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“One Unalterable and Indivisible Nature” Through the “Ineffable Union”

Armenian Christology and Materiality
« Une nature inaltérable et indivisible » à travers « l’indicible union » : la christologie arménienne et la notion de matérialité
Christopher Sheklian
p. 25-51

Résumés

Cet article met en dialogue la christologie miaphysite de l’Église apostolique arménienne, et plus largement sa réflexion théologique propre, avec les débats théoriques contemporains sur la matière et la matérialité. L’auteur soutient l’idée selon laquelle la théologie, et la pensée christologique en particulier, participe des fondements mêmes des débats conceptuels et philosophiques sur la matérialité. Les théologies chrétiennes occidentales ont largement influencé le développement des idées sur la matérialité, qui sont étroitement liées à notre façon d’aborder et de comprendre la matière, la nature, l’environnement et l’agentivité des humains et des objets. La thèse du présent article est que la théologie miaphysite arménienne exprime une conception subtilement différente, mais importante, de cette relation entre le matériel et le spirituel, propre à reconsidérer certains termes des réflexions sur la matérialité en sciences sociales et en philosopie.

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Texte intégral

The Matter of Materiality

  • 1 The text of V. Kʿertʿogh’s Concerning the Iconoclasts comes from Kʿertʿogh, 2004, 493-500. The Engl (...)

1“We do not call the things that God has put on earth for our enjoyment ‘vile’, nor do we spurn them as disgusting things”, insists Vrtʿanēs Kʿertʿogh, a seventh-century Armenian theologian writing in defense of icons and the use of painted images in the Church.1 Pigment and paint, although made of “base” materials like clay, cannot be vile or disgusting because they were made by God, and nothing made by God could be vile or evil in its own right. According to Kʿertʿogh, they might be corruptible or susceptible to the fallen free will of humanity – but not evil or vile in themselves. Kʿertʿogh, writing in defense of images, also pens a powerful defense of the material world, of materiality itself.

  • 2 J. Sallis, 2000, 149.
  • 3 L. White Jr., 1967, 1203-1207.

2Kʿertʿogh’s defense of the material, of “the things that God has put on earth”, runs counter to a tendency in the history of Western philosophical thought to include Christianity among the various philosophical culprits who denigrate the earthly, the material, and the embodied. This philosophical tendency to “turn away from nature”2 insists that the material and the spiritual should be kept separate, preferring the spiritual. According to critics who highlight this strain of Christian thinking, matter and materiality, the earthly and the embodied, do not matter for Christianity. The very “roots of our ecological crisis”, suggests historian Lynn White Jr., can be traced to the Christian tendency to see humanity as “superior to nature”, even “contemptuous” of it.3 Christian attitudes towards nature, matter, and materiality are thus implicated in the most pressing issues of our times.

  • 4 C. Bynum, 2011, 25.
  • 5 J. Heckscher, 2013, 140.

3In response, Christian theologians and other scholars have highlighted aspects of Christian thought and history that affirm matter and materiality. Historians have explored the robust use of material objects in medieval Roman Catholicism4 and Eastern Orthodox thinkers insist that the characterization of Christianity as contemptuous of nature “cannot possibly be reconciled with Orthodox Christian history”.5 Kʿertʿogh, then, is not unique among Christians in his affirmation of matter and materiality.

  • 6 We can define Christology as theological reflection on “Who Christ Is”. This way of considering the (...)
  • 7 Held in Chalcedon (modern-day Kadıköy, a neighborhood of greater Istanbul) in 451 AD, the Fourth Ec (...)

4While theological affirmations of matter and the created world can be found in all Christian traditions, the very ways we consider the “problem” of materiality relates genealogically to specific forms of Christianity. In particular, this article argues that the long theological discussion of Christology, the question of “Who Jesus Is”, is central to the conceptual history of materiality.6 Debates about the human and divine natures of Jesus Christ shaped the use of terms like nature, essence, and substance – the very conceptual assemblage of materiality. Crucially, the Christological definition promulgated at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 is implicated in the conceptual foundations of modern Western philosophical thinking about materiality.7 Hence the subtly but consequentially different Miaphysite Christology of the Armenian theological tradition offers an alternative conceptual configuration of materiality that insists on the beauty and benefit of the material world, as exemplified by Kʿertʿogh’s text.

  • 8 G. Deleuze, 1991.
  • 9 J. Bennett, 2010, 3.
  • 10 Ibid., 14.

5Today, over a millennium after Kʿertʿogh, a multidisciplinary material turn similarly defends the conceptual centrality of the material world, material objects, and indeed materiality itself. Starting from the premise that there is a bias against the material world running through the whole history of Western philosophy, thinkers such as the influential philosopher Gilles Deleuze emphasize instead an alternative philosophical thread, running from Spinoza to Henri Bergson, that valued matter and materiality.8 The reconceptualization of matter and materiality, the possibility of “absolving matter from its long history of attachment to automatism or mechanism”,9 is not merely an academic exercise. Rather, the profound stakes include the possibility of “wiser interventions” into an ecology that includes humans and non-humans, an ethics that “cultivate[s] the ability to discern non-human vitality”, and grounds for another “way to promote human health and happiness – to raise the status of the materiality of which we are composed”.10 In other words, the contemporary cross-disciplinary “material turn” connects our philosophical comportment to matter and materiality to concrete ethical and ecological consequences.

6This article details contemporary engagements with the concepts of matter and materiality, then turns to the ways Christian theology and specifically the dominant strain of Western, Chalcedonian Christology have shaped and continue to inform the philosophical contours of these concepts. I argue that juxtaposing the insights from the Armenian Christian theological tradition brings these contours into sharp relief. The article demonstrates that differences in Christology relate to different conceptual assemblages around the question of materiality. By sketching the Armenian theological account of materiality through attention to its distinct Miaphysite Christology, the article argues that different assemblages of notions such as nature, essence, and substance reconfigure the very conceptual foundations of materiality. This account of the Armenian theological tradition, including an exploration of the term բնութիւն [bnutʿiwn; nature], thereby refines the conceptual history of materiality and brings new tools to bear on contemporary debates about materiality, debates with profound consequences that range from taking indigenous ways of life seriously to the very way we treat the earth in an age of climate change.

Material and Ontological Trends

  • 11 B. Latour, 1996, 369.

7Contemporary philosophy and social theory take up a defense of materiality not only as an exercise in the history of philosophy but also to address how we engage with the world. For instance, French philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory reconsiders who and what can act, prompting new modes of interacting with non-humans. Actor-network theory “aims at describing the very nature of societies”, but in so doing “does not limit itself to human individual actors, but extends the word actor – or actant – to non-human, non-individual entities”.11 Latour’s work has dramatically reframed the philosophical discussion about who or what has the ability to act, especially in light of the longstanding concern to distinguish subjects from objects.

