The Ecclesiastical History of Evagrius Scholasticus - Coptic ...

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EVAGRIUS
the union of the acknowledged elements in Christ, on the relationship
between his full manhood and full Godhead. Nestorius urged that the
unity and distinction of Christ should be sought on di¡erent levels,
unity at the level of the person (prosopon) distinction in his two natures
(physeis), an approach which respected the Antiochene emphasis on the
equal weight which the two aspects of Christ (human and divine)
required. By contrast, Cyril of Alexandria (patriarch 412^44) concentrated
on the unity of the composite being of Christ by emphasizing, in
line with the Alexandrian tradition, Christ the Word (logos): his phrase,
the one nature (mia physis) of the Word made £esh, underlined the fact
of unity by treating physis as almost a synonym for hypostasis but did
not tackle the character of the union. Each approach had its problems:
Nestorius’ di¡erent levels appeared to threaten the unity of Christ,
whereas Cyril’s formulation did not clearly exclude the Apollinarian
heresy, which pressed the analogy of a human body and its soul for the
construction of Christ so far as to exclude from Christ the presence of a
human soul. 58 This very di⁄cult theological debate was exacerbated by
the long-standing rivalries between the major sees in the Eastern
Church, particularly between Alexandria and Constantinople, so that
the potential for rational reconciliation about approaches to a shared
goal was reduced.
At Chalcedon the coherence of a Christological de¢nition which
could have achieved compromise between Antiochene and Alexandrian
traditions was threatened by the need to accommodate the doctrinal
position of Pope Leo to that of the greatest eastern opponent of
Nestorius, the recently-deceased Cyril of Alexandria. Matters were
greatly complicated by the involvement of the pope, and the importance
for notions of papal supremacy of the validation of the Tome of Leo, a
letter sent to Patriarch Flavian in June 449 to counter the heresy of
Eutyches in which Leo proclaimed Christ as one person in whom there
are two natures, divine and human, permanently united without being
confused or mixed. 59 The insistence of the papal legates on including the
language of Leo’s Tome, whose clarity and precision might appear to
pass over the nuances of debate in the East, in the Chalcedonian
Formula seemed to many in the East to amount to a betrayal of Cyril’s
theology, and led to a division in the East between those who accepted
58 Grillmeier, Christ II.2. 503^10.
59 ACO II.ii.1, no. 5 (Latin text); ACO II.i.1, no. 11 (Greek).