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Consubstantiality Beyond Perichoresis: Personal Threeness, Intra-divine Relations, and

Personal Consubstantiality in Augustines, Thomas Aquinas and Maximus the
Confessors Trinitarian Theologies

Nicholas Loudovikos, University Ecclesiastical Academy of Thessaloniki, University of

Winchester, Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies, Cambridge

Abstract

Modern theological discussions of the Trinity have at least shown, in my opinion, that the
tension, in both East and West, between the different possible ways of theologizing about the
Trinity has not so much to do with underlying personalist or essentialist tendencies, but to a
greater or lesser degree with our way of understanding the inner connection between the
different levels and dimensions of Divine Being. For example, is the person ontologically
detached from nature as freedom is from necessity? Are the divine energies, logoi, or wills
identical with divine nature or not, and in what sense are they or are they not identical? Do
the divine Persons possess the divine nature or are they included in it and identical to it, etc.?
Following twenty years of study, I am more and more convinced that one of the most crucial
factors concerning our ways of understanding the Trinity is the concept of consubstantiality.
The form this concept acquired in the works of the Cappadocians and Maximus the Confessor
is so explicitly neglected or even rejected by modern Orthodox personalists and, at the same
time, ignored by many of the contemporary Augustinian or Thomist scholars, or even,
perhaps, by Augustine and Thomas themselves. However, the Patristic understanding of
homoousion offers broader perspectives to our cognizance of perichoresis and has something
important to suggest to our understanding of the Filioque.

Introduction

The appearance of G. L. Prestiges God in Patristic Thought initiated a sort of

polarization between Eastern and Western Trinitarian theologies. What seemed to be at stake

to many was a conflict between the personalistic or the essentialistic character(s) of

Trinitarian ontology, inasmuch as the supposedly personalist East contradicted the

supposedly essentialist West and vice versa, and without any real possibility of synthesizing

the two. Today we know that this was a rather schematic way of understanding the

difference, resulting in an unfair opposition between East and West. Following twenty years

of study, I am more and more convinced that one of the most crucial factors concerning our
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ways of understanding the Trinity is the concept of consubstantiality. The form this concept

acquired in the works of the Cappadocians and Maximus the Confessor is so explicitly

neglected or even rejected by modern Orthodox personalists and, at the same time, ignored by

many of the contemporary Augustinian or Thomist scholars, or even, perhaps, by Augustine

and Thomas themselves, as we shall see below. Nevertheless, the Patristic understanding of

homoousion offers broader perspectives to our cognizance of perichoresis and has something

important to suggest to our understanding of the Filioque.

1. Consubstantiality in the Greek Fathers and Maximus

As I have argued elsewhere, the concept of homoousion constitutes the difference

between the Plotinian triad of the Three Primordial Hypostases (One, Nous, Psyche) and the

Christian Trinity. The Plotinian Hypostases represent three non-consubstantial fragments and

parts of Being. Consequently, Being is ultimately the sum of all these parts. It is impossible

for the three parts to exist in free communion because they necessarily have to be added

together in order to constitute the wholeness of Being, i.e. in order to make sense as

representing Being per se. Conversely, each consubstantial person of the Divine Trinity

represents Divine Essence in its wholeness. This consubstantial wholeness composes the base

of a personal dynamic communion of the Divine Hypostases that is absolutely free. Since

each hypostasis possesses the whole of divine being in himself, each is in communion with

the others exclusively out of free love. According to Basil the Great, the essence does not

merely represent the identity of the properties of the Three Hypostases, Their similarity, but

also shows the inexpressible unity, the reciprocity or inter-penetration of the Three Persons.

Indeed, consubstantiality is a very great discovery on the part of Patristic theology, and it is

simply impossible to approach the mystery of the person properly unless we investigate it.

The diminution of theological interest in consubstantiality and, as a consequence, in the

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entirely unique notion of nature in Orthodox theology, have created specific problems for the

ontology of the person in recent years. And these will not be overcome merely by good

will. Rather, a reinvigoration of interest in homoousion seems to offer the greatest potential

for the rectification of these difficulties. Indeed, the Patristic notion of consubstantiality

represents the discovery of a balance of essence and person within a subject, which does not

require either the over-elevation or the diminution of any of its ontological parts.

