We have now surveyed the history and literature behind and the major positions of the Christological Controversy; we have seen that the issues at stake in determining how many physeis, hypostaseis, and prosopa there are in Christ are to a very large degree matters of incommensurate vocabulary in the languages involved (primarily Greek and Syriac) in connection to competing ecclesiastical sees (first Alexandria, with the help of Rome, against Antioch, through its proxy Constantinople, but thereafter the imperial oikoumene against the Churches within and beyond its borders developing independently of the empire’s influence) and personal animus between episcopal leaders (especially people like Cyril and Nestorius). The last post ended with fairly sage advice from the Miaphysite polymath Bar Hebraeus, who refused to stand in judgment either of Chalcedonians or of East Syrian dyophysites on the grounds that, as far as he could tell, the substance of each Christology was the same even though each formula was different, and that ultimately the argument was about words. But virtually all late antique and medieval Christians believed that Jesus Christ was one; virtually all believed that he was fully everything that it is to be God and everything that it is to be human; virtually all believed that there were not two Sons, two Christs, or a divine quaternity of hypostases.
It should be admitted that, even if we regard the attempt of Chalcedon to reconcile the Alexandrian and Antiochian parties as insufficiently vague in its Definition and unsuccessful in the attempt, Christians living long after the heat of the Controversy, even if their Churches continue to hold fast the inherited lines, have otherwise been willing on occasion to acknowledge this continuity of faith with one another. Rabban Bar Sauma (d. 1294 CE), when he traveled to the West as a redirection of his pilgrimage to Jerusalem with his student Markos (who became the catholicos Yahballaha III in Baghdad along the way), and acting as a representative of the Mongols, described his faith to the Latin cardinals in the following way:
I believe in one God, hidden, everlasting, without beginning and without end, Father, and Son, and Holy Spirit: three persons, coequal and indivisible; among whom there is none who is first, or last, or young, or old: in nature they are one, in persons they are three: the Father is the Begetter; the Son is the Begotten; the Spirit proceeds. In the last time one of the persons of the royal Trinity, namely the Son, put on the perfect man, Jesus Christ, from Mary the holy virgin; and was united to him personally, and in him saved the world. In his divinity he is eternally of the Father; in his humanity he was born in the time of Mary; the union is inseparable and indivisible forever; the union is without mingling, and without mixture, and without compaction. The Son of this union is perfect God and perfect human, two natures [kyane], and two [qnome]—one prosopon [parsopa].1
Noticeably, the Latin cardinals do not interrogate his Christology—only whether Bar Sauma knows or has something like the Filioque in his Trinitarian theology. That is not to say that Latin Christians were not critical of the Nestorians: the awe in which Rabban Bar Sauma was held and the legendary character the Church of the East held in Europe (generating legends like that of Prester John, for example) is simply the flipped side of the coin whose obverse was contempt. Friar William of Rubruck (d. 1293 CE) thought very little of the Nestorian theological acumen; Marco Polo (1254-1324 CE), who traveled on behalf of the court of Kublai Khan throughout China, often encountered them and disliked them.
But the reception of Bar Sauma does speak to a Catholic interest in the “Nestorians” and in the Miaphysites that has a long afterlife, sometimes with tragic, sometimes with benign consequences. Syriac was rediscovered in Europe during the Renaissance; Teseo Ambrogio’s 1539 Introductio in linguam chaldaicum had the honor of being the first time Syriac script was committed to the printing press. Rabelais’s concept of the “ideal humanist education” included “Hebrew, Arabic, Chaldaean [Syriac], and Latin”; he tells his son that he wishes him to “learn the languages perfectly; first of all the Greek, as Quintilian will have it; secondly, the Latin; and then the Hebrew, for the Holy Scripture sake; and then the Chaldee and Arabic likewise.”2 Gillaume Postel was the first chair of Syriac and Arabic at the French Collège royal from 1538 to 1543; the Bibliothèque royale also got its first Syriac manuscript, a Syriac Gospel book, around this time. By 1555, two thousand copies of the first Syriac New Testament were printed; Andreas Masius published the Syrorum peculium, a grammar of the language, in 1571. There were Syriac representatives at the Council of Florence in 1444; Rome nearly reunited with the Nestorians in the 16th century; but ultimately, the Syriac-speaking Maronites and Melkites were the most important links between Rome and these farther Eastern Churches, encouraging Latin foundations like the Maronite College. In the 18th century, the Assemani family’s Bibliotheca Orientalis became the anthology of Syriac literature, which scholars still consult.
