Catherine Mowry LaCugna
One Trinity of Communion among Persons
Catherine Mowry LaCugna (1952–1997) joined the Notre Dame University Faculty in 1981 after finishing her doctorate at Fordham University on Hans Küng’s methodology.1 She taught Systematic Theology at Notre Dame, where she eventually held the Nancy Reeves Dreux Chair of Theology. Greatly appreciated by students, she received the Sheedy Teaching Award of the Notre Dame University College of Arts and Sciences in 1996. Briefly, and for now only very initially stated, she stands out for having argued strenuously in favor of understanding Trinity as a single trinitarian movement or, better, life of communion among relationally constituted divine and human persons. Indeed, her primary concern was to develop what she called a practical understanding of Trinity, a concern so well indicated by the title of her major book on Trinity, God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life.2 In 1992 she won the First Place Award from the Catholic Press Association for this book. Before her untimely death, she intended to pursue further work in pneumatology. In her memory, the Catholic Theological Society of America established the Catherine Mowry LaCugna Award for New Scholars.
As we turn to a review of LaCugna’s presentation of Trinity, we should already now note that Karl Rahner, John Macmurray, and John D. Zizioulas will mediate various elements of Idealist thought to her as she develops her understanding of Trinity. She embraces and reads, in one might say rather radical fashion, Rahner’s axiom that the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity and vice versa, appeals to Macmurray’s thought to anchor her insight that person is relational, and identifies with Zizioulas’s assertion that person takes priority over substance.
LaCugna on Trinity
In reviewing LaCugna’s trinitarian thought, we will refer mainly to LaCugna’s longer work, God for Us. In this study she brings together much of what she had explored earlier on in various shorter studies. She provides strategically placed, helpful summaries and methodological remarks, surely a pedagogically helpful lesson learned over her years of teaching. These summaries and remarks will help guide us as we select, present and then examine in further detail aspects of that thought more susceptible to being recognized as echoes of earlier, post-Kantian German Idealist trinitarian thought. In one of her more methodological remarks toward the end of God for Us she reviews the overall development of her trinitarian argument. It begins with an historical reconstruction in part 1 of this study, where she notes problems arising from the separation of theologia and oikonomia. She sees the doctrine of the Trinity being developed separately “from the experience of salvation, from sacramental and liturgical life, from other doctrines.” Then in her methodological and metaphysical reconstruction in part 2 she argues the need for theology to work out of the recognized “unity of theologia and oikonomia” (382).3 Part 1, “The Emergence and Defeat of the Doctrine of the Trinity,” proceeds in six chapters. In them she examines the history of trinitarian thought, East and West, up to and including Thomas Aquinas in the West and Gregory Palamas in the East. Part 2, “Re-Conceiving the Doctrine of the Trinity in Light of the Mystery of Salvation,” moves, in four chapters, from a consideration of what she identifies as method in chapter 7 to a longer examination of content in chapter 8. For the most part, chapters 9 and 10 provide further reflections on implications of her theological, and at times more philosophically rooted, positions taken regarding a single trinitarian movement or life of communion for various areas of study. She mentions theological anthropology, ethics, spirituality, and sacramental theology (381–82).
In part 1 LaCugna draws attention to the ancient Christian distinction between oikonomia and theologia, with more stress on oikonomia as referring, using her words, to the mystery of salvation and less focus on theologia, referring to the mystery of God (22–30). After a brief review of selected New Testament texts, she leads us into a consideration of pre-Nicean Christian reflection, remarking that what we see is the economy’s own order (taxis) which “marks the economy that expresses the mystery of God’s eternal being (theologia).” All things come from God the Father through Christ in the Holy Spirit and return through Christ and the Spirit to God (25, see 12, 24–25). She will, especially in chapter 7, consider the patristic distinction between theologia and oikonomia preferable to the relatively more recent one between immanent and economic Trinity. For LaCugna, this latter distinction leads far too easily to the idea of two Trinities, one Trinity ad intra or within and another Trinity ad extra or without, that is, outside the Trinity (212).
Here in part 1 she reviews the history of trinitarian thought, East and West, from the perspective of the growing distinction and even separation of theologia, considered more and more as referring to God in Godself independently of the oikonomia or work of salvation (42–43). She sees this move toward separation verified, for example, in the case of the Cappadocians who developed an understanding of Trinity that more and more stressed self-relatedness over relatedness to us (57).4 She has several concerns regarding Augustine’s approach to Trinity, among which is the fact that Augustine stresses God’s working ad extra as one (97–99). She speaks of his Trinity as the Trinity within (82),5 a view of Trinity reinforcing the sense that the Trinity can be understood in itself and with less reference to the economy of salvation. LaCugna finds that after the Cappadocians and Augustine this overall movement toward a separation of theologia from oikonomia climaxes in the West with Thomas Aquinas, who first treats of God as one or De Deo Uno and then God as Trinity or De Deo Trino.6 In the East the separation comes to full expression with Gregory Palamas. He makes a real distinction between the unknowable and incommunicable divine essence, including apparently the divine Persons, and the communicable divine energies through which God brings about, and relates with, creation (10, 188, 197).7
After what LaCugna identifies as her historical reconstruction of Trinity-related thought from the New Testament to Aquinas and Palamas in part 1, in part 2 she carries out, as has been mentioned, her methodological and metaphysical reconstruction of the doctrine of the Trinity. She entitles this part 2 “Re-Conceiving the Doctrine of the Trinity in Light of the Mystery of Salvation” (207) and proceeds in four chapters. She takes up method in chapter 7 (13, 249, 319) and content in chapter 8 (319). In chapters 9 and 10 she continues her reflection on Trinity, mostly considering various theological themes and the ways in which they become problematic when we separate theologia from oikonomia. She reinterprets these themes positively in light of her proposed reintegration of theologia and oikonomia. We will focus more closely on chapters 7 and 8, in which she in effect reconstructs the early New Testament and pre-Nicean patristic focus on oikonomia (for example, 222–24), understanding theologia as contemplation of it (169). This reconstruction is presented, one might dare say in almost Hegelian fashion, as a return, through the history of the developing separation between oikonomia and theologia, to a renewed and enriched understanding of oikonomia as that in and out of which we understand theologia. In this renewed understanding of oikonomia, for LaCugna all of theology is doxology, praise of the God who is for us.
