The Council of Dvin

Armenia was not at Chalcedon. In 451, the year the council met, the Armenian church and nobility were fighting the Sasanian empire over an attempt to impose Zoroastrianism, and the battle of Avarayr was fought that same year. Nobody could be spared for a council in Bithynia, and by the time the definition arrived it came as a foreign document already carrying imperial politics with it.

What arrived, moreover, arrived through Syrian channels and in a form shaped by the churches that had already rejected it. Armenian bishops were reading Chalcedon in translation, presented by people who told them it divided Christ into two, and there was no Greek-speaking Armenian hierarchy in a position to argue otherwise. A council at Dvin in 506 took a position against it. The council of 555, under the Catholicos Nerses II, made the rejection formal and permanent, with a confession of faith and canons preserved in the Armenian collection known as the Book of Letters.

It has never been reversed. The Armenian Apostolic Church stands with the Coptic, Syriac and Ethiopian churches in the family usually called Oriental Orthodox, defined precisely by the non-reception of this one council.

The lesson the case teaches is about how councils actually work. Chalcedon was as ecumenical as a council gets: imperially convened, patriarchally attended, doctrinally decisive. It still did not bind a church that was not in the room and had other things to do that year.

The formula at issue is one incarnate nature of God the Word. Chalcedon's opponents held it; Chalcedon defined two natures in one person; and Christendom divided over the difference for fifteen centuries.

The difficulty is that the Greek word rendered nature was doing two jobs. In one usage it means something like a concrete individual existent, in which case saying Christ has one nature is a way of saying he is one being and not two, which Chalcedon also wanted to say. In another it means something like a kind or a set of properties, in which case saying Christ has one nature suggests his humanity has been absorbed into his divinity, which Chalcedon's supporters heard and rejected. The formula the Oriental Orthodox churches use came to them from Cyril of Alexandria, who was a saint on both sides of the argument.

From the later twentieth century, theologians from the Oriental Orthodox and Eastern Orthodox churches met in a series of unofficial and then official consultations and produced agreed statements concluding that the two families confess the same faith in Christ in different formulae, and that the anathemas of the past were directed at positions neither side actually holds. Parallel agreements were reached with the Catholic Church.

The formal separation stands. Agreed statements are not union, reception of them has been uneven, and there are jurisdictional and canonical questions the christological agreement does not touch. The atlas records the agreement and the continuing separation together, because both are true.