Friedman, Russell L. <Medieval Trinitarian Thought from Aquinas to
Ockham>. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Pp. xiii,195. $85.00. ISBN: 978-0-521-11714-2.
jts.oxfordjournals.org/content/61/2/833.extract
Reviewed by Therese Scarpelli Cory
In Medieval Trinitarian Thought from Aquinas to Ockham, Russell
Friedman explores the trends and patterns of development in medieval
approaches to the central problem of Trinitarian theology: In what way
are the three Persons of the Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit)
distinct from one another, such that they still constitute one single
God? In order to address this problem, medieval theologians drew on
all the resources of metaphysics and philosophy of mind at their
disposal. Their treatments of this Trinitarian question, then, are of
interest from both a theological and a philosophical perspective.
Covering a wide range of well-known and lesser-known medieval figures,
this book gives an excellent overview of the main trends in
Trinitarian theology from 1200-1350, in a thorough, engaging, and
accessible manner.
The book is divided into four chapters. Chapter 1, "The Trinity and
the Aristotelian Categories: Different Ways of Explaining Identity and
Distinction," examines what Friedman calls "the relation account" and
"the emanation account" of personal distinction in the Trinity. The
relation account, which can be traced back to Augustine and Boethius,
and whose 13th-century formulation is typified in Aquinas and
Bonaventure, holds that the distinction between the Persons of the
Trinity is constituted by their opposed relations to each other: "That
the Father has a Son and that the Son has a Father, these are the
differences that make the Father and the Son personally distinct from
each other" (9). The emanation account, championed by the
Franciscans, holds that these relations must be grounded in some
logically prior distinction between the way that each Person
"emanates" or is originated. "On the emanation account, the Father is
the divine essence in a fundamentally different way than the Son is,
and the Holy Spirit is the very same divine essence in a third totally
different way, these three different ways being how each one
originates or has being" (17). Friedman describes the incipient
stages of this emanation account in Bonaventure and traces its
development in John Pecham (who reifies these emanations) and Henry of
Ghent (whose emanation account completely excludes the role of
relation in personal distinction). Of particular interest is his
discussion of what implications the disagreement between these
traditions holds for the Roman Catholic/Greek Orthodox disagreement
over the <i>Filioque</i>.
The second chapter, "The Trinity and Human Psychology: 'In the
Beginning Was the Word,'" examines the psychological model of the
Trinity, which can be traced back to Augustine. While the
psychological model appears in both relation and emanation accounts,
Friedman argues that it became especially important to emanationist
theologians, who needed an explanation for why the Trinitarian
emanations were distinct prior to the relations that they grounded.
The chapter begins with an admirably clear overview of Augustine's
"verbum" theory and the way in which the Augustinian psychological
model was used in Henry of Ghent and the Franciscan tradition to
explain the Trinitarian emanations by reference to knowledge and love.
According to this view, the Father emanates the Son in the way that
the mind generates a self-concept or mental word, and the Spirit
originates as the love exchanged between Father and Son. After
reviewing a number of objections by thinkers of the Dominican
tradition (Aquinas, John of Naples, Durand of Saint-Pour?ain), the
chapter concludes by showing how John Duns Scotus's adoption of the
psychological model shaped crucial aspects of his philosophy of mind.
The third chapter, "The Trinity and Metaphysics: The Formal
Distinction, Divine Simplicity, and the Psychological Model,"
continues the discussion of the psychological model. It begins with
an interesting analysis of whether there is indeed a "shift" in
Trinitarian theology at the turn of the 14th century--a question
Friedman answers with a qualified yes and no. On the one hand,
Scotus's theology provides a thread of continuity between the 13th and
14th centuries to the Franciscan Trinitarian discussions, a role that
Aquinas's theology plays for the Dominican tradition. On the other
hand, Friedman also notes a "discontinuous" tradition in the 14th-
century Trinitarian theology, motivated by an increasing worry that
the previous century's Trinitarian theology had failed in its duty to
divine simplicity. This trend, which rejects the psychological,
emanationist, and relational accounts, provides the matter for the
second half of the book (chapters 3-4).
