Oriental Orthodox Churches Explained

1. What Oriental Orthodoxy Is

Oriental Orthodoxy is a communion of six self-governing apostolic churches that hold the faith of the first three ecumenical councils and did not receive the Council of Chalcedon of 451. The six are the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria, the Syriac Orthodox Church of Antioch, the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church, and the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church of India. They are in full communion with one another, they recognise each other's bishops and sacraments, and they form a single family without a single universal primate over it.

Each of the six traces its foundation to an apostle or to apostolic-era mission. The Copts trace their church to Saint Mark at Alexandria. The Syriac Orthodox trace theirs to Saint Peter at Antioch, where Acts 11:26 says the disciples were first called Christians. The Armenians name Saints Thaddeus and Bartholomew and the fourth-century evangelisation under Gregory the Illuminator. The Malankara churches of Kerala trace their origin to Saint Thomas. These are living claims that shape how each church understands itself, and they are the first thing to hear before anything is said about Christology.

The dividing line with the rest of Christendom is a single council and the language it used. Nicaea in 325, Constantinople in 381 and Ephesus in 431 are received by the Oriental Orthodox as ecumenical and binding. Chalcedon in 451 is not. Everything that follows in this guide, including the accords with Rome, turns on what that refusal meant then and what it is now agreed to have meant.

Where the Name Comes From

The name Oriental Orthodox is a modern convention adopted to give these churches a title they accept. Older Western writing called them monophysite, which they reject as a description of their faith, or Jacobite, after Jacob Baradaeus, the sixth-century Syriac bishop whose consecrations kept the non-Chalcedonian hierarchy alive. Scholarly and ecumenical usage now prefers Oriental Orthodox, non-Chalcedonian, or miaphysite. The churches themselves generally use their own proper names and simply call their faith Orthodox.

How Large the Family Is

The largest of the six by membership is the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church. Ethiopia's 2007 national census recorded Ethiopian Orthodox Christians as the single largest religious group in the country, at roughly 43.5 per cent of the population, which places the church among the larger Christian bodies in the world. The Coptic Orthodox Church is the church of the great majority of Egyptian Christians. The Armenian Apostolic Church is the national church of Armenia and has a very large diaspora. Precise totals for the family as a whole are contested and depend on how governments count, so this guide gives none.

The Ethiopian figure is from the 2007 Population and Housing Census of Ethiopia, published by the Central Statistical Agency of Ethiopia. Membership counts for the other five churches are not published on a comparable basis and are omitted here rather than estimated. Note that some widely cited surveys of "Orthodox Christians" combine Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox totals, which produces a number that describes no actual communion.

2. The Six Churches, One by One

The six churches share a faith and share almost nothing else. Their liturgical languages, calendars, chant, fasting rules, church architecture and canon law grew up separately in Egypt, Syria, Armenia, the Ethiopian highlands and the Malabar coast. Reading them as six branches of one culture misses what they actually are, which is six national and linguistic traditions that recognise each other's faith.

The Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria

The Coptic Orthodox Church is the church of Egypt, headed by the Pope of Alexandria and Patriarch of the See of Saint Mark, currently Pope Tawadros II, who was enthroned in 2012. Its liturgical language is Coptic, the last stage of the Egyptian language, alongside Arabic in ordinary parish use. The principal liturgy is the Liturgy of Saint Basil, with the Liturgies of Saint Gregory and Saint Cyril used on other occasions. Coptic monasticism runs back to the beginnings of organised Christian monasticism, to Anthony the Great and Pachomius in the deserts of the third and fourth centuries, and it remains central to the church's life: bishops are drawn from monks, and the great desert monasteries of Wadi El Natrun and the Red Sea are working communities.

Modern Coptic history includes sustained persecution. In February 2015 twenty Coptic Christian migrant workers from Egypt and one Ghanaian companion, Matthew Ayariga, twenty-one men in all, were murdered in Libya by the group calling itself Islamic State. The Coptic Orthodox Church canonised them as martyrs, and on 11 May 2023 Pope Francis announced that the twenty-one would be inscribed in the Roman Martyrology, the Catholic Church's official list of martyrs, with the consent of Pope Tawadros II. A Catholic pope adding to the Roman calendar men who died outside visible communion with Rome is a substantial ecumenical act, and it says how Rome now reads the relationship.

