Incarnational Realism: Trinity and the Spirit in Augustine and Barth 9781472551221, 9780567536051

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TO HOLLY

acknowledgments

This book was begun at Vanderbilt University as a dissertation, and significantly revised for publication while I have been at Eden Theological Seminary. I am deeply aware of my debts to many at both institutions. At Vanderbilt, Ellen Armour, Doug Meeks, and John Thatamanil were essential for my intellectual development, and I thank each of them for their tireless investment in me. Paul DeHart is a tremendous example as a scholar and teacher, and always spurs me to greater care and precision as a thinker and writer. I owe Patout Burns, who first woke me up to the thought of Augustine, my deep gratitude for his example of exacting care and passion in historical work, and for his advocacy for this book. Every scholar should have the opportunity to teach and research in a collegial setting like Eden. The faculty and staff here have welcomed me as one of their own from the beginning. I thank David Greenhaw and Deb Krause for bringing me onto the faculty, for their encouragement and guidance, and their support for this project. Christopher Grundy, Kristen Leslie, Damayanthi Niles, Mai-Anh Le Tran, and Marilyn Stavenger have been particularly hospitable as my family and I adjusted to life in St. Louis. Lerone Martin has shared many companionable hours with me as we figured out life as junior faculty members and first-time authors (and shared an office wall). Damayanthi and Lerone have made Eden’s History and Theology Department a collaborative, invigorating space to teach and work. I must also name John Bracke, Leah Gunning Francis, Clint McCann, Martha Robertson, and Carl Schenck as supportive and welcoming members of Eden’s faculty, all of whom I have been privileged to work alongside. Michael Boddy has helped me navigate the resources of the library at Eden and Webster University. I am grateful to Pat Garnett for her administrative support, tireless good cheer, and endless supply of coffee. One of the little secrets of graduate theological training is that you don’t really know what you’re doing, professionally, until you’re in the classroom figuring out how to teach. Your students make all the difference. I think appreciatively of the students of my course “The Skill and Practice of Theological Conversation” at VDS for their hard work and enthusiasm about the process of theological reflection on history (and thank Jim Hudnut-Beumler for the opportunity). At Eden, the students of my Church History courses are a constant inspiration in their tireless devotion to the church, their passion ix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

for social justice and mission, and their willingness to embark on the study of history together. Special mention goes to Chris Goff, who as my teaching assistant provided helpful feedback on some of the manuscript. Obviously, no one completes a project like this without interlocutors and friends, who make the process of research, reflection, and writing a collaborative, dialogical affair from the beginning. Let me simply name them, hoping they know how essential their presence and companionship, and their questions and challenges, have been: Michael Gibson, David Dunn, David Dault, Nate Kerr, Sean Hayden, Tim Eberhart, Jason Fout, Devin Singh, David Belcher, Sarah Sanderson-Doughty, Derek Axelson, and Carolyn Davis. Peter Kline and Daryl Ellis provided very helpful feedback on an earlier version of Chapter 7. Special mention should be made of friends Tyler Wigg-Stevenson and Thunder and Emily Jones. My two richest conversation partners are Joshua Davis and Natalie Wigg-Stevenson. I simply would not be the theological thinker I am, or aspire to be, without the many hours of conversation with Josh. Buried in the volumes of e-mail correspondence with him are the flashes of many of the insights I have tried to work out here. Natalie and I talked each other through our dissertations, just as we have talked each other through the sometimes bewildering and always fascinating journeys of junior faculty. She has an uncanny ability to remind me why the work of theology is important, and has indelibly impacted the way I think and write. I thank them both. Finally and most importantly, my best friend and wife Holly has been with me and supported me every step of the way through my education, and as we transitioned into life at Eden. Holly encouraged me when I was just beginning to realize what my vocation was, so many years ago, and through countless hours over coffee we figured out how to reinvent ourselves and carve out a life together as we sought a place to belong in the church and the academy. Without her enthusiasm, love, and companionship, I would not be here. Our daughters, Claire and Charlotte, completely upended our life, and in so doing enriched it in a way we couldn’t have expected. Seeing Claire grow into a precocious, smart, and charming preschooler has been amazing, and writing this book while Charlotte began smiling, talking, and (one of these days!) walking has enriched the experience beyond measure. To my girls—I love you and thank you. A few less personal, but still essential, matters to close. Much of the Introduction, and portions of Chapter 1, appeared in different form as “The Decline and Fall of the West? Debates about the Trinity in Contemporary Christian Theology,” in Religion Compass 6, no. 3 (March 2012), pp. 163–73. I thank John Wiley & Sons Inc. for permission to use this material. Citations from Barth’s Church Dogmatics appear by kind permission of Continuum International Publishing Group. Chad Gerber generously shared the manuscript of The Spirit of Augustine’s Early Theology: Contextualizing Augustine’s Pneumatology (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012) before x

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

publication for my consultation. Bruce McCormack very helpfully (and graciously, given our differing perspectives!) offered feedback on an earlier version of Chapter 7, and made then-unpublished material available to me as well. John Webster, who with Ivor Davidson and Ian McFarland edit the T&T Clark Studies in Systematic Theology series in which this book appears, kindly reviewed the manuscript and advocated for its publication. Finally, Thomas Kraft, Anna Turton, and the staff at Continuum/T&T Clark made this book possible. Thanks to you all.

xi

abbreviations

Abbreviations are from Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia (ed. Allan D. Fitzgerald, OSA; Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999). bapt. De baptismo civ. Dei. De civitate Dei conf. Confessiones div. qu. De diversis quaestionibus octoginta tribus doc. Chr. De doctrina Christiana en. Ps. Enarrationes in Psalmos ep. Epistulae ep. Jo. In epistulam Joannis ad Parthos tractatus f. et symb.  De fide et symbolo Jo. ev. tr. In Johannis evangelium tractatus lib. arb. De libero arbitrio mor. De moribus ecclesiae catholicae et de moribus Manichaeorum ord. De ordine quant. De animae quantitate retr. Retractationes s. Sermones Simpl. Ad Simplician Trin. De Trinitate vera rel. De vera religione

xii

introduction

Adolf von Harnack is said to have called pneumatology the “orphan doctrine” of Christian theology, lost, no doubt, in the Hellenizing adulteration of the simple message of the gospel of Jesus Christ. The purpose of this book is to interrogate this theme of the forgetfulness of the Holy Spirit, a trope that has become virtually universal among those who worked in trinitarian theology in the late twentieth century. The absent center of Latin Christianity, it seems, is the unthought and underappreciated doctrine of the third person, whose spectral absence in the West renders the doctrine of God an arid and lightless affair. Noting this assumption of pneumatological absence provides the inception of this book, in which I develop two broad trajectories of investigation. First, my intent is to focus on the peculiar rhetoric and rationality of modern trinitarianism as it discusses forgetfulness of the Holy Spirit, or Geistesvergessenheit, and in particular as it locates the ruin of pneumatology within the Augustinian tradition. Here, I want to uncover broader patterns and contexts of intelligibility within which this narrative of Geistesvergessenheit makes sense. Second, I embark on an in-depth study of two figures: Augustine himself, whose De Trinitate set the tone for Latin trinitarian theology with his so-called psychological analogy, and whose Neoplatonic proclivities seemed to insulate the trinitarian life from the experience of redemption in history. I complement the discussion of Augustine with an equally close perusal of the pneumatology of Karl Barth. Barth appears in these pages, and makes an essential conversation partner for Augustine, because he is one of the major sources of the “trinitarian revival,” and because he is so often criticized for failing to rise above his Latin roots. But there is a second, more evocative reason for the inclusion of Barth: I will argue that Barth displays an intriguing blend of theological tendencies or trajectories. Sometimes, he sounds deeply Augustinian in his trinitarian theology, though at other times, he thinks like a Hegelian. These tendencies, which underlie many of his internal tensions and contradictions, help to explain the often perplexing logic of contemporary trinitarian theology. 1

INCARNATIONAL REALISM

My goal, in analyzing the function of pneumatological discourse in these two theologians, is that light will be shed on the deep structure of trinitarian logic and its function in the broader discourse of Christian theology. I am sympathetic to Augustine and Barth, more so than I am to much contemporary trinitarian theology; so this book represents the beginnings of a case for reexamining the story of trinitarian theology in Western theology. To set this reexamination in motion, I will devote this introduction to a sketch of how trinitarian doctrine became one of the dominant themes of contemporary theology, which will open up a set of questions to be further explored in the body of the book.

The History of a History: The Revival of Trinitarianism At the heart of much recent theological discussion on the Trinity lies a narrative of the decline, fall, and revival of trinitarian thought in the Western Christian tradition. The presumption that theologians might, or even must, build a theology that is thoroughly informed by trinitarian doctrine is now so widespread that it can be difficult to get a sense of where this trinitarian interest began, or what kinds of agendas, assumptions, and principles might be tacit within it. This introduction will give a brief overview of the resurgence of trinitarian thinking in the last several decades, and offer some analysis of the principles and ideas that have characterized trinitarian theology in that time. The intent here is to offer a survey of the major figures and factors behind contemporary trinitarian theology in order to set the contemporary context for the study of this book. The story, which I call the “standard narrative,” that unifies much contemporary trinitarian thinking concerns the inability of trinitarian thought in the tradition of Augustine to remain sufficiently focused on the divine plurality (the distinctiveness of the three trinitarian persons), a plurality that is supposed to be preserved in Greek theology. I will describe this story in more detail in the next chapter, but for now, I intend to show how it developed into something like a consensus (at least among the more confessionally oriented theologians I will focus on here) and trace the stages of the conversation that ensued in its wake. Three figures who decisively shaped trinitarian thinking in the twentieth century are central here.

The Origins of the Rhetoric of Western Trinitarian Decline Perhaps the most important book in twentieth-century thought on the Trinity is an inauspicious monograph by Karl Rahner simply entitled The Trinity.1 The book is most famous for expressing what is now known as “Rahner’s rule,” and for the complaint that most Christians were “mere 2

INTRODUCTION

monotheists.”2 For Rahner the doctrine has so little impact on Christian life and practice that Christians might as well be unitarian, were it not for the need to confess the perplexing formula of the Trinity in order to remain orthodox. Rahner’s rule, often called his Grundaxiom, is simply this: “the ‘economic’ Trinity is the ‘immanent’ Trinity and the ‘immanent’ Trinity is the ‘economic’ Trinity.”3 Rahner argued that the habit of Catholic scholastic theology to discuss God under two headings, “De deo uno” and “De deo trino,” encouraged theologians to consider the divine nature as a singular essence, and to think of the Trinity as something of an addendum. Rahner connected this to the Augustinian tradition of thinking of the Trinity according to the “psychological analogy,” which is to conceive the three persons of the Trinity according to Platonic categories of memory, intellect, and will, thus privileging the one divine mind as the preeminent category. The problem, Rahner thinks, is that this encourages us to think of the Trinity without reference to the history of salvation, and focuses primarily on the unity of the divine nature as a single mind, rather than on the plurality of the persons. Instead, Rahner asserts that the Greek tradition had preserved the emphasis upon the persons and their distinctions, implying that Eastern Orthodox theology had preserved a more authentic and salutary way of thinking about the Trinity. As I will discuss further in the first chapter, Rahner was reacting against the formulaic and rather dry neoscholastic manuals of the time, and in particular was engaging a debate on the nature of grace common in Catholic theology in the first half of the twentieth century; for now, it is enough to simply observe the lines of argument that would be so enormously influential among Rahner’s readers, and would soon widen into a general consensus about the state of Western trinitarian doctrine: the lament about the disjunction of the “One God” and the “Triune God,” the charge that the Trinity had become irrelevant to the life of faith, the preference for “Eastern” trinitarian theology, and the role of Augustine and Aquinas as scapegoats. In order to set the stage for this, however, the reception of Rahner’s argument would need to cross-fertilize with two other streams of thought: the theology of Karl Barth, and the representation of Eastern Orthodox theology found in Vladimir Lossky. I will be occupied with the trinitarian theology of Karl Barth in detail in Chapters 5 and 6, so I will simply outline his pivotal role in the trinitarian revival here. Barth, best known for his monumental Church Dogmatics,4 published the first half-volume of that work, The Doctrine of the Word of God, in 1932. Barth’s concern with the Trinity lies in his view that it is essential to understanding revelation: God reveals Godself as Lord, and this self-revelation demands a corresponding structure of the divine being in eternity. In other words, God reveals who God is, and God’s being eternally (or, in Barth’s lingo, “antecedently”) reflects that capacity to self-reveal. Thus the Trinity is a way of talking about God the Revealer, the revelation itself, 3

INCARNATIONAL REALISM

and the “revealedness” or effect of that revelation, corresponding to Father, Son, and Spirit.5 Barth blamed modern Protestant theology, particularly the nineteenth-century “father of liberal theology,” Friedrich Schleiermacher, for ignoring the character of God in revelation, and thus the doctrine of the Trinity. Barth’s doctrine of the Trinity, with its strict correlation of God’s eternal being and God’s self-revelation, and his unique step of placing the doctrine at the very head of his dogmatics, thus is a polemic against liberal Protestant “anthropocentrism,” which, he thought, denied the integrity of revelation in lieu of the religious self-consciousness of the human spirit. As the Dogmatics progressed, Barth returned repeatedly to the explanatory power of the Trinity, developing his Christology in the climax of the Dogmatics, The Doctrine of Reconciliation (vol. 4), as the “history of the Son.” Here Christ’s life is an event of God’s own being, the mystery of the trinitarian relations played out in the drama of the Son’s life, death, and resurrection. Barth characterized this as a “historicizing” of the doctrine of the Trinity, a translation of traditional metaphysical categories into “the sphere of history.”6 In these latter volumes of the Dogmatics, Barth thinks of the relationship of Father and Son in the (immanent) Trinity as one that is enacted or “actualized” in the economy of salvation. Thus, for Barth the distinction between the two ways of talking about the Trinity, immanent and economic, is minimized, if not dissolved altogether. As we will see in Chapters 5 and 6, it is this latter idea that was so significant to Barth’s readers, rather than what many viewed as a rather abstract grammatical “formula” of revelation in CD 1/1. However, we do not find a historical narrative of trinitarian decline in Barth as we do in Rahner, even if Barth is quick to condemn what he sees as the Augustinian habit of seeking “vestiges” of the Trinity in creation.7 His concern lies more with combating the agnostic tendencies of modernist Protestantism in nineteenth-century Germany. Thus while Rahner’s constructive proposals weren’t as closely attended to, Barth’s were taken up as programmatic by a generation of theological thinkers. Before we follow that story, another confluence has to be noted, and this is the influence of Eastern Orthodox theology.8 We have already seen in Rahner the (somewhat vague) gesture toward the superiority of “Greek” thinking on the Trinity; before Rahner had even made this claim, however, Vladimir Lossky, in his widely read primer on Orthodox theology, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church,9 said something very similar. Lossky’s book was, for many Western readers, their first introduction to Eastern Orthodox theology, and this highlights an important backdrop to the trinitarian revival: the ecumenical context. While the reaction to Western theological history was filtered through the lenses of reaction against German Protestant liberalism (Barth) and Catholic neoscholastic aridity (Rahner), Lossky’s reading of the Augustinian tradition’s errors provided a decisive 4

INTRODUCTION

confirmation of Rahner’s diagnosis and widened the context of impact for Barth’s constructive influence. Lossky makes many of the same historical claims as Rahner: Greek theology starts with the persons and proceeds to the nature, and thus privileges the plurality of the Trinity over the unity of the divine essence. Augustine’s “trinitarian psychologism” is an analogy that prioritizes the divine essence, and tends to push thinking of the Trinity toward “Sabellian unitarianism” (in other words, modalism).10 Lossky advocates a return to the Greek Fathers for a theology of the Trinity that would more authentically highlight the real relationships between the divine persons, in such a way that our deifying relationship with the life of the Trinity would be restored to its rightful place. As is the case with Barth and Rahner, Lossky’s argument becomes much more telling once his context is considered. Lossky was among a number of Russian Orthodox exiles in Paris at the time,11 and the book was written for two purposes: to represent the Orthodox tradition to Western theology, and to fulfill the ideal of a “neo-patristic synthesis,” which advocated a new Orthodox theological vitality based in the enduring truth of the theology of the church fathers.12 Lossky’s contribution to this synthesis lies in his appropriation of the thought of Gregory Palamas (d. 1359), who distinguished between the essence and energies (physis/energeia) of the divine nature. The eternal divine essence cannot be experienced or known as such; only through uncreated “energies” or “operations” that proceed from it and convey grace through the Trinity do we participate in God. Lossky wants to safeguard the divine mystery by distinguishing between the eternal essence of God, which is unknowable, and its trinitarian manifestation in history, by which we know God in God’s works. This is quite distinct from Barth and Rahner, who employ the doctrine of the Trinity to correlate (or identify) eternity and history. The convergence of rhetoric between Rahner and Lossky has tended to obscure their differences, although, as we will see in Chapter 1, their combined influence has also obscured the source they both relied upon.

The Construction of a Revival: The Reception of Barth, Rahner, and Lossky None of these three theologians postured as if they were beginning a “revival” in trinitarian thought as such. Nevertheless, in the receptions of their theologies in the 1970s and the 1980s, a strong feeling emerged—first in Germany, then England and America—that the doctrine of the Trinity didn’t just offer a way of reconfiguring and rethinking concerns internal to particular schools of theology, but in fact was the key to a revitalization of theology as such. This takes place in two broad stages, in which the function of trinitarian plurality—the emphasis upon the threeness of the divine persons—becomes progressively emphasized. 5

INCARNATIONAL REALISM

The first stage focused upon the Trinity’s importance for rethinking God’s relationship with history. In the next chapter, I will call these theologians trinitarian “idealists,” referring to their implicit indebtedness to Hegel and idealist philosophy. Where Rahner was initially most influential was in his depiction of trinitarian decline in the psychological analogy, and his famed axiom or “rule.” For example, Piet Schoonenberg radicalized Rahner’s rule to the extent of refusing the possibility of knowledge of the eternal nature of God, in contrast to Rahner’s speculations on the nature of the immanent Trinity.13 In Catherine LaCugna’s popular God for Us, she likewise argued that our knowledge of God is restricted to the economic Trinity, the abstraction from which constitutes a “defeat” of the doctrine of the Trinity, as occurred, she argues, in the Latin West.14 The rule was at its most potent, however, when it was combined with receptions of Barth’s thought. Here the emphasis fell upon drawing out Barth’s hints at a historical actualization of God’s eternal being, a kind of self-realization of eternity in time. These Barthian hints thus provided the context for the initial reception of the Rahner-Lossky polemic: trinitarian plurality serves to draw attention to the drama of Christ’s life and death, and portrays the interactions of Father, Son, and Spirit in history as overcoming Western tendencies toward abstract monotheism. In 1965, while Barth was still writing, Eberhard Jüngel published what he characterized as a “paraphrase” of Barth’s trinitarian theology.15 Jüngel describes Barth as developing a theology of “being as becoming,” that is, the Trinity as the self-determining of God’s being in Christ’s history. Jüngel, a Lutheran, helped open the way for what I will later characterize as the Lutheran reading of Barth. The Lutheran principle of the communicatio idiomatum, or sharing of attributes, of the two natures of Christ, maintains that the attributes of the divine nature are transferred to Christ’s human nature, and vice versa; the implication Jüngel and others deduce is that the acts of the human being Jesus are really and genuinely acts of God’s own eternal nature, and are even ways the divine nature “becomes,” or realizes itself historically. Once Jürgen Moltmann moved on from his Theology of Hope to the Christology of The Crucified God, he developed an account of the doctrine of the Trinity that he described as “a shorter version of the passion narrative of Christ.”16 The Trinity is really a way of talking about the cross, for Moltmann: he describes God, not as an eternal divine essence, but as an “event” in which the three divine persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, take upon themselves all of the pain of history’s victims in Christ’s death. Moltmann does Barth one better: whereas Barth thinks of God in history, for Moltmann the cross is the sign of “history in God.”17 Later he would clarify that this means we should think of “God” as a kind of community of three persons who together share the agony of Christ’s death and in so doing make it part of God’s eternal life.18 Further Lutheran readings of Barth19 can be found in Wolfhart Pannenberg and Robert Jenson. Pannenberg’s 6

INTRODUCTION

sweeping theology of history, organized around the “ontological priority of the future,” uses the Trinity to portray history as a kind of trial or test of God’s lordship; the kingdom of God is handed over to Son and Spirit to enact in history, and history itself is the outworking of the divine unity and deity.20 Likewise, Robert Jenson reinterpreted Barth’s theology in an explicitly historicizing manner in The Triune Identity and the first volume of his Systematic Theology.21 He interprets the trinitarian persons as God’s essence as past, present, and future in history. God’s being is like a narrative, in which God is a character enacting God’s identity in Jesus. As a correlate, Jenson argues strongly that the Trinity is God’s proper name: in a famous phrase, God is “whoever raised Jesus from the dead”: the Trinity is not just a description of God’s being, but God’s self-identification against every other pretender to the title of deity.22 Following this tendency to think of the Trinity in terms of God’s self-realization in history, the most notable Catholic theologian of the time, outside of Rahner, was Hans Urs von Balthasar, whose work has become widely read in recent years. Eschewing Rahner’s “transcendental Thomism” (though not without marked metaphysical inclinations of his own), Balthasar learned deeply from Barth.23 His dramatic trinitarian reading of the gospel narratives is most succinctly developed in Mysterium Paschale, where Balthasar treats the trinitarian relations as kenotic (mutually self-giving and self-emptying), paradigmatically so in the cross and descent of Christ into death on Holy Saturday.24 The second stage of reception concerns the development of trinitarian personalism, denoting how these convergences and divergences in theology would go fully mainstream as a “revival” of trinitarian thought once the thought of John Zizioulas began to be known. Zizioulas is something of a transitional figure, because it is his major work Being as Communion that takes the now-familiar paradigm of the Eastern emphasis upon divine plurality over against Western privileging of divine unity (often known as the “Régnon paradigm”—to be discussed in the next chapter), and makes it a programmatic principle, not only for lamenting the decline and fall of Western trinitarian thinking, but also for constructing the personalistic type of trinitarianism that becomes ubiquitous in the 1980s.25 With Zizioulas and his readers, trinitarian plurality develops into a self-sufficient principle. Neither Barth nor Rahner invested much significance in the terminology of “person” with respect to the Trinity; in fact, both expressed serious reservations about the idea, since modern readers tend to invest the term with connotations like self-consciousness and personality that are foreign to the way the term functioned in classical trinitarian doctrine. Both Barth and Rahner had worried that use of the language of “person” for the trinitarian subsistents would imply three separate centers of action and consciousness, which would make the Trinity sound like three gods, instead of three “persons” who are one God; Barth preferred the term “mode of being,” while 7

INCARNATIONAL REALISM

Rahner referred to the hypostases as “distinct manners of subsisting.”26 Nevertheless, this stage of trinitarian thought marks the point where the idea of trinitarian persons as selves or agents is emphasized by Zizioulas and those following him. Sometimes called “social trinitarianism” (especially regarding the work of Moltmann), it is perhaps more fair to call it trinitarian “personalism,” for this tendency to emphasize divine relationality, and the Trinity as a model of relation and communion, originates in the emphasis upon the divine persons in relation as constitutive of the Godhead. This does not require thinking of the trinitarian persons as independent subjects, but social trinitarians tend to radicalize this emphasis, arguing that the divine persons should in fact be thought of as self-conscious individual selves in a social relationship, or community. Zizioulas proposes the idea of a Cappadocian “ontological revolution,” involving the identification of being with personhood via the notion of “hypostasis.”27 The Cappadocian teaching that was allegedly forgotten in the West was to identify the unity of God with the hypostatic communion of the persons. Here the Régnon paradigm is transformed from a historical heuristic to become the key to Orthodox trinitarian thinking itself, for Zizioulas radicalizes the purported Eastern emphasis upon the threeness of the persons to argue that relationality is itself the being or substance of God, and that this is the revolutionary insight of the legacy of Nicaea.28 This principle obtains both in the being of God and in the being of creation itself—communion or relationality therefore becomes a universal ontological principle. Zizioulas has been enormously influential, and the influence of his trinitarian ontology helped solidify a disparate number of sources into a markedly unified narrative on trinitarian thinking, which characterizes much of the 1980s and the 1990s. This story combines the purported theological enervation of modern liberal theology in its neglect of Christology and revelation (Barth) against the backdrop of the Augustinian-Thomist overemphasis upon the monistic, substantialist unity of the divine life, at the expense of the distinctiveness of the trinitarian persons in the divine essence and thus in salvation history (Rahner, Lossky). It then finds in Zizioulas something of a manifesto for regarding the Trinity as a theological exemplar, a relational and communal principle of personhood that extends to church, world, politics, ecology, and more. Perhaps most notable here is the work of Colin Gunton, who at King’s College, London, founded a series of seminars, working especially with Christoph Schwöbel in applying the doctrine of the Trinity as a comprehensive remedy for the ills of modernity.29 Gunton was especially strident in critiquing Augustine for the failures of his psychological analogy, in an essay I will examine in Chapter 1,30 and deployed Zizioulas’s brand of trinitarian personalism as a paradigm for developing relationally based visions of personhood, church community, and politics.31 8

INTRODUCTION

Many others either followed, or paralleled, Gunton in seeing such a paradigm in the Trinity. Mention might be made, for example, of Leonardo Boff’s Trinity and Society, which finds in the Trinity a paradigm for the ideal political community,32 or Miroslav Volf, who develops a model of reciprocity, forgiveness, and reconciliation from the Trinity.33 LaCugna drew heavily on Zizioulas in thinking of personhood as relational in reaction to Augustinian individualism. Likewise, in his later works after The Trinity and the Kingdom, Moltmann moved away from the Trinity as an enactment of the death of God for the life of the world, and saw in it a model for just and equal human society, vis-à-vis the monarchical, despotic tendencies of (Western-oriented) “political monotheism.” In recent years, the employment of this trinitarian principle has ramified in increasingly diverse and creative ways. Beyond the initial applications to ecclesiology and politics, the doctrine has been applied in the fields of theology of religions and comparative theology and ecotheology.34 Especially popular and influential have been feminist appropriations of the principle of trinitarian diversity for thinking about the problems of sexual difference.35

The Critical Response We have discerned in the foregoing three distinct periods of trinitarian thinking. First, the foundational works by Barth, Rahner, and Lossky appeared within a wide period stretching from 1932 (Barth’s CD I/1) to 1960 (Rahner’s original essay on the Trinity).36 As I have suggested, each of these works are actually contextual polemics, being immersed in particular debates and exigencies within their theological traditions. The doctrine of the Trinity gives shape to a cogent doctrine of revelation (Barth), a reinvigorated theology of grace (Rahner), and a recovery of Orthodox negative theology (Lossky). But each of these agendas shifted, subtly or overtly, in the second period, which covers the 1960s and the 1970s in German theology. Here Barth’s later narratively oriented theology of the trinitarian drama of Christ, often combined with a reading of Rahner’s axiom, found fruition. Third, with the translation of Moltmann’s works into English, and the publication of Zizioulas’s Being as Communion, talk of a “revival” of trinitarian theology in a much more programmatic and organized way emerges in English-speaking theology; this revival focuses on the relational resources of trinitarian personalism. We now move on to a fourth and final period, picking up in the mid-1990s, which finds the standard narrative deployed as a matter of course, and the employment of trinitarian doctrine as a paradigm of divine-human relationality emerging throughout Christian theology. At the same time, however, objections have started to arise, primarily from historical theologians,37 which call into question the standard narrative of trinitarian decline in the West. Thus the primary rhetorical motivator of so many of the theologians just described has come into question. 9

INCARNATIONAL REALISM

In Chapter 1, I will examine the role of the so-called Régnon paradigm and its exposure (at least among English readers) by Michel Barnes, who is one of several recent authors to launch a campaign to recover the Augustinian-Thomist tradition from its polemical eclipse.38 Luigi Gioia, Lewis Ayres, and Maarten Wisse have contributed exemplary work on Augustine’s trinitarian theology;39 Matthew Levering, following the impressive work of Gilles Emery, is among those who have sought to recover Aquinas.40 Likewise, Barnes’s indictment of the often-facile nature of historical narration in contemporary trinitarian theology has been forcefully echoed by Bruce Marshall, who also points out the problem with determining Eastern and Western trinitarian tendencies entirely by their “starting points” (i.e. in threeness or oneness, respectively).41 Richard Cross has incisively critiqued the idea that the Eastern and Western trinitarian traditions constitute two distinct “models.”42 This historical literature has been clear in showing some of the exaggerations and misconceptions resident in the story of Western trinitarian decline, especially the Eastern-Western opposition, and the purported Western proclivity for unitarianism in trinitarian thought. Moreover, Ayres in particular has been careful to show how much Western and Eastern theologians (namely, Augustine and the Cappadocians) operate from nearly identical premises when developing their trinitarian theology. But while the basic story trinitarian theology told about itself in the twentieth century thus has at least one compromised structural element, this has not prevented a basic East-West, triunity-unity opposition from achieving near ubiquity. Perhaps the reason for this, apart from the significant ecumenical impulse that legitimately underlies much contemporary theological construction, lies in the fact that the conceptual heart of the trinitarian revival has seemingly proven so fruitful. This is the championing of the doctrine of the Trinity as a principle of community and relationality that overcomes the reductionism of overly monist conceptions of the divine and overly individualist portraits of the human. As one study put it, “If we had to name a single issue on which recent trinitarian theologians have achieved the greatest consensus, we might well point to their collective enthusiasm for the category of ‘relationality.’”43 Likewise, one of the newest introductory works on the Trinity, by Declan Marmion and Rik Van Nieuwenhove, remarks: “this new picture of God as three persons who relate to each other in love . . . where there is a mutual giving and receiving, challenges the more aggressive and individualistic elements of contemporary Western culture.”44

The Plan of this Book This book requires, therefore, a dual approach. On the one hand, I am offering a reading of Augustine’s trinitarian thought, and in particular, his 10

INTRODUCTION

pneumatology. A full-length study has yet to appear on the Spirit in De Trinitate,45 and since the doctrine of the Holy Spirit tends to be regarded as the most problematic aspect of the Augustinian tradition, I have focused on his trinitarian thought through that lens. However, my interests are not purely historical; rather, they are theologically constructive, and so I read Augustine with an eye cast to the contemporary discussions I have outlined here. In particular, I am concerned to come to terms with the pluralist presumption that seems to animate the trinitarian revival, which we have already seen manifest in two broad trends. I will discuss these trends in more detail in the following chapter: the idealist idea that trinitarian differentiation is the condition of God’s integral self-involvement in history; and the personalistic assumption that the Trinity functions as a paradigm of relationality through its modeling of social relations. I regard both of these trends as salutary in their intentions; the question is how those intentions are accomplished, and what the gains and losses are in the doctrine of the Trinity when it is made to serve as an increasingly formalistic conceptual paradigm to serve idealist or personalistic ends, as I will argue it often is.46 My intention to accomplish both historical and constructive purposes is, admittedly, a fine line to walk: in the next chapter, I will examine three theologians whose constructive theological interests led them to some fairly significant misreadings of Augustine. Anachronism is a serious danger to be wary of in a project like this. Nonetheless, it is my contention that in Augustine we encounter insights that sit at odds with the contemporary trinitarian discussion at a fundamentally basic level, even though his entire doctrine is built around the Trinity as a mystery of salvation, as Rahner put it. I have thus sought to read him with careful attention to historical fidelity, while at the same time being attentive to the ways his trinitarian theology might open up new ways of thinking about the trinitarian being of God, the nature of our redeemed and even defied life in God, and the social nature of that life in the church as a mode of participation in Christ. Rather than offering a monograph purely on Augustine, though, I have brought him into conversation with the trinitarian trajectories and tensions of Barth’s Church Dogmatics.47 This is for two reasons. First, it is impossible to engage with contemporary trinitarian thought without accounting for Barth, and despite there being a virtual publishing industry devoted to his theology, it is my sense that the revolutionary elements of his trinitarian theology have not been fully tapped. I do not claim to do that here—but I do aspire to offer at least a fresh angle on his trinitarian concerns through his pneumatology. Second, I want to avoid the impression that Augustine’s trinitarian thought is faultless. I argue that in De Trinitate we see the idea of a God whose singular essence is self-giving in the Logos—that the incarnation of Jesus Christ is the definitive form of God’s revelation and gift of grace in the pouring out of the Spirit. The strength of Augustine’s vision lies in his indelible correlation of the procession of the Son from the Father in 11

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eternity, and the mission of the Son in the incarnation. For Augustine, this is a distinction due only to our time-bound perspective, but it is not a real distinction in God’s life. The distinction between immanent and economic Trinity, that is, has no real purchase on the Trinity itself. But this is not to say that Augustine thinks this insight all the way through; he tends to talk about the incarnation as a “manifestation” of the Son, and lacks the conceptual tools to think in a really radical way about the historicity of the incarnation as in some way genuinely impacting the divine life. For this, I turn to Barth, who makes the astonishing claim that, in some way, the history of Jesus is the content of the divine life—God’s Urgeschichte—without at the same time history serving as a necessary medium for God’s historical becoming. What Barth hits on is a subtle point, one he himself has trouble articulating consistently; thus I will argue that he needs a healthy dose of Augustine’s insight to carry this out consistently. Throughout this book, I have a basic thesis that I draw upon Augustine and Barth to articulate and develop: that at its best, Western theology, as represented by these two theological voices, offers a trinitarian vision of God who is a singular act of self-giving, and that pneumatology is a way of talking about that self-giving as including ourselves. In the medieval Neoplatonist appropriation of Pseudo-Dionysius, such as we find in Bonaventure, God was called a bonum diffusivum sui—a self-diffusive good, a God whose nature overflows in goodness such that eternally God simply is the gift of self-giving. The real insight Augustine and Barth begin to open up, is that this self-diffusive good, when viewed through the lens of trinitarian theology, is identical to the trinitarian processions of Son and Spirit. The Son, in the person of Jesus Christ, simply is the eternally self-giving nature of God made flesh, the knowledge of whom is the mission of the Holy Spirit. The term I have given this, adapted from Ingolf Dalferth (Chapter 6), is “incarnational realism.” Putting things this way might already raise a question for many readers. Zizioulas has only been the most vocal of those who argue that Western theology is so Christocentric that it loses any focus upon the Spirit. Somewhat ironically, I have taken the strategy of conceding this point in order to contest it. Put less obtusely, I am contesting its presuppositions: I argue in this book that this Christocentrism is precisely in congruence with the best insights of Augustinian and Barthian theology. On the one hand, I argue that we should think of the self-giving act of God as a singular act in Christ, and should not look for a second act in the Spirit. The missions of the trinitarian persons do not necessarily entail distinct redemptive acts in the economy of salvation. Rather, we should look for one act of God in different valences, or modalities: the reception of the act of God is part of that very act itself. In other words, Son and Spirit act together in the incarnation and the corresponding pneumatological gift of grace, a gift that is itself the gift of participation in the Son. It is not so much that the Spirit doesn’t have 12

INTRODUCTION

anything to do in the economy of salvation;48 it’s that if we look for the work of the Spirit anywhere else than ourselves insofar as we are in Christ, we are making the mistake of thinking that hypostatic particularity entails distinct works in the self-giving act of God, rather than God’s act being something singular—something simple—whose singularity includes our own personal participation as part of that very act. Pneumatology names something performative: it is not so much a description of the nature of the third hypostasis of the Trinity as it is the discourse that encodes the event of our participation in the Trinity through the work of that hypostasis. My argument is that to receive the Spirit is to participate in a mystery, the mystery of correspondence to Christ, which is not known so much as it is done. The Spirit’s work is a distinct work from that of Christ in that it is participation in that work. As Augustine will put it, the mission of the Son is our knowledge of the Son in time; the mission of the Spirit is being bound in love to the Son as we know him. This presumes, therefore, that Christology and pneumatology do not operate on the same register; one is doctrinal, the other is the performative dimension of that doctrinal speech. Therefore, on the other hand, the concern about Christocentrism (or as Barthians often worry about, “Christomonism”) is one that operates on a basic, if understandable, confusion.49 The problem is a category mistake that is woven throughout trinitarian theology in the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries, and is attached to the concept of “person.” Later in the book, I discuss how trouble ensues when the concept of a self-conscious subject is assumed to be the reference point for understanding the Trinity, whether the label is applied to the individual hypostases, or to the divine nature as such. When applied to the Son and Spirit in terms of their missions, the term wreaks havoc, because understanding Son and Spirit as persons—as centers or subjects of agency— inevitably ends up portraying their missions as competitive, since both Son and Spirit (if they are persons) must be subjects of their own acts. This is an assumption we must do away with—although its effects are deeper than we realize, I will argue. A shorter way of putting this is simply to point out that to call the Son and Spirit “persons” should not be understood as implying that they are persons in the same way; nor should their work in the economy of salvation be understood in the same way; nor, again, should the way we talk about each be the same. Unpacking this claim will require listening closely to both Augustine and Barth. The reader will note some peculiarities of this book. I have made a number of strategic choices, some of them unusual though hopefully not idiosyncratic, in order to hear the theological voices of Augustine and Barth speak more clearly, and to avoid imposing upon them contemporary concerns and categories that obscure more than they clarify. I am seeking to allow them to change some of the terms of the conversation, in other words. Thus I engage many of the tropes of contemporary trinitarian conversation 13

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tangentially or not at all. I eschew any attempt at comparing Augustine and the Cappadocians (though space is a factor here as well); I do not treat of the relative merits of “opposition of relations” and “relations of origin” in the trinitarian processions; and I have elected not to discuss the filioque. When it comes to my readings of Augustine and Barth, I have not always found their theology to be most fruitful in the usual places: Augustine’s precise discussion of the trinitarian relations in De Trinitate 5–7, or Barth’s technical discussion of the Trinity in Church Dogmatics 1/1, §9, to note the obvious instances. I have found Augustine’s agonizing over the bedeviling question of the relationship and priority of intelligentia and voluntas, or Barth’s analysis of the secondary objectivity of knowledge of God, for example, as offering greater insight into the overall trinitarian and pneumatological vision they have to offer than the more usual passages of explicit doctrinal analysis. It is my hope that the reader will find these strategic choices as rewarding as I have. A further distinctive deserves special mention, for purposes of clarity: I have avoided whenever possible using the language of “persons” for the members of the Trinity at all, preferring “hypostases” or the even more obscure “subsistents” instead. Readers should not discern a preference for “Eastern” categories in this nomenclature, but rather a deliberate choice to follow Barth and Rahner in suspicion of the baggage coming along with the vocabulary of “person.” On the other hand, the focus of this book on “Western” theology does not indicate that I am championing or defending a superior Western trinitarian doctrine over against Eastern theology; rather, I am seeking to understand some of its presuppositions outside of its polemical shadow, with the modest hope that, in a likely very small way, this book can help reframe such fraught issues as the filioque and the role of the Trinity in ecumenical discussions. One final caveat. One of the most difficult decisions in the writing of this book concerns the use of masculine language for the first two subsistents of the Trinity. I fully accept feminist critiques of sexist and patriarchal language used of the divine, even (or rather especially) when referring to the “Father” and the “Son.” I wish to state clearly that I find appeals to revelation or authority to back up the necessity of such masculine language completely unconvincing, and potentially harmful in the church’s continuing attempt to come to terms with centuries of sexism and misogyny.50 Thus it is with particular regret that I have elected to retain language of Father and Son in this book. I decided to do this simply because I worried that using different names for the First and Second in the Trinity than those employed by Augustine or Barth would commit the reader to a continuous act of mental translation that would bog down and muddle the exposition of their thought. My intent is not to honor their patriarchal assumptions, but rather to avoid putting in place too many obstacles to understanding them. In part, too, this comes from a conviction (one often explored in the classroom 14

INTRODUCTION

with my students) that our ability to cogently critique a position or thinker is directly proportional to the efforts we have expended in understanding that position or thinker sympathetically. That said, I have used two stylistic deviations from traditional trinitarian language—I consistently refer to the Spirit with a feminine pronoun, and I use what some feel is a barbarism (“Godself”) to refer to the deity reflexively. These are simply compromise gestures, but ones I felt necessary to distance myself from patriarchal language as much as possible while still trying to live within the thought world of my interlocutors. No one is more aware of the shortcoming of trinitarian language, and indeed of my halfway gesture, than myself. I am sensitive to feminist concerns that speaking of the Spirit in the feminine doesn’t redress the issue of sexist language for the divine, since it just reinforces the use of gendered language for God. My hope is that, if we can begin to rethink the language of “person” in the Trinity, the force of this concern can be shifted—we can think of the Spirit less as the lone girl, taking a backseat to the starring roles accorded to the guys, and more as a signifier of something like a “queering” of the Trinity.51 Although it has become a courtesy to inform readers of the parts of the book that can be profitably read in isolation, I have conceived the following chapters in a fairly cohesive argument. The argument mounts as it goes, however, so the Augustine chapters will make tolerable sense standing alone, even if my reservations about Augustine aren’t named until we have traversed Barth’s theology; my reading of Augustine is continually in the background (or at least the subtext) of my reading of Barth, however, which might make the Barth chapters obscure to the reader who dips in to see what I have to say about the Barthian election debate, for example (it’s in Chapter 7, by the way). Nevertheless, a brief synopsis of the argument follows. Chapter 1 develops a rough typology of trinitarian positions in contemporary theology, and tries to garner a sense of the major critiques of the Augustinian psychological analogy and its impact on pneumatology through a reading of Colin Gunton, Robert Jenson, and Jürgen Moltmann. I identify two major classes of twentieth-century trinitarianism—personalism and idealism—that have already been adumbrated here. Finally, I close with a reading of Rahner and his rhetorical debt to the work of Théodore de Régnon. Chapters 2 through 4 focus on the trinitarian theology and pneumatology of Augustine. Chapters 2 and 3 concentrate on De Trinitate, books 1–7 and 8–15, respectively, and approach it as a contemplative text that enacts the ascent to God in grace as occurring in the descent of the incarnation. The gift of the Spirit is the gift of charity that registers as a kind of deifying performance of Christ by grace. This reading is followed by an examination of Augustine’s ecclesiology in his homilies of the first epistle of John, wherein I seek to show, as Augustine develops his ecclesiology of the totus christus, how participation in Christ is a social bond of love to the neighbor that 15

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makes Augustine’s pneumatology inherently ethical. It is here that the stakes of incarnational realism begin to emerge, for the church is in a very real sense a continuing participation in the incarnation for Augustine. Moreover, I argue, Augustine’s peculiar way of thinking about the mystical ascent actually locates the vision of God within the community, in a kind of “ethical apophaticism.” As part of this chapter, I engage some of Augustine’s defenders, particularly in Radical Orthodoxy, and seek to extricate Augustine from that school’s tendency to overread its heroes. Chapters 5 through 7 concern Barth and the Barthian legacy. Chapter 5 revisits the idea of revelation in Barth’s early thought before turning to the first three volumes of the Church Dogmatics to trace Barth’s ­developing Christological clarity in articulating the dialectic of revelation. As this occurs, I show, his pneumatology gains increasing clarity as the objective (not subjective!) reality of redemption’s effect in humanity. Alongside this theme, I analyze the way Barth’s trinitarianism oscillates between “Augustinian” and “Hegelian” tendencies, the nadir of which is Barth’s often lauded analogia relationis of CD 3; the sexism of Barth’s account of man and woman is not accidental to that analogy. This is followed by Chapter 6’s reading of the Christology and pneumatology of The Doctrine of Reconciliation in CD 4. Here, Barth is of two minds, offering a sharply Hegelian, pluralist trinitarianism in CD 4/1, which, I seek to show, actually works against his best interests. With his consideration of the hypostatic union in Reformed categories in CD 4/2, his Christology, his account of human participation in God, and therefore his pneumatology finally fall into place. Chapter 7 then follows by analyzing two influential readers of Barth (Rowan Williams and Bruce McCormack) and showing that their reading of Barth is indebted to Barth’s Hegelian inheritance, which, I argue, is finally a counterproductive force in receiving his theology. I complete that chapter, therefore, with an examination of Hegel’s trinitarian philosophy, with a view to isolating the essential issues where idealist assumptions have informed our thinking of the “person” and thus misadjusted our trinitarian expectations. I conclude the book with a description of the trinitarian “grammar” that can be gleaned from reading Augustine and Barth together, and with a final consideration of what separates this way of thinking about the Trinity from most contemporary discussions. I close by suggesting that modern trinitarianism’s great desideratum, a theology of relationality, is a goal we should affirm and seek in theology—but the Trinity is not the way to get there, and in fact understanding the Trinity as any kind of relational exemplar of communion is counterproductive.

16

1 augustine and the problem of the spirit in contemporary trinitarian theology

As I discussed in the Introduction, the trinitarian revival can in large part be characterized as a blossoming of theological construction by those who follow Barth’s lead in positioning trinitarian theology at the very inception of the Church Dogmatics, understanding it as the grammar of Christian theology itself, and who similarly follow Rahner’s attempt to restore the doctrine to the center of Christian practice and theology, as advocated in his programmatic The Trinity. It is generally organized around what I have called a “standard narrative” that traces the decline of trinitarian theology in the Augustinian tradition, integral to which is a supposed neglect, forgetfulness, or downplaying of the role of the Holy Spirit in the economy of salvation. In this chapter, I want to focus more closely on a few representative thinkers among those discussed in the Introduction, and show how their criticisms of Augustinian pneumatology and trinitarian theology, and in particular, the psychological analogy, are developed in the course of reconstructing trinitarian doctrine. I have selected three influential theologians in this first section: Colin Gunton, Robert Jenson, and Jürgen Moltmann. Each represents important lines of argument concerning the viability of Augustinian pneumatology, and the need to rebuild upon the ruin of Augustinian trinitarian decline. Moreover, they provide ideal exemplars of the distinct patterns of trinitarian reconstruction I have already labeled as “personalist” and “idealist.” These terms are meant to capture two characteristics of each position. First, they offer a rough assessment of the general philosophical background underlying the position;1 second, they offer a general sense of the way in which the relations of the trinitarian subsistents are interpreted. As the name implies, personalism tends to privilege the person as the irreducible ontological reality: “the Self is constituted by its relation to the Other . . . it has its being in its relationship; and . . . this 17

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relationship is necessarily personal.”2 This definition, from philosopher John Macmurray, supposes that the self is not a Cartesian subject who posits herself in thought so much as an agent whose identity is realized in reciprocal correspondence with others who are in relationship with her. Because personalism implies a plurality of persons in mutuality, when these categories are applied to the Trinity the model becomes one of a social life of communion among the hypostases: as Leonard Hodgson puts it, “in the eternal being of God, quite apart from creation, there exist all the elements necessary for a fully personal life.”3 Thus trinitarian personalism is the view that the trinitarian life of God is irreducibly social, involving a mutuality that in some sense acknowledges distinct agencies in the Trinity; the trinitarian relations are, then, to be understood on the model of persons in reciprocal relationship. There are more or less nuanced versions of how literal this idea of multiple agencies should be understood, but this basic pattern fits a broad swath of contemporary trinitarian theology, and in most cases it is offered because it functions as an ontological basis or exemplar for human sociality. English and American trinitarian theologies have tended to be personalist, although there are numerous exceptions.4 Trinitarian idealism, on the other hand, privileges the historicization of the divine being in some way. The precedents here are Hegel and the legacy of German idealism. The basic model is the self-constituting subject, who knows itself and dynamically realizes its subjectivity in a temporal process of unfolding. In trinitarian terms, history is the medium of the divine self-realization, and the emphasis in trinitarian idealism is that God posits God’s divinity in a process or event of becoming. In this paradigm, the trinitarian relations are moments of dialectical relationship, the affirmation and negation of self and otherness. As Eberhard Jüngel puts it: “The modes of God’s being which are differentiated from each other are related to each other in such a way that each mode of God’s being becomes what it is only with the two other modes of being . . . God’s being is thus a being in becoming . . . [The] Yes of God to himself constitutes his being as God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit . . . it constitutes the historicality of God’s being, in which all history has its ground.”5 In this sense, the trinitarian relations are to be understood as ontological moments—often but not always personal moments—in the unfolding life of God in history, though generally history is not taken to be a strictly necessary medium for this unfolding; rather, the eternal dynamic relationality of God is itself the ground of history. In line with idealism’s Hegelian inheritance, the idealist Trinity is modeled not so much on the dynamic sociality of a mutuality of persons as it is on the dynamic self-realization of a subject in time. Thus, the gain of trinitarian idealism is that it frames the distinction between God and history, between the immanent and economic Trinity, in as minimal a way as possible, eliminating fears of an overly remote, transcendent God. 18

AUGUSTINE AND THE PROBLEM OF THE SPIRIT

As we will see throughout this chapter, and thematize in Chapter 7, there is considerable overlap between these two positions. These definitions, however, can offer a rough starting point in familiarizing ourselves in greater detail with representatives of each. This will be the task of the next three subsections. With these analyses in place, we will have the necessary context to begin an in-depth discussion of Augustine’s pneumatology and trinitarian theology in the next three chapters.

Patterns of Critique in Contemporary Trinitarianism Colin Gunton: Trinitarian Personalism In a well-known essay, valuable for how representative it is of modern trinitarian assumptions,6 Gunton finds Augustine’s thought to be a major factor in the decline of trinitarian theology in the West, resulting in modern Western atheism.7 Gunton indicts Augustine for his Platonist suspicion of the material world, leading to his reluctance “to give due weight to the full materiality of the incarnation.”8 Augustine, he says, betrays a modalist tendency by concentrating on the one divine substance over the hypostatic identities of the three persons.9 Following Zizioulas, Gunton argues that Cappadocian theology originated an “ontological revolution” that highlights the idea of the divine being as a communion of persons known by their concrete relationships in the economy of salvation; Augustine, however, misses out on this revolution because of the thrall Neoplatonism continues to hold over his thought. Rather than a communion of persons, his way of thinking of the Trinity becomes indebted to the Platonic triads of the “threefold mind.”10 Gunton reads the later books of Augustine’s De Trinitate as confounded by the logical puzzle of God’s triunity, and on a “hopeless quest” for analogies in experience, especially mental experience, to help explain it, rather than explicating that threefoldness from the historical economy of salvation.11 This quest then functions as a kind of Procrustean bed into which Augustine forces his doctrine of the Spirit. Absent another (economic) method of distinguishing the Son and Spirit, Augustine is driven to the distinction between understanding and will in the psychological analogy, with the result that Augustine’s controlling paradigm is driven by the “inner structure of the human mind” rather than the “‘outer’ economy of grace.”12 Pneumatology becomes a way of completing the speculative equation, rather than a reflection on the historical work of the Holy Spirit. Gunton’s contention is that by assuming a metaphysically determined conception of the trinitarian roles of the Son and Spirit, Augustine is forced to characterize the hypostatic uniqueness of the Spirit in nonbiblical terms like “gift” and “love.” The latter is particularly problematic in that Augustine uses it both for the Spirit and the divine essence 19

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as such, further supporting a monist conception of the divinity and failing to yield a distinctive, properly interpersonal understanding of the Spirit’s work in uniting the divine community.13 Gunton’s concerns with De Trinitate are not unique, but he does state them with particular economy and force. In the next two chapters, we will judge how fair they are as characterizations of Augustine’s project; for the moment, it is important to note how closely Gunton relates the psychological analogy and Augustine’s problems with the Trinity. For Gunton, as for many twentieth-century readers, Augustine’s theology is almost entirely determined by its metaphysical underpinnings. Gunton’s descriptions of Augustine’s shortcomings are, to be sure, rather superficial: he does not discuss specific philosophical assumptions that Augustine makes, and his Platonism, as Gunton presents it, seems to reduce to a generally dualistic ontology and a privileging of intellectual categories as metaphors. The real force of Gunton’s complaint lies in his belief that Augustine has failed to understand the “theological revolution” of Cappadocian theology (or in fact, his own Western predecessors, such as Tertullian) in failing to free himself from Neoplatonism. The source of Augustine’s pneumatological fumblings lies in his choice of the Neoplatonic mental triads, rather than the economy of salvation, as a source to understand the trinitarian relationships. Depriving himself of the witness of Scripture, Augustine is cast back on apparently more autochthonous philosophical categories to find analogies for the logical puzzle of the Trinity. Near the end of the article, Gunton makes a revealing comment when he proffers two “desiderata” for a reconstructed doctrine of the Trinity. The first is a proper conceptual distinction between the Son and the Spirit, and the second an “engagement with ontology.”14 This characteristically Guntonian theme, which he has adopted programmatically from Zizioulas, signals the importance he places upon the “ontological revolution” of Cappadocian trinitarian theology. The problem with locating the unity of the Godhead in an underlying substance apart from the hypostatic distinctions is that it leads to an unknowability of God such that “there can be no theological ontology at all.”15 For Gunton, the great Nicene revolution in trinitarian theology concerns a vision of the communion of the trinitarian persons that underwrites a relational ontology of church and creation. The problem with the psychological analogy is not just the scriptural or conceptual indefensibility of its analogs for the trinitarian reality, but also that it yields individualistic and intellectualist implications for humanity’s self-understanding. For Gunton, trinitarian theology offers an account of God’s being that authorizes a social ontology in analogical correspondence to that divine being, in particular a theology of creation characterized by the relational priority of particulars, and an ecclesiology grounded in the communion of persons.16 Augustine’s failure, then, is that his model of the trinitarian relations undermines their 20

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personal, relational being, with the result that his vision of the economy of salvation and the social nature of redeemed reality is impoverished.

Robert Jenson: Trinitarian Idealism Robert Jenson is not known for the moderation of his rhetoric, so it suits him when he characterizes the doctrine of the Trinity as the key battlefront in a kind of world-historical culture war. Hellenism, the theology of “Olympian-Parmenidean religion,” is opposed by the gospel, but Western theology has been enfeebled by its inability to separate from the former.17 For Jenson, Augustine is the representative and originator of this enfeeblement, and the problem is located precisely in his articulation of the Spirit within the terms of the psychological analogy. Both in his famed The Triune Identity and his two-volume Systematic Theology, this opposition between the God of Hellenism and the God of the gospel has generated a remarkably fecund theology characterized by the refusal to speak of God except from God’s trinitarian self-identity given in revelation. For Jenson, revelation demands a strict and rigorous identification between the events of the economy of salvation and God’s self-realization in those events. The great danger of Hellenism is its presupposition that God’s true being is located in eternity apart from history, a presupposition that factors in Augustine’s great failure to appreciate the Nicene-Cappadocian breakthrough. Whereas for Gunton, the Cappadocian revolution is located in an ontology of communion, for Jenson, the Cappadocians operate with a temporal or historical ontology. Jenson combines an Eastern privileging of hypostatic particularity over Western essentialism with his own radicalizing of the Barthian schematic of the divine historicity;18 in so doing, he argues that the trinitarian relations are themselves the temporal structures of evangelical history.19 The three hypostases or identities correspond to the “three arrows of time . . . It is by the temporal dynamic between Jesus and his Father and our Destiny, that the three are God.”20 Eternity, on Jenson’s interpretation, is not abstract timelessness but faithful fulfillment of narratively articulated self-identity.21 Over against this temporal ontology, which trinitarian theology explicates and grounds in the language of the gospel, according to Jenson the West fell to Hellenistic temptation by locating God in a timeless eternity, and characterizing God negatively, in that God’s self-revelation is “left behind”22 for the positing of an ineffable, self-enclosed, static divinity in itself. Again, the major culprit is Augustine: on the one hand, his Neoplatonism causes him to run the Nicene faith through the mill of an eternity that definitively divides God in Godself from God in the history of salvation;23 on the other hand, that philosophical monism of the divinity destroys the Nicene-Cappadocian idea of the triune identities, such that the trinitarian persons in their “mutual structure” become flattened into a substantialist “identical possession . . . of 21

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an abstractly simple divine essence.”24 Thus, given this dichotomy of eternity and time, abstracted from the temporal structures of revelation, Augustine has no recourse but to cast about for analogies to understand the logical puzzle of the Trinity.25 The great disaster of Western theology is this: It is this reality—which in itself should not be denied—of the soul that knows and wills God, that in Augustine and after is the image of the Trinity by which trinitarian language has meaning . . . the incarnation or the coming of the Spirit to the congregation do not achieve this. It is in that God is triune, and in that temporal being is ontologically dependent on inner analogy to timeless being, and in that for the intrinsically self-conscious soul the grasp of this analogy is its own active reality, that we can by analogy to the soul meaningfully say “Father, Son, and Spirit” about God.26 For Jenson’s Augustine, the only true locus of knowledge of God is the analogical correspondence of rationality and self-consciousness between the soul and God, for that is the only ontological link in the Platonic eternity-time disjunction. But this means that the psychological analogy takes precedence over the structures of the evangelical narrative, such that the latter, which is the Eastern premise in understanding the Trinity, falls prey to the ineffability of the eternal God. And this means the separation of the immanent and economic Trinities. The symptom of this separation is “Augustine’s hopeless problem with the Spirit”:27 like Gunton, Jenson sees Augustine’s discussion of the Spirit as “gift” as irreparably misguided, in this case because Augustine’s requirement that the economic missions manifest eternal processions poses an insuperable problem for that “identity.” On Augustine’s grounds, the Spirit cannot be eternally gift because she is only temporally given, but this leaves us with a God whose historical self-revelation does not correspond to God’s true eternal being. Two points are worth mentioning before we turn to Moltmann. First, Jenson concedes, however grudgingly, that Augustine is genuinely on to something with his reflections on the self-conscious mind, for the latter inscribes a problematic into Western thought that forms the legacy of modern philosophy.28 Jenson’s own constructive proposal regarding the Trinity, in fact, appropriates the “Augustinian-Hegelian discovery of God’s personhood,” understanding God as a personally infinite “Subject,” whose mediating “Object” is the Son, and the Spirit who transcends the two in infinite eschatological openness.29 Second, Jenson returns to the problem of the Spirit as “gift” in his chapter on pneumatology in Systematic Theology to develop a point about the nature of God’s agency in revelation. “Disallowing” Augustine’s question as to how the Spirit can be a gift without an eternally created term to receive it,30 he notes the later Western debate on the Spirit’s indwelling as formulated by Peter Lombard—in contemporary terms, the 22

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problem of uncreated and created grace. Jenson argues that the gift of the Spirit can be nothing less than the Spirit herself: “If the Spirit is truly a personal being, he finally has only himself to give.”31 Despite conceding that the Spirit cannot be a “person” in the sense that the Father and the Son are,32 on Jenson’s view the Spirit’s personhood demands a certain conception of the Spirit’s gift. The importance of Jenson’s claim is that this highlights the way he reads a signal failure in Barth, namely the latter’s failure to account for the Spirit’s hypostatic identity when Barth assigns the Spirit’s agency to the Son—a continuation of the basic Augustinian error of occluding the trinitarian identities.33

Jürgen Moltmann: The Shift from Idealism to Personalism We have already seen in Gunton and Jenson an appropriation of the Régnon paradigm that attributes the reputed “forgetfulness of the Spirit” of the West to the Augustinian focus upon the one divine substance over the differentiation of the three hypostases. In the theology of Moltmann, this narrative receives perhaps its most sustained and radicalized presentation. Gunton and Jenson offer two different forms of a “trinitarian ontology,” one personalist in nature, the other temporal-historical, but Moltmann represents something of a mixed case. This reflects the episodic and eclectic nature of his thought: the early Christological historicizing of the trinitarian relations that forms the core of The Crucified God develops into the “open Trinity” of The Trinity and the Kingdom, which in turn evolves into the stronger panentheist vitalism of God in Creation and The Spirit of Life.34 The polemical core of this conceptual malleability, however, resides in the critique of the Western monism of the divine substance in favor of an Eastern trinitarian sociality.35 Like Gunton and Jenson, Moltmann attributes the eclipse of the Spirit in the West to its inheritance of Augustinian monism. Perhaps the most succinct account of this narrative is found in a discussion of the imago dei in God in Creation and The Spirit of Life. In this discussion, Moltmann attributes the Western predilection for a monistic concept of God and an individualistic anthropology to the Augustinian psychological analogy. Rejecting Gregory of Nazianzus’s model of the “primal human community” of Adam, Eve, and Seth, Augustine sets up a correspondence of the human soul to the “single Being of the triune God, not to the threefold nature of God’s inner essence.”36 This prioritizing of the single divine essence, critiqued at the inception of The Trinity and the Kingdom under the twin rubrics of the “supreme substance” and “absolute subject,”37 resides at the heart of Moltmann’s revolt against Latin theology, variously represented in Tertullian, Augustine, and Aquinas, and exemplified in Barth and Rahner.38 Moltmann subjects this prioritization of the single divine essence in the psychological analogy to a twofold critique. First, because the one divine being is reflected in a single human soul, 23

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the Western God stands in a relationship of domination to the soul as “an emblem of sovereignty,” just as the soul stands in a relationship of domination to the body (and man to woman).39 Thus the psychological analogy is warrant for a body-denying hierarchicalism,40 and ultimately a hierarchical political absolutism in “the figure of the omnipotent, universal monarch, who is reflected in earthly rulers.”41 Thus Moltmann’s well-known critique of “political monotheism” is grounded in his critique of the Augustinian tradition. Second, the psychological analogy itself is internally hierarchical: the “inwardly subjective differentiation into spirit—knowledge—love”42 is Augustine’s image of the Trinity. But, according to Moltmann, this tripartite division itself has a monarchical structure, in that the “spirit” is the origin of the two processions of knowledge and love and thus is superior to them.43 Moreover, in the psychological analogy the soul is primarily characterized by consciousness and reason, so that the dimensions of affectivity and love are devalued—and with them, embodiment and the experience of the Spirit of life.44 The “primal human community” modeled on the divine community, which rejects these hierarchical, authoritarian patterns, sets the tone for the social trinitarianism that characterizes the later Moltmann, and reflects the same personalist patterns seen in Gunton. However, we can see a “historical-ontological” line of critique against Augustinian trinitarianism in The Spirit of Life that reflects concerns predominantly found in his earlier work. Here the focus is more explicitly idealist, in that Moltmann characterizes the trinitarian relations dialectically, and as historically realized. In this narrative, Western “essentialism” originates in the Augustinian opera trinitatis ad extra sunt indivisa (the external works of the Trinity are undivided), a maxim that eliminates the possibility of triune involvement in history, in that only the single divine essence acts externally (ad extra). In the Western version of the Trinity, consisting as it does in the monarchy of the Father and the descending chain of revelation through the Son in the Spirit (due to the filioque), “the Holy Spirit is once and for all put in third place in the Trinity, and subordinated to the Son.”45 This has the effect of relativizing the Spirit’s work in Christ’s history, and thus of preventing the trinitarian inference from the economy of the salvation to the immanent Trinity: “we always reach only the ‘God for us’ and discern nothing of ‘God in himself.’”46 Moltmann worries that since only the one divine substance acts ad extra, what the trinitarian persons are within the Godhead bears no real relationship to how God acts outside Godself. The result is that the inference from economic works to immanent being is indirect at best, and at the end of the day actually impassable. Over against this Western paradigm of a “vertical eternity-time relation,” then, in which the hypostatic identities are confused and indistinct by virtue of the priority given to the one divine subject as agent, Moltmann contrasts Joachim of Fiore’s theology of history, 24

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embodied in the “sequence of the times of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit in salvation history.”47 This Joachimist eschatology, culminating in the kingdom of the Spirit that anticipates the eternal Sabbath,48 enlarges upon and is the fruit of the dialectic of history first developed in The Crucified God. In that book, Moltmann’s idealism is most clear: the Augustinian indivisibility of the opera ad extra (external works) is reversed in the dialectical switch from “God in history” to “history in God.” The ad extra event of the cross has a “retroactive effect on the Father and causes infinite pain”49 such that the (very much divided) opera ad extra correspond to the “passiones trinitatis ad intra” (internal sufferings of the Trinity). The event of the cross eschatologically opens the history between Father and Son through the Spirit, who proceeds from that event.50 In this manner, similar to the system proposed by Jenson, the hypostatic distinctions that preserve the true identity and personhood of Father, Son, and Spirit are elaborated historically, in the strict identity of economic mission and immanent procession, with the Spirit given a distinct, eschatological role.51

Augustine and Analogy: Unanswered Questions in the Trinitarian Revival I have briefly discussed the critique of Augustinian theology in Gunton, Jenson, and Moltmann in order to grasp how those critiques play not simply into his critical reception, but also the constructive ambitions of modern trinitarianism. In Gunton, we saw a strong charge of “philosophical determinism” against Augustine, in that Augustine’s basic premise in conceptualizing the procession and mission of the Spirit is almost entirely determined by his Neoplatonic predilections, including the choice of an analogy based on the Platonic “mental triads.” For Jenson, a similar choice on Augustine’s part for a Greek conception of God’s timeless eternity and simplicity means that the hypostatic individuality and identity of the Spirit is lost in the white noise of the abstract divinity; further, Augustine’s attempt to describe the Spirit’s personal self-communication as “gift” falters because of his essentialist presuppositions. Finally, Moltmann’s polemic against Western monarchianism attributes to Augustine a focus on the single divine subjectivity that stands in a dominological correspondence to creation, promoting relations of tyranny and individualism in which the experience of the Spirit is occluded; further, the Augustinian focus on the unity of the trinitarian opera ad extra precludes a strong account of the Spirit’s unique work in the economy of salvation. Three broad themes, then, to concern ourselves with in this book: theological anthropology, the relationship of eternity and time, and the nature of divine agency. So much for a sketch of the Augustinian critique. Before proceeding, however, it is important to point out that a second thematic emerged in 25

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the above readings: all three thinkers assume that Augustine draws upon Platonist philosophy to formulate an analogy for the logical puzzle of the trinitarian divine life, in order to illuminate the incomprehensibility of the divine. All three, that is, hold that the psychological analogy is just that—an analogy, a mimetic relationship between God and soul.52 Furthermore, in opposition to the individualist, dualist ontology connected to the psychological analogy, we found our thinkers to be engaged in the construction of alternate analogies corresponding to the purported Cappadocian trinitarian pluralism. In Gunton, on the one hand, this analogical structure had marked practical and social overtones: trinitarian theology backgrounds anthropology for a relational ontology in whose image politics and ecclesiology can be rethought. For Jenson, on the other hand, it is a temporal-historical ontology that results: the “horizontalizing” of the trinitarian relations recasts conceptions of time and personhood as oriented to Jesus, his Transcendence, and their Destiny. Moltmann combined elements of both of these tendencies in recasting divine agency via his social trinitarianism: he seeks a ground for political and ecclesial understandings in his Cappadocian personalism, but he also makes the divine being an “event” between those persons, whether the “eschatology of being” of The Crucified God or the Joachimite historical periodization from The Trinity and the Kingdom onward. The underdetermined premise in these moves, however, lies in the way this analogy between the Trinity and creation is supposed to operate.53 For Augustine, the psychological analogy is apparently little more than a mirror—an image that says more about the thinker’s projection than it does about the object of vision itself. But if Augustine is casting about for metaphors to explain a mystery, it is not always clear how, at a methodological level, Gunton, Jenson, or Moltmann are that different from him.54 In trinitarian personalism, the problem is much more acute because the basis of the very system is a mimetic relationship between divine and human personhood. At times, Gunton appears simply to posit the trinitarian analogate as metaphorical inspiration; but elsewhere a much stronger (though still ultimately pragmatic) ontological account of analogy seems operative, as when he posits a Coleridgean “open transcendental” consisting of “a notion, in some way basic to the human thinking process, which empowers a continuing and in principle unfinished exploration of the universal marks of being.”55 Either way, his account suggests a continuity of being between the divine and human, wherein divine relationality implies a relationality inherent to created existence itself. The latter account of analogy recalls Zizioulas’s claim that God is the ground of being and thus the highest exemplar of human relationality, and thus offers more theological substance, but still struggles to explain how the likeness between the two obtains. On the other hand, a trinitarian idealist like Jenson is on much stronger ground, because the position does not rely on metaphorical relations, but the historical realization of God’s self-revelation. The overriding concern in Jenson is 26

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offering a metaphysical explanation of how God’s trinitarian life and the world’s history can be contiguous such that the trinitarian relations, and in particular the life, death, and resurrection of Christ are in fact determinative of God’s being. Moltmann represents a mixed case: beginning with a clear example of a historical trinitarian ontology in The Crucified God, by The Spirit of Life, his “social Trinity” is almost entirely an exemplarist ontology.56 This shift from idealism to personalism is instructive, for it points to certain resonances between the two prima facie different accounts of trinitarian doctrine. The project of the trinitarian revival appears to be not simply limited to the revisiting and repristination of patristic choices in the construction of trinitarian dogma; it is a far more ambitious attempt to conceive the meaning of being itself from a trinitarian point of view, and to postulate an analogical structure between divine and created being such that the latter bears the image of the Trinity—whether this is primarily expressed socially or historically. One of the lingering questions that will occupy this book, however, is whether analogy is a strong enough relationship to sustain trinitarian reflection, and when we come to Barth, whether analogy is always ideologically neutral.57 At this point, however, we need to back up and reexamine the historical narrative that Gunton, Jenson, and Moltmann work with.

Historicizing the Rhetoric of the Revival The theologies of the two Karls—Barth and Rahner—are widely held to be the sine qua non factors of the twentieth-century trinitarian revival.58 While perhaps a little too simple, making Barth and Rahner so central does highlight two of the major thematic and rhetorical tropes that helped organize widespread interest in the Trinity. Both Barth’s foregrounding of trinitarian theology in the first volume of the Church Dogmatics, and Rahner’s articulation of his Grundaxiom, legitimate the idea that in the twentieth-century trinitarian theology was rescued from the oblivion of abstraction and disuse. But if Barth and Rahner provide much of the rhetorical architecture for twentieth-century trinitarianism, they are also ill-fitted to be the pioneering rediscoverers of the Trinity they are sometimes made out to be. Barth’s theology, as we will see, has seen its share of criticism, and Rahner’s reception has been quite selective. For many, it seems that Barth and Rahner are at once the first to rouse themselves from the dogmatic slumber of Western Trinitätsvergessenheit, but at the same time still caught within the self-destructive heart of that tradition: as Paul Fletcher says about Barth, “he was lauded for inducing a renewal but he was criticized for not advancing far enough along the very path that he had cleared.”59 When I analyze Barth in Chapters 5 and 6, I will discuss how Barth’s readers have critiqued his pneumatological limitations; indeed, while each 27

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of the theologians profiled above are explicit in their indebtedness to Barth, their desire to go beyond him is also patent. Gunton, whose dissertation treated Barth and Hartshorne,60 called CD 1/1 “the most influential treatise on the Trinity this century,” but rebuked Barth for “not being trinitarian enough.”61 Jenson’s first two books were on Barth’s trinitarianism, and he self-consciously positions himself as radicalizing Barth’s work while correcting his failed pneumatology;62 and, as we have seen already, Barth is the foil for much of Moltmann’s work, from Theology of Hope to Spirit in the World. In reply, I am concerned in this book to show that the distance that separates Barth from these theologians and their contemporaries lies in a kind of conceptual proximity with Augustine, even if that proximity is not explicit or avowed by Barth. Moreover, I will argue that many of the critiques that a theologian such as Jenson or Moltmann levels at Barth and Augustine, in terms of their focus upon divine simplicity and eternity, their Christological orientation, or their employment of the opera trinitatis ad extra sunt indivisa maxim, in fact touch upon the areas where Barth and Augustine are most compelling and successful as trinitarian thinkers. Substantiation of all of this lies in the coming chapters; in this section, I will focus on Rahner’s theology as a rhetorical antecedent to the trinitarian revival, showing how he established some of its leading trends, even as many of his material concerns were overlooked. My intention here is to expand on the material discussed in the Introduction in order to historicize the critique of Barth and Augustine found in contemporary trinitarians, by showing how many of the predominant tropes of the “standard narrative” derive from a set of easily isolable sources. The most important of these is found in Rahner’s short work on the Trinity.

Karl Rahner: An Augustinian Despite Himself? Rahner offered a significant critique of the Augustinian-Thomist tradition of trinitarian thought, and in particular, the psychological analogy; but in a curious dynamic, this critique has been picked up more in form than in substance by many later readers, while his most material contributions to trinitarian theology have been overlooked, at least by the mainstream of twentieth-century trinitarian theology. This may, in part, be due to the fact that Rahner’s concerns with uncreated grace—the conceptual heart of his interest in the Trinity—are articulated in a neoscholastic idiom unfamiliar to many Protestant theologians energized by Barth’s dramatic historicized trinitarianism. So in adopting the form and rhetoric of Rahner’s polemic without his substantive theological concerns, many twentieth-century trinitarian circles seemed to have inherited from him a predisposition to a kind of free-floating polemic that lacks clarity about the purpose his Grundaxiom is supposed to fulfill. Moreover, one searches in vain in Rahner for a complaint about Western-Augustinian Geistesvergessenheit; 28

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instead, he is preoccupied with the relationship between the incarnation and appropriation theory. The “free-floating polemic” later readers inherited is found in the broad lines of Rahner’s lament over the fall of Western trinitarian theology. The opening polemical fusillade of The Trinity complains about “mere monotheism” and the disjunction of trinitarian doctrine from the life of faith, identifies Aquinas’s separation of the treatises De deo uno and De deo trino as a major factor in the marginalizing of trinitarian doctrine, and valorizes the “Eastern” doctrine that begins with the three persons, rather than the one divine substance. Rahner also immortalizes the charges that the one divine substance functioned as a quasi-fourth hypostasis in the West, he argues that the Augustinian psychological analogy is speculative and separated from salvation history, and he offers his Grundaxiom of the identity of the immanent and economic Trinities as a solution for that speculative separation.63 In short, Rahner offers a compelling, if rather broad, narrative of decline. When the reader pushes past these introductory salvos, though, he or she finds that the real problem driving Rahner’s argument lies in more nuanced issues. When Rahner champions “the Greeks,” he is not just concerned with an appropriate quota of divine plurality, but engaging in a debate in Catholic neoscholastic theology of the time, which revolved around the notions of “uncreated grace” and “proper missions.” What Rahner is after in The Trinity is a way of eliminating any arbitrary relation between the divine nature and the trinitarian processions, so that God’s self-communication in history really corresponds to God’s eternal being. Thus, when God gives Godself in Christ, it is characteristic of God’s trinitarian nature to do so; when God indwells the soul in grace, the human person can have real relations with the divine persons.64 For Rahner, the connection between the doctrine of the Trinity and the life of faith does not lie in the idealist concern to dialectically historicize the trinitarian relations (as his Grundaxiom was often deployed to do by Barth-wielding Protestants), and certainly not in the personalist attempt to make the Trinity a communion of subjectivities; he is concerned with the communication of grace to the subject, and his axiom of the identity of the immanent and economic Trinity safeguards this communication. If the incarnation is not arbitrarily but essentially related to the procession of the Son, and if the gift of grace is not arbitrarily but essentially related to the procession of the Spirit, then the soul inhabited by God has a real relation with the trinitarian subsistents themselves, not with an undifferentiated divine unity. This is “uncreated grace,” the direct experience of the divine self-communication in the soul, rather than a created impartation distinct from the hypostatic realities of the divine persons themselves. For Rahner, the psychological analogy is incapable of understanding the distinct manners of subsistence of the processions,65 and it cannot account for the modes of self-bestowal in grace according to which Word and Spirit are possessed as independent objects of knowledge and love, in 29

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their hypostatic particularity.66 The rubric of the identity of the immanent and economy Trinity guarantees that God’s self-communication is according to the two basic modalities of God’s own self-relation. Self-communication implies an addressee, a personal recipient;67 thus the divine revelation and self-giving that is the economic Trinity is an event that includes the elevation and participation of the human recipient, and it possesses two basic modalities: truth and love.68 Relative to Aquinas, Augustine figures rather peripherally in Rahner’s argument, simply providing a convenient terminus a quo for the problematic trajectory of the psychological analogy. As interpreted by the scholastics, the analogy forgets the economic Trinity insofar as it abstractly formulates a schematic for understanding the inner life of God on the basis of psychological data. The Thomist dichotomizing of the De deo uno / De deo trino theological treatises can be traced to the original Augustinian abstraction from salvation history, which “begins with the one God, the one divine essence as a whole . . . as a result the treatise becomes quite philosophical and abstract and refers hardly at all to salvation history.”69 Although the analogy has biblical validity and makes some effort toward defining “formal concepts” of trinitarian doctrine (e.g. procession, communication, relation, etc.), its starting point is the “human philosophical concept of knowledge and love.”70 Furthermore, the analogy fails to capture the dynamic of the triune economy whereby “this intra-divine knowledge is seen as self-revealing and this intra-divine love as self-communicating.” The Grundaxiom seeks to counteract the Augustinian doctrine’s tendency (at least as formulated in school theology) to be premised upon abstract reflection upon the human spirit, and not the divine self-communication in the economy: the former concerns an a priori model projected upon the Trinity, whereas the other constructs the doctrine from the shape of human existence as revealed in the experience of salvation. It may be reasonably doubted whether Rahner makes this distinction as clearly as he thinks he does: he critiques the psychological analogy for its “attempt to bring home to the intelligence of the faith an understanding of the threefold-distinct manner of subsisting of the one God by means of psychological categories and according to the model of the spiritual self-actuation of man,” which, he argues, “differs considerably from the method used in the present essay.”71 The method Rahner uses, though, articulates the processions in terms of the “metaphysics of spirit,” which knows only two basic activities of spirit, knowledge, and love, which are, after all, the same categories used in the psychological analogy. The difference lies in the path one takes to get there: Augustine and Thomas offer a model of the divine relations extrapolated with greater or lesser explanatory power from an a priori account of human psychological processes or self-consciousness; Rahner is seeking to describe the event of participation in the triune dynamic of God’s own life as encountered by humanity in its 30

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self-transcendence in history, such that the doctrine of the Trinity is itself the “grammar” of that participation.72 It is my judgment that, whatever the incautious generalizations he makes historically, and even given the reception of Rahner’s (widely ignored) constructive categories in the conclusion of The Trinity,73 his depiction of the trinitarian dimensions of the experience of salvation is profoundly cogent. If it could be shown, as in fact I will seek to do in the next two chapters, that Augustine’s so-called psychological analogy is precisely the “grammar” of the experience of salvation as participation in the incarnation through the Spirit’s gift of grace, then Rahner will actually be in a significant degree of continuity with Augustinian trinitarian doctrine. At the least, this would be ironic: given the influence of his polemic against the Western tradition, if Rahner remains a deeply Augustinian trinitarian—perhaps even against his will—then we have real reason for digging deeper beneath the fragile artifice of the standard narrative of Western trinitarian declension.

Régnon and the Rhetoric of Modern Trinitarianism This (potential) irony of an unobserved symmetry between Rahner’s intentions and those of his foils is one key observation I need to make in highlighting the contingency of the trinitarian revival. Before drawing this section to a close, however, if we follow recent scholars in locating the sources of Rahner’s rhetoric in his appropriation of nineteenth-century scholar Théodore de Régnon’s work, the standard narrative becomes even more highly locatable. Soon after Rahner’s work appeared, historical theologians demurred about the characterization of the Western trinitarian tradition as abstract, quasi-modalist, and individualistic,74 but it wasn’t until a pair of articles was published by Michel Barnes in 1995 that the source of that characterization became well known in Anglophone scholarship.75 Barnes demonstrated that the stereotype of a fundamental divide of Eastern and Western trinitarianism on the basis of differing emphases on divine plurality and unity rested on the work of a single scholar, Régnon. Régnon’s Études de Théologie Positive sur La Sainte Trinité76 was read by both Lossky and Rahner, and Régnon’s central opposition of Latin and Greek theology was repeated near-verbatim by both. Rahner did not cite Régnon, however, and Lossky’s references disappeared in the English translation, so that Régnon’s influence went unnoticed for English-speaking readers. A quick survey, such as I have sketched in the Introduction and this chapter, shows the function of the “beginning point” of the one and the three surfacing repeatedly as something of a cliché in proponents of the revival. Gunton, Jenson, and Moltmann all make much of this claim, as do many other later readers of Rahner, such as LaCugna, Pannenberg, and Boff. Régnon’s words recur almost verbatim, and usually without acknowledgment:77 31

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Latin philosophy contemplates the nature in itself first, and then seeks the agent [suppôt]; Greek philosophy contemplates the agent and then penetrates to find the nature. The Latin thinks of personality as a mode of nature, while the Greek thinks of nature as the content of the person . . . Also, the Latin says “three persons in God,” and the Greek says “one God in three persons.”78 Furthermore, the Rahnerian lament over the disjunction of the unity and triunity of God in theology, and the loss of the Trinity in the life of faith, seems to be echoed from Régnon: “Without a doubt, the distinction of the theologians between God ut Unus and God ut Trinus is legitimate and reasonable . . . but we must avoid abusing it. It seems that in our time, the dogma of the divine unity has as it were absorbed the dogma of the Trinity, of which we speak only as a memory.”79 While Barnes focuses upon Lossky as a vector for the Régnon paradigm,80 passages like the above indicate that Rahner’s uncredited recapitulation of Régnon in the opening jeremiad of The Trinity is at least as equally responsible for the rhetorical patterns of the trinitarian revival.81 Furthermore, Rahner’s preference for “the Greeks,” and his claim for the alignment of Greek trinitarianism with the biblical perspective,82 when read alongside Lossky’s anti-filioquist championing of the Cappadocians, helped to set the stage to read Rahner’s polemic as explicit warrant to connect the Western Geistesvergessenheit, the Augustinian psychological analogy, and the Latin focus on the unity of nature and the divine substance in an epic historical narrative of decline, and to oppose this narrative to a privileging of the Cappadocian stress on the “communion” of the hypostases in the economy. This further step is precisely what we witness in Gunton, Jenson, and Moltmann above, along with many others.83 The exposure of Régnon’s dominance has been so successful, however, that we are arguably at a point where we should beware of a backlash that unfairly demonizes him.84 Kristin Hennessy has recently pointed out how divergent this universalizing narrative is from Régnon’s own intentions. The ecumenical intent of his massive Études is to “bring about a rapprochement of [the Latin and Greek] approaches in light of the persistent mystery of the Trinity and the failure of any single system, even neo-Thomism, to express this mystery fully.”85 Thus it is not Régnon himself but particular appropriators of his work that are “the true authors of ‘de Régnon’s paradigm.’”86 In order to qualify the Greek-Latin plurality-unity distinction that is now synonymous with his name, Hennessy argues that Régnon’s advocacy for the Greek system should be understood as a tacit way of resisting the tendency for neo-Thomist historians to measure every system by the authority of Aquinas; further (as Barnes himself notes)87 in the Études “Greeks” and “Latins” do not correspond to the Cappadocians and Augustine; rather, the terms represent the patristic (both Greek and Latin) and the scholastic eras, 32

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respectively, with Augustine functioning as the transition between the two. In fact, Régnon is “an ally, counseling us away from the evils of that paradigm for which he has been blamed, but did not create.”88 In acknowledgment of this important corrective, it is perhaps better to use the term “pseudo-Régnon paradigm.” It is, nonetheless, important to remind ourselves that, even as bowdlerized and distorted into a simplistic formula, Régnon’s work did postulate a basic distinction of Greek and Latin trinitarian “schemas,” starting from the persons and plurality, or the substance and the unity, respectively, that is of questionable historical accuracy. And he did identify Augustine as a proto-scholastic, thereby inscribing or reinforcing a tradition of reading Augustine in disjunction from Pro-Nicene theology. If he emphasized complementarity rather than opposition between East and West, he still reified an unhelpful distinction, even if he is innocent of absolutizing it. All the same, Hennessy’s article does remind us that the concern lies not with Régnon himself but his incautious appropriators, and the tendentious use to which his paradigm has been put. The problem, then, is the nearly universal forgetfulness of the origins of these rhetorical debts in a very select set of secondary sources (beyond Régnon, the work of Olivier du Roy had a massive influence on the understanding of Augustine’s trinitarian theology): the reliance of the trinitarian revival upon the pseudo-Régnon paradigm amounts to a kind of theological bottleneck. The diversity and breadth of the Christian tradition of trinitarian theological thought has been reduced to one narrow model derived from one particular source, and mediated to a generation of scholars by a particularly influential pair of theologians, Lossky and Rahner.89 In other words, the ubiquity of the Augustine-Cappadocian or West-East binary opposition is no mark in favor of its accuracy; it is simply the effect of a tightly enclosed echo chamber of historical scholarship.90 The narrative is reducible to a very small set of secondary sources, which themselves often languish in obscurity, such that the warrant for the Augustine-Cappadocian binary seems to stand in inverse relationship to the scale of the narrative based upon it. It is as if the power of the narrative derives from the simplistic framework imposed on history to reduce it to convenient textbook schemas.91 This dynamic should be cause for some suspicion about the quality of the historical work being done by our trinitarian theologians. Since Barnes’s work, the dominance of the paradigm has regularly been pointed out by his correspondence partner Lewis Ayres, and by Sarah Coakley, Matthew Levering, and Bruce Marshall, among others.92 It has since become widely recognized as a facile stereotype; Marmion and Nieuwenhove, for example, explicitly acknowledge the importance of rejecting Régnon’s East-West trinity-unity stereotype.93 But even if theologians have begun to recognize the shortcoming of the Régnon-inspired history, there is more at stake than simply rejecting a bad historical paradigm; if we should rethink much of mainstream twentieth-century trinitarian theology 33

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as a movement that constellates around a certain set of stereotyped formulae, what other determinative factors can we discern that shed light, not on the putative historical sources, but on the tacit assumptions and facile historical research behind those formulae? Putting the matter thusly allows me to undertake a second set of investigations in this book, alongside the more purely historical ones that will occupy the next three chapters: this would be the attempt to understand in some small degree, not just the way in which particular historical figures (Augustine preeminently, Barth more proximately) were misunderstood, but some of the factors operative in controlling those misunderstandings, and what those factors might tell us about the assumptions and structures of modern trinitarian theology itself. When we come to consider the philosophy of Hegel in Chapter 7, we will see one such major factor.

