CHURCH

The Word of God Born According to the Flesh
From the Council of Nicaea to the Council of Chalcedon: In the fourth and fifth centuries, fighting against heresies–from Arianism to Nestorianism–the Church lived through crucial phases that defined and made more precise the terms of faith in Jesus Christ. A decisive step came with the proclamation of the dogma of “Mary, Mother of God”

by Lucio Brunelli*

“Holy Mary, Mother of God…” We Christians of the twenty-first century are used to letting the Hail Mary slide down sometimes, the way you let a drink of coffee or wine slide down your throat, without thinking too much about it. I don’t think this is the worst thing in the world. Our generous God appreciates just a good intention, too, and Our Lady listens to us, even when we ourselves (maybe half-asleep at night in bed) are no longer listening to the words we are murmuring. And yet, this appellation, “Mother of God,” is something out of this world. For we don’t say, “Mary, Mother of Jesus.” We say, and it was a conscious decision to say, “Mother of God.” How can it be maintained that a Jewish girl, 15 years old at most, could have physically generated in her little maternal womb the immense and eternal God who created everything long before Mary came into the world? For Christians of the fourth and fifth centuries, it was certainly not like swallowing a drink of coffee. Long theological disputes went on about this holy appellation, and political battles were even fought. It took a Council to bring the conflict to an end. This was held at Ephesus in 431 and proclaimed the definition of Mary as Theotokos, Mother of God, to be Catholic dogma.

The School of Antioch: Nestorius and Theodorus
It was Nestorius, since 428 the influential Bishop of Constantinople, who started the controversy. He maintained and taught in public that the formulas of popular devotion that were already addressing Our Lady as “Mother of God” had to be corrected. According to Nestorius, appeal should be made to Mary simply as the Mother of Christ (Christokos). It may seem like a quibble over terminology, a topic for theological sophisms. But a closer look shows that at stake was the very foundation of the faith, the event of the Incarnation.
Nestorius had formed his ideas in the so-called “School of Antioch.” Its leading figure was Theodorus of Mopsuestia, who died in 429. He taught that the two natures of Christ, human and divine, were not intrinsically united, but only extrinsically joined. “Almost like two pieces of wood,” the historian Joseph Lortz explains, “that are clamped together in a perfect contact, but remain intact in themselves.” This interpretation placed the essential unity of the Redeemer in danger. It was no longer a case of a true Incarnation of the Word, but only the indwelling of the Word in a man. Christ was separated virtually into two persons. Some of His sayings or actions recounted in the Gospels were attributed to His divine nature. Others, less sublime, were assigned to His human one.

The reaction: the School of Alexandria
The Alexandrine theology rose up against these theses. Its most combative and impassioned representative was Bishop Cyril, from the year 412 the Patriarch of Alexandria. Moving in the sure wake of the Council of Nicaea (325), Cyril professed faith in Christ “true God and true man,” maintaining that the union between the two natures was physical, not moral; substantial, not accidental. Just as the soul is distinct but not separable from the body, so could the man-Jesus no longer be separated from the fullness of the mystery of God. “Whoever sees Me sees the Father.” For this reason, and only for this reason, it was correct to call Mary “Mother of God.”

Pentecost, 431: the Council of Ephesus
The clash with Nestorius was inevitable. In 430, Cyril sent a circular to all the bishops and monks of Egypt, in which he rejected Nestorius’ teaching and turned to Pope Celestine I for a decision. The Pope called together a synod in Rome, which ruled in favor of Cyril. He asked Nestorius to retract, but the Patriarch of Constantinople reiterated his thought, maintaining that God was incarnated in the womb of the Virgin only in His human nature. At this point, Cyril turned to the emperor, Theodosius II, to resolve the controversy by a council. The emperor called together a council in Ephesus, to open on the day of Pentecost 431 in a church dedicated to Mary. It is not our place here to report the chronicle of the various highly tormented sessions. The two sides engaged in a fight to the finish. In the end, Cyril’s thesis prevailed. From that moment up to our own day, denying that Mary is the Mother of God means being outside the Catholic communion. “If a person does not confess that Jesus Christ is God in the true sense of the word, and that therefore the Holy Virgin is the mother of God because she generated, according to the flesh, the Word made flesh, may he be anathema” (Council of Ephesus).

The mystery of God in a human fragment
The Council refuted the theories of the Nestorians one after the other. “We shall confess one sole Christ and one sole Lord. We shall not adore the man and the Word together, with the danger of introducing a sign of division by saying together, but we adore one and the same Christ, because His body is not extraneous to the Word, that body with which He sits next to the Father, and it is certainly not two Sons who sit with the Father, but one, with His own flesh, in His unity…” (Council of Ephesus, Cyril’s second letter to Nestorius).
The whole Church, and above all the people of the faithful, joyfully welcomed the conclusions at Ephesus. In Rome, the new Pope Sixtus III wanted a great basilica to be built on the Esquiline Hill, dedicated to the “Mother of God.” It was the year 432, and the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore reminds us still today of the Council that bestowed on Mary the title of Theotokos.
At Ephesus, as in the councils that preceded and followed it, between the fourth and the sixth centuries, the Church found herself defending a principle of reality. All the heresies, from the more daunting gnosis to the Nestorian error, manifested a sense of scandal in the face of the mystery of a God who reveals Himself completely in a human fragment. It was a scandal for the intellectuals and all the high authorities, because if the truth were the fruit of knowledge, any religious bureaucracy would be sufficient to administrate its practical applications. It meant joy for the humble, because if God’s grace is linked inseparably to a particular human being, all that is needed is an attentive gaze and a heart capable of wonder.

Seeing with the eyes of the body
In this age dominated by hucksters, an age of illusions and abstractions, it is a consolation to discover that the struggle of the fathers of the Church against the heresies is a struggle to defend the whole of reality from appearances. “If the Mother were fictitious, then the flesh would also be fictitious… and fictitious would be the scars of the Resurrection” (St Augustine). In the dispute against Nestorius, Pope Celestine I asked a pious monk who lived in Gaul, St John Cassian, for advice. In his work, The Incarnation of the Lord, the monk made this commentary on verse 5 of Psalm 143: “‘Bow your heavens and come down, Lord’… The psalmist was begging the Lord to manifest Himself in the flesh, to appear visibly in the world, to be assumed visibly in glory, and finally that the saints might see, with the eyes of the body, everything that they had foreseen spiritually.” “With the eyes of the body”–these were the very words of this holy monk.

*Vatican Correspondent for Rai2 News