Brian Hamilton-Vise

I know that what I am asking is impossible. But in our time, as in every time, the impossible is the least that one can demand. —James Baldwin

Splintered?

Another of my classes this semester is Mystery of God, essentially on the development of the doctrine of the Trinity through history. I have never given much thought, I admit, to God’s being triune; I have never cared so much about this confession until I began participating in mass regularly. (I do remember my parents teaching me, when I was very young, that “Jesus is God but God is not simply Jesus,” but that has been more or less the extent of my trinitarian education.) By now it has become enormously important to me, and I can’t wait to begin learning the language and implications of this peculiar conviction of ours.

One of the questions I’m going in with is about the filioque, about why the West thought it so important that the Spirit proceed from both the Father and the Son. My introduction to these questions, I should say, was through Zizioulas’s Being as Communion last spring–and he made me quite sympathetic to the Eastern formulation. If the unity of God is not a person, is it then a substance? And if a substance, then have we not splintered God into something more basic than Father, Son, Holy Spirit? (Have we not, then, affirmed Eckhart’s talk of going to the “simple ground” of God, beyond Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?) I suspect there’s a better way that the West speaks of God’s unity than in terms of substance, but I haven’t yet heard it. Or maybe I have, in a hymn I was just listening to: “Therefore in celebrating your [Christ's] glory, we proclaim the love of the Father, in the light of the Spirit: burning seal which makes you one.”

10 January 2007 | Comments (3)
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» On 18 January 2007, Spencer Daniel said: 
<p>But on the other hand, if the unity of God is a person then don&#8217;t we end up with some form of Modalism or Monarchianism?  After all, if the Oneness of God is a person, that person is either the Father, or the Son, or the Holy Spirit, or someone else.  If it is one of the three but not the other two, then we have Monarchianism.  If it is someone else, then either the three persons are just aspects of the one person (and we have modalism), or the three persons are something other than the one person (and we have something even worse). </p>

<p>Perhaps &#8220;substance&#8221; should not be understood as something so radically different from the three persons.  Presumably my personhood is something distinct from my substance, but we wouldn&#8217;t say that my substance is something radically other than my personhood.  Maybe this is analogous to how we talk about God: the three persons are really distinct, but they are each the one substance.  </p>

<p>Honestly, I don&#8217;t know much about the issues here, so you&#8217;ll have to let me know what you come up with in the course of studying.</p>
» On 19 January 2007, Brian Hamilton said: 
<p>It sets up a kind of monarchy, no doubt, to say that both the Spirit and the Son proceed from the Father, that the unity of God <em>is</em> the generative communion of the Father. But surely there are ways to construe this monarchy that aren't problematic? I don’t know a thing about this history either, but these are my questions.</p>
» On 19 January 2007, Spencer Daniel said: 
<p>There may be a difference between saying that the unity of God is the generative communion of the Father and saying that the unity of God is the person of the Father.  The &#8220;of&#8221; the Father may be understood in two different ways.  First, it may be a genitive of posession &#8211; that is, the generative communion is &#8220;of&#8221; the Father in that it belongs to the Father in some way, but is not identified with him.  This identification would be the second way of interpreting the &#8220;of&#8221; &#8211; it is &#8220;of&#8221; the Father because it is the Father.  If we take the first interpretation, the Unity is constituted by something that is not a Person, and it seems to me that the same problems arise as with the Western emphasis on substance (do you know if Western theologians have traditionally denied that the unity of the substance of God issues in some special way from the Father?); if we take the latter approach, we have a Monarchianism and not a monarchy.  The difference between these two terms, I take it (without any real knowledge other than a brief glance in a dictionary of heresies) is that Monarchianism exalts one Person (usually the Father) above the others in His nature whereas the monarchy of the Father would simply be an exaltation of him in terms of his relation to the other Persons.  In other words, for Monarchianism the Father is something greater than the others but for the monarchy, he is just someone greater than the others.  I don&#8217;t know, though, this is just some thinking off of the top of my head.  I&#8217;ll be interested to know how your thought progresses on this topic.  </p>

<p>By the way, how did you get some of your stuff to be in italics?  I clicked on &#8220;Textile Help&#8221; (doesn&#8217;t &#8220;textile&#8221; mean &#8220;having to do with cloth&#8221;?), but it didn&#8217;t work.</p>

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Brian Hamilton-Vise is a Ph.D. student in moral theology at the University of Notre Dame, where his research is in the history of Christian political and economic thought. His side interests are in the development of negative theology and in recent political theory. Email him at bdhamilton@gmail.com.

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