If that is truly the case, then what is one to make of the Non-Chalcedonian doctrine of "one nature from two natures?"
One hypostasis from two hypostases?True. Please provide an example of an impersonal hypostasis.
Are you saying then that the humanity of Christ is not hypostatic - that is that you deny its reality? There is a difference between self-subsistent hypostases and non-self-subsistent hypostases. A self-subsistent hypostasis has a person, a non-self-subsistent hypostasis does not. The humanity of Christ is real and hypostatic but it is not its own, it does not belong to itself it belongs to Christ, the self-subsistent hypostasis of the Word.
This is the same as the later teaching of Leontius about enhypostasis. The humanity has to be hypostatic or it is not real.
I believe your assertion that "not all hypostases are personal" is not Orthodox teaching. Perhaps you could cite your source for it and prove that it is.In St. Cyril's early writings that is the case. The terminology was in the formative stage and had not been firmed up.
Your body is hypostatic. But it does not have its own person. It rather belongs to the person of your spirit which is also hypostatic but which is of a different nature. St Cyril used the body/spirit anaology of two natures in union all the time. That Christ is One is a good book of his to read. It was certainly not some early language he repudiated. The body and the spirit are totally different, two different natures, but they are united and make one hypostasis, while both remain hypostatic and completely different.
Is Christ two beings or one being who has two real ways of being?
St. Cyril himself recognized this and was able to speak of two natures after the hypostatic union and even to sign the Formula of Union drafted by Theodoret of Cyrus, an act that drew criticism from some of his more extreme partisans and from later Non-Chalcedonians like Severus of Antioch and Timothy Aelurus.
Depends how nature is used, that's all. He also never spoke of Christ being 'in two natures', at the most he spoke 'two natures in Christ'. You seem to think that I am obliged to not understand how you are using nature and hypostasis. Of course I do. And I agree with you usage.
Isn't it time to move beyond the use of confusing terminology?
Absolutely - but I seriously and sadly have not sensed that you wanted to.
If everyone actually understands and believes that our Lord is the one hypostasis of the Word in two natures, human and divine, then why continue to speak of "one nature from two natures?"
Because you have still not recognised that this usage is entirely acceptable to Nestorians. You are using hypostasis as a synonym for person and so you are only saying that Christ is 'one person in two natures'. Nestorius said the same. I don't think you think like Nestorius for one moment, but you do seem to be thinking that only the OO terminology is problematic. It isn't, for what I understand perfectly you find confusing and what you understand perfectly I can see has plenty of scope for confusion.
Why continue to insist that Christ has but one will? I doubt that Fr. John Romanides meant that as an endorsement of Non-Chalcedonian doctrine.
Do you agree with the teaching:
"his human will follows and that not as resisting and reluctant, but rather as subject to his divine and omnipotent will."
It is in this sense that we speak of 'one will'. We don't dispute that the humanity has its own proper will. We have synodally stated at the highest level:
"the Hypostasis of the Logos became composite (sunqetoj) by uniting to His divine uncreated nature with its natural will and energy, which He has in common with the Father and the Holy Spirit, created human nature, which He assumed at the Incarnation and made His own, with
its natural will and energy."
So it cannot be said that we don't confess the human will of Christ. We do. But we assert that it is subject to the divine will. Just as the greatest saints have united their will to Christ as far as possible and from an external union as it were of devotion. So in Christ the humanity finds its glorification in serving the Divine Word.
It is clear what St. Cyril meant because, as I mentioned above, he moved beyond his early use of the word physis and was able to come to an agreement with the Antiochenes concerning the two natures of Christ.
The use of physis for hypostasis is far from an early usage. And are you aware of his letters where he complains that the Antiocheans are barely Orthodox enough but he is willing to put up with their errors for the sake of union on the more important matters?
He came to understand that the orthodox Antiochenes did not mean two hypostases in Christ any more than he himself did.Whoa!
In fact he came to see that he had been conned because many of the Antiochean supporters of the heretic Theodore were saying that Cyril had been won over to their false Christology. John of Antioch was certainly sound but many of his followers were far from Orthodox.
Are you actually saying Christ's humanity is an hypostasis?
Are you actually saying that Christ's humanity is not real?
Or are we just getting lost in terminology which I thought you didn't want. Why don't you just explain what you believe is necessary without using physis or hypostasis?
Then you are being consistent when you say "one nature from two natures!"
Christ is one real individual being from two different ways of being and these two ways of being do not cease to be completely different, nor completely active in Christ, but he is one being and individual not two.
Anything else is heresy.
You really do mean "one hypostasis from two hypostases."
Well it is more complex than that. Do you want to learn what I mean? I mean that the realities of which Christ is composed are from the ousia of humanity and Divinity. But the Christ is not incarnate in the whole ousia of humanity rather he has united one real instance of humanity with his real Divine hypostasis and person. The word we use for a real instance is a hypostasis which is defined, certainly by us, as an instance of a generality or class.
My flesh is certainly a real instance of the class of human flesh, and my spirit is certainly a real instance of the class of human spirit and these have been united to make me, but my flesh does not cease to be a real instance of flesh, different from all other real instances, and my spirit does not cease to be a real instance of human spirit different from all other real instances. If my flesh is not a real instance then it is not hypostatic but it does not stand on its own, it belongs to me.
In a not completely dissimilar way the humanity of Christ with natural will and energy is a real instance - do you deny this. It is not 'the human ousia' it is an individuated instance of the human ousia. But it does not belong to itself, it belongs to the person of the Word. If it is ousia then Christ is incarnate in all men. In our terminology it is hypostatic but not an independent hypostasis.