It would be helpful, perhaps, to begin with Athanasios the Great. In the face of the

Arian danger, which casts doubt upon the equality of the Hypostases of the Trinity,

Athanasios stands out with astonishing positions such as this: necessarily we say that what is

from the essence of the Father, and proper to Him, is entirely the Son; for it is all one to say

that God is wholly participated in and that He begets; and what does begetting signify but a

Son? (1) The ancient axiomatic unity of the essence is distributed here. Through an activated

event of complete participation, the Son is the only being in whom the Father participates,

because if the offspring be not always with the Father, this is a flaw in the perfection of

His essence (2). So the perfection of the Paternal Essence lies in the fact that it is

everlastingly and completely participated in by the Son. This event of essential participation

should not be taken as the contents of relationship, or as a relationship, but rather as a

timeless and inconceivable mutual giving. It is not merely what Florensky called a

relationship which appears as essence (substantia) (3), it is consubstantiality, i.e. exhibiting

diversity in the identity of the essence ( ),

as Basil the Great so profoundly puts it.(4) The fact that diversity is shown in the identity of

the essence really does constitute a new ontology, an uncreated, supra-metaphysical ontology

which alone is capable of explaining precisely the distinction between essence and hypostasis

through which this profound paradoxology of this self-other is expressed. If we are not

mindful of the fact that essence and hypostasis are identical as terms in reality, and if we
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place the hypostasis at a distance from the essence, no matter how slight, the paradoxical then

disappears and becomes rationalized. We might then hasten to affirm that the hypostasis is

inherent, but the magnificence of patristic theology is that it perceives hypostasis as

inseparable, that it sees the hypostasis as fundamentally in relation to the essence, and not

above, before, or after it. Thus the mystery of hypostasis is grounded in the notion that the

whole nature of the Father is impressed upon the Son as with a stamp.(5) This is why, when

Basil the Great affirms the name Father a term of affinity, he hastens to add by nature.

(6) The Son constitutes a character of the Fathers hypostasis so that we can understand

consubstantiality well.(7) Saint Basil goes on to explain that the Son exists in the form of

Godas Paul says (Phil. 2:6)because He is in the essence of God.(8) The Father is the

principle and cause in the Trinity, but the only-begotten Son is an image of the essence of the

Father (9) as wisdom, power, and justice, i.e. as living and active essence. (10) And this is

the case precisely because the essence of the Father is free of all condition or eternal and

without form. Every conceivable characteristic of the Essence therefore communes of

necessity with the whole, and the divine Essence is only given as an entirety, (11) which is

why every union is in the communion of the divinity (12). In this way, the Fathers and the

Sons modes of existencebegotten and unbegottenare contemplated in the essence (13)

in the sense that every participation by the other is true to the extent that it is contemplated in

and through the essence. Consequently, the hypostatic distinction of the other is grounded in

the inter-giveness of essence, and inter-communion or inter-giveness of essence forms the

mystery of the communion between the Trinitarian Persons.

Inasmuch as he construes homoousion merely as sameness, John Zizioulas avers

(referring to me) that those, therefore, who refer to the ousia (or the homoousion) as such

and build an ontology on that basis have departed fundamentally from the spirit of the Greek

Fathers. It is essential to emphasize that I do not claim that homoousion somehow pre-exists
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in God such that it creates or causes the hypostatic communion. On the contrary, what I have

argued since 1999 (first in my Closed Spirituality and the Meaning of the Self, which is

written in Greek) is that for the Greek Fathers, and especially for Maximus the Confessor, it

is impossible to speak of the Trinitarian hypostatic communion without taking into account

the active role of nature in it. It is equally impossible to speak of a supposed overcoming of

nature, understood either as blind necessity, or, which is no different, as static sameness.

Nevertheless, it is precisely in this fashion that Zizioulas writes in his last published article on

Trinitarian freedom:

Trinitarian freedom is, negatively speaking, freedom from the given and,

positively, the capacity to be other while existing in relationship and in unity of

nature. In as much, therefore, as unity of nature provides sameness and wholeness,

Trinitarian freedom, as the capacity to be other, can be spoken of as freedom from

sameness. And in as much as otherness provides particularity, Trinitarian freedom

can be spoken of as freedom from selfhood and individuality. (14)

Here divine nature is simply a passive and static given of necessity/sameness from which the

person must escape, which cannot actively be included in hypostatic otherness. Due to the

personal capacity to be other, nature cannot participate in the very definition of divine

otherness, a position that stands in opposition to that of the Cappadocians, as we have already

seen, and of Maximus the Confessor, as we shall see below. The ontological scheme as a

whole would appear to be Levinasian rather than Patristic: freedom from Sameness/Totality,

and subsequently freedom from selfhood for the sake of the Infinity/Other. The Father is the

first to emerge from this necessity/sameness, and then He draws out the two other persons.

