From Monachos.net
- "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth" (Jn 1.14).
- 'Who do you say that I am?' (Christ, as in Mt 16.15).
The chief and paramount confession of the Christian faith is that of Simon Peter in response to the probing question posed by Christ: 'You are the Messiah, Son of the living God'. Before the Christian person stands the one called Messiah, the one called Son, the one confessed as God yet known, mysteriously, as man. Peter's confession of this incarnate one as none other than the divine Saviour is so central to the Christian life that Christ himself refers to it as the rock upon which stands the Church. Yet it is essentially, profoundly, a mystery. And of this mystery the evangelist John the Theologian would pen the classic elaboration: 'The Word became flesh and dwelt among us'.
Few single phrases in the apostolic witness have proven more confounding to accurate perception. What does it mean to say that 'the Word became flesh'? What or who is the Word? What is the flesh, and how does it 'dwell'? What is the nature of the incarnational 'becoming'?
Simple answers to such questions often prove entirely more complex and problematic than anticipated. 'Who is the Word?' Surely the divine Logos, co-eternal with the Father. But should this be so, does not the 'becoming' of John's statement become problematic? Is it conceivable, is it possible, for the eternal second person of the holy Trinity to 'become', to change? And then, 'what is the flesh?' Surely the full humanity, the real and true manhood, of the incarnate Son. But here another problem: how to join human and divine without destroying one, the other, or both? Can Christ be said to have a human mind or soul if he is the Son, the Word of divine will and purpose? If not, can he truly be called 'human' -- for what human lacks a soul?
That the mystery of an incarnational confession should be so difficult to approach, intricate to define, only reflects the impenetrability encountered by Simon Peter when the essential question was first posed to him. The one who proclaimed the man before him as Son of God, swiftly returned to a wholly human perception of Christ's person, for which he receives one of the sharpest rebukes in scripture ('Get thou behind me, Satan!').
The Church, in the development of her doctrinal consciousness in her early history, faced no less challenging a task, posed no less directly to the ecclesial body by some among her number than to Peter by Jesus Christ. Who is the one whom we confess as man-yet-God, eternal-yet-temporal, immortal-yet-mortal, servant-yet-king? How has he come to be the one who stands in our midst, from his station as creator and transcendent divinity?
That which scholars call 'the Christological controversy' most often refers to the heated discussions over just such questions -- discussions which filled the air from the early fourth century to the middle of the fifth. We must, however, view this delineation with caution. The questions which fuelled this 'controversy' (this term alone is misleading: the period is home to a series of independent, yet often interrelated controversies in the plural) did not arise in the fourth century, and the questions were not resolved in the fifth. Since Christ first posed his probing query to Peter, it has been and remains the chief interrogation of the Church and every Christian person. While scholars, for the sake of compartmentalising history to enable more focussed research and teaching (a valid approach, if undertaken with due caution) often speak of the great 'Christological era' of our period rising from the ashes of the 'Trinitarian Controversy' of the third and fourth centuries, the reality of Christian history is that both concerns were and are interrelated. Reflections on the Son's relationship to the Father, of the personal life of the Trinity, clarified perceptions of the mystery that forms the basis of an incarnational theology: the full life of the Word. That Christological questions came so strongly to the fore in the decades and centuries following Nicaea does not indicate a change of interest, concern or focus; rather, it is the natural development of reflection amongst those professing Christian belief within the now-clearer vision of the Son's consubstantial divinity.
The central issue of the discussions forming this 'controversy', or more properly this long period of intense Christological reflection and discussion, was the proper interpretation of John's single phrase: 'the Word became flesh and dwelt among us'. The great ecumenical council at Nicaea in 325 had, to the minds of most by the middle of the fourth century, responded to Arius' challenge to the Son's divinity with a definitive confession of his wholly divine status. To call the Son homoousios, consubstantial, with the Father is to assert that he is essentially/naturally divine in the same way, manner and degree as the Father. Disputes would continue to rage over just how this term was to be read, used and understood in Trinitarian discussion (see, for example, the turbulent debates between Eunomius, Aetius and the Cappadocian Fathers between the 360s and 380s); however, a clear Christological point was established: the 'Word' of John's 'the Word became flesh' was wholly divine, eternally the Son, consubstantial in his divinity with the Father.
How then does this word 'become flesh'? Do not the predicates of the Son's eternal divinity -- such predicates as eternity, incorruptibility, immortality, immutability -- conflict to an unbridgeable degree with the predicates of fleshly, human existence -- temporality, corruptibility, mortality, mutability? Further, does not the confession of the Son as homoousios with the Father, thus eternally and unchangeably God as the Father is God, itself prevent any confession of that Son's 'becoming' or 'changing'? Does God in his divinity become, in the incarnation, other than he was before it?
