Trinity as Cataphaticism
When it comes to something like the doctrine of the Trinity, it is difficult to think how such a conceptualization of God is not in and of itself apophatic. It seems almost incomprehensible that God exists simultaneously as one and three—it defies the law of non-contradiction. And yet, the doctrine of the Trinity appears to signal the mystery of God even while trying to say something cataphatic about the God-world relation.
This cataphatic aspect of trinitarian theology is traceable to the earliest period of the formation of Christian theology. It is almost a truism to say that the Christian belief in God as Trinity hinges on how Christians answer the question Jesus himself posed: ‘who do you say that I am?’ Athanasius of Alexandria answered that question forcefully by arguing that Jesus as the Christ is the incarnation of the full divinity of God as the Logos of God. In doing so, Athanasius was not being entirely apophatic. Without claiming to have entirely determined the nature of God, Athanasius was stating that God’s simplicity was such so as not to preclude communion with but to freely enter into communion with the not-God. To make sense of such a communion, we must think and name God’s being in terms of permanent distinctions. Athanasius definitively set the thinking on the Trinity on its cataphatic way, which would continue into late-medieval theology, where, as an example, Dominicans and Franciscans debated whether the Father was Father before the generation of the Son or in the generation of the Son.
In as much as Athanasius, and Christian thinkers after him, attempted to demonstrate the reasonableness of the thinking and naming God as Trinity, post-reformation philosophers would easily dismiss the idea that God is Trinity. These modern philosophers did not so much apophaticize the doctrine of the Trinity as much as simply declare it unintelligible. If Christian thinkers during this period continued to affirm that God is Trinity—and there were many who did not—there was no real attempt to discern how such an understanding of God made sense in light of conceptualizing the God-world relation in terms of the realism of divine-human communion. Most simply affirmed the doctrine based on faith or a particular understanding of salvation as justification, which replaced communion with imputation. As Troutner indicates, Immanuel Kant seemingly dealt the final blow in apophaticizing all speculative knowledge of God and reducing the intelligibility of God to practical reason. And regarding the latter, he pulls no punches: ‘the doctrine of the Trinity, taken literally, has no practical relevance at all….Whether we are to worship three or ten persons in the Deity makes no difference…no difference in rules of conduct.’[1]
It would take a modern philosopher, ironically, to rescue the doctrine of the Trinity from apophatic oblivion, and that philosopher would be G. W. F. Hegel. If A. N. Whitehead proclaimed that all philosophy is a footnote to Plato, it is no exaggeration to say that what has been dubbed the revival of trinitarian theology is a footnote to Hegel, albeit one that tries a little too desperately to distance itself from Hegel. Not only did Hegel rescue trinitarian theology from modern “apophatic” annihilation, he was more cataphatic about ‘Trinity’ than any other thinker before him. Troutner is right: Hegel took profoundly seriously “the Christian claim to make God known,” but what is known about the relational nature of the true infinite can only be conceptualized as Trinity.
Hegel inspired Christian theologians to think once again cataphatically about the Trinity as the Christian conceptualization of the communion and reconciliation of God and the world, to use more explicit language. Even if these same theologians attempted to distance their trinitarian theologies from a pure Hegelianism, Hegel’s emphasis on the ‘death of God’ and trinitarian being’s relation to history/time would exist as a remnant in the contemporary Christian revival of trinitarian theology. The attempt to unpack these particular aspects in relation to the doctrine of the Trinity would result in robustly cataphatic trinitarian theologies, the first signs of which are evident in the Russian religious thought of Vladimir Solov’ev and the Christian dogmatic theology of Sergius Bulgakov, whose work now is only being given the attention it deserves and who prefigured many of the later trajectories of systematic theology, including the ‘crucified God,’ together with liberation theology’s engagement with Marxist analysis.
Even though the Russian theologians revived trinitarian theology, credit is usually given to Karl Barth, who in the first volume of his Church Dogmatics unleashed what was considered a bomb not simply in the dominant liberal Protestant tradition but in the broader Christian theological world by identifying the ‘prolegomena’ with the doctrine of the Trinity.[2] After Barth, a cascade of robustly cataphatic trinitarian theologies would soon follow Barth’s pattern of reading the narrative economy back into the immanent trinitarian being of God (Hans Urs von Balthasar, Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Robert Jenson, to name a few).
