Three is perfection, four is redundant. (Un)Fortunately, one of these people gets knocked-off.

In this post I’d like to focus on Richard’s initial argument for why God must be a Trinity of persons. Thus far in his argument he has argued for two divine persons, and now adds a further line of argument to show that God is in fact a Trinity and not a Binity of persons. Why must God be a Trinity of persons? Richard argues from his notion of perfect love.

“Greatest love cannot lack in anything.”

Perfect love requires the following.

(i) A person “wishes another to be loved as oneself.”
(ii) A person “wishes that another person be loved equally by the one whom s/he loves supremely and by whom s/he is supremely loved.”

Translation: For person a, person b, and person c, a has perfect love only if

(1.) a equally loves b, and vice versa.

(2.) a equally loves c, and vice versa.

(3.) a desires that b equally loves c, and that c equally loves b.

(1)-(3) will be jointly sufficient for a‘s perfect love if it turns out that there is a b and a c, and that all the lovin’ obtains between a, b and c as described in (1.)-(3.), especially that b equally loves c, and vice versa.

Recall that ‘equal love’ requires that the persons who ‘equally love’ have the same substance-kind. We might say the intensity (my word) of love is measured by the kind of substance that is the object of love. If I love a human, there’s a certain intensity of my love for a human; but if I love God, then my love is maxed-out because God is the most lovable being. Also, recall that Richard argued in Book 1 of On the Trinity that there can be only one divine substance. Thus, for a to love an equal, b and c, b and c must satisfy the following necessary and sufficient condition:

For divine person a, who has the one divine substance essentially, persons b and c are equal to a if and only if b and c each has the one divine substance essentially.

Notice that a divine person can love a creature ‘perfectly’, but that this love is not ‘love of an equal’ because no creature (besides Jesus) is constituted by the divine substance. So, God can “so love the world that …”, but we might say the quality of this love is fixed by the object of the love. Since divine persons are divine, love for such a person is as intense a love as possible; but love for creatures is less intense simply by reason of the kind of being that a creature is.

The argument from perfect love for a Trinity of persons continues.

(4.) If a has perfect love, then there must be a third person c, otherwise a fails to have perfect love.

(5.) If a fails to have perfect love, then either a is unwilling to have perfect love or is unable to have perfect love.

(5.i) If a is unwilling to have perfect love, then perfect love must be elsewhere. But who else besides a divine person could have perfect love essentially? Nobody. But a person who has the divine substance essentially satisfies the description of ‘the best of all possible beings’ (substances). Therefore, a person, who has the divine substance essentially, has perfect love.

(5.ii) If a, who has the divine substance essentially, is unable to have perfect love, then a does not satisfy the description of the best of all possible beings (substances). But a, who has the divine substance essentially, satisfies the description ‘the best of all possible beings’. But a person who satisfies the description ‘the best of all possible beings’ has perfect love. Therefore, a has perfect love.

(6.) Therefore, there are (at least) three divine persons.

In the next post I survey another argument that Richard employs, namely an argument from perfect happiness.

“And the best thing is, we can take these blocks apart!”

In the last post, I introduced the ‘generic view’ of the trinity, namely the claim that Divinity (that which makes the divine persons God/divine) is shared equally by all three persons and so does not belong to any one divine person more than another. In this post, I would like to highlight some of the issues faced by a generic view.

My point of departure is modern day criticism of the generic view such as that of Colin Gunton and John Zizioulas (to name just a few). These authors are not, in my opinion, the most philosophically astute critics, but nevertheless, they do highlight some of the issues relevant for the generic view.

Before I launch into this, I need to make one point clear. In the last post, I described the Cappadocians as representatives of the generic view, but Gunton and Zizioulas (probably inaccurately) think the Cappadocians hold a derivation view, not a generic view. Gunton and Zizioulas thus direct their criticisms against Augustine, not the Cappadocians. But nevertheless, I will treat their criticisms as applying to the generic view in general.

With that out of the way, let’s begin by restating the key tenet for the generic view:

(GV) Divinity belongs equally to each divine person.