This, practically speaking, is the monarchy of the Fatheraccording to Zizioulas. If we apply

Ricoeurs criticism in relation to this Levinasian/Zizioulian scheme, we are compelled to

admit that this position entails an even more decisive subjectivism, as it shows an initial will
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of self-enclosure and separation from the other (moment of ecstasis from sameness) in

order for the other to be understood as radical exteriority (the moment of freedom from

selfhood and individuality). (15) It is precisely this danger of an ecstatic and separated

subjectivism from which the Patristic notion of the Trinitarian homoousion saves us. Without

it we are left with a subject who never really meets the other, as he, first, avoids the others

existence (ecstasis above sameness), and then he avoids his own existence and denies his

selfhood. In both cases either the other is absent or the self is missing.

Let me substantiate this by using Maximus texts. Maximus, in continuity with the

Cappadocians, speaks of a sort of movement of nature within the Trinity but which,

nevertheless, does not imply time. And this is precisely what constitutes homoousion! This

timeless movement also permits divine nature to participate in the very definition of divine

otherness. Concerning divine essence, the Confessor avers that though it stays in immovable

rest, the divine essence seems to move, moving towards each other (

. In this context, is a verb meaning both move and contain).(16) This

movement is referred to as convergence () to the one, of those who originate

from him, by Gregory Nazianzen. (17) So, homoousion is a timeless intra-Trinitarian

movement; it is an affirmation by the Son of His nature as the Fathers nature, an affirmation

by the Spirit of His nature as the Fathers nature, and a reciprocal affirmation by the Son and

the Spirit of their essence as that of the Fathers together with each others, timelessly

following the causal affirmation made by the Father of his nature as the Sons and the

Spirits nature through generation and ekporeusis. This reciprocal affirmation of nature as

immovable movement, i.e. as (movement towards and mutual containment) and

/convergence between the Three, is initiated by the Father. And this initiation of

reciprocal affirmation is the principle of the Monarchy of the Fathera point on which we

all agreei.e. the Fathers absolute monocausality , which, in the same moment, timelessly
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and actively but not passively is reciprocally affirmed by the two Others. This affirmation is

not of course automatic, since it represents the intra-Trinitarian love, i.e. the free natural

dialogical reciprocity between the Three Persons. We could, perhaps, also refer to this event

as a reciprocal inter-giveness in the sense that it happens not as a static sameness but

dynamically, as if (, is the word used by Maximus) it can be described as a timeless,

reciprocal essential dialogue on the ontological level, constituting the very mode of being of

God. All these are names for this dynamic and personal understanding of homoousion, which

expresses the mystery of the personal and natural Trinitarian communion in such a way that

renders the latter inconceivable without the former and vice versa. In this way, Maximus

succeeds in affirming the absolute and active onticity of the three divine Persons, while

simultaneously avoiding passivity on the part of any one of them. Beginning with St Gregory

of Nyssa, reiterated by St John Damascene, and culminating in St Gregory Palamas, the

Greek Patristic position affirms that the Spirit is eternally spirated only by the Father but

through the Son. This view, however, can be properly fathomed only in light of this

cognizance of homoousion as reciprocal inter-giveness. It is only through this understanding

that we can avoid any instrumentalization, i.e. any degradation of the Spirit through His

exclusive and typically passive reduction/subjection to the realisation of the relationship

between the Father and the Son. According to Maximus, the Spirit is fully integral and active

in his eternal procession by the Father alone and not simply the servant of the Father-Son

relationship. Otherwise, as Palamas asserts, He would be just an act between them.(18).

It would be a serious mistake to interpret the Greek Patristic homoousion as some

sort of Hegelian kenosis, since it represents precisely the opposite, a timeless plerosis, i.e. the

mutual dialogical affirmation/fulfilment of otherness on the level of nature, without which

any personal otherness is a transcendental, or, better, narcissistic fantasy. Consequently,

divine homoousion does not exclusively mean sameness, but is a pre-eternally achieved and
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timeless reciprocal, inter-personal, essential /movement, containing,

/convergence, or dialogical reciprocity. Or, we could simply call it inter-giveness.