  • 12 Immanuel Kant, often heralded as the harbinger of philosophical modernity, in the Critique of Pure (...)

8Within dominant strands of Western philosophy, distinguishing subjects from objects often goes hand in hand with attributing agency or, in Jane Bennett’s term, “vibrancy” to human subjects to the exclusion of material objects.12 To be inert, without spirit, a thing or an object separate from a human – or divine – subject is central to this philosophical understanding of materiality. The more recent interventions of Bennett and Latour confront this distinctive characteristic of philosophical modernism, the desire to exclude agency or vibrancy from objects, things, or the material world in general. While there are important critiques of the attempt to imbue matter with agency or vibrancy, notably the potential elision of human responsibility for changes in the material world, both interventions like Bennett’s and responses to them demonstrate the contemporary salience of debates over materiality and the ways that a conception of materiality and the material world intertwines with ethical debates.

  • 13 For instance, the debate about the Anthropocene, the question of whether human activity has so prof (...)
  • 14 G. Harman, 2018, 5.
  • 15 E. Kohn, 2014.
  • 16 L. Chumley, 2017, S2.

9In the face of environmental catastrophe, human responsibility for that catastrophe and a potential posthuman future, the relationship of humans to nature is perhaps the most pressing corollary to the debate over the status of materiality and the material world.13 In the past two decades, a few theoretical movements have taken on the mantle of ontology, the inquiry into being itself. Object-oriented ontology, most closely associated with the theme of this article, asserts that “all objects must be given equal attention, whether they be human, non-human, natural, cultural, real or fictional”.14 The “ontological turn”, most closely associated with the discipline of anthropology, offers an effort to describe “other kinds of realities beyond us”.15 Linguistic anthropologist Lily Chumley links the recent revived interest in ontology with the focus on materiality.16

  • 17 Ibid., S3. These interventions do not all share the same terminology, nor are the various terms syn (...)
  • 18 The work of anthropologist Webb Keane helps to clarify this modernist philosophical obsession, wher (...)

10If climate change and human attitudes towards the earth are the most obvious reasons to seek “alternative foundations for ethics and politics”,17 the importance of arguments over matter and materiality extends beyond climate change. Lingering colonial abuses that suppressed indigenous practices because of a supposed category error that condemned all attributions of agency to things as fetishism points to the connection between philosophical notions of materiality and the politics of decolonization.18 Christian worries about idolatry, debates over pornographic images, and current concerns about the highly visual online present all share an anxiety over what pictures might “want” and how the materiality of the image can affect human behavior. In other words, a wide body of literature spanning multiple academic disciplines that reach into broader contemporary debates all grapple with the ethical and political implications for the understanding of a “family” of concepts that this article collects under the banner of “materiality”.

Materiality and Theology: The Influence of Christology

  • 19 C. Bynum, 2011, 25, 36.
  • 20 On the topic of (Eastern) Orthodox Christianity and materiality, see C. Barber, 2013 and T. Carroll (...)
  • 21 J. Chryssavgis and B. V. Foltz, 2013, 1.

11Studies of Christianity have followed – and in some cases even led – these trends. Countering the longstanding association between Christianity and the denigration of matter and the material world, scholars of various Christian traditions have highlighted both historical examples and theological arguments that uphold the material world as part of God’s creation. Caroline Walker Bynum, for instance, in her essay Christian Materiality, describes “holy matter” in the late medieval period in Western Christianity to demonstrate that, at least at times and under certain circumstances, Western Christianity has not been averse to matter and materiality.19 Contemporary work on Eastern Orthodox Christianity emphasizes the materiality of practices including icon use, incense, and the embodied and physical nature of liturgy more broadly.20 Likewise, Eastern Orthodox theologians assert a long-standing concern with the environment at the heart of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, “a way of honoring and dignifying the reality of our own creation by the hand and Word of God”.21 Hence, scholars of Christianity have joined the broad, interdisciplinary “material turn”, in part as a corrective to the association between Christianity and an anti-material strain in philosophy.

  • 22 C. Bynum, 2011, 32.
  • 23 J. Heckscher, 2013, 140.

12At the same time, these efforts often implicitly leave the criticism of Western Christian anti-materiality in place. Bynum is clear that she is talking about a particular time and place, focusing on “the specificity of the late medieval situation to cast some doubt on the generalizing that has been done by others”.22 Responding directly to Lynn White, scholar of Eastern Orthodoxy Juretta Jordan Heckscher argues that “however approximate for the Christian West, this account of Christianity cannot possibly be reconciled with Orthodox Christian history”.23 These recent responses insist that the Christian denigration of materiality heralded by critics like White is only one strain of Christian thinking. Yet that strain dominates the influence on intellectual history and is implicated in the very way modern Western philosophy has thought about matter and the material world.

  • 24 The idea of the “economy” came to refer to the interconnection between various details of Christian (...)

13A variety of theological concerns and philosophical influences have shaped the way different branches of Christianity have thought about materiality. Philosophical currents in conversation with Christian theology, such as the Cappadocian synthesis of classical learning or the neo-Platonic influence on Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, have influenced the extent to which strains of Christian thinking have denounced or defended the earthly, bodily, or the material. Theological reflection on God’s creation and humanity’s place in it or anxieties over idolatry, among other concerns, have shaped Christian ideas about matter and the material world. Yet it is the overwhelming centrality of the doctrine of the Incarnation to the entire efficacy of the Christian economy of salvation24 and related questions of Christology – the reflection on Jesus Christ and the attempt to answer the question posed by Jesus in Scripture, “Who do you say I am?” – where the clearest connections between theological speculation and the conceptual history of materiality are to be found.

  • 25 Arius (ca. AD 256-336) was a presbyter in Alexandria, whose name became associated with non-Trinita (...)
  • 26 Athanasius, 2011.
  • 27 On these various positions, including Adoptionism, Docetism, Eutychianism, see D. Wilhite, 2015. On (...)

14In On the Incarnation, St. Athanasius’ fourth-century statement of orthodox Christology in the face of Arianism,25 the bishop of Alexandria makes it abundantly clear that the entire economy of salvation, the efficacy of the Christian faith, depends upon Jesus Christ being truly human, God-become-man.26 Facing detractors who thought that Christ was merely a man who assumed the nature of God at His baptism or that he was some kind of spectral projection of divinity, Athanasius insisted on the embodied and material nature of Jesus Christ.27 According to Athanasius, without the incarnation, the embodiment of God as the person Jesus Christ, the material existence and earthly ministry of the Incarnate Word of God, there is no Christian salvation.

  • 28 John of Damascus, 1980, 23.

