3. The One God
3
The One God
Rahner and His Rule
Since Karl Rahner’s little treatise on the Trinity, Catholic and Protestant theology have both witnessed a resurgence of trinitarian reflection.[79] Theologians have been busy attempting to redress the flaw in theology proper that Rahner identifies in medieval and modern trinitarian theology, the separation of the “philosophical” treatise on the one God from the “theological” treatise on the Trinity, a separation that Rahner claims became standard in theology sometime between Peter Lombard’s Sentences and Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae. Rahner’s famous axiom that “the ‘economic’ Trinity is the ‘immanent’ Trinity and the ‘immanent’ Trinity is the ‘economic’ Trinity” has, however, given this trinitarian resurgence a particular shape.[80] Guided by “Rahner’s rule,” theologians have eschewed the “abstractions” of scholastic trinitarian theology and given attention to the historical particularities of the gospel story.[81] The trinitarian revival has been a fundamentally evangelical, that is, a gospel-centered, revival.
Though widely accepted, Rahner’s axiom has proved ambiguous and controversial. It is, as David Bentley Hart has argued, subject to two opposite temptations. One is the danger of forsaking “the economic for the immanent Trinity, by allowing some far too thoroughly developed speculative account of the Trinity to determine what in the story of Christ’s relation to the Father and the Spirit is or is not genuinely revelation, genuinely Trinitarian.” Taken correctly, Hart argues, Rahner’s rule means that “nothing can be assumed to be merely economic,”[82] and this implies that there can be no final closure in our doctrine of God that would encompass and simplify the story of Jesus.
More commonly in recent theology, Rahner’s rule serves as the basis for a collapse of the immanent or ontological Trinity into the economic, producing a theological Hegelianism that obliterates any distinction of history and theology, any distinction between who God is and what God has done. God becomes locked into interdependence with creation, and if this is so, Hart argues, Christian faith becomes another story of necessity.[83] Christianity confesses, however, that God has no need of his creation and need not be our God, because “all we are, all we can ever become, is already infinitely and fully present in the inexhaustible beauty, liveliness, and ‘virtue’ of the Logos.” God loved and knew us before we were; he loved and knew us, as he now loves and knows us, in the Son. This “freedom of God from ontic determination” is not a piece of hellenizing, but the basis for creation’s goodness and beauty: “Precisely because creation is needless, an object of delight that shares God’s love without contributing anything that God does not already possess in infinite eminence, creation reflects the divine life, which is one of delight and fellowship.” In short, “in being the object of God’s love without any cause but the generosity of that love, creation reflects in its beauty that eternal delight that is the divine perichoresis and that obeys no necessity but divine love itself.” Hart points out that the misreading of Rahner’s rule also damages the infinity of God, and specifically suggests that, on this erroneous understanding of Rahner, God’s will is viewed as being other than his being, as is the case with the wills of finite beings. Since God is infinite, will and being are one, and thus his will to create manifests his being, his beauty. To make God dependent on the creation undermines the Christian doctrine of God; but, equally, to make God dependent on the creation damages the Christian doctrine of creation. Hart notes that in some cases the desire for a suffering God is a desire to escape God as judge by making him co-sufferer.[84] We may be sinners, sure, but God does after all sympathize, and he affirms that we too have a valid perspective, one that God should and does acknowledge.
Hegelianized theology presents itself as an effort to weed Hellenistic metaphysics out of the biblical idea of a narrated God who reveals himself in history, including the history of the cross. Hart argues, though, that the Christian narrative arises precisely from the double affirmation of divine apatheia and the story of the cross; if the cross is some necessary stage in God’s self-realization, it is not an act of utter and bottomless grace.[85] Further, contrary to intentions, a God who suffers with us becomes “the metaphysical ground of Auschwitz.”[86] For if God realizes his identity by identification with our suffering, suffering itself becomes necessary. The problems of collapsing the ontological into the economic are, finally, moral as much as they are metaphysical.[87]
Rahner’s work has also been one of the inspirations behind the effort to develop a de-hellenized trinitarianism,[88] often elaborated in a “social trinitarian” direction. According to social trinitarians, “Christians should not imagine God on the model of some individual person or thing which has three sides, aspects, dimensions, or modes of being; God is instead to be thought of as a collective, a group, or a society, bound together by mutual love, accord and self-giving of its members.”[89] Social trinitarians are typically quite happy to employ the word “person” to describe the Father, Son, and Spirit, and though acknowledging that the word is not used univocally of God and human beings, they typically find significant continuity between the theological and the anthropological uses. The problem with the modern idea of “person” is its individualism, which social trinitarians are eager to challenge. Once shorn of its modernist individualism, the term “person,” applied to God or humans, is legitimate, and in both cases refers to a distinct center of self-consciousness and a being that is inherently relational. Because God is exhaustively person, his life is exhaustively communal. For God, being is communal.
The challenge for social trinitarians is to demonstrate that their theology is in fact a form of monotheism. How can God be one God if Father, Son, and Spirit are all “distinct centers of consciousness”? Some social trinitarians flirt with tritheism, and some go so far as to tumble happily into bed with tritheists. Most attempt to protect against tritheism by an emphasis on perichoresis, the unity of the three persons arising from their exhaustive mutual relationality.[90]
Rahner himself never comes close to flirting with social trinitarianism. Like Karl Barth, he suspects that the modern concept of “person” is so corrupted that it is beyond recovery for trinitarian theology. Also similar to Barth, he prefers to use the phrase “distinct ways of subsisting,” and he makes clear that in the Trinity there are not “several spiritual centers of activity” or “several subjectivities and liberties.” This is so because “there is only one essence, hence one absolute self-presence,” and also because there is “only one self-utterance of the Father, the Logos”:
The Logos is not the one who utters, but the one who is uttered. And there is properly no mutual love between Father and Son, for this would presuppose two acts. But there is loving self-acceptance of the Father (and of the Son, because of the taxis of knowledge and love), and this self-acceptance gives rise to the distinction. Of course, that which we call “three persons in God” exists in God with self-awareness. . . . But there are not three consciousnesses; rather, the one consciousness subsists in a threefold way. There is only one real consciousness in God, which is shared by Father, Son, and Spirit, by each in his own proper way.[91]
Whatever Rahner means by stressing the identity of the immanent and economic, he does not mean that we can simply “read off” the immanent relations from the economic, for in the economy the love of the Father and Son is evidently mutual, reciprocal, responsive.
What Rahner does want to emphasize is the incarnation. His general axiom, he claims, could be justified by reference to a “defined doctrine of the faith,” namely, in the fact that “the second divine person, God’s Logos, is man, and only he is man.” In the incarnation “something occurs ‘outside’ the intra-divine life in the world itself, something which is not a mere effect of the efficient causality of the triune God acting as one in the world, but something which belongs to the Logos alone, which is the history of one divine person, in contrast to other divine persons.” To be sure, the union of the Logos and flesh is “causally effected by the whole Trinity,”[92] the Father sending and the Spirit as the agent of the Son’s human conception, yet it still belongs alone to the Son to be incarnate. To put it in dogmatic/systematic categories, Rahner is attempting to unite theology proper with Christology, to ensure that Christology is not an added extra to the doctrine of God but rather at its center.
Patristic Trinitarian Theology
“Reunite” would be more accurate, for in pushing Christology and theology proper together, Rahner is pushing theology back toward the patristic mode of trinitarian reflection. John Behr has recently argued that Nicene theology is not “trinitarian theology” in the sense that later theology understands it. In its later “textbook form,” trinitarian theology begins with “what can be known and said of this God; that he is one, the uncreated origin of all creation, love, goodness and so on; and then proceeds to analyze how this same God is three—how the persons of the Trinity are related, their different characteristics and relationships.” Once the “immanent Trinity” is in place, “the next step is to relate this Trinity to the activity of revelation, the economy of salvation recorded in Scripture, the ‘economic’ dimension of Trinitarian theology.” Trinity is thus made into a “realm unto itself,” supplemented by reflection on the person and work of Christ, with the result that Christian faith is understood as fundamentally “trinitarian” and “incarnational.”[93]
This has the unfortunate effect of detaching Nicene theology from its roots in biblical exegesis, of separating the interests of the apostles from those of the fathers, of encouraging the myth of hellenization, and of making it difficult to see how the Trinity is found in Scripture, “except by a forced exegesis.” Behr affirms that “the Christian faith is intrinsically Trinitarian” but suggests that this is only evident when the gospel is put at the heart of theological reflection: “The basic proclamation of Christianity, that Jesus is Lord, the one of whom the Spirit spoke through the prophets, makes necessary a confession of faith in the Trinity.” The apostles
were concerned to explain, through the medium of Scripture, how the Lord Jesus relates to the one God, his Father, in the Spirit. This basic scriptural grammar of Trinitarian theology—that the one God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, is the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, made known in and through the Spirit—is preserved in the most abstract discussions of the fourth century, in the creeds of Nicaea and Constantinople, and in liturgical language.[94]
What Behr claims about patristic trinitarian reflection is particularly true of Athanasius. Athanasius does not run afoul of Rahner’s complaint about the division of the doctrine of God into a treatise on “the One God” and a treatise “on the Trinity.” For Athanasius, to speak of God is to speak of the Triad. He knows no other God and cannot conceive of another way of speaking about God.