Any discussion concerning Trinitarian personalism without this sort of understanding of

homoousion leads unavoidably either to the absurdity of a Trinitarian transcendental

subjectivism and the affirmation of Gods nature as passive sameness or to the Spirit

functioning as a sort of instrument of the Father-Son relationship. (19).

2. Augustine and Thomas on the consubstantial Trinity

Let us now switch to Augustine. I think that I am perhaps the first Orthodox

theologian who claimed some sixteen years ago (20) that it is unfair to treat Augustine as an

essentialist. A thorough and unbiased reading of his De Trinitate demonstrates that his basic

arguments concerning hypostasis/person in the Trinity are in line with the Cappadocians.

However, there are also some decisive differences, the most important of which has to do

with the way Augustine conceives of the divine homoousion. As he writes in Book 6 of the

De Trinitate:

Whether [the Holy Spirit] is the unity between [Father and Son], or their holiness,

or their love, or whether the unity, therefore, because he is the love, it is obvious

that he is not one of the two. Through him both are joined together; through him

the begotten is loved by the begetter, and in turn loves him who begot him; in him

they preserve the unity of spirit in the bond of peace, not by participation, but by

their own essence, not by the gift of anyone superior to themselves, but by their

own gift.[]. Whatever the Holy Spirit is, it is something common between the

Father and the Son, or rather it is this very communion [between them] , which is

consubstantial and co-eternal; which can be properly called friendship, or, even

better, love; and this again is a substance, because God is substance and God is
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love, as it is written (Spiritus ergo sanctus commune aliquid est patris et filii,

quidquid illud est, aut ipsa communio consubstantialis et coaerterna; qua si

amicitia convenienter dici potest, dicatur,sed aptius dicitur caritas; et haec

quoque substantia quia dues substantia et deus caritas sicut scriptum est). (21)

Here Augustine clearly identifies the Spirit, first, with divine love, second, with Gods

substance, and, third, with consubstantiality. If this is true, then the Triune God is somehow

given His essential divinity by the Spirit. Even some of the most important Augustinian

scholars, such as Lewis Ayres, (22) seem to be puzzled by this passage. This perplexity

is manifested even in Ayres final hermeneutical statement: There is no impersonal or pre-

personal essence of the persons; Father, Son and the Spirit have an essence that is their own,

which is eternally one, and also which is the Spirit.(23) Augustine is right, of course, to

identify generally God with love. But if this personal essence of Father and Son is the Spirit,

then, first, we risk confusing the personal/hypostatic properties of the three divine persons,

since the essential modes of the former two are reduced to that of the latter, i.e. of the Spirit.

Second, the Father and the Son appear to depend wholly upon the Spirit for their existence;

in a sense they really exist only through the Spirit, Who is their real existence. In other

words, God is the Spirit. Thus, without a dynamic conception of homoousionthe likes of

which we find in MaximusGods personal Threeness results in an essentialization of one

of the three. This essentializing occurs in order ensure the existence of Gods essence, but

in so doing it risks a dangerous confusion of the incommunicable hypostatic properties of the

three persons. In order to overcome this, Ayres asserts that the Spirit gives himself as the

Fathers gift and as the Sons gift. Father and Son are one because the Spirit gives himself in

the begetting of the Son and gives himself as the Sons love for the Father.(24) But, if this is

the case, we either diminish the Spirits integritysince we understand Him to be the one

who serves the Father and the Sons need to stay united, according to Augustine, in the unity
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of spirit and the bond of peaceor we reduce the two others reciprocal givenness to the

Spirits givenness. In any case, we replace this dynamic essential inter-givenness or

homoousion with one of the Trinitarian persons. Conversely, according to the Maximian

perspective, divine love is expressed through this pre-eternal and timeless mutual inter-

givenness of essence, initiated by the Father and timelessly reciprocated by the two Others.

This reciprocity in love realizes the pre-eternal consubstantial communion of the three

Persons, without reducing this love to the hypostasis of only one person or identifying divine

essence with this person and thereby risking a confusion of the non-communicable hypostatic

properties of the divine Trinity. It seems to me that if Augustine had been familiar with

Maximus approach, he would have perhaps succeeded in articulating a stronger metaphysics

of Trinitarian communion.

