In his treatise Contra Nestorianos et Eutychianos, Leontios of Byzantium articulates his own Christological vision, attempting to show how the Chalcedonian paradigm offers an antidote to the evacuation of the incarnation implicit in aphthartodocetism, but also to the Nestorian tendencies of authors such as Theodore of Mopsuestia. Leontios challenges the Monophysite understanding of the incarnation as a “natural union” (henōsis physikē), insisting rather that soul and body are ontologically perfect in themselves, and preferring to use the term “essential union” (henōsis ousiōdes) to characterize the unity between divinity and humanity in the person of Christ. While Leontios asserts the physical reality of Christ’s body as well as the presence of a single subject in the person of Christ, this is accomplished by way of retrieving a surreptitiously Evagrian understanding of the relationship between the eternal Logos and Christ’s own humanity. The reason why Leontios was able to reintroduce elements of Origenist anthropology behind the bastions of Chalcedonian Christology was his skilful reliance on the semantic polyvalence of the term hypostasis, which could denote a principle of subjectivity or a composite reality formed of two distinct natures. While the Chalcedonian paradigm relied on the former meaning of the term in line with the Cappadocian Fathers, and viewed the hypostasis of the eternal Word as Christ’s own principle of subjectivity, Leontios’ vision reserved the term hypostasis for the reality that comes into existence at the moment of the incarnation and that can be defined by specific physical characteristics.
The purpose of this paper is to reassess Leontios’ notion of hypostasis in Contra Nestorianos et Eutychianos, highlighting the points of contact, as well as the differences, between Leontios’ (crypto-Evagrian?) relational understanding of the concept, and its more “normative” reading -denoting personhood- that underpinned the Chalcedonian definition.
No comments:
Post a Comment