Rev. Thomas Joseph White, O.P.
Pontifical University of St. Thomas (Angelicum)
Second John Zizioulas Lecture, Department of Theology of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Allow me to begin on a biographical note. In 1994 I was a graduate student at Oxford, beginning my theological studies, and I had the frequent privilege of attending class with Bishop Kalistos Ware. One day in class he announced with some reverence that Metropolitan John Zizioulas would soon be speaking at the university, a lecture that I then myself attended. The lecture was on Cappadocian theology. Afterward, I remember discussing the implications of the lecture for Catholic-Orthdox relations with a young fellow student named Marcus Plested, now a well-known professor of Orthodox theology. It seemed clear to me at the time and it remains my convinction to this day, that core themes in Catholic and Orthodox theology of the Most Holy Trinity, the Incarnation, the Redemption and Resurrection, and the divinizing life of grace, are mostly convergent, and mutually complimentary, even symphonic in resonance. Consequently I’m deeply honored to be invited to give this lecture in honor of the theological legacy of Metropolitan Zizioulas. Recently, Bishop Maxim Vasiljević has recently edited a volume of his writings, one chapter of which contains a profound study of the concept of relation and personhood in the Cappadocians and Thomas Aquinas, respectively. There he states the following at the conclusion of his writing: “A creative synthesis of the Thomistic and the Cappadocian concepts of personal ontology may prove to be desirable—if not necessary—in our time.”[1] While I will not treat the particular theses of this text, or for that matter agree in fact with all of his particular judgments or conclusions, I do think that what I hope to present here is largely concordant with and complimentary to the vision of Zizioulas, and I seek above all to show the profound resonance of the thought of Thomas Aquinas and that of several major eastern Christian doctors, not least Saints Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus. Being also a Thomist and being present in Athens, I will also rightly defend the honor and veracity of the thinking of Aristotle, who while not a Church father, is on my understanding of things, a great metaphysical student of God’s gift of creation, in its depths, particularly with regard to the centrality and importance of the relational character of being and nature.
In Catholic theology of the past few decades, there has been an increasing attention given to the notion of Trinitarian theology as a form relational ontology.[2] How and in what way did early Christianity produce a new form of ontological thinking about subsistent personhood in God and, by extension, in human beings? And how did ancient and medieval Christian theology develop a distinctive notion of personhood as relational, in light of the revelation of the mystery of the Trinity? In turn, in what sense can human persons be understood in relational terms in light of the idea of Trinitarian persons as relational? In this essay, I would like to explore this idea by appeal to ideas specific to St. Thomas Aquinas by considering four relation notions: (1) St. Thomas on the nature of opposed relations in metaphysics, (2) opposed relations in the Trinity, and the notion of persons as subsistent relations (3) relations as non-substantial properties of human persons in two distinct modes of being, and (4) these human modes of relations in Christ as indicative of subsistent relations of Trinitarian persons.
1. Aquinas on the nature of opposed relations in metaphysics
Aquinas treats the nature of relations from a metaphysical view as a philosopher informed in great part by the antecedent analysis of Aristotle from the Metaphysics, and by the interpretations of that text he has studied in medieval commentators.[3] As Aquinas notes, Aristotle affirms that real relations exist in the world between things and they are best understood metaphysically by way of opposition or mutual reference within reality.[4]. There are two sorts of real relation of this kind, namely those pertaining to quantity and those pertaining to action and passion.[5]
Real relations of a quantitative kind, then, are relations or size, shape, weight, and the like as when we note that two objects differ really in size and one is relatively larger or smaller than the other. We can also speak here of comparative degrees of intensity as when we speak by comparative quantity of a higher or lower degree of sound or color. The qualities in question are measurable in comparison to one another by degrees.[6] The ontological reality of relativity originates in the things themselves, and not merely in our minds, but it depends upon a prior property of the realities in question, without which they would not be really related in such a way. Thus, one man is truly relationally taller or shorter than another, or one person truly has a relationally greater or lesser degree of talent in calculus or the violin than does another.
The second instance of a real relation, as noted, is action and passion. (Passion here denotes undergoing or being subject to causal origination or change from another.) The mother who is giving birth actually to the child is really related to the child as a cause of generation, just as the child is really related to the mother as deriving from the mother. The surgeon who operates acts upon the patient and so is really related to him, just as the patient is really related as the one who is acted upon. Likewise, there are other examples that we will note are pertinent in Trinitarian theology and in Christology: the human mind that knows a reality rightly is passively informed by that reality and so really related to it, just as the concepts that derive from that same knower are passively begotten by the mind.[7] One human person who loves another human person has love that really derives from him as a voluntary subject and that incline him toward the good of the other.[8] Likewise, each human being as an individual substance, who receives all that he is in his existence and essence as human from God the creator, is really related to the Creator as he from whom all being is received.[9] Or the human body when subject to suffering is really related to the sources that subject the body to suffering (as through torture and crucifixion), just as our senses and spiritual powers of intellect and will can be said to truly suffer due to the infliction of various forms of pain from external sources, be these sources that we come to perceive intellectually and mourn volitionally in the spiritual heart, or that we come to sense and feel by external and internal sense powers.[10]
When we say that these relations are oppositions, we indicate that the two ontological terms of the relation must both exist in ongoing metaphysical relation to one another in order for the relational dimension of their respective beings to emerge. We can call this mutual relatedness “oppositional” in that it is only when the two things in question are juxtaposed to one another that the relations are active, either in a relation of action to passion or of similitude and dissimilitude of quantitative intensity or size of quantity.