The Syriac Orthodox Church of Antioch

The Syriac Orthodox Church, headed by the Patriarch of Antioch and All the East, keeps the West Syriac liturgical tradition in Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, the language family Jesus spoke. Its principal eucharistic liturgy is the Anaphora of Saint James, and its hymnody, largely shaped by Ephrem the Syrian and Jacob of Serugh, is one of the great bodies of Christian poetry. The patriarchate has been seated in Damascus since 1959 after centuries at various monasteries and cities of the region, and the historic monastery of Mor Hananyo near Mardin in south-eastern Turkey remains a spiritual centre. The church suffered severely in the massacres of Ottoman Christians during the First World War, an event Syriac Christians call Sayfo, and again in the Syrian and Iraqi wars of the last two decades. Its diaspora in Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands and the United States is now a large part of its life.

The Armenian Apostolic Church

The Armenian Apostolic Church is the national church of Armenia and of the Armenian diaspora. Armenia's adoption of Christianity as the religion of the kingdom under Gregory the Illuminator, traditionally dated to 301, is commonly described as the first such adoption by any state. Worship is in Classical Armenian, and the Armenian liturgy has its own distinctive features, including the use of unleavened bread and unmixed wine, a practice unusual among Eastern churches.

Governance is unusual too. The Armenian Church has two catholicosates, the Catholicosate of All Armenians at Etchmiadzin in Armenia and the Catholicosate of the Great House of Cilicia at Antelias in Lebanon, together with the Armenian Patriarchates of Constantinople and of Jerusalem. All are within one church and one faith, and the relationship between the two catholicosates has been strained at various points in the twentieth century. The Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem is one of the three major communities with rights in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, alongside the Greek Orthodox and the Latin Catholics under the Franciscan Custody, with the Coptic, Syriac and Ethiopian churches holding lesser rights there. That is why a visitor to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre encounters Armenian clergy in it.

In 2015 Pope Francis declared Gregory of Narek, the tenth-century Armenian monk, poet and author of the Book of Lamentations, a Doctor of the Church. Gregory belonged to the Armenian Church and lived long after Chalcedon, so the declaration named a teacher of the whole Church from within the non-Chalcedonian tradition.

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church is the ancient church of Ethiopia, with roots in the conversion of the Aksumite kingdom in the fourth century under Frumentius, whom Athanasius of Alexandria consecrated as first bishop. The word Tewahedo is Ge'ez for "made one" or "unified", and it is the church's own name for its Christology, which tells you how central the question is to Ethiopian self-understanding. The liturgical language is Ge'ez.

The Ethiopian church was under the Coptic Patriarch of Alexandria for most of its history, receiving its metropolitan from Egypt, and it became autocephalous in stages during the twentieth century, with its own Ethiopian patriarch from 1959. Its distinctive practices include a large body of clerical deacons and debtera cantors, the ceremonial tabot, a consecrated altar tablet kept in each church and carried in procession at Timkat, and a canon of Scripture broader than the Catholic, Eastern Orthodox or Protestant canons, taking in the Book of Enoch and Jubilees. Its observance of Saturday alongside Sunday, and its dietary rules, reflect a strong Old Testament strand in Ethiopian Christianity. The rock-hewn churches of Lalibela belong to this tradition. For the wider setting, see our guide to Christianity in Africa.

The Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church

The Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church is the church of Eritrea, in the same Ge'ez tradition as the Ethiopian church and now separately organised. After Eritrean independence in 1993 the Coptic Patriarch of Alexandria granted the Eritrean church autocephaly, and its first patriarch was enthroned in 1998. It keeps the Ethiopian liturgical books, calendar and fasting discipline substantially unchanged. The Eritrean church has faced significant state pressure, including the removal and detention of Patriarch Abune Antonios from 2006 until his death in 2022, a case documented in the annual reports of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom.

The Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church

The Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church, also called the Indian Orthodox Church, is the autocephalous Oriental Orthodox church of the Saint Thomas Christians of Kerala in south India. It is headed by a Catholicos of the East and Malankara Metropolitan seated at Devalokam in Kottayam, and it uses the West Syriac liturgy in Malayalam and Syriac. Its relationship with the Syriac Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch, and the split with the Jacobite Syrian Christian Church that arose from it, is treated in section 9 below because the Kerala situation needs its own explanation.

3. What Happened at Chalcedon in 451

The Council of Chalcedon met in 451 to settle how the divinity and humanity of Christ are held together in one person, and it produced a definition that most of Christendom received and a large part of the Christian East did not. Every party at Chalcedon already confessed that Christ is God and man. The argument was over which technical vocabulary states that without falling into one of two errors the Church had already condemned.

