Jump forward with us 125 years,
from the Council of Nicea to the last days of the Western Roman Empire;
Gaul, Hispania, much of North Africa have all been lost,
Arian barbarians control nearly all of the Western Roman world.
Britannia had long ago been abandoned
The Huns have smashed into the Empire, sapping its remaining strength.
But there was still the East, with its rich provinces of Anatolia and Egypt, to support the Empire.
If the East would just step in, perhaps Rome could be put back together as it had under the reign of Aurelian.
But the East was in the middle of a religious dispute.
Now, that wasn't the only reason this didn't happen, of course.
At this point, the East and the West had, in some ways,
become closer to rivals than to coordinated parts of the Empire.
And the Huns, although not causing as much damage as in the West,
had extracted unimaginable tribute from the Eastern Empire.
But, for all that, it certainly didn't make it any more likely that the East would step in when,
in the middle of this crisis, the Emperor, Theodosius II, found himself mired in a religious schism.
And here's where it gets really complex.
All that esoteric and minor doctrinal stuff we talked about in the previous episodes,
that's just a warm-up for what's coming now, so get ready.
So there's this monk, Nestorius, and he's chummy with the Emperor.
He gets tapped to be the Patriarch of Constantinople;
just about the biggest deal you can be in the Christian world at the time,
with Rome itself still barely part of the Empire.
But he gets caught up in a local debate over the nature of Christ
and starts espousing that Christ has two separate natures — one divine and one human.
We'll call this "Nestorianism."
This, of course, causes a huge flameout with the folks that we'll call,
for reasons that will become obvious in a moment, "the Chalcedonians,"
as they believed that Christ had two perfectly unified natures — one divine and one human,
which, of course, caused a huge blowup with the guys that we'll call the "the Monophysites,"
who believed that Christ was entirely of one nature — divine and human.
I know what you're thinking: "If anything, this all makes too much sense."
But, just in case a few of you got lost in how much sense that just made, I'll dive into a little more detail.
That really is the basic split though:
Does Christ have two separate natures,
two unified natures,
or one nature that sort of encompassed what everybody else called two natures?
And that may seem really trivial, but, to people of the day, it was more than a simple matter of life and death.
It was a matter of eternal life, or eternal damnation,
so this is really, really important to a lot of people.
But it also gets wrapped up with church politics, regional disputes, and imperial authority,
because this guy, Cyril of Alexandria, starts calling Nestorius' teachings "heretical."
But the clergy in Constantinople are all basically like,
"Hey, who are you from faraway Alexandria to be telling us what to do?"
So Cyril actually reaches out to the pope in Rome and asks him for a judgement,
who, in turn, basically says,
"Ugh, Cyril, go excommunicate this guy if he doesn't change his mind in, like, ten days."
So Nestorius turns to his buddy, Theodosius II, and says, "Let's call a council and figure this out.
"And, by 'figure this out,' I mean 'Let's excommunicate Cyril'"
But, before the council even gets called, Cyril stands up and is basically like,
"You can't excommunicate me! I excommunicate YOU!"
And now it's on.
The council is called, and Cyril tries to ninja his way into being the guy running the council basically by saying,
"I'm the guy running this council."
At first, this doesn't work. But several of the delegations are delayed,
and this gives Cyril time to prod some of the undecided bishops until he has a majority.
And so, he just declares the council started and himself in charge.
Nestorius is, of course, having none of this, doesn't acknowledge Cyril,
and refuses to accept that the council can begin before the delegation from Antioch arrives,
which it hasn't yet.
The bishops who back Nestorius all show up to the place where the council is being held to protest,
and things start to get rowdy.
At this point, the emperor's representative steps in and asks Cyril to just wait for four more days
to see if the Antiochians arrive,
which is when Cyril really steps up his ninja game
and basically tricks the emperor's representative into reading the emperor's decree,
which ends with an offhand line about how he wants them to, quote,
"Start the council without delay and bring unity back to the church quickly."
But an offhand line by the emperor is still an order by the emperor.
And so, with that imperial decree read aloud to what was effectively a quorum,
because the protesting bishops who supported Nestorius were there in the hall,
legally, for both the church and the state, the council had now started.
And, of course, that council promptly held up the excommunication of Nestorius.
But, then, the delegation from Antioch finally arrives and, miffed that Cyril had started the thing without them,
forms their own council and excommunicates Cyril.
So Cyril's council excommunicates the Antiochians.
And, now that everybody's excommunicated everybody else,
everybody has to get word to the emperor, who's back in Constantinople, about who has been excommunicated.
But the Nestorians have more friends at court, and they divert all of Cyril's messages
until Cyril's faction sends a man dressed as a beggar with a message hidden in a hollowed-out cane,
to secret his message through.
So the emperor gets the news and banishes Nestorius,
which, clearly, that resolves everything.
Everyone would meekly give up, agree to get along, and all splits in the church would be healed forever.
And yet, shockingly, everybody just kept excommunicating each other.
The emperor called a second council to determine which of these excommunications were really legal.
But this council was a mess, too, famously known as "The Robbers Council,"
as it was convened with no time for any of the representatives from the West to get there,
and so it was run almost entirely by Monophysites from the East.
They proceed to excommunicate and condemn everybody even remotely connected with Nestorius.
And, then, they went further and basically declared that the only correct way to see Christ
was as having one nature.
And, of course, this sets of everybody.
The pope was livid, the bishops that were excluded were furious,
and it goes without saying that those who got excommunicated or condemned
without having any say in the matter were a little put-out as well.
So the church starts to tear itself apart over this.
And, in the midst of all of it, Theodosius II croaks.
So the new emperor, Marcian, calls a third council to try to unravel this and figure out if any of it was legal at all.
So, this time, the bishops all come together at a place called Chalcedon.
All of the things the second council had said were, basically, immediately overturned,
a bunch of the folks who had supported the second council were demoted or excommunicated,
and the Chalcedonian Creed, or the idea that Christ was two perfectly-combined natures,
was adapted as official canon of the church.
Okay, so, surely now everything would be settled. Right?
Wrong again!
See, this is right about where the Coptic, Ethiopian, Eritrean, Syriac,
and Armenian Apostolic and Malankara churches,
split from what would now be called the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches
— although, at the time, they were really one thing.
Remember in the "Justinian and Theodora" episodes
how Justinian kept trying to bring the church back together?
This is the split he would later be trying to heal.
And remember how Justinian was Orthodox and Theodora was Monophysite?
Again, that's a big deal because this council, the Council of Chalcedon,
split the whole Christian world down those lines.
And this division would rip the Byzantine world apart for centuries.
It would take on political dimensions as well as religious ones,
as one easy way to oppose the emperor was always to stir up whatever religious faction he wasn't a part of.
This split would also make it easier for other groups
to break the more Monophysite-leaning regions off from the empire as it started to decline.
Who knows how history would have turned out without these schisms, heresies, and disputes?
Would it have saved Rome,
or would it have just left Europe even more fragmented without those hard-fought ideas to bind it together?
What we do know is that is that all this though and all this effort
helped to shape the Late Classical and Early Medieval period.
For better or worse, these esoteric disputes
played a huge part in the transition from the Ancient world to the Medieval one.
So, thank you for bearing with us as we wound our way through all that esoterica.
These names — Arianism, Monophysites, Chalcedonians
— they're going to come up again and again as we discuss this period of history.
And there's no way we could give a complete picture of this era without them.
Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time.