On the Voluntariness and Natural Necessity of Impeccable Passions in Christ: On the Question of the Boundaries Between Orthodoxy and Monophysitism

Abstract

This article examines the issue of the manifestation of natural, sinless passions in the Lord Jesus Christ, which has not received wide coverage in Orthodox dogmatics. The main nerve in this issue is the teaching on the deliberate «permission» of each specific passion in Christ by His divine will, which was formed by anti-Chalcedonian Severus of Antioch and Julian of Halicarnassus. However, such an understanding later was characteristic of the St. Maxim the Confessor and John of Damascus, which causes an ambiguous attitude towards it in the Orthodox thought and does not allow a clear distinction to be made between the Orthodox teaching and the monoenergism. In contrast to the position of the St. Maximus and St. John, the article examines several statements by other Fathers, among whom stand out Leontius of Byzantium and St. Sophrony of Jerusalem, whose positions regarding voluntariness are similar and consist in the fact that Christ combines in Himself voluntary incarnation with the simultaneous assumption of natural causality and self-moving human will; at the same time, the Savior always had the power to exalt Himself above human sinless passions in a supernatural way. Such «Leontiefian» understanding of voluntariness is exactly seen as Orthodox by prof. V. V. Bolotov, A. I. Brilliantov and archpriest Sergei Bulgakov.