In his work, Nicaea and Its Legacy, Lewis Ayres raises a number of issues important to the discipline of theology.¹

The first is simply the difficulty of studying the past, especially the fourth century, one of the key periods in the formation of Christian theology. Reading texts from fifteen hundred years ago is sufficiently challenging, but these texts are set in a very complex history (or histories) of theological, social and imperial controversies and transitions. Then there is the task of relating the study of historical theology to modern systematic theology, knowing that simply retelling the history more thoroughly will not solve or resolve modern issues, for they have their own complicated genealogy. There is also the need to be aware of the involvement of different exegetical practices and presuppositions—then and now—in all of this. Finally, and most broadly or ecumenically, there are the implications that such work now has for dialogue between “Western” and “Eastern” trinitarian theology, and the questionable usefulness of such categories. That Ayres has remained sensitive to these, and other, dimensions of difficulty, while also engaging with a substantial body of literature, numerous primary texts, and diverse secondary texts (if that is still a useful distinction) makes his work both challenging and significant.

Following Michel Barnes, as well as in the work they did together, Ayres has done much to deconstruct the oppositional model of trinitarian theology, usually traced back to Théodore de Régnon, which dominated so much of twentieth-century theological scholarship, both historical and systematic. This caricature sets the “Cappadocian East” (as moving from the three to the one) in opposition to the “Augustinian West” (moving from the one to the three); posits that distinct analogies illustrate these differences (the “social” and the “psychological,” respectively); and then focuses on the writings which deploy these analogies as the supposedly “classic texts” of their respective traditions, thereby establishing the thesis as a proven fact.

The attempt of Barnes and Ayres to correct this misconception is certainly very commendable and welcome, as is much else in their work. However, I would ask whether Ayres's account of what he revealingly refers to as “a fully pro-Nicene theology”²

is indeed an adequate description of what Athanasius and the Cappadocians, in particular (distinctive as they were) were working towards, or whether it constitutes an appropriation of what they were doing by an Augustinian tradition of theology mediated through the categories of contemporary systematics.³ And, if the latter, does this point to a difference of approach more profound than the one posited by de Régnon? Is it possible that Ayres's opposition—as much as it was utilized by twentieth-century Orthodox theologians and apologists—is really an opposition as construed from within a “Western” framework, where the issue is the relation between the one and the three, so that the “Eastern” position, as it would be articulated by its proponents, is not even on the horizon? If this is the case, then the de Régnon paradigm has been removed, not in order to allow these diverse writers to appear in their distinctiveness (before we begin to categorize them as old-, neo-, or pro-Nicene), but rather to subsume their distinct voices within a particular (and particularly totalizing) discourse.

This is, I realize, a serious charge. But a few apparently minor points will, I think, make the case. They will do so all the more clearly on account of their being apparently trivial, as such examples often reveal our own unexamined presuppositions most acutely. The first concerns the term “God.” It goes without saying that every serious student of theology should pay scrupulous attention to the way in which this term is used. That the writings of the Hebrew Scriptures, even in Greek translation, use this term precisely was already noted by Philo: when used with an article (

) it refers to the One who alone is God; when used without an article it has a more general meaning.

⁴

Origen points out the same feature regarding the writings of New Testament,⁵

and this has been noted by many writers, systematic theologians, and scriptural scholars since.⁶

With a few exceptions, where it is also used of Jesus (though always on the prior assertion that he is Son of God), the term “God” with an article is reserved for the one God of Israel, the Father of Jesus Christ. This usage is deeply ingrained in the fourth-century creeds; with very few exceptions, whatever else they may say, they assert: I believe in one God, the Father … and in one Lord, Jesus Christ … and in one Holy Spirit (or something very similar). Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and, therefore, other than “the only true God” (John 17:3); the question in the fourth century was whether he could be affirmed to be as divine as the Father, and so also be called upon as

, as he occasionally is in Scripture. The same question was asked of the Spirit, and Gregory Nazianzen answered in the affirmative despite the absence of any scriptural precedent, though this, to his chagrin, did not make it into the Creed of Constantinople.

