The Council of Ephesus (431)

Catholics call Mary the Mother of God. The title is old, it is in the Hail Mary, and it was defended at a council in 431 that is remembered as the council of Mary. That is not quite what it was. The bishops who met at Ephesus were not arguing about Mary. They were arguing about her son, and whether the child she bore and the eternal Word of God are one and the same. The title was the test case. As Cyril and the council saw it, if you could not say that Mary bore God, then whoever you thought she bore, it was not God in person.

This is the third of seven articles on the ecumenical councils of the first millennium. The first two, on Nicaea and Constantinople, were about the Trinity: whether the Son and the Spirit are God. Ephesus opens the second great question, which would take three more councils to settle: how the Son who is God is also the man Jesus.

It is also the first of the ecumenical councils whose acts survive. That is a gain and a warning. The record reports what was read aloud on the day and preserves the signatures. But it was assembled by the winning side, and it should be read as such.Price and Graumann, The Council of Ephesus of 431, introduction, on the collections in which the acts come down and Cyril's hand in shaping them.

Two ways of talking about Christ

By the 420s there were two habits of speech about Christ in the Greek East, which historians label by the cities where they were strongest, Alexandria and Antioch. The labels simplify; each city had more variety than a label allows. But the tendencies were real. Theologians in the Alexandrian tradition, following Athanasius, started from the Word of God and said that the Word himself was born, suffered and died, in the flesh he had made his own: the subject of every sentence about Jesus was God the Word. Theologians in the Antiochene tradition, wary of that language, were careful to keep the divine and the human distinct: the Word cannot be born or die, so those things are said of the man he assumed. Both sides accepted Nicaea. Both rejected Apollinaris, who had said the Word took the place of Christ's human mind. They differed on what Nicaea's “became man” had to mean.

In April 428 Nestorius, a monk and preacher from Antioch, became bishop of Constantinople, chosen by the emperor Theodosius II. Within months he was in trouble over a word. Theotokos, “God-bearer” or “Mother of God,” was an old title for Mary in the Greek East. Bishops of Alexandria had used it for a century, and Socrates says that Origen, two centuries before, had already discussed it; it also appears in what may be the oldest surviving prayer to Mary, a papyrus scrap of the Sub tuum praesidium, whose date is disputed.Alexander of Alexandria uses Theotokos (“Mary the mother of God” in the NPNF translation) in a letter of about 320 to Alexander of Constantinople, preserved in Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History 1.4 (1.3 in the NPNF numbering); Socrates 7.32 for Origen. The Rylands papyrus of the Sub tuum praesidium has been dated anywhere from the third century to the fifth. Socrates tells the story this way: a priest of Nestorius' household, Anastasius, preached that nobody should call Mary Theotokos, since she was a human being and God cannot be born of a human being; the congregation was scandalised; and Nestorius, rather than let his own priest be found in error, took up the argument himself in a series of sermons. He preferred Christotokos, “Mother of Christ,” and said so in his reply to Cyril, which the council would later read and condemn.Socrates, Ecclesiastical History 7.32; Nestorius' second letter to Cyril, in Tanner, vol. 1, pp. 44–50. Socrates, who had read Nestorius, adds that he did not find in him the teaching that Christ was a mere man; he thought Nestorius simply frightened of a word he did not understand. That is one contemporary opinion, not the council's.

The reaction in Constantinople was immediate and in Alexandria it was organised. Cyril, bishop of Alexandria since 412, nephew and successor of Theophilus, wrote to the monks of Egypt against the new teaching, and then to Nestorius himself. His Second Letter to Nestorius, sent early in 430, is a careful statement of the Alexandrian position without polemic, and it is the text the council would judge to be the faith of Nicaea. Nestorius replied that Cyril had misunderstood Nicaea. Both men also wrote to Rome.

Why the council was called

Pope Celestine held a synod at Rome in August 430, condemned Nestorius' teaching and gave him ten days from receipt of the letter to recant, on pain of excommunication, and he appointed Cyril to see the sentence carried out. Cyril, acting on that commission, sent Rome's letter on to Constantinople together with a third letter of his own, ending in twelve anathemas that Nestorius was to sign. The anathemas were written in the sharpest Alexandrian terms: the Word was united to flesh “hypostatically,” the one who suffered in the flesh was God, and anyone who divided the sayings of the Gospels between two persons or two subjects was anathema. To an Antiochene reader they looked like Apollinaris returned.Cyril, Third Letter to Nestorius, in Tanner, vol. 1, pp. 50–61. In the usual reconstruction (McGuckin, Christological Controversy), the two letters reached Nestorius at the beginning of December 430, by which time the emperor had already called the council; Nestorius could point out that Rome's ultimatum had been overtaken.

