The Living Tradition An Orthodox Archive of the Church Fathers and Early Church

Theme

Jesus Christ, God and man

One person in two natures: the four councils that worked it out and the four adverbs that guard it.

  • Dogmatic definitionDefined by an ecumenical council or otherwise confessed by the Church as binding doctrine. Not every sentence a council wrote is a definition: its acts, letters and disciplinary canons are different things.
  • Received Orthodox teachingTaught consistently and received throughout the Orthodox Church, though not necessarily formulated in a conciliar definition. This is not a claim that no Father ever wrote differently.

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The Christological question is not a puzzle for specialists. It asks what actually happened in Christ, and therefore what has happened to human nature.

Ephesus in 431 confessed one subject, the eternal Word, and so the title theotokos. Chalcedon in 451 confessed two natures in one hypostasis, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation. Constantinople in 553 fixed a Cyrilline reading of Chalcedon. Constantinople in 681 confessed two natural wills and two natural operations.

The logic throughout is the principle Gregory the Theologian stated: what has not been assumed has not been healed. Every step in the argument is finally about whether human nature — mind, will, body — is actually saved.

Follow this theme through the archive

  • The Council of Ephesus

    The council that confessed the Virgin Mary as Theotokos and condemned Nestorius. Its procedure was contested at the time, and its consequences included the first lasting division in the Church.

    Council

  • The Council of Chalcedon

    The council that confessed Christ in two natures, unconfused and undivided, in one person. Its definition is the classic Christological statement of the Church, and its reception divided the Church permanently.

    Council

  • The Third Council of Constantinople

    The council that confessed two natural wills and two natural operations in Christ, against monothelitism. It also condemned a bishop of Rome by name, which has been discussed ever since.

    Council

  • Cyril of Alexandria

    Archbishop of Alexandria and the decisive figure at Ephesus, whose insistence on the one incarnate subject of Christ became the Church's own; a great theologian whose conduct has been criticised since his own lifetime.

    Father or writer

  • Maximus the Confessor

    The theologian of Christ's two wills, mutilated and exiled for refusing an imperial formula, and vindicated by the Sixth Ecumenical Council nineteen years after his death.

    Father or writer

  • Jesus Christ: incarnation, death and resurrection

    One person in two natures, and why four adverbs at Chalcedon still matter.

    Lesson

Sources for this page

  1. Tier C The Seven Ecumenical Councils of the Undivided Church Henry R. Percival (ed.); Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (series eds.) The Seven Ecumenical Councils annotated edition of conciliar texts Source record

Tiers are explained in the methodology. No page on this site has been reviewed or approved by any bishop, priest, synod or seminary.