The concrete individual nature, containing as it does a plurality of really distinct principles, substantial and accidental, needs some unifying principle to make these one incommunicable reality, proximately capable of receiving a corresponding unitary existential act: without such a principle, they say, each of the substantial and accidental principles in the concrete individual nature would have its own existence: so that the result would be not _really_ one being, but a being really _manifold_ and only accidentally one—“unum per accidens”. This principle is _subsistence_. The human nature of our Divine Lord has not its own connatural subsistence; this is supplied by the subsistence of the Divine Person. Moreover, since the human nature in question has not its own subsistence, neither has it its own existence; existence is the actuality of the subsisting being; therefore there is in Christ but one existence, that of the Divine Person, whereby also the human nature of Christ exists.(301) Of those who deny that the distinction between the existence and the essence of any created nature is a real distinction, some hold in the present matter the Scotist view that subsistence is not a positive perfection really distinct from the complete individual nature. Others, however, hold what we have ventured to regard as the more common view: that personality is something positive and really distinct from nature. But they explain what they conceive subsistence to be without any reference to existence, and without distinguishing between the essential and the existential order of reality. The most common explanation seems to be that subsistence is a unifying principle of the concrete individual nature, as stated above. Thus conceived, it is not an _absolute_ reality; nor is the distinction between it and the nature a _major_ real distinction. It is a _substantial mode_ (68), naturally superadded to the substance and modally distinct from the latter. It so completes and determines the substance or nature that the latter not only exists in itself but is also, by virtue of this mode, incommunicable in every way and _sui juris_.(302) It gives to the substance that ultimate determinateness which an accidental mode such as a definite shape or location gives to the accident of quantity.(303) This mode is absent (supernaturally) from the human nature of our Divine Lord; this nature is therefore communicable; and the Personality of the Divine Word supernaturally supplies the function of this absent natural mode.