Theologians like Gunton and Zizioulas seem convinced that GV entails that Divinity is ‘prior’ or ‘ontologically primary’ to the divine persons. It’s hard to know just what they mean by that, but I take it that the idea goes something like this: Divinity is like a building block for the persons in the way that a brick is for a wall. Divinity can exist apart from the persons (but not vice versa), just like how a brick can exist apart from its wall (but not vice versa). Gunton and Zizioulas move very hastily to that conclusion, so I would like to unpack some of the assumptions that (seem to) get them there.

First then, Gunton and Zizioulas assume GV entails that Divinity is a fourth entity, different from the three persons. That is:

(T4) For any divine person x, Divinity is not identical to x.

That much seems fair enough. Certain things (like being shareable) apply to Divinity but not to a divine person, so it’s at least plausible to think that Divinity is not strictly identical to any divine person.

Second, Gunton and Zizioulas seem to assume further that if Divinity is a fourth entity, distinct from the persons, then it’s a concrete individual in its own right:

(T5) Divinity is a concrete individual.

T5 may or may not follow from T4, depending on whether one links the conditions for non-identity with the conditions for individuality.

Still, suppose we granted T5. In itself, T5 isn’t necessarily a problem. Most scholastic theologians, for example, maintained T5, and many patristic authors probably did too (like Tertullian, the Cappadocians, Augustine, etc.).

Third, Gunton and Zizioulas assume T5 entails that Divinity is capable of existing independently of the divine persons:

(T6) For any divine person x, Divinity could exist if x did not.

Again, T6 may or may not follow from T5, depending on whether one thinks the conditions for individuality correspond to the conditions for (the capability of) separate existence.

Nevertheless, it is from T6 that Gunton and Zizioulas infer their conclusion: if Divinity can exist on its own, then it must be a kind of fundamental building block for the divine persons in the way a brick is for a wall. That seems to be the sense of saying Divinity is ‘prior’ or ‘ontologically primary’ to the persons.

Now, why exactly is this such a problem? It seems to me that Gunton and Zizioulas have at least two worries relevant to our discussion. First, all the really good stuff about being God (e.g., the divine attributes) belongs to Divinity, and so if Divinity is a concrete individual which can exist on its own apart from the divine persons, then the persons turn out to be superfluous. The persons end up being secondary to Divinity.

Second, for Gunton and Zizioulas, God is fundamentally ‘personal’. That means, I take it, that some x and y can only be divine/God if they stand in a mutual loving relationship. But if Divinity can exist on its own, apart from the persons, then Divinity would be divine/God in virtue of its intrinsic properties only, without a need for any mutual loving relationships at all.

Consequently, Gunton and Zizioulas deny T6. As they see it, Divinity cannot exist on its own, apart from the persons. It is the persons who are divine/God, not some entity called Divinity (which is not itself a person). And with that, Gunton and Zizioulas reject the generic view altogether, opting instead for a derivation view. For them, Divinity just is the Father, so there is no ‘Divinity’ that is not a person.

Unfortunately, Gunton and Zizioulas seem to me mistaken about T6. The major advocates of the generic view are theologians like the Cappadocians, Augustine, Aquinas, Scotus, etc. For all these people, T6 is a metaphysical impossibility. Divinity simply cannot exist apart from the divine persons.

Take Gregory of Nyssa as an example. Although there is debate about his theory of universals, one plausible interpretation is that Gregory thinks Divinity is an immanent universal, and so Divinity, like any other immanent universal, simply cannot exist apart from the things/persons that exemplify it. Similar points could be made about Augustine, Aquinas, and so forth. GV does not necessarily entail T6.

It seems to me that a more powerful objection to the generic view is this: if divine properties belong (strictly speaking) to Divinity, then divine properties will not belong to the persons unless we can tell a metaphysical story that successfully explains how the persons ‘inherit’ Divinity’s properties. And that’s a difficult metaphysical story to tell. (The derivation view faces the same problem, but only for the Son and Spirit since the Father is identical to Divinity.)

