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A little while in the Son of God: Austin Farrer on the trinitarian nature of prayer

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2011

Jeffrey Vogel
Jeffrey Vogel*
Affiliation:
Hampden Sydney College, 1 College Road, Hampden-Sydney, VA 23943, USAjvogel@hsc.edu
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Abstract

This article explores Austin Farrer's contribution to trinitarian theology, arguing that he grounds understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity in the life of prayer. While Farrer nowhere offers a systematic presentation of the believer's experience of the Trinity, an investigation of his writings, particularly his sermons and devotional works, reveals that it is precisely in prayer that he thinks the force of the doctrine is revealed to the believer. Beginning with Farrer's ‘empirical principle’, the idea that to know anything one must exercise one's relation to it, the article attempts to show how the act of praying constitutes a living out of the doctrine of the Trinity. Living in the Son entails an adoption of an attitude of sonship towards the Father, which Farrer describes most succinctly as an ‘active openness of heart’. This filial attitude, which Christ expressed humanly throughout his life, is adopted by believers through the Holy Spirit who, according to Farrer, is not an object of direct experience. In this, his trinitarian understanding of prayer differs from Sarah Coakley's, whose reflection on this topic serves as a point of comparison at various places throughout the article. Through Coakley's work, the trinitarian nature of prayer has become a theme in contemporary theology. Thus, this article is aimed at more than simply illuminating a somewhat neglected aspect of Farrer's thought; it is also an attempt to contribute to an ongoing, constructive conversation about the Trinity in the life of faith.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 64 , Issue 4 , November 2011, pp. 410 - 424
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 2011

Introduction

The name of Austin Farrer does not usually come up in discussions about trinitarian theology. To the extent that his work is still read and commented on, it is usually in the context of thinking about divine providence, the nature of revelation or the justification of belief. This is fitting, of course, as it is precisely in these areas that his contribution was most original and, in many ways, anticipated developments within contemporary thought. For example, his dictum, everywhere repeated, that human beings are more themselves the more they are in God sums up neatly the idea of non-competitive transcendence that some theologians now use to get a handle on the divine–human relationship.Footnote 1 Or again, his description of miracles as the enhancement of a creature's natural potency, rather than its usurpation and overthrow, is potentially useful for those who would like to give every due to the methods and findings of science without thereby acceding to a deterministic worldview.

The small guild of Farrer scholars would readily agree that on these and other topics his thought has never received the attention it deserves. It has become a commonplace to suggest that, if not for his idiosyncratic style and unwillingness to go with the current of contemporary intellectual trends, Farrer's genius would be more widely recognised now than it is. That his contribution to trinitarian theology is equally worthy of note may require more argument. For, while the triune nature of God is everywhere presupposed in Farrer's writings, and is occasionally the topic of a sermon or lecture, it is not a subject that receives extended treatment in his work – at least not enough to be considered one of his prominent concerns. Even where he does take the matter up, Farrer proves unwilling to indulge in much speculation. For example, he writes:

The revealed parable of the Godhead is a story about two characters, Father and Son. Only, we add, since the Father in this case is not a human father, but the first of all persons; and since the Son is not son to a man, but Son to his God; therefore the Father does not merely beget the Son, he also indwells him by his Spirit. Why, then, you may well ask, was the Holy Ghost called ‘Person’ by orthodox definition? I can only reply, Because the Latins could not hit upon a better word.Footnote 2

A little later in the same passage he affirms the deity of the Holy Ghost, but adds that ‘the Trinity is not (in human terms) a society of three, but a society of two, inspiring and inspired’.Footnote 3 Comments like these put Farrer at odds with proponents of a social model of the Trinity and have led at least one scholar to fault him with having a ‘somewhat weak pneumatology’.Footnote 4

As I hope to show in this article, the limited space Farrer devotes to the doctrine of the Trinity in his major works does not indicate a lack of interest in the subject, even less a lack of concern for its importance in the lives of believers. Nor can it be satisfactorily explained by saying that he was content to remain somewhat divided as an author, wearing now the hat of rational theologian and now that of pulpit preacher. Rather, his relative silence on the Trinity outside of his devotional works goes to the heart of what is a clearly defined understanding of the doctrine. To invoke the ‘empirical principle’ Farrer lays out in Faith and Speculation, according to which to know anything one must exercise one's relation to it, that is, one must do more than simply think about it,Footnote 5 the Trinity is not something that can be understood from the outside, but only through participation. ‘The life of the Blessed Trinity’, he writes, ‘is revealed by being tasted, when we are made partners with the Son in his very Sonship to the Father.’Footnote 6

