The robber council
The second council of Ephesus
The second Council of Ephesus in 449 AD is not remembered fondly. Pope Leo I calls it the Latrocinium — the Robber Council — and the name has stuck.
The controversy that produces it is a new Christological dispute. Eutyches, an elderly monk in Constantinople, has reacted against Nestorianism so strongly that he has gone to the opposite extreme: he teaches that after the incarnation, Christ's human nature is absorbed into the divine, like a drop of water in the sea. There is only one nature — the divine. The human has been swallowed.
This is called Monophysitism — one-nature theology — and it is the mirror image of Nestorianism. Where Nestorius separated the two natures so radically that some thought he divided Christ into two persons, Eutyches merges them so completely that Christ's humanity disappears.
The emperor Theodosius II, sympathetic to Eutyches, calls a council at Ephesus to resolve the matter. Dioscorus of Alexandria controls the proceedings with something close to thuggery. Pope Leo has sent a letter — the Tome — that articulates the orthodox position on Christ's two natures with great clarity. It is not read at the council. Bishops who try to object are physically intimidated. Flavian of Constantinople, who opposes Eutyches, is beaten so badly at the council that he dies of his injuries three days later.
Eutyches is rehabilitated. The Tome is ignored.
Leo refuses to accept the council's decisions. He demands a new council. He gets one — at Chalcedon, two years later.
“What has been done is not a judgment but a robbery.”
— Pope Leo I on the second Council of Ephesus, 449 AD
“He who pleads his cause first seems right; Until another comes and questions him.”
The Robber Council is the low point of conciliar theology — the moment when the machinery designed to discern truth was used as a weapon to suppress it.
The institutional structures of the church can serve truth or distort it. A council can be stacked, controlled, manipulated by the powerful to produce a predetermined outcome. The church's history includes both kinds of councils.
What protects the truth in such situations is not the institution itself but the people within it who refuse to sign what is false — the bishops who voted no, Leo who rejected the outcome, Flavian who died rather than capitulate.
Institutions do not have consciences. The people within them do. What does your conscience require of you within the institutions you inhabit?