Nestorius asked the emperor for a council, and Theodosius II, who at that point favoured him, summoned one for Pentecost 431, 7 June, at Ephesus, and sent a count, Candidian, to keep order and to keep the bishops to doctrine. The summons went out on 19 November 430. Bishops were to come with a few colleagues each, not with their whole provinces.

1. April 428
   Nestorius becomes bishop of Constantinople

   A monk and preacher of Antioch, chosen by Theodosius II.

2. Late 428–429
   The dispute over Theotokos begins

   Preaching in Constantinople against the title; Cyril writes to the monks of Egypt.

3. Early 430
   Cyril's Second Letter to Nestorius

   The text the council will judge to be the faith of Nicaea.

4. August 430
   Synod at Rome under Celestine

   Nestorius given ten days to recant. Cyril adds the Twelve Anathemas.

5. 19 November 430
   Theodosius II summons a council to Ephesus

   Set for Pentecost, 7 June 431.

6. 22 June 431
   Cyril opens the council without the Syrians

   Nestorius is deposed in a single session.

7. 26 June 431
   John of Antioch arrives and holds a rival council

   It deposes Cyril and Memnon of Ephesus.

8. 10–11 July 431
   The Roman legates arrive and join Cyril's council

   Two bishops and a priest. They confirm the sentence on Nestorius.

9. August–October 431
   The emperor sends the bishops home

   Nestorius, Cyril and Memnon are detained; neither council is approved; Nestorius returns to his monastery and Maximian is consecrated in his place.

10. 433
    The Formula of Reunion

    Cyril accepts a confession sent by John of Antioch and the Eastern bishops; communion is restored.

Who came, and when

The numbers that follow are the counts the acts give, and the acts are Cyril's. Cyril arrived early in June with a large Egyptian delegation, usually put at about fifty bishops. Memnon, the bishop of Ephesus, was his ally, and the Syrians would later complain that the city's churches were closed to them. Juvenal of Jerusalem came with the bishops of Palestine and joined them. Nestorius came with a small group of bishops, sixteen by the usual count, and a military escort. The Roman legates, two bishops and a priest, were still at sea. John of Antioch and the Syrian bishops, who were Nestorius' natural supporters, were late: John wrote that the journey was long and the roads bad, and he was still some days away when Pentecost passed.Whether John was delayed or delaying is an old question. Cyril's party assumed the latter. John's letter excusing himself is in the acts.

On 21 June, Cyril announced the council would open the next day. The acts preserve a protest signed by sixty-eight bishops asking him to wait for the Syrians, and Candidian, the emperor's representative, came to the church, read out the emperor's instructions and objected to the meeting going ahead; his protest too is in the record. Cyril opened it anyway, on 22 June, in the church of Mary, with an assembly of his own supporters whose size the sources put somewhere between 150 and 200. He presided himself, in his own cause. Nestorius was summoned three times and refused to come until the Syrians arrived.

What the council did on 22 June

The session lasted one day. As the acts report it, the bishops heard the Creed of Nicaea read. Then Cyril's Second Letter to Nestorius was read, and bishop after bishop was asked, by name, whether it agreed with the faith of Nicaea; they said it did. Then Nestorius' reply to Cyril was read, and the question was put again; they said it did not. A collection of passages from earlier Fathers was read, then passages from Nestorius' sermons. The letter of Celestine was read. Witnesses reported that Nestorius had said, a few days earlier in Ephesus, that he would not call a two- or three-month-old baby God. The bishops then deposed him: “Our Lord Jesus Christ, whom he has blasphemed, has determined through this holy synod that Nestorius is excluded from the episcopal dignity and from all priestly communion.”The judgement against Nestorius, in Tanner, vol. 1, p. 62. The record gives 197 subscriptions to it. The city, by Cyril's account, met the news with torches and rejoicing.

The council's positive teaching, then, is its judgement that Cyril's second letter is the faith of Nicaea. The letter is worth reading, because it is more measured than his reputation.

Three things in that text carry the weight, as the council received it. There is one Christ, and the one who is Christ is the eternal Word. The union is not a matter of favour or of the Word dwelling in a man as in a temple; it is a union in the Word himself, “hypostatically,” a word whose exact sense in Cyril is still discussed and which later Catholic teaching renders as union in the person of the Word. And Theotokos follows from that: not because Mary is the source of the divine nature, which nobody claimed, but because the one she bore is God.

What the council did not do is define this in a creed. It judged a letter. A decree passed a month later, on 22 July, forbade anyone to “produce, write or compose” any creed other than Nicaea's, and that rule shaped how the next council would have to work.

