Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Rome, November 21, 2023
Speaker: Ryan Haecker (University of Austin)
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Ryan Haecker, curator of the proceedings of the Conference held in Cambridge in September 2019 “New Trinitarian Ontologies” (currently being published), reviewed, during the seminar on 21 November 2023, the positions attributable to it and the critical ones (Prof. John Betz and Prof. Fr. White). Prof. Haecker underlined how today’s debate, beyond the divergences, can allow us to explore the various ways in which, starting from the source of everything which is always new, we can talk about God today, just as God spoke and speaks about himself.
What novelty does the Trinitarian ontology represent? The answer apparently seems “none!” The doctrine of the Trinity has been conveniently defined; it would therefore seem impossible to add anything new. Yet, the incarnation recreated the world, its occurrence in history does not pertain to an event that has been lost, exhausted, but continues to be in Christianity. The most ancient idea of God must therefore be the one that has always been waiting to be discovered.
Trinitarian ontology is intended to be a response to the collapse of modern formal ontology: the structure of beings in relation to being, or ontology, is shaped by its participation in the Trinitarian Mystery. Instead of asking the simple question “what is being?” one may ask “What is God”? This originating question calls us to reflect with Aristotle on what simply “is” or, to put it with Augustine, on what simply is the creative cause of the universe.
In Fr. White’s vision, economic processions are visible manifestations of the immanent Trinity. Prof. Haecker underlined how in Fr. White’s vision the economic Trinity appears as something essential and at the same time accidental compared to the immanent processions. White’s Trinitarian theology is centered on proportions essentially mediated by analogy, on apophatic negation and, albeit implicitly, on arguments whose dialectical negativity is suppressed by the fullness of revelatory grace.
In his book Christ the Logos of Creation John Betz proposes the analogy in the form of catalogia (a new way of understanding the analogy of being). Betz thus outlines his Trinitarian ontology: the essence of the Father is simply that of existing; exists in the Son and in the Logos; our existence is instead a gift of the Holy Spirit. Existence is therefore a Trinitarian gift: from the Father, in the Son and from the Spirit. For Betz, analogy is the death of the self-reclusive certainty of reason which, in its absolute reflexivity, opens up to the Transcendent, to the divine Logos and to the Trinity. To the criticisms addressed to the conception of divine identity – where the identity of essence and existence would mean the same thing – Betz responds that this identity must not be understood as static but as dynamic. It is destined to be realized through the procedural relations of the Trinity: the analogy is fulfilled from above “in the ana-kata-Logos of theology”, in which the Logos is the love of the Trinity.
Given this, Ryan Haecker pointed out how John Betz in his recent article “What’s New in the Trinitarian Ontology?” stated that an interesting characteristic of the new Trinitarian ontology is Hemmerle’s reflection on the kenotic aspect of language. It qualifies our analogia entis in such a way that – as for Erich Przywara – the divine identity between essence and existence can now be understood as that self-donation of the Father to the Son, whereby the divine essence exists eternally. In response to the question “what is new in Trinitarian ontology?” he replies: “in a certain sense nothing, but in another sense everything”. For Hemmerle the Trinity rises as a principle of revelation, bursting from below as the foundation of being, while from the gift of love it transforms into every thought. In fact, the procession of the Son from the Father is an expression, in the Spirit, of the love of the Son for the Father and, in the same way and overall, creation is a gift of every act of being, the way in which we speak of being must be in the same sense as a gift. In considering being as a gift Hemmerle can be radically contrasted with Heiddeger. The revelation or non-closure of the Dasein can be conceived not as “Being empties itself” but as a kenotic gift from a superior creative source and/or as a katology of analogical metaphysics. Since this self-emptying of Being is essentially expressed in the maior-dissimilitudo between God and Creation, Hemmerle can say that the emptying God in Christ establishes the analogia entis, the theological grammar of being.
Based on the vision of the bishop of Aachen – underlines Haecker – the new vision of the Trinity is more relational. The simple unity of the Trinity is constituted by the essential relationships of the divine persons, while Creation is the work of the Trinity, an effect that resembles its cause. For this reason, it can be said that the structure of being, or ontology, participates in the subsisting relations of the Trinity. Creatures, therefore, know in a way that resembles the way God made the world. He did it to make himself known and knows all those who know in a perfect reciprocity of absolute knowing. Logic is founded on the divine Logos. It could therefore be objected to White’s positions that the way in which the economic Trinity knows God cannot be considered as a merely virtual remainder of the visible manifestations of the immanent Trinity, while compared to Betz’s positions that the indifferent unity of essence and divine existence, to which our way of knowing opens up in the ultimate theological analogy, cannot remain closed to the dialectical analysis of its mediated and differentiated relationships.
