Ethnicity of Severus of Antioch

Hmm... How much does it matter....

Mor Severus was born in Sozopolis in Pisidia, which is in the area of modern Atalya in SW Turkey. His own writings were in Greek; those which exist in other languages (Syriac, Coptic, Arabic, Ethiopic/Ge'ez) are translations, some of considerable antiquity and some newer.

Lukas Van Rompay of Duke University in the USA characterizes the legacy of Mor Severus in Greek in the following terms in his very helpful article "Severus, Patriarch of Antioch (512-538), in the Greek, Syriac, and Coptic Traditions", from the Journal of the Canadian Society of Coptic Studies, vol. 8 (2008), 3-22:

Modern Coptic historian Maged S.A. Mikhail makes a similar point in his book From Byzantine to Islamic Egypt, where he observes that Greek was a perfectly fine vehicle in which to express opposition to Chalcedon in Egypt proper for several centuries not only after the Council itself, but even well into the era of Arab rule; I don't have the book in front of me, but if I recall correctly, that didn't stop until around the 10th century, when the language shift to Arabic finally began to manifest itself in Church writings. (HG Bishop Severus Al Ashmunein wrote the first Arabic-language work in the Egyptian church at that time, and in it he complained that he more or less had to write in Arabic because so many Copts were losing their ancestral language by that point.)

As to whether or not this says anything about Mor Severus' ethnicity, I don't know. Since Greek was the language of prestige and intercultural communication at that time, it makes perfect sense that he would have written in it, and that people produced translations in Syriac and Coptic (and later other languages) for their flocks who spoke the local language of the area. This way everyone could understand, regardless of education level. This happened with many saints in the East, like St. Cyril, St. Athanasius (though we know that he was an ethnic Copt, because he spoke with St. Anthony in his own language, and recorded in his biography that the Abba himself knew no Greek), St. Basil, etc.

If I had to guess, I would assume that Mor Severus is called the Crown of the Syrians because we know his works primarily through the surviving and very abundant Syriac translations. The same source I just quoted at length lists elsewhere some 125 homilies, around 240 letters, and several hundred hymns authored by him have been translated by European scholars (mainly into French) in the 20th century alone, and the majority of those translations were done from Syriac manuscripts.

I guess you could argue that Sozopolis in Pisidia was technically within Mesopotamia or at least within that cultural sphere (it was a colony of the Seleucids in Roman times), which seems like it should naturally place Mor Severus among the Syrians, but in reality it was a culturally mixed area, with both Greeks and Syrians in it.

It seems to have been something unusual before a certain point in time that an early eastern Christian writer of any confession purposely eschewed Greek, given that this would mean purposely not using the language that would reach the most readers (and also -- particularly after the Chalcedonian schism -- marking yourself as not a good and cooperative citizen of the Eastern Roman empire, which the Copts and Syriacs within it no doubt were). We remember St. Shenouda the Archimandrite (pre-Chalcedon Coptic saint, born c. 347) for precisely that reason, as he had a classical Greek education but chose to write in the language of the people, molding his home dialect of Sahidic into a formidable tool for expressing Orthodox theology in a uniquely Egyptian way. So he is one of those saints who we definitely know the ethnic identity of, but for many they left only Greek, no matter what their actual ethnic identity was. If they were influential, eventually that work was translated.

It works the other way around, too: nobody doubts the ethnic Syrianess of Mor Ephrem (who was born on the eastern edge of Anatolia, whereas Mor Severus was born in the southwest), for instance, and yet his prayers have been translated into Greek, Russian, English, etc. Same thing with Mor Isaac of Nineveh, or really any saint that was far enough away from the borderlands of the two major empires of that time. That doesn't make any of them 'Greeks'.

I'm pretty sure he was Greek. The region he was born in was originally a Greek colony. And all his writings were written in Greek. Also biblical commentaries called Catenas in the byzantine tradition have preserved alot of Severus biblical commentaries within them (most of his writings were ordered to be burned thus preserved mostly in syriac). Some theorize his large precense in greek byzantine catena may be due to the compilers having been Greek anti-chalcedonians..

