empire it found an asylum in the kingdom of Persia, whither several teachers of the theological school of Edessa fled. One of thein, Barsumas, became bishop of Nisibis (435–489),' founded a new theological seminary there, and confirmed the Persian Christians in their aversion to the Cyrillian council of Ephesus, and in their adhesion to the Antiochian and Nestorian theology. They were favored by the Persian kings, from Pherozes, or Firuz, onward (461–488), out of political opposition to Constantinople. At the council of Scleucia (498) they renounced all connection with the orthodox church of the empire. They called themselves, after their liturgical language, CHALDEAN OF ASSYRIAN Christians, while they were called by their opponents NESTORIANS. They had a patriarch, who after the year 496 resided in the double city of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, and after 762 in Bagdad (the capital of the Saracenic empire), under the name of Yazelich (catholicus), and who, in the thirteenth century, had no less than twenty-five metropolitans under his supervision.

The Nestorian church flourished for several centuries, spread from Persia, with great missionary zeal, to India, Arabia, and even to China and Tartary, and did good service in scholarship and in the founding of schools and hospitals. Mohammed is supposed to owe his imperfect knowledge of Christianity to a Nestorian monk, Sergius; and from him the sect received many privileges, so that it obtained great consideration among the Arabians, and exerted an influence upon their culture, and thus upon the development of philosophy and science in general.'

'Not to be confounded with the contemporary Monophysite abbot Barsumas, a saint of the Jacobites.

• The observations of Alex. von Humboldt, in the 2d vol. of his Kosmos (Stuttg. and Tüb. 1847, p. 247 f.), on the connection of Nestorianism with the culture and physical science of the Arabians, are worthy of note: "It was one of the wondrous arrangements in the system of things, that the Christian sect of the Nestorians, which has exerted a very important influence on the geographical extension of knowledge, was of service even to the Arabians before the latter found their way to learned and disputatious Alexandria; that Christian Nestorianism, in fact, under the protection of the arms of Islam, was able to penetrate far into Eastern Asia. The Arabians, in other words, gained their first acquaintance with Grecian literature through the Syrians, a kindred Semitic race; while the Syrians themselves, scarcely

Among the Tartars, in the eleventh century, it succeeded in converting to Christianity a king, the priest-king Presbyter John (Prester John) of the Kerait, and his successor of the same name.' But of this we have only uncertain accounts, and at all events Nestorian Christianity has since left but slight traces in Tartary and in China.

Under the Mongol dynasty the Nestorians were cruelly persecuted. The terrible Tamerlane, the scourge and the destroyer of Asia, towards the end of the fourteenth century almost exterminated them. Yet they have maintained themselves on the wild mountains and in the valleys of Kurdistan and in Armenia under the Turkish dominion to this day, with a separate patriarch, who from 1559 till the seventeenth century resided at Mosul, but has since dwelt in an almost

a century and a half before, had first received the knowledge of Grecian literaturo through the anathematized Nestorians. Physicians who had been educated in the institutions of the Greeks, and at the celebrated medical school founded by the Nestorian Christians at Edessa in Mesopotamia, were, so early as the times of Mohammed, living, befriended by him and by Abu-Bekr, in Mecca.

"The school of Edessa, a model of the Benedictine schools of Monte Casino and Salerno, awakened the scientific search for materia medica in the mineral and vege table kingdoms. When it was dissolved by Christian fanaticism under Zeno the Isaurian, the Nestorians scattered towards Persia, where they soon attained political importance, and established a new and thronged medical institute at Dschondisapur in Khuzistan. They succeeded in spreading their science and their faith to China towards the middle of the seventh century under the dynasty of Thang, five hun dred and seventy-two years after Buddhism had penetrated thither from India.

"The seed of Western culture, scattered in Persia by educated monks, and by the philosophers of the last Platonic school of Athens who were persecuted by Justinian, took beneficent root among the Arabians during their first Asiatic campaign. Feeble as the science of the Nestorian priests may have been, it could still, with its peculiar medical and pharmaceutic turn, act genially upon a race which had long lived in free converse with nature, and had preserved a more fresh sensibility to every sort of study of nature, than the people of Greek and Italian cities. What gives the Arabian epoch the universal importance which we must here insist upon, is in great part connected with the trait of national character just indicated. The Arabians, we repeat, are to be regarded as the proper founders of the physical sciences, in the sense which we are now accustomed to attach to the word."

