Richard Price is head of the History of Christianity subject group at Heythrop College, University of London. His previous publications include Theodoret, History of the Monks of Syria: A Translation and Commentary, and Augustine. Mary Whitby is Instructor in Greek and Latin in the University of Oxford and Lecturer in Ancient Greek at Merton College, Oxford. She is a General Editor of the Translated Texts for Historians series.
Chalcedon in context is a fine companion to the recently translated Acts, a careful exploration of the complexity of council records as historical sources, and a fitting beginning for a well-conceived new series. This volume is obviously for the specialist, yet a requirement for every library. With regard to thoroughness and overall attention, there is no equivalent to this collection available in English: each essay, followed by a comprehensive bibliography, offers yet one more illustration of how Chalcedon continues to speak to all of Christ's Church. These eleven essays, preceded by an introduction by Averil Cameron, derive from a conference held in Oxford in 2006 to mark the publication in 2005 of the Acts of the Council of Chalcedon in an English translation by Richard Price and Michael Gaddis. I reviewed that three-volume book in JTS, ns 59 (2008), pp. 380-3. I would add to what I wrote there that it notably advances historical understanding of the council and its business: it has rendered more accessible its records and, by the generally candid and unpartisan respect evident in the annotations and mostly well-judged comment, it enables all students to evaluate the long-standing, if not indeed permanent, theological significance of the council. The same approach and the same virtues are evident in the present companion volume. Without exception the essays are worth reading; each evokes thought, each invites questions and responses beyond the scope of such a review as this. I catalogue and describe the pieces. David Gwynn writes 'The Council of Chalcedon and the definition of Christian tradition'. Tradition at the council is visibly in process not merely of definition but of creation as authorities were chosen and designated. He quotes Gibbon who writes, with some perceived justice, of the ossification of the ancient theology as it became fixed and inviolate; Newman, on the other hand, seems to be preferred, who appealed to what one might call the Church's dynamic conservatism in remembering its past. Gwynn lightly evokes (he can scarcely do more in the space he has) the duty of historical theology to discriminate between 'remembering' and 'fabricating'. Examples of duty being done appear throughout the contributions here. Thomas Graumann, ' "Reading" the First Council of Ephesus', looks at the way the Acts of Ephesus 431 were composed and creatively construed at Chalcedon 20 years on. The 'apple of discord' (as Theodoret called Cyril's Third Letter to Nestorius with the 12 chapters) and explanations of how successive councils disposed of it figure here and in Richard Price's 'The second council of Constantinople and the malleable past'; the title sufficiently explains the content. Fergus Millar's 'The Syriac acts of the second council of Ephesus (449)' adds to the sum of knowledge by description and analysis of the Syriac versions. Price's 'The Council of Chalcedon (451): a narrative' neatly recapitulates the burden of the story as already given in the published Acts; and in 'Truth, omission and fiction in the Acts of Chalcedon' Price reassuringly, and I judge truly, concludes that 'we have no reason to suppose that the Acts of Chalcedon are seriously misleading as to the proceedings of the council', despite some examples to the contrary. Andrew Louth asks the difficult question 'Why did the Syrians reject the Council of Chalcedon?' and answers 'for the same reason as most of the east: because they judged Chalcedon to have betrayed the faith of Cyril, in which they saw the faith of the Church'. All historical theologians must regret that an alleged intrinsic contrast and opposition between Antioch and Alexandria and their Christologies (as though it were somehow owing to the water supply) still figures in histories of doctrine. Very rightly Louth rebuts this quasi-scholastic simplification and goes to the heart of the matter: what Cyril said was what people knew (and, of course, that is always a matter of epistemology) was the Christian religion, and the Syrians thought the council and Leo in particular had sold the pass to Nestorius. Catherine Cubitt writes on 'The Lateran council of 649 as an ecumenical council'. Maximus the Confessor (I simplify) claimed it was so and constructed (but did not fabricate) the records and 'tradition' itself. Judith Herrin writes on 'The Quinisext council (692) as a continuation of Chalcedon' particularly in connection with the notorious 'Canon 28' and the status of the see of Constantinople. Charlotte Roueche on 'Acclamations at the Council of Chalcedon' describes their important function in the context of assembly and debate. This essay leads neatly into the last, by Michael Whitby, 'An unholy crew? Bishops behaving badly at church councils'. Church councils were, he thinks, mostly well conducted affairs, but Chalcedon presented unusually contentious matters, and was clearly noisy and liable to become almost uncontrollable at critical points. If there is a fault in the book (and when there is so much that is well said, true, and worth saying that it seems hypercritical to mention it) there is a tendency to improve the drama. It makes a better tale, maybe even a truer tale, if Dioscorus merely made Cyril's heirs 'disgorge [what] they had improperly purloined out of church funds' (p. 77); but the complaint against Dioscorus by the allegedly injured parties was never brought to trial and its justice cannot now be known. And is not Dioscorus too easily cast as heroic victim when it is said that he refused the summons to appear for judgement 'not out of cowardice still less of a guilty conscience, but to spare his supporters' (ibid.)