(A Very Brief) History of the Trinity and the Argument from Design (Part One)
[Behold the sky and the earth: they cry
out that they are made].
--St.
Augustine.[1]
Knowledge of the divine
persons [that is, the
Trinity] was necessary to us … for a
proper discernment about the creation of things.
--St.
Thomas Aquinas[2]
Both of these ways of
speaking of God [the
positive and the negative] must, in their
proper sense, be applicable to him, yet on the other hand neither of them—being
or not being—can be applicable in a proper sense. Both are applicable in their own way, in that
the one statement affirms God’s being as the cause of the being of things,
while the other denies it because it lies, as cause, so infinitely beyond all
caused being; on the other hand, neither is properly applicable, because
neither way of speaking presents us with the real identity of what we are
looking for, in its essence and nature.
For if something cannot be identified as either being or not being in
terms of its natural origin, it clearly cannot be connected either with what
is, and what is therefore the subject of language. Such a reality has a simple and unknown mode of
existence, inaccessible to all minds and unsearchable in every way, exalted
beyond all affirmation and denial.
--Maximus
the Confessor.[3]
Believing in God—at least in the
increasingly secular West—seems in bad shape.
It is not just, as Philip Clayton bluntly puts it in the opening to his
book (itself tellingly titled) The
Problem of God in Modern Thought, that “Not to put too fine a point on it:
the context for treating the question of God today must be skepticism.”[4] Perhaps just as troubling—if not more
so—“With the fading of the concept of God and its function for humanity in the
public consciousness of a culture that has become religiously indifferent, the
existence of God has not only become doubtful but the content of the concept of
God has also become unclear.”[5] One bemused commentator has noted that such
is the confusion raging in the “God debates,” that he is not entirely sure that
anyone is arguing for or against God—at least not the God held by Augustine, Athanasius,
Maximus, the Cappadocians, Aquinas, Calvin, or Barth.[6] In the same vein, Stanley Hauerwas, being his
usual provocative self, wrote in a recent essay that America has never produced
a compelling atheist because it has never had an interesting-enough God to
deny.[7]
Our task in this essay is not to
engage in these contemporary debates directly, but to narrate a brief history
attempting to elaborate why the debates have taken the puzzling shape they
have. In order to do so, and for the
sake of summary, we will look at the historical emergence of two concepts
variously designating the God-world relation: that of the machine, and that of
the sublime. We shall then compare them to pro-Nicene Trinitarian
thought—primarily using Gregory of Nyssa—in order to expose some of their
deficiencies. In essence, our argument
is that both the rise of the picture of God as machine-maker, and God as
sublime, deconstructed the theology latent within Patristic Trinitarianism. But this is not merely a critique ticking off
a list of orthodox propositions. Rather more importantly, it is to point out
that changes in Trinitarian doctrine in, for example, Isaac Newton, also
correlate fundamentally with changes in world-view. As Simon Oliver puts it: “Although Newton’s work
on motion is studied almost exclusively as a physical theory … like Aquinas’
understanding of motion it was accompanied by a very particular theological
vision.”[8] Put in a more encompassing way—since
“worldview” has a one-sidedly conceptual connotation—changes in Trinitarian
theology can serve as a very able index to map transitions in what Charles
Taylor has termed the “social imaginary.”[9] This is because, as Khaled Anatolios puts it:
“Trinitarian doctrine emerged not form some isolated insight in to the being of
God, such that its meaning might be grasped from a retrieval of that singular
insight.” It is rather that “Trinitarian doctrine emerged as a kind of
meta-doctrine that involved a global interpretation of Christian life and faith
and indeed evoked a global interpretation of reality.”[10] To watch this history unfold is therefore to
begin to understand why it was that the rise of mechanism and the rise of the
sublime were both in their own way related to changes in the “social imaginary”
that can also be mapped onto fluctuations in Trinitarian doctrine.
