John Anthony McGuckin Nestorianism TENNY THOMAS The doctrine that emerged from the christo- logical controversies of the 5th century, ascribed to Nestorius of Constantinople, that there were two separate persons in Christ, one human and one divine: the man Jesus and the divine Logos. Nestorianism grew out of the Christology developed at the school of Antioch by Diodore of Tarsus (d. before 394) and Theodore of Mopsuestia (ca. 350–428). Nestorius himself, arguably, did not actually teach a two separate person Christology as much as he was “heard” to teach one by the Alexandrian theologians. He himself was under the impression that he was representing the traditional Christol- ogy of Syria as exemplified in Diodore’s and Theodore’s Christologies, which stressed the need to preserve the distinct integrity of the two natures (divine and human) in Christ. One of the critical issues of the era was the lack of a distinct terminology for “Person,” which was to be worked out in this dispute for the benefit of the wider church, introduc­ing technical terms into the Christian theo­logical vocabulary such as persona, prosopon, hypostasis, and physis. Diodore and Theodore followed a tradi­tion of historical exegesis very different from the allegorical tradition of the School of Alexandria. Diodore presented Christ as subsisting in two natures, human and divine. The images of temple and priest were central to this school’s Christology. In the womb of Mary, the Logos had fashioned a temple for himself, in which he dwelt. This temple, the man Jesus, was the subject reference of Christ’s human experiences of suffering. The full divinity of the Logos, he thought, was thus protected from any hint of dimin- ishment. This idea was first developed by the Syrians against the heresies of Arius and Apollinaris. In refuting the christological monism that was Apollinarism, Diodore leaned heavily towards an opposing empha­sis that at the time of the incarnation and after it, the divine and human natures of Jesus Christ were distinctly separate to such an extent that there was never an admixture or a union possible. This was meant to stress that the natures, created and uncreated, could not be confused, but it tended to underplay the sense in which the two natures dynamically interacted in the Lord’s incarna­tion, and left unsaid in what medium they interacted.

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Michael Prokurat, Alexander Golitzin, Michael D. Peterson Скачать epub pdf TRINITY TRINITY. According to the understanding of the Orthodox Church, the confession of faith in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (q.v.) is as old as Christianity. It is not the product of human reasoning, but the articulation of divine revelation, and it is embedded in the earliest Christian documents. The Apostle Paul, for example, closes 2 Cor with a Trinitarian blessing sometime in the A.D. 50s, and it seems to be the case that he is himself but repeating a formula already employed in Christian worship. The Gospel of Matthew concludes with the Trinitarian formula for Baptism (q.v.) already in use in that community ca. A.D. 80. The “Last Supper” discourse in Jn 14–16 contains four passages on the Holy Spirit which make it clear that the Spirit is regarded as a distinct person, “another Comforter/Advocate,” together with the Son. While profession of the three persons is from the earliest Christian scriptural witnesses, the Church also inherited the confession of God (q.v.) as one from the Hebrews: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord” (Duet 6:4). There do not appear to have been any speculative attempts to square this circle earlier than the 2nd c. Father, Son, and Spirit were simply facts of primitive Christian experience; they were acknowledged as such in tandem with faith in the divine unity. The word, “trinity” (Greek trias and Latin trinitas), does not appear until Theophilus of Antioch (Greek) in the 180s and Tertullian (q.v.) (Latin) a decade or two later. The latter, together with Irenaeus of Lyons (q.v.), provide the first attempts at explaining the dual confession of God as one and three. Tertullian relies primarily on a Stoic model, the divine substance in three different and eternal modes of expression. Irenaeus uses the analogy of the human person, speaking on some occasions of Son and Spirit as the Father’s Word and Wisdom, and elsewhere as his “two hands.” In the 3rd c. Origen, borrowing from Platonism and the earlier work of Clement of Alexandria and Justin Martyr (qq.v.), arranges Father, Son, and Spirit in a descending hierarchy of hypostases (persons, or substances). His terminology was preserved in the Greek East during the great Trinitarian controversies of the 4th c. But his notes relating to subordination and hierarchy were rejected as a result of the ultimate victory of the Nicene Creed championed by Athanasius (qq.v.). It was the glory of the Cappadocian Fathers, especially Basil’s On the Holy Spirit, Gregory of Nazianzus’s Theological Orations, and Gregory of Nyssa’s (qq.v.) Against Eunomius and “On Not Three Gods,” to supply the language and concepts reconciling Origen’s terms with the Nicene homoousios (consubstantial) in such a way as to become the classical formulation of the Orthodox doctrine of the Trinity.

