ABSTRACT

Readers of Augustine’s De Trinitate usually come to realize that the doctrine of the Trinity is more confusing than ever they had imagined. They realize this, not because Augustine presents them with an especially clever or convoluted explanation of how to understand three-and-oneness or of the deep meanings of technical Trinitarian terms: rather, it is because Augustine is so very persistent in returning time after time to how confused he himself is – so persistent in raising again and again questions which he cannot, or cannot immediately, answer. Augustine, the reader quickly discovers, has thought of more difficulties with the doctrine of the Trinity than any sceptic. What kind of three are the three in the Trinity, if they are not three Gods? What do we actually mean by ‘Persons’? And how can the One who is sent not be less than the One who sends? And why is the Holy Spirit not also called a Son if the Holy Spirit also comes forth from the Father? Why does the Holy Spirit have no distinctive name, since ‘Holy’ and ‘Spirit’ both also are said of Father and of Son? And if Christ is ‘the power of God and the wisdom of God’, does that mean that the Father himself is not wise, but only attains wisdom through the Son? The questions come thick and fast. What Augustine quite dramatically indicates is that the search for clarity, at its

best, begins in confusion. Or rather, it begins in honesty about confusion, in the willingness to acknowledge what one does not understand, the willingness to consider and explore rather than suppress a difficulty, the willingness to articulate and examine a muddle rather than nervously to push it under a carpet. And it is important to understand that what this in fact means is that the search for clarity begins in faith, in real conviction, in a very distinctive kind of confidence. It is not in spite of his Christian conviction that Augustine can confess so freely everything about the Trinity which he does not understand, but precisely because of it. This is something that shines through very powerfully in De Trinitate: Augustine shows an enormous freedom to be puzzled, and exhibits no anxiety whatsoever that if he perhaps probes too far or asks too many questions, the reality under discussion might fall apart, that it might somehow disappear or prove itself unworthy of belief. Where there is an instinct to suppress uncertainties, confusions, and questions

about faith, on the other hand, this may well be an indication of a fear that on some level faith cannot stand up to questioning, that it might dissolve before one’s eyes if one allowed oneself to think too closely about how confusing it is. Fragility in the

faith of an individual or a community, in other words, is likely to be accompanied by rigidity as well, by an anxiety, a guard kept against raising too many questions, against acknowledging too much confusion. And clearly where such a fragility and such a rigidity reign, there can be little possibility of a genuine search for clarity, though there may well be a good deal of effort to achieve tidiness, completeness, or intellectual closure, to describe a position where the answer to all questions can already be known in advance. In some ways the style of Thomas Aquinas, the great thirteenth-century theolo-

gian, could not be more different from that of Augustine, and yet in him too one can find a search for clarity which begins in something which looks rather like an acknowledgement of confusion, and in him too one can sense a kind of calm conviction – in the truth of God, and in the truth of the faith which he has received – lying behind both the search for clarity and the willingness to dwell with confusion. At every stage Thomas’s thought proceeds through the posing of questions, questions to which he never attempts his own answer before he has given voice to a range of difficulties and articulated a series of competing positions. Can God’s existence be demonstrated? Is it self-evident? Can a created intellect see the essence of God? Does God know evil things? Does God know singulars? Could God make the past not to have been? Could God create a better universe than this one? Might the universe have always existed? Is there one supreme evil which is the cause of all other evils? One might be tempted to dismiss the recurring pattern of questioning, always

followed by the laying out and weighing up of alternative answers, as merely the formal structure into which Thomas pours his theology – and it is certainly true that readers have to accustom themselves to the systematic division of Thomas’s text into questions, articles, objections, replies to objections, and so on. But this posing of questions, and this consideration of rival visions, is in fact not merely a surface feature of Aquinas’ thought – it is what shapes and drives it forward. There is a fundamental conviction behind Aquinas’ theology, a conviction that the faith which he has received is in its very depths coherent, that ultimately it hangs together and makes sense, and that a patient consideration of all the various voices within scripture and tradition, and of all the available sources of human wisdom, will ultimately serve to illuminate this coherence. Again, one can see something of this same calm faith exhibited in the work of the

