Why Precision Strengthens the Case

Getting the terms right is not a softening of the Orthodox position but its sharpening. The charge that the non-Chalcedonian churches are Eutychians is false and can be refuted from their own texts; the charge that they rejected an Ecumenical Council is true, unanswerable, and sufficient. This file sets out what the real objection is, why the caricature is a bad argument as well as an unjust one, what “Miaphysite” does not establish, and how to speak accurately without conceding anything.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Objection, Stated Exactly

The Orthodox Church’s objection to the non-Chalcedonian churches is this:

They did not receive the Council of Chalcedon, which is the Fourth Ecumenical Council of the Church, and they broke communion over it; nor have they received the three Ecumenical Councils that followed. Their leading teachers were deposed and anathematized by councils the Church holds to be ecumenical, and no council has revisited those judgments. They are therefore not in the Church’s communion.

That is the whole of it, and every clause of it is a matter of public record that neither side disputes. It requires no diagnosis of their inner theology, no attribution of a doctrine they deny, and no polemical embellishment.

Why the Caricature Is a Bad Argument

Suppose one argues instead: “The Copts are Monophysites; they teach that Christ’s humanity was swallowed up in his divinity; therefore they are heretics.”

The argument is unjust, because it is false — that is reason enough, and METHODOLOGY §4.1 requires accuracy toward an interlocutor. But set justice aside for a moment and consider it simply as an argument. It is also weak, and it damages the position it is meant to serve, in four ways.

It is refutable. The Coptic and Syriac churches condemn Eutyches by name and confess Christ consubstantial with us in his manhood. The moment an interlocutor produces one of their confessions, the argument collapses — and it takes the arguer’s credibility with it. An Orthodox who has staked the case on a false premise now looks to have no case.

It concedes the field if it fails. If “they are heretics because they are Eutychians” is the whole argument, then when the premise falls the conclusion appears to fall with it, and the natural inference is that there is no remaining objection — which is exactly the inference the Church does not accept. Building the case on a bad premise is how one ends up unable to state the good one.

It misidentifies the disease. The Church condemned Severus and Dioscorus for what they actually did, and her polemicists — John the Grammarian, Leontius of Jerusalem, St. John of Damascus — argued against what they actually taught. The sixth- and eighth-century Fathers did not think the Severans were Eutychians; they said so, and wrote separate treatises accordingly (see St. John of Damascus and the Summing Up). To use the caricature is to argue worse than the Fathers did.

It obscures the real difficulty, which is harder. The genuinely difficult question is not whether Severus was an Eutychian — he was not — but whether a Christology that distinguishes the natures “in thought alone” can carry the weight the Definition puts on the abiding duality, and what follows from the fact that this tradition also did not receive the doctrine of the two natural wills and two natural energies. That is a real question, it is the one the Fathers actually pressed, and the caricature prevents it from being asked.

What “Miaphysite” Does Not Establish

Precision cuts both ways, and this is the discipline that keeps precision from becoming concession.

Establishing that the non-Chalcedonian tradition is not Eutychian establishes exactly that and nothing further. In particular, it does not establish:

That the two Christologies are identical in substance. That is a further claim requiring further argument, and it is contested — including by Orthodox theologians who have read the Severan corpus closely. The near-synonymy of physis and hypostasis in Cyril is a fact; that this fact dissolves the whole disagreement is an inference. See Section 09, where the Orthodox assessments of that inference are set out on both sides.

That the conciliar condemnations were mistaken. Severus was condemned for rejecting Chalcedon and the Tome, not for Eutychianism (see The Condemnation of Severus and the Hardening). Showing that he was no Eutychian does not touch the ground on which he was actually condemned.

That “one nature” and “two natures” are simply two ways of saying the same thing. They may be, on the Cyrilline reading of physis; but the Definition does not merely say “two natures,” it says the one Christ is in two natures, unconfusedly and undividedly, with the property of each preserved — and it does so in a vocabulary where physis means the common nature, not the concrete subject. Whether the Severan formula can carry all of that is precisely what is in question (see In Two Natures).

