973
NESTORIUS
will help you to conquer the Persians." Nor did his fury against the heretics find vent only in words; he proceeded to deeds of persecution which, by exciting tumults among the people, led to the effusion of blood. The Pelagians alone, with whose doctrine of free-will (but not of original sin) he sympathized, he treated in- dulgentlj-, receiving to himself Julian of Eclanum, Coelestius, and other banished leaders of that party, in- terceding for them in 429 with the emperor and with the pope Celestine, though, on account of the very un- favorable reports concerning Pelagianism which were spread by the layman Marius Mercator, then living in Constantinople, his intercessions were of no avail (comp. Schaff, Ch. Hist, iii, 716). While thus busily engaged in the persecution of others, Nestorius raised up even among the orthodox party in the Church a numerous host of enemies, who Avere not long in accusing him also of heresy. Having been trained in the strict Antiochian doctrine as to the clear distinction be- tween the divine and human natures of Christ, he and his friend Anastasius, whom he had brought with him from Antioch, could not fail to disapprove of some expressions then current in the Church, which evident- ly proceeded upon confused notions in respect to the two natures of Christ. One expression iu particular, the title Skotokoq, or Mother of God, applied to the Virgin Mary, more especially taken in connection with the excessive veneration of the Virgin which had be- gun to prevail, called forth the strongest reprobation on the part of Nestorius. Along with his friend Anas- tasius he took occasion in his public discourses to state, in the most emphatic manner, his objections to the cer- tainly very bold and equivocal expression mothei- of God, which had already been sometimes applied to the Virgin Mary by Origen, Alexander of Alexantlria, Atha- nasius, Basil, and others, and which, after the Arian con- troversy, and with the growth of the worship of Mary, had passed into the devotional language of the people (comp. Schaff, Ch. Hist, iii, 716, also 582, 583). The sense, or monstrous nonsense, of this term of course was not that the creature bore the Creator, or that the eternal Deity took its beginning from Mary, which would be the most absurd and the most wicked of all heresies, and a shocking blasphemy; but the expression was intended only to denote the indissoluble union of the divine and human natures in Christ, and the veritable incarnation of the Logos, who took the human nature from the bodj' of Mary, came forth God-Man from her womb, and as God-Man suffered on the cross. For Christ was born as a person, and suffered as a. person; and the personali- ty in Christ resided in his divinity, not in his humanity. So, in fact, the reasonable soul of man, which is the cen- tre of the human personality, participates in the suffer- ing and the death-struggle of the body, though the soul itself does not and cannot die. The Antiochian theolo- gy, however, could not conceive a human nature with- out a human personality, and this it strictly separated from the divine Logos. Therefore Theodore of Mop- suestia had already disputed the term theotolcos with all earnestness. "Mary," he says, "bore Jesus, not the Logos, for the Logos was, and continues to be, omni- present, though he dwelt in Jesus in a special manner from the beginning. Therefore Mary is strictly the mother of Christ, not the mother of God. Only in a figure, ;)e/- anaphoram, can she be called also the mother of God, because God was in a peculiar sense in Christ. Properly speaking, she gave birth to a man in whom the union with the Logos had begun, but was still so in- complete that he could not yet (till after his baptism) be called the Son of God." He even declared it " in- sane" to say that God was born of the Virgin ; " not God, but the temple in which God dwelt, was born of jV^ary." In a similar strain Nestorius and his friend Anastasius argued from the pulpit against the theotokon. Nestorius proposed the middle expression, mother of Christ (XpiaToruicog), because Christ was at the same time God and man. He delivered several discourses on