Question 47 - The Diversity Amongst Creatures

Why this Question Matters.

God is a simple unity and it therefore seemed reasonable to philosophers and theologians that such unity would be reflected in what He created. However, one must ask about the extent of such unity; after all, there simply is diversity and inequality in the world. Have these come about directly caused by God’s intention or have they come about indirectly? Aquinas argues that there is unity in the world, to the extent that we can say that there is one world, but that it would be a mistake to say that the world is one, in the sense of lacking diversity or inequality.


The Thread of the Argument

A1: Aquinas asks whether God is the source of multiplicity of things. This may seem a rather odd question, but it is motivated by opposition to the Gnostic and Neo-Platonist belief in the essential oneness of things. (Indeed this latter belief lives on today in some New Age and Neo-Gnostic sects and can arguably be seen to lie behind occult beliefs such as astrology.) After going though a number of faulty arguments about diversity and its origins, Aquinas argues that diversity comes about by the intention of God to communicate His goodness to creatures and to represent His goodness though them. As any one creature is finite and therefore cannot provide an adequate representation of God’s goodness, God produces diverse creatures so that the inadequacy of the representation of any one may be made up by others.

In response to the objection that agents tend to produce just one effect (and therefore God acting as efficient cause would produce a unity of effect), Aquinas argues that a voluntary agent like God acts though a form conceived in the intellect (Ia.q19.a4); God’s simplicity is not in contradiction to that form being of diverse things (Ia.q15.a2) and so it is quite reasonable to consider God as the cause of diversity in creatures.

A2: A consideration of God’s justice might lead one to think (as it apparently did Origen) that God would have created all things equally and that therefore any inequality that exists in the world would have to be explained by something other than God’s actions. However, Aquinas points out that this reasoning is faulty: justice presupposes the differences in merit that lead to the differences in reward; but anterior to creation there are no differences in merit that might lead to differences in reward. There is nothing upon which justice can be founded in the act of creation. Rather, inequality exists in creation for the benefit of the whole and must be attributed to God’s wisdom in the same way as diversity is accounted to God.

A3: There seems no particular reason to suppose that God’s creative activity is limited to the creation of just one world. Aquinas however sees the ordering of all things in creation as an argument that the world is indeed one. Things in creation have an ordering both to one another and to God as their creator and this ordering is a sort of “glue” that provides unity. Indeed, one might argue that the world is all that God has created and so is by definition a unity.


Handy Concepts

• God is the source both of the diversity of things and of their inequality.
• God has created diversity and inequality in order to show forth better His goodness and for the greater good of the whole.

Difficulties

• From Aquinas’s answer to the third objection of the third article it appears that he is taking the word “world” in a very limited sense as suggested by the medieval understanding of cosmology. In the light of more recent understanding of the extent of the created universe, it is interesting to speculate how Aquinas might re-write the answer to this question. He might address physical theories of the so-called “multiverse” or he might address metaphysical “many-worlds” theories. I suspect he would find the first fascinating and would give the second short shrift.

Question 46 - The Beginning of the Duration of Creatures

Why this Question Matters.

A famous medieval debate concerned the possibility of either, on the one hand, proving that the created universe must have existed forever or, on the other hand, whether it could not have existed forever. The relationship of this argument to the creation account given in the book of Genesis is manifest: if the eternity of the universe is provable, then the Genesis account has to be interpreted very broadly indeed. Aquinas held to the position that neither the eternity nor the non-eternity of the universe could be proved and that the non-eternal creation of the universe is therefore purely an article of faith. In this question, Aquinas lays out his reasoning on both these questions and discusses the relation between creation and time.


The Thread of the Argument

A1: Ten supporting objections are given to the thesis that the universe must have existed from eternity. Rather than go through these each in turn, it suffices to point out that many of them are based on the same difficulties that Aquinas had to answer in Ia.q45 when dealing with the very notion of creation ex nihilo. In particular, our observation of the created universe suggests that any change or being has to be preceded by a previous change or being. Similarly, if we make the mistake of seeing creation purely in terms of being a change, then it has to be considered a change in some subject which would have to appear to pre-exist the act of creation.

Aquinas argues that the existence of the world is a consequence of God’s will and that, as argued in Ia.q19.a3, there is no metaphysical necessity constraining God from holding the created universe in being for whatever type and length of duration He wills. Having set forth his position Aquinas, showing due deference to the reputation of Aristotle, argues that the latter’s arguments on this subject were not attempts at a proof of the eternity of the universe but were demonstrations that earlier accounts of the coming to be of the universe were faulty.

The fourth and the eighth objections demonstrate a lack of appreciation for the utterly radical nature of creation ex nihilo; Aquinas takes the opportunity to amplify just how radical this idea of creation is. The fourth objection suggest that before the universe exists there would have to be a vacuum in the place where the universe comes to be (and it was widely believed that a vacuum was impossible); the eighth suggests that if God existed before the universe was created then time must have existed before the universe existed in order for there to be a “before” and an “after”. Aquinas replies that a vacuum is not nothing (something modern physics would applaud!) but rather a space capable of holding a body; not even this exists before creation. Likewise, time did not exist before the creation of the universe; when we speak of God being in eternity, we are claiming much more than that God exists in a temporal forever.

A2: Conversely to the arguments of article 1, the idea that the universe could have existed forever would seem to be troubling. If we think of the universe as co-eternal with God then it’s hard to think of it being created, even if its being depended entirely upon Him; if there never was a time when the universe didn’t exist then we can’t say that it came to be, which is surely what we mean by creation. Likewise, if the universe has always existed, then time would have had to traverse an actual infinity to arrive at now. Aquinas answers these objections by pointing out that “ex nihilo” refers to “out of nothing” rather than “after nothing” and that it is hard to make any sense of the idea of a traversal with an undetermined point in the infinite past.

Aquinas’s major argument is similar to that given in answer to article 1: the existence or otherwise of the universe is entirely dependent on God’s will, but we cannot know the content of God’s will by natural arguments but only by revelation. He also offers a supporting argument from the eternal existence of universals; their eternal existence demonstrates that we cannot show that concrete particulars have not always existed.

The reply to the seventh objection gives us a succinct summary of Aquinas’s teaching on the difference between per se and per accidens series of causes that we discussion in the Introduction to Metaphysics and which Aquinas uses in the proof of the existence of God in q2.a3.

A3: In modern physics, time is considered to be part of the space-time continuum that comes to be in the big bang. This immediately poses awkward questions that bear a surprising similarity to some of the questions that Aquinas has addressed above. In particular, it is hard to get the mind around the idea that time is created in the creation of the universe, and harder still to start thinking about what might have happened “before” the big bang. So, now looking at this from a philosophical and theological point of view, does it make sense to say that the creation of the universe occurs at the beginning of time if time itself is created along with the rest of creation?

Aquinas answers that this phraseology is to be interpreted in accord with the standard interpretation of scripture. This states that four things were created “in the beginning”: the highest heaven; corporeal matter; time; and angelic nature. The difficulties that we may have with this concept are all related back to how we understand the idea of creation ex nihilo.


Handy Concepts

• There can be no metaphysical proof that the created universe has existed forever.
• There can be no metaphysical proof that the created universe has not existed forever.
• Creation is an act of God’s will and therefore our knowledge of the eternity or non-eternity of creation comes from what has been revealed to us of God’s will.
• Aquinas produced the short document De Aeternitate Mundi during the medieval controversies about the eternity of the universe.

Difficulties

• Aquinas’s argument against the possibility of proving the finite duration of the Universe using an argument based on the eternal existence of universals seems to be rather weak, or at least missing a few steps of explanation.

Question 45 - The Mode of Emanation of Creatures from the First Principle

Why this Question Matters.

Christian theology has always considered the account of creation given in the book of Genesis as a description of creation ex nihilo, from absolutely nothing at all. This immediately poses serious philosophical problems; not the least of which is the fact that all “acts of creation” that we see in nature are actually changes. Put in the Aristotelian terms that Aquinas would use, in natural creation an already existing subject is reduced to actuality from its potentiality to be the new entity. If we’re trying to give a metaphysical account of creation ex nihilo, then we are faced with the fact that there simply isn’t a subject that can be the subject of change! Therefore, God’s act of creation is both unique and different from natural change. In this question, Aquinas faces up to the philosophical challenges posed by this doctrine.


The Thread of the Argument

A1: The very idea of creation itself needs some thought. We are quite used to the idea that we can make something out of something else, and we sometimes say that we create something out of something else. However, Aquinas wants to reserve the word “create” for the act of making something out of nothing; an act clearly alluded to in the opening words of the book of Genesis. With an allusion back to Ia.q44.a2, Aquinas claims the idea of creation for the coming forth of the totality of an entity from the first cause rather than for the more restricted notion of a particular effect emanating from a cause (which is what we have when we consider making something from something else).

In thinking about the coming to be of things in the created order, we are used to the idea of something (like a man) coming forth from something else (not a man, but the fusion of sperm and ovum, for example); in thinking about creation, we have to generalize this to consider the idea of some being coming forth from non-being. The third objection argues that this makes no sense; when we try to say that something is made out of nothing we are trying to say that “nothing” stands in some relation to that which is made, in the same way that we say that something is, for example, made out of bronze. Aquinas answers this objection by observing that “out of” is used in a different sense when we speak of “creation out of nothing” (ex nihilo, in Latin); what is in view here is not a relation to a material cause but an ordering. In addition, one may simply take “out of nothing” as being a denial of “out of something”.

