Michel Rene Barnes - “Other 4th Century Latin Nicenes” 1 “Other Latin Nicenes” Introduction This chapter treats the great tradition of Latin trinitarian theology as it appears in the second-half of the fourth century. I say, “great tradition” as a way of encompassing the variety of Latin trinitarian traditions that co-exist within Christianity in the western half of the Roman Empire. I am particularly interested in the theologies of those authors who were responding to the series of crises triggered in the aftermath of Nicaea, 325., and of these I limit myself to those authors who either evidenced sympathy with a theology like that expressed at Nicaea, or to those authors who attacked critics of the language found in the creed of Nicaea. Neither of these circumstances necessarily presupposes direct contact with the Nicene creed, since much of the language in the creed had a prior and separate history in Latin trinitarian theology. This fact is especially true of “one substance” language. The phrase “other Latins” in my title is meant to signal that my intention is to approach my chosen era of Latin trinitarian theology from some other perspective than the theologies of Hilary’s de Trinitate and Ambrose’s de Fide and de Spiritu Sanctu. It is typically the case in scholarship that the theologies of these two authors are used to provide a description of Latin Nicene trinitarian theology generally, and to determine the context for other Latin Nicene authors.1 Here I will begin instead with the many as the means to provide a doctrinal context that includes the few.2 One result of excluding For example, R. P. C. Hanson uses the knowledge and appropriation of Hilary’s theology by a Latin Nicene as the standard for measuring the sophistication and significance of the other “Nicene” Trinitarian theologies in the West. See his The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy 318-381, (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1988). Hanson’s use of Hilary of Poitier as the standard for Latin Pro-Nicene theology finds its most important (and peculiar) expression in his schematizing Hilary as “Western Pro-Nicenes [stage] I” even though a number of those authors in the chapter “Western ProNicenes [stage] II” write before Hilary’s “Nicene” works. (The subtitle of Hanson’s work is both more descriptive and useful than the “before the colon” title. “The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God” is a majestic title that does no credit to the scholarship Hanson’s book contains.) 2 The name that is here missing from both the small list of paradigmatic Latin Nicenes (Hilary, Ambrose, Augustine) as well as the longer list of “other Latin Nicenes” is Marius Victorinus. Frankly, 1 Article Version Michel Rene Barnes - “Other 4th Century Latin Nicenes” 2 Hilary and Ambrose from my treatment of Latin Nicenes is the clear appearance of a methodological and historical question: why exactly are the theologies of Hilary and Ambrose privileged in scholarly accounts of fourth century Latin Nicene trinitarian theologies? Because they wrote so much? Because they so neatly fit the dominant narrative that Latin trinitarian theology only develops when Greek trinitarian theology pushes it? I will begin my study of Latin Nicenes -- as I have just defined them -- not with Phoebadius directly, but with Serdica. My interest here is western trinitarian theology within the boundaries of Latin thought,3 and for this purpose Serdica has a special place because of what it reveals and embodies of Latin trinitarian theology in the middle of the fourth century. I am not suggesting that the theology expressed in the creed of western Serdica is “Nicene” or that the Latin intention for the council was to uphold and defend the creed of the Council of Nicaea. The utility of western Serdica is as a window onto the continuing presence of key tropes in Latin trinitarian theology. Serdica gathers these theological idioms together into a crowded package, one which allows us to recognize easily the influence of the tropes or idioms in post-Serdican Latin trinitarian theology. Serdica also has a special place because some scholars have suggested that the creed of western Serdica injected Greek theology into the living body of Latin trinitarian despite the great number of erudite publications on Victorinus we still lack what I would regard as a credible and sophisticated account of the place of his theology in the Nicene controversy and the significance of his theology for later Latin Nicene Trinitarian theology. There is no consensus whatsoever in scholarship as to whether Victorinus would ideally belong in the “Paradigmatic Latin Nicene” category, or the “Other Latin Nicenes” category, or a “Mutated Nicene” category, and nothing decisive can be constructed here within the limited scope of this essay. 