Scripture and Metaphysics: Aquinas and the Renewal of Trinitarian Theology

SCRIPTURE AND METAPHYSICS Aquinas and the Renewal of Trinitarian Theology Matthew Levering SCRIPTURE AND METAPHYSICS ...

Author: Matthew Levering

326 downloads 2409 Views 816KB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!

Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

SCRIPTURE AND METAPHYSICS Aquinas and the Renewal of Trinitarian Theology

Matthew Levering

SCRIPTURE AND METAPHYSICS

Challenges in Contemporary Theology Series Editors: Gareth Jones and Lewis Ayres Canterbury Christ Church University College, UK and Emory University, US Challenges in Contemporary Theology is a series aimed at producing clear orientations in, and research on, areas of “challenge” in contemporary theology. These carefully coordinated books engage traditional theological concerns with mainstreams in modern thought and culture that challenge those concerns. The “challenges” implied are to be understood in two senses: those presented by society to contemporary theology, and those posed by theology to society. Published These Three are One After Writing Mystical Theology Engaging Scripture Torture and Eucharist Sexuality and the Christian Body On Christian Theology The Promised End Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy, and Gender A Theology of Engagement Alien Sex: The Body and Desire in Cinema and Theology Scripture and Metaphysics

David S. Cunningham Catherine Pickstock Mark A. McIntosh Stephen E. Fowl William T. Cavanaugh Eugene F. Rogers, Jr Rowan Williams Paul S. Fiddes Sarah Coakley Ian S. Markham Gerard Loughlin Matthew Levering

SCRIPTURE AND METAPHYSICS Aquinas and the Renewal of Trinitarian Theology

Matthew Levering

© 2004 by Matthew Levering 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK 550 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia The right of Matthew Levering to be identiﬁed as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. First published 2004 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Levering, Matthew Webb, 1971– Scripture and metaphysics: Aquinas and the renewal of Trinitarian theology / Matthew Levering. p. cm. – (Challenges in contemporary theology) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-4051-1733-8 (alk. paper) – ISBN 1-4051-1734-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Thomas, Aquinas, Saint, 1225?–1274. Summa theologica. Pars 1. Quaestio 1-43. 2. Trinity. 3. Bible–Theology. 4. Philosophical theology. I. Title. II. Series. BT111.3.L49 2004 230¢.2–dc22 2003014254 A catalog record for this title is available from the British Library. Set in 10.5 on 12.5pt Bembo by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall For further information on Blackwell Publishing, visit our website: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com

To Romanus Cessario, O.P. and Matthew L. Lamb

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

1

Setting the Scene: Theological Ends

Chapter 1 Sacra Doctrina: Wisdom, Scripture, and Metaphysics 1 Wisdom 2 Theologizing as a Wisdom-Exercise 3 Isaiah and St. John the Evangelist as Contemplatives Chapter 2 YHWH and Being 1 R. Kendall Soulen’s Post-Supersessionist Trinitarian Theology 2 Aquinas on Being and YHWH Chapter 3 Scripture and Metaphysics in the Theology of God’s Knowledge and Will 1 Jon D. Levenson on the God of Israel 2 St. Thomas Aquinas on the Knowledge and Will of God in His Unity Chapter 4 The Paschal Mystery and Sapiential Theology of the Trinity 1 N. T. Wright and Richard Bauckham on Jesus and the Identity of God

12 23 28 34 39 47 53 57 75 77 83 110 112

viii

contents 2 Hans Urs von Balthasar on the Cross as Analog for the Trinity 3 The Paschal Mystery as Revelatory of the Trinity in Aquinas

Chapter 5 Scripture and the Psychological Analogy for the Trinity 1

Aquinas and the Psychological Analogy

120 132 144 149

Chapter 6 Biblical Exegesis and Sapiential Naming of the Divine Persons

165

1 The Person of the Father 2 The Person of the Son 3 The Person of the Holy Spirit

169 179 185

Chapter 7 Essence, Persons, and the Question of Trinitarian Metaphysics 1 Trinitarian Ontology in Clarke, Zizioulas, and Hütter 2 Trinitarian Ontology and Aquinas’s Approach

197 202 213

Conclusion

236

Index

242

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The writing of this book has involved, as a delightful consequence, the initiation and deepening of a number of friendships. Since friendship requires seeking a shared good together, in this case the seeking of truth about the triune God we worship, I have been accompanied by many friends, in various ways, in preparing this book. First and foremost is my friend and dean, Michael Dauphinais, with whom I have worked together in myriad wonderful ways since our shared years at Duke Divinity School. Gilles Emery, O.P. read the entire manuscript and offered valuable encouragement; because this book in many ways (I hope) serves as a kind of “prolegomena” to a reading of Fr. Emery’s speculative trinitarian theology, his friendship has meant a good deal to me. John Boyle, Stanley Hauerwas, Gregory LaNave, Vincent Twomey, and Thomas Weinandy, O. F. M. Cap., provided valuable corrections and insights by generously reading earlier versions of chapters. I have beneﬁted as well from encouragement from Peggy Mary Brooks, David Burrell, C.S.C., Tremayne and Regina Cates, Jeffrey Gainey, Thomas Hibbs, Russell Hittinger, Reinhard Hütter, Steven A. Long, Edward Mahoney, Bruce Marshall, and Michael Sherwin, O.P. Bernhard-Thomas Blankenhorn, O.P. carefully read the penultimate draft of the book and offered superb criticisms; I owe a special debt to him. To Lewis Ayres, Rebecca Harkin, Fergus Kerr, O.P., and Debbie Seymour, I owe deep gratitude for guiding the manuscript with marvelous skill through the process at Blackwell. The trenchant writings of Ayres and Fr. Kerr have shaped my own interpretations of Aquinas. The completion of the manuscript corresponded with the launching of the English edition of Nova et Vetera, no small project, for which I am especially grateful to Georges Cardinal Cottier, O.P., Charles Morerod, O.P., and my colleagues Diane Eriksen and Joseph Pearce. My students at Ave Maria College honed my approach to these topics, and our registrar,

x

acknowledgments

Maria Herbel, kindly assisted me by scheduling my classes in a way that allows for some research. My department chair, William Riordan, has sustained my work at Ave Maria. Words cannot express the love that I have for my greatest friend, my wife Joy, and our four children; our marriage has been wonderfully enriched by the loving presence and support of our parents and our extended family. The writing of the book would have been impossible without support from my beloved grandmother Irene B. Webb, who has been a great blessing in my life. Finally, a particular word of thanks must go to Romanus Cessario, O.P., who read the entire manuscript and suggested many improvements, and to Matthew L. Lamb, whose insights can be seen throughout. The book had its genesis in a graduate seminar organized by Fr. Lamb at Boston College in the Fall of 1999. May God continue to bless Fr. Cessario and Fr. Lamb for so generously sharing their theological wisdom. To Romanus Cessario and Matthew Lamb, in gratitude to God for their care and ﬁdelity, I dedicate this book.

INTRODUCTION

Many recent theologies of the triune God envision an opposition between scriptural and metaphysical modes of articulating truth. In this view, metaphysical analysis, with its effort to expose “reality in its ontological, causal and communicative structures,”1 impedes theological understanding of the God who chooses to reveal himself not in philosophical propositions, but in dramatic, historical, and narrative form. Given this criticism, it follows that the abstract language of metaphysical theologies of the triune God obscures the practical relevance of the living God of Scripture and salvation history. Theologians and biblical scholars who grant the reality of this opposition between Scripture and metaphysics have responded in two main ways. First, some have repudiated Greek metaphysics, arguing that it has served as a means of the Church’s distancing herself from the living God of Israel and has enabled the Church to supersede and domesticate this God. Secondly, some have sought to redeﬁne “metaphysics” along scriptural lines, by developing a Christological and Trinitarian metaphysics. In this vein, Christ’s Paschal mystery, for instance, serves as an analogy for the Trinity. The fact that Christ has revealed God to be a Trinity of Persons, likewise, is seen to require a Trinitarian metaphysics, in which the relational character of the Trinity governs our understanding of “being.” For such thinkers, Scripture provides the justiﬁcation for developing more dramatic and narrative accounts of the distinction of the divine Persons, accounts that move well beyond the cautious metaphysical illumination of the divine order of origin by means of the traditional Trinitarian names Father, Son, Word, Image, Holy Spirit, Love, and Gift.

1

Pope John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, no. 66.

2

introduction

Each of the seven chapters of this book will address in depth an aspect of these concerns regarding the relationship of Scripture and metaphysics in the theology of the triune God. The book will thus provide a uniﬁed analysis of, and constructive response to, such concerns, in the course of presenting systematically the themes of Aquinas’s treatise on God in Summa Theologiae 1, qq.1–43. Throughout the book, I argue that renewal of the theology of the triune God requires that theologians reject the alleged opposition between scriptural and metaphysical modes of reﬂection, without conﬂating the two modes. Scriptural and metaphysical modes of reﬂection came unglued, I argue, when theologians no longer recognized contemplation as the rightful “end” of Trinitarian theology. As Jean Pierre Torrell reminds us: When Thomas says that theology is principally speculative, he means that it is in the ﬁrst instance contemplative; the two words are practically synonymous in Thomas. This is why – we shall not be slow to see this operative in Thomas’s life – research, study, reﬂection on God can ﬁnd their source and their completion only in prayer. The Eastern Christians like to say of theology that it is doxology; Thomas would add some further clariﬁcations to that, but he would not reject the intention: the joy of the Friend who is contemplated is completed in song.2

When practical relevance replaces contemplation as the primary goal of Trinitarian theology, the technical precisions of metaphysics come to be seen as meaningless, rather than as ways of deepening our contemplative union with the living God revealed in Scripture.3 2

Jean-Pierre Torrell, O.P., Saint Thomas Aquinas, Vol. 1: The Person and His Work, trans. Robert Royal (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996): 157. Cf. Servais Pinckaers, O.P., “Recherche de la signiﬁcation véritable du terme spéculatif,” Nouvelle Revue Théologique 81 (1959): 673–95. 3 Cf. Bruce D. Marshall, “The Trinity,” in The Blackwell Companion to Theology, ed. Gareth Jones (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), which offers an intriguing account of the past, present, and future of Trinitarian theology. Marshall examines Schleiermacher’s account of the Trinity. Schleiermacher holds that all doctrines express Christian (temporal) experience, and he argues that the traditional teaching (were it true) is both conceptually incoherent and fails to express a signiﬁcant aspect of our experience of “salvation.” Marshall compares this account to that of Cardinal Johann Baptist Franzelin, who published the ﬁrst edition of his The Triune God in 1869. Franzelin’s manual argues that the Bible itself teaches the fundamental aspects of traditional Trinitarian doctrine, as illumined by the Councils of the Church. Having drawn the comparison between Schleiermacher and Franzelin, Marshall notes that theologians of the twentieth-century “renewal” in Trinitarian theology, led by Barth and Rahner, sought to move beyond both Schleiermacher and Franzelin in a way

introduction

3

For pre-Enlightenment theologians, contemplation of the triune God – a contemplative union rooted in faith formed by charity – is the primary goal of Trinitarian theology, and it is only within this contemplative end that “practical” ends are truly achieved. For this earlier theological tradition, the Church’s mode of contemplating the triune God in Scripture requires a difﬁcult metaphysical ascesis – the limp of Jacob, the awe of Moses – because her God is salviﬁcally and radically strange. Indeed, with this perspective in mind, A. N. Williams has approvingly remarked that “eternity will apparently be spent in the reﬂection on issues today considered purely technical.”4 This view is held by both the Greek and Latin Fathers, as well as by the great medieval theologians. St. Gregory of Nyssa states, “The knowledge of God is a mountain steep indeed and difﬁcult to climb – the majority of people scarcely reach its base.”5 Using a different analogy to make the same point, St. Bernard contends that “the bedroom of the King is to be sought in the mystery of divine contemplation.”6 Contemplative Trinitarian theology belongs to the interior spiritual conversion by which self-centered human beings become God-centered. This book will argue that modern theologians, seeking to ascend the mountain of divine knowledge and to ﬁnd the “bedroom of the King,” need to learn anew the contemplative and metaphysical practices that are

that would integrate the insights of both. Marshall concludes, however, that the result has been to lose touch with the profundity of the tradition of Trinitarian teaching. In his view, the alleged “renewal” has succeeded largely in elevating the positions of the nineteenth century beyond their actual importance. In Marshall’s view, Trinitarian theology rooted in the classical tradition has far more profound resources at its disposal than those which are available to theologians whose work springs out of the controversies – the parallel movements of Protestant liberalism and Catholic manualism – of the nineteenth century. 4 A. N. Williams, “Contemplation: Knowledge of God in Augustine’s De Trinitate,” in Knowing the Triune God: The Work of the Spirit in the Practices of the Church, ed. James J. Buckley and David S. Yeago (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), 131. Williams is expounding Augustine’s view, but makes clear that it is her own as well. See also her The Ground of Union: Deiﬁcation in Aquinas and Palamas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) and William T. Cavanaugh, “A Joint Declaration?: Justiﬁcation as Theosis in Aquinas and Luther,” Heythrop Journal 41 (2000): 265–80. On Williams’s work, see Fergus Kerr, O.P., “Thomas Aquinas: Conﬂicting Interpretations in Recent Anglophone Literature,” in Aquinas as Authority, eds Paul van Geest, Harm Goris, and Carlo Leget (Leuven: Peeters, 2002): 165–86, at 183–6. 5 St. Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses, trans. Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson (New York: Paulist Press, 1978): 93 (no. 158). 6 St. Bernard, On the Song of Songs II, trans. Kilian Walsh O. C. S. O. (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1983): Sermon 23, no. 9, 33.

4

introduction

necessary for worsh ipping Israel’s God rather than culturally relevant idols. As we will see, Aquinas proves an invaluable guide for this “learning anew.” He understands theology as wisdom, that is, a participation in Christ’s sacred instruction in divine Wisdom. In his view, the story of YHWH should be read as sacred instruction in the divine “name,” charged throughout with the prophetic urgency that this “name” not fall among the idols. We learn from Aquinas how the language of “being” preserves Israel’s radical insistence upon the intimate presence in the world of her transcendent God, a presence that is ultimately Messianic, given the evil of the world. Furthermore, Aquinas exposes how the doctrine of divine Personhood attains real knowledge of, without overnarrating, the inner life of God as revealed in Scripture. He ﬁnds in the proper names of the Trinity – Father, Son, Word, Image, Holy Spirit, Love, Gift – the biblical distinctions of the divine communion-in-unity into which our lives have been salviﬁcally drawn. Against supersessionism, including the unconscious supersessionism that is Trinitarian ontology, he teaches Christians that we must always speak of our triune God under two aspects. The present book is thus an exercise in dialogic contemplation of the triune God, guided by the insights of Aquinas, that draws upon the insights of a wide array of Jewish and Christian exegetes and theologians. Revealed Wisdom, as interpreted in faith by the modes of human intellectual wisdom, illumines the mysteries of divine “being” in three divine Persons. I should note that neither the problem, nor the basic solution advanced here, is new. Already in 1964 Giles Hibbert had written: It is common enough to encounter Christians who have been seriously upset and put off by what they have seen of St. Thomas’s theological treatment of the Trinity. They go as far as to regard it as thoroughly untheological and even unfaithful to the Christian tradition, because it seems to them that it destroys the Mystery-Content of the Trinity and tries to substitute for it a series of explanatory “metaphysical formulae”. . . . Our starting point will be a question which is raised by this accusation against St. Thomas: namely, whether a thorough and consistent use of metaphysical philosophy should, or even can, be allowed within theology; or whether it necessarily impedes, if not actually destroys, the realization of God as Mystery – present within the worshipping Christian community. In other words, does metaphysicizing inevitably mean de-theologizing? We would maintain that the metaphysical approach to the Trinity of the great Doctors of the West, if properly understood, can be seen to provide a means for

introduction

5

better appreciating how man in this life is to stand in his presence before God, and as such it certainly does not de-theologize.7

Hibbert goes on to show that “metaphysics” belongs to the personal encounter by which human words truly express divine revelation. Scripture, as human words about “God,” cannot help but have metaphysical intelligibility. Hibbert points out that in order for human words to signify God, “[t]hey must have the possibility of being open, being able to point beyond themselves, beyond the sphere and context of their own immediate origin; or in other words by way of analogical predication they must have the possibility of metaphysical realization.”8 The Church expresses revelation in human words which are inevitably metaphysical in content. As Hibbert concludes, “Thus, because the words with which the revelation of God is handed on are human and have a potential metaphysical content, what is handed on by way of them has a direct personal relevance – ‘encounter content’ it could be called – in making God known to man. But it is of course necessary that this content be actualized and brought to life. An inadequate metaphysics will only kill it, robbing it of its signiﬁcance and power. A genuinely metaphysical theology will make it live.”9 Metaphysical analysis sustains the believer’s ability to express, both within Scripture and in Christian theologies that interpret Scripture as a channel of divine Revelation, the Holy Trinity’s radical and mysterious presence. The technical issues that will concern us are thus relevant not only to the few who have the time and ability to study philosophy and theology.10 7

Giles Hibbert, O.P., “Mystery and Metaphysics in the Trinitarian Theology of Saint Thomas,” Irish Theological Quarterly 31 (1964): 187–213, at 187–8. 8 Ibid., 189. 9 Ibid. 10 In noting that such issues are today considered “purely technical,” Williams does not of course mean to suggest that they have no soteriological import or no import for regulating our action, that is, for enabling us to encounter the God who saves us and to identify and live out the Christian virtues. On the contrary, as Williams shows in her The Ground of Union, the “purely technical” issues of classical Trinitarian theology are shot through with soteriological implications. Yet, the signiﬁcance of contemplative ends has been neglected, or to put it another way, the telos of Trinitarian theology has been reversed (cf. Ellen T. Charry, By the Renewing of Your Minds: The Pastoral Function of Christian Doctrine [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997]). “Purely technical” issues are explored primarily for the sake of reformulating action. Without being able to examine his programmatic proposals – many of which, certainly, I think are valid – one can simply note this tendency (inﬂuenced by his teacher Jürgen Moltmann) in Miroslav Volf, “ ‘The Trinity Is Our Social Program’: The Doctrine of the Trinity and the Shape of Social Engagement,” Modern Theology 14 (1998): 403–23.

6

introduction

Most Christians contemplate God liturgically and through personal prayer and study, rather than also by developing the intellectual habits proper to speculative theology. Nonetheless, attempts to speak about God (not merely to fellow theologians, but also and perhaps especially to persons in the pews) require some understanding of “technical” issues. Anyone who has ever heard a sermon on the Trinity – Catholics will attest to the painfully awkward experience that is “Trinity Sunday” – will admit that talk about the three Persons quickly becomes horribly thin unless the preacher has some metaphysical understanding (without denying the unfathomable mystery) of how the Persons are perfectly one and yet distinct.11 Simply put, no one in the pews wishes to hear about three gods. There is an expectation, rooted in Christian faith and the practices of faith,12 that the mystery must possess some intelligibility, that scriptural and metaphysical modes of reﬂection cannot ultimately be opposed. There must be some way of distinguishing the three Persons from the multiple gods of polytheism, beyond simply asserting that this is “not polytheism” and that the three are “one God,” whatever that might mean. Likewise, popular nonﬁction suggests a widespread fascination with whether the word “God,” the agent whose works are testiﬁed to in Scripture, has a metaphysical referent.13 Is God real? Does he “exist”? Does 11 For explorations of the relationship of doctrine and worship, see, e.g., Waclaw Swierzawski, “Faith and Worship in the Pauline Commentaries of St. Thomas Aquinas,” Divus Thomas 75 (1972): 389–412; Mark A. McIntosh, Mystical Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998); Geoffrey Wainwright, Doxology: The Praise of God in Worship, Doctrine, and Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980); Robert Barron, And Now I See . . . A Theology of Transformation (New York: Crossroad, 1998); Reinhard Hütter, “Hospitality and Truth: The Disclosure of Practices in Worship and Doctrine,” in Practicing Theology, ed. Miroslav Volf and Dorothy C. Bass (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002): 206–27; and Frans Jozef van Beeck, S.J., “Trinitarian Theology as Participation,” in The Trinity, ed. S. Davis, D. Kendall, and G. O’Collins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999): 295–325. 12 For analysis indebted to the work of George Lindbeck and Stanley Hauerwas reminding us that Christian doctrines “are entangled with” (to use Sarah Coakley’s phrase) Christian practices, see Practicing Theology, ed. Miroslav Volf and Dorothy C. Bass, especially Sarah Coakley’s “Deepening Practices: Perspectives from Ascetical and Mystical Theology,” 78. Coakley’s essay emphasizes the way in which the graced practice of “infused contemplation,” at the highest stage of the day-to-day ascetical (thus not otherworldly) and sacramental life made intelligible by the doctrine of cooperative grace, enables deepened theological insights, as God connaturalizes the believer to the doctrinal truth. With regard to Aquinas as a contemplative, see the work of Jean-Pierre Torrell, O.P., Saint Thomas Aquinas, Vol. 2: Spiritual Master, trans. Robert Royal (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2003); cf. M.-D. Chenu, O.P.’s evocative chapter 3 – “The Contemplative” – in his Aquinas and His Role in Theology, trans. Paul Philibert, O.P. (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2002): 35–61. 13 Cf. Cornelius Ernst, “Metaphor and Ontology in Sacra Doctrina,” The Thomist 38 (1974): 422–5.

introduction

7

God know and love us? To name only recent bestsellers, Karen Armstrong has written a “history” of God that historicizes God as a cultural construct. Jack Miles has authored a “biography” of God that puts God, a split personality in Miles’s view, on the therapist’s couch. Stephen Hawking’s introduction to the physical universe, A Brief History of Time, ends with the hope that, were physics able to discover a uniﬁed theory that explains all the internal structures of the universe, then attention could be turned to the greatest question of all, namely why the universe exists: “Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we ﬁnd the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we would know the mind of God.”14 But since God is not a creature, human attempts to articulate the uncreated could not be satisﬁed by physics, let alone cultural history or psychoanalysis. Beginning from creaturely things, one may inquire into what it would mean to be “not a creature.” Only such metaphysical inquiries15 can encounter the God of history who teaches, “To whom then will you compare me, that I should be like him? says the Holy One. Lift up your eyes on high and see: who created these?” (Isaiah 40:26) Yet, to many believers in the God revealed in Scripture, metaphysics appears to be exactly the problem. Not only has the very possibility of metaphysics been the subject of intense disputation especially since Luther,16 but also metaphysics seems to many Christians to be a way to 14

Stephen W. Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (New York: Bantam Books, 1988): 175. 15 On this see David B. Burrell, C.S.C.’s review of L. Gregory Jones and Stephen E. Fowl, eds, Rethinking Metaphysics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995) in Modern Theology 12 (1996): 109–12. Burrell begins, “Whether or not one is favorable or not to metaphysics, the tricky question remains: what is it? That is a metaphysical question, of course; perhaps the metaphysical question, which should remind us that metaphysics has come to refer to the paradigmatic activity proper to philosophy: one which inquires into the nature of things, indeed of anything at all. So anyone who urges us ‘beyond metaphysics’ must have in mind a peculiar way of carrying out that inquiry, for actually to venture beyond metaphysics would carry us beyond inquiry itself, which would put us quickly out of bounds,” 109. Burrell has in view the complex work of John Milbank. See, e.g., Milbank’s “Only Theology Overcomes Metaphysics,” in The Word Made Strange (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997): 36–52. 16 See, e.g., Gordon E. Michalson, Jr., Kant and the Problem of God (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999); cf. Terry Pinkard, German Philosophy, 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Heidegger inﬂuentially structures his whole philosophy around the rejection of classical metaphysics (onto-theology). For discussion of Heidegger’s inﬂuence, see e.g., Laurence Paul Hemming, Heidegger’s Atheism, chapter 8: “Jean-Luc Marion and the Contemporary Theological Appropriation of Heidegger,” 249–69; Fergus

8

introduction

get around the fact that the living God has revealed himself historically to Israel and the Church. To put it bluntly, now that God has revealed himself in Scripture, why would Christian theologians still rely on the insights of Greek metaphysics? Why would not the revealed God of Scripture either completely transform prior notions of “metaphysics,” or else be utterly beyond the conceptual realm of metaphysics? The present book seeks to engage such questions. The book, I hasten to note, is not a work of metaphysics, although it contains metaphysical analysis. Rather, I have written a work of Trinitarian theology that persistently calls into question the alleged opposition between metaphysical analysis and scriptural exegesis by exploring how Aquinas’s use of metaphysics illumines the meaning of scriptural revelation.17 For Aquinas, Trinitarian theology is ultimately ordered to contemplative union, and so at the outset we can note that his Trinitarian theology is not isolated from his doctrine of salvation. In the Eucharistic liturgy, in which the whole Mystical Body shares in Christ’s sacriﬁcial fulﬁllment of Israel’s Torah, Christ’s members (as the perfect Temple) manifest God’s name by worshipping the Trinity. By sharing in the self-emptying form of Christ, revealed by the Spirit in word and sacrament, Christ’s

Kerr, O.P., After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002): 85–93. Kerr ﬁnds a similarity between Hans Urs von Balthasar’s metaphysics in his Theological Aesthetics and Gilson’s metaphysics. Both Balthasar and Gilson emphasize that the doctrine of pure Act, in which creatures are a ﬁnite participation, does away with both essentialism and any attempt to make God a “being” among beings. 17 For exemplars of Christian metaphysics, see e.g., Etienne Gilson, God and Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941); idem, Being and Some Philosophers (Toronto: Pontiﬁcal Institute of Medieval Studies, 1949); David B. Burrell, C.S.C., Knowing the Unknowable God: Ibn-Sina, Maimonides, Aquinas (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986); Thomas S. Hibbs, Dialectic and Narrative in Aquinas: An Interpretation of the Summa Contra Gentiles (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995); Jacques Maritain, A Preface to Metaphysics: Seven Lectures on Being (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1946); idem, Essence and the Existent, trans. L. Galantiere and G. Phelan (New York: Pantheon, 1948); Cornelio Fabro, La nozione metaﬁsica di partecipazione secondo S. Tommaso d’Aquino, 2nd ed. (Turin: Società Editrice Internazionale, 1950); idem, Participation et Causalité selon S. Thomas d’Aquin (Louvain: Publications Universitaires, 1961); L. Geiger, La participation dans la philosophie de s. Thomas d’Aquin (Paris: Vrin, 1942); Rudi A. te Velde, Participation and Substantiality in Thomas Aquinas (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995); Fran O’Rourke, Pseudo-Dionysius and the Metaphysics of Aquinas (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992); Jan A. Aertsen, Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996); W. Norris Clarke, S.J. The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001); Steven A. Long, “On the Natural Knowledge of the Real Distinction of Essence and Existence,” Nova et Vetera (English) 1 (2003): 75–108.

introduction

9

cruciform members already mystically “see” the Father.18 This liturgical union with the Trinity is contemplative, although as a liturgical union requiring the active holiness of Christ’s members, Christian contemplation is not thereby bifurcated or cut off from Christian action. As the Fathers and medieval theologians recognized, the contemplative liturgical union with the Trinity that is enjoyed by believers whose faith is formed by charity, is expressed theologically in contemplative and metaphysical modes. The goal of this book, therefore, is sharing in the Church’s manifestation of God’s “name” by renewing the practices of theological contemplation. The ﬁrst chapter of the book treats sacra doctrina, the sacred teaching or wisdom that is knowledge of God and all things in relation to God. This chapter argues that appropriating the revealed sacred teaching has always demanded, even for the biblical authors, metaphysical questioning. Indeed, the practice of metaphysical questioning constitutes a 18

Cf. my Christ’s Fulﬁllment of Torah and Temple: Salvation according to Thomas Aquinas (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002). Contemplative practices cannot be separated from moral practices: both require an ascesis, a self-humbling, a conversion from self-centeredness to God-centeredness. Put another way, overcoming idolatry requires both intellectual and moral conversion. Gustavo Gutierrez has argued that “contrary to interpretations based on readings of the Bible from the standpoint primarily of religious philosophy, idolatry cannot be reduced to a kind of process of intellectual and religious cleansing on the way to monotheism, a process that supposedly went on throughout the history of the Jewish mind. Without abandoning the realm of the cultic, the prophets forcefully point out that the idolatry of the people also takes the form of placing their trust in power and wealth, which they turn into real idols. Their behavior means that they follow principles that differ from, and are opposed to, those that spring from the covenant they have made with Yahweh, the only God and the Lord of Israel” (Gutierrez, The God of Love, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell [Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991]: 56). From a similar perspective, Roberto S. Goizueta has noted that “Christian doctrine remains important as the Christian community’s articulation of our lived commitment to Christ, and as the word of God which inspires and transforms our lives. But what most deﬁnes us as Christians is not our intellectual assent to those doctrines but our lived commitment to Christ and our neighbor. Likewise, theology remains important as the community’s reﬂection upon that commitment in the light of the Scriptures, but what makes that reﬂection credible and authentically Christian is, above all, its roots in the lived commitment to Christ and neighbor” (Goizueta, Caminemos con Jesús: Toward a Hispanic/Latino Theology of Accompaniment [Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1995]: 78–9). Gutierrez and Goizueta are right to insist upon uncompromising Christian morality, but the arguments of both authors would be assisted by a richer account of what constitutes, and what sustains, “our intellectual assent to those doctrines.” Through his critique (inﬂuenced by the work of Matthew L. Lamb) of the modern concept of “praxis,” which leads him to advocate an “aesthetic” understanding of praxis, Goizueta moves in the direction of providing such an account (cf. 80ff., especially 106–8).

10

introduction

spiritual exercise that puriﬁes from idolatry those who would contemplate the self-revealing God. This unity between rational investigation and contemplative beatitude ﬁnds wonderful expression in St. Athanasius’s understanding of human sharing in the divine image: They would be no better than the beasts, had they no knowledge save of earthly things; and why should God have made them at all, if He had not intended them to know Him? But, in fact, the good God has given them a share in His own Image, that is, in our Lord Jesus Christ, and has made even themselves after the same Image and Likeness. Why? Simply in order that through this gift of God-likeness in themselves they may be able to perceive the Image Absolute, that is the Word Himself, and through Him apprehend the Father; which knowledge of their Maker is for men the only really happy and blessed life.19

The alleged opposition between metaphysics and salvation history in theology founders when confronted with this understanding of salvation (in history) as holy contemplation, an understanding shared by Aquinas.20 The remaining chapters continue in systematic fashion the book’s discussion of divine “being” with various theologians, most importantly St. Thomas Aquinas.21 The chapters span the themes contained in Aquinas’s treatise on God in the Summa Theologiae 1, qq.2–42. While not directly treating q.43, on the temporal missions of the Son and Spirit, the book 19 St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation, trans. a Religious of C. S. M. V. (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, 1993): 38 (no. 11), emphasis added. See also Khaled Anatolios, Athanasius: The Coherence of His Thought (New York: Routledge, 1998). 20 Compare a twelfth-century Muslim contemplative approach to the divine unity: “The ﬁrst stage of faith in divine unity amounts to a person speaking the words ‘There is no god but God’ while his heart is heedless or even denies it, as hypocrites may profess faith in divine unity. In the second stage one believes the meaning of the statement in his heart, as the community of Muslims believe it, and this is the faith of the common people. The third represent those who bear witness to [faith in divine unity] on the path of interior illumination by means of the light of truth, and that is the stage of those who are ‘drawing near,’ and takes place when one sees many things, but sees them emanating in their multiplicity from the Almighty One. The fourth stage is that of those who see only unity when they regard existence, which is the witness of the righteous ones and those whom the Suﬁs call ‘annihilated’ by faith in divine unity” (Al-Ghazali, Faith in Divine Unity and Trust in Divine Providence, Book XXXV of The Revival of the Religious Sciences, trans. David B. Burrell, C.S.C. [Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, 2001]: 10, emphasis added). 21 To grasp the contemplative spirit that distinguishes Aquinas’s theological appropriation of biblical, liturgical, patristic, and philosophical themes, see Jean-Pierre Torrell, O.P.’s magisterial two-volume study, Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 1: The Person and His Work, trans. Robert Royal (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1996) and especially Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 2 Spiritual Master, trans. Robert Royal (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2003).

introduction

11

engages this topic by emphasizing the scriptural and soteriological foundation of Aquinas’s theology of God.22 Chapters 2 and 3 address God in his unity, in dialogue with Jewish and Christian theologians whose concern is that Aquinas’s account of God’s “attributes” (what one can say about God as one) distort, in a supersessionist and onto-theological manner, the one living God revealed as YHWH to Israel as narrated in the Old Testament. Chapters 4 through 7 then explore aspects of the theology of the Trinity. Chapter 4 asks whether the Paschal mystery of Jesus Christ is revelatory of the Trinity in such a way as to constitute an analogy for the Trinity. This chapter inquires into the modes by which we understand the “distinction” of Persons in God. The ﬁfth chapter extends this topic by directly considering Aquinas’s account of the “psychological analogy” as a means of understanding the Persons as subsisting relations. In both the fourth and ﬁfth chapters, at stake is whether Aquinas’s analogy for understanding the Trinity is grounded sufﬁciently in God’s revelation in Scripture.23 The sixth chapter turns to Aquinas’s description of the Persons of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Here the theologians in light of whose work I contextualize Aquinas’s views are biblical exegetes. Aquinas’s description 22

On this topic see e.g., Émile Bailleux, “Le cycle des missions trinitaires, d’après saint Thomas,” Revue Thomiste 63 (1963): 165–92. 23 My approach to Scripture is reﬂected in Adrian Walker’s “Fundamentalism and the Catholicity of Truth,” Communio 29 (2002): 5–27. Walker notes, “The inspiration of Scripture necessarily passes through, while never being simply reducible to, the participation of the Church (and of Israel) in Jesus Christ’s original act of traditioning, which is both immanent in, and transcendent of, the Church” (20). Cf. the important work of David S. Yeago, “The New Testament and Nicene Dogma: A Contribution to the Recovery of Theological Exegesis,” Pro Ecclesia 3 (1994): 152–64; idem, “The Spirit, the Church, and the Scriptures: Biblical Inspiration and Interpretation Revisited,” in Knowing the Triune God, ed. James J. Buckley and David S. Yeago (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001): 49–93; Stephen E. Fowl, Engaging Scripture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), especially 183–205, where he offers “a theoretical account to support my ad hoc use of biblical scholarship in the course of this book” (186); idem, “The Conceptual Structure of New Testament Theology,” in Biblical Theology: Retrospect and Prospect, ed. Scott J. Hafemann (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002): 225–36; C. Kavin Rowe, “Biblical Pressure and Trinitarian Hermeneutics,” Pro Ecclesia 11 (2002): 295–312; Thomas G. Guarino, “Catholic Reﬂections on Discerning the Truth of Sacred Scripture,” in Your Word is Truth: A Project of Evangelicals and Catholics Together, ed. Charles Colson and Richard John Neuhaus (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002): 79–101; Thomas Weinandy, O. F. M. Cap., Does God Suffer? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000): 27–39; Gilles Emery, O.P., “Biblical Exegesis and the Speculative Doctrine of the Trinity in St.Thomas Aquinas’s Commentary on John,” chapter 7 of Trinity in Aquinas (Ypsilanti, MI: Sapientia Press, 2003); Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, Vol. 1, trans. Mark Sebanc (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998) and Vol. 2, trans. E. M. Macierowski (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000); Thomas F. Ryan, Thomas Aquinas as Reader of the Psalms (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000); R. Francis Martin, “Sacra Doctrina and the Authority of Its Sacra Scriptura According to St. Thomas Aquinas,” Pro Ecclesia 10 (2001): 84–102.

12

introduction

of the Persons can seem far from the narrative reality that one meets in the New Testament and in the “biblical theology” practiced by contemporary biblical exegetes. This chapter inquires into whether Aquinas’s highly metaphysical (speculative) account treats the themes of “biblical theology,” and if so, what is gained by Aquinas’s nonnarrative approach. Lastly, the seventh chapter addresses the movement in theology towards developing a metaphysics that is properly theological, in other words a Trinitarian metaphysics. After examining the work of proponents of this development in light of classical Jewish and Muslim concerns, I argue that Aquinas’s nuanced analysis of the relationship of “essence” and “Persons” accomplishes the main goals of proponents of “Trinitarian ontology,” without creating the conceptual and interreligious problems that Trinitarian ontology creates. Aquinas’s approach retains the integrity of the Old Testament revelation while fully displaying its integration into Christ Jesus’ deﬁnitive revelation of God. In short, the book aims both at reordering contemporary Trinitarian theology and at identifying further “signposts,” as Walker Percy might put it, along the contemplative path marked out by God himself in Scripture and tradition.24 I hope to show that by following a path of contemplation (grounded in the active holiness that sharing in Christ’s salviﬁc fuliﬁllment of Israel’s Torah involves), Trinitarian theology remains fully inserted within Christ’s salviﬁc fulﬁllment of Israel’s Temple, where God’s name, against the idols, is manifested.

1

Setting the Scene: Theological Ends

Before embarking on this task, however, a brief “setting of the scene” is in order, so that the reader will understand more fully the post-Kantian and post-Hegelian debate about theological ends within which this book, and contemporary appropriation of Aquinas’s theology of God, is inscribed. In different ways, Cornel West, Stanley Hauerwas, and Charles Taylor have retold American intellectual history with William James – himself profoundly inﬂuenced by Kantian and Hegelian streams of thought – at the center.25 As such retellings would suggest, modern Trinitarian 24 Walker Percy, Signposts in a Strange Land, ed. Patrick Samway (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991). 25 Portions of the following have appeared in my “Beyond the Jamesian Impasse in Trinitarian Theology,” The Thomist 66 (2002): 395–420. Cornel West’s study, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,

introduction

13

theology conceives of its goals, content, and structure along the lines of the Jamesian pattern. For this reason, the remainder of this introduction will describe James’s philosophy, its instantiation in certain criticisms of classical theology of God, and contemporary resources for moving beyond such criticisms. I will show that in the name of making the Trinity relevant and useful, modern theologians have fallen into a “Jamesian impasse” that ends by either knowing nothing or claiming to know too much. What is needed, I will argue, is a rediscovery of the meaning of contemplative wisdom. In James’s famous Gifford Lectures, The Varieties of Religious Experience, he examines from a psychological perspective classic accounts of “the religion of healthy-mindedness,” “the sick soul,” “the divided self, and the process of its uniﬁcation,” “conversion,” “saintliness,” “mysticism,” and “philosophy,” among other topics. For our purposes in this introduction, James’s understanding of philosophy is especially telling. James begins by noting that philosophy, as related to religious experience, has generally been thought to have to do with the intellectual warrants of religious claims. He inquires as to whether philosophy has been able to live up to this task: The subject of Saintliness left us face to face with the question, Is the sense of divine presence a sense of anything true? We turned ﬁrst to mysticism for an answer, and found that although mysticism is entirely willing to corroborate religion, it is too private (and also too various) in its utterances to be able to claim a universal authority. But philosophy publishes results which claim to be universally valid if they are valid at all, so we now turn with our question to philosophy. Can philosophy stamp a warrant of veracity upon the religious man’s sense of the divine?26

James’s conclusion is a ﬁrm “No.” His chapter reviews various attempts to demonstrate the existence of God and his attributes – from Protestant 1989), nicely connects Emerson with James. I am indebted to Stanley Hauerwas’s analysis of James’s work for bringing this insight to the fore, as well as for directing my attention to James’s use of Newman (although Hauerwas mistakenly attributes to Newman a lengthy quotation culled by James from a contemporary manual on natural theology). See Stanley Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Natural Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2001): 72–86. See also Charles Taylor’s Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), and my forthcoming review of this book in Modern Theology. 26 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Penguin Books, 1982): 430.

14

introduction

and Catholic manuals to Kant and Hegel – and ﬁnds that none of the attempts succeeds. James limits the task of philosophy as regards religious expression to logical clariﬁcation of doctrines and to weeding out claims that have been proven scientiﬁcally to be false.27 Yet, philosophy that seeks to speak about God remains of interest to James. Granting the validity of Schleiermacher’s theory that “theological formulas” are at best “secondary products” attempting to express religious feelings, he adapts this theory to encompass the whole variety of religious expression: “Religious experience . . . spontaneously and inevitably engenders myths, superstitions, dogmas, creeds, and metaphysical theologies, and criticisms of one set of these by the adherents of another.”28 James then responds to a great opponent of Schleiermachian precepts, John Henry Cardinal Newman. First, James discusses Newman’s argument in The Idea of a University that theology is indeed a science or a systematic arrangement of truths known about God ( James mistakenly summarizes Newman’s view as “theology based on pure reason”29). For James, this can be shown empirically to be false, since, unlike science, neither dogmatic theology nor “natural theology” (metaphysics) has ever led to anything but sectarian division. Second, James nonetheless admits that Newman’s account of God’s attributes is, as “rhetoric,” magniﬁcent.30 James does not quote this passage of Newman’s, but instead quotes at length a Thomistic manual’s dry account of God’s existence and attributes. James then gives Newman backhanded but real praise. Newman, says James, “gives us scholastic philosophy ‘touched with emotion,’ and every philosophy should be touched with emotion rightly understood. Emotionally, then, dogmatic theology is worth something to minds of the type of Newman’s.”31 Thus although Newman has insisted that his theology is scientiﬁc, James ﬁnds its real value in its ability to convey and stimulate religious emotion. James goes on to note that the manualist’s account of God’s existence and attributes fails precisely this test. The falsehood of the manualist’s account can be shown not only empirically, but also by the meaninglessness of the manualist’s account even were it to be true. James states: 27 28 29 30 31

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.,

455. 433. 435. 442. 442.

introduction

15

Take God’s aseity, for example; or his necessariness; his immateriality; his “simplicity” or superiority to the kind of inner variety and succession which we ﬁnd in ﬁnite beings, his indivisibility, and lack of the inner distinctions of being and activity, substance and accident, potentiality and actuality, and the rest; his repudiation of inclusion in a genus; his actualized inﬁnity; his “personality,” apart from the moral qualities which it may comport; his relations to evil being permissive and not positive; his self-sufﬁciency, self-love, and absolute felicity in himself: – candidly speaking, how do such qualities as these make any deﬁnite connection with our life? And if they severally call for no distinctive adaptations of our conduct, what vital difference can it possibly make to a man’s religion whether they be true or false?32

He then compares dogmatic theologians to naturalists who never get out in the ﬁelds and woods, but stay inside classifying and arranging bones. Metaphysical accounts, in this view, are nothing but meaningless words, quite cut off from anything relevant to a religious person. These abstractions, James suggests, are even demonic – “they have the trail of the serpent over them” – insofar as they serve as substitutes for anything worthy of worship and religious feeling. He concludes, “So much for the metaphysical attributes of God! From the point of view of practical religion, the metaphysical monster which they offer to our worship is an absolutely worthless invention of the scholarly mind.”33 Even as James bids “a deﬁnitive good-by to dogmatic theology,”34 therefore, Newman is somewhat excused by James on the grounds that Newman’s description of God’s attributes is at least emotionally evocative. James’s criticism of the “metaphysical monster,” however, sweeps away Newman’s claims for the intellectual seriousness of theology. The gauntlet thrown down by James in the United States, and by Kant and Schleiermacher in Europe, has greatly inﬂuenced how Christian theologians understand theology and in particular how they understand the place of metaphysical arguments within theology. Most contemporary theologies of the triune God shy away from metaphysics as overly abstract and instead seek practical, rather than contemplative, ends. For example, the late Catherine Mowry LaCugna’s God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life begins with the following proposal: “The doctrine of the Trinity is ultimately a practical doctrine with radical 32 33 34

Ibid., 445. Ibid., 447. Ibid., 448.

16

introduction

consequences for Christian life. That is the thesis of this book.”35 According to LaCugna, theological articulations of the doctrine of the Trinity have, because of their “esoteric treatment of God’s ‘inner’ life,” alienated believers from the living God.36 Language about God in himself, in order not to degenerate into logical error that would impugn either God’s unity or his Trinity, must be speculative or contemplative. It thus relies upon achieving the most rigorous conceptual distinctions. Such language, says LaCugna, is not fully “at home with the concrete languages and images of the Bible, creeds, and the liturgy.”37 Similarly, David S. Cunningham has remarked: To many people, including both Christians and non-Christians, this doctrine (at least as it has traditionally been elaborated) remains esoteric and irrelevant. Too often it is expressed in cryptic formulas, or described in densely compressed philosophical prose; this does little to set the doctrine in a bright and convincing light. Furthermore, the key terms of Trinitarian theology continue to be translated with little appreciation for the contemporary context of their reception. Nor is the doctrine very often shown to be of great signiﬁcance for the day-to-day lives of Christian believers.38

Cunningham’s book therefore emphasizes the “Trinitarian virtues” of polyphony, participation, and particularity and concludes with the “Trinitarian practices” that inform and embody these Trinitarian virtues. Such theologies seem to place the goal of Trinitarian theology in the practical fruits that the doctrine can inspire. Despite the intentions of the authors, however, these practical fruits then displace the Trinity as the locus of interest in Trinitarian theology. The intention is nonetheless a worthy one: to show that Trinitarian theology is not “merely” intellectual, but rather is transformative of the student of Trinitarian theology. Is there another way of accounting for the goal of Trinitarian theology that would expose the transformation of the practitioner without suggesting that the study of God has something other than transformative knowing of God as its primary goal? 35

Catherine Mowry LaCugna, God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life (New York: HarperCollins, 1993): 1. 36 Ibid., ix. 37 Ibid. 38 David S. Cunningham, These Three Are One: The Practice of Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), ix.

introduction

17

It seems to me that what is required is grasping how human transformation occurs within the movement whereby we rise from idolatry and, instead of primarily contemplating creatures (ourselves), contemplate God for his own sake rather than for the sake of creatures. Reﬂecting upon the Latino/Hispanic context, Roberto Goizueta has articulated an antipragmatist account of “ends” that may help us grasp the signiﬁcance of contemplation. Goizueta notes that some cultures appear to judge value in terms of outcomes, results, or products. Such cultures can no longer celebrate the sheer gift of being. As Goizueta points out: Celebration implies relinquishment of control; it implies a willingness to “let go.” It thus implies an afﬁrmation of life as an end in itself: regardless of its products, its results, its outcomes, or its conclusion, life is good. For Latinos and Latinas, all human action is, at bottom, a liturgical celebration. . . . Only when intersubjective human action is lived out as an end in itself, as something to be afﬁrmed and celebrated regardless of the “outcome,” can relationships become sources of individual empowerment and human liberation.39

In other words, human transformation requires, and takes place within, relationships that are not outcome-based, but rather are rooted in celebration of the other for his or her own sake. Goizueta goes on to describe the mystical (cruciform40) “interiority” that makes possible personal communion: “This interiority – or sensitivity to the a priori presence of the poor as intrinsic to the my own identity – thus creates that spirit of humility without which it is impossible to relate to the poor person as ‘other.’ ”41 Drawing upon the work of José Vasconcelos, he connects this “spirit of humility” that inspires Christian praxis with contemplation, although he does not use the term. He afﬁrms that “if the option for the poor has a necessary, aesthetic dimension and, as Vasconcelos maintains, the highest form of aesthetic union is mystical union, a necessary dimension of the option for the poor implies a personal, interior spiritual life.”42 Goizueta hastens to add that such spiritual life or mystical union cannot be dissociated from embodied practices, “since the spiritual is always mediated by the sacramental concrete.”43 This 39

Roberto S. Goizueta, Caminemos con Jesús, 110-111. For a splendid account of cruciformity, see Michael J. Gorman, Cruciformity: Paul’s Narrative Spirituality of the Cross (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001). 41 Ibid., 209. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid., 210. 40

18

introduction

understanding of contemplation as an ecclesial practice, rather than an individualistic encounter, complements his earlier emphasis upon human transformation (charity) as occuring within nonutilitarian relationships. It is just such a relationship that contemplation of God for his own sake brings about, and it is within this nonidolatrous (ecclesial) relationship that true awareness of God’s radical love for us comes about. Goizueta’s understanding of theological ends, in its focus upon moral praxis, thus pushes toward a contemplative understanding without sacriﬁcing what theologians such as LaCugna wish to gain. Due to his concern to ward off any hint of (ivory tower) quietism, however, Goizueta remains hesitant to envision distinctly contemplative ends. In contrast, Josef Pieper boldly afﬁrms that “man’s ultimate happiness consists in contemplation.”44 What does it mean for human beings to desire happiness? Pieper notes that the typical places that human beings look for happiness – pleasure, money, power, etc. – call forth profound longing for something more. He arrives at the conclusion that happiness can consist only in embracing the “whole good” – the universal good – and that for happiness truly to engage our freedom, we must receive this “whole good” actively and freely. He then asks, “If ‘the whole good’ alone will ultimately quench the thirst of our natures, and if we can obtain this whole good only by receiving it actively; if, in short, happiness consists in action – what kind of action must that be?”45 Action that transforms us interiorly – making us “happy” – must be action that has primarily internal effects rather than external effects. Such action primarily perfects the person who acts, although secondarily (and importantly) it will have external effects. There are two kinds of actions that primarily perfect and transform the person who acts: knowing or the act of intellect, and loving or the act of will. Does happiness consist in knowing, loving, or a combination of both? Answering this question, Pieper directs us to Aquinas’s view of the relationship between these two powers of the one human soul: “Happiness does consist in having everything that the will can possibly will. . . . It consists in our obtaining as a possession ‘the whole good.’ But – this having, possessing, obtaining, is something different from willing!” If possessing the whole good in our soul (being perfectly “happy”) is not an act of will, it is an act of the 44 On Pieper see Bernard Schumacher, ed., Josef Pieper: A Philosopher Bridging Tradition with Modernity (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, forthcoming). The quotation is from Josef Pieper, Happiness and Contemplation (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 1998): 13. 45 Ibid., 55.

introduction

19

intellect: “Possession of the beloved, St. Thomas holds, takes place in an act of cognition, in seeing, in intuition, in contemplation.”46 The whole good is loved and possessed as known. In knowing fully, we possess the object that we love, and delight in this possession. The Bible, Pieper points out, speaks about “knowing” in this same intimate way, both with regard to the union of man and woman and with regard to eternal life.47 In contemplation, which is a knowing inspired by love, human beings receive and possess “the whole good,” happiness.48 Pieper identiﬁes three elements that belong to the “action” that is contemplation. First, contemplation “has to do with the purely receptive approach to reality, one altogether independent of all practical aims in active life.”49 This means that contemplation, rooted in radical charity, aims at perceiving truth for its own sake rather than for the sake of a further end. Second, contemplation is not the process of reasoning by which we arrive at a truth. Instead, contemplation is the intellectual seeing of the truth – resting in and enjoying the truth. Third, contemplation of truth evokes in us amazement or wonder. On ﬁrst sight, it might seem that William James and Pieper are at a complete impasse: James focuses on religious feelings and practical actions, while Pieper focuses on contemplation of truth for its own sake. In fact, however, the impasse is illusory. The ends that James desires can only be found by following the path that Pieper describes toward amazement, wonder, and happiness. Once one recognizes that contemplation is a rising from idolatry, away from seeking happiness in creatures, one can see that the creaturely goals (of the will) that James wants are to be found in the contemplative embrace of God for the sake of God, as opposed to the practices of idolatry. 46

Ibid., 63. Ibid., 70. 48 Cf. Fergus Kerr, O.P., “Thomas Aquinas: Conﬂicting Interpretations in Recent Anglophone Literature,” in Aquinas as Authority. Kerr summarizes A. N. Williams’s perspective: “The impetus to understand God, as Williams puts it, is part of the larger process by which God draws human beings towards himself – the gracing of nature that we may come to glory. . . . It is not reﬂection on one’s own experience of God’s goodness, or the intense awareness of God’s presence or absence that motivates unitive love, Williams insists – rather, in Thomas’s view, it is meditation on God’s nature. The painstakingly technical considerations of the divine nature, simplicity, goodness, transcendence, immanence etc., should be viewed as a form of meditation meant to incite the love that leads to union. . . . On this interpretation, Thomas Aquinas offers a study of the transcendental conditions of divinization, a study which (however) is itself always already an ascetic practice: an initiation into contemplation” (183–5). 49 Ibid., 73. 47

20

introduction

What does this mean for Trinitarian theology? As we will discuss in more detail in the chapters to come, contemplation possesses two aspects: study and prayer. For Aquinas, the two are not opposed.50 Theological study arises within the ecclesial (liturgical) context that makes possible the believer’s rising from idolatry, and theological study aims at fostering this ongoing rising from idolatry. Thus study and prayer share the same goal and belong to the same charitable movement of imitatio Christi – a movement which, as ecclesial and liturgical, overﬂows into the active life of teaching and preaching. As Thomas Hibbs has remarked, “The Christian practice of contemplation is rooted in and overﬂows into charity.”51 How are all these aspects to ﬁnd expression in a theology of God? I will argue in chapter 1 that understanding theology as wisdom provides the key. For now, we might simply ask whether Trinitarian theology that primarily focuses upon the immanent processions and relations in God can be adequate to expressing the triune God revealed as radical self-gift in history. Here we might advert to the encyclical Fides et Ratio for guidance.52 The encyclical reminds us of the distinction between two tasks of 50

On Aquinas’s view of contemplation see Jean-Pierre Torrell, O.P., Saint Thomas Aquinas: Spiritual Master, 1–21 on theology and spirituality; see also Simon Tugwell, O.P.’s discussion of Aquinas’s view of contemplation in “Thomas Aquinas: Introduction,” in Albert & Thomas: Selected Writings, ed. Simon Tugwell, O.P. (New York: Paulist Press, 1988): 279–86. Both Torrell and Tugwell show that the meaning of “contemplation” was somewhat ﬂuid for Aquinas. 51 Thomas S. Hibbs, Virtue’s Splendor: Wisdom, Prudence, and the Human Good (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001): 224. 52 Critiquing, among other things, Fides et Ratio (cf. 117), the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo in After Christianity (trans. Luca D’Isanto [New York: Columbia University Press, 2002]) has contrasted “the God of metaphysics” with “the God of the Bible.” He identiﬁes the God of the Bible as a God of “weakening” or “kenosis,” contingency, and historicity who undermines any claims to a constrictive “order of being” in favor of an hermeneutical and communal understanding of “productive interpretation” and “being as event.” In contrast, the God of metaphysics – the product of the claim that God “exists” outside of the historical communal announcement of “salvation” – appears as an authoritarian mask for the violent scapegoating of those who do not ﬁt into a particular (ecclesial) deﬁnition of “truth.” Rejecting any “truth” beyond the aesthetic, Vattimo proposes that “[i]f there is salvation somewhere, it has the features of lightening [weakening] rather than justice. . . . Eternal life is nothing but the ‘perfect’ enjoyment of meanings and spiritual forms generated by the history of humanity, which now constitute the ‘kingdom of immortality’ ” (55). In response, one might remind Vattimo of the words of the prophet Amos, “Woe to those who lie upon beds of ivory, and stretch themselves upon their couches, and eat lambs from the ﬂock, and calves from the midst of the stall; who sing idle songs to the sound of the harp, and like David invent for themselves instruments of music; who drink wine in bowls, and anoint themselves with the ﬁnest oils, but are not

introduction

21

theology: auditus ﬁdei, or hearing and receiving the content of faith, and intellectus ﬁdei, or understanding and articulating the content of faith.53 John Paul II explains, “With the ﬁrst, theology makes its own the content of revelation as this has been gradually expounded in Sacred Tradition, Sacred Scripture and the Church’s living Magisterium. With the second, theology seeks to respond through speculative enquiry to the speciﬁc demands of disciplined thought.”54 Thus speculative theology does not simply recapitulate the biblical narrative. Rather, the central aim of the intellectus ﬁdei is to investigate the truths of faith.55 Metaphysical concepts enable the speculative theologian to present the revealed mysteries as intelligible truth that fulﬁll humankind’s thirst for truth. For John Paul II, if dogmatic theology is not informed by metaphysical speculation, it cannot articulate the meaning of Scripture, because the mysteries revealed in Scripture are salviﬁc truths intended for all human beings. Scripture’s meaning cannot be conveyed solely by more stories in addition to the stories of Scripture. Rather, the narrative of Scripture requires from the theologian the metaphysical questioning that investigates the revealed mysteries by seeking their “ontological, causal and communicative structures,”56 and thus enables the theologian to express judgments about the meaning of Scripture’s claims about God and human beings. Numerous theologians, agreeing with Karl Rahner that the doctrine of the Trinity no longer matters in the lives of most Christians, have sought to demonstrate the relevance of the doctrine. The ultimate relevance of the doctrine of the Trinity, however, consists in human beings’ acquiring the practices of contemplation, which form the spiritual exercise by which we are drawn away from idols and united, in Christ, to the true God in friendship. It is here that scriptural and metaphysical modes of instruction meet. Teaching the doctrine of the Trinity requires (even in Scripture) a metaphysical ascesis in order to accomplish the spiritual exercise of con-

grieved over the ruin of Joseph!” (Amos 6:4–6). In chapter 2 I will seek to show that metaphysical reﬂection preserves our understanding of the intimacy of God to man, an intimacy that is reﬂected in the justice God accomplishes for the oppressed. 53 For further elucidation of the signiﬁcance of this distinction, see Thomas Weinandy, O. F. M. Cap., “Fides et Ratio: A Response to John Webster,” New Blackfriars 81 (2000): 225–35, especially 231ff. 54 Fides et Ratio, no. 65. 55 Ibid., no. 66. The encyclical also speaks of fundamental theology, whose responsibility it is to show how truths arrived at by reason support the truths of faith (no. 67). 56 Ibid, no. 66.

22

introduction

templation, in which the self-centered person becomes God-centered. Far from encouraging quietism or bifurcating the active and contemplative life, contemplative practices detach the person from created goods and open the person more profoundly to the radical self-giving for the sake of the Kingdom that characterizes the Christian. In knowing and loving God’s name for his sake, we rightly order our loves: “So keep my charge never to practice any of these abominable customs which were practiced before you, and never to deﬁle yourselves by them: I am the LORD your God” (Leviticus 18:30). Human beings attain the goal of contemplative embrace when, ﬁlled with charity by graced imitatio Christi, we rest in God even in the midst of our labors in the world for God.57 The goal is resting in God for his own sake; in attaining this goal, practical ends are wondrously achieved.58

57 This point is made by Ellen Charry, describing the work of patristic and medieval theologians: “I also noticed that they understood human happiness to be tied to virtuous character, which in turn comes from knowing God. Becoming an excellent person is predicated on enjoying God. For these theologians, beauty, truth, and goodness – the foundation of human happiness – come from knowing and loving God and nowhere else” (By the Renewing of Your Minds, vii). See also her programmatic ﬁrst chapter, “The Art of Christian Excellence,” 3–32. 58 See Michael Dauphinais, “Languages of Ascent: Gregory of Nyssa’s and Augustine of Hippo’s Exegeses of the Beatitudes,” Nova et Vetera (English) 1 (2003): 141–63. Dauphinais shows that Gregory and Augustine, understanding contemplation as impossible without moral conversion, read the beatitudes as spiritual (contemplative) exercises.

Chapter One1

SACRA DOCTRINA: WISDOM, SCRIPTURE, AND METAPHYSICS

Rahner’s critique of the Thomistic approach to the theology of the triune God – a critique voiced in similar ways by two other giants of twentieth-century theology, Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar – remains the standard way in which Aquinas’s approach is understood by contemporary theologians.2 In an oft-cited passage, Rahner remarks: As a result [of beginning with God’s essence] the treatise becomes quite philosophical and abstract and refers hardly at all to salvation history. It speaks of the necessary metaphysical properties of God, and not very explicitly of God as experienced in salvation history in his free relations to his creatures. For should one make use of salvation history, it would soon become apparent that one speaks always of him whom Scripture and Jesus himself calls the Father, Jesus’ Father, who sends the Son and who gives himself to us in the Spirit, in his Spirit. On the other hand, if one starts from the basic Augustinian-Western conception, an a-Trinitarian treatise “on the one God” comes as a matter of course before the treatise on the 1

An earlier version of this chapter appeared as “Wisdom and the Viability of Thomistic Trinitarian Theology,” The Thomist 64 (2000): 593–618. 2 Rahner’s seminal work was “Der dreifaltige Gott als transzendeter Urgrund der Heilsgeschichte,” in Die Heilsgeschichte vor Christus, Vol. 2 of Mysterium Salutis, Grundriss heilsgeschichtlicher Dogmatik (Einsiedeln: Benziger Verlag, 1967). It has appeared in English as The Trinity, trans. Joseph Donceel (New York: Crossroad, 1998 [1970]). The new edition contains an introduction by Catherine Mowry LaCugna, who lauds Rahner’s work as the foundation of contemporary Trinitarian theology. For Barth’s and Balthasar’s position, cf. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theologik, Vol. 2: Wahrheit Gottes (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1985), especially 128f. For further discussion, see Fergus Kerr, O.P., After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002): 181–3.

24

sacra doctrina: wisdom, scripture, and metaphysics Trinity. In this event, however, the theology of the Trinity must produce the impression that it can make only purely formal statements about the three divine persons, with the help of concepts about the two processions and about the relations. Even these statements, however, refer only to a Trinity which is absolutely locked within itself – one which is not, in its reality, open to anything distinct from it; one, further, from which we are excluded, of which we happen to know something only through a strange paradox.3

This paragraph suggests four major concerns, some of which, one notes, have been directed against Rahner’s own transcendental method of deducing theological conclusions. First, “philosophical and abstract” or “metaphysical” knowledge about God is contrasted with “God as experienced in salvation history,” and the Thomistic approach is faulted for paying insufﬁcient attention to the latter. Second, Rahner argues that attention to salvation history rules out beginning with a metaphysical inquiry (i.e., an account of God under the rubric of what pertains to God’s unity or essence), because such a starting-point fails to appreciate that the God of salvation history is never abstractly “one,” but already Father, already personal.4 Third, if a treatise on what pertains to God as one precedes the 3

Rahner, The Trinity, 17–18. Citing the work of Théodore de Régnon, Rahner connects this “biblical” view with the position of the Greek Fathers, in contrast to the Latin Fathers. On this point, see Michel René Barnes, “De Régnon Reconsidered,” Augustinian Studies 26 (1995): 51–79 and “Augustine in Contemporary Trinitarian Theology,” Theological Studies 56 (1995): 237–50. Barnes’s work has decisively swept away de Régnon’s theory. For further insight, see Michel René Barnes, The Power of God: Du´namiV in Gregory of Nyssa’s Trinitarian Theology (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2001); Sarah Coakley, “Rethinking Gregory of Nyssa: Introduction – Gender, Trinitarian Analogies, and the Pedagogy of the Song,” Modern Theology 18 (2002): 431–43; Lewis Ayres, “On Not Three People: The Fundamental Themes of Gregory of Nyssa’s Trinitarian Theology in its Polemical Context,” Modern Theology 18 (2002): 445–74; André Malet, “La synthèse de la personne et de la nature dans la théologie trinitaire de saint Thomas,” Revue Thomiste 54 (1954): 483–522 and 55 (1955): 43–84; idem, Personne et amour dans la théologie trinitaire de saint Thomas d’Aquin (Paris: Vrin, 1956); Emile Bailleux, “Le personnalisme de saint Thomas en théologie trinitaire,” Revue Thomiste 61 (1961): 25–42; Gilles Emery, O.P., “Essentialism or Personalism in The Treatise on God in St. Thomas Aquinas?” The Thomist 64 (2000): 521–63; idem, “Trinité et unité de Dieu dans la scolastique XIIe–XIVe siècle,” in Le Christianisme est-il un monothéisme?, eds Gilles Emery and Pierre Gisel (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 2001): 195–220. Richard Cross has recently argued that Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine differ as to whether the divine essence is a universal, and that this difference (repeated between John of Damascus and Aquinas) limits the Latin ability to identify personal properties in God (Richard Cross, “Two Models of the Trinity,” Heythrop Journal 43 [2002]: 275–94), but Emery’s work demonstrates the opposite. 4

sacra doctrina: wisdom, scripture, and metaphysics

25

treatise on what pertains to God as three, then the theology of the Trinity will be conﬁned to making “purely formal statements about the three divine persons,” because the earlier metaphysical treatise – rather than the dynamism of salvation history (which, it is worth noting, moves from the revelation of God in his unity to the revelation of God in his Trinity) – will guide the theological investigation.5 Fourth, the Trinity, understood in this way, is “locked within itself,” an object of abstruse contemplation rather than a deﬁnite historical presence and actor.6 5

On these grounds that Rahner lodges his well-known complaint: “Christians are, in their practical life, almost mere ‘monotheists.’ We must be willing to admit that, should the doctrine of the Trinity have to be dropped as false, the major part of religious literature could well remain virtually unchanged” (10–11). In my view, what Rahner is (rightly) indicating here is the need for the treatise on God (one and three) to be read as a uniﬁed whole. However, compare the comment of Yves Congar, O.P.: Any attempt to present him [Aquinas] as an “essentialist”, that is, as being conscious of and as afﬁrming ﬁrst of all the common divine essence, and only secondarily the Persons in that essence, would be to betray the balance of his theology. Such an interpretation should no longer be possible since the appearance of studies by A. Malet, H. F. Dondaine, E. Bailleux, M.-J. Le Guillou and others. This interpretation has all too frequently been based on the fact that Thomas’ study of the Trinity of Persons in the Summa is preceded by a study of the divine essence. Surely, however, it is hardly possible not to proceed in this way from the point of view of teaching? Is this procedure not justiﬁed by the economy of revelation itself? Did John Damascene not begin with the unity of ‘God’? Thomas had a very lively sense of the absolute character of God, his transcendence, his independence and his sufﬁciency. In his mystery, which is both necessary and absolute, God knows and loves himself. He communicates his goodness with sovereign freedom in the free mystery of creation and of the “divine missions” through which creatures, who are made “in his image”, are included in that life of knowledge and love and are in this way “deiﬁed.” (Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit, trans. David Smith [New York: Crossroad, 1997]: III, 117) 6

Rahner elaborates this point in two directions. First, he calls attention to the Thomistic doctrine of mixed relation, in which God is “logically” related to us and we are “really” related to God. He asks, “How can the contemplation of any reality, even of the loftiest reality, beatify us if intrinsically it is absolutely unrelated to us in any way?” (15). Rahner misunderstands what Aquinas means by “relation” in this context: see Thomas Weinandy, O. F. M. Cap., Does God Change? (Still River, MA: St. Bede’s Publications, 1985), 86–96 and Does God Suffer? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000): 130–7; Sara Grant, Toward an Alternative Theology: Confessions of a Non-Dualist Christian (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002): 40ff. Second, Rahner argues that the contemplation of the Trinity does not truly engage us in a knowing of the particular Persons, who remain interchangeable. He asks, “is our awareness of this mystery merely the knowledge of something purely extrinsic, which, as such, remains isolated from all existential knowledge about ourselves as in our present theology the treatise on the Trinity is isolated

26

sacra doctrina: wisdom, scripture, and metaphysics

This chapter will focus on the criticism that Aquinas’s highly metaphysical treatise on God, one and three, is insufﬁciently scriptural and thereby turns the living God of the Bible into the abstract “God” of the philosophers. Speciﬁcally, I will argue that Aquinas’s treatise is engaged with, and governed by, salvation history in a way that Rahner did not recognize.7 To understand how Aquinas’s theology of the triune God is attuned to “God as experienced in salvation history in his free relations with creatures,” we must revise our expectations about what kind of theology should ﬂow from attention to salvation history. For Aquinas, a theology of God guided by salvation history must be contemplative in character, in order to reﬂect (while reﬁning and deepening) the contemplative stance that characterizes the deﬁnitive prophetic and apostolic appropriation of God’s self-revelation. In a world conditioned by idolatry, the words and deeds that reveal God must be appropriated sapientially, if their regulative function is to be adequately grasped.8 To state the matter another way, this chapter will seek to demonstrate that the crucial means for retrieving Aquinas’s theology of the triune God, especially as regards its relationship to salvation history, will be reclaiming

from other dogmatic treatises telling us something about ourselves conducive to our real salvation?” (15). Analysis of Aquinas’s understanding of wisdom, however, will show that the contemplation of the Trinity is, in Aquinas’s view, a transformative exercise. Far from “the knowledge of something purely extrinsic,” contemplation of the Trinity belongs to the appropriation of our destiny of sharing in the life of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Contemplation is only possible when, contra Schleiermacher, one avoids conceptual conﬂation of the economic (our experience of the Trinity) and the immanent (the Trinity as such). 7 In pp. 34–64 of The Ground of Union: Deiﬁcation in Aquinas and Palamas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), A. N. Williams has shown that the dynamism of the economy of salvation suffuses Aquinas’s treatment of God as one and three. Williams demonstrates that for Aquinas, contemplation of God-in-Himself (the “immanent” Trinity) does not result in a God “locked within itself,” since contemplation belongs intrinsically to the graced movement by which we are conformed to the triune God, i.e. deiﬁed. 8 Cf. Giles Hibbert, O.P., “Mystery and Metaphysics in the Trinitarian Theology of Saint Thomas,” Irish Theological Quarterly 31 (1964): 187–213. Waclaw Swierzawski, in an article that focuses upon how Aquinas understands God as the object of the theological virtue of faith, notes that “Thomas the theologian, had his theological basis in the Bible, but also took his philosophical experience from the ancient philosophers and used it in his theology. God as the object of faith appears chieﬂy according to his biblical vision, but this concept in very often expressed in metaphysical language, connected with the concept of being.” Swierzawski adds that “[t]he two attitudes, the purely biblical and the philosophical are combined by Thomas in a unique way, and we will observe during our work a richness of that which we call ‘philosophare in ﬁde’.” See Waclaw Swierzawski, “God and the Mystery of His Wisdom in the Pauline Commentaries of Saint Thomas Aquinas,” Divus Thomas 74 (1971): 466–500, at 466–7.

sacra doctrina: wisdom, scripture, and metaphysics

27

his vision of theology as contemplative wisdom patterned by the narrative of Scripture.9 As Otto Pesch has remarked in the context of introducing a lecture on justiﬁcation and grace according to Aquinas, “the whole spirituality of Thomas Aquinas’ theology” can be described as “Wisdom is salvation.”10 With this insight in mind, the chapter will proceed in three steps. I will ﬁrst explore Aquinas’s account of wisdom, which he presents in four ways: wisdom as a (natural) intellectual virtue, wisdom as a gift of the Holy Spirit, wisdom as sacra doctrina, and Wisdom as the Son of God.11 I will argue that Aquinas’s theology of wisdom indicates the path by which his theology of the triune God integrates metaphysical analysis while remaining governed by scriptural revelation, itself infused with metaphysical contemplation. Secondly, in light of recent analyses of philosophical theology as pedagogy and spiritual exercise, I will suggest that Aquinas’s theology of the triune God must be read as an exercise of contemplative ascent, in which Aquinas employs metaphysical investigation as a spiritual exercise in aid of the believer’s participation in God’s own knowledge. Third, I will conclude by proposing that Aquinas’s view of St. John the Evangelist as the contemplative of Wisdom Incarnate is particularly instructive with regard to the relationship of Scripture and metaphysics in Aquinas’s theology of the triune God. By showing that revelation cannot be separated from the inspired authors’ contemplative practices, Aquinas’s interpretation of St. John radically challenges the dichotomy between Scripture and metaphysics.12 9 Rowan Williams has undertaken a somewhat similar project with regard to Augustine’s De Trinitate. See his “Sapientia and the Trinity: Reﬂections on the De Trinitate,” in Collectanea Augustiniana, Vol. 1, ed. B. Bruning (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1990): 317–32. I am also indebted to the valuable treatment of Aquinas’s use of metaphysics in The Three-Personed God: The Trinity as a Mystery of Salvation, William J. Hill, O.P. (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1982): 62–9. 10 Otto Pesch, “Christian Existence According to Thomas Aquinas,” Etienne Gilson Lecture Series (Toronto: Pontiﬁcal Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1989): 2. Pesch explains, “For Christian existence is nothing else than to live out the unity of faith, hope and love, and that means to understand God’s truth for the world and for human beings and to be related, ‘attracted’ by the Giver of that truth in love” (3). 11 For a thorough discussion of this topic, see Kieran Conley, O. S. B., A Theology of Wisdom: A Study in St. Thomas (Dubuque, Iowa: The Priory Press, 1963); see also the interesting study of L. Boadt, “St. Thomas Aquinas and the Biblical Wisdom Tradition,” The Thomist 49 (1985): 575–611. 12 Aristotle recognized that “it is because of wondering that men began to philosophize and do so now. . . . Now a man who is perplexed and wonders considers himself ignorant (whence a lover of myth, too, is in a sense a philosopher, for a myth is composed of wonders), so if indeed they philosophized in order to avoid ignorance, it is evident that

28

sacra doctrina: wisdom, scripture, and metaphysics

1

Wisdom

Commentators on Aquinas’s treatise on God generally detach it from the previous question, which is (not incorrectly) viewed as a “methodological prolegomenon”13 to the entire Summa. The problem with this approach is that it risks overlooking a key resource for recognizing the treatise on God as an exercise of theological wisdom. In 1, q.1, a.6, Aquinas asks whether sacra doctrina is the same as wisdom. Answering in the afﬁrmative, he points out, “This doctrine is wisdom above all human wisdom; not merely in one order, but absolutely. . . . [S]acred doctrine essentially treats of God viewed as the highest cause – not only so far as He can be known through creatures just as the philosophers knew Him – That which is known of God is manifest in them (Romans 1.19) – but also so far as He is known to Himself alone and revealed to others.”14 Sacra doctrina is not just a new way of looking at things, but is God’s own knowledge as revealed to us in Christ Jesus (the creaturely mode of our knowledge of God is not overturned by revelation).15 As such, sacra doctrina constitutes the perfect wisdom. Yet, how do believers, and speciﬁcally how do theologians, participate in and teach this Wisdom which is God himself, they pursued science in order to understand and not in order to use it for something else” (Metaphysics A, 982b10–20, trans. Hippocrates G. Apostle [Grinnell, Iowa: The Peripatetic Press, 1979]); cf. Denise Schaeffer, “Wisdom and Wonder in Metaphysics A: 1–2,” The Review of Metaphysics 52 (1999): 641–56. As Hans Urs von Balthasar notes, “the greatest Christian thinkers (including Origen, Augustine, Anselm and Thomas Aquinas) consistently understand the intellectus ﬁdei as including this interior completion of the philosophical act in theology . . .” (H. U. von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol. 1: Seeing the Form, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982]: 146). Balthasar further remarks that “because of that ﬁnal securing of reality which the believer who encounters God in Christ experiences, the theological vision makes it possible for the ﬁrst time for the philosophical act of encounter with Being to occur in all its depth” (146). 13 A. N. Williams, The Ground of Union, 39. 14 1, q.1, a.6. For emphasis on sacra doctrina as wisdom, see Mark F. Johnson, “The Sapiential Character of the First Article of the Summa theologiae,” in Philosophy and the God of Abraham, ed. R. James Long (Toronto: Pontiﬁcal Institute of Medieval Studies, 1991): 85–98. 15 See Jean-Pierre Torrell, O.P., “Le traité de la prophétie de S. Thomas d’Aquin et la théologie de la révélation,” in La doctrine de la révélation divine de saint Thomas d’Aquin, ed. Leo J. Elders (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1990): 171–95; Paul Synave, O.P. and Pierre Benoit, O.P., Prophecy and Inspiration: A Commentary on the Summa Theologica IIII, Questions 171–178, trans. Avery Dulles, S.J. and Thomas Sheridan, S.J. (New York: Desclée, 1961); Michael Dauphinais and Matthew Levering, Knowing the Love of Christ: An Introduction to the Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002): 11.

sacra doctrina: wisdom, scripture, and metaphysics

29

incarnate in Christ? To begin to answer this question, we will examine Aquinas’s teaching on wisdom. Aquinas has a speciﬁc intellectual virtue in mind when he speaks of wisdom.16 Adopting the position taken by Aristotle in his Physics and Metaphysics, Aquinas states that wisdom is knowledge of what is most knowable in itself, but least knowable to our intellects, which know only through sense perception.17 Spiritual realities are most knowable in themselves. Due to our intellects’ dependence upon sensibles, spiritual realities are least knowable to us. As Aquinas shows in 1, qq.2–3, the ultimate spiritual reality is the ﬁrst cause, which is pure act (and therefore transcends every genus). The intellectual virtue of wisdom, therefore, is the virtue of ordering all things in accord with knowledge of God as ﬁrst cause, as well as with knowledge of the ﬁrst causes in every particular genus. By knowing the ﬁrst causes, the wise person “rightly judges all things and sets them in order, because there can be no perfect and universal judgment that is not based on the ﬁrst causes.”18 On the basis of this knowledge of the principles of all things, the wise person is able to judge all the conclusions of the particular sciences or ﬁelds of knowledge. Insofar as wisdom demonstrates conclusions from principles, wisdom is a science; however, since wisdom judges all particular sciences by knowing their principles, wisdom is more than a mere science.19 A second aspect relevant to the account in 1, q.1, a.6 of sacra doctrina as wisdom is Aquinas’s presentation of “wisdom” as one of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit to the believer. The gifts of the Holy Spirit enable the person who possesses faith formed by charity to respond to the special prompting of the Holy Spirit. As Servais Pinckaers has noted, “In the collaboration between grace and us, the virtues represent the active side of our participation; but their action needs to be completed by the gifts which dispose us to welcome the motions of the Spirit and constitute the passive or receptive side of the spiritual life; they render us docile to grace.”20 The virtues, both natural and supernatural, engage our natural 16 On the intellectual virtues, see Thomas Hibbs’s instructive Virtue’s Splendor: Wisdom, Prudence, and the Human Good (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001). 17 1–2, q.57, a.2. 18 1–2, q.57, a.2. 19 1–2, q.57, a.2, ad 1. 20 Servais-Théodore Pinckaers, O.P., La vie selon l’Esprit: Essai de théologie spirituelle selon saint Paul et saint Thomas d’Aquin (Paris: Cerf, 1996): 206. See also Pinckaers, The Sources of Christian Ethics, 3rd ed., trans. Mary Thomas Noble, O.P. (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995): 151–7; Romanus Cessario, O.P., Christian