This is not to say that one cannot try to communicate the church's belief in the Trinity to others – as I have already noted, Farrer occasionally does so himself, most notably in The Glass of Vision, where he explores at some length the images of the triune God found in the New Testament writers. However, his insistence on the inseparability of knowledge and action does suggest that the value of such expositions is limited, as getting another to grasp the doctrine or the impulse behind it is not sufficient to give her a true understanding of it. Just as we come to know our friends only in the course of acting towards and responding to them, by a ‘perpetual try-on’ of the friendship,Footnote 7 the life of the Trinity is understood only when it is ‘acted and lived’.Footnote 8 And so it is that we find Farrer's comments on the Trinity largely confined to works and sermons intended to exhort believers to pursue such a trying on. The reserve with which he treats the doctrine in his major works is consistent with his view that one can only understand it by living it.

The link Farrer forges between understanding of the Trinity and experience of it raises the well-known question of the verifiability of religious belief, something I do not plan to get into here.Footnote 9 It is sufficient to note that one does not often find him arguing for the verifiability of the positive doctrines of Christianity, those related to what he calls ‘saving history’, of which the Trinity is surely one. Though he attempts to meet the empiricist's demand in establishing the reasonableness of belief in God, and lays the groundwork for the acceptance of Christian dogma by arguing for the agreeability of natural and supernatural causation, he holds that belief in the incarnation requires, if not a Kierkegaardian leap, a true act of faith. It can be reasoned from but not reasoned to, or as Farrer himself puts it, ‘the Christian theologian is wise after the event’.Footnote 10 At any rate, doctrines such as the Trinity were significantly downstream from where the analytic philosophers of his day pitched battle against Christian belief.

My aim in the following article, then, is not to assess whether it is philosophically defensible to link the believer's knowledge of the Trinity with her experience of it, but to explore what Farrer means when he says that the life of the Trinity must be ‘acted and lived’. How does one act and live it? Where does one get a taste of it? And what form does experience of the Trinity take? An approach to these questions can be made by considering Farrer's insistence that the natural element of Christian dogma is not the theologian's disquisition, but the life of faith, particularly the life of prayer. As he puts it:

Prayer and dogma are inseparable. They alone can explain each other. Either without the other is meaningless and dead. If he hears a dogma of faith discussed as a cool speculation, about which theories can be held and arguments propounded, the Christian cannot escape disquiet. ‘What are these people doing?’ he will ask. ‘Do not they know what they are discussing? How can they make it an open question what the country is like, which they enter when they pray?’Footnote 11

While Farrer nowhere offers a systematic presentation of the believer's experience of the Trinity, an investigation of his writings, particularly his sermons and devotional works, reveals that it is precisely in prayer that he thinks the force of the doctrine is revealed to the believer.

In attempting to make this point, I am not solely interested in illuminating a somewhat neglected aspect of Farrer's thought. The trinitarian nature of prayer has become a theme in contemporary theology, particularly through the work of Sarah Coakley, but also through increasing familiarity with mystical writers like Adrienne von Speyr.Footnote 12 Unlike Coakley, whose signal contribution to contemporary theology has been to offer an account of the origin of trinitarian reflection in the Christian tradition based on the experience of a kind of wordless prayer, Farrer is less interested in providing an archaeology of the doctrine; if pressed, he would probably have said that the teaching comes first, revealed, as it was, in the life of Christ, and the experience confirms it – just as he says the Christian is first captured by a story and only afterwards seeks to justify it in the court of public rationality.Footnote 13 And in contrast to von Speyr, whose bold description of the inter-trinitarian life would probably not have appealed to Farrer – the self-described least mystical of menFootnote 14 – his account of ‘living’ and ‘tasting’ the Trinity is, in the end, rather spare. In unity with both, however, Farrer is convinced that there is a relationship between the Christian's understanding of God and her experience of prayer, that the Trinity is best understood in the act of praying. I will have occasion to note points of contrast and similarity between Farrer and Coakley on the role of the Spirit in prayer in the course of examining his position. It is my hope that this article, in considering Farrer's treatment of prayer, contributes in some measure to current theological conversation about the experience of God as Trinity.

