A certain tradition of interpreting Chalcedon as a factual disavowal of Cyril has existed in the West. In the East, on the contrary, the true Christian faith remained quite definitely Cyrillian. Furthermore, the implications of the Chalcedonian statement about “the preservation of the properties of each nature” were not always fully recognized in the East. For instance, many Byzantine spiritual authors explain such passages as Luke 2:52 (i.e., Jesus progressed in wisdom and maturity) as some pedagogical tactic on the part of Christ rather than as a real change from ignorance to knowledge, from childhood to human adulthood. For them, Christ’s divinity implied omniscience, and his humanity was modified accordingly. But was it then concretely identical with our humanity? This reluctance to admit human ignorance in Christ may have Hellenistic-Evagrian roots, which equated ignorance with sinfulness, and may therefore be anthropologically, and not christologically, motivated. Other Byzantine theologians had no difficult admitting human ignorance in Christ. Their opposition to a Christian heresy of the 6th century, called Aphthartodocetism, which carried Monophysitism(i.e., Christ had but one nature and that divine) to a new extreme, also indicates a perception – both biblical and Chalcedonian – that Christ’s humanity was, indeed, very similar to ours in every way except sin.

It is obvious that the Church struggled greatly to come to the understanding of Who Jesus Is. We truly believe that the Church has been guided by the Holy Spirit since it seems beyond human intellectual ability to have conceived the resulting definition of who we believe to be.

The fullness of humanity in Christ will also be further defined in the theological synthesis of Maximus the Confessor and his doctrine of the two wills, as well as in the affirmation during the period of iconoclasm of Christ’s “depictability.” The christological debates around Chalcedon – just like the trinitarian controversies of the fourth century – illustrate the limitations (actually recognized by the fathers of the Church) inherent in doctrinal definitions and other conceptual formulas.

This is one of the reasons why, as the Eastern Church has done, it is easier to say what God and Jesus are not. Definitions always fall short, even though they are important.