Monophysitism

In Christian tradition Jesus of Nazareth is God incarnate. As the ‘‘anointed one,’’ Christ in Greek and Messiah in Hebrew, he died on the cross to save mankind. There was much theological debate on the nature of the Christian God in the early church. The two main themes were the relation between the Father and the Son and the relation between the divine and human natures of Christ. The understanding of these two relations was in danger of causing confusion in the minds of believing Christians. On the one hand, the Son might be considered subordinate to the Father, who was the creator of everything. On the other hand, Jesus might be considered as either too divine to suffer on the cross or too human to be fully God. To eliminate the possibility of undesirable interpretations, it had to be decreed that not only the Father and the Son but also the human and divine natures of Christ coexisted as equals. Any inability to grasp such equalities was explained by interpreting them as divine mysteries inaccessible to human understanding.

The equality of Father and Son was promulgated at the Council of Nicaea (325), against Arius (c.260-336), a prominent cleric of Alexandria, who favored subordination. The bishops of Egypt accepted with most of the rest of Christianity that Christ was ‘‘begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father.’’ Equality of natures was propagated at the Council of Chalcedon (451). This time, the Coptic church split off from much of the rest of Christianity by holding on to the doctrine that there was only one nature in Christ. This is called the Monophysite doctrine (from Greek monos, ‘‘only,’’ and physis, ‘‘nature’’) (Frend 1979), though a minority of Egyptian Christians followed Chalcedon and the emperor in Constantinople and persists to the present day. Purely political motives, including rivalries between patriarchates, often played a role in such theological disputes.

According to the Council of Chalcedon, Christ is as much God as man and, therefore, both at the same time. The union of the two is interpreted as an unfathomable mystery. If Monophysitism holds that Christ has only one nature, is it the divine one or the human one? The matter is not entirely clear, even to theologians. This lack of clarity has been the basis of an argument that reunion of the Coptic church with other Christian churches may be easier from a doctrinal point of view than might be assumed. It would appear that Monophysitism may have been inspired less by the belief that there is one nature than by the belief that there are not two. Two natures might make Christ no longer a single person, even if Chalcedon insisted that the two natures coexisted in a single person. An extreme expression of the notion of two persons existing in Christ was the belief that Mary had given birth to the man Jesus and not to God. Those who opposed this belief vigorously defended Mary’s role as the theotokos (‘‘who bore God’’).

The occasional defense of Monophysite doctrine is a characteristic of Coptic literature dating after the Council of Chalcedon. Monophysite doctrine seems to make Christ more divine than he is according to the doctrine of two natures. For example, at some point, when passing through a crowd, Jesus asks who touched his garment, Coptic church fathers make it explicitly clear that they assume that Jesus was only pretending and in fact knew the answer to his own question. The question as to how he could have suffered on the cross remains unanswered. It is common for apologetic discourse to keep hammering on the concept ‘‘only’’ (monos) without attention to its deeper doctrinal significance. The aim seems to be to assert independence.