I'm not sure I have ever been as disappointed in an eagerly-awaited book as I was in Fr. Giulio Maspero's Rethinking the Filioque with the Greek Fathers. Intellectual history always necessarily includes a systematic element, but the restraint required to genuinely understand what the authors themselves meant, putting oneself aside in charitable empathy for the object of one's inquiry and ruthlessly adhering to one's proper discipline, is particularly challenging for systematic theology. Given Fr. Maspero's background in physics, it reminds me of the tendency of physicists to turn into philosophers of quantum mechanics; a friend once quoted Vadim Kaplunovsky's description as follows: "many have gone down that dark path never to return." It is that "dark path" in historical theology that concerns me, especially with respect to the filioque.
I apologize in advance that the format and time constraints limit my ability to provide extensive and specific citations, but I'm hoping I made the bibliography clear and the quotations accurate. I use names like "Nyssen" for Gregory of Nyssa and "Cyprios" for Gregory of Cyprus for brevity. Bold is generally how I add emphasis; I will usually italicize quotes and use standard font for original emphasis. Brackets might be original or my own, but my own changes are formatting and citations, not substantive. In any case, I am trying to integrate a large number of works, and that is necessarily going to fail to capture the entire context. I would highly encourage people to read any works that they find interesting.
I. The "dark path" in historical theology
II. The pluralist road to Constantinople
III. Theological pluralism: a case study in Alexandria
A. Antecendents: Irenaeus of Lyons
B. The contemporary: Didymus the Blind
C. Athanasius the Great
D. The successor: Cyril of Alexandria
IV. Maspero turns his blind eye to the West
V. The Byzantine model: Nikephoros Blemmydes
VI. An ecumenical reading: recognition of theological pluralism
A. Western pluralism
B. Theological pluralism in Byzantium: Gregory of Cyprus
C. Theological pluralism in Byzantium: Gregory Palamas
VII. The "Cappadocian victory" model as a cause for Catholic self-flagellation
VIII. Drop the anti-filioquism
IX. Apologia pro Vita Sua: an autobiographical note
I. The "dark path" in historical theology
Let's start with questions of historical methodology. I am approaching this issue primarily from the perspective of metaphysics and systematic theology. But for a very similar critique concerning the plurality of textual and exegetical traditions, this presentation by Nathaniel McCallum on Erick Ybarra's YouTube channel is absolutely essential. I will point out at various points where McCallum's historical approach complements my own, but the fundamental concern is that a monolithic sense of Christian history motivated by a variety of concerns has more or less obliterated the sense among historians of theological pluralism in the period from Nicaea to Constantinople. In particular, Constantinople was perceived as the coalescence of Christianity around Cappadocian theology (and especially pneumatology), which I call the "Cappadocian victory" paradigm. What follows is an explanation of how Maspero has fallen for this narrative completely and how it has caused him to badly misread numerous Latin and Alexandrian Fathers.
To begin, we can observe that Maspero seems to have been led down the "dark path" by Sarah Coakley, who wrote the foreword to this book. Maspero admits Coakley's influence, citing especially two of her works: "Beyond the Filioque Disputes? Re-Assessing the Radical Equality of the Spirit through the Ascetic and Mystical Tradition" (previously published in It Is the Spirit Who Gives Life, ed. Radu Bordeianu) and God, Sexuality, and the Self. Maspero and Coakley have both adopted the systematic perspective that the idea of "hierarchy," which they see as a subordinationist tendency built into early Trinitarian thought (especially Origen's), is the bête noire of Christian theology. In particular, it is speculative theology about causal relations in this hierarchical context, most emphatically the "filioquist" speculation, that is the quintessential example of rationalism run awry. In Maspero's and Coakley's view, the cure to this sort of hyper-rationalism is a return to patristic apophaticism and mysticism. But this so-called "apophatic" position is a form of modernist anti-intellectualism that destroys the cataphatic position of those they study. In short, their contemporary, post-Kantian theology has impeded their ability to perceive the coherence of the authors they study and therefore has radically compromised their role as historians.
This question of the role of historical and systematic theology came up in the critiques of Lewis Ayres's Nicaea and Its Legacy in Harvard Theogical Review 100:2 (Apr. 2007), which Coakley edited. In that collection, Fr. Khaled Anatolios's rejoinder to Ayres provides a auspicious warning: "So my fundamental discomfort has to do precisely with the prioritizing of what I have called the mathematics of tri-unity over the presentation of a holistic vision of Christian life in which a particular reading of Scripture is appropriated and performed." Notably, Ayres's system that Anatolios was critiquing in this case was an even looser systematic account of pro-Nicene theology than what Maspero and Coakley are now offering for the filioque. As will become clear in my own pluralist account, I would likewise dispute Ayres's assertion that "a number of [Athanasius's] key arguments are simply not carried into later tradition (such as some key elements of the manner in which the Spirit is dependent on the Son in the Epistulae ad Serapionem)." Yet Ayres's relatively weak claim in that regard does not come close to the alleged failures with which Maspero will charge Athanasius.
In any case, Anatolios's own historical method provides a stark contrast with the aspirations of a Maspero or a Coakley. Rather than attempting to achieve a doctrinal or metaphysical synthesis that the patristic authors likely did not intend, he sees these authors as providing a coherent account of their own Christian life. In his work on Athanasius, he describes the Alexandrian Doctor as "a systematic theologian in his own right, someone who claims to offer a certain vision of the coherence of the Christian faith," but he also notes elsewhere that "Athanasius is not propounding Christological metaphysics in a systematic manner, but is trying to show the correct way in which to understand Christological statements." Likewise, in describing Anatolios's own systematizing efforts in Retrieving Nicaea, Anatolios says he is "trying to show how the development of trinitarian theology entailed a global interpretation of Christian faith and life as a whole," which means he must "destabilize the division of the tasks of historical and systematic theology."
Anatolios describes his own role as a historical theologian in the conclusion to Retrieving Nicaea:
The purpose of this concluding chapter is to suggest some elements that can contribute toward a creative retrieval of Nicene trinitarian faith. There is not a single and monolithic path for such retrieval, just as fourth-century theologies that accepted the Nicene homoousios were not utterly uniform. The burden of this book has been to propose that both the construction of Nicene theology and its reappropriation are systematic endeavors in the sense that they aspire to interpret the entirety of Christian experience in light of the oneness of being of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But the exact contours and contents of this project differed from on theologian to another, and rather than trying to homogenize a "Nicene theology," we have chosen to retrieve key insights from three preeminent theologians of that era. This task of retrieval involves both a receptive and an actual constructive posture. The receptive element is composed of reconstructing the logic by which questions pertaining to the divinity of Christ and the Spirit in the fourth century led to a trinitarian reinterpretation of Christian faith. Of course, this work of reconstruction, being an interpretive endeavor, cannot itself be purely receptive. I have exercised selectivity and systematization both in my choice of representatives of the Nicene tradition and of aspects of their work.
Michel René Barnes likewise points out the importance of understanding the author's logic and its coherence for any credible reading in Augustine and Nicene Theology. In his seven steps of historical interpretation, the fifth is a "close reading or exegesis of the text that uncovers the key steps in the author's logic or expression," and the sixth is that the "reading must identify, and show a fluency with, those conceptual idioms that are they key building blocks of the author's logic or expression." It is particular unfortunate that Fr. Maspero's own work comes on the heels of Augustine and Nicene Theology, which provides a survey of patristic Latin theology in its historical context reflecting (and in some cases, collecting) Barnes's lifetime of work in the sources. Maspero performs this task well with Gregory of Nyssa and the various Syriac writers he studies in his book, but completely fails to do so with any Western author, especially the scholastics. The following passage from Barnes might well have been written of Fr. Maspero's handling of Augustine's De Trinitate:
If one compares the number of Augustinian texts consulted in contemporary accounts of his Trinitarian theology to the number of Augustinian texts consulted in accounts from a hundred years ago, what one finds is that the number has shrunk drastically. Hardly anyone refers to the last Trinitarian writings by Augustine anymore, those against Maximinus. The fact that these texts are not translated from Latin into a modern language means that, practically speaking, they are not being read by systematicians, a limitation that was not in place a hundred years ago. Given that systematic reconstructions of Augustine's Trinitarian theology are now made on the basis of the single text, De Trinitate, or not uncommonly, a canon of selections from this single text, we can conclude that the actual reading of Augustine has been made functionally superfluous. The rhetorical voice of such reconstructive narratives is one of comprehensiveness, but the "historical method" supporting the narrative is in fact reductive. Stories of increasing scope are told on the basis of diminishing experience and evidence.
And this is Maspero's great failure and his step down the "dark path." By trying to be so comprehensive in his "reconstructive narrative," he has disregarded the logic of the Western authors (including Alexandrian authors) entirely, substituting his and Coakley's hierarchical narrative where it absolutely does not exist. Note that the sort of historical caution that Anatolios and Barnes have in mind here is not the postmodern timidity that Coakley has in mind when she says the following in the foreword to Maspero's book: "Indeed, while other theologians in the period of postmodernity have tended to recoil, in line with current fashion, from that they see as the modernistic pretensions of any Dogmengeschichte [history of dogma] of an earlier generation, Fr. Maspero has remained refreshingly impenitent about seeking some such metanarrative of doctrinal development, albeit one suitably chastened by the complexity and breadth of the texts he surveys." Anatolios and Barnes clearly have no problem with giving an account of the history of dogma. Rather, the problem is that neither Coakley nor Maspero are "suitably chastened" by the authors they study in their metanarratives. I suspect that Maspero may even know that he has gone too far; he describes his chapter on Augustine in a footnote as "epistemologically bold," which seems to have been a subconscious admission that he doesn't actually know Augustine well enough to form an opinion.
But proper epistemic humility is in this case not only a question of mundane historical method in terms of the logic of the authors. We are also dealing with the most transcendent mystery of Christian faith: the Holy Trinity. So we must not only respect the logic of the authors themselves but also bear in mind a similar humility in the systematic task. I have yet to find a better summary of this challenge than that given by Fr. Jean-Hervé Nicolas in Catholic Dogmatic Theology: A Synthesis (Book I of Matthew Minerd's translation, p. 26):
This process [of theological reasoning] is oriented to something more than more complete knowledge of a particular truth, aiming also at a doctrinal synthesis in which truths are illuminated by one another, each being interdependent in its intelligibility within the whole. When such a synthesis is concretely realized by a theology or by a "school," we call it a "system." A system cannot coincide exactly with a doctrinal synthesis, which is an ever-sought objective ideal which will never be realized, for its inaccessible model is the transcendent, simple, and total Divine Truth. This means that a system is only an imperfect realization of the ideal synthesis, one ever to be perfected, corrected, and supplemented.
...
Each system (at least every system that merits being taken into consideration) sketches out and organizes its synthesis around true principles, and a given system has the merit of placing its central principles in relief, though it sometimes attributes a role to them that other, equally true principles are misunderstood. This is what unbalances its synthesis and is a cause of errors in its conclusions. A theological system is fully valid (even at its own particular level as an ever-developing system) only if it is truly capable of integrating all the truth found in other systems as in capable of eliminating its own errors.
...
Nevertheless, they are distinct, and theological pluralism is a fact. Let us only say that through all of its effort, each theological system (as well as each theologian) aims to reduce the pluralism to unity without fully succeeding in this task. This effort at reduction can indeed be expressly renounced by the theologian, and some profess that pluralism as such is good and ought to be maintained. Nonetheless, such an effort represents an inseparable aspect of theological investigation and the affirmations or denials to which it leads. Indeed, it is impossible to theologize without affirming and denying, and whoever simultaneously affirms that one statement is true and another false, affirms at the same time that everything that contradicts what he affirms (and that affirms what he denies) is false. On the other hand, a theological statement (a theologoumenon) is never isolated. It necessarily enters into an organized ensemble from which it receives its justification, meaning, and value. In short, is is part of a system. No theologian truly holds that the system that he adopts and that he constructs (for a system takes on a unique form in each person) is equivalent to every other system and can be indiscriminately replaced by any other whatsoever.
As against such pluralism, nothing characterizes the "dark path" of Maspero and Coakley so much as the attempt to find one golden philosophical thread running from the Apostles to present-day philosophy, which appears to be a nigh-irresistible temptation. There is almost-universal consent today that the Neo-Thomist historical scholarship, which tried to fit all of Christian history into the Thomistic synthesis, produced numerous and significant historical errors that often dominated historical discourse. But the cure seems to have been worse than the disease in this regard. One alternative has been to assert a rival totalizing synthesis: the Neo-Palamite view of the East has tried to subsume all of Christian history into the essence-energies distinction (starting with Lossky and followed in David Bradshaw's Arisotle East and West, Aristeides Papadakis's Crisis in Byzantium, and Philip Sherrard's The Greek East and the Latin West). This is essentially just a rival metaphysical system to Thomism, and it produces the same sort of theological blind spots. But in some ways, what Maspero and Coakley are doing is even worse.
The more pernicious school of thought here is that of modern existentialism, primarily because it doesn't hold itself out as a school. This is what I have in mind for the "dark path." Modern existentialism is driven by the Kantian separation of noumena (thought) and phenomena (experience). This is a peculiarly modern problem; in a significant way, pre-modern philosophers had such a clear understanding of the connection between being and intelligibility that they never would have believed something as bizarre about human reason. Unfortunately, this alien (and very contemporary) way of thinking is now pervasive among systematic and moral theologians. (For the implications of this methodology in moral theology, I refer the reader to Matthew Levering's The Abuse of Conscience.) The notable characteristic of this methodology is an emphasis on experience as the "true" or "ontological" reality that logic and reason don't actually reach. In the Trinitarian context, this results in a completely disproportionate focus on categories like "personalism," "relationality," "mysticism," and "love" that are perceived to be associated with this ineffable "real" experience, while the "logical" and the "systematic" can be no more than poor descriptions of the underlying reality.
Probably the worst offenders here are John Zizioulas and John Behr. Zizioulas, of course, introduced the "social Trinity" model, which overemphasizes the category of person. While those such as Maspero and Coakley may not follow that model to its extreme, they retain the disproportionate emphasis on the relational and the personal. For such historians, the assertion that the Cappadocian theology, with its particular emphasis on the category of hypostasis, is simply the definition of Trinitarian theology is an irresistible temptation. And while such post-Kantian historians often claim to reject the de Régnon paradigm of "Latins start from the essence, and Greeks start from the person," they do so because they denigrate the formal science of metaphysics (noumena) to the point that they cannot even imagine even Western Fathers pursuing it. It is not clear how turning the Fathers into proto-existentialists is any better than trying to turn them into proto-Thomists.
Behr's post-Kantian approach goes to an even further extreme, and Ayres's rejoinder to Behr's critique is telling. Behr thinks of Augustine as inaugurating a "modern paradigm," which as Ayres observes as invoking a "fairly standard account of the divisions between Eastern and Western Christianity." Ayres does not explicitly detect the post-Kantian disdain for noumena here, but he does pick up on "the Barthian character of Behr's Orthodoxy." According to Ayres, Behr's approach results in "an overly restrictive notion of the shape of appropriate Christian discourse, one that hampers our reading of the pro-Nicenes," exactly as Maspero's ends up doing. I agree with Ayres that the "central question of interpretation and appropriation" is "to what extent is an engagement with Nicene theology an engagement with a theological culture in many ways deeply alien to that shaped by the modern post-Enlightenment discourses of academic theology?" There are those like Ayres, Barnes, and Anatolios who are sensitive to this question, and there are those like Maspero and Coakley who are all too eager to take for granted the post-Kantian existential approach.
Suffice it to say I do not think the post-Kantian approach is successful as a historical methodology. In many ways, it is even less accurate than the triumphalist approaches of the Neo-Thomists and the later Neo-Palamites, who at least give careful attention to the metaphysical concepts of their own paradigms. In the end, any accurate metanarrative must recognize theological pluralism and conceptual diversity, because that is an undeniable fact of both history and our present experience. That is the lesson that we should learn from modern philosophy: the map is not the territory. In other words, our descriptions of the things are not the things themselves. From that perspective, we can recognize, contra Neo-Thomism and Neo-Palamism, that no formal synthesis can perfectly describe its object, while still not going to the post-Kantian extreme that the entire idea of metaphysics is theologically inferior to existentialist/personalist philosophy.
We can pursue an alternative to this sort of totalizing discourse about the faith. As prudent Christians, we should take into that systematics will necessarily founder on the mystery of the Trinity, and it is exactly here that the "inaccessible model" that is "the transcendent, simple and total Divine Truth" must prevent a complete doctrinal synthesis. (For that matter, any formal system cannot help but be incomplete according to Gödel, but that limitation is even more acute here.) With respect to affirmations in the context of Trinity, we are necessarily forced to rely on paraconsistent logic, a set of formal affirmations that are subcontrary or, said another way, do not follow Leibniz's law of identity (i.e., that two identical objects are indiscernible). This is simply the case because the assertions that "the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God; the Father is not the Son or the Holy Spirit, the Son is not the Father and the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is not the Father and the Son" are contradictory if we interpret them all according to the same rules. If there are no formal limits on the assertions we make in this context, then the concept of a systematic Trinitarian theology would be reduced to nonsense. Yet in turn, whatever formal limits we employ concerning divine transcendence will typically be axioms that cannot be proved, meaning there will be a necessary theological pluralism as Nicolas suggests. If we do not even give the Fathers the same conceptual space that we would allow for ourselves, it is unlikely that we will understand them. But if we do allow them that space, then pluralism is only to be expected.
But this still leaves the question: how do these totalizing metanarratives, these "historical tropes" in Lewis Ayres's parlance, become so dominant in the field of history? I would say that the same thing has happened with a "Cappadocian victory" paradigm as happened with the de Régnon paradigm. A couple of influential authors reached a certain conclusion, and that conclusion is uncritically accepted by later historians. No one actually checks to see whether the interpretive grid can be derived from the original texts anymore. Then the alien interpretive grid is used to interpret the author's other texts, so that it becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy of what the author will say. Until someone points out that this reading simply makes no sense in the author's context based on the actual texts, the historical trope continues to dictate the interpretation.
Unfortunately, it does not help that two of the most influential Catholic theologians on the filioque, Fr. Yves Congar and Fr. Jean-Miguel Garrigues, both used exactly this methodology. Fr. Thomas Crean in his book Vindicating the Filioque (p. 197) confesses his perplexity at Congar's claim that "for St. Cyril, the Holy Spirit receives his 'hypostatic existence' from the Father alone, but his 'substantial existence' from the Father and the Son." As Crean points out in a footnote, "Congar does not here quote or cite any texts in support of his claim. Likewise, Jean-Miguel Garrigues claims that there are 'innumerable texts' in which Cyril distinguishes ekporeusis and proienai or hyparchein (to exist), but those he quotes in support of this claim do not in fact draw any such distinction, or even use the word ekporeusis." This is how the "Cappadocian victory" narrative gained traction among Catholic theologians even to the point of dominating the 1995 Clarification -- a couple of renowned theologians took it for granted, and it has influenced the exegesis of Latin and Alexandrian authors ever since.
As I will argue, the better alternative is to see a necessary pluralism in systematic theology that applies to Constantinople as well. Then we can then turn to the task of intrepreting the Fathers and hearing what they have to say.
II. The pluralist road to Constantinople
One interpretive challenge is that the Fathers of the Church did not reach the level of systematization that would be called a doctrinal synthesis or a theological school. They were engaged in a much more straightforward task: defending their faith against assertions that it was false or even absurd. That required the use of logic, metaphysics, and epistemology, but the use of those concepts was both practical and Scriptural as opposed to primarily systematic. There is a modern bias against such "polemical" works in a way that privileges the systematic Ivory Tower model of theology, as if the exigencies of conflicts with heretics somehow produced less thoughtful reflections, even though the polemical need was likely the impetus for writing such things at all. It is why works like Augustine's De Trinitate and Gregory of Nyssa's Ad Ablabium are interpreted as supposedly "more reflective" or "mature" and given canonical status over and above their more clearly polemical works, regardless of chronological order.
The fact that the patristic authors had a way of doing theology coherently but not systematically is why, for example, Barnes can bluntly say "Augustine's Trinitarian theology did not survive the Middle Ages" and "when the theology of the 'historical Augustine' is articulated by me or others, there is bafflement about where and how such a theology, or means of doing theology, 'fits.'" It is not so much that there are not Augustinian ideas or that systems built on these ideas cannot be legitimate developments of his thought so much as that those developments are not what Augustine himself had in mind. Barnes describes this process as follows:
There were, undoubtedly, some years after Augustine's death during which theologians worked with the same intellectual concepts at hand; for approximately two centuries after Augustine's death there were Homoian (Arian) bishops in North Africa; sea lanes to southern Europe remained open; and whoever the Western "emperor" was that held jurisdiction over North Africa, he would claim to be "Roman." Over time, each of these would fall away until none were left. The complete text of De Trinitate was replaced by piecemeal quotation -- which for centuries was the only way the text was known. New philosophies and conceptual idioms dominated reading, and a form of exegesis and commentary designed to "read" fragmented texts developed: scholasticism. Through this hermeneutic, "fragmentation" was lost as the disparate remains of previous books were woven into new unities by the emerging European culture of scholasticism, but the sense that something important might be missing was covered over by the intellectual seams that grew stronger as the independent vigor of post-Roman, neo-Latin cultures grew. Thomas and others developed sophisticated and dense literature based upon individual tropes originally found in the textual fragments. Somewhere in all this benign reception the logic and doctrine of Augustine's Trinitarian theology as expressed in his writings was denatured and reinvented as a hermeneutical bridge connecting islands of Augustinian thought otherwise lost or submerged. It is impressive to note that this "Augustinian Trinitarian theology" -- even though a construct -- as in itself strong enough and profound enough to last half a millennium -- and counting.
His footnote goes on:
The Trinitarian theology expressed by Augustine in his books (376-429) was received by a theological culture unable to read them intelligently. A coherent body of thought emerged through the isogenesis of brilliant minds in the Middle Ages; but this coherent body did not derive in any substantial way from the patristic texts. The received theology was projected onto the historical texts as they emerged. Difference between what Augustine "said" in 412 and what he was perceived to have "said" in any text existing in 1412 (or 1912) that were accounted for were glossed over ("existent relations"?) by the scholastics. The theology of scholastic Augustine was received by all sides as the theology of the historical Augustine, and still is today. "Scholastic Augustine" who taught, e.g., a Neoplatonic triad of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, etc., became one of the most enduring straw [men] in history, since, e.g., The Testimony of the Twelve Patriarchs.
Other than to add that I suspect Boethius was in many ways "the first medieval" and the great synthesizer of Augustine's Latin tradition, analogous to Maximus's role in the Byzantine tradition, I completely agree with Barnes. Even viewed collectively, the orthodox Fathers supporting the doctrine of Nicaea cannot even individually, much less collectively, be thought to define one metaphysical school or even a properly doctrinal synthesis, especially since essentially none of the authors themselves were trying to do so. Further, we still have to bear in mind the caution raised by Nicolas that each individual intrepreter brings a slightly different interpretation to the broader school. At best, one might note common logical structures in the theological and polemical arguments, as Barnes does well in his summary of Latin theology and, for that matter, as Maspero does well with Syriac and Cappadocian theology. Yet even relatively loose categories, such as "pro-Nicene" (Lewis Ayres) or "neo-Nicene" and "pro-Nicene" (Barnes), might be more systematic that the texts permit. For example, as Anatolios pointed out in his critique of Ayres, Ayres's criteria would exclude St. Athanasius.
Anatolios himself seems to have been the most successful at identifying these common logical structures, since he has defined the distinction between Nicenes and Arians based on how each school defines the unity of the persons in Retrieving Nicaea.
The essential distinction, from within the common ground of confession of the Trinity as differentiated unity, was whether the divine Trinity was united according to a unity of being, or by unity of will. To say this is not to prejudge the question of just how that unity was conceived; it does not presume, for example, that numerical oneness or equality is a necessary feature of that unity so conceived.
Within Anatolios's broader taxonomy, distinctions of the kind that Ayres and Barnes draw become more reasonable. In other words, if we take the concept of unity of being as primary, then arguments from the concept of physis, one power-one physis, and inseparable operations can be considered various accounts of that kind of unity, which in turn produce these less-than-systematic philosophical schools. My own proposal for analyzing the filioque dispute fits into the broader context of orthodoxy that Anatolios defines. In terms of historical support, this approach finds support in Russell Friedman's tracing of two medieval models of Trinitarian relations back to Aristotelian philosophy that would have been known in the post-Nicene period. Specifically, those models are as follows:
- Relational: The personal properties of the Trinity are inherently relational, based on the fact that every relational property by its nature logically involves opposition, i.e., relating to something else. This is exemplified by Rome and Alexandria and typified by the logical method of Porphyry.
- Emanational: The modes of production are the reasons for relational properties. This is exemplified by Cappadocian theology and typified by the vertical causality of Neoplatonism.
In each case, the model is built on an analogy from knowledge of created things, but the ultimate object of description is, in the words of Nicolas, "the transcendent, simple, and total Divine Truth." So this is precisely the kind of area where we would expect different philosophical schools to develop. One of the most obvious considerations in distinguishing them is the concept of relation: there is a sense in which relation is used to express the distinction between two things (relational), and there is a sense in which relation is used to express the natural connection between them, as offspring to parents (emanational). In the medieval context, this corresponds to the dispute between St. Thomas and St. Bonaventure on whether the Father is Father because He is distinct (relational) or whether the Father establishes the distinction between the Persons because He is Father (emanational). Neither of those senses is false, but in the application of the concept to the Trinity, the relational model emphasizes distinction, and the emanational model emphasizes natural likeness. And as we expect, there is a constellation of real experiences, including liturgical experiences, around which these schools develop.
In that regard, those same emphases can become limitations when each model gives an account of participation in the divine nature -- the relational account is challenged to give an account of likeness in a model built on distinction, and the emanational account is likewise challenged to give an account of distinction in a model based on divine likeness. Both models end up relying on the categories of activity and power vis-à-vis creation, but in fundamentally different ways. The relational model will emphasize immediacy and immanence of activity -- that all created being images the activity of the shared power of the divine nature, but to a finite degree in accordance with the respective finite natures being mixed with non-being. Thus, the account of participation is based on the participation of an effect in its cause. The emanational model will emphasize energeiai, characteristic modes of divine activity that are participable by finite natures and united in their distinction within God. Note that, even here, the distinction between the models is one of emphasis, since created activity in likeness to divine activity is common to both the relational and the emanational models. But the relational mode is focused on the act of being itself (esse), while the emanational model is focused on the diverse ways of being. (This prefigures the much-later distinction between Thomist analogia entis and the Scotist formal distinction.)
