RTS Papers / Summer 2017
Substance and Signs in the Sentences of Peter Lombard
SUBSTANCE VERSUS ACCIDENS IN THE TRINITY
1. God known through the creation
Peter has no extensive treatment of natural theology. However, in saying that God can be known in four ways, he anticipates St. Thomas at least in the method of discovering things about God through the things that have been made. One might think of Paul’s statement in Romans 1:20 as a doctrine of signs in terms of natural theology. These four ways in the Sentences are roughly (1) from design to a Designer, (2) from mutability to the Immutable, (3) from the supremacy of spirit over body to the Maker of both, and (4) from the supremacy of intelligence over mere perception to the all-seeing Mind. I say “roughly” because Peter’s section here lacks the precision of standard treatments of natural theology. For instance, in his first way he does not specifically use the word “design,” nor the term “all-seeing Mind” in the fourth. In all of these movements of reason, we are moving from sign to substance: or, the created things analogous to God to the divine things that are attributes of God.
It is no unitarian deity that is revealed in nature. Peter later speaks of the names given to the divine persons (d.22). Notice that “Father” and “Son” are understood as names in this world. So too are “Word” and “Wisdom” and “Gift.” In this way we can understand a bit of what the divine persons are like by analogy. Now some of the names are essential to God and others are accidental. This distinction will be crucial.
Classical theologians would use the language of Aristotle in speaking of the substance of a thing and its accidens — the former being that which is essential to it, and the latter being non-essential. Take away the substance and you take away the thing itself. Take away the accidens and the essence of it is still there. When we speak of the Father’s relation to the Son, or vice versa, we are speaking of something just as essential to God as omnipotence. It will be important to notice the difference between saying that the Son is a “Son” to the Father and that the Son is “Lord” of life, for example. Neither of these belong properly to the whole Godhead and yet the word “Son” speaks of a relational attribute that is nevertheless essential, while the word “Lord” speaks of an accidental attribute related to that which is under his Lordship.
At this point the relational and the accidental are not necessarily the same. The Trinity was free to abstain from creation such that the Son would not be Lord over the life of the world, and yet the Son could never have been anything other than the Son.
Classical Christian theology would have seen a hierarchy of attributes both between God and the world, on the one hand, and the essential attributes and accidental attributes on the other. Peter chooses to flesh this out between the economic Trinity first and the ontological Trinity second. Not that he used this language, but that he first establishes what is essential and nonessential to the relationship between the persons, and only afterwards on how the divine essence is predicated, and how God relates to that which is outside of God. Yet in both hierarchies there is a flow from substance to sign.
2. Definition of the Trinity — one in essence, three in person
An attribute is sometimes ascribed to the divine substance, universally, sometimes to the divine person, properly (d.10). To repeat, both of these classes of divine attributes are essential to God. Augustinian Trinitarianism has been falsely accused of placing the ontological Trinity “above” or “behind” the economic Trinity, an abstraction that makes the three persons mere species of a genus of divine attributes. Peter’s citation of Augustine should suffice to refute this: “It is not one thing for God to be, and another to be a person, but entirely the same thing” [I.125; Augustine, De Trin, bk7.c6.n11].
It remains to be asked whether the Son is equal to the Father in substance or in relation? After all, nothing can be either like or equal to itself, so it is only ever said relatively. The answer is that they are “equal according to substance … because of the highest simplicity of that substance” [I.165]. So statements about relation between the persons are not of substance, but neither are they accidental. They are essential relational attributes. Distinctions 28 and 29 might seem to contradict what Augustine had said about the inseparability of God’s being and God’s being-a-person. Now he deals with “begotten” and “beginning” in their relative sense, so that to simply be and to be the Son are not interchangeable. Yet there is a difference between separability of being and interchangeability of words, as Augustine adds:
Although it is different to be father and to be son, yet the substance is not different, because this statement is not made according to substance, but according to relation: nevertheless, this relation is not accidental because it is not changeable [I.156; Augustine, De Trin, bk5.c5.n6].
