The Invention of "Classical Theism" (My Abridged Thesis Part Three): Distortions in Reception History
One can, with little imagination, see
the potential synergy of a paradigm claiming Western Trinitarianism “starts
with” (or even: gives illicit preference to) the single divine substance, with
historiographical narratives creating straw gods under the created category
“Classical theism,” and can thus begin, in part, to understand why those like
Moltmann, Jüngel, Jenson, (among a nearly countless array of others)—all who,
in their own distinct manner, advocate for a return to robust Trinitarianism—also see in this move “to the East” a
revision of “Classical attributes” like simplicity and timelessness. More on
that in a moment.
For now we do well to note that such
has been the influence of this East-West paradigm, Barnes says tersely that
“the publication of [his] work in 1892 made de Régnon [the inventor of the
paradigm] the most influential and yet least known of Catholic historians of
doctrine,”[1]
and “the paradigm has become the sine qua
non for framing contemporary understanding Augustine’s theology.”[2] In
fact, with even more force Barnes notes, “[Modern theologians] need the de
Regnón paradigm to ground the
specific problems they diagnose.”[3] Some
of the saturation that this paradigm has amongst contemporary thinkers has
already been seen in the last chapter.
We have begun as well to point towards the fact that the simple elegance
of the paradigm sits uncomfortably alongside readings of Augustine’s own texts. But what has caused such a disconnect? Barnes,
tantalizingly, notes that systematic theologians who use the paradigm, “show no
awareness that the paradigm needs to be demonstrated, or that it has a history [emphasis added].”[4] As such, it is an intriguing question to ask
how the paradigm itself, in its commonly understood form, took hold of the
theological imagination at large.
The history Barnes has in mind is the
ability to trace this paradigm that so saturates the contemporary Trinitarian
imagination, back to de Regnón. But
there is a broader story to be told, one which sheds light on some of the
historical origins of the contemporary Trinitarian renaissance. This story intersects with, and illumines in
unexpected ways, why so many have been keen to create a sort of systematic
historiographical continuity leading from Augustine to Descartes. Despite very specific and high impact differences
between the two, modernized categories, often begun with Scotus and later
nominalists, and then catalyzed by Descartes, have saturated the theological
consciousness at such a high level that often—even when critiquing Descartes—the
bright light he has cast obfuscates the true nature of the pre-Modern options
he is now seen to embody as a sort of ad
absurdum climax, or the most potent catalyst revealing the inner
contradictions latent in those who came before him. To reject Descartes, or Modernism, and by
proxy Augustine (or any others embodying these modern frameworks), is in this
sense merely to shift within a spectrum of positions secretly set by what our
modern imaginations have led us to see as the only obvious and possible ones.
It is as such fruitful
to ask whether various strands of theology have become refracted as they
approach us, like light bent through water or the heat of an atmosphere. As one digs into the literature commenting
upon historiographical trends in contemporary theology viz. “Classical theism,” and Trinitarianism, a relatively small but
powerful litany emerges decrying illicit historiographical employments of the
category “classical theism” and the “de Regnón paradigm” to such an extent that
a veritable historiographical fault-line opens up, threatening to shake apart
some of the more cherished and settled opinions of the “received story” of how
an abstract non-Trinitarian philosophical theism stemming from (or catalyzed
by) Augustine or Aquinas corrupted the West.
What emerges as a theme among some identified by Sarah Coakley as a “Third-wave”[5]
of Trinitarianism decry, among many things, the all pervasive de Regnón
paradigm; other voices note what often passes as a critique (or
reception, as the case may be) of classical theism tends to be explicable by viewing
the tradition through changes which began to occur in late-Medieval theology—the
influence of which is traceable especially into the rationalism and natural
theology of the seventeenth-century onward.
More specifically, this litany of scholars—to be seen in a moment—isolate
changes which occurred through nominalism, and the rise of univocal language
for God, catalyzed in part by Duns Scotus and especially by William of Ockham.
This continues and is then radicalized through progressing generations to
produce a Modernity saturated by the post-nominalist imagination—creating not a
single monolithic viewpoint, but clusters of options that may even seem at odds
with one another, yet which all still operate within certain assumptions
governed by the legacies of nominalism.
