Now, on to the Fourth Lateran Council, convened by Pope Innocent III in 1215. This council, considered the 12th “ecumenical” council, was one of the all-time most important councils, which strongly shaped catholicism in the “high†middle ages. It was called, in part, to get another crusade going, after some crusading failures and set-backs. The resulting “constitutions†were proposed (and to some extent written by?) the pope himself. These touch on many doctrinal and practical matters, Jewish issues, and church discipline. Notable doctrinal innovations: transubstantiation, and the explicit claim that no one is saved apart from the one true Church. Here are some of the interesting bits.
“Constitution†or “Canon†number 1:
1. Confession of Faith
We firmly believe and simply confess that there is only one true God… three persons but one absolutely simple essence, substance or nature. The Father is from none, the Son from the Father alone, and the holy Spirit from both equally, eternally without beginning or end… consubstantial and coequal, co-omnipotent and coeternal; one principle of all things, creator of all things invisible and visible, spiritual and corporeal; who by his almighty power at the beginning of time created from nothing both spiritual and corporeal creatures…
This holy Trinity, which is undivided according to its common essence but distinct according to the properties of its persons, gave the teaching of salvation to the human race through Moses and the holy prophets and his other servants, according to the most appropriate disposition of the times. Finally the only-begotten Son of God, Jesus Christ, who became incarnate by the action of the whole Trinity in common and was conceived from the ever virgin Mary through the cooperation of the holy Spirit, having become true man, composed of a rational soul and human flesh, one person in two natures, showed more clearly the way of life. Although he is immortal and unable to suffer according to his divinity, he was made capable of suffering and dying according to his humanity….
There is indeed one universal church of the faithful, outside of which nobody at all is saved, in which Jesus Christ is both priest and sacrifice. His body and blood are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the forms of bread and wine, the bread and wine having been changed in substance, by God’s power, into his body and blood, so that in order to achieve this mystery of unity we receive from God what he received from us. Nobody can effect this sacrament except a priest… [this sacrament] brings salvation to both children and adults when it is correctly carried out by anyone in the form laid down by the church. …2. On the error of abbot Joachim [of Fiore, c. 1135 – 1202]We therefore condemn and reprove that small book or treatise which abbot Joachim published… in which he calls Peter Lombard a heretic and a madman because he said in his Sentences, “For there is a certain supreme reality which is the Father and the Son and the holy Spirit, and it neither begets nor is begotten nor does it proceed”. He asserts from this that Peter Lombard ascribes to God not so much a Trinity as a quaternity, that is to say three persons and a common essence as if this were a fourth person. Abbot Joachim clearly protests that there does not exist any reality which is the Father and the Son and the holy Spirit-neither an essence nor a substance nor a nature — although he concedes that the Father and the Son and the holy Spirit are one essence, one substance and one nature. He professes, however, that such a unity is not true and proper but rather collective and analogous, in the way that many persons are said to be one people and many faithful one church, according to that saying : Of the multitude of believers there was one heart and one mind, and Whoever adheres to God is one spirit with him; again He who plants and he who waters are one, and all of us are one body in Christ; and again in the book of Kings, My people and your people are one. In support of this opinion he especially uses the saying which Christ uttered in the gospel concerning the faithful : I wish, Father, that they may be one in us, just as we are one, so that they may be made perfect in one. For, he says, Christ’s faithful are not one in the sense of a single reality which is common to all. They are one only in this sense, that they form one church through the unity of the catholic faith, and finally one kingdom through a union of indissoluble charity. …
We, however, with the approval of this sacred and universal council, believe and confess with Peter Lombard that there exists a certain supreme reality, incomprehensible and ineffable, which truly is the Father and the Son and the holy Spirit, the three persons together and each one of them separately. Therefore in God there is only a Trinity, not a quaternity, since each of the three persons is that reality — that is to say substance, essence or divine nature-which alone is the principle of all things, besides which no other principle can be found. This reality neither begets nor is begotten nor proceeds; the Father begets, the Son is begotten and the holy Spirit proceeds. Thus there is a distinction of persons but a unity of nature. Although therefore the Father is one person, the Son another person and the holy Spirit another person, they are not different realities, but rather that which is the Father is the Son and the holy Spirit, altogether the same; thus according to the orthodox and catholic faith they are believed to be consubstantial. For the Father, in begetting the Son from eternity, gave him his substance, as he himself testifies : What the Father gave me is greater than all. It cannot be said that the Father gave him part of his substance and kept part for himself since the Father’s substance is indivisible, inasmuch as it is altogether simple. Nor can it be said that the Father transferred his substance to the Son, in the act of begetting, as if he gave it to the Son in such a way that he did not retain it for himself; for otherwise he would have ceased to be substance. It is therefore clear that in being begotten the Son received the Father’s substance without it being diminished in any way, and thus the Father and the Son have the same substance. Thus the Father and the Son and also the holy Spirit proceeding from both are the same reality.
