Marshall PDF

Modern Theology 20:1 January 2004
ISSN 0266-7177 (Print)

ISSN 1468-0025 (Online)
EX OCCIDENTE LUX? AQUINAS AND

EASTERN ORTHODOX THEOLOGY
BRUCE D. MARSHALL
An ancient saying has it that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Whether or not openly invoked, this sentiment frequently fits the conduct
of theologians, and not only of warriors and politicians. As early as the fourteenth century, some in the Byzantine church already saw in Thomas
Aquinas their chief theological enemy. Protestants too have long seen in
Aquinas the most obvious theological embodiment of the errors which justified their separated existence. As Aquinass standing in Roman Catholicism
rose to that of common doctor by the late nineteenth century, Protestants
and Orthodox alike found yet greater warrant for their opposition to his
views. Since Vatican II, however, Roman Catholic theologians have to a significant extent joined in opposing Aquinas, or at least the Thomism which
seeks to represent him in each theological generation. Thus Catholic as well
as Protestant theology has for some time now made common cause with
Orthodoxy against the common doctor. Finding a shared enemy in Aquinas
has been a catalyst, and not just a result, of greater ecumenical agreement in
theology.
It has perhaps become more common in recent years to regard Augustine
as the main western counterpoint to Orthodox teaching, rather than
Aquinas. The complaints lodged against both, however, are much the same.
And Orthodox theologians over the last hundred years have often zeroed in
on Aquinas as the one in whom standard western teaching takes on that form
which most needs to be combated. Vladimir Lossky is a case in point, especially on trinitarian issues. Aquinass trinitarian theology epitomizes those
western claims about the Trinity from which, as Lossky sees it, originate not
only the separation of the eastern and western churches, but virtually all the
Bruce D. Marshall
Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University, PO Box 750133, Dallas, TX 752751033, USA
Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350
Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
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Bruce D. Marshall
errors which beset western theology.1 Sergei Bulgakov is perhaps the main
alternative in modern Orthodox theology to the neo-patristic (or perhaps
more precisely neo-Palamite) view represented by Lossky and many others.2
Yet despite being far more critical of the church fathers than Lossky, and far
more open to Orthodox use of ideas stemming from western philosophy and
theology, Bulgakov is at least as stringent in his opposition to Aquinas.3 This
polemic against Aquinas no doubt owes something to the situation of
Russian Orthodoxy in the Paris emigration, as a displaced minority in a traditionally Catholic country, whose theological life was dominated at the time
by competing neo-Thomistic interpretations of the common doctor. But it
led, in any event, to the formation of objections against Aquinas which have
become ecumenically commonplace.
The encounter between Aquinas and eastern theology began, of course,
with Thomas himself. Aquinas was regularly engaged with the doctrinal
issues in dispute between the eastern and western churches, by then divided,
above all the Filioque and cognate trinitarian matters. Here he vigorously
defended western teaching.4 But he also read widely and sympathetically in
the Greek Fathers (albeit in Latin translations), and drew on them extensively
in the Summa theologiae and other synthetic works (where Pseudo-Dionysius
and John of Damascus get the most attention), and also in his biblical commentaries (where John Chrysostom assumes particular importance).5
Here, however, I will concentrate on systematic rather than historical questions. I will focus, in fact, on a single problem, though one which appears to
lie at the heart of many objections to Aquinas. The worry, in a word, is that
the Trinity makes no difference to Aquinas. The economy of salvation, as
Aquinas understands it, would be just the same even if God were not the
Trinity.
Even here it will be necessary to be selective. I will not go into the claim
that Aquinas has a Nestorian Christology, and so supposes that the Logos,
and a fortiori the whole Trinity, are not really engaged with the saving
economy. While sometimes directed against western theology in very broad
terms, this charge seems especially ill-suited to Aquinas. He gives a remarkably vigorous and explicit account of the ancient conviction that Christ is
one: one divine person, who alone is the subject of all that the human being
Jesus does and suffers. If there were another hypostasis in Christ beyond
the hypostasis of the Word, it would follow that whatever belongs to this
human being would be verified of someone other than the Wordfor
example, to be born of the Virgin, to suffer, to be crucified, and to be buried.
Against this Thomas cites Cyril of Alexandrias fourth anathema against
Nestorius, authoritatively approved, as he understands it, by the Council of
Ephesus (431).6 Because Christ is one, conversely, the human being Jesus is
truly the subject of all that the Logos is and does: Because in Christ there
is a single supposit, hypostasis, and person . . . we can say that the Son of
man created the stars.7 The unity of Christ is no merely theoretical matter
Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004
Aquinas and Eastern Orthodox Theology
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for Aquinas. On it hangs the scandal of the gospel: the preaching of the cross
is foolishness to the world, he argues in comment on I Cor. 1:18, because it
includes something which seems impossible according to human wisdom,
namely that God dies (Deus moriatur), and that the omnipotent becomes
subject to the power of the violent. The faithful, however, see in the cross
of Christ the death of God, by which he conquers the devil and the world.8
The complaint that Aquinas makes the Trinity remote from human life and
history can, however, be reformulated in a more plausible way. The problem
has two basic parts. (1) Certainly the Holy Spirit, if not the Son, remains fundamentally absent from the economy of salvation. (2) This profoundly inadequate conception of Gods saving work stems from primordial mistakes in
the way Aquinas thinks about the persons of the Trinity themselves, and how
we are related to them.
To assess the justice of these complaints, I will look at some of Thomass
ideas about deification and grace, and then at some of his claims about the
persons of the Trinity, and the way we know them. Many of the criticisms
of Aquinas now shared by Orthodox theologians and their friends in the
west touch on some genuine element in Aquinass teaching. Whether they
are really fair to Aquinass views is another matter. But the theologically
decisive issue is whether Aquinas offers an account of the disputed questions which does better justice than the views of his critics to matters with
which both are concerned.
Deification and Grace
At least since Anselm western theology has been burdened, according to
some influential Orthodox theologians of the last century, by an overwhelmingly juridical conception of the human relationship to God. The chief
casualty of this flawed outlook is deification: the patristic concept of the
divine-human relationship, according to which the outcome of Gods saving
work in Christ is not simply the payment of ransom or the remission of guilt,
but our full conformity to God, a real participation of human beings in the
divine nature (cf. II Pet. 1:4). The chief cause of the flaw is forgetfulness of
the Holy Spirit, a failure to appreciate the Spirits unique personal reality
and saving action. And the ultimate root of this pneumatological amnesia is
the Filioque, which inevitably loses the true notion of the person of the Holy
Spirit, by relegating him to the second rank, making of him a kind of helper
or vicar of the Son.9
Deification, however, clearly has a role in Aquinass understanding of
human beings and their return to God. Gods incarnation bestows upon
human beings full participation in divinity, in which the happiness of the
human being and the end of human life truly consist. This is conferred upon
us by the humanity of Christ. Indeed the motive of the incarnation can be
summed up in the ancient adage, God became a human being in order that
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the human being might become God.10 Participation in the divine nature is
not, to be sure, the only benefit bestowed on humanity by the saving
economy which turns on the incarnation of the Word. Aquinas lists ten utilitates which flow from the incarnation, and observes that there must be many
more, exceeding the grasp of human beings in their present state.11 The
divine humility enacted in Marys womb certainly brings not only union
with God for fallen creatures, but gifts of exemplary and juridical kinds
(assuming that satisfaction is a juridical concept).12 Moreover, explicit
references to deification, while not entirely wanting, are rare in Aquinas.
Nevertheless the use he does make of these notions ties them closely to
central elements in his account of the return of the rational creature to God:
grace, adoptive sonship, and the beatific vision.13 In fact all of faiths thinking concerns these two things: the divinity of the triune God, and the humanity of Christ. And no wonder. The humanity of Christ is the way by which
we attain divinity (ad Divinitatem pervenitur).14
The Holy Spirit is the agent directly responsible for this human conformity to God, and it is the Spirits personal action which links grace, adoption, and the visio Dei. The divine light which belongs to the society of the
blessed seeing God [cf. Rev. 21:23] . . . renders them deiform, that is, similar
to God.15 The vision of God in eternity fully actualizes that participation in
the divine nature which we already now enjoy by the grace of the Holy
Spirit. The Holy Spirit who indwells a human being by grace is, after all,
the sufficient cause of eternal life. Therefore the grace of the Holy Spirit
which we have in the present life, while it is not equal to glory in its degree
of actuality (in actu), is nonetheless equal to it in power. For just this reason,
Aquinas observes, the indwelling Spirit is called the pledge of our inheritance [II Cor. 1:22].16
For Aquinas, though, II Peters talk of sharing in the divine nature links
up naturally with Pauls idea that our return to God takes the form of a
divine adoption (Rom. 8:1517, 2930; Gal. 4:17).17 In this act of adoption
we receive, by Gods wholly unmerited favor, the full inheritance which
belongs by nature to his only-begotten Sonindeed we become so fully the
Fathers children by the free grace of adoption that we are entitled, just as
much as the eternal Son, to have all that is his. To decline this title, whether
moved by humility or pride, is to refuse the grace of adoption itself, and so
to refuse a share in the divine nature: by the grace of the Holy Spirit moving
us into eternal life . . . human beings, having been made partakers of the
divine nature, are adopted as children of God (in filium Dei), to whom he
owes an inheritance by right of adoption, according to Rom. 8[:17]: if children (filii), then heirs .18
Since participation in the divine nature takes the specific form of adoption
by the Father, deification has an irreducibly trinitarian structure. It is not
conformity to an impersonal divine nature, but conformity precisely to the
Son. Adoptive sonship is a participated likeness (similitudo) of natural
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Sonship.19 By the Spirits grace we partake of the divine nature as possessed

