and action, which were separated in God. The primacy of the will, which, accord-
ing to Heidegger, rules over the history of Western metaphysics and reaches its
completion with Schelling and Nietzsche, has its roots in the fracture between
being and acting in God and is, therefore, from the beginning in agreement with
the theological oikonomia.
א The reconstruction of the theological apparatus founded on the notion of the will
is at the center of Benz’s book Marius Victorinus und die Entwicklung der abendländischen Willenmetaphysik, which should be regarded as the starting point for any genealogical investigation into the primacy of the will in modern philosophy. Benz shows how both
Neoplatonic motifs (the concept of the will in Plotinus as identical with power [ potenza]
and as a good that “wills itself ”) and Gnostic themes (the will in Valentinus and in Marcus as autobouletos boulē, a will that wills itself ) come together in the construction of a “metaphysics of the will” in Western philosophy. Through Victorinus, these Neoplatonic and
late ancient motifs enter Augustine’s thought and determine his concept of the Trinity.
When Thomas Aquinas identifies in God essence and will (“Est igitur voluntas Dei
ipsa eius essentia”: Contra Gentiles, Book 1, Chapter 73, n. 2), he is actually only radicalizing this primacy of the will. Given that what God’s will wants is his very essence
(“principale divinae voluntatis volitum est eius essentia”: ibid., Book 1, Chapter 74, n. 1), this implies that God’s will always wants itself; it is always will to will.
In the wake of his teacher Ignace Meyerson, Jean Pierre Vernant restated in an im-
portant study (Vernant, passim) that the modern notion of the will is a concept that is
essentially alien to the tradition of Greek thought, and was formed through a slow process that coincides with the one that led to the creation of the Ego.
3.3. It is only from the standpoint of this fracture between being and praxis
that the sense of the controversy over Arianism, which deeply divided the Church
between the fourth and the sixth centuries, becomes fully intelligible. The dis-
pute often seems to revolve around differences that are so subtle and minimal
that it is not easy for modern readers to appreciate what was really at stake in a
conflict whose fierceness involved, together with the emperor, almost the entirety
of Eastern Christianity. It is well known that the problem concerned the archē
of the Son; but archē here does not have a merely chronological meaning; it does
not simply stand for a “beginning.” As a matter of fact, both Arius and his adver-
saries agree in saying that the Son was generated by the Father, and that this gen-
eration took place “before eternal times” ( pro chronōn aiōniōn in Arius, Letter to
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423
Alexander, in Athanasius, p. 458; pro pantōn tōn aiōnōn in Eusebius of Caesarea, Letter of Eusebius, in Athanasius, p. 75). Arius is even careful to specify that the Son was generated achronos, outside of temporality. In other words, what is in
question here is not really a chronological precedence (time does not exist yet),
or just a problem of rank (many anti-Arians share the opinion that the Father is
“greater” than the Son); it is rather a matter of deciding whether the Son—which
is to say, the word and praxis of God—is founded in the Father or whether he is,
like him, without principle, anarchos, that is, ungrounded.
A textual analysis of Arius’s letters and the writings of his adversaries shows,
indeed, that the decisive term in the controversy is precisely anarchos (without
archē, in the double sense that the term has in Greek: foundation and princi-
ple). In his Letter to Alexander (p. 458), Arius writes that “We acknowledge One
God, alone Ingenerate, alone Everlasting, alone anarchos.” The Son, who was
generated by the father before and outside of time, nevertheless has his archē, his principle-foundation, in the father, and receives his being from him:
Thus there are Three Hypostases. And God, being the cause of all things, is
anarchic and altogether Sole [ anarchos monōtatos], but the Son being begotten
apart from time by the Father, and being created [but Arius had specified shortly
before, “not like all other creatures”] and founded [ themeliōtheis, from themelios, which refers to the foundations also in an architectural sense] before ages [ . . . ]
who derived only being from the Father. (Ibid.)
It is in the same sense that Eunomius affirms that only God the Father is “begin-
ningless, everlasting, unending [ anarchōs, aidiōs, ateleutētōs]” ( Expositio Fidei, 2, p. 151); the Son is, rather, “existing ‘in the beginning,’ so not without beginning
[ en archēi onta, ouk’ anarchon]” (ibid., 3, p. 153).
Against this thesis, which gives the Logos a solid foundation in the Father,
the bishops assembled at Serdica by Emperor Constantius in 343 clearly affirm
that the disagreement does not revolve around the generated or ungenerated
character of the Son (“none of us denies that the Son is generated, but gener-
ated before all things”), but only around his archē: “He could not have existed
absolutely [ pantote], if he had had an archē, since the logos that exists absolutely does not have an archē” (ibid., p. 134). The Son “reigns together with the
Father absolutely, anarchically, and infinitely [ pantote, anarchōs kai ateleutētōs]”
(ibid., p. 136).
