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SCHOLASTICISM AND NEW PHILOLOGY: GILES OF VITERRO, O. E. S. A. (1469-1532), ON DIVINE GENERATION By DANIEL J. NODES From the earliest Christian centuries, the doctrine of divine generation brought forth an abundant and controversial literature. From the FatherSon terminology in the Old and New Testaments, to the Gospel of John's repeated naming of Christ as µ????e??? t?? pat???, unigenitus a patre, only begotten of the Father, to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed's proclamation of "God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God, begotten not made, of one essence with the Father," to the Council of Chalcedon's proclamation that the divine Son was "begotten before all ages of the Father according to the Godhead," the articulation was vast and prolific.1 Further, the formula that emerged victorious and enduring in late antiquity still challenged and urged later theologians to write treatises on the doctrine for centuries to come. That the Father is presented as uniquely the Father of the Son, and the Son uniquely the Son of the Father is a dogmatic formula based on revelation, but how God begets God without either making himself or another God was a question formulated to approach theologically the complexities of the divine Trinity, particularly the relation among the three distinct divine persons in one divine nature. Scholastic theologians of the medieval West investigated divine generation with special vigor, and that "presumptuous, seductive vision of high medieval theology," as Steven Ozment once called their attempted synthesis of reason and revelation, met its severest test in that doctrine.2 Thomas Aquinas labored to explain how Deus general deum is a true statement without God either generating himself, se deum, or another God, alium deum, but he advised that divine generation had to be maintained on authority and See John 1:14, 1:18, 3:16, and 1 John 4:9. For a summary discussion of the scriptural grounding of the doctrine of the Son as begotten of the Father, see John V. Dahms, "The Generation of the Son," Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 32 (1989): 493-501. Rational Arianism was a formidable threat to Nicene orthodoxy. As background to the theological dilemma centered on divine generation, and particularly its strong linguistic elements in the Greek East, see, e.g., the discussion of the Anomoeans, and Eunomius and his orthodox opponents, including Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, John Chrysostom, and PseudoDionysius in J. N. D. Kelly, Golden Mouth: The Story of John Chrysostom, Ascetic, Preacher , Bishop (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1995), 60-63. 2 Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform: 1250-1500 (New Haven, 1980), 21. 318TRADITIO faith and could not be proven empirically.3 Scholastic scrutiny of the doctrine continued, nonetheless, and even proliferated, despite the fact that by 1400, efforts at rational analysis seemed perverse to some noteworthy critics . Jean Gerson's complaint, for example, that disputes over divine generation were the most convincing evidence of Scholasticism's absurdities is still cited in textbooks.4 Even more notorious is the so-called humanist critique of scholastic theological method, which focused in large measure on the central Christian doctrine of the Trinity, including the topic of divine generation .5 In our time, excepting perhaps the public disdain for medieval controversies about angels dancing on heads of pins, no scholastic question has been more criticized for producing unedifying and fruitless results. That harsh legacy gives this study a fitting background and challenge, to present a form of analysis present in the scholastic literature and developed in connection with Latin humanist scholarship that helped to curtail the fanciful metaphysical speculation. The propositions ridiculed by Gerson are only part of a tradition already well aware that the difficulty surrounding the doctrine of divine generation owed much to linguistic ambiguity, especially the analogical, multivalent, and selective nature of the names for God and God's actions. As scholastic analysis of the question proceeded, commentators paid careful attention to semantics, grammar, and syntax; and the history of that linguistic attention, which parallels a much earlier phase of the controversy in the Greek East, provides a corrective to the picture of runaway metaphysical speculation on which Gerson, Ozment, and others have dwelt. Later, when the...

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