He is surely no social trinitarian. Throughout his writings, Athanasius sees this elaboration as simply an elaboration of monotheism. God is one as Trinity. He insists that “God is One and Only and First,” and yet insists at the same time that this is not said to the denigration of the Son. The Son too is “in that One, and First and Only, as being of that One and Only and First the Only Word and Wisdom and Radiance. And He too is the First, as the Fullness of the Godhead of the First and Only [plērōma tēs tou prōtou kai monou theotētos], being whole and full God. This then is not said on His account, but to deny that there is other such as the Father and His Word” (Discourses 3.6). When Scripture affirms that God is one, it is not a denial of the Triad within God but rather a statement about the true God and a condemnation of all false gods. Since the Son is himself the truth, the Son is not excluded along with idols. When the Scripture records the Lord’s “I only,” it includes the Son (en tō monō kai ho tou monou semainetai logos; Discourses 3.9). Jesus’s claim that “I and the Father are One” (John 17) asserts that the Son is “proper and like the Father’s essence”; the Son is not “foreign” to the essence but of the same essence with the Father (Discourses 3.17).
In much of the later tradition, especially post-Reformation, the doctrine of the Trinity was defended by establishing the deity of each person individually. If Scripture teaches that the Father is God, and the Son is God, and the Spirit is God, then there are three subsistences or persons in the one God. As Behr indicates, Athanasius goes about things quite differently. He does not formulate a general “immanent trinitarian theology” that is then “applied” to the economy. His reflections on the intimate relations of the immanent Trinity all arise from the confession that Jesus is the eternal Word of the Father. It is possible to isolate a “patrology” or a “Christology” within Athanasius’s writings, and that is what I have done in the following pages. But that is something of a distortion of Athanasius’s own approach, just as it is a distortion to separate Athanasius’s teaching on God from his teaching about God’s works in creating and, especially, in redeeming humanity. For Athanasius, meditating on the Father, on Christ, on incarnation, on deification (discussed in more detail in chapter 6) is meditation on one reality.
The density of Athanasius’s treatment of these themes is nicely captured by his paraphrase of Jesus’s prayer in John 17. Jesus asks his Father, in effect, “Whence is this their perfecting, but that I, Your Word, having borne their body, and become man, have perfected the work, which You gave Me, O Father?” and answers that “the work is perfected, because men, redeemed from sin, no longer remain dead; but being deified, have in each other, by looking at Me, the bond of charity” (Discourses 3.23). According to Athanasius, Jesus speaks his work of perfecting, telos-ing, humanity so that humanity reaches its destined end. He “completes” the work and in so doing “completes” his disciples. This perfection is linked with redemption from sin and death, but also to deification. Man, made in the image of God, was created to become more godlike, and the contingency of sin and death does not cause God to deviate from that purpose. Deification is closely connected with resurrection, overcoming death. God cannot die, by nature, and, in part, our deification is a participation by grace in the immortality he has by nature.
This perfecting of the human race, though, depends on the incarnation. It is because the Word has borne the body and become man that he can perfect men. He became incarnate to die in the flesh, to overcome death, to grant human beings a share in his own power and wisdom and knowledge and deathless joy. Through the Son, especially in the Son’s unity with the Father, believers have a paradigm of charity. And not merely a paradigm: it is axiomatic for Athanasius that the contemplative gaze is a transforming gaze. When Jesus says that his disciples will live “by looking at Me,” he is not speaking of examining a model, to which one then strives to conform. Conformity comes through the transforming impact of the gaze itself. By looking at Jesus, contemplating his unity with the Father, disciples are bound in charity with one another. When we gaze at the archetype, the archetype impresses himself on us.
And this, finally, as always, takes us back to the Arians. This entire passage is embedded within an anti-Arian polemic, and the whole point is that the Son is eternal Son, equal to the Father. Arians do not contemplate the Son in unity with the Father but profess a false Son who is alien to the Father. Their christological heresy thus cannot be anything but schismatic, since they cannot be transformed and bound in proper charity by contemplation of the Son who is proper to the Father’s essence. Their christological heresy must also fail eschatologically: since the end of humanity is deification, and the Arians lack any “mechanism” for deification, their God cannot bestow this perfecting gift.
That is how Athanasius writes: Father-Son, incarnate Son, common communal perfection and deification in the church, transformation into the image of the Son through contemplation of the Son, and all this packed into a brief bit of anti-Arian polemic. Athanasius cannot speak of the Father without immediately speaking of the Son, nor of the Son without the Father. He cannot speak of the Son without also noting that the Son is the one who became incarnate and the one through whom we are knit into the life of the Trinity. Given the density and interconnectedness of these themes, the best option might be to offer a series of commentaries on entire treatises of Athanasius.[95] I have chosen instead to lay out Athanasius’s theology of God, creation, the incarnation, and redemption in separate chapters, in the hope that this more “systematic” arrangement will simplify and clarify his thought somewhat. Throughout, however, I have tried to make it plain that these cannot really be separated, or even neatly distinguished.[96]
Always Father
Arianism is a heresy about the Son, but Athanasius recognizes that it is equally about the Father. He takes Jesus’s words quite literally: “He who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent Him” (John 5:23). In dishonoring the Son, the Arians also do injustice to the Father. As Peter Widdicombe points out, “The denial of the eternal fatherhood of God is the first of the heretical doctrines with which Athanasius charges his Arian opponents.” They believe, by Athanasius’s account, that “God was not eternally Father,” and that “God was not always Father, but became so later,” and they say both “not eternal Father” and “not eternal Son.” Because the Son did not always exist, “God was not always Father” (ouk aei ho theos patēr ēn).[97]
According to Athanasius, God is eternally and essentially Father because the Father eternally has the Son, but this is not because the Father lacks anything. The Father is fullness and perfect (plērēs and teleios) in himself. Refuting Arian distortions of Jesus’s statement, “I in the Father and the Father in me” (John 14:10), Athanasius argues that if Arians knew God “they would not dishonor and ridicule the Lord of glory, nor interpreting things immaterial after a material manner, pervert good words.” Piety demands that “on hearing only words which are the Lord’s, at once to believe, since the faith of simplicity is better than an elaborate process of persuasion.” Jesus’s statement does not imply that Father and Son are “discharged into Each Other, filling the One from the Other, as in the case of empty vessels, so that the Son fills the emptiness of the Father and the Father that of the Son.” That too is an insult to both. On Arian premises, “each of Them by Himself is not complete and perfect (for this is proper to bodies, and therefore the mere assertion of it is full of irreligion), for the Father is full and perfect, and the Son is the Fullness of Godhead” (Discourses 3.1).
This is a central anti-Arian argument. If the Arians deny the eternity of the Son, then they should likewise deny that the Father is eternally Father. Athanasius draws an ontological conclusion from the terminology of Scripture concerning Father and Son:
For the Son is such as the Father is, because He has all that is the Father’s. Wherefore also is He implied together with the Father. For, a son not being, one cannot say father; whereas when we call God a Maker, we do not of necessity intimate the things which have come to be; for a maker is before his works. But when we call God Father, at once with the Father we signify the Son’s existence. Therefore he who believes in the Son, believes also in the Father: for he believes in what is proper to the Father’s Essence; and thus the faith is one in one God. (Discourses 3.6)
What was God before becoming the Father of the Son? As we have noted, for the Arians, God is most basically not Father but “Unoriginate.” Athanasius objects to the term “Unoriginate” as a name for the Father because it links the Father’s eternal being to the creation. “Unoriginate” names the Father by contrast with the originated things of creation, rather than with the Son, who is his eternal essence. God’s fundamental name, then, on Arian premises, is dependent on the creation. That too is an insult to the Father, who is not in need of the creation nor defined by it. “If,” Athanasius argues, “this term is not used in contrast with the Son . . . but with things originated,” then the same can be said of terms like “Almighty” and “Lord of the Powers.” But Scripture teaches that “the Father has power and mastery over all things by the Word, and the Son rules the Father’s kingdom, and has the power of all, as His Word, and as the Image of the Father,” and so “it is quite plain that neither here is the Son reckoned among that all, nor is God called Almighty and Lord with reference to Him, but to those things which through the Son come to be, and over which He exercises power and mastery through the Word.” Thus “the Unoriginate is specified not by contrast to the Son, but to the things which through the Son come to be” (Discourses 1.33).
The name “Father,” though, implies a different contrasting pole. It is a relational term, but a term that names God in relation to the Son and not to creation: “As the word ‘Unoriginate’ is specified relatively to things originated, so the word ‘Father’ is indicative of the Son,” so that “he who names God Maker and Framer and Unoriginate, regards and apprehends things created and made; and he who calls God Father, thereby conceives and contemplates the Son.” Again, the Arians are guilty of insulting the Father. Athanasius repeats Jesus’s claim that those who dishonor the Son also dishonor the Father (John 5:23), and he adds, “If they had any concern at all for reverent speaking and the honor due to the Father, it became them rather, and this were better and higher, to acknowledge and call God Father, than to give Him this name.” Since they name God from his works and not from his eternal Son, they are in no better position than the “Greeks,” who know God only from the creation. They are stuck with the limited revelation of God in creation, a revelation that can only condemn. If they want to know the Father as Father, they must know him as Father of the Son: “They, when they call Him Unoriginate, name Him only from His works, and know not the Son any more than the Greeks; but he who calls God Father, names Him from the Word; and knowing the Word, he acknowledges Him to be Framer of all, and understands that through Him all things have been made” (Discourses 1.33). Though the Father is in fact “Unoriginate,” the biblical name “Father” is “more pious and more accurate,” since it names the Father by reference to his Word.
The debate over the use of “Unoriginate” is more intricate than the English translations would make it appear. In Greek, the terms “Unbegotten” and “Unoriginate” differ in only one letter. Unbegotten is agennētos and Unoriginate is agenētos. For earlier theologians like Eusebius of Caesarea, the two terms are for all practical purposes synonymous. Thus, to say that God is “Unoriginate” is also to say that he is “Unbegotten.” Athanasius, however, distinguishes the two, applying “Unoriginate” in somewhat different senses to both the Father and the Son, but applying the term “Unbegotten” only to the Father. The result is that, for Athanasius, it is possible for there to be a “Begotten God.”[98] Edward Gibbon claimed that in the fourth century Christians went to war over the “iota” that divided homoousios from homoiousios.[99] But that is only part of the story: they were debating about a “double nu” as well.
