The accidental Nestorian

Robert A Judge holds a Master of Arts degree. On 22 December he has used his knowledge to deliver, over at Catholic site One Peter Five, a brief for the theology of Mar Nestorios.

I doubt that was Judge's intent. His intent was to follow Cyril of Alexandria in condemning Saint Luke, on Mary mater dei's knowledge of Christ’s divine nature at some point in her life after his birth. Judge says this knowledge was throughout her life; Luke implied it came to Mary in stages. Judge cites Ephesus against a rival assumption: that Christ had an overt human nature and a covert (maybe subvert) Divine one. This, Judge tars by association with Nestorius ex-patriarch of Constantinople.

I haven't wholly read Nestorius' own work - just the introduction by its translator. Judge has Nestorius claim that Christ...became God by degrees. Nestorius' closest readers would, rather, that he had defined Christ as the union of Logos and of what Mary did conceive, which was flesh. Nestorius denounced adoptionisms such as that of Paul of Samosata. Admittedly Nestorius' union-in-Christ is not hypostatic. Nestorius could allow (did allow) that Mary was the Christipara bearer of Christ, already in union over the term of pregnancy. Nestorius simply could not allow Logotokos; therefore, not Deipara (Theotokos, Walidat al-Ilahi, etc).

Judge's sources are... not great, Pius IX and the "first" Ephesus council. I had to deal with Pius IX in other posts. As for Ephesus, this unhappy city, now for its sins ruled by Christian-hating Turks, hosted two councils. Both councils were robber-councils; there isn't one without the other. And we must remember that Chalcedon itself - to which Rome still holds, I'd argue best holds - restored a lot of what the Ephesian mobs destroyed. Especially in Rome, from Toledo before us, we correctly interpret Chalcedon that the Spirit proceeds from Father and Son.

Then there's Judge's rhetoric, which is snotty. Sorry, but that's the only way I can read this: Mary must have knowledge of her Son in order to triumph over Satan and be “eternally at enmity with the evil serpent.” In the Nestorian heresy this enmity is emptied. I am not here to deny John's Revelation; however controverted in Nestorius' Orient, Nestorius' faction wasn't the resistance, so much as (say) Dionysius of Alexandria and Eusebius. (Judge would have better luck warning me off of Luke.) On the contrary, I read the Revelation at its word: Mary's victory over Satan happens in the next plane. This happens because Mary was assumed into Heaven and exists there now. By now, she is the consummate Théologienne, knowing Christ better than Judge, Nestorius, and myself combined.

We also get many paragraphs pulling from Aquinas and making reference to Mary's Perpetual Virginity, which we can take or leave, but with no bearing on the progression of Mary's knowledge of Christ. Best I can tell, it is all so much tribal signalling. Like the condemnation of Nestorius, which had so little engagement with Nestorius' own work. But it didn't have the same ring as, oh, "Theodore of Mopsuestia".

Robert Judge has, by the accident of his poor argumentation, has served more to make this reader sympathetic to Nestorius himself, let alone what is said about Mary.