The third chapter, then, goes on to conduct the reader through the
developing debate between the "strong version" of the psychological
model (which argued that the Son's and Spirit's emanations really are
acts of the divine intellect and will) and the "weak version" (which
argued that acts of intellect and will are merely analogies for the
Trinitarian emanations). At first, the debate partners assume that
the strong psychological model implies a prior distinction between the
divine essence, intellect, and will. The Dominican tradition cited
this implication as a reason for rejecting this model. Scotus, in
contrast, goes so far as to propose a formal (rather than real)
distinction between God's essence and powers of intellect and will, in
order to save the strong psychological model.
In the next stage of the debate, however, three 14th-century
Franciscan thinkers--Peter Auriol, Francis of Marchia, and William of
Ockham--object to Scotus's solution. Their divergent responses, all
of which seek to explain the utter identity of essence, intellect, and
will in God while maintaining some version of the psychological model,
are strikingly innovative and metaphysically interesting, if sometimes
less than convincing. For example, Auriol holds that the Trinitarian
emanations do not <i>rely</i> on a prior distinction between the
divine essence and the divine powers of intellect and will, Rather,
the emanations, which occur according to the strong psychological
model, are themselves the <i>sources</i> of that distinction (which
Auriol nevertheless takes to be merely connotative). Marchia, on the
other hand, completely rejects any distinction between the divine
essence, intellect, and will, arguing that the perfections of
intellect and will are found in God only eminently: "Their functional
characteristics, i.e., what they can do, are contained in one
indistinct divine essence" (122). Ockham, finally, is caught between
a determination to uphold divine simplicity and the conviction that
Scripture and the patristic tradition propose the strong psychological
model (the Son as Word, the Spirit as Love) as a matter of faith.
Characteristically, Ockham solves the problem semantically: the term
"intellect," applied to God, merely refers to the divine essence as
generating the Son, but we have no way of knowing why this term is
used rather than any other (129-30). In these three thinkers,
Friedman finds examples of a trend of Trinitarian thought that shies
away from detailed explanations of the Trinitarian processions.
At the radical extremity of this simplicity-preserving trend in
medieval Trinitarian thought is the Praepositinianism, which provides
the topic of the fourth chapter, "The Trinity, Divine Simplicity, and
Fideism--or: Was Gilson Right about the Fourteenth Century after All?"
This chapter returns to the debate between the relation and
emanationist accounts of personal distinctions. Relation theologians
and emanationist theologists agree on the project of identifying the
unique feature that distinguishes persons of the Trinity, although
they disagree as to whether this distinction is constituted by the
opposition of relations or by prior emanations. The Achilles' heel of
this view, according to Friedman, is made explicit in Henry of Ghent,
an emanationist, and Godfrey of Fontaines, a relation theologian, both
of whom describe the Trinitarian person as being quasi-hylomorphically
constituted. For each person, the divine essence provides the "quasi-
matter," with the relation or emanation providing the "quasi-form"
that is constitutive of the distinct person (140-41). Consequently,
for some thinkers, the very quest to identify the principle of
personal distinction appeared as inherently threatening to Divine
simplicity. The originator of this radically agnostic approach to
Trinitarian theology is Praepositinus (d. 1210), who rejected the view
that personal properties <i>constitute</i> the persons, arguing
instead that the properties are the persons (i.e., the Father just is
paternity). In other words, distinctness is a basic and unexplainable
feature of the Trinity: "The divine persons just <i>are</i> distinct
from each other, and no mechanism need be given to explain their
distinction" (143). Praepositinianism was thoroughly rejected
throughout the 13th century, but resurfaced as a minority position in
the 14th century. The chapter traces the reemergence of
Praepositinianism in three 14th-century thinkers: Walter Chatton,
Robert Holcot, and Gregory of Rimini. The views of these thinkers all
amounts to the same claim: "All that we are able to do is to repeat a
fact that we know through revelation: one and the same God is three
really distinct persons. The search for simplicity in these thinkers
has ruled out any distinction, any analysis, and any explanation"
(165). From this perspective, the role of Trinitarian theology is
merely to find new and less ambiguous ways of restating what faith has
received.
