New Trinitarian Ontologies, Volume I

The Holy Trinity is the oldest idea of Christian hope. The study of being or ontology was once regarded as a seminal preparation for the study of God as the creative cause of all being in theology. Yet due to a series of theological mistakes, metaphysics came to be separated from the Trinity before God came to be conceived as the supreme being of all beings in general metaphysics, natural theology, and modern ontology. The analytic and continental philosophical traditions have since tended to treat the Trinity as, at best, superfluous, and, at worst, redundant to modern formal ontologies. Yet the postmodern collapse of all such formal ontologies has prepared the path for a renewed study of metaphysics or ontology that shares in participation with the Trinity. New Trinitarian Ontologies names a creative response to this pivotal collapse of modern formal ontologies. If ontology cannot contain but rather more radically points to God, and if all nature thus tends towards the supernatural, the angelic, and the metaphysical, then we should renew the study of the metaphysics or ontology of the Trinity. This volume represents a collection of responses to this challenge of rendering ontology in a Trinitarian style.



Introduction: Prolegomenon to Trinitarian Ontology, by Ryan Haecker



Part One—Trinitarian Ontologies

1 For a Trinitarian Ontology: A Manifesto, by Piero Coda

2 A Relational Approach to Trinitarian Ontology, by Giulio Maspero

3 Time, Motion, and Mystery: The Narrative Metaphysics of the Trinity, by John Milbank



Part Two—Metaphysics and Phenomenology

4 Being, Identity, and Ecstasy: An Essay in Trinitarian Metaphysics, by John R. Betz

5 Trinitarian Kenosis and the Limits of Phenomenology, by Emmanuel Falque

6 Counting to Four: Metaxology and the Trinity, by William Desmond

7 Metacritique and the Dynamics of Retrieval: Radical Orthodoxy, Sergii Bulgakov, and the Task for Trinitarian Ontology, by Aaron Khokhar



Part Three—Ecology and Liturgy

8 Entangled Unthinkably: Toward a Trinitarian Ecology, by Simone Kotva

9 Participation in the Divine Heart: On Faith and Trinitarian Knowing, by Katherine Apostolacus



Part Four—Eschatology and Revelation

10 E schatological Being, by Judith Wolfe

11 Martin Heidegger’s Poetics and the End of Ontotheology:

The “Passing By” of the “Ultimate God,” by Emily Stewart Long

12 From Tragic Ontology to Trinitarian Revelation: The Reconciliation with Being in Balthasar’s Reading of Nietzsche, by Paul Raimond Daniels



Part Five—Poetics of Reconciliation

13 Christ and the Destabilization of Time, by Graham Ward

14 Repetition and Re-Presentation: Reaching Eternity Through Beauty, by Isabelle Moulin

15 “ The Harmonious Silence of Heaven”: Silence, Analogy, and the Incarnate Christ in the Music of Olivier Messiaen and Arvo Pärt, by Joel Clarkson

16 God He Sees in Mirrors: “Nabokov’s Trinity” Revisited, by Erik Eklund