Louvain Studies 22 (1997) 311-327

“Hypostatized in the Logos” Leontius of Byzantium, Leontius of Jerusalem and the Unfinished Business of the 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 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 than it does to that of Leontius”2 – in other words, as the fruit of a deviant 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. 14. Daley, “A Richer Union,” 246. 15. Shults, “A Dubious Christological Formula,” 435. 16. Daley, “A Richer Union,” 254. 17. Ibid. 252. Sources in Grillmeier noted by Daley include, “Die anthropologi- sche-christologische Sprache des Leontius von Byzanz” and the treatment of Leontius in the German edition of Christ in Christian Tradition, Vol. II, Part 1. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 257-258. “HYPOSTATIZED IN THE LOGOS” 315 end result or product (apotelesma is Leontius’s term) of the unity of natures.20 Of related importance is Leontius’s celebrated definition of hypos- tasis as “that which exists by itself” (to kath’ heauto einai).21 For Leontius himself, this definition has none of the “metaphysical” resonances it has for us; rather, as Daley explains, he followed Porphyry and the Cap- padocians in understanding hypostasis by way of the idiomata, which are “particular characteristics of time, place, quality, and relation … that define each individual within [an] intelligible whole as something numerically distinct, something existing ‘by itself’.”22 The idiomata thus provide a conceptual basis for the stress placed on the actuality, density, and “normalcy”23 of Christ’s historical humanity in Leontius’s Contra Aphthartodocetas.24 The concrete picture of Christ that seems to emerges from these two emphases is summarized by Daley as follows: “The point seems to be that the convergence of the Word and the human Jesus, in Leontius’s Christology, results … in a single hypostasis, a single concrete historical individual.”25 Such an interpretation of Leontius, if correct, is clearly antithetical to the doctrine of the enhypostasis, as well as to Lynch’s claim that Leontius’s Christology was basically that of Cyril.26 Sorting out these competing interpretations requires us to determine Leontius’s place in the historical genesis of the enhypostasis more closely. But here neither Daley nor Shults offers much light. Daley’s presentation of Leontius’s devoted adherence to the Chalcedonian model exhibits no awareness of the unfinished business of Chalcedon, namely, the ambi- guity regarding Christ’s person that not only gave rise to, but neces- sitated the post-Chalcedonian controversy. For his part, Shults makes no clear judgement regarding Lynch’s claim of Leontius’s Cyrillian ten- dencies, arguing all too even-handedly on the one hand that Leontius “follows Cyril most of the time in his attack on Nestorius”27 and on the other that Leontius’s “goal in Book 3 of Contra Nestorianos et Eutychi- anos was to fight the Monophysites, who were gaining ground in the

20. Daley, “A Richer Union,” 257. 21. Ibid., 247, citing Contra Nestorianos et Euytchianos 1, the same passage ana- lyzed at length by Shults (439-440). 22. Daley, “A Richer Union,” 250. 23. Ibid., 263. 24. Ibid., 259. 25. Ibid. 26. John J. Lynch, “Leontius of Byzantium: A Cyrillian Christology,” Theological Studies 36 (1975) 455-471. 27. Shults, “A Dubious Christological Formula,” 434. 316 DENNIS M. FERRARA sixth century, without falling into the opposite extreme of the Nestori- ans,”28 and so leaving us no clear sense of where Leontius’s Christology stands in the sharply antithetical post-Chalcedonian divide. But it is just this divide that is decisive for assessing not only the ultimate signifi- cance of Leontius’s Christology, but the legitimacy and necessity of the enhypostasis doctrine itself.

The Origin and Tradition of the Enhypostasis Doctrine and the Contrasting Stances of the Two Leontiuses

