Severus patriarch of Antioch, and deposed

other · 512–518 · Antioch

Severus was a pagan-born law student at Beirut, baptised at about thirty, who became a monk in Palestine and then the ablest theological writer of the party that would not accept Chalcedon. His position is not the caricature: he held that Christ is one incarnate nature *out of two*, that the humanity is complete and unconfused, and that Chalcedon's two-natures language was a concession to Nestorius — a quarrel over what a nature is more than over what Christ is, which is why the modern dialogues have found so much common ground. He was patriarch of Antioch from 512 under Anastasius, and when Justin I came to the throne in 518 and reversed imperial policy he fled to Egypt, where he lived twenty more years and kept writing; his Greek was ordered destroyed and most of him survives only in Syriac. He is a saint of the Syriac Orthodox and Coptic churches and was condemned by the Chalcedonian ones. This dataset does not adjudicate that, and the disagreement is visible in his own record: the tenure runs 512-538, because the churches that kept his name never accepted the deposition, while the Chalcedonian reckoning ends it in 518.

How does this dataset carry a man one half of the church venerates and the other half anathematises?

By saying that, and letting his own tenure row show the disagreement.

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