Redeeming the Dialectic by means of the Filioque

"I am trying to suggest how Christian Trinitarian logic has a mediating structure which is not dialectical. The key point here (simply to state things baldly for the present, without argument) is that that which lies “between” two poles is paradoxically “extra” to those two poles, an irreducibly hypostatic third. In the case of the infinite Trinity, this extra is itself indeed the procession of the love that lies between Father and Son (as Augustine put it)—yet the arriving externality of this thirdness is still guaranteed by the fact that Father and Son (according to the logic of substantive relation, perfected by Aquinas after Augustine) are in their mutually constitutive relationship only through this additional constitutive relationship to the Holy Spirit—which is not so much their “child” as the very womb of desire of truth in which the Father has originally conceived the Word of reason. If, to speak by geometrical analogy, Father and Son are points only because they are the two ends of one line, then this line is a line only because it is the base of a square whose remaining space is the Holy Spirit."

- John Milbank, The Double Glory, or Paradox Versus Dialectics, in The Monstrosity of Christ, p. 147

On not ossifying the fathers

I am trying to take a more positive, constructive role in theology.  This post is akin to an autobiographical manifesto.  Part of it is how I came to the church fathers and ultimately my critical-appreciation of them, and the other part is how to use the Fathers to kill souls.

I left seminary disillusioned.  While I had made a lot of intellectual mistakes there, academically it was not the best (in terms of actually doing scholarship).  I didn't want to say that the Reformed faith was wrong, despite RTS's best efforts to make it so, but I knew there was something more.

For reasons I don't entirely remember, I was reading Thomas Aquinas as I left seminary.  I had one foot in the door for medieval and patristic theology.  I am not sure how I first heard of John Milbank.  I do remember reading about him in James K. A. Smith's Introducing Radical Orthodoxy.  This was late 2006, early 2007.

There is a lot wrong with Radical Orthodoxy, but there is a lot right--and a lot that is just plain fun.  So what that they over-interpreted Aquinas as a Neo-Platonist?  They got all the right people in academia angry, and that is good.  For me they introduced me not only to a wider world of theology but also to ask different--deeper--questions of church history.

I dove right in.  And made mistakes.  But I also latched on to key points: how Christology shapes everything.  (Some Eastern Orthodox guys played that card as a front to justify going to Eastern Orthodoxy when in reality they wanted smells and bells, but that is another story).  Anyway, I realized that Systematic Theology didn't have to follow the outline of Berkhof (Berkhof is useful but limited to a certain context, namely a seminary classroom).

Before continuing on the RO line, I should probably address a common criticism:  Did RO read Reformation metaphysics correctly, namely that Western theology took a nominalist turn with Scotus and the Reformation crystallized it?  Obviously, anyone who advances that reading today will be laughed at. So we can say RO was definitely wrong on that point.  Further, not all of Milbank's criticisms in "Alternative Protestantism" hold water (or at least they might attack Reformation ontology but not where Milbank thinks they do).

This was around 2008-2009.  I was able to read the Father without pretending that the Fathers were a complete deposit who taught a unified, identifiable theology across time and space.  Moreover, I was able to honestly say, "St ______ is wrong here.  That's okay.  I can still benefit from what he says elsewhere."  Side note:  Remember that stupid facebook meme that has the Nicene Fathers pictured and the caption reads, "So these guys are right about the canon but wrong about everything else?"  The epistemological howlers in that statement are too painful to mention.

Back to the Fathers.  Since I didn't (at the time) believe the Fathers taught a unified, ahistorical body of truth, that meant I didn't have to play East and West against each other.  I could say guys like Anselm, Aquinas, and Wycliff were good guys.  And I could benefit from the modern John Wycliff, Oliver O'Donovan.  While some Ecumenist Orthodox guys will speak kindly of the aforementioned gentlemen, technically speaking they are heterodox (or heretics!), so good luck with that one.  The harder-line folks will say that they (and by extension, you and me) are deprived of grace.