2. Opposed relations in the Trinity, and the notion of persons as subsistent relations
The idea that Trinitarian persons are to be understood in terms of relations of origins within the processions of the Trinity derives from as early as the fourth century in the pro-Nicene works of Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa.[11] The Son is eternally distinct from the Father as one who derives all that he is from the Father by way of generation while the Holy Spirit is eternally distinct from the Father as one who derives all that he has from the Father by means of procession. This idea entered western theology during the time of the post-Nicene debates, and it found a place in Augustine’s work in the next generation, particularly in his De Trinitate, where Augustine argued additionally that, in light of divine simplicity, we should not hold there to be any accidental properties in God that are something other than the divine substance or nature.[12] God, Augustine will affirm, is his wisdom or his goodness. He does not merely have wisdom or goodness. By the same measure, then, if there are eternal relations in God that characterize the generation of the Son and the procession of the Holy Spirit, these relations are in some way substantial or not merely accidental. Augustine also famously postulated theoretically or by speculative inquiry that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, and that there is a real likeness to this order of relations in the human soul, made in the image, whereby the truth proceeds from the knower (or his memory) and love proceeds from the knower through the medium of knowledge, as we come to love what we first come to know.[13] So just as the eternal Son is the Word or Verbum of the Father, so the Spirit is the Love of the Father and the Son.
Aquinas makes use of these former ideas but also promotes a new investigative development of them in light of his Aristotelian notion of relational opposition in action/passion operations. Basically, Aquinas follows the Cappadocians and Augustine in claiming that the distinctions of persons in God must obtain uniquely by way of relations of origin, since the persons are identical in nature and they are not differentiated by distinct natural principles (as if the Father were all powerful, the Son all wise, and the Spirit sovereignly good, in differing degrees). From the fact that there is one God who possesses the plenitude of the perfection of the divine nature in an incomprehensible simplicity that is transcendent, it follows that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit while really distinct in person are truly consubstantial or co-essential in Godhead.[14] There is only one God and all that is in the Father is in the Son by way of generation, and in the Holy Spirit by way of Spiration.
In addition, here something important happens in the history of theology. St. Thomas follows his teacher, St. Albert the Great, in interpreting Augustine on relations as non-properties in God: the persons in God are relations and relations are not accidents (given what we must affirm regarding divine simplicity), so the persons are something he terms “subsistent relations.”[15] This is to say that the persons are relative to one another in all that they are, in and through the eternal processional life of generation and spiration. The Father is not primarily to be considered unbegotten, as the source of the Trinitarian life, but is primarily to be considered in light of his paternity. He is his paternity. He is eternally “for” generation and spiration in all that he is, even as he also is always, already God in all that he is, in his transcendent divine nature.[16] The Son is begotten in all that he is, just as he is also the subsistent God and Lord in all that he is, and the Holy Spirit is spirated in all that he is, even as the Spirit receives always in all that he is to be the eternal God and Lord, from the Father and the Son.[17]
The doctrine of mutual relations by way of opposition enters here to give further understanding to the doctrine of the persons. On St. Thomas’ view, the persons are each wholly within one another in mutual indwelling (circumincessio or perichoresis) firstly because all that the Father is as God (essentially by nature) is in the Son through generation and in the Spirit through spiration so that all that one person possesses or is, is wholly within the other two persons.[18] However, it is also the case that the persons are in one another, on Aquinas’ view as the terms of mutually opposed relations. Just as the eternal principle of a relation of origin through procession implies always and forever the eternal recipient of the relation of origin through procession, so there where the principle is, the person who proceeds is present as well.[19] Otherwise stated, if the Father is always already paternal in all that he is, generating the Son in all that he is and spirating the Spirit with the Son in all that he is as subsistently relational, so too then the Son is always already present to the Father as the Word generated, as is the Holy Spirit present to the Father and to the Son as the Love eternally being spirated. The relations of the persons also are of such a kind that all that one person is is always already eternally present to the other two in virtue of their mutually opposed relatedness, that is constitutive of their inner life as processional persons.
3. Relations as non-substantial properties of human persons in three distinct modes of being
For St. Thomas, the substantial being in act of a given substance, its capacity to be or not to be, is the sign of its ontological relativity in all that it is to the Creator. Insofar as all things are given being by God, they are created and remain radically relative to God in all that they are.[20] They are, as we might say, an absolute ontological “patient” is to a transcendent agent who gives it to be all that it is. It might be tempting to think here that St. Thomas would say that the relationality of the human person and of all other created substances is “substantial” in kind since the whole substance is relative to the Creator, who gives it esse, the act of existing. On this view, human beings, like Trinitarian persons, would be themselves subsistent relations. However, St. Thomas is quite clear that the relationality even of the created substance with regard to the Creator is an ontological accident, a radical characteristic that qualifies the created substance in all that it is, but that is not what the substance is essentially.[21] If the substance that is created were essentially and substantially its created nature, then all created substances by definition would have the same essence (as essentially “relational-to-God” in all that they are) and so there would not exist any real essential differences between creatures, which is absurd, naturally. In fact, it is only because there are substances of various essential kinds that are truly created by God, and given esse or the act of existence by him, that they are in turn relative to him in all they are as a fundamental property or relational accident characterizing all that they are. There is not opposition logically or metaphysically, then, in the twin affirmations that relativity to God is accidental in creatures and that relativity to God characterizes the whole of a given created substance, in all that is, whatever its given essential kind and properties. In fact, these two affirmations are deeply related and are two sides of the same coin, metaphysically speaking.
