Father Lonergan's Five Theses on the TrinityAnd the Cappadocian Settlement

Perhaps the last of the neo-scholastics (and I mean that absolutely non-pejoratively) was the great Fr Bernard Lonergan SJ, whose book The Triune God:  Doctrines (Toronto:  University of Toronto Press, 2009) condensed Trinitarian dogmatics into just five theses:

1.  God the Father neither made his own and only Son out of preexisting matter nor created him out of nothing, but from eternity generates him out of his own substance as consubstantial with himself.

2.  The Holy Spirit, Lord and Life-give, who proceeds from the Father and who spoke through the prophets, is to be adored and glorified together with the Father and the Son.

3.  Thus, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit have one divinity, one power, one substance; they are, however, three hypostases or persons distinguished from one another by their proper attributes, which are relative; hence in God all things are one where there is no relational opposition. 

4.   The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son as from one principle and by a single spiration.

5.  The dogma of the Trinity, which is a mystery in the proper sense, cannot through natural human principles be either understood in itself or demonstrated from an effect.  Even after the revelation this remains true, although reason illumined by faith can, with God's help, progress towards some imperfect analogical understanding of this mystery.

Compared to, say the "Spanish Summa" with its twenty-six theses, Lonergan''s approach is a notable achievement.  I suppose being a theologian-economist has its advantages!  (Cue "economic Trinity" jokes.) 

Basil of Caesarea, "the Great"

In the second half of the fourth century, Sts Basil of Caesarea, his brother Gregory of Nyssa, and their colleague Gregory the Theologian exerted a tremendous amount of energy explaining the First Council of Nicaea's controversial line in the creed,  «γεννηθέντα, οὐ ποιηθέντα, ὁμοούσιον τῷ Πατρί / gentium, non factum, consubstantialem Patri», which we hear every Sunday at Mass as "...begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father..."

The word  ὁμοούσιον / consubstantia / consubstantial was a sore point for some of the Council Fathers; the "conservative" bishops winced at the use of vocabulary found nowhere in Scripture, though many of them agreed with the sense of the word, namely, that God the Son is of the same 'stuff' as God the Father.  Others, like St Basil of Caesarea, feared that "consubstantial" could be easily mistaken for the Sabellian heresy--the idea that 'Father,' 'Son,' and 'Holy Spirit' are simply three 'masks' worn by the single-personed Godhead.  In fact, one of the senses of the word "person"--Latin persona and Greek prosopon--was that of a thespian mask; Basil worried that speaking of the Son as "consubstantial" or 'having same-substance' as the Father may look like God was essentially identical between the First and Second Person, but having only a 'different' appearance.  To remedy this, Basil insisted on conversationally refining the meaning or the sense of "consubstantial" which he insisted meant "undeviatingly similar" (Ep. 9)  The use of the word "similar" put him with the so-called homoiousian party which preferred to speak of the Son as "of similar or like substance as the Father."  "Similar" does not mean "same," of course, but Basil wanted to highlight, at once, the uniformity of essence between the Father and Son, and at the same time the distinction of persons between the two.  In his famous On the Holy Spirit, he used the analogy of "prototype/type" to describe the distinction of persons between the Father and the Son.

It was with Basil, you can see, that Theses 1 and 3 began to be clarified for the Church.

In his later controversy with the heretic Eunomius, who tried to pinpoint and name the substance of the Godhead as "innascibility"--that is to say, beginninglesness, by which he identified the Father, whereas the Son was "nascible," that is, creaturely.  It was an extreme form of Arianism.  Basil responded strongly in his book Against Eunomius, in which he distinguished between the "properties" of the Godhead from the "essence" of the same.  "Innascibility"--beginninglessness--was a property, not just of the Father, but also of the Son and Holy Spirit.  It was in this book that Basil abandoned his reticence towards the word "consubstantial" and adopted it wholeheartedly, and brought Trinitarian doctrine to a new stage by pinning down the difference between the words «ousia» «hypostasis» which had, until now, been used synonymously.  Now, said Basil, ousia would be analogous to the "universal" and hypostasis to the "particular."  So, whereas Godhead or the Divinity is the ousia of the Trinity, the "Father," "Son," and "Holy Spirit" are the hypostaseis (plural of hypostasis) as particulars within the Trinity.  We see here, especially, Lonergan's Third Thesis.

Gregory of Nyssa

Basil's younger brother gifted the Church with a definitive advancement in Triadology (the Byzantine term for what we Romans call "Trinitarian theology") in his book On Not Three Gods.  As we will see in a subsequent post, Gregory of Nyssa elaborated Basil's universal/particular analogy to ousia/hypostasis by looking at the human family as a further analogy.  in the group of men Peter, James, and John.  What is common between them?  Their humanity, of course, or their "manhood."  Peter, James, and John all have the same substance of human nature.  But they are distinguished one from another as individual persons. 

With Basil's use of Aristotelian dialectic (i.e., "universal" and "particular") and Gregory's concrete analogy (Peter, Andrew, John; all sharing human nature), Lonergan's Fifth Thesis becomes apparent:  though reason can never deduce that God is a Trinity from self-evident first principles, reason can, nevertheless, make use of analogies to approach some understanding of what the Trinity means.

Further to Lonergan's Third Thesis, again, was Nyssa's conception of "appropriations" within the Trinity, that is, a "work" or "task" that, although shared by the whole Triune Godhead, distinguishes one Person from another as their principal task:  Though the whole Trinity creates, to the Father is appropriated the work of Creation; though the whole Trinity redeems, to the Son is appropriated the task of Redemption; though the whole Trinity sanctifies, to the Holy Spirit is appropriated the task of Sanctification.

Gregory the Theologian

The Latin tradition tends to call this third--and perhaps most spectacular thinker--member of the Cappadocian Fathers "Gregory of Nazianzen."  I much prefer the Byzantine label "Theologian," both to give credit for his theological ingenuity and to differentiate him from his father by the same name.  Otherwise we'd have to call him, really, "Gregory Nazianzen, Jr."!

His Five Theological Orations makes for wonderful spiritual reading if one wishes to incorporate Trinitarian dogmatics into mental prayer.

Gregory the Theologian's contribution--which would later be picked up by St Thomas Aquinas--was the introduction of "notional relations," that is to say, something about each hypostasis/person that distinguishes one from another.  Thus, the Father's notional relation is ingenerateness, since the Father is begotten from no-one.  The Son's notional relation is generation or begottenness, because the Son emanates out of the Father.  More elusive is the Holy Spirit, who simply proceeds or is spirated, and Gregory admits that he has a difficult time getting beyond the name of the Third Person's notional relation.  Here, then, is a further advancement in Lonergan's Third Thesis that the Trinity is of "three hypostases or persons distingusihed from one another by their proper attributes, which are relative," that is to say, with respect to each other.

I should add--though we are really discussing the Father-Son relation--that Gregory the Theologian paved the way for the next council, the First Council of Constantinople in 381, to formally declare the divinity of the Holy Spirit.  Enter Lonergan's Second Thesis.  But note that the Godhead of the Holy Spirit emerged more clearly only after Father-Son relation was hammered out in this "Cappadocian Settlement.

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son,and to the Holy Spirit:
as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.
Amen!