In other words, when Augustine says that “to be” and “to be the Son” are “not the same,” he was not taking back that “It is not one thing for God to be, and another to be a person.” He means that the speaker has a different sense of attribution in his mind, not that he has two utterly different beings as his referent. What all of this demands is that the being of God per se and the divine person per se both belong to what is most essential in God.
3. The Son begotten, the Spirit preceding — our analogous knowing
Speaking of any kinds of “orders” within the Trinity is risky business. It is a short step from the very idea of hierarchy to errors such as Arianism or Subordinationism. On the other hand, there are logical orders that do not imply sequence. The most mysterious is that of the Son’s eternal generation. It is reconciled how we can say both that the Son was generated before time and that he is always begotten. We have to first understand that the whole language of “before” or “was” is problematic because it assumes temporal sequence, which is impossible of eternal generation if God created time. Since time is created, it follows that the eternal generation is not subject to temporal sequence. Sensing this the authorities said things like “forever born” [I.54; Gregory, Moralia, 5] and took issue with Origen’s preference for “forever being born” [I.55; Origen, In Ieremiam, hom. 9 n4].
Earthly generation and the succession of time are themselves signs. Thus the Son was most substantially begotten, whereas earthly children merely participate in that which signifies the most essential generation. To say it in a way that would be harder to accuse of Platonism, earthly fatherhood and sonship tells the story of the essential Fatherhood and Sonship. It may be that this is part of Paul’s meaning in Ephesians 3:14-15 where every patria derives its name from “the Father.”
The language of the Nicene Creed is alluded to in that an eternal fire would give an eternal light. The exact manner of begetting the Son and procession of the Spirit may be ineffable, but there are analogies in this world. They must remain analogies. For example the Holy Spirit is the gift of God by a “double-procession” (d.14, 18): one is eternal and ineffable, the other is temporal to sanctify the creature. He is also sent invisibly and visibly, the latter being a sign of the former. He is sent visibly in the forms of the dove, the rushing wind, and tongues of fire. In these ways the truer, invisible nature and work is “signified through the temporal movement of a creature” [I.85].
The Spirit is also called the love of God in Distinctions 10 and 17. If we remember that an attribute is sometimes ascribed to the substance (universally) and sometimes to the person (properly), we will see no contradiction between all of God as love and the Holy Spirit as the divine love in some special sense. Where does the sign come in? It is in our love of neighbor, as Peter argues from John’s epistle: “the very love by which we love God and neighbor is God” [1.89].
4. Divine unchangeability and simplicity (d.8)
Peter moves on from what distinguishes God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, to what distinguishes God as God. The immutability and simplicity of God both exclude bodily motion, parts, and affection from the outside. So when God is depicted as having body parts or moving or even being moved, this is phenomenological speech. And when we speak of God in the tenses “was” or “is” or “will be,” our words are analogical. In these cases the signs help us understand the substance that would otherwise be beyond our comprehension. “Other essences or substances are subject to accidents which produce in them changes … In God, nothing like this can occur” [I.46; Augustine, De Trin, bk5.c2.n3]. So we have knowledge by a negative way.
What is immutable is “not able to be changed” and what is simple is “not able to be divided into parts.” We get to know God by what he is not, in fact, what he must not be. Everything in creation changes and is divisible, yet there must be something both indivisible and unchanging. So there must be One who must not be these imperfections. Here we have a case where natural theology is still operative even where much of our data for God’s immutability and simplicity are derived from texts of Scripture. We know what these texts mean because of the signs already understood in the world. For example, when James contrasts God to a shifting shadow or the Psalmist does the same with a garment, these signs point to God because of how utterly insufficient they are.
5. Of those things said of God in time and relatively — (d.30)
God is known as the creator, the Lord, a refuge, giver of life, etc. When we say that God made a thing, or brought it under subjection, or raised it to life, there is a change; but the substantive change has happened in the creature, not in God. We may call “creator” or “lord” or “refuge” or “giver of life” kinds of divine attributes, but only in a secondary sense. None of these are essential attributes of God. If they were then God would be eternally related to that which he creates, or to that which he rules over, or to that which seeks refuge in him, and so forth. This would make God dependent on the creation. Understanding this is important for proper theological order.
