Christ's Theandric Operation

The phrase “theandric operation” — from the Greek for “God-man-work” — first appears in the writings of the Pseudo-Dionysius.¹ When the Severians (moderate Monophysites) appealed to these writings at a religious conference in Constantinople (A.D. 531 or 533), the Catholic representative, Hypatius of Ephesus, publicly rejected them as spurious.² Despite this, the Pseudo-Areopagite’s works gradually won esteem even among Catholics — largely thanks to St. Maximus Confessor’s commentaries defending them against the charge of Monophysitism — and came to exercise wide influence on theology.³ The phrase “theandric operation” became current chiefly through a canon of the Lateran Council under Martin I (649).⁴

Three Kinds of Operation

St. Maximus Confessor, alongside St. Sophronius the chief champion of orthodoxy against Monothelitism, explains the term this way: “Christ acted solely as God when, though physically absent, He cured the ruler’s son; He acted solely as man, though He was God, when He ate and when He was troubled; He acted both as God and as man when He gave sight to the man born blind by spreading clay on his eyes, and when He cured, by mere touch, the woman with an issue of blood — and these last are properly called theandric.”⁵

Following this, Christ’s operations divide into three kinds: purely divine (such as the omnipotent command that healed the ruler’s son from a distance); purely human (eating, sorrowing); and mixed — partly divine, partly human — such as healing by physical touch combined with a word of power. Christ’s purely divine operations are not, strictly, theandric at all, since He performs them as Second Person of the Trinity together with the Father and the Holy Ghost. Properly speaking, only those acts Christ performs partly as God and partly as man — or purely as man — are called theandric.⁶

What “Theandric” Does and Does Not Mean

In its strict sense, “theandric” applies to divine operations carried out with the cooperation of Christ’s human nature — raising Lazarus, for instance, by the human cry “Lazarus, come forth!” (John 11:43). But it would be heretical to picture this “mixed” operation as some third kind of activity, neither divine nor human, blended together Monophysite-fashion. Christ’s divine energeia proceeds solely from His divine nature, and His human energeia solely from His human nature — both belonging hypostatically to the one Person of the Logos in exactly the way the two natures themselves do.⁷ St. John Damascene: “We do not speak of divided operations, or of Him operating in a divided way, but of Him operating each [operation] united with a share of the other, each remaining what is proper to itself.”⁸ Since the Logos alone is the subject who acts (principium quod) through the Divine Nature common to all Three Persons (the shared principium quo), only the Son can be called the “hegemonic principle” of this mixed operation.⁹

Even Christ’s Suffering Is Theandric

It would be a mistake, however, to carve Christ’s purely human acts and feelings — hunger, thirst, weariness, pain, suffering, death — out of His theandric operation altogether, restricting the term only to the properly “mixed” acts where Godhead and manhood visibly cooperate. In a wider and equally true sense, our Savior’s purely human actions and sufferings are themselves theandric too. It is the God-man who performs them, not a mere man. By the Hypostatic Union, Christ’s purely human acts and feelings are, at the same time and in a genuine sense, the acts and feelings of the Divine Logos Himself — who, as the “hegemonic principle,” governs the human element and, through the mediation of His manhood as principium quo, performs human deeds and bears human sufferings just as truly as He performs divine deeds through His Godhead. Only on this basis could the Son of God redeem the human race through His Passion and death.

This qualification matters: we conceive this special divine cooperation as bound up with Christ’s human acts and sufferings only insofar as they bear an intrinsic relation to the work of atonement. As Rusticus Diaconus observes: “God the Word, even while existing in His humanity, continued to fulfill His accustomed operations everywhere in heaven, though also performing certain inestimable ones through His body. For what would it have mattered to His operations from the beginning whether He had a human nature or not, so long as it did not rain, thunder, or move the stars through that humanity — so that, to put it simply, He performed nothing further through it except what was newly done for our salvation, for the sake of which He also became man.”¹⁰ It is in exactly this sense that the Sixth Ecumenical Council defines: “according to this reasoning we confess also two natural wills and operations, concurring fittingly in Him for the salvation of the human race.”¹¹

Notes