Divine Hypostases
Scholars sometimes use technical terms for no good reason,
other than the fact that they are the technical terms scholars use. When I was
in graduate school we used to ask, wryly, why we should use a perfectly good
English term when we had an obscure Latin or German term that meant the same
thing? But there are some rare terms that simply don’t have satisfactory, simple
words that adequately express the same thing, and the word hypostasis (plural: hypostases) is one
of them. Possibly the closest common term meaning roughly the same thing would
be personification—but even that doesn’t quite get it, and
it too isn’t a word you normally hear as you stand in line at the grocery
store.
The term hypostasis comes from Greek and
refers to the essence or substance of something. In the context in which I’m
using the term here, it refers to a feature or attribute of God that comes to
take on its own distinct existence apart from God. Imagine, for example, that
God is wise. That means he has wisdom. This in turn means that wisdom is
something that God “has”—that is, it is something independent of God that he
happens to have possession of. If that’s the case, then one could imagine
“wisdom” as a being apart from God; and since it is God’s wisdom, then it is a
kind of divine being alongside God that is also within God as part of his
essence, a part of who he is.
As it turns out, some Jewish thinkers imagined that Wisdom was
just that, a hypostasis of God, an element of his being that was distinct from
him in one sense, but completely his in another. Wisdom was with God as a divine
being and could be thought of as God (since it was precisely his wisdom). Other
hypostases are discussed in ancient Jewish writings, but here I restrict myself
to two—Wisdom and what was sometimes thought of as the outward manifestation of
Wisdom, the Word (Greek, Logos) of God.
Wisdom
The idea that Wisdom could be a divine hypostasis—an aspect
of God that is a distinct being from God that nonetheless is itself God—is
rooted in a fascinating passage of the Hebrew Bible, Proverbs 8. Here, Wisdom is
portrayed as speaking and says that it was the first thing God created:
The Lord
created me at the beginning of his work,
The
first of his acts of long ago.
Ages ago I
was set up,
at the
first, before the beginning of the earth . . .
Before the
mountains had been shaped,
before
the hills, I was brought forth. (8:22–23, 25)
And then, once Wisdom was created, God created the heavens and
the earth. In fact, he created all things with Wisdom, who worked alongside
him:
When he
established the heavens, I was there,
When
he drew a circle on the face of the deep,
When he made
firm the skies above,
When
he established the fountains of the deep . . .
Then I
was beside him, like a master worker;
And I was
daily his delight,
Rejoicing before him always,
Rejoicing in
his inhabited world
And
delighting in the human race. (8:27–28, 30–31)
God made all things in his wisdom, so much so that Wisdom is
seen as a co-creator of sorts. Moreover, just as God is said to have made all
things live, so too life comes through Wisdom:
For whoever
finds me finds life,
And
obtains favor from the Lord;
But those who
miss me injure themselves;
All
who hate me love death. (8:35–36)
This passage can be read, of course, without thinking of Wisdom
as some kind of personification of an aspect of God that exists apart from and
alongside him. It could simply be a metaphorical way of saying that the world is
an astounding place and that the creation of it is rooted in the wise
foreknowledge of God, who made all things just as they ought to be. Moreover, if
you understand the wisdom of the way things are made, and live in accordance
with this knowledge, you will live a happy and fulfilled life. But some Jewish
readers read the passage more literally and took Wisdom to be an actual being
that was speaking, a being alongside God that was an expression of God.
This view led some Jewish thinkers to magnify Wisdom as a divine
hypostasis. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in a book of the Jewish
Apocrypha called the Wisdom of Solomon. The book is attributed to King Solomon
himself—who is acclaimed in the Bible as the wisest man ever to have lived—but
it was actually written many centuries after he had been laid to rest.
Especially in chapters 7–9 we find a paean to Wisdom, which is said to be “a
pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty . . . for she is a reflection of
eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of his
goodness” (Wis. 7:25–26; Wisdom is referred to as “she”—or even as “Lady
Wisdom”—because the Greek word for wisdom is feminine); “she is an initiate in
the knowledge of God, and an associate in his works” (8:4).
Here too we are told that Wisdom “was present when you [God]
made the world” (9:9)—but more than that, she actually is beside God on his
throne (9:10). It was Wisdom who brought salvation to Israel at the exodus and
afterward throughout the history of the nation (chaps. 10–11). Interestingly,
Wisdom is said to have done not only what the Hebrew Bible claims God did
(creation; exodus), but also what the “angel” of God did—for example, rescuing
Abraham’s nephew Lot from the fires that destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis
19 (10:6).
In a sense, then, Wisdom could be seen as an angel, even a
highly exalted angel, or indeed the Angel of the Lord; but as a hypostasis it is
something somewhat different. It is an aspect of God that is thought to exist
alongside God and to be worthy, as being God’s, of the honor and esteem accorded
God himself.
The Word
In some ways the most difficult divine hypostasis to discuss
is the Word—in Greek, the Logos. That’s because the term
had a long, distinguished, and complex history outside the realm of Judaism
among the Greek philosophers. Full treatment of the philosophical reflections on
Logos would require an entire study, but I can say
enough here to give an adequate background to its use in the philosophical
circles of Judaism, especially regarding the most famous Jewish philosopher of
antiquity, Philo of Alexandria (20 BCE–50 CE).
