It seems that a certain tradition of interpreting Chalcedon as a factual disavowal of Cyril has existed in the West. In the East, on the contrary, Christian orthodoxy remained quite definitely Cyrillian. Further more, 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 (“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 difficulty admitting human “ignorance” in Christ. Their opposition to “aphthartodocetism” also indicates a perception – both biblical and Chalcedonian – that Christ’s humanity was, indeed, very similar to ours in every way except sin. Aphthartodocetism (aphthartos, “incorruptible”), a Christian heresy of the 6th century that truly carried Monophysitism (“Christ had but one nature and that divine”) to a new extreme. It was proclaimed by Julian, bishop of Halicarnassus, who asserted that the body of Christ was divine and therefore naturally incorruptible and impassible. Christ, however, was free to will his sufferings and death voluntarily. Severus, patriarch of Antioch, himself a condemned Monophysite, vigorously challenged Julian on the ground that the doctrine of salvation was meaningless unless Christ’s body was truly human. Justinian I, the Byzantine emperor, then proclaimed it a new heresy in an edict of 564 and would have imposed it on the Eastern church but for his death the following year.
We see in all of this that the Fathers of the Church truly struggled with coming up with the faith that we now hold about Jesus, namely that He is truly God and truly man. It was not a simple, easy path to find a way to express Who Jesus Is. The various heresies that arose challenged the Church to come up with statements about who She thinks Jesus truly is.