Person versus Individual

Lossky’s most influential and most contested idea: that person (hypostasis) and individual are not synonyms. An individual is a particular specimen of a nature, defined by the properties that separate it from other specimens. A person is the one who has a nature and is irreducible to it — not a part of nature, not a portion of it, but the “who” that possesses it and can only be indicated, never defined. This file sets out the distinction, its Trinitarian ground, its transposition into anthropology, its afterlife, and the reservation Lossky himself expressed about its patristic warrant.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

The Distinction

Take a human being. Almost everything you can say about him — that he is rational, embodied, mortal, possessed of will and memory and a particular genetic endowment — is a statement about nature: either about human nature as such, or about the particular quantum of human nature that this specimen instantiates. On this level he is an individual: a delimited portion of a common nature, distinguished from others by the accidents that mark him off. Individuality, in this sense, is a matter of boundaries: what is mine is not yours.

Lossky’s claim is that this exhausts nothing that matters. Beyond and beneath every enumerable property there is the one to whom the properties belong — the person, the hypostasis, who is not a further property, not a residue after subtraction, not the sum of the qualities and not a part of them, but that which possesses them. And because the person is not a nature or a part of a nature, he cannot be defined: definition specifies a nature, and the person is precisely what is irreducible to nature.

Lossky puts the point as an irreducibility: person signifies the irreducibility of the human being to his nature — one who is distinct from his own nature, who goes beyond it while containing it, who makes it exist as his nature — and the conclusion at which he arrives is characteristically apophatic, since what the person finally is only God can know (Torrance, “Personhood and Patristics in Orthodox Theology: Reassessing the Debate,” Heythrop Journal 52, no. 4 [2011]: 700–707, summarizing Lossky’s formulation and its apophatic terminus; Lossky, “The Theological Notion of the Human Person,” in In the Image and Likeness of God).

The Trinitarian Ground

The distinction is not a piece of philosophical anthropology that Lossky then applies to God. It runs in the other direction: it is taken from the Trinitarian dogma and transposed to the human being.

In the Trinity there is one nature and three hypostases. The three are not three individuals — three instances of divinity, three portions of a divine nature — because that would be tritheism, and the divine nature is not divisible into parts. Nor are they three modes or aspects of one subject, which would be Sabellianism. They are three whos, each possessing the whole divine nature, distinguished not by any difference of nature but solely by their relations of origin: the Father unbegotten and the sole source, the Son begotten of the Father, the Spirit proceeding from the Father (see The Holy Trinity).

Lossky insists on what follows. The hypostases are not derived from the essence, and the relations do not constitute them: “the relations only serve to express the hypostatic diversity of the Three; they are not the basis of it. It is the absolute diversity of the three hypostases which determines their differing relations to one another, not vice versa” (Lossky, “The Procession of the Holy Spirit in Orthodox Trinitarian Doctrine,” in In the Image and Likeness of God, p. 79). Persons come first; relations describe them. This is precisely the point on which he holds Latin triadology to have gone wrong, since a theology that founds the hypostases on relations of opposition ends, he argues, in “an ontological primacy of the essence over the hypostases” (ibid., p. 77; see Two Triadologies and Their Consequences).

Man is made in the image of this God. Therefore the human person, too, is irreducible to the nature he shares with all other human beings, and personhood is not a superior grade of individuality but a different order of reality altogether.

What the Distinction Does

Four consequences give the idea its power.

1. It grounds human dignity without grounding it in a property. If what is inviolable about a human being were some faculty — reason, self-consciousness, moral agency, productivity — then dignity would vary with the possession of that faculty, and those in whom it is absent or diminished would have less. Lossky’s account locates the inviolable precisely in what is not a property at all. The person is not more or less present according to capacity.

