Controversy
The Archbishop of Constantinople — Nestorius, having asserted that Mary ought not to be referred to as the "Mother of God" (Theotokos in Greek, literally "God-bearer"), was denounced as a heretic; in combating this assertion of Patriarch Nestorius, Eutyches declared that Christ was "a fusion of human and divine elements", causing his own denunciation as a heretic twenty years after the First Council of Ephesus at the 451 AD Council of Chalcedon.
According to Nestorius, all the human experiences and attributes of Christ are to be assigned to 'the man', as a distinct personal subject from God the Word, though united to God the Word from the moment of his conception. In opposition to this, Eutyches inverted the assertion to the opposite extreme, asserting that human nature and divine nature were combined into the single nature of Christ: that of the incarnate Word. Although this accorded with the later teaching of Cyril of Alexandria, Eutyches went beyond Cyril in denying that Christ was 'consubstantial with us men', by which he did not intend to deny Christ's full manhood, but to stress his uniqueness.
Read more about this topic: Eutyches
Famous quotes containing the word controversy:
“And therefore, as when there is a controversy in an account, the parties must by their own accord, set up for right Reason, the Reason of some Arbitrator, or Judge, to whose sentence, they will both stand, or their controversy must either come to blows, or be undecided, for want of a right Reason constituted by Nature; so is it also in all debates of what kind soever.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)
“Ours was a highly activist administration, with a lot of controversy involved ... but I’m not sure that it would be inconsistent with my own political nature to do it differently if I had it to do all over again.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)