This general recognition of theological pluralism in the period between Nicaea and Constantinople, of which my own theory is only one isolated example, is the most profound and productive historiographical achievement of the last fifty years. It rivals St. John Henry Newman's recognition that the "Arian" name covered a large and diverse span of theological and philosophical positions. Numerous similarly pluralist positions have been widely accepted as successful. For example, Grillmeier's Logos-sarx and Logos-anthropos models have held up relatively well under critical scrutiny. Norman Russell's magisterial work on deification shows that the later Alexandrian views of Athanasius and Cyril, which he called Alexandrian Tradition II, are very different from the Cappadocian model. Yet despite this recognition of pluralism in various other areas, on the specific subject of the filioque, the sides remain unrepentantly retrograde. It is unclear how groups with such distinct understandings of Christology and soteriology would somehow converge around a single Trinitarian pneumatology, yet this is the prevailing theory.
It is particularly inconvenient for this theory that quarreling over the "right" philosophical position dates back to the post-Nicene/pre-Constantinopolitan era. For example, St. Athanasius was better able to relate to the semi-modalism of Marcellus of Ancyra while St. Basil had more in common with the homoiousians, which was a point of conflict over their respective models. The disagreement on philosophical matters came to a head between Pope Damasus and Basil, as it is described by Barnes:
In his letters to Basil, Damasus is vehement that a Trinitarian formula of one ousia, three hypostases, is unacceptable to Westerners. It is, however, Damasus' positive statements that are my concern here, although he articulates only two of the basic themes I have been following. The first is his use of power language to identify and describe the basis of unity in the Trinity. Typical of his formulae are, "the Trinity of one power, one majesty, one divinity, and substance so that their power is inseparable" and "[the] Father, Son and Holy Spirit are of one deity, one power, one figure, and one substance." Note the relative lack of emphasis on "one substance" -- that the conclusion of Damasus' first list is a statement that the power among the Three is inseparable. This is not a Trinitarian theology that pivots on the notion of substance.
This provides the background of Barnes's summary of Constantinople:
It is said that the letter from the Council in Constantinople in 382 written to Damasus and Western bishops was "intended to be compatible with Western statements" [citing Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy]. The doctrinal summary begins with: "according to ... [our] faith there is one Godhead [theotes], Power [dunamis], and essence [ousia] of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit; the dignity being equal, and the majesty being equal in three perfect hypostases, i.e., three perfect prosopa." Notice that power is mentioned before essence. All Western Nicenes used a Latin word similar in meaning to theotes to speak about the unity of the Trinity (e.g., deitas, divinitas), but there is little that they could argue from it. Many Western Nicenes used the Latin equivalents of dunamis to speak about the unity of the Trinity and to argue for it, and some used it to argue for the unity of the Trinity. The letter equates hypostases with prosopa, implicitly allowing that either could be used. If the letters of Damasus to Basil and the Eastern bishops are accurate, then that Greek party's refusal to allow any word but hypostasis for the formula "three what?" ended with Basil's death or the council in 381. Damasus and Latin theologies of "one power, three persons" won.
This is not to say that Damasus "won" in the sense that the Latin view became the standard of orthodoxy as against the Greek view. What won is the idea that multiple schools of thought could coexist within the sphere of orthodoxy, a lesson that is repeatedly forgotten and relearned in Christian history. Along those lines, Nathaniel McCallum, at around the 21:00 mark, explains that even the Constantinopolitan creed itself at least textually appears to be based on a recension of the creed of Nicaea I made by St. Epiphanius to try to build consensus among the pro-Nicene faction. Specifically, Epiphanius is trying to reconcile Nicaea with St. Cyril of Jerusalem's local creed, the latter of which ends up being the textual basis of Epiphanius's own version. In order to minimize conflict, that version essentially just adds homoousios to the Jerusalem creed, and this irenic overture seems to have been the basis of union in Constantinople. This is perfectly in line with the theological pluralist view, which I believe to be the credible account of the facts as they actually are.
I want to highly several points that McCallum makes that are directly relevant to theological pluralism in the context of the filioque. First, Damasus's own creed, based on the best available textual evidence, included the filioque explicitly as early as 377, so that the pluralism between Damasus and Basil by concerning Constantinople is directly relevant to pluralism on the filioque. Second, as I mentioned before, the final language of the Creed of Constantinople changed the language para tou Patros ekporeuetai (John 15:26) to replace para with ek. The Johannine source of that preposition is Rev. 22:1: ekporeumenon ek tou thronou tou Theou kai tou Arniou (proceeds from (out of) the throne of God and the Lamb). (We will see that the use of ek in the context of the Spirit proceeding from the Son is characteristic of the relational model.) Third, the Cappadocians and the Antiochene theologians more broadly are lukewarm to this Johannine tradition and even the Johannine authorship of Revelation, preferring to rely on Paul's "Spirit of God" and the Old Testament in their own pneumatology. All of this means that the text of Constantinople is much more likely evidence of a compromise between multiple theological traditions than a victory for the Cappadocian paradigm.
We have arrived at the crossroads of the entire filioque debate, and that crossroads is similar to the one that faced in Barnes's seminal article "De Régnon Reconsidered" (reproduced as a chapter in in Augustine and Nicene Theology). There is, on the one hand, a theory that everyone seems to take for granted but has scant support in the texts of the authors. On the other hand, when the works of these authors are considered holistically and in context, a coherent picture emerges from each that simply does not fit within the broader metanarrative. And just as the West was caricatured as a result of the de Régnon paradigm, the Alexandrian theologians have repeatedly been treated only as less-consistent Cappadocians. Maspero is certainly among those holding that view based on his read of both Athanasius and Cyril, but when the Alexandrian conceptual framework is examined in the texts themselves, an entirely different picture emerges.
III. Theological pluralism: a case study in Alexandria
Perhaps no theological tradition has been abused by the revisionist history of "Cappadocian victory" than that of Alexandria. Even historians more sensitive to historical diversity, such as Lewis Ayres, have not entirely overcome the tendency to see Athanasius as a waystation on the way to later Trinitarian theology, as opposed to the source of a fully-developed pneumatology in its own right. But this underrates the coherence of Athanasius's contribution.
Maspero's theory actually dates back to his earlier chapter in Rethinking Trinitarian Theology; he believes that an objection raised by the "Tropici" (a name Athanasius gives to a group denying the divinity of the Holy Spirit) has merit. The Tropici assert that if the Spirit related to the Son in the same way that the Son relates to the Father, a theme that Athanasius often uses in referring to the Spirit as the "image of the Son," it would make the Spirit a grandson. The reason that Maspero thinks that this objection has force is that he situates Athanasius within the Origenist philosophical paradigm of the Cappadocians rather than locating Athanasius's own philosophical paradigm. That error is fatal to the accuracy of his theory, since Athanasius has already dealt with the issue in the context of his own theological system.
To begin, Maspero follows Simonetti's account of Origen as showing a tension between two models of Trinitarian causality: the vertical (Platonic) and the triangular (Semitic).
The vertical model involves Origen's Middle Platonist notion of the hierarchy of being. Maspero believes that Athanasius's notion of physis did important work in separating the divine nature from the Platonic "great chain of being," but it was still based on a vertical model without the balancing "tension" of the triangular model. This allegedly made Athanasius's account vulnerable to the charge of making the Spirit into a grandchild, and it was only the Cappadocians, especially Gregory of Nyssa, who fully incorporated the idea of relation from the triangular model. In particular, according to Maspero, the Cappadocians introduced the concept of relations from the triangular model into the very being (substance) of God and used the hypostatic personal properties to distinguish those relations. It should be easy to see at this point that this account fits well into the emanational model that Friedman describes, and I cannot fault Maspero's description of how the Cappadocians developed that model. Yet Maspero's overemphasis on the post-Kantian categories of "person" and "relation" causes him to disproportionately weight the accomplishments of this model as the very definition of Constantinopolitan pneumatology.
In particular, the application of this model beyond the Cappadocian school is based on Maspero's inexplicable failure to account for two significant facts: (1) the Alexandrian and Latin theologians rejected the idea of vertical causality within the Trinity outright, thus completely avoiding this problematic Origenist dynamic, and (2) the Alexandrian and Latin use of relation (especially the image-prototype relation) was not the Platonic Origenist version. Maspero's view ends up being nothing but the "Cappadocian victory" paradigm at work, and a careful study of the Alexandrian theologians shows the inaccuracy of the narrative.
A. Antecedents: Irenaeus of Lyons
There is a general sense that Athanasius either read Irenaeus or was at least indirectly influenced by his work. In any case, Anatolios has convincingly shown the conceptual similarity between the two, so there is clear evidence of some kind of common tradition with Athanasius even apart from a direct or indirect influence. Especially given Irenaeus's connection to St. John the Theologian and the Johannine corpus, it is unquestionable that Irenaeus was influential for the reception of the Johannine Scriptures, especially along the Roman-Alexandrian axis. So as a matter of historical context, Irenaeus is essential.
Two of Barnes's students wrote dissertations on Irenaeus's Trinitarian theology: Anthony Briggman (published as
Irenaeus of Lyons and the Theology of the Holy Spirit) and Jackson Lashier (
The Trinitarian Theology of Irenaeus of Lyons later
published as
Irenaeus on the Trinity). Both contribute to the most relevant part of the history for our purposes, which is Irenaeus's interaction with Theophilus of Antioch that leads to his "two hands" theology. Briggman makes out the case that Irenaeus likely became acquainted with Theophilus's work during the composition of
Adversus Haereses, after he moved away from Asia Minor. Lashier points out that this is plausible given the commerce between Antioch and Lyons.
Ireneaus develops a finely-woven conceptual structure for his pneumatology that includes three key elements:
1. The Spirit is a co-Creator based on Psalm 33/2:6 and therefore a divine co-actor.
2. The creation of man by God is "hands on" in a unique way, with the Son and the Spirit (the two hands) providing intimate contact between the divine nature and the human clay (plasma). This is why man is uniquely suited for deification, an extension of this creative act.
3. The Spirit has a unique role of perfecting or completing creation (sometimes described with "adorning" or similar terms).
Ireneaus's pneumatology involves a strong identification of the Holy Spirit with Sophia in the Old Testament, in like fashion to the identification of the Son with the Logos. He also used the potter-clay image of creation in Scripture (probably from Justin Martyr, as Briggman argues), but the subsequent use of the "two hands" imagery bringing these concepts together seems to have come from Theophilus, and this is what Irenaeus incorporates into his own anti-Gnostic argument. For Ireneaus, the "two hands" are used in an anti-subordinationist fashion to show unity; the work of the hands is the work of the whole potter (in this case, the whole Trinity acting as one, the one Creator God) in intimate contact with the clay. It is that intimacy and immediacy in the process of material creation that uniquely characterizes humankind as an object of deification and recapitulation; there is no mediation between God and man but only the direct contact of the One God with creation. Any kind of mediation, including any sort of graded hierarchy between the potter and his own hands, would defeat the logical structure of the argument, especially against the Gnostics. This is a God who gets His hands dirty in the work of material creation in a very real sense.
Here we have to think of Irenaeus's anti-Gnostic context. He sees very early on that any mediator between God and creation, whether the Son or the Spirit, is immediately problematic. This is why he is focused on the agency of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit in creation, the "let us" of Genesis 1:26, because any hint of passivity will open the door to the Gnostic hierarchy of aeons. For Irenaeus, the Creator requires three co-equal divine agents united in one divine simplicity without gap or separation and dependent on nothing outside of God. This is why, as Briggman describes, Irenaeus identifies the Holy Spirit with the "Sophia of God" in his conflict with the "sapientia of [the Gnostic] Valentinus." Irenaeus makes this identification despite the potential complications with St. Paul (1 Cor. 1:24 -- "Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God") and despite the sharp distinction with the prevailing Logos theology of the time and the resulting Spirit Christology. Among Christian writers, probably due to the influence of the Pauline language, only Theophilus seems to have expressly equated the person of the Spirit with Sophia, likely drawing from a common Jewish Sophia tradition more frequently associated with the Son (see Briggman at p. 128). For Irenaeus's purposes, it is enough to confirm his approach to see Theophilus bringing the potter-clay and Spirit-Sophia concepts together in this image of the two hands, even though Theophilus is not actually using the image in the same way as Irenaeus. That is the conceptual connection that Irenaeus needs to complete his anti-Gnostic argument.
Briggman's summary of that synthesis at p. 146-47 is apt:
The importance of the identification of the Spirit as one of the Hands of God and as Wisdom in Irenaeus' theology of the Spirit cannot be overestimated. Each of these titles entails the creative activity of the Spirit, the divinity of Spirit, and the distinction and equality of the Spirit in relation to the Son. The attribution of creative activity to the Holy Spirit is the most foundational and significant aspect of Irenaeus' pneumatology.
The identification of the Spirit as a Hand and as Wisdom reveals the Jewish character of Irenaeus' pneumatology. It also shows that he adapts and develops the traditions he adopts to his own purposes. In the case of his identification of the Spirit as Wisdom the adaptation of the tradition involves Greek philosophical concepts. The utilization of these traditions by Irenaeus goes far toward showing his theology of the Spirit to be the most complex Jewish-Christian pneumatology of the period.
We can also see this as a very early example of Christian pluralism in pneumatology. First, we can consider Theophilus's own sources for this Jewish "two hands" image, as reported by Briggman:
Whatever particular source Theophilus depended upon, his location in Antioch also suggests one that came from Asia Minor. Additional support for a tradition in Asia Minor may be found in Robinson's observation that the hands imagery is also found in the Clementine Homilies, whose date is unclear but whose provenance seems to be in the East, perhaps even Syria. Both Sirach and 4 Ezra, which contain the Hands motif or similar language, further substantiate the presence and receptivity of the tradition in the East, and their subsequent translation into Syriac shows a continuing presence in Asia Minor. All this being said, the presence of the Hands tradition in Asia Minor does not preclude its existence elsewhere, as is evident from its presence in the First Epistle of Clement 33.4, but neither do I desire to make such an argument. I am content, at this point, to show that the possibility of a source from Asia Minor is not without foundation and that it is also possible that Theophilus' source was Jewish.
But as Lashier points out, there is a difference in kind between how this Jewish dyad of Son and Spirit, the Semitic triangular model that Maspero has found, is appropriated in Irenaeus. Although there is no subordination between Son and Spirit in the triangular model, as there is in the linear/Middle Platonic model, there is still subordination between the Father and the Son-Spirit dyad. This subordination is reflected in the fact that the Holy Spirit's role with respect to creation ends up being diminished with respect to the Father and the Son, including in Theophilus. Lashier thus describes Irenaeus's conceptual innovation over the Apologists (including Theophilus) as follows:
The Trinitarian formula resulting from the retroactive alteration of the binitarian argument of [Adv.] Haer. 2 is quite advanced from the ontologically subordinate hierarchy witnessed in the Apologists' formulas. Unlike his sources, Irenaeus does not rank the three divine entities in descending order. In fact the argument of [Adv.] Haer. 2 indicts Valentinian theology on just this count for this understanding would render the divine nature compound and therefore comprised of gradated and spatially separated divine beings. Rather, in Irenaeus' formula, the Logos/Son and Sophia/Spirit exist in a reciprocally immanent relationship with the Father and with one another, such that the same divine nature encompasses all three entities. The one divinity, or the one spiritual nature that comprises all three entities, makes Father, Son, and Spirit one.
Irenaeus' emphasis on the equality of divinity of the Father, Son, and Spirit explains, in part, his reluctance to address the respective generations of the Second and Third Persons from God. For the Apologists, the generation of the Second and Third Persons served as the basis for their lesser, subordinate divine natures insofar as their generations displayed a temporal beginning to their personal existences. Therefore, in the Apologists' understanding, only the Father was eternally personal and equated with the God of Israel.
...
For Irenaeus, the Logos/Son and the Sophia/Spirit are included in the uncreated nature of God/Father because they are eternal. While Irenaeus also believes that the Son and Spirit are generated from the Father, his removal of the time element from this generation allows him to maintain the Son and Spirit's eternal natures. Therefore, Irenaeus remains a monotheist insofar as all three entities are equally God and share one divine, spiritual nature. As Barnes has observed, Irenaeus does not have a category by which to identify the separate existence of the Son and Spirit. Irenaeus believes Father, Son, and Spirit are distinguished, as indicated by the differing roles they play in the economy, but he is much more interested in their unity, such that he fails to develop a separate category approximating "person."
Lashier further explains Irenaeus's understanding of divine production as follows:
Although he says little directly regarding the generations because of Scripture's silence on the matter, his polemical argument against the Valentinian theory of emanation reveals his understanding of generation as dictated by the spiritual and eternal unity he envisions among God/Father, Logos/Son, and Sophia/Spirit. First, he removes any time element in the process. Although Logos/Son and Sophia/Spirit are generated from God/Father, this generation does not result in a beginning point to their existence. As Logos and as Spirit, they are always with God in a spiritual unity and in agreement with a simple divine nature. Second, he removes any spatial connotations in the process. Although Logos/Son and Sophia/Spirit are generated from God/Father, they do not separate from him or come out of him. They remain in a spiritual and interpenetrating unity with God at all times, even when the Son is incarnate upon earth.
Irenaeus's Logos-Sophia Triadology, with its the "interpenetrating unity" that Lashier calls "reciprocal immanence," already provides the logical structure of the relational model. This conceptual structure is present even though Irenaeus does not articulate a metaphysics of relation or the aetiology of the Persons (or even that they are Persons) in a systematic way. The model centers around three distinct divine agents performing uniquely divine acts (creation, deification) in a reciprocally immanent way that shows their unity as One God. This reciprocal immanence in the economy corresponds to an eternal relational structure in God, who is ontologically distinct from creation. Irenaeus has rejected the emanational model as inherently subordinationist; there is simply no way that Irenaeus can be reconciled with that model. Lashier describes Irenaeus's model of economic action as follows:
Irenaeus further argues for the eternal distinction of God/Father, Logos/Son, and Sophia/Spirit by their distinctive economic functions. Only God/Father is the source of the work; only Logos/Son establishes or brings the work into existence; only Sophia/Spirit arranges or forms that work. ... The result is a functional hierarchy -- God/Father is the source of the work and the two agents perform that work -- that assumes a prior spiritual or ontological unity. To put this understanding in modern Trinitarian terms, for Irenaeus, the economic manifestation of the Trinity depends on the reality of an immanent Trinity, which exists from eternity regardless of the presence of creation.
Irenaeus' theology thus may be considered Trinitarian in the full sense of the word. He believes in the existence of three divine and eternally distinct beings, named God/Father, logos/Son, and Sophia/Spirit. He accounts for both their eternal unity through a common possession of one spiritual nature and their eternal distinction through the generation of the Son and Spirit from the Father and through their different functions in the economy. In Irenaeus' understanding, the two agents' equal divinity with the Father allows them to perform these economic functions.
Irenaeus's Trinitarian theology thus anticipates both the logical structure of relational model and the model's incompatibility with the emanational model, rejecting any kind of realist analogy to production. Moreover, his use of "source" here as the source of the Persons having spirit/power is exactly how the monarchy of the Father appears in the relational model, which is compatible with the throne as the "source" of the river in Rev. 22:1 that proceeds from the throne and the Lamb. This can be contrasted with the emanational model's view of the Father as the source of productions of Persons. Irenaeus here has in mind a source of "spirit," which instead connotes divine power and substance, although it is also the reason for the Persons' existence.
Unfortunately, Irenaeus's explicit Trinitarian model was lost to history within only a generation, contributing to later confusion. Briggman (p. 205) says the following:
By the time he finished writing, then, Irenaeus had constructed the most complex Jewish-Christian pneumatology of the early Church. The difference that we have seen between his account of the Spirit and the one offered by Justin is an example of the first pneumatological transition that occurred in Christian theology during the second and third centuries. A rudimentary account of the Spirit gave way to a sophisticated pneumatology. The second transition that occurred during this period is marked by the loss of several Jewish traditions that were constituent and critical elements of Irenaeus' theology of the Spirit. The sophisticated pneumatology of Irenaeus gave way to a more rudimentary account of the Spirit. How and why this regression occurred merits further investigation. I will finish this study with a few brief comments which I hope will be a slight contribution to further explorations along these lines.
Theologians of the third and early-fourth centuries no longer identified the Holy Spirit as Wisdom, as one of the Hands of God, or as the Creator. The absence of these themes in Irenaeus' successors should be seen as contributing to the frequent devaluation of the Spirit in their writings, for they no longer had recourse to significant ways of ascribing distinction, equality, eternality, and divinity to the Holy Spirit. The writings of Origen and Tertullian, one generation after Irenaeus, and the works of Novatian, two generations later, illustrate the pneumatological changes that occurred during this period.
Given the relevance to Maspero's use of Origen, we should carefully attend to Briggman's observations (pp. 207-08) about Origen:
[The] restriction of the work of the Holy Spirit to the Church alone, in contrast to the activity of the Father and the Son toward all creation, corresponds to the subordination of the Spirit to the Father and the Son. ... The limitation of the Holy Spirit's activity relative to that of the Father and that of the Son is based upon the lower status of the Spirit's being relative to that of the Father and that of the Son. As a result, the fact that Origen withholds creative activity from the Spirit reveals the inferiority of the Spirit relative to the Father and the Son. Indeed, Origen's refusal to ascribe creative activity to the Spirit clears the way for him to regard the Holy Spirit to be the first among the creatures created by the Word.
Origen's use of the Semitic triangular model thus uses the older subordinationist understanding exemplified by Theophilus and shows no signs of Irenaeus's anti-subordinationist developments. Much of the subsequent explanatory work for the emanational account was directed to finding an alternative solution to the problem that Irenaeus had already solved in his own way. We will even see St. Basil employ the concept of Spirit as "perfecting cause" in the Origenist sense, despite recognizing the personhood and (lesser) divinity of the Spirit. Maspero has correctly identified the work that Gregory of Nyssa did to try to compensate for this subordinationist tendency. But Maspero is also, at least by all appearances, oblivious to the fact that Irenaeus had already created his own alternative paradigm.
In any case, no one after Irenaeus used the combination of Word-Sophia and "two hands" imagery to establish a Trinitarian theology. The loss of this theory had significant consequences for the following centuries. The ignorance of Irenaeus's warning about subordinationism contributed (via Origen) to the development of a new subordinationism: Arianism. Following that development, there was a need to answer a more sophisticated account of the Demiurge and the polemical use of 1 Cor. 1:24 to show the inferiority of Christ, so it became important to identify the Son (rather than the Spirit) with the divine Wisdom. Moreover, because Arianism affirmed the Logos as Demiurge, merely showing the power of creation, which was the primary purpose of Irenaeus's model, was no longer sufficient to show the full divinity of the divine Persons. For these reasons, the model of Irenaeus would no longer have been suitable in its original form.
But it was not a complete loss. There were still elements of Irenaean theology that ended up contributing to later syntheses. For example, Barnes notes the following about a possible stude nt of Irenaeus, Hippolytus of Rome:
"By means of the works," Tertullian says, "the Father will be in the Son and the Son in the Father ... and thus by means of the works [opera] we understand that the Father and the Son are one ... [thus] we should believe that there are two [Persons], but in one power." I think that the anti-monarchian polemical exegesis of John 14:9-10 by Tertullian and Hippolytus is the first time in which a common power, common works theology is articulated in Christian Trinitarian theology, ever.
In The Power of God, Barnes also quotes Hippolytus as saying that "in terms of the economy the display [of the Power] is triple." One could not more succinctly summarize what Lashier calls "reciprocal immanence" in Irenaeus; the "triple" power fits with the functional hierarchy that Irenaeus describes. Hippolytus likewise reasons from economic exercise of divine power to eternal immanent relations in the one divine power (the One God), and the reasoning is in this case fully Trinitarian. So even though Hippolytus lacks any detailed explanation of the Spirit, the Trinitarian structure is there, and it certainly could have come from Irenaeus.
This coordinate exegesis of John 14:9-11 and John 10:30, 37-38 ends up being a mainstay of Latin Trinitarian theology, with the preposition "in" becoming a synonym for this reciprocal immanence. Even though the expressly pneumatological aspects of Irenaeus's model have been pushed to the side in the face of the need to establish the divinity and personhood of the Son, the logical structure is still there to recreate it. In fact, when the need for such a pneumatology arises, that is exactly what happens with St. Nicetas, whom Barnes credits with "first articulat[ing] a Latin theology of the Holy Spirit that fully redresses the limitations of pneumatology since Tertullian" (~370s). From Briggman (p. 215):
The theology of the Holy Spirit remained weak until the Church once again found a way to define and affirm key features once present in the pneumatology of Irenaeus but subsequently absent in those of the third and early fourth centuries. One way was the reaffirmation of creative activity to the Spirit. Toward the end of the fourth century Nicetas of Remesiana preached a sermon on the Holy Spirit that could almost have been taken from Irenaeus:
"We may now turn to the other powers and works of the Holy Spirit. These will help us to realize His nature and greatness. It is only by their works that we know the Father and the Son -- 'believe the works' [John 10:38], said the Lord. In the same way, we shall not fully know the nature of the Holy Spirit unless we know how wonderful are His works... What kind of faith would it be to believe that man's sanctification and redemption depended on the Holy Spirit, but that his formation did not? ... Remember what the Prophet David said of our creation: 'By the word of the Lord the heavens were established, and all the power of them by the spirit of his mouth' [Ps. 33:6]. By the 'word' we must here understand the Son, through whom, as St. John declares, 'all things were made' [John 1:3]. And what is 'the spirit of his mouth' if not the Spirit whom we believe to be Holy? Thus, in one text, you have the Lord, the Word of the Lord and the Holy Spirit making the full mystery of the Trinity.... [I]t adds to the glory of the Father to refer the creation of all things to a Word of which He is the Father or to a Spirit of which He is the source. The fact remains that when His Word and Spirit create, it is He who creates all things. The Trinity, then, creates."
I believe the Alexandrians (Athanasius, Didymus, and Cyril, not Origen and Clement) were even more faithful to Irenaeus's model than the Latins were, adding to it the later concepts of nature and person. Specifically, they preserved the focus on the special account of the creation of man and its obverse, deification/recapitulation, as opposed to the more general "works" of John 10 and 14, and the divine activity is viewed explicitly in terms of reciprocal immanence. They also retain Irenaeus's strong version of the Creator/creature divide and the resulting anti-subordinationist understanding of the Father's monarchy. This Irenaean legacy also distinguishes the later Alexandrian model from the older triangular model associated with Origen. And as the Latins did, the Alexandrians will fill in the missing concept of "person" (in place of "agent") and "nature" (in place of "spirit") in Irenaeus's model, while preserving the fundamental relational structure.
