and I want to also second this, that I am asking for clarity, and not arguing either. I respect your honesty and think that this can actually bear some fruit, even if it is just between us fellas.
Sure. May it be so, God-wllling
this brings me to my next question (or the same only with more stuff for Chalcedon). I must again ask where is the heresy when St. Cyril, in his letter to John of Antioch, states that there is a difference between the two Natures, and that the Lord assumed sufferings in the Flesh while the divinity remained impassable, among others. I bring these up because St. Cyril makes a distinction between the humanity and Divinity, but no division. St. Leo in the Tome and the definition of Chalcedon says that there is no division.
so again, I have to ask where is the heresy?
The problem is not in recognizing that there is a difference between the natures. Obviously humanity and divinity are not the same natures, and some things are appropriate to say of divinity (e.g., that it is impassible), and others of humanity. So we have no problem at all with what our father has written, in this letter or in others, concerning the need to distinguish between the two in so far as is healthy and necessary to do so. The problem then is that Chalcedon or rather Leo's Tome which it accepted goes too far in that direction by claiming, contravening the aforementioned anathemas, that this
nature does this or receives this, while this
nature does this or receives that. Natures do not work this way. As I have heard it put by some in our tradition, this is wrong because natures do not operate separately of the person. If I fall down,
I am hurt --
humanity is not hurt. So to say "the flesh receives insults" or "the divinity receives glory" -- well, yes and no, right? Because those who insulted Him insulted not only the suffering servant or only the Lord of Glory, but
both, because He is both at all times. There is not and cannot be any division into two within Him, as the union is a true
union, wherein the two natures are united and it is no longer appropriate to speak of them separately in the manner in which the Tome does, saying that this form does this and the other does that -- no, it is the person who does this or that, even if the reason He does it is because He has needs or powers appropriate to one or the other (read: the Christ who raised Lazarus from the dead is the same Christ who wept). So to the Oriental mind, one very obvious problem with Chalcedonianism is that it messes with our conception of the incarnation and what happened at/by it. Of course, you are free to say that this is a wrong conception to begin with, but please remember that you asked for our view. This is it, as far as I understand it.
And because of this I suspect we can share many of the same fathers and agree on their writings even as we hold different understandings of the nature(s), because our fathers stressed this unity even when discussing the fact that some things are appropriate to humanity and others to divinity. So that is in our (OO) tradition, too. We just will not do as the Tome does and say that therefore, because humanity and divinity are not the same, those acts which are characteristic of one are done or received by that one (nature, rather than One person, Jesus Christ). St. Athanasius the Apostolic makes this point brilliantly when he writes in
On the Incarnation "You must understand, therefore, that when writers on this sacred theme speak of Him as eating and drinking and being born, they mean that the body, as a body, was born and sustained with the food proper to its nature; while God the Word, Who was united with it, was at the same time ordering the universe and revealing Himself through His bodily acts as not man only but God."
I suspect that a Chalcedonian reading of this passage and others like it would see it as affirming the two natures formula that they affirm, but a non-Chalcedonian/OO reading likewise finds support in it, as our father stresses the union that is at the heart of our Christology as being manifested in the acts themselves (this is very much in keeping with the way we talk about Christ in our communion;
Christ who is God and man did X; not the human or divine
nature did X).
sure, but Constantinople 2 was not called to show that the error was ended, but rather that the error was never there.
As you see it, but again, you asked for an OO perspective. And that perspective is, traditionally, that Chalcedon as a council and the Tome of Leo as a document are erroneous. And I only brought that up as a hypothetical to say that you guys wouldn't do any different in that case than we do in the case of Chalcedon: If you have to accept error in order to have communion, then you're not going to do it. Neither will we. Again, if we were talking about a situation where we were asked to affirm Constantinople 2
but not Chalcedon, I really do suspect that we (or the majority of us) would go for it. But that is just not reality, according to the terms of communion that your own communion set down. We can no more accept Chalcedon than you guys can allow us not to accept it, even if we by and large do accept what came after it as correcting it or annulling it. (It's the aforementioned Henotikon problem all over again.)