THE DIVINE ATTRIBUTES, THE SEARCH FOR SIMPLICITY, AND THE POSSIBILITY OF TRINITARIAN EXPLANATION

I want to begin this chapter by taking stock of where we are in our story. In Chapter 1, I sketched out two different ways in which later-medieval theologians tried to explain how the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are personally distinct but essentially identical. Specifically, Dominican theologians, following Thomas Aquinas, turned to the very relations between the persons to explain how they were distinct, utilizing what I called the “relation account of personal distinction.” Franciscan theologians, on the other hand, following a tendency in Bonaventure's thought, appealed to the different ways that the divine persons emanate, or receive being, to explain how they are distinct from one another. In Chapter 2, I showed how yet another major element in later-medieval trinitarian thought was brought into play: the psychological model of the Trinity. This model, descending from Augustine of Hippo, claims that human psychology – particularly the activities and architecture of the human mind – in some way reflects the Trinity, and hence can be used to illuminate or maybe even to explain the identity and distinction of the divine persons. In particular, the Son is a mental Word or Concept, and Augustine described in some detail how the formation of a concept in our minds resembles the way that the Father and the Son are completely identical except for one minimal distinction.

The task in trinitarian theology is to explain how three really distinct persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, can be essentially identical. In the present chapter, I describe the later thirteenth-century origins of two different, and indeed rival or competing, ways of explaining that most basic trinitarian fact. In particular, I discuss a theory that appeals to the Aristotelian category of relation to explain personal distinction and essential identity. From Thomas Aquinas (†1274) and on, most Dominican theologians held a version of this theory, which I call the “relation account” of personal distinction. I also discuss a rival theory that, in order to explain identity and distinction, appeals to emanation, that is to say the way that the divine persons are put into being or originated. This “emanation account” of personal distinction is closely related to the Aristotelian categories of action and passion, and, as we will see, following a tendency in Bonaventure's (†1274) thought, most Franciscan theologians adhered to this view. Significantly, the confrontation between the respective adherents of each of these two major views drives many of the most important developments in late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century trinitarian thought. For this reason, this chapter really sets the stage for the rest of the book.

The chapter is structured as follows. First I give some background information on the two trinitarian views, the primarily Dominican relation account and the primarily Franciscan emanation account; in this first section I also provide the most important trinitarian terminology.

ELEMENTS IN FRANCISCAN TRINITARIAN THEOLOGY

1. (a) The Father is the Father because he generates, and the ground of generation is that the first person is God innascible, i.e., primity gives the “proto-Father” the ability to generate and hence become the Father (= flashpoint 1).

2. (b) Nested distinctions: two sources of distinction in God, emanational distinction (disparate relations) and relational distinction (opposed relations), where the indispensable emanational distinction is nested inside the (counterfactually) dispensable relational distinction. Thus: the persons could be (but in fact are not) constituted without opposed relations.

3. (c) The Holy Spirit would be distinct from the Son, even if the Holy Spirit did not come from the Son (= flashpoint 2; see at and around Diagram D).

4. (d) Flashpoint 3: the distinction between the emanations generation and spiration is the most basic distinction in God – the emanations are intrinsically and irreducibly distinct on the basis of the different ways in which they originate, by way of nature (or intellect) in the case of generation and by way of will in the case of spiration.

5. (e) “Strong” use of the psychological model of the Trinity. The Son's generation really is intellectual in character and on this basis the Son really is a Word; the Holy Spirit's spiration really is by way of will and on this basis the Holy Spirit really is Love or a Gift. The two major characteristics of a strong use are: (1) a tight link between the divine intellect and the emanation of the Son, on the one hand, and the divine will and the emanation of the Holy Spirit, on the other; and (2) the attempt to consistently make psychological positions answer trinitarian questions – since the Son is a Word or a concept, concept theory should in some way be directly applicable in the study of the Son in the Trinity, and since the Holy Spirit is a willed Gift, a theory of willing and volitions should be directly applicable in the study of the Holy Spirit.

Thus far we have traced the origins and the development in the later thirteenth century of two approaches to the major challenge in trinitarian theology. That challenge is to explain how the three divine persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, can be distinct from one another personally, and yet identical with one another in the one simple divine essence. As detailed in Chapter 1, the two rival ways that arose of tackling the challenge were the relation account of personal distinction, held to mostly by Dominicans, and the emanation account of personal distinction, held to mostly by Franciscans. These groups each developed a set of fairly stable positions and arguments flowing out from a conception of the divine personal properties as relational or as emanational, respectively, and in this sense one can claim that they were rival trinitarian traditions.

There is yet another immensely important element in the trinitarian theology of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, and it is this element that I will discuss in the present chapter as well as in Chapter 3: the psychological model of the Trinity. According to the psychological model, human psychology – the study of the human soul, and particularly the human mind, its architecture and its activities – can be employed to explain or clarify the Trinity. The present chapter deals with the rise among Franciscans of the psychological model of the Trinity as the major way to explain the identity and distinction of the trinitarian persons.

