forgotten: the recent zeal against the errors of Apollinaris reduced the
Catholics to a seeming agreement with the double nature of Cerinthus.
But instead of a temporary and occasional alliance, _they_ established,
and we still embrace, the substantial, indissoluble, and everlasting
union of a perfect God with a perfect man, of the second person of the
trinity with a reasonable soul and human flesh. In the beginning of
the fifth century, the _unity_ of the _two natures_ was the prevailing
doctrine of the church. On all sides, it was confessed, that the mode
of their coexistence could neither be represented by our ideas, nor
expressed by our language. Yet a secret and incurable discord was
cherished, between those who were most apprehensive of confounding,
and those who were most fearful of separating, the divinity, and the
humanity, of Christ. Impelled by religious frenzy, they fled with
adverse haste from the error which they mutually deemed most destructive
of truth and salvation. On either hand they were anxious to guard,
they were jealous to defend, the union and the distinction of the two
natures, and to invent such forms of speech, such symbols of doctrine,
as were least susceptible of doubt or ambiguity. The poverty of ideas
and language tempted them to ransack art and nature for every possible
comparison, and each comparison mislead their fancy in the explanation
of an incomparable mystery. In the polemic microscope, an atom is
enlarged to a monster, and each party was skilful to exaggerate the
absurd or impious conclusions that might be extorted from the principles
of their adversaries. To escape from each other, they wandered through
many a dark and devious thicket, till they were astonished by the horrid
phantoms of Cerinthus and Apollinaris, who guarded the opposite issues
of the theological labyrinth. As soon as they beheld the twilight of
sense and heresy, they started, measured back their steps, and were
again involved in the gloom of impenetrable orthodoxy. To purge
themselves from the guilt or reproach of damnable error, they
disavowed their consequences, explained their principles, excused their
indiscretions, and unanimously pronounced the sounds of concord and
faith. Yet a latent and almost invisible spark still lurked among the
embers of controversy: by the breath of prejudice and passion, it
was quickly kindled to a mighty flame, and the verbal disputes of the
Oriental sects have shaken the pillars of the church and state.
The name of Cyril of Alexandria is famous in controversial story, and
the title of _saint_ is a mark that his opinions and his party have
finally prevailed. In the house of his uncle, the archbishop Theophilus,
he imbibed the orthodox lessons of zeal and dominion, and five years of
his youth were profitably spent in the adjacent monasteries of
Nitria. Under the tuition of the abbot Serapion, he applied himself
to ecclesiastical studies, with such indefatigable ardor, that in the
course of _one_ sleepless night, he has perused the four Gospels, the
Catholic Epistles, and the Epistle to the Romans. Origen he detested;
but the writings of Clemens and Dionysius, of Athanasius and Basil, were
continually in his hands: by the theory and practice of dispute, his
faith was confirmed and his wit was sharpened; he extended round his
cell the cobwebs of scholastic theology, and meditated the works of
allegory and metaphysics, whose remains, in seven verbose folios, now
peaceably slumber by the side of their rivals. Cyril prayed and fasted
in the desert, but his thoughts (it is the reproach of a friend) were
still fixed on the world; and the call of Theophilus, who summoned
him to the tumult of cities and synods, was too readily obeyed by the
aspiring hermit. With the approbation of his uncle, he assumed the
office, and acquired the fame, of a popular preacher. His comely person
adorned the pulpit; the harmony of his voice resounded in the cathedral;
his friends were stationed to lead or second the applause of the
congregation; and the hasty notes of the scribes preserved his
discourses, which in their effect, though not in their composition,
might be compared with those of the Athenian orators. The death of
Theophilus expanded and realized the hopes of his nephew. The clergy
of Alexandria was divided; the soldiers and their general supported the
claims of the archdeacon; but a resistless multitude, with voices and
with hands, asserted the cause of their favorite; and after a period of
thirty-nine years, Cyril was seated on the throne of Athanasius.
Chapter XLVII: Ecclesiastical Discord.--Part II.