Augustine and Western Forgetfulness of the Spirit I am now able to collect a set of consistently appearing factors in the critique of Augustine and the Western tradition among modern trinitarians, factors that constitute major tropes in the rhetorical construction of a “revival” or “renaissance” of trinitarian theology, and that often echo in the reception of Barth by that revival. In the review of Gunton, Jenson, and Moltmann, we saw a now-familiar constellation of themes concerning Augustine’s trinitarian pneumatology. An overriding factor is what I have called Augustine’s “philosophical determinism,” by which I mean the view that Augustine’s theology is determined by its (purported) philosophical influences, and thus in greater or lesser degree reducible to his Platonic-Plotinian conceptual framework. Second, there is a constellation of three issues that arises repeatedly in critiques of Augustine, and which was thematized in my three interlocutors earlier: theological anthropology, the relationship of eternity and time, and the nature of divine agency. Augustine’s privileging of the psychological analogy as the primary way of conceiving of the triune life is said to lead to an anthropology conceived individualistically, and a theology conceived monistically; the result is individuals imprisoned in their own heads and a God “in himself” frozen statically in eternity. Likewise, his pathological focus on the divine unity and simplicity comes at the expense of distinctive missions for the trinitarian subsistents in the economy of salvation. The only answer, it is universally argued, is a turn to the East with its communion and/or social understanding of the Trinity. The discussion of Rahner complicated this picture somewhat. Although he proffered a substantial critique of Augustinian-Thomist trinitarian theology, and though he mediated much of the pseudo-Régnon paradigm and gave it the particular polemical twist for which it is now infamous, we found Rahner’s concerns to be fundamentally different from his later readers. Indeed, Rahner’s own 34

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reconstruction of trinitarian doctrine looks rather like the Augustinian pattern of understanding the processions in terms of intellection and volition, suggesting that it is not the particular form of the analogy he finds troubling so much as its methodological starting point and justification. In this book, I will argue that Augustine and Barth turn to trinitarian theology in order to secure and explicate the self-identity of God to Godself in revelation; I will further seek to show how both are motivated by a similar concern to articulate the divine self-communication in rigorously Christological terms that is at the same time an account of human subjective participation in that self-communication, and it is precisely this concern that articulates the grammar of their pneumatology—which is indispensable for their trinitarian thought. This concern, which I argued is congruent with Rahner’s intentions, often functions in a different way than the project we saw in later trinitarians like Gunton, Jenson, or Moltmann. In these latter thinkers, we found a consistent concern to connect the themes of (revitalized) trinitarian doctrine to some kind of ontology that either legitimated a dynamic divine self-actualization in history, or more frequently, authorized a particular set of social relations. Relationality is not of course the only such ontological deduction that trinitarian theology underwrites in the revival, merely the most common one. We can safely say that in contemporary trinitarianism there is a consistent tendency to apply the pseudo-Régnon paradigm to privilege Eastern trinitarian thought and critique Augustinian psychological speculation, that this is in the service of constructing a suitably trinitarian ontology, and that the logic of the Western forgetfulness of the Spirit is a key plank in this program. This is not to claim, as it is sometimes argued by opponents of social trinitarian trends,94 that such thinkers necessarily base their trinitarian theology upon a predetermined general anthropology or ontology; it will be, however, my contention that personalist and idealist trinitarianisms, which differ only in degree, are both marked deeply by an overdetermination in personalistic language: because the trinitarian hypostases are persons (something said to be discovered only by the Cappadocians), our understanding of the Trinity should be regulative of how we conceive of human persons. Augustine’s failure to properly articulate a distinctive place for the Spirit in the trinitarian relations (usually said to be a symptom presenting in the filioque or doctrine of the vinculum caritas) is accordingly a failure to correctly imagine personhood, ecclesiology, and the like. Apart entirely from the often question-begging assumption that persons divine and human are the same kinds of persons at all, this neatly symmetrical analogical structure of persons divine and human rests on a supposition that revelation delivers a picture of divine persons, ready-made, from which our understanding of human persons can be constructed. This “top-down” approach, which is best seen in the exemplarist personalism described above in Moltmann or Gunton, presumes that knowledge of God is the kind of 35

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knowledge that can be handled just like knowledge of any other object, from which we might draw implications as if from a syllogism. But in my reading of both Augustine and Barth, I will show that there is no sustainable analogy between God and created being; indeed, we can understand both Augustine and Barth as employing a kind of apophatic trinitarian grammar, oriented around the deification of all our ways of knowing God, so that knowledge of God is a self-involving, ethical kind of transformation of the self. A doctrine of the Spirit developed on the premises they offer will follow a rather different logic than we have seen thus far. In fact, I will be arguing that pneumatology is not a doctrine at all, or at least not in the way (say) Christology is, but something like a performative discourse; inherent to the Augustinian doctrine of the Trinity is the moment in which God the Trinity opens out to elevate humanity into God’s own life, and pneumatology is that discursive moment that follows after the performance of that elevation; in other words, the “doctrine” of the Trinity is not simply a set of ascriptive references to the nature of God, but also the discourse of a practice of deification. The purpose of the “psychological analogy” is to encode this participation as the participation by grace of the deified believer, who acts in the gift of the Spirit who is God herself. I will call pneumatology an “aporia,” meaning that it approaches nonconceptual status: pneumatology is something we do, and something God does, in their performative unity. Pneumatology, and therefore trinitarian theology itself, has no “practical” implications—it is itself the grammar of a practice.95 The psychological analogy is thus the textual strategy of pointing to the selfcommunication of God the Trinity as an event that is the elevation of the believer to the divine life in Christ: this is the work of the Spirit, and pneumatology is that faltering apophatic speech that attempts to describe this event of subjective participation.

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2 the exercise of faith and the trinitarian logic of self-giving in de trinitate 1–7

In this chapter, I will examine the first half of Augustine’s De Trinitate,1 with the intent of tracing Augustine’s pneumatology in the context of his wider Christological, ecclesiological, and soteriological concerns in the book. My reading is at home with an increasingly large body of literature2 that offers a different perspective on Augustine than the “standard narrative” so popular in twentieth-century trinitarianism.3 But my intention is somewhat different than most of this literature, for while making every effort to read Augustine without recourse to anachronisms about Cartesianism or trinitarian “models,” and while my intent is to offer an analysis of the major lines of the argument in De Trinitate, my project is nonetheless constructive rather than strictly historical. I am concerned, therefore, to think with Augustine, and to do so in the attempt to highlight the distinctive trinitarian grammar he offers. Ever since Rahner, as we have seen, Augustine has been the central character in most narratives of Western trinitarian decadence.4 The first chapter discussed some of the common criticisms of Augustine’s theology in recent trinitarian discussion, mistakes that are supposed to have particularly victimized his pneumatology. The concerns tend to portray Augustine’s trinitarian thought as determined by his Platonism and, thus, his intractable dualism, rationalism, and individualism; they lament his focus on divine simplicity, immutability, and eternity; and highlight his divine “essentialism” (Halleux) at the cost of the hypostatic threeness of the Trinity so hard won in Nicaea. All of these alleged traits tend to be legitimated, in addition, by the pseudo-Régnon paradigm, which I discussed in Chapter 1. These critiques almost universally rest on a key assumption, namely that Augustine’s “psychological analogy” posits a formal resemblance between the memoria-intelligentia-voluntas triad (and its variations) in the human mind and the persons of the Trinity. This resemblance is an analogical 37

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correspondence of terms between the individual human mind and divine Trinity, an assumption that leads to the natural conclusion that a superior model should be suggested with more beneficial results. Hence the popularity of communion or social analogies in order to ensure the doctrine of the Trinity’s continuing relevance. One of my most important tasks in these two chapters will be to test this assumption—that Augustine’s intellectual triad is an analogy, in the sense of a metaphor or set of formal resemblances. As we will see, this assumption cannot be sustained given a fair reading of De Trinitate; in Chapter 4, I will go further and argue that a “relational” theology is not enervated but in fact finds a profoundly developed basis in Augustinian ecclesiology—precisely on the basis of his psychological analogy. Accompanying this, one of the goals of these two chapters is to test the assertions of Augustine’s “Platonism.” Such claims have weaker and stronger versions, naturally. At one level, accusing Augustine of being a Platonist is rather like claiming that he spoke Latin—true but rather trivial. There was no intellectual in his era who was not influenced in some respect by the Platonic tradition(s), just as there is no theologian in the modern era who does not in some respect operate in a post-Hegelian context. It is an accurate but uninteresting point, a broad generality about the episteme of late antiquity. When employed with more specificity, though, concerns with Augustine’s Platonist proclivities imply that Augustine is engaged in a project of synthesizing or correlating in some fashion, whether explicitly or unconsciously, Platonist or Plotinian philosophical and Christian theological imaginaries. This much more rigorous claim is found in a significant tradition of historical scholarship, and is more complicated to adjudicate. There is a long-standing tradition, dating to Harnack, Prosper Alfaric, or Régnon himself, that sees Augustine’s theological development as determined by his Platonist inclinations.5 Olivier Du Roy’s reading, so influential in modern trinitarian thought, rests on the thesis that the Platonist-Plotinian intellectual scheme of anagogy underlies Augustine’s trinitarian thought, with the result that Augustine bequeaths to the Western tradition a fundamental disjunction between the economy of salvation and an abstract, purely intellectual Trinity-soul dialectic (indebted to Platonist models of intellectual ascent).6 I will not make a direct reply to this Platonizing trajectory of reading Augustine here, especially insofar as the work of Barnes, Ayres, Gerber, Gioia, and others are providing new directions for reading Augustine’s trinitarian development in its historical context. My argument is more strictly theological in orientation: as much as Augustine’s debts to some form of Platonism may need to be acknowledged (and they do), it is both reductionist and misleading to assume that those debts are determinative for the mature shape of this theology. His trinitarian theology in general, and pneumatology in particular, is not so simply reduced to its metaphysical or ontological antecedents. In fact, my contention here is that Augustine’s trinitarian thought is 38

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at the center of his appropriation and transformation of Platonist metaphysics. At one level, this is to agree with the recent claims of Barnes, Ayres, and Gerber that an increasingly codified Pro-Nicene tradition has been received and creatively interpreted by Augustine by the time of De Trinitate;7 but beyond that, I would like to suggest here that his trinitarian thought, as it is centered in his pneumatology, represents a development of his fixation on the aporia of the relationship of God and soul as represented in his theology of grace, but cast in his theology of the incarnation. The Trinity is the key to understanding the mystery of God’s self-giving in Christ, and for understanding that mystery as inextricable from the illumination of the soul. The language Augustine uses for this dynamic is that of the image of God, the imago dei. Recent trinitarians, such as those surveyed in Chapter 1, seem to take Augustine to mean that the image of God lies in an analogical or mimetic relationship between a triadic soul and triune God. But as we will see, the real concern in De Trinitate is not with analogical correspondences between moments of our mental operation and the persons of the Trinity, but rather with the way those moments of our mental operation participate in and are elevated in the missions of Son and Spirit. For Augustine, the imago dei is an actualization of our mental operations insofar as the triune persons are the agents of those operations in their missions. In this sense, to describe the Trinity is at the same time to give an account of our participation in the Trinity. The difficulty with this claim is understanding the relationship of divine and human agency in the operations of grace, which are identical with the missions of the trinitarian persons: my argument here is that this difficulty, even paradox, is the heart of his pneumatology. Knowledge of God is self-involving, and is inextricable from the formation of the self in the imago dei, for Augustine.8 To capture this aporetic of self-involvement, the project of De Trinitate is one of spiritual practice, what Augustine calls the exercise of the mind, exercitatio mentis.9 De Trinitate, far from being a treatise of abstract speculation, is focused upon themes of contemplation, prayer, and purification, because for Augustine, to do trinitarian theology one must learn to participate in the Trinity. I will use language of “performance” to describe this discourse, which concerns the knowledge of God that occurs insofar as it is enacted in the response to the divine self-giving of grace.10 Later, I intend to highlight the relationship between this term and what Karl Barth described as “actualism,” but in the present context, it is important to be clear that I take this performative dimension of De Trinitate to be irreducible to ontological or metaphysical categories alone: it marks the precise point where Platonist categories cease to be usable in themselves in Augustinian theology. This encounter of the self with God (which, as I will argue in Chapter 4, indelibly occurs in the community) is an encounter that poses a unique dilemma for the theologian; for, given the very real need to draw upon the metaphysical and ontological resources that one has at hand in order to understand how 39

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speech about the triune God must be governed, there is at the heart of pneumatology a rigorous disciplining of language. The triune God is ineffable, and this ineffability ultimately demands a knowledge of God practiced in inhabitation, contemplation, and as we will see in Chapter 4, ethical relation. This therefore is the aporia of pneumatology for Augustine: one cannot speak of the Spirit without speaking at the same time of one’s involvement in the Spirit, and that involvement eludes speech.11 This is the way we should understand what is called the “psychological analogy,” though it is neither psychological, nor an analogy, at all:12 it is a dialectical discourse, strained by its orientation as self-knowledge even as it is the self being acted upon in excess of its own capacities by the Spirit. This peculiarity of God-talk, for Augustine, means that his received metaphysical framework—which still retains much of its integrity as the basic structure of his thought—is reshaped by a “de-centering” in this aporetic of self-involvement.13 A caveat should be noted here. Just as it is overly facile to reduce Augustine’s theology to its Platonist or Plotinian elements, so is it reductionist to set up a simple opposition between this theology and Platonic philosophy, as if they are mutually exclusive. To critique certain employments of “theological ontology,” as I do in this book, is not to claim that ontology or metaphysics is, as such, illegitimate.14 It is just as important to avoid positing an antithesis of “pagan” philosophy and Christian theology as it is to avoid their collapse. The mistake in assuming a simple Platonizing of Augustine’s Christianity, or a complete Christianizing of Augustine’s Platonism, is that it supposes a kind of uncritical Harnackianism, an opposition of Hellenism and Christian theology, as if they were pure essences easily distinguishable, the Christian gospel containing some kind of autochthonous biblical worldview and liturgical imagination that stands in a zero-sum relationship with philosophy.15 The matter is rather more complicated, for three reasons. First, “Platonism” in Augustine’s time was hardly a single, easily identifiable intellectual commodity, and in fact, second, the Platonic elements of Augustine’s thought were hybrid, coming not only from Plotinus but also from Cicero and Porphyry, as well as the already-mutated varieties of Ambrose, Simplician, and Marius Victorinus. Finally, and most generally, because it is clear that Augustine was both limited in his reading of the libri platonicorum16 and eclectic with what he appropriated from them, adapting some elements, rejecting others, transforming yet others.17 Although a close analysis of such a process is beyond the scope of this book, I do intend to highlight, in this and upcoming chapters, the manner in which his pneumatology in particular and trinitarian theology in general functions as a kind of grammar transforming at decisive points the metaphysical resources that Augustine (and in an analogous way, Barth) appropriates in formulating the understanding of faith, the intellectus fidei, of theology. 40

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Training the Reader: The Contemplative Performance of De Trinitate The premise of De Trinitate is that God is revealed as triune in the economy of salvation, and that our knowledge of God is based exclusively on God’s works in creation, including and especially ourselves, but preeminently in the incarnation. Readings of the book, such as those discussed in Chapter 1, that regard Augustine’s trinitarian doctrine as abstracted from the economy of salvation because it is focused upon an essentialist monism of an isolated eternal deity, to the detriment of God’s triune self-communication, are simply unsustainable given a close examination of Augustine’s writing. One of his central concerns, as we will see shortly, involves the mystery of the divine unity as revealed in the relationship of Father and Son, and indeed the entire economy of God’s self-revealing is tied up with understanding the missions of Son and Spirit as eternal “sendings” from the Father.18 Unfolding these ideas of mission and self-communication are the task of books 2–4 of De Trinitate; in the first book, which is our present concern, Augustine sounds the contemplative register within which trinitarian faith proceeds. This contemplative note is intimately tied up with the great theme of De Trinitate, the human soul as the image of God. The first book functions as a kind of précis, exploring the task of trinitarian faith as a speculative exercise of deepening faith, which is a kind of eschatological vision of, and participation in, the life of God. Faith is a proleptic anticipation of our final goal of beatific vision of God’s nature: “It is through this faith that we come at last to sight, so that he may love us for actually being what he now loves us that we might be” (1.10.21). It is this exercise that Augustine calls the intellectus fidei. Tied up in this phrase is the entirety of Augustine’s program in De Trinitate. The first book in De Trinitate, which sets out the keynote of that program, takes the form of a kind of exercise of purification: contemplation of God is tied to a particular practice, reading Scripture, which takes its theological orientation from Christology. The link between the two anticipates much of De Trinitate to come, which will take what I will call its incarnational realism from the idea that the incarnate Christ is God’s Word or self-communication, the verbum, spoken in time. The issue that follows from this idea is stated in De Trinitate 1.7.14: the scriptures testify of the incarnate mediator as providing the means of our restoration (pro salute nostra reparanda), but this testimony also poses the central difficulty of the Christian faith—the apparent inequality of the ineffable Father and the enfleshed Son. Augustine summarizes the Nicene faith he inherits19 as providing a set of rules for reading Scripture that will, in turn, open up a way of understanding the trinitarian missions later. These rules, the canonica regula, are a hermeneutical rubric governing the dual ways Scripture speaks of Christ (as God, forma dei, and as human, forma servi).20 But this first book offers 41

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more than this hermeneutical rubric, because it shows how this hermeneutical rule is subtended in a wider contemplative purpose. Augustine is writing to show the necessity of theological purification for the understanding of faith: the mind must be purified so that “it may be able to see that ineffable thing [God’s substance] in an ineffable manner” (1.1.3, McKenna). This purification occurs insofar as we live by faith, and as faith seeks comprehension of its object. This is Augustine’s famed faith seeking understanding, the speculative ascesis of the mind by which the reader is trained to grasp the mystery of the divine life as reflected in, indeed eternally corresponding to, the humility of God in the incarnation. This theme of exercising the mind brackets the entirety of De Trinitate; Augustine will return to it at the inception of the final book,21 where he will reiterate the project of De Trinitate as a plan of training (exercere) the reader for knowledge of the God by whom he or she is made.22 Thus we have an architectonic warrant for understanding this idea of exercise or discipline as the context within which the quest for God’s image in the soul is to be understood: De Trinitate is a contemplative exercise in purifying the soul and training the eye of faith to understand, not just the Catholic faith in the trinitarian God, but the mystery of the unity of the triune nature as revealed in the very act of participating in that God.23 Moreover, this contemplative exercise is the anticipation of the reward of faith, which culminates in the “fullness of our happiness” that is “to enjoy God the three in whose image we are made” (1.8.17–18). These themes will occupy Augustine throughout De Trinitate as an orienting principle for trinitarian reflection: its ordering to the purification of the soul by faith, and its function as a kind of proleptic participation in the beatific vision. Those who now live by faith will be brought to direct contemplation of God in the eschaton (1.8.16). There are two theological reference points for this contemplation. The first is its grounding in Christology. The rule of interpretation of Scripture, by which the Bible alternately speaks of Christ as divine and as human, forma dei et forma servi, is used by Augustine in the context of a discussion of 1 Cor. 15.24–28 that was often problematic for Pro-Nicene apologists (1.7.14–10.21). Augustine explains that the text, which speaks of the Son handing over the kingdom to the Father, refers to a transaction that occurs within the two natures of Christ: in his human nature, Christ hands over the kingdom to God, and he receives it in his divine unity with the Father (1.8.15–17). Augustine likens this movement to the basic itinerary of faith in Christ: faith moves from Christ as human to Christ as divine,24 and it does so by humility of intellect that corresponds to the humility of the Son in the incarnation (1.7.14). Thus this contemplative movement occurs within incarnational parameters, something we will have occasion to see much more as we proceed. Second, this focus on contemplation in the first book means asking how it is that we as created beings reflect the creative and redemptive agency of God, and this means to talk of the human as imago dei, as noted 42

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above (1.8.18). This theme of the image warrants some elaboration, as it will be the main thread of the exposition of this chapter and the next. The central problem—the constitutive aporetic, even—of the intellectus fidei is that the highest of God’s creatures, in which God is revealed, is humanity itself. Thus we know God preeminently by knowing ourselves, but (to twist the dialectical knot) only insofar as we know ourselves experiencing God’s self-gift, which means that ultimately we know ourselves insofar as we know God. This dynamic is even further complicated by the distortion of the imago through sin, so that this indissociability of self-knowledge and divine knowledge relies upon the cleansing of the image through the gift of grace. Augustine thinks of this gift as indelibly tied to the missions of Son and Spirit. Indeed, as we will see later in the book, it is precisely as Son and Spirit are the operative agents of our knowing and loving of God that the image of God is realized in us. Thus the “psychological analogy,” which is the conceptual machinery, as it were, of this complex knot of divine and human action, is not a kind of intellectualism so much as it is a finely observed grammar that explicates the process of coming to knowledge of God by grace. Rushes to judgment on Augustine’s individualistic biases miss this point—what we are seeing in De Trinitate is a stage in a process of grace bearing fruit in love, which ultimately will take us to the ecclesiological dimensions of Augustine’s pneumatology, as Chapter 4 will discuss. One of my more potentially controversial claims is that De Trinitate should be read as something of an apophatic text.25 Augustine’s “aporetic,” this dialectical pattern of talking about knowledge of God through knowledge of self, and of unfolding that knowledge of self as a performance of grace, is a discipline or ascesis of speech that is apophatic in intention. Talk of God, precisely speaking, is a kind of negative speech because it occurs insofar as one talks about the self knowing God. Moreover, Augustine’s particular kind of apophaticism should be called an “ethical apophaticism,” for two reasons: first, because Augustine’s way of talking about knowledge of God is as a function of one’s desire and love for God; second, knowledge of God, occurring reflexively in this way, is self-involving. Because it is self-involving, it is ethical, for the value of one’s theological reflection for Augustine is finally a function of the kind of person one becomes in the course of that exercise. Thus contemplation, the goal of trinitarian theology, is the end of faith seeking understanding; speculative thought, for Augustine, is driven by the conviction that the understanding of faith, the intellectus fidei, is the venture of reason seeking to understand, in order that it might love. Understanding what Augustine is after in this treatment of the intellectus fidei requires seeing that Augustine does not operate with the kind of phobias of the subtleties of technical and speculative theological questions that we often do, because for him, they function as ascesis for the mind, an exercise of purification leading to ever-greater apprehension of the mystery of God. The 43

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key to understanding the particular kind of performative discourse that is integral to Augustine’s pneumatology lies in grasping that he takes theology in general, and trinitarian theology in particular, to be a practice, a spiritual exercise,26 the training of the understanding for contemplation. As we will see, this aporetic, dialectical movement, in which thinking the Trinity opens into performing our life in the Trinity, is precisely the pneumatological moment in Augustine’s thought.

The Simplicity of Wisdom: Trinitarian Missions and Processions The remainder of this chapter traces a set of themes through two major sections of De Trinitate: books 2–4, which develop an account of the trinitarian missions, and thus focus on what we have become accustomed to calling the “economic Trinity.” Books 5–7 focus upon the intratrinitarian antecedents of those missions (in contemporary terms, the “immanent Trinity”): their eternal ontological conditions of possibility in the trinitarian processions. Central to both is the logic of divine simplicity, which is integral to Augustine’s exploration of a trinitarian account of divine self-giving manifest in the trinitarian missions. One of the most characteristic features of the late twentieth-century trinitarian revival is the ambivalence with which the theme of divine simplicity has been handled. As we saw in Chapter 1, it is a common rhetorical trope to portray simplicity as if it were the main culprit in relegating God’s monistic being to an isolated eternity; but I will argue here that for Augustine (and, though I cannot explore this here, the same holds for “Eastern” theology),27 divine simplicity is necessary to coherently articulate an incarnational theology of divine self-giving. It is easy, for modern readers, to lose sight of the fact that in Pro-Nicene polemics trinitarian matters, like simplicity, revolved around Christological—and therefore soteriological—concerns. The simplicity of God, for Augustine, is preeminently a way of developing an incarnational realism, that is, a theology of God’s self-identity in the trinitarian mission of the Son, and the mission of the Spirit that unites us to him, in the economy of salvation. This concern, codified in the consubstantiality of the Spirit, Son, and Father, is developed by Augustine in terms of the relative distinction of the subsistents and in the unity of operations of the three subsistents in the economy. It is quite distinct from the twentieth-century concern (encapsulated in the rhetorical function of the pseudo-Régnon paradigm) for ordering the priority of the one and the three in the divinity. Indeed, the latter often seems to trade on a competitive relationship between the one divine essence and the three hypostases, since (we are told) only an emphasis upon the latter ensures the integrity of divine self-communication in the economy. Augustine’s 44

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problem is not one of such a “starting point”; it is, rather, one of articulating the aporia of the comprehension of the incomprehensible essence of God that occurs in the redemptive knowledge of and participation in God’s self-donation in the Son through the Spirit.

The Missions of the Son and Spirit: Books 2–4 Both of the sections of De Trinitate that this chapter concerns, books 2–4 and 5–7, have polemical themes, disputing Homoian positions on the relation of Father and Son.28 The keys here are the canonica regula of book 1, which show that the notion of the “sending” of the Son does not imply his ontological inferiority to the Father. The larger trajectory of the books, however, continues the contemplative theme of book 1, developing the idea of the Son and Spirit’s missions in a way that will provide a direct link to the second half of De Trinitate—namely, Augustine’s understanding of participation in God, which rests upon divine self-identity in the economy. The consubstantiality of Son and Spirit with the Father means that participation in Christ by the Spirit is participation in God, tout court. Thus the inquiries of books 1–7 as a whole coalesce around the consubstantiality of Father and Son, the particular manner in which the Son’s relation to the Father, his begetting, is correlative with their identical possession of the divine substance. Books 5–7 constitute a focused (though, likely due to an incomplete redaction, occasionally also desultory) and dense inquiry into the manner in which certain predications can be made apropos of that relation; the preparation for this discussion is the consideration of the divine processions and missions in books 2–4. The argument of books 2–4 revolves around the basic objection of Arian-cum-Homoian positions to Nicaea, which is the apparent implication that the language of the Father “sending” the Son implies subordination (2.5.7). The Nicene reply posits the absolute equality of the persons in the divine substance, which carries with it the implication of the inseparability of the opera ad extra;29 but this inseparability also seems to imply that the incarnation must in some sense be the work of all three, including the Son (2.5.9).30 As fully divine the Son is already “in” the world as omnipresent with the Father, and thus “where he was sent to is where he already was,”31 notes Augustine. So what meaning is there in the term “sending”? Augustine’s resolution is that being sent, a mission, must mean a change, not in the Son, but in the world to which the Son is sent. It means the invisible Son becoming visible: “the Son was sent to be visible by the invisible Father together with the invisible Son” (2.5.9–10). He is made flesh and appears in (and as) creaturely reality, to the end that he becomes an object for our adoration and faith (4.20.28). The point here is that the Word, the self-giving of God in time, is the eternal self-giving of God: the Father has always been sending the Son, but he is said to be sent insofar as he is known in time. 45

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But this is not all, for Augustine notes that “he was not sent in virtue of some disparity of power or substance or anything in him that was not equal to the Father, but in virtue of the Son being from the Father, not the Father being from the Son” (4.20.27). The point of this somewhat opaque statement is that, in what Gioia calls the rule of “direction,” it is the nature of the Son’s eternal procession to be consubstantially “God from God.”32 The Father is God; the Son is God from God, God who proceeds from God. It is therefore appropriate that the Son who is eternally proceeding would also emanate from the Father in time. As we will see later, this indissolubly connects the Son’s filiation and God’s becoming known: knowledge of God is wisdom, sapientia, and insofar as the Son is sapientia de sapientia, to know the Father is thus to participate in some respect in the Son.33 At this point, though, Augustine is content to maintain that knowing the Son means recognizing him as originating from and completely manifesting the Father. Thus, for the Son to be sent means not just to be known in time, but precisely to be known as the Son, as the one who is begotten from the Father; and, as Augustine makes clear, likewise for the Spirit to be sent means for the Spirit to be known as proceeding from the Father (and the Son): “just as for the Holy Spirit his being the gift of God means his proceeding from the Father, so his being sent means his being known to proceed from him” (4.20.29).34 So the point here is that knowing God through the Son involves recognizing the Son as proceeding from the Father, as the Father’s self-communication or verbum. To know God is to know the Son as the revelation of the Father, which is to say, to order oneself to the beatifying contemplation of the Father in a wisdom that corresponds to God’s self-giving. This argument in book 4 occurs in the context of the first major Christological discussion of De Trinitate,35 which relies upon this same logic of simplicity against Porphyrian theurgy, and in so doing, highlights once again the strict correspondence between the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, and the contemplative knowing of God as graced. The background problem is that the Neoplatonic relationship of the One and Mind (Nous) presumes an emanationist relationship of subordination or devolution, not consubstantiality—Nous mediates between the absolute simplicity of the One and the multiplicity of the world. But the Son in being sent is not a “mediator” in the sense of such an ontological intermediary between God and the world. Such a mediatory principle can only be a tertium quid, neither fully God nor human, but a hybrid of them both. His mediatorship is ethical, not ontological: he is the mediator of life in his opposition to the mediator of death, the devil (4.10.13), through his teaching of humility in becoming flesh: the eternal wisdom of God, “truth itself, co-eternal with the Father” (4.18.24) is at the same time the incarnate human Jesus Christ. This becoming flesh of eternal wisdom is the condition for our ascent in knowledge of God: everything in time proceeds 46

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from and returns to the eternal, and this procession and return is “what the Son of God has been sent for.” The content of the mission of the Son is the revelation of the Father, an expression of an eternal relationship in time (4.19.25). Thus knowledge of God in Christ is humility of intellect because it is recognition of an eternal reality precisely in its earthliness, a fact that is directly counterpoised to the intellectual arrogance of the Neoplatonic philosophers (4.15.20), whose pretension is to seek knowledge of eternal things apart from this incarnational reality that reveals the eternal relationship of Son and Father. This incarnational realism is the heart of what I have characterized as Augustine’s “displacement” of Neoplatonism in De Trinitate: the continual theme of his Christology is a transformation in the meaning of “mediation,” for the mediation of Christ is one unavailable to the philosophers. Just as in Confessions the Word made flesh was the thing Augustine did not find in the libri platonicorum,36 so in De Trinitate the incarnation is the stumbling block to those “who think they can purify themselves for contemplating God . . . by their own power and strength of character, which means in fact that they are thoroughly defiled by pride” (4.15.20). It is significant that these Christological themes are accompanied by the most extended pneumatological passages of De Trinitate thus far in 4.20.29–21.31. As he noted already in book 2, there is an important disanalogy between the sending of the Son and Spirit, because while the Son is made flesh such that he is God and human, it is not the case that the Spirit, who appeared under the guise of the dove at Christ’s baptism, or the flame at Pentecost, is incarnate in or made one with those creaturely realities: “we cannot say of the Holy Spirit that he is God and dove, or God and fire, as we say of the Son that he is God and man” (2.6.11). The definition of “mission” Augustine has used for the Son applies to the Spirit,37 even though understanding the Spirit’s mission is complicated by the fact that there is no corresponding temporal, missional visibility of the Spirit along the lines of the incarnation. Neither the dove at Jesus’s baptism, nor the tongues of fire at Pentecost, are permanent manifestations of the Spirit (4.21.30). Augustine does not provide a resolution of this problem here, but we can lift out a hint in an earlier passage, where he states that Christ’s coming teaches humility and bonds believers into one spirit through charity (4.9.12).38 By drawing the parallel between the union of wills in the church and the unity of substance of Father and Son, Augustine both suggests some idea of the Spirit as the unity of Father and Son (cf. 4.20.29), and links the Spirit’s mission to participation in the Son via the relationship of charity with the neighbor. This is a theme I will discuss in detail in the next chapter. For the moment, though, it is sufficient to highlight the contrast of this pneumatological statement to the intellectual pretensions of the philosophers: knowledge of God is obtained in humility, and is ecclesial. 47

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Simplicity and the Logic of the Trinitarian Relations: Books 5–7 Books 1–4 have established the consubstantiality of Father and Son and made intelligible the compatibility of sending/mission language with that of divine coequality. Augustine’s polemical intent is well served by this argument, of course; however, the economic language of the missions requires a careful correspondence in terms of the unity of the eternal processions if divine simplicity is not going to devolve into simple incoherency. Thus, in books 5–7, Augustine undertakes a program of disciplining and sharpening of the language used of the divine essence, but precisely in order to avoid an enervation of the economy of salvation. The stakes here are high: the previous books have pointed to an understanding of the missions that implies that God is fully identical to Godself in the economy, or less abstractly, that God is fully encountered in Jesus Christ. Books 5–7 now articulate the antecedent grammar to that economic self-giving: the logic of the trinitarian relations. Earlier I noted that contemporary theological concerns for the integrity of revelation in history have denigrated “Augustinian” presumptions for divine simplicity, while by contrast, Augustine argues in common with the Cappadocians that the logic of divine simplicity is the central theological claim that secures the integrity of the incarnation as God’s proper self-communication. The logic of simplicity is not simply part of a Pro-Nicene “grammar,” but is in fact a metaphysical necessity if God’s self-communication is to be truly deifying.39 Of course, the relationship of the divine simplicity to the triunity of the persons must still be explained, given the fact that in a simple divine essence, every attribute of God is strictly identical to the divine essence, while on the other hand, the trinitarian subsistents are (apparently) distinguished by their personal characteristics. How to resolve this puzzle—or at least consistently preserve the paradox? Augustine’s answer involves clarifying the relationship of the predications that can be made of the divine substance and of the hypostases, respectively. The moves here are vital to understanding the discussion of the image of the Trinity in the latter half of the book for two reasons: first, his development of the psychological analogy will depend upon a provisional and limited mimetic parallel between the Son as sapientia and the Spirit as caritas, and their correspondence to these operations in human knowing in the ascent to God. But using these terms involves significant difficulties reconciling personal properties and divine essential unity. Second, as this mimesis or analogy is actualized in its participative performance, these categories (wisdom and love) are the primary signifiers Augustine employs to articulate that ascent to God as a divine act of human agency. These terms of the psychological analogy, that is, are shorthand for the gift of grace in the missions of the Son and Spirit. But the gift of grace, or (as I have been characterizing it in a different idiom than Augustine) the divine self-giving 48

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depends upon the complete unity and equality of the trinitarian persons. So how are sapientia and caritas properly predicated of the Son and Spirit while not compromising divine simplicity? To focus on the problem more closely: the dilemma is that sapientia and caritas are predications associated both of a particular hypostasis, and they are assigned to the divine substance itself. Augustine’s solution, which is the germ of the doctrine of appropriations, is adumbrated in this section of De Trinitate: to call the Son Wisdom or Spirit Love is to do so with the knowledge that these categories, taken strictly, are improper to these hypostases.40 The principle here is the following: if the substance of God is anything other than what is predicated of the subsistents in common, than the being of God is something other than the subsistents, which they participate in but are not identical to. Take, for example, the claim that the Son is the wisdom of the Father. Taken literally, this would seem to mean that the Father knows through the Son, which in turn would imply that the Father does not possess divine wisdom or goodness identically with the Son: the Son himself is wise; the Father is not, for the Son is the Father’s wisdom. And this commits one to the heretical claim that the Father is not fully God, since by definition God is perfect wisdom. What is more, it eventuates in the logical absurdity that the Father is the begetter of a wisdom that the Father does not possess (6.1.2). Furthermore, the Son would be the begetter of the Father, because if to be is the same as to be wise (as it must be in a simple divinity), and if the cause of the Father’s wisdom is the Son whom the Father begets, then it follows that the Son is the cause of the Father’s being. This is, in Pro-Nicene terms, inadmissible, just because the Father is the source of the Godhead: principium pater est (4.20.29). Indeed, this is the one principle agreed upon by both sides of the post-Nicene debate. Thus, concludes Augustine in 7.1.2, “Could you have a crazier notion?” This exercise in reductio ad absurdum is the basis for the distinction of relative (ad aliquid) and substantial (ad se) predications in book 7, which approximates Anselm’s later technical formulation that everything is said of the divine substance in common except what is predicated by way of relation.41 Contemporary trinitarian thinkers have tended to assume that making the Trinity sufficiently “economic” means rejecting the doctrine of appropriations: the Son must be properly the divine Wisdom, and the Spirit properly the divine Love, so that the hypostases have sufficient personal distinction. But this confuses the distinction of substantial and relative predications that are designed to preserve God’s self-identity in the economy: if the Father is not wise the same way the Son is wise, then it follows that the Father is not divine the same way the Son is. But that is Arianism (or technically, Homoianism), the whole problem of which is that it compromises divine self-communication. Wisdom is not relational the way “Son” or “Father” or “image” are, all of which are only meaningful terms as correlates of another term; it is therefore a predication of the divine substance 49

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and identical to the divine being itself: “the Son is not Word in the same way he is wisdom, because he is not called Word with reference to himself, but only in relationship to him whose Word he is, just as he is Son in relationship to the Father; but he is wisdom in the same way as he is being” (7.2.3). Wisdom is a predication of the divine substance, not the Son proper, because it does not have reference to the relation of Father and Son; terms like “image” or “Word” indicate relation, and therefore the Son as such. So Scripture talks of the Son as sapientia, says Augustine, with respect to his exemplarity as the expression or communication of the wisdom he consubstantially shares with the Father: “the model which is the image who is equal to the Father . . . [so] that we may be refashioned to the image of God; for we follow the Son by living wisely” (7.3.5). The Son’s being as Wisdom from Wisdom is expressed in his mission: he causes us to become wise in time. Sapientia is the divine essence, and the Son is sapientia from sapientia; sapientia is appropriated to the Son as God’s sapientia eternally generated and known as such in time. This latter distinction is of course the procession-mission one we have already seen, which is simply a difference in predication from the perspective of time-bound wayfarers. The Son, as wisdom from wisdom, is the fullness of God’s self-giving in eternity and in time, so that to call the Son Wisdom is to say something about the character of the incarnation as God’s self-identity in revelation. There is a further move in book 7 that follows from the same logic, which is the explicit rejection of a “substratum” in the Trinity: contra many of his readers after Rahner,42 Augustine denies that there is any sense in which the divine substance lies behind or under the three persons, for this would be to reassign the referent of substantial predications from the hypostases in common, as constituted by their relations, to an independent subsistence from which they derive their being, “as though there were three things consisting of one material” (7.6.11). This makes God divine by participation in divinity, rather having God’s divinity of Godself: “It is impious to say that God subsists to and underlies his goodness and that goodness is not his substance, or rather his being (essentia), nor is God his goodness, but it is in him as in an underlying subject” (7.5.10). The effect of positing such a substratum would be to reallocate the agency of God from that relationship by which the Father begets the Son, to something that occurs in eternal abstraction from that self-giving.43 Rejecting this specious “fourth” means that the divine substance is the Father’s eternal begetting of the Son and spiration of the Spirit, and nothing but that. Once again going against the grain of contemporary trends, the same logic of divine simplicity that controls the impropriety of using a genus-species relationship to describe the divine also undercuts any privileging of personalistic language for the trinitarian hypostases.44 This is Augustine’s infamous “three what?” (7.4.7). As Richard Cross has argued, Augustine’s logic entails the unsuitability of person-language for the hypostases, since “persons” 50

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participate in a kind of relationship that is inadmissible in God: “person” is a genus term, since it can obtain in different types of species (divine and human), and there is no appropriate species term predicable of the divine subsistents since the divine essence is not, for Augustine, the kind of thing in which a genus-species relationship can obtain at all.45 Once again, the use of genus-species language would mean that Father and Son together were more than they were individually, which would entail something less than the full deity of any one of the subsistents taken individually. This, then, is the meaning of Augustine’s infamous claim that he does not understand the Greek language of ousia and hypostasis (7.4.7): he is denying a particular relationship of ontological categories that cannot consistently be predicated of God, precisely so that the integrity of the economy of salvation can be protected.

The Augustinian Apophaticism of Participation in the Son In the discussion of De Trinitate thus far, I have stressed the link between divine simplicity and the trinitarian missions, on the one hand, and the consistent articulation of simplicity in the understanding of the divine relations on the other hand. Throughout, the clear implication in Augustine rests with the principle of divine self-identity in the economy of salvation, the fact that our ascent to knowledge of God depends upon God’s self-giving in the incarnation. Simplicity is the guarantor of trinitarian self-identity in the economy of salvation, and Augustine is delineating how the Pro-Nicene logic of simplicity articulates the integrity of God’s self-giving in the incarnation. In this section, I want to begin to highlight the relationship between this understanding of divine simplicity and the discussion of the imago dei to come in the remainder of De Trinitate. The import here is to link the contemplative themes discussed in the first part of the chapter with the mission and procession grammar just described, in anticipation of the discussion of books 8–15 in Chapter 3. The final section (7.6.12) of book 7 dwells on the ultimate incomprehensibility of the matters discussed in the preceding books. It is particularly difficult for those of unpurified thinking, who are improperly bound to the sensuality of material and bodily images for conceiving the immaterial and ineffable Godhead; a striking reminder of this is the absurdity of the genus-species articulation of the trinitarian persons just considered, as if the hypostases were like statues made of a single lump of gold (7.6.11). Only theological exercise can purify the mind for contemplation of such an unknowable reality, and this theological exercise is a kind of fides quarens intellectum: “If this cannot be grasped by understanding, let it be held by faith, until he shines in our minds who said through the prophet, ‘Unless you believe, you will 51

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not understand’” (7.6.12, quoting Isa. 7.9). This contemplative note begins to sound the theme of the second half of the book by noting the incomprehensibility of the divine unity. Divine simplicity thus functions as a kind of apophatic signifier, indicating the mystery beyond which human knowing cannot penetrate,46 the absolute ontological difference between God and world. The discussion of divine predications in books 5–7 is not an intrusion into divine mystery so much as it is an articulation of the kind of language that is allowable about that mystery without purporting to explain it at all. Given the impropriety of “person” language, and the provisional nature of appropriations language, we have seen how cautious Augustine is to speak definitively of the divine being—even substantia is not ideal, since by definition it admits of a certain inherent relationship with accidents or qualities, which is improper to God.47 This is hardly the refined apophatic language of a Pseudo-Dionysius, of course; but I want to argue that there is a deeply apophatic impulse to Augustine’s theology in De Trinitate in its own right nonetheless.48 As we will see in the next chapter, it emerges in the very idea in books 8–15 that is supposed to rest upon ontological likeness—the psychological analogy. I have already noted that the psychological analogy will need to be thought of as fundamentally a participatory grammar, not as a primarily mimetic likeness. But if the caution in books 5–7 about the suitability of ontological language about the divine essence is right, then we should expect the notion of participation in God to be the subject of careful parsing as well. To the extent that some degree of likeness between God and human persons obtains for Augustine, it is of course found in the inwardness of the soul. Later I will argue that correctly understanding how this mimesis functions lies in seeing that the vestigia of the Trinity are actualized in the performance of participation, which is the image of God proper: “One does not approach God by moving across intervals of place, but by likeness or similarity . . . a sort of imitation” (7.6.12).49 To use terminology developed by Denys Turner, the mimetic analogy obtains in the enactment of the participatory analogy.50 In book 8, Augustine will turn in interiore homine (“within the inner person”) because the act of knowing and loving God is the ultimate fulfillment of the very possibilities of human knowing and loving. The image of God is actualized in the remembering, knowing and loving of God, not self, and this actualization only exceeds the difference of God and humanity because it is the work of grace, which means that the triune God is not simply the object, but the agent of that remembering, knowing, and loving.51 This is the heart of the pneumatological performance of books 8–15. Because God is present to the soul in grace, God can elevate the soul to the vision of God. But we face a twofold obstacle: first, our mode of (discursive) knowing is never adequate to the perfect simplicity of the divine nature, which knows in simple intellection, through its own substance; second, our knowing is fundamentally that of sinful beings, and we are separated from 52

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God by our love.52 Thus while created rationality remains an image of the divine reason and in a real sense participates in the eternal ideas, this is not to know God, which means to be united to God. Contemplative union can only be a gift of God: the ontological difference between God and creation is, for creatures, insuperable (even if it poses no obstacle to God). The implication, I will be arguing, is that participation, methexis, is being fundamentally rethought as a performative, ethical union with the divine sapientia that is identical to the incarnate Jesus, and this reconceiving of participation is the very heart of Augustinian pneumatology. This is what I call “incarnational realism.” This reimaging of participation, which will be worked out in the performative aporia of self-involving knowledge of God, is the textual site of Augustine’s pneumatology. The question of Augustine’s relationship with Neoplatonism returns at this point. On Neoplatonist assumptions—assumptions that of course share this apophatic understanding of the divine simplicity—the created-uncreated difference is overcome by methexis in the One by virtue of the likeness to the One inherent in the capacities of the rationality of the philosopher. As I will discuss more in the next chapter, Augustine draws the basic shape of the ascent from Neoplatonism and indeed shares the motor of that ascent—love—with Plotinus. This includes, for Plotinus, an ethical self-cultivation, a moral improvement of the self by the self in accord with the higher nature of the rational soul. But Augustine has a doctrinal issue to contend with here, the Christian doctrine of sin: humankind cannot on its own merits attain the moral purification necessary to achieve union with God. So the ascent must be reconfigured around a pneumatology of grace, thus problematizing any kind of ontological basis for participative ascent, in the sense of an actualization of any kind of continuity of being between the divine and the created by virtue of some internal correspondence. In other words, Augustine’s sharp focus on divine simplicity and invisibility, and his sensitivity to the human sinfulness, the difference of affections, that separates us from God, means that understanding the psychological analogy as just that—an analogy—fails to capture his use of it as a Christian account of participation. The section of De Trinitate we have just surveyed highlights the ultimately incomprehensible nature of the divine processions, in order to highlight God’s ineffable essence as a problem of contemplation and grace. To think the mystery of the Trinity is for Augustine to be called to contemplation of that Trinity because of the ultimately self-involving nature of God-talk. When we contemplate the trinitarian procession and missions, we are being called to participate in the Father’s self-giving in the Son through the Spirit, since understanding the Son as sapientia means understanding that he is that by which we are made wise in time. This is the basis of the entire second half of De Trinitate: it is a pneumatological performance of contemplation, a spiritual exercise answering modo interiore (“in a more 53

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inward manner,” 8.1.1) to the object of analysis in books 1–7, the sending of the Son that reveals the ineffable consubstantiality of Father and Son in the Spirit. Augustine does not undertake the construction of any type of analogy, psychological or otherwise, in the latter half of De Trinitate. Instead he seeks to speak of the very act of knowing God. However, because God is unknowable, this act can only be considered indirectly, through a mirror, as it were. Because our elevation to the vision of God is an act of God that is more intimate to us than we are, that act is accessible only through the paradox of a self-knowing that operates on the presupposition of the knowing of God. But given the consideration of the mission of the Son already discussed, the per speculum et aenigmate (“in a puzzling reflection in a mirror,” 12.14.22) of participation is the paradox of a self-knowing performed in Christ: this participation is what Augustine means by grace, the act of the Spirit as the caritas by which God joins the self to Christ. As we will see in book 13 of De Trinitate, the ascent to God takes place in the descent of Christ.

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3 pneumatology and the psychological analogy in de trinitate 8–15

The Ascent Motif and the Unity of De Trinitate Augustine’s turn “inward” (modo interiore) in book 8 has been lamented as the great misstep in the history of Western theology, as it marks the point where his privileging of inwardness begins to inscribe itself within his trinitarian theology, thus capping the metaphysical speculations of books 5–7, which so enervate the trinitarian dimensions of the economy of salvation, with a set of analogies for the trinitarian relations locked away in the solitude of the contemplative.1 Oliver du Roy sees  Augustine’s inquiry, particularly in books 8–15, as determined by this reflexive inwardness: “the economy of redemption is not the point of departure for this intellectus fidei of the Trinity. On the contrary, it is the economy of creation and the interior illumination of the spirit.”2 The problem is, of course, the “psychological analogy” that sets up a mimetic relationship between the tripartite intellect and the Trinity, thus establishing God as something like a Cartesian self-reflexive brain in a vat.3 Once the dominating model for the Trinity switches from the economy of salvation to this psychological speculation, so we are told, Augustine has begun to take us down the road to Rahner’s “mere monotheism.”4 Accordingly, my intention here is to trace the theme of the psychological analogy in the latter half of De Trinitate, as expressed in Augustine’s discussion of the imago dei. My claim, already anticipated in the previous chapter, is simple: the psychological analogy is not an analogy at all, but rather a description of the actualization of the image of God by grace, which is the operation of the trinitarian subsistents in the soul bringing us into union with God. We must be careful to attend to Augustine’s purpose: the triad

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memoria-intelligentia-voluntas is never intended to serve as a model for the Trinity. It bears analogical moments, most notably in the production of the verbum interior, the “inner word,” and in the unitive power of love (caritas or dilectio).5 But while these analogical moments help illuminate the puzzle of the processions—particularly the differentiation of the Spirit’s procession from the Son’s begetting, something that perplexed many a Nicene—the psychological analogy itself is not a model of the Trinity: it is the way the soul participates in God through Christ.6 Nor is it the case, as is sometimes alleged, that De Trinitate 8–15 is disconnected from the first half of the book, the two being devoted, as du Roy argues, to intellectus and fides respectively. Instead, the explorations of Nicene faith in the first half of the book deepen the spiritual exercise of the soul for the ethical purification of its contemplative vision in the second. The trinitarian metaphysical grammar of books 5–7 sets the conditions of possibility for Augustine’s examination of the imago, which develops in the course of consideration of the epistemology of graced ascent to God throughout books 8–15. But this opens up the question of the structure of De Trinitate, which bears closer examination. I will therefore open this chapter with something of an excursus to discuss this question more closely, particularly in relationship to the motif of Neoplatonic anagogy that is commonly understood to structure books 8–15.7 The conventional strategy is to divide De Trinitate into two separate sections, a discussion of the dogma of the Trinity as received by faith, and a philosophical attempt to understand that dogma on the basis of reason. The former is said to proceed by authority and the latter by Platonist canons of introspective inquiry, seeking suitable analogies for understanding the trinitarian relations.8 The effect of this is that the two halves of De Trinitate are treated as separate and relatively independent treatises, cleanly divided between faith and reason, or theology and philosophy. The anachronism of this division recalls once again the tendency of twentieth-century interpreters to read Augustine through later scholastic and neoscholastic concerns about these distinct discursive registers,9 and it ignores both Augustine’s understanding of the book as a linear unity,10 and a set of significant structural themes that cross between the two traditional halves, among them the pivotal roles of the Christological sections of books 4 and 13, and correspondingly, the thematics of sapientia in books 5–7 and 12–14. Before ascribing too much significance to its thematic unity, though, we should recall that the text of De Trinitate that we have today does not correspond to Augustine’s vision for the final product, as copies of the book were stolen while Augustine was still writing somewhere in book 12.11 Because they were already in circulation, Augustine therefore left much of these first 12 books either incompletely or haphazardly revised. Thus for all of Augustine’s intentions we certainly cannot see in De Trinitate the careful literary crafting of Confessions, nor can we expect it to be entirely internally 56

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consistent. Indeed, there are some indications that books 9–10 are different drafts or versions of roughly the same argument.12 This caution having been made, though, at a general level there is a clear contour to the work, one that has to do not with the relationship of faith and reason but rather with the contemplative movement of the intellectus fidei.13 An important passage for understanding this comes near the end of book 7, which functions as a transition to the modo interiore of books 8–15. Here Augustine notes (echoing the prooemium of book 1) that until the mind is purified of materialistic modes of thinking, the affirmation of the unity of Father, Son, and Spirit must simply be believed: “There must be neither confusion nor mixing up of the persons, nor such distinction of them as may imply any disparity. If this cannot be grasped by understanding, let it be held by faith, until he shines in our minds who said through the prophet, unless you believe, you will not understand” (7.6.12, citing Isa. 7.9). The significance of this passage is that it comes after three books (5–7) of careful philosophical analysis of the grammar of predications suitable for describing the trinitarian relations; yet understanding the mystery of the divine unity does not lie in such a grammar, as important as it is. Rather, this understanding is a fruit of the knowledge of God that takes place in the union of intellect and will that is born of faith and completed in love. This union is a contemplative realization of the imago dei as the knowledge of God that is, in actuality, participation in God through the restorative operations of the Trinity in us.14 The move from books 2–7 to 8–15 is not one premised on the implication that understanding (intelligentia) is superior to faith (fides, and by implication auctoritas), an elite activity for those with adequate subtlety of philosophical training, such as we might expect of the Augustine of Cassiciacum or Thagaste.15 Rather De Trinitate is premised on their unity: contemplation of the Trinity in faith leads to deeper understanding in transformative illumination.16 The distinction is one that obtains when the soul has learned how to read Scripture through the canonica regula, and in so doing, learned to apprehend the invisible divinity in the visible Christ. Once it has done so, it embarks upon the process of transforming itself (or rather, being transformed by grace) into the image of the invisible Trinity, an image that is enacted as the correspondence of intellect and will to the trinitarian processions. Thus, for Augustine, the failure to understand the different ways that Scripture varies in speaking of the unity and plurality of the divinity, or the impropriety of species-genus language with reference to the Trinity, for example (books 5–7), betrays an undisciplined mode of thinking that is corrected and trained in speculative theological reflection. Theological refinement of the faith deepens understanding, for as we more properly understand God, we grow in likeness of God: “one does not approach God by moving across intervals of place, but by likeness or similarity . . . not proximity of place but of a sort of imitation” (7.6.12). This imitation is a matter of refashioning, of renewal by grace, and this concept of fashioning 57

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and disciplining is the context in which the sometimes torturous dialectics of books 8–15 should be understood in relationship to the eschatological contemplative themes of books 1–4, and the philosophical considerations of books 5–7. Speculative inquiry and spiritual formation cannot be dissociated in De Trinitate, because self-knowing is an ethical act of cultivation, formation, and intellectual discipline. To inquire into the processes of intellection and volition in which we gain some understanding of the Trinity is at the same time to inquire into the theological construction of the soul insofar as it is oriented toward the actualization of the image of God. The general contemplative structure of De Trinitate readily finds a place in Augustine’s intellectual context, so his complicated relationship with Neoplatonism is particularly important for working out the project of books 8–15. Pierre Hadot has argued that the spiritual exercise (exercitatio mentis) of the latter half of De Trinitate is a paradigmatic case of the classical approach to philosophical inquiry as an ascent in the stages of spiritual progress, an object of intellectual effort oriented toward the contemplative life and the epimeleia heautou, the “care of the self.”17 Indeed, at least since du Roy,18 it has been a scholarly mainstay to interpret the architectonic pattern of Augustine’s thought within a generally Neoplatonist anagogical pattern of progression.19 The themes of intellectual and moral self-purification in which union with God is achieved are familiar from Plotinus; Enneads 1.6 is the classic template of this mystical ascent, a text that we know to have been read by Augustine and influential long after him in Latin mysticism.20 The apprehension of earthly goods, the beauty of creatures, leads the mind to its own powers of judgment by which the good of creatures is judged, which in turn leads to the contemplation of the eternal good by which all things are good above the mind, the “One.” This basic pattern is reflected in the backbone of books 8–15, the relationship of scientia, temporal knowledge, and sapientia, eternal wisdom; but by this stage in the development of Augustine’s thought, the function of the ascent has markedly changed from its use in the earlier Cassiciacum and Thagaste dialogues.21 Everything rides on seeing how Augustine simultaneously adapts and transforms the classic Neoplatonic pattern: while De Trinitate does fit into the classical model of philosophy as spiritual exercise, it also disrupts the paradigm, for the ascent is oriented around the priority of grace, and the gift of charity in the soul, that realizes the ascent; further, the ascent occurs within the descending Christ, as we will see. While Augustine’s relationship with Neoplatonist philosophy is nuanced, he clearly argues that, without the mediation of Christ, the philosophical program fails.22 Neoplatonist metaphysics are, as I describe it, “displaced” in Christ, and in the speculative theological formulations that enable Augustine to articulate salvation in Christ, especially his understandings of grace and the Spirit. Displacement means that Neoplatonism retains 58

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much of its integrity as a metaphysical system, though it is “re-centered” in Christ and the deified soul, both of which are unknown apart from revelation. To this end, John Cavadini has argued that the latter books of De Trinitate are in effect a performative critique of “the Neoplatonic soteriology of ascent,” which “becomes a declaration of the futility of any attempt to come to any saving knowledge of God apart from Christ . . . it is not simply that we have a new ‘way’ for completing an ascent which remains definitively Neoplatonic in its goal, but that the goal—noesis itself—has acquired a new character.”23 Hardly, then, a proto-Cartesian process of introspection, nor a Plotinian flight of the alone to the alone,24 the dialectics of books 8–15 function as a training of the self—a training that involves the whole of the Christian life, including its practical, material, and social dimensions—to focus its knowing and loving on the trinitarian God and thereby, the neighbor. Moreover, that training opens up an ineluctable aporia resident at the very heart of the knowledge of God. The examination of the knowledge of God reveals its own indissociability from knowledge of the self, for that self-knowing both imitates and participates in knowledge of God. This twofold understanding of the knowledge of God is integral to Augustine’s understanding of the imago dei: the mimetic image acknowledges an ontological likeness between God and soul, but this image obtains only if it is actualized in the participatory image. Ultimately, however, as my reading of De Trinitate 15 will show, participation is finally premised on the fundamental dissimilarity between God and the soul—the likeness of soul and Trinity culminates in unlikeness. Participation in God therefore involves the aporetic of knowing the unknowable, or imitating the inimitable, which is a dialectical relationship in which knowledge of self and of God are so closely intertwined that one can only be spoken of via the other. Thus the image of God is ultimately not to be understood as the analogical correspondence of the mind’s remembering, understanding, and willing to the persons of the Trinity, but rather the image of God is realized in the act of remembering, understanding, and loving the Trinity. When understood in this way, the last thing De Trinitate 8–15 is about is a search for suitable “analogies” of the Trinity in the human soul. It is about the crafting of the self in the image of God, through the gift of the Spirit. I will treat the exposition of these themes in two sections. Books 8–12 center on the epistemology of knowledge and wisdom, scientia and sapientia, within which the psychological analogy is developed; books 13–15 then embed the psychological analogy within an incarnational realism, for they concern Christ as God’s self-speaking in the Trinity. In this way, Augustine joins the threads of trinitarian theology and the contemplative register of the care of the self in a kind of pneumatology as the performance of the knowledge of God. 59

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Knowledge and Wisdom in the Ascent to the Trinity We now turn in earnest to the exploration of the psychological analogy in books 8–12, understanding it as a performative elaboration of the process of human knowing as animated and impelled by grace, thereby connecting the human process of knowing with the self-giving of God in the missions of Son and Spirit. Two overriding themes dominate this first section of De Trinitate’s second half: the inherent ambiguity of embodied knowing (knowledge, scientia) in the basic epistemology Augustine appropriates from Neoplatonism relative to the more certain knowledge of intellectual realities (wisdom, sapientia), and the likewise ambiguous relationship between intellect and love in all processes of human knowing, temporal and eternal. The way these inquiries play out leads directly to the consideration of sapientia in books 13–15, because Augustine will define sapientia as the union of knowledge and love insofar as both are animated by grace.25 As Hill points out,26 this thematic development corresponds in many respects to the lines of argument in the first half of the book: just as clarifying the unity of the external divine operations reveals the inner unity of the Trinity, a unity that rests on the inherent identity of mission and procession, so the human process of knowledge is a basic unity of temporal, scientia, and eternal, sapientia, distinguished only by a relationship of origin and derivation. Moreover, I earlier noted a degree of uncertainty in Augustine with respect to the distinction between the processions of Son and Spirit, an uncertainty he shares with his Cappadocian predecessors; so in the second half of De Trinitate, we will see a question about the epistemological correlates of Son and Spirit, taking the form of a debate about the relative priority of intellect and will.27 This problem, which Augustine leaves unresolved, will highlight the most significant ambiguity and genius of Augustine’s pneumatology, as we will see. Books 8–12 are extraordinarily complex, and not entirely linear, an issue due in part to the fact that the text was pirated somewhere in book 12 and Augustine gave up writing De Trinitate for some time. Indeed, this section is more rightly characterized as an interlocking set of inquiries rather than a straightforward argument; the style is exploratory and slightly digressive—a characteristically Augustinian restlessness—but the general template and problematic is clear. The essential issue is the wholesale adaptation of the Neoplatonist ascent into a Christological frame of reference; thus the fulcrum of books 8–15 revolves around the Christological section of book 13, echoing that of book 4. But the pneumatological element is now being foregrounded, because Augustine is tracing a precise parallel between Neoplatonic ascent in knowing, and Christological descent in the incarnation. The correspondence of these two moments is the heart of Augustinian pneumatology—the Spirit descends with Christ, and thus is the generator of human ascent to knowledge of God. Understanding Augustinian pneumatology lies in seeing 60

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that the Spirit’s mission is not a separate one from that of the Son, because the Spirit’s work just is the knowledge of the Son. God’s work of self-giving is a singular one: that is the foundation of the theology of grace that is the pneumatology of De Trinitate. The central thread of the ascent pattern Augustine adapts is easily stated: it follows a general dialectic from bodies, the senses, and the flux of temporal knowledge, scientia, toward the gradually purified modes of human knowing of intellectual and eternal realities, which eventuate in wisdom, sapientia, finally seeking contemplation of the ultimate eternal good in which all such realities inhere, God. The structure of the psychological analogy is not a given, but rather goes through a series of articulations throughout books 9–14. The first time this imago trinitatis appears in its final form of memoria, intelligentia, and voluntas is in book 10, though this provisional triad is not fully explicated until book 14. A major issue in this argument, and one that lies at the heart of the distinction between scientia and sapientia, is the nature of embodied knowledge. Our knowing as embodied creatures partakes of the inherent discursivity that separates our knowing from the divine intellect, and is, as just seen, a significant component in our apophatic relation with the divine mystery. The way this is parsed in this part of De Trinitate, however, trades not so much on the inferiority of temporal knowing as it does on the relative priority of intellect and love. Our basic epistemological problem, for Augustine, is an ethical one, our alienation from the true object of our love, and our improper union with earthly realities in scientia. Our knowing is a function of our desire.28

Faith, Memory, and Knowledge In this section, I will discuss the basic themes of book 8. Much like book 1, book 8 is not so much the first step in an extended argument as it is a prefatory précis of the leading ideas of what is to come.29 The thematic center of book 8 is the idea of clinging to the good in love (8.4.6), which is mediated by the sacrament of the incarnation (8.5.7), and culminates in a pneumatology of charity (8.7.10–10.14). Driving this motif is a basic conceptual puzzle: how can we love what we do not know? The problem is that, Augustine states, we must be pure in heart to see God, but on the other hand, we can only love God if we know (see) God first.30 So we must in some sense love the unknown, which is only possible insofar as we believe it by faith. This follows immediately from the allusion to nisi credideritis non intellegetis (“unless you believe, you will not understand”—7.6.12, quoting Isa. 7.9), which closed book 7, of course; but wrongly handled it pushes up against fideism: “we must take care our faith is not fabricated . . . How then are we to love by believing this trinity which we do not know?”31 In sounding this worry, Augustine is highlighting a still relatively unexplored problem with the contemplative trajectory of books 1–7: God is truth, so to 61

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be called to contemplation of God is to be called to understand God insofar as one is able; but, as has been repeatedly seen in books 1–7, the essence of God is ineffable, and the consubstantiality of the three persons of the Trinity in one simple substance is ultimately incomprehensible. Thus Augustine’s starting point for books 8–15 resonates with the apophatic interpretation of his program in De Trinitate discussed at the end of Chapter 2. However, the Neoplatonist template Augustine is adapting introduces a complication, namely how this trinitarian ineffability squares with the illuminationist themes of the eternal ideas that so characterizes Augustinian epistemology. This problem will provide the impetus for the exploration of the first moment of the psychological analogy, memoria, as well as a discussion of the role of faith in providing its own kind of knowledge of God that provokes the quest for understanding. Memoria (which, as is often remarked, means far more than the power of recall for Augustine, but rather something more like consciousness) emerges in book 8 on the basis of a discussion that parallels the more extended meditation on cognition and the “storehouse of memory” in Confessions 9. The question is about the relationship between memoria and its verbum, the mental word—the thought—that is begotten by it: just as with material things (say, Carthage), a word is uttered in the mind when the image is recalled from memory, so in dealing with intellectual realities like justice we invoke something from the mind, an idea of justness that is apprehensible to us and that we recognize immediately (8.6.9). In both cases, the formation of a verbum occurs insofar as we apprehend the nature of something (whether material or intellectual) by grasping its participation in its universal exemplar—its idea or form, which inheres in the mind of God.32 The difference, of course, is that in the case of intellectual realties like goodness, justice, and the like, ideas are apprehended by the mind insofar as it both grasps that participation and itself participates in that intellectual reality. So the cognition of an intellectual reality like justice is self-reflexive because the mind grasps the meaning of justice by virtue of the idea of justice that is always prethematically present to it, and in so doing measures its own justness. This holds even if it itself is not just: “What is wonderfully surprising is that a mind should see in itself what it has seen nowhere else, and see something true, and see something true that is a just mind, and be itself mind, and not be the just mind which it sees in itself” (8.6.9). We recognize the apostle Paul to be just because the idea of justice is always already present (again, prethematically) to us because its exemplar is God, who is the source of all truth, indeed truth itself. So to say that the apprehension of justice is the perception of something present to the mind even when the mind does not directly perceive it is to say something about its participation in God—it is to say that the mind is fundamentally oriented to God in its knowing, because God is the exemplar and term of all human knowing.33 62

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This is a (very) brief synopsis of Augustine’s well-known “illuminationism,” which I will return to.34 It usefully shows how this epistemology both draws from and breaks with its Platonist roots; while this sketch of memoria naturally recalls Platonic anamnesis, it seems nonetheless designed to circumvent the Platonic (or quasi-Platonic) theory of the preexistence of souls.35 Memoria is not a metaphysical category that describes the soul’s ontological origin, but an epistemological function explaining our capacity for the recognition of eternal ideas in such a way that, in reflecting upon its own nature, the mind gains some understanding of the nature of the eternal God.36 That is to say, knowledge of God is self-involving: in its own rational capacity the mind recognizes its intellectual participation in God—its “illumination” by divine light.

The Ethics of Knowledge and the Image of God The disquisition on memoria that occupies book 8 thus far has set in place the first step in the development of the imago dei expressed in the psychological analogy. This begins to take us into books 9–10. The analogy of justice has shown how the process of knowledge is an intellectual apprehension of a form that illuminates the mind at the very origin of its knowing; but at the same time, it is what I have been calling an “ethical” act of knowing. This is because in Augustinian epistemology we think an object of knowledge insofar as we affix our intention to it by the will, particularly when the object of knowledge is the good itself (which, by virtue of divine simplicity, is convertible with justice). Therefore the question of justice leads to this principle of ethical knowing, clinging to the good in love. As Augustine puts it, “How will they ever be able to [see and say what a just mind is] but by cleaving to that same form which they behold . . . and how is one to cleave to that form except by loving it?” (8.6.9). Augustine concludes from this, in the final section of book 8, that the real problem of the inner Trinity that is the imago dei is simply love: “Thus it is in this question we are occupied with about the trinity and about knowing God, the only thing we really have to see is what true love is; well in fact, simply what love is . . . true love then is that we should live justly by cleaving to the truth” (8.7.10). The act of knowing involves more, for Augustine, than just intellectual apprehension: it involves a relationship of the will to that which is apprehended. At issue is the act of willing the good, of deliberately joining oneself to the good or justice that is pre-reflexively present to the mind prior to the mind’s own self-presence. The way the mind knows is inextricable from the way the mind loves. This move puts the issue of love, and therefore (as we will see) the pneumatological element, at the heart of the inquiry of De Trinitate. God is love itself, the love of self-giving in the divine missions, or as a very different Neoplatonic description would put it, a self-diffusive good. But it also invokes an earlier puzzle, the paradox of loving what we do not know: because the good of all 63

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things is grounded in that unchangeable good that is God, to perceive the good itself is to perceive God. But this is precisely the problem: knowing this God in order to love God and enter into bliss is only permitted to the pure in heart, but we need to know God to become pure in heart (8.3.5–8.4.6). Before picking up this topic, however, it is salient to observe the social nature of this love at the end of book 8.37 Augustine ends the book with an alternately celebrated and lamented exploration of a love triad that seems, at least at first, as a kind of discarded analogia trinitatis: “There you are with three, the love, what is being loved, and love” (8.10.14). In the context of the book, this is neither intended as a trinitarian analogy that is discarded for a psychological one, nor is it, pace Rowan Williams, a false start interrupted by the massive digression of books 9–14.38 It is quickly dismissed in the next book by Augustine as having no explanatory or analogical force (9.2.2); it does foreground, however, the notion of love as a “kind of life coupling or trying to couple together two things” (8.10.14). The real point of this triad, thus, is the unitary nature of love, which invokes the problem of the relative priority of intellect and will. For reasons we will explore in the next section, Augustine will prefer the act of self-love over love of external objects for illuminating the question of how our process of knowledge participates in God; but this move (which has the benefit of giving the mind a more stable object of knowledge than external objects, better reflecting the certainty and immutability of eternity) is limited by the fact that it implies only two (9.2.2). Nonetheless, by bracketing everything but this basic or originary act of self-love, love implies knowledge of the object known, since the mind is always present to itself. Therefore, the quandary of the priority of intellect and will is relieved, and a brief analogy of the Trinity emerges: the mind loving and knowing itself are three things, the subject of the act and its two acts. Because the mind is one substance, these three are one and coequal (9.4.4). There is, then, something in the mind’s act of love and knowledge that is a mimetic image of the Trinity, although it ultimately falls short, because the object of its knowledge is ephemeral: “when the human mind knows itself and loves itself, it does not know and love something unchangeable” (9.6.9). So once again there is a problem inherent to our knowing: the mind must image the Trinity as the apprehension of something eternal, and this apprehension occurs in its ownmost act of knowledge and love of itself. But our only means of apprehending the eternal as embodied, discursive reasoners is through the knowledge gained temporally, through the senses. We have here the “first draft” of the psychological analogy.39 The earlier discussion of memoria notwithstanding, Augustine first characterizes it as mens-notitia-amor (9.4.4). However, he introduces this triad while noting its insufficiency: mens is that in which notitia and amor inhere, rather than a distinct operation from which emanate intellect and will, and love and knowledge do not obtain in the mind as qualities in a subject, or as faculties. 64

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They are substantial predications, and thus identical to the mind (9.4.5).40 So clarifying the way these operations interrelate becomes the task of book 9. Doing so means seeing the temporal, ephemeral act of self-knowledge as a limited but still useful aspect of the fullness of the imago dei in the act of knowledge: if we reflect on the process of cognition, although the object of self-knowledge is not unchangeable, that in which that object is known is: the mind knows itself in the light of truth itself (9.6.9), so the operation of reason is a kind of synthesis between sensory or intellectual objects and the light of the eternal ideas in which those objects participate. In this illuminationist relationship, the eternal light by which the mind judges is not directly accessible, but functions rather prethematically, in the memoria discussed above as that depth of the self that opens up outside of itself to the God above it. But this relationship between the object of knowledge and the idea it participates in is only thematized insofar as the mind makes a judgment. This judgment, the formation of a thought out of the operation of the intellect, is the generation of a verbum, an inner word, about sensible or intellectual data in light of the eternal ideas in which that data is grasped: “thus it is that in that eternal truth according to which all temporal things were made we observe with the eye of the mind the form according to which we are and according to which we do anything with true and right reason” (9.7.12).41 With this step emerges the second vital moment, after memoria, in the construction of the psychological analogy: the idea of knowledge not simply as a faculty, notitia, but a specific operation of the intellect in generating a verbum. The clarification of these categories particularly occupies book 10, where the vocabulary shifts from notitia, “knowledge,” to intellegere/intelligentia,42 the operation of “understanding” that produces a verbum. The first time the final trinitarian triad of memoria-intelligentia-voluntas appears is in 10.10.13, and it is developed in 10.11.17–18 in the context of a discussion about the production of knowledge and love in operations of intellect and will or appetite. The shift from the first “draft” of the analogy to this one involves the need to talk about the imago as encapsulating the process of knowing as an activity of the one mind, instead of consisting of discrete faculties of the mind. The act of understanding or willing, therefore, rather than the term of that act, knowledge or love, is the image.43 This underwrites the analogy of consubstantiality between soul and Trinity: it is not the mind’s distinct faculties that image the Trinity, but rather particular operations of the whole mind, in particular relationships of origin, begetting, and uniting in the producing of a verbum.44 This clarification of the act of knowing as intentional thus solves the problem of the priority of love and knowledge in the act of knowing, though it does so a touch inelegantly. The verbum is formed insofar as the will intentionally joins the mind to an object of knowledge; but more significantly, this volition is never ethically neutral. Because the eternal ideas, which are in the divine essence, are the ultimate light of all knowing, all acts of knowing 65

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are inseparable from a particular volitional relationship to the divine: as Augustine puts it, in a characteristically sudden shift from epistemological to ethical registers,45 “This word [verbum] is conceived in love of either the creature or the creator, that is of changeable nature or unchangeable truth, which means either in covetousness or charity” (9.8.13). There is no strict priority between intellect and will, or at least, while knowing is logically prior, the process is irreducibly dynamic. Because loving and knowing do not name the interplay of two faculties, but internal moments in the single act of intellection, knowing for Augustine is an ethical act insofar as it is an intellectual one; an act of knowing is completed insofar as love joins the mind to its object in the begetting of an inner word. Knowledge is loved knowledge. Knowing is an ethical act insofar as “we use the term ‘word’ . . . when that which is conceived by the mind pleases us” (9.10.15, McKenna). Because knowing is an ethical act, every verbum is conceived in love either of the creature or the creator (9.8.13). So the act of human knowing is itself a mode of participation in eternal truth at both a prethematic level (the inhering in memoria of the ideas) and an ultimate referential level (the referral of the object of knowledge to eternal truth): God is both cause and term of the act of knowing.

