Guest post: JT Paasch on constitution trinitarianism

JT Paasch is a graduate student at Oxford, he’s originally from Utah. He earned a M.Div at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (under Kevin Vanhoozer), then went to Oxford to work with Richard Cross on medieval trinitarian theology. His doctoral thesis is titled ‘The Logic and Metaphysics of the Trinity according to William of Ockham’. I’ve appreciated his thoughtful comments on some of my posts here. I thought the following one was post-worthy.

Be sure to check out his blog, the title of which is either (1) contradictory, or (2) an example of English (or Utahn?) dry humor. I say the charitable interpretation is (2). 🙂 – Dale

In the traditional western view of the trinity, e.g., as the likes of Augustine and Aquinas think, the divine essence basically functions as a nature.

Of course, the classical (Aristotelian) sense of ‘nature’ is a little tricky. For most theologians such as Aquinas, a nature in created things is particular in the way that a trope is considered particular. Further, Aquinas would distinguish between nature-tropes and accidental-tropes. Plato’s humanity would be a nature-trope, but Plato’s paleness would be an accidental-trope. Additionally, nature-tropes are instantiated by matter, and that makes a substance (in the sense of an individual object). Accidental-tropes are instantiated by substances.

Here’s the key points about this classical view.

(1) Both of these kinds of tropes are posterior to their subjects (i.e., to their trope-bearers). The reason is that they are instantiated by their subjects, not the other way around. Perhaps another way of putting this is that the natures are posterior to the things that exemplify them.

(2) Also, natures are not individual objects. They do have some extramental reality in the same way that the modern notion of tropes have some extramental reality, but they are not individual objects. They are rather traits or attributes of individual objects. Socrates and Plato are individual objects, while ‘humanity’ is an attribute of Socrates and Plato rather than an individual object in its own right. But nevertheless, ‘humanity’ does have extramental reality because it’s really ‘there’ in Socrates and Plato.

As I said at the beginning of this comment, the divine essence functions in the same way. It is posterior to the persons, just as ‘humanity’ is posterior to Socrates and Plato. And the divine essence is not an individual object, but it does have extramental reality in the divine persons because it’s really ‘there’ in the Father and Son. Likewise, the divine persons are, in some sense, individuals just as Socrates and Plato are individuals.

The major difference between the divine essence and natures in created things is that natures in created things are multiplied by their subjects. Thus, Socrates’ humanity is not identical to Plato’s humanity. As I said, natures in created things are more like tropes because they are particular for each individual instantiator.

The divine essence, on the other hand, is like an immanent universal. It is not divided by each divine person which instantiates it. Thus, each divine person shares the numerically same nature (the divine essence). It would be as if Plato and Socrates shared the numerically same humanity. Apart from that, the divine essence basically operates like a nature.

B&R’s account is pretty much the complete opposite of this. The divine essence is like the subject which instantiates the personal properties.

I wonder about some of the things that this might entail.

(a) One might argue that the divine essence has to be an individual if it is to instantiate anything. This would be an argument similar to Scotus’s argument for individuation: any of the obvious candidates for individuation (e.g., matter, accidents, etc.) are already individual, so they must already be individuated and thus can’t function as individuators. There must, then, be something individual itself (a haecceity) which instantiates any properties and makes them particular.

I myself am not necessarily opposed to saying the divine essence is an individual. I certainly don’t want to identify the divine essence with the father, because that would lead to the ‘derivation’ view of the trinity, which doesn’t seem to me very workable.

(b) One might further argue that on this view, the personal properties have to be like natures in that they are instantiated by the divine essence. B&R certainly seem to talk this way when they say that matter instantiates forms. But if this is right, do we then mean that the personal property being a father is the generic nature paternity? That would seem to go against the whole ‘generic’ view of the classical tradition, where the divine essence is seen as the generic nature of the persons, not the other way around. And what sort of consequences would this entail?

I don’t know how I feel about this particular point. In principle, I see no reason why the personal properties can’t be seen as generic natures.

(c) I have further questions (as does Joseph) about what any of this means for the question ‘one consciousness or three?’ For the classical view, does saying the divine essence is an immanent universal block the inference that there are three consciousnesses? Likewise, for B&R’s view, does saying the divine essence is the subject of the personal properties block the same inference?

With respect to the classical view, I’m inclined to think that there is one consciousness. The divine essence is the thinking and willing power-pack, and since the divine persons are the subjects of that power-pack, there would certainly be three agents which do the thinking and willing. But since they all share the same thinking and willing power-pack, they would all perform the numerically same acts of thinking and willing, and I’m not sure that gives us enough to say there are three distinct consciousnesses. But my mind is not totally made up on that yet.

With respect to B&R, I don’t even know how to go about answering the question. They haven’t really clarified their position enough yet.

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