PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH The Council of Ephesus in 431 condemned Nestorius, the bishop of Constantinople, because he taught that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was not the mother of God How could he hold this, the Alexandrian bishop Cyril argued, if he really believed that Jesus was God? The right way to formulate the doctrine of the Incarnation, the Council decided, was to say that Christ, a single person, had two distinct natures, one divine and one human But the Council did not go far enough for some Alexandrians, who believed that the incarnate Son of God possessed only a single nature These extremists arranged a second council at Ephesus, which proclaimed the doctrine of the single nature (‘monophysitism’) Pope Leo, who had submitted written evidence in favour of the dual nature, denounced the Council as a den of robbers Heartened by the support of Rome, Constantinople struck back at Alexandria, and at a council at Chalcedon in 451 the doctrine of the dual nature was aYrmed Christ was perfect God and perfect man, with a human body and a human soul, sharing divinity with his Father and sharing humanity with us The decisions of Chalcedon and Wrst Ephesus henceforth provided the test of orthodoxy for the great majority of Christians, though in eastern parts of the empire substantial communities of Nestorian and monophysite Christians remained, some of which have survived to this day In the history of thought the importance of these Wfth-century councils is that they hammered out technical meanings for terms such as ‘nature’ and ‘person’ in a manner that inXuenced philosophy for centuries to come After the repulse of Attila the western Roman Empire survived a further quarter of a century, though power in Italy had largely passed to barbarian army commanders One of these, Odoacer, in 476, decided to become ruler in name and not just in fact He sent oV the last faine´ant emperor, Romulus Augustulus, to exile near Naples For the next half-century Italy became a Gothic province Its kings, though Christians, took little interest in the recent Christological debates: they subscribed to a form of Christianity, namely Arianism, that had been condemned as long ago as the time of Constantine I Arianism took various forms, all of which denied that Jesus, the Son of God, shared the same essence or substance with God the Father The most vigorous of the Gothic kings, Theodoric (reigned 493–526), established a tolerant regime in which Arians, Jews, and Orthodox Catholics lived together in tranquillity and in which art and culture thrived 17