The Invention of Classical Theism (My Abridged Thesis Part Eight): Proof, Such As It Is
Such shifts in
understanding as hinted at in the last chapter and now inscribed into
translations of Augustine himself, affect the very mode in which criticisms or
receptions of the tradition on these counts of simplicity, transcendence, eternity,
and other so-called “Classical attributes,” are made. Take for example Jürgen Moltmann’s peculiar
doctrine of tsimsum, taken from
Jewish Kabbalah and meant as a particularly aggressive reposte to much of
classical theism’s picture of God’s absoluteness: here space for creation is
allowed by God’s “contraction” into himself.[1]
Yet curiously if God
must “contract” to allow “room” for creation “apart” from the theistic God’s “immensity”
(the scare quotes promulgate quickly at this point), then already the critique
has misconstrued God’s immensity along finitized, univocal lines (even where
God is spoken of as infinite), and consequently inscribes this feature within
the solution it posits as a counterpositional exegesis of scripture. Even if we put aside the bodily connotations
of the idea (Moltmann does not, unlike Clark Pinnock, want to predicate a body
of God qua God),[2]
and assume this is a metaphysical contraction (however that might be
construed), in order to view this as overcoming classical “impassibility” or
“transcendence” one has to envision that classical doctrine along the lines of
competitive transcendence, which as we saw above was one of the implications of
the univocalist and nominalist transmutation.
But as we have also seen, this is precisely to misconstrue Augustine and
Aquinas and really the Patristic and Medieval tradition at large, and so
attempt to provide not only a solution to a false problem, but one that remains
within the bounds of post-nominalist and univocalist changes by merely shifting
within a spectrum defined by it: God is too big? He must become smaller to
allow room.[3] One gets the picture of a fat God sucking in
his belly (tsimsum in Kabbalah was
literally the “deep breath” God takes before exhaling the creative Word of
Creation). Similar criticisms could be
extended to other paradigms that finds it necessary to speak of God’s
“self-limitation,” where He in some sense must be absolved of transcendence to
allow created freedom, or in kenotic Christologies that feel a profoundly
literal “emptying” must occur in order for the divine Logos to “fit” (to put it
crudely) into Jesus, or more generally to allow space for created freedom.[4]
Or again, the Social
Trinitarian reaction against Augustine and the West’s supposed “modalism”—itself
not unrelated to kenosis, but as two proponents have argued strong kenotic
models must presuppose social
trinitarianism[5]—itself
rejoins Augustine’s “substance” language as if it were offering a rationalistic
definition of God, and then oscillates into, if not quite its opposite (which
would presumably be tri-theism) something quite close to it.[6] No longer bound by what it views as the
austere and impersonal strictures of simplicity or substance-language, this “social
trinitarianism”[7] shifts talk of God’s unity as a
function of the three persons,
ladening perichoresis with a “projection” of ideal human social and personal categories. This circumvents not just Augustine’s complex
views on language and predication in relation to his theology of the Trinity
and Christology, but often ignores the quagmire of linguistic difficulties
involved in speaking of God that the Cappadocians
were well aware of, in order to go straight to the Cappadocians’ supposedly
proto social-trinitarianism. In fact,
though we can only touch on this in our conclusion, such highly specific
notions of personhood and relation vaunted as the new fecundity of Trinitarian
theology in our era, ironically recapitulates (in a slightly new key) the very
reasons for Trinitarian decline in
the 17th century. It is
curious to note, for example, that despite his fame for working with
Cappadocian theology, Zizioulas nowhere goes into detail regarding their
predication theories.[8] This lacuna reinforces the sharp either-or of
God as One or God as Three by giving the impression one has a sort of direct
access to either, which of course mimics as well the neo-Thomistic
interpretation of de Regnón, though it is obviously not limited to this origin.[9]
Even further, we can
hypothesize that if nominalism were influencing interpretation as we claim, one
would also expect that concepts like “substance” or “essence” would become
abstract and subordinate to particulars, thereby burdening the exegesis of upostasiV and ousia in the
Fathers not only by reading them against one another, but by prioritizing upostasiV--now
understood in a much more individualized or particular sense than was ever
intended. Yet
without demanding that they are thereby explicitly relying on nominalism, this
is exactly what one gets with LaCugna and Zizioulas, for example. In fact one recent interpreter of LaCugna
records,
LaCugna’s account of the Cappadocians [where she understands
upostasiV to mean “concrete
existence”] fails to appreciate [ousia and upostasiV ’] mutual dependence.