To the degree that we fail to square one of these relational qualities between God and the creation with those more essential divine attributes, which God is in himself, we will have part of our theology defined by what is not-God. This is a good glimpse into what was meant by way of introduction about theological order. Not only should we not define God by what is a creature, but we should not even define God by that which God does in relation to the creature. To be sure, God’s promising act to Abraham, for example, is not Abraham. But neither is in God in his eternal essence. If it was, then God would not have been free to either covenant with Abraham or not. The relational attribute — God to Abraham — would be essential to God’s being. Would this any longer be monotheism?
6. Divine knowledge and will with respect to things outside of him
There is a broad category of God’s wisdom for Lombard. It includes knowledge, foreknowledge, providence, disposition, predestination, and, to a certain extent, will (d.35). The dilemma he sets forth shows the same concern that the divine substance precedes any relation of God to the world. If there were no future things, would God be able not to know them? It should be remembered that he asks this a few centuries before Molina and even further before all of the technical language has been added to the debate over so-called Middle Knowledge. There is no need to introduce the terms here, except to say that this inability to know “future things” does not necessarily address the distinction between the possible and the actual. Are counterfactuals things? If so, what kind of things? Leave it to some contemporary philosopher of religion to answer that since God’s natural knowledge is pre-volitional, he has “no control over it.”
The three levels of divine knowledge — natural, middle, and free — are being defined from the ground up. The reasoning of Lombard is better. He first says that it is possible for foreknowledge of a thing to not be in God for the same reason as the attributes of creator and Lord and refuge are relative. They are related to things strictly unnecessary. There is an equivocation here. The objection is calling “a thing” what is not in fact. It is using the sense of actuality without specification of it being either possible or actual.
What then if the objection was more specific? What if it was asked of Peter to weigh in on the question of God’s foreknowledge of possibilities? The answer would lie in the fact that all created things were in God’s knowledge before he made them. These objects were in the mind of God “not in their own nature” [I.197; Augustine, De Genesi ad Litteram, 5 c18 n36], but rather according to God’s reason. How does this help us? If the divine knowledge was an effect of the created thing’s existence, then several essential attributes are compromised, most obviously his omniscience, immutability and impassibility.
Even if the known things were co-eternal with him, such creaturely objects of his knowledge would be a nature that binds him against his will. But since God creates all of the natures of all things outside of himself, and since this act of creation is divinely volitional, it is difficult to see what point the modern religious philosopher has in supposing the natural knowledge is of things independent of his volition. This assumes a sequence in which the first creative act and the second act of “what to do about those natures” are divided into chronological decrees. Granted that Peter does not tackle this question in all of its modern philosophical verbiage, his conception of God is better suited to answer these difficulties.
The knowledge and the will of God intersect for Lombard in a way that does not seem wholly satisfactory. At least we can say that both attributes are absolutely essential. All that which is known and willed, outside of him, is secondary to knowledge and will per se.
God’s knowledge covers eternal and temporal things, past, present, and future things, good and evil things. But is foreknowledge the cause of things, or things the cause of foreknowledge? Even the term “before he made them” implies temporal sequence, which does not apply either to God’s knowledge or his determination. Lombard’s conclusion: God’s knowledge is causal, but only in the “good pleasure” sense of his knowledge — i. e. as inseparable from determination. Lombard seems partly motivated by denying that God is the author of evil. Hence evil is foreknown by God only in the intellectual sense. As God’s knowledge can neither be increased or diminished (d.39), so the number of the elect and reprobate cannot be altered (d.40). In this way predestination is seen as a species of knowledge.
What follows is to ask whether these created things are in God’s essence or through God’s essence (d.36). The answer is the latter. The same is true of evil things. God knows evil things through knowledge, but good things through knowledge and approbation and good pleasure.
God’s will is of the divine essence and it has “signs.” The divine will is not an effect or motion, which cannot be in God. His will of essence is not “all the things he does,” or else all things would be God. The divine will being perfectly good, no other ultimate cause for all things is to be sought. God’s will is spoken of diversely in Scripture, not because the essential will changes, but that the sense of the author varies: e. g. precept, prohibition, counsel, permission, operation. This breakdown helps Lombard embrace Augustine’s treatment of God ordaining evil by permission.
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