Likewise, we can note the relational character of the vital operations of a given living substance, especially those characterized by interior operations of knowledge and love. Already non-cognitive plant life and micro-biotic entities are oriented vitally toward nutrition, self-repair, and reproduction and, in this sense, are related metaphysically to the larger good of their species, especially in the individual offspring to which they give rise. However, in animals that have some form of sensate life and cognition allied with appetite or vital desire for the natural animal goods of the nutrition, self-preservation and reproduction, there is also some form of relationality to the things they know sensibly and aim at by sensate appetite. In human beings, however, as rational animals, these sensate features of animal life are animated and informed from within by a deeper cognitive and volitional drive toward intellectual knowledge and love. The human being relates to the truth of the world around him or her by taking in the features of being abstractly and returning to the external world in light of newly acquired understanding, to make realistic judgements, to study, and to reason more deeply about the nature of the world.[22] The human being also relates personally to the world of other persons as beings of reasonableness, dignity, and goodness, with whom they can interact through relations of love and virtue. Thus, human beings come to turn out of themselves through love to desire the good of others and to enjoy a life of shared fellowship or rational loving union with others, in social lives of friendship.[23]
So conceived, the human being is deeply relational and all human societies are vividly relational, even if human beings are not subsistent relations. Human beings can, however, as persons made in the image of God, develop relationally in constructive ways by knowledge and by love, by nature and by grace, throughout the course of their individual lives and in their corporate lives of persons.[24] They do so most constructively when they develop in relational personal ties of knowledge and love toward God, by grace above all - in faith, hope and charity - but also by nature (especially through the virtue of religion) and when this relationship (which makes them holy as human beings turned toward God in friendship with him) in turn also informs their civic, social, and familial ties, as well as their speculative, and artistic aims and friendships.
4. Two human modes of relations in Christ as indicative of subsistent relations of Trinitarian persons
This brings us at last to the topic of Christ, as St. Thomas understands him, in his incarnation, public life, crucifixion and death, and bodily resurrection. How do we find the uncreated relations of the Trinity in the human relations of Jesus, the Son of God and Word incarnate in human nature? Here we face the question of how the aforementioned Trinitarian subsistent relationality of the Son, to the Father and to the Spirit respectively, is found personally incarnate in and ontologically manifest in the human nature of Jesus, with its aforementioned three modes of human relationality, just mentioned above.
We might note firstly that the incarnation is understood by Aquinas to imply the personal hypostasis of the Son subsisting in a human nature by a substantial union, not a merely accidental one.[25] The idea derives from his interpretation of the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon, as well as his reading of Cyril of Alexandria and John of Damascene.[26] Stated in layman’s terms, the eternal Word is not merely united to the human Jesus by moral union or related extrinsically as a divine “substance” to another substance who is the human man Jesus.[27] Rather the person of the Word takes on a human nature in such a way that the concrete individual man Jesus just is the eternal person, the Word of God, subsisting in a human nature.[28] The perspective here is anti-Nestorian and pro-Cyrillian.
It follows from this that, as it pertains to the first mode of actuality and potentiality, the substance of the human nature of the man Jesus is always, already integrated into the very person of the Word. The humanity of Jesus, body and soul, comes to exist, in the womb of the Virgin Mary, but there is not a time at which this human nature ever becomes the human nature of the person of the Word. Rather from the very moment in which the body and the soul come into being, they are always already the body and soul of the eternal Word of God existing in a human nature. As Aquinas, famously claims in this regard, the existence (esse) or actus essendi of the man Jesus is the eternal existence or act of being of the Word of God himself, present in our human nature. What exists in Jesus personally and most concretely is the eternal Word made man.
If we speak then of the first mode of act and potency noted in the section above, that pertaining to the substance as such, we can say that the act of being of the substance of Jesus as man simply is the act of existence of the eternal Word who is human. The reason this is significant for our study is that this means the created humanity of Jesus is really related to the Creator, as we noted above is also the case for all created substances, all human beings. However, in this unique case of the humanity of Christ, there are other “relations” of note, that have directly Trinitarian connotations. Here we can follow Aquinas in distinguishing between the divine person of the Word and his two natures, divine and human respectively. In his divine person, Christ is the subsistent relation of the Son rendered human, existing and subsisting in a human nature. Therefore, wherever Christ is, there just is the subsistent Son and Word of God, present in human nature. And where the Son of God is, so the Father is present in the Son and the Son is present in the Father. So also the Holy Spirit is present in the Son and the Son in the Holy Spirit. The order of processions is always also likewise present. The Son made man manifests, then, in his own person incarnate among us, his eternal perfect relativity to the Father and his processional derivation from the Father. The Son made man present among us in the flesh also renders manifest in his own person his eternal perfect relativity to the Holy Spirit, as he is the processional principle and source of the Spirit, from and with the Father, and thus as the font of the Holy Spirit, who the Son, in his visible mission as the Redeemer, sends upon the world.
If we think about the human nature of the Son in relation to the divine nature, we find the iteration of the total relativity of the human nature to the Creator present in a new mode. In creatures, the “being created” is a real relation, of total relativity, toward God, from whom all things derive, that characterizes the being of the creature in all that is. In the created human nature of Jesus, St. Thomas likewise posits a real relation or relativity of the whole substance of the human nature to the divine nature. However, now this total relativity occurs within the one composite person of the Word. In this created nature, there is a complete and total relativity of the nature to the Creator, but in this unique case the total relativity is to the divine nature within the hypostatic person of the Word. This means that all that the human nature is, in its presence, being, and human operations, as well as in its human sufferings or passivity, is in some way expressive of the very person of the Son and even of the real presence of his divine nature, which is not identical with the human nature of the Son but is present in the human nature, always and everywhere where that human nature is found. Likewise, of course, this implies that where the human nature of the Son is found, so too is found the person of the Father who is related to the Son, and the person of the Holy Spirit, who is related to the Son, but also their common divine nature, which is present in the Son’s human nature and to which the human nature is really related in all that it is, ontologically relative to it as the human nature of God. The Father is not human, nor is the Holy Spirit, but they are present to and in the human nature of Jesus just insofar as it is the human nature of the eternal Son who is God.
