Summa I, Q.28, Art. 4 and Intro to Q.29: The Four Real Relations in God and the Plan of the Treatise on the Divine Persons

Orientation #

He begins at “Article four here” and at the end says “the treatise on the Trinity is divided into three parts… now we’re going to begin the third part”; he refers back to “what we learned in treatise on the understanding of God” and to “the way the philosopher names this category,” which “we’re talking before about” (prev. lecture). The previous class did q.28 a.3 on the real distinction of the relations, and the next takes up q.29 a.1 on Boethius’s definition of person.

The class, in order #

1. The four objections: more than four relations (“they like to multiply these things”) #

He reads the objections, each claiming real relations beyond fatherhood, sonhood, spiration, procession; he notes first that the last two have no proper names, so the name of the activity (spiratio) or the common name (procession) is borrowed.

• Obj. 1: God understanding himself and willing himself give relations of understander to understood, willer to willed, “which seem to be real.”
• Obj. 2: real relations in God follow the intelligible procession of the word; but intelligible relations are multiplied forever (Avicenna): I know a triangle, I know that I know it, I know that I know that I know it. He ties this to Aristotle, Natural Hearing III, right after acting and undergoing, among the reasons people think the infinite exists: “the mind never gives out.”
• Obj. 3: there are ideas in God (Augustine, “his Platonic background”); they differ only by respect to creatures (dog by one idea, cat by another); so many eternal relations.
• Obj. 4: equality, likeness, identity are relations and are in God from eternity (Father like the Son, Son equal to the Father).
• Aside: “It really exercises your mind”; Aristotle in the book on dialectic says its first use is to exercise the mind, gumnasia.

2. The sed contra as the opposite error: fewer than four (“the same road from Athens to Thebes”) #

The point: this sed contra is not an authority settling the case but the error of defect, as the objections are the error of excess.

• Sed contra: by Natural Hearing III the road from Athens to Thebes is the same as from Thebes to Athens; so fatherhood and sonhood would be one relation, not four.
• Aristotle names the category not “relation” but pros ti, “towards something”; in daily life we say “a relation between us” as if one, but I am towards my son, wife, student otherwise than they are towards me; the double is towards the half otherwise than the half towards the double. So two relations, not one.
• This is the pattern of the disputed questions: arguments on both sides, the truth in between. Two ways of erring: excess and defect. Shakespeare: “all my reports go with the modest truth, nor more, nor clipped, but so”; Falstaff: those who say more or less than the truth “are villains and the sons of darkness”; the oath “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”
• Aristotle’s four cases: to say what is is, or what is not is not, is true; to say what is is not, or what is not is, is false. Saying what is not is = adding to the truth (the objections); saying what is is not = less than the truth (the sed contra).

3. The corpus: relation founded on quantity or on action (“all relation is founded either upon quantity”) #

The point: dividing always by two, Thomas arrives at exactly four real relations.

• “The philosopher” is Aristotle by antonomasia, as Porphyry’s Introduction to the Categories became simply “the Isagoge”; De Koninck called Thomas “a very humble student of Aristotle.”
• The fifth book of wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics V] takes up the words used most in wisdom, in the axioms, and everywhere, all equivocal by reason, and distinguishes their meanings; among them pros ti, relation. Its first word is “beginning.”

1. All relation is founded on quantity (double and half; taller, shorter) or on acting and undergoing (maker and made; father and son; master and servant). (Metaphysics V.)
2. There is no quantity in God: “he is great without quantity” (Augustine). So real relation in God is founded on some activity.
3. Not on activity proceeding outside, since relations of God to creatures are not really in God: God is said to be related to the creature because the creature is related to him, as Aristotle first saw that the known is related to the knower because the knower is related to the known.
4. So on a procession that remains within God. Likeness (infinitely different, “but a little bit like it”): the image of a gold mountain or a unicorn proceeds from and remains within my imagination; even more, the thought proceeds from and remains within my reason. “The Father is in me and I in the Father.”
5. Inward processions are two only: of the understanding (the word, the thought) and of the will (love).
6. From each procession two opposed relations must be taken: of what proceeds to its beginning, and of the beginning itself. Beginning = “that from which something goes forward in any way whatsoever”; so later Thomas will ask whether the Father is a beginning of the Son; his teacher Albert said a premise is a beginning because the conclusion proceeds from it (statement merely signifies).
7. The procession of the word is generation in the proper sense belonging to living things; its relations are fatherhood and sonhood. The procession of love has no proper name because nothing in creatures is exactly like it, so its relations have no names either: the beginning’s relation is called breathing, spiratio, though that names the activity more than the relation; the other keeps the common name, procession. “You got to know what you’re doing.”