30

sacra doctrina: wisdom, scripture, and metaphysics

human resources, because they operate according to a human mode (the active side). The gifts operate according to a divine mode (the receptive side). They perfect the virtues by enabling our acts to transcend natural human resources. The gifts of the Holy Spirit conform the believer to Christ by connaturalizing the believer to God’s ways.21 What is the relationship of wisdom as a gift of the Holy Spirit to the intellectual virtue of wisdom? The intellectual virtue of wisdom is limited to what human intelligence can acquire by its natural endowments. Such wisdom judges all things in light of ﬁrst causes, as they can be known by natural human intelligence. In contrast, wisdom as a gift of the Holy Spirit is attached to the virtue of charity, and is able to judge all things instinctively on the basis of ﬁrst Truth known by the assent of faith.22 Aquinas remarks that “wisdom as a gift is more excellent than wisdom as an intellectual virtue, since it attains to God more intimately by a kind of union of the soul with Him.”23 Faith gives knowledge of God beyond mere natural human knowledge, because faith is a supernatural participation in God’s own knowledge. Referring to this inﬁnitely deeper knowledge, Aquinas cites the text from 1 Corinthians 2:10, “the Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God.”24 The gift of wisdom is an ordering of all things on the basis of this deeper knowledge. Aquinas offers a further explanation of how the intellectual virtue of wisdom differs from the gift of wisdom. He notes that the intellectual virtue of wisdom is the perfect use of natural reason, by which one orders or judges all things rightly, in accord with reason’s natural participation in God’s eternal law. The gift of wisdom, however, means connaturality with God’s eternal law, so that reason no longer needs to make its inquiry. It is for this reason that Aquinas associates the gift of wisdom with the virtue of charity, which perfects and elevates the will, rather than with the virtue of faith. Charity, Aquinas points out, causes “sympathy or connaturality for Divine things.”25 While caused by charity, therefore, the gift of wisdom

Faith & the Theological Life (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996): 164–5; idem, The Virtues, or the Examined Life (New York: Continuum, 2002): 13–18. 21 On connatural knowing according to Aquinas, see also A. Moreno, O.P., “The Nature of St. Thomas’ Knowledge ‘Per Connaturalitem’,” Angelicum 47 (1970): 44–62; cf. Pinckaers, The Sources of Christian Ethics, 93. 22 2–2, q.45, a.1, ad 2. 23 2–2, q.45, a.3, ad 1. 24 2–2, q.45, a.1. 25 2–2, q.45, a.2.

sacra doctrina: wisdom, scripture, and metaphysics

31

is a perfection of the intellect, because the gift of wisdom enables the believer to order all things rightly in relation to God known in faith.26 In short, the gift of wisdom explains why Christians do not need to be philosophers in order to be contemplatives. Christians, who know ﬁrst Truth in faith, are connaturalized to that knowledge by charity through the gift of wisdom. The ordering accomplished by wisdom as a gift (as opposed to wisdom as an intellectual virtue) is not only contemplative, but also practical, because the gift of the Holy Spirit, in contrast to the intellectual virtue, directs all aspects of the person.27 In discussing sacra doctrina as wisdom, Aquinas makes reference to both the intellectual virtue and the gift of the Holy Spirit. He ﬁrst distinguishes sacra doctrina as wisdom from the intellectual virtue of wisdom. It might seem that sacra doctrina, which is knowledge (scientia) of the things that have been divinely revealed (God and all things insofar as they are referred to God as their beginning and end),28 merely complements and extends the ordering achieved by the intellectual virtue of wisdom. On this view, sacra doctrina would be limited to adding knowledge inaccessible to natural reason, such as the teaching of the Trinity or of supernatural beatitude as humankind’s ultimate end. In fact, sacra doctrina both adds this supernatural knowledge and reorders all that can be known naturally in light of the triune God as our beginning and supernatural end.29 This sacred teaching is presented in sacra scriptura, which belongs to the structure of “faith’s encounter with God revealing.”30 For this reason, Aquinas at times uses “sacra scriptura” interchangeably with “sacra doctrina.”31 Cornelius Ernst comments that theology is “the rational exploration and declaration of the uniﬁed self-disclosure of God in himself and in the world, mediated by Scripture (cf. [prima pars] art.8). There are then three modes of 26

Ibid. 2–2, q.45, a.3. 28 1, q.1, a.3. For an introduction to the development of Thomas’s thought on sacra doctrina, as well as to the vast Thomistic literature on this topic from the generation after Thomas to the present, see especially Jean-Pierre Torrell, O.P., “Le savoir théologique chez saint Thomas,” Revue Thomiste 96 (1996): 355–96 and “Le savoir théologique chez les premiers thomistes,” Revue Thomiste 97 (1997): 9–30. 29 Brian J. Shanley, O.P., “Sacra Doctrina and the Theology of Disclosure,” The Thomist 61 (1997): 163–87. 30 Jean-Pierre Torrell approvingly cites Max Seckler, Das Heil in der Geschichte (Munich: Kösel Verlag, 1964), to the same effect. See Torrell, “Le savoir théologique chez saint Thomas d’Aquin,” 361. 31 Cf. 1, q.1, a.8. James A. Weisheipl, O.P. has outlined the relationship between sacra doctrina and sacra scriptura in “The Meaning of Sacra Doctrina in Summa Theologiae I, q.1,” The Thomist 38 (1974): 49–80. In response to Weisheipl, Thomas C. O’Brien has empha27

32

sacra doctrina: wisdom, scripture, and metaphysics

determining the basis of theology: the infallible truth of God himself, Veritas Prima; the articuli ﬁdei; and the canonical Scriptures; these three are modes of a single revelation.”32 God teaches true doctrine (about himself and all things in relation to him) in these modes; since the revelation is one, sacra scriptura can be called sacra doctrina. Aquinas’s account of revelation possesses a rich amplitude.33 Here we can only note Christ’s preeminent role, as incarnate Wisdom, in teaching the sacra doctrina.34 He shares this teaching ofﬁce with his apostolically ordered mystical Body, the Church. Insofar as they share in the Church’s teaching ofﬁce, theologians participate in the activity of sacra doctrina.35 In theological reﬂection, then, metaphysical knowledge gained by the intellectual virtue of wisdom is taken up into the sacra doctrina and illumined within it. Cornelius Ernst has shown that for Aquinas, following PseudoDionysius, “even that activity of reason which might seem in a philosophical context to be purely natural is to be understood in the context of sacra doctrina as operating within revelation, guided by the truth of sacred Scripture, that light which derives like a ray from ﬁrst truth.”36 This unity of sacra doctrina ensures that metaphysical and scriptural modes of divine naming are profoundly integrated by Aquinas.37 Ernst goes on to explain, “It is the Apostolic logia, whether by way of Scripture or also of liturgical tradition, which are held to confer symbolic and revelatory power sized (following the work of G. F. van Ackeren) the nature of sacra doctrina as a human teaching consequent upon revelation. See O’Brien, “‘Sacra Doctrina’ Revisited: The Context of Medieval Education,” The Thomist 41 (1977): 475–509. 32 Cornelius Ernst, O.P., “Metaphor and Ontology in Sacra Doctrina” The Thomist 38 (1974): 404. God is the object of sacred doctrine: 1, q.1, a.7. 33 See the chapter on revelation in Discovering Aquinas, Aidan Nichols, O.P. (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2002): 21–36; see also Victor White, O.P., “St. Thomas’s Conception of Revelation,” Dominican Studies 1 (1948): 3–34. 34 For further discussion, see my Christ’s Fulﬁllment of Torah and Temple: Salvation according to Thomas Aquinas (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), 31–50. 35 For discussion of the doctrine taught and the activity of teaching, showing that Aquinas’s account of revelation is in accord with Dei Verbum (as opposed to the view that revelation is simply a set of propositions), see Jean-Pierre Torrell, Thomas d’Aquin, maître spirituel (Paris: Cerf, 1996), 2. For discussion of the ecclesial vocation of the theologian, see Joseph Cardinal Katzinger, The Nature and Mission of Theology, trans. Adrian Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995); J. A. DiNoia, O.P., “Authority, Public Dissent and the Nature of Theological Thinking,” The Thomist 52 (1988): 185–207; idem, “Communion and Magisterium: Teaching Authority and the Culture of Grace,” Modern Theology 9 (1993): 403–18; Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., “Criteria of Catholic Theology,” Communio 22 (1995): 303–15. 36 Ibid., 407. 37 Cf. Mark F. Johnson, “God’s Knowledge in Our Frail Mind: The Thomistic Model of Theology,” Angelicum 76 (1999): 25–45.

sacra doctrina: wisdom, scripture, and metaphysics

33

upon the sensible world. The world which is offered to our senses is made transparent by the light of verbal revelation.”38 Sacra doctrina remains wisdom according to a human mode: the transmission of sacra doctrina requires for its task of ordering the normal methods of the human mind. Aquinas points out that sacra doctrina “is acquired by study, though its principles are obtained by revelation.”39 Thus sacra doctrina as wisdom is not the same as the wisdom that is the gift of the Holy Spirit, nor is this latter wisdom a substitute for sacra doctrina. Certainly wisdom as the gift of the Holy Spirit is intrinsically related to the wisdom of sacra doctrina. Yet because study is necessary for sacra doctrina, the wisdom attained by natural reason (the intellectual virtue of wisdom) remains necessary even for the theologian possessing the gift of the Holy Spirit. In the interplay of nature and grace, the truths known by metaphysical reasoning are not displaced by the infusion of revealed knowledge.40 Yet, the architectonic principle is not God known by natural reason, but God’s own knowledge, to use Mark Johnson’s phrase, “in our frail minds.” As the Romanian Orthodox theologian Dumitru Staniloae describes the interplay, “Supernatural revelation unfolds and brings forth its fruit within the framework of natural revelation, like a kind of casting of the work of God into bolder relief, a guiding of the physical and historical world toward that goal for which it was created in accordance with a plan laid down from all ages.”41 Aquinas conceives of creaturely intellect as a created, ﬁnite participation in the divine intellect or the divine Wisdom.42 In the human person as created, there already exists an analogy between human knowing – despite its profound weakness – and divine Wisdom.43 This analogy constitutes a capacity for the new embodiment of supernatural wisdom by God’s revelation that characterizes the graced human being. This “new creation” of the human being is not a human achievement but the fruit 38

Ernst, “Metaphor and Ontology in Sacra Doctrina,” 407. 1, q.1, a.6, ad 3. The objection had argued that wisdom is a gift of the Holy Spirit, and so sacra doctrina (which requires study) could not be wisdom. 40 It will be the task of the remainder of the book to illumine concretely (and thereby defend) the interplay between nature and grace that one ﬁnds in the relationship of Scripture and metaphysics in Aquinas’s theology of the triune God. The ﬁnal section of this chapter will seek to demonstrate that metaphysics is not extrinsic to Scripture, insofar as the inspired authors of Scripture contemplated the mystery of God. 41 Dumitru Staniloae, The Experience of God, trans. and ed. Ioan Ionita and Robert Barringer (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1994): 1. 42 See, e.g., 1, q.54, a.1 (with regard to angelic intellect); 1, q.79, a.4 (with regard to the human intellect). 43 Cf. Hibbert, “Mystery and Metaphysics in the Trinitarian Theology of Saint Thomas,” 193–4; Ernst, “Metaphor and Ontology in Sacra Doctrina,” 418–23. 39

34

sacra doctrina: wisdom, scripture, and metaphysics

of the Incarnation. In the ﬁrst chapter of the Summa Contra Gentiles, Aquinas explains that “divine Wisdom testiﬁes that He has assumed ﬂesh and come into the world in order to make the truth known: ‘For this I was born, and for this came I into the world, that I should give testimony to the truth’ (John 18:37).”44 Above all, sacra doctrina is this supernatural “truth” to which Christ “gives testimony.” In contrast to the modern focus upon the structure of our knowing, Aquinas explores sacra doctrina with a focus upon its content, God’s own knowledge. Yet, as we have seen, Aquinas recognizes that sacra doctrina involves human knowing (created participation in divine Wisdom) that has been supernaturally elevated to participate far more deeply in divine Wisdom by the grace of the Holy Spirit, without ceasing to be profoundly limited human knowing (acquired by study). As Giles Hibbert puts it, “It is by the practice of this art – the true art of Christian thinking, which is far more than a mere technique – that the theologian can say something relevant to man’s relationship to God which is no way attempts to destroy the Mystery, but launches the human spirit towards it.”45 Given this pattern of redemption accomplished by the missions of Wisdom Incarnate and the Holy Spirit, it should come as no surprise that the structure of Aquinas’s Trinitarian theology is best understood within the context of his analogous use of “wisdom.”46

2

Theologizing as a Wisdom-Exercise47

In light of this examination of Aquinas’s view of sacra doctrina as wisdom, one might evaluate Rahner’s view that Aquinas’s treatise on God (one and 44 Summa Contra Gentiles, Book 1: God, trans. Anton C. Pegis (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975 [1955]): 60 (chapter 1). For discussion of Aquinas’s WisdomChristology, see Joseph Wawrykow, “Wisdom in the Christology of Thomas Aquinas,” in Christ Among the Medieval Dominicans, ed. Kent Emery, Jr. and Joseph P. Wawrykow (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999): 175–96. 45 Hibbert, “Mystery and Metaphysics in the Trinitarian Theology of Saint Thomas,” 194. 46 On the importance of Aquinas’s account of the Trinitarian missions for responding to the criticisms posed against Aquinas’s Trinitarian theology by Karl Rahner, Catherine LaCugna, and Michel Corbin (in La Trinité ou l’Excès de Dieu [Paris: Cerf, 1997]), see Herwi Rikhof, “Trinity in Thomas: Reading the Summa Theologiae against the background of modern problems,” Jaarboek 1999 of the Thomas Instituut te Utrecht, pp. 83–100. For a similar critique of the positions of these three authors, see Rikhof ’s “Aquinas’ Authority in the Contemporary Theology of the Trinity,” in Aquinas as Authority, ed. Paul van Geest, Harm Goris, and Carlo Leget (Leuven: Peeters, 2002): 213–34. 47 Torrell’s Saint Thomas Aquinas: Spiritual Master discusses Aquinas’s treatise on God with an emphasis, evidently in response to Heideggerian critiques of “onto-theology,” on how

sacra doctrina: wisdom, scripture, and metaphysics

35

three) speaks “of the necessary metaphysical properties of God, and not very explicitly of God as experienced in salvation history in his free relations to his creatures” and makes “only formal statements about the three divine persons, with the help of concepts about the two processions and about the relations.”48 As noted above, Rahner seems to be suggesting that Aquinas’s use of metaphysics compromises Aquinas’s ability to speak about God as experienced in salvation history. For Aquinas, however, the presence of metaphysical language (the practice of the intellectual virtue of wisdom) is not a sign that something has gone wrong with sacra doctrina. On the contrary, salvation history describes humankind’s – at ﬁrst specifically Israel’s – increasingly profound engagement with divine Wisdom, an engagement that includes, at least inchoately, the metaphysical contemplation of wise human beings.

Aquinas brings out God’s transcendence through negative theology: “Although Thomas shares neither the equivocity nor the extreme apophaticism of Maimonides, this ascendance deserves to be remarked because it can only conﬁrm him in his option for negative theology” (58, my translation). Aquinas recognizes the profound limitations of human knowing, but whether this is an “option for negative theology” is debatable. Denys Turner has remarked Like Bonaventure, Thomas was deeply suspicious of over-zealous negativities, of theological negations unsecured in the afﬁrmation of human, carnal, worldly experience. Moreover, like Bonaventure, Thomas was happy to anchor the negative, apophatic “moment” of his theology in just the same secure bedrock in which is anchored the afﬁrmative, incarnational moment: for both, what we must say about God and the fact that all that we say about God fails of God derive with equal force from the same necessities of thought, and converge in equal measures, in a sort of “two-sidedness” of theological speech. . . . Nonetheless, in this Bonaventure and Thomas also differ: for whereas for Bonaventure, this two-sidedness of theological speech is rooted primordially in the unity of the two natures of Christ, and achieved concretely in the paradox of the passion and death of Jesus, for Thomas, the most primitive access of the human mind to this duality of afﬁrmative and negative theologies is already given to us, in some inchoate sort, in our very created, rational power to know and experience our world. That world, which God shows to us, at the same time shows God to be beyond our comprehension. (Turner, “Apophaticism, idolatry and the claims of reason,” in Silence and the Word: Negative Theology and Incarnation, eds Oliver Davies and Denys Turner [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002]: 23). On this aspect of Torrell’s discussion, see Lawrence Dewan, O.P.’s insightful critique, “Torrell on Aquinas,” The Thomist 62 (1998): 623–31, at 624–8. See also Timothy L. Smith’s analysis of Aquinas’s debt to, and difference from, Pseudo-Dionysius on divine naming: Thomas Aquinas’ Trinitarian Theology (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2003): 204–30. 48 Rahner, The Trinity, 18.

36

sacra doctrina: wisdom, scripture, and metaphysics

It may be, however, that Rahner’s real concern is the theocentricity of Aquinas’s metaphysical language. As Thomas O’Meara has put it, Rahner sought to produce “a modern systematic theology, modern in the sense of proceeding from a subject analyzed transcendentally, existentially, and historically.”49 For O’Meara, Aquinas’s “thinking is largely theocentric, and from the eighteenth century on, human subjectivity, freedom, and science are the points of departure for human reﬂection and exploration.”50 Is the answer, as O’Meara suggests, to transpose Aquinas’s treatise from the Aristotelian metaphysical categories to the metaphysical categories of modern philosophy? Before adopting such an answer we should revisit the concept of wisdom from a different perspective. As Aquinas states in the prologue to the Summa Theologiae, his theological ordering is intended to serve “the instruction of beginners.” The question, then, is how does a proper ordo disciplinae turn beginners into masters of theological wisdom? I will argue that the experience of God in salvation history involves above all the contemplative discernment that reality is radically theocentric. Even apparently anthropocentric analogies take their bearings from contemplating the real in terms not of human subjectivity or historicity, but of divine causality. Theocentric metaphysics belongs to the pedagogical intention of theological wisdom: Aquinas’s treatise on the triune God is intended to form the reader into a particular kind of knower, by guiding the reader through intellectual exercises that enable the reader to experience, through contemplation, the God of salvation history. The best discussions of this pedagogical intention – which runs throughout Aquinas’s corpus – concern the Summa Contra Gentiles.51 Although the Summa Theologiae adopts a very different structure from the Summa Contra Gentiles,52 in both works Aquinas deploys metaphysical (theocentric) analysis to raise or convert the mind to the self-revealing God who is triune spiritual substance and uncaused cause of all things. As Thomas Hibbs states, “The text [of the Summa Contra Gentiles] presup49 Thomas F. O’Meara, O.P., Thomas Aquinas Theologian (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997): 190–1. 50 Ibid., 246; cf. 248. 51 For an introduction to the debate, see Rudi A. te Velde, “Natural Reason in the Summa contra Gentiles,” Medieval Philosophy and Theology 4 (1994): 42–70. The standard work on the Summa Contra Gentiles is R.-A. Gauthier, Introduction to Somme Contre les Gentils, Collection Philosophie Européenne dirigée par Henri Hude (Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1993). 52 On this point (as regards Trinitarian theology), see Gilles Emery, O.P., “Le traité de saint Thomas sur la Trinité dans la Somme contre les Gentils,” Revue Thomiste 95 (1995): 5–40, included (in English translation) as chapter 3 of his Trinity in Aquinas (Ypsilanti, MI: Sapientia Press, 2003).

sacra doctrina: wisdom, scripture, and metaphysics

37

poses some measure of intellectual virtue in its readers and provides ample opportunity for further exercise of those virtues.”53 Aquinas must persuade readers to allow their conceptions of God to be transformed in light of the kind of intellectual probing that can dispel intellectual idolatry. Moreover, Aquinas’s arguments require readers to become learners in his school of intellectual virtue, through which he seeks (in Hibbs’ words) “to inculcate intellectual virtue and uproot the sources of intellectual vice.”54 Readers who wish to know God solely through revelation must be persuaded to recognize that the Christian God, while not the god of the philosophers, cannot be known apart from philosophical practices and inquiries, whose complexity must increase when the believer moves from simple faith to the pursuit of the wisdom of sacra doctrina, faith seeking understanding.55 By integrating dialectical inquiry with key passages from the revealed “narrative” of sacra scriptura, Aquinas prompts the reader (Christian or non-Christian) to enter into the fullness of wisdom. The reader is invited to join in the dialectical inquiry, and to see how the dialectical inquiry, as properly philosophical, both enriches and is enriched (fulﬁlled and transformed) by the Christian “narrative.” Aquinas desires to teach revealed wisdom in a way that forms in the reader the ability to engage truth at the highest intellectual level, that is, the ability to participate more and more deeply in the dynamic presence, through faith and the gift of the Holy Spirit, of God’s own knowledge in our frail minds. The value of theological wisdom thus lies in its practice of theocentric contemplative ascent, which deepens the participation in God’s knowledge that the believer already has in faith, and which is perfected in the beatiﬁc vision.56 By practicing theological wisdom, the believer 53

Thomas S. Hibbs, Dialectic and Narrative in Aquinas: An Interpretation of the Summa Contra Gentiles (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995): 3. For more insight into Hibbs’s approach to the Summa Contra Gentiles, see Hibbs, “Kretzmann’s Theism vs. Aquinas’s Theism: Interpreting the Summa Contra Gentiles,” The Thomist 62 (1998): 603–22. Hibbs is indebted to Mark D. Jordan, “The Protreptic Structure of the ‘Summa Contra Gentiles’,” The Thomist 50 (1986): 173–209. 54 Hibbs, Dialectic and Narrative in Aquinas, 23. 55 As evidence for the necessity of philosophical practices, recall the Egyptian monks of Anthony’s time who were shocked to hear that God does not have an arm or a hand, contrary to the letter of Scripture. 56 Mark Jordan notes a similarity with Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed: just as the Guide ends with the implications of Torah for human life, so likewise each of the four books of the Summa Contra Gentiles ends with discussions of the human good (ultimately, sharing in God’s beatitude). A similar exitus-reditus pattern is found in the Summa Theolo-

38

sacra doctrina: wisdom, scripture, and metaphysics

is enabled to anticipate, and to live in accord with, the ultimate end of deiﬁcation that marks the transition from grace to glory. Aquinas’s use of the metaphysical concept of relation within his Trinitarian reﬂection, Giles Hibbert remarks, enables us and assists us to genuinely start an ascent to God from the world in which we live and have our being and in which we meet and see God’s revelation, and from there provides us with a ladder placed as it were in the right position, up which if we climb (this we can only be invited to do) we will be lead with greater richness and surety into the presence of God – a presence which, however, in this life never ceases to be the “clouded” presence of faith, not that of vision.57

This account of theological wisdom as an ascent resonates with Pierre Hadot’s discussion of philosophy as spiritual exercise. Hadot has demonstrated that “the Socratic dialogue turns out to be a kind of communal spiritual exercise.”58 The spiritual exercise is not, Hadot makes clear, reducible to a moral exercise. Rather, for Plato at least, “every dialectical exercise, precisely because it is an exercise of pure thought, subject to the demands of the Logos, turns the soul away from the sensible world, and allows it to convert itself towards the Good. It is the spirit’s itinerary towards the divine.”59 In this view, philosophy itself is the practice of turning away from the temporal towards the eternal. As a practice, philosophy involves meditating on higher things in order to encourage oneself to persevere. By practicing philosophy, one becomes adept at living philosophically. Although Aquinas’s treatise on God is not intended as a Stoic aid in perseverance, his treatise can be seen as a spiritual exercise. The treatise, written for a community of learners, is intended as a formative contemplative guide into the reality of God, as self-relating and as cause of all giae. On the basis of this pattern, Jordan states, “The structure of the Contra Gentiles, as of the Guide, is not so much a descending deduction as an ascending exhortation. . . . The highest purpose of the work is not apodictic but epideictic, not demonstrative but hortatory. In short, it is a protreptic to the contemplation of God; it is an ascent to God through the world and law which culminates the ‘practice,’ that is, the possession of the wisdom of a vision” (Jordan, “The Protreptic Structure of the Summa Contra Gentiles,” 199). 57 Hibbert, “Mystery and Metaphysics in the Trinitarian Theology of Saint Thomas,” 206. 58 Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, ed. Arnold I. Davidson, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995): 90. 59 Ibid., 93.

sacra doctrina: wisdom, scripture, and metaphysics

39

things, and thus (theocentrically) into “God as experienced in salvation history” as the wise and loving God who freely creates and redeems. By excluding errors about the triune God, Aquinas’s treatise, in Hibbert’s words: enables one or even positively causes one to “point” as it were at God rather than away from him. And in the movement that then “follows” – the ascent of the mind (and heart) to God – what is being done is a matter of personal commitment, achieved in a reﬂexive spiritual act, which precisely synthesizes the via negativa and the via afﬁrmativa into one authentic movement, having true spiritual value.60

Metaphysics as a spiritual exercise is, it should be clear, requisite for the sacred teaching, sacra doctrina, that is sacra scriptura. Scriptural and metaphysical modes of reﬂection are not opposed in salvation history.61

3

Isaiah and St. John the Evangelist as Contemplatives

Indeed, Aquinas considers the Gospel of St. John to be the model of the contemplative ascent to knowledge of the triune God. Jean-Pierre Torrell has praised the Commentary on the Gospel of Saint John as “certainly among the most ﬁnished and most profound of the commentaries that Thomas left.”62 In his prologue to this commentary, Aquinas indicates that he will read the Gospel of John in light of Isaiah 6:1, “I saw the Lord seated on a high and lofty throne, and the whole house was full of his majesty, and the things that were under him ﬁlled the Temple.”63 Aquinas explains that 60

Hibbert, “Mystery and Metaphysics in the Trinitarian Theology of Saint Thomas,” 208. Cf. Francis Martin’s “Sacra Doctrina and the Authority of Its Sacra Scriptura According to St. Thomas Aquinas,” Pro Ecclesia 10 (2001): 89ff. 62 Jean-Pierre Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Vol. 1: The Person and His Work, trans. Robert Royal (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996): 339. The text of the commentary is a reportatio done by Reginald of Piperno. 63 For a discussion of Aquinas’s method of exegeting John’s Prologue, see C. Clifton Black, “St. John’s Commentary on the Johannine Prologue: Some Reﬂections on Its Character and Implications,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 48 (1986): 681–98. See also R. Guindon, “La théologie de saint Thomas d’Aquin dans le rayonnement du ‘Prologue’ de saint John,” Revue de l’Université d’Ottawa 29 (1959): 5–23 and 121–42. For the relationship of Aquinas’s Commentary on John to the Trinitarian theology of the Summa Theologiae, see Gilles Emery’s “Biblical Exegesis and the Speculative Doctrine of the Trinity in St. Thomas Aquinas’ Commentary on St. John,” chapter 7 of Trinity in Aquinas (Ypsilanti, MI: Sapientia Press, 2003). For further background on medieval exegesis and speculative theology one might see, 61

40

sacra doctrina: wisdom, scripture, and metaphysics

this passage from Isaiah’s mystical vision illuminates the manner of St. John’s contemplation of the Lord Jesus. By beginning with Isaiah’s mystical vision, Aquinas makes clear (following Augustine) that the Gospel of John is above all the fruit of an inspired contemplative. For Aquinas, the author’s contemplation of Jesus is the central mark of the Gospel. Hans Urs von Balthasar has similarly remarked that “the philosophianic or contemplative attitude of faith . . . has its beginnings in the Bible, where it emerges in the Wisdom literature of the Old Testament and, in the New Testament, is realized especially in Paul and John: God’s Word is itself shot through with human contemplation, which contains within itself the truly philosophical act.”64 Modern readers, familiar only with the production of books in the academy, tend to overlook the contemplative dimension that is manifest in many of the writings of Scripture. In contrast, as the biblical exegete Ben Witherington notes, the Fourth Gospel is “the story of Jesus Christ as sifted, ruminated on, and interpreted by the Beloved Disciple. . . . [T]he Beloved Disciple did meditate on, and preach and teach, the Jesus traditions for a long period of time, at some point casting the material into his own style and idiom, likely before writing it down.”65 The production of John’s Gospel cannot be understood without grasping the inﬂuence of its author’s contemplation and preaching. John was not a mere reporter. Rather, as he knew full well, his Gospel abounds in claims that inspire questioning that is (whether or not it is recognized to be) metaphysical. Outside the Prologue, one needs only to recall such statements as: “If God were your Father, you would love me, for I proceeded and came forth from the Father” (8:42); “before Abraham was, I am” (8:58); “I and the Father are one” (10:30), “the Father is in me and I am in the Father” (10:38); “He who has seen me has seen the Father” (14:9); “the Father is greater than I” (14:28). All of these statements, John makes clear, were met with e.g., Idit Dobbs-Weinstein, “Medieval Biblical Commentary and Philosophical Inquiry as Exempliﬁed in the Thought of Moses Maimonides and St. Thomas Aquinas,” in Moses Maimonides and His Time, ed. Eric L. Ormsby (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1989): 101–20; Leo J. Elders, S. V. D., “Aquinas on Holy Scripture as the Medium of Divine Revelation,” in La doctrine de la revelation divine de saint Thomas d’Aquin, ed. Leo J. Elders (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1990): 132–52; and Eileen C. Sweeney, “Rewriting the Narrative of Scripture: 12th Century Debates over Reason and Theological Form,” Medieval Philosophy and Theology 3 (1993): 1–34. 64 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol. 1: Seeing the Form, 146. 65 Ben Witherington, III, John’s Wisdom: A Commentary on the Fourth Gospel (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995): 4, 6.

sacra doctrina: wisdom, scripture, and metaphysics

41

incomprehension and even charges of blasphemy. Both Jesus’ audience, and John, understood that what was at stake was a radical and (metaphysically) dangerous shift in divine naming. As Aquinas knew, furthermore, the author of the Gospel also believed that the prophet Isaiah had, in some sense, seen the incarnate Word: “Isaiah said this because he saw his glory and spoke of him” (12:41). Marianne Meye Thompson has drawn attention to the connection of John’s Gospel with Isaiah’s prophecy as regards divine naming: The most likely candidates for interpreting the “I am” sayings [of Jesus in John’s Gospel] are generally assumed to be either the divine pronouncements of Isaiah or the revelation to Moses of the divine name. Thus the translations of these passages, and the traditions that sprang up around their interpretation, are of particular interest. We note, ﬁrst, that the LXX translation of Exodus 3:14 reads ‘I am the One who is’ (ejgwv eijmi oJ w[ n). This understanding of God’s self-revelation has an analog in the divine declarations of Isaiah 40–66, where “I am Yahweh” (. . .) is regularly translated “ am” (ejgwv eimi), suggesting a revelation of God as the one who simply is.66

The author of the Fourth Gospel would have been familiar with these (Greek) texts of Isaiah. It is no imposition upon the text of Isaiah to suggest that the prophet had metaphysical concerns, once one recognizes that “metaphysics” is intellectual judgment about ultimate questions regarding the nature of God and creatures. As Joseph Blenkinsopp states, “By its nature prophecy raises the issue of the reality and power of the deity who validates the prophet’s message.”67 Blenkinsopp admittedly denies that (deutero-) Isaiah possessed metaphysical intelligence. Arguing that (deutero-) Isaiah’s writings reﬂect a need to counter the rising inﬂuence of the Babylonian cult, Blenkinsopp notes that for this reason “the god of Israel was increasingly represented as a cosmic deity residing in the circle of the heavens and presiding over the destinies of all nations.”68 Despite this dim view of (deutero-) Isaiah’s capacities, however, Blenkinsopp’s interpretation of chapter six of (proto-) Isaiah is surprisingly close to Aquinas’s: 66

Marianne Meye Thompson, The God of the Gospel of John (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001): 89. 67 Joseph Blenkinsopp, A History of Prophecy in Israel (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1983): 212. 68 Ibid., 212–13. Other exegetes such as John N. Oswalt dispute the division of Isaiah into “deutero” and “trito” on the grounds that the division hinges upon the denial that real prophecy, in the sense of foretelling future realities, occurred.

42

sacra doctrina: wisdom, scripture, and metaphysics In the last analysis, what is most characteristic of Isaiah is his overwhelming sense of the reality of God. The attribution of holiness to God (the Holy One of Israel, the Holy God) implies not so much ethical character as absolute otherness. The reaction of Isaiah in the vision in which he received his commission illustrates the fact that sin is understood not so much in the act of ethical reﬂection as rather when the reality of that Other breaks through into consciousness – “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips” (Isaiah 6:5). The activity of God follows from this intuition of his being, and so Isaiah is able to communicate with remarkable immediacy the sense of divine power acting on the world and the reality of judgment.69

Isaiah’s prophecy connects God’s unity, transcendence, and immanence in a way that, while certainly not Aristotelian in style, exhibits metaphysical power of mind. In light of the metaphysical and theological statements of both Isaiah and the Gospel of John, Aquinas holds that such statements could have been expressed only by one who has interiorly questioned and probed the issues at stake in divine naming, that is, only by one who intellectually contemplates God beyond idolatry.70 Using one contemplative (Isaiah) to explore the work of another, therefore, Aquinas seeks to evoke the contemplation that undergirds John’s understanding of the God revealed in Christ: “It is described as high, full, and perfect. It is high: I saw the Lord seated on a high and lofty throne; it is full: and the whole house was full of his majesty; and it was perfect: and the things that were under him ﬁlled the Temple.”71 For Aquinas, revelation depends upon the graced interior preparation and prayerful contemplation of the disciples who receive and reciprocate Jesus’ love.72 St. John, Aquinas explains, was able to grasp and to present the mystery of Jesus’ divinity in a more profound way than were the other evangelists because “among the other disciples of the Lord, John

69 Ibid., 118. One doubts that Blenkinsopp would grant the association with metaphysics, because of the widespread misunderstanding of metaphysics as dry abstraction undertaken only by professional philosophers. 70 Cf. Norman Podhoretz’s argument that the great theme of biblical prophecy is opposition to idolatry: Podhoretz, The Prophets (New York: The Free Press, 2002), 310 and elsewhere. Podhoretz is well aware that idolatrous practices persisted in Israel for centuries, in contrast to the notion that monotheism decisively prevailed early on. 71 St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Saint John, part 1, Prologue, no. 1 (trans. James A. Weisheipl and Fabian R. Larcher [Albany, NY: Magi Books, 1980], 23). For clariﬁcation of the text of Isaiah used by Aquinas, see Weisheipl’s Appendix I, 447–9. 72 Cf. Nichols, Discovering Aquinas, 21–2.

sacra doctrina: wisdom, scripture, and metaphysics

43

was more loved by Christ.”73 In other words, St. John’s appropriation of sacra doctrina depends upon the spiritual exercise that is friendship with Christ. As Aquinas remarks, “And because secrets are revealed to friends, ‘I have called you friends because everything I have heard from my father I have made known to you’ (below 15:15), Jesus conﬁded his secrets in a special way to that disciple who was specially loved.”74 If the Summa Theologiae’s treatise on God (one and three) is a spiritual exercise intended to form as well as to inform the reader, then this spiritual exercise is necessarily rooted in contemplation of the master/friend, Jesus Christ – a contemplation of the Word through the Holy Spirit. This point becomes clear in Aquinas’s elaboration of the terms “high, full, and perfect.”75 Aquinas considers these three terms to be descriptive of “the threefold manner in which he [John] contemplated the Lord Jesus,”76 as this contemplation is manifested in the Prologue to the Gospel, in which John announces that “the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (1:1). The term “high” describes John’s contemplation of Christ’s possession, as Word, of the divine essence (“the Word was God”). Evocatively employing the text from Isaiah, Aquinas states, “Now a fourfold height is indicated in this contemplation of John. A height of authority; hence he says, I saw the Lord. A height of eternity; when he says, seated. One of dignity, or nobility of nature; so he says, on a high throne. And a height of incomprehensible truth; when he says, lofty. It is in these four ways that the early philosophers arrived at the knowledge of God.”77 This last sentence indicates the point that Aquinas wishes to make: John’s understanding of “God,” insofar as it is guided by the prophets, is not distant from the understanding of the Greek philosophers as interpreted from a Christian perspective.78 In short, thanks to the prophets, Aquinas suggests, John’s contemplation attains a metaphysically accurate (without requiring a reading of 73

Super Ioan. Prologue, no. 11 (Weisheipl, part 1, 27). Aquinas cites John 21:20. Ibid. For a discussion of what friendship involves for Aquinas, see Guy Mansini, O. S. B., “Similitudo, Communicatio, and the Friendship of Charity in Aquinas,” Recherches de théologie ancienne et médievale, Supplementa 1: Thomistica, ed. E. Manning (Leuven: Peeters, 1995): 1–26; Fergus Kerr, O.P., “Charity as Friendship,” in Language, Meaning and God, ed. Brian Davies, O.P. (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1987): 1–23. 75 Cf. Carlo Leget, “The Concept of ‘Life’ in the Commentary on St. John,” forthcoming in Reading John with St. Thomas Aquinas: Theological Exegesis and Speculative Theology, ed. Matthew Levering and Michael Dauphinais (Catholic University of America Press). 76 Super Ioan. Prologue, no. 1 (Weisheipl, part 1, 23). 77 Super Ioan. Prologue, no. 2 (Weisheipl, part 1, 23). 78 Super Ioan. Prologue, no. 3–6 (Weisheipl, part 1, 23–5). 74

44

sacra doctrina: wisdom, scripture, and metaphysics

Aristotle) understanding of God’s essence. It has to be seen that if this were not true, then John’s statement that “the Word was God” would be idolatrous in its understanding of “God.” At stake here is whether the evangelist had an idolatrous (creaturely) understanding of “God,” or whether he had, as a Jew, interiorly appropriated the teachings of the prophets about God. The four ways that Aquinas identiﬁes in Isaiah’s imagistic depiction of his vision of God – authority (the argument from design), eternity (the argument from change), dignity (the argument from participation), and incomprehensibility (the argument from ﬁnite truths to inﬁnite Truth) – show that Aquinas regards his own inquiries into the divine essence (God as one) as part of a contemplative spiritual exercise, which, like the prophet’s vision, enables a “high” understanding of God. His point is not that Isaiah or John were metaphysicians in the sense that Aristotle was. Rather, unlike many modern readers, Aquinas ﬁnds, in the prophets, spiritual exercises (sacred teaching) by which one gains interiorly a true understanding of “God” beyond the creaturely idols (cf. Isaiah 44). John’s contemplation is also “full.” Aquinas states that “contemplation is full when someone is able to consider all the effects of a cause in the cause itself, that is, when he knows not only the essence of the cause, but also its power, according as it can extend out to many things.”79 In order to know the incarnate Word, John must know his divine power and saving love: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (3:16). This aspect of “fullness” justiﬁes the scope of sacra doctrina, which treats all things in relation to God. The third term with which Aquinas describes John’s contemplation of the Lord Jesus is “perfect.” For Aquinas, contemplation is “perfect” when it attains its object. For contemplation to be perfect, therefore, the person must know and love (by faith and charity) the Trinity as Creator and Redeemer. When Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae treats what pertains to God as three, he is imitating John’s contemplation insofar as it is “perfect.” By knowing and loving the one God as three Persons – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – human beings are fully taken up into the dynamism that is grace and glory, the freely-given perfection of the imago dei. Thus, contemplation of the Lord Jesus, imitating St. John as the exemplar of friendship with God, will manifest itself in a treatise on the triune God that is “high, full, and perfect.” When contemplated with the 79

Super Ioan. Prologue, no. 7 (Weisheipl, part 1, 25–7).

sacra doctrina: wisdom, scripture, and metaphysics

45

intellectual virtue of wisdom, the divine Word reveals metaphysical truth. Yet the contemplation of the Word attains its perfection only in the contemplation of the Trinity. The process is not from a false “God in his unity” to a true “triune God.” On the contrary, each mode of contemplation reveals necessary truth. In order to interpret St. John’s words that “he whom God has sent utters the words of God, for it is not by measure that he gives the Spirit; the Father loves the Son, and has given all things into his hand” (3:34–5) and to share in the eternal life promised to one who believes, one must conceive “God” in a way that avoids idolatry. A limited idol “God” could not “give all things” or give “eternal life.” Nor does St. John conceive the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as three gods. John is no unsophisticated believer. His Gospel resounds with claims that cut directly to these issues. For Aquinas, therefore, the evangelist is a model for the theologian; Scripture, as the revelation of God against the idols, cannot be understood without attending to the metaphysical questions that belong to its heart. Unless one’s contemplation is metaphysically “high” and “full,” in accord with the intellectual virtue of wisdom, it will certainly not attain to the “perfect” intellectual contemplation that can only be had in faith. The movement of the De Deo trains the person to know and love God in the “perfect” way. Aquinas’s De Deo is thus a spiritual exercise under the guidance of the one master, Jesus Christ, the Wisdom of God, who teaches us about himself (and thereby befriends us) through inspired contemplatives such as Isaiah and John. Such knowledge, above all, humbles rather than “puffs up.” As Idit Dobbs-Weinstein writes regarding Maimonides’s and Aquinas’s exegesis of Job, “According to both Maimonides and Aquinas, it is knowledge which guards against intellectual pride, a wisdom (sapientia) possessed by those who acknowledge the natural limitations of human reason (scientia) and which manifests man’s provident participation in divine providence and government.”80 In light of the widespread critique that Aquinas’s approach obscures “God as experienced in salvation history,” I have suggested that Aquinas’s theology of God should be understood as an exercise in sapiential contemplation, which requires that sacra doctrina integrate the intellectual virtue of wisdom. In such a framework, metaphysical tools are seen to be integral to salvation history: contemplative wisdom belongs to the dynamism by which God freely relates in salvation history to human beings. As William Hill has pointed out, Aquinas operates out of a 80

Idit Dobbs-Weinstein, “Medieval Biblical Commentary and Philosophical Inquiry as Exempliﬁed in the Thought of Moses Maimonides and St. Thomas Aquinas,” 120.

46

sacra doctrina: wisdom, scripture, and metaphysics

“concern for theology as real assent of the intelligence to God. . . . The abstractness of procedure must not be misconstrued: it is not a question of knowledge of the abstract, but of abstract (and so penetrating) knowledge of the actual and so the concretely real.”81 This insight into the purpose of “abstract” theological discourse will guide our own investigation of the mystery of the one God who is three Persons. As we will see, the theoretical approach, or mode of sacra doctrina, that Aquinas adopts in his treatise on God (one and three) need not distance the reader from the biblical narrative of salvation history. On the contrary, the philosophical terms in which Aquinas, as a contemplative, probes the scriptural witness to God’s simultaneous oneness and threeness recapitulates, in the theological realm, the posture of the holy men and women in the Bible (e.g., Isaiah and John) vis-à-vis the triune God’s self-revelation. Through the contemplative practices of Aquinas’s treatise, the reader becomes a deeper participant in the salvation history narrated by Scripture. He or she learns how to join more profoundly in Israel’s invocation of the “one God” and in the apostolic invocation of the God who is revealed by Christ Jesus to be one and three, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. By means of the metaphysical ascesis, the believer is drawn closer liturgically (and thus historically and dramatically) to the God revealed in the words of Scripture. This movement occurs when, by participating more and more deeply in God’s knowledge of himself as one and three, we are drawn – impelled by love – into the transcendent mystery of God’s own inexpressible communio.82

81 Hill, The Three-Personed God, 65; cf. his programmatic essay, “Seeking Foundations for Faith: Symbolism of Person or Metaphysics of Being?” in Search for the Absent God: Tradition and Modernity in Religious Understanding, ed. Mary Catherine Hilkert, O.P. (New York: Crossroad, 1992): 17–32. 82 See Walter Principe’s “Loving Friendship According to Thomas Aquinas,” in The Nature and Pursuit of Love: The Philosophy of Irving Singer, ed. David Goicoechea (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995): 128–41.

Chapter Two1

YHWH AND BEING

Does metaphysics guide Aquinas’s discussion of God in his unity, or does the witness of Scripture? Etienne Gilson famously raised this question: Is it St. Thomas the theologian who, reading in Exodus the identity of essence and existence in God, taught St. Thomas the philosopher the distinction between essence and existence in creatures? Or is it St. Thomas the philosopher who, pushing his analysis of the metaphysical structure of the concrete even as far as the distinction between essence and existence, taught St. Thomas the theologian that He Who Is in Exodus means the Act-of-Being?2

The impossibility of answering the question reminds us of how profoundly Scripture and metaphysics are integrated in Aquinas’s sacra doctrina.3 Fergus Kerr quotes M.-D. Chenu, “However charged with 1

Portions of this chapter appeared in an earlier version as “Contemplating God: YHWH and Being in the Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas,” Irish Theological Quarterly 67 (2002): 17–31. 2 Etienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. L. K. Shook (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994): 94. 3 John F. Wippel has noted that in Aquinas’s theological works, “[W]e may ﬁnd a running series of philosophical discussions joined together as succeeding questions or chapters in works such as the Summa theologiae (see the so-called Treatises on God, or on Man, or on Law). . . . We may easily remove such discussions from the general theological context of the writings in which they appear and from the references to Scripture and the Fathers contained in some of their videturs or sed contras and use them as important sources in reconstructing Thomas’s metaphysical thought” (John F. Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas: From Finite Being to Uncreated Being [Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2000]: xxi). Such an approach, suitable for the purposes of philosophy, cannot be adopted by theologians. Theologians cannot “easily remove” Aquinas’s metaphysical insights “from the references to Scripture and the Fathers contained in some

48

yhwh and being

metaphysical language, the questions on the one God have to do with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who will send Christ, not the god of Aristotle’s Physics. We have to hold on to the religious character of the text and not reduce it to a deistic theodicy.”4 Similarly, commenting on the name “He who is,” Aidan Nichols remarks, “This is how, as Dom Ghislain Lafont puts it, the Mosaic revelation commands study of God in his essence, while the Gospel revelation will do the same for God in his Trinity.”5 Aquinas’s treatise on the triune God contemplates God by means of a progressive investigation of the “divine names,” to use PseudoDionysius’s expression. This project has its roots in the efforts of the Greek Fathers, pre-eminently Pseudo-Dionysius, to characterize the divine attributes,6 and it also has philosophical antecedents. As Wayne Hankey of their videturs or sed contras”; indeed it would be a grave theological mistake to treat these references to Scripture and the Fathers as mere decorations. Rather, without conﬂating philosophy and theology, theologians must seek to understand the interplay of Scripture and metaphysics that constitutes the fabric of Aquinas’s theology. 4 Fergus Kerr, O.P., After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002): 184, quoting M.-D. Chenu, O.P., Toward Understanding St. Thomas, trans. A.-M. Landry and D. Hughes (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1964): 321. 5 Aidan Nichols, O.P., Discovering Aquinas (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2002): 54, citing Ghislain Lafont, O. S. B., Structures et méthode dans la Somme théologique de saint Thomas d’Aquin (Paris: Desclée, 1961): 473. 6 See Wayne J. Hankey, God in Himself: Aquinas’s Doctrine of God as Expounded in the Summa Theologiae (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987): 5–17. Hankey points out, “Proclus, mediated by Dionysius, also provides Thomas with a second genre, that for treating God in himself in the Summa Theologiae. For the treatise may be regarded as a de divinis nominibus. This form was Christianized by Dionysius, but the very ﬁrst tract de divinis nominibus is contained in the Platonic Theology of Proclus, which Dionysius was imitating and transforming” (9). (Aidan Nichols notes, however, that when composing the prima pars of the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas had not yet read the Liber de causis: see Nichols, Discovering Aquinas, 198 [fn. 6].) Earlier Jewish and Christian theologians had devoted extensive attention to enumerating the divine attributes, Philo’s Quod Deus Immutabilis Sit being the ﬁrst signiﬁcant such treatise: for analysis of this development, see Thomas G. Weinandy, O. F. M. Cap., Does God Suffer? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000): 74ff.. Hankey goes on to remark, “The two major divisions of Thomas’s treatise de deo (qq.2–43) originate in the Dionysian mediation of Proclan Neoplatonism. The ﬁrst is the distinction of the de deo uno (qq.3–26) from the de deo trino (qq.27–43). This has its origin in Dionysius’ division of treatises on the divine names between one on the names belonging to the unity of the Trinity and another on those names proper to the persons considered severally. Thomas’s second division is that of the de deo uno between a consideration of God’s substance (qq.3–11) and of his operations (qq.14–27). This derives from a Neoplatonic form of Aristotle’s distinction between the ﬁrst and second acts of the soul which St. Thomas ﬁrst ﬁnds in Dionysius and later identiﬁes as Proclan” (12). See also T. C. O’Brien, Introduction to Summa Theologiae, vol.7: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost (New York: McGraw-Hill [Blackfriars], 1976): xxi ff.

yhwh and being

49

has pointed out, the neo-Platonic philosopher Proclus authored the ﬁrst treatise on the divine names and inﬂuenced Aquinas; similarly Lawrence Dewan has shown the inﬂuence of Aristotle’s Metaphysics upon Aquinas’s account of the divine attributes in 1, qq.3–11.7 Aquinas would have been inﬂuenced not least, however, by the fact that the contemplative goal of learning properly God’s names is eminently biblical.8 The Old Testament portrays Jacob, who on that night receives the name Israel, as having wrestled all night to know God’s name, and as bearing the mark of this struggle for the rest of his life (Genesis 32). Similarly, Moses recognizes that his mission depends upon knowing God’s name: “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?’ ” (Exodus 3:13). In the Decalogue, God commands that his name be recognized as holy (the second commandment, Exodus 20:7). This commandment is ﬂeshed out in Leviticus, where the laws for human holiness are ratiﬁed by the formulaic reminder, “I am YHWH” (cf. Leviticus 19). The commandment appears in the Psalms (cf. Psalm 52:9, 54:1, et al.) and the prophets (cf. Amos 5, Ezekiel 43, Isaiah 63, Jeremiah 31). King Solomon, dedicating Israel’s Temple, recalls God’s promise to place God’s name there, and thereby to answer the prayers and forgive the sins of those who acknowledge his name by acknowledging his Temple (1 Kings 8:29, 33–4). This relationship with God through knowing his name continues, in Trinitarian form, in the New Testament. In Matthew’s Gospel, the risen Jesus teaches his disciples to go forth baptizing people of all nations “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 7

Lawrence Dewan, O.P., “Aristotelian Features of the Order of Presentation in St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae, Prima pars, qq.3–11,” in Philosophy and the God of Abraham, ed. R. James Long (Toronto: PIMS, 1991): 41–53. See also Leo Elders’s attempt to ground the order of qq.3–11 in the “ﬁve ways” of q.2: Elders, “L’ordre des attributs divins dans la Somme théologique,” Divus Thomas 82 (1979): 225–32, which is further developed in his The Philosophical Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990): 140–85. 8 David B. Burrell, C.S.C. has explored the project of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim naming of God in (among other places) “A Philosophical Foray into Difference and Dialogue: Avital Wohlman on Maimonides and Aquinas,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 76 (2002): 181–94. See also two volumes of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim commentary on the revelation of God to Moses at the burning bush on Mt. Sinai (Exodus 3): Paul Vignaux, ed., Dieu et l’être: Exégèses d’Exode 3,14 et de Coran 20,11–24 (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1978) and Alain de Libera and Emilie Zum Brunn, eds., Celui qui est: interpretations juives et chrétiennes d’Exode 3.14 (Paris: Cerf, 1986). The former volume includes an essay by Pierre Hadot on the Neoplatonic antecedents of the Christian interpretation.

50

yhwh and being

28:19). In John’s Gospel, Jesus prays, “I have manifested thy name to men. . . . Holy Father, keep them in thy name, which thou hast given me, that they may be one, even as we are one” (John 17:6, 11). In Acts, Saul – the man who made havoc in Jerusalem of those who called on his [Jesus’] name” – is blinded and asks the Lord’s name, receiving the answer “I am Jesus” (Acts 9:5, 21). Jesus tells Saul that his mission is “to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the sons of Israel; for I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name” (Acts 9:15–16). These passages show the theological signiﬁcance of engagement with the divine name. By contemplative knowing of God’s name, one is drawn further into the covenantal relationship that requires and makes possible holiness, the perfection of charity.9 The contemplation of the divine names assists in union with God or deiﬁcation. However, does teaching the divine names in the highly metaphysical fashion undertaken by Aquinas assist in such biblically inspired mystical union? Aquinas composed the Summa Theologiae for pedagogical reasons, that is, in the service of teaching. Teaching, for Aquinas, possesses both an active and a contemplative aspect. Insofar as the object of teaching is 9

The awe-inspiring gift of knowing God’s name(s) has been well expressed by the Old Testament exegete Christopher R. Seitz: “what is at stake in modern debates is not whether God is father or can be addressed as ‘he.’ Rather, what is at stake is whether we are entitled to call God anything at all. The proper question is whether we have any language that God will recognize as his own, such that he will know himself to be called upon, and no other, and within his own counsel then be in a position to respond, or to turn a deaf ear” (Seitz, Word without End: The Old Testament as Abiding Theological Witness [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998]: 252). Since God is beyond human comprehension – not in the sense that human beings can know nothing about God, but in the sense that the ﬁnite cannot be compared with, let alone encompass or comprehend, the inﬁnite – afﬁrmations or positive names for God must be integrated with negative demurrals. On naming God, see Timothy L. Smith’s survey of medieval speculative grammar in Thomas Aquinas’ Trinitarian Theology, (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2003): 160–203. See also Gregory Rocca, O.P., “Aquinas on God-Talk: Hovering Over the Abyss,” Theological Studies 54 (1993): 641–61; Mark F. Johnson, “Apophatic Knowledge’s Cataphatic Dependencies,” The Thomist 62 (1998): 519–31; Albert Patfoort, O.P., “La place de l’analogie dans la pensée de saint Thomas d’Aquin: Analogie, noms divins et ‘perfections’,” Revue des Sciences Philosophiques et Théologiques 76 (1992): 235–54; Ralph McInerny, Aquinas on Analogy (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996); David B. Burrell, C.S.C., “From Analogy of ‘Being’ to the Analogy of Being,” in Recovering Nature: Essays in Natural Philosophy, Ethics, and Metaphysics in Honor of Ralph McInerny, ed. John P. O’Callaghan and Thomas S. Hibbs (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999): 253–66. Cf. Al-Ghazali, The Ninety-Nine Beautiful Names of God, trans. David B. Burrell and Nazih Daher (Cambridge: The Islamic Texts Society, 1992, 1995): 39–41; Amina Rachid, “Dieu et l’être selon Al-Farabi: le chapitre de ‘l’être’ dans le Livre des Lettres,” in Dieu et l’être, ed. Paul Vignaux, 179–90.

yhwh and being

51

the hearer, teaching belongs to the active life, since this involves external action. Insofar as the object of teaching is the “intelligible truth,” teaching belongs to the contemplative life.10 Contemplation of the divine truth is the result of an arduous process that begins with “contemplation of the divine effects” and rises to contemplation of divine truth in the intelligible realities that lie beyond reason, such as the reality of the Trinity.11 In this process that leads to contemplation of the divine truth, metaphysics and biblical exegesis each have a role. As Aquinas remarks, the ways of receiving the principles necessary to arrive at contemplation of truth vary according to the proximate source of the principle: “as regards the things he receives from God, he needs prayer, according to Wisdom 7:7, I called upon God, and the spirit of wisdom came upon me: while as regards the things he receives from man, he needs hearing, in so far as he receives from the spoken word, and reading, in so far as he receives from the tradition of Holy Writ.”12 Contemplation rooted in these sources, Aquinas suggests, produces “a certain inchoate beatitude” that anticipates the state of glory.13 This experiential “inchoate beatitude” is similar to the mystical union that Orthodox theologians such as Dumitru Staniloae have in mind when they describe an “apophatic knowledge” in which, as Staniloae argues, 10

Summa Theologiae 2–2, q.181, a.3. 2–2, q.180, a.4; cf. ad 1–4, where Aquinas draws upon Richard of St. Victor’s elaboration of six “steps whereby we ascend by means of creatures to the contemplation of God.” (ad 3) Aquinas’s treatise on the triune God is not as far separated from Bonaventure’s The Journey of the Mind to God as is sometimes suggested: both are highly intellectual contemplative ascents, although Bonaventure adopts a more mystical mode of expression. 12 2–2, q.180, a.3, ad 4. 13 2–2, q.180, a.4. Otto Hermann Pesch summarizes Aquinas’s practice of analogously naming God, but concludes: 11

On the other hand, the similarity is so fundamentally bound up with dissimilarity and based on the transcendental dependence of the created from the Creator, the concept formed from the life of created beings is such a radically alien idea for the life of God that, as has been shown, it can hardly be justiﬁed to talk of understanding by analogy, still less of statements from analogy about the ‘name’ of God. Within Christian theological circles it is questionable whether, considering the above, the sharp distinction between analogy and metaphor can in fact be any further sustained, since on close examination statements about God based on analogical reasoning have a status not superior to that of a higher order metaphor. (Pesch, “Thomas Aquinas and Contemporary Theology,” in Aquinas as Authority, ed. Paul van Geest, Harm Goris, and Carlo Leget [Leuven: Peeters, 2002]: 160). The distinction between analogy and metaphor, blurred by Pesch, in fact sustains the possibility of contemplative theology.

52

yhwh and being

“the inﬁnity or omnipotence or love of God is not just an intellectual notion, but a matter of direct experience.”14 For Aquinas, intellectual contemplation and the experience of union in mystical darkness are not opposed, since our ﬁnite intellects, even when elevated by faith, cannot grasp the inﬁnite reality of God. Given this intersection of teaching and the (deifying and mystical) contemplative life, Aquinas’s treatise on God should, as we suggested in the previous chapter, be read as a contemplative spiritual exercise. As a contemplative spiritual exercise that seeks analogous understanding of God in himself, Aquinas’s approach uniﬁes metaphysical and scriptural naming. The divine names found in Scripture cannot be understood apart from metaphysical analysis, but nonetheless it is the biblical narrative of salvation that governs the task of divine naming in Aquinas’s treatise on God in his oneness.15 Put another way, Aquinas’s discussion of God under the 14 Dumitru Staniloae, The Experience of God, trans. and ed. Ioan Ionita and Robert Barringer (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1994): 95. Staniloae, however, follows the neo-Palamite theologians in separating the divine energies from the divine essence: “We experience nothing from God, in content, other than his varied operations that have to do with the world, which is to say, in relation to us. Beyond this we know that at their basis is the personally subsistent essence, but how it is, we do not know, for it is an essence beyond all essences. All we know in God is his dynamism experienced in relation to the world or through the prism that we ourselves are” (126). Were it not for this distinction between energies and essence, which robs faith (and contemplation) of its radicality, Staniloae’s position would be strikingly similar to Aquinas’s: “The qualities of God, as we know them, disclose their richness gradually as we develop the capacity to participate in them. Yet, as a personally subsistent being, God remains always above them, although in a certain manner he is their source. Therefore, we do not err if we consider them in their totality as existent in his being in a manner beyond all understanding and in an inexhaustible simplicity. Thus, as dynamic manifestations of God, they are ‘around his being’, and not identical with his being itself ” (127). See also 247, where Staniloae speaks of “our personal participation in the Godhead for all eternity” that is inaugurated by faith, mediated by the saving doctrine, in the Trinity. 15 Metaphysical analysis clearly can be undertaken apart from Scripture, but Aquinas’s metaphysical probing in the Summa Theologiae belongs to sacra doctrina. As Stephen Pfürtner, O.P., indebted to M.-D. Chenu, has noted with regard to Aquinas’s theology of hope, “Aquinas was anything but an abstract theologian. . . . The starting point and the basis from which all his theological interpretation was orientated was rather the faith of the Church, ﬁrst expressed in the Scriptures and in her authentic documents and present to him through his living participation in its development. . . . It is completely wrong to reproach him for making these Scripture quotations a kind of text on which to hang an essentially philosophical argument, as Luther did – and, by extending his thesis further – the modern Lutherans [e.g., W. Link]” (Pfürtner, Luther and Aquinas on Salvation, trans. Edward Quinn [New York: Sheed and Ward, 1964]: 58). Pfürtner quotes Luther’s remark, “This is Thomas’s order: at the beginning he takes the words of Paul, Peter, John, Isaiah, etc., and then concludes, ‘Aristotle says this’; Scripture is interpreted according to Aristotle” (Pfürtner, 58, fn. 7).

yhwh and being

53

rubric of his oneness contemplates Israel’s God metaphysically. One might nonetheless ask whether metaphysics is a suitable instrument for the appropriation of the self-revelation of the God who is one. Does “being” truly illumine “YHWH”? Is this (metaphysically appropriated) God none other than the Trinity? In order to ask and answer these questions better, I will begin with a description of R. Kendall Soulen’s recent critique of theological explorations of God’s essence.16 Soulen’s concerns are particularly resonant because, without criticizing Aquinas by name, he lays his ﬁnger on some of the key problems that many contemporary theologians have with the Thomistic doctrine of God. Second, I will examine Summa Theologiae 1, q.2 (on God’s existence) in light of a number of related texts. By means of this approach, I hope to show that Aquinas intends to contemplate God not generically, but speciﬁcally as revealed through Moses to Israel. The concern that “being” has replaced the living God of Israel in traditional Christian accounting of the divine names17 is mistaken: on the contrary, metaphysics accurately illumines the living God of Scripture.

1

R. Kendall Soulen’s Post-Supersessionist Trinitarian Theology

In “YHWH the Triune God,” which extends the project of his The God of Israel and Christian Theology, Soulen has identiﬁed two problems with “classical” (i.e., patristic, medieval, and their modern derivatives) theologies of God: classical accounts of God’s eternal identity have chronically suffered from two limitations. First, they make God’s identity as YHWH, the God of Israel, all but irrelevant for understanding God’s eternal identity. Second, they are eo ipso forced to think “eternal identity” in one-sided reliance on YHWH’s dialectical shadow, ousia. The reliability of the gospel’s narrative

16

On the application to God of the term “essence,” see Thierry-Dominique Humbrecht, O.P., “Dieu a-t-il une essence?” Revue Thomiste 95 (1995): 7–18. 17 Ironically, just as interest in the divine attributes seems to have reached a low point in Christian theology (as importing Greek philosophy into Scripture, and as improper to nonfoundationalist, postmodern philosophy), interest in the divine attributes appears to be on the rise in philosophical circles. See, e.g., Katherin A. Rogers, Perfect Being Theology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000) and Joshua Hoffman and Gary S. Rosenkrantz, The Divine Attributes (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002).

54

yhwh and being relations is unreliably secured by etching them into the eternal countenance of being, apart from the truly reliable identity of YHWH, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.18

Regarding the ﬁrst limitation (the more intriguing one because the more original), Soulen theorizes that, for patristic and medieval Christian theologians, the naming of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit supersedes or displaces the Israelite naming of God as YHWH.19 While continuing to afﬁrm that the triune God is the God of Israel (against Marcionism), “classical” theologians assume that the New Testament names God in a deeper – and displacing – way. Soulen states that “the Old Covenant’s identiﬁcation of God becomes logically dispensable for the purposes of specifying God’s identity and purposes in their deﬁnitive form.”20 The acts of YHWH are now seen to be the acts of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. From this it would follow, Soulen suggests, that the name YHWH was never, in a strict sense, a meaningful name, since it falls away completely when the true triune name is revealed. Israel’s relationship with YHWH (that is, the entire Old Covenant) is thus compromised, since the God whom Israel worshipped as YHWH turns out to have an entirely different “name” or identity. Discussing the doctrine of the immanent Trinity (God’s eternal identity), Soulen ﬁnds that “the Christian doctrine of God in its strictest form contains no essential reference to the Scripture of Israel and its talk of God.”21 The identity of YHWH as revealed to Israel appears to have no impact upon the formulation of Christian confession of the eternal Trinity. Regarding the second limitation, Soulen, along with numerous contemporary theologians,22 takes issue with what he considers to be the replacement of the name YHWH (as revealed in narrative form in the Old Testament) with discourse about being or ousia. In “classical” discussions of God’s eternal identity, metaphysical claims about God replace claims based upon the narrative of YHWH. Soulen describes this meta18

R. Kendall Soulen, “YHWH the Triune God,” Modern Theology 15 (1999): 50. See also R. Kendall Soulen, The God of Israel and Christian Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1996). 19 Soulen, “YHWH the Triune God,” 32. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., 33. 22 For an overview, see Thomas G. Weinandy, O. F. M. Cap., Does God Suffer? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000): especially 1–26, 69–112. One might see also the review of Weinandy’s book by Romanus Cessario, O.P. in Modern Theology 17 (2001): 522–4.

yhwh and being

55

physical claim about God’s being or ousia as constituting a “fourth” in the Godhead, at least linguistically: “Insofar as Christian theology has deemed it necessary . . . to admit a ‘fourth’ into the elemental grammar of the threefold name Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that fourth has been ousia, not YHWH.”23 He rejects two common arguments in defense of metaphysical elaboration. The ﬁrst argument is that such elaboration is rooted in Scripture, particularly in “YHWH’s solemn name-revelation to Moses in Exodus 3:14.”24 In his view, this argument is based upon the misleading translation adopted by the Septuagint (and followed by the Vulgate), and therefore is not in fact rooted in Scripture.25 23

Soulen, “YHWH the Triune God,” 34. Ibid. 25 Soulen is of course not alone in his suspicion of the traditional interpretation of Exodus 3:14. Inﬂuenced not only by historical research into the culture of the ancient Near East, but also by theological (and philosophical) suspicion of the concept of “being” as applied analogously to God, biblical exegetes generally caution against metaphysical interpretations of Exodus 3:14, even when admitting that the Gospel of John contains such interpretation. Christopher Seitz, for example, notes that the Greek rendering, in the Septuagint, of the Hebrew words read: 24

“I am the One who is” (ego eimi ‘o on). . . . It was this nuance, arguably different than the narrative direction of Exodus, that in turn inﬂuenced certain New Testament and subsequent theological statements, focused on being, rather than personality. It is a very small leap to see how ousia dominated the options for Trinitarian confession. In my judgment, later Trinitarian statements would be wrongly judged antiexegetical or philosophical, rather than scriptural. Instead, their scriptural location was either detached or obscured, given the climate of exchange, or the Hebrew tradition in place in Exodus was wrongly assessed to begin with because of the LXX rendering. In the case of Exodus 3:14, we are not learning something about God’s substance or essence but something about a personal identity and history he is about to make good on at Sea and Sinai. (Seitz, Figured Out: Typology and Providence in Christian Scripture [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001]: 140). This sharp distinction between God’s “substance or essence” and God’s “personal identity and history” betrays an ignorance of the nature of treatises on God’s essence such as Aquinas’s, which were intended to gain insight precisely into God’s personal identity. For views similar to Seitz’s, see Richard Bauckham, God Cruciﬁed: Monotheism and Christology in the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998) and Ben Witherington III and Laura M. Ice, The Shadow of the Almighty: Father, Son, and Spirit in Biblical Perspective (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002): 10–13. For a short survey of the history of interpretation of Exodus 3, see Brevard S. Childs, The Book of Exodus: A Critical, Theological Commentary (Louisville, KY: The Westminster Press, 1974): 46–89. Childs comments: It remains a more difﬁcult question to assess to what extent ontological overtones were attached to the biblical formula. (Naturally much turns on the term “ontological”.) However, it is of interest to note that at least the vocabulary of the LXX’s

56

yhwh and being

The second argument is that metaphysical elaboration was, in its patristic and medieval context, simply a means of avoiding errors in discourse about “God,” that is, a means of ensuring that our discourse about God does not fall into idolatry by introducing elements that can pertain only to creatures. In contrast to this positive (and limited) interpretation of the role of metaphysics, Soulen sees metaphysical elaboration as what happened when Israel’s testimony to YHWH no longer carried any weight. Soulen argues, “What is at stake rather is the systematic subordination of one whole realm of discourse to another, namely, that of Israel’s Scriptures to that of classical metaphysics.”26 However, Soulen emphasizes that he is not intending to demonize metaphysics. Had supersessionism not already been dominant, perhaps the bishops at Nicea might have been able to incorporate ousia within prior claims about the identity of YHWH. As it was, however, ousia took over the linguistic and theological place that should have been accorded to YHWH.27 rendering of Exodus 3.14 (egw j ´ eimi j o J wn[ ) was picked up in Revelations 1:8. Certainly Philo developed the Greek translation further in terms of existence: “Tell them that I am He Who IS, that they may learn the difference between what is and what is not and . . . further . . . that no name at all can properly be used of Me, to Whom alone existence belongs” (Vita Mos. I.75). Although this vocabulary was not used in the New Testament, the note which Philo strikes has some real kinship with the witness of II Isaiah and cannot be dismissed as “alien Greek thinking.” (Childs, 1974, 83) See also the two volumes edited respectively by Vignaux and by de Libera and Brunn on Christian, Jewish, and Muslim interpretation of Exodus 3:14, along with Nahum M. Sarna, Exploring Exodus: The Origins of Biblical Israel (New York: Schocken Books, 1986): 50–2. 26 Soulen, “YHWH the Triune God,” 34. 27 Ibid., 35. Soulen also treats two leading twentieth-century Protestant theologians whose attention to the importance of Israel and general rejection of metaphysics make them promising sources for his post-supersessionist Trinitarian theology: Karl Barth and Robert Jenson. Both theologians, Soulen notes, “argue that God’s identity as YHWH, the God of Israel, is not an item that can be treated as peripheral or optional for Trinitarian theology” (35). In both cases, however, Soulen concludes that God’s identity as YHWH ultimately does not function in a determinative way. Since Barth is the most evident inﬂuence upon Jenson’s theology (as well as upon Soulen’s), we will here address only Soulen’s critique of Barth’s position. For Barth, YHWH refers to the form or Gestalt of the hidden, transcendent subject of revelation. The decisive manifestation of this Gestalt is Jesus of Nazareth (38–9). Jesus, as the self-manifesting Gestalt of revelation, supersedes YHWH. Soulen concludes that Barth, despite his interest in the revelation given to Israel, is a supersessionist: “The name Yahweh (together with Israel’s covenant from which it is inseparable) is a shadow, a prophecy whose limited truth must be dissolved (i.e., ‘the end of the people Israel as the special people of revelation’) in order that its enduring truth (God reveals Himself as Lord) may appear in the incarnation and the Church which confesses it” (40).

yhwh and being

57

Given the weaknesses he has identiﬁed, Soulen suggests a constructive principle that would avoid supersessionist confession of God as Trinity. The principle is: “In no circumstances may the Old Covenant/New Covenant schema be used to subordinate God’s identity as YHWH to God’s identity as Triune, thereby devaluing the former into a shadow of the latter, which for its part is then held to be alone the enduring truth of redemption, and thus of creation and consummation as well.”28 Whatever resonance the Christian confession of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit might have, it should not be allowed to overshadow the resonance proper to the (Christian and Jewish) confession of God as YHWH. The two confessions are equal in weight, since in different ways they name (from the Christian perspective) the same reality. The differences between the meanings associated with “YHWH” and those associated with “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” must not be covered up, but rather must be recognized and ﬁttingly exploited in order to achieve a truly non-supersessionist Trinitarian theology. Thus, Soulen holds that the classical account of God bypasses God’s eternal identity as YHWH and that the classical account gives to metaphysical claims about “being” the status that the naming of God as YHWH should have had. In what follows, I will ﬁrst identify the role that “being” plays in Aquinas’s theology of God, and second integrate this role into Aquinas’s broader understanding of the signiﬁcance of the name “YHWH.”

2

Aquinas on Being and YHWH

Aquinas’s treatise on the divine essence ﬂows from the logic of his demonstration of God’s existence, which moves from effects to the positing of a

The “enduring truth” of the name YHWH is in fact not distinguishable (logically or otherwise) from Jesus Christ. Once the true Gestalt has been manifested, the symbolical representation of the hidden subject of revelation by the name YHWH is superseded. For a critical appraisal of the idealist (Kantian and Hegelian) consequences of Jenson’s rejection of “classical” metaphysics, see Brian K. Sholl, “On Robert Jenson’s Trinitarian Thought,” Modern Theology 18 (2002): 27–36. For a Jewish attempt to understand the Christian doctrine of the triune God (in dialogue with Jenson), see Peter Ochs, “The God of Jews and Christians,” in Christianity in Jewish Terms, ed. Tikva Frymer-Kensky et al. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000): 49–69. 28 Ibid., 49. This distinction between “redemption” and “consummation” is worked out in The God of Israel and Christian Theology, but remains problematic.

58

yhwh and being

ﬁrst cause.29 In question 13 (perhaps the most frequently studied question of the Summa Theologiae by modern commentators), Aquinas states that “we can name God only from creatures,” since in this life we cannot know the divine essence, and therefore “whatever is said of God and creatures is said according to the relation of a creature to God as its principle and cause, wherein all the perfections of things pre-exist excellently.”30 Naming God depends upon properly knowing this cause-effect relationship. In turn, properly knowing the cause-effect relationship is the task of Aquinas’s demonstration of God’s existence by means of the “ﬁve ways” (1, q.2).31 The “ﬁve ways” lead to two major conclusions. First, God does not have existence, but is unlimited, uncreated existence or pure Act (1, q.3).32 It is impossible, therefore, to form a concept of God’s “being,” which differs inﬁnitely from any creaturely mode of being.33 Second, since God is pure Act and thus the perfect fullness of “to be,” all perfections are found primarily in God. It is by means of these perfections – taking away the crea29 I think that Aquinas’s demonstration of God’s existence works. The demonstration of God’s existence does not constitute a basis for Christian faith – nor does it offer an (idolatrous) deﬁnition of divine “existence” – but it reminds believers that their faith in the creating and redeeming God is not irrational, and invites nonbelievers to examine more closely the deepest mysteries of faith. Cf. Denys Turner, “How to be an Atheist,” New Blackfriars 83 (2002): 317–35. On the impossibility of rational evidence serving as a basis for the gratuitous gift of faith, see Romanus Cessario, O.P., Christian Faith and the Theological Life (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1996). For demonstration of God’s existence, see, e.g., Barry Miller, From Existence to God: A Contemporary Philosophical Argument (New York: Routledge, 1992); idem, A Most Unlikely God: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Nature of God (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996). 30 1, q.13, a.5. 31 On the manifold ways in which the “ﬁve ways” have been interpreted (in particular the controversy between M.-D. Chenu, O.P. and Henri de Lubac, S.J. against Chenu’s fellow Dominican R. Garrigou-Lagrange, in which the latter was charged with reading a Wolfﬁan rationalism into the texts of St. Thomas), see the interesting discussion in Fergus Kerr, O.P., After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002): 52–72. Beyond philosophical demonstration, the spiritual signiﬁcance of the ﬁve ways for demonstrating God’s existence – how learning these ways leads us spiritually deeper into the mystery of God – has been exposed by Leo Elders, “Justiﬁcation des ‘cinq voies,’ ” Revue Thomiste 61 (1961): 207–25; idem, The Philosophical Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990): 83ff.; Aidan Nichols, O.P., Discovering Aquinas: An Introduction to his Life, Work and Inﬂuence (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2002): 48–51; and Robert Barron, Thomas Aquinas: Spiritual Master (New York: Crossroad, 1996): 62–5. 32 On being and act, see, e.g., Michel Bastit, “L’acte propre de Dieu selon Thomas d’Aquin,” Revue Thomiste 95 (1995): 19–30. 33 Duns Scotus held that it is possible to form such a concept. See William A. Frank and Allan B. Wolter, Duns Scotus, Metaphysician (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1995): 116–18, 146–56.

yhwh and being

59

turely mode of signiﬁcation – that we name God, recognizing that God inﬁnitely exceeds our ﬁnite conceptions of these perfections (1, q.4).34 As A. N. Williams states with regard to Aquinas’s discussion of the divine attributes: “Thomas insists again and again that they are merely consequents of the two most important principles already established: necessary being and simplicity.”35 With this framework in mind, we can examine Summa Theologiae 1, q.2 more closely. It begins – reminding us of both the foolishness of unbelief and the ever-present possibility of unbelief – with the Psalmist’s fool: “the opposite of the proposition ‘God is’ can be mentally admitted: The fool said in his heart, There is no God (Psalm 53:1). Therefore, that God exists is not self-evident.”36 Unlike Anselm, then, Aquinas does not think that the fool is actually, in the strict sense, a fool; the fool’s statement is not, as Anselm thinks it to be, logically nonsensical.37 Rather, the fool, due ultimately to the effects of original sin, lacks the speculative habitus that would enable him to reason to God from contingent things. Yet the fool is a fool, and can only be understood as such. Aquinas agrees with St. Paul, whom he cites in article 2, sed contra: “The Apostle says: The invisible things of Him are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made (Romans 1:20).”38 As the biblical exegete Luke Timothy Johnson comments, noting the connection of Romans 1:20 with Wisdom 13:1: For Paul, “what can be known about God” is not grasped simply from “creation out there,” as in the existence of the cosmos. It is grasped with 34 See Hankey, God in Himself, 36–56, 73–4. Hankey emphasizes that Aquinas follows in the tradition of Proclus and Pseudo-Dionysius, both of whom start from sensible (material) things rather than from the human mind in their theological movement towards God. See also Weinandy, Does God Suffer?, 120f. 35 A. N. Williams, The Ground of Union: Deiﬁcation in Aquinas and Palamas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999): 48. See also David B. Burrell, C.S.C., “The attributes of God: (a) Simpleness,” in Philosophy of Religion, ed. Brian Davies, O.P. (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1998): 70–5. 36 1, q.2, a.1, sed contra. Cf. 1, q.2, a.1, ad 1: “To know that God exists in a general and confused way is implanted in us by nature, inasmuch as God is man’s beatitude. For man naturally desires happiness, and what is naturally desired by man must be naturally known to him. This, however, is not to know absolutely that God exists; just as to know that someone is approaching is not the same as to know that Peter is approaching, even though it is Peter who is approaching; for many there are who imagine that man’s perfect good which is happiness, consists in riches, and others in pleasures, and others in something else.” 37 For Aquinas’s critique of Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God, see 1, q.2, a.1, ad 2. Anselm’s Monologion and Proslogion model theology of the triune God as a contemplative ascent. 38 1, q.2, a.2, sed contra.

