Eutyches
author: Sebastian P. Brock
source date: 2011
edition published: 2016-09-22-16:00
availability: Copyright ©2011 by Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute Distributed under an Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) License. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

Eutyches

https://gedsh.bethmardutho.org/Eutyches http://syriaca.org/bibl/213 204 http://syriaca.org/person/482 [person] [Monk, then an archimandrite in Constantinople whose teachings on christology became controversial. [not a summary]]

(ca. 378 – ca. 454)

His early life, of which hardly anything is known, was evidently as a monk, and then an archimandrite, in Constantinople where, by 448, he and his teaching evidently had an influential following. In Nov. 448 Eusebius bp. of Dorylaeum denounced his teaching to Patr. Flavian, and Eutyches was summoned to a synod which condemned him (Pseudo-Zacharias, ‘Church History’, II.2; Acts of Council of Chalcedon, First Session). He appealed to Pope Leo I ( CPG 5948) and to Dioscorus, presenting professions of faith in formulations that were considered acceptable (Leo’s reply also survives [ CPG 5953]). He was restored at the second Council of Ephesus (449), but under the new emperor Marcian he was condemned again at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, and this time exiled. Exactly what his teaching really was is unclear (both at the time and today), but he was understood to have held that Christ is consubstantial only with the Father, and not with us — a position rejected by both miaphysites and dyophysites.

Sources

CPG 5945–5954.
G. Bevan and P. T. R. Gray, ‘The trial of Eutyches: A new interpretation’, Byzantinische Zeitschrift 101 (2008), 617–657.
J. Lebon, Le monophysisme sévérien (1909), 489–500.
E. Schwartz, Der Prozess des Eutyches (Sitzungsberichte der bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, phil.-hist. Kl., Abt. 5; 1929).
A. Van Roey, ‘Eutyches’, in DHGE , vol. 16 (1964–67), 87–91.

Sebastian P. Brock