Beyond the academy, Maronites and Melkites were enthralled by Roman ecclesiastical imperialism. The Maronites renewed communion with Rome during the Crusades; a sixteenth century dynastic dispute over the true successor to the patriarchate of the Church of the East, at the time reduced to Kurdistan, specifically the monastery of Rabban Hormizd on the northern plain of Mosul, encouraged the candidate John Sulaqa to seek Rome’s backing, which he received in 1553 and which resulted in a union that created what we now call the Chaldaean Catholic Church. This constituted a schism with the non-Roman remainder of the Church of the East, which underwent further fragmentation, persecution, and exile (its patriarch was, until recently, resident in Chicago). The Latins also missionized the Syriac Orthodox, creating a uniate church from some of their numbers. (There is also a curious history that explains the Melkite communion with Rome, but as the Melkites are, per their name, “king’s men” and therefore Chalcedonians, I will leave them aside for the time being.)3
In the 20th century, when the Roman Catholic Church formally committed itself to ecumenism and to the retrieval of unity among all Christians, it began engaging in joint international theological dialogues with all of the Eastern Churches, Chalcedonian and not. The most famous of these, of course, is with what are now called the “Eastern” Orthodox, that is, the Chalcedonian communion of Eastern Churches whose head is the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constatinople/Istanbul; but as the two most recent statements released by that dialogue showcase, Christology is not at issue between Rome and Constantinople: fundamentally, it is a matter of ecclesiological and administrative jurisprudence that at this point constitutes the serious(?) cause of division. It is in Rome’s dialogues with the so-called “Oriental” Orthodox and the Assyrian Church of the East that we find Christology is central. With the Church of the East, two joint declarations are chiefly relevant: the first, the Common Christological Declaration Between the Catholic Church and the Assyrian Church of the East uttered and signed by Pope John Paul II and Patriarch Mar Dinkha IV in 1994, acknowledges that both Catholics and East Syrian Christians confess that
The Word of God, second Person of the Holy Trinity, became incarnate by the power of the Holy Spirit in assuming from the holy Virgin Mary a body animated by a rational soul, with which he was indissolubly united from the moment of his conception. Therefore our Lord Jesus Christ is true God and true man, perfect in his divinity and perfect in his humanity, consubstantial with the Father and consubstantial with us in all things but sin. His divinity and his humanity are united in one person, without confusion or change, without division or separation. In him has been preserved the difference of the natures of divinity and humanity, with all their properties, faculties, and operations...the divinity and humanity are united in the person of the same and unique Son of God and Lord Jesus Christ, who is the object of a single adoration.
A 2018 Common Statement of Pope Francis and Catholicos Patriarch Mar Gewargis III focuses less on Christology (though it does take note of the meeting of Pope John Paul II and Patriarch Mar Dinkha and observes that “certain differences in theological expressions are often complementary rather than conflicting”) and more on the fact that “we experience a common suffering, arising from the dramatic situation of our Christian brothers and sisters in the Middle East, especially in Iraq and Syria.” With the Oriental Orthodox, no single, common declaration of common Christology has yet arisen, but this in part due to the fact that the Miaphysite heritage which connects, say, the Coptic Church of Alexandria, the Church of Ethiopia, the Church of Armenia, the Malankara Syrian Church, etc. and so forth does not result in a single common synod or a single sense of necessarily belonging to a common ecclesial communion. As a result, no one representative of any of these churches has the power to speak on behalf of more than their own church. So, one does find a common Christological statement between, say, Pope Paul VI and Pope Shenouda III, to the tune of affirming together that “the Only Begotten Son of God, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, the Word of God, the effulgence of His glory and the express image of His substance, who for us was incarnate, assuming for himself a real body with a rational soul, and who shared with us our humanity but without sin,” united “without mingling, without commixtion, without confusion, without alteration, without division, without separation.” But short of ratification in some kind of official manner by every other “Oriental” Orthodox Church, this statement carries little weight other than between Catholics and Copts.
