inexpressible nature of this economy and being amazed before what is ineffable
[ . . . ] (John Chrysostom, Sur la providence de dieu, p. 62)
2.15. The meaning of “exception” acquired by the term oikonomia in the
sixth or seventh century, especially in the field of the canon law of the Byzantine
Church, is of particular interest for its semantic history. Here, the theological
meaning of mysterious divine praxis undertaken for the salvation of humankind
coalesces with the concepts of aequitas and epieikeia originating from Roman law, and comes to signify the dispensation [ dispensa] that relieves one from a too rigid application of the canons. In Photius, the difference and, at the same time,
the contiguity of the two meanings is evident:
Oikonomia means precisely the extraordinary and incomprehensible incarnation
of the Logos; in the second place, it means the occasional restriction or the suspension of the efficacy of the rigor of the laws and the introduction of extenuating
circumstances, which “economizes” [ dioikonomountos] the command of law in
view of the weakness of those who must receive it. (Photius, pp. 13–14)
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In this direction, just as an opposition between theology and economy had
emerged in theology, so an opposition between “canon” and “economy” is pro-
duced in law, and the exception is defined as a decision that does not apply the
law strictly, but “makes use of the economy” ( ou kanonikos ( . . . ) all’ oikonomiai chresamenoi: Richter, p. 582). In this sense, in 692, the term enters the legislation of the Church and, with Leon VI (886–912), the imperial legislation.
The fact that a word designating the salvific activity of the government of the
world acquires the meaning of “exception” shows how complex the relationships
between oikonomia and law are. However, even in this case, the two senses of the
term are, in spite of their apparent distance, perfectly consistent—exactly the
same occurs in the Latin Church with the two meanings of the term dispensatio,
which initially translates oikonomia and later progressively acquires the sense of
“dispensation” [ dispensa]. The paradigm of government and of the state of excep-
tion coincide in the idea of an oikonomia, an administrative praxis that governs
the course of things, adapting at each turn, in its salvific intent, to the nature of
the concrete situation against which it has to measure itself.
א The origin of the evolution that leads the term oikonomia to assume the meaning of “exception” can be grasped in a letter that the Cappadocian theologian Basil wrote
to Amphilochius. Asked about the question of the value of the baptism administered
by schismatics, Basil answers that, contrary to the rule that would have wanted it to be
invalid, it was initially accepted as valid “for the sake of the economy of the majority”
( oikonomias heneka tōn pollōn: Basil, Letter CLXXXVIII, I, in Letters and Select Works, p. 224).
Threshold
IT is now possible to grasp more precisely the decisive meaning of the rever-
sal of the Pauline expression “economy of the mystery” into “mystery of the
economy.” What is mysterious is not, as with Paul, the divine plan of redemp-
tion, a plan that requires an activity of realization and revelation—indeed, an
oikonomia—that is as such perspicuous. Now, it is the economy itself that is
mysterious, the very praxis by means of which God arranges the divine life, artic-
ulating it into a Trinity, and the world of creatures, conferring a hidden meaning
upon every event. But this hidden sense, following the model of the typological
interpretation, is not only an allegoresis and prophecy of other salvific events,
which thus arrange themselves to create a history; it rather coincides with the
“mysterious economy,” with the very dispensation of divine life and its provi-
dential government of the world. The mystery of the deity and the mystery of
government, the Trinitarian articulation of the divine life and the history and
salvation of humanity are, at the same time, divided and inseparable.
In other words, a game that is in all senses decisive is being played out on the
field of the oikonomia, one in which the very concept of the divine and its rela-
tions with all creation that is gradually emerging toward the end of the ancient
world is in question. Between the inarticulate unitarism of the Monarchians
and Judaism and the Gnostic proliferation of divine hypostases, between the
noninvolvement in the world of the Gnostic and Epicurean God and the Stoic
idea of a deus actuosus that provides for the world, the oikonomia makes possible a reconciliation in which a transcendent God, who is both one and triune at the
same time, can—while remaining transcendent—take charge of the world and
found an immanent praxis of government whose supermundane mystery coin-
cides with the history of humanity.
It is only if all the poignancy of the economic paradigm is restored that it
is possible to overcome the exegetic contradictions and the divisions that have
prevented modern scholars and theologians from placing it in its real problem-
atic context. As we have seen, at the basis of the polemics that has constantly
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divided interpreters into two factions lies the alleged caesura between two senses
of the term oikonomia that are clearly different, the first referring to the articulation of the single divine substance into three persons, the second concerning
the historical dispensation of salvation (see Prestige, p. 111; see also Markus in
Richter, p. 79). Thus, according to Verhoeven, Evans, and Markus, the economy
in Tertullian does not entail anything temporal and refers only to the “internal
unfolding of the divine substance in a trinity of persons” (Verhoeven, p. 110).