The other council

On 26 June John of Antioch arrived with the Syrian bishops, forty-three of them by the subscriptions to what they did next: they learned what had happened and, according to their own record, held a council of their own that same day, in John's lodgings, with Candidian present. It declared Cyril and Memnon deposed for holding an uncanonical assembly and for Cyril's anathemas, which it called Apollinarian, and it excommunicated the rest until they repented. Each council then wrote to the emperor claiming to be the council he had called.

On 10 July the Roman legates arrived. Celestine's letter to the council, which they carried, told them to act in concert with Cyril, and they did: they asked for the acts of 22 June to be read to them, approved them, and added their signatures. In the session of 11 July the priest Philip, one of the legates, made a statement that Rome would quote for centuries: that Peter, prince and head of the apostles, “down even to today and forever both lives and judges in his successors.”Acts of the third session, 11 July 431, quoted in the translation of Percival, NPNF ser. 2, vol. 14 (a public-domain translation, linked); Tanner does not print it, but it is in Price and Graumann. How the Eastern bishops present heard the claim is not recorded; they acclaimed the legates' agreement with Cyril's council, which was what they wanted. Five days later Cyril's council excommunicated John of Antioch and his party.

Theodosius, receiving reports from both sides and from Candidian, first ordered Nestorius, Cyril and Memnon all detained while he tried to bring the two assemblies together. Both sides sent delegations to the court. The record also preserves a glimpse of how Cyril's side worked there: a letter from his archdeacon listing gifts sent from Alexandria to officials and courtiers, ostrich eggs, carpets, ivory chairs and a great deal of gold, with a request that the recipients help.The letter of Epiphanius, Cyril's archdeacon, to Maximian of Constantinople, preserved in the Latin collection of the acts (Price and Graumann print it). It belongs to 432, and to the campaign to keep Nestorius' deposition in force after the council, not to the council itself; historians differ on how much it says about the summer of 431. In the end the emperor approved neither council and sent the bishops home. But the outcome was not even-handed. Nestorius, who had asked to be allowed to go, went back to his monastery outside Antioch, and on 25 October Maximian was consecrated bishop of Constantinople in his place. Cyril, by Socrates' account, got away from his guards and returned to Alexandria, and no one pursued him.Socrates, Ecclesiastical History 7.34. Nestorius was moved to harsher exile a few years later, in 435 or 436 depending on the reckoning (the imperial edict against him and his books is dated August 435), first to Petra in Arabia and then to the Great Oasis in the Egyptian desert. Evagrius 1.7, quoting Nestorius, says he had been treated with respect for four years before that.

There was, in other words, no moment at which the Council of Ephesus ended in agreement. The two parties left Ephesus having excommunicated each other, and the emperor had confirmed neither.

The Formula of Reunion, 433

What made Ephesus a council of the whole Church was what came after. The emperor wanted peace, and after a year and a half of negotiation through envoys Cyril and John of Antioch came to terms in the spring of 433. The Eastern bishops sent Cyril a confession of faith, in their own idiom, built on a statement they had drawn up at Ephesus in 431; Cyril accepted it, and quoted it in a letter to John that begins “Let the heavens rejoice.”

The Formula gave the Antiochenes what they cared about, “two natures” and the distinction of the sayings, and gave Cyril what he cared about, one Christ and Theotokos. It did not mention his twelve anathemas, and John was not asked to sign them. For his part, John accepted Nestorius' deposition and Maximian as his successor. Some of Cyril's own followers thought he had given too much away; some of John's thought he had betrayed a friend, and a few Syrian bishops refused the settlement altogether. But communion between Alexandria and Antioch was restored, and when Chalcedon came to write a definition eighteen years later, it drew on this text directly, alongside Cyril's second letter and the Tome of Pope Leo.

The canons

The Greek canonical collections count eight canons of Ephesus, and that is how they are usually cited. The council itself did not issue them as a list. The first six are embedded in the synodical letter of the session of 16–17 July that excommunicated John of Antioch; the seventh is the decree of 22 July on the faith of Nicaea; the eighth is a resolution about Cyprus from the council's last session, at the end of July. Tanner prints them as those documents, and neither he nor Percival dates the Cyprus session in its heading.Tanner, vol. 1, pp. 62–68, and Percival's NPNF translation for the traditional numbering. Tanner also prints a short definition against the Messalians, a monastic movement of Asia Minor, which the canonical collections do not count.

