Page:Nestorius and his place in the history of Christian doctrine.djvu/77

Rh that a man with such characteristics was not exactly suited to the taste of the court and especially of the circle of that most pious lady, the Augusta Pulcheria; he was not cut out for a courtier. But even if the ground of his misfortune were to be found here, his life should nevertheless be called a tragedy, for his sufferings would have been too harsh a punishment. We can, however, hardly assume that the characteristics we discussed were the cause of Nestorius' unhappy fate. For he enjoyed the favour of the court as long as he lived in Constantinople and even longer, and his enemies never pretended, as far as I know, that his guilt rested in his personal character.

His enemies condemned him for his teaching. It is, therefore, his teaching that we must examine.

Nestorius was an Antiochian as regards his theological upbringing. I do not believe that he was a personal pupil of Theodore of Mopsuestia—the chronology contradicts this, and there are no convincing arguments for this assumption. But that he was educated in the traditions of the Antiochian school is without doubt.

The Antiochian Christology is most easily comprehended, if we contrast it with Apollinarism, condemned by the church about fifty years before Nestorius became bishop of Constantinople. Apollinaris of Laodicea is well known to have taught that a real incarnation and a real unity of the historical person of Christ was