Severus, Jacob Baradaeus, and the Parallel Hierarchies

Severus of Antioch gave the rejection of Chalcedon its lasting theological form, and Jacob Baradaeus gave it bishops. This file reports Severus’ actual position accurately — he anathematized Eutyches, confessed Christ consubstantial with the Father in Godhead and with us in manhood, and distinguished the natures “in thought alone” — and then traces the clandestine ordinations of the sixth century that turned a resistance into a set of churches: Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, and later Ethiopian.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Why Severus Must Be Reported Accurately

Severus of Antioch (c. 465–538) was condemned by the Church, and this collection confesses that condemnation as standing (see The Condemnation of Severus and the Hardening). He is nonetheless routinely misdescribed in polemical writing as a man who taught that Christ’s humanity was swallowed up in his divinity. He did not teach that; he condemned it. Attributing to a condemned teacher a doctrine he explicitly anathematized is not a stronger indictment but a weaker one, because it can be refuted from his own writings — and because the Church’s objection to him does not need it (METHODOLOGY §4.1: heterodox positions are reported accurately, in their own terms, with citations).

The scholarship that established this is not modern ecumenical special pleading. It goes back to Joseph Lebon’s Le monophysisme sévérien (Louvain, 1909), a study of the Syriac corpus that demonstrated from the texts that Severus’ Christology is Cyrillian and not Eutychian; it is confirmed by Grillmeier and Hainthaler and by the standard modern introduction, Allen and Hayward’s Severus of Antioch (Lebon, Le monophysisme sévérien, 1909; Grillmeier with Hainthaler, Christ in Christian Tradition, vol. 2 pt. 2, London: Mowbray, 1995; Allen and Hayward, Severus of Antioch, London: Routledge, 2004; Torrance, Christology after Chalcedon: Severus of Antioch and Sergius the Monophysite, Norwich: Canterbury Press, 1988).

Severus’ Life

Severus was born at Sozopolis in Pisidia, educated in rhetoric at Alexandria and in law at Beirut, baptized only as an adult, and became a monk in Palestine. He came to prominence at Constantinople under the Emperor Anastasius I as a spokesman of the anti-Chalcedonian cause, and in 512 was consecrated Patriarch of Antioch. He held the see six years. On the accession of Justin I in 518 and the Chalcedonian restoration that followed, he fled to Egypt, where he spent the remaining twenty years of his life in exile, writing, corresponding with his party across the East, and directing what had become a church without a state. He was condemned at Constantinople in 536 and died in Egypt in 538 (Allen and Hayward, Severus of Antioch, 2004, ch. 1; Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972, 201–232; Menze, Justinian and the Making of the Syrian Orthodox Church, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

His works survive overwhelmingly in Syriac translation, the Greek originals having been destroyed after his condemnation: the Cathedral Homilies, a very large correspondence, the polemical treatises against Julian of Halicarnassus, the Philalethes against a Chalcedonian florilegium, and above all the Contra impium Grammaticum (“Against the Impious Grammarian”), directed at the neo-Chalcedonian John the Grammarian of Caesarea and the classic statement of his case (Allen and Hayward, 2004, on the corpus).

What Severus Actually Held

He confessed the double consubstantiality. Christ is consubstantial with the Father according to the Godhead and consubstantial with us according to the manhood; the humanity is complete, with a rational soul and body, undiminished and unaltered by the union.

He anathematized Eutyches by name, and he was not merely tactically distancing himself: he wrote against the doctrine that the flesh of Christ is not of one substance with ours, and against the mixture or confusion of the natures, in the same terms Chalcedon used.

He also anathematized Julian of Halicarnassus, a fellow anti-Chalcedonian bishop who taught that Christ’s body was incorruptible from the moment of the union — the doctrine called aphthartodocetism. The Severan–Julianist quarrel was long and bitter, and it is decisive evidence about Severus: he broke with his own party’s most prominent theologian precisely to defend the genuine, passible, corruptible humanity of Christ before the resurrection (Grillmeier with Hainthaler, vol. 2 pt. 2, 1995, on the Severan–Julianist controversy; Allen and Hayward, 2004).

