Hypostasis

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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.

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. The word here means a genuine, subsisting reality — a rung on the descent that is no less real for standing below the One.

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 difficulty was partly verbal. Earlier Greek usage had treated hypostasis and ousia as near synonyms, and Latin had no clean equivalent, rendering both by substantia; the councils were in part fixing a vocabulary so that one God in three could be stated without contradiction. The Latin West eventually settled on persona for what the Greeks called hypostasis, and the divergence of those terms shadowed later disputes between the churches.

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 · Emanation · Neoplatonism · Logos