What word would you want to use for a 'real individual instance of a a member of an ousia'. I don't mind using that in conversation with you. But you must surely have a word for that which is not personal but is a real instance of an ousia. If the humanity of Christ is not an individual instance of the human ousia, and therefore as flesh neither the ousia itself, which is the whole class, nor a person, since the humanity does not have a human person, then what word would you use?
What is your source for this teaching, Peter?Do you agree with the Coptic Pope Shenouda III that "after this unity [the hypostatic union] we do not ever speak again about two natures of Christ" ?
If the two natures are not mixed, changed, or confused, why is it impossible to distinguish them - or even to speak of them - after the hypostatic union?What do you make of Coptic Pope Shenouda III's assertion that Christ has but one will, which is, of course, simply what Non-Chalcedonians have always asserted?
There is not problem with distinguishing them. And of course Pope Shenouda does not say that Christ has one will. He says many times that the humanity of Christ has a natural will. I will quote again from words he signed:
"..human nature, which He assumed at the Incarnation and made His own, with its natural will and energy."
But the human will is not independent of the will of the Word, just as the whole of Christ's humanity is not independent of the Word to whom it belongs. I wil quote again:
"these two natural wills are not contrary the one to the other (God forbid!) as the impious heretics assert, but his human will follows and that not as resisting and reluctant, but rather as subject to his divine and omnipotent will. For it was right that the flesh should be moved but subject to the divine will, according to the most wise Athanasius. For as his flesh is called and is the flesh of God the Word, so also the natural will of his flesh is called and is the proper will of God the Word, as he himself says: "I came down from heaven, not that I might do mine own will but the will of the Father which sent me!" where he calls his own will the will of his flesh, inasmuch as his flesh was also his own. For as his most holy and immaculate animated flesh was not destroyed because it was deified but continued in its own state and nature (orw te kai logw), so also his human will,although deified, was not suppressed, but was rather preserved according to the saying of Gregory Theologus: "His will [i.e., the Saviour's] is not contrary to God but altogether deified."
This is how and why we speak of one will - one will standing for a union of human and divine wills in which the human will is not removed but is deified and is subject to the divine will. If we say of a football team that they acted as one, how much more should we say that the union of humanity and divinity in Christ brought about a union in which there was no division of will, even as there was no confusion.
It seems to me that NC Christology posits a fully human Christ but then makes Him so much the passive instrument of His divinity as to be practically Apollinarian.
Do you agree with the teaching I have quoted just above? I do not believe that the OO teach anything more than this.
Do you agree with it or not?
When one speaks of "one nature from two" - whether one really means nature or hypostasis - and then says it is impossible to speak of the natures after this unity, he causes one of the natures to disappear or be absorbed into the other, despite protests of no mixture, change, or confusion.
Let me quote you a bit from St Cyril quoted by Severus as his own teaching. He says:
"There is no share in any blame that one should recognise, for example, that the flesh is one thing in its own nature, apart from the Word which sprang from God and the Father, and that the Only-Begotten is another again, with respect to his own nature. Nevertheless to recognise these things is not to divide the natures after the union."
and Severus himself says:
"Let us make an enquiry of the divinity and humanity. They are not only different in everything but they are removed from each other and distinct as well. But when the union is professed from the two of them, the difference, again, in the quality of the natures from which there is the One Christ is not supressed, but in conjunction by hypostasis division is driven out."
So we have no problem with recognising the distinction of the natures. No problem at all. But we do not allow division to set them up as separate agents with their own agendas and therefore their own persons.
Fr John Romanides sees this in the Tome:
"There is no doubt that Leo tended to separate or distinguish the acts of Christ in such a way that the two natures seem to be acting as separate subjects"
And if they are separate subjects then they are separate persons and we have Nestorianism. Not that it is my point to accuse Leo of Rome of that. But as Severus says, we have no problem with recognising difference, of course the humanity is different in every way from the divinity, but we cannot allow division to set up tow subjects.
In the case of Non-Chalcedonian Christology it is the human Jesus who seems to disappear, dominated by and made the passive instrument of the Divine.
This, rather than deifying humanity, makes a marionette of it, saving it through a form of tyranny.
I hope you will respond to the quote about the human will being subject to the divine will. I personally have never recognised what you are suggesting in anything I have read among the OO. Who is the 'human Jesus'? A man apart from the Word of God? You must be careful that you do not introduce division. When Christ ate and drank was that in his flesh or in his divinity? Of course it was in his flesh. When he suffered and dies was that in his flesh or in his divinity? Of course it was in his divinity.
But one of the Holy Trinity suffered and died, in his humanity It was not a mere man called Jesus, it was the Son of God who suffered and died
in his own flesh.
Only the Orthodox Christology - as expounded in the Tome of Pope St. Leo the Great and approved by the Holy Spirit at Chalcedon - preserves the truth in its fullness.
Only a free man, freely assenting to the will of God the Father, could redeem a humanity that willfully transgressed His commandments in the first place.
That does seem contrary to the teaching on the will I quoted earlier. Do you agree that the human will is subject to the divine will?
Nor, I'm afraid, though I do really appreciate the tone of your post and have tried to respond in like manner, do I find we have gone beyond terminology.
If you could respond to the quote about the teaching on the human will being subject to the divine will, since that seems to be an area we disagree somewhat, and if you could explain what you believe in your own words without using physis, nature, or hypostasis then that would be helpful as well.
Best wishes
Peter