Towards the end of 2010 I moved into a harder, Eastward direction.  I never officially became Orthodox.  It wasn't viable for a number of reasons.  While this meant I accepted Orthodox doctrines like anti-Filoque and icons, the main problem is I had to cut off my theological past.  Another problem is I had to place the Fathers within the received tradition of the church.  This implied a number of cognitively dissonant positions:

• The Fathers are part of Holy Tradition but I must interpret which Fathers are speaking Orthodoxically by Holy Tradition.  I couldn't square the circle.  All of the Orthodox problems with Sola Scriptura would come crashing down on Tradition.
• This meant that the Fathers probably didn't disagree about "big stuff."  
• So what was I supposed to do when I came to issues where the Fathers sounded "Western" or were plain wrong?  

The dissonance was building up.  Move on to the end of 2011. I was beginning to be more "Western" in terms of cultural outlook.  I just didn't feel right "negating" my Western heritage.  I know that no one was "making" me to do that, but the cultural enclave mentality among a certain denomination is just too overwhelming.  I was by no means Protestant, of course, but possibly Western.

My daughter was born in 2012.  My life was turned upside down and I really had to put theology on the side.  And life was hard--all of which made me reevaluate everything.

By May of 2012 I was firmly in the Protestant, even Reformed camp (again).  From 2012-2015 (now) I have been in the Protestant camp and plan to stay there.  There are problems with Reformed theology--some big ones actually.   But there are also key gains that outweigh the problems and the Reformed tradition can be the Reformational Tradition.

So how do we use the fathers?

1. Protestant liturgy is about to come to a crisis-point and the Fathers offer insight.
2. Obviously, you have to sit at the Fathers feet when it comes to triadology and Christology.
3. Some of the early church historians are quite fun.
4. Recent developments in Continental philosophy and phenomenology make Maximus, Pseudo-Dionysius (and stop pretending he was Paul's traveling companion) and to a lesser degree Origen quite relevant today.

How do we misuse the fathers?

1. Pretending that they are "infallible," either individually or corporately.
2. Pretending that they have good advice on married sexuality.
3. Pretending they exist outside of time and space.

Notes on Bulgakov, Part 1

From Bride of the Lamb.  I'll polish it in my review.

Bulgakov says he rejects pantheism and monism.  He makes several incisive criticisms against cosmic dualisms (the two creating entities annul one another).

Creation Out of Nothing

What do we mean by the word “nothing?”  Are we reifying “nothing?”  Bulgakov says there is “no extra-divine ground of creation” (Bulgakov 6).   We must distinguish two different types of “nothing:”

1. pre-creaturely nothing, ontological zero. The negation of all being
2. Ontic, creaturely nothing, me on. It is a mode of creaturely being.  

More on nothing (116ff)

• nothing is no-thing, not just something.
• Its existence can only be posited by extreme abstraction.  
• All creation has a non-creaturely, creaturely character.  
• The positive force of its being is the creaturely Sophia, which is the image of the divine Sophia (117).

Aquinas

Aquinas has a difficulty with calling creation “good.”  Rather, it is imperfect.  It is only one type of many possible worlds.  There is a non-correspondence between ideas and things, as the former is always larger than the latter.  The divine ideas are suspended in mid-air.  They aren’t entirely accidents, because God doesn’t have accidents, but to the degree that they actualize creation, they can’t be fully God, either.  

Creatio and God as Cause

Motion cannot be explained on the basis of the motion itself (???).  

“The strength of the causal series lies in its continuity” (35) and if a gap were introduced, it would fail.  And there is a gap between God and creation.  Both causality and mover belong to the world of unitary being.  “It is not possible to transcend the world.”  

But the Christian faith does not need any of this.  It has the doctrine of creation, which is personal and presupposes a personal God (37).  

Divine Sophia is the en-hypostatic life of the Trinity.  

• It is the Divine World.
• Not a hypostasis, but a hypostasizedness

Creation of the World

• a self-positing of God (46).
• But the world is not a piece of God.
• Rather, Divine Sophia has a creaturely Sophianic mode of existence in which the world exists.
• Divine Sophia exists in a dual mode
• eternal (proper mode)
• creaturely
• contains multiplicity
• relative nothingness
• There can be no divine principle of existence which exists in the “nothing” (ouk on).  
• “Nothing” is a modus of reality.  It cannot exist by itself and for itself.