great twentieth-century Catholic theologian Karl Rahner, whose trademark essays nearly always begin with some problem, some difficulty, in the faith of the Church as it is currently understood. Rahner’s goal is almost always to find a new clarity, and a new simplicity of thought, but his starting point is precisely what is not clear, what baffles, what troubles. How can it be, for instance, that God wills the salvation of all (2 Tim.), that faith in Christ and membership of the Church are intrinsically necessary for salvation, and yet there have been and are so many people for whom faith in Christ and membership of the Church are not an option? Or again, in a world of ever-expanding knowledge, who could ever know enough to be in a position to give a genuine intellectual justification of their faith? How could one ever master the competing schools of philosophy, the wisdom to be gleaned from psychology and sociology, the achievements of science, the rival claims and visions of the world religions, the discoveries of historical criticism of the Bible, who could ever master

and digest everything that is relevant in all this so as to be in a position to say that all things considered, Christian belief is genuinely a rational and responsible option? Or again, how can a Catholic affirm, as a Catholic must, that there are exactly seven sacraments and no more, without feeling that there is something arbitrary, something ‘random’, to use the helpful terminology of the teenagers of today, in this number? The pattern of Rahner’s theology is not to suspend belief until difficult questions

can be answered, so that for instance we could only believe in God’s universal salvific will if we can explain to ourselves how it works, or we can only accept that Christian faith is rational if we can overcome intellectual pluralism, or Catholics can only believe in seven sacraments if they can first give some justification for why there are exactly seven. Even as he probes the difficulties, he never calls into question the fundamental convictions of the faith: he is a Catholic theologian who does not experiment with being anything else. But he does probe the difficulties. Rahner offers his own answers to all the questions set out in the previous paragraph, but only after first ensuring that the problem, the difficulty, the tension, is fully felt. There is a kind of therapy involved in his theology: a problem needs to be brought to the surface, it needs to be fully felt, before one can begin to look for a solution. You cannot seek clarity if you will not first acknowledge and give voice to confusion. And the willingness to do this – to acknowledge one’s confusion, to examine it and express it – is itself, I am suggesting, an expression of the confidence of faith. This is true whether in Augustine, or in Aquinas, or in Rahner, or in a student of theology today. Clarity does not come if one is not willing first to acknowledge one’s confusion, and both the search for the one, and the willingness to acknowledge the other, can be understood as themselves expressions of faith. But surely, one might be inclined to say at this stage, there must be a limit to the

degree to which difficulties can be resolved and confusions clarified. For Christian theology focuses on the God whose self-description is the baffling ‘I am who am’, whose name is to be honoured by not being pronounced, the God of whom Isaiah writes ‘For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts’ (Isa. 55:9). Jesus speaks constantly in parable and paradox, and is depicted in the gospels as slipping away at the moment he is recognized. And the classic doctrines of Christianity, as articulated at Nicaea and Chalcedon, have very much the look of paradox: God is one and three, Christ fully human and fully divine. To put it very simply, then, if grappling with mystery is at the heart of theology, to what extent can seeking clarity really be its goal? We can make a start by noting that the idea of clarity is one which itself tends to

vary according to the context in which it is used. There is not a single understanding of what it is to be ‘clear’. The pursuit of clarity will be different for the mathematician, for instance, than it is for a literary critic, and it would make little sense for either to attempt to evaluate or to rewrite the work of the other according to an ideal derived from their own field. The mathematician who tries to reduce an essay of the literary critic to a series of absolutely precise definitions, claims and proofs is engaged in something a little ridiculous, and will either fail completely or lose much of the value in the original essay. In general, then, a sensitivity is required to context,

purpose, and style of thought when we inquire into questions of clarity. But then we must go a step further. For if God is not one more thing amongst others, a ‘something’ alongside and fundamentally similar to all the other ‘somethings’ in the universe, then arguably theology, with its focus on God, cannot be just one more intellectual discipline amongst others, focused on its particular ‘something’. And so it becomes necessary to keep open the possibility that clarity may mean something quite fundamentally different in theology from what it means elsewhere. One might put this point somewhat abstractly as follows. Theology is classically,

