NESTORIANISMO — NESTORIUS
Doutrinas atribuídas a Nestorius
Excertos de “Nestorius and his teaching”
THE DOCTRINES ATTRIBUTED TO NESTORIUS AND THE TERMS WHICH HE USED
The controversy was precipitated by Nestorius’s protest against the use of the term Theotokos, “Mother of God”, as a title of the Virgin Mary. Mary must not be called Mother of God. We must examine the meaning of this protest of Nestorius in all its technical bearings. But before doing so we may clear the ground a little by considering the less technical charge which was immediately brought against him. It was said that he taught that He who was born of Mary was only a man: he denied that Jesus Christ was God. It was perhaps natural that such a cry should be raised by the people, and that, when once they had got hold of the belief that Nestorius denied the Godhead of our Lord, they should never let it go. But the clergy of Constantinople also joined in the cry, and a statement which they composed containing the charge was one of the incriminating documents read at Ephesus on the evidence of which he was condemned. The document is headed “a deposition put forth in public by the clergy of Constantinople and published in church, to wit that Nestorius is of the same opinion as Paul of Samosata who was anathematized a hundred and sixty years ago by the orthodox bishops It gives a list of sayings of Paul and of Nestorius, placing them side by side, to shew that Nestorius agreed with Paul in regarding Him who was born of the Virgin as a mere man, and that he taught that the Lord Jesus Christ was not at once the Only-begotten Son of the Father, born before all ages, and also born of the Virgin Mary, but that the Only-begotten Son was one and He who was born of the Virgin another. So some at least of the clergy attested the popular charge, and Socrates could say that the general opinion was that Nestorius held that the Lord was a mere man, bringing into the Church the doctrine of Paul of Samosata and Photinus.
The charge was supported by quoting, as his, words which he never used. One instance is furnished by Schenute of Atripos who wrote: ‘Nestorius too, who was called a bishop… and others like him—he whose tongue swelled and filled his mouth and who died in exile, said (of the Virgin Mary): “She who bore a good man, who was like Moses and David and others To get the expression at all Schenute had to change one of the letters in the word Nestorius used, replacing an iota by an eta and so converting “anointed” (christon) into “good” (chreston). But even that was not all. For again and again in the sermons that are extant Nestorius insists that, though the terms “God” and “Christ” (i.e. “anointed”), and the like, are used in Scripture of Moses and others, yet they are applied to the Incarnate Word in an altogether different sense. ‘ It is the ‘ community of names that is alike, the honour (or rank) is not ‘ the same.’ ‘Community of names does not constitute community of honour or equality.’ ‘The one, I have said, is God ‘by nature, consubstantial with the Father, and Creator and ‘Maker of all; but not the other.’
Socrates himself, however, though he has a poor opinion of the intelligence of Nestorius, and thinks he simply made a “bug-bear” of the term Theotokos, acquits him of this charge and gives it as his opinion that Nestorius was no follower of Paul or of Photinus. The charge that he denied the Godhead of our Lord no doubt did much to rouse prejudice against him among those who could not enter into the meaning of his argument, but it may be dismissed without investigation. The only basis for it is the fact that he objected to the title “Mother of God”, and it is refuted by almost every word he said or wrote. The charges which the theologians brought against his teaching were much more recondite and call for careful examination. These were that he so distinguished between the Godhead and the manhood of our Lord as to treat them as separate personal existences, as though a man and God were joined together, so that our Lord was not one Person but two Persons and no real union of God and man was effected in Him. It was supposed that ho held the Word to be a Person distinct from Jesus, and the Son of God distinct from the Son of Man, and that therefore he avoided the term which expressed the real union of both and preferred to speak of a “conjunction” between them. And so some of the old charges against the Gnostics and Paul of Samosata were raked up again and he was said, in teaching “two Sons”, to introduce a fourth person into the Godhead, and to transform the Trinity into a Quatemity.
Teaching such as this is obviously destructive of the whole conception of the Incarnation. It was on the charge of such teaching that he was condemned and it is this teaching that is known to history as “Nestorianism It would surely have been condemned at any period in the history of the Church. We must keep these charges in view in our examination of his actual words. And we must bear in mind his anxiety for clearness of expression in matters of the faith. The interlocutor in the dialogue would let some difficult points alone. But4No!’ says Nestorius:
“I could wish that you would not pass them over, but examine them with all care, so that matters of faith may not be treated lightly and left without discussion, but rather may be clearly known to all—circumscribed, as it were, with definitions and illustrated with suitable examples, and not pourtrayed in shadowy images which hint at different things (these and those) till they are represented as the same” (Bazaar of Heraclides p. 14).
He is only “one of those who knock and ask at the door of Truth, if only it be the truth” (ib. p. 15). He knows it may be said to him “Things which ought to be accepted by faith, you, by accepting them on the ground of human reason, reduce to impossibilities; and, indeed, you sever us from the Christian Faith like the heathen and the Manichaeans who stumble at the cross of Christ (ib. p. 17). He knows the difficulties which he must confront, but he knows also that great moral issues are at stake, and he will not shrink from the use of all the powers of reason in the effort to reach the truth.
In dealing with views other than his own he wishes that no argument in their favour should be ignored. To the interlocutor in the dialogue, who shrinks from adducing one line of reasoning, he says:
“Say what it is with all confidence and without fear, using all their arguments persistently and exhaustively even as they would themselves; for one cannot deliver battle effectively against half an opinion” (ib. p. 26).
He is well aware that heresies embody elements of truth, and he is anxious to give credit where credit is due—even those who confess Christ to be a mere man must have their meed of praise for recognizing a fact which some theologians in his day seemed to ignore.
“Let us divide up their heresy…that we may not run away from the things which have been well said by them on account of those that have been ill said without recognizing the difference. For to confess Christ to be man, and truly and naturally man, is correct and is attested by the truth; and on this count one has no fault to find with them. But their rejection of the Divinity, which is His in truth and by nature, causes them to be rejected as undoers of the incarnation of God the Word” (ib. p. 39J.
He was certainly sometimes misunderstood, and he was in consequence sometimes misrepresented as using words and expressions which he did not use. “Half the controversies of the world would never have happened if the disputants had at the outset defined their terms is a saying the truth of which is always more obvious to the onlookers of a later age than it was to the disputants at the time. Hut in this case it is we of a later age who need to be on our guard that we may not import into the terms which Nestorius employed the sense that they bore in later ecclesiastical usage. No one who reads his writings as a whole could make the mistake, but single passages might prove to be pitfalls even for the wary. For one of the chief terms used had already acquired in the time of Nestorius, in other connexions at least, a sense which is different from that in which he employs it. The term in question is hypostasis, and Nestorius always maintained that there were in the Person of our Lord two hypostases. The Chalcedonian definition of the Faith, on the other hand, uses the expression “one hypostasis” and this expression ultimately ousted all others, so that to say “two hypostases” became impossible. To understand the use of Nestorius we must look backwards.
Termos Chaves