The Two Errors Everyone Wanted to Avoid

The first error is dividing Christ. Nestorius, Patriarch of Constantinople, was understood by his opponents to teach two subjects in Christ, a divine one and a human one, so closely conjoined as to appear one, with the consequence that Mary could be called mother of the man and not Theotokos, God-bearer. The Council of Ephesus in 431 condemned that position and affirmed Theotokos, under the leadership of Cyril of Alexandria. Whether Nestorius himself actually taught what was condemned is debated by modern historians, and the condemnation of the position stands in every tradition discussed on this page.

The second error is absorbing Christ's humanity. Eutyches, an elderly archimandrite at Constantinople, was condemned at a synod there in 448 for holding that after the union there is one nature, and that Christ's flesh is not consubstantial with ours. That is monophysitism in the strict sense: the humanity is swallowed by the divinity and stops being the humanity we share. If it is true, Christ has not taken on what he came to save, and the Incarnation does not reach us.

The Sequence of Events

In 449 a council at Ephesus, presided over by Dioscorus of Alexandria, rehabilitated Eutyches and deposed his accuser Flavian of Constantinople. Pope Leo the Great called that assembly a latrocinium, a den of robbers, and the name Robber Council stuck in Western usage. Leo had sent a doctrinal letter, the Tome, addressed to Flavian, and the 449 council did not read it. After the death of the emperor Theodosius II, a new council was summoned to Chalcedon in 451. It reversed the acts of 449, deposed Dioscorus, and received Leo's Tome. The biography of the pope who wrote it is on our page for Pope Leo the Great; this guide treats the council itself and its aftermath.

The Definition Itself

The Chalcedonian Definition confesses one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only-begotten, made known in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation, the distinction of the natures being in no way abolished by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved and coming together into one person and one hypostasis. The four negatives are the point of the formula: two of them exclude Eutyches, two of them exclude Nestorius.

Why the Definition Was Refused

The opponents of Chalcedon objected on three grounds, and each of them needs stating as they stated it. First, the phrase "in two natures" appeared to them to concede the Nestorian premise, since Cyril of Alexandria, whose authority Ephesus had vindicated, had taught "one incarnate nature of God the Word", and Chalcedon seemed to abandon his language for that of his opponents. Second, they held that the deposition of Dioscorus was procedurally unjust: on their reading he was condemned for refusing to appear and for his conduct in 449, without being convicted of heresy, and the Coptic Orthodox Church venerates him as a saint and confessor to this day. Third, they regarded the council as driven by imperial policy and by the ambitions of Constantinople, and they read canon 28, which raised Constantinople to a rank second only to Rome, as evidence of it.

Politics belonged to the story on every side. Alexandria and Constantinople had been competing for precedence for decades. Egypt, Syria, Armenia and later Ethiopia had linguistic and cultural reasons to resist a definition arriving in Greek from an imperial capital, and imperial attempts to enforce Chalcedon by deposing bishops turned a theological dispute into a national grievance. Saying that does not reduce the theology to politics. It explains why a dispute over prepositions hardened into a schism that lasted fifteen centuries.

4. Miaphysite Christology in Its Own Terms

Miaphysite Christology holds that Christ is one incarnate nature out of two, the divine and the human, united in the Word without mixture, without confusion, without alteration and without separation, with each retaining its full properties. The Greek prefix mia means one in the sense of a composite unity, a united one, as distinct from monos, which means one in the sense of sole or single. That distinction of prefixes is the whole argument in miniature, and English writing that renders both as "one nature" makes the two positions look identical when they are not.

The Cyrilline Formula

The source of the formula is Cyril of Alexandria, who used the phrase mia physis tou Theou Logou sesarkomene, one incarnate nature of God the Word. Cyril believed the phrase came from Athanasius; modern scholarship traces the wording to Apollinarian writings circulated under Athanasius's name. Cyril himself was not Apollinarian: he insisted that Christ's humanity is complete, with a human soul and mind, and he accepted the Formula of Reunion of 433 with the bishops of Antioch, which speaks of a union of two natures. The Oriental Orthodox read Cyril's mia physis formula as the definitive statement and Chalcedon as a retreat from it. The Chalcedonian churches read Cyril's acceptance of the 433 Formula as showing that his language and Chalcedon's are compatible.