The Frustration of Desire: The Tension of Knowing and Loving I have sketched above the basic pattern in books 9 and 10, in which a version of the psychological analogy emerges as a threefold operation of the mind in the cognitive process. Woven throughout this argument is an inherent problem with the temporal object of knowledge. The process of knowledge reflects something mimetically about the nature of a God who eternally speaks Godself, and is united to that word by God’s love; moreover, in our act of knowing we have some pre-reflexive knowledge of our own nature, and within and above that nature, its participation in the divine exemplar.46 But this description of the cognitive act itself is insufficiently differentiated to really get at the aporetic knot of self-knowledge and divine knowledge that is the imago dei. Most significantly, the mind’s relationship with an external object is an ephemeral one that fails to model its eternal archetype, the Trinity. In addition, the relationship with an adventitious object of knowledge muddies the strictly threefold operation of the mind itself, because it requires a fourth, external, object to know. Self-knowledge overcomes this in part, since the knower and known are one thing; but only in part, because our souls are still malleable, mutable things that fall short of the perfection of eternity, and therefore are only a step on the way to the realization of wisdom, the participation in eternal realities that is the mind’s true goal (10.3.5–10.5.7). Scientia, temporal knowledge, therefore, must somehow transcend itself in sapientia, the knowing of eternal realities by means of a reflexive relationship with the mind that participates directly in the ideas, in order for the imago trinitatis to emerge with clarity. 66

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The argument guiding books 10, 11, and 12 revolves around this dynamic: the knowledge of temporal objects, even the mind’s knowledge of itself, is not truly mimetic of God because that act of knowledge is not eternal in origin and object. The problem, which recalls the epistemological-ethical relationship in knowledge mentioned earlier, lies in the unitive character of love, and it is twofold. First, the knowing of an external, temporal object is ultimately adventitious, for the triadic relationship only exists as long as the will joins the intention to the form in the mind.47 The act of the will joining the mind to a known object in a verbum never really unites us with that object, because in an embodied, temporal state, this is impossible. Moreover, these books introduce a second problem as well: our fallen desires are fundamentally selfish and acquisitive, and therefore our knowing is entangled with an ethical relationship of alienation from the very things we seek to join ourselves to in love. In our fallen state, the perversion of our desire is such that our love for the beautiful creature is a joining of our desire to it to possess it as an ultimate end. But only God is an ultimate end, and our love for created bodies is to be a love that is loved in God as source and ground of that body. Of course, one major issue here is that our knowledge is fundamentally unlike God’s—to the extent that this difference marks the major Augustinian apophatic divide, divine simplicity. As Augustine will discuss in book 15, God knows through Godself, as creator and therefore as the origin of any particular thing; but we, as creatures, know objects as other from us, and ultimately, if we know them correctly, as originating in the creative act of God. Either way, our knowledge is always inherently discursive. There is nothing inherently problematic in this fact that our knowledge is unlike God’s; the dilemma emerges because we do not join our knowledge to a body in love without seeking to acquire that object for our own enjoyment. The good of a created being is from God, and it is only with reference to God that its good can be truly received as such, as a gift from the creator. This dynamic, which is the essence of the relationship between use and enjoyment in De Trinitate,48 complicates the scientia-sapientia relationship with an ethical component: the problem in scientia is not simply a Platonic one of the transience of the temporal so much as it is that sinful creatures operate from an acquisitive appetite of cupidity toward creation (9.12.18). In the present state, our knowing is not unitive with the object of our desire because of this fundamental attitude of acquisitiveness: it is alienation, because just in taking a created good for our own, we are alienated from the goodness of that good thing—God. De Trinitate 11.5.9 develops the ontological problem of the transience of the known object: “for this reason, to love the body seen means being alienated from it.”49 Likewise, 12.9.14 notes the ethical complications of our twisted desire: “the soul, loving its own power, slides away from the whole which is common to all into the part which is its own private property . . . by the apostasy of pride which is 67

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called the beginning of sin [the soul] strives to grab something more than the whole and to govern it by its own laws.” So because the mind joins itself to that which it apprehends, the mind in scientia cannot be the image of God, because it is always subjoined to something external to itself that is a frustration of its desire. This line of argument takes particular force from the fact that, in books 9 and 10, Augustine has successfully argued for the unitary act of the operation of knowledge: the mind, as a dynamic process of remembering, understanding, and willing, just is what it joins itself to, so the most fundamental and consistent mistake of the mind is to join itself to the material images toward which its desire is oriented.50 The mind joins its love to the material, confuses itself with the material (10.5.7–10.6.8), and so lapses into forgetfulness of itself. The desire-shaped force of habit causes it to forget that in memoria or pre-reflexive self-consciousness it is already familiar with itself and the God above it.51 To truly know itself would be to know itself as subject to God who created it, but this knowledge is occluded by the twisted force of acquisitive desire; self-knowledge is therefore a purification of desire such that the mind can remember itself, and in so doing, understand itself as referring beyond itself to its creator. Thus it is not simply that sapientia concerns intellectual, eternal realities that makes it the exercise of higher reason, and therefore more truly reflective of the image of God. Since knowledge is always volitional, a union of will with the object known, scientia cannot be the image of God insofar as it is directed toward the knowledge of temporal objects (alone). Instead, it must be fulfilled in sapientia, which concerns not simply the object of knowledge but our disposition toward it: it involves the mind “by the dutiful piety of justice . . . mak[ing] judgments on these bodily things according to non-bodily and everlasting meanings” (12.1.1–12.2.2). The realization of the image is the proper ordering of reason such that the mind is intent on “eternity, truth and charity” while at the same time attending to the “changeable and bodily things without which this life cannot be lived” (12.13.21). Contemplation of God is not a flight from the world, but the proper ethical ordering of the subject in the unity of her action and contemplation (12.14.22).52

The Pneumatological Aporia of the Image of God Christ the Mediator and the Inversion of the Ascent Having seen the emerging significance of that sapientia wherein the image of the Trinity is located, we come to the argument of books 13–14. Here is the fulcrum of the entire book, showing the interconnection of faith, grace, and Christology in the performance of participation that is the imago trinitatis. 68

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The argument of the book so far has led to an aporia. The image is actualized in the ascent of contemplation, but this actualization founders before a twofold dilemma: first, the overarching theme of the ineffability of God, and second, the disorder of the sinful mind whereby reason is degraded in the private enjoyment of temporal goods, that is, concupiscence. The argument of this final section is that, in De Trinitate 13–15, this aporia at the heart of contemplative knowledge of God is the place where the pneumatology of the book emerges most clearly, since the common link between these two problems is the nature of our love, our capacity to will the good. Here the thrust of the argument lies in seeing that for Augustine, because this is a pneumatological matter, it is Christological (and vice versa). The Christological discussion of book 13 is the apex of the latter half of De Trinitate.53 Christ is the object of faith by which we know the unknowable God and the means of human happiness in immortality. Just as book 4, with its discussion of Christ’s mediation, occupied the central place in the first half of De Trinitate, and was the pivot upon which the argument concerning the mission of the Son revolved, so book 13 is the climax toward which the entire ascensus argument revolves. The point in training the reader in the contemplative image of God is to lead him or her to understanding the work of the Son in the incarnation. Augustine couches this in terms of the demonstration by God of God’s love for us: the purpose of the incarnation is not just a deliverance from the power of the devil, but a teaching of humility. This humility is connected to the overriding intent of the incarnation, a conferring of God’s gifts upon us, which is as the same time its pneumatological donation: God loves us . . . with a quite uncalled for generosity, without any good deserts of ours . . . For even what we call our deserts or merits are gifts of his. In order that faith might work through love, the charity of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us. And he was given to us when Jesus was glorified in his resurrection . . . These gifts are merits by which we arrive at the supreme good of immortal happiness. (13.10.13–14) Rom. 5.5, quoted here, is the locus classicus for Augustine’s pneumatology: the Spirit, by whom we love God and neighbor, is the love of God given to us, the outpouring of grace that elevates us to God.54 It is tied directly to the incarnation and resurrection, as the Spirit is she who is given in order that we might participate in the life of the Son.55 But it takes a particular kind of training, or demonstration, in order for us to love God, a training in justice and humility that is at the same time the curing of the sickness of our will. The injustice of humanity in the fall necessitated their handing over to the power of the devil, but as this was contrary to the “kindly reconciliation of God” (13.12.16), God resolved 69

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to overcome the devil “not by power but by justice, [so] that men, too, by imitating Christ should seek to overcome the devil not by power but by justice” (13.13.17, McKenna). The redemptive work of Christ is operative in repaying the injustice by which he died at the hands of the devil: “He found nothing in him deserving of death and yet he killed him” (13.14.18). In killing Jesus the devil forfeited his just claim on humanity; deliverance therefore takes place by justice, in the weakness of the cross. Augustine’s understanding of the atonement has changed somewhat from his earlier exposition in book 4—the polemical philosophical background has shifted from Porphyry to Cicero and the Stoics, and the metaphors have transferred from the semantic field of illness and cure to more explicitly political resonances.56 Nonetheless, the concept of humility links them: “man’s pride, which is the greatest obstacle to his cleaving to God, could be confuted and cured by such humility on the part of God . . . through a mediator like this, who comes to aid men as God with his divinity and to share with them as man in their infirmity” (13.17.22; cf. 4.1.2). This theme of humility, based in the demonstrative power of the incarnation and crucifixion to overcome human pride, comes at a strategic point in De Trinitate, recontextualizing the ascent to contemplation of God so that it passes through the humility of faith in the incarnate Savior.57 As we have already seen in book 4, this incarnational transformation of the ascent is the linchpin of Augustine’s departure from Neoplatonism: even though knowledge of God is in some sense available to the “most eminent heathen philosophers,” they philosophize “without the mediator, that is without the man Christ” (13.19.24, quoting Rom. 1.20). A similar point had been made in book 4, where the Platonic philosophers (in particular, Porphyrian theurgists) imagined that they could attain sufficient purity of mind for the contemplation of God by virtue of the “keen gaze of their intellects,” and yet for all that neglected the “one true mediator.”58 But significantly, while book 4’s numerology had pushed it in directions emphasizing the ontological symmetry evident in the incarnation and crucifixion,59 in 13.10.13, Augustine is careful to emphasize the historical reality of the incarnation as the focal point: this mediator is not a principle uniting ontological contraries, a medium reconciling the many to the One,60 but the human Jesus Christ incarnate, crucified and resurrected, both fully God and fully human.61 The parallel with Confessions 7 echoes in particular in 13.19.24 again: not only does the incarnation befit the divine dignity, but it is just this reality—the Word became flesh, materiality—that stands against the hubris of the philosophers.62 Precisely against this intellectual hubris, Augustine does not shy away from the paradoxicality of his claim, that the eternal sapientia of God is given in the human being Jesus Christ. Augustine admits that those things that the Word did in his flesh belong to scientia; but in truth, because Christ is the coeternal Word of the Father, “the Word made flesh, which is Christ Jesus, has treasures of both wisdom 70

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and of knowledge.” This synthesis of the categories of scientia and sapientia in the incarnation is what marks book 13 as a decisive relocation of Plotinian anagogy, as it is the healing of the epistemological pride of humanity in which anagogy founders.63 The incarnation of Christ is God’s self-giving, the humility of God becoming human, and thus the wisdom of God made flesh: “Our knowledge therefore is Christ, and our wisdom is the same Christ. It is he who plants faith in us about temporal things, he who presents us with the truth about eternal things. Through him we go straight toward him, through knowledge toward wisdom, without ever turning aside from one and the same Christ” (13.19.24). It is important to emphasize the significance of the move here: Augustine is not only relocating the entire relationship of scientia and sapientia within the incarnate mediator Jesus Christ, but inverting it. As the contemplative ascends from scientia to sapientia by the purification of the intellect and encounters the barrier of his or her own sin and finitude, Christ descends as the embodiment of scientia and sapientia, enclosing the human ascent within his own descent. The descent of Christ is, by virtue of his two natures, the ascent of humanity, and the itinerary of the mind to God takes place within Christ, by means of and on the presupposition of faith in Christ. This relocation of the ascent schematic indelibly redefines the program of this second half of De Trinitate, because the ultimate expression of the inextricable linking of knowledge and love occurs in what book 4 clarified as the mission of Jesus Christ: the knowledge of the Son. In the incarnation we behold the human being Jesus Christ, but in the Spirit, we know him as the eternal Son, and this knowledge is his mission, his sending. We know that he is one with the Father insofar as we adhere to him in faith and love by the work of the Spirit, because the “treasures of wisdom and knowledge” are hidden, and accessible only to faith working through love. Sapientia is the contemplation of eternal realities in the union of knowledge and love, so for Jesus Christ to be the sapientia of God is immediately to link the mission of the Spirit with that of the Son, for by the work of the Spirit, Jesus is understood to be the eternal Son.64 The incarnational point here will be linked with its pneumatological corollary in book 15, bringing together the inquiry on the human processes of intellect and will with the incarnational realism that defines the missions of Son and Spirit. Just as the union of intellect and will in “loved knowledge” of eternal realities is the definition of wisdom, so the knowledge of Christ the human being is realized when we are united to him in love of his eternal union with the Father. The former is the mission of the Son, the latter the mission of the Spirit, but in reality their mission is the same: knowledge of the Son, in an incarnational realist sense. Ultimately, this loving union with Christ that is the mission of the Spirit is our transformation into the image of God. The union of knowledge and love in sapientia is the final stage in Augustine’s articulation of the imago 71

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dei; the image is realized insofar as the human processes of knowing are directed not toward self but toward God: “It is his image insofar as it is capable of him and can participate in him” (14.8.11). The image is an act, a performative movement of participation, rather than formal mimetic or analogical correspondence: This trinity of mind is not really the image of God because the mind remembers and understands and loves itself, but because it is also able to remember and understand and love him by whom it was made. And when it does this it becomes wise . . . When the mind loves God, and consequently as has been said remembers and understands him, it can rightly be commanded to love its neighbor as itself. For now it loves itself with a straight, not a twisted love, now that it loves God.65 All human processes of knowing are a prethematic mode of participation in the divine creator, by virtue of the mind’s participation in the divine ideas in Augustine’s illuminationism; but it is only insofar as its love is “straightened” by the Christological index of sapientia that it is truly itself, which means, it becomes wise, and truly knows the creator. Therefore for Augustine the realization of the image cannot be dissociated from the act of participating in Christ the incarnate mediator. This move of locating the image in the Christological knowledge of God is decisive in solving the problem of the ephemerality of knowing that has troubled Augustine since book 9. Human knowing can only (mimetically) image the Trinity by the sapiential contemplation of an eternal reality, but this means to contemplate the ineffable God, a God from whom, moreover, we are separated by our “twisted” (perverse¯ ) love. So the final step of understanding the image lies in seeing it as a pneumatological reality. By the reception of the Spirit—by the outpouring of the love of God in our hearts—we finally ascend to God: “When the mind truly recalls its Lord after receiving his Spirit, it perceives quite simply—for it learns this by a wholly intimate instruction from within—that it cannot rise except by his gracious doing” (14.15.21). God, therefore is not only the object but the agent of our knowledge. Because the self-giving of God in the incarnation of Christ is at the same time the pouring out of the love of God in our hearts, the Holy Spirit, this self-giving is a giving by which our selves are given back to God. The concluding section of book 14 is dedicated to exploring this theme. “Divine assistance” is necessary for the renewal of the image, a transference of our love from the temporal to the eternal (14.17.23), and this occurs, as we have just seen, through the gift of divine love that is the Spirit. This will be the means of our eschatological attainment of the full vision of God, the “full likeness” of the imago dei, and that occurs by conformity to the Son, the mediator (14.18.24; cf. 15.11.21). Thus the actualization of the 72

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image occurs in a unity of human and divine action whereby Christ mediates knowledge of the Father as the Wisdom of God, and humanity responds in love for God that is animated by Christ’s Spirit. Understood this way, Augustine’s pneumatology is not to be seen as portraying the Spirit as performing a second divine mission, a second work in the economy of salvation, so much as it is the excess or gratuity of God’s self-giving in Christ. This gift of the Spirit, and this is crucial for understanding Augustine’s pneumatology, is not a different work than that of the Son, but the “subjective” correspondence to that work in the soul. It is the unity of God’s work whereby it is the giving of God’s grace that joins us to God’s self-giving in the incarnate Word Jesus Christ. The performance of participation in the life of God is the divinizing act of union with God the Trinity that is not different than the self-giving of the Trinity in the economy of salvation. The task of the entirety of the second half of De Trinitate is to capture this act of participation, this performance of the image; because we do not behold God directly, we behold her in a mirror—ourselves, insofar as we participate in Christ through his gift of charity, the Spirit. Augustine is not abstracting from the economy of salvation to locate the image in the interiority of the subject, but rather inscribing that subject within God’s giving of Godself in the Son. And that inscription is a writing of the self with the pen of the Spirit, who is the gift of the Father’s self-giving who is the Son.

The Pneumatological Apophasis of the Image The argument of books 13 and 14 culminate the process of ascent in De Trinitate, showing how the human act of remembering, understanding, and willing self is the image of God, but only as the implicate of remembering, understanding, and willing God by God’s own grace. That image as a performative reality, an act of participation in God insofar as it contemplates God’s sapientia in the earthly, incarnate Jesus Christ, who is, precisely as incarnate in the realm of scientia, the object of fides and thus both the scientia and sapientia of God. The humility of God’s wisdom is the cure of our arrogance, and this cure reveals the ethical dichotomy between our acquisitive knowing, ruled by pride and referral to self, and God’s self-knowing, which is sapientia, the wisdom from wisdom that is Christ, and is fundamentally bestowal. Our mode of participation in Christ is the charity of God poured out into our hearts, the Holy Spirit who is God loving us and thereby elevating our love to Godself: this act, both our own act and God’s within it, is the actualization of the image of God. However, there is one final step to the argument, for having suitably trained the reader (15.1.1) to contemplate God in themselves insofar as they participate in Christ, in book 15 Augustine finally turns to the exemplar of the image, the Trinity itself. In this final subsection, I will show how the concerns of books 1–7 (the consubstantiality of Father, Son, and Spirit, as articulated in the understanding 73

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of divine missions, and the theme of divine simplicity, in the unity of the works of the Trinity ad extra) come to be correlated with the contemplation of the image modo interiore in books 8–14. For just at the moment of realization, the internal instability of the idea of the image returns: to receive the divine bestowal in the incarnation is to receive the Spirit, but doing so also opens up the dilemma of our vast ontological and ethical difference from God. I have already noted in the previous chapter, though somewhat cursorily, that the logic of simplicity that rules the consubstantiality of the Son and Spirit with the Father formulates a profound aporia of ineffability at the heart of our relation to God in the imago dei. In the conclusion to this chapter, I will examine how this apophatic paradox at the heart of Augustine’s understanding of participation in God is a final moment of rupture of the mimetic dimension of the image: De Trinitate ends with the bankruptcy of the possibility of trinitarian analogies. In order to see this, it is important to restate clearly the relationship between the mimetic and the participatory moments within the imago dei by means of a synopsis of the argument we have been tracing thus far. As we have traced the ascent from scientia to sapientia, I have noted how Augustine continually returns to their essential differentiation as one of object and modality: scientia is knowledge of temporal realities, while sapientia is both knowledge of eternal realities and knowledge of the created temporal world in light of its origin in God. The key is not to distinguish between higher and lower reason as distinct faculties, but rather, to see them, first, as the one mind contemplating distinct realities, and second, as contemplating them with fundamentally different dispositions. The great puzzle of books 9 and 10, the relative priority of understanding and will, resolved this by refusing the question, in a sense, because sapientia is “loved knowledge” (9.10.15). The indissociability of intelligentia and voluntas obtains because the verbum is a generation from the memory by the intellect, joined to its object by the will. But only in the case of self-knowledge is the object of knowledge identical to the knower, and so only in this case does the image have any stability, any true reflection of eternity. Intertwined with this epistemological inquiry, though, is an ethical one, to the extent that I have described Augustine’s epistemology as an “ethics of knowledge.” For the resolution just named exposes the real problem at the heart of the search for the imago dei, our distance from God in our moral orientation. Temporal knowledge is not simply adventitious, but acquisitive. The union of the mind with created objects is appetitive and concupiscent, and desire, which links the mind with its objects of knowledge, is perverse; it is selfish, hoarding, and arrogant. To properly be oriented to the created order is to receive it from, and refer it to, God the creator of that order. It is to receive it as a gift. Both the epistemological and ethical dimensions of our knowing66 face the same problem: in Augustine’s illuminationist ontology, to know an object is to know it as participating in the divine ideas resident in God’s 74

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eternal essence. The recognition of that participation inextricably involves the mind’s self-knowledge, which by its rational nature participates in the divine light; but precisely here we encounter our unlikeness from God, because our disordered desire prevents us from adhering to God in love, our alienated ethics thus wrecking the whole epistemological process. Our only way of participating in wisdom, sapientia, is therefore a “straightening” of our love so that we can behold eternal realities, and behold temporal realities in light of eternity. And the way that happens is through eternity becoming temporal, wisdom taking on flesh, humbling our intellect and in so doing filling our desires with the love of God. In this way, the sickness of sin in intellect and will is reformed, and in so doing, the imago dei undergoes the long discipline of contemplative transformation. Sapientia is the union of intellect and will, ultimately received as a gift of the creator, in which God is contemplated through the purity of a reformed soul. This is the focus when Augustine is discussing the image—its participation in God. The mimetic aspects of the image are entirely secondary, and serve two purposes: first, to be sure, Augustine has been seeking vestigial triads, but they don’t function to provide a model of the Trinity, but rather to provisionally illuminate specific logical problems with understanding the processions, namely the relationship between the generation of the Son and the procession of the Spirit within a simple substance. Second, and more importantly, the mimetic aspect of the image centers on the verbum, the act of cognition of a thing in the union of intellect and will, which ultimately involves, as I have just explained, a properly reformed orientation to the creator. But this interior word of created beings, it turns out, is mimetically vastly dissimilar to the Word of the Father: we know because things are, but thing are because God knows them (15.13.22). God’s knowing is an act of bestowal, and so just at its apex, the verbum, the mimetic dimensions of the imago break down. Thus to understand Augustine’s primary task to be seeking threefold metaphors or models of the divine Trinity, as contemporary theologians have tended to do, is to go wide of the mark indeed. Book 15 is concerned with the ultimate futility of the mimetic aspects of the image, and explicitly denies the analogical correspondence of image and exemplar: “So here we are then with these three, that is memory, understanding, love or will in that supreme and unchangeable being which God is, and they are not the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit . . . the trinity which is God cannot just be read off from those three things which we have pointed out in the trinity of our minds . . . all and each of them has all three things each in his own nature” (15.7.12, 17.28).67 The reason takes us back to the logic of simplicity: Augustine has relentlessly eliminated any proper correspondence of the attributes of God with the hypostases (15.5.7), because all the attributes can be reduced to one another, and all are identical to God’s essence, since God is an “inexpressible and wholly simple nature.” To take sapientia as an 75

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example (15.6.9), if wisdom is identical to God’s essence, then it follows that so is memory or will.68 Thus memory, understanding, and will are not analogs to the divine persons such that any kind of ontological implications can be drawn from that analogy. Of course, as just noted, the “psychological analogy” does have some analogical moments, and one of these is the dim resemblance between the generation of a verbum in the understanding, in its interplay with the will in joining itself to an intelligible object, and the processions of Son and Spirit of God. The rest of the book focuses on this twofold analogical relationship, but in both cases, Augustine is not intending to codify the analogy, but rather to further explicate the aporetic of participation. This means returning to the thematic of wisdom, and the problem of the verbum that resides at its heart. In the Augustinian union of intellect and will, to think of God speaking in the verbum, Jesus Christ, is to conceive our verbum as oriented to imitation of Christ: it is in knowing the Word “that we might live rightly by our word following and imitating his example” (15.11.20). But this leads Augustine back, yet again, to the incarnation as both the “embodiment” of pneumatology and the condition of our ascent to God: the analogical resemblance of our “inner Word” with the generation of the Son reveals something about the incarnation. Just as our word is incarnate, as it were, as it “becomes a bodily sound by assuming that in which it is manifested to the senses of men,” so “the Word of God became flesh by assuming that in which it too could be manifested to the senses of men.”69 God is eternally self-speaking in the Word, such that only the Word could truly become incarnate, and our knowledge of that Word is the Spirit’s gift of love. This is what we call the image of God.

The Image of God as Augustinian Pneumatology The image, thus, is not one that lies in mimetic correspondence to God, because ultimately there is no such correspondence. The image is participation in God, which occurs in love, and so the rest of book 15 will be involved in the consideration of the particular way the Spirit’s character as distinctively charity transforms the way in which we love God. We love God by the love God pours out in our hearts, which is the love of God herself. Charity just is the divine substance, and thus Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are each charity; yet the Spirit is distinctively so as the “gift” of God’s love that is given to us, a gift that is God herself, just as the Son is distinctively Word and wisdom. After quoting Jn 4.7, Augustine concludes “love therefore is God from God,” which as the self-giving of God is that which “makes us abide in God and him in us . . . it is God the Holy Spirit proceeding from God who fires man to the love of God and neighbor when he has been given to him, and he himself is love. Man has no capacity to love God except from God” (15.17.31).70 The Spirit, in other words, is love insofar as the gift of 76

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the Spirit is the gift of God’s whole loving being in the Son.71 Just as God is eternally self-revealing and bestowing in the Word, so God is eternally the gift of that bestowal in the Spirit. We, of course, experience that giving in time, but just as the knowledge of the Son is the temporal form (mission) the eternal generation of the Son takes (procession), so with the Spirit: God is eternally self-giving, and we receive that gift of the Spirit in time. This exposition of the Spirit as charity is the culmination of the entire book— the mystical ascent, we have already seen, founders on the unlikeness of God and human, but humanity participates in God nonetheless, insofar as we participate in the Wisdom of God who is the human Jesus Christ by the love of God, which is poured out into our hearts. This “caritological” pneumatology is the heart of Augustine’s understanding of the economy of salvation, which encompasses every event in which a divine person is known in time, as the self-communication of the Trinity in grace, or what amounts to the same thing, in the pouring out of the love of God in the heart.72 The fact that this communication is strictly Christological cannot be missed, for as the discussion of the verbum showed, the will’s coinherence with the intellect in the act of understanding, culminating in the generation of an inner word, renders knowing and loving indissociable. Likewise, as the only true analogical moment in the psychological analogy, the missions of Christ and Spirit cannot be conceived in abstraction from one another: there is one work of God, God’s self-communication in the fleshliness of Jesus Christ, in whom we live and love by the gift of Christ’s Spirit.73 What is more, for Augustine to speak of Jesus Christ is to speak at the same time of the totus christus, the “whole Christ” composed of those believers, the society of saints, who are united to Christ through charity. Indeed, Augustine proceeds in De Trinitate 15.19.34 to connect language of the gift of the Spirit with the totus christus, the church: “through the gift which the Holy Spirit is in common for all members of Christ, many gifts which are proper to them severally are divided among them.”74 I will discuss the corporate and intersubjective dimension of Augustine’s pneumatology in the following chapter, where I will show that Augustine’s account of the totus christus is his context for talking about divinization. Here however I will simply conclude with the observation that the pneumatology of charity serves as the summary of De Trinitate, and note how usefully pneumatology encapsulates the aporetic theme of divine and human agency and knowledge we have seen throughout the book. The paradoxicality of the gift of the Spirit is that it demands a different type of discourse, a distinct theological register, from that of Christology.75 The Spirit’s mission is not another work of God beside that of the Son’s, but the same work insofar as we ascend in Christ’s descent, when contemplation of the incarnation elevates the soul to the eternal Trinity. Pneumatology is that moment in trinitarian theology when theology opens onto something performative, when talk of Christ shows as its necessary presupposition participation 77

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in Christ, when theology becomes doxology: knowledge of the Son is the performance of the Spirit’s gift. Thus the motif of the mystical ascent in De Trinitate weaves Augustine’s pneumatology into the very fabric of the text, as it seeks to train the reader in a kind of performance of the mystical ascent through contemplation. For Augustine, trinitarian theology has become a kind of apophasis, a disciplining of language designed to show the vast unlikeness between God and humanity, an unlikeness that is at the same time the very condition of our participation, for our participation in God is not by mimetic similarity but the great paradox of an imitation of the humble human being Jesus Christ. As the dialectics of the argument of De Trinitate, which continually imbricate self-knowledge and knowledge of the divine, are designed to show, this act of participation in charity is both God’s act and our own act, and in this participation emerges the understanding that we are somehow in our selfhood graced and elevated, that the depths of our self-knowing cannot finally be separated from our knowing of God. Pneumatology is not strictly talk about God, nor is talk about the self: it is the discourse that emerges when God makes the self participate in Godself, and the only kind of discourse that can do this is an indirect, dialectical performative ascesis of speech that seeks the traces of the Spirit in the soul, traces visible only in the soul’s willing what it cannot will and acting as it cannot act: traces of deification. De Trinitate is the daring attempt to think the aporetic of an unrepresentable act, the transformation of the soul that is elevated by the Holy Spirit to an act of contemplation of God in the face of Jesus Christ. The grammar of this act is what we now call the “psychological analogy,” and for Augustine, this incarnational realism is the only way to speak of the Spirit, as the aporetic of self-involvement in the performance of participation in God. This performance is the point of the practice of theology itself, for it is a training of the mind, a purification for contemplation. It is here, in the unfathomable mystery of a transformed soul, that Augustine’s pneumatology functions—in the elevated act of understanding and will by which the soul finally comes to will union with the eternal life of the triune God. That willing, however, and thus the pouring out of the Spirit, is not a separate act from the self-giving of God, because there is no second work of God beyond that of Jesus Christ—rather, that act is a participation in the giving of Jesus Christ, and because it is an act of the will, it is an ethical act, an ordering of our love. We do not, at the end of the day, know the nature of God in anything like what we call knowing, because the knowledge of God is a performative act of love that has a logic all its own. Insofar, then, as it is the gift of the Spirit that is the gift of that participation, to understand Augustine’s pneumatology we have to understand it as a pneumatology of the knowledge of Christ.

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4 the “whole christ” and the pneumatology of deification in augustine

For most of its proponents, trinitarian theology’s twentieth-century renaissance establishes a powerful analogy between the divine communion of persons and human personhood and community. I earlier showed that Augustine has been widely blamed for the provenance of another analogy, one more deleterious, that is beholden to interiority, individuality, and rationality. The previous two chapters argued that upon a reading of De Trinitate, this “psychological” analogy turns out to be something different—it is shorthand for the enactment of the imago dei through the gift of the Spirit, a formula in which that enactment corresponds to the self-communication of God in Christ. In that Christological reading of De Trinitate, I sought to reassess du Roy’s contention that Augustine’s conception of the intellectus fidei was grounded in an interior illumination of the soul, rather than in the economy of redemption. Given this Christological rearticulation of Neoplatonic anagogy, which I described as an “incarnational realism,” the complaint that Augustine’s trinitarianism is insufficiently economic should be significantly mitigated, if not resolved. But this is still only a partial riposte to the standard model described in Chapter 1. For one might still worry that Augustine’s economy of grace is individualist and insufficiently relational; in terms of Régnon’s binary, it might not be sufficiently “personalist.” This concern is the point of departure for this chapter. However, instead of engaging this question as posed, I want to reframe it, by proposing that the pseudo-Régnonian dilemma between essentialist and personalist trinitarianisms is a false one. Augustine has reminded us to be wary of the language of person: in De Trinitate 7, he refused to invest the term with ontological significance, because doing so would be to set up an untenable relationship of a generic divine nature and its particular

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hypostatic exemplifications, which would in turn obfuscate the singularity of God’s self-giving. Nonetheless, the issue of personalism remains a constant point of reference for judging Augustine’s trinitarian theology. Perhaps the most common area of contention lies with Augustine’s so-called vinculum amoris doctrine of the Spirit, his understanding of the Spirit as the “bond of love” between the Father and Son. Critics complain that this notion reduces the Spirit to a function or impersonal relation, rather than a fully distinct “person.” This critique often corresponds to a suspicion of an overly Christological or Christomonistic focus in Augustine and Latin theology, along with worries that a distinct mission of the Spirit is thereby weakened. As I will discuss at greater length, the “bond of love” idea has also been used by sympathetic readers of Augustine to develop a theology of relationality. At the moment, though, it is important to highlight how the worry about the “depersonalization” of the Spirit misses the import of the rejection of personalist language in De Trinitate. Not only does personalism weaken the all-important function of simplicity as a guarantee of the integrity of divine self-giving, but it also rests upon a problematic reliance upon a vague relationship of mimesis. If personalistic theologies linking divine and human relationality are not purely metaphorical, exemplarist schemes, they presume a deeper continuity of being between God and world. But I argued in the previous two chapters that Augustine should be understood as developing a kind of apophatic theology, premised on his logic of simplicity. Any kind of continuity of being is difficult to sustain when an ontological difference runs through its heart, and I have suggested that such a sanguine trinitarian ontology is impossible with Augustine, whose dual account of the psychological analogy in De Trinitate is designed to show the breakdown of just such a conceptual scheme.1 How, then, to understand the Christian doctrine of God if not as the description of an inherently “relational” quality to the nature of the ultimate that ontologically grounds our own relationality? If such a relationship does not obtain, then what resources do we have then to conceive human relationality and intersubjectivity theologically? The depersonalization trope also falls prey to another assumption I have argued against. In the complaint that the Spirit is depersonalized, the implication is often that the Spirit’s hypostatic particularity is lost, at the expense of a proper, distinct mission in the economy of salvation. The reader of the previous two chapters will recall, however, my argument that De Trinitate would urge us to abandon the assumption that both Spirit and Son must be assigned distinctive missions that correspond to their personal particularity; the mission of Son and Spirit do not stand in some kind of competitive relation, as if too much Christology equals too little pneumatology. Precisely the opposite: a stronger Christology entails the possibility of a stronger pneumatology, because, as Augustine’s logic of simplicity guaranteed, the divine work of self-giving is a single work. Our participation in God’s self-giving is, itself, part of that self-giving, because that participation occurs in the 80

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incarnation of Christ. The Spirit’s mission is the gift of participation in Christ. Grasping the Augustinian response to both of these critiques lies in understanding how his model for redeemed human relationality relies upon entirely different assumptions than contemporary personalism altogether. Instead of asking whether Augustine gives sufficient weight to the concept of “person” in his trinitarianism, I will argue that understanding human sociality and community in Augustine rests upon the link between his Christology, pneumatology, and ecclesiology, in a clear development of the patterns of argument that characterize De Trinitate. The idea that embodies this knot of relations is, for Augustine, the church as the totus christus. My thesis in this chapter is that the love of the neighbor in Augustine’s ecclesiology is an extension of the incarnational realism of De Trinitate, because Augustine understands the church as the “whole Christ,” the totus christus, within which that love is the same gift of the Spirit by which we love God in De Trinitate. Moreover, I will seek to show that we should understand this caritas as the way Augustine articulates an apophatic theology of relation. Doing so displaces the entire question of trinitarian paradigms of relationality, because the underlying issue, the integrity of human participation in the divine as inherently relational, is premised not upon a mimetic relationship between the two, but upon the same participation in the divine self-giving in the economy of salvation that drives the psychological analogy. We are persons who are constituted by our love for the neighbor because this is the way we experience the life of Christ, and the church, for Augustine, is the social reality of that experience—a pneumatological reality.

The Totus Christus and the Love of God and Neighbor The heartbeat of Augustine’s Christology in De Trinitate is the idea that the invisible God humbles and makes Godself known in the flesh of Christ, and that Christ, in his divine humanity, is both the via and the patria, the way and the goal of the ascent to God. As the eternal sapientia of God in the flesh of the human Jesus, he encompasses all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge; as such, the inseparable relationship of intellect and will in our knowledge of God is fulfilled in the twofold mission of Son and Spirit as the grace-impelled clinging to God in love through the knowledge of Christ. The Christological theme of Augustine’s ecclesiology proceeds from this premise, for of course we do not see Jesus, who is at the right hand of the Father. Christ is, instead, witnessed to us in the church. The great boldness of Augustine’s theology of the church, which merits describing it as an incarnational realism, is to claim that we not only see Christ by the eyes of faith, but we also see him in the face of our neighbor in that we participate 81

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in the incarnation by being united to the neighbor in the same love by which we participate in Christ. We do see Jesus, in the face of our neighbor, by the gift of his Spirit. This theme of the unity of love of God and neighbor was adumbrated in the abortive discussion of “loving love” in De Trinitate 8, but it is the central motif of Augustine’s meditations on the totus christus. This theme is found throughout his authorship, particularly in his Enarrationes in Psalmos; but it is given especially concentrated attention in the In epistulam Joannis ad Parthos tractatus, which I discuss here as an entrée into this ecclesiological idea.

Love of Neighbor and the Problem of Donatism The dilemma of the Donatist controversy can be simply (if reductionistically) described as the problem of the presence of sin in the society of the saints. The paradox of these two realities—sainthood and sin—shoots through in epistulam Joannis. These homilies, it is generally agreed, were preached on Easter week in 407, in the heat of the Donatist controversy, and present Augustine’s most intense and focused meditations on the relationship between the nature of the church and the problem of sin in its members.2 Augustine notes that 1 Jn 1.5 presents us with a dilemma: the impossibility of a fellowship between light and darkness.3 God is light, and there is no darkness in God; she “who has been born from God does not sin.” However, “if we say that we do not have sin, we are deceiving ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1.6). We are, as he will later describe it, “squeezed in the middle” between two apparently irreconcilable demands here (5.1), whose solution only lies in identifying the kind of sin at issue. Augustine describes this sin as breaking “Christ’s commandment”: the particular sin that is the darkness with which light cannot be in fellowship is the sin of hating the neighbor.4 Christ’s commandment is simply the commandment to love one another, and fulfilling this commandment governs the forgiveness of all one’s sins (5.3).5 But who is the neighbor? What is the relationship between this love of neighbor and the moral purity that (presumably) constitutes the holiness and identity of the church? And how does love of neighbor govern the forgiveness of sins? The answer to all of this involves Augustine’s recasting of the notion of ecclesial purity, and is the heart of the counter-Donatist polemic of in epistulam Joannis. The characteristically North African exigency of ecclesial purity drives the dilemma of the homilies just mentioned: the one who has been born of God does not sin, but if we say we do not sin, we call God a liar. The genius of the homilies lies in Augustine’s combination of two themes: one, the epistle’s theology of love with, two, its anti-docetic admonition about confessing Jesus Christ in the flesh. These are compressed into a single point of counter-Donatist polemic: to hate the neighbor, and thus to cause division with the neighbor, is to deny the flesh of Christ in 82

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the presence of the neighbor, and therefore to be the spirit of Antichrist. By dividing the church body, the Donatists effectively deny the fleshly reality of the body of Christ (6.12–13). To divide the Catholic church is to fail to love, for it is precisely in charity that the church is united: “a schismatic’s hatred of fellow Christians constitutes a rejection of charity, which would in turn either prevent the forgiveness of sins or make them return immediately.”6 The Donatist position depends upon the link between forgiveness of sins and sacramental efficacy being mediated by the bishop in persona christi, with the result that episcopal holiness is essential for the church’s identity and purity. The authorized sacramental body is the one associated with the sanctity of the bishop; for Augustine, however, the true church is simply constituted by intention, that is, voluntarily by the bonds of charity. The gift of the Spirit is the charity that unites its members to Christ and to one another.7 The forgiveness of sins is “mediated” by the church only insofar as that church is the dwelling place of the Spirit as the body of Christ, and thus it binds and looses sins simply through the common charity of the saints. In other words, sacramental efficacy and forgiveness of sin are mediated by the church only insofar as that church is the totus christus. This locates the church’s identity wholly in Christ, in a rather precise parallel to the location of the mystical ascent to God wholly in Christ in De Trinitate. The Donatists maintained a specific set of formal criteria of ordinational and sacramental purity by which the identity of the church could be adjudicated. But Augustine contrasts these criteria with a sole focus on the orientation and disposition of the members of the church: “love alone, then, distinguishes between the children of God and the children of the devil” (5.7). In fact, “people’s deeds are indistinguishable apart from the root of charity” (7.8).8 The fruit of this claim is to emphasize two realities of the church (which inevitably results in the famously Augustinian emphasis upon its mixed nature), which the Donatists could not theologically accommodate: its universality and its eschatological nature. First, one of Augustine’s most outraged polemical points against the Donatists concerns the presumption that the church is restricted to Africa, insofar as only the Donatists claimed to have preserved the purity of the true sacrament.9 Against this provincialism, the unity of the Catholic church is based solely in the charity of the saints around the world, their common love for God and thus each other. Just as the gaze (intentio) of the two eyes in “the charity of the body’s structure” behold one object in one gaze, “together you have fixed the pupil of your heart’s eye on the light of truth” (6.10). Second, in epistulam Joannis returns to the canonica regula of De Trinitate to highlight the eschatological nature of the vision of God that constitutes the church: only by charity does one perceive the form of God in the form of the servant Christ, and by extension, only by charity does one perceive the form of Christ in the form of the church, his body. Purity of heart by the gift of the Spirit’s charity is prerequisite to properly seeing the form of God in the form of the incarnation, and 83

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so it follows for seeing the church in its participation in the incarnation. The wicked “shall see only the form of a slave; the form of God they shall not see” (4.5).10 But insofar as in faith we see the form of God in the form of the servant, we eschatologically anticipate his appearance, when “we shall see him as he is.” Participation in Christ by faith is an eschatological inhabitation of that anticipation, so that “the entire life of a good Christian is a holy desire” (4.6).11 In a particularly compelling image, he compares the soul to a purse that is stretched to be more capacious: “This is how God stretches our desire through delay, stretches our soul through desire, and makes it large enough by stretching it . . . This is our life—to be exercised through desire” (4.6). Thus, by relocating the locus of the purity of the church into its pneumatological reality of charity, Augustine has returned to the incarnational realism of De Trinitate: the vision of God is a question of our love, and that love is a love for Christ within the totus christus, the body of Jesus we encounter in the neighbor’s face.

The Church in Augustine’s Incarnational Realism I have alluded throughout the preceding section to the momentous significance the theme of the totus christus has for Augustine’s ecclesiology, as illustrated by in epistulam Joannis. It is time we fill out the contours of this motif, particularly since my argument here relies upon the way the motif directly links the counter-Donatist theme of neighbor love, according to in epistulam Joannis, with De Trinitate. In De Trinitate, we recall, Augustine sets up the incarnation as the precise inversion of the mystical ascent: as the contemplative ascends from scientia to sapientia, so Christ the sapientia of God descends and is known in time, by scientia. The mystical ascent in De Trinitate occurs within the incarnate Christ, just as the vision of God occurs in the inhabitation of Christ in the form of relationship with the neighbor in in epistulam Joannis. Christ is not simply the means of the ascent, but the destination as well: “What is the way (via) on which we are running? Christ said, I am the way. What is the homeland (patria) to which we are running? Christ said, I am the truth. You run on him, you run to him in whom you take your rest.”12 Augustine’s incarnational theology of mediation centers around the exchange of states inherent in the forma servi-forma dei dialectic, which follows the pattern of the admirabile commercium: by participation in Christ’s descent humanity is elevated in a deifying transaction. Christ becomes temporal so that we could become eternal, says Augustine, even as he became temporal while remaining eternal (2.10); the incarnation is an assumption of flesh such that the descent of the eternal sapientia of God is an elevation of our flesh into God’s eternal wisdom. This exchange occurs because, in joining himself to humanity, Christ is made one with his church: “the Church is joined to that flesh, and Christ becomes the whole, head and body” (1.2). This is the basis of his totus christus theology. 84

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I will not attempt to discuss the theme of the totus christus in exhaustive detail here; what is significant for my purposes is to point to the deifying exchange inherent in the joining of Christ to his body, the church.13 In De Trinitate the twofold canonica regula of forma servi-forma dei points to the training in humility and the transformation of the ascent to God in the incarnation of Jesus Christ; in his commentaries on the Psalms, Augustine expands that rule to his famed threefold rubric, which elaborates the rule with a third category by which Scripture speaks of Christ, as the head of his body. He joins the church to himself to form the “whole Christ,” so as to elevate the whole church to participation in his eternal life. This threefold rule, which is the hermeneutical key to the Enarrationes in Psalmos and in epistulam Joannis, is formulated in sermon 341: Our Lord Jesus Christ, brothers and sisters, as far as I have been able to tune my mind to the sacred writings, can be understood and named in three ways . . . The first way is: as God and according to the divine nature which is coequal and coeternal with the Father before he assumed flesh. The next way is: when, after assuming flesh, he is now understood from our reading to be God who is at the same time man, and man who is at the same time God, according to that pre-eminence which is peculiar to him and in which he is not to be equated with other human beings, but is the mediator and head of the Church. The third way is: in some manner or other as the whole Christ in the fullness of the Church, that is as head and body according to the completeness of a certain perfect man, the man in whom we are each of us members.14 It has often been noted that Augustine’s Christology is proto-Chalcedonian in its conception of Christ’s “two substances”;15 but this corporate dimension is at least as important for working out the full contours of his Christology. This is an incarnational realism: the church is really and organically the social existence of Jesus Christ, as his theology of the Spirit immediately links Augustine’s ecclesiology and Christology. The exchange of the admirabile commercium whereby the pneumatological ascent to the vision of God takes place within Christ’s descent is thus identical to the union of charity in the church, whereby Christ and church are one as head to body. This is the content of Augustinian pneumatology. The link of the forma servi-forma dei hermeneutical rubric of De Trinitate to the totus christus motif means that the incorporation of believers into the body of Christ is a moment integral to the sending of the Son by the Father. That mission, we recall, was realized insofar as Christ is known in time, so that to see Christ in faith is to see God, or in the terms I used above, to understand Jesus Christ as the eternal sapientia of God is to understand that Jesus Christ is the content without remainder of the divine self-giving. The 85

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pneumatological dimension is that moment in which we are given the capacity to receive that giving, and in so doing to participate in that sending. This pneumatological “excess” of the Son’s mission is the ecclesial dimension of his Christology. In other words, if the knowledge of God, which is sapientia, takes the form of being joined to the incarnate Son by the love of the Spirit, then the unity of knowledge and love in De Trinitate is manifest in the unity of Christ and church in the in epistulam Joannis. De Trinitate is the aspiration to the vision of God, culminating in a pneumatological apophasis that shifts the discursive register of unknowing to a performative enactment of the love of God by God’s own love, the Spirit. This pneumatological performance then gives shape to the incarnational realism of in epistulam Joannis, where that enactment is located in the social reality of the church: we find that the vision of God is nothing other than the life of the church. The truly revolutionary point of the totus christus idea lies in this identity of love of God and neighbor: “if you love the brother whom you see, you will see God at the same time, because you will see charity itself, and God dwells within it” (5.7). God is an invisible reality, and thus is seen not with the eyes but the heart, which must be cleansed for that vision (7.10). That cleansing, that exercising or formation, both occurs in the love of the neighbor, and is necessary to love the neighbor. The result is to make neither neighbor nor God an instrumental goal to the end of the other, but rather to unite them firmly and inextricably in a strict unity: love of God is love of neighbor, and love of neighbor is love of God.16 If we read this theme of Augustine’s Christology alongside the program of ascent of De Trinitate, where the mystical ascent is displaced into a pneumatology of charity, then it becomes clear that insofar as the mystical ascent attains to the vision of God in Augustine, the goal of the ascent is the face of the neighbor.

Augustine’s Daring Inversion In epistulam Joannis is an excellent example of Augustine the rhetor’s homiletical daring, as the famed “love, and do what you want” exemplifies (7.8). The most noteworthy gambit, however, occurs in the context of Augustine working out the unity of love of God and neighbor as a distinctive form of deification, which Roland Teske calls his “daring inversion.”17 In 7.5–6, following a reprisal of the Antichrist theme aimed at the Donatists (7.2), Augustine states “to act against love is to act against God.” If God is love, and if the church as the body of Christ is joined to God by the Spirit of charity, then for a person in the church to sin against another is to sin against God, for “love is from God. God is love.” This simple Johannine statement is then quickly inverted: “How then, could it be a short while ago, love is from God, and now, love is God?”18 Augustine’s intent in saying that “Love is God,” is not, of course, to resort to a vague sentimentalism equating human affection with the deity; so what does it mean to say that 86

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love is God? The answer is instructive, for it is a short demonstration of trinitarian logic: For God is Father and Son and Holy Spirit. The Son is God from God, the Holy Spirit is God from God, and these three are one God, not three gods. If the Son is God and the Holy Spirit is God, and he loves him in whom the Holy Spirit dwells, then love is God, but it is God because it is from God . . . because the Apostle says, “The charity of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us,” we should understand that in love there is the Holy Spirit. (7.6) Although the meaning of the statement dilectio Deus est has been much debated,19 the trinitarian language that follows shows that Augustine intends it as a strict equivalent to the statement of De Trinitate that “Love is God from God” (15.17.31).20 This love is pneumatological, and moreover, “missional,” as it were, since the context evokes the deus de deo of De Trinitate’s first four books.21 The love of God is the sending of the Spirit who is the love in whom we love the neighbor, as the quotation of Rom. 5.5 that follows demonstrates. In that love, true love, which loves the neighbor and thus (against Donatist rigorism) receives the sacrament worthily,22 the Holy Spirit shows herself to be given. To put it somewhat differently, the self-giving of God in Christ becomes our own giving of self to the neighbor as the work of the Spirit. This theme of self-giving is later elaborated, when on the basis of Christ’s self-giving for us (in epistulam Joannis 7.7), Augustine argues that the perfection of love seeks to bring the enemy to the knowledge of God: “perfect love is love of one’s enemy” (8.10).23 And as 9.10 clarifies, the well-known Augustinian theme of “loving love” should be understood in the terms of the identity of love of God and neighbor: “it must be that you who love your brother love love itself. Love is God. It must be, then, that whoever loves God loves his brother . . . If he has love, he sees God.” The whole ascent of De Trinitate, we will recall, was to “see God”; here, it becomes clear that to see God is therefore to see the face of the neighbor in loving union with them. We have seen that De Trinitate alters and disrupts the Neoplatonic metaphysics of participation through its Christological realism: the union of love of believers is their common participation in the form of justice (book 8), and that union is constituted by the unity of the object of their faith (book 13), the eternal reality of sapientia made flesh in the incarnate Jesus Christ.24 In epistulam Joannis 10.3 joins these two themes: The sons of God are the body of the only Son of God . . . therefore, he who loves the sons of God loves the Son of God . . . This is how this love is held fast in its entirety: just as it is joined in a single unity, so all 87

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those who depend on it make up a single unity, and it is as though fire fuses them. It is gold: a lump is fused, and it becomes a single something. But, unless the heat of charity blazes up, there can be no fusion of many into one. Because we love God, that is how we know that we love the sons of God. As in De Trinitate, the incarnate Christ is the object of faith, and being bound to him in love—by the excess of his mission that is the Spirit’s sending—constitutes the church in unity; so here the totus christus locates the love of the neighbor within the love of Christ: one becomes a member by loving, and through love he comes to be in the structure of Christ’s body, and there shall be one Christ loving himself. For, when the members love each other, the body loves itself . . . When you love Christ’s members, then, you love Christ; when you love Christ, you love the Son of God; when you love the Son of God, you also love his Father. Love, then, cannot be separated. Insofar as the church is the body of the incarnate Christ, the whole Christ, to love Christ is to love the neighbor, and to love the neighbor is to love Christ. The church, therefore, is animated and constituted by nothing other than its love—but this love is God from God, the Holy Spirit; the church is the event of participation in the sending of Jesus Christ. In other words, our love for the neighbor is the form God’s self-bestowal in Christ takes, and this is the gift of the Spirit. In Chapter 2, I argued that Augustine understands the intratrinitarian processions of Son and Spirit strictly in terms of their missions—to the extent that we should think of God as eternally self-speaking in the incarnate Word, an eternal act of self-giving. In epistulam Joannis deepens this idea by showing how, for Augustine, the church is the extension of and participation in that act of self-giving because it is the “whole Christ”—his incarnation as a social reality. As the reading of the “daring inversion” shows here, the Augustinian concept of “loving love” clearly has something to do with the pneumatological presupposition of our love for the neighbor as participation in Christ.25 Two implications follow from this teaching, one that I will discuss here, while consideration of the second will begin the next section: first, to love the neighbor in the Holy Spirit is to be deified, but in a distinctively Augustinian sense. The Spirit is that love that is “God from God” who fires us to love of God and neighbor.26 Moreover, the Spirit is the mission of the Trinity by which it is God’s act to unite us to the descent of Christ such that it becomes the ascent to God. This means that the act of love of the neighbor is the unity of God’s agency with one’s ownmost agency, and insofar as God’s act is always prior for Augustine, it is a love beyond our capacity to love. It is a deifying union of divine and human agency. This is the agential 88

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aporetic of De Trinitate that I argued is a form of the unknowing of apophasis: the quotidian act of giving oneself to the neighbor, in all her singularity, is an unrepresentable act that cannot be determined in advance, because it is a singular relation. Augustine’s “daring inversion” is therefore a formula of divinization as a way of describing the deifying transformation of our human capacities. Moreover, it can even be understood as the Augustinian version of the Athanasian “God became human so humans could become God.” A person’s love determines a person’s “quality,” says Augustine: “Do you love the earth? You will be earth. Do you love God? What shall I say? That you will be God? I don’t dare to say this on my own. Let us listen to the scriptures: I have said that you are gods and that all of you are sons of the Most High.”27 In this pneumatological grammar of the performance of participation in Christ we are therefore seeing the development of a distinctively Western logic of deification—one that is fundamentally oriented to the ethical performance of the graced soul, where “unknowing” is translated into something social. I will discuss this more in the final section.

The Holy Spirit as the Bond of Love: A Trinitarianism without Difference The second implication of Augustine’s incarnational realism, as seen in the counter-Donatist in epistulam Joannis, is more a highlighting of an unresolved problem. It involves the way in which the Augustinian logic of deification just described is premised on the intratrinitarian context of Augustine’s pneumatology. Thus far I have sought to couple the strict logic of divine simplicity, which De Trinitate trained us to see as the precondition and guarantee of self-identity in revelation, with the emphasis on incarnational divine self-giving highlighted in De Trinitate and further articulated ecclesially in the in epistulam Joannis. But for this case to be compelling, and to understand how the model Augustine presents us with compares to more contemporary versions of trinitarian sociality, we need to reexamine Augustine’s so-called vinculum doctrine of the Spirit.28 I deliberately avoided the “bond of love” theme of the Spirit throughout the exposition of De Trinitate, in order to highlight the broader trinitarian and incarnational logics that set the context for Augustine’s pneumatology, which modern readers often tend to reduce to the vinculum idea. A recent interpretive trajectory, loosely associated with the Radical Orthodoxy school of thought, sees the doctrine as the key to Augustine’s trinitarian theology. The problem I intend to analyze here is this increasing trend of interpreting Augustine’s pneumatology according to an economy of “gift,” thereby thinking of redemption as a kind of reciprocal exchange of Father and Son that is opened outside of the Trinity by the Spirit. In this interpretive topos, the Holy Spirit, as the hypostatized relation of Son to Father, gives humanity a way of inhabiting a 89

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relationship between the first two persons of the Trinity. My counter to this reading follows from my understanding of De Trinitate: for Augustine, the self-giving of God is not an intratrinitarian reciprocal exchange, for indeed Augustinian simplicity rules out any notion of intradivine reciprocity in God at all. The Word is God speaking forth as pure bestowal, and the Spirit is that bestowal in the form of our participation in the incarnation. To use the theological gloss I have been employing, if the Son is the pure act of self-giving of the Father, then the Spirit is to be understood as the self-giving that is God’s giving of a people back to Godself. Seeing what is at stake in this apparently erudite distinction is the task of this section.

Rowan Williams and Trinitarian Personalism In this section, I will be discussing an increasingly influential interpretative trend concerning Augustine, exemplified by the articles “Sapientia and the Trinity: Reflections on the De Trinitate” by Rowan Williams and “The Second Difference” by John Milbank.29 While Williams and Milbank explicitly posit this interpretation as a counter to the pseudo-Régnonian genealogical linking of Augustinian interiority and Cartesian subjectivity that attributes the source of the modern self to Augustine’s trinitarian essentialism, I will claim that this set of interpretations exhibits a close family resemblance to the “standard model” of trinitarianism in the late twentieth century. In Chapter 1, I argued that trinitarian theology’s renaissance was habitually linked to a kind of social or relational ontology, wherein the communion of persons in the Godhead was said to somehow ground or inform human community. Persons, so trinitarianism shows us, are inherently relational; this is the great gift of a suitably personalistic trinitarian theology (Cappadocian, on most such accounts). The arguments advanced by Williams and Milbank are considerably more sophisticated than those generally found in personalist accounts of trinitarian relationality, which posit a straightforward correspondence of persons divine and human, but a key premise of that model persists in their reclamation of Augustine. While they may not be concerned to claim a trinitarian personalism for Augustine in quite the manner that many French scholars did in reaction to Régnon,30 the assumption that Augustinian trinitarianism lends itself to an ontological dynamic of reciprocity—an economy of difference and relation—resides at the heart of these accounts. Rowan Williams argues that in participating in Christ by the Spirit, we participate in the relationship of love between Christ the Son and the Father, which is the Spirit. The pneumatological exchange between Father and Son locates the church in the intersubjective space of love that is the being of God. Williams’s “Sapientia and the Trinity” rests on the claim, very close to my reading of Augustine, that “the image of God in us . . . is realised when 90

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the three moments of our mental agency all have God for their object.”31 For Williams, however, this actualization of the image rests upon a human self-relation that remains fundamentally mimetic of the divine self-relation, although the analogical relationship is inverted: the self-imparting of God is a movement of God’s own life “turned ‘outwards’” as our reflexivity is a “movement into our createdness.”32 This movement into our createdness, however, is likewise directed outwards to the embodied state in which our createdness resides. As such, the human self-relation, its movement into itself as a movement outward, is mediated by something external to itself—“the mediation of the revelation of God as its creator and lover.”33 This mediation is a pneumatological actualization of the image of God through caritas. Williams reads De Trinitate 9–14 as an “enormous digression” designed to show how our self-relation as creatures is a participation in the sapientia of God, which is identical to God’s being as an intersubjective sharing in caritas: “God is in love with God, and the God whom God loves is the God who loves God.”34 As such, God “cannot be other than relational, trinitarian”; to be God is to self-relate in love and as such, to seek to self-impart this divine life of relational love. This self-imparting rests, in turn, on what Williams calls Augustine’s notion of the Spirit as “love in search of an object,”35 or, in other words, the opening of the relation between Father and Son to the possibility of outward relation and bestowal of the excess of the divine communion. Zizioulas’s prioritization of the Father’s monarchy has been popular in recent trinitarianism, as it seems to give an ontological ground for a theology of intratrinitarian relational origins,36 but Williams objects to this as a way of developing a trinitarian dynamic of reciprocity. Instead, and in my view rightly, Williams argues that for Augustine the simultaneity of the trinitarian relations precludes a priority of the Father.37 The temptation here is to understand the Father as communicating the divine essence to Son and Spirit, but such a “communication” would distinguish the divine essence from the subsistents as some kind of residue, a “fourth”: some thing would have to be communicated other than the relation of origin of Father and Son.38 Instead, for Williams the Spirit, the vinculum caritatis or “bond of love,” is the agency that constitutes the relationship of Father and Son as “active or productive,” a love that is turned “everlastingly to the exchange of generating and generated wisdom as its perfect object.”39 For Williams, the Spirit is a necessary moment in the relation of Father and Son that both establishes their relation, and establishes that relation as productive—it completes God’s self-love, and thus enables it to open outside itself.40 The divine self-reflexivity, complete in itself, is in the Spirit also a surplus of self-relation therefore in search of an “external” object to love. The human self-relation mediated by the excess of the divine self-relation is therefore constituted with reference to its exteriority—its being in communion, so to speak. 91

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Williams is fond of pointing to Augustine’s discussion of “loving love” in De Trinitate 8 as a warrant for his understanding of the Spirit as the mediating agency of relation, divine and human, in charity. I have argued that this should be understood in terms of an identity of love of God and neighbor, grounded in the incarnational realism of that relation: we love the neighbor in the body of Christ by the gift of the Spirit. For Augustine, the Trinity is a way of talking about the divine essence as a pure self-giving of love in the incarnation of Jesus, an incarnation we really participate in (and “elongate,” as it were) in the church. There are limitations to this vision, of course—looming over it is the specter of Augustine’s cogite intrare, and it presupposes a dictum of ecclesial exclusiveness (extra ecclesiam nulla salus) that many will find hard to accept. I will discuss both of these issues later; but against Williams’s account I want to make two points: first, if my reading of Augustine in these three chapters is right, Williams imports a distorting frame of reference into Augustine’s theology. Indeed, as I will argue in Chapter 7, this frame of reference is distinctly Hegelian, the problems with which can only emerge after my analysis of Barth. The second objection, however, can be stated directly: it makes the divine essence an economy of gift and relation that renders the economy of salvation entirely secondary to God’s self-relation. I have argued that for Augustine, God’s being is pure self-gift; but William’s Hegelianism appears to complicate the singularity of that gift. The stakes here will emerge as we look at the Radical Orthodox version of Williams’s reading.

Radical Orthodoxy and the Second Difference John Milbank offers a similar account to Williams, which is likewise premised on the “ontological ‘necessity’ of the Holy Spirit.”41 Here, Milbank’s fundamental, and programmatic, concept is that of a “second difference” in the Trinity, a notion that allows him to both appropriate and counter “postmodernism”; the second difference is a way of reimagining the post-structuralist “difference” of indeterminacy as a creative space of peaceful relation. Although Milbank does not cite the theme of “loving love” as such, the symmetry with Williams’s interpretation is clear, resting on the mediatory agency of the Spirit who simultaneously structures the relation of Father and Son and opens that relation to participation by creation. In turn, Milbank likewise relates that pneumatological mediation to the very structure of human acts: both in community with the other, and in the creative aesthetic activity that he calls poesis and sees as the basic foundation of human existence, human action presupposes a difference or interval between that act and its object. This interval or difference emulates the “second difference” of trinitarian relation, and opens the dyad of human intention and its object into productive excess. Whether described as the social relation between a self and another, or as the linguistic differentiation of signifier and 92

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signified, the second difference is not a Derridean deferral of meaning, but a creative supplementation. For Milbank, difference is a plenitude, rather than dissemination or différance, of meaning. However, the symmetry between the trinitarian and the human “second difference” rests on more than mere metaphorical exemplarity;42 instead, it is expressed in the relationship of Spirit and church. For Milbank, the church’s reception and social embodiment of Christ’s incarnation and atonement reflects and derives from the Marian conception of the Logos.43 Christ is a personal cipher, the establishment of a set of practices that only constitutes an “incarnation” insofar as it is eschatologically filled out by the church; the assumption of humanity by divinity44 does not take the form of a person with “any particular, specifiable content”—instead, the church “nonidentically” repeats the practices of its founder, Jesus, insofar as it assumes the creative production of humanity in toto.45 In other words, the incarnation is purely formal, and is given particular content in human agency. Milbank can speak of human agency as such being assumed by the church because of his particular understanding of divine and human action: the human creative act, which is autonomous, is “overtaken” by a divine interposition that brings that act to its teleological completion, so that the broader matrix of cultural acts together signifies something like the city of God.46 Thus human poetic activity is a kind of aesthetic production of the cultural good, the paradigm of which is the church as the Marian body that receives the Logos. Let us return to the trinitarian question. Just as the relation of the human agent and her work is one of overflow and poetic possibility, so the relationship of Father and Son is that of “an infinite aesthetic plenitude of expression.”47 As with Williams, for Milbank the Spirit is she who is the surplus of that relation opening it beyond itself: the Spirit is, in a sense, divine jouissance, the “play” between the Father and his definitive expression, the Logos. But the Spirit, as “second difference,” is actually also a moment of distance (even, it seems, alienation) between Father and Son, because personal relation risks oblivion of its participants without a suitable space of self-constitution: “the very perfection of relation between Father and Son is in danger of obliterating the usual significance of personal relatedness in which the ‘reflective interval’ in which I am withdrawn from the other establishes my difference from the other.”48 This means that the church isn’t the Augustinian continuing incarnation of Christ, despite the fact that it “fills out” the incarnation through its creative activity. Instead, is something like the totus spiritus, or Williams’s pneumatological mediation writ large: “there is something like a communicatio idiomatum between Church and Spirit, without an identifiable point of union in either nature or personhood.”49 Not only is the church for Milbank a precondition of the incarnation (in its Marian reception of the Logos), but it is indeed the precondition of the Son’s relation to the Father. The Spirit empties herself in kenosis in the church, and in that kenotic embodiment, the church is “the objective foundation of 93

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reconciliation in God.”50 The Spirit is not simply the hypostatized relation of Father and Son; but just as Christ’s incarnation is completed ecclesially, so the divine act of reconciliation is actualized in the church: citing Hegel, Milbank argues that the community is the demonstration and enactment of the dialectical moment of concrete representation of the divine response to Christ’s atonement. Because human agency is the occasion of the divine agency, the divine action of incarnation and reconciliation is completed and mediated in the church, even as human action is eschatologically fulfilled in divine supplementation. The key to understanding Milbank’s complex proposal here is to see that this kenotic act of the Spirit in the church is our participation in the “intradivine union-through-separation of Logos and Pneuma”;51 that is, the space of creative difference between Father and Son becomes a moment of separation, even alienation, because this space is where human action occurs. The divine life opens up an indeterminate space for human agency, and that indeterminacy is precisely the church’s work in history. It is the “trapping” of the Spirit in the darkness of human sin and suffering, where the church fulfills the sufferings of Christ in making atonement and thereby aesthetically enacts the relation of Logos and Father.52 The Spirit is the bond of union between Father and Son only insofar as the Spirit bears the church with her, which participates in and supplementarily fulfills that relation. This positing of the Spirit as an alienated “distance” between Father and Son is developed in Michael Hanby’s Augustine and Modernity, which is in many ways a programmatic reading of De Trinitate on Milbank’s template. As with Milbank, the productive plenitude of difference demands that the relation of Father and Son be constituted in a moment of separation that provides the occasion of human action; indeed, for Hanby, the space of that relation becomes an infinite distance. Taking this principle of difference as an occasion for human action a step further, Hanby posits a likewise infinite separation between Christ and church—head and body—in order that human purposive activity may have an infinite openness of desire for its exemplar as object of love.53 Hanby’s “aesthetics of salvation” rests on a similar view of poesis as that of Milbank—Augustine is made to say that human signification itself participates in (as exitus and reditus) “the gift and delight between Father and Son.”54 The church both participates in Christ’s response to the Father and analogically “mediates” Christ liturgically to the world,55 thereby extending the “economy of gift” between Father and Son that is simultaneously the production of the Spirit as gift and the excess of that gift in the nature of creation as signification.56

Reexamining the Augustinian Idea of the “Bond of Love” A full critique of the position of Radical Orthodoxy trinitarian “difference” will require a thorough discussion of Hegel, which I will offer in Chapter 7.57 94

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At this point, I wish to return to the question of the relationship of these models to Augustine’s trinitarianism. Taking into account the genuine diversity and creativity of the proposals Williams, Milbank, and Hanby offer, it is inherent to the way they read Augustine that the relationship of the Son takes the form of an exchange or reciprocity of mutual giving with the Father. The life of the Trinity is likened to an exchange of love between Father and Son, this exchange being in turn the subsistence of the Spirit, so that the divine being is constituted in a dynamic mutual bestowal of the Spirit by Father and Son. But it is a peculiar characteristic of this model that the outcome is a “double relation” of Father and Son. What I mean is that, for Augustine and indeed in Pro-Nicene theology in general, the relation of Father and Son just is what constitutes their hypostatic particularity. For Augustine, Father and Son are not necessarily “subsistent relations” in the Thomist sense,58 but their “personal” characteristics are nonetheless found in that relation, which in turn is simply the distinctive way each is the divine nature. But to speak of that relationship of origin as an interpersonal relationship is something altogether different, as it presupposes a relation of origin constituting the persons as Father and Son, and a second relationship of love between them. But which is the divine essence—the distinct way Father and Son are God hypostatically, or the exchange of love between them? The problem here is that if the Spirit as vinculum caritatis is the mediating agency of that reciprocity, the agent who receives and bestows the mutual charity of Father and Son, then the relation of the Father and Son is something other than the relation of origin of Son from Father, which is the Augustinian way of thinking about their unity. Both Williams and Milbank are evincing a different logic than Augustine: they are concerned to show the (ontological) necessity of the pneumatological moment in trinitarian doctrine, and both locate it in the opening of the dyadic relation of Father and Son by the Spirit, so that the Spirit constitutes the overcoming of an otherwise monadic or essentialist divine nature. The reciprocity of exchange of Father and Son becomes the condition of possibility of God’s relation with God’s other. The similarities of this ontology of communion to the standard model discussed in Chapter 1 should be clear, even if the portrait just described is articulated with a considerably heavier accretion of jargon, and postures as a defense of Augustine. I argued in Chapter 2 that the divine essence just is the filiation of the Son and the procession of the Spirit principaliter ex patre filioque. To articulate the divine unity otherwise is to abstract from the relations of origin that constitute God as Trinity in Augustinian trinitarianism, and it is to attribute the agency of God to something other than that by which God is eternally self-speaking in the Word—the “doubling” of relation I spoke of above. Later I will argue, via a discussion of Hegel, that such a doubling begins to look like a prior divine self-reflexivity that amounts to a kind of eternal solipsism. To keep the matter in terms of Augustinian provenance for now, 95

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however, the urgency of such a formulation is that it is a way of preserving the singularity of divine self-giving, based in Augustine’s counter-Homoian argument. If there is some sense in which the divine essence is anything other than what we encounter in Jesus Christ, in Nicene terms, at least, we are not truly redeemed and deified. The picture that emerged from De Trinitate in the Augustinian conception of simplicity was one in which to be God is to speak Godself in the Son, a self-bestowal that is also our elevation to God’s life in the Spirit. The Spirit is the gratuitous excess of the act of self-speaking, the assumption of the object of that act—humanity—into a sharing of God’s self-giving goodness. The problem that emerges from the portrayal of Augustine’s trinitarianism by Williams, Milbank, and Hanby, on the other hand, is that this self-giving is preceded by an internal moment of self-relation that is the true self-bestowal of God, Father to Son. This relationship of mutual bestowal in the Spirit is the way the procession of the Son is understood; but in this sense, the mission of the Son is secondary to and different in character from the eternal constitution of the Son. Procession and mission are two fundamentally different, and adventitiously related, things. What is more, it reintroduces questions about the Rahnerian nemesis of a “fourth” in the divine nature. If the relation of Father and Son via the Spirit as a relationship of mutual love and bestowal is something different than and supplementary to their relation of origination and origin, than their unity, and therefore the unity of the Godhead, is based upon something other than the relations by which the hypostases originate. In short, the Spirit as the bond of loving unity begins to look like the “fourth” substance of the Trinity, a substance distinct from the persons themselves. The motivation that Williams, Milbank, and Hanby seem to share in common with many trinitarian personalists is the desire to ontologically ground the relationship of God and world in God’s own self-relation; God can relate outside of Godself because God first relates within Godself, and indeed, the Spirit is an opening of an otherwise dyadic divine relationship to the world. But upon further consideration, this is a strange claim: why would the divine act need grounding in something prior to itself? Indeed, the idea of the divine relationship this assumes is alien to Augustinian premises of divine simplicity. First, for Augustine, the idea of a relational divine self-reflexivity is incoherent: God knows Godself immediately, without mediation of any kind, for God’s knowledge is identical to God’s essence.59 God does not know Godself as an other (e.g. in the relationship of Father and Son), for that is to think of knowledge of that other as external to oneself (in a Hegelian sense, as a negation of the self); but divine simplicity and omnipotence militates against this possibility. Likewise, God does not know the world as an other, in the sense that God relates to the world, subject to subject (or object). God’s relationship with and knowledge of the world is identical to God’s bestowal of being upon the world, or more felicitously, God’s creation of the world. 96

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Much of this presumes my later, more detailed engagement with Hegelian thought (see Chapter 7), which, I would argue, subtends the reading of Augustine by Williams and Radical Orthodoxy that I am discussing here. In this context, I want to return to a question bearing more directly on the pneumatological theme of this Augustinian reading, the notion of the Spirit as vinculum, or bond of love. There are two problems with understanding the vinculum amoris as the key to Augustine’s pneumatology and trinitarian theology: first, Augustine himself does not use the term or its variants, and second, it is not a theological position that Augustine himself holds.60 The reading that forms the template for Williams, Milbank, et al. rests on the claim that the unity of substance of the Trinity is a unity of love, in the sense of a unity formed by a relationship of Father and Son through the Holy Spirit as the bond of love; the Holy Spirit is, in turn, that agent that provides for the unity of Christians with one another.61 But let us recall once again the logic of simplicity in books 5–7 of De Trinitate: any predicate spoken of God that is not a relative term is a substantial term and spoken of the persons absolutely and equally. Love is not, as such, a relative term, but substantial, and any such absolute predication just is the divine being: God is love and wisdom and truth by virtue of God’s own substance. As we saw Augustine argue, this has a counter-Arian purpose: if the Son is (e.g.) wisdom in any other way than the Father is wisdom excepting the fact that he is “wisdom from wisdom,” he in fact is not of one substance with the Father. By implication, this follows for the predicate of love as well: if God is love, then God is love identically in each of the three persons, except insofar as the Son is love from love, and the Spirit is love from the Father and Son as one source of love. The Son is not the lover of the Father, but the love of the Father as love from love; and because this procession of love from love takes the form of the mission of the Son, ultimately this means love as the incarnate Son Jesus of Nazareth, as the form in which that love is bestowed upon the world. In turn, the Holy Spirit is the love of Father and Son insofar as she is the gift of God by which we love God in the totus christus. Of course, it would be disingenuous to claim that Augustine does not speak in terms of the Spirit as the bond of love of Father and Son by which they love one another. He clearly does. Apart from the famous passage in De fide et symbolo, which I will discuss momentarily, there are several relevant passages in De Trinitate, which tend to fall into two groups.62 Perhaps the most commonly cited occur in books 5 and 6: Hence, the Holy Spirit is in a certain sense the ineffable communion of the Father and the Son; and it is perhaps on this account that he has been so called, because the name is also appropriate to both the Father and the Son. For he is called properly what they are called in common, because the Father is a spirit and the Son is a spirit, and the Father is holy and the Son is holy. In order that the communion between them 97

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might be signified by a name which is appropriate to both, the Holy Spirit is called the gift of both. (5.11.12, McKenna) Wherefore, the Holy Spirit also subsists in this same unity and equality of substance. For whether he is the unity between both of them, or their holiness, or their love, or whether the unity, therefore, because he is the love, and the love, therefore, because he is the holiness, it is obvious that he is not one of the two. Through him both are joined together; through him the begotten is loved by the begetter, and in turn loves him who begot him . . . The Holy Spirit is, therefore, something common, whatever it is, between the Father and Son. But this communion itself is consubstantial and coeternal, and if this communion itself can be appropriately designated as friendship, let it be so called, but it is more aptly called love. And this again is a substance, because God is a substance, and “God is love,” as it is written. (6.5.7, McKenna) A few things may be observed here: first, as he does in De fide et symbolo, Augustine assumes the idea as a given from Latin predecessors.63 Second, he tends to be quite hesitant about the precise terminology of the idea, as the concatenation of terms in 6.5.7 shows: the Spirit is “something common, whatever it is” (commune aliquid . . . quidquid illud est); she is called in one breath communio, amicitia, and caritas; and 5.11.12 qualifies the idea of communio as something to be taken “in a certain sense” (quaedam). This is not the language of someone developing a programmatic idea of the Spirit as an ontologically necessary mutual bestowal of charity in the interpersonal communion of the Godhead; it is the language of a theologian ransacking concepts to express the singularity of an ineffable idea.64 More substantively, the real concern is patently unity of substance, not relational bestowal. The Spirit is the “communion” of Father and Son insofar as she is one in substance with them, but language about the Spirit’s proprium is most perplexing for Augustine here; for while the Son clearly is begotten, the “procession” of the Spirit doesn’t bear a sufficiently distinct character to qualify how exactly the Spirit’s generation differs from the Son’s. This is precisely the issue upon which Augustine comes to a flustered impasse in 15.27.48. What distinguishes the Spirit from the Son is not completely perspicuous; but what is clear is that the Spirit is one in substance with Father and Son, as her very name demonstrates: because Holy and Spirit are both substance terms, and therefore apply to the divine being as such, the Spirit signifies the common substance of Father and Son. In this sense, their “communion” simply is the essential unity of the divine essence, not a relational event mediated by their hypostatized love. The Spirit is common to Father and Son as proceeding from Father and Son. This point about the unity of the divine substance bears upon an issue that is generally linked to the vinculum amoris theme: the filioque. It is common to assume that the two ideas are linked, if not identical;65 after 98

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all, they both speak to the Spirit’s origin from both Father and Son. But upon closer examination, they are actually mutually exclusive, because (at least in its more personalist reading examined above) the mutual bestowal theme requires the double origination of the Spirit, whereas the filioque as Augustine, at least, thinks of it, understands the Spirit to proceed from the Father principaliter:66 the Father begets the Son in such a way that the Spirit proceeds from them both, but as one principle. But thinking of the Spirit as the hypostatization of the Father and Son’s mutual love means thinking of the Spirit as proceeding from Father and Son as two distinct agents that meet, as it were, in the middle.67 In most contexts in De Trinitate, the mutual love theme appears therefore as a way of illustrating the unity of substance of Father and Son; the Spirit is their communion in the sense that they share the unity of the divine essence as they are the common origin of the Spirit. It is a trope that cannot be literally applied. When he speaks of the Spirit as “gift,” however, Augustine does develop a secondary stratum of the idea. Contemporary readers often posit the mutual love theory as a mutual bestowal of the Spirit by Father and Son upon each other as gift; but if Augustine is not speaking of the Spirit as proceeding from the unity of substance and Father and Son, then he is generally speaking of the Spirit as their common love and gift, not to each other, but to creation: bestowal and gift language of the Spirit nearly always occurs in an economic context. Augustine does not state that our participation in the Spirit is participation in a common relationship of the two, nor does he ever speak of the Spirit as being in any sense the gift of Father and Son to each other; the closest thing we find to such a statement in De Trinitate is at 7.3.6, which shows the same hesitancy as 6.5.7 and 5.11.12 with its “whether . . . whether” construction (sive . . . sive): “whether he is supreme charity conjoining Father and Son to each other . . . or whether the being of the Holy Spirit should be properly and distinctly indicated by some other name, it is still quite certain that he is light because he is God.” The Spirit, that is, can be thought of as the charity by which the Father and Son unite us with the divine life—but once again, the context is unequivocally clear that the point of this is to highlight the substantial unity of the divine being precisely in giving us a share in the divine love.68 The same follows for the discussion of Hilary’s term usus for the Spirit (6.10.11), from which Augustine concludes “that inexpressible embrace, so to say, of the Father and the image is not without enjoyment, without charity, without happiness. So this love, delight, felicity, or blessedness . . . is the Holy Spirit in the triad, not begotten but the sweetness of begetter and begotten pervading all creatures according to their capacity with its vast generosity and fruitfulness.” Once again, we have a piling up of adjectives to describe an ineffabilis idea, against the background of a strong affirmation of their absolute unity and co-infinity. Finally, the text often quoted at 15.17.27, which describes the Spirit as “the common charity by which the Father and the Son love each other,” is followed by a careful discussion of the divine substance of 99

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one substance and one charity (28–29), but the Spirit is distinctively charity because the Spirit is “the gift of God who is love . . . who fires man to the love of God and neighbor . . . and he himself is love . . . through him the charity of God is poured out in our hearts, and through it the whole triad dwells in us” (15.17.31–32). The allusion to Rom. 5.5 in the text just cited is telling, and it is noteworthy that this programmatic pneumatological verse of Augustine’s is also adduced in De fide et symbolo 9.19. There, he cites the text as one of “many proofs from Scripture” for the opinion that the Holy Spirit is the mutual love and charity of Father and Son. This is striking, as the Romans text is something of a non sequitur,69 having no apparent trinitarian overtones at all. But in terms of the Augustinian pneumatology I have been attempting to sketch, it fits perfectly: the Spirit is the love of God by which we love God (“we are not reconciled to him save through Love, whereby we are also called sons,” continues De fide et symbolo), and the Spirit is the transformative and ecclesial reality of the self-giving of God in the incarnation. The Spirit is the charity of God as poured out in the economy of salvation, by which the generation of the Son from the Father manifest in Christ is completed in reconciliation of humanity. To conclude this excursus, I should note that there is real ambiguity here in De Trinitate. Strictly speaking, the statement “Father and Son love each other by the Holy Spirit” is the same kind of statement as “The Father knows all things by the Word”: one that violates the unity of the divine substance, and ultimately makes the Spirit and Word distinct in substance from the Father. This is precisely the kind of statement Augustine ruled out in book 7 when he disallowed a literal reading of “Christ, the wisdom of God.” So our interpretation of the theme has to be nuanced, and recognize some inconsistency in Augustine,70 but the overriding factors are clear: it is always placed within a context of the essential unity of the subsistents in the divine substance, and it is primarily to be interpreted economically when speaking of the Spirit as gift. Augustine at times certainly does draw upon its metaphorical or illustrative meaning, the same way the psychological analogy of De Trinitate has limited mimetic ramifications that follow from its participatory purpose. The one thing Augustine never says, however, is that the Spirit is mutually given or bestowed from Father to Son, and Son to Father;71 and he never represents human redemption as a participation in a trinitarian set of interpersonal relationships. Even the idea of Father and Son loving one another in the Spirit is expressed hesitantly, and in nontechnical terms. The conclusion from this should be that representations of Augustinian pneumatology, such as we find in Williams, Milbank, and Hanby are dubious as defensible readings of De Trinitate, whatever their value as constructive statements on their own terms. Indeed, when we come to discuss Hegel, I will have occasion to question the speculative resonances of the theology of the Trinity as an economy of difference and relation more 100

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closely. Strictly speaking in Augustinian terms, however, we must look for the pneumatological reality of relation and reconciliation elsewhere, in the incarnational realism of Augustine’s totus christus ecclesiology.

Augustine’s Ethical Apophaticism In Chapters 2 and 3, I argued that divine simplicity is an apophatic “signifier” in Augustine’s thought, and that the argument of De Trinitate 5–7 can be thought of as a study of the apophatic “grammar” of his trinitarian theology. By terming this language grammatical, I claimed that it in fact functions to regulate coherent discourse about the divine essence as subsisting in the three “persons” in their mutual relations, all the while resisting the impulse to define the precise nature of the persons as a trespass into the ultimately unknowable divine essence, whose unity stands beyond the limits of human comprehension. We can state that the divine essence is love, but only while we immediately state that the divine essence is identically wisdom, goodness, truth, and the like. This is to say, then, that we really have no idea what the divine being is. One of the implications I have been working toward in the preceding section is the suggestion that trinitarian ontologies of interpersonal reciprocity, centering in the Holy Spirit as a hypostatized relationship of Father and Son, approach a violation of this apophatic grammar. Indeed, trinitarian ontologies in general, with their fervent desire to ground human sociality in the divine exemplar, cross the apophatic boundary. This is not simply because they claim to know too much about the divine life (although this is true), but in so doing they fundamentally change the way trinitarian theology operates. As Barth will remind us, overly ambitious claims about the nature of God have an unhealthy tendency toward ideology. Trinitarian doctrine shifts from becoming a grammar of the reality of redemption and ecclesial life to a discourse of abstraction: the Trinity ceases to be a way of talking intelligibly about the life of Christ from which the church takes its life, and it becomes an ideological principle. The Trinity is the grammar of a mystery, not the architecture of an ontology; and in this final section, I want to argue that, for Augustine, the mystery of the divine life is a mystery that is lived ethically, in the mystery of the frail and damaged social relationships that constitute the church. The problem with the admittedly powerful portrait of Augustinian pneumatology that Williams, Milbank, and Hanby are offering (apart from its weak textual basis) is this: they are effectively claiming that the essence of God is relationality, which is most markedly evidenced in the reduction of the Spirit to a kind of logical moment in an ontology of relation. The paradigmatic Augustinian idea that “the unity of the Trinity is a unity of love” has shifted here, for rightly understood, this simply means that the unity of 101

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the Trinity is the single act of God’s self-bestowal in Jesus Christ, the excess of which we call the Spirit, who is the gift of our own participation in that bestowal. The unity of this love is the singularity of a self-giving act, but all that we can say about the essence of God on the basis of that act has its origin in what we can say about Jesus Christ as the eternal sapientia of God. This is the way Augustine’s thought trends, even though we may need to go beyond him to talk about this more consistently (this is something Barth will help us with). In epistulam Joannis has confirmed my interpretation of this issue, for we have seen that to participate in the body of Jesus Christ by the Spirit is to be bound in love to the neighbor—to participate in the act of divine self-bestowal is to understand the neighbor as the object of that bestowal, and the ethical act of self-giving is, by the Spirit, one with the act of giving in Jesus Christ, for it takes place insofar as we inhabit his body. What this means is that the primary way we contemplate the divine essence is in being called to love the neighbor, and that these acts are a divinizing participation in God. The logic of this is what we call Augustine’s pneumatology. The reading criticized in the preceding section, on the other hand, bears a different structure: love, or relation, generates a concept that authorizes a certain type of practice that, in turn, grounds social identity. Although explicating this structure awaits elaboration in the book’s conclusion, it should be clear why I claimed at the beginning of this chapter that the central thematic would be that of trinitarian personalism, for at issue is the attempt to controvert the assumption, present in both the detractors of Augustine and his would-be defenders, that trinitarian theology’s “use” or “relevance” lies in its significance for authorizing our construction of the person and her relations. The way in which we conceive of the persons of the Trinity, for my interlocutors, grounds the way in which we conceive of the persons that we are. But my reading of Augustine suggests that the analogical link between divine and human persons that authorizes this claim simply does not, and cannot, obtain. Like Augustine, I do not (necessarily) intend to deny any application of the category “person” to God; but I am denying that that application has anything to do with trinitarian theology, where the notion simply functions so that we do not fall silent. The Augustinian use of persona is simply not semantically rich enough to develop a social ontology, and that is for a very good reason. The relations of the “persons” in the Trinity have nothing to do with our relations with other human persons, for the Augustinian categories of “person” and “relation” in the Trinity are sui generis. Bernard McGinn has shown how Augustine’s understanding of mystical anagogy shifts throughout his theological development, to the point that, in his mature theology, the locus of the mystical vision of God occurs in the church.72 Even from the time of the Ostia “vision” with Monica in Confessions, of course, Augustine had broadened the Plotinian “flight of the solitary to the solitary” into a dialogical affair; but the upshot of the 102

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Donatist controversy, as discussed earlier, was to reinforce and deepen this Augustinian idea that the community itself is the site of the vision of God. Thus when De Trinitate is read in light of the incarnational realism of in epistulam Joannis, the implication emerges that, for Augustine, the face of the neighbor himself is the face of God, or better, the face of Christ. The strength of Augustine’s incarnational realism is that for the ascent to occur within Christ, it takes place in the relation with the neighbor. The descent of Jesus Christ is our ascent, and insofar as that descent is the divine self-bestowal on the other, so our ascent is to the face of the other. The trinitarian presuppositions of this radically ethical pneumatology will require some revisiting, as our discussion of the slippage of the vinculum amoris earlier demonstrated. The burden of the argument thus far has been to show that, by virtue of the logic of simplicity whereby Christ is one with the Father, the unknowability of the divine nature lies precisely in the simple and perfect act of self-giving love that is eternally the Trinity, and is manifested temporally in the incarnation. The simplicity and inscrutable unity of God is the presupposition of this self-giving, the simple and single act of God giving Godself in Christ. Apophaticism implies that theological speech comes to an end in unknowing; it is my claim here that, for Augustine, this unknowing is simply the ethical obligation to love the neighbor, and to love God in the neighbor. It is significant that, at the end of De Trinitate 7, after having established the “grammatical” contours of trinitarian predication about the divine essence, Augustine makes no attempt to speak of the divine essence as such; instead, he turns to the image of God, the dialectical knowledge of God articulated in our own act of knowledge and love, which I called an aporetic of self-involvement. We speak of God only by speaking of the self, and in understanding the self to be called to love. We know that God is a perfect act of self-giving love, an act so perfectly identical to God’s own being that we cannot conceive it—we can only act with, and within, it. This “aporetic knot” is a pneumatology of the knowledge of God in the face of Jesus Christ, culminating in a pneumatology of the identity of love of God and neighbor, and trinitarian doctrine is the speculative grammar designed to make it all intelligible. But, as I have just argued, this love of the neighbor is not grounded in a prior set of eternal relations between the trinitarian persons, but a simple realization of the fact that to be in Christ is to be in the church. It is simply the call to love inherent in the fact that God has given Godself to us in Christ, for that giving is the existence of a set of persons in the church, who only are the church insofar as they answer that call as a singular and concrete community constituted in the bonds of charity. The grammar of trinitarian relations serves to guarantee that the divine self-bestowal is identical to the being of God, that Jesus the Son is one with the Father insofar as he is sent into the world and known in time, and that the love shed abroad in our hearts by which we participate in that sending and knowing is in turn one with the Father, in the hypostasis of the Spirit. 103

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The problem of the ontological “grounding” of human relation in a divine relation is that it requires recourse to an authorizing and mediating concept to give structure and content to that relation, and that this conceptual mediation is an abstraction from the concrete, messy reality of trying to live in love with the neighbor. More than anything else, here we see the apophatic boundary running right through the heart of our attempts to love: whereas God just is self-bestowal, we are never wholly identical to our act of giving, but insofar as we act with the grace of God, the shedding abroad of the Spirit in our hearts, we venture into the unknown of the social relation. The truly ethical relation has no conceptual authorization, for the ethical relation is always to a singular other, and that relation is always unrepeatable, unrepresentable, and unstable. This is how we should understand “unknowing” in Augustinian terms: as the aporia in which our act of love and service is the act of the Spirit, who is known only in that act, toward a singular other. A truly ethical act would be to risk giving oneself entirely, without expectation of reciprocity. Such an act would be unrepresentable, both in the inscrutability of its grace-filled performance, and in the singularity of its relationship with a wholly unique and particular “other.” The Spirit is the love of God from God, by which we act in that love. But love remains a risk, a venture into the unknown, and that is precisely the unknowing of an ethical apophasis.