? Can that sort of thing be known except by face-to-face encounter in court: must you not have seen the defendant and looked him in the eye? The drama is improved if Cyril is portrayed as ever on the march, as it were, tracking and eradicating the heresy of Nestorius and his master Theodore, and forced only by the imperial court to moderation and peace. I think that impression will be the one conveyed. Certainly when Richard Price writes, 'Under imperial pressure Cyril of Alexandria made peace with his Syrian opponents in 433' (p. 124), he appears to have reversed the narrative. Cyril paid out lavish sweeteners at court to make them oblige John of Antioch to engage in dialogue. Theodosius the emperor distanced himself as a matter of policy; no reconciliation would happen without intervention on the part of the court because John was in law, and I should have thought in reality, the aggrieved party: an Esau to Cyril's Jacob, who had tricked his brother into allowing him to start the conciliar meeting without him. 'Using imperial pressure' would fit the case. Similarly, I think that neither the knowledge that the emperor would be much relieved if Cyril refrained from excommunicating the dead (if Cyril in fact had been told so) nor 'Theodosius' intervention, demanding that the dead be left in peace' (p. 128) moved Cyril to pronounce against such condemnation in the cases of Theodore and Diodore. I suggest that he was content if Theodore and Diodore were recognized as seriously in error, dangerously misleading, and as having their teachings implicitly condemned at Ephesus 431 (see On the Creed, para. 5). I really doubt whether Theodosius' opinions mattered to Cyril more than Queen Victoria's apparently did to Gladstone: notice had to be taken of their utterance and suitably deferential attention paid to those that were not inconvenient; otherwise they were negligible. Cyril thought Origen's speculations pernicious but he did not curse him. As for the notion that he rebutted Nestorius by assimilating him to Arius (p. 130), that is the wrong way round: the argument against Cyril was that like Arius and Eunomius (and Apollinarius, too, of course) he did not acknowledge a human rational soul in Christ. But these modest criticisms and suggestions imply no disrespect for the virtues and merits of this collection of essays and only gratitude for the value of the enterprise undertaken in the translation and presentation of the Acts of one of the greatest events in the history of the Church. Chalcedon in Context is a result of a workshop gathered to mark the publication, in 2005, of the first full English translation of the Acts of the Council of Chalcedon by Richard Price and Michael Gaddis.1 By now Price has also added to the list a translation of the Acts of the Second Council of Constantinople in the same series of Translated Texts for Historians. It is a feat worthy of a celebration in the shape of the volume under review. Until 2005 the acts of the council of Chalcedon, available only in the superb edition of Eduard Schwartz, were either often ignored by historians or more often mined solely for nuggets of information to be used in a variety of contexts. It is perhaps appropriate to quote the words of the emperor Justinian, himself no stranger to ecclesiastical councils, as a preliminary assessment of the nature of church councils in late antiquity: Those in search of the truth ought to attend to the fact that often at councils some things are said by some of those found at them out of partiality or disagreement or ignorance, but no one attends to what is said individually by a few, but only to what is decreed by all by common consent; for if one were to choose to attend to such disagreement in the way they do, each council will be found refuting itself.2 The imperial couple, Marcian and Pulcheria, who summoned the council in 451, was greeted by the assembled bishops with acclamations hailing them as the new Constantine and the new Helena. The imperial appearance provides one highlight of the lengthy and contentious gathering whose history Richard Price, one of the two translators of the Acts of Chalcedon, recaptures ("The Council of Chalcedon: A Narrative", 70-91). As Price notes, almost all the public sessions at Chalcedon were chaired by a group of high government officials, reflecting the court's ongoing interest in the proceedings as well as its need to control the aggression so often displayed by God's servers (73). Price, whose recent translation work on church councils has reached monumental dimensions, contributed in addition two more articles to the present collection: reflections on facts and factoids in the edited Acts ("Truth, Omission, and Fiction in the Acts of Chalcedon", 92-106); and an overview of the vicissitudes of fifth century dogmatic debates in the sixth century, specifically during the second council of Constantinople of 553 ("The Second Council of Constantinople and the Malleable Past", 117-132). When the Theodosian Code was presented at Rome to the senate in 438, the senators accompanied the ceremony with acclamations extolling the emperors, the Code and top officials of the realm. These were duly recorded in the gesta senatus that, in Mommsen's edition, precedes the Code itself. Acclamations had become a monotonous feature of public events and their recording provided a testimony of general consensus. Thus at the council of Chalcedon acclamations, according to Charlotte Roueche, had a significant role to play in the authentication of authority, ecclesiastical as well as secular ("Acclamations at the Council of Chalcedon", 169-77). The level of loudness of