When, therefore, the Truth prays to the Father for those faithful to him, saying I wish that they may be one in us just as we are one, this word one means for the faithful a union of love in grace, and for the divine persons a unity of identity in nature… If anyone therefore ventures to defend or approve the opinion or doctrine of the aforesaid Joachim on this matter, let him be refuted by all as a heretic. By this, however, we do not intend anything to the detriment of the monastery of Fiore, which Joachim founded, because there both the instruction is according to rule and the observance is healthy; especially since Joachim ordered all his writings to be handed over to us, to be approved or corrected according to the judgment of the apostolic see. He dictated a letter, which he signed with his own hand, in which he firmly confesses that he holds the faith held by the Roman church, which is by God’s plan the mother and mistress of all the faithful. …3. On Heretics
We excommunicate and anathematize every heresy raising itself up against this holy, orthodox and catholic faith which we have expounded above. … Let those condemned be handed over to the secular authorities present, or to their bailiffs, for due punishment. Clerics are first to be degraded from their orders. The goods of the condemned are to be confiscated, if they are lay persons, and if clerics they are to be applied to the churches from which they received their stipends. … Let secular authorities, whatever offices they may be discharging, be advised and urged and if necessary be compelled by ecclesiastical censure, if they wish to be reputed and held to be faithful, to take publicly an oath for the defence of the faith to the effect that they will seek, in so far as they can, to expel from the lands subject to their jurisdiction all heretics designated by the church in good faith. Thus whenever anyone is promoted to spiritual or temporal authority, he shall be obliged to confirm this article with an oath. If however a temporal lord, required and instructed by the church, neglects to cleanse his territory of this heretical filth, he shall be bound with the bond of excommunication by the metropolitan and other bishops of the province. …
Catholics who take the cross and gird themselves up for the expulsion of heretics shall enjoy the same indulgence, and be strengthened by the same holy privilege, as is granted to those who go to the aid of the holy Land. Moreover, we determine to subject to excommunication believers who receive, defend or support heretics. We strictly ordain that if any such person, after he has been designated as excommunicated, refuses to render satisfaction within a year, then by the law itself he shall be branded as infamous and not be admitted to public offices or councils or to elect others to the same or to give testimony. He shall be intestable, that is he shall not have the freedom to make a will nor shall succeed to an inheritance. Moreover nobody shall be compelled to answer to him on any business whatever, but he may be compelled to answer to them. If he is a judge sentences pronounced by him shall have no force and cases may not be brought before him; if an advocate, he may not be allowed to defend anyone; if a notary, documents drawn up by him shall be worthless and condemned along with their condemned author; and in similar matters we order the same to be observed. If however he is a cleric, let him be deposed from every office and benefice, so that the greater the fault the greater be the punishment. If any refuse to avoid such persons after they have been pointed out by the church, let them be punished with the sentence of excommunication until they make suitable satisfaction. Clerics should not, of course, give the sacraments of the church to such pestilent people nor give them a christian burial nor accept alms or offerings from them; if they do, let them be deprived of their office and not restored to it without a special indult of the apostolic see. … http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Valley/8920/churchcouncils/Ecum12.htm#Confession%20of%20Faith
Any post-medieval, non-Catholic Christian can probably name a dozen things not to like here. (I reckon that post-Vatican II Catholics would have some complaints as well.) This was also the council that imposed certain anti-semitic measures. But sticking to the Trinity, this document strongly asserts what Brian Leftow says is the characteristic thesis of “Latin” trinitarianism, which is that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit share one token, or one trope of divinity. But it goes beyond that. This one essence/substance “is” each of the three individually, and (in the same sense, apparently) “is” also the whole Trinity. If we read this “is” as identity (which is natural enough), we get a contradictory stance – the same one pictured on the famous Trinity shield.
Needless to say, this “is” cries out to be disambiguated, to reveal whether or not what these sentences are asserting is even possibly true. It seems that we can’t read it as identity, though, as it has properties that differ from those of each of the three persons – this essence thing neither begets, nor is begotten, nor proceeds. On the other hand, “they are not different realities, but rather that which is the Father is the Son and the holy Spirit, altogether the same” seems to imply that Father, Son, and Spirit are just three names for one self-identical thing, presumably this individual essence. Could this be “numerical identity” which isn’t, and doesn’t imply what logicians normally call identity? Hard to say – depends on exactly what relation that is supposed to be.
The proof-texting of the claim that the Father “gave” his whole nature/essence to the Son strikes me as quite dodgy. First, even if the text says that, it would surely amount to reading much later interests back into the text. Second, they seem to be referring to John 10:29, which in the NIV reads: “My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all; no one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand.” I take it there’s a problem either with the text or the translation of the Latin Vulgate here, though I haven’t verified this.