That the other three councils are a small matter. The non-Chalcedonian churches do not receive Constantinople II, Constantinople III, or Nicaea II. The second of these defined the two natural wills and two natural energies of Christ, over a heresy that grew directly out of the doctrine of one composite activity, and a confessor died for it (see Sophronius and Maximus). Whatever one concludes about 451, 681 remains.

Accuracy Is Not Equivalence

There is a fear behind the reluctance to use accurate terms, and it should be named rather than left to operate silently. The fear is that to describe an opponent fairly is to concede that he might be right, and that to grant one point is to be on a slope toward granting all of them.

The fear is misplaced, and the Church’s own practice refutes it. She has always described her interlocutors accurately when she has been at her best: St. John of Damascus set out the positions of the Nestorians, the Jacobites, the Acephali, and the Monothelites separately and answered each on its own terms; the sixth-century neo-Chalcedonians argued with Severus about what Severus actually wrote. Accuracy toward an interlocutor is not neutrality between the positions (METHODOLOGY §4.1). One can say — and this collection does say — all of the following at once, without contradiction:

The Definition of Chalcedon is the faith of the Church, and this collection confesses it.
Those who rejected it are outside the Church’s communion; their teachers were conciliarly condemned, and the condemnations stand.
Severus of Antioch was not a Eutychian, taught the double consubstantiality, and anathematized Eutyches; describing him otherwise is false.
The persecution and book-burning by which the sixth-century state enforced the council are not defensible, and the Church’s confession does not depend on them.
The separated churches have preserved the Nicene faith, the Theotokos, the Mysteries, monasticism, and fifteen centuries of martyrdom under Persian, Arab, Ottoman, and modern persecution, and the Orthodox Church has never taught contempt for them.
None of that restores communion, because communion rests on the confession of the one faith, which includes the councils.

Holding all six is not fence-sitting. It is what the position actually is.

Grief, Not Triumph

The register in which this is said matters as much as the content. The separation of the non-Chalcedonians is the oldest unhealed division in the Church — older than the estrangement of Rome by six centuries, older than the Reformation by eleven. It divides communions that share the Nicene Creed, the Theotokos, the sacramental economy, the veneration of the martyrs, and the monastic tradition. It was made permanent by imperial coercion at least as much as by theological disagreement. It has been maintained across centuries in which both sides were being martyred by the same persecutors.

The Orthodox Church confesses that she is the Church and that Chalcedon is her council. She does not confess it as a victory. The right register here is the one the repository’s companion collection on the Great Schism uses for the West: grief that the division exists, honesty about how it came about, and no pretence that the confession of the truth makes the wound anything other than a wound (see The Great Schism).

That is also the practical reason to get the words right. A person who calls his separated neighbours by a name for a heresy they anathematize is not confessing the faith more firmly; he is making it harder for anyone to hear him confess it at all.

References

METHODOLOGY.md of this repository, §4.1 (confessional standpoint; accurate reporting of the interlocutor) and §4.2 (scope of both-sides treatment).
John of Damascus. Against the Jacobites; On the Composite Nature, against the Acephali; On Heresies. In B. Kotter, ed., Die Schriften des Johannes von Damaskos, vol. 4 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1981); trans. of On Heresies in Chase, FOTC 37.
Lebon, Joseph. Le monophysisme sévérien. Louvain: Van Linthout, 1909.
Allen, Pauline, and C. T. R. Hayward. Severus of Antioch. London: Routledge, 2004.
Winkler, Dietmar W. “Miaphysitism: A New Term for Use in the History of Dogma and in Ecumenical Theology.” The Harp 10 (1997): 33–40.
Gray, Patrick T. R. The Defense of Chalcedon in the East (451–553). Leiden: Brill, 1979.
Bathrellos, Demetrios. The Byzantine Christ. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Ladouceur, Paul. “Orthodox Critiques of the Agreed Statements between the Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Churches.” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 60.3 (2016): 333–368.