Dallas Willard is one of my favorite authors, and I don’t normally go in for criticizing what he writes. But I found a great example in this (good) book (p. 122) of an idea that is fairly widespread, and which underlies a lot of social trinitarian speculation. This brief passage got me to thinking. He says,
…God is love and sustains love for us from his basic reality as love, which dictates his Trinitarian nature. God is in himself a sweet society of love where three persons complete a social matrix. Not only does each one love and receive love, but each has a shared love for another, the third person. The nature of personality is inherently communal, and only the Trinity does justice to what personality is. (emphasis in bold added)
I don’t really know what his last phrase (re: doing justice) means. But consider this claim: “The nature of personality is inherently communal.”
- On one interpretation, this is true, but trivial. It is part of what is meant by calling something a “person” that it is capable of personal relationships with other persons. So personhood includes a capacity to love and be loved, or at least, a capacity for interpersonal friendship.
- But a stronger interpretation seems to meant, according to which it is essential to persons that they are in relationship. This is contentious, and not at all obviously true.
- You might think it is easily refutable, as it declares impossible what is plainly possible: just imagine a baby, fresh from its mother, dropped on an uninhabited desert island, and this tot is raised by the wolves or chimps or orangutans (or if you think these are capable of personal relationships, suppose he’s raised by robots). Thus, it reaches adulthood, and may live out its natural life, without ever having been in a personal relationship. But this lone human would still be a person, right? This doesn’t seem to be impossible, as the stated principle implies. So the stated principle, the stronger interpretation of what Willard says, is false.
- But things are not so easy. For the social trinitarian may say this: the lone human is in a personal relationship, perhaps whether he knows it or not – to his God. God can’t not exist, and so there really is no possibility to consider, in which a person exists without relationship. If only God exists, he’s a community of three, and so is in relationship. And even if only one human existed, and never had human friends, he’d still have a relationship to God.
This reply, in my view, doesn’t work – couldn’t our lonely Robinson Crusoe reject God, and push God (almost?) entirely from his mind, so that he doesn’t have any personal relationship to (i.e. friendship with) God? Sure, he’d still bear some relations to God, but he wouldn’t be in any kind of relationship with God. If so, and if he’d still be a person, then it is false that being in relationship (to someone else) is essential to being a person. Of course, if God exists and can’t possibly not exist, then there is no possibility of any person whatever not being related to him somehow (as creature to creator, for example). But the claim, I take it, is about friendships.
Suppose that God exists, and that he is (identical to) one perfect person. This is what Jews, Muslims, and unitarians (not be confused with Unitarian-Universalists) think. Further, suppose that this one God was free to never create – so it is a logical possibily, it is consistent to suppose a scenario where only this God exists. Call this the Solitary God Scenario.
What the social trinitarian is saying, on this second, stronger interpretation of Willard’s statement, is that the Solitary God Scenario is not a possibility after all, but rather, an impossibility, for it is an essential feature of an person, including a perfect, divine person, to be in at least one personal relationship with another. They are saying there is something contradictory about the Solitary God Scenario.
Presumably, the contradiction would be this: that it is essential to divinity that it be tri-personal, or that it should contain three persons capable of personal relationships. So the Solitary God Scenario is contradictory in that it posits a divine being which doesn’t contain three persons. How do we know this is essential to divinity? Presumably, we learn from divine revelation that divinity must be tri-personal. Unless Swinburne is right, it doesn’t seem to be knowable on the basis of reason alone. If you think of the concept: unipersonal divinity – there just isn’t any (obvious) contradiction there.
Of course, there are problems with this sort of social trinitarianism. It would follow from the above, that the Father is not divine (he’s not tripersonal). None of the Three would be, except in the sense that they are members or parts of a thing which is divine. Or is the Trinity a thing it all? Perhaps it is a mere group, not a thing but just a set of things – a divine group. But can a group – a mere collection of things – be divine, that is, a divinity, a god? A god is an entity, not, we’d think, a mere construction out of three entities. Willard calls God a “he”, but also a society. Go figure.
