Following Judaism, every female element was thrown out. The Spirit could not replace the female element; first of all He appears, in the early reports of the birth of Jesus, as the male element, in respect to her as the female element. And beyond this the Spirit is an abstract concept. It was so even for those days” So the Divine Spirit never could replace, in the popular mind, the different forms of male-centered religion coming from the Old Testament.
4) The popular appeal of the transformation Christology, which was represented by Alexandria. Imagine a simple-minded human being: she wants to have God. Of course if you tell here: “There is God, on the altar. . ., go and have Him there,” then she will go – this fills the Catholic churches because there you have God on the altar. But how is this possible? Because of the Incarnation, for in the Incarnation God became something whom I can have, with whom I can walk, whom I can see, etc. All this is popular feeling, and this feeling was decisive against the Alexandrians.
What Cyril wanted was to show that the human nature is taken into the unity of the Logos, who remains what He was” Therefore he could say that the Logos Himself experienced death, since He has received His body, namely, in Jesus. In the formula “out of two natures, one,” he accepts the abstract distinction of the natures, but actually there is no difference between the natures This makes it possible for him to be the protagonist in the fight about the theotokos. The religious motive is: It is not a man who became king over us, but God, who has appeared in human form. If Nestorius were right, then only a man, not the Logos, would have died for us, (because the Logos cannot die.) Only if the natures were so united (as Cyril wanted), he could say they were united and that they can represent the duality. “If Nestorius is right, then we eat in the Lord’s Supper the flesh of a man,” What the people wanted was the physical presence of the Divine. This underlies the sacramental development, and was the whole Alexandrian theology.
First it seemed they could be united. Then the Alexandrians reacted, but they reacted so much and so victoriously that Rome took the side of Antioch. But Rome put a condition to the Antiocheans. They had to remove Nestorius because he was now too much suspect. After a synod in Ephesus in 431, in which a compromise was prepared and (also) many further synods – the famous latroceneum Ephesum ,the synod of “gangsters,” as they were called, because they came with sticks to drive each other out, and they transported hundreds of monks to the doors of the church where the synod took place, in order to threaten everybody who would deny the theotokos of Mary, God walking on earth.
After all this, the final and most famous synod, that of Chalcedon, took place in 451, the only other date (together with Nicaea, 325) which I would like you to know. In the Synod of Chalcedon, the alliance of Rome and Antioch proved its strength. They were very much supported by the fact that one of their opposition, the bishop of Alexandria, Eutychus, put forth such a radically Monophysitic attitude that he was condemned. This condemnation of Alexandria was at the same time the victory for Antioch.
How does this decision of Chalcedon look? Decisive for the actual outcome of this synod was that the Roman pope, Leo I, wrote to a synod in Ephesus a letter which was not even read by the victory-drunken Alexandrians, In Chalcedon, however, the letter was accepted as a basic document. There Leo says: “Thus the properties of each nature and substance were preserved entire, and came together to form one person. Humility was assumed by majesty, weakness by strength, mortality by eternity.” “There was one true God in the entire and perfect nature of true man.
