Coptic Orthodoxy

JUSTIN M. LASSER

The enchanting land of the Nile produced one of the most mystically penetrating expressions of Orthodoxy in the ancient world, making the Egyptian Church’s intel­lectual and spiritual life internationally renowned, and profoundly influential in the formative era of ancient Christian thought. For many centuries this church had the eyes of world Orthodoxy fixed upon it, in emulation. It was a land where multiple currents of thought and practice lived tolerantly side by side; over time, how­ever, the Orthodox were forced to live out most of their history as an endangered minority in their own land. The survival of the Coptic Orthodox Church to this day, now flourishing in a lively diaspora in America and Australasia, as well as enjoying a rebirth in its ancient monastic sites, and in the modern cities such as Cairo and Alex­andria, is a testament to its martyr’s fidelity and to its irrepressible spiritual vitality.

The term “Coptic Orthodoxy” has often been used by historians to describe the mul­ticultural Christianity of Egypt from the vantage point of the city of Alexandria, a perspective which tends to approach Cop­tic Christianity as basically a form of Greek Christianity expressed on Egyptian soil. The word Copt derives from a corruption of the Greek term for “Egyptian” (Aigyptos) signi­fying (pejoratively at first) a native of the hinterland outside the Greek-speaking lit­toral cities. The word carried with it in early Byzantine times a freight of disapproval, and this aura of prejudice lasted long into the modern age, with theological histor­ians regularly presuming (without having looked at the evidence) that Coptic Christianity had to be uneducated, peasant, and therefore unsophisticated. It was a colonial blindness among Eurocentric commentators that accounts for the late emergence of the real significance of Coptic theology in the textbooks. This scholarly confusion of earlier times, eliding the life of the Greek Alexandrian Church with the conditions of Christian Egypt in the inte­rior, failed to distinguish sufficiently between native Egyptians (Copts) and their colonial, almost foreign, neighbors to the north in the Romanized cities and in places of power throughout the Egyptian chora (countryside), as well as failing to engage thoroughly with the literature of the Coptic speaking Church, especially as it developed after the Council of Chalcedon. After the 8th century the distinction between Greeks and Copts became less important, given the new circumstances that faced the church in the form of the deep isolation that the overwhelming advent of Islam brought. In the long period of Islamic domination the fortunes of the minority Greek Orthodox were sustained by the favor of the sultans, whose hierarchy was acknowledged as ethnarchs under the terms of the sultan’s ascription of dominion to the patriarch of Constantinople. The Greek patriarch of Alexandria, therefore, became a virtual part of the administration of the Phanar until modern times. The Coptic clergy, heirs of those who had renounced links with Constantinople in the aftermath of the christological contro­versies of the 5th century, had a closer link with the people of the countryside and the towns, adopting Arabic as their normal mode of discourse, but rooting themselves in the Coptic tongue for liturgi­cal purposes. The use of the ancient Coptic served to underline their distinctive tradi­tions, their sense of ethnic antiquity, and their differentiation from the Byzantine Orthodox world.

Plate 13 Coptic fresco of Christ in glory from the Monastery of St. Antony by the Red Sea: the oldest continually inhabited monastery in the world. Photo by John McGuckin.

The life and development of the patri­archate of Alexandria has its own entry in this encyclopedia, and therefore our present essay will address the expressions of Coptic Orthodoxy beyond the city’s environs. Even in Antiquity Alexandria was known by the native Egyptians as the “great city near Egypt,” a characterization of Alexandria as a foreign city, which is telling. The advent of Christianity in the land of the Pharaohs came at a time when Egypt was deeply segregated, ruled by imperial masters, with native Egyptians in the status of near­powerless aliens in their own land.

Traditionally, Egypt was for a time the home of Jesus, Joseph, and the Theotokos. Heeding the call of the Angel of the Lord, the holy family, according to Matthew, fled Herod’s persecution into the land of Egypt (Mt. 2.13–15). The Coptic Church has sub­sequently identified numerous holy sites in Egypt related to this story, and (as pilgrim­age and cultic centers) they have long played a powerful role in the sustaining of indigenous Coptic identity. Beyond the gospel accounts, Alexandria is also remem­bered among the Copts as the see of St. Mark. Tradition recounts Mark to have been a disciple of St. Peter in Rome, and after St. Peter’s martyrdom St. Mark left for Alexandria in order to proclaim the good news, as articulated in his gospel writ­ten in Rome under the auspices of St. Peter (see the Acts of Mark). This tradition, though it is now deeply engrained in the Coptic soul, is historically a relatively late one.

