How Neo-Thomism Affected 20th Century Trinitarianism (Part Five): Case Study Three: Substance Metaphysics and Analytical Theism
In the
introduction to his beautiful biography of Thomas Aquinas, G. K. Chesterton
reminisced that, “A lady I knew picked up a book of selections from St. Thomas,
with a commentary; and began hopefully to read a section with the innocent
heading, The Simplicity of God. She then laid the book down with a sigh and
said: “well, if that’s His simplicity, I wonder what His complexity is like.’”[1]
These days, a great many words in contemporary theology are held aloft on the
long sigh of Chesterton’s anonymous friend.
“The claim that God is simple,” writes Jay Wesley Richards, “is as
obscure to most modern Christians as it is prevalent in classical theism.”[2] Or as Stephen Holmes notes, “to say this
doctrine [of simplicity] has something of a public relations problem is to
understate the issue considerably,”[3]
because, as Robert Jenson put it over twenty-five
years ago: “rejection of the dominant tradition just at this point [divine simplicity] is endemic in contemporary
theology.”[4] This rejection of simplicity is so
widespread, it even made an unlikely (and clumsy) cameo appearance in a New
York Times bestselling book—Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion.[5]
And yet a prevalent feature of the “gaps” in
historiographical commentary amongst theological engagement with simplicity is
both the assumption that it provides something of a preconceived philosophical
control on Trinitarian theological discourse (a variation of the
Western/Eastern Trinitarian paradigm) and that what it would mean for God to be
“simple” is being understood and produced in a manner univocal to
creatures. As Christopher Franks laments of many of Simplicity’s
current analytic crusaders: “The
problem is related to … the assumption that there is a tradition connecting …
Aquinas [with what] can be called a tradition of ‘perfect-being theism.’ For
Aquinas [however] God is precisely not a
being. God’s simplicity then, is not the
simplicity of a perfect being.”[6]
Thus the tradition is assumed to be capable of univocal precision and defended along those very lines, without noticing
that they have conscripted various arguments out of their more robustly
theological contexts. James Dolezal
concurs that the same phenomenon applies to modern detractors to simplicity:
“the outstanding common denominator in each of these serious and sophisticated
arguments against [Simplicity] is the strong commitment to ontological
univocism,” so that “each critic speaks as if God and creatures were ‘beings’
in the exact same sense, reducing the Creator-creature distinction to a difference
of degrees.”[7] In this vein, Stephen Holmes notes quite
perceptively that he believes a majority of contemporary criticisms of
simplicity are “wrongheaded” precisely because these critiques are “just not
what any important part of the tradition meant when they confessed God’s
simplicity.” Holmes therefore says that he can only conclude “modern problems
are the result of a misunderstanding of the tradition somewhere.”[8] In a more recent, related article, Holmes
writes of Simplicity and its relation to analogy and Trinitarianism:
[Some]
traditional attributes [in Analytic theology] have been more contentious,
notably eternity, simplicity, and aseity.
Each can find its defenders, but in each case strong criticisms
concerning coherence have been mounted that are regarded by many as at best
unanswered and possibly unanswerable.
Rather than considering these debates in detail, it is perhaps worth
pausing at the level of methodology. The
central task of analytic work is to attain conceptual clarity; if words are
carefully defined and equally carefully used, then sense will emerge [note how
this reflects emerging nominalist trends].
There is no question that this is a procedure in deep conformity with
aspects of the Christian theological tradition; it is the essence of St.
Thomas’ intellectual endeavor, for instance, to strive for clarity of meaning
and expression. However, St. Thomas
balances this with a profound appreciation of the fundamental mystery of the
divine life. We are not able to achieve
analytic clarity when we speak of God’s essence; instead, all our language is
necessarily analogical, a halting gesturing toward a luminous truth that shines
too brightly for us to ever see clearly.
