Trinity vs Dialectics
The Theological Basis of Ontology
The following is a section from our upcoming book “Communion and Time,” which will be released later this year.
The opening argument of Fr. Dumitru Staniloae’s groundbreaking essay Eternity and Time is that eternity cannot be devoid of determination, that is, it cannot be devoid of hypostaticity:
Eternity cannot be simply an unchangeable substance, it cannot be like an eternal self-subsistent law. Such an eternity would not be inexhaustible, and the fact that it is inexhaustible arises from its interiority, which is like that of personal existence. Eternity must include an interior dimension and freedom of will. Only thus can it be inexhaustible, a source of continual newness. If we think of the eternity of God simply in terms of pure reason, or of an eternal substance, then we have a false picture of eternity not the true one. Eternity must be a fullness of life, and therefore true eternity must be the eternity of God, God being perceived as a subject who is true and always the same in himself, but who at the same time is the source of an eternal and infinite variety of manifestations. But true personal life only exists where there is communion, and there is no fullness of life without fullness of communion.1
For eternity to possess content, it cannot be conceived as “unchangeable substance” or pure being. Indeterminate being is not merely “exhaustible,” but the conceptual equivalent of nothing. Hegel taught us this, although he attempts to resolve the conceptual collapse of pure being into nothing through dialectics, rather than recognizing the dead-end of pure conceptuality or “logic” devoid of its hypostatic grounding. In any case, he rightly teaches that:
Being, pure being – without further determination. In its indeterminate immediacy it is equal only to itself and also not unequal with respect to another; it has no difference within it, nor any outwardly. If any determination or content were posited in it as distinct, or if it were posited by this determination or content as distinct from an other, it would thereby fail to hold fast to its purity. It is pure indeterminateness and emptiness. – There is nothing to be intuited in it, if one can speak here of intuiting; or, it is only this pure empty intuiting itself. Just as little is anything to be thought in it, or, it is equally only this empty thinking. Being, the indeterminate immediate is in fact nothing, and neither more nor less than nothing.2
Indeterminate being, that is, being conceived as a purely abstract self-relation, is nothing because being is communion (the extent to which Hegel himself grasps this is debatable). There is nothing one can say about pure being, as it lacks all determination, it has no “name(s).” Names—including divine names—exist in relation, they are defined through their relation to and distinction from the names to which they relate. The Name of God, Jesus Christ, exists in relation to His Father in perichoretic, Spiritual love (the Holy Spirit completes the total self-giving of God - see Fr. Dumitru’s “Holy Trinity: Structure of Supreme Love”). The divine names exist as the infinitely plentiful content of the tri-hypostatic divinity, this infinity being simultaneously the actus purus that God must be (David Bentley Hart’s Beauty of the Infinite argues for the truth of “classical theism” masterfully).
The notion of “quality” or “property” reflects the more fundamental idea of the “name” in the created world, and in a sense all names are inherently “qualitative” (we see this pattern pre-existing in the Godhead; the “hypostatic properties” being the basis of the distinction between the Father, Son, and Spirit, this communion itself being the basis of the “divine names” understood as God’s infinite power of activity). Just like names which designate true hypostases, more universal “qualities" (which are always-already enhypostatized, as the Fathers argue) only exist in relation, reflecting the intrinsic unity of all universals in the Logos. A man who has lived his entire life in a universe wherein yellow was the only colour would have no concept of yellowness, as such a determination is predicated upon a distinction of colours (which pre-exist eternally in the mind of God).
These metaphysical truths point to a fundamental “axiom” of communal ontology; in the absence of all distinctions, there can be no being. The notion of indeterminate being is expressed in the tautological formula:
“A = A”
All one can say about pure being is an empty affirmation of its self-relationality:
Being (A) is (A).
Pure being–and the law of identity that it is equal to–is nothing at all.
As we have said, indeterminate being is the equivalent of nothing because being is communion. Communion is unity-in-distinction, a “determinate” as opposed to an abstract unity, a violation of the abstract law of identity. The “abstract” law of identity is distinguished from the law of identity conceived in truth, as communion does not violate the reality of self-identity.3 In order for there to be true communion, there must not be a “confusion” of the distinct identities, as such a confusion would negate the distinction upon which any unity is predicated; it would be a collapse back into self-relation. As opposed to confusion, genuine unity must be conceived in terms of mutual interiority. It is not that A=B, but that A implies a relation to B, not merely an external/secondary one (that is, secondary to a more primary self-relation), but one constitutive of and immanent to the very self-identity of A. A=A, this is true, but interior to the very notion of A is the fact that it is not B. That is to say, B is implied in the very notion of A.
