More on Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite

This is out of order from the other posts on Hart.

David Hart, Beauty of the Infinite
Part 2, section 1: Trinity
Thesis 2: Different and distance in Christian understanding are understood in Trinitarian terms. In this light, peace is the true form of difference, and beauty is the true form of distance.

i. Divine Difference.

Rahner’s Rule not only encourages a Trinitarian theology that moves from Jesus to the nature of the Trinity, but also one that moves from the church to the Trinity. Basil of Caesarea paved the way for this approach by emphasizing that the Spirit works at every moment of Christian life, and since only God can accomplish salvation – which involves our union with God Himself – a denial that the Spirit is God is a denial of one’s own experience and baptism. Hart wishes to explore the Trinity from the “vantage” of the church, asking “what the Spirit has made of sinful humanity, the better to grasp how the economic Trinity is known to us” (p. 179).

Specifically, he focuses on the fact that the Spirit is given to restore and complete the image of God in man, a reality that is apparent in the corporate life of the church. Thus, for instance, the “peaceful participation of Christians in one body” is “a true if vastly inexact image of how God is forever a God dwelling in and with, a God who truly takes delight and is truly at peace; the unity of the church somehow reflects the way in which God is one” (p. 179). Citing John 17, Hart makes the point that the unity of the church reveals that “original unity is original ‘reciprocity,’” a point that suggests that Trinitarian affirmation of difference is more radical than any postmodernism has imagined (pp. 179-180).

From this point, Hart launches into an attack on the notion that the doctrine of the Trinity is merely another “metaphysics of the one and the many” (p. 180), such as is evident in a Platonic division between a transcendental unity and a material plurality or in a Neoplatonic movement of emanation and return. (I have already commented on this passage in an earlier post, entitled “Not One and Many.”) Hart has several objections to this move. First, he renounces the effort to find “ideal or metaphysical causes of difference, ontic or ontological,” such that the perichoretic life of God is construes as a “substance in which difference is grounded.” Rather, the Trinity shows that Christianity has no theory of the one and the many, since this polarity is transcended from the beginning of all Christian thought. For Christian thought, difference does not “eventuate” as it does in Platonic metaphysics; it simply is, eternally. This is true, second, because the unity of the Trinity is always already a unity in communion; there is no “pure” unity to set off against a “pure” multiplicity. Adopting the language of postmodernism, Hart suggests that “God . . . is God in supplementation, repetition, and variation; and yet the one God” (p. 180). There is for Christian thought “nothing more ‘true’ than difference” (p. 181), but Christianity denies that this difference is rupture, or violence.

Because God is not a being who negates difference, for whom difference is not a negative reality at all but the fullness of His life; because He is a God who lives difference transcendently and infinitely, He does not stand over against the world. The difference between God and creation is not a dialectic, nor, Hart says, a difference of high and low; God’s gift of difference and distance is what makes place for high and low. God is not at the top of a scale of being, but, because He is transcendent and transcendent difference, He is infinitely near while also being infinitely transcendent.

Or, to put it differently, creation is not a first address of God but a further address, a modulation in God’s eternal self-utterance; being is rhetoric, the outward address of the eternally-speaking God (p. 181). There is no substance beneath or grounding the plurality of God’s being (whether that substance is “the One, the Concept, differance”). Trinitarian theology disrupts the ancient conceptions of ousia, deconstructing the difference of ousia and expression by insisting that God’s being is always already expression. Hart notes that the debates over the divinity of the Spirit were fundamentally debates concerning the “metaphysical hierarchies of Alexandrian speculation,” and the confession that the Spirit was eternally God shows that all such hierarchies “were alien to genuine Christian trinitarianism” (p. 182): “The three persons are not economic accommodations of a supreme ontic principle with inferior reality, but are rather all equally present in every divine action . . . , each wholly God, even as they differ” (p. 182). The differentiation of being is not a matter of “a system of substance mediating a supreme substance confined within its supernality” (pp. 182-183). The “tragicomic” vision of Plotinus, in which finitude and materiality are at best ambiguous, is replaced by the pure joy of the transcendent God who “comprises in his perichoresis the full scope of all difference, variation, and response” (p. 183). Creation’s departure from God is thus not really a departure from God, because it is precisely in that departure that creation manifests the “departure” and “distance” that are inherent in the Triune life itself. Precisely in its departure from God, creation “approximates God” (p. 183).

ii. Divine Perfection.