The numerous intriguing questions about Christian origins in Egypt (stimu­lated immensely after the finding in the late 19th century of many new and apoc­ryphal early Christian writings, and per­haps culminating in the discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts) have called out to many 20th-century scholars to investigate the history of Coptic Christianity more fully. Bauer (1971), Roberts (1979), and Pearson and Goehring (1986) have all in different ways looked at a diversity of strands in early Christian Egypt, and pointed to the powerfully formative influ­ence of Gnostic and Jewish communities, especially in the crucible of late Antique Alexandria. The Jews in Alexandria gave the church its ancient Scriptures in the form of the Septuagint, a Greek transla­tion of the Hebrew Bible. This text also acted as the catalyst by which Jewish Scriptures entered into the Hellenistic philosophical world. Connections between the Jewish communities of Jerusalem and Alexandria were quite possibly regular (if even only for the pilgrimage route) from the earliest Christian times. In the earliest centuries many Christians in Alexandria seem to have worshipped using both Jew­ish and Christian calendars without any perceived contradiction. In time, however, the Jewish revolt against Emperor Trajan (115–17) strained relations between Jews and Christians. It is at this time, perhaps, that the Jewish and Christian communities in Egypt more distinctly separated off from one another (Pearson 2007: 99). However, the break was hardly final or thoroughly pervasive, as there is consi­derable evidence of continued contact between Christians and Jews. Philo of Alexandria and the exegetical methods of his school had a dominant effect on Chris­tian theologians. From the time of Origen of Alexandria in the 3rd century, to St. Cyril in the 5th, Christian leaders started to complain of the many ways in which Jewish life in the city influenced their faithful. Cyril in particular wanted to stop the Christians observing Jewish festi­vals, a practice that must still have been common in his day.

The character and ethos of the native Christian Egyptians are most clearly displayed in their editing and redacting of earlier Christian and pre-Christian texts. It is this activity that reveals their interests and concerns. Coptic Christianity did not emerge in a vacuum but in the multicultural and philosophical center of the Roman world. One of the earliest Christian manuscripts was uncovered at the Upper Egyptian site of Oxyrhynchus in 1897 and 1903. Three separate copies of a sayings- gospel were discovered and it was later determined that these sayings derived from the Gospel of Thomas, which also exists in a complete Coptic version recovered in Upper Egypt at Nag Hammadi near the Pachomian monastery at Chenoboskion. The Gospel of Thomas is a collection of 114 sayings with clear evidence of later redactional activity. The nature of these redactions is what concerns us in regard to early Coptic monasticism and theological interests. The most obvious redactions include the phrase “one alone” and the term monachos (“single-one”). Given the early 2nd-century dating of the Greek frag­ments this may be the first-ever use of the term “monk” in specifically Christian his­tory. Of course, exactly what the early Christians meant by these terms in the Gos­pel of Thomas is debated, but what is indisputable is that here we have a deeply serious and mystical Christian theology that is refined and highly subtle.

What did it mean for early Egyptians to “become one and alone” and to “become monachoos”? This early usage of the term suggests that St. Anthony, traditionally remembered as the founder of eremitic monasticism, was preceded by nearly a century. Recent studies have challenged the traditional picture of the “first” emer­gence of monasticism in Egypt. Especially important in this vein is the work of Goehring (1996) and Pearson (2007). What Goehring discovered, to replace an older and more simplistic view that monas- ticism simply “began” with Anthony and Pachomius, was the earlier phenomenon of what he calls “village monasticism in Upper Egypt.” And, it may be assumed, the phenomenon was active also in the more suburban settings of Alexandria. Anthony, we recall from his Athanasian Vita, delivered his sister into a “house of virgins” in the city before leaving for the desert. And city-ascetics such as Syncletica are also said to have predated him. Moreover, the fact that the Gospel of Thomas provides the earliest evidences of the term monachoos suggests very early links between Syrian Christianity and Egyptian Christian­ity, as St. Thomas was traditionally the apostle to Syria. The same connection is also evinced in the writings of St. Macarius (author of the highly influential Great Letter and the Spiritual Homilies), now generally assumed to be of Syrian provenance, not the Macarius of Egypt to whom the writings were later ascribed. This lively pseudepigraphical “trade” in writings that often raised eyebrows in Christian Antiquity demonstrates signs of how asceticism moved fluidly between these two significant and foundational sites of Egypt and Syria, and also gives testimony to a rapid trans­mission of ideas that were not always valued first and foremost in terms of how the local episcopate would validate them, rather in terms of how local ascetics and sages found them useful in their inner lives. Egypt was therefore much closer to Syria in this spe­cifically Christian proto-monastic philoso­phy than has been traditionally thought.

