Russia (which he represented at the congress of Vienna) all the state papers, &c., which required her adhesion as a member of the coalition. With the withdrawal of Capo d'Istrias, after the breaking out of the Greek revolution, Nesselrode became sole minister of foreign affairs, and the foreign policy of Russia to the close of the war with France and England constitutes his political biography. Nicholas continued the confidence reposed in him by Alexander, and made him successively vice-chancellor and chancellor of the empire. Belonging to the so-called German party, the party of moderation in Russia, Nesselrode strove to infuse a pacific and conciliatory element into the negotiations which preceded the war of 1854. After the peace of Paris he was succeeded by Prince Gortschakoff as minister of foreign affairs, but retained the office of chancellor of the empire. He died at St. Petersburg on the 23rd March, 1862.—F. E.
NESTOR, the most ancient annalist of Russia, was born about the year 1056, and admitted into the monastery of Petcherski at Kieff in his seventeenth year. The current of his cloistered life offers few incidents to the biographer. In 1096, at the taking of the city by the Polovtzi, his monastery was pillaged and burnt. He styles the assailants "fierce and cursed children of Ismael." He appears to have been highly esteemed by his superiors, both ecclesiastical and secular, and was employed on various missions. In 1097 he was sent by the traitor David Igorevitch to the Prince Vassilko, whose misfortunes he narrates with signal force of style. He is supposed to have died about 1111. His chronicle, which is the sole authentic source of early Russian history, after a general introduction, commences with the year 858, and covers a space of two hundred and fifty years, concluding with the return of Sviatopolk from his wars to Kieff in 1107. The work was continued by other monks to the year 1203. The best known manuscript of Nestor's annals was at Königsberg in 1716, and was there shown to Peter the Great, who procured a copy, from which an imperial edition was printed. A German translation was published by Schérer in 1774, 4to; a more learned edition by Schlözer in 1802-9, five vols. 8vo; and a French translation by L. Paris appeared in 1834, 2 vols. 8vo. Nestor also wrote a biographical account of the most eminent of his predecessors in the convent, under the title of "Paterikon." Of this work only a fragment has been preserved.—R. H.
NESTOR, Dionysius, lexicographer, born in Novara of the noble family of Arvenada or Avogadro; flourished in the fifteenth century. Having entered the order of minor friars or cordeliers, he passed his days in study and the practice of piety. He compiled Onomasticon, a vocabulary of the Latin language, first published in Milan, 1483; he also composed "Dissertatio de præcipuis Lexicis Latinis;" and "Compendium Physicum," Paris, 1586, is by Wadding attributed to him.—C G. R.
NESTORIUS, the author of the Nestorian heresy, was a native of Germanicia in Syria, and a disciple of the learned Theodore of Mopsuestia. He became a monk, and acquired so much distinction by his learning and pulpit eloquence that, in 428, he was elevated to the patriarchate of Constantinople. The disappointment which this promotion caused to his rival Proclus, a presbyter of Constantinople, and to a party among the monks, predisposed them to take offence at his subsequent proceedings, and Nestorius was deficient in those qualities of prudence and judgment which alone could have shielded him from their hostility. Two opposite theological tendencies then divided the church—that of the Alexandrian school unduly to confound the two natures in the person of Christ, and that of the Antiochian school unduly to separate them. Proclus belonged to the former school, and Nestorius to the latter; and it was not long before this dogmatic difference between them broke out into a violent controversy. Anastasius, a presbyter of the Antiochian school, whom Nestorius had brought with him to Constantinople, began to preach against the use of the title Mother of God— θεοτοκος, as applied to the Virgin Mary, a proceeding which gave great offence to the monks and the people. Nestorius, instead of endeavouring to compose this difference, took the most direct way of exasperating it. He took part openly with the preacher, subjected to corporal chastisement several monks who insulted him for espousing the cause of Anastasius, and, assembling a provincial synod, procured a condemnation of the use of that title as savouring of the Manichean heresy. These measures stirred up against him Cyrill, patriarch of Alexandria, a learned, acute, but violent polemic of the Alexandrian school, and who was nothing loath to gratify the hereditary grudge