Daily Archives: December 19, 2007

The Father Almighty

Posted by on December 19, 2007 1 comment

While Zizioulas’ views regarding the monarchy of the Father are, in some important respects problematic, he does offer some very helpful ways in which to understand the person of the Father, a subject woefully neglected in contemporary trinitarian theology.  A chief issue that Zizioulas illumines is the matter of the Creed which proclaims belief in “God the Father almighty”.  As Colin Gunton was fond of saying, we must not ever separate the omnipotentem from the deum patrem if we seek to avoid a demonic definition of God’s almightiness as sheer voluntaristic power.

Zizioulas helpfully notes that among the patristic fathers the primary understanding of the almightiness of the Father that is confessed in the Creed is not one which emphasizes the power to act, but rather the capacity to embrace and contain.  Thus, to confess that the Father is almighty is to confess that he embraces, encompasses and enfolds all things within his own life.  The Father’s almightiness then, does not so much mean the ability of God to do things, but rather the actuality of the infinite communio which flows from the Father to the Son in the Spirit.

This understanding of the omnipotence of God is helpful, especially insofar as it clarifies how we might helpfully re-conceptualize the idea of the the Father as the arche of the Trinity.  If the Father’s almightiness is his embracing and encompassing of that which is other than himself in communio, then the Father’s almightiness seems correlative to the Son’s kenosis and the pentecostal dispersal of the Spirit.  Or rather, the Father’s infinte openess, his all-encompassing actualization of difference-embraced-in-communion constitutes the ontological ground and the primal form of the inter-trinitarian kenosis about which Balthasar has written so persuasively.  In this light it becomes possible to speak about the Father as the arche of the Trinity without engendering an inappropriate subordinationism.  The Father is the source of the personhood of the Son and the Spirit insofar as he embraces them in love in the ek-static triune relations.  The Father is not so much the fount from which the Son and Spirit eternally spring as he is the circumference of the eternal and unbroken circle of Love which enfolds and constitutes them as his beloved Son in the Spirit of their love.  And it is precisely in so enfolding the Son and Spirit that Father finds his own personhood, his own fatherhood given to him in the form of the loving gift of the Son’s obedience in the Spirit.  The Father, no less than the Son and Spirit receives his personhood in the infinite and eternal circle of the triune relations.  The primal kenosis of the Trinity is from begining to end a circle of mutal self-donation and overabundance.

The Father embraces and lovingly enfolds the Son and the Spirit, and in so doing begets the Son and breaths forth the Spirit, who return to the Father a free sacrifice of love.  Inherent in this understanding of the gift structure whereby the God is God is this sort of kenotic movement in which the going-forth of the Son and Spirit in their respective  economic missions does not alienate them from the Father (as Moltmann would have it in Christ’s cry of dereliction on the Cross), but rather enfolds all created distances within the embrace of the Father, from which they are never torn, even in going into the furthest depths of the far country.

To put it another way, the almightiness of the Father is the reality that takes place when all forms of alienation and distance which seek to  interrupt the divine life in the death and descent of Christ are negated, defeated, and purgatively enfolded into the trinitarian life of communio that is the eternal coinherence of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit.  In short, the almightiness of the Father is the resurrection of the Son, which apocalyptically places all created reality within the new world of resurrection, bringing about the end of the old world of sin and death.  And thus, as Paul says, it is the cross of Christ which is the power and wisdom of God.  Indeed, the power and wisdom of the Father.

Zizioulas on the Father as Cause

Posted by on December 19, 2007 4 comments

One of the points on which John Zizioulas has been roundly criticized is on his insistence that the Father be understood as the arche of the Trinity.  The Father, on Zizioulas’ view, informed by the Cappadocians, is the ground of the personhood of the Son and the Spirit in a distinctly a-symmetrical way.  The Son and Spirit derive their pershonhood, their hypostasis from the Father, and particularly from the Father’s freedom as a person. 

Zizioulas is quick to clarify his view.  Clearly, the Father is never without the Son and the Spirit, they are all co-eternal.  Moreover, the personal causality of the Father vis á vis the Son and Spirit should not be understood at the level of ousia, of substance.  The Father does not bestow the divine nature on the Son and the Spirit (which would result in some sort of Arianism), but rather, personhood.  Zizioulas is clear on this point, the Father is the cause of the personal being of the Son and the Spirit, but the reverse is not the case in any way whatsoever.  The Father’s personhood, unlike that of the Son and Spirit is underived an ingenerate.

This, I think is a fundamental problem in Zizioulas’ trinitarian ontology.  His whole case is built upon the premise that personhood is ontologically ultimate and the personhood can only be rightly understood in an ontological sense as communion.  However, in making the Father the cause of the communion of the Trinity, what are we to make of the Father’s distinctive status as a hypostasis of the Trinity?  How can the Father truly be personal on Zizioulas reading?  He is clear that “a person is always a gift from someone.”  If this is truly the case, how can the Father really be understood as a person?  Zizioulas is clear that the Father does not recieve his personhood from the Son or Spirit in a reciprocal way, because, Zizioulas fears that such a statement would imperil biblical monotheism.