Egypt introduced a third form of monasticism besides the anchoritic (eremitic) and coenobitic (communal) archetypes. This third form, probably the earliest, comprised “solitaries” living within the villages and participating in liturgical and communal functions, while still remaining “alone ones.” This too resonates with what is seen in the Syrian Book of Steps, which exhibits evidence of a class of Christians (the “Perfect”) that lived on the outskirts of villages and which the “Upright” Christians supported. The work of E. A. Judge (1977) on an early 4th-century papyrus from Karanis highlights a petition from a certain Isodorus to a local official concerning an offense at the hands of two thieves. What is significant in this text is Isodorus’ recounting that he had been saved by two people, the deacon Antoninus and the monk Isaac. This “monk” may be an instance of the “third form of monasticism” – the village monk. St. Jerome offers further evidence of this type of monasticism when he complained that “there are monks (‘solitaries’) living in small household communities, who exer­cise too much independence of clerical authority” (Pearson 2007: 108). Further evidence of this Coptic “village monasti- cism” is suggested by recent studies pertaining to the origins of Pachomian monasticism (Goehring 1996). According to the Life of Pachomius in the Bohairic Coptic version which has been interpreted by Joest (1994), St. Pachomius was imprisoned in Thebes, Egypt, after refusing to serve in the military around 312. In such times prisoners had to depend on the goodness of others to provide them food and clothing while in prison. The Life narrates that the Coptic Christians so impressed Pachomius with their hospitality and care for prisoners that he was so con­vinced of this “new” and true religion and its compassionate God that he prayed that night and committed his life completely to this same God. When he was finally released from prison, Pachomius sought out the nearby Christians in the town of Chenoboskion and was received into the church there.

In time Pachomius became a disciple of a local anchoritic monk named Palamon. This Palamon was not a monk living in a monastery or living the life of a hermit, but a monk of the third way living amid the town’s environs and, presumably, partaking in church life in the village. The great Pachomius one day stumbled upon a deserted village about 10 miles south of Chenoboskion called Tabennisi. This village was to become resettled as the first Pachomian (meaning chiefly “coenobitic”) monastery. However, Pearson has chal­lenged the extent to which this town was actually deserted. “While the Pachomian accounts suggest a completely vacant village akin to the ghost towns of the old American west, it is possible that the label indicates nothing more than that a sufficient degree of vacancy and open space existed within the villages to enable Pachomius to establish ascetic communities there” (Goehring 1996: 275). In short, we ought not to take too drastic a division between monastery and settlement as we have hitherto. Though St. Anthony is remembered as the first eremitic monk, and Pachomius the first coenobitic monk, the evidence suggests they were not so novel. However, the Coptic Church remem­bers them “iconically.” They present the reality of forsaking the world for quiet con­templation – with St. Anthony, being alone; with St. Pachomius, together-alone: that is, degrees of the same charism. The early evi­dence suggests that the Copts practiced a very early and unique form of village monasticism. The “interior desert,” there­fore, was much closer to the village and city than had been earlier assumed. St. Anthony and St. Pachomius were, then, the icons of a practice that was already well established in the land of the Nile – the “solitary” movement that once operated in near historical anonymity was given a name: monasticism. This would change the Christian world forever: forging a link between urban Christianity with its hierar­chical and liturgical focus, and village life, in which the monastics would serve as a powerful bridge, eventually taking over the episcopate entirely.

Beyond the historical circumstances of the village monastic movement in Coptic Egypt, the texts they produced and copied present most surprising representations of their theological and philosophical charac­ter. What a community reads often mirrors what they practice, or at least their interests. The historian of the early Coptic Church must be wary of reading Alexandrine theo­logical policy into the countryside of Upper and Lower Egypt. There are numerous instances of animosity between the monks in the chora and the clergy in the “great city near Egypt.” It is not without significance that one of the most important and famous manuscript finds was discovered buried in a jar near Chenoboskion and the first Pachomian monastery near the modern town of Nag Hammadi. This eclectic collec­tion of texts bound in 14 codices is certainly indicative of the wide-ranging character of nearby Coptic Christians. Whether or not the Nag Hammadi codices derive from the library of the Pachomian monks is still debated. Though, given the practice of monastic copying and the fragments contained in the cartonnage of the codices, a monastic origin is plausible, if not probable. If this is the case, the student of early Coptic Christianity must recognize that the Nag Hammadi texts were used by Copts, which means they considered them spiritually relevant, at least, if not enlight­ening. The fact that the divine names (such as the Holy Spirit, Christ, etc.) throughout the texts are written in reverent manner suggests a serious Christian interest in them.

The Nag Hammadi codices are often termed the “Gnostic Scriptures,” but this is a misleading description. The Nag Hammadi find contains pieces of Plato’s Republic, early Christian wisdom literature such as the Teachings of Silvanus, instances of Christian “Platonism” in texts such as Marsanes, sayings and dialogue gospels such as the Dialogue of the Savior and the aforementioned Gospel of Thomas, and gnostic treatises such as the Apocryphon of John. The immense importance of the Nag Hammadi find lies in its rare snapshot of the widely disparate currents already existing within early Coptic Christianity before later attempts to impose a more episcopally approved standard of teaching (especially after the Arian crisis was resolved) and economic adversity conspired to iron out the wrinkles of earlier experi­mental diversity. It is also important to rec­ognize the eclecticism of the Pachomians. They were able to read excerpts from Plato, Valentinus, the Apocryphon of John, and letters of Athanasius and reflect on them all intelligently and maturely: a far cry from the parody of “peasant Copt” that earlier scholarship imagined. This ability to draw insight from a variety of disparate sources is something inherent in the early Coptic spirit. These texts were the product of Coptic Christian copying. Their signifi­cance for interpreting early Coptic Christianity cannot be overstated.