He held that the natures are distinguished “in thought alone” (kat’ epinoian, in contemplation). This is the load-bearing formula, and it is where the real difference lies. For Severus the union produced one composite reality — “one nature of God the Word incarnate,” Cyril’s formula taken as the governing rule — within which Godhead and manhood remain wholly themselves and can be distinguished by the mind, but are not two things that may be numbered in the concrete. He therefore rejected “in two natures” as a numbering of the incarnate Christ, and he rejected the Tome of Leo, reading “each form does what is proper to it” as an assignment of separate activities to two operating subjects (Lebon, 1909; Torrance, Christology after Chalcedon, 1988; Meyendorff, Christ in Eastern Christian Thought, Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1975, 32–46).

He held one composite activity. Against Leo’s two proper operations, Severus insisted on the single theandric activity of the one incarnate Word, whose every act — healing, weeping, dying, rising — is the act of the single subject. This is the point of his critique that mattered most, and it is the point on which the Church would define against him: the Sixth Ecumenical Council’s confession of two natural energies and two natural wills is the conciliar answer to Severus’ single activity, worked out by St. Maximus the Confessor (see Sophronius and Maximus).

The Orthodox Assessment

Reporting Severus accurately does not make him orthodox, and the Church’s judgment on him is not open. Three things must be said.

He rejected the definition of an Ecumenical Council. That is the primary and sufficient fact. Chalcedon confessed the one Christ in two natures; Severus refused the confession, and taught others to refuse it. Whatever the merits of his exegesis of physis, a bishop who will not confess what the Church has defined has placed himself outside her communion, and his followers with him.

His formula does not do the work the Definition does. To distinguish the natures “in thought alone” is to make the abiding duality a function of how we consider Christ rather than of what he is. Chalcedon’s ἐν δύο φύσεσιν asserts that the two natures are actual in him, not merely distinguishable by us. The difference is not nothing: on Severus’ account the permanence of the assumed humanity as a real principle with its own properties and its own activity is under strain, and it broke under that strain in the following century, when a Christology of the one activity yielded monoenergism and monothelitism — a heresy that the Church had to define against and that St. Maximus died to resist.

The Church condemned him conciliarly, and the condemnation has never been revisited. He was anathematized at Constantinople in 536 under the Patriarch Menas and by Justinian’s edict, and condemned again by the Fifth Ecumenical Council (see The Condemnation of Severus and the Hardening). He is honored as a saint in the Syriac Orthodox and Coptic Orthodox Churches. That is precisely the difficulty that the modern proposals to lift anathemas have run into, and it is treated in Section 09.

What should not be said of him: that he denied Christ’s humanity, that he taught a mixture of the natures, that he followed Eutyches, or that he was indifferent to the reality of the flesh. He wrote against all four positions.

Jacob Baradaeus and the Making of a Hierarchy

Theology alone does not make a church. What made the separation permanent was ordination.

After the Chalcedonian restoration of 518 the anti-Chalcedonian bishops were deposed and their communities left without a hierarchy that could ordain. Justinian’s policy was to install Chalcedonian bishops in every see and to let the opposition die out for want of clergy. It did not die out, for two reasons: the Empress Theodora, who protected the anti-Chalcedonian exiles at Constantinople and sheltered their deposed leaders in the capital; and one extraordinarily energetic bishop.

Jacob Baradaeus (c. 500–578) was a Syrian monk living under Theodora’s protection in Constantinople. Around 542–543 he was consecrated bishop of Edessa by the deposed and exiled Patriarch Theodosius of Alexandria, with other exiled bishops, at Theodora’s request and with a commission not to a city but to a mission (Menze, Justinian and the Making of the Syrian Orthodox Church, 2008; Frend, 1972, 284–295; Allen and Hayward, 2004). [Disputed: the exact year and the co-consecrators. The sources and the modern literature give c. 542, 543, or 543/544 for the consecration; the principal consecrator is consistently Theodosius of Alexandria, but the accounts of who assisted vary, some naming the deposed Patriarch Anthimus of Constantinople and other exiled bishops then in the capital (Menze, *Justinian and the Making of the Syrian Orthodox Church*, 2008; Frend, *The Rise of the Monophysite Movement*, 284–295). The chronology rests substantially on John of Ephesus, a partisan of the movement.]

