This special issue of Harvard Theological Review is devoted to a critical discussion of fourth-century Christian trinitarian theology, a topic that is now in a significant new phase of scholarly debate amongst both historical and systematic theologians. The papers and conversation published here arose from a day-conference on 5 May 2006 at Harvard Divinity School, when a number of invited scholars and doctoral students from Yale, Chicago, Emory, Fordham, Weston Jesuit School of Theology, and St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary, joined the students of the Harvard conference course, “Trinitarianism and Anti-trinitarianism: The Christian God in Dispute” (Spring 2006), for a day of shared papers and public debate.1
It is my pleasure here to extend special thanks to my Harvard doctoral student, Mark Scott, who not only served as Teaching Assistant for the course, but also played a vital role in assisting with the editorial production of the essays in this special issue of HTR. I am equally indebted to Margaret Studier and the whole team in the managerial office of HTR: their professionalism and attention to detail is exemplary, and their special commitment has enabled a speedy publication of these essays.
The history of scholarly analysis of Christian doctrine and its contestation in the early centuries of the Christian era has experienced certain notable periods of turbulence and redirection.2
Ayres himself devotes the last part of his book (Nicaea, ch. 16) to an examination—which some readers will undeniably find contentious—of the ways in which “modern” authors massaged the story of early Christian doctrine to their own speculative or “systematic” ends. That part of the argument of Nicaea is discussed briefly in the last section of this “Introduction.” There exists at present no general history of significant moments of paradigmatic reassessment of early Christian thought, but The Oxford Handbook to the Reception History of Christian Doctrine (ed. Sarah Coakley and Richard Cross; Oxford: Oxford University Press, in preparation) will in due course attempt to remedy that gap.
Few would deny that such a period of transition and renegotiation of paradigms is currently in progress where the study of early Christianity is concerned. The analysis of the story of the development of early Christian doctrine, and especially of the doctrine of God, is undergoing multiple retellings at the beginning of the twenty-first century—to such an extent that the neophyte can be forgiven for suffering some sense of bewilderment. In practice, students are inducted into these debates either from the platform of the secular study of religion, or from the perspective of historical and systematic theology (although it is a moot point whether mutual enrichment cannot occur beyond the ideological impasses, which so often characterize the institutional separation of such approaches3
Ayres himself does to some extent manage to straddle this divide: he cites with appreciation, e.g., Elizabeth A. Clark, History-Theory-Text (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), and Clark's earlier programmatic essay, “Elite Networks and Heresy Accusations: Towards a Social Description of the Origenist Controversy,” Semeia 56 (1992) 79–117. But overall Ayres makes little attempt to confront the prevailing issues of power and gender with which feminist scholars of early Christianity have concerned themselves in recent years. For his discussion of Rebecca Lyman's critical interaction with his book, however, see 160–63, below.
One thinks here especially of the impact, both scholarly and popular, of books like The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine H. Pagels (New York: Random House, 1979) or What is Gnosticism? by Karen King (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003). Ayres does not directly tackle the issues raised in these volumes. That is not to say he is uninterested in questions of how power is related to claims to “orthodoxy”: see his allusions in this issue to the importance of Alain Le Boulluec, La notion d'hérésie dans la littérature grecque, IIe–IIIe siècles (Paris: Études augustiniennes, 1985); and his recent edited special issue of the Journal of Early Christian Studies, “The Question of Orthodoxy,” JECS 14 (2006) 395–98.
See, e.g., amongst recent discussions of this ilk, Daniel Boyarin, Borderlines: The Partition of Judeao-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Judith Lieu, Neither Jew Nor Greek?: Constructing Early Christianity (London: T&T Clark, 2002). Ayres, significantly, declares at the outset of Nicaea that this is not one of the issues that he can deal with in his book (Nicaea, 1 n.1).
Historical and Textual Reassessment of the Emergence of Trinitarianism
Lewis Ayres's Nicaea and Its Legacy is undeniably a scholarly tour de force. Its first claim is that it is instigating a significant rethinking of the emergence of patristic trinitarianism at the level of texts and history.6
Ayres does devote the early part of his book to a rich discussion of developments in the doctrine of God before Nicaea (Nicaea, ch. 1), but by his own admission, his “paradigm-changing” theses are mainly concerned with the late-fourth century. In his questioning of older “heresiological categories” (Nicaea, 1), he follows Hanson (Richard P. C. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy 318–381 AD (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988) and most other recent scholarship on post-Nicaean developments.