3 The latest and most trust-worthy comprehensive account of the Trinitarian controversies of the fourth century is Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Ayres’ treatment of western theology is broken down into three blocks: Tertullian to Lactantius (pp. 70-76); the years 360-365 (Hilary principally, pp. 177-186), and the years 365-400 (pp. 260-267). Serdica is given an important discussion (pp. 122-126); Phoebadius is mentioned on p. 139; Damasus is accessed on p. 261. The “other Latin Nicenes” that I treat in this chapter are not discussed in Ayres’ book. Hanson’s treatment of western Trinitarian theology is more extensive – most of the figures I discuss here are treated in The Arian Controversy 318-381 – but the Latins are brought forward principally to show how poorly their theology compares to Greek ‘Pro-Nicene’ theology. (Except for Hilary: Hanson likes Hilary.) Article Version Michel Rene Barnes - “Other 4th Century Latin Nicenes” 3 theology.4 I am not at all concerned with the question of whether Serdica can be considered any kind of “Nicene” or not, nor will I engage the question of the general “Greekiness” of parts of western Serdica’s theology. I will only identify those aspects of western Serdica’s theology that provide me with a place to begin as I discuss, in sequence, the theologies of the Latins that constitute the proper subject of this essay. Thus, I will first identify key Latin doctrines in western Serdica, show their Latin precedents and sources, and then in the last four-fifths of this article treat their presence in Phoebadius and the rest.5 Latin Nicenes of the Second Half of the Fourth Century The first of the Latin trajectories I will trace that appear in Serdica is the use of John 14.10, “Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father in me?”. This johannine passage, along with John 10.30, is cited to support to a doctrine of the co-eternity of the Father and Son. The western pedigree of the passage as a trinitarian proof text goes back to Tertullian. At Against Praxeus 20 Tertullian identifies 14.10 and 10.30 as the two NT texts Praxeus’s followers accept as authorities for their doctrine of God. In Against Praxeus 22 John 10:30 and 14.9-11 are co-exegeted by Tertullian, and at chapter 24 he treats John 14.10 in detail, in a way that foreshadows Hilary of Poitiers’s lengthy engagement with the passage in book III of his de Fide/de Trin. The passage also figures significantly for Hippolytus in the Contra Noetum. The “Greek” theology injected into Latin Trinitarian theology was, according to Jorg Ulrich, from Marcellus. In his “Nicaea and the West,” Vigiliae Christianae 51 (1997), 10-24, Ulrich argues that from the time of 340 “the first official Western statement in the Trinitarian controversy [triggered by Nicaea] was an adoption of the ideas of Marcellus of Ancyra as the correct and orthodox doctrine of the Trinity” (17). Ulrich goes on to identify the theology of Serdica (“western creed”) as “entirely subjected to Marcellan influences.” The councils of Gaul, Carthage, Sicily, Sardinia, and Spain that met in the late three-forties “concurred with the decisions and with the ‘Western,’ in fact Marcellan, creed of Serdica.” (19). For a more recent as well as more developed and detailed argument for the Marcellan character of the “western creed” of Serdica, see Sara Parvis, Marcellus of Ancyra and the Lost Years of the Arian Controversy 325-345 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 236-245. For a different ersoective entirely, see Joe Lienhard’s helpful discussion of the “creed of Serdica” in Contra Marcellum: Marcellus of Ancyra and Fourth-Century Theology, pp. 148-52. For a text and discussion, see J. N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds (2nd Ed., 1960; Longman’s, 1950) 5 My method uses a variation of Ockham’s Razer, namely, “the influence of the local context has an inherent prior authority in interpretation,” however “local” may be defined in a given context. 