A2: Having established that we are to take “creation” as referring to the making of something out of nothing, Aquinas turns to the philosophical difficulties facing this idea. Each of the objections is built on the fundamental idea that God is only capable of things that are not impossible; Aquinas takes the law of contradiction as not only being an epistemological fact (that we cannot know contradictories) but also an ontological fact (contradictories cannot be). So, the first objection repeats the claims of the ancient philosophers that nothing can come out of nothing and that this fact is a fundamental law of being; to hold otherwise would be to posit a contradiction. The second objection builds on a theme touched upon in the first article: every example of something being made that we know of is an example of something being made from something else. Therefore creation must be considered to be a change and therefore a change in some subject; but nothing cannot be a subject, therefore creation from nothing makes no sense. Similarly, as the third objection points out, if something has been made, then at some stage it must have been being made before it finally existed. What is being made is not the same entity as what is made, therefore what is being made precedes what is made and must be the subject of the change that occurs when something is made. Therefore when something is made, there must be a pre-existing subject of change, which is impossible under the hypothesis of being made out of nothing.

Aquinas’s answer reprises what he wrote in q44.a1-2. that everything to do with an entity must be considered to have its being from God. If God is considered only as acting to change what already is, then what already is would be left as an uncreated element of creation; a clear contradiction. The answer to the first objection is immediate; the ancient philosophers in issuing this opinion were only considering what happens within creation, not what occurs in the emanation of things from the first cause.

One might think that the second objection would be despatched with equal alacrity; however, Aquinas takes the opportunity to discuss at length how we talk about creation. His main assertion is that creation can be considered to be a change only insofar as we understand it that way by analogy with what goes on in creation. Change itself involves one thing being different now from the way it was: either it is the same being in potentiality as when the substance of the being has changed (but the prime matter underlying it is the same) or it is the same being in actuality as when its accidents have changed. Creation is different: there is not one being that is now one way and then another. Our minds may find it easier to conceive of something before it exists and then it existing, but this is not a change in a subject.

The third objection is dealt with swiftly by pointing out that the objection fails to consider the case of instantaneous creation. If there is no motion or change in creation, as has been shown by the replies to the previous objections, then we are left with the conclusion that something being created is simultaneous with it having been created.

A3: The question asked in this article may seem puzzling: is the act of creation a real entity that exists in the creature? The point here is that the act of creation creates the creature and in doing so sets up a relation in the created to the creator; there is a “pointing toward” to creator inherent in the created being. The relation is real in the creature but only conceptual in God Himself, as we saw in Ia.q13.a7. In affirming this real relation in the creature, Aquinas has to deal with some technical objections. For example, if the act of creation is a real entity in the creature, then it would seem that this real entity itself would need an act of creation; the spectre of infinite regress looms large! A similar objection came up in Ia.q42.a1 and the same answer is given here; the reality of a relation is in its pointing to something and does not require a further relation to define that reality.

The third objection comes back to the difficulty of dealing with the idea of creating something out of nothing. If the act of creation is a relation in the thing created then it would be an accident in the thing created and would presuppose the thing as a subject in which to be an accident. The act of creation would therefore seem to be ontologically posterior to the thing created, which seems very strange. In his reply to the objection, Aquinas insists on the ontological priority of the thing created but admits of a certain type of priority for the act of creation inasmuch as it is the principle of the thing created.

A4: One might be tempted to think that creation is restricted in some way to those things that have no structure (like prime matter), because composite entities are composites of more basic entities and we might wish to distinguish between the creation of the basic entities that they are composed of and the causal processes that bring the basic entities together in the composite. Against this, the creation narrative in Genesis does not restrict creation in this way, but speaks of the creation of composite things. Aquinas maintains this latter position. He argues that being created is ordered to the being of the thing created; therefore creation is associated with things to which being belongs properly. When we think of the basic components, like form and prime matter, out of which composite things are made we are not thinking of beings but of things which are the principles of being. They are real entities, but we should not imagine that they have any proper existence other than instantiated in composites. Aquinas introduces the terminology that such basic components of composite things are co-existent rather than existent and that they are co-created with the created things they comprise.

A5: Given that we sometimes say that human beings, especially in the act of conception, “take part in creation”, it seem wise to ask whether creation belongs exclusively to God or whether there is some sense in which we can say that creatures themselves create. Aquinas denies this, maintaining that God alone creates in the sense that we have been discussing in this question (that is, creation ex nihilo, in which being absolutely speaking is given to creatures). In his answer, Aquinas pays particular attention to the possibility that created entities may participate in creation by acting as instruments of God’s act of creation. He rejects this on the grounds that acting instrumentally involves some proper effect of the instrument in the act. For example, a saw is an instrument that a craftsman uses in cutting something. The act of cutting is proper to the saw itself and therefore it is correct to consider the saw as an instrument of the craftsman. In the case of creation, though, there is no instrument that has the proper action of giving being absolutely speaking; any created instrument pre-supposes something already created to act upon.

This point of view is amplified in the reply to the first objection. This objection is founded on an observation of Aristotle that that which is perfect can make something similar to itself. Immaterial creatures are more perfect than material creatures that (for example, in the case of a human procreating a human) make things similar to themselves. Therefore immaterial creatures must be able to make things similar to themselves and this must be through an act of creation, as immaterial creatures have no matter upon which to act. Aquinas counters by observing that the argument founders because the “making something similar to itself” does not apply to producing its own nature absolutely speaking but rather by applying that nature to something. In the case of human procreation, a human is the cause of human nature coming to exist in some particular determinate matter, but not in coming to exist absolutely speaking.

A6: The Nicene Creed states that the Father is “the creator of all things, visible and invisible” and that “through Him [the Son] all things were made” and that the Spirit is “the Lord, the giver of life”, so it would seem that creation can in some way be attributed to the persons of the Trinity. Aquinas constructs an answer that allows us to see the way that we might attribute creation to the essence of God whilst also maintaining the role of the persons. Remembering that effect resemble their causes, we see that creation (which is the giving of being) corresponds to the being of God and hence is to be attributed to God’s essence, common to the three persons of the Trinity. Hence we cannot claim that creation is proper to any of the persons but rather is common to the whole Trinity. However, God is a cause of things through His intellect and will and so, insofar as the processions of the divine persons include these attributes of the essence, they are causes of the production of creatures.

A7: We saw in Ia.q32.a1 that we cannot ascend from knowledge of creation to knowledge of the divine persons of the Trinity. This would seem to imply that no vestige of the Trinity is left in creatures as a result of the act of creation. What then motivates St. Augustine to say that “a vestige of the Trinity is evident in creatures”?

Aquinas answers that all effects represent their causes in some way and we must determine the way in which the cause of being is represented in the creature and we must also understand what it means to be a “vestige”. So to start with, we can differentiate between effects that resemble the causality of their causes in a vestigial way (smoke from fire, for example) from effects that resemble their cause by being like it in form (fire from fire, for example). We recall (Ia.q27) that the Son proceeds as the Word of God’s intellect and the Holy Spirit proceeds as the love of God’s will. Therefore, inasmuch as rational creatures possess intellect and will, we can say that there is a representation of the Trinity as an image. However, we can say more than this by tracing back certain things in creatures to their causes.

In the first place, a creature subsists in its own being and represents in some way its cause and principle; this points to the person of the Father, principle-not-from-a-principle. Secondly, a creature has a form which determines it to a species; this fact points to the Word in the sense that form comes from the craftsman’s conception. Thirdly, each creature is ordered to its end; this fact points to the Holy Spirit inasmuch as the ordering to the end comes from the creator’s will.

A8: Every time something is made in the created order by natural processes a new form comes to be. But a form does not come to be from anything else, so it must be created. Hence we can claim that creation is involved in all works of nature. Aquinas demolishes this neat little argument by pointing out the way that people are liable to misunderstand what a form is and what it means for a form to exist. The natural form of a body does not itself subsist; it is not a thing. Rather it is that by which something exists; it is a principle of the existence of that thing (as prime matter is also a principle of the thing). Being made and being created properly only apply to subsistent things (composites of form and matter) and not to their principles. As Aquinas pointed out in article 4, these principles, such as form and matter, can only be said to be co-created with the subsistent thing. Therefore, form begins to exist when the composite is made. When a composite is made by natural processes, it is made from the matter; so creation is not involved in the natural process but is presupposed by it.


Handy Concepts

• In Christian theology, creation is considered in the sense of creation ex nihilo, out of nothing. Creation ex nihilo involves the creation of the total being of the entity.
• Creation can only be thought of in terms of change by analogy with coming to be in the natural world. However, in creation there is not change in some subject, rather the coming to be of the subject itself.
• Something created bears a real relation to God the creator; the relation of God to the created is not a real relation but a conceptual relation.
• Creation involves the coming to be of the whole entity, not simply the parts or components of the entity or the principles of the entity. Matter and form, though they are real entities, are not subsistent and do not come to be independent of their composite.
• Created entities do not take part in creation even as instrumental causes.
• Creation is proper to the Trinity as a whole, being attributed to God’s essence. However, the persons of the Trinity can be considered as causes of creatures insofar as the processions of the divine persons include the attributes of the essence corresponding to intellect and will.
• Rational creatures can be said to contain an image of the Trinity; moreover, creatures in general can be said to contain a vestige of the Trinity.
• Forms cannot be said to be created; rather they are co-created with the composite of which they comprise one of the principles.

Difficulties

• The reader may find the answer that Aquinas gives to the third objection in article 3 rather lacking. Indeed, we must point out that this answer has been the subject of some controversy over the centuries. For details, see the footnotes to this passage in the recent Blackfriars translation.
• In article 8 Aquinas ponders the question of where substantial forms come from. Although his answer tells us of a number of positions that are false his positive answer (that they are co-created but not created at the creation of the composite) is hardly helpful.

Question 44 - The Procession of Creatures from God

Preamble

Having finished his consideration of the divine persons of the Trinity, Aquinas comes now to the treatment of a different sort of procession, that of creatures from God. The traditional (convenient, but somewhat artificial) division of the summa labels this new section (qq. 44-49) the Treatise on Creation. Aquinas himself indicates a somewhat different, threefold, division in the work: qq. 44-46 deal with the production of creatures; qq. 47-102 deal with the different types of creatures; and qq. 103-119 deal with conservation in existence and governance of creatures. One should note that qq. 47-48 continue the important discussion of the nature of evil and of its causes in creation.