by the Son in particular. We are conformed specifically to the filiatio of Jesus
Christ, to the characteristic and relationship eternally constitutive of his personal identity as the Son, in distinction from the Father, the Spirit, and everything else.20 To become a partaker of the divine nature for Aquinas is thus to
take on by grace the Sons unique way of being God, but not his personal
identitywe have the full likeness of his Sonship, of his own distinctive way
of possessing the divine nature, though we do not, of course, have numerically the same filiatio.
Thus the Son is, as Aquinas says, the exemplar of our adoptive participation in the divine nature. The Spirit has a different role. He is the imprimens
of the divine act of adoption, the one who impresses upon us the likeness of
the eternal Son become flesh, or, as Aquinas likes to say, the one who configures us to the Son.21 The Spirits distinctive place in the act of adoption
is to serve as direct agent of our conformity to God rather than as the
original on which we come to be patterned. The Fathers role in the act of
adoption is, of course, to do the adopting. He is the auctor of our deifying
adoption, the one who gives us the entirety of his own inheritance by the
gift of the Spirit conforming us to Jesus Christ, the natural heir.22
Characteristically for Thomas, however, the matter is more complicated
than this. In order to uphold the uniqueness of the incarnation it is necessary, he supposes, to maintain that the outcome or term of Gods adoptive
assumption of human beings is a relationship of the adopted to all three
persons of the Trinity, while the outcome of the assumption of human nature
in the incarnation is a relationship (namely hypostatic union) of that nature
to the Son alone. Assumption by the grace of adoption . . . is common to the
three persons with regard both to its principle [viz., the act which causes it]
and to its term.23 This suggests that the divine act of adoption results in
some kind of conformity to the Father and the Spirit, and not only to the
Son, though Thomas does not elaborate on what this might be. (There surely
is, as we will see momentarily, a sense in which the Spirit conforms us to
himself, and not only to the Son. But this has to do with other divine acts,
and other outcomes).
This passage need not, however, be taken as a repudiation by Thomas of
his own insistence elsewhere that the outcome of adoption is a participation
in the Sons filiatio in particular, and not only in features (such as the divine
bonitas, which he mentions here) shared by the three persons in virtue of
their common essence. As the act of adoption is common to the three
persons, yet undertaken by each in a different way, so (indeed a fortiori) the
divine essence and goodness common to the three is possessed by each in
his own particular way: the same essence which is paternity in the Father
is filiation in the Son.24 By adoption we therefore participate in the divine
nature in a way which conforms to this distinctiveand fixedpattern of
personal possession. Whatever conformity to the Father and the Spirit may
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result from the act of adoption, it cannot displace that share in the eternal
Sons own filial rights in which adoptive sonship chiefly consists.
Evidently Thomas does not think of either the act of adoption or the relations which result from it as merely appropriated (in Karl Rahners phrase)
to the divine personsif this means that the roles or places of the divine
persons in either case are interchangeable, and are attributed to one person
rather than another only out of a kind of verbal or epistemic fiction. Thomas
has a theology of appropriations, of course, but there is nothing mere
about them.25
An Objection: Created Grace
So far Aquinass theology apparently fails to give grounds for the worry that
he has forgotten the Spirit, or reduced salvation to a purely juridical relationship. On the contrary: he insists on the Fathers deification of the human
creature through adoptive union with the Son, by the personal action of the
Spirit. Orthodox theologians (and western critics of Aquinas) have often not
noticed this aspect of Thomass theology. But they might well wonder
whether he can be entirely serious about thiswhether he can mean by it
anything like an Orthodox theologian might normally meangiven the
prominence of another concept in his theology: the notion of created grace.
Grace, Aquinas often says, is a quality (specifically a disposition or habit)
created by God in the soul. This infused disposition (following Rom. 5:5)
is, to be sure, supernatural. We could not acquire it by our own efforts,
and it renders us capable of attitudes and actions beyond our natural ability
(like the love of caritas, or friendship with God).26 But, the objection runs,
this grace remains wholly a created reality, and therefore incapable of sustaining a genuine notion of deification. Interposed between God and the
human being, Thomass idea depersonalizes and reifies grace, and keeps
God at a distance. Deprived of direct contact with the persons of the
Trinityand especially with the Holy Spirit, who is supposed to be the
immediate agent of deificationwe are conformed not to God, but merely
to a creature. Created grace leaves us not with deification, but with a sort
of creaturification.27
A. N. Williams proposes radical surgery at this point. Thomas, she
observes, uses the term gratia creata only infrequently, and then in a sense
quite different from that which prompts the worries of Orthodox theologians. From this we may infer that effectively he has no doctrine of grace as
a created reality, which may be regarded as an unfortunate invention of later
Thomists.28
This, however, is to mistake a lexical observation for a conceptual point.
Thomas takes it to be obvious (manifestum) that grace includes not only
Gods own love for human beings, co-eternal with himself and so not
created, but also the good caused in the creature which follows from Gods
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love. Since uncreated love and creaturely good are linked as cause and
effect, grace refers primarily to Gods own love, but also to the gift which
love freely givesto what grace puts (ponit) in the person.29 This gift is
a form or quality, specifically the gift of a disposition (aliquod habituale
donum), which enables us to seek and love God with delight and readiness
(suaviter et prompte).30 Since it is a form, the grace which Gods love freely
imparts to the soul has to be a created reality (aliquid creatum).31 God cannot,
either in his essence or (a fortiori) in any of his persons, be the form of anything else.32 If God is to give us the highest gift, the eternal good of the creature, namely God himself, then he must, it seems, give us the created means
to receive him.33 The grace of God cannot be reduced to this created gift, but
neither can it be without the gift. Aquinass hesitation to speak of created
grace attests not his denial of this claim, but his high estimate of what the
created gift of divine love accomplishes. Grace is said to be created, in that
on account of it human beings are created, that is, established in a new existenceex nihilo, which is to say, not from merits, as Eph. 2:9 teaches: created
in Christ Jesus for good works .34
Thomass vigorous defense of the thought that grace has to include a
created component poses, however, no obstacle to his affirmation that grace
deifies us. Grace deifies not because it lacks any created reality, but because
of the kind of created reality grace is. As Aquinas often insists, gracegratia
gratum faciens, the created gift which flows from Gods unexacted love for
the creature and makes us pleasing to himconforms or conjoins the
soul to God.35 Were the created gift a kind of adhesive medium interposed
between God and the soul, like mortar between bricks, it would join the soul
and God only indirectly, rather than by contact, and so any conformity or
likeness between the soul and God would be an accident, rather than a result
brought about by grace itself. In the knowledge and love wrought by grace,
however, the rational creature . . . touches God himself.36 Grace, precisely
as created gift, does not block direct contact between God and the creature,
rather by grace we are joined to God himself, with nothing created intervening.37 This immediate contact brings about, moreover, a conformity not
only to the divine nature, but to each of the divine three in his personal
uniqueness, as we have already observed. In order for a divine person to
be sent to a human being by grace, it is necessary that there be a likening
(assimilatio) of the human being, by a gift of grace, to the divine person who
is sent.38
The created gift of grace is a medium for Thomas, all right, but evidently
not in the sense of an intermediary between God and the human being which
keeps the two apart. Rather it is the means by which they are joined. We are
not conformed to the created habit of grace, touching it instead of God; rather
this grace is our conformity itself, the impression the Spirit makes upon us
in order that we may touch God.39 The right simile here is not bricks and
mortar, but the ring and the wax. In order to come into contact with sealing
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wax, a signet ring has to make an impression upon the wax, giving the wax
its own shape at every point. Unless the ring creates this impression, there
is no contact with the wax, but only distance. The impressed form of the ring
is necessary in order to eliminate this distance, and genuinely conform the
wax to the ring. But of course the ring itself is not the form of the wax;
the rings impression is. Without the seal of the Spirit, without the created
form impressed by the outpoured Spirit, there is no contact of creature
with creatorno genuine indwelling of the divine persons, and so no
deification.40
It is not, however, the metaphysics of form that mainly motivates
Aquinass insistence on created grace, but the conviction that the
indwelling of omnipotenceof the divine personshas to have an effect on
us. So he can make his point about our union with the persons of the Trinity
without drawing on the idea of form. The coming of the person of the Word
into our human flesh, and of this incarnate Word into our souls, imparts to
us divine wisdom, a share in the Sons own knowledge of the Father. This
belongs to our inheritance as the Fathers adopted children. The wisdom in
which the incarnate Word instructs us, however, is not, and cannot be, a
merely cognitive grasp. The perception of the Son, and with him of the
Father, must be a kind of experiential knowledge (experimentalem quamdam
notitiam), a connatural affinity or likening in which the mind tastes, as it
were, the Son, and so the Father himself. By the incarnate Words instruction our minds must break out in loves affection, not because of what our
minds arewe too often only know, where we should also lovebut
because of who the incarnate Son is. He is not just any sort of word, but
one who breathes out Lovethe Holy Spirit. And just because the Holy
Spirit is Love (Amor), by the gift of love (caritas) the soul is made like the
Holy Spirit. By the gift through which the Spirit conforms us to himself, we
are fired with love for the Sons instruction, ready to taste the infinite good
the adopting Father bestowshis eternal Son, become our flesh.41
Aquinass understanding of the Spirits work, it appears, not only affirms
the deification of rational creatures, but actually sheds light on the subject.
By thinking of intimate likeness to God as a conformity, created by the
Spirits touch, to the incarnate Son, Aquinas offers a way of understanding
the common faith of east and west: that we human beings have union with
the divine persons, and so a real participation in the divine nature, while
remaining creatures, rather than members, of the Trinity.42
Trinitarian Mission and Personal Identity
Since, as we have seen, Thomas robustly asserts that creatures are immediately united to both the Spirit and the incarnate Son, he and his critics, Orthodox and otherwise, together face two problems of the broadest systematic
import. How is it that the persons of the Trinity succeed in giving themselves
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to us fully, but freely? How, in other words, do they give themselves in such
a way that they neither withhold their personal identities from us, nor lose
them in the act of the gift? Inseparable from this question about the divine
persons and their actions is an epistemic problem. How can we know the
very identities of the divine personswho they are, from all eternityas we
presumably must do if we are to know that just these persons have given
themselves to us in time? In terms now current (though I think misleading
at best; see below), we need to look at the way Aquinas conceives the economic Trinity in its relationship to the immanent Trinity. In Aquinass
own terms, we need to find a link between the temporal missions of the Spirit
and the Son from the Father, on the one hand, and the eternal processions
and relations in which the persons of the Trinity have their identities, on the
other.
Aquinas and his critics agree that we are united by the action of the Spirit
to the persons of the Trinity themselves, and not to created substitutes or
Doppelgnger of the divine persons. The Spirit, moreover, joins us to each of
the persons of the Trinity in such a way that we can know about our union
with them. Our deifying adoption can be thought by us; it can become the
content of our own true beliefs. Just because we are not joined merely to
created effects of the triune God, but to Spirit, Son, and Father, each in his
personal uniqueness, it seems that we have to grasp the very identities of
the divine persons if we are to know about this union at all. Did our salvation consist only in conformity to effects created by God, we could, at least
in principle, know about this saving union without knowing who the God
is that brought it about. In that case God would be for us, at least in this life,
simply the source of these effects, we would know not who or what. But God
has not withheld himself from us in this way. Rather he has given us, even
now, a real share in his own tri-personal life. So it must be possible for us to
know the identities of the divine persons, and not only to know what effects
they have caused.
How, then, can we get a fix on the identities of the divine persons? Given
the way the problem arisesthat God acts on us in such a way that we have
to be able to know who he is in his innermost depthstwo alternatives
apparently present themselves. Either
(1) the identities of the divine persons just consist in the acts by which they
join us to themselves,
or
(2) the identities of the divine persons do not consist in these acts, or any
act whose outcome or effect is a creature.
If (1) is correct, then the contents of at least some acts which yield a created
effect will belong to who God is; they will be constitutive of his own iden Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004
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tity. If (2) is correct, then the contents of no such act will belong to Gods
identity, and it will therefore be necessary to specify who each of the divine
persons is without introducing into his identity any reference to a temporal
act.
The considerable attraction of (1) to a good deal of recent theology no
doubt lies to a great extent in the directness with which it solves the epistemic problem. The actions of the divine persons are constitutive of their
identities; we know their actions, so we know their identities. We have no
need to worry that the persons might be different in themselves than they
are in their actions toward us. In fact there is no conceptual space in which
this worry can even arise. With that the need to link up the temporal actions
of the persons with their eternal identities drops away. By failing to include
the temporal actions of the divine persons in its account of their identities,
a good deal of traditional trinitarian theology created for itself, so the argument goes, a need which it could not meeta problem which, in the nature
of the case, could not be solved. Better to avoid the problem of how to link
action to person in God by avoiding the assumption which generates the
problem in the first place.
If (1) is correct, then deifying adoption seems like an especially good candidate for an act in which God has his very identity. Adoption presupposes,
to be sure, the divine act by which the eternal Son becomes incarnate, and
that by which the Holy Spirit is poured out upon all flesh. But the missions
of the Son and the Spirit into the world themselves aim, conversely, at our
ordered incorporation into the one nature of the three persons. If we follow
(1), then, being the auctor of adoption belongs to the Fathers identity. No
adoption, no Father; or, we could say, a Father who did not adopt us would
simply be a different person from the Father whose identity we come to
know when he makes us his children in the economy of salvation. Similarly,
being the exemplar of adoption is constitutive of the Sons identity, and being
its imprimens constitutive of the Spirits identity (borrowing, for a purpose
different from his own, Thomass way of locating the unique role of each
person in the ordered act of adoption).
The difficulty, however, is that the divine act of adoption is contingent.
God does not have to make a world at all, let alone enter it so as to unite
rational creatures to himself. The triune God would be, and so would have
his own identity, even if there were nothing other than God. The triune God
has his identity, therefore, apart from any contingent acts he may undertake.
So it seems impossible that being the auctor of the act of adoption can belong
to the Fathers identity. Whatever it takes to be the Father, whatever makes
this person the Father and no one else, he must possess quite apart from any
contingent acts he undertakes. The same goes for the Son as incarnate exemplar of our adoption, and for the Spirit as outpoured imprimens. The identity
of Father, Son, and Spirit apparently cannot consist in any action whose term
is a creature (like adoption), and not God himself (like the generation of the
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Son or the procession of the Spirit), or in any relation resulting from such an
action. Human persons may have their very identities in contingent temporal actions, though even there we need to have some principle of selection
by which we distinguish actions which are identity-constituting from those
which are not. But it seems impossible that the persons of the Trinity could
have their identities in this way. Should the identities of the divine persons
consist in actions or relations (as has, in fact, generally been supposed), then
these must be non-contingentactions and relations, that is, which involve
no reference to creatures.
At this point defenders of (1) will object that having severed the divine
persons from their contingent temporal acts in the fashion just described, it
becomes impossible to understand how they could give themselves to us
nothing other than themselves, and nothing less. This is surely the right
question to ask, and we will return to it. But it ought to be observed that (1)
itself offers no satisfying answer to this question. If being, say, the auctor of
adoption is constitutive of the Fathers identity (that is, if he cannot be the
Father without it), then we face two possibilities.
(a) The act of adoption is not contingent, and so not free. In that case our
union with his Son in the Spirit cannot be a gift from the Father, nor, mutatis
mutandis, from the Son or the Spirit. The divine three would indeed join us
to themselves, but they would not give themselves to us. Rather our union
with them would be a result they were compelled to achieve in order not to
lose themselves.
(b) The act of adoption is genuinely free and contingent. If being the auctor
of adoption belongs to the Fathers very identity, though, then he becomes
a different person by undertaking it than he was before (or to factor out temporal connotations, than he was otherwise). The same goes, once again, for
the Son and the Spirit. In that case the divine three give us a gift, all right,
but they do not give themselves to us. Rather they lose themselves in the very
attempt, becoming new and different persons in the effort contingently to
give themselves to us. And so they must do, if their contingent saving actions
toward us are also identity-constituting for them.
Just here the claim that the economic Trinity and the immanent Trinity are
identicalthe axiom of much modern trinitarian theologygenerates a
great deal of confusion (while usually associated with Karl Rahner, who formulated it in the fashion now standard, this claim was in play well before
him). If we take this axiom at face value, then the immanent Trinity must
have all, and only, the same properties as the economic Trinity. Should each
be strictly identical with the other, there simply is no distinction between the
immanent and the economic Trinity. That is simply what it means for A to
be identical with B. In that case the properties of the economic Trinity are
the properties of the Trinity, period. And then (1) is, indeed, our only
recourse in thinking about the connection between the divine persons and
their actions.
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Understandably, if inconsistently, many theologians lose their nerve at this

