whatever it may be; and uses ὑπόστασις of the particular concrete nature of one man. Then he is quite right in saying that our Lord had two hypostases. He had two individual perfect natures, in either of which nothing was wanting. He was perfect God and perfect man. And if you insist very much on his manhood as complete and perfect, if you are specially on your guard against Docetism or Apollinarism, you will perhaps insist that in him, besides the divinity, there was a second human hypostasis, meaning a complete and perfect individual (not merely abstract or theoretical) human nature. So many orthodox Fathers speak of two hypostases in our Lord; this was particularly the language of Antioch; Nestorius might have said that, if that had been all, without offence. Eventually, it is true, hypostasis was considered the equivalent of the Latin persona; so that now the Orthodox would consider it as scandalous to say there are two hypostases in Christ as to speak of his one φύσις:[1] It would be much more difficult to excuse Nestorius's expression: two prosopa in our Lord. But, even here, a word might be explained away. It is his perfectly clear explanation of what he means, his elaborate deductions and long arguments, that show him to be a heretic. First, there is his denial of the title θεοτόκος. Mary was not Mother of God; her son was not God; he was a man in whom God dwelt. So also Nestorius refused to admit such phrases as that God was born, God suffered.[2] He defended the idea of Theodore of Mopsuestia that necessarily every perfect human nature is a person, a man; that therefore our Lord's humanity was a man, distinct from the Son of God.[3] He refused to admit of
- ↑ In the Greek translation of the Athanasian Creed: εἶς πάντως, οὐ συγχύσει φύσεων, ἀλλ’ ἑνώσει ὑποστάσεων (in the Horologion, Venice, ed. vii., 1895, p. 520). Mgr. Duchesne has a good note on the Antiochene, Alexandrine, and Western attitudes and terminology in his Hist. anc. de l'Église, iii. 319–323.
- ↑ In his answer to Cyril's second letter (Loofs: Nestoriana, Halle, 1905, p. 176). Certainly if Nestorius only meant that Mary was not the mother of the divinity, that the divinity was not born of her, and did not suffer, he is quite right. Mgr. Duchesne (op. cit. iii. 325) points out that the word θεοτόκος needs explanation. But Nestorius's detailed explanation makes his meaning clear enough: the man Jesus who was born and suffered was not God. Sometimes he was prepared to compromise about the θεοτόκος (Hefele-Leclercq: Hist. des Conciles, ii. i. p. 263, and Loofs: Nestoriana, pp. 181, 184, 273, 302, 309, etc.).
- ↑ See the text in Hefele-Leclercq, ii. i. p. 240.
