When I originally wrote my series on reflexive relations and especially the historical use of that concept, I pointed out that the use of the phrase "image of the Son" was logically identical to what the West meant by "and from the Son," as confirmed by St. Thomas Aquinas himself. I was at the time familiar with St. John Damascene's use of the phrase and the conceptual antecedents, but not the express use of "image of the Son." Thanks to the help of Father-Deacon Anton Usher, an Eastern Catholic, I learned that this expression was used in the same way in St. Athanasius's Ad Serapion (and followed explicitly by St. Cyril) and also in St. Gregory Thaumaturgus's shorter creed, thus dating the usage to the earliest days of the Nicene faith.
The longer version of the creed reads as follows:
There is one God, the Father of the living Word, who is His subsistent Wisdom and Power and Eternal Image: perfect Begetter of the perfect Begotten, Father of the only-begotten Son.
There is one Lord, Only of the Only, God of God, Image and Likeness of Deity, Efficient Word, Wisdom comprehensive of the constitution of all things, and Power formative of the whole creation, true Son of true Father, Invisible of Invisible, and Incorruptible of Incorruptible, and Immortal of Immortal and Eternal of Eternal.
And there is One Holy Spirit, having His subsistence from God, and being made manifest by the Son, [to wit to men]: Image of the Son, Perfect Image of the Perfect; Life, the Cause of the living; Holy Fount; Sanctity, the Supplier, or Leader, of Sanctification; in whom is manifested God the Father, who is above all and in all, and God the Son, who is through all.
There is a perfect Trinity, in glory and eternity and sovereignty, neither divided nor estranged. Wherefore there is nothing either created or in servitude in the Trinity; nor anything superinduced, as if at some former period it was non-existent, and at some later period it was introduced. And thus neither was the Son ever wanting to the Father, nor the Spirit to the Son; but without variation and without change, the same Trinity abides ever.
This description of the Spirit as "Image of the Son, Perfect Image of the Perfect" or its shorter equivalent quoted by St. Gregory of Nyssa, "Perfect Image of the Perfect Son," could be substituted in place of the filioque formulation "and from the Son" with absolutely no change in meaning. That is, if the Creed recited "I believe in the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father, Perfect Image of the Perfect Son," the West would be affirming nothing different from what we affirm today, only using much older creedal language. The impasse is resolved; the filioque divide has been relegated to semantics, as the great Orthodox bishop Kallistos Ware said it had been.
So why do we continue a fight that has no reason in principle? It is purely an accident of history at this point, and to be completely blunt about it, both sides have bungled this historical study even of their own respective traditions. In an effort to recruit various historical figures as generals in a war for their respective philosophical-theological methods, they badly misread them, perhaps most notably St. Augustine, St. Photius (who in his turn misread Augustine), and St. Thomas Aquinas (who was somewhat more faithful to Augustine but at the cost of misreading St. Dionysius). And the error committed here is the quintessentially modern error, the Enlightenment distilled to perfection -- it is the confusion of the philosophical-theological account of Christian life with the life itself.
One example is the later interpolation "made manifest, to wit to men," which is an interesting addition (it is not found in Nyssen's version or earlier versions of the creed). This was probably inserted into the original creed by later monopatrists, perhaps following Theodoret of Cyrus or perhaps an earlier tradition influencing him, because it clearly puts the procession of the Spirit only in the economy. But whether deliberately inserted to make this point or included for a completely different purpose, such as the doctrine of the Holy Spirit as a Person being somewhat underdeveloped at the time, there is certainly very little evidence that this consideration was widespread or revelant to the Wonderworker himself. But when viewed through a philosophical-theological lens, this becomes retroactive evidence that "image of the Son" must mean something other than the filioque, even if that says more about the interpreter than what is being interpreted.
The result is that the historical voice itself is suppressed. Something that would've helped to show a common concept is effectively written out of history. Photius, having been inculcated in a monopatrist tradition, cannot see that St. Athanasius and St. Cyril may have been using "image of the Son" in a way that is consonant with the Western concept, even though they never used the words. Then the interaction between Theodoret and St. Cyril is likewise interpreted in a monopatrist way (Siecienski's reading in his book on the filioque being but one modern example). In yet another historical example, the language "having His subsistence from God, and being made manifest by the Son" is later seen by the Council of Blachernae as a distinction between "having existence from and existing through," with "perfect image of the perfect Son" being relegated to only the manifestation. Blachernae in turn is then reinterpreted through the Neo-Palamite lens by Papadakis as teaching an "eternal energetic manifestation" connected to the essence/energies distinction, which Anne-Sophie Vivier-Muresan has pointed out might not have been intended even by Gregory of Cyprus or even Gregory Palamas himself. The voice of St. John Damascene, who recognizes both the "image of the Son" and the monopatrist threads in the tradition, and sees the two as reconcilable, is silenced and replaced by an imaginary advocate for one or another philosophical-theological position. (St. Thomas is at least honest about this; he says that John's monopatrism is a mistake that he must have learned from Nestorians, but that is only evidence that he has taken St. John out of historical context.)
The West has not done any better. Following what was effectively a modern rediscovery of Neoplatonism, there was a fervent effort by Neo-Thomists to reclaim the narrative that St. Thomas had effectively synthesized all of the philosophia perennis into Aristotelico-Thomism, which was absolutely critical for the Neo-Thomist claims of metaphysical certainty that they were attempting to assert against modernism. As this happened during what has been called "the Neo-Thomist captivity of the Church," in which the antimodernist assertion of Thomism as the antidote to modernism was in full force, historical accident once again caused history to be bulldozed by a philosophical-theological paradigm. In this case, the baptism of Neoplatonism via Augustine became an absolutely critical historical element, whether it was Augustine himself who purified the pagans or Aquinas who finally broke the chains that tied Augustine to paganism. The inconvenient voices within the tradition, such as St. Bonaventure, who certainly had a much better grasp of the Neoplatonic tradition in the East than Aquinas did (and likely better than Augustine as well), were not heard. And given the Eastern concern about "Hellenism" that already contributed to misinterpretations of Augustine's thought, it is essentially a perfect storm in terms of the devastating impact on historicity.
At least with respect to Augustine, though, retrieving a genuine historical understanding is as easy as ABC, in this case referring to (Lewis) Ayres, (Michel René) Barnes, and (Richard) Cross. In that regard, this retrieval of what Augustine actually meant in historical context is well-summarized in Augustine and the Trinity by Ayres, Augustine and Nicene Theology by Barnes, and a pair of articles by Cross ("Quid Tres? On What Precisely Augustine Professes Not to Understand in De Trinitate 5 and 7" in The Harvard Theological Review and "Divine Simplicity and the Doctrine of the Trinity: Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine" in David Bradshaw, ed., Philosophical Theology and the Christian Tradition: Russian and Western Perspectives). Ayres's and Barnes's "new canon scholarship" concerning Augustine, which has been available for decades before the recent books that summarize it, is difficult to deny. Even its opponents are frequently forced to admit that their criticism of Théodore de Regnon (who first offered the "Greek starts with the person, and Latin starts with the essence" explanation rooted in Neoplatonism) and Olivier du Roy (who asserted Neoplatonic origins of Augustine's theology) is well-founded. But this has unfortunately not resulted in more people questioning whether opposition to the filioque might itself need rethinking.
That is essentially the line I would maintain, summarized in two points: (1) what Augustine actually thought is compatible with the Eastern "Image of the Son" formulation and (2) contemporary Orthodox criticism of the filioque based on Augustine's supposed Hellenization have been debunked. Augustine's formulation of the filioque would not have differed at all from St. Cyril of Alexandria's formulation that the Spirit proceeds from the essence of the Son, which was in turn consistent with Cyril's description of the Spirit as the Image of the Son. In responding to the Orthodox polemics against that proposition, I have titled the post "The filioque impasse resolved" in response to Michelle Coetzee's The Filioque Impasse. I have chosen Coetzee as an implicit foil not because she has introduced a particularly novel viewpoint; on the contrary, she has summarized the polemical Orthodox view on the filioque-as-Hellenization in its major aspects both accurately and conveniently without introducing new theories. Her view of Augustine as a Neoplatonist, for example, is taken more or less in its entirety from Orthodox Readings of Augustine, primarily from Bradshaw's reading, and her engagement with the scholarship of Ayres and Barnes is passing at best, making her work the perfect example of the dehistoricizing view I have pointed out. Let's begin with the false history of Western Neoplatonism.
