Dioscorus's Account of Chalcedon?

[TheLostCoin]

So, in the past I've come across this alleged quote of Dioscorus, which you can see here:
From the Life of Saint Dioscorus

"Let us now return to the time when we were taken inside to the emperor Marcian. And it happened (that), when we were taken inside, we sat down. And in it were Mark of Ephesus, Juvenal of Jerusalem, Anatolius of Constantinoploe, Stephen of Antioch and the lowliest, I, Dioscorus, as well as the emperor and she who is unworthy to be called by her name, Pulcheria. And Father Macarius came in with Pinution, his brother, He sat over apart by himself. But they are near us and the emperor, and what we say, they also hear.
The emperor said to us. ‘Define the Faith for us that you may go to your homes.’ I, Dioscorus, said to him: ‘In what is the faith of our fathers lacking that we should add to it in accord with your mind, O emperor? And do you not say, “Our fathers who laid down the Faith are orthodox, that is, Alexander, Athanasius, Theophilus, Cyril, Liberus, Innocent and Celestine”?’ I related these things, wishing to receive from his own mouth whether he accepts them or will not make changes in the Faith. Flavian , who anticipated the emperor, answered: ‘Enough of you, O Dioscorus! The ancient ways have passed on . Behold, new people exist’. I myself, Dioscorus, answered saying: ‘If I were to add to the things which my fathers built up at the synods which they attended, and if I destroyed these things, truly I would set myself up as a traitor’.
Ibas motioned to the emperor to order the Tome of Leo to be read. When he had given the order, the clerk began to read. I, Dioscorus, responded: ‘What is this scroll which is being unrolled in our midst’? the clerk said: ‘It is the letter of Leo, the patriarch’. Immediately, I leapt up in the court, took the document and threw it away. I said: ‘Do not proclaim the blasphemous acts of that man in this place, (else) I shall leave the whole city of the [empire] under the interdict, and we shall go’.
(A discussion between Pulcheria and Dioscorus follows, referring to the controversy between Pulcheria’s mother Eudoxia and John Chrysostom. Dioscorus concludes his speech: )
If you believe as I do, join me at the Eucharist. If you do not believe as I do, you are rejecting both my word and my faith like a heretic. but I, I am orthodox. Otherwise, let your august assembly relate to me the sin of my belief. Do not slander God, O emperor. For he is the one who holds your breath in his hand, and no doubt you will go to his hands without delay. Do not speak ill of the Faith, O emperor. Do not lie about matters relating to the Holy Spirit. Remove yourself, O layman. Do not touch the place where God is [or you will] burn. I shall not cease upbraiding and censuring. If I am slain with Christ, I will seek after the things of heaven, the place where Christ is.
Theodoret said: ‘We accept our father, Leo, who says: ‘The divinity is divided from him for a time and he accepts the experience of sufferings like us. Afterwards, the divinity fills his body with light and he performs all these wondrous deeds”.’ But I, Dioscorus, said: ‘On the other hand, I accept my father, Cyril, who says: ‘As a piece of iron, when it is about to be refined in the fire and is brought out glowing and is beaten upon with hammer blows and the fire is fused with the iron, so it is that the divinity and the humanity of my Savior share with one another in the sufferings which he underwent and the wonders which he performed’. And when I had said these things, the archbishops and all the members of the synod arose and cried out saying: ‘Right is the faith of Dioscorus. And there is not any weakness in it. Rather, his faith is orthodox. The faith of Flavian is narrow. We believe just as Dioscorus (does)’.
And I motioned to them with my hand (saying): ‘Be silent and listen, Israel’. And when they were silent, I continued and said to them: ‘ Do you accept the four Gospels?’ They said: ‘Yes. Certainly. He who does not accept the four Gospels is not a Christian’. I said: ‘You have spoken well. When the Christ was summoned to the wedding, was he summoned as man or as God’? They said: ‘As man’. I said to them: ‘Correct’. I said to them: ‘When he caused the miracle to happen, did he perform it as man or rather as God’? They said: ‘The matter is obvious. He caused the miracle to happen as God’. I said to them: ‘So then, understand for yourselves that the divinity was not separated from the humanity for a moment or for the twinkling of an eye. Behold then, I have taken you at your (very) own word’.
And (my) speech shut their mouths, and they did not find anything to say nor did they find a way to converse with me. And the officers of the imperial guard and the sentinels and the chamberlains and the patricians and the consuls and the generals, in short, the entire court kept crying out until their voices reached up to heaven: ‘Let the emperor live forever together with the faith like that of Dioscorus!’ There is no weakness in it, since God wills this belief and the world is set right because of it. Cast away from yourself these Manichaean deceivers. Do not let them deceive you, O emperor. Nestorius perished and was destroyed, wishing to take us to destruction with him. Be saved, my brothers, from the ambush of these dogs’."

