A Loud Absence: T.F. Torrance in the Light of Stephen Holmes (Part Five)

More contentious is the concept of Father as arche. As Nikolaus Asproulis puts it (echoing Paul Molnar in our last post) “Torrance’s close devotion to Athanasius explains to some extent his preoccupation with the homoousion … as his almost unique conceptual tool in dealing with the issue of divine monarchia.”[1] Torrance wants to argue that this mitigates the true theological position of the homoousion: “There lurked in the Cappadocian stress upon the Father as the Principle or Arche or Godhead … to borrow an expression from Karl Barth … an ‘unsubdued remnant of Origenist subordinationism.’”[2]

As such, three distinct but inter-related things happen to Torrance’s historiography.  The first is that as part of this interpretation he reads Basil and Gregory Nyssa’s use of tropos hyparxeos (mode of existence) to mean that they are merely “modes of existence” who derive from the being of the Father.[3]  For Torrance, this creates the unwitting “Origenist” move of creating an uneasy parallel with the Father as arche of the Son and Spirit, with God as arche or source of the world.[4]  This was exactly Origen’s problem: he tied the generation of the Son to the creation of the world in such a way that the two became correlative and mutually implicating in a way that seemed to totally abrogate the Son’s divine sovereignty and co-equality.  This is what Torrance fears in Basil and Nyssa’s use of the Father as arche, and naming the Son and Spirit tropos hyparxeos.

The second distinct historiographical move is made when Torrance reinforces this point by saying the analogies that Basil and Nyssa use, reinforce much the same “Origenism” as above.  He agues that the “chain analogy” in “Basil’s Epistle 38” (actually now considered to be Gregory of Nyssa’s, but this hardly affects the material point) suggests a worrying hint of subordination, for example.[5]  This may seem a small point, but it will become more important in a moment.

The third, interrelated historiographical move, is to argue that Gregory of Nazianzus largely succeeds in opposing his Cappadocian comrades by displacing the monarchy of the Father and any sense of causal relations within the Trinity.[6]  This is because, suggests Torrance, the monarchia of God becomes, not the Father, but the substance of God in which the three hypostases mutually and co-equally share (that is, in homoousial perichoresis, or as Torrance puts it “onto-relations.”).

Ok, now that is a lot to take in, I realize (one would expect no less with Torrance’s encyclopedic learning!) but bear with me.  Remember, our original claim is that all of these diverse moves can in a sense be seen as a function of Torrance’s elevation of homoousios as a historiographical criterion, and that in a sense what many take to be Torrance’s purely historical work in fact has the subtext of systematic theological discussions contemporary to his day.[7]  To begin to see this in part, we might turn to the fact that in the 1980’s Torrance got into a series of protracted debates with John Zizioulas, a former student of his.[8]  This, it seems, began to sharpen his distinctive understanding of the history (which may or may not have been already latent).  Here we can cite Jason Radcliff at length:

It is notable that Torrance's writings on the Cappadocian distinction develop throughout his life. In the 1960s, he voices hesitation about the ascetical slant of Basil's pneumatology as opposed to what he saw as the more Athanasian Christological emphasis." It is notable that during his writings from this era Torrance does not discuss his later emphasis on the procession of the Holy Spirit from the ousia of the Father nor the 'Cappadocian distinction' as such. By the 1970s he begins to discuss what he sees as a division between God's essence and energies in the Cappadocians and later Byzantine theology, particularly John of Damascus. It is only by the 1980s and in Trinitarian Faith as well as his immense work in the Reformed-Orthodox dialogue that his strong aversion to the Cappadocian distinction emerges and a full-fledged critique of it becomes prevalent. As such, Torrance's aversion to the Cappadocian distinction is more about the 1980s than the 380s. By the time of the publication of Trinitarian Faith Torrance was deep in an ongoing heated debate with his one-time assistant at New College, John Zizioulas, who is now the Metropolitan of Pergamon.[9]