Catholic renunciation of uniatism as a method of ecumenism may have come too little, too late, and seems to be inconsistent (given the late Pope Benedict XVI’s establishment of the Personal Ordinariates for disaffected Anglicans, whose status I think deserves its own post sometime).4 But Catholicism in general seems to operate on two closely related principles with respect to the Churches divided by Christological matters: first, the underlying assumption that the inherited polemic masks a deeper continuity of faith from which new unity can be found; second, that ratification of new agreements can supersede old anathematization. For the most part, it seems that the Church of the East and the Oriental Orthodox have been willing to cooperate with those basic intuitions.
But what has yet to be spelled out is exactly how that underlying essence of these distinct Christologies wraps back around to meet itself through their particular formulaic expressions, how these distinct perspectives are really numerous angles on the self-same mystery. From the historical point of view, effecting a synthesis of that sort is unnecessary, and traditionally, ecclesiastical leaders from Chalcedon onwards have preferred compromise over the rigor of working out the logical implications of different theologies and finding how they can, if they can, in fact be systematized together. (I mean, look at what happened to Maximus the Confessor.) At some point, Christological unity will have to come not merely through identification of a lowest-common denominator and a willingness to leave and let live—though that is certainly a superior philosophy to that which most ancient Christians pursued against their rhetorical and theological adversaries!—but through some kind of genuine exchange between diverse Christological traditions as partners in dialogue with something to give to one another rather than troublesome pluralism from which a common core may be abstracted. In what follows, I will attempt such a synthesis (justifying this as a post about Christology, I hope).
I will, for the time being, leave aside Chalcedon and the Neo-Chalcedonian tradition, for the reason that Chalcedon was originally itself an attempt to synthesize and reconcile Alexandria and Antioch and insofar as it was unsuccessful, therefore, the real debate stands between those two Christological traditions. A few preliminary principles are in order. The first is hermeneutical, and it is to say that I take both the allegorical method of Alexandria and the attention ad litteram of Antioch to be legitimate and complementary forms of biblical exegesis for Christians working in Christian spaces. Neither is quite biblical studies, and neither is quite systematically theological in the modern sense. Both are products of the unique research methods that Christian intellectuals developed in the second, third, and fourth centuries that separated Christianity from the emerging Judaism of the Rabbis.5 I am operating from the assumption that each see has at least as much claim as the other to constitute an ancient Christian center of learning and from both of which I acknowledge great theological masters of the wider Christian Tradition, even those opposed to each other in various ways. I write as a son of Clement and Origen (and of Philo before them); but also as someone convinced that Theodore and Nestorius were, just like Origen, unjustly condemned by the imperial church. I write as someone comfortable with the idea that Cyril of Alexadria is a dogmatic authority of ancient Christianity even while I think he was basically an episcopal thug. And I write as someone conscious of the ways that the debate has evolved, morphed, and mutated from the fifth century to the present, across numerous geographies and cultural changes, such that to some extent choosing to operate within the theological vocabularies of late antiquity is a willful and perhaps even arbitrary choice given that, simply put, this is not late antiquity and some of our assumptions about what theology is and how it is conducted have changed. Nevertheless, as I take the first Christian millennium to be the best opportunity most contemporary Christians have to find the resources for some kind of contemporary unity at an intellectual level, forth into the stream I go.