The prize was not unworthy of his ambition. At a distance from the
court, and at the head of an immense capital, the patriarch, as he was
now styled, of Alexandria had gradually usurped the state and authority
of a civil magistrate. The public and private charities of the city were
blindly obeyed by his numerous and fanatic _parabolani_, familiarized in
their daily office with scenes of death; and the prÊfects of Egypt were
awed or provoked by the temporal power of these Christian pontiffs.
Ardent in the prosecution of heresy, Cyril auspiciously opened his
reign by oppressing the Novatians, the most innocent and harmless of the
sectaries. The interdiction of their religious worship appeared in his
eyes a just and meritorious act; and he confiscated their holy vessels,
without apprehending the guilt of sacrilege. The toleration, and even
the privileges of the Jews, who had multiplied to the number of forty
thousand, were secured by the laws of the CÊsars and Ptolemies, and
a long prescription of seven hundred years since the foundation of
Alexandria. Without any legal sentence, without any royal mandate, the
patriarch, at the dawn of day, led a seditious multitude to the attack
of the synagogues. Unarmed and unprepared, the Jews were incapable of
resistance; their houses of prayer were levelled with the ground, and
the episcopal warrior, after-rewarding his troops with the plunder
of their goods, expelled from the city the remnant of the unbelieving
nation. Perhaps he might plead the insolence of their prosperity, and
their deadly hatred of the Christians, whose blood they had recently
shed in a malicious or accidental tumult. Such crimes would have
deserved the animadversion of the magistrate; but in this promiscuous
outrage, the innocent were confounded with the guilty, and Alexandria
was impoverished by the loss of a wealthy and industrious colony. The
zeal of Cyril exposed him to the penalties of the Julian law; but in a
feeble government and a superstitious age, he was secure of impunity,
and even of praise. Orestes complained; but his just complaints were
too quickly forgotten by the ministers of Theodosius, and too deeply
remembered by a priest who affected to pardon, and continued to hate,
the prÊfect of Egypt. As he passed through the streets, his chariot was
assaulted by a band of five hundred of the Nitrian monks his guards
fled from the wild beasts of the desert; his protestations that he was
a Christian and a Catholic were answered by a volley of stones, and the
face of Orestes was covered with blood. The loyal citizens of Alexandria
hastened to his rescue; he instantly satisfied his justice and revenge
against the monk by whose hand he had been wounded, and Ammonius expired
under the rod of the lictor. At the command of Cyril his body was
raised from the ground, and transported, in solemn procession, to the
cathedral; the name of Ammonius was changed to that of Thaumasius the
_wonderful_; his tomb was decorated with the trophies of martyrdom, and
the patriarch ascended the pulpit to celebrate the magnanimity of an
assassin and a rebel. Such honors might incite the faithful to combat
and die under the banners of the saint; and he soon prompted, or
accepted, the sacrifice of a virgin, who professed the religion of the
Greeks, and cultivated the friendship of Orestes. Hypatia, the daughter
of Theon the mathematician, was initiated in her father's studies;
her learned comments have elucidated the geometry of Apollonius and
Diophantus, and she publicly taught, both at Athens and Alexandria, the
philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. In the bloom of beauty, and in the
maturity of wisdom, the modest maid refused her lovers and instructed
her disciples; the persons most illustrious for their rank or merit
were impatient to visit the female philosopher; and Cyril beheld, with
a jealous eye, the gorgeous train of horses and slaves who crowded the
door of her academy. A rumor was spread among the Christians, that the
daughter of Theon was the only obstacle to the reconciliation of the
prÊfect and the archbishop; and that obstacle was speedily removed. On
a fatal day, in the holy season of Lent, Hypatia was torn from her
chariot, stripped naked, dragged to the church, and inhumanly butchered
by the hands of Peter the reader, and a troop of savage and merciless
fanatics: her flesh was scraped from her bones with sharp oyster shells,
and her quivering limbs were delivered to the flames. The just progress
of inquiry and punishment was stopped by seasonable gifts; but the
murder of Hypatia has imprinted an indelible stain on the character and
religion of Cyril of Alexandria.