point, without really being able to embrace the alternative, namely (2). So
they try to find a middle course. Yes, some argue, the economic Trinity is the
same as the immanent, but the immanent is not the same as the economic
as though B = A could be true, while A = B was false. Others say that the
immanent Trinity is identical with the economic, setting aside, however,
the properties which the triune God takes on by his economic action. But if
B = A, we cannot specify As properties by setting aside any of Bs.43 Taken
at face value, as in (1), the much-credited identity axiom seems false, but
taking it otherwise just generates incoherence.44
To be sure, one might take the axiom to mean that the persons of the Trinity
are identical in one respect, but not in another. In particular, we could say
that the persons themselves are the same economically (in relation to the
world) as they are immanently (were there no world), but their actions are
not the same in the two cases. Following this path, of course, amounts to
denying that the economic and immanent Trinity are, properly speaking,
identical. With that we do not so much interpret the standard axiom as reject
it. And thereby we rightly give up the quest for a middle course between
(1), which consistently draws a conclusion implied in the axiom, and (2),
which rejects that conclusion.
We return, then, to the thought that no temporal act or relation to creatures is part of what it takes to be Father, Son, or Spiritwe return, that is,
to (2). In that case, if we are to know who the persons of the Trinity are,
we need to be able to isolate some feature or characteristic of each (perhaps
several) which is not a temporal action or its outcome. But the very acts by
which they join us to themselves (and perhaps other temporal acts as well),
while not constitutive of their identities, have to give us an adequate basis
upon which to take this step. We need, as it were, to be able to precipitate
out those non-contingent features in which the identities of Father, Son, and
Spirit consist, and which, by joining us to themselves, they make known to
us.
In western theology there is a well-established way to do this. The basic
idea, on which there are a number of variants, is that a divine person can be
sent into the world only by one from whom he eternally proceeds. In scriptures narrative of salvation, some persons of the Trinity are clearly sent
by others. This sending, moreover, seems to have a definite pattern to it: the
Father sends the Son, and both the Father and the Son send the Spirit; the
Spirit sends no divine person, and the Father is never sent. So, for example,
the Father sends the Son to be the incarnate exemplar of our adoptive sonship,
and Father and Son together send the Spirit into our hearts to be the imprimens of that adoption.
In this pattern of missions we can perceive the origin of one divine person
from another. For how is it that, in God, one person is in a position to send
another? It cannot be due to any inherent superiority, as a master sends a
35
servant. Nor, conversely, can it be a matter of the greater heeding the word
of the lesser, as when an advisor is said to send a king into battle.45 The
only remaining possibility is that one divine person is able to send another
because the one he sends originates from him: In God [mission] implies
only a coming forth by way of origin, which takes place in full equality.46
Thus the missions of the persons display for us the specific order in which
one originates from another.47 The Father sends the Son, who must therefore
originate from him, while Father and Son both send the Spirit, who must
therefore originate from both. The Father, unsent, must be unoriginate. This
order of origin in turn makes available to us the unique identity of each
person of the Trinitythe primordial characteristics without which each
would not be the one he is.48
Like most modern Orthodox theologians, Lossky is concerned to steer well
clear of (1). He rejects any suggestion that the creative and redeeming work
of the Trinity is other than free and contingent, any confusion of oikonomia
with theologia.49 At the same time, he is an influential opponent of any trinitarian theology in which essential unity takes priority over personal diversity.50 He mistakenly thinks this puts him at odds with Thomas Aquinas.
Nonetheless, one might expect a theologian with these twin convictions to
embrace, as Aquinas does, some version of the idea that mission displays
origin, and origin gives personal identity. Yet Lossky apparently repudiates
any thought that the order among the persons of the Trinity exhibited by the
economy of salvation gives us access to their inmost personal identities.
In . . . the manifestation of divinity, one can establish the order of the
persons, the taxis. But one must not, strictly speaking, attribute this to
the trinitarian existence in itself, in spite of the monarchy and the
causality of the Father. These do not confer upon him any hypostatic
primacy over the other two hypostases, since he is a person only because
the Son and the Spirit are also.51
On this score Lossky is perhaps not entirely consistent. At times he seems to
say that the economic taxis or order among the persons does yield knowledge of who they are, and that this knowledge could come in no other way.52
He even allows that we can strip away every economic attribution from
the persons of the Trinity, and so decant the unique relational characteristics of the three (paternity, filiation, and procession)as long as the mystery
of the Trinity in unity remains intact.53 This puts him on the road Aquinas
wants to travel. But his apparently opposed insistence that we cannot (as it
is often put) read off the identities of the divine persons from their presence and action in timenot simply that we lack the wit to do it, but that
there is no basis in God for doing ithas found repeated echoes in recent
Orthodox theology.54
Lossky has multiple motives here. He does not contest the traditional take
on scriptures pattern of temporal missions, where the Father and the Son
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both send the Holy Spirit, who sends neither. Given this pattern, the principle that a divine person can only be sent in time by another from whom he
originates in eternity implies the Filioque. Since the late nineteenth century
Orthodox theologians have on occasion regarded the Filioque as a tolerable
(if mistaken) theological opinion. Lossky wholly rejects it, not only as a grave
and church-dividing doctrinal error, but as the sure index of an impersonal
essentialism chronic in the west, and ruinous of its trinitarian theology.55 But
Lossky also wants to combat an overreaching rationalism which puts the
God of the philosophers and scholars at the heart of the living God.56 In
trinitarian theology this attempt at a conceptual domestication of the divine
fails to appreciate that the relations of origin in God (paternity, filiation, and
procession) do not constitute the personal identities of Father, Son, and
Spirit. Instead they are signs of the diversity of the persons, which in itself
is an absolute that finally remains inexpressible.57
For Aquinas, then, the triune God is entirely free to undertake a saving
economy which includes temporal missions, or not to. But if there are to be
any temporal missions, they will have to follow a fixed pattern prescribed
by the relations of origin among the persons of the Trinity. A position like
Losskys agrees that the saving missions of the Son and the Spirit from the
Father are free and contingent. But he apparently rejects any necessary relationship between this contingent pattern of temporal missions and the noncontingent order in which the Son and the Spirit proceed eternally from the
unoriginate Father.
This is to say, though, that any order of origination among the persons of
the Trinity is compatible with any pattern of temporal missions. That the
Father begets the Son and that the Spirit proceeds from the Father (as third
person rather than second) does not require that the Father can send the Son
and Spirit, but cannot be sent by them. Still less does it establish any fixed
relationship of possible mission between the Son and the Spirit. And this
means that we have no way of knowing, from the pattern of temporal missions which actually comes to pass, what relationships of origin may obtain
among the divine persons. Jesus obeys the Father, and undertakes his
journey to the cross as a mission offered in love to the Father. But for all we
can tell from the relationships exhibited by the history of salvation, Jesus
might actually be the Father or the Spirit incarnate, rather than the Son. That
Jesus calls the one who sends him Father, and himself Son, fails to bridge
this gap. Losskys point, indeed, is precisely that the relationships of fatherhood and sonship on display in the economy of salvation do not require
an eternal relationship in which one comes forth from the other. Or so it
appears, at any rate, when he pursues the line of thought about the economic
taxis of the persons which succeeds in generating disagreement with
Aquinas.
We might, however, read a position like Losskys differently, taking our
cues at a point where he seems to agree with Aquinas: his suggestion that
37
we can decant relational properties of the divine persons from their economic attributions. The idea would be that while the economic pattern of
missions does not conform to the order of origination among the divine
persons, it does reflect relational properties unique to each person. This would
work better for the Son than the Spirit. In the relationships of fatherhood and
sonship which the economy exhibits we can perceive non-contingent relational characteristics which make it appropriate for one person (the Father)
to send, and the other (the Son) to be sent. How the mission of the Holy
Spirit from both the Father and the Son reflects a characteristic (procession)
which refers to the Father alone remains less clear.
Among Orthodox theologians Dumitru Staniloae takes a different view,
and insists on the need for a reliable link between the way the persons are
in the economy and the attributes they would have even apart from the
economy, in their eternal theologia.58 On this score he makes the influential
suggestion (under the guidance of several late Byzantine theologians) that
the temporal economy of the persons conforms not, once again, to their order
of origin, but to a fixed and non-contingent order in which one shines forth
from or manifests the other. In particular, the Holy Spirit originates from
the Father alone, but comes forth eternally to rest on the Son, who rejoices
in this gift. As such the Spirit shines forth from the Father, manifesting the
Fathers love for the Son, and equally shines forth from the Son, manifesting the Sons love for the Father. The temporal abiding of the Spirit on
the Son, and the Spirits temporal shining forth from the Son as well as
from the Father, reflect this fixed inner-divine order of abiding and manifestation, without requiring that the Spirit actually originate from the Son.
In this way Staniloae tries to establish explicitly what Lossky only hints at:
a basis in God for tying the temporal missions of the persons to the eternal
order among them, without implying the hated Filioque.
Does this approach account for our access to the identity of the divine
persons by way of their temporal missions? The strategy is to interpose a
middle term between the missions of the persons and their identities which
links the two without requiring mission to follow the order of origin. Presumably this third term either gives us identity-constituting features of the
divine persons, or it does not. In each case problems arise.
Losskys version of the strategy seems to take the latter course, especially
when he holds that the relational characteristics about which the missions
might teach us are signs of the personal diversity of the three, rather than
features in which their identities actually consist. This simply relocates the
problem which leads one to postulate a middle term in the first place. Rather
than wondering what the pattern of missions has to do with the identity of
the persons, we are now left to wonder what the relational characteristics of
fatherhood, sonship, and procession have to do with their identities. As
before, the two might vary independently of one another. If paternity, for
example, is not in some way constitutive of the Fathers identity, then for all
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Bruce D. Marshall
we know paternity might actually be a property of the Holy Spirit. In fact

