My friend Craig Ostrowski raised an interesting point concerning my previous post on Fr. Maspero:
The point I would like to propose for further exploration concerns the common acceptance of Cyril as a New Nicene regarding the immanent trinity (but an Old Nicene regarding the incarnation) and how that may impact his filioquist writings. I confess that I've never seen this issue treated by any scholar. In fact, many scholars who accept Cyril's classification as an old Nicene then go on treat those passages as though he fully bought into the Cappadocian technical terminological distinctions.
This "old Nicene" concept is based on Cyril and the Nicene creed using the terms ousia and hypostasis somewhat interchangeably in the term physis, as contrasted with the "new Nicene" model that distinguishes them as technical terms. Craig also refers to Grillmeier's observation that "Cyril of Alexandria followed this [new] linguistic convention for the theologia," although he did not do so in the oikonomia, which Grillmeier presumably associates with the Logos-sarx Christology of Alexandria. In my opinion, the only reason that Grillmeier makes the former assertion is because of the "Cappadocian victory" narrative, and I think that his entire view of "old" and "new" Nicene theology (and Cyril as a "New Nicene" theologian) must ultimately be discarded as inaccurate. Instead, we must accept that the so-called "old" Nicene view was simply a different theological model, and this diversity reflects pluralism rather than sequential development.
Craig cites Peter Gilbert's article "Not an Anthologist: John Bekkos as a Reader of the Fathers" as using the terminology in the way he has in mind, and I think that this is an excellent example of a work that can simply be updated with a theological pluralist outlook:
When I speak of John Bekkos as an “Old Nicene,” I do not mean that he went around preaching one divine hypostasis. I mean that Bekkos, in his debates with his contemporaries, reopens questions that were already being asked in the fourth and fifth centuries, questions about the relation between ousia and hypostasis, and about whether the Father generates the Son from his substance or from a personhood separated from his substance. Bekkos thought that, while the Creed of Constantinople is a definitive statement of the Church’s faith, it does not abrogate what was said in the Creed of Nicaea of 325; in particular, it does not annul the language of that document, which states that the Son is ἐκ τῆς οὐσίας τοῦ Πατρός, from the essence, or substance, of the Father. Bekkos sees this language to be essential for understanding, in Greek terms, what it is that the Latin Church actually believes about the Holy Spirit’s procession. Near the beginning of the book On the Union and Peace of the Churches of Old and New Rome, Bekkos speaks of his intention to “set forth methodically all the written statements in which ancient writers on the doctrine of the Trinity clearly express the view that the Holy Spirit exists from the substance of the Father and the Son, which is what the Church of the Romans acknowledges when it asserts that he proceeds from both.” Now, this way of speaking about a divine person—the person being from the substance—is not often encountered in the Cappadocian fathers and, indeed, in most Greek theological writing after them, just as it does not appear in the Creed of Constantinople of 381, although it was frequent in St. Athanasius, is found in Apollinarius, was kept in use within the party of Paulinus of Antioch, and occurs regularly in the writings of St. Cyril of Alexandria. Indeed, St. Cyril frequently uses the expression “from the substance of the Son” to describe the Holy Spirit, as Bekkos does not hesitate to point out; e.g., at Thesaurus 33, Cyril says:
It is necessary . . . to confess the Spirit to exist from the substance that is God the Son’s, possessing the entirety of his power and operation.
It is not simply that Bekkos is able to cite fathers of the Church who use the expression “from the substance,” however, that constitutes him as what I would call an Old Nicene theologian. It is, rather, his realization that the way these texts were being expounded in his day by those writers who carried on the Photian critique of the Latin Filioque doctrine missed something essential to the meaning of this formulation, that in serving for them simply as synonymous with “consubstantial,” it had become vestigial and had lost something of its original dogmatic function—and furthermore, it is his rediscovery of that function, his recognition and restatement of an inner logic to the formulation ἐκ τῆς οὐσίας. This, I would submit, is what chiefly justifies one’s calling John Bekkos an Old Nicene theologian.
I completely agree that Bekkos has hit on the underlying logic of the Alexandrian position in a way that his contemporaries were incapable of comprehending. But I think calling this position "Old Nicene," as contrasted with the "New Nicene" position, which distinguishes ousia and hypostasis in a technical way, already falls into the "Cappadocian victory" trap. It assumes that the Alexandrian position developed into the Cappadocian position, and I have explained in excruciating detail why I believe this position is radically false. Let us instead take Dr. Gilbert's entirely correct observation that homoousios had "become vestigial" in Photian theology and pursue that observation even further: it had already become vestigial in the Cappadocians!
There are at least four different conceptual ways of using the term homoousios that are documented in Barnes's Augustine and Nicene Theology:
1. Explicitly relational: Barnes points out that Athanasius uses the term homoousios technically as a one-way relation; it is always homoousios to another person. The Son is homoousios to the Father; the Spirit is homoousios to the Son. Conceptually, this technical usage serves the same purpose as the causal relations in Latin one-power theology, in that it shows a relational structure between Persons that accounts for their ability to perform distinctively divine acts like creation, deification, and miracles.
2. Nominative: In the typical Latin theology (with one notable exception), homoousios is essentially a label used synonymously with "is God" or "has the divine power." Conceptually, this is a restated version of the "one power" theology (what has divine power is God), as opposed to an assertion based on revelation that the relations of divine Persons are revealed as relations of consubstantiality, which would be more typical of Athanasius.