Superstition, perhaps, would more gently expiate the blood of a virgin,
than the banishment of a saint; and Cyril had accompanied his uncle
to the iniquitous synod of the Oak. When the memory of Chrysostom was
restored and consecrated, the nephew of Theophilus, at the head of a
dying faction, still maintained the justice of his sentence; nor was it
till after a tedious delay and an obstinate resistance, that he yielded
to the consent of the Catholic world. His enmity to the Byzantine
pontiffs was a sense of interest, not a sally of passion: he envied
their fortunate station in the sunshine of the Imperial court; and he
dreaded their upstart ambition, which oppressed the metropolitans of
Europe and Asia, invaded the provinces of Antioch and Alexandria, and
measured their diocese by the limits of the empire. The long moderation
of Atticus, the mild usurper of the throne of Chrysostom, suspended the
animosities of the Eastern patriarchs; but Cyril was at length awakened
by the exaltation of a rival more worthy of his esteem and hatred. After
the short and troubled reign of Sisinnius, bishop of Constantinople,
the factions of the clergy and people were appeased by the choice of the
emperor, who, on this occasion, consulted the voice of fame, and invited
the merit of a stranger. Nestorius, native of Germanicia, and a monk of
Antioch, was recommended by the austerity of his life, and the eloquence
of his sermons; but the first homily which he preached before the devout
Theodosius betrayed the acrimony and impatience of his zeal. "Give me, O
CÊsar!" he exclaimed, "give me the earth purged of heretics, and I will
give you in exchange the kingdom of heaven. Exterminate with me the
heretics; and with you I will exterminate the Persians." On the
fifth day as if the treaty had been already signed, the patriarch of
Constantinople discovered, surprised, and attacked a secret conventicle
of the Arians: they preferred death to submission; the flames that were
kindled by their despair, soon spread to the neighboring houses, and the
triumph of Nestorius was clouded by the name of _incendiary_. On either
side of the Hellespont his episcopal vigor imposed a rigid formulary of
faith and discipline; a chronological error concerning the festival of
Easter was punished as an offence against the church and state. Lydia
and Caria, Sardes and Miletus, were purified with the blood of the
obstinate Quartodecimans; and the edict of the emperor, or rather of the
patriarch, enumerates three-and-twenty degrees and denominations in
the guilt and punishment of heresy. But the sword of persecution which
Nestorius so furiously wielded was soon turned against his own breast.
Religion was the pretence; but, in the judgment of a contemporary saint,
ambition was the genuine motive of episcopal warfare.
In the Syrian school, Nestorius had been taught to abhor the confusion
of the two natures, and nicely to discriminate the humanity of his
_master_ Christ from the divinity of the _Lord_ Jesus. The Blessed
Virgin he revered as the mother of Christ, but his ears were offended
with the rash and recent title of mother of God, which had been
insensibly adopted since the origin of the Arian controversy. From the
pulpit of Constantinople, a friend of the patriarch, and afterwards the
patriarch himself, repeatedly preached against the use, or the abuse,
of a word unknown to the apostles, unauthorized by the church, and which
could only tend to alarm the timorous, to mislead the simple, to amuse
the profane, and to justify, by a seeming resemblance, the old genealogy
of Olympus. In his calmer moments Nestorius confessed, that it might
be tolerated or excused by the union of the two natures, and
the communication of their _idioms_: but he was exasperated, by
contradiction, to disclaim the worship of a new-born, an infant Deity,
to draw his inadequate similes from the conjugal or civil partnerships
of life, and to describe the manhood of Christ as the robe, the
instrument, the tabernacle of his Godhead. At these blasphemous sounds,
the pillars of the sanctuary were shaken. The unsuccessful competitors
of Nestorius indulged their pious or personal resentment, the Byzantine
clergy was secretly displeased with the intrusion of a stranger:
whatever is superstitious or absurd, might claim the protection of
the monks; and the people were interested in the glory of their virgin
patroness. The sermons of the archbishop, and the service of the altar,
were disturbed by seditious clamor; his authority and doctrine were