However, does it even make conceptual sense to deny that the Father’s personhood is constituted by his relations with the Son and Spirit?  The tradition of the church has made clear that the only things which distinguish the persons of the Trinity from one another are their relations.  Thus, the Father is the Father because he begets the Son and spirates the Spirit, the Spirit is the Spirit because he is spirated by the Father (through the Son we might add) and the Son is the Son because he is begotten by the Father (through the Spirit we might also add).  If this is the case, then the Father, as a distinct person of the Trinity does not constitute the personhood of the Son and Spirit a-symmetrically, but is himself constituted by his relations of generating and spirating the other two.  In other words, the Father’s fatherhood, which is what makes the Father a distinct hypostasis is only a reality on the basis of his relations with the Son and the Spirit.

Because the Father can never be the Father without the Son and Spirit, how can we say in any meaningful way that the Father causes the personhood of the other two, but is not reciprocally “caused” by the other two?  Clearly the personhood of the Father is constituted by his relation of fatherhood, which is dependent on the eternal co-reality of the Son and Spirit.  There seems no way to say in any meaningful sense that the Father’s personhood, his distinct nature as a hypostasis is underived, for it is contingent upon the Son and Spirit.

All of this seems to indicate the problematic nature of positing the Father as the cause of the personhood of the other persons of the Trinity.  In the first place, it imperils the Father’s own personhood and risks introducing and individualist notion of personhood into our understanding of the personhood of the Father.  Secondly, it introduces the very problematic notion of causality into the Trinity.  As such, it seems that Zizioulas’ monarchical model of the Trinity should not be embraced.  Rather than identifying the One God with the person of the Father, we must be more rigorous in insisting that the Three persons are the One God without remainder.

Exploring the Rule of Benedict §2: Biblical Sources and Trajectories of the Rule

Posted by on December 19, 2007 2 comments

The Rule of Benedict is saturated throughout with biblical quotations and allusions. Like many of the theological and spiritual writings of the premodern era (and distinctly unlike many of those in the modern era), Benedict does not so much cite proof texts of Scripture in support of his assertions as he simply speaks through scripture. Most often, Benedict is found citing the Gospels, the Psalms, and the Proverbs. Much of the rationale for the Rule lay in seeking after the cultivation of central biblical virtues, chiefly humility and obedience, both of which are major themes in the Psalms and wisdom literature. In the Rule of Benedict, humble obedience is the primary virtue (RB 7) of the Christian life and the primary way of struggling against sin was through the cultivation of humility. While for Augustine, the primary struggle in the Christian life was between the love of God and the libido dominandi, for Benedict the primary challenge was the struggle between the divine call to the “labor of obedience” and the human rebellion which is the “laziness of disobedience” (RB Prologue). For Benedict, according to the Bible, obedience is the master virtue to which human beings are called before God. It is the struggle to live in obedience which characterizes the Christian life. 

The wisdom literature and the prayers of the Psalms were the central resource that Benedict drew on in seeking after these biblical virtues. Central to the entire Benedictine way of life was constant immersion in the Scriptures, especially the Psalms. According the Rule, the entire Psalter was to be chanted every week by the brothers (RB 18). Benedict viewed this is a minimal endeavor, as the early monastic fathers had sung the entire Psalter daily. At the core of Benedictine spirituality was constant immersion in, and contemplation of the Holy Scriptures.

Modern readers will be quick to balk at some of the harsh uses of certain scriptures by Benedict, especially in regard to the form of discipline undertaken in the monastery (see RB 27, 28). While of course there is good reason to question flogging in response to disobedience as a viable Christian practice in our contemporary context, it behooves us to remember the historical context in which the Rule was written. In contrast to many of the rules that were promulgated in the same time period, the Rule of Benedict was widely considered to be extremely moderate and practical in its demands and strictness. Its ascetic practices were extremely moderate by comparison to the kinds of self-flagellation practiced in a wide variety of contemporary monastic settings. Likewise, as the Rule of Benedict states rightly, the forms of discipline exercised on rebellious brothers were not considered by Benedict to be the most effective or serious measures to be called upon. In the face of the failure of excommunication to restore a wayward brother, Benedict called on the abbot and the brothers to turn to “greater things”, which are chiefly “prayers…so that the Lord may cure the sick brother, for He can do all things” (RB 28).

In sum, while Benedict does not provide a biblical defense of the idea of monasticism and monastic living, such a defense is not something that one would realistically expect him to have ever thought of providing. The monastic movement during his time was a way, and perhaps the primary way in which Christians sought to return to the vision of discipleship articulated in the Bible in a way that remained within the church but still protested against the corruption and self-exaltation of the ecclesial hierarchy. The most charitable and equitable way of reading the monastic movement and its biblical roots requires attention to this context and the realization that these communities were exclusively centered on striving after ways to be faithful to God in the midst of an unstable world and a corrupt church. As such, Benedictine spirituality has much to teach the church today, especially in view of some striking similarities between the breakdown of culture in the dark ages and the fragmentation of life in late capitalist postmodern culture. In light of this, it seems prudent for the church today to be open to considering the insights of Benedictine spirituality.

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