The attitude of divine sonship

In a passing remark in one of his Christmas sermons, Farrer says the following about prayer:

For what else is it to pray, but this: that we live for a little while in the Son of God, and share in some measure the love he has for all the men with whom we have to do?Footnote 15

He does not go on in the passage to spell out what he means by this description of prayer, but one can gather from his other writings what divine sonship entails and, therefore, what it might mean for believers to live in the Son when they pray. While participation language is not absent from Farrer's work, it often has a more practical than mystical connotation, focusing on the believer's exercise of the specific way of being of the Son and less on any mysterious exchange. As he puts it:

The heart of being, the blessed Trinity above all worlds, is not a mystery by which the knowledge of the Godhead is withheld from our enquiring minds. It is a pattern of life into which we ourselves, by an unspeakable mercy, are taken up. For Christ joins us with himself in the continual, practical, daily choice of his Father as our father. Why, he makes us part of himself, he calls us his members, his eyes and tongue, his hands and feet. He puts us where he is, in Sonship to his Father, and opens to us the inexhaustible and all-quickening fountain, the spirit of Sonship, the river of life, the Holy Ghost.Footnote 16

It is, he says, a ‘pattern of life’ into which believers are taken up when they are joined to the Son. And it is conformity to this pattern that Farrer has in mind when he says that in prayer ‘we live for a little while in the Son of God’. They are put ‘where he is’, a phrase that does not describe a location, but a relationship – the relationship of the Son to the Father.

But just what is this pattern of life? And in what does divine sonship consist? In a manner strikingly similar to Hans Urs von Balthasar, Farrer presents divine sonship in terms of an attitude or disposition, one which he describes most succinctly as ‘an active openness of heart’.Footnote 17 Von Balthasar locates the nature of divine sonship in an unwavering receptivity to the Father's will, suggesting that the obedience of the incarnate Word is but a translation into temporal terms of the Word's eternal mode of being. In other words, Christ's way of being, revealed with utter clarity in the passion, but evident even in the act of becoming incarnate, simply is the living out of divine sonship on earth. Farrer, too, has a strong sense of the continuity between the Son's eternal mode of being and his incarnate life. He writes:

We cannot understand Jesus as simply the God-who-was-man. We have left out an essential factor, the sonship. Jesus is not simply God manifest as man; he is the divine Son coming in manhood. What was expressed in human terms here below was not bare deity; it was divine sonship. God cannot live an identically godlike life in eternity and in a human story. But the divine Son can make an identical response to his Father, whether in the love of the blessed Trinity or in the fulfillment of an earthly ministry. All the conditions of action are different on the two levels; the filial response is one. Above, the appropriate response is a co-operation in sovereignty and an interchange of eternal joys. Then the Son gives back to the Father all that the Father is. Below, in the incarnate life, the appropriate response is an obedience to inspiration, a waiting for direction, an acceptance of suffering, a rectitude of choice, a resistance to temptation, a willingness to die.Footnote 18

Though the ‘filial response’ is the same on earth as it is in heaven, it is expressed humanly in a waiting on and obedience to the Father, an acceptance of the divine will at every turn. It is for this reason that Farrer can say in several places that Christ's glory lies in his being ‘utterly derivative’, in his awareness of his complete dependence on the Father.Footnote 19 Just as the eternal Son never ceases to draw his being from the Father, so Christ never acts without the divine initiative in any of his undertakings. As von Balthasar puts it, ‘The meaning of the incarnation, of Jesus’ manhood, is first borne in upon us as a not-doing, a not-fulfilling, a not-carrying-out of his own will.’Footnote 20

Despite Farrer's insistence on the continuity between the Son's divine and earthly modes of being, he does not believe Jesus’ obedience to the Father should be taken for granted; later dogma should not be allowed to eclipse the fact that, as a human being, he had to gain awareness of this dependence over time, in facing down the temptation to establish himself rather than rely on the Father. In The Triple Victory, Farrer offers an extended reflection on the temptation narrative that opens the Gospel of Matthew, the whole of which, he says, turns precisely upon the nature of divine sonship.Footnote 21 In the first two temptations, Satan probes the Father–Son relationship in either direction, first bidding Jesus to use the powers appropriate to his designation as God's Son to save himself and, when that fails, to invoke the providence of God as if by right. With each refusal, the proposals grow more ‘outrageous’, so that, in the final temptation, Satan casts all subterfuge aside and openly asks Jesus to worship him. According to Farrer, every temptation ultimately boils down to this last one, the temptation to worship God's enemy, to set up some other end in place of God.Footnote 22

