The Hypostatic Union: The Controversy Regarding Christ's "Double Existence"

This controversy turns on whether the distinction between an individual nature and its existence is real or merely logical.

The Thomist Theory

Many philosophers and theologians hold the distinction between “reality” and “existence” purely logical — different names for the same thing. The Thomists, however, maintain a real distinction, positing an intermediate state, “actuality,” between mere possibility and existence: a possible being moved from possibility to actuality is not yet existent until a further, separable actus existendi supervenes, giving it “formal existence.” On this view, every creature passes through three really distinct stages of being: essential being (esse essentiae, physical essence), subsistent being (esse subsistentiae, hypostasis), and existential being (esse existentiae, existence), each flowing from the one before.

This raises the question: is there only one existence in Christ — the Logos’s divine existence — or two, a divine and a human? Cardinal Cajetan, Capreolus, Medina, Billuart, Gonet, and other Thomists hold that Christ’s sacred humanity, deprived of its own connatural existence as a human person would have had, derives its existence solely from the Logos — who supplies the missing created existence exactly as He supplies the missing human personality.¹ Some able theologians outside the Thomist school (the Jesuits Billot and Terrien among them) have adopted this view too, and it does lend the Hypostatic Union a certain sublimity.² For anyone who holds concrete reality and existence to be objectively identical, of course, the whole question dissolves — if a thing exists simply by being concretely actual, it is metaphysically impossible for Christ’s humanity to lack its own existence at all.³

The Majority View

Even granting the Thomist premise that essence and existence really differ, a further theological question remains open: is Christ’s manhood, as a matter of fact, deprived of human existence, subsisting solely through the Logos’s divine existence? Gregory of Valentia, Toletus, Suarez, Vásquez, Tanner, Franzelin, Stentrup, Christian Pesch, Tepe, and most theologians of Scotist leaning hold that theological argument alone shows Christ’s sacred humanity retains its own proper human existence within the Hypostatic Union, rather than existing through the divine existence of the Logos.

The Argument from Conciliar Definitions

Various councils have defined that, apart from lacking a human personality, Christ’s sacred humanity lacks nothing proper to man,⁴ and that the union of Godhead and manhood was formally consummated solely in the Person of the Logos.⁵ This seems impossible to square with the Thomist theory: Christ’s humanity would not be “perfect humanity, entire and undiminished” if it lacked its own existence, since existence is a property essential to any human nature; and a union consummated in the divine existence would no longer be purely hypostatic, but simultaneously “a union according to divine existence” as well.⁶ The Thomists themselves hold, along with everyone else, that the Three Divine Persons do not have “three relative existences” but one absolute existence common to all three⁷ — “I say there are not, in the Godhead, three relative existences, really and virtually distinct from the absolute existence of the essence,” as Gonet puts it.⁸ But if Christ’s manhood were united to His Godhead in that one absolute existence, the entire Trinity would become incarnate, and we would no longer have a strictly Hypostatic Union but a mere natural synthesis. Gonet and Billuart tried to escape this by saying the union occurs in the Trinity’s absolute existence only “mediately and secondarily” — but this is simply an evasion; every one of God’s absolute attributes (wisdom, omnipotence, immensity) could be limited the same way. If the uncreated existence supplies the created one at all, it must do so exactly as the Logos’s Divine Personality supplies the missing human personality — primarily and immediately. No other mode is conceivable.

Durandus had argued that Christ’s humanity was united “primarily and immediately” to the Trinity’s “absolute subsistence,” and only “secondarily and mediately” to the Logos’s own Hypostasis.⁹ Billuart refutes this effectively: “If the Word terminated the human nature formally and directly through a common, absolute subsistence, the Father and the Holy Ghost would be incarnate no less than the Son. But this consequence is false. Therefore so is the antecedent. Proof of the connection: whatever belongs to one Person of the Trinity by reason of some absolute, common attribute belongs to the whole Trinity. So, since creation, preservation, government — even the very act of uniting in the Incarnation — belong to one Person, by reason of omnipotence they belong to all three.”¹⁰ Substitute “existence” for “subsistence” in this same argument, and it turns just as effectively against Billuart’s own Thomist position. Billot attempts a different escape: “Existence is indeed one in the Godhead, like all absolute attributes, but is possessed in three distinct relative modes, such that the Father’s personal existence as such is not the personal existence of the Son or the Holy Spirit; the Son therefore has the same existence as the Father and the Holy Spirit, but under a different relation.”¹¹ This too fails to satisfy: the same principle applied here could just as well be applied to the divine Essence itself and to every absolute attribute of God. And it leads to an awkward dilemma: either the concept of divine Filiation includes existence, or it does not. If not, the missing created existence cannot be “supplied” by an existence the Sonship itself does not include. If it does, we are forced into “three relative existences” — which contradicts the common teaching of theologians altogether.¹²

The Argument from the Fathers

The Fathers scarcely anticipated the precise point at issue in this later Scholastic dispute. But like the early councils, they stressed emphatically that the Logos assumed a human nature (not a person) complete with every property human nature possessed before the Fall. St. John Damascene: “For God the Word omitted none of those things which He implanted in our nature when He fashioned us in the beginning, without assuming it, but assumed all of them — body and intelligent, rational soul, together with their properties.”¹³ Human, created existence is one such property, and so must have belonged to Christ’s sacred humanity as well.¹⁴

Some Fathers explicitly ascribe a human existence to Christ’s manhood. St. Cyril of Alexandria draws a sharp distinction between the Logos’s own (divine) existence, derived by eternal generation from the Father, and His (human) existence in the flesh.¹⁵ Billuart, arguing against Suarez and Henno, cites St. Sophronius against this reading, but Pohle judges the standard Latin translation inaccurate; the correct rendering, following Hardouin, runs: “For at once flesh, at once flesh of God the Word … for it obtained existence in Him and not separately in itself; together with the conception of the Word, these [body and soul, i.e. the human nature] were brought forth into existence and united to Him according to hypostasis, in that very moment in which they were brought forth into a real, true, and undivided existence.” Far from supporting the Thomist theory, St. Sophronius here effectively rejects it, attributing to Christ’s manhood a genuinely separate created existence.¹⁶

In the twelfth century, Euthymius Zigabenus, a Basilian monk under Emperor Alexius Comnenus, defended the same position: “Hence we predicate of Christ one personal hypostasis; but as for those [hypostases] that signify existence, it is permissible to affirm two, lest we say either nature is without existence — for we find the sense of ‘hypostasis’ that signifies existence in every nature, though not the personal sense in every nature.”¹⁷

Both sides in this dispute claim St. Thomas’s authority. Despite J. B. Terrien’s learned treatise on the subject,¹⁸ it remains disputed whether the Angelic Doctor himself held a real distinction between essence and existence.¹⁹ Certain passages of his resist a straightforwardly Thomist reading: “Just as Christ is one absolutely, on account of the unity of His suppositum, and two in a qualified sense, on account of His two natures, so He has one existence absolutely, on account of the one eternal existence of the eternal suppositum. But there is also another existence of this same suppositum — not insofar as it is eternal, but insofar as it has temporally become man — which existence, even though not accidental (since ‘man’ is not predicated accidentally of the Son of God), is nevertheless not the principal existence of its suppositum, but a secondary one.”²⁰ “The existence of the human nature is not the existence of the divine; yet it must not simply be said that Christ is two according to existence, since [the human existence] does not stand in equal relation to the eternal suppositum [as the divine existence does].”²¹

Notes