Discerning between «Theology» and «Providence (oikonomia)»
The
question of the “Provident” Trinity’s affiliation to the eternal Trinity was
also related to the Filioque issue. The
following observations on this point are basic ones. First of all, the Fathers had stressed that
the essence of God is altogether inconceivable, unthinkable and
incomprehensible, and, for the Fathers of the East, it is also without
participation, that is, one cannot participate in the essence of God. According to the West, the Scholastics and
Aquinatus, it is possible to participate in the essence of God. Therefore, from this aspect, we can discern
the difference between “theology” and “Providence (oikonomia)”. If “theology” were to concern itself only
with the essence of God, then there would have been no problem, because, the
essence of God is something incomprehensible and as such, we would have no
theology on the essence of God.
But
theology, as a field of reference to God as He is throughout eternity, is
juxtaposed to Providence (oikonomia), which preoccupied itself with the Trinity
- the Triadic form of God’s existence. Therefore, we cannot say that here we
have an absolute opposition, and that we have nothing to say; We can speak of
the persons of the Holy Trinity, and not only can we speak of them, but – more
importantly – we can participate in the life of the three Persons. It is the life that God has precisely invited
us to participate in, through our theosis: our participation in the life of the
Trinity, by partaking of the filial, loving association between the Father and
the Son. And that is what Christ did: he
brought to this world, to us, this relationship between the Father and the
Son. And He said to us “now you are also
a part of this relationship, and my Father shall acknowledge you as His
sons”. This is the ultimate gift of
adoption. It is thus, that we enter the Triadic life of God.
Here,
there is no room for negation. One must
be careful here, because lately, we have begun to flirt somewhat excessively
with Negation, as Lossky for example did.
There are very many dangers in this theory of Negation. With regard to the essence of God, there is
no doubt whatsoever that we have Negation. Nobody can talk about the essence of
God. But to confess our faith in the
Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, that is not Negation; we know that God is
Father, Son and Holy Spirit. With regard
to the persons, we have affirmation; and it is not only a logical and
intellectual affirmation because we have confessed it as such; it is a participation,
an existential participation, in which we partake of these personal
associations of God. With the Holy
Trinity, there is no room for negation, except perhaps during the use of
analogies, none of which are befitting the Holy Trinity. When we wish to describe the Trinity with
human analogies, the analogies will inevitably stop somewhere, as in the
analogy of the three (separate) persons etc.
Now,
whether the Holy Spirit and the Logos have these attributes in Their hypostases
eternally, or they take them on for our sake during ‘Providence (oikonomia)’,
is a delicate and very significant issue.
The Greek Fathers avoided giving definite hypostatic attributes to the
Persons of the Holy Trinity, because if they did what Augustine did by giving
hypostatic attributes, we would then have to say that whatever God is in His
eternal existence (for example that He is the Logos), this would also apply
during ‘Providence (oikonomia)’. In this way, we would arrive at a compulsory
‘Providence (oikonomia)’, because if the Son were the Logos of God, or the
cognizance of God, then this cognizance must also permeate ‘Providence (oikonomia)’,
in order for God to be recognized. He
would perforce have to be carried over to ‘Providence (oikonomia)’, through the
Son. In Mediaeval times, the question
had been posed as to whether any other of the Persons of the Holy Trinity could
become incarnate. The answer given by some was that this was possible; there
was no logical necessity for the Son alone to become incarnate. Other contemporaries (and more recently
Rahner and other western theologians) claimed that only the Son could have
become incarnate, because He alone is the Logos Who makes God known. Within God
Himself eternally, God recognizes Himself through the Son – the Logos.
Therefore if God wants to make Himself known to us as well, in Providence, He
must again use this instrument of knowledge that He has, i.e., the Logos. This choice is subsequently a compulsory one
that incarnates the Logos. It is not free.
On the
other hand, if we avoid giving a definite content to the attributes of the
Persons, and of course do not relate the Logos as God’s cognitive instrument,
then why should only the Son become incarnate?
We have no logical answer, no compulsory logical argument that could
convince anyone that only the Son could become incarnate, simply because He
alone has that attribute. Instead, we attribute it to freedom, inasmuch as the
Son said, “yes” to the Father freely, and that He took on this mission (
Providence (oikonomia) ) upon Himself.
