The Name: Christology, Language, and the Fragmentation of Metaphysics

 "He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who overcomes I will give some of the hidden manna to eat. And I will give him a white stone, and on the stone a new name written which no one knows except him who receives it" (Revelation 2:17)

A recurrent problem in any serious approach of Christian theology is to determine what exactly "person" means in the relation between nature-person in Chalcedon's Christology. This council (451) came off the heals of Ephesus (431) which shattered the bonds of the church. Cyril was neither a maniacal pharaoh nor a speculative nitpicker when he went after Nestorius. It was the serious concern, emergent from his subordinates attacking the title 'theotokos' for Mary, that something was deeply flawed in Nestorius' Christology. A student of Theodore of Mopsuestia, Nestorius embraced his "Antiochene" theology (not so much pertaining to Syrians but to the school/network in Antioch beginning with Diodore of Tarsus and his brightest pupil, Theodore). Theodore was no slouch, but a great hero of Nicaea's rectification at Constantinople (381). Both he and Diodore defended the faith from Julian the Apostate's refutations. They vigorously attacked Arianism, as well as insufficiently human christologies (like Apollonaris') which had made Jesus' humanity in someway fictive. But if Jesus is truly God and truly man, how is this possible? Without rehashing this debate, the concern really comes down to the question of "person".

Chalcedon's ambiguity (typified in the equally ambiguous christology of pope Leo's Tome) is in the increasingly technical terminology of "person" as distinct from nature. One sense of the term ('hypostasis') is more about an individuated substratum, an instance of a particular nature (this dog). For a long time this term was translated into Latin with substantia, not (as it became later) persona. However, another sense of this term ('prosopon') meant both a face and an actor's mask, an outward facing role. It was far less metaphysically inclined and supposed the fictive nature of identity, the way an actor "becomes" a character through a mutual identification. Theodore of Mopsuestia disaggregates these terms. In the first sense, Christ must have two "persons" because otherwise one would deny that Jesus is a concrete, individuated, human being (with particular face, body, eyes). In the second sense, Theodore talks of a prosopic union, analogically compared to a marriage. There is a single role, a single 'I', in the human Jesus and divine Logos acting as one. It makes sense that this seemingly less metaphysical (and more rhetorical) approach appealed to 19th/20th c. liberal Christians, who castigated the "Hellenic" turn in Christianity. At first blush, Theodore seems less interested in speculative questions, and more interested in the humanity of Christ in history (and not, as liberals accused, the mythology of divine incarnation, which they snarled at Cyril).

 But I would argue that it's precisely the other way around. Contrary to popular myth, the "Antiochenes" were not reflective of a greater semetic mentality (in contrast to the Hellenized philosophers of Alexandria). Diodore and Theodore were equally Hellenized. They not only heavily depended on Hellenistic schools of rhetoric, but also depended upon Aristotelian metaphysics. They were, through and through, Greeks (as they were known among the Syriac-speaking Christians in Persia). While Alexandria had a much stronger tradition of speculative philosophy (e.g. Philo, Ammonius Sacchus, Clement, Origen), such is often misunderstood as simply polished mythology. Even so, Cyril selectively inherited and deployed this tradition to serve his more fundamental concern: the identity of Christ. In other words: who is Christ?

To make a radical break: Giorgio Agamen provides an oblique entry into this question. In his What is Philosophy?, Agamben tries to determine the seemingly circular phenomenon of philosophy-qua-language. Philosophy (and thought) does not exist apart from language, but thoroughly muddled and mixed into it. To be a human being, a Homo sapiens (wise!), is to speak. And yet speech, as its theorized, has many fractures throughout it as it relates to an external world. To simplify (I think), such can be radically phrased as the gap (aporia) between sign and thing signified. In other words, there is the thing-in-itself and the human-linguistic denotation of it, but what allows man to cross this divide? Every attempt only deepens the problem, as language then develops the gap between sign/signified through semiotics and semantics, between denotation and gesture, between word and discourse. Agamben notes how this fracture only continues and spirals around and around. 

