IN this small book I publish four lectures which I was invited to give in a course of "advanced lectures in theology" at the University of London, March, 1913. The lectures were for the most part originally written in German. I translated them with the kind assistance of Miss Ida Southhall, M.A., of Birmingham, then a guest at my house. But it is not she alone to whom I am indebted. I have also to thank my dear host during my stay in London, Professor H. J. , who read two of my lectures before I gave them, and the corrector of the Cambridge University Press and two of our American students, Mr. H. Harper, B.A., of Avalan (U.S.A.), and Mr. Charles Baillie, B.D., of Picton (Canada), whose kind suggestions I often utilized in reading the proofs. However, I beg my readers to put it to my account, that in spite of all these friendly helpers, the German author very often reveals himself.
In quoting Nestorius' "Book of Heraclides" I have given the pages both of the Syriac text and of Na's French translation—not in order to raise in my reader's mind the idea that I made use of the Syriac text. Having forgotten nearly all I once knew of Syriac, I examined the Syriac text with the help of various friends only in a very few places, and I realize how much the ordinary use of the French translation alone is to be regarded as a defect in my lectures. I have quoted the numbers of the pages of the original Syriac text, as given by Nau, only in order that in this way the places where the quotations are to be found may be more accurately indicated than by merely quoting the pages of Nau's translation.
Since this book went to press I have made the acquaintance of a lecture by Dr. , a Roman-Catholic scholar, entitled Die Irrlehre des Nestorius (Trier, 1912, 29 pages), and of the interesting chapters on "the tragedy of Nestorius" and "the council of Chalcedon" in L. Duchesne's Histoire ancienne de l'Église (tom. iii, Paris, 1911, pp. 313–388 and 389–454). The latter makes little use of the newly discovered Liber Heraclidis and does not give much detail about the teaching of Nestorius. Nevertheless I regret very much that I did not know earlier this treatment of the matter, surely more learned and more impartial than any other of Roman-Catholic origin. Dr. Junglas in giving a short delineation of Nestorius' "heresy" has utilized the "Book of Heraclides" and, in my opinion, made some valuable remarks about the terminology of Nestorius which are not to be found elsewhere. However, in his one short lecture he was not able to go into details, and there are many things which he has failed to observe. There is a third Roman-Catholic research into the doctrine of Nestorius (Jugi, article "Éphèse, concile de" in the Dictionnaire de la théologie catholique, Fasc. 37. Paris, 1911, pp. 137–163), which, as I understand, endeavours more eagerly than Dr. Junglas to show that Nestorius was justly condemned; but I have not had the opportunity to read this article.
As regards my own treatment of the matter, I do not pretend to have exhausted the subject nor to have found the definite and final answers to the various questions aroused about Nestorius' life and doctrine by his Liber Heraclidis. I trust that I have indicated more clearly than Professor Bethune-Baker has already done the way by which we may arrive at a real understanding of Nestorius' peculiar ideas. Others, I hope, may be stimulated by the present lectures to a further study of Nestorius' christology. The subject is deserving of interest. For there is no other christology in the ancient church so "modern" as his and perhaps that of his teachers whose dogmatical works are lost.
F. L.
Halle on the Saale, Germany,
January 20th, 1914.
The subject of my lectures—"Nestorius and his position in the history of Christian Doctrine"—seems at the first glance to have little interest for us modern men. Almost 1500 years have passed since Nestorius played his rôle in history. And this role was in the orthodox church a very transitory one.
For the Persian-Nestorian or Syrian-Nestorian church (as the language of this church was Syriac) Nestorius, it is true, became a celebrated saint; and still to-day small remains of this once far-reaching church are to be found in the vicinity of the Urmia Lake in the north-west of Persia and south of it in the mountains of Turkish Kurdistan. But in the orthodox church Nestorius was even in his own time an ephemeral appearance. In the year 428 a.d. he became bishop of Constantinople and as early as 431 he was deposed. Four years later he was banished to Oasis in Egypt, and up to a few years ago the common opinion was that he died soon after in his exile.
For the orthodox church he remained merely one of the most condemned heretics. He was reproached not only for having forbidden the title θεοτόκος, mother of God, as applied to Mary the virgin, but it was told of him that he, separating the divine and the human nature of Christ, saw in our Saviour nothing but an inspired man[1]. What was right in his statements, viz. his opposition to all monophysitic thinking, was held to be maintained by the famous letter of Leo the Great to Flavian of Constantinople of the year 449, acknowledged by the council of Chalcedon, and by the creed of that council itself. The rest of what he taught was regarded as erroneous and not worth the notice of posterity.