B. The contemporary: Didymus the Blind
In considering Maspero's position, we turn first to Athanasius's contemporary Didymus. Especially with the Irenaean context, Didymus demonstrates that Alexandrian theology did not use Origen's Platonic understanding of participation (metaxy) between the Trinitarian Persons, at least not without significant modification. Kellen Plaxco, another student of Barnes, wrote a dissertation
Didymus the Blind, Origen, and the Trinity that traces the radical break in Alexandrian theology between Origen and Didymus, exemplifying the view which proved enormously influential for both Alexandrian and Roman theology. This Alexandrian-Roman school is precisely where I attribute the origin of the relational model. In providing the background for his exposition of Didymus, Plaxco includes a warning that could have been written word-for-word about Maspero's use of the "Cappadocian victory" paradigm:
As I have mentioned, features attributed to "pro-Nicene" theologians are all evident in writings that date from the 370s and later. Their appearance in On the Holy Spirit has enabled the presumption that Didymus did not compose On the Holy Spirit earlier than the eve of the triumph of pro-Nicene theology ensconced in the Creed of Constantinople, 381. However, that presumption rests on another, namely, that the "Cappadocians" possessed unprecedented genius. But the Cappadocians did not develop their own theological positions in a vacuum, and the premise that any theology resembling theirs must have derived from theirs, is not sound methodologically. Such working assumptions have resulted in Didymus' a priori exclusion from influential treatments of doctrinal development in the fourth century.
As Plaxco points out, the influence was likely from Didymus to the Cappadocians, not vice versa, especially since St. Gregory Nazianzen may well have met Didymus in person before giving his orations. With respect to the other Cappadocians, Mark DelCogliano's 2010 article "Basil of Caesarea, Didymus the Blind, and the Anti-Pneumatomachian Exegesis of Amos 4:13 and John 1:3" points out that Basil's anti-Pneutmatomachian exegesis of Amos 4:13 follows Didymus's approach in On the Holy Spirit rather than that of Athanasius's Ad Serapion, which has historically been misattributed as the source of both works. More likely is that Ad Serapion and On the Holy Spirit were both written contemporaneously around 360 in response to the same challenge of the "Tropici" that Maspero describes above. This missing link between Didymus and later theology, resulting significantly from the destruction of his Greek works due to his unjust condemnation as a Origenist, has contributed to the blind spot of historians with respect to the Alexandrian-Roman school.
Plaxco's conclusion effectively responds to Maspero's assertions concerning the alleged Origenist background of Alexandrian theology:
In this study I have argued two points. The first regards the consequences of "participation" for Origen's theology and pneumatology; the second concerns the nature of Didymus's "correction" of such dynamics for a new period in Christian theological development. These two points, taken together, trace a shift from Origen to Didymus. With Origen, it is possible to believe that the Holy Spirit "participates in" the Son, and that the Son "participates in" the Father. With Didymus, no member of the Trinity "participates in" any other; instead, all created beings "participate in" the Trinity as a unified divine cause.
As Plaxco makes out in detail, one of those rejections is Didymus's rejection of Origen's "graded hierarchy" (Maspero's linear model), and in particular, the rejection of Origen's notion of "image" taken from the Platonist Numenius. Numenius calls the Demiurge an "image" of the "First God" (essentially see as Aristotle's first mover, self-thinking thought), which the Second God images by "imitation" in terms of actualizing what the First God is thinking. The Second God receives the divine nature as a torch passing a flame, being a kind of divine being, but the operations of the First and Second God with this divine nature are distinct. In addition to locating Numenius as the source of Origen's understanding, Plaxco notes the use of the same concept in the anti-monarchian works of Novatian and Clement. The major transition from these anti-monarchian antecedents to later Trinitarian orthodoxy is the shift from imitating the activities of the Father to having the very same power as the Father, where that divine power serves as the delineation between divinity and creation. That corresponds to Anatolios's distinction between unity of will and unity of being, so the transition that Didymus is a broadly Nicene move (following a similar trajectory in Irenaeus). By contrast, the various Arian sects were actually the "conservative" inheritors of Origen's theory, although what they actually inherited was the inherent tension between this Hellenic model and the loving Creator of the New Testament.
This tension with the Greek philiosophy was an important impetus for the Trinitarian development; Christians all realized that, to some degree or another, a choice needed to be made between Athens (the graded hierarchy of vertical causality) and Jerusalem in order to save both. But in that development of an alternative philosophical account to Hellenism, theological pluralism arose almost immediately between the Western and Eastern halves of the Empire. The East of the Cappadocians was more strongly influenced by the Origenist solution (through Gregory Thaumaturgus) harmonized with the Syriac liturgical traditions, while the West was more eclectic both in philosophy and liturgy with a generally Roman background, primarily Stoic, Ciceronian, and Porphyrian. And behind those divisions was an underlying pluralism in the reception of the Jewish tradition with Irenaeus in the West and Theophilus in the East.
Maspero misses this pluralism completely, as far as I can tell, but it is fascinating that he very nearly hits it in his discussion of Origen's exegesis. Specifically, Origen was taking an allegorical interpretation of the two olive trees of Zechariah 4:3 as explicitly teaching the triangular model. The following is Maspero's only mention of Didymus in his entire book, and he says more than he knows here:
In his commentary on [the two olive trees of] Zechariah, Didymus reveals his awareness of this exegesis of Origen but interprets it in terms of theological "notions of the son and of the Spirit" (oi peri Yiou kai hagiou Pneumatos eisin logoi). For this he cites the authority of the church of Alexandria, probably referring to Athanasius. The semantic shift is evident as is Didymus's intention to avoid any possible misunderstanding regarding the divine nature of the Son and the Spirit by moving from the level of being to that of language.
Maspero presumably sees this as an example of how the Alexandrians missed the balancing effect of the (Semitic) triangular model, but quite the opposite is the case. Origen is following Theophilus's interpretation of the Son-Spirit dyad, which is subordinationist, and Didymus is following the anti-subordinationist approach (probably from Irenaeus). Didymus's exegesis is also grounded in the Johannine and Hebrew use of apocalyptic to express divine things symbolically but as they actually are (my thanks to Nathaniel McCallum for pointing this out). This is also a mature work of Didymus, one written years after the Council of Constantinople that cites the authority of Athanasius, and it is clear evidence of how Didymus and Athanasius have broken from Origen in favor of the Irenaean and Johannine theology. This unambiguously demonstrates theological pluralism.
This holds for Athanasius as well. Plaxco notes that Athanasius had already interpreted Zechariah 4:5 in his pneumatological work Ad Serapion. While Didymus does not interpret that passage identically, there is no doubt that Didymus has his own similar views in mind when offering a counter-exegesis to Origen here, since both of them take a more abstract and less "realistic" interpretation. Maspero's assertion that Didymus is "moving from the level of being to that of language" is based on the Kantian dichotomy between phenomena and noumena, not anything that can be found in Didymus. Didymus's move is conceptual; he is taking the anti-subordinationist reading of the passage.
In remarking on this passage from Zechariah, Maspero has completely missed that this reflects two Scriptural traditions on Zechariah. As Nathaniel McCallum pointed out in his discussion on the filioque, there is an intimate connection between Revelation and Zechariah as apocalyptic literature that was extremely influential in the Johannine tradition. Maspero recognizes the Syriac reception of Zechariah as part of an overall dyad tradition, which fits well with the Cappadocian model, but ignores the Johannine tradition connecting Zechariah to Revelation. This is yet another example of simply ignoring the theological pluralism that went into Constantinople in service of the "Cappadocian victory" interpretation.
At the conceptual level, Didymus shows a conscious rejection of the philosophical model on which Origen's exegesis is based, which shows the distinctive Alexandrian-Nicene theology in its full development. It is not a question of moving from the level of being to language but rather a move between two conceptual models, mirroring the conceptual shift on the Son-Spirit dyad from Theophilus to Irenaeus. Note that, based on Didymus's counter-exegesis of Zechariah, Origen's triangular model was considered just as subordinationist in Didymus's eyes as the so-called "linear" model. For Didymus, this subordinationism would break the immanent relational structure and the creature-Creator distinction on which his argument for consubstantiality is based. Theredore, the problem Didymus has with Origen was not the conflict of linear versus triangular, but rather Origen's subordinationist interpretation of the Father's monarchy in both models. The Alexandrian-Roman and Cappadocian schools oriented themselves around two very different ways to address the problem of subordinationism. Unlike the Cappacodian model, Didymus is following his Irenaean and Johannine tradition on this point, having in mind an immanent relational structure for the Trinity like Rev. 22:1 and using that relational structure to interpret Zechariah.
Referring back to my previous article on causality, the conceptual distinction Didymus is raising here corresponds to the metaphysically thin and metaphysically thick accounts of the relational and emanational models. Origen is reading these kinds of images as strong affirmations of the Father's uniqueness (the lampstand as compared to the olive trees), taking the created analogies more literally. This is similar to how the emanational model takes the analogy to creaturely production more literally. Didymus's response is more abstract relative to the created analogy; it is at the level of logoi, concepts. There is no way (or need) for Didymus to integrate the linear and triangular models in his own logical model, because his model is already built on a concept of relations that do not involve subordination.
The difference in principles from a philosophical perspective can be traced to the radical divine transcendence around which the relational account is built. The metaphysically thin analogy reflects that the inner-Trinitarian relations are on the other side of the Creator-creature divide, so that we can glean only very basic logical connections from the divine activities in creation, which are "causal" only by remote analogy. We are operating in the heavenly realm of the apocalyptic: the things that we can say only with symbols. By contrast, the metaphysically thick account of the emanational model presumes more qualitative knowledge based on the Scriptural terms used, much like Origen's use of the Semitic models. Maspero misses the difference between these theological models entirely.
In terms of distinguishing Didymus's use of relations from the modernist thinking of Maspero and Coakley, which sees "hierarchy" everywhere, one of the key hierarchy-breaking features that Didymus uses is the concept of servility. Much of the subordination in Origen's model is not only vertical causality but also the idea that the prior levels in the hierarchy dictate the obedience of the lower levels, which is the origin of the Arian "unity of will" approach. Coakley's feminist rereading of the fiilioque casts the relational model as entailing "hierarchy" in the Trinity, while Maspero sees in the (medieval) filioque the residuum of vertical causality, both of which implicitly assume the Arian account of relations. But the relational model was actually used by Didymus to show equality of power; it was explicitly non-hierarchical in divine being and based on "reciprocal immanence" in the manner used by Irenaeus.
In Didymus's version of the relational model, which by this time explicitly includes inseparable operations, the Son and the Spirit doing the same thing as the Father did not make them servants of the Father bur rather showed them to be God themselves, eliminating any suggestion of hierarchy between the Persons. Plaxco gives an excellent explanation of how Didymus denies servility of the Spirit, distinguishing himself from Origen's hierarchical account. I say confidently that this is the relational model in action because the conceptual move to show identity of divine power is identical to the one made by both Irenaeus and Latin theologians, the latter of whom likely had Didymus as an influence. Didymus uses inner-Trinitarian relations manifested in the economy to show identity of divine power -- a clear sign of the relational model.
C. Athanasius the Great
If we turn then to Athanasius, we find that he makes that same departure from Origen that Didymus does in terms of affirming the gap between divine and created participation and clearly distinguishing the participation relation in the Trinity from any creaturely analogues, which excludes any sort of subordinationism. From Anatolios's Athanasius: The Coherence of His Thought:
Aside from the central datum of the priority of the Father-Son relation and its containment of the God-world relation, Athanasius relies heavily on Origen in his pervasive use of the category of participation. That was the fundamental category by which Origen distinguished and related God and world. While Origen could also speak of participation within the Trinity, he distinguishes the participation of creatures in God as accidental and not essential. Moreover, Origen also uses the terminology of "externality" to contrast the creation-Creator type of participation from that within the Trinity, a strategy that Athanasius would fully exploit. Also characteristic of Origen's conception is an emphasis on the fragility of human participation in the divine, both because this participation is accidental and not essential and because humanity's orientation is alterable. Alterability is thus conceived as a quintessentially creaturely problem in Origen and perhaps even more so in Athanasius. On the other hand, Athanasius respectfully corrected his illustrious predecessor on such issues as the conception of a graded hierarchy within the Trinity and the notion that the world is an eternally necessary correlative to God's almightiness. But what most distinguishes Origen and Athanasius with reference to the relation between God and creation is precisely Athanasius's continuing of the Irenaean emphasis on the immediacy between God and creation. Origen would not deny such immediacy, but his conception of the universe is much more one of a graded hierarchy; it is a universe constituted by mediations. While stressing divine providence and re-echoing Irenaeus's insistence that there is no God beyond the Creator, Origen is just not as emphatic about the immediacy of the relation between God and creation as Irenaeus was or Athanasius would be. The convergence between divine transcendence and immanence -- or, to put it another way, the conception of divine transcendence in terms of immanence and immediate presence -- is simply not as much of a consciously employed theological topos in Origen. Athanasius's logic, however, following Irenaeus, is uniformly focused on the immediate relation between God and creation, to the point of consistently de-emphasizing created mediations.
This provides the context for Athanasius's pneumatology described in Retrieving Nicaea:
Athanasius consistently concludes his characterizations of the interrelationship of the three with a reprise of the co-relation of Son and Spirit. This strategy can be partly attributed to the fact that he is arguing against those who accept the full divinity of the Son but deny the same status to the Spirit, but it also represents the perspective of an Irenaean "two hands" theology in which the Son and Spirit are conceived as coordinate mediums between the Father and creation.
...
To sum up the relations among the three according Athanasius's presentation of the biblical patterns, we could say that in each case the Father is source, the Son is outgoing manifestation and imaged content of the source, and the Spirit is the outward actualization of that content in and toward creation. Moreover, to repeat Athanasius's typical reprise, the actualization is precisely the actualization of the content that is Christ. The characterization of the Spirit as the actualization of the dynamism of divine life extends beyond these examples and is present throughout the Letters to Serapion. A striking demonstration of this conception is the fact that the same term (energeia) is used by Athanasius to depict both the outward activity of the Trinity as a whole and the specific role of the Spirit in relation to Father and Son. Thus, in the first instance, Athanasius can say that the Trinity is "identical and indivisible in nature, and its activity (energeia) is one;" here energeia denotes the outward activity of the Trinity. But, according to the second pattern, he typically identifies the Spirit as the "living energy" of the Son: "For where the light is, there is the radiance, and where the radiance is, there is its active energy (energeia) and luminous grace"; the Spirit "activates (energoun) everything that is worked by the Father through the Son."
The use of the "image" in the Trinity is built around this logical structure in which relations are on a single ontological plane, not Origen's subordinationist structure but Irenaeus's anti-subordinationist model. The logical structure of the bolded phrase is also identical to Irenaeus's "functional hierarchy," where the Trinitarian taxis corresponds to the economic order in the exercise of divine power, of which the "source" (in the Irenaean sense of the term) is the Father. Thus, when Maspero asserts that Athanasius's "'proportional' concept of the intra-Trinitarian relations at the basis of which the Spirit is the image of the Son just as the Son is the image of the Father" somehow "lays him bare to the criticism of the Tropici that the Father was the grandfather of the Spirit," he is clearly mistaken. Athanasius and Didymus both maintain that relations are all on the same ontological plane, excluding any subordinationism but allowing a functional hierarchy that defines the inner-Trinitarian relations.
In terms of formulating the functional distinction between the Persons, both Athanasius and Didymus rely on the Spirit's characteristic designation as "seal" to show that the Spirit as image has a special active role. As seal, the Spirit imprints the image it reproduces (in this case, Christ, who is himself the image of the Father) on the souls of men, giving the Spirit a distinct characteristic in the common divine act. This is not remotely the use of "image" as a mode of production; on the contrary, the Spirit relates back to the Son qua image of the Father, presupposing the relationship between the Father and the Son. It is the absolute crucial relationship between the Son and the Spirit that establishes both their unity (consubstantiality) with one another and with the Father. If we avoid Maspero's attempt to saddle Athanasius with an ill-fitting Origenist metaphysics, Athanasius's notion of the "image of the Son" as an immanent relation that presupposes a prior immanent relation is extraordinarily clear, and it also clearly matches Irenaeus.
It is characteristic of trying to fit Athanasius into such mismatched models that one will tend to accuse Athanasius's model of being incomplete or inadequate as a Trinitarian theology. Consider Maspero and Fr. Thomas Weinandy ("The Filioque: Beyond Athanasius and Thomas Aquinas: An Ecumenical Proposal" in Ecumenical Perspectives on the Filioque for the 21st Century), who make essentially identical critiques of Athanasius when trying to fit him into their respective theological models:
Athanasius succeeds in distinguishing the two processions numerically but is not yet able to explore what it is that characterizes each one and therefore their distinction. [Maspero]
The Spirit's procession from the Father and the Son must be such that it not only accounts for his full divinity, but also positively establishes what differentiates the Spirit from the Son, that is, his singular personal identity. This, it seems to me, is what Athanasius ultimately wanted to do, but his use of the concept of 'image' does not allow him adequately to do so. [Weinandy]
But in the relational model, the fact that a person is distinguished relationally as against the other persons suffices. In other words, Maspero and Weinandy are both expecting Athanasius to solve a problem that does not even arise in his theological model; both are trying to hybridize the incommensurable Alexandrian and Cappadocian models. What they should have instead seen is that the deficiency of the emanational model in describing relations makes it peculiarly difficult for the Cappadocians to derive the relation between the Son and the Spirit, especially because they need to navigate around protecting the monarchy of the Father as emanator. That is why they would have a need to provide such explanations. From the relational perspective, Athanasius has already done the conceptual work necessary to distinguish the Son from the Spirit, and there is no need for him to go further, nor would his apophaticism likely permit him to do so. In that respect, pace Ayres, the conceptual structure for the relational model and its attendant pneumatology is already fully developed in Athanasius. This is not to say that he provides a complete metaphysical explanation, but the conceptual structure, now further developed from Irenaeus's foundational concepts, is there.
In terms of the specific Alexandrian version of the relational model, another fact that is often overlooked in Athanasian thought is that the term "homoousios" is itself relational. This is actually a unique feature of the Alexandrian version of the relational model; the Latin version of the model developed the concept of causal relations based on one power but did not use consubstantiality of nature as a relation in the way that Athanasius does. This is documented by Barnes:
It is true that Latins speak of the Holy Spirit as being "one in substance" with the Father and the Son before Greeks do. Potamius of Lisbon says (c. 360) that "the substance of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit is one" (De subst. 10). One cannot find a Greek who says in 360 (or any time in that decade) that the Holy Spirit is homoousios with the Father and the Son -- because, at least in significant part, of the particular understanding Greeks have of homoousios that has no parallel in the West. The advantage Latin theology has from its "ignorance" of Greek Nicene theology (as exemplified by, e.g., Athanasius) is that it was free to make statements about a one or single substance that would not have been possible with an Athanasian understanding of homoousios. For Athanasius and the Greeks he influenced, homoousios was a unique and one-way predicate statement: one could and should says "the Son is homoousios with the Father" but one could not meaningfully or piously say "the Father is homoousios with the Son." Ignorant of this technicality, Latins were free to say that the Father and the Son -- and the Holy Spirit -- were of one, single substance.
That one-way predication of homooousios, which matches Athanasius's use of the image relation, serves the same purpose that the causal relations serve in Latin theology: it relates Persons back to the Father, through the Son in the Spirit's case. In other words, unlike the looser use of the term in Latin theology, consubstantiality statements specifically serve a relational function in the Alexandrian model. This methdology may well be what Maximus had in mind in the Letter to Marinus when he said the Latins "have manifested the procession through him and have thus shown the unity and the identity of the essence." A critical statement in Alexandrian pneumatology, therefore, is that the Spirit is homoousios with the Son. This consubstantiality defines a relation with both the Son and the Father, which mirrors the "from both" relation in the filioque. The fact that "from" language is used in Alexandrian theology to show "the consubstantiality of the Spirit with the Father and the Son" does not exclude that the Alexandrians are talking about relations of origin. Because "consubstantiality" in this context is relational, it means that they are using the concept to establish causal relations between two distinct Persons. Anatolios notes the following in Athanasius:
In this way, the biblical message that Jesus is Savior translates directly for Athanasius into the inference that Jesus is God. By the same logic, the Holy Spirit is also fully divine, for if we are united to the Son through the Spirit, it cannot have been by a creature that the Son "linked us to himself and to the Father." We can see that intrinsic to this kind of logic is a conception of salvation not in terms of a kind of immanent well-being, nor even principally in transactional terms as a kind of exchange between human merits and divine remittance of punishment, but rather primarily in terms of union and communion. Salvation is primarily and ultimately, for Athanasius, a matter of being "joined" to God. So once against we see that a fundamental issue is that of mediation, understood precisely in terms of this "joining"; and the operative principle is that a creature cannot properly be said to join another creature to God, for only God can join creation to himself.
This is Irenaeus's understanding of deification, now augmented by Athanasius with concepts of nature, person, and relation (in the form of "image" and "consubstantiality"). By contrast, consubstantiality is not used relationally in the Cappadocian model; it is a conclusion to be demonstrated based on the modes of production. When Athanasius is interpreted according to the "Cappadocian victory" paradigm, the interpretation fails to grasp Athanasius's conceptual structure, which should rightly be considered a further development of Irenaean theology. It would even be fair to say that Athanasius and Didymus have developed a full Irenaean Trinitarian theology updated for the needs of the Arian conflict.
And as might be expected from his treatment of Athanasius, Maspero's handling of St. Cyril of Alexandria is not accurate. Because Maspero is relying here on an interpretation of Cyril that has become unfortunately prevalent in the scholarship, it is necessary at this point to provide a more extensive explanation.
D. The successor: Cyril of Alexandria
With Cyril, we can put the point against the "Cappadocian victory" paradigm even more strongly. Most importantly, let us consider Cyril's context and theological background, including the following observations that correspond with Nathaniel McCallum's presentation:
(1) Alexandria was more strongly influenced by the Johannine theology of Irenaeus than the speculative works of Clement and Origen.
(2) Alexandria strongly affirmed the canonicity of Revelation, even when its authorship by St. John was doubted.
(3) Rev. 22:1 used ekporeusthai with the preposition ek in a context that was understood to refer to the immanent procession of the Spirit by Irenaeus.
(4) By contrast, the context of the Cappadocian model generally avoided Johannine passages in pneumatology, doubted the canonicity of Revelation, and preferentially followed Origenist exegesis on Trinitarian relations.
(5) Cyril was personally involved in the deposition of the prominent Constantinopolitan patriarch St. John Chrysostom, who was from Antioch, and engaged in numerous conflicts with Antiochene theologians throughout his life.
First, leaving aside Cyril's own theology, what reason could there possibly be for viewing the Cappadocian writings as normative for Cyril's interpretation of Constantinople? Further, it is questionable whether Cyril would've even considered Constantinople itself normative in many of the years in which his theology developed. Rome didn't even know about the Council, and Alexandria saw it as Constantinople using the Emperor to take its historic priority and therefore of questionable authority. Apart from the "Cappadocian victory" hypothesis, we would never make the assumption that the Cappadocians were the normative guide for interpreting Cyril. Yet this is exactly the assumption on which this interpretation of Cyril's Commentary on John is based.
[Update -- My friend Craig Ostrowski pointed out to me that it is questionable whether Cyril even knew the creed of Constantinople. From Norman Russell's book on Cyril (endnote 92, pp. 213-14):
Whether Cyril knew of the conciliar definition of the Holy Spirit made at Constantinople in 381 is difficult to determine. The Creed read out at the Council of Ephesus (431) was that of Nicaea, which ends simply: 'And in the Holy Spirit'. The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, which expands the clause on the Spirit... was acknowledged as the creed of an ecumenical council for the first time only in 451, when it was read out at Chalcedon. Cyril never refers to it explicitly, although his treatment of the clause on the Spirit in his letter on the creed (Ep. 55) bears some resemblance to it: 'For He is consubstantial with them, and is poured forth, or rather, proceeds from God the Father as if from a source, and is bestowed on creation through the Son' (ACO I,1, 4, p. 60.21-4). Boulnois thinks Cyril may have been aware of the conciliar definition (Boulnois [1994], 509), but this seems to me unlikely. His phraseology is of a piece with his other writings; cf. Dial. Trin. 6, 1009B, 1012C.]
In discussing the frequent citation of Cyril's Commentary on John in support of the filioque, Maspero makes the following claim for his "Cappadocian victory" narrative:
The pneumatology is an excellent test for the proposed narrative. In fact, Cyril's authority has always been mentioned in the Filioque dispute. But if his texts are examined in light of the path illustrated here, it becomes clear that his concern is not to distinguish the procession of the Spirit from the generation of the Son. It is a more Nicene that Constantinopolitan pneumatology. And this is not because Cyril's Trinitarian theology is not developed, but because his concern is essentially christological and soteriological. The same role of the ninth of his anathematismata in the third letter to Nestorius of September 430 demonstrates this: Cyril's focus is to avoid that the Holy Spirit could be understood as a power extraneous to Christ, hence the emphasis on the correspondence between economy and immanence. The essential issue if that the substance of the Father passes from the Son and from the Son to the Spirit, so that the Third Person is immanent to the Second and not external to Him.
But no light at all emerges from Maspero's "dark path." Maspero's assertions that Cyril is "more Nicene that Constantinopolitan" are based on Maspero's equation of "Constantinopolitan" theology with the Cappadocian model. Otherwise, the "christological and soteriological" concerns of Cyril would not in any way suggest that his concerns are not Trinitarian; they must be, just as they were for Irenaeus. These assertions by Maspero only reflect Maspero's embrace of the "Cappadocian victory" narrative. Once those revisionist interpretations are discarded and Cyril is instead allowed to speak with his own Alexandrian voice, it becomes clear that Cyril's own view is exactly the "filioquist" view. But because of the revisionist account, Cyril's voice in this debate has been entirely suppressed.
In the revisionist view, the circular argument goes as follows: (1) assume the doctrinal source of Constantinople is Cappadocian, (2) take Cyril's acceptance of Constantinople as an acceptance of the Cappadocian theology, and (3) use that assumption to interpret Cyril's theology. This argument should be familiar; it was exactly the same circular argument used to misdate Didymus's On the Holy Spirit of Nicetas of Remesiana's work: (1) assume that the doctrinal source of Constantinople is Cappadocian, (2) assume that Didymus and Nicetas must have received their own doctrine from the Cappadocian source, and (3) use that assumption to date the work. The methodology is not correct in those cases, and it is not correct here.
Let's first look at Thomas Crean's analysis of Cyril (pp. 202-03), which is based on a comprehensive survey of the relevant texts and which interprets Cyril's theology holistically:
St. Cyril's own words are so explicit that there is little need to draw any further conclusion from them. He teaches in many places and in many ways that the Holy Spirit is eternally from the Son as well as from the Father. Although he does not in any extant text use the particular phrase ekporeuetai ex Yiou, his teaching is identical to that of the Catholic Church, that the Holy Spirit proceeds eternally from the Father and the Son as from one principle.