60

yhwh and being immediate intuition from the human experience of contingency and dependence. . . . For Paul, this reality is so obvious that its denial requires a “suppression of the truth” (1:18) that in the fashioning of every creature “his eternal power and deity has been clearly perceived” (1:20).39

Johnson focuses upon idolatry as a problem of the will, but it is equally clear that for Paul the existence of God is apparent when one moves intellectually from contingent creatures to an uncreated cause.40 For Paul, as for Aquinas, the contemplation that is “metaphysics” belongs to salvation history. If the existence of God is demonstrable, why then is it revealed to Israel? Because of the distortion caused by original sin, few if any human beings would succeed in developing and sustaining the speculative habitus necessary for demonstrating the existence of God, and for assenting to this demonstration with certitude.41 Given the situation of pervasive idolatry (the foolishness to which we all succumb apart from God’s grace), God chose to restore humankind by entering into covenant with Israel. He simultaneously reveals his powerful love and his transcendent oneness: in the context of redeeming Israel from Egyptian slavery, he gives them his names and his law. Aquinas is acutely aware of this salviﬁc context when, in 1, q.2, he introduces his effort to demonstrate God’s existence by stating, “It is said in the person of God: I am Who am (Exodus 3:14).”42 In theological context – the context of Aquinas’s sacra doctrina in the Summa Theologiae – the demonstration of God’s existence belongs to God’s continuing salviﬁc activity with his covenantal people.43 39

Luke Timothy Johnson, Reading Romans (New York: Crossroad, 1997): 32. Aquinas understands “cause” in a fourfold way. Following Aristotle, he includes within “causality” efﬁcient, formal, and ﬁnal cause (as well as material cause, not applicable in the case of God). Knowing the ultimate cause means more than knowing what accounts for the existence of contingent things; it also means knowing the purpose and goal of contingent things (ﬁnal cause). 41 Cf. 1, q.2, a.2, ad 1. 42 1, q.2, a.3, sed contra. For the place of the sed contra in Aquinas’s theological argumentation, see Leo Elders, “Structure et fonction de l’argument sed contra dans la Somme théologique de saint Thomas,” Divus Thomas 80 (1977): 245–60. Elders points out that the sed contra generally forms the foundation of the entire doctrinal elaboration that follows in the body of the article (see 260). This is especially signiﬁcant because the biblical quotations in Aquinas’s theology of God are often found in the sed contra, and often have been overlooked for that reason. 43 As Eugene F. Rogers, Jr., states, “In the context of a commentary on Romans, we are actually on a path that relates the history of Israel and the arguments of the philosophers. Thomas reads Paul so that the phrase ‘Iudaeo primo et Graeco’ renders the history of Israel 40

yhwh and being

61

For Aquinas, “being” is not separable theologically from the revelation of “YHWH,” since both names belong to the covenantal instruction given Moses. The name “I am who am” (Exodus 3:14) and “I am” (3:14) is taught by God to Moses along with his proper name YHWH (3:15). The two names complement each other, revealing God’s historical presence as inﬁnite, sheer, eternal Presence.44 They express the same God, understood metaphysically and historically. Both approaches are necessary for the weaning of the people from idolatry, which is the purpose of YHWH’s covenantal activity. The Hebrew translated here as “I am who am,” it should be noted, can be and has been translated in a range of ways. The majority of exegetes translate it as “I will be who I will be.” As the Franciscan theologian Thomas Weinandy has pointed out, however, “Those who criticize Philo and the Septuagint for rendering the name ‘Yahweh’ as ‘I Am Who Am’ or ‘He who/that Is’ fail to grasp that to be the fullness of being does not render God immutably ‘lifeless,’ but immutably ‘life-full.’ This is what Philo believes is revealed and that the Septuagint has rightly understood.”45 The translation “will be” seeks to convey this dynamic presence, but this is better conveyed by the Septuagint’s translation. In revealing his name “I am who am,” God seeks to ignite once again his covenantal relationship with the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who had been languishing in Egyptian slavery. The name “I am who am” both recalls God’s free covenantal relationship with and for Israel (as most modern commentators interpret it) and reveals a metaphysical truth about God’s essence or nature. As the Jewish exegete Michael Fishbane remarks: Before the name YHWH is revealed in v.15 to Moses as the name of the ancient God of the patriarchs, a midrashic play on this name is given (v.14) a controlling story, into which the arguments of the Gentiles must be grafted” (Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: Sacred Doctrine and the Natural Knowledge of God [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995]: 110). In light of the idolatry from which Israel was set apart, Fergus Kerr puts it another way: “Far from being an exercise in rationalistic apologetics, the purpose of arguing for God’s existence is to protect God’s transcendence” (After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism [Oxford: Blackwell, 2002]: 58). 44 From this it will be clear that no opposition between “metaphysics” and “history” is necessary. See Armand Maurer, “St. Thomas and Historicity,” in Being and Knowing: Studies in Thomas Aquinas and Later Medieval Philosophers (Toronto: Pontiﬁcal Institute of Medieval Studies, 1990): 95–116. As Maurer concludes, “Does not the crisis of metaphysics and historicity described so well by Fackenheim result from the transcendental turn taken by philosophy since Descartes?” (116). 45 Weinandy, Does God Suffer?, 77.

62

yhwh and being – a “play” of profound theological seriousness, since it serves to characterize this God through His name. God says to Moses that He is ‘ehyeh ‘asher ‘ehyeh, “I shall be that which I shall be,” and that he (Moses) should tell the people, “ ‘ehyeh (I shall be) has sent me to you” (v.14). No more, we seem to be cautioned, may be ascribed to God than that. He is the Unconditioned one who shall be as He shall be.46

Following a long tradition of Jewish and Christian interpretation, Aquinas focuses on the latter meaning as the dynamic foundation for the former: God reveals himself to be sheer inﬁnite existence, the one who is and who thus has the power to redeem Israel.47 God names himself simply by using the verb “to be” and thereby reveals the unfathomable mystery of his simplicity – the “Unconditioned one,” in Fishbane’s phrase. No creature could name himself by the name “to be.” Augustine describes this well in remarking of the name “I am who am” that “Scripture would surely not have said that, unless it were meant to be understood in some special way peculiar to God.”48 All creatures are a certain limited way of being, a being something, rather than sheer incomprehensible being. As Israel gradually recognized, this name requires a scathing critique of all idolatry. In 1, q.13, a.11, Aquinas examines Exodus 3:13–15 in more detail. He argues that the name “He who is,” more than any other name, “most properly” expresses the divinity. As Aquinas describes the giving of the name to Moses, “It is written that when Moses asked, If they should say to me, What is His name? what shall I say to them? the Lord answered him, Thus shalt thou say to them, HE WHO IS [Qui est] hath sent me to you (Exodus 3:13–14). Therefore this name HE WHO IS, most properly belongs to God.”49 Exploring this name metaphysically, Aquinas gives three reasons for this view that “He who is” expresses God (as one) in the 46

Michael Fishbane, Text and Texture: Close Readings of Selected Biblical Texts (New York: Schocken Books, 1979): 67; cf. for a study of intratextual development of biblical themes that, while concerned with the Hebrew Bible, is valuable for understanding how Exodus 3 functions in Jesus’ naming of himself, see Fishbane’s Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). 47 1, q.2, a.3. It is not for nothing that Aquinas’s treatise on God as one includes discussions of God’s justice, mercy, providence, predestination, book of life, power, and beatitude. Cf. Jean-Marc Laporte, “Beatitude in the Structure of Aquinas’ Summa: Is Ia 26 a Stray Question?” Toronto Journal of Theology 18 (2002): 143–52. 48 Saint Augustine, The Trinity, trans. Edmund Hill, O.P. (Brooklyn, NY: New City Press, 1991): Book 1, ch. 1, no. 2. 49 1, q.13, a.11, sed contra.

yhwh and being

63

highest way. First, the name “He who is” signiﬁes being and nothing more.50 It conveys God’s simplicity. Second, citing John Damascene, Aquinas notes that “He who is” does not determine any particular mode of being. Since we cannot know what God is, but only that God is, names that are broader or less determined are more expressive of the reality of God than are more determinative names. Being is a broader name than good, because only something that is, is good. Third, citing Augustine, Aquinas notes that the name “He who is” signiﬁes God’s sheer presence, his eternally present existence that encompasses past, present, and future time in its sheer “to be.” Precisely as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, God is active intimately without being limited by temporality. In all three ways, the name “He who is” (or “I am” or “I will be”) ensures both God’s transcendence and his active immanence. By naming himself in these ways – ﬁrst by means of the verb “to be,” second the by the name “YHWH,” and third as “the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob,” the God of Israel associates his historical salviﬁc activity with his metaphysical reality. In the Gospel of John, Jesus identiﬁes himself as this creating and redeeming God: “Before Abraham was, I am” (8:58).51 When such biblical texts prompt metaphysical questioning in the tradition of Greek philosophy, is 50

Aidan Nichols, O.P. puts it this way: “Although a biblical scholarship more attuned to the nuances of the Hebrew original would want to ﬁnd more in the revelation of the divine name than simply metaphysics, it is hard to deny that the biblical author is making some kind of statement about the God of the Fathers as a unique referent of the language of being. To this extent – a considerable extent! – the ancient and medieval exegesis of what is on any showing a key text of the biblical revelation is abundantly justiﬁed” (Discovering Aquinas [London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2002]: 43). 51 See Marianne Meye Thompson, The God of the Gospel of John (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001): 87–92. Thompson argues: the link between Jesus’ statement and the divine OT “I am” is through the middle term, life. Jesus claims to share in God’s kind of existence, eternal existence, existence that does not “come into being” but that simply “is” (8:35; 1:1,2). This life he has from the living Father (6:57; 5:26; 10:18). In thus using the absolute “I am,” Jesus does not simply appropriate to himself a “name” for God, but he does use language that is particularly redolent of the passage in Exodus 3:14 when he utters the “I am” as the climax to his discourse about his authority to bestow life. Furthermore, the “I am” of the Gospel may be even more allusive of the similar phrases in Isaiah, where the emphasis falls both on God’s eternity and on God’s unique identity as creator of all and sovereign over all. Both the biblical and later Jewish interpretative traditions make clear that the interpretation of God’s name, revealed in the incident of the burning bush, was inextricably linked to God’s life-giving power, in terms of past and future creation of life. (91)

64

yhwh and being

the priority of the revelation of the living God to Moses thereby imperiled? One might ask what such metaphysical reﬂection upon YHWH’s revelation of his name “I am who am” intends to achieve. Does it enable the theologian to draw closer to the living God active in history? Acknowledging a debt to the work of Robert Sokolowski, Thomas Weinandy ﬁnds – because of the Christian doctrine of creation – a unity of metaphysical and historical naming of God in Christian, as opposed to classical Greek, thought: Within Greek thought these attributes [e.g., imperishability, perfection, goodness, power] constitute God as one who is removed from, even if related to, all else that is. They constitute him as transcendent in the sense of not only making him other than the cosmic order, but also as often being incapable of actively relating to the cosmic order. Within the Judeo/Christian tradition these attributes do constitute God as wholly other than all else, but they equally constitute him as Creator and so immediately related to all else that is.52

With many modern commentators, Soulen assumes that the ontological interpretation belongs to the unwarranted philosophical displacement of For a more detailed treatment, arguing that the “I am” statements in John imply ontological unity with the divine Father, see David Mark Ball, “I Am” in John’s Gospel: Literary Function, Background, and Theological Implications (Shefﬁeld: Shefﬁeld Academic Press, 1996). Christopher Seitz views John 8:58 as “a clear reference to the ‘ehyeh ‘aser ‘ehyeh of Exodus 3:15” (Seitz, Word without End, 257). 52 Weinandy, Does God Suffer?, 72; see also Weinandy’s survey of the Old Testament’s portrait of God, 41–63. Weinandy goes on to connect the “I am” that names the one divine Act with the Persons as verbs, relational modes of pure Act. While “essence” and “Person” are the same in God, Gilles Emery is right to insist upon the practice of “redoublement” in our contemplation of the triune God, so as to avoid conceptual conﬂation of divine unity and Trinity. Carl Sträter, followed by Timothy Smith, is thus mistaken in “deﬁning ‘divine essence’ as the total divine reality” (Timothy Smith, Thomas Aquinas’ Trinitarian Theology, [Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2003], 25). Smith holds, “In order to insure that the doctrine of the Trinity is integral to the entire Summa, the subject of the early questions must be properly clariﬁed to include the totality of God, encompassing what is distinct as well as what is common and one. It is the abstracted whole of the Godhead that is seen as a unity and exists, is simple, is perfect, is good, inﬁnite, immutable, eternal, and one” (47). But as Emery remarks, “One need not have recourse to the quite embarrassing concept of ‘total essence,’ as C. Sträter has done, in order to explicate the ﬁrst section of the treatise on God. Since the relations are really identical to the essence, the essence is not constituted by the relations: this ‘totality’ (of our concepts), if one wishes to speak thus, would only be adequately expressed by the complex redoublement of our discourse joining the aspect of the divine substance and that of the relative property, this relative property being identical to the divine substance in the reality of God” (Emery, “Essentialism or Personalism in the Treatise on God in St. Thomas Aquinas?” The Thomist 64 [2000]: 534, chapter 5 of his Trinity in Aquinas [Ypsilanti, MI: Sapientia Press, 2003]).

yhwh and being

65

YHWH. If Weinandy is right, however, the ontological or metaphysical interpretation underscores the identity of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob precisely as the creating and redeeming God. It does not seem a stretch to suppose that at the same time as he reveals his personal name YHWH, God reveals his metaphysical reality, in all its conceptual incomprehensibility. The name “I am who am,” a name that is necessarily metaphysical, does not on Aquinas’s interpretation trap Israel’s God within the limitations of Aristotle’s (idolatrous) prime mover. Rather, the name belongs to the history of Israel’s and the Church’s striving against idolatrous conceptions of the divine being, a history that ﬂows through the inspired contemplative practices of the prophets. As Christopher Seitz says in summarizing prayer in the Old Testament: Prayer, it would seem, belongs to the realm of truth, from the standpoint of human beings within the covenant, and concerns God’s holy self, from the standpoint of the divine. Certain individuals are better at staying with the truth than others. This truth has a twofold character: (1) truth about God’s character and self and (2) truth about the situation of judgment and God’s absence or withdrawal from the covenant relationship for a season.53

The prophets are those whose (contemplative) prayer corresponds to the truth. Like Isaiah, they are those who have sapientially “seen” the glory of God and whose lips have been “touched” by the searing (liturgical) presence of his mercy (Isaiah 6). Connecting the prayer of the prophets to the prayer of the prophesied “servant” who will bear all sins, Seitz states that “the servant is a man of prayer. . . . His prayer is but the utterance of his life itself, which is given up in obedience – like Moses before him.”54 For Seitz, then, the prophets’ contemplation cannot be separated from the transformative disclosure of the true divine names: “To speak about prayer in the Old Testament, therefore, is to speak of God’s intimate disclosure and the way that disclosure penetrates to the heart of prayer as presented in the New Testament.”55 It follows that were one to imagine the reception of the name “I am who I am” or “I am who am” simply as a reception of a fact, a datum about God, one would miss how Scripture contains within itself “metaphysics” as the contemplative demand for transformative truth. Aquinas recognizes Moses as a supreme contemplative. For Aquinas, Moses is the 53

Christopher R. Seitz, Figured Out: Typology and Providence in Christian Scripture (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001): 171. 54 Ibid., 174. 55 Ibid., 175.

66

yhwh and being

greatest prophet of Israel because he is above all a contemplative of God’s essence; as a contemplative, he knows God sufﬁciently to lead Israel away from the idolatry of the Egyptians, spiritual (and physical) slavery.56 As Deuteronomy states, “And there has not arisen a prophet since in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face” (34:10).57 Moses’s face shines with the glory of the Lord, whom he meets on Mount Sinai and in the Tent of Meeting (see Exodus 33:11, 34:1–24, 40:34–6; Numbers 12:8).58 Such face-to-face knowledge begins with the revelation of the name “I am who am.” As the Torah makes clear, both Moses’ contemplative life and his corresponding active life revolve around his mission to separate Israel from the idolatry of the nations. This intimate connection of his divinely ordained mission with the (revealed) truth about God suggests, as Aquinas holds, that Moses, in comparison with the patriarchs, “was more fully instructed in the simplicity of the Divine essence.” The importance of Moses’ receiving the name “I am who am” at the very moment of his receiving his active mission can hardly be overemphasized.59 Agreeing with traditional Jewish understanding of the relationship of Moses to the later prophets, Aquinas states that “all the other revelations to the prophets were founded” upon this fundamental revelation to Moses.60 He argues that the Old Testament, which for him is entirely a collection of prophetic books,61 centers upon the Mosaic revelation of God’s simplicity. Thus, the Mosaic Law has its own integrity “by withdrawing men from idolatrous worship” and including “them in the worship of one God, by Whom the human race was to be saved through Christ.”62 The written law reveals the necessity of apprehending God’s simple being in order to attain to the end – 56

2–2, q.174, a.4; cf. a.6. Norman Podhoretz remarks, “Title or no title, Moses is clearly the prophet. . . . [M]ost important of all, it is Moses who meets with God on Sinai and brings back the Ten Commandments. The ﬁrst of these ratiﬁes in concrete language Abraham’s more abstract conception of the war that has been declared against idolatry” (Podhoretz, The Prophets [New York: The Free Press, 2002], 25–6). 58 Janet Martin Soskice argues that the danger of falling into metaphysical idolatry can be avoided once the ability to speak about God is seen as “the gift of God’s self-disclosure in history (both Israel’s and our own)” that is received in prayer (Soskice, “The Gift of the Name: Moses and the Burning Bush,” Gregorianum 79 [1998]: 231–46, at 246). 59 2–2, q.174, a.6. 60 Ibid. Moses is the great teacher of God’s oneness, while Christ Jesus reveals the mystery of the Trinity. 61 For discussion of this point, see Nichols, Discovering Aquinas, 25. 62 1–2, q.98, a.2. 57

yhwh and being

67

God himself – that God has ordained for rational creatures. Knowing God as sheer inﬁnite “being” does not involve capturing God in a concept; on the contrary, a proper apprehension of God as “I am who am” destroys all conceptual idolatries that seek to place God within a ﬁnite creaturely category.63 In coming to know God as “YHWH” under the rubric of oneness, the Israelites do not come to know an abstraction superseded by the revelation of the Trinity. Within his treatise on God’s essence, Aquinas discusses the name “YHWH” in 1, q.13, a.9. This discussion represents a development in Aquinas’s work, brought about by his reading of Moses Maimonides. As Armand Maurer has noted, Aquinas discusses the name YHWH only in the Summa Theologiae, his most mature work.64 Aquinas identiﬁes the signiﬁcance of the name YHWH as follows: “if any name were given to signify God not as to His nature but as to His suppositum, accordingly as He is considered as this something, that name would be absolutely incommunicable; as for instance, perhaps the Tetragrammaton among the Hebrews.”65 He holds that, as regards its ability to signify the incommunicable “substance” of the one God, “YHWH” is the most proper name for God, more proper than “God” or “He who is.”66 Through Moses, God draws the Israelites away from idolatry by giving them personal knowledge of himself. Thus “I am who am” is not an abstract name, but rather describes YHWH as known personally by Israel. 63

Jean-Luc Marion acquits Aquinas of falling into “onto-theology,” in which “being” is univocal and thus idolatrous, in his well-known retraction, “Saint Thomas d’Aquin et l’onto-théo-logie,” Revue Thomiste 95 (1995): 31–66. See also Michel Nodé-Langlois, “Ontologie et théologie,” Revue Thomiste 102 (2002): 179–201; Géry Prouvost, “La question des noms divins: Saint Thomas entre apophatisme et ontothéologie,” Revue Thomiste 97 (1997): 485–511. Provoust provides a systematic overview of the topic, sketches the views of the Greek Fathers, and then surveys various positions taken within the Thomistic tradition. 64 Armand Maurer, C.S.B., “St. Thomas on the Sacred Name ‘Tetragrammaton’,” Mediaeval Studies 34 (1972): 275–86, at 275–8. Maurer states, “The Summa Theologiae is the only work of St. Thomas, to my knowledge, that recognizes a divine name that is in a sense more suitable than ‘He who is’ because it expresses the ineffable and incommunicable divine substance. This is ‘Tetragrammaton’, the sacred name revealed by God to Moses in Exodus. The Summa does not deny anything said in the earlier writings about the appropriateness of the name ‘He who is’, but it adds a signiﬁcant item to the doctrine of the divine names, while developing this doctrine in a remarkable way” (278). Maurer’s essay is helpful also in describing the medieval signiﬁcation theory in the context of which Aquinas treats not only the Tetragrammaton, but also “He who is” and “God.” 65 1, q.13, a.9. 66 1, q.13, a.11, ad 1.

68

yhwh and being

The name conveys and guarantees YHWH’s promise to be personally (covenantally) present, as sheer Presence, not only in the past and present, but also in the future. Should Christians, however, who know that the one God subsists in three Persons, contemplate the one God known personally by Israel as YHWH? As Bruce Marshall points out in his own response to Soulen, if Christians worship Israel’s God, then Israel’s God is in fact better named as “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”67 Does this mean that Israel’s God (“YHWH”) is superseded? Aquinas asks the seemingly odd question of whether the divine nature, abstracted by our mental operation from the Persons, could assume a human nature, just as the Person of the Son did.68 In answer, he ﬁrst points out that this kind of abstraction, if we are seeking to know God as he is, is impossible, since “it is impossible for the intellect to circumscribe something in God and leave the rest . . .”69. God’s simplicity (the reality that he is pure Act, not a composite) makes God beyond the reach of our mode of knowing, which relies on abstracting one aspect from another and thus is suited to knowing composite things. But once the weakness of our intellect (its inability to know God as he is, prior to the beatiﬁc vision) is recognized, one can suitably abstract the Persons from the divine nature, as Aquinas does in his De Deo, in order to contemplate what is one in God. 67

Bruce Marshall, “Do Christians Worship the God of Israel?,” in Knowing the Triune God: The Work of the Spirit in the Practices of the Church, ed. James J. Buckley and David S. Yeago (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001): 231–64. Marshall poses the question of supersessionism and explores how the Christian tradition has understood the God of the Old Testament. He notes that many Fathers of the Church, as well as more recent ﬁgures, have equated the God of the Old Testament with a particular Person of the Trinity, especially the Word (Son) or the Father (cf. Rahner). Of the latter option, Marshall notes: The deeper problem, though, is that equating the God of Israel with the Trinitarian Father apparently makes idolaters of Christians. Israel’s God, after all, claims exclusive rights to human worship; in Isaiah’s language, he gives not his glory to another (cf. Isaiah 42:8). If this God is simply identical with the Father, then the Son and the Spirit are not the God of Israel – not the being referred to by (or whose presence is embodied in the utterance of) the Tetragrammaton. Were that the case, then in worshipping them – in giving them glory along with the Father – Christians would worship that which is not the God of Israel, and thus give their hearts to false gods. (250). 68

The signiﬁcance of this text has been pointed out by Gilles Emery, O.P., “Essentialism or Personalism,” 557–9. Bruce Marshall also remarks upon this text from Thomas (“Do Christians Worship the God of Israel?,” 243, fn. 17). 69 3, q.3, a.3.

yhwh and being

69

This abstraction, justiﬁed under the rubric of “redoublement” or the necessity of studying the triune God from two irreducible perspectives,70 enables the theologian both to avoid positing a fourth in God and to avoid depriving the divine essence (what is common in God) of “personal” reality. Aquinas explains: Because in God what is, and whereby it is, are one, if any one of the things which are attributed to God in the abstract is considered in itself, abstracted from all else, it will still be something subsisting, and consequently a Person, since it is an intellectual nature. Hence just as we now say three Persons, on account of holding three personal properties, so likewise if we mentally exclude the personal properties there will still remain in our thought the Divine Nature as subsisting and as a Person.71

The divine nature thus understood – it is crucial to see that a fourth Person is not posed here, since God is under consideration as one – could assume a human nature to its subsistence. The corollary that Aquinas draws is the point towards which we have been moving. If we understand the divine nature “as subsisting and as a Person,” Aquinas states, we are thinking of God in the way that Jewish believers do.72 This logical abstraction – knowing God as Jewish believers do, without thereby knowing God in an “a-Trinitarian” way, since the Trinity is the one God – is undertaken by Aquinas in his treatise on the divine essence.73 Aquinas explicitly 70

On “redoublement” in Trinitarian theology, see Emery, “Essentialism or Personalism,” 534. 71 3, q.3, a.3, ad 1. 72 3, q.3, a.3, ad 2. 73 As Bruce Marshall recognizes, this kind of solution is crucial for avoiding supersessionism. Marshall states: Granted that the descriptions “is the God of Israel” and “is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit” actually succeed in identifying the same being, and granted that recourse to the ﬁrst as well as the second is necessary to identify the one God, it may seem that at least on this score, supersessionism has safely been put to rest. But obviously it has not. Granting these two claims entails that Christians cannot identify the one God without recognizing that he is Israel’s Lord, but it also entails that Jews cannot identify the one God at all. If both of these descriptions are necessary to identify the one God, then of course neither of them is, by itself, sufﬁcient. This means that the God of Israel cannot actually be identiﬁed without reference to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. (“Do Christians Worship the God of Israel?,” 260). Rejecting this view, Marshall notes, “It would be possible for Trinitarian theology to avoid these unwanted supersessionist outcomes by granting that both descriptions are not in fact

70

yhwh and being

recognizes his discussion of the divine essence as not a discussion of an abstract God, but of a personal, living God – the one God who is the Trinity. Karl Rahner, however, raises a crucial question at this point: is not the God of Israel already known as Father? If so, would it not be a mistake to investigate the God of Israel, YHWH, by means of metaphysical exploration of the name “I am who am,” rather than direct engagement with the name “Father”? Why contemplate YHWH as one (sheer “to be”) rather than immediately contemplating God as Father? For Rahner, as we have seen, the Thomistic treatise on the divine essence distorts Trinitarian theology by undertaking a metaphysical analysis of God outside of the context of Scripture, of salvation history: “For should one make use of salvation history, it would soon become apparent that one speaks always of him whom Scripture and Jesus himself calls the Father, Jesus’ Father, who sends the Son and who gives himself to us in the Spirit, in his Spirit.”74 Drawing upon his earlier article “Theos in the New Testament,” Rahner goes on to make this point even more strongly. He states, “The God of the old covenant – oJ Qeo´z, as such – is already known and confessed in the experience of salvation and revelation. About this God, who is already known, who has already assumed a relation to man, we ﬁnd out, through the event of the New Testament, that he sends us his Son and the Spirit of his Son.”75 The God experienced by Israel in Old

necessary to identify God. In order to pick the one God out, it sufﬁces to describe him as the God of Israel. For this purpose one need not, in fact, describe him as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit” (262). This is exactly Aquinas’s approach. Like Marshall, Aquinas makes clear that this does not reduce the importance of the revelation of God’s Trinitarian name. In Marshall’s words, “To say that the Jewish people may identify the one true God without referring to the persons of the Trinity is not, therefore, to suggest that God might not be the Trinity, or that being the Trinity is somehow not as basic to God’s identity as being the one God” (263). 74 Rahner, The Trinity, trans. Joseph Donceel (New York: Crossroad, 1998 [1970]), 18. 75 Ibid., 59. C. Kavin Rowe has argued against this view in “Biblical Pressure and Trinitarian Hermeneutics,” Pro Ecclesia 11 (2002): 295–312: Among both Protestant and Roman Catholic exegetes and systematic theologians there is a common (and in many ways understandable) assumption that YHWH, the God of the Old Testament, is the Father only. This assumption, however, will not stand under exegetical scrutiny. The New Testament texts never identify the Father as the Son or vice-versa, but they do give the divine name kyrios (=YHWH) to both the Father and the Son. The word kyrios (and less frequently theos) and the way in which it is used in the New Testament in Old Testament citations, hymns of worship, prayers, soteriological statements, etc. exerts a unitive pressure in two directions with

yhwh and being

71

Testament times is Father because he is experienced as “the concrete God, and him as necessarily, simply, and absolutely unoriginate.”76 Admittedly, this God is not named (or known as) Father in the fullest sense until the revelation of the Son, but nonetheless the God revealed to Israel is the Person of the Father.77 Aquinas agrees that the God revealed to Israel can be called Father, but differs from Rahner by distinguishing senses of the word “Father.” He states that “in the Old Testament the Father was known under the aspect of the God Almighty. . . . although they knew him as God Almighty, they did not know him as the Father of a consubstantial Son.”78 In other words, Israel, through the revelation given to Moses from which ﬂowed all other prophetic revelations, knew God’s omnipotence as belonging to his identity as YHWH, “I am who am.” Israel knew attributes that pertain equally to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Israelites did not know, however, the properties that distinguish the Persons. Had Israel known that the Father was “uncaused,” not merely in the sense that God is uncaused but in relation to the intra-divine “causation” that distinguishes the Persons, then Israel would have known the Trinity. For Aquinas, Israel – as a whole – can be said to have known God the Trinity in his common nature as “I am” (and in this sense to know the unoriginate God), but cannot be said to know the Trinity in its intra-divine relations of origin (i.e., in the sense of “unoriginate” that pertains uniquely to the Father). Soulen’s concerns, therefore, are addressed by Aquinas. Rather than bypassing God’s eternal identity as YHWH, Aquinas integrates his metaphysical reﬂection on the name “I am who am” into a complex account of YHWH, Moses, the Mosaic Law, and the relationship of Christians to the contemplative life enjoyed by Moses and sustained, in its critique of respect to its referent, toward the Father and toward Jesus. This pressure moves us to the conclusion that YHWH is not the Father alone. There is a differentiation into Father and Son within the unity of the one Lord (kyrios heis in Deuteronomy 6:4). (303). 76

Rahner, The Trinity, 59. Ibid., 60. Rahner adds, “But this changes nothing of the fact that, when and insofar as the Trinity has not yet been revealed, the concrete God, who is necessarily conceived as unoriginate, and with whom the history of pre-Trinitarian revelation is concerned, is the ‘Father’ ” (60). 78 St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Saint John, part 2, ch. 8, lect. 2, no. 1161 (trans. James A. Weisheipl and Fabian R. Larcher [Petersham, MA: St. Bede’s Publications, 1999], 24–5). 77

72

yhwh and being

idolatry, by the Mosaic Law.79 Through Moses and Israel, God teaches humankind about the being and simplicity of God. For Aquinas, the divine name given to Moses fully displays the divine unity: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord” (Deuteronomy 6:4).80 Understood in this way, contemplative knowledge of God involves a double movement.81 This movement begins with contemplating YHWH, God known as one and as sheer inﬁnite being, who is not a philosophical abstraction but rather the personal God. In a second movement, this God is contemplated in his threeness. As Gilles Emery has shown, what intrinsically unites these two movements in Trinitarian theology is the concept of “relation,” which contains two aspects, relation in (esse) and relation to (ratio). The contemplation of YHWH, God known as one, engages “relation” in the ﬁrst sense. Emery points out: For Aquinas, there is not on one side the unique essence, and on the other side the relation. Everything converges in the relation, which comprises the element of the personal distinction (ratio) and the element of the divine hypostatic subsistence (esse). One sees very well here that, contrary to what became the common teaching of the Thomist school, Thomas Aquinas does not carry out a division between a treatise “De Deo uno” and “De Deo trino”. Instead he brings together in the analysis of the relation the aspect of the common essence of the three persons (subsistence of the divine esse) and the aspect of the personal distinction (relation of origin). These two aspects constitute together the theological notion of the divine person.82 79 Armand Maurer, C.S.B. has identiﬁed Aquinas’s sources for his knowledge of the Tetragrammaton: St. Jerome, the Venerable Bede, and above all Maimonides. See Maurer, “St. Thomas on the Sacred Name ‘Tetragrammaton’,” 282–4. 80 1, q.11, a.3; see also a.4. God’s oneness depends upon his simplicity as sheer “to be.” 81 Cf. the corpus of Gilles Emery, beginning with his essay “Le Père et l’oeuvre trinitaire de création selon le Commentaire des Sentences de S. Thomas d’Aquin,” in Ordo Sapientiae et Amoris, ed. C.-J. Pinto de Oliveira (Fribourg: Editions Universitaires, 1993): 85–117. See also Ghislain Lafont, O.S.B., Peut-on connaître Dieu en Jésus-Christ? (Paris: Cerf, 1969). 82 Gilles Emery, O.P., “Trinité et unité de Dieu dans la scolastique XIIe–XIVe siècle,” in Le Christianisme est-il un monothéisme?, eds Gilles Emery and Pierre Gisel (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 2001): 217, chapter 1 of his Trinity in Aquinas. Emery’s analysis of “relation” offers a better solution than does Dumitru Staniloae’s defense of the doctrine of the Trinity as a philosophical breakthrough. Staniloae writes:

There was a time when the coincidence of opposites was considered incompatible with reason. Wherever a synthesis of such a kind was encountered – and the whole of reality is like this – reason would break it up into irreconcilable and contradictory notions, setting up some elements over against others or trying to melt them

yhwh and being

73

Because of this fundamental integration, Christians call upon God by the name Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, rather than by the name YHWH. Yet, as Christopher Seitz notes, the “Christian confession that the name of God has been given to Jesus,” and that God is now named in and through Jesus as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, “means not that the attributes of God as rendered by the literal sense of the Old Testament have become lost in some transfer. Holiness, righteousness, justice, mercy, compassion, and jealousy, as these describe YHWH in the Old Testament, remain true of God in his essence.”83 When the treatise on the Trinity integrates the truths arrived at by contemplation of YHWH the “I am who am,” the balance between the covenants is maintained. The Old Testament is fulﬁlled, but not superseded, by the New. YHWH, understood in light of the Trinitarian name revealed by Jesus Christ, names the God personally revealed to Israel through Moses – the God who in his identity and attributes, his being, simplicity, and Presence, fuels Christian contemplation.84 As Augustine puts it:

all down by force into one new element. . . . It is a fact that plurality maintains unity and unity maintains plurality, and that the decline of either of them means the weakness or disappearance of the life or existence of any individual entity. This conception of the mode of being of reality is recognized today as superior to former ideas of what was rational, while under the pressure of reality the idea of what is rational has itself become complex and antinomic. Assertions formerly considered irrational because of their apparently contradictory character are now recognized as indications of a natural stage towards which reason must strive, for the understanding of this stage constitutes the natural destiny of reason, and the stage is itself an image of the supernatural character of that perfect unity of what is distinct within the Holy Trinity. (Staniloae, The Experience of God, 250). 83

Seitz, Figured Out: Typology and Providence in Christian Scripture, 144. In this chapter, entitled “Handing Over the Name: Christian Reﬂection on the Divine Name YHWH,” Seitz is likewise responding to Soulen’s article, although he mentions the article only in a footnote. (Seitz also responds to Soulen in “Our Help Is in the Name of the Lord, the Maker of Heaven and Earth: Scripture and Creed in Ecumenical Trust,” in Nicene Christianity: The Future for a New Ecumenism, ed. C. Seitz [Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2001]: 19–34.) 84 Similarly, C. Kavin Rowe (himself attentive to Soulen’s article) points to “kyrios” as a name indicative, in both Testaments, of the divine unity: “Read canonically, then, the full unity of God as expressed through his name kyrios is that of Father, Son, and Spirit: the – (one Lord) of Deuteronomy 6:4 is in the New Testament differentiated into kyrios pater (Father), kyrios iesous (Son), and kyrios pneuma (Spirit). Thus the oneness and unity is not impaired but is dynamically upheld through the use of his name kyrios for the Father, Son, and Spirit, the one Lord God” (Rowe, “Biblical Pressure and Trinitarian Hermeneutics,” 304).

74

yhwh and being This contemplation is promised us as the end of all activities and the eternal perfection of all joys. For we are God’s sons, and it has not yet been manifested what we shall be; we know that when he is manifested we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is (1 John 3:2). What we shall contemplate as we live forever is what he told his servant Moses: I am who I am. And so you shall say to the children of Israel, He who is sent me to you (Exodus 3:14).85

Aquinas avoids in his treatment of God’s essence the form of supersessionism that Soulen ascribes to the classical account. Another question, however, might now come to the fore: is YHWH, as narrated in the Old Testament, truly the “I am who am,” or does YHWH’s character in the narrative of the Old Testament actually develop in ways that do not square with YHWH’s claim to be the inﬁnite fullness of being (the only one who can say that his identity or nature is existence)? This question can be answered only on the basis of an account of how to interpret the Old Testament’s characterizations of YHWH, and it may be here that Soulen’s larger concerns would emerge. This task – examining how Aquinas’s treatise draws upon various Old Testament characterizations of YHWH – is that of the next chapter.

85

Saint Augustine, The Trinity, trans. Edmund Hill, O.P. (Brooklyn, NY: New City Press, 1991): Book 1, ch. 3, no. 17 (77).

Chapter Three

SCRIPTURE AND METAPHYSICS IN THE THEOLOGY OF GOD’S KNOWLEDGE AND WILL

As Thomas Weinandy has shown in detail, it seems to many that whereas the revealed God of the Bible cares compassionately and responsively (covenantally) for creatures, the God of metaphysics, idolatrously inclosed in a conceptual box of human deductions, remains distant. This chapter will seek to address this concern as regards God’s knowledge and will. Speciﬁcally, the chapter will compare Aquinas’s theology of God’s knowledge and will – which ﬂows from his analysis of God’s being, simplicity, and perfection that we examined in the previous chapter1 – to that of a Jewish biblical exegete and theologian, Jon D. Levenson. Levenson both describes well the exegetical problems that face metaphysical accounts of God in his unity and argues powerfully that the “God of metaphysics” cannot be the God of the covenants. I will focus on Levenson’s work rather than drawing in other biblical exegetes, partly for reasons of space but also because the great majority of biblical exegetes share Levenson’s rejection of Aristotelian metaphysics, if not all of his particular exegetical positions. By comparing Levenson and Aquinas on the attributes of God in his unity, I hope to expose the way that Aquinas’s metaphysical account of God’s unity defends God’s radical presence (or immanence) far better than can a nonmetaphysical account, and to show how Aquinas’s meta1

The present chapter thus completes our analysis of Summa Theologiae 1, qq.1–26.

76

god’s knowledge and will

physical analysis, which serves his biblical exegesis, strengthens his speculative theology. Levenson’s Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence attempts to sever the God of Israel from metaphysical interpretations. He identiﬁes three key errors that have distorted, and continue to distort, Jewish and Christian theological depiction of Israel’s God: “the residue of the static Aristotelian conception of deity as perfect, unchanging being; the uncritical tendency to afﬁrm the constancy of divine action; and the conversion of biblical creation theology into an afﬁrmation of the goodness of whatever is.”2 The primary result of these errors, Levenson thinks, is “to trivialize creation by denying the creator a worthy opponent.”3 As exegetically mistaken, these errors will not hold when confronted with evidence of God’s changing, inconstant will; God’s uncertain knowledge; and God’s need to master (with the liturgical assistance of Israel) the evil impulses in the world and in himself in order to win the total mastery over creation that Israel knows, in faith, that he will win. Levenson argues not only from the biblical texts themselves, but also on the basis of the rabbinical tradition and his own evident acquaintance with (largely Christian) process theology. I will examine Levenson’s critique and his constructive account of the God of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament in some detail. Aided by Levenson’s critiques, I will then address Aquinas’s theology of the knowledge and will that belong to God in his unity.

2

Jon D. Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), xxv. Levenson added this preface to the 1994 edition, responding to his critics and elaborating his viewpoint. 3 Ibid. Following Robert Sokolowski, Guy Mansini, O. S. B. has argued that until God is revealed as transcendent, evil appears to be inevitable and part of the natural order: It is this sense of things, the natural inevitability of evil, that constitutes the background against which to appreciate the word that Christianity speaks about evil. This Christian word trumps the notes of inevitability and ﬁnality that evil carries as naturally presented to us. Nature is no framework that includes God, and so neither can evil be the ineluctable thing it seemed to be as a function of nature, which is a principle whereby things happen not always “always” but sometimes only “for the most part” – in other words, fallibly. Rather, evil acquires both a contingency and a nonﬁnality it does not possess as a natural phenomenon. (Guy Mansini, O. S. B., “Error, Guilt, and the Knowledge of God: Questions About Robert Sokolowski’s ‘Christian Distinction’,” Logos 5 [2002]: 117). On this view, “creation” has its fullest meaning when God’s transcendence is revealed.

god’s knowledge and will

1

77

Jon D. Levenson on the God of Israel

As evidence of God’s changing, inconstant will, Levenson draws attention to a passage from the prophet (deutero-)Isaiah. This portion of Isaiah’s prophecy is generally seen as highly sophisticated in its portrait of God’s unity, omniscience, and omnipotence. Levenson quotes Isaiah 54:7–8: “For a little while I forsook you, but with vast love I will bring you back. In slight anger, for a moment I hid My face from you; but with kindness everlasting I will take you back in love – said the Lord your Redeemer.”4 What does it mean for God, in anger, to forsake Israel by hiding his face from Israel for a moment? Noting that this prophecy (as scholars now think) was written during the exilic period, Levenson interprets the prophecy in light of the dissonance caused by the Babylonian Exile: “at the moment, YHWH is failing to exercise his magisterial powers over the world, so that those who revere him suffer the taunts and jeers of those who do not.”5 For some reason, YHWH does not will to save his people yet. He wills instead to allow chaos to reign. Reading further in Isaiah 54 (v. 9–10), Levenson concludes that YHWH has chosen not to act because he wishes to punish the people for their sins. In Levenson’s view, this suggests that YHWH’s will contains two sides: a punishing side that allows chaos to come close to destroying his people, and a “benevolent, world-ordering side.”6 The two sides are in conﬂict within the divine will, but Israel, in covenantal faith, knows that the benevolent side will win. Interpreting Isaiah 54, Levenson states, “The side of God that unleashes them [the waters of chaos], however, is checked by the side of him that loves and forgives. This latter, friendlier dimension of the divine personality is here articulated as God’s covenantal oath to Noah, his sacred and inviolable pledge to maintain the created order.”7 Levenson suggests that these two dimensions of the divine will, and their conﬂict, are on display wherever the biblical authors meditated upon the divergence between the God they knew in covenantal faith, and the realism of their actual historical experience of chaos, sin, and suffering. Commenting upon Psalm 89, Levenson notes, “As in Psalm 74 and Isaiah 51, so here we ﬁnd a jarring juxtaposition of the hymnic afﬁrmation of God’s world-ordering power and endless faithfulness and the grim reality 4 5 6 7

Ibid., 21. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 21–2.

78

god’s knowledge and will

of historical experience.”8 Levenson emphasizes that both aspects of YHWH’s personality are allowed full range by the biblical authors: “again here the remarkable point is that the author or redactor refuses to choose between faith and realism or to beat one into the mold of the other. Indeed, as v. 50 shows, the speaking voice of the psalm dares to reproach God for the incongruity of the two.”9 This allowance for “incongruity” or inconstancy in God is in marked contrast to what Levenson has earlier described as the uncritical “Aristotelian” effort to smooth over incongruities. If history is evidence of YHWH’s will, then the covenants and crises of history indicate a conﬂict within the divine will itself. Levenson notes, however, that this movement towards asserting an unchanging divine will is not only an Aristotelian one: it is found within the Bible itself, as well as in the rabbinic tradition. As an intra-biblical example, Levenson cites 1 Chronicles 21:1, which parallels 2 Samuel 24:1. 2 Samuel records that “the anger of Lord again ﬂared up against Israel; and He incited David against them”; whereas the Chronicler, in his later version of the same event, states rather that “Satan arose against Israel and incited David to number Israel.” The Chronicler is unable to allow for the biblical testimony to a real division within the divine will. Levenson remarks, “A more reﬁned and sophisticated sensibility has proven less able to tolerate the idea that God can be a cause of evil.”10 For Levenson, such apparent reﬁnements only transpose the difﬁculty, because they hypostasize and divinize the force of anti-God (be it named Satan or Amalek). God’s agency is matched and opposed, for a time, by an anti-God; and this force thus takes on divine status at least as regards agency. In other words, the evil side within God has become hypostasized (in a Manichean way) as an evil force outside of and opposed to God. Thus, Levenson notes, “In Rabbinic thought Amalek is the hypostasization of God’s authorship of a world in which Jewry suffers for being themselves and of his willingness to allow genocidal anti-Semites to survive to strike again. God becomes God, the good God realizes his goodness, only when he overcomes his negative pole. Until then, his unity is fragmented, and his name incomplete.”11 To become God, God must defeat the anti-God, Amalek (or Satan). The Bible contains signiﬁcant evidence, in short, that God’s will is fragmented and changing. Although within the Bible itself, as within the 8 9 10 11

Ibid., 23. Ibid. Ibid., 44. Ibid., 45.

god’s knowledge and will

79

rabbinic tradition, an effort is made to deny the fragmentation of God’s will, this move results simply in a hypostasization of the evil side of God’s will into an anti-God whom God must ﬁght in order to become God (for the world). Levenson’s basic argument is that if God’s will is one, if God’s will is good, and if God’s will is powerful (divine), then God’s agency in the world will show it. The history of human suffering, and especially the terrible suffering of God’s people, shows otherwise. Thus, God’s will must in fact be divided – as suggested by numerous biblical passages – even though God’s people know, in covenantal faith, that God’s good will eventually must triumph. In arguing that God’s will is fragmented, Levenson surprisingly says little about God’s knowledge. Is God’s will (according to the Bible) fragmented because he lacks knowledge, or does God indeed have a malign will? Indeed, if God has a malign aspect in his will, on what grounds can we actually consider this evil aspect to be distorted, disordered? Levenson notes in commenting on Genesis 18 that God is subject to no human or even divine norms, but rather possesses “a freedom unlimited even by his own principles of justice and generosity.”12 God’s freedom, then, is not normed by his knowledge: he might know that something is just, but not do the just thing. Levenson’s stark (though covenantal) voluntarism no doubt inﬂuences his decision to say little about God’s knowledge, because God’s will ultimately is all that matters. In his theology of creation, however, Levenson also provides exegetical grounds for minimizing God’s knowledge. As Levenson understands the creation accounts, there is a signiﬁcant realm that in the beginning God must conquer for himself, and that is continually slipping out of God’s control. “Creation” signiﬁes this conquest, which is ongoing in the history of the world. Levenson opens his discussion of creation by stating, “We can capture the essence of the idea of creation in the Hebrew Bible with the word ‘mastery.’ ”13 God “creates” in the sense of mastering pre-existing chaos. With a number of scholars, Levenson holds the doctrine of “creation from nothing” to be mistaken or at least a case of eisegesis. He argues, “Nowhere in the seven-day creation scheme of Genesis 1 does God create the waters; they are most likely primordial. The traditional Jewish and Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo can be found in this chapter only if one translates its ﬁrst verse as ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth’ and understands it to 12 13

Ibid., 150. Ibid., 3.

80

god’s knowledge and will

refer to some comprehensive creative act on the ﬁrst day.”14 Levenson is willing to suppose that that not only the waters, but also the “other divine beings” who seem to be referred to when God says “Let us make man in our image” (v. 26), are primordial.15 On this reading, the creation story intends to show that YHWH conquers not only the primordial chaos (the waters), but also other divine beings. Levenson ﬁnds evidence of this possibility in Psalm 82:1: “God takes his stand in the assembly of El; among the gods He pronounces judgment.”16 Similarly, Psalm 74 contains a description of a primordial battle between God and sea-monsters: God’s victory enables him to establish the heavens and “all the bounds of the earth” (v. 17).17 From these texts and others like them, Levenson wishes to afﬁrm “God’s total mastery not as something self-evident, unthreatened, and extant from all eternity, but as something won, as something dramatic and exciting.”18 The creative act is an act of conquest and ordering, not an act of causing creatures to come into existence and sustaining them in existence (although this latter aspect is somewhat close to what Levenson means by ordering). Since this order is continually threatened, creation (as a “good” order) continually needs to be renewed by God’s powerful agency. In human history, disorder and chaos generally appear to be winning the day; but Israel, through its covenantal faith, knows that God will conquer by means of new powerful acts: “Whatever the special act of God, in the Hebrew Bible nature is not autonomous and self-sufﬁcient, but dependent upon God’s special solicitude, his tender concern for the ordered world.”19 Levenson’s insistence that “creation” is the continuing drama of divine mastery – the continuing drama of divine renewal of good order – is thus opposed to the Deist conception of creation as an act that occurred once long ago. Yet, it is clear that in Levenson’s account, all beings possess absolute ontological autonomy vis-á-vis YHWH, even though YHWH may master them and thus constrain this autonomy extrinsically. Levenson’s YHWH could have only limited knowledge of other beings. YHWH would be creator in the sense of “orderer,” as the one who masters the chaos. The chaos itself must escape YHWH’s full knowledge, since he is not its creator. In giving order to the primordial 14 15 16 17 18 19

Ibid., Ibid. Ibid., Ibid., Ibid. Ibid.,

5. 6. 9. 12.

god’s knowledge and will

81

waters, and defeating the forces of disorder within them, he organizes or forms living beings such as plants, animals, and human beings. He does not, however, know exhaustively and intimately their inmost principle. He did not give them being, and therefore he cannot comprehend fully the principle of their being. Levenson suggests that this inmost principle would have been a negative force: “It seems more likely that they [the ancient rabbis] identiﬁed ‘nothing’ [the ‘void’ of Genesis 1:2] with things like disorder, injustice, subjugation, disease, and death. To them, in other words, ‘nothing’ was something – something negative. It was not the privation of being (as evil is the privation of good in some theodicies), but a real, active force, except that its charge was entirely negative.”20 By ordering this “negative charge,” YHWH stamps it with his own positive (ordering rather than disordering) charge; yet, since he does not give it existence, he cannot know the inmost principle of the negative charge. It follows that YHWH could not have exhaustive knowledge of what will emerge, in history, when he organizes the “waters.” Nor could he enjoy exhaustive knowledge of human beings. Since human beings would depend for existence upon a principle (the negatively charged waters) that escapes YHWH’s full knowledge (if not his mastery), YHWH could not know exactly what human beings are going to do as history proceeds. He can know only that just as he mastered the waters, he will master human beings by his mighty acts. Intrinsically, human beings are radically autonomous from YHWH, although YHWH remains capable of mastering them extrinsically. As Levenson puts it, interpreting Psalm 44, what is required “is the awareness that history, no less than nature, slips out of God’s control and into the hands of obscure but potent forces of malignancy that oppose everything he is reputed to uphold.”21 There are massive gaps in God’s mastery of history, let alone in his knowledge of the forces active in history. Nonetheless, Levenson afﬁrms that God’s mastery is sufﬁcient so that he can be counted upon to master, eventually, those things that “deserve to be blasted from the world. . . . Some of what is, is not yet good.”22 In this historical sense, God is omnipotent. Thus YHWH’s will is fragmented, his knowledge limited. For this reason, in creation, both the original event and as an ongoing event, 20

Ibid., xxi. Ibid., xxiii. Levenson makes clear here that he is attempting to account for the Holocaust. 22 Ibid., xxiv. 21

82

god’s knowledge and will

YHWH possesses a worthy opponent. The drama for mastery that Levenson believes is depicted by the Old Testament is not only fought against the forces of disorder, ultimately nature and humankind, but also within YHWH himself. For Levenson, biblical Israel – the people descended from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob according to the ﬂesh – is caught up in a particular way into this battle. The Temple is the microcosm of creation, where creation is continually represented (re-presented), renewed, and re-created.23 The boundaries that God has imposed in his ordering of creation are observed by following the laws that God has given Israel; and the rest that is true “creation” (that is, enjoyment of the God’s order established by God’s mastering and ordering the “negative charge”) is the Sabbath. The Jewish people are thus both a sign of what God has done, and participants in the work of “good ordering” that God is presently doing in human history and will do in the future.24 By their obedience to YHWH’s laws, even in the midst of terrible chaos and fearsome suffering that seem to render such laws meaningless and the lawgiver impotent, observant Jews are sharing in YHWH’s work of ordering the world and are, by their prayers, challenging YHWH to bring this work to ultimate completion. As Levenson concludes, “Though the persistence of evil seems to undermine the magisterial claims of the creator-God, it is through submission to exactly those claims that the good order that is creation comes into being.”25 Levenson’s account of YHWH and creation thus is directed ultimately toward upholding the signiﬁcance, in light of the Holocaust, of Jewish observance of the laws of the Old Testament.26 23

Ibid., 95. See ibid., 120 and elsewhere. 25 Ibid., 156. 26 Cf. Jack Miles, God: A Biography (New York: Vintage Books, 1996). Miles surveys the literature of the Old Testament and also concludes that God’s will is fragmented and his knowledge limited. Although the book is written for a popular audience, Miles has training as a biblical scholar. For Miles, the “God” who emerges as a character from the various stories of the Old Testament is “an amalgam of several personalities in one character” (6). As the Bible progresses, God “gradually becomes both more unitary and more ethical” (111), but this development merely complicates the portrait of God obtained by the reader of the whole Old Testament. God, Miles thinks, is frequently proclaimed to be one, but speaks and acts in ways that are incompatible and incongruous (6). Miles holds that “God’s mind is cloven” (216). Ultimately, Miles presents a God whose inner psychology seems to validate the amoral, ﬂuid personality theories of pop psychology. Walter Brueggemann’s Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1997) adopts Levenson’s position without the grandeur of Levenson’s Jewish liturgical vision (271–2). 24

god’s knowledge and will

83

Despite his intentions, however, Levenson’s approach inescapably adopts metaphysical claims and begs metaphysical questions. For example, the being of Levenson’s YHWH is circumscribed or limited by the existence of the void or waters – the “negative charge” – that he did not create, and from which he gives order to everything. What does it mean to say that God is limited in being? Would it not make him ﬁnite, a being among beings (“onto-theology”)? Would he then be worthy of worship? Would it not limit and circumscribe his freedom and power? In “ordering” the world, could he have had anything but the most provisional plan toward which the order aimed, if his knowledge of future contingent realities was obscure? Similarly, can he be trusted to know individuals (Abraham) or a whole people (Israel) and to have a plan for them? If his existence is limited (ﬁnite), he is not his existence: therefore could he accurately describe himself simply by means of the variations of the verb “to be”?

2

St. Thomas Aquinas on the Knowledge and Will of God in His Unity27

If Levenson’s approach begs important metaphysical questions, does Aquinas’s speculative theology do any better? Three aspects of Aquinas’s interpretation of biblical texts in his speculative theology stand out. The 27

Bernard Lonergan, S.J. offers an account of how Aquinas’s analysis of God’s knowledge and will, which is based upon the same premises as his version of the psychological analogy for the Trinity, does not make the Trinity rationally necessary. Lonergan shows that: though our intelligere is always a dicere, this cannot be demonstrated of God’s. Though we can demonstrate that God understands, for understanding is pure perfection, still we can no more than conjecture the mode of divine understanding and so cannot prove that there is a divine Word. Psychological Trinitarian theory is not a conclusion that can be demonstrated but a hypothesis that squares with divine revelation without excluding the possibility of alternative hypotheses. Finally, Aquinas regularly writes as a theologian and not as a philosopher; hence regularly he simply states what simply is true, that in all intellects there is a procession of inner word. (Lonergan, Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas, ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997]: 204.) The opposite position is taken by Wayne Hankey in God in Himself: Aquinas’ Doctrine of God as Expounded in the Summa Theologiae (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). Hankey summarizes his concerns by concluding: While denying of God the mode of the ﬁnite, Thomas holds that proper predications are made of him. He afﬁrms that God’s acts are all one in his simplicity and yet distin-

84

god’s knowledge and will

ﬁrst is that biblical texts about God must be weighed in the context of other biblical texts about God. The whole of the Bible contains God’s revelation of himself. It follows that the biblical texts in which God speaks or acts with the speciﬁc intention of revealing his own identity (or in which the human author speaks most speciﬁcally about God’s identity) will serve to interpret other biblical texts about God. The position of the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, corresponds in this regard to Aquinas’s position: “But since sacred Scripture must be read and interpreted with its divine authorship in mind, no less attention must be devoted to the content and unity of the whole of Scripture, taking into account the Tradition of the entire Church and the analogy of faith, if we are to derive their true meaning from the sacred texts.”28 Second, Aquinas insists that biblical texts must be illumined metaphysically by analyzing, in terms of being and causality, the concepts and images expressed in the biblical texts. The Bible’s language about God and his actions (words and deeds) describe an acting God, whose being and causality is continually contrasted with that of the idols. Third, the human language used to describe God and/or his acts may be either analogical or metaphorical. If the latter, the language may in fact actually describe a reality, such as a change, in human beings. Rather than properly describing God himself, metaphorical language describes instead the relation of human beings to God.29 Since, as Dei Verbum states, “in sacred Scripture, God speaks through men in human fashion,” the intended meaning of the human words must be explored;30 insofar as guishes them as diverse forms of self-relation. God’s Trinitarian distinction is rationally derived in an intelligible sequence in the Summa Theologiae and yet denied to be so. These and many more difﬁculties arise from Aquinas’ attempt to draw together the one and the many in the manner they appeared to him. The manifold problems of his predecessors remain imperfectly resolved in his system. (147) I do not agree with Hankey that Aquinas’s theory of divine simplicity conﬂicts with his account of analogous predication of diverse human perfections, or that he rationally derives God’s Trinitarian distinction. 28 Dei Verbum, no. 12. It is worth noting that Aquinas’s understanding of, and appreciation for, the Old Testament is reﬂected also by Dei Verbum’s discussion of the Old Testament in nos 14–16. See also Christopher Kaczor, “Aquinas on the Development of Doctrine,” Theological Studies 62 (2001): 283–302. 29 On metaphorical language according to Aquinas, see, e.g., Joseph Wawrykow, “Reﬂections on the Place of the De doctrina christiana in High Scholastic Discussions of Theology,” in Reading and Wisdom, ed. Edward D. English (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995): 99–125, especially 102–9. 30 Dei Verbum, no. 12.

god’s knowledge and will

85

divine naming is involved, this exploration will involve metaphysical analysis. As Aquinas quotes Gregory the Great on naming God: “Though our lips can only stammer, we yet chant the high things of God.”31 Discussing God’s perfection, Aquinas cites Matthew, “Be you perfect as also your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48).32 Aquinas notes that “a thing is perfect in proportion to its state of actuality, because we call that perfect which lacks nothing of the mode of its perfection.”33 God’s perfection is in accord with his inﬁnite mode of being. Thus, all perfections that belong in a limited way in ﬁnite beings are attributes of God.34 In God, these perfections are simple rather than diverse, since he is sheer undivided Act.35 It follows that we name real attributes of God by naming the perfections that we ﬁnd in creaturely being, so long as we keep in mind that by these names we are not pretending to know God comprehensively.36 In attributing a perfection to God, we must remove by mental abstraction the ﬁnite creaturely mode of being, recognizing that the perfection exists in God according to his inﬁnite, unfathomable mode. I have noted that Levenson suggests that “history, no less than nature, slips out of God’s control and into the hands of obscure but potent forces of malignancy”; God may master these obscure forces, but he certainly does not know them exhaustively. In contrast, Aquinas’s understanding of God’s perfection requires that God supremely knows. Aquinas defends this position on the basis of two further scriptural passages, one from Job and the other from Romans 11. The two texts belong to perhaps the two most profound discussions in the Bible of divine Providence. It is important to note at the outset, then, that Aquinas is no more interested than is Levenson in what Levenson deems “the static, Aristotelian

31

1, q.4, a.1, ad 1. The quotation is from Gregory’s Moralia, Book V, 26, 29. 1, q.4, a.1. 33 Ibid. 34 1, q.4, a.2. 35 See 1, q.3, a.7; 1, q.4, a.2, ad 1. 36 See 1, q.3, prologue: “When the existence of a thing has been ascertained there remains the further question of the manner of its existence, in order that we may know its essence. Now, because we cannot know what God is, but rather what He is not, we have no means for considering how God is, but rather how He is not.” The point is that we cannot know God’s essence. This does not mean that we can have only (strictly) negative knowledge of God. Aquinas states that afﬁrmative names “signify the divine substance, and are predicated substantially of God, although they fall short of a full representation of Him” (1, q.13, a.2). Cf. 1, q.13, a.2, ad 2 and 3; 1, q.13, aa.3–6, 12. 32

86

god’s knowledge and will

conception of the deity.”37 Just as Levenson’s account of God’s will and knowledge seeks to make sense ultimately of the Holocaust, so too Aquinas recognizes that in speaking of God’s knowledge we are not speaking of a “mere” philosophical problem, but rather the topic at hand is inseparable from the relation of human history to God. Job, in the midst of “arguing his case” with God about the terrible mystery of his suffering, states, “With Him is wisdom and strength, He hath counsel and understanding” ( Job 12:13). Similarly, anguished by the failure of much of Israel to recognize her Messiah, St. Paul holds nonetheless that God’s plan is such that he has ordered events so that “he may have mercy upon all” and concludes passionately, “O the depth of the riches of the wisdom and of the knowledge of God” (Romans 11:33). As Aquinas reads these passages, both Job and St. Paul are granting, without fathoming, the truth that God knows all.38 This truth beﬁts, Aquinas recognizes, the God who is the dynamic fullness of “to be” and who is perfect. Since God is sheer “to be,” he is inﬁnite, unbounded, and therefore “in the highest degree of immateriality.”39 As perfectly (according to his inﬁnite mode) immaterial, he is able to possess in himself the “form” or concept of everything else, whereas nothing else can possess the “form” or concept of him, since he is inﬁnite. Aquinas thus illumines the biblical testimony with a metaphysical argument: if God is how the Bible says he is, then metaphysically (as regards his being) he must be such. To know is a perfection of ﬁnite rational existence, but knowledge in ﬁnite creatures is possessed as a habit, rather than being always “in act.” God therefore possesses the perfection – in this case the perfection of knowing – but possesses it according to his simple, inﬁnite mode.40 He is his knowledge, and his knowing is inﬁnite. Knowing is a perfection of his inﬁnite Act.41 37 Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil, xxv. For a brief response to this point, see Michael Dodds, O.P., “St. Thomas and the Motion of the Motionless God,” New Blackfriars 68 (1987): 233–42. 38 Waclaw Swierzawski points out that in his biblical commentaries, Aquinas deﬁnes God’s “glory,” a term used so frequently in Scripture, as God’s perfect knowledge of himself, his radiant Word of love, in whom all things were made and who took ﬂesh in Christ Jesus (Swierzawski, “God and the Mystery of His Wisdom, in the Pauline Commentaries of Saint Thomas Aquinas,” Divus Thomas [Piacenza, Italy] 74 [1971]: 466–500, at 484–91). We will discuss in chapter four how, according to Aquinas, God reveals his Trinitarian glory in Christ. 39 1, q.14, a.1; cf. 1, q.7, a.1. 40 As regards the mode of God’s knowledge, see, e.g., John F. Wippel, “Thomas Aquinas and the Axiom ‘What is Received is Received According to the Mode of the Receiver,’ ” in A Straight Path: Studies in Medieval Philosophy and Culture, ed. Ruth Link-Salinger, et al. (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1988): 279–89. 41 1, q.14, a.1, ad 1–3.

god’s knowledge and will

87

Is this account of God’s knowledge too strong? Surely the Bible does not justify such an absolute divine knowing? Aquinas begins with God’s knowledge of himself. If God – sheer inﬁnite Act – knows himself, then his knowledge is already inﬁnite. Aquinas quotes St. Paul, who indicates that God knows himself perfectly: “The things that are of God no man knoweth, but the Spirit of God” (1 Corinthians 2:11).42 In choosing to quote this text, Aquinas directs attention to the entire chapter of 1 Corinthians 2, which treats the “wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 2:7).43 This wisdom is Christ Jesus, who embodies God’s eternal plan (or Providence) for the salvation of the world by enabling the world to share in the Trinitarian communion of knowing and loving.44 This salvation in the Son is taught to us by the Spirit. In the verse before the one quoted by Aquinas, St. Paul states, “For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God” (1 Corinthians 2:10). God, then, knows himself. His knowledge is inﬁnite. Can inﬁnite knowledge, however, be knowledge at all? Is not “inﬁnite” inexhaustible, so that God would never reach the end of himself, and thus never know his whole being? Aquinas answers this objection – which is metaphysical – by means of metaphysical analysis of the act of knowing. Since God is simple, what he knows is not different from his act of knowing; otherwise he would be composed of the act and its object. Therefore, by his inﬁnite act of knowing, he knows himself as inﬁnite Act. His power of knowing is coextensive with his act of being. He thus comprehends himself fully as inﬁnite.45 If in this case the biblical testimony and the fruits of metaphysical analysis appear to mutually illumine each other (with the biblical testimony remaining the source of reﬂection), the next issue poses more difﬁculties. Granted that God knows himself, the question is whether, and if so to what extent, God knows things other than himself. Levenson casts doubt especially upon God’s knowledge of things other than himself. Because of the dark, negative forces at play, Levenson envisions history as continually escaping God’s control. Inﬂuenced by process theology, which sees God 42

1, q.14, a.2. Aquinas wrote a lengthy commentary on 1 Corinthians, as on all the Pauline letters. He also commented upon the Gospels of Matthew and John, as well as the Psalms, Isaiah, Job, Jeremiah, and Lamentations. 44 On Aquinas’s theological account of divine Providence in light of Christian eschatology, see the important contribution of Matthew L. Lamb, “The Eschatology of St. Thomas Aquinas,” in Thomas Aquinas and Christian Doctrine, ed. Thomas Weinandy, O.F.M. Cap. et al. (Edinburgh: T.&T. Clark, forthcoming). 45 See 1, q.14, aa.3–4. On the relation of divine simplicity to divine inﬁnity, see Eileen C. Sweeney, “Thomas Aquinas’ Double Metaphysics of Simplicity and Inﬁnity,” International Philosophical Quarterly 33 (1993): 297–317. 43

88

god’s knowledge and will

as developing along with human history, he emphasizes the dramatic, risky nature of the God-world relationship. If God knows not only himself, but knows everything from his timeless eternity, would this take the drama out of history by making God into a “static” agent, frozen, as it were, in eternity and unable to respond freely to events, in contrast to the biblical depiction of God? Similarly, would it make creatures into puppets, enacting a drama whose every “free” moment has been known for eternity? Is not the biblical portrait the very opposite – a free God engaging in a give-and-take relationship with very free creatures? Aquinas begins with Hebrews 4:13: “All things are naked and open to his eyes.”46 This quotation follows upon the more well known text in verse 12, “For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And before him no creature is hidden.”47 Hebrews 4 is thus the prime scriptural locus of the point to be discussed. For the inspired author of Hebrews, God has a radically complete knowledge of creatures. Aquinas seeks to shed light metaphysically on this scriptural claim, which he accepts in faith. God, in his supreme act of understanding, perfectly comprehends himself.48 Could God perfectly comprehend himself if he did not comprehend to what his power extends? In other words, could sheer Act comprehend himself if he did not know all the ﬁnite modes in which he could, as cause, share his existence? Could a cause know himself exhaustively if he did not exhaustively know the effects that could proceed from himself? Clearly, the answer is no. In knowing himself, God must therefore know (in himself) all the effects that could proceed from him as cause.49 Every ﬁnite mode of existence is his effect. This is so because everything is either sheer Act or created (ﬁnite) act; the latter participates in a ﬁnite way in the act of being of the former. Everything that exists – whether a dog, a man, a thought (which shares in the mode of being of the spiritual soul), and so forth – receives its existence as a caused, ﬁnite participation in sheer Act. God causes and sustains every existent by giving being, although God may (and does) work through secondary causes such as parents to bring living creatures into existence. God exhaus46

1, q.14, a.5. Aquinas cites this remainder of Hebrews 4:12–13 in 1, q.14, a.6. 48 It is worth emphasizing that God’s knowledge, like each of his attributes, is nothing other than God himself. As Matthew L. Lamb has remarked with regard to the attribute of eternity, “For Augustine eternity is not a pale abstraction. Eternity is the Triune God” (Lamb, “Eternity Creates and Redeems Time: A Key to Augustine’s Confessions within a Theology of History,” forthcoming in a festschrift for Robert Crouse). 49 1, q.14, a.5. 47

god’s knowledge and will

89

tively knows all effects that could proceed from him; therefore, God, from his timeless eternity, exhaustively and simultaneously knows everything that is other than himself.50 Furthermore, God knows each of his effects not in general, but distinctly.51 Aquinas cites Proverbs 16:2, “All the ways of a man are open to His eyes.”52 He illumines the meaning of this text metaphysically by reference to God’s perfection: since it belongs to the perfection of human beings to know singular things (rather than solely universal concepts such as “man”), it belongs to God’s perfection, though in accord with his simple, inﬁnite mode.53 He also points out that the principle that God’s knowledge must extend as far as his causality extends, applies in the case of God’s knowledge of particular things. God causes the existence of particular things, by giving them the gift of existence, a ﬁnite sharing in inﬁnite Act.54 Just as God knows all particular things, God in his simple act of understanding knows all possible statements or judgments of truth, without undergoing a process of reasoning to arrive at such truths. Indeed, God’s knowledge embraces man’s thoughts: “The Lord knoweth the thoughts of men” (Psalms 94:11).55 Since human beings will live forever in God, and thus will have an inﬁnite number of thoughts and affections of the heart, God in his inﬁnite knowledge knows these inﬁnite thoughts.56 Aquinas cuts away, with clear scriptural warrant, any possible “distance” of human beings from God; God is not “over against” 50

For further philosophical reﬂection on this point, emphasizing God’s knowledge as causal, see Brian J. Shanley, O.P., “Eternal Knowledge of the Temporal in Aquinas,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 71 (1997): 197–224; Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, “Eternity and God’s Knowledge: A Reply to Shanley,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 72 (1998): 439–45; Shanley, “Aquinas on God’s Causal Knowledge: A Reply to Stump and Kretzmann,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 72 (1998): 447–57. In his response, Shanley takes up the question of how God knows evil. On God’s knowledge of things other than himself as the “divine ideas,” see John L. Farthing, “The Problem of Divine Exemplarity in St. Thomas,” The Thomist 49 (1985): 183–222. Farthing pays attention to the relationship of biblical revelation and classical philosophy in Aquinas’s approach to this topic. See also Brian J. Shanley, O.P., “Eternity and Duration in Aquinas,” The Thomist 61 (1997): 525–48, and Matthew L. Lamb, “Eternity and Time,” in Gladly to Learn and Gladly to Teach: Essays on Religion and Political Philosophy in Honor of Ernest L. Fortin, A. A., ed. Michael P. Foley and Douglas Kries (New York: Lexington Books, 2002): 195–214. 51 On God’s distinct knowledge of each thing, see 1, q.14, a.6; on his timeless, nondiscursive knowledge, see 1, q.14, a.7. 52 1, q.14, a.11. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 55 1, q.14, a.14. 56 1, q.14, a.12. In attempting to guide us through the philosophical difﬁculties that arise when one distinguishes God from creatures as pure Act, David Burrell, C.S.C. has insightfully remarked:

90

god’s knowledge and will

human beings, but rather everything that human beings are and do is wonderfully present in God. God truly knows and loves us, from within, not extrinsically. Thus Aquinas joins, and goes well beyond, Levenson in a profound critique of the Deist god.57 The modern tendency to envision God “over against” human beings, and thus as an enemy to human freedom, makes particularly problematic the corollary that follows from all we have said so far.58 This corollary is that God, in his sheer Act, knows everything that in time is going to happen, even if these events are going to happen freely. It is crucial to emphasize in this regard that God is not in time: God simply is, and so his Act is the eternal fullness of being, sheer Present.59 It is not true to say that God knows what is going to happen “before” it happens, if the sense of “before” is that God and human beings are together in time and that God is able to foretell If the creator is the source of all-that-is, and hence of the perfections of things, the creator will be the source not merely of their “existence” (in the “on/off ” sense), but of all that emanates from their existing. Operations above all are the sign of something’s existing, so it follows that the initial and grounding perfection is existence itself. If that be the case, this utterly “non-qualitative property” of existence will be the “ effect of the ﬁrst and most universal cause, which is God” [1, q.45, a.5]. From that divine activity will ﬂow all that comes to be from such creatures. Far from being an initial “ﬂoor,” an “on/off property,” what the act of creation bestows, in creating this world, is what makes it to be and to be a world: the existential order that is the only matrix within which action occurs. (See David B. Burrell, C.S.C., “Creation and ‘Actualism’: The Dialectical Dimension of Philosophical Theology,” Medieval Philosophy and Theology 4 [1994]: 25–41, at 32). 57 On God’s transcendence and intimate presence, see Thomas Weinandy’s Does God Suffer? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000) and Does God Change? (Still River, MA: St. Bede’s Publications, 1985); Herbert McCabe, O.P., God Matters (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1987): 39–51; Michael Dodds, O.P., The Unchanging God of Love: A Study of the Teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas on Divine Immutability in View of Certain Contemporary Critics (Fribourg: Editions Universitaires, 1986); idem, “Thomas Aquinas, Human Suffering, and the Unchanging God of Love,” Theological Studies 52 (1991): 330–44 and “Ultimacy and Intimacy: Aquinas on the Relation between God and the World,” in Ordo Sapientiae et Amoris, ed. C.-J. Pinto de Oliveira, O.P. (Fribourg: Editions Universitaires, 1993): 211–27. 58 On this modern tendency, and its roots in William of Ockham, see Michael Allen Gillespie, Nihilism before Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995): 14–32. See also Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), which demonstrates the importance of Spinoza. For discussion of the noncompetitive relationship of God’s causation and ours (in dialogue with Colin Gunton), see Fergus Kerr, After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002): 43–8. See also David Burrell, “Jacques Maritain and Bernard Lonergan on Divine and Human Freedom,” in The Future of Thomism, ed. Deal Hudson and Dennis Moran (Mishawaka, IN: American Maritain Association, 1992): 161–8. Burrell argues that Lonergan gets the non-competitive relationship right. 59 1, q.10.

god’s knowledge and will

91

the future. On the contrary, God is radically outside the order of time; God is the Creator of time. He is thus perfectly present, in his eternity, “within” all moments of time as Creator and sustainer of being.60 Aquinas evokes this perfect Presence scripturally by quoting Psalm 33:15, “He Who hath made the hearts of every one of them; Who understandeth all their works.”61 Psalm 33 anthropomorphically depicts God as looking down from his throne in heaven and watching everyone whom he has created, so as to save the just. The point of the psalm is that nothing escapes God’s eye and that God’s plans will not be frustrated by any worldly powers. Recognizing that the anthropomorphic aspects of this portrait are metaphorical (because God is not bodily62), Aquinas takes up the metaphor of God’s “eye”: “His glance is carried from eternity over all things as they are in their presentiality. Hence it is manifest that contingent things are infallibly known by God, inasmuch as they are subject to the divine sight in their presentiality; yet they are future contingent things in relation to their own causes.”63 Everything is perfectly present to God, who is sheer Presence in 60

1, q.8. 1, q.14, a.13. 62 Aquinas responds to this idea in 1, q.3, aa.1–2. In article 1, he asks whether God is a body. The objections are taken from a wide variety of biblical quotations, all of which describe God in bodily terms. In response, Aquinas cites John 4:24, “God is a spirit.” He goes on to explain (drawing upon a previous discussion in 1, q.1, a.9) that the Bible “puts before us spiritual and divine things under the comparison of corporeal things” (1, q.3, a.1, ad 1). Thus, for example, “Corporeal parts are attributed to God in Scripture on account of His actions, and this is owing to a certain parallel. For instance the act of the eye is to see; hence the eye attributed to God signiﬁes His power of seeing intellectually, not sensibly; and so on with the other parts” (1, q.3, a.1, ad 3). Aquinas’s point is that in describing the active, living God, we are compelled to rely upon sensible images, even though God is immaterial. 63 1, q.14, a.13. In light of evolutionary theory, J. Augustine DiNoia, O.P. has defended this understanding of creation and the triune God’s causality in “By Whom All Things Were Made: Trinitarian Theology of Creation as the Basis for a Person-Friendly Cosmology,” in Nicene Christianity: The Future for a New Ecumenism, ed. Christopher R. Seitz (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2001): 63–73. See also Michael A. Hoonhout, “Grounding Providence in the Theology of the Creator: The Exemplarity of Thomas Aquinas,” Heythrop Journal 43 (2002): 1–19. Hoonhout points out: 61

This importance of grounding theology of providence in the characteristics of the Creator-God suffered a serious blow, however, with the emergence of nominalism in the fourteenth century. Though it was primarily a development in philosophy with its own logic, epistemology and ontology, nominalism had a theological counterpart which laid great stress upon the absolute power of the Creator. While its motive was to preserve the transcendent freedom of the Creator, this came at the cost of denying the intelligible order and genuine causality in the world. This bald emphasis upon the power and indeterminacy of God’s will over and against the world deprived the doctrine of providence of those attributes of the Creator (i.e., his wisdom, goodness and exemplarity) and those features of creation (i.e., the order, unity and teleology of nature) traditionally relied upon to express its intelligibility. (2)

92

god’s knowledge and will

his timeless eternity, but this fact does not in any way compromise the fact that in time things come to be. Indeed, God’s Presence (as Act) is what sustains each moment of time, and all of time, in being. And yet, if God knows absolutely everything from his timeless eternity, does this not displace the active biblical God? In fact, the contrary is true. Aquinas’s teaching on God’s knowledge defends metaphysically the scriptural account of a supremely active, engaged God. Since God knows each thing in knowing his causal power, God’s knowledge of things is, when joined to his will to give being to what he knows, the wondrously intimate cause of at the heart of each and every thing.64 Aquinas states, “Now it is manifest that God causes things by His intellect, since His being is His act of understanding; and hence His knowledge must be the cause of things, in so far as His will is joined to it.”65 God knows us so intimately as to be, precisely in knowing us, our cause of existence. Aquinas adds that God knows from eternity all the things that he could cause to share in his existence, whether or not he actually wills to cause those things to exist, and whether or not they exist at a particular moment in time.66 Nothing “falls out” of his knowledge. As Scripture teaches, God is not aloof but is intimately, limitlessly, and lovingly engaged – not only by the force of his will, as Levenson suggests, but also by his active wisdom – in every existing thing at every moment. God’s extraordinarily intimate engagement with the world, however, raises the problem of evil. As we have seen, Levenson proposes not only that God’s will is fragmented and his knowledge obscured, but also that God is solely the orderer, and not in a strict sense the Creator, of the world. By distancing God from the act of creating, if not from the struggle to order or re-create, Levenson limits the responsibility of God for the mess in which the world is in, that is, for the suffering caused by disruptions and disorders within both the natural and the human order. This is so even though Levenson’s reading of the biblical texts leads him to admit that God’s will is fragmented, that is, that God has a malicious side (that he is working to overcome). Both Levenson’s distancing of God from the act of creating, and Levenson’s positing of two competing intra-divine Levenson proceeds upon an understanding of Creation and God’s causality inﬂuenced by nominalism. 64 See also 1, q.22, on God’s Providence, although God’s Providence (as likened to prudence) belongs to both his intellect and his will. 65 1, q.14, a.8. Reﬂecting upon this insight would beneﬁt William J. Mander’s intriguing essay, “Does God Know What It Is Like to Be Me?” Heythrop Journal 43 (2002): 430–43. 66 1, q.14, a.9. In this regard, he cites Romans 4:17.

god’s knowledge and will

93

forces, have afﬁnities with neo-Platonic and Manichean thinkers with whose ideas Aquinas would have been familiar. Aquinas, in contrast, thinks that the biblical depiction of God requires the utmost connection of God with the world, and yet holds that God is omnipotent and all-good. If, however, God knows absolutely everything, and if his knowledge, united with his will, is causal, does this not involve God in evil? Aquinas answers by quoting Proverbs 15:11: “Hell and destruction are before God.” In the RSV, the full text of verse 11 reads, “Sheol and Abaddon lie open before the Lord, how much more the hearts of men!” God knows evil things. Since God knows all things by knowing himself, does this mean that there is evil in God – that Aquinas agrees with Levenson in positing evil within the very heart of the divinity? The question hinges upon how one understands metaphysically “evil.” Does the evil of punishment that is Sheol, or the evil of fault that is in the wicked man’s thoughts and deeds, have its own metaphysical reality? In other words, does “evil” (concretized as Sheol/hell or as wicked thoughts and deeds) have its own existence, so that there is evil being (not simply being that is evil but rather evil being, what Levenson refers to as the “negative charge”) and good being? Aquinas shows that there is no evil being.67 Creaturely being is the various ways in which God can cause his inﬁnite being to be reﬂected or

67

On this topic see Brian Davies, O.P., The Thought of Thomas Aquinas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992): 89–97; idem, “The problem of evil,” in Philosophy of Religion, ed. B. Davies, O.P. (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1998): 163–201; Herbert McCabe, O.P., God Matters, 25–38; Laurent Sentis, Saint Thomas d’Aquin et le mal: Foi chrétienne et théodicée (Paris: Beauchesne, 1992); Patrick Lee, “The Goodness of Creation, Evil, and Christian Teaching,” The Thomist 64 (2000): 239–69; Carlo Leget, “Aquinas on Evil: An evaluation of and some reﬂections in connection with two recent studies,” Jaarboek 1993 of the Thomas Instituut te Utrecht,161–87. Davies shows that the problem of evil can have a solution only if we insist upon the intimate presence of God, and that the solution will be clear only when God’s purposes have been fully revealed at the end of time: God could have created a world in which no evil suffered comes to pass (though I do not know what such a world would look like). And he could have created a world full of moral agents who always act well. But God has evidently not done that. Why not? I have no idea. And that is why I think that there is a problem of evil. But it is not a problem which casts doubt on what we say if we assert that divinity is not something ﬁctional. It is not a problem which suggests that there is no God. Rather, it is something which invites us to reﬂect on the mystery of divinity, something which serves to remind us that God is nothing less than the beginning and end of all things, the source from which everything that we can understand derives its existence. (“The problem of evil,” 198).