Lossky seems to suggest as much when he says that the Father would not
be a person without the Son and the Holy Spirit. If the Fathers existence as
a person, and therefore his personal identity, depends in some way on the
Son and the Spirit, then one or both of them presumably has the property of
paternity, or something like it, with respect to the Father: Credo in Patre, qui
procedit ex Filio Spirituque.59 We could avoid such unwanted results if we had
a way of specifying what the Fathers identity consists in, and of being sure
we were rightthat is just the problem we are trying to solve. But since
Lossky regards personal identity as finally an inexpressible absolute, the
problem may simply be insoluble on the terms in which he poses it. In the
end, Lossky has considerable difficulty accounting for how the persons of
the Trinity give themselves to us so that we actually know who they are, and
that they have succeeded in making this supreme gift to us. In fact it seems
that on a view of this sort, the divine persons cannot help withholding themselves from us. This seems like a high price to pay for wanting to exclude
the Filioque a priori.
Staniloae takes the other course. He seems to take the relations of manifesting and being manifested by, and the relation of shining forth from,
as identity-constituting features of the persons to whom they belong.60 By
reflecting these relationships the temporal missions of the divine persons
would let us in on their eternal personal identities. Here the difficulty lies in
keeping the note of origin out of the relationships that the temporal presence
of the persons displays to us. For Staniloae the Spirit shines forth from the
Son and manifests the Son to the Father, and the Father to the Son. If
shining forth from the Son and manifesting the Son belong to the Spirits
own identity, then he cannot be without themno shining forth from the
Son, no Holy Spirit.61 But this means that the being of the Spirit depends on
relationships he has to the Son, as the one from whom he shines forth, and
the one whom he manifests. And to depend for your being on a relationship
to another just is to originate from that person (certainly in God, where there
is no question of dependence other than that involving eternal origin). So it
looks like the difference between Staniloaes view and Aquinass, between
the Spirit shining forth from the Son and originating from the Son, is
merely verbal. In the Trinity, personal identity seems very deeply bound up
with origin. Unlike Lossky, Staniloae apparently accepts this, and thereby
succeeds in answering the question of how we can know the eternal identities of the divine persons. But he does so by pretty much agreeing with
Aquinas: mission displays origin, and origin gives personal identity.62
Objection (1): Does Aquinas have the Pattern of Missions Right?
Contemporary trinitarian theologies often take sharp issue with the view of
trinitarian procession and personal identity that we have just been examin Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004
39
ing in light of standard Orthodox criticisms. They object to this common

