Miaphysitism: the one-nature doctrine that split early Christianity
For fifteen centuries Christians have disagreed over a single Greek word, physis, meaning nature. Is Christ one nature that is fully divine and fully human, or one person with two natures? The Oriental Orthodox churches hold the first view, miaphysitism, and some modern church statements suggest the gap may be smaller than it looked.
The term joins the Greek mia, one, with physis, nature. Its defenders trace it to Cyril of Alexandria's phrase describing one incarnate nature of God the Word. The grammar matters: the Greek word for enfleshed describes the nature, not the Word, so a common translation that attaches it to the Word is mistaken. Cyril insisted that saying one nature did not mean the divine and human were mixed or that one turned into the other; each kept its own characteristics while being inexpressibly united.
In 451 the Council of Chalcedon settled on the rival formula, dyophysitism: one person, or hypostasis, in two natures. That became the teaching of the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, the Church of the East and major Protestant bodies. Much of the dispute may turn on vocabulary. Chalcedon used physis for a set of properties belonging to an essence, while the scholar John Anthony McGuckin argues that for Cyril the word served roughly as an equivalent of hypostasis. The earlier Council of Ephesus in 431 had itself used physis for Christ's single subjecthood.
Its origins are contested. Miaphysites claimed the language reached back to Athanasius and other early fathers, but most scholars think it came from Apollinaris of Laodicea, whose teaching was condemned and which Cyril himself rejected even while keeping the one-nature formula.
Labels remain touchy. Literally, mia-physis and mono-physis both mean one nature, and critics long lumped miaphysites under monophysitism. But miaphysites understand the union as a single nature by composition, following the theologian Severus, not the Eutychian idea of mixture, and many regard the word monophysite as pejorative and inaccurate. The Syriac, Coptic and Armenian churches now describe themselves as miaphysite.
Source: Miaphysitism
