was banished first to Petra in Arabia and then to the oasis of Ptolemais in Egypt. After being captured by Arab brigands and suffering many other hardships for which the orthodox authorities showed no pity, he died from the effects of ill-usage in the year 439. Meanwhile his followers were hounded out of the empire, being driven over into Persia. And yet the influence of Theodore and Nestorius lived on, chiefly owing to the hold it got on the important school of theological scholarship at Edessa.
The opposite tendency of thought which ripened into Eutychianism was just the emphasising and perhaps carrying further forward of the ideas of Cyril. Although this notorious Alexandrian dogmatist has been canonised and although his writings are now prized among the most highly honoured works of the Fathers, it is not easy to distinguish his position from that of the heresy that came under condemnation at the next general council He held that Nestorianism involved a duality of persons in Christ—the human Jesus being one person, the Divine Logos another. And yet he was not content to assert a unity of persons; he maintained that there was a unity of nature.[1] Nor would he allow of any real kenosis in the incarnation. While Jesus lay in the cradle, to all appearance a helpless infant, He was actually administering the affairs of the universe. When as a man He appeared to be ignorant of anything, this was only in appearance. Even when He said He did not know the day or hour of the Parousia, that only meant that He had no knowledge for the disciples which he could communicate to them.
But it was the pronounced expression of such views, carried perhaps a little further by Eutyches, the archimandrite of a large monastery near Constantinople, that drew
- ↑ ἕνωσις τῶν προσώπων will not suffice; there must be ἕνωσις καθ' ὑπόστασιν. This was quite in accordance with the idea of ὑπόστασις in the Cappadocian theologians, so that there is nothing peculiar to Cyril so far as Dorner seems to imply (Person of Christ, Eng. Trans., Div. ii. vol. i. p. 57). But Cyril goes further and has the expression μία φύσις (Ep. ad Acac. p. 115, quoted by Dorner, op. cit.), verbally at any rate an anticipation of Monophysitism, also ἑνότης φυσική, Ep. ad monarchas Aeg. p. 9.
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