Epilogue. Toward a Prospective Historiography
Epilogue
Toward a Prospective Historiography
One of the significant implications of John Henry Newman’s Arians is that “a sound dogmatic theology depends on honest doctrinal history.”1 Contemporary scholars have echoed this predicament. Khaled Anatolios has argued that the historical development of Trinitarian theology is key to its intelligibility.2 The far-reaching implication of this claim is that doctrinal history is indispensable for understanding the meaning of doctrine. In this book I have sought to contribute to this enterprise of connecting doctrinal history and theological understanding. The upshot for contemporary theology is that pure doctrinal analysis of divine simplicity apart from historical understanding, whether theological or philosophical, is fraught with danger. Throughout I have hinted at a number of things that illustrate this danger. The task remains, however, for systematic and philosophical theologians to think through the implications of the fresh issues and nuances of divine simplicity arising from ante-Nicene doctrinal history set out in the preceding pages. In particular, the distinctive ante-Nicene developments I have charted have significant ramifications with regard to two central issues that have animated the crisis of divine simplicity in modern theology. The first concerns how divine simplicity should be understood, the second, the compatibility of divine simplicity and Trinitarian theology.
Regarding the first issue, in this book I have clarified that the understanding of divine simplicity operative in modern systematic and philosophical theology is overly narrow. The definition of divine simplicity is often spelled out metaphysically, but what is missed is that ethical considerations were also central to the ancient philosophical and early Christian accounts of divine simplicity. What I have uncovered through narrating the philosophical developments from Plato to Origen is that the intelligibility of the doctrine rests significantly on the integrity of the deep interconnection between the metaphysical and the ethical. This, in turn, grants the possibility that there is a much richer definition of divine simplicity. First and foremost—if The Republic is to be taken as the locus classicus—divine simplicity refers to God’s perfect self-consistency. It is for the purpose of safeguarding this perfect self-consistency that Middle Platonists and early Christians affirmed the absence of multiplicity in God. When read in light of the Platonic theory of forms, these affirmations are statements of the total absence of contraries in God. What the doctrine of divine simplicity intends to rule out are only multiplicities that would violate God’s perfect self-consistency. For instance, a simple God may not possess goodness and justice as opposing aspects—in this sense they are one and the same. If divine simplicity is understood this way, it becomes difficult to imagine it as a doctrine that obviously leads to conflict with divine freedom or violates the integrity of God’s distinctive acts in salvation history. Thus, the puzzlement regarding God’s simplicity among modern philosophers and theologians may have resulted from an overly accentuated disjunction between metaphysical and ethical doctrines of God. Further, it will be fruitful to rethink whether the seeds for a theologically rich doctrine of divine simplicity were already hidden in the Platonic frameworks inherited by early Christian theologians. Along these lines, further explorations on divine simplicity as a metaphysical-ethical synthesis promise to advance contemporary debates, especially for reinstating the theological integrity of divine simplicity in modern theology. For a starting point, this book recommends no better place to look than Origen’s understanding of divine simplicity spelled out in chapter 5.
Regarding the second central issue that has animated the crisis of divine simplicity in modern theology, in this book I have highlighted further issues regarding the intuition central to the modern crisis, namely, that there is an incompatibility between divine simplicity and Trinitarian theology. By charting the distinctive shape of the ante-Nicene Trinitarian problematic, I have clarified why patristic theologians hardly ever noticed the logical incompatibility between divine simplicity and Trinitarian theology. In light of the ante-Nicene sources, it has become clear that it is too simplistic to suppose that divine simplicity collapses into Monarchianism. Divine simplicity does not entail this position, at least not in any obvious sense, because the historical Monarchian position was not treated simply as a thesis about logical identity. Thus, the analysis underlying the “logical problem” frequently offered by modern philosophers today makes little sense for patristic theologians who had the historical form of Monarchianism in mind. Moreover, for the purpose of constructive theology, it will be fruitful to attend to a different theological issue that was indeed noticed by patristic theologians concerning the implication of divine simplicity for Trinitarian theology: how to conceive of the generation of the Son while safeguarding the simplicity of God the Father, the generator? As I have argued, this was the theological location where early Christian theologians first recognized a potential incompatibility between divine simplicity and the anti-Monarchian emphasis on the Father-Son distinction. This issue may turn out to be a fruitful site for contemporary theological and philosophical reflections. This book thus challenges the commonplace intuition that divine simplicity and Trinitarian theology are logically incompatible; in fact, historically, divine simplicity played an indispensable role in shaping Trinitarian reflections in the ante-Nicene period.