If the earliest literature from Alexandria and Coptic Egypt thus reflects the diversity of the region, it can also serve to remind us of the influence the already established Jewish presence in Egypt must have had on the nascent church. Both in terms of influence and reaction, Judaism shaped the form of Coptic Christianity. Two early Egyptian Christian documents from the 2nd century reflect this diversity and struggle for self-definition: the Epistle of Barnabas and the Gospel of the Hebrews (both can be partly reconstructed from patristic quotations; cf. Cameron 1982). The Epistle of Barnabas refutes some who “believed that the covenant of God was both theirs [presumably the Jews] and ours” (perhaps Jewish Christians). The Gospel of the Hebrews, on the other hand, reflects a form of Christianity that strongly pre­served Jewish identity markers and Semitic theology. Thus the Epistle of Barnabas may reflect the gentile interests of the Greek districts of Alexandria, while the Gospel of the Hebrews rises from the Jewish quarter. Another text, known as the Gospel of the Egyptians, represents the early trajectories of the native Coptic district at Rakotis. In fact, two texts from this period claim to be the Gospel of the Egyptians; the first as collated from patristic quotations and the other which was found as part of the Nag Hammadi codices. The first, the patristic version, expresses a deeply ascetic form of Coptic Christianity, one that believed Jesus Christ came to “undo the works of woman­hood.” In this sense, it was believed that birth extended the suffering of this world, bringing more and more people into a fallen cosmos. It also adhered to an exegetical tradition which interpreted the “fall” of humanity in the Garden to be the result of the separation of the sexes, rather than the eating of the forbidden fruit (this herme­neutic was not uncommon, as traces of it lasted into both Origen and Clement of Alexandria). In the Nag Hammadi codices the Gospel of the Egyptians (also called the

Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit) exists in two forms and represents an amalgam­ation of pre-Christian Egyptian religious thought with the new Christian message. This very important text introduces much of the vocabulary for early Coptic Chris­tianity which would define Orthodoxy in the years that followed. Like other texts in Nag Hammadi, the Gospel of the Egyptians represents one of the earliest forms of Christian apophaticism. It describes the Father as one “whose name cannot be uttered” and he is called the “Father of the Silence.” A very similar text entitled Eugnostos the Blessed, later Christianized in dialogue form as The Sophia of Jesus Christ, also from Nag Hammadi, echoes the Gospel of the Egyptians in its use of the term auto­genes or “self-begotten” (derived from Plato’s Timaeus), terms that would be at the center of 4th-century theological con­troversy as the Alexandrian priest Arius introduced them to the wider Christian world in what would become the defining argument that made for the elaboration of Nicene Orthodoxy.

The emergence of Coptic Christianity unintentionally preserves snapshots of an important transition period in Egyptian religious history. Very early Coptic materials from Nag Hammadi and Greek fragments from Oxyrhynchus show a deep interest among the Coptic Christians in the names of God, and the power the divine names contain. This has been approached in recent times in terms of a fine line between Coptic healing and popular Christian “magic” (cf. Meyer 1999); but the belief that the divine titles convey healing power is a very ancient one, and the emphasis on healing ritual is a deep characteristic of the ancient Coptic church. It can be seen running on to the still lively interest in healing scrolls as used in the Ethiopian Orthodox tradition. These divine mysterious names are preserved in a great number of Coptic prayer scrolls which exhibit a unique feature: the use of “secret” divine names in association with the names of more familiar Orthodox intercessors such as the Archangel Gabriel or the Evan­gelists. The eclectic spirit again seems to define much of early Coptic Christianity. These early Coptic healing scrolls were undoubtedly the product of local Christian writers and healers, not the master theolo­gians of Alexandria or the larger desert communities, but they nevertheless reflect the daily life of the village Copts. They depict women praying for healing and chil­dren praying for their dying mothers, among many other concerns. The Coptic prayer scroll fragments are one of the most important windows into early Coptic Orthodoxy, as they capture the concerns of the common person, the real life of an ancient Christian village.

