medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
I am late responding to the query about persona. For the Christian West, one cannot ignore the implications of trinitarian theology. Tertullian began to pour new meaning into a word that had the relatively flat meaning a figure or object acting a role (from the stage mask, persona). He needed a word that would adequately distinguish the actors within the Trinity without turning them into totall separate entities and without turning Christ into a schizoid sufferer from multiple personality disorder. So he came up with persona as distinct from essence or nature and eventually we get a full-orbed theology of three persons but one nature in the Trinity; one person and two natures in Christ.
Joseph Ratzinger, "Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology," _Communio_ 17 (Fall 1990) 439-54, which originally appeared in German,though I do not have the citation, draws on some 20thc biblical scholarship to try to show how Tertullian and the other early Christian thinkers poured more "personality" into what had been a relatively "flat" term. They did so by a careful inductive study of the various "roles" "played" by God in the Hebrew Scriptures and transformed what had been "mere acting" in various "modes" to be "the real thing." My scare quotes here are intended to give colloquial approximations of the much more complex development that's going on here. Tertullian, of course, was trying to counter the Modalist heresy in which the Father and Son were not distinct enough to fit the New Testament data about the way Jesus acted, including the way he addressed his "daddy" (Abba) who had given him his "mission " (very prominent in John's Gospel). But not only the Modalists, rather, also the various proponents of a Logos theology in which Jesus/Son was "merely" the word spoken forth but not really God, had to be dealt with. Jesus didn't act like merely a mask/word spoken by God but acted in his own person, yet he said he and the Father were One and that he had no teaching except that given him by his Father etc. So "persona" developed as a way to reconceive "logos" as more than merely an emanation from the speaker but as both distinct yet united with the speaker.
A series of books and articles by Hans Urs von Balthasar, Ratzinger, Henri de Lubac, David Schindler etc. have explored this theologically. I cite some of them in my article , "Trinitarian and Mystical Receptivity: Modern Theory and a Medieval Case Study," Theological Studies 56 (December 1995) 696-708 (apologies for self-reference, but it's the most economical way to point to the literature.
Father, Son, Spirit are relational terms--actors in relationship. Father has no meaning apart from Son--a person becomes a Father by having a Son and a Son is a son in relation to his Father and so forth. Spirit is an outbreathing of Someone and has no existence apart from relation to its Source yet, in this Trinitiarian development, the Spirit was more than "merely" an outbreathing--He was an outbreathing that is also a "person." The whole development gave a dynamism to _persona_ that it might otherwise not have had. Obviously Augustine's _De trinitate_ needs to be taken into account here--it represents the culmination of the trajectory launched by Tertullian. In the East, of course, the Cappadocian Fathers, particularly Basil the Great, were working on similar questions. In Hilary of Poitiers and Ambrose the two streams come together; Augustine draws indirectly on the Cappadocians to synthesize things.
Why is this important for medievalists? Ratzinger argues that this exploration of the meaning of personhood, forced upon theologians to try to make sense of the Father/Son/Spirit business, contributed to western thought a genuinely new understanding of the person not known in ancient Greek and Roman thought. He may be wrong about this, but the thesis (which is by no means original with him) needs to be considered in any account of personality and personhood in the medieval West.
I do not know anything about corporation thinking in classical Greece and Rome. Is it possible that the development of the personhood of a corporation, so well known in medieval law, was at least in part facilitated by this development? In other words, though there may well have been the idea of a legal persona for an institution in classical thought, how much dynamic range and "subsistence being" did it possess?
I do not know the answers to these questions or whether anyone has really taken them up thoroughly. But the sources Ratzinger cites, from which he built his thesis, need to be taken into account. It may be an instance in which the Hebrew world view contributed something new to the Greco-Latin West via early Christian theology.
Dennis Martin
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