15This connection between Christology and materiality, the insistence that the doctrine of Christ’s incarnation and the orthodox belief in His full humanity entailed an affirmation of the earthly, embodied, and material, runs through different strands of Christianity. Later, St. John of Damascus, a near-contemporary of Vrtʿanēs Kʿertʿogh, writing the most famous defense of icons, connected the Incarnation to the defense of icons and thus again to materiality, arguing that “I do not worship matter; I worship the Creator of matter who became matter for my sake, who willed to take His abode in matter; who worked out my salvation through matter. Never will I cease honoring the matter which wrought my salvation!”28 In other words, the Doctrine of the Incarnation and allied debates about Christology are directly related to questions of matter and materiality.

Christological Difference and the Influence on Philosophy

16The dominant modes of Christian thinking, both those that fit a narrative of an anti-material bias and those that insist on the beauty and goodness of the very matter and material of God’s created world, derive from Christian traditions that accepted the Christological doctrine promulgated at the Council of Chalcedon in 451. Both the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches accepted the consequential definition of Jesus Christ as “one person in two natures, God and man”. This section briefly traces the debates over this definition, connecting the Christological discussion to the exact concepts that comprise the philosophical configuration around questions of materiality. Armenian Christianity, which departs from the Chalcedonian definition, will then emerge as an alternative arrangement of concepts related to matter and materiality.

  • 29 For an overview of Nestorius’ Christology and discussion of the extant sources, see J. A. McGuckin, (...)
  • 30 S. Wessel, 2004, 131.
  • 31 Ibid., 271.
  • 32 The phrase can be found explicitly in the First Letter of Cyril to Succensus in L. Wickham, 1983, 7 (...)

17Athanasius and his vision of the Incarnation emerged victorious in the wake of the first ecumenical Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. While this seemed to settle the debate about Christ’s divinity, it left open the question of how, exactly, Jesus Christ could be both fully human and fully divine. This question took center stage when Nestorius, the Patriarch of Constantinople, educated at Antioch, seemed to separate the human and divine parts of Jesus Christ so thoroughly that he preached two distinct Christs.29 In response, Cyril, the Patriarch of Alexandria from 412 to 444, defined his answer in opposition to Nestorius. “This virtually insurmountable chasm between God and man must have shocked Cyril, whose Alexandrian legacy envisioned a soteriology dependent on mankind’s close link to divinity”.30 This debate rocked the Christian world, with Cyril’s position emerging victorious at the Council of Ephesus in 431. Despite Cyril’s apparent victory, argument over the person and nature(s) of Christ continued. A statement known as the “Formula of Reunion”, intended to “appease both parties”, was accepted in 433.31 However, many followers of Cyril rejected the formula and instead leaned more heavily on the description of Jesus Christ as the “one Incarnate nature of the God-Logos”.32

  • 33 These churches are the Armenian, Coptic, Eritrean, Ethiopian, Syriac Orthodox, and Indo-Malankaran (...)
  • 34 For many years the term “Monophysite” was used. While the Cyrillian formula does in fact state one (...)
  • 35 For work on Miaphysite Christology see J. Lebon, 1909, and R. Chesnut, 1976. For a recent discussio (...)
  • 36 Hans van Loon argues that “Cyril of Alexandria is not the miaphysite theologian he is often made ou (...)

18In 451, the Council of Chalcedon was convened to quell ongoing debate about these Christological subtleties. With its definition of Jesus Christ as, “one person in two natures, God and man”, the Council of Chalcedon instead eventually led to a consequential break in Christendom. Those churches known as the Oriental Orthodox churches (including the Armenian Church) all eventually rejected the Chalcedonian position.33 Over time, these churches, best described as “Miaphysite”,34 developed distinct Christologies grounded in Cyril’s oeuvre,35 especially the phrase “one Incarnate nature of the God-Logos”. While both Miaphysite and Dyophysite Christians appealed to the theology of Cyril of Alexandria, the arguments between these ancient branches of Christianity over how to interpret both Cyril’s theology and the Chalcedonian formula led to significant differences in emphasis.36 While some of these differences may in fact play out in philosophical nuances that would cause them to refract contemporary ideas about materiality differently, the same productive juxtaposition of philosophical concepts charted in this article for the Armenian Church should follow from other Miaphysite Christological thought.

  • 37 M. Mondzain, 2005, 94.

19Crucially, debate over “one nature” language found in the formula that Cyril deployed in some of his letters, “one Incarnate nature of the God-Logos”, shaped not only subsequent understandings of Cyril’s theology but also central ideas related to the Christological debate, including person, nature, and essence. The material emphasis of the Eastern Orthodox Church – a Chalcedonian Dyophysite Church – described above demonstrates that these Christological differences do not simplistically map onto attitudes about the material world. Rather, these theological distinctions bear especially on the relationship between the spiritual and the material, and hence our very understanding of materiality. Mondzain cautions against “the fundamental error of confusing the incarnation with materialization”, arguing that “the incarnation is not a materialization: the icon as a memorial of the incarnational economy makes use of a flesh that is not matter”. 37The present article avoids this “fundamental error” by working genealogically and with a conceptual history to emphasize how the philosophical debates about Christology influence the very terms of argument about matter and materiality that are still with us.

  • 38 In the twentieth century, a group of ecumenical scholars from the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox Chr (...)

20While theological difference between Dyophysite and Miaphysite churches has perhaps been overblown through the centuries,38 it is fair to suggest that a millennium of considering this difference to be important (with polemical tracts and liturgical anathemas on both sides) has resulted not necessarily in irreducible dogmatic disagreements but rather varying emphases. Taking the central figure of Christianity to be a single mystical unmixed nature of human and divine rather than one person in two natures surely has consequences: for the definition of personhood, for the idea of what constitutes “nature”, and ultimately for the way one interacts with the world.

  • 39 J. W. Smith, 2021, 1.
  • 40 J. Zachhuber, 2015, 103.
  • 41 Several scholars working with Armenian theological texts see the Armenian theological tradition wit (...)
  • 42 T. Asad, 2020, 406.
  • 43 J. Zachhuber, 2020, 320.

21Christian theology’s relationship to philosophy has long been recognized and debated. According to the influential argument of classicist Werner Jaeger, the fourth-century “Cappadocian fathers” “reconciled Athens and Jerusalem and so gave birth to the Western intellectual tradition”.39 Christian theological innovations concerning being, nature, and personhood, then, can be seen as part of the broader philosophical debate, and indeed central to the history of those concepts. Yet even when Christian theology is taken seriously in this way, the “Christological debates after Chalcedon has not been a prominent starting point” and non-Chalcedonian Christology is almost completely absent from the discussion.40 This is not only an absence within philosophical history,41 but indicative of the fact that the very genealogy and grammar of the concepts – "the different ways words can or can’t make sense in particular forms of life”42 – related to materiality are inflected by Dyophysite Christology. This Dyophysite Chalcedonian Christology found its way into the later philosophical tradition of “the West”, such that “through Petavius, Patristic philosophy was drawn into some of the most heated intellectual controversies of early modernity”.43

  • 44 Ibid., 122.