On this fabulous priest-kingdom, which the popes endeavored by unsuccessful embassies to unite to the Roman churca, and whose light was quenched by the tide of the conquests of Zengis Khan, comp. MOSHEIM: Historia Tartarorum eccles. Helmst. 1741; NEANDER: Kirchengesch. vol. v. p. 84 ff. (9th part of the whole work ed. 1841); and RITTER: Erdkunde, part ii. vol. i. pp. 256, 283 (2d ed. 1882).

inaccessil le valley on the borders of Turkey and Persia. They are very ignorant and poor, and have been much reduced by war, pestilence, and cholera.

A portion of the Nestorians, especially those in cities, united from time to time, under the name of Chaldæans, with the Roman church, and have a patriarch of their own at Bagdad.

And on the other side, Protestant missionaries from America have made vigorous and successful efforts, since 1833, to evangelize and civilize the Nestorians by preaching, schools, translations of the Bible, and good books.'

The THOMAS-CHRISTIANS in East India are a branch of the Nestorians, named from the apostle Thomas, who is supposed to have preached the gospel on the coast of Malabar. They honor the memory of Theodore and Nestorius in their Syriac liturgy, and adhere to the Nestorian patriarchs. In the sixteenth century they were, with reluctance, connected with the Roman church for sixty years (1599-1663) through the agency of Jesuit missionaries. But when the Portuguese power in India was shaken by the Dutch, they returned to their independent position, and since the expulsion of the Portuguese they have enjoyed the free exercise of their religion on the coast of Malabar. The number of the Thomas-Christians is said still to amount to seventy thousand souls, who form a province by themselves under the British empire, governed by priests and elders.

'Dr. Justin Perkins, Asahel Grant, Rhea, Stoddard, Wright, and other missionaries of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. The centre of their labors is Oormiah, a city of 25,000 inhabitants, of whom 1,000 are Nestorians. Comp. on this subject Newcomb, 1. c. 556 ff., especially the letter of Dr. Perkins of 1854, p. 564 ff., on the present condition of this mission; also Joseph P. Thompson: Memoir of the Rev. David Tappan Stoddard, missionary to the Nestorians, Boston, 1858; and a pamphlet issued by the American B. C. F. M.: Historical Sketch of the Mission to the Nestorians by Justin Perkins, and of the Assyrian Mission by Rev. Thomas Laurie, New York, 1862. The American Board of Foreign Missions look upon the Nestorian and Armenian missions as a means and encouraging pledge of the conversion of the millions of Mohammedans, among whom Providence has placed and preserved those ancient sects, as it would seem, for such an end,

§ 140. The Eutychian Controversy. The Council of Robbers,

A. D. 449.

Comp. the Works at § 187.

SOURCES.

AOTS of the council of CHALCEDON, of the local council of CONSTANTINOPLE, and of the Robber Synod of EPHESUS. The correspondence between LEO and FLAVIAN, etc. For these acts, letters, and other documenta, see MANSI, Conc. tom. v. vi. and vii. (GELASIUS?): Breviculus historia Eutychianistarum s. gesta de nomine Acacii (extending to 486, in Mansi, vii. 1060 sqq.). LIBERATUS: Breviarium causæ Nest. et Eutych. LEONTIUS BYZANT.: Contra Nest. et Eutych. The last part of the SYNODICON adv. tragœdiam Irenæi (in Mansi, v. 731 sqq.). EVAGRIUS: H. E. i. 9 sqq. THEODORET: 'Epavior's (the Beggar) or Пoλúμoppos (the Multiformed),—a refutation of the Egyptian Eutychian system of doctrines (which begged together so much from various old heresies, as to form a new one), in three dialogues, written in 447 (Opera, ed. Schulze, vol. iv.).