Responding to Sergei Bulgakov's assertion that "it is impossible to unite [Cyril's] texts into a harmonious whole and to extract a coherent theological theory," Crean replies:
To this one can reply that while it is no doubt true, as Bulgakov remarks, that St. Cyril's main concern in the passages that I have considered was to uphold the divinity of the Holy Spirit and to combat Nestorianism, there is nonetheless in these passages a perfectly coherent account of the procession of the third divine person; and it was accepted both by the Council of Ephesus and also, a thousand years later, by the Council of Florence.
Crean's close reading of the texts is exactly right, of course; it takes an extraordinarily desperate effort to deny that Cyril taught the filioque. But the "Cappadocian victory" paradigm simply can't accept this. Constantinople means just what the Cappadocians said, so what Cyril is saying must be what they said. The result is that at least the Antiochene monopatrist position must have been before the later-developed filioque, just as Didymus and Nicetas must have followed the Cappadocians rather than preceding them. And if Cyril seems to be saying something different than the Cappadocians, he must not have been thinking about the issue; otherwise, he would have followed their solution.
Indeed, the "Cappadocian victory" paradigm is used to define the filioque issue. There is a repeated assertion that unless an author explicitly deals with "the relationship between the first and second processions" or "the role of the Son in the procession of the Spirit" (i.e., in terms of productions), his Trinitarian reasoning must not address the filioque. We can see this in Maspero's source Fr. Brian Daley ("The Fullness of the Saving God" in The Theology of Cyril of Alexandria: A Critical Appreciation), who himself follows Marie-Odile Boulnois's groundbreaking scholarship:
As Boulnois observes, Cyril is not primarily interested in developing a precise theological description of the personal or hypostatic origin of the Spirit, let alone of the mutual relations of the hypostases in the Trinity; he is, instead, concerned to insist, against Arians and Antiochenes, that the Spirit truly comes from, and shares, the divine substance which Father and Son possess as their own, and that the Spirit therefore properly 'belongs to' the Son, even in his incarnate state, and so is both received and sent forth by Jesus as 'his own'. Because his concerns are at once more soteriological and more christological than they are 'Trinitarian' in an isolated sense, Cyril can sound vague and even can appear contradict himself, when speaking of relations within the Trinity; Boulnois speaks of the 'fluid', even 'ambiguous' character of Cyril's language about the origin of the Spirit, despite the fact that he discusses the role and status of the Spirit perhaps more extensively, and with greater attention to Scriptural detail, than any other of the Greek Fathers.
...
While not being a 'filioquist', then, in the precise sense of later controversies, Cyril does show a tendency, unusual in the Greek theological tradition, to stress the Son's role, alongside that of the Father, in being genuinely the source of the Holy Spirit. The reason for this role of the Son, Cyril often repeats, is his unity of substance with the Father, a fully divine status which the Son has himself received in being begotten. Nor is it helpful to apply to Cyril's thought on the Spirit a distinction often found in Greek theology since Photius: that the Spirit can rightly be said to come 'from the Son' with regard to his mission in sacred history, even though within God he proceeds 'from the Father alone'. As we have seen repeatedly here, Cyril avoids and even rejects any way of thinking or speaking about God that might appear to drive a wedge between God's being in itself and God's action in history, through Christ and the Spirit, to create, to save, and to sanctify. The rhetorical force of his argument, both against Arian views and against the more overtly orthodox conceptions of his Antiochene opponents, is rather to emphasize that the single, divine, transcendent being is one with his historical manifestation in the person of Jesus and the Mysteries of the Church -- that God acts in history as God is. For this reason, as Mme Boulnois observes, 'it is impossible that the missions of the Son and the Spirit in the divine economy should not reveal, at least partially, their own proper mode of being'.
I submit that the reason Cyril seems "vague" and self-contradictory to Boulnois and Daley is that people have failed to interpret him according to the relational model and are instead trying to force him into the categories of the Cappadocian emanational model. And note that "filioquist" supposedly refers to "later controversies," even though Cyril's pneumatology likely came from Didymus (who was definitely a source of the Latin filioque) and Athanasius, whose conceptual structure exactly matches the filioque. Indeed, the repeated assertion of a so-called "patristic filioque" or "filioque of the Greek Fathers" is based on the assumption that Latin and Alexandrian theologians could not have developed their own pneumatology! Is it any wonder that Cyril seems confused when interpreted according to a view he almost certainly did not hold?
As might be expected, Daley's enthusiastic support of the "Cappadocian victory" paradigm also has its roots in the "dark path" of modern existentialism. As an example, Daley gave a speech in the same Duquesne series on the Holy Spirit in which Coakley spoke, which is also published in It Is the Spirit Who Gives Life. It falls right in line with Maspero and Coakley in terms of denigrating excessive logic (read: noumena):
Lossky's underlying critique of much of Western pneumatology seems, in one respect, at least, well-taken: In attempting to express how the unknowable God of Israel, and Jesus the Lord, and the Spirit sent forth by Jesus on the Church, are all a single divine substance, differentiated by geometrically conceived "relations of opposition" that alone allow them to define each other in reciprocal terms, Latin scholastic theology ran the risk of transforming our awareness of the Holy Trinity into a logical conundrum about unity and multiplicity.
On the most charitable interpretation I could give here of this sentence taken in isolation, Daley would be raising the same concern by calling relations of opposition "geometrically conceived" as Anatolios was when he spoke of "the mathematics of tri-unity." That is to say, if we reduce theology of the Trinity to formal logic, it misses the position that the Fathers were trying to defend, which is not solely that belief in the Trinity is (para)consistent but that it is belief in something real. But what is actually happening with Daley is instead the same post-Kantian tendency to favor the phenomenal over the noumenal, favoring what he sees as "existential" theological methods over "logical" ones.
Obviously, this misinterpretation is not limited to Western theologians. Eastern theologians use it polemically to attack the West. For example, Mikonja Knešević takes a similar approach to Daley for his own Palamite interpretation of Cyril in "Ex Amphoin. Cyril of Alexandria and Polemics over filioque of Gregory Palamas." Knešević is more motivated to defend Palamas's later interpretation, but he is clearly relying on the same "Cappadocian victory" model when he speaks about Cyril's use of ekporeusthai. The problem is that both he and Daley are showing cracks in their attempts to do so. In "The Fullness of Saving Grace," Daley says the following of Cyril's use of ekporeuesthai to describe the Son's procession from the Father:
Cyril seems to be deliberately using the now-canonical terminology for the Spirit's origin to denote the Son's origin, as well, and so to identify both in terms of unity of substance and equality of status within the divine Mystery. In doing so, he shows concern about the negative implications of what would be called a 'monopatrist' position on the origin of the Spirit: in the terms of the debate he was engaged, it could be taken to suggest that Son and Spirit participate in different degrees in the one saving Mystery of God, which flows from the Father.
Knešević says the following in a footnote on Cyril's use of ekporeuesthai in the alleged "technical" sense of the Cappadocians:
Despite the indubitable fact that Cyril never considers the question of personal procession of the Holy Spirit extensively or in isolation, nor does he directly search for the personal and ontological role that the Son plays in all of this, it is still evident that he is predominantly careful in terms of restricting the use of the word ekporeuesthai for the Spirit's ultimate origin in the Father, who is the "source of divinity" ... that is, he never uses it in the sense that the Spirit proceeds from the Son, or even from the Father and the Son. ... Whilst Daley and Boulnois think that Cyril is along the lines of the synodical definition in this terminological choice, that is, Cappadocians and John 15:26, [Norman] Russell finds such a view problematic.
[Update -- Craig Ostrowski found what appears to be the source in Russell's Cyril of Alexandria, endnote 87, p. 213: Cyril says that the Son sends Him 'who is from Him and is His own' (to ex autou te kai idion autou) (Orat. ad Theod., ACO I, 1, p. 66.24) cf. Boulnois (1994), 510.]
I characterize these as "cracks" because they show problems with trying to fit Cyril into the "Cappadocian victory" paradigm, as if Cyril were simply using the term ekporeuesthai in the same technical way that the Cappadocians did. But Cyril is not playing by the rules; he is using the term "wrongly," despite Daley's effort to explain his way around it. Knešević relies on Daley and Boulnois to support the "Cappadocian victory" interpretation of Cyril, but even he must admit that Norman Russell, who carefully studied the Alexandrian texts in his work on deification, is unpersuaded. Here, we turn back to Crean's observation: there simply is no evidence in the texts that Cyril is using this term in the technical sense that the Cappadocians do.
Let's consider Daley's argument in more detail. According to Daley, passages that clearly pertain to inner-Trinitarian relations are relegated to "driv[ing] home ... the substantial unity of the divine Persons and their constant dynamic interaction in the work of salvation, as a way of resisting any Arian or subordinationist theological schemes." This is clearly based on the assumption that these concepts of consubstantiality and relationality can be distinguished, as they are in the Cappadocian model, as opposed to being inextricably entwined, as they are in the relational model. Interpreted in the Irenaean model, for example, this would clearly be a demonstration of immanent relations, not "mere" consubstantiality.
That leads us to Cyril's own logic, which Daley's interpretation would render entirely incoherent. Unquestionably, the most reliable interpretation is that Cyril is following Athanasius. If we discard the "Cappadocian victory" paradigm, which casts Athanasius as a proto-Cappadocian, and instead understand him on his own terms, Athanasius presents a version of the relational model using consubstantiality (the homoousios relation) and image as fundamental concepts. The key feature of that model is that the Spirit relates back to the Father through the Son in the same way that the Son Himself relates to the Father.
It then becomes simple to explain Cyril's use of ekporeuesthai with respect to the Son. From Cyril's perspective, the relation of the Spirit to the Father (through the Son) in John 15:26 images the relation of the Son to the Father Himself. Daley points out that the use of ekporeuesthai for the Son is a "unique usage" of the passage by Cyril, but it is an entirely routine application of the Athanasian model. Far from "using the now-canonical terminology for the Spirit's origin to denote the Son's origin," Cyril is simply using the fact that the Son-Spirit relation images the Father-Son relation to apply the Scriptural language from one to the other.
Moreover, as even Daley seems to admit, Cyril is defending his theology against the Antiochene interpretation. The quoted passage is as follows:
For if the Son bestows (choregei) the Spirit completely from (para) the Father, and is considered to be in the position of some subordinate [in doing so], how can we escape confessing that the Spirit is completely foreign to his [= the Son's] substance, perhaps even superior to him and much more powerful, if that is the way things are, according to your ignorance? For if the Son does not, in your view, proceed (ekporeuetai) from the Father -- that is, from His substance -- how could the Spirit not be reckoned to be superior in comparison with the Son? What then shall we say, when we hear him [= the Son] saying of him [= the Spirit], 'He will glorify me, because he will take of what is mine and will proclaim it to you' [John 16:14].
On its own terms, this is an express rejection of the "technical" use of ekporeuesthai! What Cyril is actually saying is that if ekporeuesthai were intended to suggest that the procession of the Spirit were independent of the procession of the Son from the Father as opposed to dependent on the Son's procession from the Father, this would actually put the Spirit in a superior relation to the Father. This alone would suffice to show that Cyril is defending the relational model as against the emanational model, which uses the technical sense of ekporeuesthia to distinguish between modes of production as opposed to a univocal form of relation. In addition to Cyril's contrary use of ekporeuesthai, which is exactly the same sense in which the Latins use processio, Cyril also cites John 16 for eternal relations in exactly the same way that the Latins do and in a way that maps directly onto his description of the Spirit's procession "from the essence of the Son." Notably, this is the same "from the ousia of the Father" phrase that the original Nicene Creed (likely authored by Athanasius) uses to describe the causal relation between the Father and the Son. Cyril also uses both John 14:26 and 1 Cor 2 in the psychological analogy and elsewhere uses the insufflation of John 22 to show the eternal relation between the Son and the Spirit, exactly in the way that Augustine and other Latins do. While Boulnois and Daley both notice all of these anomalies to the "Cappadocian victory" model, they simply cannot get their heads around the idea that the Greek-speaking Alexandrians might share a conceptual model with the Latins rather than the Cappadocians.
Cyril is just as uncooperative with respect to the use of the preposition ek as he is with the verb ekporeuesthai. In the Cappadocian model, the modes of divine production must be distinguished from one another, but they must also be distinguished from creaturely production to ensure that the Persons are divine. This leads to a technical use of the preposition ek to show production, which is why it was acceptable (and in some ways preferable) to use the preposition ek in the Creed of Constantinople, even though the Scriptural language from John 15 was para not ek. But for the argument that those using the Cappadocian model will often make, ek can never be applied to procession from the Son, which would (in their view) question the monarchy of the Father. St. John Damascene says it this way, referring to the Pauline language: "Neither do we say that the Spirit is from (ek) the Son, but we call Him Spirit of (de) the Son." But Cyril's usage corresponds to the Johannine ek and the Irenaean conceptual model, not the Cappadocian model. For Cyril, "of" (in the sense of "belonging to") actually does mean "from."
Here I will refer to Boulnois's "The Mystery of the Trinity according to Cyril of Alexandria: The Deployment of the Triad and Its Recapitulation into the Unity of Divinity" in The Theology of Cyril of Alexandria, which describes Cyril's use of "from" (ek) and "in" (en):
In reading Cyril's work we are struck by the recurrence of formulae which characterisze the relationships between the persons, formulae based on two prepositions: 'from' (ek) and 'in' (in). The Son and the Spirit are 'from' and 'in' the Father:
"The Son who is in him and issues from him by nature [is] both distinct and of the same nature, by virtue of a natural union. He is distinct, on the one hand, because he is conceived as having his own exisetnce -- the Son is Son and not Father. On the other hand, he is of the same nature, because the one who comes from the Father by nature accompanies in every way the existence of the One by whom he is begotten" [17:3, citations from Commentary on John]
...
What will later become the perichoresis (or circumincession) undergoes here a phase of elaboration. How to understand this mutual immance? First we should set aside erroneous interpretations. We are not at all dealing with material containment: the Son is not contained inside the Father as one utensil would be within another, as asserted in a heretical book which Cyril once happened to have in his hands. This immanence is not limited either to a purely moral linking, as would be any unity existing in a human context, nor is it an indwelling by grace as occurs in the union of God with men, for in that case the relationship is extrinsic rather than substantial. When we read that the Son is 'in the bosom of the Father' (John 1:18) we should not therefore believe the heretical exegesis, based on Luke 16:22 (Lazarus received in the bosom of Abraham), which seeks to resudce the meaning of the expression merely to the assertion that the Son is in the Father's love. In other words, this immanence is not only a moral unity. It enables us to understand how three hypostases become distinct in the phase of expansion without however withdrawing into their own individuality. To say that the Son is in the Father or the Father is in the Son supposes that they are totally united both in identity of substance and that they are persons distinct in number, for a thing cannot be placed inside itself. 'To be in' implies therefore both distinction and conjunction. Therefore it is both because of consubstantiality and relationships of origin that the persons subsist mutually in one another.
Nevertheless, the terms are not interchangeable, for the Son is in the Father as in his source, while the Father is in the Son as in his perfect expression. This reciprocal immanence has, therefore, a structure which is rooted in a relationship of origin. Their being numbered together is in obedience to an immutable order described by Cyril as the relationship which joins an image to its model. 'The Son is in the Father and issues from the Father both in an inseparable and distinct way, being in him on the one hand, in that he is an imprint of him, and being conceived in his own existence as an image is in relation to its archetype.' Thus we can compare the relationship of the Father to the Son to that of a king to his portrait. This analogy emphasizes not only continuity and resemblance, but also knowledge of the kind, which can be obtained through the portrait. Similarly, the Father and the Son are one 'to the extent that one can be seen in the other without any difference' [6:27].
The relationships of co-immanence and of image must be understood in a dynamic way, as movements of mutual giving: the Son and the Spirit receive everything from the one of whom they are the image and in return glorify their archetype. 'The Father is glorified in the Son as in the image or likeness of his own form. In fact, the beauty of a model always appears in its imprint' [10:28-30]. We are far from a situation where the act of receiving implies inferiority in the Son or the Spirit, as was taught by the Arians, for, if they receive everything, that means they are totally equal. If the Son's glory is necessary to the Father (John 17:1), that proves their consubstantiality. The double movement of giving between the archetype who gives everything to the image, and the image which manifests its model, consists, finally, in an exchange of glorification. The Father is glorified by the Son and the Son by the Father because they reveal in their very selves the greatness of the other. 'Just as the pride and glory of the Son consists in his natural possession of such a begetter, so, in my view, the Father's glory equally consists in his own begotten Son being just what he is' [8:54].
If Boulnois situated this explanation in its full pneumatological context, instead of the cursory mention of the Spirit that she gives here, this would simply be the Trinitarian model of Irenaeus and Athanasius. (I doubt that Lashier's use of Boulnois's term "reciprocal immanence" for Irenaeus is a coincidence.) The mutual glorification of the Father and Son in John 17 is mirrored for the Spirit in John 16:14-15. The double image (Son is image of the Father, Spirit is image of the Son) aligns with the same usage in Athanasius and Didymus. The fact that Boulnois doesn't even see this in Cyril's exegesis of John 16 can only be attributed to the "Cappadocian victory" paradigm; she is absolutely convinced that the relational model cannot be in Cyril. She writes:
This common possession of the Spirit appears thus as a particular case of the general rule by which everything that belongs to the Father also belongs to the Son:
"Thus since the Son is the fruit and the imprint of of the hypostasis of the one who begot him, he possesses by its nature everything which belongs to the begetter. That is why he says, 'Everything the Father has is mine; that is why I said to you that he will take what is mine to make it known to you' (John 16:15). He is obviously speaking of the Spirit who exists through him and in him" [Commentary on John 16:15].
The assimilation of the Spirit with the properties common to the Father and the Son enables us to understand why Cyril presents the relationship of the Spirit to the Father and to the Son as that of a singleton belonging jointly to a dyad. This approach, however, carries two risks: on the one hand, that of considering the existence of the Holy Spirit in the Father as coming before the begetting of the Son (through which begetting the Son receives the Spirit); and on the other, that of reducing the Holy Spirit to the status of being simply a property of substance without a subsistence of His own. This is why Cyril completes this first approach by showing that the Holy Spirit is in equal measure proper to the Son, because he depends on him and receives all that he has from him, as stated in John 16:14. The Trinitarian relations no longer appear, then, to be like the belonging of a common element to a dyad, but more like the articulation of two dyads. The Father gives everything to the Son and the latter gives everything to the Spirit. Thus, the Son is the image of the Father and the Spirit is the perfect likeness of the Son. This model too, however, presents difficulties. The dyad Son-Spirit is not strictly symmetrical vis-à-vis the dyad Father-Son, in the sense that the dependence of the Spirit in relation to the Son does not exclude the original link which unites the Spirit to the Father. In consequence, even if the Spirit is proper to the Son as he is proper to the Father, the relationship of the Spirit to the Son is not the same as that of the Spirit to the Father.
Boulnois's explanation here is simply incoherent. First, the general rule if that everything the Father does, the Son also does, which in this case refers to being (with the Father) the source of the Spirit's action in the same way that the Father is the source of the Son's action. This is exactly why belonging (of) implies origin (from) in Cyril's logic. It is also untrue that there is a risk of the Spirit "coming before the begetting of the Son." By the exact same rationale that Boulnois gave for mutual glorification in John 17 (i.e., reciprocal immanence), the Spirit would be mutually glorifying the Son in John 16:14-15. The Spirit would therefore no more need to be prior to the Son to glorify Him than the Son would need to be prior to the Father. Likewise, the Spirit has no more risk of "being simply a property of substance" than the Son Himself does; since the Spirit is shown as a distinct divine agent in the divine action, His personhood is established. Perhaps nothing illustrates the absurdity so much as this: if Boulnois had applied her own explanation of "from-in" based on reciprocal immanence, she would've gotten Cyril's pneumatology right! Instead she see problems that aren't there, simply because the Trinitarian structure of functional hierarchy (the same as that of Irenaeus, Athanasius, and the relational model generally) completely escapes her.
Perhaps more importantly, though, this identifies the exegetical conflict between the Alexandrian-Roman model and the Cappadocian model on John 16:14-15. Cyril, like his predecessors, sees "from-through-in" (ek-dia-en) in terms of the functional hierarchy. So when St. John speaks of the Spirit taking "from what is mine," Cyril's logic demands that the Spirit is from the Son, and because economic relations show immanent relations, the Spirit is from the Son in eternity according to the functional hierarchy. The Cappadocian model demands with equal fervor that "what is mine" refers only to the Father's nature and that it cannot possibly mean that the Spirit is from the Son. The coordinate exegesis with John 15:26 is identical; Cyril thinks that it cannot exclude the Spirit being from the Son, and the Cappadocian model requires that it must exclude the Spirit being from the Son. Either we accept theological pluralism here, or we have to choose between which Fathers and Doctors of the Church are normative. The "Cappadocian victory" model in which we pretend they are saying the same thing is chimerical.
Moreover, the en here brings in the exegesis of other Johannine passages showing reciprocal immanence: John 14:9-11 and John 10:30, 37-38. The "in" in these passages is used to establish the eternal causal relation between the Father and the Son in the functional hierarchy, and it functions identically in the Latin "one power" exegesis. It would be entirely inconsistent with Cyril's "from-in" structure to exclude the Spirit from this reasoning. And once again, the Cappadocian model's interpretation is opposite; the "in" here results from common nature, consistent with consubstantiality being a result of productions. The Cappadocian model excludes "in" from defining the eternal relationships, while Cyril's model requires it. There is no middle ground; the Alexandrian-Roman model and the Cappadocian model are opposed to one another.
Now consider what happens with Boulnois if we instead situate Cyril's conceptual model with Athanasius and Didymus. If we then apply that methodology consistently, Boulnois's argument here directly contradicts Maspero's assertion that "image" is used identically in "image of the Father" and "image of the Son," which Maspero alleged to be a weakness in Athanasius's model. Contrary to Maspero's assertion, Cyril here is saying nothing different than what Athanasius and Didymus said with respect to the Spirit as the image (and seal) of the Son. And the two-dyad structure she describes is nothing but the logical structure of the relational model (and the filioque), as contrasted with the Cappadocian model.
We can even apply this to Boulnois's entire methodology in "The Mystery of the Trinity..." to show that her approach is self-contradictory on pneumatology. Boulnois first observes that Cyril dedicated three works to the Trinity (Thesaurus, Dialogues on the Trinity, Commentary on John). With respect to the Commentary on John, Cyril describes his exegesis as "dogmatic," choosing chapter headings relevant to Trinitarian questions and directing his prologue to how St. John foresaw the two heresies of Sabellianism and Arianism. Absent the artificial constraint that Cyril must fall within the boundaries of the Cappadocian model, there would be no reason whatsoever to think that he would not be address the inner-Trinitarian relations, including the relation of the Spirit to the Son. In any case, there is no sign at all suggesting that Cyril would be vague, ambiguous, or self-contradictory in his work, especially if his aim was to show the intellectual force of Christianity to pagans, as Boulnois thinks his motive to have been.
Boulnois here makes an interesting observation about Cyril's view of divine unity:
Cyril's insistence on speaking of the Trinity as such or of the three persons as being indissolubly linked to one [an]other comes from his idea that the Trinity is fundamentally one unity, so that it is impossible to speak of one of the three without also speaking of the others. Because of this faultless unity, man has been created in the image of the Trinity as a whole and not just in the image of the Son, as maintained by his Alexandrian predecessors, Origen and Athanasius. 'For the marks of the whole consubstantial Trinity shine in him (the man), in so far as the Divinity by nature which is in the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit is unique.'
This is all true but misleading about the antecedents in Athanasius. Didymus certainly did view man in the image of the entire Trinity; this is documented by Plaxco. But even Athanasius's use of the image was not like Origen's, nor was it incompatible with Cyril's or Didymus's.
As Anatolios has shown, both Athanasius and Origen agreed that humanity was made "according to the image of God" (the Father) through the Word in analogy to the way that the Word was the perfect image of God (the Father). But Athanasius's image is neither subordinationist (as Origen's is) or static (as the Neoplatonic vertical hierarchy is); his entire theology is based on the dynamic return to the Father (the subject of an excellent book by Peter Widdicombe). But what Athanasius seems to have in mind with this dynamic return seems to be exactly Irenaeus's view of recapitulation, as Lashier describes in a lengthy footnote:
Some scholars assert the opposite, namely, that the Spirit and Son bring humanity to the Father, the ultimate source of their redemption. ... The passages cited in favor of this position feature Irenaeus describing the orderly progression of humanity's sanctification and growth. For example, Irenaeus writes in one place that humans "ascend through the Spirit to the Son, and through the Son to the Father, and that in due time the Son will yield up his work to the Father" [Adv. Haer. 5.36.2]. Nonetheless, the interpretation results from a failure to grasp Irenaeus' understanding of the immanent Trinity apart from the economy, for the assumption that the end goal is unity with the Father alone misses Irenaeus' inclusion of the Son and the Spirit with the Father as, by nature, uncreated. As such, in uniting with the uncreated one, humans are uniting with the divine nature encompassed by Father, Son, and Spirit. Accordingly, he writes "[M]an, who is a created and organized being, is made according to the image and likeness of the uncreated God, of the Father who plans and commands, of the Son who assists and accomplishes, and of the Spirit who nourishes and completes, but with the man making progress every say and ascending towards the perfect, becoming nearer to the uncreated one" [Adv. Haer. 4.38.3]. The passages which describe humanity's progress from Spirit to Son to Father are significant in that they underscore Irenaeus' understanding of salvation as a process of growth from immature child to Godlike adult. The passages indicate nothing about the nature of the Triune God other than that Father, Son, and Spirit have different functions in the economy. Accordingly, Irenaeus understands that humanity first sees the Spirit, through whom they see the Son, through whom they see the Father. He writes, "For God is powerful in all things, having been seen at that time indeed, prophetically through the Spirit, and seen, too, adoptively through the Son; and He shall be seen paternally in the kingdom of heaven, the Spirit truly preparing man in the Son of God, and the Son leading him to the Father, while the Father, too, confers [upon him] incorruption for eternal life, which comes to everyone from the fact of his seeing God" [Adv. Haer. 4.20.5]. (The significance of the paternal vision of God in this passage, as I suggested in chapter two, is not that the Father is the ultimate source of redemption, but that salvation entails adoption, that is, seeing God and knowing him as Father -- but insofar as this vision is the effect of redemption, it presupposes the work of Father, Son, and Spirit.) Nevertheless, the reciprocally immanent Godhead assures that in seeing one divine person, humans see all three, whether or not they realize this. Irenaeus writes," [W]ithout the Spirit it is not [possible] to see the Word of God, and without the Son one is not able to approach the Father; for the knowledge of the Father [is] the Son, and knowledge of the Son of God is through the Holy Spirit..." [Epid. 7].
