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the in?nite worth of the Son of God, is the very ground of all things believed con-
cerning life and salvation by that which Christ either did or su?ered as man in
our belief.” (Laws 52.3). In the following consideration of the teaching of St
Cyril, Hooker maintains both the importance of St Cyril’s insistence on the
unity of the divinity and humanity in the single person of Christ, while repudi-
ating any Eutychian interpretation of that unity. Hooker quotes with approval
Cyril’s letter to Nestorius: “His two natures have knit themselves the one to
the other, and are in that nearness as uncapable of confusion as of distraction.
Their coherence hath not taken away the di?erence between them. Flesh is not
become God but doth still continue ?esh, although it be now the ?esh of
God.” (Laws 53.2). Anglicans continue to hold this tradition as normative today.

7. The term ‘monophysite’, which has been falsely used to describe the Chris-
tology of the Oriental Orthodox Churches, is both misleading and o?ensive as
it implies Eutychianism. Anglicans, together with the wider oikumene, use the
accurate term ‘miaphysite’ to refer to the Cyrilline teaching of the family of
Oriental Orthodox Churches, and furthermore call each of these Churches by
their o?cial title of ‘Oriental Orthodox’. The teaching of this family confesses
not a single nature but One Incarnate united divine-human nature of the Word
of God. To say ‘a single nature’ would be to imply that the human nature was
absorbed in his divinity, as was taught by Eutyches.

8. We agree that God the Word became incarnate by uniting His divine uncre-
ated nature, with its natural will and energy, to created human nature, with its
natural will and energy. The union of natures is natural, hypostatic, real and
perfect. The natures are distinguished in our mind in thought alone. He who
wills and acts is always the one hypostasis of the Logos incarnate with one per-
sonal will. In the Armenian tradition in the 12th century St Nerses the Graceful
(Shenorhali) writes: “We do not think that the divine will opposes the human
will and vice versa. We do not think either that the will of the one nature was
di?erent at di?erent times, sometimes the will was divine, when He wanted to
show His divine power, and sometimes it was human, when He wanted to show
human humility.”

9. The perfect union of divinity and of humanity in the incarnate Word is es-
sential to the salvation of the human race. “For God so loved the world that he
gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but
may have eternal life” (John 3.16 NRSV), and “In Christ God was reconciling
the world to himself ’ (2 Cor 5.19). The Son of God emptied himself and became

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