Chalcedon and the Non-Chalcedonians

St. Cyril of Alexandria is claimed as supreme post-apostolic authority by two communions that have not been in communion with each other for more than fifteen centuries: the Chalcedonian Eastern Orthodox and the Oriental Orthodox. This file — a flagship both-sides treatment governed by Methodology §4 — examines how both families read the same Father; the load-bearing distinction between miaphysite and monophysite; Severus of Antioch’s Cyrilline anti-Chalcedonianism; the terminological problem of physis and hypostasis as the true root of the split; the 1989 and 1990 Agreed Statements and their explicitly Cyrilline common ground; and — presented honestly, with no partisan verdict — the divided Eastern Orthodox reception, the Athonite and Russian objections set against the dialogue’s own conclusion, and the net result that the anathemas were never formally lifted and communion was not restored.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father); shared with Oriental Orthodox

Two Families, One Father

The deepest irony of the Christological schism is that both sides venerate Cyril as their highest doctrinal authority after the Apostles. The Chalcedonian Eastern Orthodox — the Greek, Russian, Antiochian, Serbian, and other autocephalous churches — read Cyril through the Formula of Reunion of 433 and through the conciliar approval of his letters at Ephesus and Chalcedon, holding him as the doctor whose single subject Chalcedon canonized. The Oriental Orthodox — the Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Ethiopian, Eritrean, and Malankara churches, collectively styled miaphysite — read him above all through the mia physis formula and the Letters to Succensus, holding that Chalcedon’s “in two natures” betrayed the very Father it claimed to honour (McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria: The Christological Controversy, 226–243; Russell, Cyril of Alexandria, 52–57). The schism is therefore not a quarrel between Cyrillians and anti-Cyrillians but a quarrel between two Cyrilline traditions over which one is faithful to him.

The Council of Chalcedon (451)

The Council of Chalcedon confessed one Lord Jesus Christ, “acknowledged in two natures (en dyo physesin), without confusion, without change, without division, without separation,” the distinction of natures being in no way removed by the union but the property of each preserved and concurring in one person and one hypostasis (prosopon / hypostasis). It worked with the Cappadocian distinction between ousia/physis (the common nature) and hypostasis/prosopon (the particular subject), and it solemnly received Cyril’s Second Letter to Nestorius (Ep. 4; PG 77:44–49) and Theotokos as standards of orthodoxy.

The match with Cyril is real: Chalcedon’s single hypostasis is Cyril’s one subject. But the council also did two things that the anti-Chalcedonians could not accept. It distinguished physis from hypostasis, which Cyril had used nearly synonymously; and it said the one Christ is “in two natures,” where Cyril had preferred “out of/from two natures” (ek dyo physeon). To a strict Cyrilline, “two natures after the union” was the language of Nestorius. The entire schism turns on this hinge — the move from “out of two” to “in two.”

Miaphysite, Not Monophysite

Before going further, one distinction must be fixed, because it is load-bearing and because the older textbooks routinely get it wrong. “Monophysite” and “miaphysite” are not synonyms.

Miaphysite — from mia, “one” in the sense of a single united or composite reality — names the Christology of the Oriental Orthodox: Christ is from two natures united into one composite incarnate nature, “without mingling, without confusion, without alteration, without separation,” each retaining the fullness of its own properties. Double consubstantiality is affirmed: Christ is consubstantial with the Father in Godhead and consubstantial with us in manhood. This is Cyril’s mia physis tou theou logou sesarkomene taken as the governing formula.
Monophysite — from monos, “single” or “solitary,” and properly the Eutychian error — names the teaching that the humanity was absorbed or swallowed up by the divinity, “as a drop of honey in the sea,” so that double consubstantiality is denied and Christ is no longer truly of one substance with us.

The Oriental Orthodox anathematize Eutyches by name — at the Council of Ephesus II he was their man, but his teaching that the humanity was no longer consubstantial with ours was repudiated by the later miaphysite tradition itself — and they reject “monophysite” as a pejorative mislabel that imputes to them an error they condemn. The miaphysite “one composite nature” is therefore not “one nature instead of two” but “one nature out of two,” each constituent retaining its full natural properties and operations within the single incarnate subject. The distinction is not special pleading; it is endorsed by leading scholars. Aloys Grillmeier came to prefer the term “mia-physis Christology” precisely to mark the gap from Eutychianism; Sebastian Brock explicitly defended “miaphysite” as the accurate label and pressed for retiring “monophysite” from scholarly use (Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition, vol. 2; Russell, 56). [Disputed: whether “miaphysite” and “Chalcedonian” Christologies are, at the level of substance rather than vocabulary, genuinely identical or only convergent remains contested among theologians, and the answer one gives largely determines one’s judgment of the modern dialogues.]

