Part One: Monophysite History
[part two]
[history page]
In the middle of the seventh century, the religion of Islam inauspiciously appeared on the Arabian peninsula. Founded by the Prophet Mohammed, it was received with relatively open arms by the people of Arabia, and after the Prophet's death in 632 C.E., with the phenomenal military success of the Arabian armies, spurred to action by the message of their new religious beliefs, it would spread like wild fire across the plains of northern Africa and the eastern Mediterranean. The Arabian armies therefore constituted both a political and religious threat to the nations that stood in their way, the largest of which was the Christian Empire of Byzantium. For centuries, the Persians and the Huns had threatened the boarders of the Byzantine Empire. But the Byzantines considered themselves to be a chosen Christian people, united in faith and allegiance to their 'orthodox' Emperor, and as a unified group they withstood the constant assault of their eastern enemies. The Arabs, however, conquered much of the Byzantine Empire within just a few short years, and converted many of its inhabitants from Christianity to Islam. The question that historians must ask is: why were the Arabs so successful? Why did they succeed where the Persians and the Huns had failed?
In part, the question can be answered by looking at the rise of the Monophysite movement among the Empire's Christians in the centuries preceding the Muslim invasion. In the middle of the fifth century, the church was deeply locked in Christological debates that arose out of the ecumenical councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon, and at a time when church and state were integrally mixed, strains within the church necessarily meant strains within the Empire. The debates focused on the hypostatic union -- the fusion of the divine and the human natures within the person of Jesus Christ. On the one side were the 'orthodox' who insisted that Christ had two sperate natures -- human and divine. On the other side were the Monophysites who argued that Christ had but a single nature -- composed of the human and the divine, but tending to emphasize the former. The theological issues were somewhat blurred, however, by social and political issues that tended to reflect regional interests and traditions.
Some modern day scholars have tended to take the bitter and labyrinthine debates over two natures within Christ -- which were perhaps overly dominated and confused by vocabulary
-- and reduce the entire Monophysite controversy to a simple "quarrel about words." At the same time, some scholars have suggested that these same theological debates were in actuality a vehicle by which the deep seeded anti-imperial sentiment of the dominated peoples of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt could be expressed. Although these socio-political factors have their place -- and indeed a very central place -- in the Christological controversies that emerged after the council of Chalcedon in 451 C.E., it is the purpose of this paper to re-examine the theological differences between Monophysite and orthodox Christianity in order to find a more balanced view of the role of theological and socio-political issues within this, the first lasting schism in Christendom. Therefore, this paper will first make an analysis of the Monophysite theological positions by taking into account the theologies of Euteches of Constantinople, Severus of Antioch and Philoxenus of Mabbug, three Monophysite theologians. The Chalcedonian position will then be examined in its relation to the Monophysite position. Finally, relevant social and political factors will be taken into consideration as they relate to the Monophysite controversy itself. Before beginning with an examination of Monophysite Christianity, however, a brief history of the events leading up to the council of Chalcedon is needed in order to understand the rise and development of Monophysitism.
The council of Nicaea in 325 C.E. stated that Jesus Christ was God; co-equal , co-eternal and homousious (i.e., "of one nature") with the Father.[1] Although the pronouncements of the council satisfactorily dealt with the fourth century Arian controversy (at least in the eyes of the Church, if not in reality), at the same time, it also raised new questions about the person of Jesus Christ.[2] After Nicaea, all orthodox Christians could agree that the Son was fully divine, but Jesus of Nazareth was nevertheless an historical person; a man who lived and breathed and even died within the context of history. How could this finite man also be the all-powerful God of the Judeo-Christian tradition? The Christian scriptures had no definitive answer, and therefore the relationship between this historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth and the divine Son of God was open to debate.
The issue of the divine and the human natures of Christ was no mere theological polemic. The issue would be, and indeed still is, important in Western Christianity. But in Greek patristic thought, the relationship between the human and the divine, both actually and symbolically represented in the person of Jesus Christ, takes on added significance. According to John Meyendorff, for Eastern Christians,
The true nature of man means life in God, realized once and for all, through the Holy Spirit, in the hypostatic union of the man Jesus with the Logos and made accessible to all men, through the same Holy Spirit, in the humanity of Christ, in His body, the Church.[3]
The relationship between the human and the divine in Jesus was not simply a Christological issue, but one that also necessarily struck at the very nature of Eastern Christian ideas of salvation. Salvation in the west was expressed in the Anselmian idea of satisfaction; the idea that Jesus was a perfect and corresponding sacrifice for the sins of mankind. In the east, it was expressed in mystical terms of deification and a new life in God; "God became man, so that man may become God," as Athenasius once declared. If Jesus is not truly man, then there is no relationship between Jesus and mankind, and hence no deification. Conversely, if Jesus is not God, then there is no bridge between mankind and God, and no hope of deification as well. Thus, for Eastern Christians in particular, both the humanity and the divinity need to be present in Christ to achieve mankind's salvation. The question of the Christological debates, then, was how that relationship was to be conceived.