For those unfamiliar, Zizioulas is a champion of the Cappadocian doctrine of the Father as arche.  Indeed, it is ironic that many (especially among self-described “social Trinitarians”) who pay lip-service to his paradigm shifting book Being as Communion often ignore this fact by using the “Being as Communion” phraseology as self-evidently “egalitarian” in orientation.[10]  Yet of course Zizioulas does not think this introduces ontological inequality into the Trinity, quite the opposite: understanding the Father as arche is not only a correct interpretation of the Cappadocians for Zizioulas, it also preserves the coincidence of the One and the Many, and so the communal nature of Being: “The ontological monarchy of the Father, that is, of a relational being, and the attachment of ontological causation to him, serve to safeguard the coincidence of the One and the Many in divine being, a coincidence that raises otherness to the primary state of being without destroying its unity and oneness.”[11]

In fact, quite succinctly, we find a quote from Zizioulas that embodies the very things Torrance seems to abhor: that of the Father causing the other two, and the persons being considered “modes of being”: “It is a person [the Father] that makes this possible, because it is only a person that can expression communion and otherness simultaneously, thanks to it being a mode of being …”[12]

So how does this affect Torrance?  To show this, it must be understood that Zizioulas himself has been the focus of much criticism by the “Third wave” of Trinitarian theologians, including Stephen Holmes.  This is for many reasons, but for our purposes Zizioulas’ juxtaposition of the Cappadocians with “Western-Augustinian” Trinitarianism that supposedly “since Augustine, makes the one-substance primary” and his resulting over emphasis on the volitional freedom of the Father as arche.  This is a long story and we will avoid its details.  The short of it is that Zizioulas reads the Cappadocians over-against what he perceives to be the Western deficiency of making the “One substance” of God prior to the persons, overwhelming them in a static, necessitarian monism, de-personalizing the Trinity into a frozen and non-communal monad.  This causes Zizioulas to over-react to his false diagnoses, placing a supreme emphasis on the free will of the Father to enact the communal being of the Trinity:

But this [Western interpretation of the Trinity misrepresents] the Patristic theology of the Trinity.  Among the Greek Fathers the unity of God, the one God, and the ontological ‘principle’ or ‘cause’ of the being and life of God does not consist in the one substance of God but in the hypostasis, that is, the person of the Father.  The one God is not the one substance, but the Father, who is the ‘cause’ both of the generation of the Son and the procession of the Spirit. … Thus when we say that God ‘is’ we do not bind the personal freedom of God—the being of God is not an ontological necessity or a simple ‘reality’ for God—but we ascribe the being of God to His personal freedom.  In a more analytic way, this means that God as Father and not as substance, perpetually confirms through ‘being’ His free will to exist. … And the one divine substance is consequently the being of God only because it has these three modes of existence, which it owes not to substance but to the person of the Father. … The personal existence of God (the Father) constitutes His substance, makes it hypostases. [Emphasis added][13]

Now, while it is certainly true that the Cappadocians speak of the arche of the Father, here Zizioulas distorts their presentation by focusing emphasis on the free, volitional will “of the Father” which “constitutes the Trinity’s existence.”  For the Cappadocians—as for Augustine and pro-Nicene theology generally—this would be a nonsensical interpretation of God the Father as arche, precisely because there is only one will and one activity (energeia) in the Trinity.[14]  Here Zizioulas seems to take the theological tactic of assuming that defining human persons by their relationships is the same thing as defining divine persons by their relationships, which not only distorts the original Cappadocian sense of “hypostasis” and its relationship to ousia, but also quite brazenly sidesteps dealing with the extensive apophaticism that is part and parcel of all three Cappadocian Fathers.  This may be due to the fact that Zizioulas does not in fact have the same starting point as the Cappadocians—that is biblical exegesis and theological controversy—but approaches it from a more idealistic standpoint of the divine-human communion experienced in the Eucharistic assembly (sunaxis).  Reacting quite sternly on this last point, especially against so-called “social Trinitarians,” Scot Douglas writes (perhaps exaggerating slightly):

It is a loss to the church and her ability to speak to a contemporary society that the Cappadocians have, in my estimation, been rewritten as tools of absolute orthodoxy and been subsumed within an onto-theological triumphalism that their best [apophatic] thinking and greatest [Trinitarian] contributions seem to preclude.[15]