4 Article Version Michel Rene Barnes - “Other 4th Century Latin Nicenes” 4 The second Latin trajectory I will trace is the language of the “Power of God” as a means of describing the unity in the Trinity. Serdica says, “We confess that the Son is the Power of the Father. We confess that the Word is [the] Word of God the Father, and that beside Him there is no other. We believe the Word to be the true God, and Wisdom and Power.” Power is the capacity of an existent to affect insofar as it is what it is. In its original medical and philosophical use, power is inseparable from any existent, whether the existent in question is an individual or a nature. Any two existents that possess the same power must possess the same nature, and vice versa. However, like the divine titles Wisdom, Word, Glory, and Spirit of the Lord, in Second Temple literature Power is understood to possess a kind of hypostatic existence. In early Christian literature Power is hypostasized in 1 Corinthians, Romans, Hebrews, and Luke’s Gospel. The old philosophical sense is not lost in the hypostasized usage; the older philosophical sense provides the basis for the understanding that the hypostatic Power remains connaturally united with its existent or nature of origin. However, in Trinitarian theology, any specific statement about God’s Power either the connatural or the hypostatic sense can be meant. The third Latin doctrinal tradition expressed at western Serdica that I will trace is what Simonetti and Grillmeier have called “Spirit Christology,” that is, the identification of the divine element in Jesus as Spirit and the human element as body or flesh. 6 One of the charges western Serdica levels against Valens and Ursacius is that these two teach that the “Word and the Spirit” [in Jesus, presumably] was pierced, wounded, died and rose again.7 “Word and the Spirit” name the divine in Jesus. From the time of Tertullian until sometime in the late 360’s or early 370’s a “spirit-Christology” is the normal In his treatment of Serdica in Nicaea and Its Legacy, p 125, Ayres remarks about the creed: “One of the oddities of this text is its seeming lack of any doctrine of the Spirit: although Father, Son, and Spirit are all named and said to share a hypostasis, elsewhere the statement speaks as if the Spirit were identical with the Logos and once describes the Son as ‘Logos-Spirit’().” There is a “Holy Spirit” whose soteriological significance is very limited, but where “Spirit” has any soteriological significance it refers to the divinity in Jesus. See my next footnote for the passage Ayres is referring to. 7 Another passage in Serdica says: “We believe in and we receive the Holy Spirit the Comforter, whom the Lord both promised and sent. We believe in It as sent. It was not the Holy Spirit who suffered, but the manhood with which He clothed Himself; which He took from the Virgin Mary….” 6 Article Version Michel Rene Barnes - “Other 4th Century Latin Nicenes” 5 anthropological model in the West for the Incarnation. As a corollary, one can say that scriptural passages that had previously8 supported a strong or “high” pneumatology were, during this time, understood as referring to the pre-existent divine Spirit of the Son (e.g, Luke 1.35-36, Ps. 33.6.) During this period of time Latin trinitarian theology is functionally binitarian: there are recognizable pneumatologies, but they are consistently weak or “low”. Phoebadius of Agenn Between Serdica and Hilary’s de Trinitate lie the writings of the young Hilary, Phoebadius of Agenn, Gregory of Elvira, and Potamius of Lisbon. 9 Phoebadius was probably the first bishop of Agenn, a city about seventy-five miles southeast of Bordeaux, a fact which presents us perhaps with the opportunity to find a milieu for his theology. Bordeaux was the home of Decimus Magnus Ausonius, who was born there early in the fourth century. He studied rhetoric and grammar there and in Toulouse, and then returned to Bordeaux, where he taught. From Bordeaux Ausonius went to the court of Valentinian, to become the tutor of the young Gratian. Afterwards, he went on to become the governor of Gaul, then Italy, Illyria and Africa. After the murder of Gratian in 383 he retired, but continued his correspondence with, for example, Symmachus, Paulinus of Nola, and the Emperor Theodosius.10 In the mid-fourth century the province of Aquitania II was not an isolated, cultureless wasteland, and we must be careful what we assume about Phoebadius’ intellectual resources -- a care we should extend to all Latin theologians of the fourth century. [Content Withheld] In Theophilus and Irenaeus. Surprisingly, there is no sign of any presence of Irenaeus’ theology in Gaul or Rome during the third and fourth centuries, this despite the popularity during this time of Irenaeus’ burial site as a martyr’s monument. (There is at least one case of a bishop from elsewhere in Gaul having his body taken to Lyons to be interred with Irenaeus.) 9 The western theologians I discuss in this chapter are distributed geographically from Portugal, Spain and France, through Italy, and into present-day Romania. Rufinus “the Syrian” is as Greek a theologian as Jerome is. 10 H. J. Rose, A Handbook of Latin Literature, p. 527. 