See Nicaea, chs. 11–13 for Ayres's detailed spelling out of the category “pro-Nicene” and what he sees as its three basic “strategies.”
See Nicaea, 274–75, for the discussion of the meaning of “culture” in this context; and below, in this issue, 170–71, for his admission that this category needs further explication in relation to its “pro-Nicene” form.
See Nicaea, 1, and then 274–78 for these points. Influences from Wittgenstein, Bourdieu, and Burrell (amongst others) may readily be detected in Ayres's account of what is laudable in being “pro-Nicene,” somewhat giving the lie to his later claim that the return to this “pro-Nicene” approach must somehow probe behind modern presumptions.
Ayres, Nicaea, 6.
Ayres also makes two other important, and concomitant, claims about problems with “modernistic” textbook readings of fourth-century trinitarianism. On the one hand, discussion of the Trinity in this crucial late-fourth-century period has been falsely divided from questions of Christology;11
These categories are of course themselves the abstractions of later “dogmatics” or “systematics,” which Ayres in principle opposes. However, even to continue to talk about “Trinitarianism,” as Ayres does throughout his book, might be said to remain somewhat in thrall to those categories.
Ayres, Nicaea, 1.
Much of the interest in the first part of this issue of HTR, then, concerns the assessment of these three fundamental axioms of Ayres's argument. As we shall see, Ayres's immediate interlocutors in Part I, John Behr and Khaled Anatolios, make different assessments of the success, or otherwise, of the three basic methodological moves, as they see it.
First, there are certain dangers in the unifying “pro-Nicene” tag that Ayres now champions. For it could turn out to overcompensate—by a certain sleight of hand—for an earlier (and demonstrably false) disjunction between East and West, which has indeed beguiled the systematicians for much of the twentieth century. This is John Behr's main bone of contention. As he perceptively points out, Ayres's account of the “pro-Nicene” at times involves a rereading of the thought of the Cappadocians through the lens of categories more natural to Augustine. Even to talk of “the triune God,” or to understand Gregory of Nazianzus as finding the unity of “the Godhead” somewhere else than in the “Father,” is—for Behr—to beg the question. (Later, in Part II of this issue, Christopher Beeley drives home this latter point the more forcibly, arguing that we should read Nazianzen consistently on the “monarchy” of the Father, rather than finding in him an occasional drift towards locating the divine unity in an abstract “Godhead.”13
Much depends here on how we read the somewhat ambiguous Greek of important passages such as Gregory's Oration 31.14 (on which, see Beeley's detailed analysis below). Even then, there remains the possibility that Nazianzen is simply inconsistent on this key issue of divine unity and causality: so Richard Cross, “Divine Monarchy in Gregory of Nazianzus,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 14 (2006) 105–16.
It should be pointed out that Ayres himself underscores that “differences” do remain between Greek and Latin “pro-Nicene” authors (and also between different authors writing in the same language); and he underscores the “diversity” of “pro-Nicene” perspectives right from the start of his book (see already Nicaea, 1: “This paradigm attempts … to respect the diversity of “pro-Nicene” theologies better than available accounts.”).
Secondly, on the question of the false textbook divide between trinitarianism and Christology, Behr and Anatolios both support Ayres in his laudably integrative goals on this score. But they also agree, in their different ways, that here he announces rather more than he can actually deliver in Nicaea and Its Legacy. Maybe those attempting to effect a major paradigm reform in the history of doctrine can either swing the pendulum too far to the other extreme in compensation for a distorted earlier account (as, putatively, with Ayres's unifying “pro-Nicene” category) or can continue in somewhat occluded ways to manifest features of what they ostensibly decry. Behr claims that the latter problem afflicts Ayres in his well intentioned announcement of the need to bring Christology fully into the story of emergent patristic trinitarianism. In line with Behr's own recent reemphasis on the importance of the passion narrative for early Christian doctrine,15
See John Behr, The Mystery of Christ: Life in Death (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir's Press, 2006) esp. ch. 1.
This tendency is also blamed by Behr on Augustine (see also Behr, The Mystery of Christ, 174). Ayres replies to this charge in his second input to this issue of HTR, below, 166–69.
See below what Ayres says about Athanasius (143–44), as well as Anatolios's critique (155–56) and Ayers's reply (164–65).
By the same token, one may object that Ayres's third call for closer attention to biblical-exegetical moves by the patristic authors has only selectively been carried out by Ayres himself in Nicaea and Its Legacy. Much depends here, of course, on what one means by the “plain sense” of Scripture. Maurice Wiles raised this point in his review of Ayres's book, written shortly before Wiles's untimely death.18
Maurice Wiles, review of Nicaea and Its Legacy, in Journal of Theological Studies 56 (2005) 670–75.
