Miaphysite

Part of speech: noun, adjective

Definitions

1. A follower of the Christian theological position that Christ possessed a single, unified divine nature rather than separate divine and human natures
2. An adherent of the ancient Christian belief that holds Christ to have had one composite nature combining divine and human aspects
3. A proponent of the theological view that emphasizes the unity of Christ's nature as a single entity rather than a duality of natures

Etymology: Miaphysite is a term from the theological disputes over the nature of Christ, and it is a modern coinage built from Greek pieces: "mía", meaning "one", and "phúsis", meaning "nature" or "substance", with the English suffix "-ite" added to name a follower of a doctrine. The doctrine it names is that Christ has one united nature, formed from the divine and the human, a position associated with the Christian communities of Egypt, Syria and Armenia that rejected the definition agreed at the Council of Chalcedon in 451. The word itself belongs to a much later period. Its root "miaphysitism" follows the same pattern, a modern label for a position that its adherents themselves did not use as a name for their own church. Because the word was coined to classify a position rather than to describe a community's self-understanding, its usage has a deliberately analytical flavour. The notion of "one nature" was itself a point of heated argument, and the pairing of "one" with "nature" in the Greek is central to why the term was made in the first place.

Synonyms: monophysite