 However, Agamben sees this division ultimately deriving from a critical misunderstanding of Plato in Aristotle. In brief, Aristotle thought Plato had juxtaposed the 'idea' from the individual (and corrupted) instance of it along an ontological chain. This is precisely what most people imagine as Platonic theo-ontology: an Idea above (in heaven? a world of Forms?) radiating downwards into all its pluriform (and corrupted/imperfect) manifestations. Aristotle rejects this notion for an inductive approach which forces essences into existence through backwards reasoning. In other words, while there is no Idea 'Dog' from which all dogs draw from separate from individual dogs, we can see in an individual dog (and its similarity to all other dogs) an essence that exists in and through these disparate forms, but inseparable from them. For Aristotle, such is the "soul", the form of a given body. Existence wrenches essence into existence through the existing phenomenon's sheer existing. From this moment, according to Agamben, "being" becomes the puzzle of western philosophy. For those familiar with Agamben's larger corpus of work, one can see the glaring similarities to his works on politics. It's the same problem (one which Heidegger noticed and Agamben develops).

 But Agamben argues that Aristotle radically misunderstood Plato. The "Idea" is not at the highest pinnacle of being (Being) from which all being flows. Such is only to posit a radical void at the heart of metaphysics, since being linguistically cannot be said to be (anymore than one can say, as Agamben quotes Aquinas favorably, running runs). Rather the "Idea" is identified with the anaphoric Name. Agamben sketches out Plato's major point here:

"The relation between phenomena and the idea is defined not by the participation in common traits, but by homonymy, the pure having a name. And it is this dwelling of the thing beside itself in a pure having a name that Plato tries to designate, against Anthisthenes, through the anaphor 'auto': the 'circle itself' (autos o kyklos), seizes the circle not at the level of signification but in its pure having a name, in that pure sayability that alone makes discourse and knowledge possible" (58)

From the gap between man's sensation (or a mystical intellectation through the "third eye") and his reasoning (viz. language) emerges the name. The sheer fact of sayability, to name something, is the thing itself. In other words, a circle is a circle because it is named circle. The Idea is circle itself, where universal and particular are homynymous. At the very least, this approach solves the radical insanity at the heart of Aristotelian science (which early moderns mocked): where does one draw the line between essence and accident? Dog is an essence, why not Chihuahua? What gives any category an ontological existence as essence and not one of its infinite subcategories? Moliere mocks this problem in his The Imaginary Invalid and the "scientific" circularity of the "dormative principle" as why Opium makes you sleepy. One does not get anywhere, where language and ontology simply collapse into each other. But, again, Plato did not entertain the fracture Aristotle read into him:

"Plato's strategy becomes at this point more comprehensible. He did not substantialize or separate a generality - as Aristotle assumed - but tried to think a pure sayability, without any conceptual determination" (63)

Again, Plato's interest that thing-itself is not hidden behind an infinite chain of words and names. Rather, the name brings about the thing-itself through an indirect gesture, an anaphor, a pronoun 'autos'. The Circle is the Circle, the "itself" ('autos') simply becomes part of its name as a gesture to the sheer essential existence through language. In other words, our words are not simply bungled attempts to describe reality, but actually draw (or, better yet, sing) reality into existence. The 'name' is a pre-ontic Real, opened to man through his self-consciousness. The particular's appearance (a discrete phenomenon) calls out, even demands, a name, which is precisely the essence of this existent thing. The intelligibility of the world precedes our own intellectual grasping towards it. Thus man is not so much an element (though a reflective one) along the chain of being, the mirror like ring of the Unmoved Mover staring at himself and oozing out all kinds of reality. Rather, man is a co-creator, crowning and glorifying the Real as it is. In this sense, Plato's theory of names is no different than Adam's priestly vocation to name the animals. Deep calls to deep as Adam forges the world as it actually is, the gap between name and reality healed. Or perhaps, better put, the God-given riddle that is creation is solved through man's participation in Wisdom.

