7 Trinity, virtue, and violence Aristotle Papanikolaou My chapter will begin with a tradition-specific theological construal of God – the Christian doctrine of the Trinity – that all who profess to be Christian do not necessarily accept, and that has been debated endlessly by those Christians who do accept such an understanding of God. I will selectively trace the history of the development of the doctrine of the Trinity to indicate that this particular understanding of God is simultaneously an understanding of the God-world relation. In this sense, the implication of my brief selective history will be that the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is not simply a narrative description of the threefold way in which God relates to the world, but a reasoned argument about how humans must imagine God to exist in order to make sense of a God-world relation in terms of divine-human communion. I will then try to show how such an understand- ing of God made a difference for the understanding of virtue in the seventh- century Christian thinker, Maximus the Confessor, in terms of learning how to love. I will then attempt to show how such an understanding of virtue opens up ethical possibilities in relation to war ethics and violence. Trinity An important moment in the Christological debates that is relevant to the development of the doctrine of the Trinity was that between Athanasius and the so-called Arians or non-Nicenes. 1 Lewis Ayres has recently framed this debate in terms of what he calls the grammar of divine simplicity. The following passage I think provides a helpful summary of his position: “The language of simplicity is inseparable from the language of divine incom- prehensibility and gives rise to ‘formal features’ of divine being that should govern all our speech about God.” 2 Ayres is claiming that the fourth-century debate was essentially about scriptural attributions of Jesus as the Word of God or Son of God. The genius of the pro-Nicenes was the forging of a grammar of divine simplicity that “enabled the achievement of a clear distinction between God and creation (such that ‘true God’ is synonymous with God).” 3 Ayres seems to be arguing that if the debate is primarily one over the scriptural attribution of Jesus as the Word or Son of God, the 15032-0763d-1pass-r01.indd 115 14-09-2017 21:31:07