In popular Christian writing, as well as in theology, I’m constantly seeing the word “godhead” being used to mean something like “the three members of the Trinity, considered as a group”. An example context would be discussion “the eternal fellowship of the Godhead”.
Historically, this usage puzzles me. You never see this usage in ancient, medieval, [...]
It seems I touched a nerve, judging by the word count so far (here, and here). First, let me make clear that I have no interest in mocking Catholic doctrine. I’m a non-catholic (and so non-Catholic) Christian, and am in sympathy with the Catholic tradition in many ways. I’m going to avoid some well-worn Catholic-Protestant [...]
St. Ignatius Loyola (1495-1556) founded the Jesuit order and authored a famous book of Spiritual Exercises. There, in a list of rules for correct belief, we have this:
Thirteenth Rule. To be right in everything, we ought always to hold that the white which I see, is black, if the Hierarchical Church so decides it, believing [...]
Philosopher Graham Priest is notorious for his claim that there are true contradictions. I have to confess that when I first heard this years ago, I thought the people telling me were pulling my leg. But, they were not. Priest is deadly serious, and has developed paraconsistent logics – logical systems which allow some true [...]
Thanks to Ed Feser for some interesting dialogue on the topic of mysteries in Christian theology. This post is just a bunch of miscellaneous responses to his thoughts posted last week, here and here.
As he mentioned, Ed and I knew each other briefly as students at what is now called Claremont Graduate University. I remember [...]
Last time I tried to analyze Richard’s argument in ch. 22 that his view preserves monotheism. This time, I critically evaluate the argument. Is it sound?
It goes like this:
There can be at most one omnipotent being. (premise)
No being can have more than one token of any property. (premise)
At most one token of omnipotence can exist. [...]
Below is a guest post by Greg Spendlove, who is an adjunct philosophy instructor at Salt Lake Community College. He received his Master of Arts in Christian Thought with an emphasis in Systematic Theology and a cognate in Philosophy of Religion from Trinity International University in Deerfield, IL in 2005. His Master’s thesis was entitled [...]
Has Richard, after these 21 chapters so far of Book III of his On the Trinity (De Trinitate) only succeeded in proving that there are at least three gods? In chapter 22, Richard argues for a negative answer.
First, he refers back to the doctrine of divine simplicity, which is common coin for medieval theists, even, [...]
In the preceding chapters, Richard has been arguing for the impossibility of only one divine person. If there’s one, there must be more than one; more than that, there must be at least three.
To do this, he’s used Anselmian perfect being theology – arguing that since God is absolutely perfect, and it would add [...]
Now, for a quick break in our Richard of St. Victor series, so that I can explain the point of my implausible yarn about a gnome. Tertullian, Irenaeus, and other late-2nd and early 3rd century catholic thinkers subscribed to what we can all the Logos theory. This christological theory has three main elements:
God’s internal Word (logos) [...]
As Joseph explained in his last post, in his On the Trinity, Richard of St. Victor asserts the superiority of “shared love” (Latin: condilectus). He holds that it is superior to other loves in value and in the pleasure it involves. He’s imagining something like my chart on the left.
Look at the bottom case, and [...]
Here Richard spells out more fully than before the nature of shared love (condilectus). Here he offers one main argument (A.1-3) from supreme shared love for the Trinity and then a follow-up argument (B.1-3) again from supreme shared love for the Trinity. So (A) consider the nature of shared love:
If one person loves another and [...]
Here is my paraphrase of the argument in ch.18:
It might seem that supreme goodness can exist where one person supremely loves and receives nothing in return from the other person for full happiness. But in fact such supreme goodness can’t even exist where only two persons mutually love each other. Suppose that, in divinity, there [...]
So next up ch.17. Here it is short and sweet:
Supreme happiness requires that if there is at least one divine person, there are at least two divine persons. Suppose, in divinity, there is only one person. Then (1) this person gives supreme love to no one and receives supreme love from no one. (2) Such [...]
So next up ch.16. Here’s my version of what goes on in this chapter:
Full wisdom and power can exist in only one person. If, per impossibile, there is only one divine person, he can still have fullness of wisdom and power.
The pleasures of wisdom and love differ. The pleasure of wisdom can be drawn from [...]
So we’re done with ch.14. Now on to ch.15. Here’s a paraphrase of his argument:
With divine persons, the perfection of one requires another, and so the perfection of a pair requires union with a third. Each such person is perfectly benevolent and so shares his perfection with the other. But if each is perfectly benevolent, [...]
I (and so we) took a break from the Richard posts. But we now return. Perhaps at some point I’ll blog on some conferences I’ve been to: the Metaphysics of the Incarnation conference at the University of Oxford last September. And I might share a very brief talk I gave on the Trinity at a [...]
Once upon a time, I met a friendly lawn gnome named Willy. I happened upon him when trimming the bushes along the side of my house – nearly slashed the poor little guy with my electric trimmer. I quickly apologized, and asked him to come inside and have a beer with me. Willy graciously accepted, [...]
This is one for the history buffs.
Check out this piece from my favorite magazine: Hitler’s Forgotten Library. Skip to the end (last 9-10 paragraphs) for the Trinity stuff – which is (I think, ultimately Hegel-inspired) absolute idealist / monist riffing on the Trinity.
Can’t muster much interest in that genre myself, since I think monism is [...]
After his initial argument from perfect love for a Trinity of persons, Richard tries to support it by a brief argument from perfect happiness. Here I wish to summarize what I take to be this confirming argument from the plenitude of happiness. [Keep in mind that ‘plenitude’ has that particular meaning of a property of [...]
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