We may turn subsequently to the human operations of Jesus, characterized by his human activities of intelligence and volition, as these in turn inform spiritually all his emotional and corporeal operations through his rational decision making and volitional human actions. Jesus in his human mind enjoys the grace of special understanding of his own identity, and that of his Father and the Holy Spirit.[29] He is aware of who he is, of his unity with the Father and the Spirit, and of the sense of his visible mission on behalf of humanity and the Church. Likewise, his human heart is illumined by a plenitude of grace and charity so that he is motivated volitionally by an inward understanding of the divine will, and conformity of his human actions of charity to the uncreated divine love of the Trinity, that is present in him as the Son of the eternal Father, and as Lord.[30]
As we have noted above, the human actions of understanding and volition are not subsistent relations in a human being but are properties or accidents (ontological characteristics) by which human beings orient themselves to the truth and to what they perceive to be good. This is the case in Christ as well due to the fact that he has a genuine human nature like ours.[31] However, due to the illumined character of the human mind and heart of the Son, he is able as man to know and choose the good of the Father’s wisdom and will, as the eternal Son of the eternal Father, and to which his human mind and heart are inwardly attuned. In this context, then, we may speak of a kind of adequation and analogical resemblance between Jesus’ human mode of acting and willing as man, by accidental properties of knowledge and love, and the divine mode of his Filial, eternal Wisdom and Will, received from the Father. The former are mere properties of his human nature, albeit very important ones. The latter are the subsistent nature of the Son itself, present in him in a filial mode, as the divine nature (his wisdom and will) are received eternally in the Son from the Father, as God from God, light from light, and act from act. What the Son wisely wills in his human nature in time corresponds, by similitude, to the eternal wisdom and will of the Son of the Father, and to what the Father wisely wills with the Son and the Holy Spirit from all eternity. The human relatedness of the Son, then, is revelatory of the divine relations of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Thinking in this way allows to understand what we might call instrumentally the efficient causality of the Son’s human actions, as oriented toward the eternal wisdom and will of the Father and as revelatory of eternally shared relations of the Trinitarian persons who all wisely will in common, as the one God.[32] Here there is a basic alignment of the theology of St. Thomas with that of John of Damascus, who he follows closely on the theme of the “instrumental” or organic causality of the sacred humanity of Christ. In addition, however, we can also think about final causality. What does the Trinity will, ultimately, for humanity? The answer has to do with the plenary communication of the life of the Holy Trinity to humanity by a participation in the grace of God: the redemption and divinization of the human race. So then, the Son as man desires that the Father send the Holy Spirit upon the world to communicate by grace a participation in the Fatherhood of God, in the Sonship of the Son made man and his capital grace, and in the life of the Holy Spirit. The actions and words of Jesus in his human life thus act as a relational “hermeneutic” interpretive key, within the person of the Son himself, to express in a manifestly human way, the eternal desires that he has in common with the Father and the Holy Spirit, to communicate the eternal life of God to the world.
Thomas Aquinas and John Zizioulas
Any adequate comparison of Thomas Aquinas and John Zizioulas exceeds the scope of this paper and my own area of expertise. However, I would like to make a few summary statements based on the presentation given that I think are of relevance.
First, both Aquinas and Zizioulas have a theological form of thought centered on the person or on hypostatic ontology. Zizioulas was expressly clear about his agreement with Aquinas on this point, speaking positively about St. Thomas’ claim that “the person is what is greatest in the order of nature.”[33] Evidently here they each understand the ultimate mystery of personhood to be Trinitarian and to imply mutual indwelling, consubstantiality, and eternal communion. The eternal persons in God are the transcendent and incomprehensible model for human personal communion. The bridge between the two is the Second Person of the Trinity who is human, in virtue for the hypostatic union. Such thinking is Christ-centered as well as Trinity-centered, evidently
Second, each of these great thinkers understands personhood in terms of relationality and the Trinitarian persons in terms of relations of origin. So Zizioulas wishes to renew modern personalism in light of a relational ontology of the Trinitarian persons derived from the Cappadocians. Again, he notes that Aquinas is a strategic ally in this regard, rightly in my estimation.[34] The two thinkers differ on how to go about this. Zizioulas, like Joseph Ratzinger, considers the possibility of thinking of human persons as relations, much like divine persons.[35] Aquinas does not think that creaturely persons can be subsistent relations but they can come to resemble them teleologically by the perfection of sanctification. Simply stated, for Aquinas, a human person, unlike a divine person, cannot be a relation in all that he or she is, in his very substance, but we can become more relational in our operations of contemplative knowledge and love, as we return to God, in the order of grace. Likewise both Aquinas and Zizioulas affirm the importance of a Trinitarian taxis or internal order of Trinitarian relations.[36] For example, they each affirm the paternal primacy, that the Father is the eternal primal origin of all Trinitarian life, while the Son and Spirit exist in distinct modes of being as they who receive all that they are from the Father.[37] Evidently they differ in this on the relation of the Holy Spirit to the Father and the Son, but they do have convergent ideas about the importance of relations of origin as being constitutive of the identity of hypostatic personhood in God.