The treatment of John 17:11 (“that they may be one as we are one”) seems humorously ad hoc. Well, at least it’d be humorous if they weren’t prepared to have people who disagreed killed, either by the secular authorities, or by professing Christians on a murderous anti-heresy Crusade (in Europe, rather than the Holy Land). As for Joachim, as it says, he managed to cave in quickly and completely enough to save himself.
Technorati Tags: church council, trinity, theology, lateran, Joachim of Fiore, transubstantiation, quaternity, modalism, Latin trinitarian, Pope, Pope Innocent III, crusade, heresy
Hi Perry!
I’ve not only taken it out for a test drive, I think I may have worn some tread off the tires! 😉
Seriously, I’ve discussed it in about 3 papers. I’ll eventually get around to discussing it here.
I am honestly wondering, if the Latin version of the Trinity is giving you so much grief, why not take the Eastern model out for a test drive?
Hi Kenny,
Good question. I included it not because it is universally recognized, but only because it seems to be in the same line, philosophically speaking, with earlier trinitarian thinking in Latin Christianity. My concern is theoretical, not practical, so I’m not reasoning in a quasi-legal way, that this document should be binding on all Christians.
Kenny,
I agree…and I was surprised and delighted inside a festschrift to Lesslie Newbigin that this creed was cited: precisely because what was affirmed within regarding “For between creator and creature there can be noted no similarity so great that a greater dissimilarity cannot be seen between them.” (This part of the creed was omitted above.) Why is this creed important as part of missional and ecclesial concerns?
To my mind-a foggy one among many philosophers commenting here- any statements about the Triune God are less than what we can perceive or know. The 4th Lateran Council represents the tension between saying what we believe and attempt to live into regarding God, i.e, the incarnation (the kataphatic tradition) and what we know about God is beyond our words yet perceptible (apophatic tradition).
I’d add, that even as I am content with the “inbetween-ness”, there are some idiosyncratic matters Dale cited that are at once circumstantial and at the same time appear to be written as the council looked away from what they previously penned! Those idiosyncracies distract in many ways. And, of course, there are plenty of incomplete statements made as well-all highlighted by Dale.
Regarding one of Dale’s questions, I wonder how well we’re accounting for the use of metaphor in this creed and the others. I haven’t carried this “wondering” out very far, but this creed reminded me of such usage…I wonder if the use of metaphor is another strategy for sorting out/disambiguating “is.”
I’m curious as to why this has been included as an “Orthodox Formula.” Not only is it (as you mention) rejected by Protestants, but it was never accepted by the Eastern Orthodox Church, or the various Oriental Orthodox Churches. Thus, unless you can find some compelling support for the claim that none of those groups are part of the “Church invisible,” this council isn’t even close to being ecumenical. Further, it’s not even just that it isn’t ecumenical, but that one can expect broad disagreement with much of what it says. The only people we can expect to agree with it are members of the Roman Catholic Church living between the 13th century and the 1960s, and even then agreement will likely be far from universal. Thus, completely independent of whether its trinitarian definitions are agreeable with the Christian tradition as a whole, it is hardly an authoritative source on Christian orthodoxy, nor even necessarily an important statement as far as establishing what the Christian tradition says. If we want to argue that something is the (or even an) orthodox Christian view of the Trinity, we’ll need to quote something other than this source, unless we make very strong assumptions about the Roman Catholic Church being the “one holy, catholic, and apostolic Church” of the creed.
Hi, AnonMoose,
I should have been more clear, given the end of Jeff’s comment, that I was talking about the 4th Lateran canons; but thanks.
I agree, though, that Deus Filius might conceivably be translated either as “God is the Son” or “The Son is God,” although the latter appears far more natural given the other statements in the context; it would be odd to take it both ways, since the language of the Quicunque Vult doesn’t do much to suggest that it should be. However, even if it were intended to be both, that still wouldn’t be enough for us to be able to assume that ‘Deus Filius’ is an identity. There are other symmetric relations besides identity.
Jeff — thanks for putting it in a nice symmetrical form.
Brandon — The Latin version can be found at the Wikipedia “Athanasian Creed” article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athanasian_Creed .
Translating Latin “immensus” into English as “incomprehensible” was somewhat dubious, but I’m not sure I see any problem with understanding the Latin of the Athanasian Creed to mean both “God is the Son” and “The Son is God”, etc. (for all three persons).
Even in this case it could be simply a verbal inversion or awkward translation. (I wish I had the Latin to the text to see how well the translation translates the original, but I can’t find it anywhere.)
