Chalcedon, AD 451: The Definition That Settled Christ's Two Natures — and Split the Church

Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (381) settled who the Son is in relation to the Father. But a harder question remained. If Christ is fully God and fully man, how do divinity and humanity actually hold together in one person? The council that tried to answer that question in 451 produced language still recited in creeds today. It also produced one of Christianity’s oldest schisms — one that has never fully healed.

The “Robber Council” that came first

Two years before Chalcedon, a council at Ephesus in 449 took up the same question and reached a very different verdict. Presided over by Dioscorus of Alexandria, it vindicated the monk Eutyches, who taught that Christ’s humanity was effectively absorbed into his divinity, and it deposed his chief opponent, Flavian of Constantinople — who, by later accounts, died from injuries sustained during the proceedings. Pope Leo I of Rome had sent a letter refuting Eutyches, now known as the Tome of Leo. Dioscorus would not even let it be read aloud. When Leo learned how the council had been conducted, he refused to recognize its verdict and branded it, in Latin, the latrocinium — the “Robber Council.” That verdict did not survive the next two years.

“Without confusion, without change, without division, without separation”

The political ground shifted in 450, when Emperor Theodosius II died in a riding accident. His sister Pulcheria and her new husband, the general Marcian, took the throne, and Marcian convened a new council at Chalcedon in 451. Ancient sources differ on the exact count, but somewhere between 500 and 600 bishops attended — by far the largest such gathering to that point. This time, Leo’s Tome was read, debated, and adopted as the council’s theological foundation. Chalcedon declared that Christ is one person, one hypostasis, in whom full divinity and full humanity are united “without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.” Those four phrases work as two pairs against two opposite errors: “without confusion” and “without change” rule out Eutyches’ idea that the two natures blend into something new; “without division” and “without separation” rule out any reading, associated with Nestorius, that splits Christ into two separate persons.

The split the Definition caused

The trouble was that Alexandria’s own theological tradition pointed the other way. Cyril of Alexandria, an authority both sides claimed, had insisted on describing Christ as “one nature of God the Word incarnate” (mia physis) — language meant to guard the unity of Christ’s person against any hint of division. To Dioscorus and those who shared his outlook, Chalcedon’s “two natures” formula sounded like an abandonment of Cyril’s language and, in effect, a division of Christ into two subjects. On that basis, entire churches refused to accept Chalcedon: the Coptic Orthodox Church, the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Syriac Orthodox Church, the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Churches, and the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church in India. These six churches are known today, collectively, as the Oriental Orthodox communion — a family entirely distinct from the Chalcedonian Eastern Orthodox churches, such as the Greek and Russian Orthodox Churches. The similarity of the two names causes endless confusion in English, but the two church families have been institutionally and theologically separate since 451.

Fifteen centuries later, still not fully mended

The rupture reshaped the political and ecclesiastical map of the late Roman world, and remarkably, it has still not been fully healed. There has been real movement, though. Unofficial conversations at Bristol (1967), Geneva (1970), and Addis Ababa (1971) prepared the way for official dialogue, A first agreement was reached at meetings at the Monastery of St. Bishoy in Egypt in 1989, and a second, fuller joint Christological agreement followed in 1990 at Chambésy, near Geneva: both families concluded that they had “always loyally maintained the same authentic Orthodox Christological faith,” even while using different technical vocabulary to express it. The Catholic Church reached similar joint declarations with several Oriental Orthodox churches around the same period. What none of these agreements has restored is full institutional communion — shared sacraments, shared hierarchy. Fifteen centuries after Chalcedon, Eastern and Oriental Orthodoxy remain, formally, two separate churches.

References

• Richard Price and Michael Gaddis, trans., The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, 3 vols. (Liverpool University Press, 2005)
• Leo I, Tomus ad Flavianum (Epistle 28), 449
• W. H. C. Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement: Chapters in the History of the Church in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries (Cambridge University Press, 1972)
• Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Vol. 1: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600) (University of Chicago Press, 1971)
• Joint Commission of the Theological Dialogue between the Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Churches, “Second Agreed Statement” (Chambésy, 1990)

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