As against Origen, this seems to be exactly the sort of path Athanasius has in mind. Anatolios in Athanasius: The Coherence of His Thought notes this dynamic quality of Athanasius's thought as follows:
One very striking point, which has not been noted sufficiently by previous interpreters, is that, despite his use of the terminology of governance (hegemonia) to describe God's activity in relation to creation as a whole, Athanasius nowhere, to my knowledge, uses this terminology to describe God's activity in relation to humanity. This fact in itself indicates that passivity or receptivity of humanity to the beneficient and sustaining power of the Word is of a different order than that of the rest of creation. The crucial difference is that humanity is ordained not only to receive and manifest this power, and not only to receive and manifest it consciously, but, most crucially, it is ordained to receive it actively. That is, humanity is charged with the responsibility and the fundamental vocation of persevering in its receptivity to divine grace by an active striving. Athanasius describes humanity as not only protected and maintained by the Word, but also as charged with the task of consciously assenting and clinging to this protection and maintenance. Thus, the "added grace" bestowed upon humanity comes with the condition that humanity itself maintains its accessibility to this grace. Its "likeness" to God is sumtaneous with the vocation to strive to retain that likeness: "so that as long as it preserved (sozon) this likeness it would never depart from its conception of God or abandon the company of the holy ones, but holding on to (echon) the grace of the Giver, and also the proper power of the Father's Word, it might rejoice and converse with God, living a life free from harm, truly blessed and immortal."
This is how Athanasius ties human nature to the capacity for deification in the Trinitarian life; the Trinitarian relations form the basis of our creation according to the image, which links those Trinitarian relations to our capacity for deification by grace. Christological and soteriological issues are therefore absolutely inseparable from the inner-Trinitarian relations. It is critical at this point to understand that Athanasius's logic is based on the Son as the eternal giver of the Spirit, which is the causal relation that Athanasius sees in John 16:14. The Son being the image of the Father cannot suffice to give grace to creation unless His sonship also makes him the giver of the Spirit. The significance of the Incarnation, then, is that Jesus becomes not only giver but receiver of the Spirit according to His humanity, thus restoring the original purpose of creation. Anatolios explains Athanasius's use of the concept in Contra Arianos as follows:
I do not think that Athanasius here wants us to understand literally that before the incarnation, there was absolutely no communication of grace and reception of the Spirit. But he does want to emphasize that our reception of the Spirit is to be ascribed in a most eminent way to the incarnation. This is because it is in the incarnation that the Word himself received grace humanly on our behalf, and thus granted us the definitive ability to "remain" in grace, which, as De Incarnatione demonstrated, had been the block in human-divine communion. The great consequence of the incarnation is that henceforth grace was to be united to the flesh in a way that is analogous to, derivative from, and yest still also distinct from Jesus Christ's natural reception of grace. For, in the incarnation, the Word assumed as his own a human body that was yet a natural recipient of divine grace (to physin echon tou dechesthai ten charis). Thus it is precisely in the incarnation, through Christ's human receptivity on our behalf, that our reception of the grace of the Spirit finally becomes securely united with our own flesh.
Cyril's use of "image" here is therefore inseparably tied to Athanasius's understanding of the inner-Trinitarian relations. The sense in which man is the image of the Trinity is this active and relational sense of the Son actively imaging the Father, giving the Spirit, and incorporating our souls by grace into the Trinitarian life. We are the image of God precisely in this capacity to actively image not the Person of the Father so much as the Trinitarian life oriented to Him. The similarities between this Alexandrian model and Augustine are unmistakable here, especially the use of the psychological analogy and referring to the Trinity in the singular (something that supposedly indicates the "Western" view). These are signs that Cyril's theology is closely following the Latin and Alexandrian view as contrasted with the Cappadocian view.
Boulnois goes on to describe Cyril's logical structure as follows:
The fundamental movement to be found in this approach to the mystery of the Trinity follows three phases which correspond to three refutations of three errors: (1) the affirmation of monotheism (against polytheism); (2) the real and not purely aspectual deployment (diastelletai) of the one sole Divinity in three hypostases (against Sabellianism); (3) and the recapitulation (anakephalaioutai) of the three Persons in one sole divine nature (against Arianism).
This structure is entirely from the relational model; it does not even mention the distinction between productions that is the defining feature of the emanational model. And it wasn't a case of Cyril being unfamiliar with the linear model of Platonism. According to Boulnois, Cyril's Contra Julianum specifically appeals to the vertical Neoplatonic hierarchy to show that even the best pagan philosophers recognized something like the Trinity with only one major fault: "Nothing would be lacking in their understanding of the subject if only they were willing to attribute to the three hypostases the concept of consubstantiality, which aids the conception of one sole divine nature without this tripling which leads to a change in the nature of each and to an inferiority in one of the hypostases in relation to others." Cyril knew of the Platonic model, but he instead follows Athanasius's use of consubstantiality as a relation and both Athanasius's and Didymus's rejection of any sense of hierarchy in the relational structure. In other words, based on how Boulnois describes Cyril's argument, he is clearly operating in the relational model.
This is further confirmed by Boulnois when she describes Cyril's use of the Trinitarian names as relations:
Another characteristic of these names is that they belong to the category of relative nouns (ta pros ti pos echonta), which strongly supports the affirmation of their eternal coexistence: in order to be a Father from all eternity he must have begotten from all eternity. 'We cannot conceive that he is truly Father if he does not possess the Son as the fruit of his own nature. In fact, in accordance with the main feature of relative things, we cannot have a son without assuming the existence of a father; just as we cannot imagine a father without a son.' Father and Son cannot, therefore, be deprived of convergence (syndrome). Cyril uses a more technical vocabulary (ta pros ti, ta pros ti pros echonta, schesis, anaphora) than do his predecessors Athanasius or Didymus, and brings to bear the grammatical and philosophical origins of relative nouns, such as those of Porphyry who takes Father and Son as examples of relatives who are simultaneous in being.
Like the Western adherents of the relational model, Cyril has in mind the logical use of Porphyry, the metaphysically thin version of relation, rather than the metaphysically thick analogy to the mode of production. His concept is to show logical simultaneity, eternal coexistence, rather than consubstantiality resulting from modes of productions. And as seen previously, Cyril sees the relations themselves as showing consubstantiality, which is the hallmark of the relational model in Alexandria. It simply does not do justice to Cyril's thought to ignore the conceptual structure that is clearly present.
Moreover, without the filioque, Cyril's entire model of recapitulation becomes senseless. The diastolic motion (deployment) of the Trinity corresponds to the processions of the Persons. If the Holy Spirit does not immanently proceed from the Father and the Son, being the image of the Son as the Son is the image of the Father, then the Spirit could not be the path of the systolic flow (recapitulation). In the same way that Athanasius's concept of grace requires the Son to be the eternal giver in relation to the Spirit, the relational structure is essential to Cyril's view. For that matter, the logical structure of recapitulation comes from the Johannine theology of Irenaeus, which was developed further by Athanasius and completed here by Cyril. Note that the monarchy of the Father is automatically preserved in this structure since the Father serves as the "source" in the functional hierarchy, as Irenaeus and Athanasius both affirmed. But because Cyril has rejected subordination and vertical causality in the hierarchy, there is no hint of the Neoplatonic exitus-reditus in Cyril's concept. It is in this way that the operation of the Holy Spirit in man mimics the Trinitarian life, as Boulnois describes:
It is [the Spirit] who, according to Cyril's exegesis is breathed over creation in Genesis 2:7 and sent again in John 20:22, to refashion man according to his original beauty. And the indwelling of the Holy Spirit is the means by which man is put in contact with the Son and through the Son with the Father. The Spirit's real mission is therefore to lead man to perfection, a mission which corresponds to his place in God, where he 'completes' the Trinity. Cyril calls Him 'the completion' (synpleroma) of the Trinity and the 'quality' (poiotes) of the divinity. In order to describe this fine point of the divinity, Cyril has recourse to several comparisons which appeal to the senses of taser, smell, and touch. The sweetness of honey, the heat of fire, the scent of a flower, all play a part in putting us in touch with the basic quality of what they emanate from and of which they express the essence. In so far as the Spirit is the 'completion' of the Trinity, he sums up in himself the quintessence of the divine nature.
There could not be a better way to illustrate the use of relations to show consubstantiality than this; the relation of the Spirit as synpleroma leads back to the unity (pleroma) of the Trinity (which is, incidentally, contrasted with the pleroma of creation in Irenaeus). While this bears some resemblance to the Cappadocian use of relations, such as Nazianzen's meson or Nyssen's syndetikon, Cyril's model does not concern itself at all with distinguishing the modes of production in order to avoid a vertical hierarchy, the problem that necessitated the conceptual development in the Cappadocians. On the contrary, Cyril here is making the same kind of arguments about causal relations from John 20:22 that the Latin theologians (including Augustine) do, albeit in the Alexandrian idiom of consubstantiality. If Cyril were following the Cappadocian approach, he would need to make a much sharper distinction between the economy and the immanent Trinity to avoid inadvertently pointing back to a vertical hierarchy. But because Cyril (like Athanasius and Didymus) has already rejected the vertical hierarchy as a premise, his logical structure takes an entirely different form, one that matches what was originally developed by Irenaeus.
Cyril even explicitly draws the conclusion from Athanasius's relational use of consubstantiality that the whole Trinity can be described as consubstantial. Boulnois relates that "Cyril inherits from Athanasius and from the Council of Nicaea the term 'consubstantial', which had been applied to the Son, but he goes further in applying it to the Trinity in its entirety." This is the Alexandrian relational model in full and explicit development: the relation of consubstantiality shows the unity of being in Trinity. As Boulnois notes "[i]n saying identity of substance we also mean unity of operation and of will, which allows Cyril to reject all of the Arian objections based on a distinction between the different operations within the Trinity, made by them in order to prove the inferiority of the Son or of the Holy Spirit." To be sure, this is the same end as the Cappadocian model and pro-Nicene theology generally, but it reaches the end by an entirely different path.
Indeed, I think that Cyril rejected the emanational model, just as he did with monopatrism, because it was unworkable within his own theological model. In particular, he is resistant to the use of henad, which would've been the Neoplatonic term, to express divine unity, as Boulnois explains:
Wanting to refute Sabellian teaching which stated that the distinction in the Trinity was purely nominal rather than real, Cyril warns against the confusion of three persons in a henad. The use of the plural (plethuntiko arithmo) as in Genesis 1:26, 'Let us make man in our own image', confirms that 'the numbering of the Trinity goes beyond the henad.' Cyril invokes several texts from Scripture which use a grammatical plural or suppose a distinction between two beings. This statement by Cyril on the number is not aimed only at the Sabellians, but also at the Eunomians who maintained that consubstantiality is a confusion of Father and Son. If the Trinity is contracted into a henad, everything is confused from then on and the persons have no further existence of their own. However, a comparison with human consubstantiality clearly shows that (1) the identity of nature between Adam and his son does not, consequently, entail a confusion, and that (2) each one keeps his own individuality. Otherwise, we would end with the absurd, not to say sacrilegious, situation of mixing the sacred and the profane (ezek. 22:26) in not distinguishing between Peter or Paul and Judas. 'Since the concept of the divine nature goes to the number three, it is obvious to all that each of the numbered persons is in his own hypostasis, and that it is not at the expense of a change in nature that each one ascends to the one sole divinity and merits the same adoration' [Commentary on John 1:1]. Paradoxically, the unity of divine nature does not mean that Father and Son are one in number. In other words, if we want to maintain, against Arianism, unity and common adoration, we should not, even so, lapse completely into the opposite excess of mixing. We need to be able to give the paradoxical affirmation of union without confusion, which is why the term henad is completely proscribed, being too precise in its negation of plurality, unlike the term unity (henosis).
The Cappadocian model was essentially in the same conceptual space of Neoplatonic henads (which is not to say that it was Eunomian, of course). But the Cappadocians did have to answer the problem that Cyril raises: how to articulate unity in a way that does not collapse the Persons into one another. That is what we would expect; the relational model is based on using relations to distinguish, while the emanational model is based on likeness, which creates this risk of collapse. Gregory of Nyssa ends up giving a fairly complicated account, which I understand it to say that the division in nature is actually due to the imperfection of finite natures to completely realize the nature. There really would be one humanity if we could exemplify our division in the way that God is divine. But it is a very different solution of the problem than Cyril's, since Cyril's logic excludes it.
In summary, we have reviewed all three of these Alexandrian theologians from the theological pluralist perspective, and there is not even a hint of the emanational model of the Cappadocians or any other evidence for the "Cappadocian victory" narrative. On the contrary, every single one of them shows clear evidence of viewing the inner-Trinitarian relations in exactly the same way as the relational model (and Irenaeus, for that matter). And while Maspero's read on them was mistaken, that still does not approach the degree to which he errs on the Western authors.
IV. Maspero turns his blind eye to the West
Maspero's chapter on Augustine, irenically subtitled "Western Metaphysical Poverty," is a "epistemologically bold" monument to failed hubris. I am not as much disappointed that Maspero, as a Catholic clergyman, is so dismissive of Latin theology; that is almost de rigeur for today's self-flagellating Catholic intelligentsia, especially when it comes to the filioque. (Crean's Vindicating the Filioque is the rare exception that tests the rule.) What really exasperates me is that Maspero cursorily cites two of the best books on Western Trinitarian theology that I have ever read -- Paul Thom's The Logic of the Trinity and Russell Friedman's Medieval Trinitarian Thought from Aquinas to Ockham -- without demonstrating any evidence that he understood the theological pluralism that they entail. Indeed, given what he wrote in his chapter on Augustine, I was left seriously questioning whether Maspero had read them at all. The only "Western metaphysical poverty" Maspero actually demonstrates is in his own understanding of pre-modern philosophy.
Let us see what Maspero is thinking (or not, as the case may be). Given Maspero's favorable citation of his student Chungman Lee, who makes out a case for theological compatibility between Augustine and Gregory of Nyssa, the problem does not seem to be that Augustine has endorsed any heresy in his pneumatology. (For those on a budget, I recommend downloading Lee's dissertation, which is essentially the same as the published book for purposes of this discussion.) In terms of my own assessment of Lee, my only criticisms are that he is probably too charitable with some of the positions that various modern authors have taken, many of which are historically implausible, and that he does not make any real recommendations for how to take his own conclusions forward. But on the whole, his general conclusion that there is no real theological difference between Augustine and Gregory of Nyssa and that we ought to take note of that harmony in attempting to address the filioque seems right to me. So to the extent Maspero finds a deficiency in Augustine, it must be solely in his metaphysical explanation; he is not accusing Augustine's theology of being deficient (unlike, I suppose, the ever-reviled "medieval filioque").
So what is this alleged metaphysical deficiency? Well, it's clear that Maspero's account has already gone off the rails in that regard from his introduction to the book. Here is his account of Pope Leo III on the Filioque:
The position of Pope Leo II seems very interesting not only for the fact that it is politically balanced but also from a theological and a pastoral perspective. The key point is his acceptance that the patristic doctrine presents a tradition that is favorable to the Filioque without contradicting the Eastern position, which is focused on the defense of the paternal monarchy. He dropped and kept the expression simultaneously, distinguishing the level of form from that of content.
This observation is fundamental to the present study in which the term Filioque with the theological discussions it inspires, is not understood in the medieval or contemporary sense, but in the patristic sense as:
1. affirmation of an active role of the Son in the immanent procession of the Spirit
2. without this role being causal, thereby overshadowing the monarchy of the first divine Person
This double definition marks a clear difference with respect to the medieval proposals, which in a context already distant from apophatic epistemology conceived the relationship between the Father and the Son as closed, so that the Second Person could be indicated as the cause of the Third Person. Anselm's theology, with its logicalizing defense of the Filioque, goes in this direction, which can be dubbed Filioquism. At the same time, the issue analysed here in the context of Greek patristics relates directly to immanence and not only economy, where the role of the Son in the coming of the Spirit is obvious because the gospel indicates beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Spirit is given per Christum, as sent by the Father but also by the incarnate Word. The question examined in the present research is whether this per Christum is an expression of a per Filium, which is the immanent root of the economic origin of the Spirit.
Recall what I wrote earlier about the Trinity requiring a paraconsistent logic. Human reason will founder on the shores of the divine mystery, and this will be a reason for legitimate theological pluralism, especially in this case. In that respect, theology is apophatic, in that it always involves limits on what we can say, but it likewise never ceases to be cataphatic, on pain of not being theology at all. As Fr. Nicolas said, "it is impossible to theologize without affirming and denying." This is the conceptual level at which theological pluralism takes place. It is not a question of whether such conceptual models are existential versus logical, as the theological turn of phenomenology would suggest, but whether they coherently unite the cataphatic and the apophatic.
Viewed that way, Maspero makes so many fundamental mistakes in his assertions here that he plunges to the level of "not even wrong." His assertion of the theological content of the filioque is wrong as a matter of historical fact; the doctrine that Pope Leo was affirming was the same doctrine the Franks taught, not some "active but not causal" role but both the Father and the Son as cause of the Spirit. It was the same theological tradition that Barnes has to carefully documented: the economic exercise of power shows causal relations, and in this case, that the Spirit originates from both the Father and the Son. Contrary to Maspero's assertion, in making this affirmation that the doctrine of the filioque was correct and not incompatible with the East, Pope Leo, like his predecessor Pope Hadrian, recognized the theological pluralism between Byzantine and Frankish schools. And as a theological pluralist, he was urging that we not create a conflict over this legitimate diversity. Yes, it is therefore true that Leo makes a distinction between "form" and "content," but that distinction is not a distinction between words and theology. Rather, it is a distinction between the conceptual ways that we articulate theology and the object of theology, God Himself. But Maspero falsely maps Leo's reasoning onto the post-Kantian dichotomy between content (phenomena) and logical form (noumena). The resulting slander against the great St. Anselm's "logicalizing" matches the tone of Maspero's reckless accusations against St. Athanasius, and the accusation against Anselm is no less wrong.
But Maspero's distinctive howler here, one that is repeated over and over in the book, is the "active but not causal" role of the Son. From the perspective of the Latin (and Alexandrian) doctrine of the filioque, this is entirely chimerical; Maspero might as well say that the Trinity is a "square circle." This is because Maspero's interpretation would deny R-causality between the Son and the Spirit, which would render the relational model (and the entire Alexandrian and Latin patristic models of causal relations) nonsensical. It is one thing to say, as I have, that the Byzantine tradition has a different account of causality in mind, one that is analogous to the distinction between originating and sustaining causes, even though this distinction is inadmissible in Western metaphysical systems. That would at least be respecting the Eastern school in its integrity recognizing legitimate theological pluralism. It is another thing to do what Maspero does: to deny theological pluralism and to demand that everyone join the same school, by asserting a logical impossibility as an ecumenical proposal. In the entire Latin tradition, whatever role the Father has in spiration must be identical to the role the Son has in spiration, on pain of making the Father and the Son into two principles.
Maspero's error falls into the same class of mistakes that the Orthodox scholar Jean-Claude Larchet, makes concerning Augustine. In Chungman Lee's published book (p. 59), Lee documents Larchet's interpretation of Augustine's principaliter/communiter distinction. In Larchet's mind, following "certain western theologians," what Augustine is trying to say is that only the Spirit's hypostasis originates from the Father, but the Spirit's ousia comes from both the Father and the Son. Larchet says that, in any case, this would not be adequate to support the Orthodox view on monarchy of the Father, which requires that the Father is the only source of both. But Lee later points out at p. 225 that this distinction between origin of hypostasis and origin of ousia cannot be supported from Augustine either: "Given Augustine's notion of divine simplicity, the approach of some contemporary western theologians cannot find support in Augustine. He argued that the Holy Spirit comes to exist from the Father and receives everything from him without distinction." For the same reason, Maspero's assertion would likewise be self-contradictory if situated within Augustine's logical structure. Just as the Spirit's single spiration cannot coherently be divided between ousia and hypostasis, it likewise cannot be divided between active/causal and active/non-causal.
Maspero's error about Augustine comes from the incompetence of his metaphysical assessment in the section of Chapter 8 titled "Relation: The Philosophical Background." Here, it is not so much in the background of the concepts that Maspero errs but rather his analysis of Augustine's use of those concepts. This is a terrible turn in Maspero's thought, because Maspero begins with a really excellent observation that there is an etymological distinction in the Latin and Greek concepts of relation, similar to the way the verbs processio and ekporeuesthai (in the Cappadocian sense) have slightly different conceptual connotations:
The root of the Greek schesis is linked to the verb "to have" (echein), while in Latin relatio is linked to referre, as in "to refer" or "to report." This implies that the gnoseological dimension may have a greater presence in the Latin sense, while the Greek approach is more ontological.
The terminological distinction here reflects a real conceptual distinction; in fact, it is exactly the conceptual distinction between the metaphysically thin and metaphysically thick analogies of causality that distinguish the relational and emanational models. But rather than seeing a path to theological pluralism here, Maspero immediately falls into the post-Kantian dichotomy of "gnoseological" (noumenal) and "ontological" (phenomenal), dismissing the former. For Maspero, the Cappadocian model is "real," and the Western model is "logical" or "linguistic."
This is at the heart of why Maspero bungles his analysis of Augustine as compared to Gregory of Nyssa:
Here a clear difference emerges, as [Gregory] reshaped both the metaphysical understanding of substance and relation, while the Bishop of Hippo simply juxtaposed the two, resemantizing relation (which could no longer be considered an accident) without radically changing the concept of substance. The cause of this is to be found in the poverty of the metaphysical tools with which the Bishop of Hippo worked, since the tradition of commentary on Aristotle's Categories in Western Neoplatonism was situated within the dialectic, therefore more focused on the linguistic level and less powerful on the ontological level.
There is so much wrong that a book could be written solely on the errors in these two statements. I see them as the sum of what is wrong in everything that Maspero is trying to do. It would be as foolish to try to say that the description of an electron as a particle is more "ontological" when trying to account for the results of a two-slit diffraction experiment, where the wave description may be the more natural way to describe the reality. Gregory's metaphysical understanding is not superior to Augustine's; it is merely different, with its own advantages and disadvantages depending on what one is considering. The following is Maspero's application of the Kantian dichotomy to demonstrate the alleged superiority of Gregory of Nyssa's "ontology" in Ad Ablabium:
This is a fundamental and inescapable crossroads in thought because the alternative was to consider the notions of person, nature, and relation equivocal and merely metaphorical in the two ontologies, (i.e., in the Trinity and in the world). On the other hand, the same ontological force attributed to the relation in God makes it possible to reinterpret relations at the level of creation.
In this was in the Ad Ablabium Gregory provides the answer to the question of why we are not talking about three gods but about three men, starting from what we have seen about the intra-Trinitarian relations as the principle of personal distinction in the one divine nature and through a rereading, again from a relational perspective, of the one nature of the human being. In fact, the Bishop of Nyssa identifies a dual aspect in the human physis: an intensive one and an extensive one. Man is not only any individual of the human species. Neither humanity is the mere sum of individuals, but human nature is simultaneously the communion of all men of all times and the individual man. It is a synthesis of the first Aristotelian substance and the second one, which are unified into a single concept to express the revealed novelty.
Unfortunately for Maspero, he has not responded to any of Richard Cross's arguments comparing Gregory and Augustine on divine simplicity, found in "Divine Simplicity and the Doctrine of the Trinity: Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine," Philosophical Theology and the Christian Tradition: Russian and Western Perspectives. Cross outlines the following of Gregory's use of relations:
Basically, it seems to me that Gregory explicitly defends what Radde-Gallwitz labels the nominalist [which Cross notes is more accurately "conceptualist"] account of the epinoiai, and hence of divine propria. And it should be clear enough from what I have already said that this nominalist account would be a close cousin – perhaps even a sibling or twin – of Augustine’s account of the divine attributes. In fact, Gregory’s account is clearer than Augustine’s own account, because he makes it clear – in a manner later made clear by Thomas Aquinas – that the various epinoiai are not synonymous, as we shall see.
...
Gregory insists nevertheless that the various concepts – the meanings of the various words we use of God – are different from each other. He makes the point by means of his main anti-Eunomian argument that if we believe unbegottenness to be the same concept as other concepts indicating the divine essence, then the only true claim to be made of God is that he is unbegotten. Equivalently, as Gregory puts it, if unbegottenness is something extramental, then so too must other divine attributes be: and this compromises divine simplicity.
...
But the relation is not some real constituent of the Father distinct from the divine essence: there is no difference in terms of simplicity, and our utterances about God do not require any real distinction between divine properties, be they shared by the persons or proper to just one person. So it will turn out that what makes it true that the Father is unbegotten is simply the divine essence: there is, we might say, no entity other than the divine essence to do the relevant explanatory semantic work.
...
Gregory’s account of divine simplicity is, then, more assured than Augustine’s, but Augustine – and for that matter much of the Western tradition after him – is recognizably in the tradition of Gregory, both on the question of the simplicity of the divine essence and on the question of the simplicity of each divine person. This is all directly relevant to the old de Régnon paradigm. If each person is as simple as the divine essence, then clearly Modalist problems seem to arise; if, contrariwise, each person includes something real not included by the divine essence, then it will be hard to resist the view that the persons are distinct from each other in the way that created substances are distinct from the essence that they instantiate, and (by analogy) problems about Tritheism need to be confronted. Of course, underlying an account such as de Régnon’s are worries about analogies such as those chosen by Gregory, and explicitly rejected by Augustine, according to which the Trinity of persons is comparable to the relation between human nature and a plurality of human persons – hence worries, understandable but wholly misguided, about Tritheism. I have argued elsewhere that we misunderstand Gregory – and the ways in which Augustine differs from him – if we take these analogies too seriously, and I am not the only person to have made this suggestion. If my reading is correct, the problem for both thinkers is to find a convincing riposte to Modalist challenges. But my main point is that the account of divine simplicity found in the two traditions, represented by Gregory (in Contra Eunomium 2) and Augustine, is equally strong. And this, I argue, provides further evidence that the old Western analysis of the history of the doctrine is profoundly mistaken, and that the time for serious consideration of some kind of rapprochement is overdue on both sides of the Ecumenical divide.
This is all independent of the question of the filioque: one could accept a strong account of divine simplicity, like that advocated by Gregory and Augustine, and yet be neutral on the question of the filioque; and the same seems to be true if the strong account of divine simplicity is rejected in favour of a weaker one. One reason for this is that part of the issue with the filioque lies in securing the distinction of the Spirit from the Son. For example, Richard Swinburne has argued that the filioque is necessary for the distinction between Son and Spirit on the grounds that difference between spiration and generation – and thus the difference between the Spirit and the Son — consists ‘simply in dependence on two co-causes as opposed to dependence on one cause’. But powerful voices in both the East and the West reject this line of argument: generation and spiration might just be fundamentally distinct kinds of relation irrespective of the number of causes involved: being a Son of ___, and being passively spirated by ___, could simply be distinct kinds of relation (think of being a Son of ___, and being a daughter of ___), and in this case Son and Spirit are distinct irrespective of any causal relation between the two. This point seems to me to be accepted implicitly by Gregory, who seems simply to assume an irreducible distinction between generation and procession; and later in the Latin Middle Ages Duns Scotus explicitly makes the point in the context of a rejection of the standard Western defence of the filioque. And this line of thought rejects the view that the filioque – the Spirit’s dependence on the Son – is necessary for the distinction between Spirit and Son.
