Theologia e Etymologia

John [Damascene]’s Christology, and the nature of his response to Monophysitism has, however, long been the subject of misunderstanding, a misunderstanding created by Friedrich Loofs (following on from the presentation of Christology by certain Protestant scholastic theologians), and popularized in the English.-speaking world by Maurice Relton. This misunderstanding is the doctrine of enhypostasia, the notion that the human nature of Christ is ‘anhypostatic’, and finds its hypostasis in that of the assuming Word, so that the Word, by becoming incarnate, accomplishes an ontological process known as ‘enhypostatization’. The error underlying this is very simple, and also typical of the etymologizing style of theology of the first half of the twentieth century, according to which words, and their supposed etymologies, had a kind of life of their own. But in fact, as Brian Daley has argued, the adjective enypostatos is not formed from the preposition en plus an adjective formed from hypostasis (suggesting the idea of being inward to a hypostasis); it is rather the simple adjective from hypostasis, the prefix en affirming the qualify designated by the root, in contrast to the prefix an, which denies it (cf. emphonos/aphonos, enylos/anylos, entimos/atimos): enypostatos, therefore, means ‘real’, and anypostatos ‘unreal’, or sometimes, more precisely, possessing (or not) concrete reality. There is no mysterious process of ‘enhypostatization’.

Andrew Louth. St John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Thought p.161. OUP (2002)