Summa I, Q.28, Art. 3: Why the Divine Relations Are Really Distinct from Each Other (Kinds of Opposition, Names Equivocal by Reason)

Orientation #

He opens by placing a. 3 in the treatise: the first part showed proceedings that remain in the doer (God’s understanding and loving himself), this question treats the relations based on them, and the persons distinguished by those relations begin at q. 29. “Last time we saw” aa. 1–2: real relations exist in God, and relation is not really distinct from the divine substance (prev. lecture). He closes announcing a. 4 (“how many of these relations are there”) after a break, and that the treatise on the persons will show why four relations do not give four persons. The previous class worked through a. 2 (relation identical with the divine essence); the next treats a. 4 (why exactly four relations).

The class, in order #

1. Where a. 3 sits (“the second, third articles they’ll kind of go together”) #

Point: a. 2 compared the relations to the divine substance (no real distinction, else composition in God, who is “altogether simple,” q. 3); a. 3 compares them to each other, where they are really distinct, else the Sabellian heresy.

• Scripture backing a. 2: “the Word was toward God” (a real relation to the Father) and “the Word was God” (same thing). Thomas is “going back upon what St. John taught us.”
• Distinction real vs. of reason (a. 1) is “a very subtle distinction,” and it matters: without real relations “the persons would not be really distinct.”
• It is the nature of relation, “like any kind of opposite,” to distinguish between it and its opposite.

2. The objections and Boethius (“But against all this nonsense is what Boethius says”) #

Point: he reads the three objections, noting their force, then the sed contra.

1. Things the same to one and the same are the same to each other; each relation is the same secundum rem with the divine essence; so they are not really distinct. “That’s interesting objection.”
2. Fatherhood and sonhood differ from the essence only by a distinction of reason, like goodness and power (or truth, understanding); but that kind of distinction does not make goodness and power really distinct; so neither fatherhood and sonhood.
3. In God there is no real distinction except by origin; one relation does not arise from another. His gloss: the Son proceeds from the Father, “not Sonhood from Fatherhood.”

• Sed contra, Boethius De Trinitate: substance contains the unity, relation multiplies the Trinity. (Thomas: theology is about the divinity of the Trinity and the humanity of Christ.) Without real distinction there is a Trinity of reason only — the error of Sabellius.
• Aside: “error” from to wander; the Greek gives “planet,” the wandering stars; Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, “we wander in illusions.” Error is a disordered movement of reason.

3. The body: relation includes opposition, opposition includes distinction (“the respect of one to another”) #

Point: the argument of the response as he reads it.

1. Whatever is attributed to something carries everything in its definition (attribute “man” and you attribute rational, animal…).
2. The definition of relation is the respect of one to another — Aristotle’s pros ti, translated ad aliquid; the same word St. John uses, pros ton theon, “toward God,” not “with.”
3. Such a respect implies a distinction, “according to which something is opposed to another relatively.” Aristotle’s four kinds of opposition in the Categories: contradiction, lack and having, contraries, relatives.
4. A real opposition gives a real distinction; a. 1 showed the relation in God is real; so there is real relative opposition, and opposition in its notion includes distinction. Conclusion: real distinction in God “not according to an absolute thing,” the essence, in which is “the highest unity and simplicity,” but “according to a relative thing.”

• Absolute vs. relative: “absolute” in “the squishy Washington media” is loose; for Thomas it is always the contrary of relative. “I’m absolutely a man, absolutely white”; but a father or a teacher only towards someone.
• His stock question: are Father, Son and Holy Spirit one thing or three? Answer: it depends what you mean. Res absoluta: one thing, one God, not three gods. Secundum rem relativam: three.
• Aside: how important the pagan Aristotle is here; he wonders whether Thomas prayed for him.

4. Reply to obj. 1: action and undergoing (“the third book of natural hearing”) #

Point: the first objection is “very hard,” and Thomas answers it from Physics III, lectio 5 — one of the two places where Thomas shows how to distinguish the ten figures of predication, since there Aristotle compares motion with acting upon and undergoing.

• The axiom holds only for things the same in reality and in definition (the Latin gives two synonyms for cloak, tunica and indumentum), not for things that differ in definition.
• Aristotle: acting upon is the same as motion, and so is undergoing, yet acting upon and undergoing are not the same, because acting implies respect to that from which the motion is, undergoing that which is from another.
• Kicking: “my kicking you” is not another thing than “your being kicked,” except in respect — kicking is from me to you, being kicked is in you from me. Water on the stove: the stove’s warming the water is the water’s being warmed, yet they differ in definition (warming from the fire to the water; being warmed in the water from the fire).
• Likewise fatherhood and sonhood are each the same secundum rem with the essence, but their definitions imply opposite respects: the father is the one from whom another proceeds — Albert the Great: habens in se aliquid de se in alio, “having something of himself in another” — the son is from another. So not altogether the same, hence distinguished.
• “That’s a very subtle thing”; a student notes the objection “sounds insane” as a mathematical principle (two things equal to a third are equal), and he agrees it is “a very obvious objection” — which shows how hard the Trinity is.
• Aristotle’s help: the road from Athens to Thebes is the same road as from Thebes to Athens (before two-lane highways), yet going from Athens to Thebes is not going from Thebes to Athens. “It’s a hard, hard distinction, but see a little bit of it there.”
• Aside: Charles De Koninck lecturing on the eight books of the Physics, explaining the text and then showing how a modern philosopher’s difficulty would dissolve had he read it.

