Trinitarian Perspectives in the Franciscan Theological Tradition

Maria Calisi

• Publisher: Franciscan Institute Publications
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781576593219
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Systematische Theologie & Ethik

Trinitarian Perspectives in the Franciscan Theological Tradition by Dr. Maria Calisi builds substantially on the previous volumes in the Franciscan Heritage series sponsored by the Secretariat for the Retrieval of the Franciscan Intellectual Tradition (CFIT) of the English Speaking Conference of the Order of Friars Minor. Dr. Calisi is an authority on the theology of Saint Bonaventure. Her exposition of the foundations of the Seraphic Doctor's theology in the contemplative experience of and reflection on the relational nature of God's life retrieves an important theological perspective applicable to our contemporary search for meaning. Well schooled in the patristic inheritance, Calisis engages the reader with a simple but profound analysis of the creedal sign shared by all Christians: In the name of the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit. In these pages we will discover how doctrine can shape life, and life, doctrine; how faith-filled human beings rooted in Trinitarian love can bear great fruit for both Church and society by engaging practitioners in action supportive of personal dignity, ecumenical relationships, social transformation, and ecclesial reform.

Part I: Bonaventure’s Trinitarian Theology

Eastern and Western Trinitarian Theologies

Much of Bonaventure’s highly developed trinitarian theology is arguably about God in Godself, i.e., about the pre-cosmic and eternal processions, relations, and unity within the inner life of God. This had been part of the scholastic theology that was done at the University of Paris, especially by Thomas Aquinas, during Bonaventure’s lifetime in the thirteenth century. However, Bonaventure’s theology is not just about God in Godself; this would have led to an understanding of the Trinity that is locked up within itself and unrelated to us and all of creation.¹⁷ The Seraphic Doctor strives to understand all of God’s activity in the world as the work of the Trinity; that is, creation, Incarnation, redemption, sanctification, and salvation are the work of the Father through the Son in the power of the Spirit. He does not separate his understanding of who God is as a Trinity of Persons from these central Christian teachings. It is on the basis of what Christ revealed in history, especially that God is infinitely overflowing love, that Bonaventure then speculates on the inner life of God and contemplates why God is three Persons: God is tri-Personal because God is love and interpersonal relationship is necessary for the perfection of love. The centrality of God’s love is at the heart of all Franciscan theology and all Franciscan insight. The love of God sets Francis ablaze in following Christ, and this love permeates his whole life and radiates beyond himself to generations of followers. A follower of Francis himself, Bonaventure never loses sight of the central truth of God’s love for us and it resonates in all his theology, no matter how speculative or philosophically sophisticated it becomes.

Bonaventure’s approach to discussing the Trinity is, for the most part, to begin with the person of the Father, rather than with the divine “substance” or divine being. To begin with the divine substance is a somewhat more abstract and impersonal approach. A “substance” may be defined as “a thing in itself.” A “person” may be defined as “one toward another.” This is the way that Augustine and Thomas begin their trinitarian discourses, and then they proceed to discuss the divine persons as mutual and opposite relations within the Godhead. It is important at the outset that we recognize this difference between beginning with the Father and beginning with the notion of substance.

To be “personal” is to be essentially capable of relationship. To start talking about the Trinity in terms of personhood, rather than substance, is immediately to say that relationality is the nature of God, that the nature of God is love. While almost the entire Western Church understood the doctrine of the Trinity in terms of “substance,” is it any wonder that the Franciscan would gravitate to an understanding of the Trinity that starts with interpersonal love?

Bonaventure’s starting point of relationality immediately places him in continuity with the Eastern approach to Trinitarian theology. Whereas the Latin Western theology begins with the divine substance, Eastern Orthodox theology or Cappadocian trinitarian theology also begins with the Father. Now considered the classic difference between the Greek and Latin models of the Trinity, these generalizations were devised by Theodore de Régnon¹⁸ over a hundred years ago. Besides the question of starting points, the models offer different emphases: the Greek model emphasizes personhood more than substance and trineness more than unity, while the Latin model emphasizes the divine substance more than personhood and unity more than trineness. This starting point of relationality, which Bonaventure shares with the Greek tradition, has important implications.

