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“I: Introduction and Statement of Thesis. Let me begin this essay by sketching out some intriguing features of the context in which the current trinitarian debate is taking place. In the remarkable recent outpouring of writing on the doctrine of the Trinity we may detect, I suggest, an interesting double paradox.

On the one hand, sophisticated logicians amongst the analytic philosophers of religion have devoted much energy to defending the so-called ‘Social’ (or ‘Plurality’) doctrine of the Trinity, whilst decrying the coherence of a ‘Latin’ (or ‘Unity’) model. In so doing, however, they have - with only one or two important exceptions, to be examined below - paid relatively little attention to the type of entity that they are calling ‘person’ when they count ‘three’ of them in the Godhead. Indeed, when we probe a little with the tools of the hermeneutics of suspicion, we may detect distinct whiffs of influence from ‘modern’ perceptions of ‘person’ (or ‘individual’) smuggled into the debate, and read back into the patristic texts which are being claimed as authoritative.

On the other hand, and simultaneously, systematic theologians have been at work de-bunking precisely those ‘modern’ notions of individualism that they perceive to have distorted Christian anthropology since the Enlightenment and to have undermined trinitarian conceptuality altogether. For them, construing ‘persons’ as ‘relations’ (whatever this means exactly) has become a theological watchword. Unhappily, these two camps of scholarship, despite their shared commitment to the reinstatement of trinitarian theology, show little mutual regard for each other’s work.

This paradox of intention and starting point recapitulates itself, in a rather curious way, in intra-feminist debates on the Trinity - a fact so far rarely commented upon; but this is why I speak of a ‘double paradox’. On the one hand, we have the radical feminist spoof of trinitarianism (in Mary Daly’s work) as the so-called ‘Men’s Association’, a barely-concealed symbolic endorsement, in Daly’s view, of the all-male club, which on rare occasions admits a stereotypical ‘feminine’ principle into its magic circle as a token presence (‘You’re included under the Holy Spirit. He’s feminine’). Clearly what underlies Daly’s deliberately ‘absurd’ accusation here is a deep - and not altogether unfounded - suspicion that modern patriarchal thinking has found its projective trinitarian manifestation as an association of like-minded males. In contrast to Daly’s dismissive rejection of trinitarianism, the patiently irenic work of Elizabeth Johnson on the Trinity attempts to reclaim its significance for feminism by concentrating on its celebration of ‘mutuality’ and ‘relationship’. So the divergence between analytic philosophers of religion and theologians on the Trinity is in some form recapitulated in the feminist camp: whilst Daly assumes a three-fold ‘individualism’ in the doctrine (and rejects it), Johnson prefers to construe ‘persons’ in terms of ‘relationships’.

It will be the central thesis of this paper that neither side in either of these somewhat curiously-parallel disjunctions has fully grasped the complexity and subtlety of late fourth-century trinitarianism at its best. Moreover, it will be suggested by the end that the modern contestants’ predetermined commitments to (divergent) perceptions of ‘personhood’ may lead, in the end, to insoluble difficulties. In arguing thus I shall take Gregory of Nyssa as my focus and example, a figure whose trinitarian contribution is often too easily conflated with that of the other ‘Cappadocians’, but whose profoundly apophatic sensibilities make the assessment of the intended status of his trinitarian language a particularly subtle matter for reflection. One of the more surprising conclusions to which my argument will lead is that Gregory’s approach to the Trinity is not ‘social’ in the sense often ascribed to that term today; it does not ‘start’ with three and proceed to the one. Nor does it attempt to ‘nail’ the meaning of divine hypostasis by particular reference to the analogy of three individual men: the analytic discussions here have been misled by an over-concentration on Gregory’s Ad Ablabium, as well as by an insufficiently nuanced reading of that text. If we take a wider view of Gregory’s corpus (and especially if we look at the rich range of imagery on the trinity that he uses in contexts not restricted to the polemical or apologetic), a rather different perception of his trinitarian theology emerges, one which is in no doubt about the unity of the divine will in action, but which is highly diffident about probing the details of the nature of God in Godself beyond a certain, cautiously-delimited point. Such diffidence may appear intrinsically unsatisfactory to the analytic school of philosophy of religion; but it raises questions about apophaticism that are, at the very least - or so I shall argue - worthy of greater analytic attention, and have implications for our understanding of the linguistic status of trinitarian claims.

If the gender interests of the feminist debates seem somewhat irrelevant to the analytic discussion as currently pursued, Gregory’s example should also give pause for thought. The perplexing fluidity of gender reference which characterizes Gregory’s trinitarian discussions as a whole gives the lie to attempts to sanitize the matter from any such taint; as we shall attempt to show, Gregory’s approach demonstrates how unwise it is to dislocate trinitarian debates from the matrix of human transformation that is that Trinity’s very point of intersection with our lives. If Gregory is right, moreover, such transformation is unthinkable without profound, even alarming, shifts in our gender perceptions, shifts which have bearing as much on our thinking about God as on our understanding of ourselves.”

Brian Leftow’s paper for this conference provides a useful introduction to this issue and the literature concerned.
I think here of recent work by British theologians such as Colin Gunton, Alistair McFadyen, or (rather differently) Elaine Graham. Harriet A. Harris’s article, ‘Should We Say that Personhood is Relational?’, Scottish Journal of Theology, forthcoming, contains an astute account and criticism of this strand of thinking.
Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology (Boston, 1978), 38.
See Elizabeth A. Johnson, She Who Is (New York, 1992); see, e.g., 205: ‘The ontological priority of relation in the idea of the triune God has a powerful affinity with women’s ownership of relationality as a way of being in the world’.

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