But here we are getting ahead of ourselves. We need to turn now to chapter 7, entitled “The Self-Communication of God in Christ and the Spirit” (209). As the title itself indicates, LaCugna accepts and will work axiomatically with Rahner’s general notion of Trinity as movement of divine self-communication.8 More specifically, she takes up Rahner’s Rule, namely, that “the ‘economic’ Trinity is the ‘immanent’ Trinity and vice versa” (211).9 She says that Rahner has gone in the right direction, but not far enough. In speaking of the possibilities and limits of Rahner’s axiom, she opens the way to her own proposal: “Is there a way to preserve a distinction of reason between economic and immanent Trinity without allowing it to devolve into an ontological distinction?” (217). LaCugna goes farther than Rahner does. For her, distinctions in the economy neither originate in nor need be based in distinctions in God (221, see 230–32).
At this point we would do well to step back from LaCugna’s text to note Elizabeth T. Groppe’s well-documented summary of the reasons why LaCugna generally prefers not to work with the distinction between immanent and economic Trinity. Groppe brings forth eight reasons, here closely paraphrased, which in fact give us a further sense of LaCugna’s concerns in developing her trinitarian thought. According to Groppe, for LaCugna immanent and economic terminology is imprecise and often misleading, may suggest two Trinities, does not promote a doxological understanding of theology and fails to allow for a careful handling, in theology, of the freedom of God. Furthermore, such imprecise terminology stands in the way of a deeper understanding of Incarnation and grace without “subsuming God into a world process,” blocks a consideration of the doctrine of the Trinity’s soteriological significance, and seems to continue a metaphysics of substance. Such terminology obfuscates the distinction between God and creature.10
We return now more directly to LaCugna’s text of God for Us. Here in chapter 7 we find that LaCugna does indeed seem more concerned with the question of possibly ontologically distinct immanent and economic Trinities than at other points in her book. At some points she appears to be more open to the possible usefulness of an at least epistemological distinction between immanent and economic Trinities. But here she makes a rather forceful assertion: “There is neither an economic nor an immanent Trinity; there is only the oikonomia that is the concrete realization of the mystery of theologia in time, space, history, and personality” (223). She illustrates this oikonomia in terms of exitus and reditus, one overall movement representable as a parabola: descending as God (Father), Jesus Christ, Holy Spirit, with the world at the low point of the parabola, and ascending as Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ, God (Father). LaCugna arrives at her key point, namely, that Trinity is about God’s life with us and ours with one another. She thinks here in terms of communion and indwelling: “God in us, we in God, all of us in each other” (228). With this point she opens the way to her consideration of content in chapter 8.
After this methodological reconstruction, radicalization we might say, of Rahner’s Rule, LaCugna turns in her longer chapter 8, entitled “Persons in Communion” (243), toward a metaphysical reconstruction. In this metaphysical reconstruction she proposes shifting from a substance-based metaphysics to one stressing the priority of the person, with person understood in relational terms, hence, person-in-communion. She develops her person-based relational ontology in eight steps plus a concluding summary. In the first of these steps, “Person as Relation” (243–50), she examines Eastern or Greek thought as represented by the Cappadocians and interpreted by John D. Zizioulas.11 She finds, in recapitulation as well as further development of what she had said earlier in part 1, that the Cappadocians had in effect recast Greek substance-based ontology with a relation-based one. They did this with their emphasis on the three divine hypostases as the ways in which the divine ousia or essence exists. The hypostases are themselves relations of origin, and God the Father is preeminently personal as the unoriginated but originating source of Son and Holy Spirit as well as of all of creation. So, from this Eastern perspective, all of reality is ultimately relational and person. LaCugna states rather forcefully that focusing on divine relations means personhood is constitutive of being (245).
LaCugna continues this first step as she takes up the Western or Latin perspective. She notes that Augustine, for example, rooted personhood more in the divine nature or substance, though with strong relational aspects as well. Aquinas himself stressed person as relation, though with a focus on relations within the Trinity itself. For LaCugna, the Greek approach stressed the relational character as it worked more with the oikonomia. Still both Greek and Latin trinitarian thinking led to a reconstructed relational ontology of the person in communion. “Personhood is the meaning of being” (248). She stresses in a striking way the relationship between person and freedom when she quotes from Zizioulas: “The fact that God exists because of the Father shows that His existence, His being is the consequence of a free person; which means, in the last analysis, that not only communion but also freedom, the free person, constitutes true being” (249).12 She sees the proposed relational ontology as focusing on personhood, relationship, and communion (250).
In this first step in chapter 8, LaCugna has set up her basic position concerning a relational metaphysics or ontology. In the rest of the chapter she will look at notions of personhood as she “think[s] about the relationship between oikonomia and theologia as a structuring principle for trinitarian theology” (249). So, in the second step, “Personhood in the Horizon of Modern Thought” (250–55), she briefly recalls Descartes’s turn to the subject as basically non-relational self, Locke’s working with self-consciousness, and Leibniz’s consideration of personhood as self-awareness and self-presence. She speaks as well of Kant with his stress on morality. These were understandings of person in which “the tradition (of Latin theology) that had understood God as Supreme Substance gave way to the idea of God as Absolute Subject.” At this point she refers to Moltmann and his insights in these regards (251).13 She then describes Barth’s trinitarian thought as a form of modalism and speaks of Rahner’s quite similar conclusions. For LaCugna, both Barth and Rahner arrive at an impasse in their understanding of God as absolute subject. They shy away from working with the modern concept of persons as discrete self-consciousnesses in referring to the three divine hypostheses but apply that concept to their understanding of the divine essence. LaCugna suggests an alternative when she notes that already in the “eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Feuerbach, Fichte and Hegel had argued that persons exist only in relation” (255). She recalls various philosophies, such as those of Whitehead, Sartre, and personalist philosophies which break away from the isolated Cartesian ego. As she has announced, her own presentation will now proceed as a movement through four spheres of discourse. She will examine the thought of the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray on person, the contemporary Greek Orthodox writer John D. Zizioulas’s insights especially on communion, arguments developed in feminist and Latin American liberation theologies, and Trinity-based Roman Catholic and Orthodox ethics (254–55).
