Background
Christian philosophical theology developed in a place and time where certain understandings of reality were taken for granted. It would take whole books to explain even a fraction of these assumed understandings, so I just want to pick the most important for my task, focusing on the Platonic and Aristotelian Roots of Christian thought. There are no citations, but I will acknowledge that my thinking on “person” as explained here is influenced by both Jordan Wood and Edward Butler, and my understanding of “essence” is influenced by David Bentley Hart and William Norris Clarke, SJ.
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I think it is important to start with Parmenides’ famous saying. Paraphrased, it goes “To know and to be are the same thing”. It must be noted that the ancient Mediterranean understanding of knowledge is also complex. One might say there are “grades” of knowledge. To give a simplified example in Neoplatonism, there is the “discursive knowledge” of the rational Soul, what most of us today mean when we say “knowledge”. There is “Noetic Knowledge”, to which Parmenides quote primarily applies, and there is a “knowledge” above even that which is not really proper “knowledge”, but we have to describe it thus. “Knowledge” for these people was appropriate to the “object” of knowledge.
Parmenides’ saying is the key to understanding all three senses of “knowledge” in themselves and in relation to each other. The easiest way to start is to understand that, unlike the habits of thinking we are born into today – habits I think should be critiqued – these people believed in a world that was alive. They believed in a very personal world too. These two – person and life – are very related. The things we now call “inanimate” would only be “relatively inanimate” for most of them. Stones could house spirits or Gods and at the same time could somehow be Spirits and Gods, similar to how many of us know that our bodies house us and are us at the same time. Even without housing Gods, existence is personal. To understand this worldview, we have to understand person, and this will indeed be very important for understanding the Trinity and Christ’s natures.
To start with, we have to understand that the question of person is the question of unity. For example, who you are is at once the sum of what you are, and what you do, over the entirety of your (finite or infinite) life, and at the same time more than this, since what you are has some degree of fluidity over time. You are a unity beyond all the things that you are, and which holds all that complexity together as one person without destroying it, whether this destruction is by making all of them one thing or dividing them to infinity. So, as we can see, there is a very important link between person and unity, such that in a very real sense, there is no difference between person and unity as such, which is why finding the “personhood” of anything in terms of all the “whats” will always be a problem. For example, it is easy to ignore or reject such unity or person as a concept and become a materialist of sorts (e.g. “all is just physical machinery”), since you cannot fully quantify it.
This is important because, if there really is no difference between unity as such and personhood, then there is a way to view every individual thing or their collection as one whole as a person. This is why Plato calls the Cosmos a God and why certain Church Fathers – for example, St Gregory of Nyssa and St Maximus Confessor – would do something similar with the world and Christ, in full agreement with our creeds. This unity is why Parmenides can say that knowledge and being are the same. Because the very existence of things is their unity with some person, we can say there is a link between persons and knowledge. What is this link? Well, since person as unity is not a thing among others, and is unquantifiable (and thus without boundary), every person is the unity of everything that exists. Crazy? I know. The lack of boundary to “person” means it encompasses everything, including (somehow) other persons. If we ask what the difference is between a person “containing” and “knowing” all that exists? The answer is, unsurprisingly, “nothing”. I mean, what else is knowledge but the “what” or “who” of something or someone being somehow “part” of you? And, is it even possible for there to be something of which we can have no knowledge in principle? Ofcourse no. It would be indistinguishable from absolute non-existence. “Who” you are extends beyond distance, to “unite” to yourself all that is knowable. Ofcourse, I would have to say this is not “discursive knowledge”, but the latter two kinds of knowledge. That’s why many philosophers have called the “Soul” a “Cosmos” on its own, and why we say words like “microcosm” (or micro-cosmos) when referring to persons, particularly human ones. “Discursive” knowledge is a limited way this principle expresses itself, because, for us, most of this knowledge is “potential” in relation to the discursive. We can only express it here in sequence and time. But as we should know if we are Christian, “you” are not reducible to your discursive mind.
