Trinity: one or three 'centres of consciousness'?

[Vouthon]

This post concerns some of my misgivings with the modern theological trend of “social Trinitarianism” and the confusion it has caused me.

According to the dogma and received tradition of the faith as I understand it, God is one ousia (essence, being, substance) in three consubstantial hypostases (three subsistent relations of origin of the one, ineffable Divine Essence: the Father unoriginate, the Son eternally begotten from the Father and the Holy Spirit proceeding in eternity from (in the Western Latin tradition with the filioque) the Father and the Son).

Because the hypostases are distinct only in their relations of origin (as defined, for example, at the Fourth Latern Council), everything not related to a relation of origin must be said of all three hypostases indivisibly.

I have always understood this to mean that God is therefore a ‘single’ subject/centre of consciousness and will identified with His Essence/Nature (which each Person is wholly and entirely), yet knowing Himself in a threefold manner in His inner life through the subsistent relations in origin of the Persons. So the Father is the Father in relation to the Son, the Son the Son in relation to the Father and the Holy Spirit the love between the two etc. One “I” thrice over. As one theologian, Prestige, aptly expresses it: “God is one object in Himself, and three objects to Himself.”

The Church Father St. John of Damascus (died 749 A.D.) in his An Exposition of the Orthodox Faith VIII summarises the theology of the earlier Eastern Fathers:

https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/33041.htm

We believe, then, in One God, one beginning , having no beginning, uncreate, unbegotten, imperishable and immortal, everlasting, infinite, uncircumscribed, boundless, of infinite power, simple, uncompound, incorporeal, without flux, passionless, unchangeable…

For there the community and unity are observed in fact, through the coeternity of the subsistences, and through their having the same essence and energy and will and concord of mind, and then being identical in authority and power and goodness – I do not say similar but identical – and then movement by one impulse. For there is one essence, one goodness, one power, one will, one energy, one authority, one and the same, I repeat, not three resembling each other.

But the three subsistences have one and the same movement. For each one of them is related as closely to the other as to itself: that is to say that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are one in all respects, save those of not being begotten, of birth and of procession

So, the above tells us that Holy Mother Church proclaims, adores, and worships the one utterly simple divine essence, which exists thrice over as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: perfectly and indivisibly one in all things except in their relations of origin (Paternity, Filiation and Spiration).

(continued…)

 

[Vouthon]

However, I have lately been disturbed by my reading of a modern ‘trend’ in theology over the past sixty or so years - known loosely as ‘social trinitarianism’ - which appears to insinuate that there are actually three centres of consciousness in the three ‘persons’: making them more akin to a divine ‘family’ under the ‘monarchy of the Father’, than distinct subsistent relations within one undivided essence which is one supreme reality, God. Dumitru Stăniloae speaks of the perichoresis of the three ‘divine subjects’ as implying distinct conciousnesses: “In the perfect unity of the Trinity the consciousness of the other two subjects, and thereby the very subjects themselves who bear that consciousness, must be perfectly comprised and transparent in the consciousness of each subject” ( The Experience of God , I:256).

These social Trinitarians (such as William Hasker, Miroslav Volf, Jurgen Moltmann,) accuse the Latin West (namely, St. Augustine) of locating all that is truly ‘personal’ (such as knowledge, volition, action) in the ineffable divine nature, rather than severally in the hypostases (as they seem to allege the Cappadocians did).

I would agree with them so far as St. Augustine and St. Thomas are concerned but I deem this to be “orthodoxy” (not some ‘quasi-modalism’) and reject the idea that the Cappadocians taught anything different, cetainly not this modernistic ‘social-relational’ Trinity which seems to misconstrue what ‘person’ meant in its original patristic Greek context (i.e. not discrete subjective centres of consciousness and will, as with the post-enlightenment definition of ‘personhood’, that ‘anthropomorphize’ the relations within the Godhead and undermine monotheism).

I personally cannot conceive of this being anything other than “tritheism”.

