So important to Neoplatonism did this term seem to Proclus, that he did not hesitate to say that Plutarch, by the use thereof, became "our first forefather." He therefore develops it further. Among the hidden and intelligible gods are three hypostases. The first is characterized by the Good; it thinks the Good itself, and dwells with the paternal Monad. The second is characterized by knowledge, and resides in the first thought; while the third is characterized by beauty, and dwells with the most beautiful of the intelligible. They are the causes from which proceed three monads which are self-existent but under the form of a unity, and as in a germ, in their cause. Where they manifest, they take a distinct form: faith, truth, and love (Cousin's title: "Du Vrai, du Beau, et du Bien"). This trinity pervades all the divine worlds.
In order to understand the attitude of Plotinos on the subject, we must try to put ourselves in his position. In the first place, on Porphyry's own admission, he had added to Platonism Peripatetic and Stoic views. From Aristotle his chief borrowings were the categories of form and matter, and the distinction between potentiality and actuality,[488] as well as the Aristotelian psychology of various souls. To the Stoics he was drawn by their monism, which led him to drop the traditional Academico-Stoic feud, or rather to take the side of the Stoics against Numenius the Platonist dualist and the dualistic successors, the Gnostics. But there was a difference between the Stoics and Plotinos. The Stoics assimilated spirit to matter, while Plotinos, reminiscent of Plato, preferred to assimilate matter to spirit. Still, he used their terminology, and categories, including the conception of a hypostasis, or form of existence. With this equipment, he held to the traditional Platonic trinity of the "Letters," the King, the intellect, and the soul. Philosophically, however, he had received from Numenius the inheritance of a double name of the Divinity, Being and Essence. As a thinker, he was therefore forced to accommodate Numenius to Plato, and by adding to Numenius's name of the divinity, to complete Numenius's theology by Numenius's own cosmology. This then he did by adding as third hypostasis the Aristotelian dynamic energy.
But as Intellect is permanent, how can Energy arise therefrom? Here this eternal puzzle is solved by distinguishing energy into indwelling and out-flowing. As indwelling, Energy constitutes Intellect; but its energetic nature could not be demonstrated except by out-flowing, which produces a distinction.
Similarly, there are two kinds of heat, that of the fire itself, and that emitted by the fire, so that the fire may remain itself while exerting its influence without. It is thus also there: in that it remains itself in its inmost being, and from its own inherent perfection, and energy, the developed energy assumes hypostasis, as if from a Dynamis that is great, nay, greatest; and so it joins the Essence and the Being. For that was beyond all Being, and that was the Dynamis of all things, and already was all things. If then it is all, it must be above all; consequently also above Being. "And if this is all, then the One is before all; not of an essence equal to all, and this must be above Being, as this is above intellect; for there is something above intellect."[489]
This is the most definite statement of Plotinos's solution of the problem; other references thereto are abundant. So we have a trinity of energy, being and essence,[490] and each of us, like the world-Soul has an Eros which is essence and hypostasis.[491] Reason is a hypostasis after the nous, and Aphrodite gains an hypostasis in the Ousia.[492] The One is intellect, the intelligible, and ousia; or, energy, being, and the intelligible (essence).[493] The soul is activity.[494] The soul is the third God,[495] we are the third rank proceeding from the upper undivided Nature,[496] the whole being God, nous, and essence. The Nous is activity, and the First essence. There are three stages of the Good: the King, the nous, and the soul.[497] We find energy,[498] thinking and being, then[499] the soul, the nous, and the One. We find Providence threefold (as in Plutarch)[500] and three ranks of Gods, demons and world-life.[501] Elsewhere, untheologically, or, rather, merely philosophically, he speaks of the hypostasis of wisdom.[502]
Chaignet's summary of this is[503] that[504] Plotinos holds that every force in the intelligible is both Being and Substance simultaneously; and reciprocally that no Being, could be conceived without hypostasis, or directed force. Again,[505] the world, the universe of things, contains three natures or divine hypostases, soul, mind and unity; which indeed are found in our own nature, and of which the divinest is unity or divinity.
Let us now try to understand the matter. Why should the word hypostasis, which unquestionably in earlier times meant "substance," have later come to mean "distinctions" within the divinity? For "substance," on the contrary, represents to our mind an unity, the underlying unity, and not individual forms of existence. How did the change occur?
Now Plotinos, as we remember, found fault with the Gnostics in that they taught distinctions within the divinity.[506] He would therefore be disposed to remove from within the divinity those distinctions of Plotinic, Plutarchian, Numenian, or Gnostic theology; although he himself in early times did not scruple to speak of a hypostasis of wisdom, or of Eros, or other matter he might be considering. Such terms of Numenius or Amelius as he seems to ignore are the various Demiurges; the three Plutarchian Providences he himself still uses. Still, all these terms he would be disposed to eradicate from within the divinity.
As a constructive metaphysician, however, he could not well get along without some titles for the different phases of the divinity; and even if he dispensed with the old names, there would still remain as their underlying support the reality or substance of the distinction. So he removed the offensive, aggressive, historically known and recognized terms, while leaving their underlying substances, or supports. Now "substance" had become "substances," and to differentiate these it was necessary to interpret them as differing forms of existence. The change was most definitely made by Athanasius, who at a synod in Alexandria, in A.D. 362,[507] fastened on the church, as synonymous with hypostasis the popular term "prosopon" or "face." That this was an innovation appears from the fact that the Nicene Council had stated that it was heretical to say that Christ was of a hypostasis different from that of the Father, in which case the word evidently meant still the original underlying (singular) substance. With this official definition in vogue, the original (singular) substance became forgotten, and it became possible to speak in the plural, of three faces, as indeed Plotinos had done.
In other words, so necessary were distinctions in the divinity, that the popular mind supplied other individual names to designate the distinctions Plotinos had successfully banished, for Demiurges and Providences no longer return. Thus more manifold differences re-entered into the divinity, than Plotinos had ever emptied out of it, although under a name which the poverty of the Latin language rendered as "persons," which represents to us individual consciousness of a far more distinctive kind than was ever implied in three phases of Providence, or of the Demiurge. Thus the translation into Latin clinched the illicit linguistic process, and the result of Plotinos's attempt to distinguish in the Divinity phases so subtle as not to demand or allow of manifoldness, resulted in the most pronounced differences of personality. This was finally clinched by Plotinos's illustration of the three faces around a single head,[508] which established the idea of three "persons" (masks, from "per-sonare") in one God.