Christ confirms his unique filial status during these temptations through his unwillingness to act without God. It is a status which could really only be confirmed negatively, for the very powers that Satan alleges belong to Christ on account of his sonship would have been undermined if he had pre-empted the Father with his own action. The ‘paradox’ of the incarnation, Farrer says, is that ‘the Son of God must find his way into being what he eternally is’.Footnote 23 His sonship could not be confirmed all at once, thenceforward to be held as a possession, but had to be realised over the course of his life. For it is fundamentally a response to God or, as I said above, an attitude adopted towards God, which could be tried up until and during the moment of death.

What separates Christ from the rest of humanity, according to Farrer, is that he preserved the attitude of openness to God throughout his life and, consequently, succeeded in realising his own true being. He was more fully himself than any other person for, to repeat Farrer's dictum, human beings are more truly themselves, more free, the more they are receptive to the divine will. Farrer often notes that Christ gives the impression above all of being a man of utter forthrightness, someone characterised by absolute clarity and simplicity of heart, lacking all duplicity. If it was his glory to be derivative, it is because his openness of heart to God allowed the divine light to come through in his bodily life unclouded by a mixture of motives.Footnote 24

Returning to our theme, when Farrer says that to pray is to live for a little while in the Son of God, he has in mind the way of being of the Son towards the Father. It is only in being conformed to the Son, being put ‘where he is’, that union with the Father is possible – and this union is the first object of Christian prayer.Footnote 25 As it was Christ's ‘active openness of heart’ that allowed the Father to work through him unhindered, so does prayer entail the adoption of the attitude of the Son to the Father: waiting, dependence, being derivative. One is reminded here of Simone Weil, whose identification of prayer and attention captures well Farrer's description of divine sonship as openness of heart. Prayer is not a kind of searching – Weil says that searching is precisely the opposite of true attention – but a way of waiting. It is active insofar as the one praying keeps herself ready, receptive, open and not closed. Such was the attitude of the Son to the Father, according to Farrer, and the one into which the believer must enter when she prays. But just how does one come into the attitude of the Son? To answer this question, one must look to the Holy Spirit.

The Spirit as the spring

Like Farrer, Sarah Coakley has argued that a consideration of Christian prayer, ‘especially relatively wordless contemplative or charismatic prayer’,Footnote 26 is particularly illuminating for trinitarian reflection. Somewhat uniquely, however, she gives primacy to the role of the Holy Spirit in her account, taking her lead from Paul's claim in Romans 8 that the Spirit sighs within the one praying with a sigh too deep for words. She argues that the experience of the Spirit praying through one, ‘catching’ one up and incorporating one into the life of God, constitutes the ‘only valid experiential pressure towards hypostatizing the Spirit’.Footnote 27 In other words, it is the experience of the Spirit which gives rise to pneumatology, not the reverse. Prayer, she says, is a ‘divine dialogue’ within one, not a communication with a ‘distant and undifferentiated divine entity’, but a ‘movement of divine reflexivity, a sort of answering of God to God in and through the one who prays’.Footnote 28

If, for Farrer, the question is what role the Spirit is going to have in trinitarian thought – recall his claim that the Trinity is finally a ‘society of two, inspiring and inspired’ – Coakley has had to wrestle with how to make a place for the second person of the Trinity in her alternative approach to the doctrine through the experience of contemplative prayer.Footnote 29 What she chiefly wants to avoid is a ‘narrow extrinsicism’, in which the Son is regarded ‘merely as an external model for imitation’.Footnote 30 Such an imitation would throw the emphasis back on the one praying, and the extent to which she does or does not conform to Christ's model, rather than the dialogue which is taking place within one. In addition, the specificity of content implied by an imitatio christi, especially if it is taken to mean imitation of the thoughts and actions of the historical Christ, seems to trade the freedom of the Spirit for a kind of repetition, raising the question of the needfulness of the Spirit all over again. In short, the ‘sigh too deep for words’ finds itself pressured towards conceptualisation when Christ serves as the external model.