Let us now turn to Thomas Aquinas conception of intra-divine relations in the

Trinity. For Thomas, the Trinitarian persons are distinguished exclusively by relations. With

the exception of the opposition between them, which is expressed in their relations, they are

identical with regards to essence. (25) Thus, distinction in God is only by relation of origin,

while relation in God is not as an accident in a subject, but it is the divine essence itself [].

Therefore a divine person signifies the subsistence of relation, and, in so doing, signifies

relation by way of substance. Such a relation is a hypostasis subsisting in the divine nature,

although in truth that which subsists in the divine nature is the divine nature itself. Thus, it is

true to say that the name person signifies relation directly, and the essence indirectly.(26)

These intra-essential or intra-divine relations of opposition are relations of origin,(27) and

this conversely means that even the relation between the Son and the Holy Spiritsince it is

a relation of oppositionhas to be a relation of origin, and thus it is manifest that the Holy

Ghost proceeds from the Son. (28) This seems to be the theo-logical foundation of the

Filioque.
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Let us now seek to determine if Thomas is in a certain continuity with Augustine

concerning our discussion of the way in which the Trinitarian persons are connected. It

seems that the Spirit is, in a clearly Augustinian fashion, the personal essential unity of the

two other Persons after their personal opposition: if the Holy Ghost, Who is the union of the

two, be excluded, we cannot understand the oneness of the union between the Father and the

Son. So all are connected by reason of the Holy Ghost; because given the Holy Ghost, we

find whence the Father and the Son are said to be united. (29) Commenting upon this

passage, W. J. Hankey argues that the structure of the Godhead just exposed is in fact the

application to it of the Neoplatonic logic of exitus and reditus, present from the beginning of

Western Trinitarian theology. (30) Hankey brings the witness of a series of modern scholars

in order to prove this, beginning with B. de Margerie, who speaks of Augustine as using the

Neoplatonic concept of epistroph, the conversion towards the principle in order to describe

the loving return of the Son to the Father through the Spirit. Hankey continues:

The intellectualizing of the Trinity in this way brings the Stoic and Neoplatonic

systematizing of the sciences into Christian theology. Thomas finds in the De

Trinitate of Boethius a treatise on the divisions and methods of the sciences. The

Neoplatonists carry forward the Stoic division of science into physics, logic, and

ethics, and [according to Pierre Hadot] l intuition fundamental du stoicisme,

selon laquelle le Logos est lobjet commun de trois parties de la philosophie.

Augustine picks up this tradition, but for him the interior relations of the persons

of the Trinity found the relations of the parts of science.(31)

Thus the Father becomes the principle of being, the Son of the intellect, and the Spirit of the

unifying love. Thomas also employs another Augustinian triad of Neoplatonic provenance,

as Pierre Hadot also notes, that of natura, doctrina, usus, claiming that use, whereby the

Father and the Son enjoy each other, agrees with the property of the Holy Ghost, as
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Love.(32) So the inner logic of this gathering-in of the opposed persons through the Spirit

seems to be Neoplatonic, though expressed in Biblical terms.

The difference between Augustine and Thomas on this point is that Thomas, as far as

I am aware, does not identify the Holy Spirit with divine consubstantiality. Thomas indicates

his position when he analyses John 16:14, saying, He shall glorify me: because he shall

receive of mine and shall show it to you. (33) According to Gilles Emery,

The expression of mine indicates the consubstantiality of the Son and the Holy

Spirit; the Spirit receives the whole substance of Father and Son, that is, the divine

substance in its plenitude. In receiving what belongs to Father and Son, then Spirit

is not given paternity or filiation, since these touch on the incommunicable

properties of the divine persons, but he does receive the nature; and the nature is

actually identical, in each divine person, to the personal property. (34)

This last detail (i.e. that the nature is actually identical to the personal property) is perhaps

the weak point of the Thomist understanding of consubstantiality. Homoousion for Thomas

means simply of one essence, as he explains elsewhere (35), and his view precludes any

possibility of understanding it as a dynamic movement of eternal inter-giveness. This is why,

as Emery rightly notes, consubstantiality in Thomas has nothing to do with perichoresis, and,

since it is understood simply as unity of nature, it is included in that much richer concept of

perichoresis. (36) Consequently, in Thomas there is no intra-divine movement of essence

that gives the persons full onticity and simultaneously explains the mutual hypostatic

indwelling of the Trinitarian hypostases.

