Nestorius came out of the Antiochene school, a monk and celebrated preacher, and was plucked from Antioch by the emperor Theodosius II in 428 to be Archbishop of Constantinople. Within months he had made the quarrel that consumed him. His chaplain, and then Nestorius himself, preached against the popular title Theotokos, Bearer of God, for the Virgin Mary: God, he argued, was not born, did not nurse and did not die, and the title confused the divine nature with the human; better to say Christotokos, Bearer of Christ, naming the one person in whom both natures met. Constantinople's monks and people, devoted to the title, heard blasphemy, and Cyril, the formidable Patriarch of Alexandria, heard opportunity.
The paper war that followed drew in Rome and ended at the Council of Ephesus in 431. Cyril opened proceedings before the Antiochene bishops arrived; Nestorius, deposed and anathematized by a council he refused to attend, was returned first to his monastery and then exiled to the Great Oasis of the Egyptian desert. He lived long enough to read the Tome of Leo and to believe, bitterly, that the council of Chalcedon in 451 had vindicated much of what he meant, and died about that year, the first great heresiarch of the imperial church whose fall was engineered as much by politics as by doctrine.