I think you are exactly right about the identity vs. predication point. It only becomes natural to analyze most ‘identity statements’ as identities if you have a logic that allows for identity between variables, which no one would have had before the nineteenth century. In term logics ‘identity statements’ are virtually always treated as ordinary predications, without any trouble. The scholastics even have difficulty talking about identity as such — they can and do, but they have to use circumlocutions because they have no ready word for it, since ‘identitas’ in medieval Latin just means ‘sameness’ and usually ‘sameness of kind’.
Whoops, this very text proves me wrong.
“…that which is the Father is the Son and the holy Spirit…”
My mistake.
But still, this statement strikes me as atypical of the creeds. It certainly seems different from, and perhaps stronger than, the Quicumque’s “What the Father is, the Son is, and so is the Holy Spirit.” (In fact, this particular Quicumque sentence is almost definitely using “is” predicatively, seeing as it goes on, “Uncreated… infinite… eternal”.)
In other news, something strikes me as evidence against the notion that the “is” in “Jesus is God” should be read as identity. If the credalists were asserting identity, then presumably they would have been equally prepared to assert, “God is Jesus”. But they never do, to my knowledge, and I think most people who say they believe the creeds would look at that claim funny.
This same asymmetry observation also strikes me as evidence against the identity-ness of a lot of “is” statements. I’m beginning to suspect that a lot of sentences traditionally analyzed as identities are really predications. “That man is the thief” may go the way of “That man is a thief”, which in turn goes the way of “Those men are thieves”–all predications. Just a thought.
Right, I wasn’t trying to say just that the belief-puzzle has a resolution; I was trying to suggest that the puzzle has a different form. But I guess if you accept the inference I rejected, then you can put the puzzle into the same form.
(To be explicit, that form is
(1a) A is not F.
(1b) B is F.
(1c) A is B.
For the trinity, this plays out as something like
(2a) [Jesus] is not [triune].
(2b) [God] is [triune].
(2c) [Jesus] is [God]
For beliefs, it plays out like this:
(3a) [John] is not [believed by Richard to be a smoker].
(3b) [The man seen from a distance] is [believed by Richard to be a smoker].
(3c) [John] is [the man seen from a distance].
I guess I have to admit that you can tell a story where 3a, b, and c all sound true. The de re-de dicto resolution of this seeming contradiction doesn’t give much foothold for resolving the trinity puzzle, but that’s beside your point.)
I’m not saying that this has been an insoluble problem for philosophers down the ages, just that the basic form of logic which Dale seems to be appealing to when he talks about notions of “identity” can’t handle it at all. But I do think that “Richard believes that John is not a smoker” does imply “Richard does not believe that John is a smoker” — the second sentence is a weaker assertion than the first.
Permit me to quibble, AnonMoos. In your example, you derived that
(a) Richard believes that John is a smoker.
(b) Richard believes that John is not a smoker.
But that’s not a contradiction. It merely entails that Richard believes a (de re) contradiction. But that’s okay.
We would get a contradiction if we concluded from (b) that
(b’) It is not the case that Richard believes that John is a smoker.
But this just isn’t a valid inference (even if Richard’s de dicto beliefs are consistent). Right?
I don’t see as this sort of thing introduces any wrinkles in the logic of identity. It does force us to think carefully about the semantics of intentional ascriptions (as you point out), and in particular to be careful with negations–but I’m not sure that those directly come to bear on the trinity puzzles. No?
By the way, very few of the early Christian schisms and heresies were over purely Trinitarian issues (most were Christological disputes which secondarily impacted on views of the Trinity), and I doubt whether any large number of heretics has ever been executed mainly due to alleged Trinitarian unorthodoxies (except maybe in counter-reformation Hungary). There has certainly never been a Crusade motivated mainly by Trinitarian disputes. So the East-West “filioque” dispute (almost purely to do with the doctrine of the Trinity) is in fact not very typical of theological disputes which have had “real-world” effects in history — and I bet that the East-West schism would have been reconciled long ago, if the main cause of dispute in that schism had been the “Filioque” clause (rather than much more important matters such as Papal authority).
There’s no need to go to the esoteric philosophico-theological mysteries of the Trinity to start questioning what one’s definition of “is” is — there are quite mundane situations which create problems for a logic of simple identity. For example, if the sentences “Richard believes that John is not a smoker”, “Richard believes the man that he saw from a distance yesterday is a smoker”, and “John IS the man Richard saw from a distance yesterday” are all true, then by simple substitution we derive that Richard both believes that John is a smoker and also believes that John is not a smoker — which is a contradiction (and of course from a contradiction anything follows, including “down is up” and “the moon is made of green cheese”!). The fact is that basic non-intentional first-order propositional logic is completely inadequate to represent a vast number of ordinary sentences of any human language (do a Google search for “intentionality” and/or “Montague semantics” for more on this), which means that the fact that it also can’t represent the traditional doctrine of the Christian Trinity doesn’t bother me too much…
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