2. It makes love, rather than assertion, the fulfilment of personhood. Because individuality consists in boundaries — in what excludes — while person is irreducible to any content, the person is fulfilled not by accumulating what is proper to himself but by the free gift of his nature to another. In Lossky’s frame, sin is a movement in the opposite direction: the person collapsing into the individual, taking possession of his nature and defending it, “having” instead of “being.”

3. It gives an account of freedom. Since the person is not determined by the nature, freedom is not one capacity of the nature among others but belongs to the personal mode of existing. This is where Lossky draws most directly on St. Maximus the Confessor’s distinction between the natural will (thelēma physikon), which belongs to the nature and is always oriented to the good, and the mode in which the person exercises it (see The Image and the Likeness; St. Maximus the Confessor).

4. It rules out both collectivism and individualism. A theology that reduced persons to instances of a nature would justify the subordination of the person to the species or the collective; a theology that made person equivalent to individual would justify the atomism Lossky saw in modern Western society. The Trinitarian model — full personal distinctness in full natural communion — refuses both.

The Afterlife of the Idea

Few twentieth-century theological proposals have travelled further.

Metropolitan John Zizioulas made personhood the organizing category of an entire ontology in Being as Communion (1985), arguing that the person is ontologically prior to the substance and that the Father’s free hypostatic act is the ground of the divine being. This is a development well beyond Lossky, and the two diverge sharply on method: Aristotle Papanikolaou has shown that where “for Lossky, apophaticism is the central precondition for a trinitarian theology,” for Zizioulas “apophaticism has a much more restricted role,” and that Zizioulas prioritizes hypostasis where Lossky prioritizes the energies as the ground of the realism of divine-human communion (Papanikolaou, “Divine Energies or Divine Personhood,” Modern Theology 19, no. 3 [2003]; see Metropolitan John Zizioulas).

Christos Yannaras developed a personalist and existential Orthodox philosophy in the same lineage (see Christos Yannaras). Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov), Lossky’s collaborator on the Exarchate’s journal, built his theology around what his interpreters call the “hypostatic principle” — the fulfilment of the human person in the image of the personal God (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, SVS Press, 2002; see The Hypostatic Principle). Fr. Dumitru Stăniloae worked with a closely related account of person, communion and deification (see Person, Communion, and Deification). Beyond Orthodoxy the idea has fed into a wide range of Western personalist theology.

The result is that “person versus individual” is now heard, in many Orthodox settings, as simply the Orthodox teaching on the human being. That is exactly the impression this collection is obliged to correct: it is Lossky’s theological proposal, powerfully developed by others, and it is not a conciliar definition.

Lossky’s Own Reservation

The most important qualification comes from Lossky himself. In “The Theological Notion of the Human Person” he wrote:

“For my part, I must admit that until now I have not found what one might call an elaborated doctrine of the human person in patristic theology, alongside its very precise teaching on divine persons and hypostases.”

(Lossky, “The Theological Notion of the Human Person,” in In the Image and Likeness of God; quoted in the secondary literature on the personhood debate.)

This sentence deserves to be read slowly. Lossky is conceding, in the essay where he states his doctrine most fully, that the Fathers did not hand him this doctrine ready-made; that what they elaborated with precision was the divine hypostasis; and that the transposition to the human being is a work of construction which he is undertaking. He does not think it an illegitimate construction — he takes it to be required by the Fathers’ Trinitarian and Christological grammar — but he does not pretend it is a quotation.

Both parties in the later debate have appealed to this admission. Critics read it as Lossky conceding the very point they press: that the doctrine reads modern personalism back into the Fathers (see The Person-versus-Individual Debate). Defenders read it as evidence of his scholarly honesty and as a warning against the more confident personalism of his successors — Lossky, unlike some who followed him, knew he was building.

The Objections in Brief

Set out fully in Section 08; named here so that the exposition is not left unqualified.

