Page:Lesser Eastern Churches.djvu/434

412. The Emperor (Marcian, 450-457) had not brought them the help they hoped. They were embittered against him; Chalcedon was his work. Gradually their feeling against Chalcedon grew. From the Syrian Monophysites they heard of this new synod as having undone the work of Ephesus. Armenia had taken her part with Ephesus; she approved warmly of that council. Was it not enough to stand by Ephesus? What was this new synod, which confused the issue, seemed to abandon Ephesus, to set up a fresh standard? Further, their language helped to strengthen their dislike of Chalcedon. For the two terms, nature and hypostasis, on which the whole question turns, they had only one word, pnuthiun. A Greek might confess two natures in one hypostasis; but how could an Armenian speak of two pnuthiuns in Christ, without seeming to fall into Nestorianism? And then, as so often happens, this abstract question was crossed by a practical one of politics. Once more national feeling, loyalty to the cause of Armenia, their determination to be independent of a dangerous foreign power, did more than philosophical considerations to make Armenia Monophysite. They did not want to become Greeks. They meant to keep their nation independent of the empire. Chalcedon was the council of the Emperor; its decrees were the faith of the Greeks. Like the Copts and Jacobites, the Armenians would not become Melkites — Emperor's men. Oddly enough, the Persian persecutor who then dominated Armenia saw the political advantage to himself of such a schism, encouraged it, and the Armenians listened for once to their greatest enemy.

So the Armenian Church formally rejected the faith of Chalcedon and excommunicated all who held it. She adopted as her religion the faith of Dioscor, Severus and the Monophysites; she even introduced the famous Monophysite addition to the Trisagion (p. 190) so that her position should be clear. First the Katholikos Babken (490-515) in a Synod of Valarshapat (491) approved Zeno's Henotikon; then Nerses II (548-557) in a

2 Later they found a word for — euthiun or koiuthiun (Tournebize, p. 555, n. 5).