renounced by separate congregations; every wind scattered round the
empire the leaves of controversy; and the voice of the combatants on a
sonorous theatre reÎchoed in the cells of Palestine and Egypt. It was
the duty of Cyril to enlighten the zeal and ignorance of his innumerable
monks: in the school of Alexandria, he had imbibed and professed the
incarnation of one nature; and the successor of Athanasius consulted
his pride and ambition, when he rose in arms against another Arius, more
formidable and more guilty, on the second throne of the hierarchy. After
a short correspondence, in which the rival prelates disguised their
hatred in the hollow language of respect and charity, the patriarch of
Alexandria denounced to the prince and people, to the East and to the
West, the damnable errors of the Byzantine pontiff. From the East,
more especially from Antioch, he obtained the ambiguous counsels of
toleration and silence, which were addressed to both parties while they
favored the cause of Nestorius. But the Vatican received with open arms
the messengers of Egypt. The vanity of Celestine was flattered by the
appeal; and the partial version of a monk decided the faith of the pope,
who with his Latin clergy was ignorant of the language, the arts, and
the theology of the Greeks. At the head of an Italian synod, Celestine
weighed the merits of the cause, approved the creed of Cyril, condemned
the sentiments and person of Nestorius, degraded the heretic from his
episcopal dignity, allowed a respite of ten days for recantation and
penance, and delegated to his enemy the execution of this rash and
illegal sentence. But the patriarch of Alexandria, while he darted the
thunders of a god, exposed the errors and passions of a mortal; and his
twelve anathemas still torture the orthodox slaves, who adore the
memory of a saint, without forfeiting their allegiance to the synod of
Chalcedon. These bold assertions are indelibly tinged with the colors
of the Apollinarian heresy; but the serious, and perhaps the sincere
professions of Nestorius have satisfied the wiser and less partial
theologians of the present times.
Yet neither the emperor nor the primate of the East were disposed to
obey the mandate of an Italian priest; and a synod of the Catholic, or
rather of the Greek church, was unanimously demanded as the sole remedy
that could appease or decide this ecclesiastical quarrel. Ephesus, on
all sides accessible by sea and land, was chosen for the place, the
festival of Pentecost for the day, of the meeting; a writ of summons was
despatched to each metropolitan, and a guard was stationed to protect
and confine the fathers till they should settle the mysteries of heaven,
and the faith of the earth. Nestorius appeared not as a criminal, but
as a judge; be depended on the weight rather than the number of his
prelates, and his sturdy slaves from the baths of Zeuxippus were armed
for every service of injury or defence. But his adversary Cyril was more
powerful in the weapons both of the flesh and of the spirit. Disobedient
to the letter, or at least to the meaning, of the royal summons, he was
attended by fifty Egyptian bishops, who expected from their patriarch's
nod the inspiration of the Holy Ghost. He had contracted an intimate
alliance with Memnon, bishop of Ephesus. The despotic primate of Asia
disposed of the ready succors of thirty or forty episcopal votes: a
crowd of peasants, the slaves of the church, was poured into the city to
support with blows and clamors a metaphysical argument; and the people
zealously asserted the honor of the Virgin, whose body reposed within
the walls of Ephesus. The fleet which had transported Cyril from
Alexandria was laden with the riches of Egypt; and he disembarked a
numerous body of mariners, slaves, and fanatics, enlisted with blind
obedience under the banner of St. Mark and the mother of God. The
fathers, and even the guards, of the council were awed by this martial
array; the adversaries of Cyril and Mary were insulted in the streets,
or threatened in their houses; his eloquence and liberality made a daily
increase in the number of his adherents; and the Egyptian soon computed
that he might command the attendance and the voices of two hundred
bishops. But the author of the twelve anathemas foresaw and dreaded the
opposition of John of Antioch, who, with a small, but respectable, train
of metropolitans and divines, was advancing by slow journeys from the
distant capital of the East. Impatient of a delay, which he stigmatized
as voluntary and culpable, Cyril announced the opening of the synod
