Eastern and Oriental Orthodox Christianity

In the fifth century the great question of Christian theology was how Christ could be both God and man. The Council of Ephesus in 431, led by Cyril of Alexandria, condemned Nestorius, archbishop of Constantinople, for seeming to divide Christ into two. Cyril spoke of “one nature of God the Word incarnate”, meaning that divinity and humanity were truly united in a single living reality. Soon afterwards a monk named Eutyches went further and seemed to say that Christ’s humanity was absorbed into his divinity, a position condemned by both sides.

In 451 the emperor Marcian called a council at Chalcedon, near Constantinople. Guided by a letter of Pope Leo I, the Tome, it defined Christ as one person “in two natures”, united “without confusion, without change, without division, without separation”. It also deposed Dioscorus, Cyril’s successor at Alexandria. To many in Egypt and Syria, the phrase “in two natures” sounded like a return to the teaching of Nestorius and a betrayal of Cyril. They rejected the council.

Emperors tried for more than a century to restore unity. Zeno’s Henotikon of 482 and Justinian’s efforts in the sixth century failed, and at times anti-Chalcedonian bishops were exiled. The bishop Jacob Baradaeus travelled through Syria ordaining clergy for the communities who rejected the council, and by the late sixth century separate hierarchies existed in Egypt and Syria. The Armenian Church, which had not attended Chalcedon, rejected it formally in the sixth century, and the Ethiopian Church followed Alexandria. The Arab conquests of the seventh century ended Byzantine rule in Egypt and Syria and fixed the separation.

Both families teach that Christ is fully God and fully human, one and the same Son of God. The difference is in vocabulary. The Eastern Orthodox, following Chalcedon, say that Christ is one person in two natures, divine and human, and they accept seven ecumenical councils. The Oriental Orthodox, following Cyril, say that Christ has one united nature, mia physis, which is at the same time fully divine and fully human, and they accept only the first three councils. Each side has historically suspected the other of a heresy that neither in fact teaches: the Oriental churches feared that “two natures” divided Christ, while the Chalcedonians feared that “one nature” erased his humanity.

The two families also honour different figures. The Eastern Orthodox revere Pope Leo and the fathers of Chalcedon; the Oriental Orthodox honour Dioscorus of Alexandria and Severus of Antioch as saints. Small differences in prayer still echo the old controversy. In the Trisagion hymn, “Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us”, the Oriental churches add the words “who was crucified for us”, an addition associated with Peter the Fuller, a fifth-century patriarch of Antioch. Chalcedonians objected that it seemed to attribute suffering to the whole Trinity, while the Oriental churches understand the hymn as addressed to Christ alone. In other respects their church life is strikingly similar. Both have seven sacraments, married parish priests and monastic bishops, the veneration of icons and saints, and long seasons of fasting.

Their worship, however, grew in different cultures. The Eastern Orthodox use the Byzantine rite in many languages. The Oriental churches preserve their own ancient rites: the Coptic liturgy in Coptic and Arabic, the Armenian in Classical Armenian, the Ethiopian and Eritrean in Ge‘ez, and the Syriac and Indian churches in Syriac and local languages. Ethiopian Christianity has distinctive traditions of its own, including the tabot, a consecrated altar tablet representing the Ark of the Covenant, a broader biblical canon and the keeping of Saturday as well as Sunday as holy days.

The Eastern Orthodox churches have roughly 200 million members, concentrated in Russia, Ukraine, Romania, Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, Georgia and the Middle East. The Oriental Orthodox number roughly 60 million, though estimates vary widely. The largest by far is the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, followed by the Coptic Orthodox Church in Egypt, the Armenian Apostolic Church and the churches of India, Syria and Eritrea. Each of these churches has its own long history. Armenia adopted Christianity as a state religion in the early fourth century, by tradition in 301, through the preaching of St Gregory the Illuminator. The Ethiopian kingdom of Aksum became Christian under King Ezana in the fourth century, and for centuries the head of its church was a bishop sent from Alexandria, until the Ethiopian Church gained its own patriarch in 1959. The Christians of Kerala in India trace their faith to the apostle Thomas; part of that community entered the Syriac Orthodox tradition in the seventeenth century. Many Oriental Christians in the Middle East have emigrated in recent decades, and large diaspora communities now live in Europe, North America and Australia.

Dialogue between the two families began with unofficial meetings of theologians at Aarhus in Denmark in 1964 and continued in an official joint commission. Its agreed statements of 1989 and 1990 declared that both sides have preserved the same faith in Christ, expressed in different terms, and proposed lifting past condemnations. Some churches have since made pastoral agreements, such as the one reached in 1991 between the Greek Orthodox and Syriac Orthodox patriarchates of Antioch. Questions remain over how to treat the later councils and the saints each side once condemned, and full communion awaits formal acceptance by the churches.