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5 the development of barth’s dialectical ­pneumatology of participation in the church dogmatics

Criticisms of Barth’s trinitarianism in general, and his pneumatology in particular, are not difficult to find in the last few decades of the twentieth century. Barth tends to be critiqued for many of the trinitarian problems Augustine is supposed to be guilty of: an incipient modalism due to an excessively monistic focus on the one divine subjectivity; a pneumatological deficiency owing to the failure to conceive the trinitarian subsistents with a suitable ontological density of personhood; and a tendency to isolate the trinitarian God’s true nature in eternity, at a remove from history. Similarly to Augustine, Barth has been the foil for many contemporary attempts to reconceive trinitarianism with a greater emphasis on relationality and immanence; however, Barth’s significance is unique, because proponents of the twentieth-century trinitarian revival simultaneously build upon his architectonic employment of the doctrine of the Trinity, and deplore his complicity in transmitting many of the deleterious tendencies of Latin trinitarian doctrine. All of the standard critiques can be seen in two particularly influential analyses of Barth’s trinitarianism. In a well-known article, Robert Jenson claims that Barth’s doctrine of the Trinity ultimately reduces to a “binity.”1 Because Barth follows the tendency of Western trinitarianism in failing to theorize “the three as parties of divine action,”2 his use of the vinculum doctrine of Augustinianism entails an erasure of the Spirit as a subject of divine action: “The personal agent of this work in fact turns out at every step of Barth’s argument to be not the Spirit . . . but Christ; the Spirit is denoted invariably by impersonal terms.”3 Moreover, because the Spirit is merely the actuality of the dialogical fellowship of Father and Son, in which they

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eternally covenant for the salvation of humanity, the work of God remains eternally past, with no real eschatological space in which the Spirit might work.4 Rowan Williams, in an early article, advanced similarly damning criticisms. Famously, Williams suggested that there are in fact two doctrines of the Trinity in Barth’s Church Dogmatics, a linear “interpretative” model in volume 1 based on the address of the divine subject in revelation, and a “pluralistic” model of dialogue between Father and Son in volume 4.5 While the former entails a kind of obsession with guaranteeing the infallibility and inviolability of revelation in its sovereign address to receiving humanity, Williams construes the latter in terms similar to those which he found in Augustine: the mutual exchange of life and love between Father and Son is opened out by the Spirit, who in turn animates the human respondent to not merely receive passively, but “to learn a language and so to join a society, to take seriously the ‘strangeness’ of revelation . . . as the manifestation of a life and a system of relations which men are invited to enter and share.”6 Conversely, volume 1’s focus upon the single divine subjectivity in a revelation of address “leaves almost no room for a conception of free, creative, and distinctive human response.”7 I mention Williams and Jenson here simply to signal a problem: understanding Barth’s trinitarian theology involves unpacking the intimate link between pneumatology, Christology and human agency in his theology, against the backdrop of concerns about the nature of divine agency and eternity. This complex of ideas is the same one I have isolated in Chapter 1, and focused upon in my reading of Augustine, where I have argued that it is precisely Augustine’s understanding of divine simplicity and his strict focus upon the unity of the work of Son and Spirit that is the condition of possibility of the gratuitous self-giving of God in Christ, a giving that includes our own response as animated by charity. So at one level, a similar task awaits in Barth, namely, arguing that the points where Barth’s trinitarianism is most critiqued are where it is most vital (if most misunderstood). However, my larger intent here is to continue a constructive argument begun with Augustine: to develop a dialogue between Barth and Augustine’s pneumatology of the knowledge of God in Christ, to the end that Augustine’s theology is enlarged, expanded, or corrected in Barth’s Church Dogmatics (and vice versa). This of course means attending to Barth’s own peculiar theological idiom and concerns. In this chapter I will offer an interpretation of the trinitarian-pneumatological trajectory of the first three volumes of the Church Dogmatics. Even more than was the case with Augustine, I will primarily focus upon Barth’s Christology; for Barth conceives of the doctrine of the Trinity as the discourse that theologically encodes God’s one work of gratuitous self-giving in Christ, a work that includes our own free response to that giving in the Spirit. But as the brief look at Jenson and 106

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Williams has already shown, a major point of contention with Barth is this human response.

The Problem of Human Participation in Reconciliation “In the Peace of the Analogia Entis”8 The thesis of this chapter is that Barth’s pneumatology is the heart of his famous dialectic of revelation, insofar as it is the discourse of the subjective reality of revelation and therefore, the grammar of humanity’s participation in that revelation. The dialectic is designed to configure human participation as the Spirit’s work as a performative or “actualistic” (to use Barth’s term) event of correspondence by faith to the divine act of self-giving in Christ.9 I will claim that the problem that drives the development of CD is the way Barth conceives human participation in God by means of his Christology. The issue is Barth’s ability to provide for a proper correspondence of divine and human agency, which is explicated first in the incarnation and on that basis in humanity generally. This is not to say that I am trying to find space for the integrity and autonomy of the created order within Barth’s overbearing emphasis upon eternity and the sovereignty and action of God in grace. Human agency is consistently real and integral for Barth; instead, the issue is so construing the dialectic of revelation that divine and human agencies properly correspond. There is no question that humanity really participates in Christ. The trick is rather explaining how this occurs, so the problem is not that of filling in a glaring lacuna, but rather reconciling two apparently heterogeneous realities.10 In this sense, Barth tends to work within the same aporetic knot which we observed in Augustine: pneumatology is the theological moment that signifies God as the agent of our participation in Christ, and is the historical and temporal correspondence to the divine self-giving. Moreover, I will continue to claim that this aporia signals the way in which participation in Christ is an ethical reality that is only expressed in performative terms. When Barth is misunderstood or is criticized, it is often his dialectic of revelation that is in question; many revisions of Barth proceed by way of relaxing, denying, or resolving his tension of the divine-human paradox. There are two basic directions in which the dialectic can be undermined: first, the unendurable contradiction of holy God and sinful humanity may be denied, or relativized, in favor of a more peaceful, fundamental, and originary relation between God and world. Because God is creator and first cause, the source of all being as ens realissimum, God is a given—however mysteriously and paradoxically—in being as such, and therefore a possible object of experience apart from grace, even despite human sin and limitation. Indeed God’s givenness in creation is the reality through which our 107

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own reality of self and world is real. Barth calls this the temptation of Schicksal, “fate,” which he characterizes as theological realism or romanticism. It is the first form of the analogy of being: the givenness of God’s reality to the world by virtue of the similarity in being the two share. The second temptation is that of idealism. In contrast to the relative naiveté of realism, idealism recognizes the necessary moment of critical reflection in apprehending the true, which is to be located in the nonobjective ontological presupposition of the given; instead of a continuity of being between God and world, idealism recognizes that the rational is the real. This is a dialectical relationship: thought’s correlation with truth is the basis of the analogy between God and humanity, because thought cognizes the dialectical nature of revelation—God’s givenness entails God’s nonobjectivity, for reason is always guided by something superior to and prior to itself, to which it is not adequate, and which is apprehended in the critical analysis of its limits. Therefore, the similarity between God and not-God is grounded in ever greater dissimilarity, but because this dialectical relationship is realized in thought, it is ultimately the occasion of human self-transcendence—of the sublation of the antithesis. These two characterizations form the heart of Barth’s well-known schematic of “Fate and Idea.”11 It is, of course, oversimplified, and like all typologies never fully applicable to any given thinker. But it is a powerful heuristic for understanding Barth’s thinking, and the way he reads his interlocutors. The function of the analogia entis, scattered throughout the essay, is significant, for it shows an underlying continuity between the two positions:12 in both cases, the agency of participation in God may ultimately be attributed to the creaturely side, whether that participation is the subject’s actualization of a fundamental givenness identical to the dynamism of her ownmost orientation to God, or is the self-transcendence emergent from the subject’s critical reflection upon his own self-reflexivity. That the analogy of being can be understood in both a realist and idealist sense is significant, for the Barthian dialectic is posited in opposition to both alternatives. On the other hand, insofar as Barth can admit degrees of truth in both sides,13 one begins to grasp his lifelong fascination with two figures: Schleiermacher and Hegel. Though Barth names many examples, Schleiermacher is the consummate realist for him—the monism of the Deus sive natura that is realism’s deepest intuition is found in both outward objectivity, giving “the name God to the universe as piously experienced,” as well as in subjectivity, in “God in the feeling of absolute dependence as such.”14 Idealism’s genius, whose greatest exponent is Hegel, is the sublating differentiation of the nongiven from the given, the synthesis of negation and affirmation in the “superior and reconciling tertium.”15 Barth’s dialectic is intended to navigate a way between these two alternatives, the realism/romanticism of Schleiermacher, and the idealism of Hegel. That Barth is more sympathetic to the idealist principle at this point (1929) is 108

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patent in the essay, but in true Barthian spirit, this means that it is the greater temptation. For it is just as egregious to equate reason with God (ratio sive Deus)16 as nature, for neither acknowledges the ethical antithesis of God and humanity, and both attribute human knowledge of God to a natural capacity of the human as such; indeed, idealism is the more pernicious because for it, in a very real sense human reason actualizes the divine-human dialectic. Against both, Barth posits the particularly Christian kind of knowledge as faith, which means knowledge as obedience and election. Theology is grounded in the obedient hearing of the Word, argues Barth, and “God’s Word means God’s election.”17 Thus the rejection of realism and idealism is a way of ensuring that theology’s object lies nowhere other than in the revelation of God, a revelation grounded ineluctably in the agency and subjectivity of God. Only in God’s address by the Word does humanity stand before God—there is no sense in which the subject of that act can be the autonomous human agent. For our knowledge to be knowledge of God, God must first give Godself in Christ, and in that giving, be the principle of our knowing (in Christ). The problem presented in that aporia is the heart of the Barthian dialectic, and the secret of his pneumatology. The way in which that divine self-giving is conceived is at the heart of the Christological intelligibility, and pneumatological correspondence, that Barth will give to revelation in CD. This is the problem that will guide my reading of CD; as such, I will be offering something of a genetic study here, though quite limited in scope, as I will restrict myself almost entirely to the Dogmatics itself.18 In the course of this reading, I want to highlight a significant ambiguity in Barth’s theology. Barth, I will argue, displays a constant ambiguity between two contrary tendencies: in what I will label his “Augustinian” trinitarian trajectory, he privileges a conception of trinitarian self-giving marked by an Augustinian emphasis on divine simplicity, and correspondingly, a consistent articulation of the divine self-identity in revelation in Christ. But Barth also has Hegelian inclinations, so when later readers have picked up on a “pluralist” emphasis in the trinitarian doctrine of CD 4, they are identifying this trajectory in his thought. I claim, however, that both tendencies are in his theology from the beginning of CD, and the pneumatological arc of CD is in a very real sense the battle between two very different theological sensibilities working itself out. For heuristic purposes, I will highlight the distinctions between these two themes more clearly than they actually appear in Barth’s writing; whereas I will tend to identify one or the other tendency in a particular sub-volume of CD, both models often appear on the same page. Nevertheless, they can be clearly distinguished, and as I will show, privileging one or the other has widespread consequences.

The Barthian Realdialektik: The McCormack Thesis Revisited The scope of Bruce McCormack’s landmark study, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, is wide-ranging, but one of his central points 109

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bears directly on my argument.19 So far I have been using the word “dialectic” in a general sense; it should be clear already, though, that this dialectic is not merely a rhetorical strategy, which is the way Hans Urs von Balthasar read it—as a paradoxical juxtaposition of statement and counter-statement, intended to highlight the infinity and inconceivability of God.20 Rather, it represents the dialectical nature (the Realdialektik21) of the object of theological knowledge itself, and therefore cannot be opposed to analogy as simply an alternate mode of theological discourse. McCormack’s contribution is to show how the dialectic of revelation was a consistent theme in Barth’s development from the 1922 edition of the Romans commentary onward, and that with the discovery of the patristic principle of anhypostatic/ enhypostatic Christology in 1924, Barth located that dialectic in the person of Christ: in revelation (unveiling), God veils Godself in a creaturely medium (the human nature of Christ), such that the “infinite qualitative distinction” between God and humanity is inscribed in the person of Jesus Christ himself.22 Because the Logos is the subject of the human nature of Christ, the knowability of God in Christ remains at God’s disposal, and is therefore unintuitable. Thus the revelation of God is indirect in the person of Jesus Christ—the divinity of Christ is veiled in his humanity, even as his life is the unveiling of God. In this respect, McCormack argues that Barth’s significant advance occurs when the time-eternity dialectic of the Römerbrief is articulated in these Christological terms. Following this, Barth’s theology simply had to take the remaining steps from a “pneumatocentric” construal of revelation, focused on the existential, actualistic understanding of the address of God in the moment of revelation, which McCormack identifies as lasting through CD 1/2, to the “Christocentric” understanding of revelation that emerged with Barth’s decisive insight into the doctrine of election in volume 2. From that point, Barth’s understanding of revelation would be thoroughly controlled by his Christology, in that the history of Jesus Christ would be the reference point for the intelligibility of theological discourse. McCormack disputes Balthasar’s influential thesis of a Barthian shift to analogy with the Anselm book.23 McCormack shows both how consistent Barth is in refusing the analogia entis, against Balthasar’s identification of the turn to the analogy of being in CD in the 1930s,24 and conversely, how the analogia fidei, most thoroughly thematized in CD 2/1, is in fact nascent in the second edition of the Romans commentary, and is tentatively articulated already in the Göttingen Dogmatics.25 Finally, McCormack argues, in my view correctly, that the analogia fidei itself is “an inherently dialectical concept,” for it is grounded in the dialectic of veiling and unveiling: the analogy of faith refers most fundamentally to a relation of correspondence between an act of God and an act of a human subject; the act of divine Self-revelation and the human act of faith in which that revelation is acknowledged . . . the analogy which is established in a 110

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revelation event is an analogy between God’s knowledge of Himself and human knowledge of Him in and through human concepts and words . . . human knowledge is made by grace to conform to its divine object.26 McCormack’s definition here coheres well with how Keith Johnson describes Barth’s restatement of the analogia entis as focusing around the relationship of divine grace and human agency, in a text from a few years after Göttingen: it is “a relationship of correspondence between God’s act of grace (in the Word) and the justified human’s obedient response to it (in the Spirit). This relationship is thus the result of God’s moment-by-moment act on both sides of the divide.”27 Both illustrate a crucial point: the Barthian dialectic is oriented around the issue of agency. This is how Barth configures the subjectivity of God in revelation, and the human participation in that revelation, as fundamentally asymmetrical; like Augustine’s transformation of the mystical ascent, Barth’s mature insight is to inscribe that dynamic in Christ himself, for in the person of Jesus it is God the Son who acts, and as he acts enhypostatically, the human nature is united to the divine act. The problem here is the way in which one properly conceives the participation of Christ’s human nature, and by extension, all of humanity, in that divine act.28 The dialectic, as I will be showing, provides the grammar of this participation, and adequately articulating this is the pneumatological logic that develops throughout CD. But this means that the problem is a Chalcedonian one—once it became clear to Barth in Göttingen that anhypostatic/enhypostatic Christology held the answer, a clear articulation of the hypostatic union became necessary.29 I will focus on this issue in the next chapter. Concurrent with this emergent Chalcedonian insight was a continuing alienation of Barth from his Lutheran colleagues, and preeminently the Lutheran dialectical theologians, especially Gogarten. In Göttingen the significance of the doctrine of the Trinity became clear to Barth as the way to avoid the “‘Jesus Christ pit’ of the Lutherans,” which meant, as McCormack notes, “a concept of revelation which was guilty of a deification of the creature— even if the creature in question was named Jesus of Nazareth.”30 The issue here is the Lutheran understanding of the communicatio idiomatum in terms of the ubiquity of the human nature of Christ: that is, the (uncontroversial) participation of the divine nature in the properties of the human nature and the (disputed) participation of the human nature in the properties of the divine.31 For Barth, the Lutheran communicatio idiomatum eased the dialectic of revelation by making this participation of natures mutual and direct, and in so doing, it confused (against Chalcedon’s inconfuse) God and humanity. If we understand the relationship of divine and human natures in Christ dialectically, argued Barth, if the subject of Jesus’s history is the Logos that is nonetheless apprehended only in that human history, then the relationship of eternity and time, revelation and history, and divine and human agency 111

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is indirect, so that humanity’s orientation toward God is God’s own work. But relaxing the dialectic in the equanimity of a mutual co-participation of divine and human natures meant that humanity was agential in revelation itself. But this meant that a door was opened for humanity to stand before God autonomously and for revelation to be construed as a symmetrical relationship, because it suggested a capacity within humanity for participation in God, a capax infiniti.32 Much later, in CD 4/2, Barth would characterize this step as a secret theology of glory—as a covert denial of the mystery of divine gratuity, for revelation and history could be identified, and thus, finally, God could simply be humanity spoken with a loud voice. For Barth, the Lutheran Christology was an incipient Feuerbachianism.33 It is important to note the deeply political motivation here, for this return to nineteenth-century views of faith and history meant a return to the bourgeois Kulturprotestantismus the “red pastor” of Safenwil had opposed so stringently. This worry is clear already in “Fate and Idea,” where idealism’s “second, more audacious step” in recognizing thought’s dialectical adequation to its object threatens to become ideology.34 The significance of the claim that a pneumatology of Christian knowledge concerns knowledge as election, then, is a displacement of the impulse that configures theology as the discourse of ideological projection and political identity production. It is Christian knowledge as acknowledgment of a mystery always already given in grace.

CD 1 and 2: The Analogy of Faith and Election In beginning my analysis of CD in earnest, it is important to recall a major point made earlier, concerning Augustine. A major motif of that study was the aporetic of self-involvement in De Trinitate, by which I meant the pneumatological performance of participation in Christ. For Augustine, to talk of knowledge of God is self-involving, an enactment of the likeness to God by virtue of the gift of the Spirit. In Augustinian terms, the per speculum et aenigmate of De Trinitate 1535 is therefore not simply that knowledge of God is indissociable from knowledge of self by virtue of the fact that God is the soul’s origin and goal—that much Plato or Plotinus could have said. Rather, given this, the imago is a performance of this likeness possible only on the basis of God’s self-giving; God is therefore only truly known and spoken of in the actualization of the imago. The description of that knowledge cannot abstract from the act of participation itself, and the act always shows itself to be given in the prior grace of God. As Paul put it, no one can say Jesus Christ is Lord except by the Spirit (1 Cor. 12.3). Insofar as Barth and Augustine share a common pneumatological grammar, it is located here, in the performative dialectic of Christological participation: to speak of knowledge of God is to speak of God as both 112

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subject and object of the act of knowing, while at the same time to affirm humanity as the free subject of that act as well. This is Christian knowledge as election36—its grounding in God’s gracious and prior decision, which means that ultimately knowledge of God is self-grounding, meaning that this ground is the divine act of self-knowing itself operative by the Spirit in the human agent, with Christ as its object. The function of the doctrine of the Trinity is to articulate the gratuity of God’s self-giving in Christ, and pneumatology enlarges this to so understand human participation in Christ that it is, itself, part of that self-giving of God.

The Analogia Fidei and Correspondence to God in Revelation: CD 1/1 The analogy of faith that Barth develops in place of the analogia entis is at the base of his well-known (and often derided) discussion of the “root” of revelation in CD 1/1.37 The language he uses to describe the analogy is analyzed in a section on the “knowability of the Word of God” (CD 1/1 §6), where he discusses the analogy as a correspondence (Entsprechung) and conformity to God (Gottförmigkeit), which occurs in the human act of decision in accordance with the divine decision. This term is vital for understanding Barth’s handling of analogy; Entsprechung denotes not an analogical mimesis to an exemplar, but rather an enactment of participation in a prior act of grace: Not a being which the creature has in common with the Creator for all their dissimilarity, but an act that is inaccessible to any mere theory, i.e., human decision, is in faith similar to the decision of God’s grace for all its dissimilarity . . . In faith man is in conformity to God, i.e., capable of receiving God’s Word, capable of so corresponding in his own decision to the decision God has made about him in the Word that the Word of God is now the Word heard by him and he himself is now the man addressed by this Word. One is not to seek this capability among the stock of his own possibilities.38 This correspondence, which exemplarily occurs in proclamation, is in truth a “human thought and a human word” yet “a true copy for all its human and sinful perversion, an unveiling of it even as its veiling.”39 This dialectic of veiling and unveiling, which Barth goes on to describe as a “mutual indwelling or union” of divine and human word, occurs insofar as humanity in faith is “opened up from above.”40 Thus, the dialectic is one of agency: God’s agency in revelation, in which humanity participates by grace through faith. The claim of this chapter is that the doctrine of the Trinity is the apparatus Barth employs to articulate this dialectic of revelation, and the way in which human participation is explained is the pneumatological moment of 113

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his thought. However, as with Augustine, this is not to say that this second, participatory moment is a different work from the work of revealing proper, which occurs in Christ. Quite the opposite—God has one work of revelation, God’s self-giving in Christ, and the work of the Spirit is the moment of participation in Christ that is at the same time inherent in that work. This is all a way of paraphrasing what Barth himself describes as the central truth of the doctrine of the Trinity: that revelation is Dei loquentis persona, God speaking in person. The identity of God’s Word with Godself means that revelation is identically God as revealer, revealed, and revealedness: “this subject, God, the Revealer, is identical with His act in revelation and also identical with its effect.”41 Understanding this trinitarian logic depends upon the Christological fixing of the dialectic of Römerbrief already described: if it is understood that the anhypostatic/enhypostatic person of Christ is the action of God in unveiling Godself, then the trinitarian shape of the “root” of revelation signifies the fact that “revelation in the Bible means the self-unveiling, imparted to men, of the God who by nature cannot be unveiled to men.”42 Christ, even as self-unveiling, is the veiling of the hidden God,43 for the form of revelation, the humanitas christi, is not strictly identical to its content; if the humanity of Christ as such were revelation, it would mean “the possibility of having God disclose Himself through man, of allowing man to set himself on the same platform as God, to grasp Him there and thus to become His master.”44 For revelation to be directly accessible in Christ would mean the divinization of the human nature such that the divinity is immediately given in the human nature (this is the “Jesus Christ pit” spoken of above). Instead, for revelation to be a history, the history of the Son, means that it is an act of “concrete relation to concrete men . . . an effective encounter between God and man,”45 and this encounter is the specific historical density or intensity, the being revealed of revelation—the moment of reception in that encounter in history that is simultaneously the excess of the act of God in Christ and identical to it. This third moment is how Barth describes the pneumatological correspondence to unveiling in Christ, the “self-disclosing unity, disclosing itself to men, of the Father and the Son.”46 Thus conceived, the subjective reality of revelation has the same historical objectivity as the objective reality (although it is a secondary objectivity), because it occurs in Christ himself. This relationship of primary and secondary objectivity will be the concern of CD 2/1, but before discussing this theme, a discussion of Barth’s understanding of trinitarian language is necessary.

The Trinitarian Logic of Antecedence It is commonly supposed that the formal trinitarian language of revelation (CD vol. 1) and the narrative trinitarianism of reconciliation (vol. 4) are in some tension, if not contradiction, in Barth’s thought.47 But I would argue that, even if we grant differences in style and focus, Barth is employing 114

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the compressed logic of revelation in CD 1 as a kind of grammar or formal logic which is filled out in content in the dramatic trinitarianism of CD 4.48 The “grammar” of revelation is the dogmatic guarantee that the church’s talk of divine self-impartation in Christ makes theological sense. If we read Barth as following an Augustinian pattern of thinking in understanding Jesus Christ as the entire content of the divine self-revelation and self-bestowal, then this means that for Barth (in what I have called his “Augustinian” trajectory) the referent of speech of revelation is the Word made flesh, even if the register of the two discourses, revelation and reconciliation, are not identical: “Revelation in fact does not differ from the person of Jesus Christ nor from the reconciliation accomplished in Him. To say revelation is to say ‘The Word became flesh.’”49 That this revelation is identical to the Word made flesh therefore means that to properly talk about revelation is to talk in terms of God’s saving address to humanity, reconciliation, which further means that some way of describing the mode of humanity’s participation in that revelation, human persons’ participation in their individual and concrete historicity, is integral to describing the dialectic of that address. The doctrine of the Trinity is a way of encapsulating the self-involving nature of theological discourse: to know Jesus Christ as the revelation of God means to participate in the divine act of self-knowing that is identical to the divine self-giving in Christ, and this occurs pneumatologically, namely, in a concrete and actualistic sense, an event of knowing as being taken up into that self-knowing. The way Barth handles this aporetic is located in his construal of the relationship of the immanent and economic Trinity in terms of what I will describe as the “logic of antecedence.” This is the logic that is the rubric of his doctrine of the Trinity in CD 1/1, which posits that God is antecedently in Godself as God reveals Godself in history. It can profitably be read as an early version of Rahner’s rule,50 and follows from the root of the doctrine described above: the doctrine of the Trinity is, first, nothing but the necessary presupposition, the condition of what must be the case in eternity, for God’s revelation to be a true communication of Godself in history; second, it is the context in which the statement “God reveals Godself as the Lord” is made meaningful, for that revelation is simultaneously God’s self-giving love, and God’s freedom to dispose Godself in love—the unveiling and veiling of Godself in history, therefore. The logic of antecedence circumvents all forms of Sabellianism that would ultimately dissolve God’s self-identity in revelation into agnosticism by rejecting the idea of an immanent Trinity altogether. Barth’s example is the aversion of nineteenth century liberal theology to speak of God in se as “evidence of an illegitimate, metaphysical speculation.”51 In this sense, the logical distinction of the economic and immanent Trinity operates only insofar as it undermines the illusion that such a distinction has any purchase on an ontological difference in God. 115

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Describing the necessary presupposition of revelation, the doctrine is thus a secondary description that answers the question “who it is that reveals Himself, the question of the subject of revelation.”52 Thus the language has a very particular function: it answers how one distinguishes a particular human being acting at a particular time in history as the Son of God. For Barth, this language of subjectivity in revelation opposes the two great errors patristic trinitarianism faced, subordinationism and modalism: against the former, it gives an account of the identity of Jesus with the Father, such that his presence is the form of God’s self-giving, a giving which includes our participation in Jesus as an inalienable moment within that act of God in the Spirit. We can thus know in revelation that we have to do with God Godself, a subject whose subjectivity is that of a total claim upon ourselves. Against modalism, it guarantees that the identity of God’s act with Jesus is the revelation of a depth of freedom and love in the mystery of God’s self-revelation that, while it is beyond our comprehension, still does not understand something behind that subject’s self-giving, an area of reserve that is God’s true deity, untouched by time. As with Augustine, then, trinitarian language has but one function, to guarantee the self-identity of God in revelation: “the doctrine of the Trinity tells us . . . how far the One who reveals Himself according to the witness of Scripture can in fact be our God and how far He can in fact be our God. He can be our God because in all His modes of being He is equal to himself, one and the same Lord.”53 It is important, in understanding Barth, to see why the doctrine of the Trinity in CD 1/1 is relentlessly focused upon the subjectivity and identity of God. To do this, we must be careful to clarify the question Barth’s doctrine of the Trinity responds to: it is not an answer to what kind of being God has in revelation, the question about how it is that God can reveal Godself in Jesus Christ. That is a question that would have to be answered in ontological and analogical terms because it concerns the relationship of the being and act of God: what kind of eternal being can act in time? Barth regards this question as illegitimate, and regularly refuses the “how” question of revelation, insofar as it presupposes an independent access to the event of revelation apart from a self-involving recognition of its claim upon oneself in God’s act.54 To ask how revelation occurs is to abstract from the fact that it has always already occurred. Instead, it is a question about who God is: who is the agent of this act, what subject is it that we encounter in the very particular peasant from the first century ce, and in what sense is that encounter the very ground of our being? This is how Barth’s “actualism” should be understood: it is an ontological concern, of course, but one which refuses the ontological question, for to ask the question about the ontology of God’s act is to assume that there is something more fundamental to that act that grounds that act. But there is no such grounding for Barth—to equate act and being is to claim that being is always singular. 116

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From this logic of antecedence it would seem to follow that the logic of simplicity that we examined in Augustine will hold for Barth as well; and in fact, I would urge that the logics of antecedence and simplicity have the same function. This may not seem obvious, for the logic of antecedence concerns the eternal nature of a historical act, and simplicity concerns the identity of essence inherent in the genetic relations of the Trinity. But for Barth, these are the same claims: the one explicates the eternal trinitarian relations that are the condition of possibility of economic claims about the divinity of Christ; and the other the identity of essence of Father and Son such that the Son is God’s one, total and undivided act of self-giving goodness. They both, in other words, are the theological guarantors that in Jesus Christ we have to do with the very essence of God, which essence we participate in by virtue of his Spirit. One consequence of the logic of antecedence is that Barth’s position on the relationship of eternity and time must be carefully nuanced, since that relationship is the basic grid for understanding the differentiation of the immanent and economic Trinity. This will be a task I take up in more detail in the next chapter, but we can sketch out the alternatives as they are conventionally understood here. If God really is to reveal Godself in history, then God must be antecedently in eternity what God is in each of God’s modes of being in history. Prima facie, this can only mean one of two things: first, that the historical self-manifestation of God in Jesus is actually constitutive of God’s being, in that God’s eternal being is characterized by a historical becoming in the incarnation. In this case, the distinction between God’s eternal and historical being is one of potentiality and actualization. Alternatively, we can understand God’s eternal being as fully revealed in history while remaining free, counterfactually, to have done otherwise in eternity, and while remaining immutably unchanged by the incarnation.55 I will argue in more detail later that both of these exploit themes in Barth’s theology, while missing the central insight of Barth’s understanding of eternity, which avoids the temptation to view eternity and time as incompatible terms that require either collapse or static opposition. In advance of this discussion, and in light of the foregoing analysis of CD 1/1, I can state the matter this way: eternity and time, or the immanent and the economic Trinities, concern the divine subjectivity giving itself in the human nature of Jesus Christ. In the human Jesus Christ lies everything we have to say about the nature of the eternal God, but grasping this fact means participating in the history of this human being, in being claimed by the power of his Spirit, such that knowledge of him is knowledge of God. Put differently, the objective historicity of a human life is the objectivity of God’s own eternal being, even as that objectivity is the objectivity of a subject who is not known like any other object in the range of our knowledge—it is the objectivity of the fullness of eternity in a historical moment. 117

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The Objectivity of Revelation and the Ambiguity of Barth’s Trinitarianism: CD 2/1 The competing interpretations of the significance of Barth’s construal of eternal “antecedence” are not, in fact, foreign to Barth’s own pages. The trick lies in claiming that God’s revelation has a unique objectivity that is different in character from, and incomparable in relationship to, the nature of our knowledge of other objects. This discussion of the objectivity of revelation occupies Barth in his analysis of the “knowability” of God in CD 2/1, and it is the occasion of his first major stumble in the Dogmatics. Knowledge of God’s economic self-manifestation—of Jesus—is real knowledge that has God for an object, but the ground of that knowledge is not the same as the ground of our typical knowledge, which rests upon the adequation of the knowing human subject to its object.56 Thus knowledge of God must be indirect, for God is both object and subject of our knowledge, with our subjectivity only secondary to the act of our own knowing. Our knowledge of God, which rests simply on God’s gracious election, is (once again) dialectical, because it is not given to our disposal. The objectivity of God in our knowledge is mediate, veiled insofar as a creaturely reality represents the divine objectivity, but really represents it.57 There are therefore two problems in the issue of knowledge of God: how to conceive God as subject of the knowledge of Godself (i.e. how to conceive the self-grounding nature of knowledge of God); second, how to conceive the human participant as a real but secondary subject of that knowledge. The answer to both, correctly conceived, lies in Barth’s pneumatology. I will take these problems in reverse order, for the second is quite consistently answered by Barth, while the first introduces a deep problem. Barth handles the problem of human subjectivity in the knowledge of God in terms of primary and secondary objectivity of the divine subject. The objectivity of God is not restricted by the fact that we have to understand God Himself as the real and primarily acting Subject of all real knowledge of God, so that the self-knowledge of God is the real and primary essence of all knowledge of God . . . He is therefore objectively present in a double sense. In His Word He comes as an object before man the subject. And by the Holy Spirit He makes the human subject accessible to Himself, capable of considering and conceiving Himself as object.58 God is first objective to Godself, and secondarily objective in revelation— knowledge of God in revelation is grounded in God’s own self-knowledge, which causes us to participate in that self-knowledge by the impartation of the Spirit.59 Thus, while the Spirit, in the terms used in CD 1/2, is indeed the subjective reality of revelation, this does not imply that the gift of the 118

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Spirit is to be understood as subjective, that is, correlated with our own religious apprehension, our self-consciousness or subjectivity.60 The Spirit is the same objective reality of revelation as Jesus Christ. But she is that eternal reality of God by which we are made subjects of a knowledge in faith that participates in God’s own self-knowledge.61 This secondary objectivity of pneumatology is operating at a different level than the primary objectivity of Christology: it is the excess, the surplus, the “intensity” of divine self-giving in Christ by which we participate in that giving. It is a second, performative level of description or meta-discourse with reference to the historical reality of Christ. But given this qualification, the work of the Spirit nonetheless inheres in precisely the same objectivity as the objective reality of revelation, Jesus Christ. This is why revelation’s character as self-grounding is not fideistic, which is to say, ungrounded: its ground is precisely the ground of being itself, God’s own self-knowing. But the way Barth handles this question of primary objectivity, God’s self-knowing, forms the first major problem I noted above. Here Barth admits a fracture into his trinitarian thinking that will take the remainder of CD to resolve, and which explains, in part, deep divergences among his interpreters. There are two respects in which God can be objective to Godself, encapsulated in the following quote: “he is immediately objective to Himself—for the Father is object to the Son, and the Son to the Father, without mediation.”62 By calling this self-relation immediate, Barth seems to be following a similar line of thought as Augustine in De Trinitate. If the Son is identical in essence with the Father, then God cannot know Godself as subject to object, which is a mediated self-relation. It implies a moment of intratrinitarian negation resolved by the mediation of the otherness of God to Godself in Father and Son.63 Jesus Christ simply is the self-demonstration of God, a self-demonstration identical to the God’s self-knowing, which in turn is identical to God’s being. This would fulfill perfectly the logic of antecedence of 1/1: the Word addressed to humanity would be the Word that is always God’s self-expression. However, in 2/1 Barth is seriously beginning to work with a problem that complicates this model of revelation. Although it is driven by the need to conceive human participation as a historical reality, this solution involves a conception of divine self-knowledge incompatible with the one just described.64 In order to accommodate human subjectivity as a secondary participation in God’s self-knowing, Barth differentiates the moment of subject and object in that self-knowing, in order that God may not only be the I of revelation, but the Thou that knows that I. The Thou is the “outside” of revelation, in which humanity may participate: God is object in Himself and for Himself: in the indivisible unity of the knowledge of the Father by the Son and the Son by the Father, and therefore in His eternal and irrevocable subjectivity. But in his 119

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revelation God is not only I. He is known—from outside, for in an incomprehensible way there is an outside in relation to God—as Thou and He . . . the actuality of revelation and of the knowledge of God based on revelation is just this: . . . that He also become an object Himself for these objects created by Himself.65 The problem here repeats an equivocation that occurred already in 1/1, where Barth inconsistently applied his own insight about the veiling and unveiling of revelation by differentiating the referents of those terms within the Trinity and attributing the dialectic to the relationship of Father and Son: the Father remains hidden as the I while the Son is the Thou and He given in revelation, in God’s work ad extra.66 Barth’s own best instinct is to consistently locate that dialectic in the person of Jesus Christ, thus affirming a Realdialektik in which the entire essence of God veils itself in unveiling itself in the human medium of Jesus Christ. But instead, here in CD 2/1 Barth is grounding the possibility of human knowledge and participation in an analogical relationship to an ontological ground in the Trinity itself which is the reciprocal differentiation of Father and Son. The possibility of revelation then resides in God’s self-objectification, not in God’s self-bestowal; but, as my reading of Hegel will make clear, this posits a moment of internal negation in the divine essence in order to provide the possibility of knowing God as an other. And this will have momentous consequences for our capacity to identify the knowledge of Jesus Christ with the knowledge of God the Trinity. It is worth remembering that the problem Barth is trying to solve here has to do with the integrity of human participation, in that he is trying to give it a divine, objective ground. But he is compromising that divine ground in the very act of doing so. Our accessibility lies solely in the free self-giving act of God, or in Barth’s terms, in God’s lordship and grace. “God’s good-pleasure is His knowability.”67 Positively, this means that to know God is for God to give Godself utterly to us. Negatively, it means that as entirely grace, it is unsolicited and inaccessible except insofar as it gives itself. The problem is that, with recourse to an ontological “ground” within God, Barth is in some sense vitiating his own restriction to the singularity of God’s subjectivity in revelation; this intratrinitarian dialectic produces a real difference between God’s eternal self-knowing in the Son, and the external self-speaking in revelation which follows from the resolution of God’s self-knowing in otherness. For revelation to be different in character from the relation of origin of Son from Father is for revelation to be adventitious to that origin; mission and procession become fundamentally different “moments” in God, insofar as procession functions “behind the scenes” to ontologically ground God’s self-speaking ad extra. In short, the Trinity becomes the ontological mechanism that allows God to speak Godself in revelation; but then God’s being becomes different than God’s knowability. 120

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The ambiguity Barth is introducing here is one of the coherence of his account of revelation. This is not yet manifesting as a tacit analogia entis and natural theology, as, I will show, it does in CD volume 3. But in a sign of things to come, it is significant that Barth’s opposition to the natural theology of the Vaticanum in this part-volume relies upon precisely these themes:68 the knowability of God, he says, must accord with the unity of God, which means that the knowability of God cannot be grounded elsewhere than in God’s revelation, implying that the noetic and the ontic components in the knowledge of God cannot be distinguished. The unity of God is the unity of God’s work and action—the simplicity by which God is as God reveals Godself to be in Jesus Christ, which further means that our participation in that revelation, the revealedness of the revelation, is identically God’s work in the Spirit as the subject of the history in which we know God. The only analogy between God and humanity is that which “is posited and created by the work and action of God Himself, the analogy which has its actuality from God and from God alone, and therefore in faith and in faith alone.”69 Thus the problem of human participation remains under the disavowal of analogy; insofar as God is Subject in revelation, human participation cannot be a matter of a sharing of being. Self-identity in revelation, from which the refusal of natural theology follows, is a matter of unity, or simplicity. To introduce a distinction between God’s essence and work is to introduce a diversification of the essence of God. And this is to enervate revelation in Jesus Christ of all integrity. To posit self-reflexivity in God’s essence as a basis of that work risks compromising simplicity.

Election and the Mystery of Gratuity: CD 2/2 This connection of gratuity and revelation gives some insight into understanding how Barth’s momentously revisionist doctrine of election in CD 2/2 revolves around his development of human participation in God’s self-giving. Barth’s famed doctrine of election has two functions: first, it operates as a polemic against understanding election and the economy of grace as fate—as an arbitrary choice of an abstract deity. He warns that this is the inevitable result of abstracting from the concrete life of Jesus Christ as the revelation of God in talk of election. This point has been widely recognized among readers of Barth; but Barth has a second goal. If election is to be understood concretely, then not only is the act of election in Christ concrete, which is to say, enacted historically as a singular event; so also, the life of the concrete humanity that is taken up into Christ is a participation that is “actualistic,” or grounded in the particular history of Jesus. In other words, human participation must have precisely the same kind of objectivity as revelation does itself. Thus CD 2/2 is at least as important for Barth’s pneumatology as it is for his Christology. As we will see, his adaptation of the Augustinian totus christus motif is key to this move. 121

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In CD 2/1, Barth had addressed the concern of speculative “encroachment” on the eternal divine mystery while discussing divine hiddenness; encroachment is the Ritschlian refusal to “speculate” about the eternity of God (premised on the Kantian rejection of the viability of such speculation) out of fear that doing so would distract and abstract from God’s self-giving in history.70 But the trinitarian logic of antecedence in CD 1/1 requires discursive ascriptions about the nature of God as such, as the presupposition of their economic intelligibility. This is not unwarranted encroachment on our part, argued Barth, an arbitrary projection into an intrinsically contentless abstraction. God’s knowability is the objective reality of God’s self-givenness—of “the encroachment which God Himself has made in His revelation in Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit . . . this self-demonstration is his revelation as the triune God.”71 Thus God’s knowability, grounded in God’s being, is also the unknowability of the mystery of gratuity. The dialectic of revelation returns: revelation is not the abrogation of divine hiddenness— quite the contrary. Revelation simply redefines the meaning of that term. For Barth, the hiddenness of God cannot simply be a function of our epistemic limits, for to posit the infinite as the unknowable surplus of the finite is simply to extend the reaches of cognition beyond its limit, to comprehend the incomprehensible under a concept. Instead, the divine hiddenness is the freedom of God to love without reserve, the judgement and grace under which humanity falls by God’s act in revelation: “the very hiddenness in which He is here revealed is only the mark of the grace of His revelation, with the knowledge of which our knowledge of God must begin and from which it must never depart.”72 The veiling of God is the unfathomable condescension of the incarnation, the gratuity by which the divine nature undergoes the alien and the strange in taking on human flesh.73 We can even see Barth constructing an apophatic approach in similar terms to Augustine, one which conceives the incomprehensibility of the divine nature as an ethical claim, not simply an epistemological one: it is the utter gratuity of a nature which is fully and completely love, which is so fully free as to be characterized by a total self-giving, whose self-identity is self-donation. To this self-giving belongs our correspondence in trust and obedience—our performative participation in God’s self-knowing. So to claim agnosticism about God’s nature is a presumption about God’s ability to give Godself; to rate our epistemological limits higher than God’s capacity to reveal Godself in love is an act of blasphemy.74 What is more, this kind of agnosticism is itself an abstraction, ironically, from the fact that the concreteness of the divine self-giving in Christ objectively reveals something given within the mystery of God. The logic of antecedence is not speculative; it seeks to understand the ethical depth of God’s encroachment in history. The key issue in revelation is not the kind of being God eternally has (this is a speculative question); it is rather the identity of the God who has already revealed Godself, and this is a concrete question about Jesus’ identity with the Father. 122

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Understanding CD 2/2 as a treatise on the mystery of revelation in this way is illuminating, for it allows us to read Barth as working with a particular kind of ethical apophaticism. “What is the meaning of the mystery of the freedom of this divine work? The will of God in His grace knows no Wherefore. God’s decision is grounded in His good-pleasure, and for that reason it is inexplicable to us.”75 For Barth, the great temptation in traditional Christian theologies of election is to think of divine eternity, the antecedent presupposition to the economy, as empty and contentless, an indeterminacy that only commits itself to the incarnation in a decretum absolutum, a voluntaristic arbitrary determination.76 Barth’s innovation in introducing Jesus Christ as the subject of election with the Father is to take so seriously the unity of revelation and its antecedence, that is, the unity of the Son with the Father, as to claim that the election of Jesus Christ, as the eternal (supralapsarian) will of God, is in fact the act of Jesus Christ. The divine self-identity in essence and act is total. Thus talk of divine mystery—even, or perhaps especially, mystery as the gratuity of grace, of God’s good-pleasure—must carefully clarify just how the mystery is not that of an indeterminate abstraction, a vacuum without content expressed solely in the voluntarism of a self-grounding will. This is the great problem Barth sees with traditional predestinationist theories of an absolute decree, which eventuate in sheer determinism, or in a term already seen, Schicksal, fate. His antidote is the strict restriction of theological discourse to the revelation in Jesus Christ, such that talk of God’s eternal decision to determine Godself for humanity in Jesus Christ entails that the incarnation is in some sense an eternal event within the trinitarian life of God. Later I will discuss in detail what this latter point might mean, including the apparent rejection of a logos asarkos; what is important for our purposes here is the way that the Barthian dialectic continues to receive Christological content. The dialectic is meant to express the asymmetry of divine and human agency in revelation and redemption, the fact that human participation and divine participation operate at fundamentally different levels such that human participation is itself a divine work by the Spirit (while for all that remaining fully human). This is a way of talking about divine transcendence as the prior condition for God’s “immanent” act in history, which is a deeply Augustinian idea. But if God’s mystery is the mystery of a self-disclosing gratuity, of an essence that is so identical to its act that its act of self-giving just is its essence, then—again as with Augustine—God’s transcendence is a transcendence of “affections,” of love. God transcends us by the perfection of God’s love, and God’s act of loving self-giving so perfectly corresponds to God’s nature that they are identical—God is the simplicity of self-giving love. Our participation in that love is our reception of it in the knowledge of God; Augustine called it sapientia, and Barth Entsprechung, correspondence. It is an ethical act because it concerns the orientation of our love as it is centered in our faith in Jesus Christ, which is the eternal self-giving of God precisely as temporal. It is the quality of a temporal act invested with eternal content because that 123

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eternity itself is given in history. But Barth takes a step in his doctrine of election that Augustine does not, for Augustine contents himself with saying that the Son is the temporal manifestation of an eternally self-speaking God. Barth will now say that the history of Jesus Christ is in fact the eternal existence of the Son of God—that the history of Jesus Christ is, without remainder or qualification, what it means to describe God as self-donating.77 The importance of the move is that the objective reality of election has a subjective reality of what is in fact reconciled (redeemed humanity), whose objectivity obtains precisely as the objectivity of Jesus Christ. To abstract from this reality of redeemed humanity is just as egregious as to abstract from the concreteness of God’s act in Christ: in Barthian terms, theology speaks insofar as the theologian herself is always already caught up in that act. The existence and act of the human being Jesus, and all others in him, is the act of God, and thereby, free. The human act, just as free, is enclosed within the divine act; there is an asymmetrical relation between divine and human agency in revelation and reconciliation. Here, once again, we see an important confluence of Barth and Augustine. In reading the latter’s De Trinitate, we saw pneumatology as a performative enactment of participation, as an ethical act of love with God’s own love shed abroad in our hearts, which gave the trinitarian treatise a performative form itself; De Trinitate is the spiritual exercise of a mystical ascent (duly reconfigured in Christological terms) to the loving union with God that is sapientia. Pneumatology is an inherently performative, dialectical discourse of self-involvement. So with Barth in CD 2/2; in keeping with his insistence that the history of the covenant between God and humanity is a concrete, particular one (“this God and this [person],” as he put it in the Römerbrief), the nature of theological discourse itself shifts. Election and predestination means that God has determined Godself, not in an abstract eternal act toward humanity in general, toward which we can take a position of neutrality and indifference; rather, the content of that eternal predestination, as it is enacted in the history of Jesus Christ, is the encounter and exaltation of ourselves. Our performance of that participation is the witness to the fact that our participation is accomplished already. Election takes the form of a summons and address to a subject. Thus theology becomes something altogether different—it becomes witness of that event. As Barth says, “we abandon not merely the language and style but also the intention and attitude of definitive investigation and exposition, and pass over directly to what is . . . the genre of preaching and pastoral admonition.”78 The latter pages of CD 2/2 become a direct address to the reader, an enactment and performance of the address of election. The theological context for this address is located in the covenant, described in terms which directly recall Augustine’s theme of the totus christus: In this name [of Jesus Christ] we may now discern the divine decision as an event in human history and therefore as the substance of all the 124

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preceding history of Israel and the hope of all the succeeding history of the Church . . . under this name God Himself realized in time, and therefore as an object of human perception, the self-giving of Himself as the Covenant-partner of the people determined by Him from and to all eternity.79 In these terms—the headship of Christ—the final step of Barth’s profound rethinking of the anhypostatic/enhypostatic configuration of the dialectic takes place.80 Although the dialectic always had the Word made flesh for its content, the more formal terms of CD 1/1 largely functioned to Christologically situate the interplay of veiling and unveiling in human flesh and divine Subject; here, Barth is unfolding the implications of this in terms of this person’s history. This means that the divine act of self-determination has its content in the election of a man who, as the member of a covenant people, represents that people by his obedience to God: “in and with the existence of this man the eternal divine decision has as its object and content the execution of the divine covenant with man, the salvation of all men.”81 In other words, the objective reality and subjective reality of revelation are the person of Jesus Christ, for his obedient correspondence to God is the divine act of determining humanity’s determination for Godself. Jesus Christ, as human, is both the destiny of human nature as exaltation to fellowship with God, and the manner of participation in that exaltation.82 Participation language is pneumatological language; but as with the epistemological discussion of CD 2/1, the subjective reality of revelation partakes of precisely the same objectivity as the objective reality, for the subjective reality—participation in Christ by the Spirit—has the same content as its object, the self-giving act of God. And now, we see that that act is the humanity of Christ to which we correspond in faith and love, by recognizing and acknowledging ourselves as members of a covenanted people—as in Christ our head, our lives hidden in Christ with God.83 An important implication of this move—that the humanity of Jesus is the content of the eternal self-giving of God—is that, if we are to follow Barth, we must rethink the relationship of the human Jesus and the divine Father. As we have seen, it is common among Barthian interpreters (and, increasingly, sympathetic Augustinian interpreters) to talk of reconciliation as a participation in the relationship of the Son and the Father, as an entry into the communion of the Godhead through the humanity of Jesus. But if Barth is right and Jesus Christ is subject and object of election, which means that in his humanity he is the self-identity of the divine act as a dialectical inclusion of humanity in the divine being, then his human existence as the covenant partner entails a representation of all humanity. Unfolding the full dimension of Jesus Christ as representative (Stellvertreter) will take place in CD 4; but for now, it is important to see that everything about the relationship of the Son to the Father has to be conceived exactly as the 125

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subjective reality of revelation in the Spirit—as God’s agency of our act. In other words, God’s self-donation is God’s self-relation, for God’s self-giving is Jesus Christ, just as our participation in that self-giving is Jesus Christ. The pneumatological reality of revelation is Jesus Christ as the totus christus, we ourselves, responding to God insofar as that response is a form of the divine act toward us. And that act has the form of witness and mission as an ethical act of historical existence, for the church’s essence is identical with Jesus Christ, the self-speaking of God in act.

CD 3: Barth’s “Brazen Identification” and the Analogia Relationis I have argued that CD volume 2 represents an important turning point in the development of Barth’s thinking on the pneumatological dialectic of revelation. 2/1 inscribes that dialectic within a rigorous disquisition on the knowledge of God, but also introduces a serious trinitarian ambiguity; Barth’s desire to ground knowledge of God in God’s own self-knowledge meant that he started to think of the immediacy of that self-knowledge in terms more like that of Hegelian reflexivity—God’s self-knowledge meaning the Father’s knowing of the Son as an object, and therefore the Son being a mediating self-knowing of the Father. 2/2 does not directly mitigate this tension; but it does tend in a different direction than CD 2/1, in that its focus is on grounding human participation in the humanity of Christ as covenantal participation in his headship, and on that covenantal history as the Urgeschichte that is in some sense the eternal trinitarian history. We don’t have an eternal act replicated in a historical act; the historical act in some sense is the eternal act. The four part-volumes of The Doctrine of Creation cannot be given extensive attention here; however, I do want to argue that a particularly notorious theme of volumes 3/1 and 3/2 has an important bearing on these themes, and therefore upon my reading of the pneumatology of CD. This is Barth’s account of gender relations and the human I–Thou relationship as ­constitutive of the image of God. I want to suggest here that, however much Barth’s thinking on this point might simply lapse into an ideological blind spot,84 there is a much deeper issue at play, connected to the themes just discussed, which will have implications as far as CD 4/1. The issue once more revolves around the issue of analogy—specifically, the function of the imago dei as an analogical correspondence to the life of the Trinity. The analogia fidei of CD 1/1 and 2/1, while it is not described by Barth as the image of God, is nonetheless an Entsprechung of the knowledge of God to God’s self-knowing, insofar as both of these are identical to the act of divine self-disclosure in Christ; alongside this, however, in CD 2/1 we saw another analogical relationship emerge, one in which a subject–object otherness in God functioned as the ontological 126

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ground of the relationship of humanity and God. This is something far closer to the analogia entis Barth attacked so thoroughly in that very volume: a personalist ontology of I and Thou in which both God and humanity participate, the divine relationship providing an exemplar for the mimesis of the human. Interestingly, Balthasar’s famous developmental thesis about the turn from dialectic to analogy in Barth is largely grounded in evidence from CD volume 3.85 This reading would locate an analogical turn in volume 3, in Barth’s analogia relationis. Here Balthasar has read rightly: Barth does make an analogical move in his doctrine of creation, but this is part of a tension in Barth’s trinitarian thinking that is superseded by CD 4/2 (as I will argue in the next chapter).86 What Barth is attempting in volume 3 is to think the history of creation as the history of the covenant foregrounded in 2/2, and to think that with due Christological rigor. Jesus Christ is both the noetic and ontic ground of the knowledge of creation as creation: creation is known as God’s insofar as we understand it as the presupposition of the covenant enacted in Jesus Christ, and creation exists because he is its goal and origin: “Jesus Christ is the Word by which the knowledge of creation is mediated to us because He is the Word by which God has fulfilled creation and continually maintains and rules it.”87 But the way in which this ontic basis is articulated leads to a substantial problem that replicates the pattern of CD 2/1 in sharper clarity. The tension between the analogical theme of CD 2/1 and the self-giving theme of 2/2 lies in the fact that, if our knowledge of God is grounded in God’s own self-knowledge, that cannot entail a strict correlation of the mode of knowing. God the Father does not know himself in the Son, as we know the Father in the Son. Augustine showed the incoherence of this in De Trinitate 5–7, and as I have just argued, it actually distracts from the revelatory centrality of the history of Christ. In 2/1, the awkwardness of this analogical claim is balanced by the careful attention Barth gives to the objectivity of Christian knowledge: the subject of the knowledge of God is God in the person of the Spirit, such that the subjective reality of revelation, the historical reality or intensity of participation in revelation, is grounded in the same objectivity as its object, Jesus Christ the Word of God. Put in dialectical terms, any “analogy” between human and divine knowing occurs only insofar as that human knowing, which takes the form of faith by virtue of its object (which demands knowing as fidelity), is a free knowing that occurs as a receptive participation in the divine act of self-knowing. Human participation is in fact the encounter of the divine veiling, the mystery of gratuity, which means that it is a performative enactment of that gratuity. But Barth’s doctrine of creation does not follow this dialectical logic, and that is its failure. Here the ambiguity of a divine self-objectification manifests in a covert reinstatement of analogy, which legitimates something very like natural theology. Deploying the same problematic logic that crops up in 2/1, in 3/1 the human relationship to God as creator has its analogue in 127

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a relationship internal to God Godself—the begetting of the Son: “creation denotes the divine action which has a real analogy, a genuine point of comparison, only in the eternal begetting of the Son by the Father, and therefore only in the inner life of God himself.”88 Thus the creation of humanity is the creation of a counterpart to God that mirrors God’s own non-solitariness: The creative basis of [humanity’s]89 existence was and is a history which took place in the divine sphere and essence; a divine movement to and from a divine Other; a divine conversation and summons and a divine correspondence to it. A genuine counterpart [Gegenüber] in God Himself leading to unanimous decision is the secret prototype which is the basis of an obvious copy, a secret image and an obvious reflection in the coexistence of God and man, and also of the existence of man himself.90 It would be one thing were Barth simply to claim that the analogate to God’s relationship to Godself were the relationship of God and humanity (this is the extent of the analogy in 2/1); but Barth also goes on to claim that that analogy has a mimetic correspondence in the existence of “man himself,” in the “true confrontation and reciprocity which are actualised in the reality of an ‘I’ and a ‘Thou.’”91 In other words, he locates this I–Thou personalism in the creation of humanity as male and female. But here he has entered into decidedly non-Barthian territory, for “the tertium comparationis, the analogy between God and man, is simply the existence of the I and the Thou in confrontation.”92 This analogia relationis is beginning to look very much like an analogia entis, a stable, structural analogical relationship in the ontological order independent of revelation: the relationship of man and wife bears a mimetic correspondence to the relationship of Father and Son.93 It is, of course, not quite so simple, for Barth is quick to add that the analogia relationis occurs only in an act of freedom, in the actualistic terms of encounter and decision.94 But the underlying problems are not thereby removed. First, the heteronormativity operative here is, put simply, arbitrary. Whatever the control the biblical text holds in the argument,95 Barth must take recourse to the same kind of ideological legitimation of natural theology he so deplored in the German Christians, for here gender binaries are grounded in the structure of creation, such that, ominously, the realization of one’s humanity is connected to these patriarchal norms.96 Barth’s logic here looks very much like what Helmut Gollwitzer characterized as the “brazen identification” of the social order and the order of creation that legitimated the German Kriegstheologie, which Barth opposed so strongly in the Römerbrief.97 It is the very essence of ideology to invoke revelation as the legitimation of a social institution, as Barth well knows; but this is precisely the structure of the analogia relationis in CD 3/1 and 3/2. The 128

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“completion of man by the woman” is in fact “the secret, the heart of all secrets of God the Creator.”98 The problem here is even more palpable in CD 3/2, where Barth extends many of these themes in an explicitly anthropological fashion. But here the tension between Barth’s two tendencies in trinitarian thinking is highlighted once again. On the one hand, the covenantal-historical theme emerges, for humanity is real humanity only in Jesus Christ, in which the eternal election of Jesus Christ is the election of his humanity, and thus the revelation of God’s election to the totus christus. When Barth draws an opposition between “phenomenal man” (CD 3/2, §44.2) and “real man” (§44.3), this is grounded in the fact that Jesus as representative is the true (wirklich) human, and that his temporal history is the Urgeschichte99 from which our human history (“phenomenal man”) is derived. The Christological dialectic is reaffirmed: Jesus’s true humanity, just as true and genuine humanity, is God’s own work,100 and because this humanity is a history, an act, so our humanity’s fundamental nature is our act, our decision and history vis-à-vis God.101 When he talks this way, Barth is waging an assault against “abstraction” in the same way he was in CD 2/2. The presumption of abstraction is that the concrete and actualistic relationship with God is something ancillary to general human nature as such; but if being is act, if to be a human being is to act in decision, then humanity just is its decision; and if real (wirklich) humanity is Jesus Christ, then Jesus in his decision for God means that real humanity is humanity for God. Jesus, in fact, is the condition of possibility for the knowledge of human existence as such.102 Hence, the totus christus motif becomes a way of speaking globally about humanity as such. Thus, “the ontological determination of humanity is grounded in the fact that one man among all others is the man Jesus . . . we are condemned to abstraction so long as our attention is riveted as it were on other men, or rather on man in general.”103 The being of humanity is fundamentally to be called by God, and to correspond to God in responsibility and gratitude—gratitude being the act in which humanity becomes a subject vis-à-vis God insofar as it is first the object of God’s grace.104 But then Barth makes a disastrous mistake. Following the pattern of CD 3/1, where the logic of antecedence that characterized CD 1/1 is transmuted both into a trinitarian ontology of divine relation and an ontology of creation as the presupposition of covenant, Barth invokes an analogical ontology on humanity’s part, which is located in its relational freedom. It is a point that would confuse the reader of Barth’s Nein! against Brunner, for it posits a kind of point of contact, or potentia obedientialis, between God and humanity in human freedom. What defines wirkliche Mensch ceases to be Christ, and becomes an abstract quality: “the concept of freedom is thus the decisive definition of what we mean when we describe man as subject” that is the latent and unfathomable abyss behind this subject’s positing of itself in 129

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its freedom to say I and Thou.105 As in 3/1, Barth is not defining freedom as such as an analogia entis; but he is abstracting from humanity’s freedom for God as a predicate of God’s singular act of grace (where the human being is confronted by God’s address) to a capacity of humanity’s creatureliness as such.106 It is in this context, then, that humanity’s Grundform is its being in I–Thou encounter, and exemplarily (following the same logic as 3/1) in the male–female relation.107 As with CD 3/1, the primary significance of the man–wife relationship is its analogy to that of Yahweh and Israel and Christ and his church; but this is only because the human being is characterized by its capacity for relation to a Thou in which it produces its identity. Despite its exegetical basis (he is discussing Gen. 2), the underlying theological structure of Barth’s argument is showing dangerous flaws. The problem, I submit, lies in the way in which Barth is developing the analogia fidei. The pattern in Barth’s trinitarianism I have been tracing since CD 2/1 that has tended toward trinitarian pluralism, that grounds human knowledge in a self-reflexive divine knowledge, tends increasingly toward an enervation of his own dialectic, because it reifies the dialectic in a divine ontology, instead of allowing the tension of the dialectic to stand as a historical, actualistic event in Jesus Christ. If human knowledge analogically replicates divine knowledge, there is no reason for that knowledge to be dialectical, which means, for it to be a human performance of a divine act. This analogical-ontological pattern is particularly characteristic of CD 3/2: “God repeats in this relationship ad extra a relationship proper to Himself in His inner divine essence. Entering into this relationship, He makes a copy of Himself . . . It is a question of the relationship within the being of God on the one side and between the being of God and that of man on the other.”108 The problem that has emerged with full clarity in volume 3 is this. The second model, which I have labeled as Hegelian, demands an economy of grace characterized by the mutual production of identity and the instrumentalization of the other. In seeking a ground for God’s capacity to relate ad extra, in seeking an analogia relationis, Barth has given us a set of relations characterized by strict ontological necessity. Just as God needs another to know Godself and escape the confines of a static and monistic substance, just as God’s life becomes a dialectical economy of identity production, so man needs another—woman—to know himself and escape the solipsism of the solitary self. But, as we will see in the conclusion, this ontology of the recognition of the self in the other is a very ugly ethic: it operates under the instrumentalization of the Other, the reduction of her to the Same as the medium of the ego’s self-positing. Consistently articulated, as here, it cannot but be an ethic of the master and the slave, or, patriarchally, man and “helpmate.” Over against this, as I have been arguing, is the construction of CD 2/2, an “Augustinian” model, with rather different results. It is a consistent 130

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Christological version of the dialectic that accounts for human participation in Christ’s representation. In the much-maligned “revelation model” of the Trinity in CD 1/1, which is filled out in the careful christological articulation of 2/2, Barth trades on an account of simplicity similar to Augustine’s— where the Trinity is the articulation of a singular divine self-giving in Christ, where the history of Jesus Christ is what it means for God to be self-giving goodness. In this account, there is no dialectic of relation in the Godhead, no eternal history, which is replicated in time; God simply is eternally self-bestowing, and the form which this takes is the history of Jesus. In this trajectory, Barth has no need of a ground for God’s self-giving in an antecedent economy of self-reflexivity, because grace is self-grounding, and God’s self-relation is immediate, without reflexivity or mediation. By an act of total grace, humanity is incorporated into the covenant body that Christ takes on, its identity as church and as human totally gift, which means that participation will take the form of a corresponding act of gratitude to God’s goodness in the Spirit. And the result will be an ethic that cannot be characterized by the grim necessity of the economy of identity that Barth offers in CD 3/1 and 3/2. It is not until 4/2 that Barth obtains the christological clarity on this point that allows his pneumatology to emerge in its fully Augustinian sense. Thus I will turn in the next chapter to a reading of the monumental Doctrine of Reconciliation.

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6 the vicissitudes of barth’s trinitarianism in cd 4

In the previous chapter, I traced the development of Barth’s trinitarian thinking through CD 3, and argued that a tension characterizes Barth’s doctrine of the Trinity throughout this period. Rather than a neat division between a linear, revelation-oriented model in volume 1, and a pluralist, communion-oriented doctrine in volume 4, as Rowan Williams argues, Barth’s trinitarianism tends to equivocate. Both tendencies are in his thought from at least volume 2. Earlier, I argued that Augustine transformed his Plotinian metaphysical inheritance1 by a strategy of appropriation and displacement, and that the grammar of this destructuring is his pneumatology—the subjective enactment in charity of God’s self-giving in the incarnation. Something similar is happening between Barth and Hegel across the broad landscapes of the Dogmatics. Barth was frank in “Fate and Idea” about his own idealist sympathies, and as McCormack has rightly argued, it is precisely idealism that gave his realism its Christological vividness in the dialectic of revelation. But this indebtedness is a mixed blessing, because Barth’s idealistic tendencies are always in danger of doing just what the term implies—reducing theological categories to principles of speculative thought. While he interprets the dialectic through Chalcedonian dogma, it is often, in Barth, an open question as to which side of that equation is driving the dynamic. Most significantly, his Christology sometimes flirts with the reduction of Christ to a dialectical principle or function, at the expense of his incarnational realism in which his theology is materially driven by the eschatological reality of Jesus’s history. We saw this trend most significantly in CD 3, where the incarnation becomes less the driving center of the doctrine of creation and more an analogical principle that provides an ontological framework. In this chapter, I intend to complete my reading of the pneumatological dialectic of CD, tracing the grand scope of volume 4 and the vicissitudes of the tension I have just named. In volume 4, Barth will once again take up 133

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the Christological dialectic of the anhypostatic/enhypostatic person of the Son, in the course of revisiting his understanding of the Lutheran-Reformed debate over the communicatio idiomatum which so exercised his relationship with his Lutheran colleagues earlier in his career. Analyzing these issues will occupy much of this chapter, before I conclude by discussing a fundamental issue that has heretofore remained in the background: Barth’s understanding of eternity. In volume 4, both of the tendencies I have been analyzing in Barth come to a head. On the one hand, the Hegelian pluralism that characterizes volume 3, where it legitimates a deeply problematic patriarchal personalism, persists into CD 4/1. But beginning especially with 4/2, Barth’s better instincts reemerge as he swings back toward what I have characterized as an “Augustinian” position, when he reinforces his position on the communicatio idiomatum. This leads him to clarify unresolved issues that led to the problems of volumes 3 and 4/1. By CD 4/3, he has effectively returned to the trinitarian model of volume 1 (in fact he claims he has done so),2 incorporating all the insights of 2/2 in the process—he has now fully accounted both for the divine subjectivity in revelation/reconciliation (the terms are perfectly synonymous at this point) and the mode of human participation in that revelation by virtue of his Christology.

The Ambiguity of Barth’s Christology in CD 4/1 In the previous chapter, I adverted to Barth’s uneasy relationship with Lutheranism, a relationship that is not unrelated to his status as a Swiss expatriate in Germany for many years. His break with both the Kulturprotestantismus of his predominantly Lutheran teachers, and with the dialectical theologians like Gogarten and Bultmann, was due in significant part to underlying theological issues that crystallize in his Reformed appropriation of patristic anhypostatic/enhypostatic Christology, articulated in the dialectic of revelation. As Barth employs it, this position eliminates two undesirables at a stroke: first, the static law-gospel dialectic of Lutheranism in light of the clear Reformed priority of the gospel; and second, the Lutheran interpretation of the communicatio idiomatum in favor of the Reformed emphasis upon the unio hypostatica. Against the former, Barth advocates a “teleological” direction to the dialectic of revelation—God’s revelation is always oriented toward and based in God’s grace. Against the latter, Barth sharpens the dialectical tension between humanity and divinity by means of his dialectic of veiling and unveiling as an act of the Logos enhypostatic in the human nature of Jesus Christ. As always with Barth, the issue driving the disagreement is Christological—the need to correctly articulate the relationship of the divine and human essences of Jesus Christ, and therefore, divine agency and human participation in reconciliation, a dynamic that Barth describes as the “irreversibility of the relationship between God and 134

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man.”3 This irreversibility is the clear priority of the divine agency in grace within the dialectic. This mature form of the dialectic gives CD 4 its shape as a whole,4 which progresses from a consideration of the Son of God in 4/1, to the Son of Man in 4/2, to the unity of the divine and human essences in the person of the mediator in 4/3. Thus, in CD 4 the divine act is self-unveiling veiled in a human history in which God nevertheless attests Godself to faith in Jesus Christ—the dialectic always tends to knowledge of God in grace, and therefore, incorporates the work of the Spirit that is the reception of the self-authenticating witness of Jesus Christ. But this architectonic shape notwithstanding, the perspective of CD 4 is far from static; in fact, as I have already suggested, a shift occurs between 4/1 and 4/2, with 4/3 bearing the fruits of that shift. Detailing this move is our primary task.

Jesus Christ as the True Human: The Barthian Alternatives With the full scope of the doctrine of election and its ingenious handling of human election in Christ as its presupposition, Barth’s full incarnational realism emerges in volume 4. This concerns the actuality of the atonement and the covenant in Jesus Christ, and therefore, the eschatological identity between humanity as such and the humanity of Jesus Christ. Put in Barthian terms, the relationship of humanity in Christ, and humanity as such, is one of full eschatological identity between wirklich, real, humanity and phenomenal humanity. Jesus Christ, who is the covenant between God and humanity and the eternal Word of God insofar as he is the eternal act of God’s self-disclosure, is alone “very God and very man in a temporal fulfillment of God’s eternal will to be the true God of man and to let the man who belongs to Him become and be true man. Ultimately, therefore, Jesus Christ alone is the content of the eternal will of God.”5 Therefore, the act of God in Jesus “is the most actual thing in heaven or earth.”6 The singularity of that act of reconciliation—what we might call its simplicity—follows from its historical character.7 The idea that Jesus Christ is the covenant in person is a development of Barth’s insight in the doctrine of election: Jesus Christ, as true humanity, carries all of humanity within him as the totus christus. The category Barth uses to discuss this treatment of the incarnation as wirklich humanity is Christ as the “representative,” the Stellvertreter.8 Jesus Christ in his history is the singular act of God binding Godself to humanity, and determining humanity for Godself.9 Barth has become lucidly clear about this in CD 4/1, a fact which announces itself in the title of §57.2, “The Covenant as the Presupposition of Reconciliation.” The classically Barthian term “presupposition,” Voraussetzung,10 is important here, for it demonstrates that his theological thinking follows from a prior wirklich reality: the eschatologically and eternally real act of God in election which is antecedent to and 135

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therefore determinative of human reality. But we have also seen that the election insight is not without ambiguity, for the intelligibility of Barthian talk of divine self-determination for humanity can be worked out two ways. The first, Hegelian, sense takes the form of God’s self-objectification to Godself, Father to Son, in which the act of being which is God’s essence is to be differentiated from the act of being in which God determines Godself to relate outward. In this case, the antecedence of God’s act in the economy of salvation to God’s act in eternity has an analogical structure that produces a created prototype on the basis of a prior self-production. In the second sense, with Augustinian logic, God’s act of self-determination is identical to the begetting of the Son, in that the Son, Jesus Christ the electing God, is simply God’s act of self-bestowal and disclosure. The Son is the procession by nature of a God whose essence it is to be the self-giving good; there is no distinction between self-determination for humanity and an essence that overflows itself by nature, because its essence is goodness. In the first, possibility is prior to reality, for the possibility of God’s relation ad extra is grounded in God’s self-relation. In the second, reality is prior to possibility—the reality of God’s relation ad extra is the presupposition of its possibility: God just is, eternally, self-giving in Jesus Christ. This equivocation is trinitarian in nature because the first model in a very real sense must posit a divine essence in abstraction from the relation of Father and Son (which is begetting), in which an abstract or contentless divine essence first determines to be self-relating, to self-actualize, prior to God’s being as Father and Son. For this problem to arise, these moments of self-determination and actualization need not be actually distinct moments in God’s being; it is enough that these are logically independent moments, for then act and being, essence and existence, have been differentiated.11 The great (and self-proclaimed) Barthian innovation, of course, is to actualize the doctrine of the Trinity—to understand the history of Jesus Christ as the act of divine self-determination, to so fully identify act and being that to seek an ontological ground of the history of Jesus Christ becomes superfluous, and an abstraction from the reality of that act. This is the reason Barth rejects the logos asarkos, which differentiates between the enactment of the covenant and an eternal basis for it in a prior trinitarian eternal history. Jesus Christ as the eternal self-giving love of God is the covenant in which God is eternally joining humanity to Godself and performing humanity’s partnership in the incarnation. This eliminates any sense of a divine self-relation which is the ontological ground of an external relation—for this would be to posit a supplement to revelation, a deus absconditus “behind” revelation, a mysterious and inaccessible realm of divine decree; instead, the mystery of God is precisely the fact that Jesus Christ is an act of total divine self-giving in inconceivable love. The Hegelian option second-guesses this actualism by seeking an ontological grounding for its actualization, but in so doing it falls prey to the danger of the arbitrary voluntarism Barth went to great lengths to oppose in CD 2/2. 136

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That Barth sees the shortcomings of the Hegelian option is evident in CD 4/1. He critiques the temptation to find the ground of election in eternal divine self-determination when he rejects Reformed Federal theology, in which covenant history is eternally based in a transaction enacted between Father and Son, as the ontological precondition for the historical actualization of the incarnation and atonement: Was there any need of a special decree to establish the unity of the righteousness and mercy of God in relation to man, of a special intertrinitarian [sic] arrangement and contract which can be distinguished from the being of God? If there was need of such a decree, then the question arises at once of a form of the will of God in which this arrangement has not yet been made and is not yet valid.12 Barth sees, therefore, the issue, which is not simply one of tritheism, but a more fundamental problem of an abstract being of God antecedent to and actualized in a trinitarian decree. Although the example Barth rejects is an old one, his problem with it is in what I am calling its Hegelian logic. But as we will now see, that logic runs deep through one of his most decisive moves in CD 4/1.

The “Astounding Conclusion” of Divine Obedience and the Persistence of Hegelianism The problem comes in the first exposition of Barth’s Christology of volume 4, “The Way of the Son of God into the Far Country” (§59.1), which deals with the great tension at the heart of the dialectic of revelation when it is located in the incarnation: the history of Jesus the Son is a history “which stands in the greatest possible contradiction to the being of God . . . this man wills only to be obedient—obedient to the will of the Father . . . the true God—if the man Jesus is the true God—is obedient.”13 God is obedient to God, and following the logic of antecedence, God must eternally be in Godself what God is in history. So once again, Barth has two options before him: first, to reject the incompatibility of divine sovereignty and obedience, or majesty and humility, on the grounds that God’s act of reconciliation truly reveals who God is as perfect simple self-donating love in Jesus Christ. In this case it is not an abrogation, but the perfect fulfillment, of God’s immutability for God to become human in a history of humiliation because God’s unchanging nature is God’s steadfast self-giving love.14 But a second option is to accommodate the contradiction of divine immutability and human suffering by conceiving it as a dialectical relationship of self-differentiation or alienation in the essence of God, a split between Father and Son. This Barth calls “supreme blasphemy.” “God gives Himself, but He does not give Himself away . . . of what value would his deity be to us if—instead of 137

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crossing in that deity the very real gulf between Himself and us—He left that deity behind Him in His coming to us?”15 Barth’s alternative is to affirm the Augustinian trinitarian logic of simplicity, which is ultimately ethical in nature: God’s simple, immutable nature is exhibited in the humiliation of Jesus Christ, in that “He is absolute, infinite, exalted, active, impassible, transcendent, but in all this He is the One who loves in freedom, the One who is free in His love . . . the forma Dei consists in the grace in which God Himself assumes and makes His own the forma servi.”16 But Barth’s exposition is fraught with ambiguity as he tries to work this out. For all his talk of a “blasphemous” alternative to be avoided here (which would soon be carried out with uncanny literalness by Jürgen Moltmann),17 his next move sounds remarkably similar to it. It comes in the course of an ontological explanation of “how” God became human, which becomes just the kind of thing his doctrine of election was designed to preclude: an explication of divine possibility in abstraction from its reality. This is Barth’s “astounding conclusion of a divine obedience,”18 which consists of positing a history and intratrinitarian relationality in God prior to the work of reconciliation in the incarnation, in relationship to which God’s work ad extra is a “reflection . . . an image and likeness” that is the analog to the “twofoldness of the existence of man . . . in the inner life of God Himself.”19 Because there is in the economy a first and a second, an above and a below, a prius and a posterius, there must be in strict exemplarity an above and a below, Father and Son, in the Trinity. The “Third,” the Spirit, maintains the unity of God as a fellowship (or better, history) between the Father and Son: “He is God in their concrete relationships the one to the other, in the history which takes place between them.”20 But God is God in these concrete relationships only insofar as, in eternity, God the Son is eternally subordinated to the Father, thus setting a pattern that can be replicated ad extra in the economy of salvation. What is important to see here is how, once again, Barth has taken recourse to a trinitarian model that works against his best instincts, and how the real power of his dialectic has been enervated by mapping that dialectic onto the trinitarian relations, rather than the person of Christ. If, as I have been arguing, the dialectic of revelation and reconciliation is ­ultimately a Christological dialectic, then this is irreconcilable with a trinitarian dialectic.21 The dialectic contained within the hypostatic union in the asymmetrical relationship of divine and human natures preserves something that a dialectic among the trinitarian subsistents, in the relationship of Father to Son, does not. In CD 4/2 and 4/3 Barth will more consistently understand Christ’s obedience as the form divine love takes in its self-giving in humility, rather than an act of self-alienation within the divine essence—which has the odd result of preserving in the untouched Father the very kind of static immutability that Barth wants to oppose. In this, Barth is offering a transcendence of distance, 138

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to which corresponds a mirroring of being in a pattern of subordination that bridges both sides of the divide. This pattern of subordination is not accidental; this “astounding conclusion of divine obedience” is where the troubling ethical implications of Barth’s trinitarian personalism reemerge. Just as in CD 3/1 and 3/2, the I–Thou dialectic of the Trinity was analogically replicated in an I–Thou personalism of hierarchy and subordination in humanity by the name of husband and wife, so the “mirroring” that Barth is speaking about in CD 4/1 means that the lordship and servanthood of Father and Son also demands a hierarchical analogy in humanity. In this context, it is the valorizing of hierarchy and humiliation as ethical exemplars in what Paul Dafydd Jones calls the “ethically and doctrinally injurious” shape of Barth’s “crudely hierarchical relationship” of Father and Son.22 The Christological thematic of Entsprechung, correspondence, has now become a kind of mimesis, and we have an ideological reification of tyrannical power relations.23 Further, this ontological ground functions as just the kind of Urgeschichte—an eternal exemplar in relationship to which time functions as a mere moving image— that Barth’s critics fear in his Christology, and which goes against the clear articulation of Urgeschichte as the history of Jesus in CD 2/2. Here Barth’s Urgeschichte is approaching the “theological totalitarianism” Richard Roberts fears.24 Thus, to imagine the history of Jesus differently, we have to look to the account of the “royal man” in CD 4/2.

Reformed Christology and the Pneumatological “Transition” in CD 4 I have said that CD volume 4 as a whole takes the form of the Christological– pneumatological dialectic of revelation. However, the dialectic is never an easily isolable, structural element of Barth’s thinking, because revelation itself is inherently dialectical, a Realdialektik which cannot be abstracted from without the loss of its power. The dialectic characterizes every moment of his theology, from the rhetoric of the argument to the architectonics of CD to the content of individual doctrines. Any given theological moment, including the consideration of the humanity of Jesus Christ in CD 4/2, is articulated according to the anhypostatic/enhypostatic character of revelation itself, for any given theological moment takes its shape in relationship to its Christological center. This fact explains the complex structure of §64, “The Exaltation of the Son of Man,” particularly §2, “The Homecoming of the Son of Man.” In this section Barth takes on the technical Christological problems of Protestant theology’s encounter with Chalcedon most directly, for the aporetic of the dialectic—human participation in revelation—becomes sharpest in that encounter, as the intersecting lines of divinity and humanity 139

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touch one another like live wires. CD 2/2 has provided the formal solution to this problem in the election of Jesus Christ as Stellvertreter of humanity, but in 4/2 Barth has to articulate how, precisely, the history of Jesus Christ bears the dialectical shape of election. Thus 4/2 contains the most potent articulation of Barth’s pneumatology, just because his explication of the humanity of Christ is precisely where his pneumatology functions.