For the next thirty-five years Jacob travelled the East in disguise — the epithet Burdʿoyo, “the ragged,” from which “Baradaeus” comes, refers to the beggar’s saddlecloth he is said to have worn — ordaining bishops, priests, and deacons across Syria, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, and beyond, and installing an anti-Chalcedonian patriarch of Antioch. The figures given by the sources for the number of his ordinations are very large and cannot be checked; what is certain is the effect. Where before 542 there had been a party with deposed leaders, after Jacob there was a complete parallel hierarchy with its own succession, capable of perpetuating itself indefinitely without imperial favor (Menze, 2008; Frend, 1972, 284–295). The Syriac Orthodox Church has been called “Jacobite” from his name ever since — a usage that church does not itself prefer.

The moment Jacob’s ordinations took hold, the question changed. Before, there had been a dispute inside one Church about a council. After, there were two hierarchies, two lines of succession, and two sets of altars in the same cities. Everything since has been an attempt to deal with that fact.

How the Churches Came to Stand Apart

Egypt. The Coptic Church is the oldest and most solid element of the separation. From the murder of Proterius in 457, through the Henotikon, to the definitive establishment of a separate Coptic patriarchate of Alexandria in the sixth century, Egypt was overwhelmingly anti-Chalcedonian, with the Chalcedonian patriarch supported by the imperial garrison and known as the Melkite — the “king’s man.” The population, the monasteries, and the Coptic-speaking countryside went with the separated hierarchy (Frend, 1972, 232–295; Meyendorff, Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions, Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1989).

Syria and Mesopotamia. Here the division was never geographical but communal: Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian congregations existed side by side in the same cities for centuries. Jacob’s hierarchy gave the non-Chalcedonians institutional permanence; the Syriac Orthodox Church dates its continuous separate episcopate from him (Menze, 2008).

Armenia. The Armenian Church was outside the empire and had not been represented at Chalcedon, being occupied in 451 with a war of religion against Persia. Its position was formed later and by stages. The First Council of Dvin (505–506) accepted the Henotikon and confessed a Cyrillian faith, condemning Nestorianism; the Second Council of Dvin (554/555) is generally taken as the formal Armenian rejection of Chalcedon (Frend, 1972, on Armenia; and see the disputed note below). [Disputed: whether the First Council of Dvin (505–506) itself rejected Chalcedon. The synodal letter of that council confesses the Cyrillian faith and condemns Nestorius but does not, on its own terms, reject the Chalcedonian Definition; the claim that it did rests on a secondary letter whose authenticity has been questioned. The formal Armenian rejection is generally placed at the Second Council of Dvin of 554/555. Historians differ on how much weight the first council bears.] The Armenian tradition has also never received the Tome of Leo.

Ethiopia. The Ethiopian Church received its Christianity from Alexandria in the fourth century and its metropolitan (abun) from the Coptic patriarch of Alexandria continuously thereafter; it therefore stood where Alexandria stood, and its non-Chalcedonian position is an inheritance of that dependence rather than an independent judgment on the council. It received its own autocephalous patriarch only in the twentieth century (Frend, 1972, on Ethiopia and Nubia; Meyendorff, Imperial Unity, 1989).

Together with the Eritrean Church and the Malankara (Indian) Church, these bodies form the family now generally called Oriental Orthodox. They receive the first three Ecumenical Councils and not Chalcedon or those after it; they are not in communion with the Orthodox Church; and the division between them and her is the oldest unhealed division in Christendom.

References

Lebon, Joseph. Le monophysisme sévérien: Étude historique, littéraire et théologique sur la résistance monophysite au concile de Chalcédoine jusqu’à la constitution de l’Église jacobite. Louvain: Van Linthout, 1909.
Allen, Pauline, and C. T. R. Hayward. Severus of Antioch. The Early Church Fathers. London: Routledge, 2004.
Torrance, Iain R. Christology after Chalcedon: Severus of Antioch and Sergius the Monophysite. Norwich: Canterbury Press, 1988.
Grillmeier, Aloys, with Theresia Hainthaler. Christ in Christian Tradition. Vol. 2 pt. 2. Trans. Pauline Allen and John Cawte. London: Mowbray, 1995.
Severus of Antioch. Contra impium Grammaticum; Philalethes; Cathedral Homilies; the correspondence — surviving principally in Syriac.
Menze, Volker L. Justinian and the Making of the Syrian Orthodox Church. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Frend, W. H. C. The Rise of the Monophysite Movement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972.
Meyendorff, John. Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions: The Church 450–680 A.D. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1989; Christ in Eastern Christian Thought, 1975.
John of Ephesus. Lives of the Eastern Saints (the principal narrative source for Jacob Baradaeus, written from within the movement).