TRINITARIAN ACTION AND INSEPARABLE OPERATIONS
Some Historical and Dogmatic Reflections
STEPHEN R. HOLMES
THE ANCIENT LATIN SLOGAN opera trinitatis ad extra sunt indivisa has not been universally popular recently. Indeed, it has been held up by some systematicians as a lapidary summary of everything Augustine and the Latins got wrong in their misappropriation of Greek trinitarian theology. It, or at least the doctrine it summarises, has fared better in patristic scholarship, however; recent study on the fourth-century debates, led by Michel Barnes and Lewis Ayres, has stressed repeatedly and, to my mind, simply convincingly not just that pro-Nicene theologians universally held to the inseparability of divine operations, but that this principle was key to the logic of pro-Nicene theology, providing (along with the related commitment to divine simplicity) one of its central bulwarks against the charge of tritheism.
In this paper I will first sketch this argument with regard to two representative pro-Nicene theologians, Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus. This will largely be repetition of already established scholarship, but will be helpful in bringing clarity over the shape — and variety — of pro-Nicene claims concerning inseparable operations. I will then explore two issues that the doctrine raises: the relationship of the relationships of origin to the doctrine of inseparable operations, and the relationship of the economic missions of the Son and the Spirit to that doctrine. I explore these as systematic questions, looking to demonstrate the coherence of the various doctrines; in this I draw gratefully on the tradition, of course, but I am not primarily trying to expound the thought of any particular theologian or school. Rather, given the narratives about trinitarian theology that have predominated in systematic discussions in recent decades, I think certain doctrinal themes, including the inseparability of divine operations, stand in need in our context of retrieval and re-presentation to be rendered comprehensible and plausible in our culture. This is my prospectus; let us begin the exposition by turning to the Cappadocian Fathers.
1. THE DOCTRINE OF INSEPARABLE OPERATIONS IN THE FOURTH CENTURY
Barnes has argued in a number of essays that the crucial distinction between pro-Nicene and Eunomian theology in the third quarter of the fourth century was a differing understanding of divine operations — classed sometimes as causality,1 sometimes as dunamis or power.2 He characterises Gregory of Nyssa’s core argument as a syllogism:
The Father and the Son have the same power.
Whatever has the same power has the same nature.
Ergo, the Father and the Son have the same nature.3
To be clear, the point about possession of “the same power” here is not equality, but identity. For Barnes, the move from earlier “Nicene” theologies to later “Pro-Nicene” theologies comes in the move from the older “X from X” arguments, and specifically from the — perfectly biblical — claim that the Son is the power of the Father, to more nuanced claims that the Father and the Son share one and the same power. This distinction depends on the fact that “power” had two parallel traditional uses in pre-Nicene theology: on the one hand, God can be spoken of as power — so Tertullian, for example, can use phrases such as “one power, one substance” to assert the unity of Father, Son, and Spirit; on the other hand, the Son can be spoken of as the Father’s power. This second use is then developed by claiming that the Father is never impotent, never without his power, and so the Son must be coeternal with the Father. (An argument with which Augustine found fault, of course.)
A standard development of these two lines, made popular by Origen and then found in other terms in the creed, speaks of the relationship of the Son to the Father in “X from X” language: in the creed, “God of God, light of light, true God of true God”; here, “power from power.” The unity of power in this slogan is most naturally understood, if there is no further qualification, as a unity of equality. This is clear the common pre-360 language of the Son as “image”: the exact image of the Father is equal to, but other than, the Father.
