Abstract
This paper offers a comprehensive examination of the language of “prosōpon” in Maximus the Confessor. It emerges that “prosōpon” almost never has an autonomous meaning in Maximus’ Christology and anthropology. While “person” is either a synonym for “hypostasis” or a term expressing heretical Christological doctrines, it may be used in its own right when Maximus emphasizes the fact that human actions make each of us recognizable as a unique individual. This usage cannot be separated from the colloquial meanings of “face” and “character,” or from instances of “prosōpon” in Maximian Biblical exegesis. “The face of the intellect,” identified with “the face of Christ” within us and reflected in our actions as “the face of the soul,” is the perfect image of the eternal Divine logoi of virtues, impressed by grace in the intellect of saints and reflected in their actions. Possessing one’s own “persona” or “face,” and building one’s uniqueness through one’s own decisions, is of less interest to Maximus than assimilation of oneself to Christ.
Highlights
This paper offers a comprehensive examination of the language of “prosōpon” in Maximus the Confessor
This custom of reserving the language of persons especially for Nestorians, Sabellians, and Severians is followed by Maximus himself in many of his works, especially in TP25 and TP15.33 In TP2 ⦅81⦆, Maximus refers to the views of Severus through a hendiadys of “ὑπόστασις” and “πρόσωπον” (40C7)
In the Ambigua ad Thomam he switches over almost immediately to speaking about hypostases. All of this means that an explanation of the sense of “πρόσωπον” in Maximus’ Christological and Trinitarian discussions will not itself resolve the problem of what the reality is that is being named by this word “person” or “character”, and whether it should be construed in line with Neoplatonic metaphysics and logic
Summary
The proposal of conducting an analysis of occurrences of a word and its cognates, as an initial task forming part of an extended investigation into personhood in Maximus, stems from accepting a notion which is, ostensibly, obvious and hardly questioned at all: that patrological inquiries should apply the contemporary methodology of classical studies in all its integrity. There are many more instances of “ὑπόστασις” there than of “πρόσωπον”: 119 usages of “ὑπόστασις” (occurrences in the titles added by the scribes and in the scholia having been excluded) versus 22 instances, and 8 cognates, of “πρόσωπον.” Maximus regularly inverts the Chalcedonian hendiadys in Ep15 Through those cases of inverted hendiadys he reminds the reader that he is speaking about one and the same thing: the very same person or hypostasis that the Fathers, whom he adduces in extenso in the first section of the Epistle (545A1–49A9), spoke of. In one utterance attributed by the composer of the dialogue to Pyrrhus, a premise that the speaker adopts, and which leads to a conclusion denounced by Maximus as heretical, refers to human beings by means of “πρόσωπον.”32 This custom of reserving the language of persons especially for Nestorians, Sabellians, and Severians is followed by Maximus himself in many of his works, especially in TP25 and TP15.33 In TP2 ⦅81⦆, Maximus refers to the views of Severus through a hendiadys of “ὑπόστασις” and “πρόσωπον” (40C7). “Il faut cependant noter que chez Grégoire de Nazianze et plus encore chez Basile l’usage du mot prosôpon reste rare (il est symptomatique que Maxime cite le nom de Basile, mais aucun texte de lui contenant le mot même) et que ces deux Pères lui préféraient le mot hypostasis, en raison de liens que le mot prosôpon avait encore à leur époque avec le modalisme sabellien et des risques de confusion que son usage pouvait comporter pour certains lecteurs.” Larchet, “Hypostase, personne et individu,” 42
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