The ancient Greek philosophers known as the Stoics had extensive
discussions of the divine Logos. The word Logos does mean
“word”—as in the thing you speak—but it could carry much deeper and richer
connotations and nuances. It is, obviously, the word from which we get the
English term logic—and that’s because Logos can also mean
reason—as in, “there is a reason for that” and “that view
is quite reasonable.” Stoics believed that Logos—reason—was a divine element
that infused all of existence. There is, in fact, a logic to the way things are,
and if you want to understand this world—and more important, if you want to
understand how best to live in this world—then you will seek to understand its
underlying logic. As it turns out, this is possible because Logos is not only
inherent in nature, it resides in us as human beings. We ourselves have a
portion of Logos given to us, and when we apply our minds to the world, we can
understand it. If we understand the world, we can see how to live in it. If we
follow through on that understanding, we will indeed lead harmonious, peaceful,
and enriched lives. But if we don’t figure out the way the world works and is,
and if we don’t live in harmony with it, we will be miserable and no better off
than the dumb animals.
Thinkers who saw themselves standing directly in the line of the
great fifth-century BCE Plato took the idea of the
Logos in a different direction. In Platonic thinking, there is a sharp divide
between spiritual realities and this world of matter. God, in this thinking, is
pure spirit. But how can something that is pure spirit have any contact with
what is pure matter? For that to happen, some kind of link is needed, some kind
of go-between that connects spirit and matter. For Platonists, the Logos is this
go-between. The divine Logos is what allows the divine to interact with the
nondivine, the spirit with matter.
We have Logos within our material bodies, so we too can connect
with the divine, even though we are thoroughly entrenched in the material world.
In some sense, the way to happiness and fulfillment is to escape our material
attachments and attain to spiritual heights. Among other things, this means that
we should not be too attached to the bodies we inhabit. We become attached by
enjoying physical pleasures and thinking that pleasure is the ultimate good. But
it’s not. Pleasure simply makes us long for more and keeps us attached to
matter. We need to transcend matter if we are to find true meaning and
fulfillment, and this means accessing the Logos of the universe with that part
of the Logos that is within us.
In some respects it was quite simple for Jewish thinkers who
were intimately familiar with their scriptures to connect them with some of
these Stoic and Platonic philosophical ideas. In the Hebrew Bible, God creates
all things by speaking a “word”: “And God said, Let there
be light. And there was light.” Creation happened by means of God uttering his
Logos. The Logos comes from God, and since it is God’s Logos, in a sense it is
God. But once he emits it, it stands apart from God as a distinct entity. This
entity was sometimes thought of as a person distinct from God. The Logos came to
be seen in some Jewish circles as a hypostasis.
Already in the Hebrew Bible the “word of the Lord” was sometimes
identified as the Lord himself (see, for example, 1 Sam. 3:1, 6). In the hands
of Philo of Alexandria, who was heavily influenced especially by the Platonic
tradition, the Logos became a key factor in understanding both God and the
world.
Philo maintained that the Logos was the highest of all beings,
the image of God according to which and by which the universe is ordered. God’s
Logos was, in particular, the paradigm according to which humans were created.
It is easy to see here that Logos is taking on the function also assigned to
Wisdom, which was thought to be the creator and ordering factor of all things.
In some sense the Logos is in fact “born” of Wisdom. If wisdom is something that
people have within themselves, then Logos is the outward manifestation of the
wisdom when the person speaks. And so, in this understanding, Wisdom gives birth
to Logos, which is, in fact, what Philo himself believed. Moreover, as the mind
is to the body, so the Logos is to the world.
Since the Logos is God’s Logos, it is itself divine and can be
called by divine names. Thus Philo calls Logos the “image of God” and
the “Name
of God” and the “firstborn son” (e.g.,
Agriculture 51).
In one place he indicates that God “gives
the title
of ‘God’ to his chief Logos” (
Dreams 1.230). Because the
Logos is God, and God is God, Philo sometimes speaks of “two gods” and in other
places speaks of Logos as “the second God” (
Questions on
Genesis 2.62).
But there is a difference for Philo between “the God” and “a
god” (in Greek between o theos—meaning “God”—and theos—meaning “god”). Logos is the latter.
As a divine being apart from God, Logos obviously sounds a lot
like the Angel of the Lord discussed at the beginning of this chapter. And in
fact, Philo sometimes maintained that Logos was indeed this Angel of the Lord
(e.g., Changing of Names 87, Dreams
239). When God was manifest to humans, it was his Logos that made the
appearance. Here we see Philo’s Platonic thought at work and combining with his
knowledge of scripture. God does not have direct contact with the world of
matter; his contact with the world is by means of his Logos. God does not speak
directly to us; he speaks to us through his Logos.
In sum, for Philo the Logos is an incorporeal being that exists
outside God but is his faculty of thinking; on occasion it becomes the actual
figure of God who appears “like a man” so that people can know, and interact
with, its presence. It is another divine being that is distinct from God in one
sense, and yet is God in another.
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