Later pro-Nicene theology, exemplified for Barnes by Gregory of Nyssa, moves beyond this. Although Gregory against Eunomius will be his crucial example, Barnes finds the earliest examples of the new position in Latin writers of the 350s who find language to oppose extreme Homoian theology by reaching back behind Nicaea to the anti-modalist tradition of Hippolytus and Tertullian. Phoebadeus and Hilary of Poitiers are both cited arguing that Father and Son have the same nature because they have the same power — not equality, but identity. To take a crude analogy, the point is not that I am as wealthy as my wife (equality) but that we have a joint bank account, so our wealth is simply identical. Later Ambrose in the West, and Gregory in the East, will make the same assertion; Barnes sums up with the claim “Gregory’s argument for the unity of the Trinity uses the unity between φύσις and δύναμις as the fundamental proof for the unity between divine nature and the divine persons and between the Father and the Son.”4
Now, without some background in ancient philosophy this language of “power” — still more Barnes’s other example of “productive cause” — might be opaque. The import of it can helpfully be seen, however, in a well-known text, Gregory’s On “Not Three Gods.” I will sketch Gregory’s argument in this well-known, and oft-anthologised, text; although it is not the most important text for his trinitarianism, it does illustrate my points here well and has the great benefit of familiarity to many readers. Ablabius has offered Gregory an analogy: we say that Peter, James, and John share a common nature, humanity, but we happily call them three men; why do we then not call Father, Son, and Spirit three gods even though they share the common divine nature? Gregory offers two arguments in response: one concerning the indivisibility of natures, which even if true is not really to the point, in that it would leave us with the same unity between Peter, James, and John as we find between Father, Son, and Spirit; I thus take it, with most modern readers — Stead is the significant exception5 — that the second argument, which concerns unity of action, is the heart of the case made.
Gregory insists, in common with every pro-Nicene theologian, that we cannot know or name the divine essence — if this point is conceded, Eunomianism seems to be the only option. All our names for deity, therefore, refer to divine operations (at one point Gregory offers a rather implausible etymology of θεότης, “Godhead,” as being derived from θέα, “seeing,” and so referring to God as “the all-seeing One,” a name that references an operation). Given that Gregory wants to insist that all our names for deity apply indifferently to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit alike, he therefore argues that the divine operations are indifferently the operations of Father, Son, and Spirit. Unity of power and unity of action/operations are, in Gregory’s view, mutually entailed, just as unity of power and unity of essence are: there is one divine operative power, so, on the one hand, God is one, and, on the other, divine operations are inseparable.
His famous analogies of three cooks preparing the same meal are in fact offered as disanalogies: this is not what the divine life is like. Three cooks perform three separate actions toward the same end; Father, Son, and Spirit together perform one single action. There are no analogies for this that are useful; elsewhere Gregory will, like Augustine later, speculate about psychological analogies that, as with Augustine, attempt to show not the personality of God, but this triune single action, but Gregory — again, like Augustine — is well aware of the limitations of such moves.
Gregory of Nazianzus is important in the story also: on the one hand, his famous “theological orations,” preached in Constantinople in the months before the Council convened, show a reaffirmation of similar points to Nyssan; on the other, a recent essay by Verna Harrison6 argues that he has in fact a distinctive position, which may allow some of the recently claimed distinctions between West and East to be maintained.
The fifth theological oration (Or. 31) illustrates both these points helpfully — although again of course the proof, as opposed to illustration, of either must rely on a broader reading than I can offer here. To illustrate, first, the role of unity of power in Nazianzen’s thought, consider his summary statement of his doctrine:
We have one God, because there is a single Godhead. Though there are three objects of belief, they derive from a single whole and have reference to it. . . . They are not sundered in will or divided in power. You cannot find there any of the properties of things divisible . . . the Godhead exists undivided in things divided. It is as if there were a single intermingling of light, which existed in three mutually connected Suns.7
The image of light is, of course, an ancient one, owing something at least to Ps 36:9: “With you is the fountain of light; in your light we see light,” a text regularly used to demonstrate the unity of Father and Son in the patristic period. Gregory references the text elsewhere in this oration (Or. 31:3), and Theodoret quotes Athanasius as suggesting that the line “light of light” in the creed of Nicaea results from the citation of this text during the council.8 Although the text is regularly invoked, Gregory’s particular use here is interesting, however: he has moved away from the traditional image (which he does consider elsewhere) of the sun, its rays, and its light to an image of three suns — stressing the equality of Father, Son, and Spirit (and at least implying, contra Zizioulas for instance, that the Son and the Spirit are autotheotic, but that is an argument for another day). The three suns are “mutually connected” — every created image needs to be strained to breaking point (and, here, some way beyond) to serve even remotely adequately as an analogy for the divine life — and their light is one; notice that Gregory deliberately qualifies “intermingled” with “single” to make the point that there is one operation here.9
Gregory continues to stress the point: “each of the Trinity is an entire unity as much with himself as with the partnership, by identity of being and power” (Or. 31:16). Unity of power implies unity of identity and unity of essence. The Cappadocian doctrine — in Nazianzen as much as in Nyssan — is that confessing unity of operations is the crucial, perhaps the only, defense against the accusation of tritheism.