On the other hand, according to Moingt, the economy does not “designate a
relation in being” (Moingt, p. 922), but only the historical expression of the
deity through the plan of salvation. In other words, the polemics between inter-
preters relies on the false presupposition that the term oikonomia has, like Abel’s Urworte, two contradictory meanings, and the Fathers who use it would oscillate
between these meanings in a more or less conscious way. A more careful analysis
shows that we are not dealing with two meanings of the same term, but with the
attempt to articulate in a single semantic sphere—that of the term oikonomia—a
series of levels whose reconciliation appeared problematic: noninvolvement in
the world and government of the world; unity in being and plurality of actions;
ontology and history.
Not only do the two alleged meanings of the term—that which refers to
the internal organization of the divine life, and that which concerns the history
of salvation—not contradict themselves, but they are correlated and become
fully intelligible only in their functional relation. That is to say, they constitute
the two sides of a single divine oikonomia, in which ontology and pragmatics,
Trinitarian articulation and government of the world refer back to each other for
the solution of their aporias. It is in any case essential that the first articulation
of what will become the Trinitarian dogma does not initially present itself in
ontologico-metaphysical terms, but as an “economic” apparatus and an activity
of government, both domestic and mundane, of the divine monarchy (“unitas ex
semetipsa derivans trinitatem non destruatur ab illa sed administratur”: Tertullian’s Treatise Against Praxeas, 3, 1). It is only at a later stage, when problems will appear, rightly or wrongly, to have been solved by the post-Nicene dogmatics,
that theology and economy will divide and the term will no longer be referred to
the organization of the divine life in order to be more specifically attributed to
the meaning of history of salvation; but, even at this point, they will not divide
completely and will continue to interact as a functional unity.
3
Being and Acting
3.1. The preoccupation that had led the Fathers who first elaborated the
doctrine of the oikonomia was, by all accounts, to avoid a fracture of
monotheism that would have reintroduced a plurality of divine figures, and poly-
theism with them. It is in order to elude this extreme consequence of the Trini-
tarian thesis that Hippolytus is careful to repeat that God is one according to the
dynamis (that is, in the Stoic terminology he uses, according to the ousia) and triple only according to the economy. For the same reason, Tertullian firmly objects to Praxeas that the mere “disposition” of the economy does not at all mean
the separation of the substance. The divine being is not split, since the triplicity
of which the Fathers speak is located on the level of the oikonomia, not ontology.
The caesura that had to be averted at all costs on the level of being re-
emerges, however, as a fracture between God and his action, between ontology
and praxis. Indeed, distinguishing the substance or the divine nature from its
economy amounts to instituting within God a separation between being and
acting, substance and praxis. This is the secret dualism that the doctrine of the
oikonomia has introduced into Christianity, something like an original Gnostic
germ, which does not concern the caesura between two divine figures, but rather
that between God and his government of the world.
Let us consider the theology that Aristotle develops at the end of Book L of
Metaphysics. It would simply be unthinkable to distinguish between being and
praxis in the God described here. If the Aristotelian God, as an unmoved mover,
moves the celestial spheres, this follows from his nature, and there is no need to
presuppose the existence of a special will or a specific activity aimed at the care
of the self and of the world. The classical cosmos—its “fate”—is based on the
perfect unity of being and praxis.
The doctrine of the oikonomia radically revokes this unity. The economy
through which God governs the world is, as a matter of fact, entirely different
from his being, and cannot be inferred from it. It is possible to analyze the
notion of God on the ontological level, listing his attributes or negating, one
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by one—as in apophatic theology—all his predicates to reach the idea of a pure
being whose essence coincides with existence. But this will not rigorously say
anything about his relation to the world or the way in which he has decided
to govern the course of human history. As Pascal will lucidly realize with re-
gard to profane government many centuries later, the economy has no founda-
tion in ontology and the only way to found it is to hide its origin (Pascal 1962,
p. 51). For this, God’s free decision to govern the world is now as mysterious as
his nature, if not more; the real mystery, which “has been hidden for centuries
in God” and which has been revealed to men in Christ, is not that of his being,
but that of his salvific praxis: precisely the “mystery of the oikonomia,” follow-
ing the decisive strategic reversal of the Pauline syntagma. The mystery that,
from this moment on, will not cease to startle theologians and philosophers,
and to arouse their attention, is not of an ontological, but of a practical nature.