sixteen days after the festival of Pentecost. Nestorius, who depended
on the near approach of his Eastern friends, persisted, like his
predecessor Chrysostom, to disclaim the jurisdiction, and to disobey
the summons, of his enemies: they hastened his trial, and his accuser
presided in the seat of judgment. Sixty-eight bishops, twenty-two of
metropolitan rank, defended his cause by a modest and temperate protest:
they were excluded from the councils of their brethren. Candidian,
in the emperor's name, requested a delay of four days; the profane
magistrate was driven with outrage and insult from the assembly of the
saints. The whole of this momentous transaction was crowded into
the compass of a summer's day: the bishops delivered their separate
opinions; but the uniformity of style reveals the influence or the hand
of a master, who has been accused of corrupting the public evidence
of their acts and subscriptions. Without a dissenting voice, they
recognized in the epistles of Cyril the Nicene creed and the doctrine of
the fathers: but the partial extracts from the letters and homilies of
Nestorius were interrupted by curses and anathemas: and the heretic was
degraded from his episcopal and ecclesiastical dignity. The sentence,
maliciously inscribed to the new Judas, was affixed and proclaimed in
the streets of Ephesus: the weary prelates, as they issued from the
church of the mother of God, were saluted as her champions; and her
victory was celebrated by the illuminations, the songs, and the tumult
of the night.
On the fifth day, the triumph was clouded by the arrival and indignation
of the Eastern bishops. In a chamber of the inn, before he had wiped
the dust from his shoes, John of Antioch gave audience to Candidian, the
Imperial minister; who related his ineffectual efforts to prevent or to
annul the hasty violence of the Egyptian. With equal haste and violence,
the Oriental synod of fifty bishops degraded Cyril and Memnon from their
episcopal honors, condemned, in the twelve anathemas, the purest venom
of the Apollinarian heresy, and described the Alexandrian primate as a
monster, born and educated for the destruction of the church. His throne
was distant and inaccessible; but they instantly resolved to bestow
on the flock of Ephesus the blessing of a faithful shepherd. By the
vigilance of Memnon, the churches were shut against them, and a strong
garrison was thrown into the cathedral. The troops, under the command of
Candidian, advanced to the assault; the outguards were routed and put to
the sword, but the place was impregnable: the besiegers retired; their
retreat was pursued by a vigorous sally; they lost their horses, and
many of their soldiers were dangerously wounded with clubs and stones.
Ephesus, the city of the Virgin, was defiled with rage and clamor,
with sedition and blood; the rival synods darted anathemas and
excommunications from their spiritual engines; and the court of
Theodosius was perplexed by the adverse and contradictory narratives of
the Syrian and Egyptian factions. During a busy period of three months,
the emperor tried every method, except the most effectual means of
indifference and contempt, to reconcile this theological quarrel. He
attempted to remove or intimidate the leaders by a common sentence, of
acquittal or condemnation; he invested his representatives at Ephesus
with ample power and military force; he summoned from either party eight
chosen deputies to a free and candid conference in the neighborhood of
the capital, far from the contagion of popular frenzy. But the Orientals
refused to yield, and the Catholics, proud of their numbers and of their
Latin allies, rejected all terms of union or toleration. The patience
of the meek Theodosius was provoked; and he dissolved in anger this
episcopal tumult, which at the distance of thirteen centuries assumes
the venerable aspect of the third cumenical council. "God is my
witness," said the pious prince, "that I am not the author of this
confusion. His providence will discern and punish the guilty. Return
to your provinces, and may your private virtues repair the mischief and
scandal of your meeting." They returned to their provinces; but the same
passions which had distracted the synod of Ephesus were diffused over
the Eastern world. After three obstinate and equal campaigns, John of
Antioch and Cyril of Alexandria condescended to explain and embrace: but
their seeming reunion must be imputed rather to prudence than to reason,
to the mutual lassitude rather than to the Christian charity of the
patriarchs.