As is well known, the two-nature, one-Person dogma of Chal- cedon, aimed at maintaining the Cyrillian orthodoxy of Ephesus on the divine subject of Christ while affirming the integrity of Christ’s human- ity against Eutyches’s “naturalist” interpretation of Cyril, did not bring the hoped for unity to the Church. Controversy continued to rage between “diophysites” and “monophysites,” that is, between those like Theodoret of Cyrus and Gennadius of Constantinople, who, though rejecting Nestorius, remained faithful to the Antiochene theology of , with its characteristic aversion to incarnational thinking; and those who, like Dioscorus, Timothy Aelurus, and above all, Severus of Antioch, whose Christology was firmly based on Cyril’s identification of Christ’s person as that of the pre-existent Logos and who therefore rejected Chalcedonian diphysitism as a repudiation of Cyril, at times doing so with a fundamentalist adherence to Cyril’s lan- guage, in particular the dubious mia physis formula.29 The objective basis for the controversy, and thus for the truly the- ological (and not merely political) nature of the ensuing controversy, lies in the Chalcedonian formula itself.30 On the one hand, the textual evidence for the “orthodoxy” of the council, that is, its intention to remain faithful to Cyril and the dogma of Ephesus, is really unim- peachable: the avowal in the Prooemium of fidelity to Nicaea, I Con- stantinople, and Ephesus, which gives a doctrinally exact meaning to the “Following in the footsteps of the holy fathers” with which the formal

28. Shults, “A Dubious Christological Formula,” 434. 29. These post-Chalcedonian dialectics are detailed by John Meyendorff in Christ in Eastern Christian Thought (Washington and Cleveland: Corpus, 1969) 17-31. 30. Greek and Latin texts of the Chalcedonian definition can be found in H. Den- zinger and A. Schönmetzer, Enchiridion Symbolorum (DS), 33rd ed. (Barcelona and New York: Herder, 1965) 300-303. An English translation is available in Meyendorff, Christ in Eastern Christian Thought, 13-14, and The Teaching of the Catholic Church, ed. K. Rahner (Staten Island: Mercier and Alba, 1967) 252. “HYPOSTATIZED IN THE LOGOS” 317 definition begins; the eight-fold repetition of “the same” to highlight the unity of subject underlying all of Christ’s operations; the concluding identification of this “same” as “Son and only-begotten God, Word, Lord, Jesus Christ”; the appellation of Mary as Theotokos, the shibboleth of Cyrillian and Ephesian orthodoxy. At the same time, the need to exclude Eutychianism that constituted the very raison d’etre of Chal- cedon required removal of the excesses of Cyrillian terminology (above all, the mia physis formula) and explicit recognition of the integrity of Christ’s humanity within the union itself. The results are well known: the studied parallelism with which the “one and the same” is character- ized – “truly God and truly man,” “of one substance with the Father … of one substance with us,” “begotten of the Father before the ages … [begotten] in the last days for us and for our salvation”; the affirmation of the one Christ as existing “in two natures [vs. Cyril’s “out of two natures”], without confusion, without change, without division, without separation”; and, perhaps above all, the characterization of the person unifying the two natures via the Leonine “concurring,” a term which, terminologically at least, could be construed as implying a consequent or composite rather than pre-existing subject in Christ. In short, immanent in what from one point of view is the magnif- icent mosaic of the Chalcedonian definition is a profound tension, the duality of perspectives threatening to displace the overriding unity of the whole – both in the dogmatic formulation and in the ensuing con- ception of Christ. It was just this inner tension, which in the historical circumstances was undoubtedly unavoidable, that ignited the ensuing controversy regarding the true meaning of Chalcedon. In the language of the times, the formal issue was the identity of the so-called “hypos- tasis of the union.” Was it, as the Cyrillians insisted, the pre-existent person of the Logos, become flesh in time for us and for our salvation? Or could this hypostasis, in keeping with the Antiochene conservatives, be identified simply as Christ, considered as a “composite” of the two natures? On this question theological battle was enjoined and raged fiercely. The need for reconciliation became pressing in the first half of the 6th century, especially after Peter the Fuller, the monophysite Patriarch of Antioch, ignited the theopaschite controversy by inserting “crucified for us” into the Trisagion.31 As Meyendorff points out, however, no such reconciliation was possible until the diophysites “formally agreed to identify,” with the monophysites, “the hypostasis of union with the