The Nicene thesis, which was ultimately victorious, here shows its coher-
ence with the doctrine of the oikonomia. Just as the latter is not founded on the
nature and being of God, but in itself constitutes a “mystery,” so the Son—that
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is, the one who has assumed the economy of salvation—is unfounded in the
Father, and is, like him, anarchos, without foundation or principle. Oikonomia and Christology are in agreement and inseparable, not only historically, but also
genetically: as was the case with praxis in the economy, so in Christology the
Logos, the word of God, is eradicated from being and made anarchic (from this
derive the constant reservations of many supporters of the anti-Arian ortho-
doxy against the term homousios, imposed by Constantine). If we do not under-
stand this original “anarchic” vocation of Christology, it is not even possible to
understand the subsequent historical development of Christian theology, with
its latent atheological tendency, or the history of Western philosophy, with its
ethical caesura between ontology and praxis. The fact that Christ is “anarchic”
means that, in the last instance, language and praxis do not have a foundation
in being. The “gigantomachy” around being is also, first and foremost, a conflict
between being and acting, ontology and economy, between a being that is in
itself unable to act and an action without being: what is at stake between these
two is the idea of freedom.
א The attempt to think in God the problem of a foundation that is absolutely un-
founded is evident in a passage from Gregory of Nazianzus.
The anarchon [the unfounded], the archē and that which is with the archē are one God. For the nature of that which is anarchical does not consist in being
anarchical, but being unbegotten. For the nature of anything lies, not in what it
is not but in what it is. It is the positing [
thesis] of what is, not the withdrawal
[ anairesis] of what is not. And the archē is not, because it is an archē, separated from that which is anarchical: the archē is its nature, just as the anarchical is not the nature of this. For these things regard nature, but are not nature itself. That
again which is with what is anarchical, and with the archē, is not anything else
than what they are. Now, the name of that which is anarchical is Father, and the
name of the archē is Son, and of that which is with the archē, the Holy Spirit.
(Gregory of Nazianzus, Select Orations, XLII, XV, p. 390)
The Hegelian dialectic finds in this passage its theological paradigm: in order to obtain
the Hegelian position of foundation it is sufficient to place at the center of this triadic movement the force of the negative (“that which is not”).
The paradox of the Trinitarian economy, which needs to hold together what it di-
vided, clearly appears in another Cappadocian theologian, Gregory of Nyssa. In a passage
from his Great Catechism (or Catechetical Oration), he affirms that both Greeks and Jews can accept that there is one logos and one pneuma in God; and yet, what “both parties would perhaps equally reject, as being incredible and unfitting to be told of God” is
precisely “the economy according to man of the Word of God [ tēn de kata anthrōpon
oikonomian tou theou logou].” Soon after Gregory adds that the latter indeed implies that
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425
what is in question is not simply a faculty ( exis), like the word or the knowledge of God, but “a power essentially and substantially existing [ kat’ ousian ( . . . ) yphestōsa dynamis]”
(Gregory of Nyssa, Great Catechism, p. 478). In other words, the function of the Trinitarian economy is to hypostasize, to give real existence to the logos and to the praxis of God, and, at the same time, to affirm that this hypostatization does not divide the unity, but “economizes” it (the Cappadocians are the first to use strategically the Neoplatonic
term hypostasis in this sense, in this case in its verbal form hyphistamai).
In Marcellus of Ancyra, an author of the fourth century whose “economic theology”
in particular has caught the attention of modern scholars, we can clearly see how the
relation between economy and substance is conceived as an opposition between operation
( energeia) and nature ( physis). If the divine nature remains monadic and undivided, this is because the logos separates only in the operation ( energeia monē). For this, the economy according to the flesh (or second economy, as Marcellus has it) is, so to speak, temporary: it will finish with the parousia, when Christ (following 1 Corinthians 15:25) will have
subjected his enemies and stepped on them. In the same sense, Marcellus can thus write
that the logos has become, through the incarnation, the son of Adam kat’oikonomian, while we are his sons kata physin (Seibt, p. 316).
א The theological division between being and praxis is still at the center of the
disputes that, in the Byzantine theology of the fourteenth century, opposed Gregory
Palamas to Barlaam and Prochorus. The profession of faith of the Athonites thus begins
with a neat opposition between God’s being ( ousia) and his operation ( energeia): “We anathematize those who say that the divine essence and the operation are indistinct and
one and the same. Furthermore, I believe that this operation and the essence of God are
uncreated [ aktiston]” (Rigo, p. 144).
3.4. The fracture between being and praxis is marked in the language of
the Fathers by the terminological opposition between theology and oikonomia.