The second preliminary principle is that there is a fundamental distinction in method between how one describes the divine oikonomia of creation and consummation and how one abstracts from that oikonomia a genuine theologia, a rational account of the divine. With respect to God, this is the differentiation between the so-called “economic” and “immanent” Trinities, about which I wrote here. In nuce, we know the immanent Trinity by beholding the economic Trinity, just as we only encounter the divine ousia, God’s essence or being, in the divine energeiai, his manifest activities; while we may conceptually distinguish between the two, the two are never experienced in isolation from one another, and both are specifically the encounter with the Trinitarian hypostases of Father, Son, and Spirit from distinct angles. When speaking of the economic Trinity, we are rationally interrogating scripture, tradition, and experience, including our experience of the natural world and human existence itself, to discern the three instantiations in which the divine essence is concretized to our perception and intellection; when speaking of the immanent Trinity, we are abstracting from the ways that Father, Son, and Spirit are manifest in the divine economy with its contingencies to what must logically be true of God’s inner life in eternity, as far as we can see it. Christology is invariably a study of the economic Trinity first and the immanent Trinity second. We encounter the prosopon of Jesus Christ in scripture, in tradition, and in experience first, work out his identity, his nature(s), and his work from that encounter, and then work our way from the ground-up to consider whether and how the mystery of the incarnation is in some way eternally realized in the inner life of the Son. As we move from economic to immanent Trinity and back again for Christology, we will find that the meaning of many terms we utilize to try and rationally assess who and what God is and who and what Jesus is shift depending on the context with respect to the divine oikonomia.
Take, for example, ousia and hypostasis, which through the Nicene tradition come to mean something like a general essence, later controvertible with a physis, a “nature” appropriate to what-something-is, and a hypostasis, a unique instance of that generalized nature. When we speak of God, in the classically theistic sense in which Christianity talks about God, our use of these terms is not like when we use them for things of our experience. Christians understand the divine essence to be simple, infinite, and purely actual, concretized in an infinite act of being, an infinite act of mind, and an infinite act of life that correspond, in Christian theological and hymnographic literature, to the hypostases of Father, Son, and Spirit, who are consubstantial, coeternal, and coequal with each other, and are therefore transparent to one another, interpenetrating and indwelling one another. Father, Son, and Spirit are not three “persons” like Peter, Paul, and James, sitting together at table; they are each of them the whole God in three distinct “moments” of the divine essence’s natural inner life, as the ungenerated abyss of generative existence, the generated act of self-knowledge which is the intelligibility of being, and the proceeding act of self-love which is the erotic union of being and intelligibility together. In all three hypostases, the one God says “I Am” simultaneously, in that act of self-knowledge and self-love in which God acknowledges that he is the transcendent Good and moves out from himself, through himself, and to himself in union with that Good which he is. Trinitarianism is monotheism, not tritheism. So to speak of ousia and hypostasis with respect to God is not to claim to know what God is or that there is a generalized divine essence existing apart from and superior to three divine individuals who possess it. It is to say instead that the whole of what God is we know as these three hypostases in which the one God subsists. If we are to then ask whether the Trinitarian hypostases have prosopa, “faces” or “masks” of personal manifestation to one another, we should acknowledge that if we wish to speak this way of the immanent Trinity the only differentiating feature between the hypostases is the unique manner of their hypostatic existence; otherwise, the very point of Nicene Trinitarianism is that each manifests the selfsame essence to each other. God the Father’s prosopon is beheld by Son and Spirit as, simply, the one God; so too the Son’s by Father and Spirit, so too the Spirit by Father and Son. Prosopon with respect to God cannot signify discrete psychological or material histories in the way we typically think of persons; that would not make sense for three consubstantial, coeternal, and coequal hypostases.
When we turn to the economic Trinity, acknowledging that it is the selfsame God but as perceived and known within the divine oikonomia, it makes more sense to speak of divine prosopa: not of the hypostases facing one another, but of the way they look when they face creation. Here, the many faces and bodies of Yhwh, Christ, and the Spirit in the pluriform Jewish and Christian scriptures and traditions become relevant, as do, if we want to widen our ecumenical net, the images of the divine in other religious traditions, all of which, Christian philosophy would say, can be understood as the Trinitarian hypostases as they are perceived and known to humans in their different, pluralistic situations in time, space, and material culture.
