Under these conditions, it will be impossible for us to form a concept of the human person, and we will have to content ourselves with saying: “person” signifies the irreducibility of man to his nature—“irreducibility” and not “something irreducible” or “something which makes man irreducible to his nature” precisely because it cannot be a question here of “something” distinct from “another nature” but of someone who is distinct from his own nature, of someone who goes beyond his nature while still containing it, who makes it exist as human nature by this overstepping and yet does not exist in himself beyond the nature which he “enhypostasizes’” and which he constantly exceeds.

The man who is governed by his nature and acts in the strength of his natural qualities, of his ‘character’, is the least personal. He sets himself up as an individual, proprietor of his own nature, which he pits against the natures of others and regards as his ‘me’, thereby confusing person and nature. This confusion, proper to fallen humanity, has a special name in the ascetic writings of the Eastern Church—αὐτὸτης, ϕιλαντία or, in Russian, samost, which can perhaps be best translated by the word egoism, or rather if we may create a Latin barbarism ‘ipseity’.