Logos and Language in Augustine: A Fantasy

One of Augustine's clearest attempts to braid together Christology and philosophy of language appears in the first of his Tractates on John. Commenting on John 1:1 (“In principio erat Verbum, et Verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus erat Verbum”), Augustine distinguishes between the word that sounds externally in our speech, and the “word in the human being, which remains within. That is the true word which is said spiritually, what you understand from the sound, not the sound itself.”Footnote ³ The exterior word “Deus” is the “sound,” while the inner word is what we understand from it.Footnote ⁴ The inner word, however, is also “what the sound signified, and what is in the thinker who said it”Footnote ⁵: another way Augustine captures the idea of language's content is by depicting words as signifying, aiming at, concepts.

As he elaborates the point in De Doctrina Christiana, language is a form of conventional signification.Footnote ⁶ In natural signification (smoke signifying fire, a frown signifying anger), the linkage between sign and signified is discovered, not made, but in language, the link between a particular set of sounds and a concept is imposed or stipulated. The point of exchanging these conventional signs, Augustine suggests, is that by virtue of their being subordinated to particular concepts, they allow John to bring it about that Jane thinks his thoughts after him: “Conventional signs are those which living things exchange so as to indicate to one another, as much possible, either things sensed or understood. Nor is there any other reason for our giving signs, than to introduce or bring into another's soul that which the one who gives the sign bears in his own soul.”Footnote ⁷ Words are concepts embodied in some suitable medium – soundwaves, inked lines, even (though this interests Augustine much less) the neurochemical firings of the brain.Footnote ⁸

Unsurprisingly, this theory became intertwined in Augustine's thought with the Incarnation of the Word (Jn. 1:14). A concept “in a sense is the offspring of your mind, the son of your heart,”Footnote ⁹ and just as “our word is, in a certain way, made into the body's voice, by assuming that in which it is manifested to human senses,” so too “the Word of God was made flesh by assuming that in which it would be manifested to human senses.”Footnote ¹⁰ A further parallel makes the analogy all the more attractive: “It is by assuming it, not by being consumed into it, that both our word becomes sound and that Word became flesh.”Footnote ¹¹ The spoken word “triangle” is subordinated to the concept of a triangle, so as to be (under conditions of ordinary language) transparent to it, but the concept of a triangle is not changed by this subordination; it is what it is, whether a particular language – or indeed, any language at all – has a word subordinated to it. So too, God the Word is not changed by the Incarnation; as Cyril and his heirs would put it, the Word is joined to passible humanity, and undergoes that humanity's passion, but impassibly.Footnote ¹²

Now, to a point, Porter seems to have no problem with this: “What spurs Augustine, in this instance, to search for this inner, pre-linguistic word is a theoretical, proto-Chalcedonian point about the two natures of the divine-human person Jesus Christ…In this context, the analogy is being deployed simply to avoid the mistake of saying that by becoming incarnate the Word of God is changed into (as opposed to united with) a human being.”Footnote ¹³ (Note, however, the infelicitously worded, “the Word of God is united with a human being”; we'll consider below what might be wrong with this formulation, and what difference it makes for the argument.) If the verbum mentis/verbum vocis analogy were simply a way of flagging the incarnate Word's subsistence in two irreducible natures, Porter seems to suggest, he would have no quarrel with Augustine's linguistic Christology. The trouble, though, is that Augustine sometimes fantasizes about heavenly trysts with the naked Verbum, both human and divine.

Augustine, that is, sometimes writes as though he could hold his concepts up against his words, the better to compare them. For instance, Porter quotes an unguarded moment from De catechizandis rudibus: “It is almost always the fact that my speech displeases myself. For I am covetous of something better, the possession of which I frequently enjoy within me before I commence to body it forth in intelligible words: and then when my capacities of expression prove inferior to my inner apprehensions, I grieve over the inability which my tongue has betrayed in answering to my heart.”Footnote ¹⁴ One difficulty here is with the word “before (antequam),” which suggests that Augustine imagines the mind's encounter with the concept as a moment in time which precedes his attempt to embody it in speech. He doesn't always – or even, so far as I can tell, usually – treat the concept/word relation this way, however; sometimes the relation is assimilated to that between time and eternity, as in his account of his and Monica's insight into the LORD at Ostia.Footnote ¹⁵

