Wisdom and the Viability of Thomistic Trinitarian Theology

The Thomist 64 (2000): 593-618 WISDOM AND THE VIABILITY OF THOMISTIC TRINITARIAN THEOLOGY MATTHEW LEVERING Ave Maria College Ypsilanti, Michigan L INTRODUCTION lthough we see today evidence of increasing appreciation for Aquinas's Trinitarian theology, Karl Rahner's critique of the Thomistic approach-a critique voiced in similar ways by Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar-remains the standard way in which the Thomistic approach is understood by contemporary theologians.1 One way to contribute to a new reading of Aquinas's treatise on God (one and three) is to begin with Rahner's critique. In an oft-cited passage, Rahner remarks: As a result [of beginning with God's essence] the treatise becomes quite philosophical and abstract and refers hardly at all to salvation history. It speaks 1 Rahner's seminal work was "Der dreifaltige Gott als transzendeter Urgrund der Heilsgeschichte," in Die Heilsgeschichte var Christus, vol. 2 of Mysterium Salutis, Grundriss heilsgeschichtlicher Dogmatik (Einsiedeln: Benziger Verlag, 1967). It has appeared in English as The Trinity, trans. Joseph Donceel (2d ed.; NewYork: Crossroad, 1998). The new edition contains an introduction by Catherine Mowry LaCugna, who lauds Rahner's work as the foundation of contemporary Trinitarian theology. For Barth's and Balthasar's positions, cf. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theologik, vol.2: Wahrheit Gottes (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1985), esp. 128f. Thanks in large part to thework of French Dominicans, preeminently Gilles Emery, the time seems ripe for a new appreciation of Aquinas's approach. In addition to numerous articles, Emery has contributed a monograph, La Trinite creatrice (Paris: Vrin, 1995), that responds masterfully to Rahner's claim that Aquinas's Trinitarian theology isolated the doctrine of the Trinity from the other doctrines of Christian faith. 593 594 MATIHEW LEVERING of the necessary metaphysical properties of God, and not very explicitly of God as experienced in salvation history in his free relations to his creatures. For should one make use of salvation history, it would soon become apparent that one speaks always of him whom Scripture and Jesus himself calls the Father, Jesus' Father, who sends the Son and who gives himself to us in the Spirit, in his Spirit. On the other hand, if one starts from the basic Augustinian-Western conception, an a-trinitarian treatise "on the one God" comes as a matter of course before the treatise on the Trinity. In this event, however, the theology of the Trinity must produce the impression that it can make only purely formal statements about the three divine persons, with the help of concepts about the two processions and about the relations. Even these statements, however, refer to a Trinity which is absolutely locked within itself-one which is not, in its reality, open to anything distinct from it; one, further, from which we are excluded, of which we happen to know something only through a strange paradox.2 This paragraph suggests four major concerns. First, "philosophical and abstract" or "metaphysical" knowledge about God is contrasted with "God as experienced in salvation history," and the Thomistic approach is faulted for paying insufficient attention to the lattero Second, Rahner argues that attention to salvation history rules out beginning a metaphysical inquiry (Le., an account of God under the rubric of what pertains to his unity or essence), because such a starting-point fails to appreciate that the God salvation history is never abstractly "one," but already Father, already personaL3 Third? if a treatise on what 2 Rahner, The Trinity, 17-18. 3 Citing the work of Theodore de Regnon, Raimer connects this "biblical" view with the position of the Greek Fathers, in contrast to the Larin Fathers. On this point, see Michel Rene Barnes, "De Regnon Reconsidered," Augustinian Studies 26 (1995): 51-79; and "Augustine in Contemporary Trinitarian Theology," Theological Studies 56 (1995): 237-50. Barnes persuasively challenges the accuracy of the theory, formulated in the nineteenth century by de Regnon, that the Greek Fathers began with the divine persons and the Latin Fathers with the essence. Barnes's research concerns the earlier Fathers. It is also wonh noting (because of his influence upon Aquinas) that John Damascene, in his Exposition ofthe OrthodoxFaith, first defines God's unity, perfection, goodness...