What Severus of Antioch Taught

Severus of Antioch, patriarch from 512 to 518 and the leading theologian of the non-Chalcedonian side, gave miaphysitism its mature form and is venerated as a saint by the Syriac and Coptic churches. Severus explicitly condemned Eutyches. He taught that the humanity of Christ is real, complete and consubstantial with ours, that it is not diminished or absorbed in the union, and that after the union the natures are distinguishable only in contemplation, in thought, rather than as two separately subsisting things. His objection to "in two natures" was that a nature, in his usage, always exists concretely, so to count two natures after the union is to count two concrete realities and so to divide Christ. Chalcedonian theology answers that physis and hypostasis are being used in different senses, and that the substance of what Severus asserts is what Chalcedon asserts.

Read that carefully, because it is where fifteen centuries of misunderstanding sit. Severus and Leo were arguing about the reference of two technical words. Both wanted a Christ who is fully God, fully man, and one. Neither wanted a divided Christ or an absorbed humanity.

The Four Adverbs Both Sides Use

Chalcedon says "without confusion, without change, without division, without separation." The Oriental Orthodox statement of the union says "without mixture, without confusion, without alteration, without division, without separation." The lists are near identical and they do the same work, guarding the same two flanks. In the 1973 common declaration between Rome and the Coptic Orthodox Church, discussed in section 7, both parties signed a confession using that second list.

5. Why "Monophysite" Is the Wrong Word

Calling the Oriental Orthodox monophysite attributes to them a doctrine they anathematise. Monophysitism in the sense the Church condemned in the fifth century is Eutychianism: the teaching that Christ's humanity was absorbed into his divinity and is no longer consubstantial with ours. Severus of Antioch condemned Eutyches by name. The Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Ethiopian, Eritrean and Malankara churches all anathematise him. Applying the label to them is a factual error about what they teach.

How the Label Stuck

The label was polemical from the start. Byzantine and Latin writers used monophysite to bracket the non-Chalcedonians with Eutyches, which was rhetorically useful because Eutyches had been condemned by everyone. The usage passed into Western textbooks, encyclopedias and seminary manuals and stayed there for centuries. It has receded in scholarship since the middle of the twentieth century, as the unofficial consultations between Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian theologians at Aarhus in 1964 and Bristol in 1967, and the formal dialogues that followed, established on both sides that the two vocabularies do not carry the doctrines each had attributed to the other.

What to Say Instead

Three usable terms exist. Oriental Orthodox is the churches' preferred collective name and is the safest in ordinary writing. Non-Chalcedonian is neutral and historically precise, naming exactly what the division is about. Miaphysite is the accurate technical term for the Christology. Any of the three is correct. Monophysite should be reserved for the condemned Eutychian position, which is what it actually names.

The rows summarise positions as their own adherents state them where the position is still held, and as the condemning councils described them where it is not. Nestorius's own teaching is disputed among historians; the row describes the position condemned at Ephesus in 431 rather than settling that argument.

6. Fifteen Centuries After Chalcedon

The schism after 451 became permanent because imperial policy kept trying to close it by force and by formula, and every attempt made it worse. Emperors issued documents intended to satisfy both sides: the Henotikon of Zeno in 482, which avoided endorsing or condemning Chalcedon, produced a thirty-five year break between Rome and Constantinople and did not reconcile the Egyptians. Justinian's condemnation of the Three Chapters at the Second Council of Constantinople in 553 was meant to prove that Chalcedon was compatible with Cyril, and it failed to bring the non-Chalcedonians back while splitting the Latin West for decades.

Parallel Hierarchies

By the middle of the sixth century the division was structural. Jacob Baradaeus, consecrated bishop around 542, travelled through Syria and Asia Minor ordaining a full non-Chalcedonian hierarchy, which is why Western sources long called the Syriac Orthodox Jacobites. Egypt had two rival patriarchs of Alexandria, one Chalcedonian and imperial, one Coptic and popular. Armenia formally rejected Chalcedon at the Council of Dvin, traditionally dated 506 and confirmed in the second Council of Dvin in the middle of the century. Once there were two sets of bishops there were two churches, and the question stopped being negotiable.

Under Islamic Rule

The Arab conquests of the seventh century removed Egypt, Syria, Palestine and Mesopotamia from Byzantine control and changed the position of the non-Chalcedonian churches. They were freed from imperial coercion and placed under the legal category of dhimmi, protected non-Muslim communities paying the jizya tax, with limited public rights and a long-term attrition of numbers through conversion and disadvantage. Coptic gradually gave way to Arabic as the spoken language of Egyptian Christians, surviving in the liturgy. Syriac gave way to Arabic in much of the Levant. These churches carried the faith through more than a thousand years as minorities, which shaped a spirituality of endurance, fasting and martyrdom that a Western Christian should recognise before commenting on anything else about them. Our guide to Islam and Christianity covers the wider relationship.

