Per Caritatem

In a sub-section entitled, “Thomas and ‘onto-theology’”, of chapter nine of Denys Turner’s book, Faith, Reason and the Existence of God, Turner discusses possible ways that Thomas’ acceptance of a famous dictum by the Pseudo-Denys might be taken, and whether any of the interpretations can avoid falling into the error of onto-theology.  According to the Denys, “There is no kind of thing that God is.”  One way of interpreting this statement is that God’s existence is unspecified.  This would then suggest that the name “God” means existence in general, that is, existence of no particular kind.  As Turner explains, this reading might then be taken in two possible ways.  The first way would land one in pantheism, as the name “God” would simply name the “overarching category of ‘being’ of which all other beings other than God are instances” (p. 187).  In this picture, it follows that creatures are just instances of God; hence, onto-theology is unavoidable.  The second possibility would likewise be guilty of onto-theology, as here both God and creatures are instantiations of being in general.  Thomas, however, rejects these options and insists both that God is ipsum esse subsistens (and hence, not “any kind of thing”) and that this does not mean that the name “God” points us to an “empty category.”  Rather, as Turner puts it,

[t]hat we cannot form any ‘concept’ of God is due not to the divine vacuousness, but, on the contrary, to the excessiveness of the divine plenitude.  That excessiveness eludes our language because we could not comprehend it except in a surplus description which utterly defeats our powers of unification under any conception, an excessiveness which is exactly captured in the full text of the Dionysian formula, ‘There is no kind of thing which God is, and there is no kind of thing which God is not.’  If ever there were a compendious statement of the relationship between the apophatic and the cataphatic in the pseudo-Deny’s writing, this is it:  for it says that God is beyond our comprehension not because we cannot say anything about God, but because we are compelled to say too much.  In short, for the pseudo-Denys, and for Thomas following him, the ‘apophatic’ consists in the excessus of the ‘cataphatic’ (pp. 187-188). 

In reading a section devoted to Scotus in Hannah Arendt’s book, The Life of the Mind, I came across an interesting passage in which she contrasts Scotus and Spinoza with regard to freedom and necessity. 

The Will’s autonomy–”nothing else but the will is the total cause of volition” (”nihil aliud a voluntate est causa totalis volitionis in voluntate“)-decisively limits the power of reason, whose dictate is not absolute, but it does not limit the power of nature, be it the nature of the inner man, called “inclinations,” or that of exterior circumstances.  The will is by no means omnipotent in its actual effectiveness:  its force consists solely in that it cannot be coerced to will.  To illustrate this mental freedom, Scotus gives the example of a man “who hurls himself from a high place.”  Does not this act terminate his freedom since he now necessarily falls?  According to Scotus, it does not.  While the man is necessarily falling, compelled by the law of gravity, he remains free to continue “to will to fall,” and can also of course change his mind, in which case he would be unable to undo what he started voluntarily and would find himself in the hands of necessity.  We remember Spinoza’s example of the rolling stone which, if endowed with consciousness, would necessarily be prey to the illusion that it had hurled itself and was now rolling of its own free will (pp. 131-132). 

In other words, for Scotus our experience of our being aware that in the very act of doing x, I could be not doing x, is an indication that we are indeed free and not caught in a deterministic matrix.  Spinoza, in contrast, is skeptical of our experience and claims that our awareness of our desires and volitions only delude us into thinking that we are free, as we are ignorant of the causes that constantly impinge upon us and compel us to do this or that.  Arendt goes on to say with regard to the two thinkers,

Such comparisons are useful in order to realize to what an extent such propositions and their illustrations, disguised in the form of plausible arguments, depend on preliminary assumptions about necessity or freedom as self-evident facts.  To stay with the present illustration-no law of gravity can have power over the freedom guaranteed in interior experience; no interior experience has any direct validity in the world as it really and necessarily is according to outer experience and the correct reasoning of the intellect (Ibid., p. 132).

Here I am interested in what Arendt might have in mind with the first sentence in the passage above.  Might she be interpreted as suggesting a kind of Gadamerian insight, that is, that our pre-philosophical orientations to e.g. freedom or necessity shape the direction that our position will eventually take?  This seems to me a plausible read, as I cannot imagine an orthodox Christian thinker like Scotus ever embracing a deterministic position such as the one advocated by Spinoza.  I am not claiming that Scotus’ arguments for freedom depend on revelation, but I am suggesting that given his beliefs based on Scripture, the questions that he engages and the positions that he will or will not seriously embrace are in a sense set by his pre-philosophical convictions on e.g. freedom.  I tend to agree with Scotus’ position and find his arguments very convincing, so this is not a criticism of Scotus in any way.  I simply think that Gadamer’s view that our pre-judgments determine the questions that we ask and set the trajectory of our inquiries (not that these are unammendable) is highly plausible and sits well with my own experience, as well as the experience of others.  Thoughts? 