The final part of Chapter 4 provides a quasi-conclusion to the book.
Here Friedman uses the Praepositinian meta-question of whether one
should even seek an account of the personal distinctions, in order to
address the "Gilsonian paradigm" of the 14th century: i.e., that 14th-
century scholasticism is pervaded and corrupted by a pessimistic
fideism. Agreeing with Gilson on the existence of a strong fideist
strain in 14th-century thought, Friedman nevertheless makes a
compelling case for a reevaluation of "the immense vitality and
creativity of later-medieval theologians" (170). Appealing to the
history of Trinitarian thought that he has just sketched, he points
out that the fideist strain was just one among many creative and
independent 14th-century solutions to the problem of personal
distinctions in the Trinity. Of particular interest is Friedman's
observation that Praepositinian Trinitarian theories in 14th-century
thought is rooted, not in a blind fideism or mere skepticism in the
power of reason, but in an adherence to the philosophical (and one
might add, Neoplatonic) position that all explanation essentially
involves a multiplicity that is incompatible with divine simplicity.
From this perspective, explanation itself <i>by its very nature</i>
violates the unity at the heart of the Trinity.
In this book, Friedman evinces a comprehensive knowledge of the texts
and authors that are central to this 150-year debate over Trinitarian
distinctions. By drawing less-familiar medieval figures back to their
rightful places in the discussion, he restores a concrete shape and
texture to the medieval debate on Trinitarian theology. In addition,
by exploring how medieval contemporaries responded to the various
theories he sketches, he is able to give a fuller sense of the lively
spirit and innovative character of the historical debate, while
offering philosophical evaluation of the merits of each theory.
Because of its wide-ranging scope and accessible presentation--
reinforced by the inclusion of diagrams, an appendix that summarizes
the main features of Franciscan vs. Dominican thought, and an
annotated bibliography--this book can serve as a helpful point of
introduction to Trinitarian thought during the 13th and 14th
centuries. Those who study medieval Trinitarian thought will also
find it useful for the orderly shape it gives to a dauntingly complex
medieval debate and the access it provides to less-well-known authors
and texts. For scholars of medieval philosophy, Friedman shows how
medieval Trinitarian questions provide a base from which to explore an
author's view on certain philosophical issues (relations, concept-
formation, the nature of rational explanation, distinction and
identity, essences, properties, and individation).
The origin of the book's four chapters in a set of four 2008 lectures,
however, can pose some difficulties for the reader. The chapters
remain relatively self-contained, and as subsequent chapters highlight
different trends in medieval Trinitarian thought, it is not always
clear how these trends are chronologically related, or whether they
are all targeting the same or different aspects of the problem of
Trinitarian distinction. For instance, the vocabulary of "relation
account" vs. "emanation account" (ch. 1) and "psychological model"
(chs 2-3) initially suggests distinct and mutually exclusive theories
of Trinitarian distinction all on the same level. As becomes clear
later, though, nearly all emanation accounts are also relation
accounts, and both belong to a different order of explanation than the
psychological model. (Indeed, Bonaventure's Trinitarian theology
incorporates all three.) Nevertheless, the appendix does much to
remedy this issue with its helpful summary of the key elements and
flashpoints of the medieval debate.
In sum, this book brings clarity and insight to a very diverse set of
theories, illuminating the contours of 150 years of Trinitarian
thought. Readers will welcome the fascinating window it offers into
the innovation and vitality of the medieval debate over the problem of
Trinitarian distinctions.
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