of his see against the rival see of Constantinople. Cyrill wrote strongly against the doctrine of Nestorius, gained over Celestine, bishop of Rome, and the bishops of Ephesus and Jerusalem to the same side, and had the address to separate Pulcheria, the sister of the Emperor Theodosius II., from the party of the court, who for the most part took the side of Nestorius. All attempts to mediate between the two patriarchs came to nothing. Celestine held a synod at Rome in 430, which condemned Nestorius to recant his doctrine within ten days, and failing this to be deposed from his see. Cyrill called another synod at Alexandria, which launched against him twelve articles of heresy, each sealed with an anathema, in answer to which Nestorius immediately sent forth an equal number of counter-articles and anathemas. The emperor was urged to call a general council as the only possible remedy for such a state of things, and the third œcumenical council of Ephesus met in 431. The imperial commissioner to the council was the patriarch's personal friend, and Nestorius was accompanied to Ephesus by a part of the emperor's own body-guard. But Cyrill appeared with a great following of bishops, and with a powerful body-guard of church-beadles and Egyptian sailors, who were ready, if need were, to maintain by physical force the credit of Alexandrian orthodoxy; while Memnon, bishop of Ephesus, had fully prepared the clergy, monks, and people of Lesser Asia to support the same cause. The delegates of the bishop of Rome and the Syrian bishops were long of arriving; the council could not be canonically held without them; but Cyrill held it notwithstanding, in the face of a protest from Nestorius and the imperial commissioner. Two hundred bishops sat in the council, and in one day they condemned, excommunicated, and deposed Nestorius. The Roman delegates, on their arrival, recognized the validity of the council and its sentence; but the Syrian bishops held a counter-council, under the presidency of John, bishop of Antioch, which, in its turn, excommunicated and deposed Cyrill and Memnon. Nestorius withdrew to a cloister to await the issue, relying, no doubt, upon the constancy of the emperor; but meanwhile Pulcheria had made her influence felt among the populace of Constantinople, who rose in a tumult, and declared themselves so violently on the side of Cyrill that Theodosius was obliged first to look about for some middle course as the only possible means of restoring peace, and at last completely to abandon Nestorius to the power of his enemies. He first confirmed the deposition of all the three chief actors in the controversy—Nestorius, Cyrill, and Memnon; and afterwards, upon a doctrinal basis of union having been drawn up by Theodoret, which apparently conciliated both the Antiochian and the Alexandrian bishops, and which was signed by Cyrill and Memnon, but not by Nestorius, he restored the two former to their sees, but left the deposition of the latter still in force. The truth is that the confession drawn up by Theodoret on the difficult subject of the union of natures in the person of Christ, was generally accepted as the true statement of the doctrine of the church; and the teaching of Nestorius was now acknowledged by all but a few bishops of the Syrian church to be erroneous, as involving an undue separation of the two natures. The fallen patriarch himself, however, never saw cause to acknowledge that there was any heresy in his views. He was unjustly left exposed to the malice of his adversaries, and after being driven from the asylum of his own convent in Syria, and hurried about from place to place in Egypt, where he had to bear the ill-usage of the creatures of his triumphant rival Cyrill, he at last died in circumstances of great outward misery in 440. His spirit, however, remained unsubdued to the last. His doctrine was zealously propagated by his followers. It became the theology of the Persian church, and was spread by fervent missionaries to the shores of India. There are still some remains of the Nestorian christians in the mountains of Kurdistan; and to the eye of the high Lutherans there is a faint of modified Nestorianism even in the doctrine of the Calvinistic branch of the protestant church, touching the sacrament of the supper—a fact which may serve to suggest that Nestorius was not fundamentally, or to any such serious extent unsound as to justify the treatment he received at the hands of the Ephesian council.—P. L.
NETSCHER, Gaspar, was born at Heidelberg in 1639, became the pupil of Terburg, and settled in Holland, where he died at the Hague in 1684. He is distinguished for his conversation pieces, in the style of his master, and he was little inferior to him in the tasteful finish of his execution. Netscher's