Why this Question Matters.

God as the first cause of all creation has been dealt with in a number of places in the “Treatise on the One God” but it is now time for Aquinas to return to this theme in the context of the treatment of the Trinitarian procession that he has developed in the “Treatise on the Trinity”. The subjects covered in this question (God as efficient, exemplary and final cause of creatures and as creator of prime matter) allow him to reiterate a number of themes that have already been dealt with earlier in the summa whilst at the same time elaborating on his metaphysical approach to creation.


The Thread of the Argument

A1: Is it true that everything that has being is necessarily created by God by means of efficient causality? This might seem a strange question to ask in the light of all that Aquinas has already covered concerning the radical dependence of creation on God. But the start of this new section of the summa allows Aquinas to reiterate this profound message, and to emphasize the necessity of this relation, by meeting the apparent difficulties posed by a trio of metaphysical objections to the thesis. In the first place it might seem that the relation of a caused being to its cause is not a part of the definition of that being and is therefore not necessary for its being. Secondly, one might observe that there are examples of so-called necessary beings, those that are unable not to exist. Here, Aquinas is thinking of such things as mathematical entities or of spiritual substances which contain within themselves no principle of dissolution. Therefore, depending on precisely what sort of necessity is involved, God is either not needed in order to create them or to keep them in being once they have being. Finally, what of mathematical entities in particular, that do not seem to come about through efficient causation?

Aquinas argues that any feature that is found in anything by participation must be caused by that thing which has the feature by essence (recalling something of the argument of the fourth way in Ia q.2). As there can only be one subsisting esse, (in the same way that there can only be one subsisting whiteness), all things other than God must participate in being rather than having self subsisting being and their being must be caused by God.

Turning his attention to the objections, Aquinas admits that being caused does not belong to the definition of being, absolutely speaking, but that the relation to a cause follows from those things that do belong to the definition for anything that exists. Here Aquinas is alluding to his argument that created beings are compositions of essence and existence (which we first saw in his rejection of Anselm’s ontological argument in Ia q.2 ad 2). Although we must not think of essence and existence as being two distinct things-in-themselves, we must consider them as two principles composed in any being. Therefore the definition of a thing simply cannot include its own existence, but we can deduce from the existence of a thing (and therefore of the things pertaining to its definition) that there is a composition of essence and existence which is caused by God.

To the objection that necessary beings need not be caused by anything, Aquinas turns to Aristotle to argue that one has to explain the nature and cause of their necessity; the relation between cause and effect may be necessary but it still requires the cause to exist for the effect to exist. Finally, Aquinas argues that mathematical entities exist in the reason as abstracted from created things that do have efficient causes for their beings. So, although the objects studied by mathematics do have efficient causes, it is correct to say that they are not studied by mathematicians under the aspect of efficient causation.

A2: In the metaphysical theory of hylomorphism, beings are considered to be a composition of matter and form. For anything that actually exists its matter is informed by some form; uninformed matter does not exist, in the same way that pure potentiality does not exist. However, it is still possible to consider matter and form as conceptually separable principles that are actually combined in all created beings. Matter considered in this way as completely uninformed by form is called prime matter and can be thought of as the potentiality in any thing that is reduced to actuality by form.

Does it make sense to say that prime matter is created by God? The major problem facing an affirmative answer is that it hardly seems coherent to talk about the creation of something that doesn’t exist! Aquinas addresses this challenge immediately with a brief tour through the history of philosophy (borrowed from Aristotle’s Metaphysics), pointing out that our understanding of being has developed from a thoroughly naïve view to something much more sophisticated. The objection that we cannot say that prime matter exists arises from the naïve view of being.

However, if we go so far as to consider being simply as being, we realize that we must not restrict ourselves to thinking of these-beings or such-beings but we must enquire into being-in-general. In particular, we must think not only of causes in the sense of causing something to be such-a-being (through accidental form) or this-being (through substantial form), but also in the sense of what causes everything pertaining to their being in any way at all. It’s in this sense that we should think in terms of form and prime matter which can be considered principles of being even though they might lack independent existence. When we do this, it makes perfect sense to consider prime matter, as a principle of being, as created by God.

A3: In the third article, Aquinas asks whether God is the exemplar cause of creatures. Having got used to the idea of Aquinas adopting Aristotle’s system of four causes (material, formal, efficient and final), we might be surprised to see the introduction of another type of cause. One has to recall the way in which medieval philosophers and theologians received the authoritative texts of their predecessors; with a spirit of charity and with a wish to reconcile apparent differences within and between them. After all, the premier medieval textbook, The Sentences of Peter Lombard, provided the source material for exactly this sort of reconciliation. In this case, the idea of an exemplar cause provides a way of reconciling the differences between the approaches of Plato and Aristotle to the notion of forms. For Plato, forms have their own separate existence apart from their exemplars in their own third realm. For Aristotle, forms exist only as exemplified by their exemplars. If we recall Ia qq. 14-15 (and especially Ia q.14 a.8), we get a big hint about how this reconciliation goes: forms exist as ideas in the mind of God, so they don’t quite have their own realm of existence but neither do they completely fail to exist when not exemplified. Like the plan of a building that exists in the mind of the architect before it is built, a form exists as an exemplar cause in the mind of God.

Aquinas simply has to recall the discussion of Ia qq.14-15 to affirm that God is the exemplar cause of all created things. Now one might follow the objections in claiming that the exemplar causes of created things are really the species within which things fall. In reply to this, Aquinas affirms that although we can speak of one created thing as being an exemplar of another by analogy, we should be careful of claiming per se existence for something like a species which is really an intellectual construct. Our agent intellect abstract universals from particulars, but such universals do not subsist other than in the particulars that their exemplars. Therefore we can’t really consider them as exemplar causes.

A4: Answering the last question of whether “God is the final cause of all things” allows Aquinas to dispel some misconceptions that may prevent some from accepting the obvious answer. He observes that when an agent and a patient interact causally, the agent acting for an end gives the patient the same end but in a different way. He also notes that some agents, which he calls imperfect agents, not only give to the patient but also receive something from the patient in acting on the patient. One has to be very careful when attempting to apply this analysis to the first cause, God, because He does not act to acquire any sort of thing at all; he is a perfect agent, and all the giving is one-way only.

So, to object that God in supplying ends to created things must be acting for the sake of an end is to make an incorrect analogy; God does not act for ends as He is pure actuality. The best we can say is that He acts just for the sake of His own goodness.

On another tack, one might object that if God is the end of all things, then all things must desire Him. But then one simply observes that not all things desire God. But this approach is to ignore the fact that nothing has the nature of the God except insofar as it participates in a likeness of God. Therefore things desire God (whether that desire be intellective, sentient or natural) insofar as they desire the Good.


Handy Concepts

• God is the efficient, exemplar and final cause of all created things.
• We noted above the introduction into medieval philosophy of the notion of exemplar causes. We should also note that the idea of instrumental causes (those things that act as instruments of other causes) had become common by this time and were used extensively in the theology of the sacraments. Reference to the extensive list of causes of justification given in the Decree on Justification of the Council of Trent gives an indication of how this process of expanding the notion of causality continued through the Middle Ages.
• Prime matter is one of the principles of the being of things that represents the pure potentiality that is reduced to actuality by the inherence of a form.
• We must be careful when thinking of God as final cause of things not to misapply the analogy of created things supplying the ends for other created things.
• The reply to the third objection of article 3 is relevant to the modern debate on the nature of the supernatural.

Difficulties

• Aquinas seems to leave the answer to the third objection to the first article hanging in the air. Mathematical objects, even though they are not studied under the aspect of efficient causes by mathematicians, are abstracted from things that do have efficient causes. Should he not continue the argument at this point by considering the efficient causation of the process of abstraction?

Question 43 - The Missions of the Divine Persons

Why this Question Matters.

Aquinas has built his theology of the Trinity around the immanent processions of the divine persons from the Godhead; his major focus has been to give an account of God-in-Himself. But now, as we begin the transition between Aquinas’s treatment of the Trinity and his so-called “Treatise on Creation”, notions associated with the idea of the “Economic Trinity” as opposed to the “Immanent Trinity” start to come to the fore. In this question Aquinas considers the divine missions; we immediately see one of the fundamental problems that may have motivated Aquinas to organize his Trinitarian treatise as he has. If God is omnipotent and omnipresent, what sense can we make of the notion of the Economic Trinity? How can He go anywhere or do anything if He is already everywhere and responsible for the being of everything?


The Thread of the Argument

A1: When we start to think about the economic Trinity, we’re immediately faced with a fundamental question: if God is omnipresent, how can it make sense to say that the divine persons are sent anywhere or to anything? In order to answer this question Aquinas enquires into what we might mean by a “mission”. The first component of a mission is the relation between the sender and the one sent; the second is the relation between the one sent and that to which he is sent (the terminus of the mission). When we think about the divine persons, and the theory that Aquinas has already developed, we can identify the relationship between the sender and the sent as that of origin. The second component seems trickier: God is omnipresent, therefore a divine persons cannot become present where previously He was not present; the only alternative left is that He is present in a different way, in a different mode of being, to any previous presence. So, for example, in the incarnation the Son became present to us in the flesh.

A2: Likewise, the concept of a mission might seem to clash with divine immutability; going on a particular mission with a particular objective in view would seem to imply something temporal which would imply change. This might force us to think that missions must be eternal, stretching the meaning of the word beyond breaking point. In order to answer this problem, Aquinas distinguishes carefully between the things implied by the different divine names; in particular he teases apart the significations relating to the two relations implied by mission that he described in a.1. Names like “generation” and “spiration” are associated with both an eternal relation to the principle as well as an eternal terminus; they describe the processions from the point of view of that which processes eternally. Names such as “mission” and “giving” imply a temporal terminus in addition to the eternal relation to the principle; a new mode of existing of a divine person in some aspect of creation is something temporal.

