Monophysitism

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Historical development of traditional Christian groups

The Monophysitism (from ancient Greek μόνος monos , only 'and φύσις physis , nature ') or Miaphysitismus (of μία mia , a ') is the Christological doctrine that Jesus Christ after the union of the divine and human in the incarnation only a single, divine Have nature. This is in contrast to the doctrine of two natures , according to which the divine and human nature of Christ are “unmixed and undivided” side by side. At the Council of Chalcedon in 451 the doctrine of two natures was accepted and monophysitism was rejected; however, this was still represented in some Eastern Orthodox churches .

The Antichalcedonians themselves have always opposed the designation as "Monophysites", which in any case only appears in the sources in the 7th century (and mostly with denigrating intent), and prefer the name Miaphysites . The Greek root mia means one . This word emphasizes the unity rather than the singular and better reflects the position that in Christ the divine and the human form one nature, united “without mixing, without separation, without confusion and without change”, like a theological formula customary since late antiquity reads. In their own perception, the Mono- or Miaphysites do not reject the doctrine of two natures in principle and assume that Jesus Christ was God and man - they assume, however, that the two natures were completely united in Christ, whereby the divine Logos as the second person of the Trinity is the determining agent of both natures. As the central reference person, Cyril of Alexandria emphasized the divinity of Jesus Christ because God alone can redeem people, as Jesus does.

In research today one often avoids the ambiguous and partial designation "Monophysites". However, this is still in use, especially outside of the specialist literature.

history

Since the First Council of Nicaea there had been resistance to the doctrine that divine and human beings could be united in one person. Apollinaris of Laodicea taught that Christ did not have a human soul, but was an incarnation of the divine Logos. This made him the forerunner of Monophysitism.

This emerged in late ancient Egypt against the background of ongoing rivalries between the Patriarchate of Alexandria and that of Antioch as a reaction to Nestorianism . This doctrine, represented by the theological school of Antioch and Patriarch Nestorius of Constantinople, appointed in 428, stated that the two natures of Christ, the divine and the human, were divided and unmixed in him and only morally connected in the sense of late Platonic philosophy. Nestorius deduced from this the conclusion that Mary was not the Mother of God but the Mother of Christ. Even if the subtleties of this dispute were incomprehensible to the broader church people, the controversy developed strong passions: On the one hand, the need for redemption and immortality, especially of the Egyptian Christians, who adhered to ancient Egyptian mystical traditions, demanded the perfect divinity of Christians; this salvation seemed to be endangered by the alleged “doctrine of the two sons of God”, although according to the Neoplatonic view of the connection between spirit and body, its representatives did not appear to endanger the unity of the person of Christ. On the other hand, the immensely popular veneration of the Mother of God among the Oriental (especially Egyptian and East Syrian) Christians in the tradition of the ancient oriental mother-child myths and the myth of the "eternal virgin" threatened to come into danger. The attitude of the oriental churches and of the strong monasticism in Egypt , which was under the influence of ancient Egyptian mystical traditions mentioned, was that the deity was an incomprehensible force and inaccessible to human thought; Speculations about their two natures are prohibited. Ephraem called the authors of such theological subtleties "men who try to taste the fire, see the air and grasp the light"; their theology, "this moth that eats in secret, comes from the Greeks".

The monophysite Alexandrian position and the doctrine of the divine motherhood of Mary had initially prevailed in 431 in the Council of Ephesus in the absence of almost all followers of Nestorius, with Patriarch Cyril of Alexandria using highly undiplomatic methods. The persecuted Nestorians, who represented the most radical opposing position to Monophysitism, emigrated to the Sassanid Empire and merged into a small sect around Edessa in Upper Mesopotamia. Since the 6th century they have formed their own recognized church and theological school.

It took a long time for the emperor to confirm the decisions of the Council of Ephesus. As a result, Alexandrian theology exaggerated its newly won theological position of power. Following on from Apollinaris, Eutyches took up the formula of the “one physique of the incarnate Logos” with emphatic anti-Nestorianism: The humanity of Christ was absorbed by the deity like a drop of honey in the sea. The Eutychian dispute (444 to 451) is named after him. The Syrian bishops continue to fight against this position. After the "robber synod" of Ephesus in 449 once again forced the recognition of the Alexandrian doctrine with brute force, Monophysitism was condemned in 451 under the new emperor Markian by the Catholic Orthodox Church at the Council of Chalcedon .

This council triggered a schism between the Monophysite churches of the east and the Eastern Roman imperial church. In addition to Egypt, monophysitism gained ground in Syria, Palestine and Armenia, which was accompanied by a turn away from the Hellenized upper class. The successors of the schismatic patriarch reside to this day in an unbroken line as the Coptic patriarchs of Egypt. The Monophysite position also penetrated into the empire of Aksum in Ethiopia and, as in Egypt, was combined with features of traditional popular piety and ancient pagan positions. The schismatic churches thus became real national churches.

On the other hand, Pope Leo the Great , who with his Tomus ad Flavianum had helped to prepare the Christological formula of Chalcedon from the two natures of Christ, agreed to almost all of Chalcedon's resolutions. Only the equality of the churches of Rome and Constantinople, which the council had decided, is rejected by the Catholic Church to this day.

