The Hypostatic Union: Patristic Formulas, Part I

By way of deepening and strengthening the argument from Tradition, we turn to the various formulas the Fathers before Ephesus, and some of the later councils, used to elucidate the dogma of the Hypostatic Union.

”A Substantial, Physical, Natural Union”

One of the most popular formulas held that “between [Christ’s] divinity and [His] humanity there exists a substantial, physical, natural union.” This was never intended in a Monophysite sense; it simply expressed that the constituent elements of Christ — His Divinity and humanity — are themselves substances, and that their union yields a substantial, physical unity. Justin Martyr accordingly calls Christ “the Logos given form, and become man,” meaning the Logos assumed human nature after the manner of a substantial form.¹ St. Gregory of Nazianzus insists on the same point sharply: “If any one says that the Godhead was operative in Him [Christ] as in a prophet, by way of grace, but was not united with Him and does not unite with Him substantially, let him be devoid of every higher inspiration… Let him who worships not the Crucified, be anathema.”² St. John Damascene, probably the most authoritative interpreter of the Greek Fathers on this point, explains the formula’s true bearing against Monophysite misreading: “We call it a substantial, that is a true and not an apparent, union. Substantial, not as if two natures had coalesced into one single, composite nature, but because they are united in the one composite Hypostasis of the Son of God."³

"The Logos Made Human Nature Entirely His Own”

A second formula, admitting no misunderstanding, held that “the Logos made human nature entirely His own.” St. Cyril explains: “Just as each of our bodies is proper to each of us, in the same way the body of the Only-Begotten was proper to Him and to no other.”⁴ St. Athanasius elaborates at length: those err who teach that one [subject] is the Son who suffered and another who did not suffer, “for there is no other besides the Word Himself who took on death and suffering… The Word Himself made the form of a servant His own by physical generation … and became flesh according to a nature proper to God — not as though the flesh were consubstantial with the Divinity of the Word, as if co-eternal with it, but because it was made proper to Him according to nature, and undivided through the union, from the seed of David and Abraham and Adam, from whom we too are descended… For the consubstantial and impassible and immortal does not have unity with the consubstantial according to hypostasis, but according to nature; but according to hypostasis it exhibits its own completeness… If you say that the Son and the Holy Spirit are consubstantial with the Father in the same way that the passible flesh is [consubstantial with the Word], then, even unwillingly, you introduce a Quaternity in place of the Trinity, teaching that the flesh is consubstantial with the Trinity.”⁵

This is a dogmatic text of the first importance. Its main points: first, the union of divinity and humanity is conceived as an appropriation of humanity by the Divine Logos — actively, by “physical generation from the seed of David and Abraham and Adam”; formally, by “a physical and inseparable union.” Second, this “physical union” does not make the flesh consubstantial with the Godhead — that would be Monophysitism — but rests instead on a “unity according to hypostasis,” which reaches its completeness precisely there, and excludes the absurd inference of two Sons, one who suffers and one who does not. Third, to overlook this would fall into the error of Tetradism, destructive of the Trinity itself. This account of the Hypostatic Union as an appropriation of humanity by the Logos remained current even after the Church had definitively settled on the classic formula “union according to hypostasis.”⁶

Cyril’s Formula: “One Incarnate Nature of the Word”

A third formula, used almost exclusively by St. Cyril and rarely found before him, runs: “One nature of the Word incarnate.” Cardinal Newman’s explanation of the phrase is worth quoting in full: “Physis is the Divine Essence, substantial and personal, in the fulness of its attributes — the One God. And, tou Logou being added, it is that One God, considered in the Person of the Son. It is called mia [one] because, even after the Incarnation, it and no other nature is, strictly speaking, His own, the flesh being ‘assumed’; because it, and no other, has been His from the first; and because it has ever been one and the same, in no wise affected as to its perfection by the Incarnation. It is called sesarkomene [incarnate] in order to express the dependence, subordination, and restriction of His humanity, which has neither independent rule nor personality of its own, has no distinct hypostasis of its own though it involves a new mode of generation, and does not possess the fulness of characteristics that attach to any other member of our race. On which account, while it is recognized as a perfect nature, it may be spoken of as existing after the manner of an attribute rather than of a substantive being — as Catholics speak of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist, though corporeal, as existing after the manner of a spirit.”⁷

Theodoret held that this formula simply reflected the customary Alexandrian mode of expression, which was for that very reason attacked as Monophysite by John of Antioch and the Antiochene school. Leontius of Byzantium tells the story differently: “You must know,” he says, “that St. Cyril was the first among the orthodox to employ the phrase ‘the one incarnate nature of the Divine Logos.’ We say ‘among the orthodox’ because Apollinaris often used the same formula, and for this reason the blessed Cyril was looked upon as an Apollinarist by the Orientals. But he was not an Apollinarist. It is unfair to reject everything that heretics say — we should repudiate only what is actually wrong.”⁸ Had Cyril foreseen how the Monophysites would later abuse this formula and his own authority, he would no doubt have expressed himself more carefully — but in the sense he intended, and wished others to understand, the phrase was entirely orthodox, and it took a gross misreading to twist it in favor of the Monophysite “one nature” doctrine.

Cyril used the formula chiefly against the Nestorian notion of “two independently subsisting natures,” which implies a duality of persons in Christ; a fusion of the two natures into one was entirely foreign to his intent, as shown by his careful addition of “incarnate” — a point he stresses explicitly in his Letter to Succensus — and by the fact that for Cyril “nature of the Word” simply meant “the Word subsisting in the divine nature,” i.e., the Divine Hypostasis of the Logos itself. By “one incarnate nature of the Word,” then, Cyril meant purely and simply the Incarnate Word. Nor did Cyril neglect to defend the inconfusion of the two natures against his own critics: “Considering together the elements from which the one Son and Lord Jesus Christ exists, we say that two natures were united; but after the union, since the division into two is now removed, we believe the nature of the Son to be one, inasmuch as He is one, though incarnate and made man. When we say that God the Word was made man and incarnate, let every suspicion of change be set aside; for He remained what He was.”⁹ It is unsurprising, then, that “one incarnate nature of the Word” was upheld as orthodox by the later synods against the Monophysites themselves — the Fifth Ecumenical Council of Constantinople (A.D. 553) defines: “If anyone … does not understand these words as the Fathers taught them, namely that from the divine and human natures, united according to subsistence, one Christ was made — but instead tries to introduce, by means of such expressions, one nature or substance of the Godhead and the flesh of Christ, let him be anathema.”¹⁰

Notes