Seul à seul: Plotin et la Trinité par l’Esprit selon Basile de Césarée et Grégoire de Nazianze
Authors: Vasiliu Anca ,   Editua Polirom
Published: November 2024

Through a brief comparison between two Cappadocian trinitarian texts (On the Holy Spirit by Basil of Ceasarea and the 31st Discourse of Gregory Nazianzen), parallel modalities are revealed as to the position of the Holy Spirit within the Trinity and the definition of its function ; an attempt is thus made to establish the identity of the third hypostasis. In spite of the difference in their arguments, the doctrinal stance of the two theologians, Basil of Ceasarea and Gregory Nazianzen, is the same, and their scriptural and philosophical sources are to a large extent identical. They share a common thesis : the Spirit at the same time accomplishes the Trinity as the complete manifestation of the divine and enables the advent of knowledge, so that, through the Trinity, humans are made to discover their proper condition. According to Cappadocian trinitarian theology, the Spirit is the hypostasis that relates the hypostases to each other (sun allêla) ; it is the hypostasis of their relation and that relation is identified to the very nature of the godhead. As the hypostasis of the relation, the Spirit at the same time establishes the unity of the Trinity and demonstrates the inseparability of the three. However, their unity is evidenced by the Spirit in a specific way : neither by the common divine ousia, nor by the link provided by their internal disposition (skhesis) which allows the hypostases to be described one by one (eis kai eis) according to their properties, but by taking over the part of the expression of the One (hen) via the relation (pros ti) leading through it to the unity within the One. Thus, the Spirit appears as the living expression of the relation that allows everyone to reach recognition by recognizing the divinity and the unicity of the other. In order to define the Spirit, the two Cappadocians conceive a twofold, ontological and theological, perspective of the Trinity : on the one hand, a Trinity whose divinity is ontic and consequently that evidences the Monarchy of the being ; on the other hand, a Trinity unconditioned by the being, accomplished in the privacy of mutual intellection by means of the unlimited attraction immanent to the act. To reach that twofold perspective as well as the knowledge that constitutes the Trinity, the two theologians borrow the instruments of philosophy. They resort to a topos of the reflexive experience of the divine in Platonic thought, i.e. the meeting of individual solitudes expressed in the formula one to one with the One. Such borrowing from Plotinus offers three types of stakes, which concern (i) the part assigned to the principle of homotetic similarity, (ii) the specific condition of otherness in the relation of the human and divine kinds, and (iii) the means that operates the transfer from the discursive to the contemplative dimensions of intellection, and hence to a revelation of the nature of the conjoined acts – being, living, thinking – proper to the common condition of the good or the divine to which the intellective soul pertains.