Emerging Coptic Christianity exhibits a strong proclivity to personify and hypostatize abstract concepts and attributes. Orthodoxy, after the Gnostic era, became uncomfortable with such moves, but the phenomenon was part of the particular character of earliest Coptic Christianity. Egyptian Christianity was heavily involved in the Gnostic movement. It was at the great city of Alexandria that international gnostic theologians such as Basilides, Valentinus, and Heracleon were the first to introduce Christianity to the wider Hellenistic intel­lectual world, as well as inventing the genre of literary scriptural commentary (albeit of a highly symbolic and allegorized form). The anti-Gnostic Christian response is first found in the important intellectual Pantaenus. According to Clement of Alexandria (Stromata 1.11), it seems that Pantaenus was from Sicily and according to Eusebius (History of the Church 5.10) he was a convert Stoic philosopher. Pantaenus was one of the first intellectuals to embrace and develop the seeds of Christian Logos theology that had been prepared by the gospel of John, and by the early writers such as Justin and Theophilus. According to Clement, Pantaenus was also an excellent exegete of the Scriptures. It was in Alexandria that Pantaenus founded the first Christian theological “school.” For the first five centuries the schools of Alexandria and Rome stood out as the greatest centers of Christian thought in the world. Very little is known about the accomplishments and character of Pantaenus, but his student Clement was a worthy testament. Clement of Alexandria himself served as head of the “school”: at first this was more a matter of private rhetoricians taking learned Chris­tian students for higher studies, and only later did it devolve into what can be more accurately seen as an episcopally directed catechetical school. Clement established a most important precedent in Orthodox theology: the use of philosophy in the for­mation and discovery of theological truths. Prior to Clement many Christians, such as the North African Tertullian and the Syrian Tatian, believed that Christian truth was incompatible with (Greek) philosophy; however, Clement believed that philosophy was given to the Greeks by God. Thus philosophy was considered revelatory and was not to contradict scriptural truth. The pinnacle of the mystical life in Christ was, according to Clement, manifested in a “true gnosis.”

Though Clement forever altered the land­scape of Christian intellectual engagement, he was still a Greek. It was his student Origen of Alexandria (ca. 185–253) who manifests a truly marvelous synthesis between native Egyptian theological styles, Greek philo­sophical interests, and biblical prescripts. Origen (whose name means “son of Horus”) was not a full citizen of the Roman Empire, as he was the son of a mixed marriage. He was the first truly significant international intellectual Christianity had yet produced. His writings (whether adopted or rejected) served to set the agenda for much of Christianity’s theological path after him. Origen’s more speculative theolog­ical writings share aspects of both Neo ­Platonic and native Egyptian cosmological speculation. Like many of the Coptic sources before him, Origen shows, despite all the complex and esoteric elements in his cos­mology, a constant interest in the interior, spiritual life of the individual. His work, appearing as philosophy, is thus more prop­erly understood as the first exemplar of Christian mysticism, as a way of understand­ing the soul’s mystical union with the incar­nate Logos. He became, therefore, the guiding light of the later patristic mystical tradition, and as such was the midwife of ancient patterns of Coptic thought to the international Orthodox world. The mid-3rd and early 4th centuries mark the consoli­dation of ecclesiastical oversight and unity in Egypt, especially under the Alexandrian Bishop Demetrius (ca. 189–233). Many Egyptian Christian leaders, including Bishop Dionysius (247–64), fled Alexandria during persecutions. The persecution under Diocletian (303) was the greatest test of the resolve of the Egyptian Christians and inau­gurated an “age of martyrs.” The persecution also wrought internal divisions within the church. While Bishop Peter the Martyr (ca. 300–11) was in exile, Bishop Melitius of Lycopolis began to ordain clergy in his absence, creating a parallel hierarchy, later termed the “Melitian Schism.”

During the barrage of persecutions many of the Alexandrian clergy fled into the Egyptian countryside, which led to increased contact and unity. By the early 4th century the Alexandrine episcopate had extended its authority over nearly a hundred bishops throughout Lower and Upper Egypt, as well as neighboring Libya, Nubia, and Cyrenaica. It is also in this period that more Greek Christian texts were being translated into the native Egyp­tian Coptic language (a form of ancient Egyptian language written in primarily Greek characters).

The 4th century marks the flourishing of Coptic monasticism. Following the models of St. Anthony and St. Pachomius, Copts and Greeks set off to the desert in search of God. St. Macarius the Great (ca. 300–90), a disciple of St. Anthony, attracted many followers and developed a vast network of monks in the Fayyum, at Scetis and Nitria (today, Wadi Natrun). The monks of Scetis were the principal fonts of the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, one of the most precious gems of Coptic Orthodoxy.

The monastic movement in Egypt was primarily a lay phenomenon. While most of the monks supported the Alexandrine clergy during the Arian controversy, they remained suspicious of the powerbrokers in Alexandria. In the 5th century the Great Shenoute of Atripe founded the large White Monastery which offered a more unified and disciplined form of Coptic monasticism. Abba Shenoute also represents a response to the plight of the native Copts under the yoke of oppressive landlords. His monastery became not only a refuge for the poor, but a symbol of Coptic unity. Shenoute was also a stalwart supporter of Bishop Cyril of Alexandria in his controversy with Nestorius at the Council of Ephesus (431).