8 Article Version Michel Rene Barnes - “Other 4th Century Latin Nicenes” 6 Simonetti remarks that Faustinus’ De Fide ends with a “brief but exhaustive treatise on the Holy Spirit”11 - and indeed it is true that Faustinus says explicitly that the Holy Spirit has the same substance as the Father and Son. Moreover, Faustinus quotes Psalm 33 and applies it to the Son and the Holy Spirit. These are two very important statements for Faustinus to make. I am conscious, however, of the danger of claiming too much for Faustinus -- and the danger owes to this: his understanding of trinitarian unity articulates itself through a logic of image and figure, and that logic does not in itself include or explain the co-divinity of the Holy Spirit, for the Spirit cannot be described as the image or likeness of God (since he has no image or likeness). Faustinus’ spirit is willing, but his logic is weak. Damasus of Rome It was Damasus of Rome who represented the western point of view to the coalition of eastern bishops coallesing behind the language of one ousia and three hupostases. In this meeting of minds Damasus is often portrayed as less capable than his eastern correspondents, but there is little evidence to support this caricature. Nothing that Damasus says about one substance & three persons, on the one hand, and one essence and three hupostasis, on the other, is stupid. In Letter 48 Damasus remarks that “Every school of secular learning knows no other meaning of hypostasis except usia.” (p. 292) Placing Damasus’ remark in a contemporary philosophical context is difficult since so little survives from philosophical schools in fourth century Italy and Gaul. What little we do have supports Damasus’ appeal to philosophical usage. Marius Victorinus, in his translations of the books of the Platonists, where fidelity to the original Greek text required a corresponding variety of technical Latin words, used substantia for ousia and subsistentia for hupostasis. This convention remains in use at least until the time of Boethius.12 Moreover, Victorinus’ second book of Against Arius contains an extended 11 Patrology IV, p. 90. The late Steven K. Strange offered me this guidance: “Boethius, following apparently Victorinus, uses substantia [for ousia] and subsistentia [for upostasis] respectively.” 12 Article Version Michel Rene Barnes - “Other 4th Century Latin Nicenes” 7 demonstration that the Greek Biblical word hupostasis has the same meaning as the better known Greek word, ousia, a lexigraphical task that is straightforward compared to any attempt to show that Scripture uses hypostasis to mean something greatly different than ousia or substantia.13 If a Roman as philosophically able and linguistically accomplished as Victorinus judges ousia and hupostasis to be synonyms then we are not allowed to sneer at Damasus for holding the same opinion. Conclusion [Content Witheld] The fact that Latin Nicenes in the 360s could say “the Holy Spirit is one in substance with the Father and Son” is noteworthy, and an interesting new statement by them - but it did not in itself result in a new and stronger pneumatology until other changes occur as well. I have pointed to Spirit-Christology and the exegetical questions that accompany it as being decisive. There may be other "sympathetic dynamics" at work as well that I did not observe. Just as important, there is a partially different set of constellated issues at work in Greek theology that does not figure in Latin Nicene doctrinal awareness and development. The East, for example, faced Eunomius, and countering Eunomius shaped Greek trinitarian theology, while the West did not: it faced Sirmium, 357, a history of strong monarchianism read as christological problems, and a vigorous SpiritChristology.14 The West did come to acknowledge the full divinity of the Holy Spirit via its own resources, but it cannot be denied that the Latin tradition contained a decidedly “low” Pneumatology, as we see in Novatian and Lactantius. The West simply had different problems than the East, both in the deposit of its doctrinal tradition(s) and in the crises it faced. 13 FotC, pp. 203-207. It is not that there was a strong tradition of Monarchianism in the West, but that arguments tend to be drawn from earlier anti-Monarchian polemic and adapted to the new crisis. See D. H. Williams, “Monarchianism and Photinus of Sirmium as the Persistent Heretical Face of the Fourth Century,” Harvard Theological Review 99 (2006), 187-206. 14 Article Version Michel Rene Barnes - “Other 4th Century Latin Nicenes” [Chapter Content Witheld] Article Version 8