Nielsen’s Nook

With the dangerous lack of coherence in the Chalcedonian apologetics, the debate gravitated towards questions of theopaschism, manifested especially in radical opposition of Chacedonians against the altered Trisagion: “Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, crucified for us, have mercy on us. This interpolated form was not “formally heretical” because it was addressed to Christ and not the Trinity; however, it had become the rallying cry for the Monophysites. So the polarity of the spectrum of this debate can be articulated like this:

• Monophysites: God was crucified for us.
• Chalcedonians: Only the manhood of the Logos was crucified for us.

This was the same problem that had been debated in the years prior to Ephesus concerning the term θεοτόκος (theotokos - mother of God), referring to Mary. Could the Logos really “be born” of the Virgin? Could God really be the “son of Mary”? Cyril in asserting the full theological validity of θεοτόκος against Nestorius declared in his twelfth anathematism that “the Word had suffered in the flesh”. “At stake were Christ’s identity itself and the nature of the union ‘according to the hypostasis’ defined at Chalcedon.” Since everyone admitted that God was impassible a real distinction had to be achieved between nature and hypostasis (p 70).

St. Gregory Nazianzen had made this pre-Nicene idea integral to his soteriology: “We need a God made in the flesh and put to death (ἐδεήθημεν Θεοῦ σαρκουμένου καί νεκρουμένου) in order that we could live again.” Even the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed confesses a “Son of God”, born “of the Virgin Mary”, and “crucified for us under Pontius Pilate”. It is the confession of Nicaea, with which Cyril was preoccupied, that hinged upon whether or not Mary was the Mother of God or the Word suffered in the flesh.

Meanwhile at Antioch, there were philosophical reservations. While Antioch admitted to Christ’s unity of being, confessed at Chalcedon by the term hypostasis, their difficulty remained in the fact that God who is impassible seemed to have passibility imputed to him. So the question emerged: Did God have to make death his own to vanquish it? While the Antiochene confessed the union of Christ as a doctrine, their inability to admit a distinction between nature and hypostasis resulted in only something, a nature or the flesh, dying on the cross rather than someone, the whole Christ Jesus.

John the Grammarian
John the Grammarian, in his Apology, articulated a defense for the Chalcedonian position. His defense rested on the necessity, acknowledged by the Monophysites, to assert Christ’s double consubstantiality: to the Father and to us. As the argument went, if this double consubstantiality is true in Christ, the result is two natures or substances since “the same nature could not be consubstantial to God and creatures” (p 72). The Grammarian helps us to see that the Chalcedonian definition must be understood in connection with the Cappadocians’ Trinitarian terminology. It is the thought of John the Grammarian that prepared the framework into which Leontius of Byzantium’s christological terminology fit after it had been sifted from its Origenic context.

Leontius of Jerusalem
No progress with the Monophysites was accomplished until the hypostasis of the union of Christ’s natures was identified with pre-existent hypostasis of the Logos. This connection made possible the doctrinal continuity between Cyril and Chalcedon. The chief contributor of this connection was Leontius of Jerusalem (LJ), not to be confused with Leontius of Byzantium, prominent in the previous chapter. While Leontius of Byzantium (LB) confessed multiple pre-existent hypostases of Christ (upto 3) since he refused to identify Christ with the Logos, Leontius of Jerusalem “violently attacked the ontological presuppositions of such a christology” (p 74).

Christ’s humanity, according to LJ, did not possess the hypostasis of normal human beings (body/soul). He insists that Christ’s hypostasis, belonging to the divine Logos, is not “particular” but is instead “common”. Thus Christ unites all humanity and not only a single individual to the divinity. (p 74)

- Christ’s Concrete Humanity
This idea rests on the conception of the imago Dei. St. Gregory of Nyssa saw the imago as belonging not to individuals but to humanity corporately. St. Iranaeus built his doctrine of salvation on the idea of “recapitulation” which was taken up again by Cyril, who asserts, “the incarnate Word ‘possesses us himself, since he took over our nature and made of our body the body of the Word’” (p 75).

The synonymity of “nature” and “hypostasis” in Cyril, coupled with the absence of a stable metaphysical system and the presupposition that individuation was a result of the Fall (Plato) made Cyril’s approach unjustifiable for LJ. It is LJ who argues that Christ has a rational soul contra Cyril’s unwitting Apollonarian assertion of the relationship between the two substances of Christ’s humanity.

LJ runs amuck on the shores of incoherence because he is unable to conceive a metaphysical definition of the hypostasis. Since Chalcedon distinguishes between nature and hypostasis in christology, it has become natural to apply to the theology of the incarnation the concepts that the Cappadocian Fathers used to express the mystery of the Trinity. If one takes hypostasis as “existence” as LJ did, then the Trinity is reduced to three gods. On the other hand, if one follows Thomas Aquinas in saying that the hypostases are but “relations”within the divine essence, then the theopaschite position of Cyril must be interpreted as applying to the divine nature itself.

Neither the Trinity or the Incarnation can be defined in the economies of Plato or Aristotle, in which the abstract and concrete stand in opposition to one another. According to the Cappadocians hypostasis cannot be reduced to the “particular” or “relation”. Rather, while not being predicated on nature, it is the principle of the nature’s existence.

This conception assumes that God, as personal being, is not totally bound to his own nature; the hypostatic existence is flexible, “open”; it admits the possibility of divine acts outside of the nature (energies) and implies that God can personally and freely assume a fully human existence while remaining God, whose nature remains completely transcendent. (p 77)

In this way, the Word remains impassible in his divine nature, but suffers in his human nature.