Meaning of anhypostasia | Babel Free

Definitions

The quality of Jesus Christ's humanity, such that it has its existence entirely from the hypostatic union, rather than from any independent human personhood (or hypostasis). The concept does not deny Jesus's personhood, but denies that Jesus's humanity has any personhood apart from the one hypostasis in which his humanity and divinity are united.

no-plural

Examples

“[H]e [Henry Liddon] observes, "The anhypostasia (impersonality) of our Lord's humanity is a result of the hypostatic union: to deny it is to assert that there are two persons in Christ, or else deny that he is more than man. At his Incarnation, the Eternal Word took on him human nature, not a human personality."”

“The doctrine of the person of Christ is argued with greatest fullness, and he [John of Damascus] evinces no little ingenuity and dialectic skill in treating of the personal unity in Christ's twofold nature (which he conceived as enhypostasis, not anhypostasis, of the human nature in the Logos), […]”

“By anhypostasia classical Christology asserted that in the assumptio carnis the human nature of Christ had no independent per se subsistence apart from the event of the incarnation, apart from the hypostatic union. By enhypostasia, however, it asserted that in the assumptio carnis the human nature of Christ was given a real and concrete subsistence within the hypostatic union—it was enhypostatic in the Word. Anhypostasia and enhypostasia are inseparable. In the incarnation the eternal Son assumed human nature into oneness with Himself, but in that assumption Jesus Christ is not only real man but a man.”

“‘Anhypostasia’ describes the conviction that the human nature of the incarnate Christ did not have a personal centre of subsistence, but was rather incorporated into the person of the eternal Word with which it was united at the incarnation. […] Thus ‘anhypostasia’ is a way of articulating the fact that Jesus is, as it were, so totally taken up with his proclamation of the Kingdom of God that his whole being could be defined by reference to that Kingdom.”

“Anhypostasia (the word means literally the ‘state of being without a hypostasis’) is the doctrine that although Jesus Christ had two natures, a divine and a human (as [the Council of] Chalcedon teaches), these ‘concur’ or are united in a single person (hypostasis), and this person is the divine Logos, so that the human hypostasis is superseded and replaced by the hypostasis of the divine Logos. Jesus Christ is therefore without a human hypostasis.”

“Anhypostasia is the doctrine of the impersonality of Christ's humanity. That is, Christ's human nature does not possess a hypostasis or personhood in its own right. […] Christ's humanity is anhypostatic, then, in the sense that the Word did not unite himself with a previously existing human being. It is because he unites himself with human nature as such that the incarnation is of universal significance to all human beings.”

“[I]t was in view of a weakening emphasis on Jesus' individuality, on his particular humanity, in part stimulated by the fights against Arianism and Adoptionism, that the notion of Christ's impersonal humanity took hold. Two theological words were used to try to overcome the problem: anhypostasis, which refers to the divinity of Jesus' person, and enhypostasis, which insists that, nevertheless, Jesus was truly a human being. The anhypostasis was meant to protect the view that if the Word had not become flesh, Jesus would not have existed. The person of Jesus, in other words, lay in the Logos.”

CEFR level