Dogmatic Theology — Topic 10
Consequences of the hypostatic union of the two natures in Jesus Christ in
relation to Himself
** Communion of properties, theopaschite controversies**
Let us consider the consequences of the hypostatic union of the two natures. These can be divided into three groups: in relation to Himself, in relation to the Most Holy Trinity, and in relation to the Virgin Mary. With respect to Christ Himself, the consequences of the hypostatic union of the natures are the communion of the characteristics, the deification of the flesh, common worship, two wills and two actions, and sinlessness.
According to the Chalcedonian dogma, the hypostatic union of the two natures in Christ “in no way abolishes the difference of natures, but rather preserves the quality of each nature”, that is, after the Incarnation of God the Word there was no change of Godhead into humanity and of humanity into Godhead. This does not mean, however, that the two natures have no mutual influence. In virtue of the hypostatic union of the natures, a “sharing of charactertics” takes place (“communicatio idiomatum,” or in Greek - ἀντιμεθίστασις τῶν ὀνομάτων, literally: interchange of names), so that the properties of human nature are ascribed to the Godhead, and the properties of divine nature are ascribed to the human nature of Jesus Christ.
Human characteristics can be attributed to Christ as God because, according to St. Cyril of Alexandria, human flesh became owned (became its own) by the Word. For example, crucified the Lord of glory (1 Cor. 2:8). Take heed therefore unto yourselves, and to all the flock, over the which the Holy Ghost hath made you overseers, to feed the church of God, which he hath purchased with his own blood. (Acts 20:28). We were reconciled to God by the death of his Son (Rom. 5:10).
These are examples of a particular case of «cominunicatio idiomatum». They are theopaschist expressions (Θεός for God and «πάσχω» for «Ι suffer»), which speak of God as the subject of suffering and death.
Conversely, the attributes of God are ascribed to Christ as a man. For example: Jesus said to them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am (John 8:58). No man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven (John 3:13). The first man is of the earth, earthy; the second man is the Lord from heaven (1 Cor. 15:47).
In the Tradition of the Church these expressions have actually been found since the first century. For example, St. Ignatius, one of the earliest Christian authors, writes: “Let me be an imitator of the sufferings of my God” (Epistle to the Romans).
St. Irenaeus of Lugdunum, in his book Against Heresies, says that he himself showed more than once that the very Word of God incarnate was hung on a tree.
In the Nicene Creed, too, there are theopaschist expressions: “I believe … in one Lord Jesus Christ the Son of God, the only begotten … in one essence with the Father … and suffered and was buried.” In the Creed the suffering and burial are attributed to the Son of God as the subject of these states of the human nature of the Savior.
The deification ( θέωσις) of human nature in Jesus Christ
The human nature of the Lord Jesus Christ, through its hypostatic union with the Godhead, was united with and enriched by the attributes of the Divine, i.e., entered into the state of deification. Human flesh, having been united in Christ with the fire of the Godhead, is now mysteriously deified.
The Monophysites understood deification in the sense that humanity in Christ, having ceased to be nature, and even (for the aphthartodocetes) having lost its natural properties, became part of the Divine nature, which was simple and became complex.
Orthodoxy understands the deification of Christ’s human nature in the sense that, although it was in a degraded state before His Resurrection, undergoing sinless passions, it received as many perfections as it could accommodate. The natural properties of Christ’s humanity, while remaining inseparable from the properties of the divine nature and remaining within the limits of its nature, were nevertheless elevated to the highest possible heights. St. Anastasius of Sinai defines deification as follows: “Deification is ascent to a higher [state of nature], and not the diminution or change of it… To be deified means to be elevated to greater glory, but it does not imply a change in one’s own nature.”
After the Resurrection, however, Christ also forsook the sinless passions that are the consequences of Adam’s fall into sin, and from a state of humiliation His humanity passed into a glorified state.
