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Leontius of Byzantium, Leontius of Jerusalem and the Unfinished Business of the Council of Chalcedon Dennis M

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Leontius of Byzantium, Leontius of Jerusalem and the Unfinished Business of the Council of Chalcedon Dennis M Louvain Studies 22 (1997) 311-327 “Hypostatized in the Logos” Leontius of Byzantium, Leontius of Jerusalem and the Unfinished Business of the Council of Chalcedon Dennis M. Ferrara In an age such as ours, with its easy contempt for both tradition and metaphysics, it is not surprising that the profound traditional doctrine of the enhypostasis of Christ’s humanity in the person of the eternal Logos should experience widespread and not so benign neglect. Not the least sign of this neglect is the tendency to “freeze” the account of patristic Christology at the Council of Chalcedon and to treat subse- quent developments, among which the enhypostasis stands pre-emi- nent, more or less as mop-up operations without decisive import for the interpretation of Chalcedon itself. As a result of this historical atom- ization, the two-nature, one-Person doctrine of the council begins to lead an unhistorical life of its own, subject to “retrievals” which, while congenial to the contemporary mind, often exhibit little or no connec- tion with the true teaching of the council. The doctrine of enhypostasis counters such theological errancy with the sobering dogma of the Church, which required precisely this doctrine not for the mere techni- cal refinement of Chalcedon but for the embattled resolution of its unfinished business. Far, then, from being the product of arid theologi- cal speculation, as the term taken in itself might suggest, the enhyposta- sis emerged as a response to an historical problem and hence requires for its adequate understanding a more than cursory foray into theological history. Such an exercise, however, is likely to be stalled at the outset unless the question of the authorship of the enhypostasis is settled. Historically, there have been two principal claimants to this honor, both of whom wrote in the first half of the sixth century and both, to compound the 312 DENNIS M. FERRARA problem, named Leontius – Leontius of Byzantium and Leontius of Jerusalem. Several recent studies, however, have shown the claim of Leontius of Byzantium to be unfounded, the result of an erroneous interpretation given this Leontius by the Protestant historian Friedrich Loofs in 1887.1 The true author of the enhypostasis doctrine, as will presently be documented in detail, is Leontius of Jerusalem. Unfortu- nately, efforts to debunk the fraudulent claim of the first Leontius have not always gone hand in hand with acknowledgement of the valid claim of the second. What is far worse, some have used the scholarly unmasking of Loofs’s error as an occasion for impugning the truth of the enhypostasis doctrine itself. Brian Daley, for example, referring to Barth’s “treatment of the anhypostasia of the humanity of Christ on its own, and of its enhypostasia in the Logos,” characterizes it as “a doc- trine distantly inspired, at least, by the portrait of Leontius [of Byzan- tium] drawn by Loofs and Harnack” and as one which “stands far closer to the Christology of Severus of Antioch than it does to that of Leontius”2 – in other words, as the fruit of a deviant monophysitism rather than, as it is, the necessary development of orthodox Christian faith. F. LeRon Shults builds on what for Daley is only a passing remark to launch a full-scale polemic against the enhypostasis doctrine, labeling it not only a “theory”3 but an “error of the past”4 which should be avoided in order to ensure “the clarity of believers’ confes- sion that Jesus Christ the Lord is fully divine and fully human in one person.”5 In delivering these nugatory judgements on the enhypostasis, nei- ther Daley nor Shults exhibits any awareness of its authorship by Leon- tius of Jerusalem; Daley mentions this Leontius not at all, Schults only 1. Brian E. Daley, S.J., “A Richer Union: Leontius of Byzantium and the Rela- tionship of the Human and Divine in Christ,” Studia Patristica 24 (1993) 239-265 at 264; F. LeRon Shults, “A Dubious Christological Formula: From Leontius of Byzan- tium to Karl Barth,” Theological Studies 57 (1996) 431-446. All references to Daley and Shults in the present article are to these works. Also of note are two works of Aloys Grillmeier, S.J.: “Die anthropologische-christologische Sprache des Leontius von Byzanz und ihre Beziehung zu den Symmikta Zetemata des Neuplatonikers Porphyrius,” EPMHNEYMATA: Festschrift Hadwig Horner, ed. Herbert Eisenberger (Heidelberg: Winter, 1990) 61-72; “The Understanding of the Christological Definitions of Both (Oriental Orthodox and Roman Catholic) Traditions in the Light of the Post-Chal- cedonian Theology (Analysis of Terminologies in a Conceptual Framework),” Christ East and West, ed. Paul Fries and Tiran Nersoyan (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1987) 65-82 at 80. 2. Daley, “A Richer Union,” 264. 