Being, therefore, is not “indeterminate,” but expresses the actuality of determinate identities. Being is always a being-of. Fr. Sergei Bulgakov demonstrates this truth in his analysis of the structure of the “proposition” or judgment, the most basic expression of meaning. A judgment unites a subject, predicate and a copula to say something about something. For example, a simple judgment is “I (subject) am (copula) a man (predicate).” The nature of the subject is revealed by the predicate, and the copula links the two together to render this relation actual. The “being” (expressed in the copula) cannot be conceived as prior to the subject and the predicate, as it is the being-of the subject and predicate in their relation, the “actuality” of the relation. The subject is prior to the predicate as a predicate is always the predicate “of” a subject, and the subject-predicate relation is always prior to the copula as the copula is always the actualization of this very relation. And yet, this logical priority cannot be conceived without an ontological equality of reciprocal dependence (perichoresis); it is a unity-in-distinction, wherein the unity subsists in the proper and intelligible order of 1,2,3:
The subject, the hypostasis, is the first; the predicate, the second; the copula, existence, the third. Yet it is impossible to say that the third element is thereby in any sense the synthesis of the first and the second, or that the first is the thesis to the second’s antithesis. In general, these three moments are by no means of a logical nature, of the kind which necessarily characterizes dialectical contradictions … To resolve the triunity of substance into a dialectical triunity would mean to overcome it through logic, and to award victory to logical monism, that is, to a system of absolute philosophy possessing a single center. But this is impossible. It is impossible to break off or to blunt the corners of the triunity of substance, which lies at the basis of every thought, and which constitutes thought’s outcome.4
The subject is revealed in the predicate, which it is inseparable from yet irreducible to, and the copula is the revelation of the relation between the subject and the predicate. Neither subject, predicate, or copula is reducible to the other, yet they each imply the other two.
Fr. Sergei argues that the triune structure of the judgment symbolizes the Tri-unity of the Godhead. The Father is the first, the monarchical subject; the Son is begotten of the Father as His image or predicate; the Spirit proceeds from the Father so as to reveal the relation between the Father and Son in His personhood: “…the Father is also the principle (and in this sense also the source, root, and cause) in the Holy Trinity. He is the source hypostasis, for He reveals Himself in the other hypostases, is their subject, in relation to which they are predicate and copula.”5
There are limits to this symbolism, as, in God, all three persons are equally subjects, equally express the other two (predication) and equally reveal the relation of the other two in their personhood (conjunction). And yet, despite these limits, the tri-unity of the judgment seems to be a genuine symbol of the Godhead. The Son is, indeed, the “second” subject who reveals the personhood of the Father, and Fr. Dumitru himself says that the role of the Holy Spirit is “to make the fullness of existence actual.”
Thus, we cannot reduce the Holy Spirit to “being” on account of the fact that He is the third, as He is divine hypostasis. Perhaps he may be uniquely linked with “being” insofar as He reveals the relation of the Father and Son, thereby rendering it actual. However, as Fr. Dumitru explains in the first volume of his The Experience of God, each divine person reveals the other two in their personhood:
In God it is not possible for an “ I” to assert himself over against another “ I” ; instead he continually considers the other as a substitute for himself. Each sees himself only in relation to the other, or regards only the other, or sees himself only in the other. The Father sees himself only as subject of the love for the Son. But the “ I” of the Father is not lost because of this, for it is affirmed by the Son who in his turn knows himself only as he fulfills the will of the Father. Yet precisely through this the sense of paternity grows stronger in the Father, and the quality of sonship in the Son. This is the circular movement of each “ I” around the other as center (perichoresis). Each person discloses not his own “ I,” but two together reveal the other; nor does each pair of persons disclose their own “I’s” in an exclusive way, but they place the other “ I” in the forefront, making themselves transparent for that one or hiding themselves {as it were) beneath him.
Thus, while the Holy Spirit may—in some seemingly unknowable way—be uniquely linked with being, insofar as each divine person reveals the other two, they equally possess being. Since being is common to all three persons, it is of the one divine nature. More specifically, being is a divine energy. The being of God is a being that arises in–as the content of–the relation between the three divine persons. It is an “actuality” of God, something which can be said about Him. Being is not prior to God, not something he participates in, but a truth concerning the pure actuality of intra-Trinitarian life.
The Father and Son love one another “in” the Spirit. Since creation images its Creator, we see that any relation must always occur “in” a third. When two corporeal objects relate to one another, they do so “in” space. If two objects are moving towards one another in space, they will eventually collapse into each other (at the precise moment when the “space” between them vanishes). But if they are brought together and then move outwards into three-dimensional space, they can, theoretically, continue to fill this space infinitely. Just as the Spirit of God is the “third” in Whom the communion of the two is actualized and revealed, according to Scripture, it is this same Spirit who unites all creatures to God and to each other. The Spirit is the “Spirit of unity” for creation as He is the Spirit of unity for the Father and the Son.