The Problem of the Hypostatic Union The heart of “Jesus Christ, The Servant as Lord” (CD 4/2) is §64.2.2,25 the consideration of the incarnation as such. Following Barth’s continual emphasis upon anhypostatic/enhypostatic Christology,26 it concerns the eternal election of God in its historical fulfillment in the incarnation, in “the act of divine majesty which is the meaning and basis and power of this event and therefore of the humanly temporal being of Jesus Christ.”27 As such, the divine act is both ratio essendi and ratio cognoscendi, both the ground of being and the ground of knowledge of Jesus Christ the Son. This strict correlation of the orders of being and knowledge follows from the epistemological pattern set back in CD 2/1: our knowledge of God in Jesus is a secondary act whose objectivity obtains in the primary objectivity of the reality of God. Our recognition of the new act of God has the same reality as God’s giving of Godself in Jesus Christ.28 This epistemological dynamic is the pneumatological logic of the dialectic: God has veiled Godself in acting in the human history of Jesus the man, and this act “discloses and declares and attests and reveals itself,” but only insofar as “the participation of the knowing subject in the new thing” occurs in the testimonium Spiritus sancti.29 Knowledge (Kenntnis) of God takes the form of recognition (Erkenntnis), a subjective participation in the divine act which is identical to the secondary objectivity of that act, the objectivity of God Godself in history, because the ground of that knowledge is the ground of being itself. In contrast to the picture of pneumatology noted above in CD 4/1, where the Spirit is the third moment reconciling the alienating dialectic of prius and posterius in the Trinity, here the Spirit is the act of love that is God’s self-giving, “the divine act of majesty” that is the “eternal love in which God is the one God outwards as well as inwards.”30 The work of God ad extra is, of course, the history of Jesus Christ; so what Barth is saying here in pneumatological terms is that the Spirit is the intensity or excess, the “majesty” of God and therefore the “eternal love between the Father and the Son” in the sense that the Spirit is the Seinsweise of God in which the overflow of the act of God in the Son incorporates humanity into that act, into Jesus Christ.31 This is a different kind of logic than that seen in 4/1:32 instead of the “humility of God” being a transaction of lordship and submission between Father and Son, here the Son is the mode of being of God as the humble God. The Son is the Word or act in which God determines Godself for humanity in 140

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the history of a human being. The determination of Godself for humanity is identical to the determination of humanity for God, for the humanity the Son assumes is “humanum, the being and essence, the nature and kind, which is that of all men . . . which is posited and exalted as such to unity with God.”33 As such, Barth reminds us that, in speaking of the election of Jesus Christ, we are speaking of “Jesus Christ and His own . . . Jesus Christ as the Head of His body.” The Son acting as a man acts as Stellvertreter, as the head in which the body of the elect is contained, the totus christus.34 Having noted this, I can examine Barth’s treatment of the communicatio idiomatum. McCormack has downplayed the significance of the anhypostatic/enhypostatic Christology for this seminal section of the CD,35 but I would argue that Barth is clear here about the importance of those categories for the relationship of divine and human agency in the incarnation, and this clarity is absolutely fundamental to resolving the trinitarian ambiguities I have been noting.36 When Barth speaks of the unity of the subject Jesus Christ in communio naturam,37 in which unity there is a “true and genuine participation” of both divine and human essence in the other,38 the relationship remains asymmetrical, in that the human nature is enhypostatized by the Son: “the unification of divine and human essence in Him . . . rests absolutely on the unity achieved by the Son of God in the act of God . . . in the one Subject Jesus Christ divine and human essence is united, but it is not one and the same.”39 What makes this point so important is that it is a careful guarding against abstraction, in the service of a clear Christological logic. To speak of a communio naturam without the controlling category of the unio hypostatica is to indulge in a dangerous piece of reification in talking about the relationship of two natures (or “essences”) without considering the subject who unites them. For Barth, there is no divine essence, or human essence, as such; there is the one Logos speaking and acting, and in that speaking and acting actualizing the divine essence and hypostatizing the human essence.40 Any “properties” of divine or human essence exist only as determinations of that one subject acting in unity with, and as, God in a human history. Thus, in a theme that will occupy the rest of §64.2 (and had been a motif at least since Göttingen), Barth takes a clear preference for the Reformed unio hypostatica over the Lutheran emphasis upon the communio naturam and communicatio idiomatum.41 Barth worries that the Lutheran privileging of the communicatio idiomatum drains the tension out of the dialectic of revelation and reconciliation, by neglecting the Chalcedonian “without confusion” of the natures: the communication of humanity and divinity dissolves the distinction, and thus distinct role, of each. The communication of attributes means a “de-divinisation” of the divinity, and thus a loss of the gratuity of the incarnation that comes with it being a singular act of the divine subject;42 conversely, the divinization of the humanity makes it agential in the event of revelation: “the Godhead can be seen and grasped and experienced and 141

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known directly in the humanity of Jesus Christ,”43 and thus falls prey to all of the ideological pitfalls we saw in the previous chapter regarding the “Jesus Christ pit.” To correctly articulate the matter of human participation in God, and thus of human agency in revelation, it is vital that the relationship of divine and human essence be asymmetrical. The movement of the incarnation is a humiliation of God and an exaltation of the human, but the mutual participation is not commutation: “the determination of His divine essence is to His human, and the determination of His human essence from His divine . . . the word mutual cannot be understood in the sense of interchangeable. The relationship between the two is not reversible.”44 If the divine agency in reconciliation is one of total self-giving, the human essence of Jesus Christ is what happens when God reveals and gives Godself in the incarnation. For humanity to be wholly passive here (including the humanity of Jesus) means that its participation is its calling to receive and to correspond, to be the agent of an act whose subject is God, and in so doing to be made free. Barth’s concern about the “divinization” that would occur in the transformation of the human essence means, in Christological terms, that the human essence of Jesus would be agentially contributory to the act of the Son in the incarnation. Barth does note that the Lutherans were careful to forestall the latter possibility,45 but for him the fact remains that the communicatio idiomatum, despite their intentions, involves a “compromise [of] both the true deity and the true humanity of Jesus Christ.”46 The integrity of reconciliation is well-served by neither compromise. His concern to preserve the divine agency of “true deity” is not an inflexible a priori allegiance to immutability, or to the principle of finitum non capax infiniti, but rather springs from a concern to focus upon the subject of the history of Jesus Christ, and thus the saving act of God. This is a concern for the singular gratuity of the incarnation, the excess of grace that is the eternal nature of God. The problem is that if the human essence of Jesus is deified, then, because the human essence of Jesus is the Stellvertreter for all human beings, humanity as such gains a potency for deification and “through this door it is basically free for anyone to wander right away from Christology.”47 Indeed, Barth ties this Christology directly to the anthropology of the “wonderful flower of German Idealism,”48 recalling the warning we saw already in “Fate and Idea.” Thus the reason Barth is meticulously guarding against reciprocity in the relationship of the two natures in Christ, and correspondingly, in the relationship of divine and human as such (for that relationship is identical to the communion of the two in the Son), is that reciprocity would be precisely the convertibility of subject and predicate in which Luther becomes Feuerbach. Barth’s discussion of the communicatio gratiae and operationum then fills out his concern for preserving the “true salvation and saving truth” of Jesus Christ: the act of God in the incarnation is not the exaltation of the 142

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human essence by virtue of an alteration and divinization, but an address and communication of grace. This means that from the asymmetrical relationship of divine and human agency,49 the self-determination of God for humanity in God’s election unites all of humanity in Christ their head such that human exaltation takes the form of a participation in the divine act, the correspondence of gratitude to grace.50 This address and correspondence is the actualization (operatio) of divine and human essence in the Son, which Barth famously proclaims thusly: “We have ‘actualized’ the doctrine of the incarnation . . . we have re-translated that whole phenomenology into the sphere of a history.”51 Grandstanding rhetoric aside, this statement does indeed encapsulate Barth’s great insight—the actualistic, historical understanding of the incarnation, with its highly particular focus upon the human Jesus Christ as the act of God in which reconciliation is accomplished, and from which every other dogmatic statement derives its intelligibility. This is the hinge upon which everything that Barth has said previously turns: the ambiguities and difficulties in talking about divine actualization, and self-positing, and the question of Urgeschichte—all of it is intended to understand and portray the life of Jesus Christ as that history in which “God becomes very God and very man.”52 Whether or not Barth is as radical as he supposes in his actualism,53 he has taken a decisive step in his focus upon the act and being of God as revealed in a singular history, a history that all human participation in God inhabits contemporaneously: “when we say that Jesus Christ is in every age, we say that His history takes place in every age. He is in this operatio, this event.”54 Because the hypostatic union is the act of God in which God determines Godself for humanity, and humanity for God, the incarnation is a “special actualisation” that is the “great divine and the great human novum.”55 As will become clear in the final section, what Barth is doing here lies on a complete rethinking of the divine relationship with history.

The Pneumatological “Direction” of the Dialectic I have said that the vitality of Barth’s pneumatology rests upon the basic asymmetry of the dialectic of revelation, and therefore the asymmetry of his Christology, understood in terms of his anhypostatic/enhypostatic formulation of the incarnation. This asymmetry is a way of articulating the fundamental priority of the divine act that operates in and as a human history. The mystery of the particular human life of Jesus is that it is the perfect, self-bestowing life of the divine. That we know and acknowledge and respond with gratitude to this act is the pneumatological operation of that act as grace. The Spirit is that act as it announces itself and authenticates and grounds itself in the objectivity of God’s own being. Our subjective participation in and performance of the self-giving of God is the historical intensity or excess of that act’s objectivity in Christ. This asymmetry, thus, 143

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is not a “static” dialectic of no and yes, law and gospel; it tends always to reconciliation, to knowledge of God as a sharing in the novum of God’s act in history—it has what Barth calls a direction (Weisung). This teleological direction is the “transition” from Christ’s history to ours, from wirklich humanity to our humanity, and it is where Barth’s pneumatology emerges with its fullest clarity. Every part-volume in The Doctrine of Reconciliation is organized similarly around a “transition” (Übergang) section that bridges the Christological section proper, and the consequent sections on sin, reconciliation, and ecclesiology.56 These transition sections capture the “direction” of the dialectic, in the sense that grace proceeds from the act of God in the humanity of Jesus to the reality of our own act and existence by the Spirit, who incorporates our humanity into the wirklich humanity of Jesus. Thus every Christological move in CD 4 has a corresponding pneumatological reality that is later applied ecclesiologically and ethically. The Übergang sections are the following: §59.3, “The Obedience of the Son of God: The Verdict of the Father”; §64.4, “The Exaltation of the Son of Man: The Direction of the Son”; and §69.4, “The Glory of the Mediator: The Promise of the Spirit,” in 4/1, 4/2, and 4/3, respectively. The trinitarian arrangement of the transition sections is obvious, but in addition, each section is pneumatological internally. While later paragraphs in each volume concern the Spirit in terms of ecclesiology and ethics (e.g. §67, “The Holy Spirit and the Upbuilding of the Christian Community,” and §68, “The Holy Spirit and Christian Love”), in each case the work of pneumatology has already been accomplished in the Übergang. This construction of the volumes of The Doctrine of Reconciliation follows from Barth’s rubric that the content of Barth’s pneumatology is Christology, just as the content of wirklich humanity is Jesus Christ. This in no sense denies the reality and integrity of the former, but it does establish the order of human knowing in correspondence with the order of being. Our participation in the Spirit takes the form of the knowledge of Christ, the grateful acknowledgment of the new being that is his life, in that he is the content of the act of God, even as that act of God includes our own lives and histories. His history is the dialectical principle of our theological knowledge. If the singularity of the history of Jesus Christ is the form of God’s self-giving in grace, then there can be no further work of God—the work of the Spirit is that work insofar as it becomes our own history by divine grace. Our own very real existence, and our own very real participation in Christ, both take the form of a gracious surplus to the work of God in Christ that is the content of our freedom. The Übergang from Christ to us is where the work of the Spirit occurs, the subjective performance of participation in Christ as Überfluss, superfluity.57 This language of human “superfluity” seems designed to provoke interpreters of Barth who worry about the erasure of human agency; but his point is not to relegate human life to irrelevancy but to highlight the profound gratuity of humanity’s incorporation into God’s 144

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gracious love. What Barth is characterizing is utterly beyond any kind of ontological closure, but is burst open by the overflowing grace of the gift of the Spirit. The “transition” section of CD 4/1 establishes the content of Christ’s life in the act of the Father; CD 4/2 concerns the dialectical logic of the history of the incarnation itself; thus CD 4/3, in capturing the unity of the act of the Son as mediator between God and humanity, is the history of the Son as the eschatological elevation of humanity into union with God as an ethical determination of our existence. Human participation—what Barth characterized in CD 1/1 as revelation’s “effect,” in 1/2 as revelation’s “subjective reality,” and in 2/1 as knowledge of God’s “secondary objectivity”—is now unambiguously configured as a Christological category. The Übergang is a way of characterizing our contemporaneity with the history of Christ; it is the eschatological character of the historical existence of reconciled humanity as a transition from a past of sin to a future of life, from judgement to grace, toward the “future man” Jesus Christ.58 Section 59.3 opens up the eschatological character of the transition, as it discusses the resurrection of Christ that is the basis of the justification of the sinner in §61. The resurrection is the revelation of the eschatological quality of the new act of God in the incarnation, which objectively justifies and sanctifies humanity by making that act contemporaneous to us. Insofar as human nature is exalted in the history of the wirklich human being Jesus Christ, our histories have their human reality by participation in that history. This eschatological relationship is grounded in the resurrection, where God’s act is declared for our acknowledgment and participation. Recalling the dialectical structure of the knowledge of God in CD 2/1, Barth characterizes the knowledge of that act as self-grounding: the witness of the Spirit, the testimonium Spiritus sancti internum, participates in precisely the same objectivity as the act itself, the incarnation. This eschatological power of the Spirit is both that in which “the Son of God assumes human essence and therefore becomes the Son of Man, exalting human essence to fellowship with the Godhead” and also where “there takes place the self-revelation of Jesus Christ as the One He is.”59 The witness of the Spirit is itself the Übergang from him to us: “The witness of the Holy Spirit brings about this transition—the transition of the self-witness of Jesus Christ into Church history, into the history of individual lives, into world history.”60 Thus the resurrection is the act of transition, the teleological direction of the dialectic of revelation—that moment in which the dialectic of hiddenness and unveiling issues decisively in unveiling, when the new act of God is made known by taking us up into itself in acknowledgment: “As His self-revelation, His resurrection and ascension were simply a lifting of the veil. They were a step out of the hiddenness of His perfect being as Son of God and Son of Man.”61 This is not to say that revelation loses its character as mystery—quite the contrary, it is the very essence of its character as 145

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mystery that God acts to reconcile the world and takes up humanity into the true humanity of Jesus Christ the Son.62 But this act of revelation nonetheless has a historical, human space within which it occurs, the totus christus that corresponds to it in its eschatological character. It is important to be clear here: for all the space Barth has devoted to arguing for the objective reality of justification and sanctification, for its accomplished character, this reality is eschatological, the future that is our destiny.63 Thus it is not given as such, as if the knowledge of God could leave behind its dialectical character and proceed on to something more direct, immediate, and unveiled. The knowledge of God is always a correspondence, a performance of mystery, for the resurrection is known in the reality of the Holy Spirit, which means, in a temporal act invested with eternity. These Übergang passages oscillate around a fundamental question, which is Lessing’s problem of the historical chasm that separates us from Christ: just what is it that makes the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ the power that grants humanity participation in God? What is real about the realism of our knowledge of God in Jesus Christ? Just how is it the case that Lessing’s great ugly ditch is crossed, and that Jesus Christ is our contemporary? Here we are at the very heart of the problematic of Barth’s dialectic of revelation, his attempt to render an account for the fact that in God’s No and God’s veiling, the Yes of grace, God’s unveiling that is God’s self-donation, does in fact take place. In short, the question is simply: “how it is possible and actual, and can be said in truth, that a man becomes and is a Christian.”64 Earlier, in my discussion of CD 2/2, I noted the rhetorical performance that emerged as Barth pursued a similar question: the participation of the totus christus in the election of Jesus Christ as elected man, the correspondence of our history to his own, as the surplus of that history, which are one as the content of the eternal act of God. Because Barth is an actualist, because the nature of this act is that of a historical event, the content of that correspondence is likewise actualistic and historical. The question of election is decided insofar as one comes to understand (at an “existential” level) that one is, in fact, the person to whom God’s claim of election in Jesus Christ is oriented. It is what Barth calls Entsprechung, correspondence. The issue of election is one which is performed—a call to take up one’s bed and walk, as it were.65 I argued that this rhetorical performance is Barth’s pneumatology of participation enacted, and that this performative element draws it very close to Augustine’s performative pneumatology of ascent in Christ. A similar rhetorical force obtains in the Übergang passages of CD 4: Barth is attempting to represent what is finally unrepresentable, the enactment of participation in God, to account theoretically for what is in truth a performative manner of the taking up of a call to live into an eschatological future. If my argument is at all right, we know that Barth’s tactic is pneumatological—but we also know that this tactic consists of undergoing the performative therapy66 of continually redirecting the reader to the fact that this solution is already given in God’s self-giving, 146

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in Jesus Christ. Thus, over 50 pages after the initial question concerning the “meaning, or better the power, of the existence of the one man Jesus Christ for those among whom and for whom, as the Reconciler, He, the Son of God, became also the Son of Man and one of them, their Brother,” Barth states it plainly. Lessing’s problem is a non-sequitur, for his question presupposed that we look for some other “power” than that already given: “The answer is staggering in its simplicity. He is the Holy Spirit in this supreme sense . . . because He is no other than the presence and action of Jesus Christ Himself . . . Thus the Spirit who makes Christians Christians is the power of this revelation of Jesus Christ Himself—His Spirit.”67 The resurrection immediately relativizes Lessing’s problem, for it is the eschatological reality in which Christ’s history is contemporaneous to every history. It is tempting, in answering the “how” question of reconciliation, to posit a visible mediation of God’s grace that avoids the tension of this pneumatological contemporaneity. One such answer is ecclesiological—the church is how the chasm is crossed, insofar as the church mediates the life of Christ sacramentally—and it has been frequently suggested against Barth’s evasiveness here by his Roman Catholic readers.68 But in answering the question about the pneumatological possibility and actuality of our Christian life in this way, Barth is opposing an “ecclesiological” answer to the question of the constitution of the Christian by putting the totus christus in the context of Jesus Christ as wirklich human. The Spirit’s work is not a supervening presence alongside that of the church, epiphenomenal to the institutional locus that properly identifies the sanctification of the Christian and sets her apart;69 instead, the identity of the church is found only in the Spirit, and the identity of the Spirit is in turn referred directly to Jesus Christ. Christ is the agent of the Spirit’s work and thus the identity of the community that participates in the Spirit’s work, the “sphere of His presence and action and lordship.”70 The anxiety that seeks a separate “power,” a distinguishable work of the Spirit, is the same as that which seeks to stabilize Christian sanctification and holiness in a setting apart that constitutes the church as possessing an “identity” in distinction from the world. Both are misplaced. To be anxious about the fact that the power that makes us Christians is that of the Spirit, which means, participation in Christ as a performative act of faith, acting into the mystery of God’s gratuity, is to be anxious about the fact that as graced subjects we are suspended in mid-air. Pneumatological talk is dialectical because it is dispossessing; it speaks of our participation in God only by pointing us back to our own act, but reveals that act to be the agency of God. It challenges us in our own house.71

Full Circle: Revelation as Reconciliation in CD 4/3 Every Christological paragraph has an Übergang section; but because the Doctrine of Reconciliation as a whole is structured according to the dialectic 147

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of revelation, the entire content of the third part-volume, 4/3, is überganglich insofar as it concerns Jesus Christ as the witness to revelation, thus linking the act of reconciliation and its human acknowledgment and participation in the Christological sense of the mediator as prophet.72 The effect of this is that, at the end of the Dogmatics, Barth’s pneumatology returns to the problematic of the knowledge of God that he began with in 1/1. A clue as to why this is so can be found in looking back to Barth’s explanation for his (admittedly vague) language of the “direction” of the Son in CD 4/2 to describe the all-important category of participation and sanctification. The point at issue is how we can ever see and know our being in Jesus Christ, and therefore ourselves as those who are established in Him . . . What is needed, and therefore the point at issue, is its attestation in a corresponding way of thought, direction of will, type of attitude and orientation and determination of our existence which come to us in relation to it, and which we have to fulfil in relation to it, so that in response to the love with which God has loved us we love Him in return. We have to do this because the being of Jesus Christ, and our being in Him, is irrefutably, incontestably and unassailably grounded in itself . . . Between this love, between Jesus Christ (and our being in Him) and ourselves, who have to correspond to His and our objective being, there arises for us the question of truth, the question of recognition.73 Barth’s concept of “direction” can be characterized as the pneumatological recognition of the eschatological reorientation of our temporal histories, as the incorporation of our history within the ascent to God by virtue of that fact that our history occurs within Jesus Christ. It is the teleological direction of the dialectic of revelation, the fact that the dialectic of veiling and unveiling is always oriented toward grace and the mystery of divine abundance and excess. This means that the dialectic of revelation, by virtue of its own power as the act of God, presses to be known. This is the theme of CD 4/3: the gratuity of our act, in all its integrity, as participation in the revelation of the mediator Jesus Christ. As just noted, the oft-neglected third installment of The Doctrine of Reconciliation corresponds to the traditional locus de officio mediatoris, although of course Barth is concerned to hold de officio in unity with de persona.74 Thus it concerns the union of God and humanity in the person of Jesus Christ in his act insofar as it encompasses both God and humanity. But in the rigorously Christological logic of the Dogmatics, this means not humanity’s cooperation with reconciliation in sanctification—sanctification was accounted for in 4/2 by virtue of Christ the Stellvertreter acting as wirklich humanity—but humanity’s recognition and attestation. Barth has been criticized for limiting human participation in salvation to the passivity of 148

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acknowledgment; but if, as he argues, reconciliation is already accomplished in Jesus Christ, electing God and elected man, then it follows that humanity’s part is not to cooperate or appropriate, but simply to acknowledge—to allow itself to be illuminated with the transformative knowledge that it is always already claimed by and reconciled to God. The only possible reaction to a gift is recognition and gratitude. This focus on recognition and revelation is not merely an epistemological claim; to understand it as such would be to forget how Barth has so assiduously labored to unify the ontological and the ethical (“being” and “act”), to show that knowledge of God is a sharing in God’s being. In CD 4/3, Barth is clear that “knowledge” never simply means cognition (a point frequently missed by critics of his account of human agency); knowing is participation and transformation.75 But if the asymmetry of the dialectic of revelation is to hold, then this third moment of participatory, transformative, elevating knowing must be God’s work as much as the first two moments. The dialectic of revelation is the principle of its own knowledge: “this intrinsically perfect and insurpassable action has a distinct character. For as it takes place in its perfection, and with no need of supplement, it also expresses, discloses, mediates and reveals itself.”76 This explicit return to the language of revelation thus brings CD full circle:77 as CD 1/1 explicated the logic of reconciliation by the categories of revelation through the doctrine of the Trinity, God’s self-giving in Jesus Christ, so in 4/3 “revelation takes place as the revelation of reconciliation.”78 The pattern here is identical to that of theological knowledge in the relationship of primary and secondary objectivity in CD 2/1, with one important exception. Although Barth always held to the objective–subjective/reality– possibility relationship of the dialectic of revelation established in 1/2, by the fourth volume the function of the Übergang has largely replaced “subjective” language. This is because the dialectic of revelation does not obtain primarily in the relationship of objective and subjective, which remain reciprocal vis-à-vis one another, but in the asymmetrical pattern of Reformed Christology, the pattern of anhypostatic/enhypostatic Christology: Jesus Christ is the divine Son acting in human essence, which act establishes itself in the life of humanity. The dialectic of revelation has a direction. Jesus Christ is his own knowability. The Übergang section of 4/3, “The Promise of the Spirit,” makes clear the pneumatological theme of the transitional sections. Their eschatological notes are explicitly thematized here, as Barth describes the coming of the Spirit as the unity of the divine act in the resurrection and the parousia: the time that the church inhabits is the last time, the time of a history oriented to God’s eternity through the direction of the Son. “The impartation of the Holy Spirit is the coming of Jesus Christ in the last time which still remains . . . it is the promise, given with and through the Holy Spirit, by which the community, and with it the world in which it 149

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exists and has its mission, may live in this time which moves towards its end.”79 The coming of the Spirit is the transition, the Übergang, from the divine eternity to human history by virtue of the act of Jesus the Son in human history, for the Spirit is the excess of that history that is our own. “In this reality [the promise of the Spirit] there takes place the transition and entrance of the prophecy of Jesus Christ to us and to our sphere, and all we who exist in this sphere . . . are drawn into the history of salvation and given a part in it.”80 Concerning this eschatological promise of the Spirit, it is important to reinforce that the promise of the Spirit is the coming of Jesus Christ (and vice versa). In no way does this pneumatology of the transition differentiate the unity of the work of God, the singular and simple act of self-donation and declaration in Jesus Christ that is the content of the doctrine of the Trinity. CD 4/3 is where Robert Jenson laments that the work of the Spirit has been subsumed into that of Christ; but in reality, we are seeing the final shape of Barth’s doctrine of the Trinity crystallize in all its pneumatological richness.81 In CD 1/1, we had begun with a “linear” understanding of the Trinity organized around God’s self-speaking in the Son, and here, with the Reformed Christology of 4/2 having eliminated the need for the personalism of CD 3, Barth has fully articulated this Christological focus. But now, with all the fruit of the doctrine of election and Christ’s wirklich humanity in place, this self-giving includes a self-diffusion into all of human history, and this is an elevation of human history into the eschatological time of God’s eternity. We cannot say that the Holy Spirit, “i.e., Jesus Christ acting and speaking in the power of His resurrection,”82 is subsumed within the agency of Jesus Christ, for this is to assume that there are multiple agencies in the Trinity that could be subsumed to one another. In Barth’s Augustinian logic, there is one common agency and work of God, in the form of God’s self-giving in Jesus Christ, a single and simple self-donation that proceeds from the Father and incorporates us in the work of the Spirit. “If the promise of the Spirit is one of the forms of the prophetic work of Jesus Christ, then quite apart from the dignity to be ascribed to the Holy Spirit on a sound doctrine of the Trinity, we cannot possibly think less of His work than we do of that of Jesus Christ Himself.”83

Incarnational Realism and Barth’s Eschatology of Gratuity In the previous section, we saw some of the language Barth uses to describe the eschatological character of the “transition” from Christ to humanity, particularly in his discussion of the resurrection and justification. In this final section, my primary intention is to provide some precision regarding 150

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the importance of eschatology and eternity in Barth’s theology, and thereby revisit the idea of “incarnational realism” as a locus for understanding his pneumatology. This concern will also provide a segue into the next chapter, which discusses the Hegelian and idealist influences in contemporary theology, where I will analyze how this influence intersects with one of the major controversies in contemporary Barth interpretation—that is, the debate about Barth’s doctrine of election between George Hunsinger and Bruce McCormack. Ultimately, I argue here that understanding Barth’s eschatology is crucial for understanding his trinitarian theology and pneumatology, especially insofar as his rethinking of the doctrine of election is played out in the tensions of CD 4 I have highlighted above. In a 1989 essay, Ingolf Dalferth characterized Barth’s epistemological position as “eschatological realism.”84 The piece is a direct riposte to critiques, like those of Richard Roberts or Rowan Williams, who argue that Barth’s privileging of eternity and divine agency over the human experience of history and human autonomy is problematic, if not oppressive. This boils down to a basic ontological question, argues Dalferth, concerning the “reality which determines what is to be counted as real and what isn’t.”85 And the problem with Barth—the scandal, acknowledges Dalferth—is that Barth reframes our most basic understanding of the nature of reality. From the Römerbrief onwards, the “eschatological reality of the resurrection . . . has ontological and criteriological priority over the experiential reality which we all share.”86 Barth actively attacks what we take to be reality, claiming instead that the very nature of our reality must be understood through the lens of the hypostatic union as an “ontological paradigm.”87 In categories that should be familiar to us, “our world of common experience is an enhypostatic reality which exists only in so far as it is incorporated into the concrete reality of God’s saving self-realisation in Christ. Taken by itself natural reality is an anhypostatic abstraction.”88 As Barth himself put it: “What we consider to be the truth about the created world is one thing. Quite another is the covenant of grace, the work of Jesus Christ, for the sake and in fulfilment of which creation exists.”89 We have seen these moves already in the exposition of the major epistemological themes of CD, such as the opposition of wirklich and phenomenal humanity (CD 3/2), or when we examined the significance of the totus christus as the incorporation of all humanity into Christ’s representative election in CD 2/2, a theme which reemerged in the idea of the Stellvertreter in volume 4. In each case, I argued that the relationship of the two categories is pneumatological: the Spirit is that dimension of the one act of God in Christ by which we are incorporated in the life of Christ and thereby reconciled, but because it is the work of the Spirit it is a work with the same objectivity and content of the life of Christ himself.90 Dalferth characterizes this dynamic as eschatological, because “Barth claimed every time and every person to be immediate to the eschatological reality but unable to grasp it unless the 151

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Spirit opens his or her eyes to the final revelation of God in the life, death and resurrection of Christ.”91 The basic meaning of history and temporality has been fundamentally shifted: the eschatological reality of Christ’s reality is simply the most real thing there is, and what we take to be history finds its being precisely in that eschatological reality. As we have seen, this means, concretely, that the center and meaning of history is the “journey of the Son into the far country”—the incarnation as the original act of God on behalf of humanity, indeed the content of God’s eternal life, as Urgeschichte. While I gratefully draw upon Dalferth’s lucid analysis here, I have chosen to recast his category somewhat by calling it “incarnational realism.” This is not by way of disagreement but a slight shift of emphasis, in order to highlight two things: first, the extent to which Barth’s affirmation of a Reformed doctrine of the incarnation articulates and embodies his concern with the dialectic of revelation as a Christological category from the days of Göttingen forward; second, the ways that Barth subtly employs a totus christus category from Augustinian thought to account for human participation in Christ’s “most real reality” as an ecclesial category of contemporaneity with the life of Christ. The church, in Barth’s theology, is that community that lives according to the eschatological reality of the incarnation and resurrection. The category is significant because it allows us to talk about the concreteness of the incarnation as the locus for talking about the pneumatological reality of human participation. The Christological center of wirklich humanity is not an erasure of human participation but its reconciliation and justification, the way human history comes to be a history of redemption at all, and in that way obtains its autonomy and integrity. This is a way of talking about history, and indeed time itself, in terms of the way its ethical and political character is eschatological in nature. Our history takes its meaning insofar as every moment is simultaneously the “whence and the whither” that Barth describes in his discussion of justification in 4/1: our time is a time of judgement and decision, the correspondence to and participation in our wirklich being in Jesus Christ, or the impossible possibility of living as if our wirklich being were not hidden in Jesus Christ. Time is “actualized,” made pregnant with the call to an act; it takes on an ethical character, in that God’s very nature is purely ethical—purely love, purely act, purely an act of love whose essence is to bestow life. Thus every action is a transition, the pneumatological Übergang that is a passage from Christ to us, Christ’s history inhabiting and bearing up our history. The Spirit is the eschatological act by which we are made contemporaneous with the history of Jesus, a history that is the eternity of God. The coherence with the very early theology of Krisis in the Römerbrief will be evident here;92 what has changed, however, is not that Barth has worked out the trinitarian character that provides a ground for a “stable” analogy between trinitarian life and temporal history, but rather the enclosure of the two in his Christology. The former, to be sure, constitutes 152

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a direction Barth’s thought explores between CD 2/1 and 4/1; but as the preceding argument has shown, it is the latter tendency that emerges as most dominant by CD 4/2 and 4/3. By reading the dialectic of revelation as the speculative grammar of the relationship of divine and human in the hypostatic union by way of the anhypostatic/enhypostatic articulation of their asymmetry, Barth has made the person of Jesus the measure of the eternity. This means that the human history of Jesus is Urgeschichte, the “primal history” that is the peculiar kind of temporality God’s eternity has. The controlling category here is not temporality—this is not the existentialism of the early Barth, and the “moment” should not be understood in a punctiliar sense, as if this implied that eternal life is a fragmented and occasionalistic reality. Rather, this posits eternity in terms of Barth’s eschatology of the Übergang, such that the “transition” from Christ’s history to ours has to do with the character or direction, the Weisung, of our act as a correspondence to that history. Eternity is the ethical content of God’s transcendence, the fullness of God’s self-giving reality of love and grace that is the history of Jesus Christ. Our time is characterized by its correspondence (or not) to that history—it is a question of whether we act in correspondence with that ethical quality, or act as if our humanity were not already ascended and hidden with Christ in God.93 Just as God is present in full at every point in the universe, so God is present in full at every moment in time: this is the meaning of divine eternity, and it is determined by the fact that that presence in time is a correspondence to the history of Jesus Christ. For that history, and thus that eternity, is the act of a subject who is the subject of our histories in the Holy Spirit. For Barth, as for Augustine, we have to stop thinking of eternity and time the same way we do transcendence and immanence: namely, as oppositional terms, as mutually exclusive categories that operate at the same level of discourse. Rather, in both cases the former terms are the condition of possibility of the latter, and are the excess or intensity of the latter. The present moment in Barth is the moment of judgement and justification, the moment of transition from human history to the eschatological gift of the Spirit that is the participation in the history of Jesus, that has the character of an act—nothing more and nothing less—of correspondence to that history. While Barth has shifted the speculative logic of that correspondence from a subjective–objective relationship between Christ and Spirit, to one of primary and secondary objectivity, to one characterized simply in terms of the totus christus, it is the constant trajectory of his thought that the Spirit is the act of God in Christ and the transition to human history that is the excess of that act, the possibility of every historical moment participating in that act. This is the mystery of revelation—the presence of eternity in the encounter with an executed peasant who lived in the first century. The significance of a Barthian understanding of eternity as ethical is that it characterizes eternity as a matter of the perfection of our love. Just as the 153

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self-giving of God is the human person of Jesus in his fidelity to the Father, so the form the agency of God takes in revelation is our own act. The gift of God is the gift of freedom and grace to act in correspondence to God, who is transcendent to us by the perfection of God’s love; revelation is a self-giving that is the gift of a grace identical to the ethical act that acts beyond its capacity. The gift of God is only known insofar as it gives rise to a corresponding act; we know God in performing the mystery of God’s self-giving. It is this dialectical reality, the aporetic of self-involvement, which is the reality of the Holy Spirit.

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7 self-consciousness and spirit: the trinity after hegel

The fundamental factor defining modern trinitarianism, which makes Augustinian trinitarian theology so difficult for us to comprehend, is our assumption that “person” means self-consciousness. This eliminates all but two ways of interpreting trinitarian doctrine: either the Trinity becomes three centers of self-consciousness, and thus three agents, with the result that it turns into a kind of personalism; or the Trinity becomes one dialectical, unfolding self-consciousness of self-positing and self-negation, as a form of idealism. Of course, this is not a new insight—Barth and Rahner both saw the issue very clearly, and it is why both worried about the use of “person” to describe the trinitarian subsistents; but the fascinating irony of the story of twentieth-century trinitarian theology is how quickly readers of Barth and Rahner nonetheless departed from this awareness of the theologians who gave trinitarian thought its renewed insight and urgency. It may reasonably be argued the neither was fully successful in staying true to their intentions in rejecting persona language, as I have sought to demonstrate with respect to Barth, and as I discussed briefly concerning Rahner in Chapter 1. Nonetheless, the vigor of their trinitarian doctrines remained insofar as both understood the Trinity to be, in Rahner’s words, a mystery of salvation. This chapter will seek to inquire further into the two styles of trinitarian thought discussed in Chapter 1. Common to both is the inheritance of German Idealism and its conception of self-consciousness, as I will show in an analysis of Hegel’s trinitarian thought and its presence in the mixed trajectories of Barth’s theology. I will begin by considering the latter, as I revisit two major interlocutors of the previous two chapters, Rowan Williams and Bruce McCormack. I will offer an analysis and critique of both, as representing particularly well-developed examples of trinitarian personalism and idealism, respectively. I will give special emphasis to McCormack’s compelling and creative understanding of Barth’s doctrine of election, both 155

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because of the influential position it claims in contemporary Barth interpretation, and because it very effectively encapsulates the resident ambiguities in Barth’s trinitarian thought I have discussed. The second major part of the chapter will take the form of a reading of Hegel’s use of trinitarian categories. In arguing that Hegelian trinitarianism is one of the major backdrops of modern trinitarianism, I am not claiming that every major trinitarian theologian of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries consciously or even unconsciously channels Hegel’s thought per se; rather, Hegel represents a larger idealist set of assumptions that have fundamentally shaped the way we think of the person in such a way that those assumptions (virtually automatically, it seems) become mapped onto Christian reflection on God the Trinity. As we will see, the root problem that both distinguishes post-idealistic trinitarianisms and makes Augustinian trinitarianism so difficult to accommodate within them rests on a nuanced, but essential point: the relationship between trinitarian relations and the act of divine self-bestowal that is correlated with them.

Trinitarian Personalism and Idealism In Chapter 1, I defined trinitarian personalism as the view that the trinitarian life of God is a social mutuality of distinct agencies in reciprocal relationship. There are, of course, varying ways this type of personalism can be developed. Some radicalize this model in the sense of a multiplication of consciousnesses, like Moltmann, Gunton, and Zizioulas, finding the best solution for rethinking purported Augustinian shortcomings in this trinitarian personal plurality. Moltmann, in his later work, perhaps represents the most straightforwardly literal example of such relationships, by proposing divine sociality as an exemplar for human community. I will discuss this model of trinitarianism more in the next chapter, where I highlight the questions that arise about the adequacy of this kind of paradigm. Moltmann in particular has often been accused of bordering on tritheism with his “social trinitarianism,” a charge that has a good deal of validity; but I would argue that the problems go further, because social trinitarianism is simply a particularly obvious example of deeper problems that run throughout many versions of modern trinitarianism. This will be clearer as we now look at a more nuanced development of trinitarian personalism. This version can be seen in the work of Rowan Williams, who has been quick to disavow the idea of a multiplication of consciousnesses in the Trinity,1 but as we will see below, still argues for a plurality of agencies within the divine life. As such, the model of the trinitarian life becomes one of a loving, giving exchange of subjects who produce the divine communion in a giving exchange of relations. In the following section, I will discuss how Williams relates this vision to his reading of Barth. 156

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Rowan Williams and the Problems of Trinitarian Personalism Williams’s interpretations of Augustine and Barth do not rest on a view of the Trinity as a model of persons in community, but he nonetheless still relies upon basic personalistic assumptions; rather than providing an exemplar of relationships it rests upon a view of the essence of God produced in a multiplicity of agencies. I can be rather briefer here than I will be in the following section, as the basic issues have already been adumbrated in Chapter 4, when we discussed the trinitarianism of “the gift” tied to a particular reading of Augustine’s so-called vinculum doctrine. Indeed, Rowan Williams’s reading of Barth has been as influential as his reading of Augustine, though his take on Barth is considerably more negative. In Chapter 5, we saw that Williams was concerned that Barth’s trinitarianism, at least in CD 1, left no room for human autonomy: he spoke of the need for a “plurality of agency within the Trinity” and the “inclusion of the history of man in the being of God.”2 At issue in both is Williams’s concern that, in Barth’s dialectic, God is not identified with the contingent and historical events of salvation, thereby rendering their relationship adventitious. A “pluralist” doctrine of the Trinity would mean that in Jesus Christ God is really participant in the risk of “failure and deficiency” in the contingency of Christ’s history, by virtue of the “event or transaction between Father and Son” that takes the form of the contradiction of the cross bridged by the Spirit.3 A differentiation between Father and Son allows God’s life—which is the relation between Father and Son as united by the Spirit—to simultaneously be eternally free and subject to the historical becoming of a real identification with humanity in the incarnation. Human history in some sense is determinative of the trinitarian relations, with the result that human participation in the divine life is characterized by its own proper freedom, creativity, and integrity. For Williams, positing this trinitarian pluralism is the way to correct Barth’s signal failure, a coherent doctrine of the Spirit.4 The “lovingness” of God that is the Spirit must constitute the “ground for God’s loving movement towards the world,”5 a ground that is the opening of the transaction of the Father and Son to humanity. Thus Williams’s desire for a “distinctive human response”6 and the inclusion of human history in the being of God come together in the Spirit, who is the ground of participation in the relational, dynamic life of God—an opening of God’s I–Thou self-absorption to the risk and contingency of the world.7 For Williams, this is the shape of a trinitarian doctrine more authentically determined by the events of salvation history, rather than epistemological concerns, like Barth’s “revelation model.”8 The consonance of this interpretation with certain tendencies of Barth’s theology, particularly in CD 3 and 4/1, is clear; but we can also see two ways in which Williams seems to be missing elements of Barth’s theology. First, Williams reads what I have described as the “asymmetry” of divine 157

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and human agency as precluding real “distinctive” human freedom. Because the human act of acknowledgment and response is the human act of a divine agent, for Williams this occurs at the cost of human autonomy. But as we have seen, Barth’s treatment of wirklich humanity as the humanity of Jesus Christ isn’t the erasure so much as it is the condition of possibility of integral human response, which occurs in the pneumatological “transition” of justification; for Barth, Jesus is free for God because the Logos is the agent of his history, and by grace—by the Spirit—we participate in that history as freed by the grace of God for God. The problem here seems to be that by inserting human freedom into a space within the Trinity vacated of divine agency, so to speak, and by supposing that divine self-limitation, divine “risk,” is the condition of possibility of human freedom, Williams understands the divine and human act as ontologically competitive: “God’s absolute ‘otherness’ can only impinge upon human awareness, human will, human self-reliance as negation.”9 But in the terms popularized by Kathryn Tanner, the asymmetry of divine and human agency are not to be conceived as “competitive” or “contrastive”10—indeed, they are not the same kinds of things at all. Divine agency is the justifying grace that is the very possibility of human agency, just as every moment of history becomes real insofar as it has its basis in the justifying history of the incarnation. Because of this problem of competing divine and human agency, Williams needs to raise the status of the human nature of Jesus to something co-participatory in the event of salvation. But, as we have seen with Barth, doing so compromises the integrity of the divine act. Williams quotes with some approval Wingren’s complaint that “Barth has no doctrine of the humanity of Christ” and that Barth’s “residually Nestorian (or too radically Calvinist) Christology” is connected to an absence of a doctrine of creation.11 But this status-raising of the human nature follows the same tendency as Barth himself in CD 4/1, which is grounding the divine relation ad extra in an internal self-relation ad intra. In order to make God immediately present and identified with the events of history, Williams follows Barth in pluralizing the divine agency (Father and Son) so that God can both be identified with salvation history in the Son and remain eternal and free in the Father. This trinitarian pluralism thus accomplishes an immediacy of divine presence in history; but at the same time, this is only by way of making Jesus a mediating function between the transcendent Father and the immanence of history. God’s involvement in history occurs only on the consequence of an internal “contradiction” mediated by a Jesus who is not identical to God’s self-giving. God is given in history, but only at the expense of the integrity of God’s act. Therefore we can see that the fundamental problematic of trinitarian personalism is the very premise it is based upon—the plurality of divine agency. On the one hand, this tends to detract from the singularity of God’s self-giving in gratuity, placing an abstract interval between that historical self-giving and its premise in a set of eternal proceedings and 158

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negotiations in the divine life; on the other hand, the plurality of divine agencies, in “making a space” for human participation, ends up losing sight of the empowering and deifying nature of grace that drives Barth’s emphasis upon the anhypostatic nature of human agency, with the result that human agency in gaining its autonomy loses the Christological reality invoked in Barth’s incarnational realism.

Trinitarian Idealism: Bruce McCormack and the Barthian Election Debate In my reading of the Dogmatics, I have quoted with profit from the work of two of the leading American Barth scholars now working—Bruce McCormack and George Hunsinger. But the two have been on the forefront of a vigorous debate over the significance of Barth’s doctrine of election and its consequences for his Christology and trinitarian theology, which has absorbed much of the energy in Barth interpretation in recent years. The dispute is most clearly represented in an exchange of articles by George Hunsinger, Paul Molnar, and Bruce McCormack,12 and I will briefly consider the major issues in the debate before focusing in particular on ways McCormack’s reading of Barth has developed in recent years. It is important for this book to discuss the issues in play with some detail; this is particularly so because the ensuing argument has leaned heavily on McCormack’s interpretation of Barth, and takes his emphasis upon the significance of Barth’s doctrine of election in CD 2/2 as a touchstone. In this space, I will strive to come to terms with McCormack’s recent project, and to clarify where I differ from him. Hunsinger has characterized the debate as one between “traditionalists” and “revisionists”;13 I will adopt this nomenclature here for purposes of convenience, although I share McCormack’s reservations about its helpfulness.14 The basic issue in the election dispute concerns the agency of the Logos in revelation and reconciliation, and thus the logic of the gratuity of self-giving in the economy. It quickly became apparent after the publication of McCormack’s “Grace and Being: The Role of God’s Gracious Election in Karl Barth’s Theological Ontology,”15 that the initial boundary marker of the dispute concerned the so-called logos asarkos, and although the debate has developed in important ways, especially Christologically, one of the key issues remains the relationship between God’s eternal being and God’s self-donation in the economy of salvation. McCormack’s intent is to offer an account of the divine freedom characterized in terms of God’s freedom for the world, rather than one based on the status of a counterfactual, namely whether God’s freedom implies the veracity of the statement, “God could have done otherwise than creating and/or redeeming the world.”16 My suggestion, however, will be that McCormack potentially compromises that intent in seeking an ontological ground for gratuity in the divine 159

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self-determination in election. In particular, I want to argue that, when viewed in terms of the trinitarian logic at play, McCormack’s proposal as it currently stands divides the agency of revelation, and therefore the integrity of the divine self-identity in it. In any case, it will be my contention that the debate helps illuminate vital issues related to the idealist ontology of the self-conscious subject that I view as so central to contemporary trinitarian assumptions.

The Ur-Father and the Trinitarian Logic of Self-Determination “Traditionalist” theism, as Hunsinger characterizes it, argues that Barth’s doctrine of the Trinity is logically prior to God’s election, and that an eternal, immanent Trinity and logos asarkos is the necessary presupposition of God’s act in time; God is free to engage with the world, or not, but has chosen to give Godself in grace.17 In his reply to Hunsinger, McCormack has characterized the problem with “traditionalist” theism as one that opens up a metaphysical “gap” between the Logos incarnate and the eternal Logos,18 and posits the latter as an “abstract” metaphysical subject that is only accidentally related to his manifestation in history.19 He has further characterized this as a gap between the essence and the will of God, and between the eternal processions and temporal missions.20 McCormack argues that this effectively introduces a duplication in God’s essence, one that is ontologically mendacious, moreover: either the immutable perfection of God in eternity would require change in order to manifest Godself in time (a self-defeating proposition), or an eternal act of self-affirmation in which the Son is eternally hidden in abstraction, and thus ontological differentiation, from the act of self-manifestation underlies the temporal act of self-manifestation.21 Thus we have a dual divine act of revelation and reconciliation in traditional theism: God’s essential act, which is unknown, and the act of the Logos for our salvation, which reduplicates that act but is distinct from it. But that is a differentiation of being and act, or rather an ontological differentiation of the two acts of God, one eternal, one temporal—the kind of thing Barth seemed to disavow. The surprising result of traditionalist logic, then, at least as McCormack understands Hunsinger to represent it, is that the attempt to guarantee God’s eternal perfection and freedom so that God’s act in history is free and gratuitous ends up bifurcating it. The traditionalist emphasis that God cannot undergo change and must be complete and perfect in Godself before freely self-manifesting in the economy, ends up with an adventitious, if not antithetical, relationship between eternity and history in reconciliation. Against the traditionalist view, McCormack claims that in Barth’s revision of the doctrine of election, the eternal identity of the Logos is inextricable from the human being Jesus; the history of Jesus is the “historicality of the triune being of God as founded in election.”22 This rejection of the logos 160

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asarkos lies in Barth’s understanding of the trinitarian “self-determination” in election. God’s essence is given and constituted in the eternal act of self-determination, and that eternal act of self-determination is the act of the Son, the subject of election; therefore, the content of election is the history of Jesus Christ in such a way that that history is essential to the identity of the eternal Son. It follows that God’s being as triune is in fact a consequence of God’s self-determination in election.23 In a stark reversal of the traditional opus ad extra and ad intra relationship, “the works of God ad intra (the trinitarian processions) find their ground in the first of the works of God ad extra (viz., election) . . . God gives himself (by an eternal act) his own being.”24 In this way, one avoids any “mythological speculation” about an eternal being of God beyond or behind God’s historical self-determination in Jesus Christ. As McCormack has recently put it, echoing Jüngel, “God is His decision.”25 However, Hunsinger and Molnar have been quick to ask: how does God’s becoming in election not imply the necessity of the world as a medium for God’s self-actualization?26 Repeatedly, McCormack has defended himself against the claim that this entails such a Hegelian relationship, and he is careful to reject the explicitly Hegelian position that God’s being is in a state of becoming in history; rather, God’s being is in an eternal act of becoming, an eternal act of self-determining for us in the history of Jesus. God self-determines in eternity, then acts in time.27 Finally, McCormack is quite clear that God is triune before God creates the world; in no sense is the creation of the world a precondition for the generation of the Son.28 Instead, McCormack emphasizes that God’s eternal decision, by which the command of the Father generates the Son, is an act of self-constitution, if not self-causation, a determination of God’s “plastic” nature to be God for a world that God creates.29 Against concerns of Arianism, McCormack has also been careful to say that this divine decision to self-determine as triune is an eternal decision, such that there is no time when the “Son was not.”30 The point is that God’s eternal being as Father, Son, and Spirit is a consequence, and logically secondary, to an eternal decision, a decision that is identical to God’s being.31 This decision, unlike human decisions, involves no deliberation, and thus no temporal succession—God’s decision is an eternal, self-constituting act.32 McCormack’s case rests on his argument, which he first set out in “Grace and Being,” that Barth’s doctrine of election in CD 2/2 is where Barth’s struggle to articulate the dialectic of revelation Christologically achieves its final form. I have built on this insight, although I have also argued that it is premature—in my reading, Barth’s doctrine of the incarnation, and thus the specific way his doctrine of election is configured Christologically, isn’t fully ironed out until CD 4/2. In 4/2, his affirmation of the unio hypostatica provides for the mutual correlation of divine and human agency in Christ, and therefore, in humanity as such, which gives stability to his Christology and 161

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trinitarian theology. This, as I have argued, rests on two points. First, Barth excises any fear of a deus absconditus as a true locus of divinity somewhere behind and supplementary to Christ’s person, and thus eliminates a voluntaristic decree of election that is an arbitrary decretum absolutum. To be God just is to speak Godself in God’s Son—there is no “before” and “after” in the doctrine of election, but a pure singular act of gratuity. Barth is not entirely consistent in following this, though—to consistently develop this point would preclude that kind of analogia relationis we see in CD 3 and 4/1, where the Urgeschichte of the relation of Father and Son is the ontological ground of the relation of the Father and Son in the history of Jesus. As we will see in what follows and especially in the final chapter, a consistent development of this point depends upon a careful (Augustinian) correlation of the begetting of the Son and the saving and revealing act of God—of the processions and missions of the trinitarian subsistents, that is. This point is crucial, for while McCormack does not specifically depend upon Barth’s analogia relationis and rejects what I have called trinitarian personalism,33 his way of articulating an ontology of election does rest upon some equivocations on this latter point. This is not to deny the insight of his reading of Barth—but it is to raise a question about the increasingly programmatic development of that reading.34 What I would like to suggest here is that McCormack’s proposal, in attempting to radicalize the Barthian doctrine of election, is actually trading on an unclarity with respect to the second issue—the relationship between the generation of the Son and the divine self-determination in election—and in so doing, actually reintroducing a deus absconditus back into the doctrine of election. McCormack’s proposal is, of course, specifically designed to guarantee the self-identity of God in revelation, and to strictly identify the self-determination of the divine essence with the incarnation of the Son. But in rendering the eternal generation of the Son (logically) secondary to the act of divine self-determination, I contend that he has in fact introduced an ontological ground of God’s reconciling act that is different in kind with that act itself. In so doing, a relationship of potentiality and actuality emerges in the divine essence which begins to disjunct being and act, and construes the divine act such that its identity to God’s being is occluded. The result of this is, ironically, the same problem for which he rightly criticizes “traditional theism.” The root of the problem, as I see it, is that McCormack is making two mutually exclusive claims: first, with Barth, that the eternal election of Jesus Christ the Son (in the sense of the subjective genitive) is the precondition of God’s reconciling act in history and humanity; and second, that the existence of Jesus Christ the Son is a logical consequence of God’s self-determination for history and humanity. The first is the point of Barth’s proposal in CD 2/2— the eternal Logos’s identity to the human being Jesus Christ, such that the God-human Jesus is the subject of God’s act of election. But to understand this 162

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act of election as a divine self-determination to give Godself being as Trinity is to posit a divine agency that is distinct from the Father’s begetting of the Son, and therefore an agency distinct from the reconciling act of the incarnation. This implies in turn a being of God prior to the begetting of the Son.35 That is, if the Son is the actualization of a prior divine self-determination in election, then there is no sense in which the Son can be the subject of election, because the Son is a logical result of the divine essence giving itself being as Father and Son—the Son must be the object of the act of election. So this effectively introduces a fourth subsistent into the Trinity which is agentially distinct from that agency by which the Father begets the Son. This “fourth” blurs the role of the Father with that of a naked or indeterminate divine substance distinguishable from the trinitarian hypostases; for the Father is not the Father without the Son, but McCormack is requiring a divine essence that determines to be a Father to the Son.36 In turn, this proposal requires the Father to be convertible with the divine substance as such, with the result that the agency of revelation and reconciliation is transferred from that agency by which the Father acts in the Son in begetting, to an agency which produces Father and Son. I will call this prior agency an “Ur-Father.” McCormack is insistent that this divine self-determination is eternal, not temporal; and that this differentiation of election and Trinity is logical, not ontological. However, this does not remedy the problem, which is one of agency: the Son’s act in election as Jesus Christ is a secondary moment in the being of God to this primordial one, because the very being of the Son is a function of a primordial self-determination of the Father/divine essence. The history of reconciliation is only available to us as the history of Father, Son, and Spirit, which makes that eternal act of self-determination inaccessible to us, and thus by definition a deus absconditus. But this is the abstraction that Barth’s doctrine of election was designed to exclude in the first place, and performs the same function as the ineffable eternal divine essence abstracted from the economic Trinity that Hunsinger or Molnar espouse, according to McCormack. The Ur-Father is identical to a neutral and contentless divine essence, because eternal self-determination is an abstraction from the form in which God is manifest in history. Effectively, this confuses the trinitarian logic of the begetting of the Son by the Father, in which the Son is the subsistent act of God in self-giving, with a self-causing divine essence, a causa sui,37 secondarily manifest in the Son. The agency of God in self-determination is so differentiated from that agency in reconciliation that it is difficult to see how Jesus Christ is any longer the subject of election. Indeed, he must be the object of an electing act of the divine essence. This is not an advance on Barth; it is a retreat.

Indeterminacy, Plasticity, and the Eternal Receptivity of the Son As I have argued, Barth’s affirmation of a God who is actus purus et singularis rests upon an understanding of Urgeschichte in which God’s self-giving 163

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in Christ is the very foundation of creation and time. God is nothing but an act of self-speaking, and Jesus Christ is the word God speaks. What this amounts to is saying that there is no ontological ground in God in which God self-determines in Christ: God just is a self-bestowing good in the Logos, who is Jesus Christ. The distinction I am arguing toward is one between a self-caused being (a causa sui), and an uncaused being. The first concept, apart from involving an inherent contradiction, depends upon an essence in a relationship of potentiality and actuality, or, in Hegelian terms, one that is pure negativity and non-being in dialectical relationship to pure becoming in self-determination. The second is pure actuality—pure self-giving. The issue is not so much one of God’s freedom from or for the world, I propose, as it is one about the nature of grace: gratuity is the characteristic of a God who freely gives by virtue of God’s essence, whereas a God who must first self-realize in order to self-manifest is a God conditioned by necessity, which is the compromise of gratuity. The issues crystallize, as we saw in CD 4/2, in Christological problems. This is because the dialectic of divine agency and human receptivity that Barth saw as the fundamental dynamic of revelation and reconciliation must rest on a Realdialektik if the economy of salvation and eternity of the divine life are to properly correspond. But I argued that Barth has two incompatible ways of developing this Realdialektik—namely, in trinitarian terms and in Christological terms. In the former, divine agency and human receptivity correspond to a dialectic of agency and receptivity in the divine life, the “astounding conclusion” of divine obedience and humility in the Son. But the result of this is both a muddling of the singularity of divine agency, and an unsavory ethical hierarchicalism, which Barth at least has the courtesy to signal clearly with his misogyny. The Christological dialectic, however, locates the dynamic of agency and receptivity in the incarnation, through the use of Reformed anhypostatic/enhypostatic categories, such that God’s agency is the agency of human reception of reconciliation through our pneumatological participation in Christ’s wirklich humanity. It is worthwhile looking into McCormack’s Christology, therefore, to see if the same ambiguities resident in Barth reappear in McCormack’s interpretation. And in fact they do. One of the most significant developments in McCormack’s thinking is his development of Barth’s actualistic Christology in his proposal for a “Reformed Kenoticism,” sketches of which can be found in numerous articles in the last few years.38 There are two correlative axes to this Christology I want to discuss here: first, what I will call the “eternal receptivity” of the Son, which is (second) actualized through the human will of Jesus as its “performative agent.” Essential to both of these axes is a strong rejection of divine impassibility; as McCormack sees it, this holdover from “classical substance metaphysics” prevents theology from truly grasping the decisive significance Jesus’s life, suffering, and death has for the nature and life of God. 164

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This “eternal receptivity” of the Son draws from Barth’s development of Urgeschichte as a history of “eternal obedience” in the Trinity in CD 4/1. The Son is the eternal moment of receptivity in which the Father posits himself as the electing God.39 Moreover, the Son who is eternally receptive to the Father is also the receptivity of the Trinity to the humanity of Jesus Christ, the ontological moment in which God receives the life and history of the human being Jesus. McCormack describes this as “Reformed Kenoticism,” or as he has somewhat provocatively put it, a reversal of Cyril:40 God self-actualizes through self-emptying such that it is the humanity of Jesus that is soteriologically agential in reconciliation. The concern of McCormack here is that, in order to truly have the history of Jesus be the determinative “being in becoming” of God,41 we must avoid any appearance of Nestorianism in Christology—any appearance that the human history of Christ involves something less than the act of the fully and integrally human person Jesus of Nazareth. McCormack is frank here: the traditional view, as he sees it, shrinks back from the full implications of the incarnation by virtue of its commitment to impassibility and its penchant (at least at the time of Chalcedon) for divinization. Faced with the specter of a crucified God, “even the most Cyriline theologian often turns into a Nestorian.”42 Therefore, Chalcedonianism partitions the person of Jesus into something approaching two subjects (only the human nature truly suffers) to avoid theopaschitism. This partition is in inverse proportion to the Alexandrian preservation of the agency of the Logos (especially in the Reformed rejection of the communicatio idiomatum)43 through the anhypostasis/enhypostasis of the human nature, but for McCormack this skirts perilously close to Apollinarianism, which is an erasure of the humanity of Christ.44 McCormack’s solution is to reverse Cyril’s Apollinarian tendencies and develop the position described above: it is the human nature of Christ which is the performative agent of all that is done in the history of Jesus, but only insofar as the eternal Son assumes this human Jesus into his own eternal life. The premise is a “plasticity” of the divine nature, a kind of malleability or receptivity (we might call it an “active passivity”) identical to the eternal Son, who is, we recall, the eternally self-posited God vis-à-vis the self-positing Father. The eternal receptivity of the Son is the reason McCormack so adamantly rejects impassibility, for it prevents God from actively taking the suffering and death of Christ upon Godself. Connected to this rejection of impassibility is a reversal of divinization through an appropriation of a form of the genus tapeinoticum: God’s “plastic” nature admits of a communication of the human attributes to the divine, rather than a divinization of the human. This capacity for “hominization” is precisely the capacity resident in the Son as the eternally obedient and receptive moment in the divine nature to receive human history.45 It is not clear at this point in McCormack’s still developing, and prolific, thought how this relates to the position on election already discussed. 165

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Most likely we should understand this appropriation of the Christology of CD 4/1 as a development or restating of the relationship of election and the Trinity in the essays of the early 2000s:46 God’s self-determination in election is identical to God’s self-positing as the Father and receiving in the Son. Prima facie, this solves the problem of the Ur-Father as a subsistent fourth, a deus absconditus, because election and Trinity become truly simultaneous and co-terminous, in that the Trinity just is God’s act of self-determination, self-positing Father to self-posited Son. However, while it may nuance the more obvious problem with the position of the “Grace and Being” essay, I would argue that this does not solve the problem of the Ur-Father. This is because there remains a diversification of agency in the Godhead, insofar as the ontological differentiation of being and act still holds in the dialectic of potentiality and actualization: the act of God occurs only insofar as a ground of that act is found in a moment of ontological indeterminacy. The Father is pure indeterminacy except insofar as the Father posits himself in the receptivity of the Son, but then it is only the Father who is the subject of election.47 In this case, the Son is the object of election precisely as God’s eternal moment of self-mediating receptivity, as the actualization of the Father’s potentiality. The Son is not agential, but the medium of the act of God, the eternal moment in which God mediates God’s own being to Godself prior to acting outside of Godself, in receiving the history of Jesus. This proposal has the merit of sounding quite a lot more like the Barth of CD 4, rather than McCormack’s earlier proposal, which largely focused on 2/2. However, we now have a complication: if the Father is a moment of indeterminacy, and the Son is a moment of potentiality eternally actualizing or determining that indeterminacy (although in receptivity, or negativity), then it seems that we have something like the problem of traditionalism redivivus: the dialectic of obedience in the eternal history of the Trinity represents an ontological ground for the actualization of God’s self-revelation in history. And this is just the problem I identified in Barth’s analogia relationis in 4/1. Thus it seems, at least at this point in its “midstream” development, that McCormack’s project recapitulates a problematic logic in Barth that I identified as Hegelian. Therefore, in order to understand the issues here more fully, it is time to detour to Hegel.

The Silence of the Abyss: The Hegelian Logic of Subjectivity I have contended that the logical distinction of election and Trinity, or in the terms of McCormack’s thought as it seems to be developing, of self-positing Father and self-posited Son, entails some kind of ontological distinction. This distinction obtains in the way the act of the divine essence in 166

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election seems to be understood in terms of potentiality and actualization by McCormack. The root problem, I now want to show, lies in an understanding of a self-mediating subject that seems to be Hegelian, or at least that reduplicates logic seen with particular clarity in Hegel. A short discussion of Hegel’s ontology will illuminate this contention, though a caveat is in order: I am taking Hegel as a kind of synecdoche for German idealist thought in general, and I am obviously not attempting anything like a comprehensive discussion of Hegel’s thought on the Trinity or subjectivity, which would require a monograph. I am more concerned to see how Hegel’s logic works as the epitome of a general idealist logic, when transposed into trinitarian categories; I am therefore examining a pattern of Hegelian reception rather rendering a judgment on Hegel per se.48

The Hegelian Subject and Divine Freedom Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit begins with a famous and epochal claim: “everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject.”49 The transformation of metaphysics in that statement is essential for understanding the way his thought tends to be received in modern trinitarian thought, as I asserted at the beginning of this chapter. Hegel’s system is a massive outworking of the nature of the knowing subject come to full self-consciousness, but it lends itself so readily to theological adaptation (although virtually every Christian theologian finds it necessary to modify Hegel on the Trinity, as we will see) because it understands God as the ultimate self-conscious subject.50 Foundational to this privileging of self-consciousness is the reality of mediation, which makes Hegelian thought so tempting for trinitarian thought: the relation to another constitutes the subject as what she is, because her immediate self-relation is only an abstract and prethematic knowing, a consciousness that does not yet fully grasp itself as consciousness. Grasping her own consciousness as consciousness means grasping it as otherness and taking that otherness into herself as the ground of her own subjectivity. The self-conscious subject, in other words, knows herself in otherness and receives herself as a subject through reconciliation with and internalization of that otherness. Particularly with the use of the vinculum doctrine, it requires only modest transformations to use this logic to articulate trinitarian categories—or so it would seem. I will unpack this structure of mediation shortly. The essence of the issue is that if the idealist logic of the subject who knows herself only in recognizing herself in another self-consciousness holds for the divine, as it does exemplarily, then it necessarily follows that God must know Godself in God’s other. The question then becomes what, precisely, God’s “other” is. Generally speaking, there are two options: the world, or the Son (or, in Hegel’s case, the combination of the two). Either God relates to Godself in 167

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the sense that the world is a kind of objectification of God’s own life, a way in which the divine essence realizes itself dynamically; or God relates to Godself as another in the trinitarian relationships, in something like Barth’s dialectic of glory and humility, lordship, and obedience. For many, the gain of Hegelianism is it allows us to think of the divine essence “dynamically” and not “statically,” as living and becoming in relationship; moreover, human history can come to participate in and play a role in the divine life itself, obviating worries of a tyrannical, distant vision of transcendence. The great fear, though, that most trinitarians face in wrestling with Hegel is that this might come at the cost of divine freedom: the world seems to comprise a necessity to God, meaning that God’s sovereignty is abrogated. As we have just seen, this is a major question many interlocutors have put to McCormack—whether his proposal that God self-determines as trinitarian so that God can be God pro nobis compromises the divine freedom to be God apart from the world.51 Therefore, it is most helpful to begin digging into Hegel by examining the significance of divine freedom in his ontology. Hegelian Geist comes to self-realization as an absolute subject in its positing of the world as the occasion of its own becoming. The world is a necessary moment in the divine essence because it is a medium for the becoming of the divine essence—it mediates the self-relation of God. However, this is entirely secondary to the real crux of the relationship of freedom and necessity in Hegelian ontology, which concerns the fact that the divine substance is internally self-mediating, thus combining both alternatives for the relation of sameness and difference above. In a logic that is indelibly inscribed in the patois of twentieth-century trinitarianism—it underlies both trinitarian personalism and trinitarian idealism—God’s freedom is distinct from finite freedom in that God’s other is internal to Godself. As Trinity, God is the principle of identity and otherness, or unity and difference, in their reconciliation: the Father posits himself in the Son, who is the negation (in the sense of determination) of the Father, and the Spirit is the bond of love who reconciles and unites the two, opening their dyadic relation to created otherness. The intratrinitarian otherness is the ground of God’s capacity to be God ad extra. So the real question concerning God’s freedom concerns the nature of God’s self-relation; this relation is embedded in the Hegelian logic of the concept, which will help us expand the discussion of mediation adumbrated above. The divine relationship to the world is entirely secondary to the character of the internal self-determination which is the condition of possibility of the exercise of that freedom. This self-determination revolves around the necessity of God’s self-revelation—to Godself as well as to the world. The key is the transition from substance to subject. Substance is simply the first moment in the becoming of the concept, which for Hegel names the undifferentiated abstraction of a universal concept which has not self-determined in concrete particularity. It is abstract potentiality 168

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which must be determined or qualified in order to receive content. Indeed, substance as such is non-being, for it is pure infinite negativity without the finite: it is pure immediacy without distinction and determination. Thus for Hegel the abstraction of the infinite is mediated in its relating itself to itself in representation and particularization, a determination that is a negation of the negation: Being, considered as such on its own account, turns out to be the untrue, even turns out to be nothing; and the next determination, the truth of being, is becoming. Becoming is a simple representation relating itself to itself, something wholly immediate, although it contains with itself the two determinations, being and nonbeing.52 For Hegel God is the universal concept, das in sich Verschlossene,53 the “enclosed.” Hegel’s appropriation of the Trinity is intended to provide a speculative schematic for the dynamic becoming and self-realization of that undifferentiated substantiality. This abstract universality (Allgemeinheit) of substance is represented by the Father: it is undifferentiated, and contentless, because substance has no determinations—it isn’t mediated through any finite relations that give it content. Thus it posits itself in finitude and particularity (Besonderheit) in the Son, who is a determinate negation of abstract universality; this distinction is a separation between the two that is reconciled and sublated in the individuality (Einzelheit) of the Spirit, who is the moment in which substance becomes self-conscious infinite subjectivity.54 The Logos is the key in the sublation of substance into Spirit: as an eternal principle, it mediates the self-differentiation of the contentless infinity of the Father. The Logos comes into actuality as the divine substance becomes subject by knowing itself in its own determinate negation, knowing itself as an “other” to an “other.” But this self-reflexivity, Father to Son, cannot obtain in anything like traditional Christian theological categories.55 First, the immanent Trinity and the Father are identical, because both are simply the form the naked divine essence takes as the first moment of origin (Father), but that essence is the dialectic as the ontological ground of the divine self-becoming in history (the immanent Trinity). Second, the Father’s relation to the Son is identical to the divine relationship to the world, because the Son is the finite negation of the abstract infinite of the Father—the Son is the particularity that gives essence content through determination. Thus in both the relation of Father and Son, and the relation of God and world (these being in reality the same thing), an abstract or spurious infinite substantiality comes into actuality in relationship to finitude.56 The Son is an eternal principle, but that principle is actual only inasmuch as it is posited in separation from the One.57 These moments of abstract infinity and finite particularity thus entail the correlation of the immanent Trinity and economic Trinity with Father and Son, respectively. 169

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The reason this conceptual structure for Hegel blurs the distinction between the Father and the immanent Trinity is that the moment of Allgemeinheit is both the first moment of the dialectic and the dialectic itself in nuce, in ideality but not yet in actualization. Indeed, every moment of the dialectic is itself dialectical, for the abstract infinity of the universal, which is without differentiation, is negated and sublated as soon as the infinite knows itself in its negation—in the finite. Therefore, the Father is already the dialectic in potentiality, an immanent Trinity that is actualized only in the becoming of the historical economy which is identical to its self-knowing. If we are to follow Hegel’s logic, the prior moment of potentiality is pure negativity with no positive determinations; thus the Father, or the immanent Trinity, has no content, agency, or reality until actualized in its self-knowing in becoming, in the Son-cum-economic Trinity. The Father as such remains the eternal idea, the first moment in an abstract posteriority, with no content or role other than as an inaccessible and unthinkable One. Correspondingly, the Son’s role is that of a negation of that indeterminacy precisely in its manifestation. This is why for Hegel (and correspondingly for Barth insofar as he thinks in Hegelian terms) for God to be in relation ad extra God must be in relation ad intra. In fact these relations are identical. The empty eternity of the Father is the necessary presupposition or ideality of relation to the incarnation of the Son; and the relations ad intra are purely ideal and potential; insofar as they are actualized, this is necessarily ad extra, for the requirement of self-knowing in Hegel is knowing oneself in the negation of one’s own infinity by the other. God must act ad extra to know Godself as a subject. The Son is the medium of the Father’s self-knowing, indeed the actualization of the Father’s being.

The Spirit and Hegelian Geist In Chapter 4, I argued that social or communion-oriented doctrines of the Trinity are, ironically, precisely those that instantiate a “fourth” as the locus of the true unity and substantiality of the divinity. A look at Hegel’s understanding of the Holy Spirit within the Trinity explicates this counterintuitive claim more clearly. For Hegel the Spirit is the third moment of reconciliation, and the mediation of the diremption of the Father and Son in the becoming of God as absolute spirit. The self-conscious subject only knows itself in the other, but in this knowing it is both negated—the other is other precisely as the negation of the subject’s universality, as its contradiction— and elevated in the reconciliation of this negation in its own self-knowing. Thus the Spirit represents the concept of the absolute in and for itself, the One as eternal love, for love, says Hegel, is “both a distinguishing and the sublation of the distinction . . . in friendship and love I give up my abstract personality and thereby win it back as concrete. The truth of personality 170

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is found precisely in winning it back through this immersion, this being immersed in the other.”58 This reconciliation of otherness is the becoming of the concept in which it is determined—acquires content through mediated relations with the other—and becomes self-conscious Spirit, as thought thinking itself, as the concept “in and for itself” (an und für sich). This becoming renders Geist living and active,59 a dynamic reality that in its sublation of its concrete particularity is the absoluteness of the infinite subject who recognizes its own infinity in its always already having gone beyond the finitude of its determination. This will perennially be Hegel’s devastating riposte to Kant: to recognize a limit is already to have transgressed it, for indeed subjectivity is precisely the recognition of the infinite beyond of the finite. But this is also where it becomes so difficult to engage trinitarian thought in post-Hegelian, or indeed, in post-idealist, terms at all. For in Hegel’s paradigm shift from substance to subject, adjudicating the adequacy of trinitarian logic cannot simply rest on classical affirmation of the identity of substance of Father and Son. If God is to be thought of as Subject, then being and non-being are moments of dialectical becoming in the reconciling love of the Spirit. Divine self-identity and divine self-alienation are, in fact, identical—and this is a claim that cannot even be comprehended in Pro-Nicene logic. But that is not a verdict of legitimacy or illegitimacy for Hegel or Pro-Nicene logic; it is simply a recognition of as-yet unreconciled incommensurateness. The root of the issue is that a Hegelian ontology is an ontology of a subject’s self-knowing, which constitutes that subject as Geist. But in Hegelian ontology, that subject self-becomes as the assumption and erasure (sublation) of the ideal potentiality of substance—it is only insofar as substance is determined in particularity and finitude that it emerges out of pure negativity and into being at all. An ontology of becoming is premised on the negation of this first moment of indeterminacy, a premise that operates precisely on the function of an ontological difference internal to being itself. But this has obvious problems for Christian theology, for a Hegelian conception of the Trinity would imply the subsumption of Father into the Son, and Son into the Spirit. Each turn of the dialectical screw is the becoming of the former into the latter, and the subjectivity of God only emerges on the implication of God’s self-knowing as Spirit. God can only give Godself insofar as God is first self-revealing to Godself; but this means that God is only truly subject in the Spirit. To return to the discussion of Barth and McCormack, in Hegelian terms neither the Son nor the Father is the subject of revelation, because a subject is the reconciliation of identity and otherness. God only becomes a subject in the sublation of the Father–Son relation in the Spirit. McCormack does not, of course, espouse this position,60 and on the other side, proponents of traditional theism certainly would abhor the implication. However, we can see that this Hegelian logic helps showcase problems in maintaining the 171

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singularity of the divine agency in revelation on both sides of the debate. The issue lies in the relationship of eternal ground and economic manifestation: when we think of the relationship between the immanent and economic Trinity in the sense that the former is a kind of eternal presupposition and ground to the divine act of self-giving in time, this “eternal history” (to use the Barthian term) becomes an eternal exemplar of which the economy is simply a repetition and simulacrum. It is arguable that both traditionalism and revisionism become subject to this: traditionalism locates this eternal exemplar in the immanent Trinity, McCormack, in an “Ur-Father” who self-determines to become in the relation of Father and Son. The relationship between the two is analogical, the difference between a ground of being and its manifestation. But this renders the eternal ground what Barth feared in the doctrine of election—an inaccessible and empty divine abyss of nothingness behind the decree of election, one whose speech emerges from and returns to silence.

The Problem of Hegelian Logic in Trinitarian Theology It is not my intention to launch an internal critique of Hegel’s trinitarianism proper here, a project which would require a far more detailed encounter with a system of thought which, after all, is designed to assimilate contradiction within itself. For my purposes, I want to return to the point that has more directly occupied this book. The Augustinian logic of divine simplicity, is, as we saw, not simply a metaphysical claim, but a soteriological category. It is designed to safeguard the gratuity of God’s self-giving in Christ, understood in the sense of the singularity of the divine act as eternal self-bestowing in the incarnation and the excess of that act in the Spirit who is our participation in God’s life. But as we have seen in the foregoing, Hegelian logic operates on fundamentally different premises, because simplicity for Hegel is undifferentiated abstraction. It takes particularity and finitude, the economy of sameness and difference, for the divine to become self-giving. As I conclude, I want to highlight the conceptual space where the fissures between Hegelian logic and its trinitarian reception begin to open up. The Hegelian subject is a subject who comes to self-knowledge in the exteriorization and objectification of the subject; this subject is the actualization of its potentiality for self-expression through self-alienation and sublation of that alienation. This is the idealist logic of the subject or person; and the assumptions built into it are found throughout contemporary trinitarian theology, in all its forms. The dispute between traditionalism and revisionism in Barthian thought is an example, because the common ground where they share basically Hegelian assumptions is located in the nature of the subjectivity of God as one of mediated self-understanding; the difference is where this mediation occurs. For traditionalism, divine self-revelation is 172

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the manifestation of a prior self-understanding; God can manifest Godself externally because God first understands Godself internally. God can speak the Logos ad extra because God first speaks ad intra; but God’s external action is still premised on God’s internal action. Two things follow: first, the two acts stand in a relationship of potentiality to actualization—the act ad extra actualizes a possibility that emerges as a consequence of a prior ad intra act. This relationship of potentiality to actualization means that an act ad intra mediates between the divine essence as such and the act ad extra. This is simply another way of stating McCormack’s objection that a gap obtains between the eternal essence and temporal manifestation of God in traditional theism. In traditionalism, the generation of the Son precedes the self-determination of God to act ad extra; but this still means that there is a reduplication that runs between God’s being as Trinity and God’s trinitarian act of reconciliation. They are different in character. God’s self-revelation is distinct from God’s act of self-understanding, or rather, God’s self-revelation ad extra is different in character from God’s self-revelation ad intra; the result is that something of God lies behind and apart from what we receive of God. On the other hand, in revisionism:61 if we take the same set of assumptions (the distinction in the subject between the act of self-revelation and self-understanding) and return them to a more autochthonous Hegelian expression, then the traditional relationship of the divine act ad extra and ad intra is reversed. Divine self-understanding is mediated through divine self-revelation insofar as self-revelation is the objectification of the act of self-understanding. This is why, for Hegel, revelation is necessary to God, and so the world: God’s act of self-revelation is the necessary externalization, in a medium alien to Godself, of the act of self-understanding. The negation of the self in the other is where the self knows itself, and so the Son/ world is the necessary moment of external becoming through which God knows Godself as a subject. Here, as I have already argued, a fundamental trinitarian problem arises, for the self-determination through which God determines God’s own essence is prior to that becoming through which God’s self-knowing is completed through the actualization of that prior potentiality. Once again, God’s essence is not identical to God’s self-revelation, for the self-determination of the divine essence in order to self-know remains forever distinct from the realization of that determination, the Son, insofar as the Son is known in the world. The problem is that both positions employ a distinction—one that is not simply logical, but indeed ontological—between an indeterminate and a determinate essence of God. For traditionalism, the immanent Trinity is a prior essence that self-determines as economic Trinity for revelation, but is not, of itself, self-donating; for revisionism, the Ur-Father is a prior essence that self-determines for the begetting of the Son and a trinitarian being in revelation; but once again, the naked essence of God is not, prior to that 173

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self-determination, self-donating. Both end up with a double structure to the essence of God.62 This returns us to Barth’s fundamental question of the logic of revelation as a trinitarian question; debates about various “models” of the Trinity in CD aside, I would suggest that we understand the value of what Barth was working toward in his doctrine of election as a way of thinking about the divine self-communication in Christ that is premised on the singularity of the divine subject. At his best, in what I argue are Augustinian premises, we have no distinction between ad intra and ad extra, which means that we seek no “ground” in the divine being for God’s action external to Godself; rather, we take God to be an essence which is characterized by its eternal self-bestowal, identical to the eternal generation of the Son, who in turn is identical to the human being Jesus Christ. It is not that God’s self-determination in the Son is the ground of God’s self-donation in time, but rather that God’s self-speaking in Jesus Christ is itself the ground of creation. God is an essence that is self-speaking, and this speaking is the Logos, a speaking that because it is in perfect coincidence—indeed, identity—with the subject of that speech, is in fact self-communication, in the sense of self-bestowal. Here we do not see the Logos as the ­becoming of God through which God actualizes God’s essence, which implies a relationship between God’s primordial being and God’s self-revelation mediated by God’s self-understanding or self-determination; instead, this subject is nothing but its act of bestowal. Thus what the doctrine of the Trinity is meant to express is that Christ is God’s act of self-speaking, an act in which God subsists, and that this just is what it is to be God. If trinitarian theology were to follow this path, it would be heeding Barth’s caution regarding the specter of a deus absconditus in revelation and reconciliation, an indeterminate ground of a more or less arbitrary economic manifestation. But understanding how exactly this should be understood requires a careful, constructive statement of Augustinian trinitarian logic which has learned from Barth. This is the task of the conclusion of this book, to which I now turn.