If contemporary trinitarian theology is marked either by a robustly cataphatic drive to say as much as possible about the immanent Trinity or an exclusive focus on the economic Trinity, there have been attempts to continue to think the immanent Trinity based on the economic Trinity but in such a way as to restrict what can be affirmed about the immanent life of God, no matter how complete the revelation of God is in God’s economy. It is these trinitarian theologies that I argue are properly seen as apophatic, and the two theologians in particular who stand in this mold, and who are surprisingly absent from Troutner’s thoughtful essay, are Karl Rahner and Vladimir Lossky.
Trinity as Apophatic Cataphaticism
It is an odd paring: Vladimir Lossky and Karl Rahner. Beyond their dispute with the neo-scholastics—the common enemy of twentieth-century theology—their theologies are miles apart, or, at least, on the surface. Rahner remained within the Thomistic frame and Lossky did have some sympathy for the non-neo-scholastic kind of Thomism, which is not surprising, given that his mentor was Etienne Gilson. Lossky, however, went in a different direction than transcendental Thomism or Bulgakov’s integration of German Idealism. In fact, he felt the necessity to retrieve a Dionysian apophaticism that was overshadowed by the Thomistic synthesis and which alone could preserve the very intention of the event of the Incarnation itself, which was divine-human communion. For Lossky, apophaticism was demanded not simply as a method but as an attitude in order to “live the dogma” of the Trinity, to realize theosis.
In attempting to safeguard the intention of living the dogma of the Incarnation, and not just articulating it in propositional form, Lossky may have missed the point of the doctrine of the Trinity itself. He may have overcompensated neo-scholastic rationalism with Dionysian apophaticism to the point of reducing the Trinity to linguistic expression, i.e., another form of propositionalism, albeit one different from the neo-scholastic kind. By doing this, he was forced to express divine-human communion with the essence-energies distinction, which has some weight within the Greek patristic tradition, but never constituted the necessarily decisive and consistent ‘antinomic’ frame over centuries for articulating the realism of divine-human communion. In fact, Athanasius’s affirmation of the full divinity of the Incarnate Christ was also an affirmation that it was in the Logos—not the Holy Spirit or the Father—in which divine-human communion is realized, and not simply the ‘energies’ of God. It is in the very person or hypostasis of the Son in which all become children of God; hence, the need for the category of hypostasis as one of communion and not simply delineation of irreducible distinctiveness over and against the other persons of the Trinity. To put it in Rahnerian terms, ironically, Lossky’s insistence of the essence-energies distinction falls into the same trap as the neo-scholastic insistence on created grace—it simply cannot account for why it is that only the Logos is incarnate, as it allows for the possibility that any of the persons could be incarnate. The fact that there is Incarnation reveals Trinity, but not why only the Logos is Incarnate. The danger of not being able cataphatically to answer such a question is to put into question whether in fact God’s revelation is an actual self-communication of God, i.e., the very realism of divine-human communion.
Rahner’s position is not dissimilar to Lossky’s in the sense that his primary concern is to preserve the realism of divine-human communion. He also affirmed that God as Trinity could not be proved by reason but is in fact a datum or fact of revelation, even if he did turn to a theological anthropology to show that reasons could be given for affirming the unity-in-distinction of God’s self-communication in truth and love. In theology, we work from the revealed manifestation that God has self-communicated God’s self in a threefold manner. Rahner, however, would not compromise on the affirmation that if, in fact, the Logos was incarnate, this reveals something of the immanent trinitarian being of God beyond simply ‘that’ God is Trinity, otherwise, it would not be a self-communication of God. In arguing this point, Rahner is also claiming that what is communicated is the Logos and the Holy Spirit and not simply the ‘energies’ of God. In other words, the realism of divine-human communion is mediated via union with the persons of the Logos and the Holy Spirit. This means that the Logos and the Holy Spirit are the Christian response to the realism of divine-human communion, and not ‘energies’ of God in antinomic relation to God’s unknowable essence. For this reason, Rahner affirms that, at least, minimally we can say of the immanent Trinity ‘the unoriginate who mediates himself to himself (Father), the one who is in truth uttered for himself (Son), and the one who is received and accepted in love for himself (Spirit)’.[3] To go beyond this speculation is unnecessary and even dangerous, insofar as it moves the Trinity from theology to myth. In so doing, it disconnects the Trinity from the experience of being human such as to be capable of receiving God’s self-communication; it also undermines the reasonableness of the Christian response to the question of the realism of divine-human communion. In the end, Rahner’s cataphatic apophaticism with regard to the immanent Trinity is grounded in the same concern that haunts Lossky—to preserve the realism of divine-human communion. It then makes sense that Rahner’s own Ignatian spirituality would shape his theology, as the Orthodox Christian ascetical tradition shaped Lossky’s. For both, spirituality is not a sphere separated from dogma, but that which informs theology insofar as the realism of divine-human communion is an event confirmed in and through spiritual practices.
