Theological Origins of Modernity

the contradictions of premodernity 133
between God and man. Th is notion was a source of great strength in a Roman
world in which the distance between gods and men had grown quite
large, but it also posed a real problem for Christians because it was so diffi
cult to explain what this meant. How should one understand the claim
that God had become a man, and that man could in turn become a God, or
at least come to dwell with God? Th is question was in fact two diff erent but
related questions. What is the relationship between the divine and the human
(or the Father and Son) within the Godhead, and what is the relationship
of other human beings to this God-man? How could there be multiple
beings and multiple wills that were coordinated with one another? Th e
early Christian debates between the Arians, Manicheans, Pelagians, and
Trinitarians were at heart disagreements about how to make sense of this
fundamental Christian notion. Building on a Neoplatonic foundation, the
church fathers developed a Trinitarian answer to these questions that became
church doctrine at the Council of Nicea and succeeding councils.
Th is doctrine was more fully elaborated by Augustine and his followers.
Th ey understood God, in many ways following Plotinus, as absolute intellect,
absolute love, and absolute power. Th ey argued that man was created
in the image of God, was endowed with freedom, had fallen by his misuse
of this freedom, and was redeemed by God’s incarnation and self-sacrifi ce.
Th is answer was revived and elaborated within an Aristotelian (or
Averroist) framework by scholasticism. Scholastics held that the words
‘Father’ and ‘Son’ could be meaningfully used in relation to the Godhead,
but that the usage had to be understood in terms of an analogy to human
life. To say that Jesus Christ is the Son of the Father is to affi rm a truth, but
in a special way: it is not simply a poetic metaphor or an emotive expression,
but neither is it a claim that Jesus Christ is the biological son of God.
Th e medieval scholastics and their predecessors explored the rationality
of analogical reasoning with subtlety and insight. Augustine, for example,
works through a series of progressively more adequate analogies in On the
Trinity. Aquinas argued that we can gain some insight into God by refl ecting
on things and their qualities or attributes. Since everything is created
by God, the ways in which things are must refl ect something of his nature.
Th e entire project was based, however, on the conviction that people could,
to a degree, comprehend rationally how words such as ‘father’ and ‘son’
could appear in true statements about God as well as about human beings
because the meaning of words was rooted in the real existence of universals.
Th e prominence and pervasiveness of reason in this account made
possible the reconciliation of God and man within the Trinity and the
coordination of divine and human will in the world. Th e will (voluntas) of