Story

The Council of Chalcedon

451 CE

Biblical Narrative

Across the water from Constantinople, in a basilica dedicated to the martyr Euphemia, six hundred bishops gathered in the autumn of the year four hundred and fifty-one. The emperor Marcian sat enthroned, his soldiers in the colonnades; the empress Pulcheria, more theologian than any of them, sent her instructions. Twenty-two years after the Council of Ephesus had condemned Nestorius for cleaving Christ in two, the church now feared the opposite error — a Christ in whom the human had been swallowed by the divine, like a drop of wine in the sea.

The fathers had received from Pope Leo of Rome a letter, the Tome, which set forth a careful balance: in Christ, two natures, one person, neither confused nor divided. They had read it in Greek translation; they had wept; they had cried that Peter had spoken through Leo. But the monks of Egypt and the bishops of Antioch heard in the Tome an echo of the Nestorian poison they had fought to expel. They came to Chalcedon armed with quotations from Cyril of Alexandria, the great enemy of Nestorius, ready to make war on Rome's two natures.

For weeks the bishops debated. The Tome was read line by line; objections were raised; concessions were drafted. At last a definition was crafted that no one fully loved: Christ is acknowledged in two natures — divine and human — without confusion, without change, without division, without separation, the difference of the natures preserved, coming together in one person and one hypostasis. The fathers acclaimed it; the emperor signed it; the church declared it the faith of the apostles.

But the Egyptians refused. They went home to Alexandria carrying the bones of Cyril and the conviction that Chalcedon had betrayed him. The Syrians, divided, watched their bishops break with one another. The Armenians, beyond the imperial frontier, would not even attend. Within fifty years the empire's eastern provinces were torn between Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian churches, and the rifts grew until they could not be closed. The council that meant to unite the faith had drawn the deepest line in Christianity until the Reformation.

We confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, complete in deity and complete in humanity, truly God and truly man, in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.Definition of Chalcedon (Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum II.1.2)

Archaeology · History · Genetics

The Council of Chalcedon (8 October — 1 November 451 CE) was the fourth ecumenical council and the most consequential christological council of late antiquity. Convened by the emperor Marcian and the empress Pulcheria, it was attended by some 520 bishops — the largest council of the patristic era — and produced the Chalcedonian Definition, which became the christological touchstone of Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Christianity. The definitive critical edition of the proceedings is Eduard Schwartz's Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum II (Berlin 1932-38); the standard English translation is Richard Price and Michael Gaddis, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon (Liverpool 2005, three volumes).

The council's central document, the Definition, reaffirmed the creed of Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (381), endorsed the Twelve Anathemas of Cyril of Alexandria against Nestorius, and adopted Pope Leo I's Tome (Letter 28 to Flavian) as the standard exposition of the two-natures doctrine. The four adverbs — asynchytos, atreptos, adiairetos, achoristos (without confusion, change, division, separation) — were the diplomatic core that allowed Antiochene and Alexandrian factions to coexist, at least on paper.

The political fallout was immediate and lasting. Patriarch Dioscorus of Alexandria, who had presided at the violent Second Council of Ephesus (449), was deposed at Chalcedon; his Egyptian church refused to accept the verdict. Within decades the Coptic, Syriac Orthodox (Jacobite), Armenian Apostolic, and later Ethiopian and Indian Malankara churches separated from the Chalcedonian communion. They are termed "Oriental Orthodox" or "non-Chalcedonian." Imperial efforts at reunion — the Henotikon of Zeno (482), the Three Chapters controversy under Justinian, the Monothelite compromise of the seventh century — all failed.

The Chalcedonian crisis profoundly affected late-antique Judaism. Imperial energy and resources poured into christological disputes; legislation against Jews intensified under Theodosius II (Codex Theodosianus 16.8) and Justinian (Novella 146, 553 CE, restricting synagogue use of the Mishnah). The fragmentation of Christian unity weakened Byzantine control of Egypt, Syria, and Palestine, helping pave the way for the Persian conquest of 614 and the Arab conquest of 638 — events that transferred the great Jewish communities of the Levant out of Christian rule.

Chalcedon was meant to seal the unity of the church; instead it inscribed in stone the divisions that the next century could not heal.Adapted from Aloys Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition vol. 2