# God for Us (Lacugna)



## RamistThomist (Feb 2, 2014)

Lacugna, Catherine. _God for Us: The Trinity and the Christian Life_. HarperSan Francisco

Argues that developing theological reflection slowly separated economy from theology, which made the Trinity appear more and more irrelevant. I am not sure about her thesis in the specifics, but I think she is on to something: positing an ontological God apart from God’s decision to redeem the world in Christ does create a metaphysical gap in God. Like others before her, she seeks to correlate the pattern of God’s salvation in history with the being of God (Lacugna 4). 

*Introduction and Chapter 1*

Contrary to what might appear, she is not arguing a “fall” in the early church from Nicene onwards. Rather, the early church necessarily (and rightly) used the philosophical and theological categories available to confront heresies. The downside is that these categories made correct speech about God increasingly difficult. 

Lacunga correctly downplays the so-called differences between East and West on the Trinity. That there are differences is evident, but neither side has the clear advantage. Both ended up separating the being of God from his Acts in history. 
“Economy” is the pattern of God’s saving actions in history. It is “the order that expresses the mystery of God’s eternal being” (25; cf. Ephesians 1:3-14). Few early theologians would deny this, but more and more were led, outside of a strong Nicene philosophy, to a subordinationist Christology: God sends Christ who sends the apostles (and/or the Spirit). Lacugna sees Irenaeus as evidencing this subordinationism, but I don’t think he is. She says he is influenced by the Logos Christology of the Apologists, but the text she quotes from Irenaeus evidences nothing of the strict separation of Logos endiathetos/Logos prophorikos. Of course, it would be equally mistaken to read a sophisticated Nicene understanding of “being” back into Irenaeus.

After Irenaeus oikonomios took on a new connotation: (For Tertullian) “the economy of the divine being expresses the unity of the Father” (28). This in itself is not problematic, but it moves the emphasis from what God has done to speculations about the metaphysical oneness of God.

The Problem of Arius

Arius’s challenge was not so much that he had good arguments against the Son’s deity, but that the way he phrased the arguments seem to account for a lot of biblical passages. He did highlight key areas where talk of God’s economy had been eclipsed. The response to Arius was mostly successful: Christ is the economy of God come into the world. The metaphysical oneness of Father and Son, however, made it difficult to talk of God suffering for us.

*The Cappadocians*

In this section Lacugna gives some helpful clarifications of the philosophical jargon that the Cappadocians used. She sets forth the fundamental thesis of the Cappadocians as God’s ousia exists as three hypostases (54). 
Stoic categories: a category is a predicate, a way of talking about being. There are four of these:
substance ←> matter
quality: that which differentiates matter
Disposition: being in a certain state of matter
relation: that which an object is defined by

Aristotelian categories: 
Primary substance: a particular entity (this oak tree)
secondary substance: a generalized entity (oak-ness)
relation: a term is relative to another if it implies another (a Father is constituted by Son). Relation is the weakest (thinnest) of categories because it only says what a thing is with reference to another and nothing about the entity itself. 

Relational categories work quite nicely when talking about Father or Son. Problem, though: “Spirit” is not a relational term. As Lacugna notes, “The distinction of hypostases is grounded in the relation of origins” (67). 

*Pros and cons of Cappadocian Theology*

Saying that the three hypostases manifest the divine ousia lessens the gap between ontology and economy. However, this seems to cut against their likewise assertion that God’s ousia is so unknowable. One agrees that it is, but what is the point of saying that if the hypostases manifest the ousia? If they do, then in some sense the ousia is knowable. 

Further, to the degree that hypostasis still connotes a concrete existent of the divine ousia, there is the spectre of tritheism. To speak of hypostases concretizing the ousia almost implies that the ousia is divisible (Sergius Bulgakov makes this point with much force, The Comforter, Eerdmans). 

Aquinas: 

After Feurbach and the Enlightenment, the idea of an “in-itself” is viewed as an impossibility.