If prayer is primarily a divine dialogue in the one praying, with the Spirit answering to God from its habitation among creatures, what role does the Son have? Has Coakley resolved the question of why there must be three in God with her approach, or has she merely supplanted one binitarian model with another, one which is unique perhaps in its de-emphasis of the Son in favour of the Spirit? This question becomes acute when she says that the one praying represents the Christ figure in the model she is proposing. Just as Christ is ‘divine and perfected creation’, humanity entering into the divine life through the Spirit, so, too, are those in whom the Spirit prays caught up into God's life. ‘Christ’, she says, comes to denote not primarily the past earthly Jesus or even the risen Christ, but the ‘transformed divine life’ towards which creation is tending.Footnote 31 By allowing oneself ‘to be shaped by the mutual interaction of Father and Spirit’, one is able to make the transition from regarding Christ as an external model to entering into the divine life itself, to ‘become nothing less than “other Christs” in the particularity of our lives’.Footnote 32 Through the Spirit, one is invited ‘into the Christic life of redeemed sonship’, and made co-heirs of the Father with Christ.Footnote 33

Coakley says the form of prayer she is describing is ‘ineluctably tri-faceted’, insofar as God is experienced as doing the praying in one, receiving one's prayer and inviting one into a life of sonship. She resists any simplistic appropriation of the activities to the three divine persons; one does not have three experiences of God, but a single experience that is yet tri-faceted. It is a question, however, whether the third item in her series really refers to an experience of God at all. Coakley says that the one praying is invited to participate in sonship, but if ‘Christ’ has come to mean creaturely life fully transformed, it is not clear, strange as it may sound, what the experiential pressure to hypostatise the Son would be. Is the historical Christ simply exhibit A of one in whom the divine dialogue takes place uninterruptedly? How is one's participation in divine sonship related to the sonship of Christ, beyond the fact that they are both equally enabled by the interaction of Father and Spirit? And what can be said of the life of sonship into which the one praying is invited, other than that it is perfected creation? Coakley's aversion to extrinsicism, with the negative implications it would seem to have for the freedom of the Spirit to cross boundaries and rupture binary ways of thinking, leaves one with the difficulty of saying what the ‘Christic life’ looks like. Perhaps this is her goal, but the model she proposes seems to have the potential to reduce to a new kind of binitarianism, in which the Son has no real role to play other than to provide an instance of a life that is fully transformed. And might this not return us, after all, to a kind of extrinsicism, though now without any specific content?

In one sense, Farrer could be held guilty of precisely the kind of extrinsicism Coakley dislikes. His most extensive reflection on prayer, Lord I Believe, is a guide for contemplating the various events in Christ's life in the tradition of Ignatian spirituality, and one occasionally finds him commending use of the rosary to facilitate meditation.Footnote 34 The pastoral concern is always front and centre in Farrer's writing on Christian spirituality. I showed above, however, that he also has an idea of prayer as a kind of participation in the divine Son, particularly in the open, receptive attitude of the Son to the Father. Like Coakley, Farrer also has a sense that truly to pray involves being prayed through:

To begin with, we can exercise our faith in the grace of Christ when we resolve and when we pray, by taking seriously those words which tag on to our prayers, ‘through Jesus Christ our Lord’, making our prayer as part of his prayer, and believing indeed that he prays in and through us.Footnote 35

Obviously, Farrer's account makes Christ central, whereas Coakley's description depends on the primacy of the experience of the Spirit. Despite this key difference, the similarities between their views are notable. Farrer also draws on the imagery of Romans 8, stating that it is ‘the Spirit of Sonship, overflowing from Christ to us, which speaks in our hearts when we say Our Father’.Footnote 36 Even more strikingly, he says in a meditation on Mary:

What she asks is what he [Christ] asks, it is asked by God from God. The prayer of love is a movement of the heart in the Blessed Trinity, it is the converse between the divine Persons, the asking and granting of filial desire. And so it is, when at one with Mary and all saints, we pray in Jesus’ name.Footnote 37

To pray in Christ's name is to be admitted into the conversation between divine persons, to be brought into the life of God, to be prayed through. This dialogue, according to Farrer, takes place between the Father and the Son, and it is the Spirit's role to bring one into that conversation.

