My beautiful wife Christine is a quiet mystic. She would not describe herself that way, yet on occasion she has been given visions—a vision of Christ/Aslan after the loss of our daughter through miscarriage and a vision of angels during the celebration of the Holy Eucharist. Two years ago she shared her story at a Hoot & Holler gathering here in Roanoke and more recently she was interviewed by Lee Hunsacker in which she shared her glorious vision of angels. That interview, as well as the recording of her H&H talk, is now available for your edification. I invite you to give it a prayerful listening. It begins at 24.10.
Jonathan McCormack, David Bentley Hart, and Whether Anyone Remains
Mummy portraits from Roman Egypt, 1st–3rd century. Painted from life, buried with the dead. Each one someone.
Everything turns on a simple question: when we lose ourselves, in prayer or in love or finally in death, is anyone still there? If not, then love was only ever God loving himself through masks, and the dead are not given back as themselves.
In The I That Is Not Mine published here on Eclectic Orthodoxy earlier this week, Jonathan McCormack has put the question with unusual nerve: when the ego falls silent and only “I AM” seems to remain, who is saying “I”? He walks a long way with the Advaitin, granting that the possessive ego may vanish and the wall between knower and known grow porous. Then, at the last step, McCormack holds back. “Separation is unreal,” he writes, “but distinction is not.” And he ends on a single word: what remains, when the ego is gone, is gift.
I agree with McCormack’s conclusion and I have no quarrel with his phenomenology. McCormack himself puts the point well: “the phenomenology underdetermines the ontology.” An experience in which only “I AM” seems to remain does not, by itself, tell us how many subjects there are. The question is not what we feel but what we are. Answering readers in the comments, McCormack has given his answer: the creature enjoys “non-exteriority without numerical identity.” It has no being outside God, yet it is not God.
He then asks, candidly, the question on which everything turns: “How far can ‘participation’ be intensified before the distinction between participation in divine actuality and being a mode of divine actuality becomes difficult to state?” In plain terms: how close to God can we come before we stop being ourselves? It is the right question, and I will argue three things about it: McCormack’s formula cannot answer it, Hart’s metaphysics cannot answer it either, and the answer is the word McCormack saves for last.
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A figure in a dream can say “I am not the dreamer,” and it would be right. It thinks, it speaks, it is this figure and no other, with its own face and its own part in the story. It has no exterior to the dreamer’s mind; there is nowhere for it to stand outside the dream. It depends on him completely, having no being of its own for a single instant. It is not numerically identical with him. And the dreamer is in no way constituted by it; he would be himself without this dream. Every condition McCormack sets (non-exteriority, complete dependence, the absence of numerical identity, the asymmetry he rightly calls essential) the dream figure satisfies, and it can even ask, as he does, who is saying “I.” And still it is nothing but the dreamer’s dreaming.
I agree with every one of these conditions. They are true of every creature, and the classical Christian tradition taught them long before Hart. My point is only that they are not enough: they are true of the dream figure as well. Mind you, I do not suggest that Hart thinks we are dreamt. I mean only that his conditions do not exclude it. Add a real activity of its own and nothing changes: souls in the Hindu tradition act and bear their karma, and Spinoza’s modes strive to persevere in being.
Why does this matter? Because no one can love a figure in his own dream. He can only enjoy his own dreaming; there is no one there to love him back, and no one to lose. A self that meets every one of these conditions and is still a dream figure is no one to love, and no one to be given back.
Nor is this merely a thought experiment. The Hindu theologian Rāmānuja taught exactly “non-exteriority without identity.” Souls, for him, are real, many, distinct from Brahman and wholly dependent on him, and they are still Brahman’s prakāra, his modes, the body of which Brahman is the self. McCormack’s formula describes a Hindu monism almost word for word, so it cannot be what separates Christian theology from monism. The line between a creature and a mode has to be drawn somewhere else.
Phenomenology will not draw that line either. A dream figure that fell silent and searched itself for a self would find only the dreamer, and an Advaitin would say the search had succeeded. Experience alone cannot tell us what we are; the stillness feels the same whether anyone is in it or not. Theosis may one day bring experience and truth into perfect transparency, so that we know as we are known. But transparency only shows us what we already are; it cannot decide it. The Advaitin expects it to disclose Brahman, the Christian a creature held in love, and the way there looks the same to both. The question has to be settled on other ground.
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That line was drawn at Nicaea, and it requires no special training to grasp. The Church confessed two ways in which something comes from God, and Christians still say it every Sunday: the Son is “begotten, not made.” The Son is begotten: he receives the Father’s own nature, whole God from whole God, distinct as person and identical in what he is. The world is made: it receives from God a being that God is not, by will and from nothing. Will and nature are one in God, so the difference cannot lie in two faculties within him. It lies in what comes forth. The Son is what God is. The world is what God is not. The Son, being what God is, cannot not be; the world, being what God is not, need not have been. How God gives a being that is not himself, with nothing outside him to make it from, the Church has never explained. It confessed it, and refused every account that would make the world a part of God. The whole Arian controversy turned on keeping these apart, because only the first relation yields God, and only the second yields a creature.
McCormack has a word for the way the world comes from God, the word his essay ends on: gift. Note that a gift has two sides, someone who gives it and someone who receives it. A gift that turned out to be the giver would not have been given at all. When God creates, he gives an existence that becomes the recipient’s own in the very act of being received; the dreamer, by contrast, only lends his mind to the figure he dreams. Before the gift there is nothing there to receive it; the creature exists as the one being given to. Hence it cannot be dissolved back into its source. The Son receives the Father’s own nature and so is God; the creature receives a being that is not God’s nature, and so is wholly its own. Here lies the difference between participation and mode, a difference in kind that no change of degree can reach. Intensify participation as far as you like; a gift will never become a mode, because a mode is never given a being of its own.
McCormack offers an image for the creature: a “living mirror” that “contains nothing of its own” and becomes most fully itself “in receiving what it cannot produce.” The image gets half of the gift right, the half a monist would also accept: everything the creature has comes from God. What it leaves out is the other side. A mirror receives light only by reflecting it; the light plays across its surface, and nothing in it sees. A person is someone to whom the light is given and in whom it becomes his own seeing.
And what is given is never a bare self. McCormack puts it beautifully in the comments: theosis “doesn’t save us from our particularity; it saves particularity from possession.” What is given is this life, these relations, this history, received over time. The possessive ego may die; what it tried to own does not die with it, because it was never its own to lose. It was given, and what God gives he does not take back.
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Can Hart supply this? McCormack insists that he can. Hart’s monism, he explains, is not “identity monism,” in which “finite beings are appearances, modifications, or temporary differentiations of the one divine substance.” It holds that there is “only one infinite and underived actuality of Being,” which can “give rise gratuitously to genuinely finite created actualities.” Here I must be fair. Hart affirms real natures, real creaturely acts and secondary causes, and he has no wish to make the creature a mask; against Hegel, he insists that God gains nothing from the world. If his monism were only what McCormack describes, the question would be the one already asked: what makes the distinction real? Nor does Hart want the person lost. To his credit Hart has insisted for years that we are saved with our histories and our loves. The question is only whether his metaphysics can give him what he wants.
But the texts say more. Creation from nothing does not settle the matter, since Hart himself calls it “the most radical and rigorous formulation of the metaphysics of emanation imaginable.” In The Light of Tabor, God is “the one Nature of all natures, of which human nature exists entirely and solely as a mode,” and Hart repeats the point in his Substack essay Expression and Being: all created natures are “modes of the infinite expressiveness of God in the Logos.” The same essay answers McCormack’s question about the “who” directly. Finite subjectivity, Hart writes, is “a unique expression and contraction of that original actus,” “always a unique personal instance” of the one identity of mind and being, “nothing but the impartation of being in an instance of the here and now.” In plain terms, each of us is a single, finite instance of God’s one act of being. Notice what is missing. The finite subject is the impartation; nowhere is it the one to whom being is imparted. And the essay closes by calling all that exists “the expression of personhood—or, rather, of the Person of all personhood.” The irreducible “who” McCormack hopes for is, on Hart’s account, an instance of the one Person.
Hart does now say something welcome. “A truly expressionist ontology,” he writes, “requires a wholly unnecessary creation,” not because God might have chosen otherwise but as “an entirely modal assertion of the total ontological contingency of the created.” Put plainly: the world need not exist, though not because God could have done otherwise. I welcome the first half. If it means that the world truly need not have been, without picturing God choosing among options, I agree. But contingency is not otherness. A dream figure is wholly contingent, since the dreamer need never have dreamed it, and it is still nothing but his dreaming. A contingent mode is still a mode.
Nor does Hart distinguish creation from the generation of the Son by kind. Christ, Hart writes, is the one in whom “the eternal utterance of the Father in the Logos by the Spirit” and “the created repetition or reverberation of that utterance in the finite” are one. If creation is the reverberation of the Word, its difference from the Word is the difference of an echo from a voice, a difference of degree; and the line between creature and mode that Nicaea drew was a difference of kind. A world like that is not given. It is expressed.
Why does the difference matter? Because there are only two ways to come from God and be truly someone. One is to receive God’s own nature, as the Son does, and then one is God. The other is to receive a being of one’s own, and then one is a creature, a gift. An expression of God that is neither is only God appearing in a particular form, no one in its own right. If we are expressions, there is in the end no one but God. If we are gifts, there is someone to love, and someone to be given back.
So when McCormack wagers that perfect participation will disclose created persons “precisely as irreducible modes of address and communion,” I can take his wager only with a distinction. If by “mode” he means what Maximus calls tropos, the manner in which a created nature exists, there is nothing to correct. But the mode in Hart is a mode of the divine nature, and a mode of God is God in a particular form; it can never be fully someone other than God. What McCormack is reaching for, the irreducible “who” that can say “you,” is a gift.
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The question becomes sharpest in Christ. McCormack writes that for Hart, Christ’s humanity “is most perfectly and completely human precisely because it is wholly transparent to the divine Logos.” I agree entirely. But it leaves a plain question standing, one any Christian can answer. A mode of a nature is that selfsame nature in a particular form. So: is Christ’s human nature a mode of his divine nature? If it is, then Christ has one nature appearing in two ways, and that is exactly what the Council of Chalcedon ruled out when it confessed two natures “without confusion, without change.” If it is not, then Christ’s humanity is truly other than his divinity: created, received, and wholly his own, and his perfect transparency to the Father is a creature’s openness to God, held perfectly as a gift. That is the Christ McCormack wants. He is also the prototype of theosis, of which every deified life is an icon: a union in which the creature becomes most fully itself, because the closer it comes to God, the more completely it is given to itself.
One nature or two? Everything McCormack hopes to keep depends on the answer, and the Church gave it long ago.
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Return, then, to his question. When the ego falls silent and only “I AM” seems to remain, who is saying “I”? Not the possessive ego, the self that imagined it owned its life; that was always a fiction. Nor God speaking through a mask, which would make the person a disguise. The one saying “I” is the one being given to: a self that never owned its existence and therefore cannot lose it, because it has always held its being as received. That is why the one we have lost can be given back as herself. She was a gift from the beginning.
McCormack ends: “What remains is gift.” He is right. It was the answer to his own question from the beginning, the only way to state the difference between participation and mode, and the only ground on which a Christian nonduality can remain Christian: not a theology of modes, in which the many return to the one, but a theology of gift, in which the many are given, and given, and given, and never taken back.
Our Father, who art in heaven. The familiar beginning of the Lord’s Prayer. I have said those words more times than I could possibly count. Strangely it took me an embarrassingly long time to even notice that the very first thing the prayer does, prior to petitioning for bread or forgiveness or deliverance, is to put God somewhere else. There, apparently, and not here. In heaven, a word we still hear as a direction: up, and far.
We know better, of course. God is everywhere, we rightly believe it, and our catechisms are quite firm on the point. But experience has taught me that what we believe and what we pray for have never been on the best of terms. We have all been there, praying and waiting for something to happen that did not happen, and we all know which of the two usually wins. God is everywhere. But yet, God seems very far away.
Near the end of a late afternoon Intro to Orthodox Theology class a few years ago, I was asked by a student why a God who is everywhere should feel so far away. I gave him an answer. Sure, it was a competent answer, full of the right distinctions, and I remember his reaction, a polite nod. He had asked about his prayers, and I had answered him about God’s attributes. This essay is my second attempt at an answer.
For a long time I assumed the distance was the problem, the thing faith existed to fix, and I noticed that theologians mostly seemed to agree, though they fixed it in opposite ways. Some pulled God closer by blurring the line between him and the world, until the creature looked like a ripple on the divine surface, pleasant enough, I suppose, if a little unsure of its own existence. Others shrugged, called the distance by its modern name, absence, and let the matter rest. It took me years to see that the two camps agreed on the one thing that mattered. Both assumed that distance meant empty space, a gap lying between two things, something to be closed or else despaired of.
But what if nothing lies between us at all? What if the distance between God and me is something I am?
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Everything I have has been given to me, beginning with the plain fact that I am here at all. I did not make myself. God’s existence is simply what he is, and belongs to him as nothing else can; mine comes to me from another, and I hold it as one holds a gift, on account of the one who gave it. And every gift has two sides, someone who gives it and someone who receives it. Here the picture of the ripple fails. A ripple is nothing other than the sea itself in motion; take away the moving sea and there is no ripple left over. But what God gives me is not a piece of himself. It is an existence of my own, and a gift that turned out to be the giver would not have been given at all. So there are two of us, God and me, and the difference between us is real. But notice where it lies. Nothing stands between a giver and the one he gives to; they meet in the giving itself, and I exist only as the one receiving. That difference is the distance I began with. It is no empty space I must somehow cross. It is the form of my being received.
The Fathers at Nicaea, who by all accounts were not given to sentimentality, saw why that qualification matters. Receiving alone does not make a creature. The Son also receives everything from the Father, and the Son is God. What matters is what is received. The Son receives the Father’s own nature, whole and undivided, so that his receiving marks a difference of persons within the one God and no distance of kind at all. I, however, receive otherwise. I am given a being that God is not, brought forth by his will from nothing rather than begotten from his nature.
I should pause on the word will here, because it tends to bring to mind a God leafing through possible worlds like a man choosing a tie. I mean nothing of the kind; nothing in God deliberates. I mean only that the world is not required by what God is. The Son belongs to the divine life itself, so that God would not be God without him; the world, however, adds nothing to a God already complete. The Son is begotten of what God is, and that begetting is love’s own life. The world is given by a God who needs nothing more. The one is begotten, the other given.
I have taken to calling this, for want of a better phrase, the distance that is us.