31. Meyendorff, Christ in Eastern Christian Thought, 21-22. 318 DENNIS M. FERRARA pre-existent hypostasis of the Logos,” “thus ma[king] possible the recogni- tion of a genuine doctrinal continuity between Cyril and Chalcedon.”32 Precisely this identification was dogmatically affirmed at II Constan- tinople in 553.33 “The chief merit for this identification,” writes Meyen- dorff, “seems to belong to Leontius” – not Leontius of Byzantium, but “Leontius of Jerusalem.”34 It is the latter Leontius, then, who must be assigned the principal credit for originating that enhypostasis “theory” (Shults), according to which Christ’s human nature subsists not in itself but in the person of the eternal Logos, in this providing what Grillmeier calls “the ‘interpretatio’ of the Chalcedonian mia hypostasis”35 and thereby a theoretical and technical basis for the teaching of II Constantinople. Far from being a mere repeater of patristic commonplaces, as Shults’s passing reference to him would have us believe, Leontius of Jerusalem stands as the great innovator; with his “doctrine of insubsis- tence,” writes Grillmeier, “the history of a great christological concept begins.”36 This encomium does not, to be sure, rest on any assignation of a new meaning for the term enhypostaton: “we shall wait in vain” to find in Leontius’s vocabulary “the famous enhypostatos, with the alleged meaning of ‘subsisting in’.”37 Leontius’s new theological insight is expressed, rather, through an innovative use of verbs, as in his adding of the prefixes syn (with) and en (in) to the root verb hyphistemi to describe the in terms of a “subsisting together” (“In his one own hypostasis subsist together the human and the divine natures of the Logos”) or in terms of a “subsisting in” (Christ’s sarx, as a passable nature, has its subsistence in the impassible Logos).38 Leontius, in fact,

32. Meyendorff, Christ in Eastern Christian Thought, 53. 33. “… the Council of Constantinople made clear that in the Incarnation… the hypostasis or person of Jesus Christ is none other than that of the eternal Word of God, who in the incarnation united to himself human nature. … This idea found clear expres- sion in the Council’s confirmation of the Theopaschite formula, ‘our Lord Jesus Christ crucified in the flesh is true God, the Lord of Glory and one of the Holy Trinity.’ … In asserting this, the Council Fathers removed an ambiguity in the Chalcedonian Defini- tion, which had not clearly identified the hypostasis of the incarnate Lord as the hypostasis of the preexistent and eternal Word of God. The Council of Constantinople now made this identification and declared it to the teaching of the Catholic Church.” G. L. C. Frank, “The Council of Constantinople II as a Model Reconciliation Council,” Theological Studies 52 (1991) 636-650 at 646. 34. Meyendorff, Christ in Eastern Christian Thought, 53. 35. Grillmeier, “The Understanding of the Christological Definitions,” 81. 36. Aloys Grillmeier, S.J., “The Christology of Leontius of Jerusalem,” Christ in Christian Tradition, Vol. II, Part II: The Church of Constantinople in the Sixth Century, in collaboration with Theresia Hainthaler, trans. John Cawte and Pauline Allen (London: Mowbray and Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995) 276-312 at 282. 37. Ibid., 284. 38. Ibid., 282-283. “HYPOSTATIZED IN THE LOGOS” 319 coined a great number of neologisms to express his theological break- through, for his “pleasure in new expressions was unrestrained.”39 An innovative interpretation of the adjective enhypostaton just happened not to be one of them. But this has no significance for the validity of the enhypostasis doctrine; if it seems to, it is only because, in the wake of Loofs’s misinterpretation of Leontius of Byzantium, we have come to expect it. Once shorn of such false expectations, Leontius of Jerusalem’s teaching stands clearly in the light. Grillmeier presents a rich harvest of representative texts from Contra [or Adversus] Nestorianos, a work, which, ironically, was mistakenly attributed by Migne to Leontius of Byzantium.40 Thus: The Logos has in the last ages clothed his eternal hypostasis, which existed before the human nature, and the fleshless nature, which existed before the ages, with flesh, and hypostatically inserted the human nature into his own hypostasis, and not into that of a simple human being (aute te idia hypostasei … ten anthropeian physin enypestesen).41 And again: … [the human nature of the Logos] is not in a hypostasis proper to itself alone, that is, that of a simple human being, but in the hyposta- sis of the Logos which pre-exists it.42 And yet again: The humanity of the Savior does not have a subsistence of its own (en idiazouse hypostasei), but from the very beginning subsisted in the hypostasis of the Logos.43 Further, while not employing the specific term “anhypostatic” (any- postatos), Leontius inculcates its content by denying that the assumed humanity subsists “as its own person” (idiohypostatos)44 and by charac- terizing it as “aprosopic” (aprosopos), that is, as lacking its own proso- pon.45 Finally, while Leontius conceives the union of the divine and human in Christ as a composition (synthesis), he does not speak either of a “composite nature” or of a “composite hypostasis,” but rather of a

