WHY THE ORIENTAL ORTHODOX ARE NOT HERETICS

A FAIR AND EQUITABLE EXPOSITION OF THE NON-CHALCEDONIANS FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF FURTHER DIALOGUE

By Bp. Joseph (Ancient Church of the West) 

INTRODUCTION

When the Lord prayed in the Upper Room, “That they all may be one; as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee” (John 17:21), He spoke not only of the apostolic band gathered around Him, but of the whole Church that would be born from their witness. Unity was not an afterthought in Christ’s prayer; it was His testament. Yet, within centuries of His Ascension, divisions scarred the Body of Christ. Few were so enduring as the schism of the fifth century between those who received the Council of Chalcedon and those who rejected it, and the Churches we now call “Eastern Orthodox” and “Oriental Orthodox.”

For a millennium and a half, Chalcedonians branded the others as “Monophysites,” as though they had denied Christ’s humanity and embraced a heresy as dangerous as caricatures of Nestorianism. The Oriental Orthodox, in turn, looked upon Chalcedon as a betrayal of St. Cyril of Alexandria, their most beloved Father, and feared that its formula divided Christ into two sons. What began as a debate about words became a centuries-long estrangement, hardened by imperial politics and persecution.

But was this division truly about heresy? Or was it, as the Apostle Paul once warned, a quarrel of words that grew into something more dangerous than intended (2 Timothy 2:14)?

THE CYRILLIAN LEGACY

To understand the Non-Chalcedonian position, one must stand with St. Cyril at the heart of his Christology. Writing against Nestorius, Cyril declared: “We confess that the Word of God was united to flesh according to hypostasis, and that from the union was made one Christ and Son, not as though the difference of the natures was taken away… but that divinity and humanity, forming an ineffable unity, produced for us one Lord and Christ and Son.”

For St. Cyril, the heart of orthodoxy was that the one eternal Word of God had truly become man. Not that He “inhabited” a man, nor that He joined with humanity as though by contract, but that He Himself had taken our nature into His very person. In her womb, St. Mary bore God, not merely man. To protect this unity, Cyril insisted upon the phrase: “one incarnate nature of the Word.”

It was this formula that the Oriental Orthodox clung to after Chalcedon. For them, the Chalcedonian decree of “in two natures” was perilous. It sounded like a return to the worst representations of Nestorius, who spoke so freely of “two” that the unity seemed dissolved. If St. Cyril had been the doctor of truth, why depart from his words?

THE CHALCEDONIAN RESPONSE

And yet, the Chalcedonians were not Nestorians. They too proclaimed with St. Leo the Great: “The proper character of both natures was maintained and came together in one Person… humility was assumed by majesty, weakness by power, mortality by eternity.” The intention of Chalcedon was not to divide, but to preserve: to confess that Christ is truly God and truly man, without confusion or diminution of either.

But the words, “in two natures,” were heard differently by different ears. For Alexandrians, they seemed to divide; for Antiochenes and Romans, they preserved integrity. And in that semantic chasm, a schism was born.

NEO-CHALCEDONIAN SYNTHESIS

It was left to later Fathers, the so-called Neo-Chalcedonians, to bridge this gap. Leontius of Byzantium distinguished “nature” from “hypostasis,” showing that to confess Christ “in two natures” was not to confess “two Sons.” St. Maximos the Confessor, centuries later, brought the matter to its consummation: “There is one Christ, the Son of God, Who is one in both natures, which are united in Him without division or confusion.”

In St. Maximos, Cyril’s unity and Chalcedon’s integrity found harmony. The tragedy is that this harmony was not heard by those who had already suffered under imperial coercion and exile. For the Copts, Syrians, and Armenians, Chalcedon meant persecution. They became the “Monophysites” of Byzantine polemic, though their Christ was the same Christ as that of Constantinople. Byzantine insistence became oriental resistance in one of the most predictable reactions to ecclesial persecution of all time. 

POLITICS AND EMPIRE

Here is where theology and politics intertwine. The schism was not only about the mystery of Christ but about power. The Byzantine emperors sought to consolidate religious unity for the sake of political control, and Chalcedon became a tool of empire. Resistance to Chalcedon in Egypt and Syria was as much resistance to Constantinopolitan domination as it was fidelity to Cyril. The label of “heresy” served the empire well: it justified persecution, exile, and suppression.

