Hypostatic Union

Diagram of the Hypostatic Union according to St. Cyril of Alexandria

Hypostasis referred in ancient philosophy to the fundamental and intimate reality of things and beings. It differs from the nature of a thing which indicates what it is (what) but not who it is. The adoption of this term allowed for a clear affirmation that Jesus Christ is a single person (one hypostasis) who possesses two distinct natures (divine and human), without mixing or separating them.

Theological meaning[edit | edit source]

The Hypostatic Union, defined by the first ecumenical councils^[1] guarantees that Christ can be both fully God (to Save humanity) and fully man (to identify with us). It preserves the mystery of Redemption as formulated by the Creed: "He was born of the Father before all ages, and became man". This notion is very present in the work of Maria Valtorta: he is both the Savior God and the human brother we can know and imitate.

It is good that the term ὑπόστασις (hupostasis) was already in use at the time of Jesus^[2], it is only employed in the sense given by Christian theology by Maria Valtorta^[3].

In "The Gospel as it was revealed to me"[edit | edit source]

Main texts[edit | edit source]

GRM 324.3 (Jesus, the Incarnate Word).
GRM 567.17 (You have insulted the Incarnate Word who loved you so much).
GRM 630.21 (Comments on the Our Father).
GRM 634.11 (I am a real man, but I am also true God).

Overall summary[edit | edit source]

These four texts by Maria Valtorta offer a living catechesis on the mystery of the Hypostatic Union, as defined at the Council of Chalcedon (451). This council affirmed that Jesus Christ is one person in two natures, fully man and fully God, without confusion or separation.^[4]

In the first text (GRM 324.3), through the testimony of James of Alphaeus the Apostle, the emphasis is on confessing faith: Jesus is God born of a woman, and therefore truly man, but his true Father is the Most High. His divinity is proclaimed as one with that of the Father and the Spirit. This confession forms the basis of Christian faith and answers the objections of the world that would reduce Jesus to an ordinary man.

The second text (GRM 567.17), addressed to Judas, concretely illustrates the coexistence of the two natures: limited in time and space as man, Jesus remains omnipresent and almighty as God^[5]. Here, the Hypostatic Union appears as a Judean truth that personally engages Judas: to reject Christ is to reject God himself.

In the third text (GRM 630.21), the Resurrected One comments on the prayer of the Our Father and shows both his eternal preexistence as the divine Word and his human brotherhood with his disciples, who have become his juniors. The Hypostatic Union is thus illuminated in its dimension of communion: Christ, the firstborn, opens believers to filial relationship with the Father. The Eucharist, where Jesus gives himself as food and drink, becomes the sign and means of this participation.

Finally, the fourth text (GRM 634.11), where the risen Jesus speaks of his multiple Apparitions, reveals the fullness of the Hypostatic Union in glory. The humanity of Christ remains real and tangible—a true body, warm and solid—but now transfigured by divinity, freed from the limits of space and time. The glorified humanity fully participates in divine power, without ceasing to be human.

Thus, these four passages compose a journey: from the confessed Incarnation to the lived tension of the two natures, then to the filial brotherhood that introduces believers into Trinitarian communion, up to the glorification where the humanity of Christ shines with divine power. They do not simply repeat a dogma: they unfold its truth in the form of spiritual and existential experience.

In this sense, Valtorta’s writings appear as a mystical illustration of the Chalcedonian definition: they show how the Hypostatic Union, far from being an abstract formula, is the very Heart of the Christian mystery, which challenges, consoles, nourishes, and saves.

