Patriarch Mar Dinkha IV signed a Common Christological Declaration confessing the same faith in Christ, which is the most significant practical development on this question in fifteen hundred years.

Eutyches was an elderly archimandrite of a large monastery in Constantinople, an implacable enemy of Nestorius and a man of more zeal than precision. His formula was: two natures before the union, one nature after it. Stated sympathetically, he was insisting that what the incarnation produced is one thing and not a pairing, and that after the union you cannot go on counting, because counting is what Nestorius did. The point where he broke from the tradition was narrower than the label suggests: when pressed at a synod in Constantinople in 448 he hesitated to confess that Christ's flesh is consubstantial with ours. That is the sentence that condemned him, and it is a serious one, because it cuts the line between Christ and the race he came to save. Historians generally judge that Eutyches was an unsystematic defender of Cyril rather than the author of a doctrine, which is why the word Eutychianism describes a position almost nobody held in the form the label implies.

He was condemned in 448, restored at a council at Ephesus in 449 that Pope Leo called a robber synod, and condemned again at Chalcedon in 451. Leo's letter to Flavian, the Tome, was read at Chalcedon and shaped the outcome, and the bishops acclaimed it. Politics was thoroughly involved: the emperor Marcian convened the council, and its twenty-eighth canon, raising the rank of Constantinople, was refused by Rome. Councils are held by people, and holding that they reached the truth does not require holding that the process was clean.

Here is the core of the Definition, in a standard English rendering of the Greek. 'We all with one voice teach that it is to be confessed that our Lord Jesus Christ is one and the same Son, the same perfect in Godhead and the same perfect in manhood, truly God and truly man, of a reasonable soul and body; consubstantial with the Father according to the Godhead, and consubstantial with us according to the manhood; like us in all things except sin; begotten of the Father before the ages according to the Godhead, but in these last days, for us and for our salvation, born of Mary the Virgin, the Theotokos, according to the manhood; one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, made known in two natures without confusion, without change, without division, without separation; the difference of the natures being by no means taken away because of the union, but rather the distinctive character of each nature being preserved, and concurring into one person and one hypostasis, not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son and Only-begotten, God the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ.'

Four terms are the load-bearing words, given here in the adjective stems in which they are usually transliterated: asynchytos, atreptos, adiairetos, achoristos. Without confusion and without change face Eutyches: the natures are not blended into a third thing and neither is altered into the other. Without division and without separation face Nestorius: there is one subject, not two who cooperate. Read them as fences round a field. They tell you where the road ends on each side; they do not tell you what is in the middle. It is worth adding that some witnesses to the Greek text read out of two natures rather than in two natures at this point, and the difference between those two prepositions is precisely the difference that would divide the church, which tells you how fine the question was.

So what does the Definition settle? That Christ is one subject, one hypostasis, who is the eternal Son. That he is complete in deity and complete in humanity, with a rational soul, so Apollinarius is excluded. That his humanity is the same humanity as ours, so Eutyches is excluded. That the natures are neither mixed nor parted. And that Mary is rightly called Theotokos, which is a statement about her son. What it deliberately does not settle is how. It offers no mechanism, no psychology, no account of how one subject can be the bearer of two sets of properties. It was written by bishops who had watched every positive explanation produce a new heresy, and they confined themselves to saying what must not be said.

Two things it left open were settled later, and both are part of the package. The Second Council of Constantinople in 553 clarified, against readings that made the human nature an independent man, that the humanity of Christ has its subsistence in the person of the Word, which later theology calls the enhypostatic union: the human nature is real and complete but never existed as a person on its own. And the Third Council of Constantinople in 680 and 681 settled the question you met in Gethsemane. Against monothelitism, the view that Christ has one will, it confessed two natural wills and two natural operations, the human will neither opposing nor being absorbed by the divine but following it in free obedience. Maximus the Confessor had argued for this at the cost of his tongue and his right hand, and his argument is the one the council adopted: a will belongs to a nature, so a Christ with one will has one nature, and the Gethsemane prayer would then be a rehearsal rather than a prayer.

