Excurses: The Zizioulas-Torrance Debate in the Light of de Regnón
Etienne
Gilson.[1]
While we will await our next chapter
to outline some of the practical outcomes of these historiographical pathways,
an immediately relevant example of how such debates affect constructive
theology is forthcoming. Here we may
turn briefly to a famous debate between T.F. Torrance and John Zizioulas,
regarding the Father as arche of the
Godhead. Our intention is not to resolve
this debate, but to demonstrate that what we have beneath the surface is yet
another area of inquiry where the interfaces between systematic theology and
historiography have been affected by the neo-Thomistic “environment” our essay
is describing.
It is difficult to overstate the
importance of the homoousion [Greek for “of the same essence/substance”]
for Torrance’s theology.[2]
The homoousion means for Torrance that “God himself is the actual
content of His revelation, and that God himself is really in Jesus Christ,
reconciling the world to himself.”[3]
And though in principle Torrance concedes that the word “homoousion” is
not sacrosanct, “it proved to be of astonishing generative and heuristic power,
for it was so well rooted in the source of the Church’s faith that it was
pregnant with intimations of still profounder aspects of divine reality in
Jesus Christ pressing for realization within the mind of the Church.”[4]
Indeed even a casual reading of The Trinitarian Faith reveals that the homoousion
is its thematically organizing principle.[5] In
fact Patristic scholar Frances Young comments as such that The Trinitarian
Faith “it is not chronology but logic that determines the sequence.”[6]
Jason Radcliff is, as such, quite
insightful when he follows a similar line of thought and notes “Torrance
approaches the Father’s as a dogmatician and not as a patrologist. In
essence he reads and appropriates the Fathers Christologically, not
historically.”[7] This is meant as no sleight, of course. Torrance’s deep knowledge of the tradition
allows jewels hidden in the murky depths of time to be dredged upward into the
light of current day concerns. Nonetheless,
it is to point out, as Morwenna Ludlow has in her absolutely fantastic recent book
on Gregory of Nyssa, that we must be cautious not to confuse Torrance as a
historian of Patristic doctrine, and miss the fact that “[his historical work]
is carried out on partly textual grounds, but also in response to broader
questions being discussed between systematic theologians.”[8]
This method of Torrance undoubtedly
has incalculable upside for a systematic presentation of Christian theology,[9]
and yet what we have at hand with this particular historical evaluation of the immediate significance of the homoousion is “a debate about modern
systematic theology is going on in the pages of what many people have come to
regard as textbook accounts of the development of early Christian doctrine.”[10] Let
us state the obvious: in some sense this is inevitable, and indeed, fruitful. Our use of the past constructs and decides
its authority, as much as invokes it.[11] History must be done for the sake of the
present, and as we have already alluded to, in the latter portion of the
twentieth century theologies began arguing not just from history in the sense
of seeking their own precedent, but were operating as well at a higher, “meta”
level, constructing self-aware strategies of just how one is to interface and
retrieve past sources.[12] In part, nonetheless, confusion regarding
Torrance is due to Torrance himself being insufficiently explicit about the
fact that he himself is engaged at this meta-level of discourse.[13] For example, he opens The Trinitarian
Faith by saying that by “let[ting] the patristic theologians … speak for
themselves” the reader will be illuminated by the church’s “one authentically
ecumenical confession of faith.”[14] However
much he illuminates many of their central concerns, Torrance precisely does not
allow the Fathers simply to “speak for themselves.” Rather, “[Torrance] hardly discusses other
Patristic scholars or secondary texts, and is not always entirely transparent
about his filters for reading the Fathers.”[15]
Paul Molnar, albeit inadvertently,
points us in the direction we shall look on the page after his quote just
above:
[Because
of the homoousion] the divine
monarchy must be understood to reside in the being of God as one and
three. Here Torrance is critical of some
of the Cappadocians, namely Basil and Gregory [Nyssa] ... because they made too
sharp a distinction between the immanent and the economic Trinity and because
they never referred to the Holy Spirit as God.