The controversy emerging out of Nicaea tended to divide along opposing schools of thought. Theologians of the Antiochian school emphasized the humanity of Christ, their counter-parts at Alexandria his divinity. The issue finally came to a head when, in the fifth century, Nestorius, bishop of Constantinople, apparently argued against the use of the term 'Theotokos' (i.e., "God bearer") by the Alexandrian school to describe Mary the mother of Jesus.[4] In his view, she was the mother of Jesus only in respect to his humanity, and therefore could not rightfully be called the mother of God. The Alexandrian school felt it necessary to speak of the mother of Jesus as the mother of God for it was a long established tradition, and the council of Nicaea had made it clear that Jesus was indeed God. Nestoius based his defense on the teachings of his former master, Theodore of Mopsuestia. Theodore had stated that Jesus was fully human, but was joined to the divine Word, or Logos, by an external union. Nestorius' Christ was in reality two separate persons, mysteriously linked and present in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. His views seem to have been too unorthodox for many church leaders, and an ecumenical council at Ephesus was convoked to specifically discuss, and in the end, condemn the Nestorian position.
The council of Ephesus had stated that "the Word in an unspeakable, inconceivable manner united to himself hypostatically flesh enlivened by a rational soul , and so became man."[5] But how this relationship between the divine and the human was to be conceived was not made clear. How can one speak of God being incarnate within Jesus, and still equally assert Jesus' full manhood? The awkwardness of the Ephesian definition can best be explained by the very nature of the council of Ephesus itself. The statement was not so much a comprehensive and positive statement of who Christ was, but in the tradition of the creeds of the past, was more of an anti-Nestorian tract (i.e., it defined what was un-orthodox more than it defined what was orthodox).
A mid-fifth century archimandrite of a monastery in Constantinople by the name of Eutyches would nevertheless answer the above questions in the negative, stating that, in Jesus Christ, the humanity was absorbed by the divinity, dissolved like a drop of honey in the sea. Eutyches had himself fought against Nestorianism, but oddly enough, after Ephesus, found himself in opposition to the orthodox bishops he had previously sided with against Nestorius.[6]
With the debate now shifted to the area of the relationship between the divine and the human within the single person of Christ, it became increasingly clear that the Ephesian statement of faith would have to be refined. Only two years after the council had made its pronouncement, another ecumenical council was called at Chalcedon to deal with the issue at hand. In its sixth session, the following statement was affirmed:
Following then the saintly Fathers, we all with one voice teach the confession of one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ: the self-same Perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, truly God and truly Man, the self-same of a rational soul and body, consubstantial with the Father regards his divinity, the self-same consubstantial with us as regards his humanity; like us in all respects, except for sin; begotten the ages from the Father as regards his divinity, and in the last days, the same for us and for our salvation from Mary, the virgin God-bearer as regards his humanity; one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only-begotten, acknowledged in two natures which undergo no confusion, no change, no division, no separation; at no point was the difference between the natures taken away from the Union, but rather the property of both natures is preserved and comes together into a single person and a single subsistant being; he is not parted or divided into two persons, but is one and the self-same Son, God, Word, Lord Jesus Christ, just as taught from the beginning about him, and the Lord Jesus Christ himself instructed us, and as the creed of the fathers handed it down to us.[7]
Due to the influence of Pope Leo III's Tome at the council, the statement reflected papal and Western Christian understandings of the relationship between the divine and the human in Christ, and was thus necessarily supported by the papal legates in attendance. The statement was also supported by the eastern emperor. However, according to W.H.C. Frend, many of the bishops present were actually repulsed by the wording of the Creed, for they had "howled down" any notion of two natures in Christ just two years earlier at the council of Ephesus. They therefore saw the council's move towards "two natures in Christ" as a return to Nestorianism. Although the council, which was meant to clarify the orthodox position, had reached something of a definitive statement on the issue of Christ's divinity and humanity, already the seeds of disagreement and descent were being sown. Therefore, it is to the theological position of those who in their own day were called the "hesitentso" or the "diakrinomenoi" (those who had reservations), that this paper will now turn.[8]
[history page]
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Monophysitism, Footnotes
note: All Bible verses taken from the NRSV.
1. First council of Nicaea, Expositio fidei CCCXVIII patrum, Norman P. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, (Washington D.C., 1990), 5.
2. Arians and semi-Arians contested the Nicene formula in the centuries following the council, and won some key concessions under Emperor Constantius II. The councils of Constantinople and Aquieleia reaffirmed the Nicene definition of faith in the later part of the fourth century, but Arian missionary activity among the German tribes after their formal condemnation by the Church, ensured the continued existence of Arianism long into the Medieval period.
3.John Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology: historical trends and doctrinal themes, (New York, 1974, rev. 1983), 32.
4. There is some debate as to whether Nestorius himself held the theological position that is named after him. The discovery of The Bizzare of Heracleides in 1895 has prompted some scholars to reevaluate Nestorius' claim to orthodoxy. See Nestorius of Constantinople, The Bizzare of Heracleides, G.R. Driver and L.Hodgson, trans., (Oxford, 1925).
5.Cyril of Alexandria, Cyrilli epistula altera ad Nestorium (as accepted by the Council of Ephesus), Norman P. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 41.
6. Meyendorff, 33.
7. Council of Chalcedon, Deinitio fidei, Norman P. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 86.
8.W.H.C. Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement: Chapters in the History of the Church in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries, (Cambridge, 1972), xiii.
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