Thus, this is the problem of personhood: How does one understand and give the details on the “nature” of personhood? This is one of the questions that drives debate about Christ and the Trinity: In what way can three persons – which in Christian theology is “hypostases” – be said to encompass each other while claiming they are “One God” and “one essence” (“Ousia” in the Greek). Plus, a question that might be more pertinent now: Why just three?
Ousia
This word means “essence” or sometimes “nature”, depending on the context. To simplify, we should say it means “whatness”, “what” a thing is. This is not only about species, but other things like the roles you play in society, or size, or even location. The reason that certain Platonists insist that person is not reducible to “whatness” because no one is ever just “one thing”. I am a human, a mammal, a Son, a brother; I have a certain height, a certain skin colour, etc. “I” unite all of these as one person.
On the other hand, speaking solely of “whatness” brings up the question of the universal and particular. There is “humanity” as such (whether you think there is a material or non-material substance like that or it is just a concept), and there is this particular human. “Things” are divided from each other and within each other, and whether you think universals are just concepts or greater than concepts, the universal is formally greater than the particular, and it is “matter” (however you define it) that defines and perhaps “dilutes” the universal into the particular. At least, this is so for a great many philosophers.
However, if we are to go by what the creeds say about the Trinity, then we cannot apply this logic to our God. Our Creeds do not say “One Universal, three particulars”. Universals are always among other universals, also distinguished from them. But we say our God is the creator of even these. The “What” of the Christian God is not a universal, and because it is not a universal it is not “knowable” in the discursive sense, and also not “knowable” in the Noetic sense. First, the “Noetic sense” pertains to universals (among other things). Secondly, the “discursive” already begins to dilute this into the particular, since universals as such are strictly inaccessible to thinking in time (for example, we can only “think” the human as a universal by imagining or thinking about the bare outlines and properties of a particular human, even if we have to make up one in our minds). To apply the language of universals to the Christian God directly is not to think about the logic of divine personhood well enough. One might say it looks very similar to the heresy of “Modalism” (One God, three “modes”). Ofcourse, that claim would need to be substantiated. Modalism is very ambiguous, and we have a habit of throwing the word “heresy” against merely similar things, rather than considering positions themselves for their own merits and demerits.
So, we have the first trinitarian problem: how do we understand the “What” of God? In fact how do we even know about the “What” since it is not a universal or a particular? This question links to that of salvation via the second problem, and this second problem makes the first one more complicated.
Hypostasis
Now, I couldn’t give you a very detailed origin and history of this word. That is not my expertise. What I will do is give some background and how it is used in Christian theology after the Council of Chalcedon.
Now, “hypostasis” might be a word that joins the “universal” and “particular” in the previous section. It is simply an “instantiation”, an “instance” of something or someone, whether it is both universals and particulars that are instantiated, or just particulars. This is a heavily simplified account, however, as there are few, if any ancient people (Platonists or otherwise) that really believed in individual hypostases of universals. Noetic entities are complex like us, only instead of instantiating particularized universals in space and/or time, they instantiate the universals themselves, and possibly all universals, in each Noetic hypostasis. “Noetic” comes from “Nous”, which can be translated “Mind”, “Intellect”, “Intelligence”, or “Spirit”. These words do not refer to the discursive mind or the usual “Soul” that animates the body, but the parts of us and others that contain the full “whats” of all that we can be, eternally (i.e. prior to actual flowing time), hence why I said they instantiate the universals. In Christianity, the “Noetic entities” have historically been identified with angels and our own spirits, although I would question this reduction of Noetic entities to just these two.
As we can see, the problem of personhood comes up again, in the form of the question of hypostasis. A hypostasis is also another possible word for “person”, hence why the classic trinitarian formula of One “Ousia” and three “Hypostases” is translated as “One Essence, three persons”.
