One of the more disputed theological questions of the last fifty years has been the question of whether the kenosis of the Son of God in time (Phil 2:6–11) points to a kenosis within the immanent Trinity as its transcendent archetype. Hans Urs von Balthasar famously answered this question in the affirmative and strikingly so: not only does the temporal kenosis of the Son reflect an eternal kenosis in the form of the Son’s eternal humility and
obedience with respect to the Father; this same phenomenal kenosis invites us speculatively to consider as its ultimate transcendental condition a primordial kenosis—an Urkenosis—that consists in the Father’s eternally emptying himself in giving his Son all that he has and all that he is.³ For Balthasar, in other words, the Son’s temporal kenosis is ultimately a reflection of a reflection, a mimetic enactment of the Father’s own total gift of himself in begetting
him. Contemporary Thomists, on the other hand, have tended to reject the notion of an intra-trinitarian kenosis—and the corresponding idea that God is humble in himself—on the grounds that it introduces a category distinctive to the economy and bound up with the contingency of creation. As Bruce Marshall puts it with respect to Balthasar: “Our understanding of how the three persons are one God must not be infiltrated or ‘contaminated,’ as it were, by terms and concepts that refer only to the economy.”⁴

Of course, this is not to say that we could know something about the Trinity apart from the economy, for Thomists themselves would have to admit that all our knowledge of God is dependent upon it and indeed “contaminated” by it, if this is the right expression—if by the economy we mean not just salvation history, but the whole of created reality as divinely superintended. The question is rather a question of ascription: what can one say about God in his eternal nature on the basis of the economy and what not? Take, for example, the Incarnation, or the fact that Christ suffered. Does God becoming man mean that God mutated into a man or that his divine nature suffered

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