For what it's worth from wiki:

The earliest Greek catena is ascribed to Procopius of Gaza, in the first part of the sixth century. Between the seventh and the tenth centuries Andreas Presbyter and Johannes Drungarius are the compilers of catenas to various Books of Scripture. Towards the end of the eleventh century Nicetas of Heraclea produces a great number of catenae. Both before and after, however, the makers of catenae were numerous in the Greek Orient, mostly anonymous, and offering no other indication of their personality than the manuscripts of their excerpts. Similar compilations were also made in the Syriac and Coptic Churches.[3]

More on the subject first is a pdf download and attempts to explain why ample comments from Severus found in the Byzantine manuscripts :

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sou...FjACegQIAxAB&usg=AOvVaw2S7_SpAccDF-3WyTU1TLBK
Second article:
A Rediscovered Greek Fragment of Severus of Antioch

Al Masihi said:

What happened to all the Greek Miaphysites? They seemed to have made up a large portion of the Anti Chalcedonians, yet they no longer seem to exist. Empress Theodora and Emperor Anastasius

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Probably the same thing that happened to the Armenians, Egyptians, and Syrians who accepted Chalcedon: they were absorbed into the dominant population so that they eventually lost their distinctive identities. This is obvious enough on the Chalcedonian side as some of them used to still speak Syriac up until very recently (and not just the Maronites, either; you can still find some Melkites in Maaloula, Syria who speak a form of Neo-Aramaic, because they were never successfully fully Arabized, unlike the Chalcedonians in Palestine or wider Syria). And from the non-Chalcedonians, there is an entire category of Byzantine people of Armenian descent on Wikipedia (though some of them were from before Chalcedon, and Armenia was for a very short time partially controlled by the Byzantine Empire, 387-536). We can assume that at least some of them would've been converted to Chalcedonianism or raised in it from birth, given their connection to the Greek ruling elite of the time.

Al Masihi said:

Are there any resources to read on the Council of Chalcedon and or Miaphysitism? As I’m trying to come to the truth of the matter.

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Yes. Gaddis and Price translated the acts of the council in two volumes a few years ago for the University of Liverpool's "Translated Texts for Historians" series. You should be able to find that online, as I know it has been made available electronically. There you can read first hand about the trial of HH St. Dioscorus, and what he said and didn't say. You can also read the acts of Ephesus II in 449, though I don't think they've had a modern translation, and the translation that is available (online again) is very antiquated and betrays a Chalcedonian bias in some parts. That one is available via the Internet Archive, because it's old enough to be out of copyright (1881).

That would cover the primary sources, as far as we have them, and there is a little bit more out there from HH St. Dioscorus if you visit places like the Orthodox Joint Commission page (for unity between OO and EO). That letter is written after Chalcedon, during his exile on Gangra. (This letter is appended to Perry's translation of Ephesus II, linked earlier, but a bit easier to read on a modern website rather than from a scan of an old book.)

There is the collection which floats around the internet under the name "Coptic Interpretations of the Fourth Ecumenical Council", which is in reality a mixture of both OO and EO documents that discuss Chalcedon and its implications, though some of the articles use unfortunate and confusing language (e.g., "Monophysitism Reconsidered"....no, I'm not going to reconsider that; the fathers say no, so the answer is no...of course I know that's not really what he means, but it's still misleading, no doubt unintentionally).

For me the best book written in the modern day in English is Fr. Shenouda Maher's opus Christology and the Council of Chalcedon. It is very thorough and well-written, and Fr. Shenouda is a real scholar (having received a Ph.D. from Oxford in England), contributing many articles on Coptic language, theology, and church ritual for over 40 years now. Unfortunately it is a rather expensive book due to its large size, and I have not found any scan of it online yet. Perhaps one exists and I just don't know about it.

From the Armenians, it would be a good idea to read the letters of the Patriarch Catholicos Babken II (or Babgen, depending on the dialect), who oversaw the Council of Dvin in 506 which led to the Armenian rejection of Chalcedon. Those are available in English translation in a book called The Armenian Church and the Council of Chalcedon, written by Karekin Sarkissian in the 1960s. I've seen that in PDF form, though I can't remember where I got it from. Those letters (two of them, both written "To the Orthodox in Persia", by which HH means Armenians) really show the truth of the quote earlier from Van Rompay's article: at that time, there was no regard for ethnic division; rather, Chalcedon was rejected on purely theological grounds, since the wording of the Tome was seen to give shelter to Nestorians. (The Nestorians themselves in Persia were saying so, and taunting the Armenians that they -- the Nestorians, not the Armenians -- were now the Orthodox, as the Greeks and Latins have decided via the council of Chalcedon, so the Armenians were now heretics...the Armenians didn't know about Chalcedon yet, since they didn't have any representatives there.)