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Nearly everything I know about distance I learned from space. My parish is 40 some miles from my driveway; my oldest friend lives on the other side of the continent. Distances of that sort are measured. But the distance that is us is of another kind entirely. There is no road between God and the creature, no medium, no measure. God is not elsewhere the way the far country in the parable is elsewhere, and no amount of travel will bring me nearer to him.
Nor, and this took me longer realize, is it a distance of degree. For years I carried a picture of creation as type of staircase of light, with God at the top and everything else arranged on the steps below, the angels bright, the ground rather dim, and ourselves somewhere in the middle, squinting upward. It is a lovely picture and a very old one. The problem is that a fainter light is still the same light. On the staircase, the creature differs from God only as dusk differs from noon. Dusk, given enough sunlight, becomes noon. The distance that is us belongs to another order. No brightening crosses it, since my being is received and God’s is not, and received being is no dimmer version of the being that gives it.
A better picture, albeit still imperfect, is the relation between an author and a character in her novel. Where is the character, in relation to the author? The question simply dissolves. She is not across the room, nor tucked in a drawer; there is no distance between them in any sense a surveyor would recognize. And yet the difference could hardly be greater. The author is real in a way the character is not, and everything the character is, down to the last gesture, comes from her.
The picture fails at one point, and I have come to love that failure more than the picture. A character is only imagined, a passing shape of the author’s mind, and however vivid she may be, she cannot answer back. But the creature can, it can answer back. Why? Because it holds an existence that is truly its own, an act of being that belongs to it and to no one else, even though every bit of it is received, and the proof is that it can turn toward its maker and speak. The Psalter is one long record of creatures answering back, in praise and in complaint, sometimes in the same breath. Not so with a novel’s character — it has never turned on the page to address her author like that. (I have written elsewhere about what it means for a creature to receive its being, in The Wound That Receives.)
I recall when I first encountered the word diastēma as a graduate student at St. Andrews, reading Gregory of Nyssa late into the night in student housing that never quite got warm. Gregory called the creature’s side of this difference diastēma, which means interval or extension. Whatever has a beginning, he says, is stretched out; it unfolds in time, passes from what it was toward what it will be, and is never present to itself all at once. God, by contrast, is adiastatos, without interval. He does not unfold, since nothing in him is still waiting to arrive. I remember coming to the realization that I was nothing but interval: a human being stretched between a beginning I did not choose and an end I cannot see.
That, I think now, is the heart of it. I do not stand on one side of the distance and look across at God on the other. There is no other side to stand on. I am the distance that is us, given being. My becoming and my reaching are what received existence looks like from my lived experience, and becoming and reaching have belonged to the gift from my very start.
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I do think it seems natural to suppose that a God so unlike us must also be very far from us. But the Christian tradition says that the reverse is true.
At Pascha our church fills up, people crowding on the side and in the back. By the time the procession comes back in from the dark, candles lit, we are packed so tightly that you can hardly lift your arm to cross yourself without apologizing to someone (even worse in the choir!). It is the happiest, jubilant crowd I have ever seen, and it illustrates, rather beautifully, why creatures keep their distance from one another. Two bodies cannot stand in the same place; one must shift if the other is to have room. We jostle because we are the same sort of thing, laid out on the same plane, each taking up room the other might have had.
But God does not jostle. He is no single thing among others, no larger item in the inventory of the world, and so he competes with nothing and needs no one to step aside for him. He is present in the very act of giving by which I exist at all, while the existing itself belongs to me. The difference of kind that seemed to explain his remoteness turns out to explain his nearness. Only what is wholly other can be wholly near.
The distance, moreover, runs one way, it is asymetrical. Think of the father in the parable, who sees his son “while he was yet a great way off” and runs. The son’s distance was a runaway’s, which ours, as creatures, is not; but the shape of the thing is the same. All the distance in that story lay on the son’s side. The father never had any. So it is with us: we are far from God in the sense that we are not God, while God is never far from us.
Augustine said it better than anyone has since. God, he confessed, is more inward to me than my own innermost self and higher than my highest. The two halves of the sentence hold each other up: precisely because God is higher than the highest, he is closer than the closest. A God who was merely very large would indeed be far off. The God who is beyond every kind is nearer to me than I am to myself. Which is why the sense of distance in prayer, painful and real as it can be, is never a report that God has gone. Gregory of Nyssa would say it is what the nearness of an inexhaustible God feels like to a finite mind that cannot hold him. I wish in hindsight I had known to tell my student that.
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I have come to think the best evidence for all of this is no argument at all, but a handful of things we do almost every day without thinking. Whoever gives thanks, whoever loves, whoever respects and honors a neighbor, is already living in the distance that is us, and a metaphysics that abolishes that distance makes nonsense of every prayer its adherents pray.
Take thanksgiving. A few winters back I stood in a canyon out in the Joshua Tree desert and shouted my own name at the massive rocks to hear it come back. It came back, a little quieter each time, and I remember thinking, rather absurdly, that the canyon had never once thanked me. I gave it my loudest shout and it echoed back. But an echo cannot thank the voice. It is only the voice returning, and it has nothing of its own from which to say thank you. Thanks requires two, a giver and one who receives, and the one who receives must be genuinely someone. The Church calls its central act the Eucharist, which is simply Greek for thanksgiving, and the name is quite exact. Our first and final word to God is gratitude, and gratitude is only possible for someone genuinely other than the one thanked.
Or take love. There is a strand of spiritual writing, very old and often very beautiful, that speaks as though the highest union with God would be a kind of dissolving, the self poured out like a drop of water into the sea until nothing of it remains. I have never been able to make that picture quite square with anything I know about love. There is an elderly couple at our church who have stood in the same spot on the left side of the nave for as long as I have attended. When he helps her after the Liturgy it is perfectly obvious that the point of their long union has never been to become one person. Love delights in the beloved. It needs someone to be delighted in and someone to do the delighting. The union for which we were made is closer than any dissolving could be, precisely because both remain, and the creature is gathered to God as itself.
And take the neighbor. The distance that is us holds between each of us and God, and so it holds, in a lesser way, between each of us and everyone else. Every person I meet is also given. Her being does not come from me and is not mine to arrange, and she cannot be folded into my plans for her without some violence being done. I suspect a great deal of cruelty begins at the moment one person forgets that another is a gift and starts treating her as a possession. To see the distance that is us is to see every face as something. some one, that arrives from beyond me, asking to be received.
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If the distance is the shape of our being, then the Incarnation might seem to present a difficulty, since surely in Christ God closed the distance at last. What he did is more astonishing. He entered it.
When the bishops at Chalcedon, in AD 451, set out to define how God and humanity are joined in Christ, they chose their words with the great care. The two natures, they said, are united without confusion and without separation. Without separation, because in Christ God and humanity are one person, as close as closeness can be. Without confusion, because the humanity is never melted down into the divinity, and remains in him fully human and fully received. And here is the wonder of it: divine and human natures do not belong together by nature. Nothing in either makes the other its natural extension. Chalcedon joins what nature never joined, and joins it without mixture, and so the union is sheer gift. Paul’s word for it is emptying (Phil 2:7). The Son takes what was not his own, and the flesh he takes remains flesh, glorified and never dissolved.
In Christ, then, the distance that is us is inhabited, and it remains. God comes to live on the creature’s side of it, as a creature, without ceasing to be God. And because the one who comes is the Son, whose whole being is to receive from the Father, we are drawn in him into that receiving, so that our own reception of being comes, by grace, to share in his.
This matters most where life is hardest, because the distance that is us is also where things can go wrong. A creature that is genuinely other can turn away, can be wounded, can be stretched past bearing. When we suffer, the temptation is to wish the distance gone, to want God to end our creatureliness so that nothing could ever hurt us again. God heals in another way. He comes into the distance where the wound is, takes the wound as his own, and heals it from within, and the cross is the place where he stands furthest into our side of the distance, all the way down to death.
Each Sunday when I partake of the chalice, the priest or deacon says my name. The servant of God Robert partakes. I stand there with my arms crossed over my chest, and the gift is given to me already waiting for it. Creation was not like that. Before the gift there was no one to receive it; no creature stood waiting at the door when God gave being, and the one who receives came to be in the very act of receiving. That receiving, then, is no mere passivity, the undergoing of something by a thing already there, since there was nothing already there to undergo it. It is the creature’s first act, the act of being given to itself. The distance that is us arrives with the gift, as its shape. God does not first lay out an empty space and afterward fill it. In giving, he gives the receiver too.
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Those who read the last part of my series on apophasis, You Cannot Finish God, will remember Gregory’s word epektasis, the soul’s endless reaching toward a God it can never exhaust. I won’t repeat that story here. I only want to add what it looks like once the distance that is us is in view.
Gregory’s most beautiful telling of it comes in his homilies on the Song of Songs, which I think are the loveliest thing he wrote. The bride of the Song rises in the night to seek her beloved, and no sooner has she found him than she hears him call again: arise, come away. Gregory reads every finding as the start of a new seeking. The soul, he says, goes from beginning to beginning, through beginnings that never come to an end. She is never finished with love, because the one she loves is never finished giving.
Only an extended being can go on beginning like that. God has no beginnings; he is whole, and nothing in him waits to arrive. The creature, stretched out in time and desire, can begin again forever. The bride’s endless beginnings are the distance that is us, lived without end.
And there, it seems to me, is the answer to the fear I started with. I had imagined that distance from God was the problem, and that heaven would be the moment it finally closed. Gregory sees it the other way round. Heaven is the distance become felicity. It can never be abolished, since the infinite is inexhaustible by the finite. But in the life to come it will no longer be felt as absence. It will be the form of the creature’s endless receiving, more of God forever, without ever reaching the bottom of what there is to receive.
Gregory is usually read as answering an old worry here, one Origen had raised before him: that souls come to rest in God might grow sated with the good, as one tires even of a magnificent banquet, and fall away again. But satiety is only possible where the good can be exhausted. A creature forever receiving more of an inexhaustible God never reaches the point at which desire could slacken, and so the very distance that once made the fall possible becomes, in the end, what makes it impossible. What we now suffer as the ache of distance is the first stirring of that endless beginning.
The gifts of God, Paul says, are irrevocable. If God is as the Gospel says he is, none whom he has called into being will in the end be lost to him.
Our Father, who art in heaven. I think of the prayer differently now. The prayer sends God nowhere at all. Heaven names the difference between the One who gives and the ones who are given, and that difference, it turns out, is the only place he has ever met us. The distance that is us is the form of the gift, and the first thing God gives when he gives us ourselves.
When the ego falls silent and only “I AM” seems to remain, who—or what—is saying “I”?
The question is more dangerous for Christian theology than it first appears. Christianity has always possessed a language of self-loss almost violent enough to satisfy any nondualist: one must die to oneself, lose one’s life in order to find it, cease to live so that Christ may live within, become poor in spirit, empty oneself, pass beyond images, concepts, possessions, even the anxious ownership of one’s own virtue. The great ascetical traditions do not promise the modern self a more polished version of its familiar sovereignty. They promise its undoing.
And yet Christianity has usually insisted, with equal force, that salvation does not culminate in the disappearance of the person. The creature is not a veil that God finally tears away from his own face. Deification does not reveal that there was only one subject all along. The saint does not awaken from the dream of being Peter or Mary or Macrina into the discovery that the only real “I” is God.
What, then, actually happens to consciousness in theosis?
David Bentley Hart does not provide a phenomenological manual of deification, and it would be misleading to pretend that he does. What he provides is something in certain respects more provocative: a metaphysics of consciousness, creation, freedom, participation, and Christ in which a remarkably nondual phenomenology becomes conceivable without the metaphysics of numerical identity. If his account is followed inward—if one asks not only what it says reality is, but what reality so constituted might feel like when transparently known—then theosis begins to look less like the supernatural decoration of an otherwise ordinary ego and more like a transformation in the very grammar of the word “I.”i
Hart himself has invited the comparison. At the beginning of You Are Gods he remarks that the essays might have borne the subtitle “Studies in Vedantic Christianity,” though he adds that “Neoplatonic Christianity” would say more or less the same thing. The provocation is instructive. Vedānta need not function here as an exotic metaphysics imported into Christianity; it can serve as an unusually lucid conversation partner for truths about participation, consciousness, and deification that Hart believes belong already to the Christian metaphysical inheritance.ii
What follows takes Hart’s metaphysics seriously enough to ask what it might mean in experience. The question is not whether Hart has secretly written a Christian Advaita, nor whether the Upaniṣads secretly teach Orthodox theosis. It is simpler and stranger: if the deepest ground of every finite act of consciousness is the divine Logos, if human nature is made for deification, and if Christ is the perfect transparency of the human to the divine “I AM,” what should awakening to that truth be like?
The “I” Deeper Than the Ego
Ordinary consciousness is almost inseparable from possession. My body, my memory, my projects, my wounds, my convictions; even my consciousness seems to belong to me as an interior chamber into which the world occasionally sends reports. Behind these possessions we imagine an owner, a small metaphysical monarch who says “I” and takes the saying itself as evidence of sovereignty.
Hart’s anthropology is inhospitable to this picture. The empirical ego is not the source of consciousness but a finite psychological organization of a spiritual depth it neither creates nor contains. The Christian contemplative tradition has spoken of the nous, the scintilla or spark of spirit, the deep heart; and Hart is quite willing, in comparative contexts, to place beside these terms the Sanskrit ātman. But this depth should not be imagined as a second, natureless subject hidden behind the psychological person. It is the depth of this created life, whose consciousness is received rather than self-grounding. God is “nearer to me than my inmost parts.” At the root of the creature’s finite “I am” is the uncreated “I AM,” the Logos through whom every rational nature exists and knows.
This is the point at which Hart’s recent Christology becomes especially daring. In Jesus, on his account, the human psychological consciousness is perfectly transparent to its divine ground. There is no interval of sin, no defensive opacity, no false possession separating the human act of consciousness from the eternal Logos whose incarnate life it is. Christ is not less human because his humanity is wholly transparent to God. He is the revelation of what humanity looks like when nothing in it resists its own divine ground and end.iii
For the rest of us, consciousness is lived in exile from this transparency. We take the finite contraction for the source. We hear the word “I” and imagine that the little empirical speaker has manufactured the voice.
Theosis would therefore not add a divine object to the contents of consciousness. It would change the relation between consciousness and its own depth. The “I” that had seemed private and self-originating becomes transparent to the I AM that was always nearer than the ego to itself.
This is not yet Advaita. But phenomenologically it begins to approach territory in which an Advaitin would feel at home.
Hart comes closer to describing this transition in Roland in Moonlight than his more systematic works might lead one to expect. There he distinguishes the ordinary ego from a depth that is “I more deeply than the ego is I,” and speaks without embarrassment of the “oceanic experience of the ego’s dissolution into fuller existence.” The language matters. What is dissolved is not consciousness into vacancy, but the ego into a more comprehensive mode of life.iv
Elsewhere in the same book he describes the highest level of nous or ātman as possessing a kind of “sublime anonymity”: at that depth, he says, “we’re all one and the same in a sense,” while the individual soul acts as a prism through which the light of being is differentiated into the private experience of this or that finite subject. The image gives the Hartian problem an almost Vedāntic sharpness. The light is universal; the refraction is particular. Mystical consciousness may therefore feel like a return toward the light before its refraction without requiring the prism itself to be unreal.v
When the Self Cannot Be Found
Suppose contemplative purification actually succeeds in quieting the ordinary machinery by which the ego continually announces itself: memory rehearsing its injuries, fantasy constructing futures in which it is finally secure, desire measuring the world by usefulness, judgment arranging persons into allies and threats, the nearly continuous murmur of self-reference.
What remains?
A Christian sometimes answers too quickly: “the person.” But the person is not an object one discovers sitting at the bottom of the mind after all other objects have been removed. One may search experience for the owner of experience and find nothing at all resembling the substantial little self one expected. Nor should “person” simply be treated as another name for a natureless hypostasis hidden behind experience. For Hart, hypostasis and nature are inseparable: concrete existence is always the actuality of a nature, while personhood names a richer first-personal and expressive structure of being.
Hart’s metaphysics gives us no reason to fear this discovery. If the creature possesses no self-subsisting act of being, why should contemplation uncover one? The self is not an interior idol. Its deepest reality is participation.
Thus an experience of “no-self” could, within a Hartian ontology, be entirely truthful at the phenomenological level. What disappears is the ego as proprietor: the fiction that there exists somewhere within consciousness a self-begotten owner who possesses being, agency, and awareness in its own right. The contemplative does not necessarily experience a more magnificent private soul behind the ordinary ego. There may instead be a strange translucency: consciousness without the familiar weight of possession, awareness no longer curved obsessively back upon itself.
Hart’s writings repeatedly return to specular images for created consciousness: mind as a finite participation in divine light, receiving rather than originating the radiance by which it knows. If one follows that imagery phenomenologically, the contrast is between an opaque empirical ego and a “living mirror” whose very perfection consists in transparency. A perfect mirror does not cease to exist because it contains nothing of its own; it becomes most fully itself in receiving what it cannot produce.
Perhaps the Christian mystical paradox can be put this way: the self may disappear as possession precisely as the person begins to appear as gift.
The Vanishing of the Doer
Something similar occurs with agency.
Modern freedom is haunted by the image of an uncaused chooser standing before neutral alternatives. The more completely an action originates from me alone, uncontaminated by nature, desire, reason, grace, or final cause, the more authentically mine it seems.
Hart regards this conception as nearly unintelligible. A rational act is free not because it erupts without cause or purpose, but because intelligence apprehends a good and desire moves toward it without obstruction. Freedom grows with knowledge. The more perfectly the Good is known, the less arbitrary the will becomes; and at the limit, perfect freedom is a determination so complete that sin becomes impossible.vi
Now ask what such freedom would feel like.
Ordinary agency is full of friction. I deliberate, resist, force, second-guess, compel myself, regret. The will is experienced almost muscularly, as though a small inner agent were pushing the body and world from behind.
But if freedom is perfected as the will becomes transparent to its true Good, then increasing freedom may produce decreasing awareness of willing as effort. Action begins to feel less like self-assertion and more like consent, attraction, even spontaneity. The good act happens from the deepest truth of the agent without the familiar drama of an ego watching itself choose.
At the extreme, perfect agency might phenomenologically resemble non-doership.
Here the nineteenth-century Bengali Hindu mystic Sri Ramakrishna (1836–1886) becomes unexpectedly relevant. Ramakrishna moved with unusual freedom between ecstatic devotion to Kālī and other personal forms of God and the disciplines of Advaita Vedānta; in his mature teaching he distinguished jñāna, the realization of nondual Brahman, from vijñāna, a fuller realization in which the world and personal devotion return as manifestations of the same divine Reality. His language of agency can be startlingly absolute: “I am the machine and God is the Operator”; “I am the carriage and God is the Driver.” Ayon Maharaj has accordingly reconstructed this dimension of Ramakrishna’s thought as a form of hard theological determinism. Yet Ramakrishna also insists on spiritual effort, moral responsibility, and the impossibility of simply adopting divine doership as an intellectual excuse.vii
Hart would not accept the metaphysics of creaturely agency as illusion. His account of divine causality is noncompetitive: God does not act instead of the creature but gives the creature its very power to act. Primary causality does not occupy the space of secondary causality. Hence an act can be wholly dependent upon God and wholly the creature’s own. In a recent formulation, Hart makes the point still more sharply: there is one actuality of being, imparted to creatures in finite modes, so that genuine creaturely action is the divine act truly active in the creature. By contrast, to be governed by pathos—to be merely moved or qualified from without—is, to that degree, a privation of actuality. The paradox is exact: surrender of egoic doership can mean not less agency but more, because the person becomes less passively driven and more freely expressive of the Good.viii
Phenomenologically, however, the two accounts may come surprisingly close. The felt distinction between “God’s action” and “my action” can disappear even while the metaphysical distinction between primary and secondary causality remains.
Paul’s “I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me” may be less a paradox of grammar than a phenomenology of perfected agency.
The World Becomes Interior
There is another boundary theosis may unsettle: the border between consciousness and world.
The Cartesian picture imagines an interior mind facing an exterior universe. Consciousness is a chamber; the world stands outside it. Knowledge then becomes a mysterious traffic between two alien domains.
Hart’s metaphysics of consciousness rejects the picture at its foundation. Mind and world can meet because both already participate in Logos: subjective intelligence is open to objective intelligibility because reality is, at its roots, rational through and through. Hart sometimes describes this relation in nuptial terms. Knowing is not the collision of two sealed substances but a union in which being gives itself to mind and mind receives the form of being.
If that is true, contemplation might alter not merely what one sees but the felt topology of seeing itself.
The world may cease to feel simply “outside.” Beauty is no longer an object over there inspected by a spectator over here. The tree, the face, the light upon stone appear with an almost interior intimacy; while consciousness, conversely, seems no longer enclosed behind the forehead but opened outward into the intelligibility it receives. The distinction between knower and known does not have to vanish metaphysically for their opposition to vanish phenomenologically.
Christian mystical literature has often described such moments through light: not merely seeing a luminous object, but finding oneself and the world together disclosed within illumination.
Again, an Advaitin would recognize something here. The subject-object structure has softened. The old dyad has lost its hardness.
But Christianity has not yet said that subject and object were numerically one all along.
Nor is the language of coincidence merely ours. In Roland in Moonlight Hart gathers Eckhart’s “God’s ground is my ground,” Plotinus’s return of nous to its divine source, Augustine’s God who is more inward than the inmost self, and Islamic accounts of delimited being returning to nondelimited Being around what he calls “the real experience of a final coincidence of being and knowing in God or the transcendent ground of all.” He then locates there the meeting of the unity of mind and the unity of being.ix
The phrase “final coincidence” is dangerous only if coincidence is immediately translated into numerical identity. Hart’s own metaphysics does not require that translation. It allows the opposition of knower and known to be overcome in an act of participation whose intimacy can be total without turning the finite knower into the uncreated source of knowing.
Christ at the Center
We can now return to the dangerous question: when the empirical ego becomes transparent, when possessive agency subsides, when subject and object cease to confront one another as alien realms—what remains at the center?
Hart’s answer is not anonymous consciousness.
It is Logos.
The deepest divine “I AM” is not an impersonal field into which persons occasionally crystallize. It is the one infinite life of God, eternally Father, Son, and Spirit; and the Logos is the Father’s divine Word, Image, and self-expression within that Trinitarian plenitude. Thus the ground of finite consciousness is not anonymous awareness. It is participation in a divine life that is already knowledge, love, and delight. Infinite consciousness is not solitude.
This matters enormously. For if the deepest ground of my consciousness is participation in the divine I AM through the Logos—if my created logos subsists only in the uncreated Logos—then theosis does not reveal that my finite “I” was a mistake. It reveals that my “I” was never self-originating. The center is not removed; it becomes transparent to a deeper divine ground that it did not create.
Christ is therefore not merely an external religious object contemplated by the Christian mystic. The incarnate Logos is the perfect human manifestation of this transparency: the human “I” wholly open to the divine I AM without confusion of created and uncreated. The finite subject’s capacity to say “I” is grounded in that divine life, while its own particularity remains created, historical, and received.
Theosis is not the creature becoming the Logos by nature. It is the creature becoming transparent to the Logos by participation.
This makes Paul’s sentence almost unbearably exact: “I live”—the created hypostasis remains—“yet not I”—the possessive empirical center has lost its sovereignty—“but Christ lives in me.”
Not I, yet I.
The grammar of theosis is neither simple identity nor simple duality.
What If the Advaitin Is Describing Something Real?
At this point the comparison with Advaita can no longer be avoided.
Suppose we believe the Advaitin about the experience—not automatically about every metaphysical inference drawn from it, but about what contemplative consciousness can actually undergo. Suppose the familiar ego can disappear; suppose consciousness can seem centerless and without a second; suppose action can occur without a felt doer; suppose the boundary between knower and known can become strangely porous; suppose acquisitive desire can fall silent and what remains can be experienced as luminous being, awareness, and bliss.
Must a Christian say that such an experience is false?
A Hartian metaphysics gives no obvious reason to do so.
Hart himself is unusually hospitable to the language of Vedānta. In The Experience of God he deliberately employs the Sanskrit triad sat-cit-ānanda—being, consciousness, bliss—as a cross-cultural name for the classical metaphysical conception of God. He does not thereby become an Advaitin. But he does deny that Christian theology owns a fundamentally different ultimate reality from the one toward which the great metaphysical traditions gesture when they speak of infinite Being, infinite Consciousness, and infinite Bliss.x
If finite mind exists only as participation in infinite Consciousness, if its being is donated at every instant by infinite Being, and if every rational desire is drawn ultimately toward infinite Bliss, then contemplative consciousness might indeed discover that its ordinary separateness was in some sense unreal.
The decisive question is: unreal in what sense?
Advaita answers, in its classical Śaṅkaran form, that the deepest Self is nonindividual Brahman. The plurality of localized subjects belongs to conditioned consciousness; liberation reveals that Ātman is Brahman.
A Christian answer shaped by Hart would make a smaller and decisive claim: separation is unreal, but distinction is not.
No experienced boundary between God and creature need remain. No sense of autonomous possession need remain. No competitive relation between divine and human agency need remain. The subject-object dyad may become phenomenologically transparent. Yet none of this requires the finite person to become numerically identical with God.
Nonduality, on this account, would mean non-separation through participation.
The Christian could therefore listen to the Advaitin’s “I am Brahman” neither with easy assent nor with easy dismissal. Perhaps the experience is disclosing something Christianity has too often obscured beneath images of God as a very large object standing over against very small objects. Perhaps what is discovered is the impossibility of existing outside the divine act.
The dispute begins only when one asks what the word “I” finally means.
The Adamic Heart
Here St Sophrony introduces another possibility—one that may be as radical, phenomenologically, as universal Self-consciousness, but moves in a different direction. Hart supplies much of the metaphysical grammar here: participation, noncompetitive causality, the divine ground of consciousness, and the natural telos of deification. Sophrony, writing from within the hesychast tradition and in an explicitly experiential register, supplies something Hart generally does not attempt: a phenomenology of what such transparency can become in prayer.
For Sophrony, the destruction of egocentric individuality does not leave a private soul contemplating God in splendid isolation. Grace enlarges consciousness. The human hypostasis acquires what might be called an Adamic consciousness: humanity ceases to be an abstraction composed of billions of remote individuals and becomes “the whole Adam,” one human life borne within prayer.
This universality is not achieved by discovering that every person is secretly the same subject.
It is achieved by love.
In the prayer of Gethsemane, Christ bears the tragedy of Adam—all human history, suffering, sin, abandonment—as his own. Sophrony regards this not merely as a moral example but as a revelation of hypostatic existence. When the Holy Spirit draws a human person into the prayer of Christ, the heart expands beyond the limits of private biography. Another’s suffering becomes interior without ceasing to be another’s. The person prays not merely about humanity but, in a sense, from within humanity’s common life.
This is a very different answer to the problem of universal consciousness.
One trajectory says:
localized I → universal Self.
Sophrony’s trajectory is closer to:
localized ego → hypostatic person → universal communion.
The first overcomes limitation by expanding identity. The second overcomes isolation by expanding love.
And the phenomenology may, at certain points, be remarkably similar. The boundaries of the private ego become permeable. Consciousness is no longer confined to personal interests. The suffering and joy of others are experienced with an immediacy that ordinary individualism cannot explain. The person becomes, as Sophrony says in various ways, dynamically commensurate with humanity.
But the grammar remains relational. There is still prayer. Still address. Still “I” and “Thou.” Indeed, the more universal consciousness becomes, the more intensely personal its relation becomes.
This is why Gethsemane may be a better Christian icon of cosmic consciousness than an ocean.
The saint does not dissolve into the sea.
He discovers the sea inside his heart and begins to pray for every drop.
Light Without Possession
Sophrony’s phenomenology of uncreated light adds another dimension. In moments of profound grace, ordinary self-observation can cease almost entirely. The body may become weightless or disappear from attention; chronological time may lose its ordinary succession; visible creation can seem insubstantial beside the overwhelming reality of divine light. Yet Sophrony insists that true hypostatic existence does not vanish. Paradoxically, the persona blossoms precisely when egocentric self-consciousness falls silent.xi
This is extraordinarily close to the distinction we have been pursuing.
The disappearance of egoic self-reference is not the disappearance of the person.
The vanishing of temporal succession is not the annihilation of history.
The permeation of consciousness by divine light is not the conversion of creature into divine essence.
The person becomes transparent without becoming unreal.
And because the light is personal—the manifestation of the living God rather than an anonymous metaphysical luminosity—the culmination of contemplation remains encounter. The Christian mystic may pass beyond concepts, images, discursive prayer, and ordinary subject-object distance, yet the final structure is still face-to-face.
This is perhaps where Christian and Advaitic nonduality approach one another most closely and divide most profoundly.
The convergence is therefore more intimate than doctrinal summaries might suggest. The Christian hesychast and the Advaitic contemplative may each discover that the familiar ego was never the depth of consciousness; that action need not be experienced as the exertion of a private will; that the old partition between an interior spectator and an exterior world can become strangely insubstantial; and that desire, once relieved of its anxious need to possess, can fall into a stillness that is anything but lifeless. Yet precisely here, where the phenomenologies seem nearest, their interpretations begin to divide. For the Advaitin, such transparency may disclose the nonindividual Self; for the Christian, it may disclose a created consciousness whose deepest interior is already open to the uncreated presence of God. The disagreement concerns not whether the ego can disappear, but what—or who—is revealed when it does.
Hart himself gives the paradox an almost programmatic form in Roland. The spiritual end, he suggests, is “a perfect personal identity that’s also a perfect dispossession of self.” He can therefore place Buddhist insubstantialism and Vedāntic essentialism surprisingly near one another at one level: both can expose the pitiable littleness of the possessive ego. Dispossession does not manufacture a new person beneath the ego; it allows personal identity to become more fully manifest as openness and hospitality to the other.
That formulation is especially important here. It means that the Christian alternative to Advaita need not be the preservation of an egoic kernel against dissolution. Hart can concede the dispossession almost without reserve. What he refuses to surrender is the personal identity that becomes manifest through that dispossession.xii
But the Christian adds: at the heart of this silence is not less relation but infinitely more.
The divine I AM is not solitary: the one divine life is eternally Father, Son, and Spirit.
Desire After Desire
There remains one final phenomenological puzzle. If theosis is fulfillment, why does anything still move?
Many descriptions of liberation speak of desirelessness. If desire means the ache of incompleteness—the reaching of a deficient self toward something it lacks—then perfect beatitude should indeed extinguish it.
Hart agrees, but only after distinguishing desire from deficiency. Divine love is not need. Plenitude can be ecstatic. Fullness can overflow, give, receive, delight. And for the finite creature, participation in infinite beauty need never become static possession. Gregory of Nyssa’s epektasis becomes here the proper image of beatitude: an endless movement into God in which every fulfillment enlarges the capacity for further delight.xiii
So the phenomenology of deification contains another apparent contradiction.
Craving ceases.
Desire becomes infinite.
There is no longer the anxious motion that says: I need this object in order to become whole. But there remains—and intensifies—the ecstatic motion by which fullness goes out of itself toward inexhaustible Beauty and toward the beloved other.
This may help explain why reports of awakening can sound simultaneously desireless and saturated with love. Nisargadatta Maharaj could speak of realization as the end of personal craving while also describing love as the natural expression of awakened being; Ramakrishna could contrast selfish kāma with the sweetness of prema and insist that the liberated lover still wishes to taste the sugar rather than merely become it.xiv
Perhaps the Christian need not dispute the cessation.
Perhaps the dispute concerns what comes after it.
Not One, Not Two
We can now answer the question with which we began.
When the ego falls silent and only “I AM” seems to remain, who is saying “I”?
A strict Advaitic answer ultimately identifies the deepest Self with Brahman. The Christian disagreement is not adequately stated by calling Brahman simply “impersonal.” The sharper Hartian question is whether ultimate actuality could be metaphysically less than personal if first-personality, freedom, and expressive agency are genuine perfections of contingent being. A ground wholly devoid of the power of personhood would somehow have to produce an actuality absent from itself.
A Hartian Christian answer is stranger, and Roland in Moonlight brings us surprisingly close to it.
The “I” is genuinely mine, because I am an irreducible created person and not a divine disguise. This does not mean that a natureless “who” exists behind or prior to created nature: my hypostatic singularity is the concrete actuality of this created nature, while personhood names the expressive, first-personal depth in which that life can become gift and address. Yet my capacity to say “I” is not mine as possession. It is received from the uncreated Logos whose presence is more intimate to consciousness than the empirical ego is to itself. In theosis, the possessive center becomes transparent; agency ceases to feel competitive with grace; the world becomes interior to consciousness without being absorbed into it; desire loses the form of lack and becomes delight; and the heart expands toward the whole Adam.
At the center stands Christ: the human life in which there is no interval between the created act of human consciousness and the divine I AM of the Logos, no sinful opacity, no refusal of the Father, no private good defended against universal love.
The Christian destiny is to become transparent in that same direction.
Not to become Christ by ceasing to be ourselves, but to become ourselves in Christ.
This is why theosis can be genuinely nondual without becoming a metaphysics of identity. The opposition disappears; the distinction remains. God is not over there. The creature is not outside God. Grace is not an alien force. The divine will is not a rival will. The other is not a foreign object. And yet communion does not resolve into a solitary consciousness talking to itself.
Perhaps this is the peculiar Christian form of nonduality:
not the discovery that there has only ever been one “I,”
but the discovery that every true “I” lives from the divine I AM, and therefore can become infinitely open to every “you.”
Sophrony’s Adamic consciousness then ceases to look like an exotic mystical achievement and begins to look like the flowering of personhood itself. The heart becomes universal not because the many were unreal, but because love can make the many interior to one another without abolishing their faces.
And perhaps this is why the language of deification so often trembles between self-loss and self-discovery. The ego must indeed die. The imagined proprietor must vanish. The private center must be displaced. There may come a point at which the mystic searches for the old self and simply cannot find it.
But what remains is not nothing.
What remains is gift.
Light.
Christ.
The whole Adam.
And an “I” that at last no longer needs to belong to itself in order to be real.
Footnotes
i David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (Yale University Press, 2013); You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature (University of Notre Dame Press, 2022); and TheLight of Tabor: Toward a Monistic Christology (University of Notre Dame Press, 2025). The phenomenological development offered here is my own.
ii Hart, You Are Gods, introduction, where he notes that “Studies in Vedantic Christianity” might have served as a subtitle.
iii Hart, The Light of Tabor, especially the discussions of person, nature, and Christ’s human consciousness.
iv David Bentley Hart, Roland in Moonlight (Angelico Press, 2023), in the discussion of the ego, nous/ātman, and mystical consciousness: “I more deeply than the ego is I” and the “oceanic experience of the ego’s dissolution into fuller existence.”
v Hart, Roland in Moonlight, in the same discussion of “sublime anonymity,” the sense in which “we’re all one and the same,” and the soul as prism.
vi David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved (Yale University Press, 2019), 172–91; Hart, “What Is a Truly Free Will?,” Public Orthodoxy, April 24, 2020.
vii Sri Ramakrishna, The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, trans. Swami Nikhilananda (Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1942), 176, 379–80; Ayon Maharaj, “Hard Theological Determinism and the Illusion of Free Will,” Journal of World Philosophies 3, no. 2 (2018): 24–48.
viii David Bentley Hart, “Expression and Being – First Half: Personhood and the Good beyond Beings,” Substack, September 29, 2026. Hart describes being as expressive actuality, genuine creaturely action as participation in the divine act, pathos as privation of actuality, and personhood as an expressive structure irreducible to a merely impersonal ground.
ix Hart, Roland in Moonlight, in the comparative discussion of Eckhart, Plotinus, Augustine, and Islamic mystical metaphysics and the “final coincidence of being and knowing in God.”
x Hart, The Experience of God, especially the use of sat-cit-ānanda as a cross-cultural expression of the classical metaphysical understanding of God.
xi Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, especially the descriptions of uncreated light and the flowering of the persona/hypostasis under grace.
xii Hart, Roland in Moonlight, in the later discussion of selfhood, love, Buddhist insubstantialism, and Vedāntic essentialism: “a perfect personal identity that’s also a perfect dispossession of self.”
xiii Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite; You Are Gods.
xiv Ramakrishna, Gospel, on kāma, prema, and tasting rather than merely “becoming” sugar; Ayon Maharaj, Infinite Paths to Infinite Reality (Oxford University Press, 2018), on Vijñāna Vedānta.
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Jonathan McCormack is an attachment specialist and therapist trained in New Zealand whose work explores attachment, contemplative practice, theology, and the nature of the self. His writing has appeared on Jonathan Pageau’s The Symbolic World, among other publications. He is currently completing Vedantic Christianity: Trinity, Nonduality, and the Mystery of the Person, a book-length exploration of Christian and Vedāntic understandings of consciousness, personhood, deification, and nonduality.
“The mystery of the Trinity,” Isaac Goff observes, “saturates Bonaventure’s theological vision.”1 Bonaventure never wrote an independent philosophical treatise on the one God. His theology begins and ends with the God of the Scriptures: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit:
For Bonaventure, the First Principle, or the Trinity, frames and structures theology. He sees the eternal life of the Trinity as an ordered dynamic of emanation (origination), exemplification and consummation. Reflecting its exemplar, the entire created order, including the First Principle’s salvific purpose in the Incarnation, the grace of the Holy Spirit, and the sacramental economy, will in different degrees and modes manifest the inner dynamism of the Trinity. This insight will guide Bonaventure’s course of inquiry and exposition in a way that mirrors, in the finite realm, the eternal, Trinitarian origination, exemplification, and return.2
The ultimate purpose of sacred theology is to bring us into an ever-deepening knowledge and love of the Holy Trinity. Theology is “the only perfect wisdom,” Bonaventure tells us, because it is ordered to the knowledge that leads to eternal enjoyment of God. “In this knowledge one finds perfect taste, life, and the salvation of souls; that is why all Christians should be aflame with longing to acquire it” (Brev. 1.3).
In my judgment, Bonaventure’s creative contribution to Trinitarian reflection lies here: building on the insights of Richard of St Victor and the theologians of the Summa Halensis, he systematically grounds the gospel pronouncement “God is love” within the eternal life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. As arcane and impenetrable as his arguments may seem to those of us unschooled in scholastic theology, they address a matter central to the gospel itself: Why is God love? St Bonaventure’s answer: Because the unbegotten Father eternally generates his beloved Son, Jesus Christ …
Terminological Excursus: A Trinitarian Glossary
In the Breviloquium, Bonaventure tells us that the Godhead contains the following:
two emanations: begetting and spiration—the two modes by which the simple divine nature is perfectly communicated, thus constituting the Holy Trinity.
three hypostases (subsistent realities): if you don’t know their names, talk to your pastor.
four relations: paternity (the Father begets the Son), sonship (the Son is begotten by the Father), spiration (the Father and Son jointly breathe forth the Spirit), and procession (the Spirit proceeds from the Father and Son).
five characteristics (notiones): innascibility, paternity, filiation, spiration, and procession.
three personal properties: paternity, filiation, and procession—i.e., the properties which uniquely identifies each divine Person.
Given the above, how do we properly speak about the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? Bonaventure expounds three modes of predication concerning God: the essential mode, the personal mode, and the notional mode. Zachary Hayes elaborates:
The essential mode of predication is that by which we speak of God in terms of his divine nature and its essential attributes; the personal mode is that whereby we speak of God in terms of properties that truly distinguish the Persons from one another; the notional mode, while distinguishing the Persons, is broader than the personal mode since it involves predications that express relations among the Persons. A brief example may help to clarify these three modes of predication. It is commonly said in Christian theology that God is love. Bonaventure distinguishes three ways in which love is predicated of God in a Trinitarian context. As an essential predication, it designates that love which pertains to the very nature of God and which is predicated of all three Persons. As a personal predication, it designates that Person who is love that is produced from perfect liberality. As a notional predication, it refers to the concord of will between the Father and Son whereby they breathe the Spirit from perfect liberality. Viewed in another way, essential predications speak of the divine nature in response to the question “what” (quid); personal predications speak of a determinate Person in response to the question “who” (quis); notional predications refer to the Persons in an indeterminate way in response to the question “how” (qui). It would be a violation of logic to cross the lines between these three modes of predication, and would lead to confusion.3
Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.
The Trinitarian Emanations and the Self-Diffusive Good
But if there is the highest goodness, since it belongs to goodness to communicate itself in the highest degree, and this is most of all in producing from itself an equal and giving its being… If the highest charity, since charity is not a private love but is directed to another: therefore it requires plurality. Likewise, if the highest joy, since “of no good is the possession joyful without a companion” [Seneca], therefore for the highest joy a society and so a plurality is required. (1 Sent. d. 2, a. 1, q. 2)
Bonaventure here states the programmatic principle, inherited from Dionysius the Areopagite, that governs his understanding of the why of Trinity. The divine Being is infinite goodness and love, infinite plenitude, infinite fecundity, infinite diffusiveness: “God’s being is supreme good, wherefore it supremely diffuses itself in a threefold outpouring: utterly actual, complete, and directed toward an end, that is, most final” (Hex. XI.11). To restate along Trinitarian lines: the Father is the transcendent wellspring of absolute goodness and love and therefore communicates himself in the generation of the Son and the spiration of the Spirit. Perfect love requires three hypostases who equally possess the divine essence and are united as the one God in indivisible interpenetration (circumincessio). The Father loves the Son and the Spirit and, in them, the one divine goodness that is his own; so too the Son loves the Father and the Spirit, and the Spirit the Father and the Son. Goff succinctly sums up Bonaventure’s doctrine of the Trinity: “The Father is the sole originator of the Trinity and Godhead and communicates his nature or being to the Son, and together with and through the Son communicates his divine being to the Holy Spirit: Three Persons in one nature.”4
The Emanation of the Son
The first and eternal expression of the Father’s fecundity is the generation of the Son. As “the unbegotten fountain-fullness of goodness,”5 he communicates himself by producing one who is “similar, equal and consubstantial” (Hex. XI.9). “The Father is, indeed, ‘Father,’” Ilia Delio comments, “because, in the diffusion of the good, he (infinitely) generates a Son.”6 Bonaventure states the general principle: “The more prior a being is, the more it is fecund and the principle of others. Therefore, just as the divine essence, because it is first, is the principle of other essences, so the person of the Father, since he is the first, because from no one, is the principle and has fecundity in regard to the other persons” (1 Sent. d. 2, a. 1, q. 2).
This generation is both necessary and voluntary. Its necessity arises from the Father’s effluent goodness. As the Good, he is infinitely communicative, and his natural fecundity cannot remain unexpressed. Bonaventure states that “the natural fecundity of the Father is necessarily the ground of communicating the nature to another” (1 Sent. d. 6, a. 1, q. 1). Yet this necessity is neither coercion nor compulsion. The divine generation is wholly consonant with the divine will. “The generation of the Son is according to will as in the account of approving—but not as in the account of producing, except insofar as the will is a principle conjoined to nature; and this so that nature produces principally, with the will concomitant” (1 Sent. d. 6, a. 1, q. 2).7 The generation of the Son, therefore, is both necessary and voluntary: necessary according to the Father’s natural fecundity, yet voluntary because the Father approves and loves the Son whom he generates. Nature and will therefore coincide harmoniously in the divine emanation, though Bonaventure carefully distinguishes their roles. Nature is the principal productive principle and will accompanies it: the Son proceeds “as wholly similar and by way of nature, yet as beloved” (ibid.). The Father does not first confront a choice whether to generate; rather, the innascible Father lovingly communicates the fullness of his divine nature in the generation of his beloved Son. Necessity and love are not rivals. The Son therefore receives from the Father the infinite fullness of the one divine essence while remaining personally distinct from him. Divine generation also entails a “necessity of immutability,” Bonaventure notes: the Father eternally begets the Son. His generation of the Son (as with the procession of the Spirit) involves no passage from potency to act, no new actuality in God, and no coming into being on the part of the Son.
Bonaventure names this eternal Son both Image and Word. As Image, the Son is the perfect likeness of the Father: “For the Father from eternity begot a Son similar to himself, and he declares himself, and a likeness similar to himself, and with this, his entire power” (Hex. I.13). As Word, he is the Father’s perfect self-expression: “The Father generates a Word which is the similitude of the Father and equal to Him in all things” (Disp. Quest. q. 4, a. 2, ad 8). And because the Father knows himself perfectly, his self-expression is exhaustive: “Whence, as the Father, in knowing Himself, knows whatever can be known, so in speaking the Word, He expresses everything that He can express and everything that can be expressed in the deity” (ibid.). Nothing remains unspoken. Hence there can be no second Word: “in that Word was said whatever can be said” (ibid.). The Father has emptied himself completely in his Son.
The Emanation of the Holy Spirit
The second and eternal expression of the Father’s fecundity is the spiration of the Holy Spirit. The Son receives from the Father the totality of the divine nature and therefore shares with the Father in the second divine procession. Father and Son together spirate the Holy Spirit. The one divine will of Father and Son is fecund and diffusive: from their concord of love they together spirate the Holy Spirit as personal Love. In his Collations on the Hexaemeron, Bonaventure expressly speaks of the spiration of the Spirit as a diffusion of love:
There is diffusion through the relation of love. For it is necessary that where there is beatitude, there must be the highest love, and consequently love on the supreme level. Now love may be reflexive, connective, and charitable. Connective love, by which I love another, is more perfect than reflexive love, by which I love myself; but the charitable is more perfect than the other two, because it has a beloved and a cobeloved (condilectum): therefore this is in the divine. And so, it is with this charitable love, that the Father loves the Son, and the heat is infinite. Likewise, there love is gratuitous, owed, and commingled. Again, there love is pure, full, and perfect, as a flowing (effluens) and outflowing (effluxa) in the Son, and as flowing back (refluxa) into the Holy Spirit. (Hex. XI.12)
Yet Father and Son do not constitute two principles of the Spirit’s procession. Because Father and Son are one in nature and perfectly harmonious in will, they together are one principle. The order nevertheless remains irreducibly Trinitarian: the Father is from no one; the Son is eternally generated by the Father; and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. The Son’s power to spirate is itself received from the Father, so that even here the Father remains the fontal source of the divine emanation.
Bonaventure distinguishes the generation of the Son and the procession of the Holy Spirit according to their modes.8 Both nature and will are involved in each procession, but in different ways. In the generation of the Son, “nature is the first principle, with will accompanying”; in the procession of the Spirit, the order is reversed: will is the productive principle, with nature accompanying.9 Yet by “will” Bonaventure does not mean an arbitrary act of choice. The fecundity of the divine will is the fecundity of love: the Spirit proceeds from Father and Son by way of their mutual love. Thus generation proceeds by way of nature, while spiration proceeds by way of will—that is, by way of love and therefore in perfect freedom. Both processions manifest the infinite fecundity of the divine Good. The Father communicates the divine nature to the Son, who proceeds as his perfect likeness; Father and Son together breathe forth the Spirit as the bond of their love. The Triune God is the diffusive outpouring of Love.
The names Bonaventure deems proper to the third Person are illuminating:
The Holy Spirit is properly the Gift, the mutual bond or Love, and the Holy Spirit as such. ‘Gift’ designates him as the one given gratuitously, ‘bond’ or ‘Love’ as one given freely as the gift excelling all others, and ‘Holy Spirit’ as one given freely as an excelling gift, who is also personal. (Brev. I.3.9)
At this point you may be feeling a bit of vertigo trying to sort out the Trinitarian semantics of the word love. As we saw above, Bonaventure speaks of love in three ways: essential, notional, and personal. Essential love is the divine essence itself, the love common to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Notional love is the mutual love or concord of will between Father and Son from which the Spirit proceeds. Personal Love is the Holy Spirit himself, who proceeds from their one fecund divine will as Love and Gift. As Hayes puts it, “He who proceeds per modum amoris is himself Amor.”10
For Bonaventure, the Holy Spirit is the nexus, or bond, of the Father and the Son: proceeding from two distinct Persons, he is their one mutual and subsistent Love. “The nature of a bond [nexus] begins from distinction and tends or leads into unity: hence the ultimate and completive formal character is unity. Although therefore a bond [nexus] is of two and from two, if it is a perfect bond [nexus], it is from them insofar as they are one, not insofar as they are several” (1 Sent. d. 11, a. 1, q. 2). Bonaventure does not mean that the Spirit actively joins Father and Son together, as though they were previously separated. Rather, nexus expresses the hypostatic completion of the divine processions in the unity of love.11 As Bonaventure puts it: “It well befits a person in God, since it well befits a person to have regard to another person; hence the Holy Spirit is the love by which the Father loves the Son” (1 Sent. d. 32, a. 1, q. 2). Thomas Piolata helpfully interprets:
The Father gazes upon the Son—and the Son upon the Father—in the hypostatic love of the Spirit. The Spirit proceeds into another, e.g. into the Son from the Father, ut obiectum: that is, proceeds into the Son as the object of the Father’s love… Put simply, to proceed into the other as object (ut obiectum) is to proceed as the love by which the one-loving loves the object of love. In God, however, this love does not subsist in the will of the lover as in human love, but comes out hypostatically. Commenting on this same argument and distinction, the 17th century Capuchin bonaventurean, Bartholomaeus de Barberiis puts it concisely: “In God, the Holy Spirit is the love by which the Father loves the Son, and thus, by such love, a gaze (respectus) is conveyed to the person, as well as a hypostasis.”12
This is, I admit, very difficult to grasp. What does Bonaventure mean when he speaks of the Spirit as proceeding into another? Fortunately, Piolata comes to the rescue:
The Father and the Son thereby mutually stretch forth and incline (tendere) toward one another in the Spirit. To proceed into the other sicut obiectum means that the Spirit proceeds as the love of the Father for the Son and of the Son for the Father. Yet the Spirit subsists neither in the Father nor in the Son, but hypostatically in se as their nexus: the complete hypostatic manifestation of love-for-another (in se) realizes the fullness of communion (nexus). The Spirit is the person in whom distinction is completed in communion. The Spirit, as nexus, is the extremum “in which they [Father and Son] are joined together (coniunguntur).”13
In simpler terms, the Father reaches toward the Son in love, and the Son toward the Father, and this mutual love subsists personally as the Holy Spirit. In the Spirit, their distinction reaches its fulfillment in communion. The Seraphic Doctor pulls it all together in this passage:
For the complete account of procession these two are required: that it be from another, and that it tend toward another; but the love who is the Holy Spirit does not proceed from the Father insofar as the Father loves himself, nor from the Son insofar as the Son loves himself, but insofar as one loves the other, since he is the bond: therefore the Holy Spirit is the love by which the lover tends toward another: therefore he is love both from another and toward another, and these two embrace the account of perfect procession: therefore procession is in divine things. (1 Sent. d. 13, a. 1, q. 1)
Bonaventure refuses to treat the Father–Son relation as a dyadic unit that does not need the Spirit. The love shared by the Father and the Son finds its hypostatic consummation in the Holy Spirit, the unitas caritatis. And so we may say, “The Father and the Son love each other by the Holy Spirit, that is, by mutually harmonizing they spirate the Holy Spirit, or by spirating the Holy Spirit they are mutually connected” (1 Sent. d. 32, a. 1, q. 1).
The Spirit is thus what Bonaventure calls the unio consequens distinctionem, the union consequent upon distinction. Father and Son, distinct in Person yet one in their fecundity of will, together spirate the Spirit; and in the Spirit their mutual love reaches its personal and completive expression. “To speak of the finality of the Holy Spirit,” Piolata observes, “is thus to speak of ultimate union… The Father and the Son come together in the unitive nexus of the Spirit.”14 The self-diffusion of the divine Good thus reaches its Trinitarian consummation in the Holy Spirit.15
The Eternal Circle of Love
We are now in a position to return to a passage cited earlier from Bonaventure’s Collations on the Six Days. Having described the perfection of Trinitarian love, the Seraphic Doctor writes: “Again, there love is pure, full, and perfect, as a flowing (effluens) and outflowing (effluxa) in the Son, and as flowing back (refluxa) into the Holy Spirit” (Hex. XI.12). The language of flowing and flowing back evokes the Neoplatonic movement of procession (proodos) and reversion (epistrophē). The love that effuses from the Father through the Son returns in the Spirit. Luis Iammarone offers this insightful interpretation:
The love existing between the divine persons is pure, divested of interest, full, perfect, flowing and fluid in the Son, that is, as a current and, in turn, received in the Son and as flowed back in the Holy Spirit to its source. In the Holy Spirit, the Trinity’s life of love finds its fulfillment… The divine life, for Bonaventure, is the ebb and flow of the love between the divine persons.16
Effluens, effluxa, and refluxa—“herein lies the intelligible circle of divine love.”17
In the Sentences, Bonaventure employs the image of circle, invoking Dionysius: “the divine love is a certain eternal cycle, going forth from the best, through the best, and into the best.” Bonaventure then interprets this cycle as “the conjunction of principle with end” (1 Sent. d. 45, a. 2, q. 1). In the end is the beginning. The Father is the beginning without beginning, the fontal source of the divine processions. In the Spirit the divine movement reaches its completion and returns to its source. “As zenith,” comments Piolata, “the Holy Spirit is the point of return, as it were, the person in whom divine life returns to the Father. The end returns to the beginning.”18 The return of the Spirit is a movement of love.
Yet we must not picture this eternal circle as three Persons occupying three successive points along a circumference. There is neither temporal succession nor distance within the divine life. The Son is never generated apart from the Father’s love, nor does the Spirit appear as a third Person added to an already constituted Father and Son. The mutual love of the Father and Son and the spiration of the Spirit are inseparable. Nor should we think of “return” as another interpersonal movement, as if the Spirit is responding to the Father by loving him in return. Bonaventure is employing the metaphysical pattern of procession and return: in the Spirit, the divine procession reaches its terminus, and the end is joined to its fontal exordium. “The circle of divine life is closed in the mystery of the third divine person, in whom the circle is complete: the end returns to the beginning.”19
Here Bonaventure’s doctrine of circumincessio comes into play. In a magnificent passage later in the Hexaemeron, he compares the Trinity to the sun:
The eternal sun, Father and Son and Holy Spirit, is living, flashing, and warming: the Father supremely living, the Son supremely flashing, and the Holy Spirit supremely warming. The Father is the most lively light, the Son, the most beautiful and most flashing splendor; and the Holy Spirit, the most burning warmth. Just as the sun enlivens everything, enlightens everything, and warms everything; and just as these three—vigor, splendor, warmth—are one sun, and yet they have distinction, they are not three suns; so too the Father and Son and Holy Spirit are one God. And just as liveliness is splendid and warming, splendor is lively and warming, and warmth is lively and splendid in the visible sun itself, so too is the Father in himself and in the Son and in the Holy Spirit, and the Son is in the Father and in himself and in the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is in the Father and in the Son and in himself according to the relation of circumincession, which denotes identity with distinction. (Hex. XXI.2)
Bonaventure appropriates living light to the Father, radiant splendor to the Son, and burning warmth to the Holy Spirit, yet none exists apart from the others. Light shines and warms; splendor lives and warms; warmth lives and shines. They are distinguishable without being separable. So too with the divine Persons. The Father is in the Son and Spirit; the Son is in the Father and Spirit; the Spirit is in the Father and Son. Circumincessio thus means, in Bonaventure’s concise phrase, “identity with distinction” (Hex. XXI.2).
For Bonaventure, though, circumincession is not simply another way of affirming the unity of the three divine Persons. It is intimately connected with the procession of the Holy Spirit as the nexus of Father and Son. Piolata explicates: “As nexus, the Holy Spirit actualizes the fundamental framework of divine circumincessio. One might say that in the Spirit, circumincessio unfolds.”20 The Spirit is thus both the personal bond of Father and Son and the Person in whom their perichoretic indwelling finds its consummating expression. The eternal circle of divine Love and the coinherence of the divine Persons converge in the Holy Spirit.
The eternal circle of divine Love must therefore be seen through the lens of circumincession and Trinitarian taxis. There is an irreversible order of origin: the Father is innascible and infinite fecundity; the Father begets the Son; and in their mutual love the Father and Son spirate the Spirit—yet each Person indwells the others. The Spirit is the nexus amoris, the personal Love in whom the distinction of Father and Son reaches its perfect communion. “The Spirit reveals that order is for love—that love completes order. In the Spirit, the circle of divine life is complete as it culminates in mutual love.”21
The Seraphic Doctor’s transfiguration of the doctrine of the Trinity is now in clear view. He has accomplished what Dionysius chose not to do: he has incorporated the principle of self-diffusion and return into God’s Triadic life. The Good is the living communion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. From the fontal plenitude of goodness, the eternal Word is generated as his perfect Image; from the Father and the Son, the Spirit proceeds as personal Love; and the Spirit returns to its unoriginate source. Yet Father, Son, and Spirit intimately and completely indwell one another. The divine processions do not carry us away from divine unity. They reveal what that unity eternally is. The Triune God is a transcendent circle of Love: from the Good, through the Good, into the Good—distinction without separation, communion without confusion, each Person coinhering in the others.
Conclusion
We can now see why the mystery of the Holy Trinity stands at the heart of Bonaventure’s vision of God. God is the supreme Good, and the Good is supremely self-diffusive. The Father is the fontal plenitude of goodness and love, communicating the fullness of the divine nature by generating the Son and, with the Son, breathing forth the Holy Spirit. The divine processions are therefore the supreme diffusion of the Good: infinite goodness effusing itself infinitely, without diminution or loss. The Father gives all that he is to the Son; Father and Son pour forth their love as the Spirit. The one God is eternally fecund, eternally communicative, eternally Love.
We might gather Bonaventure’s vision of the Trinity into a simple formula of my own: the unoriginate Father is the Good, the only-begotten Son is Wisdom, and the proceeding Holy Spirit is Love. Each of these names identifies the simple divine Being, but may be appropriated to the divine Persons. Thus: the Father is the Good as the fountain-fullness whose fecundity disseminates the whole divine nature; the Son is Wisdom as the perfect Word who contains in himself the intelligibility of all things; and the Spirit is Love, the Gift who emanates from the perfect concord of Father and Son as their eternal bond. Love is its own end. Good, Wisdom, and Love belong equally and indivisibly to the hypostases via the divine nature they share, yet each name fittingly illuminates each Person within the Trinitarian taxis. The Good transcendently expresses himself in Wisdom and breathes forth Love.
And now we are ready to ask the next question. If the effluent Good already communicates himself perfectly within the Trinity, why does he create? Why does the God who lacks nothing bring into existence a world that is other than himself? With Bonaventure, we must begin our answer where all things begin: in the inexhaustible fecundity of the Triune Good.
“For, just as the Father willed his own person, so the person of the Son—who is of the same being as the Father—is not unwilled by the Son. The Son is wanted and loved by the Father, so we should understand that God’s being is voluntary and willed. The Son is freely desired by the Father, and the Son loves, wants and honours the Father in the same way, and the will of the Father in the Son is one and the same, so we can consider the Son to be in the Father, and the Father to be in the Son.” Athanasius, Against the Arians 3.66. See Tikhon Pino, “Continuity in Patristic and Scholastic Thought: Bonaventure and Maximos the Confessor on the Necessary Multiplicity of God,” Franciscan Studies 72 (2014): 107-128. Pino notes patristic antecedents regarding the intrinsic generativity of the divine being between Bonaventure and the early Church Fathers, particularly St Athanasius. ↩︎
“The two immanent emanations are distinct not only logically but in reality, since they are different both in terms of their origin and in terms of the relations which are involved. Emanations exist in God because God exists as most perfect and fecund being, in whom are found the two perfect modes of production: that of nature and that of will. But it is not sufficient to say that there are emanations; it is necessary to show how they differ from each other. For Bonaventure, this is done most adequately in terms of the differences in the point of origin and in the relations corresponding to each. Generation is from one Person, while spiration is from two. Hence, they differ in origin. The active generation of the Son in itself does not necessarily imply a third Person; active spiration, on the other hand, does, since the love of the Father and Son is directed to a third without whom it would not be perfect love; hence, the Spirit proceeds as that which can be given as gift. In brief, the first emanation is per modum naturae, concomitante voluntate, while the second is per modum voluntatis, concomitante natura.” Hayes, 233. ↩︎
See Bonaventure, 1 Sent. d. 6, q. 2; d. 10, a. 1, q. 1; d. 10, a. 1, q. 3. ↩︎
For a serious Orthodox discussion of Bonaventure’s doctrine of the Holy Trinity, see Wilfred S. Royer, “The Trinity in the Thought of St. Bonaventure: An Eastern Orthodox Perspective” (PhD diss., Marquette University, 1994). Royer is appreciative of Bonaventure’s theology but also critical, as one would expect. Perhaps most interesting is his consideration of the question, “Can the Filioque be removed from Bonaventure’s doctrine without essentially damaging it?” He ultimately answers in the negative. Unfortunately, he does not explore what an Orthodox version of the Bonaventurian doctrine might look like. ↩︎
Why Christian mystery is a surplus of meaning and never a contradiction
A few days ago I had a friendly exchange about how to teach the Trinity to children. A thoughtful Christian parent told me she was content to leave God’s oneness and threeness unreconciled, since the two, she reasoned, are irreconcilable, and she was willing to live with the dissonance. There is no doubt something admirable in that sentiment, even something attractive. It declines to tidy God up, refuses glib analogies, and springs from genuine humility, the humility of someone who knows the limits of her mind and will not pretend otherwise. It rests, nonetheless, on a confusion between two things Christians have every reason to keep apart: the incomprehensible and the incoherent.
Let me state what this essay is not about. I offer no proof of the Trinity, no attempt to make the doctrine easy, and no argument against mystery. My concern is the nature of Christian mystery itself, which can be put in a short sentence to which I will return throughout: a mystery exceeds the mind, but a contradiction cancels itself. The Christian faith has always lived by the first and has never asked anyone to believe the second.
Two kinds of darkness
When the Christian tradition calls God incomprehensible, it uses the word in a very precise sense. To comprehend something (that is to say to grasp it whole, to know it as completely as it can be known) is to encircle it, and the finite cannot encircle the infinite. John Chrysostom, preaching against those who claimed to know God’s essence as God knows himself, insisted that not even the seraphim comprehend God, though they truly know him; Thomas Aquinas, centuries later in the West, taught the same of the saints who behold God in heaven (Summa Theologiae I.12.7). Knowing and comprehending are different acts, as anyone knows who has loved a friend for forty years without ever presuming to have him figured out.
The darkness surrounding God is therefore of a peculiar kind. Aristotle observed that our minds stand to the most luminous truths as the eyes of bats stand to daylight, an image Aquinas took up gladly, since it locates the difficulty in the eye and leaves the light untouched. Ps. Dionysius, the great teacher of apophatic theology (the theology that speaks of God chiefly by saying what he is not), calls it a “superluminous darkness,” a darkness made by too much light, the cloud on Sinai into which Moses enters and sees nothing, because what he approaches is so full of being and meaning that his sight is overwhelmed.
There is another darkness altogether, and it belongs to sentences that state incoherent impossibilities: “the square is round,” “the number is both even and odd.” Aristotle stated the principle these sentences violate, and he was quite precise about it: the same thing cannot at the same time both belong and not belong to the same subject in the same respect (Metaphysics IV.3). Logicians call it the law of non-contradiction. Notice its final phrase. A contradiction is not merely two claims in tension; it is two claims that collide in the same respect, and such a collision leaves the mind with an absurdity, since each term destroys what the other asserts.
These two different types of darknesses then reveal themselves most clearly in what they do to us when we dwell on them. A mystery rewards contemplation, there’s a pay-off: the longer one stays with the Incarnation, the more there is to see. Some have contemplated this their entire lifetimes and emerged asking for more. A contradiction, however, punishes contemplation: the longer one stares at a round square, the less there is and the more absurd it becomes, until there is nothing left to behold. So it is that one can advance into a mystery, while it is impossible to advance into a contradiction. A mystery exceeds the mind, but a contradiction cancels itself.
Unreconciled or irreconcilable?
Perhaps the parent meant only that he himself cannot see how oneness and threeness fit together. If so, he is right, as is every Christian who has ever lived, for seeing how they fit would mean comprehending God. His word, however, said something else. The truths are unreconciled for us; to call them irreconcilable is to claim that what I cannot reconcile cannot be reconciled at all, and the distance between those two words is the subject of this essay.
That second claim takes my failure to see how two truths cohere and assigns it to God himself, as though the limit of my comprehension marked a fault line in the divine being. It inverts apophatic reverence. The apophatic theologian confesses that his concepts fall short of God, whereas the one who embraces contradiction implies that God falls short of coherence; the first bows before a surplus, the second attributes a deficit to the Most High. Genuine humility makes the more modest claim: I do not see how this is so, and it does not follow that it cannot be so. The gap belongs to me.
The confusion also carries an apologetic cost. Unitarians (i.e., those who confess God as one person only) and Muslims have long pressed exactly this objection, that “one God in three persons” is arithmetic nonsense. The Christian who replies, “Yes, it is irreconcilable, and I believe it anyway,” has conceded the argument and asked for credit for believing it, a credit no one should extend and the Church has never requested.
Dogma as the refusal to be incoherent
Among the least appreciated facts about Christian doctrine is that the seven ecumenical councils, and the theologians behind them, spent their energy removing contradictions and never once canonized one. To read the debates of the fourth century is to watch the Church laboring, patiently and at great cost, to specify the respects in which God is one and the respects in which God is three.
The decisive achievement undoubtedly belongs to the Cappadocian Fathers, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa, who took two Greek words long used almost interchangeably, ousia and hypostasis, and pulled them apart. Ousia would name what God is (i.e., the one divine nature, whole and undivided); hypostasis would name who God is (i.e., Father, Son, and Spirit, each distinct by his relation to the others). God is one ousia in three hypostases, and since oneness and threeness are affirmed in different respects, Aristotle’s condition for contradiction is never met.
Precision about what this achieves guards against claiming too much. The Cappadocian distinction neither explains the Trinity nor demonstrates its coherence, since demonstrating coherence would require comprehending the divine nature, which is exactly what no one can do. Its achievement is more modest and, for that very reason, unassailable: it shows that no contradiction has been proven. Aquinas, centuries later, stated the principle with precision. The truths of faith cannot be demonstrated, yet every argument brought against them can be answered, because the contrary of a truth can never be demonstrated (ST I.1.8). Mystery owes the world no proof of its consistency; it owes only the assurance that no one has shown it to be nonsense.
The Council of Chalcedon did the same for Christ in AD 451, confessing one person in two natures “without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.” Each negation blocks a route to incoherence, whether by blending the natures into a hybrid or by splitting the person in two, so that the definition stands as a fence of negations, every post exists to keep contradiction out. One may say that the history of dogma, seen in this light, is the history of the Church declining to be incoherent. Errant teaching repeatedly took the easier path and relieved the tension by dropping one of the terms; orthodoxy kept both and did the harder work of distinguishing the respects. Every council said, in its own idiom, what I affirm here: a mystery exceeds the mind; a contradiction cancels itself.
A test you can use
From all this follows a practice useful in prayer, in argument, or at the kitchen table with a child. When two truths of the faith seem to collide, ask: in what respect? God is one and God is three: one in what respect, three in what respect? Christ is God and Christ is man: in what respect each? Scripture says that God does not change (Mal. 3:6) and also that he relented from the judgment he had announced against Nineveh (Jon. 3:10): does “change” bear the same sense in both places? Most apparent contradictions dissolve under that single question, and those that resist become precise.
The test carries one condition, without which it becomes a loophole: a respect must be nameable. It is not difficult to dissolve any contradiction by announcing that the claims hold “in different respects” while declining to say which respects. “In a respect we cannot know” names no respect at all. The Cappadocian fathers named theirs, the what and the who, which is why their distinction really does work. The test cuts in runs both directions. When someone defends a doctrine by insisting that God’s goodness may look like cruelty to us and still be goodness, the same question applies: good in what respect? If the only answer is a respect beyond our knowing, in which “good” can include what by every available measure is its opposite, then the word’s meaning has been dissolved, it has been emptied of content. What presents itself as mystery is simply a contradiction.
Paradox and its counterfeit
Those who love the Church’s worship may suspect that all this logic tames something wild, for the Eastern Orthodox hymns abound in paradox: the Uncontainable contained in a womb, the Virgin who is Mother, Christ trampling down death by death. The liturgy, however, sings no contradictions. A paradox is an apparent contradiction, and its power lies in the search it provokes. The Virgin is virgin in one respect and mother in another, and the wonder lies in their joining. The One whom the heavens cannot contain is contained in a womb by taking a nature that can be contained. Death is trampled by a death that death could not hold. The resurrection is impossible to nature, since the dead do not raise themselves, yet it contradicts nothing; a miracle exceeds what nature can do, and that is a different thing entirely from a claim that cancels itself. Every such hymn can be unfolded, and the unfolding is where the awe and inspiration reside. Paradox is mystery’s rhetoric; contradiction is its counterfeit.
Objections
The strongest objection comes from analytic philosophers (i.e., those who work by the methods of formal logic) who press what they call the logical problem of the Trinity. The Father is God, the Son is God, and the Father is not the Son; if “is God” means “is identical with God,” then by the plain logic of identity (i.e., two things identical with a third are identical with each other) the Father is the Son, and the doctrine collapses. The tradition’s reply is that it never read “the Father is God” as an identity between one person and another. The phrase means that the Father possesses the whole divine nature, a claim about what he is, whereas “the Father is not the Son” concerns who he is. The proof of contradiction needs the identity reading, a premise the Church has never held. How three possess one nature without division we cannot show, since showing it would require comprehension; that the argument against it fails, we can.
A subtler objection arises within the apophatic tradition itself. Dionysius says that God is “beyond every assertion and every denial” (Mystical Theology 5), and Nicholas of Cusa, the fifteenth-century cardinal and philosopher, made the “coincidence of opposites” the key to thinking about God. Why, then, should God submit to the law of non-contradiction, which is after all one of our concepts? A careful reading answers. To place God beyond both assertion and denial is to say that neither “A” nor “not-A” contains him, which is a refusal to encircle God, the very opposite of asserting both. The opposites that coincide for Cusa are contraries (i.e., extremes on a single scale, such as the greatest and the least), which meet in the infinite because finite measure has no purchase there; once again, a distinction of respect. Nor is logic a law standing over God to which he must bow. Our reasoning participates in the rationality of the Logos, the Word through whom all things were made. Hence Aquinas can say that God cannot make a contradiction true without implying any lack of power in God, for “a round square” names no possible thing and so gives omnipotence nothing to do (ST I.25.3). If God could make contradictions true, every word he speaks could be true and false at once: “I am with you” would mean as well “I am not with you,” and revelation would tell us nothing, convey no meaning. The Logos is the guarantee that when God speaks, his word means what it says.
For readers in my own Eastern Orthodox tradition, where Vladimir Lossky, the twentieth-century Russian theologian, taught a generation to prize “antinomy” as the mark of genuine theology. Rightly understood, antinomy does indeed name a healthy instinct, the refusal to resolve paired affirmations (God is utterly transcendent; God is intimately present) into one another. Held in nameable respects such pairs are the very shape of mystery. The danger comes when antinomy is taken to mean something else: that two claims may collide in the same respect and both stand, that our failure to reconcile them discloses something about God rather than about us, and that the sharper the collision, the deeper the theology. That is to mistake a contradiction for a mystery, to treat what cancels itself as though it exceeded the mind, and those of us who have learned from Lossky ought to say so.
Inexhaustible
Gregory of Nyssa, the most daring of the Cappadocians, gave the Church its finest account of why God can never be grasped. The soul that loves God, he taught, is forever stretching forward (the word is epektasis, drawn from Paul’s “straining forward to what lies ahead.” For an in depth treatment on this subject, see You Cannot Finish God), each arrival becoming a new departure, because the one it seeks is infinite. We never reach the end of God, and for Gregory this is the whole joy and aspirationg of eternity.
Why do we never reach the end? Because there is always more to understand. Understanding never breaks down against God and leaves us staring at nonsense; it is outrun by him, forever, and to be outrun by one’s beloved is delight. Incomprehensibility, in Gregory’s hands, turns out to be another name for inexhaustibility.
Much turns on that distinction, and we do well to teach our children. A mystery exceeds the mind; a contradiction cancels itself. The Trinity belongs wholly to the first, a light too bright for our eyes, into which we will spend eternity growing. Christ asks no one to believe nonsense. He asks us to walk toward a meaning that will never run out.
In my preceding article “The Triune Good,” we followed St Bonaventure into the Holy of Holies, where the two cherubim gaze upon the mystery of God as Being and Good. Under the first name, we contemplated God in the unity and simplicity of his transcendent essence; under the second, we entered into the mystery of his Trinitarian life. The unbegotten Father is the highest Good (summum bonum) and is therefore supremely self-diffusive (bonum diffusivum sui), eternally communicating the fullness of his divine essence in the generation of the Son and the spiration of the Holy Spirit. Bonaventure’s language is surprisingly amatory. God is “loving in a loving way with love” (Itin. VI.2)—an eternal communion of Triadic Love.
A century earlier, Richard of St Victor argued for the plurality of the divine persons from the perfection of divine goodness in his classic work De Trinitate:
Now, where the fullness of all goodness is, the true and the highest charity cannot be missing. For nothing is better than charity, nothing is more perfect than charity. But no one can be said rightly to have charity in a private and own love of oneself. Therefore, love must be directed to another for being charity. Consequently, where there is not a plurality of persons there can certainly not be charity. (De Trin. III.2)
Perfect love requires another. The divine person must have a condignus, another of equal dignity whom he can love as much as himself. Supreme love cannot terminate upon an inferior beloved, for then the lover could not love another as much as himself. The fullness of charity therefore requires two persons equal in goodness and glory. Yet even this mutual love does not exhaust the perfection of charity. If the two possess together the supreme joy of their love, perfect generosity requires that they desire to share that love with another. There must therefore be a third, a condilectus, a co-beloved whom the first two love together and with whom they communicate the fullness of their common love:
It should now be noted about these divine persons that the perfection of one person demands the addition of the other [the eternal Son], and it follows that the perfection of the two persons demands the cohesion of the third [the Holy Spirit]. As it is already said above about the two persons that they must be perfect to the highest degree in order that both rightly can be loved to the highest degree by the other. Just as both have the same wisdom and the same power, both must truly have one and the same highest good will. And it belongs to the highest and totally perfect good will to share with others all the abundance of its fullness. But where there is an equal good will in both persons, it is necessary that they with the same wish and for a similar reason must want a partaker in their most high happiness. For where two mutually loving persons embrace each other with the highest desire and are delighted in each other with the highest love, then the one finds his highest happiness in the intimate love of the other, and, conversely, the other finds his highest happiness in the intimate love of the first. But as long as he only is loved by the other, he seems to own the highest sweetness of his pleasures alone; likewise, as long as the other does not have a partaker in his love he will be missing the fellowship in his highest happiness. In order that both can share these pleasures they must have a partaker in their love. (De Trin. III.15)
Divine charity thus reaches its perfection not simply in the mutual love of two persons, but in their generous communication of that love to a third. “Where there are three divine persons in mutual love,” comments Ilia Delio, “there is perfection.”1 The transcendent plenitude of love effloresces into Trinity.2 Readers unacquainted with Richard’s reasoning will no doubt be surprised by his arguments. He too, like the rest of us, affirms the Trinity on the basis of divine revelation. What he is offering here—and, as we will see, Bonaventure too—is what medieval theologians called rationes necessariae, “necessary reasons.”
The Franciscan masters who composed the Summa Halensis in the first half of the thirteenth century received Richard’s insight and incorporated it into their own Trinitarian reflections:
The highest goodness must contain the highest and most preeminent love; it is highest, insofar as one loves another as himself; and preeminent, since he wills that other person to be loved by a [third person] as that [third person] loves himself… Therefore, it is necessary to posit that the highest good loves another as himself and wills that this other be loved by [yet] another as that other loves himself; but this [love] is not able to occur in fewer than three persons; therefore, there are three persons; therefore, there is a Holy Spirit; but he does not have being unless by “proceeding”; therefore, his procession exists. (SH I, n. 304)
The Halensian theologians then joined Richard’s insight to the Dionysian principle of effluvious goodness. In their hands, writes Boyd Coolman, the bonum is imagined, as “flowing, self-diffusive, self-communicative, ecstatic plenitude, and of the summum bonum as maximally and perfectly such.”3 There are two principles of diffusion in things—nature and will. The highest natural diffusion is generation; the most perfect diffusion of the will is ecstatic love and therefore personal. Both must be found in God, for “it is essential for the highest good to be diffusive or communicative” (SH I, n. 304). The first gives us the eternal generation of the Son; the second, the procession of the Holy Spirit.
This is the theological inheritance that Bonaventure makes his own: God is the supreme Good; therefore he eternally communicates himself in his bounteous charity. Bonaventure embraces the maxim and unfolds its Trinitarian depths. Because each divine Person possesses the divine essence in mutual perichoretic indwelling, each Person’s love of himself embraces the other two; each eternally delights in and loves the others. The life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is Love.4
The Fountain Fullness of the Father
What does it mean to say that Love is self-diffusive within the eternal life of God? Delio suggests that we begin with Bonaventure’s understanding of the innascible Father as primary and first principle within the Trinity and who is therefore the fontalis plenitudo, the fountain fullness of the Godhead. As Bonaventure writes in his Sentences: “By reason of primacy the person is born to produce another from itself; and I here call primacy innascibility, by reason of which, as the ancient opinion says, there is in the Father a fontal fullness toward every emanation” (1 Sent. d.2, art. 1, q. 2). The term innascible will no doubt be unfamiliar to most readers, but it has a twofold meaning for the Franciscan: (1) it signifies that the Father has no origin and is thus synonymous with ‘unoriginate’ and ‘unbegotten’; (2) it signifies the absolute primacy of the Father. The Seraphic Doctor elaborates in scholastic fashion:
Therefore, since the first principle, by virtue of the fact that it is the first being, is supremely one; and for this reason it is supremely simple and immense; and for the same reason it is eternal, unchangeable, and necessary as may be gathered from the above; and again, by the mere fact that it is the first being, it is most perfect in producing, most fontal in emanating, and most fecund in germinating, and this with respect to things that are equal, coeternal, consubstantial, distinct, original, and ordered, it follows that the first principle, because it is first, exists eternally with the fullness of all these perfect qualities. For this reason, it is in this principle, in as far as it is first, that all beings and all knowledge come to rest. (Disputed Questions on the Mystery of the Trinity q. 8, concl.)
Here Bonaventure joins together the themes of Being, goodness, fecundity, and eternal emanation that we have been tracing. Because the divine esse is supremely good, esse itself is supremely self-diffusive; and because God is eternal and fully actual, this self-diffusion is itself eternal:
This ‘to Be’ (esse) is supremely good, therefore ‘to Be’ supremely diffuses itself in a threefold diffusion: the most actual, the most complete, and the ultimate or most ultimate. Because most actual, it always is, always was, and always will be; it always generates, is always generated, and will always generate. A creature cannot have this, that it should always be, should always have been, and shall always be: therefore it is necessary that the eternal God must emanate in this way. (Hexaemeron XII.11)
Like the Halensian theologians who preceded him, the Seraphic Doctor incorporates the Dionysian principle into the Trinity. The self-diffusiveness of the divine Being comes to personal expression in the Father as the fontal fountain of the Son and Holy Spirit. Delio helps us to better understand the Bonaventurean view of the Father:
To understand the unity of persons in Bonaventure’s trinitarian theology is to locate their origin in the good. The very “source” of infinite goodness is the Father. Because the Father is unbegotten (that is, has no prior source), the Father is first or primal. As the infinite “first person,” the Father is absolutely fecund and, thus, the fountain-fullness of goodness. It is difficult for the human mind to conceive of an infinite source of goodness but we can compare it to one of the natural wonders in North America, Niagara Falls. Anyone who has ever seen the torrents of gushing waters bursting forth over the falls has never failed to gasp in awe and wonder at the magnificent power of these waters. Imagine that the source of these bursting torrents of waters is infinite. Such an image, although a limited one, gives us an idea of what the Father’s infinite goodness is like.5
If the Father is the inexhaustibly fecund and self-diffusive source of the Godhead, what then does he diffuse? His Son and Holy Spirit! As the eminent Bonaventurean scholar Zachary Hayes explains:
The divine nature is the rich fountain from which flows the entire created universe. But Bonaventure pushes beyond this to argue that the concept of primacy may be traced into the depths of the divine nature itself, where it may be seen as the characteristic of the first divine Person. As the divine nature is absolutely prior with respect to all other essences, and thus is a se in the fullest sense of the word, so the Father, as that Person who is non ab alio [not from another], is first with respect to the other Persons. Hence, there is in God one in whom resides the fullness of divine fecundity with respect to the Persons. But since whatever God is in himself he is in act, it follows that the divine fecundity with respect to God himself must be in act, and hence there must be a plurality of Persons in God… God is the infinitely rich and fecund mystery whose eternal being is a dynamic ecstasy of goodness and love. The divine nature is not a static, monadic being, but is to be conceived more as a unifying power which, in the unity of the divine fecundity, produces a plurality without multiplying the nature. The Trinity of Persons is the fruit of the most perfect unity which, while subsisting in a multiplicity of Persons, is yet not multiplied in itself.6
In stressing the monarchy of the Father, Bonaventure locates his theology of the Trinity within the Eastern patristic construal of the Trinitarian emanations,7 perhaps drawing upon St John of Damascus’s On the Orthodox Faith, which he knew well. This makes his position distinctive within Latin scholasticism, distinguishing it from the more characteristically Augustinian presentations.
Since the fourth century, the Church catholic has confessed the eternal generation of the Son and Holy Spirit by the unbegotten Father. The early creeds focused on the divine identity of Jesus Christ and his relationship with God. Consider these lines proclaimed by the Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325: “And in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten from the Father, only-begotten, that is, from the essence (οὐσίας) of the Father.” If you recite the “Nicene Creed” every Sunday, you may be startled by the phrase “from the essence of the Father.” “I don’t remember that.” And that’s because our liturgical creed dates from the 381 Council of Constantinople. The dogmatic intent of the Nicene phrase is clear: the eternal Son is homoousios with the Father because he is begotten from the ousia of the Father. Like produces like. And so with the Holy Spirit. The same divine consubstantiality belongs to the Paraclete, whom the Second Ecumenical Council would confess as “the Lord and giver of life, who proceeds from the Father.”
Why the Good Must Be Triune
We have seen that the goodness of the Father is superabundantly fecund, flowing forth in the Son and Holy Spirit. But Bonaventure presses the matter further. Could God be the infinite Good and yet exist eternally as a solitary person? His answer is no. As with Richard, the very perfection of divine goodness requires that God be Triune. For if it belongs to the nature of the good to diffuse and communicate itself, then the supreme Good must communicate himself supremely. And the highest possible self-communication is not the creation of something less than God, however glorious that creature might be. It is the eternal communication of the fullness of the divine being to another who is equal, coeternal, and consubstantial. As Bonaventure explains in the Breviloquium:
Since faith is the first condition of divine worship and the foundation of doctrine which is according to godliness, it requires that our thinking about God be of the loftiest and most devout order. Now, our thought would not be of the loftiest order if we did not believe that God can supremely communicate Himself; and it would not be of the most devout order if, believing Him able, we believed Him unwilling to do so. Thus, if we are to think of God most loftily and most devoutly, we are to hold that He supremely communicates Himself by eternally possessing One who is beloved and One who is Mutual Love, so that He is both one and trine. (Brev. 1.2.4)
We can succinctly (inadequately as it must be given the complexity and subtlety of his thought) lay out Bonaventure’s argument in four premises.
First, the perfection of divine beatitude requires that supreme goodness and love be communicated to another:
If there is the highest beatitude; but wherever there is the highest beatitude, there is the highest goodness, the highest charity, and the highest joy. But if there is the highest goodness, since it belongs to goodness to communicate itself in the highest degree, and this is most of all in producing from itself an equal and giving its being… If the highest charity, since charity is not a private love but is directed to another: therefore it requires plurality. Likewise, if the highest joy, since “of no good is the possession joyful without a companion” [Seneca], therefore for the highest joy a society and so a plurality is required. (I Sent. dist. 2, art. 1, q. 2)
Note that here Bonaventure argues from the perfection of the divine beatitude and includes the communicability of divine goodness and love within it, right alongside the highest joy. God delights in his love.
Secondly, within the oneness of the Godhead, perfect divine love requires personal plurality: lover and beloved:
Unity is more perfect in which, together with the unity of nature, there remains the unity of love. But “love tends toward the other.” Therefore it includes the distinction of the lover and the beloved. Therefore, if the most perfect unity exists in God, it is necessary that He possess an intrinsic plurality for He has nothing outside Himself that is supremely lovable. (Disp. Quest. q. 2, a. 2, fund. 9)
The perfection of divine love therefore requires an other within God himself: one who loves and one who is beloved, distinct in Person yet one in nature. Bonaventure here is echoing Richard of St Victor.
Thirdly, perfect love requires a third: the co-beloved:
Perfect love is both generous and shared: because it is generous, it tends toward another; because it is shared, it wills that the beloved be loved by another, and that the other be loved as itself and by itself: therefore there is love and co-love; but this cannot exist with fewer than three. (I Sent. d. 2, a. 1, q. 4)
The love of lover and beloved reaches its perfection in co-love: their shared love of a third. Thus the perfection of divine love requires neither one nor two, but at least three Persons—another Victorine echo.
Fourthly, divine fecundity has two—and only two—intrinsic modes of procession; therefore there cannot be more than three divine Persons:
Supreme primacy in the supreme and highest principle demands the highest actuality, the highest fontality, and the highest fecundity… Therefore since the perfect production, emanation and germination is realized only through two intrinsic modes, namely, by way of nature and by way of will, that is by way of the word and of love, therefore the highest perfection, fontality, and fecundity necessarily demands two kinds of emanation with respect to the two hypostases which are produced and emanate from the first person as from the first producing principle. Therefore, it is necessary to affirm three persons. (Disp. Ques. q. 8, concl.)
The possibility of more than three Persons is excluded by the fact divine fecundity admits only two intrinsic modes of emanation: by nature and by will. These are eternally and perfectly realized in the generation of the Son and the spiration of the Holy Spirit. Since divine simplicity permits no further personal distinction apart from these modes of emanation, there can be no fourth Person.
What Bonaventure means by these two modes of emanation cannot be adequately explained in passing. “Nature” does not signify a mechanical or involuntary production, nor does “will” signify a divine decision to produce the Holy Spirit. The divine processions are simultaneously “natural and voluntary, free and necessary” (Itin. 2). The distinction takes us into the heart of Bonaventure’s understanding of the eternal processions of the Son and the Spirit, which will be the topic of our next article.
For an Orthodox appreciation of Richard of St Victor’s contribution, see Kallistos Ware, “The Human Person as an Icon of the Trinity,” Sobornost 8 (1986): 6-21. “In this way,” Ware writes, “Richard sees God, as the Cappadocians do, in terms of interpersonal community. In his argument there is a movement from self love (the Father alone) to mutual love (Father and Son), and so to shared love (Father, Son and Holy Spirit).” ↩︎
None of these things is necessarily bad. Most are necessary if an institution is going to function.
But none of them appears in the readings for Proper 22 as the criterion by which God judges the success of God’s people.
Isaiah gives us a vineyard.
Yahweh’s beloved has planted it carefully: fertile hill, cleared stones, choice vines, watchtower, wine vat. Everything has been done for its flourishing. And then comes the terrible disappointment:
“He expected it to yield grapes, but it yielded rotten grapes.”
At the end of the song Isaiah tells us exactly what those grapes were supposed to be. The vineyard is Israel and Judah; Yahweh expected justice, but found bloodshed; expected righteousness, but heard a cry.
That is God’s annual report.
Not attendance.
Not income.
Not construction.
Not political access.
Not institutional prestige.
Justice. Righteousness. And whether suffering people are crying out beneath the structure we have built.
The Gospel takes up Isaiah’s vineyard and turns the question toward stewardship. A landowner plants a vineyard, fences it, constructs the winepress and watchtower, and leases it to tenants. At harvest time he sends servants to receive the fruit that belongs to him. The tenants beat one servant, kill another, stone another. Finally the owner sends his son. The tenants see the heir and reveal the fantasy at the center of their violence:
“This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his inheritance.”
They have forgotten that they are but tenants.
They think the vineyard belongs to them.
That may be one of the Church’s oldest and most persistent temptations.
When Gift Becomes Possession
Matthew’s parable has a dreadful history of Christian interpretation. “The kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces its fruits” has repeatedly been heard as though Jesus were announcing the divine cancellation of Judaism and transferring Israel’s property deed to Christianity.
We should refuse that reading.
Jesus is a Jew speaking within Israel’s prophetic tradition. Matthew even tells us that the chief priests and Pharisees understand that this particular indictment is directed toward them. The issue is corrupt stewardship, not the racial or theological replacement of the Jewish people.
Indeed, the vineyard itself is not discarded. The tenants are judged precisely because the vineyard remains precious to its owner.
That distinction matters terribly, because Christians have often done exactly what the tenants do: mistaken stewardship for possession.
The history of Christian antisemitism should make preachers extraordinarily cautious here.
Christians have often read this parable as though Jesus were issuing an eviction notice to Judaism: the Jews killed the prophets and the Son; therefore God took the vineyard from them and gave it to the Christian Church. In nineteenth-century preaching, the tenants could become “the Jewish nation,” collectively guilty of ingratitude and treachery. In twentieth-century Germany, theologians of the German Christian movement went further, reconstructing Jesus himself as an Aryan opponent of Judaism and using New Testament polemic to sanctify racial antisemitism. The road from exegesis to atrocity was neither straight nor inevitable. But Christian theology had spent centuries laying some of its paving stones.
The habit did not disappear with nineteenth-century preaching. John of Kronstadt offers a particularly grim modern example. After initially condemning the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, he later apologized to the Christians of Kishinev and wrote that “the Jews themselves were primarily to blame for the pogrom.” He later became closely aligned with the monarchist far right and an honorary member of the Union of the Russian People, one of the principal Black Hundred organizations, part of the ultranationalist, monarchist far right in early twentieth-century Russia. The old theological habit of treating Jews as the rejected people could thus mingle easily with nationalist politics and conspiratorial antisemitism.
Nor is the supersessionist reading of this parable merely historical. In a 2026 sermon from Holy Cross Monastery, the preacher identifies Christians as the “other husbandmen” to whom God gave the vineyard after “the nation of the Jews proved themselves unworthy by their rejection of Christ.” The interpretive move is unmistakable: Israel failed; therefore the vineyard is now ours.
Which makes Matthew’s own ending rather inconvenient for Christian triumphalism. Jesus’ hearers do not say, “Destroy the vineyard.” They say, in effect, entrust it to tenants who will produce its fruit. The vineyard remains God’s. The warning is aimed not at an ethnicity but at unfaithful stewards. The moment the Church reads the parable as proof that it now owns what Jews lost, it begins behaving remarkably like the tenants Jesus condemns.
The irony is almost unbearable.
Christians took a Jewish Jesus, preaching a Jewish prophetic warning to Jewish leaders about the fruits God requires, and turned that warning into a weapon against Jews.
The tenants seized the vineyard again.
The Church Is Not the Owner
The appointed Psalm reinforces the point. God brought the vine out of Egypt, prepared the ground, planted it, and caused it to fill the land.
The vine belongs to God.
The vineyard belongs to God.
The Kingdom belongs to God.
And therefore the Church belongs to God too.
The Church does not own Christ.
The Church does not own salvation.
Neither does it own Scripture, the poor, the nation, not even itself.
It is entrusted with something. It is entrusted with stewardship, not ownership.
And entrusted things are judged by what we do with them.
That is where Christian history becomes an uncomfortable homiletical text.
The question is not whether Christianity succeeded institutionally. By many ordinary measurements, it succeeded spectacularly. It accumulated buildings, land, political influence, cultural authority, universities, seminaries, governments, cathedrals, publishing houses and wealth.
Here’s the difficult issue. Much of that institutional success was aided and abetted by collusion with the state, with the wealthy and powerful.
The question Isaiah asks is different, and it forces us to ask whether Christianity’s institutional success has sometimes depended upon advantages the Gospel itself should have judged.
What fruit did it bear?
That question does not permit easy self-congratulation.
When Providence Blesses the Powerful
The history of American slavery gives us one of the starkest examples of what happens when the Church mistakes an existing social order for God’s order.
Southern Christianity did not merely tolerate slavery as an unfortunate feature of society. Some of its leading theologians and preachers developed elaborate biblical and providential defenses of it.
Jerome Copulsky’s discussion of the proslavery theologians in American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order is particularly useful here because he shows how thoroughly slavery could be absorbed into a Christian account of nation, Providence and social order.
Benjamin Morgan Palmer, the celebrated Presbyterian minister of First Presbyterian Church in New Orleans, argued shortly after Lincoln’s election that the South had received a providential trust “to conserve and to perpetuate the institution of domestic slavery as now existing.” Palmer declared that Southerners should proclaim that they held this trust from God and were prepared to “stand or fall” with it.
This was not merely theological abstraction. Palmer urged his hearers to bind themselves in “sacred covenant,” pursue “separate and independent existence,” and build a new Confederacy in defense of that order.
In other words, at least some leading Southern clergy did not simply defend slavery after secession. They helped provide theological arguments for secession itself in order to preserve a slaveholding order they believed God had entrusted to them.
James Henley Thornwell, one of the most formidable Presbyterian theologians of the South, gave the same structure an even more elaborate theological justification. Copulsky quotes him defining slavery as “the obligation to labour for another, determined by the Providence of God,” and construing the master-slave relation as a morally legitimate social arrangement providentially established for mutual benefit.
Thornwell could even distinguish Christian freedom from earthly freedom so sharply that the enslaved person might, in his account, be spiritually free while remaining socially enslaved. The enslaved Christian could become one of the Lord’s freedmen while still “honor[ing] their masters on earth.”
And when the institution itself came under judgment, Thornwell’s theology made room for its preservation. Slavery, he argued, belonged to the fallen order, but Providence could extract blessing from it. The Church’s task was not “to change their social condition,” not to make enslaved persons citizens or freemen, but “to save them.”
That is the point at which Isaiah 5 becomes almost unbearably relevant.
Yahweh expects justice and hears a cry.
The theologian hears the cry and develops a theology explaining why the structure producing it should remain.
This is one of the great dangers of Christian theology: not merely that it can fail to hear suffering, but that it can hear suffering clearly and then explain why the suffering is providentially necessary.
The temptation is hardly confined to American Christianity. A saying widely attributed to John of Kronstadt declares: «Демократия — в аду, а на небе — Царство.» (“Democracy is in hell; in heaven there is a Kingdom”). The precise primary-source origin of the aphorism is difficult to establish, and it should therefore be quoted cautiously. But its popularity in monarchist Orthodox circles is itself revealing.
The theological move is familiar. Because the reign of God is called a kingdom, monarchy is treated as somehow more congruent with divine order than democracy. But basileia tou Theou is not a constitutional blueprint. The New Testament’s language of divine kingship tells us who ultimately reigns; it does not tell us whether human political societies should be governed by emperors, hereditary monarchs, constitutional republics, parliaments or town meetings.
The danger is the same one we have already seen: a contingent political arrangement becomes identified with God’s order, and resistance to that arrangement can then be portrayed as resistance to God. Whether the structure being defended is a slaveholding Confederacy or an autocratic empire, theology becomes most dangerous when it stops judging power and begins explaining why power is sacred.
Scripture Can Be Used Against the Gait of Jesus
Copulsky notes that proslavery theologians did not imagine themselves departing from Christianity. Quite the opposite. They believed they were defending biblical orthodoxy against abolitionists whom they accused of placing conscience, sentiment and modern notions of equality above Scripture. They drew on patriarchal narratives, legal texts, Pauline household codes, providence, anthropology and social theory to make slavery appear orthodox and morally intelligible.
By the mid-nineteenth century, Southern ministers could present slavery as a providentially ordained social institution and sanctify the political and economic order of the planter class.
Even more strikingly, Thornwell could portray the conflict over slavery as nothing less than a battle between Christianity and atheism. Those who sought to reform the inherited social order became enemies of Providence; those who defended hierarchy became defenders of God.
There is a recurring mechanism here.
First, identify your social order with God’s order.
Then identify criticism of that order with rebellion against God.
Finally, call the defense of your own privilege fidelity to Christianity.
Perhaps the most grotesque example in Copulsky’s chapter is Palmer’s use of Exodus imagery. Preaching on a Confederate fast day in 1861, Palmer likened the slaveholding Confederacy to Israel escaping bondage and described the United States as a modern Pharaoh refusing to let them go.
A preacher can know the Exodus story intimately and still manage to place the slaveholders among the liberated Israelites.
That should make every preacher humble about claims to possess the “plain meaning” of Scripture.
The question cannot merely be:
Can we find a text for it?
Palmer and Thornwell certainly could.
The question has to become:
Does this interpretation move with the gait of Jesus?
Paul Gives Up His Religious Capital
Philippians gives us another version of the temptation, this time within the self.
Paul lists the credentials that might give him religious confidence: circumcised on the eighth day, Israelite, Benjaminite, Hebrew, Pharisee, zealous, righteous according to the law.
Then comes the astonishing relinquishment:
“Whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ.”
This passage has sometimes been mishandled as though Paul were declaring Judaism worthless.
He is doing something far more searching.
He is abandoning the use of religious identity as capital.
His pedigree cannot become property.
His righteousness cannot become leverage.
His zeal cannot become superiority.
Even good things become spiritually dangerous when the self says, “Mine.”
Paul wants instead “to know Christ”—and not merely resurrection power. He wants participation in Christ’s suffering and conformity to Christ’s death.
There is no theosis without kenosis.
The Christian life is not accumulation upward.
It is participation in the downward movement of Christ.
Francis and the Gait of Jesus
And that brings us, on the Sunday nearest his feast, to Francis of Assisi.
Francis is useful here not because everything that later bore the Franciscan name perfectly preserved his vision. Charisms become movements; movements become institutions; institutions acquire property, regulations, survival instincts and arguments about who properly owns the founder’s memory.
But Francis himself gives us one unusually vivid historical example of another way to measure Christian success.
He relinquishes status.
He moves toward the poor.
He embraces the leper whom respectable society avoids.
He refuses accumulation.
He seeks peace rather than domination.
He addresses the creaturely world not merely as material available for human consumption but as a fraternity of beings sharing creaturehood before God.
The direction of the life is unmistakable.
He moves downward.
He walks the gait of Jesus.
If Matthew asks whether the tenants will return the fruit of the vineyard, Francis helps us imagine what that fruit might look like embodied in a human life.
Not triumph.
Not possession.
Not power.
Kenosis.
Judging the Church in History
The history of Christianity contains extraordinary beauty.
Hospitals and schools.
Abolitionists and martyrs.
Monasteries preserving learning.
Congregations feeding their neighbors.
Christians resisting tyranny.
Women and men tending plague victims.
Peacemakers.
Mystics.
Teachers.
Communities practicing reconciliation.
But the same history contains antisemitism, slavery, patriarchy, colonial domination, racism, economic exploitation, nationalism and enthusiastic alliances with political power.
How do we tell which is Christian success?
Not by asking which side had the larger institution.
Not by asking which survived longest.
Not by asking which had the most bishops, the finest liturgy, the purest confession, the richest donors, the largest membership, or the closest access to the ruler.
Isaiah offers the harder measure:
Justice. Righteousness. Listen for the cry.
Jesus offers another: Where is the fruit?
Paul offers another: What are you willing to relinquish in order to know Christ?
Francis offers another: Which direction are you walking?
Perhaps every Christian institution needs periodically to stand before those questions.
Does our theology protect the vulnerable, or explain why their vulnerability is necessary?
Does our preaching disturb unjust arrangements, or baptize them?
Does our wealth become generosity, or does generosity become the justification for retaining our wealth?
Does our political influence serve those without power, or merely increase our own?
Does our tradition help us follow Jesus, or become another possession by which we declare ourselves superior to others?
Does the Church still move in the Way of Yahweh, the gait of Jesus, and the kenotic dance of the Spirit?
Because apostasy does not always look like abandoning Christianity.
Sometimes it looks like Christianity retaining its creeds, vestments, Scriptures, bishops, pulpits, buildings and hymns while losing the gait of Jesus.
The tenants in Matthew are not condemned because the vineyard failed.
They are condemned because they forgot whose vineyard it was.
And perhaps the most dangerous moment in the life of any church comes when it mistakes possession of the vineyard for the fruit the Owner desires.
The Church has repeatedly called itself successful when it possessed the vineyard.
Fr Aidan Kimel
Jonathan Tobias
johnstamps2020
matushkamarychristine
Robert Fortuin