Thus, even after the Resurrection, Christ’s human nature remained human nature. It did not become a divine nature, it did not acquire divine attributes. But it remains in a glorified state. This state before Christ’s death his disciples had seen only once at the Transfiguration. Now, according to V.N. Lossky, “The humanity of the Word, deified by divine energies, after the Resurrection and Pentecost, cannot be presented to the sons of the Church except in this glorified form. This humanity reveals a Deity which is the radiance common to the three Persons of the Most Holy Trinity” (Essays on Mystical Theology).
The Lord Jesus Christ requires one indivisible divine worship
The ninth anathema of the Fifth Ecumenical Council reads: “Whosoever says that in Jesus Christ each of His natures is to be worshipped, thereby introducing two acts of worship, one particular to God the Word and another to man, and does not worship the incarnate Word in His human nature, which has become His own, as the Church has always believed and recognized on the basis of unbroken tradition, let him be anathema.” This position was used later in the polemic against iconoclasm.
In Jn. 5:22-23 the Lord Himself says that it is necessary to honor the Son as one honors the Father, i.e., “the Son” is the name not of nature, but of the hypostasis. Worship always refers to persons, not to an impersonal nature. Since there is one Person in Christ, it is this Person that is worshipped, not each of the natures separately.
Consequences of the hypostatic union of the two natures in Jesus Christ in
relation to the Most Holy Trinity
It was the Second Person of the Trinity who was incarnated: John the Evangelist says, The Word became flesh (John 1:14). Not the Godhead, but the Word, that is, the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity.
As we know, there is no non-depositional nature, and the Divine nature does not exist outside of hypostasis either. The Divine nature resides wholly, though in various ways, in each of the Hypostases of the Trinity. The Divine nature is “all in the Father, all in the Son, and all in the Holy Spirit.” Therefore, when we speak of the Incarnation, we do not mean that the impersonal Godhead is united to the human nature. But God’s nature in one of His Hypostases is all and “wholly united with human nature” (St John Damascene. An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith. Book 3, Ch. 6).
The Father and the Holy Spirit, continues St. John of Damascus, did not participate in any other respect in the Incarnation of God the Word, except by grace and desire. From a dogmatic point of view, what is most essential in the matter before us is the relationship of the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity to the other Persons after the Incarnation. We express the relationship of the Persons of the Most Holy Trinity by means of personal, or hypostatic, properties.
These properties are eternal; as properties of God they cannot change. Therefore it is dogmatically important to show that after the Incarnation the relationship between the Persons of the Trinity had not changed, and that after the Incarnation the Incarnate is the same Son of God, natural, not adopted, and that His humanity has no person of its own, no hypostasis. And if this is so, then the Incarnation, first, does not introduce a fourth Person into the Trinity, and second, does not divide the one Person of the Son of God.
Consequences of the hypostatic union of the two natures in Jesus Christ in
relation to the Virgin Mary
** The Virgin Mary as the Theotokos (Θεοτόκος)**
This appellation came about as a result of the doctrine of the hypostatic union of the natures in Christ and of the sharing of characteristics. When it is said that the Virgin Mary gave birth to God, it means that She give birth not to the Godhead, nor to the Divine nature per se, because the Divine nature is eternal and could not undergo any birth in time, rather She gave birth to God the Word in His humanity. We call the Mother of God the Theotokos, because the subject of the birth was the Son of God. He was the subject of the seedless conception and the virgin birth, because in Christ, by virtue of the unity of the Person, the unity of the Hypostasis, there is no one else who could have been born of Her. It is not the “what” that is born, but the “Who,” not the nature, but the Hypostasis.
The problem as regards the appropriation by Tradition of the name Θεοτόκος is similar to the problem raised during the theopaschite controversy. The action of Christ can be seen from two points of view: from the point of view of the duality of the natures and from the point of view of the one hypostasis. As a consequence, we can also speak of the communion of properties. Since the properties of the two different natures belong to the one Divine Hypostasis, we can speak of the birth or death of God.