94

god’s knowledge and will

imitated ﬁnitely.68 Were there evil being as such, it would have to arise as participating divine evil being as such. As we have seen, Levenson seems to think that there may well be divine evil being as such, inasmuch as the divine will is fragmented between a good and a bad side. But were there divine evil being as such, warring against good divine being, then God could not be one (contra Deuteronomy 6:4).69 Arguing that God is good, Aquinas cites two central scriptural texts: “The Lord is good to them that hope in him, to the soul that seeketh him” (Lamentations 3:25) and “None is good but God alone” (Luke 18:19).70 Arguing that every created being is good, he refers to 1 Timothy 4:4, “For everything created by God is good.”71 If, however, “everything created by God is good,” we must ask again: what is evil? In human beings, evil may be present in two ways. It may be physical lack of good, as when a human being has lost a leg. Second, evil may be present in the human being as a lack of spiritual good. The human person is intended to know and love God, and to love other creatures in God. When, instead, the person acts against love, the person actively incurs a lack of his or her proper good; the soul is deformed. Just as the body of a person who has lost a leg has suffered a loss of its proper good, so also the soul of a person who hates and wills harm to an innocent child has suffered a loss of its proper good, and the person can rightly be said to possess an “evil” soul.72 It is the defect or the lack of being that is called evil, not the existence of the thing per se. With regard to 68

See, among numerous passages, 1, q.2, a.3; 1, q.4, aa.2–3; 1, q.3, a.8, especially ad 1. Levenson’s view of biblical monotheism is most clearly expressed in Creation and the Persistence of Evil, 131–9; in his view the key to biblical “monotheism” is allegiance to YHWH, whether or not there was/is some kind of pantheon of gods. In other words, biblical monotheism is more practical/functional than theoretical/philosophical. 70 1, q.6, a.1; 1, q.6, a.2, obj.2 and ad 2. See also 1, q.6, a.3. 71 1, q.5, a.3. 72 Gregory M. Reichberg has drawn attention to the fact that Aquinas: 69

took particular care to indicate the limitations of privation as a tool for elucidating the special sort of evil that emerges within human freedom. This evil he designates by the names “sin” (peccatum), “moral fault” (malum culpae), or “moral evil” (malum morale). Aquinas’s conceptualization of evil along positive lines as something done is most visible in his analysis of intentional wrongdoing (peccare ex industria aut ex certa scientia), also termed “sinning from malice” (peccare ex malitia). (Reichberg, “Beyond Privation: Moral Evil in Aquinas’s De Malo,” The Review of Metaphysics 55 [2002]: 750–1) For Aquinas, sin cannot be described solely in terms of privation, since it is an act. However, as Reichberg continues:

god’s knowledge and will

95

God’s knowledge of evil, therefore, Aquinas states, “Now a thing is knowable in the degree in which it is; hence, since this is the essence of evil that it is the privation of good, by the very fact that God knows good things, He knows evil things also; as by light is known darkness.”73 God’s knowledge, in union with his will, is the cause of all good; insofar as God permits (in his Providence) a lack or defect of good in a thing, he knows – precisely by knowing the good of the thing – that the thing possesses a certain lack or defect of good. In this way, he knows fully both the evils in the material world and the evils in the spiritual world. He knows them as defects (lack of being) in his good creation, defects which he is permitting in order to accomplish the wondrous work he, in his supreme wisdom and goodness, has in view. A ﬁnal point about God’s knowledge should already be evident: God does not change his mind. Aquinas cites James 1:17: in God “there is no change nor shadow of alteration.”74 Both St. James and Aquinas know that the Bible often depicts God as changing, but attention to literary genre indicates the truthfulness of James’s words. When a created thing changes, it changes in relation to God. When Israel changes, God does not change; rather, Israel’s relation to God changes. The scriptural authors, recognizing that God is personally, intimately, and lovingly present in all created realities, sometimes describe creaturely change, in relation to God, as a change in God.75 As the prophet Malachi recognizes, in fact God’s unchanging constancy, his goodness, constitutes the ground upon which Israel, if we consider moral evil with respect to its mode of being, it can be said to consist in nothing other than the privation of a human act’s ordination to its proper and ﬁtting end. “The evil of fault,” he [Aquinas] writes, “consists in the privation of order in an act.” From this point of view, moral evil detracts from what is properly human; it represents an impoverishment, a special sort of incompleteness (lack of integritas) that affects the doer and his action. This leads Thomas to cite anew the Augustinian dictum that “sin is a non-being” (peccatum est nihil), which, he explains, can rightly be said on two counts. First, on the part of the act itself, insofar as it is deprived of its due excellence, and second, on the part of the agent who, having freely posited a disordered act, is himself deprived of valuable internal goods, natural and supernatural. (758–9) It is worth noting that “malum culpae” is best translated as the “evil of fault,” in order to contrast it with the “evil of punishment.” On this see Romanus Cessario, O.P., The Godly Image: Christ and Salvation in Catholic Thought from Anselm to Aquinas (Petersham, MA: St. Bede’s Publications, 1990). 73 1, q.14, a.10. 74 Ibid. 75 See Saint Augustine, The Trinity, trans. Edmund Hill, O.P. (Brooklyn, NY: New City Press, 1991): Book 5, ch. 4, no. 17 (201).

96

god’s knowledge and will

despite its failings, can be assured of God’s covenant faithfulness to his promise to redeem Israel: “For I the Lord do not change; therefore you, O sons of Jacob, are not consumed” (Malachi 3:6).76 The same point holds for God’s will. Aquinas cites a scriptural text that afﬁrms (through the story of Balaam and Balak) God’s absolute sovereignty over human events: “God is not as a man, that He should lie, nor as the son of man, that He should be changed” (Numbers 23:19).77 Seeking the divinely intended meaning of scriptural passages that seem to contradict the clear statements of Numbers, Malachi, and James, Aquinas argues that they may suggest either that God wills to change the order of natural causes, or that the expression of God’s will is intended metaphorically, as often is clearly the case. Illumined metaphysically, these scriptural afﬁrmations that God does not change are corroborated by the reality that God is already supremely the fullness of actuality; he cannot add anything to his perfection, and his sheer actuality rules out any potentiality to undergo a defection from full actuality.78 He is already the glorious fullness of love and care, and he is fully present to each one of his creatures at every moment, in accord with their capacity to receive his Presence. When Aquinas turns to God’s will, he begins by asking whether there is will in God. He identiﬁes a scriptural source for the answer in Romans 12:2, “That you may prove what is the will of God.”79 The full text of this passage (RSV) reads: “I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacriﬁce, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (12:1–2). Aquinas’s choice of scriptural text thus links the discussion of God’s will with what has been said about God’s knowledge, 76 Cf. Joyce G. Baldwin, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi: An Introduction and Commentary (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1972): 245. On the topic of whether God changes or suffers, see Weinandy’s Does God Suffer? Weinandy shows that a changing, suffering God would be less able to be present compassionately with those people who are suffering, and would be less able to relieve suffering. In addition to the work of Michael Dodds, see also Maurice Curtin, “God’s Presence in the World: The Metaphysics of Aquinas and some Recent Thinkers (Moltmann, Macquarrie, Rahner),” in At the Heart of the Real, ed. Fran O’Rourke, (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1992): 123–36. Curtin emphasizes that the notion of God’s causality, and the intimate presence that is afﬁrmed in that notion, is abandoned by recent thinkers. 77 1, q.19, a.7. See Thomas G. Weinandy, O. F. M. Cap., Does God Suffer? 78 1, q.14, a.15. 79 1, q.19, a.1.

god’s knowledge and will

97

since St. Paul here unites the renewal of the mind with the discernment of God’s will. God’s will, in other words, follows upon God’s knowledge or wisdom: as the passage suggests, when our minds are renewed so as to be able to know wisdom, we will be able to discern God’s will. The choice of text also links the whole discussion of God with our salvation.80 Aquinas then illumines this scriptural text metaphysically. When we speak about the supremely simple God using words taken from the perfections of creatures, we distinguish God’s intellect and will, even though in him they are the same. The desire to embrace truth and delight in possessing it is the intellectual appetite, or the will. Since God knows himself, he must delight in the truth that he knows as good. This delight is the intellectual appetite or will in God (the act of the will is love81). God eternally knows himself and eternally delights in this knowledge as fully possessed. When God apprehends himself as inﬁnite good, his will does not choose whether to delight in inﬁnite goodness; rather, God’s will is necessarily attracted by its proper object, inﬁnite goodness.82 Indeed, since in knowing himself God knows all goodness, God’s will is completely moved by the knowledge of his own essence.83 God’s beatitude or happiness is so full that there is nothing more to desire, and so his will simply delights. Aquinas beautifully describes the fullness of the beatitude of God: As to contemplative happiness, God possesses a continual and most certain contemplation of Himself and of all things else; and as to that which is 80

For readings of Aquinas’s theology of the triune God that develop the relation of Aquinas’s theology of God to his doctrines of creation and salvation, see A. N. Williams, The Ground of Union: Deiﬁcation in Aquinas and Palamas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) and Gilles Emery, O.P., La Trinité Créatrice (Paris: Vrin, 1995), summarized in idem, “Trinité et création. Le principe trinitaire de la création dans les commentaires d’Albert le Grand, de Bonaventure et de Thomas d’Aquin sur les Sentences,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 79 (1995): 405–30, chapter 2 in his Trinity in Aquinas (Ypsilanti, MI: Sapientia Press, 2003); see also Emery’s “Essentialism or Personalism in the Treatise on God in Saint Thomas Aquinas?” The Thomist 64 (2000): 521–63, chapter 5 in Trinity in Aquinas. 81 Aquinas treats God’s will before God’s love (1, q.20), but the act of the will is love. For a Thomistic account of God as love, see William Rossner, S.J., “Toward an Analysis of ‘God Is Love’,” The Thomist 38 (1973): 633–67; Brian Davies, O.P., “How Is God Love?,” in Moral Truth and Moral Tradition, ed. Luke Gormally (Portland, OR: Four Courts Press, 1994): 97–110. Davies argues that the doctrines of Trinity and Incarnation reveal the true nature of God’s love, but I would suggest that he undervalues the glory of the divine unity. 82 1, q.19, aa. 3, 10. For further philosophical discussion of Aquinas’s understanding of will, see, e.g., Lawrence Dewan, O.P., “The Real Distinction between Intellect and Will,” Angelicum 57 (1980): 557–93 and “St. Thomas, James Keenan, and the Will,” Science et Esprit 32 (1995): 19–33. 83 1, q.19, a.1, especially ad 3.

98

god’s knowledge and will active, he has the governance of the whole universe. As to earthly happiness, which consists in delight, riches, power, dignity, and fame, according to Boethius (De Consol. III, 10), He possesses joy in Himself and all things else for His delight; instead of riches He has that complete self-sufﬁciency which is promised by riches; in place of power, He has omnipotence; for dignities, the government of all things; and in place of fame, He possesses the admiration of all creatures.84

God, then, is will (just as he is intellect), and delights eternally is his perfect goodness. But why does his will extend to anything beyond himself? If his will is completely engaged by his own essence, how could he will anything else? Indeed, were he to will other things besides himself, it would seem that his will could not be said to be completely engaged by his own essence. If he wills the other things that we see around us, moreover, it would seem that these other things might either frustrate God’s will, or be unﬁtting things for God to will. How could God’s will be fully engaged in delighting in the divine essence and somehow also be engaged, even in a limited way, in the often terrible particulars of natural and human history (earthquakes, wars, abortion, genocide)? At ﬁrst glance, Levenson’s notion of God’s fragmented and impotent will seems like the only way out. Aquinas, in contrast, afﬁrms with St. Paul that the will of God is “what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Romans 12:2). Recognizing that some passages in Scripture seem to suggest that God’s will is malevolent, in contrast to St. Paul’s clear statement about the goodness of God’s will, Aquinas devotes two articles to the “expressions” of God’s will that are found in the Bible. He divides these “expressions” into ﬁve kinds: “prohibition, precept, counsel, operation, and permission.”85 God’s will is simple, unlike our will which manifests itself in various expressions. Aquinas notes that “what is usually with us an expression of will, is sometimes metaphorically called will in God; just as when anyone lays down a precept, it is a sign that he wishes that precept obeyed. Hence a divine precept is sometimes called by metaphor the will of God, as in the words: ‘Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven’ (Matthew 6:10).”86 God’s will, in its simplicity, is called by Aquinas God’s “will of good pleasure,” whereas the metaphorical signs of God’s will are called God’s “will of expression.”87 The point of this distinction is to 84 85 86 87

1, 1, 1, 1,

q.26, q.19, q.19, q.19,

a.4. a.12. a.11. a.11.

god’s knowledge and will

99

enable biblical interpretation to proceed without anthropomorphizing God. Does God will things other than himself ? Aquinas again turns to a passage from St. Paul: “This is the will of God, your sanctiﬁcation” (1 Thessalonians 4:3).88 God thus wills things other than himself, above all human beings and their sanctiﬁcation in Christ by the Holy Spirit. In willing other things, God not only possesses a wise plan for their salvation, but also is intimately and intensely involved with what he wills, to the point of sanctifying sinners. How and why does God will things other than himself? Aquinas notes that appetite in natural things seeks not only to acquire its proper good and to rest in it (these aspects pertain to the self-fulﬁllment), but also has self-giving dimension. In resting in the good that one possesses, one also wishes to share it. If this self-giving aspect belongs to the perfection of the will in creatures, then it must analogously belong to God according to his inﬁnite mode of being. Aquinas states: “Hence, if natural things, in so far as they are perfect, communicate their good to others, much more does it appertain to the divine will to communicate by likeness its own good to others as much as possible.”89 In willing himself, therefore, God wills to communicate his own goodness in ﬁnite modes. Our question – why would God will other things, when he is delighting in his own inﬁnite goodness – is thus turned on its head: embracing his own inﬁnite goodness does not in fact trap God in his own self, but rather constitutes precisely the reason why God wills to share his being in ﬁnite ways, that is, why God wills other things. As regards how God could do this without fragmenting his one, simple will, Aquinas’s answer is similar to his explanation of how in knowing himself, God knows all possible ﬁnite ways in which he could share his inﬁnite being (that is, all other things). In willing his own being, God wills the being of certain of the ﬁnite ways in which he could share his inﬁnite being. He does not will other things for their own sake; rather, he wills other things so that they may share in his own goodness – as St. Paul says, for sanctiﬁcation. Aquinas notes that God “wills both Himself to be, and other things to be; but Himself as the end, and other things as ordained to that end; inasmuch as it beﬁts the divine goodness that other things should be partakers therein.”90 In willing the one end (his 88

1, q.19, a.2. The link between Aquinas’s theology of God and his soteriology could hardly be more emphasized. 89 1, q.19, a.2. 90 Ibid.

100

god’s knowledge and will

own goodness), God thereby wills both himself and all other things, because he wills all other things to share in that end. He includes other things in the one end which he wills.91 However, since God’s will is selfcommunicative and perfectly one, can he be said to will freely the ﬁnite things that he creates and sustains in being? Or is the creation of things a necessary act, belonging to the necessary attraction of his will to its inﬁnite object, his own goodness? Aquinas draws upon yet another statement of St. Paul: God “Who worketh all things according to the counsel of His will” (Ephesians 1:11).92 This text belongs to the magniﬁcent hymn that opens the Letter to the Ephesians in which St. Paul praises the Father who “chose us in him [Christ] before the foundation of the world” (1:4) and “destined us in love to be his sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace which he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved” (1:5–6). Aquinas illumines St. Paul’s afﬁrmation metaphysically: “Although God necessarily wills His own goodness, He does not necessarily will things willed on account of His goodness; for it can exist without other things.”93 Nothing is added to God’s inﬁnite goodness by the things that God wills as sharers in his inﬁnite goodness; just as nothing is added to God’s inﬁnite being by the creation of things that participate in being. Such things do not add to God, but rather, by God’s wondrous generosity, share in and reﬂect God. The extent of God’s freedom in creating can be more nearly fathomed by asking whether anything caused God to create. Is there not some purpose intrinsic to a dog, for example, that would have caused God to will to create it? The answer is no, because the ultimate object of God’s will is not the dog. God wills each thing for the purpose of the ultimate end or goal of creation. This object is his own goodness as shared in by creatures. The dog belongs to the wondrous universe that God has ordered to his own goodness. It is toward this “end” that the whole universe, in God’s mysterious Providence, is proceeding. Thus, no other cause than the divine will caused God to 91 Aquinas’s account of God’s causality of all things by God’s knowledge and will is consistent with the natural processes that belong to the created order: for example, the gasses in the universe that eventually form the sun and the planet Earth; human beings who procreate, write books, build houses; plants that grow and produce seeds, etc. All of these things ultimately “are,” however, because God gives them the (continual) gift of being, which is a participation in God himself, and God gives this gift because of his own goodness. Aquinas notes, “Since God wills effects to proceed from deﬁnite causes, for the preservation of order in the universe, it is not unreasonable to seek for causes secondary to the divine will. It would, however, be unreasonable to do so, if such were considered primary, and not as dependent on the will of God” (1, q.19, a.5, ad 2). 92 1, q.19, a.3. 93 1, q.19, a.3, ad 2.

god’s knowledge and will

101

create.94 Neither God does not will to create “by a necessity of nature.”95 Among various arguments against such a doctrine of necessary emanation, Aquinas points out that since creatures that act by intellect and will are more perfect than creatures who act by nature, it follows that God, in his inﬁnite perfection, acts by intellect and will; and his divine nature would not determine him to the production of created effects.96 Thus, God’s creating is perfectly free, a mystery of sheer gift. Levenson’s fragmented God is unable to give fully this gift, since he does not create from nothing, but instead orders and masters things. In Aquinas’s view, by contrast, unless God were fully the giver of this gift, nothing could exist. Aquinas cites Wisdom 11:26, “How could anything endure, if Thou wouldst not?”97 Aquinas presses this extraordinary intimacy of God with creation to a point that, to those who have not realized the implications of God willing what he knows, will cause surprise. He holds that the will of God is always fulﬁlled. The ﬁrst objection to this claim comes from the mystery of salvation as expressed in the Bible: “God will have all men to be saved, and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4).98 If, as seems likely, not all men will be saved (since some appear to die unreconciled to God with blood upon their hands), then it would seem that God’s will is not always fulﬁlled. Aquinas interprets 1 Timothy 2:4 in light of two other central scriptural texts on this topic: Psalm 115:3, “God has done all things, whatsoever he would”99 and (from St. Paul’s discussion of “God’s purpose of election”)100 Romans 9:19, “Who resisteth His will?”101 It is worth noting that the ﬁrst verse of Psalm 115 is the Te Deum: “Not to us, O 94 1, q.19, a.5. Cf. Oliva Blanchette, The Perfection of the Universe According to Aquinas: A Teleological Cosmology (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992). 95 1, q.19, a.4. 96 Ibid. For a defense of God’s freedom in creating, see Bernhard-Thomas Blankenhorn, O.P.’s response to W. Norris Clarke, S.J. (who seems to have changed his view: see The One and the Many A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001]: 238) and to Norman Kretzmann: “The Good as Self-Diffusive in Thomas Aquinas,” Angelicum 79 (2002): 803–37. 97 Ibid. 98 1, q.19, a.6, obj.1. 99 1, q.19, a.6: “Deus autem noster in caelo universa quae voluit fecit” (from the Hebrew) or “Deus autem noster in caelo omnia quaecumque voluit fecit” (from the Septuagint). The numbering of the Psalm is different in the Vulgate, which places this verse in Psalm 113:11. In the RSV, the psalm reads, “Our God is in the heavens, he does whatever he pleases.” 100 Romans 9:11. 101 1, q.19, a.8, obj.2. For Aquinas’s full discussion of the predestination of the saints, which follows upon God’s Providence (and which must be understood in light of the fact that God is not in time, and so there is in God no “pre” or “post”), see 1, q.23.

102

god’s knowledge and will

Lord, not to us, but to thy name give glory, for the sake of thy steadfast love and thy faithfulness!” Aquinas illumines these fundamental scriptural loci by means of a metaphysical analysis of causality. He distinguishes between God, who is the “universal cause” of all things, and “particular causes” or secondary causes through which God accomplishes his plan.102 We touched upon this distinction above: secondary causes preserve the “order of the universe,” in which things can truly cause effects.103 These particular causes are willed by God, yet they may nonetheless be free. Simply put, if “the divine will is perfectly efﬁcacious, it follows not only that things are done, which God wills to be done, but also that they are done in the way that He wills. Now God wills some things to be done necessarily, some contingently, to the right ordering of things, for the building up of the universe.”104 God wills that Jane be a human being with free will (God wills her free will), and God wills that Jane freely cause certain effects. It needs to be seen that were God not to will the act of Jane’s free will, she would have no free will. Were God not to will her free act (the act that she freely wills), she would have no free act. Created act depends upon participation in pure Act, God himself. Recall that Aquinas does not imagine God as “over against” human beings, as if God’s intimate involvement in his creation were a threat to human freedom. On the contrary, it is God’s constant gift of being that enables and sustains any free act. The Enlightenment portrait turns reality upside down. God’s intimate involvement is what enables a free act to be free.105 Human freedom is not lost when God wills human freedom.106 102

1, q.19, a.6. See 1, q.19, a.5, ad 2. 104 1, q.19, a.8. For further discussion, see Bernard Lonergan, S.J., Grace and Freedom, ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000): 66–118, Servais Pinckaers, O.P., The Sources of Christian Ethics (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1995); Harm J. M. J. Goris, Free Creatures of an Eternal God: Thomas Aquinas on God’s Infallible Foreknowledge and Irresistible Will (Leuven: Peeters, 1996). Goris’s book deserves to receive more attention from theologians. 105 It is no surprise that the Enlightenment portrait of God “over against” human beings, threatening human freedom, has led not only to a rejection of God, but also paradoxically to a rejection of human freedom itself, replaced by mechanistic materialism. Cf. David B. Burrell, C.S.C.’s Introduction to his translation of Al-Ghazali, Faith in Divine Unity and Trust in Divine Providence, where Burrell notes that trust in divine providence, for Al-Ghazali, “entails aligning oneself with things as they really are: in Ghazali’s terms, with the truth that there is no agent but God Most High,” when this is properly understood (xx). 106 For further elucidation, see Herbert McCabe, O.P.’s God Matters 14–18. See also Brian J. Shanley, O.P., “Divine Causation and Human Freedom in Aquinas,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 72 (1998): 99–122. Shanley remarks: 103

god’s knowledge and will

103

The distinction between the “universal cause” (God) and the “particular causes” (created things) assists us in understanding why the particular causes cannot frustrate God’s will. This carries us into the question of whether God wills evils, but we should ﬁrst understand the underlying metaphysical framework of causality. Why cannot a defect in a particular cause frustrate the will of the universal cause? For example, did not Adam and Eve (particular causes) frustrate God’s will by eating the fruit? Did not Cain frustrate God’s will by killing Abel, whom God had blessed?107 Aquinas explains that all particular causes are included within

None other than Jean-Luc Marion has argued recently that Aquinas is separated from the subsequent scholastic and modern onto-theological tradition by a deeper sense of divine transcendence that is rooted in creation and that is reﬂected in a different sense of divine causation. God does not cause as the supreme or most powerful Being among beings; God cannot be encompassed by an a priori concept of being or an a priori concept of causation. Aquinas’s God is not a Cartesian causa totalis et efﬁciens moving other beings according to the modern mode of efﬁcient-productive causation. It is rather that God as the creative causa essendi originates beings in a way that transcends any mode of mundane moving and so lies beyond or conceptual ken. For Aquinas, God is not a rival to human freedom like some Homeric deity or the model idol that Nietzsche rightfully saw as a threat to human freedom. Instead, the radical transcendence and distinction of the Creator God from the created world means that God empowers rather than overpowers creaturely freedom. God generously allows created beings to share in divine providence as bearing the dignity of causes in their own right. This is especially true of the human person, who falls under divine providence as a secondary cause of a peculiar kind because it belongs to him to reﬂect the Creator’s own mode of causation through his free, rational, provident, and self-determining actions. (121–2). See also Steven A. Long, “Providence, liberté et loi naturelle,” Revue Thomiste 102 (2002): 355–406. 107 One might ask further: what about Abel? Given that God has willed to permit Cain to do what he freely did, what about poor Abel, who did nothing except for get murdered just when things were looking up in his life? What about God’s command (even taken metaphorically or according to a spiritual sense) to “wipe out” the Amalekites, men, women, and children? In permitting even one instance of innocent suffering, is not God (as Ivan Karamazov says) a villain? In response to the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel and others have come to the conclusion that were God to permit such innocent suffering, despite having the power to stop it, then God would be guilty as at best an accessory to the horrifying crime. Or are we to deny that anyone suffers innocently, and thus make a mockery out of human justice and human experience of, for example, the fragility and innocence of young children? Such questions are raised by John E. Thiel, God, Evil, and Innocent Suffering: A Theological Reﬂection (New York: Crossroad, 2002). Thiel is aware that, according to St. Paul (elaborated by Augustine, the Council of Trent, and others), every human being deserves death because of the introduction of death into the world through original sin, which establishes the dreadful murderous disorder that we ﬁnd elaborated, not merely in

104

god’s knowledge and will

the will of the universal cause: “if any particular cause fails of its effect, this is because of the hindrance of some other particular cause, which is included in the order of the universal cause.”108 Nothing falls out of the providential “order” willed by the universal cause (God), even though the God wills to establish this order (the ordering of all things to the end of his goodness, which is the object of his will) through free causes that are “defectible and contingent.”109 God’s universal will is to order all things to his goodness. Cain’s horribly defective act, in God’s unfathomable wise plan, conduces, despite its wickedness, to this ordering. Human beings cannot stand outside the order of God’s goodness.110 This causal order grounds Aquinas’s answer to the objection posed by a reading of St. Paul’s statement that “God will have all men to be saved” (1 Timothy 2:4). God is like a just judge who in principle (God’s “antecedent will”) wills that all people should live. However, people are free to choose whether to live in justice or whether, by injustice, to experience the “death” the story of Cain, but throughout Genesis (and the remainder of the Bible) (see Thiel, 105ff.). Although one may not be guilty of a particular sin when one suffers, one is caught up in the guilty disorder that is the human condition after the Fall, in the sense of belonging interiorly (or exteriorly in Christ’s case and, through Christ, in the case of baptized children before the age of reason) to the disorderly realm that is the post-Fall world. Thiel states: “This consistent teaching on the universality of sin and guilt has typically been conceived in a way that makes innocent suffering impossible in a Christian worldview” (116). Were this true, then it would be difﬁcult to understand martyrdom. Thiel’s statement needs more nuance: the suffering of the martyr is innocent, and yet belongs interiorly (not simply extrinsically) to the context of the world’s guilt. None of us suffers, as it were, alone; we suffer as part of a disordered body, even when we also suffer (innocently) as part of Christ’s Mystical Body. Both of these aspects are afﬁrmed by what Thiel calls the “classical tradition,” despite Thiel’s claim that “[v]ictimizing sin often causes victimization out of all proportion to the victim’s guilt, and thus the scandal of innocent suffering that the classical tradition works so hard to deny” (128); “the classical tradition makes extraordinary efforts to distance God completely from innocent suffering by denying its very existence” (131). On the contrary, informed by the innocent suffering of Christ and the martyrs (Abel and Job ﬁguratively representing Christ), the classical tradition does not deny the scandal of innocent suffering, but rather sees its interior sacriﬁcial value in the interior healing, or new ordering, of the world whose sin consists precisely in the rejection of self-giving love. Thiel’s position requires him to reject, having misunderstood, the New Testament’s view of Christ’s death as the perfect sacriﬁce (see 150ff ). 108 1, q.19, a.6. 109 1, q.19, a.8. 110 1, q.19, a.6, ad 1. This does not mean that human beings are not called to lament profoundly the state of terrible disorder that persists, even though Christians know that this disorder is now (eschatologically and providentially) ordered in Christ. Cf. Matthew Boulton, “Forsaking God: a theological argument for Christian lamentation,” Scottish Journal of Theology 55 (2002): 58–78.

god’s knowledge and will

105

that is punishment (God’s consequent will).111 Does this not mean, however, that God himself wills evils? If God wills particular causes, does not God will Cain’s act of murder, and does not God will Cain’s refusal (if he did refuse) to repent? Why should Cain be ordered to God’s goodness by eternal punishment, if God himself is the universal cause? Here we ﬁnd the key reason why theologians balk at depicting God as so intimately and intensely involved in the world.112 As Levenson remarks, “I ﬁnd it especially odd that scholars who lived through the years of the Holocaust and other unspeakable horrors of our century should have imagined that the Hebrew Bible consistently upheld a doctrine of God’s uniform, uninterrupted kingship, in spite of ample textual evidence to the contrary.”113 Aquinas’s metaphysics, far from distancing him from the living God, seems to have led him too far in exposing the scriptural God of Presence!114 In illuminating metaphysically the key biblical loci on God’s will, from both the Old and New Testaments,115 Aquinas has shown at every step 111

For a defense of the distinction between God’s antecedent and consequent will, see Richard Schenk, O.P., “The Epoché of Factical Damnation? On the Costs of Bracketing Out the Likelihood of Final Loss,” Logos 1 (1997): 132–3. 112 Like Levenson’s, Thiel’s God is distanced from the world, even though Thiel repeatedly speaks of God’s solidarity and presence with innocent sufferers, and of God’s promise to defeat suffering and death. Thiel remarks, “My theological proposal removes God’s agency from suffering and death in order to reject any notion that these events are God’s retributive justice and the traditional belief that all human suffering is guilty” (129). Thiel struggles against the dualism – separation of God from his creation – that his position implies. If God’s will, however, is not intimately engaged in everything that happens, it is impossible to escape the abyss of dualism. To his credit as a logician, Levenson embraces such dualism, even while (like Thiel) afﬁrming that God will triumph. 113 Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil, xxiii. 114 As Pope John Paul II remarks of this God in Crossing the Threshold of Hope, trans. Jenny McPhee and Martha McPhee (New York: Knopf, 1995), “In a certain sense God has gone too far!” (40). 115 I should note that although I am not attempting to locate my argument within the context of Jewish theology, I do not think that the arguments that I am making are foreign to Jewish theology. In Aquinas these arguments are indebted, through Maimonides and through the Old Testament itself, to Jewish theology. For example, Levenson argues against the position of Abraham Joshua Heschel who: like his Hasidic sources, sought to afﬁrm the principle “All is God” by reference to the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. “The miracle of coming into being out of nothing is only possible through the continual action of God,” Heschel wrote. “His power is constantly present within all His creations, and were He to remove Himself for a moment they would revert to their natural state, which is nothingness.” (Creation and the Persistence of Evil, xxiv) Levenson remarks about Heschel’s position, “This notion of the God who sustains all things, though derived from some common biblical afﬁrmations, is difﬁcult to reconcile with the

106

god’s knowledge and will

God’s extraordinary engagement with the world. As Jesus said, “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground without your Father’s will. But even the hairs of your head are all numbered” (Matthew 10:29–30). Jesus goes on to suggest that, in accord with his Father’s will, human beings will be ordered to God’s goodness in two different ways: “So every one who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven; but whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 10:32–3). How does God’s intimate involvement in creation not involve him in doing evil? First and foremost the acts of free rational creatures, angels and human beings, belong to free rational creatures. No one, including God, compels these actions. Levenson fears that in Protestant theology “the Aristotelian conception of God as unmoved, perfect being” is added to “the classical Reformation notion of grace and its corollary, the fear of ‘works righteousness,’ ” with the result that human acts no longer have any role “in the cosmogonic-soteriological drama.”116 Aquinas’s emphasis on God’s willing all things and on God’s will being fulﬁlled would no doubt inspire this same fear. As Aquinas states, however, “it is not by God’s will that man becomes worse. Now it is clear that every evil makes a thing worse. Therefore God wills not evil things.”117 As the Bible makes clear, man becomes worse by his own sinful acts. God wills only being; God cannot will defect. God is giver of being, not giver of absence of being, old mythological image of the divine warrior at combat with the inimical forces” (xxv). I would agree with this, and would suggest that the mythological image of the divine warrior at combat, while an important metaphor, is not the key self-identiﬁcation of YHWH in the Old Testament. In my view, Levenson overemphasizes the importance of this metaphor, exactly because of the problem of evil. Note how Levenson continues: The image of God’s creating out of nothing leads rather easily to a conception of God as against nothing: there is nothing he is against. This, in turn, leads one to wonder whether there is evil at all in a world in which, as Heschel and his Hasidic source put in, “all is God.” Thus Heschel, though anxious to differentiate his position from pantheism, seems, like pantheism, unable to coordinate the God of morality with the God of cosmogony. In this, his thought, like Niebuhr’s, has broken with the biblical pattern, for better or worse. (xxv) The question is whether Heschel has indeed failed to coordinate the two aspects; and a further question is whether the “biblical pattern” is preserved in Levenson’s own attempt at coordination. 116 Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil, xxvi. 117 1, q.19, a.9.

god’s knowledge and will

107

even though he permits moral and physical corruption to exist by sustaining whatever being remains. Aquinas afﬁrms that God “in no way wills the evil of sin, which is the privation of right order towards the divine good.”118 Aquinas also denies that evil, in itself, “operate[s] towards the perfection and beauty of the universe,” except insofar as God permits evil and accomplishes good out of it (the Cross is an example).119 What, then, does God will when he wills the free act of Cain, that is, when he wills the being of the participated act? We need to approach this question from another way in order to understand it: what does Cain will in his free act of murdering his brother? He wills some good that he thinks will accrue to himself upon his brother’s demise. Does God will the “good” that Cain wills? No, because this good is illusory. In willing to allow the free act of Cain, God wills the good that God alone, in willing himself, fully sees: the unfathomable good, to be revealed at the Final Judgment, of the ordering of all creation, including free creatures, to God’s Goodness. As Aquinas states, “God therefore neither wills evil to be done, nor wills it not to be done, but wills to permit evil to be done; and this is a good.”120 We can only know that it is a good when we understand that God’s willing is not arbitrary, but ﬂows from his wisdom; and that both his willing – that is, his loving, since love is the ﬁrst movement of the will121 – and his wisdom belong to the wondrous perfection that makes him worthy of our worship.122 118

Ibid. 1, q.19, a.9, ad 2. On Aquinas’s difference from Bonaventure here, see Michal Paluch, O.P., “ ‘God permits the evil for the good’: Two different approaches to the History of Salvation in Aquinas and Bonaventure,” Angelicum 80 (2003): 327–36. 120 1, q.19, a.9, ad 3, emphasis added. God does directly will punishment, as the good of justice, even though defect (such as the loss of life, or the loss of eternal goods), results. God also wills the corruption and decay of material things: “in willing the preservation of the natural order, He wills some things to be naturally corrupted” (1, q.19, a.9). 121 1, q.20, a.1. 122 As William Cavanaugh aptly puts it, “Because of God’s absolute simplicity, God knows and loves other things by knowing and loving Himself as creator and sustainer of all that is. We are thus drawn into God’s own circle of knowing and loving which will serve as the basis for Aquinas’s unfolding of the doctrine of the Trinity.” See William T. Cavanaugh, “A Joint Declaration?: Justiﬁcation as Theosis in Aquinas and Luther,” Heythrop Journal 41 (2000): 265–80, at 267. Arguing against LaCugna, Cavanaugh suggests that a “proper understanding of divine simplicity is necessary both to explicating the Trinitarian processions and to Aquinas’s display of the participation of the human being in the Trinitarian life. Far from a divorce of the immanent from the economic Trinity, Aquinas begins with the divine simplicity precisely as a way of overcoming the zero-sum view of divine and human relations, clearing the way for the participation of the human in the divine” (266). Cavanaugh explains that “it is the very otherness of God that explains human participation in the 119

108

god’s knowledge and will

Thus the ordering of creatures to God that God wills in willing himself is not an extrinsic imposition upon history by an aloof God, as many theodicies mistakenly imply. Rather, God wills this good ordering to be accomplished through the free action of the incarnate Son, Jesus Christ cruciﬁed.123 Nor does God will, as Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov would have it, a “future” good ordering that somehow makes up for the evil that human beings do in history. God does not “foresee” events as if he were watching an unfolding movie. From eternity, God directly wills the good ordering of creatures, and by his own sacriﬁcial death in Christ, he accomplishes in history this sheer gift of good ordering. Denys Turner has thus rightly remarked that Aquinas: sits ill to our contemporary debates, since he is a metaphysician, but not one as offering what Heidegger rejects, a defender of natural theology, but not of “theodicy”, a theist who knows nothing of “deism”, an apophaticist whose negativity is rooted in rational foundations, and a rationalist whose conception of reason is as distanced from that of the Enlightenment as it is possible to be.124

Trinity, because it breaks down the zero-sum calculation of the human and the divine. Precisely because God is pure act, God is not another being in the universe which competes for ‘space,’ as it were, with human agents” (269). In the saving action of God – the missions of the Son and Holy Spirit – we are therefore drawn to share more intimately in the divine Act in which we already participate, as Aquinas’s treatment of the properties of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit makes clear. As will be apparent, Cavanaugh’s treatment owes much to the insights of A. N. Williams (about deiﬁcation) in The Ground of Union. Thomas Weinandy’s study of divine actuality in Does God Change? and Does God Suffer? reaches similar conclusions, as does Brian Davies’s The Thought of Thomas Aquinas (cited by Cavanaugh) and Michael Hanby, Augustine and Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2003): 82–90. 123 Romanus Cessario, O.P. states, “Co-present in the divine intelligence with the tragedy of human history is its merciful remedy. Before all time the human history of Jesus Christ as head and salviﬁc focus of historical humanity has been predestined; in that human history and destiny all human histories have been actively saved” (The Godly Image, 205). See also Emile Bailleux, “La plénitude des temps dans le Christ,” Revue Thomiste 71 (1971): 5–32; Nicholas J. Healy, “Inclusion in Christ: Background to a Christian Doctrine of Providence,” Communio 29 (2002): 469–89. 124 Denys Turner, “Apophaticism, idolatry and the claims of reason,” 33–4. Turner concludes that “if you want to be an Eckhartian, and say, as he does, that ‘you should love God as he is non-God’, then you had better be a Thomist ﬁrst, lest it be said of you with justice, as Scotus said of other over-enthusiastic aphophaticists of his time, negationes . . . non summe amamus, which, roughly paraphrased, means: you cannot love a mere postponement” (34).

god’s knowledge and will

109

This chapter has sought to engage Levenson’s work as representative of an antimetaphysical turn in Old Testament theology, and in biblical exegesis in general. I am well aware that the fact that Levenson is writing Jewish theology, and that my effort is one of Christian theology, makes this critical engagement somewhat problematic. However, Levenson’s work opens up with burning clarity the gaps that scholars today ﬁnd in metaphysical accounts of the God of Israel, and boldly proposes a constructive proposal regarding God’s causal ordering that seeks to ﬁll those gaps. Aquinas’s views, when understood as a radical and biblical vision of God’s intimate presence in the world, ﬁll the gaps better than does either Levenson’s constructive proposal or most contemporary systematic theologies. Indeed, Aquinas’s metaphysical analysis, not surprisingly, turns out to be radically Christological and pneumatological in its implications. Only such an understanding of God’s intimate presence could justify the claim that the self-same God of Israel is Jesus of Nazareth, Israel’s Messiah, whose Cross, understood in light of his resurrection in the Spirit, reveals God’s gift of good ordering as profoundly rooted in God’s personal engagement with sinners. To this topic – God’s Paschal mystery and the revelation of the triune God – we now turn.

Chapter Four

THE PASCHAL MYSTERY AND SAPIENTIAL THEOLOGY OF THE TRINITY

When the New Testament scholars N. T. Wright and Richard Bauckham fault patristic and medieval theology for distorting metaphysically the biblical portrait of the Trinity, their arguments should be given signiﬁcant weight.1 This is even more the case when their view corresponds to a movement in Protestant (Barth, Moltmann) and Catholic (Mühlen, Balthasar) Trinitarian theology to employ the Paschal mystery of Jesus Christ as the fundamental datum for speculation about the inner life of the Trinity.2 Anne Hunt, in her study of this theological movement, speaks for many of these theologians in arguing that before the twentieth century, theologians focused on the “divine being ad intra” with the result that the events of salvation history did not shape their speculative conclusions about

1

See Thomas G. Weinandy, O.F.M. Cap., Does God Suffer? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000): 1–74, for a survey a contemporary theological/exegetical critiques of the doctrine of divine impassibility and an account of the Old and New Testaments that suggests that metaphysical investigation is in fact required by Scripture itself. 2 In order to grasp the links between Protestant and Catholic theologians on this point, as well as to understand their philosophical underpinnings, see David Coffey, Deus Trinitas: The Doctrine of the Triune God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999): 105–50; and Samuel M. Powell, The Trinity in German Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

the paschal mystery and theology of the trinity

111

the Trinity.3 Hunt indicates surprise that this situation lasted as long as it did: “Why then is the Trinity not considered in terms of Jesus’ death and resurrection? In retrospect it seems an astonishing omission in classical Trinitarian theology. Apparently the interconnection of the Trinity with Jesus’ death and resurrection is simply not a question at this stage in the tradition.”4 In the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar and numerous of his contemporaries, Hunt recognizes something new, namely an interpretation of the Trinity that ﬁnds in Christ’s passion and resurrection, rather than in the metaphysical structure of spiritual act, the foundation for speculation about the inner-Trinitarian mystery. Does Aquinas approach the mystery of the Trinity through the revelation of God in the words and deeds of Jesus Christ? This chapter will suggest that the answer is yes. Contemporary theologians’ focus on the revelatory character of Christ’s passion and resurrection has, as we will see, clear afﬁnities with Aquinas’s approach. Nonetheless, although the profound connections between Aquinas’s theology of the triune God and his soteriology have been exposed by, among others, A. N. Williams,5 one must state at the outset that Aquinas, in his formal discussions of the triune God in himself, hardly makes reference to Christ’s passion and resurrection. The concerns raised by contemporary exegetes and theologians, and their call for a different approach, are not surprising. If Christ cruciﬁed and risen is the heart of revelation, should not reﬂection upon his Paschal mystery guide reﬂection upon all other theological topics? Should not the Paschal mystery strikingly illumine the reality of God-in-himself ? This chapter addresses these concerns of the “Paschal mystery”6 exegetes and theologians, in order to gain insight into the revelation that the one God of Israel is a Trinity of Persons. First I will examine the exegetical approaches and concerns of N. T. Wright and Richard Bauckham, both of whose investigations of the biblical “identity of God” leads them to criticize traditional theological approaches to the divine identity. In light of Bauckham’s and Wright’s call for a depiction of God that employs the Paschal mystery as the central analogy for the divine life, I will describe in detail Hans Urs von Balthasar’s approach to this question. I will then attempt to clarify further the issue at stake by exploring 3

Anne Hunt, The Trinity and the Paschal Mystery: A Development in Recent Catholic Theology (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1997), 2. 4 Ibid., 5; cf. vii–viii. 5 A. N. Williams, The Ground of Union: Deiﬁcation in Aquinas and Palamas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 6 This name has been applied to them by David Coffey.

112

the paschal mystery and theology of the trinity

the theological signiﬁcance of Christ’s Paschal mystery according to Aquinas. Aquinas’s treatise on Christ’s passion can help us to understand what it might mean to say that the Paschal mystery is the prime locus of revelation about God without thereby suggesting that Christ’s suffering, qua suffering, is an analog for the divine life. Using both Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae and his Commentary on the Gospel of John, I will show how for Aquinas, Christ’s Paschal mystery manifests – to the eyes of faith – the Trinity.

1

N. T. Wright and Richard Bauckham on Jesus and the Identity of God

N. T. Wright has remarked, “Long before anyone talked about ‘nature’ and ‘substance,’ ‘person,’ and ‘Trinity,’ the early Christians had quietly but deﬁnitely discovered that they could say what they felt obliged to say about Jesus (and the Spirit) by telling the Jewish story of God, Israel and the world, in the Jewish language of Spirit, Word, Torah, Presence/Glory, Wisdom, and now Messiah/Son.”7 For Wright, narrative theology – theology that seeks insight into Israel’s God by retelling the story of Israel and placing Jesus within that story, as does the biblical narrative – offers the most accurate portrait of God. Wright conceives of his exegesis as dependent upon this form of narrative theology. In Wright’s words, “if you start with the God of the Exodus, of Isaiah, of creation and covenant, of the Psalms, and ask what that God might be like, were he to become human, you will ﬁnd that he might look very much like Jesus of Nazareth, and perhaps never more so than when he dies on a Roman cross.”8 Speculative theology is suspect – at the very least to be normed and corrected by narrative theology. Given this starting point, Wright warns against the tendency of Christians to speak about a “God” abstracted from this Jewish story. Although he thinks that a “high Christology” belonged to the Christian message from the outset,9 Wright is wary of translating the language of the New Testament authors into the terms of the later creedal formulations. The phrase “Son of God” exempliﬁes this mistake for Wright: 7

N. T. Wright, “Jesus and the Identity of God,” Ex Auditu 14 (1998): 48–9. Wright, “Jesus and the Identity of God,” 54. 9 See, e.g., the exegetical essays in The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology, N. T. Wright (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 18–136. 8

the paschal mystery and theology of the trinity

113

“Later Christian theologians, forgetting their Jewish roots, would of course read this as straightforwardly Nicene Christology: Jesus was the second person of the Trinity.”10 In fact, Wright suggests, the early Christians were simply making use of a phrase found frequently in the “Jewish story” of their milieu, in order to convey Jesus’ messianic identity. As Wright argues in a number of places, the key to the worldview or story of Jesus’ Jewish milieu was that “YHWH would comfort and restore his people after their exile, would pour out his wrath upon the pagans who had held them captive, and would return in person to Zion to reign as king.”11 Wright interprets Jesus’ actions in light of this Jewish narrative. On the basis of an analysis of Jesus’ actions, as recorded in the synoptic gospels, Wright concludes that Jesus “believed that it was his own task not only to announce, but also to enact and embody, the three major kingdom-themes, namely, the return from exile, the defeat of evil, and the return of YHWH to Zion.”12 By enacting and embodying these three tasks, Jesus was doing (or claiming to do) what only YHWH could do. For Wright, Jesus’ resurrection explains the shift in “worldview” that occurred among Jesus’ disciples after his death. In light of his resurrection, his disciples recognized that in Jesus YHWH had actually returned to Zion and renewed the covenant, now ordered around Jesus himself, as the true interpreter of Torah and true embodiment of the Temple, in whom the exile of Israel was over and through whom sins were forgiven.13 Given the validation of Jesus’ messianic actions, it became necessary to “speak of him within the language of Jewish monotheism.”14 The resurrection conﬁrms that Jesus’ enactment and embodiment of YHWH’s work was truly the presence of YHWH, the God revealed in the Jewish Scriptures, restoring and renewing (as promised by the prophets) Israel and the world. Wright summarizes this perspective: “In Jesus himself, I suggest, we see the biblical portrait of YHWH come to life.”15 10

Wright, “Jesus and the Identity of God,” 48. N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), 588. See also Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 145–338. 12 Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, 481; cf. “Jesus and the Identity of God,” 52–3 (and elsewhere throughout Wright’s corpus). 13 Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, 538–9. 14 Wright, “Jesus and the Identity of God,” 52; cf. The Climax of the Covenant, 99–136. 15 Wright, “Jesus and the Identity of God,” 53. In addressing the same texts of Wright and Bauckham that I am discussing here, C. Kavin Rowe has pointed out that their understanding of ﬁrst-century Jewish monotheism needs to take more fully into account the fact 11

114

the paschal mystery and theology of the trinity

For Wright, the early Christians were not only challenging the worldview or story of their Jewish milieu; they were afﬁrming it, announcing its fulﬁllment, and redescribing God by insisting that “[Jesus] and his Father belonged together within the Jewish picture of the one God.”16 On this basis, he critiques views of God that seem to him to be unbiblical: “Western orthodoxy has for too long had an overly lofty, detached, high-and-dry, uncaring, uninvolved, and (as the feminists would say) kyriarchal view of god. It has always tended to approach the Christological question by assuming this view of god and then ﬁtting Jesus into it.”17 The “kyriarchal” god, he implies, would never have become truly incarnate – in other words, never would have entered into the messiness of enacting and embodying the restoration and renewal of Israel. The “kyriarchal” god of “Western orthodoxy” remains fundamentally ahistorical, even when the Incarnation is afﬁrmed as dogma. He suggests that “[w]e could only ask the ‘kenotic’ question in the way we normally do – did Jesus ‘empty himself ’ of some of his ‘divine attributes’ in becoming human? – if we were tacitly committed to a quite unbiblical view of God, a high and majestic God for whom incarnation would be a category mistake and cruciﬁxion a scandalous nonsense.”18 Instead, rather than beginning with theological or philosophical a priori claims, theologians, aided by historical methodology, should contemplate Jesus’ (Jewish) humanity, as presented in the synoptic gospels, in order to “see, as Paul says, the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”19 In Jesus, Israel’s God is fully revealed.20

that “imaging, and, of course, identifying YHWH as a human being is categorically ruled out by the foundational ﬁrst two commandments of the Decalogue” (Rowe, “Romans 10:13: What Is the Name of the Lord?” Horizons in Biblical Theology 22 [2000]: 167; cf. 169). Rowe argues that it is necessary to distinguish more adequately “between Creator and creature” (168) in order to grasp the radicality of St. Paul’s claims about Jesus. In this view, Wright and Bauckham “by and large get at the central question the wrong way around. That is to say, their studies move in the direction of how it is that Jesus can be identiﬁed with YHWH (the divinity of Jesus), the one God of Jewish monotheism. It is the implicit underside of this question, however, that needs the attention and creates problems for their theses – how can the creator YHWH, the one who cannot be imaged as a human creature, be totally identiﬁed in his identity with the human creature Jesus?” Rather than analyzing Jesus’ identity metaphysically, Rowe answers the question by suggesting that Paul’s (or Saul’s) encounter with the risen Lord enabled Paul to re-read the Scriptures and ﬁnd that the life of Jesus embodied and revealed the identity of YHWH. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 54–5. 19 Ibid., 55. 20 Wright remarks, “I do not think Jesus ‘knew he was God’ in the same sense that one knows one is tired or happy, male or female. He did not sit back and say to himself ‘Well

the paschal mystery and theology of the trinity

115

Richard Bauckham, a New Testament scholar with a background in the theology of Jürgen Moltmann, has taken a similar approach to the question of Jesus’ identity. Bauckham ﬁrst makes the argument that ﬁrstcentury (or “Second Temple” period) “Jewish monotheism did not characterize the uniqueness of God in such a way as to make the early Christian inclusion of Jesus in the unique identity of God inconceivable.”21 Bauckham notes that scholars of the Second Temple period have generally made one of two claims with regard to the issue of “monotheism.” On the one side are scholars who hold that Second Temple Judaism conceived monotheism strictly, so that the attribution of divinity to Jesus would have meant breaking with the Jewish monotheistic worldview. On the other side are scholars who suggest that Jewish monotheism of this period was open to “various kinds of intermediary ﬁgures – principal angels, exalted humans, personiﬁed divine attributes or functions – who are understood to occupy a subordinate divine or semi-divine status.”22 Bauckham proposes that both sides are partially right. In his view, Second Temple monotheism was indeed strict: “most Jews in this period. . . . drew the line of distinction between the one God and all other reality clearly, and were in the habit of distinguishing God from all other reality by means of certain clearly articulated criteria.”23 However, despite this strictness, Second Temple monotheism was also ﬂexible, or open to a narrative that attributed divinity to Jesus. Bauckham argues that this ﬂexibility lies in the particular ways that Second Temple monotheism “understood the uniqueness of God.”24 These ways can be seen by reﬂecting upon the practice by observant Jews of reciting the “Shema” (Deuteronomy 6:4–6) and the ﬁrst two commandI never! I’m the second person of the Trinity!’ ” (Wright, “Jesus and the Identity of God,” 53.) Wright adds that the “category of ‘vocation’ [is] the appropriate way forward for talking about what Jesus knew and believed about himself.” (Ibid.) Although Wright’s critique is aimed at the patristic and medieval tradition, for Aquinas, Jesus’ human knowledge of his divinity certainly belongs to his vocation of preaching about divine mysteries. This knowledge could not trivialize Jesus’ human thinking (as in “Well I never! . . .”). On the contrary, Jesus’ exalted human knowledge – as a spiritual communion – rules out such childish self-reﬂection. 21 Richard Bauckham, God Cruciﬁed: Monotheism & Christology in the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999): 72. 22 Ibid., 2. 23 Ibid., 3. He adds, “So-called intermediary ﬁgures were not ambiguous semi-divinities straddling the boundary between God and creation. Some were understood as aspects of the one God’s own unique reality. Most were regarded as unambiguously creatures, exalted servants of God whom the literature often takes pains to distinguish clearly from the truly divine reality of the one and only God.” (3–4) 24 Ibid., 5.

116

the paschal mystery and theology of the trinity

ments of the Decalogue (Exodus 20:2–6 and Deuteronomy 5:6–10). By reciting twice daily the Shema (and possibly reciting the Decalogue as well), Second Temple Jews engaged in what Bauckham describes as a “kind of practical monotheism, requiring a whole pattern of daily life and cultic worship formed by exclusive allegiance to the one God.”25 In other words, their monotheism was not simply of the intellectual variety, as with a puriﬁed concept of God. Rather, their monotheism involved obedience to the God speaking in the Torah and through the prophets. Bauckham states, “Since the biblical God has a name and a character, since this God acts, speaks, relates, can be addressed, and in some sense known, the analogy of human personal identity suggests itself as the category with which to synthesize the biblical and Jewish understanding of God.”26 More than a mere conceptual breakthrough, Jewish monotheism was the response of a people to the God whose identity is revealed “in the narratives of Israel’s history.”27 Bauckham is careful to point out that these narratives, even in their most anthropomorphic passages, “are aware of the transcendence of God,” in the sense that the biblical authors recognize that in presenting God as a character with a personal (narrative) identity they are employing language analogously.28 Despite this caveat, Bauckham emphasizes that a monotheism deﬁned in terms of personal (narrative) “identity” differs greatly from a monotheism deﬁned in the categories of Greek philosophy, namely the “concept of divine essence or nature.”29 By developing the category of identity, he seeks to overcome the limits imposed by the standard distinction between “functional” and “ontic” attribution of divinity. Second Temple monotheism, he argues, was concerned not with abstract attributes but with the identity of a personal God, YHWH, and thus functional lordship cannot be separated in this context from “ontic” lordship.30 Israel has learned God’s personal characteristics – who, rather than merely what, God is – through her history (the patriarchs and the Exodus) and through God’s revealing the divine name and its meaning to Moses (Exodus 3 and Exodus 34). Bauckham distinguishes two classes of such characteristics: “There are those which identify God in his relationship to Israel and there are those 25

Ibid., 6–7. Ibid. 27 Bauckham here acknowledges a debt to narrative theology (notably the work of Hans Frei), with its emphasis on “identity” as revealed by the continuity of a narrative. 28 Ibid., 8. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., 41–2. 26

the paschal mystery and theology of the trinity

117

which identify God in his relation to all reality.”31 The two classes are united, Bauckham notes, in “Israel’s eschatological expectation”: the prophets testify that precisely in fulﬁlling his promises to his people Israel (in accord with his identity as already revealed to Israel), YHWH will reveal to all nations “his sovereignty as Creator and Ruler of all things.”32 It is by these characteristics – Creator and Ruler – that Second Temple Judaism, inﬂuenced largely by Deutero-Isaiah, knows God’s personal identity as the one true God.33 Only the God identiﬁed as Creator and Ruler could be worshipped, because only this God is distinct from every creature.34 With regard to the personiﬁcations of divine Wisdom found in Second Temple literature, Bauckham argues that in each case Wisdom is intended to express an aspect of YHWH’s identity, that is, the one God’s identity. Bauckham suggests that personiﬁed Wisdom may indeed involve, for the Jewish authors, “some form of real distinction within the unique identity of the one God,”35 but the oneness of God (YHWH’s identity as Creator) is not challenged by these authors. The point is that Second Temple Judaism insists upon God’s oneness, as constituent of God’s identity, without thereby ruling out “distinctions within the divine identity.”36 Bauckham then makes two extended arguments. First, he argues that the New Testament authors, without rejecting Jewish monotheism, purposefully include Jesus within God’s identity: “They include Jesus in the unique divine sovereignty over all things, they include him in the unique divine creation of all things, they identify him by the divine name which names the unique divine identity, and they portray him as accorded the worship which, for Jewish monotheists, is recognition of the unique divine identity.”37 This argument, which Bauckham substantiates by brieﬂy surveying the New Testament in light of the Old Testament, depends upon the particular discourse used by the New Testament authors to describe Jesus and his work. Simply put, Bauckham’s position is that by employing particular Old Testament passages and motifs, the New Testament authors purposefully inscribe Jesus into the discourse of Jewish monotheism. While we cannot here evaluate the merits of Bauckham’s proposal, 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid. Ibid.,

9. 10. 10–11. 13–16. 22. 26.

118

the paschal mystery and theology of the trinity

we can note its similarity to Wright’s approach. Just as Wright evokes the “worldview” of Second Temple Judaism and then shows how Jesus’ actions enact the fulﬁllment of YHWH’s anticipated restoration of Israel, Bauckham points to the discourse in which Second Temple Jews narrated YHWH’s identity and then shows how the New Testament authors identify Jesus with the God of Israel.38 The second argument that Bauckham makes is of more signiﬁcance for our purposes. Bauckham suggests that for the early Christians, “focusing on the earthly Jesus turned the issue of the divine identity around.”39 Not only was Jesus identiﬁed with the already-known personal characteristics of the God of Israel, but now the identity of the God of Israel had to be re-thought in terms of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. In this re-thinking, the New Testament authors turned once again to the Scriptures of Israel. As Bauckham states, “They brought the Old Testament text into relationship with the history of Jesus in a process of mutual interpretation from which some of their profoundest theological insights sprang.”40 Bauckham considers Deutero-Isaiah (Isaiah 40–55) to be the crucial text for this process of mutual interpretation, because here one ﬁnds the themes of Jewish monotheism interwoven with the revelation of God’s glory in the person of his suffering Servant.41 Interpreting Philippians 2:5–11, he suggests that the central theme of the passage is not the “contrast of divine and human natures,” but the contrast between divine status (honor) and the “loss of all status.”42 The God of Israel, in Jesus, is revealed as the “self-giving” God, whose identity itself (Creator and Ruler) is pure self-giving.43 In Bauckham’s words, “the cross reveals who God is.”44 Baukham proceeds to clarify the relationship of the God revealed by the Cross to the identity of God revealed the Old Testament. Recalling 38 While their methods have a structural similarity, they obviously proceed along different paths. It should also be noted that Wright has documented and defended his position, in his two volumes on Jesus and Israel, far more extensively than Bauckham has done thus far. 39 Ibid., 46. 40 Ibid., 47. 41 Ibid., 48ff. 42 Ibid., 61. Bauckham gives a similar interpretation of the Gospel of John. He notes that for the Fourth Evangelist, “When Jesus is lifted up, exalted in his humiliation on the cross, then the unique divine identity (‘I am he’) will be revealed for all who can to see” (65–6). 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid., 63.

the paschal mystery and theology of the trinity

119

his earlier discussion, he notes t–hat God in the Old Testament is identiﬁed not simply as Creator and Ruler, but also as the God of the Exodus and the covenants, the merciful and faithful God. The prophets foretell the eschatological vindication of this covenant God, in which the covenant God, characterized by mercy and faithfulness, will be revealed to all the nations. The New Testament authors witness to the reality that in Jesus’ Cross, this eschatological vindication has been manifested.45 The relationship between divine identity in the two Testaments is thus one of both “consistency” and “novelty.” The consistency is found in two aspects: the fact that the Old Testament expects that God’s covenantal identity (God’s mercy and faithfulness) will be manifested by a new, triumphant act; and the fact that the God of Israel, in the Old Testament as well as the New, “is characteristically the God of the lowly and the humiliated, the God who hears the cry of the oppressed, the God who raises the poor from the dust, the God who from his throne on high identiﬁes with those in the depths, the God who exercises his sovereignty on high in solidarity with those of lowest status here below.”46 The novelty, Bauckham proposes, consists in three related points: ﬁrst, in Jesus, the God of Israel dwells “not only with but as the lowest of the low”; second, the divine self-giving happens through incarnation, in a human life; third, “the inclusion of Jesus in the identity of God means the inclusion in God of the interpersonal relationship between Jesus and his Father.”47 With regard to this third aspect, Bauckham emphasizes that this relation in God does not undermine God’s personal agency towards creatures. Rather, God’s personal agency even in the Old Testament is understood in an analogous way, so that God’s personal agency does not rule out (as it would for mere human beings) a distinction of subjects in God. These aspects of novelty require the revelation of a new name: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:19).48 Like Wright, Bauckham concludes by afﬁrming Jesus’ divinity but criticizing theological approaches inﬂuenced by Greek philosophical categories. He remarks, “The conceptual shift from Jewish to Greek categories was from categories focused on divine identity – who God is – to categories focused on divine being or nature – what God is.”49 This analysis 45 46 47 48 49

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.,

71. 73. 73–5. 76. 78.

120

the paschal mystery and theology of the trinity

does not mean that he rejects the formulations of the early councils, such as the Nicene homoousion. Instead, he critiques the Fathers of the Church on other grounds: “the shift to categories of divine nature and the Platonic deﬁnition of divine nature [substance] which the fathers took for granted proved serious impediments to anything more than a formal inclusion of human humiliation, suffering and death in the identity of God. That God was cruciﬁed is indeed a patristic formulation, but the Fathers largely resisted its implications for the doctrine of God.”50 In sum, the “God of the attributes” could not adequately account for the revelation of the suffering God. The identity of God as a suffering God has only been fully realized, Bauckham suggests, in the twentieth century, through the work of theologians such as Barth and Moltmann, drawing upon the breakthrough insights of Martin Luther.51

2

Hans Urs von Balthasar on the Cross as Analog for the Trinity52

Bauckham mentions two Protestant theologians, but he could equally have mentioned the contribution of the Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar toward understanding the Cross as an analog for the Trinity. How does Balthasar understand the Cross? I will begin with two texts from Balthasar’s trilogy. In volume four of his Theo-Drama, Balthasar states, “It is all the more terrifying for the Son, therefore, in the darkness of his anguish, to see that this whole work, which has begun to be realized in Mary, is pointless (because of his gratuitous suffering) and doomed to failure. The Son is not simply alone with sinners in that absolute exchange envisaged by Luther: he is accompanied by a witness to God’s activity (which always operates sola gratia), and this robs the Man of Sorrows 50

Ibid., 79. Ibid. Bauckham cites his own Moltmann: Messianic Theology in the Making (Basingstoke: Marshall Pickering, 1987), as well as Alister E. McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), D. K. P. Ngien, The Suffering of God According to Martin Luther’s ‘Theologia Crucis’ (New York: Peter Lang, 1995), and J. Moltmann, The Cruciﬁed God, trans. R. Wilson and J. Bowden (London: SCM, 1974), among others. For an opposing view, drawing on the brilliant work of Michel René Barnes, see John Milbank, “The Force of Identity,” in The Word Made Strange (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997): 194–216. In light of Gregory of Nyssa’s reﬂections on God’s active power, Milbank warns against theologies that make “pity and suffering ontologically ultimate” (208). 52 This section has appeared, in slightly different form, as “Balthasar on Christ’s Consciousness on the Cross,” The Thomist 65 (2001): 567–81. 51

the paschal mystery and theology of the trinity

121

of all hope of completing his mission.”53 Does this mean that Jesus is hopeless on the Cross? Compare a second text, this time from volume two of Balthasar’s Theologik (published ﬁve years later): “Jesus must have had before his eyes the impossibility of accomplishing his earthly mission . . . from the very beginning and, as resistance to him grew, with increasing clarity.”54 In his experience, therefore: two things can and must occur together: forsakenness by the Father as the ﬁnal radicalness of frustration and failure (Mark 15:34, Matthew 27:46) and the knowledge (which at the moment is perhaps no longer tangible) that “the hour is coming, indeed it has come, when you will be scattered, every man to his home, and will leave me alone; yet I am not alone, for the Father is with me”(John 16:32). Ultimate failure and sure knowledge of ultimate fulﬁllment are not, as in the Old Testament, juxtaposed, but contain one another here.55

In this second text, Balthasar holds that Jesus would have known that his earthly mission of gathering Israel was doomed, and yet would have known (even if not in a “tangible,” conscious way) that the Father would accomplish the mission. How is one to understand this insistence that the incarnate Son is both robbed of all hope for his mission and yet still knows that the Father will triumph? Balthasar’s answer is that this experience of the incarnate Son reveals the unity, in the Spirit, of “removal into the uttermost distance from the Father and the ﬁnal step towards and into the Father. The paradox of every Christian mission, that is, movement away from God as movement towards God, is brought here to a unique, because most profoundly Trinitarian, fulﬁllment.”56 In other words, Balthasar proposes that cruciform abandonment functions as the supreme analog for the Trinity. Challenging both the psychological analogy (Augustine and Aquinas) and the intrasubjective analogy (Richard of St. Victor), Balthasar seeks a new path for Trinitarian theology. His critique of Augustine’s 53

Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama IV: The Action, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994): 357. 54 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theologik, Vol. II: Wahrheit Gottes (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1985): 222; cf. 305ff. For the English translations, I have employed by permission a draft of Adrian Walker’s forthcoming translation. 55 Ibid., 223. 56 Ibid.

122

the paschal mystery and theology of the trinity

psychological analogy is standard; he suggests that it tends towards monism.57 His critique of Richard is more signiﬁcant, since most theologians who criticize Augustine’s model seek to embrace Richard’s. Balthasar notes that “it is mistaken to take a naïve construction of the divine mystery after the pattern of human relationships (as Richard of St. Victor attempted by way of a counterblast to Augustine) and make it absolute; for it fails to take into account the crude anthopomorphism involved in a plurality of beings.”58 For Balthasar, Richard’s mistake is not tritheism – Balthasar later remarks that four of the six books of Richard’s De Trinitate are devoted to the one divine essence, in order “to exclude all suspicion of tritheism”59 – but rather lies in Richard’s grounding of his analogy upon three human persons rather than upon the Trinitarian event of the incarnate Son’s Passion, death, and Resurrection. Balthasar argues that in order to gain more than “the faintest glimmer of an elucidation of the superabundant triune life resident within the divine unity,”60 one must look beyond all creaturely analogies and focus upon the revealed archetype, Jesus Christ.61 Balthasar thus identiﬁes the incarnate Son of God’s Paschal mystery (itself the ultimate expression of the entire kenotic existence of the incar57

Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama, Vol. III: The Dramatis Personae: The Person in Christ, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992): 526. He explains that Augustine’s analogy for the Trinity from the imago dei or the rational soul’s memory, understanding, and will “takes place within the same spiritual being, thus yielding an image of the inner life of the one divine Spirit; but, at the same time, the sequence closes the created spirit in on itself and is unable to show how genuine objectiﬁcation and genuine love – which is always directed toward the other – can come about.” 58 Ibid., 526–527. For a more favorable scholarly reading of Richard, cf. Nico den Bok, Communicating the Most High: A Systematic Study of Person and Trinity in the Theology of Richard of St. Victor (Paris: Brepols, 1996). 59 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama, Vol. V: The Last Act, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1998): 82; cf. Theologik II, 39. 60 Theologik II, 39. 61 Cf. Theologik II, 35–42. Balthasar describes Augustine’s analogy as “dialectical,” beginning from knowing, and Richard’s as “dialogical,” beginning from loving. Regarding both analogies, he concludes, “Augustine and Richard, and thus Scheeben as well, were fully conscious of the fragility of their undertakings. . . . The images remained as such unconnected and juxtaposed in the created realm – those most clearly of all which consciously presented themselves as imagines Trinitatis: the point of intersection where the lines projected by Augustine, Richard and Scheeben would have to meet was inﬁnitely beyond construction. They are – and here Hegel’s method can be included as well – images which look upwards from below and (what might be surprising at ﬁrst glance) which Christ does not utilize when he undertakes to exposit the divine aspect of his person into the language of his humanity” (Theologik II, 61).

the paschal mystery and theology of the trinity

123

nate Son) as an economic Trinitarian analogy for the immanent Trinity.62 Because of the “identity of unity and difference” in Jesus (whose divine and human natures are united in the Person of the Son), his metaphysical constitution already points to the unity and distinction of the divine Trinity.63 The suffering, death, and resurrection of the incarnate Son reveal analogously the eternal mutual kenosis of the Father and the Son in the ecstasis of love.64 The Father’s kenotic begetting of the Son is imaged by the Son’s kenotic handing-himself-over to the Father; the intra-divine kenosis means that every intra-divine relation involves mutual kenosis. Balthasar posits (working “backwards” from the atemporal order of the processions) “the Son’s antecedent consent to be begotten and the Spirit’s antecedent consent to proceed from Father and Son.”65 In this mutuality he ﬁnds “the way in which the Persons of the Trinity ‘make room’ (‘space’) for one another, granting each other freedom of being and action.”66 Since the kenotic “distance” between the Father and the Son constitutes (as spanned by the Spirit) the greatest possible separation, no matter how “bitter,” the incarnate Son endures (out of love) the Father’s wrath against sinners without thereby causing the Godhead to break apart.67 Quoting the mystical theology of Adrienne von Speyr, Balthasar further holds that the intra-divine kenosis means that the Father in a certain sense 62

For further analysis, see above all Thomas Rudolf Krenski’s Passio Caritatis. Trinitarische Passiologie im Werk Hans Urs von Balthasars (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1990); see also, e.g., Anne Hunt, The Trinity and the Paschal Mystery: A Development in Recent Catholic Theology (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1997); idem, “Psychological Analogy and Paschal Mystery in Trinitarian Theology,” Theological Studies 59 (1998): 197–218; Margaret Turek, “Dare We Hope ‘That All Men Be Saved’ (1 Timothy 2:4)?: On von Balthasar’s Trinitarian Grounds for Christian Hope,” Logos 1 (1997): 92–121; idem, “‘As the Father Has Loved Me’ (John 15:9): Balthasar’s Theodramatic Approach to a Theology of God the Father,” Communio 26 (1999): 295–318; J. B. Quash, “‘Between the Brutely Given, and the Brutally, Banally Free’: Von Balthasar’s Theology of Drama in Dialogue with Hegel,” Modern Theology 13 (1997): 293–318; Brian J. Spence, “The Hegelian Element in Von Balthasar’s and Moltmann’s Understanding of the Suffering of God,” Toronto Journal of Theology 14 (1998): 45–60; Steffen Lösel, “Murder in the Cathedral: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s New Dramatization of the Doctrine of the Trinity,” Pro Ecclesia 5 (1996): 427–39; Edward Oakes, S.J., Pattern of Redemption: The Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar (New York: Continuum, 1994): 242ff. 63 Theologik II, 117–18. 64 Balthasar acknowledges his debt to the Trinitarian metaphysics of Gustav Siewerth, Clemens Kaliba, Wilhelm Moock, and Klaus Hemmerle. See Theo-Drama V, 66–76. 65 Theo-Drama V, 93; cf. Theologik II, 126–28. 66 Ibid. 67 Theo-Drama IV, 325; Theo-Drama V, 98.

124

the paschal mystery and theology of the trinity

“conceals” knowledge in order to make room for the freedom of love.68 He states: “The Father shows the Son less his total knowledge than his total love, which conceals something whose concealment lets love radiate even more brightly.” In God there are things that exist “only to provide love with every opportunity for development, to give it the room which it would lack if everything were stale foreknowledge – room which it needs, for it cannot exist without self-surrender, movement and ﬂight.”69

Again following von Speyr, Balthasar speaks of faith, analogously understood, as a “divine virtue.” He explains that “faith as it exists in God . . . is in harmony with ‘irrefragable knowledge’ but is not swallowed up by it, because the love that grants freedom to the other [divine person] always offers him something ‘that transcends his capacities of knowing’, something that has an utterly unique origin, springing from the ‘hidden depths of the one and communicated to the hidden depths of the other.’ ”70 Divine knowledge is muted in order to allow for the fuller expression of the ecstatic interplay of love. The metaphysical suppositions of this kenotic theology of the Trinity deserve notice. Drawing upon Gustav Siewerth, Balthasar argues that love – as self-surrender – encompasses the other transcendental categories.71 The self-emptying or self-surrender that distinguishes (and unites) the 68

Theo-Drama V, 96. Cf. Guy Mansini, O.S.B., “Balthasar and the Theodramatic Enrichment of the Trinity,” The Thomist 64 (2000): 499–519; Thomas G. Dalzell, The Dramatic Encounter of Divine and Human Freedom in the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar (New York: Peter Lang, 1997). 69 Theo-Drama V, 96. The notion of “stale foreknowledge” in God suggests that Balthasar is taking a univocal approach to divine knowledge. Furthermore, two other questions arise here. How could the Father’s “total knowledge” differ from the Son’s “total knowledge” without, at some point, rending the unity of the divine essence? How can divine Persons knowing and willing distinct things not be three gods? Second, does not Balthasar’s opposition of “total knowledge” to “total love” suggest a division between the divine intellect and the divine will, which are one and the same (given the unity of the divine essence)? On such questions, which expose fundamental problems in Balthasar’s use of analogy, see Bernhard Blankenhorn, O.P., “Balthasar’s Method of Divine Naming,” Nova et Vetera (English) 1 (2003); 245–68. 70 Ibid., 97. 71 Theologik II, 127; cf. Theo-Drama V, 68ff. For discussions of kenotic love in Balthasar’s metaphysics, see, e.g., John O’Donnell, S.J., Hans Urs von Balthasar (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1992): 7; Aidan Nichols, No Bloodless Myth: A Guide through Balthasar’s Dramatics (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2000): especially 197; Angela Franz, “Trinitarian Analogia Entis in Hans Urs von Balthasar,” The Thomist 62

the paschal mystery and theology of the trinity

125

Persons in God accounts for all real distinctions, including that of the multiplicity of creatures and that of the creature and God: “Without this personal distance in the circumincessio of the Persons it would be impossible to understand either the creature’s distance from God or the Son’s ‘economic’ distance from the Father – a distance that goes to the limit of forsakenness.”72 All creatures bear the Trinitarian mark of kenotic distinction, i.e. self-surrendering love (simultaneously letting the other “be” to the point of complete self-surrender and full communio73), and this Trinitarian mark is most profoundly realized in the incarnate Son, Jesus Christ. The metaphysical priority of love is demonstrated experientially by the example of the child, who is awakened to the fullness of its (human) being through “being received into the space of the parent’s love.”74 Balthasar adds that, “though it remains true that fully realized love also presupposes a fully realized knowledge . . . the unpreconceivability of the self-surrender or self-expropriation which ﬁrst makes the Father Father cannot be ascribed to knowledge but only to groundless love, which fact proves the identity of love as the ‘transcendental par excellence,’ ” more fundamental than being or knowing.75 Balthasar’s theology of the Trinity, and his corresponding Trinitarian metaphysics, lead him, when he focuses his attention speciﬁcally upon the Cross, to develop the substitutionary aspects of Luther’s theology.76 In the

(1998): 533–59; Manfred Lochbrunner, Analogia Caritatis. Darstellung und Deutung der Theologie Hans Urs von Balthasars (Freiburg: Herder, 1981); Mark McIntosh, Mystical Theology (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1998): 107. 72 Theo-Drama V, 98. 73 Referring to the poetry of Paul Claudel, Balthasar speaks of the “communion of all particularized things in being.” (Theologik II, 34) 74 Theologik II, 162. 75 Theologik II, 162–163. This theme is a central argument of Theologik II. 76 For further analysis, see Roch Kereszty, “Response to Professor Scola,” Communio 18 (1991): 227–36; Michele M. Schumacher, “The Concept of Representation in the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar,” Theological Studies 60 (1999): 53–71; Gérard Remy, “La substitution: Pertinence ou non-pertinence d’un concept théologique,” Revue Thomiste 94 (1994): 559–600; idem, “La déréliction du Christ: Terme d’une contradiction ou mystère de communion?” Revue Thomiste 98 (1998): 39–94; Michel Beaudin, Obéissance et solidarité: Essai sur la christologie de Hans Urs von Balthasar (Montreal: Fides, 1989); Karl-Heinz Menke, Stellvertretung (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1991); M. Imperatori, S.J., “Heidegger dans la ‘Dramatique divine’ de Hans Urs von Balthasar,” Nouvelle revue théologique 122 (2000): 191–210; David Coffey, Deus Trinitas: The Doctrine of the Triune God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999): 105–50; Gilbert Narcisse, O.P., “Participer à la vie trinitaire,” Revue Thomiste 96 (1996): 107–28; Guy Mansini, O.S.B., “Rahner and Balthasar on the Efﬁcacy of the Cross,” Irish Theological Quarterly 63 (1998): 232–49.