Therefore Aquinas insists that the idea of “mission” includes within itself the temporality of its effect. However, that a divine person exists with a new mode of being to a creature does not imply any change in God, but simply a change in the creature.

A3: Having identified that a divine person sent on a mission to a creature starts to exist in that creature in some new mode of being, Aquinas now turns to the possibility that there could be several new modes of being for the divine person. He frames this discussion in terms of some of the types of grace recognized by Christian theology. In particular he focuses on the notions of sanctifying grace (gratia gratum faciens), which is that by which we are made holy by participation in the divine life; and gratuitous grace (gratia gratis data), the gift given to one for the benefit of others.

Aquinas wishes to argue that a divine person is present to a creature in a new mode of being associated simply with sanctifying grace. This may seem quite counterintuitive because it might seem to be mistaking a cause (the new mode of being of a divine person, an uncreated grace) with its effects (sanctifying grace or gratuitous grace, both created graces). Similarly, one might wish to simply identify uncreated grace, gratuitous grace and sanctifying grace as different modes of being of a divine person in a creature. It must be pointed out (see “Difficulties” below) that Aquinas’s stand on this issue has been much misunderstood (especially outside the Catholic tradition) as over-favouring created grace to the detriment of the uncreated grace of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

The reason that Aquinas adopts this point of view is that when he enquires into how a divine person might be present to a creature by a new mode of being, he identifies that there are limited possibilities. We know that God exists in everything through His essence, power and presence as a cause (Ia q.8 a.3). For the rational creature there are only two new ways by which a divine person may be present: as that which is known in the knower and as that which is loved in the lover. It is precisely sanctifying grace that allows us to know and to love God and it is therefore this by which God is present to us in a new mode of being. In simple terms, God is always present to us in as intimate a way as is possible as far as being is concerned; but sanctifying grace opens up a new mode of His being present to us by transforming our receptivity to Him. In terms of the common misunderstanding of Aquinas’s position, uncreated grace is always present where there is fruitful created sanctifying grace, but it is the created sanctifying grace that opens up the possibilities of the uncreated grace that is always potentially there. As the reply to the first objection puts it: “Through sanctifying grace rational creatures are perfected not only in order that they might use this created gift, but also in order that they might enjoy the divine person Himself.”

A4: Is the Father sent on a mission to us? If we consider the indwelling of the Trinity as promised in John 14:23, it might seem so. However, if one notices that “mission” includes the idea of procession then one has to recognize that as the Father does not proceed, He is not sent on a mission. We have to distinguish between the fact that the Father dwells within us and how He gets there! It is not by mission in the way that the Son and the Spirit are sent to us.

A5: One might recognize that some missions of divine persons are visible (the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity, for example) and that others are invisible (a gift of gratuitous grace, for example). One’s first thought might be that the missions of the Son are precisely those that are visible and that the missions of the Holy Spirit are precisely those that are invisible. In this article (can the Son be sent invisibly?) and in a.7 (can the Spirit be sent visibly?), Aquinas tests this hypothesis.

In support of the hypothesis identifying visible and invisible missions with the Son and the Spirit respectively, one might claim that the invisible missions are those that occur through the gift of grace and that these gifts are associated with the Spirit rather than with the Son. However, this line of thinking is too simplistic: Aquinas argues that the whole Trinity dwells in the mind through sanctifying grace and that a divine person being sent on a mission through invisible grace implies both the new mode of being present to the mind and an origin from another. Hence the Father, the Son and the Spirit are present though invisible grace; the Son and the Spirit are present as through a mission (see a.4) and are present together.

The gifts of the Holy Spirit are truly attributed to the Holy Spirit (Ia q.38 a.2) but this does not prevent them from being attributed also, by appropriation, to the Son. To attempt to make a simple identification of a gift of grace with the Spirit is to miss an inter-relatedness of the Trinity; it is to attempt to prise the persons too far apart. Similarly, it is mistaken to simply identify the Son as purifying the intellect and the Spirit as purifying the will; the Son is the Word who spirates the Love, sent to us to form the intellect so that it might “break forth into the affection of love”.

A6: a.1 implies that divine mission involves the coming to be of a new mode of existence of a divine person to a creature. This, in combination with the argument of a.3, implies that anyone who participates in grace is the recipient of an invisible mission of a divine person; grace perfects them, opening them to the presence of the divine person. The objection (on the basis of John 7:39) that divine missions could not have been sent to the Old Testament patriarchs fails; Aquinas distinguishing between the invisible mission of the divine persons and the visible signs given at Pentecost.

In replying to the second objection, Aquinas makes an important connection with the theology of the virtues that he will develop in the second part of the summa. The idea of participation with grace might seem to imply an instant step-change in the person participating in that grace; but this would seem to be inconsistent with the gradual process of perfection in the virtues, suggesting a disconnect between grace and the virtues. Aquinas insists that, although it must be true in some sense that there is such a step-change, this does not exhaust the possibilities for the action of grace. In particular, grace does act through the gradual perfection of the person through the developing virtues.

Similarly, connection is made with the theology of the sacraments to be developed in part III of the summa. The sacraments are instrumental causes of grace, so divine missions are not made to the sacraments themselves, but to the recipients of the grace through the sacraments.

A7: Aquinas now turns to the question dual to that posed in a.5: is the Holy Spirit sent on visible missions? The objections home in on the difficulties we might have in actually distinguishing between what we mean by visible and invisible missions. For example, we might wish to assert bluntly that if the Holy Spirit were to be sent on a visible mission, this would involve Him being made incarnate or by Him being made intimately connected with a creature in some other way. At the opposite extreme, we might argue that idea of an invisible mission is incoherent as all divine missions must, in some way, make themselves visible through their effects.

To answer this question, Aquinas returns to what might be considered one of his foundational theological principles: that God provides for everything according to its mode. The mode most proportionate to man is to be led to invisible things through the visible (Ia q.12. a.12), therefore it is quite reasonable to suppose that even when God acts through an invisible mission it is made manifest in some visible way. However, we may distinguish the missions of the Son and of the Holy Spirit in that the Son was sent as the author of sanctification and the Holy Spirit as the gift of that sanctification. Putting these together, Aquinas arrives at the conclusion that the Son is sent visibly as author and the Holy Spirit visibly as sign of sanctification.

In answering the objections Aquinas actually enumerates the visible missions of the Holy Spirit (ad.6): the appearance of a dove at the baptism of Christ; the appearance of a cloud at the transfiguration; the breathing of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles related in John 20:22-3; the tongues of fire at Pentecost. We notice that not all manifestations of the Holy Spirit are considered as visible missions: notably the reply to the first objection, building on the teaching of Augustine, distinguishes between prophetic visions which are made manifest through spiritual images rather than through corporeal forms and visible missions that are made manifest through creatures. Similarly, in the reply to the fourth objection, Aquinas distinguishes visible mission made manifest through a rational creature (as in the incarnation of the Word) and visible mission made manifest through any other creature. That made manifest through a rational creature is witness to the author of sanctification, whereas that made manifest through any other creature is simply a sign of that sanctification.

A8: Finally, Aquinas asks whether a divine person can only be sent on a mission by the person from whom He proceeds. The objections suggest a number of reasons why this assertion might be true, but Aquinas points out that theological opinion was divided on the issue. His resolution is to point out that both positions, pro and contra, can be considered true in some sense. If the person who sends another person is considered from the point of view of being the principle of Him who is sent, then the proposition must be taken to be true. However, if the “person who sends” is considered from the point of view of being the principle of the effect of the person that is sent, then one can rightly claim that the whole Trinity sends the person.


Handy Concepts

• The distinct notion of mission is consistent with the omnipresence and omnipotence of God insofar as mission denotes the coming to be of a divine person to a creature in a new mode of being.
• The dynamic notion of mission is consistent with divine immutability in that it represents a new real relation to the creator in the creature, but not a real relation or any coming-to-be in the creator.
• Sanctifying grace (gratia gratum faciens)is that by which we are made holy by participation in the divine life; gratuitous grace (gratia gratis data) is a gift given to one for the benefit of others. The new mode of being of a divine person is an example of a created grace, whereas the indwelling person is an uncreated grace.
• The new mode of being of a divine person in a creature corresponds to sanctifying grace. Anyone who participates in grace is the recipient of an invisible mission of a divine person.
• We may distinguish visible from invisible missions of the divine persons, the former often associated with the Son and the latter with the Spirit; but as Aquinas argues, it is less cut-and-dried than that.

Difficulties

• We’ve suggested above (a.3) that Aquinas is often misunderstood as arguing in favour of created grace (the way in which we are transformed and conformed to the image of the Trinity) to the detriment of uncreated grace (the indwelling of the Trinity through the agency of the Spirit). This may be because commentators miss the (necessary) subtlety of his argument that mission corresponds to sanctifying grace. That this misunderstanding is a misunderstanding can be amplified by referring to a beautiful passage from Aquinas’s Commentary on the Gospel of John (Chapter 4, Lecture 2) that emphasizes the intimate connection between created grace and the uncreated grace that creates it:

“Now water is of two kinds: living and non-living. Non-living water is water which is not connected or united with the source from which it springs, but is collected from the rain or in other ways into ponds and cisterns, and there it stands, separated from its source. But living water is connected with its source and flows from it. So according to this understanding, the grace of the Holy Spirit is correctly called living water, because the grace of the Holy Spirit is given to man in such a way that the source itself of the grace is also given, that is, the Holy Spirit. Indeed, grace is given by the Holy Spirit: “The love of God is poured out into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us” (Rom 5:5). For the Holy Spirit is the unfailing fountain from whom all gifts of grace flow “One and the same Spirit does all these things” (1 Cor 12:11). And so, if anyone has a gift of the Holy Spirit without having the Spirit, the water is not united with its source, and so is not living but dead: “Faith without works is dead” (Jas 2:20).”