So, with this being said...

1. Does anybody know where this particular text comes from, whether or not it's from Dioscorus or some tradition?
2. If this is legitimate, did Pope Dioscorus believe that Christ suffered in His Divinity (something which Saint Cyril says is blasphemous)?

I post this as a discussion point rather from any place of hostility - but considering that this was seen in a positive light by the poster on that thread, I was wondering if people had more information about this quote and where it comes from.


After all, in the Coptic Liturgy and the Agpeya, either this alleged quote borrows from the Liturgy of Saint Cyril's own words, or the Liturgy of Saint Cyril literally took these words from this account, as the "not separated for a twinkling of the eye" is said verbatim in both the Liturgy of Saint Cyril and this quote.

 

[dzheremi]

I've never seen or heard of this text before (following your link it seems like it's copied from a discussion thread on Wikipedia, which is not a place I would go for anything), so I can't say anything about where it comes from. I am under the impression after having asked my priest about it that we do not have a whole lot of written material by HH St. Dioscorus. I have seen his letter to the monks of the Hennaton, and his letter to St. Shenouda the Archimandrite concerning the Origenists, and have heard of but not seen another letter, but have seen no Vita of his.

I would suspect it to be a later work for precisely the same reason you have already given regarding its exact phraseology. I suppose it is not impossible that HH would have quoted the anaphora exactly, but it seems a bit too convenient to accept without a strong tradition of upholding this tradition of his life, which as far as I know we don't have. Actual accepted vitas are easy to find and have a known pedigree; see by contrast to the thing you've found the Life of St. Shenouda by his disciple St. Besa, the Life of St. John the Little by Zacharias of Sakha, the Life of St. Anthony by his disciple HH St. Athanasius the Apostolic, the life of HH St. Severus of Antioch by Zacharias of Mytilene, etc.

 

[TheLostCoin]

I would suspect it to be a later work for precisely the same reason you have already given regarding its exact phraseology. I suppose it is not impossible that HH would have quoted the anaphora exactly, but it seems a bit too convenient to accept without a strong tradition of upholding this tradition of his life, which as far as I know we don't have. Actual accepted vitas are easy to find and have a known pedigree; see by contrast to the thing you've found the Life of St. Shenouda by his disciple St. Besa, the Life of St. John the Little by Zacharias of Sakha, the Life of St. Anthony by his disciple HH St. Athanasius the Apostolic, the life of HH St. Severus of Antioch by Zacharias of Mytilene, etc.

What's bizarre though is the fact that it's written in first person.

 

[dzheremi]

From what I've personally seen that seems to have been pretty common, e.g., in St. Shenouda's discourses. I'm thinking that there may be a connection here between material like this and, say, the Martyrdom of St. John of Phanijoit (written 1211 AD; one of those rare instances where we have one extant manuscript and it's very helpfully dated), which itself not generally in first person but contains a long discourse between the saint and his persecutor in the Muslim court (his story is of conversion to Islam and then return to Christianity, which is to this day a very sensitive subject in Egypt), all in first person. I think there is a desire on the part of some Coptic people to make HH St. Dioscorus into a kind of "martyr for Orthodoxy", or at least a passion-bearer/confessor a la St. Samuel of Qalamun (St. Samuel the Confessor), as when I asked my own priest why we don't seem to have any writings from HH St. Dioscorus, he said it is not only because he taught rather than wrote very much (we call him in Coptic Pensakh 'our teacher'), but that the preserved correspondence from exile included things like a note that came with pieces of his teeth and beard, saying "This is the price that I paid for defending Orthodoxy" (at Chalcedon; see the synaxarium entry below). That's not the kind of thing you can really study, unlike his letters to the monks.