Her theology reflects a nominalist
misreading of their metaphysic [emphasis added], in so far as ousia
for LaCugna is a term that is merely expressive of existence, but what actually exists are the
individual upostaseiV. Since there is no
‘real’ ousia in LaCugna’s portrayal of the
Cappadocians, and since (on her account), she concludes that ‘personhood and not substance [is] the
ultimate principle’ in Cappadocian theology.[10]
Raith concludes of
LaCugna’s nominalist reading of the Cappadocians that, as such: “she
‘conflates’ the concepts of ‘being’ and ‘person’ resulting in a concept of
being that can no longer be used in its original Cappadocian context to refer
to God in his utter simplicity and unity.”[11] This nominalist reading can also manifest in
the sense that each upostasiV can
gain dense psychological predication,[12]
and in particular that each possesses a will tuned in agreement with the
others, rather than the traditional teaching that all three possess one will, precisely because will is linked to substance. With the nominalist dissolution of substances
as real, will becomes a predicate of “concrete existence.”[13]
These nominalist
inflections of the tradition affect historiographical selection techniques as
well, for example:
A thorough study of the Cappadocians would have to admit
that a variety of strategies are employed and concepts used by them, to
safeguard the Trinitarian unity … A first
question that must be asked of the Gunton/Zizioulas approach is why they
privilege or select certain concepts and strategies (principally koinonia)
above others [Emphasis added]. If Gunton and Zizioulas have yet to explain
why they select certain concepts from the Cappadocians and not others, they
also have to fully elucidate why they appear to reduce the concept of ousia (essence/substance) found in the
Cappadocians, to the concept of koinonia
(communion).[14]
Fermer is quite aware
(and disapproving) of the Cappadocian/Augustinian binary—his question is as
such, rhetorical. He already knows why
they select the way they do: because the Cappadocians are being interpreted
over as more personalist or socially minded, against a specific interpretation
of Augustine as having a “substance metaphysic” which is considered to be a
prodigious eraser of personhood. Nor is
this, as we have seen, isolated to Zizioulas or Gunton. This selection and interpretation process
that prioritizes theologians according to their preferred analogies for God, as
Khaled Anatolios has recently argued, tends to spill over and skew historical
studies at large.[15] 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.”[16] 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].[17]
Holmes thus concludes of this “Perfect Being
theism” that it in fact is relatively recent, “in fact Leibniz might be the
first to employ [ens perfectissimum]
as the central claim concerning God,” and that when it was catalyzed by the
same shifts that de Lubac and MacIntyre identified with Kleutgen and the post-Aeterni Patris environment, Holmes notes
these arguments look like “almost a parody” of Aquinas’ “Five Ways,” or
arguments regarding God, and the picture of God that emerges begins to resemble
what many including Isaac Dorner critiqued as its “Classical conception.”[18] Holmes’ opinion is shared by others with quite
similar prognoses. Kevin Vanhoozer, for
example, 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.”[19] This is not (just) a general criticism,
rather its features tend in a very specific direction: This “modern approach”
which Vanhoozer equates with what he calls “analytical theism,” is a discourse
demarcated precisely by what one would expect given Marion’s analysis of idipsum being glossed by a particular neo-Thomistic
(and hence, broadly understood as post-Cartesian) understanding of ipsum esse as causa sui: clear and pristine conclusions moving deductively from
initial and analytically precise definitions (like being-itself) produced from
a consideration of “pure nature.” In
other words: epistemological preference for univocal predication between
creatures and God. In his recent
book-length defense of divine simplicity, James Dolezal concurs: “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.”[20]
Notice that there are
different ways nominalism and univocity are operating here: first, nominalism, or something shaped by
it, can be conflated with the development of the earlier tradition in order to
then be rejected. This is Vanhoozer’s
sense. Additional and very sophisticated
examples of this (which cannot be reduced ad
absurdum to our thesis, but which are surely implicated in part) would be
Philip Clayton’s magisterial The Problem
of God in Modern Thought, and Eberhard Jüngel’s equally complex God as the Mystery of the World.[21]
For both, the particular course of Western metaphysics culminating in protest
Atheism and the Death of God movements, redounds precisely upon narrating both
a legacy from Augustine through Descartes into Modern philosophy, and the
historically describable disintegration of divine simplicity—though each
attacks the problem from their own angle (albeit over very similar periods of
history, from Descartes up until Nietzsche and Schelling).