⁷

Yet, for whatever reason, we have become so accustomed to speaking of “the triune God” or “the trinitarian God”—the one God who is three—that we find it difficult not to think of the Trinity whenever we read the word “God.” So, when expounding the theology of Athanasius or one of the Cappadocians in his book, Ayres frequently, and without comment, refers to “the triune God” or “trinitarian God,” despite the fact that these terms are nowhere to be found in their writings (and the former cannot even be rendered in Greek). These theological formulations not only affect his words about their works, introducing unspoken assumptions about what they are talking about, but also filter his rendering of their words themselves. For instance, Ayres quotes a passage from an oration of Gregory Nazianzen as follows:

This is certainly a difficult passage to translate, and it can be done in various ways. But the passage does not include the word “God” in the original Greek, nor does it have us “defining” God (as if Gregory would have had such audacity), and certainly not “as a Trinity.” In the year before Ayres's book appeared, the first English translation of this oration was published, which renders the passage (given here more fully, with the key phrase in Greek) as follows: The use of the passive, “is defined,” is vital, reflecting Gregory's theological approach more generally, that of contemplating the revelation of God in Christ by the Spirit, rather than subjecting the being of God to our limited human activity of thinking and defining, and certainly not “defining God as Trinity.” Gregory was and still is regarded as one of the greatest rhetoricians—word-smiths—of the fourth century; he uses his words with care. If we are to begin to hear what he has to say, then we must pay utmost attention to how he uses his words, rather than simply hearing our own voice projected onto him.

A similar point could be made with regard to our tendency to speak of “God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.” While this might be possible in Latin (given the ambiguity resulting from the absence of an article), it does not reflect the patterns of fourth-century Greek writers, if this formulation is even possible in their language. The more usual idiom would be to speak of

(“the God and Father”), the Son of God, or the Word of God (or equally

—not “God the Word” but “the God-Word”), and the Spirit of God. In other words, the referent for the term “God” remains clear each time: the one of whom Jesus is the Son and Word, as fully divine as the Father so that he can also be called upon as God, “true God of true God,” and likewise the Holy Spirit, who is the Spirit of God, and, as the one received through Christ, the Spirit of Christ (following the language patterns of Scripture)—Christ, whose work, pro-Nicenes hold, reveals him as fully divine (though not called “God” by Scripture). To speak of “the triune” or “trinitarian God,” the one God who is three, Father, Son and Spirit, sounds not only odd, but distinctly modalist.

The point made here also speaks to the liturgical and hymnographic tradition. The Eastern Anaphoras address in the second person singular—God, that is, the Father—though always together with his Son and Holy Spirit: “For Thou art God, ineffable, inconceivable, invisible, incomprehensible, ever-existing and eternally the same, Thou and Thine only-begotten Son and Thy Holy Spirit” (Liturgy of St John Chrysostom). Later Eastern hymnography occasionally speaks of a “triadic divinity” or “tri-hypostatic divinity,” using the abstract noun, but does not, so far as I am aware, ever refer to a “triadic” or “triune” God.¹⁰

There is, then, a very real sense in which our distinct ecclesial traditions have given us different ears to hear the texts of antiquity differently.

I am not sure that the significance of this difference has been satisfactorily acknowledged, or that it has even registered. To describe this objection as a canard or red herring proves the point that its full force has not been heard! The intention here is not to reinscribe de Régnon's opposition. But by pointing out this apparently minor question (how the word “God” is used), I do mean to suggest that there may well be a more fundamental difference, not between a Greek East and a Latin West, but between—on the one hand, the more archaic use of the word “God,” following Scripture and preserved into the fourth century and thereafter in the East (at least until the late Byzantine period, but still to this day in its hymnography), and—on the other hand, an approach to theology that sees its primary task as “defining God as Trinity.” Whether God as Trinity originates in the West with Augustine or not, certainly now it characterizes the language of Western theological discourse and, because of its familiarity, becomes an unexamined presupposition in the activity of reading others.

This presupposition is explicitly acknowledged by Ayres, who states that one of the main goals of his work is to set out “an account of pro-Nicene Trinitarianism in which Greek, Latin and Syriac speakers shared a set of fundamental ‘strategies’ in their trinitarian theologies.”¹¹

I have argued that this goal is flawed, inasmuch as it presumes that this—“trinitarianism”—is indeed what his subjects were doing. This primary “strategy,” moreover, is inseparable for Ayres from two others: the first is a “series of Christological assumptions” (that “the Word is a co-equal person in the indivisible Godhead”); the second, a “series of assumptions about the nature of human purification and spiritual progress … which shapes pro-Nicene scriptural exegesis.” That these two other “strategies” might be handled by Ayres in a similarly problematic manner is suggested by his treatment of passages from Gregory's Orations 29 and 30. It is simply not accurate to say that Gregory attributes scriptural material “either to the pre-incarnate Word or to the incarnate Word.”¹² In the passages to which this statement refers, Gregory does not speak of the “pre-incarnate Word” (another phrase common in modern theological discourse, but which I have yet to find in the writings of the Cappadocians). Rather, Gregory differentiates between how Scripture speaks of Christ as divine and human, a distinction between what is spoken of him by nature and what belongs to what he has done “economically,” with the following important qualifications: first, that it is one and the same Christ that is being spoken of in both ways, and second, that our knowledge of Christ's divinity derives from the works that he has done as human (when interpreted, in the light of the Passion, through the Scriptures)—that is, that “theology” is grounded in the “economy.” Whether in my own work, as Ayres suggests, I restrict, in some kind of “Barthian” manner,¹³ the scope of theological discourse appropriately or inappropriately, is not the issue; what Gregory himself says or does not say is. If I am right in my characterization of Gregory's point, then our question must be: what does he understand the task of theology to be, and how does he understand its workings?

