Nestorius

The populace accompanied the members with torches and cen sers to their lodgings, and there was a general illumination of the city. A few days afterwards (June 26th or 27th) John of Antioch arrived; whether inclined or not to the cause of his former co presbyter, he disapproved the precipitancy with which Cyril had acted, and at a conciliabulam of forty-three bishops held in his lodgings he was induced by Candidian, the friend of Nestorius, to depose the bishops of Alexandria and Ephesus on the spot. The Ephesians intervened to prevent the execution of this decision on the next Sunday. Meanwhile a letter from the emperor declared invalid the session at which Nestorius had been deposed unheard; numerous sessions and counter-sessions were afterwards held, the conflicting parties both seeking the imperial support. In the end Theodosius decided to confirm the depositions which had been pronounced on both sides, and Cyril and Memnon as well as Nes torius were by his orders laid under arrest. Representatives from each side were now summoned before him to Chalcedon, and at last, yielding to the sense of the evident majority, he gave a deci sion in favour of the "orthodox," and the council of Ephesus was dissolved. Maximian, one of the Constantinopolitan clergy, a na tive of Rome, was promoted to the vacant see, and Nestorius was henceforward represented in the capital only by one congregation, which presently became extinct.

But the Antiochenes maintained for some time an attitude of antagonism towards Cyril and his creed, and were not pacified until an understanding was reached in 433 on the basis of a new formula involving some concessions by him. The union even then was opposed by certain bishops, who were deposed from their sees. Their school at Edessa was closed by Zeno in 489. Immediately after his deposition Nestorius withdrew into private life in his old monastery of Euprepius, Antioch, until 435, when the emperor ordered his banishment to Petra in Arabia. A second decree, it would seem, sent him to Oasis, probably the city of the Great Oasis, in Upper Egypt, where he was still living in 439, at the time when Socrates wrote his Church History. He was taken prisoner by the Blemmyes, a nomad tribe that gave much trouble to the empire in Africa, and when they set him free in the Thebaid near Panopolis (Akhmim) c. 45o, they exposed him to further perse cution from Schehute, the hero of the Egyptian monks. There is some evidence that he was summoned to the Council of Chalcedon, though he could not attend it, and in the concluding portion of his book known as The Bazaar of Heraclides he not only gives a full account of the "Robber Synod" of Ephesus 449, but knows that Theodosius is dead (July 450) and seems aware of the proceedings of Chalcedon and the flight of Dioscurus, the unscrupulous suc cessor of Cyril at Alexandria. Nestorius was already old and ailing

and must have died very soon after. There are still Nestorians in Kurdistan, and the Syriac Church is Nestorian in theology, as are the churches in Asia founded by Nestorian missionaries in the middle ages.

Modern View.

Only recently has an attempt been made to judge Nestorius from some other evidence than that afforded by the accusations of Cyril and the inferences drawn therefrom. This other evidence consists partly of letters from Nestorius, pre served among the works of those to whom they were written, some sermons collected in a Latin translation by Marius Mercator, an African merchant who was doing business in Constantinople at the time of the dispute, and other material gathered from Syriac manuscripts. Since the helpful collection of Nestoriana published by Dr. F. Loofs in 1905 there has also come to our knowledge the most valuable evidence of all, Nestorius's own account of the whole difficulty, viz., The Bazaar' of Heraclides of Damascus. This pseu donym served to protect the book against the fate that overtook the writings of heretics, and in a Syriac version it was preserved in the Euphrates valley where the followers of Nestorius settled. Ebed Jesu in the i4th century mentions it together with Letters and Homilies, as well as the Tragedy, or a Letter to Cosmas, the Theopaschites (of which some fragments are still extant) and the Liturgy, which is still used by the Nestorian Church. The dis covery of The Bazaar, which is the Apologia of Nestorius, was made public by Dr. H. Goussen (though members of the Arch bishop of Canterbury's Mission to the Assyrian Christians had previously been acquainted with the book). The text has been edited by P. Paul Bedjan (Leipzig, 191o) and a French translation has been made by M. l'abbe F. Nau. A representative selection of extracts has been given to English readers in J. F. Bethune Baker's Nestorius and his Teaching (Cambridge, 1908), chapter ii. of which describes the ms. and its accounts.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.-On

Nestorius, in addition to the modern literature cited in the article, and the standard histories of dogma (A. Harnack, F. Loofs, R. L. Ottley's Doctrine of the Incarnation, etc.), see R. Seeberg, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, Bd. ii. § 27 (Leipzig, 191o), L. Duchesne, Histoire ancienne de l'eglise, vol. iii. chs. x. xi. (19I0) ; J. F. Bethune-Baker, Nestorius and his teaching (1908) ; F. Nau, Nestorius, d'apres des sources orientales (1911) ; Hist. de N. d'apres la Lettre a Cosme et l'Hymne de Sliba, etc., textes syrienne ed. et trans. by F. Nau (1919) ; F. Loofs, Nestorius and his Place in History (1914) ; C. Pech, Nestorius als Irrlehrer (1921) . See also Catholic Encyclopaedia.