Perhaps Rahner’s attitude to the immanent Trinity would make more sense by unpacking how Rahner understands the Trinity as the ‘radicalization’ of monotheism.[4] ‘Radicalization’ for Rahner means that the affirmation of the one God is not a theoretical or abstract monotheism, but the God who is concretely manifested in history and creation. Put another way, a radical monotheism that affirms the one God acting concretely in history needs the concept of mediation in order to avoid nominalism and pantheism. But such a mediation, if it is truly to be radical, must be Godself; but, in order to think of such a mediation as Godself, one must think of a self-mediation of God to himself through himself as the condition for the possibility of the mediation of Godself in history. Again, this does not mean that God is triune only in relation to history, or that God needs history for self-expression. It simply means that God can become history without ceasing to be the immutable, triune God. ‘This we can and must affirm, without being Hegelians. And it would be a pity if Hegel had to teach Christians such things’[5].
Aristotle “Telly” Papanikolaou is Archbishop Demetrios Chair in Orthodox Theology and Culture at Fordham University.
[1] ‘The Conflict of the Faculties,’ in Allen W. Wood and George Di Giovanni (trans. and eds.) Religion and Rational Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 264. German original 1798.
[2] One could argue Bulgakov made exactly the same move in his own unique way with the publication of the first volume of his own dogmatics, The Lamb of God in 1933. It is a little-known fact that Barth and Bulgakov met in 1930 at a conference at the University of Bern and even had dinner together, where Barth probably got an earful about ‘Sophia.’ As Brandon Gallaher reports, Barth then read a 1925 German Reader of Russian thought and theology (Freedom and Necessity in Modern Trinitarian Theology [Oxford: Oxford University Press] 2016). His criticisms notwithstanding, it’s hard not to imagine some Bulgakovian influence on the first volume of his 1932 published Dogmatics. The general lines of Bulgakov’s trinitarian theology can be traced back as early as 1917 in his Unfading Light.
[3] The Trinity, trans. Joseph Donceel (New York: Crossroad, 1997). German original 1967.
[4] “Oneness and Threefoldness of God in Discussion with Islam,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 18, trans. Edward Quinn (New York: Crossroad, 1983), 105-21. German original 1978.
[5] Ibid, 114-15.
Trinity as Cataphaticism
When it comes to something like the doctrine of the Trinity, it is difficult to think how such a conceptualization of God is not in and of itself apophatic. It seems almost incomprehensible that God exists simultaneously as one and three—it defies the law of non-contradiction. And yet, the doctrine of the Trinity appears to signal the mystery of God even while trying to say something cataphatic about the God-world relation.
This cataphatic aspect of trinitarian theology is traceable to the earliest period of the formation of Christian theology. It is almost a truism to say that the Christian belief in God as Trinity hinges on how Christians answer the question Jesus himself posed: ‘who do you say that I am?’ Athanasius of Alexandria answered that question forcefully by arguing that Jesus as the Christ is the incarnation of the full divinity of God as the Logos of God. In doing so, Athanasius was not being entirely apophatic. Without claiming to have entirely determined the nature of God, Athanasius was stating that God’s simplicity was such so as not to preclude communion with but to freely enter into communion with the not-God. To make sense of such a communion, we must think and name God’s being in terms of permanent distinctions. Athanasius definitively set the thinking on the Trinity on its cataphatic way, which would continue into late-medieval theology, where, as an example, Dominicans and Franciscans debated whether the Father was Father before the generation of the Son or in the generation of the Son.
In as much as Athanasius, and Christian thinkers after him, attempted to demonstrate the reasonableness of the thinking and naming God as Trinity, post-reformation philosophers would easily dismiss the idea that God is Trinity. These modern philosophers did not so much apophaticize the doctrine of the Trinity as much as simply declare it unintelligible. If Christian thinkers during this period continued to affirm that God is Trinity—and there were many who did not—there was no real attempt to discern how such an understanding of God made sense in light of conceptualizing the God-world relation in terms of the realism of divine-human communion. Most simply affirmed the doctrine based on faith or a particular understanding of salvation as justification, which replaced communion with imputation. As Troutner indicates, Immanuel Kant seemingly dealt the final blow in apophaticizing all speculative knowledge of God and reducing the intelligibility of God to practical reason. And regarding the latter, he pulls no punches: ‘the doctrine of the Trinity, taken literally, has no practical relevance at all....Whether we are to worship three or ten persons in the Deity makes no difference...no difference in rules of conduct.’[1]
It would take a modern philosopher, ironically, to rescue the doctrine of the Trinity from apophatic oblivion, and that philosopher would be G. W. F. Hegel. If A. N. Whitehead proclaimed that all philosophy is a footnote to Plato, it is no exaggeration to say that what has been dubbed the revival of trinitarian theology is a footnote to Hegel, albeit one that tries a little too desperately to distance itself from Hegel. Not only did Hegel rescue trinitarian theology from modern “apophatic” annihilation, he was more cataphatic about ‘Trinity’ than any other thinker before him. Troutner is right: Hegel took profoundly seriously “the Christian claim to make God known,” but what is known about the relational nature of the true infinite can only be conceptualized as Trinity.