39. Grillmeier, “The Christology of Leontius of Jerusalem,” 286. 40. Shults, “A Dubious Christological Formula,” 433, n. 5. 41. Grillmeier, “The Christology of Leontius of Jerusalem,” 282, citing Contra Nestorianos (CN) V, 28. 42. Ibid., 289, citing CN II, 7. 43. Ibid., 283, citing CN II, 14. 44. Ibid., 284-286, citing CN II, 10. 45. Ibid., 279, citing CN II, 35. 320 DENNIS M. FERRARA

“composition of natures according to hypostasis,”46 thereby maintaining that attention to the hypostasis of the Logos which predominates in his thought.47 This compelling focus is precisely what is lacking in the “radically different”48 Christology of Leontius of Byzantium, which, as we saw, opens itself to the charge of conceiving Christ’s person as a “result” of the union of natures, a position peremptorily excluded by Leontius of Jerusalem’s doctrine of insubsistence. As Grillmeier puts it, “the problem which we had to clarify in the case of his namesake (of Byzantium), namely, whether he considered the subject in Christ as a tertium quid, does not even arise for Leontius of Jerusalem.”49 But this difference is ultimately not surprising, since, as Grillmeier adds, the two stood at rel- atively opposite poles in the diophysite-monophysite controversy that divided the Church between Chalcedon and II Constantinople: Worthy of notice is the fact that Leontius of Jerusalem achieved the clarification of his Chalcedonian language in discussion above all with the Nestorians, while Leontius of Byzantium went through a similar process in discussions with the Severans. For this reason, each of them places the accent in a different place. Leontius of Jerusalem extends the understanding of the one hypostasis, while Leontius of Byzantium builds up the two-nature teaching.50 Grillmeier’s historical judgement, together with Daley’s detailed analysis, seems to me sufficient to overrule Lynch’s argument for the Cyrillian character – that is, dominant focus – of Leontius of Byzan- tium’s Christology and thus to place it outside the enhypostasis tradi- tion. Leontius’s true contribution to Christology (apart from his formal definition of hypostasis as “that which exists by itself”51) appears to lie elsewhere, in the possibilities it opens up for maintaining the density and actuality of Jesus’ historical humanity, thereby serving as a healthy counterthrust to the Eutychianism that perennially tempts even the most orthodox Alexandrianism. But a retrieval of Leontius of Byzan- tium along these lines can remain faithful to the larger tradition only if

46. Grillmeier, “The Christology of Leontius of Jerusalem,” 294-295, citing CN I, 20. 47. Ibid., 291. 48. Meyendorff, Christ in Eastern Christian Thought, 53-54. 49. Grillmeier, “The Christology of Leontius of Jerusalem,” 277. 50. Ibid., 288. 51. As the texts cited below indicate, Leontius’s kath’ heauto einai was taken up by later theologians such as John of Damascus, but not with the “consequent” or “idiomatic” resonances it possessed in Leontius’s own theology. The definition also seems to anticipate the per se subsistens of the scholastics, though whether it is the actual source of the latter I am not prepared to say. “HYPOSTATIZED IN THE LOGOS” 321 it maintains the enhypostasis doctrine itself, of which this Leontius was not the author, as well as the dogmatic affirmations of II Constantino- ple which it historically enabled,52 a function it has continued to fulfill down to our own day. After the council, the substance of the enhypostasis doctrine, though not the details of Leontius of Jerusalem’s own exposition,53 became standard in the Church. We find it clearly expressed, for exam- ple, by John of Damascus, and indeed in much the same terms as those of Leontius of Jerusalem: For the flesh of the Logos of God did not subsist independently (idiosystatos hypeste), nor did it become any other person besides that of the Logos of God (oude hetera hypostasis gegone para ten tou Theou Logou hypostasin). On the contrary, it was in that person [of the Logos] that the flesh subsisted, or, rather, was hypostatized (all’ en aute hypostasa, enypostatos mallon), and it did not become an inde- pendently subsisting person in itself (kai ou kath’ heauten idiosystatos hypostasis gegone).”54