We are thus moving within a realm of freedom and not in an atmosphere of
logical necessity. Otherwise, if we were to give a positive content to the
hypostatic attributes, we would necessarily be moving along the lines of
logical need with regard to ‘Providence (oikonomia)’.
When the
issue of the Filioque is expanded on, you shall see how both Augustine and
Aquinatus indeed supported the argument that if the Son and Logos are the
cognizance of God, and the Spirit is the Love of God (note Augustine’s argument
which Thomas repeats), then the Spirit’s origin must be eternally dependent on
the Son also, because (as stressed by Augustine) cognizance precedes Love; you
cannot love something that you do not recognize. This is a gross mistake, as analyzed in the
relative chapter; at any rate it gives rise to a logical argument, a logical
requisite. If you cannot love something
that you do not know, then God cannot love Himself, without prior cognizance of
Himself through the Son, and this can be so, only if based on the association
between memory and cognizance, which enables, specifies and realizes the Mind’s
cognitive ability, which is God. It is
only on this basis that Love – the Spirit - can be constructed. You can
understand how, in this way, we are dealing only with logical necessities when
we give a positive content or positive attributes to the hypostases. And, by
avoiding to give this definitive content, the Greek Fathers are simultaneously
introducing an air of freedom to all the important questions such as “why does
the Son become incarnate, and not the Spirit?”
However,
this means we cannot fully relate the Trinity of ‘Providence (oikonomia)’ with
the eternal Trinity of Theology. There is a certain difficulty here. If we do
not associate it, we risk claiming that in ‘Providence (oikonomia)’, God did
not give nor did He show His true Self, but that He was somehow hiding
something from us; that He did not tell us who He actually is. Hence, we cannot
say that the Theological Trinity is one thing and the Providing Trinity is
another. We must state that the Trinity
is one and the same. Then where is the difference?
The
difference is that for the Theological Trinity we cannot say anything
definitive as regards the content of the personaes’ attributes. We have an
element of negation here. For the “Providing” Trinity we have positive things to
say about the attributes of the Persons, but this is only because these Persons
have freely undertaken these kinds of attributes within Providence. That is, if
the Son appears as the revelation of the Father (he that has seen me has seen
the Father), this does not mean that in the eternal Trinity the Son necessarily
has this function and attribute. If the
Spirit appears as love and communion to us, and as that which creates the bond
of love within the Church, which builds the church etc., it doesn’t mean that
within the Theological Trinity the Holy Spirit has the same function. Because
by the same reasoning, we could say that the Crucifixion of the Logos is
similarly a part of the eternal, Theological Trinity. Just as the Son
undertakes a ministration, an attribute, a relationship that He did not
previously have eternally, thus the Spirit and all the other attributes of
Christ that we see in Providence are not extensions of the Theological, eternal
Trinity. These are attributes taken on by the Persons freely, for our sake.
At this
point we must make another important observation, i.e., it is precisely because
these attributes have to do with ‘Providence (oikonomia)’ and not theology, the
differentiation of these attributes must be limited to ‘Providence (oikonomia)’
only, and that when we refer to theology, we cannot make such differentiations,
i.e., to say that the One is Love and the Other is Knowledge. None of these can be said with regard to
theology. So, what does this mean? It means that at the level of theology, all
actions - because they are in fact actions – are uniform, and
simultaneous. They diversify, at the
level of Providence.
This is
equally important with regard the to the unison of God; not from the aspect of
essence for which we can say nothing, but from the aspect of action. Because as
you know, it is by the action of God that He communicates with us and we with
Him. Saint Gregory Palamas made this
distinction between essence and action. It is of course an older one, it dates
back to the Cappadocians, but it was systematized and exploited further, and
the purpose of this distinction was to keep the essence of God unaffected by
‘Providence (oikonomia)’. That is, God was to maintain His transcendence,
during His actions within Providence.
Of course
the action of God is not something that He acquires in order to enact ‘Providence
(oikonomia)’; it is something that already exists. But in Theology, whih comes before
‘Providence (oikonomia)’, this action is uniform. During ‘Providence (oikonomia)’, it is
expressed in different ways, without creating any division or distance or separation
of the three Persons.