Comments by the editor or Maria Valtorta^[6][edit | edit source]

GRM 68.1 (Maria Valtorta adds on a typewritten copy: "There too emerge the two natures united in one person: God and Man"^[7].)
GRM 207.11 (Discourse on the fleshly reality of Jesus. "It is not a question, however," notes Maria Valtorta on a typewritten copy, "of denying the Hypostatic Union by which the Word, being really in the flesh of the Son of God and Mary, has not ceased to be one with the Father and thus with Love; he has not ceased to be the Holy of holies, because he was so by his divine nature and so in his human nature, by Grace and by very perfect will."^[7])
GRM 342.5: "God Who parts from God to save the guilty creature". Expression that Maria Valtorta justifies by this note on a typewritten copy: "Since He is one with the Father, the Word was no longer in the Father as before the Incarnation."^[7] Likewise, the text of GRM 381.2 makes a distinction between "the Word of the Father as He is in Heaven" and "the Son of man".
GRM 346.5 "I will be God in Heaven with the Father and the Spirit", that is, no longer God on earth (Son remained united to the Father), but God in Heaven (Son returned to the Father), as explained in the note in GRM 342.5. This expression is similar to that of John 16:28: "I came from the Father and have come into the world, and now I am leaving the world and going to the Father"; it is consistent with the formulation of the Creed: "Descended from Heaven… ascended to Heaven, he sits at the right hand of the Father."
GRM 474.2/3 Maria Valtorta, overwhelmed in the contemplation of the Man-God, expresses the following concept: divinity, always hypostatically united to Jesus Man, was not at every moment sensible to the Redeeming Man, who had to go as far as experiencing this pain.

Insight for other expressions[edit | edit source]

GRM 62.2 ("But I often do that. To raise My spirit and be united to the Father").
GRM 62.3 ("If all the world came to Me to listen to Me [...] I would not even regret Heaven, where I was in the Father! ...).
GRM 123.5 ("Also for this soul I have taken flesh and I left Heaven to be her Redeemer and the Redeemer of many souls like hers!").
GRM 126.1 ("Not Mine: of Him Who sent Me").
GRM 126.10 ("May You be blessed, Messiah, our avenger!" - "Not I, but God, the eternal Lord").
GRM 128.2 ("Oh! Mercy! Only You can…" - "Not I. God.".).
GRM 129.3 ("Raise your spirit. God is in Heaven. Worship Him and go towards Him.")
GRM 249.4 ("with the fullness of love with which I love Him now that I see Him faithful to the Lord" - "You mean to Himself." - "To the Lord. Now He is the Messiah of the Lord and must be loyal to the Lord like anybody else, more than anybody else.")
GRM 254.3 ("And I wonder why they exist. Are they necessary?" - "You should ask Him Who made them.")
GRM 272.2 ("To God. All glory and praise to Him. I am His Messiah and I am the first to praise and glorify Him. And the first to obey Him.")
GRM 287.6 ("To God. Not to His Servant").
GRM 298.6 ("from the Father, not from Me").
GRM 317.3/5 (Conversation of Jesus with his Father for the salvation of Judas. The humanity and divinity of Jesus. Notes by Maria Valtorta).
GRM 399.4 ("this Jesus Who left the Father to come and save you and Who will give His life to give you Health").
GRM 452.11 ("Do you suffer? God does, too [...] Do you know to what extent? Suffering to separate Himself from Himself and striving to know what it means to be a human being with all the miseries of mankind [...] God, Who descended to save you, suffers all that. God suffers that in Heaven, allowing Himself to suffer it.")
GRM 479.2 (Dialogue of John of Zebedee the Apostle and Mary: "'But we must rejoice if He goes back to the Father, because no one will be able to hurt Him any more.' And she said moaning: 'Oh! but before!'").
GRM 487.9 (Priestly prayer of Jesus: "Father, My Father! I told You at the beginning of time: “Here I am to obey Your Will'").
GRM 517.2 (In his humanity, Jesus is wounded by betrayals, conspiracies, heartbreaks, refusals).
GRM 534.8 ("Tell the people in your countries that the Light is in the world, and let them come to the Light. Tell them that Wisdom left Heaven to become bread for men").
GRM 600.21 ("I left the Father to come to Her and become Jesus in Her immaculate womb. And yet, I came from the Inviolate woman in the bright ecstasy of my Birthday. And I was nourished with her love, that became milk. I am made of purity and love, because Mary nourished Me with Her virginity fecundated by the perfect Love Who lives in Heaven").
GRM 618.5 ("I am no longer separated from the Father. You will no longer be separated from Your Son. And, by having Your Son, You have our Trinity. A living Heaven, You will bring the Trinity to men on the Earth, and You will sanctify the Church, You, Queen of the Priesthood and Mother of the Christians").
GRM 632.34 ("if the Rabbi of Nazareth has finished His mission, the Immanuel continues His until the end of time for all those who have faith, hope and charity in the One and Trine God, of Whom the incarnate Word is one Person, Who through divine love left Heaven to come to teach, to suffer, to die in order to give the Life to men").
GRM 637.6 ("as I left Heaven to dwell in Mary’s womb, so, now that I was leaving the Earth, I was electing Mary’s womb as My Tabernacle").
GRM 642.9 ("He had to die. And His Most Holy Humanity died").