Further, they thought of the Father as arche and this implied degrees of deity, thus opening the door to
subordinationism which, of course, Torrance strongly opposes because any such
thinking undermines the Deity of the Son and the Spirit and thus calls into
question God’s actions ad extra as
Savior and Redeemer.[17]
For
our purposes, of the many concepts jammed into this pregnant quote, we will
focus on Torrance’s explanation of Father as arché. As Nikolaus Asproulis puts it (echoing Paul Molnar above)
“Torrance’s close devotion to Athanasius explains to some extent his
preoccupation with the homoousion …
as his almost unique conceptual tool in dealing with the issue of divine
monarchia,”[18]
and indeed, “a careful reading of Torrance … would indicate that Athanasius is
celebrated as his patristic hero to which the whole patristic (and
Reformation—mainly Calvin and Barth—as well) should be fitted.”[19] As
such, three distinct but inter-related things happen to Torrance’s
historiography, mapping somewhat neatly, as it happens, onto the three
inter-related concepts that Molnar spoke of: homoousion, perichoresis, and onto-relation.
The
first is that as part of this interpretation he reads Basil and Gregory Nyssa’s
use of tropos hyparxeos (mode of
existence) to mean that they are merely “modes
of existence,” (and not Torrance’s concept of onto-relations) who derive from
the being of the Father.[20] For Torrance, this creates the unwitting
“Origenist” move of creating an uneasy parallel with the Father as arche of the Son and Spirit, with God as
arche or source of the world
(butchering perichoresis).[21] This was exactly Origen’s problem: he tied
the generation of the Son to the creation of the world in such a way that the
two became correlative and mutually implicating in a way that seemed to totally
abrogate the Son’s divine sovereignty and co-equality. This is what Torrance fears in Basil and
Nyssa’s use of the Father as arche, and
naming the Son and Spirit tropos
hyparxeos.
The
second distinct historiographical move is made when Torrance reinforces this
point by saying the analogies that
Basil and Nyssa use, reinforce much the same “Origenism” as above. He agues that the “chain analogy” in “Basil’s
Epistle 38” (actually now considered
to be Gregory of Nyssa’s, but this hardly affects the material point) suggests
a worrying hint of subordination, for example.[22] This may seem a small point, but it will
become more important in a moment. The
third, interrelated historiographical move, is to argue that Gregory of
Nazianzus largely succeeds in opposing his Cappadocian comrades by displacing
the monarchy of the Father and any sense of causal relations within the
Trinity.[23] This is because, suggests Torrance, the monarchia of God becomes, not the
Father, but the substance of God in which the three hypostases mutually and
co-equally share (that is, in homoousial perichoresis,
or as Torrance puts it “onto-relations.”).
This is to be expected given our general thesis that Torrance uses the homoousion as not only his general guide
for systematic theology, but for his reception of the history of theology as
well. Torrance wants to argue that the
Father as arche mitigates the true
theological position of the homoousion: “There
lurked in the Cappadocian stress upon the Father as the Principle or Arche or Godhead … to borrow an
expression from Karl Barth … an ‘unsubdued remnant of Origenist
subordinationism.’”[24]
What
is fascinating, and something we will come to see presently, regards how the
sharpness of Torrance’s judgments just elaborated gain their contours in a
debate with Zizioulas—a debate haunted by the background presence of (a certain
interpretation of) Thedore de Regnón’s paradigm. Hence, among other things, the
Zizioulas-Torrance debate affected by the general neo-Thomistic
historiographical “slants” this paper is presenting, though such affectation is
nearly completely subterranean—indeed, invisible—when one engages only the
surface level presentations of the arguments themselves. To begin to see this in part, we might turn
to the fact that in the 1980’s Torrance got into a series of protracted debates
with Zizioulas, who was a former student of Torrance’s.[25] This, it seems, began to sharpen his
distinctive understanding of the history (which may or may not have been
already latent). Here we can cite Jason
Radcliff at length:
It
is notable that Torrance's writings on the Cappadocian distinction develop
throughout his life. In the 1960s, he voices hesitation about the ascetical
slant of Basil's pneumatology as opposed to what he saw as the more Athanasian
Christological emphasis. It is notable that during his writings from this era
Torrance does not discuss his later emphasis on the procession of the Holy
Spirit from the ousia of the Father nor the 'Cappadocian distinction' as such.
