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Into this context comes the tradition of Judaism. Philo uses these distinctions to suggest that the personal God of Israel is a uniquely distinctive and singular reality or hypostasis in contrast to the impersonal thought thinking itself thing (ousia) of Aristotle. One branch of Middle Platonism picks this up and God and souls become hypostases while impersonal things, including cups, chairs, etc., become ousias. The other branch of Middle Platonism represented by Numenius of Apamea pushes the God as impersonal monad and ousia interpretation which nevertheless reinforces the ousia = non-personal substance/thing of a typical kind and hypostasis = personal substance of a uniquely and distinctive individual (usually God as person).

We have here the elements of a conceptual revolution in ancient philosophy and religion. It was the characteristic trait of ancient philosophy, religion, and humanism that the individual was not valued in and of itself in its particularity but only as an paradigmatic instance of a universal ideal type. Person was just an epiphenomenal mask. By contrast, as Tillich brings out, even the post-Christian humanism of the modern world is Judeo-Christian to the extent the unrepeatable individual per se is valued in and of itself. The roots of this contrast is in the Trinitarian controversy and the debt the parties owed to Philo and Origen.

Consider, the Christological controversy was settled in terms of ousia (homoousia) as the substantive divinity of both the Father and Christ. They are of one essence. Now, in the Trinitarian controversy, given the pre-history of the words ousia and hypostasis and given that ousia was implied already in the omoousia solution to the christological issue and finally given that the conventional and more common word for person (prosopon) had no ontological weight given its epiphenomenal connotation, the Church Fathers chose hypostasis to designate God in his distinctive, unrepeatable, and individual personalities in all their distinctive particularity because it had ontological and substantive weight—personhood was ontologically ultimate. They feared that the use of prosopon would convey a modalist or Sabellian message which would be a subordination of persons to impersonal ousia. And this is what the Latin and Calvinist west, even as early as in Augustine’s time, did not understand and confessed it did not understand. As Fr. Theodore Regnon, S.J. put it, "Latin philosophy (Christian theology) considers the nature in itself first and proceeds to the agent; Greek philosophy (Christian theology) considers the agent first and passes through it to find the nature. The Latins think of personality as a mode of nature; the Greeks think of nature as the content of the person. The western lack of understanding of what the Greek Fathers had accomplished in the nature of the distinction and relations of priority within it between ousia and hypostases led to a certain re-paganization of Trinitarian thought in which the philosophical essentialism of an unreformed ousiological metaphysics engenders the accent to fall on the divine unity in the west."

Now the so-called "monarchia of the Father" in eastern Trinitarian theology means person trumps impersonal thing. Even the divine ousia exists because the Father is the PERSONAL source of the communion of divine hypostases that is the ousia. The west tends to take it the other way around, beginning with ousia, and thus, from an eastern perspective, betrays the very essence of the meaning of the Trinity as interpersonality as ultimate reality. With the influx of insufficiently re-constructed philosophical concepts in the west, you get the re-paganization of Christian theology in the west as instanced by debates over God’s foreknowledge of future contingents, whether it is matter or form of an ousia/substantial thing that individuates (and individuates both things and persons), and so on. The west was captured by an ousiological metaphysics. This metaphysics held western theology in captivity. It is in its nominalist form coming from William Occam that we find it still in captivity in the Calvinist’s even having the very question of whether God knows future contingents in light of predestination, and time. This was a metaphysics, St. Maximos the Confessor points out, that saw time as an enemy and thus sought that stable enduring thing through change that thereby is the most fundamental kind of being. Thus, that kind of perdurance was dubbed with the past participle he says. In essence, what is called by contemporary philosophers "the metaphysics of presence" according to Maximos is really the metaphysics of the past, as fully complete and determinate, used paradigmatically to colonize all the other temporal modes of present and future. The present is the predestined creature of the past both in Calvin and Newton. The essentialism downgrades accidental being or sumbebekos. Now sumbebekos as accidental being was also not well understood in the west. It is not being that exists in another like a form of being found within one of the predicate categories. It designates the happenstantial, the contingently situational so it is not precisely necessary-essential that my wife has auburn hair; that she has this hair color is accidental in the sense of sumbebekos, it is fortuitous in the sense that her hair could have indifferently been auburn or not auburn but it is necessary that it have some color. This kind of accidental being can be found in every category. Thus, in the pagan Greek view, that a human is this or that individual is accidental but it is necessary that a human be somebody. The distinction then between accidental being in the sense of sumbebekos from an accident-predicate is that the accidental being is the contingent or fortuitious actuality according to every necessary category. So, accidental being in this sense is the contingent affection or actual constellation or situation or event that takes place according to the necessity of different categories. On the Orthodox reading, this sumbebekos is really God’s governance or the concrete realization of God’s purpose in time. To downgrade it is a spiritually sick symptom of the religiosity of sarx that finds time to be a corrosive force that bears no faith or hope. Thus, accidental being just as the unique particularity of persons and the future, is downgraded in pagan metaphysics in favor of fully determinate being-essences (the dead, fully completed and determinate and deterministic past idealized as enduring presence) or ousiological being for the paradigmatic past participle. It was not till Scotus developed his concept of haecceity and the individual’s will did you find the beginning of the overturn of a ousiological metaphysics in western Christian theology. Maximos pointed out the original meaning of sumbebekos was not negative as it as in pagan philosophical theology but was positive. It meant the adventurous and creative way things are "brought together." So, in Orthodox theology coming from Maximos, the pagan agenda to make (persons and) reality in its concreteness, in all its contingency, fortuity, distinctiveness, and unique unrepeatibility unreal in favor of impersonal, universal, and necessary is set on its head. Thus, sumbebekos, as very purposeful counterpoint in Byzantine theology, is the creative way (Logos) that God brings all things together (sumbebekos) in the existential fullness of their realization (uparktikos) of his eikonomia. This lead Maximos to revolutionize Aristotle’s categorical analysis of Being in one of its meanings. But to back up a bit. Now, the Cappadocians start to make systematic use of these terms ousia and hypostasis to build the foundations of eastern theology. But it is St. Maximos the Confessor who really completes this task and thus is called the father of Byzantine theology. This takes us back to the question of whether the meanings of Being given by Aristotle are an exhaustive list. For Maximos states:

It is no accident, or rather, is foreordained blind inspiration that the Stagirite spoke both worse and better than he meant. For when he says that ‘indeed the inquiry or perplexity concerning what being (on) is, in early times and now and always, is just this: what is substance (ousia) (Meta Z 1.5, 1028b).’ he begs the question by his reduction of the problem of Being to that of one kind of substantial being. For the categorial determinations of the meanings of Being that have their focus or reference to a more fundamental kind of being are multiple. For as Tradition has taught us to see, there is another substantive mode of existing which is that of the personal mode of existence. The logos was in our tongue but we could not see. There are hypostases that are a personal mode of existence (tropos hyparxeos) that is the referent or fundamental kind of being that has characteristic manners or modes (tropoi) of being as modifications of the first-personal to be (eimi) that is the voluntary (thelesis) analogue to ousiological energeia and that can existentially realize (uparktikos) itself contranaturally, naturally, or supranaturally with their respective vices and virtues.

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...a contrast of Orthodox/Christian spirituality to pagan Neo-Platonism’s impersonalism and ultimate aethicalism (if reality is supremely impersonal, ethics, personality, and interpersonal relationships are epiphenomena to be transcended in pagan view. By contrast, God is Trinity, Christianity is THE personal and interpersonal religion par excellance

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THE SIGN OF THE CROSS: A BYZANTINE VIEW

When a Byzantine Catholic or Eastern Christian makes the sign of the cross, he does so in a particular way. He takes the thumb, index and middle fingers of his right hand and joins them. The pinky and fourth finger come down and together touch the palm of the hand. There is a theological reason for this.

The three fingers that are joined, represent the Holy Trinity. It is usually when the Holy Trinity is invoked or worshipped that the sign of the cross is made. The two fingers touching the palm of the hand represent the two natures of Christ, human and divine.

In this way, when the Eastern Christian makes the sign of the cross, he is not merely doing it as a reference to the sacrifice of the Son of God on the cross, but is making a statement that he believes in the orthodox faith of the Church. That faith declares that God is three Persons (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) and that Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Word of God, has two natures; human and divine.

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Do not let the men deceive themselves and others with the assertion that the “Man of the Lord,” as they call Him, Who is rather our Lord and God, is without human mind. For we do not sever the Man from the Godhead, but we lay down as a dogma the Unity and Identity of Person, Who of old was not Man but God, and the Only Son before all ages, unmingled with body or anything corporeal; but Who in these last days has assumed Manhood also for our salvation; passible in His Flesh, impassible in His Godhead; circumscript in the body, uncircumscript in the Spirit; at once earthly and heavenly, tangible and intangible, comprehensible and incomprehensible; that by One and the Same Person, Who was perfect Man and also God, the entire humanity fallen through sin might be created anew.

www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf207.iv.ii.iii.html

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