The economic and ontological paradigms are completely different in their
theological genesis: the doctrine of providence and moral reflection will only
slowly try to construct a bridge between them, without ever fully succeeding.
The fact that Trinitarianism and Christology, before assuming a dogmatic-
speculative form, were conceived in “economic” terms is something that will
stubbornly continue to mark their subsequent development. Ethics in a modern
sense, with its court of insoluble aporias, is born, in this sense, from the fracture
between being and praxis that is produced at the end of the ancient world and
has its eminent place in Christian theology.
If the notion of free will, which is, all things considered, marginal in classical
thought, becomes the central category first of Christian theology and then of
the ethics and ontology of modernity, this happens because these find in the
above-mentioned fracture their original site and will have to confront it right to
the end. If the order of the ancient cosmos “does not amount to the will of gods,
but rather to their own nature, which is emotionless and inexorable, which is the
bearer of every good and every evil, inaccessible to prayer [ . . . ] and dispenses
very little mercy” (Santillana, p. 11), the idea of the will of God, which, on the
other hand, freely and shrewdly decides his actions and is even stronger than his
omnipotence, is the irrefutable proof of the collapse of the ancient fate and, at
the same time, the desperate attempt to provide a foundation for the anarchic
sphere of divine praxis. Desperate, since this will can only entail the groundless-
ness of the praxis, that is, the fact that there is no foundation of acting in being.
א In Gnosis, the opposition between a god who is foreign to the world and a demi-
urge who governs it is more essential than that between a good and an evil god. Both
Irenaeus and Tertullian clearly grasp this “idle” and “Epicurean” character of Marcion’s
THE KINGDOM AND THE GLORY
421
and Cerdo’s good God, to whom they oppose a God who is, at the same time, good and
active in all creation. Irenaeus writes that “they found out the god of Epicurus, who does nothing either for himself or others” (Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 3, 24, 2, p. 371). And according to Tertullian, Marcion would have attributed “the name of Christ [to] a god
out of the school of Epicurus” (Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem, I, 25, 3, p. 71).
The attempt to reconcile the idle god who is foreign to the world with the actuosus
god who creates and governs it is certainly one of the crucial stakes of the Trinitarian
economy: both the very concept of oikonomia and the aporias that make its definition so arduous depend on it.
3.2. The problem that makes the image of the world in the classical tradi-
tion explode when it collides with the Christian concept of the world is that of
creation. What is incompatible with the classical concept is here not so much
the idea of a divine operation, but rather the fact that this praxis does not nec-
essarily depend on being, and nor is it founded on it, but is the result of a free
and gratuitous act of the will. If it is true that the idea of a divi
ne apraxia finds
a solid basis in the Aristotelian tradition, classical thought, especially starting
with the Stoics, does not shrink from conceiving a divine action, and, in this
regard, the Apologists do not fail to evoke the Platonic demiurge. On the other
hand, what is new is the division between being and the will, nature and ac-
tion, introduced by Christian theology. The same authors who elaborate the
economic paradigm strongly emphasize the heterogeneity of nature and will in
God. The passage from Origen in which the will marks a real caesura in God
and the creation is, in this sense, exemplary:
{All that exists in heaven and on earth, visible or invisible, insofar as it refers to the nature of God, it is not [ quantum ad naturam Dei pertinet, non sunt]; insofar as
it refers to the will of the creator, it is that which the will of the one who created
wanted it to be [ quantum ad voluntatem creatoris, sunt hoc, quod ea esse voluit
ille qui fecit]}. (Origen, Homily on 1 Kings 28, I, 11. See also Benz, pp. 330–331) The pseudo-Justin insists that essence ( ousia) and will ( boulē) must be considered to be separate in God. If being and the will were the same thing in God, given
that he wants many things, he would be one thing at one time, and another
thing at another time, which is impossible. And if he produced by means of his
being, given that his being is necessary, he would be obliged to do what he does,
and his creation would not be free (Justin, Opera Iustini subditicia, pp. 286–291).
As has been suggested (Coccia, p. 46), the very motif of creation ex nihilo
emphasizes the autonomy and freedom of divine praxis. God has not created the
world due to a necessity of his nature or his being, but because he wanted it. To
the question “why did God make heaven and earth?” Augustine answers: “quia
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voluit,” “because he wished to” (Augustine, A Refutation of the Manichees, I, 2, 4).
Centuries later, in the heyday of Scholasticism, Thomas Aquinas clearly restates
contra Gentiles the impossibility of founding creation in being: “God acts, not per necessitatem naturae, but per arbitrium voluntatis” ( Contra Gentiles, Book 2, Chapter 23, n. 1). In other words, the will is the apparatus needed to join together being
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