Encounters With Rome

Contacts with the Latin West produced unions that did not last and communities that did. The Council of Florence issued bulls of union with the Armenians in 1439 and with the Copts in 1442, and neither took hold in the churches concerned. Later missionary activity produced separate Eastern Catholic churches drawn from these traditions, including the Coptic Catholic, Syriac Catholic, Armenian Catholic, Ethiopian Catholic, Eritrean Catholic and Syro-Malankara Catholic Churches, each in full communion with Rome and keeping its ancestral rite. Those churches are covered in our guide to the Eastern Catholic Churches. The Oriental Orthodox generally experienced their formation as division rather than reunion, and the 1993 Balamand statement on uniatism, agreed between Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, addressed the same problem in a different setting.

The Twentieth-Century Turn

The recovery began with private scholarship and unofficial meetings. Theologians from the Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian churches met unofficially at Aarhus in Denmark in 1964, at Bristol in 1967, at Geneva in 1970 and at Addis Ababa in 1971, and reported that they found no substantive disagreement in Christology once the terminology was clarified. The Second Vatican Council's decree on ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio, promulgated in 1964, spoke of the separated Eastern Churches with a warmth that made official contact possible. Pope Paul VI met the Syriac Orthodox Patriarch Ignatius Jacob III in 1971 and signed a common declaration with him, the first of the series that section 7 covers.

7. The Common Declarations of 1973, 1984 and 1996

Three common declarations, signed by a pope and by the head of an Oriental Orthodox church, state that the Catholic Church and that church confess the same faith in Christ in different formulations. They are the substantive result of the modern dialogue, and they are why the fifth-century argument can no longer be described as an open Christological dispute between Rome and these churches.

1973: Paul VI and Pope Shenouda III of Alexandria

On 10 May 1973 Pope Paul VI and Pope Shenouda III, Pope of Alexandria and Patriarch of the See of Saint Mark, signed a common declaration in Rome. It was the first meeting of a Roman pope and a Coptic pope since the fifth century. The declaration confesses one faith in the Incarnate Word, perfect God and perfect man, whose divinity and humanity are united in one real and perfect union, without mingling, without commixtion, without confusion, without alteration, without division and without separation. It states that in Christ his divinity was not separated from his humanity for a moment nor for the twinkling of an eye. The two also established a joint commission and committed their churches to a common pastoral witness.

The Coptic formula in that text is the classical miaphysite one. Rome signed it. That is the ecumenical significance: the Catholic Church affirmed that the Coptic wording expresses the orthodox faith, without either party abandoning its own conciliar tradition.

1984: John Paul II and Patriarch Ignatius Zakka I Iwas

On 23 June 1984 Pope John Paul II and Moran Mor Ignatius Zakka I Iwas, Syriac Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch and All the East, signed a common declaration in Rome that went further in two respects. Doctrinally, it stated that the confusions and schisms that occurred between their churches in later centuries do not affect the substance of their faith, since these arose only because of differences in terminology and culture and in the various formulae adopted by different theological schools to express the same matter, and that they find today no real basis for the sad divisions and schisms that subsequently arose over the doctrinal formulation of the mystery of the Word of God made man.

Pastorally, it made a concrete provision. Where the faithful of either church have no access to a priest of their own church, and material or moral necessity requires it, they may receive the sacraments of penance, the Eucharist and anointing of the sick from a lawful priest of the other. The declaration also provided for cooperation in priestly formation and in the use of church buildings. That level of sacramental sharing is rare, and it exists because both churches recognise the other's priesthood and Eucharist as valid.

1996: John Paul II and Catholicos Karekin I

On 13 December 1996 Pope John Paul II and Catholicos Karekin I of All Armenians signed a common declaration in Rome confessing the same faith in the mystery of the Word Incarnate. The text states that the divisions of the past arose largely from the different meanings attached to the terms used and from the historical and political circumstances of the fifth and sixth centuries, and it professes a common faith in the one Christ, true God and true man, in whom divinity and humanity are united without confusion, without change, without division and without separation. Further declarations with Armenian and other Oriental Orthodox heads have followed the same pattern in later years.