Severus of Antioch: Cyrilline Anti-Chalcedonianism

The figure who gave miaphysitism its theological backbone was Severus of Antioch (c. 465–538), the most formidable anti-Chalcedonian thinker of the age (consecrated Patriarch of Antioch in 512; fled to Egypt in 518 under imperial pressure; condemned in 536). Severus professed strict fidelity to Cyril — “one nature, that of the Word Incarnate” — while at the same time rejecting Eutyches and insisting on the abiding, undiminished reality of Christ’s humanity. He is therefore the test case for the distinction above: miaphysite, emphatically not Eutychian. He distinguished the two natures “in thought alone” (kat’ epinoian), conceding everything Chalcedon meant to protect about the integrity of the humanity, while refusing the conciliar grammar that expressed it. He rejected Chalcedon’s “in two natures” and the Tome of Leo as crypto-Nestorian, reading them as a covert restoration of the two subjects Cyril had fought — and reading Leo’s celebrated sentence that “each form does what is proper to it” as splitting the one Christ into two operating agents (Gray, The Defense of Chalcedon in the East (451–553), 104–141; Meyendorff, Christ in Eastern Christian Thought, 32–46). His major dogmatic work against the neo-Chalcedonian John the Grammarian, the Contra impium Grammaticum (“Against the Impious Grammarian”), survives in Syriac and remains the classic statement of the Cyrilline case against the council. That Severus could affirm the full reality of Christ’s manhood while denying Chalcedon’s formula is the single most important fact for assessing the schism: it shows that the dispute was never, on the miaphysite side, a denial of Christ’s humanity, but a quarrel over whether “two natures after the union” could be said without surrendering the one subject.

The Terminological Problem as the Root of the Split

Set side by side, the two positions disclose that their disagreement is, to a remarkable degree, a disagreement about words. Cyril used physis and hypostasis nearly interchangeably, both naming the one concrete subject; Chalcedon prised them apart along the Cappadocian line, physis for the common nature and hypostasis for the particular subject. Once that is seen, “one nature” (Severus, physis = subject) and “two natures” (Chalcedon, physis = nature) need not be contradictory claims at all: they may be the same confession in two vocabularies — one composite subject who is fully God and fully man, the integrity of each preserved (van Loon, The Dyophysite Christology of Cyril of Alexandria, 90–108; Meyendorff, 32–46). This is the insight on which every modern attempt at reconciliation rests. Whether it dissolves the schism or merely relocates it — whether the divergence is only verbal, or whether real differences about the union hide beneath the words — is exactly the question the two families still answer differently.

The Agreed Statements of 1989 and 1990

The twentieth century saw this insight pressed into formal ecumenical work. The official Joint Commission of the Theological Dialogue between the Orthodox Church and the Oriental Orthodox Churches produced two landmark texts.

The First Agreed Statement was issued at the Anba Bishoy Monastery, Egypt, 20–24 June 1989. It located the common ground precisely “in the formula of our common Father, St. Cyril of Alexandria: mia physis (hypostasis) tou Theou Logou sesarkomene” — and, tellingly, glossed physis with hypostasis in parentheses, conceding the very near-synonymy at the heart of the dispute. Both families confessed that they condemn both Nestorianism and Eutychianism, and agreed that the natures are distinguished “in contemplation” (theoria) only, not divided in reality.

The Second Agreed Statement was issued at Chambésy, Geneva, 23–28 September 1990. Its key conclusion is worth quoting in full: “both families have always loyally maintained the same authentic Orthodox Christological faith, and the unbroken continuity of the apostolic tradition, though they have used Christological terms in different ways.” On that basis the commission recommended the lifting of the mutual anathemas and condemnations that the two communions had pronounced against each other’s teachers and councils. A further meeting in 1993 produced a set of “Proposals for Lifting the Anathemas,” specifying how this might be done. The whole movement of the dialogue is thus the application, at the level of churches, of the scholarly recognition that Cyril and Chalcedon spoke one faith in two grammars.

The Eastern Orthodox Reception — Both Sides

Here the file must hold to Methodology §4 and present the reception without taking a side, because the Eastern Orthodox world itself did not speak with one voice.