In the first of these studies, her first sphere of discourse, which is equally the third overall step in chapter 8, “Persons in Relation: The Personalist Philosophy of John Macmurray” (255–60),14 LaCugna draws upon several aspects of Macmurray’s personalist philosophy to reinforce her understanding of person as relation. Among the many elements she brings to discussion from that thought there is, first, the rejection of the Cartesian idea of the isolated individual or subject. For Macmurray the self is an agent, one who acts and is what one does. She summarizes his notion of the self as agent, “embodied, operative, material, existent. … a person directed toward other persons, or better, toward an entirely personal world. The Self can be a Self only in relation to other selves” (256). In referring to Macmurray’s Buber-like language of you and I,15 LaCugna stresses the importance of the notion of mutuality in establishing personal identity, whether the relationships be equal or unequal. We should note a second element in Macmurray’s thought to which LaCugna calls attention, namely, Macmurray’s idea of God. She quotes Macmurray as saying that God is “a personal Other who stands in the same mutual relation to every member of the community” (259).16 We should as well briefly indicate a third element that LaCugna brings in, namely, Macmurray’s emphasis on a positive understanding of community as a heterocentric communal way of life (257–58). In extrapolating from Macmurray’s thought, LaCugna then defines a person as “a heterocentric, inclusive, free, relational agent” (259). She turns to John D. Zizioulas for clarification concerning community and communion.
This turn occurs in and constitutes her fourth step in chapter 8. Here LaCugna takes up the second of what she has called four spheres of discourse, the first having been that of Macmurray. She entitles this second sphere, “Persons as Ecstatic and Hypostatic: The Contribution of Contemporary Orthodox Theology” (260–66). Here she draws upon Zizioulas’s thought especially as it is found in the first study, “Personhood and Being,” in his volume of collected studies, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church.17 We can briefly review several aspects of LaCugna’s drawing upon Zizioulas, but not so much at this point by following LaCugna’s order of presentation. Rather, we will focus in a more synthesizing way on her uptake of Zizioulas on person as ecstatic and as hypostatic.
With Zizioulas, for LaCugna hypostatic recalls the Cappadocians’ use of hypostasis to distinguish person from essence and substance (ousia) (261). She says that for Zizioulas this distinction means that the Cappadocians, and he with them, give priority to person over essence or substance, and specifically divine Person over divine substance. In that person is essentially relational in the Cappadocian presentation, such reference to person gives rise to an understanding of substance as the communion of persons. Though such communion is only imperfect and partial in its human actualizations, it is perfect in its realization as what the triune God is. Hence, for Zizioulas there is an overall priority of person over being. LaCugna’s stress on the hypostatic character of the person, meaning in fact on personhood as relational, brings us to the notion of person as ecstatic. Here, again following Zizioulas, LaCugna distinguishes between biological hypostasis characterized and structured by ontological necessity and what Zizioulas calls ecclesial hypostasis brought about through baptism. Ecclesial hypostasis is the relational being of personhood characterized and structured by ontological freedom (262). She quotes Zizioulas to the effect that true personhood is ecstatic in character, involving a free going out of oneself to another in love.18 She adds that his way of relating freedom and nature, with freedom taken ontologically rather than morally, is rooted in the Greek trinitarian understanding of God (261). LaCugna brings her presentation of this second sphere of discourse to a close with a summary of what she takes from Zizioulas on person as free and relational in communion: “The constitutive elements of personhood are self-affirmation in freedom and not necessity; the affirmation by another in love; uniqueness, concreteness and unrepeatability; subsistence in communion” (265).
LaCugna enters into what she identifies as her third sphere of discourse when she develops the fifth step, “Persons Oppressed: The Trinity and Liberation Theologies” (266–78), in her overall argument in the present chapter 8. We will regrettably not be able to entertain a more detailed review here of this longer constructive consideration, which treats of subjects so important to and consonant with her stress on Trinity as oikonomia, God for us. Rather, we simply note first of all that LaCugna opens this reflection by recalling Macmurray’s and Zizioulas’s turning away from Cartesian individualism to an understanding of person as “relation-to-”. She then develops this insight with reference to personhood’s social dimension, a point she does not find in Zizioulas’s thought. She reflects critically on the liberating functions of theological feminism and of the notion of perichōrēsis (266). With regard to theological feminism, she notes the difficulties inherent in a comparative theology of complementarity between men and women with, among others, the description of men as more active and women as more passive. She recalls that such understandings have sought justification in the trinitarian rootage of all in God the Father. She counters such understandings by referring to Patricia Wilson-Kastner’s calling upon the notion of relationality within God that leads to a richer and more complex understanding of men and women as “unique, embodied, and … equal qua person” (269–70). Each person, male and female, human and divine, is self-reflexive and has a capacity for self-transcendence. LaCugna quotes approvingly Wilson-Kastner’s application of her thought to Trinity. God is “a unity of three centers of awareness and centeredness who are also perfectly open and interdependent on each other.”19 As LaCugna notes, this idea of three centers is just what Barth and Rahner avoided affirming.
LaCugna continues to work with the thought of Wilson-Kastner who, in order to establish divine unity, focuses on the idea of perichōrēsis as understood by Jürgen Moltmann.20 Wilson-Kastner reviews the background to this patristic notion that, according to LaCugna, came to replace the earlier idea that divine unity was tied to the person of God the Father (270). Being-in-one-another, permeation without confusion, a sort of divine dance (272), came to be accepted as a description of the relations among the divine Persons in both East and West. However, especially in Latin trinitarian theology there remained the danger of considering this as occurring in divinis alone. LaCugna says it can be better understood in terms of the oikonomia. She develops this idea by referring to the trinitarian thought of Leonardo Boff who, like Wilson-Kastner, does not identify the divine monarchy with that of the Father (275). She quotes Boff as saying that “the united society that exists [through perichōrēsis] in the Trinity is the foundation of human unity; the latter is inserted in the former.”21 This human unity, properly understood and realized, takes the social form of a community that is inclusive and constituted by interrelated equals.