52. As Francis A. Sullivan, S.J., notes in a recent study, “knowledge of the con- troversy which occasioned [a] council will be of prime importance in identifying the point of doctrine which the council intended to settle” (Creative Fidelity: Weighing and Interpreting Documents of the Magisterium [New York and Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1996] 56). Unfortunately, Sullivan fails to follow his own criterion in the laconic assessment of II Constantinople proferred in the course of the ensuing chapter on the doctrinal weight of the various ecumenical councils (56-79). Departing for once from the care that char- acterizes his assessment of the other councils and that makes his book as a whole a joy to read, Sullivan ignores the post-Chalcedonian doctrinal dispute between monophysites and diophysites that were the proper provenance of the council, virtually limiting the purpose and significance of II Constantinople, which “certainly does not go down as a glorious chapter in the history of councils or of the papacy” (ibid., 63) to the condem- nations, which “no one nowadays takes seriously,” of the famous Three Chapters (ibid.). As for the council’s dogmatic canons, Sullivan can only bring himself to say that “in some respects they clarify the meaning of the dogmas of Ephesus and Chalcedon, giving them a somewhat more ‘Alexandrian’ formulation” (ibid.). In this tepid and even dis- torted assessment, Sullivan appears to continue the bias against II Constantinople which, as Frank convincingly argues, has unfairly dominated Western theological thought in this century (“The Council of Constantinople II,” 636-639, 649, n. 25) – a bias by no means shared by the East. 53. Of particular significance is Leontius of Jerusalem’s failure to “carry through consistently on his own new concept of insubsistence” due in part to “the continuing effect of the Basilian-Cappadocian teaching about the idiomata,” a heritage which he shared with his namesake from Byzantium; see Grillmeier, “The Christology of Leontius of Jerusalem,” 299. Leontius’s inability to articulate his new concept except in dialogue with the less developed notions of the past offers a pertinent lesson in the development of ideas, showing how inchoately even the greatest and most original insights burst upon the human mind, how much further intellectual trudging is needed to move from an initial insight to a clear and thematic grasp of its implications. 54. John of Damascus, De Fide Orthodoxa III,9, trans. Frederic H. Chase, The Fathers of the Church, 37 (Washington: CUA Press, 1958) 286-287. The Greek text is 322 DENNIS M. FERRARA

John also conceived the “composition” of Christ’s hypostasis in a man- ner that, because of its stress on the pre-existent Logos, “recalls the thought of Leontius of Jerusalem.”55 The enhypostasis did not, moreover, remain a preserve of Eastern , but was received in the West, where it became common coin among the scholastics. Thus Thomas: Personality pertains of necessity to the dignity of a thing, and to its perfection so far as it pertains to the dignity and perfection of that thing to exist by itself (which is understood by the word ‘person’). Now it is a greater dignity to exist in something nobler than oneself than to exist by oneself. Hence the human nature of Christ has a greater dignity than ours, from this very fact that in us, being exis- tent by itself, it has its own personality, but in Christ it exists in the person of the Word.56 … although this human nature is a kind of individual in the genus of substance, it has not its own personality, because it does not exist separately, but in something more perfect, viz. in the person of the Word.57 … if there is any hypostasis in Christ besides the hypostasis of the Word, it follows that whatever pertains to man is verified of some other than the Word, e.g., that he was born of a virgin, suffered, was crucified, was buried. And this … was condemned with the approval of the Council of Ephesus [here follows a citation from the council]. Therefore it is plainly a heresy condemned long ago by the Church to say that in Christ there are two hypostases, or two supposita, or that the union did not take place in the hypostasis or suppositum.58 Absorption does not here imply the destruction of anything pre- existing, but the hindering of what might otherwise have been. For if the human nature had not been assumed by the divine person, the human nature would have had its own personality. And in this way it is said, although improperly, that the person absorbed the nature, inasmuch as the divine person by his union hindered the human nature from having its [own] personality.59 found in (PG) 94 (Paris: Migne, 1860) 1015-1018. This is the same text cited by Shults (438, n. 24), but in which he sees at best only an ambiguous use of the term enhypostaton. By contrast, Meyendorff, who presents John’s Christology as an “effort at systematization” (Christ in Eastern Christian Thought, 116-131), notes that John separated himself from the thought of Leontius of Byzantium by “following Cyril of Alexandria and the council of 553 [in] consider[ing] the hypostasis of Christ as the pre-existent hypostasis of the Logos” (118). 55. Meyendorff, Christ in Eastern Christian Thought, 119. 56. Summa Theologiae (ST) 3, q. 2, art. 2 ad 2. 57. ST 3, q. 2, art. 2 ad 3. 58. ST 3, q. 2, art. 3c. 59. ST 3, q. 4, art. 2 ad 3. “HYPOSTATIZED IN THE LOGOS” 323