22Miaphysite Christology and its attendant philosophy started from the same theological consensus about Christ’s divinity and humanity but developed along a different path. “Miaphysite philosophy is both more complex and more traditional” than earlier historians of theology and philosophy were willing to admit, insists theologian Johannes Zachhuber.44 His remarkable study, The Rise of Christian Theology and the End of Ancient Metaphysics traces the ways doctrinal differences about the person of Jesus Christ led to different philosophical musings, especially with regard to distinctions between phýsis (nature) and hypostasis (substance), the idea of a universal or a particular nature, and exactly what kind of substance ousia (essence/being) was. In other words, the philosophical terms and concepts that strike to the heart of ideas about matter, the elemental, and materiality.

  • 45 T. Asad, 2020, 415.

23Miaphysite Christology, then, like the one articulated by the Armenian Christian tradition, offers two important insights: first, it refines the philosophical genealogy of these foundational concepts of matter and materiality, pointing out that it is not just Christian theology or even specifically Christology that has played a part in the formation of basic understandings of matter and materiality, but Chalcedonian Christology, a subset of the Christian tradition. Second, an alternate Christology unsettles those very concepts. Matter and materiality have taken conceptual shape through the way they have been held together and distinguished from the spiritual or ethereal, a distinction that resonates clearly with Chalcedonian Christology. Another Christology does not merely proffer another ontology or culturally situated idea of matter and materiality, it unsettles the very configuration by which we approach (the) matter. As anthropologist of religion Talal Asad would put it (following Wittgenstein), Armenian Miaphysite Christology helps us to uncover the very grammar of the concepts central to the contemporary material turn.45

Armenian Miaphysite Christology

  • 46 B. Zekiyan, 2006, 270.
  • 47 The most comprehensive discussion of Chalcedon and the Armenian Church is found in N. Garsoïan, 199 (...)
  • 48 B. Contin, 2021, 403.

24For the Armenian Church, as Boghos Levon Zekiyan says, “to express correctly Christ’s ontological constitution becomes almost an obsession”.46 Throughout the sixth and seventh centuries a series of Synods at Dvin refused to recognize and eventually anathematized Chalcedon.47 During the seventh and eighth centuries, a flowering of Christological thought produced several distinct Christological positions. Catholicos John of Odzun, Khosrovik the Translator and Bishop Stepʿanos Siwnetsʿi all became important touchstones for subsequent Armenian Christology. While scholars continue to excavate this formative period and the details of each theologian’s position, a distinctive Armenian discussion of Christology – and its attendant conceptual apparatus – emerges in this era and the “doctrinal and dogmatical attitude of the non-Chalcedonian Armenian Church was fully elaborated in the first half of the eighth century”.48

  • 49 S. Siwnetsʿi, 2007. From a draft translation by Dr. Roberta Ervine, used with permission. For more (...)
  • 50 On Shnorhali’s letter and ecumenical overtures, including the translation of this passage, see M. P (...)

25Despite this accepted diversity, there was important congruence in the Armenian position. Siwnetsʿi, associated with some of the strongest anti-Chalcedonian strands of the Armenian Church, declares Jesus Christ “a single nature of two, without confusion and without division”.49 Centuries later, the Catholicos St. Nersess Shnorhali, one of the most famous Armenian ecclesiastics of all time and generally more amenable to rapprochement with the Dyophysite Eastern Orthodox imperial church, writes that “[The Word] united his divinity with humanity in an unfathomable and ineffable mixture, and became out of the two perfect natures, one perfect person (hypostasis) in one unalterable and indivisible nature”.50 Shnorhali, while seemingly more comfortable with an idea of mixture than Siwnetsʿi, also stresses a single, “unalterable and indivisible” nature. Notably, he uses the Miaphysite language “out of two natures”, distinct from the Chalcedonian formula, “in two natures”.

26We can note here two important aspects of all Miaphysite Christology relevant to our discussion. The first is the use of the term “nature”, in Armenian բնութիւն [bnutʿiwn]. With a wide and nuanced range of meaning, the use of this term in Armenian connects Christology and materiality, the essence of Christ to the elements, the matter of the world. Second, we see both Siwnetsʿi and Shnorhali articulating a central tenet of the Miaphysite Christological position, while navigating the conceptual difficulty differently: that although Christ’s human and divine aspects should not be considered separate natures and instead a single nature, that single nature remains without confusion or division between human and divine.

Nature, Essence, Matter

  • 51 H. van Loon, 2009, 513.
  • 52 J. Zachhuber, 2020, 73.
  • 53 Ibid., 89.

27Siwnetsʿi and Shnorhali’s Christological statements both invoke the contested word “nature”, in Armenian բնութիւն. One of the terms at the heart of the Dyophysite-Miaphysite debate, nature (in Greek phýsis) sometimes meant something close to essence or essential attribute and at other times something more like “natural property”.51 Already in the Cappadocian defense of the creed promulgated at the Council of Nicaea, phýsis was part of a conceptual assemblage articulated in relation to other terms, most importantly hypostasis (substance) and ousia (essence/being). These terms, partially grounded in Greek philosophy – especially that of Aristotle and his Categories – were used by Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa to explain the relationship within the Trinity. Zachhuber designates their collective project “Cappadocian philosophy” and suggests that by the mid-fifth century it “has become a ‘classical’ theory that is to say, a kind of conceptual lingua franca employed by Christian thinkers independently of their particular theological background”.52 Both Dyophysite and Miaphysite thinkers attempted to use their understanding of the relation between phýsis, hypostasis, and ousia to describe how Jesus Christ could simultaneously be truly God and truly man while remaining a single person.53

  • 54 Ibid., 85. Zachhuber suggests that “it is arguable that Cappadocian philosophy was particularly uns (...)
  • 55 H. van Loon, 2009, 513.
  • 56 J. Zachhuber, 2020, 110.
  • 57 Ibid., 109.

