AFTARTODOCETI. — A name composed of two Greek words: ἀγάπητος (“incorruptible”) and ἀγάπητα (“doceti” [v.]), used to designate the partisans of the Monophysite Giuliano, bishop of Halicarnassus, on account of their doctrine concerning the incorruptibility of the body of Jesus Christ before his resurrection. They 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; and Phantasiasts, since the Catholics attributed to these sectarians the error of the Docetists. The Latins translated the word a. as “incorrupticola.”
Since several Greek Fathers had taught that Adam, before the sin, possessed an impassible and incorruptible body, exempt from the deficiencies of animal life, Giuliano and his disciples attributed an identical condition 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; through a pure miracle, which was repeatedly renewed during his mortal life, Jesus freely subjected his impassible flesh to infirmities that have nothing preventable about them—such as hunger, thirst, cold, fatigue, and death itself—thus setting aside the laws that governed II. Christ truly suffered and truly died, but by a miracle.
This thesis was vigorously opposed by Severo of Antioch, who upheld the true doctrine, teaching that the Word had assumed a passible and mortal body, like that of Adam after his fall. The controversy, which arose around 510, when the two acephalous Monophysites were in Constantinople, reached its fullest development between 518 and 520, when the two antagonists fought one another in a series of more or less lengthy writings. Of Giuliano’s writings only a few fragments remain, whereas those of Severo have been preserved in Syriac translation.
The dispute resulted in dividing the anti-Chalcedonians into two equal factions. As early as 536, Giuliano’s party organized itself into a separate Church with its own hierarchy, of which Gaianas was the first bishop, and it remained in Egypt until about the beginning of the ninth century, seeking to spread into Asia Minor and India. It exerted 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 to impose it on the entire Byzantine Church by decree.
From the theological point of view, Aftartodocetism seems to follow a middle path between Severo’s verbal Monophysitism and the crude Monophysitism of Eutyches; several of Giuliano’s formulas in fact bring him close to the latter.