Summa I, Q.29 a.4: 'Person' in God Means Relation as Subsisting (Augustine, Boethius, and Univocal vs. Equivocal Names)

Orientation #

He opens from last time: “now we know that the word person belongs to God” (prev. lecture, a.3), and closes by announcing that qq. 30 and 31 “are put together”: q.30 on the number/plurality of persons, q.31 on things following upon it. Verified sources also match Summa Contra Gentiles IV ch. 15 for about ten minutes, though he never names it in the transcript. The previous class treated q.29 a.3 (whether “person” belongs to God) and the next treats q.30 a.1 (whether there are several persons in God).

The class, in order #

1. Objection 1 and the grammar of “said to itself” (“person is said, not to what? The son”) #

Point: the article asks whether “person” signifies relation or substance in God; the first objection is Augustine, De Trinitate VII: “the person of the Father” says nothing other than “the substance of the Father”, for person is said ad se, not ad filium.

He warns this is a text “you could easily misunderstand without Thomas’s help”, and gives the tool: a grammatically affirmative phrase can signify something negative.

• “Substance exists in itself”: cannot be taken affirmatively (nothing exists in itself); it means “not in another”.
• “One” = not divided; “simple” = not composed — the same, but the present case is “more explicit”.
• Statements “known through other statements” is affirmative; but not every statement can be so known, else none would be. The first ones are called known “to themselves” (per se nota). Taken affirmatively that says “it is so because it is so” — “a woman’s reason, as Shakespeare says”; a statement cannot be its own reason. So per se must be understood negatively: not through another.
• Aristotle, Natural Hearing IV [ed.: Physics], eight meanings of “in”: strictly nothing is in itself. “I drank a glass of wine”: the wine is in the glass, really distinct from it; the “glass of wine” is not in itself. “Health is in my body, but is my body health? No.”
• So existere per se of substance, and the pair absolutum / relativum: relative = towards another (Aristotle’s pros ti, Latin ad aliquid); absolute is said “in itself / towards itself”, but should be read “not towards another”. Hence Augustine’s “person is said to itself” reads: not towards the Son — apparently absolute, not relation.

2. Objections 2–4 and how Thomas argues the wrong side (“how convincing Thomas can make the opposite side”) #

• Obj. 2 (Augustine, same book): quid asks about essence or nature; asked “quid tres?” of the three who bear witness in heaven (Father, Word, Holy Spirit — he notes the scriptural interpolation question but sets it aside), we answer “three persons”; so person signifies essence. He flags this as “really something about the word what”.
• Obj. 3 (Aristotle, “fourth book of Wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics IV]): what a name signifies is its definition; person’s definition is “individual substance of a rational nature”, not “individual relation”; so it signifies substance. (“I’m even more convinced now of the false side.”)
• Obj. 4: in men and angels person signifies something absolute (note Thomas’s precise absolutum vs. English “fuzzy” absolute); if in God it signified relation it would be said equivocally of God, men and angels. Aside on method (one line each): the moderns “set up strong men” and don’t state the opposite forcefully; Descartes contradicts Aristotle on fundamentals without recalling Aristotle’s position, reasons, or refuting them (his doctoral thesis compared them); Aristotle rejecting Plato recalls the position and the reasons and argues against both; worse than ignorance is error — giving the wrong reasons for the old view, then knocking it down; Berkeley on why the mind has difficulty (we “insist upon principles we should not have”) touches the two causes of difficulty in Metaphysics II without citing or answering Aristotle.

