Against Nestorius, defined that Mary is Theotokos, Mother of God, because the one born of her is a single person, the Word made flesh.
- Where
- Ephesus — Selçuk, Turkey
- Convoked by
- The emperors Theodosius II and Valentinian III, by an edict of 19 November 430, summoning the bishops for Pentecost 431
- Pope
- Celestine I, who had already condemned Nestorius at a Roman synod in 430; his legates were the bishops Arcadius and Projectus and the priest Philip
- Emperor
- Theodosius II
- Sat
- Opened 22 June 431, before the Antiochene bishops and the papal legates had arrived
- Sessions
- Held in the church of Mary at Ephesus. The proceedings were disorderly: Cyril opened without John of Antioch, who arrived days later and held a rival council that deposed Cyril
- Bishops present
- About 200 bishops at the opening; 197 subscribed the sentence against Nestorius, with more added later
What it faced
Nestorius came to Constantinople as its archbishop in 428 with a reputation for zeal and a horror of anything that sounded like paganism. When he heard the people of the city calling Mary Theotokos — God-bearer — he objected. God has no mother; a creature cannot be the source of the uncreated. He proposed Christotokos, Christ-bearer, as the safer word.
The instinct was pious and the consequence was ruinous. To say that Mary bore only the man, and that the Word came to dwell in him, is to end with two subjects in Christ — the Son of God and the son of Mary — joined in an alliance rather than a person. Then it is not God who is born, not God who thirsts, not God who dies. Cyril of Alexandria saw that the whole of salvation was at stake in the title: if the one who suffered on the cross is not the Word himself, the cross is the death of a righteous man and nothing more.
Cyril sent Nestorius three increasingly hard letters, the third carrying twelve anathemas. Both men appealed to Rome. Celestine held a synod in 430, condemned Nestorius and gave him ten days to recant. Then the emperor called a council anyway — and it convened in an atmosphere closer to a faction fight than a deliberation.
What it defined
- ✠That the Blessed Virgin Mary is truly Theotokos, Mother of God — because the one she bore is a single person, and that person is the eternal Word made flesh.
- ✠That the union in Christ is hypostatic: God and man are united in one person, not merely associated in will or dignity.
- ✠That Nestorius is deposed from the episcopate and excluded from the college of priests.
- ✠That no one may compose or propose a creed other than the faith of Nicaea.
In its own words
“…the holy virgin bore in the flesh God who was united hypostatically with the flesh, for that reason we call her mother of God.”
“If anyone does not confess that Emmanuel is God in truth, and therefore that the holy virgin is the mother of God (for she bore in a fleshly way the Word of God become flesh), let him be anathema.”
“Our lord Jesus Christ, who has been blasphemed by him, has determined through this most holy synod that the same Nestorius should be stripped of his episcopal dignity and removed from the college of priests.”
Its decrees
Ephesus issued decrees rather than a numbered code of canons.
- Decree on the faithForbids anyone to produce, write or compose a creed other than that of Nicaea; those who do are deposed if clergy, anathematised if laity.
- Against the MessaliansCondemns the Euchite or Messalian enthusiasts, who held that prayer alone, not the sacraments, drives out the indwelling demon.
- On CyprusConfirms the ancient independence of the church of Cyprus against the claims of Antioch — the charter of an autocephalous church.
- ✕It did not make Mary a goddess, or say she is the source of Christ's divinity. The title is a statement about her Son, not about her. The Church has always taught that Mary is the mother of the person who is God, not the origin of the divine nature — Cyril says so in the same letter the council received.
- ✕It did not decide the matter cleanly. Cyril opened the council before John of Antioch and the papal legates arrived; John held a counter-council that deposed Cyril; the emperor at first arrested both. Judged as a procedure, Ephesus was a scandal. Judged by what it defined, it was right — and the Church has always distinguished the two.
- ✕It did not condemn the Antiochene school as such. The reconciliation two years later shows that what was condemned was a way of speaking about Christ, not the whole theological tradition of Antioch.
- ✕It did not settle the language of natures. That was left in a state the next twenty years would prove unstable, and Chalcedon had to finish the work.
What people think it did
Ephesus invented the cult of Mary by baptising the local worship of the goddess Artemis, whose great temple stood in the same city.
What happened: A popular claim with nothing behind it. The definition is Christological, not Marian: it is about who her Son is, and the title Theotokos is used to protect the unity of his person. The word was in Christian use long before the council — Origen is reported to have used it in the third century, and it appears in the prayer <em>Sub tuum praesidium</em>, whose papyrus is generally dated to the third or fourth century. Nothing in the acts refers to Artemis.
Nestorius taught that Christ was merely a man, and the Assyrian Church of the East is therefore heretical.
What happened: Nestorius denied that too, and said so. Modern scholarship, since the recovery of his <em>Bazaar of Heracleides</em> in 1895, has argued about how far his actual position matched the one condemned. The Catholic Church's own judgment on the Church of the East today is the 1994 declaration: the same faith in Christ, differently expressed. What the council condemned remains condemned; whether Nestorius himself held it is a genuinely open historical question.
What followed
In 433 Cyril and John of Antioch signed a Formula of Union, drafted in Antiochene language and accepted by the Alexandrian: one Christ, one Son, one Lord, in whom is a union of two natures, and therefore Mary is Theotokos. It is one of the great acts of theological peacemaking, and it cost both men something to sign.
Those who could not accept the deposition of Nestorius went east, beyond the Roman frontier, and became the Church of the East — which carried the Gospel to Persia, to India and along the Silk Road to China, and which the West long and unfairly called simply 'Nestorian'.
That fifteen-hundred-year quarrel was formally closed on 11 November 1994, when John Paul II and the Assyrian patriarch Mar Dinkha IV signed a Common Christological Declaration confessing the same faith in Christ and acknowledging that the two traditions had used different words for it. The Assyrian Church still does not use Theotokos; the declaration recognises 'Mother of Christ our God and Saviour' as expressing the same faith.
Follow it further
Sources
- Council of Ephesus — letters, anathemas, sentence, Formula of Union (English)
- Common Christological Declaration with the Assyrian Church of the East (1994)
Every date, figure and quotation on this page was checked against the conciliar text or a published translation before it was written, and independently re-checked by three separate passes over dates, quotations and theology. Where the sources disagree — attendance figures above all — the page gives the range rather than choosing.