That this is not a tenable theory I hope to prove in my lectures.
To-day it is my aim merely to show that just at the present time different circumstances have led to the awakening of a fresh interest in Nestorius.
The church of the ancient Roman Empire did not punish its heretics merely by deposition, condemnation, banishment and various deprivations of rights, but, with the purpose of shielding its believers against poisonous influence, it destroyed all heretical writings. No work of Arius, Marcellus, Aetius and Eunomius e.g., not to speak of the earlier heretics, has been preserved in more than fragments consisting of quotations by their opponents. A like fate was purposed for the writings of Nestorius: an edict of the Emperor Theodosius II, dating from the 30th of July 435 ordered them to be burnt[2]. Even the Persian church, about the same time won over to Nestorianism, had to suffer under this edict: only a few works of Nestorius came into its possession for translation into Syriac.
This we learn through Ebed-Jesu, metropolitan of Nisibis (†1318), the most famous theologian of the Nestorians in the middle ages and who has given us the most complete account of the writings of Nestorius. He introduces in his catalogue of Syrian authors[3] the notice about Nestorius with the following words: Nestorius the patriarch wrote many excellent books which the blasphemers (viz. the Antinestorians) have destroyed. As those which evaded destruction he mentions, besides the liturgy of Nestorius, i.e. one of the liturgies used by the Nestorians, which without doubt is wrongly ascribed to Nestorius, five works of the patriarch. The first of these is the book called Tragedy, the second the Book of Heraclides, the third the Letter addressed to Cosmas, the fourth a Book of letters and the fifth a Book of homilies and sermons.
For us the edict of Theodosius against the writings of Nestorius has had a still more important result. Until 1897 nothing was known about the second book mentioned by Ebed-Jesu, i.e. about the Book of Heraclides. Also the Letter addressed to Cosmas mentioned third by Ebed-Jesu had to be counted and is still to be counted as lost[4]. Of the three other works ascribed by Ebed-Jesu to Nestorius we had and still have only fragments—occasional quotations in the works of his enemies and his friends.
Among the hostile writings in which we find such fragments are to be named especially the works of his chief opponent Cyril of Alexandria; then the proceedings of the council of Ephesus; then some works of Marius Mercator, a Latin writer who in the time of Nestorius lived in Constantinople and translated a series of quotations from Nestorius given by Cyril, three letters of Nestorius and also, but with considerable omissions, nine of his sermons; finally the church history of Evagrius (living about 590). The latter gives us[5] an account of two works of Nestorius dating from the time of his exile, one of which must be the Tragedy, while the other could not be identified up to the last ten years, and he inserts in his narration extracts from two interesting letters of the banished heretic. Among the friends who preserved for us fragments of Nestorius the Nestorians of later date played a very unimportant part. Important is a Latin work which has connection with the earliest friends of Nestorius, the so-called Synodicon, known since 1682[6] or, in complete form, since 1873[7], and which is a later adaptation of a work of Bishop Irenaeus of Tyrus, a partisan of Nestorius, which was entitled "Tragedy" like the lost "Tragedy" of Nestorius, upon which perhaps it was based.
The quotations of these enemies and friends represent, as I said, fragments of three books of Nestorius mentioned by Ebed-Jesu, viz. the Book of letters, the Book of sermons and the Tragedy. The first two of these three works of Nestorius need no further explanation. The third, the Tragedy, about which Evagrius and the Synodicon teach us, must have been a polemical work, in which Nestorius, as Evagrius says, defended himself against those who blamed him for having introduced unlawful innovations and for having acted wrongly in demanding the council of Ephesus[8]. The title which the book bears must have been chosen because Nestorius told here the tragedy of his life up to his banishment to Oasis in Egypt.
Fragments of other books of Nestorius not mentioned by Ebed-Jesu were not known to us ten years ago[9].