All that is said of the Father may be said of the Son, and vice versa, except that the Son is Son and the Father is Father. Because the Godhead (theotēs) of the two is a single Godhead, God is one: “The Godhead of the Son is the Father’s; whence also it is indivisible; and thus there is one God and none other but He. And so, since they are one, and the Godhead itself one, the same things are said of the Son, which are said of the Father, except His being said to be Father” (Discourses 3.4).
Athanasius considers it an insult to the Father to say that he is without his Son. Denying the Son involves denial of the Father because it involves denying the Father’s fatherhood. Athanasius finds further problems in the Arian account of how the Son created the world. Some Arians suggest that the Son might have learned to be dēmiourgos, or framer, of the world from the Father. The Father has this power of framing the world in himself and does not need anything, certainly not an assistant. When the Father determines to create, however, then he also wills to beget the Son as his dēmiourgos. To Athanasius, this leaves the Arians in a dilemma. If the power to create can be learned, it might be unlearned, and if the Son can learn and unlearn this skill in creating, might the Father not also lose the power to create? Did the Father too learn wisdom? (Discourses 2.28).
The Arian position also insults the Father by implying that he is selfish with his gifts. If the power to create can be taught to creatures, why did the Father not bestow this power on all his creatures? Why limit it to the Son? If the Arians take the latter course, they imply that the Father is jealous of his own abilities and refuses to share them broadly. He keeps his gifts close to himself. If creative power can be taught, then the Arians “are ascribing jealousy and weakness to God—jealousy, in that He has not taught many how to frame, so that there may be around Him, as Archangels and Angels many, so framers many.” On the other hand, the Arian position might imply that the Father is weak, “in that He could not make by Himself, but needed a fellow-worker, or under-worker.” God is neither jealous nor deficient: “Perish the thought! For He has said Himself, ‘I am full’” (Discourses 2.29).
Eternal Son
If most of Athanasius’s “patrology” is simultaneously a Christology, the same, mutatis mutandis, goes for the Christology. The Word must be eternal Word, or else the Father is “speechless”; the Wisdom must be eternal, or else the Father is a fool who becomes wise; the Son must be eternal and proper to the Father’s essence, or else the Father is incomplete.
Athanasius builds up to these conclusions by offering a metaphysical distinction between the manner of the Son’s relation to the Father and the manner of creation’s relation to the Father. Created things participate (metechein, metochē) in God, or they would not exist at all, but created things are still external (exōthen) to the Father. But what does participation mean for Athanasius?[100]
Participation in general means receiving a share in something and originally referred to the common share that two similar things have in the eternal Platonic form of those things. Two similar couches share in the eternal form of the couch, and thus the two couches are said to “participate” in the form. If Alexander and Athanasius are both wise, they are wise because they both participate in, to a greater or lesser degree, the eternal form of Wisdom. Participant things have a real but derived and partial “possession” of what they participate in. Participation can take several different forms or exist in several different modes. Participation can be linked with being, as two human beings share in the same human nature. It can also be a participation by will, as when two rational beings share in a common purpose, or a participation by grace.
For Athanasius, participation has a number of additional implications. Participation always involves a share in something external. Participation and externality go together; the participated (original) and the participant (i.e., the derived) are divided from each other and are usually divided ontologically. That which participates and that which is participated are not just different beings but different sorts of beings. Athanasius does little with the Platonic doctrine of ideas and makes little use of the technicalities of the modified Platonisms with which he was glancingly familiar. But he uses the concept from Plato and plugs it into a biblical worldview, that is, a worldview that distinguishes Creator and creature. In place of participated forms, then, Athanasius has a Creator. Creatures exist by participation in God because creation is not part of God’s existence nor internal to him.
For Athanasius, too, participation implies dependence. Creation is by participation because it is dependent for its life, stability, and existence on power and energy that is not inherent in the creation itself. It exists only by a continuous gift of life and stability from the Triune God. For Athanasius, to speak of participation is to speak of creaturehood, contingency, and dependence, but also of grace, the gracious provision of existence out of nothing. To speak of participation is, in Athanasius’s sense, to give a philosophical term to the reality that Paul (citing Greek thinkers) affirms: “In Him we live and move and exist” (Acts 17:28).
That is not how the Son relates to the Father. The Son does not participate in the Father in the way that creatures do, externally and dependently. What then is the Son’s relation to the Father? Athanasius has two ways of answering. On the one hand, he frequently speaks of the Son as “proper” (idios) to the Father’s essence, while on the other hand he makes the same claim by using the notion of “whole participation.”[101] In both formulations, the Son is viewed as being internal and inherent to the Father’s essence, rather than external to it. Even when the Son is said to be a “partaker” of the Father, participating in him, this is not participation in the same sense that creatures participate. The Son is “wholly participant” in the Father:
It is the Father that He partakes; for this only remains to say. But this, which is participated, what is it or whence? If it be something external provided by the Father, He will not now be partaker of the Father, but of what is external to Him; and no longer will He be even second after the Father, since He has before Him this other; nor can He be called Son of the Father, but of that, as partaking which He has been called Son and God. And if this be unseemly and irreligious, when the Father says, “This is My Beloved Son” (Matt. 3:17), and when the Son says that God is His own Father, it follows that what is partaken is not external, but from the essence of the Father. And as to this again, if it be other than the essence of the Son, an equal extravagance will meet us; there being in that case something between this that is from the Father and the essence of the Son, whatever that be. (Discourses 1.15)
Further, “such thoughts then being evidently unseemly and untrue, we are driven to say that what is from the essence of the Father, and proper to Him, is entirely the Son; for it is all one to say that God is wholly participated, and that He begets; and what does begetting signify but a Son?” (Discourses 1.16).
In this, Athanasius makes the somewhat stronger claim that the Son is not only wholly participant in the Father, but that he is what is participant in the Father. That which participates in the Father simply is the Son: “The Son Himself partakes of nothing, but what is partaken from the Father, is the Son; for, as partaking of the Son Himself, we are said to partake of God; and this is what Peter said ‘that you may be partakers in a divine nature’” (Discourses 1.16). Only in this way can the Father see himself in his Son, and only in this way can the Son reveal the Father to us: “If the Son be not all this, but, as the Arians consider, originate, and not eternal, this is not a true Image of the Father, unless indeed they give up shame, and go on to say, that the title of Image, given to the Son, is not a token of a similar essence, but His name only” (Discourses 1.21).
His more characteristic way of describing the relation is with the term idios, “proper,” which, as we shall see, is crucial to Athanasius’s theology. It functions as a descriptor not only of the relation of Father and Son but also of the relation of the Son to his appropriated (idiopoieisthai) body. The concept also plays a role in his account of deification. The force of the term is evident when Athanasius uses it with reference to God’s “attributes.” God is “properly”—in himself and not by participation or derivation—one, simple, good, love. Created beings too have their “properties” proper to them: we are instable, corruptible, bodily. When Athanasius uses the term “proper” to describe the relation of the Father to his Son and Spirit, he is stressing “that the Son and Spirit are as closely related to the Father as characteristics are to their natural subjects, as radiance to light, and streams to fountains.” Son and Spirit are not characteristics but are the Father’s Word and Spirit. Yet they are as essential to the being of God, to the being of the Father, as any of the Father’s divine attributes.[102]
The biblical description of the Son being “in” the Father is a pointer to the fact that the Son is “proper” (idios) to the Father’s essence. Arians do not believe that the Son is a “genuine Son from the Father,” and thus “they belie Him who is such, whom alone it befits to say, ‘I in the Father and the Father in Me.’” That “in” points to the inseparability of the Father and the Son. The fact that the Son is in the Father means that “the whole Being of the Son is proper to the Father’s essence, as radiance from light, and stream from fountain; so that whoso sees the Son, sees what is proper to the Father, and knows that the Son’s Being, because from the Father, is therefore in the Father” (Discourses 3.3).
It is true that believers are also “in” the Father through the Son, but Athanasius argues that our manner of dwelling-in differs from the manner of the Son’s indwelling of the Father. John 17:21, which draws the analogy between the way we are “in” the Father and the way the Son is, also distinguishes the two. Jesus says simply that he is in the Father, but when he speaks of believers, he says that they are “in us.” In saying this, “He has pointed out the distance and difference; that He indeed is alone in the Father alone, as Only Word and Wisdom; but we in the Son, and through Him in the Father.” Jesus was saying that “by Our unity may they also be so one with each other, as We are one in nature and truth; for otherwise they could not be one, except by learning unity in Us” (Discourses 3.21).
While the Son and the saints are both “in” the Father, the Creator-creature distinction runs between the two. This means, in Athanasius’s terminology, the distinction of grace and nature runs between the two (see chapter 4, below). Believers are in the Father by grace, while the Son is Son by nature. “Since the Word is in the Father, and the Spirit is given from the Word,” he argues, “He wills that we should receive the Spirit, that, when we receive It, thus having the Spirit of the Word which is in the Father, we too may be found on account of the Spirit to become One in the Word, and through Him in the Father.” There is a comparative “as” involved. The disciples are to be united “as” the Father and the Son are united; the disciples are to be one “as” Father and Son are one. But this is “only a request that such grace of the Spirit as is given to the disciples may be without failure or revocation.” Athanasius explains: “What the Word has by nature . . . in the Father, . . . He wishes to be given to us through the Spirit irrevocably.” The permanence of this grace is dependent on the work of the Spirit and is not rooted in anything in ourselves: “It is the Spirit then which is in God, and not we viewed in our own selves; and as we are sons and gods because of the Word in us, so we shall be in the Son and in the Father, and we shall be accounted to have become one in Son and in Father, because that Spirit is in us, which is in the Word which is in the Father” (Discourses 3.25). The distance between the Son and his people is overcome by the grace of the Spirit: “Because of the grace of the Spirit which has been given to us, in him we come to be, and he in us; and since it is the Spirit of God, therefore through his becoming in us, reasonably are we, as having the Spirit, considered to be in God, and thus is God in us” (Discourses 3.24).