But lay these problems aside. The lessons I draw from this are as follows:
- One can’t argue for or support social trinitarianism on the basis of the claim that human persons are essentially relational, for they are not. A human which is truly solitary, in that he has no friends at all, is nonetheless a person, a personal being, a being capable of friendship. If one is going to know that a social trinitarian theory is true, it’ll have to be known on the basis of divine revelation. Then, maybe, something relevant to human relations will follow from this theory.
- The Solitary God Scenario isn’t something we know, simply by reflection, to be contradictory. On the face of it, why couldn’t this be, and why couldn’t the solitary God be truly and fully happy? You might say – but he’d be lonely, incomplete. Well, maybe not. Maybe he would have a desire, out of his overflowing goodness, to create angelic and human companions, but maybe nonetheless, he’s not (prior or “prior” to creation) aching for company – his desire may stem from a fullness and not from a deficiency. The point is, it’s hard to see this as impossible.
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Hi Scott,
I don’t know if that’s all he means… But if it is, he’s mistaken in taking me to be some sort of Spinozan (etc.) “rationalist”. I’m very concerned with the relevant biblical evidence, and will some day focus more on it here. It’s just, we can’t fudge the philosophizing – we can’t think sloppily, because we’re already enraptured with some theory or other. In the present case, an a priori argument is just that, and can only be evaluated as such.
Dale,
I think Dan’s point, in one way, is one about philosophical method. Think of it this way: in philosophy there are those 17th c. rationalists who start with some concept and then explore what this concept logically entails or denies; there are also those Aristotelians–who are quite keen about empirical data in addition to logical formulations. I think Dan’s point is that an empirical approach is equally important. So, if we want to give a definition of a person, we need to consult actual people out in the world. In ‘this world’, all human persons have biological relations to his/her parents. In ‘this world’, all people do have a relation with another person or persons. And that this relation functions as a foundation for higher-order relations, e.g. conscious awareness, conscious love. One might think of children given up for adoption who never ‘met’ their mom and dad. And yet, when the child grows up, she or he may long to meet her/his biological parents.
I don’t think Dan is saying that we can’t think about God ‘in Godself’; but rather, if we think about God ‘in Godself’, we need to think about _this_ God who has revealed Himself to particular human beings. As it were, a Christian theology without the biblical witness (and one might had in some manner, the witness of Christ’s church through the ages) is not Christian theology.
Dan,
Is your idea that given our epistemic limits, we can only think/reason/know about God as God appears to us, and not how God is “in himself” (in Godself, if you like)?
Dale, please forgive my cheek, but I think it is you that is missing the point, and the genre or discipline. There doesn’t seem to be much point in my opinion to discuss your fantastical imaginings, b/c social trinitarians, at least as I understand them, and most “trinitarian” theologians are trying to understand the trinity in light of our current situation, not what might be if there were C Sectioning robots. And if that were the world we lived in, there wouldn’t be much point in trying to understand God, would there. From a philosophical point of view, I guess I can see your concern for consistency. But it just doesn’t carry much theological weight or interest. Why not address the real situation we’re in, that people are born into relationship, that they are thrown into lives with others. It’s not a matter of necessity the way you’re construing necessity, but it is the God given order.
Hey guys – thanks for the comments. Alexander first:
1. It’s part of what *I* mean in calling something person, that it is capable of personal relationships. I guess one may work with a simpler concept of personhood (e.g. rational substance – but depending on how it’s understood, the “rational” part MAY imply the capacity for personal relationships – I don’t know). In any case, whatever we say about the garden-variety concept of personhood, of course from the abortion debate, there’s a (somewhat fuzzy) definition of “person” which I think implies a capacity for friendship. In any case, not much hangs on this claim, I think.