By the 1970s he begins to discuss what he sees as a division between God's
essence and energies in the Cappadocians and later Byzantine theology,
particularly John of Damascus. It is only by the 1980s and in Trinitarian
Faith as well as his immense work in the Reformed-Orthodox dialogue that
his strong aversion to the Cappadocian distinction emerges and a full-fledged
critique of it becomes prevalent. As
such, Torrance's aversion to the Cappadocian distinction is more about the 1980’s
than the 380’s [Emphasis added]. By the time of the publication of Trinitarian
Faith Torrance was deep in an ongoing heated debate with his one-time
assistant at New College, John Zizioulas, who is now the Metropolitan of
Pergamon.[26]
For
those unfamiliar, Zizioulas is a champion
of the Cappadocian doctrine of the Father as arche, that is the source or fons
divinitatis of the Son and Spirit. Indeed, it is ironic that many
(especially among self-described “social Trinitarians”) who pay lip-service to
his paradigm shifting book Being as
Communion often ignore this fact by using the “Being as Communion”
phraseology as self-evidently “egalitarian” in orientation.[27] Yet of course Zizioulas does not think this
introduces ontological inequality
into the Trinity, quite the opposite: understanding the Father as arche is not only a correct
interpretation of the Cappadocians for Zizioulas, it also preserves the
coincidence of the One and the Many, and so the communal nature of Being: “The
ontological monarchy of the Father, that is, of a relational being, and the attachment of ontological causation to
him, serve to safeguard the coincidence of the One and the Many in divine
being, a coincidence that raises otherness to the primary state of being
without destroying its unity and oneness.”[28]
As
we have seen this assertion does not stand alone as a mere historical judgment,
but is predicated on a reading of theological history that positions the East
via the figures of the Cappadocians, as opposed to a similarly typified
“Western” proclivity toward modalism through the (now monstrous) visage of
Augustine. In fact, quite succinctly, we
find a quote from Zizioulas that embodies the very things Torrance seems to
abhor, which we briefly saw above: that of the Father causing the other two persons as their Source, and the persons
themselves being considered “modes of being”: “It is a person [the Father] that makes this possible,” says Zizioulas, “because
it is only a person that can expression communion and otherness simultaneously,
thanks to it being a mode of being …”[29]
For
our purposes what is important in this quote is that Zizioulas’ juxtaposition
of the Cappadocians with a “Western-Augustinian” Trinitarianism that supposedly
makes the one-substance primary,[30] results
in Zizioulas over-emphasizing the
volitional freedom of the Father as arche
to counter-balance the Augustinian-Thomistic tradition of emphasizing the
priority of “substance ontology.” Zizioulas’
historiography and constructive systematic proposals are as such built upon
this perceived Western deficiency of making the “One substance” of God prior to
the persons, overwhelming them in a static, “necessitarian” monism, a frozen
and non-communal monad. Zizioulas, over and against Augustine’s “substance
metaphysics” places a supreme emphasis on the free hypostatic will of the Father to enact the communal
being of the Trinity:
But this [Western interpretation of the
Trinity misrepresents] the Patristic theology of the Trinity. Among the Greek Fathers the unity of God, the
one God, and the ontological ‘principle’ or ‘cause’ of the being and life of
God does not consist in the one substance of God but in the hypostasis, that is, the person of the Father. The one God is not the one substance, but the
Father, who is the ‘cause’ both of the generation of the Son and the procession
of the Spirit. … Thus when we say that God ‘is’ we do not bind the personal
freedom of God—the being of God is not an ontological necessity or a simple
‘reality’ for God—but we ascribe the being of God to His personal freedom. In a more analytic way, this means that God
as Father and not as substance, perpetually confirms through ‘being’ His free will to exist. … And the one
divine substance is consequently the being of God only because it has these
three modes of existence, which it owes not to substance but to the person of
the Father. … The personal existence of God (the Father) constitutes His
substance, makes it hypostases.[31]
Now,
while it is certainly true that the Cappadocians speak of the arche of the Father, here Zizioulas