3. Shults, “A Dubious Christological Formula,” 432 and passim. 4. Ibid., 433. 5. Ibid., 431, 446. “HYPOSTATIZED IN THE LOGOS” 313 in passing and in a way which masks the sharp divergence of his thought from that of his namesake from Byzantium.6 This silence might be considered excusable on the ground that both authors, Daley in par- ticular, are concerned with elucidating the Christology of Leontius of Byzantium. But the excuse only holds if we examine Leontius’s Chris- tology apart from the controversy that raged after Chalcedon and was resolved at II Constantinople. When located clearly and exactly within this historical mise-en-scene, and especially when contrasted with the Christology of Leontius of Jerusalem, the Christology of Leontius of Byzantium appears in a light far different from that shone on it by Daley and Shults. This difference, in turn, is decisive in assessing the view of the same authors on the far weightier matter of the enhyposta- sis doctrine itself. In what follows, I will approach the latter by way of the former, contrasting the theologies of the two Leontiuses within the context of the Christological controversy of the sixth century as a way of bringing to light the origin of the enhypostasis doctrine, and concluding with reflections on the necessity of the doctrine for interpreting the formula of Chalcedon. By way of introduction, I will attempt an initial clarifica- tion, vis-a-vis the presentations of Shults and Daley, of what Leontius of Byzantium did and did not say. What Leontius of Byzantium Did and Did Not Say As to what Leontius of Byzantium did not say, Shults correctly cites the findings of Daley and Grillmeier that the en in the term enhy- postaton used by Leontius in the famous passage from Contra Nestoria- nos et Eutychianos is “not a localizing prefix” and that the term does not therefore mean “to exist within something else,” but simply “to exist,” “to have a concrete actuality.”7 The term anhypostaton, accordingly, means precisely and only the opposite – to lack real existence. From a purely terminological viewpoint,8 then, Shults summarizes correctly when he states that, “throughout the first millennium of Christian theology,” 6. Shults, “A Dubious Christological Formula,” 438, n. 23. 7. Ibid., 438. 8. No small reason for Shults’s position is the rigid connection he establishes between the enhypostasis doctrine and the adjectival term enhypostaton used by Leontius of Byzantium. This rigidity leads him to neglect the vast preponderance of the actual historical evidence for the doctrine, as detailed below (318-323) and finally to the his- torically outlandish claim that the enhypostasis “theory” originated in 17th-century Protestant scholasticism (431-433, 441-443). 314 DENNIS M. FERRARA enhypostaton and anhypostaton “mean simply ‘subsisting’ and ‘not sub- sisting’ respectively.”9 He is therefore also correct in labeling as erroneous the prevailing scholarly view that Leontius “introduced a philosophical theory … to help explain how two natures can exist in a single hypos- tasis,” namely, by redefining the term enhypostaton “to signify a nature that has its existence not in its own hypostasis but in the hypostasis of another nature.”10 Daley argues similarly,11 but then moves the argument a momentous step further by citing the erroneous view of von Harnack, who, “adopt[ing] Loofs’s reading of Leontius completely,” identified the enhypostasis as an expression of heterodox monophysitism,12 a view with which, judging from his assessment of Barth as cited above, Daley himself seems to be in agreement. As to what Leontius actually did say, Shults offers good insight by focusing his presentation around Leontius’s analysis of the various modes of union, the tropos tes henoseos,13 a view lent greater specificity by Daley’s contention that exploration of Chalcedon’s “way of ‘uncon- fused and inseparable union’ … becomes the fundamental project of Leontius’s theology, the unifying theme that provides both the cate- gories of his questioning and the shape of his conclusions.”14 Viewed within this Chalcedonian problematic, what for Shults is Leontius’s “paradigmatic analogy”15 and for Daley his “principal model”16 for under- standing Christ’s unity, namely, the union of soul and body, assumes particular significance. For in developing this model, Leontius, as Daley explains him, drew extensively on the thought of the 4th-century neo- Platonist Nemesius of Emesa (a dependence also noted, as Daley points out, by Grillmeier17) to argue that, just as “each human individual is a ‘composite’ of two natures in a single hypostasis,”18 so Christ’s hyposta- sis is a unique “composite” of the divine and human natures.19 This analogy seems to result in a “consequent” or “a posteriori” conception of Christ’s hypostasis, insofar as the mia hypostasis of Christ appears as the 9. Shults, “A Dubious Christological Formula,” 431. 10. Ibid. 11. Daley, “A Richer Union,” 241. 12. Ibid., 242. 13. Shults, “A Dubious Christological Formula,” 435.
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