The point of all this is not to get into too many details about Zizioulas (perhaps in another post?)  It is to point out that Zizioulas exaggerates the Patristic concept of the Father as arche precisely by interjecting God’s will not only as opposed to substance but also over-against the other hypostases: that is to say, Will is located, not in the mutually shared essence, but appears to be allocated precisely to the hypostasis of the Father.  And this newly emphasized concept of freedom over and against the “necessity” of nature is often referenced by Zizioulas as the “mode of existence” of the hypostasis, that is, its “tropos hyparxeos”: “Substance is not relational in itself but in and through and because of the ‘mode of being’ it possesses.”[16] 

Remember: Torrance dislikes this term “tropos hyparxeos” or “mode of being” in Basil and Nyssa, thinking it leads to subordinationism, reinforcing their already “Origenist” relapse of speaking of the Father as arche.  For Torrance, both homoousios and its link with perichoresis amounts to a rejection of causal relations within the Trinity.  This is why, we may remember, Torrance also rejects Basil and Nyssa in favor of Nazianzus.

To be sure, Torrance is in good company among contemporary theologians who are uncomfortable with the Patristic use of the Father as arche. Yet, in the arena of contemporary systematic theology, Torrance is quite unique in singling Gregory of Nazianzus out as an exception to the rule of the Father as cause among the Cappadocians.  Leonardo Boff, Jürgen Moltmann, Catherine LaCugna, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and Miroslav Volf all consider Nazianzus to have taught the doctrine (and so much the worse for Gregory!).[17]  And it would be churlish of us to not recognize that this is still a matter of some debate among Patristic specialists, as if Torrance was making some obvious blunder in his interpretation.[18] 

Yet the debate is not so much set in the terms that Torrance brings to it: where he sees perichoresis and homoousios as indicating a rejection of causality within the Godhead, it is virtually unanimously accepted today that for all three Cappadocians (and the tradition at large) this is not the case.  The debate among Patristic specialists is rather how Gregory’s thought as a whole plays out, which is to say how does God the Father as arche relate to Gregory’s concepts elsewhere that the essence of the entire Trinity can be named monarchia? 

The answer seems to be that these are diverse ways of grasping at attempts to variously conceptualize the One and the Three.  Torrance as such seems to be assuming that two options are possible: namely that of causal subordinationism OR causeless equality are the only two games in town.  In his own words describing Nazianzus concept of relations (schesis) within the Trinity: “The Son [is not] to be thought as proceeding from the person of the Father … but from the being of the Father … as in the council of Nicaea.”[19]  It would be reductionist of us to suggest that Torrance’s conflict with Zizioulas was the reason for this sharp juxtaposition of essence/person (with Torrance falling on the other side of Zizioulas preference for person as cause), but it undoubtedly fueled it.  But the turning of ousia and hypostasis against one another like this, and both again against any notion of causality, presumes that Nicaea and pro-Nicene theologians had a robust concept of either, and that in addition exclusive priority could be named to one or the other (though to be fair Torrance himself is in many other places adamant one cannot turn the One against the Three, and vice-versa).  Torrance’s ahistorical absolutizing of a robust concept of homoousion and perichoresis here rears its head by shaping how Torrance interprets terms.

This can be seen even more clearly in his rejection of tropos hyparxeos in Basil and Nyssa.  One can argue plausibly that this is again in part due to the strange overemphases and permutations in Zizioulas theology that Torrance is pushing against.  It can also plausibly in part be seen due to a sort of timeless systematic use of homoousious as universal measuring stick.  If one uses homoousion like this, then formulations that introduce “causal” language or “modes of being” appear to mitigate a robust Trinitarianism by pressuring it toward Arianism, and historical interpretive decisions follow.

