The Second Council of Constantinople

Date

553

Location

Constantinople

Convoked by

The Emperor Justinian I

Attendance

About 165 bishops subscribed the sentence

Overview

A century after Chalcedon, large parts of Egypt and Syria remained outside communion with Constantinople. Justinian's policy was to show that Chalcedon could be read in a thoroughly Cyrilline way, and so to remove what he took to be the obstacle.

His instrument was the condemnation of the Three Chapters: the person and writings of Theodore of Mopsuestia, certain writings of Theodoret of Cyrus against Cyril, and a letter attributed to Ibas of Edessa. All three had been associated with the Antiochene tradition, and two of the men had been received at Chalcedon.

The council condemned the Three Chapters and issued fourteen anathemas clarifying the Christological confession. It did not revise Chalcedon; it read Chalcedon in a particular way and said that this was how Chalcedon should be read.

The controversy

The difficulty was procedural as much as doctrinal. Condemning men long dead, two of whom a previous ecumenical council had received into communion, looked to many Western bishops like an attack on Chalcedon itself. That is why Vigilius resisted, and why the council's reception in the West took decades and cost some local schisms.

The council also anathematised Origen by name in its eleventh capitulum, in a list of heretics. Whether the separate fifteen anathemas against Origenism belong to this council or to a synod immediately preceding it is a genuinely open question; Percival prints them with an excursus setting out the difficulty. This site treats their conciliar status as disputed.

The positions in play

Justinian and the Eastern bishops

Sought a Cyrilline reading of Chalcedon that might recover the non-Chalcedonian churches.

Vigilius of Rome and much of the West

Feared that condemning the Three Chapters would in effect undo Chalcedon, and resisted for years before yielding.

The non-Chalcedonian churches

Were not reconciled by the council. The policy failed in its central aim.

What the council issued

The council's fourteen capitula confess one hypostasis of the incarnate Word, in whom divinity and humanity are united without confusion or division, and reject readings of Chalcedon that would make Christ two subjects. The formula of the hypostatic union in Cyril's sense is set out with unusual precision.

It issued no creed and no disciplinary canons. Where later collections speak of the canons of the Fifth and Sixth Councils, they mean the canons of the Council in Trullo, which met in 692 and supplied canons for both.

Canons

This council issued no disciplinary canons. The canons commonly attributed to the Fifth and Sixth Councils are the canons of the [Council in Trullo](/councils/trullo-692/), held in 692.

Who was there

Eutychius of Constantinople presided. The Eastern patriarchates were represented; the Western episcopate was barely present. Vigilius, in the city throughout, refused to sit and issued his own judgement; the council removed his name from the diptychs while professing to keep communion with the Roman see. He accepted the council's decisions the following year.

Reception

The Eastern Orthodox Church receives this as the fifth ecumenical council. Rome came to receive it, though not without local schisms in northern Italy that lasted into the seventh century.

The Oriental Orthodox churches were not reconciled by it and do not receive it. The Assyrian Church of the East regards the condemnation of Theodore of Mopsuestia, one of its principal teachers, as a serious injustice.

Reception outside the Eastern Orthodox Church

Oriental Orthodox churches

Do not receive it; the council's aim of reconciling them was not achieved.

Assyrian Church of the East

Does not receive it and honours Theodore of Mopsuestia, whom it condemned.

Roman Catholic Church

Receives it as the fifth ecumenical council, after a difficult and protracted Western reception.

Consequences

The council fixed a Cyrilline reading of Chalcedon as the Church's own, which is how Chalcedon has been understood in the East ever since. It also demonstrated the limits of imperial religious policy: the churches it was designed to recover were not recovered, and the West was alienated for a time.

Its condemnation of Origen, whatever the precise status of the fifteen anathemas, marks the point at which Origen's reception in the Church becomes definitively negative, even as his exegetical influence continued to be felt through writers who had absorbed it.

Liturgical commemoration

Commemorated with the Fathers of the first six councils in July.