t his arrival
was followed by one of the most distinguished cursing matches of
antiquity. The Roman bishops on occasions of this character always had
recourse to cursing, and they scarcely ever failed to ease themselves up
with an overflow of anathemas and execrations. Cyril and Nestorius
exchanged mutual imprecations, even before the sitting of the council.
The saint, it is said, had launched twelve anathemas at the heretic in
an Alexandrian synod in the year 430, and the heretic Nestorius thanked
the saint by returning the same number of inverted blessings. This has
been a heavy business among Popes for many centuries. John and Cyril
engaged in the same kind of warfare immediately after John's arrival at
Ephesus. John and his party congratulated Cyril, Memnon, and their
accomplices by deposing and excommunicating them, and now the parties
continue, for some time, to give vent to their feelings in mutual
anathemas. These benedictions were the only articles of mutual exchange,
current and of legal tender value between the parties. At last the
Emperor had Nestorius and Cyril arrested, and ordered all the bishops to
return each to his church, and so no conclusion was reached. The Greeks
called the second assembly at Ephesus a gang of felons, but the first,
it is said, excelled it in all the arts of villainy. The contest was
finally ended, not by the church, but by the state. The Emperor
reinstated Cyril and banished Nestorius, and the western diocese was in
the end reduced to submission and the church to unity, not by
ecclesiastical authority, but by imperial power. (See Evagrius 1, 5;
Liberatus c. 6; Godeau 3, 310.) The Council of Chalcedon met in the year
451. St. Leo, bishop of Rome, took the advantage of the troubles which
the quarrel about the two natures occasioned in the empire, and presided
at the council by his legates, which was a new feature in councils. But
the fathers of the council apprehending that the church of the west
would, from this precedent, pretend to the superiority over the eastern
church, decided, by their twenty-eighth canon, that the see of
Constantinople and the see of Rome should enjoy alike the same
advantages and privileges. This was the origin of the long enmity which
prevailed and still prevails between the two churches, the eastern and
the western. This council endorsed and established the "two natures in
one person." The twenty-eighth canon of this council has been rejected
and condemned