western triadology (from which, as Aquinas boldly puts it, we can infallibly infer the Filioque) not by denying that mission displays origin, but by
contesting the pattern of missions on which the triadology is based.63 To
suppose that the Holy Spirit is only sent by the Son, and in no way sends or
acts upon the Son, is simply to misread scriptures narration of Gods saving
economy. The Spirit reposes and acts upon Jesus throughout the course of
his saving mission: in his conception, his baptism, his journey into the
wilderness, his proclamation and ministry, his passion and resurrection. To
ignore all this in favor of the Spirits mission from the Son results in that
neglect of the Spirit unhappily characteristic, so the objection goes, of
western theology as a whole. It produces artificial clarity about the order of
origin among the persons at the expense of the Spirits equality with the Son
in the economy of salvation, and in the triune life itself. We need to acknowledge the fully reciprocal character of the relation between the Son and the
Spirit in the economy, and therefore in the order of origin: the Son must be
thought of as originating eternally in, or perhaps even from, the Spirit.
We cannot undertake a full treatment of this important question here. Two
observations will have to suffice. One concerns Aquinas, the other the logic
of the matter.64
Contrary to what one might expect, Aquinas insists that the Spirit does
send the Son. Now the Lord God and his Spirit have sent me, Isaiah
declares (48:16), and Aquinas applies this typologically to the mission Christ
receives from the anointing Spirit to proclaim the gospel (cf. Luke 4:18).
There is thus a scripturally mandated sense in which a divine person is sent
by another from whom he does not originate.65
Lest this be thought to eliminate the needed connection between order of
mission and order of origin, Aquinas observes that the Spirits capacity to
send the Son is to be referred to the human nature in virtue of which he
has been sent.66 This does not mean that the Spirit somehow sends the
human nature rather than the person of the Son. Thomass consistent rejection of Nestorianism bars this reading, but so do his explicit instructions
about how to interpret Christological locutions like secundum quod homo and
secundum humanitatem (in virtue of being man or on account of the human
nature). They do not specify the subject to which a predicate (in this case,
sent by the Holy Spirit) applies, but that in virtue of which it applies to
the subject.67 The Holy Spirit genuinely acts upon the incarnate Son, but only
in virtue of his incarnation. So if to send means to bring about (or have a
distinctive role in bringing about) a created state of affairs which is true of
a divine person (such as proclaims the gospel), then the Spirit sends the
Son. But if to send means to determine that this state of affairs will be true
of a divine person, then only one from whom this person originates can send
him. In that sense the Spirit cannot send the Son, but the Son can send the
Spirit.68 Jesuss proclamation of good news to the poor at the Spirits insti Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004
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Bruce D. Marshall
gation shows that he is the eternal Son, sent into the world by the Father
from whom he originates.
Thus Aquinas strives to save both the scriptural data regarding the
sending of the divine persons and the principle that these data, rightly read,
disclose to us their eternal origin and identity. Still, one senses the force of
the objection that this results in a basically unidirectional reading of the relationship between Christ and the Spirit, a kind of Christological domestication of the scriptural witness to the Spirits work. This may prompt the
thought that the connection between mission, origin, and identity needs to
be reconceived. On this score, however, our options are limited.
(1) Assume that the relationship of mission between Christ and the Spirit
is mutual or reciprocal rather than unidirectional. This presents us with two
possibilities:
(a) We could drop the idea that mission displays origin. The economy
exhibits a mutual pattern of mission between the Son and the Spirit, but
gives us no basis for deciding which of the two, if either, originates from the
other. When it comes to the divine three, however, personal identity apparently depends on origin (though there is controversy as to how). That being
the case, leaving origin undecided leaves identity undecided, and so
unknownthe pattern of temporal missions fails to disclose the inmost identities of the persons after all. We can try to eliminate the cost of leaving origin
undecided by rejecting the dependence of identity upon it. But this implies
that the identity of the Son (for example) would be unchanged if he did not
originate from the Father. What starts out seeming like laudable epistemic
modesty soon exacts a heavy toll.
(b) We could hold on to the principle that mission displays origin. In that
case, since the Son and the Spirit send each other, they must originate from
each other. But this seems impossible. To originate from another is to depend
for your total being on another (in Aquinass terms, to receive complete esse
from another). I cannot originate from another who cannot exist unless I do,
and, moreover, unless I give him existenceif there be any such, as in God
there are. So if the Spirit originates from the Son, then the Son cannot originate from the Spirit, and conversely.
(2) Assume that the scriptural pattern of missions is, at root, unidirectional. This also presents us with two possibilities, depending, once again,
on whether we reject or accept the principle that mission displays origin.
(a) We might hold that the Son sends the Spirit, and is not sent by him,
but deny that this has any implications for the eternal origin of one from the
other. This is the traditional position of Eastern Orthodoxy; we have already
considered some of the perplexities to which it gives rise. Similar difficulties
would attend the converse suggestion that the Spirits sending of the Son
has no implications regarding origin.
(b) We might, finally, hold that the pattern of contingent temporal missions is unidirectional, and does inform us as to personal origin and iden Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004
41
tity. In that case we could either (i) give priority in the pattern of mission to
the Holy Spirit, sending Christ, or (ii) give priority to Christ, sending the
Holy Spirit. The first implies that the Sons origin and identity in some way
depend on the Spirit, as trinitarian theologies now sometimes suggest. The
second implies that the Spirits origin and identity depend on the Son. This
is Thomass view, and the one traditional in the west, though with a number
of variations.
Seizing either one of the alternatives in (b) will require us to account for
the scriptural data which supports the other side. Thomas does this by
appealing consistently to the Sons incarnate condition as the reason why the
Spirit can genuinely act upon him. He thereby hopes to do justice to the
witness of scripture regarding the Spirits action upon the Son, without
allowing this simply to reverse the basic direction of the temporal missions:
the Spirit acts upon the Son, but does not send the Son in the sense in which
he is sent by the Son. If, by contrast, we give priority to the Spirit in the
pattern of missions, to what will we appeal in order to account for scriptures witness to the Sons action upon the Spiritfor example, his pouring
out of the Spirit on all flesh (cf. Acts 2:33)? We might be able to locate a
feature of the Spirits economic condition which promises to account for this,
without surreptitiously turning the Sons action upon the Spirit into a
mission in the full sense, which (i) is committed to avoiding (the Spirits selfeffacing kenosis, for example). Then the whole issue of mission and origin
will come down to which approach most thoroughly and consistently
accounts for the full range of scriptural data.69
In any case we cannot settle for a standoff between these two opposed
ways of assigning priority in the pattern of missions. That would simply
return us to the unhappy alternatives in (1). So while Aquinass way of
accounting for the scriptural witness to the missions of the Son and the Spirit
does not seem entirely satisfactory, it is less than clear that there is a coherent alternative which is more satisfactory. So it is surely plausible to pursue
Thomass basic strategy (2.b.ii, in the schema just sketched), and attempt to
deal with the complexities of the scriptural witness more effectively than he
does.70
Objection (2): Could Any of the Three Become Incarnate?
A second objection to Aquinass way of thinking about the connections
between mission, origin, and personal identity in God is that Aquinas
himself seems not to believe it. The now commonly alleged proof of this is
Aquinass contention that any of the three divine persons could have become
incarnate. That a divine person takes flesh is the work of Gods power alone,
which is numerically the same for all three persons. Therefore, Aquinas
argues, divine power could have united human nature to the person of
Father or of the Holy Spirit, just as it united that nature to the person of the
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Son.71 Here, so the objection goes, Aquinas makes plain a baffling conviction: the persons of the Trinity are completely interchangeable in the
economy of salvation. Each could assume the place ascribed to another in
the scriptural narrative of redemption, and the narrated economy would
remain the same. If Jesuss way from the manger to the cross could transpire
unchanged were it the incarnate life of the Father or the Spirit rather than
the Son, then the relations among these three displayed by Jesus life can tell
us nothing about their relations of origin. So the persons of the Trinity cannot
give themselves to us after all. They might have their identities in particular relations of origin to each other, but we could never know what these
relations are from their presence and mission in time.
This is the conclusion, we have argued, to which Lossky is driven. But at
least he intends otherwise. Aquinas appears explicitly to embrace a complete
disconnection of theologia from oikonomia, and in so doing reflects the
common mind of western theology. We end where we began: the Trinity
makes no difference; the economy of salvation would be just the same
without it.
Aquinas makes it plain, though, that his theology of trinitarian missions
has to interpret his decision regarding this scholastic topos on divine power
and incarnation, and not conversely. Any divine person could become incarnate. But not just any divine person could be sent by another, and not just
any divine person could send another. For Thomas this pattern of missions
blocks the inference upon which the objection depends. Any divine person
could become incarnate, but this incarnation, this history of salvation, could
come about only by the enfleshment of the Son. Jesus is sent by one divine
person, and sends another. If Jesus is himself a divine person he can, therefore, only be the Son. The triune God is free to enact an economy of salvation, or not, an incarnational economy, or not, and an economy of the Sons
incarnation, or not. But the economy enacted by Jesuss journey from
Bethlehem to Golgotha, Emmaus, and Pentecost requires the incarnation of
the Son. The economy of salvation which actually comes to pass would not
remain unchanged were another person to become incarnate. It would be
unimaginably different.
This follows from the logic of the missions as Aquinas conceives them, but
he is in any case quite explicit about it. The Father, since he is unoriginate,
cannot be sent.72 This means that if the Father had become flesh, his incarnation, and the human life he might have led as God incarnate, could not
have the character of a mission. The Father could be born of a woman,
Thomas observes, but he could not be sent into the Virgins womb, since there
is no one who could send him. He is not from another, and without that
incarnation would not rise to the level of a mission (non sufficeret ad rationem
missionis).73 Of course the total existence of the Son of God become our flesh,
and not simply his acceptance of it, has the meaning of a mission. An incarnate Father could not set his face toward Jerusalem as a mission from
43
another, could not accept the cross in Gesthemane as an act of obedience to

