The Second Council of Ephesus

A synod at Constantinople under its bishop Flavian of Constantinople, acting on a charge brought by Eusebius of Dorylaeum, had deposed the archimandrite Eutyches, who confessed that Christ was from two natures before the union but allowed only one nature after it (Evagrius, Ecclesiastical History 1.9–10). Leo I of Rome, in the letter to Flavian known as the Tome, called that statement absurd (Leo, Letters 28.6 (the Tome)). The emperor Theodosius II summoned a council to meet at Ephesus on 1 August 449 to end the controversy (Second Council of Ephesus, Syriac acts pp. 6–7). Evagrius, who accepted Chalcedon, says that Dioscorus of Alexandria was made president through Chrysaphius, a court official hostile to Flavian, and that those who had judged Eutyches were to attend without a vote (Evagrius, Ecclesiastical History 1.10).

The first session is described by both sides. Flavian wrote to Leo that Dioscorus had the statement of Eutyches read, declared him orthodox and restored him, and then moved the condemnation of Flavian and of Eusebius; that Leo’s letters were not read; and that when he appealed to the Roman see soldiers surrounded him (Flavian, Appeal to Leo). Leo learned from his deacon Hilarus, who had escaped, that his legates had protested in the council (Leo, Letters 44.1–3). When the minutes were read at Chalcedon in 451 they showed that Leo’s letter had not been read. Dioscorus said that he had twice proposed it, and bishops who had signed said that they had done so under compulsion, with soldiers around them (Evagrius, Ecclesiastical History 2.18). The Syriac chronicle that goes under the name of Zachariah, written by opponents of Chalcedon, says that the acts of the trial of Eutyches were examined, that Flavian and Eusebius were removed, and that Eutyches was received because he presented a recantation and confessed the true faith (Zachariah, Chronicle 2.3).

The minutes of a later session survive in Syriac. On 22 August, in the church called Mary, the council heard that the Roman envoys would not attend, since their commission covered only the case of Eutyches, and that Domnus of Antioch was ill (Second Council of Ephesus, Syriac acts pp. 13–14) (Second Council of Ephesus, Syriac acts pp. 21–26). It deposed Ibas of Edessa (Second Council of Ephesus, Syriac acts pp. 134–145); Theodoret of Cyrrhus, whom Dioscorus charged with writing against Cyril of Alexandria (Second Council of Ephesus, Syriac acts pp. 251–254); and Domnus himself, as opposed to Cyril and to the council of 431 and a follower of Nestorius (Second Council of Ephesus, Syriac acts pp. 359–362).

Theodosius confirmed the council by an edict, which says that Flavian and Eusebius had revived the error of Nestorius and that they, Domnus and Theodoret had been deposed as unworthy of their office (Second Council of Ephesus, Syriac acts p. 366). In the letters that follow it he speaks of two holy and ecumenical synods held by his will and orders all bishops to subscribe (Second Council of Ephesus, Syriac acts pp. 369–370). Leo, with a synod at Rome, asked him to leave everything as it had been until a larger council could meet in Italy (Leo, Letters 44.1–3). In July 451 Leo wrote to the empress Pulcheria of “that meeting, not of judges but of robbers, at Ephesus” (Leo, Letters 95.2); his Latin word is latrocinium (Leo, Letters 95.2, the Latin as quoted by T. H. Bindley, The Oecumenical Documents of the Faith (1906), p. 220). The name “Robber Council”, or Latrocinium, which the English editor of the acts of Chalcedon uses in his summaries (Council of Chalcedon session 1), is therefore Leo’s; the council’s own minutes call it holy and ecumenical (Second Council of Ephesus, Syriac acts pp. 21–26). At Chalcedon the presiding officials ruled that Flavian had been unjustly deposed, and the bishops deposed Dioscorus (Evagrius, Ecclesiastical History 2.18).

Those who did not receive Chalcedon wrote of the council differently. The Syriac chronicle from their side counts it as the second synod of Ephesus (Zachariah, Chronicle 2.3), and the Syriac copy of its acts, made in 535, ends by naming “the holy and God-loving Dioscorus” (Second Council of Ephesus, Syriac acts pp. 376–377). The Coptic Synaxarium, the book of commemorations read in the liturgy of the Coptic Orthodox Church, keeps his day on 7 Tout and calls him “the great champion of Orthodoxy” (Coptic Synaxarium 7 Tout). The same tradition rejected the teaching ascribed to Eutyches: the chronicle says that he rejected the truth of the body taken from the Virgin (Zachariah, Chronicle 2.2). In 1990 a joint commission of the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox churches condemned the Eutychian heresy together and recommended that each side lift its condemnations of the other’s councils and fathers (Orthodox–Oriental Orthodox Agreed Statement (1990) 1, 10).