In these ways I have offered the ante-Nicene developments charted in this book as fresh resources for advancing the contemporary debate on divine simplicity and its relation to Trinitarian theology. But why should these developments be privileged? Why should the theological issues before Nicaea be considered foundational for a Christian doctrine of God? These questions reveal a final aspect of my argument that has hitherto remained hidden beneath the surface. This concerns how the distinctive shape of the ante-Nicene doctrinal ecology surrounding the doctrine of divine simplicity relate to the overall development of patristic Trinitarian theology between the time of Origen and the fourth century.
It is well known that adherence to divine simplicity was a core commitment in fourth-century Christian theology. Pro-Nicene writers—East and West—possessed what Lewis Ayres has called a shared habitus in which we find the language of divine simplicity serving a variety of theological purposes.3 Athanasius, in his anti-Arian polemical writings, employed the language of simplicity to establish the centrality of “Father” as a theological term.4 Moreover, he also turned to simplicity to sever the association between human and divine generation.5 The centrality of divine simplicity was prevalent in the West as well. Hilary of Poitiers, like Athanasius, employed the doctrine of divine simplicity to safeguard the nature of the Son’s begetting from anthropomorphism.6 Hilary thought that the simplicity of God not only calls for devotion, reverence, and worship; it also indicates the supreme efficacy of divine action.7 Divine simplicity became firmly established as a key category for pro-Nicene theologians in the second half of the fourth century. Most notably, the anti-Eunomian polemic of the Cappadocians Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa revolved around the understanding of divine simplicity and its implications for theological epistemology.8 Basil and Gregory thought that divine simplicity need not force the theologian to choose between radical apophaticism, according to which God is absolutely unknowable, and radical knowledge of God’s essence (ousia), which is to be gained through a single divine name, “unbegotten” (agennētos).9 Hence Basil and Gregory’s anti-Eunomian writings reimagined God’s simplicity such that it enables the possibility of knowing God without claiming too much or too little. The Cappadocians’ understanding sits alongside that of another theological giant in the fourth century, Augustine, who famously stated: “We say it [i.e., the Trinity] is simple because it is what it has, with the exception of the relation of the persons to one another.”10 According to Augustine, God’s simplicity entails that all the divine names such as “great,” “good,” “wise,” and many others must be identical to each other, as he explains in De Trinitate.11 De Trinitate V–VII spell out an account of the predication of divine names that allows us to make sense of the distinctions between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit without compromising the simplicity of God. Our fourth-century sources, then, suggest that it is perhaps not too much of an exaggeration to identify divine simplicity as omnipresent in pro-Nicene theological discourse, functioning as a key “grammatical” principle shaping pro-Nicene theological language.12
Far from being exclusively a pro-Nicene strategy, divine simplicity was also a crucial piece of anti-Nicene theology of the fourth century. We find that Arius was already concerned with models of the generation of the Son that would potentially endanger the simplicity of God.13 This concern with safeguarding God’s simplicity in speaking of divine generation was not unique to Arius.14 But he thought that absolute divine primacy is attributed to the Father, implying, along with Origen, that the Father is the only purely simple and immutable being who possesses divinity absolutely.15 Whatever the Son’s divine status is, he does not possess the kind of divinity found only in the Father.16 Simplicity, functioning in this context, already serves a “subordinating” purpose to differentiate the Father’s divine status from the Son’s. This use of divine simplicity as a theological strategy continued to occupy a unique place in anti-Nicene theology beyond Arius, most notably in the works of Aetius and Eunomius of Cyzicus. According to Lionel Wickham, “. . . the concept of God is, for Aetius and Eunomius, the concept of the absolute and metaphysically simple.”17 Eunomius, following Aetius, argued that the simplicity of God implies that only a single name could be absolutely attributable to the divine essence, namely, “unbegotten” (agennētos).18 Like Origen and Arius before him, Eunomius employed divine simplicity to differentiate the Father from the Son, reserving primacy in relation to divinity only to the former. A closer look at the variety of theological sources in the fourth century, then, reveals that divine simplicity was a central theological strategy, albeit used in radically different and even opposing ways, for both pro-Nicenes and anti-Nicenes.