In steering clear of the heresy of ‘modalism’ - the denial of the real distinction of origin between the Persons (i.e. claiming that they are just interchangeable ‘modes’ by which one divine person reveals Himself in the economy of salvation, rather than eternal subsistent realities innate to the inner life of God) - it seems to have fallen prey to an equally heinous ‘tritheism’ of independently willed divine agents, which surely offends the biblical revelation to Moses of the unicity of God (i.e. “I am that I am”, “the Lord your God is one”).

I would like to hear from the theologically literate folks on the forum (to help me make sense of all of this): should we conceive of one or ‘three’ centres of consciousness/knowledge in the Godhead? Isn’t God perfectly and indivisibly one in every way other than the relations of origin of the Persons, including therefore a single divine consciousness and will which each of the Persons “is” and has entirely?

 

[TK421]

I’m not a theologian but I read stuff and AFAIK the standard answer would be that the three Persons of the Holy Trinity do each have a Divine consciousness while simultaneously having one Divine consciousness. The Father is not the Son and the Son is not the Father, but the Son is God and the Father is God, etc.

I’m not qualified to say whether or not the stuff you’ve been reading would count as a deviation from the dogma of the Trinity, but any explanation of the Trinity (including the one in the CCC) is grossly inadequate compared to the actual reality of God in the Beatific Vision. It would be the Sacred Congregation on the Doctrine of Faith to make a definitive answer if these people are saying something heterodox.

Peace.

 

[Wesrock]

@Vouthon, my understanding is as yours. I follow Sts. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas on the matter, and agree that social Trinitarian movement as you’ve described it (I haven’t read into it independently) would be a type of tritheism.

 

[twf]

I have always believed that there are three centres of consciousness. The three divine persons are in perfect unity and conformity and in that sense share a consciousness, but also are each “self-aware” of being the Father, or being the Son, or being the Spirit. Our Lord prayed to the Father…his consciousness praying to the Father’s. He didn’t pray to himself. If my understanding all these years has been heretical… Lord have mercy on me.

 

[Vouthon]

I have always believed that there are three centres of consciousness. The three divine persons are in perfect unity and conformity and in that sense share a consciousness, but also are each “self-aware” of being the Father, or being the Son, or being the Spirit.

Thank you for your contribution.

Personally (and I may, of course, be wrong), I have a serious problem with conceiving of the Persons - subsistent relations of origin of the hypostases - as possessed of their own “centres” of consciousness. If we have three self-aware divine ‘selves’, then I cannot understand how the Godhead could be ‘simple’ and ‘indivisibly one’.

The Persons are truly ‘distinct’ - contra modalism - but only in their relations of origin. In practically every other respect, the Persons are ‘one’ and ‘identical’ due to their unicity of essence/being/substance.

“While distinct from one another in their relations of origin (as the Fourth Lateran Council declared, “it is the Father who generates, the Son who is begotten, and the Holy Spirit who proceeds”) and in their relations with one another, they are stated to be one in all else, co-equal, co-eternal and consubstantial, and each is God, whole and entire” (Coppens, Charles, S.J. (1903). A Systematic Study of the Catholic Religion . St. Louis: B. HERDER).

St. Augustine, for example, provided our western theological tradition with its classic expression of Trinitarianism, through a psychological analogy of the Trinity in which the unity of essence is compared with the rational part of the human soul, composed as it is of “the mind, and the knowledge by which it knows itself, and the love by which it loves itself.”

Now this is a very imperfect analogy, because the faculties in our mind are not truly distinct ‘persons’ in their relation of origin, however I personally don’t think it lends itself well to conceiving of the Trinity as three ‘centres of consciousness’ as opposed to one consciousness threefold/thrice over.

I would thus quote approvingly the words of the 20th century Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth, when he noted in his Church Dogmatics:

It is well to note at this early stage that what we to-day call the ‘personality’ of God belongs to the one unique essence of God which the doctrine of the Trinity does not seek to triple but rather to recognise in its simplicity . . .