Question 42 - The Co-Equality of the Persons

Why this Question Matters.

One of the great threats to the orthodox doctrine of God comes from those who would identify subordination amongst the persons of the Trinity. Typically the Father would be placed first followed by the Son and then the Holy Spirit in an order of dignity or of power or even of temporal existence. This position is in marked contrast to the creedal faith of the Church which insists on the co-equality of the persons of the Trinity but which allows for a certain sort of ordering in the Trinity (see Ia q.27 a.2 et passim) associated with the idea of being a principle. In this question Aquinas concentrates on rebutting these erroneous positions whilst bolstering the orthodox doctrine.


The Thread of the Argument

A1: We are probably used to an informal idea that the divine persons are co-equal, but what does it mean to say that two divine persons are equal? When we think about material things, we tend to think in terms of equality of quantity or of quality; there is some attribute of the things concerned about which we claim equality or inequality. When we think mathematically, we can put forward some absolute notions of equality as when we say that two sides of an equation are equal. When we think about the divine substance and the persons of the Trinity, we have to be careful to specify what we really mean. Aquinas starts his treatment of equality in the Godhead from the point of view of a negation of “greater than” and “less than”. The only thing there is in the Godhead to which we might apply the idea of such inequalities is the divine substance; this clearly cannot be unequal among the divine persons as they are each individually fully God. Hence we must consider the divine persons equal in this sense.

One might be concerned that with a notion of equality based purely on essence, there is nothing left upon which to base any distinction between the persons! We certainly do not believe that the Father is identical to the Son, but is this not implied by saying that they are equal? Aquinas answers that, as far as talking about God is concerned, we can signify equality (and likeness) with either names or with verbs. When thinking in terms of names, we identify the essence of the Father with that of the Son and there is a sort of convertibility between equality and likeness (a property not shared with created things). When we think in terms of verbs, there is a sort of reception by the Son from the Father of the divine essence: this allows us to say that the Son is made equal to the Father, but the Father is not equal to the Son.

Similarly we might have the concern that equality is a relation and it is by relations that the persons of the Godhead are made distinct. However, we recall from our discussion of relations in general that Aquinas does not consider equality to be a real relation but only a relation of reason. These relations of reason do not compromise the real relations that distinguish the persons.

A2: A fundamental creedal belief of Christianity is the co-eternality of the persons of the Trinity. Aquinas defends this belief with a discussion of the relationship between agents and action. He identifies that voluntary agents choose the time of their action and that natural agents produce their action when they have the power to produce the action. We might think of a natural and voluntary agent like a man as having to accrue the necessary power after which time it is down to his power of choice as to when he acts. When we think about actions, we tend to consider actions that have successive stages (they start to happen, they continue and then they cease). In this case, we cannot think of the effect as existing until the action is complete. When we consider God, we realize that He generates the Son because of His nature rather than as an act of His will and that He has the necessary power of generation from eternity. We also recognize that the generation of the Son is not a successive action (otherwise the generation would be a change in the Godhead, contradicting divine immutability). Put together, these imply the Son is eternally generated from the Father. A similar argument proves that the Spirit is co-eternal with the Father and the Son.

As one might expect, the major target of this question is the Arian heresy. The first objection is based on the Arian identification of the possible modes of generation that might be applied to the Son. Aquinas sweeps this objection aside by noting that there is no mode of procession amongst creatures that perfectly captures the generation of the Son by the Father and that the modes put forward by the Arians do not include the one that most nearly approaches the Son’s generation. This is the procession of a word from an intellect; as the intellect of God is pure act, thus not having to pass from potentiality to actuality, the procession of the word from the divine intellect is co-eternal with the divine intellect.

A further objection put forward is that if the Son is being generated eternally from the Father, this might seem to imply that the Son’s generation is not yet complete (and will never be complete). This would seem to imply that the Son lacks the perfection of having His generation completed. However, we have to remember that God exists in eternity rather than in time; there is no temporal now in which the generation of the Son is taking place; but rather an indivisible analogy of now that always abides. In a sense, one is justified in saying that the Son is eternally being born as well as that He is always already born.

A3: We’ve seen above that the divine persons are equal in terms of essence as well as co-eternal. Does this imply that we can’t identify some sort of “natural ordering” amongst the divine persons? As the Athanasian creed implies, we must never “divide the substance” or “confuse the persons”, but the lack of an ordering in the Trinity might seem to confuse the persons. Aquinas rescues the situation by appeal to the idea of “principle”. We saw in Ia q.33 a.1 that there is a “principle” in God with respect to origin that does not introduce any notion of priority. It’s on the basis of origin that we may rightly associate a natural ordering in the Trinity. Aquinas quotes St. Augustine as making the distinction that this is not “an ordering whereby one is prior to another, but whereby on is from another”.

A4: Examples from scripture (such as John 14:28, “The Father is greater than I”) strongly suggest that the Son is in some way less than the Father. Similarly, paternity is associated with the Father but not with the Son. Although Aquinas has already asserted equality amongst the persons, there still seems a lingering doubt that the Father is greater than the Son in some way. This is the challenge that various subordinationist heresies presented to the orthodox doctrine of the co-equality of the divine persons.

Aquinas’s defence of the orthodox position returns to the theme already suggested in a.1; God’s greatness is the perfection of the divine nature and this greatness is associated with the divine essence. Part of the perfection of the divine nature involves the paternity of the Father and the filiation of the Son and it is through the filiation that the Son attains to the perfection of the nature that is in the Father. Divine paternity and filiation provide an analogy with human paternity and filiation; but the analogy cannot be pushed too far as human paternity and filiation involve successiveness (see a.2). Paternity is of the essence of the Father because that is what constitutes the Father as Father; similarly filiation is of the essence of the Son. Therefore we can rightly claim that the same essence that is the paternity in the Father is the filiation in the Son and consequently the Son has the same dignity as the Father.

When we consider the scriptural witness, we can also observe the words of the Apostle Paul that “He thought it not robbery to be equal with God” (Philippians 2:6). It is clear that scripture that teaches any notion of non-equality actually refers to the humanity of Christ in the hypostatic union.

A5: John 14:10 tells us that the Son is in the Father and that the Father is in the Son; what does this mean? If we think of “being in” in the way that Aristotle took it to apply to created reality we seem to be left befuddled; it doesn’t work. Similarly, how can relational opposites “be in” each other?

Aquinas claims that the Father and the Son are “in” each other in three ways corresponding to essence, relation and origin. As far as essence is concerned, the Father is His own essence which is the same as the essence of the Son. If we think about the relation between the Father and the Son then it is clear that, conceptually speaking, the Father is in the Son is the same sense that the relation is in the Son and vice versa. As the procession of the Son is immanent to the Father, we also see that the Son remains within the Father. Conversely, everything is said by the Word and thus the Father is in the Son.

A6: Rounding off his survey of the equality amongst the divine persons, Aquinas turns to the power of Father in comparison to that of the Son. Following the strategy of a.4, Aquinas notes that power is associated with the perfection of the nature of God which is therefore associated with greatness.

A tricky objection suggests that the power of the Father enables Him to generate a Son equal to Himself, but that the Son cannot do likewise. Aquinas’ answer again alludes to the approach in a.4. Just as it is the same essence that is the paternity in the Father and the filiation in the son, so it is the same power by which the Father generates and the Son is generated. Although the power is the same, the Son is not able to generate because this omnipotence comes with a relation that differs between Father and Son.


Handy Concepts

• The starting point for understanding the equality amongst the persons of the Trinity is a recognition that ideas of equality and inequality pertain to the persons as they are the divine essence. Having grasped this, the co-equality of the persons follows naturally as does their equality in terms of power.
• The persons of the Trinity are co-eternal.
• The natural ordering of the persons in the Trinity does not imply any ordering of priority.
• Scriptural references to the Father being greater than the Son refer to the human nature in the hypostatic union.

Question 41 - The Persons and the Notional Acts

Why this Question Matters.

In Ia q.32 a.2, Aquinas introduced the ideas of the properties and of the notions or characteristic acts in God. We recall from there that the properties in God are what belong to each person, as a person, which allow them to be distinguished one from another and that the notions are these distinguished characteristics inasmuch as they are known by us. Thus the notions were introduced from the point of view of epistemology (how we may know the distinction between the persons of the Trinity) rather than ontology (the reality of the persons of the Trinity). It is the notions that allow us to know of the distinction between the persons. In the rest of Ia q.32 Aquinas defended what might be called the classical view of the notions; now it is time for him to give a lengthier account of them.


The Thread of the Argument

A1: In returning to the theme of the notions from Ia q.32, Aquinas has to join the treatment given there up with the discussion in Ia q.40. In the latter, when considering the ontology of the Trinity Aquinas had to give the idea of relation priority over the idea of origin. However, we recall that in Ia q.40 a.4 Aquinas was willing to admit that, conceptually speaking, we could think in terms of the relations constitutive of the persons as being presupposed by origins, which are themselves associated with the notions. The very short answer to this question summarizes this discussion by saying that in order to designate the order of origins among the persons, we have to attribute these notions to them.

In addition to this recapitulation, Aquinas addresses some further objections to the idea of the notions. For example, Boethius observed that when one attempts to apply Aristotle’s categories of being to God all of the nine accidental categories collapse down into substance, except for relation. Since the notions would naturally fit into the category of action, this would seem that we could only apply notion to the essence of God rather than to the persons. In reply to this objection, Aquinas distinguishes between two orders of origin (with corresponding acts) in God. The first is the procession of creatures from God, to which the reasoning of this objection does apply; this is an action of the whole essence of God. The second is the procession of divine person from divine person. But here the reasoning from Ia q.32 a.2-3 applies: in their being (as opposed to how we know about them) the notions simply are the relations.