On the side of the dialogue’s conclusion stood the Joint Commission and its supporters, who held that the historical and terminological analysis was sound: the two families do confess the same faith, the ancient anathemas rested on a tragic miscommunication of terms, and consistency therefore demanded that those anathemas be lifted and communion restored. On this reading, to refuse reconciliation once the substantial agreement is acknowledged is to prefer fifth-century vocabulary to the truth it was trying to express.

On the side of opposition stood a substantial body of Chalcedonian theologians and monastic authorities who judged that the statements compromised Chalcedon, the Tome of Leo, and the later councils, and improperly proposed rehabilitating men whom those councils had condemned — above all Dioscorus and Severus. The Sacred Community of Mount Athos, in memoranda issued around 1995, objected on several grounds: the agreed language was “susceptible to a monophysite interpretation”; even the moderate miaphysitism of Dioscorus and Severus is heresy, so that condemning only the extreme Eutychian form is insufficient cover; the non-Chalcedonians must therefore unconditionally accept all the Ecumenical Councils, not merely the first three; and an anathema imposed by an Ecumenical Council cannot be lifted by a commission, since to do so would set a later authority over a council. The Russian Orthodox Church added a procedural objection of its own: no single local church may act in this matter without pan-Orthodox consensus, lest unilateral communion fracture the Orthodox world itself.

A particular flashpoint was the proposed rehabilitation of teachers and bishops condemned by the Ecumenical Councils. The Agreed Statements asked each family to recognize the other’s saints; for the Eastern Orthodox this meant accepting the orthodoxy of Severus and Dioscorus, whom Chalcedon and its successors had anathematized by name. To the dialogue’s supporters this was the necessary and honest consequence of having found the two confessions identical in substance: if Severus was in fact a faithful Cyrilline who anathematized Eutyches, his condemnation rested on the same terminological misreading the whole dialogue had diagnosed. To the opponents it was the reductio that exposed the project — for it would set the judgment of a modern commission above the solemn sentence of an Ecumenical Council, and would require venerating as saints men the conciliar tradition had marked as heresiarchs. The two readings cannot both stand, and the impasse between them is exactly where the Eastern Orthodox reception came to rest.

The fullest scholarly survey of this opposition is Paul Ladouceur, “Orthodox Critiques of the Agreed Statements between the Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Churches,” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 60.3 (2016): 333–368, which catalogues the objections and the responses to them without resolving the dispute in either direction.

This compendium renders no verdict on which side is right. Both can claim Cyril; both invoke real principles — the integrity of the conciliar tradition on one hand, the priority of substance over vocabulary on the other; and the disagreement between them is precisely a disagreement about whether the terminological diagnosis, once granted, settles the dogmatic question or merely frames it.

The Net Result

For all the achievement of the Agreed Statements, the practical outcome is unambiguous and must be stated plainly. Despite the statements, the mutual anathemas were never formally lifted on a pan-Orthodox basis, and full eucharistic communion between the Eastern Orthodox and the Oriental Orthodox was not restored. The dialogue produced a remarkable convergence of theological diagnosis and a shared confession of Cyril as common Father; it did not produce reunion. The two families that revere the same doctor of the one Christ remain, at the altar, apart — and the reason they remain apart is, in the end, a dispute over how to weigh the very terminological difference that Cyril’s own usage first set in motion.

References

Cyril of Alexandria, On the Unity of Christ (Quod unus sit Christus), PG 75:1253–1361; CPG 5228; trans. John A. McGuckin, On the Unity of Christ, Popular Patristics 13 (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1995).
Cyril of Alexandria, Second Letter to Nestorius (Ep. 4), PG 77:44–49.
First Agreed Statement, Joint Commission of the Theological Dialogue between the Orthodox Church and the Oriental Orthodox Churches, Anba Bishoy Monastery, Egypt, 20–24 June 1989.
Second Agreed Statement, Chambésy, Geneva, 23–28 September 1990; with the 1993 “Proposals for Lifting the Anathemas.”
Severus of Antioch, Contra impium Grammaticum (surviving in Syriac).
John A. McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria: The Christological Controversy (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2004).
Norman Russell, Cyril of Alexandria (London: Routledge, 2000).
Hans van Loon, The Dyophysite Christology of Cyril of Alexandria (Leiden: Brill, 2009).
John Meyendorff, Christ in Eastern Christian Thought (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1975).
Patrick T. R. Gray, The Defense of Chalcedon in the East (451–553) (Leiden: Brill, 1979).
Aloys Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition, 2 vols.
Joseph Lebon, Le monophysisme sévérien (Louvain, 1909).
Paul Ladouceur, “Orthodox Critiques of the Agreed Statements between the Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Churches,” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 60.3 (2016): 333–368.