As important as these points are (regarding the use of the term “God” and how Scripture speaks about Christ, tied in as they are with the relation between theology and economy), as I have drawn them out they indicate, I suspect, the root cause of my unease with Ayres's work: that it operates at a level removed from a close analysis of the history of the controversy and the texts that we have remaining from that period. Ayres does not overly concern himself with the details of the controversy. For example, the outbreak of the conflict between Arius and Alexander is simply said to have occurred “in AD 318 (but maybe as late as 322),”¹⁴

with a footnote referencing Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret, but no mention of the scholarly debate regarding the date, nor the implications that either date might have for identifying the historical context of crucial documents and so for understanding the development of the key players in the debate and the debate itself.

With regard to theological exposition (for that is the concern we share, though the same point could be made regarding other concerns, such as the social setting in which these texts were written), rather than beginning with the surviving texts, and through a close analysis of these expounding the theological vision they contain and the controversies in which their authors were engaged, Ayres expounds the “pro-Nicene strategies” that he discerns and considers of importance. Indeed, as Khaled Anatolios observes elsewhere in this issue,¹⁵

the only complete text that Ayres analyzes, Gregory of Nyssa's Ad Ablabium, is the very one he tells us we should no longer privilege in presentation of his theology! Now, it is certainly not possible to present each and every text written during the course of the fourth century. But it simply will not do to focus on sections from texts where the discussion seems to be pertinent to the theological locus that we have decided to treat, without at least some consideration of the text as a whole—its genre, scope, argument, etc.—and how it holds together for the author on his own terms as these are expressed by the texts themselves. “Trinitarianism” may well be a category in our theological discourse, but is it in that of the fourth-century writers? If there is one thing that we should have learned from historical and philosophical scholarship in recent decades, it would be that it is not necessarily the case that elements of a discourse are static and always present; that to understand a discourse we must listen to its own idiom, with its own nodal points, rather than seeking out what we think are analogues to the idioms of our own discourse. We cannot presume that our terms and phrases (e.g., “triune God”) are adequate to describe what the fourth-century writers are talking about. A clear example of this is Athanasius's work On the Incarnation, which was abysmally treated by R. P. C. Hanson in his Search for the Christian Doctrine of God, in which Hanson laments that “his doctrine of the Incarnation has almost swallowed up any doctrine of the atonement, has rendered it unnecessary,” yet which Khaled Anatolios pointed out is in fact written specifically as an apology for the cross, a fact which is obscured if we presume we already know what Athanasius meant by “incarnation” before even reading the work.¹⁶

Quite reasonably, Ayres explicitly states that he does not intend to offer a complete portrait of each figure;¹⁷

this is not the goal of his work, nor need it be. But it is certainly necessary to present how the theological outlook of each of our subjects holds together, before we can even begin to analyze the various alignments that were made (or that we see as being made) during the course of the fourth century. Ayres notes that others have suggested that the fourth-century debates were “not ‘simply’ Christological or ‘simply’ Trinitarian,” and recommends that “it would be far better simply to avoid the categories.”¹⁸ Yet it is precisely a version of “trinitarianism” (and its accompanying “strategies”) that is the driving concern of his work: there is almost no discussion about “incarnation” and the only mention I found of the crucifixion was a passing comment noting that the “pro-Nicenes” take the soul's formation as effected by “the action of Christ as Incarnate (and crucified, resurrected and ascended) Word.”¹⁹ It is certainly possible that Athanasius's On the Incarnation was not as influential in the fourth century as we might have thought,²⁰ but that it is a vital part of Athanasius's theology can hardly be denied.

One of Ayres's most damning criticisms of modern systematic theology is that it utilizes the results of the early theological controversies without respecting the legitimacy of the theological method that produced these dogmas. But does not the same occur when we utilize aspects of our subjects' works as if they were detachable dogmas, corresponding to the categories of our own theological outlook? It seems to me that Ayres's analysis of the fourth century is more indebted to the categories, the theological loci, of contemporary systematics (whatever their genealogy may be), than his critique of this discipline might lead him and us to suppose, and, more importantly, that this unexamined indebtedness leads him to, if not misrepresentation, then at least a lopsided picture.

If there is harsh criticism in my words, it reflects the challenge that Ayres's book raises and, thereby, confirms its significance.