In standard formulations of trinitarian theology nowadays, one says that there is (only) one God “in three Persons.” But what does this mean? We can ask about how these “Persons” relate individually or collectively to the one God. How exactly are they “in” him? But more fundamentally, what is meant by “Person” here?
Some trinitarians will tell you that the answer is, basically: nothing. The famous North African bishop Augustine, probably the most influential “Western” catholic writer on the Trinity said around the year 420,
So the only reason, it seems, why we do not call these three together “one person,” as we call them “one being” and “one god,” but say “three persons” while we never say “three gods” or “three beings,” is that we want to keep at least one word for signifying what we mean by “trinity,” so that we are not simply reduced to silence when we are asked three what, after we have confessed that there are three. (The Trinity [De Trinitate], VII.11, pp. 228-9, trans. Edmund Hill, modified)
And in a controversy about the Trinity among London Anglicans in the 1690s, an Anglican theologian John Wallis asserted that
The blessed Trinity is three somewhats; and these three somewhats we commonly call “Persons,” but the true notion and true nature of that distinction is unknown to us. (quoted in Stephen Nye, Observations on the Four Letters of Dr. John Wallis, &c., in The Faith of One God (London, 1691), 8, modernized.
This is the great discovery of Christian theology? That within the one God there are three “somewhats,” something-or-others? Really?
But many, probably most trinitarians disagree, and even trinitarians who loudly emphasize our inability to understand God, or what these “Persons” are, in fact, when you look at their speech and practice in unguarded moments, think of the “Persons” in one of the ways outlined below.
But first, let’s get clear about something. In English nowadays, “person” often means human being. But this is not what anyone means in the context of trinitarian theology; no one has ever asserted that there are three human beings within God. These uses of “person” are related, though. It is easy for any normal human to move beyond the concept of a human person to the more abstract concept of a personal being. A “person” in this sense is a someone, possibly a “he” or a “she,” possibly a user of pronouns like “I,” “me,” and “my.” This is the concept of a living being who can have a first-person perspective on the world, which is to say, a being who can be conscious. But even worms, probably, are conscious. A person is also capable of friendship and intelligible communication. If there were to be an intelligent alien like “E.T.” in the famous movie by that name, he would be a person – not a human person, but “person” in the sense of a personal being, someone who can give and receive communication, and even be a friend. Many mythical creatures are persons, such as gnomes, sprites, fairies, leprechauns, spirits, angels, demons, and gods.
In my view, this concept of a personal being is built into the human species, and is found without exception in all times and places in human history. Because in trinitarian theology theorists are wont to insist on some special meaning for “Person,” I have labeled this universal concept as the concept of a “self.” I think of me, the bearer of my name, as a self, and so did anyone in ancient China, or medieval Africa. We humans think of ourselves as intelligent, conscious, living beings, capable of communication and friendship.
Of course, one’s culture may intervene, and cause a person to deny that humans really are so many selves. In the earliest Buddhism, a central teaching was that there really are no selves, though there appear to be. (Or: there are selves but they are reducible to, nothing more than, causally-connected series of momentary mental and physical events.) You and I, in this teaching, dissolve under careful analysis, much as clouds, close up, are merely a huge mass of momentary mental and physical events. And in some varieties of Hinduism, it is taught that there is really only one self (the ultimate reality, Brahman), though there appear to be many selves. Both views, I suggest, cut against common sense, which acknowledges that you’re one (real) self, and that I’m another.
Next time: if there are three “Persons” in the Trinity, how many selves does this amount to? One? Three? Four? None?
“In standard formulations of trinitarian theology nowadays, one says that there is (only) one God “in three Persons.” But what does this mean? We can ask about how these “Persons” relate individually or collectively to the one God. How exactly are they “in” him? ”
Dale, is the Trinitarian claim reversible? In your opening statement here it is reversed, passing from
a) one God in three persons
to
b) three persons in one God
I may be wrong, but I think the Trinitarian tends more to a) than b), which would make sense if we understood GOD as roughly synonymous with the divine OUSIA.
However, in boldly guarding this language, Trinitarians also seem to have some work cut out around IN. http://biblehub.com/john/17-23.htm. If we are IN Christ, the Father is IN Christ, and God is IN Father, Son/Christ and Holy Spirit, then the scope of this preposition could do with some serious re-clarification. But certainly the reversibility of the language might then be possible, although would it necessarily be synonymous?
Thomas
It is highly misleading and confusing to refer to hypostasis, prosopa, and ousia as “available options”. The whole point about the doctrine of the “trinity” (at least as it was eventually settled by the Cappadocian scoundrels) is to oppose hypostasis (and, subordinately, prosopon) to ousia in the formula “one ousia in three hypostaseis“.
Augustine is clearly not saying that the theological content of the notion of trinitarian person is basically nothing. He’s talking about the difficulty in selecting a term that expresses the theological doctrine of the Trinity from the available options: hypostasis, prosopa, and ousia.
In other words, he’s talking about creating a technical vocabulary when language is inadequate to express theological content; he’s not at all saying the notion of a Trinitarian person is basically contentless. The result is that this post misses the mark entirely on Augustine’s view of a trinitarian person is.
Having read quite a lot by Augustine on this, but by no means all, in my view he does think that “Person” here is lacking in content. He thinks there is no metaphysical model of the Trinity we can grasp, and that we’re left to making analogies with things we experience. But all such are *bad* analogies. So we just pile on analogies which seem contrary to one another, and hope this leads us to have enough understanding of it to think it is a good thing, this traditional Trinity-language. I think people tend to neglect the start and end of his De Trinitate, preferring to cherry-pick analogies that he uses and almost discards. At the start, he makes clear that he’s going to defend the traditional language no matter what, and that he feels rather put out to defend it. In the end, he hits strong negative mysterian notes. In any case, feel free to tell us what, in your view, a “Person” is for Augustine.