Concluding discussion: Consubstantiality beyond Perichoresis

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Practically speaking, it is difficult to speak of Trinitarian consubstantiality in an

Augustinian or Thomist context in the sense given to this term by Maximus. Though modern

Western theology seeks to follow St John Damascene(37) and likes very much talking about

perichoresis, it is a concept in a Western theological context that is usually taken as being

broader than consubstantiality, precisely because of the static conception of the latter term.

But without the notion of homoousion as mutual personal/essential convergence and

givenness, our Trinitarian theology either tends to regard the person as ecstatic vis--vis the

divine essence, which we find in Augustine, or as essentialistic, which we find in Thomas.

Accordingly, divine unity and, along with it, perichoresis, is more personalistic in

Augustine, while Thomas sense of divine unity and perichoresis hovers between

personalism and essentialism. Persons are now either intra-divine relations or personal modes

of divine being, as Karl Barth liked to call them, (38) a position that comes dangerously close

to Modalism. Unfortunately, theologians are somehow afraid of being as bold as the

Confessor. Maximus solution overcomes both personalism and essentialism, highlighting an

ontological holism, the time of which has, perhaps, not yet come for modern Christian

theology.

Divine consubstantiality is a reality far more primordial than perichoresis because it

is only through this dynamic understanding of homoousion (as opposed to its understanding

as simply the divine unity of nature, which occurs in Augustine or Thomas as well as in

many modern theologians) that true perichoresis can occur. In this sense, consubstantiality is

a more advanced concept than perichoresis, insofar as it gives the latter term its true

meaning. Without this sort of consubstantialityand since it may be plausibly claimed that

we need something more than the unity of essence in order to understand the mode of the

divine mutual indwellingperichoresis can happen only through the activity of persons,

above (in the Augustinian version) or within (in the Thomist version) the essential sameness,
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i.e. between the hypostases of the Father and the Son and exclusively through the hypostasis

of the Spirit, as some Western theologians insist today.(39) According to this perspective,

perichoresis, in the words of Durand, affirms the immanence of generation and the

reciprocity of the relation between the Father and the Son. (40) On the one hand, the Spirit

proceeds from the Father as his hypostatic love for the Son, while, on the other, the Son is

himself fully Son in the very fact that He returns this same Love to the Father in eternal

thanksgiving. This returning of a received filial Love to its paternal Source achieves the

Trinitarian cycle of eternal life. (41) However, if we follow this way, we risk turning the

Trinity into a fundamental Duality through a sort of psychologism in which this passive and,

as we said above, instrumentalized Spirit is reduced to expressing the perfection in

communion of the Father-Son relation, in the very relation of the Father to the Spirit. (42)

Thus we affirm again the Filioque by asserting that the Spirit is like a hypostatic sign of the

sharing between the Father and the Son, in so far as the Spirit proceeds from their mutual

love. The quality of his paternal and filial origin appears in the Spirit, the Person who

proceeds from the love of the Father and the Son. (43) It is difficult for anyone who has a

certain knowledge of the Greek Patristic tradition not to discern here a tendency towards a

de-personalizing of the Spirit, inasmuch as no principle of love or unity (see the similar

expression tanquam ex uno principio of the Council of Lyon) can be put above the clearly

distinguished Hypostases as a not clearly hypostatic source of the Spirit, which is in turn

coupled with a reduction of the Spirit to a sort of common energy between the Father and the

Son, to use the aforementioned expression of Palamas. The Spirit, according to the old

Photian argument, would then at least have to proceed hypostatically also from Himself in

order to be essentially equal to the other Persons.