After her considerable discussion of the liberating movements of theological feminism and Latin American liberation theology, LaCugna enters the fourth and final sphere of discourse to which she had earlier referred. This sphere now forms the sixth step in her overall argument here in chapter 8. She entitles this sixth step “Voices from Christian Ethics: Catholic and Orthodox” (278–88). As we did with regard to the third sphere, that of liberation theology discourse, again here we will simply note several points indicating the overall thrust of her argument. Here LaCugna dialogues with Margaret Farley, a Catholic moralist working with the notion of personhood in relation to Trinity. In this dialogue LaCugna carries out a series of reflections, in relation to Latin trinitarian theology, on the possibility of expressing the equality and mutuality of the divine Persons in various gender-based terms when they are understood within the framework of person as actively receptive. But she proposes that, even more fundamentally, we should look at Jesus Christ, in whom there is expressed divine sexuality, that is, free and perfect relationality overcoming “the antinomies of maleness and femaleness” (281–82). She refers as well to the Spirit, actively receptive in animating the human community. With Farley, and stressing active receptivity, she agrees on the importance of a strong eschatological ethic of “interpersonal communion characterized by equality, mutuality, and reciprocity” (282).
LaCugna then turns to Greek trinitarian theology, referencing especially that of Stanley Harakas, an Eastern Orthodox ethicist whose thought is rooted in that of Gregory Palamas (283). After considering various Eastern notions such as the role of the divine energeia in relation to the unknowable divine ousia, she stresses the importance of the Eastern emphasis on person as constitutive of being which establishes an ontological foundation for a Trinity-based understanding. In this understanding personhood is the “norm of every relationship, every ethic, every institution, every decision” (286–87). She fears, though, that the unknowable ousia and revealed energeia distinction could weaken the general Eastern stress on the relation between God and economy. Ironically, she finds that Latin trinitarian theology with its heavy ethical emphasis seems to have more to say about persons in the oikonomia, though it stresses theologia. Greek trinitarian theology, which is less explicit in its reflection on specific ethical questions, seems to have less to say about persons in the oikonomia, despite the fact that person is what it stresses.
At the end of her reflection in this fourth sphere of discourse, LaCugna proceeds in a shorter but helpful synthesizing seventh step in her argument, entitled “Toward an Understanding of Persons in Communion” (288–92). Here in a series of italicized paragraph headings and a further nonitalicized remark she describes persons as being
essentially interpersonal, intersubjective … ineffable, concrete, unique, and unrepeatable ecstasis of nature … the foundation of a nature … free-for, free-toward others, poised in the balance between self-possession and other orientation … catholic [inclusive and expressing totality] … requires ascesis … an exponential concept … with each new relationship we “are” in a new way … [those] living as persons in communion, in right relationship, [and this] is the meaning of salvation and the ideal of Christian faith. (288–92)
Following on this summary presentation of what it means to be person, LaCugna brings together many elements of her overall understanding of Trinity in an eighth and final step in her argument, “Communion with the Living God through Christ in the Holy Spirit” (292–304). Her intention here is, briefly stated, to highlight from a trinitarian perspective several aspects of the work of Christ and the Spirit as person (316n137). She insists that Trinitarian reflection as such and the notion of personhood must be measured by revelation occurring “in the face of Christ and the activity of the Holy Spirit” (293). She proceeds to do this in three reflections, the first of which is entitled “Jesus Christ: The Communion of Divine and Human” (293–96). Here she recalls and works with the basic notion that person is, as she says, the foundation of nature. She draws attention to three characteristics of Jesus which flow from this notion of the ontological priority of person. First of all, she points out rather colorfully that Jesus was neither a doormat nor an autocrat (293). He was strong and yet tender, proclaimed the reign of God through service, dying for others. Second, Jesus was what LaCugna calls a Catholic person, namely, one who is inclusive. All he did was rooted in his person and served as an expression of who he was. He related well with women, showed concern for sinners, and was fully culturally conditioned. All this he was as a person. Indeed, when “Jesus’ person is identified with God’s ousia, then we must say that God suffers” (294–95). Third, Jesus is the divinized human being. He is the communion of divine and human and, as LaCugna says, the perichōrēsis of theologia and oikonomia (296).
In the second reflection, “The Holy Spirit: Uniting Persons in Communion” (296–300), LaCugna reminds us of ways in which we experience the Holy Spirit active in the world and in the Christian community. Among her many remarks, we should note, for example, that “the Spirit humanizes God, and also divinizes human beings.” She insists that concentrating on the filioque origin of the Spirit in Father and Son along with the idea that ad extra God works as one will simply draw attention away from who the Spirit really is. Understanding who the Spirit is requires attention to the oikonomia. The Spirit is the Spirit of God, of Christ, and of the Christian community (298). The Spirit, as for any person, cannot be considered alone and without relational reference to others. As principle of communion, the Spirit is free with the freedom of a person, a freedom of love for and toward others. “God’s freedom cannot be located in solitariness” (299).
LaCugna continues in a third reflection, “The Living God” (300–304), to reconsider several of the classical divine attributes. She recasts these attributes by shifting their point of reference from substance to person. Divine immutability means that God is “immutably personal.” Impassibility needs to be interpreted “in the light of the cross” (301). God suffers in Christ, though this phrase requires careful interpretation. Also, God is incomprehensible not because the divine essence as substantial is unknowable by the human mind but because God as personal is ultimately mystery. Persons are “indefinable, unique, ineffable” (302). Unoriginate origin comes to express the fact that God is the source of all personhood and is, as such, directed outward toward others. As Creator, both Father and Mother indicate origin, with Mother in some ways a better way of referring to God. Incomprehensibility then is the unfathomable mystery of a God with us through Christ in the Spirit (302–03). And incorporeality is transformed into corporeality insofar as in Christ God has taken on the full human condition, while remaining in a sense incorporeal because God “is not exhausted or defeated by the economy.” God is incorporeal in that the Spirit moves as it wills and yet becomes corporeal in the Spirit-established communion among persons, the Body of Christ. Regarding God’s perfection, LaCugna brings her overall trinitarian thought together when she says God is the perfection of love, communion, and personhood rather than being mere self-sufficiency (303– 04).