Similarly, one might argue that what can be truly said of God must either be said of the essence or of the persons and that what we can say of the persons is limited to their names and the names of their properties. In answer, Aquinas recalls the difference between reality and what we can say of reality, and amplifies this with a demonstration of how we think of action as the origin of motion in created things contrasted with how we must think of this in God where there is no motion.

A2: Aquinas next asks whether the notional acts are voluntary (that is, are they a result of some definite act of His will) or whether they are necessary. In view here are mistakes such as those made by the Arians (and various other types of subordinationist) that would see the Father as supreme, bringing forth the Son and the Holy Spirit by acts of His will. But another problem is the opposite error of thinking that God is in some way made, by the force of necessity, to bring forth the Son and the Holy Spirit.

At the foundation of these errors is a misunderstanding of the analogy between the way creatures proceed from the Godhead and the way in which the persons of the Trinity proceed, leading to confusion between the two. It is clear from what has been said before about God’s intellect and will that he does bring forth creature by an act of His will. But it should by now be equally clear that the procession of the persons in the Godhead pertains to the very nature of the Godhead itself. In this sense it is true to say that the notional acts are necessary rather than voluntary. But we must remember that it is in the nature of God Himself for these personal processions of the Trinity to exist. Therefore we must to note that this type of per se necessity is not a necessity that can be in any sense considered as forcing God’s hand. Rather it is a necessity that reflects the nature of God Himself. One might make an analogy with the observation that it is necessary for me to be rational in order to be a human being.

A3: Having set forth his Trinitarian theology, Aquinas will move on next (in Ia qq.44-49) to talk about creation. We will see that Aquinas’s theology of creation is strongly Trinitarian in that he sees the procession of creatures from God in analogy to the procession of the persons from the Godhead. Here, some of that discussion is anticipated when Aquinas asks whether we are to understand the notional acts as processions from something-or-other or ex nihilo (that is, from nothing at all). It might at first sight seem as though the immanent procession of the persons has to be understood as a procession ex nihilo in the same way that the procession of creatures from the Godhead is a procession ex nihilo (Ia q.45 a.2). However, Aquinas denies this: the Son (for example) is not generated from nothing but from the very substance of the Father.

The root of the difficulty for this question, as Aquinas identifies it, is that when we talk about creation or about the making of things we distinguish between created makers who make things out of other pre-existing things but when we talk about God creating, we acknowledge that He creates from nothing. It’s therefore obviously very tempting to apply this to the procession of the persons from the Godhead and identify this as such an act of creation. This, however, is mistaken as it repeats the error made by the Arians in interpreting various scriptural passages as implying that the generation of the Son is such an act of creation. This is why in the creed we say that the Son “was begotten, not created”: the idea of generation from the Godhead must be clearly distinguished in reality and in the way we understand it from the creation of the created order. We must also remember (against other heresies that “divide the substance”) that the Father does not transfer some part of His nature to the Son in generating Him, but rather communicates the whole of His nature to Him.

A4: As the objections point out, there may be reason to doubt that we can associate the idea of a “power” in God with the notional acts. For example, the Son proceeds as the conception of God’s intellect and the Spirit proceeds as love in an act of God’s will. The argument of Ia q.25 a.1 might suggest that we shouldn’t consider God’s acts of understanding and will as coming under the purview of God’s power. However, as the idea of power is intimately tied up with the idea of being a principle of some act, Aquinas insists that we should consider the notional acts as deriving in some way from a power of God.

Aquinas emphasizes that we must recall that when we predicate things of God there are two different ways of distinguishing between them and that it is vital not to confuse the two. There is a real distinction between such predicates and there is a conceptual distinction. There is a real distinction between His essence and those things that He creates; similarly there is a real distinction between persons that we recognize through the notional acts. However, because there are no accidents in God, there is only a conceptual distinction between an action and the agent of that action. These considerations apply to the implicit distinction between a power and that of which the power is a principle. So those things that correspond to real distinctions, such as the coming forth of created things from God or the coming forth of persons from the Godhead can be associated with the idea of power in the sense of principle. But when we consider acts of God’s intellect or of His will, remembering that in reality will and intellect correspond with essence, we have to recognize that we can only make a distinction of reason and we use the notion of power as principle in an analogical sense.

A5: Continuing on the theme of the power of God associated with the notional acts, Aquinas asks whether the “power to generate” and the “power to spirate” are themselves real relations in the Godhead. Aquinas denies this on the grounds that a power in any agent is that by which the agent acts and that in so acting the agent produces something similar to itself with respect to the form by which it acts. This is precisely why the Son in being generated by this notional power of God is of the same essence as the Father.

A subtlety that Aquinas deals with is related to the fact that as realities, the divine essence and the relations are identical. We might think that, for example, “the power to generate” is associated with the corresponding relation through the identification of essence and relation. No ground is given here, though, as distinction must be made between the person who generates and that by which He generates. The Paternity of the Father is not that by which He generates; rather the essence is that by which the Father generates and the Paternity is that which constitutes the person who generates. The “power to generate” can, of course, be identified indirectly in this way with the person who generates but directly it is identified with the divine essence.

A6: Having established that one may talk about powers associated with the notional acts, it is important to nip in the bud incorrect idea that may flow from this. For example, the existence of such powers might suggest that it they be actualized more than once; why, for example, can the Father not bring forth more than one Son? To say that He cannot do so would appear to be limiting the limitless!

Aquinas recalls, in the sed contra, that in God the possible and the actual coincide and that this would therefore lead to the heretical assertion of more than three persons in the Godhead. To swat away this impious suggestion, Aquinas goes back to basics in giving a number of reasons why this line of thought is faulty. For example, at the root of the Trinity is that fact that the persons are defined and distinguished by being subsistent relations; we can count these as handed to us in revelation and there is no mechanism by which they may be multiplied. Similarly, the processions are associated with acts of God’s will and of His intellect; these acts are single simple acts again giving no basis for their multiplication.


Handy Concepts

• Notions or characteristic acts in God are concerned with how we may know the distinctions in the Trinity rather than simply how they are.
• Although there is an analogy between the procession of the persons in the Trinity and the procession of creatures from God, pushing the analogy too far leads to some of the classical heresies.
• The notions are necessary in the sense of being natural to God.

Question 40 - The Persons in Comparison to the Relations

Why this Question Matters.

Right at the start of his treatment of the Trinity Aquinas identified subsistent relation as the key concept in identifying and distinguishing the Persons of the Trinity. In the light of the material that he has developed since that introduction, he now returns to consider in greater depth the comparison of the Persons and the relational properties.


The Thread of the Argument

A1: Returning immediately to the theme of Question 28, Aquinas asks whether the relations in the Godhead can be identified with the Persons of the Trinity. The reason that he returns to this question is that he wants to address some of the possible problems and alternative approaches to the relational understanding of the Trinity, in the light of the theory that he has developed in the body of the treatise. Here Aquinas can recall that since the essence is the same as each Person (Question 39, Article 2) and each relation is necessarily the essence, we can identify the relations with the persons. Aquinas can apply the reasoning of this latter question to conclude that the relative properties are in the Persons and yet they are the Persons. In this way, Aquinas both argues against those who would attempt to drive a wedge between the relations and the Persons as well as preparing the ground for his contention in the next article that what distinguishes the Persons is founded in their relational properties rather than in what founds the relations.

The first objection suggested that if two things are the same, then the multiplication of one would imply the multiplication of the other. This would seem to rule out there being more than one relation in one Person; troubling if we reflect upon the paternity and common spiration in the Father. The answer to this objection allows Aquinas to amplify the point made in his reply: Person and relative property signify the same reality but differ conceptually. God’s simplicity excludes any composition of form and matter (therefore the abstract is to be identified with the concrete in God) and it excludes any composition of subject and accident (therefore any real attribute of God is His essence). The former means that, for example, God’s deity is God and it also implies that the Paternity of the Father is the Father: the relative properties and the Persons signify the same reality although their modes of signifying differ. The two identities together imply the identity of Person and relational property. The multiplication suggested in the objection need not happen: for example, the common spiration is not a single person subsisting per se but one property existing in two Persons in a way similar to the existence of one essence in two Persons (as seen in Question 30, Article 2).

The fact that Person and property signify the same reality and yet differ in their mode of signification allows us to understand that the relations determine distinct Persons in the Godhead yet do not determine distinct essences in the Godhead. The relational properties are only “in the essence” of God via this identity of Person, essence and relation; their signification only operates when considered as signifying something like a form in a subject.

A2: When we think of created things, and particularly when we thing about created things through the lens of Aristotle’s division of being into the categories, it’s hard to see that the relations are fundamental to the distinction between the Persons. In the Categories, being is divided into “substance” and the nine accidental categories, one of which is “relation”. This division implies that substance is, in a sense, primary and that relation is secondary: in this case, relation would appear to pre-suppose a distinction between substances. However, if we try to apply this reasoning to the relations in the Godhead and to the essence of God Himself, we have to be careful; the relations in the Godhead are subsistent and each the same as the essence. Putting this informally, we might ask whether God the Father is Father because he begets the Son or whether he begets the Son because He is Father. In contrast to other theologians of his day (Bonaventure, for example), Aquinas takes the latter view. The relational property of being Father is the primary source of what makes the Father a distinct Person; the fact that the Father is the originator of the Son and that the Son originates from the Father is secondary to the relational properties of being Father and of being Son.

In order to argue in support of this position, Aquinas identifies that the only possibilities for distinction in the Godhead arise from either origin or relation. There is in the Godhead, of course, no real difference between these, but they differ by their mode of signifying: origin signifies in the mode of an act and relation signifies in the mode of a form. In the created world, relation follows upon act, therefore Aquinas’s intellectual opponents apply this to the Trinity and argue that, for example, the Father is distinct from the Son because the one generates and the other is generated and that the relations follow after the fact. Aquinas identifies two major faults with this position.

