other · 448 · Constantinople
Eutyches was an elderly and well-connected archimandrite of a large monastery at Constantinople, godfather to the eunuch Chrysaphius who ran the palace, and a fierce partisan of Cyril against anything that smelled of Nestorius. Summoned before the Home Synod under Flavian in November 448, he said that Christ was of two natures before the union and one nature after it, and — pressed repeatedly, which is what makes the record valuable — declined to confess that the Lord's body is of the same substance as ours. That is the sentence that condemned him. He was deposed, appealed to Rome and to Alexandria, and the appeal worked: Dioscorus reinstated him at the Second Council of Ephesus in 449 by force, Flavian was deposed and died of his injuries, and Leo called it a robbery. Chalcedon in 451 reversed all of it and defined the two natures in one person. Eutyches is worth stating carefully because his name became a label for a position most of those accused of it did not hold: the churches that rejected Chalcedon anathematised Eutyches too, and their theology is Severus' one-nature-out-of-two, not this.
What did Eutyches actually refuse to say?
That the flesh of Christ is the same as ours.