‘Person’ as used in the Church doctrine of the Trinity bears no direct relation to personality. The meaning of the doctrine is not, then, that there are three personalities in God. That would be the worst and most extreme expression of tritheism…We are speaking not of three divine I’s but thrice of the one divine I.

(continued…)

 

[Vouthon]

The orthodox theologian Zizioulas has exerted a formative influence on this ‘social Trinitarian’ camp and been accused by the Baptist theologian Stephen Holmes of “implying that each of the hypostaseis is fully personal, possessed of their own will, intellect”.

However, to my surprise (and despite my misgivings of his personalistic ontology), it seems that he has in more recent years disclaimed that kind of idea or at least qualified his thinking.

“In patristic thought, the person is not the center or subject of consciousness or of psychological experiences. This is apparent from the following highly significant observation: the persons of the Holy Trinity have only one will, only one “consciousness,” and—if the term may be permitted—”psychological experience.” In reality, all the things that in personalism constitute essential elements in the concept of the person are connected by the Fathers with the nature or essence of God, in other words, with what is common to the three Persons and not what is different. In other words, these are not hypostatic-personal properties that define the concept of the person, but properties relating to the essence or the nature of God.” ( The One and the Many , p. 21).

“The Greek Fathers insisted that memory, knowledge, will and love are not individuated between the persons of God but common to them all. They understood that to confer individual psychological attributes upon the persons of God may lead to the projection of creaturely characteristics onto God.” (John Zizioulas, Lectures in Christian Dogmatics , p. 69)

However, the other social Trinitarians proper don’t. Thus, in his book The Christian God , Richard Swinburne presents an understanding of God as a collective of three omnipotent divine individuals, which of course is pure heresy and Tritheism.

I consider this ‘trend’ in modernity to be disturbing. It seems to come in ‘softer’ and ‘harder’ forms. In its ‘softer’ variety, I find that it has become rather endemic in modern English Eastern Orthodox popular discourse - directed as polemic against alleged Latin Catholic ‘essentialism’ in our Trinitarian theology and ‘quasi-modalism’ (i.e. too much emphasis upon the unity of divine essence/substance to the detriment of the distinction of persons and relationality) - and in its harder form, amid some Protestant theologians (although resisted by many others, such as the leading Baptist theologian Stephen Holmes) like the above, which deviates entirely into Tritheism. There is thus a wide ambit.

 

[Vouthon]

The Father is not the Son and the Son is not the Father, but the Son is God and the Father is God, etc.

Yes, I agree.

The Father is not the Son because of His Paternity (He begets), the Son is not the Father because He is begotten of the Father.

The Three Persons are distinct in their eternal relations of origin - begetting of the Son and procession of the Spirit - but everything else one might say about them (will, power, intellect, goodness etc.) is spoken indivisibly, I would say, of the Divine Life they share as one essence and being. In that sense the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) tells us: “Each of the persons is that supreme reality, viz., the divine substance, essence or nature… Although therefore the Father is one person, the Son another person and the holy Spirit another person, they are not different realities, but rather that which is the Father is the Son and the holy Spirit, altogether the same; thus according to the orthodox and catholic faith they are believed to be consubstantial .”

This is because of the dogmatic proposition at the Council of Florence, that “everything is one where the difference of a relation does not prevent this”, otherwise put it as “no distinction except in relations of origin”:

“These three persons are one God not three gods, because there is one substance of the three, one essence, one nature, one Godhead, one immensity, one eternity, and everything is one where the difference of a relation does not prevent this.” (Council of Florence Session 11)

To me, this would appear to mean ‘one’ in mind/consciousness (just as there being one will as St. John of Damascus said)?

 

[John_Martin]

The Object Known is in the Knower; God, in his persons, is the only being able to be the actual object while in the knower, alive, the Son in the Father, the Father in the Son, and the Spirit;
The Father knows the Object of the Son and Creation knowing the object of the Father and the Spirit.
In, In, In; not adjacent. In implies one.