The centrality of this limitation may be seen from its importance in the
defining of orthodox Trinitarian doctrine in the fourth century … In classical
doctrines of the divine perfections, this doctrine of analogy plays an
important part in defining how differing divine attributes are related. At the heart of this is the doctrine of
divine simplicity. ‘Simplicity’ is,
traditionally a central divine attribute that claims that god is no way
composite or divided. This conditions
the accounts of all other divine attributes, which are clearly multiple. So we claim that God is variously good, just,
loving, omnipotent, eternal, and so on, whereas
the doctrine of divine simplicity insists that God is in fact just God, [emphasis
added] and that our multiple
perceptions are primarily a feature of our inability to grasp or articulate
divine perfection … There is a standard analytic ‘disproof’ of divine
simplicity that picks up on this use, while ignoring the warning concerning
analogy…and that thus illustrates the potential problems with recent perfect
being theology. Simplicity, it is
claimed, teaches that God is identical with his attributes, but it seems to
follow that if God is identical with his love, and God is identical with his
omnipresence, it seems to follow that God’s love is identical with God’s
omnipresence, which is obviously meaningless.
The answer to this point is to insist on the partial, hesitant, and
analogical nature of the language being used [to signify that God is God].[9]
There is, as such, a peculiar distortion that stands between
modern commentary and traditional sources.
It will be no surprise to readers at this point that one such refracting
“lens” on the tradition comes by way of neo-Thomism. Perhaps no one has put his finger on this
trend more acutely than Jean-Luc Marion has in a recent essay.[10] Marion investigates the use of the Latin term
idipsum (the self-same) in Augustine,
and discovers the term has two general senses.
It means at some points “the thing itself,” or at other points that
which remains what it is.[11] Yet he notes most translators miss these
specific uses “and often translate the term ‘being-itself.’” This perhaps seems innocuous, yet this switch
loads into Augustine’s use of idipsum a
very particular philosophical history.
As an example note Confessions IX.4.11:
“O’ in pace! O’ in Idipsum! [Ps. 4:9]…tu es idipsum valde, quia non mutaris,”
which presumably should be translated: “O’ in peace, O’ in the selfsame … you
are the self-same, you, who never change…” Yet in the translation by Boulding
(representing one of many other translations) we read: “… Oh! In Being Itself … you are Being itself, unchangeable …”[12]
This is not an oversight, says Marion, rather “the fact is that some end up
translating another text, unwritten
but dominant, which nevertheless superimposed itself on Augustine’s text and
fused with it.”[13]
As such there is “a clear pattern, which comes from the fact that they do not
translate idipsum but rather what
they spontaneously read instead of it: ipsum
esse [being itself].”[14] Thus when we search for a reason for this
mistake regarding what otherwise should be obvious translational choices, it
stems from relatively recent historical narratives: “one has to move further
into the modern era to find its true paradigm,”[15]
as Marion says.
Here it is specifically modern neo-Thomism that Marion
argues is in large part responsible:
These slips in translations are, of course, not purely
fortuitous, nor are they caused by inattention on the part of the translators,
who are otherwise consistently excellent.
On the contrary, they result from too much earnestness, not on the
philological but on the conceptual level: the (neo-)Thomist de-nomination of
the most proper name of God determines their understanding of the Augustinian
de-nomination of God’s name in such an indelible way that they do not refrain
from correcting the latter through the former.[16]
The attempt to make (a certain sort of) Thomist out of the
whole tradition means that translators understand idipsum “so resolutely in the sense of ipsum esse that, even when constrained by philology to translate it
literally as the same thing, or the same, that is, without ontological
import, the ontological claim remains intact and, to complete itself, is added
to the … sentence, so that it may be maintained at all cost and survive.”[17] Nor is this conspiracy mongering; Marion
cites the explicit concession of several translators, here Aimé Solignac: “[Idipsum], as we obviously see, is the
technical term similar to the Ego sum qui
sum of Exodus, a term which, understood in a metaphysical sense, defines God … the best translation in French
seems to be: Being itself” [Italics
original to Marion’s citation].[18] Marion retorts immediately after the Solignac
quote: “It is quite clear: the translation of idipsum that conflates it with ipsum
esse is not based on the text nor St. Augustine’s theology, but on
interpretation of the term ‘in a metaphysical sense’ [as Solignac uses it].”[19]
To be clear, what is at stake in this discussion is not the legitimacy of Augustine’s occasional
use of the terms ipsum esse and idipsum esse.[20] Nor indeed is it a tout court condemnation of Aquinas’ much more systematized
use. Rather it is to point toward how
these are being used by translators and theologians as theological controls on Augustine’s thought in a way alien to the
Bishop himself, making Augustine’s use of these terms not only determinative of
idipsum (rather than vice-versa) but
also a precursor to post-16th century readings of Thomas influenced