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This article is a paper read at the informal Conference between Orthodox Catholic and Roman Catholic theologians in Paris in 1950. It was written in French and appeared in " Russie et Chretiente», which published all the papers and minutes of the conference. It was translated from the French text by Seminarian Alexander Romanoff, a student at St. Vladimir " s Seminary. The Editors My paper will be almost entirely devoted to the presentation of the Orthodox doctrine in its positive aspect. As yet Orthodox theology does not possess a trinitarian doctrine definitely elaborated and recognized by the magisterium of the Church or by the majority of theologians as a doctrine incontestably representative of Orthodoxy. This article will be an attempt to explain the faith from the basis of a synthesis of scriptual and traditional teaching. In Trinitarian theology all parts belong together, so I think it best to outline briefly the essential principles of the doctrine, so that the teaching concerning the Holy Ghost may be placed in its proper perspective. 1. God is a perfect and absolute being. God is one: not only numerically one, but one in Himself. The plenitude of divine perfections, the modes of His existence, are united in one absolute identity of His being. But unity is not outside of plurality; all unity is unity of a plurality. Unity has logical priority over plurality, but is inseparable from it. In God, plurality is the plenitude of his perfections, the diversity of the forms of His existence. Many of the perfections and forms we attribute to God are but virtual in Him. But even those that are proper to Him do not divide Him; each real attribute exists in God in its absolute perfection, but without separating from the others, and in perfect reciprocal interpenetration. 2. The first form which is really proper to God after unity is hypostasis. God is personal: He is so of necessity because the impersonal, anhypostaton, does not exist according to Orthodox theology. The Bible gives us a very clear picture of God’s personality, but without doctrine or precise terminology.

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22, Hex. 1). St Gregory of Nyssa urged Christians »to amass the riches of pagan culture/including Ethics, Physics, Geometry, Astronomy, and Dialectic (Vita Mos. 360). It was suggested to rely upon «general notions» (κοινα ννοιαι), i.e., to a certain extent, transcendental ideas which all the people can understand by intuition. At the same time Philosophy should not take the place of faith, »simple and without sophisms» (Bas. Spir. 6, 13). St Basil the Great divided all the «propositions» (δγματα) accepted by reason into »moral» (θικος), «physical» (φυσικος), and »mystical» or " contemplative» (ποπτικος); taken together, they become the soul " s garment, the fabric of which is borrowed from different sources (Psal. 44, 10). Moral laws were considered by the Cappadocians as a heritage of the whole mankind, but their fulfilment was admittedly possible only after the advent of Grace. St Basil presents cognition of nature in his Hexaemeron (that is, [a Work] of Six Days) as a field of competing natural philosophical hypotheses that can become clear in terms of the world view only through mystical dogmata. Finally, the latter ones are dimly seen by philosophic reason, but they are given per se only in Orthodox Theology. The place of Philosophy in the structure of cognition of the Cappadocian school can be defined as auxiliary. The Cappadocian school doctrine of the Trinity that later became its chief achievement was based on a biblical foundation with the employment of philosophic terminology. Being increasingly discontent with the Neo-Platonist emanationism, the Cappadocians chose the way of an exact distinction of the terms «essence» (οσα) and »hypostasis» (πστασις), which St Athanasius had not yet used. They were charged with tritheism, but the Neo-Nicene doctrine prevailed at the Second Oecumenical Council in Constantinople (381 AD). Having deepened the generally accepted notion of «person» (πρσωπον) with the idea of »hypostasis», the great Cappadocians arrived at the dialectical disclosure of the dogma of the Trinity «without division and without confusion,» reconciling contradictory views of triunity in the unfathomable nature of the Godhead that is beyond the grasp of the mind.