LITERATURE.

PETAVIUS: De incarnatione Verbi, lib. i. c. 14-18, and the succeeding books, particularly iii., iv., and v. (Theolog. dogmatum, tom. iv. p. 65 sqq. ed. Par. 1650). TILLEMONT: Mémoires, tom. xv. pp. 479–719. C. A. SALIG: De Eutychianismo ante Eutychen. Wolfenb. 1723. WALCH: Ketzerhist. vol. vi. 8-640. SCHRÖCKн: vol. xviii. 433–492. NEANDER: Kirchengesch. iv. pp. 942-992. BAUR: Gesch. der Lehre von d. Dreieinigkeit, etc. i. 800-825. DORNER: Gesch. d. Lehre v. d. Pers. Chr. ii. 99–149. HEFELE (R. C.): Conciliengesch. ii. pp. 295– 545. W. CUNNINGHAM: Historical Theology, i. pp. 311-'15. Comp. also the Monographs of ARENDT (1885) and PERTHEL (1848) on Leo L

The result of the third universal council was rather negative than positive. The council condemned the Nestorian error, without fixing the true doctrine. The subsequent union of the Alexandrians and the Antiochians was only a superficial peace, to which each party had sacrificed somewhat of its convictions. Compromises are generally of short duration; principles and systems must develope themselves to their utmost consequences; heresies must ripen, and must be opened to the

core.

As the Antiochian theology begot Nestorianism, which stretched the distinction of the human and divine natures iu

Christ to double personality; so the Alexandrian theology begot the opposite error of Eutychianism or Monophysitism, which urged the personal unity of Christ at the expense of the distinction of natures, and made the divine Logos absorb the human nature. The latter error is as dangerous as the former. For if Christ is not true man, he cannot be our example, and his passion and death dissolve at last into mere figurative representations or docetistic show.

A large portion of the party of Cyril was dissatisfied with the union creed, and he was obliged to purge himself of inconsistency. He referred the duality of natures spoken of in the symbol to the abstract distinction of deity and humanity, while the two are so made one in the one Christ, that after the union all separation ceases, and only one nature is to be recognized in the incarnate Son. The Logos, as the proper subject of the one nature, has indeed all human, or rather divine-human, attributes, but without a human nature. Cyril's theory of the incarnation approaches Patripassianism, but differs from it in making the Son a distinct hypostasis from the Father. It mixes the divine and human; but it mixes them only in Christ, and so is Christo-theistic, but not pantheistic.'

On the other side, the Orientals or Antiochians, under the lead of John, Ibas, and especially Theodoret, interpreted the union symbol in their sense of a distinction of the two natures continuing in the one Christ even after the incarnation, and actually obtained the victory for this moderate Nestorianism, by the help of the bishop of Rome, at the council of Chalcedon.

1 Cyril's true view is most clearly expressed in the following propositions (comp. Mansi, v. 820, and Niedner, p. 364): Thе évσάρкwois was a voikǹ Evwois, or becoming man, on the part of God, so that there is only μία σεσαρκωμένη φύσις τοῦ λόγου. Ὁ Θεὸς λόγος, ἑνωθεὶς σαρκὶ καθ ̓ ὑπόστασιν, ἐγένετο ἄνθρωπος, οὐ συνήφθη ἀνθρώπῳ. Μία ήδη νοεῖται φύσις μετὰ τὴν ἕνωσιν, ἡ αὐτοῦ τοῦ λόγου σεσαρκωμένη. Ἡ τοῦ κυρίου σάρξ ἐστιν ἰδία τοῦ Θεοῦ λόγου, οὐχ ἑτέρου τινὸς παρ' αὐτόν. The ἕνωσις τῶν φύσεων is not, indeed, exactly a σύγχυσις τῶν φύσεων, but at all events excludes all diaípeois, and demands an absolute co-existence and interpenetration of the λóyos and the oáp. The consequence of this incarnation is the existence of a new entity, a divine-human subject, which is in nothing only God or only man, but in everything is both in one, and whose attributes (proprietates, idio mata) are not, some divine and others human, but all divine-human.