 

[TK421]

@Vouthon

The hypostatic union seems to suggest that Jesus Christ who “grew in wisdom and stature” would have distinctiveness as a person. God has nothing to grow in, already being entirely complete, but at the Incarnation he does, but not the Father or the Holy Spirit, but only the Son.

i.e. Jesus wasn’t roleplaying being a baby with Mary and Joseph. He was actually growing and learning from them.

 

[Bithynian]

to help me make sense of all of this

I don’t have any insightful or thoughtful answers for your (excellent) questions at this very moment. From another perspective, I think one consideration should be kept in mind as to why Social Trinitarianism is so controversial: the implications for human sociality arising from divine sociality.

One of the long-running disputes within evangelical Christianity vis a vis Social Trinitarianism is the eternal subordination of the Son to the Father, and whether this social relation can serve as a ‘blueprint’ for human social relations. In many conservative Reformed communities, eternal subordination is the basis of gender relations: men and women are equal in essence, but women are eternally subordinate to men in function. Likewise (and if I’m remembering correctly), Russian Orthodox theologians have also fielded eternal subordination in defense of the masculine essence of the priesthood (this was due to some controversial calls for the admission of women to the diaconate).

At the same time, Social Trinitarianism is also controversial in the West because it is largely associated with postmodern theologians such as Barth (whose reputation in conservative Reformed circles has suffered tremendously), and also the primary centres of liberal theology (Oxbridge, St Andrew’s, etc.).

 

[Vouthon]

I’ve actually found an article online by a Baptist theologian who started writing a book planning to expound on the glories of “social Trinitarianism” influenced by his reading of Zioulas, Moltmann, Virolav and the rest but in the process of so doing - and directly studying the fourth century Patristics - came to believe that it was a tritheistic heresy in violation of Nicene orthodoxy, such that the forthcoming book (to be published next year) is now a rebuttal of the entire 20th century postmodernist ‘trinitarian revival’.

See:

Why I no longer believe in a passible God - Credo Magazine

From about 1990 to about 2005, I was immersed in the study of Karl Barth and John Howard Yoder. I published a book on Yoder and a follow-up book on social ethics. I was reading people like Colin Gunton, John Zizioulas, Mirosalav Volf and Stanley Grenz, who were promoting the idea of relationality as the essence of God. This relationality is seen as fundamental to the nature of God as Triune in that the three persons are regarded as individual persons with their own wills who cooperate together like a family. So, the relationality within God is expressed in God’s external acts in the creation.

Zizioulas and company had argued that the new social Trinitarianism was grounded in the work of the Cappadocian fathers and was preserved better in the eastern tradition than in the western tradition shaped by Augustine. Gunton attacked Augustine as not having done justice to the doctrine of the Trinity. This historical narrative of the Eastern social trinity versus the Western near-Unitarianism was crucial to my whole project because the relationality within God—mirrored in the way God related to the creation—supposedly was the explanation for what Scripture means when it says “God is love.” My idea was to articulate a social ethics of love based on a doctrine of God as love.

At this point, I began to read the fourth-century fathers and the leading patristic scholars for myself, and that was a jarring and eye-opening experience. Reading the primary sources is dangerous if all you want is to get your preconceptions confirmed so you can get on with your argument. (To paraphrase C. S. Lewis, a young revisionist cannot be too careful about his reading.)

Relational theism of all sorts represents a move toward pantheism and the various forms of social Trinitarianism and theistic personalism represent a move toward polytheism.

The orthodox, Nicene tradition had generated a doctrine of God in which the three persons ( hypostases ) share one common being ( ousia ) and thus constitute one God. The mystery of God means that the immanent Trinity is incomprehensible to human reason and that what is revealed in the economy (that is, in history) is all true so far as it goes, but it does not reveal all of God’s eternal being.

There is only one God, but our minds cannot grasp all that God is. Once we understand that the persons are not individuals with separate centers of consciousness and will, as human persons are, we realize that the mystery of the Trinity is beyond human comprehension

 

[Vico]

…

The self-consciousness of each divine person (subjective, not objective) is of the divine essence so common as one to the divine persons.