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The Monarchian crisis of the 3rd century highlighted a new stage in the development of Christian pneumatology. In response to the Monarchians (most notably, Sabellius and Paul of Samosata) who argued for an idea of the unity of God in which the varied “names” of Father, Son, and Spirit were simply variant aspects of the selfsame single being (a monad with different non- hypostatized external aspects), the early Logos school of patristic theologians, espe­cially Tertullian, Hippolytus, and Origen, provided an explicit account of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit as three distinct personal realizations of one divine sub­stance. At this time a distinct terminology was introduced. Origen expressed it clearly in his celebrated formula “one ousia [Sub­stance] and three hypostases [Persons].” Tertullian presented it as a relation of one Nature (natura) to three Persons (personae). For a while there was confusion between the western and eastern churches over the terminologies used in Latin and Greek (hypostasis among the Greeks being used for differentiation, while its semantic parallel, the Latin word substantia, con­noted the unity of divine being for west­erners). But by the 4th century clarity returned as they realized that the two approaches were saying the same thing by different semantic routes. The Arian controversy of the 4th century marked a critical stage in the development of pneumatological language in the church. Arius and his later radical followers, Eunomius and Aetius, elevated as a chief theological axiom the philosophical assump­tions that cause is always greater than its effect, and that a name has an essential con­nection with what it designates. These pre­suppositions forced the Arians to insist that the Father was greater than the Son as the cause of the Son’s being, and that the Son was greater than the Spirit as the cause of the Spirit’s mission. The radical Arians (Heterousians) argued that such names as Unbegotten, the Only Begotten, and the Sanctifier were essential properties that designated different substances. Thus, the Spirit, for these Arians, had to be Heteroousion, of a different substance to God, and thus not God.

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This early condemnation of homoousios would play a significant role in the controversy of the 4th c. regarding the Alexandrian presbyter, Arius, and the struggle over the Nicene Creed (qq.v.). Arius had proposed that the Word of God incarnate in Christ was less than divine, a creature of the one God and Father. His understanding of salvation seems in consequence to have been based upon a “heroic” model of Christ as trailblazer and exemplar. Against this view, first Alexander and then Athanasius of Alexandria (q.v.) championed the teaching of Irenaeus: that God himself had taken on humanity in order to make his creatures participants in his divinity. The First Ecumenical Council (q.v.) at Nicaea in 325 endorsed a creed that incorporated the word homoousios in order to underline the Word’s co-divinity or consubstantiality with the Father and so retain the traditional doctrine of theosis. Due to the term’s prior association with modalism, however, it was not accepted readily by the Eastern bishops. Athanasius was quite wrong to brand all of his opponents with the label, “Arians.” Most of the educated, Greek-speaking episcopacy were theological followers of Origen (q.v.) and embraced the latter’s use of hypostasis (usually translated now as “person,” but more literally meaning something closer to “substance”) for the three persons of the Trinity. In consequence, though, they were obliged to assume Origen’s subordinationism as well, that is, the notion that Son and Spirit stand in a lesser, subordinate relationship to God the Father. It was this tendency in Origen’s thought that contributed substantially to Arius’s initial success in persuading some-scarcely all-of the Eastern bishops to approve his program. Most disliked both him and Athanasius, and with some justice. It required the singular genius of the Cappadocian Fathers (q.v.) to find a solution incorporating both Athanasius’s insistence on the full divinity of the Son and Origen’s terminology, an accomplishment sealed by the endorsement of the expanded Nicene Creed at the Second Ecumenical Council at Constantinople (q.v.) in 381.