On the one hand, language for God became
increasingly univocal and clear, subverting—indeed inverting—in key ways the apophatic and spiritual qualities that
were vital to the exigencies of pro-Nicene formation. In the 17th century, as Amos
Funkenstein describes it, the new view of the universe as unequivocal and
homogenous “inspired a fusion between theology and physics to an extent unknown
earlier and later.” This fusion of
theology and physics resulted in new problems “which grew out of the need to
invest certain theologoumena with precise physical meaning.”[11] In part, this caused mutations in the concept
of God that also began to be read back into the tradition. Just as importantly, God seemed to recede as
science advanced: “Once God regained transparency
or even a body, he was all the easier to identify and so kill.”[12]
In reaction to
this rationalist picture of God—especially in our own time—there has been a
sort of equal but opposite oscillation against these crystalline boxes we built
to house the divine. In the place of the
univocal and clear, God is seen as so transcendent as to evade any and all
signification, what Martin Laird has called “the current apophatic rage”[13] and James K. A. Smith the
“logic of determination” which results in “a kind of radical, negative theology
for which to say anything specific [about God] is to act from a deep hubris,
that, in the very act of confession, corrupts the divine.”[14] Here God becomes the Sublime; though in this
sense protected from the ambit of scientific discovery, the cost of such
bulwarks is that “This word
[God] has become as enigmatic for us today as a blank face.”[15] Even the “still, small voice” that spoke to
Elijah would presumably be met with a “quiet, please.”
It is not just that these concepts
are spiritually unsatisfying—though admittedly thinking of God as Greasemonkey
Supreme or addressing Him with a bow as “Your Emptyness” leaves something to be
desired. It is that both of these
strategies are often put forward by proponents who call on the tradition itself
to defend the pedigree of each strategy.
This is not illogical of them, or wholly wrong. There is a deep history of referring to God
as Craftsman and Aristan—so why not Designer?
The problem arise, as we shall see, in the fact that similarity in terms
and concepts conceal key differences in the traditional meaning of the
theologians being resourced. In another sense, not just terms and concepts are
different, but the entire operation is shifted in modern discourse into an
epistemological key. This is in part the problem: knowledge of God is, to be
sure, a question that involves the epistemological. Yet to transpose it into terms that are
primarily epistemological misses the transformative, Christological,
pneumatological, and ecclesial aspects involved.[16] It is very often the case today that one can
take a mystical writer like Teresa of Avila, or Pseudo-Dionysius, and in a
Philosophy-of-Religion-ish manner see them as an example of the more general
phenomenon of “mystical experience,” because one has plucked certain passages
out of a greater context and held them up as archetypal.[17] Or, in the same vein, one can turn the
mystical against the theological by doing much the same. And yet as Vladimir Lossky argued long ago:
“There is no Christian mysticism without theology; but above all, there is no
theology without mysticism.”[18]
Obviously there are huge and diverse
swaths of possible information that could be included here. But in order to guide our path we will
proceed in three sections that will include both a small history and a case study
along with it. First, we shall look at
the logic of transcendence and apophaticism that went into the formation of
Nicene Trinitarianism. This type of
transcendence can be called for the sake of summary “non-competitive,” a phrase
which we shall borrow from Kathryn Tanner.
It is just this non-competitive, non-contrastive transcendence and
apophatic theology that begins to change as we enter closer into the Modern
era. As God’s presence and activities
were more and more thought seen as encapsulated in relatively clear—and indeed
even bodily—terms, certain metaphysical presuppositions in Nicene
trinitarianism become discarded, and how we understand the God-world relation became
changed. Following the recent and
intriguing scholarship of Simon Oliver, we will show that it is no accident,
for example, that Newton’s mechanical philosophy was related to his
“voluntaristic Arianism.”
As we have already begun to argue,
pictures of God and world are correlative.
Thus these anti-Trinitarian changes into a more mechanical and physical
understanding of the God world relation had concomitant metaphysical
consequences for how the world was seen in relation to God. Thus in the second section we will look
briefly at how creation was viewed, on the one hand, by Gregory of Nyssa. On the other hand we will look at William
Paley and his Design argument. Briefly
included will be modern commentators on Intelligent Design, but our main
concern will be to look at the historical transition into an understanding that
the activities of God and the activities of nature are somehow at odds with one
another—so that to explain something by one meant in essence excluding the
other. As naturalistic explanations came
to the fore, because of the conflation of physical and theological
explanations, God suddenly seemed out of a job.
