The Hypostatic Union: The Patristic Argument

The Fathers of the first four centuries — there is no need to extend the argument beyond 431 — condemned the heresy of Nestorius before it was ever broached. To bring out their teaching effectively, we consider it first as the simple testimony of Tradition, and second in its deeper speculative bearings.

The Fathers as Witnesses to Tradition

The ante-Ephesine Fathers testify to Primitive Christianity’s belief in the Hypostatic Union whenever, in their characteristically simple language, they ascribe divine attributes to the man Christ or human attributes to the Divine Logos, and insist on the inseparable unity of Jesus against any attempt to divide Him into two persons.

The Doctrine Foreshadowed

“Hypostatic Union” as a technical phrase is foreshadowed in the Fathers long before Nestorius. Foremost among the Apostolic Fathers here is St. Ignatius of Antioch (d. 107): “One is the physician, both bodily and spiritual, begotten and unbegotten, God existing in the flesh, both of Mary and of God, capable of suffering and yet impassible, Jesus Christ our Lord.”¹ It was plainly on the same supposition that St. Melito of Sardis could speak of “God suffering at the hands of the Israelites.”²

St. Irenaeus of Lyons (d. 202) supplies four leading propositions. First, one and the same person is both God and man: “for if one indeed suffered, and another remained impassible; and one indeed was born, and another descended upon him who was born, and again left him — they are shown to be not one, but two. … But the Apostle knew one alone, who was both born and suffered: He is the Word of God, He, the Only-Begotten of the Father, Christ Jesus our Lord.”³ Second, God is man and the man Jesus is true God: “The Word will be flesh, the Son of God the son of man … and this offspring, like us, is the mighty God and possesses an ineffable generation.”⁴ Third, the Incarnate Word possesses human as well as divine attributes: “The Word of God redeemed us with His own blood, and in the Eucharist confirmed His cup as His own blood, His bread as His own body.”⁵ And fourth, the union of Godhead and manhood in Christ must be conceived as hypostatic — for, as Irenaeus notes, St. John himself refuted “the blasphemous rules which divide the Lord into two distinct substances [hypostases], calling him a compound being.”⁶

St. Gregory of Nazianzus taught substantially the same doctrine: “If any one introduces two sons, the one of God the Father, and the other of the mother, but does not acknowledge them to be one and the same, he shall forfeit the adoptive sonship promised to those who have the true faith. For though there are two natures, the divine and the human, there are not two sons.”⁷ Among the Latin writers, Tertullian gave the dogma its most concise early form: “We see a double state [i.e., nature], not confused but conjoined in one person, God and man, Jesus.”⁸ St. Ambrose has a memorable formulation of his own: “For it is not one [person] from the Father and another from the Virgin, but the same [person] in one way from the Father, in another from the Virgin.”⁹ St. Augustine similarly: “Now truly [Christ] has appeared as mediator between God and men in such a way that, uniting both natures in the unity of [His] Person, He raised the ordinary by means of the extraordinary, and tempered the extraordinary by means of the ordinary.”¹⁰

Irenaeus and Tertullian, it should be noted, use the later ecclesiastical formula “in the unity of person” even before St. Augustine. Hippolytus at least foreshadows it, if confusedly: “For neither was the Logos without His flesh, and in Himself the perfect only-begotten Son, although He was the perfect Logos, nor could the flesh subsist apart from the Logos, because it had its subsistence in the Logos.”¹¹ Epiphanius, in developing his own account of the Incarnation, writes that “the Logos has united body and spiritual soul in one unity and one spiritual Hypostasis” — and clarifies elsewhere that he means to exclude any human personality in Christ: “We do not introduce two Christs or two kings and sons of God, but the same God and the same man. Not as if the Logos dwelled in the man, but because He wholly became man … the Word was made flesh. He does not say, ‘The flesh became God,’ because he wished to emphasize above all things that the Logos descended from Heaven and took on flesh from the womb of the Blessed Virgin, and in a most perfect manner incorporated into Himself a complete human nature.”¹² St. Athanasius, too, uses “subsistence” as a synonym for “hypostasis”: “Christ is one according to an unfailing subsistence, so that both together are one — perfect in every respect, at once God and man.”¹³

The Argument from the Creeds

The argument from Tradition gains special weight from the Fathers’ repeated appeal to the baptismal creed, based on the Apostles’ Creed and regarded as the strongest bulwark against Christological heresy.