For Clayton, the
story of Modern philosophical theology “is a story of how two major strands of
pre-modern thought about the divine—the divine as infinite, and the divine as
perfect—became entwined, defined the agenda for modern thought in a form known
as ‘onto-theology’ and then separated
again, perhaps permanently.”[22] This separation occurs, in Clayton’s analysis,
because of a fundamental incoherence:
“the two concepts [infinity and perfection] evidence radically different
logics.”[23] Thus the Western metaphysical tradition for
Clayton (especially as analyzed through Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Fichte, and
ultimately Schelling) is nothing but various negotiations attempting to stem
the hemorrhaging of its own intrinsic impossibility. “It may be,” says Clayton,
“that we will be forced to prefer one [infinity or perfection] over the other.”[24] After he finishes a lengthy narration—the
“collapse of the early modern view of God, the God of infinite perfection,”[25]—the
general thought he has put forward many times through the book, namely “Could
it be that the real problem here is perfection-based theology itself?”[26]—reaches
its head. As perhaps the most
sophisticated voice among those advocating for Christian panentheism, Clayton
opts no longer for a God of perfection but of infinity precisely on the basis
of this history.[27]
On the other hand, Jüngel’s ultimate
goal is to move beyond the onto-theological metaphysics of perfection in order
to radically re-conceptualize God’s identification with the crucified Christ
and recapture the theological power
within the concept of “the death of God,” which Jüngel traces as a concept
which started in Christian theology,
and then migrated into philosophy, and ultimately to protest-atheism itself.[28] “As far as the concept of God is concerned,
the history of European Christianity until now has fallen prey to this danger ...
It has considered itself capable of thinking God without thinking of him
simultaneously as the crucified . . . the perfection
of God required by the law of metaphysics forbade imagining God as suffering or
even thinking of him together with the one who was dead.”[29]
When Christian theology does this, and
one gains a proper re-contextualization of theism within its crucified identity
with the Nazarene, theology can begin to affirm “talk about the death of God is
a meaningful but inauthentic expression of the impossibility of continuing to
think God, postulated metaphysically as independent absoluteness, in the unity
of divine essence and divine existence.”[30] Jüngel’s discussion is in its basic structure
contained within the constellating line drawn between Augustine and Descartes
that we have hinted at. In its essence
Jüngel’s treatment of modern atheism revolves around the question of God’s
“location,”[31]
and this, perhaps surprisingly, implicates divine simplicity. “In order to think God really,” says Jüngel, “the simultaneous originality and unity
of his essence and his existence had to be conceived of. But, in order to think God really, one had to make a mental distinction between his
essence and his existence.”[32] In the Cartesian turn to methodological
doubt, however, as is famous, the cogito became
the indubitable foundation and criteria for all real existence and essences. “I
think, therefore I am,” not only established the existence of the ego but its
essence: “I think therefore I am means then ‘I am a thinking essence.’”[33]
The aporia is that the cogito can only work momentarily, that
is, in the instant it occurs: “the certainty of this cogito me cogitare [I think myself thinking] is the certainty of
reflective doubt which can assure me only of my present existence.” And this is precisely because “memory is not
removed [by Descartes] from the suspicion of deception. Descartes expressly says ‘…that this
proposition: I am, I exist, is
necessarily true [only] every time I pronounce it or conceive of it in my
mind.’”[34] This meant “that man is constantly thrown
back upon the zero point of cogito me
cogitare.”[35] Here—though Descartes does not perceive it,
the argument begins a historical unraveling of the concept of God. The formal distinction between God’s essence
and God’s existence transmutes into a real distinction. “To exist,” for Descartes based on the
strictures of the cogito means “to be
present to the ego.” All objective presence,
all objective existence, is an adjunct to subjective self-presence. The simple unity of God’s essence and
existence become rent precisely down
the fissure this begins to open. To
understand his complex point, it behooves us to quote two passages from Jüngel
at length:
In order to demonstrate the actual strength of man is his
weakness, a proof of the existence of God was needed which showed God to be a
‘necessary existence’ (ens necessarium)
which was free of that very human defect.