The communicatio idiomatum is the grammar that follows from one person in two natures. Since there is one subject, whatever is true of either nature may be said of that subject, however it is named. So the church can say that the Son of God died, and that the man Jesus made the world, and that the child in the manger upholds all things. The apostles already spoke this way, as 1 Corinthians 2:8 shows and Acts 20:28 may (it is the more disputed of the two, as the inquiry above notes), and the rule was formulated to describe what they were doing and to stop it going wrong.

The classical Western statement is Thomas Aquinas's. In the Summa Theologiae III, question 16, he rules that the predication holds in the concrete but not in the abstract. You may say God is man and this man is God, because the concrete terms name the person. You may not say deity is humanity, because the abstract terms name the natures, and the natures are not communicated to each other. Clean, and its critics say too clean: it answers a metaphysical question with a rule about how to talk, and a reader may feel that something has been arranged rather than explained.

The Lutherans went further, and their reason was not linguistic. Martin Chemnitz in The Two Natures in Christ, published in 1570, and then the Formula of Concord in 1577, article eight of the Solid Declaration, set out three kinds of communication. The first, the genus idiomaticum, ascribes the properties of either nature to the person, as everyone does. The second, the genus apotelesmaticum, says that the works of Christ's office are done by the whole person through both natures. The third is the disputed one: the genus maiestaticum holds that the divine majesty is really communicated to the human nature, so that Christ's humanity itself shares in omnipresence and the other divine glories. The Lutheran argument is that a union in which nothing is actually given to the humanity is a union in name; that the incarnation means the flesh of Christ is now the flesh of God and therefore glorified rather than merely adjacent to glory; that the fathers, especially John of Damascus, speak of the flesh being deified; and that Christ's own promise to be present in the Supper and to be with his people to the end of the age requires a humanity that is not locked in one place. The Lutherans are not saying the human nature turns divine. They say it receives what the person has, while remaining human.

The Reformed reply is that this cannot be had without paying the first of those four terms. To give omnipresence to a human nature is to give it something no human nature can have and remain one, which is confusion, however carefully the word is avoided. On the Reformed account the communication is to the person and not between the natures: the person is omnipresent because he is God, and he is finite because he is man, and both are true of him without either nature acquiring the other's properties. From this follows the doctrine that Lutherans nicknamed the extra Calvinisticum, stated by Calvin at Institutes 2.13.4: the Son, while wholly united to the flesh he assumed, was not confined within it, since the Word remains what he always was. Reformed writers insist the nickname is a slander, and they have a case. E. David Willis showed in 1966 that the same point is made by Athanasius, Augustine, Peter Lombard and Aquinas long before Calvin, which is why Reformed authors prefer to call it the extra catholicum.

Each side has a weakness its opponents press, and a student should be able to state both. The Lutheran weakness became visible inside Lutheranism itself: if Christ's humanity possesses divine majesty from conception, why did nobody notice? Between 1619 and 1627 the theologians of Giessen and Tübingen fought that out. Giessen, with Balthasar Mentzer and Justus Feuerborn, held that the incarnate Son abstained from using the communicated majesty during the humiliation. Tübingen, with Lucas Osiander the Younger and Theodor Thumm, held that he used it secretly and concealed the use. A Saxon judgement in 1624 sided with Giessen. The Reformed weakness is that the extra can sound as though part of the Son stayed outside the incarnation, so that what we meet in Jesus is less than the whole Son, which is not what the Reformed intend but is what their formula has to be defended against; and it leans hard on a distinction between what is said of the person and what is said of the nature that Chalcedon itself does not draw.

Two other traditions belong here and are too often left out of a Protestant account. The Eastern Orthodox position, worked out by John of Damascus in On the Orthodox Faith and standing on Maximus before him, uses the word perichoresis for the way the natures interpenetrate in the one person, and it is deliberately asymmetrical: the divinity permeates and deifies the flesh, while the divinity receives nothing from the flesh and neither nature is altered. Christ's humanity is genuinely glorified, and in later Orthodox theology that glorification is by the divine energies rather than by any sharing in the divine essence, which is how the tradition affirms a real deification of the flesh without confusion of natures. The similarity to the Lutheran concern is not accidental; Chemnitz read the Damascene closely and cited him. The Roman Catholic tradition holds with Aquinas to the concrete predication rule and adds, in later theology, a developed account of the habitual grace and beatific knowledge of Christ's human soul, which is one way of asking what the humanity actually receives. A reader who knows only the Lutheran and Reformed dispute will think this is a Protestant family argument. It is a question the whole church has worked on.