So I think in terms of creating a kind of faux-martyrology around HH, it makes sense that he would be presented as having personally won the day in these instances, because that makes his eventual dethroning and exile all the more unjust. Here he is, preaching the correct faith that all recognize as being so, and yet look what happened.

I don't want to give the wrong impression, as I deeply love HH St. Disocorus and consider him a valiant fighter for Orthodoxy no matter what the Chalcedonians say about him or any of us, but this dialogue probably comes from a time when we were still licking our wounds, so to speak. That is not to say that is false (I don't know; I've never seen it before and do not know where its ultimate origins lie), but it appears to me to be nothing more than a variation/elaboration on an entry from the syanxarium, where HH's departure is commemorated with the following words on Tout 7 (September 18th):

On this day of the year 451 A.D., the blessed father and the great champion of Orthodoxy, Saint Dioscorus, 25th Pope of Alexandria, departed. His departure took place on the island of Gagra after he had fought the good fight defending the Orthodox faith.

When he was summoned to the Council of Chalcedon by the order of Emperor Marcianus, he saw a great assembly of 630 bishops. Saint Dioscorus asked, "In whom is the faith lacking that it was necessary to gather this great assembly?" They told him, "This assembly has been convened by the emperor's command." He replied, "If this assembly has been convened by the command of our Lord Jesus Christ I shall stay and speak with what God may give me to say; but if this assembly has been convened by the emperor's command, let the emperor manage his assembly as he pleases."

When he saw that Leo, Archbishop of Rome, was teaching that Christ has two natures and two wills after the Union, he took the charge to refute this new belief. He stated that our Lord Jesus Christ is one, He who was invited to the wedding as a man and changed the water into wine as a God, and that the two natures were not separated in all of His works. Quoting Pope Cyril, he said, "The Hypostatic Union of the Word of God with the flesh is like the union of the soul with the body and like the union of fire and iron: even as they are of two different natures, by their union they became one. Likewise, our Lord Christ is one Messiah, one Lord, and one Nature." None of those who were gathered at that assembly dared to contradict him. Among them were some who had attended the Council of Ephesus, which had been convened against Nestorius. Some informed the Emperor Marcianus and the Empress Belkarya that no one disobeyed their commands concerning the faith except Dioscorus, Patriarch of the City of Alexandria. They brought St. Dioscorus, and the leading bishops of the Council who debated and discussed the matter till it was evening, but St. Dioscorus would not deviate from his Orthodox belief. The emperor and empress were irritated at this, and the empress commanded to smite St. Dioscorus on his mouth, and to pluck out the hair of his beard. He took the hair and the teeth that were knocked out and sent them to Alexandria saying, "This is the fruit of Faith."

When the rest of the bishops saw what had happened to Dioscorus, they agreed with the emperor, being afraid of undergoing the same fate. They signed the document of the belief that Christ has two distinct and separate natures. When St. Dioscorus knew this, he sent for the document and pretended that he wanted to sign it too. But when he read the document, he wrote at its foot that he excommunicated everyone who had signed it, as well as everyone who deviated from the Orthodox Faith. The emperor was enraged and he commanded to banish St. Dioscorus to the island of Gagra, along with St. Macarius, the Bishop of Edko, and two others, and the Council of Chalcedon was resumed.

When they took St. Dioscorus to the island of Gagra, its bishop, because he was a Nestorian, met him with contempt and disdain. However, God performed at the hands of St. Dioscorus many great signs and wonders, so that all obeyed him, respected and revered him greatly, for God honors His chosen ones in every place. St. Dioscorus told St. Macarius, his companion in exile, "You shall receive the crown of martyrdom in Alexandria." He sent him with one of the believing merchants to Alexandria, where he received the crown of martyrdom.

St. Dioscorus, having ended his good fight, departed from this vain life and received the crown of eternal life. He departed on the island of Gagra where his body was laid.