According to Augustine, Truth and Love have a reciprocal relationship, and the absence of one indicates an absence of the other.  For example, if one does not approach the Scriptures with love, then one should not expect to obtain Truth.   When we encounter differing interpretations of the same passage, the principle of charity must be our guide.  As Augustine explains,

Unless we believe that Moses meant whatever he did mean in his books with an eye to those twin commandments of love, we should make the Lord out to be a liar, by attributing to our fellow-servant a purpose which is at odds with the Lord’s teaching.  Since, then, so rich a variety of highly plausible interpretations can be drawn from those words, consider how foolish it is to rashly assert that Moses intended one particular meaning rather than any of the others.  If we engage in hurtful strife as we attempt to expound his words, we offend against the very love for the sake of which he said all those things (Confessions 12.25.35, Boulding trans.). 

In his work, On Christian Teaching, Augustine states that all valid meanings of Scripture must promote love of God and love of others.  Thus, the Scriptural exegete is not simply one who pursues truth, but one who pursues love-God is after all both Truth and Love.  Continuing his discussion in the Confessions of multiple meanings in Scripture, Augustine says the following:  “I would hope to have written in such a way that if anyone else had in the light of truth seen some other valid meanings, that too should not be excluded, but present itself as a possible way of understanding in what I had said” (Confessions, 12.26.36).  In this amazing statement, Augustine aligns himself with many contemporary hermeneutical voices (e.g., Gadamer), particularly, the idea that meanings are not to be confined solely to the intention of the author.  Commenting on this passage, Thomas F. Martin writes,

Augustine’s truth resides in the truth of the other interpreters, and vice versa.  Thus the seeming diversity and disparity of many truths can and must be held together and harmonized on a deeper level by the law of love. [...] Diversity and concord-they are not at odds, but are framed by the very law of love.  Augustine makes clear that this ‘law’ must be used rightfully.  It does not tolerate falsehood.  It is not an escape from the demands of truth.  It does, however, preclude contentiousness (12.18.27).  And it generates a multiplicity of meanings.  It is this very love that puts Augustine in communion with Moses:  there is a community of interpretations that extends from Moses to Augustine, bound together by the law of love (Martin, “Exegesis and Confessio,”  in Paffenroth and Kennedy (eds.), A Reader’s Companion to Augustine’s Confessions, p. 204).

“The interpreter of Scripture can never claim to have cornered or domesticated God’s word, it even seems to do us violence, but this is divine violence that restores us to life!  This, I would propose, is Augustine’s own way of insisting upon incommensurability, the painful abyss between Divine Word and human words.  The interpreter of the Scriptures must never lose sight of the incommensurability:  there will never be a perfect fit.  It is precisely this ‘gap’ that keeps the interpreter of Scripture humble yet driven, never claiming to have arrived at Scripture’s final truth, yet never ceasing passionately to search for even a fleeting glimpse of it” (”Book Twelve:  Exegesis and Confessio,” Thomas F. Martin, p. 199, as found in A Reader’s Companion to Augustine’s Confessions).

The following passages are taken from George Tavard’s book, The Starting Point of Calvin’s Theology.  Tavard’s work is a significant and unique contribution to Calvin studies, as it introduces readers to Calvin’s practically unknown book, Psychopannychia, which examines the immortality of the soul.  In addition to highlighting Calvin’s thorough knowledge of the Church Fathers and Scripture, Psychopannychia also reveals “Calvin’s rootedness in the medieval mystic tradition and his deep catholicity, even as he took steps that would define him as a Reformer.”[1] In chapter 10, Tavard highlights the orthodoxy of Calvin’s Trinitarian theology. 

The originality of his presentation of Trinitarian doctrine emerges from his understanding of the notion of “person” in God.  This had been a point of debate in medieval speculation.  The stream of thought that originated in the writings of Boethius and was chiefly represented by Thomas Aquinas understood personhood as “a distinct subsistence in a rational nature.”  A person is that entity which is endowed with reason and subsists in itself.  On the whole, reflection on the dogma of the Trinity has mostly followed this line of approach (p. 177). 

Another stream of thought, however, that goes back to Richard of St. Victor in the twelfth century, and was chiefly emphasized by John Duns Scotus at the end of the thirteenth, understood personhood as, seen negatively, the incommunicability, or, positively, the uniqueness, of a spiritual or rational being.  A person is that spirit which is itself and no other.  Personhood belongs to the order of existence rather than of subsistence. In the God of the Christian revelation it designates a dimension of divinity that is so unique that it cannot be communicated and shared.  That there are in God three such dimensions is at the core of the revelation of Christ.  Abba, the Father of the Logos incarnate, is neither the Son nor the Spirit, and vice versa twice repeated.  The Father is known to believers in a glass, darkly, through the further revelation of the filiation of the Second Person and the procession of the Third” (p. 177). 