This is a puzzling phenomenon. The commitment to divine simplicity seems to have led to two radically divergent visions of the Trinity in the fourth century. These two visions, in turn, were built upon two divergent interpretations of divine simplicity. Accounting for this phenomenon, I suggest, is a crucial task for deepening our understanding of how the debates in the early fourth century emerged in the first place. In my view, we still lack an adequate historical account of this phenomenon framed in terms of the theological developments after Origen.19 While I do not pretend to have resolved the puzzle in this book, the ante-Nicene doctrinal development charted in the preceding chapters opens up a fresh perspective for doing so. The decisive insight that has emerged from my argument is that before Nicaea, divine simplicity assumed two roles in the context of the Father-Son relation. As we have seen, it is possible to utilize simplicity—as Origen did—to frame both the distinction and the unity between the Father and the Son. This dual function of simplicity offers a new lens through which to narrate the transition from third- to fourth-century Trinitarian thought prospectively. In contrast to a retrospective narrative that narrates the transition in terms of issues that became central only later in the fourth century, a prospective narrative describes the transition in terms of issues that were central before Nicaea. Whereas a retrospective narration measures doctrinal developments by looking back, a prospective narration measures doctrinal developments by looking forward. In what follows I shall briefly explain how the bifurcation of the function of divine simplicity in Origen offers a fresh way of mapping the transition from third- to fourth-century Trinitarian theology.20
As I have argued elsewhere, Valentinian emission and Monarchianism marked out the key erroneous positions on the Father-Son relation in Origen’s own representation of his third-century polemical landscape.21 Origen’s heresiology offers a window into the ante-Nicene polemical landscape associated with the question of the Father-Son relation before the outbreak of controversy between Arius and Alexander and well before Athanasius’s polemical attempt to reshape the landscape in terms of “Arianism.” Building a narrative of the transition from third- to fourth-century Trinitarian theology in light of Origen’s own heresiological categories has the advantage over a general categorization of post-Origenian trajectories into those stressing unity and others stressing distinction between the Father and the Son. This is because “anti-Valentinian” and “anti-Monarchian” situate theological emphases of unity or distinction within specific polemical contexts found in the ante-Nicene period.
By tracking the fate of the anti-Valentinian and anti-Monarchian emphases, which sit alongside each other in Origen’s via media, as I have argued in this book, we can take a fresh look at the emergence of rival accounts of the Trinity in post-Origenian developments. For after Origen, the tight integration of the anti-Monarchian and anti-Valentinian functions of simplicity in Origen’s Trinitarian theology seems to have fallen apart. The anti-Monarchian function was the contentious one.22 Some, like Arius, can be read as stretching the anti-Monarchian move to emphasizing the Father’s transcendence over the Son in a more radical way than Origen probably would allow.23 This tendency was continued by those with “subordinationist” tendencies, such as Aetius and Eunomius. Others, like Alexander of Alexandria and Athanasius, instead emphasized the Father and the Son as equal (perhaps in a return to Irenaeus’s emphasis?),24 thus drifting toward a dissolution of the Origenian point that the Father, as the absolute simple source of divinity, is greater than the Son, who is the derived image.25 Needless to say, both trajectories are problematic from the viewpoint of Origenian theology. The second trajectory is problematic because it disrupts the anti-Monarchian component of Origen’s synthesis. Origen construes monotheism as the idea that there is only one purely simple source of divinity, the Father himself. This is how Origen refutes the Monarchian objection that he has fallen into polytheism. It is easy, then, to imagine why some (like Arius and those sympathetic to his concerns) might find the theology of Alexander and Athanasius problematic: this trajectory threatens to compromise monotheism (construed in the Origenian manner in terms of the absolute transcendence of the Father).