Some Arians respond to this argument by positing a Word and a Wisdom that is inherent in the Father, “proper” to his essence and yet not identical to the Son. There is a Word and Wisdom that is the Father’s own and, given the simplicity of God, in no way different from the Father himself. This is the Wisdom and Word by which the Son is generated. Athanasius finds this doubling of Wisdom and Word incoherent. This reduces the Son, the Word of the Father, to one among many (Discourses 3.2). This pluralization of the Son is inherent in the Arian claim that the Son is a creature. Participant beings are multiple; a begotten Son inherent in the Father’s nature is a single Son, the unique and utterly final Word of the Father. Creatures become “sons,” not the Son. They are “gods” (Ps. 82:6), not God as the Father is God. When human beings become one as the Father and the Son are one, “we shall be such, not as the Father is by nature in the Son and the Son in the Father, but according to our own nature, and as it is possible for us thence to be molded and to learn how we ought to be one, just as we learned also to be merciful.” Everything from flesh shares a natural likeness, since “like things are naturally one with like,” but the Son and Word of the Father is of a different character, “unlike us and like the Father.” Though “He is in nature and truth one with His own Father, we, as being of one kind with each other (for from one were all made, and one is the nature of all men), become one with each other in good disposition, having as our copy the Son’s natural unity with the Father” (Discourses 3.20). God’s Word is one, single, final. Our words are fragmentary, partial, temporary, and therefore multiple. We can never say the final word. Because God is beyond this temporal fragmentation, his Word is stable, single, final (Discourses 2.36).
In other contexts, Athanasius makes the same point by distinguishing between begetting and making. In part, his arguments demonstrate how the Arian position ends in contradiction, both of itself and of Scripture. If the Son is a work, then the Son must come under judgment, since all works come under judgment (Eccles. 12:14). But the Son is the judge, and how can the judge be judged (Discourses 2.3)? If the Son is a creature, then there is an interval between the Father and the Son, an interval that must be temporal. But the nature of the interval does not really matter. The Arian position implies space and distance between Father and Son, but Scripture says that the Son is the one who made “the world [aiōnas, ages]” (Heb. 1:1–3). He is the Lord of intervals, the measure of all temporal and spatial distance. How, then, can an interval exist before he exists (Discourses 2.58)? He is the measure of all things, the standard by which all ratios are measured: how can there be something measurable before he is?
The Arian claim that he is a “creature but not as one of the creatures” is simply a smoke screen and an evasion. All creatures differ from other creatures, so “difference” is no mark of the Son’s uniqueness. Quite the opposite: since all creatures differ, the fact that a created Son differs from other creatures is a mark of his sameness with other creatures (Discourses 2.19). If the Son is a creature, then the Arians should have the courage of their convictions and admit that the Son is in the same condition (tēn autēn homologeisthō taxin echein) as every other creature (Discourses 2.20).
Reasoning from the paradigm of sonship, Athanasius argues that sons are born of the nature and essence of their fathers, not made from external material. So too with divine sonship. As we saw in chapter 2, Arians emphasize the temporal priority of parents over children, but Athanasius stresses the community of essence. “Those who ask of parents, and say, ‘Had you a son before you begot him?’ should add, ‘And if you had a son, did you purchase him from without as a house or any other possession?’ And then you would be answered, ‘He is not from without, but from myself.’” There is a difference between possessions and children. “Things which are from without are possessions, and pass from one to another; but my son is from me, proper and similar to my essence, not become mine from another, but begotten of me.” Human sonship is a perichoretic reality and a paradigm of divine life. A human father can say, “I too am wholly in him, while I remain myself what I am,” and the same applies to the Father with his Son. Thus, “though the parent be distinct in time, as being man, who himself has come to be in time, yet he too would have had his child ever coexistent with him, but that his nature was a restraint and made it impossible” (Discourses 1.26). There certainly are discontinuities between divine and human begetting, but there is also analogy: “Granting the parent had not a son before his begetting, still, after having him, he had him, not as external or as foreign, but as from himself, and proper to his essence and his exact image, so that the former is beheld in the latter, and the latter is contemplated in the former” (Discourses 1.26).
In other words, the Son is Son by nature and not by will (Discourses 3.59–60).[103] The Son cannot be made by will because he himself is the good pleasure and will of the Father. “If,” Athanasius argues, “in whom He makes, in Him also is the will, and in Christ is the pleasure of the Father, how can He, as others, come into being by will and pleasure?” Again the Arian position implies temporality and change in God. If the Son was not before he was begotten, and if, as Athanasius argues, this can only be understood as a temporal statement, then God willed and determined to beget and to create before the Son was. That is nonsense, since the Son is the Word, and how can God deliberate about anything when he is yet wordless? As Athanasius puts it, planning
goes before things which once were not, as in the case of all creatures. But if the Word is the Framer of the creatures, and he coexists with the Father, how can his counsel precede the Everlasting as if he were not? For if counsel precedes, how through him are all things? For rather he too, as one among others is by will begotten to be a Son, as we too were made sons by the Word of Truth; and it rests, as was said, to seek another Word, through whom he too has come to be, and was begotten together with all things, which were according to God’s pleasure. (Discourses 3.61)
Since everything is done by the counsel of the Father with his will, there can be no counsel except the Son. The Son is the “living counsel” of the Father, as well as “power, and Framer of the things which seemed good to the Father.” The Son is the “good pleasure of the Father” (Discourses 3.63) and the “living will” (zōsa boulē) of the Father (Discourses 2.2). The Son is not made by the good pleasure of God but is the “object of the Father’s pleasure,” just as surely as the Father is the “object of the Son’s love, pleasure, and honor” (Discourses 3.66). Athanasius defends this conclusion by appeal to some of his standard texts: Proverbs 8:24; 1 Corinthians 1:24; Isaiah 9:6.
In saying that the Son is not Son by will, Athanasius is not arguing that the Father involuntarily begets the Son. The Father does not beget the Son against his will, since the Son is the Son of his good pleasure. Athanasius’s point is that will is not the same in God as it is in human existence. Or, to put it differently, will and being are identical in God. God wills to be what he is, and he is what he wills. As Rowan Williams points out, Athanasius is insisting that the whole “anthropomorphic model of ‘deliberation’” fails when considering God’s existence and will. We ought not think that God, after due consideration, determines to be Trinity today and might determine to be something else another day, nor even that he determines, after deliberation, that he will be Trinity from ages to ages. “What sense does it make to say that God ‘decides’ to be what he is? Yet it is part of the definition of God that no other reality makes him what he is, no necessity is imposed on him. The human antitheses between purposeless and purposive (deliberative) action and between my choice and what is imposed on me from outside cannot apply to God. He does not decide to be good; yet he is consciously and purposively good, and no external force compels him to be so.”[104] The Word is the will of the Father and thus cannot be the product of will, unless we are willing to multiply wills.
Athanasius also frequently reasons from the biblical names of the Second Person as “Word” and “Wisdom.” As we noted in the previous chapter, Athanasius uses the different titles of the Second Person to highlight different aspects of his relation to the Father. The paradigms are mutually qualifying. Since the claim that the Second Person is eternal “Son” might imply possibility or temporality, the Scriptures also designate the Second Person as “Word,” since words are generated without passion. The Word is the Son, and the Son is Word and Wisdom. Since God is eternally himself, “Word and Wisdom is neither creature nor part of Him whose Word He is.” Nor, though he is a Son, is he “an offspring passibly begotten.” Scripture delivers us from materialist and anthropomorphic conceptions of God’s fatherhood and sonship by “uniting then the two titles.” Scripture calls him Son to highlight the fact that he is of the essence of the Father, the Father’s “natural and true offspring of His essence,” while it designates him as Word and Wisdom so that “none may think of the Offspring humanly.” Scripture “calls Him Word, Wisdom, and Radiance; to teach us that the generation was impassible, and eternal, and worthy of God. What affection then, or what part of the Father is the Word and the Wisdom and the Radiance?” (Discourses 1.28). These titles too imply that the Son is eternal, for the Father has never been speechless, unreasonable (alogos), or a fool. He demands to know whether God was “ever without Reason” or, being light, if he was ever “ray-less.” “Who indeed can bear to hear them say that God was ever without Reason?” (Discourses 1.24).
Athanasius argues that unless the Word is eternal and proper to the Father’s essence, the Father cannot even be the Creator that Arians want him to be. Scripture makes it clear that the Father creates through his Word. If God is to be inherently and properly a maker (poiētēs), he must have his framing Word (dēmiourgikos logos), not as an external assistant or instrument (organon), but as a word proper to him (Discourses 2.2). The Father does not use the Son the way a carpenter or shipwright might use “adze and saw” (Discourses 1.25). By implying that the Father needs some external assistance to create, the Arians again insult the Father, suggesting that he is weak unless he takes in hand an external Word.
In several places, Athanasius argues that the Arian position makes creation impossible. The Arians claim that the creation cannot endure the direct touch of God, and therefore creation has to be mediated through a created Son. But if the creation cannot handle God’s direct touch, how can the Son? An infinite regression threatens:
For it follows either that, if He could endure it, all could endure it, or, it being endurable by none, it was not endurable by the Word, for you say that He is one of originate things. And again, if because originate nature could not endure to be God’s own handiwork, there arose need of a mediator, it must follow, that, the Word being originate and a creature, there is need of medium in His framing also, since He too is of that originate nature which endures not to be made of God, but needs a medium. But if some being as a medium be found for Him, then again a fresh mediator is needed for that second, and thus tracing back and following out, we shall invent a vast crowd of accumulating mediators. (Discourses 2.26)
If the Father has to create through a creature, how does that first, creating creature get created? Does there not have to be a prior mediating creature? “If the Son be a creature,” Athanasius asks, “by what word then and by what wisdom was He made Himself?” Scripture teaches that “all the works were made through the Word and the Wisdom,” and “if it be He who is the Word and the Wisdom, by which all things come to be, it follows that He is not in the number of works, nor in short of things originate, but the Offspring of the Father” (Discourses 2.5).