• Conclusion: only four real relations, since there are only two kinds of activity remaining in God, God understanding himself and loving himself.
• On logos in John: “the Word was towards God”; to be taken in the sense of thought, not spoken word; English kept “word,” so “word” must be moved to mean thought and becomes, like logos, equivocal by reason — the spoken word is a sign of the thought (as Albert said of statement).
• Anticipated question: if four real relations, why not four persons? Breathing distinguishes the breather from the one breathed, but it is not opposed to being Father or Son, so it belongs to both; it does not distinguish Father from Son — they are distinguished by fatherhood and sonhood. To be worked out in the treatise on the persons.
• The order so far: processions (origins, going-forwards), then relations founded on them, then persons distinguished by the relations.

4. Ad 1: understander and understood are the same in God, but the word proceeds (“the relation of the same to the same”) #

Five replies, because objections lie on both sides; where the whole truth is on one side you answer one set only.

• Where understanding and understood, willing and willed differ, there is a real relation: I love my wife, I know a dog — I am not my wife or a dog. In God they are entirely the same: by understanding himself he understands all, by willing his goodness he wills all (from the treatise on God’s understanding). A real relation needs two really distinct things; so these are relations of reason only, like the relation of the same to the same — “Socrates is Socrates” is not a real relation, “Socrates is not really two.”
• But the relation to the thought is real, because the word is understood as proceeding through the intelligible action, not as the thing understood; even we distinguish the thing understood from the thought, the unicorn from my image of it. So in God understanding himself there proceeds a thought of God, and the relations of thought to speaker and speaker to word are real. When we understand stone, what the understanding conceives is called the word. He compares a.1 ad 4.
• Aristotle’s classic one-sided relation: when I see you I am really changed, but if you do not know it you are not affected (people in church somehow sense being looked at); seeing a stone or chair is an immaterial activity that is only in my eyes, not in the chair. So knower to known is real in creatures, known to knower of reason only — and this is the relation between God and creatures: the creature really dependent, God in no way changed. “He’s a really independent guy.”
• Digression: God’s love is gratuitous; he did not create me because I would be better than others he could have created. Army retreat: someone is left behind to slow the advance, not because he deserves to die. Had Rosalind said yes, Romeo would not have had Juliet. Thinking God chose me for the wonderful person he foresaw is pride, one of the great Gregory’s four species. Empedocles: men see a part of the truth and boast of the whole; Aristotle’s rhetorician who thinks himself politically wise. Aristotle shows defects in predecessors but is not upset to find they had his thought; following Heraclitus’s advice to find what is common, he perfects what most of them saw. More humility in the Greeks than in the moderns; Euclid respects those before him and adds his own.

5. Ad 2: in us many acts, in God one (“by one act only He understands everything”) #

• In us intelligible relations are multiplied to infinity because by one act I understand stone, by another that I understand it, by another that I understand that; in God this has no place, since by one act he understands everything. The treatise on the Trinity depends on the treatise on God’s operations. “Very one-track mind,” but that one thought expresses infinitely more than all ours.
• His poem: God the Father said it all in one word; when that word became a man he spoke few words and said so much; “it was a brevity and soul of wit.”
• The greater the mind, the more it says in fewer words: Aristotle and Thomas say more in a few words than others in a book. Student question on angels: the higher the angel the fewer thoughts, though still more than one; by nature they know first their own substance, then need more or fewer thoughts for the whole. Grade school math: “extra practice for those who need it,” yet some who did only the first exercises understand better; Thomas: a lesser mind needs more examples and still understands less. Thomas quoting Paul’s verbum abbreviatum. Shakespeare says more in few words than a novel; Polonius, “more matter, less art”; a seminary commencement speech: “words, words everywhere, and not a thought to think.”

6. Ad 3: the ideas are relations understood by God (“many relations understood by God”) #

The respects in the ideas are understood by God; so not many relations in God but God knowing many relations, insofar as he knows his nature as imitable by the dog in this way (one idea) and by the cat in that way (another).

7. Ad 4: equality and likeness are relations of reason (“co-equal in essence”) #

Thomas defers the full answer to the comparison of persons (he thinks q.42). Equality of Father and Son is not by their relations (fatherhood is not “equal to” sonhood) but, as Augustine teaches, by each being one and the same God numerically. A student asks whether that makes it real: they are really equal, but equality is not a real relation, since there is no real relation of a thing to itself; equality is in something absolute, the divine substance — as Athanasius and the liturgical blessing say, “co-equal in essence.”

8. Ad 5: the road is the same, the respects differ (“the relations are diverse”) #

The road from Athens to Thebes and back is one; Massachusetts to California and back likewise; but the relations are diverse. “Watch the language”: is there one relation “between” two and four? Two is half of four, but four is not half of two, it is double; the Father is father to the Son and not son, the Son son and not father; Father and Son are breather to the Holy Spirit, who is breathed, not breather. One could conclude sameness only of something absolute lying between the two.