“Gee Hank, it sure is swell that communism won out.
This house belongs to all of us!”

In the last post, I pointed out some of the problems faced by an Athanasian sort of derivation view. If you found such problems to be decisive, then alternatively you could opt for a generic view. In this post, I would like to introduce the generic view.

As I mentioned in the first post, the generic view claims that Divinity belongs equally to the three persons, similar to how three people might jointly own the same house. Divinity thus belongs to no one divine person any more than another. The generic view (let’s call this GV) rejects DV in favor of this:

(GV) Divinity belongs equally to each divine person.

For both the derivation and the generic views of the trinity, Divinity is an entity that’s shared by the persons. On (the Athanasian version of) the derivation view, this shared entity just is the Father, but on the generic view, this shared entity is not the Father. The Father isn’t shared, Divinity is.

There are various ways to fill this out. One option is to say that Divinity is like a constituent that’s shared by all three divine persons. So long as Divinity belongs equally to all three persons and so does not belong to one person more than the others, it’s a generic view.

Another option is to say that Divinity is like a kind-nature. Just as the generic set of human properties (e.g., animality, rationality, etc.) make something human, so too would Divinity be a generic set of divine properties/tropes/etc. (e.g., the divine attributes) which make something divine.

The Cappadocians (especially Gregory of Nyssa) probably held this latter view. They are known for the claim that in God there is one ousia and three hypostases, where a hypostasis is a concrete substance/person, and the ousia is the divine kind-nature shared by the three hypostases/persons, similar to the way that three humans (hypostases) share one kind-nature (ousia).

This might suggest that there are three Gods just as there are three humans. Whether or not that’s right depends on Gregory’s views on universals (kind-natures), and there’s a debate about that in the literature. For convenience, let’s just assume that Gregory and the other Cappadocians think Divinity is numerically one undivided thing that is shared by all three persons. What makes theirs a generic view is just that Divinity is shared equally by all three persons and so does not belong to one divine person more than the others.

The Cappadocian ‘generic view’ is very different from Athanasius’ ‘derivation view’. Athanasius was writing in the mid-4th century, and the Cappadocians were writing at the end of the 4th century. Athanasius was writing to defend the Council of Nicea in 325, and the Cappadocians were active around the time of the next major Council, that of Constantinople in 381 (the Council where Q was dropped). It would appear, then, that in the 4th century, there was a general shift from the derivation view to the generic view.

Of course, that’s a very sweeping generalization that a real historian would have solid grounds for denying. It’s not obvious that there was any ‘standard’ view in the 4th century, nonetheless that Athanasius’ and the Cappadocian views were ‘standard’. But still, older patristics textbooks have propogated the story of a shift from the ‘derivation view’ to the ‘generic view’, so we do run into it every once in a while.

In the next post, I will discuss some of the issues faced by a generic view.

“You were filming that?”

In the last post, I explained that for Athanasius’s version of the derivation view, when the Father generates the Son, the Father shares his substance with the Son. That means, I took it, that the Father himself becomes a constituent in the Son, similar to the way that a lump of bronze is a constituent in a bronze statue.

One of the things Athanasius wants to do with this idea is explain how the Son is divine/God. The basic idea is that the Father shares his substance, i.e., Divinity, with the Son, and so the Father shares his properties with the Son. That is, to put it the other way around, the Son inherits properties from the Father. This is supposed to account for how the Son gets divine properties. However, this is where we start to run into problems.

Suppose, for example, we said that the Son inherits all the Father’s properties. If that’s the case, then for any property the Father has, the Son will inherit it and therefore have that property too.

This might be desirable for all the divine properties like omniscience, omnipotence, and so forth because we might want to say that the Son is all those things. But what about the Father’s property of begetting the Son? Consider an argument given by Richard Cross:

1. The Son inherits all the Father’s properties =df for any F,
   if the Father is F, the Son is F.
2. The Father begets the Son.
3. Therefore the Son begets the Son.