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In his response, Cyril makes a distinction between things that are one by composition, and things that are two because they are separate and by themselves. When someone attributes συν or μετa “to one person and one nature or hypostasis — as he himself did when he wrote that the Son is seated on the throne “with his own flesh”—the unity by composition is maintained. But when συν or μετa are applied to two separate beings—like Peter and John—, this does not indicate one entity. As usual, Cyril’s point is Christ’s unity over against a division into a man and the Word by themselves. His remark on one person, nature or hypostasis is a general statement. It cannot be concluded from this that the three terms have exactly the same meaning. Our investigation into Cyril’s use of the mia physis formula so far leads to the following conclusion. In his writings until the reunion with the Orientals in 433 there are only four occurrences in which the archbishop speaks of ‘one nature’ in a christological context. In one of them, it concerns a general statement about the application of συν and μετa to a unity which is compounded. Two times we encounter the mia physis formula in a quotation from Apollinarius’s Letter to Jovian, which Cyril thought to be a work from Athanasius; he does not comment on the formula in any way. The only instance in which Cyril of Alexandria himself actually employs the mia physis formula is found in Contra Nestorium, where it is mentioned without any emphasis. One can only conclude that, in contrast with the many examples of dyophysite language, miaphysite terminology hardly plays a role in Cyril’s christology before the Reunion of 433, and therefore, is certainly not typical of his own christological vocabulary. It is the partisans of his own party, dissatisfied with the reunion, which occasion him to give more attention to the mia physis formula in several letters… …It may be concluded that, although the mia physis formula occurs relatively often in [the] letters following the reunion with the Orientals, the main reason that Cyril defends it is probably that he believed it to be taught by Athanasius and other Church Fathers. It is for him a tool —but by no means an essential tool — to stress the ontological unity of the Incarnate Word. He repeatedly explains it by referring to the anthropological analogy: just as the one human nature is a composition of the two natures of soul and body, so Christ is the one Incarnate nature of the Word, out of the natures of the Word and the flesh.

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  Historically speaking, whilst the argument of " terminological misunderstanding " is a recent innovation, there were some implicit references to the post-Chalcedonian controversies. Great scholars like Leontius of Jerusalem in his Aporiae and Saint John of Damascus in his treatises against heretics referred to such tricky approaches that aim to overlook the existing dogmatic differences. Saint Maximus the Confessor, who is one of the greatest theologians in the history of Christendom, faced the attempts of Severus of Antioch, a Monophysite heretic, to manipulate the words " nature " and " hypostasis " . He considered this to be a sort of wickedness, while John of Damascus asks, " Why should one equate these terms in the domain of economy!? " But I will come back to this question in the next article.   Lack of the academic scholarship   This situation leads us to the following problem. The reader of the papers presented in the joint commissions will not find - whether in the unofficial or the official dialogues - a single study on   Christology by any of the Fathers of the Church. On the Contrary, John Romanides criticized Saint Leo of Rome for giving Theodoret a chance to speak. He referred to Leo as the supporter of a heretic and said that, " Leo followed Theodoret like a pet on a leash " while Dioscorus by supporting Eutiches was less mistaken!   I was in the Coptic Church when I read his paper. This means that his words could have been taken by me as a victory and source of credibility for my Coptic faith. However, with humble unbiased search we can discover how his Anti-Papal motive, as he implicitly described it later in the same paper, led him to launch this harsh attack against one of the greatest doctors of the whole Christendom and how his approach lacks historical support if we carried out a fair historical investigation. From such a careful investigation emerges a critical question; do we have a Christological and historical study by St. Leo the Great presented to the Monophysites? Romanides failed to produce such an academic approach when he criticized Leo without reading him within the historical and doctrinal context let alone his mistake in claiming that he knows what Dioscorus meant by one nature , an orthodox meaning according to Romanides, while we have almost nothing survived from his writings! At the same time, how can it help the Monophysites when we overlook academic methodology? This is accurately described by Prof.