9. The plan of the treatise on the persons and of q.29 (“aggredi de personis”) #

The point: the third part of the treatise on the Trinity, fifteen questions, is divided step by step, and parts need not be equal.

• Three parts: one question, one question, fifteen. Thomas’s first division of an Aristotelian work is almost always into two, prologue and tractatus; the prologue of Romeo and Juliet is tiny beside the play.
• Thomas gives the reason for the order: persons are distinguished by relations based on processions, so in teaching one goes processions, relations, persons. Aggredi, “approach,” is used of something difficult, as Aristotle attempts to speak of time (Augustine: I know what time is if nobody asks me).
• Persons: absolute consideration (ten questions) vs comparative (five), ratio two to one. Absolute: in general (four questions) vs in particular (six). In particular, divided by the three persons: one on the Father; the Son has three names, son, word, image, but son is understood from father, so two, word and image; the Holy Spirit as gift and as love — “one is two, and one is three” [as he leaves it].
• Four things pertain to the common consideration: (1) the signification of “person”; (2) the number of persons — four, since four relations?; (3) what follows on or is opposed to the number, diversity, likeness; (4) what pertains to the knowledge of persons. How to divide four into two or three: either (1) against the rest, or (4), knowledge, against what is known; or three, joining (2) and (3), since the third is closest to the second.
• Q.29 has four articles: (1) the definition of person given by Boethius; (2) comparison of person with essence, subsistence, hypostasis — hypostasis should name an individual substance but came to be synonymous with person; subsistentia signifies what exists by itself; essence the nature; do these mean the same or not?; (3) whether the name person belongs in divine things; (4) what it means there. The first two are preliminary, general, and would serve equally for asking whether “person” belongs to human beings and what it means, as John Paul II speaks of human persons (“treat like a person, not a thing”); the last two are in particular. Joke: a modern nun named Jane Person — “I didn’t know you were a person.” He stops for a seven o’clock meeting.

His words #

• fatherhood, sonhood; usage for paternitas, filiatio
• Natural Hearing; Aristotle’s Physics [ed.: Physics]
• said contrary; the sed contra, here taken as the opposite error, not an authority
• towards something; pros ti, Aristotle’s name for the category [ed.: relation]
• excess and defect; the two ways of erring, more or less than the truth
• antonomasia; naming by a common name par excellence (“the philosopher,” “the Isagoge”)
• fifth book of wisdom; Metaphysics V, the book of the equivocal words
• equivocal by reason; a word with several meanings related by a ratio (logos, “word”)
• going forward; procession (processio)
• beginning; that from which something goes forward in any way (principium)
• breathing; spiratio, naming the activity, borrowed for the relation
• relation of reason; requires no real distinction, e.g. same to same, known to knower
• verbum abbreviatum; Paul’s phrase quoted by Thomas for saying much in few words
• aggredi; to approach, used of a difficult matter
• prologue and tractatus; the first two-fold division of a work
• hypostasis, subsistence, essence; individual substance / what exists by itself / the nature

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 28, a. 4 (objections, sed contra, corpus, five replies)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 29, prologue and list of four articles
• handout, “Note for Sixth Book of Wisdom, Reading 4,” p. 14 (verified source; not named by him)

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Physics III: reasons for the infinite; the road Athens–Thebes
• Aristotle, Metaphysics V: relation founded on quantity or action; “beginning” its first word
• Aristotle, book on dialectic: gumnasia (Topics I, inferred)
• Porphyry, Isagoge
• Avicenna, on intelligible relations multiplied to infinity (as cited in obj. 2)
• Augustine: God great without quantity; ideas; equality by the same God; on time
• John 1 (Logos); “the Father is in me and I in the Father”
• Summa I, q. 28, a. 1 ad 4; q. 42 (his guess) on equality of the persons
• Athanasius / liturgical blessing, “co-equal in essence”
• Gregory the Great, four species of pride; Empedocles; Heraclitus; Euclid; Shakespeare (Falstaff; Romeo and Juliet; Polonius); Chesterton on the general

His questions #

• Why isn’t God’s understanding himself a real relation? Because the understanding and the understood are entirely the same in God; a real relation needs two really distinct things.
• What are the two ways of making a mistake? Excess and defect: saying what is not is, or what is is not.
• If there are four real relations, why aren’t there four persons? Breathing is not opposed to fatherhood or sonhood, so it belongs to both Father and Son and does not distinguish them.
• Is “Socrates is Socrates” a real relation? No; Socrates is not really two.
• Is the equality of Father and Son a real relation? No; they are really equal, but as one and the same divine substance, and there is no real relation of a thing to itself.
• Is four to two half? No, double; the respects differ though the road is the same.
• Is it necessary that the parts of a division be equal in size? No; one, one and fifteen questions, like a prologue against a play.
• How would you divide the four things pertaining to the common consideration of persons into two or three? Into two by setting the first (or the fourth) against the rest; into three by joining the second and third.