For Augustine, the true horizon for wordless intellection is eschatological: in heaven, he thinks, we will need neither the enfleshed words through which we communicate now (cf. de civ. Dei 22.29),Footnote ¹⁶ nor, calamitously, the enfleshed Word through which we now know the LORD:

Just prior to this quotation, Augustine even, like Bultmann avant la lettre, introduces 2 Corinthians 5:16 as authorizing a disinterest (if only heavenly) in the flesh of Christ. It is telling that Augustine's passing comment in De civitate Dei that in heaven “our very thoughts will be visible to one another”Footnote ¹⁸ comes at the end of a discussion of the “spiritual vision” of the divine nature which will be possible in and through our resurrected “spiritual bodies,” a discussion which includes not one reference to the ascended flesh of Christ (cf. again de civ. Dei 22.29).

This is a problem for Augustine's Christology, it's true: he ought rather to have said that our journey through the Son's humanity into his divinity continues even in heaven, whose joys will be magnified by the delights of true Eucharistic communion with Christ's flesh, no longer veiled by the accidents of bread and wine.Footnote ¹⁹ But is it a problem caused by his account of language? Why not say instead that this is where the analogy between human language and Incarnation breaks down?Footnote ²⁰ After all, if we extend the incarnational model of language to account for (intra-linguistic) synonymy and (inter-linguistic) translatability,Footnote ²¹ it would seem to suggest, not the unrepeatable incarnation of every concept in a unique sonic or inscriptional “body,” but rather a kind of conceptual metempsychosis, in which concepts roam from one linguistic body to another, just “as a caterpillar, having come to the end of one blade of grass, draws itself together and reaches out for the next.”Footnote ²² Or (to tarry a moment longer with the analogy) perhaps we ought to say that the indispensability of Christ's ascended flesh derives from the fact that the Incarnation is the paradigmatic assertion, the only linguistic event in which the sign captures – if only we have eyes to see it, and everlasting time in which to read it – the infinite fullness which the Father knows in conceiving his Word. It seems to me, then, that Augustine's linguistic analogies are neutral with respect to this particular Christological error.

Non-Reciprocal Relations (I): Creation

As Porter sees it, however, Augustine's fantasies about getting beyond embodied words don't only mislead him about the enduring significance of Christ's flesh, but equally ensnare him in false distinctions between Jesus and the divine Word. Augustine, Porter reminds us, rules out predicating “accidents” of the LORD on grounds of divine simplicity; applied to God, the Aristotelian categories reduce to two, substantial and relational predicates.Footnote ²³ But Augustine also denies that statements describing the LORD's changing relations to creation pick out any changes in him: since the truth-values of these statements change as creatures change, the corresponding properties in God would change too, and divine immutability bars that path like a flaming sword. A statement such as, “Lord, you have become our refuge,”Footnote ²⁴ is parallel, Augustine suggests, to a coin's being counted as the price of a bushel of wheat.Footnote ²⁵ Both need to be analyzed in terms of what the scholastics would call “real” and “logical relations”: “We were worse before we took refuge in him, and we become better by taking refuge in him. But in him, no change at all.”Footnote ²⁶

Aquinas takes over Augustine's account of a non-reciprocal God-world relation. For him, while creaturely life is entirely (so to speak) “dative,” given over to the LORD,Footnote ²⁷ the Trinity who is the LORD is “nominative” with respect to creatures, entirely unconditioned by creation.Footnote ²⁸ As Kathryn Tanner summarizes the principle, now become venerable: “Talk in which the character of divine agency varies with its effects [is] able to be reduced without remainder to talk about the self-same divine will having different created effects.”Footnote ²⁹ But this is so, for Aquinas, only because the LORD is eternally conditioned by the relations of gift and exchange that constitute his life – ad intra, the Triune life too is entirely dative.Footnote ³⁰ When Aquinas says that God has logical relations to creatures, even though the Father has real relations to the Son, this is what he means: creatures are conditioned by God, but God unconditioned by creatures; only God conditions God. The LORD is absolutely free in his relations to creation, because he is who he is (cf. Exod 3:14), with or without it; creatures, by contrast, are purely gratuitous, the “play” of God (cf. Prov. 8:30).

