Hypostasis and the Human

The theological payload of Christ in Eastern Christian Thought: Meyendorff’s argument that the Christological councils yield an anthropology. Because the humanity of Christ is real, complete, and personally the Word’s own, the human being is defined not by a closed nature but by a capacity for God — so that participation in the divine life fulfills rather than diminishes what is human. This file sets out that argument, its patristic warrants, and the questions it raises.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration) / Orthodox Church in America

The Governing Sentence

Meyendorff’s own compression of the thesis is the one worth keeping in view: man is truly man when he participates in divine life, and this participation in no way diminishes his authentically human existence, human energy, and will (Meyendorff, Christ in Eastern Christian Thought, Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1975).

Every clause is load-bearing. Truly man — participation is not a departure from humanity but its realization. In no way diminishes — this is the anti-monothelite point, generalized. Existence, energy, and will — the three terms are the technical vocabulary of the seventh-century councils, transposed into anthropology.

The argument is not that Christology has anthropological implications, as though the two were separate topics. It is that in the Greek patristic tradition Christology is the anthropology, because in Christ the truth about the human being is enacted rather than described.

Hypostasis: the Grammar

The whole depends on the technical distinction, stabilized in Byzantine usage, between nature (physis, ousia) — what a thing is, the set of properties and capacities shared by all members of a kind — and hypostasis (hypostasis, prosopon) — who someone is, the concrete subsisting subject in whom a nature exists.

Applied to the Incarnation this yields the Chalcedonian confession: one hypostasis, the eternal Word, in two natures, divine and human, each complete and each retaining its own properties. Applied to the Trinity it yields the Cappadocian grammar: one essence, three hypostases (see The Holy Trinity).

Two consequences of this grammar carry Meyendorff’s argument.

First: Christ’s humanity has no human hypostasis of its own — and this does not make it less human. The sixth-century solution, later summarized in the term enhypostaton, is that a nature need not have its own hypostasis to be real; it needs only to subsist in some hypostasis. Christ’s human nature subsists in the hypostasis of the Word. It is therefore not an abstraction (which a nature without any hypostasis would be) and not a second person (which would be Nestorianism). Meyendorff insists on the point because the alternative readings both destroy the anthropology: if Christ’s humanity is impersonal in the modern sense, He is not a man; if it has its own person, the union is a partnership and not a salvation.

Second: will and energy belong to nature, not to person. This is the Maximian axiom that the Sixth Council received. Because Christ has two natures He has two natural wills and two natural operations — He wills humanly with a human will, and this human willing is the willing of the divine Person (Maximus, Disputation with Pyrrhus; Meyendorff, Christ in Eastern Christian Thought, 1975, on Maximus’s doctrine of the will; see Natural and Gnomic Will).

The anthropological transposition is direct. If willing is a function of nature and not of person, then a deified human being does not lose his will by being united to God; a nature that is fully activated by grace is more, not less, itself.

What Human Nature Is

From this Meyendorff draws his account of the human person, which is the most influential and the most contestable part of the book.

The human being is constituted by relation to God. Meyendorff argues that in the Greek Fathers human nature is not a self-contained substance to which a relation to God is subsequently added, but is defined by its openness to and orientation toward God. To be in the image of God is to be capable of God. This is what makes deification intelligible: it is not the addition of a foreign perfection but the actualization of what the nature is for.

Sin is therefore mortality and corruption before it is guilt. Meyendorff reads the Greek patristic doctrine of ancestral sin as the inheritance of death and the corruption that follows from it, rather than the inheritance of Adam’s guilt — a reading he grounds in the Greek of Romans 5:12 (eph’ hō pantes hēmarton), which he takes as “because of which [i.e., death] all have sinned” rather than the Latin in quo omnes peccaverunt, “in whom all have sinned” (Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, 1974, on the doctrine of man and ancestral sin; see Theological Anthropology and Soteriology). Death, on this account, is the condition that produces sin, not merely the penalty that follows it; and salvation is accordingly the destruction of death, not the satisfaction of a debt.