after Anselm, described as fides quaerens intellectum, ‘faith seeking understanding’. But both the nature of its ‘seeking’ and the nature of the ‘understanding’ it hopes to attain will take something of their character from the nature and content of the ‘faith’ from which it starts. It is not just any old seeking that faith engages in, nor any old type of understanding that faith seeks, but a form of seeking and a kind of understanding which must be in keeping with what it is in itself – a faith in something radically beyond our control or comprehension. This is the sort of point one finds made repeatedly in the writings of Karl Barth: theology cannot find readymade, from some other sphere of intellectual life, a general concept of intellectual responsibility and respectability, of what it is to be ‘rational’, and simply adopt it. It has to allow its own subject matter, God as he reveals himself to us, to determine not only its content but also its method and the standards to which it holds itself. There can be no question, then, of the theologian beginning from some already

given, universal ideal of clarity and trying to determine whether or how ideas about God match up to it. The issue must rather be, what is the type of clarity appropriate to this particular enterprise, to talk about God, about Christ, about revelation, about the transcendent? Of course it is also necessary to add (and this is not always made as clear by thinkers like Barth as it ought to be) that were there no continuity between clarity as understood in other contexts and the clarity sought in theology, little would be gained by using the word. The vital point, however, is that we must be willing to discover from the heart of the faith itself in what ways the clarity to be sought in theology is and is not continuous with other concepts of clarity. The dominant kind of philosophy in the English-speaking world values a parti-

cular style of rigorous clarity very highly, and recently, in a movement known as ‘analytic theology’, a number of philosophers have been turning their attention beyond the traditional topics of philosophy of religion to central questions in Christian theology – beyond questions of the existence of God and the problem of evil, for instance, to the doctrine of the Trinity and the two natures of Christ. A certain mutual suspicion, or at least unease, is often felt between these new ‘analytic theologians’ and the more usual kind of Christian theologians. One way of articulating this unease, at least as it occurs on the side of the traditional theologians, is precisely in terms of the nature of the clarity that is the goal. The philosophers come to theology deeply schooled in a particular standard and style of clarity, and they try to raise and answer theological questions in a way that meets with its demands. The result can seem odd, somehow unfitting to the subject matter. Brian Leftow, for instance, offers an essay on the Trinity whose main focus is the model that a timetravelling Rockette can provide. After quoting from the Athanasian creed (‘ … the Father is God, the Son is God and the Holy Spirit is God. And yet they are not

three Gods, but one God’) he comments ‘Such odd arithmetic demands explaining’1. Leftow’s analysis is extensive and careful, and includes a substantial excursus onto the possibility of time travel itself. And the time-travelling Rockette has much to offer: she can be one and multiple at the same time; she can dance in perfect unison with herself; she can even, in a certain sense, carry on a conversation. On one level this is very clever; a precise intellectual problem is identified and a precise resolution to it offered. On another level, though, something seems out of kilter; the thinking that produces a resolution to the problem is somehow too detached from the subject matter itself. It seems to be a case of puzzle seeking solution rather than faith seeking understanding. An intellectual difficulty, arising out of the doctrine of the Trinity, has been identified in such a way that it can be cut loose from the doctrine, from everything else that faith in God involves, and be addressed as a self-standing puzzle. Clarity has been achieved at the price of too detached and too narrow a focus. It is not hard to imagine discomfort coming from the other direction as well,

though. Is not the appeal to mystery a very easy refuge? What is to stop the theologian from using mystery as a fig leaf for intellectual laziness and sloppiness, a trump card to defeat an opponent? Indeed, sometimes the invocation of mystery would seem extraordinarily useful not only to the intellectually lazy or irresponsible, but also to those who have control and don’t care that it should be questioned too much: if the Church, for instance, is a mystery, then perhaps this means it should not be subject to the kinds of analysis that are appropriate for ordinary human institutions, and in this way those who occupy its current structures might find themselves rather conveniently insulated from criticism. If mystery is inescapable in theology, and yet not every invocation of it is neces-