But how does the Spirit do this? For Farrer, it is by giving the one praying the filial desire which unites her with the Son in receptivity to the Father, that is, by giving her the attitude of the Son. ‘Only how does the Spirit of Christ shape our spirits?’, he asks, ‘I am going, in answer, to give you a very dull word, a word which has no poetic colour or emotional aura – the word is, attitude.’Footnote 38 This attitude, as I have already said, is an openness of heart to the Father. Though Christ had to live out this attitude humanly, and differed from the rest of humanity inasmuch as he was able to do so completely, it is not the case that the difference was one of degree only; the difference between complete openness to the Father, the source of life, and anything less than that is a qualitative one. It is the difference between humanity which is united to God and humanity which is separated from God. According to Farrer, one cannot approximate the attitude of the Son other than through grace – and this is the work of the Spirit.

While Farrer's account of prayer differs from Coakley's in that the Spirit is not an object of experience of the one praying, the Spirit retains a certain primacy in the realm of action. The Spirit is the hidden power which ‘inspires’ one, moves one, so to speak, into the relationship between Father and Son. Farrer writes:

We know the Spirit in the Trinity because we know him in our souls. If a man has no sense of what it is to be inspired, even in his prayer, we shall talk to him in vain about the Holy Ghost. Not that the Holy Ghost is anything that we feel. For first, we cannot feel him, even when he signifies his action to us by the force and direction he gives to our aspiration; and second, the most part of his action is without any awareness in those he inspires.Footnote 39

Because it is characteristic of the Spirit to direct one outward, the Spirit never emerges into view. The Spirit ‘underlies’ our movement and, consequently, never confronts us as an object of experience. We ‘know’ the Spirit, Farrer says, but only through the effects of the Spirit in us. Farrer likens the Spirit to a spring, breaking upwards from beneath our hearts, displacing our self-will, rendering us open and receptive to the Father, uniting us to the Son. ‘The action of the Holy Ghost’, he says, ‘unites us about a centre which lies outside ourselves, in the heart of God.’Footnote 40

Prayer is the movement of the believer into the heart of God. According to Farrer, the Spirit is the source of this movement, the one who imparts filial desire. One can only await the Spirit's activity within one: ‘Be quiet, wait until your living will begins to move, and to long for the will of God.’Footnote 41 One cannot will one's way into union with God because the disposition necessary to enter into the divine life is precisely one of receptivity. It is the will that must be overcome – or at least transformed – by the Spirit if one is to live in the Son of God. For we are sons not by nature, but adoption. The attitude of divine sonship is uniquely that of the incarnate Christ, and yet through grace we come to share in it. On the other hand Farrer does not seem to think that waiting for the Spirit to move one at the beginning of prayer requires one to maintain mental blankness or wordlessness. He might well have approved of Teresa of Avila's insistence that the humble expectation of prayer does not mean ‘staying where we are like ninnies’.Footnote 42 It is possible that the attempt to suppress thought or avoid language in the event of prayer does more to confirm the hold of self-will over one than root it out, that the effort to eradicate self-consciousness, in fact, works against the openness necessary to prayer.Footnote 43 Perhaps this is why Farrer commends use of aids to meditation like the rosary for those beginning in prayer – for in their use is a humble admission that one can do no more than ready oneself, an acknowledgement that it is ‘by God that we go to God’.Footnote 44

The dialogue into which one is taken in prayer is not exclusive of the one praying. As Farrer writes, ‘To pray is to give back the mind of God, coloured with our own.’Footnote 45 Truly to pray is not to be absorbed into the Son, but to live a while in the Son, to be where he is, in attitude, and to participate in his prayer to the Father. There is no hint of self-annihilation in this language; on the contrary, we are more ourselves the more we are in God. It is only self-will that is excluded in participation in divine sonship, that assertion of selfish desire which conflicts with Christ's active openness of heart.

According to Farrer, prayer is non-exclusive in a second way. In the passage with which I began, Farrer says that to pray is to ‘live for a little while in the Son of God and share in some measure the love he has for all the men with whom we have to do’. The movement of the Spirit in prayer is twofold. In the very act of enabling the believer to live a while in the Son of God, in giving her the attitude of sonship, the Spirit also returns her to the world with the love that God has for humanity. ‘The Trinity cannot be explored except from the centre’, Farrer writes. ‘And what is the centre? It is the Love of God. The name of Love has been fearfully profaned, and yet no other name will do.’Footnote 46 In describing divine sonship as an active openness of heart, Farrer suggests that prayer, as participation in this attitude, is essentially orientated towards others, that it finds its fruition in love.

