DAMIANITES. - A sect of the 6th-7th centuries, so called after the Monophysite patriarch of Alexandria, Damian (578-604), who was inspired by Severian Monophysitism. The error with which he was reproached and which caused a schism between the Monophysites of Egypt and those of Antioch concerns the Trinity.
Damian already made the distinction that our Latin Scholastics would later make between the conceptus in and the conceptus ad in order to define the divine person. He taught that this person, taken as a person, is constituted by the hypostatic property, which is to say the opposed relation, the conceptus ad of Cajetan. United to the divine nature, with which, moreover, it is identified in reality, the hypostatic property becomes the concrete person, which is God. God the Father is the relation of paternity with the divine nature. God the Son is the relation of filiation with the same divine nature. Nothing in all this that is not orthodox.
The polemical spirit, combined with personal quarrels, confused everything. There was disputing over words; but through the logomachy Copts and Syrians undoubtedly ended by coming to an understanding, and at the Synod of Alexandria of 616 they sealed the union.
The Damianites were also called "tetradites," since Damian showed himself willing to introduce a fourth hypostasis into the Trinity, saying that each person participated in the common essence of the divinity.