Where the two figures differ most, arguably, is on a couple of important notions from ancient Greek philosophy, especially regarding nature. Ironically we could say that in some respect Aquinas is far more Aristotelian and thus in his own way Athenian, than Zizioulas, or perhaps it is best to put things this way. Zizioulas marks strongly the critical break and discontinuity between classical pre-Christian thought as an ontology of nature (in Aristotle and Plato) versus post-Christian thought as a thought about persons, relations, and divine freedom.[38] Freedom plays an especially important role in the way he understands the distinction of the persons in God, because the Father freely causes the Son to be generated, in the sense of aitia or original causal source, used by the Cappadocians.[39] Here Zizioulas is appealing overtly to a notion of freedom and of personhood developed in the Victorine and Franciscan medieval traditions of the west, in persons like Richard of St. Victor, Bonaventure, and John Duns Scotus.[40] This places his closer ecumenically to modern Catholic thinkers like Joseph Ratzinger and Hans Urs von Balthasar, at least in some respects.[41] However, Aquinas appeals to Aristotle and Boethius in order to understand persons as individuals having rational nature, and works out an analogical conception of the divine nature of the Trinitarian persons.[42] For him there is a great deal of continuity to be found between classical pre-Christian philosophy and revealed Trinitarian dogma and theology. That being said, Aquinas does have a very deep understanding of the Christian uniqueness of the concept of the person and of relational personhood, similar to that of Zizioulas. Zizioulas is an ecumenical thinker reaching out to western resources found especially in Victorine and Franciscan thought as well as in major contemporary Catholic thinkers. Aquinas is reaching out eastward in a very self-conscious way, making use of major ideas from Cyril, Dionysius, and John of Damascus.
Conclusion
As is clear from my remarks, I see the great efforts of St. Thomas Aquinas in regard to the mystery of the Trinity and of divine and human personhood to bear striking resemblances to those of great figures in eastern patristic tradition. As such, his thought also provides a venue for ecumenical research so as to consider ways that the work of John Zizioulas might be compared and contrasted constructively with that of Thomas Aquinas. If we wish to think about the constructive Christian preservation and transformation of classical pre-Christian ontology, both in the past and in the future, then we would do well to engage anew with the example of St. Thomas, as well as that of John Zizioulas, whose reflections in this domain contain great riches and who indicates to us very insightfully the unfathomable profundity of God’s trinitarian being.
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[1] See Metropolitan of Pergamon, John D. Zizioulas, “Chapter 6: The Cappadocians and Aquinas in Dialogue on Personhood,” Knowing аs Willing The Ontology of Person, Nature, and Freedom, ed. by Bishop Maxim Vasiljević, (Los Angelos: St. Sebastian Orthodox Press, 2025), 95-114.
[2] See in this regard the influential work of Piero Coda, From the Trinity: The Coming of God in Revelation and Theology (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2020), which reflects systematically and historically on Trinitarian ontology and contains many references to the theme of relational being.
[3] Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, trans. by J. P. Rowan (Notre Dame, Ind.: Dumb Ox Books, 1995) in In V Meta., lec. 17, nos. 1001–32, commenting on Aristotle, Meta. 5.17 (1020b26–1021b11; Summa Theologica, trans. by English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1947), in ST I, q. 13, a. 7, and in q. 28, a. 1.
[4] St. Thomas, In V Meta., lec. 17, 1001 and ST I, q. 13, a. 7: “…relation in its own proper meaning signifies only what refers to another.”
[5] In V Meta., lec. 17, nos. 1001-1002.
[6] ST III, q. 7, a. 9.
[7] ST I, q. 27, a. 2.
[8] ST I, q. 27, a. 4.
[9] ST I, q. 44, a. 4; q. 45, a. 4.
[10] ST III, q. 46, aa. 5-6.
[11] See, for example, Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 29, no. 16. [Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 7, trans. C. G. Browne and J. E. Swallow, ed. P. Schaff and H. Wace (Buffalo, N.Y.: Christian Literature Publishing, 1894).] Gregory of Nyssa, On “Not Three Gods”: To Ablabius. [Letters and Select Works, vol. 5 of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers, 2004).] See the study of relational ontology in Gregory of Nyssa by Illaria Vigorelli, La relatione: Dio e l’uomo. Schesis e anthropologia trinitaria in Gregorio di Nissa (Rome: Città Nuova, 2020)
[12] Augustine, The Trinity, 5.1.6. [ed. J. E. Rotelle, trans. E. Hill. (Hyde Park, N.Y.: New City Press, 1991).]
[13] Augustine, The Trinity, 7.2.6; 15.5.27.
[14] ST I, q. 28, aa. 1-2; q. 42, aa. 1-2.
[15] ST I, q. 29, a. 4.
[16] ST I, q. 33, aa. 2 and 4.
[17] ST I, q. 40, a. 2. See the study by Gilles Emery, “The Personal Mode of Trinitarian Action in Saint Thomas Aquinas.” The Thomist 69, no. 1 (2005): 31–77.
[18] ST I, q. 42, a. 5.
[19] ST I, q. 42, a. 5: “It is also manifest that as regards the relations, each of two relative opposites is in the concept of the other. Regarding origin also, it is clear that the procession of the intelligible word is not outside the intellect, inasmuch as it remains in the utterer of the word. What also is uttered by the word is therein contained. And the same applies to the Holy Ghost.”
[20] See St. Thomas, De Potentia Dei, q. 3, a. 3 and ST I, q. 45, a. 2, ad 2: “But as action and passion coincide as to the substance of motion, and differ only according to diverse relations (Phys. III), it must follow that when motion is withdrawn, only diverse relations remain in the Creator and in the creature. But because the mode of signification follows the mode of understanding…creation is signified by mode of change; and on this account it is said that to create is to make something from nothing. And yet ‘to make’ and ‘to be made’ are more suitable expressions here than ‘to change’ and ‘to be changed,’ because ‘to make’ and ‘to be made’ import a relation of cause to the effect, and of effect to the cause, and imply change only as a consequence.”
[21] ST I, q. 45, aa. 3 and 4. See q. 45, a. 3, ad 3: “The creature is the term of creation as signifying a change [from non-being to being], but is the subject of creation, taken as a real relation, and is prior to it in being, as the subject is to the accident. Nevertheless creation has a certain aspect of priority on the part of the object to which it is directed, which is the beginning of the creature.”