But the first trajectory is also problematic from the Origenian view-point because the understanding of the Son as the perfect image of the Father in act and will is already at the breaking point when it comes to holding together the anti-Monarchian emphasis on the transcendence of the Father and the anti-Valentinian requirements on the Son’s generation. Further stress on the transcendence of the Father over the Son disrupts the balance, with the risk of leading back toward the Valentinian notion of emission in which the Father is said to generate that which is (1) separate from himself, (2) contrary in nature to himself, and (3) related to himself in a relative temporal order. It is also easy, then, to imagine why many in the fourth century found the “Arian” position problematic: this trajectory threatens to violate the required continuity between the Father and the Son, thus bringing back a Valentinian kind of separation between the two.26
The shape of the post-Origenian landscape, therefore, may be framed in light of the fact that divine simplicity as a principle of differentiation between the Father and the Son (originally an anti-Monarchian emphasis) gradually acquired a polemical overtone after Origen. On the other hand, the anti-Valentinian function of divine simplicity—its requirements regarding the Son’s generation—seems to have been universally accepted and explicitly stressed by theologians after Origen. From Arius to Athanasius, Eusebius of Caesarea to Hilary of Poitiers, all maintained the anti-Valentinian point as crucial to Trinitarian theology.27 This suggests that while the anti-Monarchian function of simplicity became a central issue of contention at the end of the third century and the beginning of the fourth, the anti-Valentinian function remained indisputable. In light of this, the disintegration of Origen’s synthesis between the anti-Monarchian and anti-Valentinian functions of divine simplicity can be seen as a key theological dimension of the fourth-century dispute.
The foregoing sketch, given its brevity, naturally invites further examination. But it suffices to illustrate the promising questions made available when we attempt to narrate the development of patristic Trinitarian theology from Origen to the fourth century prospectively. In particular, new conceptual clarity is available on two issues concerning the status quaestionis of Trinitarian theology at the beginning of the fourth century.
First, in chapter 6 I emphasized that Origen’s “subordinationist” tendency actually reflects primarily his anti-Monarchianism when read in his ante-Nicene context. If my argument is correct, then it opens up the possibility of rethinking the “subordinationist” trajectory in post-Origenian theology as the result of a persistent anti-Monarchian concern that originated in the late second or early third century and passed through to later “Arian” and ”Eusebian”28 theologies of the fourth century. This opens up a further set of illuminating questions for interrogating more deeply the nature of disagreements between various participants of the controversy in the fourth century: how did an anti-Monarchian theological tendency (i.e., what is commonly termed “subordinationism”) come to be read and understood out of this context in the case of Arius and those sympathetic to him? Did Arius and his supporters think of themselves as simply “anti-Monarchian” in the sense that Origen thought of his own “hierarchical” understanding of the Father-Son relation? The reinterpretation of “subordinationism” in ante-Nicene, rather than post-Nicene, terms leads to the first set of new questions emerging from a prospective narration.