distorts their presentation by focusing emphasis on the free, volitional will
“of the Father” which “constitutes the Trinity’s existence.” For the Cappadocians—as for Augustine and
pro-Nicene theology generally—this would be a nonsensical interpretation of God
the Father as arche, precisely because there is only one will and one activity (energeia)
in the Trinity.[32] The relations within the Trinity are certainly
not unfree, as if the inner life of
God was just some sort of divine chemistry working itself out. Yet Zizioulas emphasizes God (the Father’s)
freedom by splitting God’s volition over-against nature.[33]
The
point of all this is not to get into too many details about Zizioulas. It is
to point out that Zizioulas exaggerates the Patristic concept of the Father as arche precisely by interjecting God’s
will not only as opposed to substance
but also over-against the other hypostases:
that is to say, the divine Will is located, not in the mutually shared essence,
but appears to be allocated precisely to the hypostasis of the Father.
And this newly emphasized concept of freedom over and against the
“necessity” of nature is often referenced by Zizioulas as the “mode of
existence” of the hypostasis, that
is, its “tropos hyparxeos”: “Substance is not relational in itself but in and
through and because of the ‘mode of being’ it possesses.”[34]
Torrance,
on the other hand, dislikes this concept of “tropos hyparxeos” or “mode of
being” in Basil and Nyssa, thinking it leads to subordinationism, reinforcing
their already “Origenist” relapse of speaking of the Father as arche.
For Torrance, both homoousios
and its link with perichoresis amounts to a rejection
of causal relations within the Trinity.
This is why Torrance also rejects Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa
in favor of Gregory Nazianzen. To be
sure, Torrance is in good company among contemporary systematic theologians who
are uncomfortable with the Patristic use of the Father as arche. Yet, in the arena of contemporary systematic theology,
Torrance is quite unique in singling Gregory of Nazianzus out as an exception
to the rule of the Father as cause among the Cappadocians. Leonardo Boff, Jürgen Moltmann, Catherine
LaCugna, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and Miroslav Volf all consider Nazianzus to have
taught the doctrine (and so much the worse for Gregory!).[35]
It
would be churlish of us to not recognize that this is still a matter of some
debate among Patristic specialists, as if Torrance was making some obvious
blunder in his interpretation.[36] Yet the debate is not so much set in the
terms that Torrance brings to it: where he sees perichoresis and homoousios as
indicating a rejection of causality
within the Godhead, it is virtually unanimously accepted today that for all
three Cappadocians (and the tradition at large) this is not the case. The debate among Patristic specialists is
rather how Gregory’s thought as a whole plays out, which is to say how does God
the Father as arche relate to
Gregory’s concepts elsewhere that the essence of the entire Trinity can be named monarchia? The answer seems to be that these are diverse
ways of grasping at attempts to variously conceptualize the One and the Three. The pro-Nicenes avoided the horns of the
dilemma, summarized nicely by Lewis Ayres precisely by noting the persons
constitute the substance, and the substance itself is never “without
hypostasis.”[37]
As
Ayres continues: “The Father’s goodness naturally (but not from necessity)
gives rise to an image (the Son) which reveals the Father’s essential nature or
Goodness. This revealing image is part
of the perfection of the Father’s existence.”[38] It is here that causality is used to maintain
distinction and equality via the concept of the eternal generation of the
Son. The choice was not between causal
subordinationism and acausal equality:
“The transformation of Logos theology into a discussion of the Word’s
eternal procession of the model of the product of the inner word focuses
attention ever more clearly on the manner in which the Son’s existence is the
perfection of the Father’s mode of being and yet still mediatorial.”[39] Here we may note with some perplexity that in
their best moments, both Zizioulas and Torrance would agree nearly entirely
with Ayres, and yet as the material of their theologies respectively unfolds,
both splice the terms in one way or another: Zizioulas by prioritizing
“person,” as arche, and Torrance by
emphasizing the Son is generated not from the person, but from the ousia, of the Father.