[22] On the degrees of life in creatures, as compared to the eternal life of the generation of the Word from the Father, see Summa Contra Gentiles IV, chap. 11 and on the spiritual life in particular, as analogous to life in God, see De Potentia Dei, q. 9, a. 9. [Summa Contra Gentiles IV, trans. C. O’Neil (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955).]
[23] See the suggestions to this effect in SCG IV, chap. 21, as a basis for analysis of the procession of the Holy Spirit.
[24] See on these matters, Michael Sherwin, By Knowledge and by Love: Charity and Knowledge in the Moral Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2011; Charles De Koninck, The Primacy of the Common Good Against the Personalists in The Writings of Charles De Koninck (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2016).
[25] St. Thomas, ST III, q. 2, aa. 2, 3, and 6.
[26] See especially, ST III, q. 2, aa. 2-3. I have examined in greater depth this feature of St. Thomas’ Christology in The Incarnate Lord. A Thomistic Study in Christology (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2015), chap. 1.
[27] ST III, q. 2, aa. 6 and 8.
[28] ST III, q. 2, a. 2; q. 3, a. 1; q. 16, a. 4.
[29] ST III, q. 9, aa. 2-3.
[30] ST III, qq. 18-19.
[31] ST III, q. 5.
[32] See on this point, ST III, q. 19, a. 1.
[33] ST I, q. 29, a. 3: “‘Person’ signifies what is most perfect in all nature—that is, a subsistent individual of a rational nature. Hence, since everything that is perfect must be attributed to God, forasmuch as His essence contains every perfection, this name ‘person’ is fittingly applied to God; not, however, as it is applied to creatures, but in a more excellent way; as other names also, which, while giving them to creatures, we attribute to God; as we showed above when treating of the names of God.” See the appreciative discussion of this text of Aquinas by Zizioulas in Knowing as Willing, chap. 6, pp. 96-100.
[34] Zizioulas, Knowing As Willing, chap. 6, p. 101: “The ontology of Person which the Cappadocian fathers introduced into Christian philosophy, gradually made its way into the West, reaching its culmination in the thought of the great medieval scholastics, including Thomas Aquinas.” Zizioulas is critical of Aquinas in certain respects and appreciative in others, with regard to his ontology of relational personhood in the Trinitarian mystery. Although it exceeds the scope of my proposals here, I believe it can be shown rather clearly that Zizioulas at times mistakenly misreads Aquinas and proposes differences on his misreading between Cappadocian theology and Thomistic theology that are in fact not reflective of St. Thomas’ true positions.
[35] Consider Joseph Ratzinger, “Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology,” Communio: International Catholic Review 17, no. 3 (Autumn, 1990): 439–54, compared with Zizioulas, Knowing as Willing, chap. 8: “The Holy Trinity and the Human Person,” 133-40.
[36] For this theme in Aquinas, see for example, ST I, q. 42, aa. 2 and 3, on order within the Trinitarian processions.
[37] See on the paternal primacy in Aquinas, for example, ST I, q. 33, a. 1. In ST I, q. 36, a, 3, Aquinas affirms and argues for the theological validity of the traditional Greek notion (found in the Cappadocian fathers) of the Father as cause (aitia) of the Son and as the unique fontal principle of the Holy Spirit, such that one can say that the Father spirates the Spirit through the Son.
[38] Zizioulas, Being as Willing, chap. 6, p. 97: “In classical Greek thought, therefore, personhood was connected to Being only in a ‘tragic’ sense—implying a conflict with true Being. Man emerged as a person only through some kind of confrontation with Being, as this was embodied in the totality of the κόσμος which alone deserved the name of Being in the absolute sense. To be a person meant for the Greeks to revolt against Being—that is, to disregard what Plato was so anxious to stress: the world does not exist for the sake of the individual man, but man exists for its sake.”
[39] Zizioulas, Being as Willing, chap. 6, p. 112: “The level, or pole, of Being on which its particularization occurs is not that of substance but of personhood: only a person can generate a person as its ontological cause, according to the Cappadocians. This makes the Person a product of freedom, both at the level of creation and of God Himself. There is no need, therefore, to speak, as the Scholastics do, of a necessary being in the case of the emergence of either divine Persons or of the human ones. Rather, both owe their personhood to an event of free communion….Freedom, therefore—when applied to personhood—cannot be understood merely as an expression of the rationality of human (and divine) nature. For it to be applicable also to God’s being, it must not be defined as the capacity to choose from among (given) possibilities, as this would be incompatible with God as the author of being. The Cappadocians would instead relate freedom to the level of personhood as an event of perichoresis—a dynamic interrelation of persons— where each freely grants the others the capacity to exist as free co-partners in their common being. Freedom would be in this case the capacity to be other within a mutual relationship of love between persons.”
[40] Zizioulas, Being as Willing, chap. 6, p. 112: “If we were to situate the Cappadocians’ personalism within contemporary discussions on personhood, the closest parallel would likely be found in the thought of philosophers such as Martin Buber, who sees personal identity as emerging from an I-Thou relationship, where the presence of the Other is a sine qua non condition for personal existence. If I am not mistaken, this ontological role of the Other is not as clearly emphasized in the personalism of Aquinas. It is more distinctly encountered in the thought of Richard of St. Victor, whose ideas were not followed by Aquinas. The idea of the Other as constitutive of Being, developed in our time by phenomenologists such as Emmanuel Levinas, bears some resemblance to the personalism of the Cappadocians.”
[41] See for example, Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Press, 1995). Zizioulas here posits a number of theses famously characteristic of his work (pp. 17–49): God owes his Trinitarian existence to the person of the Father, who freely chooses to cause the other two persons to be, through love. The generation of the Son and spiration of the Spirit are acts of freedom of the Father, then, such that God does not exist either by substantial or natural necessity but only as a result of the eternal free decision of the Father that God should exist as Trinity. “The fact that God exists because of the Father shows that His existence, His being is the consequence of a free person; which means, in the last analysis, that not only communion but also freedom, the free person, constitutes true being. True being comes only from the free person, from the person who loves freely—that is, who freely affirms his being, his identity, by means of an event of communion with other persons” (Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 18).