Palamas:

The main problem with Palamas is that he posited an essence-beyond-essence, or God in itself. Indeed, one can see the Palamite structure accordingly:

God-essence

Persons

----------------- (line of hyperousia)

Energies​the heart of the criticism: ousias do not have “interiorities.” In other words, there is not a subsection of ousia apart from the life of that ousia. As Heidegger reminds us, “ousia” is always “par-ousia,” being present. If Palamas wants to say that the energies make the ousia present, fine. But if he says that, then one really doesn’t have warrant to speak of a superessential, ineffable ousia by itself, for the very point of the energies and of ousia in general is that it is not by itself.
Perhaps the most damaging criticism of Palamas is the divorcing of economy and ontology. Related to this is that the energies seem to replace the role of the Persons in the divine economy. For example, the energies are not unique to a single person but common to all three who act together. This is not so different from the standard Western opera ad intra indivisible sunt. Lacugna, quoting Wendebourg, notes, “the proprium of each person...fades into the background” (Lacugna, 195). By contrast, the Cappadocians would say we distinguish the Persons by their propria--by their hypostatic idiomata. In Palamas, though, this role has been moved to the energies. This is further confirmed by the fact that Palamas has the persons as hyperousia. If we can no longer distinguish the persons by their propria, then Palamas is guilty of the same modalism that the East accuses the West of.


*Part 2*

Lacugna begins with an interesting observation. Pre-Nicene liturgy consisted of a lot of mediatorial prayers to the Father through Christ. While this was not denied by later Trinitarianism, neither was it affirmed as much. From a later vantage point it didn’t seem to make much sense to see Christ as a mediator when he was primarily thought of as sharing the same being as the father. Of course, one does not deny Christ’s consubsantiality, but the emphasis on theologia soon eclipsed the biblical witness to economia. Lacugna draws the conclusion: the saints were soon seen as mediators (210). 
*
Conclusion and Critique
*
My critique will also include a lot of the later material in her book. While I think her initial thesis is sound (a hard divorce between economy and theology posits an irrelevant Trinity), I think she is rather haphazard in applying it. She correctly notes that on the Cappadocians’ model, God exists as Father, Son, and Spirit, yet she downplays problems for the Cappadocians (they came very close to concretizing the essence; their mysticism made much of their Trinitarianism irrelevant, and so they are prey to Lacugna’s critique). Further, while her take on Zizioulas is appreciated, and though she offers a brilliant and brutal critique of Palamas, she doesn’t really take into account Palamas’s virtual dogmatic status in the Orthodox world. This makes it rather problematic for her to say we should look to the East on the Trinity.

Further, regarding the word “Person.” In her discussion on Barth she does note that that the definition of “person” shifted from the ancient world to the modern.. She accuses Barth of modalism because Barth defined “person” as tropos huparxos and that God is one divine subject who exists in three modes of simultanaeity. There is a certain irony in Lacugna’s rejection of Barth: Barth used the exact same definition, literally word-for-word, as Gregory of Nyssa, to whom Lacugna says we ought to return! The problem, as Bruce McCormack has noted, is that the word person in the post-Enlightenment world simply doesn’t mean the same thing as it did in the ancient world. He notes,



> Second comment: as Bruce indicated, the problem repeatedly in the nineteenth century was the assumption that the patristic hypostasis and prosopon could be translated into the English ‘person’, with all the connotations of those words in a post-Romantic age. Strauss, for instance (a quotation Bruce used): ‘to speak of two natures in one person is to speak of a single self-consciousness, for what else could a single person mean?’ However, it is clear that in the patristic construction of Trinity and Christology such ‘personal’ characteristics as ‘self-consciousness’, if considered at all, were attached to natures not persons—this was, for instance, the whole point of the orthodox solutions to the monoenergist and monothelite controversies. (This is why Barth preferred ‘mode of being’ to ‘person’ for the three hypostases of the Trinity; in post-Romantic terms, all that is ‘personal’ in God is one.)