Torrance,
whatever balancing he does regarding ousia
and hypostasis being inseparable,
appears to forget as much when some of his constructive theological work
commences. He apparently assumes that only
two options are possible when the rubber meets the road: namely that of causal
subordinationism or causeless
equality. In his own words describing
Nazianzus’ concept of relations (schesis)
within the Trinity: “The Son [is not] to be thought as proceeding from the
person of the Father … but from the being
of the Father … as in the council of Nicaea.”[40] It would be reductionist of us to suggest
that Torrance’s conflict with Zizioulas was the only reason for this sharp
juxtaposition of essence/person (with Torrance falling on the other side of
Zizioulas preference for person as cause), but it was undoubtedly fueled by it.[41] But
the turning of ousia and hypostasis against one another like this
(not from the person, but from the being), and both again
against any notion of causality, presumes that Nicaea and pro-Nicene
theologians had a robust concept of either ousia
or hypostasis and in addition to
the idea that exclusive priority could be named to one or the other. Torrance’s ahistorical absolutizing of a
robust concept of homoousion and
perichoresis here rears its head by shaping how Torrance interprets terms, and
these terms are themselves still being shaped in tacit ways by de Regnón, and
the long shadow cast by neo-Thomism by way of Zizioulas’ own reactions.
In
addition, Torrance takes issue with neo-Palamism in his day, especially in the
figure of Vladimir Lossky. As we have
seen, however, Lossky’s own neo-Palamism was fueled both by a general need to
differentiate between Eastern and Western theology that was itself indebted to
a general western context of turn of the century French Patristic scholarship,
and, even earlier, de Regnón’s contrasting of the Cappadocian’s use of
essence and energy with Francisco Suarez, a later Thomistic commentator. Torrance’s interpretation of this
“Cappadocian distinction” does not just stem from de Regnón, but is possible to
trace to a German line of interpretation through Adolph von Harnack,
which turns Athanasius (“Nicene”) against the later Cappadocians
(“neo-Nicene”).[42] Whatever its ultimate source, Torrance traces
this interpretation of essence and energies back to Basil, yet Matthew Baker—in
line with our own argument here—notes that Torrance’s critique is really more
about Lossky and other twentieth-century interpretations.[43]
Thus
in a roundabout way, while Torrance deftly avoids the trap of the de Regnón
paradigm that so many Trinitarian theologians of late have fallen into—the
paradigm does, in its own way, come in through the back door. While Torrance seems to reject any easy
East-West differentiation that the corrupted reading of De Regnón provides, he
nonetheless is still operating by its implicit logic that relatively clear-cut schematic representation of ideal
positions are possible. Torrance uses
the “de Regnón” logic but transposes it to differentiate between Eastern
positions: acausal unity (in the De Regnón paradigm, associated with Augustine)
is identified with Nazianzus, while the typically Eastern paradigm is now
associated with the causal “subordinationism” of Basil and Nyssa. Torrance thus shuffles the perceived
allegiances of some of the players typical to the East-West divide, but does
not completely question the characterizations of the construct itself.
As
such, we can shed light on the otherwise somewhat strange claim made by Colin
Gunton, when he observed that Augustine (interpreted through the illicit East-West
interpretation of the paradigm of De Regnón), is secretly informing Torrance’s
theology.[44] Instead of the typical “begins with the one
substance/begins with the three persons” the juxtaposition becomes: “acausal
equality” vs. “causal subordinationism.”