Ibid., 674.
See below, 144.
Anatolios remarks, for instance, on the irony of Ayres's lack of attention in Nicaea to the first five (Scriptural) books of Augustine's De Trinitate (see below, 156–57). To be fair, Ayres has announced the publication of another book on Augustine that will doubtless remedy this gap.
See below, 144.
Much of the scholarly stimulation at the level of historical and textual analysis in Ayres's book, then, resides in his methodological or theoretical framing of the narrative. For here Ayres calls into play categories of analysis (“grammar,” “practice,” “strategy,” “culture,” etc.) which have their acknowledged roots in twentieth-century philosophy and social science, but which Ayres deems newly illuminating for the telling of the fourth-century account.23
See Ayres, Nicaea, chs. 11–13, and esp. 273–78.
Ayres actually acknowledges the same point, Nicaea, 5.
Beyond East and West in Systematic Accounts of Patristic Trinitarianism
The idea that, already in the late-fourth- and early-fifth-century trinitarianism of the Cappadocians and Augustine, the East starts from the three and moves to the one (favoring analogies that illustrate the relation of the particular to the generic, such as three men and one humanity), while the West starts from the one and moves to the three (favoring the so-called psychological analogies of Augustine), has obtained the unfortunate status of a truism in much systematic theological work of the later twentieth century.25
Ayres, Nicaea, 385 n. 3. cite many of the recent systematic treatments of the Trinity (e.g., by Jürgen Moltmann, Colin Gunton, Catherine LaCugna, David Brown) that express this viewpoint, noting that much of this work unthinkingly replicates received paradigms; see also my own brief discussion of this tradition of systematic trinitarian thinking in Re-Thinking Gregory of Nyssa (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003) 2–6.
Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (trans. members of the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius; Cambridge: James Clarke and Co., 1957).
John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1985).
Miroslav Volf, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1998).
Colin Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991). On this representation of Augustine, and on other similar charges against Augustine, see Michel René Barnes, “Augustine in Contemporary Trinitarian Theology,” Theological Studies 56 (1995) 237–50.
Ayres does not trouble himself overmuch30
There are only brief critical asides about Lossky, Zizioulas, Volf, and Gunton woven into Nicaea, ch. 16.
See Michel René Barnes, “De Régnon Reconsidered,” Augustinian Studies 26 (1995) 51–79, which charts some of the impact of, and secondary interpretative accretions upon, Théodore de Régnon, Études de théologie positive sur la Sainte Trinité (Paris: Retaux, 1892–1898).
See Ayres, Nicaea, 413 n. 56. Ayres also applauds de Régnon's account of patristic Christology (Nicaea, 302–4).
Precisely on this point the contribution by Kristin Hennessy in Part II of this issue is of importance. Hennessy's close reading of de Régnon's three untranslated volumes (a feat undertaken by few!) establishes that de Régnon has rarely been attended to with care, especially amongst English-speakers,33
Amongst French scholars, Yves Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit (trans. David Smith; New York: Crossroad, 1997; see esp. vol. 3, xvi–xvii), reads de Régnon accurately and perceptively, as does André de Halleux, “Personnalisme ou Essentialisme Trinitaire chez Les Pères Cappadociens,” Revue Théologique de Louvain 17 (1986) 129–55, 265–92. Perhaps one of the main practical reasons that de Régnon remains ill-considered in the Anglophone world, and especially in the United States, is that there are relatively few copies of his work available in American libraries (and those that are available, e.g., in the Widener Library at Harvard, are now “brittle” and thus restricted in their public use).
Interestingly, one of the details of exegesis that Hennessy's reading of de Régnon takes up in passing, is the problem that de Régnon himself confronted in his exegesis of Gregory of Nazianzus: how was the question of the trinitarian monarchy to be read in his corpus?34
Hennessy draws attention to this exegetical point, 189 n. 36, below.
Ayres, Nicaea, 244–51.
The last two contributors to the issue, Cross and Drever, also take up detailed points of trinitarian discussion which have ecumenical and systematic significance, this time in relation to neglected, or misconstrued, facets of Augustine's De Trinitate. Both are responding to the charge of the late Colin Gunton that Augustine's so-called psychological approach to the Trinity is a harbinger of modern individualism and that Augustine fails even to understand the meaning of hypostasis in “Eastern,” Cappadocian thought.36
Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, esp. 39–40.