2. On this, I think I’ve refuted this in my later post, here. What do you think?
3. This is an interesting thought. I think the kind of relationships I was talking about involve two agents being mutually aware, and deliberately interacting with one another. I guess I’d say, if God has been pushed entirely (or almost so) out of someone’s mind, then they’re not in relationship with him. Again, of course they bear various relations to him, but they don’t stand in any friendship relation.
4. I’d call those pseudo-friendships – even if the one agent thinks he’s in a real relationship. Wouldn’t you? Or you could say it’s a metaphorical usage of relationship-language. But it arguably wouldn’t fall under the genus of friendship.
5. Not sure what Willard thinks about fetuses… In any case, a fetus might bear ethically important relations to people (e.g. being its mother’s biological daughter) without being in any personal relationship. Remember – not any old relation which obtains between persons is thereby a personal relationship – I mean, it’s not necessary a kind of friendship, which I take it is what social trinitarians are appealing to.
To Scott’s point on Alexander’s point 5 – it’s right that if two agents are in a relationship, then they needn’t, at a given time, be thinking of one another, or be active at all. I take it, “being in a relationship” is being disposed to act in certain ways in certain contexts. So I think it implies mutual awareness and intentionally acting for the good of the other, but not occurently.
Dan – I certainly don’t want to waste time pounding on a straw man. Can you say precisely how my post misconstrues this German tradition? (I had more in mind recent English-language stuff – sentiments like Willard’s are fairly common – but in any case, please do say where you think I’m going wrong.)
Dan – your comment 11 is missing the point. IF the social trinitarians I’m discussing are right, then it is literally impossible for there to be a universe containing exactly one person – one being capable of I/thou relationships. It isn’t relevant that in *some* sense, no human is ever alone. (Of course, it plainly is *possible* for a human to be a person, yet at no time be in a personal relationship. Just imagine a world with C-sectioning robots in charge. And if this is correct, then the st speculators are mistaken.) The argument – if they’re right, a radically isolated person is impossible. But, such is possible. So, they’re mistaken.
One last thought: one wonders whether your hypothetical of the baby on a desert island breaks down simply because even for the baby, and thus for everyone, communion comes before isolation. The baby must first emerge from the mother’s womb, a communion of sorts, into direct contact with the mother. All isolation in this respect must understood as the absence of a prior communion. There is no such thing as pure absence. Isolation, as you’ve presented it, is a pure abstraction that actually finds no realization for people because all people have necessarily been in communion at least at their own birth.
You say: “For the social trinitarian may say this: the lone human is in a personal relationship, perhaps whether he knows it or not – to his God.”
In fact, however, this sounds more like Augustine in the Confessions – the immanence of God to the human heart – rather than a social trinitarian. It would have been nice had you actually selected an exemplar of the Social Trinitarian movement, like Moltmann, rather than your unwitting suspect, Dallas Willard, and ultimately the straw man argument you construct against what is now a 60 year German Tradition. I say this as someone who is by no means a social trinitarian.
On 5, I think that is right. We shouldn’t narrowly define ‘relationship’ as ‘conscious’, although a relationship may certainly include conscious activity.
1. I don’t think it is TRIVIAL to say that to be a person is in part to be capable of loving relationships.
2. An even less trivial claim is to say that to be a person is to be the sort of being that finds at least part of its fulfillment in loving relationships with others. The latter claim is sufficient to rule out the lonely monopersonal God hypothesis as logically impossible, if one thinks it is logically necessary that God is fulfilled.
3. Robinson Crusoe may push God out of his mind, but perhaps he still has a relationship with God. For one, there is God’s relationship with Crusoe–God loves Crusoe. Arguably if A is in an interpersonal relationship with B, then B is in an interpersonal relationship with A, albeit perhaps an unconscious one. But maybe Willard’s idea is that one needs to be actively in a relationship…
4. It could be that every developed person of normal intellectual capacities is actively in an interpersonal relationship, albeit perhaps the other party to the relationship is non-existent or non-personal. Thus, the kid raised by robots still has an interpersonal relationship with the robots, though the robots aren’t persons. Perhaps Scrooge has an interpersonal relationship with his coins. (This is a modification of Tillich’s ultimate concern idea, minus the requirement that the concern be ultimate and plus the requirement that it be interpersonal.) Perhaps Crusoe thinks of Fate as a person, or of the island as a friend or adversary, etc.
