The Lord of limits : on Trinitarian ontology and the tragic

Abstract

The essay focuses on a dimension of the trinitarian metaphysics of Rowan Williams. It aims to articulate his understanding of the ontological implications of the Trinity, particularly in relation to his theological leitmotif of the tragic, and has a reparative focus of easing some of the tensions that may arise in such relating. The argument brings focus on the interconnections between trinitarian identity-in-difference and creaturely finitude, showing that Williams's trinitarian ontology articulates a model of metaphysical analogy in which creaturely limit and externality is grounded in the distinction of the Father and the Son, in a trinitarian circulation of dispossession and reception. This trinitarian movement of giving and receiving forms the principle of created finitude and contingency, exemplified in the experience of “distance” between the crucified Son and the Father. However, this hypostatic distinction is supplemented by a movement of generativity in which self-expenditure is not the mutual annihilation of the dyad of Father and Son, but always already a donation of identity-in-otherness in which there is no divine “individuality” prior to relation. Moreover, intratrinitarian love is not merely an erotic movement of self-fulfilment in the other, but a desire for the desire of the other, a ‘deflection’ to the other of the other. In the trinitarian logic, this other is conceived as the personal hypostasis of Holy Spirit. Hereby, Williams sustains a grammar of trinitarian aseity while also giving a grounding for finitude within the intratrinitarian difference in which creatures are incorporated, through the Spirit, into the eternal kenosis of the Son.