The series of discussions and disputes in our era centre round precisely such questions. Key figures are known for specific readings mulled through the Church's doctrinal consciousness, some deemed heretical, some enshrined as orthodox. In response to Arius' abjuration of the Son's divinity, a certain pro-Nicene bishop of Laodicaea, Apollinarius, proposed a vision of the incarnation that preserved in radical absoluteness the fully divine stature of the Logos in his incarnate reality. Another bishop, Athanasius of Alexandria, took much the same approach (indeed, all three names -- Arius, Apollinarius and Athanasius -- fit under the modern umbrella term of 'Alexandrian' in their Christological approach, precisely because so much of their consideration, though not their conclusions, overlaps); but in Athanasius the problems that would be identified in Apollinarius were absent -- though Athanasius himself, considered always a great defender of the faith, had difficulties in the Christological vision of his own. It is in the collective works of Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus, three bishops known together as the 'Cappadocian Fathers', that the potential difficulties posed by Athanasius' Christology -- namely the questionable place of the human soul in Christ, which is never denied but which holds little theological significance in his discourse -- is met with the firm insistence on the full reality of Jesus' humanity for which all the Cappadocians are known. In his reaction to Apollinarius in particular, Gregory of Nazianzus would pen the phrase that later became the standard patristic apothegm on incarnational soteriology: 'That which is un-assumed is un-healed' (Epistle 101).
Meanwhile, in other realms of the Empire, such theologians as Diodore of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia also took up a radical insistence on the full, complete human nature of the incarnate Christ, moving beyond the Cappadocian Fathers' insistence on its reality, to reflections on how such a full reality came to be united to the divine Logos in the 'becoming' of the incarnational act. An inherent difficulty in accounting for a true union between two complete natures is most directly associated with the name of Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople from 428 and theological disciple of Theodore. His insistence that the absolute reality of the two natures demanded a union at the level of 'appearance' attracted the fire of the 'Seal of the Fathers', Cyril bishop of Alexandria, who reflected instead upon the incarnation as a unitive reality at the level of hypostasis. While the ecumenical council at Ephesus in 431 would vindicate Cyril's position resoundingly in the condemnation and deposition of Nestorius on grounds of preaching a 'two-Sons Christology', yet another council would have to be called -- at Chalcedon in 451 -- in an attempt to reach resolution between Christians in the empire's eastern realms, which saw Cyril as nothing more than a 'new Apollinarius', and those in Alexandria and elsewhere who saw such opposition as merely the ensconced camps of 'the Nestorians'. Whilst largely a dispute among the 'eastern Churches' of the day, it would be a pope of Rome, Leo the Great, who would, along with the memory of Cyril, become among the chief theological influences at that council.
Chalcedon produced a 'Definition', a confession of Christ's person that articulates the mystery of the incarnational union largely through apophatic qualifiers, or statements of negation. He is 'unconfusedly, immutably, indivisibly, inseparably united'. Positions deemed heretical (the assumptive theory of Apollinarius, the divisive vision of Nestorius) are precluded by such negations, while the mystery of the incarnation is preserved precisely as mystery, as reality unknowable. Of the ineffable, negation is the ultimate affirmation. The 'how' of the incarnational becoming is most fully known, says Chalcedon, in the 'how not' of its four main alpha-privative adverbs.
Chalcedon is often seen as the culmination of the 'Christological Controversy' -- the end-point and definitive response to the problems that preceded it. Indeed, to much of the Christian world this has ever since been so, and Eastern Christendom is to this day divided along 'Chalcedonian Orthodox' and 'Non-Chalcedonian Orthodox' lines. But while the ecumenical stature of the Chalcedonian council made its Christological profession the normative expression for Orthodoxy thereafter, the divisions within Christendom following its final session were more vast and, ultimately, more lasting than those encountered by Cyril after the council at Ephesus. Those who felt Cyril's memory had been betrayed at Chalcedon rallied behind his mia physis ('one nature') formula for the incarnate Christ, claiming that the Chalcedonian Definition smacked of Nestorian dualism. The fiercer pro-Chalcedonians accused these, in return, of renewing again the heresy of Apollinarius. And so diophysite ('two-natured') and monophysite ('one natured') became convenient names to launch against the Christology of one's opponents, most often inaccurately-flung insults in both directions, misrepresentative too often of others' positions.
And the rift has never healed. Though the past century has, happily, seen much of the name-calling cease, the fact is that Chalcedon still divides the Christological world. Many, the present author included, see this not as the horror by which it is characterised by some. Concrete doctrinal expression will always divide those who subscribe to it from those who do not -- this is precisely its purpose. Yet while there are genuine issues of true doctrinal division between pro- and non-Chalcedonians, issues which Chalcedon rightly and properly stands to separate, there are also others based on perceptions of content, language, vision and confession that stem more from the troubled history of Christological dialogue than matters of genuine content. That everyone who preaches mia physis is a heretic, is a statement immediately countermanded by the fact that Cyril of Alexandria, for whom it is a favourite phrase, is a canonised saint in 'diophysite' Chalcedonian Orthodoxy. Might the confession of the fathers have something to offer us for a productive discussion today?