stamped on him. Be that as it may, Flavian died a few days later from the ill-treatment he had received at the council. The emperor confirmed the decisions of this disreputable council. But Leo i., bishop of Rome, the first of the great popes, repudiated it as invalid and sternly denounced its proceedings, designating it Latrocinialis—the "Robber Council."[1]
The Eastern Church was now miserably divided. Egypt, Thrace, and Palestine held to the Eutychian side, while Syria, Pontus, and Asia supported the opposite position, which Flavian had championed, but which was now maintained by the most powerful man of his age, the great Leo. The next year (a.d. 450) Theodosius ii. died through a fall from his horse. His sister, Pulcheria, was already exercising great power in the State, and she now married a senator Marcian, sixty years of age, who thus becoming emperor, at once reversed the policy of his predecessor and entered into communication with Leo for the settlement of the troubled state of the Church. An indirect proof of what this condition was may be gathered from the fact that the following year Marcian issued a law against brawling in church and forbidding meetings in private houses or in the street. The same year he banished Eutyches. The result of the emperor's correspondence with the pope was that Marcian summoned a general council which was to have met at Nicæa, the now venerated site of orthodoxy. Subsequently, to suit the convenience of the emperor, the place of assembly was changed to Chalcedon on the Bosphorus, as that was near Constantinople.
The council of Chalcedon is the last of the four general councils recognised both by the Churches of the West—Protestant (i.e. Lutheran and Anglican) as well as Roman Catholic—and by the main body of the Eastern Church. It met in the church of St. Euphemia, holding its first session on 8th October, a.d. 451. There were some five or six hundred bishops present, most of them from the
- ↑ Leo, Epis. 95, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. xii. p. 71.