Dale:
That’s clearly not the case in this passage. Augustine is dealing with the problem of rendering the Greek hypostasis/ousia distinction into Latin, since the correlates are substance and essence. It’s a recurring discussion through De Trinitate. He’s talking about the poverty of “our language” (i.e., Latin) to express a technical distinction made originally in Greek. In a discussion of the same issue a few chapters earlier, Augustine says:
“Because the usage of our language [i.e., Latin] has already decided that the same thing is to be understood when we say essence, as when we say substance, we do not venture to use the formula one essence and three substances, but rather one essence or substance and three persons.”
The silence he’s talking about is not an apophatic silence; he’s just saying that if you don’t take certain Latin terms outside their ordinary usage, then Latin speaking people won’t have any words to the doctrine of the Trinity as originally formulated in Greek.
It would indeed be bizarre for someone who wrote so much and with such care about what the term person means in the context of Trinitiarian doctrine to say that theologians don’t mean much of anything when they talk about the Trinitiarian persons. Trinitarian theology of the period, particularly Augustine’s, is much discussed and well understood in contemporary secondary literature.
“don’t mean much of anything” I meant poor in content, not wholly lacking any content. Still, you haven’t said what Aug thinks the “Persons” are, in your view.
“I meant poor in content, not wholly lacking any content.” That is why I characterized you as claiming that Augustine “doesn’t mean much of anything” rather than “doesn’t mean anything at all.”
As to what Augustine thinks the persons of the Trinity are, as I said, treatments of the subject are thick on the ground. I’d recommend Lewis Ayres’ “Augustine and the Trinity” for a good overview. Obviously I cannot spell out Augustine’s doctrine of the Trinitarian persons in the comment of a blog, but I can at least indicate the elements that it would be necessary to include: a) Augustine’s insistence that the persons are neither separate instantiations of a more general nature nor b) mere appearances of one and the same being (as the Latin term persona tends to suggest). Rather, c) to each person belongs the fullness of divinity (indeed, the same divinity). d) The persons are then distinguished by their relation to each other–by begetting and being begotten, or spirating and being spirated, etc. e) In light of divine simplicity, the persons are not distinct from the essence of God, though they are from each other.
To say that there is little content to Augustine’s notion of divine persons when in fact that notion sweeps in so much–the perfections of divinity, the simplicity of God, a reconfiguration of classical metaphysics, the notion of subsistent relations, meditations on Scripture, reflections on how best to translate natively Greek theological concepts to Latin, the ways in which the persons of Trinity are reflected in triadic structure of creation etc.–is controverted by the volumes and volumes Augustine actually wrote on the subject.
To affirm the “simplicity” of something/someone which/who accommodates for three “persons” (whatever the meaning of the word in this special case) is rather mysterian, no?
Is this claim supposed to be evident to the rational mind?
The divine simplicity affirmed by classical theists does not exclude relation; it does exclude composition between act and potency (and thus substance/accident, matter/form, and essence/existence composition). See e.g., http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1028.htm
Are you seriously affirming that EITHER one espouses Thomism, OR one shouldn’t even try to deal with these … er … sublime concepts?
No
Whether there is a universal, cross-cultural concept of a “self” is an
empirical question primarily for anthropologists and historians. The
anthropological and historical evidence I’m aware of simply doesn’t
support your claim that there is such a universal concept, at least how
you define it. Look into anthropologist Harry Triandis’ work on this, as
well as NT historian Bruce Malina’s.
My claim is that this concept is naturally and easily formed by all humans, and that this belief in multiple selves is natural to us. But this doesn’t mean that the belief is universal. Many things are natural to us in this way, e.g. moral realism, but can be eradicated (or confused) by cultural influences. In the post I cite certain Buddhists and Hindus who official line is that there are not multiple selves – but I would wager that most such people in fact believe in them. I’m glad to hear what anthropologists and historians say about this. Is this the Triandis paper you have in mind? http://www.gelfand.umd.edu/Individualism%20and%20Collectivism.pdf Malina? Yeah, I had that book assigned in college. But surely, he’s going to say that they weren’t “individualistic”, but in ways consistent with believing in selves, right? (Just not “separate” ones.)
One more thought: it is very hard to imagine a group of humans with no self-concept, and with no belief in multiple human selves. They would be unable to use personal pronouns, I think, or even to think things like “I’m going hunting next Tuesday.”
Probably? How about amoebas? How about viruses?
Besides, I seriously doubt that Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel would agree with the definition of “self” as a generalization of the notion of “person” …
I’m not sure about the worm claim. I would say that we should attribute mental states only when it seems necessary to explain behavior. Rats, surely yes. Worms – I would say, unclear.
Dale
The setting of the “boundary” will inevitably be rather arbitrary, wouldn’t you agree? Think of an animist. Think of Descartes, for that matter …
I’m happy to admit that the boundary will be vague. But I wouldn’t say it’s wholly arbitrary, no. Extreme views like those you mention don’t show that common sense for humans is attributing mental states only to “higher” animals.
Rather than suggesting that (at least some) lower life forms “are conscious”, isn’t it much more “common sense” to affirm that life, in its complexity, involves a gradual process of “conscience” (e.g. vegetative, sensitive, appetitive, affective, conscious, self-conscious)?
Comments are closed.