RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Monophysitism
curus, charging that he had been deposed by that “ Nestorianizing council,’ secured the consecration of the presbyter Timotheus A‘lurus (see Monopuysites, §§ 3-5) as antibishop to his Chalcedonian successor. Throughout Syria, Egypt, and the entire East the charge of Nestorianizing continued to be asserted and reasserted against the council of Chalcedon. A schism between the conciliar and the anticonciliar partizans was inevitably approaching. Likewise in orthodox Greek Antioch, Peter the Fuller, supported by his political and ecclesiastical partizans, eventually displaced the Chalcedonian occupant of this other apostolic see, and succeeded to his patriarchal authority. During the rule of the Chalcedonian Leo, who had succeeded 3. Fruitless the Emperor Marcian, the Creed of Attempts at Chalcedon was opposed generally by Reconcilia- the monks and their political partizans tion. throughout the East. After his death, the intruding Basiliscus annulled the imperial approval of his two predecessors in confirming the conciliar acceptance of the “Tome” with the creed, but he was soon displaced by the Chalcedonian Zeno (q.v.) whose unsuccessful efforts to reconcile the opposing ecclesiastical parties resulted in the promulgation of the compromise Henoticon (q.v.) in 482, condemning both Nestorianism and Eutyches, but not imposing on the Church the creed of the fourth Council of Chalcedon in addition to the dogmatic declarations of the three councils preceding. As before, during the ceaseless controversy after the compromise Antiochene confession had been accepted by the Alexandrine Cyril, the extremists of both the Chalcedonian and the anti-Chalcedonian parties refused to be reconciled by this substitute neutral statement. What the Christological teaching of the Syrians was during these troubled times is evident from the doctrine of Philoxenus (q.v.), the anti-Chalcedonian bishop of Hierapolis (c. 500), and from that of the anti-conciliar Severus (q.v.), his contemporary, and anti-Chalcedonian patriarch of Antioch 4. Syrian in 513. “ Disturbances being caused in Christology Palestine (in 508) by a certain Nephaat this _lius, who, from being one of the extreme Period. Monophysite party, had turned Chalcedonian, and, with the assistance of the Patriarch of Jerusalem, was expelling many monks from their monasteries, Severus, seeking to counteract the movement, went to Constantinople, where he wrote a treatise against the charge of Eutychianism, the Philalethes, against those who found the Chalcedonian doctrine in Cyril. Here he remained three years until after the ordination of Timothy to the see of Constantinople (511); after which he returned to Majuma and immediately set himself to abolish the Henoticon compromise, whereby all mention of the Council of Chalcedon had been expunged, and to procure the deposition of the patriarchs Flavian of Antioch and Elijah of Jerusalem ” (Sixth Book of the Select Letters of Severus, ed. E. W. Brooks, Introduction, 2 vols., London, 1902-04). “ And at the same time Severus of Antioch became known who wrote several books concerning the question of the one nature of the divine and the human, without mixture and without confusion or corruption;
so that they continue each in its own place, as the nature of man consists of a spiritual nature and of the body, and the nature of the body consists of two natures, the one material and the other of form, without the soul being changed into the body, or the material parts into the form, or the contrary ” (HE. F. K. Fortescue, The Armenian Church, p. 281, London, 1872). Herein is again asserted the traditional Antiochene teaching of ‘‘one compound person ”’ of the first formula, with the added dogmatic declaration against the error of Eutyches, “without mixture, confusion, or corruption,” the last word against the ‘ aphthartodocetics”’ (see JULIAN oF Haticarnassus). The use throughout of the term “ nature,” where the Greeks would alternate their two corresponding terms physis (‘ nature’’) and prosdpon (“person”) or hypostasis, proves that the Creed of Chalcedon is untranslatable into Syriac, as it also is into Armenian and into Coptic.
This Christological creed is found developed more fully in the doctrinal declaration of Philoxenus who, in his treatise on the incarnation, asserts that the nature (i.e., the person) of Christ is composed of divinity and of humanity, without conversion, confusion, or commixture. He teaches that the Son, one of the Trinity, united himself with a human body and a rational soul in the womb of the Virgin. His body had no being before this union. In it he was born, in it he was nourished, in it he suffered and died. Yet the divine nature of the Son did not
suffer or die, nor was his human nature
5. Chris- or his agency or death merely visionary,
tology of as the docetic Gnostics asserted, but Philoxenus. actual and real. Furthermore, the
divine nature was not changed or transformed into the human, or confused or commixed with it; neither was the human nature changed or transmuted into the divine, or commixed or confused with it; but a peculiar cooperation (i.e., Communicatio idiomatum [q.v.]) of the two natures was effected, similar to that by means of whose union the body and soul become one human being. For as the soul and body are united in one human nature, so from the union of the divinity and the humanity of Jesus Christ has proceeded a nature (i.e., person) peculiar to himself, not simple but compound; the “one compound person” of the first Antiochene formula, also ascribed to Athanasius in his term “The one nature of the Word made flesh,’’ and continually used by his Alexandrine successor Cyril. The Eutychians or Monophysites were, however, notorious, even before the Council of Chalcedon, for asserting, in addition to their original heresy of the absorption of the humanity of Christ by his divinity, the error that the human nature of Christ existed before his incarnation in the womb of the Virgin.
During the centuries following the final separation of the anti-Chalcedonian Syrians from the Greeks of the Byzantine patriarchates, their traditional teaching concerning the several sections of the fundamental apostolic faith of the Christian Church was like that of the Greeks, formulated in an authoritative and accepted system of dogma. Therefore, when the patriarch of the Syrian Jacobite Church,
Monophysitism