Begotten, Not Made (3 of 4)

Eternal Generation, creation, and modality

This is a continuation of a previous post. You can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

While the following is not technically a letter, it began as one. A dear friend and colleague expressed to me his reservations about the doctrine of eternal generation, specifically his inclination to think that the begotten-not-made distinction is philosophically indefensible. He wanted to know my thoughts on the distinction and whether I think it’s cogent. I began a reply, but that letter quickly morphed into a journal article. Hence, what I sent him was the final manuscript. The piece is now published in Religion Studies, vol. 55 (2019), pp. 503-535. As for whether my friend was persuaded, well, he's now an Orthodox convert. Please subscribe and consider supporting my work.

* NOTE: With footnotes, the article exceeded Substack word limits, requiring it to be broken into seven posts. I have thus remove the majority of footnotes and trimmed some text in order to make it more accessible for Substack readers. For those who wish to see the article in full, you can find it here.

Eternal Generation, Creation, and Modality

The last of the distinctions we will consider between Eternal Generation (EG) and creation is the respective modalities of the two causations, namely, EG is modally necessary while creation is modally contingent. The point may sound unextraordinary – of course things divine are modally necessary while things created are modally contingent. However, the point was not obvious in the ancient world. While both Plato and Aristotle ascribe will (boulēsis) to God, it is not clear that such will involves contrary choice. In NeoPlatonism, The One emanates the world involuntarily.¹ And because all that issues from The One emanates without contrary choice, it seems that the hypothetical necessity is unavoidable: if God exists, then so does the world that issues from God. Here, the distribution axiom comes into play, according to which if modal necessity is assigned to a hypothetical, then the modal necessity distributes to both the antecedent and the consequent: □(p→q)→(□p→□q).² In the hypothetical conjoining of The One and the world, the modal necessity ascribed to the cause (The One) is distributed to the effect (the world). A similar issue emerges in Aristotle’s account. Aristotle’s Movent (or immutable mover) does not choose to make the world; in fact, a common reading of Aristotle is that God does not even think on the world he produces. The Movent does not choose to bring creatures into being; it is the nature of the Movent to perpetually cause mutable entities to come into being. Hence, for Aristotle, the world is eternal and coterminous with the Movent that moves it. The very same modal claim noted in reference to NeoPlatonism could thus be argued for Aristotle as well.

The Eastern Church fathers make a decisive break with this pagan trajectory, insisting on the contingency of creation in contrast with the modal necessity of things divine. Numerous arguments appear in the Eastern fathers in defence of the point. Yet, all the arguments boil down to a defence of divine contrary choice. Some make an argument from perfections, namely, God cannot give free choice if this is a power that he lacks.³ This case parallels very closely the Eastern patristic insistence that the image of God consists of both reason and free choice, or self-determination (to autexousion), and thus the Archetype (God) must have freedom as imaged in man.⁴ Others make the argument that divine freedom is prime facie, given that God clearly has capacities that he does not at every moment exercise, such as the capacity to destroy the world, and must therefore operate by contrary choice.⁵ Still others make an argument from evil, namely, if God operates without free choice, then all things are fated; if all things are fated, then God is the cause of evil; God, being Good, cannot be the cause of evil; therefore, all things are not fated, so God operates by free choice.⁶ Regardless of whether one concedes these arguments, the point remains: the Eastern fathers are committed to divine freedom and with this to the contingency of creation.

Now, the contingency of creatures is straightforwardly established by divine freedom. Granting, as the Eastern fathers do, that God has libertarian capacities of choice, then the creation of the world and other aspects of providence are of such a kind that they could be otherwise, since creation is a free articulation of the divine will.⁷ The more difficult point to establish is the modal necessity of EG. Two challenges present themselves. The first challenge is this. Some wrongly take the Eastern fathers to suggest that EG is involuntary. Yet, the Eastern fathers are clear that EG is a product of the will of the Father, not an involuntary emanation.⁸ This insistence raises the question of whether the very same argument for the contingency of creation can be applied to EG. Assuming this challenge can be overcome, the second difficult is this. If EG can be shown to be modally necessary, does it follow that the Father necessarily generates this Son? If the eternal generation of a Son is necessary but the Father could generate a different Son, then ‘our’ Son’s existence is still modally contingent, even though EG is modally necessary.

To the first problem, as noted above, the Eastern fathers deny that EG is an involuntary emanation by the Father. Yet, at the same time, they refuse the Arian notion that the Son is contingently generated, such that the Son might not have been. The via media they defend is what we might call a ‘natural’ or ‘fitting’ volition. Athanasius draws a comparison with operations of divine goodness: ‘For it is the same as saying, “The Father might not have been good”. And as the Father is always good by nature, so He is always generative by nature’.⁹ Clearly, Athanasius does not intend ‘by nature’ to refer to the divine essence common to the hypostases, since generating the Son is the idiosyncrasy that distinguishes Father from Son and Holy Spirit.¹⁰ Nature here refers to the idiosyncratic nature (idiōtēs) of the Father. The point that the Father is generative by nature is crucial. For, as Athanasius points out, ‘to counsel and choose implies an inclination two ways’ (to bouleuesthai kai prophairesthai eis hekatera tēn rhopēn echei), which is precisely why, though God is free in how he articulates his goodness, there is no inclination to be not good and thus no counsel or choosing involved in whether to do good.¹¹ So it is with EG. Because the very identity of the Father is rooted in him being generative, there is no counsel involved in whether to generate a Son who is the exact likeness of his glory. To beget is the idiosyncratic nature of the Father – something that cannot be said of the Father as creator of all things, for example.

The strong claim that to beget is the nature of the Father conjoins the Father’s immutability and modality with EG. Because the Father’s personhood is rooted in EG, his immutability requires that EG is equally immutable, lest the Father be subject to contrarieties. In other words, though the Eastern fathers introduce contrary choice and contingency into God’s acts of creation and providence, their notion of fitting volition in reference to EG moves closer to the talk of divine will in Plato and Aristotle, noted above.¹² The Father’s act of EG admits no contrary choice; hence, it is modally necessary, and this necessity distributes to EG, as per the distribution axiom: the Father and EG are conjoined, so the modal necessity of the Father distributes evenly to EG.

This brings us to the second challenge, however. The connection between the personhood of the Father and EG only requires that the Father is generative. Nothing in the argument so far seems to require that the Father generates this Son of God. Might the Father have eternally generated Son1, Son2, or Son3 and still been the Father? If so, which Son to beget would still be subject to counsel and choice, and thus the existence of ‘our’ Son of God would be contingent. To this point, two responses may be offered. The first simply reverses the argument. Just as the personhood of the Father is rooted in his being Father to the Son, so the singularly unique property of ‘our’ Son of God is that he is the Only Begotten of the Father; the relationship is symmetrical. If the Father begets a Son, then the Son he begets will be the Son he has in fact begotten. For the identity of the Son is his being begotten of the Father before all worlds. Or, to use Leibniz’s indiscernibility of identicals, there is no way to distinguish The Only Begotten Son from a second Only Begotten Son when being The Only Begotten Son is the sum total of the personal properties of the subject.