5. Reply to obj. 2: the four opposites (“power and goodness do not imply in their definitions one some kind of opposition”) #

Point: the likeness in obj. 2 is real but the difference is that power and goodness are no kind of opposite, while father and son are relatives.

• How can the substance be both fatherhood and sonhood? Go back to the treatise on the unity of God: how can it be both will and understanding, truth and goodness, power and will? If you grasp how God simply contains these, it is not too hard to see him containing fatherhood and sonhood in one thing.
• The difference requires Aristotle’s four opposites (Categories; also Metaphysics V):
  • Contradictories: to be and not to be — Hamlet’s line is “a question” because you cannot both be and not be, and must either be or not be.
  • Lack and having: lack is non-being in a subject capable of having. This glass is not blind though it does not see; everything sees or does not see, but not everything sees or is blind. (Many senses of lack in Aristotle, not gone into.)
  • Contraries: virtue/vice, health/sickness, black/white. Going down the list they have more in common: lack and having share a subject, contraries share subject and genus — vice is a real habit, a real inclination (to eat too much, to run away in battle), not the mere lack of virtue.
  • Relatives: double and half, which also share a genus.
• Power and goodness: contraries? lack and having? relatives? No. So God is truly powerful and truly good without two really distinct things. Can God be Father and Son without real distinction? No, because something relative is in the very definition of each, and relatives are one kind of opposite.
• Later resumed: “likeness is a slippery thing” (he attributes it to Plato, then retracts: “He didn’t say that”). Power and goodness, like fatherhood and sonhood, are the same as the substance and belong most of all to God — yet there is no opposition between the two.
• Aside: a Laval doctoral thesis on Marx: the Marxists make much of opposites but never distinguish the kinds; the thesis tried to bring Aristotle’s distinctions to bear.

6. Digression: the rule of two or three, and the four species of pride (“he follows the rule of two or three”) #

Point: when Thomas has four he divides into two twos or one and three; pride shows the second, opposites the first.

• Gregory the Great, Moralia, four species of pride: thinking you have an excellence you lack; having it from yourself; having it by your own merits; having it uniquely. Examples: claiming to know the Pythagorean theorem without being able to demonstrate it (the calculus professor: he could not teach without it, few of his students could prove it); saying “I discovered it” when Euclid taught me; thinking I deserved my grace, or deserved to be created while others did not; “I’m the only guy who knows it” (the joke that only two or three understand relativity and Einstein is not one of them). Thomas divides into three — the thing, the way of having, the uniqueness — and subdivides the way (own discovery/power vs. own merits).
• Opposites he divides into two: contradictories, lack/having and contraries all have one member removing the other (sight excludes blindness; “if I have virtue, I don’t have the opposite vice” — “that’s very discouraging” going through Aristotle’s list). Relatives instead posit each other: nothing is double without something being half; yet the double cannot be what it is double of — four is double of two, so not two; two half of four, so not four. So “one posits the other, but still one can’t be the other.” Two, then subdivided into three.
• The rule is his own from reading Thomas, not a stated rule: John divided into two, Matthew into three; the 150 Psalms into three following Augustine, marked by Ps. 50 (repentance), 100 (good deeds), 150 (resting in God), three stages of charity; the treatise on the Trinity, 17 questions in three parts, the 15 on the persons in two.
• Why it matters: relatives are a different kind of opposite, which is why Father, Son and Holy Spirit are together, none before or after.

7. Digression: Porphyry’s Isagoge and names equivocal by reason (“the great Porphyry”) #

Point: imitating Porphyry’s proemium, he gives five reasons why one must understand names equivocal by reason, and “opposite” is one such name — the tool for obj. 2.

• Porphyry, anti-Christian (books burned; Augustine speculates why), yet his Isagoge to the Categories is respected by pagans, “Mohammedans” and Christians; Albert’s paraphrase was the first Albert he read at Laval; Cajetan wrote a commentary. Written for “Chrysostom” [ed.: ASR; the addressee of the Isagoge is Chrysaorius], who asked what genus, species, difference, property, accident mean. Proemium: needed for the Categories, for definition (species by genus and difference), division (genus into species by differences) and demonstration (property proved of species by definition). “That’s magnificent.” None of his philosophy colleagues had read it. By antonomasia it is “the Isagoge,” introduction to logic and in a sense to all philosophy.
• Clue from the Summa Contra Gentiles (his favourite): every name said univocally of many is genus, difference, species, property or accident; none holds of God and man; so no name is said univocally of God. Hence the Isagoge is a complete distinction of names said univocally (one exact meaning of all). Names with many meanings are equivocal, by chance or by reason.
• Five reasons to understand names equivocal by reason: (1) names said of all things (being, one) and of very many (act, ability) are all equivocal by reason; (2) the axioms all thinking rests on use such words; (3) Sophistical Refutations: the commonest mistake is mixing senses of a word — no one is fooled by “Maris hit 61 home runs with a bat; a bat is a flying rodent,” but with a likeness among meanings one is; his sophism against “the whole is more than a part”: animal is a part of man, yet animal includes dog, cat, horse — resolved by composing part vs. universal whole (Metaphysics V); (4) to know what wisdom (being, one, thing — res itself, as seen here) and political philosophy (“political” is equivocal by reason) are about; (5) to name and understand a bit what cannot be sensed or imagined.
• Application: “opposite” is equivocal by reason — virtue/vice, blindness/sight, double/half are not opposed the same way; the treatise on the substance of God said our names for God are analogous, “another way of saying equivocal by reason.” Power and goodness are not any kind of opposite; father and son are.