If the Son is generated or made in order to enable the Father to create, then the Son exists for us rather than we for the Son. This makes God look niggardly: if God is capable of making a hardy Word that can endure his direct creation, why should he make so few such creatures and so many of the fragile beings who cannot endure his presence and power? For Athanasius, the Arian position also implies a flawed arrangement within the divine counsel. If the Son alone could endure the direct creating hand of God, then it seems that God would give priority in his counsel to the Word. Though the Word is made first, yet in the counsel of God, other creatures are prior, since the Son is created for us: “He creates Him first, yet counsels first about us; and He wills us before the Mediator; and when He wills to create us, and counsels about us, He calls us creatures; but Him, whom He frames for us, He calls Son and proper Heir. But we, for whose sake He made Him, ought rather to be called sons; or certainly He, who is His Son, is rather the object of His previous thoughts and of His will, for whom He makes all us” (Discourses 2.30). This implies a priority to the “weak” (us); God’s favor is to the weak more than to the strong (Discourses 2.30), and for Athanasius this is unworthy of God. On Arian premises, in the “decrees” of God, we are considered first, and the Son is merely an instrument for our creation.
The unity of the Father and the Son, Athanasius insists, cannot be a unity of will. That kind of unity again pluralizes the Word and Wisdom of God that must be single. Many beings are one in will with the Father but are not for that reason equal to the Word and Wisdom of God. “Since what the Father wills, the Son wills also, and is not contrary either in what he thinks or in what he judges,” he argues, “but is in all respects concordant with him, declaring doctrines which are the same, and a word consistent and united with the Father’s teaching,” it follows that “He and the Father are One.” If this is the nature of the unity of Father and Son, then “the Angels too, and the other beings above us, Powers and Authorities, and Thrones and Dominions, and what we see, Sun and Moon, and the Stars, should be sons also, as the Son; and that it should be said of them too, that they and the Father are one, and that each is God’s Image and Word” (Discourses 3.10). The likeness and unity that the Son bears to the Father must be ontological, not voluntary. Otherwise, there is nothing to distinguish the Word of the Father from created words, the Son from creatures (Discourses 3.11).
When Jesus says that he and the Father are one, therefore, he is speaking of an identity of Godhead (tautotēs tēs theotētos) and the single nature (physis) that he shares with the Father.[105] Father and Son “are one, not as one thing divided into two parts, and these nothing but one, nor as one thing twice named, so that the Same becomes at one time Father, at another His own Son, for this Sabellius holding was judged a heretic.” On the contrary, “they are two, because the Father is Father and is not also Son, and the Son is Son and not also Father” while “the nature is one . . . and all that is the Father’s, is the Son’s.” It is not accurate to say that the Son is “another God,” since that would imply that the Son was “procured from without” and the Son would be a “godhead procured foreign from the Father’s.” Rather, though “the Son be other, as an Offspring,” yet “He is the Same as God; and He and the Father are one in propriety and peculiarity of nature, and in the identity of the one Godhead” (Discourses 3.4). Succinctly, the “Godhead of the Son is the Father’s” (Discourses 3.4). The Word has an identity of nature with the Father (tēn ontōs kai alēthōs tautotēta tēs physeōs tō patri echei).
This can be taken to mean that there is a something—“Godhead”—that the Father and the Son both share. That is not Athanasius’s meaning. That would imply that the Father and the Son exist by participation in something else and would also suggest that the Father and the Son are “brothers,” since they both derive from something prior, the true “father” of the divine persons. In saying that the Godhead of the Son is the Father’s Godhead, Athanasius is saying that the Son is the form of the Father’s divinity. What makes the Father God is the Son. Athanasius states it this way: “There is but one form of Godhead, which is also in the Word; and one God, the Father, existing by Himself according as He is above all, and appearing in the Son according as He pervades all things, and in the Spirit according as in Him He acts in all things through the Word” (Discourses 3.15).
The fact that the Son receives from the Father is no impairment of his identity as the form of the Father’s Godhead, as the one whose nature is identical with that of the Father. Athanasius sometimes hedges on passages like John 5, which claim that the Son has received all he has from the Father. He applies such statements of receptivity to the incarnation: it is as incarnate Son, as flesh, that the Son receives (see Discourses 3.38). At other times, and more properly, he recognizes that the doctrine of the Trinity implies receptivity within the life of God. To say that the Son receives all he has from the Father is not to say that the Son lacked something at one time. He has always had what he received from the Father. The point is to underline that “whereas the Son has eternally what He has, yet He has them from the Father” (Discourses 3.35). Such passages do not prove the Arian position but the opposite, for if the Son received “all things” from the Father, he is not among the “all” but superior to them (Discourses 3.36).
Athanasius defends the Nicene term homoousios, particularly in his various defenses of the Nicene settlement (Defense of the Nicene Definition; On the Synods). Sanctified by the council’s approval, it is a standard of orthodoxy. Yet Athanasius appeals to and uses the term infrequently in his anti-Arian treatises. He uses various equivalent phrases (e.g., ek tēs ousias tou patros) but does not appeal to the slogan. He gravitates more commonly to other terms: to participation, to the fact that the Son is “proper” to the Father.
The Wisdom of God
Throughout this discussion, Athanasius relies heavily on Paul’s statement in 1 Corinthians 1:24 that Christ is the “Wisdom” and “Power” of God. He takes that statement quite straightforwardly. The Father does have “His own” Wisdom and Word and Power, but “His own” Wisdom and Power is the Son himself, a hypostatic Word and Wisdom, the Word and Wisdom that is the Father’s image.[106] Not every theologian has been so bold with Paul’s claim. Augustine spends two books of On the Trinity trying to figure out what Paul means, and he comes to a position quite different from that of Athanasius.[107]
In book 6, Augustine tries out the notion that the Father’s power and wisdom is simply the power and wisdom that he begets as Son, so that the Father is wise only by virtue of the begotten wisdom, powerful by virtue of begotten power, great by virtue of begotten greatness, and so on. In general, he explores the idea that all terms we use to describe God’s attributes are relational, all attributes encircled by the Father’s begetting of the Son. In book 7, however, he rejects this solution. Being God and being great are not different for God; he is simple. If the Father is great by virtue of the greatness that he begets, then he is God by virtue of the Son, but that would mean that the Father begets his own godness. Since his being God and his being are the same for God, then, on the theory Augustine explores in book 6, the Father would be by virtue of begetting the Son. The Father not only begets his own godness but begets his own being. That, Augustine argues, is irrational. How, he demands, could the Father do this without having deity, power, wisdom, being in himself, first? He must have it to give it to the Son. Finding the strong reading of 1 Corinthians 1:24 absurd, Augustine insists that the Father must have power, wisdom, and all other attributes in himself rather than simply in the Son.
These are powerful objections, but there appear to be conundrums in every direction. Augustine says that “the Father is powerful” is a statement about the esse of the Father, rather than a statement ad Filium relative. But in making that distinction, Augustine seems to threaten God’s simplicity, which he is trying to protect, from another direction. To protect simplicity, he insists that being-God is not separable from being-powerful, being-great, being-good. But then he distinguishes the Father’s being from the Father’s being-Father: in himself, he is great, wise, powerful. Those are descriptions of his being per se, rather than descriptions of him as Father. And speaking of the Father’s being-wise, powerful, great is not the same as speaking of the Father’s being-Father. Apparently in defiance of simplicity, Augustine implies that “being-Father” is not identical to the Father’s being-God, not identical to his being.
Everything, he concludes, that is something in relation to another must also be something additional to that relation (omnis essentia quae relative dicitur est etiam aliquid excepto relativo). Augustine uses created examples to illustrate and concludes that “if the Father is not also something with reference to himself, there is absolutely nothing there to be talked of with reference to something else.” That solves one problem only to raise another. How can the Father be something other than what he is in relation to the Son? Father, as Augustine has said, is a relative term, and it would seem that we cannot even rationally ask, who is the Father aside from the relation to the Son? In that direction lies an abyss, for we cannot help but ask who or what the Father might be when he is not Father, and the answer will be that we simply do not have any idea.
Augustine would probably answer these queries by appealing again to his distinction between relational and substantive terms. The Father is, because he is the First Person of the Godhead, good, just, loving, holy; he is also inherently Father, since, though “Father” is a relational term, he always has a Son. But the way Augustine finally interprets 1 Corinthians 1:24 suggests that the Father has attributes that are more proper than the Son, more intrinsic to the being of the Father than his being Father. Perhaps this is where the criticisms leveled against Augustine hit home, particularly the criticism that he privileges the one essence over the persons. Saying that the Father has “his own” wisdom is not exactly “privileging” unity over plurality, but Augustine leaves open the possibility that the Father has some surplus godness left over that is not exhaustively poured out in the Son, that is not wholly expressed in his being Father. We can see how the pressure of this argument led Thomas and others to conclude that the persons simply are their relations, top-to-bottom: the Father is Father all the way down, the Son is simply and sheerly Son.
