The Cappadocian and Maximian Foundation

Farrell’s constructive account of the First Europe rests on the Cappadocian Fathers and St. Maximus the Confessor: the Cappadocians for the monarchy of the Father and the primacy of person over essence, and Maximus for the Christological and anthropological completion of that vision — the theology in which Farrell was himself formed as a translator and scholar. This file expounds that constructive core and notes, honestly, where Farrell’s readings are contested.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox / Byzantine (patristic Trinitarian theology)

The Constructive Half of the Book

God, History, and Dialectic is remembered chiefly for its polemic against Augustinism, but its first volume — God: The Foundation of the First Europe — is constructive, not negative. Before diagnosing the Second Europe’s pathology, Farrell sets out the theology he takes to be healthy: the patristic doctrine of God as the Cappadocians, Maximus, Photius, and Palamas developed it. This constructive foundation is important for reading the book fairly, because it shows that Farrell’s target is not “the West” as a place but a specific theological construction, over against a patristic alternative he expounds with real competence (see The Two Europes).

The Cappadocians: The Monarchy of the Father

The foundation is Cappadocian. From St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory the Theologian (of Nazianzus), and St. Gregory of Nyssa, Farrell draws the two load-bearing convictions of First-European triadology:

The monarchy of the Father. The unity of the Godhead is grounded in the person of the Father, the one unoriginate source (archē, aitia) from whom the Son is begotten and the Spirit proceeds — not in a prior common essence. Gregory the Theologian’s account of the Father as the single cause, and Basil’s distinction of the one ousia and three hypostaseis, are the classic statements (see St. Basil the Great; St. Gregory the Theologian; St. Gregory of Nyssa).
The irreducibility of person to essence. Because the persons are constituted by their relations of origin to the Father rather than by opposition within a common essence, person is not a mode or fold of essence; the personal is primary and cannot be dissolved into the essential (see The Two Triadologies).

For Farrell this Cappadocian settlement is the whole difference. A theology that grounds unity in the Father’s person and keeps person irreducible is non-dialectical: it radiates asymmetrically from one source and never needs opposition to distinguish the persons. This is the theology he opposes to Augustinian simplicity throughout the book (see What “Dialectic” Means).

Where the Cappadocian Reading Is Contested

Honesty requires the note that Farrell’s Cappadocian reading is exactly the one recent scholarship has questioned — not by denying the monarchy of the Father, which is genuine Cappadocian teaching, but by denying the sharp systematic contrast Farrell builds on it. The reassessment associated with Michel Barnes and Lewis Ayres argues that the neat opposition between a “person-first” Cappadocian East and an “essence-first” Augustinian West is the de Régnon paradigm — a nineteenth-century schematization that the fourth-century sources do not straightforwardly support, since the pro-Nicene theologians of East and West shared far more grammar than the paradigm allows (Barnes, “De Régnon Reconsidered” [1995]; Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy [2004]; see The Scholarly Debate). Farrell’s constructive Cappadocianism is thus not neutral ground: it presupposes the very East-West contrast that a serious body of scholarship regards as overdrawn. The monarchy of the Father is Cappadocian; the claim that it stands in stark systematic opposition to the whole Latin tradition is Farrell’s (contested) frame.

Maximus the Confessor: The Completion

The second pillar is St. Maximus the Confessor — and here Farrell writes from inside his own scholarship, since his Oxford doctorate and his book Free Choice in St. Maximus the Confessor (1989) were precisely on Maximus (see From Oxford to St. Tikhon’s; St. Maximus the Confessor). Maximus completes the First-European foundation in two ways:

The logoi and the cosmic vision. Maximus’s doctrine that all created things subsist according to their logoi, which are contained in and united to the divine Logos, gives the First Europe a non-dialectical cosmology to match its non-dialectical theology: creation is grounded in the personal Logos and moves toward deification, not driven by an impersonal dialectical necessity (see St. Maximus: Cosmology of the Logoi).
The will and the person. Maximus’s dyothelite theology — that willing belongs to nature, so that Christ’s two natures entail two natural wills, while the fallen “gnomic” mode of willing belongs to the deliberating person in ignorance — secures the integrity of the human person and its free movement toward God. Farrell’s own translation of the Disputation with Pyrrhus is the record of this argument, and this repository cites it as such (Maximus, Disputation with Pyrrhus, trans. Farrell; see St. Maximus: Dyothelite Christology).

Maximus is also the pivotal figure for the Filioque question, because his Letter to Marinus defended a Latin use of “through the Son” as compatible with the monarchy of the Father — a fact that complicates any flat opposition of East and West and that the appreciative Orthodox readers of Augustine press against the maximalist critique (see The Filioque as Watershed). Farrell, who knew Maximus intimately, reads him as a First-European witness; the Letter to Marinus nonetheless sits somewhat awkwardly with the sharpest form of the Two-Europes thesis, and an honest account notes the tension.

The Foundation and the Thesis

The constructive foundation is, for the most part, simply Orthodox theology, and where Farrell expounds the Cappadocian monarchy and the Maximian vision he is a reliable guide working within his own competence. The point at which exposition becomes thesis is the claim that this foundation stands in total systematic opposition to a dialectical Augustinian West — the frame, not the patristics. The reader can receive Farrell’s Cappadocian and Maximian theology as sound while holding the sharp East-West antithesis he builds on it as a contested construction (see METHODOLOGY.md, §4.1–4.2).

References

Farrell, Joseph P. God, History, and Dialectic, Vol. I: God, The Foundation of the First Europe. 1997; 4-vol. ed. 2016.
Farrell, Joseph P. Free Choice in St. Maximus the Confessor. South Canaan, PA: St. Tikhon’s Seminary Press, 1989.
Maximus the Confessor. Disputation with Pyrrhus. Trans. Joseph P. Farrell. South Canaan, PA: St. Tikhon’s Seminary Press.
Barnes, Michel René. “De Régnon Reconsidered.” Augustinian Studies 26/2 (1995): 51–79.
Ayres, Lewis. Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.