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The Significance of the Seven Ecumenical Councils, Part 1

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The Significance of the Seven Ecumenical Councils, Part 1

Mario Baghos

Variously interpreted as a violent revolutionary, a social activist, or not existing at all, our
Lord Jesus Christ is often subjected to harsh misrepresentations in the public space and
discourse that are either existentially damaging or have little or no value for either the
believer or non-believer. These misconstruals of the Lord are connected to general
misrepresentations of God: the influence of Enlightenment Deism has been hard to shake,
and it has resulted in an impersonal view of God that has nothing to do with the revelation
given to the Church that God is personal; that he is three persons, Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit, a reality and experience disclosed to us by the Lord Jesus. This article, which is in two
parts, is supposed to remind us of the importance of the seven ecumenical councils of the
Orthodox Church: for their doctrinal definitions concerning our Lord and Saviour are
inspired by God himself, and are consistent with the saints’ experience of him. Part one
addresses ecumenical councils one-to-four; and part two, councils five-to-seven.

The First and Second Ecumenical Councils

Our Lord has in fact deemed that we should know, inasmuch as humanly possible, the truth
concerning our provident God for our salvation. Although the transcendent God is in his
innermost being or essence inaccessible to us, in his relationship to the world he can be
known—and is known and experienced—within the sacred body of his Son, the Church. That
the Son of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, is also completely God—sharing in the same essence
with the Father—is something that the Church has always experienced in the faith “once and
for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 1:3). Historically, however, this faith had to be
expounded, or clarified, in response to heretical notions that disparaged the Son’s divinity,
that represented him as a creature and not fully God. Thus, when in the fourth century the
Roman Empire was ravaged by the teachings of Arius and his followers who claimed that the
Son of God was a creature, not sharing in the divinity of his Father, the emperor St
Constantine responded by convoking a council of the Church in the city of Nicaea in AD 325
to address the problem. This was known as the first ecumenical council, the word
‘ecumenical’ coming from the Greek word oikoumene (οἰκουµένη) which means civilisation
and referred to the Roman Empire. It was the first major council of the Roman Empire which,
since Constantine’s reign, began to work in collaboration with the Church, and although the
emperor convoked the council it was a bishop of the church, St Ossius of Cordova, who
presided. This set the precedent for all future councils.

At the first ecumenical council held in Nicaea, therefore, saints of the Church like Alexander
and Athanasius of Alexandria—supported later by Roman Pope saints Julius and Liberius—
affirmed what the Church always held to be true: that the Son of God is “one essence with the
Father,” homoousion to Patri (ὁµοούσιον τῷ Πατρί),1 as enshrined in the creed that we recite

1
Other notable saints present at the council included St Nicholas of Myra, St Macarius of Jerusalem, and St
Spyridon of Trymithous, to name a few.
every divine liturgy, which was given final form at the second ecumenical council held in AD
381 in the capital city of Constantinople during the reign of the emperor Theodosius I. The
second council, like the first, dealt with Arianism, reaffirmed the Nicene doctrine that Christ
is “one essence” with the Father—fully divine and fully God—and also affirmed the divinity
of the Holy Spirit.

One may consider why it is important for the Church to promulgate the truth concerning its
experience of the Holy Trinity, of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, as being fully God?
It is because the heretical notions that rejected the divinity of the persons of the Trinity can
compromise our participation in God. If Christ, the Son of God, is not fully divine and thus
eternal—the way that his Father is divine and eternal—then how could he save us from
mortality and the finitude of death? Only the eternal God can raise us—who are finite and
mortal—up to eternal life, which our Lord Jesus accomplished when he defeated death
through the cross and his resurrection. How can the Holy Spirit sanctify us if he is not fully
God, to be worshipped equally with the Father and the Son? Of course, we do not believe in
three Gods, but one God who is three persons, each one sharing the same divinity, the same
Godhead; and this is the Christian God who has saved us from death.

The Third and Fourth Ecumenical Councils

Our God has saved us through the agency of the Son, who, while forever working together
with the Father and the Spirit on account of their shared divine essence, activity and will,
became one of us by assuming human nature in its totality, apart from sin. The Son did this
while paradoxically remaining fully God, so that in Christ Jesus we contemplate the mystery
of God becoming man while remaining God, the Godman or theanthropos (Θεάνθρωπος) as
we call him. It of course follows that if the Son of God was born into this world as a man
while remaining God, that his holy Mother, the Theotokos (Θεοτόκος) and ever-virgin Mary,
gave birth to God in the flesh. But in the early fifth century this sacred truth that we revere
was criticised by Nestorius, the bishop of Constantinople, who affirmed that the holy Virgin
should not be called ‘Theotokos,’ which means God-bearer, that is, the one who gave birth to
God, but ‘Christotokos,’ the one who gave birth to a mere man, Jesus Christ.