Here in chapter 8 LaCugna’s argument in favor of the priority of person over essence or nature or substance, namely, persons in communion, proceeded in eight steps. More generally stated, LaCugna moved from considering person as relation to brief remarks on modern thought on personhood, Macmurray on persons, reference to Zizioulas on communion especially in relation to God, feminist and liberation theology critiques of unacceptable social situations. She continued with a consideration of Catholic and Orthodox ethics in relation to trinitarian thought, a summary review of the proper understanding of persons in communion, and, finally, the measure of these reflections on personhood in light of God’s self-revelation in Christ and the Spirit. She brings the chapter to a close with several remarks further qualifying what she has said. She says that theologia exceeds oikonomia in the way in which being a person exceeds “even a life-time of self-expression” (304). She then proposes that using the word “person” of God does not describe the essence of God but indicates the ineffability of God. She ends the chapter with what would seem to be a rather surprising, longer remark, given the emphasis on the hypostatic character of Father, Son, and Spirit. She stresses what is important is that God is personal and not whether God is “one person in three modalities, or one nature in three persons.” Trinity is about the “encounter between divine and human persons in the economy of redemption” (305).22
In chapters 9 and 10, LaCugna prolongs her trinitarian reflection with a series of more practical considerations flowing from her understanding of a single relational Trinity as communion of persons. In chapter 9, for example, she asserts that the best way to come to understand “God’s economy is theology in the mode of doxology” (320). Here she embarks on a series of enriching theological discussions carried out from the perspective of her having brought together theologia and oikonomia in a doxological trinitarian theology. This trinitarian theology includes both primary theology, which is ultimately Christian living, and secondary theology as systematic, conceptually expressed reflection on primary theology (357). It is at this point in her spelling out of theology and even all of Christian life as doxology that LaCugna cites, often and quite specifically, Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament (335–46). At the end of the chapter she summarizes these discussions, seeing doxological trinitarian theology as bringing together “spirituality with theology, orthodoxy with orthopraxis, the contemplative with the speculative, apophatic with kataphatic, the pastoral with the academic” (368).
In chapter 10 she further sketches out aspects of life in line with trinitarian faith (368). Among the various themes taken up, she works at length with the reign of God as “where God’s life rules” (383). Here she regularly and often refers to the Gospels of Matthew and Mark as well as to the Acts of the Apostles when she surveys New Testament teaching on the ways in which Jesus speaks of the reign of God and lives it in his own life (383–88). Jesus’ ways of speaking and living take on particular meaning for those who are to live in the household of God as persons in communion with God and with one another. LaCugna takes up as well the notion of God as archē. She recalls that in a truly trinitarian perspective divine monarchy is “the shared rule of equal persons in communion” (394) with all this implies in the social and political realms of human life when this life is seen as a share in divine life. Throughout this chapter LaCugna is concerned to highlight the practical character of the doctrine of the Trinity, including its implications for ecclesial living, sacramental life, sexual life, overall Christian ethical living, and spiritual life (377 with 400–10). She ends her study with the conviction that God’s being for us implies we share with one another as we live the life of God (411).
Hearing and recognizing Idealist echoes in LaCugna’s trinitarian thinking can at first sight prove challenging. Though in God for Us she carries out a critical and constructive review of what she has identified as pertinent moments in the history of the development of trinitarian thought, for all practical purposes her review ends with Thomas Aquinas in the West and Gregory Palamas in the East. She works within the overall American intellectual context rather diffusely impacted by Idealist thought. But she only briefly refers directly to Idealist insights as when, for example, she says Rahner “is not echoing Hegel’s idea that God’s self-enactment is necessary in order for God to be God” (168). As we have seen, LaCugna also acknowledges that “already in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Feuerbach, Fichte and Hegel had argued that persons exist only in relation” (255).23 She cites Jürgen Moltmann when she speaks of the movement from Descartes to John Locke and Kant as leading to understanding God as absolute subject (251). She does note that this notion of absolute subject is not foreign to, but of course fully restructured by, post-Kantian German Idealists. But if we are to catch the sounds of Idealist echoes in her trinitarian thought, we will in addition to these few references need to trace ways in which Idealist thought may have influenced her thinking more indirectly. We will want to attend to various authors to whom she refers and with whose thought she works, authors who themselves have been influenced directly or indirectly in their own trinitarian thinking by Idealist thought.
LaCugna has often enough referred to such trinitarian thinkers as Barth and Pannenberg who themselves surely manifest various Idealist influences in their thought. But the way in which she starts from, appreciates, and wants to push further Rahner’s axiom, “The ‘economic’ Trinity is the ‘immanent’ Trinity and the ‘immanent’ Trinity is the ‘economic’ Trinity,”24 makes of Rahner an ideal conversation partner of hers to whom we can turn. So we will begin with him in our effort to trace a path of more indirect Idealist influence on her trinitarian thought. As we have seen, she no longer wishes to speak of an immanent and an economic Trinity, as Rahner does. Already in discussing Rahner’s axiom, she insists on only one Trinity, that of experience and not another beyond it (212, see 216, 223) and only one level, not two, ad intra and ad extra (228). She continues her reflection on a possible distinction between immanent and economic Trinity as epistemological rather than ontological, insisting that we must not think in terms of, and separate out, two trinities (229, see 217, 231). Rather, she speaks of one Trinity of communion among divine and human persons in the oikonomia.25 She sees “the eternal begetting of the Son and the breathing forth of the Spirit taking place in God’s economy” (354) with God’s economy in turn being “the life of God and creature existing together as one” (377). LaCugna has then offered a further, some might say radicalizing, clarification of the identity Rahner posits between economic and immanent Trinity when she takes it to mean one Trinity, namely, that of the oikonomia.
With LaCugna’s clarifying stress on the oneness of the Trinity in mind, we can now look at a question we had not explicitly raised in our treatment of Rahner in chapter 7 above. That question concerns a possible rootage of Rahner’s axiom itself in Idealist trinitarian thought. We propose to find a family resemblance between Rahner’s axiom and the thought of Hegel and Schelling and thus an Idealist influence, mediated through Rahner, on LaCugna’s trinitarian thought.
