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.The Second Ecumenical Synod affirmed not only the perfect divinity of Christ, but also His perfect humanity, by condemning the heresy of Apollinarianism, which began to spread in 362.This heresy consisted in the denial of a “rational” soul to the incarnate Logos, as­serting that the God-Man took on only the “irrational” soul and material body, having His divinity in place of the ra­tional soul.The Fathers protested against this, maintaining that if the incarnate Logos did not assume full humanity with its rational soul, He left our noblest part unhealed; “for that which He did not assume, He did not heal.” These were the arguments which the Fathers at the Second Synod opposed to Apollinarianism; but they had as yet no definite and crystallized idea of the manner in which the full divinity and the full humanity of Christ were united in His person.Some held that the relation was extremely close; others, extremely loose.Nestorius, the Archbishop of Constantinople, was of the latter opinion, and drew so sharp a distinction between the two na­tures in Christ, that he came eventually to recognize two per­sons in Him, maintaining that Christ, the son of Mary, was one, and Christ, the Son of God, was another; so that Mary should be rightly called “Christotokos” (i.e.Mother of Christ) and not “Theotokos” (i.e.Mother of God).To combat this heresy, Theodosius II summoned to Ephesus in 431 the Third Ecumenical Synod, which affirmed that the Church confesses one Christ, one Son, one Lord, Who is at once both God and Man, Who was born of the Father before all the ages, and became incarnate through the Virgin Mary at the appointed time.In his pride, Nestorius refused to yield to the unanimous decision of the Church, and preferred to retire into exile, where he died in 440.A similar fate befell his supporters; persecuted by the Orthodox, they took refuge with the Persians, who re­ceived them with open arms, as a hostile gesture towards the Byzantine Empire.The Fourth Ecumenical Synod.Nestorius had consid­ered the relation between the two natures of Christ to be so loose that he distinguished in them two separate persons, united only by a moral tie such as is created, for instance, between man and wife by marriage.At the other extreme, Eutychius and Dioscorus held the union to be so close that they taught that, after the Incarnation of the Son and Logos, not two but one single nature should be spoken of; that is, the divine, which had either absorbed the human into itself, or had mingled and fused with it.It was in order to condemn this other extreme of opinion, known as Monophysitism, that the Fourth Ecumenical Synod met at Chalcedon in 451, in the reign of the Empress Pulcheria.This Synod issued a De­cree which both reaffirmed the pronouncements of the Third Synod, that the Lord is one and the same, perfect in Godhead as in manhood, and that two natures exist in the God-Man, and also laid it down that these two natures are united in the single Person of the Logos, not only “without distinction and without separation,” but “without confusion and without change” as well, the one nature suffering neither annihilation nor alteration by the other.The Fifth Ecumenical Synod.The decisions of the Synod of Chalcedon were not, however, universally accepted.The Armenians, considering that the Decree of Chalcedon verged on Nestorianism, rejected it at a local Synod which met at Etchmiadzin in 491.The Copts of Egypt, their neighbors the Abyssinians, and the Syrian Jacobites likewise pre­ferred to break away from the Catholic Church and to found schismatic Monophysite communities rather than admit two separate natures in Christ, — a doctrine which they thought amounted to cutting in two the Person of the God-Man and returning to the teaching of Nestorius.In order to emphasize the difference between the recognition of two persons in Christ, which was the heretical opinion held by Nestorius, and the recognition of two natures in one Person, which was the Or­thodox teaching of the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, the Emperor, Justinian the Great, following the now estab­lished custom, convened the Fifth Ecumenical Synod at Con­stantinople in 553.This Synod condemned certain Theological works of Nestorian flavor, hoping thereby to conciliate the Monophysites and to persuade them to return to the Catholic Church.The Sixth Ecumenical Synod [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]