(continuing from previous post)
I found the metaphysic of separation to be present in your writing at three points, although at second glance, I admit I may have been mistaken. First was your argument about the failure of Trinitarian theosis, but having read your response, I now see it is a different argument from what I thought. The next place where I found it most clearly was when you asked, “Where does the nature end and the person begin?” I also thought I saw it when you said that in Social Trinitarianism, the personhood of the Father and Son is “robust,” because I took that to imply a contrast between the supposedly less personal understanding of Trintarianism. On a second look, after reading your reply, I can see how I misread you in each case.
In my own defense, however, one of the reasons that I interpreted you as I did is because I consider your words in the context of what I already know about Mormon theology, in which I find a thoroughgoing embrace of the metaphysic of separation at virtually every point. I believe this happens because it is demanded by Mormon materialism. In a materialist metaphysic, nothing can exist as an individual except by separation from others – because bodily separation is the only principle of individuation that material beings have. Yet, in an immaterial metaphysic, that need not be the case, because it is necessary that non-physical beings be individuated on the different basis from material division. Yet because you have to grant the possibility, or at least the conceivability, of immaterial subsistence to see that, the materialist commitments of Mormon theology prevent even very intelligent Mormons from grasping this point. An example of this can be found in Ostler’s critique of the Trinity in Aquinas as he summarizes it in this FAIR article:
fairlds.org/FAIR_Conferences/2005_Fallacy_of_Fundamentalist_Assumptions.html
The persons of the Trinity are reduced to mere relational substances on his view, or relational subsistences, that is, the persons aren’t things, they’re not separate, they’re not distinct–they’re mere relations. And if you ask, ‘Well doesn’t a relation require something and something else that are in relation together?’ I would say yes, but let’s take away the something and the something else and see what’s in between and that’s what Thomas Aquinas was talking about–those are the persons.
The context of this statement is an attempt to briefly summarize Ostler’s case for why the Trinity reduces to either modalism or incoherence, and admittedly he doesn’t give it the full treatment here that does in his first book. But the point at which he reveals the underlying metaphysic of separation is when he assumes that separation between somethings, with another “in between,” is necessary for them to have individual being – a materialist assumption, which reveals that, unbeknownst even to himself, his is making an external critique based on materialism, and not a refutation of the internal coherence of Aquinas’s thought. The metaphysic of separation is the crux of Ostler’s argument.
Now Ostler is not even the best source for this. I say that that metaphysic of separation is inherent in Mormonism
per se, not just because materialism entails it, but because it is contained in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ official, inspired criticisms of the ecumenical Councils that defined the Trinity. In evidence of this, I call in witness Elder Dallin H. Oaks, speaking at the April 1995 General Conference:
In the process of what we call the Apostasy, the tangible, personal God described in the Old and New Testaments was replaced by the abstract, incomprehensible deity defined by compromise with the speculative principles of Greek philosophy. The received language of the Bible remained, but the so-called “hidden meanings” of scriptural words were now explained in the vocabulary of a philosophy alien to their origins. In the language of that philosophy, God the Father ceased to be a Father in any but an allegorical sense. He ceased to exist as a comprehensible and compassionate being. And the separate identity of his Only Begotten Son was swallowed up in a philosophical abstraction that attempted to define a common substance and an incomprehensible relationship.
I could multiply examples of this kind of thinking almost indefinitely; even if I limited myself only to official statements like this one, I could make an impressive dossier.
Of course, you are not quite like other Mormons. You get a lot about Catholicism that others do not, because you not only were Catholic, but admit to Catholic leanings in your thinking. In fact, you can probably spot the misrepresentations of conciliar theology in Elder Oaks’s inspired comments as quickly as I can. For this reason, I suggest that if you find yourself resistive to the metaphysic of separation, it is because of your Catholic influences, not your Mormon ones. The project you seem to be working in this thread is a way of fitting a doctrine of participation, really a scholastic idea, to a model of deification drawn from Mormonism. But the two are incompatible at the level of first philosophy.
[Note: because this post is long, I did not quote all Tom’s posts that I am partly responding to. They are on this thread at #’s 59-62.]