On this basis, we can argue that the traditional Greek understanding of Gregory of

Nyssas or John Damascenes expression concerning the eternal procession of the Spirit by
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the Father through the Son does not provide theological support for the Filioque, as some

Roman Catholic theologians now argue. It is Palamas who in an exemplary fashion describes

and articulates the traditional way in which this expression was understood in the East. For

him, we affirm the procession through the Son only because when one pronounces the term

Father the first thing that comes to his mind is the Son, and, only as a second step, when

one hears that this Son is Logos, then the concept of the Spirit also comes into his mind.(44)

Consequently, this expression simply describes the ineffable order of divine generation and

procession, which is of course only according to our mode of thinking ( ), not

as a real priority of the Son over the Spirit. Even when Palamas speaks in an Augustinian

fashion of the Spirit as the mystical love ( ) of the Father for the Son, (45)

he nevertheless insists that the only principle of the Spirit is the Father and avoids reducing it

to a reciprocal gift between the two other persons. The Spirit expresses Gods absolutely

koinonetic/relational nature, which cannot be reduced to a dialectic between the Father and

the Son. In any case, the idea that the Spirit manifests the perfection of the relation between

Father and Sonan idea that is not wrong in a certain sensehas never implied in the

context of the Greek Patristic tradition a reduction of Him to a sort of reciprocal gift,

circulated by both the others. This notion would imply that, according to Palamas, the

procession from the Father is imperfect on an ontological level and must be complemented

by the Spirits procession from the Son. (46)

A possible way for Orthodox theology to accept the aforementioned Augustinian and

Thomistic Theology of divine unity-through-the- Spirit would be, perhaps, to see it as

referring to divine economia, which is paradoxically always identified with theologia, i.e.

Gods inner life, in the West. The Spirit really and exclusively expresses the divine unity ad

extra, and He is indeed the one Who manifests Gods Tri-unity to creation, i.e. the reciprocal

love between Father and Son in which man is called to participate through grace. But when
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speaking of theology, it is only the concept of this dynamic consubstantial intergivenness

which, more so than perichoresis, can help us fathom the mystery of divine Tri-personal

unity as represented by the Cappadocians and Maximus the Confessor.

The subject of the present paper is not of course the Filioque, but it is difficult not to

refer to it when speaking of divine unity. According to Gregory Palamas, there is also

another way to accept the Filioque, a way that is uniquely significant because it seems to

echo precisely this Maximian comprehension of consubstantiality. As Gregory claims, the

Spirit does not proceed also from the hypostasis of the Son, but we can say that the Spirit

also proceeds from the Sons essence, since the Son is homoousios with the Father; thus, the

Spirit proceeds also from the Sons essence, though through the hypostasis of the Father.

(47) It is precisely this dynamic understanding of divine essence that permits Gregory to

think of the Sons essence as , containing, moving towards the Spirit, though

without disturbing the absolute initial hypostatic monocausality of the Father. (48) There

exists an absolute and perfect relation/communion between the Son and the Spirit, but this

happens in the name of the Father and because of Him. To put it in other words: the Son

loves the Spirit as proceeding from the Father, and He also loves the Father with one and the

same love, with which the Father loves His Son in the Spirit, and the Spirit in His Son; the

Spirit loves the Father in the Son, and the Son in the Father, with the same love the Father

loves the Spirit in the Son and the Son in the Spirit. This is expressed in the theology of the

homoousion as seen above, and this, according to Greek Patristic Trinitarian theology, seems

to be the only way to maintain both the absolute communion and the absolute integrity of the

divine Persons.

Concerning now our ecumenical discussion on the Trinity, I think that the real

difference between East and West has perhaps to do with the theology of the uncreated

energies. Even the dispute over Filioque is perhaps rooted in this difference. It is precisely
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the theology of the uncreated energies that allows the Orthodox to make this clear distinction

between a theological and an economical Trinity, where, while the Filioque is totally

accepted within the context of the latter, it is rather misleading in the context of the former,

inasmuch as this would reduce the Spirit to an energy/act between the Father and the Son, as

noted above. The Spirit is active as the ontological bond between the Father and the Son in

the economia, since the Spirit manifests ad extra the divine energy; this energy is the act of

the good-willing Father, but only by the Son, Who is the , the only one Who acts

in the name of the Father, and through the Spirit, Who is the , the person Who

hypostatically manifests the one and unique essential energy of the divine hypostases of the

Father and the Son as the active bond of love between them. In the absence of such a

theology, we need to project economia on to theologia in order to vouchsafe the reality of a

God for us, since it is precisely this reality, as I understand it, that in the end the Filioque ,

consciously or unconsciously, intends to protect.

