Someone’s Word: A Relational Way of Speaking

I recently had a chance to linger over the opening pages of Gregory of Nyssa’s Catechetical Discourse, and I’m struck by his nimble presentation of trinitarian theology.

Let me try to state his argument in 280 characters:

God, as perfect, must have Logos, or he’d be alogos, irrational, disordered. But God’s word, unlike ours, must be substantial, powerful, purposive: The Wordful God is all this. But Word is also a relational term, so Word is related to the one whose Word he is. Essence + relation.

The crucial move in Nyssa’s dialectic is to set up “word” as a necessary feature of belief in God’s godness, and then turn that same term around to show that it entails hypostatic distinction. All through the argument, he’s trading on a kind of underlying analogy: we look at our own existence as including word and breath, then turn to God’s being as including these things par excellence, analogically.

I’ll skip over the longer section in which Nyssa argues for God’s necessary wordfulness. It’s a lovely section, but it’s the part where he thinks he is traversing common ground with his Greek interlocutors: pagan monotheism already values this kind of account of the one God. At least the kind of pagan monotheism Nyssa thought was worth engaging philosophically –a pretty Platonic kind.

But I want to rehearse the brief passage in which Nyssa turns his discourse to trinitarian, interpersonal distinctions. Here are three versions of it. First, the version in Schaff’s Fathers:

This Word is other than He of whom He is the Word. For this, too, to a certain extent is a term of “relation,” inasmuch as the Father of the Word must needs be thought of with the Word, for it would not be word were it not a word of some one. If, then, the mind of the hearers, from the relative meaning of the term, makes a distinction between the Word and Him from whom He proceeds, we should find that the Gospel mystery, in its contention with the Greek conceptions, would not be in danger… (Schaff edition, p. 476.)

Second, the more literal version Ignatius Green offers in the bilingual St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press edition:

This Word is different from him whose Word he is. For this is also a sort of relational manner of speaking, since it is altogether necessary for the Father of the Word to be heard of together with the Word; for he would not be the Word if he is not someone’s Word. If then, the thought of [our] hearers distinguishes the Word himself and him from whom he is with a relational sign, our mystery will no longer be in danger… (p. 67)

And finally, a peek at the Greek:

ὁ δὲ Λόγος οὗτος ἕτερός ἐστι παρὰ τὸν οὗ ἐστι Λόγος. Τρόπον γάρ τινα τῶν πρός τι λεγομένων καὶ τοῦτό ἐστιν, ἐπειδὴ χρὴ πάντως τῷ Λόγω καὶ τὸν Πατέρα τοῦ Λόγου συνυπακούεσθαι: οὐ γὰρ φἂν εἴη Λόγος, μή τινος ὧν Λόγος. Εἰ οὖν διακρίνει τῷ σχετικῷ τῆς σημασίας ἡ τῶν ἀκουόντων διάνοια αὐτόν τε ςτὸν Λόγον καὶ τὸν ὅθεν ἐστίν, οὐκέτ᾽ ἂν ἡμῖν κινδυνεύοι τὸ γμυστήριον (p. 67)

I just think it’s incredibly deft for Nyssa to turn this corner from substantial Logos to hypostatically distinct Logos by pointing out that the perfection called Logos is a πρός τι / pros ti way of talking: a word has to be somebody’s word. Aristotle of course named πρός τι / pros ti as one of the categories, and eventually, the early church pounced.

Michel Rene Barnes (in his book on Dynamis in Nyssa) points out that Nyssa is unpacking some moves Origen makes at the beginning of Peri Archon, but making them a little more explicitly triadic. That’s insightful; Nyssa definitely pries apart word and breath to make it more clear that he intends to count to three once he’s established the truth of distinction. But I’m more impressed by how Nyssa is carrying out a sort of speculative elaboration of the deep structure of John’s prologue: the word was with God, and the word was God.

I’m also impressed by how well this “relational turn” in Nyssa’s Discourse maps onto the first few books of Augustine’s De Trinitate: predicating substantialiter vs predicting relationaliter, etc. It’s enough to make you want to try to prove Augustine read Nyssa’s Discourse (though a quick survey of available Quellenforschungen warns me that proofs are not likely to be definitive). Not too long ago the chasm between Augustine and the Cappadocians was taken to be one of the assured results of modern theology. But to see Nyssa, the most Cappadocian of the Cappadocians, providing an early articulation of the moves that Augustine spells out in detail is to see the essential unity (yes) of the distinct voices (yes yes) in classic pro-Nicene thought.