126

the paschal mystery and theology of the trinity

economy of salvation, the forsakenness of the incarnate Son involves the pouring-out of the Father’s “wrath” upon Jesus Christ. As Balthasar states, “Can we seriously say that God unloaded his wrath upon the Man who wrestled with his destiny on the Mount of Olives and was subsequently cruciﬁed? Indeed we must.”77 Yet, he argues that the “exchange of places” in Luther is rendered in overly formal categories. According to Balthasar, Luther “wants nothing to do with the one, unifying hypostasis in Christ, or with the humanity as an imago dei (the humanity touches the divinity only at a mathematical point, as it were), or, ﬁnally, with a theandric operation of the united natures and therefore with an obedience to mission which accompanies the suffering Christ into his Godforsakenness.”78 Luther did not recognize that the substitutionary act of Christ on the Cross expresses a reality in the Trinitarian life. Simply put, the kenosis by which the Father begets the Son implies “such an incomprehensible and unique ‘separation’ of God from himself that it includes and grounds every other separation – be it never so dark and bitter.”79 Humankind’s (and Christ’s) separation from God is experienced within human consciousness. For this reason, Balthasar’s Christology, which he identiﬁes as a “Christology of consciousness,” focuses upon “the individual human consciousness of Jesus.”80 He argues that Jesus’ human consciousness coincides with his consciousness of mission. Jesus’ mission-consciousness is always absolute: as his human consciousness develops over time, his mission-consciousness likewise increases in clarity, and so there is never a distinction between his (nonstatic) human consciousness and his mission-consciousness.81 His human “I” is identical with his mission. His mission-consciousness is his “fundamental intuition concerning his identity” as the one sent from the Father.82 In this way, Jesus’ consciousness is more than merely human, since his mission-consciousness is of his being sent from the Father to accomplish salvation (his mission is thus both particular and universal, and expresses in a human way his divine Sonship). Balthasar explains that “Jesus is aware of an element of the divine 77

Theo-Drama IV, 345; cf. 348. Theologik II, 310. 79 Theo-Drama IV, 325. 80 Theo-Drama III, 166. Balthasar explicitly rejects, as impossible, the quest to uncover a “psychology of Jesus.” Yet, his purpose is to show that Jesus’ human consciousness, insofar as we can know of it from the biblical data, is identical with his mission-consciousness. 81 Balthasar’s debt to Schleiermacher is clear, although he radically re-works Schleiermacher’s theory. 82 Theo-Drama III, 166. 78

the paschal mystery and theology of the trinity

127

in his innermost, indivisible self-consciousness; it is intuitive insofar as it is inseparable from the intuition of his mission-consciousness, but it is deﬁned and limited by this same mission-consciousness.”83 Christ’s human consciousness is entirely delimited by his consciousness of mission. This perfect accord differentiates Christ from other human beings, and indicates his divinity. Balthasar states, “The qualitative difference between his faith and ours is this: we only receive our mission on the basis of our coming to faith, whereas Jesus always has and is his mission; in his mission, he has utterly abandoned himself to the Father who guides him and in whom he has complete trust.”84 Jesus’ will perfectly accords with the Father’s from the beginning; over the course of time, Jesus learns what his mission entails. Jesus’ absolute obedience (as Son) to the Father, in the Holy Spirit, allows the Holy Spirit to teach him what he has to learn (beyond the fact that he is “the one sent”), when he has to learn it.85 What Jesus learns is described by Balthasar in terms of intuitive “initiation,” “opening up,” and “becoming explicit,” rather than as new knowledge. He learns that his mission, as the one sent to reveal the Father, requires him to descend to the uttermost point of not-knowing, of abandonment by the Father: the Word is revealed precisely in its opposite, the silence (non-Word) and death of the Cross.86 Balthasar explains that “the outcome is that he is forsaken by God on the Cross. Yet this ‘inﬁnite distance’, which recapitulates the sinner’s mode of alienation from God, will remain forever the highest revelation known to the world of the diastasis (within the eternal being of God) between Father and Son in the Holy Spirit.”87 Jesus’ “knowing” of divine realities, for Balthasar, is a more and more explicit intuitive grasp of the divine “diastasis,” or separation, that Jesus (as the incarnate Son revealing the Father) is called to enact, 83

Ibid. Ibid., 170–71. The question of how Christ’s human knowledge corresponds with his divine knowledge is thus placed to the side. Rephrasing the question in terms of consciousness, rather than of knowledge, enables Balthasar simply to afﬁrm that Christ’s mission-consciousness “totally occupies his self-consciousness and ﬁlls it to the very brim. He sees himself so totally as ‘coming from the Father’ to men, as ‘making known’ the Father, as the ‘Word from the Father’, that there is neither room nor time for any detached reﬂection of the ‘Who am I?’ kind” (172). 85 Ibid., 179–80, cf. 182–3; 227. 86 For further discussion of this point, see especially Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, Vol. VII: Theology: The New Covenant, trans. Brian McNeil (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989): 130–61. 87 Theo-Drama III, 228. 84

128

the paschal mystery and theology of the trinity

ultimately, upon the Cross. The content of Jesus’ supreme knowing is precisely unknowing or not-knowing. In the last volume of his Theo-Drama, Balthasar takes pains to afﬁrm that “[i]t is an indispensable axiom that the Son, even in his human form, must know that he is the eternal Son of the Father.”88 Jesus must, Balthasar says, enjoy “the immediate vision of the Father.”89 He explains that Jesus’ knowing “that he is the eternal Son of the Father” means that Jesus “must be aware of the unbreakable continuity of his processio and his missio, or, in other words, he must know of his transcendental obedience, which upholds his entire earthly existence (Theo-Drama III, 165ff, 515ff).”90 Jesus’ “knowing” of his eternal Sonship is in fact his absolute missionconsciousness, his “transcendental obedience.” Balthasar’s insistence that Jesus must enjoy the immediate vision of the Father is likewise qualiﬁed. He emphasizes that “[i]n the Lord’s Passion his sight is veiled, whereas his obedience remains intact.”91 This veiling holds for Jesus’ entire life, if not to the same degree as the ultimate not-knowing Jesus experiences on the Cross: Jesus’ mission “presupposes (right from the Incarnation) a certain veiling of his sight of the Father: he must leave it in abeyance, refrain from using it; this is possible because of the distance between Father and Son in the Trinity.”92 We are now able to interpret more precisely Balthasar’s position on whether Jesus possessed “hope” on the Cross. By following the path of absolute obedience to the Father, Jesus (the Son) is inﬁnitely separated from the Father. Jesus’ separation is not that of will (as if he joined sinners in hating the Father), but a separation constituted by lack of conscious knowledge that makes his obedience to the Father blind, without thereby becoming disobedience. In obedience to his mission of “being sent,” Jesus “distances” himself to such a degree that he has absolutely no knowledge of the Father’s love. Balthasar states: The Son bears sinners within himself, together with the hopeless impenetrability of their sin, which prevents the divine light of love from register88 Theo-Drama V, 124. It is worth noting that volume V was published ﬁve years after volume III. In the later volume, Balthasar is taking the opportunity to clarify some of the positions adopted in the earlier volume, and he goes over much of the same terrain again in volume II of the Theologik. 89 Ibid., 123. 90 Ibid., 124. 91 Ibid. 92 Ibid., 125; cf. Theologik II, 261–5, 322ff, where Balthasar, generally following Adrienne von Speyr, describes the incarnate Son’s “super-obedience” (“Übergehorsams”).

the paschal mystery and theology of the trinity

129

ing in them. In himself, therefore, he experiences, not their sin, but the hopelessness of their resistance to God and the graceless No of divine grace to this resistance. The Son who has depended [sich verlassen] entirely on the Father, even to becoming identiﬁed with his brothers in their lostness, must now be forsaken [verlassen] by the Father. He who consented to be given [ver-geben] everything from the Father’s hand must now feel that it was all “for nothing” [vergebens].93

Thus Jesus’ lack of hope, his conscious not-knowing, is total. Yet Jesus’ will is still perfectly in accord with the divine will; his missionconsciousness remains intact, and in this there resides an implicit “hope.” His union with sinners means not a perversion of will, but rather that at the moment when his mission is most fully “opened up” and made explicit to him, he knows absolutely nothing. His depth of not-knowing (as the not-knowing of the Son, the Word) goes inﬁnitely beyond any mere human separation from truth. Balthasar afﬁrms, “In his dereliction [on the Cross], the Father gives no word of answer to the Son; and his Word, that is, the Son himself, sinks into the silence of death.”94 This death is enormously fruitful, because it is located within the Trinitarian life. Balthasar holds that “the Son’s eternal, holy distance from the Father, in the Spirit, forms the basis on which the unholy distance of the world’s sin can be transposed into it, can be transcended and overcome by it.”95 The Son’s holy distance is intellectual, whereas the unholy distance of the world’s sin is moral. As Balthasar states, “This [the free rejection of God’s will] cannot be said to be an element that is present as a possibility in the Son’s relationship with the Father.”96 Yet the Son’s holy distance, in the divine plan, encompasses the unholy distance: “These two forms of timelessness – the God-forsakenness of the damned and the God-forsakenness of the Son on the Cross – are not simply unrelated. The latter is because of the former.”97 Father and Son mutually surrender 93

Theo-Drama IV, 349; cf. Theologik II, 294ff. Balthasar indicates that Jesus’ experience on the Cross is what John of the Cross describes as the “dark night of the soul.” In his apostolic letter Novo Millennio Ineunte (2000), the Pope takes up the same theme, but the Pope, drawing upon Catherine of Siena and Thérèse of Lisieux, insists upon “the paradoxical blending of bliss and pain,” without suggesting that the bliss is no longer experienced (no. 27). 94 Ibid., 359; cf. Theologik II, 294ff. 95 Ibid., 362; cf. Theologik II, 314ff., where Balthasar summarizes Adrienne von Speyr’s theology of Holy Saturday. 96 Theo-Drama V, 502. 97 Ibid., 311; cf. 257 and elsewhere. For further elucidation of this point, see Aidan Nichols, O.P., No Bloodless Myth, 216.

130

the paschal mystery and theology of the trinity

themselves and are abandoned by the other, and this abandonment goes inﬁnitely beyond the condition of ﬁnite sin.98 Moreover, “[b]ecause of the energy that man has invested in it, sin is a reality, it is not ‘nothing’.”99 Sin is the “refuse” or “chaff ” that is consigned by Jesus to hell.100 It follows that the incarnate Son can truly bear all sin – in its hypostasized form, stripped of its association with particular disobedient persons – without perverting his own will. Quoting Adrienne von Speyr, Balthasar notes, “ ‘The Son presents to the Father, in his own person, the sin of the world that he has taken away’, at the same time presenting to him ‘in his Body, his Bride, the living sinner now stripped of sin’.”101 98 The problem nonetheless remains: how does a fundamentally “intellectual” distance – it has to be such, since the divine Persons never hate each other – encompasses a willful distance constituted by hatred of God? Balthasar afﬁrms that Adrienne von Speyr solves this problem:

The mention of the Father here opens up a new and signiﬁcant dimension of Adrienne von Speyr’s theology which supplies what is lacking in Luther’s theology. For here Hell is a Trinitarian event. She portrays at length the Trinitarian form of sin, a matter which cannot be presented here. However, a fundamental statement is that on Holy Saturday the Son (as man and redeemer) is initiated into the dark mystery of the Father, something which itself can happen only in secret and in silence. This presupposes a motion (not potentiality) in the eternal life of the Trinity. This is already true of the Cross: “The Father is never more present than in this absence on the Cross.” Hell is described as a “preserve” of the Father, in the sense that, as creator (indeed, already as generator of the Son, in whom every possible universe is always already co-projected) he foresaw and took responsibility for the possibility of the creature’s freedom and, on the basis of the abuse of its freedom, the possibility of its eternal perishing: “a chaos of sin . . . like a mirror image of the chaos at the beginning of creation.” And now there is something like a “retraction” of the Father, in order to admit the incarnate Son into this ultimate darkness, which the Father discloses to him, as the redeemer of sinners, only here at the end of the way of redemption. (Theologik II, 321–22, emphasis added). 99 100

Theo-Drama V, 314. Cf. Theologik II, 324: In his passage through hell, Christ encounters not only sin, which has now become an amorphous mass, but also ﬁgures which Adrienne has called “efﬁgies” [Efﬁgien]. These efﬁgies consist of what of his own substance a man has lent to the sin he has committed: “This lost piece of man goes into hell with sin.” The Son replaces what has been lost by his personal grace: “So the erstwhile sinner is indeed now closer to the Lord, but at the same time, as sinner, he is copied, in negative, in hell. An efﬁgy of him . . . lies buried and rejected in hell.” The efﬁgies are like a hollow impression, as when a body has lain in the sand. (The quotations are from Adrienne von Speyr’s Kreuz und Hölle, Vol. I: Teil die Passionen [Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1966])

101

Theo-Drama V, 314–15.

the paschal mystery and theology of the trinity

131

For Balthasar, then, the Son’s obedience on the Cross, in order to bear sin fully, must be characterized by two elements: absolute faithfulness, and absolute lack of grounding in knowledge. Jesus only moves to the pinnacle of obedience (the pinnacle of union with the Father’s will) by simultaneously entering the abyss of not-knowing. The highest obedience – the highest charity – is that which obeys without (conscious) knowledge or hope.102 This highest charity expresses the self-abandoning that characterizes absolute Love, that is, the Trinity: “This obedience alone exegetes God as Trinitarian love, and that precisely by the Father’s exposing his Son out of love for the world to the contradiction of the contradivine.”103 Complete self-abandoning to the “other,” a self-abandonment made absolute by unknowing (so as to be willed as self-abandoning rather than as something else), serves as Balthasar’s analog for the Trinity. All the elements of the Paschal mystery, as understood by Balthasar, are taken up into this analog and themselves become analogs – Christ’s faith, death, and so forth.104 Having laid out Balthasar’s understanding of the Paschal mystery as analog for the Trinity, we may question whether it is adequate to the mysteries that it describes. His analog depends upon an account of the Cross that requires exegetically Jesus’ absolute unknowing to the point of sending away his mother. Theologically and philosophically, the analog requires 1) an understanding of sin as “chaff ” so that Jesus can engage sin interiorly without perverting his will, 2) an understanding of charity as made perfect by lack of knowledge, and 3) an understanding of the distinction of Persons as an inﬁnite “distance” encompassing the divide (of will) between sinners and God. One notes then that Balthasar does not simply exegete the Paschal mystery in order to arrive at theological conclusions: rather, he brings important theological and philosophical a prioris to his exegesis. If his exegesis of the Paschal mystery is tested by its fruit, one ﬁnds that his understanding of his analog leads to an account of the Trinity that afﬁrms the Father “shows the Son less his total knowledge than his total love, which conceals something whose concealment lets love radiate even more brightly,” because love requires that everything not be “stale foreknowledge,” since love “cannot exist without self-surrender, movement, and ﬂight.”105 The divine Persons have “faith,” analogously understood, since they are continually receiving new knowledge from each other, and since there is always something concealed that has yet to come to light. One 102 Cf. Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James W. Ellington (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1993): 11–14 (nos. 398–401). 103 Theologik II, 331. 104 See Bernhard Blankenhorn, O.P.’s excellent, “Balthasar’s Method of Divine Naming.” 105 Theo-Drama V, 96.

132

the paschal mystery and theology of the trinity

Person knows something that another Person does not yet know.106 Balthasar insists that his statements, as analogous, can be held in conjunction with their opposites. For Balthasar, “the Father gives everything to the Son” can be held in conjunction with “the Father conceals some knowledge from the Son,” because of the analogous character of time in the Trinity. Yet, once “analogy” ultimately overturns the principle of contradiction, one wonders whether the limits of human language about God have been overstepped. Either the Father conceals knowledge, or he does not. We might ask, in conclusion: Does Balthasar’s account stand exegetically? Is his hypostasizing of “sin” metaphysically acceptable? Could Christ have enjoyed perfect charity without the full participation of his intellect? Could a “distance” within God include the willful rejection of God? Does his theology fragment, by overstepping the limits of human language, the unity of God? Is there a better way of understanding the Paschal mystery’s revelatory character? Sapiential theology will have recourse here to the contemplative union in self-giving love promised by Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God” (Mt 5:8).107

3

The Paschal Mystery as Revelatory of the Trinity in Aquinas

The approach recommended by Bauckham, and taken by Balthasar, thus takes us from a “kyriarchal” view of God to the other extreme.108 106

Such conclusions would seem to beg a return to apophatic caution. Karen Kilby, responding in this way to social theories of the Trinity that overburden the limits of analogy, aptly inquires: “Where exactly, one might wonder, did they acquire such a vivid feeling for the inner life of the deity?” (Kilby, “Perichoresis and Projection: Problems with Social Doctrines of the Trinity,” New Blackfriars 81 [2000]: 439.) See also David Bentley Hart, “No Shadow of Turning: On Divine Impassibility,” 187–93; Gilles Emery, O.P., “L’immutabilité du Dieu d’amour et les problèmes du discours sur la ‘souffrance de Dieu’,” Nova et Vetera 74 (1999): 5–37; and Sarah Coakley’s analysis of the Trinitarian theology of Gregory of Nyssa in “‘Persons’ in the ‘Social’ Doctrine of the Trinity: A Critique of Current Analytical Discussion,” in The Trinity, ed. S. Davis, D. Kendall, and G. O’Collins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999): 123–44. 107 Michel René Barnes’s “The Visible Christ and the Invisible Trinity: Mt. 5:8 in Augustine’s Trinitarian Theology of 400,” Modern Theology 19 (2003): 329–355 alerted me to this text’s function in framing sapiential Trinitarian theology. Servais Pinckaers, O.P. has demonstrated Aquinas’s profound debt to Augustine’s reading of the Sermon on the Mount. See also the superb article of Benedict M. Ashley, O.P., “What Is the End of the Human Person? The Vision of God and Integral Human Fulﬁlment,” in Moral Truth and Moral Tradition, ed. Luke Gormally (Portland, OR: Four Courts Press, 1994): 68–96. 108 The relationship of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s thought to Aquinas’s is a complex one, but in the areas of Trinitarian theology, Christology, and soteriology there is a marked diver-

the paschal mystery and theology of the trinity

133

Does Aquinas fall into the kyriachal view? Does he make the mistake that Wright ﬁnds in “Western orthodoxy,” the mistake of bypassing the historical Jesus in describing the Trinity? In light of Wright’s thesis that traditional Trinitarian theology, because of its nonnarrative character, “has always tended to approach the Christological question by assuming this [ontological] view of god and then ﬁtting Jesus into it,”109 I will now explore how, according to Aquinas, Christ’s Paschal mystery determines our understanding of the Trinity. As with our analysis of Balthasar, it is necessary ﬁrst to ask what is meant when one speaks about the revelatory power of Christ’s Paschal mystery. What is the salient aspect (or aspects) of Christ’s Cross and Resurrection that might illumine the inner life of the Trinity? Wright suggests that the salient aspect is the way in which Jesus’ historical experience is precisely the opposite of what one would expect to ﬁnd from a “kyriachal” God, that is, from “an overly lofty, detached, high-and-dry, uncaring, uninvolved” God that, in Wright’s view, emerges out of the tradition of Western metaphysics. Jesus’ historical experience, and in particular his Paschal mystery, reveals a God who is lowly, attached, present,

gence. Commenting on Balthasar’s interpretation of Aquinas’s historical role in The Theology of Karl Barth (263–6), Fergus Kerr, O.P. has noted: Much as with de Lubac, Thomas is admitted to be a “transitional ﬁgure”: before him the one and only concrete spiritual order governed all theology, ahead of him lay the duplex ordo, culminating at Vatican I. “Whoever does not realise how Thomas was open both to the past and to the future will misunderstand his position in the history of human thought.’ Yet, if de Lubac encouraged us to read Thomas as the inheritor of the patristic conception of natural desire for God, Balthasar (here at least) preferred us to read Thomas more in terms of what was to come. The notion that philosophy and theology should divide and go their separate ways is the ‘authentic spirit of Thomism”. In the event, the three treatises that did not interest Aquinas – de Deo Trino (excellent formal training but no shaping inﬂuence on the project of the Summa Theologiae), de Christo (carefully done but with no inﬂuence on all that precedes in the Summa), and de Ecclesia (simply absent) – are, Balthasar contends, precisely what Christian theology is about. In other words, Thomas’ focus was already opening him to the standard account in terms of theistic proofs, natural law, etc. His predominantly philosophical methodology prevents him from doing Christian theology properly. Above all, as he says, theology does not deal with singularia: the very particular historical events are treated as mere examples. Thus, in the end, Balthasar chooses Barth over Aquinas, because Barth’s methodology means theology practiced as scientia de singularibus. (Fergus Kerr, O.P., “Thomas Aquinas: Conﬂicting Interpretations in Recent Anglophone Literature,” in Aquinas as Authority, ed. Paul van Geest, Harm Goris, and Carlo Leget [Leuven: Peeters, 2002]: 169.) 109

Wright, “Jesus and the Identity of God,” 54.

134

the paschal mystery and theology of the trinity

caring, and involved. The Paschal mystery reveals the inner-Trinitarian life as one of humility, self-giving, presence, and love. Aquinas’s discussion of God’s essence (what is common to the Persons) is representative of the tradition of Western metaphysical reﬂection upon God that Wright criticizes. Thus it is worth asking what, in Aquinas’s view, the Paschal mystery reveals. Aquinas treats this the topic of question 46, article 3 of the tertia pars of the Summa Theologiae. The question posed is “Whether there was any more suitable way of delivering the human race than by Christ’s passion?” It would seem, Aquinas notes in the objections, that there were more suitable ways than Christ’s bloody death. In accord with Wright’s portrait of a kyriarchal God, “God could have liberated mankind solely by His Divine will.”110 Not only would this have spared the life of his incarnate Son, but also it seems more ﬁtting on another ground, that of the divine power. Injustice is typically righted by a superior power: thus courts of law have the power to deprive the criminal of his freedom in order to restore the order of justice by means of this retributive punishment. If the court of law does not or cannot exercise this superior power, the criminal continues to act with impunity. Thus, “it seems more suitable that Christ should have despoiled the devil solely by His power and without the Passion.”111 As these objections show, Aquinas is well aware of the notion of a “kyriarchal” God (although Aquinas would not have used “lordly” in a pejorative sense) that Wright both opposes and links with metaphysically sophisticated treatises. Aquinas, however, rejects the kyriarchal portrait of God quite as strongly as Wright does. Christ’s Paschal mystery reveals a different God, not a God “on high” who rules by divine decrees or a God who comes down to earth to demonstrate his absolute power. In his response, Aquinas states that indeed Christ’s passion was the most suitable, or ﬁtting, manner of redeeming the human race on the grounds that Christ’s passion teaches us about the God who saves us. He states, “In the ﬁrst place, man knows thereby how much God loves him, and is thereby stirred to love him in return, and therein lies the perfection of human salvation.”112 Christ’s Paschal mystery reveals to humankind the extraordinary depth of God’s love. Without Christ’s passion, humankind would not have known the superabundance of God’s love. The Paschal mystery reveals the Trinity (God-inhimself) in terms of a wisdom of wondrous love, to the point of the Son of God giving his own life for the salvation of sinners, that is, for the salvation of those who by pride had cut themselves of from God. 110 111 112

3, q.46, a.3, obj.1. Aquinas draws here upon Anselm’s marvelous Cur Deus homo. Ibid., obj.3. 3, q.46, a.3.

the paschal mystery and theology of the trinity

135

Aquinas gives a second reason for the ﬁttingness of Christ’s passion as the way that God chose to redeem humankind: by his passion, Christ “set us an example of obedience, humility, constancy, justice, and the other virtues displayed in the Passion, which are requisite for man’s salvation. Hence it is written (1 Peter 2:21): Christ also suffered for us, leaving you an example that you should follow in His steps.”113 Obedience is ultimately the conforming of one’s human will to the will of God, who is love: “everything that the Son does is directed to the glory of the Father.”114 Humility is the opposite of pride, and means that one loves each thing in accord with its goodness, rather than proudly rejecting the goodness of other things. In this way, Christ’s passion reveals the Trinity not only as constant and just, but also as perfect love and perfect humility, since God in Christ actively loves, rather than dominates, the creatures he has made. Lastly, Aquinas comments on the ﬁttingness found in the symmetry of God’s plan: “as man was overcome and deceived by the devil, so also it should be a man that should overthrow the devil; and as man deserved death, so a man by dying should vanquish death.”115 This symmetry of God’s plan (his divine Providence) manifests the wisdom of God, who orders all things rightly. Like Wright, Bauckham, and Balthasar, then, Aquinas has recourse to Jesus’ Cross in order to dispel the myth of what Wright calls the “kyriarchal” or aloof and uncaring God. The Paschal mystery of Jesus Christ reveals a God of superabundant and active love, humility, and wisdom. As Aquinas observes, “Christ suffered voluntarily out of obedience to the Father.”116 The incarnate Son, in his humanity, obeys the Father’s will. Yet, does the fact that Christ suffered out of obedience to the Father mean that God the Father abandoned the Son to a state of God-forsakenness, or poured out his wrath upon the Son? In contrast to Balthasar’s view, Aquinas states that the Father “abandoned” the incarnate Son in the sense of not shielding him from those who would crucify him. As Aquinas points out in answer to an objection, “It is indeed a wicked and cruel act to hand over an innocent man to torment and death against his will. Yet God the Father did not so deliver up Christ, but inspired him with the will to suffer for us.”117 Furthermore, the incarnate Son did not undergo 113

Ibid. St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Saint John, part 2, ch. 14, lect. 3, no. 1906 (trans. James A. Weisheipl and Fabian R. Larcher [Petersham, MA: St. Bede’s Publications, 1999], 352). 115 3, q.46, a.3. 116 3, q.47, a.3. 117 Ibid, ad 1. 114

136

the paschal mystery and theology of the trinity

the abandonment by God experienced by unrepentant sinners in hell. Hell is an experience that depends upon possessing a perverted will; the perverted will itself constitutes the experience of “wrath” that constitutes the interior punishment. Christ could only have experienced such absolute abandonment had his will been perverted. Even so, the Father did abandon the Son to undergo the most intense suffering. The incarnate Son was able to undergo the most intense suffering possible, precisely because of his intimate knowledge of the Father. In suffering innocently for the sins of all others, he knew fully the glorious love of the Father that the sinner rejects; in this way, his perfect knowledge of the Father enabled him to suffer, out of love, immeasurably profound pangs of sorrow for sins. The Father inspired Christ’s human will with this perfect charity by infusing Christ’s humanity with the fullness of the grace of the Holy Spirit. In Christ’s passion, one thus sees manifested the incarnate Son’s obedience to the Father through the Holy Spirit. The Paschal mystery of Jesus Christ reveals God’s wisdom and love in Trinitarian form. As Romanus Cessario has put it, “He who in the depths of the divine reality is the perfect image expressed by the Father and who together with the Father breathes forth personal love as the bond of fellowship, replicates this divine communion within the medium of his humanity and his human history for our sakes . . . The perfect mesh of the Father’s loving initiative to save humankind and of Christ’s human response is a crucial feature of Christ’s satisfactory work, according to St. Thomas. For in that communion of loves our own imaging communion with the Trinity is restored.”118 If we now return to Anne Hunt’s comment – “Why then is the Trinity not considered in terms of Jesus’ death and resurrection? In retrospect it seems an astonishing omission in classical Trinitarian theology” – it should be apparent that her criticism misses the way in which Aquinas interprets Christ’s Paschal mystery as the revelation of God’s Trinitarian wisdom and love. For Aquinas, Christ’s Paschal mystery manifests the Father as the one who sends the Son (the Father’s Word of love for the world); manifests the incarnate Son who is God’s perfect Word in the world; and manifests the Holy Spirit who gifts the incarnate Son with supernatural love. As Aquinas writes in his Commentary on the Gospel of Saint John, “And just like one of us who wants to be known by others by revealing to them the words in his heart, clothes these words with letters or sounds, so God, wanting to be known by us, takes his Word, conceived from eternity, and clothes it with ﬂesh in time. And so no one can arrive at a knowledge of the Father except through the Son.”119 Only the revelation of Jesus 118 119

Romanus Cessario, O.P., The Godly Image, 205–6. Super Ioan. 14, lect. 2, no. 1874 (Weisheipl, part 2, 339).

the paschal mystery and theology of the trinity

137

Christ provides humankind with knowledge of the Trinity, and this revelation is received only through faith.120 Aquinas’s Commentary on the Gospel of St. John nonsystematically addresses the revelatory function of Christ’s Paschal mystery in three ways. In one set of passages, Aquinas discusses the Father’s generation of the Son in terms of self-giving. In a second set, he explores how Christ is sent to manifest the Father. In a third set, he identiﬁes the Paschal mystery as the central way in which Christ manifests his Father and the Trinity. I will discuss each of these thematic sets of passages in turn. Aquinas speaks of an “astonishment of devotion” that characterizes the believer who, “considering the great things of God, sees that they are incomprehensible to him; and so he is full of astonishment: ‘The Lord on high is wonderful’ (Psalms 93:4), ‘Your testimonies are wonderful’ (Psalms 118:129).”121 Nowhere is this astonishment more ﬁtting than in reﬂection upon the Father’s eternal generation of the Son. In generating the Son, the Father gives or communicates everything to the Son. Against the notion that the modern period invented the theology of self-gift and selfcommunication, it is necessary to emphasize that this language of radical giving, which is ultimately biblical, appears in Aquinas.122 Commenting on John 5:20, Aquinas notes that “because the Father perfectly loves the Son, this is a sign that the Father has shown him everything and has communicated [communicaverit] to him his very own power and nature.”123 120

Bruce Marshall, in “Do Christians Worship the God of Israel?,” interestingly compares Balthasar’s Theo-Drama (III) and Aquinas’s Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew on this point: “As Hans Urs von Balthasar puts the claim, ‘distinguishing a plurality in God is only possible on the basis of the action of Jesus Christ. In him alone is the Trinity opened up and accessible.’ Modern Trinitarian theology in particular has tended to insist upon this point. Traditional reﬂection on these issues had, to be sure, commonly held that ‘the Trinity is implicitly contained in Christ’ ” (242). Marshall distinguishes the modern view (Balthasar) from the traditional view (Aquinas) on the grounds that the modern position requires reference to Jesus. In my view, Balthasar and Aquinas are saying the same thing here. However, since both Christ (cruciﬁed) and the revelation of the Trinity were preﬁgured in the Old Testament, it was not impossible for learned Jews to gain insight into the mystery of the Trinity, and implicit faith in God the Trinity is possible for people of all times and places. On this subject, see my Christ’s Fulﬁllment of Torah and Temple: Salvation According to Thomas Aquinas (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002). 121 St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Saint John, part 1, ch. 3, lect. 2, no. 449 (trans. James A. Weisheipl and Fabian R. Larcher [Albany, N.Y.: Magi Books, 1980], 191). 122 Although there are not three “selves” in the modern sense in the Trinity, nevertheless the Father gives all that he is (the divine essence) in begetting. The radical character of this generation is denoted in the phrase “self-gift.” 123 Super Ioan. 5, lect. 3, no. 753 (Weisheipl, part 1, 302). Note the contrast with Balthasar’s view.

138

the paschal mystery and theology of the trinity

Similarly, commenting on John 3:34, Aquinas conceives of the Father’s generation of the Son in terms of gift: “For God the Father is said to give [dare] the Holy Spirit without measure to Christ as God, because he gives to Christ the power and might to spirate the Holy Spirit, who, since he is inﬁnite, was inﬁnitely given him by the Father: for the Father gives it just as he himself has it, so that the Holy Spirit proceeds from him as much as from the Son. And he gave him this by an everlasting generation.”124 The generation of the Son is the Father’s self-gift or selfcommunication. Further, Aquinas interprets John 5:20, “For the Father loves the Son, and shows him everything that he does” by connecting the Father’s love with the Father’s generative communication or gift. How can this be, given that the Father generates by the divine nature?125 Aquinas notes, “If love is taking essentially [pertaining to God’s oneness], it indicates the divine will; if it is taken notionally [pertaining to the distinction of Persons], it indicates the Holy Spirit.”126 The generation of the Son does not pertain to either of these kinds of love, because the Father generates neither by the divine will nor by the Holy Spirit, but by the divine nature. Aquinas explains that when we link the Father’s generation of the Son (his self-gift) with the Father’s love, this refers not to the power of generation, but to the fruit of generation. Because the Father generates the Son by giving him everything he has – by speaking the entire Trinity in his Word – the Son is the perfect image of the Father. As image (Hebrews 1:3, Colossians1:15), the Son must be perfectly loved by the Father. Aquinas states, “For since likeness is a cause of love (for every animal loves its like), wherever a perfect likeness of God is found, there also is found a perfect love of God.”127 The Father’s love is a sign of what he has done for the Son in giving him everything that he, the Father, possesses. It is love that manifests a giver who has generated his perfect likeness. If the Father’s begetting of the Son is characterized by this absolute self-giving, then if Christ is to make the Father known, he will have to do so by giving himself. Aquinas repeatedly afﬁrms that manifesting the Father, making him known, is the task of the incarnate Son. Following Chrysostom, he interprets John 17:6, “I have manifested your name to 124

Super Ioan. 3, lect. 6, no. 543 (Weisheipl, part 1, 221). On the potentia generandi, see John Boyle’s excellent “St. Thomas and the Analogy of Potentia Generandi,” The Thomist 64 (2000): 581–92. 126 Super Ioan. 17, lect. 6, no. 2262 (Weisheipl, part 2, 510). 127 Super Ioan. 5, lect. 3, no. 753 (Weisheipl, part 1, 302). 125

the paschal mystery and theology of the trinity

139

the men” as suggesting “the characteristic work of the Son of God, who is the Word, and the characteristic of a word is to manifest the one speaking it: ‘No one knows the Father except the Son and any one to whom the Son chooses to reveal him’ (Matthew 11:27); ‘No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known’ (John 1:18).”128 Before Christ’s coming, the people of Israel knew God the Father, but they only knew him as Father in the sense of Creator, and as the one and only God. Christ’s disciples, on the other hand, are able to know the Father by faith (by the grace of the Holy Spirit) as the Father of the only-begotten Son.129 In exploring how Christ manifests his Father, Aquinas emphasizes the disciples’ friendship with Christ. The ﬁgure of the apostle John is paradigmatic for Aquinas, since he was uniquely beloved by Christ. Interpreting mystically John’s closeness to Jesus at table, Aquinas writes that “we can see from this that the more a person wants to grasp the secrets of divine wisdom, the more he should try to get closer to Christ, according to ‘Come to him and be enlightened’ (Psalms 34:5).”130 The sign of friendship is that friends reveal their secrets to each other, and thus when we have become friends of God in Jesus Christ he reveals to us, by the Holy Spirit, what belongs to his inﬁnite wisdom: “It is characteristic of the Holy Spirit to reveal the truth because it is love which impels one to reveal his secrets.”131 Christ’s wisdom is nothing less than the Trinity. In speaking his Word (the Wisdom of God), the Father speaks the whole Trinity. Thus Aquinas notes that if someone were to ask, “The Father will manifest himself, will he not?” the answer is “Yes, both the Father and the Son. For the Son manifests himself and the Father at the same time, because the Son is the Word of the Father: ‘No one knows the Father except the Son’ (Matthew 11:27).”132 Since Christ is the Wisdom of God, his wisdom is the Trinity, and learning his wisdom, as his friend, means to share in his Trinitarian life.133 Aquinas would agree with St. Maximus 128 Super Ioan. 17, lect. 2, no. 2194 (Weisheipl, part 2, 485–6); cf. 7, lect. 3, no. 1061 (Weisheipl, part 1, 423). 129 Super Ioan. 17, lect. 2, no. 2195 (Weisheipl, part 2, 486); cf. 1, lect. 8, nos. 179–86 (Weisheipl, part 1, 89–91), which discusses the glory of Christ as the glory manifested to those who recognize, in faith, his divinity. 130 Super Ioan. 13, lect. 4, no. 1807 (Weisheipl, part 2, 303). 131 Super Ioan. 14, lect. 4, no. 1916 (Weisheipl, part 2, 357): “Manifestare autem veritatem convenit proprietati Spiritus sancti. Est enim amor qui facit secretorum revelationem.” 132 Super Ioan. 14, lect. 5, no. 1937 (Weisheipl, part 2, 367). 133 Super Ioan. 15, lect. 3, no. 2016 (Weisheipl, part 2, 403). See also Super Ioan. 14, lect. 4, no. 1920 (Weisheipl, part 2, 359): “note how intimate his indwelling is, for he will be

140

the paschal mystery and theology of the trinity

the Confessor’s remark that “[t]heology is taught us by the incarnate Logos of God, since He reveals in Himself the Father and the Holy Spirit. For the whole of the Father and the whole of the Holy Spirit were present essentially and perfectly in the whole of the incarnate Son.”134 Christ, then, reveals the Trinity to his friends. As incarnate Wisdom, he does so by teaching through his words and actions.135 Aquinas frequently describes Christ’s “eagerness to teach.”136 Yet, Jesus’ words cannot be understood simply by hearing or reading them, as can the words of other teachers. Rather, in order for true teaching to occur, we must hear or read his words in the Holy Spirit. As Aquinas writes, “The root and fountain of our knowledge of God is the Word of God, that is, Christ. . . . From this knowledge of the Word, which is the root and fountain, ﬂows, like rivulets and streams, all the knowledge of the faithful.”137 This knowledge requires not merely hearing, but rather a participation in the Word by faith through the power of the Holy Spirit.138 In addition to words, Jesus teaches effectively by what he does. Commenting on John 5:36 “The very works which my Father has given me to perform – those works that I myself perform – they bear witness to me that the Father sent me” – Aquinas remarks that “the sort of

in you, that is, in the depths of your heart: ‘I will put a new Spirit within them’ (Ezekiel 11:19).” 134 St. Maximus the Confessor, “On the Lord’s Prayer,” in The Philokalia, compiled by St. Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and St. Makarios of Corinth, Vol. 2, ed. and trans., G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1981): 287. 135 For a thorough discussion, see Michael Dauphinais, The Pedagogy of the Incarnation: Christ the Teacher According to St. Thomas Aquinas (Notre Dame: Doctoral Dissertation, 2000). See also Michael Sherwin, O.P., “Christ the Teacher in St. Thomas’s Commentary on the Gospel of John,” forthcoming in Reading John with St. Thomas Aquinas: Theological Exegesis and Speculative Theology, ed. Matthew Levering and Michael Dauphinais (Catholic University of America Press); Richard Schenk, O.P., “Omnis Christi Actio Nostra Est Instructio: The Deeds and Sayings of Jesus as Revelation in the View of Thomas Aquinas,” in La doctrine de la révélation divine de saint Thomas d’Aquin, ed. Leo J. Elders (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1990): 104–31. 136 Super Ioan. 9, lect. 4, no. 1355 (Weisheipl, part 2, 104). 137 Super Ioan. 17, lect. 6, nos. 2267–2268 (Weisheipl, part 2, 512). 138 Cf. Super Ioan. 3, lect. 1, nos. 431–443 (Weisheipl, part 2, 184–8) where Aquinas interprets Jesus’ words to Nicodemus about being “born again.” Aquinas writes that in order to know Christ truly, “It is necessary that one be [spiritually] generated in the likeness of the one generating; but we are regenerated as sons of God, in the likeness of his true Son. Therefore, it is necessary that our spiritual regeneration come about through that by which we are made like the true Son; and this comes about by our having his Spirit” (no. 442, p. 187).

the paschal mystery and theology of the trinity

141

person he [Christ] is can be learned through the works he does.”139 His deﬁnitive work is his passion. As the “way,” Christ opens up for us friendship with the Father; as the “truth” and “life,” Christ is the end or destination of the way, and thus is the consubstantial Son.140 In revealing himself by his works, Christ thus reveals the Father: “the Father was seen in the incarnate Christ: ‘We have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father’ (John 1:14).”141 Thus far, our discussion of Aquinas’s Commentary on John has suggested two things. First, Aquinas holds that the Trinity is constituted by absolute self-giving. Second, Aquinas holds that Christ’s mission, as the incarnate Word, was to reveal the Father by teaching through words and deeds. Now we arrive at the third theme: through his Paschal mystery, Jesus Christ manifests the Father in a supreme way. Aquinas states that Christ “carried his cross as a teacher his candelabrum, as a support for the light of his teaching, because for believers the message of the cross is the power of God.”142 His Cross and resurrection reveal the true meaning of his oral communication, and so the Paschal events are the culmination of his teaching. Following Augustine, Aquinas remarks, “Christ hanging on the cross is like a teacher in his teaching chair.”143 Christ, in his humanity, teaches the obedience that springs from love.144 This obedient love (or human self-giving) gives access to the Father: “For just as the love which the Father has for him is the model or standard of Christ’s love for us, so Christ wants his obedience to be the model of our obedience. . . . Christ shows that he abided in the Father’s love because in all things he kept the Father’s commandments.”145 When we come to understand Christ’s love, manifested on the Cross, he reveals for us the Father’s love – the love expressed (as we have seen) as the absolute self-giving that begets the Son, the Father’s Word or Image.

139

Super Ioan. 5, lect. 6, no. 817 (Weisheipl, part 1, 327–8). Aquinas makes the same point later in discussing how Christ teaches through his action of prayer: “For every action of Christ is a lesson for us.” (Super Ioan. 11, lect. 6, no. 1555 [Weisheipl, part 2, 190]). 140 Super Ioan. 14, lect. 2, nos. 1867–1870 (Weisheipl, part 2, 336–7). 141 Super Ioan. 14, lect. 2, no. 1881 (Weisheipl, part 2, 342). 142 Super Ioan. 19, lect. 3, no. 2414 (Weisheipl, part 2, 566). 143 Super Ioan. 19, lect. 4, no. 2441 (Weisheipl, part 2, 574); cf. Barnes, “The Visible Christ and the Invisible Trinity.” 144 Super Ioan. 14, lect. 8, no. 1976 (Weisheipl, part 2, 383). 145 Super Ioan. 15, lect. 2, no. 2003 (Weisheipl, part 2, 398).

142

the paschal mystery and theology of the trinity

In short, it is by attending to Christ’s passion and resurrection – through which our hearts are puriﬁed – that we truly learn who God is. By suffering on the Cross, Christ obediently does the Father’s will; he abides in the Father’s love. This love is manifested by Christ, through his human act of supreme suffering, as supreme self-giving. By his resurrection, Christ, as man, reveals the fruit (the glory) of this supreme self-giving: the fruit is the glory of friendship with the Father, since like loves its like.146 When we are conformed to his (self-giving) image, we manifest his glory and are gloriﬁed with him. As Aquinas explains, commenting on John 3:16, Christ “indicates the immensity of God’s love in saying, ‘have eternal life’: for by giving eternal life, he gives himself. For eternal life is nothing else than enjoying God. But to give oneself is a sign of great love: ‘But God, who is rich in mercy, has brought us to life in Christ’ (Ephesians 2:5).”147 Christ, whose Paschal mystery is God’s revelatory gift of himself to us, thus reveals that “eternal life” (sharing in God himself) is sharing in God’s supreme self-giving – a self-giving that is, unlike human self-giving, without risk, suffering, or loss, in other words a self-giving that is glory. In giving himself, Christ reveals the Wisdom of the Father who draws all things into the self-giving communio of Love.148 The Paschal mystery is Christ’s ultimate teaching about his Father, and at the heart of this sapiential teaching is self-giving. In a way that differs from that of the “Paschal mystery” theologians such as Balthasar who see the Cross as a sign of radical intra-divine abandonment, and yet agrees with their emphasis on self-giving, the Paschal mystery does indeed reveal the Trinity according to Aquinas. For Aquinas, as for Wright, the Paschal mystery must be approached in faith through the purifying pedagogy with which God had instructed Israel (for Aquinas this means largely the Mosaic testimony to God’s being and simplicity, and other attributes), and through Christ’s oral teaching before his passion, death, and resurrection. Thus Aquinas, like Wright, would agree with Richard Hays’s important remark that “the Gospels teach us how to read the Old Testament, and – at the same time – the Old Testament teaches us how to read the 146

Super Ioan. 17, lect. 1, nos. 2190–2192 (Weisheipl, part 2, 482–4). Super Ioan. 3, lect. 3, no. 480 (Weisheipl, part 1, 202). Cf. on Christ’s supreme obedience Super Ioan. 19, lect. 5, no. 2452 (Weisheipl, part 2, 578). 148 See also Super Ioan. 14, lect. 6, no. 1947 (Weisheipl, part 2, 371): “these words indicate the intimacy of Christ with us: with him, that is, with the one who loves and obeys him, since he takes pleasure in us, and has us take pleasure in him, ‘delighting in the sons of men’ (Proverbs 8:31).” 147

the paschal mystery and theology of the trinity

143

Gospels.”149 To understand this divine pedagogy, Wright employs historical and literary methods. As we have seen, Aquinas’s metaphysical approach to the divine pedagogy, while different from Wright’s exegetical methods, is not opposed to them. Far from constructing an aloof “kyriarchal” idol, he seeks to maintain faithfulness to the transcendent and immanent God revealed to Israel as YHWH, the one God, the “I am.” Aquinas places metaphysics in service of God’s command to Israel to avoid all forms of idolatry. Christ’s Paschal mystery reveals that his claim to be the Son of the Father – his claim to be the perfect image of the Father – is indeed the very truth manifested by the incarnate Word’s suffering, death, and resurrection. The Spirit conforms the incarnate Son, on the Cross, into the perfect “analogy,” or human “icon,” of the Father. The analogy is grounded in the incarnate Son’s wisdom and self-giving love, not in absolute unknowing or utter self-abandonment. For this reason, the Paschal mystery serves as an “analogy” for the Trinity precisely in directing our hearts to the perfected imago dei that we see (in faith) in Jesus Christ.150 The “analogy” of the Paschal mystery is thus properly developed through metaphysical investigation of the imago dei, the spiritual capacities for wisdom and love. As ways of instilling within believers greater contemplative understanding of the mystery of the Trinity, reﬂection upon the Paschal mystery and the psychological analogy, as developed metaphysically by Aquinas, complement one another.

149

Richard B. Hays, “Can the Gospels Teach Us How to Read the Old Testament?,” Pro Ecclesia 11 (2002): 405. Hays uses the abbreviation “OT.” 150 Cf. Michael A. Dauphinais, “Loving the Lord Your God: The Imago Dei in Saint Thomas Aquinas,” The Thomist 63 (1999): 241–67; Jean-Pierre Torrell, “Image et béatitude,” chapter 4 of Saint Thomas d’Aquin, maître spirituel, 105–32.

Chapter Five

SCRIPTURE AND THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ANALOGY FOR THE TRINITY

David Coffey has issued an intriguing challenge to the Augustinian sapiential tradition of Trinitarian theology that has found in St. John’s use of the name Logos for the Son of God a way of achieving some analogous contemplative understanding of the mystery of how the three-Personed God is one God, and vice-versa. Coffey states: But that the two processions take place according to the divine intellect (by knowledge) and the divine will (by love), respectively, is something that could only be known if revealed, and revealed it simply has not been. If my views on the Prologue of the Fourth Gospel, argued earlier, are correct, that Jesus is there called the Word of God does not provide a legitimate point of departure for such speculation, as calling a human being a “word” cannot be literal, and indeed can only be metaphorical, speech. Jesus is said to be the Word of God only inasmuch as in his person he embodies divine revelation. Therefore the Thomist-Lonerganian system, to the extent that it rests on Augustine’s psychological analogy, must be said to be a rather shaky ediﬁce. Lacking proper grounding in the Bible, it should probably be characterized as philosophico-religious speculation rather than theology strictly so-called. At best it is an illustration of something already revealed in other ways.1 1

David Coffey, Deus Trinitas: The Doctrine of the Triune God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999): 30. For a critical assessment of Coffey’s book, see Paul D. Molnar’s review in Theological Studies 62 (2001): 377–9. Molnar rightly points out that “[t]his book represents a much needed counter-move to a number of celebrated recent presentations of the doc-

the psychological analogy for the trinity

145

Although Coffey refers to his interpretation of the Prologue of St. John’s Gospel, his understanding of the entirety of the New Testament texts about Christ is at issue. He argues that the New Testament, while viewing “God’s very divinity as shared in uniquely by the man Jesus,”2 consistently understands Christ in his actions, not in his being. According to Coffey, the “biblical world of meaning” is “functional” rather than metaphysical or ontological.3 The early Church, shaped by Greek philosophical concerns, shifted Christian understanding of Jesus away from his actions – away from the biblical world of meaning – and toward questions about Jesus’ being. The Council of Nicea, Coffey argues, “penetrates to a metaphysical level of reality that was scarcely the concern of the biblical writers.”4 This level of reality drives a wedge between the biblical Jesus and the “ontological” Jesus of Nicea’s “homoousion.” Post-Nicene theology has to attempt to deal with this tension: “The result has been that, as theology concerns itself with understanding this action, it is necessarily driven back to the biblical concept of Savior, which it now has to appropriate in terms of the homoousion, ﬁnding that it has to produce elaborate theories to do so.”5 Soteriology and Christology are thus separated with unfortunate consequences, as theological treatises addressing Christ’s actions as Savior are written with little connection to parallel treatises on Christ as ontologically God and man. For Coffey, the New Testament writers presume Jesus’ prerogatives functionally without concerning themselves with potential ontological trine of the Trinity that have polemicized against a doctrine of the immanent Trinity and have ﬂoundered because of their failure to understand the importance of this doctrine” (377). Molnar, however, ultimately cannot agree with Coffey’s conclusions; cf. Paul D. Molnar, “Deus Trinitas: Some Dogmatic Implications of David Coffey’s Biblical Approach to the Trinity,” Irish Theological Quarterly 67 (2002): 33–54. David Tracy has recently defended the psychological analogy as a valid fruit of speculative Trinitarian theology: “I continue to believe . . . that the brilliant use of the analogies of intelligence and love by the western Trinitarian theologies of Augustine and Aquinas are splendid, plausible, and modest analogically speculative forms for reﬂection on the immanent Trinity without any loss of a grounding in the realistic forms (here, especially, doctrine, confession, and liturgy) of articulating the economic Trinity” (Tracy, “God as Trinitarian: A Christian Response to Peter Ochs,” in Christianity in Jewish Terms, ed. Tikva Frymer-Kensky et al. [Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000]: 84). Cf. David Tracy, “Trinitarian Speculation and the Forms of Divine Disclosure,” in The Trinity, ed. S. Davis, D. Kendall, and G. O’Collins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999): 287. 2 Ibid., 10. 3 Ibid., 9. 4 Ibid., 10. 5 Ibid.

146

the psychological analogy for the trinity

questions to which these prerogatives might, outside the “biblical world of meaning,” give rise. Conceiving divinity functionally leaves ample room for a certain duality within God, whereas conceiving divinity ontologically necessarily raises difﬁcult questions about whether Jesus’ functional prerogatives (his divinity as revealed in and by his actions) compromise God’s unity. Since the New Testament simply treats Christ’s actions, it treats him always in his humanity: “Whatever the New Testament says about Christ, no matter how exalted it may be, is said of him as a man, as a human being. His essential humanity is never pushed beyond legitimate limits by anything it says of him, and so he is never seen as even a possible rival to the one God of Israel, to whom he himself prayed.”6 The classical Trinitarian questions arise only after the “functional” biblical worldview, in which God is understood “in his dynamism, that is, in the exercise of his power,” has been eclipsed by the Greek one.7 Coffey’s insistence that the biblical worldview is a “functional” rather than “ontological” one faces problems already in the Old Testament, but meets its greatest challenge in the Gospel of John. He therefore devotes a good deal of effort to interpreting the Gospel of John. As he states, “In my view, nowhere in the New Testament, not even in the Prologue of the Fourth Gospel, is the concept of a metaphysical (or ontological) incarnation attained.”8 Acknowledging a debt to Maurice Wiles, Coffey makes a twofold argument. First, commenting on John 1:14, “the Word became ﬂesh and lived among us,” he holds that “become ﬂesh” does not in this context mean “become human.”9 Rather, “ﬂesh” is understood as opposed to “spirit,” and indicates the assumption of mortality and weakness. Second, he argues that the second half of verse 14, “and lived among us,” indicates that John envisions Jesus as a living man who is changed by coming down to live among us, living the sphere of “spirit” and immortality. Coffey notes, “John says that the Word became ‘ﬂesh’ rather than ‘human’ because he thought of the Word as already and always a human, the divine, preexistent man who had lived with God from eternity in the sphere of the Spirit but who at a certain point exchanged this mode of existence for that of mortal men and women, the sphere of the ﬂesh.”10 The idea of a divine man who came down from heaven accords with Coffey’s view that “ontological” 6 7 8 9 10

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.

10. 11. 12. 13.

the psychological analogy for the trinity

147

questions were not raised by the New Testament authors, since any attempt by the Gospel writer to distinguish between divinity and humanity in Jesus would have raised the question of being. Coffey holds, then, that the “Word” of John’s Prologue is simply the divine man, not a way of distinguishing between the preexistent Son and the human nature that he assumes in the incarnation. Comparing John 1:14 with Colossians 2:9, “In him the fullness of deity dwells bodily,” Coffey suggests that the meaning in both cases is that the divine man embodies God’s Wisdom functionally; at the very least, neither passage demands “to be understood in the sense of a metaphysical incarnation.”11 However, he does not mean to discredit the legitimacy of what, in his view, is the later (and fully legitimate) development of the New Testament’s teaching in light of ontological categories. His position leads him rather to insist simply that “Word is metaphorical (in the economic as well as the immanent Trinity), secondary, and not privileged.”12 It follows from this view that analysis of the name “Word” in order to gain analogous insight into the mystery of distinct Persons in God (the Trinity) is a misguided endeavor. In short, the “illustration of the Trinity” developed by means of the psychological analogy may be evocative and even illuminating in certain respects, but by injecting ontological concerns into the New Testament it substitutes a philosophical path for the revealed path that makes Trinitarian theology truly theology.13 Coffey thus requires that Trinitarian theology, in seeking understanding of the mystery of distinction in God, move beyond the analogy from “Word” and instead take its bearings from the New Testament’s functional understanding of God, “namely the New Testament statements about Jesus and the Spirit as emissaries of the Father.”14 This leads him to propose two “models” of the Trinity, a procession model dependent upon the New Testament testimony to Jesus and Spirit being “sent,” and a return model dependent upon Coffey’s view that, in the New Testament, “the Holy Spirit is Christ’s human love of the Father” and therefore that the human process of “active selftranscendence” in Christ is none other than the Holy Spirit’s work in returning Christ (and us) to the Father.15 11 12 13 14 15

Ibid. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 4. Ibid. Ibid., 64. The latter model shows the inﬂuence of Rahner’s theology.

148

the psychological analogy for the trinity

Coffey’s odd interpretation of the Word as a preexistent divine man16 can here be left to the side, as can his almost equally problematic distinction between ontological and functional concerns in the biblical worldview.17 Instead, I wish to pursue Coffey’s view that Trinitarian theology should move beyond the analogy from “Word” and take its bearings rather from the New Testament’s functional understanding of God, “namely the New Testament statements about Jesus and the Spirit as emissaries of the Father.”18 Coffey’s position justiﬁes exploring anew Thomas Aquinas’s understanding of the psychological analogy. I will seek to show that Aquinas’s understanding of the psychological analogy ﬂows out of his biblical exegesis, and thus belongs to the sapiential ascent traced above.19 16

As an opponent of his view, Coffey cites only James D. G. Dunn, Christology in the Making (London: SCM Press, 1980). Not surprisingly, Coffey does not cite any biblical scholars who support his view. In fact, the case against Coffey’s reading, from the side of biblical scholars, is overwhelming. Ben Witherington III, in his John’s Wisdom: A Commentary on the Fourth Gospel, interprets John 1:14 in a way clearly opposed to the position taken by Coffey: At v. 14 the logos ﬁnally reaches the human stage. The strophes before this were not in any direct way talking about the incarnation, but here the subject is directly treated. Here one ﬁnds “ho logos sarx egeneto.” This means “the Word became ﬂesh.” It certainly does not mean that the Word turned into ﬂesh with no remainder, because he remains the Word who is beheld by the community at the end of the hymn. Thus it might be better to say that what is meant is either the Word took on ﬂesh, or the Word came on the human scene. The Word became more than he was before, not less. To his divine nature he added a human one. (55) In a footnote to this passage, Witherington adds, “In this case the subject is ontology, not primarily status or prerogatives as was true in the Philippian hymn” (374, fn no. 37). Francis J. Moloney, S.D.B., in his The Gospel of John (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1998), also takes a position that contradicts Coffey’s. Moloney interprets John 1:14, “As the Baptist came into the human story (cf. v. 6: egeneto anthropos) so also the Word enters the human story: the Word became ﬂesh (sarx egeneto). The preexistent Word, so intimately associated with God (vv. 1–2), now enﬂeshed, can be the communication and revelation of God in the human situation, where he now dwells (v. 14b)” (38). Many other exegetes could be cited to the same effect. On “being” or the “I am” statements in the Fourth Gospel, see Marianne Meye Thompson, The God of the Gospel of John (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001): 87–92. 17 Richard Bauckham has proposed the category of “identity” as one that blends the central insights of both the functional and the ontological perspectives. See Bauckham, God Cruciﬁed: Monotheism and Christology in the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998). 18 Coffey, Deus Trinitas, 4. 19 As A. F. Gunten, O.P., remarks after tracing the development of Aquinas’s understanding of the “Word” from his Commentary on the Sentences to the Summa Theologiae,

the psychological analogy for the trinity

1

149

Aquinas and the Psychological Analogy

Descriptions of the psychological analogy for the Trinity often make it sound far more abstract than the analogy actually is, as formulated either by Augustine or (in condensed fashion) by Aquinas.20 The standard critique of the psychological analogy is that, by taking its bearings from the mind, it is ultimately unable to move beyond the divine unity to a truly Trinitarian vision.21 The Orthodox theologian Boris Bobrinskoy, following Yves Congar, O.P., has articulated this standard critique: Fr. Yves Congar has deﬁned his [Augustine’s] attitude as “a static, essentialist approach.” Moving from the One to the Three, St. Augustine will examine the relations of the Trinitarian persons inside the one, divine Essence. It is in this context, on the basis of the use of natural reason, that he developed his theory of psychological analogies. . . . What, in Augustine, only had an illustrative character, became a systematic criterion of later theological thought, with Anselm and in Thomism. This view reﬂects a profound knowledge of the psychological domains, and thereby tries to have access to the divine Mystery. It is an essentialist vision which, from the outset, moves from the vision of the One God to elaborate a doctrine of the Trinity.22 “The texts of Scripture invited him to undertake a philosophical study that bears its fruits. It then permits him to give a more precise interpretation of Scripture” (Gunten, “In principio erat Verbum: Une évolution de saint Thomas en théologie trinitaire,” in Ordo sapientiae et amoris ed. C.-J. Pinto de Oliveira, O.P. (Fribourg: Editions universitaires, 1993): 119–41, at 141). 20 Timothy Smith argues that in the Summa Theologiae Aquinas “set aside” Augustine’s “doctrine of the divine image” (Smith, Thomas Aquinas’ Trinitarian Theology, [Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2003]: 70). In contrast, I think it quite clear that Aquinas does “use the doctrine of the divine image to illustrate the way God is one and three” (70), although he approaches it metaphysically. On this point see William B. Stevenson, “The Problem of Trinitarian Processions in Thomas’s Roman Commentary,” The Thomist 64 [2000]: 619–29. Smith remarks, “The task Thomas addresses in q. 27 is one of exegesis, however, not rational speculation” (80), but exegesis and rational metaphysical speculation need not be opposed in this way. For an excellent account of Aquinas’s debt to Augustine, see D. Juvenal Merriell, To the Image of the Trinity: A Study in the Development of Aquinas’ Teaching (Toronto: Pontiﬁcal Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1990). 21 For an account of the psychological analogy in Aquinas that shows how this pitfall is avoided, see Gilles Emery, O.P., “Essentialism or Personalism in the Treatise on God in Saint Thomas Aquinas,” The Thomist 64 (2000): 544–6, chapter 5 in Trinity in Aquinas (Ypsilanti, MI: Sapientia Press, 2003). See also the analysis provided by Bernard Lonergan, S.J., Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas, ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997): 199–204 and 214–15. 22 Boris Bobrinskoy, The Mystery of the Trinity: Trinitarian Experience and Vision in the Biblical and Patristic Tradition, trans. Anthony P. Gythiel (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1999): 284.

150

the psychological analogy for the trinity

According to Bobrinskoy, psychological analogies ﬂow from and embody a “essentialist vision.” Fergus Kerr has described the unfortunate popularization of this notion by John Macquarrie’s inﬂuential Principles of Christian Theology: Macquarrie sets out the standard objections to “substantialist metaphysics” in comments such as the following. In protest against the allegedly prevalent conception of the self as substance, for instance, he writes: “the model or paradigm underlying the notion of substance is that of the solid enduring thing (like a rock). But thinghood cannot be an enlightening model for selfhood. . . . This is to reify the self, to treat it as a thing, however reﬁned that thing may be thought to be. This is at bottom a materialistic understanding of selfhood that cannot do justice to it. The self, as personal existence, has a dynamism, a complexity, a diversity-in-unity, that can never be expressed in terms of inert thinghood” (p.72). Further on, when we get into the doctrine of God, it turns out that this same notion of substance distorts understanding of divine selfhood: “The formula of one substance and three persons constitutes an interpretation that has ceased to communicate, for it talks the language and moves in the discourse of an obsolete philosophy” (p.192). Macquarrie, in his Heideggerian way, proposes to replace the ‘obsolete’ language of substance and “inert thinghood” with that of temporality and history. This account of the classical concept of substance is quite fanciful.23

Aquinas begins his account of the psychological analogy with the divine processions (Coffey’s “procession model”). Far from being unitarian or essentialist, Aquinas’s argument takes as its starting point Jesus’ words, “From God I proceeded” (John 8:42).24 Aquinas is concerned with how to understand this personal procession. As part of his theological exegesis, Aquinas reviews both how this passage has been interpreted in the past, and the Church’s doctrinal teachings (the witness of Tradition) that bear upon this passage. His method of biblical exegesis leads him 23

Fergus Kerr, O.P., review of James W. Felt, S.J., Coming to Be: Towards a ThomisticWhiteheadian Metaphysics of Becoming (New York: SUNY Press,) in Modern Theology 18 (2002): 413–16. Kerr concludes, “At least one thing is clear: Felt makes it untenable to go on attacking ‘classical theism’ for its connivance with ‘substance metaphysics’ ” (416), since the whole notion of “substantialist metaphysics” involves a misunderstanding of the concept of substance. Kerr directs attention to William P. Alston, “Substance and the Trinity,” in The Trinity, ed. S. Davis, D. Kendall, and G. O’Collins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999): 179–201. Alston shows that Greek metaphysics did not conceive substance as “inert.” 24 Summa Theologiae 1, q.27, a.1, sed contra. Emery, “Essentialism or Personalism,” 553–61 responds to the charge of unitarianism.

the psychological analogy for the trinity

151

to devote signiﬁcant space to the heretical interpretations of Arius and Sabellius.25 Aquinas states that Arius interpreted John 8:42 and similar passages as signifying that the Son proceeds from the Father as an effect from a cause. Since an effect is never coequal with its cause, Arius reasoned that “the Son proceeds from the Father as His primary creature, and that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son as the creature of both.”26 Aquinas’s response to Arius is instructive for the light it sheds on Aquinas’s concerns in treating the mystery of the Trinity. He argues that Arius’s interpretation is false because the New Testament – speciﬁcally passages from the letters of St. Paul and St. John, authoritative interpreters of Jesus’ words – contradicts Arius’s position. Signiﬁcantly, both passages selected by Aquinas pertain directly to our personal relationship to distinct Persons of the Trinity.27 25

Investigation of the great heresies is an important means by which Aquinas seeks to gain understanding of the Trinity. For Aquinas’s theological exploration of other early heresies related to Trinitarian doctrine, see Gilles Emery, O.P., “Le photinisme et ses précurseurs chez saint Thomas: Cérinthe, les Ebionites, Paul de Samosate et Photin,” Revue Thomiste 95 (1995): 371–98. 26 1, q.27, a.1. 27 Aquinas explores human beings’ relations to distinct divine Persons further on in his treatise. He notes that the change occurs in the creature, not in God. Thus he states, “For a thing is sent that it may be in something else, and is given that it may be possessed; but that a divine person be possessed by any creature, or exist in it in a new mode, is temporal” (1, q.43, a.2). This is so because “[t]hat a divine person may newly exist in anyone, or be possessed by anyone in time, does not come from change of the divine person, but from change in the creature” (1, q.43, a.2, ad 2). The new relationship is truly present in the creature: The soul is made like to God by grace. Hence for a divine person to be sent to anyone by grace, there must be a likening of the soul to the divine person Who is sent, by some gift of grace. Because the Holy Ghost is Love, the soul is assimilated to the Holy Ghost by the gift of charity: hence the mission of the Holy Ghost is according to the mode of charity. Whereas the Son is the Word, not any sort of word, but one Who breathes forth Love. Hence Augustine says (De Trin. IX.10): The Word we speak of is knowledge with love. Thus the Son is sent not in accordance with every and any kind of intellectual perfection, but according to the intellectual illumination, which breaks forth into the affection of love. (1, q.43, a.5, ad 2) Aquinas concludes this passage by speaking of “a certain experimental knowledge” that belongs to those who have a relation to the Word. Similarly, he writes, “By the gift of sanctifying grace the rational creature is perfected so that it can freely use not only the created gift itself, but enjoy also the divine person Himself; and so the invisible mission takes place according to the gift of sanctifying grace; and yet the divine person Himself is given” (1, q.43, a.3, ad 1).

152

the psychological analogy for the trinity

The ﬁrst passage Aquinas cites against Arius is 1 John 5:20, “And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, to know him who is true, in his Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life.” Believers thus have a distinct personal relation to the Son (that is, the condition of being in the Father’s true Son Jesus Christ). The second passage is 1 Corinthians 6:19: “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit . . .?” Again a distinct personal relation is indicated, this time to the Holy Spirit. Since “to have a temple is God’s prerogative,” the latter passage teaches the full divinity of the Holy Spirit, just as the former passage teaches the full divinity of the Son. Aquinas thus moves from the Persons, revealed in believers’ personal relations to them, to their common essence, divinity. Of course the Trinity acts as one ad extra; the divine Persons are distinguished only by their internal relations, not by distinct ways of acting toward creatures. Yet, rational creatures have distinct relations to each Person, in accord with the properties that belong to each Person in the ordered relations of the Trinity. Not only does Aquinas begin his discussion of the Trinity with the Persons, he focuses on biblical texts that demonstrate that the treatise on the Trinity is no mere abstract exercise, but rather belongs to the heart of our Christian life.28 Having established these biblical passages as particularly problematic for Arius’s position, Aquinas then seeks the reason why Arius’s biblical inter28

In “What does love know? St. Thomas on the Trinity” (New Blackfriars 82 [2001]: 260–72), Rowan Williams, now Archbishop of Canterbury, takes an approach similar in many respects to the one I am taking here. Williams seeks “to challenge the accusation of abstractness levelled against” Aquinas’s theology of the triune God, in particular by LaCugna. Toward the end of his brief essay, he states, “Throughout this paper so far, I have been attempting to suggest that we radically misunderstand Thomas’s Trinitarian theology if we ignore the way in which he repeatedly grounds what he wants to say in the exigencies, as he sees them, of what has emerged in our historical encounter with God as set out in Scripture. How must God be if this is how God acts?” (270). He concludes that the analogy from the mind accounts for the wisdom and love that God enacts in the created order, by grounding in God the “divine gratuity and other-centeredness” that God manifests in creation and redemption. Williams suggests that the doctrine of the Trinity should recall us to the “tight interweaving of love and knowledge” (272), action and contemplation. Williams’s approach is adopted by Fergus Kerr, After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002): 195ff. Yet one would not wish to extend this argument to the conclusion, expressed by Dumitru Staniloae, that were God not Trinity, then we would be left with “the formula for an impersonal or unipersonal god who does not possess the spirit of communion within himself, and hence is neither apt for, nor disposed towards, communion with created persons” (Staniloae, The Experience of God, trans. and ed. Ioan Ionita and Robert Barringer [Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1994]: 246; cf. 249).

the psychological analogy for the trinity

153

pretation led him into error. He ﬁnds that Arius’s error was brought about by a lack of proper metaphysical understanding.29 Speciﬁcally, Arius’s mistake lay in thinking of the Father’s begetting of the Son in terms of a cause’s production of an external effect. Arius lacked the concept of an action that remains within the agent, and thereby may remain coequal and consubstantial with the agent. He thus failed to grasp how God the Father can beget or cause the Son without the Son thereby being less than the Father. Aquinas points out that a variation of this same mistake was made by the other preeminent heretic in Trinitarian doctrine, Sabellius. Sabellius, like Arius, thought of the Son as an external effect and assumed that this would make the Son less than the Father. Rather than concluding that the Son was less than God, however, Sabellius conﬂated “Father” and “Son” (falling into a perfect essentialism) so that “Son” is simply a descriptive term for the Father in the Father’s outward acts as incarnate. According to Aquinas, Sabellius thought that “God the Father is called Son in assuming ﬂesh from the Virgin, and that the Father also is called Holy Spirit in sanctifying the rational creature, and moving it to life.”30 As with Arius, Aquinas ﬁrst points out against Sabellius that Jesus’ own words demonstrate the contrary, namely that the Father and the Son truly are distinct. He cites John 5:19, “the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing” (RSV). It should be clear that in this statement the being of the Son is at stake. Does Jesus intend to be speaking of one God appearing in two ways, or of distinct Persons in the one God? Does the Son share distinctly in the divine being (the “I am”), or is “Son” simply a metaphorical name for the one God, the Father? Aquinas makes clear that biblical exegesis requires metaphysical analysis: ontological questions are embedded in Jesus’ words. Aquinas proceeds to show that at the metaphysical level the essentialism of Arius and Sabellius has the same root: “Careful examination shows that both of these 29

John F. Wippel has drawn attention to Aquinas’s awareness of the inﬂuence of philosophical presuppositions upon theological conclusions: “For his [Aquinas’s] view that differences between theologians arise from differences in their underlying philosophical positions see In II Sent., d.14, q.1, a.2 (Scriptum super libros Sententiarum, P. Mandonnet, ed., [Paris, 1929], Vol. 2, p.350): ‘Similiter etiam expositores Sacrae Scripturae in hoc diversiﬁcati sunt, secundum quod diversorum philosophorum sectatores fuerunt, a quibus in philosophicis eruditi sunt.’ ” (Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas: From Finite Being to Inﬁnite Being [Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2000]: xxi–xxii, fn no. 21.) 30 1, q.27, a.1.

154

the psychological analogy for the trinity

opinions take procession as meaning an outward act; hence neither of them afﬁrms procession as existing in God Himself.”31 The metaphysics of Arius and Sabellius is fundamentally incapable of grasping spiritual being: “act” for them is not conceived apart from the material constituents of the acts that we see around us. Biblical exegesis itself, then, calls for an adequate metaphysical understanding of spiritual act. Jesus’ words, “From God I proceeded,” require that his hearers understand what he means by “procession.” Jesus was speaking about his own mode of being, that is, his own relation to the source of being, God. Either he meant that he proceeded from God but not as God (Arius), or that he proceeded in the sense of the Father proceeding to outward act (Sabellius), or that he proceeded as a mere human being (Paul of Samosata), or that he proceeded as a distinct mode of being God. Metaphysically, the concept of procession can either be understood in terms of outward, external processions, or in terms of inward, intellectual processions. Since the ﬁrst way (outward processions) reduces Jesus to a mere creature, the second way is necessary. This second way is the psychological analogy. Biblical exegesis also requires the psychological analogy for another reason. Aquinas knew well Isaiah’s testimony to God the Creator: “To whom then will you compare me, that I should be like him? says the Holy One. Lift up your eyes on high and see: who created these? He who brings out their host by number, calling them all by name; by the greatness of his might, and because he is strong in power not one is missing” (Isaiah 40:25–6). God, the Creator, is not on the same level as creatures. When Aquinas speaks about God, therefore, he does so analogously and cautiously. He notes, “As God is above all things, we should understand what is said of God, not according to the mode of the lowest creatures, namely bodies, but from similitude of the highest creatures, the intellectual substances; while even the similitudes derived from these fall short in the representation of divine objects.”32 Since God is Spirit (John 4:24), spiritual creatures reﬂect the divine identity in the highest manner, even though they fall woefully short. The spiritual power to know and love God is the pinnacle of the creature’s participation, both naturally and by grace, in the divine being, since spiritual nature manifests the greatest similitude to the triune God. In order truly to contemplate the 31 32

Ibid. 1, q.27, a.1.

the psychological analogy for the trinity

155

Trinity, one must rise up interiorly from contemplation of the image – the dynamism of ﬁnite spiritual act healed and perfected by knowing and loving God in himself – within us. In order to be understood not merely notionally but really, in Newman’s sense, the Bible’s words about God thus call for the contemplative deployment of the psychological analogy, through which one contemplates the ﬁnite spiritual image, healed and elevated by Christ, in order to glimpse (and experience in faithﬁlled contemplation) the mystery of the inﬁnite reality of God the Trinity. In short, Aquinas’s biblical exegesis leads him to the psychological analogy for the Trinity from two directions: as the necessary corrective to the metaphysical errors underlying the Trinitarian heresies of Arius and Sabellius, and as the contemplative action suggested by analogical predication illumined by the biblical theology of the creation of human beings: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27).33 In neither case is the analogy intended to be “demonstrative” of a reality in God: the fact that the distinct processions, in their relations of origin, constitute distinct Persons in God is something we can know only by means of revelation.34 In both cases Aquinas’s account of the psychological analogy ﬂows from his effort to illumine biblical revelation, as interpreted in the Church’s Tradition. Because Arius imagined the Son in terms of outward procession, he could not grasp how the procession of the Son would not introduce diversity in God. Lacking a proper analogy, Arius then had to defend the supreme simplicity of the God of Israel (whatever is in God, is God) by positing that the Son is a creature. Similarly, Sabellius defended God’s supreme simplicity by proposing that the Father is called “Son” in certain external acts. The psychological analogy avoids this difﬁculty posed to 33

The biblical exegete Richard Elliott Friedman comments on Genesis 1:27, “We argue but truly do not know what is meant: whether physical, spiritual, or intellectual image of God. . . . Whatever it means, though, it implies that humans are understood here to share in the divine in a way that a lion or cow does not. That is crucial to all that will follow” (Friedman, Commentary on the Torah [San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001]: 12). It seems clear that the distinction between human animals and other animals, once one grants such a distinction, rests on rationality, the spiritual soul. 34 Timothy Smith emphasizes this point: “One must then maintain the proper lines of the analogy between the manner of understanding and loving in us and the manner of the two processions in God” (Thomas Aquinas’ Trinitarian Theology, 85–6).

156

the psychological analogy for the trinity

God’s simplicity.35 Aquinas notes that the act of understanding involves the procession of a concept (an inner word), and this procession remains within the intellect. As he states, “the more a thing is understood, the more closely is the intellectual conception joined and united to the intelligent agent; since the intellect by the very act of understanding is made one with the object understood.”36 When God knows himself in his Word, this unity is perfect: “as the divine intelligence is the very supreme perfection of God, the divine Word is of necessity perfectly one with the source whence He proceeds, without any kind of diversity.”37 The generation of the Word is not an act that actualizes a potency, but rather is perfect act generating perfect act.38 Coffey’s evaluation of the psychological analogy – “Lacking proper grounding in the Bible, it should probably be characterized as philosophico-religious speculation rather than theology strictly so-called”39 35 Cornelius Plantinga, Jr. rejects this doctrine of “Trinitarian simplicity.” He argues that “simplicity theory of the Augustinian, Lateran [the Fourth Lateran Council’s teaching that on the one essence and three Persons, in which the council rejected a “quaternity”], and Thomistic sort cannot claim much by way of biblical support. Paul and John do not state, or even suggest, that Father, Son, and Spirit are ﬁnally just the same object. The whole drift of their thought appears to go just the other way. Simplicity doctrine ﬁnds its way into Christian theology via Neoplatonism. . . .” (C. Plantinga, Jr., “Social Trinity and Tritheism,” in Trinity, Incarnation, and Atonement, ed. R. J. Feenstra and C. Plantinga, Jr. [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989]: 21–47, at 39.) With regard to Aquinas’s account, Plantinga asks, “But how can three things (the divine relations) that are really distinct each bear an identity relation to the divine nature or essence, differing from it ‘only in our mind’s understanding’? That is, how can three things identical with some fourth thing remain distinct?” (40–41). Plantinga advances these questions in defense of his theory of “social Trinitarianism,” according to which the three Persons each have a distinct essence along with their shared generic essence. Regarding this generic essence, Plantinga comments, “Father, Son, and Spirit each has this essence, though none is it” (31). Plantinga grounds his theory upon strict adherence to the biblical witness. In striving to make his interpretation intelligible and defend it against charges of tritheism, he demonstrates that interpretation of the Bible requires posing and answering metaphysical questions. As Matthew Lamb has pointed out to me, Plantinga’s account of the psychological analogy mistakenly conceives knowledge as by confrontation rather than by identity; Plantinga also fails to see that the reality of the relation is the reality of the terms, not a third thing. For a reply to Plantinga, David Brown, and other social Trinitarians, see Brian Leftow, “AntiSocial Trinitarianism,” in The Trinity, ed. S. Davis, D. Kendall, and G. O’Collins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999): 203–49; cf. Michel René Barnes, “Divine Unity and the Divided Self: Gregory of Nyssa’s Trinitarian Theology in Its Psychological Context,” Modern Theology 18 (2002): 475–96. 36 1, q.27, a.1, ad 2. 37 Ibid. 38 See Lonergan, Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas, 114–15. 39 Coffey, Deus Trinitas, 30.

the psychological analogy for the trinity

157

– is thus the very opposite of the psychological analogy as it is concretely developed, on biblical grounds, by Aquinas. This is shown further by the next article of question 27. Having argued that the psychological analogy gives an account of procession that enables theologians to avoid the interpretive error of Arius and Sabellius, Aquinas seeks to demonstrate that the psychological analogy does not eclipse the name “Son.” Certainly the psychological analogy makes sense of the name “Word” for the Second Person of the Trinity, but does it allow for the preeminence in the New Testament of the name “Son”? Aquinas answers in the afﬁrmative. In his view, the account of procession in God provided by the analogy from the soul’s powers makes intelligible the New Testament’s depiction of the procession of the divine Word as the “generation” of a “Son.” In created intellects, Aquinas notes, “the act of human understanding in ourselves is not the substance itself of the intellect; hence the word which proceeds within us by intelligible operation is not of the same nature as the source whence it proceeds.”40 In God, in contrast, the act of understanding is the same as the divine nature. It follows that “the Word proceeding therefore proceeds as subsisting in the same nature.”41 Generation requires this coming forth as a likeness from something existing in the same nature. Since the Word is an absolutely perfect likeness proceeding from God and existing in the same nature, the Word is perfectly generated or begotten, and so the name “Son” applies supremely. Does the psychological analogy also shed light upon the procession of the Holy Spirit? Were the psychological analogy to lead to the conclusion that only one procession (that of the Word) existed in God, then clearly this analogy would be dangerous, despite its usefulness in helping theologians avoid Arius’s error. In treating the second procession in God (that of the Holy Spirit), Aquinas again begins with the New Testament: “The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father (John 15:26); and He is distinct from the Son, according to the words, I will ask My Father, and He will give you another Paraclete (John 14:16).”42 Is the psychological analogy able to illumine this revelation of a second procession in God? In answer, Aquinas argues that indeed there are two, and only two, processions in an intellectual nature. The acts of an intellectual nature are of two kinds: either knowing an object as true by means of the procession of a concept and the act of judgment (intellect), or willing the object known as good 40 41 42

1, q.27, a.2, ad 2. Ibid. 1, q.27, a.3.