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8 incarnational realism and the augustinian logic of the trinity

The great paradox, and temptation, of Christian theology of the Trinity lies in its necessity of representing what is finally unrepresentable in thought: the reality of our participation in Christ and our knowledge of God, inasmuch as both that participation and that knowledge are the work of God. The knot of issues tied up with that reality both capture the heartbeat of the Christian logic of salvation and reveal how thoroughly that logic is a mystery. The particular set of issues I have attempted to foreground throughout this book—theological anthropology, the nature of divine agency, and the relation of eternity and time—all concern the inherent paradox of the work of the Holy Spirit in Augustine and Barth. Pneumatology, I have argued, is a fundamentally performative reality, because it doesn’t so much concern a set of truth claims or descriptions about the nature of the third hypostasis of the Trinity. Instead, talk of the Holy Spirit continually points away from the Spirit herself in two directions: to Christ, in whom we are redeemed and whose incarnation is the gift of the self-giving God; and to ourselves, insofar as we find ourselves caught up in the act of redemption, an act that is somehow at the same time our own act as well. This aporetic knot is the heart of pneumatology. Augustine and Barth never tired of pointing out how dispossessive this dynamic is. Augustine highlighted the hubris of the philosophers, who prided themselves on their apprehension of the good as if it were available to anyone with sufficient intellectual fortitude, and he uncovered how knowledge of God was premised on a basic contradiction: in loving God, we love what we do not know, and know what we do not have the capacity to love rightly. Likewise, Barth was always “begin[ning] again at the beginning”1 in reorienting us to revelation and reconciliation as an event of contemporaneity with Christ, which captures us insofar as we acknowledge, receive, and confess it as a reality that occurs only on its own terms. What 175

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he early derided as the “peace of the analogia entis” is any attempt to reduce that act to something resident in being as such, and therefore available to human manipulation. It is a false peace, a stable relationship and connection between God and humanity, something one can appropriate, reject, or remain neutral toward as one more item encountered in the world of one’s own agency. This dynamic has been explored in the past six chapters, but in exegetical and exploratory modes. My intention in this concluding chapter is to try to provide an account that summarizes these findings with somewhat more focus. This will involve three major tasks. First, I will offer a brief analysis showing how, in my reading, Augustine and Barth mutually pullulate and contrast in their trinitarian theologies. I will highlight how they differ from one another, and more importantly, together provide important clues about the Western logic of pneumatology and the Trinity that illuminate many of the problematic assumptions of the contemporary resurgence in trinitarian thinking. Second, I will sketch out the two areas where I find this logic to make its most compelling, and potentially most controversial, claims. This will concern what I have called the singularity of the divine agency, and the apophatic logic of deification of Western pneumatology. Finally, I will conclude by returning to the theme of this book—incarnational realism—and contrast it with the assumptions of both trinitarian idealism and personalism.

Augustine and Barth on Pneumatology and Participation in Christ The indissoluble link between trinitarian self-giving and human participation, between Christology and the totus christus, is the central paradox of pneumatology, and provides the guiding motif for the comparative purpose of this section. I have suggested in my discussion of both Augustine and Barth that the Christological–pneumatological nexus is the place in their thought where available metaphysical resources were simultaneously employed and altered, even displaced. The Neoplatonism Augustine inherits, which provides him with the all-important notion of divine simplicity and his illuminationist metaphysics of the eternal ideas, stops short before the “Word made flesh”; and in the course of accounting, pneumatologically, for our participation in the Word, the Plotinian mystical ascent is radically altered by being recontextualized as a Christological descent. Likewise, Barth’s Hegelianism provides him with a way of describing the nature of reality in fundamentally historical, actualistic ways, and allows him to account for God’s act as that of a subject who encounters us; but by locating the dialectic of revelation in Christ, he immediately relocates the divine 176

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act and human participation within the history of a human subject and unhinges its metaphysical hubris. The problem with both, however, is that for all of their christological displacement of these philosophical resources, they still remain constrained by their metaphysical assumptions. Thus the clash between their systems can usefully correct one another.

Barth on Augustine’s Pelagianism It is perhaps easiest to begin with Barth’s correction of Augustine, as Barth explicitly responded to Augustine on the question of the Holy Spirit.2 In an essay dating from the same year (1929) as “Fate and Idea in Theology,”3 Barth enlarges on a problem I noted in De Trinitate: the ambiguity between a metaphysics of illumination, by which the mind always already knows God (prethematically), and Augustine’s Pauline emphasis on this knowledge as an event of grace. For Barth, Augustine preserves a germ of the Pelagian idea of righteousness of works. He confuses the Holy Spirit with the human spirit because understanding the gift of the Spirit as charity means that, at the end of the day, the soul’s own work is the basis of righteousness, even if its work rests on the basis of operative grace. Grace is the actualization of the ontological grounding of the creature in the divine. Barth can go so far as to say that “I believe that as long as we do not root Augustinianism completely out of the doctrine of grace, we will never have a Protestant theology.”4 In Barth’s view, however, “the fundamental significance of the Holy Spirit for the Christian life is that this, our participation in the occurrence of revelation, is just our being grasped in this occurrence which is the effect of the divine action.”5 The Augustine here is Przywara’s, but even allowing for this, Barth’s harsh words for Augustine’s “sweet poison”6 show the profound disagreement between my two interlocutors. The basic problem is that, in a Platonist metaphysics of illumination, the mind by virtue of its nature is participant in the good. Augustine corrects this with a strong emphasis on the sinfulness and finitude of the human mind, the need to “philosophize with a Mediator,” but a slippage still remains by virtue of which access to God might plausibly occur without the benefit of divine revelation. The problem is sharpest in Augustine’s articulation of the imago dei, where we saw him at this most promising: the fact that the mimetic image is only enacted in the participatory image still leaves the former autonomously (though potentially) in likeness to God. In the vestigia, Barth argued, the laudable intent to “explain the world by the Trinity in order to be able to speak about the Trinity in this world” had the opposite result: the language of the world became determinative of the language of revelation.7 This is the precise structure of natural theology for Barth, with all its ideological susceptibility, and furthermore is premised on the same analogia entis he feared in Augustine’s doctrine of grace.8 Whatever we make of this point regarding Augustine, we must note that his critique applies even more cuttingly to 177

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contemporary trinitarians than it does to Augustine proper. As we saw in the first chapter, trinitarian ontologies regularly posit some kind of analogical relationship between persons divine and human, thus presuming, but rarely explaining, a continuity of being between them that reduces the Trinity to a formalistic framework exemplifying the principle of relationality. Indeed, it should be remembered that unlike later readers of Barth who worry that Augustine’s “psychological analogy” was too psychological, Barth was worried that it was an analogy. His concern was not with the appropriateness of psychological analogs to the Trinity, but rather with the inability of any analogy to attend to “the indissoluble unity and the indestructible distinction of the three elements.”9 But the real crux between Augustine and Barth is Christological. Here Barth does register a definitive correction against the bishop of Hippo, though one he himself did not always consistently articulate. It concerns the way each theologian’s Christology contextualizes the relationship of time and eternity. In my reading of Augustine, I pointed to the radical implications of Augustine’s claim that sapientia—knowledge of the ontological realm composed of the eternal, immutable ideas, of the good itself—was identical to knowledge (scientia) of the crucified human Jesus Christ as the eternal self-expression of God. Because the Logos is united with a human being, the ascent to God has already taken place in this human being. However, the implications here remain implications: eternity is decisively manifest in Jesus Christ, but Augustine cannot say, as does Barth, that eternity, Urgeschichte, is identical to the determination of God for the incarnation and history of the human Jesus Christ; he cannot say that the human Jesus Christ is the subject of God’s electing and reconciling act. Augustine will say that the Word became flesh because the Word is already the eternal self-manifestation of God; he cannot say, as does Barth, that that enfleshed self-manifestation is the totality without remainder of our knowledge of God. And this is the crux of the issue between the two thinkers: the richness of Augustine’s category of memoria is also its flaw, for if the mind is always already participant in the good itself, even if only potentially, is it not the case that there is some reserve in the being of God other than what we encounter in the flesh and face of Jesus Christ?

Augustine on Barth’s Fumbling of Simplicity However, Augustine has a riposte against Barth at this point. One of the leading themes of my reading of Barth concerned Barth’s own equivocation on this Christological point. Here he has not fully learned from Augustine. As we saw in Augustine’s formulation of a Pro-Nicene grammar of substantial and relative predications in De Trinitate 5–7, his trinitarian theology is governed by a strict grasp of the significance of divine simplicity. As Anselm later put it, everything is said of the divine substance in common except what 178

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is predicated by way of relation: except insofar as the Son is Wisdom, or the Spirit Love, as Wisdom from Wisdom or Love from Love, the divine essence, which is nothing but the “subsistent relations,” Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is one and singular in its act of self-giving. With this move, Augustine reinforces Nicaea’s slash of the lifeline to any form of Arianism, by guaranteeing that the Father, Son, and Spirit are identically God. Against Barth, however, this implies that Father and Son do not relate to one another as subject and object, which would differentiate God’s knowledge from God’s being, and would make God relate to Godself in some degree mediately, which in turn implies that there are parts of God nonidentical to other parts of God. It is here that Barth falls short, for he cannot resist at times giving place to Hegel, and inscribing the dialectic of affirmation and negation in the Godhead itself—most notably in the master and slave hierarchical pattern that legitimates both the misogyny of CD 3 and the “eternal obedience” of 4/1. Barth’s problem is twofold. Introducing a moment of negation, a self-relation that simultaneously posits a distance of God from Godself and locates this relation anterior to God’s self-giving in the economy, is exactly the pattern of Urgeschichte for which Barth’s critics have criticized him: history and economy, indeed, the person of Jesus Christ (the precise area of Barth’s great gain!) become a simple simulacrum of an eternal history and relation forever inaccessible to us who sojourn in the region of dissimilarity. Ironically, Barth’s own advance against Augustine is undermined by the precise metaphysical resource (Hegel) that makes that advance possible; and Augustine’s Neoplatonism, which lies behind his most significant flaw, is also his resource for thinking the singularity of God’s self-giving in a way that Barth fumbles. The site of this disagreement resides, in no small part, in the evolving way Barth handles the question of pneumatology. While he consistently, and rightly, follows Augustinian logic in understanding the work of the Spirit as inextricably tied to Christology, he takes four volumes of the Dogmatics to adequately describe human participation in Christ through the Spirit. It takes a fully articulated account of the hypostatic union, through ­anhypostatic/ enhypostatic categories, to account for human participation in God as part of Christology itself. Without this dogmatic move, Barth is continually tempted to ground human participation in an eternity of which time is a mere simulacrum, the reflection of an intratrinitarian dialectic of sameness and otherness. Thus in his analogia relationis, human relations patriarchally replicate the hierarchical relationship of Father and Son in eternity. This, surely, is Barth’s own “sweet poison.”

Incarnational Realism We cannot push this comparison any further without working through a more precise clarification of the trinitarian logic that emerges from the 179

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consideration of Augustine and Barth, and I turn to this now. This concerns what, precisely, it means to talk of trinitarian theology as the discourse of the singularity of God’s self-giving in Christ. In this section, I want to offer a sketch of the “incarnational realism” made possible by Augustine and Barth, which is an understanding of trinitarian logic that has learned from both Augustine’s insight into the necessity of simplicity and from Barth’s Christological reorientation. Subsequent to this, in following the pneumatological link of Christology and participation in Christ, I will discuss the aporetic of pneumatology proper, sketching how it can be understood as a kind of apophatic discourse of deification. My concern here is to highlight how key the incarnational rubric is as a principle delineating the Augustinian impulse in trinitarian thought. As we will see in the final section, this principle is, at the end of the day, the thing that separates Augustine and Barth’s contribution from the mainstream of contemporary twentieth-century theology. And that is to the latter’s detriment, even if we should affirm many of its goals.

The Trinitarian Logic of Mission in Augustine and Barth To frame the first theme, concerning trinitarian logic, it is worthwhile to return to an observation made in the first chapter—namely, how definitive Rahner’s “rule” has been for modern trinitarians. The concern to correctly relate knowledge of “God in Godself” and knowledge of “God for us” is found throughout the different strains of the trinitarian revival, whether it is LaCugna’s flat denial of the possibility of the former, Jenson’s near-total conflation of the two, or Gunton’s two-tiered symmetry between them. Running throughout these appropriations of the Grundaxiom are a strong confidence in revelation’s ability to give us a rather precise delineation of the nature of God, with easily identifiable implications of our knowledge of that nature. In trinitarian personalism’s exemplarist schemes of analogy, God’s self-relation of communion is a model for our own relations of communion; in idealist trinitarianisms, history and the world are in some sense the mediating principle of God’s historical becoming. The question for both, however, is whether these analogical or idealist schemes are not simply too reductionist, at the expense of the integrity of God’s reconciling act in the economy of salvation. On the one hand, in trinitarian personalism the character of God’s act in history can actually seem superfluous, an accidental occasion or concrete illustration of what is essentially a purely metaphorical relationship between human community and divine community. The relationship between God in Godself and God in the economy of salvation is secondary to this metaphorical relationship; in fact, the revelatory quality of the economy of salvation seems to lie largely in that Jesus lives out an exemplary relational existence as Son to the Father. On the other hand, in trinitarian idealism the God-world relation is one of necessity, insofar as God’s being is in becoming in God’s other. This is not 180

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necessarily to say that the world is necessary to God; but it is to point out that God’s self-revelation in the economy is only possible as a result of the necessity of God’s self-alienating otherness internal to Godself. God does not so much pour out God’s love in history as God incorporates history into Godself in what sometimes begins to look like a startlingly narcissistic picture of self-reflexivity. Neither of these is a relation of gratuity, which I want to set out here. This relation of gratuity is identical to the incarnation of the Son and the outpouring of the Spirit of participation in the Son; it is secured by a trinitarian conception in which the singularity of divine self-donation in Jesus Christ is the material content of trinitarian doctrine as such, and the corresponding doctrinal articulation of that act is a trinitarian “grammar” configured around God’s eternal nature as self-donating good. This grammar is stymied by both social-communion and idealistic doctrines of the Trinity. The crux of this matter lies in a problem we saw in the previous chapter as we discussed Hegel—the relationship between the action of Trinity as a whole and the relations of origin of the hypostases—and is illustrated by the great myth of contemporary trinitarianism that Rahner popularized. This is the impersonal “fourth” that is reputed to lie behind the trinitarian subsistents in Augustine’s (and sometimes, Barth’s) theology, as the unity of the divine substance anterior to and privileged over the plurality of persons. My reading of Augustine has demonstrated the complete historical falsity of this charge, and I have intimated that, in a rich irony, both idealist and personalist doctrines of the Trinity actually employ such a “fourth” in order to articulate the intelligibility of the divine act. In fact, this implicit dependence upon a “fourth” in the Trinity is a trait that is common to both detractors of Augustine like Gunton or Jenson, and to his defenders, such as Williams or Milbank, who incorporate personalistic emphases. In both cases, the communion of the persons, or the mutual bestowal of love by Father and Son, is handled as something that is itself understood as agential and the term of human participation. To say that God’s being is one constituted in relationality—that God’s unity is that of the communion of persons—is to say, correlatively, that to be a divine hypostasis is to participate in something, or to communicate something, which is more primordial than the hypostases itself. It is extraordinarily difficult to claim that “God is a loving communion of persons” without hypostatizing that “communion” as the real referent of the term “God,” of which the persons are mere instances or participants. But if that is the case, we are back with a deus absconditus behind the “persons.” Let me unpack this further. My reading of De Trinitate 5–7 maintains that we should see the “Anselmian” axiom in Deo omnia sunt unum, ubi non obviat relationis oppositio as an accurate dogmatic formula for Augustine’s contention that all predications about God concern the one divine essence, unless they are predications that concern the relations of the subsistents. 181

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Wisdom applies to the divine substance, for wisdom is an absolute term; Word or Image or Son are relative terms, and therefore denote the second subsistent proper. But if we think of the unity, or nature or essence, of God as a communion of persons, or an identity produced in the dialectic of Father and Son, then to say God really is to say something different than that the one divine essence subsists as the Father’s begetting of the Son and spirating of the Spirit filioque. It is to say something like the following: the Father and Son and Spirit are God insofar as they are participants in an event of communion, or they are simply moments in a process of becoming that is itself the divine life. Both of these are really distinct from the subsistents as the principle of their unity and deity. The divine essence here in fact functions as a fourth behind the trinitarian relations, an abstract negativity that unites the hypostases or (as we saw with trinitarian idealisms like that of McCormack) self-determines to exist as Father, Son, and Spirit, thus relocating redemptive agency from the subsistents to this essence. Thus the problem of the “fourth” is a problem concerning the logic of the production of the deity attributable to a common divine essence that is different from the Father’s begetting of the Son and procession of the Spirit.10 When Augustine rejected the over-literalization of the language of “person” or “hypostasis” for the trinitarian subsistents (as if they were three statues made of the same lump of gold), he rejected this problem, which differentiates between the essence of God as a genus, and the Father, Son, and Spirit who are species or individuants of that genus. But in the Augustinian reception of Pro-Nicene logic, Deum de Deo . . . Deum verum de Deo vero means that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are each in themselves God, all the while being God not without the others, nor constituting three Gods.11 The most succinct expression of this grammar is the Anselmian gloss on Augustine’s logic in De Trinitate 5–7. It has to be remembered why these distinctions are important: they preserve the unity of substance of Father and Son such that, in Jesus Christ, we participate in the being of God without reserve. The indivisibility of the external operations (opera trinitatis ad extra indivisa sunt) means that the act of God in Jesus Christ is the act of God entire: the whole divine life is in Jesus Christ, not just one member of the Trinity acting on his own. The purpose of this axiom is not to flatten the trinitarian differentiations outside of the immanent Trinity, because it relies upon the simplicity of the divine life, and thus the singularity of the divine act. The work of God ad extra is one, and this unitary work of God is constituted by its reference to the terms of the trinitarian relations. In other words, the work of God ad extra is that work that occurs insofar as God speaks Godself in the Son, Deum de Deo. God is the Father who begets the Son and spirates the Spirit with the Son, the God whose unity is one that inheres in the relations of these subsistents such that the one divine essence is a simple and singular act of self-donation, a self-diffusive, overflowing good. There is no essence of God other than 182

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that which subsists in those relations. God acts insofar as God the Father eternally generates a Son who is Word and Image in whom God is eternally self-speaking, and there is no other act of God than that by which the Father speaks in the Son. For Augustine and the mature Barth, a strict correlation of procession and mission is key to working this out: the only distinction between procession and mission is that between an eternal self-speaking of God and the human knowledge of that speaking in time. God is always self-giving, although the created term of that giving is contingent, not necessary for that self-giving. The difference between Augustine and Barth lies in how they articulate this identity of procession and mission. In a significant sense, this is their only real disagreement, in terms of the Trinity itself. While it is false, as I argued at length, that Augustine is uninterested in the economy of salvation or the integrity of the incarnation as the self-communication of the divine essence, it is certainly the case that the metaphysical privilege of his theology lies in eternity. Time is the region of dissimilarity, a devolution and degradation of the singularity of the divine eternity. To be sure, the relationship of the two lies more in their ethical distinction than their ontological dualism—Augustinian time has more to do with the quality of one’s love, one’s intentio, than it does with the inherent inferiority of created being. The foundation of Augustine’s theology is, after all, located in the affirmation of the goodness of created being ex nihilo. Still, when it comes to articulating the incarnation, the content of the Son as sapientia is determined by his eternal procession from the Father. His manifestation in history reveals the content of that eternity, and draws the contemplative from Christ as human to Christ as God. Barth’s orienting points, on the other hand, are quite the opposite. His concept of Urgeschichte is shot through with ambiguity, as we saw; at times, it names an eternal exemplar replicated in a temporal repetition or simulacrum, as in the analogia relationis. But when he is able, with the doctrine of election and the hypostatic union, to account for human participation not as a created shadow but a Christological reality—an incarnational reality— then he is able to glimpse a trinitarian doctrine in which the history of Jesus is the orienting point of God’s eternal act: the incarnation is the content of the Son’s eternal election. The trouble for Barth, though, as “traditionalists” hasten to add, is that Hegel is but one step away once we begin to think of the world as the necessary mediation of God’s self-realization, such that God’s freedom is lost and the world becomes the content of God’s being. Barth at his best, though, or at least the direction Barth is trying to point toward, reframes the question. The issue is not whether or not the world is necessary to God (it isn’t); the issue is whether God’s relationship with the world only occurs as part of a process of prior self-mediation in the “eternal history” of Father and Son, in which case the history of Jesus is only secondary to God’s self-determination to be God for us by relating to Godself as prius and posterius. In that case, the real action lies back in eternity. 183

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The key here is to rethink our conception of eternity so that, along with Augustine and Barth, we think of the distinction of time and eternity as not ontological, but ethical, concerning the eschatological quality of our historical existence. God eternally is a self-diffusive good identical to Jesus Christ, because there is no temporal “prior” or “posterior” to the incarnation. Eternity is one timeless moment, but it is a timeless moment of God’s overflowing love. This means that history looks fundamentally different from the divine perspective than it does from ours. The center and basis of God’s creative act is the history of Jesus; creation itself occurs on the basis of that history, as does creation’s eschatological goal. God’s act is one, but it diffuses and refracts: God speaks Godself in Jesus, such that the incarnation is that self-speaking, which echoes and reverberates through history and creation itself. The Son is eternally what the medievals called the exemplar of creation: he is the one act of God by which creation comes into being, and in accordance with which creation is likened to its creator. This is not to say that history has no integral reality itself, in its messy contingency and particularity, in its simultaneously chaotic complexity and yet irreducible linearity.12 Quite the contrary: that is the essence of pneumatology. Urgeschichte does not erase history’s reality, but history’s eternal reality precisely is the way the many, particular acts of knowledge of and participation in the Son as proceeding from the Father are the same in character and essence as the generation of the Son himself. Knowledge of the Son is the reality of the Spirit shed abroad in our hearts. Every such act of knowledge is the content of the eternity of God, and every such act of knowledge is the act of God. In correspondence to the logic of the verbum, the Spirit, for Augustine, is not a second act that runs parallel to the first, but the excess of that act that is the fullness of the life of God experienced in participation in the body of Christ. As a verbum is an inner word joined to its object by the “glue of love,” so God as eternally self-giving good takes the object of God’s act of self-bestowal to Godself in the outpouring of the love of God. The Spirit is eternally the gift of God, but this does not imply the necessity of a term for that self-giving, just because it is the nature of God to overflow in goodness; but the Spirit is only known as gift in time, which means that the mission of the Spirit is the temporal form in which her eternal procession continually occurs. Likewise, the Son is eternally Word; but the Son is only known as the Word in time as Jesus Christ. But more importantly: if the mission of the Son is the incarnation of Jesus Christ, then the mission of the Spirit is the knowing of the Son as Jesus Christ in time. The mission of the Spirit is that by which the history of Jesus Christ is Urgeschichte, by which we are contemporaneous with Christ and therefore, by which Jesus Christ is wirklich humanity—that act by which God acts for and in all history. This is a pneumatological reality, the excess of the already-gratuitous self-giving of God. In a rigorously Christological dialectic of revelation, the singular act of God is articulated in the form of a human history, and the 184

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Son’s relationship with the Father is the Son’s assumption of humanity in himself as totus christus enacted in the pneumatological correspondence of that humanity.

The Apophatic Aporia of the Spirit: Deification and Participation The preceding section has outlined the Christologically oriented logic of trinitarian self-giving, as understood in terms of the mission of Son and Spirit, in Augustine and Barth. In this section, I want to relate this to the underlying grammar of trinitarian theology: deifying participation in Christ. The Spirit is the power of Jesus Christ by which the act of the Son in Christ is its own knowability and historicity, the intensity of the encounter with the risen Christ in history. To talk about participation in Christ, therefore, is to talk about the way the life of the human subject is oriented in correspondence to the life of God. That correspondence is why, in this book, I have argued that Augustine and Barth together offer a pneumatology that is fundamentally aporetic and performative, or rather, is the aporetic of performance. This is so because both conceive the Holy Spirit as the gift of God by which we know God, the love of God shed abroad in our hearts by which we, as ethical subjects in our orientation toward the good of God’s self-giving, correspond to and participate in God. Knowledge of God is a performance of the life of God, partaking in the nature of God’s being as a self-diffusive good of love. Thus when Barth focuses his trinitarian exposition on the problem of revelation’s knowability in CD 1/1, the last thing he is concerned with is epistemic matters—he has the logic of grace in mind. He is following the same path as Augustine in understanding our relation with God as a transformative enactment of response, a “knowing” that takes the form of an ethical act. The grammar of this enactment is aporetic because it is the enactment of grace, the act of God known only insofar as one performs that act, an act that transcends one’s own by indwelling it in deepest intimacy. The knowledge of God takes the form of a self-knowledge that is closer to me than myself. This is a participation in the self-donation of God in Christ, and it is what deification looks like in an Augustinian logic of grace. The argument of this book could, perhaps, be summarized in the claim that the person and work of the Holy Spirit is only intelligible in the context of an Augustinian doctrine of grace (with—perhaps—Barth’s deeply ironic worries about Augustine’s Pelagianism taken into account). I have, of course, argued this without any real discussion of Augustine’s labors over that doctrine against the Pelagians, but this is due to the fact that the doctrine of grace is itself simply the speculative outworking of his pneumatology, which in turn is inextricable from his Christology. Everything that is to be said about God, and about ourselves in reference to God (thus, about ourselves as such), is to be said concerning Jesus Christ, including that sphere of discourse that we call “pneumatology.” Jesus Christ is, 185

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in other words, the material content of trinitarian doctrine, which has one purpose: to provide the grammar of our deification, or put differently, the antecedent logic of our participation in God in the whole Christ. The doctrine of the Trinity articulates the way in which that participation is the work of God, God acting within our response to God’s act of self-giving. Thus it has two moments: the identity in being of Jesus Christ with the Father, and the character of the act of God in Jesus Christ as grace. Because the Trinity is the concept that substantiates the antecedent logic of primary-level Christian discourses of Christology and grace, it is simultaneously referentially identical and semantically distinct from those doctrines. Indeed, as both Barth and Augustine saw in their different ways, these two discursive domains of Christology and grace are the same: the human ascent to God takes places within Christ’s descent for Augustine, which occurs in the outpouring of the love of the Spirit in our hearts; for Barth, because Jesus Christ is wirklich humanity, Christology already describes both divine self-giving in grace and human reception of that grace in the person of Jesus Christ. The fundamental asymmetry inherent to the dialectic of God’s act in Jesus Christ is the fundamental asymmetry that obtains in the encounter of God and human as such. It is only insofar as participation in God is wholly God’s act that it ever becomes our own proper (empowered) act. All this immediately needs qualification: I am not claiming, and it is far from obvious to my mind that even Barth would claim, that every theological statement is to be translated into one concerning Jesus Christ. Every theological statement is referred to its concrete and actual relationship to the Word in Jesus Christ—predications concerning the work and nature of God have their criteria of intelligibility and their ultimate referent in discourse about Jesus Christ, but the register of theological discourse varies widely. This is a significant point, for once it is understood that pneumatology is ultimately referred to Jesus Christ and our participation in him, even as it operates at a different register, one at a certain remove of inference, implication, and synthesis, we lose the temptation to assume that “Christocentrism” precludes a suitably “robust” pneumatology.13 Christology and pneumatology are not in competition, because they do not operate at the same level of theological discourse. Pneumatology does not concern a second sphere of reasoning concerning a second work of God alongside that which concerns Christology, for there is one work of God, that which takes its meaning and basis in Jesus Christ. Pneumatology is that theological site where various theological loci—Christology, ecclesiology, anthropology, God, sin, and grace—converge in a “metadoctrine” that centers their unity in the mystery of salvation. Pneumatology is not an autonomous sphere of Christian discourse and logic; it is that speech that concerns that discourse and logic insofar as it is enacted. The stronger one’s Christology, the stronger one’s pneumatology. 186

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This differentiation of theological registers has a further implication. If contemporary trinitarians tend to assume that Christology and pneumatology operate univocally (and thus competitively), they also tend to assume that ascriptions that concern the unity of God, and those that concern the threeness of God, likewise operate on the same level of logic, which entails that one’s trinitarian “model” operates on a continuum of emphasis upon one or another of these poles. But trinitarian theology is not a Faustian exercise in delicately balancing sufficient emphasis upon “oneness” or “threeness,” or in privileging one or the other as a methodological “starting point.” The problem lies, again, in the confusion of reference and register. Substantial and relative statements do different kinds of work and concern different modes of description of God in God’s work. The unity of God is that of an act, for God’s being is an act of self-diffusive love in Jesus Christ, and the character of that act has reference to those relations by which that act subsists eternally as a self-donation that already is the assumption of the donee. This is why the differentiation of ascriptions ad extra and ad intra do not concern an entity whose homogenous exterior conceals an internal differentiation that stands in more or less accidental relationship to that homogenous whole; rather, they have to do with the character of an act with reference to its term—the elevation of the world to deifying participation in God—and to its origin—the character of that elevation as a self-speaking of God. Here is where Barth’s logic of antecedence is important: the trinitarian life of God is not something different than the incarnation of Jesus Christ, as if it were something “behind” the incarnation rendering the latter mendacious; rather, it is simply what must be the case in God’s eternal nature if God is indeed to be incarnate in the human Jesus. Pneumatology, therefore, is simply an extension of that logic, for it concerns the fact that our participation in Christ is of precisely the same eternal origin and nature as the person of Jesus Christ himself. But it is our response. It is inherent to pneumatology that it concerns the deification of the human person as agent of its act. The consequence of the Augustinian logic of grace is that the gift of the Spirit as the love of God poured out within our hearts requires us to conceive of the coincidence of the agency of God, and the agency of humanity, both in their integrity. God’s act is the empowering life of the human person’s act, and the faltering attempt to capture this paradox is the aporetic of the Spirit. But this is a thinking of something that cannot be thought, for it concerns a love only known as a performance of a prior gift of grace. What emerges from Augustine’s incorporation of the logic of grace and the aporetic of self-involvement in De Trinitate is a performative reality predicated upon a prior and prevenient act of God’s self-giving. It is in performing the ascent to God that we encounter God’s descent in Christ as the outpouring of the love of God in our hearts. To call this deification is to say that the graced soul is one whose agency is a partaking of the divine essence, even as it is wholly and without reserve that subject’s own agency. 187

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And insofar as God’s transcendence is one of affections, of the quality of God’s love, the nature of that graced and deified agency has to do with what Barth called the subject’s Weisung, and what Augustine labels her intentio; it has to do with the ethical quality and orientation of a self whose love loves more than its own capacity. Trinitarian logic is the necessary antecedent to and the grammar of this logic of deification.14 The Augustinian logic of deification is premised on the singularity of God’s self-giving in Christ, which means that it is a particularly ethical kind of apophaticism, one that articulates God’s unknowability as that of an incomprehensible gratuity, the undivided mystery of an essence whose essence just is its act of bestowing itself upon the creature in the obscurity of a Jewish peasant’s life and death. To combine, once again, Augustinian and Barthian idioms, for the Spirit to be the love of God poured out in our hearts means that our life is hidden with Christ in God: an Augustinian-Barthian pneumatology of deification concerns the way in which the life of the graced subject is fundamentally eschatological, precisely in its quotidian everydayness. The hidden eternity of our life in God is that of the ethical intensity and eschatological excess of our relationship with the neighbor. It is in the depths of our own ethical act, in the recognition of a fundamental transformation by grace in the intimacy of our deepest interiority, even and precisely in the ambiguity of its tension with the failures and treacheries of our faithlessness and unlove, that we recognize the eternal mystery of a self-giving of God in the face of Jesus Christ. All this is involved in the logic of pneumatology, which at its root concerns the way in which theological anthropology is constructed in theological discourse. One of the implications of this logic is that pneumatology is inherently and indelibly economic, a speculative reflection on the economy of salvation. Because it concerns a performative dimension that corresponds to the more strictly referential concerns of Christology, it will always be aporetic insofar as its shades into the irreducible grammar of praxis. The nature of revelation, at least insofar as it functions in Augustinian and Barthian theology, is that of a divine self-giving known only insofar as it has always already claimed us and been enacted in our response. Talk of God is inherently self-involving; thus to formulate trinitarian concerns, and especially to concern oneself with the aporia of pneumatology, is to “start from” that divine self-giving in Christ insofar as Christ is the one who lays claim upon the speaker. The referent of this doctrinal discourse is always going to be Christology, and pneumatology is only ever going to be given to speech in that it concerns itself with this fact. It would, of course, be irresponsible to talk about deification without acknowledging Barth’s absolute rejection of this category, as I discussed in Chapter 6.15 Indeed, Maarten Wisse has argued against using the term with reference to Augustine, worrying that deification, which has become “the hype of twenty-first-century theology,”16 too easily blurs into the kind of 188

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“pan-mediation” emphasis upon sharing of being that social trinitarians depend upon, and which, after all, Augustine was opposing in his deconstruction of the psychological analogy. This is certainly right—but as Wisse himself notes, deification in the “weak sense” is soteriological, not ontological, focusing on communio cum Christo rather than the communicatio idiomatum for its force.17 My use of the term is intended to highlight the fact that in pneumatology, divine and human agencies become indiscernibly intertwined, to the extent that a human act is in fact the act of God in the Spirit. This names an aporia—that wirklich humanity could be Jesus Christ’s, in such a way that our own, very real and integral, humanity could be derivative of his. This is the mystery of self-involving nature of participation in the Spirit, and it is as profoundly Barthian as it is Augustinian.

The Project of the Trinitarian Revival in Retrospect After all that I have sought to argue in this book, incarnational realism can be stated quite simply. It is an attempt to express the idea that the measure of our knowledge of God, the agent of our redemption, and the material content of trinitarian doctrine is, simply, the incarnation. The work of the Spirit is to make us contemporaneous to, and participants in, the incarnation, in the form of the church, which at bottom is an extension of Jesus’s mission—the love of the neighbor. I call this a kind of “realism” because I take this relationship to the incarnate Christ to be a real encounter with the redemptive act of God, not a principle signifying a more universal and ultimately more generic truth. At their best, this is what Augustine and Barth were working toward. My worry about contemporary trinitarianism is that it often loses sight of this very simple fact. In trinitarian personalism, the redemptive act of Christ seems not much more than a “concrete universal” exemplifying certain ontological truths about the relational nature of humanity and reality. This is an important point, but one it seems we don’t really need the Trinity to demonstrate. In trinitarian idealism, the person and work of Christ is indeed important, an essential moment in the economy of salvation; however, Christ still primarily functions, not as a particular person, but a general principle of God’s self-mediation. The larger story about Jesus is that he is the one in whom God knows Godself. He mediates between abstract universality and the self-knowing of an essence in-and-for-itself. He is less Bonhoeffer’s “man for others” and more Hegel’s “narcissistic gratitude” of a “circular, specular” self-recognizing absolute subject.18 In the last few pages, I have tried to express why this incarnational realism is so vital for grasping pneumatology, at least as Western thinking in the lineage of Augustine understands it. The scandal of the Holy Spirit in twentieth-century theology was, unfortunately, subject to a double misunderstanding from the beginning: neither Augustine nor Barth actually suffered from a deficit of pneumatological insight, and in fact their trinitarian theologies were built around the aporia of the Spirit as a participative 189

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reality in Christ; second, the idea that constructing a more “relational” trinitarian theology was going to create more room for the Spirit in the economy of salvation seemed to assume, as Paul Fletcher put it, “if we say often enough that [the divine] persons are relational then human beings will follow suit.”19 This “top-down” approach, as I labeled it in Chapter 1, does indeed suffer from a kind of naiveté, in that it is premised on the notion that theological theory (invented whole cloth) somehow directly translates into Christian practice. Moreover, it seems odd to imagine that a “model of God” could be constructed that would prove regulative for the construction of the human; on reflection, it presumes that the reality of God is a blank screen upon which to project our chosen metaphors. In Barthian terms, this is Feuerbachian logic, which is simply positing the nature of God as the epitome of human predicates. But the revelation of God in Jesus Christ is always apprehended at the moment of breakdown in all of our analogies, the unlikeness to our likeness, the divestment and dispossession of our self-assurance. We learned from Augustine that this assurance is the hubris of the philosophers, and from Barth that this Feuerbachian structure is the structure of natural theology. Both are the subtle, but catastrophic, shift that occurs as the “brazen identification” of human constructs—“natural” knowledge and the social order—with God’s revelation. It occurs when creation functions as the middle term between revelation and human society, such that human interpersonal and political realities are reified with the stability of nature itself. Thus oppressive structures—like Barth’s patriarchy—become identified with the orders of creation themselves. Revelation becomes the ideological legitimation of regnant sociopolitical structures: society simply reflects “what is natural.” This is what Barth had in mind when he polemicized against the “peace of the analogia entis.” This is not to say that social trinitarianism is oppressive, but simply that it partakes of this structure of ideological representation.20 What then is the use of trinitarian theology, if not to ground a social ontology? As I close this book, it is not without a certain wistfulness regarding the relational project of much of twentieth-century trinitarianism. We do indeed need to learn how to live as relational beings, to relate to our “others” in peace, and to live in communion. But a more or less arbitrary metaphor divinized with the authority of revelation is not going to do this; being deified will. And that is an act, not an idea. To learn from Augustine’s conception of the Spirit as the love that is the joining of God’s Word to the world in love, as the grace that is the return to God that is itself a moment in God’s eternal self-giving; and to follow Barth when he argues that this self-giving, and thus the eternal nature of God, is identical to the history of Jesus Christ, to whom we are made contemporaneous in the eschatological transition that is the gift of the Spirit: this is to conceive of pneumatology as the performance of grace, as the love of God shed abroad in our hearts with an interiority 190

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closer to us than we ourselves. This is a transcendence of affections, of a love that transcends by dwelling in a deepest intimacy, whose proximity is that of the neighbor. And it is to understand our life as hidden in God—to understand the true locus of our identity to be identical to Jesus Christ, the true human being, who in the hiddenness of God’s mystery is the singular act of a self-bestowing love that is the intensity and overflowing effulgence of our histories. This is a conception of the Spirit as the promise and gift of God, the pledge of an eschatological inheritance and the ascent to God in the face of the neighbor. I have not attempted, in this book, to imagine what this social relation might look like, as my intent has been to break the analogical connection between a putative trinitarian sociality and human sociality, for that connection, ubiquitous in contemporary trinitarianism, both compromises the divine self-giving in Jesus Christ, and inscribes the conception of charity within a totalizing economy of the same that all too easily becomes an ideology of the polis. Indeed, at the end of this study, this is perhaps the most important lesson to learn from Augustine and Barth’s pneumatology: how radically dispossessive it is, how it suspends our subjectivity in midair, how it refuses to grant our institutions (including and especially the church) the finality of divine authority. It is a pneumatology that troubles us in our own house, that is more the venture into the luminous darkness of mystery than it is the formal structures of an ontology. The Trinity at the end of the day is the signifier for the stark paradox that in a crucified criminal from the early decades of the Common Era we encounter the definitive act of God in history, and that act is enacted in a correspondence on our part. That correspondence, too, is that act of God, and we call it the Holy Spirit. The all too ready temptation is to ease this paradox by allowing the eternal act of God to stand somewhere safely behind the person of Jesus Christ, all the while making this person something less than fully one of us. An object of wonder and spectacle, perhaps, a model for emulation; but certainly not the eternal mystery of God hidden in the face of one of our companions.

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Introduction 1 The Trinity (trans. Joseph Donceel; New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 2007). 2 Ibid., p. 10. 3 Ibid., p. 22. 4 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics (trans. G. W. Bromiley et al., 4 vols in 13 parts; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956–77). Hereafter CD. 5 CD 1/1, p. 296. 6 CD 4/2, pp. 105–06, 109. 7 CD 1/1, pp. 333–47. 8 Due to the focus of this book, I unfortunately will be unable to give any significant attention to the importance of contemporary Eastern Orthodoxy trinitarian theology, nor to adjudicating historical claims about the relative merits of Cappadocian vs Augustinian theology. 9 The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (trans. Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius; Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1957). 10 Ibid., pp. 57, 81. 11 For more, see Nicolas Zernov, The Russian Religious Renaissance of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), pp. 250–82; Aidan Nichols, Theology in the Russian Diaspora: Church, Fathers, Eucharist in Nikolai Afanas’ev (1893– 1966) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 62–134. 12 Georges Florovksy, “Patristics and Modern Theology,” Diakonia 4, no. 3 (1969), pp. 227–32. 13 Piet Schoonenberg, “Trinity—The Consummated Covenant: Theses on the Doctrine of the Trinitarian God,” Sciences Religieuses/Studies in Religion 5, no. 2 (1975), pp. 111–16. 14 Catherine Mowry LaCugna, God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), p. 144. 15 God’s Being Is in Becoming: The Trinitarian Being of God in the Theology of Karl Barth: A Paraphrase (trans. John Webster; Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2001). 16 Theology of Hope: On the Grounds and Implications of a Christian Eschatology (trans. James W. Leitch; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993); The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (trans. R. A. Wilson and John Bowden; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), p. 246. 17 The Crucified God, pp. 246–47. 18 Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God (trans. Margaret Kohl; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993).

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NOTES 19 Moltmann is actually a Reformed theologian, as was Barth; but the character of his theology, which is notoriously eclectic, tends toward Lutheran influences, at least at the time of his early work in Christology. 20 Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology (trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley; vol. 1; Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1991). 21 Robert Jenson, The Triune Identity: God According to the Gospel (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982); Systematic Theology I: The Triune God (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 22 The Triune Identity, p. 8. 23 The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation (trans. Edward T. Oakes; San Francisco: Communio Books, 1992). 24 Mysterium Paschale: The Mystery of Easter (trans. Aidan Nichols; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990). 25 Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985). See also Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church (ed. Paul McPartlan; New York: T&T Clark/Continuum, 2006). 26 Barth, CD 1/1, pp. 355–59; Rahner, The Trinity, pp. 104–13. 27 Being as Communion, p. 36. 28 Strictly speaking, for Zizioulas this communion is grounded in the monarchy of the Father, who freely originates Son and Spirit. The hypostatic distinctiveness of the first person as unoriginated, therefore, is the ground of communion. It may not escape the reader’s notice that there is potentially something of a contradiction in the very idea of “being as communion,” at least if it has to have prior reference to an ontological unity, as it does in Zizioulas. I have discussed this problem from different angles in Travis Ables, “On the Very Idea of an Ontology of Communion: Being, Relation, and Freedom in Zizioulas and Levinas,” The Heythrop Journal 52, no. 4 (July 2011), pp. 672–83, and “Being Church: A Critique of Zizioulas’s Communion Ecclesiology,” in Unity, Diversity, Otherness: Toward an Ecumenical Ecclesiology in a Fragmented World (ed. Gesa Elsbeth Thiessen; New York: T&T Clark, 2009), pp. 115–27. 29 Persons, Divine and Human: King’s College Essays in Theological Anthropology (ed. Christoph Schwöbel and Colin E. Gunton; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991). 30 “The History. Augustine, the Trinity and the Theological Crisis of the West,” in The Promise of Trinitarian Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991), pp. 31–57. 31 The One, the Three, and the Many: God, Creation, and the Culture of Modernity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 32 Trinity and Society (trans. Paul Burns; Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988). 33 After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1998). 34 See respectively S. Mark Heim, The Depth of the Riches: A Trinitarian Theology of Religious Ends (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2001); Sigurd Bergmann, Creation Set Free: The Spirit as Liberator of Nature (trans. Douglas Stott; Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2005). 35 Besides LaCugna, see Elizabeth A. Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1993); Hannah Bacon, What’s Right with the Trinity? Conversations in Feminist Theology (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2009).

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NOTES 36 Originally The Trinity was published as “Der dreifaltige Gott als transzendenter Urgrund der Heilsgeschichte,” in Mysterium Salutis: Grundriss Heilsgeschichtlicher Dogmatik (ed. Johannes Feiner and Magnus Löhrer; vol. 2; Einsiedeln: Benziger Verlag, 1967), pp. 317–97, itself an expansion from the 1960 essay “Remarks on the Dogmatic Treatise ‘De Trinitate,’” in Theological Investigations (trans. Kevin Smyth; vol. 4; Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1966), pp. 77–102. 37 Although I primarily focus on historical theologians here, many analytic philosophers of religion have been critical of the claims of social trinitarian thought; for example, see Sarah Coakley, “‘Persons’ in the ‘Social’ Doctrine of the Trinity: A Critique of the Current Analytic Discussion,” and Brian Leftow, “Anti Social Trinitarianism,” both in The Trinity: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Trinity (ed. Stephen T. Davis, Daniel Kendall, and Gerald O’Collins; New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 123–44 and 203–49, respectively; Dale Tuggy, “Divine Deception, Identity, and Social Trinitarianism,” Religious Studies 40, no. 3 (2004), pp. 269–87; Michael C. Rea, “The Trinity,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology (ed. Thomas P. Flint and Michael C. Rea; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 403–29. I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer for Religion Compass, who drew my attention to this philosophical literature. 38 “Augustine in Contemporary Trinitarian Theology,” Theological Studies 56 (1995), pp. 237–50. 39 Gioia, The Theological Epistemology of Augustine’s De Trinitate (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Wisse, Trinitarian Theology beyond Participation: Augustine’s De Trinitate and Contemporary Theology (New York: T&T Clark, 2011). 40 Levering, Scripture and Metaphysics: Aquinas and the Renewal of Trinitarian Theology (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2004); Emery, Trinity in Aquinas (Ann Arbor, MI: Sapientia Press, 2003) and The Trinitarian Theology of Saint Thomas Aquinas (trans. Francesca Aran Murphy; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 41 Bruce D. Marshall, “The Trinity,” in The Blackwell Companion to Modern Theology (ed. Gareth Jones; Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2004), pp. 183–203. 42 Richard Cross, “Two Models of the Trinity?” Heythrop Journal 43, no. 3 (2002), pp. 275–94; “On Generic and Derivation Views of God’s Trinitarian Substance,” Scottish Journal of Theology 56, no. 4 (2003), pp. 464–80. 43 David Cunningham, These Three Are One: The Practice of Trinitarian Theology (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), p. 25. Cunningham connects this emphasis to Régnon’s influence as well (pp. 26–27). 44 An Introduction to the Trinity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 19. 45 Although see Chad Tyler Gerber, The Spirit of Augustine’s Early Theology: Contextualizing Augustine’s Pneumatology (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), which covers Augustine’s pneumatology through his ordination in 391. See also Jae-Bum Hwang, The Trinitarian Logics of St. Augustine and Karl Barth: With Special Reference to their Respective Pneumatologies and Filioque-Positions (PhD diss., Union Theological Seminary, 1998), which unfortunately came to my attention too late to consult extensively for this book. 46 A similar concern can be found in Wisse’s discussion of the “functionalization” of the Trinity in linking it with relational ontology, Trinitarian Theology beyond Participation, pp. 5–10, and Richard M. Fermer, “The Limits of Trinitarian Theology

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NOTES as a Methodological Paradigm,” Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 41, no. 2 (Nov. 1999), pp. 158–86. 47 My selection of sources deserves comment; I am focusing on Trin. and CD just at a point in the scholarly conversation when these works are being deemphasized, or at least recontextualized, as representative sources of Augustine’s and Barth’s theology. Witness the work of Barnes and Ayres, who often focus on Augustine’s sermons and letters over his supposedly systematic treatises like Trin.; and Bruce McCormack, who has done much to ground readings of CD in Barth’s earlier work. In both cases, essential context is provided by going outside of the classic sources, and I do not intend to regress from such advances here. I have elected to focus on Trin. and CD, however. In part, this is for expedience—I am not writing a monograph on either theologian, only a few chapters, and space precludes a comprehensive survey of their authorship. At least as importantly, though, I am seeking to be attentive to the performative contours of their pneumatology—how it is developed and expressed organically and even dramatically within the constraints and demands of a particular literary work, as expressing one overall intent and goal. 48 I owe this way of putting things to Eugene F. Rogers, Jr., After the Spirit: A Constructive Pneumatology from Resources outside the Modern West (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2005), p. 45. 49 On the “Christomonism” accusation, see the discussion in David Guretzki, Karl Barth on the Filioque (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), p. 42n131. 50 For example, I have in mind many of the essays in Speaking the Christian God: The Holy Trinity and the Challenge of Feminism (ed. Alvin J. Kimel; Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1992). 51 This term alludes to a long-standing conversation with Natalie Wigg-Stevenson, whose influence I happily acknowledge here.

Chapter 1 1 I do not, of course, make the claim that these philosophical backgrounds are explicit or avowed by any given trinitarian personalist or idealist; I am simply saying that the position fits a general pattern and set of assumptions. 2 John Macmurray, Persons in Relation (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), p. 17. 3 The Doctrine of the Trinity (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1944), p.  190, following Clement C. J. Webb, God and Personality (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1918). 4 Cf. the discussion on personalism (concentrating on Martin Buber) in Paul Fletcher, Disciplining the Divine: Toward an (Im)political Theology (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2009), p. 73. Fletcher’s book, which is a critique of social trinitarianism with a vision for how it fits into the wider political predicament of modern theology, deserves far more attention than it has received thus far. 5 Jüngel, God’s Being Is in Becoming, pp. 77, 111, emphasis removed. 6 Gunton, “Augustine, the Trinity.” 7 This is a major theme that runs throughout Gunton’s authorship, most notably in The One, the Three, and the Many, where he contextualizes modernity’s Cartesian “disengagement” from world and body and resultant atheism in terms of the Western divorce of the doctrine of creation from the economy of salvation, which in turn is

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NOTES grounded in Augustine’s failure to properly articulate the mediating roles of Son and Spirit in creation. 8 “Augustine, the Trinity,” p. 34. 9 Ibid., pp. 42–43. Gunton’s source for this claim is the translator’s preface to his edition of De Trinitate—an interesting insight into how casually authoritative the Régnon paradigm, which I discuss in the next section, tends to be in contemporary trinitarianism. Zizioulas’s use of the Cappadocian-Augustine opposition is highly influential on Gunton. See Being as Communion, for example, pp. 27–65. 10 Gunton, “Augustine, the Trinity,” p. 43. 11 Gunton, “Trinitarian Theology Today,” in The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, p. 3. 12 “Augustine, the Trinity,” p. 45. 13 Ibid., pp. 49–51. 14 Ibid., pp. 52–53. 15 Ibid., p. 31. 16 For the former, see especially The One, the Three, and the Many; for the latter, “The Church on Earth: The Roots of Community,” in On Being the Church: Essays on the Christian Community (ed. Colin E. Gunton and Daniel W. Hardy; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989), pp. 48–80. Ironically, Miroslav Volf finds Gunton’s proposals in The One, the Three, and the Many “excessively abstract,” and attributes this abstraction to Gunton’s inattention “to the concrete Trinitarian narrative of the historical self-donation of God.” Volf, “‘The Trinity Is Our Social Program’: The Doctrine of the Trinity and the Shape of Social Engagement,” Modern Theology 14, no. 3 (July 1998), p. 421n40. 17 Jenson, Systematic Theology, p. 11. The language of “enfeeblement” is from The Triune Identity, p. 161. 18 Jenson’s radicalization of Barth concerns the relationship between the divine identity and the events of the evangelical history: “It is the metaphysically fundamental fact of Israel’s and the church’s faith that its God is freely but, just so, truly self-identified by, and so with, contingent created temporal events,” Systematic Theology, pp. 47–48, emphasis mine. The step from identification by temporal events, to identification with those events, is a significant one in Jenson’s ontological outworking of the temporal triune relations. 19 The Triune Identity, p. 106. 20 Ibid., p. 107, emphasis original (here and throughout the book, unless otherwise indicated). Evidently under the influence of Balthasar, in the Systematic Theology this historical reading of the triune relations becomes cast in dramatic terms. This set of dramatic metaphors requires a personalistic recasting of the hypostases. 21 Systematic Theology, p. 54. Further on this, cf. ibid., pp. 207–23, where “God’s eternity [as] temporal infinity” (p. 218), via Nyssa, is used to interpret the Thomistic esse, act of being, according to the correspondence of the triune roles with the “poles of time,” the danger of “modalist puerilities” notwithstanding. 22 The Triune Identity, p. 26. 23 Ibid., p. 116. 24 Ibid., p. 120. 25 Ibid., p. 128. This is a theme that we have just witnessed in Jenson’s student, Gunton. 26 The Triune Identity, p. 129.

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NOTES 27 Ibid., p. 153n97. 28 Jenson also admits, following Alfred Schindler against Michael Schmaus, that Augustine is not attempting a “psychological Trinity-doctrine,” but seeking through the analogies to “give meaning to our language about the Trinity,” The Triune Identity, p. 154n109. Trinitarian language, thus, is exerting a certain ontological pressure and making exigent a reformulation of the ontology of the self. Schmaus, Die psychologische Trinitätslehre des heiligen Augustinus (Münster: Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1967); Schindler, Wort und Analogie in Augustins Trinitätslehre (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1965). 29 The Triune Identity, p. 144. There is, however, something of a shift in his thought, as he notes in Systematic Theology, p. 117n7; in his entry “The Triune God” in Christian Dogmatics (ed. Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson; vol. 1; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), pp. 83–191, Jenson argues that God is personal as a self-realizing subject in the incarnation: the person of God is Jesus, “the object as which God knows himself” (p. 170; this seems to be his position in The Triune Identity quoted above as well). In Systematic Theology, however, he offers a personalist position, reading the Cappadocian tropos hyparxeos as referring to the trinitarian persons as relational and dialogical agents: “a person is one with whom other persons—the circularity is constitutive—can converse, whom they can address” (p. 117). By the time of Systematic Theology, Jenson has read Zizioulas and Balthasar, as this shift makes clear. 30 Systematic Theology, p. 148. 31 Ibid., p. 149; cf. p. 160 on the “vindication” of Lombard. 32 Systematic Theology, p. 160: the Spirit’s “I” is in the Son as the Son is the totus christus. Hence for Jenson the community is the telos (and thereby, a necessary moment) of God’s self-positing. 33 I will return to Jenson’s problem with Barth in Chapters 6 and 7. 34 God in Creation: A New Theology of Creation and the Spirit of God (trans. Margaret Kohl; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993); The Spirit of Life: A Universal Affirmation (trans. Margaret Kohl; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001). 35 Moltmann has noted his debt to contemporary Orthodox theology for the development of his social trinitarianism in the context of ecumenical discussions of the late 1970s; he acknowledges the influence of Dumitru Staniloae in History and the Triune God: Contributions to Trinitarian Theology (trans. John Bowden; New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1992), p. 179, and Experiences in Theology: Ways and Forms of Christian Theology (trans. Margaret Kohl; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), pp. 306–08. Recently he has credited Geevarghese Mar Osthathios with the inspiration for a social doctrine of the Trinity; A Broad Place: An Autobiography (trans. Margaret Kohl; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008), p. 292. 36 God in Creation, p. 235. 37 Trinity and the Kingdom, pp. 10–16. 38 Cf. ibid., pp. 16–20, 137–48. Moltmann’s entire thesis of overcoming the Western monotheistic focus on divine unity in this book rests, naturally, on the Régnon opposition, although in my findings he never acknowledges him; for one uncredited statement of the paradigm, see Trinity and the Kingdom, p. 19; cf. his foreword to Joy McDougall’s Pilgrimage of Love: Moltmann on the Trinity and Christian Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. xii: “While my opponents derived the ‘threefold identity’ of God from the unity of God, I went from the threeness of the persons to the ‘threefold unity’ of God.”

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NOTES 39 God in Creation, p. 236. 40 A “theological decision in Western anthropology [that] has had far-reaching and tragic consequences,” God in Creation, p. 239. 41 Trinity and the Kingdom, p. 197, following Erik Peterson’s “Monotheismus als politisches Problem,” in Theologische Traktate (Munich: Kösel-Verlag, 1951), pp.  48–147, now translated in Theological Tractates (ed. and trans. Michael J. Hollerich; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), pp. 68–105. 42 God in Creation, p. 237. For a similar account critiquing Augustinian theology’s focus on the experience of God as corresponding to experience of self rather than of others, cf. Spirit of Life, p. 220. 43 The implication is that Moltmann’s Cappadocians are incompatible with those championed by, say, Zizioulas, who explicitly relies upon the Father as origin for the basis for his theology of communion. 44 So the opening overture of The Spirit of Life, pp. 17–38. 45 The Spirit of Life, p. 293. 46 Ibid., p. 292. 47 Ibid., p. 295. Moltmann has shifted his reading of Joachim here; in The Trinity and the Kingdom, he read Joachim’s theology of history as combining Augustinian and Cappadocian eschatologies, but in The Spirit of Life he more sharply contrasts the two as falling into distinct monarchical and historical patterns. 48 Trinity and Kingdom, p. 220. 49 Ibid., p. 160. 50 The Crucified God, pp. 245–46, 255. 51 There is a tension in the way Moltmann conceives of the Spirit as proceeding from the event of the cross as an intradivine event between Father and Son, and his position on the filioque. The former seems to be an interpretation of the Western position on the procession of the Spirit from Father and Son, with a transposition to Moltmann’s eschatological-historical terms. But alongside this pattern, still employed in The Trinity and the Kingdom, there is a critique of the filioque, following the Orthodox, that blames both Augustine and Barth for the vinculum doctrine that “provides no justification for the Holy Spirit’s independent existence as Person in the Trinity,” The Crucified God, p. 143; cf. p. 183. The adoption of the Joachimite historical eschatology seems designed, in part, to account for this tension insofar as the third kingdom, that of the Spirit, proceeds both from the event between Father and Son on the cross, and bears its own hypostatic independence and character. McDougall similarly notes Moltmann’s use of the Augustinian framework in The Crucified God; see Pilgrimage of Love, p. 48. 52 The major sources here are Schmaus, Die psychologische Trinitätslehre, and Olivier du Roy, L’intelligence de la foi en la Trinité selon saint Augustin: Genèse de sa théologie trinitaire jusqu’en 391 (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1966). I will discuss Du Roy in more detail in Chapters 2 and 3. 53 Wisse, Trinitarian Theology beyond Participation, pp. 8–9, discusses this issue under the term “pan-mediation.” He argues that trinitarian theology in the twentieth century often seems reduced to a way of solving the idealist problem of the relationship of the Absolute and the world. The procession of the Son becomes a speculative reconciliation of infinite and finite. Corresponding to this is a strong epistemological curtailment of knowledge of the Absolute that, in turn, authorizes the use of analogy in its place. I will discuss similar issues regarding Augustine’s relationship with Platonism, and Barth’s dependence upon Hegel, in following chapters.

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NOTES 54 Cf. Wisse, Trinitarian Theology beyond Participation, pp. 6–7. 55 The One, the Three, and the Many, p. 142. For an incisive and probing critique, see Fermer, “The Limits of Trinitarian Theology,” pp. 160–63, for his breakdown of the “stages” of Gunton’s and Zizioulas’s personalist argument. An in-depth analysis follows this breakdown, in which Fermer especially focuses on the analogical move (cf. pp. 168–69). 56 McDougall characterizes Moltmann’s theological strategy as a “social trinitarian analogy of fellowship,” Pilgrimage of Love, p. 10, grounding the rule of faith for right relationship in the divine archetype of a personal, relational ontology. McDougall stresses the “relational ontology of love” in Moltmann’s later thought over the historical dialectical ontology of The Crucified God, with his distancing of himself from Western Geistesvergessenheit as key in the shift; see Pilgrimage of Love, especially pp. 59–100. 57 Cf. Fletcher, who characterizes this “simplistic correlation” of the “human divine analogy” as “an idealist belief that if we say often enough that these persons are relational then human beings will follow suit,” Disciplining the Divine, p. 90. 58 For a few examples, see John Thompson, Modern Trinitarian Perspectives (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Ted Peters, GOD as Trinity: Relationality and Temporality in Divine Life (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993); Neil Ormerod, The Trinity: Retrieving the Western Tradition (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2005), p. 23; Anne Hunt, Trinity: Nexus of the Mysteries of Christian Faith (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2005), p. 36; Marshall, “Trinity,” p. 186. As I have hinted above, a distinct English-American tradition might be discerned in the personalism represented by Webb and Hodgson, as well as in philosophers like Macmurray. Other theologians such as David Brown, Cyril Richardson, James Mackey, and Claude Welch could be mentioned as well. The contribution of such an independent tradition does not garner much attention in contemporary trinitarian literature; it is to my regret that the scope of this book prevents me from discussing it as well. 59 Disciplining the Divine, p. 36. 60 Becoming and Being: The Doctrine of God in Charles Hartshorne and Karl Barth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 218. See also Gunton, The Barth Lectures (ed. P. H. Brazier; New York: T&T Clark/Continuum, 2007). 61 “The Question of God in the Modern World: Trinitarian Possibilities,” in The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, pp. 19–20; Becoming and Being, p. 218. 62 Alpha and Omega: A Study in the Theology of Karl Barth (New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1963), a revision of his doctoral dissertation on Barth’s doctrine of election; God after God: The God of the Past and the God of the Future, Seen in the Work of Karl Barth (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1969). The latter is particularly important as a kind of programmatic study clearly anticipating positions advanced in The Triune Identity and Systematic Theology. For his concerns about Barth’s pneumatology, see Chapter 5. 63 For all this, see Rahner, The Trinity, pp. 10–22. 64 Ibid., pp. 34–38. For a technical background to the discussion, see Rahner, “Some Implications of the Scholastic Concept of Uncreated Grace,” in Theological Investigations (trans. Cornelius Ernst; vol. 1; Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1961), pp. 319–46. A full study can be found in William J. Hill, Proper Relations to the Indwelling Divine Persons (Washington, DC: Thomist Press, 1952).

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NOTES 65 The Trinity, p. 117. Human knowledge and love, in other words, do not subsist as internal hypostatic differentiations constituted by their opposition of relations. 66 The Trinity, pp. 34–38. 67 Ibid., p. 89. 68 Ibid., p. 98. 69 Ibid., pp. 17–18. 70 Ibid., p. 19. 71 Ibid., p. 115. For doubts regarding Rahner’s ability to free himself from metaphysical speculation, see Paul Molnar, Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity: In Dialogue with Karl Barth and Contemporary Theology (New York: T&T Clark, 2002), pp. 83–124. 72 In Rahner’s words, the Trinity is a “salvific experience and an experience of grace,” The Trinity, p. 39 (section title). Anne Hunt, following a discussion of Rahner, ably connects the function of the psychological analogy to the “dynamics of grace,” although she goes on to argue that it needs to be complemented with the communal dynamics of the social analogy; Trinity: Nexus of the Mysteries of Christian Faith, pp. 173–81. 73 I am referring to his account of the two processions in terms of origin-future, history-transcendence, offer-acceptance, and knowledge-love, The Trinity, pp. 91–93. Cf. Marmion and Nieuwenhove’s insightful comments in An Introduction to the Trinity, p. 170. 74 For example, Edmund Hill, the later translator of De Trinitate: “I feel strongly that it is high time this distinction was seen for the crude generalisation it is, and dropped from all the literature. It is really most unscientific to apply to the fourth and fifth centuries a distinction between eastern and western theologies that is obvious enough in the middle ages and after,” “Karl Rahner’s ‘Remarks on the Dogmatic Treatise Trin. and St. Augustine,’” Augustinian Studies 2 (1971), p. 69; cf. E. L. Mascall, The Triune God: An Ecumenical Study (Allison Park, PA: Pickwick Publications, 1986), who is perfectly aware of Rahner’s and Lossky’s reliance on Régnon (p. 13), and is “sometimes tempted to wonder whether the alleged opposition between the two traditions may have been over-emphasized by such Western experts as Théodore de Régnon and Father Karl Rahner” (p. 24). 75 Barnes, “Augustine in Contemporary Trinitarian Theology”; “De Régnon Reconsidered,” Augustinian Studies 26, no. 2 (1995), pp. 51–79. The content of the “paradigm” is somewhat more complex, extending, as Barnes notes, to the texts and passages taken as definitive for Cappadocian theology, including especially Nyssa’s On the Trinity and On “Not Three Gods,” which have taken on particularly authoritative status through anthologization. Barnes’s work was anticipated (as he acknowledges) by a pair of important essays by André de Halleux in the 1980s: “‘Hypostase’ et ‘personne’ dans la formation du dogme trinitaire,” and “Personnalisme ou essentialisme trinitaire chez les Pères cappadociens?” dating from 1984 and 1986, respectively, collected in Patrologie et Œcuménisme: Recueil D’études (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1990), pp. 113–214, 215–68. 76 Études de Théologie Positive sur La Sainte Trinité (vol. 1; Paris: Victor Retaux et Fils, 1892). 77 As Barnes puts it, none of the authors that utilize the paradigm “shows any awareness that the paradigm needs to be demonstrated, or that it has a history,” “Augustine in Contemporary Trinitarian Theology,” p. 238.

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NOTES 78 “La philosophie latine envisage d’abord la nature en elle-même et poursuit jusqu’au suppôt; la philosophie grecque envisage d’abord le suppôt et y pénètre ensuite pour trouver la nature. Le Latin considère la personnalité comme un mode de la nature, le Grec considère la nature comme le contenu de la personne . . . Aussi le Latin dit ‘trois personnes en Dieu’; le Grec dit: ‘un Dieu en trois personnes.’” Régnon, Études de Théologie Positive, pp. 433–34. This is the locus classicus of a formula that is repeated regularly throughout the fourth, fifth, and sixth studies in the volume. For example, p. 429, where Régnon explicitly contrasts the Latin and Greek theories in terms of being based (fonde) upon “l’unité de la substance divine” and “le dogme des trois hypostases divines,” respectively; also cf. pp. 231–32, 262–63. What typically does not get repeated from Régnon, as Kristin Hennessy is at pains to point out, is Régnon’s emphasis on the congruity of the two approaches: “Dans les deux cas, c’est la même foi, le même dogma; mais le mystère se présente sous deux formes différentes” (“In both cases, it is the same faith, the same dogma; but the mystery presents itself in two different forms”), pp. 433–34. See Hennessy, “An Answer to de Régnon’s Accusers: Why We Should Not Speak of ‘His’ Paradigm,” Harvard Theological Review 100, no. 2 (April 2007). 79 “Sans doute, la distinction des théologiens, entre Dieu ut Unus et Dieu ut Trinus, est légitime et fondée en raison . . . Mais il faut éviter d’en abuser. Il semble qu’à notre époque, le dogme de l’Unité divine ait comme absorbé le dogme de la Trinité dont on ne parle que par mémoire”; Études de Théologie Positive, pp. 364–65. 80 “De Régnon Reconsidered,” pp. 57–58; the important point is Lossky’s 12 citations of Régnon in the French original of Mystical Theology, all but two of which are elided in the English translation’s simplified citation system, thus occluding Lossky’s dependence upon Régnon’s Études. 81 Hwang, The Trinitarian Logics of St. Augustine and Karl Barth, p. 273n3, suggests another source for the popularization of Régnon. This is the article “Augustin (Saint). Vie, œuvres et doctrine,” by Eugène Portalié, SJ, in Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique (ed. A. Vacant, E. Mangenot, and É. Amann; vol. 1; Paris: Librairie Letouzey et Ané, 1908) pp. 2268–472. Portalié cites Régnon: “greces au contraire disait: trois personnes ayant une même nature . . . Augustin . . . envisage avant tout la nature divine et poursuit jusqu’aux personnes pour atteindre la réalité complète. Deus, pour lui, ne signifie plus directment le Père, mais plus généralement la divinité” (“the Greeks said: three persons having the same nature . . . Augustine . . . contemplates beforehand the entire divine nature and pursues afterward the persons in order to reach the complete reality. Deus, for him, does not directly signify the Father, but the divinity more generally”) (p. 2347). Portalié, however, states that Régnon’s admiration for the Greeks didn’t allow him to see Augustine’s theology as an advance beyond them. Portalié’s article has been translated into English: A Guide to the Thought of Saint Augustine (trans. Ralph J. Bastian, SJ; Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1960). The section on the Trinity is found on pp. 129–35. 82 Cf. Rahner, “Theos in the New Testament,” Theological Investigations, 1, pp. 146–48: the New Testament uses theos to denote the “concrete, individual, uninterchangeable Person” of the Father who “possesses the divine nature unoriginately, and communicates it by eternal generation to a Son too, and by spiration to the Spirit.” Rahner is trying to establish the biblical support of Régnon’s “Greek view” in the article. 83 Barnes identifies a number of authors—de Margerie, LaCugna, Brown, Mackey, O’Donnell, Moltmann—where the paradigm is used as a constructive premise,

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NOTES “Augustine in Contemporary Trinitarian Theology,” p. 238. The list is easily expanded: for just a few other examples, cf. Boff, Trinity and Society, p. 137; Gunton, “Augustine, the Trinity,” pp. 42–43; Jenson, Systematic Theology, pp. 116, 123, and programmatically in The Triune Identity, pp. 103–60; Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, p. 280; Thompson, Modern Trinitarian Perspectives, pp. 5, 144; the report by the British Council of Churches Study Commission, The Forgotten Trinity: The Report of the BCC Study Commission on Trinitarian Doctrine Today (London: British Council of Churches, 1989), which alludes to it in several places, for example pp. 5, 20–22; the WCC document Spirit of God, Spirit of Christ: Ecumenical Reflections on the Filioque Controversy (Faith and Order Paper 103; ed. Lukas Vischer; London: SPCK, 1981), p. 11; Christoph Schwöbel’s “Introduction,” in Persons, Divine and Human, p. 12, who notes that the approach typifies the then-emergent trinitarian resurgence; Zizioulas, Being as Communion, p. 40, citing Rahner. The paradigm regularly shows up in other Orthodox writers in addition to Lossky, as well; for example, Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church (New York: Penguin Books, 1963), p. 214; John Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes (New York: Fordham University Press, 1974), p. 181, who explicitly quotes both Régnon and Rahner; Meyendorff, Catholicity and the Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1983), p. 19, where it is connected to the Augustinian “anthropomorphic analogy” with its deleterious “direct impact upon the theology of the Holy Spirit.” 84 “In the wake of Barnes’s article we see already a discernible trend towards treating de Régnon, now, as the new theological whipping boy in a story of declension,” Sarah Coakley, “Introduction: Disputed Questions in Patristic Trinitarianism,” Harvard Theological Review 100, no. 2 (April 2007), p. 132. The issue, edited by Coakley, is devoted to Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), and the issues it raises. 85 “An Answer to de Régnon’s Accusers,” p. 181. 86 Ibid., p. 182. 87 “De Régnon Reconsidered,” p. 54. 88 Hennessy, “An Answer to de Régnon’s Accusers,” p. 197. 89 Barnes characterizes this phenomenon as a “scholastic modernism,” apparently referring to uncritical reliance upon authority; “Augustine in Contemporary Trinitarian Theology,” p. 238. 90 Indeed, this insularity in the largely German and Anglophone trinitarian theological scholarship I am discussing is illustrated by the near-total absence of awareness of how Régnon was (disputatiously) received by his own French Catholic peers, many of whom responded, albeit rather defensively, that the West is more personalistic than the allegedly essentialist, homoousian-dominated East; cf. Barnes, “De Régnon Reconsidered,” pp. 55, 59–62, who discusses Henri Paissac, Andre Malet, Guy Lafont, M. J. Le Guillou, and Bertrand de Margerie. De Halleux, “Personnalisme ou Essentialisme Trinitaire,” after refuting Zizioulas at length (pp. 219–41), critiques the essentialist readings of the Cappadocians in Malet, Le Guillou, and Lafont (pp. 242–65). De Halleux has an acute sense of how the Cappadocians become rhetorical pawns in both Catholic and Orthodox hands: “D’une part, en effet, des théologiens orthodoxes canonisent Basile et les deux Grégoire comme seuls docteurs œcuméniques et leur attribuent un personnalisme

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NOTES exclusif du langage de l’essence; et d’autre part, des théologiens catholiques croient devoir défendre la théologie trinitaire augustinienne et thomiste en imputant à ces mêmes Pères un apophatisme apocryphe et un défaut de personnalisme trinitaire” (“Indeed, on the one hand, some Orthodox theologians canonize Basil and the two Gregorys as the only ecumenical doctors, and attribute to them a personalism exclusive of the language of essence; on the other hand, some Catholic theologians believe they need to defend Augustinian and Thomist trinitarian theology, and attribute to these same fathers an apocryphal apophaticism and a failure of trinitarian personalism”) (p. 216). Mascall goes so far as to suggest that Augustine is the great opponent of privileging the one divine essence in the West, The Triune God, p. 24. 91 Echoing Coakley, “Disputed Questions,” pp. 135–38, it is notable that in their own way, Barnes and Ayres themselves tend to employ sweeping, unnuanced historical narratives when they are discussing twentieth-century theology itself: Barnes characterizes not just modern pseudo-Régnonian trinitarians, but modern systematic theology in toto as exhibiting a lust for encyclopedic totalization organized by polar oppositions, philosophical determinism, reductionism of original sources, and idealist predilections for reading history according to the logic of concepts (“Augustine in Contemporary Trinitarian Theology,” p. 243; cf. also pp. 239–41). Likewise, the final chapter of Ayres’s Nicaea and Its Legacy amounts to a wholesale indictment of the legitimacy of the discipline of systematic theology as such, based upon modern trinitarian theology’s failure to understand Pro-Nicene theology. 92 Most of whom follow Barnes. See Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy, pp. 302–04; Levering, Scripture and Metaphysics, p. 24n4; Coakley, “Re-thinking Gregory of Nyssa: Introduction—Gender, Trinitarian Analogies, and the Pedagogy of The Song,” Modern Theology 18, no. 4 (Oct. 2002), pp. 432–34 (the entire issue, edited by Coakley and devoted to Nyssa, is relevant); Marshall, “Trinity,” p. 190. 93 An Introduction to the Trinity, pp. 94–95, 166. In a testament to the tenacity of theological rhetorical habits, though, Marmion and Nieuwenhove are not always consistent in rejecting the dichotomy, particularly when they are following Zizioulas’s “ontological revolution,” for example, p. 82. 94 For helpful demurrals to social trinitarian programs, see Karen Kilby, “Perichoresis and Projection: Problems with Social Doctrines of the Trinity,” New Blackfriars 81, no. 957 (Nov. 2000), pp. 432–45; Peters, GOD as Trinity, pp. 184–86; Fletcher, Disciplining the Divine; Wisse, Trinitarian Theology beyond Participation. 95 By “grammar of a practice,” I mean that the doctrine of the Trinity, and in particular pneumatology, is a description of the experience of God in faith, by which God is known insofar as God reveals Godself to be known, in faith and act. This is not the same as claiming that pneumatology or trinitarian theology grounds, warrants, or provides a pattern for practice, as if it were a simple one-to-one correspondence of objective description and subjective application of its consequences for the life of faith. For a critique of trinitarian ontology in some respects similar to my own, toward the end of understanding Thomas’s trinitarian theology as an exercise in contemplative wisdom, cf. Levering, Scripture and Metaphysics, especially pp. 197–235, Fletcher, Disciplining the Divine, and Wisse, Trinitarian Theology beyond Participation, who notes that Augustine’s trinitarian theology cannot be “functionalized” (p. 11).

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Chapter 2 1 I will use Edmund Hill, OP’s translation in The Trinity (Brooklyn: New City Press, 1991), although occasionally the less idiosyncratic style of Stephen McKenna will be preferable: The Trinity (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1963). Hill omits the traditional chapter numbers, which I supply for consistency of reference. I will cite Trin. parenthetically in the text. The Latin text is from Corpus Christianorum: Series Latina (vols 50 and 50a; ed. W. J. Mountain and Fr. Glorie; Turnholt: Typographi Brepols Editores Pontificii, 1968). 2 The most notable here are Gioia, in Theological Epistemology of Augustine, which will certainly become the standard work on Trin. itself; the numerous articles published by Lewis Ayres and Michel Rene Barnes (see the Bibliography), and now of course Ayres’s Augustine and the Trinity; Rowan Williams, “Sapientia and the Trinity,” in Collectanea Augustiniana: Mélanges T.J. van Bavel (ed. B. Bruning, M. Lamberigts, and J. Van Houtem; Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1990), pp. 317– 32, and “The Paradoxes of Self-Knowledge in the De Trinitate,” in Augustine: Presbyter Factus Sum (ed. Joseph T. Lienhard, Earl C. Muller, and Roland J. Teske; New York: Peter Lang, 1993), pp. 121–34; and Wisse, Trinitarian Theology beyond Participation. 3 It is an interesting measure of how far the tide has turned in recent years that Gerber can (to my mind rightly) say that Augustine “undertook reflection upon the Holy Spirit’s distinctive character arguably more thoroughly and certainly more consequentially than any other early Christian thinker,” Spirit of Augustine, p. 2. 4 Of course, Aquinas is Rahner’s real target, although it exceeds the bounds of this book to examine Aquinas’s trinitarian theology. See Emery, Trinity in Aquinas and The Trinitarian Theology of Aquinas; Levering, Scripture and Metaphysics; and Ormerod, The Trinity. 5 The narrative that has been common since Prosper Alfaric is that Augustine’s intellectual conversion in conf. 7 was to Platonism, rather than Christianity, and that his theological conversion only really takes place with a period of sustained reading of the Pauline literature, cf. pp. 395–96. See Alfaric, L’évolution intellectuelle de saint Augustin (Paris: Nourry, 1918). For a recent discussion, see Brian Dobell, Augustine’s Intellectual Conversion: The Journey from Platonism to Christianity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). For the essential works on Augustine’s Platonism, mid-century (Courcelle, Solignac, du Roy, O’Connell, etc.), see Goulven Madec, “Le ‘Platonisme’ des Pères,” in Petites Études Augustiniennes (Paris: Collection des études augustiniennes, 1994), p. 49, and “Le néoplatonisme dans la conversion d’Augustin. Etat d’une question centenaire (depuis Harnack et Boissier, 1888),” in Internationales Symposion über den Stand des Augustinus-Forschung (ed. Cornelius Mayer and Karl Heinz Chelius; Würzburgh: Augustinus-Verlag, 1989), pp. 9–25. Note the dismissal of Alfaric in Gerber, Spirit of Augustine, p. 4. 6 I will discuss the ascent motif more in Chapter 3. For sustained replies to du Roy, see Gerber, Spirit of Augustine, as well as Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity. Although I would argue that Gerber’s book may at times rely too heavily on a theory of Pro-Nicene catechesis as determining Augustine’s theology from the very beginning, it is nonetheless a definitive study in his early trinitarian thought.