All the fragments previously known and in addition to them more than 100 new fragments preserved especially by the Syrian-monophysitic literature I collected and edited in 1905 in a volume entitled Nestoriana[10]. It is with pleasure that here in England I mention the collaboration of the learned English scholar Stanley A. Cook, an expert in Syrian language and literature, without whose help I never could have used the Syriac texts in the British Museum. I will not speak long of the book which this help and that of a German scholar then at Halle, Dr. G. , enabled me to compose. Three remarks only shall be made. Firstly: The Syriac fragments gave us knowledge of a book of Nestorius not mentioned by Ebed-Jesu, which was written in the form of a dialogue and which was certainly a comprehensive work, although the number of the fragments handed down to us is very small. The title of this work is The Theopaschites, that is, the man who thinks God had suffered, a title certainly chosen because Nestorius in this dialogue opposed the Cyrillian party, which he accused of holding a doctrine which imagined the God in Christ suffering.
Secondly: The introductory headings in the Syriac fragments of the sermons of Nestorius in combination with a reconstruction of the order of the leaves in the manuscripts used by Marius Mercator and by the council of Ephesus, offered the possibility of arranging the fragments of the sermons of Nestorius in such a manner that more than 30 sermons could be clearly discerned and that not a few of them were recognisable in their essential contents and their characteristics.
Thirdly: By the help of the quotations I succeeded in finding—as did also at almost the same time a Catholic scholar[11] independently of me—the original Greek of one sermon of Nestorius in a sermon preserved in a manuscript at Dresden and printed in 1839 as a work of Chrysostomus. It is a sermon on the high priesthood of Christ in many respects especially characteristic of the teaching of Nestorius.
Thus my Nestoriana gave for the first time an opportunity to survey the remains of the works of Nestorius then accessible. They were the first factor in arousing fresh interest in Nestorius. They inspired, as the author himself says, the writing of a monograph on the christology of Nestorius by a Roman Catholic chaplain, Dr[12].
But the second factor now to be treated is still more important and surely more interesting. Let me give some introductory remarks before treating the subject itself.
Some few heretics of the ancient church were fortunately enabled long after their death to triumph over the condemnation or even destruction which the orthodox church pronounced against their writings.
Of Apollinaris of Laodicea, the heretic whose doctrine was to Nestorius a special cause of offence, we have still not a few writings because the Apollinarists secretly introduced the works of their master into the church literature, inscribing them with the names of orthodox authors of good renown, e.g. Athanasius, Julius of Rome, Gregorius Thaumaturgos. Since these fraudes Apollinaristarum[13], of which as early as the 6th century some church writers had an idea or at least a suspicion[14], were carefully examined, a small collection of works of Apollinaris could be made. Prof. of Jena gave such a collection in his Apollinaris von Laodicea in the year 1904.
Severus of Antioch, the most conspicuous of the Monophysites of the 6th century, continued to be admired in the Syrian monophysite church, although the orthodox church had anathematized him. Hence not an unimportant part of the works of Severus translated into Syriac has been preserved, especially among the Syriac manuscripts of the British Museum. And, besides others[15], your famous countryman E. W. has, to the great advantage of historical science, begun the publication of this material[16].
Pelagius, the well-known western contemporary of Nestorius, whose doctrine Augustine opposed, wrote beside other smaller dogmatical works a large commentary on the Epistles of Saint Paul, the original text of which was held to be lost. An orthodox adaptation only of this work, as was the opinion of ancient and modern scholars, existed in a commentary regarded since olden times as belonging to the works of Hieronymus and it has been printed among them. But nobody took much notice of these commentaries; for because they were regarded as having been revised they could teach nothing new about Pelagius, and one could only make use of those thoughts which otherwise were known to be his. Lately we have come by curious bypaths to valuable knowledge about the Pelagius-commentary which we hope will soon put us in possession of the original text of Pelagius. The well-known Celtic scholar, Heinrich Zimmer, formerly professor at the University of Berlin (†1910), was led, as we see in his book Pelagius in Irland (1901), to traces of the original Pelagius-commentary by quotations in Irish manuscripts. He even believed he had recovered the original commentary itself; for a manuscript which he found in the monastery of S. Gallen (Switzerland) in his opinion nearly resembled the original text, in spite of some additions, and showed that the Pseudo-Hieronymus, i.e. the form printed among the works of Hieronymus, was more authentic than was previously supposed. This judgment on the manuscript of S. Gallen and the Pseudo-Hieronymus proved, it is true, to be too optimistic. But the investigation, begun by Professor Zimmer, has been furthered by German and English scholars by means of extensive study of manuscripts. Professor A. Souter of Aberdeen, who played a prominent rô1e in this research and who really succeeded in finding at Karlsruhe a manuscript of the original Pelagius-commentary, is right in hoping that he will be able to give to theological science the original text of Pelagius within a few years[17].
