Maximus the Confessor on Hypostasis and Nature

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RamistThomist

Puritanboard Clerk
This is from Hans urs von Balthasar's Cosmic Liturgy. It is a hard read, but it takes you to the heart of post-Chalcedonian Christology.

The terminology
  1. Aristotle: ousia is the highest and most comprehensie of being (216).
    1. The Cappadocians used this as “universal concept
    2. And because Maximus didn’t want to identify God with a universal concept, he places God outside being (Ambigua PG 91, 1036B).
  2. Maximus at times wants to distinguish ousia from this-ousia.
  3. Being (einai). The existential aspect of Being (HuvB 218).
    1. Christ united in his own person “two distinct intelligible structures of being” (logoi tou einai) of his parts.”
  4. Hypokeimenon. Underlying subject. Maximus seldom uses this. It denotes the concrete, existent bearer of qualities that determine whata thing is.
    1. It does not mean the same thing as hypostasis. It is more of a point of reference for logical predicates than an existential reality.
  5. Hyparxis. Existence. Used to mean the Being of the Persons of God (tropos tes huparxeos; Cappadocians used this, as did Karl Barth).
  6. Hypostasis. Leontius refined it to mean “being-for-oneself.” It is what distinguishes a concrete being from others of the same genus (HuvB 223). It is the ontological subject of the ascription of an essence, not the consciousness of such a subject.
    1. It isn’t merely the contraction (systole) of universal being; it also suggests the “having” of such a being. When the Cappadocian Fathers defined hypostasis as the manner in which each person has his origin, it was to show the reality his having the Godhead.
    2. A nature is the hypostasis’s property (224).
 
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