8. Reply to obj. 3: distinguished by opposition according to procession (“they are taken by opposition according to the procession”) #

Point: relations do not proceed from one another, but are taken by opposition according to the procession of one from another.

• Aristotle, Metaphysics V: relations are based on quantity (including the one) or on action. I am a father because I generated my son; fatherhood is based on that act, not the same as it. Likewise we understand the divine relations as based on one generating another and two breathing another.
• The father is the one from whom another proceeds, the son the one who proceeds from another: “distinguished ultimately by procession.”
• Four is double and half: not said absolutely of four (odd or even is absolute), but towards different things; the relation is not the quantity but based on it — because four is four it is double of two and half of eight.

9. Recap and preview (“Let’s see where we are, as Lincoln would say”) #

Point: a. 1, real relations; aa. 2–3, relations compared to the substance (distinction in definition, none secundum rem) and to each other (real distinction, not by a res absoluta but a relative thing); a. 4 next, how many — four, and the treatise on the persons must explain why four relations do not give four persons. Break.

His words #

• going forwards / proceedings — processiones that remain within the doer [ed.: processions]
• secundum rem — “really”, as opposed to according to the meaning of the name
• ad aliquid / pros ti — Aristotle’s name for relation, “toward something”; St. John’s pros ton theon
• opposite — four kinds: contradiction, lack and having [ed.: privation and habit], contraries, relatives
• absolute — always opposed to relative; res absoluta vs. res relativa
• natural hearing — [ed.: Physics], third book, “Lectio 5”
• ten figures of predication — [ed.: categories]
• acting upon / undergoing — [ed.: action and passion]; the latter also “passion”
• tunica / indumentum — the two Latin synonyms for cloak
• habens in se aliquid de se in alio — Albert the Great’s definition of father
• rule of two or three — his observed rule of Thomas’s divisions
• the fifth book of wisdom — [ed.: Metaphysics V]
• lack — non-being in a subject able to have (the glass is not blind)
• antonomasia — how “the Isagoge” got its short title
• univocal — said with one and the same exact meaning of all
• equivocal by chance / by reason — the latter “another way of saying analogous”
• composing part vs. universal whole — the two senses in the sophism
• looking philosophy / doing philosophy — wisdom and political philosophy
• res — noted as itself equivocal
• ability — [ed.: potency]

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, ST I q. 28 a. 3: objections 1–3, sed contra (Boethius), response, replies 1–3
• Boethius, De Trinitate (via the sed contra)
• Aristotle, Physics III, Thomas lectio 5 (via reply 1): acting upon, undergoing and motion
• John 1:1, the Greek pros ton theon
• Porphyry, Isagoge, proemium (from memory)

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Categories, on the four oppositions; Metaphysics V on opposites, relatives (based on quantity or action), whole and part; Sophistical Refutations
• Thomas, ST I q. 3 (God altogether simple); the treatise on the unity/substance of God; q. 29 ff. on the persons
• Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles, no name said univocally of God and creatures
• Albert the Great, on the father; paraphrase of the Isagoge; Cajetan, commentary on the Isagoge
• Gregory the Great, Moralia, four species of pride
• Augustine, on the division of the Psalms; on Porphyry’s hostility
• Thomas’s divisions of John, Matthew, the Psalms
• Shakespeare, Comedy of Errors; Hamlet (“to be or not to be”)
• Aristotle, the road from Athens to Thebes

His questions #

• Are God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit one thing or three things? It depends: one res absoluta (one God), three relative things.
• Is my kicking you something really different from your being kicked? Not absolutely, only in respect: kicking is from me to you, being kicked in you from me.
• Is the warming of the water something different from the water being warmed? Same thing, different in definition.
• Is the road from Athens to Thebes the same as from Thebes to Athens? Is going one way the same as going the other? The same road; not the same going — a hard distinction.
• Are power and goodness contraries, lack and having, or relatives? None; so no real distinction. Father and Son are relatives, so really distinct.
• Is everything either seeing or blind? No: this glass does not see but is not blind; blindness is lack in a subject able to have sight.
• Am I proud when I say I know the Pythagorean theorem? Not if I really can demonstrate it; proud if I pretend, or claim I discovered it myself.
• Is four double or half? Both, towards different things; neither is said of four absolutely, as odd or even is.
• Why four relations don’t give four persons? Left open — for the treatise on the persons.