158

the psychological analogy for the trinity

by means of the procession of love (will). Every intellectual nature, be it the human soul or (analogously) God himself, is united with the being of its object under these two aspects, the true and the good. For this reason, there is no third procession. Another difﬁculty arises. Since God is perfectly simple, the divine intellect is the same as the divine will. Does this mean that what constitutes two processions in other intellectual natures must be one procession in God? Aquinas replies that without positing diversity of operations in God, one can posit analogously a distinction of processions based upon order of origin within the divine act. This order of origin arises from the reality, demonstrated by Augustine, that “nothing can be loved by the will unless it is conceived in the intellect.”43 The divine Act is supremely one; yet, as the Act of an intellectual nature, it must involve analogously this order of origin. Aquinas states, “So as there exists a certain order of the Word to the principle whence He proceeds, although in God the substance of the intellect and its concept are the same; so, although in God the will and the intellect are the same, still, inasmuch as love requires by its very nature that it proceed only from the concept of the intellect, there is a distinction of order between the procession of love and the procession of the Word in God.”44 The procession of the Word occurs by way of a likeness, and may be called generation; the procession of Love (the Holy Spirit) occurs by way of an ecstatic impulse toward the object known, and may be called spiration.45 The processions of the Son and the Holy Spirit are distinct in God, but they are intimately related. As Aquinas states, “the Son is the Word, not any sort of word, but one Who breathes forth Love.”46 This point should caution against any suggestion that Aquinas’s use of the psychological analogy tends toward a rationalistic equation of God, who is inﬁnite and incomprehensible, with the human mind. Aquinas employs the

43 1, q.27, a.3, ad 3. As Augustine puts it in Book X of De Trinitate, we do not love the unknown, but rather we love to know the unknown. 44 Ibid. 45 William Charlton argues that Aquinas’s own description of the processions, like those of Arius and Sabellius, falls into “physicalism.” See Charlton, “McCabe on Aquinas on the Trinity,” New Blackfriars 80 (1999): 491–501. This charge holds especially, Charlton thinks, for Aquinas’s concept of the procession of the will, since it is described in terms of impulse. Charlton argues further that the psychological analogy does not distinguish two processions. According to Charlton, they can be conﬂated into one act that is judged to be enjoyable. Charlton would beneﬁt from the exposition of the two processions in Lonergan’s Verbum. 46 1, q.43, a.5, ad 2. Cf. Augustine, De Trinitate, Book 9, ch. 2.

the psychological analogy for the trinity

159

analogy to illumine what has been revealed, namely an order of origin in the simple divine Act. He speaks analogously rather than univocally. He does not equate the Word with the human procession of the intellect, or the Spirit with the human procession of the will. The interplay between Word and Spirit is far more mysterious than what we understand analogously from the human processions of the intellect and the will. To this point, we have explored why Aquinas begins his discussion of the distinct Persons in God by interpreting Jesus’ words, “From God I proceeded.” By examining the decisive heretical interpretations of Jesus’ words (Arius, Sabellius), Aquinas shows that a metaphysics of spiritual act is needed in order to grasp analogously the kind of eternal divine procession that could both distinguish Jesus (as Son) from God and preserve the absolute unity of Father and Son by indicating how the simplicity of the divine Act is not broken by the diversity of processions. He thereby manages to interpret metaphysically the biblical concept of procession in a way that retains both distinction and unity. This does not complete the exegetical/speculative task, however.47 He also needs to show how the processions involve relations of origin that constitute distinct Persons or subjects in God. Aquinas’s interpretation of procession has shown that the distinct Persons in God are not prior to the processions. The Father is not Father “before” begetting or generating the Son; rather, begetting constitutes the Father as Father. As Aquinas notes, “The Father is denominated only from paternity; and the Son only from ﬁliation.”48 The Father is paternity 47

On the relationship in Aquinas between exegetical and speculative labors, see Gilles Emery, O.P., “Biblical Exegesis and the Speculative Doctrine of the Trinity in St. Thomas Aquinas’s Commentary on St. John,” in his Trinity in Aquinas (Ypsilanti, MI: Sapientia Press, 2003). Emery shows how speculative theology, for Aquinas, belongs within the exegetical act and, in its systematic form, ﬂows from it. 48 1, q.28, a.1, sed contra. This stands in contradistinction to Thomas Weinandy’s view that: the Father is the Father in that he begets the Son in the Spirit. The Father spirates the Spirit in the same act by which he begets the Son, for the Spirit proceeds from the Father as the fatherly Love in whom or by whom the Son is begotten. . . . While in human beings something must ﬁrst be known before it is loved, in God the knowing and the loving are simultaneous – the begetting and spirating come forth from the Father as distinct, but concurrent, acts. The Father does not, even logically, ﬁrst beget the Son and then love the Son in the Spirit. The begetting of the Son and the proceeding of the Spirit are simultaneous and, while distinct, mutually inhere in one another. The Father is the Father because, in the one act by which he is eternally constituted as the Father, the Spirit proceeds as the Love (Life and

160

the psychological analogy for the trinity

(begetting); the Son is ﬁliation (being begotten). Yet, procession, while necessary for illuminating the order of origin in the Trinity, as well as the dynamic character of each of the Persons, tends to conceive of Persons as emanating from the essence, and thus provides an inadequate understanding of divine personhood. Aquinas thus explores the relations that one ﬁnds constituted by the processions. In the order of origin, there is a real relation – not merely a logical relation, but a relation of mutual dependence – in the Father’s generation of the Son. The relation is one of “opposition” in the order of origin of the processions.49 Since it is not an opposition between the relation and the divine Act of being, the relation is the same as the divine Act of being. In the relative opposition according to origin, the Father is the relation “begettor,” and the Son is the relation “being begotten.” Since the reality of “relation” is in the termini, “relation” adds to the analogy the element of stable, though not static, personhood.50 Furthermore, the category of relation has the marvelous beneﬁt of possessing two aspects: “in,” since relation must always subsist in a substance, and “to,” since the proper meaning of relation is to indicate a “towards something.” Aquinas notes that relation, in creatures, has a “respect to that in which it is” and a “respect to something outside.”51 When, in light of biblical revelation, relation is applied analogously to God, these two respects under which “relation” must be viewed illumine the “redoubleTruth) in whom the Son is begotten of the Father. (Thomas G. Weinandy O. F. M. Cap., The Father’s Spirit of Sonship, Reconceiving the Trinity [Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1995] 69–72, emphasis added). Weinandy is right that in God there is no priority, even a logical one; the priority is conceptual, i.e. in our mind. Yet, for the purposes of the human discourse that is Trinitarian theology, this conceptual priority in our minds is necessary: without it, we would not be able to distinguish conceptually two processions. Similarly, Weinandy correctly afﬁrms that the Spirit is present in the generation of the Son, but pace Weinandy, the Spirit is present simply as the one who proceeds from the begotten Son, not as a principle. In the real relation, “Father” corresponds to “Son”; were “Father” to be equally constituted as Father by relation to the Holy Spirit, then the Persons could no longer be distinguished by the real relations (which arise from the processions). 49 “Opposition” tends to be understood spatially rather than metaphysically, and thus must be used cautiously if one is to avoid tritheism. 50 In the second volume of his Theologik, Hans Urs von Balthasar argues that “relation” is too weak a category to ground a distinct Personal identity. As I will suggest in chapter 7, the fault lies in Balthasar’s understanding of “relation.” 51 1, q.28, a.2. Emery draws out this point in “Essentialism or Personalism.”

the psychological analogy for the trinity

161

ment” – that is, the viewing of the mystery of God in two irreducible respects – that fuels contemplation of the God of Israel who is one and three.52 When the divine relation is viewed in its respect “in,” the Father is simply the simple God. When the divine relation is viewed in its respect “to,” the Father is begetting, paternity. It is the same relation, and thus it is true to say that the Father is God and the Father is paternity. Yet, it is not true to say that the God is paternity, because that would not respect the dual aspect of “relation” that preserves analogically our understanding of divine unity-in-Trinity.53 The relation Father – Son, as a clear relative opposition, nicely exposes the meaning of divine “relation.” If these two real relations (Father and Son) are found in the order of origin of the procession of the Word, however, how does the procession of Love, or the Holy Spirit, involve a relation of origin? In the order of origin of the procession of Love, spirating Love is opposite to Love being spirated. In this relative opposition according to origin, the Holy Spirit is the relation “Love being spirated.” The relation “spirating” is none other than the Father and the Son. This is so because the “Father,” as we have seen, is distinct from the “Son” only as regards the relative opposition begettor-being begotten. It is this relative opposition alone that distinguishes “Father” and “Son.” Thus Father and Son cannot be distinct in a second way. In begetting the Son, the Father bestows upon him his spirative power.54 While the real relations in God are four (begetting, begotten, spirating, being spirated), then, only three relations subsist distinctly in the divine Act. Only three relations – paternity, ﬁliation, procession (or being spirated) – are distinct modes of being the one divine Act. As distinct modes of being the one divine Act, the three relations in God are rightly called “Persons.”55 Aquinas notes that “person in any nature 52

Ghislain Lafont coined this term, which has been developed further by Gilles Emery. Chapter 7 discusses this approach in detail. 53 Thus, the normal pattern – a (Father) = b (God), a (Father) = c (begetting), therefore b (God) = c (begetting) – does not hold in Trinitarian theology. Rather, because relation is viewed in two irreducible respects (redoublement), one must think of a1 and a2. 54 I will discuss this point in more detail in the next chapter. 55 For further theological discussion of human and divine personhood, see Horst Seidl, “The Concept of Person in St. Thomas Aquinas: A Contribution to Recent Discussion,” The Thomist 51 (1987): 435–60. Seidl emphasizes that “person” is properly a metaphysical concept. As such, “person” requires other such concepts for intelligibility, including “individual substance, universal, nature, and existence” (435). The metaphysical concept of “person” – rather than a phenomenological explanation of personality – is applied analo-

162

the psychological analogy for the trinity

signiﬁes what is distinct in that nature: thus in human nature it signiﬁes this ﬂesh, these bones, and this soul, which are the individuating principles of a man.”57 In God, what is distinct are the relations, which subsist or exist distinctly in God. Therefore, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are called Persons inasmuch as they subsist distinctly in the one divine Act. Since the Persons are distinct only in their mutual relations, each Person is the same as the divine Act. The Persons are distinct modes of actively being the one divine Act. The distinction lies solely in the relative order of origin of the processions, but it is a distinction that makes a difference. Since “person” is applied analogously to God – and since Augustine, among others, had exposed the difﬁculties associated with even analogous use of the term – Aquinas argues carefully for the ﬁttingness of the term. “Person” is particularly ﬁtting or suitable because, as Boethius noted by way of deﬁnition, we reserve the term “person” to individuals who possess rationality.58 Further, as Richard of St. Victor added, spiritual selfpossession gives an “incommunicability” to the person.59 Individuality and incommunicability ﬁttingly illumine the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Analogously understood, they are Persons who subsist distinctly in (inﬁnitely) rational nature, although the divine nature is not itself differentiated in them. In his analysis of the concept of “Person,” Aquinas does not identify further what particular characteristics or properties distinguish the Persons, and neither does he explain further how to distinguish the Persons without anthropomorphizing them. Rather, he contents himself with drawing the metaphysical analog of individual and incommunicable subsistence in rational nature. It is crucial to understand why he does not proceed in the opposite fashion by asking what pertains to human personalities: to do so would be to introduce into the analog anthropomorphic and tritheistic elements. Even so, this cautious approach leads one to ask whether the metaphysical analog is sufﬁciently “personal.” Is the analog gously by Aquinas to God. Focusing upon how this metaphysical analysis engages and clariﬁes the experience of biological, psychological, sociological, historical, and spiritual aspects of human personhood, Yves Floucat offers a complementary perspective; see Floucat, “Enjeux et actualité d’une approche thomiste de la personne,” Revue Thomiste 100 (2000): 384–422. See also Albert Patfoort, O.P.’s review essay addressing the Trinitarian and Christological issues raised by Ghislain Lafont, O.S.B.’s Peut-on connaître Dieu en Jésus Christ? (Paris: Cerf, 1969): Patfoort, “Un projet de ‘traité moderne’ de la Trinité. Vers une réévaluation de la ‘notion’ de personne?” Angelicum 48 (1971): 93–118. 56 1, q.29, a.4. 57 1, q.29, a.1. 58 1, q.29, a.3, ad 4.

the psychological analogy for the trinity

163

adequate to convey the sense of truly distinct, active Persons witnessed to in narrative form by Scripture? The answer is clearly no. The metaphysical analog developed in q.29 – an analog that is properly metaphysical but that belongs to the interpretation of the New Testament, as we have seen – identiﬁes the mode of divine “Personhood” that belongs to each “Person” in God, but the particular characteristics of each Person need to be ﬁlled out by a separate investigation of not “Person,” but this Person. Aquinas undertakes this task in the remaining questions (qq.30–43) of his treatise. He investigates the distinct characteristics of the Persons by returning to the order of origin exposed biblically and metaphysically in qq.27–8. As we will see in the next two chapters, he seeks to identify the distinguishing marks of the three Persons by attending to how the particular characteristics attributed to the distinct Persons in Scripture are illumined by analysis of the order of origin. In this way, he avoids a rationalizing anthropomorphism that goes beyond what we can know (analogously) from revelation, while nonetheless achieving insight into the divine Persons as described biblically in relational terms ﬂowing from the order of the divine processions. What, then, has the metaphysical analysis of divine processions, relations, and Persons accomplished? The difﬁculty of keeping these metaphysical concepts straight has led many frustrated theologians away from Aquinas’s Trinitarian theology as overly abstract. When one follows the metaphysical analysis with care, however, one recognizes how powerfully it afﬁrms the relational name revealed in the Gospels. Building upon the dynamic relationality implied in Jesus’ relationship with his Father – again we return to his words, “From God I proceeded” – Aquinas’s metaphysical analysis enriches biblical exegesis by expressing the relationality of the divine Persons who subsist, in distinct modes, as the one God. Through sapiential contemplation of biblical revelation, we thus come to know more profoundly the thoroughly relational communion that is the subsisting Persons. As Thomas Weinandy has written, “As subsistent relations fully in act, the persons of the Trinity are utterly and completely dynamic and active in their integral and comprehensive self-giving to one another, and could not possibly become more dynamic or active in their self-giving since they are constituted, and so subsist, as who they are only in their complete and utter self-giving to one another.”59 To share, by a knowing fueled by love, in this relational act – the one divine Act expressed, in 59

Thomas G. Weinandy, O.F.M. Cap., Does God Suffer? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000): 119.

164

the psychological analogy for the trinity

the order of origin of the processions, distinctly by the divine Persons – is to enter into a glorious dynamism of perfect communion. Christ is Savior not only because he bears our sin, but ultimately because he puriﬁes our hearts and draws us, by his Spirit, into the communion of the relational three-Personed God.60 The various critiques put forward against the psychological analogy seem, from this vantage point, misguided. Coffey’s criticism that the analogy has no biblical foundation overlooks the fact that the analogy ﬂows from the New Testament’s testimony to the “procession” of both Son and Spirit. Furthermore, the analogy demonstrates its value by providing some understanding of the biblical witness to a God who is absolutely one and yet intrinsically, and dynamically, relational. The standard criticism that the analogy is essentialist appears, at least in Aquinas’s metaphysical version, to be the very opposite of the truth. On the contrary, the analogy is propelled by analysis of distinct processions and their relations of origin, not by analysis of the essence. Lastly, the analogy offers a powerful response to the view – advocated among Christians by Arius and Sabellius – that confessing three coequal, consubstantial, truly distinct Persons in God would, by introducing a fundamental diversity, destroy the unity of God.

60 For elaboration of this point, see Gilles Emery, O.P., La Trinité créatrice (Paris: Vrin, 1995): 384–413 and the excellent article by Charles Morerod, O.P., “Trinité et unité de l’Eglise,” Nova et Vetera 77 (2002): 5–17.

Chapter Six

BIBLICAL EXEGESIS AND SAPIENTIAL NAMING OF THE DIVINE PERSONS

Scholars have long noted the relative lack of exegetical studies on the theology of God in the New Testament. As Marianne Meye Thompson has recently remarked in a book that attempts to address that lack: About twenty-ﬁve years ago, Nils A. Dahl, a professor at Yale Divinity School, wrote a now oft-cited essay entitled “The Neglected Factor in New Testament Theology.” That neglected factor, according to Dahl, was God. A decade later Leander Keck asserted that Dahl was indeed correct: “The understanding of God has been the neglected factor in the study of New Testament theology as a whole. This is particularly true of the study of New Testament Christology, even though every statement about Christ implicates God, beginning with the designation of Jesus as the Anointed.” While there are numerous studies about God in the OT, focused variously on names for God or conceptions of God, “God” has largely been ignored as the proper subject of inquiry and reﬂection with respect to the substance of NT theology. Furthermore, the contrast with OT studies is only highlighted, not relieved, by the plethora of Christological studies in the NT. Apparently scholars have concluded that the OT is about God and the NT is about Jesus, or else that God has but secondary importance in engaging the witness of the NT Scriptures.1

1

Marianne Meye Thompson, The God of the Gospel of John (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001): 1–2. Cf. C. Kavin Rowe, “Romans 10:13: What Is the Name of the Lord?” Horizons in Biblical Theology 22 (2000): 136, especially fn 5.

166

biblical exegesis and naming of the divine

Thompson, following Dahl, suggests that a central reason for this lack is “the fact that most of the references to God occur in contexts that deal with some other theme.”2 Exegetes, focusing on these other themes, generally treat God only insofar as God is related to their particular theme (e.g., Christ, righteousness, and so forth). One would suspect that the general contemporary theological suspicion of treating “God in himself,” along with the corresponding emphasis on “God for us,” has contributed to the situation; as, no doubt, has the disputed question of the status of language about “Father,” “Son,” and “Spirit” in the New Testament. Many, if not most, New Testament scholars deny that the New Testament authors thought of either the “Son” or the “Spirit” as divine; such scholars hold that Trinitarian language is a later imposition upon the texts of the New Testament, which according to this view do not envision a “God” other than the one God of Israel. Stimulated by the work of Thompson and others, however, this situation may be changing.3 Thompson’s book focuses on “God” as understood in the Gospel of John. Similarly, Luke Timothy Johnson and William Kurz, S.J.’s The Future of Catholic Biblical Scholarship includes an essay by Kurz that focuses on the Trinitarian implications of the Prologue of the Gospel of John. Kurz argues that it is necessary and justiﬁable to “bring particularly the Nicene Creed to bear on our interpretation and actualization of the Johannine prologue. Recently, under the unexamined inﬂuence of historical criticism, teachers and preachers of Scripture have often seemed to go out of their way to minimize connections between this biblical prologue which Christians read and the creed which they recite and doctrines which they believe.”4 Displaying a thorough knowledge of the insights of historical criticism into the contextual background of the Prologue, Kurz concludes, “Thus the prologue explicitly claims that Jesus . . . is in fact the Word or Son of God who was with the Father from before creation.”5 Kurz then compares the Prologue 2

Thompson, The God of the Gospel of John, 2. See e.g., David Yeago, “The New Testament and Nicene Dogma,” Pro Ecclesia 3 (1994): 152–64; Robert W. Jenson, “The Bible and the Trinity,” Pro Ecclesia 11 (2002): 329–39; and the emerging work of C. Kavin Rowe, “Biblical Pressure and Trinitarian Hermeneutics,” Pro Ecclesia 11 (2002): 295–312, “Luke and the Trinity: An Essay in Ecclesial Biblical Theology,” Scottish Journal of Theology 56 (2003): 1–26, “The God of Israel and Jesus Christ: Luke, Marcion, and the Unity of the Canon,” Nova et Vetera (English) 1 (2003): 359–80. 4 Luke Timothy Johnson and William Kurz, S.J., The Future of Catholic Biblical Scholarship: A Constructive Conversation (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002): 165; Kurz’s essay draws upon an earlier essay, “The Johannine Word as Revealing the Father: A Christian Credal Actualization,” Perspectives in Religious Studies 28 (2001): 67–84. 5 Ibid., 174. 3

biblical exegesis and naming of the divine

167

phrase-by-phrase with the Nicene Creed and ﬁnds an impressive continuity. This continuity enables Kurz to argue for the view that “to seek and ﬁnd the mind of God in Scripture requires reading the particular passages within the overall context of God’s total revelation – i.e., not only within all of Scripture, but also in the Church’s life and Tradition, and amid the coherence of all the truths of faith among themselves and with God’s whole plan of revelation.”6 In a masterful essay that opens the volume, Luke Timothy Johnson likewise rejects the tendency to pit Scripture against the ecclesial matrix in which Scripture is read theologically.7 In his view, the key step toward recovering a properly Catholic biblical exegesis is to seek instruction in “premodern” biblical exegesis in order to regain what it means to practice, certainly with the tools of historical criticism but also with a theological and pastoral insight formed in the biblical worldview, ecclesial exegesis: a community of readers, governed by the rule of faith, who are not merely academics but are also, within a particular ecclesial tradition, hearers and practitioners of the Word.8 From a different perspective – that of Protestant biblical theology – Ben Witherington III and Laura Ice have asked whether the New Testament teaches the fundamental elements of what the Church later codiﬁed as Trinitarian doctrine. In The Shadow of the Almighty: Father, Son, and Spirit in Biblical Perspective, Witherington and Ice explore the meaning of “Father,” “Son,” and “Spirit” by surveying the use of each term in the New Testament texts, including Paul, the Synoptics, John, the general epistles, and Revelation.9 Although the book is brief and intended for a wide audience, nonetheless its survey of many of the relevant scriptural texts offers a means for developing the program of Johnson and Kurz.10 This chapter will employ Witherington and Ice’s book as a resource for 6

Ibid., 187. Ibid. The chapter is entitled “What’s Catholic about Catholic Biblical Scholarship? An Opening Statement.” 8 Johnson’s insights resonate with the philosophical work of Alasdair MacIntyre. Kurz makes clear that the key difﬁculty for Johnson is squaring his vision of ecclesial exegesis with the ecclesial authority exercised by the Magisterium of the Church. 9 Ben Witherington and Laura Ice, The Shadow of the Almighty: Father, Son, and Spirit in Biblical Perspective (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002). Earlier Thompson had published The Promise of the Father: Jesus and God in the New Testament (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000). 10 I will focus on the areas where Witherington and Ice’s book may help to deepen our understanding of Aquinas’s sapiential theology of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; thus I will not draw out areas of clear disagreement, such as on the nature of baptism and so forth. 7

168

biblical exegesis and naming of the divine

entering more deeply into the sapiential ascent toward contemplative union offered by St. Thomas Aquinas. Like Aquinas, Witherington and Ice study the uses of the terms Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in order to gain insight primarily into God, rather than primarily into our relationship with God. Similarly, their exegesis aims at discovering whether and how “Father,” “Son,” and “Spirit” name divine Persons: by identifying the distinctive roles or characteristics of the Persons, they hope to show that these roles and characteristics constitute three distinct agents who are the one God. The purpose of this chapter is not to evaluate Witherington and Ice’s book, but rather to enable to the reader of Aquinas’s text to hear the biblical motifs that infuse Aquinas’s metaphysically sophisticated analysis of the proper names of the Persons. The Protestant scholar John Goldingay has recently challenged the validity of such sapiential analysis precisely on the grounds that it ignores Scripture: For all its truth and fruitfulness, the doctrine of the Trinity seriously skews our theological reading of Scripture. It excludes most of the insight expressed in the biblical narrative’s portrayal of the person and its working out of the plot. There is a paradox here. Some of the key ﬁgures in the development of the doctrine of the Trinity emphasized how little we may directly say about God, particularly God’s inner nature. Yet theology nevertheless involves the venture to think the unthinkable and say the unsayable. Yet in doing so it ignores the theological potential of the things that Scripture does say.11

By comparing the conclusions of Witherington and Ice with those of Aquinas, I hope further to expose the way in which Aquinas’s speculative, metaphysically informed treatment of the proper names of the Persons belongs within contemporary discussion, both biblical and speculative, 11

John Goldingay, “Biblical Narrative and Systematic Theology,” in Between Two Horizons: Spanning New Testament Studies & Systematic Theology, ed. Joel B. Green and Max Turner (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000): 123–42, at 131. Interestingly, Goldingay and I both maintain that it is valuable to read the Old Testament in light of the work of Jack Miles and Jon Levenson, although it seems that Goldingay would agree with their viewpoint rather than with that of Aquinas. Goldingay states, “I am not yet ready to give up the hope that Christian doctrine and lifestyles might be shaped by Scripture, though I do not have great expectation that this will ever happen. If it is to do so, however, of key importance will be not the reading of scriptural narrative in light of what we know already and how we live already, but the reading of scriptural narrative through the eyes of people such as Jack Miles and Jon Levenson who do not believe what we believe or do not practice what we practice” (138).

biblical exegesis and naming of the divine

169

regarding what Christians should say about the distinct Persons whom, as one God, we worship. Does Aquinas’s sapiential theology – which hews close to the credal and ecclesial Tradition – skew the biblical (narrative) portrayal of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit or ignore “the theological potential of the things that Scripture does say”? Does sapiential, traditionconstituted inquiry work, or is there a continual distancing from the biblical Word? In the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas devotes six questions speciﬁcally to the Persons of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. These questions constitute the pinnacle of Aquinas’s treatise on God: here we encounter the mystery of the proper names of the Persons, which has been prepared for by the discussion in qq.27–32 of processions, relations, and Persons. Each name, as a marker of a “proper” distinction in God, resonates with awe-inspiring meaning for the Christian believer who seeks to know God and in love, to praise him with a “pure heart” puriﬁed of idolatrous discourse. Questions 33–8 are not bereft of biblical quotations, and they are rich in quotations from the Fathers. Nonetheless, Aquinas’s treatment of the proper names of the Persons – Father, Son, Word, Image, Holy Spirit, Love, Gift12 – can appear mechanically technical. In order to appreciate Aquinas’s metaphysical precision as a mode of purifying our worship of the living three-Personed God, one must hear the biblical “echoes”13 that resound in Aquinas’s treatment of the proper names and that remind us of the source and goal of his contemplation. Reference to the exegetical insights of Witherington and Ice will help to expose these decisive echoes, by enabling us to understand what biblical themes and issues are at stake in the sapiential puriﬁcation of our worship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

1

The Person of the Father

There are two central aspects to Witherington and Ice’s treatment of the Father that will shed light on Aquinas’s discussion of the Person of the Father. The ﬁrst is that the Father is the principle or source of the whole divinity, and that all life comes from him. Commenting on the Gospel of John, Witherington and Ice remark, “The Father has life in himself and 12

Aquinas owes his identiﬁcation of the proper names for the Persons to Augustine, who in De Trinitate beautifully exposes the names Gift, Word, and Image in Book 5, chapter 3 and the name Love especially in Book 9 (cf. Book 15, chapter 5). 13 To use Richard Hays’s phrase. See his extraordinary Echoes of the Scripture in the Letters of Paul (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

170

biblical exegesis and naming of the divine

has granted the Son the same privilege (5:25–6).”14 In summarizing the witness of the New Testament texts, they make a similar point with regard to the Father’s “begetting” power. “Father” is a suitable name because the Father is “begettor” of the Son. In Witherington and Ice’s view, this begetting role pertains to the begetting of Jesus’ human nature. Insofar as Witherington and Ice are suggesting that the begetting of Jesus’ human nature is a personal property of the Father, Aquinas would of course disagree; but they seem also to be pointing more generally to the Father’s role as the principle of the Son’s being. They write, “One of the important motifs that generates this Father language is the notion of the Father as a begetter of the Son, and in an extended sense of humankind, particularly of believers who are ‘born of God.’ ”15 Second, Witherington and Ice focus upon the discontinuity between the Old Testament’s infrequent use of “Father” and the use of “Father” in the New Testament. Witherington and Ice argue that the New Testament texts (and thus Jesus himself) ground their discussion of God the Father “in a particular set of historical relationships: (1) the relationship of Jesus with God; (2) the relationships of early Christians with God made possible by Jesus and enabled by the Holy Spirit.”16 They admit that God is occasionally presented in the Old Testament and inter-testamental literature as a “Father” to his people Israel or to a future Davidic king.17 However, they note that God is not prayed to or addressed personally as Father in the Old Testament. Further, they emphasize that the use of “Father” in the New Testament is radically focused upon relationship with Jesus: “Jesus wishes to call Israel forward into a new relationship with a God who can be addressed as abba if one will become a disciple of the one who has a unique relationship with that abba.”18 Jesus thus reveals a highly personal sense of “Father.” The “Father” is the one who is Jesus’ Father. Father, as used in the New Testament, is not ﬁrst a broader category and then also, by extension, Jesus’ Father; rather, Father is ﬁrst Jesus’ Father. To be “Father” in this sense means to be Father of the onlybegotten Son. 14

Witherington and Ice, The Shadow of the Almighty, 50. Ibid., 59. 16 Ibid., 63–4. 17 See especially their treatment in pp.1–16. 18 Ibid., 63. In emphasizing discontinuity, they are explicitly arguing against the direction taken by Marianne Meye Thompson in The Promise of the Father, although at times the divergence with Thompson’s view seems to be exaggerated. 15

biblical exegesis and naming of the divine

171

This view shapes Witherington and Ice’s interpretation of John 8:31–59, a passage that is often considered anti-Semitic. In their view, the Gospel of John highlights this new, unique, intimate relationship to the Father that is now possible in Jesus, but not outside of him. They state, “According to this Gospel, people must ﬁrst become children of God through faith, before God is truly their Father, and that entails ﬁrst also having a relationship with Jesus. The Son has been bequeathed life from the Father, and he is the one who bestows it and the relationship with God it involves on others (5:25–6).”19 When in John 8:31–59 some Jews argue with their fellow Jew, Jesus, that Abraham is their father and thus they do not need to be freed from (spiritual) bondage, Jesus condemns them harshly, warning that such a misunderstanding of God’s Fatherhood would leave them in their sins. According to Witherington and Ice, Jesus’ point is that a radically reconceived notion of God’s Fatherhood is necessary for entering into the salvation that Jesus, as messianic Son, brings. In accord with God’s saving will to fulﬁll his covenants and redeem all humankind through his Son Jesus Christ, God will now have to be related to as the Father of the Son. Human beings call upon this God as “Father” by calling upon his Son; to relate to him as “Father” in this sense is possible only if one knows (implicitly or explicitly) the “Son” to whom he is primarily Father, and through whom human beings are restored to right relationship with God (freed from spiritual bondage). The New Testament offers, through Jesus, a radically reconﬁgured notion of God’s salviﬁc Fatherhood and our adoptive sonship – reconﬁgured around the person of Jesus the Son and Savior.20 From these two central themes in Witherington and Ice’s discussion of the Father, we can gain insight into Aquinas’s sapiential analysis.21 The ﬁrst question Aquinas asks in his exploration of the Person of the Father is whether the Father is the “principle” (principium) of the Son and Holy 19

Ibid., 48. This point – the newness of Jesus’ revelation of the Father – is made also by Jean Galot, S.J., “Le mystère de la personne du Père,” Gregorianum 77 (1996): 5–31. 21 I have been preceded in this effort to expose the biblical foundations of Aquinas’s theology of the Father by René Lafontaine, S.J. In “La Personne du Père dans la pensée de saint Thomas,” chapter 4 of L’Ecriture âme de la théologie (Bruxelles: Institut d’Etudes Théologiques, 1990): 83–108, Lafontaine states: “je montrerai au départ d’exemples choisis comment le discours systématique de la Somme présuppose l’autorité de l’Ecriture et y renvoie comme vers son épanouissement ultime” (83). Drawing upon the work of M.-J. Le Guillou, who has argued for the signiﬁcance of the concept of “paternity” in Aquinas’s thought, Lafontaine traces the understanding of the Father in Aquinas’s doctrines of Trinity and creation, the moral life, and Christology. 20

172

biblical exegesis and naming of the divine

Spirit. Answering yes, Aquinas moves from this biblically derived afﬁrmation to speculative questions that ﬂow from it. If the Father is the principle, how is he still one God with the Son and the Spirit? Would not the Father, as the principle, be greater than the Son and Spirit, who would seem to be lesser than their principle?22 Ultimately such questions are liturgical ones: has the New Testament deviated from the worship of the one God? Aquinas explains that the Father is the principle because both the Son and the Spirit proceed from him: “anything whence something proceeds in any way we call a principle.”23 He then moves to examine metaphysically what it means to be a “principle.” The Latin Fathers, Aquinas notes, distinguished “principle” from “cause.”24 “Principle” can signify cause, but it can also signify, more 22 Elizabeth A. Johnson, C.S.J. remarks, “In addition to limiting attention to only one of several Trinitarian languages, the structure of the processional model carries an inherent difﬁculty. While afﬁrming and promoting the equality of divine persons and their mutual interrelation, it nevertheless subverts this by its rigid hierarchical ordering. The Father gives everything and receives back nothing that could be considered ontologically essential. The Spirit on the other hand receives everything and gives nothing essential in return” (Elizabeth A. Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Discourse [New York: Crossroad, 1992]: 196). She notes that this “subtle hierarchy” continues to beleaguer Trinitarian theology based upon the processional model, even when “God as a profound relational communion” is appreciated and emphasized (196). While in theory “[s]equence . . . does not necessitate subordination” (196) in practice:

the basic metaphors being used necessarily signify an order of precedence in their human gestalt. Processions, whether academic, liturgical, funeral, and so on, imply rank. Parents exist before their children, and are responsible for their existence. A gift implies a giver who is already there. While Trinitarian equality is afﬁrmed, the images falter and are simply not capable of bearing the burden of the mutuality to be expressed. The Father generates the Son and from one or both proceeds the Spirit, a pattern that presses headlong toward a ﬁrst followed by a second and a third, in fact if not in intent. The impression is consistently given of an inherent inconsistency in classical Trinitarian theology that it uses constructs that by their very design undermine equality and mutuality and introduce subordination in a subtle way. Different metaphor systems are needed to show the equality, mutuality, and reciprocal dynamism of Trinitarian relations. (197) Johnson interprets the Trinity through the lens of power rather than of wisdom. The “order” against which Johnson – in calling for a social and theological ordering based upon her views of “women’s reality” and human happiness – contends is in fact the biblical order of begetting and spiration. Since this order is the Trinity, it is not metaphorical speech but analogical. Johnson’s withdrawal of the notion of “order” from Trinitarian theology cuts off Trinitarian theology from its foundation in revelation, and constructs a myth. 23 1, q.33, a.1. 24 1, q.33, a.1, ad 1. He notes that this distinction was not made by the Greek Fathers.

biblical exegesis and naming of the divine

173

widely, simply the “ﬁrst term of a thing.”25 In order words, “principle” can signify the order that things have in relation to each other, rather than signifying a cause – effect relationship. “Cause,” in contrast, suggests a temporal priority, a difference of substance, and a dependence of the effect on the cause in a way that makes the effect lesser than the cause in perfection or in power.26 In identifying “principle” as a better term for describing the Father than “cause,” Aquinas notes that “the wider a term is, the more suitable it is to use as regards God (q.12, a.11), because, the more special terms are, the more they determine the mode adapted to the creature.”27 The mystery that the Father is “principle” of the Son and Holy Spirit does not therefore indicate in any way that the Son and Holy Spirit are lesser because they are not the Father. Rather, it implies an order of origin. This order lacks any kind of subordination of the Son and Holy Spirit. Indeed, following the Latin Fathers, Aquinas argues that even referring to the Son and Holy Spirit as “principled” or “caused” would be a mistake. The mystery of procession from the Father, Aquinas wishes to emphasize, is completely distinct from our experience of cause and effect, which always contains some sense of subordination on the part of the effect. The Father is “principle” in a way that goes beyond our common understanding of what this might mean. It is not, however, “proper” (unique) to the Father to be a principle; the Son is one principle, with the Father, of the Holy Spirit. Aquinas speaks of the Father as “the principle not from a principle” and of the Son as “the principle from a principle.”28 However, it is “proper” to the Father to be unbegotten. Uniquely among the Persons of the Trinity, the Father is not “from another.”29 The Father is not only a principle, he is the ﬁrst principle in the order of origin of the divine Persons. To speak of the Father as “principle” thus should open up a (mysterious) vista of an order of origin in which the Father is ﬁrst and is the “from whence” of the other two Persons, and yet in which the other two possess the same dignity as the Father, in perfect equality with him. The caution with which Aquinas approaches this task of using human language to name what is distinct about the Father, without thereby indicating any 25 26 27 28 29

1, q.33, a.1, ad 1 and 3. Ibid., ad 1. Ibid. 1, q.33, a.4. Ibid.

174

biblical exegesis and naming of the divine

kind of subordination of the coequal Son and Spirit, reﬂects the extraordinary profundity of this mystery, which human language can so easily compromise. How could something be ﬁrst, the “from whence” – perhaps the most awe-inspiring mystery of all – and yet not be superior in any real sense to the two Persons who proceed? Aquinas’s language preserves both sides of the mystery: the Father’s uniqueness in the Godhead as the principle without a principle, and the Son’s and Spirit’s coequality with the Father. It is this profound mystery that engages the person who contemplates, by means of the order of origin, the Persons in God. The second aspect distinguishing the Father that is identiﬁed by Witherington and Ice is the discontinuity between the few references to God as “Father” in the Old Testament, and the numerous references to God as “Father” in the New Testament. In the New Testament, what is meant is Jesus’ Father, the Father of the Son; and Jesus’ Father becomes, insofar as we have faith in Jesus, our Father: we participate in, even if we do not fully share, the way in which Jesus is Son of the Father. In other words, what is meant by “Father” in the Old Testament is God in his unity, whereas what is meant in the New Testament is the Father of the Son. The New Testament celebrates our participation in the Son, through the Spirit, in praising the Father, i.e., our sharing in the Trinitarian life. Like Witherington and Ice, Aquinas ﬁnds in the Old Testament some foreshadowing of the more speciﬁc understanding of “Father”: “It is said (Psalms 89:26): ‘He shall cry out to me: Thou art my Father.’ ”30 In the New Testament, Aquinas argues, “Father” signiﬁes the relation that distinguishes the “Father” as a distinct Person in God. This relation is paternity: the Father is the principle of the Son, and is properly named by this relation. “Father” names the relation paternity (thus the noun “Father” in God, as an active relation, should be thought of as more like a verb31), which subsists in God and therefore is God. Yet, since God is not male or female, why not apply to the ﬁrst Person a name that more adequately minimizes the creaturely “mode of signiﬁcation” in its application to God?32 Aquinas points out that every father 30

1, q.33, a.2. See Thomas G. Weinandy, O.F.M. Cap., Does God Suffer? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000): especially 115–20. 32 Although the context for this question is not a feminist one, it touches upon feminist concerns: why name God “Father” if God is not, in some sense, male? Aquinas’s answer focuses upon the fact that the ﬁrst Person of the Trinity is a person, not a process; and his personhood is deﬁned by active begetting (as opposing to receptive bringing forth). The difﬁculty for feminist theologians goes far deeper than simply the name “Father.” In a review 31

biblical exegesis and naming of the divine

175

begets, but every begetter is not a father. Since, as noted above, “the more common term is more properly applied to God,” would it not be more proper to name the ﬁrst divine Person “begetter” or “genitor” rather than “Father” (thereby leaving out the ways in which the name “Father” of Nicholas Lash’s Believing Three Ways in One God (London: SCM Press, 1992) in Modern Theology 11 (1995): 262–4, Sarah Coakley points out: This too is a point at which feminist issues impinge on Trinitarianism at deeper levels than Lash is aware. It is in his favor that he takes earlier feminist critiques of traditional theological language seriously, and at various points in his text adverts to them positively. But minor complementary adjustments to “Father” language do not go far enough; the more pressing issue is how the very nature of perfect “relationship” is constructed and idealized in any given Trinitarianism, and whether subliminal gender messages are not insidiously encoded here. (A telling case in point is precisely the identiﬁcation of the Spirit with “love” in Augustine and Aquinas. Is it a coincidence that Aquinas grants women a share in the beatiﬁc vision in virtue of their supposedly greater capacity for love (see ST 3a.55, 1 ad 3)? Or that Augustine had earlier judged women fully in the “image of God” only through their marital conjoining to a male bearer of Christic rationality (de Trinitate 12, 7, 10–12)?) This shows that the more complex “archaeology” in this area has only just begun: gender is inscribed deeply, if hiddenly, in both Eastern and Western visions of the Trinity – though in signiﬁcantly different ways which demand further analysis. (264) Without granting Coakley’s reading of Aquinas or Augustine, I agree that gender is inscribed in our biblical, analogical Trinitarian language deeply and hiddenly, but also quite openly. Coakley’s recent collection of essays, Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), explores divine and human power in light of human dependency, submission, and kenosis, and opens crucial avenues for a way forward, yet her rejection of “implied ‘essentialist’ visions of gender” (37; cf. 153–67) continues to press the question – for those who are not persuaded by her critique of “gender binaries” in favor of an almost completely ﬂuid account of bodiliness – of whether the male and female bodies of human persons differentiate human persons in a way that is signiﬁcant for analogous (Christian) discourse that builds upon creaturely reality. See also Janet Martin Soskice’s work on this topic, “Trinity and Feminism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Theology, ed. Susan Frank Parsons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002): 135–50 and “Can a Feminist Call God ‘Father’?” in Speaking the Christian God: The Holy Trinity and the Challenge of Feminism, ed. Alvin F. Kimel, Jr. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1992): 81–94. As Soskice remarks in the latter article, “what real choices does the Christian feminist have? The least problematic, as I have said, is to reject Christianity altogether. If, on the other hand, one stays within Christianity, one must come to terms with those sections of its texts and those parts of its tradition where the symbolism is ineradicably masculine” (91). Both Coakley and Soskice recognize that the doctrine of the Trinity, so long as Scripture and tradition are taken seriously and the words Father and Son are employed (theologically and liturgically), will not be “free” of all gender implications (the mode of signiﬁcation) no matter how much we recognize that God (the res signiﬁcata) has no gender. The procedure of using human language to delineate analogously the divine attributes cannot escape the fact that the human language, both esoterically and openly, is indebted to the reality of the

176

biblical exegesis and naming of the divine

is less “common” or encompassing)?33 Addressing a question that is also addressed (in light of modern feminist thought) by Witherington and Ice, Aquinas notes that “generation signiﬁes something in process of being made [in ﬁeri].”34 The distinct divine relations or Persons, however, are not in process of coming to be, but rather are. “Begetter” and “genitor,” therefore, inaccurately give the impression of a relation in which neither term is perfected or complete; whereas “Father” expresses, in a resolutely personal manner, the full existence of the other term in the relation (the relation Father-Son is in the Father as “paternity” and in the Son as “ﬁliation”).35 “Father” is properly the name of the divine Person who is distinguished in the Godhead by paternity, or generation. Learning this name enables us to contemplate the mystery, revealed in the New Testament, of perfect divine generation of another Person that does not destroy divine unity.36 “Father” is thus differently understood in the New Testament than it is in the Old. However, which meaning of “Father” belongs ﬁrstly to God? Is “Father” applied ﬁrst and foremost to the distinct Person, or to God understood in his unity? Aquinas answers by pointing out that the primary sense of “Father” is the eternal sense. Eternally, the Father is Father of the Son. God is not eternally Creator in this sense; rather, God

sexual differences between male and female human beings. Jesus ratiﬁes the ability of such sexually differentiated language to convey truth about God the Trinity, and thus the goodness of such language even in our fallen world. Has such language (Father, Son) in fact been good, that is, in fact communicated the truth of the divine Persons, God himself, in a salutory way to the church? Answering in the negative, Daphne Hampson shows in Theology and Feminism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990) that Jesus’ choice of such language is incompatible with feminist understandings of reality, at least as feminism has been traditionally construed by its academic practitioners. Christian revelation offers the possibility of reformulating feminism: see e.g., Pope John Paul II’s 1988 apostolic letter Mulieris Dignatatem; Francis Martin’s important The Feminist Question: Feminist Theology in the Light of Christian Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994); J. A. DiNoia, O.P., “Knowing and Naming the Triune God: The Grammar of Trinitarian Confession,” in Alvin Kimel, Speaking the Christian God: The Holy Trinity and the Challenge of Feminism: 162–87. 33 1, q.33, a.2, obj.2. 34 1, q.33, a.2, ad 2. 35 Ibid. 36 Thus, the Father does not give himself in a way that constitutes a “separation” or distance between himself and the Son that then has to be “bridged” by the Holy Spirit. Although the Holy Spirit is the mutual love between the Father and the Son, the Holy Spirit is not the “glue” that holds the Father and Son together. The communication of the divine nature is explored by Gregory Martin Reichberg, “La communication de la nature divine en Dieu selon Thomas d’Aquin,” Revue Thomiste 93 (1993): 50–65.

biblical exegesis and naming of the divine

177

(understood as one) is “Father” of all creatures in time. It follows that “paternity in God is taken in a personal sense as regards the Son, before it is so taken as regards the creature.”37 Aquinas adds that “ﬁliation” eternally is God the Son, while in creatures there are found various degrees of ﬁnite, limited likeness to this perfect ﬁliation.38 God the Trinity is the Father of irrational creatures (see Job 38:28) by reason of what Aquinas calls a “trace” (vestigia) of the divine ﬁliation, and is the Father of all rational creatures (see Deuteronomy 32:6) by reason of the image of God in the rational creature, which is a “likeness” (similitudo) of the divine ﬁliation. More immediately, the relation of adoptive sons and daughters to God by grace is a supernatural likeness of the divine ﬁliation (Romans 8:16–17), and this likeness is enhanced by glory, the completion of grace (Romans 5:2).39 Although rational creatures become adopted sons in the incarnate Son, rational creatures are adopted sons of the whole Trinity, not simply of the Father. Creatures become adopted sons of the whole Trinity insofar as they share intimately, by the power of the Holy Spirit, in the divine ﬁliation by being “conformed to the image of the Son of God.”40 While the relation Father-Son is limited to the divine Persons, nonetheless insofar as creatures are generated and receive their being (including receiving their adoptive sonship), there is a likeness – Aquinas cautions against over-exuberance by calling it a “remote similitude” (similitudinem quandam remotam) – of creatures speciﬁcally to the Son’s proper mode of subsistence in God.41 The likeness is “remote” because the Son possesses by nature what he 37

1, q.33, a.3. Ibid. See also ad 1: “For as the word conceived in the mind of the artist is ﬁrst understood to proceed from the artist before the thing designed, which is produced in likeness to the word conceived in the artist’s mind; so the Son proceeds from the Father before the creature, to which the name of ﬁliation is applied as it participates in the likeness of the Son, as is clear from the words of Romans 8:29: ‘Whom He foreknew and predestined to be made conformable to the image of His Son.’ ” 39 1, q.33, a.3. The biblical citations are Aquinas’s. The signiﬁcance of the name “Father” for human understanding of deiﬁcation (union with God) is explored further by Victor M. Fernández, “Sentido teológico de la paternidad de la primera Persona,” Angelicum 77 (2000): 437–58. Gilles Emery, O.P. has examined the Father’s role in the Trinitarian work of creation: “Le Père et l’oeuvre trinitaire de création selon le Commentaire des Sentences de S. Thomas d’Aquin,” in Ordo Sapientiae et Amoris, ed. C.-J. Pinto de Oliveira (Fribourg: Editions Universitaires, 1993): 85–117. 40 1, q.33, a.3, ad 2. For a thorough discussion, see Luc-Thomas Somme, O.P., Fils adoptifs de Dieu par Jésus Christ: La ﬁliation divine par adoption dans la théologie de saint Thomas d’Aquin (Paris: Vrin, 1997). 41 Ibid. 38

178

biblical exegesis and naming of the divine

receives (the Son is subsisting ﬁliation), whereas creatures are not God. Aquinas cites John 1:18 as evidence of the Son’s absolute pre-eminence: “The only begotten who is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared unto us.”42 From the above, one can see that Aquinas’s discussion in q.33 of the distinct characteristics (or names) of the Person of the Father contains few of the biblical quotations that one might expect to ﬁnd.43 He cites the Gospel of John only once in the four articles that compose q.33. The ﬁrst and fourth articles have no biblical quotations whatsoever. It should also be clear, however, the insights that animate Witherington and Ice’s exegetical treatment of God the Father – namely, the Father as the principle (without a principle) who begets the Son, and “Father” as the proper name for the divine Person – also animate Aquinas’s treatment. Witherington and Ice develop these concerns within an exegetical context (that is, by means of comparison of biblical texts) and with an eye to debates within current New Testament studies. In contrast, Aquinas seeks sapiential insight by exposing how each name, when understood through metaphysical ascesis or puriﬁcation, serves as a pathway to deeper contemplative knowledge of or union with, through the revelation of the Father by the Son and Spirit, the Person of the Father.44 It should be seen that Aquinas’s approach both remains attuned to the central motifs of the New Testament, and enables the reader of Scripture, puriﬁed in heart, to see more deeply into the mystery of the Father.

42

Ibid. The contemporary disjunction between speculative theology and biblical exegesis, however, may somewhat color such expectations. Aquinas lectured daily on the Bible, and would have expected his readers to be familiar with the array of relevant biblical passages. For the study of the Bible in Dominican priories, see William A. Hinnebusch, O.P., The History of the Dominican Order, Vol. 2: Intellectual and Cultural Life to 1500 (New York: Alba House, 1973): 20–1. 44 Hinnebusch’s work reveals the extraordinary contemplative atmosphere in which Aquinas lived and taught, which would have informed the way he approached the divine names. See Hinnebusch, The History of the Dominican Order, Vol. 1: Origins and Growth to 1500 (New York: Alba House, 1966); 347–53; Vol. 2: 56–7. On human experiential relationships to distinct Persons through the divine missions of the Son and Spirit, see 1, q.43 as well as Albert Patfoort, O.P., “Ista cognitio est quasi experimentalis,” Angelicum 63 (1986): 3–13 and “Missions divines et expérience des Personnes divines selon S. Thomas,” Angelicum 63 (1986): 545–59. See also Gilles Emery, O.P., “Essentialism or Personalism in the Treatise on God in Saint Thomas Aquinas?” The Thomist 64 (2000): 521–63, especially 527–31; Charles André Bernard, S.J., “Mystère trinitaire et transformation en Dieu,” Gregorianum 80 (1999): 441–67. 43

biblical exegesis and naming of the divine

2

179

The Person of the Son

Much of Witherington and Ice’s treatment of the Son is devoted to showing that the New Testament does in fact teach the divinity of the Son. In this regard, their approach is not far from that of the early Fathers who strove against the Arian heresy. While the refutation of Arius occupies signiﬁcant portions of Aquinas’s biblical commentaries, especially the Commentary on John, and is present in the Summa Theologiae as well, Aquinas in his discussion of the Person of the Son in qq.34–5 is occupied instead with exposing the signiﬁcance of the names Word and Image for understanding what distinguishes the Person of the Son. Aquinas begins by asking whether “Word” (Logos) is a personal name in God, or rather a name that applies to God in his unity, as belonging to his act of understanding. Following John Damascene, Aquinas suggests that “Word” can have three meanings: “ﬁrst and chieﬂy, the interior concept of the mind is called a word; secondarily, the vocal sound itself, signifying the interior concept, is so called; and thirdly, the imagination of the vocal sound is called a word.”45 Insofar as “Word” is used of God, it must have the ﬁrst meaning. Implied in this ﬁrst meaning is the concept of procession: the interior word proceeds from the intellect. Since procession, as we have seen, belongs solely to the Persons in God, “Word” must be a personal term when applied to God.46 As a strictly personal term, “Word” thus implies no alteration of the essence.47 However, is there not a concept formed in any act of understanding, and does not the act of understanding belong to what is one in God? Recalling his earlier discussion of God’s knowledge, Aquinas argues that the Father speaks the Word, rather than understands the Word.48 This distinction between “speaking” and “understanding” an inner word is 45

1, q.34, a.1. For a thorough discussion of the themes broached here, see the impressive essay by Yves Floucat, “L’intellection et son verbe selon saint Thomas d’Aquin,” Revue Thomiste 97 (1997): 443–84 and 640–93, and his study L’Intime fécondité de l’intelligence: Le verbe mental selon saint Thomas d’Aquin (Paris: Téqui, 2001). See also Bernard Lonergan, S.J., Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid., ad 1. 48 God’s knowledge belongs to the common essence, but this does not mean that there is an “essence” outside the Persons that understands. Rather, the Persons are the one divine understanding according to their distinct modes; thus, the Father understands as generating a Word, and the Son understands as the Word proceeding. The essential attributes are never separated from the order of origin, even though the essential attributes are perfectly one and simple. On this point, see 1, q.34, a.2, ad 4.

180

biblical exegesis and naming of the divine

signiﬁcant because the former conveys the sense of origin that distinguishes what belongs to the Persons in God from what belongs to them in common. Only the Father speaks the Word, although all the Persons understand and are understood. In the Word the whole Trinity (as well as all creatures) is spoken, because the Father’s Word expresses everything that he knows.49 The Word thus subsists distinctly as a Person in God, in relation to the Father who speaks. Furthermore, since this speaking is the generation of a concept or Word, it can be seen that this is the Father’s generation of the Son. The Word is a proper name of the divine Son.50 Contemplating the Son as Word thus offers a way to understand the meaning of ﬁliation in God. Analysis of the name “Word” provides insight into the mystery of how the Son – subsisting ﬁliation – is both distinct from God (as spoken) and is God (who is pure immaterial Spirit). Yet, would it not be better simply to exploit the familial image expressed by the name “Son”? The New Testament reveals various names through which we enter into this mystery of divine ﬁliation or of a second Person in the Godhead: “For the Son’s nativity, which is his personal property, is signiﬁed by different names. . . . To show that He is of the same nature as the Father, He is called the Son; to show that He is coeternal, He is called the Splendor; to show that He is altogether like, He is called the Image; to show that He is begotten immaterially, He is called the Word.”51 Even so, the work required in order to understand divine ﬁliation through such lenses – -”Splendor,” “Image,” “Word” – seems quite technical and difﬁcult. Why does Aquinas not begin with the image of the divine family (Father-Son) and from this familial image develop a portrait of the Persons in God as a perfect interchange of wisdom and love? It should be noted that Aquinas does employ the familial image when he considers it helpful. In attempting to explain how the Holy Spirit proceeds immediately from the Father and mediately from the Son, Aquinas states, “So also did Abel proceed immediately from Adam, inasmuch as Adam was his father; and mediately, as Eve was his mother, 49 1, q.34, a.1, ad 2 and especially ad 3. Cf. my “Speaking the Trinity: Anselm and His Thirteenth-Century Interlocutors on Divine Intelligere and Dicere,” in Saint Anselm – His Origins and Inﬂuence, ed. John R. Fortin (Lewiston: Edwin Mellon Press, 2001): 131–43. 50 1, q.34, a.2. For the development of Aquinas’s understanding of human words and the divine Word, see A. F. Gunten, O.P., “In principio erat Verbum: Une évolution de saint Thomas en théologie trinitaire.” 51 1, q.34, a.2, ad 3.

biblical exegesis and naming of the divine

181

who proceeded from Adam.”52 The familial image thus has a place within Aquinas’s speculative theology, but a circumscribed place, since he hastens to add that “this example of a material procession is inept to signify the immaterial procession of the divine persons.”53 In describing the Son, he turns to the biblical analogs “Word” and “Image,” rather than to the roles of fathers and sons within human families. By drawing out the implications of immaterial (spiritual) analogs, he seeks insight into the mystery of spiritual “Sonship.” Indeed, in so doing Aquinas is on solid biblical ground. Witherington and Ice approach the divine Son in two ways: through an exploration of Jesus’ description of himself as “Son of Man” in the context of Israel’s messianic expectations, and through the inﬂuence of the Jewish Wisdom literature.54 The connections to the Wisdom literature are especially important because they give insight into the uniqueness and immaterial character of the Son. Noting that John 1:18 calls the Son “monogenes,” Witherington and Ice point out that Wisdom is called “monogenes” in Wisdom of Solomon 7:22: for wisdom, the fashioner of all things, taught me. For in her there is a spirit that is intelligent, holy, unique [monogenes] . . . all-powerful, overseeing all, and penetrating through all spirits that are intelligent and pure and most subtle. For wisdom is more mobile than any motion; because of her

52

1, q.36, a.3, ad 1. Ibid. Pope John Paul II has remarked, “In the light of the New Testament it is possible to discern how the primordial model of the family is to be sought in God himself, in the Trinitarian mystery of his life. The divine ‘We’ is the eternal pattern of the human ‘we,’ especially of that ‘we’ formed by the man and the woman created in the divine image and likeness” (“Letter to Families,” no. 6, Vatican translation [Boston: St. Paul Books & Media, 1994]). The Pope’s words, composed during the “Year of the Family,” remind us that every human community, and especially the profound one that is the family, ﬁnds its source in God and must be measured in light of God’s perfect unity and communion of Persons. Similarly, the Catechism of the Catholic Church employs this image in its section on “Life in Christ,” when discussing the nature of the family (no. 2205: the Catechism does not use the image in its ﬁrst section on “The Profession of Faith,” when discussing the Persons of the Trinity). Anthropomorphism, which can be found in the work of popularizers of the familial image, fails to observe proper caution and turns the Trinity into an expression of good home life. 54 Cf. Witherington’s Jesus the Sage: The Pilgrimage of Wisdom (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994), as well as his John’s Wisdom: A Commentary on the Fourth Gospel (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995) and The Many Faces of the Christ: The Christologies of the New Testament and Beyond (New York: Crossroad, 1998). 53

182

biblical exegesis and naming of the divine

pureness she pervades and penetrates all things. For she is a breath of the power of God, and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty; therefore nothing deﬁled gains entrance into her. For she is a reﬂection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of his goodness. (7:22–6)55

As the Word, Jesus possesses the immaterial, divine qualities that had been attributed to Wisdom.56 The Gospel authors (not only John but to a lesser extent Matthew and Luke) thus express the characteristics of Jesus’ divine ﬁlial identity by turning to the qualities described in the Old Testament’s characterization of Wisdom. When Aquinas, in his turn, seeks to glimpse the divine characteristics of the Son, who is ﬁliation, his exploration of the Person of the Son as “Word” and “Image” corresponds to the biblical authors’ depiction of Jesus’ characteristics as Son in terms of the language of immaterial Wisdom. The New Testament’s familial language (Father-Son) is not lost but rather is grasped more deeply. As we have seen, Wisdom of Solomon 7:22 describes Wisdom as “the fashioner of all things.” Similarly, Wisdom of Solomon 8:1 says, “She reaches mightily from one end of the earth to the other, and she orders all things well.” John applies the attributes of Wisdom to the Logos (Word), although there are differences as well, not only because Jesus is Wisdom come in the ﬂesh but also because John, in his opening chapter and elsewhere, puriﬁes the concept of Wisdom in light of his theology of the one God who is Father, Son, and Spirit. The ﬁrst chapter of John bears witness to this reﬁnement of the Old Testament concept of Wisdom. First John introduces the eternal Word: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (1:1–5). In Wisdom of Solomon 7, Wisdom was seen as “a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty” and as the “fashioner of all things” who “pervades and penetrates all things” and who is a “reﬂection of eternal light” and “image of his goodness.” John’s theology of the Word reﬁnes these concepts. The Word is God and yet also is “with God,” indicating distinction but not emanation. The Word is not simply the “fashioner of all things,” but rather God is said to make all things 55 56

Ibid., 91. Ibid.

biblical exegesis and naming of the divine

183

through the Word. The Word does not simply “pervade” all things, but rather in the Word is life and light, in which creatures share. Second, John introduces the coming of the Word in the ﬂesh, as Jesus Christ: “The true light that enlightens every man was coming into the world. . . . And the Word became ﬂesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father” (1:9,14). The incarnate Son, who is Jesus Christ, makes known the invisible Father. Aquinas asks further whether the name “Word” indicates not only relation to the Father, but also, in some sense, relation to creatures, as John suggests. Following Augustine, Aquinas notes that if the Son is the Father’s “spoken” Word, in which the Father utters all that he knows, then not only the whole Trinity but also all possible creatures are spoken in the Word. Similar to what the Old Testament says about Wisdom, in the Word God knows (and creates) all creatures. This is clear from the Gospel of John. Yet, how one should distinguish the relation Father-Word from the relation to creatures connoted by the name Word? After all, as we have seen, the Persons in God are distinguished solely by relation of origin. Were the Son/Word also distinguished in God by relation to creatures, then it would seem that not only would God be in a relation of mutual dependence to creatures (thus ceasing to be the free transcendent God), but also there might be a new distinct relation in God, and thus another Person. The Father generates the Word in knowing all that is God and all the ways that God could be ﬁnitely participated. As regards the personal relation Father-Word, therefore, strictly speaking, the name Word “does not imply relation to the creature,” but rather implies relation to the Father.57 However, insofar as the Word is the divine essence as spoken, the Father utters in the Word all possible creatures, and all possible creatures are understood in the Word. In this way, the name Word does imply relation to creatures, even though the relation to creatures is shared by the whole Trinity as belonging to God essentially (rather than as belonging to the distinction of Persons).58 By distinguishing the relation to creatures from the relation to the Father, Aquinas illumines the progression in the ﬁrst chapter of John’s Gospel from verses 1–2 (which discuss the Word in relation to God) to verses 3–4 (which discuss the Word in relation to creatures). The relation to creatures implied by the name Word, Aquinas notes, 57 58

1, q.34, a.3, ad 1. Ibid.

184

biblical exegesis and naming of the divine

is not a relation in time. It belongs to God in his eternity, because he eternally knows creatures.59 If Aquinas’s sapiential analysis of the Word corresponds to Witherington and Ice’s emphasis on Wisdom, what about his analysis of “Image,” the second name by which he explores the meaning of divine Sonship? The name “Image,” which we have already seen in Wisdom of Solomon 7, is found in St. Paul’s opening exhortation in his Letter to the Colossians.60 In their book, Witherington and Ice refer readers to Witherington’s earlier book, Jesus the Sage, for a discussion of Colossians 1:15.61 There Witherington shows that the Colossians hymn (1:15–20) is itself suffused with the inﬂuence of the Wisdom of Solomon.62 As with the Gospel of John, he notes that “the composer of this hymn is not simply transferring what was once said of Wisdom to Christ, for there are various small emendations or additions along the way.”63 In accord with Aquinas, Witherington interprets Colossians 1:15 – Christ as “image” or “icon” of the invisible God – to signify perfect likeness, not merely likeness. Witherington afﬁrms, “Christ is said to be the image of the invisible God, but this does not mean he is merely a likeness of him, but rather that he is the exact representation of him, in character and otherwise.”64 As Aquinas states, when “image” is used of the Son, it refers to being of the same divine nature.65 Why is not the Holy Spirit an “image”? Aquinas notes that an image must be referred to something else of which it is the image. If this is so, then it follows that “for a true image it is required that one proceeds from another like to it in species, or at least in speciﬁc sign. Now whatever 59

1, q.34, a.3, ad 2 and 3. The “relation” in time is in creatures, but not in God, since God is not dependent upon creatures. On this point see Thomas Weinandy, O. F. M. Cap., Does God Change? (Still River, MA: St. Bede’s Publications, 1985): 90–6. 60 In q.33, a.3, obj.3, Aquinas cites Colossians 1:15, “Who is the image of the invisible God, the ﬁrst-born of every creature,” and he presumes this quotation in q.35. 61 Witherington and Ice, The Shadow of the Almighty, 74–5. They maintain that the Son is presented in the New Testament as like the Father. For example, commenting on Mark 14:61–2, they state that “the Son of Man is presented as reﬂecting and participating in the divine identity” (80). Even so, their discussion would have been signiﬁcantly improved by examining Colossians 1:15. 62 Ben Witherington III, Jesus the Sage, 266–7. 63 Ibid., 267. 64 Ibid., 269. Witherington does not think that the next phrase of Colossians 1:15, “the ﬁrst-born of all creation,” means that the Son is created: “When the hymn says he is the ﬁrstborn of all creation this probably does not refer to his being created, for it is about to go on to say he is the author of all creation. Clearly he is depicted here as on the side of the creator in the creator-creature distinction” (ibid.). 65 1, q.35, a.2, ad 3.

biblical exegesis and naming of the divine

185

imports procession or origin in God, belongs to the persons.”66 Both the Son and the Holy Spirit proceed in God. In fact, as Aquinas points out, the Greek Fathers frequently speak of the Holy Spirit as the Image of the Father and of the Son.67 Why does Aquinas, following Augustine, value this name as one that gives insight into what distinguishes the Son from the Spirit? First and foremost, Aquinas notes that in the New Testament only the Son is named Image.68 He explains that Image properly names the Son not because the Son receives the divine nature (the Holy Spirit receives the divine nature as well), but because the Son receives the divine nature as begotten, or as born (natus). Something that is begotten from another, is always of like species, or its image. In contrast, something spirated from another (as love is), is not necessarily its image. This is true even though in the case of the Holy Spirit – “the divine love” – it is of like species.69 Thus, “Image” names the absolute likeness proper to ﬁliation, and thus gives us insight into what distinguishes the Son in the Trinity. The Son, in the order of origin of the divine Persons, is distinct because he proceeds as the Father’s Word and because he is the perfect begotten Image of the Father.

3

The Person of the Holy Spirit

Aquinas begins his discussion of the Person of the Holy Spirit by asking whether the name “Holy Spirit” is the proper name of one divine Person.70 This question touches upon two contemporary concerns, raised by Witherington and Ice, that will help us reach the heart of Aquinas’s discussion. The ﬁrst is whether the “Spirit” actually names a personal agent at all, since in the Old Testament the “Spirit” in often described in terms that do not reﬂect personal agency. The second is whether Christ is the Spirit, an idea that has developed among biblical scholars in light of St. Paul’s statements in 1 Corinthians 6:17 and 15:45 and 2 Corinthians 3:17–18, and that has been appropriated by some theologians. 66

1, q.35, a.1. 1, q.35, a.2. 68 Ibid. 69 1, q.35, a.1. 70 For a survey of the Holy Spirit in Aquinas’s theology, see Jean-Pierre Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas: Spiritual Master, chaps 7–9, 153–224. Torrell draws upon a wide range of (largely French) Thomistic literature. 67

186

biblical exegesis and naming of the divine

Citing the M. E. Lodahl’s Shekinah Spirit: Divine Presence in Jewish and Christian Religion as an important recent example, Witherington and Ice note that some biblical scholars think that “the Holy Spirit is not seen as a person in the NT, but rather what we have is simply another expression of the same sort of notions about divine presence as are found in the OT and in non-Christian early Judaism.”71 As with their analysis of the Father, Witherington and Ice emphasize the discontinuity between “Spirit/ ruach/shekinah” in the Old Testament and “Spirit/ pneuma/ paraclete” in the New Testament. In the former, they argue, the Spirit typically appears as an impersonal agent. God sends his spirit upon human beings, especially the prophets, but God’s spirit does not exercise a distinct personal agency.72 By contrast, in the New Testament – especially in the Gospel of John, Acts, and the letters of Paul – the Spirit is generally, though not always, spoken of as a distinct, personal, divine agent who shapes people and events.73 Aquinas recognizes the prevalence, especially in the Old Testament, of language about the Spirit for which it is difﬁcult to pin down personal agency. Following Hilary, he cites as examples of such difﬁcult language Isaiah 61:1, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,” Matthew 12:28, “In the Spirit of God I cast out devils,” and Joel 2:28, “I will pour out My Spirit over all ﬂesh.”74 In interpreting such passages, Aquinas argues that at times the word “spirit” simply means the whole Trinity, which is spirit (as immaterial), rather than a speciﬁc, distinct personal agent.75 If “spirit” sometimes means the whole Trinity, however, how is one to tell when the word refers particularly to the Person of the Holy Spirit? Could it be that the Spirit is so close to the Son that, indeed, the Spirit and the Son (both of whom come forth from the Father) are not distinct divine Persons – in other words that the risen Christ, at least, is the Spirit?76 71 Witherington and Ice, The Shadow of the Almighty, 102, referring to M. E. Lodahl, Shekinah Spirit: Divine Presence in Jewish and Christian Religion (New York: Paulist Press, 1992). 72 Witherington and Ice, The Shadow of the Almighty, 103–5. 73 See ibid., 145–7, for a summary of this aspect. 74 1, q.36, a.1, obj.1. These examples come from Hilary of Poitiers (De Trin. 8), who suggests that in the three cases the word “Spirit” refers respectively to the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. The confusion derives from the fact that the “spirit,” as used in these examples, can signify an impersonal agency. 75 1, q.36, a.1, ad 1. 76 See Roger Haight, S.J. Jesus Symbol of God (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999). Haight writes, “The symbol of the Spirit more forthrightly makes the claim that God, God’s very self, acted in and through Jesus. This stands in contrast to the symbols of God’s Word and

biblical exegesis and naming of the divine

187

The conﬂation of Christ and the Spirit takes theological form in the varieties of “Spirit Christology,” according to which Christ, and especially the risen Christ, manifests God the Spirit in such a way that Christ can properly be described as the Spirit.77 The biblical scholar J. D. G. Dunn Wisdom which, insofar as they became personiﬁed and then hypostatized, tend to connote someone or something distinct from and less than God that was incarnate in Jesus, even though it is called divine or of God. By contrast, the symbol of God as Spirit is not a personiﬁcation of God, but refers more directly to God, so that it is clear from the beginning that nothing less than God was at work in Jesus” (451). Haight has earlier stated that the Spirit is God “at work” in God’s creation (448). Thus, Spirit-Christology – recognizing the Spirit at work in Jesus – means recognizing that in Jesus God’s Spirit was at work in God’s creation (452). For Haight, the “symbols” of Word or Wisdom do not have this same connotation of agency; moreover, such symbols, while valuable in certain ways, are more prone to “literalist misreading” which uproots them from the level of “vital religious imagination” and errs by understanding them in terms of “a pre-existent Logos” (177). In Haight’s view, then, these symbols are not as adequate an expression of God’s work in Jesus as is available through Spirit-Christology, which emphasizes that in the fully human Jesus we experience precisely God at work or God’s Spirit. Worship of the “risen Christ” is, insofar as it brings about “salvation” by empowering “human existence and freedom that share in God’s absoluteness” (178; cf. 454f.), an encounter with God at work, that is, with God as Spirit. Thus encounter today with “Jesus” is none other than encounter with “God as Spirit.” Regarding his theory of symbols, Haight explains: Five symbols from the Jewish-Christian scripture which ﬁgure most prominently in later Trinitarian theology provide good examples of these qualities of conceptual or linguistic religious symbols. These are Yahweh, Spirit, Word, Wisdom, and Logos. Yahweh is the name of the absolutely transcendent one. The scriptures are ﬁlled with the theme of God’s inapproachability and the need of mediation to establish contact. The other symbols may be understood by contrast: they point to indications and traces of God in the world. . . . And what is this Logos that according to the poem of John was with God from the beginning? This Logos is God’s wisdom, and God’s Word, and God’s Spirit, and perhaps God’s reﬂective reason as well. These symbols, metaphors, or models did not have a stable univocal meaning. (472–3) It should be clear that Haight’s work turns Catholic theology into Schleiermacher’s The Christian Faith, and shares with Schleiermacher the implicit rejection of the doctrine of the Trinity. For critical analysis of Haight’s work, see most importantly Thomas Weinandy, O. F. M. Cap., “The Symbolic Theology of Roger Haight,” The Thomist 65 (2001): 121–36, especially 128–9, and “The Case for Spirit Christology: Some Reﬂections,” The Thomist 59 (1995): 173–88. 77 Developing a view held by numerous other biblical scholars, the New Testament scholar J. D. G. Dunn has outlined and defended a version of “Spirit Christology” in works such as Jesus and the Spirit: A Study of the Religious and Charismatic Experience of Jesus and the First Christians as Reﬂected in the New Testament (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1975); Christology in the Making: A New Testament Inquiry into the Origins of the Doctrine of the Incarnation (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1980); and The Christ and the Spirit: Collected Essays of J. D. G. Dunn, Vol. 1: Christology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998). In his recent

188

biblical exegesis and naming of the divine

is best known for promulgating this view. Witherington and Ice devote a signiﬁcant amount of work to explaining why “Spirit-Christology” is an exegetical mistake.78 Aquinas’s question is a more reﬁned one: whether one can name a distinct divine Person by means of terms that apply equally well to the other two Persons, “holy” and “spirit.”79 Would not such a name leave in question the distinctiveness of the Person thus named? How does this name distinguish characteristics that specify this Person in the Trinity? Aquinas begins by recalling his teaching on the two divine processions, which ground the relations and to which the New Testament powerfully testiﬁes. He notes that unlike in the case of the “Word,” there is no name to signify clearly the proper name of the second procession in God. This is because we name God analogously from creatures, and “in creatures generation is the only principle of communication of nature.”80 Thus the second procession could only properly be called “generation,” but this name would not distinguish it from the ﬁrst procession (Aquinas therefore calls it “spiration”). For this reason, the relation that is constituted by the second procession does not have a “proper” name, one that like “Father” and “Son” distinguishes the relation clearly from the characteristics of the other Persons. First, therefore, the name “Holy Spirit” indicates that this Person possesses what the Father and the Son possess; all three are “holy” and “spirit.” These common attributes suggest the full divinity of the Spirit. Second, the names “holy” and “spirit” denote the unique properties of love, what make love distinctive. As regards the name “spirit,” Aquinas states, “For the name spirit in things corporeal seems to signify impulse and motion; for we call the breath and wind by the term spirit. Now it study The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), Dunn argues Christ, speciﬁcally the risen Christ, “is experienced in and through, even as the life-giving Spirit, just as the Spirit experienced other than as the Spirit of Christ is for Paul not the Spirit of God” (264). On the same page, Dunn speaks of “Paul’s similarly puzzling conception of the risen Christ’s relationship with the Spirit (closely identiﬁed, but not completely).” Dunn’s version of “Spirit Christology” is, while in my view mistaken, far less deleterious than Haight’s. Gordon D. Fee’s God’s Empowering Presence: The Holy Spirit in the Letters of Paul (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994) argues against versions of “Spirit Christology,” including Dunn’s; see, e.g., 832–42. Witherington and Ice acknowledge a signiﬁcant debt to Fee’s work in their section on the Holy Spirit. 78 On Spirit-Christology, see Witherington and Ice, The Shadow of the Almighty, 131–5. On John’s account of the Logos, see also Witherington’s John’s Wisdom, 47–59. 79 See 1, q.36, a.1, obj. 1 and ad 1. 80 1, q.27, a.4, ad 3.

biblical exegesis and naming of the divine

189

is a property of love to move and impel the will of the lover towards the object loved.”81 This impulse or movement of the lover to the beloved is the “love” that is the Holy Spirit in the Trinity: the Holy Spirit is distinguished in relation to the other Persons as the unitive force. Regarding the name “holy,” Aquinas makes a similar point. He argues that “holiness is attributed to whatever is ordered to God. Therefore because the divine person proceeds by way of the love whereby God is loved, that person is most properly named the Holy Spirit.”82 The Holy Spirit proceeds in the “ordering” of God the Son to God the Father, as the Love that, in the divine order of origin, is a Person. In knowing himself, God loves what he knows.83 Just as with the Son (Word, Image), soteriological motifs are clearly present in the meaning, within the Trinity, of the name of the subsisting relation that is the Person of the Holy Spirit. Yet, if the Person of the Holy Spirit is distinct in the Trinity as the personal love that “orders” the Father and the Son to each other by uniting them, this suggests that the relation that is the Person of the Holy Spirit is constituted by relation to both the Father and the Son. In contrast to the relation “Father-Son,” the relation that is the Holy Spirit is therefore more difﬁcult to conceive analogously. The Holy Spirit is not the Son of the Father; rather, the Holy Spirit is related both to the Son and to the Father, in one relation. Thus, analysis of the name “Holy Spirit” leads into reﬂection upon how the procession of the Holy Spirit (the procession that constitutes the subsisting relation that is the Holy Spirit) involves both the Father and the Son, so that the Holy Spirit is related to both. Is it possible to gain some understanding of this mystery and thereby understand more profoundly, even if by a mere glimpse, what distinguishes the Holy Spirit as a Person in the Trinity? Witherington and Ice ﬁnd in the New Testament two distinct “sendings” of divine Persons (agents) from the Father, that of the Son and that of the Holy Spirit.84 Moreover, not only are the processions of distinct divine Persons from the Father revealed in the New Testament, but also these processions have a certain order and pattern. From their analysis of the Gospel of John, Witherington and Ice afﬁrm that “[t]he Spirit is 81

1, q.36, a.1. Ibid. 83 See 1, q.36, a.2. 84 See, e.g., Witherington and Ice, The Shadow of the Almighty, 107, on the Son and Holy Spirit in the Gospel of Mark. 82

190

biblical exegesis and naming of the divine

clearly seen as Jesus’ agent just as Jesus is seen as the agent of the Father on earth (see 16:13–15).”85 Similarly, drawing on the work of Gordon Fee, Witherington and Ice point out that “Paul primarily concentrates on the Spirit’s relationship to the Father,” but also that in Paul “the Spirit conveys to the believer the very presence of Christ, even though Christ remains in heaven at the right hand of God.”86 Thus the Spirit is Christ’s (the Son’s) agent, as well as the Father’s agent. However, Witherington and Ice do not attempt to gain insight into the distinctiveness of the Holy Spirit’s procession in the Trinity. Their goal is simply to show that in the New Testament, the economy of salvation, the Spirit is a distinct divine Person or a distinct divine agent.87 Aquinas identiﬁes a similar pattern in the witness of the New Testament about the Holy Spirit. He argues that the passages that point to the involvement of the Father and the Son in commissioning the Spirit’s work mean that the Holy Spirit proceeds, in the divine Trinity, from the Father and the Son. This point takes on a particular poignancy because it belongs to the division between Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholics.88 As Theodore Stylianopoulos writes, the difﬁculty for the Eastern Orthodox is that “the ﬁlioque as a doctrinal formula and as articultated by Augustine and all his later interpreters posits that not only the Father but also the Son is a source or origin or cause of the Spirit.”89 From the Orthodox perspective, understanding the Son in this way leads to “compromising the principle of the ‘monarchy’ of the Father and confusing the hypostatic properties of the Father and the Son, as if one could have a hybrid Father-Son person or hypostasis.”90 In Aquinas’s view, however, procession from the Father and the Son is the only way to account for the Holy 85

Witherington and Ice, The Shadow of the Almighty, 128; cf. 129. It should be noted that in their section on the Holy Spirit, they frequently argue that the reception of the Holy Spirit is separate from water baptism. On this and on other points, I disagree with their analysis. 86 Ibid., 132 and 134, respectively. 87 See also Witherington, John’s Wisdom, 250–4. 88 But on this point see the hopeful document, “The Father as the Source of the Whole Trinity: The Procession of the Holy Spirit in Greek and Latin Traditions” (1995), by the Pontiﬁcal Council for Promoting Christian Unity (see Catholic International 7 [1996]: 36–49 for the English translation); cf. Albert Patfoort, O.P., “Le Filioque dans la conscience de l’Eglise avant le concile d’Ephèse,” Revue Thomiste 105 (1997): 318–334; Bertrand de Margerie, S.J. “Vers une relecture du concile de Florence grâce à la reconsidération de l’Écriture et des Pères grecs et latins,” Revue Thomiste 86 (1986): 31–81. 89 Theodore Stylianopoulos, “The Filioque: Dogma, Theologoumenon or Error?,” in The Good News of Christ (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1991): 207. 90 Ibid., 209; cf. 218.

biblical exegesis and naming of the divine

191

Spirit as a relation distinct from the Son: “It must be said that the Holy Spirit is from the Son. For if He were not from Him, He could in no wise be distinguished from Him.”91 The Son’s procession from the Father constitutes the relation Father-Son. If the Spirit’s procession from the Father constituted the relation Father-Spirit, then the Spirit would be related to the Father exactly as the Son is related to the Father. Recall that the distinct relations in the Trinity are relations of opposition in the order of origin (e.g., Father-Son). The Son is relatively opposed solely to the Father in the Trinity. If the Spirit were also relatively opposed solely to the Father, then the relations Son and Spirit would not be distinct from each other. The relation of origin that distinguishes the Spirit must be distinct from the relation of origin that distinguishes the Son. The Romanian Orthodox theologian Dumitru Staniloae argues that to go further would be to fall into rationalism: “we will refrain from explaining the generation of the Son and the procession of the Holy Spirit, that is, the mode of being of the three persons. Instead we will conﬁne ourselves only to casting their unity of being and of love into relief. Thus we seek to avoid the psychologizing explanations of Catholic theology which has recourse to these only from its desire to ﬁnd human arguments in favor of the Filioque.”92 In contrast, Aquinas afﬁrms that Scripture itself provides a theologically rich explanation of the distinction between generation and procession. He states, “We ought not to say about God anything which is not found in Holy Scripture either explicitly or implicitly. But though we do not ﬁnd it verbally expressed in Holy Scripture that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son, still we do ﬁnd it in the sense of Scripture, especially where the Son says, speaking of the Holy Spirit, “He will glorify Me, because He shall receive of Mine’ (John 16:14).”93 As Aquinas recognizes, John 16 is a central biblical locus for understanding the sending 91

1, q.36, a.2. See Gilles Emery, “La Procession du Saint-Esprit a Filio chez saint Thomas d’Aquin,” Revue Thomiste 96 (1996): 531–74, chapter 6 in Trinity in Aquinas (Ypsilanti, MI: Sapientia, 2003). In light of Aquinas’s attitude toward the Eastern Orthodox, Emery sketches Aquinas’s deployment of a full range of biblical, patristic, and metaphysical arguments, interwoven by Aquinas to demonstrate the truth of the ﬁlioque. See also Emery, “Saint Thomas d’Aquin et l’Orient chrétien,” Nova et Vetera 74 (1999): 19–36; Jaroslav Pelikan, “The Doctrine of Filioque in Thomas Aquinas and its Patristic Antecedents: An Analysis of Summa theologiae, Part I, Question 36,” in St. Thomas Aquinas 1274–1974: Commemorative Studies, Vol. 1, ed., Armand A. Maurer (Toronto: Pontiﬁcal Institute of Medieval Studies, 1974): 315–36. 92 Staniloae, The Experience of God, trans. and ed. Ioan Ionita and Robert Barringer [Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1994]: 247–8; cf. 274. 93 1, q.36, a.2, ad 1.