Freedom for love is understood here as the most basic ontological category, one that gives rise to and determines not only nature and substance, but even existence, not only in creation but also in God himself. Here we see a modern version of the classical western “Franciscan” conception of the Trinitarian person of the Father logically pre-constituted in freedom “prior” to generation or spiration. However, in this case, the freedom of the Father has been articulated as the very act of his hypostasis, so that the Trinity comes to be as an eternal act of freedom. Zizioulas sets up a polarity of opposition between a theology that affirms an ontology of Trinitarian substance (the essence of the three persons), which would make freedom an attribute of God, versus an ontology of personhood in which freedom is constitutive of being, choosing the latter against the former.
By contrast, in a Thomistic conception of person as subsistent relation, the nature of God only ever subsists relationally in the persons, just as the relational persons only ever subsist in a nature. To say, as indeed Athanasius and the Cappadocian Fathers did say, that there is a common nature or ousia in God, is not to say that the persons are in communion by means of an impersonal essence, but that the person of the Father is wholly in the Son and Spirit because he naturally communicates all that he is as God to them (so as to be homoousios). The fact that the generation and spiration are natural, not free, connotes not that God is restrained but that God the Father in knowing and loving himself in the greatest possible love of infinite actuality can and does inevitably communicate all that he is to the Son and to the Spirit. The analogy to freedom in human persons is an analogy to the delight the will takes in the good that is perfectly possessed, so that one is free to love what is best and to love all other goods relative to what is best and perfectly possessed. It is not an analogy to elective freedom by which God the Trinity is said rightly to choose to exist or not exist.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, meanwhile, an proposes similar to Zizioulas, also inspired by Richard of St. Victor, that the very notion of God as love in Christianity requires that we rethink the way in which we ascribe unity to God, and therefore how we characterize Trinitarianism as a form of monotheism. If God truly is love, then he must be characterized by self-giving in otherness, relationships of reciprocity, and mutual acts of freedom. See Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory. Vol. 5, The Last Act, trans. G. Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1998): 82–83: “The ideal of a mere unity without ‘the Other’ (Plotinus’s hen, but also the Monos Theos of Judaism and Islam) cannot do justice to the Christian affirmation that God is love. Such a unity would be self-sufficient and could not be communicated; ‘otherness’ would be a mere declension from it. But where God is defined as love, he must be in essence perfect self-giving, which can only elicit from the Beloved, in return an equally perfect movement of thanksgiving, service and self-giving. Absolute self-giving of this kind cannot exist in the creaturely realm, since man has no control over his existence and, hence, over his ‘I,’ and ‘we cannot give away that over which we have no control’ (Brunner, 24). We must try to grasp the fact that where absolute Being is concerned, Being that has possession of itself, ‘divine self-possession expresses itself in perfect self-giving and reciprocal surrender; furthermore the creature’s own existence, over which it has no control, is drawn into this movement’ (Brunner, 25). This self-giving cannot be motivated by anything other than itself; hence it is a boundless love where freedom and necessity coincide and where identity and otherness are one: identity, since the Lover gives all that he is and nothing else, and otherness, since otherwise the Lover would love only himself. Yet, even where it is a case of total reciprocal self-giving, this distinction cannot be ultimate: without disappearing, it must transcend itself in a new identity of love given and received, which the lovers themselves are bound to regard as the miracle, ever new, of their mutual love. Thus in God there must be ‘an eternal amazement at, and affirmation of, this reciprocal otherness that accompanies the oneness’ (Brunner, 42) and ‘an eternal newness characterizing perfect, supratemporal constancy’ (Brunner, 45).” Balthasar is citing the related study by August Brunner, Dreifaltigkeit: Personale Zugänge zum Geheimnis (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1976).
[42] See ST I, q. 29, esp. art. 4. I have offered an analysis of this feature of Aquinas’ thought at greater length in The Trinity: On the Nature and Mystery of the One God (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2022), chap. 23 and 24.
RESPONSE
Fr. Isidoros Katsos
Associate Professor of Theological Epistemology and Philosophy
I Preliminaries
I would like to thank Fr. Thomas Joseph White for his transparent, well-argued, and profoundly rich paper, which aims to bring into dialogue the Western and Eastern theological traditions on a highly debated topic—relational ontology. His work exemplifies the spirit of ecumenism that the John Distinguished Lectures seek to promote. Many thanks to our distinguished speaker for this contribution.
I am also grateful that he has presented his argument not through the lens of abstract Trinitarian theology or metaphysics—disciplines accessible to only a few—but through the lens of human condition and anthropology, which concerns us all.
In my humble opinion, the most important lesson to take from this talk is its choice of topic. As we see in the title, Fr. Thomas Joseph White’s discussion demonstrates that ontology and anthropology converge in the person of Christ. Throughout the paper, Christology becomes the “hermeneutic interpretive key”—to use the speaker’s beautiful expression—through which the doctrines of the Church attain direct relevance for us all. This reminds us that a theology that isolates itself from Christology—and, therefore, from the divine-human perspective—risks becoming idle speculation, entirely foreign to the teachings of the Church.
II Methodology
As a first methodological note, I suggest that we leave the Filioque outside the scope of our discussion. I understand that for many Orthodox theologians, it is central to the debate. However, it is not the focus of this paper, and thus it should not be the focal point of our conversation today. I encourage restraint and a focus on the argument presented.