Denzinger (Sources of Catholic Dogma) has this (old numbering):

ST. LEO IX 1049-1054
Symbol of Faith *
[From the epistle “Congratulamur vehementer” to Peter,
Bishop of Antioch, April 13, 1053]
343 For I firmly believe that the Holy Trinity, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, is one omnipotent God, and in the Trinity the whole Godhead is co-essential and consubstantial, co-eternal and co-omnipotent, and of one will, power, and majesty; the creator of all creation, from whom all things, through whom all things, in whom all things [Rom. 11:36] which are in heaven or on earth, visible or invisible. Likewise I believe that each person in the Holy Trinity is the one true God, complete and perfect.

http://patristica.net/denzinger/

 

[John_Martin]

When I talk to “God”, I am only “envisioning” one Person whom I am addressing:
When I pray to the Father, I am looking him “in the eyes” and so my eyes see no other eyes than the eyes of the Father, the One God.
When I pray to the Son, I am looking him “in the eyes” and so my eyes see no other eyes than the eyes of the Son, the One God.
When I pray to the Holy Spirit, I am looking him “in the ether” and so my eyes see no other eyes than the flame of the Holy Spirit, the One God.

My “awareness” does not address a “panel of persons” in addressing God.

 

[Vouthon]

self-consciousness of each divine person (subjective, not objective) is of the divine essence so common as one to the divine persons.

Amen!

One Anglican theologian, G.L. Prestige in his 1950s study God in Patristic Thought , aptly described it thus:

https://trinityinyou.com/g-l-prestige-fathers-and-heretics-pp-87-93/

"As against the Sabellians, Athanasius insisted that the personal distinctions in the Godhead, which have been revealed in temporal history, are permanent and authentic features of the personality of God who has revealed them. As against Arius, he maintained that howsoever God reveals Himself, is the self-same God who is revealed. Hence comes the two sides of the Catholic doctrine.

Each Person is a genuine hypostasis. This term, owing to the derivation of Western theological language from the Latin, is commonly translated Person, but it does not mean an individual person in the ordinary sense. Its real purport is to describe that which ‘stands up to’ pressure, that which possesses a firm crust, and so an object in the concrete, something which is not a mere attribute or abstraction, but has a being of its own, and can jostle other objects without losing its identity.

Applied to God, it expresses the idea of a solid and self-supported presentation of a divine reality. All the qualities which modern speech associates with personality, however, such as consciousness and will, are attributed to Greek theology to the complementary term of the definition; they belong to divine substance, the single being of God, and to the several ‘Persons’ only by virtue of their embodiment and presentation of that unique being. The entire difference between the Persons is one not of content but of manner.

Nothing whatsoever exists to differentiate between the Father, the Son, and the Spirit except the difference of aspect with which each presents the whole reality of God. God exists Fatherwise, Sonwise, and Spiritwise; this illustrates the truth that personality can live and act only in social relationship. But He is always God; and this confirms Him as the ultimate ground of all existence and the sole object of legitimate allegiance and worship"

And from the Dictionary of Latin and Greek theology:

“In none of these usages [by the orthodox] does the term ‘persona’ have the connotation of emotional individuality or unique consciousness that clearly belongs to the term in contemporary usage. It is quite certain that the trinitarian use of ‘persona’ does not point to three wills, three emotionally unique beings, or, as several eighteenth-century authors influenced by Cartesianism argued, three centers of consciousness; such implication would be tritheistic.

In other words, despite the variety of usages and implications we have noted, the patristic, medieval, Reformation, and Protestant scholastic definitions of the term ‘persona’ are united in their distinction from colloquial modern usage.”

(– Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms (2nd. Ed.), pp. 263-4)

 

[twf]

But then Jesus, as true man and true God, but also have a human consciousness. And that human consciousness belongs specifically to God the Son… not God the Father or God the Holy Spirit. If the three divine persons share a consciousness, I don’t see how the Son could pray to the Father prior to the incarnation… but the Son Incarnate, in his human consciousness, could pray to the Father. Is that correct?

