Ephesus

Behind the Ephesus controversy lay two different schools of Christology that had developed within Christianity during the 4th century. The Antiochene school, centered in Syria, emphasized the full reality of Christ's humanity. Theologians trained in Antioch were alert to any language that seemed to confuse or absorb Christ's human nature into his divinity. They tended to describe the relationship of divinity and humanity in Christ using words like 'conjunction,' 'indwelling,' or 'association.'

The Alexandrian school, centered in Egypt, emphasized the unity of the person of Christ. For Cyril of Alexandria, the great champion of this school, you could never speak of 'the man Jesus' and 'the divine Son' as though they were two separate subjects who cooperated. The subject of everything Christ did — being born, eating, weeping, suffering, dying, rising — was the eternal divine Son. Cyril's technical phrase was hypostatic union: the union of natures in one hypostasis (person, subject).

Nestorius was trained in Antioch and became patriarch of Constantinople in 428. When a controversy broke out in Constantinople over whether the title Theotokos should be used for Mary, he entered the debate on the Antiochene side. He preferred Christotokos ('Christ-bearer') because he felt Theotokos implied that Mary bore the divine nature as such — which seemed to him theologically careless. Cyril fired back that Nestorius's caution about Theotokos revealed a fatal division of Christ's person.

Cyril's twelve anathemas, circulated before the council, sharpened the conflict. They condemned anyone who divided the Word from the man Jesus into two sons, or who denied that Mary was truly Theotokos, or who attributed Christ's sufferings only to 'the assumed man' rather than to the Word himself. The anathemas were fighting words. John of Antioch and other Syrian bishops saw them as Apollinarian — as if Cyril were collapsing Christ's humanity into his divinity. The scene was set for confrontation.

The council opened on June 22, 431, before the Syrian delegation loyal to Nestorius had arrived. Cyril, presiding, had the council seat Nestorius three times and depose him on the third non-appearance. When John of Antioch and the Syrian bishops arrived days later, they formed their own counter-synod that condemned Cyril and deposed him. For a brief period, both Cyril and Nestorius were condemned — a theological paradox that could only be resolved by imperial intervention.

Emperor Theodosius II eventually decided in favor of the majority (Cyril's) council, and Nestorius was exiled to Egypt, where he spent his remaining years writing a defense of his theology (the 'Book of Heraclides,' which only survived in a Syriac translation discovered in 1895). The lasting rupture was with the Assyrian Church of the East, which never accepted the council's judgment and still does not — maintaining the tradition of Theodore of Mopsuestia and a Christology emphasizing Christ's two natures as two qnome (subjects).