The Invention of "Classical Theism" (My Abridged Thesis Part Seven): Gods, August and Otherwise
Yet, as with other areas mentioned in
the introduction it seems these historical “placings” of Augustine are subtly
inscribed with preconceived readings of him in such a way that they produce as much as find the Augustine
for which they are looking. Here it
serves us well to cite Daniel Castelo’s general judgment at length, who gives an
excellent summary (specifically in regards to divine immutability, but which
can be easily extended to simplicity and Classical theism as a whole):
Unfortunately in the area of systematic theology, if the
theme of divine impassibility does happen to be mentioned, it is usually in the
form of derision, usually with the evaluation of past sources as inadequate or
overly wedded to past conceptual tendencies.
With such approaches, thinkers try to resolve or improve these sources
rather than entertain or engage them on their own terms … Often … the dismissal
is phrased as a rejection of ‘classical theism.’ This phrase is a catch-all category,
suggesting that previous voices within the tradition operated by means of a
unified account of metaphysics that has as its orienting concerns Hellenistic
philosophical categories … This narrative is both comforting and helpful when
contemporary observers have to wrestle with the fact that for many in the
ancient church the axiom of divine impassibility was prominent in their
God-talk. This linguistic and conceptual
feature can be explained away as an accident of history rather than a category
that was used intentionally and in a qualified way by many within the early
church. The narrative of ‘classical
theism’ is a convenient way of sidestepping the difficulty that is involved in
speaking about historical constructs that address the relationship between God
and suffering. Is it no wonder then that
so many individuals assume this grand narrative? ... [Yet] given that
‘classical theism’ is an anachronistic category of convenience for labeling
different and distinct voices under one heading, the term fails to account for
the multivalent ways in which divine impassibility functioned for numerous
ancient writers and thinkers, especially those who were able to affirm both
divine impassibility and the
legitimacy and value of the incarnate Christ who suffered in the flesh … [I
argue] that the category of ‘classical
theism’ [is] nonviable for contemporary systematics … [Emphasis added].[2]
Castelo continues, and observes of the “suffering God” debate
that: “Historical narrations of the shift [to a passible God] have ensued with
the purposes of establishing some sort of continuity with the received
tradition, but interestingly enough the
assessment of the change has occurred post factum to divine passibility’s establishment as the biblical and conceptual
norm [Emphasis added].” In other words, “the impulse to affirm ‘a suffering
God’ was often applied to, rather
than generated from, the inquiry
itself, thereby skewing the ensuing historical findings and reconstructions.”[3] Paul Gavrilyuk has recently concluded much
the same: “Patristic theology did not face a choice between the apathetic deity
of the philosophers and the suffering God of the Bible, because these views of
God represent questionable scholarly constructs, rather than the actual
theological options available to the theologians of late antiquity.”[4] Gavrilyuk’s and Castelo’s remarks, of course,
apply to the “Hellenization thesis,” not nominalism. At this juncture then, let us repeat again:
the thesis of univocalist and post-nominalist shifts are meant to be neither
monolithic (controlling all other interpretations) nor exclusive (excluding
other interpretations).
The specific nature of the
“Hellenization thesis” and its concomitants must be accounted for in contemporary
rejections of “Classical theism.” Yet it
is precisely the exaggeration of reason, and the increasing precision of its
distinction from faith in the nominalist shifts, which progressively exaggerate
the theological commentator’s ability to discern what is a “purely
philosophical” addendum, and what is pristine and originally “Biblical.” Thus trains of thought regarding the
“Hellenization thesis,” collude with similar pressures coming from the
univocalist and post-nominalist shifts, in particular in its reaction against neo-Thomism,
which makes pride of place for philosophy and “pure nature’s” ability to ground
the turn to specifically theological discourse.