Nestorius was effectively denouncing the divinity of Christ when he said this, for to acclaim
the Virgin as God-bearer or Theotokos is to acknowledge that she gave birth to God in the
flesh for our salvation. But, strangely, Nestorius still believed in the divinity of the Son of
God, just not that the Son of God was born of a woman. The outcome of his attempt to
synthesise the man Christ, who he believed was born of the Virgin, and the Son or Logos of
God who is the second person of the Holy Trinity, created a duality in Christ, for Nestorius
affirmed that the man Jesus was at some point in his life assumed or adopted by the Son of
God; that there were in other words two persons or prosopa (πρόσωπα) in Christ, two active
subjects! This was of course antithetical to the Church’s experience, for, as St Cyril of
Alexandria, who refuted Nestorius’ teaching on both the Virgin and Christ, declared: we
know only one Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ; it is the one Christ that we worship, pray to,
and participate in in the Eucharist.2 This Christ is both divine and human, since he is the Son

2
Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman P. Tanner (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press,
1989), 51.
of God who became man while remaining God—but he is nevertheless ‘one’ person, the
second person of the Holy Trinity.

In order to maintain the unity of Christ in opposition to Nestorius’ rendition of him as two—
or even three persons (for he had said that when the man Jesus and the Son of God were
combined, they created a new, third person)—St Cyril used various devices, including
asserting that there is “one nature of [God] the Word incarnate” (mia fusis tou [Theou] Logou
sesarkomeni/µία φύσις τοῦ [Θεού] Λόγου σεσαρκωµένη).3 This statement would seem to
imply that there is only one nature in Christ, which would be incorrect. But Cyril used the
word φύσις, commonly translated as ‘nature,’ to designate ‘reality’ or ‘personhood,’ meaning
that we can paraphrase his saying to denote that there is one reality or person of God the
Word who became man as Christ Jesus. Another ecumenical council was held in Ephesus in
431, during the reign of Theodosius II, that enshrined Cyril’s teaching and rejected the ideas
of Nestorius.

But, after his repose in the Lord, Cyril was misinterpreted by his over-zealous followers
(Eutyches and Dioscorus), who believed that the bishop, in his statement “one nature of the
Word incarnate,” referred to the word nature or φύσις literally, so they concluded that if
Christ only had one nature, that must be the divine one. These were described as
monophysites (µονοφυσίτες), believing that Christ’s humanity was overshadowed or
subsumed by his divinity. But their position was not acceptable to the Church. We said above
that Christ is fully God because only the eternal God can save humans from death; but Christ,
in order to save us from death, is also fully human, otherwise we cannot participate in the
salvation he wrought in our behalf. A fourth council, held in Chalcedon in 451, clarified St
Cyril’s teaching and, with additions made by the Tome of Pope Leo of Rome, came up with
the following definition of faith:

So, following the saintly fathers, we all with one voice teach the confession of one
and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ: the same perfect in divinity and perfect in
humanity, the same truly God and truly man, of a rational soul and a body;
consubstantial with the Father as regards his divinity, and the same consubstantial
with us as regards his humanity; like us in all respects except for sin; begotten before
the ages from the Father as regards his divinity, and in the last days the same for us
and for our salvation from Mary, the virgin God-bearer, as regards his humanity; one
and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only-begotten, acknowledged in two natures which
undergo no confusion, no change, no division, no separation; at no point was the
difference between the natures taken away from the union, but rather the property of
both natures is preserved and comes together into a single person and a single
hypostasis; he is not parted or divided into two persons, but is one and the same only-
begotten Son, God, Word, Lord Jesus Christ, just as the prophets taught from the
beginning about him, and as the Lord Jesus Christ himself instructed us, and as the
creed of the fathers handed it down to us.4

As Orthodox Christians we believe therefore that there is one Christ in two natures, divine
and human; he is fully God insofar as he is divine and has the power of God over life and

3
Translated from St Cyril’s Second Letter to Succensus in PG 77, 241.
4
Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 86.
 death, and he became fully human that we might participate in the eternal life that only he
can give.

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