William Placher, for
example, writes “some of the features contemporary critics find most objectionable
in so-called traditional Christian theology in fact come to prominence only in
the seventeenth century. Some of our
current protests, it turns out, should not be directed against the Christian
tradition, but against what modernity did to it.”[6] Nicholas Lash cautions us to understand that “between the thirteenth century and the end of the
twentieth [stands]…two centuries of
modern theism, [emphasis added]”[7]
while Walter Kasper can speak of this modern phenomenon as the “heresy of
theism,”[8] where
“the modern age has to a great extent abandoned concrete [that is, Trinitarian]
Christian monotheism in favor of the abstract theism of a unipersonal God who
stands over against man as perfect…In the final analysis this conception is the
popular form of Christianity half under the influence of the Enlightenment, or
else, the religious remnant of Christianity in a secularized society.”[9] Frans
Jozef van Beeck argues “The remote, impassive, faceless ‘God-out-there’ which
the West…has gotten used to, surfaced only at the confluence of a number of
late medieval, early modern, and modern trains of thought and mentalities.”[10] Add to
this the fact that some commentators on theism’s typical poster-child, Aquinas,
with an eye to the historiography we are now talking about, note he is not a “Classical theist,”[11] in
this sense (undoubtedly, a rather startling claim), it might be better, as
Vanhoozer puts it, “to distinguish the
biblical-theological theism of the patristic, medieval, and Reformation eras
from the more properly philosophical
theism of the modern era,”[12]
and as such “the ‘Theory of Theology’s Fall Into Philosophy’[13]
looks stronger when one examines what happened in modern rather than ancient times.”[14] Vanhoozer thus uses the paradoxical but
useful term “neo-Classical theism,” to distinguish the later developments from
“Classical theism,” in the Church Fathers.
And, to cite one more in the chorus: “It is principally the god of modernity,” writes David Bentley Hart
with his typical flourish, “the god of pure sovereignty, the voluntarist god of ‘permissive decrees,’
[emphasis added] and praemotio physica—who
has died for modern humanity, and perhaps theology has no nobler calling for
now than to see that he remains dead, and that every attempt to revive him is
thwarted: in the hope that, in becoming willing accomplices in his death,
Christians may help prepare their world for the return of the true God revealed
in Christ, in all the mystery of his transcendent and impassible love.”[15]
Thus, the litany. But what are the specific arguments and
concomitant historiographical claims being made? The litany of scholars just
cited above, to put it simply, question the “Continuity Thesis” of a dark
Western “merely theistic” legacy drawn from Augustine to Aquinas to Descartes,
by pointing out how seemingly subtle but wide-ranging changes occurred in
late-Medieval Scholasticism, became concentrated, inflected, and even
supposedly denied (yet in the denial, not transcended, merely dialectically
opposed) in various later seemingly unrelated thinkers and schools like
Cardinal Cajetan, Suarez, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and German Idealism at large,
among many others. As such, instead of current
revisionist theologians like Moltmann or philosophers like Whitehead airing the
dirty laundry of the Classical Theism of Aquinas or Augustine (and despite
explicit contentions by these thinkers that this is exactly what they believe
themselves to be doing), what is actually occurring are complex negotiations within the spectrums of thought defined by
post-nominalist fallout.[16]
Nor is this merely a matter parochial
to domains reserved for the theologians.
While at first glance it threatens to remain obscure, the thesis that
massive shifts in the theological and social imaginaries at large occurred in
seemingly esoteric branches of late-Medieval debates about universals, and the
nature of the relation of God’s will to God’s essence, has also recently been
accorded an increasingly prestigious place of honor amongst philosophers and
sociologists attempting to discern the nature and periodization of Modernism
(and thus, postmodernism) itself, along with the concepts of “secularism” that they
engender.[17] In curious ways then, the refraction of
Classical thought identified by these theologians through univocity and
nominalism, is part and parcel of a story of how we are to conceive the
emergence and nature of the modern imagination itself, which, in increasingly
subtle ways, controls theological discussion at the outset by setting the
parameters of what is and is not implied conceptually in terms like
“transcendence,” “immanence” “reason” “revelation” “person” “nature”
“substance” etc... [18]
[1] Michel René Barnes, “De Regnón Reconsidered,” Augustinian Studies, 26 (1995): 51.
[2] Michel Rene Barnes, “Augustine in Contemporary Trinitarian
Theology,” Theological Studies, 56
(1995): 238.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Sarah Coakley, “Afterword: ‘Relational Ontology,’ Trinity,
and Science,” in The Trinity and an
Entangled World, 191.
[6] William Placher, The
Domestication of Transcendence: How Modern Thinking About God Went Wrong (Louisville:
Westminster: John-Knox, 1996), 2.
[7] Lash, “Considering the Trinity,” 188. Emphasis added. Here the time-stamp of “two centuries” should
not distract us from the fact that Lash’s argument can be linked up with changes
that took places earlier in the nominalist shift.
[8] Walter Kasper, The
God of Jesus Christ, (New York: Cross Road, 2007), 295.
[9] Ibid., 294. Kasper, however, is still influenced by the
de Regnón paradigm (296) but sees East and West as complimentary.
[10] Frans Jozef van Beeck, “Trinitarian Theology as
Participation,” in Steven T. Davis et al. The
Trinity: An Inter Disciplinary Symposium on the Trinity (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999), 320.
