Recherche – Detailansicht
Ausgabe: | Dezember/2021 |
Spalte: | 1234-1236 |
Kategorie: | Dogmen- und Theologiegeschichte |
Autor/Hrsg.: | Zachhuber, Johannes |
Titel/Untertitel: | The Rise of Christian Theology and the End of Ancient Metaphysics. Patristic Philosophy from the Cappadocian Fathers to John of Damascus. |
Verlag: | Oxford u. a.: Oxford University Press 2020. 384 S. Geb. US$ 105,00. ISBN 9780198859956. |
Rezensent: | Richard Cross |
This book develops a very ambitious thesis that, if true, would require a radical rethinking of a vast amount of Patristic theology from Basil of Caesarea to John of Damascus. The basic thought is that the Cappadocians – preeminently Gregory of Nyssa – devel-oped two complementary accounts of universals: an »abstract« one, employed in the context of Trinitarian theology, and a »concrete« one, employed for theological anthropology. The core of the abstract theory is that a universal is an abstract item individuated in its concrete particulars; and the core of the concrete theory is that a universal is the collection of its particulars. According to Johannes Zachhuber, the abstract theory is well-suited for giving an account of the doctrine of the Trinity, but less helpful in its application to Christology, albeit that this application is naturally suggested by the Chalcedonian double homoousion. The reason is that an individuated nature is a hypostasis: hence an individuated human nature is a human hypostasis. Thus the »no nature without hypostasis« slogan of Nestorians and miaphysites (helpfully abbreviated as »NNWH«). Understandably but perhaps regrettably, Z. does not have anything to say about the theology of the Church of the East. But he has much to say about the miaphysites, and this section – almost a third of the book – constitutes to my mind its most interesting part, carefully covering material that has not been worked over in much detail since the magisterial work of Joseph Lebon in the first half of the twentieth century. If most Chalcedonians adopt the abstract theory of the Cappadocians, the miaphysites, according to Z., adopt the concrete theory. Hence their criticism of Chalcedonian Christology, that if we construe the incarnation as a relation between universals (divinity, humanity), what will result is the incarnation of all three divine persons in every instance of human nature (a conclusion helpfully abbreviated as »WT/WHI«).
There is a great deal of very rich material here, and rather than discuss it in detail, I will focus on the nature and cogency of the general analysis just summarized. I fully agree with Z. that there is a distinctive Christian philosophy of universal and particular, to be sharply contrasted with ancient metaphysics, and that it begins with Basil and Gregory. But I disagree with the precise analysis offered by Z.
The way Z. sets up the abstract theory, it seems as though individuation is a property of natures: as he puts it at one point, »hypostasis […] is existence with properties that individuates universal ousia« (54; equivalent locutions passim). Now, making individua-tion a property of common natures, rather than of particulars, is characteristic of the philosophical tradition from Alexander of Aphrodisias, with its commitment to the divisibility of common natures and its view of individuals as particular natures. (See Z.’s comments on p. 68 for much the same assessment, along with the suspicion, voiced but not systematically explored, that Gregory’s abstract and concrete theories are incompatible with each other.) We find particular natures in Gregory’s Ad Graecos (which Z. sus-pects, for other reasons, to be inauthentic). But this seems to me to be in sharp contrast to what I take to be the distinctively Patristic view on the matter, which takes as its starting point the monadic indivisibility of the universal and its refusal, at least initially, to talk about particular natures. On this view, individuation is a prop-erty of par-ticulars, and not possibly a property of an indivisible common nature. So I found the presentation of the abstract view, and its use as an analytical tool in the discussion of the later Chalcedonian tradition, not as clear is it might have been.
Viewed in the way I have just outlined, indeed, Z.’s abstract theory of universals, far from being unsuited to Christological purposes, is in fact ideal: the divine person, initially instantiating or realizing just one universal – divine nature, shared coordinately with Father and Spirit – begins to realize another too: human nature, along with various associated accident-universals. Indeed, the model seems better suited for a Christological function than it does for its original Trinitarian application. After all, if the three divine persons are realizations of a monadic deity, and Peter, Paul, and John are realizations of a monadic human nature, then the inference from three divine persons to three Gods seems prima facie irresistible. Gregory of Nyssa’s notorious claim that »three human beings« is catachrestic does little to help. At any rate, this admis-sion shows that the solution to the Trinitarian dilemma is not to be found in the theory of universals at all. As Gregory tells us in Ad Ablabium, he believes that the distinctive metaphysical characteristic proper to the divine case is not unity of essence but unity of ac-tivity – something not discussed by Z.
To return to the Christological case, Z. rightly finds the abstract view in the Chalcedonian theologian John the Grammarian (the »impious« opponent of Severus of Antioch), and Z. may well be right in supposing that John is the first thinker expressly to apply the Cappodocian abstract theory to the Christological case. It seems to me that we in fact find the same kind of intuition in the miaphy-site Severus of Antioch. (I was not convinced by the textual case Z. makes to the effect that Severus accepts Gregory’s concrete universals, but that is a detail that reasonable people could well disagree about.) It strikes me that Severus concurs with his opponent on the question of universals – likewise following Gregory of Nyssa, whom both men revered – but holds that there was no such thing as a single two-natured beast (hence NNWH). The two sets of essential properties, divine and human, constitute one theandric nature, so to speak. And to this extent the disagreement between the two was indeed verbal.
So among other things it does not seem to be the case that we can quite as readily associate the concrete account of universals with the miaphysites as Z. believes. It also remains somewhat unclear to me quite how to conceive of the concrete account of universals, as found in Gregory of Nyssa, in relation to the philosophical account of particular natures found in (e. g.) Philoponus. Are these to be identified or distinguished? And if the latter, in what way? It would have been worth exploring these philosophical questions more systematically.
Despite these caveats, I learned a great deal from this book, and greatly appreciated the opportunity to read it. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the development of Christological doc-trine in the years between Chalcedon and John of Damascus, albeit not for the faint-hearted. It includes, to boot, an excellent discus-sion of the debate on tritheism between Damian, the miaphysite Patriarch of Alexandria, and Peter of Callinicus.