In a still more curious manner Priscillian, the first heretic, who in consequence of his being accused was finally put to death (385), has been enabled to speak to us in his own words. None of his writings were preserved; we only had the accounts of his opponents. Then there was suddenly found, 27 years ago, in the University library at Würzburg (Bavaria) a manuscript of the 5th or 6th century containing 11 treatises of the old heretic perfectly intact—the genuineness of which cannot in the least be doubted. It must remain a riddle for us how this manuscript could be preserved without attention having been drawn to it. Nevertheless it is a matter of fact that these 11 treatises of Priscillian now, more than 1500 years after his death, can again be read; they were printed in the edition of the discoverer, Dr. , in 1889.
A similar fortune was prepared for Nestorius. A Syriac translation of his Book of Heraclides mentioned above, which was made about 540 a.d., is preserved in a manuscript, dating from about 1100, in the library of the Nestorian Patriarch at Kotschanes in Persian Turkestan. The American missionaries in the neighbourhood of the Urmia Lake having heard about this manuscript, attempted to gain further information about it, and in 1889 a Syrian priest, by name Auscha’nâ, succeeded in making secretly a hurried copy of the manuscript for the library of the missionaries at Urmia. One copy of this Urmia copy came into the University library of Strassburg, another into the possession of Professor Bethune-Baker of Cambridge; a fourth copy has been made directly after the original at Kotschanes for the use of the Roman Catholic editor, the well-known Syriac scholar Paul Bedja.
The rediscovery of this work of Nestorius was first made known when the existence of the Strassburg manuscript was heard of, in 1897[18]. The publication of the Syriac text was delayed longer than scholars seemed to have had a right to hope. The first detailed notice of the work, therefore, was given by Professor Bethune-Baker in his work, Nestorius and his teaching, edited 1908. This scholar had been enabled by means of an English translation of a friend to make use of the Book of Heraclides or "Bazaar of Heraclides" as he called it. Long quotations from the book of Nestorius made this publication of great value. As late as 1910 the edition of the Syriac text by Paul Bedjan appeared and at the same time a French translation by F. Nau[19]. It is especially this publication which is able at the present time to arouse interest in Nestorius.
First the preface of the Syriac translator attracts our attention. The translator remarks at the conclusion that the following book of Nestorius belongs to the controversial writings on the faith and must be read after the "Theopaschites" and the "Tragedy", which he wrote as apologetic answers to those who had blamed him for having demanded a council[20]. This remark not only confirms what we already knew from Evagrius about the Tragedy of Nestorius, but it enables us also to identify the second book of the banished Nestorius known to Evagrius. Evagrius tells us that it was directed against a certain Egyptian—Cyril is often called by Nestorius "the Egyptian"—and that it was written διαλεκτικῶς[21], apparently meaning "in the form of a dialogue". These words of Evagrius even before the discovery of the Book of Heraclides could be held to point to the Theopaschites, which has in the fragments that are preserved the dialogue form. Nevertheless in my Nestoriana I did not venture to make this identification because the book known to Evagrius must have also contained historical-polemical passages, while the fragments we have present no such material. Now according to the preface of the translator of the Book of Heraclides the Theopaschites really contained historical-polemical material. One can therefore now without doubt identify it with the second book notified by Evagrius.
More interesting than the preface is naturally the book itself. Its title, "Tegurtâ" of Heraclides of Damascus, according to Bedjan[22] and Nau[23] corresponding in Greek to Πραγματεία Ἡρακλείδου τοῦ Δαμασκηνοῦ, hence "Treatise of Heraclides"—not "Bazaar of Heraclides" as Professor Bethune-Baker translated—is the most puzzling thing in the whole work. The Syriac translator remarks in his preface that Heraclides was a noble and educated man living in the neighbourhood of Damascus, and that Nestorius puts this name in the title of his book because he feared that his own name would prevent people from reading it[24]. The Syriac translator therefore had already found the title Treatise of Heraclides in his Greek original. He does not seem to have known anything about the meaning of this title. The vague remarks he makes about Heraclides tell nothing more than anyone might guess without his help. The book itself in its present incomplete condition—about one-sixth of the whole is missing—nowhere explains the title, Heraclides not being mentioned at all. And Nestorius has made no effort to conceal his authorship. The names of the persons which, in the dialogue of the first part of the book, head the single portions of the text, viz. NestoriusSophroniusHeraclidesBethune-Bake[25]