Wednesday, August 19, 2015

Carpe Diem #800 Monophytism


Dear Haijin, visitors and travelers,

As prepared the prompt list for this month I discovered a theological idea which I had never heard of. It's directly the result of the monotheistic belief of The Aten, the religion "invented" by Akhenaten, and was the base of the most christian religions. I had never heard of Monophysitism our prompt for today. It isn't an easy prompt so I thought to give a brief explanation of the meaning and birth of it.

A brief definition of Monophysitism can be given as: "Jesus Christ, who is identical with the Son, is one person and one hypostasis in one nature: divine."

Monophysitism was born in the theological "School of Alexandria", which began its Christological analysis with the (divine) eternal Son or Word of God and sought to explain how this eternal Word had become incarnate as a man—in contrast to the "School of Antioch" (birthplace of Nestorianism, the antithesis of Monophysitism), which instead began with the (human) Jesus of the Gospels and sought to explain how this man had become united with the eternal Word in the Incarnation. Both sides agreed, of course, that Christ was both human and divine, but the Alexandrians emphasized divinity (including the fact that the divine nature was itself "impassible" or immune to suffering) while the Antiochines emphasized humanity (including the limited knowledge and "growth in wisdom" of the Christ of the Gospels). Individual Monophysite and Nestorian theologians in fact rarely believed the extreme views that their respective opponents attributed to them (although some of their followers may have). Ultimately, however, the dialectic between the schools of Alexandria and Antioch produced Christologies that on all sides (notwithstanding ongoing differences between the Oriental Orthodox and Chalcedonian churches) avoided the extremes and reflect both points of view. (Source: Wikipedia)

Sailing on The Nile

In the part of the world were we are this month, the region of The Nile, 
Monophysitism is the mean idea of Jesus as a divine being. Because of the difficult prompt today, I have tried to bring it here in another way.
As I look at Monophysitism and haiku than there is in a way a connection between the two ideas. In Monophysitism Jesus is seen as divine and isn't that the way we, haijin, look at nature itself? Don't we see nature as divine? All our haiku (and tanka maybe) are based on the idea of nature and mankind as part of it. Isn't nature the most important theme of our beloved haiku? We can see that e.g. in the use of kigo (seasonwords) which connects our haiku with nature. In the classical way of writing haiku we have to use a kigo, a word that points us to the season in which the haiku is written. 
In my opinion, as a believer of the Creation, all and everything is divine. This divinity I see in everything and everyone. It's based on the idea of seeing God in all and everything and that God is everything. So that tells us that nature is divine. Haiku and Monophysitism I think can be seen as the same idea.

I have sought out my archive to find a haiku fitting this idea and I think I found one:

rustling bamboo -
song of a Nightingale fades away
a new day rises

a new day rises
in the mystery of the dawn
the sound of rain

© Chèvrefeuille

I know this prompt isn't easy, so ... just try to catch the idea which I gave here "haiku is nature, so haiku is divine".

This episode is open for your submissions tonight at 7.00 PM (CET) and will remain open until August 22nd at noon (CET). I will try to publish our next episode, Khartoum, later on.

3 comments:

  1. Wonderfully challenging post. I'll be spending eight hours in the car tomorrow and this will be something to try and get my head around and come up with words that are worthy of the topic. [Not while I am taking over part of the driving :-]

    ReplyDelete
  2. very interesting reading about Monophysitism for the first time; and an equally interesting prompt

    much love...

    ReplyDelete
  3. I like these interesting challenges. On a personal level I find it hard to understand how anyone of literary or visual artistry could not or would not interpret the beauty of the natural world as a testament to a divine power. Atheism has to be intrinsically alien to a true artist.

    ReplyDelete