The Father’s Primacy Understood as Fecundity

To begin the discussion with the person of the Father¹⁹ is all-important for Bonaventure because the First Person is the First Principle, or Cause, of all reality, both divine and created. Bonaventure utilizes an important philosophical principle that states that “the more primary a thing is, the more fecund it is, and it is [therefore] the principle of others.”²⁰ As the eternal Origin, the Father communicates the divine substance (or divine being) eternally to the Son and to the Spirit. The Father is the divine person “who is not from another;” this distinguishing property is called innascibilitas (literally “not born” from another) and may be translated as “unbegottenness.” The “Unbegotten One” is an accurate approximation in naming the First Person because it refers to the personal property that is unique to the Father and cannot be shared with the other two divine Persons. For Bonaventure, the name of “Unbegotten One” offers pregnant negative and positive meanings. In the negative sense, “unbegotten” denotes an utter lack of a source, and thus establishes the Father as primary, truly the First Person. In the positive sense, the name connotes fecundity and establishes the Father as the sole Source of the divine essence; but the word “source” does not fully express the absolute fecundity in divinity. The Father is so perfectly, infinitely, and absolutely fecund, that Bonaventure employs the metaphor of fontalis plenitudo (fountain-fullness). It is the image of the moving, flowing, life-giving abundance of a spring; its lapping sounds convey a message of overflowing generosity. This paternal fecundity generates the Son and breathes forth the Spirit in eternity.

To speak about the “primacy of the Father” may grate on many people’s ears, especially if it sounds as though subordinationism²¹ were being introduced into the Trinity. This is because “primacy” is associated with being first in importance, rank, value, honor, and power; it implies leadership and preeminence. How are we to understand this, especially with regard to the Trinity which is a communion of equal persons-in-relation?

Let us start by saying that whatever we know about God the Father, we know through the Son and Spirit because God has revealed Godself in history. This statement suggests two points. One is that we should not divorce the Trinity from the history of salvation, which is made present today in the Church community, the Scriptures, and the sacraments. The second point is that we can know God only in history, only in time. God is eternal, and eternity is not “unending time,” but the absence of time. There is no beginning and no end, no past and no future, but it has been said that there is an “everpresent.” Therefore, there is no time sequence in eternity—the notion of “first, second, third,” is repugnant to God. In this sense, then, the Father is not really “first” at all. No divine Person has primacy. But since we are all time-bound beings, we can speak about eternal things only in sequence and only by using verbs in their present, past, or future tenses. We do not have an “eternal verb tense.” Therefore, the importance, status, and prominence that are often associated with “the first” have no reality in God.

Bonaventure also speaks of the Father as the “cause” or “origin” of the Son and Spirit, but this should not imply the literal beginning of the persons’ existence: their existence is eternal. God was/is never without the divine Word and Spirit. Terms like “cause,” “origin,” and “source,” are necessary because we have to begin somewhere to speak about the Trinity. There is no subordinationism within the Trinity. Perhaps our language itself reveals how “substantive,” rather than relational, we are in our thinking and imagining.

Bonaventure understands divine primacy as eternal fecundity. He maintains as fact the philosophical axiom that “the more primary a thing is, the more fecund it is, and is therefore the origin of others.”²² Unquestionably, for Bonaventure, the Father’s primacy means nothing other than this: Within God there is an unfathomable fecundity of mind and heart; an unfetterable, boundless expression of goodness, a fountain-fullness of self-transcending, Trinity-producing love who willingly overflows to fill the bottomless chasm between time and eternity so that we may be created, sanctified, and saved.

The Self-Diffusiveness of the Good

Another constitutive element for understanding Bonaventure’s trinitarian theology is the philosophical principle that the nature of goodness is to be self-diffusive, which he derives from the Neoplatonic philosophy of the Pseudo-Dionysius.²³ The centrality of this principle cannot be over-estimated, because it is the grounds for the necessity of a tri-Personal God. It is also the basis for God’s relation to the world.²⁴

In the first volume of the Commentary on the Sentences, Bonaventure discusses the question of why there ought to be a plurality of persons in God. He argues that supreme beatitude must necessarily abide in God. Supreme beatitude entails supreme goodness, perfect charity, complete simplicity, and primacy. A plurality of persons is essential for the fulfillment of these attributes, for “the possession of any good is not enjoyable for one who is without a companion.”²⁵ We can see the importance of this principle of goodness as self-diffusive by examining Bonaventure’s major work which formed generations of Franciscans, The Soul’s Journey into God.

