This article is part 4 of a series on Nestorius. It is suggested that you read them in sequence.
By Robert Petrovich
But I have endured the torment of my life and all my fate in this world as the torment of one day and lo! I have now already got to me the time of my dissolution, . . . [and mine] eyes have seen the salvation of God. This article is part 4 of a series. It is suggested that you read them in sequence.
– from The Bazaar of Heracleides
Exile
Schenoute I
In August 435 an imperial edict proscribes the writings of Nestorius and any meetings of his followers; Nestorius himself is dragged from retirement and banished to Petra in Arabia; a second decree sends him to the Great Oasis in the Libyan desert, known now as the Oasis of Kharijah. How Nestorius spends the remainder of his days is somewhat uncertain, but we know that at some point he is carried off in a raid by either Nubians or the Blemmyes and set free again circa 450 in the Egyptian Thebaid, with his hand and one rib broken. Nestorius gives himself up to the governor at Panopolis in order not to be accused of having fled, and then, there in the desert inhabited by thousands of orthodox monks and nuns in a city of monasteries, his persecution continues at the hand of Schenute (Shenoudi), the hero of the Egyptian monks, appointed by Cyril in 431 to act as archimandrite at the council that condemned Nestorius. In Panopolis Nestorius dies, still defending his doctrinal position. It is there in Egypt, probably during the final year of his life, that Nestorius writes The Book of Heracleides of Damascus (mistakenly translated into Syriac as The Bazaar of Heracleides), a pseudonymous defense of his teaching and a history of his public life.
Council of Chalcedon (October 8–25, 451)
After the death of Nestorius’s principal antagonist, Cyril, in 444, the ecclesiastical balance of the Imperial Church suffers another turn of events. At the so-called Robber Council of Ephesus (449), Cyril’s successor in Alexandria deposes the Bishop of Tyre, who was once a friend of Nestorius, and the Bishop of Edessa, who is known in his city as a great teacher, together with the Bishop of Cyprus and the new Bishop of Antioch, the nephew of John. Two years later, the new empress, the older sister of Theodosius II, succeeds her brother after his early death in a horse-riding accident and summons a council to meet at Nicaea. When the Hunnic invasion of Rome that year prevents the imperial representative from reaching Nicaea for fear of the Huns in Illyricum, he orders the bishops to move the council to Chalcedon. This council endorses a letter written by Leo, the new Bishop of Rome, in which he uses the term “Mother of the Lord”— somewhat as Nestorius had originally wished. At this council, the Bishops of Edessa and Cyprus both take the view that Leo’s Roman perspective helps rehabilitate Antiochene theology, and both bishops are restored to their sees. If we may believe the final pages of The Bazaar of Heracleides, Nestorius too rejoices at this reversal of Roman policy from the perspective of his exile during the last days of his life.
Missions East
Theodore of Mopsuestia
In the Syriac-speaking world of the fifth century, Theodore of Mopsuestia was held in high esteem, and the condemnation of his pupil was not well received. After the deposition of Nestorius, whose doctrines had been theirs since the first century, a Great Syriac Church built up, and the Sassanid Persian kings, then at war with Byzantium, used the opportunity to assure the loyalty of their Syrian Christian subjects by supporting the division between the churches of the East and West: They granted protection to the adherents of Nestorius (462); they executed the pro-Byzantine Catholicos and replaced him with the bishop of the Persian city of Nisibis, Bar Sauma (484); and when the Byzantine emperor closed the school of Edessa for its heretical tendencies (489), they allowed the transfer of the school to Nisibis. After 489, the Church in Persia, which then called itself Chaldean, practiced an autonomy like that of the old eastern patriarchates. They did not accept the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon, and the great doctor of their school was Theodore of Mopsuestia. From the monastery of Beth ‘Âbh in Mesopotamia under the Sassanids, many missionaries traveled east into Asia from the sixth through the eighth centuries, even reaching China in 635.
Monastery Beth ‘Abhe
This article previously appeared in The Community Communique.