Page:Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Volume 6.djvu/481

Rh Others, and affirmed that, after the union of the two natures, the human and the divine, Christ had only one nature the divine, His humanity being absorbed in His divinity. After several years of controversy, the question was finally decided at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, when it was declared, in opposition to the doctrine of Eutyches, that the two natures were united in Christ, but "without any alteration, absorption, or confusion"; or, in other words, in the person of Christ there were two natures, the human and the divine, each perfect in itself, but there was only one person. Eutyches was excommunicated, and died in exile. Those who would not subscribe to the doctrines declared at Chalcedon were condemned as heretics ; they then seceded, and afterwards gathered themselves around different centres, which were Syria, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, Cyprus and Palestine, Armenia, Egypt, and Abyssinia. The Armenians embraced the Eutychian theory of divinity being the sole nature in Christ, the humanity being absorbed, while the Egyptians and Abyssinians held in the monophysite doctrine of the divinity and humanity being one compound nature in Christ. The West Syrians, or natives of Syria proper, to whom the Syrians of this coast trace their origin, adopted, after having renounced the doctrines of Nestorius, the Eutychian tenet. Through the influence of Severus, Patriarch of Antioch, they gradually became Monophysites. The Monophysite sect was for a time suppressed by the Emperors, but in the sixth century there took place the great Jacobite revival of the monophysite doctrine under James Bardaeus, better known as Jacobus Zanzalus, who united the various divisions, into which the Monophysites had separated themselves, into one church, which at the present day exists under the name of the Jacobite