Such presuppositions have been passed on to posterity. Reinhard Hütter (with an explicit nod to
Torrance) summarizes what he appears to believe is a generally valid
historiographical statement that “Western theologians [who want to defer to the
East] tend to follow Gregory of Nazianzus, while the most important
representative of Eastern Orthodox theology advocate the monarchia following Basil the Great and Gregory of Nyssa.”[45]
[1] Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy (Notre
Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), 189.
[2] Cf. Colin Gunton, “Eastern and
Western Trinities: Being and Person.
T.F. Torrance’s Doctrine of God,” in Father,
Son, & Holy Spirit (London: T&T Clark, 2003), 116: “Athanasius
served Torrance as a theologian of God’s being as Barth served as a theologian
of his act (though the greatness of both is that they integrated the two) and
it would be difficult to exaggerate the importance for [Torrance], in all
aspects of his work, of the principle of the homoousion.”
[3] T.F. Torrance, The Christian
Doctrine of God: One Being, Three Persons (Edinburgh: T&T Clark,
1996), 7.
[4] Ibid., x. Helpful overviews
of this topic for Torrance include: Kang Phee Seng, “The Epistemological
Significance of homoousion in the
Theology of Thomas F. Torrance” in The
Scottish Journal of Theology 45 no.3 (1992): 341-366; and C. Baxter Kruger,
“The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God in the Theology of T.F. Torrance: Sharing
in the Son’s Communion with the Father in the Spirit,” in The Scottish Journal of Theology 43 No.3 (1992): 366-390.
[5] But Cf. especially The Trinitarian Faith, 110-190.
[6] Frances Young, “From Suspicion
and Sociology to Spirituality: On Method, Hermeneutics, and Appropriation With
Respect to Patristic Material,” in E. Livingston, ed., Studia Patristica (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1997), 424.
[7] Ibid., 24
[8] Ludlow, Gregory of Nyssa, 25.
[9] Here cf. the fantastic work of
Jason Robert Radcliff, Thomas F. Torrance
and the Church Fathers: A Reformed, Evangelical, and Ecumenical Reconstruction
of the Patristic Tradition (Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2014).
[10] Ibid., 37.
[11] Nor is this merely a recent
phenomenon. As Paul C. Lim brilliantly
argues in Mystery Unveiled: The Crisis of
the Trinity in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2012), this has been a necessary part of the essence of theology. In the so-called “Socinian” controversies
that raged across Europe, and with particular intensity in England, all sides cited Patristic authority for
their Trinitarian, or even anti-Trinitarian views. Cf. 16-69, 217-321. Even currently, the notion of how to
appropriate the authority of the Fathers is a live debate for the Orthodox. Cf. Pantelis Kalaitzidis, “From the ‘Return
to the Fathers’ to the Need for a Modern Orthodox Theology,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, 54
(2010): 5-36.
[12] See: Webster, “Theologies of
Retrieval.”; David Ferguson also cites
“Retrieval” as one among several contemporary approaches in theology: David
Fergusson, “Theology Today: Currents and Directions,” The Expository Times, 123/3 (2012): 105-112. For some specific examples beyond those
already mentioned: Joshua McNall, A Free
Corrector: Colin Gunton and the Legacy of Augustine (Minneapolis: Fortress
Press, 2015); Kevin Mongraine, The Systematic
Thought of Hans Urs Von Balthasar: An Irenaean Retrieval (New York:
Crossroad, 2002); W. David Buschart & Kent D. Eilers, Theology as Retrieval: Receiving the Past, Renewing the Church (Illinois:
InterVarsity Press, 2015); Michael Allen & Scott R. Swain, Reformed Catholicity: The Promise of
Retrieval for Theology and Biblical Interpretation (Grand Rapids: Baker
Academic, 2015); Oliver Crisp, Retrieving
Doctrine: Essays in Reformed Theology (Illinois: InterVarsity press, 2011).