Thomas also conceives the “composition” of Christ’s person in the man- ner of Leontius of Jerusalem and John of Damascus: The person of Christ subsists in two natures. Hence, though there is one subsisting being in him, yet there are different aspects of subsis- tence, and hence he is said to be a composite person, inasmuch as one being subsists in two [natures].60 Bonaventure offers the following succinct formulation: … divinity and humanity can be joined, not in a union of nature or accident, but in a union that is personal and hypostatic. Now, divine nature cannot subsist in any subject other than its own hypostasis. The union, then, cannot occur in the hypostasis or person of man, but only in that of God. By this union, therefore, the first principle, in one of his hypostases, became the supposit of human nature. Hence, there is but one person and one personal unity, that is, of the person who assumed humanity.61 It is, finally, this same millennium-old doctrine that is taught by the 17th-century Protestant scholastics whom Shults, as noted earlier,62 claims to be the true originators of the enhypostasis. I limit myself here to his citation of a certain Heidegger: Assuredly there must of necessity be one hypostasis, one subsistent person. Either the divine person subsists in the human, or the human in the divine. That the divine nature should subsist in and be sustained by the human is opposed to its infinite perfection. So the human is per se anhypostatos and becomes enhypostatos in the logos who being pre-existent, in fact existent from eternity, has received in time the form of a servant … as its shrine and instru- ment.63 Christian orthodoxy could hardly be stated with greater exactness. Barth’s invocation of the enhypostasis, if not his particular development of it, stands in the same doctrinal tradition.

The Enhypostasis as the Necessary Clarification of Chalcedon and Its Significance for Today

St. Athanasius’s celebrated retort to those opposing Nicaea’s use of the nonscriptural term homoousios, namely, that “even if the expressions

60. ST 3, q. 2, art. 4 c. 61. Breviloquium IV, 2, in The Works of Bonaventure, Vol. II, trans. de Vinck (Paterson: St. Anthony’s Guild, 1963) 148. 62. See above, note 8. 63. Shults, “A Dubious Christological Formula,” 443. 324 DENNIS M. FERRARA are not in so many words in the Scriptures, yet … they contain the sense of the Scriptures” – to which the saint added, somewhat acidly, “and [thus] convey it to those who have their hearing unimpaired for reli- gious doctrine”64 – bears an analogy to the relation of the enhypostasis to the doctrine of Chalcedon, an analogy which, while by no means perfect, does not limp either. For just as Scripture teaches the strict divinity of the person of Jesus Christ, yet by its non-technical mode of expression leaves a door open for the Christological deviations which so busied the early Church (and busy us again today), so Chalcedon, while identifying the person of Christ as that of the eternal Logos, by its studied diphysitism “left the door ajar,” as G. L. C. Frank has put it, “to a Nestorianizing tendency.”65 In simple terms: did Chalcedon pull back from and even “correct” the stark dogma of Ephesus or only specify it further so as to preclude the monophysite misunderstanding? More precisely: are we to read Ephesus’ identification of Christ’s divine person in the light of Chal- cedonian diphysitism, or Chalcedonian diphysitism in the light of the Ephesian identification of Christ’s person? It was precisely this question that was decided in favor of Cyrillian orthodoxy by II Constantinople, a decision that would not have been possible without the theological breakthrough of Leontius of Jerusalem’s doctrine of enhypostasis, which provided a theoretical basis for subordinating, without disavowing the advance made at Chalcedon, the duality of natures to the unity of per- son, and, most particularly, the humanity to the divine person – vistas alien, it may be added, to the Christology of Leontius of Byzantium. Far, then, from being the result of a scholarly error and a misun- derstanding of the patristic Church, the enhypostasis doctrine is one of the latter’s greatest achievements, a doctrine that faithfully, clearly, and “unavoidably” (Barth) expresses the Church’s hard won faith in Christ. I say the “doctrine” of the enhypostasis, not the “theory.” For to affirm the doctrine is not to canonize any specific terminological and meta- physical explanation thereof, whether that of its originator, Leontius of Jerusalem, or of John of Damascus, or of Thomas Aquinas, or of any theologian whatsoever. To affirm the doctrine of the enhypostasis is to acknowledge “the absolute distinction between hypostasis and nature,”66 where hypostasis signifies personal subject, answering to the question

