Andrew Louth - Syriac Christian Church

INTRODUCTION 57
Maximus was breaking new ground. To do this involved thinking
through what was meant by the hypostatic union, and indeed what
was meant by the term hypostasis. 7 It is tempting to see a progress in
one strand of Christian thought about the Incarnation from an idea
that barely avoids docetism in which God appears in human form,
through Apollinarianism in which the human mind is replaced by the
divine mind, to the position of Orthodoxy in which the divine Son
assumes a fully human nature. From such a point of view, Maximus
represents the final clarification of Orthodoxy. Landmarks on the way
would be St Athanasius’ assertion that ‘the Lord came not to show
himself, but to heal and teach those who were suffering’, 8 and the
principle enunciated by St Gregory of Nazianzus that ‘the unassumed
is the unhealed, only that which is united to God is saved’. 9 From
seeing Christ as God appearing in human form, theological reflection
moved to seeing Christ as the Son of God living a fully human life.
The great Ecumenical Councils trace this theological journey, but its
starting-point is the conviction that in Christ one encounters God as
person and its guiding light the growing realization that this entails
that the person of the Incarnate One is the Word, the divine Son, ‘One
of the Trinity’. The critical issue is: what is a person? And the heresies
that litter this theological path— docetism, Apollinarianism,
Eutychianism, Monenergism, Monothelitism—can be seen as the
result of premature attempts to resolve this issue. (It should be said,
in fairness, that many scholars would see this theological path as
leading nowhere, or narrowing down to vanishing-point: but if this
path does lead somewhere, then it is Maximus to whom we must
attend if we want to understand where.)
What is Maximus’ answer to this problem? It is guided, as will now
be evident, by his ‘Chalcedoman logic’. Person is contrasted to nature:
it is concerned with the way we are (the mode, or tropos), not what we
are (principle, or logos). When he became incarnate— when he
assumed human nature—the Word became everything that we are.
But he did it in his own way, because he is a person, just as we are
human in our own way, because we are persons. Maximus sometimes,
as we have seen, expresses this distinction of levels by distinguishing
between existence (hyparxis) or subsisting (hyphistanai, from which
the noun, hypostasis) and being (ousia, or einai): persons exist, nature
are. Whatever we share with others, we are: it belongs to our nature.
But what it is to be a person is not some thing, some quality, that we
do not share with others—as if there were an irreducible somewhat
within each one of us that makes us the unique persons we are. What
is unique about each one of us is what we have made of the nature
that we have: our own unique mode of existence, which is a matter of
our experience in the past, our hopes for the future, the way we live