The first hour was devoted to theopaschism and patripassianism. Theopaschism is not a heresy. Starting with the theopaschite formula: "One of the Trinity was crucified in the flesh", validated at the Second Council of Constantinople (553), we identified the theopaschite problem: reconciling divine impassibility and Christ's suffering. We evoked the notion of "impassible suffering", of pathoi apathos, in Cyril of Alexandria, then, in contrast, the praise of Anaxarchus of Abdera and Epictetus in Celsus' Against the Christians, and emphasized the perennial parallel between Epictetus and Christ, which can be traced as far back as Spinoza's The Spirit of Mr. Benedict (or Treatise of the Three Impostors). We then took up the articulation between Christology and anthropology, drawing a parallel between the Christological schema: two natures in one substance, and the Cartesian anthropological schema: one nature made up of two substances. This led to the question of man's unity, a fact whose "invincible feeling attests to its reality" (M. Guéroult): the feeling of "pain that arises unexpectedly", hunger, thirst. Various models of unity were evoked: the "Platonic" model of the pilot in the ship, the Aristotelian hylemorphist model, the idea of "contagion" between body and soul, and the notion of "sympathy". We focused on a passage by Pierre Charron (1541-1603) in which the notions of "hypostasis" and "subject" were used to describe the union of soul and body:
The soul is to the body as form is to matter, extended and spread everywhere giving life, movement, feeling, to all its parts, and both together make but one hypostasis, one whole subject, which is the animal.
We ended with an analysis of the notions of person and individual in John of Damascus, analyzing a formula from chapter 47 of De fide orthodoxa: οὐδέ γάρ ἔχει κατηγορούμενον εἶδος χρηστότητος (Christ is not something that would have the form "christicity").