[13] Radcliff, Thomas F. Torrance and the Church Fathers, 194.
[14] T.F. Torrance, The
Trinitarian Faith (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988), 1-2.
[15] Radcliff, Thomas F. Torrance and the Church Fathers, 194.
[16] Paul Molnar, Thomas F. Torrance: Theologian of the
Trinity (New York: Ashgate, 2009), 63.; Radcliff, Thomas F. Torrance and the Church Fathers, 66-70.
[17] Ibid., 64.
[18] Nikolaus Asproulis, “T.F.
Torrance and John Zizioulas on the Divine Monarchia:
On the Cappadocian Background and the Neo-Cappadocian Solution,” Participatio 4 (2014): 164.
[19] Ibid., 183.
[20] Molnar, Theologian of the Trinity, 156.
[21] On this I am reliant on the
argument of Ludlow, Gregory of Nyssa, 16ff.
[22] Torrance, Doctrine of God, 125.
[23] Cf. especially Torrance, Trinitarian Faith, 319-322.
[24] Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 179n.46.
[25] For a general outline of the
debate cf. Ralph Del Colle, “’Persons’ and ‘Being’ in John Zizioulas’
Trinitarian Theology: Conversation With Thomas Torrance and Thomas Aquinas,” Scottish Journal of Theology 54:1
(2001).
[26] Jason Radcliff, “T.F. Torrance
in Light of Stephen Holmes Critique of Trinitarian Thought,” Evangelical Quarterly, 86:1 (2014), 32.
[27] John Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies on Personhood
and the Church (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985); for
Zizioulas’ most thorough defense of his interpretation of the Cappadocians see
his more recent work, Zizioulas, Communion
and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church (New York:
T&T Clark, 2006), esp. 113-155, 171-178.
[28] Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness, 35.
[29] Ibid., 29.
[30] John Zizioulas, “On Being a
Person,” in Christoph Schwöbel and Colin Gunton, eds., Persons, Divine and Human (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991), 40.
[31] Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 41. ; Cf. Catherine LaCugna (God For Us, 369): “As the Cappadocian’s
worked it out, hypostasis (person)
was predicated as prior to and constitutive of ousia (nature). The Theoretical and practical significance
of this move simply cannot be overemphasized [emphasis added] particularly
as [this] stands in sharp contrast [emphasis
added] to the instinct of the
Latin-formed mind that wants to make ousia
an inner core of reality, separate from or prior to qualities, attributes,
or hypostases.”
[32] Cf. Stephen Holmes, The Quest for the Trinity: The Doctrine of
God in Scripture, History, and Modernity (Illinois: Inter Varsity Press,
2012), 14.
[33] “Therefore, as a result of love,
the ontology of God is not subject to the necessity of the substance.” (Being as Communion, 46). As a result, Zizioulas identifies the freedom
of the will with the hypostasis. This is
slightly ironic as in doing so Zizioulas essentially sides against Maximus and
with Phyrrus, who similarly argued that will must be identified with person,
not nature. The irony is two-fold: the
first, of course, is that Maximus’ arguments are considered the “orthodox”
position, and one necessary for Trinitarian theology given that, as Maximus
argued, if will correlates to hypostasis there are three wills in the Trinity,
which is to say three Gods. The second
irony is that Maximus has become more and more integrated into Zizioulas’
theology as of late, which means that he cannot be unaware that on this issue
he is taking Phyrrus’ side. Obviously we cannot go into it here, and I mean no
crass conflation of Zizioulas’ nuanced project with Pyrrhus, however this may
in fact represent a point of divergence between the father’s Zizioulas wants to
resource and his own intentions for them.
Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea,
178n.65 makes much the same observation in passing.
[34] Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness, 25.
