I figured that I'd jot down some things I've been learning this summer; maybe someone else will be interested, maybe not, but it'll force me to think through it. The main thing I've been reading up on so far has been 13th century trinitarian theology; mainly Duns Scotus with some Henry of Ghent, but also a little Bonaventure and Aquinas (especially after being corrected on some errors in thinking on my last post). Much of the following is recapping a dissertation I've been reading by Russell Friedman, entitled, In Principio Erat Verbum: The Incorporation of Philosophical Psychology into Trinitarian Theology, 1250-1325.
All of the thinkers in this period look back to Augustine and Anselm in their formulations of the Trinity. Many of the strategies of these two are incorporated into later, more precise Scholastic thought, though in different ways. Aquinas and Bonaventure are similar in their thinking, yet develop differences which are further developed by succeeding thinkers.
One model of thinking about the Trinity involves looking at the relations between the persons. Augustine in particular champions this model (though I believe that similar steps were taken by at least one of the Cappadocians; I'll have to look this up). The key thing is that whatever distinguishes the persons in God can't be an essential property as they all have one essence. Neither can it be an accidental property, as God doesn't have any accidents in an Aristotelian sense (besides, we don't exactly want the persons to be accidental to God's nature, even if we are going with a contemporary, non-Aristotelian framework). The only other Aristotelian category which makes sense once you remove talk of accident and substance is relation. The divine persons are therefore distinguished from one another through their relational properties. In most beings, relations are a cheap manner of being, even below accidents; the fact that there are more books than DVDs in this apartment has nothing to do with the being of the books or DVDs. However, when these relations are within the divine essence, they have a manner of being as full as any substance.
Aquinas in particular takes up this line of approach. The persons are distinguished not merely by relations, but by opposed relations; the Father has the relation of paternity to the Son, and the Son has the relation of filiation to the Father. The Holy Spirit must have a relation to both Son and Father in order to be distinct from them, and so they both have the relation of active spiration to the Spirit and the Spirit has the relation of passive spiration from both the Son and Father (thus, the relation account demands the filioque).
Bonaventure, on the other hand, tends to take the lead of Richard of St. Victor and his emanationist model. In this model, the relations of origin become the most important; what makes the Son a distinct person is the origin of generation (procession in the mode of nature), and what makes the Spirit a distinct person is the origin of spiration (procession in the mode of will). The Father is who he is through being ungenerated. Generation and spiration are simply intrinsically different from each other and do not need opposing forces to distinguish them.
Now, here is an important thing to note: even though I have said that Aquinas and Bonaventure foreground the respective views, for them this is merely a conceptual distinction. Both speak of relations and both speak of emanations, but the ordering is the ordering of our concepts; these are really identified within God. Franciscans and others sympathetic to the Franciscan viewpoint on this issue, however, took the matter a step further. In particular, Henry of Ghent incorporated Augustine's psychological model of the Trinity along with Aquinas' philosophical psychology (with some tweaking). Augustine, in his De Trinitate, likened the Trinity to the memory, intellect, and will. Henry identifies the procession of generation with the procession of the mental Word (intellect/understanding) (thereby identifying procession in the mode of nature with procession in the mode of intellect), and the procession of the will (linked to love) with the spiration of the Spirit. Duns Scotus, Henry's pupil, follows in this, making this psychological emanation scheme his complete account of the Trinity by collapsing the relations into the emanations (this is, of course, leaving out many details on all sides).
I'm struggling with the psychological view of the Trinity myself. It's foreign to much of contemporary theology, and seems to be rather anthropomorphic. At the same time, I've been working through some reasonings for looking at it. Looking at the Son as God's understanding (as a simplification, at least; all of the above accounts separate God's understanding qua Son from God's understanding qua God), one can then make parallels to John's prologue, or Proverbs 8 with wisdom, or Genesis 1 with the ordering of the world from chaos. Similarly, identifying the Spirit with God's will makes sense considering who the Spirit is and how the Spirit acts in the Christian (at least as a broad characterization; I'm going for the big picture here). Similarly, it does seem like there is an outward movement from ourselves when we know something and when we will something, which nonetheless remains with ourselves. Finally, it does not seem (overly) anthropomorphic to say that God has a will or understanding; these seem to be pretty standard traits attributed to God and even within philosophy flow out of the cosmological argument. None of this is to imply that we have even the foggiest idea of God's phenomenology.