The three
Persons in Providence always act in unison, but not all three do the same
thing. The action of God becomes
differentiated in the sphere of ‘Providence (oikonomia)’, without inducing a
separation of the Persons. Where the Father is, there the Son and the Spirit
are; where the Son is, there the Father and the Spirit are. They cannot part.
But, whatever the Father does, is not what the Son does, etc. All these differentiated actions of God in
‘Providence (oikonomia)’ do not comprise extensions of differentiation within
he “eternal” Trinity.
Western
theology reached the point of relating ‘provisional’ differentiations to
differentiations within the “eternal” Trinity, that is, with ontological
differentiations. And this is one of the reasons that it has become
theologically trapped in the FILIOQUE as well.
The
position of the Hellenic Fathers automatically creates a radical distinction
between theology and ‘Providence (oikonomia)’, which was assuredly pointed out
by Basil the Great (who by the way was the one who introduced this, as we have
no similar formulation before him), and we shall briefly outline the history of
this case.
There is
a theological expedience in this replacement, which he expands on, in his work
“on the Holy Spirit”. The expedience is
that with the former glorification – the Alexandrian one – with its use of
“through” and “in”, there is an underlying innuendo of God on the basis of
‘Providence (oikonomia)’. Because it is precisely in ‘Providence (oikonomia)’
that God appears to us, or, that we recognize Him in this way: through the Son,
in the Holy Spirit. This way also
contains the element of hierarchy, of classification; i.e. the Son precedes and
the Spirit follows. Basil the Great wrote, for the reason that the
“Spirit-militants” whom he wished to thwart used this “in” (in the Holy Spirit)
as a denoting of space, so that when they said “in Spirit” in the glorification,
and given that “in” presupposes space, the Spirit is therefore understood as
being within creation, inside space, and therefore not within Divinity. This
was a pretext, but essentially, Basil wanted to say something more. He made this distinction that I mentioned,
between the way in which we refer to God on the basis of ‘Providence
(oikonomia)’, and the way in which we refer to God, not on the basis of
‘Providence (oikonomia)’, but more on the basis of the Eucharist experience,
during Worship. Thus, this form of
“though the Son, in the Holy Spirit” is not necessary when we wish to express
the relations between the Father, the Son and the Spirit. Take special note of this detail, as it is
very delicate.
In this
way, Basil the Great creates a kind of negation, as the prepositions “through”
and “in” have something definite to say about the three Persons, while the
“also” and “and” do not say anything positive. They simply tell us that the one
is alongside the other. In this way,
Theology (in the true sense of the term) is stripped by Basil the Great, of the
associations between the three Persons that is observed in ‘Providence
(oikonomia)’. And this is important,
because as we shall see when we discuss the FILIOQUE later on, the Alexandrian
Fathers and especially Saint Cyril of Alexandria, because they were based on
this glorification, had already reached the point of somehow transferring the
FILIOQUE to the eternal existence of God; i.e. the dependence of the Spirit
from the Son, as if the Spirit proceeded eternally through the Son. We shall
see, when we discuss the FILIOQUE, how this had a certain basis and had been
partially accepted, that the Spirit proceeded through the Son, but it will
require extremely lengthy explanations.
Our topic here is to stress that, according to Basil the Great, the
subject of God on the basis of ‘Providence (oikonomia)’ includes associations
of the Persons that are not necessarily associations that exist at the level of
Theology. That was why he made these
changes to the prepositions in the glorification. He replaced them with “also”
and “and”, as a means of declaring that
while we can say “through” and “in” with regard to Providence, in Theology
there is another way, without the use of “through” and “in”. Thus, he introduced a deep incision between
the “Providing” Trinity and the “Theological” Trinity, without implying any
other Trinity. The conclusion therefore
from the all the above is that the Holy Trinity that we see in ‘Providence
(oikonomia)’ allows us to give a definitive content to the hypostatic
attributes. However, it is a definitive content that we cannot extend into the
“eternal” Trinity.
Article by
Professor Metropolitan of Pergamus and Chairman of the Athens Academy I.
Zizioulas