I. Plotinus's program in the East vs. where the West begins
The first unquestionably expert philosopher in Neoplatonism in Western Chrisitanity was Marius Victorinus, who appears to have been an influence on both Augustine and Boethius. Victorinus is the bête noire in every Orthodox theory of Neoplatonism in the West, since Augustine appears to have read his work. So in demonstrating why the Orthodox polemic is at odds with the historical record, we will start here.
Barnes explains why Victorinus's Trinitarian work cannot be taken in the Neoplatonic sense imputed to him: Victorinus is unconcerned with so-called "vertical causality," the explanation for how things are brought into existence. Barnes's explanation in Augustine and Nicene Theology cannot be improved, so I will simply reproduce it (bold is my emphasis):
I will attempt to sum up the key presupposition(s) which distinguishes Victorinus' Neoplatonism. It is a common-place to think of Being as unmoving or motionless because it "goes" nowhere, nor changes for it has no parts. For Neoplatonists, Being brings being(s) into existence. For the interested but not specialist reader, what must be kept in mind is that the goal or logic of Neoplatonism is, for our purposes here, to explain the origin(s) and kind(s) of being. Plotinus has the famous "dual-motions" of higher being [exitus-reditus]: the inward motion which results in identity, the outward motion which results in (a) new being. Each level of "generation and return" produces a new being (hypostasis?) whose being-ness is derived and less than the level of origin. Hence the famous hierarchy of being which is known as a "vertical causality." I have characterized this dual-motion as "Stoic tonos stripped of it [sic] materiality," and I have made no claims to originality by this linking of Neoplatonic hierarchy of being to the Stoic notion of the inward and outward motion (tonos) of the pneuma. If the conceptual origins of Neoplatonic aetiology may be found in Stoic origins, then to that philosophy we add Aristotelian concepts of potentiality and actuality to being, but understanding "potentiality and actuality" not in a strict Aristotelian sense, in which actuality brings into being what was there potentially, but as power and act. "Power" is not an uncompleted act; it is that which makes an act possible, and which determines what that act "will be." The existence of the act does not diminish it; indeed, what a thing is -- its ousia -- may be its power(s) existing in the unity of whatever the "it is." Or as Plato so succinctly put it: "I am proposing as a mark to distinguish real things that they are nothing other than power."
Given that Neoplatonism is a philosophy which seeks to provide the explanation of the origin and kinds of beings (as I said above), here I provide the reader with a provision definition of Being which should be kept in mind, as word-for-word as possible, for understanding any characteristic Victorinus attributes to Being. Thus:
Being (in the sense of "God is Being, from whom all creation takes its being") is an auto-kenetic crystalline active power unfolding within itself unceasingly. The key concept is that of intrinsic cyclic motion, power to act. Existence is a verb, an action, a doing. "Action springs forth" (from "to be") as the "Word leapt."[Barnes explains in a footnote that "crystalline" refers to the triadic relational structure of the activity.]
Victorinus is not dealing with the static Neoplatonic hierarchy of being at all; he is referring to the soul's activity in the form of a triadic power. Created effects, most notably the human soul with its activities of being, living, and thinking, are related to this power as images, so that every created thing is a finite image of the triadic act of being in the Trinity. Just as there is not a vertical hierarchy of powers in the soul but rather a horizontal relation among them, so the triadic image in Victorinus does not follow Plotinus's project of establishing a hierarchy of being but instead establishes an account of existence based on power-activity. Barnes explains further:
The fundamental principle of existence, from which comes being, etc., is this tonos. The essence of the soul moves in three fundamental or self-constituting (auto-genesis) ways or tonoi or frequencies -- however we take the analogy to be best conceived: the motion of being, the motion of life, the motion of intellection. This motion is often called "horizonal" [sic] to distinguish it from the "descending" notion of being "spilling over" or flowing down. In vertical causation, the previous source is prior (at least notionally) and superior to its product: the cause must always be prior to its effect, greater than its effect, and contain that effect.... Most scholars place Plotinus' aetiology within this genera of causalities (vertical causation, source greater than its effects, etc). The key to understanding Victorinus' Trinitarian theology is to understand that his aetiology does not wholly (or principally) owe to this Plotinian genera of noetic triad, but to the genera of another "Neoplatonism," one often attributed to Porphyry, or at least called after him.
Victorinus has not taken Plotinus's One-Nous-Soul triad; he has instead borrowed Plotinus's account of the human soul: "What then are the constitutents seen in soul and how many are there? Since we find in soul ousia and life together and ousia is common to all soul, and life also common, and life is also Intellect" (Ennead VI.2.7). Unlike One-Nous-Soul, this Being-Life-Intellect triad is rarely used, and it falls into a more general class of philosophical descriptions of the soul rather than a particularly Neoplatonic account of being. So if the distinctive feature of Neoplatonism is emanation, we may say, following Russell Friedman's distinction of Trinitarian accounts, that Victorinus's model is relational rather than emanational (I will have more to say on this later). In any case, in this specific application, Victorinus appears to be completely original to his theology; he has connected the ousia of the soul to the Nicene homoousion in a way that no one before, and perhaps not even anyone since, did. That "perhaps" brings us to the reception in the West, but before that move, I want to directly address how Barnes's work answers the more polemical Orthodox interpretation offered especially by David Bradshaw.
Bradshaw interacts with Marius Victorinus especially at pp. 108-14 in Aristotle East and West, but based on Victorinus's general familiarity with Neoplatonism, he interprets what Victorinus says in terms of "vertical causality." As Barnes pointed out, this is a mistaken reading of Victorinus. Based on this mistaken reading, Bradshaw understands Victorinus's distinction between esse, "existence which is unqualified and in that sense 'infinite'" (Greek to einai), and finite being (Greek to on), the circumscribed, intelligible existence of substance(s), which corresponds to activity in creation (agere, operari) . But this actually relates to how the Son is uniquely presented in the economy as an object of vision, a uniquely Latin concern with respect to Homoian Arians that Barnes situates in context throughout the book, which is why Victorinus distinguishes between the hidden Father and the manifest Son. This is clear in Victorinus's use of the concept in a polemical response to the use of John 14:28, a common text cited by Homoians. As Bradshaw puts it:
Attempting to explain the statement of Christ that "the Father is greater than I" (John 14:28) -- always a difficult text for the orthodox -- Victorinus writes:
The Father is greater [than the Son] because He gave all to the Son and is the cause of the Son's being and mode of being. But He is also greater because he is inactive action (actio inactuosa). Such act is more blessed because it is without effort and unchanging, the source of all things that are, dwelling in respose, perfect in itself and needing nothing. The Son, however, received being, and proceeding from action to act (in quod est agere ab actione procedens) comes into perfection. He is realized as a plentiude by motion, having made all things that are. (Adv. Arium 1.13.9-16)
...
Potency, which preexists all things, is both a "preprinciple" and exists prior to the truly on ... Scripture and common knowledge affirm that this [preprinciple] is God and esse and that there is nothing before Him (ante ipsum nihil esse), He who is at once esse and operari. We confess and adore this God as the principle of all that is, for by act (actione) are those things which are; for before action they do not yet exist. For we believe in a God who acts, as for example, "In the beginning God made heaven and earth" ... Therefore He is the true God and the only God, because He is God in both power and activity (potentia et actione), but internal (interna), whereas Christ is both power and in activity (potentia et actione), but now external and manifest (foris et aperta). God the Father is therefore first act and first existence and first substance, the original to on, who by His own action begets Himself. (Adv. Arium 1.33.8-25).
Interpreted in the context of the Homoian argument concerning the manifestation of different Persons in the economy showing a kind of subdivinity, Victorinus's answer must surely refer to the expression of the Word in creation, not some inherent distinction of divine power between the Father and the Son. The certain clue here is the "common power, common works" assertion based on John 14:9-10, the predecessor of the later doctrine of inseparable operations and a core principle of the anti-monarchian Latin theology identified by Barnes. In the later Christian philosophy, this would be called a divine mission, an extension of the inner-Trinitarian relations with a created term: the inner Word becomes an outer Word. The inner-Trinitarian "manifestation of the hidden" becomes the ad extra divine mission of the Son in revelation. Bradshaw's reading misses the Christian context of Victorinus in his conclusion, instead assuming he is giving an account of vertical causality. This is is why he asserts that "[m]uch like Plotinus, Victorinus insists that what is present in the effect must be present implicitly or in a hidden manner in the cause," a conclusion that clearly runs afoul of the explanation that Barnes has laid out.
