THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD IN LATE ANTIQUITYthe great sees and between individual bishops could and did lead to major
splits with long-term repercussions. This was particularly the case after the
Council of Chalcedon, for much of the east, especially in Syria and Egypt,
refused to accept its decisions and went on to form its own ecclesiastical hier-
archy during the reign of Justinian, a factor which had profound implications
for the empire.^28 From the point of view of the state, imperial support for
the church necessitated a clear understanding of what the church was as an
institution, and was not compatible with quarrelling and division among the
clergy. Whether the bishops themselves were as committed to church unity is
less clear, but questions of church organization and the authority of episcopal
sees were of pressing importance to them, and the many councils and church
synods in this period dealt largely with these issues and other questions of
church order. As for the doctrinal issues, despite the numbers of councils
and the level of controversy, division continued unabated; if anything the
councils actually increased the tension and infl amed division by polarizing the
various groups and forcing them to defi ne their positions ever more exactly.
The eventual outcome of a long process was the growing split between the
Byzantine empire in the east and the papacy in the west, especially after 800,^29
but the eastern empire was already internally divided in the fi fth century over
the relation between the divine and the human natures of Christ, a question
which the Council of Chalcedon failed to settle for the longer term, just as
the Council of Nicaea had failed to settle once and for all the question of the
relation of Father and Son.
Christians had interpreted their faith in different ways since its beginning.
However, the advent of imperial support, and the consequent public role
assumed by the institutional church, gave an entirely new complexion to the
process; what had been disagreement became not merely ‘heresy’, worthy
of the strongest condemnation, but also a crime liable to punishment from
the state. The Greek term ‘heresy’ originally meant simply ‘choice’; but each
Christian group in turn defi ned the choices of the rest as heresies, and in the
late fourth century, before the legislation of Theodosius I, Epiphanius, bishop
of Salamis in Cyprus, had composed a Panarion, literally a ‘Medicine-Chest’
or list of remedies, arguments directed against some eighty such objection-
able ‘heresies’; his work was to have a long life and was used by writers as
different as Augustine and John of Damascus. The Councils of Ephesus and
Chalcedon carried forward this attempt to arrive at a defi nition binding on
the whole church, and both councils took place in a context of bitter rivalry.
Again, personalities were much involved; one of the most striking, and some
would say unscrupulous, both before and during the Council of Ephesus in
431, was Cyril, the nephew of Theophilus and bishop of Alexandria since 412,
a formidable leader who dominated the proceedings through a mixture of
cleverness, bribes and intimidation.
Nestorius, a monk from Antioch, made bishop of Constantinople by The-
odosius II in 428, was also passionate, but he was no match for Cyril and in
fact stayed away from the council proceedings. The issue was whether, and,