Is this feasible? Well, not if we assume that begetting is an irreflexive relation. If begetting (or, more generally, production) is irreflexive, then nothing can beget itself:

(T2) For any x, it is impossible for x to beget x.

If that’s right, then T2 contradicts (3), so we have a problem. Of course, we might reject T2, but that doesn’t necessarily get us out of hot water. After all, we might just reformulate (1) – (3) like this:

1. The Son inherits all the Father’s properties =df for any F, if the Father is F, the Son is F.
2. The Father is unbegotten.
3. Therefore the Son is unbegotten.

But (3) contradicts the original claim T1: the Son is begotten by the Father. So we’re still in trouble. We might point out that being unbegotten is not a genuine property, but rather only a logical negation. Even so, if (1) and (2) are true, it’s hard to see how (3) wouldn’t follow, irrespective of whether or not negative properties (like being unbegotten) are real, extramental properties. At the very least, then, we have a logical problem to solve.

The most obvious way to escape such problems is to deny (1): the Son does not inherit all the Father’s properties. Instead, we might say that the Son inherits some of the Father’s properties, but not all of them. In particular, we might say that the Son inherits the Father’s divine properties, but no other properties:

(T3) The Son inherits the Father’s divine properties =df for any F that belongs to the Father, the Son is F iff F is a divine property.

Nonetheless, it’s not clear to me that T3 is compatible with DV. If the Son inherits only some but not all the Father’s properties, what determines which properties the Son inherits? How could that be explained without resorting to ad hoc strategies?

One might say that Divinity is identical to the Father’s substance, but the Father’s substance is not identical to the Father (the Father has his own property or properties that his substance/Divinity does not). That way, when the Father shares his substance with the Son, he’s only sharing Divinity and not his whole self. Then the Son would only inherit divine properties, not the Father’s personal property or properties.

However, that more or less commits one to a generic view, not a derivation view. In the next post, I’ll turn to the generic view.

Now Q comes with spring arm action
and dyno bud (optional)!

The Nicene Creed claims that

(Q) The Son is begotten from the substance of the Father.

The term ‘begotten’ is just an older English term for ‘generated’. In the ancient world, ‘generation’ was a technical term for biological reproduction (e.g., when humans make baby humans, when trees make baby trees, and so on). In this post, I want to describe how Athanasius takes Q to imply a derivation view of the trinity.

1. Q and generation.

In the 4th century, most thought that a biological father produces a child by giving up a part of himself (his seed). That seed grows in the womb and becomes a child. Also, it was thought that the seed contains the father’s essence/kind-nature, and that’s why biological parents produce offspring of the same kind.

One of the key ideas here is that the child comes ‘out of’ the father, or better: ‘out of the substance/essence of the father’. Many church fathers, Athanasius included, tried to capture this notion by using the analogy of light coming out of the sun, or water flowing out of a spring.

Q’s wording thus could easily have suggested to the ancient ear that the Son is the Father’s natural offspring, and that’s how Athanasius takes it. He argues at length that the Son is the Father’s natural Son, not an adopted Son. The Son is really generated by the Father.

However, the Father is incorporeal, so he can’t break off a part of his substance and give it to the Son. Instead, the Father must share his substance with the Son. What does that mean? Well, given all this talk about daddies giving up parts of themselves to make children, it seems to me pretty natural to think of it like this: the ‘substance of the Father’ becomes a constituent of the Son.

To use a well-trodden analogy, if we compare the Son to a bronze statue, we might say that the Father’s substance is like the bronze, and the Son is like the statue, so the Father’s substance is a constituent of the Son similar to the way that the bronze is a constituent of the statue.

2. Q and God

In my first post, I said that ‘Divinity’ is that which makes the divine persons divine. How does Divinity fit into the picture? One option would be to say that Divinity is identical to the Father’s substance. Okay, but what, precisely, is the Father’s substance? If we assume that the Father’s substance is identical to the Father — it just is the Father — then it follows that Divinity is identical to the Father.