Hegel inspired Christian theologians to think once again cataphatically about the Trinity as the Christian conceptualization of the communion and reconciliation of God and the world, to use more explicit language. Even if these same theologians attempted to distance their trinitarian theologies from a pure Hegelianism, Hegel’s emphasis on the ‘death of God’ and trinitarian being’s relation to history/time would exist as a remnant in the contemporary Christian revival of trinitarian theology. The attempt to unpack these particular aspects in relation to the doctrine of the Trinity would result in robustly cataphatic trinitarian theologies, the first signs of which are evident in the Russian religious thought of Vladimir Solov’ev and the Christian dogmatic theology of Sergius Bulgakov, whose work now is only being given the attention it deserves and who prefigured many of the later trajectories of systematic theology, including the ‘crucified God,’ together with liberation theology’s engagement with Marxist analysis.
Even though the Russian theologians revived trinitarian theology, credit is usually given to Karl Barth, who in the first volume of his Church Dogmatics unleashed what was considered a bomb not simply in the dominant liberal Protestant tradition but in the broader Christian theological world by identifying the ‘prolegomena’ with the doctrine of the Trinity.[2] After Barth, a cascade of robustly cataphatic trinitarian theologies would soon follow Barth’s pattern of reading the narrative economy back into the immanent trinitarian being of God (Hans Urs von Balthasar, Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Robert Jenson, to name a few).
If contemporary trinitarian theology is marked either by a robustly cataphatic drive to say as much as possible about the immanent Trinity or an exclusive focus on the economic Trinity, there have been attempts to continue to think the immanent Trinity based on the economic Trinity but in such a way as to restrict what can be affirmed about the immanent life of God, no matter how complete the revelation of God is in God’s economy. It is these trinitarian theologies that I argue are properly seen as apophatic, and the two theologians in particular who stand in this mold, and who are surprisingly absent from Troutner’s thoughtful essay, are Karl Rahner and Vladimir Lossky.
Trinity as Apophatic Cataphaticism
It is an odd paring: Vladimir Lossky and Karl Rahner. Beyond their dispute with the neo-scholastics—the common enemy of twentieth-century theology—their theologies are miles apart, or, at least, on the surface. Rahner remained within the Thomistic frame and Lossky did have some sympathy for the non-neo-scholastic kind of Thomism, which is not surprising, given that his mentor was Etienne Gilson. Lossky, however, went in a different direction than transcendental Thomism or Bulgakov’s integration of German Idealism. In fact, he felt the necessity to retrieve a Dionysian apophaticism that was overshadowed by the Thomistic synthesis and which alone could preserve the very intention of the event of the Incarnation itself, which was divine-human communion. For Lossky, apophaticism was demanded not simply as a method but as an attitude in order to “live the dogma” of the Trinity, to realize theosis.
In attempting to safeguard the intention of living the dogma of the Incarnation, and not just articulating it in propositional form, Lossky may have missed the point of the doctrine of the Trinity itself. He may have overcompensated neo-scholastic rationalism with Dionysian apophaticism to the point of reducing the Trinity to linguistic expression, i.e., another form of propositionalism, albeit one different from the neo-scholastic kind. By doing this, he was forced to express divine-human communion with the essence-energies distinction, which has some weight within the Greek patristic tradition, but never constituted the necessarily decisive and consistent ‘antinomic’ frame over centuries for articulating the realism of divine-human communion. In fact, Athanasius’s affirmation of the full divinity of the Incarnate Christ was also an affirmation that it was in the Logos—not the Holy Spirit or the Father—in which divine-human communion is realized, and not simply the ‘energies’ of God. It is in the very person or hypostasis of the Son in which all become children of God; hence, the need for the category of hypostasis as one of communion and not simply delineation of irreducible distinctiveness over and against the other persons of the Trinity. To put it in Rahnerian terms, ironically, Lossky’s insistence of the essence-energies distinction falls into the same trap as the neo-scholastic insistence on created grace—it simply cannot account for why it is that only the Logos is incarnate, as it allows for the possibility that any of the persons could be incarnate. The fact that there is Incarnation reveals Trinity, but not why only the Logos is Incarnate. The danger of not being able cataphatically to answer such a question is to put into question whether in fact God’s revelation is an actual self-communication of God, i.e., the very realism of divine-human communion.