by nominalism which tend to destabilize and exaggerate interpretations of
Augustine himself.[21] The translations suggest not just an
infidelity to Augustinian terminology (though the glossing of idipsum is exactly this) but in the mode of their employment. Augustine’s primary use is both apophatic and
doxological (“What is idipsum, the
thing itself? How shall I say it, for if
not by saying idipsum? Brothers, if
you are able, understand idipsum. For whatever else I will have said [of God] I
cannot speak the idipsum”).[22]
These names are not terms meant to be utilized as the
capstone of an airtight theoretical system, as in Heidegger’s charge of Western
onto-theology, but ways of human grasping which address God as the one who
addressed us as Himself. Theoretical
insights are certainly possible from them, but the mode of these secondary insights would not be in the key of a
“technology of the divine” but praise, and in fact the destabilization of set
systems. Thus when Augustine does call
God “being itself,” this is not a content-rich claim somehow pried apart as a
foundational control on all subsequent revelation, but is measured by idipsum—which is to say to call God
“being itself” is to say God is God, the selfsame: “idipsum quod Deus est, quidquid illud est” (“that itself which is
God, whatever that is”).[23] The idipsum
is meant to say God is his own metric, He cannot be measured by any concept
but Himself, as Karl Barth is wont to reiterate. This is the basis of God’s non-competitive
transcendence in Augustine.[24] God as idipsum
is not merely the highest exemplification of being who jostles for priority
of influence in a zero-sum system consisting of other more diminutive agencies;
nor is God in some sense merely supernal as the negation of finite creation,
thereby placing Him in a dialectic with the world—where His transcendence could
only appear as abstract and empty, and eventually as an airy and antiquated
notion to be shorn off as unnecessary to understand the much more concrete
cosmos. Augustine’s use of idipsum speaks of a different logic
entirely.
Janet Martin Soskice has more
generally called the transition from the “Divine Names” of the Patristic and
Medieval tradition, to the “Divine Attributes,” of a Modernity embodied in
Descartes, Locke, Hobbes, and others.[25] In particular, her essay focuses on comparing
and contrasting Thomas Aquinas and John Locke.
She writes that the question “how can we name God,” can be taken in two
senses: as primarily ontological, or epistemological.[26]
These two emphases, however, says Soskice, should initially caution us to
reflect upon the otherwise banal but wide-reaching fact “that the same term may
serve different functions in different theologies.”[27] Whereas, for Aquinas—however technical his
theology may seem—it was always meant as a cautious and analogical approach to
understanding with some manner of consistency how scripture (and so revelation)
names God, and can be clarified by reason.
Moreover, Aquinas’ theology is meant to be understood as a manner of
elaborating union with God in Christ, a sort of discipleship manual for
theological exegesis and contemplation of God.[28] Locke’s understanding of predicating
attributes to God, however, is based on the primacy of reason, even to the
extent that it replaces scripture, which Locke deems often obscure and
confusing. As Soskice summarizes the
matter:
When Aquinas dealt with such predicates such as ‘eternal,’
‘one’ and ‘simple’ he stood in a tradition of reflections de nominibus Dei going back to Denys the Areopagite and beyond—a
theological and mystical as well as philosophical tradition. Locke’s confidence that not only God’s
existence but also God’s qualities could be spelled out apart from revelation
and through rational reflection alone is not new, or rather was new in Descartes, [emphasis added] whom Locke follows
here. Appellations that had been
distinctively theological became with Descartes the terminology of rational
analysis and metaphysics alone. With
Descartes the ‘divine names’ have become ‘classical attributes.’[29]
Jean-Luc Marion names a nearly identical transition: The
problem of the divine names—originally a theological issue—is transposed here
[with Descartes] for perhaps the first time, into the strictly metaphysical
domain. Here we find, in its most
essential roots, the foreshadowing of what will become some centuries later our
modern question: what name is Metaphysics qualified to give to God; what speech
is metaphysics able to utter concerning God?”[30] This epistemological dilemma does not remain
isolated in philosophy, but enters into theology through a variety of
channels—for our purposes through neo-Thomism codified via Pope Leo XIII’s
encyclical Aeterni Patris. As Alasdair MacIntyre notes, the single most
important influence upon Aeterni Patris
was the Thomist, Joseph Kleutgen—though curiously Kleutgen’s legacy, much like
Barnes’ judgment upon Kleutgen’s near-contemporary de Regnón we saw a moment
ago, is that it was as ubiquitous as it was invisible: “[Kleutgen] was probably
the most influential Catholic theologian in the nineteenth century, though
there is no study or biography and he does not have an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church,”
as Fergus Kerr puts it.[31]
MacIntyre continues:
“Kleutgen was a thinker of outstanding philosophical ability and erudition and
it is unsurprising that he and Thomists who shared his attitudes should have
created a climate of opinion in which a certain way of reading Aeterni Patris was almost taken for
granted.”[32]
What was this climate of opinion?