The Coptic monks, however, also expressed their own theologies which were, at times, at odds with Alexandria. Many of the monks of Upper Egypt were vigorous supporters of “Origenist” theology, while others were literal exegetes of the Scriptures (what the Origenist ascetics denounced as “fundamentalists”). Again we note that Egyptian monasticism had remained signif­icantly diverse, capable of coexisting with multiple strands, even with tensions that frequently broke out (and would need an international attempt at resolution in the condemnation of Origen and Evagrius in the time of Justinian). At times, certain monasteries were set up in opposition to each other (take, for example, the pro-Chalcedonian monastery at Canopus and the anti-Chalcedonian monastery at Enaton).

The 5th and 6th centuries were the most important time for the consolidation of a unified Coptic Orthodoxy. Though much of the 5th century was characterized by deepening internal fractures caused by the post-Chalcedonian controversies and the emergence of rival hierarchies, the very struggles served to produce a self-conscious “national” Coptic Church that, whether Chalcedonian or anti-Chalcedonian, distin­guished itself from the other great patriarchal centers of Christianity. The influence and power of the Egyptian Christians reached their pinnacle in the victory of Cyril of Alexandria at the Council of Ephesus (431). However, St. Cyril’s victory also marks the beginning of the slow demise of Egyptian patriarchal power and influence. Egypt’s con­stant slippage away from the ambit of the Byzantine and Roman ecclesiastical worlds coincided with the advent of Islam as over­lord. The glory days of Egyptian Christianity were fast coming to an end, and centuries of difficult survival were to be its future lot.

After the Council of Ephesus the divi­sions within the Christian world were pro­gressively entrenched, rarely alleviated. In a post-Ephesine effort to heal the fractures of christological division, St. Cyril and John of Antioch reached a compromise in the form of the “Formula of Reunion” of 433. This compromise, brokered by the court of Constantinople, did not long hold. With St. Cyril’s death in 444 the possibility of reunion died along with him. Cyril’s succes­sor Dioscorus of Alexandria undermined the effort by attacking the Formula of Reunion and advocating for the

Christology of Eutyches of Constantinople, which asserted that there were no longer two natures (human and divine) after the union (the incarnation), but only one. Eutyches was soon after condemned by Patriarch Flavian of Constantinople. Prior to the rise of Dioscorus of Alexandria, Rome had been a staunch ally of the patri­archate of Alexandria. However, in 449 a second council at Ephesus was convened, which resulted in the rehabilitation of Eutyches, but also included a direct chal­lenge to the theology of the other patriar­chal centers. With the death of Emperor Theodosius in 450, another council was convened in 451, this time at Chalcedon. In an age when the philosophy of language and the use of words decided policy and the fates of empires, this council sealed the fate of the Coptic Christians. Dioscorus was deposed and the Tome of Leo was proclaimed consistent with the theology of St. Cyril. The Council of Chalcedon (451) affirmed the Orthodox position proclaim­ing that there exist two natures after the union, indissolubly and unconfusedly bonded, in the single person of the Lord. Ironically, the Rome that once stood with Alexandria now became the main opponent of Alexandrine Christology. Furthermore, the fact that Nestorius himself (now in exile in Upper Egypt) believed that the Council of Chalcedon rehabilitated his orig­inal theology scandalized the Egyptians and convinced them that Chalcedon was ill-conceived and therefore not an authentic ecumenical council. From this time onwards Coptic Christianity formally took a different path from the other Orthodox centers, a division which remains unhealed to the present day. According to the History of the Patriarchs, when Dioscorus was deposed, the pro-Chalcedonian Proterius was consecrated bishop of Alexandria. How­ever, the native Egyptian populace rejected this imperial interference, assassinated

Proterius, and consecrated Bishop Timothy Aleurus (“The Cat”) in his place in 457. For many years afterwards, pro- and anti- Chalcedonian hierarchs vied for supremacy in the city of Alexandria; the internal divi­sion of the Christian community ever weakening it, and causing large sections of the Egyptian population to resent the interference of the Byzantine court. During this period the western part of the empire was in near-collapse, which left open the prospect of the fall of the whole of western Christendom. These conditions strengthened the hand of the bishop of Rome as the official powerbroker in the West and encouraged Constantinople to make important concessions to “Old” Rome in an effort to keep them in the fold. However, this led to the alienation and isolation of the other patriarchal centers in the East.

Proterius’ pro-Chalcedonian successor, another Timothy, called Salofaciolos (“Wobble Cap”), was installed under the auspices of Emperor Leo, who exiled Timothy Aleurus. When Emperor Basiliscus ascended the throne, Timothy the Cat returned from exile and brought the relics of Dioscorus with him. This event also marks an important step in isolating Coptic Orthodoxy from the Chalcedonian Ortho­dox communion, for when Timothy effec­tively canonized Dioscorus, the teaching of the earlier archbishop was effectively ele­vated into becoming a standard of the com­plete rejection of Chalcedon, and more – a rejection of the principles of compromise that even Cyril himself was willing to enter­tain. To this day the canonization of Dioscorus (and the concomitant view that his thought is the authentic Cyrilline heritage) remains one of the principal disagreements between anti-Chalcedonian and Chalcedonian Orthodox communions.

