Andrew Louth - Syriac Christian Church

12 INTRODUCTION
THE SEVENTH-CENTURY COMPROMISES:
MONENERGISM AND MONOTHELITISM 19
It was these divisions, intensified by Justinian’s persecutions, that
were exposed by the Persian advance into the Middle East in the
second decade of the seventh century. The Shah Chosroes sought to
exploit them: in 614 he called leaders of the three Christian groups in
his newly-conquered domains (the Monophysites, the Armenians, and
the Nestorians, supporters of Nestorius, who after his condamnation
in 431 had migrated east to Persia) together to a meeting. At this
meeting Chosroes seems to have agreed to maintain Nestorian
dominance among Christians in traditionally Persian lands and
Monophysite dominance in formerly Byzantine territory. It was a great
boost to the Monophysites: the Monophysite Patriarch of Antioch,
Athanasius the Camel-Driver (595–631), rejoiced at the passing of the
‘Chalcedonian night’. With the Byzantine victory at the end of the
620s, however, the old divisions emerged. But Heraclius and the
Patriarch of Constantinople, Sergius, himself of Syrian Jacobite
parentage, had a plan for union. This built on the Cyrilline
Chalcedonianism of Justinian and amounted to the affirmation of one
divine person, possessing two natures, one divine, one human, both in
their full integrity, with the further assertion that this single person
was expressed in a single activity (or energy, in Greek: energeia): a
doctrine called ‘Monenergism’.
It seemed a natural development: the Cyrilline phrase, ‘one
Incarnate nature of God the Word’, would suggest, given the
Aristotelian association of nature and activity, the idea of a single
energy; on the Monophysite side, Severus could be cited in support of
it; and both sides accepted the near-apostolic authority of Denys the
Areopagite who had spoken of Christ’s ‘divine-human [theandric]
activity’. The historical origins of this compromise are obscure, but it
seems that in the 610s Sergius had sought advice from the
Chalcedonian Bishop Theodore of Pharan (in Sinai) and the
Monophysite Bishop Macaronas of Arsinë in Egypt, and made further
contact with the learned Egyptian Monophysite, George Arsas, from
whom he sought patristic authority favouring Monenergism. This
compromise was tried out first of all in 622, when Heraclius was in
Armenia (where Christianity was largely Monophysite)—
unsuccessfully—then in Lazica (only evangelized in the time of
Justinian, in contrast to the neighbouring areas of Armenia and
Eastern Georgia) in 626, where the local Metropolitan Cyrus of Phasis
(modern Poti, on the Black Sea) was recruited to Monenergism. After
Heraclius’ victory and recovery of the True Cross, Monenergism seems
to have been the basis of the incorporation of the Armenian Church