The six canons of the synodical letter concern the dispute itself: bishops who joined John of Antioch's assembly, or who hold with Nestorius, or who have been deposed by the council, lose their standing, and canons 1 and 4 extend the same to those who hold the opinions of Celestius, the follower of Pelagius whose teaching Rome had condemned. Those two clauses are the council's only reference to the Pelagian controversy, a confirmation of the Western judgement rather than an examination of it. Two of the eight matter beyond the moment:

• Canon 7, the decree of 22 July. No one is to produce, write or compose “a different faith” from that of Nicaea, or to present another creed to converts. Anyone who does is deposed if a cleric and anathematised if a layman. The occasion was a creed that a priest named Charisius reported was being used to receive converts in Philadelphia, and which the council judged Nestorian. The decree became a standing problem for every later council that wanted to say anything new.
• Canon 8, the resolution on Cyprus. The bishops of Cyprus complained that Antioch was claiming the right to ordain their metropolitan. The council ruled that they should keep their ancient custom of ordaining their own, and added a general principle: no bishop is to take over a province that was not his from the beginning. The Church of Cyprus has cited it for its independence ever since.

What Ephesus did not do

It did not make Mary the subject of a dogma about herself. Theotokos is a statement about Christ: that the one born of Mary is the Word of God in person, so that she is truly his mother. The council said nothing about her conception, her sinlessness or her end. Those are later questions, and the Church answered them later, in 1854 and 1950.

It did not produce a creed, and by its decree of 22 July it forbade one. The result is that the council's central positive act on the person of Christ is a judgement that a letter agrees with Nicaea, not a formula of its own. That gap is what Chalcedon filled.

It did not settle whether Cyril's anathemas were the Church's teaching. They were read into the acts as part of his third letter; the record contains no vote on them. Rome did not take them up as its own; the reunion of 433 did not ask John's party to sign them. A century later the Second Council of Constantinople in effect endorsed them, by condemning the writings Theodoret had directed against them. They remain foundational for the Oriental Orthodox churches, which receive Ephesus but not Chalcedon, and that is one reason the two councils are read so differently on either side of that divide.

And it did not, perhaps, condemn what Nestorius believed. What the Church calls Nestorianism, the teaching that Christ is two persons, a man and the Word who indwelt him, is the doctrine Cyril charged him with, and the Catechism describes the heresy in those terms (CCC 466). Whether Nestorius himself held it is a separate and disputed question. His own defence, the Bazaar of Heracleides, written in exile near the end of his life and lost until a Syriac translation came to light in 1889, accepts a great deal of what Chalcedon would say and insists that he had never taught two Sons.Nestorius, Bazaar of Heracleides, trans. Driver and Hodgson. Socrates had said the same in the 430s. Modern historians are divided on how far the Bazaar represents what Nestorius taught in 428 and how far it is a later refinement; McGuckin and Wessel take different views. The Church's judgement on Nestorius' teaching stands; the question is whether the man held it. He died in exile in Egypt; the date is uncertain, and is usually put around 450 or 451, about the time Chalcedon met.Evagrius, Ecclesiastical History 1.7, drawing on Nestorius' own letters from exile, is the main source for his last years. The Church of the East, beyond the Persian frontier and outside the emperor's reach, never received the council of 431; from the late fifth century it made the theology of Nestorius' Antiochene teachers its own, and it commemorates him among its Greek doctors, which is why it has so often been called Nestorian. In 1994 Pope John Paul II and its patriarch, Mar Dinkha IV, signed a joint declaration confessing the same faith in Christ: that the Assyrian Church prays to Mary as “Mother of Christ our God and Saviour,” that the Catholic tradition calls her “Mother of God” and also “Mother of Christ,” and that both churches recognise these expressions as legitimate statements of the same faith and respect each other's liturgical preference. Full communion has not followed. But fifteen and a half centuries after Ephesus, the two churches that divided over the word have agreed on what it means.

Why it matters

The Catechism states the council's teaching without the drama, in the settled language of later doctrine: “Christ's humanity has no other subject than the divine person of the Son of God, who assumed it and made it his own, from his conception,” and for that reason “the Council of Ephesus proclaimed in 431 that Mary truly became the Mother of God by the human conception of the Son of God in her womb” (CCC 466). The point is not a title. It is that when Christians say Jesus wept, Jesus was crucified, Jesus rose, the one they are talking about is God, and not a man that God was near. Everything that is said in the Creed about God the Son becoming man depends on that one being the subject of both halves of the sentence. The Church had believed that long before 431; what Ephesus did was to say, in Cyril's words and on a single June day with half the Church outside the door, that the alternative was not an option. It took two more years for Alexandria and Antioch to say it together, and twenty for a council of the whole Church to say it in words of its own.