28Yet in the new Christological debates about the humanity and divinity of Christ, this “classical theory” that provided “terminological foundations” was stretched to its limits.54 Already Cyril of Alexandria uses some of the philosophical and theological terms of art differently from the Cappadocian consensus. In Cyril’s own writing, van Loon argues, phýsis can refer to what he calls a “common nature” or an “individual nature”, and “in the majority of cases where φύσις occurs in the singular, there is a reference to the essence or to the natural properties of the nature”.55 While the Patriarch of Alexandria had thoroughly “adopted the Cappadocian ontology”,56 because “Christology stretches this theory to the breaking point”,57 Cyril begins to shift the meanings of some of the key philosophical terms. Both Miaphysite and Dyophysite Chalcedonian authors attend to different aspects of Cyril’s work, stretching even further the classical Cappadocian philosophy in various directions. The different uses of these sources for alternative Christological positions result in contrasting conceptual assemblages composed of terms like person and nature.

  • 58 S. P. Cowe, 2020.

29For Armenians, too, the Cappadocian fathers became formative sources that were deployed in Christological arguments. In addition to the Cappadocians, Peter Cowe has convincingly shown that Armenian grammatical and technical philosophical thought emerged from “Hellenic paideia”.58 By the seventh and eighth centuries, not only the Cappadocian fathers and Greek grammatical texts but much of the more recent Christological debates had also either been translated into Armenian or were available in Greek or Syriac originals to the learned theologians of the time. Armenian theological and especially Christological thought thus begins from the same philosophical and technical conceptual apparatus as both other Miaphysite churches and the Dyophysite Eastern Orthodox Church.

  • 59 B. Contin, 2021.
  • 60 J. Zachhuber, 2020, 148.
  • 61 Ibid., 128.
  • 62 Contin, 2021, 438.

30Benedetta Contin, in an important recent article, demonstrates conclusively that Armenian theologians not only engaged in the same dogmatic debates as other churches of the time, but also grappled with the same philosophical distinctions that Zachhuber traces.59 She shows that “Xosrovik [or Khosrovik] the Translator”, a contemporary of Catholicos John of Odzun and Stepʿanos Siwnetsʿi, developed a unique answer to the question of “particular natures”, one of the philosophical tools used in the Christological debates. For Miaphysites, “the term physis when used in the Christological context belonged to the side of the individual”. Thus, nature “meant something at least similar if not identical, with, hypostasis. Yet in focusing so much on physis as particularized, miaphysites such as Severus also emphasized the ontological continuity between the universal and the particular”.60 In an attempt to “guarantee the full presence of the nature in the individual” without simply identifying physis with hypostasis, Miaphysite thinkers like John Philoponus introduced the idea of particular natures.61 Khosrovik, Contin shows, uses the term omn (a “this such” in Contin’s translation), to “denote a particular individual”,62 entering the debate on particular natures with a different solution from both other Miaphysite thinkers like Philoponus or Dyophysite theologians.

  • 63 The Greek text of the letter with facing translation can be found in Basil, 1926, 197-226.

31Khosrovik thus engages precisely the debates Zachhuber traces, which stretched Classical and Cappadocian ideas to provide a philosophical foundation for either Dyophysite or Miaphysite Christological positions. As we have seen, these debates are directly related to the very conceptual assemblage of materiality. Khosrovik, as Contin articulates, comes to a distinct and sophisticated Christological confession. He brings Aristotelean logic, the work of the Cappadocian Fathers (especially the famed Epistle 38 that discusses the relationship between hypostasis and ousia explicitly),63 and foundational Armenian Christian texts like The Teaching of St. Gregory to articulate an Armenian Christological position that is attune to the contemporary theological and philosophical arguments taking place in other Christian traditions. In so doing, he offers an arrangement of the foundational concepts that differs from the conceptual assemblages of the Christian traditions that have most influenced the development of Western philosophical thought on materiality.

  • 64 Contin, 2021, 431.
  • 65 Ibid., 439.

32“<I confess that> we should name the human <nature> divine, and the divine <one> human according to the unutterable union, as the sermons of the Holy Fathers teach us”, Khosrovik writes.64 This Christological confession depends on central texts of the Armenian theological tradition, namely The Teaching of St. Gregory, which Contin shows is the source for Khosrovik’s beautiful term “unutterable union” [անճառ միաւորութիւն, which can also be translated as “ineffable union”]. At the same time, it comes from his careful reading of texts like Epistle 38, which leads him to his own unique definition of բնութիւն, nature, as “‘what bears in itself the common as a whole’ and is signified by name.65 Khosrovik’s definition of բնութիւն in this dual philosophical and confessional tract underlines that the entire Armenian conceptual assemblage related to materiality – including the Armenian terms for ideas like matter, humanity, person, and nature – is held together differently than Dyophysite and even other Miaphysite Christians. While Khosrovik’s definition demonstrates a particular philosophical attention and sophistication, his use of the Armenian concept բնութիւն accords with this unique Armenian conceptual assemblage of terms, ideas, and the “grammar” of concepts related to materiality.

  • 66 R. Thomson, 1964, 45.
  • 67 Ibid., 45.
  • 68 Ibid., 46.

33Բնութիւն, according to the premier dictionary of Classical Armenian, the Nor Baṙgirkʿ Haykazean Lezowi, covers a wide range of meanings, including explicitly many of the Greek words embroiled in the debate over the person of Christ: phýsis and hypostasis, but also prosopon, person. As Contin notes, Khosrovik’s work relies not only on Cappadocian philosophy, but also The Teaching of St. Gregory, a long homily found in Agathangelos’ History of the Armenians, one of the earliest pieces of literature written in the Armenian language. Renowned Armenologist Robert Thomson, discussing several philosophical terms in The Teaching of St. Gregory, notes that բնութիւն “is a term of wider application than those so far discussed [especially էութիւն, ēutʿiwn, used specifically for the existence of the Deity], in that all beings, created or eternal, have their own individual nature which has to be further defined before the differences between objects are apparent”.66 He continues the explanation by noting that in paragraph 362 of The Teaching of St. Gregory էութիւն and բնութիւն appear in a reduplicated phrase as “a forceful way of saying that the Deity can be defined as one existence”.67 This early articulation of բնութիւն, already used Christologically,68 shapes the philosophical and Christological apparatus of later thinkers like Khosrovik.

  • 69 E. Koghbatsʿi, 2003, 458.

34If the semantic range of բնութիւն suggests essence or attribute, including the Armenian էութիւն, it also conjures “creation”, the created world that today we speak of as the environment or the natural world. In the Biblical text of II Peter 3:10 (“The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare.”) the Armenian word for the “elements” destroyed by fire is բնութիւն. In this context designating the fundamental elements of creation, that is, matter itself, բնութիւն means not just creation and the created world, but “element”, in Armenian տարր [tarr]. Տարր, used in Modern Armenian to refer to the elements that make up the Periodic Table of the Elements, was used in Classical Armenian as early as the fifth-century author Eznik Koghbatsʿi to refer to the ancient idea of the four elements.69 So, there is a strong material, even elemental, component to the Armenian term used to describe the nature of Jesus Christ. The resonance of բնութիւն with տարր, element, underscores the extent to which Miaphysite Christology might have influenced Armenian concepts of matter and materiality.

