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The Marian Council of Chalcedon

 Sat, 5 Jan 2008  PRINT   E-MAIL  

by Fr. Peter Damien Fehlner, FI

Extremes have a way of producing, or at least occasioning the appearance of their direct opposites. Indeed, even before the appearance of Nestorius on the ecclesial scene and the condemnation of his heresy, trends which would lead to the promotion of the exactly contrary and equally false view of the hypostatic union and role of Mary in bringing it to pass, were already active.

Nestorius naturalized or minimized the Incarnation by affirming two natures and two persons in Christ. Sounded logical: two natures begotten, one from eternity of the Father, the other of Mary in time. In Christ, therefore, there were two persons, united to form one moral person. Best of all, the theory’s easy to accept; it doesn’t require the obedience of faith to accept intellectually, nor the witness of faith before scoffers as does the miraculous, the strictly supernatural. A moment’s reflection, however, should tell us that a merely natural religious theory promising salvation cannot be true, and that, in the end, all heresy concerning the Incarnation and divine Maternity is simply a rationalization of an unwillingness to stand with Mary at the foot of the Cross and by the altar.

Eutyches, a rather puritanical monk of Constantinople, in opposing the error of Nestorius and his disciples, employed a reverse kind of logic: one person in Christ, therefore one nature. Divinity and humanity were united in the unity of a preexisting person; therefore, united, the two natures are one nature. Est pluribus unum. Just as soul and body unite to form one human nature, so divinity and humanity unite in Jesus to form one theandric reality, the one Christ.

Very logical, but in its own way just as rationalistic as the views of Nestorius. The major difference between the two is this: whereas in the practical order Nestorius stressed the autonomy and sufficiency of the natural, Eutyches stressed the supernatural or divine to the exclusion of the human and natural. Here is the remote basis for a slogan still very popular among large numbers of Western Christians separated from Rome: God alone, Christ alone, grace alone, Scripture alone, faith alone. The stress is always on the “alone” of the supernatural, to the exclusion of our free cooperation with the Saviour in the work of salvation, first of all in the Virgin Mother and above all in the divine Maternity and Redemption. Not all who more or less are affected by the trend given classic form by Eutyches are consistent. Some will accept the divine Maternity in some sense, but never the Mediation of Mary as Coredemptrix and Dispenser of all grace.

Why this prejudice against our cooperation in the work of salvation, against good works, against the very concept of merit, so essential to any genuine affirmation of liberty as the key characteristic of a human act of cooperation? Once again the answer is to be found in a faulty concept of the Incarnation, and more exactly of the hypostatic union. The Nestorian error excluded the supernatural factor of grace as key to the goodness or merit of our works in view of salvation. The monophysite error (that of Eutyches) excluded the very possibility of merit in fusing, or better, confusing the humanity of Jesus with His divinity as a kind of single, theandric reality or nature.

What was wrong with this? To many then, and still today, this sounds plausible, and hence many are inclined to say: if Christ is the one Mediator between God and men (cf. 1 Tim 2: 5), then Mary is not Mediatrix and Coredemptrix. It was St. Leo the Great who caught the subtle equivocation in this “confusion” of natures. We may compare, up to a point, the hypostatic union with the union of soul and body. But only up to a point, because there’s a crucial difference: body and soul considered in isolation are not complete natures; they unite to form one integral nature or reality known as human nature. Divinity and humanity cannot unite thus, because each is a complete nature already, and were they fused, as Eutyches proposed, each would cease to be itself, or one or the other would absorb its partner. God cannot be part of a creature and remain God; and a creature cannot remain a creature if part of God.

Eutyches claimed that the hypostatic union defined as one person, therefore one nature, was merely a fusion, not a confusion of natures, and so the Son by virtue of His divinity remained “consubstantial” with the Father, as defined at the Council of Nicea (325).

St. Leo then posed to him the key question: in his (Eutyches’) view, was the Incarnate Son also “consubstantial” with us? Eutyches replied in the negative. Christ is truly human, but His humanity is a divinized humanity, whereas ours is merely an ordinary, natural humanity. Christ can save us because it is God alone Who is acting in His divinized humanity. In our terms, Mary is not a maternal Mediatrix Who actively begets the Saviour, but merely a virgin through Whom the divinized man passes to appear in the world as God-with-us.

St. Leo then explained why this view is just as fatally wrong as that of Nestorius: it renders null the entire purpose of the Incarnation, namely, that a divine Person without ceasing to be divine and so consubstantial with the Father becomes consubstantial with us in being born of the Virgin Mary. The humanity assumed by the Word hypostatically is a complete, fully natural human nature, consubstantial with ours. That is the realistic basis for our sharing in the divine nature (cf. 2 Pet 1: 4), in the adoption of sonship (cf. Gal 4: 4-7). All of this, as St. Paul hints, depends on the maternal Mediation of the Woman, whereby the Son of God came to be born as man, to be born under the law (of suffering for sin), but being man-God was able to save those under the law unable to save themselves. All this, St. Leo insists repeatedly, hinges on Christ’s consubstantiality with Mary. She is not merely Mother of Christ as Nestorius said, but virgin Mother of God. But as perpetual virgin, She is truly and not merely apparently mother of the God Who became man for our sake, that is of the Christ: Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God, exclaimed St. Peter (cf. Mt 16: 16).

Once we appreciate the “consubstantiality” of Jesus with Mary, we grasp why in a supernatural view of the Incarnation and Redemption, the maternal Mediation of Mary is so important. The Incarnation, as willed by God in the one economy of salvation, is Marian in mode, because Jesus and Mary are jointly predestined: Mediatrix in the Mediator. Of course Christ is our one and only Mediator (cf. 1 Tim 2: 5): not to the exclusion of our cooperation, and above all the unique cooperation of Mary, but to its inclusion. This is why He became Incarnate, says Bl. John Duns Scotus: not to exclude, but to make possible our cooperation in a truly human way. That is why the merit and satisfaction of Christ on the Cross and on the altar is not an action of God alone, but of a man Who is God. That is why in coming into the world and in leaving it He can be joined actively by His Mother, and through that Immaculate Mother by us. For through Her we are consubstantial with Him, both in being and in operation.

Fr. Peter Damien Fehlner is a priest of the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate. He is a doctor of dogmatic theology and professor of theology in various seminaries in North America and Europe. He wrote several books on Marian and Franciscan topics. His latest book in English was on St. Maximilian Kolbe.

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