But also, what we mean by ousia and hypostasis with respect to everything other than God changes to some degree. For one thing, the “essence” of any finite thing qua finite thing is not simple, infinite, and purely actual; it has some discrete content which we intuit through our perception of it. As Gregory of Nyssa grasped, this becomes complex when we understand God as infinite, because it then becomes the case that God is the nondual ground of the world’s own being, such that we cannot essentialize even creaturely beings, who are capable of infinite mutation “from glory to glory” into the divine image and likeness, and who are therefore not reducible to our perceptions of them, and whose innermost self cannot be abstracted so easily from that infinite emptiness which God is. That is to say, the true essence of creation is none other than the divine essence of the God who, by nature and intention, overflows into and as creation; all the creaturely “essences” which we intuit are none other than the modal possibilities of how God’s infinite being may come to be in creaturely form, which are logically, numerically infinite. This is a logical consequence of the fact that creation does not possess its own ontological integrity apart from God; creation does not exist other than insofar as God emanates/creates it, such that if God is being, we are non-being, and if we are being, God is beyond being (to invoke certain classical formulae on the matter). Likewise, from God’s point of view, the true hypostasis of creation is none other than the Son: it is in and through Son that all things exist and have come to be, and it is in and through him that they are offered back to the Father in praise, such that when God sees creation, all he sees is the Son in whom creation subsists. But to say that creation subsists in the Son, who is in turn the second subsistence of the divine essence, is clearly to talk about two different kinds of subsistence. The Son is a subsistence of the infinite divine essence; creation is a mode of that subsistence that emanates from the Father in and through the Son by the Spirit, but is not itself a fourth hypostasis of the divine essence. So just as it is the case that the creaturely ousiai with their various physeis which the Son contains in his hypostasis are really just finite modal possibilities of the infinite divine ousia in creaturely emanation, so, too, any creaturely hypostasis or qnoma that we could speak of, any concrete existence of a creaturely essence, is similarly not a hypostasis or qnoma in the same way that the Son is a hypostasis of the divine essence. To say Father, Son, and Spirit are not separate individuals the way Peter, Paul, and James are is also to say that Peter, Paul, and James are not hypostases the way the Trinitarian hypostases are. Creaturely essences and creaturely subsistences are analogous to the divine essence and the Trinitarian hypostases, but they are not univocal with them. This is why, from God’s point of view, the intelligible creation of God’s poiesis and the eschatological creation of the divine ktisis, in which the plasis has been brought into full alignment with the poiesis, is simply the embodiment (Grk: ensomatosis) of the Son, his Logos (Amb. 7.22), which is always eternally realized, though in time this is not ubiquitously manifest.
Prosopa are likewise analogous when we are talking about God and about creation. The way God appears to God is just as God; the way creation appears to God is also as God; the way God appears to creation is a matter of creation’s own evolving awareness of God and of itself. The outward manifestation of creaturely essences, natures, and subsistences, the prosopa of the universe, are all that present themselves to our senses as objects for intellection; unless we achieve the vision of saints, we do not ordinarily see the union of all things with one another or their union in God, such that the only prosopon we see when we look anywhere is that of God “all in all” (1 Cor 15:28). From our perspective, creation is an unending play of masks in which the outward faces which we wear towards the universe are always significant, changing, and yet partial reductions of what we perceive to be deeper, more infinite wells of truth and meaning within that none of us, not even the most fortunate, not even great gods and goddesses, get to fully express in a single lifetime.
So, with all of that in mind, I think we can say with certainty that Theodore of Mopsuestia’s prosopic union is completely orthodox. It is not just that the one hypostasis/qnoma of the Son assumed a human nature that lacked its own concrete existence, still less that he assumed a “mere man”; every human subsistence lacks true self-existence by comparison to the divine hypostasis of the Logos. Two natures (physeis/kyane), two subsistences (hypostases/qnome) and one personal face (prosopon/parsopa) is completely logical provided that we do not univocalize the duality: the divine nature does not exist in the same manner as human nature, nor divine subsistences as human subsistences, nor divine faces as human faces. And, if one is “looking up,” so to speak, from the ground of the historical experience of Christ as the apostles knew him and the New Testament writers conceptualized him, prosopic union is an appropriate summary of that experience as it is communicated in tradition and scripture, doing justice to the New Testament’s own diversity in describing Christ’s natures, roles, and identity, the importance of the visionary experience of the risen, ascended, and glorified Christ and of the sensory experience of his humanity. The one prosopon of Jesus Christ is where the infinite divine nature, subsisting in and as the Son, God’s Logos, is united to finite human nature, subsisting analogously in and as the individual man Jesus of Nazareth.