Chalcedon did not unite the church; it divided it, and the division has lasted. Large and ancient communions rejected the Definition and remain outside it: the Coptic Orthodox Church of Egypt, the Syriac Orthodox Church, the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Churches, and the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church of India. Together they are called the Oriental Orthodox, they accept the first three ecumenical councils, and they number tens of millions. The Assyrian Church of the East stands in a different position again, accepting the first two councils and not Ephesus, and has its own long history of being described by a label its members reject.

Get the terminology right, because it is a matter of accuracy and not only of courtesy. Monophysite means one nature, and in the strict sense it names the position of Eutyches: that Christ's humanity was absorbed into his deity or blended with it. The Oriental Orthodox churches anathematise Eutyches. What they confess, with Cyril and with Severus of Antioch who died in 538, is one incarnate nature of the Word, in which the humanity is complete, consubstantial with ours, and neither changed nor mixed nor diminished. The accurate term is miaphysite, from mia, one, used precisely to mark the difference from monophysite. Calling these churches monophysite without qualification asserts of them something they condemn.

The substance of the disagreement was, to a large degree, the word physis. In the Cyrilline vocabulary a physis was a concrete existing thing, near to what Chalcedon called hypostasis; so 'in two natures' sounded, to ears trained that way, like 'in two persons', which is exactly what Ephesus had just condemned. Chalcedon used physis for the abstract set of properties belonging to a kind, which allowed it to count two without dividing the subject. Add to that a Greek council imposing Greek terms on Egyptian, Syriac and Armenian churches with their own theological languages, an imperial house enforcing it, and the deposition of Dioscorus of Alexandria, and you have a schism whose causes are not reducible to any one factor.

In the twentieth century the two families met and talked. Unofficial consultations sponsored by the Pro Oriente foundation began in Vienna in 1971, and an official Joint Commission of the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox churches issued agreed statements in Egypt in 1989 and at Chambesy in Switzerland in 1990. The second of those states that the two families have always guarded the same authentic Orthodox christology and the unbroken continuity of apostolic tradition, and recommended the lifting of the mutual anathemas. On the Roman Catholic side, Pope Paul VI and Pope Shenouda III of Alexandria issued a common declaration in 1973, and Pope John Paul II and the Syriac Orthodox Patriarch Ignatius Zakka I Iwas another in 1984, which went so far as to permit the faithful of each church to receive certain sacraments from the other where their own is unavailable. The judgement these documents reach is that the christological difference is in terminology rather than in faith.

Report the limits of that judgement as carefully as the judgement itself. The 1989 and 1990 statements have not been formally received by all the Eastern Orthodox churches; several, including monastic communities on Mount Athos, objected, and communion between the two families has not been restored. Some theologians on both sides hold that real differences remain, over the two wills and two operations confessed in 681, over the status of the fourth council as such, and over the men each side anathematises, since Chalcedonians honour Leo and Flavian and the Oriental Orthodox honour Dioscorus and Severus. It would be as dishonest to report the agreements as a completed reunion as to go on using the word monophysite. What a student should take away is that the matter is open, that the direction of travel has been towards recognition, and that the way to find out what a church believes is to read what it confesses.

There is a pastoral point here that this course has to make plainly, because of who is in the room. Many students of this school belong to the Coptic, Ethiopian, Syriac, Armenian and Assyrian churches, in some cases under pressure and in some cases under persecution. These are the churches of the martyrs of the last decade. They preserved the faith in languages and lands where no Western missionary set foot for a thousand years. A teacher who describes their christology in terms they reject, on the authority of a textbook paragraph he has not checked, is doing to them exactly what Nestorius's enemies did to him.