Chapter 22: Monophysites and Dyophysites

Three currents stood out from the tormented landscape that was presented by the ecclesiatical rivalries and quarrels of the Church, which was struggling for the recognition of its authority and preeminence. They corresponded to the two poles of imperial power: Rome and Byzantium, and the cradle of Hellenized Christianity, Alexandria.

Monophysism had more to do with schism than heresy. Born in Alexandria, this doctrine was not innovative but used old speculations on the nature of the Messiah to mark itself from Rome. After the Council of Chalcedoine, held in 451, the eastern Churches seized hold of the Jacobites of Syria and the Armenian churches, so as to constitute their dogma, which was still honored by the Egyptian Coptics. But it is also necessary to take account of the animosity that had not ceased to be manifested between Alexandria and Antioch, the city in which — from the end of the First Century — the communities devoted to Jacob and Simon-Peter had been implanted. The judgment of Tertullian was once more verified “Episcopatus aemulatio mater schismatum est.”

By rejecting Arius, the Church of Rome had defined, through the credo of Nicaea, the rudiments of Catholic dogma: the Christ was God; he formed a single substance with the Father; although he was created for all eternity by the Father, he was incarnated by descending to earth and thus became a man entirely apart [from the others]. This was the position of Tertullian and, for Rome, it defined the role of the Church most advantageously: a spiritual and temporal power; the union of the celestial kingdom and the temporal kingdom. The Church was founded by God and by “Jesus, put to death under Pontius Pilate,” whose two principal apostles, Peter and Paul, were martyred in Rome, designating by their sacrifice — according to the example of Christ — the legitimate place of the “Holy See.”

Arianism, issued from Alexandria, established a subordinate relationship between God, the creator of all things, and the Son, created as any man but invested by the divine Logos. “Did you have a son before he was born?” Arius asked of mothers and his question, ironically aimed at the Mother Church, attacked the pretension of ecclesiastical Rome to divine perpetuity.

It was still from Alexandria and Cyrille, a disciple of Athanase (Arius’ enemy), that the revolt against Rome came. The revolt grafted itself to one of the specious quarrels in which Alexandria and Antioch had engaged for centuries.

There was the unique substance of the Father, the Son and the Logos, or Spirit, but was it the nature, the physis of this Jesus who was a man entirely apart and, at the same time, the God of all eternity?

For the party of Antioch, there was a Messiah of two natures, one divine and one human. Such was the opinion of Theodore of Mopsueste (350–428), Theodoret of Cyrus, and Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople. An error, retorted the party of Alexandria: to admit two natures was to recognize two Messiahs, two persons, one the eternal Logos, the other an historical individual. Monophysites, or the supporters of a single nature, thenceforth entered into the lists of those combating the Antiochians or Dyophysites, who distinguished two natures.

Paradoxically, Monophysism derived from the hostility manifested towards Arius by Athanase of Alexandria, who insisted on the unique nature of the incarnated God-Logos. Around 370, Apollinaire of Laodicee (Latakiech, in Syria), desiring to pursue the struggle against Arianism, insisted on Athanase’s thesis and attracted the animosity of Epiphanius of Salamis, the hunter of heretics and the juridical enemy of Origen.

In 374, Epiphanius denounced Apollinaire to Damase, the Bishop of Rome: Apollinaire was condemned by a synod.

In 381, while the ecumenical council of Constantinople anathematized Arianism and Apollinaire’s theses, an adversary of Apollinaire, the Antiochian Diodore of Tarse, took the position opposite to the incriminated doctrine and decreed that the most important thing about the Christ was his human nature, his suffering, his exemplary sacrifice. He counted two natures in this Messiah, tossed about, as pretext, from one camp to the other, on the waves of a theology of power: the Word [Verbe] or Logos, Son of God, and Jesus the man, son of Mary. Thus, Theodore of Mopsueste developed the theory of Diodore.

