JESUS, HUMANITY AND THE TRINITY forms of connection or union with the non-divine, for the sake of perfecting what is united with God, in an effort to repeat the perfec- 3 tion of God's own triune life. 'God, full beyond all fulness, brought creatures into being. ... so that they might participate in Him in proportion to their capacity and that He Himself might rejoice in His works... through seeing them joyful and ever filled to overflowing with His inexhaustible gifts." In a variety of distinct forms of connection or union in the gift-giving effort, God's work begins with creation, continues in historical fellowship with a particular people, Israel, and ends with Jesus as the one through whom, in the Spirit, all people and the whole world will show forth God's own triune goodness in unity with God. The incarnation is the perfect form of such relations of connection or union for gift-giving ends: 'it belongs to the essence of the highest good [that is, God] to communicate itself in the highest manner to the creature, and this is brought about chiefly by His so joining created nature to Himself that one Person is made up. Hence, it was fitting that God should become incarnate In order for the whole of the human and natural worlds to be perfected with God's own gifts, they must be assimilated to this perfect relation between God and the created world in Christ, by way of him. Indeed, the Word, with the Spirit, sent by the Father, has, since the begin- ning of the world in diverse fashions, been working for the embodi- ment of God's goodness in it. By assuming human nature in all its embodied connectedness and embeddedness in its physical surround- ings, the Word in Christ joins the human as well as the natural world with God. It is in the body that we stand in solidarity with the whole material creation. All this God has taken into himself, in sharing man's bodily condition of weak- ness and limitation: 'O marvellous device of divine wisdom and love, uniting things lowest with the highest, human with the divine, through our nature, the least and last and sunken lower still, raising up the whole universe into union with himself, encircling and enfolding all with his love, and knitting all in one; and that through us!"+ Maximus the Confessor, "Third Century of Love,' trans. G. Palmer, P. Sherrard, and K. Ware, in The Philokalia, vol. 2 (London: Faber & Faber, 1981), section 46. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, trans. Dominican Fathers (Westminster, Maryland: Christian Classics, 1981), IIIa, Q. 1, A. 1, body. A. M. Allchin, Participation in God (Wilton, Connecticut: Morehouse-Barlow, 1988), 60, citing E. B. Pusey's Sermons (1845), 294. 36 THE THEOLOGICAL STRUCTURE OF THINGS Human beings who are one with Christ, by the Spirit, further the effort for all people and for the cosmos as a whole in recognition of their essential links with all others and their inextricable being in the midst of the natural world. Thus, 'we have always to remember that God's glory really consists in His self-giving, and that this has its centre and meaning in God's Son, Jesus Christ, and that the name of Jesus Christ stands for the event in which man, and in man the whole cosmos, is awakened and called and enabled to participate in the being of God.” Through Christ, human beings have a crucial mediatorial role to play in God's gift-giving ends for one another and the whole world: 'In his way to union with God, man in no way leaves creatures aside, but gathers in his love the whole cosmos disordered by sin, that it may at last be transfigured by grace." God's whole effort to share God's trinitarian life with the world, with all its many distinct facets, is in this way focused in Christ: 'The incarnation of the Word of God at Bethlehem, in Galilee, in Jerusalem, is not an isolated wonder, but a central focal point in a network of divine initiatives which spread out into the whole of human history, indeed into the whole universe." Situated within this theological structure of many different parallel or analogous relations of gift-giving unity, human life - indeed, any aspect of the structure (say, Christ himself on the account I offered in the last chapter) - gains a greater intelligibility, as each aspect becomes a kind of commentary on the others. Intelligibility here is like that of myth according to Claude Lévi-Strauss, where conundrums are naturalized, rather than resolved, by repeating them across a variety of domains. Or it is like the intelligibility provided by a Freudian Karl Barth, Church Dugmatics II/1, trans. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957), 670. "Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (Crestwood, New York: St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1976), 111, discussing the views of Maximus the Confessor. A. M. Allchin, Participation in God, 72, discussing Maximus the Confessor. On this as the view of Bonaventure, see Ewert Cousins, Bonaventure and the Coincidence of Opposites (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1979), 206-7: 'although the coincidence of opposites is the universal logic of Bonaventure's system, each major area of his thought has its own specific form of the coincidence of opposites based on the metaphysical structure of that area. The notion of Christ the center, then, accounts for the common logic at the same time that it sustains the specific difference of each class." * See Claude Lévi-Strauss' treatment of myth in his Structural Anthropology, trans. C. Jacobson and B. Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1973). 