Alongside this recognition, however, these quotations illustrate Harrison’s suggestion of a distinctive theme within Nazianzen’s theology. She proposes that there is a characteristic rhetorical move in his various Orations,10 a repeated employment of antithesis to hold together two truths that are apparently in tension. With regard to the Trinity, there is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a regular antithesis between unity and plurality. A fine example of this occurs in Or. 39: “. . . they are divided undividedly, if I may speak thus, and united in division. For the divinity is one in three, and the three are one, in whom the divinity is, or, to speak more precisely, who are the divinity.”11 This delight in rhetorical antithesis is certainly a feature of Gregory’s preaching; the question is whether it implies a distinctive theology.
Harrison argues that it does, specifically on the point I have been considering. She speaks of “distinct yet collaborative activities of the divine persons”12 — a denial of the claim of inseparable operation — and then suggests that this distinctive theology, mediated through the regular liturgical reading of Gregory’s homilies in the Eastern church, is adequate to establish the claim that there is a distinctively Eastern trinitarianism, which has recently been rediscovered by the West; are these claims supported by the evidence?
I fear the answer must be no, in both cases. On the first, the only textual evidence she presents for separated operations is the quotation I have already cited from Or. 31. She places emphasis on the word translated in my citation “intermingling” — she prefers “commingling,” but I am not sure there is much at stake in that translation difference. The Greek word is σύγκρασις, which she identifies as a technical Stoic term that “refers specifically to a kind of mixture in which the things blended — in this case, the activities of the three divine persons, named as light — each retain their own identity and properties. This kind of blending,” she continues, “contrasts with a fusion in which the distinct identity and properties of each are lost.”13
I note first that the contrast drawn from Stoic philosophy here is not to the point: I see nowhere a claim that the “distinct identities” of Father, Son, and Spirit are lost in their unity of operation (the “distinct . . . properties” are moot, since Gregory, of course, affirms that there are no distinct properties of the persons, save only the relationships of origin). Rather, the question on the table is whether there is one single divine operation or three separate divine operations. Even Harrison’s own description of the meaning of the technical Stoic term suggests that there is only one — she speaks of a “blending” resulting in a “mixture.”
Elsewhere, it seems to me that Harrison’s citations make it clear that Gregory was committed to unity of power and so unity of operation; her concern about the triune nature of this single power/operation is important, and something I will come back to, but for now let me survey the evidence for unity. As her title (“Illumined from All Sides . . .”) makes clear, Harrison is concerned about a powerful image from Gregory in which in contemplation we are caught up in, surrounded by, the light of the Trinity. She describes Gregory’s narration of this as an endless movement, his “gaze” shifting “between God as one and the three persons”; she immediately acknowledges, however, that “Gregory uses a περί compound to speak of the hypostases as three lights surrounding him, adding that together they constitute one undivided light.”14 She concludes this discussion of mystical vision with the summary comment, “When he says ‘but one light,’ this statement is juxtaposed antithetically to the statements about threeness that precede it and must not be understood as negating or superseding them.”15 Again, the positive point, that we must not lose the specifically trinitarian character of the single power/being/light of God, is well taken, but it cannot be read, as Harrison clearly acknowledges, as a denial of the singleness of those divine realities.