For man could be defined as man only by referring to something which is
‘more perfect than man.’ God could then
be God only in that he is not less perfect than he is. But if the perfections of God is an important
theme [for Descartes] only because man is not quite perfect and needs something
more perfect above himself to secure himself, then paradoxically the idea of a
perfect God is dependent upon the postulate of a less perfect reality—that is,
the self-understanding of man. God ends
up in the position of a predicate of perfection, which is conceived of in terms
of the defectiveness of a not quite perfect human essence. Thus, by identifying God with that which is
highest, God is totally relativized by
man. The [act of] understanding God
makes itself its own problem.[36]
We are dealing with a disintegration in a very precise sense
of the word. For the new metaphysical
approach of Descartes requires, in spite of the historical disclaimers he made,
that God’s being be so radically divided into his essence and his existence,
that the understanding of God must disintegrate…The concealed problem consists
of the fact that God only enters into the presence [of existence] which allows
him to be [and be present] when he is represented (imagined) as God.
The ego as ‘thinking thing’ has become the subject…of all
existence. That means that God, when he
is conceived of by me as God, must in
terms of His essence be above me and with himself, only with himself. But in terms of his existence, as this essence, God must be with me and only with me, because only through me can he be present.[37]
As DeHart summarizes Jüngel’s argument,
in terms quite reminiscent of Clayton’s similar language regarding God’s
perfection and God’s infinity: “it therefore seems that the concepts of divine
essence and divine existence are moving in opposite directions, so to speak.”[38] Jüngel’s point can be made by analogy to a
picture often referred to as “Jastrow’s duckrabbit.” Depending on how one views the picture, it
either looks like a duck, or a rabbit.
The catch is that it cannot look like both simultaneously, so each image
exists, so to speak, only in the absence of the other. When man “proves” the existence of God,
precisely by “capturing” it in the presence of the ego, it is God’s essence as “that which is infinitely
superior to me” which seems to evanesce.
Conversely, if one could speak in the abstract of God’s essence in his
azure heights, it is precisely his existence
within the Cartesian system that is no longer secured, because it is not
discernable “by me,” and so vanishes.
What is curious about the theses of
both Clayton and Jüngel is that God in post-Cartesian metaphysics splits
precisely along the cracks diagnosed by Marion as concentrating the residual
post-nominalist oscillations of infinity and perfection in Descartes’ thought:
the cracks of a God strained both completely beyond and completely within human
reason. It is simply that both Clayton
and Jüngel assume a continuity between Cartesian questions (and so, answers)
and the earlier tradition that no longer seems particularly viable.[39] Thus while their respective critiques of modern (and largely philosophical) theism
in our view remain largely cogent, it is the retrojection of these problems as
a consummation of aporia in Western Christian discourse at large—Patristic and Medieval—that seems off base. But precisely such a continuity provides both
of their staggeringly learned analyses a much-needed pivot to move their own constructive
proposals into a position of supplanting what they consider deficiencies. So while our genealogy does not approach
deconstructing their brilliant projects as a whole, there is a critical sting in
the assertion that the critiques their solutions presuppose are at the very
least highly questionable.
In a second and
related sense, nominalism can be (explicitly or implicitly) assumed as the modus operandi of theology, and the
fleeting, analogical nature of the tradition found wanting under these more
exacting considerations. This is the
general consensus of the emerging movement of analytic theology. There is a third sense as well: it is not merely detractors who suffer from this historiographical
deficiency, but many proponents, again especially amongst the Anglo-American
analytic tradition.[40]
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.”[41] 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. Fourth, as we saw
with LaCugna, nominalism can deputize individual terms and concepts to fill
them with alien content and/or modes of employment, thus coupling with the de
Regnón paradigm, e.g., for a particular reading of the Cappadocians. Here both
opponents and proponents seem to be missing not only how simplicity occurred in
the Christological and ultimately Trinitarian thought world of Augustine and
Aquinas, they miss the specifically exegetical reasons for its employment by
turning straight away (implicitly or explicitly) into questions of univocal/analytical
philosophy to either verify or make hash of the doctrine. As we have seen in the last chapter, such
misunderstandings also play into reinforcing an understanding of the specific
differences between Western and Eastern trinitarianism as well when coupled
with the de Regnón paradigm
[1] Cf. Moltmann, Trinity
and the Kingdom, 110ff.