Kleutgen identified a discontinuity in the history of Western philosophy
separating prior times from modernity.
Yet, MacIntyre notes, “Kleutgen mislocated the rupture.” By locating the
break with Descartes, but the continuity up through Suarez, Kleutgen “overrated
later Scholasticism’s genuine debt to Aquinas,” and as such failed to
“distinguish adequately the positions of Aquinas and of Suarez.”[33] Suarez, says MacIntyre, “both in his
preoccupations and in his methods, was already a distinctively modern thinker,
perhaps more authentically than Descartes, the founder of modern philosophy.”[34] Thus whereas Aquinas’ actual method is “engaged in describing how the mind moves to
the achievement of truth … [where] the work is one of conceptual clarification,
analysis, and description,” and not at what we would call epistemological
justification. As such Aquinas’ method
reflects on the range of questions and answers given up until his time to
isolate the best answers given so far.
Kleutgen, however, “treats Aquinas as presenting a finished
system whose indebtedness to earlier writers is no more than an accidental
feature of it. And in so doing
reproduces Suarez rather than Aquinas.”[35]
Thus MacIntyre opines:
It was a mark of the unusual philosophical ingenuity of
Kleutgen that, having first misidentified Aquinas’ central positions with those
of Suarez, thus opening up a kind of epistemological question for which there
is no place within Aquinas’ own scheme of thought, he went on to supply an
epistemological answer to that question by reading into texts in De Veritate an epistemological argument
which is not in fact there. So by this
creative multiplication of misinterpretations Aquinas was presented as the
author of one more system confronting the questions of Cartesian and
post-Cartesian epistemology, advancing, so Kleutgen contended, sounder answers
than either Descartes or Kant. None of
this is in fact to be found in Aeterni
Patris itself … Scholasticism is praised insofar as it continued the work
of Aquinas. And Aquinas’s achievement is
understood as the culmination of tradition, to which both pre-Christian and
patristic authors have contributed. Epistemological
questions are nowhere adverted to. Yet
those who responded to Aeterni Patris all
too often followed Kleutgen in making epistemological concerns central to their
Thomism. And in so doing they doomed
Thomism to the fate of all philosophies which give priority to epistemological
questions: the indefinite multiplication of disagreement. There are just too many alternative ways to
begin … [A host of Thomists began] contrasting the unity of Thomist thought,
its ability to integrate disparate elements within itself, with the falling
into contention of those disparate elements in the history of philosophy from
Descartes onward so that unresolvable disagreements were continually multiplied
… Thomism, by epistemologizing itself after Aeterni
Patris, proceeded to reenact the disagreements of post-Cartesian
philosophy.[36]
Here Suarez (and to this we should
add Cardinal Cajetan) as a commentator on Thomas comes in, though we can only
deal with it briefly in order to make the connection. Whereas for Thomas God’s simplicity, for
example, was meant to identify the God who was fully in act in the divine
economy, for Suarez (and here he anticipates Kant, and later Frege) “existence”
does not add anything conceptually to “essence.” Which means that the unity of God’s
attributes are no longer viewed as such because of the personal Divine unity of
act and being (Holmes’ specific complaint), but because at some abstract level
of essence all the attributes must be identical with one another. In this way analysis is now ripe “for some
systematic science of being qua being
completely free from existence as being itself actually is.”[39] This is something that becomes shared with
the philosophical environment of Suarez’ day however varied the material
propositions involved—Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, et al: “It seems, then, to
be a fact that in the seventeenth-century classical metaphysics, essence reigns
supreme.”[40] In fact, Gilson notes how essence has turned
against existence, fundamentally inverting earlier claims in the tradition like
Aquinas. In his own way (though with
somewhat different judgment regarding what it means), Eberhard Jüngel also
narrates how in modern though God’s essence and God’s existence are turned
against one another, leading to the collapse of the doctrine of God
metaphysically conceived.[41]
Just as important as this shift in
perspective, however (and we might remind ourselves of the transition from
“Divine Names” to “Divine Attributes” that Soskice spoke of in this respect),
is the fact that Suarez comes to his position, remarkably enough, by believing
he is commenting on the authentic meaning of Thomas himself. As such it appears that however diverse the
post-Cartesian philosophical environment is, in many ways its difficulties and
successes can be seen as merely perpetuating the discourse of Aquinas or
Augustine. Undoubtedly at one level
modern philosophical discourse has rightly been shown over the last
half-century to be far more indebted to the scholasticism it often decried. And yet this should not blind us to shifts that
occurred even amongst the various similarities.