This opposition, which is not yet present as such in Hippolytus, Tertullian, and
Clement of Alexandria, is, however, as we have seen, foreshadowed in them
by the distinction between dynamis and oikonomia (thus, in Clement’s Excerpta each angel “has his own dynamis and his own oikonomia”: I, 11, 4, p. 51). In Eusebius of Caesarea, the antithesis is already fully articulated, even though it is not
a real opposition, so much so that he can open his Ecclesiastical History precisely with the enunciation of the two topoi from which a single discourse follows:
And my logos will begin, as I said, with the economy and theology of Christ,
which are higher and greater than those based on man. For he who would commit
to writing the history that contains the Church’s narrative, must begin from the
first with the beginning of the oikonomia of Christ Himself (since we have been
deemed worthy to derive even our name from Him), an oikonomia more divine
than most men imagine. (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, I, 1, 7–8, p. 4)
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HOMO SACER II, 4
The terminological distinction corresponds, in Eusebius, to the distinction be-
tween the divinity and the humanity of Christ, which he compares with the
difference between head ( kephalē) and feet:
Now since in Him there are two modes of being, and the one may be likened to
the head of the body, in that He is conceived of as God, and the other may be
compared to the feet, in that for our salvation He assumed human nature of like
passions with us. (Ibid., I, 2, 1, p. 4)
Starting with the Cappadocians, in particular with Gregory of Nazianzus, the
opposition theology/ oikonomia becomes technical: not only does it indicate two
different fields (the nature and essence of God, on the one hand, his salvific
action, on the other; being and praxis), but also two different discourses and
rationalities, each having its own conceptuality and its specific characters. In
other words, there are, with regard to Christ, two logoi, one that concerns his
divinity, and one that relates to the economy of the incarnation and salvation.
Each discourse, each rationality, has its own terminology, which should not be
confused with the other if we want to interpret it correctly:
To give you the explanation in one sentence, you are to apply lofty names to the
divinity, and to that nature in Him which is superior to passions and incorporeal;
but all humble names to the composite condition of Him who for your sakes
emptied Himself and was Incarnate—and, avoiding to say worse things, was
made Man—and afterward was also exalted, so that, abandoning what is carnal
and earthly in your doctrines, you may learn to ascend with the divinity, and you
will not remain permanently among visible things, but will rise up with Him into
the world of thought, and come to know which logos is of nature, and which of
the economy. (Gregory of Nazianzus, Select Orations, XXIX, XVII, pp. 307–308)
The distinction between these two rationalities is restated in the oration conse-
crated to the feast of nativity, in which, having evoked the infinity and unknow-
ability of God, Gregory writes:
This, however, is all I must now say about God; for the present is not a suitable
time, as my present subject is not theology, but economy. (Ibid., XXXVIII, VIII,
p. 347)
Approximately fifty years later, Theodoret of Cyrus shows himself to be perfectly
aware of the distinction between these two rationalities and, at the same time, of
their reciprocal articulation. He writes that “it is therefore necessary for us to re-
alize that some names are appropriate to theology, some to the economy” ( Commentary on the Letters of Saint Paul, vol. 2, The Letters to the Hebrews, 4, 14; see
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427
also Gass, p. 490). If w
e confuse the two logoi, even the integrity of the economy of the incarnation is threatened, and we run the risk of falling into the Monophysite heresy. If, on the one hand, any undue transfer of the categories of one
rationality to the other must be avoided (John of Damascus will write that “it is
not right to transfer to the economy what has reference to matters of theology”:
Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, III, XV, p. 62), the two rationalities remain
nevertheless linked, and the clear distinction between the discourses should not
be turned into a substantial caesura. The care with which the Fathers avoid both
confusing and separating the two logoi shows that they are aware of the risks
implicit in their heterogeneity. Arguing against a hypothetical representative of
Monophysitism in the Eranistēs, Theodoret thus affirms that the Fathers’ “object
was to give us at one and the same time instruction on the theology and the
economy, lest there should be supposed to be any distinction between the Person
of the Godhead and the Person of the Manhood” (Theodoret, Dialogues, p. 233).
The Patristic distinction between theology and economy is so tenacious that
it can be recovered in modern theologians in the guise of the opposition between
immanent and economic Trinity. The first refers to God as he is in himself and is
for this reason also called the “Trinity of substance”; the second refers to God in
his salvific action, by means of which he reveals himself to mankind (for this rea-
son, it is also called the “Trinity of revelation”). The articulation between these
two Trinities, different and inseparable at the same time, is the aporetic task that
the Trinitarian oikonomia bequeaths to Christian theology—in particular to the
doctrine of the providential government of the world—which therefore presents
itself as a bipolar machine, whose unity always runs the risk of collapsing and
must be acquired again at each turn.
3.5. The radical gap, and at the same time the necessary solidarity between
theology and economy, possibly shows itself most clearly in the controversies
about monotheletism that divide the Fathers in the seventh century. We do have
a text, Maximus the Confessor’s Dispute with Pyrrhus, in which the strategic
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