DAMIANITI. - A sect of the sixth and seventh centuries, so called after the Monophysite patriarch of Alexandria, Damiano (578–604), who drew inspiration from Severian Monophysitism. The error imputed to him, and which caused a schism between the Monophysites of Egypt and those of Antioch, concerned the Trinity.
Damiano already made the distinction later made by our Latin scholastics between the conceptus in and the conceptus ad in defining the divine person. He taught that the latter, taken as person, is constituted by the hypostatic property, that is to say, the opposed relation, Gaetano’s conceptus ad. United to the divine nature, with which moreover it is identified in reality, the hypostatic property becomes the concrete person, who 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. There is nothing unorthodox in all this.
Polemic spirit, combined with personal issues, confused everything. The dispute concerned words; but through the logomachy Copts and Syrians undoubtedly came to understand one another, and at the Synod of Alexandria in 616 they sealed their union.
The D. were also called “tetradites,” because Damiano seemed to wish to introduce a fourth hypostasis into the Trinity, saying that each person participated in the common essence of divinity.