Page:The age of Justinian and Theodora (Volume 1).djvu/303

 convened before the opening of the sixth century, but of these only three were allowed to rank as Oecumenical, that of Constantinople in 381, that of Ephesus in 431, and that of Chalcedon in 451. The first of these did little more than to confirm the decisions of Nicaea, but it won from Theodosius a tacit permission to proceed to extremities against Paganism. The second anathematized the heresy of Nestorius, Patriarch of the Eastern capital, who wished to deprive the Virgin Mary of the title of Theotokos, or Mother of God. The bishops who assembled at the Asiatic suburb of Chalcedon, under the supervision of the Emperor Marcian, were less successful in producing concord in the Church than those who composed any of the previous councils; and their resolutions were debated for long afterwards by dissentient

were determined by the ejection from the fold of Orthodoxy of those who maintained the existence of but one nature or one will in the God-man (Monophysites, Monotheletes), and also of a small party who propounded the incorruptibility of the body of Jesus (Aphthartodocetae). The erection of this fabric of dogma was essential to Orthodoxy, the underlying conception of which was that God became man so that man might become God; ii Clement, 9; cf. Bigg, op. cit., p. 71. Hence if the Saviour were made out to be merely a sham human being the whole scheme of redemption must fall through at once. The last step led them to consult about the mundane relatives of Jesus, and ended in the dogma that Mary's was an asexual birth, the Immaculate Conception, and that, as she could never have been sullied by any carnal conversation, the brothers of Jesus, as represented, must merely have been his cousins. But the Church did not approach some of these latter considerations till a later age.]
 * [Footnote: Godhead with the flesh, viz., the Incarnation of Jesus. These controversies