GEORGIOS SISKOS: Fundamental differences on Christological expressions of St Cyril of Alexandria and Severus of Antioch

Severus’s Christological expressions manifest a verbal affinity with those of Cyril, whereas their notional content shows a decisive departure from Cyril. Firstly, Cyril from the formula of reunion 433 onwards, explicitly accepted the antiochean division of scriptural sayings into the manhood and the divinity of Christ, without necessarily supposing that this would lead to division of Christ. Severus considered the formula of reunion as Cyril’s condescension to prattling children and built a chain of argumentation as to why an attribution of scriptural sayings to divinity and humanity of Christ leads inevitably to the division of Christ. Secondly, Cyril’s concept of division of Christ’s natures in theory alone did not signify fictional fantasy, but a real distinction, which does not result to a real division. Severus’s fundamental axiom that for a thing to exist in reality it has to be self-subsistent, namely having a hypostasis of its own, lead him to consider Cyril’s distinction of divinity and humanity in theory alone as univocal with fictional fantasy of a mind imagining the existence of two hypostases and natures in Christ, which never exist as such in reality. Thirdly, Cyril used the expression two hypostases, two natures to describe Christ’s natures, because he never thought of them as necessarily self-subsistent, which inevitably leads to an actual division. Severus by furnishing self-subsistency as the only reality eliminated deliberately every verbal and notional duality in Christ. The paperwill explore Severus’s gradual notional alteration of Cyril’s Christological expression.