We find the same result when we move away from mystical vision to classical theological claims. Harrison cites the third theological oration as follows:
Monarchy [in God] is what we value, yet not a monarchy restricted to one person . . . but held together by equality of nature, agreement of will, identity of movement, and convergence to the one from whom they came — all of which is impossible for created nature. So though there is distinction in number, there is no division of the essence.16
The monarchy — an absolutely central theological term — and the movement here are unequivocally asserted to be single; I take it that the terms in the repetition “equality of nature, agreement of will, identity of movement” are to be taken as synonymous, and that Gregory here — as he does elsewhere — asserts singleness of “essence” and “will” also. If Harrison’s only concern is to insist that the single essence, operation, will, light, and life of God is triune, then of course she is right, but it is difficult to see that this point is unique to Nazianzen.
The essay begins by suggesting that, in focusing on Nyssan, Barnes — and indeed Ayres — have inaccurately minimised the distinction between East and West, and that a focus on Nazianzen would correct that inaccuracy; unfortunately, the distinctions being sought are, I believe, phrased unhappily: inseparability of operation can coexist with specifically, and ordered, triune action. Harrison offers a helpful reminder of the distinctive shape of triune action, which will become important for my reflections before the end of this paper (which is why I have given her arguments so much time); this does not, however, in any way suggest the basic doctrine of a single divine power, or of the inseparability of divine works, stands in need of amendment.
2. INSEPARABLE OPERATIONS AND THE RELATIONS OF ORIGIN
So, I turn to the first of my two systematic investigations, concerning the relations of origin. The theology I have sketched so far insists that there is one divine essence, and so one divine power, and so one divine operation; how, under this rubric, do we make sense of the claims that the Father begets the Son and that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son?
Now, it may be that the right answer here is, “we don’t!” The ancient slogan with which I began insists only that the external operations of the Trinity are inseparable, precisely because, I presume, there was an unwillingness to ask the speculative question concerning the eternal divine life. The immanent life of the Godhead, insofar as we can speak of it at all, is characterised by two eternal events (whatever that means): the eternal generation of the Son and the eternal procession of the Spirit. This leads quickly to the five notions, the only five things that, according to Thomas Aquinas, we can actually know to be true of the eternal divine life: the Father is ingenerate; the Father generates the Son; the Son is generated by the Father; the Father and the Son spirate the Spirit; and the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. Perhaps the wise theologian confesses all this to be true and then stops and refuses to speculate how any of this relates to the single power of the Trinity and the inseparability of the divine operations; certainly this seems to have been the general patristic answer.
Contemporary systematicians, however, face questions in articulating the doctrine of the Trinity that the Fathers never faced, and so perhaps they do need to face questions they never framed or chose to pass over as too speculative. In particular, the pervasive post-Rahnerian predilection for identifying the eternal life of God with the gospel history, even if it is rejected, creates a particular intensity around the question of how economy and eternity relate. The two systematic problems I have identified are both, I suggest, raised to prominence by this context.
This first problem is real, if we are to avoid the error that Harrison warned against in her explorations of Nazianzen. We must not move from a recognition of the three distinct eternal divine hypostases to an account of the economy that is undifferentiated and that speaks simply of the work of God. If recent theology and spirituality has been guilty of that — it was Rahner’s weighty charge, of course — then recent theology and spirituality has been inadequately trinitarian. (This only I will concede to Rahner.) Further, this question of divine activity does seem to me to be where this problem bites most seriously; many of the problems raised against classical trinitarianism can be answered easily and quickly by an appeal to Christology, if only we are attentive to classical Christology; this one cannot. We find ourselves required, on the one hand, to insist on a single divine operation — as a condition, as I have shown, for not lapsing into tritheism; the monarchy of God is what is at stake here — and, on the other hand, to confess at least two diverse operations — generation and procession — that are not just appropriated but actually divided up between the three Persons. I think in the contemporary context I have sketched, it is appropriate to find this unsatisfactory and not to rest content with a suggestion of impenetrable mystery.