another, could not yield up his life as an offering to another. An incarnate
Father could not be the exemplar of our adoption, the firstborn among many
brothers and sisters.74 An incarnate Father could not, for Aquinas, be Jesus.
There belong to [the Son] entreaty of the Father, making satisfaction to the
Father, and other actions of this kind which exhibit the Fathers authority.75
The Fathers authority with regard to the Son is simply his capacity, rooted
in relations of origin between the Son and himself, to send the Son while
himself remaining unsent.76 By acting in ways which make plain the authority of another over him, by whom he is sent, Jesus shows that he cannot possibly be the Father.
The same goes, though Aquinas is less concerned to make the point explicitly, for the possibility an incarnate Spirit. A Spirit who became flesh could
be sent, unlike an incarnate Father, but he still could not be Jesus. The risen
Jesus, after all, sends the Holy Spirit; he pours out the Spirit on all flesh. Jesus
therefore has the capacity to send the Spirit, and for Aquinas, as we have
seen, this capacity implies origin. For that reason it is irreversible. The Spirit
might have become incarnate, but a risen Spirit could not pour out the Son,
still less the Father, on all flesh. In fact he would have no one to send. An
incarnate Spirit could not do what Jesus does, and so he could not be Jesus,
any more than an incarnate Father could.
Counterfactual reflection of the kind Aquinas pursues here aims not to
satisfy a merely speculative urge, but to clarify the situation that actually
obtains. By showing that any of the divine persons might have become incarnate, Aquinas does not seek to obliterate the possibility of knowing the
triune God from the scriptural economy. On the contrary, his argument
brings into sharper relief the bond of mission to personal identity, the necessity that any possible economy of salvation take shape in conformity to
the non-contingent identities of the divine persons. He seeks to isolate the
real reason why the Son alone becomes incarnate: not because this
was the only incarnational economy of salvation available to God, but
because the economy of salvation we actually have could have been realized
in no other way. The argument thus underscores, rather than undermines,
the triune Gods overwhelming commitment to the particular redemptive
design which unfolds in scripture, out of all the possibilities available to him.
In the saving economy which Jesuss deeds and words enact, incarnation
is a mission, and this certainly belongs to the Son alone, and not to the
Father.77
Unde Lux?
Aquinas seems to offer considerable resources for coming to grips with problems Christian theologiansOrthodox, Catholic, and Protestant alikenow
commonly regard as fundamental. This suggestion could be extended to a
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number of areas beyond those discussed here. Rather than regarding him
merely as their common enemy, theologians across the denominational spectrum have reason to look to him for light. Not, of course, that Aquinas should
become everybodys common doctor. But many might find here a way
forward on matters they care aboutlight from the west.
Whether this is likely to happen anytime soon is another question. Official dialogue among the divided confessions has come into very heavy
weather, and smooth sailing is nowhere on the horizon. Theology at all levels
continues to be done in the service of denominational and other partisan loyalties, and appeals to Aquinas inevitably bring with them a raft of dubious
but stubborn associations. Yet the light has its own stubborn way of shining,
and the theological mind of seeking it, in spite of everything.
NOTES
1
See La Procession du Saint-Esprit dans la doctrine trinitaire orthodoxe, in A limage et