Rahner’s position is not dissimilar to Lossky’s in the sense that his primary concern is to preserve the realism of divine-human communion. He also affirmed that God as Trinity could not be proved by reason but is in fact a datum or fact of revelation, even if he did turn to a theological anthropology to show that reasons could be given for affirming the unity-in-distinction of God’s self-communication in truth and love. In theology, we work from the revealed manifestation that God has self-communicated God’s self in a threefold manner. Rahner, however, would not compromise on the affirmation that if, in fact, the Logos was incarnate, this reveals something of the immanent trinitarian being of God beyond simply ‘that’ God is Trinity, otherwise, it would not be a self-communication of God. In arguing this point, Rahner is also claiming that what is communicated is the Logos and the Holy Spirit and not simply the ‘energies’ of God. In other words, the realism of divine-human communion is mediated via union with the persons of the Logos and the Holy Spirit. This means that the Logos and the Holy Spirit are the Christian response to the realism of divine-human communion, and not ‘energies’ of God in antinomic relation to God’s unknowable essence. For this reason, Rahner affirms that, at least, minimally we can say of the immanent Trinity ‘the unoriginate who mediates himself to himself (Father), the one who is in truth uttered for himself (Son), and the one who is received and accepted in love for himself (Spirit)’.[3] To go beyond this speculation is unnecessary and even dangerous, insofar as it moves the Trinity from theology to myth. In so doing, it disconnects the Trinity from the experience of being human such as to be capable of receiving God’s self-communication; it also undermines the reasonableness of the Christian response to the question of the realism of divine-human communion. In the end, Rahner’s cataphatic apophaticism with regard to the immanent Trinity is grounded in the same concern that haunts Lossky—to preserve the realism of divine-human communion. It then makes sense that Rahner’s own Ignatian spirituality would shape his theology, as the Orthodox Christian ascetical tradition shaped Lossky’s. For both, spirituality is not a sphere separated from dogma, but that which informs theology insofar as the realism of divine-human communion is an event confirmed in and through spiritual practices.
Perhaps Rahner’s attitude to the immanent Trinity would make more sense by unpacking how Rahner understands the Trinity as the ‘radicalization’ of monotheism.[4] ‘Radicalization’ for Rahner means that the affirmation of the one God is not a theoretical or abstract monotheism, but the God who is concretely manifested in history and creation. Put another way, a radical monotheism that affirms the one God acting concretely in history needs the concept of mediation in order to avoid nominalism and pantheism. But such a mediation, if it is truly to be radical, must be Godself; but, in order to think of such a mediation as Godself, one must think of a self-mediation of God to himself through himself as the condition for the possibility of the mediation of Godself in history. Again, this does not mean that God is triune only in relation to history, or that God needs history for self-expression. It simply means that God can become history without ceasing to be the immutable, triune God. ‘This we can and must affirm, without being Hegelians. And it would be a pity if Hegel had to teach Christians such things’[5].
Aristotle "Telly" Papanikolaou is Archbishop Demetrios Chair in Orthodox Theology and Culture at Fordham University.
[1] ‘The Conflict of the Faculties,’ in Allen W. Wood and George Di Giovanni (trans. and eds.) Religion and Rational Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 264. German original 1798.
[2] One could argue Bulgakov made exactly the same move in his own unique way with the publication of the first volume of his own dogmatics, The Lamb of God in 1933. It is a little-known fact that Barth and Bulgakov met in 1930 at a conference at the University of Bern and even had dinner together, where Barth probably got an earful about ‘Sophia.’ As Brandon Gallaher reports, Barth then read a 1925 German Reader of Russian thought and theology (Freedom and Necessity in Modern Trinitarian Theology [Oxford: Oxford University Press] 2016). His criticisms notwithstanding, it’s hard not to imagine some Bulgakovian influence on the first volume of his 1932 published Dogmatics. The general lines of Bulgakov’s trinitarian theology can be traced back as early as 1917 in his Unfading Light.
[3] The Trinity, trans. Joseph Donceel (New York: Crossroad, 1997). German original 1967.
[4] “Oneness and Threefoldness of God in Discussion with Islam,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 18, trans. Edward Quinn (New York: Crossroad, 1983), 105-21. German original 1978.
[5] Ibid, 114-15.
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