[35] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, 311-312; Leonardo Boff, Trinity and Society trans. Paul Burns (Turnbridge Wells: Burns and
Oats, 1988), e.g. 82; See the survey of contemporary opinions in Ben Fulford,
“’One Commixture of Light’: Rethinking Some Modern Uses and Critiques of
Gregory of Nazianzus on the Unity and Equality of Divine Persons,” International Journal of Systematic Theology,
11:2 (2009): 172-189; and on Catherine LaCugna specifically, cf. Charles D.
Raith II, “Ressourcing the
Fathers? A Critical Analysis of
Catherine Mowry LaCugna’s Appropriation of the Trinitarian Theology of the
Cappadocian Fathers” International
Journal of Systematic Theology 10:3 (2008): 267-284.
[36] Cf. Christopher Beeley, “Divine
Causality and the Monarchy of God the Father in Gregory of Nazianzus,” Harvard Theological Review 100:2 (2007):
199-214.
[37] It should be duly noted that
both Torrance and Zizioulas at their best seem more than keenly aware of this.
[38] Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy, 304.
[39] Ibid.
[40] Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 141.
[41] Cf. Radcliff, T.F. Torrance and the Church Fathers,
194: “Embedded within this debate is Torrance’s more negative reception of the
Augustinian West and the Byzantine East.
However, the attacks are … aimed more at theologians of his own
context. His battle with Augustinian
soteriological dualism is perhaps more deeply with the
Federal/Scholastic/Westminster theology that he came across in his own context
and his critique of the Cappadocians and Gregory Palamas is more of John
Zizioulas and, even more so, the neopalamite theology of e.g. Lossky.”
[42] Radcliff, Thomas F. Torrance and the Church Fathers, 139-140.
[43] Matthew Baker, “The Place of St.
Irenaeus of Lyon in Historical and Dogmatic Theology According to Thomas F.
Torrance,” Participatio: The Journal of
the Thomas F. Torrance Fellowship 2 (2010): 5-43, at 42.
[44] Gunton, “Eastern and Western
Trinities: Being and Person,” 51. I
therefore have to disagree with Radcliff when he writes “Gunton’s categories
(and critiques of Torrance) are somewhat out of date” (Radcliff, Thomas F. Torrance and the Church Fathers,
157n.234). Radcliff is certainly correct
to note that the “De Regnón” paradigm is falling out of favor. Yet as we demonstrate, its legacy and logic are
still affecting Torrance’s interpretations.
The “Augustinian” character is of a peculiarly dialectical sort. As we have argued the sharpness of Zizioulas’
interpretation of the Greek Fathers is due in part to his anti-Augustinian
utilization of the de Regnón paradigm.
In disputing this sharpness, Torrance inverts Zizioulas’ claim, but
instead of going back to “Augustine” in this schema in a literal sense, it is
utilized in Torrance to differentiate between the Cappadocians themselves: by
distinguishing the non-hierarchical doctrine of Gregory Nazianzus (and
Athanasius) where they teach the Son and Spirit are “from the essence” of the
Father (and so, evidence “Western” characteristics to misappropriate the de
Regnón terminology here), to St. Basil and Gregory of Nyssa’s hierarchical idea
that the Son and Spirit proceed “from the person” of the Father (in De Regón’s
sense, “Eastern”). In this sense Gunton
is absolutely right, though he does not know exactly why. Instead of being “Augustinian” in any robust
historical sense, Torrance is merely “Augustinian” by the way de Regnón’s
binaries are being read to shape interpretive options and their labels (where
“from the essence” = Western-Augustinian).
In another sense though, Radcliff is absolute right to note that
Torrance is unique in that he sees Augustine as in line with Greek Trinitarian
thought (Ibid., 157) anticipating the
later arguments of Rowan Williams, Lewis Ayres, and Michel Rene Barnes.
[45] Reinhard Hütter, Suffering Divine Things: Theology as Church
Practice (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 1997), 239n.74.
[46] Asproulis, “Divine Monarchia,” 187.
[47] Khaled Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and
Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), 6.
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