Non-Reciprocal Relations (II): Christology

Now, Porter raises no objections to this principle as applied to God's relations to creatures, with one exception – the human nature of Jesus. If “refugium factus es” picks only a logical relation in God, what of “caro factum est,” predicated of the Word (Jn. 1:14)? Porter summarizes his worry this way: “We want to say that God becomes flesh in such a way that Jesus of Nazareth is God, and it is not clear that we can mean this if we affirm the same kind of relation existing between Jesus and the Word as between the price of an object and a coin.”Footnote ³¹ Rephrasing and unpacking a bit, we might wonder: does the verbum mentis/verbum vocis analogy for the Incarnation suggest that Jesus is only incidentally related to the Word whom he embodies, like two hapless commuters crashing into one another on the subway?

Recall that I earlier flagged a solecism on Porter's part (“the Word of God is united with a human being”Footnote ³²); the same infelicity reappears here, in Porter's statement about “the relation existing between Jesus and the Word.”Footnote ³³ Now this sort of statement – which abstracts Jesus from the Word in order to “relate” them – is, at first glance, Nestorian; the creeping Nestorianism which Porter detects in Augustine's thought is perhaps just the shadow cast across it by some of his own formulations. (This is not Porter's only way of putting things, as we'll see below, but it's a formulation which seeps in even when he intends only to speak of the divine and human natures.Footnote ³⁴) Porter rightly jumps back from this Nestorian shadow, but his vaulting ambition, seeking safer ground, o'erleaps itself, and falls on the opposite error of Monophysitism. Where Porter goes wrong, both in rejecting the Augustinian position on the relation of Christ's two natures, and in his own revisionist proposal, he does so because he's held captive by this picture of Jesus and the Word as two objects needing to be related, either tied together with fraying string, as by Nestorius, or fused into a single alloy, as by Eutyches. That picture lies in Porter's language, which repeats back to him a false choice between those opposed errors.Footnote ³⁵

Augustine, it has to be said, is not the most helpful interlocutor for resolving these kinds of questions, since his work, while certainly “proto-Chalcedonian,”Footnote ³⁶ is innocent of the complexities imposed by the controversies over Nestorius and Eutyches, to say nothing of Severus of Antioch (fl. 512–38) or Sergius of Constantinople (d. 638), and so relatively underdetermined with respect to the concerns of classical Christology.Footnote ³⁷ Indeed, he never, so far as I know or Porter reports, explicitly analyzes John 1:14 in terms of his developing logic of non-reciprocal relations, though that logic is probably implicit in his use of the linguistic analogy.Footnote ³⁸ The schoolmen, however, received and venerated both Augustine and the long tradition of Chalcedonian Christology (synthesized for them principally in Damascene's De Fide Orthodoxa), and they developed Christologies which integrated Augustine's account of the non-reciprocal Creator-creature relation into their treatments of the union of divine and human natures in the hypostasis of the Son.Footnote ³⁹

Now, if we compare Porter's formulations above to the long Chalcedonian tradition running from Cyril to (say) Aquinas, the first thing that stands out is that the latter theologians do not speculate about “the relation between Jesus and the Word,” for the simple reason that, for them, Jesus is the Word. For Chalcedon, recall, there are two natures in one person, who is the Son: there is no “human person” Jesus to whom the Logos is united, since the only person in the God-man is God the Son, who assumes a complete human nature. This point is practically the whole burden of Cyril's campaign against Nestorius, whose key error (so the Alexandrian bishop thought) rested on the attempt to relate Jesus to the second person of the Trinity, as though he weren't that person from the start.Footnote ⁴⁰

Aquinas simply reprises this position: “A person in human nature is not presupposed to assumption, but rather, is related to it as the end-point of the assumption…For if it were presupposed, it must either have been corrupted—in which case it was assumed in vain; or it remains after the union—and thus there would be two persons, one assuming and the other assumed, which is false…And so it remains that the Son of God in no way assumed a human person.”Footnote ⁴¹ If we accept this account of the Logos as the sole subject of the Incarnation, and of Logo's human nature as his “sacred instrument,”Footnote ⁴² then it should be clear that no question about the relation between the Word and Jesus can arise, since if you abstracted the Word from Jesus, the latter would simply disappear.