For example, though Torrance is absolutely right Nazianzus nowhere uses tropos hyparxeos (this judgment itself a mighty feat by Torrance’s intellect, given there were no search engines as he wrote) neither Basil nor Nyssa use this term with any frequency.[20]  Tropos hyparxeos cannot be considered (as Torrance appears to) as a technical term, especially not one in competition with homoousios. There was a remarkable fluidity of various terminology grasping at an emerging orthodox conception of the Trinity that Torrance’s prioritization of a robust concept of homoousion appears to gloss over.[21]  In addition, tropos hyparxeos never occurs in the plural form—meaning it is not taken as synonymous with hypostasis as Torrance appears to think it does in his critique.  For Torrance, the hypostasies are properly substantive relations (schesis) as with Gregory Nazianzus.  However,

for the Cappadocians it seems not to be the case that Father, Son, and Spirit are relations or modes of origin; rather they are three hypostases which are distinguished by ‘distinguishing’ or ‘identifying’ marks (idiomata); an idioma is explained sometimes as the distinctive mode of origin (tropos hyparxeos) of each, or the relation (schesis) each has with one another. …This is not just a question of terminology.  Torrance’s argument rests on the claim that Gregory Nazianzus’ concept of intra-Trinitarian relations is fundamentally … different from Basil and [Nyssa] emphasis on each Trinitarian person’s mode of origin.  The problem is that all three Cappadocian’s theologies seem very close on this count.  For example, Torrance praises those theologians (including Nazianzus) who emphasize the fact that the persons are ‘all inseparably united in God’s activity in creation and redemption.’  But this is precisely the view of the other Gregory and Basil too. … Torrance also remarks that for Nazianzus the individuating characteristics unite the three persons.  But it is far from clear why this should not be the case for the other two Cappadocians as well.  … It is of course true that for Nyssa these differnces are expressed in terms of origin.  The father is the source and the other two are caused.  But, as Prestige has argued, that does not entail subordinationism in the usual sense … Torrance admits that Nazianzen writes of the monarchy of the Father, but he insists that this does not entail superiority (i.e. degrees of deity) but simply order (taxis) … But Torrance needs to specify precisely why [the same is not also true of the other two Cappadocians].[22]

Torrance repeatedly lauds Nazianzen for a simultaneous appreciation of God as one and three (precisely because he avoids “causal” language) and distinguishes Nazianzus from his two compadres precisely on this issue.[23]  Yet the simultaneous appreciation of One and Three appears in all of the Cappadocians.  Take this beautiful passage by Gregory of Nyssa:

And through whatever processes of thought you reach a conception of the majesty of any one of the three persons of the Blessed Trinity in which we believe, through these same processes you will arrive invariably at the Father and Son and Holy Spirit and gaze upon their glory. … For it is impossible in any manner to conceive of a severance or separation whereby either the Son is thought of apart from the Father or the Spirit parted from the Son; but there is apprehended among these three a certain ineffable and inconceivable communion and yet at the same time distinction, with neither the difference between the persons disintegrating the continuity of their nature, nor this community of substance confounding the individual character of their distinguishing notes.  Do not marvel if we assert that the same thing is both joined and separated, and if, as though speaking in riddles we devise a strange and paradoxical sort of united separation, and disunited connection. (Epistle 38)

Note that even in this one quote a variety of atypical ways of describing the Trinity are in play.  Torrance’s prioritizing of the homoousion as a historical criterion often cuts its way through many of the analogies and terms used, leaving many corpses in its wake.  But if this is anachronistic on a material level (that is, homoousion is the only legitimate material expression and control) the very idea of a singular criterion is also anachronistic methodologically to the Cappadocians.  Torrance, as we said, notes that many of the analogies Basil or Nyssa use (e.g. of the Trinity as “interlocked chain”) appear to alarmingly convey (even if unintentionally) a subordinationism that Nazianzus avoids.  Yet as Sarah Coakley has recently argued, one must take all the Cappadocian analogies as a whole, and see them as “mutually self-correcting,” rather than individually absolutized.[24]  This applies as well to Torrance’s critique of Basil’s equation of ousia with “the general” and hypostasis with “the particular.”  Thus Ludlow points out that it seems in part the disconnect is here brought by Torrance mislocating “the function of analogy” in Cappadocian writing by judging each individually against an absolute standard.