5. A better (to me) counterexample is the human embryo, which as far as we know is apparently incapable of the complex mental states required for interpersonal relationships. (Does Willard accept the embryo’s personhood?) Though there may still be a miraculous relationship with God, I guess…
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Zizoulas places a strong emphasis on the monarchy of the Father as _the_ way to uphold the unity and diversity of divine persons. He’s been criticized for this re-do of EO positions, b/c Zizoulas seems to aim for a derivation view of the divine essence; whereas certain Cappodocians uphold a generic view of the divine essence. This at least, is one item that could be talked about re: Zizoulas. I know Miroslav Volf wrote a book criticizing Z.’s (and Ratzinger’s) views of the Trinity as the model for the constitution of the church = Father = Pope; Son and Holy Spirit = other local churches—anyways, a lot could be said here.
Hi Mike,
Good question. I haven’t read Zizioulas, so I’ll let others chime in. But I believe he’s asserting the superiority of a social / orthodox view.
Dale,
How is Willard’s proposal different from John Zizioulas? If I’ve understood him, the Trinity is communal (or ecclesial), i.e., that personhood is ontologically relational. I’m not certain if Zizioulas is advancing social trinitarianism or if this is an attempt to make Eastern Orthodoxy intelligible to the Western Church, in which case, he may be advancing a third way in understanding the Trinity.
Hi Scott,
Re: Harris, I dug around a little, and found this reference: Harris, Harriet A., “Should We Say that Personhood Is Relational?” Scottish Journal of Theology. 1998. Vol.51:2. I’ll take a look at that – thanks for the ref & summary. I agree that it’s true but trivial that a person is a thing capable of being in relationships. I also agree that for *human* persons, it is a natural state, and the full human flourishing requires being in relationship to others. I also agree with you and Boethius in most of what you say in your #3 comment.
I think the rub comes with motivating this premise: (in your words) “a maximally wise being will be a person loving another person”. I think I’ll post soon on a version of this sort of a priori proof of Social Trinitarianism.
SC – thanks for your comment, and welcome!
You do a nice job articulating a fairly popular line of thought supporting Social Trininty theories. I think there’s a problem with this inference: “If we accept the completeness and self-sufficiency of God’s nature then *this* axiom, combined with a personal view of God, leads to social trinitarianism.” But I’ll say more in a coming post about this. I do hope you stick around, and jump into that discussion as well.
Dear SC,
It isn’t that I generally disagree with you; it is that I feel several ‘jumps’ are made. For example, if Robinson Crusoe (=RC) met some people and formed relationships with them, would this count as constituting RC as a person? But what about the thousands, millions, billions of other human person RC could meet and have a relationship with? Basically, the problem is that if we want to give a *definition* of ‘being a human person’ we need to isolate the essential features and the necessary features. For example, in classical philosophy, Boethius says the *essential* definition of a human person is: an individual substance of a rational nature. Of course, we could add on other features to this definition, but mention that these other features are not *essential* but *necessarily consequent to the essential features*; for example, Boethius and many other classical philosophers think that the capacity to laugh is something proper to human persons in virtue of the fact that humans are rational. So, there are essential properties and necessary properties. Nec. props. presuppose essential props.; and essential props. do not presuppose nec. props.
So, if we say that human are necessarily ordered toward a social existence, we could say just that: humans necessarily are teleologically ordered toward social relationships. We don’t want to indicate a particular number of social relationships, b/c a particular number is neither essential nor necessary for being a human person; still, we can say, humans are necessarily teleologically ordered to social relations (in general).