[2] Cf. Clark Pinnock, The
Most-Moved Mover (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001), 34: “There is an
issue that has not been raised yet in the discussion around the open view of
God. If He is with us in the world, if
we are to take biblical metaphors seriously, [!] is God in some sense
embodied? Critics will be quick to say
that though there are expressions of this idea in the bible, we shouldn’t take
them literally. But I do not believe
that the idea is as foreign to the Bible’s view of God as we have assumed. In tradition, God is thought to function
primarily as a disembodied spirit, but this is scarcely a biblical idea. For example Israel is called to hear God’s
word, to gaze on his glory and beauty.
Human beings are said to be embodied creatures created in the image of
God. Is there perhaps something in God
which corresponds to embodiment? Having
a body is certainly not a negative thing because it makes it possible for us to
be agents. Perhaps God’s agency would be
easier to envisage if he were in some way corporeal.” Among many things, it is interesting to note
that Pinnock’s argument slides from “taking Biblical metaphors seriously” into
“making God’s agency easier to understand.”
[3] O’Regan believes much the same of Moltmann, cf. Anatomy of Misremembering, 346:
“Moltmann’s impatience with paradox is symptomatic, perhaps suggesting that
Moltmann’s honesty resolves in the end to a post-Enlightenment commitment the
univocal.” It is absolutely fascinating
to note that in saying this, O’Regan also notes that the many oscillations of
post-nominalist shifts we spoke of in the last chapter are also exemplified in
Moltmann (348-350): “In a fundamental way, then, Moltmann reenacts the Hegelian
eclipse of biblical and Christian dramatics, which depend upon distinct spheres
of incommensurable—though not incompatible—agency. In this eclipse, the historicization of God
is married to the apotheosis of the world and human being. Thus, we have at once the exaggeration of the
horizontal and vertical poles of the relation between God and the world…as a
matter of fact Moltmann demonstrates extraordinary certainty regarding the
nature of God. God, or God’s history,
can be unambiguously read off the history of the world.” Of course again, this cannot simply be cited
as the legacy of nominalism and voluntarism (in a negative key) as there is an
extremely complex tale to be told regarding the influence of Jewish Kaballah
and Gnosticism on Hegel himself that then also finds its way into
Moltmann. Cf. O’Regan, Gnostic Return in Modernity, 179-225.
[4] Kathryn Tanner, Jesus,
Humanity, and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology, (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 2001), 11, notes similarly: “Behind the problem, to which kenosis and the historicizing of God are
offered as solutions, is the mistaken idea of God as a kind of being over
against other kinds of beings…”; Cf. Sarah Coakley, “Does Kenosis Rest on a
Mistake?: Three Kenotic Models in Patristic Exegesis,” in C. Stephen Evans, ed.
Exploring Kenotic Christology: The
Self-Emptying of God (Oxford: Oxford University, 2006), 246-265, where she
argues that kenotic Christologies simply ignore the complicated (and
analogical!) tradition of communicatio
idiomatum to assume a direct competition or jostling between the
natures. Cf. 248n.3: “the ‘mistake’ I am
attempting to expose is the presumption made by modern philosophical analyses
of kenosis that there is a necessity
to bring ‘divine’ and ‘human’ characteristics into the same plane and make them into a ‘coherent’ package.”
[5] Thomas R. Thompson and Cornelius Plantinga jr. “Trinity and
Kenosis,” in Exploring Kenotic
Christology, 165-189; cf. 166-167, where they “argue that the viability of
the kenotic model [here they mean any model assuming real relinquishment of
divine attributes] is dependent upon a social model of the trinity—that the
success of the former requires the success of the latter.”
[6] The accusations that Augustine or the West embodies a
“substance metaphysics” that controls the theological vision of God by static
or dualistic metaphysical categories, is odd for a number of reasons. The first is that Augustine in De Trinitate explicitly rejects the idea
that God can be called a substance.