192

biblical exegesis and naming of the divine

of the Spirit. In 16:7, Jesus tells his disciples that “it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.” A similar stance is taken by the verse that follows upon the one Aquinas quotes. Jesus promises: “All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you” (16:15).94 In the distinct relation of origin that constitutes the Spirit, therefore, the Spirit is relatively opposed not solely to the Father, but also is relatively opposed to the Son.95 This position, Aquinas points out, is not far from that taken by many Greek Fathers. He states, “Hence also the Greeks themselves recognize that the procession of the Holy Spirit has some order to the Son. For they grant that the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the Son; and that He is from the Father through the Son. Some of them are said also to concede that He is from the Son; or that He ﬂows from the Son, but not that He proceeds.”96 The Father and the Son are distinguished solely by the relation of origin Father-Son. They are not distinguished by anything that is not this relation of origin. It follows that “whatever is from the Father, must be from the Son unless it be opposed to the property of ﬁliation.”97 If this 94

These biblical texts have been interpreted by Eastern Orthodox theologians as referring to the economy of salvation (the missions) rather than to the immanent processions themselves, but Aquinas insists that the former are revelatory of the latter, given Christ’s mission to reveal the mystery of the Trinity. Dumitru Staniloae holds that: from the order in which the divine persons are manifested in the world Catholic theology infers an order of their relations within the Godhead, and admits no freedom for that divine order by which the persons are active in the world, for – according to this view – divine acts in the world must strictly reproduce the order in which the persons are found within the divine life. This theology denies that the Son can be sent by the Holy Spirit, as the Lord says he is (Luke 4.18), because in the eternal sphere it is the Spirit who proceeds from the Son. We see here no understanding of the mystery of divine freedom, and an interpretation of God’s work in the world that follows an order devoid of freedom. . . . Hence too the rationalism of Catholic theology. (The Experience of God, 274) Aquinas would agree that the Holy Spirit internally moves the incarnate Son (Luke 4:18). For Aquinas, the reality of a divine order of origin – like the order of a dance – does not restrict the freedom of the Persons. Cf. Yves Congar, O.P., I Believe in the Holy Spirit, trans. David Smith (New York: Crossroad, 1997): III, 119–20. 95 Whereas in the distinct relation that constitutes the Son, the Son is relatively opposed only to the Father. 96 1, q.36, a.2; for the similar perspective of contemporary Orthodox theologians, most importantly Dumitru Staniloae, see Stylianopoulos, “The Filioque: Dogma, Theologoumenon or Error?,” in The Good News of Christ, especially 206–7. 97 1, q.36, a.2, ad 6.

biblical exegesis and naming of the divine

193

is so, then the Father and the Son, while distinct Persons, are not distinct as regards the spirative power. As regards spirative power – the act of spiration – they are “one principle” of the Holy Spirit.98 The Eastern Orthodox theologian might ask whether this view compromises the monarchy of the Father or conﬂates the Father and Son into one hypostasis. The answer is no. Since the Father, in generating the Son, gives him the power to spirate the Spirit, the Spirit according to Aquinas proceeds “principally or properly” from the Father.99 Aquinas concludes therefore that is proper to say that “the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son.”100 Although the Father and the Son are one principle of the Holy Spirit – “one in the spirative power” – nonetheless “if we consider the supposita of the spiration, then we may say that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, as distinct; for He proceeds from them as the unitive love of both.”101 The Father and the Son are not conﬂated by being one principle of the Holy Spirit. The monarchy of the Father is not lost, because the Father and the Son remain “two spirating” Persons (“from the Father through the Son”).102 Yet, the Father and the Son are one principle of spiration, because spiration is perfectly one.103 Generation and ﬁliation, not spiration, distinguish the Father and the Son. Following Augustine, Aquinas identiﬁes “Love” as a proper name of the Holy Spirit, just as “Word” and “Image” are the proper names of the Son. The Holy Spirit is not the love that belongs to God in his unity. Just as Aquinas has earlier distinguished between “to understand” (which belongs to each Person as the one God) and “to speak the Word” (which is proper to the Father), so now he distinguishes between “to love” and “to (spirate) Love.”104 In the former sense, which pertains to the one divine 98

1, q.36, a.4, especially ad 1. Aquinas speciﬁes that the word “principle” does not here mean “personal agent” (see ad 5). 99 1, q.36, a.3 and ad 2, respectively. 100 1, q.36, a.3. 101 1, q.36, a.4, ad 1. 102 1, q.36, a.4, ad 7; cf. ad 5. 103 1, q.36, a.4. 104 1, q.37, a.1; cf. 1, q.37, a.2, ad 2. For analysis of the signiﬁcance of q.37 in Aquinas’s Trinitarian theology, see Anthony Keaty, “The Holy Spirit Proceeding as Mutual Love: An Interpretation of Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae, I.37,” Angelicum 77 (2000): 533–57. Responding to H. F. Dondaine’s thesis, Keaty argues that Aquinas’s theology of the procession of the Holy Spirit is determined not by a change in Aquinas’s attitude toward his predecessors on this topic, but rather by “the rules formulated in I.27 and I.28” (542) by Aquinas in order to interpret the meaning of the relevant biblical passages without falling into Arianism or Sabellianism. Dondaine’s position is followed by Yves Congar, O.P. in volume one of his I Believe in the Holy Spirit, trans. David Smith (New York: Crossroad, 1997): I, 90

194

biblical exegesis and naming of the divine

essence, all three Persons love, according to the modes in which they subsist in God: the Father and Son love (essentially) as spirating Love, and the Holy Spirit loves (essentially) as Love proceeding.105 In the latter sense, the Father and Son spirate Love, and Love proceeding is the Holy Spirit. Once the Holy Spirit is recognized as the mutual love of the Father and Son in this latter sense, Aquinas points out, “it necessarily follows that this mutual love, the Holy Spirit, proceeds from both.”106 As proceeding from the Father and Son, the Holy Spirit is their mutual bond. In the Person of the Holy Spirit, the relation Father-Son is expressed as that of LoverBeloved.107 As Witherington and Ice note with regard to the Gospel of John, “It cannot be overemphasized how much John stresses the unity and love and intimacy between the Father and the Son.”108 This love – as a distinct appetitive movement or impulse (Love proceeding) in God – is the Person of the Holy Spirit. Aquinas afﬁrms that the name “Love” implies a relation to creatures: “As therefore we say that a tree ﬂowers by its ﬂower, so do we say that the Father, by the Word or the Son, speaks Himself, and His creatures; and that the Father and the Son love each other and us, by the Holy Spirit, or by Love proceeding.”109 The Holy

and III, 117. Congar holds that Aquinas preserves the concepts of the Spirit as Love, Gift, and mutual love of the Father and Son, but does not “make these ideas the principle by which the mystery of the holy Triad should be understood theologically or that on which a theological construction should be erected. The principle that he prefers is the structure of the spirit itself, which includes knowledge and love of itself. He does not, however, deduce these faculties or these acts from the essence of God, nor does he see in this structure the equivalent of Anselm’s rationes necessariae. . . . [For Aquinas] what afﬁrms the Triad of Father, Word-Son and Spirit is faith. The best way of approaching this mystery of faith intellectually, he claims, is through our knowledge of the structure of a spiritual being” (III, 117). Congar does not grasp the role of biblical exegesis in determining Aquinas’s approach. 105 1, q.37, a.1, ad 4. 106 1, q.37, a.1, ad 3. 107 Ibid. Congar cautions against interpreting this anthropomorphically: “The theme of the Spirit as the mutual love of the Father and the Son has been widely discussed in recent works on triadology and in spiritual books. It is not difﬁcult to explain and it can easily be applied to other forms of expression. It is in accordance with human experience and it has strong echoes in the psychologic study of interpersonal relationships. It also quickly arouses a warm response. On the other hand, however, it presents certain difﬁculties to the theologian. Above all, it takes anthropomorphic expressions to the limit of doctrinal precision” (III, 122). Congar adds that the theme of mutual love differs from the Greek emphasis on the principle of the Father’s monarchy. See also F. Bourassa, “Le Saint-Esprit unité d’amour du Père et du Fils,” Sciences ecclésiastiques 14 (1962): 375–415; idem, “Le Esprit saint, ‘communion’ du Père et du Fils,” Sciences ecclésiastiques 29 (1977): 251–81 and 30 (1978): 5–37. 108 Witherington and Ice, The Shadow of the Almighty, 48. 109 1, q.37, a.2; cf. ad 3.

biblical exegesis and naming of the divine

195

Spirit is not the cause of the mutual love of the Father and Son; rather, they love each other by spirating love.110 Aquinas also names the Holy Spirit “Gift.” What does the name “Gift” specify about the distinctive characteristics of the Holy Spirit among the Persons? As with the name “Love,” Aquinas’s discussion draws upon Augustine. In Book IV, chapter 20 of On the Trinity, Augustine notes that just as to be from the Father is the same as “to be born,” so also to be from the Father and the Son is the same as “to be the Gift of God.”111 Aquinas explains that although the Son, as John 3:16 says, is also given (from the Father), nonetheless the Holy Spirit, as the mutual love of Father and Son or as Love proceeding, has a special, distinctive likeness to gratuitous gift. This is so because to give the gift of oneself freely, without the intention of receiving anything in return, is to love.112 Aquinas states that “love has the nature of a ﬁrst gift, through which all free gifts are given.”113 Since their love is not self-aggrandizing – each possesses fully the inﬁnite divine nature – the Father and the Son give this gratuitous gift in spirating their mutual love. The Holy Spirit, as Love proceeding, is thus “the ﬁrst gift.”114 “Gift” properly names the Holy Spirit in two ways: by reference to the distinct characteristic of the Holy Spirit as one who proceeds but is not a principle in the Trinity (recall that the Father is a principle without a principle, and the Son a principle with a principle), and by reference to the distinct characteristic of the Holy Spirit as Love.115 These characteristics are borne out (and indeed revealed) in the New Testament, which speaks of the gifts of the Holy Spirit and calls him the “Spirit of grace” (Hebrews 10:29).116 Aquinas quotes Augustine: “By the gift, which is the Holy Spirit, many particular gifts are portioned out to the members of Christ.”117 The doctrine of the Trinity informs the doctrine of salvation and vice-versa, as always in the Summa Theologiae.

110

1, q.37, a.2. Quoted in 1, q.38, a.2. 112 1, q.38, a.2. Here Aquinas cites Aristotle’s deﬁnition of a gift as “an unreturnable giving.” On the Son’s being given, see ad 1. 113 Ibid. For further discussion, see e.g., F. Bourassa, “ ‘Don de Dieu’, nom propre du Saint-Esprit,” Sciences ecclésiastiques 6 (1954): 73–82. 114 Ibid. 115 Cf. 1, q.38, a.2, ad 2. 116 See Witherington and Ice, The Shadow of the Almighty, 138, 142. 117 1, q.38, a.2; cf. ad 3. Cf. Bruce D. Marshall, “What Does the Spirit Have to Do?” forthcoming in Reading John with St. Thomas Aquinas: Theological Exegesis and Speculative Theology, ed. Matthew Levering and Michael Dauphinais (Catholic University of America Press). The quotation from Augustine is taken from On the Trinity, Book XV, ch. 24. 111

196

biblical exegesis and naming of the divine

One would expect nothing less from a doctrine of God rooted in the words of Scripture. Witherington and Ice remark that “while it is quite true that there is no developed doctrine of the Trinity enunciated in the New Testament, there is nonetheless the raw data to construct such a doctrine. There is an especial wealth of material about the relationship of the Son to the Father, and of the Spirit to the Son.”118 Aquinas draws upon the “developed doctrine” as elaborated by the Fathers and by his medieval predecessors, and as enunciated by the Church’s credal formulations. By means of metaphysical precision, he teaches the doctrine of the Trinity – the doctrine of the distinct characteristics of the Persons of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – in such a way as to illumine the Trinitarian pattern of our salvation and to provide for those who seek divine truth in love, a foretaste of the eternal happiness of contemplating, in the divine essence, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; Word, Image, Love, Gift. From each of these names, Aquinas draws precious insight in order to enable us to see both the perfect unity of Persons and the chiseled speciﬁcity of their personal characteristics. He does so without losing sight of the fact that all our language about the divine Persons is analogous, and that therefore utmost caution and reticence is required in the task of applying names to the Persons.119 All this would be of nought, however, were Aquinas to neglect what Witherington and Ice call the “raw data” provided by the New Testament about the Persons of the Trinity. As we have seen, it is this “raw data” that Aquinas sapientially illumines, so that we see the New Testament’s revelation of the Trinity, God in himself, with contemplative clarity that, by purifying our knowing, crystallizes (as it were) the steps of the mystical dance revealed in Christ who, through the Spirit, invites our participation in the inexhaustible life of the Father.120

118

Witherington and Ice, The Shadow of the Almighty, xi. Cf. Rowan Williams’s discussion of St. John of the Cross’s theology of the Trinity, “The deﬂections of desire: negative theology in Trinitarian disclosure,” in Silence and the Word: Negative Theology and Incarnation, ed. Oliver Davies and Denys Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002): 115–35. 120 This metaphysically informed knowledge is, or should be, mystical. As Georges Cardinal Cottier, O.P. has pointed out, “while with knowledge the object is received in the knowing subject according to the mode of the knower, love is directed to the object in itself in such a way that here below love goes further than knowledge. It is from this ‘further’ that mystical knowledge is born.” (Cottier, “Metaphysics and Mysticism,” Nova et Vetera [English] 1 [2003]: 277). 119

Chapter Seven

ESSENCE, PERSONS, AND THE QUESTION OF TRINITARIAN METAPHYSICS

Aquinas expends much effort in distinguishing between what pertains to what is common in God and what pertains to the distinction of Persons. In speaking about God, one needs to avoid two errors. First, we should not conﬂate the unity and the distinction of Persons in God. Second, we must not make of the divine essence a reiﬁed “fourth” in the Trinity, as if the common essence existed anywhere other than in the Persons. Aquinas’s discussion of how to avoid these errors in theological speech occupies a signiﬁcant portion of his treatise on the Trinity in the Summa Theologiae. He largely devotes questions 30–1 and 39–42 of the prima pars to this task. Oddly, despite renewed attention to interreligious dialogue, these questions receive little attention in contemporary Trinitarian theology outside of Thomistic circles. These questions become pressing, however, when one is concerned to understand how the God proclaimed as one in the Old Testament is the same God who is proclaimed in the New. If the New Testament is witnessing to more than one person in the Godhead, what happens to Old Testament discourse about God’s unity? Is divine unity now superseded by a “super-unity” that is Trinity, so that divine unity must now itself be understood in Trinitarian terms? Does the concept of divine unity need to be modiﬁed to account for the distinct personal modes in which this one God subsists? How can one God subsist distinctly in three ways, and remain recognizably “one”?

198

the question of trinitarian metaphysics

In the medieval period, Jewish and Muslim theologians pressed such questions in polemical fashion,1 and Christian theologians could not ignore the difﬁculties. One ﬁnds the ninth-century Muslim theologian Abu ‘Isa al-Warraq challenging Melkite Christians: “As for their claim that the substance is not numerically a fourth to the hypostases, and their dislike of employing number, two or any other, when referring to it alongside any of them, we question them about this and say: Tell us about the hypostases. Since they are eternal and numerically three and you afﬁrm that the substance is other than them, do you afﬁrm that it is a fourth, or do you derive it from the three themselves or from one of the three and designate it substance and consider it as other than the three?”2 Similar questions are found in the late-thirteenth-century Jewish work the Nizzahon Vetus (“Old Book of Polemic”), a popular handbook for answering Christian claims. As the Jewish scholar David Berger notes in his introduction to the Nizzahon Vetus, “The Trinity, which was an obvious target for logical questions, posed a particular problem for Jewish polemicists; they considered it so irrational that they had trouble in coming to grips with it.”3 An anonymous remark in the Nizzahon Vetus simply points to the impossibility of the one God of the Torah turning out to be, in any sense, two: “Thus, if you say that he [Jesus] is God, then you have in 1

The medieval dialogue between Jews, Christians, and Muslims was intensely polemical and politically charged, and in this sense far from something to be proud of, given Christian oppression and persecution of Jews, Muslim invasion and conquest of Christian countries and oppression of Christians and Jews, and the Christian crusades. Nonetheless, as regards Christian theological awareness of Islam, it could be argued that medieval Christian theologians were signiﬁcantly more aware of the thought of their Muslim contemporaries than is common today. How many Christian theologians today are familiar with non-Western Muslim theological treatments of Christianity, as well as with Muslim philosophy? On this point see e.g., Pim Valkenberg, “How to Talk to Strangers: Aquinas and Interreligious Dialogue,” Jaarboek 1997 of the Thomas Instituut te Utrecht, 9–47; “John of Damascus and the Theological Construction of Christian Identity vis-à-vis Early Islam,” Jaarboek 2000 of the Thomas Instituut te Utrecht, 8–30; Marcel Poorthuis, “The Three Rings: Judaism, Christianity and Islam: A bibliographical essay on their interaction in the Eastern and Western world,” Jaarboek 1999 of the Thomas Instituut te Utrecht, 7–53; Marcus van Loopik, “Rabbi Mosche ben Nachman-Ramban: Eine Jüdische Propagandaschrift, Barcelona 1263,” Jaarboek 1999 of the Thomas Instituut te Utrecht, 54–82; Joseph Kenny, “Saint Thomas Aquinas: Reasons for the Faith against Muslim Objections (and One Objection of the Greeks and Armenians) to the Cantor of Antioch,” Islamochristiana 22 (1996): 31–52; Joseph Ellul, O.P., “Thomas Aquinas and Muslim-Christian Dialogue: An Appraisal of De rationibus ﬁdei,” Angelicum 80 (2003): 177–200. 2 David Thomas, ed. and trans., Anti-Christian Polemic in Early Islam: Abu ‘Isa al-Warraq’s “Against the Trinity” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992): 103 (no. 65). 3 David Berger, Introduction to The Jewish-Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages: A Critical Edition of the Nizzahon Vetus (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1996): 13.

the question of trinitarian metaphysics

199

effect denied God, for it is written in the Torah, ‘See, then, that I, I am he; there is no god beside me’ [Deuteronomy 32:39]. The counterargument that they are one may be refuted by reference to Jesus’ statement, ‘It is I and he who sent me; he has not left me alone’ [cf. John 14:23–4; 5:30]; this implies that they are two.”4 These concerns obviously remain fundamental to any Christian theology of God that seeks to be coherent in itself and engaged in interreligious dialogue.5 Aquinas’s sapiential effort in qq.30–1 and 39–42 to speak truthfully about God’s conceptually distinct, but identical, unity and Trinity thus remains centrally important, despite (or because of) its apparent abstraction from the concerns of soteriology and anthropology that drive modern Trinitarian handbooks. Although the issues raised in qq.30–1 and 39–42 are generally overlooked or noted only brieﬂy, nonetheless these questions may be due to emerge from obscurity. The contemporary movement towards “Trinitarian ontology,” which has captured the attention of a wide variety of theologians and philosophers, should bring these questions, so important for non-idolatrous contemplation and proclamation of the God of Jesus Christ, back to the forefront of Trinitarian theology.6

4

David Berger, ed. and trans., The Jewish-Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages: A Critical Edition of the Nizzahon Vetus (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1996): 200 (no. 194). 5 Herbert McCabe remarks that Aquinas “holds that we cannot understand how God could be both Father, Son, and Spirit as well as utterly one and simple, but we do understand that this does not involve the kind of contradiction that would be involved in saying, say, that God is three Fathers as well as being one Father, or three Gods as well as being one God. What we have to do in this case is to see how we are compelled to say each of the things but not to try to imagine them being simultaneously true; we should not expect to form a concept of the triune God, or indeed of God at all, we must rest content with establishing that we are not breaking any rules of logic, in other words that we are not being intellectually dishonest” (Herbert McCabe, O.P., “Aquinas on the Trinity,” New Blackfriars 80 (1999): 268–83, at 271). McCabe would have beneﬁtted from Gilles Emery’s work. See also Leo Elders, S.V.D., “Geheimnischarakter und Rationalität in der Trinitätslehre nach Thomas von Aquin,” in Der dreifaltige Gott und das Leben des Christen, ed. Georg Schwaiger (St. Ottilien: EOS Verlag, 1993): 74–87; Georg Scherer, “Die Unbegreiﬂichkeit Gottes und die Trinität bei Thomas von Aquin,” in Im Gespräch mit dem dreieinen Gott, ed. Michael Böhnke and Hanspeter Heinz (Düsseldorf: Patmos Verlag, 1985): 258–75. 6 In introducing his annual review of books and articles on Trinitarian themes, Gilles Emery, O.P. has nicely described the problem: The history of theology shows that it is under the aspect of Trinitarian faith that monotheism has become a question for theology. The problem posed is then this: if it is appropriate, as common usage has it, to speak of a “Trinitarian monotheism,” in what manner is Trinitarian faith monotheistic? in what does the divine unity consist? Many works . . . discuss this question and attempt to respond to it. Certain of them avoid recourse to the notion of substance or of essence, considering it

200

the question of trinitarian metaphysics

In response to deist theological or philosophical depictions of God that make Christian revelation irrelevant, Trinitarian ontology suggests that Christian revelation deconstructs and radically reconﬁgures any prior account of “being” or “God.” There is no possibility here of canvassing, even in a preliminary fashion, the work of the wide range of philosophers and theologians who have, from different perspectives and with different emphases, developed the movement that is broadly known as Trinitarian ontology.7 We will examine this theme in the works of three contemporary thinkers: W. Norris Clarke, S.J.’s Explorations in Metaphysics, John Zizioulas’s Being as Communion, and Reinhard Hütter’s Suffering Divine Things (one philosopher and two theologians; Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and Lutheran respectively). Taken together, these thinkers provide a reasonably adequate portrait of the basic positions and concerns of the leading variants of Trinitarian ontology, although Hütter’s recent attached to an outdated cosmology and metaphysics. Confronted by the hubris of the subjective idealist and the conception of the absolute self-determination of God in modern thought, contemporary Trinitarian theology seeks to give more place to human liberty by afﬁrming the primacy of plurality in God, that is to say a personal plurality that is the work of love, grounding history and guaranteeing human liberty. Thus for the unity of essence in God are substituted, more and more, the notions of union or of communion, conceived on the basis of a “social analogy,” or on the mode of perichoresis or of an exchange that is interpersonal, communicable, open, hospitable, and capable of integration. The conception of unity is then found profoundly modiﬁed, and one should ask whether monotheism is sufﬁciently maintained. To this question is added that of the function of reﬂection on God the Trinity. The contemporary discourse on unity as perichoretic communion is animated, at bottom, by a practical purpose that recalls the project of theodicy, and which is presented as a response to the critiques of modern theism and of atheism. Many contemporary essays on “Trinitarian ontology” are inscribed in the same purpose. One expects the doctrine of God the Trinity to be such that, in order to respond to the demands of understanding the world and human life, it bears with it a remedy to modern individualism and avoids any presentation of God which, in conceiving him as a supreme substance over against man, would make him a “rival” for man. Trinitarian theology is thus put in service of anthropology and apologetics. Is this indeed its proper place? Patristic and medieval speculative reﬂection is developed, more modestly perhaps, in order to respond to monarchian, Arian, subordinationist or tritheist doctrines, with the goal of securing the afﬁrming of the divine unity in the distinction of persons: the Father, the Son and the Spirit are not three gods but one God alone. (Emery, “Chronique de théologie trinitaire (V ),” Revue Thomiste 101 [2001]: 581–2, my translation). 7

For an introduction, see the study and accompanying bibliography (by no means exhaustive) of Klaus Obenauer, Thomistiche Metaphysik und Trinitätstheologie: Sein-Geist-GottDreifaltigkeit-Schöpfung-Gnade (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2000), reviewed by Gilles Emery, O.P. in his “Chronique de théologie trinitaire (V),” 614–17.

the question of trinitarian metaphysics

201

important metaphysical work has moved away from his earlier position. As we will see, the three approaches beg especially Abu ‘Isa al-Warraq’s sophisticated questions about the rapport of the substance and the hypostases in God. Once Trinitarian ontology has reopened these questions, this section of Aquinas’s Trinitarian treatise emerges as acutely relevant to adequate worship of the God who is God of both Old and New Testaments.8 I will argue that Aquinas’s sapiential effort always to distinguish linguistically and theoretically two aspects when speaking of the triune God enables him to avoid, in a way that Trinitarian ontology cannot, the twin errors of, on the one hand, conﬂating God’s unity and Trinity so as to render one or the other unintelligible and, on the other hand, denying the real identity of the two aspects in the triune God.9 8

For analysis of the relationship between essence and Persons in God, see the following recent studies of Gilles Emery: “Essentialism or Personalism in the Treatise on God in Saint Thomas Aquinas?” The Thomist 64 (2000): 521–63 and three contributions to Le Christianisme est-il un monothéisme?, “Questions adressées au monothéisme par la théologie trinitaire,” 25–33, especially 33 where he raises the question of “Trinitarian ontology”; “Trinité et unité de Dieu dans la scolastique XIIe-XIVe siècle,” 195–220 (chapter 1 of his Trinity in Aquinas [Ypsilanti, MI: Sapientia Press, 2003]); and “Bilan et propositions pour un ‘monothéisme trinitaire’: Réﬂexion dogmatiques,” 345–53. 9 Although David S. Cunningham’s solution is to reject ontology altogether as “substance metaphysics” and replace it with the notion of participation, nonetheless it is worth quoting Cunningham’s criticism of Trinitarian ontology in “Participation as a Trinitarian Virtue: Challenging the Current ‘Relational’ Consensus,” Toronto Journal of Theology 14 (1998): 7–25, at 9: Nor does it help to ground this notion [relationality] ontologically. In order to avoid the criticism that I have just suggested – that is, in order to claim that divine relationality is not a contingent matter – some writers have claimed that it lies at the very heart of what it means to be. Thus, the ancient metaphysical claim that “To be is to be a substance” is replaced by the claim that “to be is to be in relation.” I have some signiﬁcant doubts about the coherence of such a claim. Ontological statements are supposed to tell us about what something is – its being or essence. The old substance metaphysics was certainly an ontology, in that it suggested that God “is” a substance. What is less clear is whether “in relation” is something that one can “be” in a way that fulﬁls the requirements of an ontology. The preposition “in” offers a hint here; prepositional phrases cannot stand alone, but assume a substantive that governs them. (If I use such phrases as “out the window” or “over the line,” my audience will naturally assume that I am referring to something that is, in fact, out the window, or over the line.) In this sense, the claim that “to be is to be in relation” does not really answer the ontological question about a thing’s being or essence; it leaves that question untouched and then goes on to say something about the interdependence of the (as yet ontologically evasive) entities. As a result, audiences tend to “ﬁll in” the undeﬁned ontological status of entities with whatever is handy – and in this respect the dominant tradition is, once again, a metaphysics of substance.

202

the question of trinitarian metaphysics

1

Trinitarian Ontology in Clarke, Zizioulas, and Hütter

In a programmatic essay, “To Be Is to Be Substance-in-Relation,” W. Norris Clarke, approaches the topic of Trinitarian ontology from the standpoint of Thomistic metaphysics.10 Clarke contrasts the standard Aristotelian account of “being” with the insight that “being” must be “substance-inrelation.” The latter grounds a relational ontology. In the realm of creatures, all beings are, no matter how apparently autonomous, constituted by relation. In itself, the creature is constituted by its relation to God, its Creator. Therefore, in the realm of creatures, ontology or metaphysics – the study of being qua being – must recognize that created being is relational by deﬁnition. As Clarke states with regard to creatures, “To be a substance and to be related are distinct but complementary and inseparable aspects of every real being. The structure of every being is indissolubly dyadic: it exists both as in-itself and as toward others.”11 Clarke then asks whether this relationality of being belongs to divine being. For Aquinas, Clarke ﬁnds, the (philosophical) answer is no. Aquinas had two overriding concerns: to reject any hint of philosophical deduction of the reality that God is Trinity, and to preserve the freedom of God in creating. Thus, although in creatures being is (as good) self-communicative, and in this way relational, Aquinas argues that we can say only that in divine being it is most “ﬁtting” that God communicates his own goodness, both in the intra-divine processions, and in the procession of creatures from God.12 In Clarke’s reading, Aquinas comes close to acknowledging the intrinsic relationality of divine being, but stops short by concluding that although we can recognize the ﬁttingness of the relationality of divine being when revelation teaches us, we cannot philosophically rise to the conclusion that divine being, like creaturely being, is relational by deﬁnition. Clarke criticizes Aquinas for remaining overly cautious in this aspect of his metaphysics. In contrast to Aquinas, Clarke notes, Bonaventure was bolder. Following the school of the Victorines, Bonaventure argues that since being (as good) is self-communicative, the highest good must be selfcommunicative in the absolutely highest degree. In The Journey of the Mind to God Bonaventure states: 10

This essay has appeared as chapter 6 of Clarke’s Explorations in Metaphysics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994): 102–22. 11 Clarke, Explorations in Metaphysics, 108. 12 Ibid.

the question of trinitarian metaphysics

203

Behold, therefore, and observe that the highest good is unqualiﬁedly that than which no greater can be thought. And this good is such that it cannot rightly be thought of as non-existing, since to exist is absolutely better than not to exist. And this good exists in such a way that it cannot rightly be thought of unless it is thought of as triune and one. For good is said to be self-diffusive, and therefore the highest good is most self-diffusive. But this highest diffusion cannot be unless it be actual and intrinsic, substantial and hypostatic, natural and voluntary, free and necessary, unfailing and perfect. Unless there were in the highest good from all eternity an active and consubstantial production, and a hypostasis of equal nobility, as is the case with one who produces by way of generation and spiration, – thus there belongs to the ﬁrst Principle from all eternity a co-producer – so that there is the loved and the beloved, the generated and the spirated, that is, the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, that is to say, unless these were preset, there would not be found the highest good here, because it would not be supremely self-diffusive. For the diffusion that occurred in time, in the creation of the world, is no more than a focal point or brief moment in comparison with the immense sweep of the eternal goodness. From this consideration of creation one is led to think of another and a greater diffusion – that in which the diffusing good communicates to another His whole substance and nature. Nor would He be the highest good were He able to be wanting in this, whether in reality or in thought.13

Clarke identiﬁes an afﬁnity between Bonaventure’s position with Hegel’s views. Drawing upon both Bonaventure and Hegelian philosophy, Clarke proposes that “it is according to the divine nature – inevitable, if you will (‘necessity’ is perhaps too strong a word, with misleading implications of impersonal compulsion) – to communicate its goodness to some ﬁnite created world, but to which particular ﬁnite universe would have to be determined by a free choice. . . .”14 For Clarke, philosophy can achieve the 13

St. Bonaventure, The Journey of the Mind to God, trans. Philotheus Boehner, O. F. M., ed. Stephen F. Brown (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1993): 33. In discussing Bonaventure, Clarke does not refer directly to this text, but it exempliﬁes Bonaventure’s view. The necessity implied here is recognized, Bonaventure suggests elsewhere, only by the light of faith, and thus is a necessity of ﬁttingness (see Brown, fn 166, 69). On the relationship of faith and reason in our knowledge of the Trinity, see St. Bonaventure, Disputed Questions on the Mystery of the Trinity, trans. Zachary Hayes, O.F.M. (St. Bonaventure, NY: The Franciscan Institute of St. Bonaventure University, 1979 [Vol.3 of The Works of St. Bonaventure, ed. George Marcil, O.F.M.]): q.1, a.2, responsio (128–33). See Gilles Emery, “Trinité et Unité de Dieu dans la scholastique XIIe-XIVe siècle,” 209–14. 14 Clarke, Explorations in Metaphysics, 108. Clarke’s position here is superbly critiqued by Bernhard-Thomas Blankenhorn, O.P., “The good as self-diffusive in Thomas Aquinas,” Angelicum 79 (2002): 803–37. Blankenhorn notes that “Thomas Aquinas’ teaching on

204

the question of trinitarian metaphysics

insight that divine being must be relational, but it cannot determine the precise mode in which the divine nature communicates itself. Christian revelation goes beyond, and supereminently conﬁrms, the insights of philosophy by identifying the mode, namely the mode of the Trinity. In his presentation of the Trinity, Clarke suggests that the selfcommunicative impulse of the divine being is fulﬁlled super-eminently in the divine Persons ﬂowing forth from the divine nature or being. According to Christian revelation, Clarke notes, “the inner being of God is by the very necessity of its nature self-communicating love, which ﬂowers out into the internal procession of the three Persons within the unity of the divine nature.”15 Since the divine being is itself relational (selfcommunicating), it follows that the procession of the Persons can be seen as a ﬂowering of the inner dynamism of the divine being – a ﬂowering expected by philosophy, but whose exact mode could not have been determined. The Persons are, on this account, simply the expression of the dynamism of the divine being, since they are the divine being communicating itself. As Clarke concludes (recognizing that Aquinas did not hold this position), “It is thus of the very nature of being at its supreme intensity to pour over into self-communicative relatedness.”16 Being, at its most intense, is relational being: perfect Trinity. The intrinsic meaning of “being” is “relational being” – at its divine source, is the inﬁnite relational Being that Christians call Trinity. This does not mean, however, that being is a mere relation with no substantial reality. This would rob “being” of any self-possession or distinct actual presence. Rather, Clarke holds, “The intrinsic structure of all being is irreducibly dyadic: substance-in-relation.”17 Substance here is not

bonum diffusivum sui . . . leads to the relationality of all created being (esse) but not to the relationality of the divine being, the latter being so partly because of Thomas’ subordination of the good as self-diffusive to the good as ﬁnal cause, which allows him to consistently maintain both the self-diffusive character of the divine good and the free divine choice to create” (803). 15 Ibid., 109. 16 Ibid. 17 At the end of his essay, Clarke notes that a discussion with David Schindler in the pages of Communio (20 [1993]: 580–98) has led him to amend his concept of a “dyadic” structure of being to a triadic, so as to include the aspect of receptivity (119–20). (Clarke also mentions the inﬂuence of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Trinitarian theology.) For created being, this aspect of receptivity is clear, since we receive existence from God. For divine being, the aspect of receptivity is less clear, but Clarke thinks that by careful analogy, on the basis of the revelation of the divine processions, we may apply the concept of “receptivity” to God the Trinity, taking away the conditions of temporality and change that “receptivity” implies in creatures. On this point, see Clarke, Explorations in Metaphysics, 119–20 and

the question of trinitarian metaphysics

205

understood as static and self-inclosed, as modern philosophers from Descartes on have tended to understand it.18 Instead, the term “substance” simply refers to the “in-itself dimension of being.”19 This “in-itself ” aspect cannot be separated from the relational or self-communicative aspect of being. Properly understood, “being” both stands on its own and is profoundly relational and self-communicative; precisely in standing on its own (the “in itself ” aspect), being is self-communicative, since being is “active presence.”20 For Clarke, the deﬁnition of “being” is nicely captured by Aquinas’s deﬁnition of the divine Persons. As one would expect from a Trinitarian ontology, Clarke’s description of being as “substance-inrelation” mirrors Aquinas’s description of the divine Persons as subsisting relations, relations subsisting in the divine essence or being. Elsewhere Clarke has noted: “To be, therefore, it ﬁnally turns out, is to be-incommunion. . . . There is no viable substitute for communion; this is the law of being itself.”21 Clarke’s position, which we found already largely present in Bonaventure (drawing from Richard of St. Victor), has a richly pastoral impact. Since being is “self-communicative love,”22 one can come to understand both creation and the Trinity. The Greek Orthodox theologian John D. Zizioulas gained international theological prominence for his Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood

Clarke, Person and Being (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1993): 82f. Clarke has treated this theme in other places as well. 18 Clarke mentions Descartes, Locke, and Hume. He further notes that Aquinas (as interpreted by Josef Pieper) insisted that the highest being (God) possesses the power to relate to all things as that which orders all things and to which all things are ordered (116). Clarke also cites Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity (New York: Herder & Herder, 1970): 102–3, as well as Cardinal Ratzinger’s “Concerning the Person in Theology,” Communio 17 (1990): 438–54. In both places Ratzinger argues that the relational aspect of “person” was not adequately developed in traditional Christian anthropology, which instead relied upon Boethius’s deﬁnition, even though “person” as applied to God was recognized to be completely relational. Clarke argues that the medieval concept of the human person was in fact relational: “The notion of the self, the person, as primordially an isolated, atomic individual, only accidentally related to others, came in much later, with Descartes and Locke. It is as alien to the classical and medieval Christian tradition, both theological and philosophical, as their notions of substance are to the classical and medieval one of substance as active relation-generating center” (118). Yet, Clarke agrees with Ratzinger that Aquinas’s thought needs further development on this point, so as to accentuate the relational, rather than the “in itself,” aspect of personal being. On this point, see Clarke’s essay “Person, Being, and St. Thomas” in Explorations in Metaphysics, 211–28. 19 Clarke, Explorations in Metaphysics, 113. 20 Ibid. 21 Clarke, Person and Being (Marquette: Marquette University Press, 1993): 82. 22 Ibid., 88.

206

the question of trinitarian metaphysics

and the Church.23 The ﬁrst section of this book offers a theological account of Trinitarian ontology. Zizioulas is concerned to avoid an account of God which would view God as subject to any natural “givens.” Inﬂuenced by Heidegger and by the Eastern Orthodox emphasis on deiﬁcation (and also, one would suppose, by the oppressive uniformity sought by Communist political systems in traditionally Orthodox countries), Zizioulas considers as a negative reality the fact that: the being of each human person is given to him; consequently, the human person is not able to free himself absolutely from his “nature” or from his “substance,” from what biological laws dictate to him, without bringing about his annihilation. And even when he lives the event of communion either in the form of love or of social and political life, he is obliged in the last analysis, if he wants to survive, to relativize his freedom, to submit to certain natural and social “givens.”24

In Zizioulas’s view, deiﬁcation involves escaping these “givens” and sharing in the absolute personal freedom of divine existence. Deiﬁcation, however, is not something that happens only after death; it begins in this life, by means of communion with Christ in the Church. Zizioulas describes his understanding of deiﬁcation: “The demand of the person for absolute freedom involves a ‘new birth,’ a birth ‘from on high,’ a baptism. And it is precisely the ecclesial being which ‘hypostasizes’ the person according to God’s way of being. That is what makes the Church an image of the Triune God.”25 God’s way of being, Zizioulas notes, is absolute freedom, and the Christian shares in this way of being even while still on earthly pilgrimage. Zizioulas’s identiﬁcation of God’s way of being as absolute freedom leads him to be highly critical of Greek philosophical ontology before its 23

John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997): 1985. See also his “The Doctrine of the Holy Trinity: The Signiﬁcance of the Cappadocian Contribution,” in Trinitarian Theology Today, ed. Christoph Schwöbel (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1995): 44–60. After writing this section, I found many of my concerns about Zizioulas’s approach reﬂected in Thomas Weinandy’s “Zizioulas: The Trinity and Ecumenism,” New Blackfriars 83 (2002): 407–16 as well as in Lucian Turcescu’s incisive critique of Zizioulas’s concept of “person” in “ ‘Person’ versus ‘Individual’, and Other Modern Misreadings of Gregory of Nyssa,” Modern Theology 18 (2002): 527–39; see also Thomas Weinandy, O.F.M. Cap., The Father’s Spirit of Sonship (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1995), 63. 24 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 19. 25 Ibid.

the question of trinitarian metaphysics

207

puriﬁcation (in Zizioulas’s view) by the Greek Fathers. For Zizioulas, Greek philosophical concepts of being were essentialist; they failed to recognize the primacy of person, and thus of freedom. The Greek Fathers, notably St. Basil, radically revised this ontology, Zizioulas states, by insisting upon the Father as principle. All “being” is owed to the Person of the Father. The hypostasis (Person) of the Father is prior to the concept “being,” in that the Father communicates all being. Zizioulas notes that “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 analytical way this means that God, as Father and not as substance, perpetually conﬁrms through ‘being’ His free will to exist.”26 Being is not prior to Father; rather Father, the free Person, is prior to being as the one who constitutes divine being. Zizioulas makes the same point in another way: “If God exists, He exists because the Father exists, that is, He who out of love freely begets the Son and brings forth the Spirit.”27 Being itself is therefore the Father’s free act in establishing the Trinitarian communion of love. As Zizioulas remarks, the Father’s free act of love in begetting the Son and bringing forth the Spirit is “constitutive of His substance, i.e., it is that which makes God what He is, the one God.”28 Being is communion because being ﬂows forth from the Father’s absolute personal freedom; the Father, in an eternal event of communion, freely acts to constitute the being (communion) of the Trinity. According to Zizioulas, however, the doctrinal formulation of the Trinity as “one substance (ousia), three Persons” brought about confusion about the intent of the Cappadocian Fathers. It would seem from this formulation that “the unity of God, the ‘ontology’ of God, consists in the substance of God.”29 The divine substance or essence thus became the way that theologians, misunderstanding the Cappadocians, came to speak about God’s being. In both the West (Aquinas and theologians following his example) and in manuals of “modern Orthodox dogmatics,” the doctrine of the triune God was arranged under two headings, “On the One God” and “On the Trinity.”30 As already suggested above, Zizioulas rejects this approach on the grounds that for the Greek Fathers, radically revising 26 27 28 29 30

Ibid., 41. Ibid. Ibid., 46. Ibid., 40. Ibid.

208

the question of trinitarian metaphysics

Greek ontology, “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.”31 If one is not going to fall back into pre-Christian Greek ontology, the treatise on the Trinity, not the treatise on God’s essence or being, must be prior. This is so because the Father is the principle of being. Ontology itself is Trinitarian: “being” can only be understood as “communion” – ultimately the free event of Trinitarian communion, caused freely by the Person of the Father, in which the creature shares fully in Christ. Zizioulas argues that the Greek Fathers’ breakthrough to this personalist ontology came about through their liturgical experience, in which God is known (eucharistically) through “personal relationships and personal love,” and in which the divine life comes to us as communion.32 In eucharistic context, “life” or being was recognized to be communion. This liturgical experience then shaped their doctrine of the triune God: their doctrinal position was grounded in their experiential (liturgical) realization that “without the concept of communion it would not be possible to speak of the being of God.”33 Since this communion is Trinitarian, the Greek Fathers necessarily adopted a Trinitarian ontology: “It would be unthinkable to speak of the ‘one God’ before speaking of the God who is ‘communion,’ that is to say, of the Holy Trinity.”34 By beginning with the reality of (liturgical and Trinitarian) communion, the Greek Fathers were able to see that the concept of the Trinity provides the concept of “God” with its meaning. Breaking from the essentialist ontology of Greek philosophy, the Greek Fathers grasped that “it is communion which makes beings ‘be’: nothing exists without it, not even God.”35 Yet Zizioulas is careful to add that the “communion” which “being” is cannot be properly understood if “communion” is treated as merely another essence or substance. On the contrary, God’s “being is the consequence of a free person” – the Father.36 “Communion” is thus a personalist rather than an essentialist concept. As Zizioulas states, “the ultimate ontological category which makes something really be, is neither an impersonal and incommunicable ‘substance’ 31 32 33 34 35 36

Ibid. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 17. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 18.

the question of trinitarian metaphysics

209

[as is held by essentialism or pre-Christian Greek ontology], nor a structure of communion existing by itself or imposed by necessity, but rather the person.”37 The divine being is caused when the Father freely (exercising his freedom in love, which constitutes the divine being as communion) wills to exist as Father. Zizioulas afﬁrms: “True being comes only from the free person, from the person who loves freely – that is, who freely afﬁrms his being, his identity, by means of an event of communion with other persons.”38 It follows that the Father does not, for Zizioulas, exist by necessity or on account of his “nature”; rather he exists by his free will, and shares this free existence in love with the Son and the Holy Spirit.39 In this way, Zizioulas hopes to uphold both the absolute freedom of the divine Persons (and of the human persons who are “hypostasized” by baptism into the divine mode of personal being), and their absolute communion. In the Trinitarian ontology advocated by Zizioulas, it is the free, personal event of (Trinitarian) communion, caused by the Father’s love, that constitutes true “being.” The two versions of Trinitarian ontology that we have discussed so far are, it will be clear, very different. Clarke, from the perspective of a Christian philosopher, seeks to open up the concept of “being” to show that being is itself relational. In this way, he seeks to overcome the apparent divide between traditional metaphysical investigations of God – in which “being” is considered as referring to what pertains to God in his unity – and Trinitarian theology. For Clarke, Trinitarian theology can enrich metaphysics by enabling philosophers to attend more profoundly to the relational character of being. Clarke’s discovery is that the relationality of the Persons is just what one should expect from an analysis of “being,” in which it becomes clear that “being” (as intrinsically selfcommunicative) ﬂowers intrinsically into relations. The Trinity is thus, in its character as subsisting relations, a description of the divine “being.” In this way, the conceptual distinction between “being” (pertaining to what is common to the Persons) and “Person” in God is overcome by showing that being itself is relational. Zizioulas, too, intends to overcome the traditional distinction between “being” and “Person” by demonstrating that being is communion. However, Zizioulas approaches the topic from the opposite perspective than that of Clarke. Whereas Clarke is concerned to reﬁne the traditional 37 38 39

Ibid., 17–18. Ibid., 18. See ibid., 41, 48–9.

210

the question of trinitarian metaphysics

concept of “being,” Zizioulas is primarily concerned to emphasize the personal freedom of the Father and the Father’s role as principle or cause of all being. Zizioulas would not have much sympathy for Clarke’s effort to show that being itself, as a metaphysical concept, is relational. For Zizioulas, the ﬂowering of the Trinitarian relations out of the divine being is precisely the mistake made by Western theologians from Augustine on. Zizioulas wishes to reverse the direction: any concept of divine “being” must ﬂow from a prior concept of the communion of Persons, rooted in the Father’s role as principle and in the Father’s absolute personal freedom. While the endpoint is generically the same (“being as communion,” or Trinitarian ontology), therefore, the paths traveled by Clarke and Zizioulas to that position are polar opposites: Clarke analyzing the concept “being,” Zizioulas analyzing the concept “Person.” Nonetheless, the two approaches share a similar result, despite their dissimilarities.40 Both conﬂate the concepts of “being” and “Person” so that one can no longer use the concept “being” to refer to what pertains to God in his utter simplicity and unity. Rather, the concept “being” (as intrinsically relational) now refers primarily to what is distinct (relational) in God.41 Having described the positions of Clarke and Zizioulas, I can summarize Reinhard Hütter’s approach in his Suffering Divine Things much more brieﬂy. In Suffering Divine Things, Hütter grapples with the question of how (Protestant) theology can at once be fundamentally receptive or “pathic” (normed by Scripture and Church doctrine) and creative or “poietic” (fostering new developments). Hütter also inquires into how theology can claim to know theological truth solely by means of Christian resources, that is, without having recourse to a metaphysics of being.42 In order to address these issues, he develops an account of theology as a 40 Dumitru Staniloae’s position stands somewhere in between these two contrasting poles. Like Zizioulas, Staniloae insists upon the priority of the Persons: “This [divine] love does not produce the divine persons, as Catholic theology afﬁrms, but presupposes them” (Staniloae, The Experience of God, trans. and ed. Ioan Ionita and Robert Barringer [Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1994]: 245). Like Clarke, Staniloae emphasizes love: “Love in the world presupposes as its origin and purpose the eternal perfect love between a number of divine persons” (ibid.). 41 It should be noted that Clarke’s recent The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001) makes many valuable contributions, as does his earlier work, much as I disagree with this aspect of his thought. 42 As Hütter states, “. . . when under the conditions of postmetaphysical thinking a cognitive-theoretical grounding of theology as a discipline has become obsolete, two alternatives are possible. The ﬁrst is a constructivist understanding of theology grounded in the constitution of the religious subject or of religious intersubjectivity and directed toward a life orientation and a pragmatic articulation or actualization of faith. . . . The other alter-

the question of trinitarian metaphysics

211

participation in the divine Trinitarian life of communion. The “pathos” and “poiesis” of the theologian – of theological truth – are a participation in, and image of, the pathos (receptivity) and poiesis (activity) of the divine Persons in the communion of the Trinity.43 Hütter draws upon Zizioulas in order both to articulate a “metaphysics” that is Trinitarian rather than philosophical, and to describe how human beings participate ecclesially in this Trinitarian mode of being. How does Hütter understand Trinitarian ontology? In Suffering Divine Things, he accepts Zizioulas’s narrative of a post-Cappadocian fall into essentialism that has been reversed only recently by a reappropriation of the Trinitarian metaphysics of the Greek Fathers. As Hütter recounts: One of the central features of contemporary Trinitarian theology is the increasing attention leading Western theologians are paying to the Eastern Orthodox understanding of the Trinity – one deriving from the Cappadocian Fathers and especially from Gregory of Nazianzus – as a “communion of persons” or as an onto-relational unity. The central assumption of this Trinitarian perspective is the logical priority ascribed to the divine “persons,” who can exist only in relation to one another and as such constitute God’s deity, providing thus also the basis of God’s unity. That is, the unity resides in the relation of the persons to one another rather than in some substance logically preceding these persons as whose ‘mode of being’ the latter would then be understood.44

This description is not as radical as Zizioulas’s as regards the absolute freedom of the Father. For that reason, it reveals the particular ways in native would be explicitly pneumatological as well as ecclesiological prolegomena to Christian theology, that is, a development of the pathos that makes Christian theology plausible as a distinct church practice.” (Hütter, Suffering Divine Things: Theology as Church Practice, trans. Doug Stott [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000]: 23) There are good reasons not to accept “the conditions of postmetaphysical thinking.” Indeed, while Hütter still has reservations about the “metaphysics of being,” he now afﬁrms a “metaphysics of participation” or “metaphysics of creation” modeled upon Aquinas’s. See Reinhard Hütter, “Est and Esse: The Afﬁrmative and the Negative in Theological Discourse,” in Théologie négative ed., Marco M. Olivetti (Padua: CEDAM, 2002): 325–40, especially 333 and 340. On the voluntaristic nihilism implicit in “postmetaphysical claims,” see e.g., Hütter’s “The Directedness of Reason(ing) and the Metaphysics of Creation,” forthcoming; Michael Allen Gillespie, Nihilism before Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); and Nicholas Boyle, “After Realism,” in Who Are We Now? Christian Humanism and the Global Market from Hegel to Heaney (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998): 247–81. 43 See Hütter, Suffering Divine Things, 27, 117–25, 153-7. Hütter’s account of the “pathic” and “poietic” aspects of theology represents a signiﬁcant achievement. 44 Ibid., 117; cf. 154. No doubt Hütter would now revise this position in light of recent work (noted above) by Michel Barnes, Lewis Ayres, and Gilles Emery, O.P., among others.

212

the question of trinitarian metaphysics

which Zizioulas’s version of Trinitarian ontology has inﬂuenced mainstream Western theology (Catholic as well as Protestant). There are two particularly important aspects: ﬁrst, the proposition that the Persons “constitute God’s deity” and provide “the basis for God’s unity”; and second the rejection of any prior account of “being” which would then enable the divine Persons to be described as distinct “modes” in which this one “being” subsists. To these points, Hütter adds two further nuances. Citing Wolfhart Pannenberg, he emphasizes (from a pneumatological perspective) the aspect of perichoresis or mutual indwelling as constitutive of the Persons’ “being” as communion.45 As Pannenberg brings out, the Persons are “ecstatic” in the sense that each Person exists in the other two and in relation to the other two. “Being” is thus a communion of ecstatic love (of each Person in the other two). Second, he draws out the notion of “pathos” or “kenosis” (self-emptying in receptivity to the other) in the Trinitarian life of communion. He argues, “Within the triune communion, each of the divine persons receives its hypostatic reality from the other two; that is, each becomes the person it is through the pathos of relationality qualifying and identifying it from the perspective of the other two persons. The personal being of each person . . . resides in its reception of identity through the other two; that is, it is pathically constituted.”46 This “pathic” element of the Persons’ perichoretic communion – their receiving of their identities from each other – complements the “ecstatic” element. Hütter identiﬁes the pathic element with “intra-Trinitarian kenosis”47 in which the Persons are constituted by kenotic self-emptying. By including the theme of kenosis, Hütter connects his version of Trinitarian ontology with the Christological version of Trinitarian ontology proposed by such theologians as Hans Urs von Balthasar, who as we have seen interprets the Son’s “abandonment” on the Cross by the Father as a revelation of radical intra-divine kenosis and ﬁnds in this kenosis the key to the “being” of the Trinity.48 Hütter thus provides an interpretation of Trinitarian ontology that combines existing pneumatological (mutual indwelling as ecstatic love) and Christological (intra-divine kenosis) approaches. 45

Ibid., 117. Ibid. 47 Ibid. 48 For an exposition of Balthasar’s Trinitarian ontology, see Angela Franz Franks, “Trinitarian Analogia Entis in Hans Urs von Balthasar.” 46

the question of trinitarian metaphysics

2

213

Trinitarian Ontology and Aquinas’s Approach

To recapitulate: For Clarke, being itself is relational, in the sense that “being” ﬂowers internally into relations. Relations emerge from the selfcommunication intrinsic to being. The risk associated with this account is clearly that of conﬂation of divine unity and divine Trinity: it becomes impossible to speak of a “unity” that is not intrinsically relational. In Clarke’s account, the word “being” applies equally well to the Trinity (since “being” is intrinsically communion), and thus it becomes difﬁcult to speak of a divine unity that is conceptually distinguishable from divine threeness. For Zizioulas, in contrast, the relations do not ﬂower forth intrinsically from the dynamism that is “being”; rather, the Father freely afﬁrms his own being and thereby, in the event of communion, constitutes the Trinity. The Father is the source of “being,” and “being” simply describes the Trinitarian communion. Here the divine unity is simply the perichoretic communion or, indeed, the Father himself in his free afﬁrmation of himself in the other Persons. In Zizioulas’s account, it becomes unclear how the “unity” of God is to be fully upheld, since this “unity” is the interrelationships of the three: it is the three (and ultimately the Father, who comes dangerously close to embodying divine “unity” in Zizioulas) who constitute a “unity” that is, therefore, reducible to threeness.49 Hütter, in Suffering Divine Things, agrees with Zizioulas in having the three constitute the divine “unity,” so that “being” refers to threefold communion rather than to oneness per se. For Hütter, “being” is nothing other than the Trinity, and cannot be understood conceptually in distinction from it. Hütter does not follow Zizioulas’s emphasis on the monarchy of the Father. In its place, Hütter emphasizes the ecstatic mutual indwelling of the Persons as constitutive of the divine unity, and notes that this mutual indwelling occurs by mode of absolute kenosis or pathic self-emptying to the other. However, his account continues to suffer from the problems found in Clarke’s and Zizioulas’s as regards defending a real

49

Elizabeth Johnson takes Zizioulas’s approach to its full conclusion by conceiving of the Trinity as uniﬁed in the same way that a “triple helix” is uniﬁed. It is impossible to see how monotheism, belief in one God, is retained here. On Johnson’s debt to Zizioulas, see Patricia A. Fox, God as Communion: John Zizioulas, Elizabeth Johnson, and the Retrieval of the Symbol of the Triune God (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 2001). See also Elizabeth A. Johnson, SHE WHO IS: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (New York: Crossroad, 1992).

214

the question of trinitarian metaphysics

divine unity. Although Hütter avoids the internal ﬂowering of Persons from “being” that characterizes Clarke’s view, he embraces the idea of the three “constituting” a unity that in such a way as to endanger both the full divinity of each Person in himself and the simplicity of God. The difﬁculties caused by Trinitarian ontology recall the question from Abu ‘Isa al-Warraq with which we began: “Tell us about the hypostases. Since they are eternal and numerically three and you afﬁrm that the substance is other than them, do you afﬁrm that it is a fourth, or do you derive it from the three themselves or from one of the three and designate it substance and consider it as other than the three?”50 Clarke derives the hypostases from “being,” risking making “being” a fourth from which the three Persons emerge; Zizioulas and Hütter derive the unity (one “God”) from the three, leaving in doubt the question of how each Person, in himself, is fully God. Does Aquinas avoid these pitfalls any better? In arguing that the answer is yes, I will highlight ﬁve aspects of his approach: 1) his practice of “redoublement,” 2) his identiﬁcation of metaphysical “undividedness” as the way to understand numerical terms applied to God; 3) his insistence upon the real identity of divine essence and Persons, 4) his differentiation of the Persons solely in terms of the communication of the essence (relations of origin), and 5) his account of the order of origin and the mutual indwelling of the Persons.

Redoublement Aquinas’s practice of redoubling in his doctrine of God has been analyzed by Ghislain Lafont, O. S. B. and exposed more fully by Gilles Emery, O.P.51 Aquinas begins with the fact that God can be viewed under two 50 David Thomas, Anti-Christian polemic in early Islam: Abu ‘Isa al-Warraq’s “Against the Trinity”, 103 (no. 65). 51 See Ghislain Lafont, O. S. B., Peut-on connaître Dieu en Jésus Christ? (Paris: Cerf, 1969) and Gilles Emery, O.P., “Essentialism or Personalism.” (My analysis in this chapter is deeply indebted to Emery’s seminal studies.) The work of Gerald Bray is typical in its misunderstanding of Aquinas’s project. Bray fails to grasp Aquinas’s deﬁnition of “person,” asserting erroneously that for Aquinas, “person was an aspect of nature which signiﬁed what was distinct in that nature.” He then concludes, “The Trinitarianism of Anselm and Aquinas can rightly be criticized for being too philosophical, too abstract, and even reactionary, in the sense that it is dependent on the primacy of nature over person – almost inevitable in any philosophical theology, but directly counter to the spirit of Chalcedonian Christology. Unfor-

the question of trinitarian metaphysics

215

aspects: what is common and what is proper (to the Persons). Given these two aspects, neither of which is reducible to the other, one must speak about God in two ways. As Emery notes, “in order to speak the Trinitarian mystery, it is necessary always to employ two words, two formulas, in a reﬂection in two modes that joins here the substantial (essential) aspect and the distinction of persons (relative properties). This is precisely what Thomas does in the structure of his treatise on God.”52 Since a divine Person is a Person precisely in possessing the divine essence in a mode distinct from that of the other Persons, the concept of Person as subsisting relation integrates the concept of “essence.” Following Basil the Great, Emery notes, “One cannot conceive of the person without the substance or without the nature belonging to the very ratio of the divine person, this latter being deﬁned as ‘distinct subsisting in the divine nature [distinctum subsistens in natura divina]’.”53 It is appropriate to investigate ﬁrst what is common, so as to integrate this concept into the concept of Person as subsisting relation. These two steps are the “redoublement” in Trinitarian theology: in seeking to understand the Persons (the second step), one integrates what one has learned about the essence (the ﬁrst step). As Augustine points out, “[E]very being that is called something by way of relationship is also something besides the relationship.”54 Therefore, even if one were to wish to begin with the Father – as do most notably Zizioulas and Karl Rahner55 – one would still need to inves-

tunately, Christology and Trinitarian theology tended to go their separate ways during the high Middle Ages, and they are still not always closely linked even today.” (Gerald Bray, The Doctrine of God [Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1993]: 183.) In elucidating Aquinas’s balanced account of essence and Persons, integrated in the doctrine of Person as subsisting relation, Emery’s “Essentialism or Personalism” incisively treats a number of the fundamental themes of Trinitarian theology. 52 Emery, “Essentialism or Personalism,” 534. 53 Ibid., 535. 54 St. Augustine, The Trinity, trans. Edmund Hill, O.P. (Brooklyn, NY: New City Press, 1991): Book 7, chapter 1, no. 2 (219). 55 Emery makes reference to Michael Schmaus, Rahner, and Walter Kasper, and notes that this view “is largely accepted today in the essays and manuals of Trinitarian theology” (549). Cf. Wendelin Knoch, “ ‘Deus unus est trinus’: Beobachtungen zur frühscholastischen Gotteslehre,” in Im Gespräch mit dem dreieinen Gott, ed. Michael Böhnke and Hanspeter Heinz (Düsseldorf: Patmos Verlag, 1985): 209–30; Hans Jorissen, “Zur Struktur des Traktates ‘De Deo’ in der Summa theologiae des Thomas von Aquin,” in Im Gespräch mit dem dreieinen Gott, ed. Michael Böhnke and Hanspeter Heinz (Düsseldorf: Patmos Verlag, 1985): 231–57.

216

the question of trinitarian metaphysics

tigate what attributes of the Father are common to the Trinity, and what attributes belong to the Father as incommunicable personal properties. Indeed, as Emery has shown, in order to understand the Father qua Father, rather than in an “essential” manner, one must investigate ﬁrst what belongs to the common divine nature. To do otherwise would be to consider the Father “in a prerelational or essential manner” as if the Father could be thought of “independently of his constitution as a person, that is to say, independently of his personal relation.”56 One must ﬁrst recognize the Father as “divine” in order to be able (as a second step) to comprehend the uniqueness of his paternity, his ability to communicate his whole essence and yet remain fully himself. It is this shared divinity that Aquinas speaks of in investigating the divine “being” (or nature or essence)57, which is perfectly simple and which, when shared by the Father with the Son and Holy Spirit, remains undivided.

Undividedness Nonetheless, could not the practice of redoublement imply, and even require, Trinitarian ontology? It would seem that, having treated divine “being” under the aspect of what is common (one) in God, the next step would be to treat “being” under the aspect of the distinction of Persons. Why would this not revolutionize the concept of divine being, when it becomes clear that divine being does not subsist as a monad, but rather subsists distinctly in the three? The answer consists not only in acknowledging that redoublement in the doctrine of God requires a dual movement in which “relation in” (what is common) and “relation to” (what is distinct) signify the same relation viewed under relation’s two aspects, which cannot be conﬂated. The answer also requires recognizing the undividedness of the divine being in the Persons. In the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas places the concept of undividedness at the beginning of his effort to avoid the errors that often occur 56

Emery, “Essentialism or Personalism,” 548. Aquinas, interpreting “homoousion” as “of one essence,” explains the terms being, essence, and nature as follows: “Because nature designates the principle of action while essence comes from being (essendo), things may be said to be of one nature which agree in some action, as all things which give heat; but only those things can be said to be of one essence which have one being. So the divine unity is better described by saying that the three persons are of one essence, than by saying they are of one nature” (1, q.39, a.2, ad 3). 57

the question of trinitarian metaphysics

217

when speaking of divine essence and Persons. He notes that numerical terms, when applied to God, do not signify quantity; quantity belongs only to material things. Rather, numerical terms when applied to God signify metaphysical undividedness. Aquinas states, “So when we say, the essence is one, the term one signiﬁes the essence undivided [indivisam]; and when we say the person is one, it signiﬁes the person undivided; and when we say the persons are many, we signify those persons, and their individual undividedness. . . .”58 The divine being or essence is strictly undivided even as subsisting distinctly in three Persons. It is this absolute undividedness that we mean when we speak about the unity of God. Since “being” is common to God, “being” is undivided and is not, qua being, intrinsically relational (even though it subsists, as undivided being, in the divine relations).59 What then is relational in God, if not the divine being? Aquinas emphasizes that relation – in its proper aspect of “relation to” – pertains solely to the divine relations: “The supreme unity and simplicity of God exclude every kind of plurality of absolute things, but not plurality of relations. Because relations are predicated relatively, and thus the relations do not import composition in that of which they are predicated.”60 In other words, a plurality of relations does not destroy the divine unity and simplicity. The relations, while they subsist in the divine being, do not derive from the divine being. If they did, they would be related to the divine being as source.61 In this 58

1, q.30, a.3. Emery notes in regard to the concept “subsisting relation” or relation subsisting in the essence: “At stake is once again the numerical identity of the essence in each of the persons, following the homoousion of Nicaea” (559). 60 1, q.30, a.1, ad 3. 61 Cf. Emery, “Essentialism or Personalism,” 540–6. Noting that this point is the “fundamental insight” of Hans Christian Schmidbaur’s recent Personarum Trinitas: Die trinitarische Gotteslehre des heiligen Thomas von Aquin [St. Ottilien: EOS Verlag, 1995]), Emery states: 59

There is, therefore, no “derivation” of persons from an essential act in Thomas. This observation clariﬁes anew the structure of the treatise on God: the distinction of the two sections of the treatise (what concerns the essence, then what concerns the distinction of persons) does not express a separation between a treatise on a “monopersonal” God and a treatise on God the Trinity, nor a conception of the essence which opens up into a plurality. In reality, it prevents the derivation of the persons from the essence: it is to relation, and not to essence in its proper formality, that the manifestation of the plurality in God belongs. The pivot of this structure is, once again, the doctrine of relation, since only this opposed relation according to origin allows for the introduction of the aspect of plurality in God. (546)

218

the question of trinitarian metaphysics

regard, Augustine remarks that we must not think of the Persons “as though they were three things consisting of one material, even if whatever that material might be it were wholly used up in these three; for there is nothing else, of course, of this being besides this triad. . . . [W]e do not talk about three persons out of the same being, as though what is being were one thing and what person is another.”62 Rather, the relations in God relate only to each other. The divine being subsists in three distinct modes, but the divine being is not what is related in these distinct modes. The divine being is the same in each Person. What are related are solely the Persons who subsist in the divine being. Paternity is related to ﬁliation, and both are related to procession. Yet, is not paternity the same as the divine being? Why then would not the divine being (in the Father) be related to ﬁliation? One tends to imagine the Father as a distinct entity, as if because he possesses the divine being in a distinct mode (paternity), the divine being in him relates distinctly to the divine being in the other Persons. But the Father does not possess being as a distinct entity. If this were so, there would indeed be three gods, three divine entities. Rather, the Father is a distinct relation subsisting in the divine being. Dumitru Staniloae, citing Basil the Great, reminds us: When we think of the Father as incomprehensible and uncreated, we think also of the Son and the Holy Spirit, for the inﬁnity, glory, and wisdom of the Father are not separated from those of the Son and of the Spirit, but in them is contemplated what is uninterruptedly and undividedly common: “For it is in no wise possible to entertain the idea of severance or division, in such a way as that the Son should be thought of apart from the Father, or the Spirit be disjoined from the Son. But the communion and the distinction apprehended in them are, in a certain sense, ineffable and inconceivable, the continuity of nature being never rent asunder by the distinction of the hypostases, nor the notes of proper distinction confounded in the community of essence.”63

In contrast to Schmidbaur, Emery refuses to grant “primacy” to the concept of person (as if God’s unity were somehow secondary), preferring instead to emphasize the integration of the two concepts of essence and Person in “subsisting relation.” 62 St. Augustine, The Trinity, Book 7, chapter 3, no. 11 (230). 63 Staniloae, The Experience of God, 252; citing Letter 38, PG 32.332D.

the question of trinitarian metaphysics

219

The real relations in the divine being are opposed to each other; the divine being is not opposed (related) to the relations. The divine being does not itself relate because the relations subsist in the undivided divine being. As Aquinas says, “relations do not import composition in that of which they are predicated.”64 He makes the same point in explaining the use of the term “Trinity.” Although there are three Persons in the one God, nonetheless “when we say, Trinity in Unity, we do not place number in the unity of nature; as if we meant three times one; but we place the Persons numbered in the unity of nature; as the supposita of a nature are said to exist in that nature.”65

Identity of Essence and Person, Distinction of Persons This conceptual distinction between the divine being (essence or nature) and the divine Persons (distinct relations) can easily, however, lead to the impression that the being and the Persons are not the same. One of the purposes of Trinitarian ontology, in some of its forms at least, is to ensure that “being” is not reiﬁed as a “fourth,” as if “being” were somehow outside the Trinity. Aquinas shares profoundly in this concern. Noting that “[s]ince as Jerome remarks, a heresy arises from words wrongly used, when we speak of the Trinity we must proceed with care and with beﬁtting modesty,”66 Aquinas works diligently to express the real identity of the divine being and Persons, and yet at the same time to preserve the real distinction of Persons. He warns against using language about the Persons that appears to derogate from their perfect unity in being (essence). This mistake, he notes, is that of Arius, “who placed a Trinity of substance with the Trinity of persons.”67 Thus, Aquinas allows such words “other” and “distinction” to describe the Persons, but rejects words such as “separation,” “division,” “disparity,” “alien,” and “discrepant.”68 These latter words, in his view, would signal a lack of real identity in “being” among the Persons. He quotes Hilary (De Trin. vii): “It is sacrilege to assert that

64 65 66 67 68

1, q.30, a.1, ad 3. 1, q.31, a.1, ad 4. 1, q.31, a.2. Ibid. Ibid.

220

the question of trinitarian metaphysics

the Father and the Son are separate in Godhead.”69 In contrast, “other” and “distinction” imply no more than relative opposition within the order of origin. He also rules out words describing the essence that seem to obscure its communicability, among them “singularity” and “only” (unici). Aquinas emphasizes that divine simplicity requires a real identity of the divine essence with the Persons: otherwise there would be multiple gods.70 This real identity means that essence is the same as Person in God. And yet, how can essence be the same as each Person and the same as the three Persons together, if each Person is really distinct from the other two? In discussing redoublement and metaphysical undividedness, we already have provided the lineaments of the answer to this problem, but Aquinas adds further important nuances. He emphasizes that relation, when applied analogously to God, is not “accidental” to the essence (as relation is in creatures). On the contrary, in God, because of divine simplicity, the relations “are the divine essence itself.”71 It follows that it is only in our mode of thinking – not in God himself – that there is a difference between essence and relation in God. Essence and Person are really identical in God. Why then do we understand them by different concepts (“essence” and “person”)? Drawing upon his discussion of analogous naming in q.13, Aquinas explains that “divine things are named by our intellect, not as they really are in themselves, for in that way it knows them not; but in a way that belongs to things created.”72 The human intellect gains knowledge by way of the senses. In the material things that are the objects of the senses, there are two aspects:

69

Ibid. 1, q.39, a.1. 71 Ibid. 72 1, q.39, a.2. On this topic, see the helpful comments of Emery in “Essentialism or Personalism,” 547: 70

In creatures (to which, precisely, our mode of signiﬁcation is linked in virtue of the constitution of our knowledge), actions are the work of supposits: “the essence does not act, but it is the principle of the act in the supposit.” In God, the essence is really identical to each of the three supposits or persons, but, since it is necessary to take account of the mode of our knowledge and of our language, the essence is grasped in the notional act on a different mode from the person, since the person is distinct whereas the essence is common. The essence is what the notional act communicates. It is also by it (principle quo with the property) that the Father begets and that the Father and Son spirate the Holy Spirit, but it cannot itself be the subject of a productive (notional) act in God.

the question of trinitarian metaphysics

221

form (the nature of the species) and individuating matter. In speaking of created things, therefore, we speak of individuals sharing in a nature. This “mode of signiﬁcation” extends to speech about the triune God: the divine nature is like the form, and the Persons sharing in this nature are what are “individual” or “distinct” in the nature. Aquinas notes that “in God the essence is taken as the form of the three persons, according to our mode of signiﬁcation.”73 By the formal aspect (nature), we express what is one in God; by the individuating aspect (person), we express what is three in God. But in God – as opposed to in our dual mode of speaking – these two aspects are the same. In emphasizing the real identity, Aquinas avoids the danger of positing a fourth (“being” or “essence”) in the Trinity. On the other hand, does he go too far? If the difference is only in our mode of speech, not in God himself, can one still maintain that there are three Persons in one God? Should there not be really either three Persons in three gods or one Person in one God, if there is no difference between Person and essence in reality but only in our mode of speaking? The answer, as will be seen from what we have said above, is that while there is a real identity of Person and essence, there is a real distinction, not only in our mode of speaking but in reality, of the Persons in God. Here Aquinas notes that “relation as referred to the essence does not differ therefrom really, but only in our way of thinking; while as referred to an opposite relation, it has real distinction by virtue of that opposition.”74 In other 73

1, q.39, a.2. 1, q.39, a.1. Comparing Gregory of Nyssa’s and Augustine’s Trinitarian theology, David Bentley Hart puts it this way: 74

It is precisely here that the artiﬁcial distinction between “Greek” and “Latin” theology has worked the most injurious mischief, by prompting many to rush to one end or the other of a scale that must be kept in balance. . . . Otherwise, we will ﬁnd ourselves trading in mythology: speaking of God as an inﬁnite psychologic subjectivity possessed of plural affects, or as a confederacy of three individual centers of consciousness; in either case reducing God, the transcendent source of all being, to a composite being, an ontic God, in whose “subjectivity” there would remain, even within the immanent divine life, some sort of unexpressed interiority (or interiorities), some surfeit of the indeterminate over the determinate, some reserve of self in which identity is constituted as the withheld. God is one because each divine Person, in the circle of God’s knowledge and love of his own goodness (which is both wisdom and charity), is a “face”, a “capture”, of the divine essence that is – as must be, given the inﬁnite simplicity of God – always wholly God, in the full depth of his “personality”. For any “mode of subsistence” of the inﬁnite being of God must be an inﬁnite mode, a way whereby God is entirely, “personally” God. God is never less than wholly God. (Hart, “The Mirror of the Inﬁnite: Gregory of Nyssa on the Vestigia Trinitatis,” Modern Theology 18 [2002]: 546)

222

the question of trinitarian metaphysics

words, as already stated, the essence does not relate; only the Persons do. If this is true, how can it be true to say “God begot God,” as is implied by the “God of God” of the Nicene Creed?75 Aquinas points out that “God,” although referring to the divine unity, does not refer to the essence as if the essence stood on its own, outside of the Persons. As he remarks, “this word God signiﬁes the divine essence as in Him Who possesses it.”76 The word “God” can stand for the essence or for a Person or Persons. Aquinas thereby balances the real identity of Person and essence in God with the equally real distinction of Persons. This balance is on display in Aquinas’s account of the patristic practice of appropriating essential attributes – attributes that belong to what is common or shared in God – to distinct Persons. Because of the real identity, each Person possesses all the attributes of the essence. Yet, because of the distinction of Persons, it can be helpful to illumine the relative properties of the Persons by means of essential attributes. These essential attributes of God can be known to some degree (analogously) by reason, whereas the personal properties can only be revealed to faith. In appropriating essential attributes to distinct Persons, therefore, one sheds light on what is naturally less known (the Persons) by what is more known (the essence). Aquinas states that this appropriation can be done in two ways: “in one way by similitude, and thus the things which belong to the intellect are appropriated to the Son, Who proceeds by way of intellect, as Word. In another way by dissimilitude; as power is appropriated to the Father, as Augustine says, because fathers by reason of old age are sometimes feeble; lest anything of the kind be imagined of God [the divine Father].”77 The result of the practice of 75

1, q.39, a.4. On medieval supposition theory, which developed in order to handle this kind of problem, see Stephen F. Brown, “Medieval Supposition Theory in Its Theological Context,” Medieval Philosophy & Theology 3 (1993): 121–35. 76 Ibid. In contrast, one could not say “essence begot essence” (1, q.39, a.5). Cf. Emery, “Essentialism or Personalism,” 546–7. Furthermore, this does not mean that the unity of Persons causes the unity of essence, as Timothy Smith implies: “For Thomas, the unity of the nature is caused by, or consists in, the unity of the Persons (in the act of being)” (Smith, Thomas Aquinas’ Trinitarian Theology, [Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2003]: 41). 77 1, q.39, a.7. The best recent discussion of how the doctrine of appropriation is elaborated in Aquinas’s Trinitarian theology is found in Jean-Pierre Torrell’s Saint Thomas Aquinas: Spiritual Master, 158–63, which draws upon H.-F. Dondaine’s critical French edition (1946) of the Summa Theologiae I, qq.27–43. Torrell points out that appropriation lies between mere wordplay that does not describe at all the reality of the Persons, and pro-

the question of trinitarian metaphysics

223

appropriation is that (as Trinitarian ontology seeks) the essence is further integrated conceptually with the Persons, but the conceptual distinction between essence and Persons remains, in a way that it does not in Trinitarian ontology. We have come some way toward formulating a response to Abu ‘Isa al-Warraq’s important concerns: “Tell us about the hypostases. Since they are eternal and numerically three and you afﬁrm that the substance is other than them, do you afﬁrm that it is a fourth, or do you derive it from the three themselves or from one of the three and designate it substance and consider it as other than the three?”78 The essence or “substance” is other from the hypostases only in our mode of conceptual signiﬁcation, not in God. The essence is not a “fourth,” nor is it derived from the communion of the Trinity (“from the three themselves,” Hütter) or from the Father (“from one of the three,” Zizioulas). The Persons are numerically three, but this does not imply composition in God, since they are not a quantity.

