What Actually Happened In 451
A council, an empire, a translation problem and a deposition. The story is more human, and more tragic, than the doctrine.
The background nobody mentions
Two years before Chalcedon, in 449, a council was held at Ephesus under Dioscorus of Alexandria which the opposing party regarded as violent and irregular, history knows it by the name its enemies gave it, the “Robber Council.” Whatever the truth of the accusations, its memory poisoned everything after. Chalcedon met in an atmosphere of grievance and reprisal.
The council
The Emperor Marcian convened Chalcedon in 451 near Constantinople. It produced a Definition confessing one and the same Christ, perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, made known in two natures without confusion, change, division or separation, in one Person and one hypostasis.
It also deposed Dioscorus, Patriarch of Alexandria. Rarely mentioned in popular accounts: the charges on which he was deposed were largely canonical and disciplinary, his conduct at the council of 449 and his refusal to appear when summoned, rather than a formal conviction for the heresy of Eutyches.
Why Alexandria refused
- Because "two natures" sounded, in Alexandrian usage, like the very division St Cyril had fought Nestorius to prevent.
- Because deposing their Patriarch was experienced as an assault on the see of St Mark by the rising power of Constantinople.
- Because the council was convened and enforced by imperial authority, and what followed was not persuasion but coercion, rival bishops imposed, and in the years and centuries after, real violence against those who would not conform.
- Because the terms were being carried between Greek, Latin, Syriac and Coptic, and the key words did not mean the same at both ends of the journey.
What followed
Not debate but hardening. Anathemas in both directions. Saints of one family condemned by the other. Separate hierarchies in the same cities. Within two centuries the Islamic conquests cut the political ties that might have forced a resolution, and the families lived largely out of contact for over a thousand years. By then each had inherited a caricature of the other, and a vocabulary in which correcting the caricature was itself suspicious.
The point of telling it this way
Not to assign blame. Both sides suffered and both sides sinned. The point is that when you lay out the actual sequence, a disputed prior council, an imperial convocation, a canonical deposition, a mistranslated word, then centuries of enforced separation, you are looking at a historical catastrophe, not a revelation of two incompatible faiths.
A faith is not divided by a translation error. A Church can be.