EGYPTIANS AND RUTHENIANS

Michelangelo’s design for Piazza del Campidoglio took about 120 years to complete (the statue of Marcus Aurelius was set up in 1538 and Palazzo Nuovo was finished in 1654). A scenographic backdrop to the piazza is supplied by Palazzo Senatorio, dedicated in 1598. As it happens, the pope at the time was Clement VIII, who is probably best known to history for the execution of Beatrice Cenci – together with her brother and step-mother – on charges of parricide.

Clement’s inscription on Palazzo Senatorio amounts to a catalog of his achievements from the date of his election in 1592 to 1598 (Latin Inscriptions of Rome, 1.7A). These accomplishments include the relief of Esztergom (in Hungary) from a Turkish siege, the negotiation of peace between France and Spain, and the reconciliation of the Holy See with Henry of Navarre (who, upon converting to Catholicism in 1593 in order to obtain papal sanction as king of France, famously quipped that Paris was worth a mass: Paris vaut bien une messe).

The least perspicuous item in the list is undoubtedly: RVTHENOS ET AEGYPTIOS RO(manae) EC(clesiae) RESTITVTOS (‘the restoration of the Ruthenians and Egyptians to the Roman church’). The Ruthenians are the easier of the two: ‘Ruthenian’ is the Latin name for an Orthodox Slavic community dwelling in the territory of what was historically the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (today’s Belarus and Ukraine). By the Union of Brest-Litovsk, implemented in 1596, the Metropolitan of Kiev and five bishops entered communion with Rome with the right to retain their ancestral liturgy: thus the Ruthenians became Catholic.

The case of the ‘Egyptians’ is rather less clear-cut. My first idea was that the reference concerned the Maronites of Lebanon, whose liturgy was reformed by Clement VIII. The Maronites are however in no sense Egyptians: the reference in fact concerns the Copts – the native Christians of Egypt. The name ‘Copt’ comes from the Arabic qubti, derived from Greek aeguptios, ‘Egyptian’ (whence also the Latin aegyptius). The Copts of the present inscription were delegates of Gabriel VII – or, more properly, Jibrā’īl VII – the Coptic Patriarch of Alexandria (1590–1601). Gabriel had been persuaded by an emissary of Pope Sixtus V to renounce the thousand-year-old Christology of his church and to make his submission to Rome.

Here we find ourselves on the notoriously treacherous terrain of Trinitarian theology. In its doctrine of the hypostatic union of the natures, classical Christian orthodoxy steers a middle path between Nestorian dyophysitism (the view that the divine and human natures of Christ were conjoined rather than united, condemned by the Council of Ephesus in AD 431) and Eutychian monophysitism (the view that Christ’s human nature was dissolved in his divine nature, condemned by the Council of Chalcedon in AD 451). Like other churches of the East, the Copts profess miaphysitism, which holds that Christ had a single nature possessing both a divine and a human character; from the point of view of orthodoxy, this is – alas! – materially equivalent to monophysitism.

Although the delegates bearing Gabriel’s profession of faith were received into communion by Clement VIII in 1597, the patriarch’s conversion remained a purely personal affair; in no sense were the Copts restored to the Roman church. Indeed, the notion that the Copts had ever formed part of that church reflects an anachronistic retrojection of Roman primacy into the era of the Christological controversies that saw the schism between the Oriental Orthodox churches and the church at large.