I know the Syriacs also wrote some works on Chalcedon and our rejection of it, but to be honest I haven't read them outside of I guess some of the letters of Mor Severus and Mor Bar Salibi's Against the Melchites (which I found difficult to understand, to be honest, so I don't know if I can recommend it), which is much later in the 12th century.

To be honest with you, at least as I see it most of our theological conflict with the Chalcedonians has more to do with the underlying traditions of Alexandria and their conflict with the tradition of the Greeks in Syria (not the Syriacs). Fr. Shenouda's book goes into this at some depth, so again I would really recommend it.

The Greeks will say "It is a shame that HH St. Cyril used physis to mean two things, depending on the context" (or similar laments), and in a way I agree: it would have been easier if HH had only the Chalcedonian use of the term in his writings, because then the Chalcedonians could say that they are really following him, and we really aren't (or if he only used explicitly non-Chalcedonian language, we could say the same to them). Instead they sometimes resort to saying that the entire tradition of miaphysite Christological understanding was formed after the time of HH St. Cyril himself, using some Apollinarian forgeries (Apollinarius of Laodicea thought that Jesus had a normal body but a 'divine mind' instead of a human soul), which to me seems ridiculous since Apollinarianism is anyway flatly contradicted by the prayers of both churches claiming Orthodoxy.

I can't speak for the Chalcedonians (and this is not the place for them to advocate for their churches anyway), but we pray things like this:

O God, who dwells in the highest and looks upon the hearts of His humble servants, who willed to visit us with mercy and come to us incarnate of the Holy Spirit and of the holy Virgin Mary.

O You who promised our father Adam with salvation and confirmed His holy promise to all the fathers by His virginal Birth in the fullness of time from a pure and chaste, first-born Virgin.

He sanctified her, purified her, filled her with grace, and preferred her above all women of the world. She is the ever-virgin, Mary, the new Eve, the pride of our race and the second bodily heaven.

O You who loved us, and out of the fullness of His love and mercy, out of signs to His righteousness and justice, and out of His wisdom and fairness, He desired to save us from the death of the original sin and rescue us from its eternal punishment, by dying on our behalf in a human flesh which He took from the Virgin Mary, the Mother of Salvation.

While the first Eve was the source of destruction, the new Eve became the gate of heaven.

O You who was incarnate of the first-born Virgin, You honored her everlasting virginity and perfect chastity through Your Birth from her, for she is an image of the original glory, on which God created our forefathers Adam and Eve when they were together in the Paradise of joy.

O You who honored the second Eve by dwelling in her womb for nine full months and was formed of her by the Holy Spirit, who dwelt upon her.

He took flesh, having a human soul, uniting with it in one hypostasis and one nature and the Logos was born of her, who was and is, the blessed God forever.

-- from a fraction for the fast and feast of St. Mary

I'm not sure how much clearer it can be that we believe that Christ had a human soul, but there you have it. Hopefully there are more resources that you can find in Arabic. My Arabic is quite poor, but I imagine there are many things published in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, etc. from the Oriental Orthodox churches that can provide you with guidance.

Al Masihi said:

I’m trying to overcome my bias to the Byzantine Church, trying to be honest with myself, I don’t find anything wrong the Christology of Saint Dioscorus, in all honesty his Christology seems more simpler then the Chalcedonian one. I personally believe only one view can be correct, either the Chalcedonians were correct and Dioscorus was wrong in opposing the Council or he was right and no new council should have been made after Ephesus, I’m sure you agree hat both can’t be fully right, both can’t claim full Orthodoxy after all Christ founded one Apostolic Church not two. I’m trying to find my best where his Church really is, also I’m a person who likes to decide on one viewpoint, also since I frequently engage heretics like Muslims in my life, it’s better to stay consistent and present a consistent view of Christology to them. Presenting both a Chalcedonian and Miaphysite Christianity to them at the same time is quite complex and a bit self contradicting to the beholder.