Hypostatic union is a more appropriate description from the top-down, so to speak, beginning from the immanent Trinity and proceeding to the economic. Insofar as the divine nature is the true ground of being for all creaturely beings, and the Son is the true hypostasis of creation, as Sergius Bulgakov correctly intuited, the mystery of the Incarnation is eternally pre-contained in the hypostasis of the Son, who already contains human nature and all human “hypostases” within himself. That is to say, as Bulgakov puts it, the “Divine Humanity” of Christ is an eternal factum of the Son by virtue of being who he is: as the Logos of God, he naturally and hypostatically contains the logoi of the world, which is the macanthropos, and the human being, which is the microcosm of the universe, as the particular way in which he emanates the Wisdom of God which he is. There is no true hypostatic plurality in Christ, insofar as the divine hypostasis of the Son also pre-contains the human “hypostasis” of Jesus of Nazareth, as one individual instantiation of the human nature which the Son also contains. So, from God’s angle, Jesus Christ simply is the Son, just as from our angle, Christ is the one prosopon in which the Son and the man Jesus, his Temple, are united.
So, at least in theoretical principle, hypostatic and prosopic unions have much to offer one another as theories which describe the Christological mystery from distinct angles, specifically those of the immanent and economic Trinities, and which also present the twofold mystery of the God-world relationship. But there remains the scandal of particularity that Theodore mentions: namely, why is it the case that this man, Jesus, is the one prosopon in which divinity and humanity are united, or, from the angle of the hypostatic union, why is it that the Logos assumes humanity as the hypostasis of this man, Jesus, as opposed to some other man?
On some level this is a question unanswerable because it goes to the heart of the Christian experience of God. Christians are Christians insofar as they experience God in the person of Jesus Christ; that experience is no more or less “explicable” in some reductionist sense than the experience that generates any other religious belonging. But within Christian recursive reflection on the meaning of the Christian mystery, it is a question that demands some kind of an answer. There are many rational souls and bodies that, united together, are considered human beings on the creaturely level, human “hypostases”; in theory, the Son could have assumed any one of them, or could have become incarnate as any one of them, or could have historically prepared any one of them. So why this one? Why Jesus, and not, say, Moses, or David, or the Buddha, or Muhammad? After all, in at least some versions of each tradition to which those figures are relevant, they all have quasi-incarnate or deified status, too. In Early Judaism, Moses was deified at the end of his life; in most varieties of Buddhism, there is something fated to the Buddha’s life and enlightenment, which in Mahayana at least are also the ground on which Buddha Nature is the true nature of all interpenetrating, empty dharmas; esoteric Islam of Sufi and Shia varieties heavily appropriates Logos-type theology to explain Muhammad. So why Jesus? What mechanism could Christians produce for Christians themselves to explain the Logos’s eternal identification of himself within history as this man, or from within time, the status of this man as the worthy Tabernacle or Temple of the indwelling Logos (Jn 1:14)?