See Cross, below, 230.
Drever's article comes to similar conclusions. By reading those sections of the De Trinitate that reflect on the self before God (as made in the imago Dei) alongside parallel discussions about selfhood in Augustine's Confessions and his commentary on Genesis, Drever gives the lie to the presumption that Augustine's arguments are falsely founded in speculative neo-Platonism, rather than in biblical or doctrinal reflection, or that Augustine's views about the self thus anticipate the secular modern “turn to the subject,” ultimately rendering the trinitarian God redundant. On the contrary, argues Drever, such readings merely presume what they conclude; it is rather that Augustine's vision of the self is already rooted in the trinitarian God, and thus that the structure of the human mind can only be made known through the Trinity. The “psychological analogies” (which in any case are not the only ones considered by Augustine, as we have already noted) should therefore not be read as anticipations of modern monistic selfhood but as indicators of the self's being made precisely in the imago Dei (the image of the Trinity), and engaging restlessly in search of divine transformation and salvation in relation to that Trinity. Hence it is not the triadic structure of the human mind that allows us to understand God, says Drever, but rather the trinitarian God who leaves his imprint on the human mind as an invitation to relationship. And even the favored analogies of the mind are ultimately found fallible by Augustine, subject to the same limitations as all the others, given the uniqueness of the divine and the creaturely fallibility of the human.38
See Trin. 15.4.26, and Drever's discussion below, 239–41. Drever's article follows the trend in Augustinian scholarship initiated by Rowan Williams, Lewis Ayres and Michel René Barnes, and recently taken up more insistently, in comparison with the modern Cartesian tradition, by Michael Hanby, Augustine and Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2003).
The systematic and ecumenical implications of Ayres's call to reconsider the relation of Greek and Latin versions of fourth-century “pro-Nicene” theology, which this issue of HTR further investigates, must by now be obvious. Once the false wedge between East and West in this early period is removed, certain sorts of polemicizing about the innate superiority of one approach over the other become suspect, and we are returned to the texts themselves with fresh eyes, and—by implication—with fresh possibilities for ecumenical engagement. The marked capacity of Western systematicians, in recent years, to self-flagellate about the shortcomings of their own Augustinian tradition, and to prefer instead the “Eastern promise” of so-called social trinitarianism, looks suspect indeed once the misreadings on which such a propulsion has been based are brought into the light of day. And it is such fashions and fads of the modern period that cause Ayres (in chapter 16 of Nicaea and Its Legacy) to decry the task of systematic theology altogether, in favor of a close historical account. Yet what this issue of HTR has now added to Ayres's proposal, whilst also extending and nuancing its key claims, are the following: first, a certain set of cautions about the dangers of exegetical overreaction to the old paradigm (since careful readings still show us differences between, and within, the Greek and Latin trinitarian thinkers of this period, as Ayres too acknowledges); second, a certain warning against false blaming of new theological scapegoats from the past (since authors such as de Régnon and Lossky turn out to be more subtle in their approach than often presumed39
Hennessy supplies this warning in relation to de Régnon in this issue. At the day conference last year Aristotle Papanikolaou of Fordham University also made an important intervention in defense of Vladimir Lossky, and in clarification of Lossky's understanding and use of de Régnon. He pointed out that Lossky does not argue for the superiority of the “Eastern” approach because the East “starts from the three” (a misreading of de Régnon, in any case), but rather because the Cappadocian and Dionysian traditions in the East are seen as appropriately apophatic compared with the scholastic tradition of the West. On this point, see further, Aristotle Papanikolaou, Being with God: Trinity, Apophaticism and Divine-Human Communion (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006) 181 n. 101.
Historiography in Nicaea and Its Legacies
In the introduction to Nicaea and Its Legacies, Ayres makes the claim that he would rather do “historical theology” (as he dubs what he is doing in this book), than “modern Trinitarianism,” not because the latter “has engaged with pro-Nicene theology badly,” but because “it has barely engaged with it at all.”40
Ayres, Nicaea, 7; see 5 for “historical theology.”
Ibid., ch. 16, but esp. 384–92.