According to Tavard, the 1559 version of the Institutes appears to bring these two approaches together. 

Starting with the Greek term hypostasis used in Hebrews 1:3, Calvin explains in the Latin versions:  ‘There is no doubt that he [the Apostle] designates some subsistence in which he [the Father] differs from the Son.’[2]  This is further clarified with the remark:  “Person I call a subsistence in the essence of God, which, related to the others, is distinguished by an incommunicable property” (p. 178).[3]  

However, in the French version of 1561, Calvin adds a new aspect and attempts to explain the term “subsistence” in terms of indwelling.  “This word [hypostasis] implies a subsistence residing in the essence of God, which, being related to the others, is distinct from them by virtue of an incommunicable property.”  So interestingly, for his French readers, Calvin explicates subsistence by the term “residence”-a term that is “borrowed from the well-documented spiritual experience of sensing God ‘indwelling’ in the Christian soul” (p. 178). 

Tavard goes on to say that due to Calvin’s pastoral concerns, he tended to focus his biblical commentaries in a moral direction and that this aspect of Calvin has been advanced by his predecessors more so than the mystical roots of his Trinitarian theology. 

Nonetheless, the indwelling of the three Persons in the soul was the model he followed when he explained the Father, the Son, and the Spirit as three mutual indwellings in the divine ousia.  Each Person is a specific indwelling, a residence, in this essence of God. ‘But as it [la Parole, the Word] can have been in God only as residing in the Father, this shows the subsistence of which we speak, which, though it is joined with the essence by an inseparable link, nonetheless has a special mark by which to be different from it.’[4] The divine Word subsists and dwells in God the Father.  [...] It remains that the writing of Psychopannychia had turned his theological perspective in the direction of the soul’s interiority, exactly in that inner dimension of humanity-Augustine’s ‘intimiority’-in which Christian faith and experience have located the indwelling of the Three Persons (p. 179). 

Notes

[3] Personam voco subsistentiam in Dei essential quae, ad alias relata, proprietate incommunicabili distinguitur (I, ch. 13, n. 6). 

[4] Inst. of 1559/61, I, ch. 13, n. 6. 

As I have highlighted on numerous occasions on this blog, St. Augustine is perfectly content with the idea that Scripture has multiple true meanings and that these meanings can and do go beyond the mind of the human writers of Scripture (cf. Confessions XII and Augustine’s discussions on the possible true meanings of Gen 1:1).  If this is the case, then the question naturally arises as to how one is to discern which meanings are legitimate and which are illegitimate. In my reading of Augustine, my impression is that he does not attempt to lay out hard and fast hermeneutical rules, which when applied properly, always yield the correct interpretation-an approach that strikes me as radically modern.  Rather, he suggests loose principles that allow for the possibility of many new interpretations to arise over time and, which speak to the Church in a fresh way without genuinely contradicting former interpretations (at least that is the goal).  I recently came across the following passages from On Christian Doctrine that seem to me to suggest possible ways that Augustine might answer the question of which interpretations are valid and which are not (all the while still affirming the excess of meaning in Scripture).  What do you think and what would add?  I am of course not claiming to be exhaustive here and realize that tradition plays a signifanct role for Augustine–I am simply attempting to get the conversation started. 

1. The principle of charity. If Scripture is properly understood, it will always lead to love of God and love of neighbor. In book III of On Christian Doctrine, Augustine writes, “scripture enjoins nothing but love, and censures nothing but lust, and moulds men’s minds accordingly. [...] By love I mean the impulse of one’s mind to enjoy God on his own account and to enjoy oneself and one’s neighbour on account of God; and by lust I mean the impulse of one’s mind to enjoy oneself and one’s neighbour and any corporeal thing not on account of God” (III.36-38, p. 76, trans. by R.P.H. Green, Oxford Univ. Press).
2. Multiple meanings are a gift. “Could God have built into the divine eloquence a more generous or bountiful gift than the possibility of understanding the same words in several ways, all of them deriving confirmation from other no less divinely inspired passages?” (On Christian Doctrine, III.85-86, p. 87)
3. When equivocal meanings arise, the best practice is to allow Scripture to interpret Scripture. “When one unearths an equivocal meaning which cannot be verified by unequivocal support from the holy scriptures it remains for the meaning to be brought into the open by a process of reasoning, even if the writer whose words we are seeking to understand perhaps did not perceive it. But this practice is dangerous; it is much safer to operate within the divine scriptures. When we wish to examine passages made obscure by metaphorical expressions, the result should be something which is beyond dispute or which, if not beyond dispute, can be settled by finding and deploying corroboratory evidence from within scripture itself” (On Christian Doctrine III.86-86, p. 87).