I do not think, however, that the resources to answer this question are available in fourth-century trinitarianism; I am no great expert on the period, and would be happy to be told otherwise, but for now this is how it looks to me. Thomas, already cited, gives us the clearest way through. At the heart of Thomas’s doctrine is the claim that the three Persons are subsistent relations, and here I think is a clue to how to solve our first systematic problem.
Thomas’s reasons for teaching that the Persons are subsistent relations bear examination. He is aware, of course, of the problems of terminology that were noted explicitly by Augustine:17 simply put, straightforward etymology would translate both ousia and hypostasis as substantia in Latin, and so the Greek distinction between the two appears unavailable. The Latins had their own vocabulary, substantia and persona, developed by Tertullian, but mapping the two vocabularies together was at least nontrivial; indeed, by Thomas’s time, several definitions of what persona actually meant were available: Boethius had offered the classic version, but he had derived his definition from reflecting on the subdivisions of Aristotelian categories, not from trinitarian dogma, and it did not easily correspond; as a result, Richard of St. Victor had offered an alternative definition more adequate, so he thought, to trinitarian doctrine. Thomas is aware of all this debate and negotiates it carefully; in his view Boethius’s definition is the right one, but it needs some degree of redefinition to make it serviceable for trinitarian use.18
All of this is to say that Thomas was aware of a need to adequately narrate the being of Father, Son, and Spirit, and he was actively engaged in reflecting on this question. His account of the persons as subsistent relations no doubt owes something to this reflection — and indeed to similar reflection that his teacher Albertus Magnus and other medieval theologians had undertaken. The primary question in this tradition of reflection was, does the word person most properly reference the essence of each of the Three, or the relation, the distinctive character? Thomas rejects the former fairly quickly: necessarily, the essence of the divine Persons is just the divine essence, and so this option leads to a collapsing of the Persons into the ousia. Most medieval theologians attempted a middle way, holding that the term referred to both essence and relation, but to whatever extent “essence” is invoked, the same problem occurs: persona means to some degree the same as substantia. Thomas therefore insists that person means just the relation, the peculiar property of each of the Three — unbegottenness, begottenness, and procession.
He is able to make this move only because of his earlier analysis of the nature of the triune relations. Following the line proposed variously by Gregory of Nazianzus, Augustine, and Boethius, relation is a metaphysical term that refers to a genuine distinction in a simple essence that does not, however, introduce division and so compromise simplicity. The eternal generation of the Son by the Father is an account of how the unrepeatable divine essence is related to itself. The relations are real, but the essence remains simple and so, crudely speaking, one.
This account presumes for its coherence, I think, Thomas’s account of perichoresis, an idea that was not developed in the fourth century, which may be a reason why the logic Thomas proposes was not worked out earlier. He insists on the complete mutual indwelling of the Three: commenting on John’s gospel, Thomas asserts:
In material things, what comes forth from another is no longer in it, since it comes forth from it by a separation from it in essence or in space. But in God, coming forth does not arise in this way. The Son came forth eternally from the Father in such a way that the Son is still in the Father from all eternity. And when he comes forth, he is in him, in such a way that he is always coming forth and always in him.19
On the basis of this mutual indwelling, we can see that the relations of origin can be considered self-relations of the single divine essence.
The last part of the jigsaw here is Thomas’s fundamental account of God as actus purus (“pure act”). The claim is once again connected with the nexus of divine perfections that mark out the uniqueness of the Godhead. Here the initial point is the logical claim that metaphysical perfection excludes potentiality because to fulfill any imagined potentiality in the divine life would make God better, and a claim that God is perfect excludes the possibility of God becoming better. Given this, we may assert that there is no activity proper to God that is not always eternally fulfilled by God: God is pure act, without any unfulfilled potentiality.