la ressemblance de Dieu (Paris: Aubier, 1967), pp. 6793 (ET The Procession of the Holy
Spirit in Orthodox Trinitarian Doctrine, in John H. Erickson and Thomas E. Bird, eds., In
the Image and Likeness of God [Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimirs Seminary Press, 1985], pp.
7196); Essai sur la thologie mystique de lglise dorient (Paris: Aubier, 1944) (ET The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church [London: James Clarke, 1957]), especially chapters 25.
Unless cited only from an English version, all translations are my own.
2 On this see Paul Valliere, Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov: Orthodox
Theology in a New Key (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2000);
cf. my review in Modern Theology Vol. 19 no. 2 (April, 2003), pp. 305309.
3 Note, e.g., Bulgakovs criticisms of Aquinas on creation (his view betrays an anthropomorphic conception of God which constitutes the fundamental defect of Western theology in general and of Thomism in particular), divine and human agency (Aquinas and
Thomism make determinism the universal principle of ontology), and the eucharist (transubstantiation as characterized by Aquinas is a rationalistic, groundless determination
that does not have any direct relation to the Christian faith, and as such an influence that
must be completely overcome in Orthodox theology). The cited passages are, respectively,
from The Bride of the Lamb, trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002), pp. 32, 205; The Eucharistic Dogma, in The Holy Grail and the
Eucharist, trans. Boris Jakim (Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Books, 1997), pp. 79, 69.
Bulgakovs attitude toward Roman Catholicism hardened considerably after a near
embrace of the Catholic Church, during his sojourn in the Crimea from late 1918 to late
1922. Upon his exile from Russia Bulgakov soon came to reproach himself for having succumbed to the bolshevik-catholic temptation, and for having been prepared to betray
Orthodoxy at the hour of Golgotha (as Bernard Marchadier relates, citing passages from
Bulgakovs journals, in the Introduction to his translation of Bulgakovs Sous les remparts
de Chersonse [Geneva: Ad Solem, 1999], p. 15. This work, which Bulgakov subsequently
withheld from publication, fully details his sympathy for Roman Catholicism during his
time in the Crimea.). Bulgakovs attitude toward Anglicanism was much more favorable,
to the point of proposing, controversially, limited intercommunion between Orthodox and
Anglicans. See By Jacobs Well, in James Pain and Nicholas Zernov, eds., A Bulgakov
Anthology (London: SPCK, 1976), pp. 100113, and Bryn Geffert, Anglicans and Orthodox
between the Wars (Ph.D. Diss., University of Minnesota, 2003), especially pp. 172204.
4 Aquinas will argue directly against the teaching of contemporary Byzantine theology, at
times sharply. See, e.g., De Potentia 10, 4, c, in fin.: thosethe Greekswho say that the
Holy Spirit is from the Father through the Son, yet not from the Son, do not understand
their own words (propriam vocem ignorant), since the one necessarily implies the other (S.
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Thomae Aquinatis Quaestiones Disputatae, vol. 2, ed P. Bazzi et al. [tenth edition, Turin/Rome:
Marietti, 1965], p. 267b). Aquinass treatise Contra errores Graecorum, while it defends (in
part II) western teaching on the Filioque, papal primacy, the unleavened bread, and purgatory, is mainly an interpretation in meliorem partem of a collection of texts from the Greek
Fathers (subsequently recognized to be highly defective), to which Aquinas responded at
the request of Pope Urban IV. In it one should not seek an encounter of great breadth
between the respective positions of the Greeks and the Latins (Jean-Pierre Torrell, Initiation saint Thomas dAquin: Sa personne et son oeuvre [Fribourg: Editions Universitaires
Fribourg Suisse & Paris: Cerf, 1993], p. 180. ET Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 1: The Person
and His Work, trans. Robert Royal [Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press,
1996], p. 124).
In his commentary on the Gospel of John, for example, Aquinas consistently orients himself
by appealing to the interpretations of both Augustine and Chrysostom, usually attempting
not to harmonize them, but rather to show that the text admits both meanings (though he
occasionally concludes that Chrysostoms interpretation is implausible). This commentary
draws heavily on the treatment of John in the earlier Catena Aurea, where (in the work as
a whole) Aquinas cites 57 Greek Fathers, and only 22 Latin ones (cf. Torrell, Initiation,
p. 203; ET p. 139).
Summa theologiae III, 2, 3, c; on the unity of Christ see especially III, 17, 1 (From here on I
will cite the Summa theologiae by part number only; e.g., III = Tertia pars. I follow the Latin
text in the Blackfriars edition, 60 vols. [London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 196473]). For Cyrils
anathema in the context of the Council of Ephesus, see DH 255.
Super Evangelium S. Ioannis Lectura, ed R. Cai (fifth edition, Turin/Rome: Marietti, 1952),
(caput) 3, (lectio) 2 (no. 468).
In I Cor. 1, 3 (no. 47). Raphael Cai, O. P., ed., S. Thomae Aquinatis Super Epistolas S. Pauli
Lectura, vol. 1 (8th edn, Turin/Rome: Marietti, 1953).
Vladimir Lossky, Rdemption et dification, in A limage et la ressemblance de Dieu, pp.
95108; here: p. 101 (ET, p. 103). Cf. Dumitru Staniloae, Theology and the Church, trans. Robert
Barringer (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimirs Seminary Press, 1980), pp. 1315, 107108.
III, 1, 2, c. Aquinas attributes this patristic commonplace to Augustine, though the source
turns out to be spurious.
III, 1, 2, c.
Cf. III, 1, 2, c; ad 2.
A. N. Williams gathers the explicit texts on deification in the Summa theologiae and takes
them as basic to interpreting the whole enterprise of the Summa: The Ground of Union: Deification in Aquinas and Palamas (New York, NY: Oxford, 1999). The texts themselves have long
been noticed; cf. already Henri Rondet, Gratia Christi: Essai dhistoire du dogme et de thologie dogmatique (Paris: Beauchesne, 1948), pp. 198199, 208209. For a rich collection of
passages on deification and cognate ideas from Thomass biblical commentaries, with
running annotations, see Luc-Thomas Somme, Thomas dAquin, La divinisation dans le Christ
(Geneva: Ad Solem, 1998). Giles Constable locates the notion of deification in the complex
discussion of likeness to Christ in the medieval west; see The Ideal of the Imitation of
Christ, in Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995), pp. 143248; on Aquinas see especially pp. 237238, 245.
Compendium theologiae I, 2 (no. 3). Raymund Verardo, ed., S. Thomae Aquinatis Opuscula
Theologica, vol. 1 (Turin/Rome: Marietti, 1954), p. 14a.
I, 12, 5, c; cf. ad 3; 6, c.
All from III, 114, 3, ad 3.
Aquinass theology of adoptive sonship has generated an extensive modern literature. For
a recent presentation of many pertinent texts in Thomas, plus an account of the modern
debate, see Luc-Thomas Somme, Fils adoptifs de Dieu par Jsus Christ (Paris: Vrin, 1997).
III, 114, 3, c.
III, 23, 4, c. Adoptive sonship is in a certain way a likeness of eternal Sonship (23, 2, ad
3; cf. 23, 1, ad 2; 24, 3, c).
On taking the relation of filiatio as a property or characteristic constitutive of the Son as a
particular person, cf. I, 30, 2, ad 1 (it is one of the relational properties in God which are
quasi personas constituentes; 32, 3, c drops the quasi). Since whatever has accidental
existence in created realities has substantial existence when carried over into God (28, 2,
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c), the relation of filiatio and the property of possessing it must alike be thought of as themselves having substantial existence. Thus subsistent Sonship is the person of the Son (30,
2, c; cf. 41, 6, c). Thomass idea that the divine persons are constituted by opposed relations, which must be thought of as subsistent, is often taken to be the scholastic understanding of the trinitarian persons. But this idea was in fact extensively contested in the
Middle Ages (see below, note 48).
See De Potentia 10, 4, c (Quaestiones Disputatae, vol. 2, p. 267a); Super Ioannem, 14, 6 (no.
1957).
On Father, Son, and Spirit as, respectively, auctor, exemplar, and imprimens in the divine act
of adoption, cf. III, 23, 2, ad 3.
III, 3, 4, ad 3.
I, 42, 6, ad 3; cf. 42, 4, ad 2. For similar remarks regarding the Spirit, cf. 30, 2, ad 4; 37, 1,
ad 4.
On this see Bruce D. Marshall, What Does the Spirit Have to Do?, in Matthew Levering,
ed., Reading John With St. Thomas Aquinas, (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America
Press, forthcoming); idem, Trinity and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000), pp. 251256. The objection that the places of the divine persons turn out (fatally) to
be interchangeable arises in a different way with regard to Thomass contention that any
of the three might have become incarnate. On this see below, pp. 413.
See, e.g., III, 109, 3, c.
So Lossky, e.g., argues that for Orthodox theology the power of love communicated to the
soul by the Holy Spirit, while distinct from the divine hypostasis of the Spirit, cannot be,
as it is for Aquinas, a created effect, an accidental quality whose existence depends on our
created substance. Rather it is an uncreated gift, a divine and deifying energy in which we
really participate in the nature of the Holy Trinity (Thologie mystique, pp. 210211; ET, pp.
213214). Lossky rejects with equal insistence, though for different reasons, the standard
western alternative to Aquinas, namely Lombards view that the power of love in us is
not a created gift, but the person of the Holy Spirit himself. Bulgakov is equally antagonistic to the notion of created grace; cf. Bride of the Lamb, pp. 298300.
Cf. Ground of Union, pp. 8489.
All from III, 110, 1, c. For Aquinas any divine act is, on account of Gods simplicity, coeternal with himself and identical with his own being (although we cannot avoid thinking
of them as distinct; cf. I, 19, 2, ad 1). But this does not mean that the effect of every act, the
gift that follows from it, is the same as the divine being. On the contrary, the term of any
free (and so contingent) divine act is not God, either as essence or person, but some created
reality. Even the hypostatic union is a created reality (aliquid creatum; III, 2, 7, sc), while
the person of the Word, and the free divine decision to unite a human nature to him, are
not. Conversely, even the will to create a world is identical with the divine being, but this
does not, of course, mean that the creature who results from that will is identical with the
divine being. So it is with grace. Considered as the eternal love of God itself, grace is
identical with Gods own being. Considered as a certain supernatural reality in the human
being which flows forth from Gods love, grace is not identical with Gods own being (III,
110, 1, c).
III, 110, 2, c.
Cf. III, 110, 1, ob 2, on which more in note 33. Caritas too, the disposition to love God with
the intimacy of friendship which flows from grace as habituale donum, has to be a created
reality in the soul (IIII, 23, 2, sc).
It is not possible that God in any way enter into composition with another, either as a
formal principle or as a material principle (I, 3, 8, c).
III, 110, 1, c. Thomass reply (III, 110, 1, ad 2) to the objector who denies (ob 2) that grace
is a created reality in the soul, and so a medium between God and the soul, does not,
as Williams oddly suggests (Ground of Union, p. 88), implicitly agree with the objector that
grace is not really a created medium. The point is rather that God gives (new) life to the
soul not by being its form (which is impossible), but by being the efficient causethe
creatorof a form it would otherwise lack.
III, 110, 2, ad 3. As texts like this indicate, Aquinas denies that grace, even as created disposition, depends on our created substance, rather than on the love of God which alone
can cause it (against the suggestion of Lossky and others; cf. above, note 27). It should be
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observed that if Aquinas only rarely speaks of created grace, he never speaks expressly
of uncreated grace. Both members of this lexical pair become pivotal only in later reflection on the topic (for some of the history here, see Grard Philips, Lunion personnelle avec
le Dieu vivant: Essai sur lorigine et le sens de la grce cre [second edition, Leuven: Peeters,
1989]). But just as Aquinas has his own way of talking about what created grace typically refers to, so also uncreated grace: by the word grace it is sometimes possible to
signify something uncreated, either Gods acceptance [of us], or the uncreated gift which
is the Holy Spirit. In II Sent. 26, 1, 1, c (P. Mandonnet, O. P. & M. F. Moos, O. P., eds., S.
Thomae Aquinatis Scriptum Super Libros Sententiarum, 4 vols [Paris: Lethielleux, 19291947]).
By grace the soul is conformed to God (I, 43, 5, ad 2). Thomas here speaks of the conformity wrought by the missions of the Son and the Spirit. They dwell in us only by way
of sanctifying grace (per gratiam gratum facientem) (I, 43, 3, sc), but sanctifying grace is precisely that by which the human being himself is conjoined to God (III, 111, 1, c).
I, 43, 3, c.
In I Sent. 14, 3, c. The context makes it clear that Thomas is talking about the created
gift, and not only the divine love from which it springs: because grace joins us to God
immediately, it is also necessary that grace come forth from God into us without any
intermediary.
I, 43, 5, ad 2. On conformity to the indwelling Father, though without any mission (a point
to which we will return), cf. 5, c.
For this reason the attainment of lifes final aim does not eliminate the need for a created
disposition which joins us to God, but perfects it. The created light of glory is not required
for the vision of God in the manner of a likeness in which God is seen, but rather in the
manner of a certain perfection of the intellect, strengthening it to see God . . . It is not a
medium in which God is seen, but rather a medium by which (sub quo) God is seen. Therefore it does not take away the immediacy of the vision of God (I, 12, 5, ad 2).
On the argument of the last two paragraphs see also Bruce D. Marshall, Action and Person:
Do Palamas and Aquinas Agree about the Spirit?, St. Vladimirs Theological Quarterly Vol.
39 no. 4 (1995), pp. 379408; here, pp. 386392.
All, once again, from I, 43, 5, ad 2. On faiths knowledge as rooted in a connaturality
with the triune God by grace, cf. Bruce D. Marshall, Quod Scit Una Uetula: Aquinas on the
Nature of Theology, in Joseph Wawrykow and Rik Van Nieuwenhove, eds., Aquinas as
Theologian (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004).
In western theology a strong notion of deification is not confined to Aquinas, or to Roman
Catholic theology more generally. For example, Luther also makes much of the idea (if not
the word), though he articulates it in another way than Aquinas, against the background
of quite different concerns. Cf. Bruce D. Marshall, Justification as Declaration and Deification, International Journal of Systematic Theology Vol. 4 no. 1 (2002), pp. 328.
The language in this case is Rahners; cf. Der dreifaltige Gott als transzendenter Urgrund
der Heilsgeschichte, in Johannes Feiner & Magnus Lhrer, eds., Mysterium Salutis, vol. 2:
Die Heilsgeschichte vor Christus (Einsiedeln: Benziger Verlag, 1967), pp. 317401; here: p.
383. ET The Trinity, trans. Joseph Donceel, second edition (New York, NY: Crossroads, 1997),
p. 101.
On why a distinction between the immanent and the economic Trinity is more an obstacle
than an aid to understanding the actions of the Trinity and the identity of the divine
persons, see my essay, The Trinity, in Gareth Jones, ed., The Blackwell Companion to Modern
Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003).
I, 43, 1, c.
I, 43, 1, ad 1.
Aquinas stresses, in his version of this argument, that the missions do not simply point to
the eternal processions, as though these were the remote background of the missions.
Rather the processions themselves are given with the missions, present in the missions as
their necessary basis: A mission includes an eternal procession, and adds something to it,
namely a temporal effect (I, 43, 2, ad 3).
Though in the medieval discussion there is considerable controversy about how origin
yields identity: over whether the identities of the divine persons consist in opposed relations which result from origin (as Aquinas and the Dominicans after him held; cf. above,
note 20), or in the mode of origination itself (as Bonaventure suggests, and as Scotus held,
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along with many theologians of the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, especially the
Franciscans). For a useful brief sketch of the differences between these approaches, with
references to further literature, see Russell L. Friedman, Gabriel Biel and Later Medieval
Trinitarian Theology, in Russell L. Friedman and Lauge O. Nielsen, eds., The Medieval
Heritage in Early Modern Metaphysics and Modal Theory, 14001700 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003),
pp. 99120.
Lapophase et la thologie trinitaire, in A limage et la ressemblance de Dieu, pp. 723; cf.
pp. 89 (ET, p. 15).
La Procession du Saint-Esprit, (above, note 1), p. 84 (ET, p. 88).
La Procession du Saint-Esprit, p. 89 (ET, pp. 9293).
We cannot know God outside the economy in which he reveals himself. Lapophase et
la thologie trinitaire, p. 9 (ET, p. 15).
Lapophase et la thologie trinitaire, p. 17 (ET, p.24).
Not least in connection with a desire, which Lossky shares, to be faithful to the legacy of
Gregory Palamas. Orthodox interpreters regularly read Palamas as blocking any move from
economy to theology, from the economic manifestation of the persons in their common
energies to their properly personal existence in the unreachable divine essence (cf., e.g.,
John Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas, trans. George Lawrence [second edition, New
York, NY: St. Vladimirs Seminary Press, 1998], p. 232). Dorothea Wendebourg in particular has taken this to mean that for Palamas and his modern heirs the persons themselves
are simply absent from the economy of salvation; only the impersonal divine energies are
actually given and present (cf. Geist oder Energie: Zur Frage der innergttlichen Verankerung
des christlichen Lebens in der byzantinischen Theologie [Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1980]). One
can see why Palamas sometimes gives rise to this worry, but it probably goes too far; see
my essay, Action and Person, (above, note 40), pp. 385386. Wendebourgs thesis has generated considerable debate; cf. the comments in Reinhard Flogaus, Theosis bei Palamas und
Luther (Gttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997), pp. 7275, 212215, and A. N. Williams,
Ground of Union, pp. 139142.
I will not attempt to go into the Filioque here. For a detailed survey of Aquinass main texts
on the topic, see Gilles Emery, The Procession of the Holy Spirit a Filio According to St.
Thomas Aquinas, in idem, Trinity in Aquinas (Ypsilanti, MI: Sapientia Press, 2003), pp.
209269. For discussions of some of the main systematic issues, including the objection that
the Filioque suppresses the personal diversity of the three hypostases, see my essays, The
Defense of the Filioque in Classical Lutheran Theology: An Ecumenical Appreciation, Neue
Zeitschrift fr systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie Vol. 44 no. 2 (2002), pp. 154173
(with references to literature on the history of the controversy, and on the extensive modern
ecumenical discussion), and Action and Person, especially pp. 401408. The suggestion
in the latter essay that trinitarian theology can reach pretty much the same results with or
without the Filioque now strikes me as excessively optimistic. It is difficult to finesse this
issue, especially on Thomistic grounds.
La Procession du Saint-Esprit, p. 84 (ET, p. 88).
La Procession du Saint-Esprit, p. 75; cf. p. 84 (ET, pp. 79, 87).
In this [economic] revelation of itself the Trinity also draws our attention to certain
premises about the intrinsic relations between the divine Persons. The theological teaching
on the inner reality of the Holy Trinity is based on these indications and on the bond which
joins the eternal relations between the divine Persons together with their saving activity.
Dumitru Staniloae, The Holy Trinity: Structure of Supreme Love, Theology and the Church
(above, note 9), pp. 73108; here: p. 75. See also Trinitarian Relations and the Life of the
Church, idem, pp. 1144, and Staniloaes dogmatics, in English as The Experience of God,
vol. 1, trans. Ioan Ionita and Robert Barringer (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press,
1994), pp. 245280.
The western Middle Ages extensively debated the question of how the Son can proceed
from the Father, and the Holy Spirit from both, without the Son and the Spirit adding anything to the Fathers being. It was generally perceived that this would be an undesirable
result, since it would make the Father in some way originate with respect to the Son or the
Spirit. The issue comes up with particular force in connection with the question of how the
Holy Spirit can be, as person, the love of the Father and the Son for one another, without
adding something to the Father and the Son which they would otherwise lack. In Aquinas
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see, e.g., I, 37, 12; 39, 7, ad 2. John of Damascus had already seen the problem clearly: if
the Father does not have something, then neither does the Son or the Holy Spirit. De Fide
Orthodoxa I, 8 (John of Damascus, Writings, trans. Frederic H. Chase [New York: Fathers of
the Church, 1958], p. 184 [translation altered]).
Byzantine theologians tried to show that on the one hand a relationship of origin between
Son and Holy Spirit was not necessary, and that on the other hand there did exist a certain
relationship which distinguished Son and Holy Spirit as persons. Theology and Church, p.
15 (italics in original).
It is in this sense that we are to understand the statement that the Spirit is through the
Son, that is, the Spirit shines forth because of the fact that the Son exists, and for the sake
of the Son . Theology and Church, p. 98.
The upshot of this argument might seem to be that the Filioque is unavoidable. Aquinas
certainly sees it this way, but the issue is more complicated than so far appears. The
Franciscan tradition in medieval trinitarian theology (see Friedmans essay, above, note 48)
generally accepts the principles that mission displays origin, and that identity is origindependent (indeed they have a stronger view of the latter point than Aquinas). But against
Aquinas they reject the thought that proceeding from the Son as well as the Father is
identity-constituting for the Spirit. Whether this coheres with their acceptance of the idea
that the Spirits place in the scriptural pattern of missions (and so his sending by the Son)
has to display his origin is another matter; here a good deal of historical research yet needs
to be done.
The quoted phrase is from De Potentia 10, 4, ad 14 (Quaestiones Disputatae, vol. 2, p. 269b).
The suggestion that Aquinas neglects the distinctive economic role of the Spirit fails to find
any support in the texts; on this see my essay What Does the Spirit Have to Do? (above,
note 25). The present question, though, is whether he ties the Spirits mission in a plausible way to an account of the Spirits place in the trinitarian order of origin.
I, 43, 8, sc & c.
I, 43, 8, c. Cf. De Potentia 10, 4, ad 14: That the Son is said to be sent by the Holy Spirit is
to be understood as applying to the Son on account of his human nature.
See, e.g., III, 16, 1012, and Bruce D. Marshall, Christology in Conflict (Oxford: Blackwell,
1987), pp. 184185.
This I take to be the sense of Thomass distinction between principium personae and
principium effectus (I, 43, 8, c) in the concept of mission.
Coping with the scriptural data is not simply a matter of adding up the number of passages which favor each side. Considerations like relative simplicity and conceptual coherence count for an interpretation of the scriptural pattern of missions. So Aquinas argues,
for example, that any interpretation which has the Son proceeding from the Spirit is conceptually implausible, since it effectively turns the Spirit into the Father: It cannot be
inferred that the Son is from the Holy Spirit . . . because it would follow that the Holy Spirit
would be the Father, since to be the Father is nothing other than to have the Son proceeding from him (De Potentia 10, 4, ad 21). Orthodox theologians, to be sure, have often made
a cognate objection against the Filioque: it turns the Son into the Father, since a divine person
can originate only from the Father. But this too, Aquinas argues, is conceptually incoherent. Being the origin of the Spirit is not opposed to any person-constituting feature of either
the Father or the Son. On the contrary: To be the origin (principium) of the Holy Spirit does
not belong to the Father as Father, that is, by reason of paternity. In this way he is related
only to the Son. Otherwise it would follow that the Holy Spirit would actually be the Son
(De Potentia 10, 4, c [Quaestiones Disputatae, vol. 2, p. 266a]). Of course this implicates further
conceptual claims, in particular the notion that the persons are constituted by pairs of
opposed relations (see above, notes 20 and 48), and ultimately the question of how to
account coherently for the unity of the triune God.
Among theologians who have followed this course, see especially Matthias Joseph
Scheeben, Die Mysterien des Christentums 2231 (Joseph Hfer, ed., Gesammelte Schriften,
vol. 2 [third edition, Freiburg: Herder, 1958; first published 1865]; ET The Mysteries of Christianity, trans. Cyril Vollert [St. Louis: Herder, 1946], pp. 126180), and Herman Schell, Das
Wirken des dreieinigen Gottes (Mainz: Verlag von Franz Kirchheim, 1885), the better part of
which (pp. 141622) is devoted to pursuit of this strategy.
III, 3, 5, c.
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72 Cf. I, 43, 4.
73 III, 3, 5, ad 3.
74 The Trinity could still carry out the act of adoption, but the roles of the persons in this act
would remain fixed by characteristics tied, as we have seen, to origin (cf. III, 3, 5, ad 2; 3,
8, c, and above, notes 19, 22). The divine act of adoption would thus look utterly different
to us than it actually does. That our adoption has the lucidity it possesses in scriptures
economy is part of what Aquinas means by talking about the appropriateness (convenientia) of the Sons incarnation, in contrast to any other possibility.
75 In III Sent. 1, 2, 2, c (no. 95).
76 We note in the Fathers authority with respect to him the fact that [the Son] is from
another (In III Sent. 1, 2, 2, c [no. 95]).
77 Super Ioannem 8, 3 (no. 1192).