The discussion must go on

Footnotes:
1. Orationes adversus Arianos I.16, ed. J.P. Migne, PG 26: 44D-45A. (Paris, 1857-1912).
2. Ibid.
3. P. Florensky, Der Pfeiler und die Grundfeste der Wahrheit (Mnchen, 1925), 476.
 18

4. Adversus Eunomium II.28, PG 29: 637C.

5. Ibid. II.16, 605.
6. Ibid. II.24, 625B. See also I.27, 569C-572B.
7. Ibid. I. 20, 556B-557C.
8. Ibid. I.18, 552B-553B.
9. Ibid. II.31, 644A-645C.
10. Ibid. II.17, 605B-608D.
11. Ibid. I.23, 561C-564C.
12. De Spiritu Sacto XLV, PG 32: 149B-152A.
13. Adversus Eunomium II.28, PG 29: 636C-637D.
14. John Zizioulas, Trinitarian Freedom: is God Free in Trinitarian Life?, in Wozniak, R. J.
and Maspero, Giulio (eds.), Rethinking Trinitarian Theology: Disputed Questions and
Contemporary Issues in Trinitarian Theology (London and New York, 2012), 197.
15. Paul Ricoeur, Soi-mme comme un Autre (Paris, 1990), 387.
16. Scholia in Dionysium Areopagitum, PG 4: 425A.
17. Orationes III.2, PG 35: 517-26.
18. Gregory Palamas, II.81, ed. and trans. ,
51 (, 1981).
19. And it is of course senseless to think that the homoousion/consubstantiality, understood
as it was understood above, occurs before the communion of the persons, thus forming a
sort of cause of their communion: it is precisely this personal communion that occurs as
consubstantiality.
20. (, 1999), 59-72.
21. De Trinitate V.7, eds. J. Leemans and L. Jocqu, CCSL 50, 235 (1953-2014).
22. Lewes Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity (Cambridge, 2010).
23. Ibid. 259.
24. Ibid. 254.
25. Summa Theologica I.36.2, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York,
1947).
26. Ibid. I. 29. 4.
27. Ibid. I.28.44.
28. Ibid. I.36.2.
29. Ibid. I.39.8.
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30. W. J. Hankey, God in Himself. Aquinas Doctrine of God as expounded in Summa

Theologiae (Oxford, 2004), 123-4.
31. Ibid.
32. Summa Theologica I.39.8.
33. Ibid. I.36. a.2. ad. 1.
34. Gilles Emery, The Trinitarian Theology of St Thomas Aquinas (Oxford, 2007), 274.
35. Summa Theologica I.39. a.2 ad. 3.
36. G. Emery, The Trinitarian Theology of St Thomas Aquinas, 303. See also Matthew
Levering, Scripture and Metaphysics. Aquinas and the renewal of Trinitarian Theology
(Oxford, 2004), 26 et.seq.
37. De Fide Orthodoxa XIV, PG 94: 860A-861A. See, for example, Emmanuel Durand,
Perichoresis: A Key Concept for balancing Trinitarian Theology, in Wozniak, R. J. and
Maspero, Giulio (eds.), Rethinking Trinitarian Theology: Disputed Questions and
Contemporary Issues in Trinitarian Theology (London and New York, 2012), 177-92.
38. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. I (London, 1932-68), 355-358.
39. See E. Durand, Perichoresis: A Key Concept for balancing Trinitarian Theology. See
also the essays of Giulio Maspero, Patristic Trinitarian Ontology, and Gisbert Greshake
Trinity as Communio, in Wozniak, R. J. and Maspero, Giulio (eds.), Rethinking
Trinitarian Theology: Disputed Questions and Contemporary Issues in Trinitarian Theology.
The same tendency exists also in some Orthodox personalists, but in their case an ec-static
comprehension of the monarchy of the person of the Father precludes not only any
reference to consubstantiality, but also any sort of filioquism.
40. See E. Durand, Perichoresis: A Key Concept for balancing Trinitarian Theology, 182.
41. Ibid.185.
42. Ibid.187.
43. Ibid.189. The italics are mine.
44. II.49.
45. Capita Physica, Theologica, Moralia et Practica XXXVI, XXXVII, PG 150: 1144D-
1145D.
46. II. 41.
47. Ibid. II.67,73. The quoted passage is from chapter 73.
48. G. Greshake, in his Trinity as Communio, 337, seems to take the term perichoresis
as meaning in Greek , and speaks about a dance () of the three Divine
 20

Persons around each other (337). The Greek word, however, reads , something
that has nothing to do with a dance.
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