The Council of Ephesus

Extract

It is a striking instance of the wondrous ways of Divine Providence that the city whose past renown circled round its false cult of ‘great Diana of the Ephesians’ should be the place whence should be proclaimed to the world, and for all time, the Divine Maternity of Mary, παναγíα θεοτόκος, the All-holy Mother of God.

The Council of Ephesus, the fifteenth centenary of which occurs this year, is in importance second only to the Council of Nicaea. That earliest Oecumenical Council affirmed against Arius the Divinity of our Blessed Lord. This Synod of Ephesus by proclaiming the Divine Motherhood of Mary, affirmed against Nestorius, God-Incarnate, One Person in Two Natures, and that Person Divine.

In the controversies that led up to both these Councils the very existence of the Christian Faith was at stake. It was saved in the one by the test-word όμοούσιος (of one substance); it was saved in the other by the touchstone of orthodoxy θεοτóκος (Mother of God).

Nestorius, monk and priest of Antioch, became Patriarch of Constantinople in 428, and soon after, in his presence, the priest Anastasius preached violent diatribes against the term Theotokos.

‘It was impossible,’ cried he, ‘that God should be born of a woman. Let no one call Mary Theotokos, for Mary was but a woman.’ The people were roused. But the Patriarch, instead of showing them that there was little to fear in a term which everyone used, and which had been employed for at least two centuries by great writers, such as Origen, Eusebius of Caesarea, Athanasius, Cyril of Jerusalem, Didymus, Gregory Nazianzen, Basil, Theophilus of Alexandria, and others, himself endorsed the sermons of his chaplain and began to commit to writing and to circulate widely his objectionable doctrines.