When Emperor Zeno expelled Basiliscus the fortunes of the Copts seemed to change.

Timothy the Cat’s successor, the theologian Peter Mongos (“The Stammerer”) com­muned with Acacius, the patriarch of Con­stantinople. In 482 the Emperor-theologian Zeno entered the fray by publishing his Henoticon, which was ultimately an effort to circumvent the Council of Chalcedon, acting as if the council never occurred. Zeno simply affirmed the “Twelve Anath­emas” of St. Cyril as a standard of Christol- ogy, condemned the theologies of Nestorius and Eutyches, and sidelined the Council of Chalcedon and other councils.” The importance of the Henoticon, however, exists not in what is contained within, but what is noticeably absent – that is, any dis­cussion of the “natures” of Christ. Zeno’s ecumenism lay not in what was said, but what it tried to smooth over. His was an ecumenism of agreeing not to discuss whatever it was which divided. This move by Emperor Zeno was of strategic signifi­cance; it incorporated Rome by not condemning (or even addressing Leo’s Tome), it brought the Copts back in by affirming their great theologian-saint, and dismissed the council (Chalcedon) that had caused such dissention in the empire and church. However, the Roman Church was outraged by Zeno’s attempts, which they perceived as unprincipled compromise. In 484 Pope Felix convened a council that condemned Constantinople’s Patriarch Acacius on account of his support for this policy of degrading Chalcedon (and Leo), resulting in what was later termed the “Acacian Schism.”

It seemed for a time that the impact of Chalcedon was waning and the empire was yearning to forget both Dioscorus’ council in 449 and the appearance of Leo’s Tome at Chalcedon. However, the ascension of Justinian in the early 6th century marked an end to this consensual amnesia. Justinian revived the imperial ambitions to recapture the whole Mediterranean as Roman territory. This meant drawing Egypt back close to the Byzantine bosom. He realized that in order to accomplish this he needed the support of the bishop of Rome, who was still the main powerbroker in the western regions. Though Justinian tried with all his might to unify the Chalcedonians and anti-Chalcedonians, his attempts ulti­mately failed and alienated many commu­nities in the East while failing to impress on the West the extent to which the inclu­sion of Leo’s Tome in the Chalcedonian “picture” was deeply problematical. Justinian’s efforts were also very compli­cated, as is evinced in the activities of his wife Empress Theodora, who supported the Monophysite clergy just as much as he tried to hinder them. This intra-family dis­pute helped institutionalize the various theological principles throughout the empire, especially under the efforts of Jacob Baradaeus, whom Theodora greatly patronized. Coptic Christians began to be called “Jacobites” by the Chalcedonian party because of the immense efforts of Jacob Baradaeus in ordaining and establishing a separate anti-Chalcedonian hierarchy. After this period it is customary to designate the pro-Chalcedonians as “Melkites” (from their imperial allegiance; the word deriving from the term “royal”) and the anti-Chalcedonian majority, the “Copts.”

While the 6th century marked the isola­tion of the Coptic Church from the larger Orthodox world, it also deepened a greater sense of Coptic “national” unity and cohe­sive identity. The strained relations between Egypt and Constantinople made the Copts ready to accept the divorce that occurred after the Arab invasion of the peninsula. In some instances the Copts received improved treatment under the Arabs; they were granted religious freedom, their taxes were greatly reduced (even if they had to pay the dhimmi which separated them as “protected” religious people under Sharia), and they were given many important posts within the government (a state of affairs that lasted politically until the 20th century). Over time, however, it was inevitable that Coptic Christian culture should be deeply suppressed, and the Copts often were subjected to bitter oppressions, losing their living language (it survived only as liturgically ossified) and most of their cultural institutions along with it.

The centuries that followed produced many martyrs and confessors for the faith. The Copts had to learn to survive the Fatimid and Ayyubid rulers and the cruel Mameluk rule in the 13th to 16th centuries. The rule of the sultans led to a compara­tive time of peace, as the patriarch of Con­stantinople was given overall leadership of all Christians in the Islamic world, and thus the Copts could have a voice, albeit one they would not have chosen for themselves. Well into the middle of the 20th century Coptic intellectuals ran many departments of the government and made Alexandria into a truly international city. The year 1952 marked an important change of tide in the affairs of Coptic Orthodoxy. The Egyptian Revolution in that year under Colonel Nasser, who broke with the British postwar administration, inspired a “return to Islam” which left the minority Copts out of the representational process. The remaining economic and political influence of the Copts began to erode. A period of the Copts being closed out of higher education and professional employment followed, and led to a massive exodus of Coptic Christians from Egypt. The spreading of the Copts all over the world, and their assumption there of significant professional roles, in turn led to an increasing renaissance in Coptic cul­ture, which fed back to the motherland and caused a major revival in the fortunes of the Coptic Church in Egypt in the latter part of the 20th century and today. Additionally, increased contact with Chalcedonian Orthodox and Roman Catholics has led to vigorous dialogues and realistic prospects of reunification, based on the serious yet honest and open analysis of the original causes of the rupture of union.