37 JESUS, HUMANITY AND THE TRI recounting of the compulsive repetition of traumatic events in a person's life-though in the theological case what is recounted is good after good." In such cases, meaning is enhanced as a similar structure variously permutated becomes visible. The Trinity Let us begin discussion of this theological structure with the triune God. There are, appropriately enough, three ways of talking about the perfect unity of the Trinity as a relation that implies the perfection of the three Persons. One can talk of this unity in terms of a unity of essence or substance; in terms of co-inherence of substance and Persons; and in terms of indivisibility in action: 'owing to their having the same essence and dwelling in one another, and being the same in will, and energy, and power, and authority, and movement, so to speak, we recognise. the unity of God."1" Unity of essence or substance does not mean that the Persons of the the Trinity are like one another in virtue of a shared generic nature - way three people are like one another in that they are all human." Unity of essence or substance means that the three Persons of the Trinity are the very same thing or concrete substance in three modes or forms of presentation." They are like three distinct appearances of the same thing from different angles, although here such appearances are objective and lasting, unlike the transient effects of perspective, and although here the whole is presented differently and not just one side or part becoming visible from a particular point of view. The very same thing is therefore found repeated in Father, Son and Holy Spirit, "Lévi-Strauss' interpretation of myth was influenced by Freud's talking cure, I believe. John of Damascus, 'Exposition of the Orthodox Faith,' trans. S. Salmond, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 9 (Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson Publishers, 1994), 10. Such is not the Cappadocian view, despite the often misinterpreted passage in Gregory Nazianzus, 'Fifth Theological Oration,' trans. C. Browne and J. Swallow, in Christology of the Later Fathers, ed. Edward Hardy (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1954), paragraph 11. The analogy with Seth and Eve (or elsewhere in the Cappadocians, Abel and Adam) has to do with the implications of their difference from one another - the one being begotten and the other not. The analogy is not meant to suggest that the essence of the Trinity is generic- the analogy does not hold in that respect - as is made clear in paragraphs 14 and 15. 12 See G. L. Prestige, God in Patristic Thought (London: SPCK, 1952), 102-3, 157–9, 168, 173, 213-15, 229-30, 234–5. 38 AL STRUCTURE OF THINGS although none of these Persons is to be identified with any other: the Father is all that the Son is except the Son is not the Father, etc. • The three therefore co-inhere, they are in one another, in virtue of this same essence or substance reappearing in them in different modes of existence. And one can also say, for the same reason, that the three are in one another personally: the Father is in the Son and the Son in the Father, etc. As Athanasius puts it: 'For the Son is in the Father...because the whole Being of the Son is proper to the Father's essence. . . so that whoever sees the Son, sees what is proper to the Father, and knows that the Son's Being, because from the Father, is therefore in the Father."13 Thus, the Son is the very will or heart of the Father, and that will or heart remains in the Father - the Father does not lose his own will or heart through its communication to the Son. Therefore the Son is in the Father (because the will or heart which is the Son remains with and in the Father) and the Father is in the Son (in that it is the very will or heart of the Father that is com- municated to the Son, flowing out as the Son), and so on. What the first Person of the Trinity is essentially is communicated totally or completely to the other two, without the loss or depletion of what the first is and remains. Their relationship in this respect is like that of source of light, ray of light and illumination." On an equal footing with the Father, without any distance of space or interval of time, the Son and Spirit are, moreover, already essentially, what they are given from the Father - they are already by nature what they receive. They have by rights of nature what they are given; what they are given is their very own." The image here is of three perfectly overlapping suns, in an ordered mutual illumination: 'it is just like three suns cleaving to each other without separation and giving out light mingled and conjoined into one."17 Athanasius, Four Discourses against the Arians,' trans. J. H. Newman and A. Robertson, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 4 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1957), discourse 3, section 3. Athanasius' favored imagery; see ibid., 313, 315, 364–6. See Hilary of Poitiers, 'On the Trinity,' trans. E. Watson and L. Pullan, Nicene and Post- Nicene Fathers, vol. 9 (Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson Publishers, 1994), 65. 16 Ibid., Book 6, section 27. 17 John of Damascus, 'Exposition of the Orthodox Faith,' 11. See also Gregory of Nyssa, 'Against Eunomius,' trans. W. Moore and H. Wilson, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 5 (Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson Publishers, 1994), Book 1, section 36. 39

In this chapter, Dr. Tanner outlines her theological anthropology, that is, her theological
way of talking about human beings, based on the Trinitarian overflow of God’s good
gifts into the world. In the first few pages of this chapter, how does she describe the being
and action of God in relation to human action. What does she say about human action
here.