With the definition “God is love,” Christian experience proposes an ontological hermeneutic which in the signifier “love” (agape) summarizes absolute existential freedom. Ecclesial experience has declared from the very first that the divine being “is love.” Not that God has love - that love is a moral-qualitative characteristic of God (a property of the way He acts), not that God first exists and since He exists He loves. The phrase “God is love” reveals precisely that which the phrase “God is Trinitarian” also reveals – both phrases signify the mode that makes God *be* God. This mode is not one of omnipotence, omniscience, being unbegotten, or immortality. From the earliest texts recording the Church’s experience, the mode of existence that differentiates God from everything else is his absolute existential freedom, a freedom from any predetermination/necessity/rational prescription of existence. Both the signifier “love” (agape) and the linguistic signifiers that refer to the triad of the hypostases of God refer to this absolute existential freedom. The linguistic signifiers that ecclesial experience has used to identify the three hypostases of the Godhead reveal: - the personal character of every hypostasis - the existential otherness of every hypostasis - the existential relationship that connects each hypostasis with the other two hypostases Since the first moment of the church’s historical life the signifiers of the personal hypostases of God have been: Father, Son, and Spirit. The names of the personal hypostases of the Trinitarian Godhead reveal existence not as self-contained individuality, not as a unit of existential autonomy, but as a mode of relation/self-transcendence/love. The names indicate that the existence of each hypostasis of the Trinitarian God is realized as a relationship of love, that each hypostasis exists as love, that it *is* love. By signifying relationship and the dynamic of relationship, the names of the hypostases of the Trinitarian God realize the possibility that one signifier should indicate both the subjective identity (existential otherness) of each hypostasis and the common mode of existence of the three hypostases (i.e. love). What is signified linguistically by the name “Father” is the subjective identity (existential otherness) of the causal principle of divine being, and also a mode of existence that does not bind the hypostasis to individual self-containedness. The name “Father” indicates that the specific hypostasis of God is neither known nor exists in itself and for itself but only as the “begetter” of the Son and the “processor” of the Spirit. The Father hypostasizes his being (makes it a hypostasis, a real existence) in a loving mode: “begetting” the Son and causing the spirit to “proceed.” This being of the Father’s is indicated not only by His Godhead but also by His fatherhood: his uncircumscribed and non-predetermined freedom exists because He loves. Thanks to the name “Father,” this freedom is signified not simply as something to do with the will, but as the cause of the being’s being hypostasized. The freedom is signified linguistically as the causal principle of being because it is identified with the hypostatic self-determination of God as Father, that is to say, as love: He exists and constitutes the cause of the existence not because he is God, but because he wills to be the Father – to exist as freedom of loving self-transcendence and self-offering. The same absolute existential freedom is also indicated by the name “Son”: by the sonship a hypostasis of being is signified that is not predetermined existentially by its “nature” or “essence,” but is self-determined as freedom of relationship to the Father. The relationship is loving, that is to say, is free from causal existential dependence. He wills to exist because He loves the Father; His love is signified by the name “Son” as an existential response to the freedom of the love of the Father, the causal principle of existence. The Son exists without His existence “preceding” His sonship, without its being bound existentially to predeterminations of individual self-containedness. That which he *is* is signified precisely by the voluntary sonship, not by the essential (i. e. belonging to the essence and therefore necessary) godhead. He is God because He exists as Son of the Father, because His existence corresponds to and refers to the life-giving will of the Father: He hypostasizes the freedom of love, its non-subordination to existential necessities. Personal hypostasis should be seen not as an individual entity and an existential identity existing in itself, but as loving relationship and referential realization, that is to say, as freedom transcending any defining autonomy. - Christos Yannaras, *Relational Ontology*
Posted on: Wed, 24 Dec 2014 20:28:41 +0000
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