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
The terminology
- Aristotle: ousia is the highest and most comprehensie of being (216).
- The Cappadocians used this as “universal concept
- And because Maximus didn’t want to identify God with a universal concept, he places God outside being (Ambigua PG 91, 1036B).
- Maximus at times wants to distinguish ousia from this-ousia.
- Being (einai). The existential aspect of Being (HuvB 218).
- Christ united in his own person “two distinct intelligible structures of being” (logoi tou einai) of his parts.”
- Hypokeimenon. Underlying subject. Maximus seldom uses this. It denotes the concrete, existent bearer of qualities that determine whata thing is.
- It does not mean the same thing as hypostasis. It is more of a point of reference for logical predicates than an existential reality.
- Hyparxis. Existence. Used to mean the Being of the Persons of God (tropos tes huparxeos; Cappadocians used this, as did Karl Barth).
- 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.
- 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.
- A nature is the hypostasis’s property (224).