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  In my opinion, the most important passage in the Tome is number IV . This passage of the Tome summarises the meaning of the scriptures and echoes Paul’s two famous poetic passages in Philippians 2: 6 and Galatians 4:4-6, which describe how God became man and gathered weakness with almightiness in His very own Person. St. Leo ends with the conclusion " …Therefore in consequence of this unity of person which is to be understood in both natures , we read of the Son of Man also descending from heaven, when the Son of God took flesh from the Virgin who bore Him. And again the Son of God is said to have been crucified and buried, although it was not actually in His Divinity whereby the Only-begotten is co-eternal and con-substantial with the Father, but in His weak human nature that He suffered these things. And so it is that in the Creed also we all confess that the Only-begotten Son of God was crucified and buried, according to that saying of the Apostle: " for if they had known, they would never have crucified the Lord of glor.” (1 Corinthians 2:8).   The Chalcedonian creed grew meaningfully in this spirit. Despite the use of classic patristic terms like " Theotokos " and " hypostasis " , it was not limited by terminology. It managed to be, as Karl Rahner says, “both; a point of end and beginning. As much as it managed to explain a doctrine and put an end to nearly two hundred years of controversy, it managed to be the base for a deeper Christian anthropology in the light of Divine love.”   4th Ecumenical Council held in Chalcedon   The " Theanthropic” Essence   Having answered my initial question of who is Christ and grounded my understanding of what that practically means through studying the Council of Chalcedon, I began to take steps in deepening my concept of faith and spirituality. I found that there are two kinds of spirituality; a real and a fake one. Real spirituality is based on Christ as the reality and the cornerstone of the Church. He is Truth (Jn 14:6) and real spirituality is abiding in Him (1 Jn 2: 28). In contrast, fake spirituality often emanates from shifting emotional needs. Some people enact a superficial spirituality out of fear of hell or judgment, while others seek good deeds to satisfy something inside them or wear a mask like the Pharisees (Mark 12:40). This appearance of spirituality cannot carry on permanently and can never be as beautiful or solid as a spirituality based on the image of the God Man i.e. Theanthropos. When spirituality is deeply rooted in the knowledge of Christology, we are better equipped to recognize the beauty and meaningfulness of Christian life.

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16 It is important not only to emphasize the distinction in cognition of hypostases in their natural unity, but also the very principle of a hypostasis being cognized through a consubstantial one. 17 Although St. Athanasius still does not use hypostatic terminology to describe the actual intra-Trinitarian differences and relations, yet, taking into account the following development of theological terminology, his approach allows to deduce a hypostatic principle of cognition. Accordingly, it is through the personal or hypostatic action of the Son, distinct from the action of the Father and of the Holy Spirit, that the hypostasis of the Father is cognized by creation. 18 St. Athanasius remarks that the representatives of the human race, being rational (λογικο) images-icons of the Logos, are capable of cognizing the Logos and through Him – His Father, Whose Image He is. 19 By analogy with the Trinitarian mutual knowledge of hypostases and human cognition of one of the Trinitarian hypostasis through another, one human hypostasis is cognized and estimated by other ones 20 and through them. 21 Personal action, in particular the incarnation, of the Son of God also enables cognition of the common Divinity of the Son and Father, as well as the uncreated energies, common to the them, and God as the Trinity of hypostases and One in essence. 22 Personal action of an individual hypostasis of the human race also can contribute to cognition of God by other human hypostases. 23 Uncreated Energies and Knowledge Knowledge of God is based on the ability of assimilation of the uncreated energies by creation. While the essence of God is incomprehensible and not subject to human knowledge, the Divine energy is offered, multiplied, indivisibly ‘separated’ and imparted 24 to various created hypostases according to the hypostatic-structural principle ‘from the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit’. 25 The principles of offering and assimilation are alike hypostatic, which once again confirms the essentiality of hypostatic reality for the human cognition of God.

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