Differentiation of the Persons by Communication of the Essence Aquinas differentiates the Persons in terms of the communication of the essence (relations of origin). This theme bears directly upon the issue perties that distinguish the Persons. Rather, appropriated names have a certain afﬁnity with the properties of the Person, and by this afﬁnity enable us to grasp more deeply the reality of the Person. See also J. Châtillon, “Unitas, aequalitas, concordia vel connexio. Recherches sur les Origines de la Théorie Thomiste des Appropriations (Sum. Theol., I, q. 39, art. 7–8),” in Armand A. Maurer, ed., St. Thomas Aquinas 1274–1974: Commemorative Studies, Vol. 1 (Toronto: Pontiﬁcal Institute of Medieval Studies, 1974): 337–79. In Trinity and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000): 251–6, Bruce Marshall has eloquently defended appropriation theory: “Every attribute and action common to the three persons belongs primarily to one of them. The primacy here in question is that of likeness (similitudo, as the medievals put it) rather than of causality or existential dependence. . . . Every attribute and action common to the three persons belongs to each of them in a different way” (254). This is true so long as one understands the “different way” to be in the order of origins, not in the appropriated term itself. Norman Kretzmann has investigated the way in which the transcendental “Truth” is rightly appropriated to the Son, in “Trinity and Transcendentals,” in Trinity, Incarnation, and Atonement, ed. R. J. Feenstra and C. Plantinga, Jr. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989): 79–109. 78 David Thomas, Anti-Christian polemic in early Islam: Abu ‘Isa al-Warraq’s “Against the Trinity”, 103 (no. 65).

224

the question of trinitarian metaphysics

raised in the Nizzahon Vetus: “Thus, if you say that he [Jesus] is God, then you have in effect denied God, for it is written in the Torah, ‘See, then, that I, I am he; there is no god beside me’ [Deuteronomy 32:39]. The counter-argument that they are one may be refuted by reference to Jesus’ statement, ‘It is I and he who sent me; he has not left me alone’ [cf. John 14:23–4; 5:30]; this implies that they are two.”79 If one afﬁrms that the Son is God, and that there is a distinction between the divine Son and the divine Father, does not this contradict God’s message in the Torah that there is no God besides YHWH, the “I am”? Is Israel’s God being worshipped by Christians? Aquinas explains that the divine Persons are differentiated in the Trinitarian processions by two “principles of difference,” origin and relation.80 These two principles differ conceptually, although in reality they are the same. Aquinas notes that “origin is signiﬁed by way of act, as generation; and relation by way of the form, as paternity.”81 For two crucial reasons, he ﬁnds “relation” to be a more adequate word than “origin” for describing the distinction of Persons.82 First, origin is not something intrinsic in a thing, whereas relation is intrinsic (not “out there” between two things, but in the two things).83 79

David Berger, The Jewish-Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages: A Critical Edition of the Nizzahon Vetus, 200 (no. 194). 80 1, q.40, a.2. 81 Ibid. 82 Hans Urs von Balthasar criticizes Aquinas’s technical Trinitarian theology on the grounds that “relation,” even when combined with procession, is too weak a category to ground a distinct Personal identity: “the question arises whether processio and relatio, as the text of De Pot. 10, 3 maintained, can be identiﬁed secundum rem, since the ﬁrst category expresses an act and a terminus, whereas the second expresses neither of these, meaning as it does nothing other than the sheer bond between two beings. What connects them is the Augustinian analogy of the mens, whose transposability into the sphere of God is boldly presupposed – even though in order to do so the accidental must be reinterpreted as a substantial reality. Yet if ‘relatio’ formally signiﬁes nothing more than the bond between two termini, how can it then be taken as laying the foundation for the hypostases as such? Faith knows from the facts of revelation that the hypostases really exist in their relative opposition, just as it knows from the same facts and from the interpretation of them in the Church that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one God. To come to grips speculatively with the mystery of the identity of both aspects succeeds only by the mutual approach of two irreducible propositions whose uniﬁcation cannot be successful” (Balthasar, Theologik, Vol.2: Wahrheit Gottes [Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1985]: 124). Balthasar’s understanding of “relation” as “the bond between two termini” is mistaken. 83 In “Essentialism or Personalism” Emery notes, “In contrast to the approach nearly universally adopted in the wake of nominalism, this analogy does not consider relation

the question of trinitarian metaphysics

225

Therefore relation, unlike origin, can account for an intrinsic distinction, a “stable” personhood. The distinction must be intrinsic if one is to have distinct Persons. Second, origin is not constitutive of a Person, but rather describes the path by which a Person is constituted; it does not describe the Person so constituted.84 In contrast, relations constitute Persons. Because of the divine simplicity, if there are relations in God, then there are distinct divine Persons. Unlike in creatures, where relation is an accidental quality and does not subsist, in God relations subsist, since whatever is “in” God, is God (otherwise it would be a creature). Aquinas remarks, “Relation presupposes the distinction of the subjects, when it is an accident [i.e., in creatures]; but when relation is subsistent, it does not presuppose, but brings about distinction.”85 The relation itself constitutes a distinction in God. For this reason, the relation (relative property) is the Person. In creatures, certainly, “relation” is an abstract concept, whereas “person” is a concrete concept; but in God, the abstract and the concrete are the same, as with Godhead and God. Thus one can truly say that “paternity is the Father Himself, and ﬁliation is the Son, and procession is the Holy Spirit.”86 What is the usefulness of this realization for the question raised by the Nizzahon Vetus, namely, how can one be two? What is the good of learning that the Persons in God are subsisting relations? Aquinas points out that the concept “relation,” in its proper (relational) aspect, does “not signify existence in something, but rather existence towards something.”87 Certainly a relation must be “in” a substance. The divine relations exist “in” the divine essence, in the sense that they are the simple divine essence. Because the proper meaning of “relation” is existence toward another, however, the relations in God are distinct solely from each other. Aquinas emphasizes therefore that “the distinction of the divine persons is not to be so understood as if what is common to them all is divided, because the common essence remains undivided; but the distinguishing principles themselves [that is, relation and origin] must constitute the things which are distinct.”88 Relation does not import any distinction in God that would destroy God’s unity of being and thereby deny as a category understood as being between individuals, but in individuals, ‘in the things’ ” (554). 84 1, q.40, a.2. 85 1, q.40, a.2, ad 4. 86 1, q.40, a.1, ad 1. 87 1, q.40, a.1. 88 1, q.40, a.2.

226

the question of trinitarian metaphysics

God’s injunction in the Torah. The relative properties do not divide the unity of God, because they do not describe related beings, but rather relations in the one being – relations that do not alter (or relate to) the one being in which they subsist, because they are the one being in which they subsist. We gain a deeper understanding of this reality when Aquinas describes the “notional acts” (actus notionales). Since, as Aquinas says, “[e]very origin is designated by an act,”89 the procession of the persons must be described in terms of acts such as generation and spiration. Aquinas calls these acts “notional” because they signify the characteristic activity (notiones) of the Persons, namely their mutual relations.90 Although we distinguish them conceptually from the relations, in accord with the distinction (in our mode of signiﬁcation) between act and relation, the notional acts are the same as the relations.91 Here the important point, for our purposes, lies in the reality that in the notional act of generation, the Son does not proceed from the Father ex nihilo, as creatures do from the Creator. The Father generates the Son of his substance (de substantia Patris), the divine essence: Therefore the Son of God is begotten of the substance of the Father, but not in the same way as man is born of man; for a part of the human substance in generation passes into the substance of the one begotten, whereas the divine nature cannot be parted; whence it necessarily follows that the Father in begetting the Son does not transmit any part of His nature, but communicates His whole nature to Him, the distinction only of origin remaining.92

The Son is the one divine substance as communicated by the Father. The substance is the same: only the distinction of origin (the relation) differs. In the Father’s communication of his substance, the substance is a “consubstantial generating principle” or cause (not a material principle).93 Distinguishing substance and Person, even while recognizing their real identity, helps us to understand that the distinction of Persons is utterly relational. The Father, as

89 90 91 92 93

1, q.41, a.1, ad 1. Ibid. On this point, see Timothy Smith, Thomas Aquinas’ Trinitarian Theology, 102–3. 1, q.41, a.1, ad 2. 1, q.41, a.3. 1, q.41, a.3, ad 1.

the question of trinitarian metaphysics

227

the principle of generation, has the power to generate.94 But the power to generate is not paternity. Paternity (the Father) is the notional act of generating; the power to generate is that by which the Father generates. The two are conceptually distinct. In God, paternity is the Person of the Father, while the Father’s power to generate belongs to his essence. Aquinas remarks that “the agent is distinct from that which it makes, and the generator from that which it generates: but that by which the generator generates is common to the generated and generator, and so much more perfectly, as the generation is more perfect.”95 The divine Persons thus share the same power, but in the Father this power is possessed as the power of generating, in the Son as the power of being generated, and in the Holy Spirit as the power of being spirated, in accord with the relative properties by which they possess the divine essence.96 The Persons are distinguished solely as relations, not by any essential attribute such as power. In this way, the divine unity is upheld along with the distinction of Persons. The fundamental issue of ﬁdelity to the God of Israel, raised by the Nizzahon Vetus, thus receives a careful response.

Appreciating the Order of Origin and Mutual Indwelling of the Persons However, it seems as though one of the key issues raised by Trinitarian ontology has not yet been adequately addressed. Recall Hütter’s emphasis on how Trinitarian ontology reveals “being” as a communion of ecstatic (out-going) love and as a pathic communion of kenotic self-emptying. For all our careful distinctions about how to speak about being and Persons in God, does not Christ reveal that God is self-emptying love? If God is self-emptying love, is this not an adequate characterization of “being”? And would this not be a Trinitarian characterization of being, one known not philosophically but through the revelation of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the Paschal mystery? Moreover, if the Trinity (as

94

1, q.41, a.4. 1, q.41, a.5, ad 1. 96 1, q.41, a.6, ad 1; cf. 1, q.42, a.6. On this issue and Aquinas’s change of mind about it over the course of his career, see John F. Boyle’s “St. Thomas and the Analogy of Potentia Generandi,” The Thomist 64 (2000): 581–92. 95

228

the question of trinitarian metaphysics

one) is the Creator, why would not created being be ultimately describable as “Trinitarian”? Despite cogent reasons against it, are we not back to Trinitarian ontology? In answer, let us review the two common errors in speaking about the triune God. The ﬁrst error is to conﬂate the oneness and threeness; the second error is to make of the divine essence a reiﬁed “fourth” in the Trinity. Trinitarian ontology, motivated by desire to avoid the second error, falls into the ﬁrst. God’s being is not a communion, because being is not what relates in God. The analogy of being cannot be “Trinitarian,” because the divine being is (necessarily) conceptually distinct from the relations in the divine being. “Being” describes what is, in an undivided way, one in God. The analogy of being, predicated upon the creative act in which God the Trinity creates all else, pertains to what is one in God. While true, this position needs nuance. Certainly, the gift of creaturely being is Trinitarian (and thus Christological, since Christ is the Word). Everything God does when he acts as one, is the act of the whole Trinity in accord with the order of origin of the processions in God. Indeed for Aquinas, as Emery has emphasized, “The processions of the divine Persons are the cause of creation.”97 The procession of creatures depends upon the processions of the divine Persons. Aquinas states that “the divine Persons, according to the nature of their procession, have a causality respecting the creation of things. . . . God the Father made the creature through His Word, which is His Son; and through His Love, which is the Holy Spirit.”98 Therefore, within every creature, one ﬁnds a trace or (in rational creatures) an image of the Trinity.99 Although the gift of creaturely being is Trinitarian and every creature bears a trace or image of the Trinity, however, this does not mean that the analogy of being is Trinitarian (as “Trinitarian ontology” would have it). On the contrary, the analogy of being pertains to the analogy, which must always be cautiously expressed, between inﬁnite divine being, which is undivided and one, and creaturely being. The Trinitarian trace and 97

1, q.45, a.6, ad 1. On this theme, see Emery, “Essentialism or Personalism,” 527–31; for a detailed treatment of this theme in Aquinas’s Commentary on the Sentences (compared with the commentaries of Albert the Great and Bonaventure), see Emery, La Trinité créatrice: Trinité et création dans les commentaires aux Sentences de Thomas d’Aquin et de ses précurseurs Albert le Grand et Bonaventure (Paris: Vrin, 1995). See also Emile Bailleux, “La création, oeuvre de la Trinité, selon saint Thomas,” Revue Thomiste 62 (1962): 27–50. 98 1, q.45, a.6. 99 1, q.45, a.7.

the question of trinitarian metaphysics

229

image in creatures pertain to a certain representation that one can, in faith, ﬁnd in creatures of the distinct properties of the Persons. It might seem, nonetheless, that the Paschal mystery provides a Trinitarian analogy of being. As we have seen, the Paschal mystery is revelatory of the Trinity because Christ’s passion and resurrection reveal him, by the power of the Holy Spirit, to be the perfect Image of the self-giving Father. Does Christ reveal the Trinitarian meaning of “being”? Certainly, the Paschal mystery makes supremely manifest Christ’s claims about his relationship, as Son, to the Father and the Holy Spirit. Through the dialogue of the Father and the incarnate Son in the Holy Spirit, the Paschal mystery conﬁrms Christ’s testimony that there are distinct Persons in God, and thus conﬁrms the relations of self-giving within the Godhead. Even so, the Paschal mystery suggests that this self-giving is common to the three Persons. While the three Persons are distinct, the giving itself is common: each Person gives or is given. The “giving,” as love, belongs to what is shared, to the divine “being.” In short, redoublement retains its value in analyzing the Trinitarian character of the Paschal mystery. Having made this point, the danger remains of reifying being (or essence) and thus separating “being” from “Trinity.” Given this danger, it is crucial to appreciate Aquinas’s account of the order of origin and the mutual indwelling of the Persons. The order of origin is a reality that does not elicit much excitement among theologians today. If the greatest insights we have into the divine Trinity lie in the order of origin, then this might seem like hardly any insight. By contrast for Aquinas, as we saw in the previous chapter, the eternal order in which the communication of the divine nature occurs is the supreme contemplative height of Trinitarian theology and Christian faith. This order is revealed in the New Testament by the names Father, Word and Image (the Son), Love and Gift (the Holy Spirit), in which names we see an order of intra-divine processions whose analogical signiﬁcation can be teased out by contemplative reference to the processions in the soul. It is by penetrating, in sapiential contemplation, the mystery of this revealed order that theologians gain deeper insight into the Trinity. This order, Aquinas points out, belongs strictly to the Persons in God, not to the essence.100 Having called the order of origin an “order of nature” in God, Aquinas remarks that this does not mean that the divine nature is subject to order: “The order of nature means not the ordering 100

1, q.42, a.3, ad 4.

230

the question of trinitarian metaphysics

of [the divine] nature itself, but the existence of order in the divine Persons according to natural origin.”101 The order of origin thus teaches us strictly about the distinction of Persons. Since the Persons are distinguished in the communication of the divine essence from the Father to the Son, and from the Father and Son to the Holy Spirit, the order of origin does not signify that one Person is greater than another Person in God. Aquinas notes that “the greatness of God is nothing but the perfection of His nature.”102 Because the Persons share the same essence, they are equal. The distinction of Persons in the communication of the divine essence (being) means that the Father, for example, is not more digniﬁed because he is (as he certainly is) the principle of all. Rather, Aquinas explains, “As, therefore, the same essence, which in the Father is paternity, in the Son is ﬁliation, so the same dignity which in the Father is paternity, in the Son is ﬁliation.”103 The divine nature (that is, the divine greatness and dignity) “exist in the Father by the relation of giver, and in the Son by the relation of receiver.”104 Given the identity of “being” and “Person,” despite the distinction of Persons, no inequality between giver and receiver is possible. Divine being subsists in the ordered Trinitarian relations. In this sense, which is the only theologically valid sense in which “Trinitarian ontology” could be understood, one sees fully that being exists in God in the relations, and vice versa. This interplay of the two aspects under which the triune God can be viewed is also evident in Aquinas’s treatment of perichoresis, or the mutual indwelling of the Persons.105 Aquinas remarks, “There are three 101

1, q.42, a.3, ad 3. 1, q.42, a.4. With regard to John 14:28, “The Father is greater than I,” Aquinas (drawing upon Athanasius and Hilary) comments in 1, q.42, a.4, ad 1 that Christ may be saying this with regard to his human nature, or, if he is saying it in regard to his divine nature, he means to signify that the Father is the principle from whom the Son comes (the Father’s “paternal authority”). 103 1, q.42, a.4, ad 2. 104 Ibid. 105 In the Trinitarian thought of Colin Gunton, Jürgen Moltmann, and others, perichoresis has become a political concept that bears far more theological weight than it can sustain. See the comments in this regard made by Karen Kilby in “Perichoresis and Projection: Problems with Social Doctrines of the Trinity,” New Blackfriars 81 [2000]: 435–43. She concludes, “In short, then, I am suggesting we have here something like a three stage process. First, a concept, perichoresis, is used to name what is not understood, to name whatever it is that makes the three Persons one. Secondly, the concept is ﬁlled out rather sugges102

the question of trinitarian metaphysics

231

points of consideration as regards the Father and the Son; the essence, the relation, and the origin; and according to each the Son and the Father are in each other.”106 The Persons dwell perfectly within each other because they share the very same, undivided essence (being). Since each Person is the essence (distinguished only by the relation of origin), the fact that the Persons share the same essence means that each Person is perfectly in the other two Persons. Secondly, the Persons dwell perfectly within each other because they are distinguished by relation to each other. In each Person, therefore, the relational reality of the other Persons is present: “as regards the relations, each of the two relative opposites is in the concept of the other.”107 Thus, the mutual indwelling of the Persons can be conceived both from the perspective of relation “in” (essence) and from the perspective of relation “to” (Person).108

tively with notions borrowed from our own experience of relationships and relatedness. And then, ﬁnally, it is presented as an exciting resource Christian theology has to offer the wider world in its reﬂections upon relationships and relatedness. . . . Projection, then, is particularly problematic in at least some social theories of the Trinity because what is projected onto God is immediately reﬂected back onto the world, and this reverse projection is said to be what is in fact important about the doctrine” (442). 106 1, q.42, a.5. 107 Ibid. Staniloae terms this “intersubjectivity” (The Experience of God, 262), but this seems to tend toward tritheism. Compare the valuable description provided by another Orthodox theologian, David Bentley Hart: “Just as the Father is the plenitude of divine goodness, in whom inhere both his Word (manifestation, form) and Gift (the life in which the Word goes forth, light in which he is seen, joy in which he is known, generosity wherewith he is bestowed), so in the Son whom the Father generates the depth of the paternal arche and the boundless spiritual light and delight of wisdom also inhere, and in the Spirit whom the Father breathes forth the plenitude of paternal being and ﬁlial form inhere in the ‘mode’ of accomplished love. Each Person is fully gathered and reﬂected in the mode of the other: as other, as community and unity at once” (Hart, “The Mirror of the Inﬁnite: Gregory of Nyssa on the Vestigia Trinitatis,” 546–7). 108 Although he is right that perichoresis has not traditionally been used to displace or modify the unity of essence, Miroslav Volf is mistaken in suggesting that perichoresis therefore has pertained more to the unity than to the Trinity of Persons: “traditionally, perichoresis has been used mainly to reﬂect upon the divine unity” (Volf, “ ‘The Trinity Is Our Social Program’: The Doctrine of the Trinity and the Shape of Social Engagement,” Modern Theology 14 (1998): 409). Volf cites John Damascene: In De Fide John of Damascus, who popularized the term that Pseudo-Cyril ﬁrst extended from Christological into Trinitarian language, writes, “For . . . they are made one not so as to commingle, but so as to cleave to each other, and they have their being in each other without any coaescence or commingling” (I, vii). Here

232

the question of trinitarian metaphysics

Just like the order of origin, therefore, the mutual indwelling of the Persons is a fundamental insight of Aquinas’s Trinitarian theology. The perichoresis of the Persons is based not upon a dynamic intertwining or dance of three strands (a triple helix), which would make perichoresis extrinsic rather than intrinsic to each Person, but rather upon the very notion of Person as subsisting relation. Lastly, Aquinas explains that the mutual indwelling is also due to origin. Since the procession of the Word and the procession of the Spirit are not external processions, as if they went out of God, but rather are internal processions, remaining within the Godhead, whatever is spoken in the Word, is in the Word (and the

perichoresis describes the kind of unity in which the plurality is preserved rather than erased. But the resources of perichoresis for thinking about identity are as rich as for thinking about unity. For it suggests that divine persons are not simply interdependent and inﬂuence one another from outside, but are personally interior to one another. (ibid.). Describing what he means by “identity,” Volf continues, “First, identity is non-reducible. Persons cannot be translated fully into relations. A person is always already outside of the relations in which he or she is immersed. If this were not the case, ‘not-mine’ could never become ‘mine’ because it would have no place outside of itself to land, so to speak” (410). From this comment, it seems that Volf is not speaking about either “person” or “relation” with the same metaphysical clarity practiced by Aquinas and the Greek Fathers. Regarding such use of “identity,” one would need to recall Herbert McCabe’s bracing reminder, “I think it will be clear that Aquinas’s doctrine gives us no warrant for saying that there are three persons in God; for ‘person’ in English undoubtedly means an individual subject, a distinct center of consciousness. Now the consciousness of the Son is the consciousness of the Father and of the Holy Spirit, it is simply God’s consciousness. There are not three knowledges or three lovings in God. . . . If we say there are three persons in God, in the ordinary sense of person, we are tritheists” (McCabe, “Aquinas on the Trinity,” 282). For similar concerns, well expressed, see also David S. Cunningham, “Participation as a Trinitarian Virtue: Challenging the Relational Consensus,” Toronto Journal of Theology 14 (1998): 7–25, especially 7–9. Cunningham notes that in most contemporary theology “relation” is used in a loose sense, with the result that “the emphasis on ‘relationality’ in the work of many contemporary Trinitarian theologians still conjures up an image of three individuals, even if very closely related ones. This helps to explain the popularity of the tag-line ‘persons in communion,’ which (I suspect) is most frequently read as implying that, ﬁrst, there are (relatively independent) persons, who (then) come into communion (as contrasted with persons who are not in communion)” (8). Cunningham cites LaCugna, Colin Gunton, Alan Torrance, Elizabeth Johnson, Walter Kasper, and Moltmann as exemplars of this difﬁculty. Given this tendency toward tritheism, Jean-Hervé Nicolas, O.P.’s “Una et trina Deitas,” which (as Nicolas’s contribution to the festschrift for Jean-Pierre Torrell) focuses on explicating God’s unity, is timely. See Nicolas, “Una et trina Deitas,” in Ordo sapientiae et amoris ed., C.-J. Pinto de Oliveira, O.P., (Fribourg: Editions universitaires, 1993): 229– 46.

the question of trinitarian metaphysics

233

same for the Spirit).109 Since the whole Godhead is spoken by the Father in the Word, the whole Trinity is in the Word. Mutual indwelling thus is seen to be at the heart of the Trinitarian mystery. The conceptual distinction of essence and Persons illumines, rather than obscures, the reality of mutual indwelling. In these ﬁve ways – redoublement, undividedness, the real identity of divine essence and Persons, the differentiation of the Persons solely in terms of the communication of the essence (relations of origin), and the order of origin and mutual indwelling of the Persons – I have attempted to show that Aquinas’s theology of the triune God both upholds the unity of God better than does Trinitarian ontology, and provides a better (nonessentialist) account of the distinction of Persons in God.110 Aquinas’s approach embodies the insight of St. Maximus the Confessor: “Nor in the Divinity is one thing derived from another: the Trinity does not derive from the Unity, since it is ungenerated and self-manifested. On the contrary, the Unity and the Trinity are both afﬁrmed and conceived as truly one and the same, the ﬁrst denoting the principle of essence, the second the mode of existence. The whole is the single Unity, not divided 109

In “ ‘The Trinity Is Our Social Program,’ ” Volf suggests that the Trinity is best understood as “the narrative of divine self-donation” (412). Volf explains how this narrative should structure the Christian life: If my argument is cogent, then to propose a social knowledge based on the doctrine of the Trinity is not so much to “project” and “represent” “the Triune God, who is transcendental peace through differential relation”, as John Milbank argues in his justly acclaimed Theology and Social Theory (6). Rather, to propose a social knowledge based on the doctrine of the Trinity is above all to renarrate the history of the cross, the cross understood not as a simple repetition of heavenly love in the world, but as the Triune God’s engagement with the world in order to transform the unjust, deceitful, and violent kingdoms of this world into the just, truthful, and peaceful “kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah” (Revelation 11:16). (415) Aquinas’s theology of God narrates the “divine self-donation” in terms not only of love (the procession of will), but also of wisdom (the procession of intellect), thereby challenging the modern voluntarist focus upon power without falling into a rationalistic conception of God. Thus Thomistic theology restores the central place of contemplation (also displaced in modernity) as a mode of deiﬁcation, without falling into quietism, since contemplation, as wisdom, is based upon the charity that comes to us through the Spirit of Jesus Christ, our Paschal sacriﬁce. 110 Trinitarian ontology also aims at renewing our sense of the Trinitarian character of creation and of creatures, which would require developing further the doctrine of the Trinitarian vestigia and imago.

234

the question of trinitarian metaphysics

by the Persons; and the whole is the single Trinity, the Persons of which are not confused by the Unity. Thus polytheism is not introduced by division of the Unity or disbelief in the true God by confusion of the Persons.”111 Indeed, understanding the other areas of Trinitarian theology depends upon grasping the technical discussions of the rapport of essence and Persons. Only such metaphysical precision retains the unity of Scripture: the revelation in the Old Testament of the one God is not superseded by the revelation, in the New Testament, that the one God subsists in three Persons. As the biblical scholar C. Kavin Rowe eloquently remarks, The New Testament and the early Church made claims about the human person Jesus of Nazareth and about the Spirit (see above texts) that required speciﬁcation in terms of ontology. It would not do simply to state the claims (YHWH is somehow both Father and Jesus Christ; the Spirit is somehow inseparably the Spirit of God the Father and of the human person Jesus Christ; there is a Trinitarian pattern of salvation, etc.). The relation of God the Father, Jesus Christ, and the Spirit as well as the relation of Jesus’ divinity and humanity had to be speciﬁed in terms consistent with the most fundamental theological thrust of the Old Testament, that of the unity and singularity of the one Creator God and the directives for exclusive worship that were inextricably bound with this God’s identity. That YHWH (kyrios) is both God the Father and Jesus Christ leads of necessity to the question of essence, or ‘being,’ most acutely at the point of the Christian worship of Jesus Christ.112

Rowe has placed his ﬁnger upon the heart of the explication of the Christian God. His conclusion is that “the ontological judgments of the early ecumenical Creeds were the only satisfying and indeed logical outcome of the claims of the New Testament read together with the Old.”113 This

111

St. Maximos the Confessor, “On the Lord’s Prayer,” in The Philokalia, compiled by St. Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and St. Makarios of Corinth, Vol. 2 ed. and trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware, (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1981): 296. 112 Rowe, “Biblical Pressure and Trinitarian Hermeneutics,” Pro Ecclesia 11 (2002): 307. 113 Ibid., 308. He continues: If the Old Testament counts for anything, we cannot worship a mere human (one who is created) instead of, in conjunction with, or over against the one God of the Old Testament. Such worship would mean rank and obvious idolatry, the total denial and destruction of Old Testament monotheism. . . . To put it into dogmatic terms, we cannot simply confess an economic Trinity but must also move to speciﬁcation

the question of trinitarian metaphysics

235

conclusion signals, one may hope, a reuniﬁcation of biblical exegesis and contemplative theology.

with respect to the immanent Trinity if the Old Testament is to retain its authoritative witness. Conversely, the Old Testament’s afﬁrmations about God and the worship of God force us to make statements about divine ontology in light of the claims of the New Testament. We may go one step further yet and assert that the ontological judgments of the early ecumenical Creeds were the only satisfying and indeed logical outcome of the claims of the New Testament read together with the Old. . . . [T]he two-testament canon read as one book pressures its interpreters to make ontological judgments about the Trinitarian nature of the one God ad intra on the basis of its narration of the act and identity of the biblical God ad extra. (Rowe, “Biblical Pressure and Trinitarian Hermeneutics,” 307–8) Rowe acknowledges a debt to the canonical hermeneutics of Brevard Childs.

CONCLUSION

Karen Kilby has asked, “Does the Trinity need to be relevant? What kind of relevance does it need to have?”1 Kilby notes that modern Trinitarian theologies, prompted by the view of thinkers such as Schleiermacher and William James that the doctrine of the Trinity has no practical relevance, have energetically worked to make the doctrine of the Trinity more exciting. The unfortunate result, however, has been not only weakening the doctrine’s intelligibility, but also dramatizing the doctrine to adapt it to ﬁt particular practical (social or political) viewpoints. Kilby’s solution, drawing upon George Lindbeck’s theory of doctrine, is to give the doctrine of the Trinity a regulative or “grammatical” role in Christian life. She argues that “one should renounce the very idea that the point of the doctrine is to give insight into God,” and that the doctrine “can instead be taken as grammatical, as a second order proposition, a rule, or perhaps a set of rules, for how to read the Biblical stories, how to speak about some of the characters we come across in these stories, how to think and talk about the experience of prayer, how to deploy the ‘vocabulary’ of Christianity in an appropriate way.”2 Yet, having brilliantly identiﬁed the problem, Kilby may have fallen into it herself. If the doctrine of the Trinity is not primarily about God, but rather is primarily about us, then are we not back at the same problem? Her solution is the Jamesian impasse once again, but this time acknowledged as such: “The doctrine on this account can still be seen as vitally important, but important as a kind of structuring principle of Christianity rather than as its central focus: if the doctrine is fundamen1

Karen Kilby, “Perichoresis and Projection: Problems with Social Doctrines of the Trinity,” New Blackfriars 81 [2000]: 442. 2 Ibid., 443.

conclusion

237

tal to Christianity, this is not because it gives a picture of what God is like in se from which all else emanates, but rather because it speciﬁes how various aspects of the Christian faith hang together.”3 What differentiates Kilby’s view from those of other theologians caught up in the Jamesian impasse is that she, having masterfully critiqued their efforts to make the doctrine relevant, accepts the impasse with a certain sadness brought about by the sight of so many theological ventures run aground. If the doctrine is to have primarily practical ends – as Kilby clearly thinks it must – then theologians should at least avoid projecting these ends into their characterizations of the Trinity himself. She admits that theologians who accept the creedal confession that God is three and one “will inevitably try to make sense of this” and ask what it means as regards the inner life of God. If such questions must be asked, Kilby requests that theologians have the decency not to “use the doctrine as a pretext for claiming such an insight into the inner nature of God that they can use it to promote social, political or ecclesiastical regimes.”4 While I agree with Kilby’s criticisms, I do not accept her conclusion. A better solution lies in renewing our understanding of the relationship between the theological interpretation of Scripture and the practices of metaphysical inquiry, and rediscovering theology as contemplative wisdom. Aquinas’s contemplative insights remain continually engaged with scriptural revelation (chapter 1) – both that of the living God of Israel who names himself YHWH, the God of the covenant and the “I am” (chapters 2 and 3), and that of Christ Jesus, who reveals himself to be the saving Word and wisdom of the Father, and who reveals their mutual Spirit of love by the divine charity expressed supremely upon a cross in Jerusalem under Pontius Pilate (chapter 4). The insights are drawn forth and crystallized from the scriptural revelation by means of metaphysical analysis that preserves Aquinas’s contemplation of the Trinitarian names from idolatry (chapters ﬁve and six). Finally, Aquinas’s contemplative exercise allows him to distinguish what belongs to God in common from what characterizes the three distinct Persons in God (chapter seven). His careful distinctions neither conﬂate the two aspects, as is commonly the problem today, nor allow us to imagine that the two aspects are not, in reality, the very same God. In short, we have undertaken a contemplative exercise, guided by Aquinas, that has both addressed many of the key problems in contem3 4

Ibid., 443–4. Ibid., 444.

238

conclusion

porary Trinitarian theology and offered liturgically signiﬁcant – ordered to deiﬁcation – “insight into the inner nature of God,” in Kilby’s phrase.5 The primary goal of such an exercise is to gain knowledge of God in himself. Within the exercise, Scriptural and metaphysical instruction complement one another. The knowledge of God in himself is sought not for the sake of any created good, but simply because of the glory and beauty of God. However, such knowledge is sought within, and made possible by, the context of the triune God’s self-revealing gifts of creation and redemption. In seeking contemplative ends, we attain practical ends as well.6 As Jesus said, “But seek ﬁrst his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well” (Matthew 6:33). However, is this a sufﬁcient apologia for the kind of speculative theology practiced in this book? I have sought to articulate the persuasiveness of Thomistic speculative Trinitarian theology from within the practice of dialogue with inﬂuential contemporary exegetical and theological positions.7 This seems a way to carry forward the Thomistic theological tradition of identifying and constructively replying to objections brought forward from Scripture and from other theologians. Yet, will the conclusions reached here be of interest to “the person in the pew”? Have I identiﬁed anything that will help believers in their life of faith, and preachers in their pastoral ministry? Here it is useful to quote once more from Kilby: The doctrine of the Trinity arose in order to afﬁrm certain things about the divinity of Christ, and, secondarily, of the Spirit, and it arose against a background assumption that God is one. So one could say that as long as Christians continue to believe in the divinity of Christ and the Spirit, and as long as they continue to believe that God is one, then the doctrine is alive and well; it continues to inform the way they read the Scriptures and 5

Ibid., 444. Victor White, O.P. has remarked that for Aquinas Sacra doctrina’s “whole raison d’être . . . is in man’s need for teaching about his end and his salus, and how he is to direct his intentions and actions towards them. In this sense it is wholly supremely practical. Our presentday understanding of the psychological function of symbols and beliefs may help us to understand how eminently practical and inherently salutary are such seemingly ‘speculative’ treatises as those on the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Eucharist.” (White, Holy Teaching: The Idea of Theology according to St. Thomas Aquinas [London: Blackfriars, 1958]:14.) 7 Steven A. Long has nicely characterized the aridity of a “Thomism” that would make only historical claims: see his “Nicholas Lobkowicz and the Historicist Inversion of Thomistic Philosophy,” The Thomist 62 (1998): 41–74. 6

conclusion

239

the overall shape of their faith. But clearly many theologians are wanting something in addition to this, something beyond this, some one particular insight into God that this particular doctrine is the bearer of. It is when one gets to thinking about three being one, and how this might be possible, that most Christians grow puzzled, silent, perhaps even uninterested, and this is what so many theologians are troubled by. It is therefore (though few would quite admit it directly) the abstraction, the conceptual formula, the three-in-oneness, that many theologians want to revivify, and if one is going to make an abstraction, a conceptual formula, relevant, vibrant, exciting, it is natural that one is going to have to project onto it, to ﬁll it out again so that it becomes something the imagination can latch onto.8

Kilby rightly identiﬁes the abstraction of the doctrine as what is troubling many theologians, and indeed many “people in the pew” and pastors. At its height, certainly, contemplation does not require study. Yet, the intellectual (metaphysical) exercises that Aquinas, pedagogically, undertakes in the Summa Theologiae assist believers in arriving at such sublime contemplation. These exercises enable us, like the inspired authors of Scripture themselves (St. John), to appropriate God’s revelation. As Wayne Hankey, without making distinctions between human appropriation (a “revelation” given by the natural light of the intellect) and divine revelation but nevertheless with profound insight, describes the relationship of Scripture and metaphysics in Aquinas’s theology of the triune God: History provides the evidence for that unity of the two theologies, scriptural and philosophical, in which Aquinas believed and which is essential to his theological practice. They are both aspects of one thinking which is both human and divine or, alternatively, they are two forms of revelation. It continually turns out that any other course than this broad ecumenical way does not limit revelation to Scripture but makes revelation theologically incomprehensible.9

Such contemplation invests the full powers of mind and heart in an integrative wisdom that journeys upwards, in faith, to the triune God who exceeds our knowing, yet who has given us (through creation and redemption) true knowledge of himself – a graced knowledge that, when 8

Kilby, “Perichoresis and Projection: Problems with Social Doctrines of the Trinity,” 442–3. 9 Wayne J. Hankey, God in Himself: Aquinas’ Doctrine of God as Expounded in the Summa Theologiae (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987): 146.

240

conclusion

joined to love, is unitive. Such holy wisdom (purity of heart) is the salviﬁc fulﬁllment, in Christ’s Mystical Body, of Israel’s Temple.10 Once this view of contemplative wisdom is adopted, then the quest for immediate relevance, excitement, and practical import becomes less urgent. It becomes less urgent not because the quest is now relativized (although it is) – and certainly not because the quest has been abandoned in a form of quietism – but rather because the quest has been, in the manifestation of God’s “name” in his mystical Temple, fulﬁlled. Simply put, contemplating the majesty and intimate presence of God sufﬁces to calm fears about God’s relevance. What we learn of God’s analogous “characteristics” in his unity and Trinity inﬂames our longing for eternal union with this God of inﬁnite and simple being, goodness, wisdom, and love; who is Creator, Sustainer of every aspect of creaturely being, and Redeemer; who is personal Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Word, Image, Love, and Gift; who is three and one perichoretically, as a mystical dance. The very caution with which we have to learn – apprenticing ourselves to a master of the divine names – to speak about this triune God reﬂects the terrible glory of this unfathomable God, and enables us to rejoice even more in the beauty and delicacy of each glimpse that, squinting in the inﬁnite light, we attain in Christ. As C. S. Lewis famously put it in his children’s books, we come to realize by grasping the theocentric character of reality that this God is not “tame.” Furthermore, when we undertake these intellectual exercises within the Church, with her doctrinal and liturgical tradition of naming God in order to appropriate God’s self-revelation, we come to know that no union with this God is other than charitable union with our fellow human beings and indeed with all creation. Ultimately we do not, on our own, accomplish this true unity: God himself unites us according to the pattern that, in his wisdom, he knows as conducing to our true good, and God enables us to cooperate with him in building, in the world, his Temple of living stones.11 10 See Charles Morerod, O.P., “Trinité et unité de l’Eglise,” Nova et Vetera 77 (2002): 5–17, Luc-Thomas Somme, Fils adoptifs de Dieu par Jésus Christ (Paris: Vrin, 1997); Matthew Levering, Christ’s Fulﬁllment of Torah and Temple: Salvation according to Thomas Aquinas (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 2002). 11 Trinitarian monotheism is thus a wisdom, not a ploy for power in modern terms (to which the dynamism of divine teaching and human contemplation remains foreign). For a standard depiction of monotheism as violent, see e.g., Martin S. Jaffee, “One God, One Revelation, One People: On the Symbolic Structure of Elective Monotheism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 69 (2001): 753–75.

conclusion

241

What is learned through Aquinas’s contemplative practices is thus sufﬁcient meat for the people in the pew and for pastors. In speaking about the highest mysteries, theologians can describe more than an abstraction that functions as a regulative, grammatical norm. The project of Trinitarian theology is not, as it were, a Jamesian tragedy. Nonetheless, as we know from personal experience and from the lives of the saints, such contemplative learning (in faith) does not spare us from the experience of suffering and anxiety. In the intense experience of the fragility of our being – what has been called “the unbearable lightness of being” – our self-centered perception of reality impedes our ability to trust our broken selves to the God “in whom we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). Not only by contemplative exercises but also by our suffering insofar as it becomes (Eucharistically) a suffering-for-others joined in the Holy Spirit to Christ’s sufferings, we must learn to trust the Trinity to hold our fragile being in his hands. As Henri Nouwen put it, we must be trained and formed like the trapeze artist so that we completely “let go” in order that God, who bestows upon us our new name (Revelation 2:17) in his mystical Temple that is his Body, may catch us.12 Indeed, it is only if our contemplative exercises are sustained by continual prayer and sacramental grace that the practices of contemplative wisdom may avoid the poison of pride, manifested in the careerism and ecclesial inﬁdelity of the “academic” theologian. Contemplative exercises on their own cannot produce the theology that the Church needs. Once, admiring a book on the theology of wisdom, I was told that its author had, in later life, suffered from acute and eventually suicidal depression. In prayerful solidarity with that author, we can afﬁrm that the fragile contemplative wisdom of the theologian has meaning only as cruciform participation, in the Mystical Body, in the fulﬁllment of God’s covenants with Israel that has been accomplished on the Cross by the Messiah – the Wisdom of God, who is salvation.

12 Henri J. M. Nouwen, Our Greatest Gift: A Meditation on Dying and Caring (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994): 66–7. A homily preached by Fr. Robert Imbelli introduced me to this book.

INDEX

Abel 103–4n107 Abraham 171 Act, divine 58, 89n56, 107–8n122, 161–2 Acts of the Apostles 50, 241 Adam 103 Alston, William P. 150n23 Amalek 78 Amos 20–1n52, 49 Anselm, Saint 59 antipragmatism 17 anti-Semitism 78, 171 apophaticism 35n47, 51–2, 108n124, 132n106 appropriation theory 222–3n77 Aquinas, Saint Thomas: Balthasar on 132–3n108, 224n82; causality 60n40; Commentary on the Gospel of Saint John 39–40, 136–9, 140–1, 142, 178, 183–4; contemplation 2, 19, 20n50, 38–9, 237–8; 1 Corinthians 87n43; Cross 135, 141; De Deo 45, 68, 72; divine names 4, 48, 49, 58–9, 237; Eastern Orthodox Church 191n91, 192; essentialism 25n5, 133–4; evil 93–5; Exodus 47, 60, 62–3; family image 180–1; Father 171–8; ﬁliation 182; God 58–9, 60, 71, 75–6; God’s knowledge 75, 92;

God’s will 75, 92–3, 96–101; Holy Spirit 185–96; Image 184–5; James 95; Job 45; John’s Gospel 39–45, 153, 157 (see also Commentary); Lamentations 94; Love 193, 195; Luke’s Gospel 94; mixed relation doctrine 25n6; Moses 65–6; Paschal mystery 112; paternity/ﬁliation 177; Paul 59, 60–1n43; Persons 11–12, 25n5, 162–3, 205, 216–20, 222–3; physicalism 158n45; Presence 91–2, 109; procession 150–1, 157–8; Proverbs 89, 93; psychological analogy 121–2, 148, 149–64; Rahner on 34–5; redoublement 69, 160–1, 214–16, 216, 228; Sabellius 153–4; sacra doctrina 9–10, 27–9, 31–4, 37, 43, 46, 47–8; salvation history 24, 26; Scripture 191–2; Son 179–85; speculative theology 83–4, 159n47, 169; study/prayer 20; Summa Contra Gentiles 36–7; Summa Theologiae 2, 10–11, 36, 47–8n3, 50–1, 58, 59, 84n27, 133–4, 169, 195, 197, 216, 239; theology 4, 11, 12; Trinitarian ontology 213; Trinitarian theology 8–9; Trinity, doctrine of 4, 196; triune God 26–7, 39, 48, 70n73,

index 97n80, 111, 239; truth 51; Wisdom 27, 28–34, 37; Word 148–9n19, 151n27, 179–80, 183–4; YHWH 67–8, 71–2 Aristotle: being 202; causality 60n40; deity 76, 86; Metaphysics 49; philosophy 27–8n12; Physics 48; Wisdom 29 Arius: 1 Corinthians 152–3; 1 John 152–3; John’s Gospel 152–3; Persons 151–3, 164, 219–20; procession 154; refutation 179; simplicity of God 155 Armstrong, Karen 7 ascesis 3, 9n18, 21–2, 46 Athanasius, Saint 10 Augustine of Hippo, Saint: contemplation 22n58; De Trinitate 27n9; divine name 62; essence 24n4, 149; eternity 88n48; Holy Spirit 195; Persons 218; psychological analogy 121–2, 149; relation 215; Trinitarian theology 144; Trinity 73 autonomy 80, 81, 90; see also free will Ayres, Lewis 25n4 Bailleux, E. 25n5 Balaam and Balak story 96 Baldwin, Joyce G. 96n76 Balthasar, Hans Urs von 23, 110; on Aquinas 132–3n108, 224n82; Christology 126–7; contemplation 40; faith 124; God’s knowledge 124n69; metaphysics 8n16; mission of Jesus Christ 121; Paschal mystery 122–3; relation 160n50; Trinitarian theology 121–2, 125–6; Trinity 111 baptism 49–50, 206 Barnes, Michel 24n4 Barth, Karl 2–3n3, 23, 56n27, 110,

243

120 Basil, Saint 207, 218–19 Bauckham, Richard: identity of God 111, 116–19, 120, 148n17; Jesus 119; Second Temple monotheism 115–16; Trinity 110 beatitude 22n58, 51, 97–8 begetting 138, 170, 174–6, 185, 221–2, 226 being 4, 17; Aristotle 202; communion 209–10; divine 10–11, 212, 216–17; freedom 209; gift 100n90; homoousion 216n57; Jesus Christ 145; Persons 4; relation 204; YHWH 53–7, 61–6; see also essence Berger, David 198 Bernard, Saint 3 Blankenhorn, Bernhard-Thomas 101n96 Blenkinsopp, Joseph 41 Bobrinskoy, Boris 149–50 Boethius, Anicius 98, 162 Bonaventure, Saint 35n47, 51n11, 202–3, 205 Boulton, Matthew 104n110 Boyle, John F. 227n96 Brown, Stephen F. 222n75 Burrell, David B. 49n8, 89–90n56, 102n105 Cain 103–4, 105, 107 Cappadocian Fathers 207 Catholic theology 110, 191 causality 60n40, 89n50, 96n76, 100n91 Cavanaugh, William 107–8n122 Cessario, Romanus 95n72, 108n123, 136 charity 18, 19, 20, 30–1 Charlton, William 158n45 Charry, Ellen 22n57 Châtillon, J. 223n77

244

index

Chenu, M.-D. 47–8 Childs, Brevard S. 55–6n25 Christian Fathers 3 Christology 126–7, 145, 165, 214–15n51 1 Chronicles 78 Chrysostom, St John 138 Clarke, W. Norris 200; hypostasis 214; philosophy 203–4; relation 205n18; “To Be Is to Be Substance-in-Relation” 202–5; Trinitarian ontology 202–5 Coakley, Sarah 175n32 Coffey, David: Holy Spirit 147; John’s Gospel 146–8; Logos 144; Prologue to John’s Gospel 145; psychological analogy 156–7, 164; Word 147–8 Colossians 138, 147, 184 communio 46, 125 communion: being 209–10; perichoresis 212; Trinity 208–9 Congar, Yves 25n5, 149, 194n104, n107 consummation 57n28 contemplation 4, 9n18, 241; Aquinas 2, 19, 20n50, 38–9, 237–8; Augustine 22n58; Balthasar 40; charity 19, 20; divine names 50; ecclesial practice 17–18; Father 178; happiness 18–19, 97–8; image/knowledge 155; intellectual 52; investigation 10; Islam 10n20; James 19; Moses 65–6, 71–2; Pieper 19; prayer 6; Scripture 12; Trinitarian theology 2, 3, 20; Trinity 26n7, 44; truth 19, 51; Wisdom 239–40 1 Corinthians 30, 87, 152–3, 185 2 Corinthians 185 covenants 60, 75, 79, 119 creatio ex nihilo 79–80 creation 76n3, 81, 101n96; created things 103–4, 115n23, 221

creation theology 79 Creator-God 65, 91n63, 154, 176–7 Cross 120, 135, 141, 241 Cunningham, David S. 16, 201n9, 232–3n108 Curtin, Maurice 96n76 Dahl, Nils A. 165 Dauphinais, Michael 22n58 Davies, Brian 93n67 Decalogue 116 Dei Verbum, Second Vatican Council 84–5 deiﬁcation 38, 50, 177n39, 206 Descartes, René 205n18 Deutero-Isaiah 117, 118 Deuteronomy 66, 71n75, 72, 94, 115–16, 177, 199, 224 Dewan, Lawrence 49 diastasis 127–8 DiNoia, J. Augustine 91n63 divine names: Aquinas 4, 48, 49, 58–9, 237; Augustus 62; contemplation 50; Exodus 49, 61, 74; John’s Gospel 41; knowledge 22; Moses 49, 61, 74, 116; New Testament 229; order of origin 1; Scripture 52–3; see also YHWH Dobbs-Weinstein, Idit 45 Dodds, Michael 96n76 Dondaine, H. F. 25n5, 193n104 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 108 Dunn, James D. G. 148n16, 187–8 Duns Scotus, John 58n33, 108n124 Eastern Orthodox Church 191n91, 192n94 ecstasis 123, 212 Egyptian idolatry 66 Elders, Leo 60n42 Emery, Gilles: Eastern Orthodoxy 191n91; essence 64n52; “Essentialism or Personalism”

index 68n68, 224–5n83; heresies 151n25; redoublement 214–15; relation 72, 217n59, 228; speculative theology 159n47; Trinitarian theology 199–200n6 Enlightenment portrait 102–3 Ephesians 100, 142 Ernst, Cornelius 31, 32 esse/ratio 72 essence: Augustine 24n4, 149; Emery 64n52; God 47, 53, 66, 85n36, 222; hypostasis 223–4; identity 55n25, 219–20, 221; Persons 152, 179n48, 201n8, 217–18n61, 219–20, 223–7, 229–32; relation 215; substance 198, 203, 223–4, 225–6; Trinity 197, 227–8, 229; unity 200n6 essentialism: Aquinas 25n5, 133–4; post-Cappadocian 211; psychological analogy 150, 164; Sabellius 153–4; Zizioulas 207 eternity 88n48 Eucharist 8–9, 241 Eve 103 evil: Aquinas 93–5; free will 106–7; God 93n67; God’s will 106, 107; human beings 94–5; inevitability 76n3; Satan 78; see also sin Exodus: Aquinas 47, 60, 62–3; covenant 119; divine names 49, 61, 74; Moses 66, 74; translation 41, 55n25 Ezekiel 49 faith 37, 58n29, 124, 131–2, 224n82 Family, Year of 181n53 Father: Aquinas 171–8; begetting 138, 159–60, 170, 221–2, 226; contemplation 178; God of Israel 70–1, 139; Holy Spirit 139; Jesus Christ 170–1, 174; New Testament 70–1n75, 170, 174; Old Testament

245

170, 174; as principle 171–4, 210, 230n102; procession 173–4; self-surrender 129–30; Son 23, 70–1n75, 123, 139, 141, 151, 153, 155–6, 159–60, 161, 177–8, 190, 226–7, 231; Witherington and Ice 169–71, 174, 178; Word 180, 183–4; YHWH 70; see also God; paternity; Persons Fee, Gordon 190 Felt, James W. 150n23 feminist theology 174–5n32 Fernández, Victor M. 177n39 Fides et Ratio encyclical 20–1 ﬁliation 159–60, 177, 180, 182, 192–3, 218 Fishbane, Michael 61–2 Floucat, Yves 162n55, 179n45 forsakenness 121, 126, 129–30, 135–6 Franks, Angela Franz 212n48 Franzelin, Johann Baptist 2n3 free will 102, 103–7 freedom 206–7, 209 Friedman, Richard Elliott 155n33 gender/Trinity 175n32 Genesis 49, 79, 81, 155 Al-Ghazali 102n105 gift: being 100n91; Holy Spirit 29–30, 33, 37, 195; Levenson 101; Paschal mystery 229; Persons 137n122; Son 138; Wisdom 30–1, 33 Gilson, Etienne 8n16, 47, 8n17 glory 38, 86n38, 114, 141, 142 God: Aquinas 58–9, 60, 71, 75–6; aseity 15; attributes 11, 14, 48, 49, 53n17, 64, 215–16; Bible 20–1n52, 26, 75; causality 96n76, 100n91; corporeal parts 91n62; created things 88–9, 103–4, 115n23, 221; Creator 65, 91n63, 154, 176–7; essence 47, 53, 66, 85n36, 222;

246

index

God: Aquinas (cont’d) evil 93n67; existence 14–15, 47, 58–9, 60; identity 111, 112–14, 116–20, 148n17; John’s Gospel 166; kyriarchal 134; metaphysics 20–1n52, 75; New Testament 165–6, 197; Old Testament 70–1, 82n26, 118–19, 165, 197, 234–5; ontic/psychologic 221n74; perfection 85; philosophy 26, 37; Presence 13, 90n57, 91–2, 96, 109; suffering 120; transcendence 76n3, 90n57; truth 32; unity 75–6, 217–18, 232n108; Weinandy 75; Word 156; YHWH 237; see also Father; God of Israel; God’s knowledge; God’s will; Persons; triune God God of Israel: Bauckham 116–17; Father 70–1, 139; Levenson 76, 77–83; Marshall 69n73; Soulen 53; Trinity 111; see also YHWH God-centredness 9n18, 21–2 God’s knowledge: Aquinas 75, 92; Balthasar 124n69; causality 89n50; human beings 89–90; Levenson 79, 87–8; limitations 81–2; Matthew 238; Paul 87; perfect 86–7; and will 75 God’s will: antecedent/consequent 104, 105n111; Aquinas 75, 92–3, 96–101; evil 106, 107; fragmentation 78–9, 81–2; good pleasure/expression 98–9; and knowledge 75; Levenson 98–9; Matthew 98–9, 106; Paul 97, 99, 100 Goizueta, Roberto S. 9n18, 17–18 Goldingay, John 168 goodness 95–6, 107 grace 33, 38 Greek Fathers 192, 207–8 Greek ontology 208

Gregory of Nazianzus 211 Gregory of Nyssa, Saint 3, 22n58, 24n4, 120n51, 221n74 Gregory the Great 85 Gunten, A. E. 148–9n19, 180n50 Gunton, Colin 231n105, 232n108 Gutierrez, Gustavo 9n18 Hadot, Pierre 38, 49n8 Haight, Roger 186–7n76 Hampson, Daphne 176n32 Hankey, Wayne 48–9, 59n34, 83n27, 239 happiness 18–19, 97–8 Hart, David Bentley 221n74 Hauerwas, Stanley 6n12, 12 Hawking, Stephen 7 Hays, Richard 142–3 Hebrews 88, 138, 195 Hegel, G. W. F. 12, 14, 203 Heidegger, Martin 7–8n16, 108 Hell 130n98, 136; see also Sheol heresies 151n25, 155 Heschel, Abraham Joshua 105– 6n115 Hibbert, Giles 4–5, 34, 38, 39 Hibbs, Thomas 20, 36–7 Hilary, Saint 186, 219–20 Hill, William 45–6 Hinnebusch, William A. 178n43, 178n44 Holocaust 82, 105 Holy Spirit: Act 108n122; Aquinas 185–96; Augustine 195; coequality 174; Coffey 147; connaturalization 30; Father 139; gift 29–30, 33, 37, 195; human beings 99; Love 151n27, 193–5, 229, 237; New Testament 186, 189–90; Old Testament 185–6; Paul 190; procession 151, 157, 180–1, 185, 190–1, 192, 232; relation 161, 176n36, 216, 227; Son 136, 152–3,

index 191, 192n94; Witherington and Ice 186, 188, 189–90, 194, 196 homoousion 120, 145, 216n57 Hoonhout, Michael A. 91n63 human beings 96; autonomy 81, 90; charity 18; evil 94–5; free will 102; God’s knowledge 89–90; Holy Spirit 99; knowing 33, 35n47; Persons 151n27, 178n44; understanding 157 Hume, David 205n18 humility, spirit of 17, 135 Hunt, Anne 110–11, 136 Hütter, Reinhard 200–1; Suffering Divine Things 210–12, 213–14; Trinitarian ontology 210–12, 227 hypostasis 78, 224n82; Clarke 214; essence/substance 198, 203, 223–4; evil 78; Father/Son 190, 207 Ice, Laura: Father 169–71, 174, 178; Holy Spirit 186, 188, 189–90, 194, 196; New Testament/Trinity 167–8; Son 179, 181–2, 184 identity: essence 55n25, 220, 221; functional/ontological 148n17; God 111, 112–14, 116–20, 148n17; Persons 229–31; triune God 201; Volf 231–2n108; YHWH 54, 56n27, 57, 116–17, 118 idolatry 60, 65, 66, 67–8 image 155, 184–5 imitatio Christi 20, 22 Incarnation 34, 41, 56n27, 119, 147 interiority 17, 42–3 intersubjectivity 121–2, 231n107 Isaiah, Book of 7, 41–2, 49, 65, 77, 186 Isaiah, prophet: as contemplative 42, 44; divine names 41; God the Creator 65, 154; prophecy 77; vision 40

247

Islam 10n20, 198; see also al-Warraq, Abu ’Isa Israel 4, 49, 60, 67–8, 95, 116–17; see also God of Israel Jacob 49 Jaffee, Martin S. 240n11 James, Saint 95 James, William 12–15, 13, 19, 241 Jenson, Robert 56n27 Jeremiah 49 Jesus Christ: being 145; Father 170–1, 174; homoousion 145; human consciousness 127; John 40; John’s Gospel 50, 63, 121, 150–1, 224; mission 121, 126–7, 128, 141; names 50; New Testament 145–6; Nicodemus 140n138; obedience 128, 135; Paschal mystery 1, 11, 110, 131–2, 133–4, 141; passion 134–5, 136, 142, 229, 241; Paul 114; resurrection 111, 113, 136, 142; revelation 109, 136–7; salvation 108n123; sin 130n100; sinners 128–9; and Spirit 187–8; Trinitarian theology 137n120; Trinity 113, 139–40; Wisdom 139, 147; Word 237; Wright 114–15n20; YHWH 56n27, 63, 113; see also Son; Word Jewish monotheism 115, 117–18 Jewish people 82, 116 Jewish theology 109, 112, 198 Job 45, 85, 86, 104n107, 177 Joel 186 1 John 74, 152–3 John Damascene, Saint 25n5, 63, 179, 231–2n108 John of the Cross, Saint 196n119 John Paul II, Pope 21, 176n32, 181n53 John the Evangelist, Saint 27, 39–45, 144

248

index

John’s Gospel: antiSemitism 171; Aquinas 137, 138, 153, 157, 191–2; Arius 151–3; Coffey 146–8; divine name 41, 50; God 166; Jesus Christ 50, 63, 121, 150–1, 224; Prologue 145, 147, 166–7; Seitz 55n25; Witherington 40–1, 148n16; Word 182–3; see also Aquinas, Commentary Johnson, Elizabeth A. 172n22, 213n49 Johnson, Luke Timothy 59, 166–7 Johnson, Mark F. 28n14, 33 Jordan, Mark 37–8n56 judgment 157–8 Kant, Immanuel 12, 14, 15 Karamazov, Ivan 108 Keaty, Anthony 193n104 Keck, Leander 165 kenosis 114, 122–4, 126, 212, 213–14 Kerr, Fergus 19n48, 47–8, 61n43, 132–3n108, 150 Kilby, Karen 132n106, 230–1n105, 236–7, 238–9 Kimel, Alvin F. 175n32 Knoch, Wendelin 215n55 knowledge: as attribute 88n48; human beings 33, 35n47; image 155; judgment 157–8; love 124, 144; names 22; senses 220–1; see also God’s knowledge Kretzmann, Norman 223n77 Kurz, William 166–7 kyrios 70–1n75, 73n84, 114, 234 LaCugna, Catherine Mowry 15–16, 107n122, 232n108 Lafont, Ghislain 48, 214–15 Lafontaine, René 171n21 Lamb, Matthew L. 88n48 Lamentations 94 Lash, Nicholas 175n32

Latino/Hispanic approach 17 Le Guillou, M.-J. 25n5, 171n21 Levenson, Jon D. 75; Creation and the Persistence of Evil 76; gift 101; God of Israel 76, 77–83; God’s knowledge 79, 87–8; God’s will 98–9; Heschel 105–6n115; Holocaust 105; monotheism 94n69; YHWH 77–83 Levering, Matthew 9n18 Leviticus 22, 49 Lewis, C. S. 240 Lindbeck, George 6n12, 236 Locke, John 205n18 Lodahl, M. E. 186 Logos 144, 147, 148n16, 182, 187n76; see also Word Lonergan, Bernard 83n27 Love: Aquinas 193, 195; Holy Spirit 151n27, 193–5, 228, 237; knowledge 124, 144; procession 158; self-emptying 227–8; selfsurrender 124–5, 129–30, 131, 142; Staniloae 210n40; Trinity 207 Luke’s Gospel 94 Luther, Martin 7–8, 120, 125, 126 McCabe, Herbert 199n5, 232n108 MacIntyre, Alasdair 167n8 Macquarrie, John 150 Maimonides, Moses 35n47, 37n56, 45, 67, 105n115 Malachi 95–6 Malet, A. 25n5 Manicheism 78, 93 Mansini, Guy 76n3 Marion, Jean-Luc 67n63, 103 Mark’s Gospel 121, 184n61 Marshall, Bruce D. 2–3n3, 68, 69–70n73, 137n120, 223n77 Mary, Mother of God 120 Matthew’s Gospel: baptism 49–50; forsakenness 121; God’s knowledge

index 238; God’s will 98–9, 106; perfection 85; Son/Father 139; Spirit 186; Trinity 119 Maurer, Armand 61n44, 67, 72n79 Maximus, Saint 139–40, 233 medieval theology 22n58, 54, 110, 167, 198 metaphor/analogy 51n13 metaphysics 1, 7–8, 61n44; ascesis 3, 9n18, 21–2, 46; Balthasar 8; God 20–1n52, 75; Incarnation 147; John the Evangelist 40–1; ontology 202; Persons 161–2n55; procession 154; revelation 5, 8; sacra doctrina 9–10; salvation history 10–11; Scripture 1, 2, 5, 21, 27, 52n15; substantialist 150; technical practices 3; theology 4–5; Trinitarian 1, 12; YHWH 65, 71–2 Milbank, John 120n51, 233n109 Miles, Jack 7, 82n26 mission 121, 126–7, 128, 141 mixed relation doctrine 25n6 Molnar, Paul D. 144–5n1 Moltmann, Jürgen 110, 115, 120, 230n105 monotheism: Jewish 115, 117–18; Levenson 94n68; Old Testament 234–5n113; Trinitarian 199–200n6, 240 Mosaic Law 66–7 Moses 48, 55, 61, 65–6, 71–2, 74, 116 Mühlen, Heribert 110 names: Holy Spirit 188; Jesus 50; Moses 74; Persons 168–9; see also divine names nature 33, 206 neo-Palamites 52n14 Neoplatonism 49n8, 93 New Testament: divine names 229; Father 70–1n75, 170, 174; ﬁliation

249

180; God 165–6, 197; Holy Spirit 186, 189–90; Jesus Christ 145–6; Son 70–1n75, 179; Spirit 234 Newman, John Henry 14, 15, 155 Nicea, Council of 56, 145 Nicene Christology 113 Nicene Creed 120, 166–7, 222 Nichols, Aidan 48, 63n50 Nicodemus 140n138 Nietzsche, Friedrich 103 Nizzahon Vetus 198, 224, 225, 227 nominalism 91n63 Nouwen, Henri 241 Numbers 66, 96 obedience 116, 128, 131, 135, 136 Old Testament 142–3; antimetaphysical turn 108–9; Father 170, 174; God 70–1, 82n26, 118–19, 165, 197, 234–5; Holy Spirit 185–6; monotheism 234–5n113; prayer 65; Spirit 185; YHWH 74 O’Meara, Thomas 36 ontology 64–5, 202 onto-theology 34–5n47, 67n63, 83, 103 origin, order of 1, 224–7, 229, 233 Oswalt, John N. 41n68 ousia 53–6, 207; see also being Pannenberg, Wolfhart 212 Paschal mystery: Aquinas 112; Balthasar 122–3; Jesus Christ 1, 11, 110, 131–2, 133–4, 141; revelation 137; Trinitarian ontology 228; Trinity 143 passion 134–5, 136, 142, 229, 241 paternity 159–61, 176–7, 218, 224, 227 pathos 211, 212, 213–14 patristic theology 22n57, 54, 110, 167

250

index

Paul, Saint: Aquinas 59, 60–1n43; Colossians 184; free will 104–5; God’s knowledge 87; God’s mercy 86; God’s will 97, 99, 100; Holy Spirit 190; Jesus Christ 114; Johnson 59–60; Spirit 185 Percy, Walker 12 perfection 85 perichoresis 212, 230–1n105, 232n107, 233, 240 personalist ontology 208–9 Persons: agency 189–90; Aquinas 11–12, 25n5, 162–3, 205, 216–20, 222–3; Arius 151–3, 164, 219–20; Augustine 218; being 4, 210, 212, 216–17; coequality 174; distinction 197, 219–20, 222–3, 223–7; essence 152, 179n48, 201n8, 217–18n61, 219–20, 223–7, 230–2; faith 131–2; Father 207; gift 137n122; God 69, 125; human beings 151n27, 178n44; identity 230–1; metaphysics 161–2n55; mutual indwelling 230–3, 233; names 168–9; origin 224–7, 229; ousia 207; perichoresis 212, 230–1n105, 231n107, 232, 240; procession 24, 172n22, 204, 228–9; relation 151, 161–2, 209, 221, 224–7; Scripture 163; Son 68; Trinity Sunday 6; undividedness 216–19; unity 164, 196; YHWH 234–5 Pesch, Otto 27, 51n13 1 Peter 135 Pfürtner, Stephen 52n15 Philippians 118 Philo 48n6, 56n25, 61 philosophy: Aristotle 27–8n12; Clarke 203–4; God 26, 37; presuppositions 153n29; spiritual exercise 38 physicalism 158n45 physics 7

Pieper, Josef 18–19 Pinckaers, Servais 29 Plantings, Cornelius Jr. 156n35 Plato 38 Podhoretz, Norman 42n70, 66n57 poiesis 211 postmetaphysics 210–11n42 post-supersessionism 56n27 praxis 9n18 prayer 6, 20, 51, 65 Presence 13, 90n57, 91–2, 96, 109 presuppositions 153n29 primordial chaos 80 process theology 76 procession: Aquinas 150–1, 157–8; Arius/Sabellius 154; Father 173–4; ﬁliation 218; Holy Spirit 151, 157, 180–1, 185, 190–1, 192, 232–3; knowledge/love 144; love 158; metaphysics 154; mission 128; paternity 218; Persons 24, 172n22, 204, 228–9; relation 160–1, 163; Son 185, 190; Word 158, 232–3 Proclus 48n6, 49, 59n34 projection 231n105 prophecy 42n70 Protestant theology 56n27, 110, 167–8 Proverbs 89, 93 Psalms 49, 59, 77, 80, 81, 89, 91, 101–2, 139, 174 Pseudo-Cyril 231–2n108 Pseudo-Dionysius 32, 48, 59n34 psychological analogy: Aquinas 148, 149–64; Augustine 121–2, 149; Coffey 156–7, 164; essentialism 150, 164; Trinity 155 Rahner, Karl 2–3n3, 21–2, 23–6, 34–5, 70 ratio/esse 72 reading 51

index receptivity 204–5n17 redemption 57n28 redoublement 69, 160–1, 214–16, 216, 228 Régnon, Théodore de 24n4 Reichberg, Gregory M. 94–5n72, 176n36 relation: Augustine 215; Balthasar 160n50; being 204; Clarke 205n18; Emery 72, 217n59; essence 215; Holy Spirit 161, 176n36, 216, 227; origin 224–7, 233; Persons 151, 161–2, 209, 221, 224–7; procession 160–1, 163; redoublement 216; Son 216; substance 201n9, 204–5, 225–6; Trinitarian ontology 230; Trinitarian theology 72, 232n108; Trinity, doctrine of 163–4; Weinandy 163; Zizioulas 213 resurrection 111, 113, 136, 142 revelation 48, 84, 204; faith 224n82; interiority 42–3; Jesus Christ 109, 136–7; metaphysics 5, 8; Mosiac 48; Paschal mystery 137; preTrinitarian 71n77; sacra doctrina 33; verbal 32; Wisdom 33–4; YHWH 11 Revelations 56n25, 233n109 Richard of St Victor 51n11, 121–2, 162, 205 Rogers, Eugene F. Jr. 60–1n43 Romans 28, 59, 85, 86, 96, 98, 101, 177 Rowe, C. Kavin 73n84, 113–14n15, 234–5 Sabellius 153–4, 155, 164 sacra doctrina 47–8; John the Evangelist 43; metaphysics 9–10; revelation 33; sacra scriptura 32; salvation history 46; truth 34; Wisdom 27, 28–9, 31, 33, 37 sacra scriptura 31, 32

251

Saintliness 13 salvation 87, 108n123 salvation history 10–11, 23, 24, 26, 45–6, 110–11 2 Samuel 78 sanctiﬁcation 99 sapientia 45 Satan 78 Saul 50 Schindler, David 204–5n17 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 2n3, 14, 15 scientia 31, 45 Scripture: Aquinas 191–2; contemplation 12; divine names 52–3; metaphysics 1, 2, 5, 21, 27, 52n15; Persons 163; Trinity, doctrine of 168; triune God 3 Second Temple Judaism 115–16, 118 Second Vatican Council 4, 84–5 Seidl, Horst 161–2n55 Seitz, Christopher 41n68, 50n9, 55n25, 64n51, 65, 73 self-centredness 9n18, 21–2 selfhood 150 self-revelation 46 self-surrender 124–5, 129–30, 131, 142 Septuagint 55, 61 Shanley, Brian J. 89n50 Shema 115–16 Sheol 93–4 Siewerth, Gustav 124 signiﬁcation mode 221, 223 sin 94–5n72, 130n98, 130n100; see also evil sinners 128–9 Smith, Timothy L. 50n9, 64n52, 149n20, 155n34 social Trinitarianism 156n35 Socratic dialogue 38 Sokolowski, Robert 64 Solomon, King 49

252

index

Son: Act 108n119; Aquinas 179–85; coequality 174; divinity 179; Father 23, 70–1n75, 123, 139, 141, 151, 153, 155–6, 159–60n48, 161, 177–8, 190, 226–7, 231; forsakenness 126, 129–30, 135–6; as gift 138; Holy Spirit 136, 152–3, 191, 192n94; Logos 144; New Testament 70–1n75, 179; obedience 131, 136; Persons 68; procession 185, 190; relation 216; salvation 87; self-surrender 129–30; suffering 120–1; Witherington and Ice 179, 181–2, 184; Word 157, 158, 228; Wright 112–13; see also ﬁliation; Jesus Christ Soskice, Janet Martin 66n58, 175n32 soteriology 111, 145, 199 Soulen, R. Kendall 53–7, 64–5, 74 speculative theology 112, 178n43, 238; Aquinas 83–4, 159n47, 169 Speyr, Adrienne von 123–4, 130 spiration 188, 193, 227 Spirit 154–5; Jesus Christ 187–8; Matthew 186; New Testament 234; Old Testament 185; Paul 185; Word 159; see also Holy Spirit Spirit Christology 187, 188 Staniloae, Dumitru: apophaticism 51–2; Basil the Great 218–19; intersubjectivity 231n107; Love 210n40; revelation 33; Spirit/Son 191, 192n94; Trinity 72–3n82, 152n28 Stevenson, William B. 149n20 Sträter, Carl 64n52 study/prayer 20 Stylianopoulos, Theodore 190 substance: essence 223–4, 225–6; nature 206; relation 204–5, 225–6

suffering: covenants 79; Eucharist 241; God 120; Job 104n107; Son 120–1; Weinandy 96n76 Summa Contra Gentiles 34 supersessionism 4, 56, 57, 68n67, 74 supposition theory 222n75 Swierzawksi, Waclaw 26n8, 86n38 Taylor, Charles 12 teaching 50–1, 52 technical issues 3, 5–6 Tetragrammaton 67, 68n67 theology: Aquinas 4, 11, 12; basis of 31–2; metaphysics 4–5; negative 35n47; pre-Enlightenment 3; Wisdom 4, 37–8 1 Thessalonians 99 Thiel, John E. 104n107, 105n112 Thomistic manual 14–15 Thompson, Marianne Meye 41, 63n51, 165, 166, 170n18 1 Timothy 94, 101, 104–5 Torah 12, 66, 116, 198–9, 224 Torrell, Jean Pierre 2, 10n21, 20n50, 39 transcendence 4, 76n3, 90n57 translation problems 55 Trinitarian ontology 199–201, 233n110; Aquinas 213; Clarke 202–5; Hütter 210–12, 227; Paschal mystery 229; redoublement 228; relation 231; Zizioulas 205–10, 212 Trinitarian theology 12–13, 200n6; Aquinas 8–9; Augustine 144; Balthasar 121–2, 125–6; Christology 214–15n51; contemplation 2, 3, 20; Cunningham 16; Emery 199–200n6; Jesus Christ 137n120; Marshall 2–3n3; non-supersessionist 57; Rahner 23–6, 24–5; relation

index 72, 232n108; relevance 236–7; Wright 133–4 Trinity: Augustine 73; Bauckham 110; communion 208–9; contemplation 26n7, 44; Cross 120; essence 197, 228, 229; God of Israel 111; Jesus Christ 113, 139–40; Love 207; Matthew 119; monotheism 199–200n6, 240; Paschal mystery 143; psychological analogy 155; resurrection 136; unity 213, 219; see also Persons Trinity, doctrine of: Aquinas 4, 196; gender 175n32; heresies 151n25, 155; Kilby 238–9; LaCugna 15–16; Molnar 144–5n1; Rahner 25n5; relation 163–4; resurrection 111; Scripture 168; teaching of 21–2 Trinity Sunday 6 tritheism 122, 231n107 triune God 2, 3, 73; Aquinas 26–7, 39, 48, 70n73, 97n80, 111, 239; errors 228; identity 201; Rahner 23; redoublement 69; self-revelation 46 truth: Aquinas 51; contemplation 19, 51; God 32; sacra doctrina 34; Scripture/metaphysics 1; Wisdom 30; Word 45; YHWH 57n27 Turner, Denys 35n47, 108, 108n124 unbelief 59 understanding 37, 157 unity 75–6, 200n6, 213, 217–18, 219, 233n108; Persons 164, 196 Vasconcelos, José 17 Vattimo, Gianni 20–1n52 Veritas Prima 32 virtues 29–30, 37 Volf, Miroslav 231–2n108, 233n109 voluntarism 79, 233n109

253

Walker, Adrian 11n23 al-Warraq, Abu ’Isa 198, 201, 214, 223 waters 80, 81 Weinandy, Thomas G.: attributes 48n6, 64; Father/Son 159–60n48; God 75; Presence 90n57; relation of Trinity 163; salvation history 110n1; suffering 96n76; YHWH 61 West, Cornel 12 Wiles, Maurice 146 Williams, A. N. 3, 5n10, 19n48, 26n7, 97n80, 111 Williams, Rowan 27n9, 152n28, 196n119 Wippel, John F. 47–8n3, 153n29 Wisdom: Aquinas 27, 28–34, 37; Aristotle 29; charity 30–1; contemplation 239–40; Cross 241; as gift 30–1, 33; human knowing 33; Jesus Christ 139, 147; Logos 182, 187n76; revelation 33–4; sacra doctrina 27, 28–9, 31, 33, 37; theology 4, 37–8; truth 30; Word 187n76; YHWH 117 Wisdom of Solomon 51, 59, 101, 181–2 Witherington, Ben III: Father 169–71, 174, 178; Holy Spirit 186, 188, 189–90, 194, 196; John’s Gospel 40–1, 148n16; New Testament/Trinity 167–8; Son 179, 181–2, 184 Word: Aquinas 148–9n19, 151n27, 179–80, 183–4; Coffey 147–8; Father 180, 183–4; God 156; Jesus Christ 237; John’s Gospel 182–3; procession 158, 232–3; Son 157, 158, 228; Spirit 159; truth 45; Wisdom 187n76; see also Logos worship/doctrine 6n11

254 Wright, N. T. 110; God’s identity 111, 112–14; Jesus Christ 114–15n20; resurrection 113; Second Temple Judaism 118; Son 112–13; Trinitarian theology 133–4; YHWH 143 YHWH 4, 41; Aquinas 67–8, 71–2; autonomy 80; being 53–7, 61–6; Father 70; God 237; as God of Israel 77; identity 54, 56n27, 57,

index 116–17, 118; Jesus 56n27, 63, 113; Levenson 77–83; Leviticus 49; metaphysics 65, 71–2; Old Testament 74; personality 78; Persons 233–5; revelation 11; truth 57n27; Weinandy 61; Wright 143 Zizioulas, John: Being as Communion 200, 205–10; essentialism 207; relation 213; Trinitarian ontology 205–10, 212