Athanasius points, I think, in another direction, a path toward cognitive rest, if not “resolution.” He insists that the Father’s wisdom simply is the Son, as is his power. This might be taken in two ways. On one view, the Father truly is nothing without the Son. Of course, since the Son is begotten of the Father, the Son is nothing without the Father either. Of course, too, the Father never has been without the Son, who is his own Word, “proper” to his essence, so the Father has never been without his power, wisdom, goodness, being. Yet the Father’s attributes are utterly dependent on the existence of the Son and are realized in the Son, just as much as the sun is realized and is light because of the radiance that supplements it. On this interpretation, God is radically dependent internally. I am before I am a father; I am apart from at least some of my human relations; I am more than my fatherhood. The heavenly Father is not before or apart from being Father; the person Paul calls “God” is not God except as he is Father of the Son. On another interpretation, Athanasius is saying that the Father has “his own” wisdom, but that wisdom is paternal wisdom, which means wisdom that exists in the Father (ad se) only as it is the wisdom poured out for and manifest in the Son. The Son too has “his own” wisdom, but has that wisdom only as receptive wisdom, received eternally from the Father. Each of the persons shares all the same attributes, and these attributes are their “own,” but these attributes are “inflected” relationally, “held” by each person distinctly as a person. All the Father’s attributes are inflected paternally, the Son’s filially, the Spirit’s spiritually.
I suspect that the first of these readings more accurately captures Athanasius’s thought. By linking 1 Corinthians 1:24 with Romans 1:18–20, Athanasius says that the power and Godhead that is seen in the creation is the Son (Discourses 1.12: idios autou dynamis kai theiotēs, hina ton huion sēmainē), and also that the Son simply is the Father’s Wisdom and power. But since the Son is idios to the Father, he is as “proper” to the Father as any of his “attributes.” Augustine would agree that there is not the slightest sliver of space between the Father and the Son, just as he would not allow the slightest sliver of space between the Father and his attributes. But for Athanasius, those two statements are identical: there is not the slightest sliver of space between the Father and his attributes because he has all that he has in the Son, who is proper to his essence. Augustine believes as strongly as Athanasius in an eternal radiance from the light of the Father. Yet Augustine is still capable of conceiving an unsupplemented origin: the Father “in himself” having attributes “in himself,” the light without radiance, the fountain without the stream. Augustine seems to leave a small crack open for thinking that the Father has something that is “his own,” something that appears more intimate and intrinsic to his being than the Son. Athanasius will have none of this, and so he is more radically trinitarian, because he does not envision any glimmer of life for the Father that is not realized in the Son. In slight but significant contrast to Augustine, he sees that the Scriptures entail the conclusion that “the Son is the Father’s All; and nothing was in the Father before the Word” (Discourses 3.67, emphasis added). For the Father, too, it is all about the Son, all about the eternal Word that became flesh.
Image of the Son
Given the circumstances of his life and work, Athanasius has less to say about the Spirit than about the Son. Yet he does write about the Spirit, notably in Letters to Serapion concerning the Holy Spirit.[108] His approach to the question of the Spirit is similar to his approach to the question of the Son. In both cases, he emphasizes the simple and accurate biblical terminology. While it might appear that the Spirit should be considered a second Son, and brother of the Son, there is a simple refutation of this. The Spirit is never “called Son in the Scriptures, so as to be considered as a brother, nor is it called the son of a Son, lest the Father be conceived as a grandfather” (To Serapion 1.16). Behind this is the basic distinction of God and human beings. “God is not like a human being,” and specifically so in the fact that he is not made up of components or divisible into parts. This means that the Father is begetter, and only begetter, and the Son begotten and only begotten. The Father is begotten of none, and the Son begets none. Unlike human beings, who have composite and complex identities, the identities of the divine persons are simple: “Just as the Father will never cease to be uniquely Father, so also the Son will never cease to be uniquely Son” (To Serapion 1.16).
The Spirit too is utterly unique within the Godhead, and he is no more a creature than a Son. God is not a Monad coming to completion as a Triad. He is eternally complete as Triad (To Serapion 1.16–17). Scripture again is the key. Creatures come from nothing, but Scripture says nothing like this of the Spirit, who is “said to be from God” in 1 Corinthians 2:11–12. Since, according to the same passage (v. 10), he searches God, he must be in God in the same way, as Paul says, that “the spirit of a human being” is intrinsic to the human being. Like the Son, the Spirit is known to be God by what he does. What he does manifests who he is. The Spirit is the Spirit of holiness and of new birth (Rom. 1:4; 1 Cor. 6:11; Titus 3:4–7). Creatures do not sanctify and renew, but are sanctified and renewed by God. So the Spirit must be God (To Serapion 1.22). The “direction” of participation confirms this. The Spirit does not participate but instead communicates life and holiness to those who participate in him, and thus, again, he is God. Were he not God, then it would not be the case that those who participate in the Spirit participate in God. But Scripture says that we remain (menein) in God by the gift of the Spirit (To Serapion 1.23–24). All this shows that the Spirit is just as proper (idios) to the Father and the Son as the Son is to the Father.
One of the more striking turns in the letter is Athanasius’s description of the Spirit as the “image” of the Son. Appealing to the biblical paradeigmata light and fountain (To Serapion 1.19), he draws connections, as he does elsewhere, between “image” and radiance, expression, and river. Since the fountain is in the river, and the light source in the radiance, and the expression in the subsistence, so “the Son is in the Spirit as in his own image,” just as the Father is in the Son. As the Father is to the Son, so the Son is to the Spirit, and Athanasius expounds in some detail on the Spirit’s imaging of the Son. The Son is “one,” and therefore the Spirit who is “his living energy and gift which sanctifies and illumines” must also be “one, full, perfect.” The Son is sent by the Father, but the Spirit is sent by the Son, and so, in the Son’s sending of the Spirit, we have an analogy to the incarnation. So too the Son’s glorification of the Father (John 17:4) is imaged in the Spirit’s glorification of the Son (John 16:14). The Son came “in the name of the Father,” but he says the Father will send the Spirit “in my name” (John 14:26; To Serapion 1.20).
This does not, Athanasius insists, make the Spirit a son of the Son, or a grandson of the Father. That would violate the pattern of scriptural language. But there is still an analogy, and that analogy bolsters Athanasius’s interweaving of Trinity, incarnation, and redemption. As we shall see in chapter 6, the Spirit is the one through whom the Son deifies the faithful. But that does not mean that the work of deification is done at a distance from the Son. The Spirit is the Son’s image, and when the Spirit deifies and spiritualizes the believer, he is necessarily making the believer over into the image of the Son. The Son bears the imprint of his Father, that imprint is in the Spirit, and the Spirit comes to us to form us according to the heavenly pattern.
Elsewhere in his writings, Athanasius frequently appeals to the Son’s gift of the Spirit as a way of highlighting the Son’s divinity. If the Son received the Spirit, then the Arians might have a point; then the Son would be on the same level as we are, as recipients of the Spirit. But the Son gives the Spirit and therefore must be divine (Discourses 3.24). To be sure, the Scriptures speak of the Son also receiving the Spirit, but, for Athanasius, these statements are spoken “humanly,” of the Son’s life as creature, as man. Athanasius affirms the full divinity of the Spirit, and does so in connection with the indwelling presence of the Spirit in believers. Because the Spirit is in us, we are “knit” to God, because we are in God and God is in us. Citing 1 John 4:13 (“by this we know that we abide in Him and He is us, because He has given us of His Spirit”), Athanasius notes that “because of the grace of the Spirit which has been given to us, in him we come to be, and he in us.” Given that the Spirit is the Spirit of God, it follows that “through His becoming in us, reasonably are we, as having the Spirit, considered to be in God, and thus is God in us.” Without the Spirit, we “are strange and distant from God,” but “by the participation of the Spirit we are knit into the Godhead; so that our being in the Father is not ours, but is the Spirit’s which is in us and abides in us.” Again citing 1 John (4:15), he concludes that we maintain the indwelling Spirit “by the true confession” (Discourses 3.24). In short, Jesus’s prayer that “they might be in us” is a prayer for the Spirit, since the Spirit is the person who joins us to the Son. Jesus is praying not that we would come to have “identity with Him” but that “the Spirit should be vouchsafed through Him to those who believe, through whom we are found to be in God, and in this respect to be conjoined in Him” (Discourses 3.25).
More specifically, Jesus is praying for the irrevocable gift of the Spirit. Citing the example of King Saul, who received the Spirit, sinned, and was abandoned by the Spirit, Athanasius concludes that it is possible to fall from the Spirit. If anyone “falls from the Spirit for wickedness,” grace will remain in him if he is “willing.” But “otherwise, he who has fallen is no longer in God (because that Holy Spirit and Paraclete which is in God has deserted him)” (Discourses 3.25). Hence Jesus prays that the Spirit would remain in the disciples. The Word is from the Father, and the Spirit from the Word, and thus Jesus “wills that we should receive the Spirit, that, when we receive It, thus having the Spirit of the Word which is in the Father, we too may be found on account of the Spirit to become One in the Word, and through Him in the Father.” The prayer that the disciples will become one “as we are One” is also “a request that such grace of the Spirit as is given to the disciples may be without failure or revocation. For what the Word has by nature, as I said, in the Father, that He wishes to be given to us through the Spirit irrevocably.” Paul teaches that the Father answered this prayer, assuring believers that nothing can separate us from the love of Christ and that the gifts and graces of God’s call are “without repentance” (Discourses 3.25).
God Indwelling God
The triune life, Athanasius says, is, to use the later patristic term, perichoretic life.[109] The Father and the Son dwell in each other in inexhaustible mutuality and intimacy. While it is true that all creatures also “live and move and have being” in the Father, the Son’s being-in the Father is unique: “He as being from the Fount of the Father is the Life, in which all things are both quickened and consist; for the Life does not live in life, else it would not be Life, but rather He gives life to all things” (Discourses 3.1). The language of indwelling does not mean that the Father is emptied out into the Son or that the Son is emptied into the Father. Athanasius does not leave room for internal triune kenosis. On the contrary, he sees such an idea as blasphemous, since it implies that the Father and the Son are empty and need filling, or that they become empty. Rather than a self-emptying, Athanasius sees Father and Son each as supremely full and perfect, filled with all the fullness of God (Discourses 3.1).