Without wanting to play Radical Orthodoxy’s game of “pin the Modernity
on Scotus,” nonetheless in this case Scotus is a factor in the shift: Suarez
“centered much of his career on commenting on Aquinas, and yet on the crucial
issue of language about God, he appealed to Aquinas greatest rival among
medieval philosophers, John Duns Scotus.”[42]
Our point here is not that
Swinburne, Plantinga, and others have no legitimate complaints when it comes to
(certain types of) the doctrine of simplicity, rather it has been to sketch
that their interpretation of DDS in Aquinas and the tradition at large is
itself in many ways indebted to Scotus, and more proximately the “essentialism”
of neo-Thomism by way of earlier commentators like Cajetan and Suarez. This runs into Leonine Thomism by the likes of
Kleutgen and others, who utilize certain foundational conceptions of God’s
“essence” in an attempt to counter modern skepticism. What we have here is the strong and purely
philosophical form of DDS, one that is being used as rationally demonstrable
natural theology to provide a foundation for later “theological” claims, in
fact has a pedigree in neo-Thomism which has also found a second life in
certain strands of Analytic theism. As
such it is no surprise, as Vanhoozer writes of Classical Theism’s contemporary
detractors that they “[conflate] the development of the doctrine of God in the
church during the patristic, medieval, and Reformation eras with the more
modern approach, characteristic of natural theology or analytical theism.”[46]
[1] G.K. Chesterton, Saint
Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox (New York: DoubleDay, 1956), xvi.
[2] Jay Wesley Richards, The
Untamed God: A Philosophical Exploration of Divine Perfection, Simplicity, and
Immutability (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2003), 213.
[3] Steven R. Holmes, “Something Much Too Plain To Say: Towards
A Defense of the Doctrine of Simplicity,” Neue
Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie. 43 (2001): 137.
[4] Robert Jenson, "The Triune
God” in Robert Jenson and Carl Braaten, eds., Christian Dogmatics 2 vols. (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press,
1984), 1: 166.
[5] Cf. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York:
Houghton-Mifflin Company, 2006),134f.
Dawkins is of course, unaware of Divine Simplicity as a theological
issue, and only obliquely attacks it by registering it as an assault on the coherence of God as an explanation for
the universe precisely because, he says, any entity that made the universe
would have to be more complex than
the universe. This would violate (what he takes to be) Ockham’s famous razor. This is an absurd position even before one
arrives at the doctrine of simplicity, for as John Lennox likes to put it,
“Henry Ford was more complex than the Model-T, and yet he created it.” Perhaps
surprisingly given the general animus toward the doctrine, a recent and
sophisticated account of God’s existence has been given with the doctrine of
simplicity as a primary movement.: Robert J. Spitzer, New Proofs for the Existence of God: Contributions of Contemporary
Physics and Philosophy (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 2010), 122ff.;
David Bentley Hart, The Experience of
God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013),
134ff.
[6] Christopher A. Franks, “The Simplicity of the Living God:
Aquinas, Barth, and Some Philosophers,” Modern
Theology, 21:2 (2005): 275-300.