The point for our purposes is the dynamism here proposed as being native to the divine life. (As an aside, one of the repeated complaints against so-called “classical theism” in the twentieth century was that it proposed a unacceptably static view of deity;20 it may be that this is demonstrable, perhaps with particular reference to certain debased forms of the tradition — the neo-Thomism of a Garrigou-Lagrange, for example — but at the level of assertion, where it usually operates as far as I can see, it is a complaint so wrong-headed as to be almost incredible; Thomas asserts that God is a verb, eternal action without any external stable actor; his God cannot be classed as too static.) What is this eternal action that God is? The conclusion is (I think) mine, not Thomas’s, but it seems necessary: it is the single, simple, unrepeatable, eternal generation-of-the-Son-and-procession-of-the-Spirit. We must here speak hesitantly and reverently, but I think we may with good reason say that this happening is the divine life.
The point of all this derivation is as follows: my first systematic question was how the eternal generation of the Son and the eternal procession of the Spirit related to the single divine operation claimed as necessary by Cappadocian trinitarianism; we are now, I suggest, in a position to propose an answer to that question; my answer, not that of either of the Gregorys or of Thomas, although I hope I have shown that I am trying to stand in continuity with their various theologies: the one eternal divine operation just is the generation of the Son and the procession of the Spirit.
Just to clear up the one obvious question: I take it, as I think Thomas must have done, that the eternal divine relations are a single simple event, although we cannot speak of that event without speaking of two different processions. I suspect indeed that if we think hard enough, we will discover that the reason it is dogmatically necessary to say filioque is that it protects this character of the two processions as a single and simple eternal movement — but that is definitely an argument for another day. Let me turn instead to my second systematic investigation, the relationship of inseparable divine operations to the particular economic missions of the Son and the Spirit.
3. INSEPARABLE OPERATIONS AND THE DIVINE MISSIONS
The systematic problem here is easy to state: if all divine operations are inseparably works of the whole Trinity, how do we parse such obviously true claims as “God the Son was incarnate of the Virgin Mary” or “the Holy Spirit was poured out at Pentecost”? Within the tradition we have the doctrine of appropriation, but that clearly is of little use here: it makes some sort of sense to say that creation is a work of the whole Trinity that can nonetheless be appropriated to the Father, but to say that incarnation is a work of the whole Trinity that can be appropriated to the Son appears much more difficult — indeed, just wrong.
The point in the patristic tradition at which this problem became most obvious was probably the run-up to the fifth ecumenical council. A formula had been proposed, which incidentally has been regularly quoted, and just as regularly misunderstood, in recent theology: “One of the Trinity suffered in the flesh.”21 The problem with this formula in the eyes of the Fathers — Boethius was much involved, if I may have him as a church father — was not any squeamishness about divine suffering; Christological claims about the impassible suffering of the Son had been commonplace since at least Cyril of Alexandria.22 No, the problem was whether it could possibly be meaningful to speak of “one of the Trinity” doing anything — the extent to which contemporary dogmatics has found the question of suffering generative or problematic, but has simply ignored the question of divine action, is perhaps a sober illustration of how distant from the concerns of the writers we cite we have sometimes become. That said, the formula seems unarguable, and indeed something similar enough was declared orthodox at the Council;23 how can it be squared with a commitment to the inseparability of divine operations?
Thomas is again helpful in putting the conditions in place for a possible solution. First, he proposes a link between the relationships of origin and the economy. Emery suggests that formulae such as “the temporal procession of creatures drives from the eternal procession of persons” can be found nearly twenty times in the corpus.24 This is not, as I read it, a suggestion that it belonged to God’s nature to create — Thomas had issues around the eternity of creation, but they come elsewhere; rather, it is an insistence that, given the contingent fact of creation, it was inevitable that this God, who is Father, Son, and Spirit, would create as Father, Son, and Spirit, and not in some different way.