In virtue of the fact that the Savior’s humanity has never, for any fraction of time, existed separately, independently, but received its very being in the Hypostasis of God the Word, it became peculiar to the Son of God from the very moment of the Incarnation, and was therefore deified from the very beginning. Saint John Damascene writes: “The Holy Virgin is conceived and called Theotokos, not only because of the divine nature of the Word, but also because of the deification of His human nature” (St John Damascene: An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, Book 3, Ch.12).
In Orthodox theology, the name Theotokos was already a criterion of right faith in the fourth century, long before the Third Ecumenical Council. St. Ephrem the Syrian wrote that whoever denied that Mary gave birth to God did not see the glory of His Divinity. St. Gregory the Theologian wrote that whoever does not recognize Mary as the Mother of God is excommunicated from the Godhead.
Why is so much emphasis placed on this term? The refusal to use this term in a strictly dogmatic sense leads to a denial of the reality of the Incarnation of God and actually means falling into Nestorianism. If we refuse to call the Virgin Mary the Mother of God, we are thereby recognizing as the subject of the Incarnation and birth not God the Word, but someone different from Him, some separate, self-identical person, thus destroying the mystery of the Incarnation, the hypostatic union.
The Blessed Virgin Mary is the Ever-Virgin (ἀειπαρθένος)
The confession of Mary as the Ever-Virgin means that she was a virgin before the Nativity, she was a true virgin in the Nativity, giving birth to Jesus Christ painlessly, without violating her virginity, and she remained a pure virgin after the Nativity, without knowing her husband for the rest of her life.
The virgin birth was already mentioned in the Old Testament in Isaiah 7:14. The Incarnation of God is told directly in the Gospel (Matthew 1; Luke 1). From the earliest times the Church has confessed Mary as Virgin. Thus, the martyr Irenaeus of Lugdunum writes that in order to impersonate Adam in Himself, God the Word Himself was born of the virgin Mary.
The Church’s belief in the primogeniture of the Theotokos is also recorded in the Ecumenical Councils. Thus, on the Fifth Ecumenical Council: “If anyone does not confess two births of God the Word, one before the ages from the Father, timeless and immortal, and the other in the last days, when He descended from heaven and was incarnate of the Holy Blessed and Ever-Virgin Mary, and was born of Her, let him be anathema” (the second anathema). In the First Rule of the Sixth Ecumenical Council: “We confirm the doctrine expounded by two hundred God-bearing Fathers (i.e., on the III Ecumenical Council), we proclaim Christ the only Son of God, who was incarnate, and we confess that the Most-Pure Ever-Virgin, who bore Him without seed, is uniquely and truly the Mother of God.
Consequences of the hypostatic union of the two natures in Jesus Christ in
relation to Himself
** Communion of properties, theopaschite controversies**
- The term “enhypostaton”. The doctrine of the hypostatic unity of Christ.
- Consequences of the hypostatic union of the two natures in Jesus Christ in relation to Himself
- Consequences of the hypostatic union of the two natures in Jesus Christ in relation to the Most Holy Trinity
- Consequences of the hypostatic union of the two natures in Jesus Christ in relation to the Virgin Mary
- The Supernatural Image of the Birth of Christ
- The Soteriological Meaning of Christ’s Sinlessness
The Soteriological Meaning of Christ’s Sinlessness
The source of the sinlessness of Christ’s human nature is that it received its being in the Hypostasis of God the Word, which became the principle of its individualization and received its mode of existence. From the moment of the Incarnation Christ’s humanity was in indissoluble unity with the Godhead. As such, the Savior was characterized by freedom from original sin, and thus by perfect personal sinlessness, since personal sins are the consequence of original sin. Throughout His earthly life the Lord did not commit a single sinful act and was free from all hidden sinfulness.