I do not pretend to offer here a cohesive theory, not wishing to tread in matters beyond my ken. I am a Christian, so I begin when doing Christian theology from the belief that God revealed God’s self in Jesus, not from a position of having to consider that claim as one possibility among others (which I otherwise do in other contexts). But a few ideas seem like relevant contenders. Origen’s theory of minds in which the rational spirit of Jesus was the only unfallen created intellect offers itself. Theodore’s concept of the good pleasure of deity to indwell Jesus as Temple has a dialectical weight to it, as he explores and rejects the possibilities of essential, hypostatic, and energetic unions. Bulgakov’s concept of progressive hagiasmos, in which the divine kedushah becomes gradually more and more evident in the family of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob before culminating in Mary and her Son, and John Behr’s idea of Jesus demonstrating on the cross the perfect humanity that is transparent to the perfect divinity of the Logos are also important ideas in this vein. David Hart’s elucidation of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as the Son’s incarnation in a way that reveals the metaphysical structure of reality without being reducible to or even centrally dependent on the Christian Tradition is another edge of the portrait, so to speak.6
But however we answer the question, “Why Jesus?”, what we should have front and center in our minds is that hypostatic and prosopic unions are mutually complementary illuminations of the Christological cornerstone. In Christ, Christians believe, we see God humanized (by the eternal hypostatic assumption of our nature) and the human being deified (in the prosopic metamorphosis by grace of our human existence into the divine glory). And so we also, consequently, see the missing link in the God-world relationship. In a previous post I wrote that creation is a natural overflow of the intrahypostatic relations of Father, Son, and Spirit, the logical and proper ergon of God’s energeiai in which he engages neither against his ousia nor in order to realize it but in the celebratory manifestation of who and what God is. Creation, I said, can be spoken of in three ways: as intelligible poiesis, sensible plasis, and eschatological ktisis; or, as Divine Wisdom, Creaturely Wisdom, and their final, even nuptial unification in the eschaton; or, as macanthropos, microcosm, and as the final world in which the human being, male and female, manifests the image and likeness of God by royal priesthood in the universe. Christ is the common center of each concentric rung of that interpretive apparatus, and the Church—humanized especially by his Mother—stands beside him as his partner. The resulting image is, as it were, not the aspis of Herakles, Achilles, or Aeneas, but of Arthur, who famously rode into battle bearing the icon of the Theotokos with child upon Prydwen, his scildan: spiraling out from Christ, the God-Man, is the entirety of creation as a glittering cosmos arrayed in splendor, with all of time, space, and matter included as though glimpsed together in an instant, that very same instant in which God the Father beholds all things gazing upon the Son in rapt contemplation and adoration.
The translation is from Michael Philip Penn et al., Invitation to Syriac Christianity: An Anthology (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2022). I have here slightly modified the translation to drop the rendering of qnome as “persons” in the final line, which I think undercuts the differentiation between qnoma and parsopa.
I have borrowed the translation from Francoise Briquel Chatonnet and Muriel Debié, The Syriac World: In Search of a Forgotten Christianity, trans. Jeffrey Haines (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), 253.
Summarized from, and for more on which see, Chatonnet and Debié, The Syriac World, 251-284.
For a Catholic take on the Catholic history of uniatism and the outstanding issues between Rome and the other ancient Christian communions, Aidan Nichols, Rome and the Eastern Churches, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2010) is still the standard book. The caveat lector here is that Nichols is sometimes a bit tone-deaf about how his pro-Roman sentiments come across even when he is explicitly describing ecclesiastical imperialism by Rome against Eastern Christians. The frank truth is that Eastern Christians do not have fond cultural memories of Latin involvement in their churches and societies and those who do profess union with Rome today are often liturgically and theologically heavily Latinized. For an Orthodox counterpoint on what stands at issue between the Eastern Orthodox and its other eastern counterparts, see the latter pages of Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Church: An Introduction to Eastern Christianity, 3rd ed. (New York: Penguin, 2015).
See Emmanuel Fiano, Three Powers in Heaven: The Emergence of Theology and the Parting of the Ways (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023) for this argument.
See Hart, You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature (South Bend, IN: UND Press, 2022), 112-114. I also here thank Hart for the private correspondence that generated this particular trio of articles and especially for the initial suggestion of the hypostatic union/prosopic union as the difference in perspective on the incarnation from the vantage of an eternal factum in the divine life on the one hand and as an event within history on the other.
This is going to require several re-reads I suspect.
I’d be interested to hear whether you’ve engaged much with Robert Jenson and his very Neo-Chalcedonian Christology. And also, for that matter, what you make of the debate between your friends DBH and JDD surrounding the unique hypostasis of Christ. It seems to me that aspects of Neo-Chalcedonian theology run the risk of collapsing the imminent trinity into the economic, which, if I’m reading your rightly runs the risk of undercutting your reconciliation between the Assyrian position (Prosopon) and the Chalcedonian position (hypostasis).