Translation: Person in modern-speak means a situated self-consciousness, implying, among other things, a mind. This is most certainly not what the Patristics meant, to the degree they had a coherent definition of person, anyway. “Self-consciousness” and “mind” for the Fathers was located in the nature, not the person (otherwise we would have three or four minds in the Trinity). Lacugna simply hasn’t reflected enough on what person can mean. To say we should go back to “personalism” is not helpful at all. You can’t say you want to go back to the robust personalism of the Cappadocians if you mean person = self-consciousness, for that’s precisely what the Cappadocians rejected! I have my own reservations about Barth’s project, but he knew exactly what both he and the Cappadocians were saying and avoided all the problems that Lacugna’s project succumbs. 

*A Trinitarian Ethic*

This is where he project comes close to self-destruction. Despite being a Roman Catholic and teaching at Notre Dame, Lacugna is a feminist. To be fair, though, she blunts a lot of her feminist critique and actually raises good points. My problem in this section is her use of vague language that will likely provide fodder for later mischief.

*Conclusion:*

Despite being published by Harper San Francisco, this is a surprisingly good read. The historical analyses on the Cappadocians and Augustine are superb. She corrected a lot of my own misreadings of Augustine. I don’t think she has fully reflected either on how the modern world forced Trinitarian dialogue to mutate nor does she really understand what the Cappadocians were saying.


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## CharlieJ (Feb 2, 2014)

I have grave doubts about the accuracy of Lacugna's historical work. I don't remember exactly where I first encountered a significant critique of Lacugna, but it may have been (explicit or implicit) in Lewis Ayres, _Augustine and the Trinity_. Although, perhaps for all that, she is still saying something interesting in the present.


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## RamistThomist (Feb 2, 2014)

CharlieJ said:


> I have grave doubts about the accuracy of Lacugna's historical work. I don't remember exactly where I first encountered a significant critique of Lacugna, but it may have been (explicit or implicit) in Lewis Ayres, _Augustine and the Trinity_. Although, perhaps for all that, she is still saying something interesting in the present.



It's been a while since I have read Ayres. I'll have to double-chech that.


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## CharlieJ (Feb 2, 2014)

I should add that I think the East-West divide on the Trinity has been greatly overblown. I know both Ayres and D. B. Hart have made that claim, Ayres at length. I think Colin Gunton was demonstrably wrong here, and his mistakes have had an ugly afterlife (a shame, since his work is in many ways quite profound). I actually reviewed an evangelical scholar's book-length critique of Gunton's criticism of Augustine. The book is Bradley Green, _Colin Gunton and the Failure of Augustine_. My review is in Augustinian Studies 42/2 (2011): 324-26.


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## RamistThomist (Feb 2, 2014)

CharlieJ said:


> I should add that I think the East-West divide on the Trinity has been greatly overblown. I know both Ayres and D. B. Hart have made that claim, Ayres at length. I think Colin Gunton was demonstrably wrong here, and his mistakes have had an ugly afterlife (a shame, since his work is in many ways quite profound). I actually reviewed an evangelical scholar's book-length critique of Gunton's criticism of Augustine. The book is Bradley Green, _Colin Gunton and the Failure of Augustine_. My review is in Augustinian Studies 42/2 (2011): 324-26.



I mostly agree. I think Lacugna's point on Augustine was that he moved analysis of the Trinity away from the economy and into the intraTrinitarian life (and in the soul of the believer). Did he prioritize nature over person? I think that is most of the critique of Augustine. I think the question is misleading since both person and nature are important concepts. I actually _don't_ like Augustine on the Trinity.

I agree with Hart that Augustine did speak of the persons as _mutually irreducible_, which would seem to lend some weight to the person-theory. On the other hand, Augustine's use of simplicity was so strong that he could speak of "to be is to be a person."


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