Christianity in the 5th century
The council ultimately stated that Christ's divine and human nature were separate but both part of a single entity, a viewpoint rejected by many churches who called themselves miaphysites.
[3] At the end of the 4th century the Roman Empire had effectively split into two states although its economy and the Church were still strongly tied.
Cyril of Alexandria regarded the embodiment of God in the person of Jesus Christ to be so mystically powerful that it spread out from the body of the God-man into the rest of the race, to reconstitute human nature into a graced and deified condition of the saints (Jesus Christ as the new Adam), one that promised immortality and transfiguration to believers.
Nestorius, on the other hand, saw the incarnation as primarily a moral and ethical example to the faithful, to follow in the footsteps of Jesus.
After quoting the Nicene Creed in its original form, as at the First Council of Nicaea, without the alterations and additions made at the First Council of Constantinople, it declared it "unlawful for any man to bring forward, or to write, or to compose a different (ἑτέραν) Faith as a rival to that established by the holy Fathers assembled with the Holy Ghost in Nicæa.
It was the fourth of the first seven Ecumenical Councils and is therefore recognized as infallible in its dogmatic definitions by the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches.
Chalcedon was called to address concerns first raised in November 448, at a synod at Constantinople, which condemned Eutyches for unorthodoxy.
An archimandrite of a large Constinapolitan monastery,[8] Eutyches taught a Christological position at the opposite extreme from that of Nestorius,[9] namely that Christ was not consubstantial with humanity.
The Council of Chalcedon repudiated Eutyches and his doctrine of monophysitism, described and delineated the "Hypostatic Union" and two natures of Christ, human and divine.
Late Antique Christianity produced a great many renowned Fathers who wrote volumes of theological texts, including Augustine, Gregory Nazianzus, Cyril of Jerusalem, Ambrose of Milan, Jerome, and others.
Some of these fathers, such as John Chrysostom and Athanasius, suffered exile, persecution, or martyrdom from heretical Byzantine Emperors.
The Cappadocians promoted early Christian theology and are highly respected in both Western and Eastern churches as saints.
These scholars along with Gregory Nazianzus set out to demonstrate that Christians could hold their own in conversations with learned Greek-speaking intellectuals and that Christian faith, while it was against many of the ideas of Plato and Aristotle (and other Greek Philosophers), was an almost scientific and distinctive movement with the healing of the soul of man and his union with God at its center—one best represented by monasticism.
After his death (or according to some sources, during his life) he was given the Greek surname chrysostomos, meaning "golden mouthed", rendered in English as Chrysostom.
These include Tertullian (who later in life converted to Montanism), Cyprian of Carthage, Gregory the Great, Augustine of Hippo, Ambrose of Milan, and Jerome.
[19] Augustine's work defined the start of the medieval worldview, an outlook that was later firmly established by Pope Gregory the Great.
He later converted to Christianity, became a bishop, and opposed heresies, such as the belief that people can deserve salvation by being good.
[20][failed verification] By the 6th century, specifically under Justinian I, the ecclesiastical had evolved a hierarchical "pentarchy" or system of five sees (later called patriarchates), with a settled order of precedence.
It began early in the Church as a family of similar traditions, modeled upon Scriptural examples and ideals, and with roots in certain strands of Judaism.
John the Baptist is seen as the archetypical monk, and monasticism was inspired by the organisation of the Apostolic community as recorded in Acts of the Apostles.
From the 6th century, Germanic tribes were converted (and re-converted) by missionaries of the Roman Catholic Church, firstly among the Franks, after Clovis I's conversion to Catholicism in 496.
Conversion of the West and East Germanic tribes took place "top to bottom", in the sense that missionaries aimed at converting Germanic nobility first, which would then impose their new faith on the general population The first non-Roman area to adopt monasticism was Ireland, which developed a unique form closely linked to traditional clan relations, a system that later spread to other parts of Europe, especially France.
Commonly Irish monasteries were established by grants of land to an abbot or abbess who came from a local noble family.
On Christmas 498,[28] however, Clovis I following his victory at the Battle of Tolbiac converted to the orthodox faith of the Roman Church and let himself be baptised at Rheims.
[30] However, the decisive reason for Clovis to adopt the Christian belief was the spiritual battle aid he received from Christ.
A good example for this are several Thor's Hammer with engraved crosses, worn as an amulet, that archaeologists have found in Scandinavia.
[35] Another exemplary event happened during Ansgar's second stay in Birka: A pagan priest demanded from the locals that they not participate in the cult of the foreign Christian God.
[37] He was seen as of divine descent, was the leader of the religious cult and was responsible for the fertility of the land and military victory.
An illustration of these tendencies is the Anglo-Saxon poem Dream of the Rood, where Jesus is cast in the heroic model of a Germanic warrior, who faces his death unflinchingly and even eagerly.
The Georgian Orthodox Church became independent in 466 when the Patriarchate of Antioch elevated the Bishop of Mtskheta to the rank of "Catholicos of Kartli".