The reaction against this means that whatever resembles Hellenistic discourse
is viewed with suspicion as a control
on biblical discourse, and so thereby is a corruption that needs to be
expunged.[5]
Charges similar to Castello’s have been
leveled at Process Philosophy by Medieval historian David Burrell. Noting what Process Philosophy often
castigates as “Classical theism,” bears only superficial resemblance to a much
more robust phenomenon (“a hodgepodge that bears little historical scrutiny”[6] in
his words), he asks: “wherein lies the appeal?”[7] On the next page he answers his own question
by noting that despite Process philosophy’s own self-understanding, it was
reacting not to classical theology, but to the abstract God of both Liberalism
and more conservative strands of Natural theology, where the trinity and
incarnation “were already vestigial myths.”[8] This “merely monotheistic” God seemed both
distant and abstract, and was anachronistically retrojected as implicit in
Patristic and Medieval language of transcendence and its concomitants. From such a vantage point, “classical treatments of divine transcendence,
shorn of their intentional side as developed in the doctrines of Incarnation
and of Trinity, could appear to be in need of radical revision. But in retrospect it might appear that so
drastic a revision was required only because the earlier surgery had been so
radical [Emphasis added].”[9]
This “post factum” criterion applied to,
rather than (merely) generated from, the historical tradition regarding
Augustine, is to such an effect that even English translations of Augustine’s
work have been inscribed by certain trends stemming from narratives
presupposing Augustine’s place in the history of theology. 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. 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.”[16] 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].[17] 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].”[18]
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.[19] 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.[20] 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 as we have said 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”).[21] 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”).[22] 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.[23] 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. Those, for example,
who (positively or negatively) describe Augustine as champion of a “timeless
God” are not wrong, but are insufficient to him. A God described as timeless is merely
transcendent in a negative sense, and still implicitly referenced in terms
dependent for their negative definition on the time-bound character of the
world. This point is elegantly put by
David Bentley Hart, here in regards to apatheia:
Though the theologian must affirm that God is
by nature beyond every pathos—in the
purely technical sense of a change or modification of his nature or essence,
passively received ab extra—this is not merely to say that he is
impervious to external shock. If it were, it would mean only that he
enjoys to a perfect degree the same affective poverty as a granite
escarpment. He would not really be beyond suffering at all, but
simply incapable of it; to call him impassible would be then to say no more
than that, in the order of the mutable, he is immutable; or that, in the order
of the contingent, he is rescued from contingency simply by virtue of being
that force that is supreme among all other forces. This would, in a very
real sense, place God in rivalry to all finite things, though a rivalry
that—through the sheer mathematics of omnipotence—he has already won. But
this is folly. Divine apatheia is not merely the opposite of
possibility; it is God’s transcendence of the very distinction between
responsive and unresponsive, between receptivity and resistance. It is
the Trinity’s infinite fullness of perfected love, which gives all and receives
all in a single movement, and which does not require the supplement of any
external force in order to know and to love creation in its uttermost
depths. Whereas we—finite, composite, and changing beings that we
are—cannot know, love, or act save through a relation to that which affects us
and which we affect, God’s impassibility is the infinitely active and eternally
prior love in which our experience of love—in both its active and its passive
dimensions—lives, moves, and has its being. God’s apatheia is his
perfect liberty to be present in both our passions and our actions, but in
either case as a free, creative, and pure act.[24]
Idipsum is Augustine’s signal that he does not
stop at this dialectic of time/timelessness or God/world. As he says commenting upon the figure of
Wisdom in The Wisdom of Solomon: she
stands firm, “if we can properly say she stands; the expression connotes
immutability, not immobility” (dicitur
autem propter incommutabilitatem, non propter immobilitatem).[25] For God is not related to eternity analogous
to the way we are to time; God who is Trinity
is eternity—“eternity is the very
substance of God.”[26] As such “Augustine’s immutability,” says
Ayres (and we might extend this to his doctrine of God at large), “should not
be taken as a simple projection of stasis as we see it in the created order.”[27] Neither the apophatic nor the kataphatic way
is valid in and of itself, for both are abstractions (albeit necessary ones)
that gesture toward the primal reality
of the God who is Triune, and the finite world’s participation and expression of
that freedom precisely in its acts of autonomy and worldliness:[28]
We should understand God, if we can and as far as we can, to
be good without quality, great without quantity, creative without need or
necessity, presiding without position, holding all things together without
possession, wholly everywhere without place, everlasting without time, without
any change in himself making changeable things, and undergoing nothing. Whoever thinks of God like that may not yet
be able to discover altogether what He is
[emphasis added], but is at least piously on his guard against thinking
about him anything that He is not.[29]
[1] Cf. Allen, “Exodus 3 After the Hellenization Thesis.”
[2] Daniel Castelo, The
Apathetic God: Exploring the Contemporary Relevance of Divine Impassibility (Eugene:
Wipf and Stock, 2009), 40-41. For a
short overview on the rise of passibilist theology, cf. Ronald R. Goetz, “The
Suffering of God: The Rise of a New Orthodoxy,” The Christian Century 103 (1986): 385-389, and the first chapter in
Thomas Weinandy, Does God Suffer?.
[3] Ibid., 10.
[4] Gavrilyuk, Suffering
of the Impassible God, 172.