But our world is still polluted with the dark pall of Aristotelian madness. The gap between sign-signified only intensified as Aristotelian science developed. Agamben sees a line tying this Aristotelian trend through the medieval ontotheologians and scientists, reaching a critical melting point with the Nominalists:

"On the other hand, developing the Aristotelian claim according to which the 'pathemata' and things are the same for all, while words and letters are different, Boethius specifies that, out of the four elements that form the linguistic-semantic knot, two (res and intellectus) are by nature (naturaliter) and two (nomina and litterae) are by convention (positione). This is the beginning of the process that will lead to the primacy of the concept and to the transformation of the sayable into a mental reality whose identity is totally independent of the word in its auditory materiality. The process of de-linguisticization of knowledge that would lead to modern science is possible only if the conceptual meaning of the word is, in this way, made autonomous from its variable signifier. As Ruprecht Paque has shown (1970), this is the case because modern science did not simply originate from the observation of nature, but was first of all made possible by the investigations of Ockham and the medieval logicians who isolated, in the experience of language, the suppositio personalis - in which the word refers in the act and only as a pure sign to a res extra animam - and privileged it over all those cases in which the word somehow refers to itself (suppositio materialis)" (66)

In other words, Agamben is arguing that as natural-language became separated from customary/historical-language (the actual name vs. the human name), thus language became separated from thought. And thought then requires a kind of pure intellectation, an act of pure untainted thought thinking, to grasp the thing-in-itself. Such breeds either the nihilism at the heart of Rationalism or ultimately a kind of pragmatic and skeptical agnosticism. It's helpful to remember that the Middle Ages was a highly materialistic and scientific era at its height. Albertus Magnus was not simply a theologian, but an engineer (and a very early theorist of AI). The debate that ended in the condemnation of Berengar's eucharistic theology and the enshrining of transubstantiation flowed from an educated materialism. The Aristotelian-compatible doctrine was a means to synthesize, and undermine, the Stercoranism that lurked in the shadows. Whether anyone actually believed that eating the eucharist turned the body of Christ into human waste, its presence formed a logical consequence of era. 

Descartes' attempt to found Rationalism upon sheer intellectation (an impossibility, which acted as a ticking time-bomb) was a response to the civil war raging in France among Roman Catholics and Huguenot-Calvinists. Reason, accessible to all men, could act as the common denominator. But it also sought to end the acid skepticism emerging from this nominalist approach to knowledge. It's not so much a problem of metaphysics, but the collapse of metaphysics into epistemology (the aporia reaching a breaking point). Smashed to pieces by the historicist humanism of many Reformers, Roman Catholics turned to philosophic skepticism. The human voice wavered before the unknowability, the aporia between sign and thing signified, between human projects and the subliminal terror of divine Real. Not a few Protestants shared a similar concern (many embracing the same sign/signified dynamic, manifest in Reformed sacramentology) and they turned to their own projects. Humanism gave way to an Aristotelian-inflected scholasticism, building their system upon the circle of knowledge found in a collection of texts, juxtaposed to Roman Catholics who did the same upon a magisterial institution. It's striking to compare the Reformation creeds of the 16th c. to the Westminster Confession of Faith (1646). The former begin in confessing (naming) the triune God, sometimes in relation to the appearance in Jesus Christ. The latter begins with the problem of epistemology, the need to anchor on a fixed and given list of books.

It was this medieval-modern continuity of scholasticism that set up the radical problems at the heart of philosophy and science. Language is defined apart from reason, and reason becomes rapidly defined apart from empirical reality. The thing-in-itself appears as part of a dichotomy, which, again, either demands man's build his Babel to grasp it, or abandons all hope for function. The latter leaves man in the fog described in Humean skepticism, irrational man garbed in his ragged traditions, an ape in a tailored suit. However, for the former, for those who have hope, they continue to explore this depth, and yet in doing so become tyrannical and murderous. Creation as such is vivisected to find the Real behind, going deeper and deeper through logic and the physical sciences. This project seems to come alive again in every generation, and also brings about the same despair. Yet it, in the process, dehumanizes man (and obliterates the nobility of creation). For Owen Barfield, who saw the problem in the same way, modern science is the ultimate form of idolatry: its models rape reality, violently taking its place. Science becomes scientism and technique (in Ellul's sense), it no longer cares to "save the appearances", but to destroy them and replace them with its own mechanized constructs. And in the mean time, philosophy aimlessly wanders into an abyss of metaphysical abstraction and logical irrationality. Strangely, Aristotelian revivalists parallel Positivists in constructing paradigms that increasingly say nothing about Reality, but get farther away the more they try to approach it. It's this problem that Agamben sketches out:

"It is only starting from this aporia, that is, from the loss of the passage ('poros') and the experience ('peira') that could reconnect philosophy and science, that we can explain the apparently unlimited domination of a technology that both philosophers and scientists seem to observe in dismay. Technology is not an "application" of science: it is the consequential product of a science that no longer can or wants to save appearances, but obstinately tends to replace its hypotheses with reality, to "realize" them. The transformation of the experiment - which now takes place through machines that are so complex that they do not have anything to do with real conditions, but purport to force them - eloquently shows that the translation between languages is no longer at stake. A science that renounces saving appearances can only aim at their destruction; a philosophy that no longer calls itself into question, through the ideas, in language [lingua], loses its necessary connection with the sensible world" (84)

Framed another way: the Aristotelian fracture (as a reformulation of his understanding of Plato) only intensifies. Existent properties threaten an infinite chain of essences, and thus existent properties can be condemned to the dump of sheer materiality (potentiality, not actuality) in the category of "accident". And in so doing, existence is ironically forced out of existence. Modern science continues this trend through making visible phenomena simply nonexistent products of our evolved reptile/ape brains. As Barfield made it clear in his example of a rainbow: since the rainbow does not exist according to the categories/toolkits of modern science, it does not exist even though one sees it. Philosophy and science become infinitely distant, as the former builds a kingdom of the clouds and the latter becomes an infinitely destructive machine. In the latter's case, it results in radical dehumanization or breaks down into myopic pragmatism (depending on broken categories that are self-consciously false).

The only way out is overcoming this divide through the name. To name something is to recognize it in its very Reality. The fragmentation of Aristotelian categories is actually the liberation of reality, that every existent thing is its own essence precisely in its being named. The dots and lines that make up the circle essentially exist in the same way the circle does, just as the Barfieldian rainbow essentially exists as much as the lightwaves that constitute it. Their essence is in their name because essence is not an ontological category. Agamben concludes his essay thus:

"The truth that is expressed in language - and given that we do not have other ways of expressing it, the truth that is at stake for us as speaking humans - is neither a real fact nor an exclusively mental entity, nor a 'world of meanings'; rather, it is an idea, something purely sayable, that radically neutralizes the sterile oppositions mental/real, existent/nonexistent, signifier/signified [significato]. This - and nothing else - is the object of philosophy and thought" (89)

Philosophy is, essentially, philology because sophia is none other than the logos. Wisdom is to recognize and speak the names. As much as they exist, they are. The circle testifies to "the circle itself", the anaphoric gesture that appears in, yet exceeds, any individual appearance. It's not because there's a perfect circle somewhere "up there", but because the circle itself is not an ontological category. It is a name and a name is the domain of language and is properly thought as such. The name is literally the subject of a given phenomenon, its pre-ontic founding, under (sub) through project with a voice (jectum).

Here we return to the original question: what is a "person"? Theodore's theology (through Mopsuestia) created a serious fragmentation in Christ through his Aristotelian metaphysics. The individuated natures then assume a prosopic unity, as a husband and wife become one. Yet such is supposed to solve a metaphysical question as to how God and man are united in Jesus Christ. But if Christ is the name of this joint dyophysic prosopon (the two-natured face) then it begs the question how this came about. How can Christ be the name by which we're saved, if the name is fundamentally a created reality. As Theodore would never countenance God as eternally human (his theology is precisely to counter such a proposition, despising all theopaschite language), he must mean that Christ qua Christ is created. That's what horrified Cyril. Christ qua human was created, but not Christ as such (the name). To call Mary 'theotokos' was to call the Antiochene bluff. It was not a mythological account of how a divinity appeared as a human (plenty of these tales existed among the Hellenes). Rather, it was identifying the man Jesus Christ with the eternal God in such a way that left no remainder. Jesus was not simply the newest name for God (a development along God's providential history). Rather, Jesus is God.