Summary and assessment

In the foregoing paragraphs, I have been trying to explicate Farrer's idea that the Trinity is understood only from within, by being ‘acted and lived’, focusing on his understanding of prayer as the site of this experiential knowledge. While he does not put forward a developed trinitarian account of prayer à la Sarah Coakley, he clearly holds that Christian prayer involves entering the life of God, and that this entails inhabiting a particular ‘pattern of life’. Beginning with his claim that to pray is to live ‘for a little while in the Son of God’, I explored what divine sonship means for Farrer, and concluded that to live in the Son involves the adoption of Christ's attitude of receptivity and openness of heart towards the Father. Thus, one understands God-in-relation by being put where the Son is and exercising his relation to the Father – not as an observer, but as a participant.

As I noted above, Farrer does not claim that the doctrine of the Trinity is revealed in prayer; rather, the dogma grew out of the images used by the New Testament writers in response to the events of Christ's life.Footnote 47 In this, I think, Farrer differs somewhat from Coakley, who has attempted to show how pressure to speak of God as threefold arises out of the threefold experience of prayer itself. For Farrer, such an experience remains just that, a threefold experience of God, and does not necessarily tell us anything essential about God:

Here we have a tri-form experience of God, not the experience of a triune deity. If human experience is a prism which breaks the single ray of divine grace into several colours, that is just what we might expect: for it is universally true that our experience of God and our thought of God resolve the unity of the great Cause in the plurality of his effects.Footnote 48

According to Farrer, the experience of prayer cannot lead us to the image of the Trinity, though it enables us to understand it ‘from the centre’. We receive ‘in imaged presentation the shape of the mystery of our redemption’, but we understand it only when ‘we are taken up into the movement of the life above all creatures, of the Son towards the Father in the Holy Ghost’.Footnote 49

A good bit of space above was devoted to the experience of the Spirit in prayer, as it is here that Coakley's thought has been especially illuminating for contemporary reflection and Farrer's has seemed lacking to some. While the two thinkers revolve around a similar description of prayer, Farrer does not think that the Spirit is an object of direct experience, whereas Coakley makes pneumatic experience, the primary datum of the kind of prayer she has in mind. For Farrer, the Spirit is known only from its effects, in the movement of our will and the granting of filial desire; the Spirit is the spring hidden beneath our hearts which brings us into the life of the Son. Clearly, this is not the same as no experience of the Spirit at all. One becomes aware in prayer of the divine life bestowed on one, and understands that it is only by God within one that one is opened for participation in the ‘converse between the divine Persons’ that is the life of God.

Still, one wishes Farrer had found a way to describe that very conversation as between three, as open and not closed, rupturing one's circumscribed, finalised ways of understanding God and others. Coakley's emphasis on the Spirit has been extremely fruitful in this regard. And yet, as I argued above, she, too, encounters some difficulty in trying to conceive of the divine dialogue as truly threefold, at times seeming to substitute the one praying for the Son. The Son and Spirit vie for position as dialogue partners with the Father in Farrer's and Coakley's accounts, respectively, and there seems no easy conceptual way across the divide. Perhaps it is a difficulty inherent in the dialogue metaphor itself. A preliminary suggestion might be to refuse the need to choose between the two. Just as scripture speaks at different times of the believer's being in Christ and being in the Spirit, with no apparent concern to reconcile these claims, so, too, might Farrer's and Coakley's accounts stand well side by side; any attempt to resolve them into a single account would miss something essential about prayer with a triune God.

Farrer's own safeguard against the potential for his description of the ‘converse between the divine Persons’ into which the believer enters in prayer to seem self-enclosed or purely binary in emphasis is the love which stands at its centre. Truly to understand the Trinity is to act and live it, to be conformed to the pattern of the divine life. If, according to Farrer, to pray is to live a little while in the Son and to share in the Son's love for the world, then to go to God is ultimately also to go to the world. It is a single motion. If prayer entails the adoption of Christ's attitude of active openness of heart through the power of the Spirit, then contemplation and action are inseparable. For, as Farrer says in another context, ‘God has no attitudes which are not actions.’Footnote 50

Footnotes

Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.

References

1 The idea has been particularly emphasised by Tanner, Kathryn in God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment? (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988)Google Scholar and Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2001).