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What are the main complaints lodged against Aquinas by Orthodox theologians?

What are the main complaints lodged against Aquinas by Orthodox theologians?

How did Aquinas engage with eastern theology in his own work?

How did Aquinas engage with eastern theology in his own work?

Modern Theology 20:1 January 2004

ISSN 0266-7177 (Print)

EX OCCIDENTE LUX? AQUINAS AND

Aquinas and Eastern Orthodox Theology

Aquinas and Eastern Orthodox Theology

Sonship.19 By the Spirits grace we partake of the divine nature as possessed

Aquinas and Eastern Orthodox Theology

Aquinas and Eastern Orthodox Theology

Aquinas and Eastern Orthodox Theology

Understandably, if inconsistently, many theologians lose their nerve at this

Aquinas and Eastern Orthodox Theology

Aquinas and Eastern Orthodox Theology

we know paternity might actually be a property of the Holy Spirit. In fact

Aquinas and Eastern Orthodox Theology

ing in light of standard Orthodox criticisms. They object to this common

Aquinas and Eastern Orthodox Theology

Aquinas and Eastern Orthodox Theology

another, could not accept the cross in Gesthemane as an act of obedience to

See La Procession du Saint-Esprit dans la doctrine trinitaire orthodoxe, in A limage et

Aquinas and Eastern Orthodox Theology

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004

Aquinas and Eastern Orthodox Theology

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004

Aquinas and Eastern Orthodox Theology

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004

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