1 Corinthians 1:24 says that Christ is the power and wisdom of God. Augustine spends two books of de Trinitate trying to figure out what that means. In Book 6, he tries out the notion that the Father’s power and wisdom is simply the power and wisdom that He begets as Son, so that the Father is wise only by virtue of the begotten wisdom, powerful by virtue of begotten power, great by virtue of begotten greatness, etc. In general, he tries out the notion that all terms we use to describe God’s attributes are relational.
In Book 7, he rejects this solution. Being God and being great are not different for God; He is simple. If the Father is great by virtue of the greatness that He begets, then He is God by virtue of the Son. It’s as if the Father begets His own Godness. Since his being God and His being are the same for God, then the Father is by virtue of begetting the Son. The Father not only begets His own Godness, but begets His own being. And, Augustine asks, how could the Father do this without having Godness, power, wisdom, being in Himself? He must have it to give it to the Son. Augustine finds these conclusions absurd, and thus insists that the Father must have power in Himself rather than simply in the Son.
These are pretty powerful objections, but there seem to be conundrums in every direction.
Augustine wants to say that “the Father is powerful” is a statement about the esse of the Father, rather than a statement ad Filium relative . But in making that distinction, Augustine seems to threaten God’s simplicity from another direction. To protect simplicity, He insists that being-God is not separable from being-powerful, being-great, being-good. But then he distinguishes the Father’s being from the Father’s being-Father: In Himself, He is great, wise, powerful; those are descriptions of his being per se, rather than descriptions of Him as Father. Everything, he concludes, that is something in relation to another must also be something additional to that relation ( omnis essentia quae relative dicitur est etiam aliquid excepto relativo ). He uses created examples to illustrate, and concludes that “if the Father is not also something with reference to himself, there is absolutely nothing there to be talked of with reference to something else.”
That solves a problem at one end only to raise another: For how can the Father be something other than what He is in relation to the Son? Father, as Augustine has said, is a relative term; can we even ask, Who is the Father aside from the relation to the Son? That way lies an abyss, for we can’t help but ask who or what the Father might be when He’s not Father? Perhaps this is where the criticisms of Augustine hit home, the criticism that he privileges the one essence over the persons. This is not “privileging,” but he is definitely hinting that the Father might have some surplus Godness left over that is not
We can see how the pressure of this argument led Thomas and others to conclude that the Persons simply are their relations, top-to-bottom, the Father Father all the way down. But that only seems to fall into the original problem that Augustine was intent on solving. But perhaps there are paths toward cognitive rest, if not “resolution.”
One, radical, path would be to bite the bullet and say that the Father’s wisdom simply is the Son. (This seems, by the way, to be Athanasius’ solution, though he’s not troubled by it as Augustine is.) The Father truly is nothing without the Son; of course, since the Son is begotten of the Father, the Son is nothing without the Father either. Of course, too, the Father never has been without the Son who is His own Word, “proper” to His essence, so the Father has never been without His power, wisdom, goodness, being. Yet, the Father’s attributes are utterly dependent on the existence of the Son. This yields a picture of God as radically, superlatively dependent - not on creation, but on Himself, each person radically dependent on the others. I am before I am a father; I am apart from my human relations. The heavenly Father isn’t before or apart from being Father; the Person Paul calls “God” isn’t God except as He is Father of the Son.
Another path, less radical: The Father has “his own” wisdom, but that wisdom is paternal wisdom, which means wisdom that exists in the Father ( ad se ) only as it is the wisdom poured out for and manifest in the Son. The Son too has “his own” wisdom, but has that wisdom only as receptive wisdom, received eternally from the Father. Each of the Persons shares all the same attributes, and these attributes are their “own,” but these attributes are “inflected” relationally, “held” by each Person distinctly as Person. All the Father’s attributes are inflected paternally, the Son’s filially, the Spirit’s spiritually.
As I say, these are not “solutions.” They are two of perhaps several possible pathways for resolution. The first, as far as I can see, is perfectly orthodox, and if it seems illogical perhaps we simply have to revise our logic.