Cf. De Trinitate VII.5.10: God is not a substance, for then “God
subsists, and is a subject, in relation to his own Goodness.” Rather God is His own goodness.
Augustine rejects substance language on the grounds of simplicity, rather than simplicity making Augustine a
culprit of “substance metaphysics”! For many, of course, this will be a moot
point, since the charge of “substance metaphysics” seems more akin to
identifying a trope of argumentation within a thinker (tending towards more
static, ahistorical, a-personal categories, etc…), than it does specified
terminology. In fact they would at this
point find themselves in odd company with Aquinas, who notes that—in opposition
to the Fourth Lateran Council (1215 A.D.), Augustine appears to state that the divine essence generates, rather than
the person of the Father (de Trin. VII.3),
a position Aquinas himself adamantly rejects since generation and relation are
proper to persons alone (ST I. q.39.
a.5, c). Far from condemning Augustine
for “substance metaphysics,” Aquinas opts for a more charitable route of
interpreting Augustine as a whole: what
Augustine means, says Aquinas, is that “the Son, who is the essence … is from the Father, who is the essence …” (ST I
q.39 a.5 ad.1). This both seems to
indicate that Aquinas is not unreflectively assuming a “substance metaphysics”
(since both he and Lateran IV reject it) and
that Augustine, despite what may perhaps be some incautious turns of
phrase, when interpreted charitably and holistically, is affirming the same
“personalist” values as many who vilify him.
Cf. Bruce D. Marshall, “Aquinas the Augustinian? On the Uses of
Augustine in Aquinas’ Trinitarian Theology,” in Aquinas the Augustinian ed. Michael Dauphinias, Barry David, and
Matthew Levering (D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2007),
41-62. This leads to the second reason
that, as William Alston, “Substance and The Trinity,” in The Trinity: An Interdisciplinary Symposium, 179-203 points out,
the paradigm for substance even in Aristotle was the living organism (199) and so was not “static” or “lifeless.” Cf. Kerr, After
Aquinas, 48-50 for the same judgments as Alston, only regarding Aquinas’
use of cause and substance. In fact the
charge against Thomism (that it trades on a “substance ontology”) is itself
predicated on Cajetan: “Cajetan allowed himself to be contaminated by Scotism,
and reduced Thomas’ metaphysics of the existential act of being to an ontology
of substance” (83). For critiques of Patristic trinitarianism along the lines
of the so-called “substance metaphysics,” cf. Peters, God as Trinity: “When the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed was
formulated in A.D. 381 our theologians were quite
confident [emphasis added] they could speak of the being of God. Whether
speaking of the divine ousia in Greek
or substantia in Latin, no one
doubted that these terms referred to the divine reality itself…What it means
for God to be understood in terms of divine substance was spelled out over
time. Augustine described God as a
substance that is invisible, unchangeable, and eternal…” (31-32). Ironically, in Peter’s mind, a classical
commitment “to a substantialist understanding of God’s being,” runs into an
obstacle in modern thought, viz. “the denial that we could know God in
Godself.” Given the apophaticism of the
tradition it would be difficult to manufacture a more pronounced
misunderstanding at this point. Similar
critiques are found in Jenson, The Triune
Identity, e.g. 120, 162-163; Moltmann, The
Trinity and the Kingdom, 149-150. In
part the critique of “substance metaphysics” was popularized by John
Maquarrie’s influential Principles of
Christian Theology (cf. Levering, Scripture
and Metaphysics, 150 for this judgment), but of course the stage was set
far earlier in the general turning of subject against substance conceived as
inert since the Voluntarist turning of God’s will against God’s essence, which
then played out in various ways through Descartes, and later Romanticism,
German Idealism, and even Russian Nihilism (cf. Gillespie, Nihilism Before Nietzsche).
Yet even as early on as the debate between Maximus and Pyrrhus, nature
or substance was for Pyrrhus connected to the idea of necessity opposed to
freedom, so again the idea is not solely the property of nominalism as a
phenomenon. Ironically, the charge of
“substantialism” along Scotist lines has recently been applied to social
Trinitarianism itself because of its utilization of theological deduction based
on the priority of certain concepts.