2017: Francis and Pope Tawadros II on Baptism

On 28 April 2017 in Cairo, Pope Francis and Pope Tawadros II signed a common declaration on the mutual recognition of baptism between the Catholic Church and the Coptic Orthodox Church, so that a person baptised in either church who enters the other is not baptised again. The Coptic Orthodox Church had historically rebaptised Catholics received into it, so the declaration resolved a real and painful practical question rather than restating a principle.

The Standing Machinery

A Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue between the Catholic Church and the Oriental Orthodox Churches was established in 2003 and meets regularly, working through the sacraments, the nature of the Church, and the exercise of communion and authority. Alongside it, the Joint Commission of the Theological Dialogue between the Orthodox Church and the Oriental Orthodox Churches, which is the Eastern Orthodox track rather than the Roman one, issued agreed statements in 1989 at the Anba Bishoy Monastery in Egypt and in 1990 at Chambesy in Switzerland finding the Christology of the two families to be the same. Those statements have been received unevenly among Eastern Orthodox churches, and communion between the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox has not been restored.

8. What Remains Open Between Rome and the Six

Four questions remain open after the Christological accords, and all four concern authority rather than the person of Christ. Naming them plainly is more useful than optimism, because the reader who has just read section 7 will reasonably ask why communion has not followed.

The Status of Chalcedon

The Catholic Church holds the Council of Chalcedon to be an ecumenical council whose definition is binding dogma. The Oriental Orthodox Churches do not receive it. If the two families now confess the same faith in Christ, the question is what it would take for the non-Chalcedonians to receive a council they refused, or for Rome to accept a communion in which one party does not hold one of its dogmatic councils. Proposals exist on both sides, including the argument that reception of the faith Chalcedon defended might be distinguishable from reception of the council's text and canons. None has been agreed.

The Later Councils

The same problem multiplies. The Catholic Church counts twenty-one ecumenical councils. The Oriental Orthodox count three. Constantinople II in 553, Constantinople III in 680 to 681, which defined that Christ has two wills, and Nicaea II in 787 on the veneration of images, all stand outside the Oriental Orthodox reception, as do the medieval and modern Western councils. In practice the Oriental Orthodox venerate images and hold to the reality of Christ's human willing, so the doctrinal content of several of these councils is largely uncontested, and their conciliar authority is.

Saints Anathematised on the Other Side

The two traditions honour men the other condemned. The Coptic Church venerates Dioscorus of Alexandria, whom Chalcedon deposed. The Syriac and Coptic churches venerate Severus of Antioch, whom Constantinople condemned. The Catholic Church venerates Leo the Great and Flavian of Constantinople, whom the 449 council deposed. Liturgical texts on both sides carry anathemas against the other's saints. Any restoration of communion requires a settlement of the diptychs and the liturgical books, and this is a genuinely hard pastoral problem rather than a formality, because these names are sung in the liturgy.

Primacy

The role of the Bishop of Rome is the same obstacle here as it is with the Eastern Orthodox. Oriental Orthodox ecclesiology has no universal primate of any kind, since the six churches govern themselves and hold communion by mutual recognition. Catholic teaching holds that the pope has full, supreme and universal jurisdiction, defined at the First Vatican Council in 1870. That question is unresolved between Rome and every other apostolic communion, and our guide to the papacy and the Petrine office sets out the Catholic case.

The Catholic side of this table follows Unitatis Redintegratio 13 to 18, the 1983 Code of Canon Law canon 844, the published texts of the common declarations named in section 7, and the 1993 Directory for the Application of Principles and Norms on Ecumenism. The Oriental Orthodox side varies by church, since each of the six governs its own discipline and none binds the others. Ask the particular church rather than assuming.

9. The Syrian Churches of Kerala

The Saint Thomas Christians of Kerala are one ancient community that has divided into several churches, and untangling them is the single hardest piece of Oriental Orthodox geography. All of them trace their origin to the apostle Thomas and to a Christian presence in south India long predating European contact. The divisions that produced today's map begin with Portuguese pressure in the sixteenth century and the Coonan Cross Oath of 1653, when a large part of the community swore not to submit to the Portuguese Latin hierarchy.

The Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church

The Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church is autocephalous within the Oriental Orthodox communion. It is headed by a Catholicos of the East and Malankara Metropolitan, seated at the Catholicate Aramana at Devalokam in Kottayam, Kerala. Its position is that the Catholicate re-established in Malankara in 1912 gives the Indian church its own head, so it governs itself in full communion with, and not under, the Syriac Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch. It uses the West Syriac liturgy in Malayalam.

