In three of the last four posts (Rick St. Vick 6, 7, 9, 10) I surveyed some of Richard of St. Victor’s arguments for why there must be at least three divine persons. (We’ve yet to see an argument for there aren’t more than three persons.) Here I’d like to respond to these, and to one JT’s responses too.
Richard proposes the following:
(T7) Supreme love should be directed at the highest kind of lovable beings.
Richard seems to assume that love is a kind of volition fixed by its object. If I love an ant, well, I’ve got ant-love. But if I love a human being, then that’s a higher kind of love, human-love. And, if I love God, that is the highest kind of love possible. I don’t find anything problematic with the notion that a divine person (and any creature) should love ‘the highest kind of lovable being’. What needs to be teased out more is why more than one divine person satisfies this description. It isn’t until Book 4 that Richard tells us what he thinks a ‘person’ is; so at this point we are left wondering why we should think ‘the highest kind of lovable beings’ is a person (several persons) who has the divine substance.
Next, Richard considers two states of affairs:
(S1) A divine person x (1) has self-love and (2) loves divine person y, and (3) y has self-love but (4) y does not love x.
(S2) A divine person x (1) has self-love and (2) loves divine person y, and (3) y has self-love and (4) y loves x.
Prima facie it does not seem problematic to say that (S2) is a better state of affairs than (S1) on the assumption that loving another person is something better to have than not having it simpliciter [= pure perfection]. On, e.g., Chisholm’s good/evil calculus, (S1) contains a negative feature (4) that nevertheless is either balanced off or defeated by (1)-(3) (you decide which). But (S2) does not contain any negative features, but contains entirely good features; hence (S2) is a diffusively good state of affairs.
This brings us to JT’s worry that Richard seems to beg the question by saying that perfect love by definition entails that a person loves another person, and vice versa. Richard certainly stipulates that perfect love entails more than one person. If we take ‘perfect love’ simpliciter, then there isn’t much traction for thinking why it entails two additional divine persons. But if we take ‘perfect love’ as a perfection relative to a person (e.g., in the way that sweetness is a perfection of sugar, and awesomeness is relative to JT’s bartending abilities), then we might find some intuition that helps us to see whether Richard begs the question or not.
What intuition might Richard have that being a person entails that it is good for the person to love another person? This might be a moral intuition, it might be an ontological intuition, or both. It would seem to be vaguely analogous to God deciding that it’d be better for Adam (for a person) to not be alone in the garden; so God decides to create Eve (another person, not a talking rock or circuit board); in fact, a human capable of bearing children. The whole ‘be fruitful and multiply’ notion seems to be in the back of Richard’s mind, at least insofar as the goodness of there being more than one person is concerned. (One might look to Aristotle’s ‘a person is a social animal’ as another motivating intuition.) Or again, this might be the neo-Platonic ‘plenitude of goodness’ thesis–that goodness by definition brings about others. And Richard supposes ‘others’ here are divine persons (and not creatures). But what does e.g., Adam gain from Eve that puts Adam in a better situation?
JT writes:
What could a divine person gain from loving another that he wouldn’t get through self-love? Or as Ockham puts it, how could a divine person’s act of loving another divine person be any more or less perfect than their act of loving the divine essence itself? After all, God’s internal acts of love are supposed to all be equally perfect.
A charitable reading of Richard might go like this. It is true that a divine person loving the divine essence is a perfect act; but so too is a person loving another person. We might say it is like comparing apples (loving the divine essence) and oranges (loving another person). Both acts of loving are perfect insofar as they are the kinds of acts they are (acts fixed by the kind of object). It isn’t that loving another divine person is ‘more perfect’ than loving the divine essence simpliciter; but that loving another divine person is another kind of perfection (a person-relative perfection). So, what Adams ‘gains’ is the person-relative perfection of loving another person. Either this begs the question, or states what are primitive facts about persons.
However, Richard needs to give us reasons to suppose we should think there must be such a person-relative perfection in God. To my mind, Richard takes “a person loves another person” as a primitive intuition about the perfection of persons. It shouldn’t be that e.g., the Father’s loves the Son, is how the Father is morally perfect (supposing ‘moral perfection’ is a divine attribute), or that the Father gains some epistemological or psychological insight about himself or the nature of love. It might just be that by saying “‘a person loving another person’ is better than ‘a person not loving another person’” [PL = perfect love] is a negative claim. Consider this,
(3) If e.g., y does not love x (e.g., because y is unwilling), then x grieves because y does not love x.
As I mentioned before, Richard takes grieving and being happy (with regard to the same object) as contraries. Hence, if Richard wants to say that the Father is perfectly happy, then he’s got to deny that the Father is one who grieves. So, perhaps when he posits PL Richard is merely denying that ‘a person grieves because of another person’. If this is right, then Richard’s argument from love is a kind of apophaticism (negative theology–saying what God is not). However, this might not be right because Richard seems committed to saying that love is a real divine attribute, not merely the negation of grief. In any case, it is worth considering.
Richard also mentions that a divine person might not have perfect love if the person in question is unwilling or unable. Given (3), Richard seems to add that a divine person might not have perfect love if another person is unwilling or unable to love the first person. So, there might be two senses of ‘unable’: (1) x‘s not having power to love another person, (2) x‘s not having all the right conditions for perfect love (that is, x needs y to love x if x is to have perfect love, so x is ‘unable’ to have perfect love if y doesn’t love x.).