In the case of Hegel, from the perspective of his encyclopedic system we can say that he presents immanent Trinity twice: first, as the conceptual movement of pure thought in logic; second, as first moment in the triply structured movement of the consummate or Christian religion. In each case, immanent Trinity is contained, so to speak, as first moment ultimately taken up into the third dialectically developing moment. In the movement of logic, namely, that of pure thought, this inclusive third moment is the absolute idea and in the movement of the consummate or Christian religion it is, as Hegel comes to identify it in his 1831 lectures, the kingdom of the Spirit. These movements, and indeed the whole of Hegel’s encyclopedic system, constitute, dialectically speaking, one triadically structured movement of Spirit. Underlying this integrated and integrating conception of Trinity is of course the way in which Hegel relates the sphere of logic as movement of pure thought and the realphilosophical spheres, with these latter being the ones in which he presents the philosophies of nature and of Spirit. For Hegel “the relationship between logic and the spheres of nature and Spirit remains mutual, in that logic both is and contains the spheres of nature and Spirit in as it is their ‘archetype’ (Vorbildner) and the latter spheres in turn are and contain logic as their ‘inner formative principle’ (inner Bildner).”26 Given for Hegel the inclusion of immanent Trinity within economic Trinity and the fact that they are aspects of, or perhaps better moments in, one overall movement of Spirit, it is surely the case that for Hegel immanent Trinity is ultimately the economic Trinity and vice versa. Hegel presents a single trinitarian movement of inclusive divine subjectivity, a movement of self-developing Spirit.
In the case of Schelling as of Hegel, reference to a movement of immanent and economic Trinity should be used carefully and with various qualifications. Furthermore, Schelling’s presentation of Trinity is not as monosubjectivally formulated as was that of Hegel. But Schelling did work with a series of three potencies effectively structuring for him all of reality from the willed arising of Father, Son, and Spirit as originating forms of these potencies on through history to the revelation of Trinity in the Christian religion. There the potencies of Son and Spirit effect through their, we could say, more dialogical interaction occurring in human consciousness ultimately resulting in an enriched and fuller reestablishment of the divine unity. This interaction is a movement of Son, Spirit, and Father, each one individually and the three together, from potency to personhood. In this scenario, we see as well in Schelling’s thought an all-encompassing coherence of structured movement characterizing all of reality rooted in this single free divine movement of potencies becoming Persons. To this extent at least we can say that for Schelling the immanent Trinity is the economic Trinity and vice versa.
So with regard to Hegel and Schelling we would say that the immanent Trinity is the economic Trinity and vice versa in order, with this way of speaking, to reflect the movement from potentiality to realization of that potentiality. In comparison, Rahner, for his part, would first say that the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity and then vice versa, surely due at least in part to his emphasis on the human experience of God based in the one divine self-communication. Especially Hegel but also Schelling would in fact seem to be stressing as much or even more the continuity, even ultimate identity, of movement between immanent and economic Trinity than does Rahner. To safeguard divine freedom and transcendence, he seems in his concrete treatment of Trinity to distinguish more strongly between the two while still insisting that one is the other. This position of Rahner’s is rooted in his understanding of the relationship of God to us as one of true divine self-communication. Yet, considered within the context of our previous indication of Rahner’s familiarity at least with Hegel, there are sufficient grounds here to speak in terms of family resemblance. That is, a family resemblance between the one overall single trinitarian divine self-development in the thought of Hegel and, perhaps less directly, of Schelling, on the one hand, and the insistence by Rahner, on the other, that the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity and vice versa. This family resemblance permits us to claim for Rahner’s axiom a certain Idealist paternity. Without wishing to push the familial image too far, we can I think justifiably say that this family resemblance between Rahner’s axiom and Idealist trinitarian thought permits us in turn to recognize a certain therewith mediated Idealist grand-parenthood to LaCugna’s further development of Rahner’s axiom. It is striking that LaCugna, in emphasizing one Trinity, seems at least in relation to this oneness to echo quite clearly the trinitarian thought of Hegel and Schelling. As we just saw, they themselves each proposed a single overall movement of Trinity, a movement respectively more monologically or dialogically structured. She seems, perhaps ironically, to be closer to these Idealist approaches than is Rahner in that he in fact continues to work with the distinction between immanent and economic Trinity.
Again, within the overall context of a rather diffused Idealist influence on American thinking LaCugna draws upon the thought of the Scottish personalist philosopher, John Macmurray. She does this to bring to the fore a more explicitly formulated notion of person as relational. Macmurray reacted strongly against Idealism, whether in its post-Kantian German forms and especially that of Hegel or in various forms into which Idealist thought and especially that of Hegel developed in England and Scotland. Yet we can still recognize some significant Idealist influence on various aspects of his thought and in particular on his notion of person as relational. And, as we have seen, it is to Macmurray’s thought on person as relational that LaCugna appeals in support of the development of her own trinitarian thought. It is true that Macmurray rejected the overall Idealist idea, going back to Descartes and reaching a certain climax in the Hegelian concept as Macmurray understood it, of person considered as movement of thought. He replaced it with a view of person as agent, one who acts.27 Still, he retained a sense of person recognizably close, at least structurally speaking, to the overall Idealist conception of person as dynamically developing in and through its relationship to an other.28
