ABSTRACT
The tenets of modern personalism (in particular of C. Yannaras, J. Zizioulas, and his disciples) cannot, without anachronism, find in St. Maximus the Confessor a basis for their ideas that give to “person,” as compared to hypostasis, an axiological sense, or that opposes person to individual by giving to the former a relational connotation and to the latter a connotation of separation and egoism linked to the modern idea of individualism. An analysis of the texts of Maximus’s corpus indeed shows that, for the Confessor – as for his predecessors on which he depends (the Cappadocians, Leontius of Jerusalem) and for his successors who understand themselves to be his heirs (John of Damascus) – the concepts of hypostasis, person, and individual are virtually identical, and that each of them is used with a certain flexibility. They seem, in some contexts, to have particular connotations, but they lose these in others, and appear, in the end, to be generally interchangeable.
