A Divine Analogy for Libertarian Will, part 1

In my ongoing discussion with Isaac, he wrote:

I don't think of my volition as needing a prior cause. I think of myself as the originator of my willing. This does not mean that it was random in any way in the same sense that God's willing something prior to creation free of antecedents was random or any willing He does now post creation with antecedent events is determined.

In a well known article, Alvin Plantinga expresses a similar thought:

The first point to note is that on the Christian scheme of things, God is the premier person, the first and chief exemplar of personhood. God, furthermore, has created man in his own image; we men and women are image bearers of God, and the properties most important for an understanding of our personhood are properties we share with him. [...] God does and has done many things: he has created the world; he sustains it in being; he communicates with his children. But it is extraordinarily hard to see how these truths can be analyzed in terms of causal relations among events. What events could possibly cause God's creating the world or his undertaking to create the world? God himself institutes or establishes the causal laws that do in fact hold; how, then, can we see all the events constituted by his actions as related to causal laws to earlier events? How could it be that propositions ascribing actions to him are to be explained in terms of event causation?

In brief, the argument claims that both we and God are persons, and on this basis it is possible to construct an analogy between God's will, which is not determined by an external cause, and our own.

I think there are a number of problems with this view. In this post, I would like to tackle the attempt to draw an analogue based on the concept of a divine "person." Two caveats are in order. First, it is only Plantinga that makes appeal to personhood, not Isaac. Second, it is not clear that the argument really requires the concept; perhaps it is possible to draw a direct analogy between the human and divine will in the absence of an analogy of persons. Nevertheless, the conceptual deployment of personhood indicates a basic theological mistake that seems worth addressing.


Problem 1: Confusion concerning "person"

The divine analogy for libertarian will fundamentally misunderstands what is meant by the theological term "person" with respect to God. The Scriptures themselves do not christen God "person," which is instead a term of technical theological vocabulary that translates the Greek hypostasis. The hypostasis ("person") refers to that which underlies the accidents (a beach ball, for example, might be repainted from red to blue or pop and deflate, but beneath the accidents -- in this case, color and shape -- it nevertheless remains a beach ball). It is furthermore distinguished from ousia ("nature," "substance") as an individuation of the latter (what I take to the beach, for example, is not just "beach ball as such" or "the nature of beach ball" but rather this beach ball). That I am a hypostasis expresses subsistence beneath accidents (I am still Joshua with and without a beard) and individuation of essence (I am "Joshua," not "man"). In fact, in the order of creation nature only exists in hypostasis.

As James Chastek points out, it is initially hard to see what work the term hypostasis could do with respect to God. The concept is required because of the difference between nature and a concrete particular. In God, however, there is no such difference:

In God, however, the nature itself existed.  This was necessary in order to account for the sort of God that both Hellenic philosophy and Judaic revelation spoke of: God, as creator, was responsible for the existence of every sort of thing that was itself indifferent to existence, and so it would involve contradiction to make his nature indifferent to existence. Thus divinity as divinity, and not merely as a divine self, exists. There thus seems no reason to introduce a divine hypostasis over and beyond this.

On the contrary, to speak of God as a hypostasis seems incorrect, insomuch as it implies a distinction between essence and existence or between substance and accident, both of which are fundamentally denied of God. One cannot simply say something like, "God is a person because God is rationally benevolent and exists," for the claim that such a being is necessarily a person (hypostasis) is precisely what is denied in affirming that the divine nature exists.

The term "person" (hypostasis), however, emerged as valuable in the early attempts to formulate the doctrine of the Trinity. If "human nature" really existed, we would have to ask how each of us were at once seven billion persons and yet substantially one being. Thus, the division between ousia and hypostasis offered the Church Fathers a conceptual clue for articulating how God could be at the same time one substance and three distinct relations. Thus, the traditional formulation of the trinitarian faith became "three hypostases in one ousia."

Note that the term "person" is in this way being used in an extremely equivocal sense. God is not a "person" in the sense that we are persons, for all the reasons outlined above. As St. Thomas says:

Since everything that is perfect must be attributed to God, forasmuch as His essence contains every perfection, this name "person" is fittingly applied to God; not, however, as it is applied to creatures, but in a more excellent way. [...] It is one thing to ask the meaning of this word "person" in general; and another to ask the meaning of "person" as applied to God. [...] In human nature it signifies this flesh, these bones, and this soul, which are the individuating principles of a man. [...] Now distinction in God is only by relation of origin, as stated above, while relation in God is not as an accident in a subject, but is the divine essence itself; and so it is subsistent, for the divine essence subsists. Therefore, as the Godhead is God so the divine paternity is God the Father, Who is a divine person. Therefore a divine person signifies a relation as subsisting. And this is to signify relation by way of substance, and such a relation is a hypostasis subsisting in the divine nature, although in truth that which subsists in the divine nature is the divine nature itself.

To speak of God as "person," in other words, is to adopt the concept of hypostasis as an attempt to think the difficulty of the Trinity, which requires something like a non-accidental distinction of relation within a unity of substance.

Thus, the term "person" can name the human and divine only in an equivocal sense.