Notes and references[edit | edit source]

↑ Council of Ephesus 431, then formulated by the Council of Chalcedon (451) and confirmed by later Councils (Constantinople II‑III, Constantinople V).
↑ In the Septuagint (Wisdom 16:21), hupostasis denotes the divine reality that sustains the world. Philo of Alexandria (20 BC – 50 AD), a Hellenized Jew, uses hupostasis to describe: 1 - Divine ideas (influenced by Plato) as substantial realities. 2 - The Presence of God in the world, for example in De Opificio Mundi (The Creation of the world), where he speaks of hupostasis as the intelligible substance behind matter. 3 - The concrete existence of beings, as opposed to their appearance. "The hupostasis of created things is like the shadow of divine reality." (Philo, De Somniis, I, 75). At the end of the 1st century BC and beginning of the 1st century AD, the term began to be taken up by early Christian authors (such as the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, around 60–90 AD), who relied on its use in the Septuagint and by Philo to express the idea of an underlying divine reality (Hebrews 1:3: "The Son is the radiance of his glory and the exact representation of his hupostasis").
↑ Example GRM 474.3 or in the notes she writes.
↑ The council teaches that Jesus Christ is "one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, true God and true man, consubstantial with the Father according to divinity and consubstantial with us according to humanity, like us in all things except sin. Begotten of the Father before all ages according to divinity, and, in the last days, born of the Virgin Mary, Mother of God, according to humanity. One and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only begotten, recognized in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation."
↑ See Colossians 2:9: "For in Him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily."
↑ The typewritten notes below are not part of The Gospel as Revealed to Me and therefore have no official English translation. They have been translated using machine translation.
↑ ^7.0 ^7.1 ^7.2 Automatic translation.

[1] Council of Ephesus 431, then formulated by the Council of Chalcedon (451) and confirmed by later Councils (Constantinople II‑III, Constantinople V).

[2] In the Septuagint (Wisdom 16:21), hupostasis denotes the divine reality that sustains the world. Philo of Alexandria (20 BC – 50 AD), a Hellenized Jew, uses hupostasis to describe: 1 - Divine ideas (influenced by Plato) as substantial realities. 2 - The Presence of God in the world, for example in De Opificio Mundi (The Creation of the world), where he speaks of hupostasis as the intelligible substance behind matter. 3 - The concrete existence of beings, as opposed to their appearance. "The hupostasis of created things is like the shadow of divine reality." (Philo, De Somniis, I, 75). At the end of the 1st century BC and beginning of the 1st century AD, the term began to be taken up by early Christian authors (such as the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, around 60–90 AD), who relied on its use in the Septuagint and by Philo to express the idea of an underlying divine reality (Hebrews 1:3: "The Son is the radiance of his glory and the exact representation of his hupostasis").

[3] Example GRM 474.3 or in the notes she writes.

[4] The council teaches that Jesus Christ is "one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, true God and true man, consubstantial with the Father according to divinity and consubstantial with us according to humanity, like us in all things except sin. Begotten of the Father before all ages according to divinity, and, in the last days, born of the Virgin Mary, Mother of God, according to humanity. One and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only begotten, recognized in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation."

[5] See Colossians 2:9: "For in Him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily."

[6] The typewritten notes below are not part of The Gospel as Revealed to Me and therefore have no official English translation. They have been translated using machine translation.

[:0-7] 7.0 ^7.1 ^7.2 Automatic translation.

[1]

[2]

[3]

[4]

[5]

[6]

[7]