Furthermore, as we have seen in Origen, divine simplicity was primarily attributed to the Father. In the fourth century, however, divine simplicity was attributed primarily to the divine essence (ousia) shared by the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.29 This is the state of affairs we find in fourth-century pro-Nicene theology. If one narrates the development of patristic Trinitarian theology retrospectively, the ante-Nicene use of simplicity seems “heretical.” This perspective, once again, has the potential to mislead, not least because it misses the fact that one of the reasons divine simplicity emerged as central in patristic Trinitarian discourse at all was certainly its usefulness in an anti-Monarchian context, as I have argued. The simple-composite distinction offers third-century anti-Monarchians like Origen a strategy for affirming an emphasis on the distinction between the Father and the Son in terms of “order of priority.”30 When viewed prospectively, then, it is the emergence of the idea of the simplicity of the divine essence, which seems innovative and requires explanation. This might perhaps explain why the “Arians” or “Eusebians” found what Anatolios calls the “reconstruction of divine transcendence” in Athanasius odd and perhaps even dangerous because simplicity of the Father was probably taken by these theologians as a given if one wanted to safeguard Trinitarian discourse against the threat of Monarchianism.31 A prospective narrative therefore turns the question upside down. It is the emergence of the idea of the simplicity of the divine ousia in pro-Nicene theology that becomes the puzzle, not the “subordinationist” (in fact, anti-Monarchian) attribution of simplicity to the Father in anti-Nicene theology. This transformation of perspective leads to fresh questions: How did divine simplicity evolve from being attributed to the Father to being attributed to the divine essence? Might we understand this transition in terms of the dissociation between divine simplicity as a principle of differentiation between Father and Son and its anti-Monarchian polemical function? The transition from the simplicity of the Father to the simplicity of the divine ousia highlights a second set of new questions emerging from a prospective narration of the developments of patristic Trinitarian theology.
To sum up then, my suggestion is that the dual functions of divine simplicity before Nicaea charted in this book offers a promising starting point from which to narrate the emergence of rival Trinitarian visions after Origen. By tracking the fate of divine simplicity in later divergent visions of the Trinity, we will be better placed to understand how later fourth-century developments have their origins in the disintegration of Origen’s via media that can be understood only in terms of ante-Nicene heresiological categories. For Origen, the key errors in connection with the Father-Son relation were Valentinian emission and Monarchianism. Did these contexts remain shared markers of doctrinal errors on the Father-Son relation among key participants in the fourth-century controversies? If doctrinal-polemical contexts indeed shifted in the transition from Origen to the post-Origenian theological landscape, how should our historiography map this shift from ante-Nicene doctrinal categories (“Valentinian emission” and “Monarchianism”) to ones emerging in the fourth century (“Arian,” “Nicene,” “Eusebian,” “Eunomian”)? I have argued that these questions arise naturally when the historian considers doctrinal developments prospectively. It is my hope that what I have offered in this epilogue will spark further work exploring the potential of this approach, leading to a more compelling account of the transition from Origen to the beginning of the fourth-century Trinitarian controversies.
In the introduction I framed my project in this book as a “Newmanian” exercise, seeking to resource doctrinal analysis in and through the medium of doctrinal history. It is well known that Newman in his later life famously turned to the task of setting out the general principles of doctrinal development.32 No doubt his studies on the development of Trinitarian orthodoxy inspired him to search more formally for a way to make sense of the development of doctrine. It has been argued that, while in Arians Newman had a “romantic” perception of ante-Nicene theology as displaying a reverent simplicity for mystery in its refusal to formulate orthodoxy in a single formula, the central axis of his panoramic view of the development of patristic theology shifted from the ante-Nicenes to Athanasius. Subsequently, for Newman Athanasius and “Nicene orthodoxy” eclipsed Origen and ante-Nicene theology as the key to understanding the doctrinal development in the early centuries.33 Given this crucial trajectory in Newman’s thinking, the final aspect of my argument in this book takes an “anti-Newmanian” turn. For, as I have argued in this epilogue, a careful study of the ante-Nicene doctrinal ecology should urge us to seek a prospective rather than retrospective account of the development of doctrine. The burden of explaining the discrepancies between ante-Nicene theology and later established “Nicene orthodoxy” could potentially lead to a distorted understanding of doctrinal developments. Origen is a case in point. Might it not be more fruitful to shift the burden of explanation to a different question, namely, how can we make sense of the emergence of “Nicene orthodoxy” out of ante-Nicene doctrinal contexts? In other words, why did doctrinal markers shift from those found in the ante-Nicene period to a more complex set found in the fourth century? Posing these questions is to call for a reverse movement to the one found in Newman’s own development. What I have suggested in the epilogue is a fresh narration of the development of patristic Trinitarian theology by returning to the distinctive ante-Nicene doctrinal ecology as the starting point. It is in light of this historiographical orientation that I offer the historical developments charted in this book as foundational for a better understanding of how divine simplicity became established as a crucial part of Christian doctrine after Origen.