Productive God

Michel Rene Barnes ( The Power of God: Dunamis in Gregory of Nyssa’s Trinitarian Theology ) claims that the fourth century Trinitarian debates are not just a debate about relations but a debate about “productivity,” and thus about “power.” The question that divides Eunomius and Gregory of Nyssa, he says, is “does God possess a ‘natural’ productive capacity,” that is, a capacity to “reproduce the nature of the productive existent”?

That is, “If God has a natural productive capacity, He can produce a ‘Son’ with the same nature; if God does not have a natural productive capacity, whatever ‘Son’ means it cannot mean a product with the same nature as God.” This also affects their undersatnding of creation: “If productivity is natural to God, then creating itself (a kind of productivity) has its source in God; if productivity is not natural to God, then creating must in some way have its source exterior to God. It goes almost without saying that Gregory’s understanding is that God is naturally productive and that God creates. Eunomius understands that God is not naturally productive, and creation is the function of something exterior to God’s nature . . . .The argument over interior or natural productivity versus exterior or accidental productivity is carried on in terms of whether divine productivity is a capacity that can be delegated by the true God (for it is not natural) or whteher divine capacity is such that it cannot be delegated (any more than nature can be delegated).”

For Gregory, divine productivity is an issue of divine goodness: “Denying a real Trinity is fundamentally the same as denying the intrinsic goodness of God; giving is the highest good, and existence is the highest gift. If the Father does not – indeed, as Eunomius argues, cannot – generate existence as full as His own, then the limits of God’s goodness have been reached.”