Summa I, Q. 30, a. 2: Why Only Three Persons: Opposed Relations, Word and Love, and the Order of Origin

Orientation #

He opens straight on “the second” article and closes: “we got two articles, that’s pretty good,” so a. 1 was done the same session or just before (prev. lecture). He refers back several times to “what has been said before” (the two processions, generation as a likeness, the numbering-number point, the proemium of the treatise). The previous class did q. 30 a. 1 (whether there are several persons in God); the next takes aa. 3–4 on what numerical terms signify in God.

The class, in order #

1. The five objections (“more persons than three”) #

Point: he reads the objections of a. 2 and singles out the first two as “very important.”

1. Plurality of persons follows plurality of relative properties; there are four relations (fatherhood, sonhood, common breathing, and the unnamed one, procession); so four persons. “Nice, straight argument.”
2. Nature is no more distinct from will in God than from understanding. One person proceeds by way of will (love), another by way of nature (Son); so there should be yet another by way of intellect (Word). Three proceeding persons, four in all. He calls this “really profound.”
3. In creatures the more excellent thing has more intrinsic operations (man grows, reproduces, nourishes like a plant, senses like an animal, and in addition understands and wills); God infinitely exceeds creatures; so infinite persons. Student aside: “does that mean I’m God?” — he lets it pass. (He mislabels this one “fifth” when moving on.)
4. From the Father’s infinite goodness comes his communicating himself by producing a person; the Holy Spirit has the same infinite goodness; so he too should produce a person, and so on forever. “An interesting objection.”
5. Whatever is under a determinate number is measured (number is a multitude measured by one); but the persons are immense, immeasurable — “immensus Pater, immensus Filius, immensus Spiritus Sanctus” in the Quicumque; so they should not be contained in the number three.

2. Sed contra and the body of the article (“only by reason of a relative opposition”) #

Sed contra: 1 John, “three who give witness in heaven: the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit”; asked what three, Augustine answers: three persons. Aside: there is a question whether that text is authentic; “they tend to say it’s not.”

Thomas’s argument, as he glosses it:

1. The persons are subsisting relations really distinct from one another (shown before).
2. Real distinction among divine relations is only by relative opposition.
3. So two opposed relations pertain to two persons; relations not opposed to each other must pertain to the same person.
4. Fatherhood and sonhood are opposed: subsisting fatherhood is the Father, subsisting sonhood the Son.
5. The other two relations are opposed to each other but to neither of these. So they cannot both belong to one person; either one belongs to both Father and Son, or one to each.
6. Procession (being breathed) cannot belong to Father and Son, for then generation would proceed from the procession of love — against what was said: “you have to know to love.”
7. So breathing belongs to both Father and Son, having no relative opposition to fatherhood or sonhood; and being-breathed belongs to another person, the Holy Spirit, who proceeds by way of love. Conclusion: only three persons.

Aside on the Filioque dispute with the Orthodox: Thomas will argue later that if the Holy Spirit did not proceed from the Son there would be no real distinction between them — the Father would have fatherhood and spiratio, the Son the other two, and there would be no third person. The relation common to Father and Son distinguishes both of them from the Holy Spirit “but that doesn’t make a fourth person”; they are in that sense one beginning of the Holy Spirit.

3. Reply 1: four relations, three properties (“breathing is the same as the Father and the Son”) #

Point: breathing is a relation but not a property, since it belongs to two persons, and not a personal relation, since it constitutes none. Fatherhood, sonhood and procession are the personal properties.

• No real distinction between spiratio and the Father, or spiratio and the Son; real distinction between spiratio and the Holy Spirit (whose relation he calls procession, “for want of a name”).
• Reprise of the Filioque point: the only basis of real distinction is opposition of relations of origin; it is “not enough” to say one proceeds per modum intellectus and the other per modum voluntatis, since understanding and will are not really distinct in God. “That’s a very subtle thing.”

4. Reply 2: Word and Son, likeness versus love (“proceeds by reason of what likeness”) #

Point: what proceeds by way of intellect (Word) and by way of nature (Son) both proceed as a likeness; love does not; so in God, where understanding and being are the same, Word and Son are one person and the procession of love is not generation.

• “Something more known to us”: we call our thought a concept; Shakespeare in the sonnets calls his thoughts his children; poets and Dickens speak of a favourite child among their works — a likeness between what proceeds in intellect and what proceeds by nature.
• Imagination and reason alike: image is the Latin word for likeness; what is imagined or thought proceeds as a likeness of the thing. Hence if understanding and nature were the same, what proceeds would be the same. In us they are not, “so my thoughts are not my children”; if for me to be and to understand were the same, “my thought would be my child.”
• Love vs. knowing: when I like something, it makes an impression on my heart, producing an inclination toward the object itself; love goes out to the object. Knowing need not: I can think of murder without wanting it, yet a likeness of murder is in my thought (that is why I can give its definition).
• Thomas’s qualification: the one who proceeds by love is of the same nature not insofar as it is love but insofar as it is divine love — “what’s divine is God.”
• Holy Spirit “a very mysterious person”: a sign is that there is no proper name for his procession or relation; we borrow names. Aside: a prayer book devoted to the Holy Spirit, made by a priest who thought the Spirit neglected [name of the brother who showed it: unclear in recording].