64. “Defence of the Nicene Definition” (De Decretis), Cap. V, 21, St. Athanasius: Select Works and Letters, ed. A. Robertson, A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, 4 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1971) 164. 65. Frank, “The Council of Constantinople II,” 644. 66. Meyendorff, Christ in Eastern Christian Thought, 57. “HYPOSTATIZED IN THE LOGOS” 325

“who?” It is to acknowledge that the sole such personal subject in Christ is the eternally pre-existent hypostasis of the Word and Son of God, and thus that Christ’s humanity has no independent, personal existence of its own; that, despite its consciousness and freedom, this human nature is not a personal “who,” but exists precisely as the humanity of this divine subject. It to acknowledge, accordingly, that Jesus Christ is not a human but a divine person, “one of the Holy Trinity,” as II Constan- tinople says.67 And it is, finally, to exclude any understanding of the per- son of Christ or of the union of the divine and human in him that denies these precisions or calls them into question. This, not anyone’s further theoretical elaboration, is the substance of the enhypostasis and the doctrine of the Church. Let me conclude with three observations on the significance of the enhypostasis for today’s Christology. First and most obviously, II Con- stantinople must be considered the Church’s own authoritative inter- pretation of Chalcedon, one which compels us to read Chalcedonian diphysitism in light of Christ’s primordial unity as divine subject. Accordingly, attempts to use Chalcedonian diphysitism to justify a bipo- lar conception of Christ’s person and identity, whether of a relational, process, or Spirit-Christology kind, are at best a relapse into pre-Ephesian confusion and at worst manifestly heterodox.68 Second, alarmist declarations to the contrary notwithstanding, the affirmation of Christ’s personal divinity as the eternal Logos and of the humanity as enhypostatized in the Logos in no way compromises the his- torical density, actuality, and freedom of his humanity. More particularly,