Perichoresis provides Athanasius with answers to a number of Arian objections. The “one God” of which Scripture speaks is not the Father alone, since the Son is in the Father; therefore the “one God” includes the Son (Discourses 3.9). The Son is different from the Father, but the Son is not a second God alongside the Father. This is clear from their perichoretic union. The Arians “cannot see the One in the Other, because their natures and operations are foreign and distinct. And with such sentiments, they will certainly be going on to more gods, for this will be the essay of those who revolt from the One God” (Discourses 3.16). He appeals to the perichoresis of Father and Son to solve an apparent contradiction in Scripture. On the one hand, the Son is said to sit at the Father’s right hand, yet, at the same time, other Scriptures suggest that the Father is at the right hand of the Son. How can both be true? Athanasius believes that perichoresis solves the dilemma. Though the Son sits on the right, “yet He does not place His Father on the left.” On the contrary, “the Son, though sitting on the right, also sees the Father on the right,” though in human terms he says, “‘I saw the Lord always before My face, for He is on My right hand, therefore I shall not fall.’” This is possible because “the Son is in the Father and the Father in the Son,” so that “the Father being on the right, the Son is on the right; and while the Son sits on the right of the Father, the Father is in the Son” (Discourses 1.61).
Athanasius expounds the image of light and radiance perichoretically, arguing that the source is always in the radiance, the spring always in the stream that flows from the spring (Discourses 3.3). Because of the union of Father, Son, and Spirit, the works of God are all works of the three persons together. The Father always acts and works in the Son and through the Spirit: “There is but one form of Godhead, which is also in the Word; and one God, the Father, existing by Himself according as He is above all, and appearing in the Son according as He pervades all things, and in the Spirit according as in Him He acts in all things through the Word.” In this way, Christians “confess God to be one through the Triad, and we say that it is much more religious than the godhead of the heretics with its many kinds, and many parts, to entertain a belief of the One Godhead in a Triad” (Discourses 3.15).
Behold Your God
For Athanasius, triunity is not some odd datum about God, a peculiar accident of his personality, like having a mole or flaming red hair. To say God is triune is not simply to say that he is plural, but to say what is most fundamental about his character and actions. Saying that God is triune, the Father with the Son and the Spirit proper to him, means that there is mutual love, glory, and no rivalry between Father and Son. Biblical statements about the one unique God would disprove the existence of the Son if there were rivalry (hamilla) between them. But there is none:
If there then is rivalry of the Son towards the Father, then be such words uttered against Him; and if according to what is said to David concerning Adonijah and Absalom, so also the Father looks upon the Son, then let Him utter and urge such words against Himself, lest He the Son, calling Himself God, make any to revolt from the Father. But if he who knows the Son, on the contrary, knows the Father, the Son Himself revealing Him to him, and in the Word he shall rather see the Father, as has been said, and if the Son on coming, glorified not Himself but the Father, saying to one who came to Him, “Why do you call Me good?” (Discourses 3.7)
Unlike David, the Father does not have to worry about the Son’s usurpation. Unlike Kronos, the father of Zeus, the Father does not have to keep watching his back in case his Son attacks, wielding a sharp sickle. To say that the Godhead is plural, yet without rivalry, is to toss every ancient theogony safely into the dustbin of history.
God is the truth, but he is the truth as Triune God and not otherwise: “If the Son was not before His generation, Truth was not always in God, which it were a sin to say; for, since the Father was, there was ever in Him the Truth, which is the Son, who says, ‘I am the Truth’” (Discourses 1.20). To say that the Son might not have been is to suggest that the Father might not have been good, since the Son is the Father’s goodness (Discourses 3.66).
Unless God is eternally triune, further, he is not eternally complete but comes to completion. The Arian view implies that God was first a “Monad” and only afterward “by addition became a Triad.” On Arian premises, then, “what we know concerning God grew and took shape.” And this means that God’s being as Triad is a formation ex nihilo: “If the Son is not proper offspring of the Father’s essence, but of nothing has come to be, then of nothing the Triad consists, and once there was not a Triad, but a Monad.” A Triad that comes from nothing can return to nothing, and so the Arian position threatens the eternal character of God. It will not do to begin with a defective Triad that is later completed with the begetting of the Son, since that would imply that “a thing originated is reckoned with the Creator, and what once was not has divine worship and glory with Him who was ever” (Discourses 1.17). Without the Son, the Father would not possess plenitude and perfection (Discourses 1.20). It is a good thing for the Father to be Father, and if he was not always Father, then, at one time, he lacked some good. Athanasius insists that the Father must have an eternal Son, because the Father’s essence could never have been imperfect: “If He is called the eternal offspring of the Father, He is rightly so called. For never was the essence of the Father imperfect [atelēs], that what is proper to it should be added afterwards” (Discourses 1.14).
Athanasius implies that the begetting of a son is the perfection of nature, a perfection that human beings reach in the course of time. God has never fallen short of this perfection, this completion of his nature, because he has eternally had a Son. The Father’s goodness is not, for Athanasius, something that he has in himself as an isolated divine person, because he is not an isolated divine person. If the Father is kyriōs Father, Father in the full and proper sense of the word, then it is impossible for the Father to be what he is unless he has a Son, and if he is not what he is, he is certainly not good. Thus, again, it is not quite correct to say, as the later tradition often did, that each person has all the perfections of the divine nature, as if each person could contain those perfections without the others. Each person exhibits all perfections precisely by being a member of the triune communion.
Athanasius introduces the pregnant language of telos, “perfection” or “end,” here. This might be taken in the more or less “static,” Apollonian sense that God has always been in a motionless condition of harmony and balance. Telos, though, more typically carries a temporal connotation.[110] Having a Son thus perfects, completes, brings to its fulfillment the Father’s essence. The Father does have a telos, and that telos is reached in begetting a Son. Since it would be unworthy of God to suggest that he ever fell short of that fulfillment, the Son must be eternal. This implies that the Father is not complete “in Himself” (contrary to what one finds in Augustine). Athanasius also implies that it is necessary for the Father to be completed in another. Of course, since the Son is eternal, the Father has always already reached his complete end, but the Father’s being is such that it is not completed without the Son. He is Light, and Light, to be complete, requires radiance. The Father is origin, but, Athanasius implies, cannot be origin without the eternal supplement of the Son. And this, in turn, implies a kind of eternally realized eschaton in the life of the Trinity. The Father has always already reached the consummation; he is always already the God of the future, the God whose future is wholly realized in the Son, the God who is always waiting to greet us down the road.
That God is a Trinity also implies that there is eternal difference in God. Some of Jesus’s statements about his relation to the Father are given in order to establish just this point. Jesus says that he has “received” from the Father and that things have been “delivered” to him “only to show that He is not the Father, but the Father’s Word, and the Eternal Son, who because of His likeness to the Father, has eternally what He has from Him, and because He is the Son, has from the Father what He has eternally” (Discourses 3.36).
Because God is Triune, the life of God is a life of eternal gift-exchange. The Son receives from the Father for us. Adam received gifts and quickly lost them, but if the Son receives gifts from his Father, he will retain them:
When then the Savior uses the words which they allege in their defense, “Power is given to Me,” and, “Glorify Your Son,” and Peter says, “Power is given unto Him,” we understand all these passages in the same sense, that humanly because of the body He says all this. For though He had no need, nevertheless He is said to have received what He received humanly, that on the other hand, inasmuch as the Lord has received, and the grant is lodged with Him, the grace may remain sure. For while mere man receives, he is liable to lose again (as was shown in the case of Adam, for he received and he lost), but that the grace may be irrevocable, and may be kept sure by men, therefore He Himself appropriates the gift. (Discourses 3.38)
This is stated in the context of the economy. The Son receives and is glorified “humanly.” Yet what makes the reception and glory permanent is the fact that they are received by the Son in human flesh and retained by him for us (Discourses 3.38).
Only a Triune God can be a creating God. If the Father did not always have his “framing Word” (dēmiourgikos logos), he could not always have been a maker. If the Word and Wisdom of the Father once was not, then “it is the same as saying, that God is not Maker, if He had not His proper framing Word which is from Him, but that that by which He frames, accrues to Him from without, and is alien from Him, and unlike in essence” (Discourses 1.17). If the Son is not an eternal framing word, then the Father must have relied on something external to himself to create, and that would imply weakness in the Father, or lack of completeness.
If God is always maker, always accompanied by his “Framing Word,” why did that Word not always frame? Why is the creation not eternal? Why did God not always make? Athanasius answers in part by rebuking speculation: “‘Who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been His Counselor?’ or how ‘shall the thing formed say to’ the potter, ‘why did you make me thus?’” More intriguingly, he answers by claiming that created things could not be eternal because temporality, being-from-nothing, is part of the definition of a created thing: “Although God always had the power to make, yet the things originated had not the power of being eternal. For they are out of nothing, and therefore were not before their origination; but things which were not before their origination, how could these coexist with the ever-existing God?” God created when it was best for creatures to be created: “God, looking to what was good for them, then made them all when He saw that, when originated, they were able to abide” (Discourses 1.29).
Yet the Father was always capable of making the world, since the Son was always at his side, the Son who was his creative Wisdom and Word. He creates by will but can create only if he has a creative capacity “proper” to himself. He does not have to receive that power from without. How can God’s essence be fruitful in itself if he did not possess an eternal “framing energy”? Can God be a “light that lightens not” or a “dry fountain”? The Arians answer that God brought forth his framing energy by will, but Athanasius dismisses this as an embarrassment: “If He frames things that are external to Him and before were not, by willing them to be, and becomes their Maker, much more will He first be Father of an Offspring from His proper Essence.” This is true because the will depends on something that is “above the will”: “It is a something that surpasses will, that He should be by nature, and should be Father of His proper Word. If then that which comes first, which is according to nature, did not exist, as they would have it in their folly, how could that which is second come to be, which is according to will?” (Discourses 2.2). In short, the Father’s “generative nature” is evident in the eternal production of the Word (Discourses 2.2), and it is this generative nature that makes it possible for the Father to make a world other than himself.