 

[Eric_Hyom]

In John’s Gospel Jesus prays - so that they may be one, as we are one.

Can the greatest commandments possibly describe how Christ is One with the Father?

The Father loves the Son as he loves himself.
The Son loves the Father as he loves himself.

Can the Father love the Son more than he loves himself?

Could the spirit be the power of God’s love; working through the perfection of the greatest commandments?

1 Samuel 18-1, NIV version

Jonathan became one in spirit with David, and he loved him as himself.

Could we be One with each other if we live by the greatest commandments?

 

[Vouthon]

But then Jesus, as true man and true God, but also have a human consciousness. And that human consciousness belongs specifically to God the Son… not God the Father or God the Holy Spirit. If the three divine persons share a consciousness, I don’t see how the Son could pray to the Father prior to the incarnation… but the Son Incarnate, in his human consciousness, could pray to the Father. Is that correct?

The pre-incarnate Son is co-eternal and co-equal with the Father (“true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father”) and obviously He did not ‘pray’ to His own Divine Essence, nor to the hypostasis of the Father. God the Son is perfectly and entirely ‘God’, the selfsame supreme reality.

In his pre-resurrection incarnate humanity - complete with his full human nature and soul - He did, however, pray as any human would using his human brain to the Father, because in His humanity he had become a servant (i.e. made a little lower than the angels as to His human nature).

To quote St. Augustine from Book I of his De Trinitate:

For he did not so take the form of a servant that he lost the form of God in which he was equal to the Father. So if the form of a servant was taken on in such a way that the form of God was not lost—since it is the same only begotten Son of the Father who is both in the form of a servant and in the form of God, equal to the Father in the form of God, in the form of a servant the mediator of God and men the man Christ Jesus—who can fail to see that in the form of God he too is greater than himself and in the form of a servant he is less than himself?

Wherefore, having mastered this rule for interpreting the Scriptures concerning the Son of God, that we are to distinguish in them what relates to the form of God, in which He is equal to the Father, and what to the form of a servant which He took, in which He is less than the Father; we shall not be disquieted by apparently contrary and mutually repugnant sayings of the sacred books. For both the Son and the Holy Spirit, according to the form of God, are equal to the Father, because neither of them is a creature, as we have already shown: but according to the form of a servant He is less than the Father…

 

[twf]

You mention that Our Lord prayed to the Father in his pre-resurrection humanity… but what about his post-resurrection glorified humanity? At every Mass, Christ as high priest offers his sacrifice to the Father. St John saw Christ as a “Lamb slain” standing before the Father in heaven.

 

[Bithynian]

Zizioulas

I see Metropolitan Zizioulas’ name constantly crop up in Anglophone scholarship on Social Trinitarianism (ST for brevity), and - to be honest - I’m not sure about the degree of contiguity (if there even is any) between his Orthodox conception of ST and whatever Protestant theologians might conceive of ST. They operate from so radically different presuppositions about Christology, pneumatology, ecclesiology and anthropology that, when I’ve read their works, I oft think that Met Zizioulas and his fellow Orthodox theologians aren’t even talking about the same thing as Protestant theologians. It doesn’t help that the bulk of Met Zizioulas’ works are in Greek and untranslated (especially those on Orthodox ecclesiology), and Protestant theologians (for whom fluency in Modern Greek is non-existent) seem to rely upon secondary analyses of a restricted range of his writings.

In a lot of ways, it’s surprising that Protestants even engaged with Met Zizioulas’ thought on the Trinity, since he with Christos Yannaras and John Romanides are the most prominent Orthodox anti-Augustinians of the 20th century. Romanides is sometimes quite hysterical on this point in his writings, seeing St Augustine’s pneumatology as largely responsible for the heresy of the West, and he conceived of Calvinism as the logical conclusion of Catholicism. To a large extent, this is why ST has not been particularly influential (or even engaged with) in the Catholic Church: we’re not going to repudiate Augustine’s articulation of the Trinity, and the implications of ST are somewhat irrelevant to our theology.