67. DS 424. 68. Perhaps the fundamental paradigm for the modern misunderstanding of Christ is the definition of person as essentially “relational,” a definition which, while increasingly popular, is historically and metaphysically inept, since person signifies not relation itself, but the absolute presupposition thereof, namely, the unique and sovereign subject, a notion rooted in the Aristotelian concept of “first substance” as hoc aliquid, quasi per se subsistens, et quod est separabile, et non communicabile multis, as St. Thomas puts it (Commentary on the Metaphysics V, 903). It is thus disconcerting to find as emi- nent a theologian as William M. Thompson, for example, claiming support from “a growing number of scholars,” interpret Chalcedon as having adapted the Cappadocians’ “essentially relational” understanding of person to Christology, resulting in the view that “Jesus’ personhood is bipolar,” “a relational reality co-constituted by the two poles of humanity and divinity,” “a relational project, a unity (= person) through duality (= through relating to Divinity and humanity),” The Jesus Debate: A Survey and a Synthesis (New York and Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1985), 329. How this conception is consonant with Thompson’s earlier recognition of the “Second Council of Constantinople” as having “clarified Chalcedon by making it clear that one person (or hypostasis) in which the two natures reside is that of the divine Word itself… (this is called enhypostasia)” (ibid., 327) escapes me completely, since the latter expressly rules out the former. For whoever or whatever might be the result of a “relational project,” it is surely not the Son of God. 326 DENNIS M. FERRARA such affirmations are entirely compatible, in dogmatic principle at least, with what John Galvin has called the paradigm shift in contemporary Christology from the humanity of Christ to the Jesus of history.69 At the same time, this compatibility can be assured in fact only insofar as, on the hand, the paradigm shifters realize that the Jesus whose history they so intensely explore is none other than the eternal Word of God, and that in exploring it they are entering into the sacrosanct depths of God’s incarnation, into the extent to which, in the words of Leo’s Tome, “the Incomprehensible willed to be comprehended;”70 and, on the other, insofar as the keepers of the patristic and scholastic flames conceive the relation of divine person vis-a-vis the assumed humanity in a truly tran- scendent rather than categorial and competing sense, and so do not use selective dogma as a pretext for relapsing into a practical mono- physitism. Doing all this will require a much more explicit and nuanced recognition of the ineluctable duality of “ from below” and “Christologies from above” than has been the case up until now. A healthy first step in this direction would be the recognition by all concerned not only of the insuperability, given our historical finitude, of such a per- spectival duality, but of the difficulty of maintaining it in both theory and concrete practice. Immeasurably helpful for both sides, I believe, would be attention to the final point I wish to make. Now, as in the 4th, 5th, and 6th centuries, the ultimate issue in Christology is not theoretical, but soteriological. And on this point the angels are on the side of the Cyrillians. As Frank puts it: Cyrillian Christology reflected that deep soteriological concern with regard to the question of who can save humanity, a concern which was found in the earlier patristic tradition and which was expressed so forcefully in the teaching of one of Cyril’s predecessors, Athana- sius. … from the viewpoint of Cyril and his followers, the Christolog- ical debate had to do with the very possibility of salvation itself and not just with intellectual speculations about ‘nature’ and ‘person’.71 Christology thus has its primary provenance not in the life of the mind, but in the life of the soul: it is not a philosophical, but a religious doc- trine.72 Greek Christology knew this well; implicit in it is the whole

69. John P. Galvin, “From the Humanity of Christ to the Jesus of History: A Par- adigm Shift in Catholic Christology,” Theological Studies 55 (1994) 252-273. 70. Leo I, “Tomus [I] Leonis,” DS 294. 71. Frank, “The Council of Constantinople II,” 640. 72. Reading the bowdlerized Chalcedonianism that characterizes so much of recent Christology, I often feel as if the spirit of Siger of Brabant has taken on a new, intra- theological form, with speculation severed from its living roots in worship. And I cannot help wondering: So this is what they think of Christ. But what Christ do they pray to? “HYPOSTATIZED IN THE LOGOS” 327

Greek theology of grace, which in essence can only be that of the West as well. Today’s Christology must be no less; in, through, and beyond its wealth of new scholarship and insight, it must in the last analysis, because in the first, be a doctrine of grace, what the older theology in relation to Christ called the gratia unionis, the “grace of union,” and in relation to us, redemption and divinization. All of this hangs on a right answer to the question: who is Jesus Christ? And none of it is possible without a right answer to this ques- tion. And the right answer is that of revelation and faith, an answer first given by Peter and then, under successively more closely articulated horizons, by the Church at Nicaea, at Ephesus, and at II Constantinople. That answer comes not from flesh and blood, but from on high. Absent it, all the human wealth that a “theology from below” brings – and must bring – to Christology lapses into a form of Pelagianism.73 The point of the enhypostasis is to enable that answer of revelation and faith, to enable us to confess, clearly and without ambiguity, that Jesus Christ is the consubstantial Word and Son of Father who for us and for our salvation came down from heaven, took flesh of the Virgin Mary to become one of us, suffered under Pontius Pilate, died for our sins, and rose on the third day for our justification and redemption, and so lead us, the brothers and sisters of whom he is the first born, into the life of the world to come – He, the eternal Son of God and no other.

Dennis Michael Ferrara received his doctoral degree from the Catholic Univer- sity of America in 1988 with a study on imago Dei in Thomas Aquinas. He is an independent scholar residing in Washington, D.C. Address: 4840 MacArthur Blvd., Washington, D.C. 20007, U.S.A.

73. While I am not prepared to posit a strictly causal connection between the two, the contemporary emphases on autonomy and freedom in regard to both Christ’s historical humanity and the moral human subject seem more than coincidentally related. Here we do well to recall the primary, existential meaning of soteriology: that we are truly free only insofar as Christ has freed us (Gal 5:1).