What is particular fascinating is that if Bradshaw had made the connection to Victorinus's actual purpose, he might realize that the distinction Victorinus is drawing between to einai and to on in the context of the economy serves exactly the same explanatory purpose as the essence/energies distinction. This is, of course, why Victorinus notes that even the Father is "the original to on," so as not to suggest, by being to on, in this sense the Son has a different nature or power from the Father. Rather, the Son is "external and manifest" in the economy while the Father remains "hidden." So the to on, the power of (finite) being that is expressed in creation and in the economy, is the same in the "first act and first existence and first substance," the Father, as the Son. It is why Victorinus says in another passage quoted by Bradshaw that "[i]nsofar as [the Logos] defines and encloses, providing form to each, it is the on, the already existing, since [thanks to it] there has come to be a particular form of esse (Adv. Arium IV.19.26-37)." This is not an account of the Logos's begetting from the Son or a confusion of the Son's existence (esse) with finite being (to on); rather, it is an explanation of how the ad extra acts of the Trinity reveal the existence of the Persons without thereby diminishing the Son's divinity.
And although everything in Victorinus looks like a nail under Bradshaw's Neoplatonic hammer, it seems that Bradshaw himself has some unconscious awareness that his tool is unsuited to the task. Such anomalies include contrasts with true Neoplatonists ("It is interesting that he denies there to be any participation of on in esse; this is directly contrary to the view expressed in the Commentary [on Parmenides]. He also gives no indication that esse and to on are somehow the same reality viewed under the light of different aspects, like the One and One-Being of the Commentary."). Although Bradshaw asserts that Victorinus's distinction between "the Father as internal activity and the Son as external activity" is his "adaptation of the two acts of Plotinus [concerning vertical causality]," he notes that "Victorinus does not present the distinction as universally applicable, for he does not discuss activity or generation in the sensible realm, and even within the Godhead he does not use it in discussing the procession of the Holy Spirit.... He also downplays the notion that the external act is inferior in reality to the internal act, for although he does acknowledge a certain inferiority of the Son to the Father he places much greater stress on their consubstantiality." Viewed from the perspective of Latin anti-Homoian theology as outlined by Barnes, it would be apparent that the economic visibility of the Son and the consubstantiality of the Trinity are two distinct lines of argument, which is why Victorinus does not conflate his economic explanation with his inner-Trinitarian explanation. Despite these clues, Bradshaw continues to try to pound Victorinus's use of the soul triad (being-life-intellect) into the shape of Plotinus's Intelligible Triad of One-Nous-Soul, although at least conceding that this "more considered view" is significantly different. But Barnes's account of the origin of the soul triad in Victorinus shows that such efforts are futile.
I do not say any of this to denigrate Bradshaw, his work in Aristotle East and West is both impressive and, for the Eastern part especially, generally persuasive. But only one of him and Barnes can be right about what Victorinus had in mind, and it pretty clearly isn't Bradshaw. The problem is that the connection through Plotinus's Intelligible Triad is the only way that Bradshaw can equate Victorinus's view of activity of the soul to Aristotle's Prime Mover and his "unqualified being" to the Form of the Good (the One), which is infinite in the sense of formlessness and unknowability. But if what Victorinus has in mind is not Neoplatonism's vertical causality at all but instead "an auto-kenetic crystalline active power unfolding within itself unceasingly," one that is infinite not in the sense of formlessness but infinite power, omnipotence itself, then Bradshaw has landed on the wrong sense of potency.
Instead of Bradshaw's view, Barnes has the right of it when he says "'Power' is not an uncompleted act; it is that which makes an act possible, and which determines what that act 'will be.' The existence of the act does not diminish it; indeed, what a thing is -- its ousia -- may be its power(s) existing in the unity of whatever the 'it is.'" As Barnes points out, Plato was actually the first person to point out that every being is an expression of a power, and this concept, not the vertical causality of Plotinus, seems to have been far more important for Latin theology, at least implicitly. Such a power as Victorinus describes would be exactly the kind that St. Augustine has in mind when he says "God alone acts (poiei) and is not himself actualized or affected," a position which is quoted by St. Gregory Palamas in support of the same position (Capita 133.3-6, as quoted by Tikhon Pino in Essence and Energies). This would be pure active potency, not a passive potency actualized by moving to act or even an infinite cyclical act in the fashion of the Prime Mover. It would be the dunamis to the energeia of creation and grace. And that is a good place to move on to the Bishop of Hippo.
II. Augustine as Latin theologian
The title "Augustine as Latin theologian" is a response to Bradshaw's "Augustine the Metaphysician" in Orthodox Readings of Augustine, which largely follows what he says about Augustine in Aristotle East and West and "Time and Eternity in the Greek Fathers." Coetzee, in particular, repeatedly and favorably cites this work, along with Zizoulas, Being and Communion, and Hireotheos (Vlachos), The Person in the Orthodox Tradition. Those works are the principle basis for Coetzee's audacious claim "I have demonstrated that the fundamental point of departure between the Eastern and Western traditions is [1] different understandings of the word 'person' in relation to the Divine Persons and [2] parallel divergent notions of divine unity." The main thrust of Coetzee's argument is that the Cappadocians had a robust metaphysicial notion of person, which Coetzee follows Hierotheos in calling "person-hypostasis." Coetzee likewise follows Zizoulas in saying that the unity of the Trinity is constituted by the mutual love of the Persons, and in this sense, "God is love," as contrasted with the Western view in which the persons are allegedly demoted to "mere relations" and the unity of the Persons is constituted only as the divine simplicity of Plotinus's One. I will address the second assertion first.
With respect to the Platonic notion of unity, the problem is that if Ayres, Barnes, and Cross are right about the history, then none of these claims can be true. I showed this with Victorinus not because he is a critical source for Western theology or even Augustine in particular, although Augustine and Boethius both probably read him. If Victorinus, who is clearly immersed in Neoplatonic philosophy to a degree far greater than many of his Western Christian contemporaries, does not even follow Plotinus in this regard, how much less likely is it that others were adopting the Intelligible Triad, vertical causality, and its implicit use of Aristotle's Prime Mover? It is not, and there is essentially no evidence that this was the case. So what is the explanation for how we arrived at this point, when the West is charged with a "Hellenism" that there is no historical reason to believe existed?
Once again, historical accident prevailed over the overarching narrative. The Cappadocian context was, in large part, a struggle against Greek Neoplatonism and especially the application of vertical causality to the Trinity, which is the "Hellenism" that they decry. But the real problem in that regard is that Origen, who had enormous influence in the East and some in the West, had adopted this very approach, so that a large part of the Cappadocian project was rehabilitating the Christian use of hypostasis from this Origenist influence. That difference over the philosophical authority of Origen seems to have been the dividing line particularly between the Cappadocians in the East and the Rome-Alexandria axis in the West. In both Rome and even Origen's own city of Alexandria, the reception of Origen's Platonist speculation tended to be qualified in a careful way. Notably, as per Khaled Anatolios's Athanasius, "Athanasius respectfully corrected his illustrious predecessor [Origen] 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," what we might call Origen without Originenism. By contrast, one might fairly say that Eunomian theology was nothing other than an enthusiastic embrace of Origenism. Even moderate neo-Arians (the homoiousian party) saw the danger posed by such extreme views.
In terms of the reception of Origen in the West, only St. Jerome was intimately familiar with Origen's work, and he was ferociously defensive against the charge by his former friend Tyrannus Rufinus that he ever adopted the Origenist philosophy. This is indicative of a stance very similar to that of St. Athanasius: Origen was a respected theologian and exegete, but there was no general endorsement of his philosophy. As for the philosophical influence of Origen among other Westerners, Elizabeth Clark's standard work The Origenist Controversy summarizes it well:
[T]he person who came to epitomize "Western" theology was Augustine, whose mind was barely touched by the Origenist dispute at the time it erupted. In later theology, Augustine drew the line against Origenist speculation: the body belonged to the first creation (sexual intercourse would not have been part of Paradise had sin not intervened) and would continue in some form in the afterlife; the affirmation of an apokatastasis was roundly denounced; and hierarchy of status was championed both here and in the hereafter. Banished was Origen's vision of the original and final unity of all rational creation. Through both his theological brilliance and his ecclesiological politics, Augustine forged for the West a theology that, however broad in its social and historical vision of the unity of humankind in sin, forfeited Origen's larger cosmological concerns. By refusing to answer the Origenist question of the soul's origin, Augustine in effect bypassed most of the Origenist (and anti-Origenist) discussion that occupied other Western theologians during his formative and mature years.
