Edessa Callirrhoë could take some pride in being among the first kingdoms to embrace Christ. In the AD fifth century, a monk by name Rabbula decided that they'd embraced Him wrong. Gaddis takes up much of a chapter detailing this Semitic Savonarola.
We know Rabbula from a Vita composed by a successor, who intended this text to contrast that one's career to Ibas who had overturned Rabbula's reforms. Ibas is blamed for taking bribes for enacting his "reactionary" agenda. Ibas meanwhile was also an Antiochene, for which "Nestorianism" the second Ephesus will condemn him.
As Gaddis reads Rabbula's conduct, he finds little to commend. Gaddis feels like Rabbula ran Edessa like it was a monastery, not a town with actual humans in it; and an Egyptian hermitage at that, not like the more-eirenic Syrian establishments. Rabbula is compared to Moses, in his later years as Israel's Divinely-appointed totalitarian. The writ of Empire no longer stretched into that city's government. Rabbula - perhaps knowing his origins - further bound the local monks to his episcopacy; so, really, the canons of the Greek Church didn't stretch into there either.
The world hereby got a taste of Monotheletism, if anyone had a tongue to taste it. (Gaddis' subtitle is "The ideal bishop".) Not only did Rabbula see no "wall" between church and state, for him there was no distinction. If you had a problem with Rabbula's regime, you had a problem with G-d.
Soon enough, Cyril's monks would take the streets of Ephesus in advance of that Synod. The Empire had to post guards at Nestorius' gate just to keep him physically safe. (Which protection, Cyril used as pretext to declare Nestorius the Empire's patsy.) Some three decades after Chalcedon, Cyrus II would finish Rabbula's work in the name of Theotokos; the emperor Zeno could do nothing.
Outside filioque there is no salvation, from our own fallible nature.
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