The difficulty in which were entangled the clerics trying to legitimate their authority by fortifying it with “divine truths” precisely concerned the way that they transformed into concrete realities the purely speculative reasons that Judeo-Christian Gnosticism had maintained at the very limits of coherence: a God who drew from his eternal essence a Logos (or image) of which the flash (or reflection) preserved its imprint in human matter. From this, divine Wisdom — Sophia or Mary, feminine Spirit — gave birth to — and always from the same virginal essence — a Messiah, a savior, a redeemer, who assumed the body of a man, and thereby knew the miserable lot of mortals and, through, his exemplary sacrifice, ascended towards his Father by showing mankind the road of salvation and the ascensional route of the divine that was inside it. What spoiled and complicated the metaphysical purity of such a construction was the will or the necessity of introducing a temporal power, a legal authority.

The apologue of Sophia, the virgin, and Prunikos, the prostitute, contented itself with allegorically expressing the descent of the Spirit into matter and the deplorable fate that imposed upon it the “malediction of the flesh.” But the parthenogenesis of a young Jewish bride giving birth to a God after having welcomed a dove?!

In 423, when Theodose II named the Antiochian Nestorius to be the patriarch of Constantinople, popular Greek Christianity — dressed in the costume of the commonly invoked ancient Goddess — took up the custom of celebrating Mary as the mother of God. She was Theotokos. (In the Fourth and Fifth Centuries, the custom of offering cakes to Ceres became Christianized. One would call “Collyridians,” from the Greek word collyres, “little cakes,” the new Christians who gave to Mary offerings reserved for her archetype. Epiphanius would unleash his fury against them, no doubt due to ordinary misogyny, but also because he suspected that, under the Christian facade, the old fertility rites remained intact.)

Therefore Nestorius (381–451), the Bishop of Byzantium from 428–431, claimed for himself the Dyophysite school of Antioch. His disciples held him to be, along with Theodore of Mopsueste and Diodore of Tarse, among the “three great lights of the Church.” His political realism incited him to follow the Antiochian tradition of historical exegesis, rather than the allegorical tradition of Alexandria. Nevertheless, he clashed with the general sentiment of the Greek Catholics by rejecting the expression “mother of God” (Theotokos) in favor of Anthropotokos or Christotokos (mother of Man or mother of the Christ).

Cyrille of Alexandria, adversary of Nestorius and partisan of Apollinaire of Laodicea, quickly counter-attacked: “If the Christ is God, and Mary is his mother, would she not be the mother of God?”

The emperor convened a council at Ephesus in 431. Through a maneuver that revealed the political obedience of theological argumentation, the partisans of Cyrille, arriving first, obtained the condemnation of Nestorius. As the Theotokos, the Mother of God, Mary triumphed. Nestorius was deposed. Although a counter-council of the Nestorians replied by deposing Cyrille of Alexandria in 436, the patriach of Byzantium was banished to Petra, then in Upper Egypt, where he died. By imperial order, the ensemble of his works was burned. Nevertheless, a copy of his Bazaar of Heraclides escaped destruction. In it, he proclaimed that God could not have been born from a woman, nor that he died on the cross. This was a thesis commonly accepted by the Christian Gnostics of the Second Century and that the Church would condemn under the name “Docetism.”

The fall of Nestorius involved that of the Dyophysites Diodore of Tarse and Theodore of Mopsueste, who — held as orthodox in their era — would be posthumously placed among the camp of the heretics. Nevertheless, Diodore deployed great ingenuity by explaining that, in Mary’s uterus, the Logos built a temple for itself. This temple was Jesus the man, headed for birth and suffering, whereas the divine Logos, for its part, escaped from control by human destiny.

Likewise, Theodore insisted on the union in a single person of the nature of Man, complete in its humanity, and nature, perfect in its divinity, and the Logos-Son, consubstantial with the Father.

In 489, the school of Edessa, in which Nestorianism enjoyed a great popularity, fell under the prohibitions of Emperor Zenon. The persecution would hunt the Nestorians, whose Churches would spread everywhere in the East, Samarcande and Tartaria as far as India, even China. They have maintained themselves ever since by conserving, according to their dogma, the idea that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and not the Son, which is what the Byzantine Church affirmed. The West would only keep a trace of these doctrines, which were condemned under the name “Adoptianism,” associated with Felix of Urgel and Elipand, the Bishop of Toledo, excommunicated by the Council of Frankfurt in the Eighth Century because they maintained that God had adopted Jesus the man so as to deposit his Logos in him.