This is not to say that either Augustine or his predecessors in the West were unfamiliar with Origen. György Heidl tracks such influences in Origen's Influence on the Young Augustine and concludes that the libri pleni that Augustine describes in Contra Academicos as a "few drops of most pleasant unguent," which lit an "incredible conflagration" in which Augustine realized that Christian philosophy had the capacity to explain the object of the philosophers' speculation. Heidl is, I think rightly, skeptical of the conclusion that these libri pleni were the "few books" of Plotinus that Augustine describes in De beata vita with a much milder reaction. Rather, Heidl believes that what triggered the "conflagration" in this case were likely books on Christian philosophy encountered in Milan with Sts. Simplicianus and Ambrose, including the Homily on the Song of Songs by Origen. With regard to the background of this development, Heidl cites an instructive narrative from Augustine's Confessions:
Augustine visited the experienced and philosophically well-educated Simplicianus immediately after the reading of the libri platonicorum and Scripture. The old master was "glad" that Augustine "had not fallen in with the writings of other philosophers which had been full of frauds and deceits according to the elements of this world" (cf. Col. 2:8). He then told Augustine the story of Marius Victorinus' conversion "in order to exhort me," Augustine says, "to Christ's humility which is hidden from the wise and revealed to the little ones." This remark thus reveals that Simplicianus taught Augustine to evaluate Platonism or Neoplatonism properly and to recognize its subordinate place to Christianity.
In addition to reinforcing the fact that the reception of Platonism by Christian philosophers such as Victorinus was critical, as Barnes amply demonstrates, this also provides another example of "Origen without Origenism" similar to Athanasius's position. As another example, the exegetical works from Origen were well-known and influential in the West, but when describing St. Ambrose's reception of Plotinian doctrines, Heidl is clearly negative: "[D]espite the undeniable influence of a number of Plotinian Enneads on Ambrose's works, the presence of 'Plotinian doctrines' in these homilies is highly questionable. In fact, Ambrose's ideas substantially differ from Plotinus' metaphysics." In a footnote, Heidl adds "It is an open question whether Ambrose used Plotinus' treatises directly, or whether he simply copied a Greek model (perhaps a writing of a Cappadocian father), as he often did, which already contained the passages of Enneads 1.6; 1.7; 1.8; 3.5 in a 'Christianized' form. If this was the case, Ambrose probably was not conscious of using Plotinus' texts."
We have arrived at a rather remarkable juncture. It has practically become a commonplace that Augustine's model of the Trinity was based on Plotinus's Intelligible Triad (whether or not "baptized" by him), which was the basis for de Régnon's theory that Latin theology "begins with the essence." There is more than a hundred years of scholarship in both East and West to this effect; indeed, Barnes notes "that Régnon's constellation of themes remains recognizable in recent Augustinian scholarship, such as Edmund Hill's introduction to his translation of De Trinitate. Hill's emphasis on Augustine's interpretation of the Old Testament theophanies, his comparison of Gregory Nazianzen's relational theology with Augustine's, and his insistence on the theological continuity between early Greek and Latin theologies (cast in opposition to a hard-line division of these two traditions ironically attributed to Prestige), all these features reveal to the reader a scholarly world still circumscribed by Régnon's insights a hundred years later." Yet there is no plausible account of Augustine's reception of the Intelligible Triad, either from Plotinus or mediated through Origen! There is not even reasonable evidence of any pro-Nicene Latin theologian having applied the Intelligible Triad (or, even implicitly, Aristotle's Prime Mover) in the Christian context.
The assertion that Augustine has somehow collapsed the essence of God into the expression of God's will in creation immediately falls with the Neoplatonic assertion. It is based entirely on the notion that Augustine is collapsing the (Neoplatonic) simplicity of the One with the intelligible being of the Intellect. But like Victorinus, Augustine is instead distinguishing the infinite internal existence of God from its expression in the economy. Instead of saying that God is beyond being in His essence (like the Neoplatonic One) but accessible in His energeia, Augustine instead is drawing the distinction between the infinity of God, which transcends even the infinity of numbers (see Adam Drozdek's "Beyond Infinity: Augustine and Cantor") and which acts without converting potency to act, and created things that can only have a finite (though potentially infinite in a certain respect) relation to God. And this is a fatal flaw in Bradshaw's argument based on Augustine's belief that God is intelligible.
The reason that we can understand that God's infinity-above-infinity is in Augustine's mind is the very analogy that Bradshaw admits: the eye can only see one side of a body at a time. Bradshaw points out that Augustine cannot possibly mean this analogy literally, since a body could be comprehended by the simple expedient of walking around to take multiple views, but does not seem to understand why he says this. But based on the distinction of Augustine's infinity-beyond-infinity and Plotinus's essence beyond being, it becomes clear what Augustine has in mind. What Augustine means is exactly what Aristotle means in saying that the intellect can potentially be infinite, in that it can in principle become any form. But it can never actually comprehend every form in the manner that God Himself does, so when presented with a truly infinite, an infinite-beyond-infinite that includes every possible form, then even if such a form serves as the object of the intellect, it would only be an object that could be taken in by infinitely many views. The intellect would take on ever-greater understanding without ever comprehending the object, which is why Augustine says that the divine essence is knowable but not comprehensible.
Bradshaw has Augustine seeing Aristotle's Prime Mover, which has infinity in terms of an infinite cyclical motion of thought, a mental perpetual motion machine. This is because he sees Plotinus's Intellect in Augustine. But Augustine does not have Aristotle's Prime Mover or Plotinus's Intellect in mind. He has the divine Logos, the Word of God through Whom all things are created in His image. And the reason why I have called Victorinus's account "relational" is the same reason that I would call Augustine's account "relational" -- because "image of" is a relation (and "perfect image" would be identity of power and substance). The finite things that are called from non-being by God are not emanated from God but instead are made to exist by imitation of God's own infinite act of existence. They might move toward God's own internal motion, but they cannot become God's internal motion and thus be absorbed into it. The beatific vision, in Augustine's mind, does not imply that we see God's essence in the mode of Plotinian (or Origenist) identity and collapse back into it. On the contrary, we continue moving eternally toward a comprehension that we can never achieve, a situation that is nonetheless satisfying from the perspective of desire because we know for certain that there is always more to know. The difference between this view and the Intelligible Triad in this regard turns on a difference between two fundamental paradigms in Christian philosophy: relational and emanational.
III. The relational model and Western triadology
The distinction between "relational" models and "emanational" models of the Trinity was identified in the context of medieval Scholasticism in Russell Friedman's Medieval Trinitarian Thought from Aquinas to Ockham, but traces it all the way back to the fourth century. Friedman summarizes the distinction between the models as follows (bold emphasis is mine):
In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, then, there were rival ways of looking at the Trinity, one way that appealed to relations, the other to emanations. Before I specify how these two ways differ, I would like to point out what they have in common. What these two explanatory approaches to trinitarian identity and distinction agreed upon was that each divine person was constituted; that is to say, each person took on his own distinct personal being, on account of a single characteristic that is unique to that one person and distinguishes that person from the other two persons. This single characteristic was called a "personal property" (proprietas personalis), and according to both the relation and the emanation account the personal properties bring about some type of real distinction between the persons. The three divine persons, then, according to both the relation and the emanation account, are essentially identical (i.e., they share completely the same divine essence), apart from one difference, which is the unique personal property that makes each of the persons distinct from the other two persons. The personal properties thus bring about "merely" personal distinctions, that is, a real but not an essential distinction.