From Scripture we see that Christ was characterized by an awareness of personal sinlessness. For example, He asks the Jews, “Which of you convinceth me of sin?” (John 8:46) or: “for the prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in me”.(John 14:30), that is, he has nothing akin to himself, nothing unclean, on which he can extend his power. In calling everyone to repentance, Christ Himself never felt the need to repent. Nowhere in Scripture does it say that Christ felt remorse, nor was there any sense of personal guilt peculiar to Him to any degree. The Savior’s sinlessness is also indicated by the observation of the Evangelists in their description of His Baptism. It is noted that Jesus, after His baptism, immediately came up out of the water. It points to the fact that after His immersion the Lord did not confess His sins, unlike other people, but left the water immediately afterwards.
The Lord’s sinlessness is spoken of in both the Old and New Testaments. In the Old Testament, for example:He committed no sin, and there was no lie in his mouth he had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth. (Isaiah 53:9). The apostle Peter says:Who did no sin (1 Pet. 2:22). Apostle John:in him is no sin (1 John 3:5). The apostle Paul:For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; (2 Cor. 5:21). In Hebrews 7:26 the apostle says of Christ:For such an high priest became us, who is holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, and made higher than the heavens.
The Supernatural Image of the Birth of Christ
Original sin, as the corruption of human nature, the human disposition to evil and sin, is inherited by every human being from his parents. Many of the Eastern Holy Fathers taught that after the fall of our forefathers, sinful disorder manifested itself in all aspects of human existence, including procreation. Although in the Orthodox Church the teaching that original sin passes from parents to children precisely through carnal conception is not dogmatic, as in the Catholic Church, it does not contradict, but rather corresponds to the Eastern Fathers’ tradition.
So, if Christ had been born naturally, He too would have been infected with sin, but, as we know, God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. (1 John 1:5). The divine life and sin are mutually exclusive, and God can do nothing sinful by the content of His life, nothing sinful can enter into fellowship with and unite with God. Besides, if Christ had been in any way sinful, He would also have been in the power of death and the devil and His death would not have been voluntary and therefore redemptive. And He Himself would be in need of salvation, so He could not deliver others from the tyranny of sin and the devil. Therefore Christ would not have been born naturally.
According
to the understanding of the Holy Fathers, the supernatural way of conception
and birth of the Son of God was chosen not to witness or demonstrate the
omnipotence of God (this assumption makes no sense, since both conception and
birth of the Savior was carried out away from human eyes), but so that the
Savior of the world was free from the sinful disorder (original sin) in His
human flesh. According to the understanding of the Holy Fathers, the special
way of birth from the Holy Spirit and Virgin Mary was chosen so that the total
holiness and purity of the Lord’s flesh would be achieved. St. Athanasius the
Great, for example, taught that the Son of God “receives our body not the
usual way, but from the pure, undefiled, immaculate virgin, a body pure,
untouched by male communion”, i.e. being untouched by “male communion” is a
necessary condition for the “purity” of the Savior’s flesh. Choosing this
particular way of the Incarnation, “the Word of God, Creator and Lord of the
Sun, did not take defilement upon Himself, but on the contrary, being
incorruptible, brought life and purified a mortal body.” (Homily on the
Incarnation).
The term “enhypostaton”. The doctrine of the hypostatic unity of Christ.
The most successful polemicist against Severus among the followers of the Council of Chalcedon was Leontius of Byzantium († c. 543). In order to show how two natures, divine and human, are combined in one Christ, he widely and often innovatively employed the categories of Aristotelian logic in his reasoning.