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NOTES 7 The language of “Pro-Nicene” is now fairly well known; a coinage from Ayres and Barnes, the point of the term is to highlight that what is generally known as “Nicene” orthodoxy acquired its landmark ecumenical status by a specific strategy of rhetorical production in the 380s. See, for example, Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy, pp. 6, 167–68, and for a fuller definition, pp. 236–40. Three points are salient for Pro-Nicene theology: some explicit version of the person–nature distinction; the eternal generation of the Son; and the unity of operations of the subsistents. 8 The two best English-language studies on the image of God in Trin. have received remarkably little attention by contemporary theologians. See John Edward Sullivan, The Image of God: The Doctrine of St. Augustine and Its Influence (Dubuque: Priory Press, 1963), and David N. Bell, The Image and Likeness: The Augustinian Spirituality of William of St Thierry (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1984), pp. 21–88. Sullivan consistently notes how the imago, for Augustine, consists in the movement toward the exemplar-principle, God. This is so precisely by not locating the image autonomously in the intellect of the individual subject: “Man does not image God by his rationality independently of some relation to God as object of his power,” The Image of God, p. 50; cf. p. 136. 9 Trin. 9.12.17. 10 See the Introduction for my use of the terminology of “performativity.” 11 I concur with Gioia, Theological Epistemology of Augustine, when he writes that “The De Trinitate is based on the presupposition that it is impossible to dissociate questions concerning the identity of God we believe in from those related to the way we have actually come to know him” (p. 3). Hence Gioia approaches Trin. “from the angle of knowledge of God” insofar as Augustine “aims at introducing his reader into the practice of this knowledge.” 12 I will continue to use this term for sake of convenience; however, as the argument will show, the appropriate term in the Augustinian idiom is the imago dei. 13 I use the term “aporia” or “aporetic” in a strict sense to mean the act of knowing the unknowable God, as thematized in the subject’s act of self-knowing in such a way as that knowing exceeds its own capacity. An aporia, as I use the term, is the necessary affirmation of two heterogeneous realities that are irreconcilable, yet indissociable. I take this way of putting things from Jacques Derrida’s “To Forgive: The Unforgivable and the Imprescriptible,” in Questioning God (ed. John D. Caputo, Mark Dooley, and Michael J. Scanlon; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), p. 45. 14 An example of the kind of antagonism I want to avoid here is found in John Milbank, “Only Theology Overcomes Metaphysics,” in The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), pp. 36–52. Ayres and Gerber have offered careful scholarship documenting the eclectic nature of Augustine’s adaptation of Platonic and Plotinian categories and ideas. That said, Ayres and Gerber can sometimes seem to imply that Augustine’s commitments to authoritative structures of Pro-Nicene “culture” preclude or marginalize his interest in philosophical matters as concerns outside of the emerging Nicene “culture.” If true, this seems to me to brush up against a false dilemma. Wisse, reading Augustine’s polemical prooemium in book 1, notes the tendency of Barnes and Ayres to stress Augustine’s Pro-Nicene tendencies while downplaying his relationship with Neoplatonism; Trinitarian Theology beyond Participation, p. 19. 15 Robert Crouse offers an extended and nuanced survey of contemporary positions on Augustine’s relationship with Platonism in “Paucis Mutatis Verbis: St. Augustine’s

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NOTES Platonism,” in Augustine and His Critics: Essays in Honour of Gerald Bonner (ed. Robert Dodaro and George Lawless; New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 37–50. He rightfully points out that in a century since Harnack so deeply marked by an “anti-Hellenic temper,” Platonizing criticisms of Augustine will be popular (p. 39). See also John J. O’Meara, “The Neoplatonism of Saint Augustine,” in Neoplatonism and Christian Thought (ed. Dominic J. O’Meara; Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), pp. 34–41. 16 The famed “books of the Platonists” in conf. 7.9.13–14. See Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity, p. 17, and Gerber, Spirit of Augustine, pp. 14–16, for discussion and references to the literature concerning the texts of Plotinus’s Enneads we can reliably expect Augustine to have read. 17 Ayres characterizes this process as “piecemeal,” highlighting both the hybrid nature of Augustine’s Platonism and the ad hoc nature of his adaptation of Plotinian sources, in Nicaea and Its Legacy, p. 391. He argues in Augustine and the Trinity, pp. 37–39, that the adaptation of Neoplatonism primarily concerns the immateriality and simplicity of God, the Father’s role as principium, and the Son’s role as intellectus. Ayres argues (as does Gerber, Spirit of Augustine, p. 84) that in the case of the Spirit, Augustine diverges entirely from Plotinus, as Augustine reads the latter as a binitarian. 18 To his credit, du Roy sees that fixation on the Régnonian opposition of “partir de la personne ou de la nature” is secondary to the significance of “beginning with” the economy of salvation; the connection between the incarnation and the knowledge of the Trinity, and thus between the economy of salvation and trinitarian mystery of God, is rightly the determinative question for du Roy; L’intelligence de la foi, p. 452. 19 To use this language of “inheritance” is not to presume that Augustine writes in abstraction from contextual and polemical issues of Pro-Nicene argumentation. It is simply to acknowledge that, a generation after Constantinople, he can take certain doctrinal regularities as settled. Thus when Augustine speaks of “all the Catholic commentators I have been able to read” in 1.4.7, he gives a concise formulation of that Pro-Nicene logic, indicating it as his point of departure. 20 Trin. 1.7.14, referring to Philippians 2; the term canonica regula derives from Trin. 2.1.2. 21 Trin. 15.1.1. 22 This bookending is not accidental, as Trin. 1 was most likely either authored, or heavily redacted, at roughly the same time of book 15, near the end of the process of completion of the text. For the dating of Trin., the treatment of Anne-Marie La Bonnardière is the standard, although she focuses only on books 12–15 and the final redaction, including the exhortative prooemia to most of the books. Recherches de Chronologie Augustinienne (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1965), pp. 165–77. For the dating of the earlier books, see Pierre-Marie Hombert, Nouvelles Recherches de Chronologie Augustinienne (Paris: Institut d’Études Augustiniennes, 2000), pp. 45–80. 23 For a fascinating rhetorical analysis of the performative movement of Trin. as a training of the reader, see Brian Stock, Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1996), pp. 243–78. 24 Basil Studer emphasizes this movement as central to Augustine’s understanding of Christology; The Grace of Christ and the Grace of God in Augustine of Hippo:

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NOTES Christocentrism or Theocentrism? (trans. Matthew J. O’Connell; Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1997), especially pp. 43–47. 25 See the hesitation of Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity, p. 262, to use this admittedly overdetermined term to express Augustine’s sense of the divine ineffabilis in the unity of persons. 26 Madec argues that in this respect, Augustine is misunderstood by medieval scholasticism, which in only retaining Augustine’s conclusions, “sans retrouver le cheminement de la recherché, renverse et fausse la perspective,” Le Christ de Saint Augustin: La Patrie et la Voie (new edn; Paris: Desclée, 2001), p. 182. Although I would argue that this is more true of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century neoscholasticism Rahner reacted against so vehemently than of many medieval theologians, the point still stands that understanding Augustine entails grasping the general performative movement of Trin. Pierre Hadot makes a similar point when he highlights modern habits that assume incoherence or error on the part of the ancient author, but fail to understand the “form that renders all the details necessary”; quoted in Arnold I. Davidson, “Introduction: Pierre Hadot and the Spiritual Phenomenon of Ancient Philosophy,” in Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault (ed. Davidson, trans. Michael Chase; Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1995), p. 8. 27 On simplicity in the Cappadocians, see Andrew Radde-Gallwitz, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and the Transformation of Divine Simplicity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). See Richard Cross, “Two Models of the Trinity?” for the fundamental congruity of understandings of consubstantiality (Cross uses homoousion) in Nyssa and Augustine. 28 See especially Michel Barnes, “The Arians of Book V, and the Genre of ‘De Trinitate,’” Journal of Theological Studies 44, no. 1 (Apr. 1993), pp. 185–95, and “Exegesis and Polemic in Augustine’s De Trinitate I,” Augustinian Studies 30, no. 1 (1999), pp. 43–59. 29 Although Augustine utilizes the maxim opera trinitatis ad extra indivisa sunt, the principle, as he acknowledges in 1.4.7, is inherited. It is common to all Pro-Nicenes, including the Cappadocians. 30 This is, as we have seen, Rahner’s basic concern with proper missions. 31 Trin. 2.5.7; this paragraph is a short synopsis of the line of argument beginning with this section, and is found throughout books 3–4 as well. 32 “We do, after all, call the Son God from God, but the Father we simply call God, not from God” (2.1.2). Gioia highlights this hermeneutical rule of “direction” (de deo, from God) as supplementing the forma servi-forma Dei rubric and blocking apparent subordination; Theological Epistemology of Augustine, pp. 26–27; cf. pp. 120–23. 33 Gioia likewise focuses upon the essential link between the economic and immanent Trinity on the basis of the missions of Son and Spirit; Theological Epistemology of Augustine, pp. 106–24, especially pp. 112–17. 34 As Ayres puts it, “the manifestation of the divine Word is a manifestation of the eternal relationship of Father and Son, and hence, a making known of the Father,” Augustine and the Trinity, p. 187. 35 See the discussion in Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity, pp. 166–68, for the christological remodulation of the ascent here. 36 This caveat is crucial—everything rests, of course, on the “word made flesh” for Augustine’s disruption of Neoplatonism. The scholarly tradition of interpreting

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NOTES Augustine’s trinitarian theology against the background of Plotinus’s series of emanations is, of course, very old, and classically represented by du Roy. See the detailed discussion in Peter Manchester, “The Noetic Triad in Plotinus, Marius Victorinus, and Augustine,” in Neoplatonism and Gnosticism (ed. Richard T. Walis and Jay Bregman; Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), pp. 207–22; Gerber, Spirit of Augustine, pp. 57–122, is invaluable. 37 “His being sent (mitti) means his being known to proceed from [the Father]” (4.20.29). 38 Pace Michael Hanby, Augustine and Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2003), whose reading of Trin. I will discuss more in Chapter 4, I would argue that this is what Augustine means by the language of “similarity” (4.2.4): an ethical ordering in humility and charity, rather than an ontological mediation, a principle of harmonia between God and creation. Augustine does of course operate on the basis of certain Neoplatonic metaphysical assumptions here, as his numerology in 4.4.7–7.11 shows; but the point is that he is framing mediation in an ethical, historical sense, communicated in participation in the earthly Jesus. Cf. Wisse, Trinitarian Theology beyond Participation, pp. 134–40. 39 Gioia overstates the utilitarian function of the metaphysical claims being made in this section of Trin., arguing that Augustine’s intent is to show the utter inadequacy of logical and ontological categories in articulating the mystery of the Trinity, Theological Epistemology of Augustine, pp. 154–57. They are, of course, inadequate; but this does not entail their superfluity, nor heterodoxy, as Gioia seems to be close to claiming at points. Likewise, Wisse may be overstating the matter by calling Augustine’s Trinity “an island of irrationality within the realm of doctrinal reflection”; Trinitarian Theology beyond Participation, p. 92. Mystery in Augustine is not primarily epistemological; it is ethical and existential. 40 On the exegesis of 1 Cor. 1.24 (“Christ the power and wisdom of God”) driving this passage within a context of Homoian and Neo-Nicene polemic, see Michel Barnes, “De Trinitate VI and VII: Augustine and the Limits of Nicene Orthodoxy,” Augustinian Studies 38, no. 1 (2007), pp. 189–202. Barnes notes the anachronism of looking for a fully realized doctrine of subsistent relations within books 5–7. 41 In deo omnia sunt unum ubi non obviat relationis oppositio. This is the formulation of the Decretum pro Iacobitis, codified at the Council of Florence, 1441. For the decree, see Henry Denzinger, The Sources of Catholic Dogma (trans. Roy J. Deferrari; St. Louis: B. Herder Book Co., 1957), §703. Anselm himself puts it differently: Quatenus nec unitas amittat aliquando suum consequens, ubi non obviat aliqua relationis oppositio, in De processione spiritus sancti 1 (“The unity should never lose its consequences except when a relational opposition stands in the way”). S. Anselmi cantuariensis archiepiscopi opera omnia (ed. F. S. Schmitt; vol. 2; Rome, 1940), p. 181. Translation from Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works (ed. Brian Davies and G. R. Evans; New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 393. 42 See Chapter 1. 43 This point is made even more strongly in ep. 120.3.13: “now hold with unshakeable faith that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are a trinity and that there is, nonetheless, one God, not that the divinity is common to these as if it were a fourth, but that it is itself the ineffably inseparable Trinity,” Letters 100–155 (trans. Roland Teske, SJ; Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2003). 44 For this discussion, see 7.4.7–7.6.11.

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NOTES 45 Richard Cross, “Quid Tres? On What Precisely Augustine Professes Not to Understand in De Trinitate 5 and 7,” Harvard Theological Review 100, no. 2 (April 2007), pp.  215–32, especially pp. 223–26; as Cross notes, this relationship was at times used as an example by the Cappadocians, but with serious reservations on their part too (pp. 230–32). 46 Cf. on this point, John Cavadini, “The Structure and Intention of Augustine’s De trinitate,” Augustinian Studies 23 (1992), p. 106. 47 “God is improperly called substance . . . He is called being (essentia) truly and properly in such a way that perhaps only God ought to be called being,” Trin. 7.5.10; cf. 2.18.35, where Augustine more generally indicates the impropriety of “nature, or substance, or essence, or whatever else you may call that which God is”; again, the point here is not metaphysical ineptness, but a recognition of the sharp boundaries of conventional metaphysical language. 48 For a measured analysis of Augustine’s apophaticism, surveying a wide cross-section of his authorship, see T. J. van Bavel, OSA, “God in between Affirmation and Negation According to Augustine,” in Augustine: Presbyter Factus Sum, pp. 73–97. Van Bavel judges that, despite a very deep emphasis on divine ineffability in Augustine, he is not to be classed with the strict apophaticism of Plotinus. See also Deirde Carabine, The Unknown God: Negative Theology in the Platonic Tradition: Plato to Eriugena (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1995), who points out that the true Augustinian mode of apophasis is what she calls the “via amoris,” “the way of faith in the unseen God” (p. 274) that is christologically driven: “his Christo-centric theology is precisely the most important indication of how Augustine attempted to guide his flock to the vision of the unseen, unknowable God” (p. 277). 49 As Bell puts it, the image of God is to be conceived “in terms of likeness, which is essentially the actualization of participation,” Bell, The Image and Likeness, p. 28. 50 See Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 95. 51 This is a slight, but crucial, modification of the statement of Rowan Williams: “The image of God (as opposed to the mere vestigia of triadic structures in the mind) is realised when the three moments of our mental agency all have God for their object,” “Sapientia and the Trinity,” p. 319. 52 See Trin. 7.6.12 quoted above, and cf. 8.7.11: a separation between self and God “not in terms of distance but of divergence of values.”

Chapter 3 1 So, for example, Phillip Cary: “As with modern versions of the ‘turn to the subject,’ of which Augustine’s project is the ancestor, it is not what the soul sees but the soul’s seeing that is the great clue for philosophers to follow,” Augustine’s Invention of the Inner Self: The Legacy of a Christian Platonist (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 65 (Cary is discussing conf. 7, but the parallel is apposite). Cary cites Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), who can say that “it was Augustine who introduced the inwardness of radical reflexivity and bequeathed it to the Western tradition of thought” (p. 131), but is nonetheless careful to differentiate Augustine from later Cartesianism in a way that Cary perhaps is not.

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NOTES 2 “Ce n’est pas l’économie de la Rédemption qui est le point de départ de cet intellectus fidei de la Trinité. C’est au contraire l’économie de la création et de l’illumination intérieure de l’esprit,” L’Intelligence de la foi, p. 454. 3 This expression is typically used to describe the epistemological skepticism following from more extreme forms of Cartesian solipsism; the classic critique is Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 4 Again, du Roy is appropriate (L’Intelligence de la foi, p. 455): “Telle est la situation de son intelligence de la foi au sommet du De Trinitate: d’une part la foi est représentée par des formules antiariennes statiques, d’autre part l’intelligence est représentée par un processus réflexif. La thème théologique de l’image en l’homme servira à établier un lien analogique entre ces deux pôles, l’intellectus et la fides” (“Such is the situation of the understanding of faith at the culmination of De Trinitate: on the one hand, the faith is represented by static anti-Arian formulas, and on the other, understanding is represented by a reflexive process. The theological theme of the image in humanity serves to establish an analogical connection between these two poles, understanding and faith”). Ayres is concerned, as I am, to argue that nowhere does Augustine presume that the Trinity is “most like a unitary self-thinking mind,” Augustine and the Trinity, p. 276. 5 In addition to Turner’s distinction of “mimetic” and “participatory” images, cf. Sullivan’s distinction of “analogy” and “image” in Trin.: they are distinct insofar as the “static” ontological analogy has self as an object, whereas the image, a “dynamic” operational function, has God the Trinity for its object; The Image of God, pp. 144–48. Gioia similarly differentiates between “image-exemplar” and “image-relation,” with a similar judgment of priority as that in Turner and Sullivan; Theological Epistemology of Augustine, pp. 275–97. 6 In the oddly inconclusive final chapter of Augustine and the Trinity, Ayres describes one of his purposes as seeking to “slightly de-centre Books 8–15 of the De Trinitate as a source for his mature Trinitarian theology” (p. 317). As he clarifies a few pages later, his intent is to argue that we cannot understand Augustine’s trinitarianism as a project dependent upon understanding the processes of knowledge and love in the mind as an analogical site for the Trinity (p. 322). This is, of course, right. But Augustine and the Trinity has the somewhat perplexing character of a book that seeks to illuminate the development of Augustine’s doctrine of the Trinity while marginalizing, as far as possible, the major work Augustine wrote to express it. On the one hand, Ayres (along with Barnes) has rightly gone to great lengths to show that Trin. is, apart from s. 52, the only Augustinian text to develop the psychological analogy, and that to understand Augustine’s trinitarianism in context we have to attend to the polemical development of his Pro-Nicene claims throughout his authorship. I fully concede this point, particularly as a further proof that Augustine never intended to draw an analogical relationship between the human mind and the Trinity. On the other hand, I would argue that the premise of Trin. as a program of spiritual exercise and transformation, in which the remaking of the soul in the imago dei is indelibly connected to the contemplation of the Trinity, is essential to Augustine’s understanding of the Trinity. This dimension seems to me enervated by Ayres’s “de-centring” because Augustine’s concern is not simply to flesh out the concerns of Pro-Nicene theology, but to integrate trinitarian doctrine into a wider contemplative and theological project. While much is gained by contextually “flattening out” the idiosyncrasies of Trin., much is also lost. Perhaps this is simply due to a restriction of scope: Ayres

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NOTES acknowledges that he is not offering “a detailed study of how Augustine sees the saving action of God as a Trinitarian event, nor how he consequently sees Christian life as shaped by the Trinity” (pp. 4–5). This is an excellent way of characterizing what I am attempting in these chapters. 7 I will not attempt to describe the structure of Trin. in great detail here; what is significant for the purposes of this study is the relationship of the two traditional halves of the text, books 1–7 and 8–15. See the helpful studies of Earl C. Muller, “Rhetorical and Theological Issues in the Structuring of Augustine’s De trinitate,” Studia Patristica 27 (ed. E. A. Livingstone; Leuven: Peeters Press, 1993), pp. 356–63; Cavadini, “Structure and Intention of De Trinitate,” pp. 103–23; Edmund Hill, “St. Augustine’s ‘De Trinitate’: The Doctrinal Significance of Its Structure,” Revue des Études Augustiniennes 19 (1973), pp. 277–86, the conclusions of which are substantially reproduced in Hill’s edition of Trin. 8 In addition to the statements adduced above from du Roy, L’intelligence de la foi, see pp. 460–62, where he further connects this bifurcation of “raison et la foi” to the order of the theological treatises in Aquinas’s Summa. 9 Cf. Robert Crouse, “St. Augustine’s De Trinitate: Philosophical Method,” Studia Patristica 16 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1985), p. 502. 10 While a statement of author’s intent is not always a reliable barometer of a text’s meaning, Augustine’s statement to Aurelius that “the inquiry proceeds in a closely-knit development from the first of [the books] to the last” is at least an indication that he did not intend a dual structure; Trin., prologus (ep. 174). 11 After copies of the book were pirated, Augustine laid the project aside for some time. He worked on the treatise intermittently over nearly 20 years, often putting it aside to write more pressing occasional material during the Donatist controversy, or the more immediately relevant civ. Dei. 12 Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity, p. 281. 13 At bottom, the real issue with seeing Trin. through the opposition of faith vs reason is that it is simply too vague to be useful. To speak much more concretely, though, there is a case to be made that De Trinitate is a kind of self-critique by Augustine, in the sense that it represents a sustained attempt to adapt the illuminationist epistemology that is so central to his pre-395 treatises to the incarnation-centered faith of his mature theology. Accounting for this would entail revisiting some of the debates about the Platonist continuities and discontinuities in the development of his thought (e.g. Dobell, Augustine’s Intellectual Conversion; Carol Harrison, Rethinking Augustine’s Early Theology: An Argument for Continuity [New York: Oxford University Press, 2006]), something I am currently at work on in an article tentatively entitled “Illumination as a Christological Problem in Augustine.” 14 This theme is announced in book 1.8.18, where the eschatological goal of the movement of vision from the Son forma servi to the Son forma dei is “his being seen in his equality with the Father, that being the ultimate vision which suffices us.” 15 See, for example ord. 2.5.15, discussed by Gerber, Spirit of Augustine, p. 29. 16 Barnes puts this well: “The utility of faith for salvation lies in the fact that it marries an epistemology with a moral anthropology, and then grounds them both in Christology”; “The Visible Christ and the Invisible Trinity: Mt. 5.8 in Augustine’s Trinitarian Theology of 400,” Modern Theology 19, no. 3 (July 2003), p. 342. Matt. 5.8 (only the pure in heart will see God) is central to the contemplative themes of books 1–4, as Barnes shows, and sets in motion the paradox of the latter half of the

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NOTES book as well (8.4.6), as I will highlight below. This text thus nicely summarizes the program of Trin. 17 Cf. Pierre Hadot, “Spiritual Exercises,” in Philosophy as a Way of Life, p. 107: Trin. “is not trying to present a systematic theory of trinitarian analogies. Rather, by making the soul turn inward upon itself, [Augustine] wants to make it experience the fact that it is an image of the Trinity.” 18 L’intelligence de la foi, pp. 72, 170. The language of anagogia is not itself Augustinian, as du Roy admits. See also Frederick E. Van Fleteren, OSA, “Augustine’s Ascent of the Soul in Book VII of the Confessions: A Reconsideration,” Augustinian Studies 5 (1974), pp. 29–72, for a helpful discussion, and “The Ascent of the Soul in the Augustinian Tradition,” in Paradigms in Medieval Thought: Applications in Medieval Disciplines (ed. Nancy van Deusen; Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1991), pp. 93–110. Gioia calls the anagogical reading—centered in created analogies of the Trinity—as the “mainstream reading” of Trin., stating that it “mistakes marginal aspects of this work for its main purpose,” Theological Epistemology of Augustine, p. 255. 19 See the discussion in Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity, pp. 122–24, on anagoge¯ in Neoplatonism. 20 On this see Turner, The Darkness of God. 21 On the Augustinian ascent, see especially the loci classici in conf. 7.10.16–12.18, and 9.10.23–26. Cf. Dobell, Augustine’s Intellectual Conversion, pp. 191–98, for a synoptic comparison of ascent vocabulary from lib. arb., vera rel., and conf. 22 In general, Gioia sees a much sharper distinction between philosophy and theology in Augustine than I do (Theological Epistemology of Augustine, see especially pp. 40–67). I would argue that Augustine’s trouble is not with philosophy as such (as if he would have distinguished an autonomous philosophical discipline itself), but with philosophical pretension to the vision of the Good apart from the mediator, Christ. 23 John Cavadini, “Structure and Intention of De trinitate,” pp. 106, 109; cf. p. 110, where he characterizes Trin. additionally as a performative auto-critique: it “is in effect a re-issuing of [Augustine’s] earlier philosophical dialogues, but here radically redone, as a critique of the position that there is any accurate or saving knowledge of the Trinity apart from faith in Christ.” This way of putting it encapsulates Augustine’s attitude toward Platonic philosophy in general—it provides a general metaphysical context of intelligibility, but both its method and goal is transformed christologically. 24 Enneads 6.9.11. 25 This is a heuristic division, and I am not arguing for a sharp delineation between books 12 and 13; indeed they form a unity in many respects. This way of reading books 8–15 simply has the advantage of highlighting the way the two halves fall roughly into a treatment of scientia and sapientia, the latter especially being animated by the Christology of book 13. 26 See Hill’s “Introduction,” in Augustine, The Trinity, pp. 12–29. 27 A word is in order about the relationship of “knowledge and love” (notitia and amor) and “intellect and will” (intelligentia and voluntas). The former are Augustine’s most general terms for these epistemological processes, and in the “first draft” of the psychological analogy they represent the imprecise nature of Augustine’s initial explorations;

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NOTES when he develops the final form of the triad, memoria-intelligentia-voluntas, he is using much more exact terminology. In general, the contrast between the two is best thought of as concrete acts or operations of intellect and will resulting in states of knowledge and love. 28 Illuminating here is Margaret Miles, “Vision: The Eye of the Body and the Eye of the Mind in Saint Augustine’s ‘De trinitate’ and ‘Confessions,’” Journal of Religion 63, no. 2 (April 1983), pp. 125–42; “‘Facie ad Faciem’: Visuality, Desire, and the Discourse of the Other,” Journal of Religion 87, no. 1 (Jan. 2007), pp. 43–58. 29 Ayres, citing Quintilian, notes that 8.10.14 uses technical rhetorical terms (exordium and contexto) to characterize the preceding book as an introductory preface to books 9–15; Augustine and the Trinity, p. 281. Cavadini sees book 8 as a first attempt at a failed ascent, prior to the second ascent of books 9–14; “Structure and Intention of De trinitate,” p. 106. 30 Turner’s discussion is illuminating: The Darkness of God, p. 81. See also the importance of Matt. 5.8 for book 1, as discussed in Barnes’s study “The Visible Christ and the Invisible Trinity,” above. 31 For this line of argument, Trin. 8.4.6–5.8. Quoting this Isaiah verse, ep. 120.1.3 (Letters 100–155) states the logic of faith and reason clearly: “In certain matters, therefore, pertaining to the teaching of salvation, which we cannot yet grasp by reason, but which we will be able to at some point, faith precedes reason so that the heart may be purified in order that it may receive and sustain the light of the great reason, which is, of course, a demand of reason!” 32 See esp. div. qu. 46 on the ideas; cf. Theodore Kondoleon, “Divine Exemplarism in Augustine,” Augustinian Studies 1 (1970), pp. 181–95. 33 Rowan Williams points out that rather than “innate data,” the discussion of the forms or ideas is at bottom more about the grammar of subjectivity rather than the content of the ego, for all that the argument concerning the idea of justice seeks to establish is that we are compelled by love of the saints to aspire to the form of life we find desirable in them, and that, in thematizing this form of life, we discover something about the nature of justice itself. Thus “what our moral longing longs for, loves, is love, in that it is directed to persons who are loving . . . that is why love of God and love of neighbor are not really to be distinguished,” “The Paradoxes of Self-Knowledge,” p. 125. 34 See the helpful discussion in Gerald O’Daly, Augustine’s Philosophy of Mind (London: Duckworth, 1987), pp. 199–207; pp. 178–89 are also relevant. 35 On this, see Bell, The Image and Likeness, p. 23. Augustine rejects the doctrine of the preincarnate state of the soul and its fall into embodiment flatly in Trin. 12.15.24; alluding to the famous Meno passage regarding the boy’s recognition of geometric truths, Augustine sarcastically observes that “it is unlikely that everybody was a geometer in a previous life . . . the conclusion we should rather draw is that the nature of the intellectual mind has been so established by the disposition of its creator that it is subjoined to intelligible things in the order of nature, and so it sees such truths in a kind of non-bodily light.” Cf. retr. 1.4.4. 36 Manchester argues that Augustine’s use of the category of memoria demonstrates how little Augustine is reliant upon Plotinus in the psychological analogy: “the schema of his triad . . . is too eccentric to be an adaptation of any of Plotinus, Victorinus, or Porphyry . . . Augustinian memoria is simply sui generis,” “Noetic Triad,” p. 217. Manchester has in view the supposed reliance of the Augustinian triad upon Victorinus’s esse-vivere-intelligere, itself dependent upon Plotinus’s on-nous-zo¯e¯ . As

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NOTES Wisse notes, memoria in Augustine is a dynamic category, capturing “the concrete history of the subject” as much as the static “traces of the eternal ideas in the individual soul” of Platonism; Trinitarian Theology beyond Participation, p. 238. 37 The sociality of Augustinian love is shown in the discussion of loving the brethren in 8.7.11–8.9.13. 38 “Sapientia and the Trinity,” p. 323. Williams’s reasoning is that this triad is picked up again in 15.6.9 when Augustine seeks a trinity in wisdom; but there it is reiterated only to emphasize its dissimilarity to the Trinity. Hanby, Augustine and Modernity, likewise sees this as the “chief analogue for explicating the Trinity” (p. 50), insofar as Augustine’s “doxological ontology” presupposes the aesthetic difference between Father and Son as a precondition for the manifestation of divine love. However, as I will argue in Chapter 4 (discussing both Williams and Hanby in more detail), Augustine’s reason for rejecting this analogy is sound. The image of the Trinity cannot be intersubjective reciprocity; we cannot see the divine self-giving as a participation in the reciprocity of Father and Son. Christ is not the manifestation of an independent and prior triune love (p. 75); the incarnation is the act of divine love. 39 The Bibliothèque Augustinienne edition of Trin. has a helpful table of the eight major triads of books 8–15, which I reproduce here. See vol. 16, La Trinité (Livres VIII–XV) (trans. Paul Agaësse, SJ, notes by Agaësse and J. Moingt, SJ; Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1955), p. 578. The table is reproduced in Yves Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit (trans. David Smith; New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1983), 3:89. 1. amans, amatus, amor (Trin. 8.10.14; cf. 9.2.2); 2. mens, notitia, amor (9.3.3); 3. memoria, intelligentia, voluntas (10.11.17); 4. res (visa), visio (exterior), intentio (11.2.2); 5. memoria (sensibilis), visio (interior), volitio (11.3.6–9); 6. memoria (intellectus), scientia, voluntas (12.15.25); 7. scientia (fidei), cogitatio, amor (13.20.26); 8. memoria Dei, intelligentia Dei, amor Dei (14.12.15) 40 See also 10.11.17–18. Gioia, Theological Epistemology of Augustine, p. 278, has a helpful discussion. 41 Ayres, “The Discipline of Self-Knowledge in Augustine’s De Trinitate Book X,” in The Passionate Intellect: Essays on the Transformation of Classical Traditions (ed. Lewis Ayres; New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1995), p. 274n38, has a helpful bibliography on illuminationism. 42 Cf. Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity, p. 304. As Todd Breyfogle notes, Augustine tends to use the verb intellegere and the nouns intelligentia and intellectus interchangeably, or at least without any technical distinctions; “Intellectus,” in Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia (ed. Allan D. Fitzgerald, OSA; Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999), p. 453. I will use intelligentia for convenience when describing the psychological analogy. 43 Cf. O’Daly, Augustine’s Philosophy of Mind, p. 6: “the soul is none other than the coherence of its faculties of memory, understanding and will, whose co-operation is characteristic of all human behaviour”; Hill, “Introduction,” p. 25, stridently makes a similar point. 44 This clarifies that the verbum is the key moment in which the psychological analogy illuminates the procession of the Son, thus raising the vexed paradox of Trin., namely, why the Spirit is not a Son: the act of intellect is prior to the joining of the mind to the intentional object by will, but the will is integral to the generation of the Word from the intellect. Book 9.12.17–18 is occupied with this question: why love is not a word or begotten. Gioia calls the “inseparability between knowledge and

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NOTES love” one of the theological foundations of Trin., deriving from the “unity between the saving work of Christ and the role of the Holy Spirit”; Theological Epistemology of Augustine, p. 128. Cf. Rowan Williams, “Paradoxes of Self-Knowledge,” p. 127; A. N. Williams, The Divine Sense: The Intellect in Patristic Theology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 161–62. 45 It would of course be more accurate to say that a bifurcation of epistemological and ethical is simply not a division it would have occurred to Augustine to make. 46 The language of “pre-reflexive self-awareness” is that of Denys Turner; Sullivan uses the scholastic language of “habitual self-knowledge.” Involved here is the distinction between se nosse, innate self-knowing, and se cogitare, the active generation of a verbum in reflection upon oneself. See Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity, pp. 300–01. 47 This knot of issues particularly occupies book 11, which finds Augustine differentiating carefully between the outer and inner self, and the cognitive operations respective to each. Even when the external object is no longer gazed upon, notes Augustine, the will can still join itself to an impression, as it were, of the object in the memory (11.4.7). 48 On the uti-frui relationship, see Trin. 9.8.13; 10.10.13; 10.11.17, as well as of course the locus classicus, doc. Chr. 1.4. 49 Cf. the clarification of retr. 2.41.2—this is with reference to loving it unto the praise of the creator. The ultimate corruption of the created order is using it for self-pleasure, in the sense of appropriating it as a private good, not a good shared in the human community (cf. 12.9.14–12.10.15). 50 Turner makes the point that this amounts to a potential critique of introspection, in that the materialist error emerges in the act of turning the mind toward its own contents; The Darkness of God, p. 88. 51 This is Williams’s “central paradox” of Trin.: the self loves the idea of knowing itself, even when ignorant of itself, which means that it must know itself as a knowing subject in some regard, “Paradoxes of Self-Knowledge,” p. 128. Ultimately, this means that self-knowing points beyond itself, insofar as our knowing is an activity fundamentally determined by its orientation toward the good—such that it cannot finally see itself as an “object” without reference to God and neighbor (p. 131). 52 In this passage, Augustine dismisses a famous “social analogy” for the Trinity (12.5.5– 7.9; Manchester, “Noetic Triad,” p. 217, notes that this was an analogy Victorinus used); this seems to be in response to the possibility of seeing the image of God in the creation narrative of Adam, Eve, and Seth. In the course of considering this possibility, Augustine rejects one possible implication that would align the image of God only with the Son, which would then exclude woman from the image of God, except in relationship to the man. There is a very real patriarchal logic ruling paragraphs 7.9–12, including Augustine’s association of man with the ratio superior and woman with the ratio inferior in paragraph 10, thus perpetuating the deeply problematic assumption that runs throughout Greek and Latin thinking that construes male and female on the hierarchy of sapientia and scientia. There can be no disputing, and no defending, Augustine’s role in mediating the misogyny of late antiquity here and elsewhere in his authorship. On the other hand, though, as the discussion leads him to Paul’s consideration of the woman and the image of God, Augustine is quick to offset the outright patriarchy of 1 Cor. 11 with the egalitarian statement of Gal. 3.26. He is also destabilizing the ontological basis of that regnant sexism, for he stresses that contemplative reason is embodied

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NOTES in the woman just as much as the man, and that the scientia-sapientia binary, while still encoding a gender hierarchy, is not an ontological difference as such; it rather lies in the ethical disposition and orientation of the soul (12.7.12). Cf. Wisse, Trinitarian Theology beyond Participation, pp. 252–53. Sullivan notes that Augustine is in disagreement with “much of eastern patristic thought” in affirming equal participation in the image of God by men and women; The Image of God, p. 49. See also Kari Elisabeth Børresen, “In Defence of Augustine: How Femina is Homo,” in Mélanges T.J. van Bavel, who offers a cautious affirmation of Augustine’s “inclusive intention, without repeating his tragic content” (p. 428). 53 Seminal here is Madec, “Christus, scientia et sapientia nostra. Le principe de coherence de la doctrine augustinienne,” Recherches Augustiniennes 10 (1975), p. 78, much of which is concerned, pace du Roy, to stress Augustine’s christological unification, rather than Platonizing dissociation, of scientia and sapientia, eternity and time, and the like; see especially pp. 84–85. For more, see Madec, “Notes sur l’intelligence augustinienne de la foi,” Revue des Études Augustiniennes 17 (1971), pp. 119–42. 54 Joseph Lienhard calls it “his most convincing scriptural refutation of Pelagianism,” “‘The Glue Itself Is Charity: Ps. 62:9 in Augustine’s Thought,” in Augustine: Presbyter Factus Sum, p. 379. La Bonnardière compiles a list of the usages of this verse, counting at least 201 occurrences from 387 to 429, the vast majority after 411. “Le verset paulinien Rom. 5, 5, dans l’oeuvre de S. Augustin,” in Augustinus Magister: Congrès International Augustinien, Paris 21–24 Septembre 1954 (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1954–55), pp. 657–65. 55 Gerber shows that Augustine’s writings in Rome (especially quant. and mor.) are the first time he links the Spirit’s proprium with divine caritas, and speaks of the Spirit as the source of our love for God, with Rom. 5.5 as his basis; Spirit of Augustine, pp. 123–32. 56 “Political” here is more appropriate than “judicial” as a descriptor for Augustine’s atonement thinking: the regulating principle is not the verdict rendered by the divine judge, but the site of struggle in a contest between two powers. Cf. Hill, The Trinity, p. 367n36, who makes a similar point. 57 On the importance of humility in Augustine’s Christology, see Brian Daley, “A Humble Mediator: The Distinctive Elements in Saint Augustine’s Christology,” Word and Spirit 9 (1987), pp. 100–17. 58 4.15.20, 14.19; an emphasis, similar to that in book 13, on faith as the means of purification for the contemplation of eternal things follows in 4.18.24; cf. conf. 7.9.13–21.27 on the libri platonicorum. Crouse writes that Trin. involves a “thorough-going reform in the basis and method of philosophy . . . the contemplation of the triune life of God, the essential aim of all philosophia, and the only adequate end of human reflection, could not be attained by ‘those who philosophize without Christ.’” (“Philosophical Method,” p. 504). This reformed philosophy involves the reconstitution of scientia in light of revelation (p. 506). On the conception of mediation in Porphyry and Augustine, see Eugene TeSelle, “Porphyry and Augustine,” Augustinian Studies 5 (1974), pp. 123–33, and on the displacing of methexis by a “radical Christianizing” through participation in the “flesh-taking of Christ the Mediator,” see Gerald Bonner, “Augustine’s Concept of Deification,” Journal of Theological Studies 37, no. 2 (October 1986), p. 373. 59 I would argue that, at bottom, Hanby’s reading of Augustine is determined to reinstall du Roy’s anagogy of Plotinian mediation (although as a good thing); strikingly,

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NOTES the “numerology” of book 4 controls his reading of Trin.; Augustine and Modernity, pp. 27–71. 60 Cf. Gioia: “Christ does not become an epistemological ‘function’ destined to solve a Platonic aporia between time and eternity . . . what pertains to [Christ’s] humanity becomes for us the way (uia) to happiness and vision of God . . . through constant adhesion to the person of the only Mediator between God and us, the Word made flesh,” Theological Epistemology of Augustine, p. 69. Gioia, however, seems to see no significant difference between books 4 and 13 and their account of mediation. Studer points out that Augustine’s conception of mediation has different emphases in the two books, one corresponding to the mediation between the “One” and the many, and one that focuses on the humanity of Christ as the mediator, respectively; The Grace of Christ and the Grace of God, p. 44. 61 To use slightly anachronistic Chalcedonian language—although cf. the “two substances” of 13.17.22. 62 Ayres draws attention to the parallel between the scientia-sapientia pairing and the two natures of Christ in “The Christological Context of Augustine’s De Trinitate XIII: Toward Relocating Books VIII–XV,” in Studies in Patristic Christology (ed. Thomas Finan and Vincent Twomey; Portland: Four Courts Press, 1998), pp. 95–101. 63 Wisse is convincing that Augustine’s purpose in Trin. is apologetic—he utilizes and subverts the ascent paradigm, making its movement rhetorical rather than conceptual, in order to persuade “semi-pagan readers of the truth and indispensability of faith in Christ,” Trinitarian Theology beyond Participation, p. 300. The argument, which depends in considerable part upon the humility of the intellect in the christological passages in Trin. books 4 and 13, is found passim throughout Trinitarian Theology beyond Participation, but pp. 149–223 are particularly helpful. 64 Gioia’s discussion is excellent here, and I am indebted to its clarity on this point; see Theological Epistemology of Augustine, pp. 68–105: “it is only as object of faith through love (dilectio) that Christ’s humanity and his deeds allow us to see (i.e. know) the Father” (p. 79); as he points out, faith and vision/knowledge are one, though they are distinct in modality, in strict parallel to the two natures and one person of Christ (to use Chalcedonian language): “even though the modality of faith and vision are different, the object is the same, i.e. God revealing himself in Christ through the Holy Spirit. The identity of the object of both faith and vision is grounded in the hypostatic union: Christ is our science and wisdom” (p. 83). 65 14.12.15, 14.18. As the tacit distinction between capacity and participation in the quote shows, for Augustine the image is in fact located in the capacity for participation, which is only actualized in participation by grace (cf. Gioia, Theological Epistemology of Augustine, pp. 286–87). Strictly speaking, both are aspects of the image, but in terms of capacity and participation, or potentiality and actuality; the problem is that human sin has stymied the possibility of realizing the image of God, which ultimately is simply participating in God through Christ. Cf. Wisse, Trinitarian Theology beyond Participation, p. 165, who points to the dynamism of Augustine’s position. 66 It is worth reiterating—this differentiation is anachronistic to Augustine. 67 For a similar denial of any trinitarian analogy, cf. s. 52.23: “I haven’t introduced these three things as though they were to be equated to the divine triad, as though they were to be marshaled into an analogy,” Sermons 51–94 on the New Testament (trans. Edmund Hill, OP; Brooklyn: New City Press, 1991).

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NOTES 68 Du Roy laments that this failure of anagogical ascent is where Western theology remains, unable to link the trinitarian processions to the trinitarian analogies and the list of attributes discussed in book 15; L’intelligence de la foi, pp. 446–47. He is right to see the theory of appropriations nascent here; but this is not an enervation of divine self-giving in the economy. Simplicity and unity of external operations (the basis of appropriations theory) is the guarantee of divine self-identity in revelation and salvation. 69 In addition, our word is manifest because it is “manifestable,” our self-expression revealed in the intersubjective space of language, which precedes our work—“we cannot have a work which is not preceded by a word.” So too the Word of God is that through which all things were made; when Rahner complained about the Augustinian tradition positing an arbitrary link between the incarnation and the procession of the Son, he overlooked the last lines of 15.11.20: “it was not God the Father, not the Holy Spirit, not the trinity itself, but only the Son who is the Word of God that became flesh.” 70 This is an absolute statement, without reference to sinfulness as a hindrance to the otherwise natural capacity for the vision of God; Cary fails to reckon with this in his claim that, for Augustine, humankind has no need of elevating grace for the vision of God (Augustine’s Invention of the Inner Self) (p. 67); see J. Patout Burns, The Development of Augustine’s Doctrine of Operative Grace (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1980), pp. 111–12, on the shift from the natural desire for God to that of beatitude through the charity of the gift of the Spirit in Augustine’s theology, as a result of the Pelagian controversy. Burns identifies this as one of the most significant developments in Augustine’s theology (p. 184). 71 Thus Rowan Williams rightly states that the mission of the Spirit is to share the love that is, properly speaking, the divine essence itself: “the effect of the Spirit’s work is the effect of love, as far as we are concerned,” “Sapientia and the Trinity,” p. 327. 72 Note, once again, the citation of Rom. 5.5 at the end of 15.17.31. 73 As we have seen, Augustine’s epistemology is not totally precise when it comes to the mutual relationship of intellect and will, and correspondingly not as illuminating as might be preferred for articulating the processions of Son and Spirit. It is clear that knowing must have some logical priority, since we cannot love what we do not know; and it is clear that the mission of Christ must in some sense precede that of Spirit, because the giving of the Spirit is a consequence of the incarnation, and is Christ’s act. Nonetheless, Augustine is not entirely able to answer the question as to why the Spirit is not a Son to his satisfaction—this will be one of the benefits of the beatific vision (15.25.45)! It is evident that by the end of book 15, he is somewhat exhausted by the project, noting his dissatisfaction with his handling of this question, and contenting himself with citing a long passage from Jo. ev. tr., 99.8–9. 74 Cf. 15.26.46, where the baptism of Christ prefigures the anointing of the church by the Spirit. Ayres, “Christological Context,” especially pp. 108–13, emphasizes that the exercitatio mentis of Trin., by virtue of being christologically articulated, is therefore located in the context of the totus christus. 75 One implication of this is that pneumatology is constitutively economic, which perhaps might help explain why the Western (and Eastern) aporia of the Spirit’s “proper name” or the distinction of the Spirit’s procession from the Son’s generation is not the theological embarrassment it is sometimes taken to be. For example, see the discussion of Pavel Florensky in Rogers, After the Spirit, pp. 23–29.

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NOTES

Chapter 4 1 This is one of Wisse’s major points: Augustine’s way of understanding the Trinity opposes at a basic level the “functionalization” of the Trinity whereby trinitarian theology simply becomes “a mere redescription of the state of ontology.” Trinitarian Theology beyond Participation, pp. 86–87. 2 Homilies on the First Epistle of John (trans. Boniface Ramsey; Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2008). I will refer to this as in epistulam Joannis in the text, and cite it parenthetically. Secondary literature on these homilies is not large; important studies include Dany Dideberg, Saint Augustin et la première Épître de saint Jean: Une théologie de l’Agapè (Paris: Beauchesne, 1975); Paul Agaësse’s introduction to the Sources Chrétiennes edition, Saint Augustin: Commentaire de la Première Épître de S. Jean (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1961), pp. 7–102; Eoin G. Cassidy, “Augustine’s Exegesis of the First Epistle of John,” in Scriptural Interpretation in the Fathers: Letter and Spirit (ed. Thomas Finan and Vincent Twomey; Portland: Four Courts Press, 1995), pp. 201–20; Lewis Ayres, “Augustine, Christology, and God as Love: An Introduction to the Homilies on I John,” in Nothing Greater, Nothing Better: Theological Essays on the Love of God (ed. Kevin J. Vanhoozer; Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2001), pp. 67–93. 3 The verse is repeated six times in ep. Jo. 1.5. 4 I will take the liberty of substituting “neighbor” for Augustine’s “brother” for two reasons: first, it corrects the latter’s exclusivity, without using the slightly more cumbersome “brother and sister;” and second, it implicitly allows for the extension of the object of charity to the enemy, something that will concern Augustine in this chapter. 5 This point—that the sanctifying power of the Holy Spirit is identical to the gift of charity manifest in the forgiveness of the neighbor—is the focus of J. Patout Burns, “Christ and the Holy Spirit in Augustine’s Theology of Baptism,” in Augustine: From Rhetor to Theologian (ed. Joanne McWilliam; Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1992), pp. 161–71, which I draw on throughout this section. 6 Ibid., p. 164. 7 On all this, see Burns, Development, pp. 52–88, especially pp. 59–71. The reading of Augustine in this chapter is in general much indebted to Burns’s work, which in particular shows the importance of the Donatist controversy for the development of Augustine’s theology of grace, providing an essential link between the early turn to Pauline theology in Simpl., and the later mature development of the Pelagian controversy. Burns’s book is still often overlooked—it is only superficially discussed by Harrison, Rethinking Augustine’s Early Theology, pp. 274–76; and Dobbell, Augustine’s Intellectual Conversion, does not seem to know it, despite the importance of Burns’s thesis for the decades-old debate about Augustine’s theological development. 8 In a particularly bold piece of exegesis in 7.7, he notes that the only difference between God the Father and Judas—both of whom, after all, handed over Jesus to death—is that the one did it in charity, and the other in betrayal. This is also the context of Augustine’s famed dilige, et quod vis fac—“love, and do what you want” (7.8): the moral content of an act lies in its intention. Cf. the slogan of bapt.—with charity nothing harms, without it nothing profits (cited by Burns, Development, p. 63).

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NOTES 9 Cf. en. Ps. 21.2.26–9 (an important text for understanding the totus christus idea). 10 Cf. en. Ps. 85.21: “the wicked will see Christ’s human form only, and be debarred from the vision of him who being in the form of God is God’s equal,” Expositions of the Psalms 73–98 (trans. Maria Boulding, OSB; Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2002). 11 The same idea drives Augustine’s appropriation of the Pauline per speculum et in aenigmate in Trin. 15. This language of purity, desire, and charity is further linked with the image of God in ep. Jo. 4.9. 12 Ep. Jo. 10.1. 13 The Augustinian theme of the totus christus, especially in en. Ps., has received an increasingly large amount of interest in recent decades; see especially Michel Réveillaud, “Le Christ-Homme, tête de l’Eglise: Etude d’ecclésiologie selon les Enarrationes in Psalmos d’Augustin,” Recherches augustiniennes 5 (1968), pp.  67–84; William S. Babcock, The Christ of the Exchange: A Study in the Christology of Augustine’s Enarrationes in Psalmos (PhD diss., Yale University, 1971); Michael Fiedrowicz, Psalmus Vox Totius Christi: Studien zu Augustins “Enarrationes in Psalmos” (Freiburg: Herder, 1997); T. J. van Bavel, “The ‘Christus Totus’ Idea: A Forgotten Aspect of Augustine’s Spirituality,” in Studies in Patristic Christology, pp. 84–94. 14 S. 341.1, in Sermons 341–400 on Various Subjects (trans. Edmund Hill, OP; Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1995). The key biblical text behind the idea is 1  Cor. 12.12–27 (“You are the body of Christ and its members”); important as well is Acts 9.4 (“Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?”); Col. 1.24 (“That I may fill up in my flesh what is lacking from the afflictions of Christ”), and the biblical theme of the joining of man and woman as one flesh (Gen. 2.24; Matt. 19.6; Eph. 5.31–32). As the text shows, the parallel between this threefold rule and the canonica regula of Trin. is not exact—the second rule is not a precise equivalent of the forma servi, which concerns Jesus’s subordination to the Father as human, but speaks more broadly of the incarnation as opposed to the preincarnate Word. This distinction does not materially affect the argument above, however. 15 See. ep. 137.3.9–12. Brian E. Daley has particularly concerned himself with this theme; for example “A Humble Mediator”; “The Giant’s Twin Substances: Ambrose and the Christology of Augustine’s Contra sermonem Arianorum,” in Augustine: Presbyter Factus Sum, pp. 477–95. 16 Augustine has shifted here from a position in doct. Chr. where the neighbor is just such an instrumental end. Gioia notes this shift, Theological Epistemology of Augustine, p. 210. Cf. ep. Jo. 8.10, 10.7. 17 See Teske, “Augustine’s Inversion of I John 4:8,” Augustinian Studies 39, no. 1 (2008), pp. 49–60, quoting van Bavel. Teske makes clear that the shift from Deus dilectio est to Dilectio Deus est is intentional by Augustine, despite the sheepishness of translators in following him (pp. 49–50). The Latin copula construction does not require the translation “love is God,” but it is clear from Augustine’s argument that the inversion is intended. Teske also notes several other instances of the inversion (pp. 51–55). 18 Ep. Jo. 7.6, my emphasis; cf. 9.10. 19 See Teske, “Augustine’s Inversion,” pp. 56–60, who arrives at a similar conclusion to the above. 20 Deus ergo ex deo est dilectio; cf. 15.6.10. Later in the paragraph, the connection is made to the Spirit firing the person to love of God and neighbor.

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NOTES 21 See Gioia, Theological Epistemology of Augustine, pp. 26–27, 120–23. 22 Augustine quotes the Pauline warning against receiving the Eucharist unworthily (1 Cor. 11.29) toward the end of the paragraph. 23 There is, of course, considerable ambiguity here, as love is also “harsh” for Augustine (7.11); love for another’s welfare in his view includes discipline and even, as with his infamous invocation of compulsion, violence. 24 Trin. 13.2.5. 25 This is against interpretations, such as that of Williams or Hanby, that see the notion of “loving love” as adumbrating some kind of Trinity in Trin. 8. They take this to mean that in the love of the other, a triad emerges—the lover, the beloved, and the love itself—that is a model for the trinitarian relations, and thus an exemplar of the intersubjective nature of Augustinian charity that corresponds to those relations. See below. 26 Trin. 15.17.31. 27 Ep. Jo. 2.14, quoting Ps. 82.6. Cf. Jo. ev. tr. 1.4, and more directly, s. 344.1: “he was God taking on a human being, in order to make human beings into gods,” in Sermons 341–400. The first clause of the sentence makes it clear that for Augustine, deification is an ethical category: “Christ came to change our love.” Cf. Bonner’s seminal “Augustine’s Concept of Deification,” who especially focuses upon the christological function of deification in Augustine in terms of our adoption into filiation. 28 I will use this term interchangeably with others that represent the same idea, including vinculum caritatis and nexus amoris; but it is important to recognize that this is not a Augustinian term per se, but a later scholastic coinage, used particularly by Aquinas; see Catherine Osborne, “The nexus amoris in Augustine’s Trinity,” Studia Patristica 22 (ed. Elizabeth A. Livingstone; Leuven: Peeters Press, 1989), pp. 309–10. I will discuss the idea in Augustine’s theology more fully below. 29 The broad contours of this interpretation have since appeared in different forms in the work of Eugene Rogers, Lewis Ayres, David Bentley Hart, and Michael Hanby (among others). Gioia does not discuss Milbank, but points to Williams’s influence on Barnes, Hanby, and Ayres; The Theological Epistemology of Augustine, pp. 19–23. The reading is not of Radical Orthodox provenance, though it has been programmatically deployed by Milbank. 30 See Barnes, “De Régnon Reconsidered.” 31 “Sapientia and the Trinity,” p. 319. 32 Ibid., p. 321. 33 Ibid., p. 323. Williams’s point is that, for Augustine, this mediation is an immediate relation, in distinction from the mind’s relating itself to itself through the mediation of external objects in the world, which is the source of alienation in the embodied state. 34 Ibid., p. 325. 35 Ibid., p. 329. 36 See the Introduction. 37 Interestingly, Ayres seems to be reverting to a position emphasizing the monarchy of the Father in Augustine and the Trinity, pp. 177–272, when he is discussing Trin. 5–7. Indeed, Ayres quotes Williams as a source for this position (p. 254n13), although as I have just shown, Williams’s admittedly personalist reading of Augustine precludes the priority of the Father. Cf. Ayres, pp. 263–64: “the Father’s begetting of the Son is identical with the establishment of the communion of Father, Son and Spirit because

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NOTES in the begetting of the Son the Father gives his love (or substance), thus eternally establishing the Son as lover of the Father and the Spirit as the personal giving love of Father and Son.” 38 “Sapientia and the Trinity,” p. 328. However, when Williams speaks of sapientia existing as “being eternally loved, eternally contemplated” and “generating an other” in such a way as to not be identical to the Father, the category begins to sound like something more similar to the sophia of Sergius Bulgakov. 39 “Sapientia and the Trinity,” p. 328. 40 Ibid., p. 329. Williams nuances the question of the subjectivity of the hypostases: Augustine affirms neither three nor one divine consciousness, for “the divine wisdom exists only as something like a relation between subjects. Yet the ‘content’ of what these subjects are conscious of is formally identical, differentiated only by the locus of this or that subject within the overall pattern of relation or interdependence . . . sapientia is a conscious life whose consciousness of itself exists only in a manifold interrelation of loving acts—or rather, a differentiation and self-reflexivity within one loving movement” (pp. 330–31). This is different than contemporary “mythological” schemes of trinitarian pluralism articulated as “interactive drama” and “a highly anthropomorphic plurality of agencies” (pp. 331–32). 41 “The Second Difference,” in The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), p. 173. I am not claiming that Milbank is dependent upon Williams—the original version of this essay (1986) predates “Sapientia and the Trinity.” I am simply analyzing a reading of Augustine with notable structural similarities. 42 More correctly, Milbank would protest the qualifier “mere”—metaphorical transactions would already be a form of ontological poesis. 43 “The Second Difference,” p. 186; cf. “The Name of Jesus,” in The Word Made Strange, p. 152, where Jesus arrives “simultaneously with the Church.” 44 The basic Milbankian move seems to lie in the convertibility of these terms: it is at least as true to say that divinity is assumed by humanity in his theology. Milbank, to cast an eye toward the discussion of Chapters 5 and 6, does not conceive the incarnation in terms of the anhypostasis of the human nature of Jesus. 45 See “The Name of Jesus,” especially pp. 150–52. 46 “A Christological Poetics,” in The Word Made Strange, p. 130. Here, it should be clear, human agency is in some sense the prerequisite of the divine act, as the occasionalist language seems to suggest. 47 “The Second Difference,” p. 187. Milbank states that this plenitude is the Logos here. 48 Ibid., p. 188. This shows why, as I characterized above, the relation of Father and Son for Milbank is understood both on the model of intersubjectivity and in terms of signification; going beyond Hegel, one might propose, substance becomes subject and then semiosis in this system. 49 “The Second Difference,” p. 185. 50 Ibid., p. 184. 51 Ibid., p. 186. 52 Ibid., pp. 198–90. 53 Augustine and Modernity, pp. 53–54, 64; at p. 207n195, Hanby states that the rubric guiding this claim—that eros requires a lack—does not obtain in the Trinity, insofar as the Son is the image in exact correspondence to the imaged, the Father; though why the “distance” between Father and Son must still be infinite, he does not explain.

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NOTES 54 Ibid., p. 34. 55 Ibid., p. 37. “Mediation” is to be taken strictly here—the historical community is intrinsic to the manifestation of Christ as “form.” This recalls Milbank’s formalist definition of revelation above. 56 Ibid., pp. 51–55. Positing the relation of Son and Father as such an economy requires Hanby to affirm both that the Son is intended by the Father’s “productivity,” and is the aesthetic principle of his own begottenness (p. 51). That is, Hanby must affirm both that the Father and the Son are the principle of the Son’s generation. 57 Although I cannot discuss the matter further here, a powerful critique of Hanby, and Milbank, lies in the observation that the need to posit an intradivine separation or distance as a space for human intention and freedom presupposes a competitive relation of divine and human agency—even in being the creative act that grants human agency, divine agency must preserve an autonomous space for natural human freedom (e.g. “A Christological Poetics,” p. 130). If distance is the space of freedom, then there is no sense in which divine and human agency can coincide. See especially Joshua Davis, “A Critique of the Metaphysics of Ontological Poesis: Responding to Theology and the Political,” Political Theology 10, no. 1 (January 2009), pp. 153–65. 58 See Michel Barnes, “Augustine and the Limits of Nicene Orthodoxy,” p. 190. To note Barnes’s caution, Augustine is indeed not Aquinas. But I would argue that Augustine’s logic points clearly to the later Thomist codification of the “grammar” of relative predications as subsistent relations. Regardless, the salient point is that relation does not connote relationship: one is a logical category of the correlation of terms, the other is the content of the relation of persons, which implies multiple subjects in the Godhead. 59 For the argument in this paragraph, cf. the short but illuminating discussion in Eugene TeSelle, “Holy Spirit,” in Augustine through the Ages, p. 436: “It is a [Porphyrian] doctrine of divine self-actualization through formative conversion which Augustine explicitly rejected: God does not become wise through an internal process of actualization, but being essentially wise, overflows in the trinitarian relations.” This “formative conversion” in Porphyry and Victorinus is the potentiality of the Father actualized in the Son through the movement and life of the Spirit. 60 Cf. Osborne, “The nexus amoris in Augustine’s Trinity.” 61 Gioia follows this reading, and this is the source of my most significant disagreement with his generally superb study; the ontological unity of the divine persons is not enough, says Gioia, but needs to be complemented with a unity of will or dilectio between Father and Son; Theological Epistemology of Augustine, pp. 126–27. But this equivocates on the point at hand: Gioia realizes and states (with admirable conciseness) the logic of simplicity of books 5–7, “an understanding of consubstantiality rooted in soteriology cannot support the argument that the unity between Father and Son is a function of the relativity of the Father to the Son” (p. 152), but also claims that the unity of substance is really a unity of love (e.g. p. 168)—what is this latter but a “function of the relativity of Father and Son”? Ayres also “doubles” the relation of Father and Son through the Spirit in order to make it both substantial and relational: “we must say both that Father and Son are in their essence love and that the Spirit is the love of Father and Son and fully another beside and in them,” Augustine and the Trinity, p. 259. My claim, on the other hand, is that if we are to take Augustine’s view on simplicity seriously, such a double relation becomes illegitimate—and unnecessary.

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NOTES 62 A sample of relevant passages, not exhaustive but covering the most substantive discussions: Trin. 5.11.12; 5.16.17; 6.5.7; 6.10.11; 7.3.6; 15.17.27, 29, 31; 15.19.37. Trin. 8.8.12 and 8.10.14 do not explicitly speak of the idea, but feature the “love triad” that implies it. 63 Finding Augustine’s sources for the idea is famously vexed; in f. et symb. 9.19, he simply avers, “some have even dared to believe that the Holy Spirit is the communion or deity, so to speak, of the Father and the Son,” Faith and Creed, in Augustine: Earlier Writings (trans. and ed. John H. S. Burleigh; Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1953), pp. 349–69. Du Roy looks primarily to Ambrose’s De spiritu sancto, L’Intelligence de la foi, pp. 486–87 (appendix 6); cf. Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity, pp. 88–89. 64 Gioia insightfully comments that “any account of the inner-life of the Trinity which yields to the temptation of systemization for its own sake, is doomed to fail under the strain put on it by the doctrine of the Holy Spirit,” Theological Epistemology of Augustine, p. 166. 65 See, for example, A. Edward Siecienski’s valuable The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 59–63. 66 Trin. 15.17.29: “only the Father is called the one from whom the Word is born and from whom the Holy Spirit principally proceeds,” nec de quo genitum est uerbum et de quo procedit principaliter spiritus sanctus nisi deus pater. Cf. 4.20.29. 67 Although the project of the article is quite different from the argument here, David Coffey sees this very clearly in “The Holy Spirit as the Mutual Love of the Father and the Son,” Theological Studies 51, no. 2 (June 1990), pp. 193–229. 68 The paragraph closes thusly: “And so the Father is wisdom, the Son is wisdom, the Holy Spirit is wisdom; and together they are not three wisdoms but one wisdom; and because in their case to be is the same as to be wise, Father and Son and Holy Spirit are one being.” 69 Coffey notes his perplexity; “Holy Spirit as the Mutual Love,” p. 196. 70 This issue did not go unnoticed by the scholastics. Aquinas, for example, clarified the strict logic of trinitarian relations thusly: for God to love can be taken either essentially or notionally (either in substance or relative predications, in Augustine’s language). In the former sense, Father and Son love each other “not by the Holy Ghost, but by their essence,” that is, inasmuch as the Father and Son love one another in strictly the same way that they are one substance with one another, and with the Holy Spirit. In the latter, Father and Son “love each other and us, by the Holy Ghost, or by Love proceeding.” That is, “to love” taken notionally is equivalent to “spirating love,” which would then mean that “Father and Son love each other by the Spirit insofar as they in common spirate the Spirit” (as from one principle). To speak of the Spirit as bond of love, then, is to speak of the Spirit as bestowed upon us from the Father and the Son. Summa Theologica (trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province; New York: Benziger Bros., 1948), 1a q. 37, art. 2. 71 Ayres approaches this kind of language in Augustine and the Trinity, while noting the tentativeness of Augustine in these areas. He seems to make a special effort in Augustine and the Trinity to use what appears to me to be deeply non-Augustinian language of a trinitarian “communion” emerging in the later stages of Augustine’s thought, and argues that Augustine’s “mature” position points to a view of the communion of the three produced from the eternal act of the Father, while rejecting the position that Augustine holds a proto-doctrine of subsistent relations (though Ayres is less vehement than Barnes in rejecting this; see Augustine and the Trinity,

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NOTES pp. 268–72). Ayres argues for a much stronger picture of “the Spirit as the agent identical to the act of communion between Father and Son” (p. 258), going so far to argue that the Father’s bestowal of the Spirit of love upon the Son can even be understood as the generation of the Son in the Spirit (pp. 265–66). This is a puzzling position for Ayres to take, for reasons I have tried to stress in the last three chapters; the entire momentum of Augustine’s position is against what Richard Cross calls a “derivation” view of the Trinity (see “On Generic and Derivation Views of God’s Trinitarian Substance”), in which the Trinity is constituted through the Father’s bestowal of substance upon Son and Spirit, rather than by the relations that constitute the “persons” as they subsist in the divine nature. A derivation view, that is, too easily maps onto the idea that the Father is the Godhead as such, which runs afoul of Augustine’s argument about divine simplicity in Trin. 5–7 as I portrayed it in Chapter 2 (for this derivation view, see, for example, Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity, p. 265: “for the Father to act eternally as principium is for the Father eternally to give rise to two who share the divine fullness and through whom the Father eternally works”). In light of his statements in “Sempiterne Spiritus Donum: Augustine’s Pneumatology and the Metaphysics of Spirit,” in Orthodox Readings of Augustine (ed. Aristotle Papanikolaou and George Demacopoulos; Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008), pp. 127–52, it seems appropriate to read Ayres as making an ecumenical gesture here regarding the filioque; cf. the discussion in Augustine and the Trinity, pp. 266–67. John Behr has particularly taken Ayres to task for what Behr sees as Western assumptions about the identity of the term “God” with the Trinity, whereas Behr argues that from the Eastern perspective, this tends toward modalism, and the term should be reserved for the Father; see “Response to Ayres: The Legacies of Nicaea, East and West,” in Harvard Theological Journal 100, no. 2 (April 2007), pp. 146–49. Much of this response also appears as “Calling upon God as Father: Augustine and the Legacy of Nicaea,” in Orthodox Readings of Augustine, pp. 153–66. Although Behr explicitly denies this, it is difficult not to read him as recapitulating the pseudo-Régnon binary. 72 See Bernard McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1991), pp. 228–62, especially pp. 239, 251–55.

Chapter 5 1 Robert Jenson, “You Wonder Where the Spirit Went,” Pro Ecclesia 2, no. 3 (Summer 1993), pp. 296–304. 2 Ibid., p. 299. 3 Ibid., p. 303. Cf. p. 304: “When does the Spirit disappear from Barth’s pages? Whenever he would appear as someone rather than as something.” See pp. 301–02 on the culpability of the vinculum. 4 Ibid., p. 303. This theme assumes Jenson’s peculiar temporalization of the trinitarian relations, for which see above, Chapter 1. 5 See Rowan Williams, “Barth on the Triune God,” in Wrestling with Angels: Conversations in Modern Theology (ed. Mike Higton; Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2007), pp. 106–49 (originally published in 1979).

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NOTES For one statement of the above point, see pp. 130–31. Richard Roberts, “Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Time: Its Nature and Implications,” in Karl Barth: Studies of His Theological Method (ed. Stephen W. Sykes; New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 88–146, is likewise concerned that the absolute unity of “God’s being-in-act” as the “ontological fundamentum” of Barth’s thought correlates with the absolute priority of eternity over time, to the expense of the integrity of the latter. The “real existence” of God in eternity is not, for Roberts, relatable to “that experience experienced by the human subject as a mere percipient being” (pp. 107–08). 6 “Barth on the Triune God,” p. 133. Williams has important things to say about Barth’s understanding of the filioque in this regard, something to which I will return when I discuss this essay in more detail in Chapter 7. 7 Ibid., p. 140. 8 The quote comes from a letter of Barth to Thurneysen, commenting on a visit of Przywara to Münster in 1929, cited in Bruce L. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development, 1909–36 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 383. In what follows, I will not be treating the idea of the analogia entis on its own terms at all; I am simply concerned to trace the discursive function of this idea in Barth’s thinking. Keith Johnson’s superb Karl Barth and the Analogia Entis (New York: T&T Clark, 2010) traces Barth’s thinking on the theme. 9 Although I will develop the significance of Barth’s term “correspondence,” Entsprechung, later on, it is important to recognize at this point that it does not signal the term of an analogical relationship between God and world, but rather, the performative enactment of a divine gift of grace. The differentiation I am making will become clear in due course, particularly in my discussion of CD volume 3. 10 I put it this way to raise a question about Balthasar’s influential interpretation of Barth as a monist. This critique has perhaps its most well-known expression in Roberts, “Barth’s Doctrine of Time.” 11 “Fate and Idea in Theology,” in The Way of Theology in Karl Barth: Essays and Comments (ed. H. Martin Rumscheidt; Allison Park, PA: Pickwick Publications, 1986), pp. 25–61. 12 The discussion of Johnson, Karl Barth and the Analogia Entis, pp. 93–109, is indispensable for understanding the essay as a response to Przywara’s reworking of the analogia entis; cf. McCormack, Critically Realistic, pp. 384–89. 13 The guiding insight of McCormack’s study is that Barth learned from both realism and idealism: pace the “critical realism” of T. F. Torrance or George Hunsinger, Barth’s realism “was built on a foundation laid by idealism,” Critically Realistic, p.  235; McCormack points especially to the influence of Barth’s brother Heinrich, and the Marburg Neo-Kantianism of Cohen and Natorp; pp. 43–49, 218–26. 14 “Fate and Idea,” p. 34. 15 Ibid., p. 53. In truth, both realists and idealists synthesize their dialectical opposite from their own side, a “primum” and a “secundum” in a sublating third. The difference lies in whether the “superior and reconciling principle” is “being” or “logos” (p. 52). In some sense we might understand Hegel, who unites the two principles of being and thought, as the synthesis of the two types for Barth. 16 Ibid., p. 50. 17 Ibid., pp. 58–59.

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NOTES 18 This genetic approach is especially appropriate because of the tendency, since Hans Urs von Balthasar’s The Theology of Karl Barth, to understand Barth’s project developmentally. Evaluating some of the key proposals on this front—namely, Balthasar, Williams, and McCormack—will be a subtheme of these chapters. 19 Apart from McCormack’s own comments in “Foreword to the German Edition of Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology,” in Orthodox and Modern: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), pp. 291–304, a helpful overview of McCormack’s contribution is found in Paul Dafydd Jones, The Humanity of Christ: Christology in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics (New York: T&T Clark, 2008), pp. 19–26. Jones is especially helpful regarding the anhypostasis/ enhypostasis christological motif, which will be central to my argument concerning Barth. 20 The Theology of Karl Barth, p. 79; the whole chapter, pp. 64–85, is relevant. 21 I am following McCormack here, who in turn attributes to Michael Beintker, Der Dialektik in der “dialektischen Theologie” Karl Barths (Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1987) his insight into theological dialectic as not merely a Denkform, but as inhering in “the inner dialectic of the Sache”; McCormack, Critically Realistic, pp. 10–12. 22 Critically Realistic, pp. 327–28. I will discuss the anhypostatic/enhypostatic concept further in Chapter 6; the basic sense is that the human nature of Christ is anhypostatic, or impersonal, and that the hypostasis or subject of Jesus’ life is the Logos; the human nature is therefore enhypostatized through the eternal Son. Barth’s affirmation of the principle is the reason why his Christology is generally characterized as Alexandrian. 23 For a sketch, see Critically Realistic, pp. 1–28. See Barth, Anselm: fides quaerens intellectum: Anselm’s Proof of the Existence of God in the Context of His Theological Scheme, (trans. Ian W. Robertson; Richmond: John Knox Press, 1960). 24 With CD 2/1, and Barth’s Christology. However, Balthasar’s evidence is largely located in CD 3, though McCormack does not highlight this. One of McCormack’s intents is to minimize the impact of some traditionally accepted “turns” in Barth’s theology, notably concerning the Anselm book that is crucial to Balthasar’s thesis. 25 Critically Realistic, pp. 340–41. 26 Ibid., pp. 16–17. As McCormack goes on to say, this analogy is thus completely dependent upon its correspondence to the Realdialektik of veiling and unveiling in revelation. 27 Karl Barth and the Analogia Entis, p. 117. Johnson is describing the argument of The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life (1929), a reply to Augustine that will occupy us in the final chapter. 28 By focusing on the agency of God in revelation—which Barth often glosses, particularly in the early parts of CD, with the language of “subjectivity”—I am suggesting a different way of thinking about Barth’s categories than Trutz Rendtorff offers; Rendtorff argues that the language of “subjectivity” implies a dependence on Enlightenment models of self-constituting identity on Barth’s part when speaking of God; cf. Jones, The Humanity of Christ, p. 77, who notes that this is a way of foisting the charge of Feuerbachianism back on Barth. On Rendtorff and his followers, see John Macken SJ, The Autonomy Theme in the Church Dogmatics: Karl Barth and His Critics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 124–43. 29 Barth derived the category from Heinrich Heppe’s compendium of Reformed dogmatics; see Johnson, Karl Barth and the Analogia Entis, p. 61.

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NOTES 30 Critically Realistic, p. 351; cf. pp. 363–66 for a fuller discussion. Cf. Timothy J. Gorringe, whose superb Karl Barth: Against Hegemony (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), is an important supplement to McCormack’s study in terms of a contextual reading of Barth’s theology, p. 102. For the background in Barth’s reading of the Reformers at Göttingen, especially Zwingli, see Johnson, Karl Barth and the Analogia Entis, pp. 52–58. 31 I will be discussing the issue of the communicatio idiomatum at length in Chapter 6, but, as with the analogia entis, I will not be considering the historical accuracy of Barth’s understanding of the issue (nor, for that matter, of anhypostatic/enhypostatic Christology—Paul Dafydd Jones has raised questions about the latter in The Humanity of Christ, p. 24n22); what is important here is the status of these positions as representations—the way Lutheran and Reformed understandings of the communicatio idiomatum functioned in debates within CD. 32 For Barth, the corollary to this is that generally, such a strong position is taken by the Lutherans on the humiliation of God in the incarnation and crucifixion that a subtle hominization of the divine takes place (hence, the “Jesus Christ pit”). What is at stake is the suggestion of a fluidity or univocity of divine and human natures—something like the “peace of the analogia entis” he opposed in “Schicksal und Idee.” 33 See CD 4/2, pp. 82–83. Much of the language above follows McCormack’s account in Critically Realistic, p. 392, detailing Barth and Thurneysen’s emerging worries about Gogarten. Gorringe likewise draws attention to this understanding of anhypostatic/enhypostatic Christology for Barth, beginning in Göttingen, for opposing a non-dialectical understanding of Christ’s person; see especially Against Hegemony, pp. 100–04. Gorringe draws attention to the significance of the Lutheran communicatio idiomatum for Barth at several points; see for example ibid., pp. 79, 98. 34 “Fate and Idea,” p. 47; cf. p. 52. Johnson shows how Barth also has Przywara in mind with these fears about ideology; Karl Barth and the Analogia Entis, p. 153. 35 “We see now through a mirror in an enigma . . . the only thing ever seen in a mirror is an image. So what we have been trying to do is somehow to see him by whom we are made by means of this image which we ourselves are, as through a mirror,” Trin. 15.8.14. 36 This is, I take it, what Eberhard Jüngel means when he states that God’s being precedes theological questioning; God’s Being Is in Becoming, pp. 9–11. Thus the “hermeneutical question of theology” is inherent in Barth’s logic of antecedence: “in what sense God must be spoken of in order that our speaking is about God,” p. 1. 37 I will not discuss the “root” of revelation in detail here; see the brief description in the introduction. 38 CD 1/1, pp. 239–40. 39 Ibid., p. 241. 40 Ibid., p. 242. 41 Ibid., p. 296. 42 Ibid., p. 315. Adam Neder, in Participation in Christ: An Entry into Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2009), sees such passages in CD 1/1 as portraying an “existentialism” which is overcome in the historical actualism of 4/1. This coheres with McCormack’s general chronology. 43 Cf. Jüngel: “the deus absconditus is not a God who is hostile to revelation. Rather, precisely as the deus absconditus, that is, in his hidden mode of being, God is the subject of revelation.” God’s Being Is in Becoming, p. 31.

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NOTES 44 CD 1/1, p. 323. 45 Ibid., pp. 325, 331. 46 Ibid., p. 332. 47 See above on Rowan Williams’s suggestion to this effect. Alan J. Torrance, in Persons in Communion: An Essay on Trinitarian Description and Human Participation (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), makes much of this division as well. 48 To some extent, the two trajectories I am tracing correspond with Williams’ two Barthian models discussed above; but I am assessing the models differently, of course, than Williams; in addition, I am suggesting that we should complicate the neat developmental thesis found in both Williams, with his oft-repeated theory regarding CD 1 and 4, and McCormack’s later work, with his privileging of the watershed moment in Barth’s theology in CD 2/2. The correspondence between Williams and McCormack on this point was first suggested to me by Benjamin Myers, who was kind enough to share a paper of his to that effect before it was published: “Election, Trinity and the History of Jesus: Reading Barth with Rowan Williams,” in Trinitarian Theology after Barth (ed. Myk Habets and Phillip Tolliday; Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2011), pp. 121–37. 49 CD 1/1, p. 119; cf. p. 153: “The Word of God is Jesus Christ and . . . its efficacy is not distinct from the lordship of Jesus Christ.” 50 Guretzki makes a similar point in Karl Barth on the Filioque, p. 34. 51 The quote is from McCormack, Critically Realistic, p. 358. Gorringe quotes Barth’s letter to Thurneysen in which he states that the Wesentrinität, not just the economic Trinity, is necessary to overcome this “Jesus Christ pit”: “I understand the Trinity as the problem of the inalienable subjectivity of God in his revelation,” p. 102. See also Jüngel, who notes Barth’s careful deployment of trinitarian theology to avoid both adoptionism and modalism: “The Dogmatics is a brilliant and diligent attempt to reconstruct in thought the movement of the statement ‘God corresponds to himself,’” God’s Being Is in Becoming, p. 36. 52 CD 1/1, p. 380. 53 Ibid., p. 383. 54 See, for example, CD 1/2, p. 34: “Even here, where we see what has actually happened in His Son, there can be no question of understanding how the condescension of God acts. We can only know and worship its actuality.” 55 The former, roughly, is the position McCormack has come to take, along with such earlier “revisionist” Barthians as Jenson, Jüngel, and Moltmann; whereas the latter “traditionalist” position is taken by George Hunsinger and Paul Molnar. The labels used here are those of Hunsinger, “Election and the Trinity: Twenty-Five Theses on the Theology of Karl Barth,” Modern Theology 24, no. 2 (April 2008), pp. 179–98. The crux of the debate centers around the place of CD 2/2 in the development of Barth’s thought. The center of my response to this debate rests on a resistance to both McCormack’s neat developmental thesis and Hunsinger’s consistent reading of CD. Further discussion is found in Chapter 7. 56 Human cognition implies both that the human subject “resembles” what she can apprehend, and that she is a “master” of what she can apprehend; the objects of our knowledge are those “which we can always subjugate to the process of our viewing” and are therefore subject to our “spiritual oversight and control,” CD 2/1, p. 187. As Barth sees it, this problem plagues the traditional construal of divine ineffability, from Plotinus to Kant, which presumes a logic of the infinite as the negation of the

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NOTES finite; but, as Barth points out (in a Hegelian insight), this is already to posit thought’s comprehension of the infinite as simply its own negative determination. 57 Ibid., p. 16. 58 Ibid., p. 10. Cf. Guretzki’s description of the subjective reality of revelation—the Holy Spirit—as already grounded in the objectivity of the incarnation in CD 1/2; Karl Barth on the Filioque, pp. 139–40. See also p. 143, where he correctly notes that Barth’s commitment to the principle opera Trinitatis ad extra sunt indivisa drives his insistence on the unity of the work of Son and Spirit. 59 CD 2/1, p. 16. 60 For Barth, this is Schleiermacher’s mistake. CD 2/1 is taking on a problem inadequately addressed in CD 1/2, with its christological–pneumatological relationship of “objective” and “subjective” realities of revelation; this way of framing the matter largely leaves the knowledge of God in the terms of active disclosure and passive reception, without accounting for how the latter is a free act in its own respect, while at the same time partaking of the same character as the first. 61 “It is when we understand faith as knowledge that we understand it as man’s orientation to God as an object . . . In the Bible faith means the opening-up of human subjectivity by and for the objectivity of the divine He, and in this opening-up the re-establishment and re-determination of human subjectivity . . . which makes it possible and necessary not only as knowledge but also as love, trust and obedience,” CD 2/1, pp. 13, 14. 62 CD 2/1, p. 16, emphasis mine. 63 As I will argue more extensively later, this makes the divine essence a “fourth”: if God’s self knowing is that of the Father knowing the Son as subject to object, then the divine essence is a production of the relation of Father and Son: as knowledge is produced in differentiation of otherness and reconciliation of that differentiation, so the divine being is a production of that differentiation. 64 Barth is already anticipating the moves he will make with respect to election, though they are not yet being consistently deployed to solve this problem; see, for example, CD 2/1, p. 150, 1: “the readiness of man included in the readiness of God is Jesus Christ. And therefore Jesus Christ is the knowability of God on our side . . . [this] means that the only begotten Son of God and therefore God himself, who is knowable to Himself from eternity to eternity, has come in our flesh, has taken our flesh, has become the bearer of our flesh, and does not exist as God’s Son from eternity to eternity except in our flesh.” He immediately goes on to note that this is the meaning of God making Godself an object for God’s own knowledge in the flesh of Christ, although it is just this latter point that is ambiguously articulated. It will take the rethinking of election to make this idea fully coherent, as we will see shortly. 65 Ibid., pp. 57–58. Cf. the reading of Jones, The Humanity of Christ, pp. 72–73. 66 CD 2/1, p. 323; the problem is that the dialectic of hiddenness and revelation, on Barth’s own terms, should be that of the two natures of Christ. While following the deeply traditioned instinct that God is known in God’s works, Barth is here coming perilously close to the Palamist split of essence and existence he elsewhere execrates, and which, he claims, posits the essence of God as a deus absconditus that is indeterminate, contentless, and the remainder concept behind God’s self-revelation. 67 CD 2/1, p. 74. 68 For what follows, see ibid., pp. 79–84. Barth is replying to the decree on revelation in the first Vatican Council, which decrees that “God, the beginning and end of all

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NOTES things, can with certainty be known from created things by the natural light of human reason.” 69 CD 2/1, p. 83. On pp. 81–82, Barth discusses the view of Gottlieb Söhngen, who posits the analogia entis as a consequence and expression of the analogia fidei: “the divine word assuming human nature is our analogy of faith assuming the analogy of being . . . the Word of God must always be the sovereign Subject in every living movement of faith.” In the face of this, Barth admits “If this is the Roman Catholic doctrine of analogia entis, then naturally I must withdraw my earlier statement that I regard the analogia entis as ‘the invention of the anti-Christ’ . . . But I am not aware that this particular doctrine of the analogia entis is to be found anywhere else in the Roman Catholic Church or that it has ever been adopted in this sense.” Indeed, against Söhngen, Barth avers that the (valid) principle esse sequitur operari cannot be reversed into operari sequitur esse without the abstraction of the analogy taking place (ibid., p. 83). On Barth’s dialogue with Söhngen, see Johnson, Karl Barth and the Analogia Entis, pp. 170–90. 70 In my reading, LaCugna’s God for Us represents the clearest contemporary example of this worry. 71 CD 2/1, p. 67. 72 Ibid., p. 210. 73 In CD 2/1, Barth is speaking of divine hiddenness in somewhat richer terms than in the section of the mystery of God in CD 1/1, where the discussion is primarily restricted to the formal nature of the dialectic. In 2/1, however, the dialectic is given content in terms of love and freedom as the shape of divine hiddenness. 74 CD 2/1, p. 201. 75 CD 2/2, p. 30. 76 Ibid., p. 100. 77 We have seen this adumbrated already in CD 2/1, p. 151 (see above). This is contra what is, in my estimation, a misunderstanding of Barth’s concept of Urgeschichte (at least at this point in the development of his thought), which criticizes him for portraying the history of reconciliation deterministically as a temporal copy or reflection of a pre-existent eternal archetypical history. Rather, Barth understands predestination, “the beginning of all things with God [that] is itself history” as the concrete history of Jesus Christ—this is what was in the beginning with God, and thus with it, “this history, encounter, and decision between God and man,” CD 2/2, p. 185. The former understanding of Urgeschichte is represented well by Roberts, “Barth’s Doctrine of Time,” and is followed to some extent by Nathan Kerr, Christ, History and Apocalyptic: The Politics of Christian Mission (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2009). 78 Ibid., p. 323. 79 CD 2/2, p. 53. Cf. p. 118: “And as He became Christ, so we become Christians. As He became our Head, so we become His body and members. As He became the object of our faith, so we become believers in Him.” 80 Jüngel likewise sees the doctrine of election in Barth to be understood in terms of the enhypostasis and anhypostasis of the human nature of Jesus; God’s Being Is in Becoming, p. 96. 81 CD 2/2, p. 116. 82 Ibid., p. 118. 83 Col. 3:3, quoted in CD 2/2, p. 323; this text is a linchpin of Barth’s pneumatology.