However – here we come to the heart of the matter – Aquinas doesn't merely affirm the union of the two natures in the person of the Son, but interprets that union according to the logic of non-reciprocal relations which define God's relation to creatures in general, as a way of stressing that the line between Creator and creature runs brightly even through the God-man himself. He wonders how humanity and deity relate as they're united in the person of the Son, and in particular whether that union is “something created.”Footnote ⁴³ An obvious objection Aquinas's own metaphysics seem to pose to that way of putting the matter is that the hypostatic union is clearly true of God the Son, and “nothing in God can be created, because whatever is in God, is God.”Footnote ⁴⁴ If the union of the two natures is genuinely something that occurs “in” the second person of the Trinity, how can it be a created event? Doesn't this require that God's being be determined by creation itself?

Aquinas responds to the objection by way of the distinction between logical and real relations: “There is a certain relation which is considered between the divine and human natures, insofar as they coincide in one person, the Son of God,” and

We can gloss this line of thought much as we glossed Aquinas's application of the distinction to creatures more broadly: as creature, Jesus’ humanity is entirely determined by its relations to his deity. But Jesus’ human actions aren't only (non-competitively) caused by God, but, because of his human nature's assumption by the Son, are themselves God's actions. (The name we give to this qualitative difference between Jesus’ actions and mine is “hypostatic union,” without exactly knowing what we're describing by it.) Nonetheless, deity remains in the nominative case even with respect to the assumed humanity: even Incarnation adds nothing to the Son, though the Incarnate One is none other than the Son.Footnote ⁴⁶

This metaphysics buttresses the Chalcedonian tradition's insistence that the two natures remain “unconfused.” The Son really undergoes the Passion in his humanity, which, by virtue of being united to the Son, is the humanity of God; but because the Son's love for the Father in their shared Spirit is undiminished even by creaturely sin (diminishment being the only direction of alteration open to it), the divine Son undergoes even the cross “impassibly.”Footnote ⁴⁷ But likewise, the logic of non-reciprocal relations also underlies Chalcedon's insistence that the natures are “undivided.” Consider the account (to be found in Aquinas, Bonaventure, and Maximus the Confessor, among others) of Jesus’ acts of knowing and willing as “theandric”: Jesus’ divine knowledge and will non-competitively actualize his human faculties, which freely but infallibly cooperate with his deity.Footnote ⁴⁸ (The asymmetry between the LORD's acts and ours, that is, underscores the transcendence which keeps the two natures from tripping over and interfering with one another.) The Creator-creature relation doesn't just run through the God-man; it finds its perfect instance in him.

Aquinas, I noted, sees the barrier of a logical relation of Christ's deity to his humanity as permitting the Son to be the Son with or without the Incarnation. But this is exactly what worries Porter; he sees in it an unacceptable attenuation of the link between the Son and the man, Jesus: “If the Incarnation is merely a way of speaking about changes in human nature with respect to God, then there's nothing to make the Incarnation even conditionally necessary with respect to the particular human being Jesus of Nazareth born of the Virgin Mary.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Now, Porter doesn't unpack this expression “conditional necessity,” but it is surely opposed to the unconditional necessity proper to, for instance, a triangle's interior angles summing to 180 degrees. We might rather think of conditional necessity as the necessity of faithfulness, the necessity which follows on the fact that God keeps his promises. This is the necessity with which we can say, for instance, that the consecrated Eucharistic elements are Christ's body and blood: Jesus told us they would be, and Jesus doesn't lie. Porter is right that the Incarnation is necessary in this sense: God having ordained from eternity to unite divinity and humanity in the person of the Son, that event necessarily occurs “in the fullness of time” (Gal. 4:4, cf. ST 3.1.3 ad 4). But, so far as I can tell, nothing follows from this about the character of or reasons for that union.

Aquinas also identifies a third kind of necessity, that of fittingness, “sicut equus necessarius est ad iter.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Now this isn't necessity at all in that word's colloquial English sense, though it might prove extensionally equivalent with necessity sensu stricto if we stipulate that the actor in question – the LORD – infallibly wills to do what's most fitting (this following from his goodness), and is always able to do it (this following from his omnipotence). Aquinas has a great deal to say about the necessity of the Incarnation in this sense, and from many vantages. It was supremely fitting that God become man, Aquinas observes, in agreement with Anselm, because “a mere man could not have satisfied for the whole human race, and God was not bound to satisfy; hence it was necessary for Jesus Christ to be both God and man.”Footnote ⁵¹ It was supremely fitting that God the Son and not the Father or the Spirit become man, Aquinas notes, because “mission in its proper nature implies procession from another, and in divinity, procession is according to origin, as was said above. Hence, as the Father is not from another, in no way is it fitting for him to be sent.”Footnote ⁵² It is supremely fitting that the God-man be a Jew because “it would be out of place, to say the least, for God to be born of an idolatrous people that has forsaken him to worship what its own hands have made.”Footnote ⁵³ We could go on, but it ought to be clear from this that nothing in Aquinas's denial of a real relation of Christ's divinity to his humanity commits him to viewing the Incarnation as an arbitrary or inscrutable gesture.

