JPI 620/813
Communio Personarum: Trinity and Church
This course seeks both to introduce students to Trinitarian theology and ecclesiology and to deepen their awareness of the import of the twentieth-century renewal of the doctrine of the Church that culminated in the Second Vatican Council. Taking the communio personarum as its guiding thread, the course first discusses the role of the notion of communio in the renewal of twentieth-century ecclesiology. It then goes on to explore the ultimate source of this communio through a substantial introduction to some of the principal figures in trinitarian theology, such as Athanasius and the Cappadocians, Augustine, Richard of Saint Victor, Aquinas, and von Balthasar. Finally, it offers a systematic account of the nature of the Church as participation, through the missions of Christ and the Holy Spirit, in the communion existing among the three divine Persons. In this context, the course also seeks to unfold the "missionary" implications of the Church as sacramental realization of mankind's universal destiny to share in the Trinitarian communio.