If we say that, then there’s a sense in which Divinity belongs more properly to the Father than it does to the Son. The Father is divine because he just is Divinity, but the Son is only divine because Divinity is one of his constituents. Think of the bronze statue again. A lump of bronze is bronze because it just is bronze, but a statue is bronze only because one of its constituents is bronze.

This is the central claim of the derivation view. The basic idea is just that Divinity belongs, strictly speaking, to the Father, but not the Son (and Spirit). The Son (and Spirit) have Divinity in some kind of derivative way. Let’s call this DV, for the ‘derivation view’:

(DV) Divinity belongs more properly to the Father than to the Son.

(We could state this point in a different way by saying that homoousious is an asymmetrical relation.)

This does not mean that the Son and Spirit have a lesser kind of divinity, nor does it mean that they are not God/divine. If we assume that a God (or a divine thing) is anything that has Divinity, then the Father, Son, and Spirit are all God/divine on this view. The Father has Divinity (properly), so the Father is God/divine. The Son and Spirit have Divinity too (because the Father shares his Divinity with them), so they are God/divine too.

I have described here only one version of the derivation view, namely the Nicene/Athanasian view. Athanasius’s notion of the Father as a constituent in the Son seems to me a helpful way to conceptualize the derivation view. But one needn’t think of the Father as a constituent of the Son. One could have a different account. But anyone who maintains DV in some form or other holds some version of a derivation view.

“I hate wearing this stupid hat.
They didn’t make me a bishop anyways.
At least the cape’s pretty cool.
It’s got St. George’s Cross going on.”

In my last post, I gave some basic definitions for the ‘derivation view’ and the ‘generic view’ of the Trinity, and I said that the historical background for the ‘derivation view’ rests in the Nicene Creed’s claim that

(Q) The Son is begotten from the substance of the Father.

Of course, the meaning of ‘from the substance of the Father’ is not exactly clear, not in a philosophical sense anyways. What exactly is Q supposed to mean? In this post, I want to explain what one interpreter, namely Athanasius, felt was at stake with Q.

As I said in my previous post, it’s very hard to know just what the authors of the Creed actually meant by Q. Not surprisingly, nobody in the 4th century seemed to know either. Everybody who wrote about Nicea over the next forty years expressed different opinions. In fact, it’s probably safe to say that there was no ‘standard’ interpretation of Q at the time.

Nevertheless, one very loud voice in the mid-4th century was that of Athanasius. For whatever reasons, at same point in history (like a few centuries later) his view came to be seen as the ‘orthodox’ interpretation of Q. Whether or not it actually was is debatable, but hey, we’re stuck with tradition, so we’re stuck with him.

One of the things Athanasius took Q to mean — though many disagreed — was this: Arius was wrong. Arius was a presbyter who taught and wrote in Alexandria during the early decades of the 4th century. He claimed that the Son was created from nothing (ex nihilo).

What does it mean to say something is created from nothing? It means that something is produced without any pre-existing ingredients (i.e., ‘parts’ or ‘constituents’). We make things with pre-existing ingredients all the time. A mason, for example, makes brick walls out of bricks. But this is not a creation. A wall would be created only if the mason caused the whole wall, and all of its parts, to pop into existence. Here’s a working definition for creation:

(CRT) For any x and y, x creates y =df iff (i) x causes y to exist,
and (ii) for any part or constituent z of y, x causes z to exist.

So why did Arius say the Son was created without any pre-existing ingredients? His logic is fairly straightforward. Arius felt that there could only be one uncaused cause; there couldn’t be two. The Father is obviously an uncaused cause, so that means there can’t be any others — and that includes the Son. Arius thus concluded that the Son had to have a cause, namely the Father.

So which ingredients did the Father use to make the Son? The Bible says that the Son was the ‘firstborn of all creation’. Arius took that to mean that the Father produced the Son before anything else, so when the Father produced the Son, nothing was lying around to use as an ingredient.

Well, there was the Father himself, but Arius maintained that the Father is a simple monad — he is not divisible into pieces and he is not made up of parts, so the Father couldn’t break off a chunk of himself and use it as an ingredient in the Son. Thus, Arius concludes that the Son had to be made without any pre-existing ingredients whatsoever (he was made from nothing).