To this day Egypt is still home to surviv­ing Chalcedonian Orthodox Christians. The majority of these Orthodox pledge alle­giance to the Greek Orthodox patriarchate of Alexandria. After the collapse of the sultanate in the aftermath of World War I, and then the collapse of the support of the Russian Orthodox tsars, the political and economic condition of the Alexandrian Chalcedonian Orthodox community dwin­dled significantly. In Nasser’s period of Arabization, the very large community of Greeks in Alexandria (the city of Kavafy and Durrell) took flight in great numbers. The great spiritual center of Chalcedonian Orthodox Christianity in Egypt is located at the foot of Mount Sinai in the Monastery of St. Catherine. It is certainly an irony of history that once more in modern times the great division between Greek in the city and Copt in the country seems to have emerged. The modern dialogue between the Coptic and the Chalcedonian Orthodox has largely been stimulated and sponsored by the out­lying communities, international pressures being exerted on the local Christians. The time is now at hand when the next real steps in that dialogue of love need to be taken to a new level by the local churches themselves, leaving aside centuries of dis­trust and resentments (on both sides) and learning to respect and trust one another again. The theological dialogues have abun­dantly shown that the present Coptic con­fessions of their “Miaphysite” faith in Christ are reconcilable with the early theology of St. Cyril, in turn reconcilable with the doctrine (properly understood) of the Council of Chalcedon in 451. What remains for a real movement towards union, how­ever, is more than theological analysis, rather a movement towards the restoration of fraternal affection. A common realization is perhaps called for, that in the present circumstances of such massive challenges facing the very continuance of a Christian presence in the land of Egypt, the Coptic and Orthodox communities, who truly have so very much in common, cannot any lon­ger pretend that a continued parallel exis­tence is a good idea or a sustainable goal.

SEE ALSO: Africa, Orthodoxy in; Alexandria, Patriarchate of; Apostolic Succession; Council of Chalcedon (451); Council of Ephesus (431); Council of Nicea I (325); Gnosticism; Heresy

REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS

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Bauer, W. (1971) Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, trans. R. Kraft et al. Philadelphia: Fortress Press.

Bell,D.N. (ed.andtrans.) (1983) The Life of Shenoute: By Besa. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications. Bleeker, C. J. (1967) “The Egyptian Background of Gnosticism,” in U. Bianchi (ed.) Le Origini dello Gnosticismo. Leiden: E. J. Brill, pp. 229–36. Burmester, O. H. E. (1973) The Egyptian or Coptic Church: A Detailed Description of Her Liturgical Services and Rites and Ceremonies Observed in the Administration of Her Sacraments. Cairo: Centro Francescano di Studi Orientali Christiani.

Cameron, R. (ed.) (1982) The Other Gospels: Non-canonical Gospel Texts. Philadelphia: Westminster Press.

Carter, B. L. (1986) The Copts in Egyptian Politics. London: Croom Helm.

Chitty, D. J. (1999) The Desert A City: An Introduction to the Study of Egyptian and Palestinian Monasticism under the Christian Empire. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Clarke, S. (1918) Christian Antiquities in the Nile Valley. Oxford: Clarendon Press

Goehring, J. E. (1996) “Withdrawing from the Desert: Pachomius and Development of Village Monasticism in Upper Egypt,” Harvard Theological Review 89: 267–85.

Joest, C. (1994) “Ein Versuch zur Chronologie Pachoms und Theodoros,” Zeitschrift fiir die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 85: 132–4.

Judge, E. A. (1977) “The Earliest Use of Monachos for ‘Monk’ (P. Coll. Youtie 77) and the Origins of Monasticism,” Jahrbuch flit Antike und Christentum 20: 72–89.

McGuckin, J. A. (2001) St. Cyril of Alexandria: The Christological Controversy, Its History, Theology and Texts. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press.

Meyer, M. W. (1999) Ancient Christian Magic: Coptic Texts of Ritual Power. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Orlandi, T. (1986) “Coptic Literature,” in B. Pearson and J. Goehring (eds.) The Roots of Egyptian Christianity. Philadelphia: Fortress Press,

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Parrott, D. M. (1987) “Gnosticism and Egyptian Religion,” Novum Testamentum vol. 29, Fasc. 1, pp. 73–93.

Pearson, B. A. (2007) “Earliest Christianity in Egypt,” in J. E. Goehring and J. A. Timbie (eds.) The World of Early Egyptian Christianity: Language, Literature, and Social Context. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, pp. 97–112.

Pearson, B. A. and Goehring, J. E. (eds.) (1986) The Roots of Egyptian Christianity. Philadelphia: Fortress Press.

Roberts, C. (1979) Manuscript, Society, and Belief in Early Christian Egypt. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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