35In these reflections on the word բնութիւն, then, we see the mutual imbrication of debates over materiality and the environment, as well as the connection to the Christological debates in Greek. It is worth noting that this single word բնութիւն in Armenian encompasses in its different usages several Greek words, including the physis, hypostasis, and prosopon whose differentiation was central to the Christological debates. That is, the Miaphysite Armenian term for the nature of Christ holds together concepts and resonances that are differentiated in the Chalcedonian Greek milieu, a perfect synecdoche for the debate writ large.

  • 70 Gregory of Narek, 2008, 458. Abraham Terian’s translation, on which this translation is based, tran (...)

36We can see the theological consequences of this in one of the most famous prayers of the Armenian tradition, Prayer (Ban) 41, from the beloved Book of Lamentations of St. Gregory of Narek. In the text of Ban 41, which is used in the “Rest Hour” liturgical service of the Armenian Apostolic Church, Narek addresses God, saying, “You alone are ineffable in heaven and inscrutable on earth, in the elements [տարր] of existence unto the very ends of the universe.”70 Expressed here is a rather remarkable version of what is sometimes called panentheism, the idea that God pervades all existence and creation while nonetheless transcending it. Narek’s prayer is utterly unafraid to identify Jesus Christ with materiality, with the elements of existence. Kertʿogh’s statement that the materials of pigments, the things God put on earth, cannot be called vile takes on a new salience in light of this prayer: if Jesus Christ is in the elements of existence, the very things that make up the materiality of pigments, then to spurn elemental matter would be to spurn Jesus Christ himself. Guarding against the accusation of Monophysitism, the rejection of either the divine or earthly aspects of Jesus Christ, Armenian Miaphysite Christology has always asserted Christ’s full humanity.

Paradigmatic Anxieties: Why Christology Matters

  • 71 J. A. McGuckin, 2013, 45.
  • 72 M. Papazian, 2024, 32-33.
  • 73 In Papazian’s telling, what the present article describes as “paradigmatic anxieties” arise in part (...)

37The complicated coordination of human and divine is at the heart of all Christological positions and debates. Both Chalcedonian and Oriental Orthodox Christians steer between the two recognized heretical poles of strong division (the preaching of two distinct Christs) and mixing of the human and divine. Yet the choice of how to describe the complicated simultaneity of human and divine in the two positions pushes each just slightly further from one of the poles. As McGuckin has put it, the ancient Christian churches all “sing the song of the Incarnation in a certain key”.71 Michael Papazian notes that “for much of its history, the Armenian Church viewed Nestorianism as the greatest threat to orthodoxy. Affirmation of the Alexandrian one-nature Christology clearly set the Armenian Church apart from Nestorianism”. On the other hand, “[t]he Chalcedonians, who are more concerned with the threat of Eutychianism and the neglect of the full humanity of Christ, have cause to speak of Christ in two natures. The miaphysites, more concerned to elucidate their rejection of the two-subject Christology, emphasize the union in one subject. Hence, their preference for the ‘one-nature’ formula”.72 That is, different emphases in Christology have been driven in part through what we might call “paradigmatic anxieties” over the understanding of who Christ is and how to treat the relationship with His human and divine aspects.73

38In the Chalcedonian position, which holds together the human and divine as two natures in one person, it is arguably the mixing that generates greater anxiety. “Nature” in the Dyopyhsite tradition implies an unease with mixing. Two natures can indeed be held in one person, as long as those natures remain distinct. By extension, nature used synonymously with the elemental, material world, must be distinct from the spiritual, the divine, and therefore remains inert. It is precisely this characterization of nature and materiality, one that requires division from the spiritual and active, that the new defenders of materiality attempt to undermine or correct. Yet the very necessity to demonstrate the vibrancy of matter derives from centuries of treating the material world as inert.

39For Miaphysites, on the other hand, the decision was to emphasize the unity of Christ. In this, they reveal their characteristic anxiety as relating not to mixing but to division. Բնութիւն, as opposed to “nature”, holds the divine and human, the spiritual and the material, the active spark and the inert closer together from the outset. Without advocating mixing, the deeper worry is the potential to divide, not to recognize the divine in the material, to flee too completely from the world. The grammar of the concept of բնութիւն and of other Miaphysite ideas bound up in the conceptual assemblage of materiality allows, as Narek does, for the possibility of God in the very elements of existence.

40Both positions, as Zachhuber argued and has been shown here in the Armenian case, come with divergent philosophical developments of an entire suite of concepts. This article has argued that the philosophical elaboration of concepts related to Christology include precisely those – such as nature, matter, element, and essence, among others – that are relevant to how we conceive the very idea of materiality. The use, the grammar of these concepts related to materiality, continue to reflect the paradigmatic Dyophysite unease over mixing, highlighting a genealogical relationship between the Chalcedonian desire to keep divine and human “without confusion” and Calvinist Protestant anxiety about the agency of materiality or “contemptuous” attitudes towards the natural world. Over centuries, Christological arguments, the Chalcedonian Christological position, and its attendant anxieties influenced the very grammar of the concept of materiality.

  • 74 T. Asad, 2003, 189-90. Asad clarifies that the kinds of conceptual genealogical relationships this (...)

41Debates about the Christian ancestry of modern concepts remain unsettled. Following the insights of Talal Asad, I do not want to suggest that Christology matters because contemporary understandings of nature are simply secularized Chalcedonian Christology.74 Rather, recognizing the paradigmatic anxieties of each Christological position clarifies the grammar of the concepts that make up the conceptual assemblage of the overarching term “materiality”, and shows how that conceptual assemblage varies along Christological lines. Crucially, such genealogical relationships hold independent of the present “religiosity” of either individuals or populations. These Christological debates and resonances infuse the very grammar of the concepts, the possibilities for how they are used and the groundings for the connotations and debates. Similarly, the aim of the present article is not to promote Armenian Miaphysite Christianity but rather to suggest that the grammar of the concepts of the genealogically related տարր and բնութիւն throws the usages, the assumptions, and the very grammar of the concepts of element, matter, nature, and other terms at the heart of contemporary philosophical debates into sharp relief.

42In so doing, this foray into Armenian Christology and its attendant philosophical configurations of matter, nature, and essence offers two important results. First, it refines the genealogy of some of the operative concepts. Nature, the elements, matter – taken together as materiality – are not simply “Christian” ideas but emerge as concepts deeply inflected by a Chalcedonian Dyophysite answer to the Christological question of how to hold the two (human and divine) aspects of Christ together without resulting in a mixed or confused single nature while also not dividing Jesus Christ into two fully distinct persons. This Christological answer comes with attendant anxieties that help reveal the grammar of the concepts even as they are deployed today in contemporary debates about materiality.

