Eusebius of Nicomedia, ally of Arius, denied that we can infer anything about God from what has been created. On one hand “there is God” while on the other “things created by free will.” The Word is also a creature of the free will of God. This free will is . . . . Continue Reading »
Late medieval theologians were divided, we’re told, between intellectualists and voluntarists. The first took God’s intellect to be “prior” to His will, and believed His will conforms to His reason. The latter put the will in the place of “priority” . . . . Continue Reading »
Hegel’s “sublation” seems to be a conceptual vestige of perichoresis. Sublation requires the Trinity: If all is one, nothing other can be absorbed within being destroyed. If we have sheer differentiation, all is utterly other. Hegel is right: Sublation happens. Aquinas . . . . Continue Reading »
From an article by Anselm Min. “The three Persons are thus mutually internal in the unity and totality of the divine process, of which the Father is the originating principle, the Son the pluralizing, and the Spirit the reintegrating and unifying principle, and from which none could be . . . . Continue Reading »
Levinas opposes the reduction of the Other to the Same. So, with more reason, does Athanasius: The Father and Son are not one in the sense that “one thing is twice named, so that the Same ( ton auton ) becomes at one time Father, at another time His own Son.” This is the error of . . . . Continue Reading »
Denys Turner ( Eros and Allegory: Medieval Exegesis of the Song of Songs (Cistercian Studies Series) ) has the best summary I’ve read of the problems the doctrine of creation poses for any form of Platonism. First, Platonism has difficulty explaining how anything can exist other than God: . . . . Continue Reading »
Trinity season seems to be an anomaly in the church year. The other seasons mark and celebrate what God has done for us. Advent and Christmas celebrate the incarnation of the Son, Epiphany marks His revelation to the Gentiles, Lent is a time for remembering His sufferings and death; Easter is a . . . . Continue Reading »
Hegel writes that the Trinity enables Christianity and especially Christian art to attain a concreteness impossible in Judaism and Islam: “When we state . . . of God thathe is simple One, the Supreme Being as such, we have thereby merely given utterance to a lifeless abstraction of the . . . . Continue Reading »
“Persona est rationalis naturae individua substantia,” said Boethius in his treatise on the two natures. This has been viewed as a radically deficient definition of personhood, but Peter Simpson argues that it’s got more going for it than many imagine. In response to the charge . . . . Continue Reading »
Barnes again: “For Gregory the transcendence of God includes the capacity to produce; indeed, Gregory’s conception of this capacity as a dunamis means not only that this capacity exists as a natural capacity in God, but because this capacity is the dunamis of the divine nature, . . . . Continue Reading »
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