Divine Prototypes

• These are the plan of creation (55).
• The problem Patristics faced with this was how to relate these prototypes, which were divine, to creation.  Bulgakov suggests Sophia is the relation.
• Ideas are the “seeds” of being.
• Creation

Temporality of Creation

What do we mean when we say that the world is created “in time?”  How do eternity and temporality interact without the former subsuming the latter?  Is the latter merely an illusion?

• Temporality is not yet time; time is the mode of its existence (70).
• Time is the abstract measure of temporality, but it is not the unique measure.
• With respect to creation, we must not speak of the beginning of time (which is contradictory), but of the emergence of temporality.
• Time is a relation within becoming.

Therefore, we say that creation is beginningless, but not eternal.    It can’t have a beginning in time since time, too, is created.  Therefore, we say that creation and time emerge from temporality.

The World Soul and its Hypostases

world soul: the creaturely Sophia (79).  It is here that Bulgakov’s project shines in all its brilliance but also threatens to come undone.  He admits that the existence of the world-soul marks a “loss of clarity” and one wonders if he is reverting back to Aristotle’s chain of being.  But it is a lively chain, for he assures us: “There is no place for dead matter in the world.”

• We are speaking of the world soul, not the world spirit.  The difference between soul and spirit is that the soul is not hypostatic, whereas the Spirit is.  
• The soul corresponds to the spirit’s nature.  It is the spirit’s hypostatizedness.
• This is not Neo-Platonism, for he does not see the World Soul as a hypostasis.  
• The World-Soul is a connected, multi-organic unity
• It is the world’s inner entelechy which unifies.
• Therefore, there is an “inner life principle” in the world.  If this were not so, then why would we enjoin creation to praise God if creation is merely dead matter?
• It is the actualization of creaturely being (197).  The world-soul actualizes creation’s instincts for power.
• In its proper being it is divided into heaven and earth

Angels

Angels are how God usually relates nature (199).  They are the bearers of the sophicanic prototypes of creation and the earth’s reality.  Creation arises through the elemental forces of the world soul but its formation presupposes angelic activity and participation (Rev. 7:1, 14:18; 16:5; and fight battles).

Angels are the sophicanic heaven of the world, the creaturely bridge between Divine Sophia and Creaturely sophia, metaxu.  Angels contain the assurance that creation is a ladder of life.

Main Point

The connection of God and the world is grounded in Sophianicity.  “The divine Sophia is one, though she has two forms of being” (223).  Bulgakov argues that the Western insistence on speaking of God as First Cause and creation as Second Cause has the effect of subsuming the latter under the former.  Rather, God is not the cause of the world but the Creator.

• In the creation of the world God repeats or doubles his own Being.  This is the Divine Sophia positing the Creaturely Sophia’s mode of existence (222).
• It is the self-repetition of the Divine Sophia.

Bulgakov thinks he solves the main aporia--that of divine and human freedom--in placing this interaction within the realm of creaturely Sophia (231).

The Church

Holds to a highly qualified apostolic succession (280-282).

The Eucharist

• He suggests that Ignatius’s stringent appeal to the bishop suggests that his position is new and far from indisputable (284).
• The initial emphasis was not on the Bishop, but on the koinonia.

History and Knowledge

• mankind finds its unity in Adam and is the gnoseological subject, The Universal-I.  It is realized in the particular cognitive acts of individuals.  This is what Hegel was getting at when he said knowledge is social.  If knowledge is atomized, it can’t be transmitted.
• If there is a transcendental subject, then there is a transcendental object.  This is the world in its integral unity, creaturely Sophia.

Expanding Being in History

We know from revelation that spiritual hierarchies participate together with man in the world.  “They act within the limits of the world.”  

Criticisms

What does Bulgakov mean by alluding to an “ontological hierarchy” in creation (53)? Elsewhere, he rightly rejects the Aristotelian chain of being.  I think he means something along the lines that creation is not a nominalistic bundle of atoms (a string of pearls without the string).  