From all this, it follows that the origin is neither indeterminate chaos nor undifferentiated monad. The origin is determined in differentiation. Returning to the issue of aesthetics, Hart adopts the language of Bonaventure to claim that “In the life of God, already, there is ‘language’ – icon and semeion – but neither negation nor sublation” (p. 183). This also means that the Triune God creates without negation or violence, giving over existence peacefully to beings other than Himself, in an artistic expression ad extra.

It is important that divine perfection be understood as specifically a Triune reality, and not merely an abstract question of plurality or a purely reflexive binary relation. The key is to recognize the role of the Spirit in creation. Hart expresses it this way: “if the Spirit is God who differs yet again, an ‘unexpected’ further inflection of God’s utterance of himself, so that difference is never merely the reflex of the Same but the fullness of reply, in all the richness and dilatory excess of the language of love, then the Spirit eternally remodulates the divine distance, opens a futurity (to speak in terms of extreme analogical remoteness) to the Father and Son, a ‘still more’ in the music of divine address, awaited and possessed” (p. 184). Each person of the Trinity has his own “idiom,” expressed in the economy, and the “Spirit’s idiom is one of variation with difference” (p. 184). And in this perfection of difference, God is beautiful.

The Spirit’s difference from the Son must be affirmed, even if we do not know how to describe that difference. Neither is prior to the other, any more than knowledge and love are prior; rather “each is given by and made full in the other” (p. 185). In redemption, the Son receives the power to give the Spirit from the Father, and the Spirit receives from the Father the power to communicate the Son, so that “the Son and Spirit are both sent and sending (the Spirit sending Christ into the world, the waters, the desert, the Son sending the Spiri
t upon the disciples)” (p. 185). At the same time, the Spirit is always “between the Father and Son . . . , occupying the distance of paternal and filial intimacy differently, abiding in and ‘rephrasing’ it” (p. 185).

Hart suggests again that the economic work of Son and Spirit gives us some insight into the immanent life of the Trinity. As he says, “the Son saves persons by embracing them within the corporate identity of his body while the Spirit imparts the Son in an endless diversity of settings and draws creatures in an always peculiar fashion into that identity” (p. 185). This suggests that the Spirit that moves between Father and Son is “also the infinite openness of the divine distance, the endless articulation of the inexhaustible content of the Father’s very likeness in the Son” (p. 185). Or, “God is the event of his circumincession, in which he has graciously made room for beings” (p. 185). God makes room for beings because God is never an “inward, unrelated gaze,” and “his gaze holds another ever in regard, for he is his own other” (pp. 185-186). If the Spirit is the One who “inflects the distance” of Father and Son, then “in every ‘moment’ of that distance there is a difference, an aesthetic surfeit in its phrase; each ‘extractable’ interval is measured differently” (p. 186). God speaks Himself with a rhetorical fullness in the Spirit, and God is always “his own mediation, deferral, icon” (p. 186). There is, in short, analogy within God, not merely between God and creatures: “the coincidence in God of mediacy and immediacy, image and difference, is the ‘proportion’ that makes every finite interval a possible disclosure – a tabernacle – of God’s truth” (p. 186).

Again, Hart insists that all this has to be taken in the context of the analogical gap between Creator and creation. All of God’s perfections are “wholly convertible with his essence” (p. 186). But for creatures to reach the infinite Creator, it must be asked whether there is not a necessary negation of finitude or a reduction of the infinite to “determinate negation.” Or, perhaps the proportion id God’s difference is an absolute difference, so that God is a “Wholly Other” being that can never be reached (p. 186). To answer these questions, Hart turns in the next section to explaining from the work of Gregory of Nyssa how the finite can reach the infinite. In sum, Gregory says that God is known first as a surprising beauty that inflames desire and draws us deeper and deeper into His glory, but in such a way that “one is always at the beginning of one’s pilgrimage toward him always discovering and entering into greater dimensions of his beauty” (p. 187).