The first problem is that in order to identify two things as distinct it is necessary to identify something intrinsic to them that provide a foundation for the distinction. Origin simply does not supply that intrinsic property, rather being a sort of trajectory from a thing to a thing that presupposes a distinction between them. Actually within a divine Person there are only two candidates that might provide the distinction: essence and relation. The former doesn’t distinguish, so it must be the latter that does. This line of reasoning explains Aquinas’s insistence in the first article that the relations are in the Persons.

The second problem is that positing the origins of the Persons as fundamental to the distinction between the Persons is prone to lead to the error of dividing something common to the three Persons. In other words, this approach leads to the idea of dividing the substance and therefore to tritheism.

A3: Even if we grant that it is the relations that make the Persons, is it possible that we might abstract the notion of relation from the notion of Person and still maintain a distinction between what would simply be hypostases of the Trinity? No: Aquinas insists that even when we are considering things as abstracted intellectually (as opposed to what is truly in reality) relation remains necessary for the distinction of the Persons. If we abstract away relation in our thinking, then Person evaporates from our thinking as well.

Aquinas considers how we make abstractions and identifies two fundamental types. When we consider a man as a rational animal, if we abstract the idea of rational from man and then remove the concept of rational, then we no longer have the concept of man but only the idea of animal. This example involves the abstraction of a universal from particulars. In contrast, if we consider the example of abstracting from a matter/form composite such as a bronze ring, abstracting and then removing the idea of a ring or circle still leaves us with bronze as a concept in the mind.

When we consider God, there are no universals and particulars and there is no composition of matter and form, but there remains the analogue of them by means of the different modes of signifying. Corresponding to the example of particulars and universals, abstracting and removing the properties leaves the common essence of God but not the hypostases which are analogical to particulars. When the properties that do not constitute the Persons are abstracted and removed in the sense of the matter/form abstraction, the concept of hypostasis remains. However, if the properties that constitute the Persons are removed, the concept of hypostasis vanishes. The point is that as the relational properties are subsistent, they “bring along with them” their corresponding supposits. One simply cannot be thought of without the other.

Those that argue that origin provides the foundation for relation might suggest that one can therefore abstract away the notion of relation whilst still leaving origin as the basis for the hypostases. However, in the first place Aquinas has shown the weakness of this position in the previous article and secondly since every hypostasis with a rational nature is a Person (following Boethius) it would be necessary to abstract way the rationality of the nature rather than the properties constituting the Person in order to be left with a hypostasis which is not a Person.

A4: In asking whether the characteristic (or notional) acts such as begetting and spirating are presupposed by the relations, Aquinas has the chance to summarize and elaborate upon his teaching from the earlier articles and the opportunity to distinguish between reality and how we may conceptualize that reality. Here he explicitly mentions the two possibilities: either the Father is the Father because He generates or the Father generates because He is Father. Aquinas favours the latter, but he is willing to make conceptual distinctions that explain the structure of the problem and the approach of other theologians.

Assuming that the relations in God really constitute the Persons and make them distinct then we can observe that origins in God can be signified actively (e.g. generation or spiration) or passively (e.g. being begotten or proceeding). This distinction allows us to observe that the origins as passively signified are conceptually prior to the properties of the Persons who proceed. When origins are signified actively, they are conceptually prior to any non-constitutive property of the Person. For example, the characteristic act of the common spiration is conceptually prior to un-named relation common to the Father and the Son. So in the conceptual realm, when we think of what constitutes the Person of the Father we can think in terms of a relation that presupposes the characteristic act of begetting but we can also think in terms of the relation constitutive of the Father being presupposed by the characteristic act. This process of distinction mirrors the conceptual distinction that one might make between the word “Father” signifying the divine relation of paternity and the subsistent Person.


Handy Concepts

• The relations constitute and distinguish the divine Persons.
• Person and property signify the same reality but differ in their mode of signification.
• “God the Father begets the Son because He is Father” rather than “God the Father is Father because he begets the Son.”
• We cannot abstract the idea of relation from the divine Persons in order to leave some kind of bare but distinct hypostases.
• Distinctions can be made facilitating the conceptual priority of the characteristic acts over the relations.

Difficulties

• Question 40 has gained the reputation of being one of the hardest questions to understand in the summa. Emery quotes Dondaine as saying that it considers “the most arduous problems in Latin Trinitarian theology”.
• Aquinas’s conclusions in this question represent one side of an enduring split in Western theology between what one might approximately characterize as a Dominican school and a Franciscan school.
• Article 4 appears to make distinctions between the real and our conceptual understanding of the real that almost contradict one another.

Question 39 - The Persons in Comparison to the Essence

Preamble.

Aquinas has now spent some time investigating the Persons of the Trinity as Persons. For the rest of the Trinitarian treatise, he will investigate the relationship between the Persons and various other aspects of the Trinity. In this question, he investigates the relationship between the Persons and the essence; in Question 40 a detailed inquiry is made into the Persons and the relations and properties; in Question 41 the characteristic acts of the Persons are considered; in Questions 42 the Persons are compared with one another; and in Question 43 the missions of the Persons are considered.


Why this Question Matters.

The Christian doctrine of the Trinity is prone to the opposite errors of tri-theism (where the Persons are seen as individual Gods) and of modalism (where the Persons are “collapsed” into the divine essence and are seen merely as “modes of being” of the divinity). In the first article Aquinas recalls that divine simplicity implies that the Persons and the divine essence are the same reality; but that there is a real distinction between the Persons because they are subsistent relations. With this apparently paradoxical situation explained through our analogical understanding of God, the rest of the question is devoted to how we may speak of, and understand, the Persons in relation to the divine essence without falling into error.


The Thread of the Argument

A1: Returning to the theme of how we are to understand the idea of God as being three persons in one essence, Aquinas asks whether the essence in God is the same as a Person. At first sight, this proposition would seem to be nonsense: for example, if the persons are distinct then this would imply distinction in the essence which contradicts the unity of God’s essence. Similarly, identifying Person and essence would seem to mean that each Person (or subject) would have its own nature; again a problem.

Aquinas returns to Divine simplicity in his answer: simplicity implies immediately that the essence of God can be identified with each Person. However, this answer is troubling in that we’ve spent many questions demonstrating the distinction between the Persons and now we seem to be saying that really they are the same. Some theologians, recognising this difficulty, proposed that we can find some way to distinguish between Person and essence. Aquinas rejects this saying that the relations in God (which define the Persons) are the Divine essence because of Divine simplicity. We must affirm that essence and Person are the same reality whilst simultaneously holding that there is a real distinction among the Persons. To reconcile this apparent paradox we remember that a Person is a relation subsisting in the Divine nature; the distinction between the Divine essence and the Persons is not a real distinction but a conceptual one.

This conceptual distinction between Person and essence allows us to affirm something of the essence while denying it of the Persons. Therefore we can simultaneously affirm the unity of the essence and the distinction of the Persons. The strangeness of this position arises from the fact that in God the relations are subsistent; in created things this is never true and therefore analogies that we might attempt with creatures break down. Thus, as far as created natures are concerned, individuals are individuated as subjects by matter. When we use the notion of “subject” or “hypostasis” when referring to God by analogy with created subjects we have to remember that the principle of individuation that gets us the notion of “subject” is different. To think of three blobs of “stuff” within God pushes the analogy too far; although they are analogous, individuation by relation is different from individuation by matter.

A2: Aquinas continues this theme of naming Divine realities by analogy with created realities when he turns to the question of whether we can say that the three Persons are “of one essence”. In creation the nature of a species is individuated by matter; this means that we perceive the nature of a thing through its form and its individuality through its being a subject having that form. By analogy we talk of the essence as being the form of the three Persons. Now when we use the genitive “of” with created things we are happy to say that a form is “of” the subject that has the form. So we refer to the “health of John”. We don’t say that the thing is “of” the form; “John of health” (or “John is of health”) without a qualifying adjective (“John is of good health”) simply doesn’t work. Similar considerations allow us to say both “the essence of the three Persons” and “three Persons of one essence”, with emphasis on the unity of the essence.

A3: We can claim that the essence of God is the same as a Person and that the three Persons are of one essence; we can go even further than this and name an individual Person “God”. But when we do this are we using the name “God” in the same way as when we use the name “man” in the sentence “Socrates is a man”? In the latter, when we say that “Plato, Socrates and Cicero are each men” we mean that that there are three men under consideration. When we say that “The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are each God”, are we saying that there are three Gods? The objections suggest that that is precisely what we mean; but of course Deuteronomy demands “Hear oh Israel! The Lord your God is One God”.

To resolve this, Aquinas considers the more general question of how any name applied to the essence of God can be applied to each of the Persons individually. He immediately distinguishes between names that signify the essence as nouns and names that are adjectives and claims that such nouns are predicated of the Persons in the singular only (so that saying “The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are each God” only refers to one God). Adjectives, however, can be predicated in the singular or the plural. To see this, we recall that substances (signified by nouns) are those things that exist in and of themselves and that accidents (signified by adjectives) have their existence in some substance. Hence nouns are put into the singular or the plural according to the form corresponding to the substance; adjectives then agree grammatically with their nouns.

When we consider creatures, the only case where there is single form for a multitude is where we have a collection and this is signified by a collective noun which is in the singular (“a profession”). When described adjectivally (“professionals”) we get the plural, however. It is different when we consider God: we’ve seen in the last article that the divine essence has a signification like a form and this form is most definitely a unity. Therefore nouns that signify the divine essence are predicated of the Persons only in the singular. (Socrates, Plato and Cicero are three men that share the form of a human being and are each individuated by matter, but Father, Son and Holy Spirit, individuated by relative opposition, are not three Gods but one God.)

Adjectives are predicated in the plural because of the plurality of Personal subjects. An example from the Athanasian Creed illustrates the difference between the divine nouns and adjectives: using adjectives we speak of three who are eternal, uncreated, and immeasurable; but we speak of them as the eternal, the uncreated, and the immeasurable.

