DIOSCORO I. - Patriarch of Alexandria from 444 to 451, died in exile at Gangres in Paphlagonia on 4 Dec. 454. Of the life of D. before he became bishop, it is known only that he was archdeacon to his predecessor St. Cirillo, and that he accompanied him to the first Council of Ephesus (431).
From St. Cirillo he inherited a great horror of the Nestorian heresy, which went beyond bounds and led him to adhere too exclusively to certain Christological formulas of his master, which could lend themselves to ambiguity and did not accord either with those of the Antiochene Orientals or with those of the Latin West. On the pretext that St. Cirillo loved the formula: “One incarnate φύσις of the divine Word,” he condemned those who maintained that there were two natures, δύο φύσεις, in Jesus Christ. All his misfortunes arose from such an intransigence, which St. Cirillo did not know. When Eutiche, condemned by the Council of Constantinople in 448, appealed to him, he espoused the cause of the obstinate monk and, in agreement with the eunuch Crisafe, had the emperor Teodosio II convene an ecumenical council to review his trial. Everything had previously been arranged to ensure the rehabilitation of the Constantinopolitan archimandrite at the synodicle that met at Ephesus in 449. For the conduct of D., who had secured its presidency, V. CALCEDONIA (Il Concilio di C.); EFESO, LATROCINIO di. At Ephesus Eutiche was recognized as orthodox and the “dyophysites,” that is, those who affirmed the two natures in Christ, were condemned.
As a result of this decision D. became the father of monophysitism—not of the crude monophysitism known as Eutychianism, which caused the humanity of the Savior to disappear into divinity like a drop of water in the ocean, but of verbal monophysitism, to which Severo di Antiochia would later give his name: one who, wholly enslaved to formulas, opposed the terminology canonized by the Council of Chalcedon.
The triumph of D. after the “Ephesian robber council” was short-lived. In Oct. 451 a new ecumenical council, summoned by the emperor Marciano, was held at Chalcedon. Before reaching the city, the Fathers held a preliminary meeting at Nicaea, where D., in agreement with certain Egyptian bishops, had Pope St. Leone excommunicated. Such an act, together with other misdeeds, was reproached to him at session III of the Council of Chalcedon (10 Oct. 451), at which he refused to appear, and resulted in his deposition. This sentence was approved by the emperor Marciano, who moreover exiled him to Gangres, where he died.
D. seems to have written little; only a few letters and fragments of letters survive, in Syriac and Armenian translation. A lengthy funeral eulogy by Macario, bishop of Tkou in Egypt, attributed to him, is not his, or at least has been greatly interpolated. The Memoirs of D. are likewise apocryphal; fragments of them remain
in Coptic (cf. E. Amélineau, Mémoires publiées par les membres de la mission archéologique française au Caire, IV, Parigi 1895, pp. 165-95).
As for the Life of D. by the deacon Teopiste (F. Nau, Die Vita Dioskurs von Theopistus syrisch und französisch, in Journal asiatique, 10ª serie, 1 [1930], pp. 5-108, 310-41), it is a dithyrambic eulogy of its protagonist, woven with legend, which reveals nothing about the life of D. before his episcopate and which must have undergone later reworkings.