Saturday, February 12, 2022

Richard Price on Cyril, Nestorius, and “Prosopon”

  

[Nestorius] insisted on two natures not, as he was accused of doing, in order to express two separate realities (‘two sons’). The one individual reality of Jesus Christ, however, could not be defined as nature or hypostasis but instead had to be understood as one prosopon. In the texts written before the council Nestorius thus conceived of the joint prosopon—joint, that is, of Godhead and humanity—as the ‘person’ of Christ. The word does not straightforwardly denote ‘person’ in a modern sense (nor does any of the alternatives offered at the time). While it is often designated the ‘individual’, it did not usually evoke notions of personality and substantial integrity. That said, prosopon was, to Nestorious, the concrete reality of a person as it could be perceived by, and present itself to, another it was an ‘I’ in relation to a ‘you’, and in this way surely more than just an outward presentation. The properties essential to a ‘person’ were disclosed to the ‘other’ through, or at the level of, its prosopon (or, in the reverse perspective: allowed the ‘other’ perception and cognisance of them), as had been the case of Theodore of Mopsuestia. In this way, the word seemingly failed to express without ambiguity the substantial reality and personality of a human subject. After all, the term prosopon could still be used, as it had been in the world of the theatre, to designate an adopted rule. It also carried overtones from its use in biblical exegesis. Since Origen, interpreters had sought to establish which ‘person’ or ‘character’ ‘spoke’ for instance, the verses of the Psalms (exegesis ek propsopou). The Psalmist might speak from the propsopon of the divine Wisdom at one point, and from that of a pious man praying at another; or the prophet could speak directly from the prosopon of God. Such usage was at a distance from the use of prosopon (‘person’) in an ontological sense. And so Cyril criticized the idea for its seemingly exclusive external focus. When he criticized the conjunction of the divine and human natures ‘merely’ in a prosopon, he latched on to these connotations that could seem to reduce the ‘person’ to no more than an appearance, something where unity remained at an outside, surface level, not forming a real individual subject. Yet the use of propsopon as synonymous to hypostasis to denote one of the there divine ‘persons’ in the Trinity shows that this understanding of the term was narrow and tendentious. (Richard Price, The Council of Ephesus 431: Documents and Proceedings [Translated Texts for Historians 72; Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020, 2022], 79-80)

 

In a footnote to the above, we read:

 

It seems doubtful, however, that he also thought of the joining of two prosopa of the divine and the human natures, respectively, in the incarnation (which might have lent itself further to the criticism of ‘two sons’)—and which the theory of a joint prosopon logically seems to require. This understanding is certainly expressed in Theodore of Mopsuestia and also follows logically from Nestorius’ later reflections in the Liber Heraclidis. In the Liber Heraclidis (after Ephesus)—but only then—Nestorius appears to have developed the understanding of Christ’s prosopon and its relationship to the two ‘natures’ and hypostaseis into a more systematic presentation of a ’prosopic union’—resembling, structurally at least. Cyril’s hypostatic union. We must note, however, that in the surviving texts from the period up to Ephesus the accusation of teaching two prosopa is never levelled against him. The language is also completely absent from the excerpts of Nestorian texts selected and presented for the purpose of his conviction as a heretic. Had he used the phrase, such an omission from the criticisms and denunciations of the time would be difficult to explain. (Richard Price, The Council of Ephesus 431: Documents and Proceedings [Translated Texts for Historians 72; Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020, 2022], 79 n. 129)