At this point, despite the great majority of Torrance’s powerful theological and historical judgments being both profound and vastly learned, here Torrance seems to be a product of the general period in which he wrote as a Systematic theologian.  In the words of Khaled Anatolios, in the question of the Trinity Systematic Theologians have put such weight on the analogies one uses that “this centralization of the role of analogies in mediating the meaning of Trinitarian doctrine tends to spill over from systematic theology to historical studies, where the Trinitarian theologies of figures foundational to the tradition are often interpreted principally in terms of their preferred analogies.”[25]  Torrance has a tendency to lock the historical development into an ideal level circulating around a (to us) pre-given theoretical terminus.  This both can gloss the actual course of development, but also (much against Torrance’s own ecumenical bent) begin to exclude many theologians (here: Basil and Nyssa) who do not find themselves in strict conformity to an expressive norm.

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[1] Nikolaus Asproulis, “T.F. Torrance and John Zizioulas on the Divine Monarchia: On the Cappadocian Background and the Neo-Cappadocian Solution,” Participatio 4 (2014): 164.

[2] T. F. Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God: One Being, Three Persons (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), 179n.46.

[3] Ibid., 156.

[4] On this I am reliant on the argument of Morwenna Ludlow, Gregory of Nyssa: Ancient and Postmodern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 16ff.

[5] Torrance, Doctrine of God, 125.

[6] Cf. especially T. F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith: The Evangelical Theology of the Ancient Catholic Church (New York: T&T Clark, 1988), 319-322.

[7] Again, here we are indebted on Morwenna Ludlow’s extensive work.

[8] For a general outline of the debate cf. Ralph Del Colle, “’Persons’ and ‘Being’ in John Zizioulas’ Trinitarian Theology: Conversation With Thomas Torrance and Thomas Aquinas,” Scottish Journal of Theology 54:1 (2001).

[9] Jason Radcliff, “T.F. Torrance in Light of Stephen Holmes Critique of Trinitarian Thought,” Evangelical Quarterly, 86:1 (2014), 32.

[10] John Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies on Personhood and the Church (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985); for Zizioulas’ most thorough defense of his interpretation of the Cappadocians see his more recent work, Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church (New York: T&T Clark, 2006), esp. 113-155, 171-178.

[11] Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness, 35.

[12] Ibid., 29.

[13] Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 41.

[14] Cf. Stephen Holmes, The Quest for the Trinity: The Doctrine of God in Scripture, History, and Modernity (Illinois: Inter Varsity Press, 2012), 14.

[15] Scot Douglas, Theology of the Gap: Cappadocian Language Theory and the Trinitarian Controversy (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), 276.

[16] Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness, 25.

[17] See the survey of contemporary opinions in Ben Fulford, “’One Commixture of Light’: Rethinking Some Modern Uses and Critiques of Gregory of Nazianzus on the Unity and Equality of Divine Persons,” International Journal of Systematic Theology, 11:2 (2009): 172-189; and on Catherine LaCugna specifically, cf. Charles D. Raith II, “Ressourcing the Fathers?  A Critical Analysis of Catherine Mowry LaCugna’s Appropriation of the Trinitarian Theology of the Cappadocian Fathers” International Journal of Systematic Theology 10:3 (2008): 267-284.

[18] Cf. Christopher Beeley, “Divine Causality and the Monarchy of God the Father in Gregory of Nazianzus,” Harvard Theological Review 100:2 (2007): 199-214.

[19] Christian Doctrine of God, 141.

[20] Cf. Ludlow, Gregory of Nyssa, 22f.

[21] Cf. Joseph T. Lienhard, “Ousia and hypostasis: the Cappadocian Settlement and the Theology of ‘One Hypostasis’” in Stephen Davies, Daniel Kendall SJ, and Gerald O’Collins SJ, eds., Trinity: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on The Trinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 104-107.

[22] Ibid., 23-25.

[23] Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 112-113.

[24] Sarah Coakley, “’Persons’ in the Social Doctrine of the Trinity: Current Analytic Discussion and ‘Cappadocian Theology’” in Trinity: An Interdisciplinary Symposium.

[25] Khaled Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), 6.