3. Victorinian: Barnes notes that Victorinus uses the term homoousios in his own idiosyncratic way that is taken from Porphyrian Neoplatonism and that is not the technical way that Athanasius is using it. This eventually provides a starting point for the psychological analogy in Augustine, but Augustine does not really inherit the underlying metaphysical structure at all, instead operating in the nominative model of homoousios.
4. Neoplatonic: This is the more technical use of ousia from the Middle Platonic/Neoplatonic model, especially concerning the eminence of the divine ousia, that is characteristic especially of Gregory of Nyssa's Trinitarian theology. This is primarily driven as a response to Eunomius's use of the same concepts.
What Bekkos found with respect to the inner logic of ek tes ousias did not only relate to the use of that phrase but the very concept of homoousios in Alexandrian theology. Without the ek tes ousias in its correct meaning (i.e., the filioque), the entire argument on which Alexandrian theology is based (viz., that dependencies in divine economic activities in Scripture are meant to reveal consubstantial relations of origin) would simply fail. The structure of the Cappadocian argument is actually reversed. They show consubstantiality by the activity-power-nature argument for each of the Persons, then use that to show that the relations of origin must be relations of consubstantiality. In short, the Alexandrian logic is that relations based on consubstantiality are directly revealed, and the Cappadocian logic is that the consubstantiality of the relations is what must be demonstrated. As I mentioned, the latter is driven to some extent by the exigencies of the conflict with Eunomius, but it is also based on the fact that something is simply missing from the Cappadocian understanding of the Alexandrian theology. They do not see the full theological content of the term homoousios, seeing it primarily as a philosophical assertion of identical nature ("simply as synonymous with 'consubstantial,'" as Dr. Gilbert put it).
To illustrate what I think the difference between (1) and (4) is, I've put together a couple of diagrams of the different models.
My concept for the Irenaean diagram is musical, taking inspiration from Irenaeus's use of the lyre as an image for the harmony of creation. However, it is important to understand that Irenaeus's image is based on the diversity of the notes (created things), so it needs to be modified in this case to focus specifically on the functions that each note is performing. In that respect, I believe that it shows how divine co-activity illustrates the relational structure between the Persons.
For purposes of the illustration, we will take major and minor chords (root-3rd-5th) and consider how each note functions in defining the chord. The root note provides the context for both of the other notes; this is analogous to the way that the Father is the principle for the entire Trinity. The perfect fifth harmonizes ideally with the root note, essentially following automatically from the defining root. But the root and the fifth alone (the power chord) lacks something. In a chord progression, the power chord might fit within a larger context, but by itself, the chord is incomplete. But the third (major or minor) completes the chord, because it determines how the root and fifth resonate with one another without itself being either the root or the fifth. It is that sort of defining role that I think Irenaeus has in mind in the Incarnation; the structure is based on how the Father and the Spirit relate to one another in the Son, and the relations are both essential and simultaneous.
The Cappadocian model is built on the concept of instability in the Neoplatonic model, and in that model, instability means descent. The dyad is unstable; it cause things to fall away from the One. What the Cappadocian model does, as far as I can tell, is to have the Spirit hold the Trinity together by providing a simultaneous exaltation of the Son that excludes any possibility of the Son descending. I've illustrated this force, which is associated with the anointing of the Son, that holds the Son at the level of the Father and the Spirit. In that sense, the Spirit is the bond (syndetikon) or middle term (meson) between the Father and the Son that keeps them together. That upward force is what I take St. John Damascene to have in mind when he speaks of the Spirit as the "impulse" of the Trinity, and it is why I suspect he does not consider the bond itself as defining the Spirit (as the filioque would require) but instead being a result of the procession of the Spirit. The relations of Son and Spirit here to the Father complement one another as opposed to the Father-Son relation and the Son-Spirit relation being mutually defining.
Note that both of these models make sense of the economy and Christ's unique role in the Incarnation. Christ's defining mediatorial role in the Irenaean model parallels His defining mediatorial role in the economy, which in turn matches the triadic structure of creation itself. In the Cappadocian model, Christ's dual motions of descent and ascent in the Spirit are naturally suited to drawing humanity up in the Spirit. Both the concepts and the work they do are very different, but they are nonetheless directed at what Scripture and Tradition reveals about the nature of the economy. This is what I have in mind by theological pluralism, and I believe that such pluralism is a better explanation than the "Old Nicene"/"New Nicene" model.
[Update -- Dr. Gilbert provided the following response:
I would correct one thing: when I stated that "in serving for them simply as synonymous with 'consubstantial,' it had become vestigial," I was referring to the formulation ἐκ τῆς οὐσίας, not to the term consubstantial; I didn't mean to imply that the homoousion had become vestigial for the Cappadocians or for the tradition that followed them. And even the Cappadocians themselves, in many texts, show that they are not exclusively wedded to the "first substance, second substance" interpretation that they sometimes give to hypostasis and ousia. But I would agree with you that the interpretation given to the homoousion in later Byzantine tradition, in taking a certain reading of the Cappadocians as normative, tended to ignore something that was present in authors like St. Athanasius and St. Cyril, for whom the theology of ἐκ τῆς οὐσίας was not vestigial at all. I think Bekkos picks up on this difference, and correctly sees it as a root issue in the whole pneumatological debate between East and West.
I think we were actually agreeing on this point, in that I saw the ek tes ousias as reflecting specifically how the Alexandrians were using the term homoouosios. I replied as follows:
