The Eternal Circle of Love: St Bonaventure on the Holy Trinity

“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.

1. J. Isaac Goff, “On the Trinity of God,” in Bonaventure Revisited, 97. ↩︎
2. Goff, 99. ↩︎
3. Zachary Hayes, “Bonaventure’s Trinitarian Theology,” in A Companion to Bonaventure, ed. J. Hammond et al., 213-214. ↩︎
4. Goff, 107. ↩︎
5. Dominic Monti, trans., Breviloquium, xlviii. ↩︎
6. Ilia Delio, Simply Bonaventure, 44. ↩︎
7. “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. ↩︎
8. “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. ↩︎
9. See Bonaventure, 1 Sent. d. 6, q. 2; d. 10, a. 1, q. 1; d. 10, a. 1, q. 3. ↩︎
10. Hayes, 234. ↩︎
11. See Hayes, 228-233; Thomas Anthony Piolata, Ratio finiendi: The Finality of the Holy Spirit in the Theology of St. Bonaventure (Doctoral diss., Durham University, 2024), 84-88. ↩︎
12. Piolata, 114-115. ↩︎
13. Ibid., 118. ↩︎
14. Ibid., 86–87. ↩︎
15. 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. ↩︎
16. Quoted by Piolata, 122. ↩︎
17. Piolata, 122. ↩︎
18. Ibid., 96. ↩︎
19. Ibid., 121. ↩︎
20. Ibid., 167. ↩︎
21. Ibid., 94. ↩︎

Incomprehensible, Not Incoherent

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.

The Fecundity of Infinite Goodness

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.

Part 3

1. Ilia Delio, Simply Bonaventure, 43. ↩︎
2. 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).” ↩︎
3. Boyd Taylor Coolman, “The Comprehensive Trinitarianism of the Summa Halensis,” in The Summa Halensis: Doctrines and Debates, ed. L. Schumacher, 120-121. ↩︎
4. See Thomas Piolata, “God Is Love: An Investigation of Bonaventure’s Theology of the Essential Love of God,” Nova et Vetera 23, (2025): 237–261. ↩︎
5. Delio, 43. ↩︎
6. Zachary Hayes, “Bonaventure’s Trinitarian Theology,” in A Companion to Bonaventure, ed. J. Hammond et al., 209-210. ↩︎
7. Excepting the Filioque, of course. 😎 ↩︎

Judging the Church in History: the Real Criteria of Christian Success in the World

Churches are very good at counting things.

Attendance. Membership. Giving units. Budgets. Endowments. Square footage. Construction. Programs. Clergy. Staff. Influence. Institutional longevity.

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.

Jesus asks whether it bore the fruit.

No Hidden Reasons: God and the Suffering of Children

When a child suffers, Christians are tempted to say that God must have his reasons, perhaps reasons we cannot see, but reasons still. My essay “Returning the Ticket” argues the opposite, and two thoughtful readers Tuppy and Elliot from the Examined Faith podcast have recorded a sustained discussion of it that I can commend to you.

The video is below, and their own post on it is here.

It’s a generous and careful reading. They go through the argument patiently, read the comment section, and take up Job, lament, and Ivan Karamazov with great seriousness and empathy. I’m grateful to them. Their conversation also raises a few questions you may share.

No hidden reasons. I do not claim that God has reasons we can’t access. That position is skeptical theism, and it keeps the manager-God: the suffering child is still spent on something, presumably a greater good, and we simply aren’t shown the accounts. Apophasis is not a veil over God’s reasons. I hold that there is no ledger at all, no reckoning in which the child’s suffering is used for anything. It buys nothing and answers to nothing. That is why Ivan is right about the God he rejects.

Direction, not quantity. They ask whether speaking of God through Christ is cataphatic, positive speech, after all. Yes, and it has to be. Apophasis doesn’t ration how much we may say of God. It governs which way the inference runs. We reason forward from what God has shown in Christ. The theodicist reasons upward from what a good manager would permit. That requires a God behind Christ with a different calculus, and the homoousion rules that out. There is no Father who keeps books the Son doesn’t.

Transfiguration is not settlement. Paul says present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory to come. But glory is not the ledger balanced at the end. A glory that needed the horror would just be compensation with better accounting. See The Unnecessary Child where I take up Jordan Wood’s position.

Universalism belongs to the package, as they rightly saw. An evil that was unnecessary in its origin but is sustained forever hasn’t been overcome. It has been made permanent. The companion essay, Giving is the Whole of Our Story (third in the series) takes this up.

Tuppy and Elliot close by asking how Ivan becomes Job. I would say he won’t become Job by a better argument. Ivan needs a different God to look at: the one weeping at Bethany and crying out from the cross.

The Most Important Word in the World: East of Eden, Cathy Trask, and the Mystery of Evil

By John Stamps

At least once a month, Shelly and I make a pilgrimage to Steinbeck country. We have the perfect excuse: Shelly’s brother Jeff lives in Carmel. So when we cross the Salinas River near Watsonville, we say hi to Lennie and George hiding in the brush. We all wish we were “living off the fatta the lan’”—with flourishing crops, a beautiful house, thriving farm animals, and of course, rabbits. Down on Cannery Row, Mack and the boys greet us. So do Flo and the girls. Doc tells us hello. When we drive through the fertile fields of King City and past the dry, hardscrabble hills near San Lucas on our way to Pismo Beach, the Steinbecks, Trasks, and Hamiltons remind us to cherish and protect God’s creation. We promise that we will.¹

But when we drive through Salinas, I am extra, extra careful. Cathy Trask (aka Cathy Ames when we first meet her) scares the bejeebers out of me. 

What? Don’t you know who Cathy Trask is? She is arguably the most central character in East of Eden. I don’t say that lightly. Cathy sets the tragedy of the novel into motion, and long after she has checked out, what she has done refuses to stay in the past. Here is how the omniscient narrator describes her:

I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents. . . . As a child may be born without an arm, so one may be born without kindness or the potential of conscience… It is my belief that Cathy Ames was born with the tendencies, or lack of them, which drove and forced her all of her life… She was not like other people, never was from birth.

That is a disturbing description. Steinbeck does not merely tell us that Cathy does evil things. He asks us to imagine that something is missing in her from birth: kindness, conscience, even something he is willing to call a soul. Cathy is his monster.

More specifically, Cathy Trask is a she-devil. God forgive me. That is a horrible thing to call any woman, and it carries a long and ugly history. Women have too often been made into monsters, witches, temptresses, and convenient explanations for the presence of evil in the world.²

The title of Steinbeck’s novel tells us where his tragedy unfolds. East of Eden reaches back to the Bible’s first great tragedy. Cain murders his brother. Abel’s blood cries out from the ground. God judges Cain but does not surrender him to vengeance; he marks Cain so that no one will kill him. And then comes one of the saddest sentences in Genesis:

And Cain left the presence of Adonai and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden. (Gen 4:16)³

Cain goes into self-exile. But his exile is more than geographical: he goes out from the presence of Adonai. He goes east of Eden. That is where Steinbeck locates the Trasks and Hamiltons—and us. He takes the ancient tragedy of Cain and Abel and relocates it to nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. The biblical tragedy is our own. We too go out from the presence of God. Yea, verily, unto this very day.

Which brings me back to Cathy. I am intrigued by the new Netflix East of Eden series hitting our screens on October 1. Zoe Kazan created it and serves as co-showrunner, writer, and executive producer. Her grandfather Elia Kazan directed the classic-but-flawed 1955 James Dean film. Kazan has placed Cathy Trask front and center in her retelling. At seven episodes, the new series should give us a fuller treatment of Steinbeck’s sprawling novel than we got from that film—or from the more comprehensive but currently unavailable 1981 miniseries starring Jane Seymour and Timothy Bottoms.

Still, I harbor a few misgivings about what Zoe Kazan is trying to do with Cathy. Kazan wants to recover her as a human being rather than leave her as the monster Steinbeck announces at the novel’s beginning. Fair enough. But I hope she does not make Cathy’s evil too intelligible. I do not want to discover the childhood wound, trauma, or social circumstance that finally explains why Cathy became Cathy. Part of what makes Steinbeck’s Cathy so terrifying is precisely that she resists explanation.⁴

And yet Kazan may be onto something. Hannah Arendt went to Jerusalem expecting to encounter one of the architects of the Holocaust and found in Adolf Eichmann something far less impressive and, for that reason, even more disturbing. She famously called it “the banality of evil.” Eichmann did not possess the satanic grandeur we might expect of monstrous evil. He was frighteningly ordinary.

This marks the difference between imaginary evil and the evil we actually encounter in the world. Simone Weil put the matter counter-intuitively and memorably:

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.

Maybe Steinbeck himself fell into precisely that trap. He wanted Cathy to be a monster, and he made her magnificently, fascinatingly monstrous. But real evil may be considerably less interesting. And perhaps that is what Zoe Kazan sees in Cathy that I do not, yet.

Cathy is not another fallen Eve. Cathy is not another Lilith. She is closer to John Milton’s Lucifer in a female body:

Farewell Remorse: all Good to me is lost;
Evil be thou my Good.
(Paradise Lost IV.109–110) 

Her womanhood does not explain her evil. Nothing in Cathy’s history finally explains her evil. That is precisely what makes her so terrifying, and so bewildering. We keep looking for some wound, injury, or circumstance that will make Cathy finally make sense. But that is our mistake.

Steinbeck even gives us a clue to Cathy’s devilish character. Her feet are “small and round and stubby, with fat insteps almost like little hoofs.” Otherwise, however, Cathy is beautiful. And that too belongs to Steinbeck’s portrayal of evil. Evil rarely unmasks itself as sheer evil. It deceives by appearing desirable, attractive, even good. Cathy’s beauty does not make beauty suspect; it makes Cathy more dangerous because she can exploit our natural attraction to what appears good. The little hoofs may give the game away, but everything else invites us to trust what we see.

The devil, St Paul reminds us, does not necessarily look like the devil. “For Satan himself disguises himself as an angel of light” (2 Cor 11:14).

But Cathy’s evil still confronts us with the question we cannot stop asking: Why is she evil? St Augustine knew something about that temptation. Looking back upon his own attempt to discover the origin of evil, he confessed:

I searched for the origin of evil, but I searched in a flawed way and did not see the flaw in my very search. (Confessions VII.5.7)

The mistake lies in treating evil as a problem we might eventually solve with sufficient information and intelligence. Gabriel Marcel famously distinguished a problem from a mystery. A problem stands before me as something I can examine objectively and solve. A mystery is different: I am implicated in it. I cannot stand outside it as a disinterested observer.⁵

Our mistake is thinking that Cathy must finally make sense. Evil may have causes, occasions, and histories without possessing an intelligibility of its own. We can ask endlessly why Cathy is Cathy without ever arriving at an explanation adequate to the evil we encounter in her. Evil is irrational and absurd.

That distinction matters enormously when we encounter Cathy Trask. So long as Cathy is a problem to solve, evil conveniently belongs to someone else. We stare at this terrifying woman and ask, How could anyone become like that? But Genesis will not permit us to keep evil at such a comfortable distance. Sin does not crouch only at Cathy’s door. It crouches at Cain’s door. It crouches at Cal’s door. It crouches at mine. East of Eden is not merely where Cathy lives. It is where I live whenever I go out from the presence of God.

Cain and Abel provide the biblical story that East of Eden endlessly retells—in the two generations of Trask brothers, Charles and Adam, and Caleb and Aron:

And it happened at the end of some days that Cain brought from the fruit of the ground an offering to Adonai. And Abel—he too, for his part—brought from the firstborn of his flock and from their fat portions. And Adonai paid heed to Abel and his offering. But to Cain and his offering he did not pay heed. And Cain became exceedingly angry, and his face fell. (Genesis 4:3–5)

And already the story refuses to explain as much as we would like it to explain. Cain brings an offering. Abel brings an offering. Adonai pays heed to Abel and his offering but not to Cain and his. Why? Genesis does not tell us. Later interpreters have supplied answers, but the narrator leaves us with the disturbing asymmetry. What Genesis does tell us is what happens next. Cain becomes exceedingly angry. His face falls. And God speaks to him:

And Adonai said to Cain:
“Why are you angry?
And why has your face fallen?
If you do good, there is acceptance, isn’t there?
But if you do not do good,
sin is crouching at the door.” (Genesis 4:6–7a)

What a bizarre image. Sin has suddenly become a wild and dangerous animal. It crouches outside the door, waiting. Genesis does not explain where this beast came from or why it is there. It simply tells Cain: the beast is there.

But that only deepens the mystery. How did this beast find its way into God’s good creation in the first place? St Augustine gives voice in the Confessions (VII.5.7) to the question lurking behind this entire essay:

Unde malum?—Whence is evil?

It is a question we desperately want Genesis to answer. But Genesis never finally tells us.⁶

The light and the darkness, the sun, moon, and stars, the seas and the dry land, the vegetation, the great sea monsters and the swarming creatures, the winged birds and the beasts of the earth—these all belong to the creation Genesis pronounces “good.” And when God has finished creating humankind in the divine image, Genesis pronounces its highest verdict: וְהִנֵּה־טוֹב מְאֹד (wĕhinnēh-ṭôb mĕʾōd). “And behold! Very good!”

But “very good” does not mean incapable of going very wrong indeed. Evil was not God’s intention for creation, yet the possibility of rebellion, misery, and death is there. Genesis does not explain that possibility. It tells us how human beings succumb to evil; it does not tell us where evil itself ultimately comes from. The narrative itself dramatizes the point. When the serpent suddenly appears in the garden, the narrator offers no account of the origin of its malice. The serpent is simply there. And in the very next chapter, sin is already crouching outside Cain’s door.

The Bible certainly wrestles with God’s justice in the face of evil and suffering. Job does. The Psalms do. The prophets do. But it never gives a comprehensive explanation of evil that “justifies the ways of God to men,” as Milton famously announces in Paradise Lost. Genesis declares creation “very good”; it does not declare it “the best of all possible worlds.” There is no biblical equivalent of Gottfried Leibniz’s philosophical theodicy. Scripture does not explain evil away; it does not explain its origins or demonstrate why its existence was necessary. It names evil as evil and laments the suffering it causes.

Instead, Scripture repeatedly insists that evil is not ultimate. We can resist evil—and we must resist evil—even unto death. God’s good creation is real, but disorder, violence, suffering, and death remain frighteningly real within it. Their persistence does not make them sovereign. Things do not have to be this way. There is no necessity to evil.

And that brings us back to the beast crouching outside Cain’s door.

Its desire is for you.
But you—תִּמְשָׁל־בּוֹ (tîmšol-bô)—you can master it! (Genesis 4:7b)

Genesis does not explain the beast. It tells Cain that the beast need not conquer him.

Steinbeck hangs the meaning of East of Eden on a single Hebrew word from the story of Cain and Abel: timshol. After warning Cain that sin is crouching at the door and that its desire is for him, God tells him: “but you timshol over it” (Gen 4:7).

Steinbeck may have asked a single Hebrew verb to do some very heavy lifting, but he understood perfectly well what he wanted timshel to mean. Lee—the Trask family’s Chinese servant and confidant, a native Californian with several years at UC Berkeley under his belt, and probably everybody’s favorite character in the novel—can barely contain himself when he explains his discovery to Samuel and Adam:

Don’t you see?” he cried. “The American Standard translation orders men to triumph over sin, and you can call sin ignorance. The King James translation makes a promise in ‘Thou shalt,’ meaning that men will surely triumph over sin. But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—’Thou mayest’—that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.’ Don’t you see?

In the novel, Lee discovers three ways the crucial verb has been translated. “Thou shalt rule over him” sounds like a promise: you will master sin. “Do thou rule over him” sounds like a command: you must master sin. But Lee becomes enthralled by a third possibility: “Thou mayest rule over him.” Timshel. “Thou mayest.” The future remains open.

Lee disclaims:

This is not theology. I have no bent toward gods. But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul.

Methinks Lee doth protest too much. Of course this is theology. He has just made a claim about what it means to be human in a world created by God, confronted by sin, and yet not determined by it. Timshel is not merely a declaration of human freedom. It is a declaration about the limits of evil.

Please indulge me with a brief grammatical excursus. Steinbeck gets the Hebrew spelling and pronunciation wrong. Timshel misreads the vowel pointing. The qamatz under the שׁ in תִּמְשָׁל is a qamatz qatan. It should be transliterated timshol, not timshal, and certainly not timshel. Timshol/תִּמְשָׁל is simply the Qal imperfect of משׁל, “to rule” or “to master.” It does not literally mean “thou mayest.”⁷

But Steinbeck stumbled onto something real. The imperfect can have modal force: depending upon context, it can express what may, can, should, will, or must happen. Hence timshol can be heard not simply as a prediction—“you will master it”—but as possibility and exhortation: “you can master it.” But I won’t begrudge Steinbeck his grammatical error. What he does with timshel is sheer literary genius. So let’s stipulate that timshel means “thou mayest” for the remainder of the essay.⁸

And now the question has changed. Steinbeck eventually turns it upon Cal, Cathy’s son—and upon us. The question is no longer simply, Why is Cathy evil? That question allows me to remain outside the mystery, examining Cathy as though she were some strange specimen under glass. Genesis asks the far more uncomfortable question: What will I do about the evil crouching at my own door?

Cal fears that Cathy has determined what he is. His great terror is essentially this: I am my mother’s son; therefore her evil is in me. And timshel says no. Inheritance is not destiny.

But that leaves one disturbing question. Perhaps the biblical character Cathy most resembles is neither Eve nor even the devil, but Judas Iscariot, “the son of perdition” (John 17:12), who betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver and whose betrayal, the Gospels tell us, fulfilled Scripture. Steinbeck has assigned her a role from which she seemingly cannot escape. Everybody else gets timshel. Does Cathy? Does Judas?

St Thomas Aquinas (ST I, q. 2, a. 3, ad 1) confronts the intellectual problem of evil as well as anyone. Responding to the objection that an infinitely good God should permit no evil whatsoever, he appeals to St Augustine:

Since God is the highest good, He would not allow any evil to exist in His works, unless His omnipotence and goodness were such as to bring good even out of evil.

St Thomas then adds: 

This is part of the infinite goodness of God, that He should allow evil to exist, and out of it produce good.

I want to add just one word to his conclusion. Out of evil, God produces infinite good.

Perhaps that is where we should leave Cathy Trask—and Judas Iscariot too. We need not solve the problem of evil. Scripture itself speaks of “the mystery of lawlessness” (2 Thess 2:7). Evil is indeed a great mystery, but God’s steadfast love and mercy are greater still. We certainly need not pretend that we can see how every evil will finally be overcome. Timshel does not explain evil. It does something more modest but perhaps more important: it tells us that the beast need not master us.

And industrial-strength Christian hope dares to say something more. Evil will not master God. We trust the goodness, mercy, and love of God. St Paul gives this unashamed boldness its fullest expression at the conclusion of Romans 8:

But in all these things we are super-conquerors through him who loved us. For I am certain that neither Death, nor Life, nor Angels, nor Principalities, nor Existing Things, nor Coming Things, nor Powers, nor Height, nor Depth, nor any other created thing will be able to separate us from the love of God in Messiah Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:37-39)

Footnotes

1. David A. Laws, “‘Literary Landmarks’ of East of Eden,” in East of Eden: New and Recent Essays, Dialogue (2013), 25–58. Laws offers a delightful photographic tour of the actual Salinas Valley landscapes that inform Steinbeck’s novel, including the dry country around the Hamilton ranch east of King City and near San Lucas. Laws describes East of Eden as Steinbeck’s “most fully developed and ambitious” use of landscape, in which the physical contrasts of the valley become integral to the novel’s exploration of good and evil, birth and death, east and west, love and hate. ↩︎
2. Eleanor Johnson, Monstrous Bitch: A History of Terrifying Women (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2026). Johnson traces the long cultural history of the demonization of women, beginning with the Mesopotamian demoness Lamashtu and continuing through Medea, witches, vampiresses, and modern representations of female monstrosity. ↩︎
3. All translations from the Greek New Testament, the Greek Old Testament (LXX), and the Hebrew Bible are my own, unless otherwise indicated. If you’re curious about my translation choices, I always defer to Bauer-Danker-Ardnt-Gingrich (BDAG), Lust’s Greek-English Lexicon of the Septuagint, and HALOT. When I don’t, it turns out to be a mistake. ↩︎
4. Hillary Busis, “East of Eden: Zoe Kazan on How She Made Steinbeck’s Masterpiece Her Own,” Vanity Fair, August 18, 2026. ↩︎
5. Diogenes Allen, Theology for a Troubled Believer: An Introduction to the Christian Faith (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010). Allen wrote the book in response to the questions of a thoughtful Christian struggling with suffering and the problem of evil. Rather than constructing a comprehensive theodicy, Allen situates these questions within the larger grammar of Christian faith: the nature and goodness of God, creation, human suffering, the life and sacrifice of Christ, resurrection, sin, evil, and Christian hope. His aim is not so much to “solve” the problem of evil as to show how Christians may think faithfully and intelligently about suffering without isolating it from everything else they confess about God and God’s purposes for creation. See especially part two, “Suffering,” and chapter 17, “Sin, Evil, and Hope for the Future.” ↩︎
6. Christopher Rowland, The Open Heaven: A Study of Apocalyptic in Judaism and Early Christianity (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 75, citing m. Ḥagigah 2.1. The Mishnah warns against speculation concerning “what is above, what is beneath, what was beforetime, and what will be hereafter.” It is extraordinarily difficult to observe such restraint. We want to know what lies above us and what lies below us, what happened before, and what will happen afterward. But Genesis 4 relentlessly returns Cain—and us—to the present: sin is crouching at the door. What will you do? ↩︎
7. Mark D. Futato, “Gen 4:7b,” Daily Dose of Hebrew, June 1, 2016, video. Futato offers a concise grammatical and syntactical analysis of Gen 4:7b and correctly pronounces תִּמְשָׁל (timshol), in contrast to Steinbeck’s timshel. But is timshol a modal of necessity? Not necessarily. The syntax permits more than Futato’s brief treatment allows. But what else can you do with a three-minute video? ↩︎
8. For the delightful and complicated story behind Steinbeck’s timshel, see Sheila Tuller Keiter, “The Most Important Word in the World,” Jewish Review of Books (Fall 2022). The Hebrew of Gen 4:7 is תִּמְשָׁל (timshol), the Qal imperfect, second-person masculine singular, of משׁל, “to rule, govern, master.” Hence Steinbeck’s timshel does not itself mean “thou mayest”; the verb means “you will/may/can rule.” Nevertheless, Steinbeck was onto a genuine feature of Biblical Hebrew. The imperfect can carry modal force, expressing what may or can happen rather than simply predicting what will happen. Keiter also reconstructs the curious history of Steinbeck’s timshel. Steinbeck asked his editor, Pascal Covici, to consult the eminent Jewish scholar Louis Ginzberg about Gen 4:7. Keiter plausibly suggests that Ginzberg’s Lithuanian (Litvish) pronunciation may have caused timshol to sound something like timsheyl to Steinbeck, thus giving us the famous nonword timshel. Steinbeck’s Hebrew may therefore be shaky, but his theological intuition is considerably better: Cain is not told that sin must conquer him. The future remains open. ↩︎

The Triune Good: From St Dionysius to St Bonaventure

When I concluded my original series on Dionysius the Areopagite back in 2018, I was left with a question: If God is the self-diffusive Good, what does this tell us about the eternal life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? As far as I could tell, Dionysius had not incorporated the doctrine of the Trinity into his compelling metaphysical vision. I don’t mean that it is absent in his theology. He identifies the hyperousios One as the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and distinguishes the divine processions within the Godhead from the processions by which creatures come forth from God: 

We have been instructed by the sacred writings that the Father is the God-source and that Jesus and Spirit are god-growing and (as it were) full-blown off-shoots and, as it were, flowers of the theogonic divinity and lights beyond being. Yet, it is not possible either to speak or to think how these are. (DN II.7)

Dionysius “stops short,” as John Jones observes, “of developing a system of the transcendent Trinitarian relations.” The relations are real, even though “one cannot conceptually grasp” them.¹

And so I began to wonder whether the Areopagite’s radical apophaticism had introduced an unbridgeable gap between God’s immanent life and his self-revelation in the history of salvation. Karl Rahner, Thomas F. Torrance, and Robert W. Jenson had taught me decades ago the whole point of the doctrine of the Trinity is to assert the identity of the immanent and economic Trinities. In my reading of Dionysius, though, I felt as if the Triune God had disappeared into the cloud of unknowing. Yes, the One manifests himself in the theophany of creation, but where is the God who reveals himself in the biblical story? On the drama of Pascha, The Divine Names is silent.² As a priest I found myself confronted with a quandary. How do I preach the One’s ad extra processions as gospel? 

At the heart of Dionysius’s vision is the Good, ecstatically pouring itself forth into finitude, bestowing being, life, wisdom, and beauty upon creatures. Yet shouldn’t this diffusion of divine goodness also illuminate God’s own Trinitarian life? Shouldn’t his erotic manifestations bring us into the Love that is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?

After my deep dive into the corpus Dionysiacum, I learned that St Bonaventure of Bagnoregio was, in the words of the French scholar Jacques Bougerol, “without doubt the most Dionysian mind of the Middle Ages.”³ So I purchased several of his books and downloaded a number of scholarly articles, fully intending to immerse myself in them. Alas, life intervened and my project was pushed to the back burner. Seven years later, I am finally reading the Seraphic Doctor!

Bonaventure receives from the Areopagite a strong apophatic construal of divine transcendence. God surpasses every concept by which the creaturely intellect seeks to comprehend him. Thus Bonaventure can appropriate the language of the Mystical Theology and speak of the ascent to the One who is above essence and knowledge. “And this Dionysius teaches,” he writes: “to dismiss the sensible, the intellectual, beings and non-beings … and so, to enter into a ray of darkness” (Hex. II.32). Yet in this appropriation, the “God beyond being” is altered. In his Itinerarium (“journey”), Bonaventure places side by side two ways of contemplating God: as Being, the primary name that directs us to the unity of the divine essence, and as Good, the primary name that opens upon the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. What then becomes of divine superessentiality when he joins them as the terms that best reveal the mystery of divinity? “The second name is more true,” Adriaan Peperzak observes, “but being is included, not negated in goodness.”⁴ Rather than attempting to answer the question, I will simply allow Bonaventure to speak for himself. 

In the Itinerarium Bonaventure traces our journey into God, beginning with the world outside us, through the soul within us, and finally to God above us. We first contemplate material creatures as vestiges of God, discovering the divine power, wisdom, and goodness reflected throughout the sensible world. Turning inward, we contemplate the soul as the image of God in our natural powers of memory, intellect, and will, and ponder its restoration and elevation by grace. Creation and the soul thus become mirrors reflecting God and rungs of a ladder by which we ascend toward him. We are now prepared to rise above ourselves to behold divinity. Here we reach the summit of our speculative ascent. We enter the Holy of Holies and see before us the Ark of the Covenant and above it the two cherubim of glory facing each other, each gazing upon the Mercy Seat. The cherubim represent the two ways in which we may contemplate God directly—as Being and Good.

Being: He Who Is

We begin with the proper name God reveals to Moses in the Book of Exodus: He Who Is. God is Being (ipsum esse). Under this name, we attend to the divine essence in its absolute unity. Yet such contemplation is possible only because the mind itself is illuminated by “the light of Eternal Truth, for our mind itself is formed directly by Truth itself” (Itin. V.1). Bonaventure lays out his reflection on Being in three steps.

First, Bonaventure establishes Being as the first object of the intellect. Whatever we understand, we understand it first as something that is. Yet Bonaventure means more than that being is simply the most universal concept under which everything falls. The finite can be recognized as finite only in relation to the infinite, the imperfect in relation to the perfect, being-in-potency in relation to being-in-act:

Therefore, let anyone wishing to contemplate the invisible things of God with respect to the unity of [His] essence, focus in the first place on being-itself. Let that person see that being-itself is so very certain that it cannot be thought not to be, for most pure being-itself occurs only in full flight from non-being just as nothingness occurs in full flight from being. On this account, just as absolute nothing has nothing of being or its attributes, so, by contrast, being-itself has nothing of non-being, either in act or in potency, either in objective truth or in our assessment of it. Because non-being is the lack of being, it does not enter our understanding except through being; Being, moreover, does not enter our understanding through something else, because everything that is understood is understood either as non-being, or as having being-in-potency, or as having being-in-act. If, therefore, non-being cannot be understood except through being. and if being-in-potency [cannot be understood] except through being-in-act; and [if] being denotes what is the pure act of being; then being is what first enters understanding. This being is “pure act.” (Itin. V.3)

Bonaventure brings to explicit contemplation what is implicitly present in every act of understanding: esse purissimum, Being utterly free from non-being and privation. Our understanding of created being therefore already points beyond itself toward the transcendent God who is the infinite fullness of being. As Christopher Cullen puts it, our apprehension of finite being presupposes an implicit apprehension of “infinite, perfect, most pure and absolute being.”⁵ Intellect knows being not only through abstraction from sensible things, “but also through an intuitive grasp of the Divine Being.”⁶ In the words of the psalmist, “In his light we see light” (Ps. 36:9). 

Yet as Bonaventure notes, we do not ordinarily attend to the divine Being. Like an eye intent upon colors while overlooking the light by which it sees them, the intellect attends to particular beings while neglecting the divine Being through which they become intelligible:

It appears most truly, then, that, “as the eye of a bat is to the blaze of the day, so is the eye of our mind to what is by nature most evident to all” [Aristotle]. Because the eye of our mind is accustomed to the murkiness of beings and to the imaginings of perceptions, when it does gaze upon that light of the highest being, it seems to see nothing. It does not understand that darkness itself is our mind’s brightest light, just as when the eye looks at pure light, it seems to see nothing. (Itin. V.4) 

Second, when we consider God as pure being, we discern his essential attributes (Itin. V.5):

• Being is absolutely first, because it does not receive being from another;
• Being is timeless, because it neither begins nor ceases;
• Being is simple, because does it possess anything other than being-itself and therefore lacks all composition; 
• Being is thoroughly realized and actual, because it contains no potency;
• Being is perfect, because it contains within itself all perfections and no defects;
• Being is supremely one, because it contains no diversity.

Each of these attributes mutually imply the others, for we cannot think of one without thinking of the others:

You have something here to lift you up in wonder! For being-itself is the first and the very last; is timeless and utterly in this moment; is utterly simple and the greatest; is utterly realized and utterly unwavering; is utterly perfect and boundless; is utterly one, yet all-inclusive. (Itin. V.7)

Third, Bonaventure then converts the attributes into paradoxical pairs. Paraphrase cannot capture the power and beauty of Bonaventure’s contemplation:

If you wonder at this with a pure mind, you will be completely imbued with a greater light, as you see further that because it is the very last, it is, therefore, the first. For, because it is first, it does all things for its own sake and must, of necessity, be the ultimate end: the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega.

Therefore it exists in this very moment, because it timeless. For, because it is timeless, it does not flow from another, it does not lose anything of itself, and it does not change its state from one state into another. Therefore, it has neither past nor future, but only being that is in this very moment.

Therefore it is the greatest, because it is utterly simple. For, because it is utterly simple in essence, it is, therefore, the greatest in strength, because the more strength is unified, the more it is infinite. Therefore it is totally unwavering, because it is fully realized.

For, because it is thoroughly realized, it is, therefore, pure act; and as such cannot acquire anything new; it loses nothing it already has and, for that reason, it cannot be changed.

Therefore it is boundless, because it is utterly perfect. For, because it is utterly perfect, nothing can be thought of beyond it better, nobler, worthier, and, for this reason, nothing greater; every such being is boundless!

Therefore it is all-inclusive, because it is supremely one. For what is supremely one is the universal principle of all multiplicity; and for this reason, it is the universal cause of all things, efficient, exemplary, and defining of all things, as it is “the cause of existence, the ground of understanding, and the pattern for living one’s life.” 

It is, therefore, all-inclusive, not as the essence of all things, but as the utterly most excellent, the utterly universal, and the utmost ample cause of all essences, whose strength, because it is supremely unified in its essence, is, therefore, utterly most infinite and most multiple in its efficacy. (Itin. V.7)

The Seraphic Doctor concludes his meditation on Being with these words: “To behold Him perfectly is to be blessed, as was said to Moses: I will spread all good out before you.” The final word is telling.

The Good: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit

Having contemplated God under the name of Being, Bonaventure is ready to turn to the second cherub and the second proper name of God: the Good. That God is infinite goodness is revealed to us in the New Testament:

The second inspects the New, which establishes the plurality of Persons by baptizing in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, Christ our Teacher, wanting to lift to Gospel perfection the youth who observed the Law, applied primarily and precisely the name of Goodness to God. No one, he says, is good but God alone. Damascene, following Moses, says that the first name of God is “He Who is;”Dionysius, following Christ, says that the first name of God is “Good.” (Itin. V.2)

Bonaventure thus announces himself as a disciple of the Areopagite: the Holy Trinity is the Good. He now invites us to reflect upon divinity through this name. And here he takes up and develops a creative adaptation of Dionysian thought already pioneered by the early Franciscan school. The Summa Halensis had located God’s self-diffusive Goodness within God himself, above all in the Father as the fontal source of the Son and Holy Spirit. Bonaventure receives this Franciscan inheritance and makes it his own:

See, then, and pay attention: “the best” is simply that than-which-nothing-greater-can-be-thought. It is such that it cannot rightly be thought not to be, since to be is in every way better than not to be. It is such that “[the best]” cannot rightly be thought of unless it is thought of as three and one. For “good is said to be self-diffusive.” The highest good is, therefore, the most highly self-diffusive.

But the highest diffusion cannot exist unless it is realized and inherent, substantial and hypostatic, innate and voluntary, unfettered and indispensable, inexhaustible and flawless. Unless there were timelessly within the highest good a bringing-about that is realized and con-substantial, and a hypostasis of equal nobility such as a bringing-about by way of begetting and of breathing-forth, so that there is a co-beginning belonging timelessly to a timeless beginning so that there is a beloved and a co-beloved, one begotten and one breathed-forth, that is the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit; if this were not so, there would never be the highest good because it would not be absolutely self-diffusive. (Itin. VI.2)

The word “consubstantial” is crucial. Why is God the highest expression of self-diffusiveness? Because the Father eternally generates two hypostases who equally possess his selfsame essence. In his love the Father gives himself totally. Whereas Dionysius spoke of God’s self-diffusion in terms of his creation of finite beings, Bonaventure identifies the Father as self-diffusive goodness through his begetting of the consubstantial Son and his spiration of the consubstantial Spirit. Each possesses the essence that properly belongs to the inascible Father. Each is equally divine; together they are the one God.

If God were only self-diffusive in his processions toward the cosmos, he would not be absolute Goodness, “for a diffusion in time and in creation is nothing but a speck or an instant compared to the boundless nature of the timeless goodness” (Itin. VI.2). We could then conceive, either in thought or reality, of a greater Good—namely, one that communicates to another his entire substance and nature. “You can see, then,” Bonaventure concludes “that through the utmost communicability of the good, it is necessary that there be a Trinity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit” (Itin. VI.2).

Bonaventure then unfolds the divine goodness as an effusion of love:

If you can, therefore, gaze intensely with the mind’s eye on pure goodness, which is the pure realization of a beginning, loving in a loving way with love, freely given and due, and a mixture of them both; which is its fullest diffusion innate and voluntary, which is a diffusion by way of the Word in which all things are spoken, and by way of the Gift in which all other gifts are given. (Itin. VI.2) 

Bonaventure’s language here is strikingly amatory. He describes pure goodness as actus purus principii caritative diligentis amore, which Regis Armstrong renders as “the pure realization of a beginning, loving [diligens] in a loving way [caritative] with love [amore].” Three different Latin expressions for love are crowded into a single phrase, and each carries its own nuance. Caritative, derived from caritas, gives the love its specifically theological character: as Armstrong observes, caritas is typically associated with God and the good, resonating especially with the Johannine declaration Deus caritas est. Diligens, from diligere, presents the principle itself as actively loving: goodness is here an act of a lover. Amor, finally, supplies the love with what Armstrong, following Michael Casey, describes as a greater “intensity and warmth” than the more deliberative dilectio. Amor connotes a passionate love involving the whole person. Bonaventure thus contemplates the supreme Good as the pure actuality of a principle whose very act is love—loving charitably and with the fullness of amor.⁷ And this densely amatory description immediately flowers into Trinitarian fecundity: this love is “freely given and due,” its diffusion is “fullest,” and it proceeds by way of the Word and the Holy Spirit. The Trinitarian self-diffusion of the Good is, at its deepest, the self-communication of love.

Part 2

1. John N. Jones, “The Status of the Trinity in Dionysian Thought,” The Journal of Religion 80 (2000): 655. ↩︎
2. In his Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, Dionysius does interpret the sacrament of baptism as initiation into the death of Jesus, yet the resurrection of Jesus remains conspicuously absent. ↩︎
3. Jacques Guy Bougerol, Saint Bonaventure: Études sur les sources de sa pensée (Northampton: Variorum Reprints, 1989), Avant-propos. ↩︎
4. Adriaan T. Peperzak, “Bonaventure’s Contribution to the Twentieth Century Debate on Apophatic Theology,” Faith and Philosophy 25 (1998):189. ↩︎
5. Christopher Cullen, Bonaventure, 61. ↩︎
6. Ibid., 62. ↩︎
7. Regis J. Armstrong, “Commentary,” Into God, 317-318. ↩︎

Introducing St Britta

We thought it was time to make an icon of our beautiful Blue Merle Collie. Her name is Britta. She really is an infinitely sweet dog. And Jesus loves her! 😎