The entire modern project of trinitarian theology, first, is found by Ayres to have been in thrall to certain “meta-narrative strategies” which obstruct the cause of “pro-Nicene” thought. There are basically three such strategies, Ayres suggests. Modern theology has assumed that premodern theology is “heteronomous,” and in need of release from authority; it has presented classical Christian theology as falsely entangled with static Greek metaphysics; and it has set fidelity to Scripture into a misleading disjunction with the apologetic utilization of pagan philosophy. Moreover, claims Ayres, the very undertaking of systematic theology, in the guise we now know it, was concocted out of these same modern aberrations. What modern Protestantism created (a new tendency to ground Christian belief in rational or empirical truths that purportedly could be established elsewhere), was soon emulated, in various guises, by nineteenth-century Roman Catholic theology. And one of the egregious pedagogical results was a new disjunction between such systematics and other demarcated disciplines in the theological curriculum (historical theology, Scripture). The “pro-Nicene” commitment to the plain meaning of Scripture, sustained by contemplative practice and undergirded by a profound sense of mystery, withered on the modern branch. The prime suspect in the modern story of trinitarian theology, as far as Ayres is concerned, is Hegel, whose distorting idealist influence on modern dogmatics—and not least on Barth—he greatly bemoans; and Rahner, too, is summarily dismissed—in two short pages—as sharing equally in “a Hegelian or idealist paradigm.”42
Ibid., 410.
Ibid., 407–14.
Ayres's tirade against modern trinitarian theology is unnervingly sweeping, but he does admit at one point that his “brief characterizations overly simplify a complex situation.”44
Ibid., 412.
Ibid., 416.
Ibid., 425–29.
Ayres adds to these latter historiographical reflections in the current issue of HTR. In responding to critics from what he calls the “left” and “right,” he shows more of his methodological hand. An appeal to the Spirit's operation in the history of the Church becomes the more explicit, as does a certain acknowledged aporia about how to speak about “continuity and change” in Christian doctrinal development.47
See Ayres's second input in this issue, 159–71, esp. 164–66.
First, it must surely be admitted that Ayres is himself, under the guise of his preferred trope of “historical theology,” engaged in a fully systematic enterprise. It would be ironic if his project succumbed to the same sort of genetic fallacy that he rightly sniffs out in the modernist attempt to recover an original Christian purity; yet there are certainly moments when, rhetorically at least, “pro-Nicene theology” takes up a position ironically similar to this in Ayres's narrative. Thus, whereas Harnack adulated Jesus' teaching over a later collusion with Greek metaphysics, now Ayres adulates “pro-Nicene” theology over modernity's aberrations. But Ayres is, of course, far too sophisticated a thinker not to notice such dangers! And so, by the end of Nicaea and Its Legacy, he has to admit that all historical reconstruction, and indeed all “contemplation of Scripture,” is always already infused with philosophic and hermeneutical theorizing, whether implicit or explicit;48
See Ayres, Nicaea, 422–23.
Secondly, and concomitantly, we have already noted that certain key terms from contemporary postmodern anthropology and philosophy (“culture,” “strategy,” “grammar,” “practice,” “phenomenology”) are required to do heavy-lifting work in Ayres's normative narrative, and it is to his credit that he is willing, in one important section of his book, to give an explicit account of his sources of authority on this score.49
Ibid., chs. 11–13.
Finally, it is to Ayres's credit that he insists that “historical theology” should always be willing to be porous to other disciplines, without being tempted to be reduced to them. Yet it has to be said (as already mentioned at the start of this “Introduction”) that he is more willing to consider the lessons of some such cognate disciplines than others. His engagement with gender analysis, as we noted, is slight (and this at a time when much scholarly effort is being applied to analyzing the relation of gender and “heresy” in the early Christian centuries); and the insights of classical sociological theory do not impinge to any great degree on his narrative either. Be that as it may (and Ayres might well respond that he was “coming to that”), what strikes the systematician finally, in reflecting on the significance and distinctiveness of Ayres's Nicaea and Its Legacy, is the remarkable underlying appeal to the Spirit's operation in Christian history. It is a nice irony, as Ayres has himself admitted in private correspondence, that what causes him ire in his rejection of Hegel (Hegel's pneumatology), can become for Ayres, in turn, the distinctive means whereby the maintenance of the authority of “the Church” is affirmed, and the elusive mechanics of doctrinal development assured.50
Ayres (private correspondence, 2 January 2007): “…we should have faith in the Spirit's guidance of the Church over time, but … our response should not be one of white-washing the messiness of that development, but rather one of a two-fold belief in narrating the course of continuity and development … and recognizing that such continuity is the Spirit's work and remains mysterious…. I add, half-jokingly, that of course often when something appears to be Hegel it's his work as palimpsest: the echo of real Christianity showing through what he's overlaid … ”