The Cappadocian school is therefore no more "ontological" for its metaphysical thickness than the Alexandrian-Roman school, nor is the Alexandrian-Roman school "merely metaphorical" because it is relatively metaphysically thin. Rather than the sort of name-calling that Maspero, Coakley, and Daley all do against so-called "filioquism," we could instead work for rapprochement around the idea that Cross outlines here: there can be multiple metaphysical schools even when the concept of "relation" is doing similar theological work. If we accept that everyone is operating at a conceptual level with due respect for divine transcendence and that this produces a natural theological pluralism, then we can start to understand what makes up the theological schools.
In this conceptual space, a picture is worth a thousand words, so it is easiest to illustrate these conceptual structures to show where Maspero's description is wrong. Once we leave aside the metaphysical baggage and consider the conceptual structure, then we can compare Maspero's own description to the conceptual models of those authors to see if even one of his purported "objections" holds water.
Here is Maspero's illustration of what he takes to be as the Cappadocian model of the Spirit as meson between the Father and the Son:
Here is Friedman's relational model, which is nearly identical:
But perhaps it is the overlap of passive spiration with the relation of the Holy Spirit back to the Father and the Son that Maspero finds so troublesome. In that case, we can turn to the Franciscan emanational model. Friedman illustrates it as follows:
The arrow in this design is the same as Maspero's; the brace shows the meson in exactly the way that the dashed arrow does in Maspero's illustration. These drawings are simply the same. But perhaps Maspero thinks that these later Western models were somehow successfully cobbled from Augustine's broken model, as opposed to being what Augustine himself taught. Maspero seems to take this position when he asserts that, in Augustine's original concept of relations, "the danger of what will be later called Filioquism[*] resides here, as the relation between the Father and the Son, at least in this formulation, seems to be perfect in itself without any reference to the Spirit, because from the linguistic perspective the Son refers to the Father and not to the Third Person." Maspero seems to be asserting that these later authors may have somehow overcomes the flaws of Augustine's own theology, from which Augustine himself was only saved by a blessed inconsistency.
[*I must query "called by whom?" Those who espouse the post-Kantian philosophy of Maspero, Coakley, and Daley, presumably.]
This description of Augustine is just as flawed as the rest of Maspero's analysis. In applying the tools of modern group theory to Augustine's logical structure, Thomas Ryba ("Augustine's Trinitology and the Theory of Groups," Augustine: Presbyter Factus Sum) illustrates Augustine's conceptual structure as follows:
Of course, Ryba cautions that he is not "suggesting that Augustine consciously anticipated the modern notions of relations, mappings, or groups in his formulation of the Trinity, but, rather, that the notions he described are susceptible to an interpretation under these formal descriptions." It is very clear that the Father-Son relationship is in no way closed off in Ryba's depiction and that the categories of substance and relation are both incorporated in the new model.
Yet Maspero somehow still asserts that the "metaphysical tools at [Augustine's] disposal are, however, inferior to what happens in the East" and that the "misunderstandings on the side of the Orthodox tradition can instead be traced to the metaphysical deficit of the theological tools developed by Augustine, which do not reach the perfection of those found in Greek Trinitarian theology." Ryba's assessment of Augustine's use of Aristotle's Categories (including the use of substance in this model) says exactly the opposite:
[A. C.] Lloyd [a critic of Augustine's ontology] is mistaken in arguing that Augustine is forced to maintain a "non-symmetric theory of identity." He is mistaken because a singular lack of imagination does not allow him to see a way out of the dichotomy between tritheism or modalism. But there is a way out, and Augustine has found it by revising the categories of classical ontology to allow relations to operate reflexively upon substances to define necessary new properties.
This is why Maspero's assertions that "[i]t is clear [in Augustine] that the introduction of the relation in the divine substance is not envisaged here, as a substance relative in itself -- rather than ad se -- is not admissible from this metaphysical perspective" and that Augustine "recovers the relational dimension of the Spirit, not on a formally metaphysical level but on that of communion and love" are completely unsupportable. Maspero has read (or, at least, should have read) an entire book about how the identity of the relations with the divine substance can be explained metaphysically: Paul Thom's The Logic of the Trinity. The fact that Augustine doesn't provide a fully developed explanation in no way implies the lack either of a conceptual structure or of conceptual modifications to fit that structure.
Let's look at Thom's picture of that structure:
Thom (pp. 39-41) summarizes Augustine's accomplishment as follows:
Three questions must be asked about the Augustinian structure. Does it actually model the four propositions that make up Augustine's view of the Trinity (the unicity and simplicity of God, the relative distinction of the Persons, and their substantial identity with God)? Is it consistent with the ontology of the Categories? And is the model internally consistent?
According to the structure shown in Figure 2.11, there is one and only one God; so it asserts divine unicity. According to the structure, the divine perfections are God; and in that sense the model affirms divine simplicity. The model also shows the substantial identity of the Persons with God. What it does not show is the relative distinction of the Persons. This, indeed, was already clear in our semantic matrix for the Persons, which does not give a representation of the relationality of the Persons; and the ontological structure, while it shows the Persons as interrelated, does not give a representation of what these interrelations are. Consequently, it does now show what it is about the Persons that makes them distinct from one another. So, the model does not finish the task Augustine set himself. It is inconsistent with Arianism, but it does not ground its anti-Arianism in anything more basic.
In order for the structure displayed in Figure 2.11 to be realized, some of the principles governing the Categories ontology must be dropped. Because a substance in this structure stands in the relationship ab to something, we have to drop Definition 1.3 ("a substance is a nonaccident that is not from anything"). This can be replaced by a new definition of substance [Definition 2.1].
...
This definition states that a substance is a nonaccident that is not from anything other than itself.... So, part of what is going on in Augustine's revision of the Categories ontology is that he is generalizing to cover cases that the Categories did not envisage.
...
Thus, the ontology implicit in Augustine's structure differs from the ontology of the Categories in two respects. The definition of substance must be altered from Definition 1.3 to Definition 2.1; and Rule 1.3 must be replaced by Rule 2.1 [N.B., the latter change opens the possibility that God's essence can be in relation to Godself without being an accident to Godself]. There is no obvious internal inconsistency in this ontology.
And although Augustine himself did not give an account of relational distinction, the modifications that he made to the Categories ontology did. Thom (p. 116-17) explains this as follows:
So while the Categories ontology does not allow that a relation can be a substance, a modified ontology that substitutes Rule 2.1 for Rule 1.3 allows for this possibility. Since that substitution is made in the ontologies of Augustine and Boethius, the possibility already existed in earlier ontologies that a relation can be a substance, even if it was not explicitly recognized there. In any event, this possibility plays a crucial role in the thought of Bonaventure, Albert, and Thomas.
Thus, Ryba's and Thom's conclusion is that Augustine's conceptual framework is a paraconsistent logic using modified classical categories that is open to the understanding of Persons as relations. Nor is the Father-Son relation formally closed in this structure, as Maspero and Coakley each claimed:
[T]he relation between the Father and the Son, at least in [Augustine's] formulation, seems to be perfect in itself without any reference to the Spirit, because from the linguistic perspective the Son refers to the Father and not to the Third Person. [Maspero]
Even to say 'filioque' is to presume that a privileged dyad of Father and the Son is already established, and that the Spirit then somehow has to be fitted in thereafter. [Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self]
The fact that formal closure is instead achieved by the relation of the Holy Spirit to the Father and the Son was formally demonstrated in the systematizing efforts of Boethius, who was himself a clear and direct influence on Aquinas. That is a particular damning conclusion, because Maspero claims (contra Thom but without explanation) that Aquinas overcame Augustine's limitations by his concept of subsistent relations. It is not clear what uniquely "linguistic" limitations Augustine faced; the fact that Holy Spirit is not naturally read as a relational term is something that all Trinitarian theologies must confront. Regardless, if Maspero thinks that Aquinas somehow "solved" this problem for Augustine, he was clearly anticipated in that solution by Boethius's formalization of Augustine, which Paul Thom clearly demonstrated (and Maspero should have known about). As Alexey Fokin put it in his chapter "Models of the Trinity in Patristic Philosophy" in Philosophical Theology and the Christian Tradition: Russian and Western Perspectives, "This [logical] scheme was first briefly sketched by St. Augustine, but it was Boethius who gave it its full rational form. Although the method used by Boethius, like that of the Cappadocian Fathers, was based on Aristotelian logic, Boethius did not go beyond this logic."
This explicit comparison of the logical (and ontological) structures of Boethius and the Cappadocians is the subject of the 2014 article "Relations in the Trinitarian Reality: Two Approaches" by Pavel Butakov. Butakov outlines the comparison as follows:
In this paper I will analyze two Trinitarian theories which contain the earliest examples of full-fledged "social" and "anti-social" models of the Trinity. The "social" model belongs to Gregory of Nazianzus (329-390), once an archbishop of Constantinople; it is presented in his Theological Orations (Ors. 27-31) and became paradigmatic for Eastern theology ever since. The author of the "anti-social" model is Bethius (475-525), the first medieval thinker; his model is developed in the treatise On the Trinity, and it became the mainstream theoretical approach to theology of the Trinity in the West. What is common for both models is that they rely on the Aristotelian category of relation to be able to introduce difference in God.
Here, "social" and "anti-social" refer to the distinctions between the use of relations in the emanational and relational models that I described previously, viz., that the emanational model uses the relation to establish unity of nature in distinction and the relational model uses relational opposition to establish difference within unity. This corresponds exactly to Friedman's mapping of the relational and emanational models to Aristotle's definitions of relations in the Categories and the Metaphysics respectively. Boethius in particular relies on the one-way property of relative distinction (relating-to) as the basis of his own logical model. Butakov illustrates the model as follows:
In articulating the difference between the Boethian and Cappadocian models, Butakov notes that the Boethian model is "closed" in the following formal sense:
A model should be considered complementable ("open") if it can accept new same-type elements without a change in the other elements, or in their relations, or of the adequacy of the model. If addition of a new same-type element affects the other elements of the model, or their relations, or makes the model inadequate, such a model should be considered non-complementable ("closed"). A complementable model is similar to a key ring: adding another key to it affects neither any of the previous keys, nor their attachment to the ring, and the key ring remains what it was and does what it was doing. A non-complementable model could be compared to a pair of scissions which by its definition consists of two blades and a fulcrum. It is impossible to add another blade or a fulcrum without it ceasing to be a pair of scissors. In the Trinitarian context a complementable model would allow adding another person or a relation, while a non-complementable model would not.
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In the model of Boethius each person of the Trinity is constituted by unidirectional relations in such a way that the number of possible options is exhausted by three: the Father is the one who the relation is from; the Son is the one who the relation is to and from; the Holy Spirit is the one who the relation is to. A person with no relation can not be a fourth option, since for Boethius a divine person is a subsisting relation to other divine persons. An attempt to introduce a fourth relational person to the Boethian model will have severe consequences for the members of the Trinity.
Butakov notes that Gregory the Theologian's model (illustrated below), which is built on the distinction between procession and generation, lacks this property of formal closure.
Instead, it depends on a metaphysically thick analogy for relations and productions, as the emanational model does. As Butakov describes, this Cappadocian model "requires a position of extreme realism concerning the status of the relations; otherwise they could not function as individual elements of the model, and the objective difference between the two relations would not be justified. In other words, Gregory treats generation and procession as subsisting realities that are different from the persons." But there is no internal principle for formal closure. Butakov notes that "Gregory himself does not provide any theoretical ground for number three except for a Pythagorean discourse on the greater stability of a triad and of a monad or a dyad."
Maspero's lost opportunity due to his failure to perceive theological pluralism is devastating. In point of fact, he has identified a legitimate development of the emanational paradigm in Gregory of Nyssa. The way that Gregory develops the relations of the Holy Spirit, reconciling the linear and triangular models, is by no means illegitimate, but it takes place within that specific theological school. Specifically, it is dealing with the problem of formal closure, one that is avoided by design in the relational model. One could point to Cyril's use of the Neoplatonic concept synpleroma (completion) to show that the relational model reaches the same dogmatic conclusion as the emanational, albeit by a different route. But it does no good to simply say that they are the same.
What emerges in these "bilingual" historical figures like Cyril, Maximus the Confessor, and the Frankish-era Popes Hadrian and Leo is that they are tolerant of theological pluralism. They are charitably disposed to the idea that dogma can be expressed in different ways. And this is not mere political expedience on their part, trying to court allies, but rather a legitimate ability to recognize what is authentic theological pluralism and what instead denies the revealed truth. It is not coincidental that the Franks and Photios were each thoroughly incapable of seeing outside of their own conceptual models and that this intolerance for theological pluralism produced the Great Schism.
Indeed, if Fr. Thomas Crean's close reading of Maximus's Letter to Marinus is correct, then there is even evidence that Maximus explicitly taught theological pluralism. Fr. Crean notes that the phrase en alle lexei te kai phone, is often interpreted as "in their mother tongue," so Maximus is often taken to be asserting that the filioque results from inherent deficiencies in the ability of Latin to express concepts. If we instead interpret this instead in terms of the Latins' characteristic and accustomed way of speaking, then what Maximus is likely pointing out here is the difference in theological schools, rather than a linguistic deficiency. Note that Maspero takes a similar "linguistic deficiency" approach with Syriac as he does with the Latins, but unlike his analysis of Augustine, he also has evidence of cultural exchange that shows the Syriac and Cappadocians coalescing around a common conceptual framework apart from linguistic differences. If we factor in those cultural connections, then it is far more likely that the Cappadocian-Antiochene-Syriac axis and the Rome-Alexandria axis were developing their respective theologies independently and in parallel. In other words, Rome and Alexandria coalesced around a common conceptual framework, despite linguistic differences, in the same way Cappadocian and Syriac theologians did. Maximus, a man uniquely immersed in both East and West, was in a perfect position to perceive the sanctity of both systems.
In that regard, Butakov's work is a shining example of the right way to accept theological pluralism. He admits that each model has its advantages and its challenges. Unlike Maspero, he does not denigrate one as deficient or impoverished as compared to the other's alleged perfection. He does not prejudice the work of one model simply because another exists. Had Maspero followed that irenic approach to theological pluralism, he could have recognized the Cappadocian metaphysical development as paradigm-specific to its own Origenist inheritance, as opposed to simply defining the dogma itself in the "Cappadocian victory" narrative. He could have brought Syriac theology in, not as a hostile witness to outvote the West, but as yet another school within theological pluralism. Instead of peaceful coexistence, though, Maspero chose war.
V. The Byzantine model: Nikephoros Blemmydes
Maspero attempts to enlist Nikephoros Blemmydes, a famously irenic figure, into his campaign for Cappadocian victory.
To confirm the importance of the proposed conclusions we can cite the pneumatology of Nikephoros Blemmydes who, in the middle of the thirteenth century, read the patristic data precisely in the line of an active but not causal role of the Son in the procession of the Holy Spirit, expressing the connection between the economy and immanence in relational terms.
But what if we instead look at Blemmydes in terms of irenic theological pluralism, as we did with Maximus?
Unquestionably, Blemmydes is in the Cappadocian school, so this gives us an incredibly powerful opportunity to look into the mind of a master of the Cappadocian synthesis to see its logic. Fortunately, we have as a guide the excellent work of Basil Lourié in "Nicephorus Blemmydes on the Holy Trinity and the Paraconsistent Notion of Numbers: A Logical Analysis of a Byzantine Approach to the Filioque." Like Ryba with Augustine, Lourié applies the group-theoretical approach to explain Blemmydes's logic in a way that (following Gregory Nazianzus's Pythagorean argument) excludes dialetical pairing. And also like Ryba, he concedes that Blemmydes "was not a theoretician" of this logic, but his "merit consists in making some first steps in its direction when it became semi-forgotten by his contemporaries," thus showing "an imperfect but unusual, for his epoch, sensitivity" to "a powerful flow of patristic logical thought" from the Cappadocians.
This formal analysis of Blemmydes results in a numbering set for the Trinity that is "pseudo-natural"; it looks like normal counting, but it always skips from one to three. The logical operation associated with this structure is the "ternary exclusive or" (3XOR) operation. One very interesting feature of Lourié's analysis is that it would produce a Qǝbat, a kind of reverse-filioque in which the Spirit is Mother from the Syriac tradition, to balance the filioque. This is Blemmydes's famous "through one another" formulation. In other words, it explains the inherent compatibility that Maspero correctly identifies between the Syriac and Cappadocian traditions.
In this formalism, the monarchy of the Father and the resulting causal relations are used to pick out the non-causal Trinitarian relations between the Father and the Son, which Lourié summarizes as follows:
Let us notice that these paraconsistent relations in the Holy Trinity are not causal. In their respective causal relations, both Son and Spirit are completely distinct without forming any paraconsistent relations. However, this consistent and "classical" reasoning in Triadology is placed within a non-classical concept (our pseudo-natural numbers), exactly according to Niels Bohr's Correspondence Principle.
However, in non-causal relations, the Father is not necessarily the first in the Holy Trinity. Many Byzantine authors, whereas not Blemmydes, dedicated detailed explanations to why there is no "physical order" among the hypostases of the Holy Trinity, that is, why any hypostasis could be counted as the first one. Thus, theoretically, there is not only one choice of the first element (discussed by Blemmydes) but all the three, and the resulting number of the pseudo-ordered pairs in the paraconsistent conjunction is equal to the number of permutations (ordered combinations) of the two elements from n [= n!/(n-2)!].
In the Holy Trinity, where n = 3, this results in 6. If one element from three is already chosen, we have to replace n in the above formula with n-1, which results in 2: the two paraconsistent non-causal conjunctions covered by the symmetric formula.
Thus, Maspero's "causal" and "non-causal" relations can fit within this Cappadocian logical model (E-causality). But they are incompatible with the use of relations in the Boethian model, which is like the Irenaean model in requiring all of the relations to be in a causal structure (R-causality). This Cappadocian logic does not die with Blemmydes; it influences Gregory of Cyprus in the anti-unionist response to Lyons, and it becomes directly relevant to Florence through the Palamite theologian Joseph Bryennios, the teacher of Mark Eugenikos. In terms of that later inheritance, Lourié has written three articles on the use of this paraconsistent logic by Bryennios: "A Logical Scheme and Paraconsistent Topological Separation in Byzantium: Inter-Trinitarian Relations according to Hieromonk Hierotheos and Joseph Bryennios," "What Means 'Tri-' in Trinity? An Eastern Patristic Approach to the 'Quasi-Ordinals'," and "The Trinity from Six Groups: A Logical Explanation of Byzantine Triadology by Joseph Bryennios" (unpublished).
Lourié located eighteenth-century reproductions of Byrennios's illustrations of these logical relations, depicted below:
The first compares Bryennios's own logical conception, as three interlocking circles (sets) at the vertices of a triangle (Sch. A) with how he understands the Latin model based on pairwise (dialectical) relations (Sch. B). Note that Bryennios sees the Latin structure in terms of vertical causality, even though this is not actually the logical structure of the Boethian model. This is perhaps the best evidence of misunderstood theological pluralism; the East has failed to understand the Western model, but not because of "the metaphysical deficit of the theological tools developed by Augustine, which do not reach the perfection of those found in Greek Trinitarian theology," as Maspero claims. Rather, Bryennios is trying to understand the Western view in his own conceptual model, and due to theological pluralism and the incompatibility of the models, it simply cannot fit. The second illustration shows the logical structure that Lourié outlines of a sixfold set of relations that can then be oriented around causal and non-causal based on the monarchy of the Father. It is difficult to imagine a clearer image of (1) the internal logical structure of the fully-developed Cappadocian model from Gregory Nazianzus and (2) the difficulties that theological pluralism presented for mutual understanding. Both East and West had a very clear understanding of their own logical model, yet they could not recognize that the other side was conceptualizing the same object in a different way.
So rather than taking Maspero's monolithic approach, let us instead take what we have learned about these models, including the difficulties in cross-paradigm discussions, and try to understand the history of the filioque in these terms. In that, we will see two magisterial figures, Thomas Aquinas in the West and Gregory Palamas in the East, each struggle to explain pluralism in terms of their respective paradigms.
VI. An ecumenical reading: recognition of medieval theological pluralism
A. Western pluralism
Butakov remarks on the subsequent development of the Boethian and Cappadocian models as follows:
So we have examined the two Trinitarian theories which were the first in church history to provide exhaustive and functionally complete theoretical models for the "social" [emanational] and "anti-social" [relational] approaches. Their functionalist is exhaustive since both are able to support the consubstantiality of the divine persons and their numerosity, and to identify each of the persons. Both models are simple and elegant, and both are Trinitarian, i.e. their structure is tied not to any number of persons but exactly three. In both theories these goals are achieved by an application of the Aristotelian category of relation, although the ways in which the category is applied and the functions of the relations in the models are different.
The two models became two separate paradigms for the later Eastern and Western theological traditions until St. Thomas made an attempt to unite both of them into one system in his Summa Theologiae. Aquinas allows for both interpretations of the Trinitarian relations. On the one hand, he speaks of the "relations of origin" in God (S.T. 1.28.4), which function in the same way as relations in the Gregorian model that bond the persons in pairs. On the other hand, he also uses the Boethian approach to relations and insists that each person is a "subsisting relation" (S.T. 1.29.4). The combined model is cumbersome and less effective; moreover, it does not work without yet another distinction between opposite and non-opposite relations of origin (S.T. 1.30.2). It lacks the elegance and simplicity of the paradigmatic models of Gregory and Boethius, and does not allow achieving more than each of them already does. It is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss Aquinas' theory; nevertheless, his desire to use both models speaks for their value, and his trouble to combine them reaffirms their incompatibility.
We see that Aquinas shows the monolithic understanding of patristic authority, but he has difficulty seeing how the category of relations as used in the Cappadocian model can fit into the Boethian model that was a dominant influence on his own theological thinking. St. Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, following primarily St. John Damascene, takes the opposite approach. Bonaventure starts from the understanding of relations in the Cappadocian model, primarily St. John Damascene, and then attempts to reconcile that model with Augustine's understanding of divine simplicity and relations. As Barnes points out, this scholastic reading is based an "inverted Augustine"; like Athanasius, Augustine himself was much more concerned with the "extra-Trinitarian" Christology, the Christian life relative to the Trinity as proclaimed doxologically, than providing a systematic metaphysical explanation.
But what is more interesting for our purposes is that Augustine is amenable to being systematized in different ways, much like Christian doctrine itself. Certainly, if the question of the priority of relations versus productions is the defining issue, we would not expect the concepts of the other model to be completely excluded; the logical structure of the relational model must account for the productions, and the emanational model must account for the logical structure of the relations. In addition, the Fathers, like Augustine, were defending dogmatic affirmations, not themselves providing a fully systematic account. The most we can generally say about the Fathers in the context of this pluralism is that their individual conceptual structures are more exemplary of one model or the other, but there will generally be elements of their thought that can be systematized in either paradigm.
Even the "logicalizing" Anselm, for example, who articulated the fundamental metaphysical principle at the heart of the relational model -- "The unity should never lose its consequences except when a relational opposition stands in the way, nor should the relations lose what belongs to them except when the indivisible unity stands in the way" -- is cited by Friedman as a source of the emanational model. That is because Anselm likewise provides an explanation of the productions as emanations that could be a starting point for the emanational account. But as a general rule, someone who starts with a more logical, numerical, or abstract approach that is "metaphysically thin," like Athanasius, Augustine, Boethius, or Anselm, will naturally prioritize the relational logic, while someone with a "metaphysically thick" analogical method (especially those grounded in Neoplatonism) will more naturally start from the concept of productions themselves. The fact that there is a need to do additional conceptual work to fit in concepts from the other model is often mistakenly used to conclude that a Father's work is inchoate, underdeveloped, or unconsidered relative to someone else's work. We saw exactly this tendency with the interpretation of the Alexandrian theologians.
The filioque is probably the best example. In the relational model, the filioque emerges as a logical consequence from how relations are defined in terms of distinction. But explaining how that relational distinction translates into personhood is a metaphysically complex task, even if the relational logic itself is not. In the emanational model, the relationship between the Son and the Spirit is something that is much more difficult to explain, because the productions themselves don't explain it, particularly given the importance of the monarchy of the Father in defining the productions. Gregory of Nyssa, Bonaventure, and Scotus show that it can be done, and, given the importance of defining the Trinitarian names as relational in Christian theology, that task cannot be avoided. But, once again, it is by no means a light philosophical task.
So why has theological pluralism been relatively successful within the West? It is because there is a common dogmatic object that the models are trying to explain. And what is the common dogmatic object that the filioque affirms? The common dogmatic assertions of the fully-developed pro-Nicene theology are the following:
1. There are three irreducibly distinct divine Persons.
2. Those persons are united in being, not will or activity. (Anatolios's Nicene principle)
3. The distinctions between the Persons in this one being are based on relations among the Persons.
At point 3 develops a bewildering variety of potential explanations. Bonaventure and Aquinas both agree that relations distinguish persons relative to divine simplicity but they do not agree on the underlying metaphysical connection between person and relation -- Bonaventure adopts the Cappadocian (emanational) model and Aquinas adopts the Boethian (relational) model. So they can agree on the filioque despite having adopted essentially incompatible metaphysical structures, both based on the principle that persons are defined in relation to one another but without agreement on what those relations are in the metaphysical sense. In short, they agree that the Persons are distinguished relationally, but they do not agree how.
More importantly, this theological pluralism follows the antecedents in Rome, Alexandria, and Cappadocia, both before and after the First Council of Constantinople. And even those parallel developments follow even earlier Johannine/Irenaean and Syriac theological trajectories, which had led to irreducible theological pluralism. Yet even if we restrict ourselves to the Byzantine anti-filioquist response, there was theological pluralism.
B. Theological pluralism in Byzantium: Gregory of Cyprus
First, we have to address the fact that the filioque to which the East was responding was not what the West (including Alexandria) actually mean by the filioque, i.e., the assertion that the Holy Spirit is distinguished by relation to both the Father and the Son. In responding to the union proposals of Lyons, the East sees what Photios saw and what the Cappadocian model immediately leans to when it hears the filioque: the vertical causality of Origen. That much is clearly seen in the drawing of the Latin model from Bryennios labeled as Sch. B above. As I hope I have shown, that is a complete caricature of the relational model, but owing to the loss of awareness on the Eastern side, that is clearly how it was perceived. On that much, all the anti-unionists agreed.