  • Lucian Turcescu argues that the sharp person/individual opposition cannot be exegeted from the Cappadocians and that its proponents import nineteenth- and twentieth-century insights and foist them on Gregory of Nyssa and Basil (Turcescu, “‘Person’ versus ‘Individual’, and Other Modern Misreadings of Gregory of Nyssa,” Modern Theology 18, no. 4 [2002]: 527–539).
  • André de Halleux argued that the Cappadocians were “at the same time and equally totally both personalists and essentialists,” so that the personalism/essentialism opposition on which the modern Orthodox case rests is a bad controversy (de Halleux, “Personnalisme ou essentialisme trinitaire chez les Pères cappadociens? Une mauvaise controverse,” Revue théologique de Louvain 17 [1986], in two parts).
  • Sarah Coakley has questioned the transfer of modern notions of “person” onto Cappadocian hypostasis in the analytic and social-Trinitarian discussions (Coakley, “‘Persons’ in the ‘Social’ Doctrine of the Trinity: A Critique of Current Analytic Discussion,” in The Trinity, ed. Davis, Kendall and O’Collins, Oxford, 1999, pp. 123–144).
  • Nikolaos Loudovikos objects to a personhood set in dialectical antithesis to nature, and proposes instead a “personal” or “hypostatic nature,” arguing that freedom has to do with nature as God’s loving gift rather than with escape from it (Loudovikos, “Possession or Wholeness? St. Maximus the Confessor and John Zizioulas on Person, Nature, and Will,” Participatio 4 [2013]: 258–286).
  • Alexis Torrance reassesses the whole debate and argues that the relation of this theology to patristic thought is more nuanced than either its advocates or its critics have allowed (Torrance, Heythrop Journal 52, no. 4 [2011]: 700–707).

See Also

References

  • Lossky, Vladimir. “The Theological Notion of the Human Person.” In In the Image and Likeness of God, ed. John H. Erickson and Thomas E. Bird. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974. (Source of the admission that he had not found an elaborated patristic doctrine of the human person.)
  • Lossky, Vladimir. “The Procession of the Holy Spirit in Orthodox Trinitarian Doctrine.” In In the Image and Likeness of God, ch. 4, pp. 71–96. (Relations express but do not ground the hypostases, p. 79; the ontological primacy of essence over hypostases in Latin triadology, p. 77.)
  • Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. London: James Clarke, 1957. Chs. 3 and 6.
  • Zizioulas, John. Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985.
  • Papanikolaou, Aristotle. “Divine Energies or Divine Personhood: Vladimir Lossky and John Zizioulas on Conceiving the Transcendent and Immanent God.” Modern Theology 19, no. 3 (2003): 357–385.
  • Papanikolaou, Aristotle. Being with God: Trinity, Apophaticism, and Divine-Human Communion. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006.
  • Torrance, Alexis. “Personhood and Patristics in Orthodox Theology: Reassessing the Debate.” The Heythrop Journal 52, no. 4 (2011): 700–707.
  • Turcescu, Lucian. “‘Person’ versus ‘Individual’, and Other Modern Misreadings of Gregory of Nyssa.” Modern Theology 18, no. 4 (2002): 527–539.
  • de Halleux, André. “Personnalisme ou essentialisme trinitaire chez les Pères cappadociens? Une mauvaise controverse.” Revue théologique de Louvain 17 (1986), parts 1 and 2.
  • Coakley, Sarah. “‘Persons’ in the ‘Social’ Doctrine of the Trinity: A Critique of Current Analytic Discussion.” In The Trinity: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Trinity, ed. Stephen T. Davis, Daniel Kendall and Gerald O’Collins, 123–144. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
  • Loudovikos, Nikolaos. “Possession or Wholeness? St. Maximus the Confessor and John Zizioulas on Person, Nature, and Will.” Participatio: Journal of the Thomas F. Torrance Theological Fellowship 4 (2013): 258–286.
  • Sakharov, Nicholas V. I Love, Therefore I Am: The Theological Legacy of Archimandrite Sophrony. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002.