In the third and final section we
will look at positions in reaction to what they perceive as the arid
rationalism of the first two sections, and call for a new apophaticism. Here we jump much closer to our own time by
looking at what many have described as a “theological turn” in French
philosophy. In particular we will look
at Jacques Derrida, the so-called Father of Deconstructive philosophy, because
his theory of deconstruction has both explicit and implicit parallels to how
Derrida wants to read pseudo-Dionysius.
Much of what Derrida wants to say about difference is startlingly
similar (despite many of his own dogged protests) to what the Cappadocians
would also affirm about God. Yet the key
difference (no pun intended) here lay in the way that Cappadocian
Trinitarianism is not a free-wheeling negation that exists on the level of
texts, but one that involves a transformation of the subject as they are
incorporated deeper into God’s own life.
In our conclusion, we will suggest
that most contemporary understandings in the God debate seem to oscillate
between the Machine and the Sublime. The
New Atheists, and many of their opponents, see God as solving (or not) complex
engineering problems in the physical world.
Others, unimpressed with the scope of these arguments, say that science
and faith cannot contradict one another because God is simply beyond. We will suggest that, while certainly not
everyone will be convinced, part of the path forward is first to glance
backward and ask—just what are we defending anyway?
[1] St. Augustine, Confessions, XI.4.6.
[2] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologia, Prima Pars, q.32 a.1, ad.3m.
[3] Mystagogia, PG 91, 664AC.
Translation adapted from Hans Urs Von Balthasar, The Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor (San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003), 89.
[4] Philip Clayton, The Problem of God in Modern Thought
(Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 2000), 3.
[5] Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology vol.I trans.
Geoffery W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s, 1991), 64.
[6] David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness,
Bliss (New Haven: Yale, 2013), 1.
[7] Stanley Hauerwas, “The
End of American Protestantism,” available at: http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2013/07/02/3794561.htm. Last visited 6:40 p.m. 12/14/14.
[8] Simon Oliver, “Aquinas
and Newton on Motion,” Modern Theology vol.12
no.2 (2001): 164.
[9] Cf. Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2004), 23-30; and in more detail, Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, 171-176.: 1.) How
ordinary people "imagine" social surroundings, carried in
contemporary images, stories, legends, etc...
2.) It is different than a "theory," in that theory is mainly
possessed at a theoretical or reflective level, and by only a few elites or a
small minority. 3.) The Imaginary is shared by large groups at an often
pre-theoretical level (i.e. "gut feeling" etc...). These social imaginaries provide a common
"understanding," (if the purely intellectual connotations are put
aside, and "understanding," includes emotional, physical, and psychological
disposition) which provides and "atmosphere" or "context"
for common practice.
[10] Khaled Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and
Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2011), 8.
[11] Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination:
From the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1985), 72-73.
[12] Ibid., 116.
[13] Martin Laird “’Whereof
We Speak: Gregory of Nyssa, Jean-Luc Marion, and the Current Apophatic Rage,” Heythrop Journal, 42 (2001), 1-12.
[14] James K. A. Smith, Speech and Theology: Language and the Logic
of Incarnation (London: Routledge, 2002), 127-133.
[15] Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith (New
York: Crossroads, 1978), 46.
[16] 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. 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 (254). Aquinas is
representative of the former, and Locke the latter. 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” (252).
[17] Cf. the critical
remarks of such strategies by Sarah Coakley, “Dark Contemplation and Epistemic
Transformation: The Analytic Theologian Re-Meets Teresa of Avila,” in Oliver
Crisp and Michael Rea, eds., Analytic
Theology: New Essays on the Philosophy of Theology (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009), 280-312. “Only a closer attention to the subtleties of
mystical discourse itself (including its apophatic maneuvers), and to its accompanying and repetitive bodily practices
[emphasis added] can help the analytic tradition beyond its usual confines of
expectation at this point.” (282-283); Denys Turner, “How to Read the
pseudo-Denys Today?” International
Journal of Systematic Theology vol.7 no.4 (2005): 428-440: “Derrida’s Denys
amounted to little more than a dismembered torso…” (428).
[18] Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church,
(New York: St. Vladimir Seminary Press, 1976), 9.
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