For Arius then, to say that the Son is created from nothing means that the Son is not made with any pre-existing ingredients. But, as I said above, Athanasius thinks Q entails that Arius is wrong. As Athanasius sees it, Q entails that the Son is, in fact, made from at least one pre-existing ingredient, namely the substance of the Father.

Athanasius thus seems to take ‘the substance of the Father’ as an ingredient that goes into the Son. And since it’s the substance of the Father, it’s clearly something that’s in the Father too. But what exactly is it? Is it a part or constituent? Is it just the Father himself? For that, we’ll have to wait until the next post.

– “Daddy, why do trees branch out?”
– “So you can climb in them, Jimmy.”

Patristic scholars tell us that the doctrine of the trinity was really developed in the 4th century. The question is: what exactly is the ‘development’? If you read many of those scholarly big books on patristic theology, you’ll occasionally come across the idea that there were two major theories of the trinity floating around in the 4th century: the ‘derivation view’ and the ‘generic view’. But what exactly are these two views, and who held them?

In this series, I would like to explain the ‘derivation view’ and the ‘generic view’. My take on this is derived from (pardon the pun) Richard Cross. He explains his views on this in his article, ‘On Generic and Derivation Views of God’s Trinitarian Substance’, Scottish Journal of Theology 56 (2003): 464-480). In this first post, we need to set the stage and cover some of the background.

1. Some basic definitions

First, then, let’s set out some basic definitions for the derivation view and the generic view. To do that, first consider this question: what is it that makes a divine person divine? For our purposes here, let’s assume that there is some entity which, when possessed by a person, is necessary and sufficient to make that person divine. This entity can be defined in various ways: as a property or trope, as a bundle of properties or tropes, as a substance, as some other kind of a part or constituent — anything you like. Fortunately, we don’t need to say precisely what this entity is right now, so for the moment, let’s just call it Divinity.

Now, whatever Divinity is, classical theism maintains that there is only one of them in the Godhead. There are not three Divinities, one for each divine person. There is just one Divinity, and all three persons share it. But how exactly should we understand this ‘sharing’? There are (at least) two options here.

The first option is called the derivation view. On this view, Divinity belongs properly to the Father, though it’s shared with the Son and Spirit. As a rough analogy, imagine if three people lived in the same house, but only one of them owned it. The derivation view holds something like this: Divinity is like the house, belonging properly to one person, though shared with the other two.

The other option is called the generic view. On this view, Divinity belongs equally to all three persons. Again, to use a rough analogy, if three people jointly owned a house, the house would properly belong to all three equally. The house would not belong to any one person more than the others. This is the basic idea behind the generic view: Divinity is like the house, belonging equally to all three persons.

So those are the basic definitions for the derivation view and the generic view. In future posts, I will describe these ideas more fully. But before I do that, we need to talk briefly about some history.

2. Some historical background: Nicea and Q

The historical backdrop to all this (and especially to the derivaton view) is the Council of Nicea in 325. When the Council composed the famous Nicene Creed, they began with a traditional claim:

(T1) The Son is begotten from the Father.

But the Council added to T1 a curious little qualification (let’s call this Q, for ‘the Qualification’):

(Q) The Son is begotten from the substance of the Father.

The next time the Christians got together to discuss these matters in a big way was at the Council of Constantinople in 381. Interestingly, this Council decided to drop Q from the Creed, replacing it with T1 instead. I’ll have more to say about that later.

Perhaps everybody’s lives would have been easier if Q had died in 381, but Q lived on, a rogue statement that shows up here and there to instigate theological controversy. (For example, the scholastics regularly discussed Q, and in our own day theologians like Colin Gunton and John Zizioulas discuss it too.)

In any case, historically, it’s very hard to know just what the participants of the Nicene Council actually meant by Q. In the next post, I will explain how Athanasius interpreted Q, for his interpretation of Q is what we today frequently think of as the 4th century version of the ‘derivation view’.