Aftartodocetae

AFTARTODOCETAE. - A name composed of two Greek words: ἀγάπητος ("incorruptible") and ἀγάπητα ("docetae" [v.]), used to designate the partisans of the Monophysite Julian, bishop of Halicarnassus, on account of their doctrine concerning the incorruptibility of the body of Jesus Christ before his resurrection. These are also called Gaianites or Gainites, from the name of their first bishop Gaianas, consecrated at Alexandria in 536; Julianists, from the name of their principal theologian and true founder; Phantasiasts, since Catholics attributed the error of the Docetae to these sectaries. The Latins translated the word a. as "incorrupticola."

Since several Greek Fathers had taught that Adam, before sin, had an impassible, incorruptible body, exempt from the deficiencies of animal life, Julian and his disciples attributed an identical state to the humanity of Our Lord, from the very first instant of his conception. According to them, by nature and as a permanent condition, the body of the incarnate Word was impassible before the resurrection just as it was afterward; by a pure miracle, which was frequently renewed during his mortal life, Jesus freely subjected to the infirmities that have nothing reprehensible about them - such as hunger, thirst, cold, fatigue, death itself - his impassible flesh, thus derogating from the laws that governed it. Christ truly suffered and truly died, but by miracle.

This thesis was vigorously attacked by Severus of Antioch, who upheld the true doctrine, teaching that the Word took a passible and mortal body, like that of Adam after his fall. The controversy, which arose around 510, when the two acephale Monophysites were at Constantinople, reached its greatest development between 518 and 520, the period in which the two antagonists fought each other in a series of writings more or less lengthy. Of Julian's writings only a few fragments remain, while those of Severus have been preserved in Syriac translation.

The dispute had as its result the division of the anti-Chalcedonians into two equal factions. From 536 the party of Julian organized itself into a separate Church with its own hierarchy, of which Gaianas was the first bishop, and it maintained itself in Egypt until around the beginning of the 9th century, seeking to spread into Asia Minor and the Indies. It exercised a visible influence on certain Armenian theologians. There were also Catholics who upheld this doctrine, and the emperor Justinian I, on the eve of his death, in 564, wished by a decree to impose it on the whole Byzantine Church.

From the theological point of view, Aphthartodocetism seems to hold a middle way between the verbal Monophysitism of Severus and the crude Monophysitism of Eutyches; various formulas of Julian really bring it close to the latter.

Martino Jugie