Andrew Louth - Syriac Christian Church

8 INTRODUCTION
state eternally from the Father. This was affirmed at the first
Ecumenical Council, called at Nicaea by the Emperor Constantine in
325, though not finally accepted throughout the Church until the
second Ecumenical Council, held at Constantinople and convened by
the Emperor Theodosius I in 381. As the so-called Nicene Creed put
it: the Lord Jesus Christ is ‘the only-begotten Son of God, begotten
from the Father before all ages, Light from Light, true God from true
God, begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father’ (what is
usually called the Nicene Creed, that recited at the Eucharistic liturgy
in both East and West, is in fact the creed endorsed at the second
Ecumenical Council).
This uncompromising affirmation of the divinity of Christ raised in
acute terms the problem of the relationship between the divinity of
Christ and his unquestionable humanity. In broad terms, two
approaches emerged. One sought to preserve the integrity of the two
natures of Christ by keeping them clearly separate. In the actions of
the Incarnate Christ, there could be clearly distinguished actions that
are to be ascribed to his divinity—notably his miracles—and actions
that are to be ascribed to his humanity—hunger, thirst, suffering,
spatial limitation, in fact any kind of limitation. These actions came
together in the one single life that Jesus led, but they were to be
clearly distinguished, lest either the divinity or the humanity be
compromised. Towards the end of the fourth and the beginning of the
fifth century, this approach was particularly associated with Antioch.
The other approach started from the affirmation that in Jesus of
Nazareth one encountered God Himself, the Son, the Second Person of
the Trinity, living a human life. His divinity was manifest in his
miracles, his humanity in his evident limitation, but though they
could be clearly distinguished in his actions, they could not be
separated, for God had entered completely into the limitations of
human life: the Godhead had ‘emptied itself’, to quote Phil. 2.7—the
Incarnation was an act of kenosis. This approach emphasizes the unity
of the person of Christ, and emphasizes the paradox of the union of
divine and human in Christ, seeing in this paradox a demonstration
of God’s limitless love for human beings. This approach was associated
particularly with Alexandria, in the fourth century with its great
Patriarch, Athanasius, especially and in the fifth with his successor,
Cyril. Cyril was fond of expressing the unity of Christ with a phrase
that he (mistakenly) thought had been used by Athanasius: ‘one
Incarnate nature of God the Word’.
These two approaches collided in the third decade of the fifth
century in the persons of the newly-appointed Patriarch of
Constantinople, Nestorius (who had formerly been a monk in Antioch),
and Cyril, the experienced and wily Patriarch of Alexandria. 12 The