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NOTES 84 A blind spot for which he should not be excused, especially given the sharply anti-ideological tenor and insight of so much of CD. Gorringe offers a nuanced reading of Barth on this point in Against Hegemony, pp. 200–08, pointing out that many resources for a feminist reading of Scripture are in Barth while allowing that “there is no possibility that Barth’s teaching on the relation of men and women can be followed,” p. 207. 85 Note the prevalence of 3/1 and 3/2 (vols 5 and 6 in Balthasar’s citation) in the chapter devoted to “The Centrality of Analogy,” Theology of Karl Barth, pp. 114–67. As McCormack notes (Critically Realistic, pp. 2–3), Balthasar in fact advances two hypotheses of an analogical turn in Barth’s thought: first, he explicitly claims that the Anselm volume is a conscious shift; second, he seems to think, though this is stated less clearly, that a turn occurs within CD itself, pointing especially to the Christology in volume 2, even if his evidence largely draws from volume 3. 86 Which of course Balthasar did not have available to him at the time; see Johnson, Karl Barth and the Analogia Entis, p. 195. Although I have learned much from Jones’s generally fine study, his indebtedness to McCormack’s hypothesis regarding the treatment of election in CD 2/2 is perhaps deployed uncritically when he states, “the doctrine of election brings to Barth’s thought a new and conclusive stability . . . while small shifts in perspective are noteworthy, there is less need for an interpretive approach sensitive to moments of development within the Dogmatics” after 2/2; The Humanity of Christ, p. 118. Likewise, he sidesteps the question of the relationship of trinitarian doctrine in CD 1 and 4, adverting to the Aufhebung of the former in the doctrine of election in 2/2 (p. 211). Rather, as I am arguing throughout this chapter and the next, Barth’s theology is marked by a set of tensions that persist until well into CD 4. 87 CD 3/1, p. 28. 88 CD 3/1, p. 14. 89 The translators have a capitalized third person pronoun here, but it seems clearer that the antecedent of seiner Existenz is Menschen, earlier in the sentence. 90 CD 3/1, p. 183. There is a play on words in the last sentence which demonstrates the close relationship of “prototype” to “copy . . . image . . . reflection”—Urbild . . . Abbild . . . Vorbild . . . Nachbild. It is worth pointing out that this relationship of eternal prototype to temporal image or reflection very nearly fulfills the picture of Urgeschichte which Richard Roberts attacks in “Barth’s Doctrine of Time,” in which the “path of salvation [is] a merely noetic realization” of God’s act which remains “frozen in eternal election” (pp. 120–21). But it is really only in volume 3 that Roberts’s caricature approaches an accurate critique. 91 CD 3/1, p. 184. 92 Ibid., p. 185. 93 On the relationship between the analogia entis and natural theology, see Gorringe, Against Hegemony, pp. 132–33. 94 CD 3/1, p. 195. 95 Eugene Rogers has argued perceptively that Barth’s reading of scripture here is rather flat-footed, for in Genesis the I–Thou encounter is linked immediately to the fall; just at the point where Barth most needs to maintain his christological articulation of true humanity, Jesus Christ becomes entirely secondary to an a priori I–Thou personalism. See Sexuality and the Christian Body: Their Way into the Triune God (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), pp. 182–83; Jones makes a similar point; The Humanity

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NOTES of Christ, pp. 118–19. Barth, notes Rogers (p. 181), avoids a Feuerbachian projection of man’s desire onto God, only to project it onto woman. 96 “The encounter of man and woman is not in any sense an encounter of two freely disposing or disposable factors which can be shaped or reversed at will. Only as ordered by God at creation can this encounter be normal and good in its relationship to God. Any other form of the mutual relationship of man and woman alters their relationship to God,” CD 3/1, p. 308, emphasis mine. 97 “Kingdom of God and Socialism in the Theology of Karl Barth,” in Karl Barth and Radical Politics (ed. and trans. George Hunsinger; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976), p. 80: “it made a difference [in the 2nd edition of the Roman commentary] whether we perceive an identity between God’s kingdom and socialism, or whether we identify our socialism . . . with God’s kingdom.” The “brazen identification” of the natural or political order with God’s kingdom is the very structure of natural theology for Barth, which in turn is the structure of idolatry and ideology. The misstep of CD 3 is thus all the more remarkable. Jones’s response is very similar; The Humanity of Christ, p. 120n8. 98 CD 3/1, p. 295. This is because the relationship of man and woman prefigures the relationship of Yahweh and Israel, and ultimately Christ and church (p. 322); but this hardly helps matters, for it simply instrumentalizes the encounter of the analogia relationis as a shadow of its eternal exemplar. 99 CD 3/2, pp. 157, 161. 100 Ibid., p. 62; cf. the gesture toward the doctrine of anhypostasis/enhypostasis on p. 70. 101 Ibid., pp. 124–25. 102 So Jüngel, against von Balthasar, who assumes that humanity’s capacity for social relationship is the condition of possibility of covenant with God; “Die Möglichkeit theologischer Anthropologie auf dem Grunde der Analogie,” in Barth-Studien (Gütersloh: Benzinger Verlag, 1982), p. 122, quoted in Johnson, Karl Barth and the Analogia Entis, p. 202. 103 CD 3/2, p. 132. 104 Ibid., p. 174; this is an excellent statement of the analogia fidei; cf. CD 1/1, p. 245: “Man acts as he believes, but the fact that he believes as he acts is God’s act. Man is the subject of faith. Man believes, not God. But the fact that man is this subject in faith is bracketed as a predicate of the subject God, bracketed in the way that the Creator encloses the creature and the merciful God sinful man, i.e., in such a way that man remains subject, and yet man’s I as such derives only from the Thou of the subject God.” 105 CD 3/2, p. 194. 106 Barth states that creatureliness cannot be conceived as alien to the grace of God, though this does not constitute “an ability on the part of man to take up the relationship to God in covenant,” ibid., p. 224, and thus is not a true potentia obedientialis. Barth claims on p. 321 that all this does not constitute a point of contact for natural theology, for this capacity of human nature is only actualized by grace; however, it still clearly constitutes a potency, a capacity, or determination; and it certainly is an abstraction from the christological form of the analogia fidei. 107 See the argument, ibid., pp. 244–48, in which a phenomenology of I–Thou relation is set forth; and 292–99, where the “original and proper form” of this fellow humanity is man and woman. 108 Ibid., pp. 218, 220.

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Chapter 6 1 I use the word “inheritance” with some deliberateness; it would be too much to claim that Augustine or Barth knew Plotinus or Hegel extensively, and were engaged in highly intentional processes of adaptation (or subversion). In both cases, their knowledge of their philosophical forebears seems to be eclectic, and “Plotinus” and “Hegel” stand, if anything, for general metaphysical frameworks and sensibilities. 2 This is not to privilege Barth as an infallible interpreter of his own thought. In fact, my reading of the trinitarianism of CD obviously takes some issue with Barth’s statement about the “inward and outward continuity” of the course of the Dogmatics (CD 4/2, p. xi). I do, however, take it that the direction Barth set out upon in 1/1 does in fact remain the constant of the development of CD, even allowing for some deviations, particularly in volume 3. 3 CD 4/2, p. 83. 4 Jones gives a helpful table of the architecture of CD 4 in The Humanity of Christ, p. 266. 5 CD 4/1, p. 54. To be clear on exactly what Barth is saying: the human being Jesus Christ is the eternal Word and will of God; the implication thus is the rejection of the logos asarkos, which would be a regression to the deus absconditus behind revelation, ibid., p. 52. 6 Ibid., p. 83. 7 It is instructive that, following the quote immediately above, there is an excursus on the unity of grace over against the “Romanist” distinctions in the doctrine of grace; in Barth’s eyes, it is the abstraction from the singularity of Jesus Christ, rather than the validity of the conceptual distinctions as such, that rules this rejection. 8 See the “Editor’s Preface” by Bromiley and Torrance in CD 4/1, pp. vii–viii on the term Stellvertretung. As they note, “representation” is a weak English translation, as the German term encompasses ideas both of substitution and representation. In light of this, I will simply use Barth’s German term. 9 Neder also connects the theme of the Stellvertreter to participation in Christ as the wirklich human: “Barth brings participation and substitution together in such a way that neither can be described apart from the other,” Participation in Christ, p. 23. 10 Torrance insightfully remarks that “presupposition,” Voraussetzung, in Barth really means Nachaussetzung, “post-supposition”: “It is nach with regard to the revealing act of God and it is only vor in so far as it is therefore and for this reason epistemologically prior to any statements that we might make, methodological or otherwise, about God,” Persons in Communion, p. 26. 11 As I will discuss in the next chapter, while I follow McCormack in much of my reading of Barth, it is arguable that his evolving position in the contemporary debate over Barth’s doctrine of election has had mixed success in holding together these two moments. This results in some important Hegelian resonances emerging within his project. 12 CD 4/1, p. 64. Further, regarding the divine persons as contractual subjects in a legal partnership sinks to the level of “mythology” (p. 65). 13 CD 4/1, p. 164. 14 This is what Barth meant when, in CD 2/1, §31.2, “The Perfections of the Divine Freedom: The Constancy and Omnipotence of God,” he redefined immutability as

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NOTES constancy: God is the eternal actuality of self-giving love, preeminently in the incarnate Word of God. 15 CD 4/1, p. 185. Thus Barth rejects the kenosis doctrine of the Lutherans, which stands as a piece with the communicatio idiomatum—the mutual entailment of divinized humanity and hominized divinity. On the kenosis, see pp. 180–83. For Barth, both divinization and hominization mean, not participation, but transformation, alteration of an essence into another. This point is vital for grasping Barth’s argument. 16 Ibid., pp. 187–88. Note the language of forma dei/servi that evokes Augustine’s canonica regula. 17 In The Crucified God. Jüngel observes cuttingly of Moltmann: “what is intended as progress in theology never gets beyond setting up statements than which nothing greater can be conceived, but into which no thinking can penetrate,” God’s Being Is in Becoming, p. 136n24. 18 CD 4/1, p. 202; the whole discussion runs from pp. 196–210. 19 CD 4/1, p. 203. 20 Ibid. Cf. this against the statement in CD 1/1, p. 470, apropos of the Spirit, that there is no higher principle in which the unity of Father and Son is achieved. 21 For an instructive example of an interpreter following Barth’s trinitarian, as opposed to christological, dialectic, see Peter S. Oh, Karl Barth’s Trinitarian Theology: A Study in Karl Barth’s Analogical Use of the Trinitarian Relation (New York: T&T Clark, 2006). Oh bases his reading of Barth’s theological ontology in Barth’s trinitarian perichoresis rather than in his Christology, allowing him to come to a surprising conclusion: “the context of Barth’s Christology is largely limited to the doctrine of reconciliation . . . of the three doctrines of creation, redemption and reconciliation, which form the three pillars of Barth’s entire theology, he classifies only the latter within Christology,” p. 77. 22 Jones likewise links this to Barth’s sexism in volume 3; The Humanity of Christ, p. 212. He does not go as far as I do, however, in seeing operative in this crude hierarchy an ongoing tension in Barth’s thought, which for Jones, following McCormack, has achieved its final shape in CD 2/2. 23 Guretzki’s otherwise fine study Karl Barth on the Filioque is marred by a fairly serious, and puzzling, interpretive error here. Guretzki argues that much of Barth’s development is driven by a need to read the problem of interhuman alienation in sin, which is reconciled by the Holy Spirit, back into the immanent Trinity, so that the “confrontation in God” between Father and Son is likewise mediated by the Spirit in terms of the filioque. The filioque, that is, is Barth’s substitution for the Hegelian Aufhebung of the antithesis of Father and Son. Guretzki first points to the issue in The Epistle to the Romans (trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns; New York: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 495: “in this relationship of love it is not men who confront men, but God who confronts God,” but it is clear in context that Barth is speaking of the love of neighbor as the operation of God in human beings insofar as a human confronts a particular, concrete neighbor. Guretzki’s main evidence comes from CD 4/2, pp. 341–44 (Karl Barth on the Filioque, pp. 169–73), but Guretzki misses Barth’s main point: it is not that the antithesis of human and neighbor is mirrored analogically in a “dialectical” relationship of Father and Son overcome by the Spirit as a third, mediating moment in the filioque, but that the “antitheses in God’s own being and life” (4/2, p. 343) are a “history in partnership” (p. 342) of the “unity of the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit” (p. 344) in contrast to the human confrontation with the neighbor. The

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NOTES “confrontation” between God and God is properly understood here as an economic, incarnational reality, between God as Father and the humanity of Christ the Son. There are still resonances of the dialectic of the “astounding conclusion of divine obedience” I critiqued above in 4/1; but the major issue is one of contrast: the ontological “antithesis” of divinity and humanity in Father and Son is one that is no antithesis at all in the free grace of God. Even given the extreme position of CD 4/1, we are not talking about an enmity and alienation between Father and Son, which is what Guretzki seems to be suggesting. He suggests that Barth failed to account for the qualitative difference between the “otherness” between Father and Son and that between God and humans in sin (Karl Barth on the Filioque, pp. 177–78), but I would submit that he has simply missed Barth’s quite clear distinctions on this point. 24 “Barth’s Doctrine of Time,” p. 144. 25 CD 4/2, pp. 36–116. 26 Note the excursus on pp. 49–50. On this point, I differ from Jones, The Humanity of Christ, both with the claim that “Natur and Wesen take up no meaningful role in Barth’s Christology” after CD 1/2 (p. 33) and that the anhypostatic/enhypostatic distinction also becomes “incidental” by the time of CD volume 4 (p. 147); it is certainly the case that Barth does not stay within the bounds of Heppe’s categories in volume 4, but the anhypostasis/enhypostasis continues to function as a fundamental principle of “actualizing” the incarnation. Likewise, although Neder notes the development of Barth’s thinking on the “ground” of human fellowship with God from CD 2/1 to 4/1, he stops with the prius and posterius of 4/1, without considering how the stance on the communicatio idiomatum in 4/2 might alter this picture; Participation in Christ, p. 116n82. 27 CD 4/2, p. 37. 28 Ibid., p. 38. 29 Ibid., p. 39. Barth has just given a précis of the logic of the dialectic that structures CD 4 here, as the discussion of 4/3, with its focus upon the self-attestation of revelation, will bear out below. 30 CD 4/2, p. 43. 31 The tension between 4/1 and 4/2 on this point thus recapitulates the tension we saw in Augustine with respect to the vinculum, in that it described both an ontological principle uniting Father and Son—a principle in tension with Augustine’s account of simplicity—and also a description of the joint gift of the Spirit by Father and Son in the economy of salvation. 32 To be sure, I am sharpening what are tensions on Barth’s page into oppositions; Barth is still comfortably talking about the obedience of Son to Father (CD 4/2, p.  44), although carefully qualifying this with the axiom opera trinitatis ad extra sunt indivisa and with his personalist-defeating vocabulary of Seinsweisen. 33 Ibid., pp. 48–49. At first glance, this appears to contradict Barth’s earlier insistence that the particular existence of Jesus Christ as one person among others is ontologically determinative of humanity (CD 3/2, p. 132); but what he is pointing to here is that God’s act of reconciliation is not directed toward a particular individual who is arbitrarily selected as a substitute for all others; rather, in becoming human God has elected humanity as such for Godself. In essence, God has redefined what it means to be human. 34 CD 4/2, p. 59; cf. p. 36.

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NOTES 35 See McCormack, “Karl Barth’s Historicized Christology: Just How ‘Chalcedonian’ Is It?” in Orthodox and Modern, pp. 201–33; note Jones’s similar claim above. 36 Jones articulates the significance of the anhypostasis/enhypostasis well: “God alone brings into existence the totality of Christ’s person, uniting to the divine Son an individuated human essence. On another level, there is only one subject in Christ, and this subject is God in God’s second way of being. God does not merely indwell a human; Christ’s unity entails the divine Son’s being the defining and exclusive subject of his person,” The Humanity of Christ, pp. 129–30. 37 CD 4/2, pp. 60–69. 38 Ibid., p. 62. 39 Ibid., p. 63. It is important to balance this with the affirmation, on the preceding page, that “Jesus Christ, then, does not exist as the Son of God without also participating as such in human essence.” Granted the denial of the logos asarkos that is operative for Barth at this point, the mutual participation of divine and human essences is still asymmetrical. 40 “The Godhead as such has no existence. It is not real. It has no being or activity. It cannot, therefore, unite with that which is existent and real and has being and activity . . . This is done by the divine Subject in and with His divine essence, by the One who exists and is and is actual, God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and therefore in specie God the Son,” CD 4/2, p. 65. 41 Ibid., p. 66. To repeat an earlier caveat: I am treating Barth’s handling of Lutheran-Reformed polemics as representations; it is not material to the argument of this book to investigate the historical accuracy of Barth’s categories (which very well may be tendentious). What is significant for me is the manner in which the themes are deployed in CD. 42 Ibid., p. 68. 43 This is what Barth had in mind when he remarked that an abstract theologia crucis was in reality a covert theologia gloriae—the convertibility of the terms of the dialectic in the communicatio idiomatum of the Lutherans which in fact is the dissolution of that dialectic. Ibid., p. 29. 44 Ibid., pp. 70–71. Cf. p. 71: “this means that the two elements in the history . . . are not in simple correspondence”; p. 72: “For all their reciprocity the two elements in this happening have a different character. The one, as the essence of the Son of God, is wholly that which gives. The other, exalted to existence and actuality only in and by Him, is wholly that which receives.” 45 The scholastic Lutheran categories involved are the genus tapeinoticum, the category of humility, signifying the “humanization of the divine nature by its conjunction with the human,” in balance with the genus majestaticum, the category of majesty, “the divinization of the human by its conjunction with the divine,” ibid., pp. 77–78. 46 Ibid., p. 79. For Barth, Lutheran Christology is too close to the “distinctive Eastern Christology and soteriology of the Greek fathers,” presumably because of the emphasis upon deification just discussed. Cf. the canny displacement of Athanasius on p. 106: “God becomes man in order that man may—not become God, but come to God.” This is a rare instance when the English translation provides a felicity the German does not: nicht Gott werde, aber zu Gott komme. 47 Ibid., p. 81. “The recognition of Jesus Christ as true salvation and saving truth is not really strengthened, as intended by the theory of a divinization of His human essence, but weakened and even jeopardized completely,” p. 80.

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NOTES 48 Ibid., p. 82. The question of the historical plausibility of this assertion aside, the idealist resonances with the Lutherans that Barth encountered earlier in his career, both among his teachers and the dialectical theologians, are patent; the communicatio idiomatum provided a point of contact in human nature, a readiness for revelation, which was both the enervation of gratuity and the inception of ideology. Cf. on deification and the communicatio idiomatum, Neder, Participation in Christ, pp. 65–69, 86–92. 49 Note the reaffirmation of the anhypostasis/enhypostasis, CD 4/2, p. 91, the “sum and root of all the grace addressed to Him.” On headship, cf. p. 89: “as the recipient of the electing grace of God, His human essence is proved by its exaltation to be the true essence of all men. It is genuinely human in the deepest sense to live by the electing grace of God.” 50 Ibid., p. 92. 51 Ibid., pp. 105–06. 52 Ibid., p. 109. Here I disagree with Kerr’s important book Christ, History and Apocalyptic, pp. 63–92, who regards Barth’s actualism as an ontological framework by which history is externally determined by the intratriune duration of God’s Urgeschichte. In this scheme, inspired by a residual Hegelianism, Christ is the concrete universal that mediates particular and universal, a way of construing mediation the problem of which Kerr sees very clearly. Against Kerr, while we must allow for real tension in Barth’s thought, his articulation of pneumatological participation in revelation and reconciliation, and his understanding in CD 2/2 of the historicity of Jesus Christ as itself Urgeschichte and therefore the content of the eternal life of God, makes the Hegelian problem looks rather different. 53 It is not difficult to suppose that Barth’s equation of being and act (CD 4/2, p. 108) accomplishes something very similar to the equation Aquinas formulates between essence and existence in the divine substance, for all the very real differences between the two thinkers; indeed, Barth had earlier reaffirmed the scholastic actus purus, though with the addition of the et singularis, which is his true innovation. Analyzing this possibility is outside the scope of this book, however. For a start, see Eugene F. Rogers, Jr., Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: Sacred Doctrine and the Knowledge of God (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995). 54 CD 4/2, p. 107. 55 Ibid., pp. 113, 115. 56 “In the third part of this section [viz. §59.3] we must engage in a kind of transitional discussion between the problems and answers we have just given and the questions we will have to add to them . . . Our christological basis [§59.1–2] includes within itself the fact (and with it quite simply ourselves, our participation in that event), that the turn from Jesus Christ to us has already been executed and is a fact in Him, that in and with Him we, too, are there as those for whom He is and has acted,” CD 4/1, pp. 284–85. The transitional sections are the basis of Joseph Mangina’s reading of Barth’s theology of participation in Karl Barth on the Christian Life: The Practical Knowledge of God (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), pp. 51–90. Mangina’s highlighting of the self-involving character of knowledge of God in Barth is a helpful verification of my emphasis upon Barthian pneumatology as performative in these chapters. I am grateful to Joshua Davis for bringing this book to my attention. Cf. also Guretzki, Karl Barth on the Filioque, pp. 162–63.

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NOTES 57 This is exactly how Barth describes faith: “the additional element—the surplus, or, as we might almost say, the luxury—which constitutes the distinctive feature of the faith of those whom we see moving towards the miracles of Jesus . . . Grace is so truly grace, and so truly free as grace, that it is capable of this . . . superfluity [Überfließens fähig ist],” CD 4/2, pp. 245–46. Cf. 4.1, p. 201. I have gratefully learned here from Eugene Rogers on the point of the Spirit’s “superfluity” in Barth, by which he means the gratuitous excess of God’s work in the human response to God (After the Spirit, pp. 30–32). 58 CD 4/1, p. 555; cf. the entire discussion of this theme, pp. 543–59 concerning “the transition from that past to this future [which] is our present” (p. 547): our history as justified. 59 CD 4/2, p. 125. It is of the very essence of the question that the power of the Spirit be understood as “the powerful and effective presence of Jesus Christ Himself—not . . . a second force beside Him,” p. 128. Jesus Christ is the act of God, something that is already a trinitarian formulation: in a human being, Jesus, we see the act of the eternal God who gives Godself in that human being, and by virtue of the fact that we are confessing knowledge of the unknowable God, we testify that we act as subjects of knowledge by the pneumatological agency of that God’s own self-knowing. 60 Ibid., p. 131. 61 Ibid., p. 133. 62 Ibid., p. 146: “the event of revelation participates in the majesty of the will and act of God revealed in it . . . it awakens and underlies a human knowledge which is comprehension only to the extent that it consists in a comprehending of this incomprehensible. By its sacred incomprehensibility we mean its necessary and essential and distinctive newness and difference and strangeness as the event of the revelation of the hidden presence and action of God in the flesh, and therefore of the will and act of God within a world and humanity which are estranged from it.” 63 On the objective, Christological character of sanctification, cf. George Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 118–19. 64 CD 4/2, p. 318. 65 Although Mangina sees the connection between Entsprechung and the analogia fidei, he worries that it is “highly problematic,” for in its location of human agency in the objectivity of Christ, it “excludes the co-incidence of divine and human agency” (Barth on the Christian Life, p. 87n17). But such a “co-incidence” is precisely what Barth is arguing against. 66 On Rogers’s use of this term, see After the Spirit, pp. 29–30. 67 CD 4/2, pp. 322–23. It is this answer, of course, that bothers Robert Jenson and Rowan Williams, who argue that the Spirit is thereby depersonalized. 68 See Philip J. Rosato, SJ, The Spirit as Lord: The Pneumatology of Karl Barth (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1981), and John Yocum, Ecclesial Mediation in Karl Barth (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2004); Mangina holds a similar position in Barth on the Christian Life. Jenson appeals to the visibility of the church as the stand-in for the Spirit’s agency; see “You Wonder Where the Spirit Went,” p. 303, appealing to Nissiotis and Ratzinger. But Barth’s argument makes clear that the work of the Spirit and of Christ refuses an interval of divine absence that could be filled by an institution as Christ’s vicar: “there can be no question of Jesus Christ being even temporarily directed in His absence to let Himself be represented by an

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NOTES honoured Christianity and the holy Church,” CD 4/3, p. 349. Johnson helpfully highlights how determinative this need was for a visible church for Przywara and Söhngen in debating Barth on the analogia entis; Karl Barth and the Analogia Entis, pp. 171–72. 69 CD 4/2, p. 321: “the Spirit is not a second thing side by side with a first, which is a Christian institution and order and doctrine and morality that are given elsewhere and stable in themselves.” Post-Weberian worries about institution and charisma are in view. 70 Ibid., p. 323. Articulating how the history of Jesus as the “royal man” is the direction of the Son and therefore of the totus christus is the focus of the rich scriptural exegesis of §64.3; here the content of the term Entsprechung is filled out. Jones has an excellent discussion in terms of “correspondence,” The Humanity of Christ, pp. 150–69; especially p. 170: “Correspondence means answering. It means human freedom—an event constituted by (a) an act of genuine human spontaneity and (b) the consequent exercise of agency that is (c) directed by, sustained by and performative of God’s loving intention.” Cf. p. 169n35. Neder also notes that objective participation in Christ is the establishment of “freely responsible human subjects,” Participation in Christ, p. 47. 71 CD 1/1, p. 468; cf. the talk of anxiety in 4/2, p. 321. 72 See the long excursus on the prophetic office of Christ in CD 4/3, pp. 11–38, which also ranges over questions of mission and ecumenism from the perspective of prophetic proclamation. 73 CD 4/2, pp. 296–97. Emphasis mine. 74 CD 4/3, p. 275. 75 Cf. CD 4/3, pp. 183–84, a discussion of “knowledge” (yada, ginōskein) in scripture: “What [knowledge] really means is the process or history in which man, certainly observing and thinking, using his sense, intelligence and imagination, but also his will, action and ‘heart,’ and therefore as whole man, becomes aware of another history . . . in such a compelling way that he cannot be neutral towards it, but finds himself summoned to disclose and give himself to it in return, to direct himself according to the law which he encounters in it, to be taken up into its movement, in short, to demonstrate the acquaintance which he has been given with this other history in a corresponding alteration of his own being, action and conduct.” 76 CD 4/3, pp. 7–8. 77 Barth also returns full circle to the Barmen Declaration: the thesis paragraph to §69 simply repeats the famous statement of the 1934 document—“Jesus Christ as attested to us in Holy Scripture is the one Word of God whom we must hear and whom we must trust and obey in life and in death” (cf. p. 86). 78 Ibid., p. 8; cf. p. 114, which recalls the threefold form of the Word of God in CD 1/1 in the context of the well-known discussion of “other lights.” This explicit recall of categories from CD 1/1 is not, in my estimation, sufficiently attended to by interpreters such as Williams and McCormack who posit a sharp disjunction between the trinitarian doctrine of volumes 1 and 4. 79 CD 4/3, p. 295. 80 Ibid., p. 350. 81 “You Wonder Where the Spirit Went,” p. 303. Cf. Mangina, Barth on the Christian Life, p. 72: “Is the agent of this knowledge [of God] the risen Jesus, or the Holy Spirit? Barth would undoubtedly refuse the terms on which the question is asked.”

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NOTES 82 CD 4/3, p. 351; this crucial phrase, or a close variant, is repeated five times in the following pages, a rhetorical enactment of the unity of pneumatology and Christology for Barth. 83 Ibid., p. 358. 84 “Karl Barth’s Eschatological Realism,” in Karl Barth: Centenary Essays (ed. Stephen W. Sykes; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 22. 85 Ibid., p. 22. 86 Ibid. 87 Ibid., pp. 27–28. 88 Ibid., p. 29. 89 CD 3/1, p. 370. 90 Cf. Dalferth’s discussion (“Eschatological Realism,” pp. 25–26) of Barth’s awareness that his theology could have begun with either the second or third article of the creed because of this dynamic, discussed in his “Concluding Unscientific Postscript on Schleiermacher” in 1968. The postscript appears in The Theology of Schleiermacher: Lectures at Göttingen, Winter Semester of 1923/24 (ed. Dietrich Ritschl, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley; Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1982), pp. 261–79. The “theology of the third article” comment is found on p. 278. 91 “Eschatological Realism,” p. 26. 92 Indeed, it is arguable that Barth’s dialectical pneumatology of participation is one of the major constants within his theological development, once the development of faith’s “objectivity” in Christ which I have been describing is accounted for; see Guretzki, Karl Barth on the Filioque, pp. 62, 67, on the Spirit’s role in the Romans commentary, and on pneumatological “contemporaneity” to Christ. 93 To clarify: this does not (necessarily) entail voluntarism, or, as Mangina argues (citing Hauerwas), an “ethical occasionalism”; it is simply to point to the singularity and unrepresentability of the ethical act in Barth’s thought—knowledge is performed, and an emphasis on virtue, habitus, and (thus) created grace would be a fundamentally alien element in Barth’s thought. This is not to deny continuity in the ethical subject, or to avoid the question of “character,” but to refuse an anthropocentric ground for that character. See Barth on the Christian Life, p. 167 and more broadly, pp. 165–98. Cf. Neder, Participation in Christ, p. 114n40.

Chapter 7 1 “Sapientia and the Trinity,” pp. 331–32. 2 “Barth on the Triune God,” p. 131. Williams is considering von Balthasar in the background. 3 “Barth on the Triune God,” p. 133; cf. pp. 134–36. 4 Williams does not quite say this, but he does argue that the “linear” model of volume 1 leaves Barth without any compelling reason for talking about the “ontological necessity of the Spirit,” as Williams had put it in his discussion of Augustine (see above, Chapter 4); cf. “Barth on the Triune God,” pp. 124–26. 5 Ibid., p. 125. 6 Ibid., p. 140.

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NOTES 7 Cf. p. 126, where Williams makes a revealing comment: he takes the “linear/epistemological” model of revelation in CD 1/1 to mean that God is “self-showing” in that God reveals Godself to Godself, Father to Son. Unsurprisingly, Williams then finds it hard to understand how Barth can conceive of the Spirit’s role of revealedness, of guaranteeing the reception of revelation, antecedently in Godself: “it is distinctly odd to say that he reveals himself to himself, and assures himself of his self-revelation” (p. 126). But the logic of antecedence in CD 1/1 is not a logic of mimesis—economic function does not replicate immanent function. God is not the guarantor of revelation to Godself and then to humanity, but eternally oriented to revealing Godself to humanity. God’s self-revelation to humanity in the Spirit is in uninterrupted continuity with the procession of the Spirit from Father and Son. 8 “Barth on the Triune God,” pp. 113, 137–39. 9 Ibid., p. 118. 10 See Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1988). 11 “Barth on the Triune God,” pp. 128, 142–43. These complaints seem somewhat at odds; an inability to conceive a human nature of Christ seems more of an Apollinarian tendency, rather than Nestorian. 12 George Hunsinger, “Election and the Trinity”; Bruce L. McCormack, “Election and the Trinity: Theses in Response to George Hunsinger,” Scottish Journal of Theology 63, no. 2 (May 2010), pp. 203–24; Paul Molnar, Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity: In Dialogue with Karl Barth and Contemporary Theology (New York: T&T Clark, 2002); “The Trinity, Election and God’s Ontological Freedom: A Response to Kevin W. Hector,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 8, no. 3 (2006), pp. 294–306, and most recently “Can Jesus’ Divinity be Recognized as ‘Definitive, Authentic and Essential’ if it is Grounded in Election? Just how far did the Later Barth Historicize Christology?” Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 52 (2010), pp. 40–81. The exchanges between McCormack and Molnar are more extensive than is represented here; for the most recent bibliography, see Bruce L. McCormack, “Trinity and Election: A Progress Report,” in Ontmoetingen—Tijdgenoten en Getuigen: Studies aangeboden aan Gerrit Neven (ed. Rinse Reeling Brouwer, Akke van der Kooi, and Volker Küster; Kampen: Kok, 2009), pp. 14–35. See also the brief literature review in “Divine Impassibility or Simply Divine Constancy? Implications of Karl Barth’s Later Christology for Debates over Impassibility,” in Divine Impassibility and the Mystery of Human Suffering (ed. James F. Keating and Thomas Joseph White; Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2008), p. 170n54, as well as the discussion in “Foreword to the German Edition,” pp. 295–98. For reasons of space, I will primarily engage Hunsinger, Molnar, and McCormack, recognizing with some regret that many other capable scholars who have contributed to the discussion cannot be discussed in detail here. 13 “Election and the Trinity,” p. 179. 14 McCormack, “Response to Hunsinger,” pp. 204–05. 15 I will cite the version as found in McCormack, Orthodox and Modern, pp. 183–200. 16 For McCormack, God’s freedom is one for the world, a freedom to self-determine for creation in Jesus Christ; for example, “Let’s Speak Plainly: A Response to Paul Molnar,” Theology Today 67, no. 1 (2010), pp. 60–61. This is what Kevin Hector

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NOTES means when he calls the existence of the world “contingently necessary,” “God’s Triunity and Self-Determination: A Conversation with Karl Barth, Bruce McCormack and Paul Molnar,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 7, no. 3 (July 2005), pp. 246–61. 17 Hunsinger, “Election and the Trinity.” 18 McCormack, “Response to Hunsinger,” pp. 208–09. 19 This formulation—“abstract metaphysical subject”—is used with particular insistence in McCormack, “Karl Barth’s Historicized Christology,” pp. 206–28. 20 McCormack, “Response to Hunsinger,” pp. 214–15. 21 Ibid., pp. 205–09. 22 McCormack, “God Is His Decision: The Jüngel-Gollwitzer ‘Debate’ Revisited,” in Theology as Conversation: The Significance of Dialogue in Historical and Contemporary Theology: A Festschrift for Daniel L. Migliore (ed. Bruce L. McCormack and Kimlyn J. Bender; Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009), p. 64. 23 McCormack, “Grace and Being,” pp. 193–94. 24 Ibid., p. 195. 25 McCormack, “God Is His Decision,” p. 60. 26 For example, Hunsinger, “Election and the Trinity,” p. 195; see also Molnar, Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity, pp. 61–81; “The Trinity, Election and God’s Ontological Freedom.” 27 McCormack, “‘With Loud Cries and Tears’: The Humanity of the Son in the Epistle to the Hebrews,” in The Epistle to the Hebrews and Christian Theology (ed. Richard Bauckham, Daniel R. Driver, Trevor A. Hart, and Nathan MacDonald; Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009), pp. 60–61. 28 McCormack, “Let’s Speak Plainly,” pp. 63–64. 29 Ibid., p. 59; “Progress Report,” p. 25. 30 This is the first of the three counter-Arian criteria McCormack posits in “Divine Impassibility or Simply Divine Constancy?” p. 180. 31 At one point, McCormack seemed to claim that election was ontologically prior to the Trinity in God’s being, “Seek God Where He May Be Found: A Response to Edwin Chr. Van Driel,” Orthodox and Modern, p. 271; he has since clarified that the priority is simply logical, “Progress Report,” p. 34n49. 32 McCormack, “Divine Impassibility or Simply Divine Constancy,” pp. 171–72; “‘With Loud Cries and Tears,’” p. 61. 33 McCormack is quite clear that Barth’s trinitarianism concerns a single divine subject; see “Karl Barth’s Christology as a Resource for a Reformed Version of Kenoticism,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 8, no. 3 (July 2006), p. 247. 34 Assessing McCormack’s theology is complicated by the fact that his thought is still very much in development, and a major series of monographs providing a definitive statement of his reading of Barth’s theology of election has not yet appeared. My analysis and critique here should be, therefore, regarded as provisional—an assessment along the way, as it were. 35 This dilemma emerged early, in McCormack’s reply to van Driel, where in response to the kind of contradiction just named, McCormack concedes that the subject of election is more properly the Father. “Seek God Where He May Be Found,” p. 266; “we would be speaking more accurately if we were to speak of the ‘Father’ as the subject who gives himself his own being in the act of election”; cf. p. 272. This is in

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NOTES response to Van Driel’s protest that understanding Christ as the subject of election means, tautologically, that “Jesus Christ elects to be Jesus Christ,” ibid., p. 269. Cf. Edwin Chr. Van Driel, “Karl Barth on the Eternal Existence of Jesus Christ,” Scottish Journal of Theology 60, no. 1 (February 2007), pp. 45–61. McCormack has since clarified that the agent of election is Father and Son in unity (“Progress Report,” p. 26); but insofar as this is a unity logically prior to the begetting of the Son, then it is in fact a different thing entirely, as I describe shortly. 36 McCormack admits to this, in a way, but argues with Schelling that “it is the act itself which makes the so-called ‘background’ to be the ‘background’ of this act”; that is, the eternal act of self-determination makes the Father to be the Father of the Son. “Why Should Theology be Christocentric? Christology and Metaphysics in Paul Tillich and Karl Barth,” Wesleyan Theological Journal 45, no. 1 (Spring 2010), pp. 75–76. 37 McCormack has denied that his concept of divine self-determination implies a self-causing divine essence; see “Why Should Theology Be Christocentric?”, pp. 74–76; “Progress Report,” pp. 26, 35n52: “Nor have I ever equated Self-constitution with Self-causation.” However, the distinction is not perspicuous, and it is difficult to see how God giving Godself being (“Grace and Election,” p. 195; “‘With Loud Cries and Tears,’” p. 60; “Let’s Speak Plainly,” p. 59) is not in some form divine self-causation. 38 See “Reformed Version of Kenoticism,” itself simply a sketch of McCormack’s 2007 T. F. Torrance Lectures, which are due to appear as the first of three volumes McCormack is currently working on; see “Progress Report,” p. 28. Other notable discussions: “Divine Impassibility or Simply Divine Constancy?” and “‘With Loud Cries and Tears.’” 39 McCormack, “Divine Impassibility or Simply Divine Constancy,” pp. 171–73; “Let’s Speak Plainly,” pp. 58–59. 40 McCormack, “Divine Impassibility or Simply Divine Constancy,” p. 177. 41 McCormack, “‘With Loud Cries and Tears,’” p. 60. 42 McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions of Barth’s Doctrine of the Atonement,” in The Glory of the Atonement: Biblical, Historical and Practical Perspectives (ed. Charles E. Hill and Frank A. James III; Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2004), p. 355. 43 McCormack, “‘With Loud Cries and Tears,’” pp. 39, 45; “Divine Impassibility or Simply Divine Constancy?” pp. 175–76. 44 In addition to the texts in the preceding note, see McCormack, “Reformed Version of Kenoticism,” p. 250: “It would seem hard to avoid the conclusion that omnipotence would have to overwhelm and displace finite causality and the work of the God-human would, therefore, be a divine work only . . . On this showing, the Logos acts through the human nature as his instrument and can even be thought of as acting upon his human nature.” 45 McCormack poses this in direct response to Chalcedon’s tendency to divinize the human nature of Jesus, worrying with Barth that this signifies an erasure of that humanity, and a blurring of the creator–creature distinction. See especially “Participation in God, Yes; Deification, No: Two Protestant Responses to an Ancient Question,” in Orthodox and Modern, pp. 253–60; McCormack’s option is for the genus tapeinoticum, not the communicatio idiomatum, as the problem with the latter is precisely that it effects such a blurring.

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NOTES 46 This seems to be McCormack’s own view—cf. “Let’s Speak Plainly,” p. 63; “Divine Impassibility or Simply Divine Constancy,” pp. 171–72; “Progress Report,” p. 26. 47 McCormack, “Progress Report,” p. 26. 48 I will primarily depend upon Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (ed. Peter C. Hodgson, 3 vols; Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984–85). The lecture series of 1827 is my basic source, as these represent the most mature form of his thought on the philosophy of religion, and most closely correlate with the final 1830 edition of the Encyclopedia, where the Trinity is decisive for the ascent of the dialectic to absolute knowledge. For general discussion, see Peter Hodgson, Hegel and Christian Theology: A Reading of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 49 Hegel, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (trans. A. V. Miller; New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), §17 (p. 10). 50 On Hegel, see also Wisse, Trinitarian Theology beyond Participation, pp. 29–40; cf. pp. 150–63 on contemporary idealist interpretations of De Trinitate 8–15. 51 Molnar implies this problem in Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity, pp. 62–64, while recognizing McCormack’s refusal of Hegel; cf. Molnar, “The Trinity, Election and God’s Ontological Freedom,” pp. 301, 306. 52 Philosophy of Religion, vol. 1, p. 410. Cf. vol. 1, pp. 426–27: “Absolutely necessary essence, taken in the general or abstract sense, is being not as immediate but as reflected into self, as essence. We have defined essence as the nonfinite, as the negation of the negative—a negation that we call the infinite. So the transition is not made to abstract, arid being but to the being that is negation of the negation.” 53 Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 369–71. 54 See the 1830 edition of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline, §§567–71, in Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind (trans. W. Wallace and A. V. Miller, rev. M. J. Inwood; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 264–65. 55 This is neither a point in its favor or disfavor; it simply marks a basic incompatibility. 56 The spurious infinite is the accumulation of finite determinations without the sublating mediation of the infinite taking up these determinations into itself as spirit; but this is equivalent to the non-differentiation of the abstract infinite in that it is the unmediated immediacy of the in-itself. If the Father is taken as an absolute, the Father is identical to the spurious infinite. 57 See especially  Hegel, Philosophy of Religion,  vol. 3, pp. 292–93. The incarnation epitomizes this for Hegel, for it signifies the unity of spirit and nature, finitude and infinity in a particular whose particularity is his relation with the universal. 58 Ibid., vol. 3, pp. 276, 286. 59 For the most concise summary of Spirit as “developed vitality” as Trinity, see ibid., vol. 3, pp. 273–74. 60 Adam Eitel, in “The Resurrection of Jesus Christ: Karl Barth and the Historicization of God’s Being,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 10, no. 1 (January 2008), pp. 36–53, does in fact advance beyond McCormack to a synthesis of Barth and Hegel. Even here, however, Eitel stops short of the full articulation of Hegel’s trinitarianism as just described. 61 I use this term because the problem here lies just as much with theologians like Robert Jenson, Jürgen Moltmann, or Wolfhart Pannenberg as it does with McCormack.

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NOTES 62 Hans Frei illuminatingly calls this the structure of a subject self-alienating for external expression. See The Identity of Jesus Christ (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 1997), pp. 141–44.

Chapter 8 1 CD 1/2, p. 868. 2 Barth also discusses the vestigia trinitatis in CD 1/1, pp. 333–47; but his critique there is much less convincing, as it depends upon the same erroneous assumptions about the “psychological analogy” that Gunton et al. made in Chapter 1. 3 The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life: The Theological Basis of Ethics (trans. R. Birch Hoyle; Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993). 4 Barth in a letter to Paul Althaus in 1929, quoted by Johnson, Barth and the Analogia Entis, p. 110. Johnson also notes that in the same letter, Barth describes the lecture as “implicitly and explicitly the most anti-Catholic piece I have ever written.” 5 Holy Spirit and the Christian Life, p. 6. 6 Ibid., p. 22. 7 CD I/1, p. 341. 8 Ibid., p. 334. A “general anthropology” or “ontology” within “a greater nexus of being” (pp. 36–37) need not posit such an analogical structure as the basis of an understanding of revelation; that such a nexus be posited at all, even subsequent to revelation, is already for Barth a capitulation to the analogy of being and to natural theology. 9 CD I/1, p. 374. 10 I have been helped here by John Webster’s analysis in “Life in and of Himself: Reflections on God’s Aseity,” in Engaging the Doctrine of God: Contemporary Protestant Perspectives (ed. Bruce L. McCormack; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), pp. 117–19. 11 This is the formulation of the Quicumque vult, the so-called Athanasian Creed. 12 I say this, not so much as a reply, but as an invocation of the concerns of Kerr, Christ, History, and Apocalyptic. 13 A further implication of this, one that I cannot investigate here, concerns the relationship of Christianity and other religions. In my opinion, none of this makes for Christian exclusivism, nor even Christian inclusivism (though arguing that would be more difficult). I think of Augustine’s argument against the Donatists’ sectarian restriction of the universality of God’s redemptive act as a starting point here, as well, of course, as Barth’s demolition of the confusion of Christianity with Christ in CD 1/2 and his discussion of “other lights” in 4/3. The self-diffusive love of God has its center of diffusion in the Word made flesh—but the diffusion is as wide as creation. I want to thank John Thatamanil for tirelessly reminding me of the need to remember this issue in this project; see his forthcoming “The Promise of Religious Diversity: Constructive Theology after ‘Religion,’” Fordham University Press. 14 Calling this a “distinctively Western” discourse of deification, as I have occasionally in this book, is not necessarily to make a comparative claim vis-à-vis Orthodox logics of deification so much as it is to claim that language for a tradition that, in contemporary parlance, is often assumed to be lacking this logic. 15 Cf. McCormack’s “Participation in God, Yes; Deification, No.”

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NOTES 16 Trinitarian Theology beyond Participation, p. 301. 17 Ibid., pp. 305–08. 18 Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money (trans. Peggy Kamuf; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 23. 19 Disciplining the Divine, p. 90. 20 To be sure, there are real ideological questions to be asked about the use of relational ontology, even if I cannot discuss those here. For a rudimentary start, see Ables, “On the Very Idea of an Ontology of Communion.”

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Alfaric, Prosper  38, 205n. 5 Ambrose  40, 225n. 63 analogy  20, 22, 23, 25–7, 36, 37–9, 79, 80, 91, 93, 102, 178, 180, 190, 191, 200n. 57, 247n. 8 Anselm  49, 110, 178, 181, 182, 209n. 41, 228n. 24, 233n. 85 anthropology, theological  25, 34, 175, 186, 188 apophaticism  21, 36, 101, 103, 104, 176, 180 aporia  104, 175, 180, 185, 187, 189, 206n. 13, 219n. 75 Aquinas  3, 8, 10, 23, 28–30, 32, 34, 95, 204n. 90, 205n. 4, 212n. 8, 222n. 28, 224n. 58, 225n. 70, 239n. 53 Arianism  45, 49, 97, 161, 179 Athanasius  89, 238n. 46, 247n. 11 Augustine,  agency, divine  39, 48, 50, 52, 72, 73, 77, 78, 88 agency, human  39, 48, 73, 77, 78, 88 anagogy  see ascent analogy  48, 52–6, 59, 64, 66, 67, 72, 74–8, 81, 102, 177, 218n. 67, 222n. 25 apophaticism  16, 36, 43, 52, 62, 67, 74, 78, 80, 81, 86, 89, 101, 188, 210n. 48 aporia  39, 40, 43–5, 53, 59, 69, 74, 78, 89, 103, 187 ascent  15, 16, 38, 46, 48, 51, 53, 54, 56, 58–60, 69–73, 77–9, 81, 83–6, 102, 103, 124, 146, 176, 178, 186, 187, 213n. 18, n. 21, 219n. 68 bond of love  see under Holy Spirit canonica regula  41, 45, 57, 83, 221n. 14

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charity (caritas)  15, 47, 58, 61, 66, 68, 73, 76–8, 83, 84, 86–8, 91, 92, 98–100, 177, 220n. 5, n. 8 Christ  41, 42, 45, 48, 54, 58–61, 69–71, 70, 73, 77–9, 81–5, 87, 88, 96, 103, 178, 183, 186, 187, 218n. 64 see also Son Christology  37, 41, 46, 47, 56, 60, 68, 72, 77, 81, 85, 86, 176, 178, 185, 207n. 24 church  15, 16, 37, 38, 43, 47, 77, 81–6, 92 see also totus christus communion  see relationality Confessions  47, 56, 62, 70, 102, 207n. 16, 213n. 21, 217n. 58 consubstantiality  45, 46, 48, 54, 62, 65, 73, 74 contemplation  15, 39, 40–6, 52, 53, 57, 58, 61, 62, 68–72, 78, 212n. 16 De fide et symbolo  97, 98, 100 De Trinitate  1, 11, 14, 37–9, 41–3, 45, 47, 49, 52, 53, 55–61, 67, 69, 71, 73, 74, 77–84, 86–92, 94, 96, 97, 99, 100, 101, 103, 112, 119, 124, 127, 177, 181, 182, 187, 196n. 47, 207n. 22, 211n. 6, 212n. 7, n. 11, n. 13, 214n. 29, 215n. 39, 218n. 63 and decline of Western theology  1, 17, 19, 21–3, 27, 37, 55 deification  36, 48, 53, 59, 73, 77, 78, 84–6, 88, 89, 102, 187, 188, 222n. 27 desire  43, 61, 67, 68, 74, 75, 84 divinization  see deification Donatism  82–4, 86, 87, 89, 103, 220n. 7, 247n. 13 dualism  20, 26, 37 ecclesiology  see church

INDEX economy of salvation  41, 44, 48, 51, 55, 73, 79, 183 Enarrationes in Psalmos  82, 85 epistemology  56, 59–63, 66, 74, 75 eschatology  41, 72, 83, 84 essence, divine (and synonyms)  45, 48–52, 76, 91, 96, 97, 100, 101, 103, 182 eternity  46, 47, 64, 66, 68, 75, 84, 178, 183 ethics  16, 40, 43, 46, 53, 58, 61, 63, 65–7, 73–5, 78, 89, 101–3, 183, 188, 209n. 38 exercise of the mind (exercitatio ­mentis)  39, 41–4, 51, 53, 56, 58, 124 faith  42, 45, 51, 56, 57, 62, 69, 88 Father  41, 42, 45–7, 49, 50, 71, 75, 85, 91, 97–100, 183, 220n. 8, 222n. 37, 224n. 61 fides quarens intellectum  42, 43, 51 forma dei/forma servi  41, 42, 84, 85, 212n. 14 gift of Spirit  15, 19, 22, 25, 36, 59, 69, 72, 73, 76–9, 81, 83, 92, 98–100, 112, 177 grace  39, 43, 48, 52–5, 58, 60, 69, 73, 177, 185, 187, 190, 219n. 70 Holy Spirit  19, 22, 25, 35, 43–8, 50, 58, 60, 61, 69, 71–8, 81, 83, 85–8, 91, 92, 96–100, 172, 175, 177, 186, 190 see also pneumatology humility  42, 46, 47, 49, 69, 70, 73, 81 ideas, eternal  53, 62, 63, 65, 72, 74 illumination  39, 62, 63, 65, 72, 74, 79, 176, 177, 212n. 13, 214n. 35 image (imago)  22, 39, 42, 43, 51, 52, 55–9, 61, 63, 65, 66, 68, 69, 71–6, 79, 103, 112, 177, 206n. 8, 211n. 5, 216n. 52, 218n. 65 in epistulam Joannis ad Parthos ­tractatus  15, 82–9, 102, 103 incarnation  12, 16, 19, 22, 31, 39, 41, 42, 44, 45, 47, 51, 53, 60, 61, 69–71, 73, 74, 76, 77, 82–5, 87, 88, 92, 100, 133, 172, 183 incarnational realism  41, 44, 47, 53, 59, 71, 78, 79, 81, 84–6, 89, 92, 100, 103

264

incomprehensibility  see ineffability individualism  19, 20, 23, 25, 26, 31, 34, 37, 43, 79 ineffability  40–2, 51, 53, 62, 69, 72, 74, 98, 99 intellect (intellectus, intelligentia)  3, 14, 37, 42, 56, 57, 60, 61, 64–6, 71, 74–7, 81, 213n. 27, 215n. 42, 219n. 73 see also knowledge; notitia; scientia intellectus fidei  40, 41, 43, 55, 57, 79, 211n. 2 inwardness  52–5, 73, 79, 90, 210n. 1 knowledge  24, 39, 41, 43, 47, 52–4, 57, 59–68, 71, 72, 74, 78, 81, 86, 103, 112, 175, 178, 185, 213n. 27, 215n. 44, 216n. 46, n. 51 see also intellect; notitia; scientia language  see predications, relative and substantial love (amor, dilectio)  19, 24, 43, 47–9, 52, 53, 56, 58–61, 63–5, 67, 69, 71–3, 75–8, 82–4, 86–9, 91, 92, 97, 100, 103, 175, 183, 190, 213n. 27, 215n. 44, 221n. 17, 222n. 25 mediator  41, 46, 69, 70, 72, 84, 85, 177, 218n. 60 memory (memoria)  3, 37, 56, 61–4, 68, 74, 76, 178, 214n. 27, n. 36 mind (mens)  39, 42, 62–8, 74, 75, 177, 178, 214n. 35 mystery, divine  41–3, 52, 53, 188 neighbor,  41, 46, 69, 70, 72, 82–4, 86–9, 92, 102, 103, 220n. 4, 221n. 16 Neoplatonism  1, 3, 19–21, 25, 26, 34, 37–40, 46, 47, 53, 56, 58–60, 62, 63, 67, 70, 79, 87, 133, 176, 177, 179, 205n. 5, 206n. 14, n. 15, 207n. 17, 208n. 36, 217n. 58 see also philosophy notitia  64, 65, 213n. 27, 215n. 39 see also intellect; knowledge; scientia participation  31, 36, 39, 41, 42, 45, 52–4, 57, 59, 66, 72–8, 80, 81, 84, 87, 88, 99, 176–8, 218n. 65

INDEX patriarchy  216n. 52 Pelagianism  177, 185, 219n. 70, 220n. 7 per speculum et aenigmate  54, 112, 221n. 11 performance  39, 44, 52, 53, 59, 60, 72, 73, 77, 78, 112, 146 persons, trinitarian  37, 48–52, 95, 101, 102, 182, 223n. 40 philosophy  20, 25, 34, 40, 175, 176, 190, 209n. 39, 213n. 22, 217n. 58 see also Neoplatonism Platonism  see Neoplatonism pneumatological problems  1, 11, 17, 19, 20, 22, 25, 34, 37, 189 pneumatology  34, 36–40, 44, 47, 53, 59–61, 63, 69, 73, 76–8, 81, 85–7, 89, 97, 100–3, 106, 112, 124, 133, 146, 185, 191 see also Holy Spirit predications, relative and substantial  48–52, 57, 65, 97, 178, 181, 225n. 70 processions and missions  11–12, 22, 25, 39, 41, 43–5, 47, 48, 50, 51, 56, 57, 60, 71, 73–6, 77, 81, 85, 86, 88, 96, 98, 182, 183, 215n. 44, 219n. 73 psychological analogy  1, 3, 8, 17, 19, 20, 22–4, 26, 29–32, 34, 36, 37, 40, 43, 48, 52, 53, 55, 59, 60, 62–4, 66, 76–80, 100, 178, 189, 198n. 28, 211n. 6, 213n. 27, 215n. 39 purity  41–3, 57, 64, 68, 70, 78, 82 relationality  38, 64, 81, 88, 89, 91, 101, 225n. 71 relations, trinitarian  44, 48, 51, 91, 95, 179, 209n. 40, 224n. 58, 225n. 71 revelation  35, 47, 50, 59, 177 Rom. 5.5  69, 87, 100, 217n. 55, 219n. 72 salvation  31, 37, 172 scientia  58–61, 66–8, 70, 71, 73, 74, 178, 213n. 25, 217n. 53 see also intellect; notitia; knowledge  Scripture  41, 42, 57, 85, 100 see also canonica regula

self-giving, divine  39, 44, 48, 50, 51, 61, 71–3, 76–81, 85, 87, 88, 90–2, 96, 100, 133, 172, 187, 188, 190 self-involvement  39, 40, 43, 53, 59, 63, 78, 112, 124 simplicity, divine  44, 48, 50, 51, 52, 67, 74, 75, 80, 89, 90, 96, 101, 106, 172, 176, 178, 180, 226n. 71 sin  43, 52, 53, 67–9, 71, 75, 82, 83, 177 Son  41–50, 61, 69, 71–3, 75–8, 81, 85–7, 96–9, 124, 183, 224n. 61 see also Christ subordination of Son  45, 46, 208n. 32 totus christus (whole Christ)  77, 81–6, 88, 100, 176, 221n. 13–14 Trinity  3, 12, 18, 36, 39, 42–4, 63, 64, 66, 73, 75, 77, 80, 87, 89, 92, 95–7, 155, 156, 176, 178, 181, 183 unity, divine  8, 20–3, 25, 30, 34, 37, 41, 52, 97, 98, 100, 224n. 61 unity of operations (opera ad extra)  44, 45, 74 will (voluntas)  3, 14, 47, 56, 57, 60, 61, 63–6, 68, 69, 74–8, 81, 213n. 27, 219n. 73 wisdom (sapientia)  46, 48–50, 53, 56, 58–61, 66–8, 70–7, 81, 84, 86, 87, 91, 102, 124, 178, 182, 213n. 25, 217n. 53, 223n. 40 word (verbum)  41, 45, 46, 50, 53, 62, 65–7, 70, 75–7, 215n. 44 vestigia  52, 177, 247n. 2 vinculum amoris  see under Holy Spirit Ayres, Lewis  10, 33, 38, 39, 196n. 47, 204n. 91, 206n. 7, n. 14, 207n. 17, 208n. 25, 211n. 4, n. 6, 214n. 29, 218n. 62, 219n. 74, 222n. 37, 224n. 61, 225n. 71 Balthasar, Hans Urs von  7, 110, 127, 197n. 20, 227n. 10, 228n. 18, n. 24, 233nn. 85–6 Barnes, Michel  10, 31–3, 38, 39, 196n. 47, 201n. 75, n. 77, 203n. 84, n. 89, 204n. 91, 206n. 7, n. 14, 209n. 40, 212n. 16, 224n. 58

265

INDEX communicatio idiomatum  6, 111, 134, 141–2, 165, 189, 229n. 31, 236n. 15, 237n. 26, 238n. 43, 239n. 48, 245n. 45 correspondence (Entsprechung)  113, 123, 125, 126, 139, 146, 148, 153, 154, 227n. 9, 241n. 70 covenant  127, 129, 135, 137 creation  107, 127, 128 critique of Augustine  4, 177–9 critiques of  105, 150, 151, 157, 158, 189, 196n. 49 deification  see divinization deus absconditus  136, 162, 163, 166, 174, 229n. 43, 231n. 66 dialectic  107–14, 122, 123, 125–7, 129, 130, 131, 133–5, 137–40, 143–9, 152, 153, 157, 161, 164, 176, 242n. 92 direction (Weisung)  144, 148, 149, 153, 188 divinization  114, 141, 142, 159 Doctrine of Creation (CD vol 3)  121, 126–31, 133, 134, 139, 150, 151, 162, 179, 234n. 97 Doctrine of God (CD vol 2)  118–27, 129–31, 133, 134, 136, 139, 140, 146, 149, 151, 153, 157, 159, 162, 166, 231n. 60, 233n. 86 Doctrine of Reconciliation (CD vol 4)  4, 16, 105, 109, 112, 114, 115, 126, 127, 131, 133–5, 137–40, 144–9, 151–3, 157, 158, 161, 164–6, 179, 230n. 48, 233n. 86, 235n. 4, 241n. 78 Doctrine of the Word of God (CD vol 1)  28, 105, 113–17, 119, 120, 125, 126, 129, 131, 133, 134, 145, 148–50, 185, 230n. 48, 231n. 60, 233n. 86, 241n. 78, 242n. 4, 243n. 7 ecclesiology  see church economic/immanent Trinity  4, 115, 117, 160, 172, 173, 230n. 51 election  109, 110, 112, 121, 123–5, 129, 135–8, 140, 141, 146, 149–51, 155, 159, 160–3, 165–7,

Barth, Karl,  act  116, 124, 129, 135, 140–3, 148, 149, 151, 153, 161, 162, 173, 176–8, 183, 245n. 36 actualism  39, 107, 110, 115, 116, 129, 130, 143, 146, 176, 239n. 52 agency, divine  106, 107, 110, 111, 113, 123, 124, 126, 129, 130, 134, 135, 141–3, 150, 151, 154, 158–61, 163, 164, 166, 172, 186 agency, human  106, 107, 109–13, 123, 124, 129, 141, 143, 144, 158, 159, 161, 175, 186 analogia relationis  16, 127, 128, 130, 162, 166, 179, 183, 234n. 98 analogy  120, 121, 126–9, 133, 136, 138, 139, 152, 172, 233n. 85 analogy of being (analogia entis)  108, 110, 111, 113, 121, 127, 128, 130, 176, 177, 190, 227n. 8, 232n. 69 analogy of faith (analogia fidei)  110, 113, 126, 128, 130, 232n. 69, 234n. 104, 240n. 65 anhypostatis/enhypostatis  110, 111, 114, 125, 134, 139–41, 143, 149, 151, 153, 159, 164, 165, 179, 228n. 22, 229n. 33, 237n. 26, 238n. 36 apophaticism  36, 122, 123 Augustinianism  16, 109, 115, 130, 131, 134, 136, 138, 146, 150, 152, 162, 174 Christ  107, 109–11, 113–17, 119, 120, 121, 123–7, 129, 131, 133–5, 137, 139–54, 157, 161, 162, 164, 165, 174–6, 179, 186, 190 see also Son Christology  4, 16, 106, 107, 110, 119, 121, 133, 138–40, 142, 144, 145, 147, 152, 158, 159, 161, 164–6, 178–80, 186 church  144, 147, 152, 240n. 68 see also totus christus Church Dogmatics  3–4, 11, 16, 17, 27, 106, 109, 133, 159, 174, 179, 196n. 47, 235n. 2

266

INDEX 172, 174, 183, 231n. 64, 233n. 86, 235n. 11, 244n. 31, n. 35 eschatology  145–52 eternity  105–7, 115, 117, 122–4, 134, 135, 138, 146, 151, 153, 159–61, 163, 178, 179, 183, 227n. 5 ethics  107, 109, 123, 131, 138, 139, 144, 149, 152, 153, 242n. 93 “Fate and Idea in Theology”  108, 112, 133, 142, 177, 229n. 32 Father  119, 120, 123, 125–8, 137, 138, 140, 145, 150, 157, 163, 165, 166, 171, 172, 179, 183, 244n. 35 freedom, divine  115, 116, 122, 159, 160, 183, 243n. 16 freedom, human  129, 130, 158 God  108, 109, 117, 120, 126, 129, 130, 136–8, 140, 141, 153, 154, 160–4, 173, 179 see also Trinity Göttingen  110, 111, 141, 152 grace  111–13, 120–2, 127, 131, 142–5, 148, 154, 158, 177, 185, 186, 235n. 7 Hegelianism  16, 109, 126, 130, 134, 136, 137, 155, 161, 164, 166, 176, 179, 183, 227n. 15, 239n. 52 see also idealism hiddenness, divine  114, 115, 120, 122, 123, 135, 140, 145, 146, 148, 230n. 56, 231n. 66, 232n. 73 historicization  6, 12, 21, 28, 117, 136, 143 history  116, 117, 124, 129, 131, 143, 150–3, 157–61, 179 Holy Spirit  105, 114, 117–19, 121, 125–7, 138, 143–7, 149–54, 157, 175, 177, 179, 240n. 59 see also pneumatology humanity  129, 135, 144, 145, 147, 150–2, 158, 164, 186, 233n. 95 hypostatic union (unio hypostatica)  16, 111, 134, 138, 141, 143, 153, 161, 183 idealism  108, 109, 112, 133, 142, 227n. 13 see also Hegelianism ideology  27, 101, 112, 126, 128, 139, 177, 233n. 84, 234n. 97

267

incarnation  107, 117, 122, 123, 137, 138, 140–3, 145, 146, 152, 161, 162, 164, 165, 178, 183 incarnational realism  133, 135, 151, 152, 159 knowledge  14, 109–13, 115, 117–21, 123, 126, 127, 130, 135, 140, 143–6, 148, 149, 241n. 75 logic of antecedence  115, 117, 119, 122, 129, 137, 187, 243n. 7 logos asarkos  123, 136, 159, 160, 161, 235n. 5, 238n. 39 Lutheran theology  6, 111, 112, 134, 141–2, 229n. 31–2, 236n. 15, 238n. 41, n. 43, nn. 45–6, 239n. 48 mediation  119, 126, 131, 145, 147, 148, 158, 166, 172, 179, 183 metaphysics  115, 160, 176, 177, 179 natural theology  121, 127, 190, 234n. 106 obedience, divine  137–9, 164–6 participation  16, 107, 108, 111–13, 115, 116, 118–21, 123–6, 129, 131, 134, 142, 144–9, 152, 153, 157, 159, 164, 177, 179, 183, 186 patriarchy  16, 126, 128, 130, 139, 164, 179, 234n. 95 performance  107, 112, 122, 130, 146 personalism, trinitarian  6, 106, 109, 128, 130, 133, 134, 136, 139, 150, 158, 159 pneumatology  1, 16, 34, 105, 107, 109, 112, 118, 126, 140, 143, 144, 146–8, 150, 151, 191, 242n. 92 see also Holy Spirit potentiality, divine  117, 162, 166, 167, 172 processions and missions  120, 136, 160–2, 182 Realdialektik  110, 120, 139, 164, 228n. 26 realism  108, 109, 133 reciprocity, trinitarian  120, 128, 142 reconciliation  115, 135, 137, 142, 143, 147–9, 160, 175

INDEX Reformed theology  16, 134, 137, 141, 149, 150, 152, 164, 165, 229n. 31, 238n. 41 representation (Stellvertretung)  125, 131, 135, 140–2, 148, 151, 235nn. 8–9 resurrection  145, 147, 149, 151 revelation  3, 8, 9, 16, 35, 106, 107, 110–16, 118–23, 125–8, 131, 133, 139, 146, 148, 149, 154, 157, 160, 162, 171, 173–5, 177, 185, 231n. 66 revisionism  159, 172, 173, 230n. 55 Römerbrief  110, 114, 128, 152, 236n. 23 self-determination, divine  160–4, 166, 173, 174, 245n. 37 self-giving, divine  106, 109, 113–16, 122, 124, 125, 131, 136–8, 142–4, 150, 153, 154, 158, 163, 172, 174, 190 self-reflexivity  126, 130, 131 simplicity, divine  109, 117, 121, 131, 138 Son  119, 120, 123, 125–8, 135–8, 140–2, 145, 149, 150, 152, 157, 161–3, 165, 166, 171–4, 179, 183 see also Christ subjectivity, divine  105, 109, 111, 113, 114, 116–18, 120, 134, 142, 171, 172, 174, 176, 228n. 28, 238n. 36 tensions, theological  1, 16, 23, 27, 105, 133, 141, 155, 179, 183, 189, 237nn. 31–2 time  see history totus christus  121, 124, 126, 129, 135, 141, 146, 147, 151–3 see also church traditionalism  159, 160, 162, 166, 172, 183, 230n. 55 transition (Übergang)  144–50, 152, 153, 157, 190, 239n. 56 and trinitarian revival  27, 28, 105, 155 Trinity  111, 113, 114, 116, 138–40, 144, 149–51, 158–63, 165, 166, 173, 174, 176–8, 181, 183

Ur-Father  163, 166, 172, 173 Urgeschichte  12, 126, 129, 139, 143, 152, 153, 162, 163, 165, 172, 178, 179, 183, 232n. 77, 233n. 90, 239n. 52 veiling, divine  see hiddenness, divine Word (Logos)  109, 110, 111, 113–15, 119, 134, 141, 158–60, 162, 164, 169, 174, 178 see also logos asarkos Behr, John  226n. 71 Boff, Leonardo  9, 31, 203n. 83 Bonaventure  12 Bonner, Gerald  222n. 27 Brunner, Emil  129 Bultmann, Rudolf  134 Burns, J. Patout  219n. 70, 220n. 5, n. 7 Cappadocians  8 Carabine, Deirdre  210n. 48 Cartesianism  18, 37, 55, 59, 90, 196n. 7, 210n. 1, 211n. 3 Cary, Phillip  210n. 1, 219n. 70 Cavadini, John  59, 213n. 23, 214n. 29 Chalcedon, Council of  85, 111, 133, 139, 141, 165, 218n. 64, 245n. 45 Christ  29, 81, 103, 186, 189 see also under Augustine; Barth; see also Son incarnation  11, 27, 189, 191 participation  11, 36, 175, 180, 185, 186, 190, 191 self-giving of God  35, 102, 181–3, 188, 191 Word (Logos)  11, 29, 90, 93, 94, 184, 186 see also under Barth Christology  44, 186 Christomonism  13, 196n. 49 pneumatology, relationship to  13, 36, 80, 176, 180, 187, 188 church  93, 94, 186 participation in Christ  11, 103 and relationality  20, 90 Cicero  40, 70 Coakley, Sarah  33, 195n. 37, 203n. 84, 204n. 91 concept, logic of  104, 168, 169, 171 creation  20, 25, 183, 190

268

INDEX Cross, Richard  10, 50, 208n. 27, 210n. 45, 226n. 71 Cunningham, David  195n. 43 Cyril of Alexandria  165 Dalferth, Ingolf  12, 151, 152, 242n. 90 Davis, Joshua  224n. 57, 239n. 56 De Trinitate  see under Augustine Derrida, Jacques  93, 206n. 13, 248n. 18 divinization  36, 165, 176, 180, 185–90, 247n. 14 Eastern Orthodoxy  2–5, 7, 9, 14, 22, 29, 32, 34, 44, 193n. 8, 198n. 35, 238n. 46 ecclesiology  see church Emery, Gilles  10 eschatology  22, 25, 26, 41, 42, 93, 94, 184, 188 eternity  21, 22, 25, 28, 34, 44, 175, 184, 188 ethics  104, 184, 188 Father  11, 14, 91, 93, 95, 96, 99, 103, 168–71, 179, 182–6, 202n. 82 feminism  9, 14, 15, 196n. 50, 233n. 84 see also Augustine, patriarchy; Barth, partriarchy Feuerbach, Ludwig  112, 142, 190, 228n. 28, 234n. 95 filioque  see under Holy Spirit Fletcher, Paul  27, 190, 196n. 4, 200n. 57 Gerber, Chad Tyler  38, 39, 195n. 45, 205n. 3, n. 6, 206n. 14, 207n. 16, 212n. 15, 217n. 55 Gioia, Luigi,  10, 38, 46, 206n. 11, 208n. 32–3, 209n. 39, 211n. 5, 213n. 18, n. 22, 215n. 44, 218n. 60, n. 64, 224n. 61, 225n. 64 God,  agency, divine  25, 34, 93, 94, 175, 176, 182, 183, 186 deus absconditus  181 essence, divine (and synonyms)  3, 13, 44, 49, 50, 92, 178, 181, 182 freedom  164, 168 impassibility  164, 165

ineffability  26, 40, 191 knowledge  30, 35, 36, 175, 185, 189 and otherness  168, 170, 171, 181 potentiality  164, 166–8, 170 revelation  21, 22, 26, 30, 35, 36, 180, 181, 188, 190 self-consciousness  167, 170 self-determination  164, 182 self-diffusive  12, 182, 184, 187 self-giving  11, 12, 30, 35, 36, 44, 49, 80, 90, 96, 102–4, 156, 164, 180, 182, 184, 188 simplicity  28, 34, 44, 48, 80, 96, 103, 182 subjectivity  168, 170, 171 transcendence  18, 168, 188, 191 and world  167, 168, 180, 181 Gogarten, Friedrich  111, 134 Gollwitzer, Helmut  128 Gorringe, Timothy  229n. 30, 233n. 84 grace  3, 23, 29, 104, 164, 181, 185, 186, 190, 200n. 64 Greek Orthodoxy  see Eastern Orthodoxy Gregory of Nazianzus  23 Gregory of Nyssa  201n. 75 Gunton, Colin  8, 9, 15, 17, 19–28, 31, 32, 34, 35, 156, 180, 181, 196n. 7, 197n. 9, n. 16, 200n. 55 Guretzki, David  196n. 49, 231n. 58, 236n. 23, 242n. 92 Hadot, Pierre  58, 208n. 26, 213n. 17 Halleux, André de  37, 201n. 75, 203n. 90 Hanby, Michael  94–6, 100, 101, 209n. 38, 215n. 38, 217n. 59, 222n. 25, 223n. 53, 224n. 56–7 Harnack, Adolf  1, 38, 40, 207n. 15 Hartshorne, Charles  28 Hegel, Hegelianism  1, 6, 16, 18, 22, 34, 38, 92, 94–7, 100, 108, 120, 151, 155, 156, 164, 167–73, 176, 179, 181, 183, 189, 223n. 48, 235n. 11, 236n. 23, 239n. 52, 246n. 57 see also under Barth; see also idealism Hennessy, Kristin  32, 33, 202n. 78 Hilary of Poitier  99

269

INDEX Hill, Edmund  60, 201n. 74, 205n. 1, 212n. 7, 213n. 26, 215n. 43, 217n. 56 Hill, William  200n. 64 Hodgson, Leonard  18 Holy Spirit  29, 36 see also under Augustine; Barth; see also pneumatology bond of love  80, 89, 91–101, 157, 168–70, 225n. 63, n. 70, 226n. 71 and church  93, 94, 97 filioque  14, 24, 32, 95, 98, 182, 199n. 51, 236n. 23 forgetfulness (Geistesvergessenheit)  1, 23, 28, 32, 34 gift  22, 23, 94, 184, 185, 191 grace  11, 185, 187, 190 knowledge of Son/Christ  12, 13, 36, 189 love  49, 104, 179, 188 participation  90, 181, 184, 185, 187, 189, 191 performance  175, 187 person  23, 79, 80 procession and mission  29, 80, 81, 182, 184 relation of Father and Son  see bond of love relationship to the Son  20, 24, 80, 93, 102, 181, 185 vinculum amoris/caritatis  35, 80, 89, 91, 95, 97, 98, 103, 105, 157, 167, 199n. 51, 222n. 28 Homoianism  45, 49, 96, 209n. 40 Hunsinger, George  151, 159–61, 163, 230n. 55 Hunt, Anne  201n. 72 idealism  16, 18, 142, 155, 167, 171, 172, 199n. 53 see also under Barth; trinitarian revival; see also Hegel ideology  190, 191 see also under Barth image (imago)  23, 90, 91 see also under Augustine incarnation  44, 81, 93, 94, 103, 175, 180, 181, 183, 184, 187, 189 incarnational realism  12, 16, 176, 180, 189

Jenson, Robert  6–7, 15, 17, 21–3, 25–8, 31, 32, 34, 35, 105, 106, 150, 180, 181, 197n. 18, 198n. 28–9, n. 32, 230n. 55, 240nn. 67–8 Joachim of Fiore  24–6, 199n. 47, n. 51 Johnson, Keith  111, 227n. 8, n. 12, 229n. 34, 241n. 68 Jones, Paul Dafydd  139, 228n. 19, 229n. 31, 233n. 86, 236n. 22, 237n. 26, 238n. 36, 241n. 70 Jüngel, Eberhard  6, 18, 161, 229n. 36, 230n. 51, n. 55, 232n. 80, 234n. 102, 236n. 17 kenosis  93, 94, 164, 165, 236n. 15 Kerr, Nathan  232n. 77, 239n. 52, 247n. 12 knowledge  29, 30, 36 see also under God LaCugna, Catherine  6, 9, 31, 180, 202n. 83, 232n. 70 Lessing, Gotthold  146, 147 Levering, Matthew  10, 33, 204n. 95 Lombard, Peter  22, 198n. 31 Lossky, Vladimir  3–6, 8, 9, 31–3, 202n. 80 love  29, 30, 102, 104, 191 McCormack, Bruce  16, 109–11, 133, 141, 151, 155, 159–68, 171–3, 182, 196n. 47, 227n. 13, 228n. 19, n. 24, 229n. 33, 230n. 48, n. 55, 233n. 85, 235n. 11, 241n. 78, 243n. 12, n. 16, 244n. 31, nn. 34–5, 245nn. 36–8, n. 45 McDougall, Joy  200n. 56 McGinn, Bernard  102 McKenna, Stephen  42, 66, 70, 98, 205n. 1 Macmurray, John  18, 200n. 58 Manchester, Peter  209n. 36, 214n. 36, 216n. 52 Mangina, Joseph  239n. 56, 240n. 65, n. 68, 242n. 93 Marmion, Declan  10, 33, 201n. 73, 204n. 93 Marshall, Bruce  10, 33

270

INDEX mediation  167–70, 189, 199n. 53, 224n. 55 metaphysics  27, 30, 39, 164, 167, 172, 206n. 14 Milbank, John  90, 92–7, 100, 101, 181, 206n. 14, 222n. 29, 223n. 41–2, n. 44, n. 48, 224n. 57 Miles, Margaret  214n. 28 Molnar, Paul  159, 161, 163 Moltmann, Jürgen  6, 8–9, 15, 17, 23–8, 31, 32, 34, 35, 138, 156, 194n. 19, 198n. 35, n. 38, 199n. 43, n. 47, n. 51, 200n. 56, 230n. 55, 236n. 17 Myers, Benjamin  230n. 48 mystery  13, 101, 175, 191 Neder, Adam  229n. 42, 237n. 26 Negative determination  169–71, 179 Neoscholasticism  see scholasticism Nicaea, Council of  8, 45, 179 see also Pro-Nicene Nieuwenhove, Rik Van  10, 33, 201n. 73, 204n. 93 Oh, Peter  236n. 21 ontology  7, 8, 17, 18–24, 26, 27, 35, 39, 40, 46, 52, 53, 70, 80, 90, 91, 96, 98, 101, 103, 128–30, 160, 162, 164, 171, 177, 178, 189–91, 200n. 56, 204n. 95, 209n. 38, 220n. 1, 247n. 8, 248n. 20

subjectivity  18, 22, 167, 171, 172, 187, 191 Plotinus  34, 38, 40, 53, 58, 59, 71, 102, 112, 133, 176, 206n. 14, 207n. 16–17, 209n. 36, 210n. 48, 214n. 36, 217n. 59, 230n. 56, 235n. 1 pneumatology  see also under Augustine; Barth; see also Holy Spirit aporia  36, 103 Christology, relationship to  13, 36, 180, 186, 187, 189 knowledge  103, 184, 204n. 95 participation  12, 13, 175, 176, 180, 181, 184–8 performance  13, 36, 185, 188, 190 Western  1, 176, 189 Porphyry  40, 70, 214n. 36, 217n. 58, 224n. 59 Portalié, Eugène  202n. 81 Pro-Nicene  20, 21, 33, 39, 41, 42, 44, 45, 48, 49, 51, 56, 95, 96, 171, 178, 182, 204n. 91, 205n. 6, 206n. 7, n. 14, 207n. 19, 208n. 29, 209n. 40, 211n. 6 Przywara, Erich  227n. 8, n. 12, 229n. 34, 241n. 68 psychological analogy  see under Augustine Quicumque vult  247n. 11

Palamas, Gregory  5, 231n. 66 Pannenberg, Wolfhart  6–7, 31, 246n. 61 patristic era  27, 32, 110, 116, 134, 217 Paul, Apostle  62, 87, 112, 177, 205n. 5, 216n. 52, 217n. 54, 220n. 7, 221n. 11, 222n. 22 person, human,  agency  92–4, 187, 188, 224n. 57 participation  30, 34, 36, 157, 185, 187, 188 relationality  8, 18, 20, 24, 26, 79, 80, 90, 91, 104, 189–91, 200n. 57 self-consciousness  4, 13, 22, 30, 68, 119, 155, 167, 170 soul  22, 24, 26, 29

Radical Orthodoxy  16, 89, 92, 94, 97 Rahner, Karl,  critique of psychological analogy  6, 28–30, 32, 34, 219n. 69 critique of Western theology  29, 31, 37, 205n. 4 grace, theology of  3, 9, 28, 29, 200n. 64, 201n. 72 “mere monotheism”  29, 55 metaphysics  7, 30, 201n. 71 proper missions  29, 208n. 30, 219n. 69 “Rahner’s rule” (Grundaxiom)  2–3, 6, 27–30, 115, 180 and Régnon  31, 201n. 74 trinitarian persons  8, 155, 202n. 82

271

INDEX and trinitarian revival  27, 28, 155 Trinity, The  2, 9, 17, 28, 31, 32, 201n. 74 Régnon, Théodore de  8, 10, 15, 23, 31–5, 37, 38, 44, 79, 90, 197n. 9, 198n. 38, 201n. 74, 202n. 78, nn. 80–2, 203n. 84, n. 90 relationality, divine  see under Trinity relationality, human  see under person, human Rendtorff, Trutz  228n. 28 revelation  see under God Roberts, Richard  139, 151, 227n. 5, 233n. 90 Rogers, Eugene  196n. 48, 219n. 75, 233n. 95, 239n. 53, 240n. 57 Roy, Olivier du  33, 38, 55, 56, 58, 79, 199, 205n. 6, 207n. 18, 211n. 4, 212n. 8, 219n. 68, 225n. 63 Russian Orthodoxy  see Eastern Orthodoxy salvation  31, 175 economy of  13, 19, 21, 24, 25, 30, 34, 80, 92, 180, 188–90 soteriology  44, 189 Schelling, Friedrich  245n. 36 Schindler, Alfred  198n. 28 Schleiermacher, Friedrich  4, 108, 242n. 90 Schmaus, Michael  198n. 28, 199n. 52 scholasticism  3, 28, 30, 32, 33, 56, 68, 208n. 26, 216n. 46, 222n. 28, 225n. 70, 238n. 45, 239n. 53 Schoonenberg, Piet  6 Schwöbel, Christoph  8, 203n. 83 Simplician  40, 220n. 7 Söhngen, Gottlieb  232n. 69, 241n. 68 Son  14, 22 see also under Augustine; Barth; see also Christ knowledge of  12, 13, 184 procession and mission  11, 12, 80, 184 relationship to Father  93, 95, 96, 103, 157, 167–71, 179, 182–5 relationship to Holy Spirit  20, 24, 157, 185 self-giving of God  12, 182

Tanner, Kathryn  158 Taylor, Charles  210n. 1 Tertullian  20, 23 Teske, Roland  86, 221n. 17, n. 19 Thatamanil, John  247n. 13 Thomist  see Aquinas Thurneysen, Eduard  227n. 8, 229n. 33, 230n. 51 trinitarian revival  1, 2, 5–9, 17, 27, 180 Christocentrism  12, 80 critiques of  9, 10, 178, 195n. 37 idealism  6, 11, 17, 26, 27, 29, 35, 151, 155, 156, 168, 172, 180–2, 189 personalism  7–9, 11, 17, 26, 27, 29, 35, 79, 80, 90, 102, 155–7, 162, 168, 170, 180, 181, 189, 190, 196n. 4, 197n. 20, 200n. 56 rhetoric  2, 9, 27, 28, 32–4, 44 “standard narrative”  2, 9, 10, 17, 27, 28, 31, 33, 37, 79, 90 Trinity,  agency  18, 95, 101, 181, 182, 191 appropriations  29, 49, 219n. 68 becoming  18, 169, 180, 182 in deo omnia sunt unum ubi non obviat relationis oppositio  177, 178, 181, 209n. 41 divine substance as “fourth”  29, 50, 66, 91, 96, 163, 166, 170, 181, 182, 209n. 43, 231n. 63 East vs West  21, 23, 29, 31–4, 203n. 90 economic/immanent  3, 12, 18, 22, 24, 25, 29, 30, 49, 169, 170 gift, economy of  89, 92, 94, 95, 157, 224n. 56 in history,  6, 7, 11, 18, 24–7, 29, 35, 44, 48, 197n. 18 opera trinitatis ad extra sunt indivisa  24, 25, 28, 45, 182, 208n. 29, 231n. 58, 237n. 32 patriarchal language  14, 15 see also feminism persons  7, 13–16, 18, 20, 21, 23, 25, 30, 34, 35, 44, 49, 102, 155, 175, 181, 190, 198n. 29, 200n. 57

272

INDEX plurality  2, 3, 5, 7, 10, 29, 31, 32, 187 see also trinitarian revival, personalism processions and missions  12, 96, 162, 183, 185 reciprocity, trinitarian  90, 91, 95, 101, 215n. 38 relationality  8–11, 16, 18–20, 24, 26, 35, 38, 79, 80, 91, 98, 101, 102, 105, 156, 157, 168, 178, 180–2, 190, 191 relations  14, 103, 156, 179 self-consciousness  7, 8, 13, 155, 160 self-giving  180, 181, 183, 185 self-reflexivity  95, 96, 169, 181 unity  3, 7, 10, 20, 29, 31, 32, 95, 182, 187 Western  2, 6, 7, 10, 23, 176, 198n. 38 Turner, Denys  52, 211n. 5, 213n. 20, 214n. 30, 216n. 46, n. 50

Van Bavel, T. J.  210n. 48 Victorinus, Marius  40, 214n. 36, 216n. 52, 224n. 59 Volf, Miroslav  9, 197n. 16 Webster, John  247n. 10 Wigg-Stevenson, Natalie  196n. 51 Williams, Rowan  16, 64, 90–3, 95–7, 100, 101, 106, 107, 133, 151, 155–8, 181, 210n. 51, 214n. 33, 215n. 38, 216n. 51, 219n. 71, 222n. 25, n. 33, nn. 37–8, 223n. 40, 230n. 48, 242n. 4, 243n. 7 wisdom  see under Augustine Wisse, Maarten  10, 188, 189, 195n. 46, 199n. 53, 204n. 95, 206n. 14, 209n. 39, 215n. 36, 218n. 63, n. 65, 220n. 1, 246n. 50 Zizioulas, John  7–9, 12, 19, 20, 26, 91, 156, 194n. 28

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