However, what Richard is missing is why there is a second or third divine person (who might be unwilling to love (another) divine person). Richard argues for three person on the basis that there is perfect love, but then considers the case that there might be three persons and there isn’t ‘perfect love’. But why suppose there are three persons if there isn’t perfect love? Richard doesn’t argue for three persons and there not being perfect love. It would seem then that Richard has significantly unjustified assumptions.
Furthermore, Richard seems to assume that the second and third divine persons, in some sense, perfects the first divine person. This would seem to go against Augustine‘s repeated claim in De Trinitate that every divine person is perfect in se. The Father is entirely perfect without the Son, etc. Perhaps Richard would claim that the only perfection in question here is ‘perfect love’, and that every divine person would have this perfection immanently. To say every divine person has this perfection immanently contradicts claims like ‘the Son does the Father’s understanding for the Father’. If this is the illicit theological view that Augustine had in mind, then Richard could say that every divine person remembers, understands, and loves in se, but that any one divine person has perfect love immanently in part thanks to the two other divine persons. Scotus later rejects such a view. But I take it that Scotus has a different theological opinion than Richard does.
Next, Richard believes that [x = divine person]:
(5.i) If x is unwilling to have perfect love, then perfect love must be elsewhere. But who else besides a divine person could have perfect love essentially? Nobody. But a person who has the divine substance essentially satisfies the description of ‘the best of all possible beings’ (substances). Therefore, a person, who has the divine substance essentially, has perfect love.
But why should we suppose that ‘perfect love’ exists anywhere? Richard assumes that it has got to exist somewhere. And the most likely place is that it exists in whatever being satisfies the description ‘the best of all possible beings’. But even still, we might be of a nihilist persuasion such that we don’t suppose that love is a basic fact about the creator of the world (if there is a creator of the world). Richard doesn’t give us arguments for why perfect love must exist; but he works from the angle that we have experienced love in this world, and we find love extraordinarily compelling and basic to the make- up and (normative) ordering of the world, esp. in human society.
Richard seems to take it as intuitively obvious that the (S2) is a better state of affairs than (S1). This intuition is what seems to drive his entire argument from love, and from happiness. What seems much less obvious is Richard’s claim that perfect love is satisfied only by three mutual lovers. Suppose we accept his intuition that perfect love entails (at least) three mutual lovers, but why not more than three? The more, the merrier? In book 4 he’ll give an argument for why there are exactly three divine persons, but not from his notion of perfect love, rather from the origin of produced divine persons and an appeal (in effect) to the indiscernibility of identicals. It seems then that Richard gives up on the idea (if he seriously held it) that he can argue from perfect love that there are exactly three mutual lovers. Instead, Richard seems to take his argument from perfect love to be successful if it shows us that there must be at least three divine persons.
Hello, I would like to present a case for R.St.V’s proof for the necessity of a three person God. Here is the jist of the problem raised by Scott, in his own words:
“What seems much less obvious is Richard’s claim that perfect love is satisfied only by three mutual lovers. Suppose we accept his intuition that perfect love entails (at least) three mutual lovers, but why not more than three?..In book 4 he’ll give an argument for why there are exactly three divine persons, but not from his notion of perfect love…It seems then that Richard gives up on the idea (if he seriously held it) that he can argue from perfect love that there are exactly three mutual lovers.”
I propose that R.St.V DID in fact “seriously” hold that the necessity of the Trinity can be argued from perfect love. In fact, I shall present one such of R.St.V’s arguments.
Scott here draws two conclusions which I believe to be incorrect. (1) R.St.V does not argue from supreme love for an exact trinity. (2) Richard’s aim is not to find the necessity of only a Trinity. Instead, R.St.V actually argues for a necessity of at least three persons (i.e. three or more). Point (2), it should be noted, follows from (1).
In book IV, Richard does indeed argue for a trinity of persons by appealing to a notion similar to the indiscernibility of identicals. But Scott, I believe, has overlooked an important feature of Richard’s argument that leads him to (1). The origin of persons in part grounds their distinctions. Procession, for instance, is a relationship resulting from origin which provides personal distinction in the divine substance. But analogous to procession of origin is what R.St.V calls a procession of Love. Yves Congar calls this concept a manner of “realizing love”. Congars sums R.St.V’s thoughts on this point, explaing that love is realized by “either {1} pure grace, or {2} it is received and giving, or {3} it is purely received and due.” The manner in which the persons of the Trinity realize love, for Richard, may be a sist, a mode of being, and therefore not grounded in origin. But even if the manner in which the persons of the Trinity realize love occurs due to their ex-sist(ance), I believe there is reason enough to see that divine and supreme love has not been abandoned by Richard as the grounds for his general argument.
Put another way, R.St.V does argue from perfect love for an exact Trinity. He says that the procession of love is one way in which the Divine Persons are distinguished. Further, he believes this procession of love may not be a result of anything. It’s just one of the ways God is. Alternatively, the procession of love may be like the procession of origin (an exist) , or even grounded in the procession of origin.
In either instance, the procession of love proves that R.St.V does believe that an exact Trinity can be argued for from love. With (1) on shaky ground, (2) also tumbles. Further, Richard’s argument appears to be valid. Therefore R.St.V’s trinity calculus of the procession of love must be recognized and its strength tested.
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