Answer: Both Arius and Augustine defined deity in terms of divine causality, thus understanding causality to be the essential attribute of deity rather than the hypostatic (i.e. personal) feature of the Father's monarchy.
In this confusion of Person, nature and attribute, Arius went on to assert that only the Father was truly God, for the Logos was begotten of the Father. Thus Christ could not be fully divine in that he was "caused by," and in no way the "cause of," the Father. Divine causality and essential deity are inextricably mixed.
In his argument against the later heresy of semi-Arianism, Augustine conceded this point, but went on to employ it in favor of the essential deity of Christ by positing the filioque doctrine. Thus Augustine saw the Son as the "cause," along with the Father, of another divine Person: the Holy Spirit. "For if the Son has of the Father whatever He has, then certainly He has of the Father that the Holy Spirit proceeds also from Him" (De Trinitate 15:26:47). In other words, the Son receives divine causality from the Father and thus is fully divine, for the Holy Spirit proceeds from both.
At this point the inconsistency in Augustine's view of the Trinity becomes apparent, for where does this leave the Holy Spirit? If the Holy Spirit is a fully divine hypostasis then wherein is manifested the attribute of causality?
Food for thought.
Until next time.
P.S. I am indebted to my friend, Dr. Joseph Farrell (+Photius), for these insights.
6 comments:
Aquinas accuses Arius of misunderstanding procession in God in the sense of an effect tending toward exterior matter. He prefers instead the word ‘principle’ to which the term of procession is interior, i.e. one in essence – which of course in Aquinas’s metaphysics also means one in esse, since in the divine nature there is no real distinction between essence and existence. He could not have accused Augustine of the same error since, as the previous post shows, according Augustine all things in God are identical with his essence. The whole purpose of the intellectual analogy – the radical imperfection of which he openly acknowledges in the de Trinitate – is to illustrate how something can proceed from another without being ‘other’ with respect to substance.
As for the full divinity of the Holy Spirit, it seems that on the basis of the Augustinian schema the divinity of the Third Person would only be called into question if there were a Fourth Person who proceeds from the Father and the Son and not the Holy Spirit. Admittedly, however, Augustine complicates the matter by his implication that the Holy Spirit has within his hypostatic character the role of principle of the volitional procession of creation.
Photius - If the persons, in so far as they subsist, are not identical with the divine essence, how can you avoid talking about an essence without first considering a person? Aquinas's view of the persons as essentially subsistent relations - it seems to me - would make it even more difficult to think about the nature apart from the persons.
As to the logic of common properties vs. unique properties, could you not use the same way of speaking to argue that since both the Son and the Holy Spirit proceed from a principle - and a common principle at that - that this characteristic must be a property held in common, i.e. of the divine essence and thus an attribute of the Father, which is impossible? It seems that the distinguishing of the hypostases on the basis of opposite relations, in the manner completed by the Latin use of the filioque, avoids this problem. But then I am not necessarily closed to an orthodox pluralism in Trinitarian metaphysics.
Photius – I simply disagree with your caricature of Aquinas’s theology. When he speaks of ‘origin’ or ‘principle’ in God, he recognizes that these words, though borrowed from created things, signify realities that transcend both their mode of expression and cognition, which is necessarily creaturely. Thomas absolutely rejects univocal correspondence between the divine ‘res’ and its extension in theological speech. At the same time, words of this kind must point in some way to the “things” signified by them; otherwise all theological speech is falsified.
As for his use of the word ‘procession’, he is using it not in the sense of a personal property specifically distinct from ‘begotten’, but – as he says – in the more general sense of having one’s being from another. This is true of both the Son and the Holy Spirit. Neither is without origin.
There is no perfect Trinitarian logic. I am not rejecting the Orthodox manner of theologizing.
Thomas,
You may not see yourself as rejecting orthodox theologizing, but your own theologizing belies a fundamentally different ordo theologiae than the orthodox -- essence, attributes, persons -- which was and remains the crux of the issue.
Dan
Dr. D.,
The method of speculative Trinitarian theology – the same in St. Thomas and St. Gregory of Nyssa – of treating of the essence before the persons, may reflect, in the Angelic Doctor at least, an epistemic priority of essence to persons, on account of the natural order of human cognition, but not therefore an ontological one. Often in Thomas’s theology the ontological and the logical are opposite. Take for example his notion that God is unknowable to us precisely because he is the most knowable thing. The mind naturally moves from the least to the most intelligible objects.
I am not engaged in a fight-to-the-death over any particular Trinitarian theology. I recognize that there are real values at stake in this discussion, on both sides. I also believe that there are non-theological forces at play. For example, a particular way of cognizing the mystery may appeal to someone because of his or her preference for philosophy or a kind of philosophy, such as realism or personalism. Also, I think much of this discussion is animated by a discredited "antinomic dialectic" (Emery, p.166-171) between Augustinian essentialism and Cappadocian personalism.
My main concern, as was Thomas’s I think, is to preserve both the incomprehensibility of God and the true meaningfulness of theo-logiae.
I see you are a friend of the good doctor. Feel free to announce that his magnum opus: God, History, & Dialectic is now available for a reasonable price in 4-volume electronic edition at www.filioque.com
Post a Comment