Council of Chalcedon

The Council of Chalcedon was the fourth ecumenical council of the Christian Church. It met in 451 in Chalcedon in Bithynia, on the Asian shore of the Bosporus opposite Constantinople, in the church of Saint Euphemia. Eastern Roman Emperor Marcian summoned the gathering, with the concurrence of Pope Leo I, to settle Christological controversy that had intensified after the Second Council of Ephesus in 449, later called the Latrocinium or Robber Council. That earlier assembly had rehabilitated the Constantinopolitan archimandrite Eutyches, associated with the teaching that after the Incarnation Christ had only one nature, and had deposed Patriarch Flavian of Constantinople. Several hundred bishops attended Chalcedon, the great majority from the Eastern provinces; papal legates represented the Bishop of Rome. The council sat from October into early November of 451.

The assembly’s principal theological work was a definition of faith on the person of Christ. After examining the Tome of Leo, writings of Cyril of Alexandria, and the creeds associated with Nicaea and Constantinople, the bishops produced a statement that Jesus Christ is one and the same Son, perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, consubstantial with the Father according to the Godhead and consubstantial with humankind according to the manhood, made known in two natures without confusion, without change, without division, and without separation. The properties of each nature are preserved and concur in one person and one hypostasis. Eutyches was condemned. Dioscorus of Alexandria, who had presided at Ephesus in 449, was deposed. The definition was intended to exclude both a division of Christ into two persons and a mixing or absorption of the natures.

Besides the dogmatic definition, the council issued disciplinary canons. The most disputed, later numbered twenty-eighth, sought to confirm privileges of the see of Constantinople as second after Rome, on the ground that the city was New Rome and the imperial residence. The papal legates protested, and Pope Leo I later refused this canon while confirming the council’s doctrinal decrees. Other canons treated clerical discipline, metropolitan rights, and the status of monks. The Definition of Chalcedon was received by the churches that became the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and most later Protestant communions, and it remains a central Christological statement in those traditions.

Substantial communities in Egypt, Syria, Armenia, and Ethiopia rejected the definition, regarding it as a betrayal of Cyril’s teaching and as tending toward Nestorianism. Those churches, later called Oriental Orthodox, maintained a miaphysite Christology and entered into lasting separation from the imperial church. Chalcedon thus both clarified the doctrine of two natures in one person for much of Christendom and marked a decisive rupture among the ancient churches of the East. It is not a person and has no birth, death, canonization, or patronage in the hagiographical sense.