As a second methodological note, I propose that we set aside our confessional preconceptions in favor of a mutual and constructive dialogue. This does not mean abandoning our respective beliefs but rather recognizing that any claim to revelation, sacred tradition, or authority must be mediated through reason in public discourse. This will be the approach I adopt in my response to Fr. Thomas Joseph’s excellent talk. My kind request to the audience is that, in our subsequent discussion, we all strive to formulate our beliefs and truth claims through rational argumentation, as this is the only path to a productive exchange.
A summary of the paper is available in both English and Greek, so I will not repeat it here. At the request of the Chair of our Faculty, Professor Dimitrios Moschos, and to initiate our conversation, I will briefly present two critical remarks within my own area of expertise and invite the audience to contribute with their questions.
III First Critical Remark on Zizioulas, after whom this series of Distinguished Lectures is named
According to the paper, the primary difference between Aquinas and Zizioulas lies in their respective Christian appropriations of ancient Greek philosophy. This pertains to the broader question of the relationship between Christianity and Hellenism—a subject on which the late Elder Metropolitan of Pergamon wrote extensively. Fr. Thomas Joseph White fairly represents Zizioulas’ position, showing that for the late Metropolitan, there is indeed “a radical break and discontinuity between classical pre-Christian thought as an ontology of nature (in Aristotle and Plato) and post-Christian thought as a philosophy of persons, relations, and divine freedom” (p. 17 of the manuscript). However, to fully appreciate Zizioulas’ perspective on reception history, two caveats must be noted.
First, in Being as Communion, Zizioulas closely links the theological project of the Church with philosophy. He writes:
“Patristic theology saw in the Eucharist the historical realization of the philosophical principle governing the concept of the person: the principle that the hypostasis expresses the whole of its nature, not merely a part” (p. 60, my italics).
Thus, even as he critiques Greek philosophy, he simultaneously affirms that the Christian project is itself genuinely philosophical. He speaks of “the new philosophical position of the Cappadocian Fathers” (p. 41, my italics) and elaborates in Lectures in Christian Dogmatics that the personal or relational ontology of the Church Fathers—especially of the Cappadocians, with an emphasis on St. Basil—opens “a new path for philosophy” and lays the foundation “for an entirely new philosophical project” (p. 52, my italics). Hence, Zizioulas does not argue for a rupture with philosophy as such but rather with a particular kind of philosophy—namely, essentialist metaphysics, which he (rightly or wrongly) attributes to the whole of ancient Greek thought.
Conversely, as I will discuss in my second remark, Thomistic relational ontology does not simply follow Aristotle. While it builds upon Aristotle’s category of relation, it also radically departs from it. In this sense, I see convergence between the Thomistic and Zizioulian receptions of Greek philosophy, despite their differing rhetorical emphases. This is evident in a striking passage from Being as Communion, where Zizioulas acknowledges that the limitations of available scholarship might have led to an incomplete assessment of relational ontology’s origins:
“Whether this [sc. relational ontology] involves a revolutionary change in the meaning of substance in Greek thought or whether it actually has a basis in aspects of Greek philosophy that have escaped our attention are questions that the author does not intend to explore here” (p. 85).
And in a footnote:
“In his profound analysis of Aristotle's idea of substance, Prof. D.M. MacKinnon has revealed the subtleties of Aristotle’s concept. Historians of doctrine would do well to take these seriously into account.”
It seems to me that Fr. Thomas Joseph White has done precisely that for us today. This brings me to my second critical reflection, which concerns the metaphysics of relations.
IV Second Critical Remark: The Metaphysics of Relations
The paper’s central argument, as I understand it, is the dual relational ontology of Christian theology: one of subsistent (i.e., substantial) relations within the uncreated Trinity and one of non-substantial (i.e., accidental) relations within creation. These two modes of relationality—substantial and accidental—coexist in the person of Christ, who unites uncreated and created natures.
The reason for this dual modality, as reconstructed in my own terms, follows Aristotle’s Categories, where he divides being’s attributes into ten categories: one comprising essential attributes and nine comprising non-essential, so-called “accidental” or contingent attributes. “Relation” is one of the nine categories of accidental attributes. Within this framework, Aquinas classifies human personal relations as non-essential (i.e. accidental) attributes. However, in the uncreated order, the essential/accidental distinction collapses due to absolute divine simplicity. Since there is no contingency in the Trinity, there can be no accidental attributes; thus, divine personal relations must be substantial rather than accidental.
As an important sidenote, it should be emphasized that the late Metropolitan Zizioulas, throughout his life’s work, consistently explored what it means for divine relations to be personal. In contrast to essentialism, which maintains that substance precedes personhood, relational ontology asserts the opposite: personhood precedes substance. Within this framework, divine personhood is not merely a derivative of God’s being; rather, it is divine personhood itself that constitutes God’s very being (Being as Communion, 17-18 and passim).
However, I would like to raise a critical point. In Aristotle’s exposition of relational attributes (Categories, ch. 6), he encounters a problem: although relations are supposed to be distinct from substance, some are not necessarily so. For instance, a hand is inherently part of a human substance, always related to it as part to whole. Aristotle offers a correction, leading to two interpretive schools: one reductionist, arguing that relational attributes reduce to monadic properties (e.g., Simmias is taller than Socrates purely due to individual size); and one realist, i.e. non-reductionist, holding that relations are an irreducible category of being.
Fr. Thomas Joseph seems to oscillate between these interpretations—sometimes treating relations as reducible to quantities or causal actions and other times as irreducible real attributes. My question is this: Are relations merely epiphenomenal properties, making them substantial—in which case we can speak of “substantial relations”? Or are they irreducible attributes of being, making them distinct from substance—in which case we can speak of “real relations”? The Cappadocian distinction between common and individual attributes in the Trinity (to koinon kai to idion, Basil (?), Letter 38) suggests the latter. If so, then the Thomistic interpretation, while creative, does not entirely align with Cappadocian thought.
