In the last issue I began to share the thoughts of the Cappadocian Fathers. This fundamental position has two important implications. First, there is no absolute symmetry between divinity and humanity in Christ because the unique hypostasis is only divine and because the human will follows the divine. It is precisely a “symmetrical” Christology which was rejected as Nestorian in Ephesus (431). You may   recall that Nestorianism held that Christ had two loosely-united natures, divine and human. A brief definition of Nestorian Christology can be given as: “Jesus Christ, who is not identical with the Son but personally united with the Son, who lives in him, is one hypostasis and one nature: human.” The “asymmetry” of Eastern Christology reflects an idea which Athanasius and Cyril of Alexandria stressed so strongly: only God can save, while humanity can only cooperate with the saving acts and will of God. However, in the patristic concept of man, theocentricity is a natural character of humanity; thus asymmetry does not prevent the fact that Christ was fully and “actively” man. It is natural for man to be God-centered. That is how he was created. So with Jesus as a man, He was God-centered in His human nature and His divine personality was the element that brought union between His divine and human natures.

Second, the human nature of Christ is not personalized into a separate human hypostasis, which means that the concept of hypostasis is not an expression of natural existence, either in God or in man, but it designates personal existence. Post Chalcedonian Christology postulates that Christ was fully man and so that He was a human individual, but it rejects the Nestorian view that He was a human hypostasis, or person. A fully human individual life was en-hypostasized in the hypostasis of the Logos, without losing any of its human characteristics. The theory, associated with the name of Apollinaris of Laodicea, and according to which the Logos, in Jesus, had taken the place of the human soul, was systematically rejected by Byzantine theologians since it implied that the humanity of Christ was not complete. Cyril’s celebrated formula – wrongly attributed to Athanasius and, in fact uttered by Apollinaris – one nature           incarnate of God the Word was accepted only in a Chalcedonian context. Divine   nature and human nature could never merge, or be confused, or become complementary to each other, but, in Christ, they were united in the single divine hypostasis of the Logos: the divine model matched the human image.

Hopefully this is beginning to make more sense. It is critical that we maintain that Christ had two natures and only one personality.   Christ IS the God-Man.