This line of argument puts the lie to the common charge that Athanasius and other “classical trinitarians” depict God as a static, immobile being. Quite the contrary, classical orthodoxy insists that God is by nature generative, productive, fruitful, and fecund. The Father is eternally Father, having begotten the eternal Son in an eternal begetting. Arians, by contrast, must conclude that the Father has something less than a “generative nature.” Generation for them is necessarily by will. But that simply raises the question of how a nongenerative God can will himself to become generative. Be that as it may, it is orthodox theology that presents a God of life and not a barren god of death.
Most dramatically, the Trinity, and the associated doctrine of the incarnation, implies that God honors and glorifies his creatures, rather than using creatures for his own promotion. If the Arians are correct, and the Son was not exalted in glory until after his death and resurrection, then the flesh of the Son is a means for self-promotion (Discourses 3.29). Orthodoxy, by contrast, insists that the Son advances the flesh rather than being advanced by it:
If then He is an ordinary man as the rest, then let Him, as a man, advance; this however is the sentiment of the Samosatene, which virtually indeed you entertain also, though in name you deny it because of men. But if He be God bearing flesh, as He truly is, and “the Word became flesh,” and being God descended upon earth, what advance had He who existed equal to God? Or how had the Son increase, being ever in the Father? For if He who was ever in the Father, advanced, what, I ask, is there beyond the Father from which His advance might be made? Next it is suitable here to repeat what was said upon the point of His receiving and being glorified. If He advanced when He became man, it is plain that, before He became man, He was imperfect; and rather the flesh became to Him a cause of perfection, than He to the flesh. And again, if, as being the Word, He advances, what has He more to become than Word and Wisdom and Son and God’s Power? (Discourses 3.51)
The Son became incarnate, and bore our flesh and its passions and pains, for us, to lighten our sufferings (Discourses 3.56). As Khaled Anatolios says, a key difference between Arian and Nicene theologies, as Athanasius saw it, was a difference between a “self-humbling” and a “self-promoting” God.[111] The world, Athanasius thought, had seen plenty of the latter, but the one living and true God is the former, the God who shows himself in the cross.
Conclusion
Critics are wrong to suggest that “classical trinitarianism” announces a static, motionless, inert God to whom it would be nonsense to pray, before whom no one would dance or sing. They are wrong if they are criticizing Athanasius, for nothing could be further from the Athanasian conception of the Trinity. It is not orthodoxy but Arian heresy that, by Athanasius’s lights, gives us an inert, barren—not to mention, unknowable—ground of being. For Athanasius, God is an eternal life of love and delight, for the Father delights in his Son, his image, and the Spirit eternally images the delight that the Son has in his Father.
Yet Rahner’s rule leaves us with some unanswered questions. If, as Rahner insists, the immanent and economic Trinity are one, and if the economy of redemption is the epistemological source of our knowledge of the immanent Trinity, then it seems that one should be able to read the ontological character of the persons from the economic interactions. To support the idea that nothing in the economy is “purely economic,” Hart appeals to the icon of the baptism of Jesus. This icon not only manifests the economic relations of the triune persons but also summarizes the whole drama of salvation and the immanent relations of the Trinity. Jesus’s descent into the waters and his ascent from them presignifies his future death and resurrection, while the gift of the Spirit in the form of a dove is a foretaste of Pentecost, when the Spirit falls as wind and fire. But in summarizing the economy of redemption, this iconographic depiction also shows that within the eternal life of God, “in declaring himself, even in uttering himself eternally, God both addresses and responds.” Christ both speaks with the authority of the Father and responds to him. In short, “if the economic Trinity is God in himself, graciously extending the everlasting ‘dance’ of his love to embrace creation in its motion, then one dare not exclude from one’s understanding of the Trinity the idea, however mysterious, of a reciprocal Thou.”[112]
This is not, Hart argues, “a purely social trinitarianism,” nor does this mean that the Son’s response is somehow “alongside the Father’s expression of his essence in the simplicity of the eternal Logos.” Still, the baptism indicates that “one must still acknowledge this distance of address and response, this openness of shared regard.”[113] To the baptism, one might add many other episodes of the Gospel narrative: Jesus’s praise of his Father for hiding and revealing the things of the kingdom (Matt. 11:25–26); his “high priestly” prayer (John 17); his anguished prayer in Gethsemane (Matt. 26:36–46). If, as Robert Jenson has put it, a person is “one whom other persons may address in hope of response,”[114] then, to judge from the Gospel narrative, Father and Son at least appear to be “persons” in a fairly straightforward sense. They do, after all, talk to each other.
We might address this question with the Athanasian skopos of Scripture, the principle that the Scriptures speak of the Son in a twofold manner, as Logos and according to the assumed flesh. But I believe another Athanasian insight is more fruitful. Above, I suggested that Athanasius’s trinitarian theology is more radically trinitarian than that of Augustine, since the latter appears to leave space to consider the Father “in himself,” not sheerly as Father of the Son. To use Athanasius’s terminology, Augustine does not grasp as clearly as Athanasius that the Son is “proper” to the Father, as intimate and intrinsic to the Father’s being as any wisdom or power the Father could call his “own.” Augustine finds it nonsensical to say that the Father can beget his own wisdom, unless he has some prior wisdom of his own to confer. But that, it seems, is to fall into an Arian paradigm, and to run into Athanasius’s critique of the “double wisdom” of Asterius. If the Father has “his own” wisdom, which is eternally conferred on the Son, which is then also his Wisdom, then we are multiplying Wisdoms. That will not do. God is one, and his Wisdom must be one.
Yet Athanasius’s appeal to 1 Corinthians 1:24 still requires refinement, a refinement that involves working through the mutuality of the relations more consistently than Athanasius himself did. We can put it this way: is the Son dependent on the Father? Yes; the Father begets the Son, so the Son is Son only because the Father has begotten him. This is an eternal begetting, and so the Son always was, but the Son’s always-existing is an always-existing that is from the Father, that depends on the Father. The Son as Wisdom and Power of the Father is dependent upon the Father. Yet, and at the same time, we must ask: is the Father dependent upon the Son? Yes; the Father is not Father except as he has a Son. The Father’s always-existing as Father depends on the eternal existence of the Son, and, for Athanasius, the Father’s eternal Wisdom and Power is precisely his eternal Word.
Dependence thus goes both ways, but the dependence is not symmetrical or identical. At least we can say that the Son depends “filially” on the Father, and the Father “paternally” on the Son. That is not saying much, though. We might also say that the Son’s dependence on the Father is the dependence of begottenness; the Son does not “beget” the Father, except in some highly attenuated sense that all relations of dependence are relations of “begetting.” The Father does not depend on the Son as one begetting him but depends on the Son for his status as Father. He depends on the Son as the one who does his will so fully that he is the living will of the Father, and he depends on the Son as his image, his radiance, and the exact representation of his glory.
Add the Spirit. Then what? The Father begets the Son in the Spirit; the Father speaks the eternal Word through the breath of the Spirit; the Father gives the Spirit to the Son as the Son’s eternal and eternally complete inheritance. The Son gives the Spirit to the Father as well, but as the return gift, the inheritance “enhanced”; the Word spoken by the Father in the Spirit reverberates back to the Father; the Son begotten in the Spirit of love loves the Father with the love that is the Spirit. Surely there are better ways to say this, but the general point is the asymmetry of the relations: the Father and the Son share the Spirit, but they do not “hold” or “give” the Spirit identically, symmetrically. We can, in fact, start the meditation all over again beginning with the Spirit. As the one by whom the Father begets the Son, the Spirit gives fatherhood to the Father and sonship to the Son, so that the Father and the Son are both dependent on the Spirit, but asymmetrically.[115] The Spirit is the one by whom the Father speaks his Word, and so the Spirit gives the Father articulation and the Word beauty and rhetorical power. The Spirit is the love by which the Father loves the Son, so that the Spirit is the one who makes the Father a loving Father and the Son a beloved Son. Or, considered from the other direction, the Spirit is the love that the Son returns to the Father, and so is it through the Spirit that the Son is the loving Son and the Father the beloved Father.
What does this mean? I suggest that it is the failure to reckon with the asymmetry of the relations that has sent certain forms of social trinitarianism down a blind alley. The Trinity is not, as social trinitarianism has suggested, a modern egalitarian democracy, made up of distinct but identical individuals. The persons are indeed equal, but not identical. At its best, though, social trinitarianism has been a plea to take the personhood of the persons seriously; it has been a plea for a scriptural exposition of the ontological life of the Trinity in which the persons converse together as they do in the Gospel story. But the response to Trinity-as-democracy should not be the implicit subordinationism that has infected some traditional trinitarianism; we do not need to resort to a unilateral hierarchical Trinity, paternal monarchianism or paternal causality, to avoid the problems of social trinitarianism. An asymmetrical account of triune life takes the pleas of social trinitarianism seriously, and can get at all the dynamism and personal interactivity that social trinitarianism wants, without threatening to collapse into tritheism.
This is, in the end, consistent with the lines of Athanasius’s teaching on the Trinity. The Father’s Word is proper to his essence; without that Word, the Father would be alogos, powerless, wisdomless, as ineffective as a light source without rays of light. That Word would not be Word, power, Wisdom, if he were not the Word of the Father. They are mutually dependent, living in the Spirit in an eternal fellowship of infinite love and joy and shared delight. Precisely in their mutual dependency, which is also mutual infinite power, they are thus persons, a communion of persons, capable of saying, each to the other, “In your light I see light.”