Theologian · Patristic
Severus of Antioch
c. 465–538 · Cyrilline (miaphysite) Christology
Patriarch of Antioch (512–518), deposed under Justin I and anathematized at Constantinople in 536; the chief theologian of the Syriac and Coptic Churches, whose 1984 and 1988 joint declarations with Rome affirm that the two sides confess the same faith in Christ in different words, though no anathema on his person has been lifted.
Born at Sozopolis in Pisidia and educated in Alexandria and Beirut, Severus became a monk and the leading theologian of the opposition to Chalcedon, which he held to have betrayed Cyril by speaking of two natures after the union. His formula was Cyril's, “one incarnate nature of God the Word,” the natures distinguishable only in thought, with one composite hypostasis, one activity and one will; but he equally rejected Eutyches, insisting that Christ's flesh is consubstantial with ours, and fought Julian of Halicarnassus to maintain that the Lord's body was truly passible and corruptible before the resurrection. The Philalethes, the three books Against the Grammarian, the Cathedral Homilies and his hymns and letters, nearly all surviving in Syriac, are the foundation of Oriental Orthodox theology.
Why he matters: He is the reason the Oriental Orthodox are not Eutychians: his careful Cyrillianism is what the Common Declarations of Paul VI and Shenouda III (1973) and of John Paul II and Ignatius Zakka I (1984) were able to recognize as the same faith as Chalcedon's. Grillmeier's Christ in Christian Tradition gives him hundreds of pages, and the Pro Oriente dialogues that healed a fifteen-hundred-year misunderstanding passed through his texts.
Where to be careful
He rejected the Council of Chalcedon and the Tome of Leo, which the Church holds as ecumenical and dogmatic, and his doctrine of one activity and one will in Christ was the seed of the monoenergism and monothelitism condemned at Constantinople III (681); the Church has never taught that the Chalcedonian formula is optional. The substance of his Christology, as the joint declarations state, is the faith of Ephesus: one Christ, perfect in divinity and humanity, without confusion, change, division or separation.
Reading
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Severus of AntiochPauline Allen and C. T. R. Hayward · An introduction with translated selections from the homilies, letters and hymns.
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The Sixth Book of the Select Letters of Severus, Patriarch of AntiochSeverus of Antioch (trans. E. W. Brooks) · His pastoral and doctrinal letters, the main primary source in English.
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Christ in Christian Tradition, vol. 2, part 2: The Church of Constantinople in the Sixth CenturyAloys Grillmeier · The Jesuit cardinal's exhaustive and fair study of his Christology.
Documented positions
Where this thinker stands on each dispute the test covers.