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The disagreement, then, between the relation and the emanation account was over the nature of these personal properties: are they relational in nature or are they emanational in nature[?] Interestingly, these two ways of explaining trinitarian identity and distinction have their remote origins in the thought of the pagan philosopher Aristotle, since they are based on the categories of relation, on the one hand, and of action and passion, on the other. The relation account itself descends ultimately from Augustine of Hippo (d. 430) and Ancius Manlius Severinus Boethius (d. ca. 525), who in their respective works De trinitate examined which of the ten Aristotelian categories can be applied to God or said about God and which cannot. To make a longer story short, Augustine and Boethius claimed that only two categories can be said about God: substance and relation. Substance is the category that describes things that have an independent existence of their own, like individual members of a natural kind, e.g., John the human being, Fido the dog, Lucy the cow. God clearly has independent existence, and so for Augustine and Boethius God is substance to the highest degree. What about relation? This is more complicated, but the problem with predicating any accident -- and relation is an accident -- of God is that Aristotelian accidents inhere in their subject, they exist in it, and they are different from their subject, since accidents can come and go while the subject remains.
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As Boethius says, it is the circumstances of the thing that the category of relation points to, not the thing itself. Aristotle actually noted this characteristic of relation when he named the category: the particular characteristic of relation, what sets it apart from the other categories, is that it is toward something (Latin: ad aliquid, Greek: pros ti), and hence relation indicates nothing about its subject or foundation besides the extrinsic circumstances in which that subject or foundation finds itself. For Augustine and Boethius, then special divine relations, possessed of no accidentality and inherence, and therefore implying no composition, are compatible with God's simplicity; in fact, these relations explain how the Father and the Son (and, by extension, the Holy Spirit) are distinct personally but identical essentially. How do the divine relations do this? Augustine and Boethius capitalized on the fact that 'father' and 'son' are relative terms.
Friedman's extended treatment of this subject thoroughly accounts for the philosophical background and medieval use of relations in Aquinas and Bonaventure, and that account essentially contradicts Bradshaw's assessment of the aetiology of Boethius's ideas in Aristotle East and West (which was already based on an incorrect assessment of Victorinus). Paul Thom independently comes to the same conclusions as Friedman about Aristotle, Boethius, Aquinas, and Bonaventure in his philosophical treatment The Logic of the Trinity. The history of Western triadology is essentially one of explaining the peculiar metaphysical qualities of these divine relations: how they can be a relative mode of being without being something besides the essence. For an early example, Richard Cross notes in his article "Quid Tres?" that Augustine wrangles with the issue of how the term "person," which refers to a genus of (rational) beings can be properly used as a term for individuals in God with no corresponding species, like "man" or "angel." Note that although Victorinus himself is not operating in this modified Aristotelian framework for inner-Trinitarian relations, instead replying on the philosophical account of the soul, Barnes nonetheless finds that his account is relational (with Barnes using the term "crystalline" to refer to its triadic relational nature). What these scholars all demonstrate is that, when one is not looking for the Intelligible Triad in the Christian philosophy in the West, one instead finds the relational model. To put it another way, if one does not make the mistake of thinking that Victorinus and Augustine derive their theologies from the Intelligible Triad but instead puts their polemical texts within their historical context, the parallels to Neoplatonic metaphysics completely evaporate.
One can think of the relational model arising from reflections on categorical being as such, essentially all of creation, and how those categories must be modified when dealing with the being of God, Who is both infinite and utterly simple. This creates an unbridgeable gap between categorical being and God's own being, and we would not know anything about God's inner life or relations but for God's act of revealing it to us. Hence, the relational account says that we know that internal relations are rationally possible, but it only serves as a defense that they are rational, not a proof that they exist, which would have to come from revelation. The relations are then grounded in the relational property of existing in relation-to, the relational opposition (which is, again, not what is meant by that term in Neoplatonic metaphysics). That philosophical development is consistent with the facts that (1) Latin theology was primarily a polemic against Homoian and monarchian accounts of the Trinity and (2) the issue of vertical causality in Plotinus and Origen was historically not even on the radar of Latin theology.
But in the West, the reception of the works of Dionysius along with Aristotelian philosophy in particular drove much greater interest in the Neoplatonic model of emanations, and this motivated inquiry into what caused the relations. Friedman explains the alternative emanational account as follows:
The resources to develop a rival to the relation account are already to be found in Aristotle's description of the category of relation. In his philosophical dictionary in Book V of the Metaphysics, Aristotle presents an account of three different types of relation. [From FN 8, there are relations founded in number and unity, causal relations of a producer to what is produced, and psychological relations, such as a measure to what is measured.] Here, only the second type is relevant: the causal relation of producer to product. The paradigmatic example that Aristotle offers of this is the relation of father to son.... Thus, the second Aristotelian type of relation, the relation of producer to product, is founded on action and passion, on acting and being acted upon, and in particular the relation of a father to a son is founded on the father's originating the son, on his having contributed to giving the son existence.... This is the intuition that later-medieval proponents of the emanation account of personal distinction were to capitalize on: production is the reason for there being a relation in the first place, and hence in some logical, non-temporal sense, the origination of the production of the Son from the Father must be "prior" to the relations between them. That is to say, some later-medieval theologians reasoned that, just as all categorial relations of the second kind are posterior to (and dependent upon) the corresponding productions, so the divine relations are logically posterior to (and dependent upon) the divine productions.
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Thus, on the emanation account, the Father is the divine essence in a fundamentally different way than the Son is, and the Holy Spirit is the very same divine essence in a third totally different way, these three different ways being how each one originates or has being. Specifically, the Father has the divine essence from no other because the Father is unemanated -- this is a property unique to the Father that gets its own name: it is the Father's "innascibility" (innascibilitas). The Son, on the other hand, is born (natus est), and hence he has the divine essence naturally by the emanation "generation" (generatio), and medieval theologians will also often say that the Son is emanated by way of nature (per modum naturae). Finally, the Holy Spirit, who is a gift willingly given by the Father and the Son, has the divine essence voluntarily by the emanation "spiration" (spiratio), and the medievals will also say that the Holy Spirit is emanated by way of will (per modum voluntatis).
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The later-medieval emanation account itself had its roots in various texts by Augustine, by John Damascene (John of Damascus, d. ca. 750), by Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1170), and most particularly by Richard of St. Victor (d. 1173) in his work De trinitate. It was only in the middle of the thirteenth century, however, that the relation account and the emanation account began to be considered mutually exclusive, so that a theologian could not be a proponent of both the one and the other. As mentioned above, Dominicans overwhelmingly held the relation account, whereas Franciscans held the emanation account.
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This divergence of views is already clear in Bonaventure and Aquinas.... [T]here is a systematic disagreement between the two theologians regarding the way in which we conceive the Trinity, and at issue here is whether the personal properties that bring about the distinction between the persons are best thought of as relations or as emanations. I want to stress, however, that, as I read it, the dispute between Bonaventure and Aquinas is about the way we conceive of the personal properties (as emanations or as relations), not about what the properties in actuality are (relations).
This passage highlights a number of important considerations: (1) the difference between the models is not in terms of what is explained (on which they agree) but how it is explained, (2) it was only after extensive consideration that one could draw the conclusion that they were two different models, (3) both models accepted the filioque, and (4) there was, in this case, a direct influence from the Christianized Neoplatonism in the East from St. John Damascene. But there is still essentially none of the "vertical causality" that drove Plotinus's Intelligible Triad and the resulting hierarchy of being. So even though the Franciscan view made a new use of Augustine's psychological model in what Friedman calls the "strong way," there is no sign that this is a late intrusion of Neoplatonism into a Latin theology that previously excluded it. But the emanational model does introduce a new concept from Aristotle, the concept of the relations as causal productions (from the Metaphysics) as opposed to mode of existence (from the Categories).
In this regard, it is important to keep in mind that the fact that the Holy Spirit is emanated by way of will does not mean that the Holy Spirit is caused by an act of will, which would be Arianism, or that the Son is the material principle from which the Holy Spirit proceeds. Rather, it means that the Holy Spirit proceeds by virtue of the Father's possession of the faculty of will with His own divine essence (also possessed by the Son) as object, which is what is meant by the titles of Love and Gift in the emanational model. Early emanational accounts, such as the one offered by Richard of St. Victor, do not always make these distinctions clearly, which contributed to confusion when they were presented to the East. (Confusion on this point, as well as confusion of the emanational and relational models generally, has greatly impaired East-West dialogue; this is discussed in greater detail in my dialogue with Fr. Christiaan Kappes.)
