Medieval Trinitarian Thought From Aquinas to Ockham by Russell L. Friedman (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 479 Medieval Trinitarian Thought From Aquinas to Ockham. By RUSSELL L. FRIEDMAN. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. 206. $85.00 (cloth). ISBN: 978-0-521-11714-2. The complexity and intricacy of Scholastic reflections on the Trinity can easily overwhelm even the most diligent of readers, which makes Russell Friedman’s short book an especially welcome addition to scholarship on medieval Trinitarian thought. Friedman balances breadth and depth with great skill and provides a work of substantial value to readers with varying degrees of exposure to Scholastic theology, medieval philosophy, and Trinitarian debates. Friedman defines his aim thus: My purpose in this book is to give a broad overview of some of the central aspects of and developments in the trinitarian theology written in the Latin West between roughly 1250 and 1350 AD. The emphasis here will be on philosophical theology, on the rational investigation of the Trinity by later-medieval theologians using the full range of tools available to them from especially the Aristotelian tradition of philosophical analysis. Nevertheless, the philosophical nature of the discussion as it is presented here should not obscure the fact that the intense interest with which later-medieval theologians approached the issue is an indication primarily of the immense religious importance it had for them. (1) With this purpose in mind, Friedman investigates two aspects of medieval Trinitarian thought. The first concerns metaphysical issues of identity and distinction, issues supremely important in Scholastic efforts to express the perfect unity of the divine essence together with the real distinction between the three divine persons. Friedman refers to the second aspect as the “psychological model” and traces it to Augustine’s considerations of the second divine person as Word. Taken together, these two aspects grant access to a wealth of debates, strategies, and dispositions within medievalTrinitarian thought. Both aspects also underwent major changes when confronted with what Friedman calls “the search for simplicity” in the fourteenth century, and he spends much time examining the ramifications for Trinitarian thought of prioritizing absolute divine simplicity. Two strategies emerged by which thirteenth-century theologians sought to explain the distinction of Trinitarian persons, and both strategies depended upon Aristotelian philosophy. Friedman labels one the ‘relation account of personal distinction’ and the other the ‘emanation account of personal distinction’. Thomas Aquinas advocated the former strategy, which came to define the Dominican Trinitarian tradition.Bonaventure defended the latter strategy, which came to define the Franciscan Trinitarian tradition. These two accounts agreed that each divine person was constituted a distinct person through a personal property (proprietas personalis) unique to that person. This agreement is particularly noteworthy given that it began to erode in the fourteenth century, a phenomenon Friedman discusses in chapter 4. BOOK REVIEWS 480 Friedman offers a helpful synopsis of the Aristotelian categories of relation, action, and passion and their foundational use in Trinitarian thought by Augustine and Boethius. Relation was used to argue that the Trinitarian persons were essentially identical but relatively distinct. Medieval Trinitarian thought further specified this as distinction according to ‘opposed relations’, which Friedman glosses as ‘mutually implicative’ relations, the general idea being that one side of the relation requires the other side of the relation. Paternity as a relation depends upon filiation as an opposite relation; the relations define each other. Aquinas can thus argue that relations are really identical with the divine essence and only introduce distinction insofar as they are mutually implicating. The essentially identical divine persons are relationally distinct, and this affirmation lies at the heart of the ‘relation account’. The ‘emanation account’ trumpets the insight that the opposed relations of paternity and filiation depend upon the action of paternal generation and the passion of filial generation. The action and passion of emanation must be logically prior to the relations founded upon that emanation.Bonaventure, formulating an emanation account, highlights the categories of action and passion for explaining the logical foundation of personal distinction, placing the emphasis not on opposed relations but “on the three irreducibly distinct ways in which the persons originate: unemanated, emanated by way of nature, and emanated by way of will” (18). The relation and emanation accounts in Aquinas and Bonaventure, Friedman stresses, mainly concern how...