3 comments:
Wouldn't one problem with a psychological model of the Trinity of Augustine's sort be that each Person should have a full set of faculties, and doesn't on Augustine's view? I may be begging the question against the Augustinian view by assuming that each persona is a full person in the modern sense.
But consider, if Christ is fully God and fully Man, then the following interpretation of the incarnation should *not* be acceptable: Jesus had a divine memory but a human intellect and will [If Augustine associated the Son with memory--I don't remember which part he associated with which person; if I guessed wrong, then please shuffle these around as necessary to make my point intelligible.]
Nor, of course, could Jesus have all three faculties twice over--one human set, and one divine set--at least, if having these faculties is constitutive of personhood. Jesus is one person with two natures (whatever that means!), not two persons with one body.
Ah, that would be at the core of the details I had glossed over. Augustine himself said that "persona" was an improper way of talking about what is three in the Trinity, but for lack of a better word it would do. I can't remember exactly how far he took the psychological model. Both Henry and Scotus wanted each person to have a full set of faculties, though it would be the same memory, intellect, and will in each person (not quite social trinitarian friendly; I think that in general, the medieval view thought that the persons needed to be distinguished by as little as possible in order to be one being, and so they needed to share every property except for the personal/relational properties constituting each person).
In Scotus' view, the understanding and will are properly of the divine essence and are held logically first by the Father; from there, intellect logically precedes will, and a given faculty in a person produces unless the produced person already exists. So the Father produces the Son through the understanding; as the Son is still God, the Son possesses the understanding and will of divine essence. The Son's intellect doesn't produce anything as it has already fully produced himself. Next, as both the Father and the Son possess the divine will and the will hasn't proceeded yet, they produce the Spirit, who then also has the divine intellect and will.
In Henry's view, there is a distinction between operations and productions. Thought and willing are actions in an of themselves without reference to any end term, and regarded in this manner they are operations. They are also productions in that they are thoughts and willings of something. For the intellect, one first grasps something passively in a vague manner; this is an operation, as nothing is produced. Then, one produces a mental "word" as one clarifies this vague impression and ones concept fits the definition of the thing in question. Finally, in another operation of intellect, one understands through the "word". In God, there is the first operation of the divine intellect. This then leads to a production of the Word, which as a mental word proceeding from the divine essence is a perfect reflection of that same essence. Finally, God (in all the persons) has self-knowledge through this Word. I guess it is similar for the Spirit as Love/Willing, though I am not as familiar yet with Henry as I am with Scotus. At any rate, all of the persons of the Trinity possess the divine intellect and will as operations; I believe there is some way in which each person also has the productive powers immediately (not through the other persons), but I can't quite remember how.
As for the Incarnation, Richard Cross' Metaphysics and the Trinity is next on my list to read; I'll be able to face those questions then.
a quick comment: for Henry the essential acts of intellect and will do have terms, namely, their object. So, the object of the Father's operative act of intellect is the divine essence, and likewise the operative act of will is the divine essence. The distinction you want to make is btwn. a term that is really distinct (a divine person) and a term that is rationally distinct from the principle (intellect or will) of that action. So e.g. the Father's essential act of intellect has a term which is the divine essence, and likewise for all divine persons. It is just that this term is rationally distinct from the Father; whereas the term of the Father's productive act by e.g. intellect is really distinct from the Father, namely the Word/Son.
The tricky bit with Henry is in sorting out the difference btwn. simple and declarative knowledge. For all intents and purposes, they seem to be identical except for the fact that the latter is generated, as though one is the parent and the other a child. When talking about this in terms of the sort of knowledge required for God's creative act, Henry tosses in 'dispositive wisdom' as a description of the Word, namely, the Word disposes God toward making real creatures (by intellect; and by will/love by the Holy Spirit). Scotus tears this apart in Ord. 1.3 , I think it is. Though as I am now re-reading this section in Henry's infamous Quod. 6.2, it seems to me that Henry is employing some ideas that Anselm uses in On the Fall of the Devil, namely btwn. bonum in se, and bonum sibi which are two passions of the will--so Henry, on my reading here, transposes this to intellect as well, such that the Word is God's knowledge as 'disposed wisdom' (or having a respect toward) possibly real creatures. Henry is a bit vague here, but I wonder whether Henry thinks the child/generated feature of the Word has an implication of the true for another, and the Holy Spirit has an implication of the good for another. If this seems to work out, hopefully I'll get an article on this written and published in due course.
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