Quote at 286.; Radde-Gallwitz in his own way also refutes this position
by critiquing what he terms the “epistemological priority of definition,” (Transformation of Divine Simplicity, 3)
by which he means that to know something, one must be able to define its
essence. If this epistemological
criterion is true, Simplicity thus entails a sort of perfect knowledge
(univocity) or a denial of any knowledge (equivocity). The first Radde-Gallwitz associates with
Eunomius and Aetius, the second with Clement of Alexandria. He continues his argument precisely by
claiming that the Cappadocian fathers Basil and Gregory Nyssa work out their
theology as a sort of “middle-way” between these shifting extremes. It is curious, and in regards to our thesis,
no accident, that D. Stephen Long (Speaking
of God) notices a similar oscillation between univocity and equivocity in
predication as in fact underlying large swaths of current problems within
modern theology. Thomas Aquinas attempts
to navigate a similar polarity by refuting Moses Maimonides (who championed something
akin to equivocity) and Allan of Lille (who tended toward univocity) by
proffering his concept of analogy and participation.
[7] Dolezal, God Without
Parts, 29. He continues: “Given
this outlook, it is no wonder that [Divine Simplicity] appears incoherent to
many modern philosophers and theologians.
[On this account] God, it would seem, could no more be identical with
his existence and attributes than any creature could be really identical with
its existence and attributes.” (ibid.)
[8] Stephen Holmes, “Something Much Too Plain To Say: Towards A
Defense of the Doctrine of Simplicity,” Neue
Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie. No.43 (2001): 140.
[9] Stephen Holmes “Divine Attributes,” in Mapping Modern Theology, 62-63.
While we agree that analytic theology is often beholden to the univocal
shifts we have touched upon, we do not insist that this is always so and
certainly am not closing the door a
priori on analytic work, even in regards to the Trinity. It is a sad fact, however, that up until
recently analytic theology has essentially been done with little sense of
history, and as such treats doctrine as essentially the manipulation of
timeless ideas. C.f. Milbank, Beyond Secular Order, 39: “After Scotus,
all these transcendental terms were generally no longer held to be fully
‘convertible’ with each other, such that (as for Aquinas), we only distinguish
their infinite uncreated, or even their finite, created instances from each
other from our limited cognitive point of view.
Instead, it was now held that these terms must be ‘formally
distinguished’ from each other, on pain of losing their separate meanings,
since it was now supposed that we have full and complete insight into those
meanings, precisely because ‘transcendental’ had already come to denote, long
before Kant, an a priori grasp of the
possible range of meaning of these terms.
This implies, questionably, that we can comprehend categorically the
mode of that ‘truth’ ‘goodness’ or ‘beauty’ which is possible for us to
comprehend, and that we can know in advance what formal shape it will take.”
[10] Jean-Luc Marion, “Idipsum:
The Name of God According to Augustine,” in Orthodox
Readings of Augustine, 167-191.
[11] Ibid., 175.
[12] Quoted in Ibid.
[13] Ibid., 176.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Ibid., 178.
[16] Ibid., 177.
[17] Ibid., 177.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Cf. Jean-Luc Marion, God
Without Being: Hors-Texte trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: University of
Chicago, 1995), xxiii: “Even when he thinks God as esse, Saint Thomas nevertheless does not chain God either to Being
or to metaphysics. He does not chain God
to Being because the divine esse immeasurably
surpasses (and hardly maintains an analogia
with) the ens commune of
creatures, which are characterized by the real distinction between esse and their essence, whereas God, and
He alone, absolutely merges essence with esse:
God is expressed as esse, but this esse is expressed only of God, not of
the beings of metaphysics. In this sense, Being does not erect an idol
before God, but saves His distance.”