  • 75 Z. Todd, 2016.
  • 76 Ibid., 4.

43Secondly, Armenian theology can then enter into conversation with these contemporary debates. For instance, the “ontological turn” in anthropology has endeavored to find and dialogue with ontologies often radically different from the dominant strains of modern Western philosophy. Often framed as an attempt to take indigenous encounters with the world seriously, anthropologist Zoe Todd offers an anticolonial critique of the use of ontology in the ontological turn.75 If “ontology is just another word for colonialism”, then the material turn must not simply engage with “other ontologies” but consider the possibility that the very intellectual endeavors that seek the material world still operate within a basic configuration set by dominant philosophical categories – like ontology.76 Instead of the radical difference the proponents of the ontological turn look for in various non-Western lifeworlds, Armenian Miaphysite Christology offers resemblance with an uncanny difference. The uncanny encounter with Armenian Miaphysite Christology is not the shock offered by the radical difference of another ontology. Rather, it is the unsettling realization that our concepts of matter, nature, and the elemental can be configured with just slight variations. Yet those variations may entail important shifts in the engagement with the world.

44Armenian Christians, as we have seen, are happy to see the Divine Logos “in the elements [տարր] of existence”. A full interpenetration of divine subject into the materiality of earthly, human existence without division (although, as Siwnetsʿi insists, still without confusion) holds out different possibilities for conceiving of subject, object, action, thingliness, and materiality. Rather than making the object a subject, we can imagine the thing, the matter, itself animated within the rational principle of the Divine, the Divine Logos. What kinds of theories of action or ideas of the earthly, the material, and the object become possible when the Divine is truly in the elements of existence?

  • 77 Francis I, 2015.

45Moreover, the ramifications are not merely conceptual. Both Christology broadly and the doctrine of the Incarnation specifically pertain to what is perhaps the most pressing concern of our times, what Pope Francis I has called in an encyclical on the environment, “Care for our Common Home”.77 How we care for that home is greatly influenced by how we conceive of it. Is the earth and the environment merely an external object? Is it, as some readings of Genesis 1:28 would have it, under our dominion, allowing us to treat it as we please? If it is an external object under our dominion, is our primary relationship to the environment one of use and consumption? The answers to these questions depend in large part upon our ideas of matter, materiality, and nature. Hence, a wide swath of the concerns of the contemporary material turn, from the possibility of taking indigenous ways of knowing seriously, to the agency of things, to the very way we treat the earth in an age of climate change, look different from the vantage point of Armenian Miaphysite concepts of matter and materiality.

46Armenian Miaphysite Christology, then, offers an alternative conception of materiality that is nonetheless still recognizable in its Christian framework. As we have seen in the second half of this article, the Armenian notion of nature, բնութիւն, encompasses a more robust presence of the Divine in the material than “nature”. Indeed, if Jesus Christ is in the very “elements of existence”, then the divinity of creation takes on a new, albeit solidly Christian, meaning. Given that perhaps the most pressing concern of our times – human-influenced climate change – abuts debates about materiality, matter, and how we conceive of the earthly and the natural, then Christology, too, matters. Armenian Miaphysite Christology, with its emphasis on the unity of divine and human, spiritual and material, offers a robust entry into these timely, if not urgent, matters.

In addition to the initial conference participants, the steady editorial efforts of Dzovinar Derderian and Marie-Aude Baronian, and two anonymous reviewers, many friends and colleagues helped strengthen this article through their engagement with earlier drafts. In particular, I'd like to thank Jesse Siragan Arlen, Sarah Bakker Kellogg, Shefali Jha, Candace Lukasik, Sarah Riccardi-Swartz, Robert Saler, Xiabo Yuan, and the members of the "Rewriting Global Orthodoxy" Project at Radboud University, under the direction of Heleen Murre-van den Berg (European Research Council Award Number: 834441).

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Notes

1 The text of V. Kʿertʿogh’s Concerning the Iconoclasts comes from Kʿertʿogh, 2004, 493-500. The English translation from this version of the text comes largely from a draft translation by Dr. Roberta Ervine, used with permission. I have, in places, modified her draft translation. All errors of translation are surely mine.

2 J. Sallis, 2000, 149.

3 L. White Jr., 1967, 1203-1207.

4 C. Bynum, 2011, 25.

5 J. Heckscher, 2013, 140.

6 We can define Christology as theological reflection on “Who Christ Is”. This way of considering the question draws inspiration from the work of J. Behr.

7 Held in Chalcedon (modern-day Kadıköy, a neighborhood of greater Istanbul) in 451 AD, the Fourth Ecumenical Council codified the position of the Christian Churches concerning the nature of Jesus Christ with the famous formula, “one person in two natures, God and man”. For the texts relevant to the Council, see P. Schaff and H. Wace, 1916, 455-548.

8 G. Deleuze, 1991.

9 J. Bennett, 2010, 3.

10 Ibid., 14.

11 B. Latour, 1996, 369.

12 Immanuel Kant, often heralded as the harbinger of philosophical modernity, in the Critique of Pure Reason, famously tried to ground human knowledge in perceived phenomena, separating them from the “thing-in-itself”. The perceiving subject, the object of knowledge, and the thing-in-itself were thus rent asunder in one of the earliest and most influential works that have shaped contemporary concepts about subject, object, matter, material, and spiritual.

13 For instance, the debate about the Anthropocene, the question of whether human activity has so profoundly shaped the earth that the geologic age we are living in should be identified by that activity, is a debate about the extent to which humanity has influenced nature and the material world. For a recent introduction that emphasizes the multidisciplinary appeal of the idea, see J. Thomas et al., 2020.

14 G. Harman, 2018, 5.

15 E. Kohn, 2014.

16 L. Chumley, 2017, S2.

17 Ibid., S3. These interventions do not all share the same terminology, nor are the various terms synonymous. Rather, the philosopher John Sallis suggests that “the sense of the elemental” may be a common thread in these different concepts of matter and materiality (J. Sallis, 2000, 156).

18 The work of anthropologist Webb Keane helps to clarify this modernist philosophical obsession, wherein subjects are allowed agency but objects are not. W. Keane, 2007, 10.

19 C. Bynum, 2011, 25, 36.

20 On the topic of (Eastern) Orthodox Christianity and materiality, see C. Barber, 2013 and T. Carroll, 2018. For an anthropological perspective on these themes, see C. Hann and H. Goltz, 2010.