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I agree with you that only one side can be correct, but as I hopefully showed one side can definitely be wrong about the other -- such as the claim that our Christology follows that of Apollinarian forgeries, which is common in Chalcedonian polemical circles. If that were the case, we wouldn't pray the prayer I showed.

With regard to Christology I would say: What makes more sense to you -- to attribute the actions, attributes, feelings, etc. that the Biblical and Patristic writings deal with in regard to Jesus to the Person of Christ (as non-Chalcedonians do), or to attribute the same to this or that nature within Christ (as Chalcedonians do)? Because the problem for our dialogue with the Chalcedonians, as I already alluded to, is that you will find both within the Patristic writings that we both claim, such as those of HH St. Cyril, the Pillar of Faith. So we can read these common fathers in a 'Chalcedonian' or a 'non-Chalcedonian' way. Obviously as a non-Chalcedonian, I read them in a non-Chalcedonian way, but I can still recognize how the Chalcedonians can read them and see them as being in line with their Christology.

So the problem is not even "how can both be right at the same time?", but rather "How can writings which can be used to support either view depending on who is reading them be understood so as to specifically refute one or the other view?" That is difficult (impossible, I'd say), because of course we're talking about fathers who wrote and lived before Chalcedon, so we cannot make them Chalcedonians or non-Chalcedonians; they're pre-Chalcedonians. They weren't writing to refute or praise Chalcedon, as that had not happened yet. And we know that both Christological views existed before Chalcedon thanks to things like the formula of reunion between HH St. Cyril and John of Antioch, by which the two viewpoints were reconciled for a time:


This is something I have admittedly struggled in the past to articulate properly to visiting friends here on Voice in the Desert subforum, because they thought that because we preach the one (mia) nature of Jesus Christ, the Word of God incarnate, then we must stumble with those who "divide as to the two natures" this or that action. You can actually find such language in at least one of HH St. Cyril's own commentaries (I believe it is on the Gospel of John, though I cannot remember exactly at the moment), which has been brought up here before.

The answer to this of course is that in both conceptions of Christology, the glorious mystery of the incarnation is a union of two natures, and we never shy away from proclaiming that. So to say "He ate and slept according to His humanity" (i.e., because He is human, He did this) or "He raised the dead according to His divinity" (i.e., because He is God, He did this) is not a problem. You will find such proclamations in our prayers. The difference is in saying in His humanity, He did this, or in His divinity He did that. That is what we don't say. We say one nature, and one act, such that it is Christ Who ate and slept, and Christ Who raised the dead. This is the key to understanding Orthodox Christology: that everything is related back to the Person. When they spit on Him, yes it landed on His human flesh (how could it not? He was truly human, not some kind of phantasm), but they were spitting on the Lord of Glory! (Not on one nature or the other, but on the Person of Christ, Who is perfectly God and perfectly man.) So there is no division into two natures not because we cannot talk about the two natures of which Christ is composed, but because the union itself is a true union of the Divinity and the Humanity. We don't pull them apart to say "Ah, which nature is doing what when?", but sometimes Chalcedonians will have this discussion.

Generally when I write or say these things, rather quickly the Chalcedonian will ask then about the crucifixion, because they think then that we are engaging in some weird kind of Patripassionism, because how can the Divinity die? Of course we cannot and would not ever say that the Divinity died (or even that the humanity died -- natures aren't people, no matter how many you say there are; you cannot nail a nature to the cross), because that is insane and heretical. But luckily we have a fraction prayer that we already borrowed from the Syrians many centuries ago which explains this:


Thus truly the Logos of God suffered in the flesh and was sacrificed and broken on the Cross. His soul parted from His body, while His divinity in no way parted either from His soul or from His body.

He was pierced in His side with a spear; blood and water flowed from Him for the forgiveness of the whole world. His body was smeared in them, and His soul came and was reunited with His body.

On behalf of the sins of the whole world, the Son died on the Cross.

He turned us from the way on the left towards the right. Through the blood of his Cross, He established the reconciliation of the heavenly with the earthly, and united the people with the peoples and the soul with the body.

And on the third day He rose from the tomb.