So at this point, not only is there a clear difference between the Western philosophical exposition of the Trinity and the Intelligible Triad, there are not one but two such explanations, each having no dependence on Neoplatonic vertical causality. From the historical perspective, if Friedman, Thom, and Barnes are correct, then Bradshaw simply cannot be right about Victorinus, Augustine, and Boethius having derived anything from Plotinus's Intelligible Triad. The last recourse for Bradshaw, then, is that the West has not followed Plotinus but has nonetheless fallen into the same philosophical trap that Plotinus did. Thus, even if they did not learn it from Plotinus, perhaps the relational model nonetheless has the same defective concept of "unity" (divine simplicity) or a deficient concept of "person," as per Coetzee's twofold accusation. Yet it turns out that this charge fares no better than the historical case.
IV. Philosophical implications of the relational model
Focusing now on the relational model, which was developed much earlier, we can consider whether there is any difference between the Cappadocian account and the relational model on the subjects of unity and person. It may be helpful here to situate the relational model within its theological context. Barnes in Augustine and Nicene Theology cites a threefold logical structure for every Latin theologian from Tertullian on: (1) the Three are understood to be one by unity of works and power, (2) the Three are distinct from one another by causal relations between one another, and (3) the Three are each always themselves and not another. The word for what is Three is persona, which is not a psychological term in this context but an ontological subject of action, akin to Aristotle's first substance. The reason that this model is rightly called "relational" is that "[i]n Latin Trinitarian theology, the idea 'person' does not provide the conceptual grounding for 'real distinctions' in the Godhead: that grounding is provided by the second and third items in the 'logic' listed just above." "Relation" is the category that provides the basis for distinction, and there is no underlying philosophical assertion that grounds the relations. Barnes notes that "[m]oderns expect Trinitarian theology to develop through a polar logic of 'person' and 'essence,' but Latin Trinitarian theology develops instead through the logic of eternal causal relations and irreducibility."
Given that a central concern was the Homoian argument that the visibility of the Son in revelation proved that He was of a different essence, the argument for unity of nature from unity of power was a critical element of Latin theology. As Barnes explains "[p]ower is substance as cause, and the distinctive causality of a specific substance is contained in (or exists as) its power, for all works arise out of a power and indicate, by their acts, the identity of that power." The central Scriptural passage for establishing this case is John 14:9-11 [ESV] Jesus said to him, "Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, 'Show us the Father'? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own authority, but the Father who dwells in me does his works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me, or else believe on account of the works themselves." It is that concluding point -- that working divine things shows that the Son is divine, that He is "in" (united with) the Father -- that establishes the core point of Latin theology. This is not yet the doctrine of inseparable operations, but it is entirely consistent with that doctrine.
This emphasis on the role of the works of the Son making the Father visible creates a strong emphasis on visual language in such passages as Phil. 2:5-7, Col. 1:15, Hebr. 1:3, and John 1:14 and 5:17-19. But the need to establish the common nature prevents the visibility of the Son from being a personal property of the Son, so these passages are interpreted in terms of how the Son acts in displaying the power of God relative to creation. The connection to visibility was also used in the context of image in terms of the Son perfectly imitating what the Father does. Barnes points out that "[t]he doctrine that the Son's unity with the Father is demonstrated in the fact that he 'images' the Father can also support a 'Nicene' Trinitarian theology whose logic is neither power-based nor substance-based, but iconic," citing Faustinus of Rome as an example. Given another interpretation by Augustine that the power that goes forth from Jesus in Luke 8:46 is the Holy Spirit, which Barnes points out in his chapter on Augustine's pneumatology, the identical argument could be made for the Holy Spirit as the Image of the Son. This is a common element with St. Athanasius, as recounted by Fr. Khaled Anatolios in Retrieving Nicaea:
One way of retrieving Athanasius's conception of the trinitarian structuring of divine immediacy in humanity's sharing in divine life is to follow his usage of the language of "image," which we haev already encountered as central to the conceptual structure of On the Incarnation. Much insight into the Alexandrian's theological vision can be gleaned by noting how the language of "image" is used to draw a series of immediate links between God and humanity. Humanity is made according to God's image, and its entrance into and perserverance in being is constituted through its participation in the divine Image, who is Word, Wisdom, and Son of the Father. The Son, in turn, is the true and perfect Image of the Father, who fully shares the being of the Father in himself and is only thus capable of sharing this being-with-the-Father with creation. The Spirit also is the Image of the Son, sharing the life of the Son to be shared by creation. Throughout this usage, "image" does not so much denote visibility or objective reproduction of a prototype. In the case of humanity, however, the being-according-to-the-image is not simply coincident with the entirety of its being, inasmuch as this being is also simultaneously being-from-nothing. That is why the human being is not simply "image" of God, but "according to the Image." Human being is thus a movement from nothing into God. When this movement became radically disrupted by sin, the divine Image, whose being is coincident with his sharing of the life of the Father, repaired human image through his own incarnate humanity. He did this by transferring humanity's movement-from-nothing into himself, such that we now have a new "point of origin" in Christ. The human bein's movement from nothing into God is now accomplished within Christ, who integrates this movement into his own imaging of the Father and the Spirit's imaging of himself. The salvific effect of the incarnation is precisely to transfer the potential obstruction of the starting point of nothingness, actualized and intensified by sin, into the free and unobstructed movement of Father, Son, and Spirit, through the new creatureliness of the incarnate Word.
We have seen previously that Athanasius was an example, as in the West, of a Christian theologian who received Origen without his Neoplatonic metaphysical baggage, but here we also see an excellent example of how "image" is used in the same relational way that the West uses it. Athanasius was certainly known in the West by St. Hilary of Poitiers and by Western Christians through his Life of Anthony, as recounted in Augustine's Confessions 8.6-8. But even if Athanasius's overall approach here was not a direct influence, the use of the "image" concept here is parallel to Victorinus's description of the soul's activity as the image of the inner-Trinitarian activity, and it is identical to the "iconic" theology that Barnes describes in Faustinus. Just as the Son and the Spirit image the divine power perfectly and are thereby one God, man, and most especially man's soul, images the divine power as the effect of a cause. This intimate connection of "image" to working (opera) as opposed to static imitation, a critical feature of Latin theology, also appears here in Athanasius. Again, Bradshaw in Aristotle East and West (pp. 154-56) seems to see this but to underestimate the significance when he says "Athenagoras, Clement, and Athanasius refer to the son as the energeia of the Father, and Athanasius refers to the Holy Spirit as the energeia of the Son" but says "[n]one of these writers attaches particular significance to the term." On the contrary, Athanasius is using energeia to show that the activity of the Son is the way the Son images the Father, and the activity of the Spirit is the way the Spirit images the Son.
This dual use of "image" as applied to God (perfect image, identity) and man (according to the image, acting in a God-like way) connects the Trinitarian relations to an account of creation and deification, what I will call the anti-Plotinian account. Recall that the central concern of Plotinus is vertical causality, which is why he posits the Intelligible Triad and the hierarchy of being. The relational account, which is focused on how the activity of the Son images the activity of the Father, naturally lends itself to explaining how humanity is created according to the image of God. In the Trinity, the exercise of divine power shows that the Persons have the same nature; in created being, as effects of the divine power, they show the power that caused them, the same Trinitarian power exercised by the Persons of the Trinity. This clearly distinguishes the uncreated (divine, possessors of the power, united by nature) from the uncreated (finite, effects of the power, acts of will). The concern is not at all to explain how creation has emanated from God (or the One in Plotinus's case) but rather to show that creation is a caused effect of divine power possessed by the Trinity. The hierarchy of being is not based on the exitus-reditus model in which successive forms are more and more remote from the unity of the One; rather, the hierarchy goes up as the creatures are more and more God-like in their characteristic activity.
Perhaps the easiest way to see what I mean by the anti-Plotinian account is to think of God's power as a kind of gravitational pull that draws things from non-being (formlessness, chaos, or nonexistence) into the act of existence. As things better and better imitate the divine activity, they are drawn closer and closer into the divine life. The lesser created beings are limited in their ability to approach, resting into stable orbits around God in their respective activity, not static but not progressing beyond their limits. But man, made according to the Image of God, is unique in that he has infinite potential to approach God and, conversely, the voluntary capacity to turn away from God toward non-being, though the latter is not infinite. This gravitational-type metaphor is seen in passages such as Romans 4:17 ("God ... who calls into existence the things that do not exist"), John 6:44 ("No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day") and John 12:32 ("And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself"). But what must be emphasized is that this is not at all the static hierarchy of being and participation in terms of intelligibility that Plotinus has in mind. I use the gravitational metaphor to illustrate that the entire account is inseparable from the concept of activity, but Augustine also uses this language of "weight" explicitly in the same sense in Confessions 13.9.10: "The body by its own weight gravitates toward its own place.... Out of order, they are restless; restored to order, they are at rest. My weight is my love; by it am I borne wherever I am borne." (One may note the similarity to God's Sabbath rest here; it is not a cessation from activity, which the static Plotinian account would require, but a resting within an order of activity.)