Bruce McCormack writes: “to substitute a doctrine of relationality for a
doctrine of substance … is simply to replace one form of metaphysical
essentialism with another” (“Actuality of God,” 201), and Kevin Vanhoozer
writes: “By taking the idea of ‘perfect love’ as its main point of reference,
however, kenotic-perichoretic relational ontotheology turns out, surprisingly
enough, to be another species of ‘perfect being’ theology. … Both proceed by
way of an analysis of concepts to a conclusion that involves necessity: in one
case, necessary existence, and in the other, necessary suffering. Significantly, the concept of necessary
suffering is drawn from elsewhere than an analysis of God’s self-enactment, but
then used to interpret the latter. …The kenotic-perichoretic relational view
thus repeats the very same error that allegedly undermines classical theism,
namely, that of specifying the unified divine essence (de Deo uno) before considering the Triune economy (de Deo Trino)…” (Remythologizing Theology, 172-173).
[7] For a fairly exhaustive and positive overview of this
phenomenon see: Thomas H. McCall, Whose
Trinity, Which Monotheism?: Philosophical and Systematic Theologians on the
Metaphysics of Trinitarian Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s, 2010),
11-56.; Not all “Social Trinitarians”
are unaware of the linguistic and conceptual difficulties, as we shall
see. Volf (After our Likeness, 190-200) lists a whole host of analogical
limitations regarding the application of the Social Analogy to Ecclesial life,
and McCall himself is a very able defender of a version of Social
Trinitarianism. Yet, for what its worth
many theologians have rallied against it, and we here generally agree with
their conclusions. Cf.: Sarah Coakley, “’Persons’ in the ‘Social Doctrine,’ of
the Trinity: A Critique of Current Analytic Discussions,” in The Trinity: An Interdisciplinary Symposium eds.
Stephen Davis, Daniel Kendall, and Gerald O’Collins (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002), 123-145; Brian Leftow, “Anti-Social Trinitarianism,” in The Trinity: An Interdisciplinary Symposium,
203-251; Mark Husbands, “The Trinity is Not
Our Social Program: Volf, Gregory of Nyssa, and Barth,” in Trinitarian Theology for the Church:
Scripture, Community, Worship eds. Daniel Treier and Jacob K. Lauber
(Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2009), 120-142; Kathryn Tanner, “Trinity,” in
the Blackwell Companion to Political
Theology (Malden, MA: Blackwell
Publishing, 2007); Karen Kilby, “Is Apophatic Trinitarianism Possible?” International
Journal of Systematic Theology vo.12 no.1 (2010); John Gresham, “The Social
Doctrine of the Trinity and Its Critics,” Scottish
Journal of Theology 46 no.1 (1993); Stephen Holmes, “Three Versus One: Some
Problems With the Social Trinity,” Reformed
Journal of Theology Vol. 3 No. 1 (2009).
[8] Papanikolau, Being
With God, 31, for example notes: “Noticeably absent in Zizioulas is any reference
to apophaticism…”
[9] Though we cannot speak in strong terms of direct dependence
or rejection by Zizioulas, this does appear to be a pendulum swing within the
same spectrum; for a major reason for the decline of Trinitarian talk in the 17th
century was the rising assumption that we can talk about the single God in a
clear and distinct manner, but talk of the Trinity is dark and mysterious. Cf. Dixon, Nice and Hot Disputes, 136: “In a departure from previous
perceptions that saw talk about God as inherently problematic, many of the
participants in the [Trinitarian] disputes claim to have clear ideas about the
nature of God. The Unitarian Tindal is
the clearest expositor of this new found clarity … Once it was conceded that
talk about ‘God’ was clear, but the ‘mystery of the Trinity’ dark, then the
Trinity was bound to become a problem in theology. … To previous generations
talk about ‘God’ was no easier than talk about ‘Trinity’…” and 194, where Dixon
talks about Samuel Clarke (Isaac Newton’s protégé): “In retrospect, it is not
Clarke’s difficulty with the Trinity that stands out, but the ease with which he felt he could talk
about God. This God, ironically, seems
far from the loving creator, redeemer, and sanctifier revealed in the Scriptures
and much more like the ‘classical’ barely personal, remote, transcendent,
sovereign deity satirized by modern ‘process philosophy.’”