The Jacobite Syrian Christian Church

The Jacobite Syrian Christian Church holds the identical faith and liturgy and takes the opposite view of jurisdiction. It recognises the Syriac Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch as its supreme head, and it is an integral part of the Syriac Orthodox Church, with a local Catholicos, the Catholicos of India, under the Patriarch. Members of this church usually call themselves Jacobites or Syriac Orthodox; the name is descriptive of allegiance rather than pejorative in Kerala usage.

The dispute between the two concerns authority and property, and it has run through the Indian courts for more than a century, with major Supreme Court of India judgments and continuing local litigation over individual parish churches. Both churches are Oriental Orthodox. Both are in the same Christological family described in section 4. Reporting the split as a theological division misdescribes it.

The Mar Thoma Syrian Church

The Mar Thoma Syrian Church is a reformed church of the same Kerala Syrian family, formed in the nineteenth century when a reforming movement influenced by Anglican missionaries revised the liturgy in the light of Protestant principles while keeping the West Syriac rite, episcopacy in the historic succession, and the Syrian identity. It is headed by a Metropolitan seated at Tiruvalla. It is in full communion with the Anglican Communion and with the Church of South India and the Church of North India, and it is not part of the Oriental Orthodox communion. It describes itself as apostolic in origin, oriental in worship and episcopal in character, holding a reformed doctrinal position within that Syrian inheritance.

The Malabar Independent Syrian Church

The Malabar Independent Syrian Church, usually known as the Thozhiyoor Church after its seat at Thozhiyoor in Thrissur district, is a small independent church that separated in 1772 and has maintained its own metropolitan since. Its historical importance is out of proportion to its size: at several points its bishops performed the consecrations that kept other Malankara lines going, including consecrations for the Mar Thoma Syrian Church, with which it is in communion. It is not in communion with the Malankara Orthodox or the Jacobite churches.

The Two Eastern Catholic Churches of Kerala

Two Kerala churches are in full communion with Rome and are Eastern Catholic rather than Orthodox. The Syro-Malabar Church keeps the East Syriac tradition and is one of the largest Eastern Catholic churches in the world, headed by a Major Archbishop at Ernakulam. The Syro-Malankara Catholic Church keeps the West Syriac tradition and was formed in 1930 when Mar Ivanios and a group from the Malankara Orthodox side entered communion with Rome; it too is headed by a Major Archbishop, at Trivandrum. Both are treated in our guide to the Eastern Catholic Churches.

10. Worship, Fasting and Daily Life

Oriental Orthodox worship is long, sung, incensed and physical, and it is the main way these churches hand on their faith. There is no single Oriental Orthodox rite. The Coptic, West Syriac, Armenian, Ge'ez and Malankara traditions have their own eucharistic prayers, calendars, chant systems and church architecture, and a Copt visiting an Armenian liturgy is visiting a foreign country in every respect except faith.

The Liturgies

The Coptic Church uses the Liturgy of Saint Basil as its ordinary eucharistic liturgy, with the Liturgies of Saint Gregory and Saint Cyril at set times. The Syriac Orthodox and the Malankara churches use the Anaphora of Saint James as their principal liturgy, with a very large collection of other anaphoras available. The Armenian Church uses a single eucharistic liturgy, the Patarag. The Ethiopian and Eritrean churches have around fourteen anaphoras in their books. Services are long, often running for several hours with the congregation standing, and the singing is unaccompanied or accompanied by cymbals, triangle and drum depending on the tradition.

Fasting

The fasting discipline of these churches is among the strictest in Christianity. Coptic and Ethiopian practice keeps a large number of fasting days across the year, including the Great Fast before Pascha, the Fast of the Nativity, the Fast of the Apostles, the Fast of the Virgin, the Fast of Nineveh, and Wednesdays and Fridays through most of the year. The fast is usually a vegan abstention from all animal products together with a delay of the first meal until a set hour. Devout Ethiopian Orthodox Christians keep fasting days across well over half the year. A Latin Catholic who thinks of Lenten discipline as two days of fasting and some Friday abstinence should hold that comparison in mind before discussing rigour with anyone from these churches.

Images and Music

All six churches venerate images, and their visual traditions are distinct. Coptic iconography has its own frontal, large-eyed style. Ethiopian painting has a strong colour palette and narrative crowding that is instantly recognisable. Armenian illuminated manuscripts are a major body of medieval art. Syriac tradition is comparatively restrained in imagery and correspondingly rich in hymnography, with the metrical homilies of Ephrem and Jacob of Serugh at its centre. The Armenian khachkar, a carved cross-stone, is a distinctive devotional form.