Being, like eternity, is an energy of God. But “being” cannot be conceived as one “part” of God while eternity another, rather, both being and eternity are mutually interior. God’s being is eternal, and his eternality the fullness of existence. His being is eternal because it is the full mutual interiority of the three divine persons, and His eternality the fullness of existence for the same reason. Thus, in being the actualities of the perichoretic God, the plurality of divine energies are, in a sense, perichoretic as well. Just as the three divine persons are distinct yet mutually interior, the divine energies are not reducible to one another, yet necessarily subsist together. God is both Lord and Love (both are divine energies according to St. Gregory Palamas), as both refer to different aspects of the infinite inner life of the One Triune God. God cannot be “Lord” one day and “Love” one another day. Nor can God act as Lord and not act as Love. Rather, the three divine persons each Love as the Lord and are the Lord as they Love (one another).
The perichoretic nature of the divine energies becomes more obvious when one begins with the energy of “being.” God is both being and providence. But if God “is” providence, then providence has being. Therefore, the energy of being is interior to the energy of providence. The same is true vice-versa, but this relation is less intuitive. God’s providence, that is, His eternal knowledge and power of determining the final destinies of all creatures, is something He eternally possesses as a “first actuality” (what equates to what Palamas calls dunamis, or “power”) as the Father contemplates the fullness of His power in His Image. Since “being” only exists in the nature of the tri-hypostatic God, and the whole God is in every energy (as Palamas emphasizes time and time again), the “being” of God only ever subsists insofar as it is equally “providence.” There is a single Trinitarian communion; it is eternal and fully actualized, so everything said of God (every divine name) implies and contains everything else: “His goodness is the same as His wisdom and greatness, and His truth the same as all those things; and in Him it is not one thing to be blessed, and another to be great, or wise, or true, or good, or in a word to be Himself.”6
Thus, the eternity of God is not “indeterminate,” not the false eternity of an “unchangeable substance,” but an actuality of the tri-hypostatic divine nature. Eternity, therefore, contains an “interior dimension” of infinite depth only realized as the “timeless motion” of the three divine persons “energizing” or “acting” in one another, each “[seeing] himself only in relation to the other, or regards only the other, or sees himself only in the other.” This communion is fully actualized as the perichoresis of the impassible, immutable, and transcendent Godhead. Put so beautifully by
:God does not have to change or suffer in order to love us or show us mercy–he loved us when we were not, and by this very "mercy" created us–and so, as love, he can overcome all suffering. This is true in two related and consequent senses: on the one hand, love is not originally a reaction but is the ontological possibility of every ontic action, the one transcendent act, the primordial generosity that is convertible with being itself, the blissful and desiring apatheia that requires no pathos to evoke it, no evil to make it good; and this is so because, on the other hand, God's infinitely accomplished life of love is that trinitarian movement of his being that is infinitely determinate–as determinacy toward the other–and so an indestructible actus purus endlessly more dynamic than any mere motion of change could ever be.7
And yet, contrary to all human expectations, the fullest manifestation of the eternal freedom of God is the humiliation of the Lord Jesus, a kenosis that is nonetheless already, by nature, the same impassible power of divinity, having overcome the threat of sin and death in His very nature (yet freely taking on ours)8:
Even the cross of Christ does not determine the nature of divine love, but rather manifests it, because there is a more original outpouring of God that–without needing to submit itself to the order of sacrifice that builds crosses–always already surpasses every abyss of godforsakenness and pain that sin can impose between the world and God: an outpouring that is in its proper nature indefectible happiness.9
Dumitru Staniloae, Eternity and Time.
Hegel, The Science of Logic.
I owe everything here to Fr. Paul Florensky of blessed memory, although I am cautious to entirely embrace his argument for the Trinity on the basis of logic (which he would, as he does in later chapter, repudiate in principle, so I am left unsure of its meaning). I am speaking specifically of pages 14-38 of The Pillar and Ground of the Truth.
Sergei Bulgakov, Tragedy of Philosophy.
Sergei Bulgakov, The Comforter.
Augustine, On the Trinity.
David Bentley Hart, Beauty of the Infinite.
David Bentley Hart, Beauty of the Infinite.
Since the Holy Spirit "equally posseses being," would you say that all that exists, since it exists by the very activity of the Holy Spirit, posseses being? That is, God's being manifests as all that is.