[10] 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, Vol. 10, No. 3 (July 2008), 270. Internal quote from LaCugna, God for Us, 244.
[11] Ibid., 271.
[12] Plantinga jr. “Social Trinity and Tritheism,” 22: “The
theory [of Social Trinitarianism] must have Father, Son, and Spirit, as
distinct centers of consciousness…” It
should be noted Plantinga jr. is an advocate, not an opponent, of Social
Trinitarianism. It is intriguing that
his claim for robust psychology in each hypostasis turns precisely on his
insistence that simplicity be dropped as false (39).
[13] Cf. Holmes, The Quest
for the Trinity, 14. It seems in
part this distinction of person and nature in Zizioulas is driven not just by
Zizioulas’ own desire to demonstrate the viability of his own tradition over
and against Westernized theology, but also due to his emphasis on our
“ecstatic” existence in Christ and the church, which overcomes our “hypostasis
of biological existence,” which is overcome in Christ (e.g. Being as Communion 54). In other words: we who are persons, are
de-personalized by death and procreation, since we are subject to natures
instead of the freedom of personhood.
This either/or dichotomy is insightful here, but it appears translate
into a dichotomy between person/nature within the Godhead itself. This appears to be an illegitimate univocal
extension of the concept: “The perfect man is consequently only he who is
authentically a person, that is, he who subsists, who possesses a ‘mode of
existence’ which is constituted as being, in
precisely the same manner in which God also subsists as being—in the
language of human existence this is what a ‘hypostatic union,’ signifies.”
(56-57). The italics are original to
Zizioulas. This freedom of God is
explicated earlier (44): “The ground of God’s ontological freedom lies not in
his nature but in his personal existence, that is, his ‘mode of existence’ in
which he subsists as a divine nature.”
But if the salvation of man is to exist in the same manner as God, while
at the same time man needs personhood to overcome
nature, this seems to cause a feedback into God, at least in Zizioulas
terminology of the “primacy” of person in God and perhaps also his
ontology. Univocity abounds.
[14] Richard M. Fermer, “The Limits of Trinitarian Theology as a
Methodological Paradigm,” Neue
Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie no.41, (1999):144-145.
[15] Anatolios, Retrieving
Nicaea, 6-8.
[16] Steven R. Holmes, “Something Much Too Plain To Say: Towards
A Defense of the Doctrine of Simplicity,” Neue
Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie. No.43 (2001): 140.
[17] 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.”
[18] Ibid.
[19] Vanhoozer, Remythologizing
Theology, 89.
[20] 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.)
[21] Philip Clayton, The
Problem of God in Modern Thought (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 2000); 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). It is pleasing to
find that this interpretation of Jüngel is not unique to this paper, but, for
example, is a tact taken by a recent interpreter of Jüngel as a central engine
to his theology. 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.
[22] Clayton, The Problem
of God , xi.
[23] Ibid., 117.
[24] Ibid., 118..
[25] Ibid., 472.
[26] Ibid., 260.
[27] Ibid., 504ff.
[28] Jüngel, God as the
Mystery of the World, 43-105.
[29] Ibid., 39.
[30] Ibid., 203.
[31] Ibid., 102ff.
[32] Ibid., 107.
[33] Ibid., 115.
[34] Ibid..
[35] Ibid.
[36] Ibid., 122.
[37] Ibid., 124-126.
[38] DeHart, Beyond the
Necessary God, 53.
[39] What DeHart, Beyond the Necessary God, 50, says of
Jüngel is true of Clayton as well: “Descartes is crucial for the modern problem
of conceiving God, but not because of some innovation he made in the
traditional doctrine of God. Indeed, the
whole thrust of Jüngel’s argument is precisely that Descartes was not an innovator at this point, that he
took up central aspects of metaphysical theism largely intact.”
[40] Rowan Williams, On
Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2000), 132: “The
impatience of some modern Anglo-Saxon theologians with the dogmatic tradition
seems in part an impatience with debate, conflict, ambivalence, polysemy,
paradox.”; Cf. De Lubac, Mystery of the
Supernatural, 172: “Limited and enclosed, this philosophy of rationality is
a philosophy of the dilemma and the univocal statement.”
[41] 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.
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