21 J. Chryssavgis and B. V. Foltz, 2013, 1.

22 C. Bynum, 2011, 32.

23 J. Heckscher, 2013, 140.

24 The idea of the “economy” came to refer to the interconnection between various details of Christian doctrine and the overall conviction in salvation of humanity and the world through Jesus Christ, the “the whole of the redemptive plan”. M. Mondzain, 2005, 21.

25 Arius (ca. AD 256-336) was a presbyter in Alexandria, whose name became associated with non-Trinitarian teachings, especially the idea that Jesus Christ was a creature distinct and subordinate to the Father.

26 Athanasius, 2011.

27 On these various positions, including Adoptionism, Docetism, Eutychianism, see D. Wilhite, 2015. On the diversity of positions about the person of Christ in the early church, see A. Grillmeier, 1975.

28 John of Damascus, 1980, 23.

29 For an overview of Nestorius’ Christology and discussion of the extant sources, see J. A. McGuckin, 2004, 126-174.

30 S. Wessel, 2004, 131.

31 Ibid., 271.

32 The phrase can be found explicitly in the First Letter of Cyril to Succensus in L. Wickham, 1983, 77.

33 These churches are the Armenian, Coptic, Eritrean, Ethiopian, Syriac Orthodox, and Indo-Malankaran churches.

34 For many years the term “Monophysite” was used. While the Cyrillian formula does in fact state one incarnate nature of the God-Logos, the term Monophysite insinuated a position that denied either the divinity or humanity of Jesus Christ. Today, the term Miaphysite is commonly used as an alternative to avoid the derogatory insinuation that “one-nature” means the denial of either Christ’s humanity or divinity and emphasizes that even if the Christology of these churches speak of one Incarnate nature, this mystically includes unmixed divine and human aspects. In contrast, the Chalcedonian position may be described as “Dyophysite”. Throughout, I often use Dyophysite and Miaphysite to describe the positions of the churches, rather than Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian, as “non-Chalcedonian” would both include the non-Miaphysite Church of the East and leave in place an implicit assumption of the orthodoxy of Chalcedon.

35 For work on Miaphysite Christology see J. Lebon, 1909, and R. Chesnut, 1976. For a recent discussion of the Christology of the Coptic Church, see S. Davis, 2008.

36 Hans van Loon argues that “Cyril of Alexandria is not the miaphysite theologian he is often made out to be” and that “his language is much more dyophysite”. H. van Loon, 2009, 578. For present purposes, whether Armenians and other Miaphysite Christians are accurate interpreters of Cyril’s thinking is less important than the later developments that always saw themselves as grounded in the orthodoxy of Cyril.

37 M. Mondzain, 2005, 94.

38 In the twentieth century, a group of ecumenical scholars from the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox Christian Churches found their respective Christologies to be in basic agreement, simply expressed differently. See P. Gregorios et al., 1981. My position throughout is that Christological differences are relevant at a theological and philosophical level without becoming a barrier to ecclesiological and ecumenical unity.

39 J. W. Smith, 2021, 1.

40 J. Zachhuber, 2015, 103.

41 Several scholars working with Armenian theological texts see the Armenian theological tradition within the history of philosophy. We can mention Benedetta Contin, Valentina Calzolari, Peter Cowe, Sergio LaPorta, Michael Papazian, and Abraham Terian, among others.

42 T. Asad, 2020, 406.

43 J. Zachhuber, 2020, 320.

44 Ibid., 122.

45 T. Asad, 2020, 415.

46 B. Zekiyan, 2006, 270.

47 The most comprehensive discussion of Chalcedon and the Armenian Church is found in N. Garsoïan, 1999. For the relevant Christological texts of the Armenian tradition, see N. Pogharean, 1994.

48 B. Contin, 2021, 403.

49 S. Siwnetsʿi, 2007. From a draft translation by Dr. Roberta Ervine, used with permission. For more on the Christological debates in Armenia during the seventh and eighth centuries, see S. P. Cowe, 2004, 30-54. See also J. Hintlian and R. Ervine, 2023.

50 On Shnorhali’s letter and ecumenical overtures, including the translation of this passage, see M. Papazian, 2024.

51 H. van Loon, 2009, 513.

52 J. Zachhuber, 2020, 73.

53 Ibid., 89.

54 Ibid., 85. Zachhuber suggests that “it is arguable that Cappadocian philosophy was particularly unsuited to the task [of bringing clarity to the Christological debates] due to its lack of an account of individuation” (94).

55 H. van Loon, 2009, 513.

56 J. Zachhuber, 2020, 110.

57 Ibid., 109.

58 S. P. Cowe, 2020.

59 B. Contin, 2021.

60 J. Zachhuber, 2020, 148.

61 Ibid., 128.

62 Contin, 2021, 438.

63 The Greek text of the letter with facing translation can be found in Basil, 1926, 197-226.

64 Contin, 2021, 431.

65 Ibid., 439.

66 R. Thomson, 1964, 45.

67 Ibid., 45.

68 Ibid., 46.

69 E. Koghbatsʿi, 2003, 458.

70 Gregory of Narek, 2008, 458. Abraham Terian’s translation, on which this translation is based, translates տարր as “substance”. A. Terian, 2021, 188. Thank you to an anonymous reviewer that steered me towards an example of this use of տարր in such a central text. In this same passage, Narek uses the word անճառ, ineffable, which Khosrovik uses and that is also associated with the mystery of the Incarnation.

71 J. A. McGuckin, 2013, 45.

72 M. Papazian, 2024, 32-33.

73 In Papazian’s telling, what the present article describes as “paradigmatic anxieties” arise in part from what are perceived to be the main theological adversaries and heretical dangers. These theological anxieties and ecclesial alignments may also have had political overlays. See Alison Vacca’s suggestion that the Umayyad caliphs supported “Armenian anti-Chalcedonianism” to “drive a wedge between the North and Byzantium” (A. Vacca, 2017, 173-176) and Benedetta Contin’s discussion of this idea (B. Contin, 2021, 400, n. 4).

74 T. Asad, 2003, 189-90. Asad clarifies that the kinds of conceptual genealogical relationships this article has traced throughout are “not a line of patriarchal descent (a begat B who begat C); it is a shifting pattern of convergence and dispersal of contingent elements” (T. Asad, 2007, 95).

75 Z. Todd, 2016.

76 Ibid., 4.

77 Francis I, 2015.

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Christopher Sheklian, « “One Unalterable and Indivisible Nature” Through the “Ineffable Union” »Études arméniennes contemporaines, 16 | 2025, 25-51.

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Christopher Sheklian, « “One Unalterable and Indivisible Nature” Through the “Ineffable Union” »Études arméniennes contemporaines [En ligne], 16 | 2025, mis en ligne le 15 décembre 2025, consulté le 03 mars 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/eac/3888 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15gmf

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Christopher Sheklian

Mississippi State University

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