Leontius employed Aristotle’s distinction between first (private) and second
(common) essences to make a similar distinction between the concepts of
hypostasis and nature in Christ: “Nature expresses the common character of a
thing, while the hypostasis underscores its unique qualities” (from here
onwards, all citations are from: “Against Nestorius and Eutychius”). Thus,
Leontius of Byzantium was one of the first to suggest that the triadological
language developed by the Cappadocians be transferred to Christology. In doing
so, the distinction between “nature” and “essence” is eliminated and they are
both understood as the second (common) essence of Aristotle. The hypostasis
(which Leontius also calls person (πρόσωπον), individual (ἄτομον), and subject
(ὑποκείμενον)) is the private (first) essence. It renders any nature a
concrete being, and in so doing is able to solidify several common natures at
once: “The definition of a hypostasis is as follows: it is either that which
is identical in nature, but differs in number; or that which consists of
various natures, but has in its being a communion of natures in one another”.
The latter case applies only to Christ, in whose one hypostasis the two
natures receive their private existence. They do not each have a private
existence separate from each other, but share a single common private
existence: in hypostases consisting of different natures, “one nature and
essence cannot be contemplated by itself, but only together with
The meaning of the term ἐνυπόστατον as an essence that received a private and concrete existence in another hypostasis is clearly expressed by St. John Damascene:
“Furthermore, a nature that is received by another hypostasis and in it acquires its being is called an enhypostatic nature. Hence also the flesh of the Lord, which did not exist independently at any time, is not a hypostasis, but rather something enhypostatic; for, being received by the Hypostasis of God the Word, it exists in it and has had and still has it as its hypostasis” (Philosophical Chapters. Ch. 45).
Leontius of Byzantium gave an answer to a question that remains relevant to the contemporary dialogue with the Monophysite churches. The question is: Why is it not possible to consider that in Christ there is one nature, even a complex one, consisting of human and divine natures - by analogy with human nature, which, although composed of two varieties of essences, body and soul, is considered one nature? Leontius says that the human nature, although composed of varieties of essences, can be called one nature because it belongs to the common human species. We cannot say this about Christ, however, because there is no common kind of “Christ” to which the individual “Christs” belong. Incidentally, even for Aristotle those particular entities which exist in the singular do not have a common essence (Categories 1b.6-7).
Scripture tells us that the Person of Christ is precisely the Person of God. In Jn. 1:14 we read: The Word became flesh. In the Gospel of John the term “Word” is the name of the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity.
Thus, Christ does not possess some human hypostasis that is separate like ours. Rather the hypostasis of the Word is common, inseparable from both His human and His Divine natures. The Savior’s humanity receives its existence not in its human hypostasis, as in the case of each of us, but in the Hypostasis of the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity; it is received and hypostasized into the Hypostasis of the Word; it in no way pre-exists the moment of the Incarnation. This is an important dogmatic point which the Holy Fathers emphasize. St. John of Damascus writes: “The Word Himself was made a hypostasis for the flesh. Consequently, at the same time as the flesh was formed, it was already the flesh of God the Word. Therefore we speak not of a man divine, but of God Incarnate” (An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith. Book 3, Ch. 2).
The best part of the doctrine of enhypostaticity is that it allows us to speak of the Savior’s humanity as hypostatic (i.e. really existing) without having anything in common with Nestorianism. In this case the humanity of Christ is neither decomposed into a system of properties, as does Severus, nor is it an ideal reality in the Platonic sense, but a concrete human being, individualized in relation to every other human being, with the difference that, unlike all human beings since Adam, the principle of the individuation of Christ’s humanity is not the human hypostasis, but the pre-eternal Hypostasis of the Logos, which takes into itself, enhypostasizes humanity, making its life the content of the life of the Divine Person. The Holy Fathers spoke of the complex hypostasis of Christ in the sense that it contains two natures, denying the Monophysite doctrine of a complex (but one) nature.
The main achievement of the Orthodox theologians of the mid-sixth century, whose teaching was expressed in the decisions of the Fifth Ecumenical Council of 553, was the unconditional recognition of the two perfect and different natures in Christ, divine and human. Also the belief in the one Person of the Savior is confirmed, since the two natures are united in the one Hypostasis of God the Word.
Christology
The Incarnation
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