A4: In a sentence like “drink another cup, my friend” the word “cup” really refers to the wine that the cup contains; we’re not being asked to suppose that someone is literally to consume a cup! In the terminology of medieval logic the “signification” of the word “cup” in this sentence is a cup, but the “supposition” is the wine that the cup contains; we are “supposed” to infer that the sentence is referring to the wine rather than to the cup. This distinction between signification and supposition facilitates the precise analysis of how we use certain types of sentences in language.

In this question Aquinas asks whether concrete names for the substance of God can have a Person as their supposit. As the Nicene Creed identifies the Son as “God from God” it would appear that we have to allow for this. Aquinas rejects some contemporary theories as inadequate, claiming that the name “God” signifies the divine essence as existing in the one that has that essence; this wider understanding of the word “God” allows it to supposit for a Person. We therefore have to be careful to recognize when the word “God” supposits for the essence and when it supposits for a Person in a given sentence.

In replying to the objections, Aquinas distinguishes between the way that words work when applied to the created and to the uncreated. For example, when we use the word “man” in a sentence, its natural supposit is to an individual person, and something extra has to be in the sentence in order for it to be understood in the sense of “humanity”. This is because we infer the conceptual notion of humanity from the collection of individuals. In contrast, the word “God” is naturally associated with the common nature and we have to have something added to it in order to understand the supposition as referring to a Person (So in “God from God” the “from” shows that a procession is involved, which is characteristic of a Person.) This observation gets us out of the conundrum caused by the two sentences “God generates” (referring to the Father) and “God does not generate” (referring to the Son) offered in the third objection. Here, the first sentence contains the characteristic act of generation that identifies that the supposition of the sentence is the Person of the Father. The second sentence does not contain such a characteristic act (it would have to read “The God who is generated does not generate” in order to supposit the Person of the Son).

The replies to the fourth and fifth objections give extended examples of how to apply Aquinas’s teaching to unravel various apparent paradoxes caused by careless inference about the supposition of the word “God”.

A5: We have certain concrete names for the divinity, such as “God”, but we also have more abstract names like “essence”. Aquinas can now ask the same question as Article 4 for such abstract names; can they supposit for a Person? This time the answer is that they cannot. In answering this question, Aquinas is following the lines of a medieval controversy involving Joachim of Fiore, who had attacked the opinion of Peter Lombard, and whose opinions were promptly condemned by the fourth Lateran council in 1215. In following the line laid down by the council, Aquinas has to be sensitive to the use of language by the Church Fathers who had been willing to say that “essence is from essence”.

Aquinas points to Joachim’s mistake as being the fact that he has not understood that to understand a proposition, one must not only take into account what is signified but also the way in which things are signified. In this case a word like “God” signifies (or supposits) in a different way to a word like “essence” even though in reality God is the same as the divine essence. “God” signifies the divine essence as existing in one who has it, therefore it can signify in a way that refers to a Person. “Essence” on the other hand, signifies the divine essence as an abstract form and cannot therefore signify a Person.

The objections fall into two themes: the use by the Church Fathers of expressions that do apparently supposit a Person with abstract names for God; and apparent paradoxes caused by careless attention to detail.

Aquinas, following his usual reverential exposition of the Fathers, claims that they sometimes expressed things more strongly than their terminology would support. Now that terminological precision has been achieved, one should read the Fathers with the appropriate translation of terms or by disambiguating such expressions with the addition of appropriate terms. So a phrase in Augustine like “essence from essence” should be read as “The Son, who is the essence, is from the Father, who is the essence”.

As an example of one of the paradoxes, the fifth objection observes that since the Father is the essence, “the essence generates”. Therefore if “the essence does not generate” (as this article would assert), we obtain a contradiction. To resolve this paradox, Aquinas distinguishes between substantival names (like “Julius”) which automatically point to concrete particulars and adjectival names (like “Caesar”) which do not. An adjectival name requires a substantival name conjoined to it in order to signify (“Julius Caesar”). Since names like “essence” are adjectival, they cannot supposit for a Person. We would need to say something like “the essence is the God who generates” in order for the supposit to work. Hence there is no paradox because the word “essence” in the two sentences is not working on the same way.

A6: A brief article covers the question of whether propositions like “God is three Persons” or “God is a Trinity” make sense. In such propositions, the Persons are taken as predicates of the concrete essential names. Aquinas affirms that this can be done, by building on the analysis of Article 5, recalling the difference between adjectival names of the Persons (that cannot be predicated of the essence) and substantival names (which can). We then have to recall that not only is the divine essence the same as one Person, but also is the same as two or three Persons; therefore any combination of the Persons can be predicated of the essence. As we saw in Article 4 the name “God”, by its very nature, supposits for the essence. Therefore just as “the essence is three Persons” is true, so is “God is three Persons”.

A7: Nouns can be either common nouns (that name items in general) or proper nouns (that name particular items). So “apostle” is a common noun whereas “Paul” is a proper noun. But notice that we sometimes refer to the apostle Paul as “the Apostle”; when we do this, using a common noun as a proper noun, it is called “appropriation”. In the context of Trinitarian theology, appropriation is the ascription of common (and therefore essential) names to one of the Persons. In this Article, Aquinas notes that we do appropriate essential names to the persons (he gives the example “Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God” from 1 Cor. 1:24) and provides a justification for this practice.

We can come to know of the essential attributes of God by the light of natural reason, and Aquinas has spent some effort in working this approach out in the treatise on the One God, using analogies of the Divine with the created. However, the attributes proper to each Person are beyond natural reason and are known only to faith. Aquinas argues that, as the Personal properties are so obscure, it is fitting that essential attributes be appropriated to the Persons in order to make the Faith manifest. However, as the objections point out, this is not without its dangers. Aquinas identifies two valid types of appropriation: in the first case by way of similarity (for example, things to do with the intellect are assimilated to the Son, who proceeds as the Word); and by way of dissimilarity (for example, power is appropriated to the Father in contrast to the way in which human fathers get weaker with age). Appropriation by similarity is much the more common of the two.

In appropriating essential attributes to the Persons, Aquinas is clear that we do not understand these attributes to be proper to the Persons, but that the process helps to make the Persons better known to us though similarity and dissimilarity to created things known to us. In doing so, we do have to be careful not to fall into error: for example, we must remember that the Father is not wise through the wisdom of the Son but rather is wise by the wisdom that is the Divine essence.

A8: Aquinas now turns to particular examples of appropriations made by some of the Fathers of the Church in their writings. The selection appears to have been made according to their importance in medieval controversies and Aquinas’s aim is to justify these appropriations against objections drawn from such controversies.

This final article is laid out in an unusual form for the summa. We have the usual section of objections laid before us first, attacking a series of appropriations, but then the rest of the question is taken up with Aquinas’s extended answer which lays out a series of principles for appropriation and then takes each objection in turn within the body of the answer. The result, very much longer than the usual respondeo section, reads a little bit like an individual academic paper embedded within the body of the summa. Because of its length, we will not attempt to précis all of the arguments and counter arguments for each of the appropriations mentioned, but will merely describe the principles that Aquinas lays out.

Aquinas begins with an important reiteration of how we know God by analogy with how we know His creatures; and of how we know creatures themselves. Our first grasp of a created object is through its very being; we first grasp that it is. The second step is for us to understand the created object as a unity; it is not simply a being, but a being that makes sense to be identified as a unified thing. We then grasp the thing insofar as it has a power to act and to cause in the world. Finally, we understand the thing in relation to what it causes; indeed, we could not claim much knowledge of a thing unless we knew how it fits into the causal structure of the world. We can see in this division a relation to the structure of much of the first part of the summa: QQ. 2-10 deal with God in his being as known through analogy with His creatures; Q. 11 deals with God’s unity; QQ. 14-26 deal with God’s operations; and QQ. 44ff. deal with God’s relationship to creatures.

From the point of view of this question, however, Aquinas takes this division of the modes of knowing creatures (and thereby knowing God, by analogy) to point to different ways in which appropriation can be applied to God. We can apply appropriation from the point of view of God’s being; this gives us the Father-Son-Holy Spirit triad “eternity”, “species” and “use” that is the subject of one of the objections. We can consider appropriation from the point of view of God’s unity; this gives us the triad “unity”, “equality” and “harmony”. From the point of view of God’s power of causation we obtain the triad “power”, “wisdom” and “goodness”. Finally, considered in the light of God’s relationship to creatures, we obtain “through Him”, “with Him” and “in Him”, corresponding to efficient, formal and final divine causality.


Handy Concepts

• The distinction between the Divine essence and the Persons of the Trinity is not a real distinction but a conceptual one.
• Within God, the principle of individuation of the Persons is by relation, in contrast to the individuation of created objects by matter. Although analogous, we have to remember that individuation by relation is different from individuation by matter.
• When considering a sentence in a language, we can talk about the signification of a term (which is what the term might be taken as pointing literally to) and the supposition of the term (which is what the term is really pointing to).
• When talking about creation we infer “humanity” from examples of individual human persons. But when talking about divinity we infer the individual Persons from the common divine essence.
• The process of using a common noun as a proper noun is called appropriation. In the context of Trinitarian theology, appropriation is the ascription of common (and therefore essential) names to one of the Persons.
• Appropriation helps to make the Persons better known to us though similarity and dissimilarity to created things already known to us.

Difficulties

• Much of this question might be seen as simply a defence of “how things are done” and of what was accepted and rejected by the Fathers of the Church. It is, of course, worth asking whether the principles that Aquinas used correspond to the principles that the Fathers used. One might also ask whether what we have here is a theory that designed to fit the facts rather than a theory that will predict the facts. But in defence of Aquinas one must also surely recognize that what he presents is principled and coherent with an organic relationship to what has gone before him.