Two texts framed medieval Christian discussions of the idea that God exercises providential care and governance over the created order: the biblical Book of Wisdom and Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. In the Book of Wisdom, the term ‘providence’ occurs at 6:17, where Wisdom “presents herself in all providence,” and again at 14:3, which says: “Father, your providence rules because you have provided a way even on the sea and a most solid path among the waves.” These passages provided both warrant and mandate for theologians to investigate how God’s omniscience and omnipotence were manifest in the providential governance of the created order; it was Boethius, however, who set the philosophical parameters for that investigation.

Boethius defines God’s providence as the “unfolding of temporal events as this is present to the vision of the divine mind” (Consolation IV prose 6). He goes on to claim that:

The philosophical problem of describing God arises at the intersection of two different areas of inquiry. The word ‘describing’ makes it clear that the issue is in part a logical one – in the broad medieval sense of ‘logic,’ which includes semantics, the philosophy of language, and even some aspects of the theory of cognition. It is the problem, first, of forming an understanding of some extramental object and, second, of conveying that understanding by means of verbal signs. But the word ‘God’ also indicates that the logical problems involved in description are exacerbated, or perhaps that new problems arise, because of the nature of the extramental object that we are seeking to describe.

Given the enormous ingenuity with which logical problems were debated in the Middle Ages, it is not surprising that the problem of describing God would be worked out in detail – and that many thinkers would lose sight of the specifically theological context in which the problem was ostensibly set. We see here a familiar phenomenon. Once philosophers (even scholastic philosophers) have fully domesticated a problem, discussions of the problem seldom lay bare the practical urgency that alone made the question worth pursuing in the first place; it becomes a technical question, answerable by technical means. Yet, though it is not always in evidence, the practical upshot of the issue is never entirely forgotten, as John Duns Scotus reminds us in his curt dismissal of the view that we can at best say of God what he is not: “We do not have supreme love for negations” (Ordinatio I.3.1.1–2 n. 10).

SOURCES FOR THE SCHOLASTIC DEBATE

At least two issues contributed to the extensive discussion of essence and existence by Latin thinkers in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. First, there was a need to explain the metaphysical structure of immaterial entities other than God (angels, within the Christian tradition) in a way that would distinguish them from the absolute simplicity of God, especially for those who rejected the possibility of matter–form composition both for such entities and for human souls (see Chapters 21 and 46). Second, there was a need to account metaphysically for the distinction between God, the uncaused cause who necessarily exists, and all other beings, which depend on something else for their existence.

This famous scholastic dispute over the relationship between essence and existence has its roots in earlier Latin and Arabic discussions. Among Latin sources, Boethius was especially influential. He begins his De hebdomadibus by listing a series of axioms, some of which compare and contrast that-which-is (id quod est) and being (esse). Consider, for instance, Axiom II: “Being and that-which-is are diverse”; Axiom VII: “Every simple entity has its being and that-which-is as one”; and Axiom VIII: “In every composite entity its being and that-which-is are diverse.” With some exceptions, modern interpreters of Boethius do not see in this contrast a real distinction between essence and existence (esse) as two distinct intrinsic principles of being. Rather, according to many of these interpreters, Boethius compares and distinguishes between a concrete entity (that-which-is) and a form in which it shares (esse).

The epistemology of religious belief, a central topic among medieval philosophers, shows no signs of disappearing from the public’s consciousness or the philosophers’ agenda. The reason why is not hard to find. Large-scale advances in science, rightly heralded as triumphs of reason, have been alleged to have implications for the rationality of religious faith: one need only think of the development of evolutionary biology in the past 150 years and of physical cosmology in the past fifty. Of course, the medieval philosophers knew nothing of evolutionary biology. And although they speculated about one big issue in physical cosmology – whether the world was created or has existed forever – their speculations were shaped not by experimental evidence but by Scripture and Aristotelian science. Nevertheless, it does not follow that medieval debates about faith and reason have been superseded. It may well be that contemporary debates on the relation between faith and reason would benefit from a fresh examination of medieval discussions.

PRELIMINARIES

A few preliminary, terminological remarks are in order, first about reason, then about faith. First, in theological contexts, reason is sometimes contrasted with divine revelation, especially when revelation is restricted in its application to doctrines alleged to be beyond the powers of human reason. There is a more expansive conception of reason according to which reason can discover on its own some items of revelation, but this chapter will exclude discussion of that possibility. Second, reason is sometimes distinguished from understanding. Reason, it is said, is discursive while understanding is intuitive.

Kant named the three main sorts of argument for God’s existence “ontological,” “cosmological,” and “teleological.” All three sorts were deployed in the Middle Ages. “Ontological” arguments are deductive and have no empirical premises. These originated with Anselm of Canterbury and flourished in the thirteenth century, but fell into disuse afterward, reemerging only with Descartes. Medieval “cosmological” arguments are also deductive, but have at least one empirical premise. Most medieval cosmological arguments depend heavily on material from Aristotle or John Philoponus; the most original medieval contributions were by al-Fārābī and Avicenna. Cosmological arguments typically first infer the existence of something, and then argue that it is God. Although medieval philosophers had much to say on the second score, for reasons of space this chapter focuses only on their existence arguments. Teleological arguments – arguments from design – were not prominent in medieval philosophical theology and mostly remained at an intuitive level. The Middle Ages’ real contribution to natural theology thus lies with the first two sorts, and so this chapter discusses only these.

ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENTS

Anselm gave the first “ontological” argument in Proslogion 2. The key passage is this:

Some readers may find it surprising to encounter a chapter on “individual autonomy” in a survey of medieval philosophy, especially in connection with political philosophy. After all, an established tradition of historical scholarship insists that the Middle Ages was a period in which hierarchy, interdependence, and communal holism were emphasized to the virtual exclusion of the individual. The recovery of Aristotle’s writings on ethics and politics during the course of the mid-thirteenth century would seem only to reinforce the generally “communitarian” and anti-individualistic orientation commonly ascribed to medieval thinkers. Recently, the image of medieval Europe as hostile to the individual has been reaffirmed by its depiction as a “persecuting society.” Thus, according to the conventional view, the Renaissance and the Reformation constituted the watershed for the appearance of the individual as a moral and political category worthy of philosophical consideration.

Yet medieval political thinkers, both before and after the dissemination of Latin translations of Aristotle’s work, were surprisingly attuned to the standing of the individual and the role of free choice in public affairs. In their emphasis on the centrality of private property and consent to government, as well as their insistence on the ability of individuals to enjoy forms of personal liberty (such as free thought, judgment, and speech), these authors resisted the supposedly hierocratic (even authoritarian) tendencies that scholarship often ascribes to the Middle Ages.

Realism and nominalism were the two major theoretical alternatives in the later Middle Ages concerning the reality of general objects: realists believed in the extramental existence of common natures or essences; nominalists did not. This so-called “problem of universals” was only one of the main questions at issue between realists and nominalists, however, whose disputes ranged widely over the status and mutual relationships of the basic items of the world (individual and universal substances, individual and universal accidents) as well as their connection to language. For scholastic authors, these questions arose first and foremost in the context of Aristotle’s Categories. As a consequence, the medieval realist–nominalist dispute included also the problem of the status and number of real categories. Realists held that the division into categories is first of all a partition of things made on the basis of ontological criteria and only secondarily a classification of terms (which could be mental, written, or spoken), and therefore that the world is divided into ten fundamental kinds of things (in a broad sense of ‘thing’), no one of which can be reduced to any other. In contrast, nominalists maintained that Aristotle’s division into ten categories is a partition of terms on the basis of semantic criteria, and that there are only two or three real categories (Substance and Quality, and perhaps Quantity too). Even though from a purely logical point of view these opinions on categories and universals are independent of each other, historically, in the later Middle Ages, realism concerning categories was always matched by a realistic conception of universals, whereas nominalism on the question of categories was always paralleled by a nominalistic position on universals.

The first unquestionably big idea in the history of philosophy was the idea of form. The idea of course belonged to Plato, and was then domesticated at the hands of Aristotle, who paired form with matter as the two chief principles of his metaphysics and natural philosophy. In the medieval period, it was Aristotle’s conception of form and matter that generally dominated. This was true for both the Islamic and the Christian tradition, once the entire Aristotelian corpus became available. For this reason, although there is much to say about the fate of Platonic Forms in medieval thought, the present chapter will focus on the Aristotelian tradition.

Aristotelian commentators have been puzzled by form and matter for as long as there have been Aristotelian commentators. Indeed, it would not be too much to say that these are topics about which Aristotelians have never formed a very clear conception, and that their failure to do so was the principal reason why Aristotelianism ceased to be a flourishing research program from the seventeenth century onward. For those who aspire to a modern revival of Aristotelianism, the concepts of form and matter can easily take on the aspect of a kind of Holy Grail, such that if only we could get these ideas clearly in focus, we could see our way forward on any number of philosophical fronts, such as the union of mind and body, the coherence and endurance of substances, the nature of causality, and so on.

Religious authority and the state were conceived very differently in the Byzantine world, the Muslim world, and Latin Europe. This last was the only civilization in which the age-old and nearly universal notion of sacred monarchy was consistently and increasingly challenged. In the Byzantine and Muslim worlds (except among the Shīʿites), the ruler remained a focal point of living religious authority. The Latin West was also distinguished by the variety of views expressed on this subject and the variety of forms which the relationship between church and state took. In some places the bishop was also temporal ruler, whereas in self-governing cities clergy had no overt political role. In feudal kingdoms, bishops were major landowners and often state counselors, but they owed their position partly to royal favor. Moreover, the way in which the church–state relationship was understood and theorized in the West changed as time went by. In Byzantium, by contrast, it never changed, while in the Muslim world, changes were rarely registered in what people wrote down.

BYZANTIUM

Eastern Christendom drew its notion of sacred monarchy from Roman imperial ideology, christianized by Eusebius of Caesarea (ca. 260–340). The one emperor was supposed to reflect the one God; he ruled “by God’s favor” as “God’s deputy.” The common form of address to a Byzantine emperor was “O most divine emperor.” For more than a thousand years, the Eastern church regarded the empire as an essential part of the expression of Christ in the world.