Grace is uncreated. If participation in God is participation in God, then what is given in grace cannot be a created effect. This is the point at which the Christological argument runs directly into the fourteenth-century one: the essence–energies distinction is the technical statement of how a creature can really participate in the uncreated without becoming God by essence (see The Essence–Energies Distinction, and Theosis). Meyendorff’s whole corpus is arranged around this junction, which is why the Christological monograph and the Palamas monograph are two halves of one project.

The Divergence from the West

Meyendorff presents this anthropology as the deepest ground of the East–West divergence — deeper than the Filioque and deeper than the papal claims, which he treats as consequences as much as causes.

Where the Latin tradition, formed by Augustine and systematized in the schools, developed the doctrines of inherited guilt, of grace as a created quality in the soul, and of satisfaction, the Greek tradition, on his account, kept a different set of terms: inherited mortality, uncreated grace, and salvation as the healing and deifying of a nature. The two are not two accounts of the same thing; they generate different soteriologies (see Azymes, Purgatory and Created Grace, and Orthodox and Catholic).

Per the repository’s confessional standpoint (METHODOLOGY §4.1), the Orthodox position on created grace is reported here as the Church’s; what is Meyendorff’s own is the historiography — the specific genealogy by which he explains the divergence, and the sharpness of the contrast he draws. That genealogy is one of the things the modern historiographical literature has questioned, and the caution is registered in The Wider Revision and What Stands.

Criticisms and Cautions

Three should be named.

The terminology is modern. “Person,” “personalism,” “existential” — the words Meyendorff uses to render hypostasis and its implications carry twentieth-century freight. Later scholarship has argued that the modern personalist reading of Byzantine hypostasis-language reads more into it than the Byzantines put there, and that Meyendorff’s vocabulary belongs to post-war Paris (Pino, “Beyond Neo-Palamism,” Analogia 3.1 [2017], on the provenance of Meyendorff’s categories; see St. Sergius and the Sorbonne). This does not make the doctrine wrong; it makes the idiom a translation whose costs should be counted.

The East–West contrast is drawn sharply. Marcus Plested and others have argued that the antithesis between a Greek personalist tradition and a Latin essentialist one is a construction of late modernity rather than a description of the medieval material (Plested, Orthodox Readings of Aquinas, Oxford, 2012; see Critique of Scholasticism). As that file rightly insists, this is a point about framing and not a claim that the real disagreements evaporate.

The reading of Romans 5:12 is a reading. The Greek/Latin difference over eph’ hō is real and ancient, and the Orthodox tradition’s account of ancestral sin does not depend on Meyendorff. But the sharp opposition of “mortality, not guilt” is his formulation, taken up widely in modern Orthodox catechesis, and the patristic evidence is more varied than the slogan suggests.

Why the Argument Endures

For all that, this is the part of Meyendorff’s work that has been most fruitful. The claim that Christology and anthropology are one subject, that deification is the actualization rather than the suppression of human nature, and that the Sixth Council’s two wills are the guarantee of human integrity in the presence of God — these have become common property in contemporary Orthodox theology and have been taken up well beyond it. When Orthodox writers say that grace perfects nature by activating it rather than by supplementing it, they are, more often than not, saying something they learned from this book.

References

Meyendorff, John. Christ in Eastern Christian Thought. Washington, DC: Corpus Books, 1969; rev. ed. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1975. (Participation in divine life and the integrity of human existence, energy and will; hypostasis and nature; Maximus on the will; the Dionysian and iconoclast chapters.)
Meyendorff, John. Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes. New York: Fordham University Press, 1974. (The doctrine of man; ancestral sin as mortality; Romans 5:12.)
Maximus the Confessor. Disputation with Pyrrhus; Opuscula theologica et polemica. (Will and operation as belonging to nature.)
Bathrellos, Demetrios. The Byzantine Christ: Person, Nature, and Will in the Christology of Saint Maximus the Confessor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Pino, Tikhon Alexander. “Beyond Neo-Palamism: Interpreting the Legacy of St Gregory Palamas.” Analogia 3.1 (2017): 53–73.
Plested, Marcus. Orthodox Readings of Aquinas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Scripture: Romans 5:12; Chalcedon, 451, Definition; Constantinople III, 680–81.