Continuity in Patristic and Scholastic Thought: Bonaventure and Maximos the Confessor on the Necessary Multiplicity of God1

Introduction

The medieval Schoolmen inherited from the Church Fathers the notion that a God with no personal diversity was metaphysically deficient. In order to rationalize the divine multiplicity, and justify, philosophically God’s specifically triune nature, the Scholastics relied on the proposition that God could not exist as a hypostatic monad. Among the various exponents of this principal, Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, more than any other, grounds this proposition in the inner, generative dynamism of the Divinity. Bearing in his Trinitarian theology explicit echoes of a patristic tradition that rejected and renounced as a sufficient God a static and inert singularity, Bonaventure was able to develop a doctrine of divine multiplicity which foregrounded the Godhead’s intrinsic need to irradiate consubstantially out of a fecund power and fullness, unfolding in a perfect Trinity of persons.

Influenced, as is known, by the Dionysian Corpus, the Franciscan master inherited a rich patrimony of Byzantine theology that upheld the logical necessity of divine multiplicity. In his doctrine one can clearly observe a unique resemblance especially to the theology of Gregory the Theologian. The bishop of Nazianzos and Constantinople had himself built up the patristic tradition of dynamic monotheism, rejecting simplistic conceptions of unity and delineating the virtues of triadic subsistence. As brought forward by Maximos the Confessor in the seventh century, these teachings combine with the thought of the Areopagitic Corpus to form a unique harmony with the thirteenth-century scholastic thought of Bonaventure. In the Franciscan Schoolman we see, recapitulated, the patristic conception that God exists in an effluent dynamism of Trinitarian subsistence.

Bonaventure’s Trinitarian Theology

Bonaventure was heir to an expansive Christian tradition whose central dogma was the belief in a tri-hypostatic God. This doctrine, of three subsistences in a single substance, was an indispensable if difficult axiom of the faith. Unyielding in its formulation, it was nevertheless subject to rational exposition, defense, and extrapolation. In his masterful scholastic treatises, the Commentary on the Sentences,² Breviloquium,³ Disputed Questions on the Trinity,⁴ and Journey of the Mind into God (Itinerarium),⁵ the thirteenth-century doctor develops a cogent and profound articulation of this Christian mystery, establishing its reasonability and its beauty in the context of dialectic, logic, and metaphysics.

In the whole of Bonaventure’s Trinitarian system one of the most important questions is the coexistence of unity and multiplicity in God. “It being supposed that it is a truth worthy of belief that God is trine, it is consequently asked whether a trinity of persons can stand together with unity of nature.”⁶ Above all, he desires to demonstrate that “in things divine, trinity and the highest unity are not opposed (non habent repugnantiam), but possess a wondrous concord and harmony, according to what the most salutary faith says.”⁷ What he contributes to this notion is a synthetic yet original rationalization of God’s multiplicity. Going further than mere validation of Trinitarian dogma, Bonaventure establishes it as a necessary metaphysical truth. Unsatisfied with showing that God can be three, he posits and defends the fact that God must be three. The truly perfect and blessed God cannot be otherwise.

The Franciscan master, to this end, does not hesitate to attribute necessity to God.⁸ The generation of the Son, which renders God plural, takes place according to neither the necessity of coercion (coactionis), need (indigentiae), nor inescapability (inevitabilitatis).⁹ Rather, it is a kind of logical necessity (exigentiae). It is in the sense of fittingness and definition that the Father is required to beget. And yet the begetting is not for this reason involuntary. Bonaventure notes that this kind of necessity is not contrary to (non repugnat) free will but only preserves God from mutability.¹⁰ It is “entirely intrinsic,” making God what he is and preserving him absolutely from being otherwise.¹¹

The proposition that God, metaphysically, must be more than one in subsistence, coincides with a number of proofs for plurality’s excellence over hypostatic unity. If God is necessarily multiple in subsistence, then multiplicity must...