The Dynamism of the Trinity in Bonaventure and Eckhart

The Dynamism of the Trinity in Bonaventure and Eckhart Thee, God, I come from, to thee go, All day long I like fountain flow, From thy hand out, swayed about Mote-like in thy mighty glow. These verses of Gerard Manley Hopkins are a succinct expression of the dynamic procession of all things from God. Hopkins did not write matching lines to express the return, or consummation, of the universe in its divine source, at least in this poem, but a passage from “The Wreck of the Deutschland” captures his sense of God as the goal of all life and action: Stanching, quenching ocean of a motionable mind; Ground of being, and granite of it: past all Grasp God, throned behind Death with a sovereignty that heeds but hides, bodes but abides. The master paradigm of exitus and reditus, the procession out and return to God, is perhaps natural to the religious mind as it reflects upon the nature of the universe. In Western thought the evolution of this dynamic  This essay was presented March 11, 2006, at Saint Louis University during a symposium in honor of Zachary Hayes, OFM. I am happy to be able to dedicate this paper to my old friend and colleague. As its content will make clear, I owe him an immense debt of gratitude for his scholarship over the years, especially on Bonaventure .  Gerard Manley Hopkins. A Selection of His Poems and Prose, by W.H. Gardner (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1953), No. 63 (untitled); and “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” No. 1, Stanza 32. 137 Franciscan Studies 65 (2007) 08.McGinn.indd 137 12/5/07 17:51:26 Bernard McGinn 138 paradigm was shaped by the way in which Neoplatonic thinkers, both pagan and Christian, sought to express how the First Principle overflows into the universe while at the same time drawing all things back to Itself. What was unique to Christian theologians was how they brought this dynamic process into God’s very self as a way for expressing the Church’s faith in God as Trinity. From this perspective, the extra-divine dynamism of creation is rooted in the intra-divine flow of life found in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I. A Brief Sketch of Some Aspects of the Evolution of Trinitarian Theology This dynamic view of God as Trinity is rooted in New Testament texts, especially in the Gospel of John. During the pre-Nicene period, the time characterized by what Bernard Lonergan called a mixture of naïve and dogmatic realism concerning the doctrine of the Trinity, Christian theologians expressed the inner divine life by appealing to concrete images, such as vegetative growth, flowing water, and the radiation of light. When they attempted a more systematic view of their belief that the one God was nevertheless three they turned to the philosophical vocabulary available to them. Thus Athenagoras, writing about 176 C.E., says that “the Son of God is the Word of the Father in Ideal Form and Energizing Power (en idea kai energeia),” making use of both Platonic and Aristotelian terms. He goes on to describe the Holy Spirit more concretely as “an effluence of God (aporraian … tou theou) which flows forth from him and returns like a ray of the sun.” During the fourth century, the clarification of the Church’s faith at Nicaea and its defense and elaboration during the half-century between Nicaea and the First Council of Constantinople produced a basic trinitarian grammar that placed the mystery in its proper dogmatic language. This led to the beginnings of the critical realism (again, Lonergan’s term) that  On Lonergan’s categories of three kinds of realism (naïve, dogmatic, and critical ) and their application to the development of the doctrine of the Trinity, see Bernard Lonergan, The Way to Nicea. The Dialectical Development of Trinitarian Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976), especially 106-37.  Tertullian in chapter 7 of his Adversus Praxean used the analogies of “roottree -fruit,” “fountain-river-stream,” and “sun-ray-apex” to present the Trinity.  Athenagoras. Legatio and De Resurrectione, edited and translated by William R. Schoedel (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1972), Legatio 10 (20-22). On early Christian trinitarianism...