Here is an outline of the second problem as it relates to the first:
For material, psychic (“Soulish”), and noetic hypostases or persons, like us or angels, there is still separation from the perspective of their “whats”. Although Noetic entities are in communion with each other, you don’t say “three hypostases, one Angel”. Same with humans. The only way we can identify humans as humans with each other is using the universal, and we have already seen that this does not work for us when it comes to the Christian God. In short, the principle of “sameness and difference” still applies to these entities. However, for the Christian God, we have “three hypostases”, and yet we do not say “three Gods”, if by God we mean the “whatness” of our God, and yet this “whatness” is not a universal. How then to understand this?
We can see another angle on the problem when we accept the creed of Chalcedon that Christ is one hypostasis in two natures. That is, Christ is “one person” in two “whats”, divine and human.
Conclusions and Implications
Abstractly, given the logic of person described at the beginning, the description of Christ makes sense. A person is the unity of many natures. Infact, since, for Christian philosophy and others, the human is the unity of all natures, a “microcosmos”, to say Christ is human and divine at once in one person is to restate the basic implications of personhood. However, the description of personhood that was given assumed an understanding of natures in terms of universals and particulars, and knowledge appropriate to both. Basically, You are a unity of many particularized universals. However, the Christian understanding of divine nature is that it is neither universal nor particular, and the source of both. So this “unity” or “henosis” of divine and human in one person still has questions that need to be answered as to their details. For example, there is the problem as to how to understand their “relations” (Unbegotten Father, Begotten Son, Proceeding Spirit) in a way that does not repeat the universal/particular relationship we already rejected, that does not reject the fact that the Son is “consubstantial” (of the same “whatness”) with the Father according to the divine nature and with us according to the human nature, that does not forget the Spirit, that does not make the divine nature “complex”, as the complex is divided needs something higher and “simpler” to unite it (e.g. a universal). Lastly, we have to explain all this in a way that clarifies the relationship between the Trinity and us. In fact, it is even possible to ask whether “hypostases” should translate “person” since it is possible for one person to have more than one “hypostasis” in a certain sense, and this question is important if one wants to maintain that it is “One God” you are worshipping, not three.
To recap, we have these basic questions in Trinitarian and Christological theologies:
1. How do we understand the “Whatness” of our God?
2. How do we understand the “Whoness” of our God?
3. How do we understand the relationship between the “What” and “Who” of our God without ending up with three Gods and/or entities with a higher (impersonal and universal) principle and/or making his “whatness” divided? i.e. without turning our God into a creature.
4. How do we understand the relationship between the hypostases without turning one or all of them into only creatures? (Since Christ is at least “part” creature)
5. How do we understand the place of this doctrine for our understanding of our creation and salvation while avoiding all the mistakes given before?
This is a tall order. It is by no means simple. It is why one should not shrug at the perplexed faces of Jews, Muslims, and even polytheists when they encounter the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. Just as their theology is not simple, neither is ours. We go through our lives and devotions without actually probing what our words mean. We should be grateful that discursive knowledge is not salvation but we should embrace humility in the fact that these things will take possibly forever to explicate in discursive detail, and that they require specialized language for the task. At the very least, with this (hopefully) short and relatively simple introduction to the complexity involved in Trinitarian theology and Christology, I have shown the door to an expansive world of Christian philosophical exploration. For those who would like to take go on that adventure, I will give a short list of introductory books and articles below. Good luck and Pax Christi.
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Recommendations
On the Classical understandings of Divinity from a Christian perspective:
The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss by David Bentley Hart
Five Proofs of the Existence of God by Edward Feser
On Classical Metaphysics from a Christian perspective:
Thinking Being: Introduction to Metaphysics in the Classical Tradition by Eric Perl
On Christian Theology:
That Man Might Become God: Lectures on Christian Theology by James Cutsinger
Some Slightly Advanced Material on Christian Theology:
The Hidden and the Manifest: Essays in Theology and Metaphysics by David Bentley Hart
Creation is Incarnation: The Metaphysical Peculiarity of the Logoi in Maximus Confessor by Jordan Daniel Wood
The Whole Mystery of Christ: Creation as Incarnation in Maximus Confessor by Jordan Daniel Wood (Releases October 15, 2022)