His blessings and prayers be with us all. Amen.

 

[TheLostCoin]

From what I've personally seen that seems to have been pretty common, e.g., in St. Shenouda's discourses. I'm thinking that there may be a connection here between material like this and, say, the Martyrdom of St. John of Phanijoit (written 1211 AD; one of those rare instances where we have one extant manuscript and it's very helpfully dated), which itself not generally in first person but contains a long discourse between the saint and his persecutor in the Muslim court (his story is of conversion to Islam and then return to Christianity, which is to this day a very sensitive subject in Egypt), all in first person. I think there is a desire on the part of some Coptic people to make HH St. Dioscorus into a kind of "martyr for Orthodoxy", or at least a passion-bearer/confessor a la St. Samuel of Qalamun (St. Samuel the Confessor), as when I asked my own priest why we don't seem to have any writings from HH St. Dioscorus, he said it is not only because he taught rather than wrote very much (we call him in Coptic Pensakh 'our teacher'), but that the preserved correspondence from exile included things like a note that came with pieces of his teeth and beard, saying "This is the price that I paid for defending Orthodoxy" (at Chalcedon; see the synaxarium entry below). That's not the kind of thing you can really study, unlike his letters to the monks.

So I think in terms of creating a kind of faux-martyrology around HH, it makes sense that he would be presented as having personally won the day in these instances, because that makes his eventual dethroning and exile all the more unjust. Here he is, preaching the correct faith that all recognize as being so, and yet look what happened.

I don't want to give the wrong impression, as I deeply love HH St. Disocorus and consider him a valiant fighter for Orthodoxy no matter what the Chalcedonians say about him or any of us, but this dialogue probably comes from a time when we were still licking our wounds, so to speak. That is not to say that is false (I don't know; I've never seen it before and do not know where its ultimate origins lie), but it appears to me to be nothing more than a variation/elaboration on an entry from the syanxarium, where HH's departure is commemorated with the following words on Tout 7 (September 18th):

On this day of the year 451 A.D., the blessed father and the great champion of Orthodoxy, Saint Dioscorus, 25th Pope of Alexandria, departed. His departure took place on the island of Gagra after he had fought the good fight defending the Orthodox faith.

When he was summoned to the Council of Chalcedon by the order of Emperor Marcianus, he saw a great assembly of 630 bishops. Saint Dioscorus asked, "In whom is the faith lacking that it was necessary to gather this great assembly?" They told him, "This assembly has been convened by the emperor's command." He replied, "If this assembly has been convened by the command of our Lord Jesus Christ I shall stay and speak with what God may give me to say; but if this assembly has been convened by the emperor's command, let the emperor manage his assembly as he pleases."

When he saw that Leo, Archbishop of Rome, was teaching that Christ has two natures and two wills after the Union, he took the charge to refute this new belief. He stated that our Lord Jesus Christ is one, He who was invited to the wedding as a man and changed the water into wine as a God, and that the two natures were not separated in all of His works. Quoting Pope Cyril, he said, "The Hypostatic Union of the Word of God with the flesh is like the union of the soul with the body and like the union of fire and iron: even as they are of two different natures, by their union they became one. Likewise, our Lord Christ is one Messiah, one Lord, and one Nature." None of those who were gathered at that assembly dared to contradict him. Among them were some who had attended the Council of Ephesus, which had been convened against Nestorius. Some informed the Emperor Marcianus and the Empress Belkarya that no one disobeyed their commands concerning the faith except Dioscorus, Patriarch of the City of Alexandria. They brought St. Dioscorus, and the leading bishops of the Council who debated and discussed the matter till it was evening, but St. Dioscorus would not deviate from his Orthodox belief. The emperor and empress were irritated at this, and the empress commanded to smite St. Dioscorus on his mouth, and to pluck out the hair of his beard. He took the hair and the teeth that were knocked out and sent them to Alexandria saying, "This is the fruit of Faith."