2 Saving Belief (New York: Morehouse-Barlow Co, 1964), p. 128.

3 Ibid., p. 129.

4 Oliver, Simon, ‘The Theodicy of Austin Farrer’, Heythrop Journal 39/3 (1998), pp. 280–97, 290CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Faith and Speculation (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1967), p. 22.

6 The Triple Victory: Christ's Temptations According to Matthew (London: Faith Press, 1965), p. 11.

7 Faith and Speculation, p. 54.

8 Triple Victory, p. 10.

9 For a discussion of this topic, see Hebblethwaite, Brian, ‘The Experiential Verification of Religious Belief in the Theology of Austin Farrer’, in Eaton, Jeffrey C. and Loades, Ann (eds), For God and Clarity: New Essays in Honor of Austin Farrer (Allison Park, PA: Pickwick Publications, 1983), pp. 163–76Google Scholar. Hebblethwaite says that ‘it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that the place of experiential verification in the justification of Christian belief provides the lynchpin of his [Farrer's] whole position as a philosophical theologian’ (p. 164).

10 Saving Belief, p. 67.

11 Lord I Believe: Suggestions for Turning the Creed into Prayer (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 1989), p. 9.

12 For Coakley's position, see especially ‘Why Three? Some Further Reflections on the Origins of the Doctrine of the Trinity’, pp. 29–55, in Coakley, Sarah and Pailin, David (eds), The Making and Remaking of Christian Doctrine: Essays in Honour of Maurice Wiles (Oxford: OUP, 1993)Google Scholar. For von Speyr's account, see The World of Prayer (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1985).

13 Saving Belief, p. 14.

14 Faith and Speculation, p. 35. My thanks to Charles Hefling for directing my attention to this passage.

15 Said or Sung (London: Faith Press, 1960), p. 29.

16 The End of Man (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1974), pp. 71–2.

17 Ibid., p. 22. Mark A. McIntosh has also remarked Farrer's similarity to von Balthasar on this point. See his Christology from Within: Spirituality and the Incarnation in Hans Urs von Balthasar (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000), p. 6.

18 The Brink of Mystery (London: SPCK, 1976), p. 20.

19 Said or Sung, p. 91; see also, Lord I Believe, p. 39, and Saving Belief, p. 126.

20 A Theology of History (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), p. 29.

21 Triple Victory, p. 91.

22 Ibid., p. 62.

23 Ibid., p. 73.

24 Ibid., p. 32.

25 Saving Belief, p. 120.

26 ‘“Batter my heart. . .”? On Sexuality, Spirituality, and the Christian Doctrine of the Trinity’, pp. 49–68, in The Papers of the Henry Luce III Fellows in Theology, ed. Gary Gilbert (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1996), p. 51.

27 ‘Why Three?’, p. 37.

28 Ibid.

29 See her interview with Shortt, Rupert in God's Advocates: Christian Thinkers in Conversation (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), esp. pp. 71–2Google Scholar.

30 ‘God as Trinity: An Approach through Prayer’, pp. 104–21, in We Believe in God (London: Church House Publishing, 1987), p. 109.

31 ‘Why Three?’, p. 37.

32 ‘God as Trinity’, p. 109.

33 ‘The Trinity, Prayer and Sexuality: A Neglected Nexus in the Fathers and Beyond’, Bulletin/Centro Pro Unione 58 (Fall 2000), pp. 13–17, 14.

34 See, for example, Lord I Believe, ch. 9.

35 The Brink of Mystery, p. 4.

36 The Crown of the Year (Westminster: Dacre Press, 1954), p. 53.

37 Lord I Believe, p. 94.

38 The End of Man, p. 64.

39 Saving Belief, pp. 129–30.

40 Ibid., p. 122.

41 Said or Sung, p. 105.

42 Interior Castle, tr. and ed. E. Allison Peers (New York: Image Books, 2004), p. 71.

43 Simone Weil is particularly attentive to the problem of the role of the will in self-denial: ‘One cannot come out of oneself by willing to do so. The harder one wills, the more one is oneself. One can only desire and supplicate’ (First and Last Notebooks, tr. Richard Rees (New York: OUP, 1970), p. 260.

44 Said or Sung, p. 88.

45 Lord I Believe, p. 19.

46 Ibid., p. 17.

47 The Glass of Vision, p. 50.

48 Ibid., p. 46.

49 Ibid., p. 56.

50 Saving Belief, p. 106.