Framed another way: God was not Christ before the union. Before the union, man knew God independently from the man Jesus by other names. While such may be acceptable, what happens to the name for the flesh of Jesus? St. Paul names him repeatedly as Jesus Christ, a significant fact that the adjective becomes almost anaphoric. Jesus Christ is the Circle itself, the pronoun as a revelation through indirect means, God's name identified with His salvific priestly-kingship. Theodore wants to create an artificial triadic distinction, between Logos (divinity), Jesus (human), and Christ (prosopic unity). But given the looming problems in the Aristotelian fracture, what happens if we begin to name other "parts" of Jesus. And even more importantly, what happens to Jesus? Per the misogynistic climate of Hellenic philosophy, women were simply subsumed (their existence turned into the unnameable remainder). Accordingly, Jesus (as man) is banished from existence through the prosopic unity of Christ. Antiochene christology is thus, counterintuitively, misanthropic.

To restate the point once again: Theodore's Christology becomes littered with various problems, most importantly it seems to deny the eternality of the name "Jesus Christ". For Theodore, the atonement is not the revelation of history, but its (penultimate) climax.

Cyril's approach is radically unlike this point, maybe because he learned the best from Origen's platonism. Man is saved always by Jesus Christ, both before and after the atonement. He is the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world. But more importantly, if the name if actually a revelation of the Real (not describing a more real phenomenon behind it) then the 'person' of Christ can be wholly identified with God. One can describe the varied parts, but in relation to the Name they're inseparable. Hence Cyril's uneasiness of talking about two natures after the incarnation; it is, at best, an abstraction. And just as the bits of rain, the waves of light, and the human eye form a matrix from which the rainbow exists, yet do not constitute the rainbow (which exists in its own right), so too does Christ exist in His own right. He is not stitched together, but is. Cyril, along with the Cappadocians, links 'hypostasis' and 'prosopon' together into 'hypostasis', but this subjectum is none other than the name, the face, the mask. Who is not simply ontological (which must be distinguished from nature), but preontic. Hence the need to identify God not as Being, but as beyond Being. In Christ, the Name appears, we have full and effective revelation not only of God, but of the Real. All of history is opened and manifest.

Now, I diverge from Agamben's anarchism (theologically and politically), see that in this naming, not only does the Real exist, but man effectively creates the real. At one point, Agamben covers anthropologists who saw naming ceremonies that create gods in their naming, tied to ancient Roman deities which were none other than named activities. However, if what lay behind ontological reality is not simply a fertile void, but a full and radiant light, then it's not simply another myth, but an actual account of the Real. Agamben toys with the idea of coming up with own mythopoetic account of why man is fundamentally a linguistic animal, yet only learns language from others (and without this social learning, man withers and dies, as the wolf girl in France did). Agamben is more right than he knows when he says that, for language to exist, God is the first man. It's why ancient iconography depicted God as Jesus Christ in the creation of Adam. It was not simply anachronism, but the eternally true Real, which stretched onto history's canvas when Jesus of Nazareth walked the land. All of history revolves around this axis. Hence Hamann's criticism of Herder's theory of language that depends upon a self-creative fecundity. No, God first spoke to man and called man's response into being. Genesis is thus the true myth in that man's creation is fundamentally because God speaks a human language.

Cyril's christology is precisely in overcoming this metaphysical fracture that Aristotelians like Theodore continue. And it's in this way that Lutheran Christology (following Luther's heavy word-based theology) similarly overcomes this problem through loyalty to Cyrillian thought. Perhaps clearest in the account of the sacraments, Luther does not accept the sign/signified concept, but depends on the sheer given promise of the Word. Do this and it's real. The "in, with, under" language should thus be understood not in a metaphysical sense, but in the name. To name this bread and wine, ritually and in the prescribed words, the Body and Blood is that it is so. There's no gap between sign/signified, which bedeviled Reformed scholastic theology and its various metaphysical attempts to sketch out this problem (whether Calvin's heavenly ascension, an ecclesiastical transformation viz. Zwingli, or the creeping memorialism of others). Christ appears in His word.

All in all, such is to explain the mysterious (yet salvific) word: the lamb of God was slain before the foundation of the world.