When the rest of the bishops saw what had happened to Dioscorus, they agreed with the emperor, being afraid of undergoing the same fate. They signed the document of the belief that Christ has two distinct and separate natures. When St. Dioscorus knew this, he sent for the document and pretended that he wanted to sign it too. But when he read the document, he wrote at its foot that he excommunicated everyone who had signed it, as well as everyone who deviated from the Orthodox Faith. The emperor was enraged and he commanded to banish St. Dioscorus to the island of Gagra, along with St. Macarius, the Bishop of Edko, and two others, and the Council of Chalcedon was resumed.

When they took St. Dioscorus to the island of Gagra, its bishop, because he was a Nestorian, met him with contempt and disdain. However, God performed at the hands of St. Dioscorus many great signs and wonders, so that all obeyed him, respected and revered him greatly, for God honors His chosen ones in every place. St. Dioscorus told St. Macarius, his companion in exile, "You shall receive the crown of martyrdom in Alexandria." He sent him with one of the believing merchants to Alexandria, where he received the crown of martyrdom.

St. Dioscorus, having ended his good fight, departed from this vain life and received the crown of eternal life. He departed on the island of Gagra where his body was laid.


His blessings and prayers be with us all. Amen.

It seems to be the case that it's a modified version of the entry of the Synaxarium, considering how similar they are - but I still find it disturbing that, in this variation of it, Disocorus preaches heresy.

Not that I'm saying he did - after all, I think that through the various Oriental and Eastern joint commissions and scholarly research on the topic that I've seen, Dioscorus was deposed by Chalcedon for his alleged conduct in 449 rather than heresy - and the significance of it is little, if it is just a modified Synaxarium entry - but it immediately caught my eye in reading it.

 

[dzheremi]

Exactly right. The preserved acts of the Council flatly say he was not deposed for heresy, and even his Chalcedonian replacement, Timothy Salophakiolos, continued to commemorate him in the liturgy of the Chalcedonian Church at Alexandria until the still-living Leo of Rome caught word of it and ordered him to stop doing so.

HH St. Dioscorus and Pope Leo of Rome had what could be considered a large degree of personal animus towards each other, perhaps going back to HH's refusal of Leo's call that "Rome and Alexandria be one in all things" (i.e., that Alexandria adopt particularly Roman practices, which we didn't do) in 445, or certainly from the mutual striking of one another's names from their respective diptychs in the liturgy (which was before Chalcedon; afterwards he urged Constantinople to do the same), an act which Leo performed first. There are several things which could have gone differently (say, if HH St. Dioscorus had not refused to come before the council after a three-fold summons), but in the world we live in, we have things like the mutation of the synaxarium that you've found, that has some degree of what could be heresy in it, but which is not present in what the Church actually proclaims and commemorates.

So what can anyone say, really? No doubt there is a genre of popular Chalcedonian miracle and martyr-making surrounding Chalcedon, and other events related to it. I have seen the Chacledonians on their forum talk about some kind of test between the confessions involving a saint of theirs, who while departed miraculously placed the confession of the Non-Chalcedonians (whatever that was...the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, I suppose, or the Jerusalemite creed of Epiphanius of Salamis for the Armenians) at her feet, and the Tome of Leo at her head. Hooray! Victory! This is that in another venue/by another expression: No, we have the Orthodox faith; you have the Tome of Leo. They are not the same thing, and we're willing to pay to continually insist on saying so, since we are constantly pressed to do so by the Greco-Romans and their edict.

That's how I read all this first-person narration supposedly from HH. Polemics by a probably ignorant person sometime after Chalcedon who sought to expand upon what we have actually received (as in the synaxarium, which no doubt has a history it's own, too), but did a poor job of it in one section.

I certainly wouldn't worry about it. Anti-Chalcedon St. Dioscorus 'fan fiction' is not the faith of the Church. You can find that rather in the liturgies, in the Agpeya, and so on, as I'm sure you already know.

It's maybe interesting as a historical stream of thought in the Coptic world whenever it was written (we know nothing of its providence, right? Could've been written last week, for all we know), but it's nothing more than that. Actual histories and saint's lives and such tend to get published somewhere officially, and I haven't seen anything more in that area regarding HH St. Discorus beyond the already mentioned letters (which are few) and the synaxarium entry I've already shared. Maybe there is more out there, but if it's not received then it sort of has no status in relation to the faith.