God With Us?

In his Grace and Christology in the Early Church (Oxford Early Christian Studies) , Donald Fairbairn lays out some helpful distinctions that clarify what was at stake in the Nestorian controversy. He initially lays out a distinction between “composite” understandings of the unity of Christ and “synthetic” understandings: “By a synthetic union,I mean a union in which God the Logos added humanity to his own person, so that the one prosopon of Christ is the Logos himself. In this view of the incarnation, Christ is a synthesis of deity and humanity in the sense that he includes both elements, but he is not a composite because these two elements were not building blocks from which his person was constructed; his person already existed as the eternal Son. On the other hand, by a composite union, I mean either the combining of divine and human natures to create the prosopon of Christ, or the conjoining or uniting of two personal subjects (the Logos and the man) so that they can be called a single prosopon . In both of these views, the prosopon of the union comes into existence at the incarnation, and so that prosopon is a genuine composite.” Theodore and Nestorius propose composite Christologies, while Cyril insists on a synthetic union.

These tensions, he points out, were inherited from differing responses to Arius. Athanasius presented a proto-Cyrillian Christology, while Diodore rebutted Arius by arguing that the Logos was not the subject of the events of the life of Jesus. The Son was “indeed born from the Father by nature,” but the “temple that was born from Mary” came from the womb itself. Diodore apparently rejects the Theotokos before it becomes controversial.

These might seem subtle metaphysical distinctions, but Fairbairn rightly notes that different understandings of grace and salvation. For Cyril certainly, the integrity of the gospel is at stake in the question of who the subject of the gospel story was: “The Nestorian controversy was not primarily about whether there were two realities in Christ and whether he was a single person; the dispute concerned who that one personal subject was” – the Logos who assumed flesh, or a composite being that came into existence at the incarnation.

Why would Cyril think this so central? The question for him is whether God has indeed come to be with us. For Cyril, grace is God’s own personal self-gift, and unless the Logos Himself has come in the flesh, assumed our nature, and unless He Himself is the actor in the drama of the gospel, then He cannot give Himself. A composite person cannot give God to humans. A composite person is not the eternal Son of the Father, who can give the gift of sonship to creatures. As Fairbairn puts it, “If he were not a single person, he would not possess the natural sonship [to the Father] that alone makes our salvation possible. If Christ’s one personal subject were not the Logos himself, then the Logos would no longer be the instigator of all Christ’s actions, and God could not give himself to us in grace.”

Cyril insisted that only a “synthetic” understanding of the union of the Logos and flesh could truly affirm the descent of God into our human situation: “Cyri linsists on the Logos’ direct personal presence in even the lowest of human situations. It was God the Logos who was born as a helpless baby; it was God the Logos who shed his blood and died on our behalf; it is through the Logos’ own humanity that we become sons of God. These bold assertions do not mean that Cyril has abandoned his belief in the Logos’ impassibility; he insists that the Logos suffers in his flesh, not in his own nature. But his understanding of grace as God’s giving us himself demands that he affirm the Logos’ personal presence in the lowest depths of human experience. Indeed, it is precisely in the depths that we need God’s presence the most, and if God were not to meet us there, we would have no hope of grace, adoption, or salvation, as Cyril understands these.” Like Athanasius, Cyril hammers on the point that the Son makes the entire human condition His own ( idios ).

In short, “Cyril saw the one subject of Christ as the Logos, as God himself who had added a concrete humanity to himself and thus embarked upon human life in order to give us his natural communion with the Father.” Composite Christologies could not the necessary work: “in Cyril’s eyes, to see Christ as a composite prosopon was to deny the crucial truth that the Logos himself was personally present with us. It did not matter to him how well or poorly Nestorius expressed the composite/semantic unity of Christ. If that unity was a composite, then Christ was not the Logos himself.”

Nestorius and Theodore did not think that the direct personal presence of the Logos was necessary for salvation. It was enough that the Logos “gave his co-operation in the pioneering work of the assumed man as that man blazed the trail to the second katastasis, and the graced man could then give that aid to those who followed.” Grace for them was some thing that God gives. For Cyril, and later for Cassian, grace is simply “God’s giving himself to humanity,” and that “demanded that they see the incarnation as a direct personal presence of God in the world, and thus that they see the single subject of Christ as the Logos himself, the one who took humanity into his own person.”

This is why the Theotokos formula took on such weight: “the key question that exposed this issue was whether the one born of Mary was the same one who had been begotten of the Father before the ages.” Composite Christologies said “No”: The one born of Mary did not exist until he was born, since the “one” is the divine-human combination that results from the incarnation. For Cyril and his party, the answer had to be Yes, because if the one born of Mary is not the very same One eternally begotten of the Father, the same One who lives in the eternal love of the Spirit with the Father, then the one born of Mary cannot give new birth or fellowship with the Trinity to sinners.