3. Sed contra: Boethius, and Augustine vs. Thomas (“Boethius saves the day”) #

Point: Boethius (De Trinitate): every name pertaining to persons signifies relation; no name pertains more to persons than “person”; so “person” signifies relation. Aside, extended: Boethius is “the greatest mind in the church between Augustine and Thomas”. Who is greater, Augustine or Thomas? He answers as with Warren Murray on Shakespeare vs. Homer: not the natural gift, but Shakespeare had the philosophers and poets in between, so his extant works are greater; likewise Thomas had Aristotle, Boethius and Augustine himself, and speaks with a precision better than Augustine’s — “you can learn more from him in less time” (John XXII on canonizing Thomas: a year of Thomas vs. a lifetime of the Fathers). Thomas repeatedly “saves the text of Augustine” that seems opposed to the truth. Style: Augustine, a rhetoric teacher, alliterates and rhymes in Latin (amat / animat); Thomas’s style is “bald”, the plain style of the three he distinguishes (Psalms commentary, as he recalls) — “so simple even I can read it”; yet his Eucharistic hymns are “perfect words” and dominate the prayers singled out after Vatican II. Leo XIII’s encyclical on Scripture gives the whole tradition (Fathers, scholastics — Thomas most of all, with division of text and connection of parts — moderns); Pius XII’s Divino Afflante Spiritu deals with modern scholarship. Chrysostom preaches off the text; Thomas covers a small section closely. Augustine’s De Trinitate mixes in the incarnation; Thomas keeps things separate — like Plato’s dialogues (easier on the imagination, but must be balanced against each other) versus Aristotle’s treatises: “appropriate to begin with Plato, but you don’t end there.”

4. Body: the difficulty and two prior opinions (“this name, person, in divine things, there is engendered a difficulty”) #

Point: “person” is said in the plural of the three (unlike essential names — not three gods), yet not ad aliquid as relative names are; if absolute, there would be three absolutely differing things in God; if relative, why not said ad aliquid.

• Opinion 1: by its own force “person” signifies essence (like “God”, “wise”), but because of the heretics’ attacks it was accommodated by the council (footnote: Nicaea; Thomas says so expressly in De potentia) to stand for relation — especially in the plural or with a dividing name (“three persons”, “other is the person of the Father and other of the Son”, partitive); in the singular it can be taken either way. Thomas: insufficient, because if the name signified only essence, “three persons” would not quiet the heretics’ calumny but give occasion for a greater one.
• Opinion 2: it signifies essence and relation together. (a) Essence directly, relation obliquely, from the etymology per se una run together into persona: unity pertains to essence, “by itself” implies relation obliquely (the Father is by himself because distinct by relation from the Son). He notes this is one of the false etymologies. (b) Relation directly, essence obliquely, because in the definition nature stands in the oblique (“of a rational nature”). Thomas: (b) comes closer to the truth.

5. Body: person in common vs. divine person (“something is of the meaning of the less common”) #

Point: something belongs to the meaning of the less universal that is not in the meaning of the more universal — and so a divine person’s meaning contains what “person” in general does not.

1. Rational is in the meaning of man, not of animal; odd is in the meaning of odd number, not of number; dog vs. animal.
2. Hence asking the meaning of “person” in common (aa. 1–2) differs from asking the meaning of “divine person” (aa. 3–4) — “that’s why divide the first two articles against the last two”.
3. Person in general = individual substance of a rational nature; individual = undivided in itself, distinct from others. So person in any nature signifies what is distinct from others in that nature.
4. In human nature that means this flesh, these bones, this soul — not in the meaning of person in general, but in the meaning of a human person. So “Saint Peter is not in heaven”: his flesh and bones aren’t there. (He recalls an interview with Pius XII before defining the Assumption: if Mary’s body were not assumed, Mary would not be in heaven.)
5. Likewise a divine person’s meaning includes what distinguishes one divine person from another, and in God distinction is only by relations of origin — “that’s why we talked about origin to begin with”.
6. “A very interesting point”: relation in God is not, as in us, an accident inhering in a subject (my fatherhood is in me toward another, but is not me); it is the divine essence itself, hence subsisting, as the essence subsists. The relations in God are God, in no way differing from God, though differing from each other.
7. As deity is God, so divine fatherhood is God the Father, a divine person. Therefore (bold in his text) divine person signifies relation as subsisting — relation per modum substantiae, i.e. as a hypostasis subsisting in the divine nature (which is not other than that nature).