The alternative Byzantine models all fell broadly within the underlying Cappadocian (emanational) school, in which the basis for personal distinction and relations was the distinction between begetting and proceeding from the (alone) uncaused Father. The logical structure of these generally triangular structures was the Blemmydes model, in which there was a logical relation of mutual implication between the modes of origin so that there must be exactly two such modes. But that created yet another question about the conceptual interpretation of the model's symmetry. Were the Persons really then "through one another" in their relationship, as Blemmydes himself thought? Or was there an additional symmetry-breaking principle beyond causation (monarchy) that could further define the relationship between the modes of origin, such as "manifestation"? If so, was such a symmetry-breaking principle only economic and merely verbal when applied in eternity, so that the eternal "reality" was the triangular model? Or was "manifestation" like causality itself, a conceptual description of a real eternal object that was conditioned to our intellectual limitations?
This produces a continuum in the emanational model concerning the relation between begetting and proceeding. One extreme can be called the purely triangular or Photian model; it held that any such relation could only be economic and that speaking of this at the immanent level would be going beyond what was revealed. This was represented by the Arsenites at the time of Cyprios. At the other extreme is the real model, which held that the mutual implication was a conceptual description of begetting and proceeding as processes that take place through one another (which seems to have been Blemmydes's own position). Neither the Photian nor the real model was a prevailing position in the East; the latter was rejected because more or less everyone agreed that something need to be said about immanent relations and why there were exactly two caused Persons, and the former was rejected because Blemmydes was pro-union, which was politically impossible in the late thirteenth century. So the more meaningful pluralism was in the middle.
Between the extremes, then, there grew to be two main schools in the East: the Cypriot school and the Palamite school. First, Gregory Cyprios accepted Blemmydes's notion that begetting and proceeding were mutually implicative but introduced "manifestation" as a symmetry-breaking principle between the Son and the Spirit, similar to the way that monarchy breaks the sixfold symmetry in Bryennios's diagram. (That Cyprios is relying on the Blemmydes model is confirmed by Vivier-Muresan, who notes that the controversial "through the Son" language is used by Cyprios despite resistance at the time.) But rather than trying to ground this symmetry-breaking principle in the underlying Person of the Father, Gregory attempts to derive the manifestation relation from the distinction between begetting and proceeding, effectively creating two levels of distinction. The productions thus create not only two distinct Persons (termini) but an implicit conceptual relation between the resulting Persons. As I explain below, it is at this level of "produced distinction" where Maspero's "active but not causal" role for the Son would actually make sense, and I think this is very likely what Gregory of Nyssa (and likely Gregory Thaumaturgus before him) had in mind for his own concept of "manifestation."
In developing an explanation, Cyprios has a problem. There are only two levels in God: nature and person. As St. Basil says (speaking for the emanational model, of course), "what is not individual is common." But there is some precedent in Gregory Nyssen to view the relational structure among the persons as being a distinct but not separate level, and this is particularly relevant to the problem Cyprios has. Unfortunately, Nyssen suffers from the same problem that Augustine did; he asserts relational properties but does not actually explain what they are in the model (which is, of course, why Maspero could force his own views of "relation" into the formulation). Cyprios takes on the monumental task of filling this gap and explaining what the relations in the Blemmydes model actually are from a metaphysical standpoint.
Cyprios starts with the concept of causality and relation in the emanational model: the causal productions by the monarch produce distinct persons. Therefore, he needs to formulate the non-causal relations, whatever they are in terms of the persons having been produced. Otherwise, he will entangle this distinction with the causal relations and the monarchy of the Father. This is why, although he does use the phrase "having existence through" characteristic of the Blemmydes model, he does not interpret it in the real sense that Blemmydes does. Cyprios's solution to the problem of what the non-causal relations are is both ingenious and, in my opinion, underrated as a contribution to the Cappadocian model.
As I understand it, Cyprios has in mind a kind of self-sustaining reaction that is initiated by the Father in His act of emanation, like a fire that is kindled or a sun that is ignited. Of course, this is both eternal and simultaneous (the Father is constantly igniting and the Trinity is constantly sustaining), but this is how Cyprios identifies an activity for the Son within the Trinity and a reciprocating activity of the Spirit within the overall structure of relations that Blemmydes lays out. This is what I believe that Cyprios has in mind for his version of the distinction between "receiving existence from" (from the Father alone) and "having existence through" (defined by the reciprocal and relational activity of the Persons relative to one another). Thus, he follows the rule that what is not individual is common, but he sees relation as two types of reciprocal and eternal interaction: causal and non-causal. Here, then, is Maspero's "active but not causal role" for the Son: in the Cypriot model's reciprocating and self-sustaining reaction among the Persons. But they are not "real" in the sense that Maspero (or Blemmydes) though.
There is a question here as to whether the distinction I have outlined corresponds to the essence/energies distinction, so that this self-sustaining reaction corresponds to an "eternal energetic procession" in the uncreated energy, rather than hypostatic properties. This is the position famously taken by Aristeides Papadakis in Crisis in Byzantium, the magisterial work on Gregory of Cyprus. As good as this work is, I believe Papadakis's position on this theological issue has been convincingly rebutted by Anne-Sophie Vivier-Muresan in "The eternal manifestation of the Spirit through the Son: a hypostatic or energetic reality?" Vivier-Muresan convincingly argues that Cyprios does not speak about eternal manifestation in the way that he speaks about the energies or the divine glory. Rather, I believe that he is putting relations between the persons of the level of nature because they are the result of the natural productions. That would mean manifestation actually corresponds to power (dynamis) rather than activity (energeia); the productions establish the modes of possession of both the nature and the corresponding divine power. It is the way that the Son and the Spirit each possess the divine power as a result of their eternal production that establishes the manifestation relation. This is why manifestation can establish a hypostatic characteristic for the Spirit, as Dumitru Staniloae argues from Gregory of Nyssa's texts and which matches Maspero's interpretation of Nyssen.
Regardless of exactly how manifestation is described, though, we can address is whether this Cypriot model is reconcilable with the relational model, and the answer is that it clearly is not. This concept of relations, with a two-tier distinction between causal and non-causal relations found in the Blemmydes model, is entirely incompatible with the concept of relations in the relational model. This is because having formally-closed relations on a single logical level is essential, since the relations themselves fundamentally define the logical structure. Moreover, the Cypriot model is not even compatible with the Bonaventuran version of the emanational model (Thom's illustration of the fully-developed Franciscan model is at p. 159; it suffices for our purposes to say that they do not match). But if we are theological pluralists, then we should turn back to the point at which theological diversity arose in the West: "The distinctions between the Persons in this one being are based on relations among the Persons." Is what Cyprios articulates here an acceptable account in that regard?
I think that if we are committed to authentic theological pluralism, we must consider the Cypriot model acceptable. It is more or less a systematized version of what Gregory of Nyssa teaches, mediated through the authoritative developments of Pseudo-Dionysius, Maximus the Confessor, and John Damascene. This same pluralism could be tolerated by Constantinople, could be tolerated by St. Maximus, and could be tolerated by the Popes at the time of the Photian Schism. It seems very difficult to conclude that the filioque doctrine, which has a creedal usage dating back to Pope Damasus, was specifically intended to exclude this model. Especially based on how Bryennios later illustrated the Latin view, I think it is likewise entirely fair to say that what the Cypriot had in mind conceptually was not what the Latins had in mind. In terms of what was actually condemned at Blachernae, what the people who condemned John Bekkos seem to have had in mind was the "real" version of the Blemmydes model, which did not match any of the Latin models (and it is questionable whether Bekkos himself held that view). In any case, we have had indications from the ecumenical bodies on both sides that the condemnations of Lyons and Blachernae no longer apply. We only need to affirm the following principles: (1) the filioque only requires affirmation of a real relational distinction of the Spirit relative to the Father and the Son, for which the Latins use the term "principle" but which is open to multiple metaphysical accounts, and (2) the East condemns a specific causal account of the filioque (probably the "real" version of the Blemmydes mode) that was never part of any Latin tradition. But in order to accept this pluralism, we must discard the "Cappadocian victory" narrative, which has silenced many voices among the Fathers, and recognize the various theological schools in the tradition.
We have therefore addressed the reason that Lyons did not achieve union: a mutual failure to recognize acceptable theological pluralism. We now also have to consider Florence, and this is where the Palamite model enters the discussion.
C. Theological pluralism in Byzantium: Gregory Palamas
The Byzantine model from Blemmydes seems to have highly influenced Gregory Palamas's own "through (dia) the Son = with (meta) the Son" interpretation of the Spirit's procession. This "through=with" formulation has been found in Palamas by Anne-Sophie Vivier-Muresan (in "The eternal manifestation...") and Mikonja Knežević (in "Ex Amphoin..." and "'Ek' and 'Dia' in Apodictic Treatises on the Procession of the Holy Spirit of Gregory Palamas"). In interpreting Blemmydes, Palamas has in mind for the term "through" not the instrumental concept "by means of," which would be causal, but rather the physical concept of the Spirit being "throughout" the Son, completely interpenetrating and "resting on" the Son.
Thus, to the extent there is an order between the Son and the Spirit, Palamas does not follow Cyprios in trying to derive the relation from the non-causal relations, which would be too much like vertical causality for Palamas. In Palamas's mind, the causal distinction based on monarchy establishes that generation and procession are mutually implicative, which would require a conceptual spirituque to balance the conceptual filioque (the "real" Blemmydes model). Rejecting both the "real" option and the Cypriot option, Palamas interprets the mutual implication of Blemmydes to mean a conceptual simultaneity that leaves no room for conceptual distinction; once the persons are produced, there can really be no further order between them.
Following this logic, Palamas says that the order is solely due to the words used in revelation and the fact that we cannot but think in sequential order as creatures; "Father" immediately leads to "Son," so that "Holy Spirit" comes next in our thinking, even though begetting and proceeding are technically simultaneous and mutually implicative. From Knežević's "'Ek' and 'Dia...":
The middle position of the Son here is not, by any means, conditioned by some substantial reasons, which is something that Palamas clearly pointed out during his explanation of the importance concerning the order (taxis) of the persons of the Holy Trinity. Namely, saying that the Spirit is "throught" (dia) the Son "from" (ek) the Father does not imply any causality from the Son's side, neither in this context represents some kind of strictly fixed order inside divine being, but is sue to the nature of the names of divine persons and to the fact that the Father can be called Father only "through" (dia) the Son.... The Spirit is, according to Palamas, also directly from the Father, just like the Son is, but due to the semantics of the name "Father" (i.e., due to the fact that "the Son is the Son of the Father, introducing in the thought the Father, even before He Himself is spoken"); this existential immediacy of the Spirit's procession from the Father is not that transparent, as it is the case with the Son's begetting from the Father; first of all, due to the limitations of the categorial apparatus, which we use to express the mode of divine existence, i.e., because"we cannot pronounce in the terms of our language simultaneously both the Son and the Spirit, as they came forth from the Father".
...
Therefore, when it is said for the Spirit that he is "through" (dia) the Son, this does not have a function of pointing to the causality, as the Latins thought, but quite the opposite: it has a function to emphasize, as strong as possible, the factual, but, on the conceptual content, insufficiently transparent relationship of the Spirit with the Father Himself. Since the Son conceptually precedes (protheoreisthai) the Holy Spirit, emphasizing that the Spirit is "through" the Son serves further to underline the direct derivation of the Spirit from the Father, and also to suspend the interpretation, which would indicate some sort of distance between the Father and the Spirit, as a result of this "theoretical" preceding of the Son. In other words, the precedence of the Son to the Holy Spirit and, consequently, calling upon the Spirit "through" the Son, is here reduced by Palamas to the precedence "in thought"; interpreting the words of Gregory of Nyssa, Palamas says that it is of great importance that he, speaking of the Son's precedence on the conceptual level, said that this precedence is "not simply in thought" (oud aples epinoia), "but [that is is] only in thought" (all'epinoia monon), which actually excludes the logical or ontological "primacy" of the Son with regard to the Spirit.
Palamas's Apodictic Treatises on the Procession of the Holy Spirit is unquestionably the source of contemporary Orthodox theology and is considered authoritative in his response to the filioque for Orthodoxy, so we cannot disregard his interpretation. Palamas expressly contradicts Maspero's interpretation of Gregory of Nyssa; he says that the relational order of the Son and the Spirit is not only not real (i.e., ontological in Maspero's sense of mind-independent reality) but not even conceptual, in the sense of our ways of thinking about metaphysical objects (e.g., the Thomist virtual distinction, the Scotist formal distinction). It is instead "only in thought," by which Palamas means merely verbal or linguistic. When applied in eternity as opposed to the economy (where there is obviously a real order), the order between the Son and the Spirit becomes merely our limited way of expressing these concepts in words, because there is no corresponding logical structure between the two. Here, Scripture has given us terms like "Father" and "Son," not for their conceptual content but for the expression of mysterious concepts that have no creaturely analogues whatsoever.
Therefore, in Palamas's view, one can appeal to the symmetrical "with" relation as a concept, since this reasonably relates to the Father's modes of production being oriented toward producing the Persons "with" one another, so that the Spirit is "to" the Son and "rests on" the Son. One can even then speak about a certain order in the "with" relation, as long as it is absolutely clear that the relationship itself is symmetrical. This appears to be how Palamas is interpreting Augustine's use of eros and other similar analogies and descriptions of relationships in the Fathers, as well as his own image of the Spirit as being at the "use" of the Son. These analogies do not connote any real asymmetry but, to the extent they are asymmetrical, are simply our limited ways of speaking about the symmetrical "with" relationship. The "order" in these relations remains merely verbal, even if, as Nyssen suggests, it should not be inverted.
Palamas seems to have in mind that the manifestation of these relations in the economy is God's deliberately giving us conceptual tools for speaking about him, even though these do not, strictly speaking, correspond to anything in God. As Vivier-Muresan says, it "is because the Spirit, in his hypostasis, rests eternally on the Son and abides in him that, in the economy, the divine energies are sent in the Spirit from the Father through the Son." In other words, the eternal relationship cannot be equated with the energeia; it instead is the natural relationship in which the divine power is possessed. This would likewise account for a "quite awkward phrase" that Vivier-Muresan points out: the Son is said by Palamas to have the power to bestow (auto to chorgein echein echei) as opposed to actually bestowing the Spirit, which seems to be Palamas's way to keep the eternal relationship on the level of nature and power. So, contra Papadakis, neither Cyprios nor Palamas teaches an eternal energetic procession, each one keeping his respective relational structure at the level of power, but Palamas backs off of any suggestion of a real symmetry-breaking relationship in eternity. Thus, Vivier-Muresan says:
Therefore, the triadology of Palamas appears to be distinct from the Cypriot’s view. More precisely, Palamas seems to step back since he assumes a position that the latter claimed to move beyond. As he refuses to take into account the literal sense of the preposition “by/through” (dia), considered as only synonymous with the prepositions syn and meta meaning “with”, he aligns with a theology that the patriarch explicitly rejected as being insufficiently faithful to the tradition of the Fathers.
Likewise, Papadakis in Crisis in Byzantium notes that Palamas followed a proposal from Cyprios's secretary that was shot down at Blachernae:
[Moschabar's] interpretation did not identify "through" with the eternal manifestation, as did Gregory's, or with "from," as did the unionists, but with the preposition syn, meta (with the genitive), or ama, which were translated as "with" or "together." True, it was an interpretation which later Palamite theologians and Mark of Ephesus at Florence would find useful. However great its subsequent popularity it could not convince Gregory or the unionists.
So here is the point of pluralism in Byzantium: both Cyprios and Palamas accept the Blemmydes model, but they differ on how to interpret "exists through" from a metaphysical perspective (though both agree that it can only be conceptual). Cyprios thinks that the way the Son and the Spirit exhibit the exercise of divine power in the economy maps onto distinct modes of possession of that power in eternity. Palamas, on the other hand, thinks that we only speak thus by way of condescension and that there can be no real ordering between the Son and Spirit in eternity. (We cannot normally speak in a way that violates the Trinitarian order, but that does not correspond to how we should think about the Trinity.)
Naturally, part of Palamas's theological project is to interpret the patristic tradition according to his own theological model. And much like Aquinas with John Damascene, Palamas comes across certain Fathers who do not speak in the way they should if they are adherents to the model. Cyril is particularly problematic for Palamas because Cyril uses the preposition ek, which simply has no symmetrical interpretation. Palamas's solution is to ascribe the use of ek to the economy wherever he can, and where he can't, to maintain that ek is solely being used to show consubstantiality, which Palamas views as being symmetrical. Of course, the reason Palamas is having such a problem with Cyril is exactly the same reason that Aquinas has a problem with John Damascene: unrecognized theological pluralism. Cyril's relational use of consubstantiality would be exactly what the Latins mean by the filioque, which Palamas cannot allow, so Palamas instead reads his own theory over Cyril.
Knešević's favorable assessment of Palamas's exegesis, based primarily on Boulnois and Daley, is accordingly unconvincing. Although he correctly admits that "Palamas incorporates cyrillian 'filioquistic' passages into his own prevalent interpretative matrix," the following conclusions are entirely typical of the denial of theological pluralism:
Firstly, it can easily be discerned that the Archbishop of Salonica, unlike many of today's western researchers, addressed the "filioquistic" passages in Cyril's opus contextually, which means that he interprets them within the historic and conceptual framework in which the Archbishop of Alexandria expounded his ideas and, above all, in the context of discussions of which he partook actively. Following that methodological principle, Palamas, as we have seen, interprets the cyrillian passages in the context of proving the consubstantiality of the Spirit with the Father and the Son. In other words, all of the cyrillian passages that Palamas takes into consideration regarding the rebuttal of the Latin reading are either of economic character, thus suggesting the temporal bestowing of grace or energy of the Spirit which occurs through or from the Son, or aim at displaying the co-equal divinity and consubstantiality of the three persons of the Holy Trinity. That was exactly the primary undertaking of Cyril and it was a priority on his theological agenda, something that Palamas himself suggests when he claims that Cyril directed the aforementioned formulations at "those who opposed consubstantiality" (epei kai pros tous antilegontas to homoousio ta toiauta gegraphen).
Thus, Palamas, whilst interpreting Cyril in the context of tradition to which he belonged and in the context of historic controversies of his age, effectively eludes the trap of anachronism into which the authors, who are prone to see Cyril as an advocate of the filioque on the eastern side, undeniably fall. Precisely speaking, Palamas provides here adequate instructions for avoiding one post factum reading, in the sense that an idea, which was already accepted once, is interpreted as if it originated much earlier in time than what it acutally is. Hence, Cyril's texts, instead of having ideas of the later period projected upon them, ought to be read in the context of this author's prevalent motives, which were mainly of christological and soteriological character. The later conflict over filioque was completely alien and unknown to Cyril. So, the appropriate line of reasoning is the one which indicates that, without later pneumatological disputes between the East and the West, the critique which -- starting with Theodoret of Cyrus -- was directed at Cyril regarding the procession of the Holy Spirit "and from the Son", would actually be thrust aside.
...
Therefore, if all of these and similar attitudes of Gregory Palamas are taken into consideration, an inescapable conclusion that is to be reached is that the Archbishop of Salonica is right along the lines of the Archbishop of Alexandria not only in terms of establishing a more firm relationship between the Son and the Spirit in the domain of divine existence per se, but also – only far more emphasized – in terms of strict renunciation of any hypostatic causality on the Son’s part. Following the abundance of formulations and further elaborations, it can be said that Palamas – which was natural went even further in this respect than Cyril himself.
Knešević doth protest too much, methinks! First, Cyril can't even be read accurately in the Cappadocian model at all, much less in Palamas's speculative extension to that model. Second, Cyril's historical opponents were Antiochenes, not "those who opposed consubstantiality," and much of what Cyril wrote was probably opposing the same monopatrism that Palamas endorses. Third, consubstantiality is used as a relational term by Athanasius, so the use of consubstantiality by Cyril would actually show eternal relations, unlike the way Palamas is using that consubstantiality in his model. Fourth, the Blemmydes model Palamas is employing contradicts the logical structure of the relational model, since it distinguishes causal and non-causal relations. Reading Cyril as teaching the filioque is therefore actually less anachronistic and more sensitive to the original context, contrary to the tendency of modern historical theologians (including Boulnois and Daley) to collapse all of the Greek-speakers into the Cappadocian model. I have no doubt that Palamas believed he was interpreting Cyril correctly, just as Aquinas believed he was interpreting John Damascene correctly, but their respective opponents clearly had the better of them in terms of historical accuracy.
I raise this to point out that if modern-day Palamites are going to condemn the West for heresy, then they have already condemned Cyril, because the facts do not allow another alternative. People can point out the supposed opinion that Cyril was not a "filioquist," but this is only to succumb to the same sort of academic groupthink that led to pervasive errors in interpretation. Perhaps in the not-too-distant future, the anti-filioquist reading of Cyril will suffer a similar fate as other discredited hypotheses. Regardless, this idea that Cyril was operating in the Cappadocian model, as opposed to the relational model, is unsustainable if Athanasius and Didymus are taken seriously. And it is certainly unsustainable for the entire Latin West, including all of its Saints revered by the East, to avoid condemnation.
On the other hand, I think that interpreting the filioque to condemn either the Cypriot model or the Palamite model suffers from similar problems. It would likely involve condemning Gregory of Nyssa's own account, which clearly could not have been rejected by Constantinople, and would definitely condemn the Neoplatonic accounts of Pseudo-Dionysius, Maximus, and John Damascene. I find it hard to believe that the filioque doctrine has developed dogmatically in such detail. Pluralism was fine in the patristic era; it is likely fine now. Even though there may be a verbal denial of the filioque in the East, I have seen essentially no evidence in this study that there is a conceptual denial. Both the Cypriot model and the Palamite model have an account of relations that should be adequate to meet the dogmatic requirements, whatever labels we decide to put on them.
With this survey behind us, let us now summarize the problems with Maspero's proposal.
VII. The "Cappadocian victory" model as a cause for Catholic self-flagellation
I mentioned earlier that the influence of the "Cappadocian victory" model through Congar and Garrigues has been baleful for ecumenical relations, since it actually reinforces the suppression of pluralism that is the root cause of division. But it's been even worse than that on the Catholic side, because instead of offering an apologetic for the filioque, based on the historical evidence for the tradition, an unfortunate number of Catholics (Maspero included) are instead offering an apology for the filioque. This is based on the entirely mistaken understanding that the later Greek understanding of "Father alone" was what the Creed of Constantinople really meant, even though there is essentially no evidence for that proposition. There likely was no such consensus meaning among the pro-Nicenes, although the textual background of the creed in Epiphanius indicates that there was at least compromise with (if not outright endorsement of) the Johannine tradition. In any case, if we did have to decide between the two, then it is just as likely (and maybe even more likely) that the filioque as taught in Rev. 22:1 was the intended meaning. But I suspect that appending either "and the Son" or "alone" to "proceeds from the Father" was not considered to deny the underlying doctrine by the other side, because they referred to two entirely different analogical concepts. That failure to endorse one side or the other does not appear to have satisfied either side, a division that continues all the way through Chalcedon and produces further splits after. But the historical fact that Constantinople was a compromise seems undeniable.
On the other hand, there is no way to accept the "Cappadocian victory" narrative without erasing the Alexandrian-Roman tradition. It renders all of the Latin and Alexandrian Fathers to some or another degree incoherent with primitive or simplistic views that must be corrected by the glorious Cappadocian model. We must apologize for these well-meaning-but-bumbling Saints of the Church who just didn't realize exactly how appalling their claims of patristic support were. We must grovel, abase ourselves before the Orthodox polemicists, put on our sackcloth and ashes, and proceed to display exactly how sorry we were for failing to be aware of the Cappadocians' singular brilliance. And this is done to the point of excluding and in some cases entirely misreading our own Latin tradition. Other than Maspero himself, I have two other relatively recent examples of the same phenomenon that show the same problems.
For, in the original Greek text of the Constantinopolitan Creed of 381, the term “proceeds” (ekporeusis) had a specific and all-important meaning. It meant to originate from a single Source, Principal, or Cause (Aitia). And the single Source, Principal, or Cause of the Holy Spirit is of course the Father, and the Father alone. As St. Gregory of Nazianzus says ...
"The Spirit is truly the Spirit proceeding (proion) from the Father, not by filiation, for It is not by generation, but by ekporeusis" (Discourse 39. 12).
Indeed, it was this very theology of the Cappadocian fathers (i.e., Sts. Gregory Nazianzus, Basil the Great, and Gregory of Nyssa) that the bishops at Constantinople I (381) intended to promote when they authored the Creed to say “The Holy Spirit ...Who proceeds from the Father.” –a reference to the Father’s Monarchy as the sole Source, Principal, or Cause of the Spirit. And the bishops at Constantinople I did this to counter the heresy of the Macedonian Arians, who, at the time, were claiming that the Spirit is merely a “creation” of the Son. ‘No,’ say the Council fathers, ‘the Spirit is Divine and has His Source, like the Son, with the Father. It is from the Father that the Spirit proceeds.’
So, to someone coming from this Eastern heritage –indeed, for any Greek-speaker who knows what the term “ekporeusis” implies (i.e., procession from a single source, principal, or cause), the addition of the Latin clause “Filioque” (“and the Son”) seriously challenges, if not totally destroys, the originally-intended meaning of this Creedal statement. And we Roman Catholics fully agree and admit this. The introduction of the Filioque is clearly a departure from the original intention and design of the A.D. 381 version of the Constantinopolitan Creed. However, it is not a departure from Apostolic orthodoxy.
In this misguided desire to somehow reconcile this mistaken model with the actual history of Western dogma, Bonocore ends up producing a nonsensical explanation that ends up violating both Catholic and Orthodox dogma:
Rather, the Western Church teaches, and has always taught, that the Father, and the Father alone, is the Source, Principal, and Cause (“Aition”) of the Holy Spirit –that is, the formal proclamation of Constantinople I. Indeed, even St. Augustine, who is often made into an intellectual scapegoat among some Eastern Orthodox (their argument being that Filioque is based totally on Augustine’s supposedly flawed theology) clearly taught that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father “principaliter” --that is, “as Principle” (De Trinitate XV, 25, 47, PL 42, 1094-1095). So, there is clearly no contradiction between Augustine and the Cappadocians or the Constantinopolitan fathers on this issue. Both Greek East and Latin West confess, and always have confessed, that the Father alone is the Cause (Aition) or Principle (Principium) of both the Son and the Spirit.
