As the resident non-Chalcedonian heretic of this messageboard, I must agree with Fr. Matt that Chalcedon was mainly about theology. For sure, there are political
aspects to every schism, but it is not until after Chalcedon that you start to see anything like a national/political identity wrapped up in the rejection of it. Modern Coptic historians like Maged S.A. Mikhail (
From Byzantine to Islamic Egypt) have dealt with the claim on the part of the Copts that the rejection of Chalcedon was a sort of 'ethnic revolt' against Greek dominance, and have found it to be baseless, as the Greek language remained a perfectly fine vehicle to express anti-Chalcedonian theology
within Egypt for centuries after Chalcedon. (There are even some much later Muslim writers, like Al-Maqrizi in the 15th century, who claim that the Copts remained conversant in Greek up until their own day, but there's no corroborating evidence of that.)
Just because many today would like to reduce it to other things doesn't mean that if we were somehow to 'fix' those other things, the schism would be over. Eventually we'd have to deal with the theology behind it. I thank God that our representatives on both sides in the official EO-OO dialogues seem to be among our keenest theological minds (and I've met one on the Coptic side -- Fr. Shenouda M. Ishak of NY -- so I can say this with some level of confidence; you don't produce a lengthy tome like
Christology and the Council of Chalcedon,
as the good father has, if you think it's all a matter of politics). It seems that many take the very slow, deliberate pace of said dialogues as a bad sign, but it is better this way than to rush into a union which would have a malformed, not carefully considered basis in anything other than theological agreement. It has taken 1,600 years and counting because both sides are
serious. Thanks be to God / نشكرالله / Слава Богу.