By way of recall, we should note that for Hegel in particular this dynamic development occurs as a dialectical movement of self-positing subjectivity in which, stated most generally, subjectivity gives rise to objectivity, the thinking through of which brings forth a renewed and more inclusive subjectivity. In Hegel’s encyclopedic presentation, this movement of spirit takes place in the sphere of logic as inclusive subjectivity, in nature as self-othering of the idea, and then in and through art, religion, and philosophy as absolute subjectivity. In this overall movement of spirit, logic presents, in a certain pristine conceptual clarity, the structure of inclusive subjectivity as self-relationality.29 Then, in the realphilosophical sphere of spirit and more precisely in the moment of objective spirit as Hegel develops it in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right,30 he speaks explicitly of person in various ways in line with his overall triadically structured dialectic. For present purposes it will be sufficient to note that for Hegel a person is a subject who has rights, recognizes that other persons have rights, and expects to have her or his rights respected by others.31
In line with this very general understanding of person, Hegel discusses the notion of person as, for example, the abstract holder of rights who then becomes subject actualizing his or her personal freedom in action (Handlung).32 Given that Hegel’s rather complex notion of person includes the idea that a person is an acting subject, it would seem Macmurray’s notion of person as agent is not as far removed from certain aspects of Hegel’s overall idea of person, at least in Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right, as Macmurray might have thought. In fact, Macmurray himself had continued to maintain a relationship between acting and thinking, with the former including the latter. As Macmurray writes, with a slight hint of Hegelian ordering, “A theory of action will exhibit the form of the personal by including within it, as its negative aspect, a theory of knowledge. … We may begin by defining action itself … as a unity of movement and knowledge.”33 Furthermore, “acting from the motive of care for others leads paradoxically to genuine self-realization.”34 He seems to be reacting negatively less to Hegel’s presentation of person as subject who acts in the Philosophy of Right and more to Hegel’s understanding of subject in the Science of Logic. He is so reacting when he insists that the other does not arise in Hegelian fashion out of the subject or self but is, rather, that in relation to which the subject or self, and more specifically, the person acts. For Macmurray the subject or self is person only in, though, and as this relation brought about through the self’s acting. Hegel and Macmurray propose two quite different ways in which the subject or self relates to the other, especially when we think in terms of the Hegel of the Science of Logic. Yet in each case the subject or self is constituted as true subject or self, and in Macmurray’s preferred term person, only through its being in relation with an other.35
I would suggest, then, that we find in Macmurray’s understanding of the self as agent and person as relation a certain movement structured essentially the same way as we see in Hegel’s notion of person as relation and even perhaps with Hegel’s view of subject in action. As we have noted, LaCugna had herself as well acknowledged that Feuerbach, Fichte, and Hegel understood person as relational (255). So I would propose that LaCugna was not only herself aware of Idealist understandings of person but has, in her insistence on personhood or subjecthood as relational (256), in fact echoed the overall post-Kantian German Idealist and especially Hegelian idea of person as relational. This judgment is based then not only on her own reference to Fichte and Hegel but also on the way in which this understanding of person was mediated to her through Macmurray.
In his history of Scottish philosophy, Alexander Broadie interestingly goes so far as to identify Macmurray, at least in some ways, with the long dominant Idealist philosophical tradition in Scotland when he lists Macmurray under the heading, “Aspects of idealism.”36 Surely Broadie is using the descriptor “idealist” in a fairly wide sense to indicate someone for whom the self, subject or, more exactly here, person is the ultimate form of reality. This self, subject, or person does not require reference as such to a continuing, underlying substance or essence. Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling had each in his own way so conceived the self without underlying substrate. Thus, Macmurray remains, fundamentally, identified with those who, like the post-Kantian German Idealists, had shifted from a substance-based metaphysics to a subject-based one. As was the case for Macmurray and for personalist philosophers in general, for LaCugna person is ontologically ultimate (301).
LaCugna reinforces her understanding of person as ontologically ultimate by referring, as we have seen, to John D. Zizioulas, Greek Orthodox theologian and Metropolitan of Pergamon. She finds very helpful his understanding of person as relational and as highest form of reality, namely, person as ecstatic and hypostatic. Of particular interest to us at this point is Zizioulas’s attribution of his understanding of person as relational to the Cappadocian Fathers, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, and the latter’s older brother, Basil of Caesarea. As previously noted, LaCugna herself cites directly two of Zizioulas’s works, namely, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church, chapter 1, “Personhood and Being,”37 and an earlier article, “Human Capacity and Human Incapacity.”38 But it is in Zizioulas’s later study, “The Doctrine of the Holy Trinity: The Significance of the Cappadocian Contribution,”39 to which we can turn for a rather more distilled formulation of his reading of the Cappadocians on, among many rich considerations, person as relational and as ultimate reality to be given priority over substance. Here, in basic continuity with his previous studies, Zizioulas writes of his reading of the Cappadocian understanding of person not as individual but as relational reality. By way of example, we can cite one of Zizioulas’s conclusions: “For according to it [the thought of the Cappadocian Fathers], true personhood arises not from one’s individualistic isolation from others but from love and relationship with others, from communion.”40 And concerning the priority of person over substance, Zizioulas concludes that “the philosophical scandal of the Trinity can be resolved or accepted only if substance gives way to personhood as the causing principle or arche in ontology.”41
Zizioulas’s attributions of the notion of person as relation rather than individual and of the priority of person over substance to the Cappadocians have been challenged by several scholars. Lucian Turcescu,42 for example, argues rather, with reference to specific texts from Gregory of Nyssa, that person and individual were not so clearly distinguished in Cappadocian thought. He analyses several texts by Gregory in which Gregory thinks of person precisely in terms of individual and concludes that Zizioulas has misrepresented the thought of the Cappadocians when he insists so strongly on a Cappadocian distinction between person and individual.43 Turcescu speaks as well of Zizioulas’s “alleged primacy of the person over substance in Cappadocian theology.”44 We might add that, in a similar vein, James L. Fredericks45 cites Jaroslav Pelikan to anchor his remarks concerning the inability of the Cappadocians to work out well the relationship between one substance and three hypostases.