Overall, Augustine's account of creation and deification falls squarely into this anti-Plotinian account from the relational model; this is documented so thoroughly in Fr. David Meconi's The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification that no other reference is required. I cite the following excerpt discussing Augustine's use of "image" for the purpose of comparison to the beliefs of Athanasius mentioned above:
Augustine's understanding of imago parallels his doctrine of creation, because each plays a paradoxical role of simultaneously distinguishing and uniting. A created image is the reproduction of a temporally antecedent archetype: because it is an "image," it is always like and patterned upon this archetype, but because it is "derived," a created image is always incommensurate with and inferior to its original non-pareil. Something images another only if it is not that other; something can reflect another only if the two are related yet separate. Created ad imaginem Dei, human persons are simultaneously God's receptive icons as well as God's distinct others. As such, Augustine argues that an image possesses a true natural propensity to become its truest self through union with its paradigmatic exemplar. The human person therefore becomes most real by becoming most fully God's. In this way we come to understand, first, how only the Son can be said to be the perfect image of God and, second, how the human person can never find any "rest" or lasting satisfaction in the creatures surrounding him but only in communion with God. This again is the paradox of the imago Dei. It simultaneously makes the ontological otherness between eternal and created persons while also highlighting the relationship between them.
Interestingly, Meconi has also (albeit inadvertently) identified one of the misinterpretations of Augustine by du Roy at p. 55. Du Roy correctly identifies that Augustine uses the fact that man is made "to" (ad) the image to make a distinction between the perfect Image (the Son) and the created image (man); this is the same way that Athanasius uses "according to." But du Roy's Platonizing reading of Augustine leads him to see a tension that isn't there: "du Roy argues that this understanding of ad allowed Augustine to hold two truths simultaneously: the human soul is both an image (however imperfect) of the divine and is at the same time naturally desirous of becoming more like God." Du Roy's insertion of Plotinus into the anti-Plotinian account causes him to miss entirely the fact that the activity of the soul is what is in the image of God, not a static exemplar. This is why, while the ascent in both Augustine and Athanasius is Platonic in the sense of engaging what is most God-like in man (the activity of the soul), but not in terms of ontological (entitative) likeness. It is not a return along the Neoplatonic chain of being but an ascent toward God.
When these Doctors of the Church are read correctly, the Rome-Alexandria axis holds firm; Athanasius and Augustine stand shoulder-to-shoulder in their account of the Trinity, creation, and deification. Both appeal to activity (energeia) in their account of "image" and deification. Both have a dynamic concept of imitation. In fact, both originate in an "Origen without Origenism" approach to Scripture. Norman Russell credits Origen with the first understanding of participation as a dynamic engagement with divine activity. In The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition, Russell describes Origen's doctrine as follows:
Deification in Origen's writings means the participation of rational creatures through the operation of the Son and the Holy Spirit in the divinity that derives ultimately from the Father.
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Although Origen adopts Clement's vocabulary, his more ontological and dynamic participation through the Logos in God's very life is new. Clement's use of 'participation' is close to that of Plato and Philo.... It expresses the way in which creatures come to possess attributes which belong properly to a higher level of being. Participation in the attributes of God is the means by which likeness to God is brought about. Origen uses participation in more dynamic way to signify 'living with the life of God.' God reaches out actively to human beings whose response, through participation in the life of the Trinity, makes them spirits, christs, and gods. Indeed Origen's doctrine may be said to be the re-expression in metaphysical terms of the Pauline metaphors of participatory union with Christ.
This leads from what Russell calls the "Alexandrian Tradition I" to the "Alexandrian Tradition II" in Athanasius and Cyril, which emphasizes the ecclesial and sacramental role in deification:
[In Alexandrian Tradition II], there is a fundamental reliance on the theme of participation, which offers a way of understanding on the ontological level how Becoming can share in Being, or the created in the uncreated, without abandoning its contingent status, and on the dynamic level how the created and contingent can partake increasingly of the divine nature through the operation of the Holy Spirit, which enables it to attain eventually to the image and likeness of God. This develops an Origenian them.
[Also,] there is a firm rejection of any approach to bridging the gulf between created and uncreated by positing an inferior level of deity which can function as a mediator. Mediation is accomplished through the exaltation of Christ's humanity. [Cf. Augustine's assertion that there is "no other mediating nature" between God and humanity on p. 59 of The One Christ, for which this tradition seems a more likely source than Plotinus.]
When the relational model is thus situated in its full philosophical and theological context, including the use of image in creation and deification, its difference from the vertical causality of Plotinus becomes even more apparent, as do the similarities between Athanasius and Augustine in its application. And this, more than anything, seems to be the problem with Bradshaw's understanding of Latin theology. It is not only that Bradshaw has not correctly understood its historical background, although he has been misled by the Platonizing reading of Victorinus and Augustine. It is more than he does not seem to understand the Christian philosophical context of what Augustine is writing.
For example, Bradshaw says in Aristotle East and West (p. 224) that "[t]he most striking feature of Augustine's conception of being, from our standpoint, is its static character. For Augustine esse is not an act, but a condition -- that of full and unqualified wholeness." He makes a similar assertion about Boethius, reading him according to the vertical causality of Neoplatonism: "Since Boethius offers no account of the procession of id quod est from esse, it is not surprising that he would conceive their relationship on the static model of participation rather than the more dynamic model of a potentiality coming to act." Bradshaw believes, apparently, that because this is credited to the Platonists, Augustine is somehow endorsing identically what the Platonists believed about these things, even though such a static concept of being and procession would be absolutely senseless in the context of Latin power theology. So he interprets Augustine as a Platonist rather than a Christian philosopher informed by Platonism. If he did the same with Athanasius, he could just as well charge Athanasius with the same inconsistency, apparently apart from the fact that Athanasius uses the Greek word energeia and Augustine does not. It could not be more obvious for Augustine that God is active in a sense that far transcends any created thing; his entire theology of deification is built on it. In fact, the term maiestas, which is often used to translate energeia, is a commonplace in Latin theology according to Barnes.
The real problem for Bradshaw seems to be that he does not understand how exactly a God who is pure act in the Aristotelian sense of act and potency can actually do anything. This is a modern philosophical problem concerning divine simplicity and modal polytheism, exemplified by Christopher Hughes's On a Complex Theory of a Simple God and discussed in Eleonore Stump's and Norman Kretzmann's work on Aquinas, which work Bradshaw discusses at some length in Aristotle East and West. Bradshaw seems to think that he can dodge the criticism with a weaker account of divine simplicity based on the essence-energies distinction, and he points out that Stump and Kretzmann essentially do the same but with no real justification in Aquinas. But the entire criticism of modal polytheism, and even the Stump-Kretzmann reading of divine simplicity, is already based on violating the distinction between created and uncreated being in the relational model. Acting through conversion of act to potency is what is explicitly denied in the relational account by placing God outside of categorical being. Augustine himself says that the unique quality of divine being is that it doesn't act by conversion of act to potency, so interpreting actus purus as essentially an exhaustion of all potency makes no sense. The concept of divine infinity as developed specifically by Aquinas (who follows Richard Fishacre) defines divine infinity as being beyond the constraints of act and potency. It may be a great mystery as to how God creates or acts in creation, just as it is a mystery how God is timeless or how the Trinity is both necessary and unknowable or how God is unaffected in Himself by interaction with creation. That is hardly an excuse to attribute an allegedly necessary consequence to the Western position that it has both expressly denied and has reasonably attributed to the mysterious difference between divine and created being.
To put it another way, if the relational account concerning the divine act of existence and the created act of existence is correct, then we would expect the question of how finite acts of existence are created to be futile. This is because it would be asking a question about the divine being that we definitely cannot understand, and the only reason that the Western model might be interpreted to say something about that issue is due to a misinterpretation of what it is saying. In the Neoplatonic model of vertical causality, there must be a participable thing in order for something to take on a higher activity, so we would have no way to relate to God without "things around God." But on the relational model of God as infinite activity and creatures as finite activity, no such "thing" would be required; created things would simply be actualized by God relative to non-being (we don't and can't know how), while God Himself is fully actualized. Rather than banishing Rome and Alexandria to neo-Paganism and Origenism for using the relational model, perhaps it would be better to understand why the Cappadocians had a completely different theological project.