[5] This is not just speculation, but occurs in Gunton, as a
prime example. He represents a fairly
pure candidate for our thesis, insofar as he has explicitly drawn a straight
historical line between Augustine and Ockham in order to reject both (Colin
Gunton, The One, The Three, And the Many:
God, Creation, and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993), 51-61. This
occurs, intriguingly and precisely as Augustine’s tendency to “Platonize”
scripture are seen by Gunton to circumvent Christology and robust
Trinitarianism the same way Ockham’s voluntarism came to do. Yet Gunton is unfortunately historically
naïve at this point, and jumps across large swaths of detail to make his
case; Bradley G. Green, Colin Gunton and the Failure of Augustine:
The Theology of Colin Gunton in Light of Augustine (Eugene: Wipf and Stock,
2011), 47, writes: “After reading and re-reading Gunton, I am still puzzled by
[him] at this point.” The correlation of
those who attempt to revise something akin to “Classical Theism,” does not,
however, have a necessary connection with the acceptation of the “Hellenization
thesis.” Bruce McCormack, for example,
has recently argued that Barth both rejects the Hellenization thesis, and yet
his “actualist” picture of God nonetheless is a rewriting of traditional
metaphysics. See: Bruce McCormack,
“Divine Impassibility or Simply Divine Constancy? Implications of Karl Barth’s
Later Christology for Debates Over Impassibility,” in Divine Impassibility and the Mystery of Human Suffering ed. James
Keating and Thomas Joseph White, O.P.,(Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing,
2009) 150-187. McCormack has on the same accounts given very
perceptive (and lengthy) criticisms of Open Theism from a Barthian
perspective. Whereas Open-Theism in
essence buys the “Hellenization” thesis, and so attempts to revise the
Classical Theistic picture piecemeal according to a more “Biblical” reading,
McCormack notes that this simply makes Theism incoherent, it cannot be
“adjusted” like this but has to be a “wholesale revision”—as he thinks Barth,
or at least his reading of Barth—via his “Actualism” successfully accomplishes
by incorporating and transcending concerns from both Theists and Open
Theists. For what its worth we find
McCormack’s reading of Barth to be one of the very few consistent competitors
to Classical Theistic Trinitarianism.
See: Bruce McCormack, “The Actuality of God: Karl Barth in Conversation
With Open Theism,” in Bruce McCormack, ed. Engaging
the Doctrine of God: Contemporary Protestant Perspectives (Grand Rapids:
Baker Academic, 2008), 185-245.
Nonetheless, if McCormack is right to point out that in Barth the
Hellenization thesis is non-necessary to develop a“revisionary” picture of God,
D. Stephen Long has recently argued cogently that in some sense Barth’s
relation to nominalism is implicated in McCormack’s own overturning of von
Balthasar’s understanding that Barth is quintessentially an anti-nominalist
theologian. Cf. D. Stephen Long, Saving Karl Barth: Hans Urs Von Balthasar’s
Preoccupation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014), e.g. 4: “Von Balthasar
saw in Barth the overcoming of the nominalist doctrine of god that could not
adequately express God’s glory.”
[6] David Burrell, “Does Process Theology Rest on a Mistake?” Theological Studies 43 (1982), 129.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid., 130.
[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.
[18] Ibid.
[19] 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.”
[20] 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).
[21] Ennarations on Psalm 121.5.
[22] De Trinitate,
II.18.35.
[23] 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..."
[24] David Bentley Hart,
"Impassibility as Transcendence: On the Infinite Innocence of God,"
in Divine Impassibility and the Mystery of Human Suffering ed.
James Keating and Thomas Joseph White (Grand Rapids: Eerdman's Publishing,
2009), 300-301. C.f Weinandy, Does God Suffer?, 110f, for a similar
point.
[25] Ennarationes on
Psalms 138.8., cited in Ayres, Augustine
and the Trinity, 203. Maximus the Confessor has a similar view: “Both ways
of speaking [apophatic and kataphatic] must, in their proper sense, be
applicable to [God], yet on the other hand neither of them—being or not
being—can be applicable in the proper sense … neither way of speaking presents
us with the real identity of what we are looking for, in its essence and nature
… [God’s reality] has a simple and unknown mode of existence, inaccessible to
all minds and unsearchable in every way, exalted beyond all affirmation and
denial.” (Mystagogia, PG 91, 664AC).
[26] Ennarationes on Psalm
101, cited in Ayres, Augustine and
the Trinity, 204.
[27] Ayres, Augustine and
the Trinity, 203.
[28] This concept of God that must transcend the
apophatic/kataphatic dialectic is surveyed at length in the Patristic and
Medieval tradition in Henri de Lubac, The
Discovery of God, 35-57. Cf. 39-40:
“the idea of God is mysteriously present in us from the beginning, prior to our
concepts, although beyond our grasp without their help, and prior to all our
argumentation … it is the inspiration, the motive power and justification of
them all … the idea of God presides over our negations and our critiques,
rather in the same way that a word on the tip of one’s tongue—a word one knows
perfectly well, tries to recall and cannot quite articulate—will brush aside
and eliminate all the other words that present themselves to the mind. ” Cf. Tanner, Jesus, Humanity, and Trinity, 1-35.
[29] De Trinitate, V,
prologue.
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