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Monophysite or ‘Oriental Orthodox’?: Worrying Trends

Today I will present my first academic conference paper. It is not all that noteworthy, but it will be a first for me. The paper is a brief synopsis and analysis of two late seventh-century Armenian documents, a chronicle and a dogmatic treatise, somewhat related to the Byzantine heresy of monotheletism and directly related to […]

Today I will present my first academic conference paper. It is not all that noteworthy, but it will be a first for me. The paper is a brief synopsis and analysis of two late seventh-century Armenian documents, a chronicle and a dogmatic treatise, somewhat related to the Byzantine heresy of monotheletism and directly related to the problems of Byzantine-Armenian church relations of that time. As I was looking over the paper last night, it occurred to me that some of the likely assembled Armenians would find my use of the conventional term monophysite either ‘reductive’ or polemical.

It is, of course, a polemical label, invented in the late seventh century by St. Anastasios of Sinai in his running battles with Coptic monophysites, but it has been used conventionally and unproblematically in Byzantine history and church history for so many decades that the new vogue in patristic studies and theology to dance around or avoid the term is a little frivolous at best and potentially menacing at worst. The new, ecumenical style of the last decade or so is to refer to monophysites (who are, in fact, basically that by their own admission, whether or not its implications are what we ‘Chalcedonians’ say they are: they do teach one nature after the Incarnation, which all other Christian confessions concerned with such definitions see as unduly confusing and confused) as non-Chalcedonians, anti-Chalcedonians or, worst of all in my estimation, Oriental Orthodox.

I imagine the trend has been developing for longer than this, but it has penetrated into the mainstream of patristics studies, even among Orthodox scholars, including the estimable and impressive Prof. (and now also Father) Andrew Louth, and I cannot help but think that this change in terminology is calculated to provide some intellectual justification for the continued, unacceptable efforts at the Patriarchate of Antioch to allow monophysites to partake of the Orthodox Eucharist. This is not to mention the already partial recognition of monophysite sacraments granted by the Patriarch of Alexandria, all of which is detailed in the Thessaloniki conference’s conclusions, which can be found elsewhere on this site or at Uncut Mountain.

History is nothing if not instructive to those who would learn from its record. In the twelfth century there was a remarkable, almost unprecedented move towards reunion betweens Byzantines and Armenians that employed genuinely unprecedented language on the Armenian side that anticipated modern ecumenist ecclesiology by 800 years. Yet even in the midst of this movement towards reunion, in one of the most ecumenist medieval documents that anyone studying the middle ages will ever see, there is still the insistence that the one nature formula is sufficient and indeed superior. In one sense, this dogged refusal to let go of the exact letter of St. Cyril’s well-meaning, correctly understood use of a phrase from what turned out to be an Apollinarian forgery is admirable to some extent, but it is a sort of literal fundamentalism, as Fr. John Meyendorff called it, and false traditionalism, which is the adherence simply to form and not to essence.

Surely St. Cyril would not have been so obsessed with form, unless it revealed something profoundly important: the Father’s battle to vindicate the necessity of calling the Virgin Mary Theotokos was just this sort of battle for theological reality, not form. There is indeed nothing more hateful to God than warring over empty differences of terminology to the detriment of the peace of the Church–it is the case, however, that most (though not all) such differences are not fights over empty formulae, but over vital truths.

It is possible, and has been possible for over 1,500 years, to understand St. Cyril’s “one nature of God the Word incarnate” in a Chalcedonian Orthodox fashion. When this alternative is posed, monophysites have flatly refused it every time. According to some, including modern Armenian apologists, there is only one nature in Christ (the divine nature), whereas His nonetheless perfect Humanity is ostensibly only an ‘economic’ reality, which is to say something that exists because of the Incarnation, but which does not possess its own “nature.” That this compromises and undermines the integrity and reality of His Humanity, as well as throwing into doubt the reality of His assumption of our humanity, needs no emphasis from me: it is entirely straightforward and requires no hostile witness to draw that conclusion from it. Another alternative response is the idea of “composite” or “synthetic” single nature “from two natures,” which etymologically and logically implies confusion. It would be tiresome to rehash the ontological assumptions of these terms to demonstrate other problems and mistakes of imagining two natures in one or the terminological equation of nature and hypostasis.

Indeed there was never any substantial disagreement between St. Cyril and the Fathers of the Fourth Ecumenical Council, who took St. Cyril as an authority and taught a perfectly compatible doctrine. It is nonetheless the case that this phrase is not exactly the most felicitous and edifying way to express hypostatic union in Our Lord Jesus Christ, and fortunately the royal road of Orthodox Tradition accommodates other expressions that aid our understanding, which could readily be led into extremes by a single perspective. For their part, there is no way that Chalcedonian Christology can be found acceptable within monophysite theology, because that theology is rooted in perpetual hostility to that Council’s teachings.

It is the breadth and precision of catholicity that allows the incorporation of rival formulations, and the narrowness of sectarianism that refuses any formulation but its own. To pretend that the division with monophysites is only a matter of muddled terminology (though there is that as well) is to fail to see the spirit in which the schism has been maintained beyond all reason. If they had possessed the mind of the Fathers, there could never have been such a long-enduring schism. To call monophysites Oriental Orthodox, except perhaps as a diplomatic form of address, is to credit their confession with a certain validity that it does not really possess.

The more I come to know and respect the Armenians as a people, the more upset I become at the colossal wrong that has been done to this most ancient of Christian nations by her own bishops. One wonders whether most of the other Christian nations would have looked on with as much indifference as they did during the massacres of 1894-96 and the genocide of 1915-23 had the Armenians not remained outside the communion of all the major European confessions.

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