mls@dasys1.UUCP (Michael Siemon) (10/11/89)
In article <Sep.29.03.13.44.1989.15974@athos.rutgers.edu> randall@thor.sandiego.ncr.com writes: >A comment about the Holy Spirit being a person or it... I don't want to pick on this poster, but rather use the quotation to ask s.r.c readers to *think* about the issue a bit more. The problem is, what do we *mean* by a person? The contrast here, between "a person or it" seems to imply that gender is inherent. Yet, a eunuch is clearly still a person in any sense we may use that word. So gender is not the base issue in whether the Spirit is "a person." The other sense of "it" vs. "person" I sense here is that persons live, while inanimate objects are (in English) "its." Since we believe in the living God, we can never happily agree to call God "it" -- even when we most reject the gender categories. The modern notion of person, in fact, is an *outgrowth* of the use of the term in the Trinitarian debates. The distinguishable identity of the persons of the Trinity is somehow an irreducicble datum for what we *mean* by person. You may reject Nicea, but you cannot work in the subsequent Western tradition without paying an intellectual tax to the orthodox camp. What I find marvelously instructive in all of this, is that the Greek fathers prefered the abstract term "hypostasis" to the more metaphoric "prosopon", while the Latins prefered "persona" (literally translating "prosopon") to the abstract "substantia" (literally translating "hypostasis") Prosopon/person originate as terms for the mask used by a character in a play. According to the metaphor, the persons of the Trinity are the _dramatis personae_ of the divine action in history. The Greeks mistrusted the sense in which this metaphor could lead to a "Joseph Campbell heresy" of the "masks of God" -- that none of these masks is real, that they are artificial constructs (either of God or, worse, of His human percipients) and not "ultimate" reality. The use of hypostasis/substance is intended to speak to this "face" of God as a "real" component of ousia/being. Yet I would urge that the metaphor *not* be dropped utterly. There is an important sense in which *we* as persons are masks, or a collection of roles in an historical drama. The mask/person metaphor insists on the reality of the play of history, and of our mandatory participation as characters in this play. With all of our experience bound to this history/mystery play, not only are *we* characters, but (to the extent that we can experience God at all) God is a character. Or rather, from the Trinitarian view, God is three characters in this drama. It is that sense, and not a Freudian analysis of "person" that underlies the dogma; and I think that one of the objections of Jehovah's Witnesses and such like groups is based on a misapprehension that "person" somehow means this modern sense of "conscious identity" or some other psychological notion. Our words change their usage over time, and it may be time to drop "personal" as a description of Father, Son and Spirit -- but *not* by way of yielding the point at issue in the early Church: God deals with us human beings according to what we have been told by Jesus is the basic nature of God: as Father, and as Son, and as Holy Spirit. Our interaction with God is a sacred drama in which we enter as minor characters while God always, triply, occupies the stage. -- Michael L. Siemon I cannot grow; ...!cucard!dasys1!mls I have no shadow To run away from, I only play.