[21] Vladimir Lossky, “Elements of ‘Negative Theology’ in the
Thought of St. Augustine,” St. Vladimir’s
Theological Quarterly, vol.21 (1977) again shows his polemical relation to
neo-Thomistic refraction which exaggerates the differences Lossky otherwise
rightly sees between Augustine and Dionysius circulating precisely around an
interpretation of Augustine’s concept of ipsum
esse: “[Dionysius] insists on the superessential character of the Thearchy,
whereas St. Augustine saw the excellence of ‘Being-Itself.’” (73). Even more
than any East/West divide based on conceptions of the Trinity—which as we have
seen is present but subdued in Lossky—Lossky “reads the defining difference
between ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ Christian approaches to theology by their different
understandings of apophaticism, seen in the ‘West’ primarily in the thought of
Augustine and Aquinas, and in the ‘East’ in the thought of Dionysius and
Gregory Palamas.” (Papanikolau, Being
With God, 19). Undoubtedly one could make the argument that there is value
in such distinctions, but the sharpness of the divide is exaggerated precisely
by a particularly strong kataphatic interpretation of Augustine’s claims which
stems from viewing him through the neo-Thomist lenses Marion has identified. Also in the background is Lossky’s own
relation to neo-Thomist critiques of Palamas of his day, which sharpen the
divide from the other direction (Being
With God 29f).
[22] Ennarations on Psalm 121.5.
[23] De Trinitate,
II.18.35.
[24] On the concept of non-competitive transcendence, cf.
Kathryn Tanner, God and Creation.;
Pannenberg, Systematic Theology,
I:400: "The Infinite that is merely a negation
of the finite is not yet truly seen as the Infinite ... for it is defined by
delimitation from something else, i.e the finite. Viewed in this way the
Infinite is a something in distinction from something else, and it is thus
finite. The Infinite is truly infinite only when it transcends its own
antithesis to the finite. In this sense the Holiness of God is truly infinite,
for it is opposed to the profane, penetrates it, and makes it holy..."
[25] Janet Martin Soskice, “Naming God: A Study of Faith and
Reason,” in Paul Griffiths and Reinhard Hütter, eds., Reason and the Reasons of Faith (New York: T&T Clark, 2005),
241-254. Cf. Marion, “The Essential
Incoherence,” 297: “The problem of the divine names—originally a theological
issue—is transposed here [with Descartes] for perhaps the first time, into the
strictly metaphysical domain. Here we
find, in its most essential roots, the foreshadowing of what will become some
centuries later our modern question: what name is Metaphysics qualified to give
to God; what speech is metaphysics able to utter concerning God?”
[26] Ibid., 254.
[27] Ibid., 252.
[28] Cf. Matthew Levering, Scripture
and Metaphysics, 1-47 for an introduction to Aquinas through this theme of
contemplating God. It is helpful to note
that our abstract associations in modern English with the word “contemplation,”
cannot be read back on Aquinas.
Contemplation involved both virtue and theory.
[29] Soskice, “Naming God,” 247.
Cf. Long, Speaking of God,180:
“Language such as divine immutability, impassibility, and ‘actus purus’
basically disappeared in the twentieth century; the theologians who defend them
today are a distinct minority. Those who
would recognize them as arising from this biblical
tradition of the divine names [emphasis added] are even fewer. Such a loss makes it more difficult to speak
well of God, for it loses the ‘way’ or logic of speaking of God that Jesus
is.” Cf. 185: “Once the tradition of the
divine names was transformed into metaphysical attributes, then God as Simple,
Perfect, Infinite, Eternal, Impassible, and Unchangeable became subject to the
same fate as metaphysics itself. The
modern era proclaimed the end of metaphysics.
If the ‘attributes’ of God depended upon a pure metaphysical reason,
then with the end of metaphysics, those attributes would likewise come to an
end, and this is what we see taking place in much of contemporary
theology. It radically shifts, almost in
a discontinuity with Christians who came before us, how we speak of God.