Ergo, the Catholic Church does not deny the Constantinopolitan Creed as originally written. This is why our Byzantine Catholic Churches recite the Creed without the Filioque, and why even we Romans are able to recite the Creed without the Filioque when participating in Byzantine Catholic or Eastern Orthodox Liturgies. This is also why we reject the clause “...kai tou Uiou ...” (“...and the Son”) being added to the Creedal expression “ek tou Patros ekporeuomenon” in Greek, even when used by Latin Rite Catholics in Greek-speaking communities. If the Greek word “ekporeusis” is to be used or intended, then it is incorrect and heretical to say that the Spirit proceeds from the Father “and the Son.” Neither East nor West believes that the Spirit proceeds “from the Father and the Son” as a common source or principal (aitia). Rather, that one Source and Principal (Aition) is the Father, and the Father alone.
But, if the Western Church agrees with the East that the Spirit proceeds from the Father alone, then what does it mean by “Filioque” –that the Spirit proceeds “from the Father and the Son”? Very simply, and keeping in mind the West’s isolation from the original Greek-language intention of the Constantinopolitan Creed, what the West means to express is a truth that is equally valid, but distinct and parallel to, the original Greek- language intention. For, when the West speaks of the Spirit “proceeding” from the Father and the Son, it is referring to something all-together different than “procession” as from a single source (aitia). It is not advocating two sources or principals for the Spirit, or some kind of “double spiration,” as is all-too-commonly (wrongly) assumed by many Eastern Orthodox. Rather, it is using the term “proceeds” in an all-together different sense. And the best way to illustrate the two different senses or uses of the term “proceeds” (Greek vs. Latin) is though the following analogy:
If a human father and son go into their back yard to play a game of catch, it is the father who initiates the game of catch by throwing the ball to his son. In this sense, one can say that the game of catch “proceeds” from this human father (an “aition”); and this is the original, Greek sense of the Constantinopolitan Creed’s use of the term “proceeds” (“ekporeusis”). However, taking this very same scenario, one can also justly say that the game of catch “proceeds” from both the father and his son. And this is because the son has to be there for the game of catch to exist. For, unless the son is there, then the father would have no one to throw the ball to; and so there would be no game of catch. And, it is in this sense (one might say a “collective” sense) that the West uses the term “proceeds” (“procedit”) in the Filioque. Just as acknowledging the necessity of the human son’s presence in order for the game of catch to exist does not, in any way, challenge or threaten the human father’s role as the source or initiator (aition) of the game of catch, so the Filioque does not deny the Father’s singular role as the Cause (Aition) of the Spirit; but merely acknowledges the Son’s necessary Presence (i.e., participation) for the Spirit’s eternal procession from the Father to Someone else – namely, to the eternal Son. Father and Son are thus collectively identified as accounting for the Spirit’s procession. This is all that the Filioque was ever intended to address; and it was included in the Creed by the Western fathers at Toledo in order to counter the claims of the 6th Century Spanish (Germanic) Arians. These Arians were of course denying this essential and orthodox truth –that is, the Son’s eternal participation in the Spirit’s procession –an issue which was never challenged or comprehensively addressed in the Byzantine experience, aside from the fact that there does exist throughout the writings of the Eastern fathers the profession that the Spirit proceeds from the Father “through [or ‘by way of’] the Son.” –an expression equivalent to the Filioque.
The "game of catch" analogy here is inept in the same way as Richard of St. Victor's "love" analogy; it would create an active and passive principle, which are two principles, rather than a procession of the Spirit from the Father and the Son as from one principle. So Bonocore has expressly denied the doctrine of Lyons and Florence exactly because what he is trying to do is impossible. Leaving that aside, interpreting Augustine's "principaliter" in a way that denies that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son communiter, as from one principle, contradicts Augustine's own view in addition to the later dogma. This incompetent historical (and theological) interpretation results directly from the adoption of the "Cappadocian victory" narrative.
Bonocore is a lay apologist who has probably been misled by the 1995 "Clarification" (which really did almost nothing to clarify, since it pushed the "Cappadocian victory" narrative that Garrigues endorsed). Because of the Clarification, this is how he understands the Catholic position he needs to defend, even if it actually contradicts all of the Latin Fathers and all of the background of Lyons and Florence. But the fact that patristics scholar Jim Papandrea makes a very similar mistake shows how the "Cappadocian victory" narrative has coopted the scholarship as well.
Papandrea's book Reading the Church Fathers includes the following explanations of the filioque at various points in the book, which might as well serve as a definition of the "Cappacodian victory" paradigm:
Together, the Cappadocians clarified that the Holy Spirit is of the same divine substance (consubstantial) with the Father and the Son and is therefore divine and is worthy of worship. Thus, the Holy Spirit cannot be a created being, or reduced to the personification of divine activity. Variations of these orthodox and Nicene clarifications had been affirmed in the West since Tertullian, and in the East at least since Athanasius, however, the Cappadocians are credited with effectively ending the debate over the divinity of the Spirit and bringing the East around to an acceptance of the Greek technical terms to be used to described the Trinity. Their work led to a revision of the creed at the Council of Constantinople in AD 381 that expanded the paragraph on the Holy Spirit to what it is today (with the exception of the western addition of filioque, "and the Son"; see below).
...
Theologically, Ambrose is less of an innovator and more of a collator and summarizer. He was influenced by all of the important western theologians, especially Tertullian and Novatian (vila Hilary of Poitiers). But he had also traveled to the East, he could read Greek, and so he was able to integrate the influences of Athanasius and especially the Cappadocians into his work. Consequently, his document On the Holy Spirit (written in AD 381, the same year as the Council) is a more succinct and accessible treatise on pneumatology than one would get from trying to glean the information from all of the Cappadocian documents directly. Ambrose does take one step that goes beyond his predecessors. Whereas the Cappadocians had said that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son, Ambrose, in his attempt to emphasize the equality of the Father and the Son against Arianism, wrote that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son (in Latin, and the son is one word, filioque). For him, the doctrine of inseparable operations applies even to the procession of the Spirit, so that the Spirit must proceed from both Father and Son (just as the Son is sent by both the Father and the Spirit). This will influence Augustine's writing on the Trinity, which in turn will lead to the addition of the filioque clause into the creed in the West (see chapter 13, below).
...
Eastern Christians think of the procession of the Spirit as parallel to the generation of the Son. Just as the Son is eternally generated from the Father, so the Spirit is eternally proceeding from the Father. ... But here's the rub: just as we would never say that the Son is eternally generated from the Father "and the Spirit" (which would paganize God, turning the Spirit into something like the mother of the Son, making the Son also the Son of the Spirit) -- so the eastern Christian will correctly affirm that we cannot say that the Spirit eternally proceeds from the Father "and the Son" since the eternal existence of the Spirit is dependent on the Father alone.* So to the extent that procession of the Spirit is analogous to eternal genenration of the Son, the procession of the Spirit must be from the Father alone, or at most, from the Father through the Son.
* Augustine did actually say this. In his On the Trinity, he did say that the procession of the Spirit from the Father and the Son applies to both eternal procession and temporal procession. However, in this he went too far. In a situation like that of the Pelagian controversy, here Augustine allowed the argument to push him to an extreme that he would later have to nuance. See the response to this question by the [1995 Clarification].
...
Western Christians, on the other hand, tend to think of the procession of the Spirit as more of a parallel to the Incarnation of the Son, that is, the giving of the Spirit to humanity is like the giving of the Son to humanity. And in this, western Christians are correct to point to all the Scripture passages which make the Spirit the gift of both the Father and the Son. The heart of the problem is that the same word, procession, actually describes two distinct doctrines. The first is eternal procession, the eternal existence of the Holy Spirit and the Spirit's place in the Trinity, and this is what the easterners are thinking of when they insist that the Spirit proceeds from the Father alone. The second is temporal procession, the gift of the Spirit to humanity and to the Church, and this is what westerners are thinking of when they insist that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. Thus, the filioque itself (double procession) technically only applies to temporal procession.
If we need any further evidence that the "Cappadocian victory" paradigm and its use in the 1995 Clarification has devastated the understanding of the Latin and Alexandrian tradition, we need go no farther than a Catholic scholar reciting essentially word for word the hardline Photian position because of it. This is insanity: Papandrea is interpreting the 1995 Clarification to say that Photius was right all along, and he does so precisely because that is how senseless it is to try to read Latin and Alexandrian Fathers in the Cappadocian model. Consider that he is reading Ambrose, a "collator and summarizer," as nonetheless going beyond and creatively synthesizing Cappadocian works, many of which he almost certainly hadn't read, as opposed to simply reproducing what others wrote (including Didymus, as Jerome less than politely suggested). It is certainly beyond question that Ambrose would not have come up with the pneumatological use of Revelation 22:1 on his own, which is a clear reflection of the Johannine tradition he was following. I do not believe it is a coincidence that Papandrea wrote a largely negative review of Lashier's work of Irenaeus that suggested to me that Papandrea was instead unable to think outside of the cognitive box in which the "Cappadocian victory" paradigm had placed him.
Thus we reach Maspero. Maspero at least doesn't assert the logically contradictory position of both Bonocore and Papandrea that the filioque was purely economic. But his alternative proposal for a "patristic filioque" based on a realist version of relations within the substance is no better. Now that we have seen Palamas's move to an even more apophatic view than his predecessors, it becomes immediately apparent that Maspero's assertion of an ontological "active but non-causal" role for the Son in the procession of the Spirit goes in exactly the wrong direction for the East. It suffers from the same flaws as the "real" version of the Blemmydes model that was rejected by both Cyprios and Palamas. And as Cross pointed out, any relational distinction between the Son and the Spirit can be at most conceptual (i.e., related to our manner of thinking about real things as opposed to the thing itself), and that goes for Augustine and Nyssen equally. Divine simplicity thus entails a hard apophatic limit on how literally any conceptual structures can be read onto the Trinity for both East and West; this is what necessitates paraconsistent logic. So this idea that Nyssen's concept of relation is somehow "real" or "ontological" within the concept of "substance" is only an expression of Maspero's Kantian ontology that privileges categories like person and relation; it cannot be found in any of the sources and does nothing to bring the models closer together. At most, Maspero's view might be adapted to fit into the conceptual structure of the Cypriot model, if the relations are not taken to be "real" in the sense that Blemmydes appears to do. But even then, it would be characteristic of the Cypriot model, not a general dogmatic principle that could be applied universally.
And Maspero's reliance on post-Kantian existentialism in apparent in his use of the psychological analogy:
The usual scheme that identifies the reinterpretation of human interiority in the light of the relationships of the three Persons in the divine immanence as a hallmark of Latin tradition is challenge. In fact, a similar trend can be found in the Greek Fathers based on the new relational ontology introduced by the Cappadocians in view of the Council of Constantinople. This suggests the need to radically rethink the relationship between the Filioque and the psychological analogy, excluding the route that the former be caused by the latter. On the contrary, this happened the other way around, as the theology which led to the distinction between the two immanent processions had as a natural consequence the rereading of the human being's internal faculties without any undue projection from the bottom up.
The bolded text about "reinterpretation of human interiority," "relational ontology," and "rereading of the human being's internal faculties" is purely contemporary. These are modern philosophical terms used in a way that has no basis in the authors Maspero purports to be interpreting. And to put icing on this Kantian cake, Maspero's single citation of Friedman in the entire book is to charge those developing the emanational model with "the loss of moderation preserved in patristic times by apophaticism" based on their strong version of the psychological analogy. The reason I bring up Maspero's passing footnote here is that it illustrates Maspero's fundamental misunderstanding of pluralism even in his own Latin tradition, which a careful reading of Friedman certainly should have prevented. These errors are as follows:
(1) Maspero's own description of the internal psychology and particularly the "reinterpretation of human interiority" is a much more literal use of the psychological analogy than any medieval short of Henry of Ghent (and maybe not even him) might have employed. Maspero's concepts are so far beyond the borders of apophaticism that the Scholastics set that for Maspero to make this charge, which Friedman himself certainly does not make, borders on the ridiculous.
(2) One of the people who makes a relatively strong use of the psychological analogy that Maspero chastises is Bl. John Duns Scotus, relying on the formal distinction. Scotus's theology clearly draws from Bonaventure, the Doctor who literally wrote the book on Christian mysticism and apophaticism (The Journey of the Mind to God). Although Bonaventure himself did not make the psychological analogy a major part of his theology, the formal distinction on which Scotus's use of the psychological analogy is based definitely draws on Bonaventure's own theology. The fact that the resulting Franciscan model is closer to the East both theologically, as an emanational model, and metaphysically, as being closer to the essence-energies distinction, makes Scotism particularly suitable for ecumenical efforts. And such use even has historical precedents: as Fr. Christiaan Kappes describes in "A Latin Defense of Mark of Ephesus at the Council of Ferrara-Florence," Mark of Ephesus himself relies on Scotus's work as against the Dominicans at the Council. Maspero's monolithic view has not only led him to suppress pluralism generally but to denigrate a particularly helpful thread of Latin tradition for his ecumenical cause.
(3) The problem for ecumenism on the filioque has not been use of the psychological analogy, especially the Biblical term Logos, but taking the "love" in "God is love" too literally, the exact same error committed when "love" and "relation" are recast in terms of modern existentialism. The author in the West who used "love" quite literally was Richard of St. Victor, who analogized the Holy Spirit to Abel being born of the love of Adam and Eve. Fr. Kappes in "The Filioque, Thomas de Aquino Byzantinus, and Ps.-Basil's Contra Eunomium" describes this as a "primitive but popular metaphor." Kappes further relates that, despite the authority of Richard, St. Thomas carefully considers this metaphor and rejects it, saying "this example of a material procession is inept to signify the immaterial procession of the divine persons" (ST I, p. 36, a. 3 ad 1). In particular, it clearly violates the concept of "one principle" endorsed at Lyons, since Adam and Eve would be an active and passive (material) principle for Abel. Given that the metaphor is unlikely to be interpreted in a sufficiently apophatic way, it is therefore inept. Unfortunately, as Kappes also points out, Western missionaries from the East frequently relied on this popular metaphor, which was scandalous to Eastern theologians who viewed it as proof that the West was really teaching two principles, exactly as Photios had claimed centuries ago in the Mystagogy. So Maspero has not only misdiagnosed the problem, which was excessive literalism about the love relation, but doubled down on the same error with his highly literalist account of relations.
This misbegotten view of his own tradition extends through the very end of the book, where Maspero lays out his idea of apophaticism. As outlined above, apophaticism serves a specific formal function in patristic and post-patristic theological schools; especially with respect to the doctrine of divine simplicity, it specifies the limits of our conceptual apparatus around the Trinity. It is intended to prevent exactly what Maspero does, which is taking terms like "relation" and "person" from our experience too literally. By contrast, in post-Kantian existentialism, the "relational" experience is what is real, while our rigorous conceptual thinking at the noumenal level must be subject to apophasis to prevent us from thinking that our concepts are the reality. Referring to Gregory the Theologian's alleged view of apophaticism, Maspero says:
The extraordinary definition of the true theologian presented by Gregory of Nazianzus seems to lead us in the direction:
"But by getting some idea of what concerns Him [God] (ta kat'auton) from the realities surrounding Him (ek ton peri auton), we piece together (syllegomen) a dark and uncertain image from different things (allon ap'allou). And so, in our opinion, the best theologian is not the one who has understood the whole, because the limited does not contain the whole, but rather the one who has been able to imagine (phantasthe) more than others and to better unite in his mind (synagoge) the mental image of the truth or a shadow of it or whatever we would like to call it." [Or. 30.17.9-14]
The true theologian knows very well that our thought is limited, as the most blessed Trinity is eternal and infinite, that is, always beyond our capabilities. At the same time, the possibility for the knowledge and worship of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit is always open, at the relational level. In fact, the correspondence of the verbs syllego and synago in the quoted text recalls precisely the drawing of the connection between the different moments and signs of God's giving of Himself in history, in imitation of the symballo that according to Luke 2:19 characterizes the meditation of the Heart of Mary.
If we refer back to J.-H. Nicolas's summary of the theological task, there could not be a better correspondence between the Thomist Nicolas and Gregory the Theologian. There can never be any systematic vision (understanding the whole) that fully contains the Divine Truth (apophasis), but we cannot cease from using what reason we have in terms of the law of non-contradiction, affirming and denying, to express that doctrinal synthesis in a coherent way (cataphasis). That is precisely the speculative (imaginative) task to which theologians put themselves. But for Nicolas, this leads to authentic theological pluralism. Maspero, by contrast, reads apophaticism in post-Kantian terms, even purporting to find his existentialist account of "relation" in Scripture.
The true path forward is likewise laid out by Nicolas, who humbly recognized the limitations even of his own Thomist school. It is not some fruitless gladiatorial combat to decide the "best" among those the many wise theologians who each are able to "imagine more than others" and "better unite in [their] mind the mental image." It is not to make the Cappadocian-Syriac school the "winner" over the Alexandrian-Roman school. It is to recognize what many irenically-minded authors in the first millennium did: that there is a such thing as legitimate theological pluralism. As we saw, the "Cappadocian victory" paradigm was three times a failure in accounting for the Latin tradition and for Catholic dogma.
Maspero's concept of "apophaticism," moored in Kantian ontology, is the battleground. Here is what I dispute:
So, following Gregory of Nyssa's warning, we must avoid turning concepts into idols through a common effort to recover the sense of Christian mystery. The conflict over the Filioque can in fact be traced to the weakening in the theological epistemology of the essential role of apophaticism, understood as affirmation of the fact that the revealed reality exceeds our ability to formulate it. This epistemological loss characterizes the turn from the patristic era, which coincides with that of the first seven Ecumenical Councils, to the medieval and Byzantine era. This seems to suggest the need to study the development of thought in the first eight centuries of the Christian era in search of a common theological grammar.
Would that Maspero had actually done such a study! He might have realized that his ascription of the filioque conflict to "the weakening in the theological epistemology of the essential role of apophaticism" is comically false. What actually characterizes the turn from the patristic era to the medieval and Byzantine era is a loss of the sense of theological pluralism. This was not driven by linguistic considerations, since productive theological exchanges continued between Rome and Alexandria through the fourth century and all the way to Chalcedon. Rather, it was the point at which Greek-speaking Alexandria was lost to the Miaphysites that Rome was separated from Constantinople, and the old Alexandrian-Roman model and the Cappadocian model gradually lost the sense of one another's existence as "Latin" and "Greek" theologies continued to develop. That sense of mutual awareness was hanging on by a thread at the time of the Seventh Ecumenical Council and the subsequent Photian Schism, and the thread was broken in the eleventh century. Apart from a single irenic dialogue between Anselm of Haverberg and Nicetas of Nicomedia in 1136, which is summarized by Ed Siecienski in The Filioque at pp. 122-24, this mutual awareness has never again been achieved.
It is this largely mythical view of a monolithic theological consensus in the Fathers and the resulting denial of theological pluralism, driven almost entirely by mutual ignorance resulting from the post-Chalcedonian theological splintering of the Roman Empire, that is responsible for the filioque conflict. Even after the Photian Schism, mutual tolerance of theological pluralism continued to operate as it had between East and West, going all the way back to the reception of Jewish traditions by Theophilus and Irenaeus. That pluralism only became a Church-dividing issue in the second millennium, and since then, each side has been polemically insistent that only schools within its own broader theological model can be orthodox. Maspero's attempt to pick a "winner" in the Cappadocian school over and against the Alexandrian-Roman school is only throwing gasoline onto this raging fire.
VIII. Drop the anti-filioquism
Maspero begins his book with an anecdote about a young man who carried a sign made from a pizza box during a 2010 papal visit to London that read "Drop the Filioque." Maspero seems to have been under the mistaken impression that the Filioque is "a theological issue that seems to be of interest only to experts in ecumenical dialogue or historians of the Church." He is apparently oblivious to the fact that by 2010, there was a robust theological community of polemics and apologetics between Catholics and Orthodox. One of the chief polemical arguments of the Orthodox against the Catholics during this time has been this assertion of the so-called "patristic filioque" as contrasted with the "medieval filioque." This is frequently asserted by Orthodox who do not recognize Catholics as a true church, some of whom even advocate rebaptism of Catholics who enter communion with Orthodox churches. So Maspero's suggestion to "Drop the medieval filioque and let's keep that of the (Greek) Fathers" is repeating, and seemingly endorsing, an anti-Catholic trope that has been used relentlessly by Orthodox polemicists. That is simply a fact.
Why a scholar of Maspero's standing thought that this would help ecumenism or why he was oblivious to the polemical context of his own writings cannot be explained. But he deserves to be chastised for it, because it was both reckless and avoidable. Had he not been so careless and sloppy in his study of the Latin and Alexandrian traditions (or had he even thought through the arguments of his own sources like Thom and Friedman), this wouldn't have happened. As it is, he should be ashamed for what he has done. Other historians, who are likely equally unaware of the Orthodox polemicists and who view these opinions as nothing but ordinary historical speculation, have endorsed Maspero's work. Having been working at the ground level of East-West ecumenism for almost twenty years, I cannot make such an endorsement; Maspero's "ecumenical" thesis is a disaster, and it does not even have the virtue of being correct. Maspero falls into every trap that has sabotaged East-West dialogue for centuries, and the lesson of history is that all of those traps result from a denial of theological pluralism.
In terms of how we would actually respond to Toby Guise, the young man with the pizza box, we can consider what Guise actually said about his experience:
I went to the Mall primarily out of historical and cultural interest rather than with any clearly defined spiritual expectations. The atmosphere there was certainly one of his expectation, even though many like me were essentially sight-seeing. But when the Pope appeared there was a definite shift in the atmosphere. It was not immediate but a sense of elation infused the crowd, which began to move down the Mall in a kind of joyful mass jog. I was personally overwhelmed by love for Pope Benedict and the desire to communicate this to him. I raised my palm towards him and shouted greetings of welcome and of blessing. His face absolutely radiated peace and love.
Coming to the end of the Mall, I was concerned at the possibility of a crush but the dynamic of the crowd prevented this. As it dispersed, people were highly energised and sharing their excitement with each other. It was an important encounter as even while I continue to reject many of the historical claims and canons of the Catholic Church, I do now accept it as a real and functioning spiritual hierarchy and highly value to Pope's presence as the most significant Christian voice in Europe.
At a personal level, Guise saw something that he didn't expect to see about the Catholic Church. That is no less true for the filioque itself; the problem has been that there is a whole Alexandrian-Roman tradition that people haven't seen. Maspero had a real opportunity here to do on the historical level what Pope Benedict XVI's visit did on the personal level: to show pluralism that hadn't been seen. Bringing the Syriac voice as yet another theological school could have helped to illuminate the pluralism in the orthodox Christian tradition that persists even today. But Fr. Maspero did not rise to that opportunity; instead, he preferred to lend his voice to anti-Catholic polemics that have only contributed to further division.
I am sorry to say of Fr. Maspero that it would've been better he had stuck to history and restrained his ambition in systematic theology and ecumenism.
IX. Apologia pro Vita Sua: An autobiographical note
I have been very hard on Fr. Maspero. Given that this is the Internet, it is very easy to dismiss my opinion as an overheated polemical exercise (as actually happened with my work on Calvinism). That is especially the case since Fr. Maspero is a scholar in this field, while I am not. For that reason, I find it necessary to give an account of what motivates me to write in this area generally and what motivated me to write what I have written about Fr. Maspero. My hope is that this will at least take any personal criticism out of the equation, so that the work can be judged on its own merit.
My first serious study of the Catholic faith began when I was in law school in Cambridge, Massachusetts (hence, the name of the blog). In the very first session of a series at St. Paul's Church called "Basic Beliefs," Fr. Jim Savage gave a presentation on the doctrine of the Trinity, and that was the first time I encountered the concept of perichoresis. I can only describe seeing that idea for the first time as a conversion experience. There was no doubt in my mind that what I had seen, was the truth. I had a sense of awe that I previously associated with looking up at the stars and contemplating the vastness of space -- here was a reality that no mind could fully grasp. And it has been so for me ever since.
Following that intuition, the study of the Most Holy Trinity, especially in the Church Fathers, has been a singular focus. Perhaps none was more influential for me than Cyril of Alexandria. I have always seen Cyril's vision as inspiring; he could see beyond himself to the heavenly horizons. He recognized when he needed to fight to preserve the faith, but he could also be extraordinarily open-minded and creative when communicating these ideas to others. I put this blog under Cyril's and Bonaventure's patronage in an effort to emulate their capacious theological vision. I hope that this article has done something to highlight the importance of Cyril's Alexandrian theology in history, which has been largely neglected.
That brings me to my present purpose. In the past couple of years, I have turned more to writing than reading. That is because I believe that the corrosive effects of Church division have left Christianity seriously hindered in its ability to witness to modern society. I believe there is an incredible intellectual legacy in the Christian faith that has been put under the proverbial bushel basket (Matt. 5:15-16), and that is largely because East and West cannot proclaim it with one voice, so as to let it shine to the world. The "bushel basket", as I see it, is this unproductive attempt of both sides to suppress the theological pluralism of the past, of which the revision of Alexandrian theology out of history is only a symptom.
Fr. Maspero's book Trinity and Man is an excellent book, and it is special exactly for not doing this. He lets Gregory of Nyssa speak for himself, rather than trying to fit him into rigid Eastern and Western categories. In that regard, it is in the same spirit as Barnes's Power of God, Ayres's Nicaea and Its Legacy, and Anatolios's Retrieving Nicaea, also very good books. Trinity and Man differs greatly from the work of Coakley, Daley, Weinandy, and innumerable others who seem far more determined to solve the ecumenical problem than to hear what any of these Saints have to say about it. It was a sad day to see Maspero join them.
I offer against those monolithic "solutions" a pluralist alternative. That pluralist alternative would instead recognize that the Cappadocians directly contradicted Cyril and the Latins on pneumatology, especially in the exegesis of John 15 and 16, yet they all somehow managed to live in one faith. That would be a path forward, not back into the mud. The best way I think to let them speak would be to affirm that the Latin version of the Creed is the Latin and Alexandrian version, while the Greek version of the Creed is the Cappadocian and Syriac version, but both are theologically acceptable based on Constantinople.
The reason that I think it is necessary to affirm the Alexandrian aspect is that two points need to be clear: (1) the "original" Constantinopolitan intentionally allowed both interpretations in local creeds, so the West never changed anything, and (2) this has nothing to do with the Creed being in Greek or Latin. The West affirms the same thing that the Latin and Alexandrian theologians always affirmed, and the East affirms the same thing that the Cappadocian, Antiochene, and Syriac theologians always affirmed. Since the Alexandrian heritage has been subsequently assimilated into the Cappadocian model, it seems simpler to say that the Greek language "stands for" that model, and Latin "stands for" the Western model. That is not because ekporeuesthai is a magic word in Greek or that it had any particular technical meaning after Constantinople but simply because the Byzantine synthesis was built exclusively on a particular version of the emanational model as a historical matter.
The only real alternative to pluralism is to keep the faith traditions for the Holy Spirit under a bushel basket. It seems that a millennium or so of past experience should be long enough to reasonably conclude that this path leads nowhere.