The Council of Ephesus (A.D. 431) declined to draft a new creed against Nestorius specifically, on the express ground that the Nicene Creed already sufficiently refuted him.¹⁴ The profession of faith in “the only-begotten Son of God, conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, crucified, dead, and buried” is itself an overwhelming argument for Christ’s personal unity, since all these human predicates are attributed directly to the “Son of God,” not to “the man Jesus.” The Oriental creeds especially preserve the formula “one Lord Jesus Christ” — aimed precisely at the recurring, Cerinthus-descended attempt to split Jesus Christ into two persons, the Son of God and the man in whom He indwells.¹⁵ Against the Patripassianist Noetus’s version of this error, the presbyters of Smyrna solemnly reaffirmed their own creed’s teaching: “We have one Christ.” Epiphanius, our source for this episode, also records that Eastern bishops required catechumens to make an elaborate profession of Christ’s unipersonality, ruling out both Nestorianism and Monophysitism in advance: “We believe … in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God … who incorporated in a sacred union the flesh, not in some other man, but in Himself. … For the Word was made flesh, not by undergoing a transformation, or by changing His Divinity into humanity. … For the Lord Jesus Christ is one and not two, the same God, the same King.”¹⁶

The Fathers as Theologians

A fuller view of primitive Tradition comes from those Patristic passages that directly discuss and explain the dogma of Christ’s single personality.

Arguing from the unity of Christ as Son of Mary and Son of God, several Fathers point to the absurd consequence of Nestorius’s position: if there really were two hypostases in Christ, as Nestorius claimed, the Trinity would consist of four Persons. On exactly this ground the African bishops, St. Augustine among them, compelled the Gallic monk Leporius — who had propagated the Pelagian heresy and anticipated Nestorianism besides — to abjure the doctrine of a twofold personality in Christ.¹⁷

It was natural for the Fathers to seek analogies between Christ and the Trinity, and several describe the relation of nature to person in Christ as the inverse of that in the Trinity: in the Trinity, three Hypostases share one nature; in Christ, one Hypostasis bears two complete natures. The Council of Ephesus itself quoted St. Gregory of Nazianzus to this effect: the elements from which the Savior is constituted are indeed distinct, “yet not another and another, far from it. For both these are one by their union, God having been made man, and man deified. … I say ‘another and another’ in the opposite sense from how it stands in the Trinity: there, indeed, [each Person] is another and another, lest we confound the Persons; but not ‘another thing and another thing,’ since the Three, as touching the Godhead, are one and the same.”¹⁸

Finally, some Fathers responded directly to the pagan and Jewish mockery of Christians for “adoring a crucified man as divine” and “degrading the immutable God” to the level of “a mutable man born of a woman” — meeting the charge by insisting that Christ, born of the Virgin, is not merely a man but also true God, and both at once by a miraculous, incomprehensible union. Pliny, in his famous letter to Trajan, reports that the Christians “confessed that they used to assemble together before dawn to say prayers to Christ, as to a god.”¹⁹ The scoffer Lucian sneers that “their chief lawgiver [Christ] persuaded them that they were all brethren, one of another, as soon as they had gone over” and “adored that crucified sophist.”²⁰ And the philosopher Celsus objects: “God is good, beautiful, blessed, most magnificent and beautiful of form. But if he would descend to men, he must change himself and become bad instead of good, ugly instead of beautiful, unhappy instead of happy, the worst instead of the best.”²¹

Notes