A reflection on *Being*

Based on Robert Sweetman's essay in Radical Orthodoxy and the Reformed T radition.  His larger target is the claim that nominalism created the Reformation (and hence ruined Christian Europe).  I think he ably rebuts that thesis, but his essay does a good job in showing what the analogia entis really is.

“Being” covers the most humble individual to the most general genera.  Being functions as a genus, but it is not a genus itself.  It does not have anything more universal in which it can participate.  Because being is not definable, it is not univocal.  

Because we have to predicate “being” over everything, this points to some sameness between everything.  And because there is a sameness, being cannot be equivocal.  Thus, it is analogical.  

Further, Thomas denies univocal knowledge (ST 1 Q. 13 a.5).  When we predicate some finite thing, we predicate it in a divided way.  When we predicate something of God, we are predicating it in an undivided way (since God has it immediately and simply).

Analogy is founded on the proportionality of one name to another where they participate in a common  unity.  The predicate of a term of both God and man is founded on some order of all creatures.  In short, analogical predication posits a single essence as a middle term uniting God and creature (Sweetman 83).  The dissimilarity is that the creature has a derived and diminished existence. 

Theological Economics of Medieval Usury Theory

From Joan Lockwood O’Donovan, Bonds of Imperfection.

medieval economics: A Christo-centric ethic of perfection that drew heavily upon the Stoic-Platonist tradition.  

• drew upon the Patristic vision of polarity of opposing loves of spiritual and earthly riches, “viewed avarice as the root of all evil,” property right as morally tainted (Lockwood O’Donovan, 99).  
• Not fully Aristotelian, though.  The Patristic vision viewed community primarily in terms of a common participation in invisible goods and a charitable sharing of divisible goods by its members.  

Canonical Development of the Usury Prohibition

The church recognized two intrinsic titles to interest (indemnity) on loans in the case of delayed repayment:  the title of damages sustained and that of profit foregone.  Further, contracts are distinguished from loans.

• The locatio: a rental contract on a piece of property
• The societas: partnership where profit and risk were shared
• The Census:  sale or purchase for life of a rent-charge (the return varied on the productivity)

The church in fact gave moral license to limited opportunities for investment and credit that favored the welfare of the poor but did not serve an expanding commercial economy (101-102).  However, as contracts became more complex over time, it was really hard to not engage in some form of usury.  

The Earlier Medieval Treatments of Usury

God’s original will for human community:  

• its members make common use of the goods of creation to relieve material want (104).  
• air, sun, rain, sea, seasons (divinely created as koinonia, unable to be monopolized; cf. modern American government attacking those who store rainwater for their gardens)
• Gratian argues this did not mean private ownership and amassing wealth.  It’s hard to see how this squares with Proverbs injunction that a godly man leaves an inheritance.  And if the wealth is to be distributed by the church, it’s hard to see how the church can make any claim to poverty and non-possessorship.

The usurer sells time:  time originally belongs to God, and secondarily belongs to all creatures.  Thus, to sell time is to injure all.  Further, time is a koinon, indivisibly shared by all creatures.  

Roman contract of loan (mutuum):  a fungible good is transferred from owner to borrower. Ownership is transferred because the borrower is not expected to repay the exact same item.  The borrower assumes the risk of loss and is bound to repay it.  Thefore, Lockwood O’Donovan argues, “The medieval theologians and canonists could argue, in the first place, that the usurer charges the debtor for what the debtor already owns” (107).

The Thomistic Treatment of Usury

Commutative justice (ST 2a2ae. 78)

Usury sins against justice in the exchange, a violation against equality in the exchange

Thomas does presuppose property right

• sterility of money theory
• Money is a means of measuring equivalence in an exchange.  It can only establish equivalence if it is formally equal to the thing itself in exchange (
• the usurer inflicts on the needy borrower a moral violence of making him repay more than he was lent.
• Thomas also argues that human industry, not money is the cause of profit.
• to charge separately for a thing

Luther’s restatement of the medieval inheritance

law of natural equity: we do not seek our profit in our neighbor’s loss.