V. The Cappadocian Neoplatonic model
In sharp contrast with Rome and Alexandria, the Cappadocian fathers were faced with a Neoplatonic onslaught in Antioch and Constantinople, having to deal with both homoiousians who were actively trying to philosophically rebut the Nicene homoousios doctrine and the heresiarch Eunomius, who used Neoplatonic philosophy to attack the divinity of the Son and the Spirit. While never fully adopting Neoplatonic metaphysics and certainly never accepting the Intelligible Triad as a model for Trinitarian processions, the Cappadocians nonetheless operated within that philosophical framework. Hence, their development of energeia and participation were much more similar to how those terms were used in Neoplatonism and much different from how they were used in Rome and Alexandria.
Norman Russell, in distinguishing the doctrines of deification between Alexandria and Cappadocia, summarizes the Cappadocian view as follows:
The Cappadocians take the doctrine of deficiation from the Alexandrians and adapt it to a Platonizing understanding of Christianity as the attainment of likeness to God as far as is possible for human nature. They do not make much use of the terminology of the Alexandrians: theopoien is used only twice by Basic, once by Gregory of Nazianzus, and twice by Gregory of Nyssa -- Gregory of Nazianzus, the only Cappadocian to speak at all frequently of deification, much preferring to use theoo and his own coinage, theosis. Nor do they base themselves on the realistic approach to deification. Only the body of Christ, the ensouled flesh which the Logos assumed, is deified in any literal sense, and even that becomes problematical in the struggle with Apollinarianism. Human beings are deified in a merely ethical or metaphorical sense, the emphasis being as much on the ascent of the soul to God as on the transformation of the believer through baptism.
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The Cappadocian concept of deification is conditioned by their Platonism and their apophatic approach to the Godhead. They took for granted that the attainment of likeness to God was the telos of human life. But God remains in his essence utterly beyond human grasp. The deification of the Christian is subordinated to this by being kept to the ethical and analogous levels. For Basil, theos is simply a title which God bestows on the worthy. It expressed man's eschatological fulfilment when the whole man, body and soul, will be spiritualized and rendered incorrupt so that it may enjoy the vision of God. For Gregory of Nazianzus theosis is man's telos brought about on the one hand by the deifying power of the Holy Spirit in baptism, and on the other by the moral struggle in the ascetic life. But we can never become 'gods' in the proper sense, that is to say, we can never bridge the gap between the created and uncreated orders of reality. For Gregory of Nyssa a man becomes a god by imitating the characteristics of the divine nature, by participating in the divine attributes, by modelling himself on the properties of the Godhead. Ultimately he transcends his own nature and becomes immune from corruption and mortality, but Gregory of Nyssa is unwilling to call this 'deification.' Deification for him is fundamentally a christological concept, which by extension may also be applied to the eucharist.
There are certainly differences between the Cappadocian Neoplatonic model and the relational model, differences that became exponentially more pronounced when the Neoplatonist who called himself Dionysius the Areopagite became the basis for philosophical synthesis in the East. St. Maximus the Confessor was even more pronouncedly Neoplatonic, although he seemed to accept the Alexandrian origins of the Western view when he said the following in his letter to Marinus:
Read in the context of the relational model and the Spirit as the Image/energeia of the Son, this makes perfect sense. But by the time of Florence, the ability to have such discussions reasonably seemed to have long passed. Unfortunately, polemical motivations have tended to make history into a battlefied in a way that has exacerbated the problem. One must continue to hope that the scholarship to correct these misunderstandings will have some effect, but it is a slow process. One highly encouraging work along these lines is Johannes Zachhuber's The Rise of Christian Theology and the End of Ancient Metaphysics, a broad survey of the use of philosophical concepts through the development of Christian dogma in the East. Of particular relevance is his description of St. Cyril of Alexandria:
Cyril clearly did not have the philosophical disposition of Origen or Gregory of Nyssa. He also, evidently, followed in his trinitarian theology a trajectory going back to Athanasius' anti-Arian argument. He could certainly not be called a follower of the Cappadocian tradition except perhaps for a largely unexplored link connecting him with Gregory of Nazianzus. Yet his relative independence of the Cappadocian tradition makes him all the more interesting for the purpose of the present section whose task it is to show the emergence of Cappadocian philosophy as a classical theory and thus as the language and conceptuality that became increasingly universally shared by authors across the Christian East.
Zachhuber's conclusion is only corroborated by Russell, Bradshaw, and many others. This is, it seems to me, the beginning of the Cappacodian Neoplatonic model and the relational model coming to be seen as incompatible in the way that the relational model and the emanational model would come to be seen as incompatible in the High Middle Ages. And most of the Orthodox polemics that Coetzee raises result from that firm conviction that the Cappadocian Neoplatonic model was not only the exclusive model for Christian theology but also the only model not tainted with Hellenization. For all practical purposes, the relational model has been lost to history.
But even accepting that there may be two models that are incommensurable in the final analysis (despite being simultaneously acceptable from a dogmatic perspective), one could ask whether there is some inherent defect or failure in the relational model that caused it to be supplanted. Is there really a fundamental problem solved by the Cappadocian Neoplatonic model in either unity or person that cannot be solved any other way without falling into Hellenism?
Zachhuber's answer is negative on both counts:
As far as the classical theory of Cappadocian philosophy is concerned, it will appear that the advocates of broad philosophical continuity between Hellenistic and Christian philosoph are essentially right. Claims to the contrary have mostly been based on the notion that the Cappadocians initiated a philosophical turn to the individual or even to the personal. Yet this interpretation is unsustainable. On the contrary, it will appear from my subsequent analysis that at heart, the Cappadocians developed an ontology of being as one; thus far, they did not diverge from the long-standing emphasis on ontological unity in Greek philosophical thought. They did not replace this principle of a single first principle or arche with an unbridled affirmation of a plurality of persons whose unity merely consists in their mutual communion, even though they affirmed that the single ousia necessarily subsists in a plurality of individual hypostases.
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Paying attention to the latter [concrete] dimension of Cappadocian philosophy makes it immediately clear how much it is geared toward the unity or oneness of being. While ousia, or being, only an exclusively exists in individual instantiations, the role of these instantiations is little more than to provide concrete realizations for the universal. They are, we might say, only hypostases of the single ousia or nature. In particular, their individuality is in no way important for this theory.
This should not come as a surprise: after all, the doctrinal paradigm on which the Cappadocian philosophy was built was based [in] the Trinity whose ousia is absolutely simple, although it only subsists in three hypostases. Yet, as the Eastern Fathers are at pains to emphasize, the affirmation of three hypostases does not impinge on the tenets of monotheism as the distinction between the three can be reduced to the fact that their mode of subsistence is different. In other words, their difference is ultimately reduced to the factuality of their separate subsistence or existence.
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The creation of the world by God always created the conceptual difficulty of how the oneness and simplicity of God could be reconciled with the plurality and diversity of created reality. Yet there could be no doubt which of these two poles predominates. While the Christian thinker could not advocate a monism in which the evolution of plurality form the single source of all being was only a semblance or an unfortunate accident, the origin and goal of all movement was and remained the unity and simplicity of the divine.
Richard Cross in his chapter "Divine Simplicity and the Doctrine of the Trinity" says the same in response to Andrew Radde-Gallwitz (and implicitly de Régnon):
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.
And perhaps the best historical example was the Council of Constantinople itself, in which Pope St. Damasus insisted that expressing the individuality by the term hypostasis was neither necessary nor helpful in the Latin view. As Barnes relates:
It is said that the letter from the Council in Constantinope in 382 written to Damasus and Western bishops was "intended to be compatible with Western statements." 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. Most Western Nicenes used the Latin equivalents of dunamis to speak about the unity of the Trinity and to argue for it. Many Western Nicenes used substantia to speak about divine unity, 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 Damaus 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 either Basil's death or the council in 381. Damasus and Latin theologies of "one power, three persons" won.
Would that we could similarly end futile quarrels today. We could start by admitting that "Image of the Son" means the same thing as "from the Father and the Son."
