Bonaventure on the Threefold Primacy of God, AI, and GEB

Here's a quote I came across while reading St. Bonaventure in his Intinerarium Mentis in Deum (The Soul's Journey into God):

Ideo omnimodum, quia summe unum. Quod enim summe unum est, est omnis multitudinis universale principium; ac per hoc ipsum est universalis omnium causa efficiens, exemplans et terminans, sicut "causa essendi, ratio intellegendi et ordo vivendi". Est igitur omnimodum non sicut omnium essentia, sed sicut cunctarum essentiarum superexcellentissima et universalissima et sufficientissima causa; cuius virtus, quia summa unita in essentia, ideo summe infinitissima et multiplicissima in efficacia.

Finally because it is supremely one, it is all-embracing. That which is supremely one is the universal principle of all multiplicity. By reason of this, it is the universal efficient, exemplary, and final cause of all things as it is the "cause of existence, the basis of understanding, and the rule of life." Therefore it is all-embracing not as though it were identical with the essence of all things, but as the most excellent, most universal, and most sufficient cause of all essences whose power, because it is supremely unified in its essence, is supremely infinite and multiple in its effects.

Bonaventure isn't the only one who notes this feature of metaphysics, but his quote brings it out well. God isn't only the first efficient cause of the universe, but also its first exemplar cause and its ultimate final cause as well. We are not just created by God, but we also have the basis for thought from God as cause of all exemplars, and we have a basis for action in God as our ultimate final cause, stirring up desire and love within us. There is a triad of being, intellect, and will; memory, understanding, and love; past, present, and future. All of these are unities expressed in diversity; rather than rationalizing the Trinity, we see how mysterious our life is.

Maybe this is the problem with Strong AI: we can give a computer its efficient cause, and maybe even to some extent its exemplars, but its final cause is always entirely reducible to these. It cannot synthesize the future into the present, it cannot have a will which is both the same as and different from its reason and memory. We must either collapse it, or separate it.

Hofstadter in his book Gödel, Escher, Bach presents human beings as "strange loops," or "twisted hierarchies": hierarchies where as one goes up or down, one ends up back where one started. Gödel's First Incompleteness Theorem is part of the basis for this book, in which Gödel produces a statement which can state its own unprovability (and hence, if it is provable, it is false; if it is unprovable, it is true, but unprovable). I think that there is something akin to that here, in these footsteps on the Trinity within ourselves; we start with willing, but then have to mention understanding and being, which in turn come back to willing. It is the non-duality of these which joins them so that they cannot be thought apart from each other, but it is their non-identity which lets them be mentioned apart from one another and so discussed independently. Is this "strange loop-ness" a vestige of the Trinity as well?

Some time, I think that I'll talk about Henry of Ghent and Duns Scotus on the Trinity and its relation to the world. For Henry especially, the Trinitarian nature of God is evident in creation's relation to God and its structure, even though at the same time all acts of God are performed by the entire Trinity. At any rate, they'll provide some more analytic approaches to what I have mentioned above.

Medieval Trinitarian Theology

Currently reading: The Metaphysics of the Incarnation: Thomas Aquinas to Duns Scotus by Richard Cross

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.

Potential Thesis Topics

One more day left of finals; I'm done studying for the night and waiting for the energy drink to wear off so that I can go to bed. As I'm up anyway, here's two potential thesis topics concerning Scotus that I've been batting around:

• Scotus' notion of contingency. Modern modal accounts make contingency out to be such that if x is contingent, then it is possible that x and it is possible that not-x. Contingency thus gets relegated to the realm of possibility; that is all there is to it. Thus, that which is contingent can be viewed as random or arbitrary, though not necessarily so. Scotus grounds contingency purely in the will, and predominantly in the divine will; all other contingency comes back to this. Thus, we explain possiblity in terms of volitional contingency, rather than contingency in terms of (logical or metaphysical) possibility; room is opened for that which is neither determined nor random.
• Eternal generation in the Trinity. This has been a big debate at Trinity; many have abandoned the view for a sparser Trinity, or merely kept the judgement behind eternal generation (that which is begotten is of the same nature as the begetter) while either rejecting or remaining silent on more than that. Aside from arguments that biblical exegesis really doesn't support the view after all (an argument outside my area of expertise), there are the philosophical arguments that EG results in ontological subordinationism. As one who has been on the side of EG (at least in maintaining its logical possibility, with further decision needing help from both systematic and biblical theologians), I would be interested in looking at a medieval view which I could take as an example which both puts for a rigorous account of EG while has the conceptual tools to defend itself against the contemporary philosophical arguments. I guess for this Scotus is as good as Aquinas or perhaps Anselm, but it provides a different explanation for those who have difficulties with Aquinas' theory of the divine persons as relations.