Hypostasis

← Encyclopedia

Hypostasis is a Greek philosophical and theological term — from hypo-, under, and stasis, a standing — for that which underlies appearance and possesses reality in its own right. In ordinary Greek it meant a sediment, a foundation, something that stands firm beneath. Philosophy and theology took up that root sense and built two of the most consequential vocabularies in Western thought on it, and the word carries a different weight in each. The Latin substantia was built on exactly the same image — sub, under, and stare, to stand — so that two languages independently named real being by the picture of something that stands underneath. That shared metaphor looks like a convenience, and it became one of the great snares in the history of doctrine.

In Neoplatonism the term names a distinct level of reality. Plotinus, writing in the third century, described all that exists as descending from a single source through three primary hypostases: the One, beyond being and beyond name; the Intellect, the eternal mind that holds the forms of all things; and Soul, which governs the visible world. Each proceeds from the one above it without lessening its source, so that to speak of three hypostases is to name three real and graded stations of being, not three parts of a thing. The tractate that opens his fifth set of treatises is titled, in the standard English, The Three Initial Hypostases — though the fixed triad owes as much to the title and to later systematizers as to Plotinus, whose own use of the word remains comparatively fluid. The word here means a genuine, subsisting reality — a rung on the descent that is no less real for standing below the One. The detail of those three rungs belongs to the entries that bear their names; what matters for the term itself is that the levels are ranked, the lower deriving from and depending on the higher.

Christian theology inherited the same word and put it to harder use. In the long doctrinal disputes of the fourth and fifth centuries, hypostasis came to name what is distinct in God — the Father, the Son, and the Spirit — as against ousia, the single substance they share. The settled formula held that God is one ousia in three hypostaseis: one being, three persons. The settlement was the work of the Cappadocian Fathers in the later fourth century — Basil of Caesarea, his younger brother Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus — who reserved ousia for the one divine nature held in common and hypostasis for each distinct mode of being. Basil offered the clarifying analogy that ousia stands to hypostasis as the general stands to the particular: as the one humanity shared by three individual human beings. The vocabulary had been made ready a century earlier. Origen, in the third century, had already given hypostasis a Trinitarian sense out of Greek philosophical materials, the bridge by which the language of the schools entered the creed.

The difficulty was partly verbal, and the verbal difficulty was severe. Earlier Greek usage had treated hypostasis and ousia as near synonyms, and Latin had no clean equivalent, rendering both by substantia. Because substantia was the literal cognate of hypostasis yet was the natural Latin for ousia, the Greek profession of three hypostaseis could reach Latin ears as three substantiae, three substances — which sounded like tritheism, three gods. The Latin counter, three personae in one substantia, carried back into Greek as three prosopa, three faces or masks, sounded to the East like modalism, one God merely wearing three roles. Each side heard the other confessing a heresy. The knot was loosened when the West came to see that the true equivalent of hypostasis was not substantia but subsistentia, and settled on persona for what the Greeks called hypostasis; no single English word has ever carried it cleanly. The philosophical-essence side of this terminology — ousia and substantia — is taken up in the entry on substance. The divergence of the terms shadowed later disputes between the churches.

The word then did a second theological labor. At the Council of Chalcedon in 451 it was fixed not on the Trinity but on the person of Christ, defined as one hypostasis in two natures, divine and human, united without confusion, change, division, or separation, each nature keeping its own properties in the one person. This hypostatic union was framed against two errors: against treating Christ as two persons loosely conjoined, which fractures the unity, and against fusing the two natures into one, which dissolves the full humanity. Here the arithmetic of the word inverts. In the Trinity hypostasis names a plurality — three of them in the one God; in Christology it names a unity — the single hypostasis in which two natures are held together. The same term is made to count in opposite directions, which is part of why it has always been hard.

The two uses are not the same, and the difference matters. For the Neoplatonist the three hypostases are unequal, ranked by their distance from the One; for the Christian the three are equal, co-eternal, one in being. Scholarship has traced the historical thread between them — many of the theologians who hammered out the Trinitarian sense had read the Platonists, and the philosophical vocabulary was ready to hand — without claiming the doctrines coincide. What the word holds in common across both is its oldest intuition: that beneath what merely appears, something stands, and is real.

→ In the library: Plotinus — The Enneads (MacKenna), V.1: The Three Initial Hypostases

→ Related: The One · Nous · Soul · Substance · Neoplatonism