Yet the truth, as Metropolitan Elias Zoghby has reminded us in his prophetic book We Are All Schismatics, is that no side emerges blameless. The East, the West, and the Orient alike all bear responsibility for the wound of division. “Schism” is our common inheritance, not the exclusive fault of one or the other.

MODERN RECONCILIATION

In our own time, dialogue has reopened what history had sealed. The Chambésy Agreements of 1990 declared: “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.”

What Chalcedonians once branded as Monophysitism is now understood as Cyrillian conservatism. What Non-Chalcedonians feared as Nestorian is now seen as linguistic nuance, which, outside of their mother languages of Greek, Latin, Syriac and Demotic, actually make little sense - the limitations of language trying to take on the ultimately unknowable and undefinable mysteries of the Godhead. After fifteen centuries, the Churches confess together: Christ is one and the same Son, perfect God and perfect Man, without confusion, without division, without separation.

THE WESTERN ORTHODOX CALLING

For the World Federation of Orthodox and Apostolic Cuurches and the Ancient Church of the West, this truth is not academic: it is vocational. Ours is a Church born of the crosscurrents of East and West, Latin and Greek, Celtic and Syriac. We exist at the fault lines of division, and so our mission is reconciliation.

To declare the Oriental Orthodox “not heretics” is not to compromise, but to be faithful to Christ’s prayer for unity. It is to embrace Cyril and Chalcedon together, to walk the Zhogbian path of humility that admits, “we are all schismatics.” It is to show that the Western Orthodox are peacemakers, standing with the Fathers, guided by Scripture, refusing to allow political empire or inherited suspicion to dictate the terms of communion.

CONCLUSION

The Oriental Orthodox are not heretics. They are heirs of St. Cyril, confessors of the same Christ whom we adore. They suffered centuries of exile and persecution not because they denied His humanity or divinity, but because they spoke differently of His unity. Today, we know their confession and ours are one. If we fail to embrace them, then we deny the very conciliar spirit we claim to uphold.

COLLECT

Almighty God, who by Thy Son hast reconciled the world unto Thyself, and by Thy Holy Spirit dost make us one Body in Christ: Take away from us all pride and bitterness, all memory of ancient wrongs, and grant that we, with our brethren of the East and the Orient, may with one voice confess Thy Son, very God and very Man, and so be restored to the fellowship of Thy Apostolic Church; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with Thee, in the unity of the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.

NOTES

1. John 17:21, Authorized Version.

2. Cyril of Alexandria, Third Letter to Nestorius.

3. Leo the Great, Tome to Flavian.

4. Maximos the Confessor, Opuscula Theologica.

5. Chambésy Joint Christological Declaration (1990).

6. Elias Zoghby, Nous sommes tous schismatiques (Beirut, 1960).

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Scriptural Sources

• Holy Bible, Authorized Version. For the Christological passages: John 1, Philippians 2, Colossians 2, John 17.

Patristic Sources

• Cyril of Alexandria, Letters to Nestorius. Defining Cyrillian Christology.

• Leo the Great, Tome to Flavian. Basis of Chalcedon.

• Leontius of Byzantium, Contra Nestorianos et Eutychianos. Clarifies “nature” and “hypostasis.”

• Maximos the Confessor, Opuscula Theologica et Polemica. Neo-Chalcedonian synthesis.

Modern Dialogues

• Chambésy Joint Christological Declarations (1990). Eastern and Oriental Orthodox consensus.

• Elias Zoghby, Nous sommes tous schismatiques. Landmark challenge to exclusivism.

• Pro Oriente Christological Consultations. Ongoing dialogue between Eastern and Oriental Orthodox.

Secondary Studies

• Aloys Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition, Vol. 2. Exhaustive account of Chalcedon and its aftermath.

• John Meyendorff, Christ in Eastern Christian Thought. Analysis of Byzantine Christology.

• Sebastian Brock, The Syrian Fathers on Christology. Non-Chalcedonian sources examined with nuance.

• Susan Wessel, Cyril of Alexandria and the Nestorian Controversy. Detailed study of Cyrillian theology.

• Georges Florovsky, The Byzantine Fathers of the Sixth to Eighth Centuries. Context for Neo-Chalcedonian synthesis.