[11] Fergus Kerr, After
Aquinas: Versions of Thomism (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), viii:
“Thomas’ God, far from being the static entity of classical theism, is so
‘dynamic’ as to be describable primarily with verbs.”; Cf. Rudi Te Velde, Aquinas on God: The Divine Science of the
Summa Theologia (Vermont: Ashgate Publishing, 2006), 85; cf. 172: “There is
something in Thomas’ conception of God as ipsum
esse per se subsistens that does not fit very well into the picture of
‘classical theism’. Classical theism, as
it is usually understood, tends to view God as an absolute entity existing
independently of the world. The theistic
God looks more like a being, a
‘self-contained substance,’ above and apart from the world, than the pure
actuality of subsistent being itself.
From Thomas’ perspective, this would mean that the independence of God, as over
against the world of finite beings, is conceived wrongly. It is as if the character of subsistence,
attributed to a theistically conceived God, is a logical expression by means of
which we think of God as separated from the world, as a distinct reality, while
Thomas intends to express by subsistence that the being of God is separated through itself from all other
beings. The difference is crucial. For Thomas, God is not ‘separated’ from the
world as a subsistent entity conceivable apart from his causal relationship to
created beings; it is as cause of all beings that God ‘separates’ himself from
all his effects by distinguishing those effects from himself. In this sense the ‘concept’ of God is, in
truth, the concept of the relationship of God and world, conceived as an
ordered plurality of diverse beings, each of which receives its being from the
divine source of being. For Thomas there
is no way of thinking of God concretely outside this relationship. The independence, or absoluteness, of God
characterizes the way He relates as cause to all other things; it is the
independence of the perfect goodness of God, who is not under any obligation or
necessity to fulfill himself by creating, but who acts out of his own goodness,
establishing all other things in being by letting them share in his own
perfection.”
[12] Vanhoozer, Remythologizing
Theology., 94.
[13] Vanhoozer here explicitly borrows and modifies a phrase
coined by Paul Gavrilyuk in The Suffering
of the Impassible God.
[14] Vanhoozer, Remythologizing
Theology., 93.
[15] David Bentley Hart, “The Infinite Innocence of God,” 323.
[16] Note: what is not
being offered is merely an alternative “Continuity Thesis.” There are no straight lines here, more of an
emerging thought-world or environment that defines and limits parameters of
discourse in a way foreign to pre-nominalist tradition.
[17] Olivier Boulnois, “Reading Duns Scotus: From History to
Philosophy,” Modern Theology vol.21
no.4 (2005): 604: “Modernity is a
concept with variable geometry, depending on whether one centers it on
Descartes, Hobbes, Kant or Hegel. Nevertheless, as an emancipation it always
depends on a preliminary debt that it more or less refuses
to recognize. Thus
it is natural that, for the last century, all non-ideological history continues
to discover the medieval genealogy of modernity.”; Pickstock, “Duns
Scotus,” 566, 568: “The issue [of transitions between epochs] does not involve
a contrast between the modern and the postmodern. It is rather that both present ‘a certain
Middle Ages’…which has never ceased to be dominant, even now in the
twenty-first century.”
[18] We certainly have no room to canvass them all in this
essay, nonetheless the analysis of the following authors have been
indispensable to our research over the years and are a constant tacit dimension
guiding the thought of this chapter, even where not explicitly cited: Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Harvard: The Belknap Press of Harvard University,
2007), though Taylor makes nominalism only one of many aspects of his narrative
(which he feels is a complementary but needed corrective to the narratives put
forward by John Milbank and the Radical Orthodoxy group); John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular
Reason 2nd ed. (MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006); John Milbank, Beyond Secular Order: The Representation of Being and the
Representation of the People (UK: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2013); Louis
Dupré, The Passage to Modernity: An Essay
on the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (Yale: Yale University Press,
1993); Michael Allan Gillespie, Nihilism
Before Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Michael
Allan Gillespie, The Theological Origins
of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Amos
Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific
Imagination: From The Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1986); Michael J. Buckley, At The Origins of Modern Atheism (Yale: Yale University Press,
1990); Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended
Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Harvard: The
Belknap Press of Harvard, 2012); Conor Cunningham Genealogy of Nihilism (London: Routledge, 2002); Michael Hanby, No God, No Science? Theology, Cosmology,
Biology (Massachusetts: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013); Larry S. Chapp, The God of Covenant and Creation: Scientific Naturalism and Its
Challenge to the Christian Faith (Bloomsbury: T&T Clark, 2012), esp.
1-137; Oliver Davies, The Creativity of
God: The World, Eucharist, Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2004);
Conor Cunningham, Darwin’s Pious Idea:
Why Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get it Wrong (Grand Rapids:
Eerdman’s Publishing, 2010).
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