Digression, four ways of signifying (another text of Thomas, he thinks in the Sentences): since the relations are the substance, one can signify substance by way of substance (“God”), relation by way of relation (“Father”, “Son”), relation by way of substance (“person”), or something absolute by way of relation (“the power to generate”, taken up later). “Very subtle” — “that’s going to solve the difficulties”.

So it is true that person signifies relation in recto and essence in obliquo — not relation as relation but as hypostasis; and likewise essence directly and relation obliquely, since essence and hypostasis are the same, hypostasis being signified as distinguished by relation, which thus falls obliquely into the definition. Hence this meaning was not perceived before the heretics’ calumny: person was used only as one of the absolute names, then accommodated to stand for something relative — correcting opinion 1 — “not only from use but from the suitability of its meaning.”

• Asides: Augustine — heresy is necessary for theology to develop; the same in philosophy, a mistake makes you see what you wouldn’t otherwise (Aristotle, Metaphysics II: indebted to others even for their mistakes); many of Augustine’s works are “contra so-and-so”, something “ad hoc” (Vatican II), gathered into a whole only by the scholastics; Augustine on grace speaks more carefully in later works as he sees more of the heretics’ mistakes. Chat about Father Vito, a former seminarian visitor and good preacher.

6. Reply to 1: ad se because per modum substantiae (“Thomas is very subtle here”) #

Point: “person” is said ad se, not to another, because it signifies relation not per modum relationis but per modum substantiae, i.e. as hypostasis — relation as something subsisting, and subsisting is proper to substance. Augustine says it signifies essence insofar as in God the essence is the same as the hypostasis, “because in God what is and that by which it is do not differ”. Preview of the comparative study later: no real distinction between God and the Father, God and the Son, God and the Holy Spirit (distinction in meaning only); real distinction between Father and Son (each toward the other) and of the Holy Spirit from both.

7. Reply to 2: two uses of “what” (“quid natat in mari”) #

Point: quid sometimes asks for the nature the definition signifies (“what is man?” — rational mortal animal, Porphyry’s definition), sometimes for the suppositum (“what swims in the sea?” — a fish); “quid tres?” asks for the persons. English parallel: “what is a triangle?” asks the nature; hearing a strange sound, “what was that?” asks the suppositum.

8. Reply to 3: keep “toward another”, drop the accident (“something distinct or not communicable”) #

Point: in the notion of individual substance — something distinct, incommunicable — in divine things relation is understood, since relation is what distinguishes one divine person from another (fatherhood, sonhood); so divine person signifies relation, but per modum substantiae, as subsisting by itself, unlike created relations which are accidents. You keep what is specific to relation (toward another; the Father is toward the Son) and drop the genus, accident, that it has in the Categories. So it is false that divine person signifies something absolute, since the absolute does not distinguish. Parallel: Aristotle first distinguishes the categories with concrete names, later uses the abstract (“health” / “healthy” both signify an accident, but “healthy” signifies it more per modum accidentis; “health” as if subsisting — Aristotle asks whether health exists as the healthy does). A colleague’s hobby-horse: “there’s no such thing as Science, only scientists” — “science has proven” makes science a person; the distinction “comes up other places”. The accidents are distinguished by how they stand to substance (quantity its measure, quality its disposition), hence the concrete way of speaking.

9. Reply to 4: not equivocal, not univocal (“a diverse definition of the less common”) #

Point: “a very good point in logic” — a diverse definition of the less common does not make the more common equivocal.