sarily legitimate, is it possible to find a simple rule to determine when the appeal to mystery is acceptable and when it is not? I do not know of one. But it is possible, through experience of Christian faith and experience of the Christian theological tradition, to develop a sense for the question, a capacity for discernment. And one can perhaps also identify some rules of thumb. First, it seems reasonable to suppose that that which is presented as fundamentally

mysterious in Scripture should retain something of this quality in theology – even to the point that we might be suspicious of approaches to theology where this is lost. In this sense, one might argue that Anselm’s formula suggesting that we understand God to be ‘that than which nothing greater can be conceived’ is actually more satisfactory, more theologically adequate, than what are supposed to be modern restatements, modern clarifications of his position in terms of God as ‘perfect being’ or ‘maximally great’. If one is going to try to identify in a single formula the God whose baffling reply to Moses’ query, ‘Who shall I say sent me?’ is ‘Tell them “I am” sent you’, it is better that the formula should have something of the elusive and indirect to it, as Anselm’s does and the modern restatements do not. Second, in an area where we meet persistent paradox in the theological tradition –

the relation of the divine and human in Jesus, for instance – it is natural to be tolerant of a contemporary thinker who renews the element of paradox, even if in a new idiom. In Karl Barth’s discussion of Trinitarian terminology in §9 of the Church Dogmatics, for instance, one can see a combination of careful intellectual work,

seeking a certain improvement in clarity, with a very straightforward admission of the mysteriousness of the subject matter. Barth proposes that we replace the traditional terminology of three ‘Persons’ in God with a new technical term, three Seinsweise (ways of being). He defends his suggestion in some detail, arguing on the one hand that an altered intellectual context means that the term ‘Person’ has acquired a set of associations which serve to confuse rather than illuminate talk of the Trinity; and on the other hand that what positive content the theological tradition had wished the word ‘Person’ to carry is actually equally or better conveyed by the term Seinsweise. But he is very clear that the changes he proposes do not allow him to sidestep or resolve all the difficulties the tradition has always faced:

The great central difficulties which have always beset the doctrine of the Trinity at this point apply to us too. We, too, are unable to say how an essence can produce itself and then be in a twofold way its own product. We, too, are unable to say how an essence’s relation of origin can also be the essence itself and indeed how three such relations can be the essence and yet not be the same as each other but indissolubly distinct from one another. We, too, are unable to say how an essence’s relation of origin can also be its permanent mode of being and, moreover, how the same essence, standing in two different and opposed relations of origin, can subsist simultaneously and with equal truth and reality in the two different corresponding modes of being. We, too, are unable to say how in this case 3 can really be 1 and 1 can really be 3.2

So where the biblical witness itself seems to insist on mystery we would be suspicious of a theology that fails on some level to preserve this. And where the theological tradition has consistently dealt in paradox we would not be surprised to see contemporary theologians continue to do so. The situation is somewhat different, however, if a thinker introduces new elements of paradox or mystery into their theological vision. If someone introduces paradox where there is no strong precedent, so to speak, there are at least grounds for caution. Hans Urs von Balthasar, for instance, suggests, without any very clear explanation, two things: first, that ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are equal, and second, that man has primacy. Should we accept this as just another of those paradoxes of which theology is full? Not necessarily. While Christian thought has certainly been marked, over the centuries, by a good deal of unreflective sexism, there is no strong precedent for taking the relationship between men and women, or between masculinity and femininity, as close to the heart of the gospel, or as any kind of central Christian mystery. Contemporary Christians, it is true, face certain difficulties in reconciling particular verses from the Pauline corpus with the convictions of our time about the equality of men and women, and the difficulties need to be dealt with in one way or another. To turn them into a mystery, however, where no mystery has until now been perceived in the tradition, might be just a case of evasion or obfuscation. At the very least one can say that the burden of proof is on the side of the one proposing a new ‘mystery’.3