In the Soul’s Journey Bonaventure leads the reader through six stages of mystical ascent (culminating in the seventh: the soul’s passing over into God). The reader progresses from the contemplation of God in creation, to the divine image of the soul and finally, to the contemplation of God in Godself. The movement is from the exterior to the interior to the superior. Ever ascending, the movement within this highest stage is first, to contemplate the divine unity through its name which is Being, and then, to contemplate the Trinity in its name which is Goodness.²⁶

Bonaventure begins the meditation with God’s own Self-naming disclosed to Moses in the Hebrew Scriptures: Qui Est or I Am Who Am (Ex 3:14). For Bonaventure, this is a proclamation of the unity of the divine substance.²⁷ Bonaventure receives the revealed name, and in the tradition of scholasticism, ushers the reader briefly through the attributes of divine Being: it is eternal, most simple, most powerful, infinite, immutable, perfect, most actual and hence pure act, and supremely one; and precisely because it is supremely one, it “is the universal principle of all multiplicity. By reason of this, it is the universal efficient, exemplary [formal], and final cause of all things.”²⁸ Bonaventure presents the divine attributes in such a way as to have them flow logically from one into the other. Like his contemporary, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure describes B/being in the same Aristotelian categories of causality (i.e., efficient, formal, material, and final), of change (in terms of act and potency), and of reality (in terms of form and substance).

For Bonaventure, however, God’s highest name is the Good,²⁹ for this is revealed in the New Testament in a verse in which Christ says, “No one is good but God alone” (Luke 18:19 and Matt 19:17). Since goodness and love are interchangeable, the quotation from the First Letter of John, “God is love” (1 John 4:8 and 16) is also relevant. In fact, it may be argued that the message that God is love and goodness is in keeping with the spirit of the New Testament as a whole. Bonaventure unites the fullest revelation of God in Christ with the Pseudo-Dionysian principle that the nature of the good is to be self-diffusive; and we can posit that there is a natural, fecund, and eternal emanation of divine life within the inner being of God.

The nature of goodness per se is such that it must go out of itself; it must be fecund and productive, ecstatic and self-communicative, generous and self-expressive. Goodness is dynamic: it must “act,” it cannot merely “be.” Therefore, the Father must be eternally and lovingly self-expressive by generating the Logos or Word. The Word must be a Person, not just an infinite number of abstract ideas, because rationality and love are the highest expression of God’s Being, and because personhood is necessary for the perfection of love.³⁰ Certainly, we speak of goodness from our limited, relative, and imperfect experience of it. The nature of the good has been the object of concern, contemplation, and philosophical speculation for thousands of years, long before the Seraphic Doctor’s academic sojourn in Paris. When Bonaventure lays claim to this Neoplatonic observation of the good’s self-diffusive nature, he applies it analogously to an already well-developed Christian concept of God, which resonated with this philosophical principle.

In a remarkably concise and compact argument in the Soul’s Journey, Bonaventure puts forth the quintessential trinitarian statement that sets him apart from any other theologian:

See and take note that the highest good in an unqualified sense is that than which nothing better can be thought.³¹ And this is of such a sort that it cannot be thought of as not existing, since it is absolutely better to exist than not to exist. And this is a good of such a sort that it cannot be thought of unless it is thought of as three and one. For “the good is said to be self-diffusive.” The supreme good, therefore, is supremely self-diffusive. But the highest diffusion does not exist unless it is actual and intrinsic, substantial and personal, natural and voluntary, free and necessary, lacking nothing and perfect. In the supreme good there must be from eternity a production that is actual and consubstantial, and a hypostasis as noble as the producer, and this is the case in production by wa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Editor’s Introduction
• Introduction: The Scriptural Revelation and Trinitarian Theology
• Part I: Bonaventure’s Trinitarian Theology
• Part II: Bonaventure, Francis, and the Experience of the Tri-Personal God
• Bibliography
• Footnotes