Porter hasn't yet emptied his clip at this neo-Augustinian position, however. Even if Aquinas can save the Augustinian position from positing a Jesus who is (so to speak) less than the Word, can he save it from positing a Word who is (if I may) more than Jesus? Porter points out that the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Symbol refers not only the economy of salvation but indeed also creation to “unum Dominum Iesum Christum.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Doesn't the Augustinian habit of referring creation to the divinity of the Son militate against this usage? This is a venerable objection, reminiscent of Rahner's complaint against Aquinas, “There never should be a treatise on the Trinity in which the doctrine of the ‘missions’ is at best appended only as a relatively unimportant and additional scholion.”Footnote ⁵⁵

And yet, Aquinas and Augustine alike are happy to speak, with Colossians and the Creed, of Jesus as divine without qualification. For instance, in his commentary on the Apostles’ Creed, Aquinas notes that Photinus “thought that Christ didn't exist before the blessed virgin, but only began to be when conceived by her. And thus he erred in two things. First, because he did not say that Christ was the true Son of God according to nature; second, because he said that Christ began to exist according to his whole being, while our faith holds that he is Son of God by nature, and that he is from eternity.”Footnote ⁵⁶ And Augustine is similarly bold in his discussion of creation in the very Tractate on John with which we began above: “Do you want to see what sort of counsel of God is our Lord Jesus Christ, that is, the Word of God? Attend to the fabric of this world; see what things are made through the Word, and then you will know what manner of Word he is.”Footnote ⁵⁷ For both theologians, the Son, even as creator, is no other than Jesus, although the act of creation itself is predicable of him, not by virtue of his assumed human nature (which presupposes the act of creation), but by virtue of the his assuming divine nature.Footnote ⁵⁸ Nonetheless, the communion of attributes is a two-way street, and it entails that Jesus, who is God the Son, is the one through whom all things are created.

Who Is the LORD? – A Provocation

We can conclude by considering Porter's constructive Christological proposal. He seeks to reinterpret the union of natures in Christ by way of a revised linguistic analogy, modelled on Wittgenstein's philosophy of language. Porter suggests that Scripture's habit – just considered above – of speaking about Jesus as unqualifiedly divine “point[s] us to the possibility of collapsing the corresponding distinction in our picture of language, the same picture that leads Augustine to posit a gap between the pre-linguistic word and the word spoken in a natural language.”Footnote ⁵⁹ (Recall that this is the distinction onto which Augustine mapped the Word and his assumed flesh, with their non-reciprocal relations.Footnote ⁶⁰) Porter worries, as we've already seen, that this word-concept dualism is implicitly Nestorian, tending to divide what the LORD has joined in Christ; he hopes to articulate an account of language which will avoid this, without in turn “collaps[ing] distinctions where we should find them” – without, that is, falling into a Monophysite Christology.Footnote ⁶¹

Wittgenstein opens the Philosophical Investigations with some critical reflections on a moment in Augustine's Confessions, in which the middle-aged bishop reflects on how he learned to speak as a baby. Augustine observes,

Wittgenstein initially complains that Augustine treats language as though it consisted only of nouns, without reference to the stranger beasts of syncategorematic terms, performatives, and the like.Footnote ⁶³ But in Augustine's defense, he's writing here about an infant, for whom language surely does consist principally of names. Later on, Wittgenstein makes the more interesting suggestion that “Augustine describes the learning of human language as if the child came into a foreign country and did not understand the language…that is, as if he already had a language, only not this one.”Footnote ⁶⁴ That is, it looks as though Augustine thinks that you must already know a language (“mentalese”) in order to learn one.Footnote ⁶⁵

Augustine's point here again seems to me to be more modest, however. Notice that he doesn't attribute thoughts, beliefs, or plans to his infant self, but rather “wills (voluntates).” This admits of a homelier interpretation than the one Wittgenstein offers of it: young children want milk (de re), even before they have the concepts with which to communicate that desire (de dicto). Now Porter doesn't deny this, exactly, but suggests that we account for it without reference to the bulky apparatus of concepts which Augustine takes us to carry around from birth, by seeing words as “grafted” directly onto the experiences (of hunger or pain, say) which supply their truth-conditions. (The parent prompts the infant to say “milk” when she's hungry; this prompting is the graft which tethers language to way of life which is human existence.) Rather than attempting “to fix the meaning of our words by establishing a connection to a referent,” we ought to see “that the connection is already there,” in the attitudes and ambitions which prompt its application.Footnote ⁶⁶ I take Porter to be expressing the same intuition which, John O'Callaghan observes, prompts “the partisans of the Linguistic Turn” to wonder

There are many difficulties with this kind of position, and it would be absurd to expect either Porter's essay or this response to address them all fully. Nonetheless, I mentioned one above, with regard to the apparent role which (abstract objects called) concepts and propositions are required to play in accounting for the possibility of (intra-linguistic) synonymy, and (inter-linguistic) translatability. (Identity of truth-conditions won't get the job done here, since the truth conditions for “x has a kidney” are the same as for “x has a heart.”) Let me add to this one further difficulty for Porter's position. To what do I refer when I say, “Humans laugh”? Not to any particular human, nor to the set of all humans, but rather to the species-kind “human,” an intelligible form determinable to particulars, one of whose proper accidents is risibility. My word “human” does bear on actual persons (risibility being a proprium of each of us), but obliquely, under the aspect of their universality rather than particularity. It looks, to me at least, as though it is a concept which, like a hidden planet torqueing its visible neighbors’ orbits, inflects the word's reference and shapes its bearing on the world.

Let me consider a Wittgensteinian rejoinder, which is to say that it's not only the conditions of application which determine the meaning of an utterance, but also the inferences which the speaker or hearer is willing to draw from them.Footnote ⁶⁸ (To have the concept of “humanity” as a species-kind might be to understand that “Humans laugh” wouldn't license the inference, “They might wake up that sleeping baby,” but would license the inference, “Humans can make vocal noises.”) But a further difficulty is in understanding what the “concepts” in question are if the metaphysics of mind in play doesn't allow for anything other than “a realm of culture that rests on, but goes beyond, the background of reliable differential responsive dispositions and their exercise characteristic of merely natural creatures.”Footnote ⁶⁹ We can have a brightline distinction between the “space of reasons” and the “space of nature,” and an organic unfolding of the former from the latter, but it's not clear to me that it's possible to have both.Footnote ⁷⁰ Why not rather admit a few “spooky” entities – rational souls, abstract objects called “concepts,” intelligible forms structuring particulars – and call it, with Quine, “swelling ontology to simplify theory”?Footnote ⁷¹

The time has come to jump off this train, as it clearly has a good head of steam, and risks carrying us away from the matter at hand, which is Jesus. How does Porter's attempt at ordinary language theology go? He begins by noting, as a cardinal virtue of his account, that in it “there is no gap between the verbum mentis and the verbum vocis to be bridged.”Footnote ⁷² In the terms of Augustine's analogy, this would mean that the metaphysical “gap” between the divine and human nature has been closed – prima facie, this is an account which, wherever it's aiming, is at least temporarily tacking toward Eutyches. That Monophysite moment echoes an earlier statement in Porter's paper, where, faced with the apparent (if only apparent, as I hope I've shown) division introduced between the Word and Jesus by the apparatus of non-reciprocal relations, he refuses altogether to apply it to Christ, insisting that the relation of his deity and humanity is fully reciprocal, real on both ends: “The relation God has to Jesus of Nazareth is part of who God is. This is not to say that the divine and human natures are in any way confused, but that the particular relation between the divine nature in the second person of the Trinity and the human nature of Jesus of Nazareth obtains eternally.”Footnote ⁷³

In the first sentence, that misleading Nestorian picture we considered above (in which “Jesus” and “God” are distinct subjects somehow related) reappears briefly, but the second sentence specifies that the relation he's after is that between the divine and human natures of Christ, which he takes to “part of who God is.”Footnote ⁷⁴ It's telling that Porter immediately stiff-arms an objection to his confusing the two natures, for this sort of claim has a distinctly Monophysite accent. And the concern motivating the objection isn't much allayed by his further clarification that he understands the relation in question as eternal: as I noted above (n. 58), if the LORD is eternal, then surely all of his relations, real or logical, are as well. From the LORD's standpoint, creation as a whole obtains eternally; time obtains only from the creaturely vantage, the vantage of change and motion.

We find further reason to read Porter ad Eutychen in the context which surround this quotation, where he suggests that the Incarnation ought to be thought out in terms of the “intra-trinitarian relations.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Now as we saw above (cf. n. 30), the intra-Trinitarian relations, for Augustine and for his heirs, are just as fully identical with the divine essence as is a predicate of quality such as “justice,” which in a creature would be an accident, but which divine simplicity renders convertible with the Godhead, with the difference that these relations retain their peculiarly extroverted orientation to another than their bearer. To be the Father is to be identical with the life that the LORD is, with the qualification that it is a way of being (tropos hyparxeōs) that life which bears an irreducible reference to another – the Son – who is another way of being that life. Now what would it mean to fold Christ's human nature into those intra-Trinitarian “subsistent relations,” except to render it divine, and that not by grace but by nature? (It's no accident that Monophysitism is associated with accounts of Christ's “heavenly flesh” as eternally pre-existing his conception by Mary.Footnote ⁷⁶)

The Monophysite reading of the above passage is strengthened by Porter's concluding suggestion “that ‘And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us’ (Jn 1:14 RSV) is the same event, the bringing into being all that is from nothing that occurs with the LORD's first utterance, ‘Let there be light’ (Gn 1:3 RSV).”Footnote ⁷⁷ Does this mean that creation through the Word is true, not only “secundum deitatem,” but equally “secundum carnem”? He goes on to add, however, “The relations of the three persons ad intra which obtain in eternity are logically (but not temporally) prior to the grafting of the Word onto creation in the Incarnation.”Footnote ⁷⁸ True enough, but one wonders where Augustine or his heirs taught that the eternal life of the Trinity is temporal at all, much less “temporally prior” to the Incarnation.

Porter's telescoping of the Son's procession and mission is reminiscent of Robert Jenson's striking claim, “To reclaim Hegel's truth for the gospel, we need only a small but drastic amendment: Absolute Consciousness finds its own meaning and self in the one historical object, Jesus, and so posits Jesus’ fellows as its fellows and Jesus’ world as its world.”Footnote ⁷⁹ The act by which the Father conceives his perfect Image is the Incarnation, and by extension, the creation of the world which is prepared for Christ, like a setting for a jewel. Unfortunately, as David Hart lamented, Hegel's “system is too well thought out, and one step toward it is complete capitulation.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Hart concludes that Jenson, like Hegel, must “posit not only the necessity of evil, but indeed the necessity of the actual history of evil.”Footnote ⁸¹ Collapsing the LORD's transcendence of his creatures even just in the case of Christ's humanity is a bit like cutting a 5’ × 5’ hole in the Hoover Dam, all the while protesting that most of the structure is still there: inevitably, if the LORD is really related to any creature, he's really related to all of them, which means conditioned by all of them, gulags and gas chambers and all.

Could God the Son have been begotten of the Father without being Incarnate? (If Maximus the Confessor is right about the reason for the Incarnation, then perhaps this is equivalent to asking if God could be God even without creation.Footnote ⁸²) Porter's protests of the logical priority of Christ's divinity to his humanity notwithstanding, the logic of his essay would suggest that Incarnation is part of what it is for the Son to be Son. And what is this if not a confusion of deity with humanity? The Chalcedonian tradition in Christology, by contrast, developed with an eye to achieving precisely the result Porter aimed at, namely, to affirm that Jesus is God the Son made flesh, without introducing either confusion or division between his divinity and humanity.

Porter's essay in Christology, like Jenson's theology as a whole, is a twofold provocation: he forces his readers to look back to Christ, and to see him in a new and strange light. Hart distilled Jenson's theological achievement into the following insight:

Porter's essay is eagled-eyed in its gazing upon this burning mystery, God incarnate. The intensity of that stare cannot but provoke his readers to turn their attention to Christ as well, and for this, we ought to be grateful. He, as much as Augustine or Aquinas, is attempting to express a truth before which we can only stammer, a reality with which we cannot wrestle without receiving a wound – but also a blessing.