Marriage, Clergy and Governance

Parish clergy in these churches are normally married men ordained after marriage, while bishops are chosen from monastics, the same pattern as in the Christian East generally. Each of the six is governed by its own synod under its own patriarch or catholicos, and there is no appeal beyond it. The Coptic Church has an unusual method for the final stage of choosing its pope: after the synod narrows the field, a blindfolded child draws one name from the altar, a practice used in the elections of recent Coptic popes including Tawadros II in 2012.

11. Four Families Commonly Confused

Four distinct families of Eastern Christianity get merged in ordinary usage, and the merges cause real errors. The table below separates them by the councils they receive and by their relationship with Rome, which is the cleanest way to keep them apart.

Oriental Orthodox and Eastern Orthodox

These two are separate communions and are not in communion with each other. The Eastern Orthodox are Chalcedonian and Byzantine, headed in order of honour by the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople as first among equals. The Oriental Orthodox are non-Chalcedonian, with six independent traditions and no universal first see. Their joint dialogue produced agreed Christological statements in 1989 and 1990 that have not led to restored communion. If a source lumps them together under "Orthodox", any number or claim it makes about either needs checking. Our separate guide to the Eastern Orthodox Church covers that communion in detail, and the Great Schism of 1054 is a different event from the division of 451.

The Assyrian Church of the East

The Assyrian Church of the East is a fourth family and belongs on neither side of the Chalcedonian line as usually drawn. It grew up in the Persian empire outside Roman jurisdiction, receives Nicaea and Constantinople, did not receive Ephesus in 431, and holds a dyophysite Christology in the tradition of Theodore of Mopsuestia. Western writing has long labelled it Nestorian, a label the church rejects. On 11 November 1994 Pope John Paul II and Patriarch Mar Dinkha IV signed a Common Christological Declaration in which both churches confessed one Christ, true God and true man, and recognised the legitimacy of each other's liturgical expressions of Mary as Mother of Christ our God and Saviour and as Mother of God. That church is not Oriental Orthodox, and its history should not be folded into this one.

Eastern Catholic Churches

The Eastern Catholic Churches keep Eastern liturgy, law and spirituality in full communion with Rome. Several of them come from the same ancestral traditions as the Oriental Orthodox, including the Coptic Catholic, Armenian Catholic, Syriac Catholic, Ethiopian Catholic, Eritrean Catholic and Syro-Malankara Catholic Churches. They are Catholic and they are not Latin rite, and confusing them either with Roman Catholics of the Latin rite or with the Orthodox churches they resemble liturgically is a common error. See our guide to the Eastern Catholic Churches.

12. What a Catholic Reader Should Do With This

A Catholic who has read this far has a short list of practical obligations, and they are the ordinary duties of truthfulness and charity rather than anything specialised. Speak about these churches accurately. Use their own names for themselves. Stop using monophysite, which names a heresy they condemn.

Learn the Names

Knowing that the head of the Coptic Orthodox Church is called Pope of Alexandria, that Tewahedo means unified, that the Syriac Orthodox pray in a form of the language Jesus spoke, and that the Malankara churches of Kerala are apostolic foundations in their own account, changes the tone of every conversation. These are ancient churches with valid orders and a valid Eucharist, and they have kept the faith under conditions of pressure that most Western churches have never faced.

Pray for the Persecuted

Christians in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Ethiopia and Eritrea have been killed, displaced and pressured within living memory and within the last decade. The twenty-one men murdered in Libya in 2015 are in the Roman Martyrology at the decision of Pope Francis, which means the Catholic Church asks its own faithful to honour them. Praying for these churches by name is a concrete act available to anyone. Our collection of daily prayers includes intercessions you can adapt.

Understand Before Responding

The Catholic position holds that Chalcedon is a true ecumenical council whose definition is binding, and that the Oriental Orthodox confession of Christ, as stated in the common declarations, is orthodox. Both of those are Catholic teaching and they are held together. Anyone arguing the Catholic case should be able to state the miaphysite position as Severus of Antioch stated it before answering it, which is the pattern the whole modern dialogue has followed and the reason it succeeded. For the wider Catholic approach to Christian unity see our guide to ecumenism, and for how the Church holds Scripture and Tradition together, our guide to Sacred Tradition.

13. Related Topics