What does this look like? To again quote Emery, who is helpful on this point: “The three persons act in the same action, but each of them performs this act in the distinct mode of his personal relation. . . . The Father acts as source of the Son and Spirit, the Son acts as Word of the Father, the Holy Spirit acts as Love and Gift of the Father and the Son. We are not in the milieu of appropriations, but solidly within that of the persons’ properties.”25 The situation here described is, of course, utterly unimaginable — but that does not make it wrong; the incapacity of our imaginations, variously or collectively, is not evidence on which to build a theological argument. We have no concept, and no capacity to imagine, what a single action inseparably performed by three agents might be like — which is just to say that God remains beyond our conceptual grasp, a thesis that should not elicit surprise.
Gregory of Nazianzus’s image of the intermingled light of three conjoined suns might begin to give us some tiny element of purchase, however: it is possible for us to imagine three lights shining creating one light, which is one light, but in which the particular properties of the three lights are in some sense preserved. We must insist that the analogy is weak, the more so more we consider the physical nature of light, where in fact each photon could in theory be traced back to one or another of the sources; but, for all its inexactness, it is the best image I have come across in the literature.
This analogy tells us something of the nature of economic action, but it does not help us with our current problem: How do we parse “God the Son became incarnate” or “one of the Trinity suffered in the flesh” under the rubric of inseparable operations? If we return to the broader concept of missions, we may quickly draw some points out that might begin to point toward a solution. This account of divine action being shaped according to the relations of origin does give us some grasp of why there is a mission of the Son and a mission of the Spirit, but no mission of the Father: Son and Spirit have a movement from an origin in their eternal being, and so their sending corresponds to their eternal relation of origin — this is Augustine.26 This also, I propose — and as far as I am aware I now move again into my own analysis, which however I maintain is congruent with the tradition — helps us to solve the problem we face.
I have suggested, following Thomas, that inseparable divine operations are nonetheless patterned after the triune relations of origin. I have also noted that the economic missions of the Son and the Spirit make sense because their sending corresponds to their relations of origin. These two ideas together suggest that we might be able to make sense of the missions if we consider them not as discrete works, but as particular aspects of broader divine operations. It can, that is, make sense to confess “one of the Trinity suffered in the flesh” if that claim is understood as a partial and incomplete narration of a broader divine operation that includes also proper works of the Father and the Holy Spirit.
There is not space to work this idea out fully here, but let me make a comment or two that might serve to render it more plausible. It is surely not just possible, but necessary, to locate the incarnation or passion as part of a wider divine work: God’s purpose was not to suffer, but to save. Incarnation, even, is a means to an end, not the end in itself. To borrow Basil’s ordering, we might accept, putting the point extremely crudely and schematically, that the single work of salvation was initiated by the Father, carried forth by the mission — and the passion — of the Son, and is being brought to perfection by the mission of the Spirit. In saying this, however, we have to remain committed to the notion that this is one single activity, an inseparable operation. What from our perspective looks like several discrete activities is one single inseparable work in divine intention and execution, and so the particularity of the divine missions may be maintained without compromising the claim of inseparable operations.
4. BY WAY OF CONCLUSION
I have been unapologetically speculative in this paper; in closing I might perhaps explain why. I recently wrote a book on the history of trinitarian doctrine; in several warm reviews, for which I am grateful, the same point was made that the book is merely historical — well, yes — and that I now need to write a constructive book on the doctrine. Initially when pressed in public, I resisted this rather flippantly by saying that I had nothing to add to the traditional statements of the doctrine found in, say, Aquinas, and certainly had no hope of improving on them, and so there was nothing for me to do constructively.
