The Logic of the Trinity: Augustine to Ockham

Preface

preface The history of logic is not just a history of logic books. All sorts of writings provide a fitting context for logical theorizing. In the Middle Ages, one of those contexts was the tradition of philosophical theology surrounding questions about the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity. The reason is that some of the theological questions about the Trinity centered on concepts that are fundamentally logical—concepts of sameness and difference, the relative and the absolute. And so in these pages I want to explore part of that theological tradition of writing from the point of view of the history of logic. I will offer analyses of the ways in which the medieval thinkers understood these concepts and adapted them for theological use. My analyses will be semantic and ontological. But I will not attempt to deploy the machinery of mathematical logic, with its formalized syntax and semantic models. Instead, I will use notions that the medievals themselves had at their disposal—basic semantic notions such as the distinction between language and the nonlinguistic world, and the idea that between these two there are relations of naming or being-true-of, as well as metaphysically charged notions such as the distinction between what a term is true of and what it is essentially true of, and the distinction between the concrete and the abstract. The history of efforts by medieval thinkers to accommodate the ontology of the Trinity within the framework of Greek logic and ontology is a remarkable one.These efforts were remarkable because they pushed creatively beyond the boundaries of existing thought while being subject to three often-conflicting types of constraint. Because they were aimed at interpreting Scripture and the Church’s traditional teachings, they had to remain faithful to those objects of interpretation. But because they were a type of logico-ontological theorizing, they had to be logically rigorous and ontologically illuminating.What counted as good philosophical xv xvi preface theory didn’t always count as good biblical exegesis.And to make matters worse,a third set of constraints arose from the fact that any public utterance regarding the Trinity had to be weighed in the light of its potential effects on the current interests of powerful institutions and individuals. In some cases, good theology, good philosophy, and good politics turned out to be three different things. The main thinkers I will discuss are Augustine, Boethius, Peter Abelard, Gilbert of Poitiers, Bonaventure,Albert the Great,Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and William Ockham. I will begin with Saint Augustine’s discussions, in Books 1–7 of his De Trinitate, about the ontological status of the divine Persons and the relations that bind them together and also separate them. My discussions will not extend to the celebrated passage in Book 9 in which Augustine introduces psychological models of the Trinity, or to the further development of those psychological models by thinkers such as Anselm. This work was carried out as part of the project “The Reception of Aristotle’s Categories in the Byzantine, Arabic and Latin Traditions” under a Discovery Grant funded by the Australian Research Council. My co-researchers on that project were John Marenbon, Sten Ebbesen, and Tony Street. It is a great pleasure to be able to record my thanks to them for the support, encouragement, and inspiration they gave me over the period of the grant as my interests gradually focused on the reception of the Categories in the Christian theological tradition. I also extend my warm thanks to those who graciously invited me to air my evolving thoughts at various seminars and conferences or who contributed to those discussions—especially Allan Bäck, John Bishop, Julie BrumbergChaumont , Moira Gatens, Gyula Klima, Simo Knuuttila, Chris Martin, and Calvin Normore.Two readers for Fordham University Press generously alerted me to numerous ways in which I could improve the manuscript , and for that I thank them.Any remaining errors of fact or logic are bound to be mine, as are any imperfections of interpretation.Translations , where unattributed, are mine. the logic of the trinity ...