[30] Jean-Luc Marion, “The Essential Incoherence of Descartes’
Definition of Divinity,” in Amelie Rorty, ed., Essays on Descartes’ Meditations (Berkley: University of
California, 1986), 297; Babcock, “The Changing of the Christian God,” 145-146:
“If we want, then, to understand the ‘vast puzzles’ [quoting Nicholas Lash]
that lurk behind the shift in the identity of Western Christianity’s God, we
will need to discover how to plot—not only for the history of culture generally
but also and quite specifically for the history of Christianity and of
Christian theology—the ways in which human sensibilities changed in the
seventeenth century. The changes were
vast enough to require a new language for their expression, the language that
first Bacon and then Locke sought to provide; and they were vast enough, too,
to lead Christians to abandon their
ancient name for God—in effect, to adopt another God.” On this Nicholas Wolterstorff, “The Migration
of the Theistic Arguments: From Natural Theology to Evidentialist Apologetics,”
in Rationality, Religious Belief, and
Moral Commitment: New Essays in the Philosophy of Religion, ed. Robert Audi
and William Wainwright (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 39, argues for
a similar shift: “The medieval project of natural theology was profoundly
different from the Enlightenment project of evidentialist apologetics. It had different goals, presupposed different
convictions, and was evoked by a different situation. It is true that some of the same arguments
occur in both projects; they migrate from one to the other. But our recognition of the identity of the
émigré must not blind us to the fact that he has migrated from one ‘world’ to
another.” Cf. Simon Oliver, “Motion According to Aquinas and Newton,” Modern Theology 17:2 (April, 2001):
163-199, where he compares and contrasts Aquinas with Newton on the somewhat
strange-sounding topic of how both view “motion” in relation to God. Oliver argues that Isaac Newton’s mechanistic
conception of matter and motion were logically related to his non-trinitarian
Voluntarism and Arianism. Precisely
because Christ was not viewed as God Incarnate, the Eternally Begotten Logos-Wisdom of the Father to which the
ordered causality and intelligible motion of the world bear analogical witness,
God’s relation to creation became envisioned purely along the lines of an act
of sheer Will. Cf. 191: “Ultimately,
[for Aquinas] all motion is seen as a participation in the most perfect
‘motionless motion’ of the Trinitarian Godhead [that is, in the generation of
the Son and procession of the Spirit from the Father] in which all things are
known, and thereby created and sustained, in the eternal emanation of the Son
from the Father. By contrast, Newton outlined a view of motion, which saw this
category as a primitive state to which bodies are indifferent. Thus motion
tells us nothing about the ontology of creation.”
[31] Kerr, After Aquinas,
216 n.3.
[32] Alasdair MacIntyre, Three
Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (Notre
Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 73.
[33] Ibid.
[34] Ibid.
[35] Ibid., 74.
[36] Ibid. 75.
[37] Russell L. Friedman, Medieval
Trinitarian Thought: From Aquinas to Ockham (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010), 100.; cf. Christopher Stead, “Divine Simplicity as a
Problem for Orthodoxy,” Rowan Williams, ed., The Making of Orthodoxy: Essays in Honor of Henry Chadwick (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989), 256: “we must not think that simplicity is
itself a simple notion.”; Andrew Radde-Gallwitz, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and the Transformation of Divine
Simplicity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)
[38] Radde-Gallwitz, Transformation
of Divine Simplicity, 5. Here
Radde-Gallwitz identifies this position with Augustine and Aquinas. In a sense he is not wrong, but the specific
nature of the identity-thesis accepted or rejected by our contemporary thought
is often making quite different claims regarding the scope and function of the
doctrine.
[39] Etienne Gilson, Being
and Some Philosophers (Rome: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies,
1952), 112.
[40] Ibid., 111.
[41] Eberhard Jüngel, God
as the Mystery of the World: On the Foundations of the Theology of the
Crucified One in the Dispute Between Theism and Atheism. Trans. Darrel L.
Guder (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 1983), 105-226. Cf. Paul DeHart, Beyond the Necessary God: Trinitarian Faith
and Philosophy in the Thought of Eberhard Jüngel (Atlanta: American Academy
of Religion, 1999), e.g. 12: “for Jüngel, the philosophical and theological
conception of God’s simplicity is centrally implicated in the collapse of
traditional theistic models in post-Cartesian metaphysics.” DeHart is quite right, however, to note that
Jüngel’s theology is not merely a jettisoning of the doctrine of simplicity,
but is in a certain sense the “search for a new doctrine of simplicity” (15)
that uses multiple sources, perhaps most notably Karl Barth, to reevaluate what
it means to say God’s essence is identical to His existence.
[42] Placher, Domestication
of Transcendence, 75.
[43] Richard Swinburne, The
Coherence of Theism (Oxford: Oxford University, 1993), 81.
[44] Richard Swinburne, The
Christian God (Oxford: Oxford University, 1994), 160.
[45] Alvin Plantinga, Does
God Have a Nature? (Milwaukie: Marquette University Press, 1980), 47.
[46] Vanhoozer, Remythologizing
Theology, 89.
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