One is Emmanuel who cannot be divided after the union; there is no division into two natures. Thus we believe, thus we confess, and thus We affirm that this Body belongs to this Blood, and this Blood belongs to this Body.

You are Christ Our God, who for our sake were pierced in Your side with a spear on the heights of Golgotha in Jerusalem.

You are the Lamb of God who take away the sin of the world.
Absolve us of our transgressions and make us stand at Your right hand side.

O God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who are blessed by the Cherubim, hallowed by the Seraphim, and exalted by thousands of thousands and ten thousand times ten thousand of the rational servants;

who sanctify and complete the gifts and the fullness of the fruits that have been brought to You as a sweet savor; sanctify also all of our bodies, our souls, and our spirits,

so that with a pure heart and an unashamed face, we may call upon You, O God the Father who are in the heavens, and pray, saying,

Our Father...

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The Logos (Christ) suffered in the flesh, and we do not divide into two natures what Has been united already. Thus we believe and confess in the true reality of Christ's incarnation ("that this Body belongs to this Blood, and this Blood belongs to this body") explicitly in the event of the crucifixion, rather than saying that the natures somehow separate on the cross, because such-and-such cannot happen to this or that nature.

So it is really not necessary to espouse Chalcedonianism in order to affirm Christ's suffering in the flesh, and the union does not become disunited on the Cross (God forbid). "His soul parted from His body, while His divinity no no way parted from His soul, nor from His body." The soul departs from the body at death, and He really did die of course, but notice how we can say all this and still affirm His divinity as inseparably united with His humanity. Even in death this is so. I'm not sure what the Chalcedonians would say differently than this, but this is a simple answer. Who was crucified, died, and rose again? Jesus Christ, the second Person of the all-perfect, indivisible and uncreated Holy Trinity.

Again, everything goes back to the Person. It is not a denial of Christ's humanity or His divinity (God forbid), but an affirmation of the inseparable union of the incarnation. I believe HH St. Severus refers to the incarnation as the union of the two which "drives out division". So it is literally not possible to 're-divide' the natures after the union so as to say this nature does this or that nature does that (cf. the Tome of Leo, which does say exactly that in one of its less careful passages). No. That is inappropriate, in our thinking. Christ does everything that Christ does, and then some theologians (as mentioned in the formula of reunion) divide the actions according to what befits this nature or that one. That is not dividing into two natures because that is not saying that the natures are acting as independent loci (places, centers of activity or experience) within the One Christ; it is merely saying these actions are manifestations of His humanity or His divinity. They are, if you will, evidence that He is both perfectly divine and perfectly human. And that is something that both the Orthodox and the Chalcedonians believe with equal conviction.

But the question for anyone to answer is as I put it before: is it most consistent with Orthodox Christology to attribute all things (whether manifestations of His humanity or manifestations of His divinity) to the Person, or is it better to attribute these to this or that nature (within the Person)?

In broad strokes, the first is the Orthodox way, and the second is the Chalcedonian way, though again you can find support for either in both camps because we read common fathers differently. It is not a matter of being 'anti-Byzantine'. Our fathers too wrote in Greek, spoke Greek (not all, but many), and were definitely considered citizens of the Byzantine Roman empire, albeit rebellious ones after Chalcedon. But Chalcedon is just what brought everything to the boiling point. The conflict clearly existed beforehand, and was navigated safely until the Byzantines who would become Chalcedonians for a time denied the miaphysite Christology (I believe a subsequent council admitted it, so long as it was not understood in a Eutychian fashion), forcing their foreign Antiochian Greek approach on everyone by saying that they must declare Christ in two natures after the union. That's how theology turns into politics, and it's always rather ugly. It is ugly on the OO side sometimes too, like when Coptic people claim that Greek was an 'invader' language, and all the saints really spoke Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, etc.; this is simply false historical revisionism from people who don't actually know their history. If you are interested in this aspect of the conflict, there are plenty of resources on it, such as Adam Schor's academic book Theodoret's People: Social Networks and Religious Conflict in Late Roman Syria, or for that matter the much more accessible article by Fr. Romanides (I believe of the Greek EO church) entitled "Leo and Theodoret, Dioscorus and Etuyches", which I believe was published originally in a theological journal whose name escapes me, but is available here on the Orthodox Joint Commision page (a repository of working papers from the OO-EO dialogues).