Compromise solutions

In the 480s, the Eastern Roman emperors tried to implement a compromise solution formulated in the Henoticon , which ignored all disputes between Orthodox and Monophysite Christians and ignored the resolutions of Chalcedon; but this attempt failed and instead of an agreement with the Monophysites only led to the Akakian schism with the Roman Church, which lasted for thirty years (until 519) . The Fifth Ecumenical Council of 553 also dealt with this problem again without being able to reach an agreement. The same was true for the short-lived promotion of the monophysitic special current of aphthartodocetism by Emperor Justinian I. Already under his successor Justin II there were massive persecutions of the supporters of monophysitism in Syria and Egypt.

In the early 7th century , monotheleticism was developed as an attempt at a compromise solution . According to this, Christ has a divine and a human nature, but both have only one common will in him. This attempt to bridge the gap between Monophysitism and the position of Chalcedon also failed. Despite some support from some popes and the Byzantine emperors, after the objection of Maximus the Confessor (approx. 580–662), monotheleticism was rejected in the imperial church. The Third Council of Constantinople finally condemned monotheletism in 680; only the Lebanese Maronites remained monothelets until the 13th century.

Imperial political consequences

According to many researchers, the schism weakened the position of the Eastern Roman Empire in the conflict with the Persian Sassanid Empire and especially during the expansion of the Arabs . A compromise between Constantinople and the economically and militarily important Syrian and Egyptian provinces did not succeed in this important dogmatic question.

The causes are to be sought not only in the ostensible theological contradictions, but in the old contradiction between rational-speculative Greek thought and mystical oriental tradition, as well as in the efforts to separate and de-Hellenize Syria and Coptic Egypt. In Egypt, Coptic became the language of theologians and radicalized monks. There were Monophysite uprisings against foreign rule in the form of the Hellenized upper classes with their privileges. The government in Constantinople, especially Emperor Justinian, reacted to acts of spiritual apostasy with secular violence, and its civil administration became the extended arm of Orthodoxy. Internally divided and weakened by the bitter war against the Sassanid king Chosrau II , Ostrom lost the eastern, orientalized territories and soon Egypt and North Africa to Islam .

Paradoxically, the loss of these areas strengthened the empire in the medium term, which gained in internal uniformity: With the disappearance of the religious conflict and the clear dominance of orthodoxy, oriental influences declined. The central Byzantine empire that was now forming was rapidly Hellenized in view of the increasing proportion of Greek speakers among the remaining population.

But at the same time the victorious dogma of the two inseparable natures of Jesus prepared the ground for the destructive Byzantine iconoclast that broke out in the 8th century . Under the premises of the inseparable, but not to be confused, two natures of Christ and the essential equality of image and represented, a pictorial representation of Christ would also be an attempt to represent his incomprehensible divinity, i.e. a heresy like that of the followers of Monophysitism. Picture lovers like Patriarch Nikephoros I, on the other hand, differentiated between the picture and the depicted object and argued that the depiction of Jesus in his human form underscores the reality of his incarnation, the incarnation of the Logos.

Today's Miaphysite churches

In the 20th century, the Monophysite churches came closer both to each other and to the Eastern Orthodox churches. Theologians of both denominations have now come to understand that different views on the meaning of the word "nature" ( phýsis ) caused by language differences had contributed significantly to the dispute, and that in many ways both sides wanted to express the same thing with different words. There is now a broad consensus on the fundamental issues.

Today's ancient oriental churches , which are in mutual communion (that is, recognize one another and allow one another to attend the Eucharist ) are

literature

  • William Hugh Clifford Frend: The rise of the Monophysite Movement. Chapters in the History of the Church in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1972, ISBN 0-521-08130-0 .
  • Christian Lange: So that we can confess together that faith that is common to us. Thoughts on two Western terms for two Christian positions of the fifth and sixth centuries from the Christian Orient . In: Eastern Church Studies . tape 53 , 2004, ISSN  0030-6487 , p. 287-308 .
  • Jean-Marie Mayeur, Luce Pietri, Andre Vauchez (eds.): The history of Christianity. Antiquity. Volume 3: Luce Pietri (ed.): The Latin West and the Byzantine East (431–642) . Special edition. Herder, Freiburg (Breisgau) et al. 2005, ISBN 3-451-29100-2 .
  • John Meyendorff: Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions. The Church 450-680 AD (= The Church in History. Vol. 2). St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, Crestwood NY 1989, ISBN 0-88141-055-1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Franz Georg Maier : The transformation of the Mediterranean world. ( Fischer Weltgeschichte , Vol. 9) Frankfurt am Main 1968, p. 155 f.
  2. ↑ The Rhythms of Ephrem the Syrian , trans. JB Morris, Oxford 1847, pp. 95, 102. Quoted from Franz Georg Maier: The transformation of the Mediterranean world. (Fischer Weltgeschichte, Vol. 9) Frankfurt am Main, 1968, p. 161.
  3. ^ Franz Georg Maier: The transformation of the Mediterranean world. (Fischer Weltgeschichte, Vol. 9) Frankfurt am Main, 1968, p. 157 ff.
  4. ^ Franz Georg Maier: The transformation of the Mediterranean world. (Fischer Weltgeschichte, Vol. 9) Frankfurt am Main, 1968, p. 161 f.
  5. ^ Friedrich Heiler: The Eastern Churches. Munich 1971, p. 345.
  6. ^ Franz Georg Maier: The transformation of the Mediterranean world. (Fischer Weltgeschichte, Vol. 9) Frankfurt am Main, 1968, pp. 251 and 298 f.
  7. ^ Vatican Radio : Pope appeals to Christians to stay in the Middle East ( memento of March 7, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) February 1, 2007