Sarah Coakley46 is a third scholar who has questioned the attribution of a seemingly more modern relational understanding of person to the Cappadocians, but without mentioning Zizioulas specifically until the last lines of her study. She argues that “we ‘moderns’ have … misconstrued Gregory [of Nyssa], reading him only selectively or with an eye to particular theological ends.”47 She notes early on, for example, that Gregory was diffident, to use her word, about exploring at length the nature of God as such.48 More specifically with regard to Gregory’s understanding of person, she examines key texts from Gregory to counter the attribution to him of aspects of the more modern notion of person (often defined in terms of autonomous consciousness) that are usually embraced in social models of Trinity.49 She corrects ten ways in which she says Gregory has been misinterpreted as a social Trinitarian. Without listing them fully, we can note that for her it is a misinterpretation to say Gregory starts apologetically with three when in fact his apologetic concern is to stress unity at the level of the divine Nature. She clarifies that Gregory starts with the Father as “one ‘person,’ as source and cause of the others.”50 With Gregory there is one divine motion of will, though the Spirit serves as an experiential, again her word, point of entry into that flow. For Gregory there are not three consciousnesses: “A hypostasis is simply a distinct enough entity to bear some ‘particularizing marks.’ ”51 Regarding hypostasis and Gregory’s more often used prosopon, she further remarks that hypostasis refers less to relationality, since its technical and delimited meaning in Gregory is what identifies in an individual that which is otherwise more general. She sees this term as applying more literally to Father, Son, and Spirit. As to prosopon, she recognizes its “more obviously ‘relational’ or ‘psychological’ meaning as visage or personal presentation.” But its use would then be considered more as analogical or even metaphorical language.52 Coakley concludes that in Gregory we see stress on “a unified flow of divine will and love.” She says we do not find here various versions of the notion of person as relational that one finds especially in trinitarian theology today. She insists that in Gregory there is “not a ‘community of individuals’; nor, incidentally, does … [Gregory]—on my [Coakley’s] reading—prioritize ‘person’ over ‘substance’ (a matter that has become polemical in the thought of John Zizioulas.)”53
Coakley and Turcescu each suggest that Zizioulas has attributed to the Cappadocians modern understandings of person which are apparently not present in any explicit or developed way in their trinitarian thinking.54 And Fredericks hesitates to state so directly that the Cappadocians gave a clearly expressed ontological priority to person over being or substance.55 Turcescu goes somewhat beyond this more generally framed overall question of attributing modern understandings of person. He proposes to identify several sources of such modern understandings that may well have influenced Zizioulas and his understanding of person as relational. He points to similarities between the thought of John Macmurray and Martin Buber in this regard, on the one hand, and that of Zizioulas, on the other. He notes that Zizioulas has referred to these two philosophers explicitly. He is of the opinion that they have influenced Zizioulas in his thinking about person.56 We have already explored possible post-Kantian German Idealist influence on Macmurray and, consequently, through Macmurray on Zizioulas. Turcescu traces back to Feuerbach, Buber’s understanding of person, as compared with individuality, in terms of appearance through relation with other persons.57 And of course this tracing back could easily continue through Feuerbach to Hegel.58 Again, a likely mediated Hegelian influence on Zizioulas.
Among others hesitant about attributing more recent notions of person to the Cappadocians, there is Alexis Torrance. He critiques what he identifies as twentieth-century attempts at “mapping the concept of personhood onto early Christian sources, an activity pursued in particular (though not exclusively) by Greek Orthodox theologians in the twentieth century.” He criticizes as well the idea that Orthodox personalism really reflects patristic thought.59 He opens his study with a very helpful introduction to that to which he refers as early twentieth-century personalism. He makes special mention of the French School of personalism and the thinking of Emmanuel Mounier, who was himself almost certainly influenced by Nikolai Berdyaev, a Russian émigré. According to Torrance, it was Mounier, for instance, who early on stressed the antithesis between individual and person.60 Torrance then notes the complex series of links between the French Personalist School and Eastern Orthodox thinkers, including the Orthodox personalist thinker, Fr. Georges Florovsky.61 He connects Florovsky with Zizioulas when he notes that “in the realm of personalist theology, his [Florovsky’s] most significant contribution was to train the pre-eminent representative of Orthodox personalism active today, Metropolitan John Zizioulas.”62
Torrance opened his study with a brief overview of early twentieth-century personalism and especially that of the French School. He thus raises the question of the history of the complex relationship, both positive and negative, between post-Kantian German Idealist thought and that of various Orthodox thinkers. I would suggest that Idealist thought is mediated to them, especially to Russian Orthodox thinkers, in a special though not exclusive way through Solovyov. Given then this complex relationship and the challenges to which Zizioulas’s interpretation of the Cappadocians on person as relational and as having priority over being, I would like to examine another, perhaps complementary, way of envisioning the relationship of Zizioulas’s relational ontology of persons in communion to what the Cappadocians have said, within the context of their trinitarian thought, about person.
Despite his criticism of Zizioulas’s reading of the Cappadocians, Turcescu himself had appreciatively noted the creative insight and value of Zizioulas’s thought as such.63 Following upon his appreciative remarks, I think it is reasonable to propose that Zizioulas has in fact proceeded in a quasi-Gadamerian way in developing his relational ontology of persons in communion.64 It would seem that Zizioulas has, on the one hand, come to the question of the trinitarian notion of person from within his own intellectual horizon, namely, that of the more modern, nineteenth- and twentieth-century understandings of person. On the other hand, he has as well, and critically important, come to realize that the Cappadocians, with their own creative reworking of Greek philosophy within their own intellectual horizon, have in effect posed the question as to how we can think of persons, divine and human, in a fuller way appropriate to our own contemporary times and concerns.65 In bringing together these two horizons through dialogue, Zizioulas has, to use Gadamer’s term, brought about a fusion of them (Horizontverschmelzung). I suggest we could consider these moves, especially here on the part of Zizioulas, as an example of what Gadamer calls history of effect (Wirkungsgeschichte) and consciousness of being affected by history (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein).66 In the process, Zizioulas has created something new and exciting, namely, his own relational ontology of persons in communion. And in so doing, he has mediated to LaCugna an understanding of person further developed out of, but beyond, what both the post-Kantian German Idealists themselves and the Cappadocians had proposed.67
We can, then, hear various echoes of Idealist trinitarian thought from within that of LaCugna. Indeed, more generally speaking she was sensitive to Idealist-influenced personalist thought as such. And she herself acknowledged the overall Idealist understanding of person as relational. But those echoes sound more clearly and distinctly when we listen carefully to what she has to say while discussing the thought of Rahner, Macmurray, and Zizioulas. Each of these three has creatively reworked various post-Kantian German Idealist trinitarian insights and in this way mediated them to her. These insights include the identification of immanent and economic Trinity, the notion of person as relational and, we could add, agent, and person as the ultimate form of reality, which last is then essentially a movement of communion. In turn, while with these insights witnessing to the Idealist trinitarian legacy, she has in her own rather forceful way brought them together. But she has done this now with a sound distinctly her own: “God for Us.”