But none of this stuff about necessary teleological orders is *good enough* for talking about the trinity. The trinity is not a mere society. The ‘trinity’ designates three and only three persons. And this is where the crunch lay. We can postulate general sorts of descriptions about God as a society of friends or lovers, but this doesn’t specify the christian god, who is three persons and one substance/essence. So, what remains is an argument for ‘why three and only three?’ Appeals to maximal perfections: e.g. love is most perfect when there are three who love one another, might get us to argue for more than one divine persons, but it doesn’t block our inferring there are 4, or 5, or infinitely many divine persons.
So, although arguments like the Trinity is a ‘unity and diversity’ are ‘nice’, and although these provide a moral exemplar of some sort for thinking about human social relations–nevertheless, these sorts of arguments don’t quite do as much work as people might hope they do.
You are correct that persons, including human persons, are no less persons for being in a situation of solitude. Still, being a member of society is *natural* for human beings. Not only do humans (qua persons) have *capacities* for love and relationships, but these capacities are intended (by our Creator) to find expression through our relationships with one another. “It is not good for the man to be alone”. There is some privation of good in a Robinson Crusoe situation.
With regard to God’s nature and social trinitarianism, I think we should not argue that God’s personhood requires tripersonhood. But God is not merely a person, God is (as Lewis put it) a “superperson”. More importantly, God is complete in Godself. If we accept the completeness and self-sufficiency of God’s nature then *this* axiom, combined with a personal view of God, leads to social trinitarianism.
While it is conceivable that a non-human person with many divine attributes (atemporality and omnipresence, for example) could exist in a Robinson Crusoe universe, with no other persons to relate to, there would again be something *deficient* or *incomplete* about such a situation, for the person’s relational capacities are not being expressed or satisfied. Since there is no privation in God’s nature, God cannot exist in such a situation.
There seem to me to be two alternatives, then. Either it is necessary that God create other persons (human beings, for example) in order to express God’s relationality, or else there is a divine society of persons.
Of course, the divine persons are one in essence and constitute one uncreated Being. By the same argument that one divine person could not be God (not a self-existent, perfect being), it follows that the Being of God is the complete Trinitarian society.
Several years ago Harriet Harris had a great article about such claims. She makes similar points–though adds a few. This view that an entity is only a person if they have a relationship with another entity is problematic b/c what about ‘Pat’ without any friends, without any relationships to speak of–is Pat a person? And if ‘Pat’ is not a person, must we treat her as human? What about bad relationships? Immoral relationships? Suppose we have a very evil teenage boy who manipulates everyone he knows and who know him– is he a person on the basis of his immoral relations with others?
Harris goes on talking about the immorality entailed by defining ‘person’ in this way; rather with a broader description: an entity with the capacity to enter into relationships (and to get out of immoral ones). I think this is something of a trivial point.
Moreover, Willard’s arg. is akin to richard of st. victor’s (though I wonder whether Willard has an acct. of divine simplicity as Richard does?)–where God’s wisdom must be maximal, and a maximally wise being will be a person loving another person, and they share their love for a third. What this argument lacks is a 4th-person blocker. Why not say a community of 4 better exemplifies a loving community than 3? Or 5? IN other words, this may be an argument from a numerology of some sort?
One feature to Richard of St. Victor’s arg. that Willard’s (as Dale reports it) doesn’t apparently have is a claim about an order of procession among divine persons. There is a first person ‘not from another, generative of another’ (Father), there is a second person ‘from another, productive of another’, and a third person, ‘from another, not productive of another’. I mentioned this vague arg. before as Henry of Ghent picks it up as a general description of the ‘principiative order’ among the persons (a ‘principiative order’ is a causal order taken broadly).
In the end, I think this arg. functions nicely as a moral exemplar to encourage us to love our neighbor–and that the act of loving (broadly taken) does require objects of love with whom we interact. Nevertheless, this arg. does not function as a successful metaphysical explanation of the Trinity.
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