Full Product Details
Author: Richard Price ,
Mary Whitby (Free-lance Academic)
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Imprint: Liverpool University Press
Volume: 1
Dimensions:
Width: 14.70cm
, Height: 2.00cm
, Length: 21.00cm
Weight: 0.495kg
ISBN: 9781846311772
ISBN 10: 1846311772
Pages: 256
Publication Date: 01 February 2009
Audience:
Adult education
,
Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Out of Print
Availability: Awaiting stock
Reviews
This volume is obviously for the specialist, yet a requirement for every library. With regard to thoroughness and overall attention, there is no equivalent to this collection available in English: each essay, followed by a comprehensive bibliography, offers yet one more illustration of how Chalcedon continues to speak to all of Christ's Church. Volume 61/2 201004 These eleven essays, preceded by an introduction by Averil Cameron, derive from a conference held in Oxford in 2006 to mark the publication in 2005 of the Acts of the Council of Chalcedon in an English translation by Richard Price and Michael Gaddis. I reviewed that three-volume book in JTS, ns 59 (2008), pp. 380-3. I would add to what I wrote there that it notably advances historical understanding of the council and its business: it has rendered more accessible its records and, by the generally candid and unpartisan respect evident in the annotations and mostly well-judged comment, it enables all students to evaluate the long-standing, if not indeed permanent, theological significance of the council. The same approach and the same virtues are evident in the present companion volume. Without exception the essays are worth reading; each evokes thought, each invites questions and responses beyond the scope of such a review as this. I catalogue and describe the pieces. David Gwynn writes 'The Council of Chalcedon and the definition of Christian tradition'. Tradition at the council is visibly in process not merely of definition but of creation as authorities were chosen and designated. He quotes Gibbon who writes, with some perceived justice, of the ossification of the ancient theology as it became fixed and inviolate; Newman, on the other hand, seems to be preferred, who appealed to what one might call the Church's dynamic conservatism in remembering its past. Gwynn lightly evokes (he can scarcely do more in the space he has) the duty of historical theology to discriminate between 'remembering' and 'fabricating'. Examples of duty being done appear throughout the contributions here. Thomas Graumann, ' Reading the First Council of Ephesus', looks at the way the Acts of Ephesus 431 were composed and creatively construed at Chalcedon 20 years on. The 'apple of discord' (as Theodoret called Cyril's Third Letter to Nestorius with the 12 chapters) and explanations of how successive councils disposed of it figure here and in Richard Price's 'The second council of Constantinople and the malleable past'; the title sufficiently explains the content. Fergus Millar's 'The Syriac acts of the second council of Ephesus (449)' adds to the sum of knowledge by description and analysis of the Syriac versions. Price's 'The Council of Chalcedon (451): a narrative' neatly recapitulates the burden of the story as already given in the published Acts; and in 'Truth, omission and fiction in the Acts of Chalcedon' Price reassuringly, and I judge truly, concludes that 'we have no reason to suppose that the Acts of Chalcedon are seriously misleading as to the proceedings of the council', despite some examples to the contrary. Andrew Louth asks the difficult question 'Why did the Syrians reject the Council of Chalcedon?' and answers 'for the same reason as most of the east: because they judged Chalcedon to have betrayed the faith of Cyril, in which they saw the faith of the Church'. All historical theologians must regret that an alleged intrinsic contrast and opposition between Antioch and Alexandria and their Christologies (as though it were somehow owing to the water supply) still figures in histories of doctrine. Very rightly Louth rebuts this quasi-scholastic simplification and goes to the heart of the matter: what Cyril said was what people knew (and, of course, that is always a matter of epistemology) was the Christian religion, and the Syrians thought the council and Leo in particular had sold the pass to Nestorius. Catherine Cubitt writes on 'The Lateran council of 649 as an ecumenical council'. Maximus the Confessor (I simplify) claimed it was so and constructed (but did not fabricate) the records and 'tradition' itself. Judith Herrin writes on 'The Quinisext council (692) as a continuation of Chalcedon' particularly in connection with the notorious 'Canon 28' and the status of the see of Constantinople. Charlotte Roueche on 'Acclamations at the Council of Chalcedon' describes their important function in the context of assembly and debate. This essay leads neatly into the last, by Michael Whitby, 'An unholy crew? Bishops behaving badly at church councils'. Church councils were, he thinks, mostly well conducted affairs, but Chalcedon presented unusually contentious matters, and was clearly noisy and liable to become almost uncontrollable at critical points. If there is a fault in the book (and when there is so much that is well said, true, and worth saying that it seems hypercritical to mention it) there is a tendency to improve the drama. It makes a better tale, maybe even a truer tale, if Dioscorus merely made Cyril's heirs 'disgorge [what] they had improperly purloined out of church funds' (p. 77); but the complaint against Dioscorus by the allegedly injured parties was never brought to trial and its justice cannot now be known. And is not Dioscorus too easily cast as heroic victim when it is said that he refused the summons to appear for judgement 'not out of cowardice still less of a guilty conscience, but to spare his supporters' (ibid.)? Can that sort of thing be known except by face-to-face encounter in court: must you not have seen the defendant and looked him in the eye? The drama is improved if Cyril is portrayed as ever on the march, as it were, tracking and eradicating the heresy of Nestorius and his master Theodore, and forced only by the imperial court to moderation and peace. I think that impression will be the one conveyed. Certainly when Richard Price writes, 'Under imperial pressure Cyril of Alexandria made peace with his Syrian opponents in 433' (p. 124), he appears to have reversed the narrative. Cyril paid out lavish sweeteners at court to make them oblige John of Antioch to engage in dialogue. Theodosius the emperor distanced himself as a matter of policy; no reconciliation would happen without intervention on the part of the court because John was in law, and I should have thought in reality, the aggrieved party: an Esau to Cyril's Jacob, who had tricked his brother into allowing him to start the conciliar meeting without him. 'Using imperial pressure' would fit the case. Similarly, I think that neither the knowledge that the emperor would be much relieved if Cyril refrained from excommunicating the dead (if Cyril in fact had been told so) nor 'Theodosius' intervention, demanding that the dead be left in peace' (p. 128) moved Cyril to pronounce against such condemnation in the cases of Theodore and Diodore. I suggest that he was content if Theodore and Diodore were recognized as seriously in error, dangerously misleading, and as having their teachings implicitly condemned at Ephesus 431 (see On the Creed, para. 5). I really doubt whether Theodosius' opinions mattered to Cyril more than Queen Victoria's apparently did to Gladstone: notice had to be taken of their utterance and suitably deferential attention paid to those that were not inconvenient; otherwise they were negligible. Cyril thought Origen's speculations pernicious but he did not curse him. As for the notion that he rebutted Nestorius by assimilating him to Arius (p. 130), that is the wrong way round: the argument against Cyril was that like Arius and Eunomius (and Apollinarius, too, of course) he did not acknowledge a human rational soul in Christ. But these modest criticisms and suggestions imply no disrespect for the virtues and merits of this collection of essays and only gratitude for the value of the enterprise undertaken in the translation and presentation of the Acts of one of the greatest events in the history of the Church. Volume 61, Issue1 201003
Author Information
Richard Price is Lecturer in the History of Christianity at Heythrop College, University of London and author of an annotated translation on 'Theodoret, History of the Monks of Syria'. He has edited the 'Acts of the Council of Chalcedon', published in the TTH series. Mary Whitby is Instructor in Greek and Latin in the University of Oxford and Lecturer in Ancient Greek at Merton College, Oxford. She is a General Editor of the Translated Texts for Historians series.
