paradoxical, for it stood in opposition to all Greek ontology against whose background it had been thought. It was a major conceptual and theological innovation: God is ‘a sort of continuous and indivisible community’.10 The crucial move in the process was to distinguish between two words whose meaning had until then been virtually synonymous, ousia and hypostasis, both meaning ‘being’. It is worth mentioning here, after Coleridge but with the help of Stephen Prickett,11 that the capacity of a