More recently, however, I have begun to imagine what a more constructive essay might look like. My, presently tentative, conclusions are that it would involve two things. On the one hand, it would involve taking doctrines — such as the inseparability of divine operations — that are attested in the tradition, but that have not been the focus of extensive recent dogmatic reflection, and engaging in a work of recovery, showing why these doctrines need to be taken seriously and negotiated, even by those who wish to reject them. On the other hand, I have been reflecting that there are certain seemingly speculative questions — such as the relationship of the inseparable divine works to the eternal relations of origin, or to the missions of the Son and the Spirit — that serve to focus those points of classical Christian dogma that contemporary historical/cultural/ecclesiastical situations render difficult, offensive, or strange. So this admittedly speculative and sketchy paper has been a first attempt to test out my theories of what constructive systematic theology in the area of trinitarian doctrine might need to look like today.
1. Michel Barnes, “Eunomius of Cyzicus and Gregory of Nyssa: Two Traditions of Transcendent Causality,” VC 52 (1998): 59 – 87.
2. Michel Barnes, “ ‘One Nature, One Power’: Consensus Doctrine in Pro-Nicene Polemic,” in Historica, Theologica et Philosophica, Critica et Philologica (ed. Elizabeth A. Livingstone; StPatr 29; Louvain: Peeters, 1997), 205 – 23.
3. Ibid., 219.
4. Ibid.
5. G. Christopher Stead, “Why Not Three Gods?” in Studien zu Gregor von Nyssa und der Christlichen Spätantike (ed. H. R. Drobner and Christoph Klock; Leiden: Brill, 1990), 149 – 63.
6. Verna E. F. Harrison, “Illumined from All Sides by the Trinity: Neglected Themes in Gregory’s Trinitarian Theology,” in Re-Reading Gregory of Nazianzus: Essays on History, Theology, and Culture (ed. Christopher A. Beeley; Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2012), 13 – 30.
7. Or. 31. 14, translation from St. Gregory of Nazianzus, The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002), 127.
8. Theodoret, Hist. eccl. 1.7.
9. The Greek is μία τοῦ φωτὸς σύγκρασις.
10. She counsels, rightly, against focusing too heavily on the “Theological Orations,” suggesting that these are essentially polemic, and that Gregory’s other sermons, particularly his festal sermons, are better sources for his positive doctrine. Accepting all this, as with Nyssan I reference the most familiar text for purposes of illustration.
11. Quoted in Harrison, “Illumined from All Sides,” 18.
12. Ibid., 22.
13. Ibid., 21.
14. Ibid., 20, citing Gregory, Or. 23:11.
15. Harrison, “Illumined from All Sides,” 21.
16. Gregory, Or. 29:2, cited in Harrison, “Illumined from All Sides,” 23.
17. De Trin. 5.9.
18. Giles Emery gives a helpful summary of this background: The Trinitarian Theology of Thomas Aquinas (trans. Francesca A. Murphy; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 110 – 14.
19. In Ioan. 16:28 (no. 2161) the translation is from ibid., 307.
20. The point is endemic, but see (e.g.) Colin E. Gunton, Becoming and Being: The Doctrine of God in Charles Hartshorne and Karl Barth (London: SCM Press, 20012) or Sang Hyun Lee, The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Princeton: Princeton U.P., 20002).
21. For a sympathetic overview of the history, see Patrick T. R. Gray, The Defense of Chalcedon in the East, 451 – 553 (Leiden: Brill, 1979), 451 – 553.
22. See on this point J. Warren Smith, “Suffering Impassibly: Christ’s Passion in Cyril of Alexandria’s Soteriology,” ProEccl 11 (2002): 463 – 83.
23. “If anyone does not confess that our Lord Jesus Christ who was crucified in the flesh is true God and the Lord of Glory and one of the Holy Trinity: let him be anathema” (Cap. 10 of the Second Council of Constantinople, 553).
24. So Emery, Trinitarian Theology, p. 343.
25. Ibid., 355.
26. Augustine, De Trin. 2 – 4.