these acclamations is further reflected in the unruly behavior that appears to characterize, unusually, the conduct of prelates at Chalcedon, as Michael Whitby shows in an entertaining survey of instances of "poor behavior" ("An Unholy Crew? Bishops Behaving Badly at Church Councils", 178-196). Like the Theodosian Code, conceived by Theodosius II as the definitive text intended to settle once and for all the mess of imperial laws, Chalcedon aspired to provide a definitive dogma, a universal endorsement of Nicaea as immutable source of Christian tradition. Nothing of the sort happened; but in the process, as highlighted by David Gwynn ("The Council of Chalcedon and the Definition of Christian Tradition", 7-26), the bishops assembled at Chalcedon debated the meaning of an authentic Christian tradition, invariably beginning with the Constantinian council at Nicaea in 325. Gwynn poses an important question-what constituted an authoritative reading of an authentic Christian "tradition"? Otherwise stated, how did conciliar resolutions acquire canonic status? As Gwynn points out, it was simpler to reach a negative rather than a positive conclusion-to compile a corpus of heresy or heretics rather than a corpus of "orthodox" interpretation. If the status of the Nicene creed as a statement of the traditional faith of the church had been established already by the end of the fourth century, this was hardly the case with the formulae produced by other ecumenical councils (Constantinople 381; Ephesos 431), not to mention the decisions of a score of regional councils. As a result, constant appeals to the Nicene council, garnished with the appellant's individual interpretation, became a major frontier in the battles waged at Chalcedon. How one such "tradition", namely the acts of the first Ephesian council of 431, was "read" at the council of Chalcedon in 451 is the subject of Thomas Graumann's article ("'Reading' the First Council of Ephesos", 27-44). The fact that reading and rereading the protocols of earlier councils constituted a crucial component of ecclesiastical councils confirms Graumann's observation (30) that these were not intended merely to provide information but rather to construct a case, or a "tradition", to use Gwynn's term. In this light, the acts need to be examined as products of a deliberate editing process aimed at self-justification (35) for a secondary audience, and primarily the imperial court (43). This approach is borne out by the Syriac version of the second council of Ephesos of 449, composed a century later "exactly at the moment when the miaphysite side had gained influence in both Constantinople and Alexandria", and when Severus of Antioch was at the court in 535, as Fergus Millar argues in an article that offers a great deal more than its title suggests ("The Syriac Acts of the Second Council of Ephesos 449", 45-69). In a fascinating narrative Millar traces the Syriac codex of the Acts through dated Syriac inscriptions and manuscripts of the fifth and sixth centuries and within the chronological context of both the councils of 431-451 and of christological disputes under Justinian. A list of the contents of the Acts reflects the ubiquity of the imperial imprint with cited letters of Theodosius II and Valentinian III. The search for a universal "truth", whether legal or theological, in the Greek Roman empire (to cite the title of Millar's recent book3), explains why scholars have often positioned the "school" of Alexandria in constant conflict with the "school" of Antioch, an opposition to which Louth objects in an article that explains a scholarly misunderstanding ("Why did the Syrians Reject the Council of Chalcedon?", 107-116). Louth proposes to view the Syrian ideology not as a "school" but as a stand shaped by the ideas of several theologians who espoused Cyrillan Christology, paradoxically the very same dogmatic views that Athanasius of Alexandria propounded and that Cyril of Alexandria adopted or claimed to represent. With this understanding, the Syrian standoff was not an expression of its "school" but of their belief that Chalcedon betrayed Cyril. Catherine Cubitt and Judith Herrin bring the discussion to the seventh century with two major councils, the 649 Lateran and the 692 Quinisext (or in Trullo). Cubitt ("The Lateran Council of 649 as an Ecumenical Council", 133-147) examines the repercussions of Chalcedon for both doctrinal questions and religious politics, with the monothelite doctrine as the prompter of the Lateran council, itself a key moment in relations between the Byzantine emperors and the papacy. Herrin ("The Quinisext Council as a Continuation of Chalcedon", 148-168) examines the fate of canon 28 of Chalcedon which confirmed the standing of Constantinople as the leading patriarchal see in the east. It also addressed concerns about particular features of clerical life. Among the phenomena discussed and addressed in 692 were inappropriate activities that Christians should avoid. These included the celebration of the New Year with public dancing, cross dressing and wearing ancient theatrical masks, and pressing grapes while invoking the name of Dionysus. Other activities targeted for condemnation were braiding hair in a seductive manner or giving worn-out Bibles to perfume dealers. Such concerns provide salutary reminders that not all conciliar discussions revolved around dogma. On the whole, this slim and somewhat expensive volume is an appropriate complement to a complicated translation endeavor. This first volume sets a high standard for subsequent instalments in the Translated Texts in Context series, and it will find a wide and enthusiastic readership among all students of the late antique church councils. Reprint in paperback of an important collection of essays first published in 2009.
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