• Students think “animal” means different things of dog and cat because dog and cat differ; but it is the same (Thomas: horse and ass have their own definitions yet univocantur in “animal”; odd and even in “number”).
• So, though relation is in the meaning of divine person and not of angelic or human person, “person” is not said equivocally; yet not univocally either, since nothing is said univocally of God and creatures (exception: once God became man, “man” is said univocally).
• Names equivocal by reason: sometimes a common name is kept by one member and the other gets a new name — five fingers, or four fingers and a thumb (the thumb holds the beer can, “stands out like a sore thumb”); “animal” kept for beasts so we don’t say man is an animal; “plant” for little things, “tree” for the one shading them.
• Student objection: might a word inside the definition itself be equivocal — e.g. “true” in “speech signifying the true or false” said of a simple, an if-then and an either-or statement; or man’s sense life differing from the beast’s? His answer: not in the case of animal — the genus prescinds from the difference in sense life, as “person” said of you and of God the Father means only “distinct from others in that nature”, not yet what distinguishes; the three statements may not be fully univocal among themselves, but the common definition still separates them all from definition (both are speech, but one signifies what a thing is, the other the true or false). Thomas’s broader point: each divine person is still “individual substance of a rational nature”. Summary he gives: divine person signifies something distinct in the divine nature; precisely, a relation of origin; as subsisting; hence relation per modum substantiae — “a little bit like” health vs. healthy. Aside: using the abstract (“health” for “healthy”) strikes him as “typically German”.

His words #

• absolutum / relativum: relative is towards another (ad aliquid, Aristotle’s pros ti); absolute “in itself” = not towards another
• per se nota: statements known “to themselves”, to be read negatively — not through another
• Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics]
• “book of Wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics]
• ad se / ad filium: said to itself / to the Son (Augustine)
• quid: “what” — asks the nature, or (colloquially) the suppositum
• accommodated (accommodatum): the name stretched to stand for relation
• per se una: false etymology of persona
• in recto / in obliquo (directly / obliquely): what a name signifies principally vs. what it implies
• subsisting: existing by itself, proper to substance
• per modum substantiae / per modum relationis: to signify relation by way of substance, substance by way of relation
• hypostasis: individual substance, in God distinguished by relation
• univocantur: are said univocally (horse and ass in “animal”)
• equivocal by reason: a common name kept by one member, a new name for the other (finger / thumb)

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 29, a. 4 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Augustine, De Trinitate VII (as quoted in objections 1 and 2)
• Boethius, De Trinitate (sed contra)

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Physics IV (eight meanings of “in”)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics IV (name signifies definition); Metaphysics II (two causes of difficulty; indebted to others’ mistakes)
• Aristotle, Categories (concrete then abstract names; relation as accident; quality divided)
• Thomas, De potentia (Council of Nicaea accommodating “person”), Commentary on the Sentences (four ways of signifying) — both as he recalls them (inferred)
• Thomas, Commentary on the Psalms (three styles, as he recalls)
• Summa Contra Gentiles IV, ch. 15 (verified source only; not named)
• Porphyry (definition of man); Shakespeare (“a woman’s reason”); Descartes; Berkeley; Leo XIII on Scripture; Pius XII, Divino Afflante Spiritu; John XXII; Chrysostom; Plato, Phaedo; Vatican II

His questions #

• Is “substance exists in itself” to be taken affirmatively? No — nothing is in itself; it means “not in another”.
• If first statements are “known to themselves”, should that be understood affirmatively? No; a statement cannot be its own reason, so per se means “not through another”.
• Which way is more convincing — stating the opposite forcefully (Thomas, Aristotle) or not (the moderns)? Thomas’s way; the moderns give the wrong reasons and knock them down.
• Who is the greater mind, Augustine or Thomas? Safest answer: not the natural gift, but Thomas had the advantage of Aristotle, Boethius and Augustine, and you learn more from him in less time.
• What does “divine person” signify? A relation of origin as subsisting — relation per modum substantiae.
• Health or healthy — which signifies an accident more per modum accidentis? Healthy; “health” signifies it as if subsisting.
• When you say “animal” of a dog and of a cat, do you mean the same thing? Yes; diverse definitions of the less common don’t make the more common equivocal.
• Could a word inside a definition (e.g. “true” of simple and compound statements) be equivocal? (student) Possibly for statements, but not for “animal” — the genus prescinds from the difference; the common definition still separates them from others.