5. Reply 3: perfection by composition and perfection by simplicity (“perfection is per modum compositionis”) #

Point: man has more intrinsic operations than animals because his perfection is by way of composition; angels, more perfect and simpler, have fewer (no imagining or sensing — one understanding does it all); in God there is really only one operation, his essence, and the two processions as shown before. “One that Aristotle often solves.”

• Aristotle in the later books of natural science on health: some attain perfect health with few means, others only with many, others only imperfect health with few means. He applies it to understanding: Thomas grasps at once what we reach by many steps, and some cannot reach even the superficial understanding; grade-school “extra practice for those who need it” — some get it with a few exercises and understand better than those who do them all.
• Literary forms: tragedy and comedy contain far more than a sonnet, so are greater by composition; yet Aristotle ranks tragedy above epic because it produces fear and pity in shorter time — the simpler form is superior. “Kind of subtle.”
• Practical arts: the first computers and radios filled a room; smaller and more powerful since. (Student remarks on phones while driving; “in some way men becoming more godlike.”)
• Teresa of Avila: the closer one gets to God the simpler one becomes; Mother Teresa compared with a politician.
• Natural order: man needs more than the cat, the cat than the tree, the tree than the stone, each more perfect by composition; “in the angels it’s just the reverse.”
• Aside: one can never completely analyse wine; thanks for the wine.

6. Reply 4: the Holy Spirit’s goodness and the plot analogy (“from another, and not from another”) #

Point: the objection would hold if the Spirit’s goodness were numerically other than the Father’s; but it is one and the same, differing only by relation, and the Spirit’s relation (proceeding from the others) excludes a relation of origin toward a further divine person.

• Student: does the Father have a goodness the Spirit lacks? Answer: the same goodness, but “with a relation that the Holy Spirit doesn’t have”; that does not make him better. The Spirit has it as from another; the Father as communicating it to another.
• The plot box (Aristotle): divide before another / not before another against after another / not after another: before-and-after = middle; before-not-after = beginning; after-not-before = end; neither = nothing. So a plot has only three parts; Homer taught the Greeks this by taking a course of action with beginning and end rather than everything that happened to Achilles or Odysseus.
• Trinity version: no before and after in God (Athanasian Creed), but an order of nature (Augustine). Divide from another / not from another against has another from him / does not: from another and has another from him = Son; not from another, has another from him = Father; from another, none from him = Holy Spirit; neither = nobody, since he would have no relation of proceeding and so no distinction from anyone. “No fourth possibility.” The only procession from the Holy Spirit is to the outside (to creatures).
• Student: is there a name for that? Answer: no; each is the one goodness, but has it with a different relation. The ordo naturae is order “not in the strict sense but in the common sense”: one from another, not before another. “A very subtle thing.”
• Student: what kind of opposition? Relative opposition; otherwise the Spirit would be another Father or Son.
• Aside on order of doctrine: in the proemium Thomas says, since persons are distinguished by relations of origin, teach first procession (one question), then relation (one question), then the persons (the remaining fifteen). Not found so ordered in Augustine, nor in the Bible, where texts on Father and Son and on the Holy Spirit (John) must be brought together; Lombard begins gathering Augustine; Vatican II tells students to follow Thomas as teacher in penetrating the mysteries and in seeing their connection and order — the fathers treated mysteries ad hoc, the summas take up the whole.

7. Reply 5: number that does not measure (“there is the same magnitude of the three persons”) #

Point: “determinate number” taken as numerus simplex (abstract, in the understanding’s taking, measured by one) is not what is said of the persons; taken as the number of things (numbered number) applied to the persons, the notion of measured does not belong, because the three have the same magnitude and a thing is not measured by itself.

• Compare the whole/part objection earlier, and the Hindus with ever-fertile gods and goddesses.
• Thomas says numerus rerum; “thing” usually means what a thing is, but relation is a thing in some sense.
• Measuring: one is not a number; six measured by two is not measured by itself; there is no repeated magnitude to count from Father to Son to Spirit. The three are no wiser or better than one, since the Father’s goodness is numerically the Son’s.
• Contrast: my son’s human nature is not numerically mine — his body, mind, knowledge are not mine; my knowing the Pythagorean theorem is the same in kind as yours, not in number. So father and son are more than the father alone, the family more than the individual, the army more than one soldier — “find out if you have to fight” — but Father and Son are not more goodness than the Holy Spirit alone. “Kind of amazing thing.”
• Closing: two articles done; “we understand a little bit of them.”

His words #

• common breathing / spiratio: the fourth relation, common to Father and Son [ed.: spiration]
• procession: his and Thomas’s name “for want of a better name” for the Holy Spirit’s relation (being breathed) [ed.: processio]
• per modum naturae / intellectus / voluntatis: the ways of proceeding as Son, Word, love
• immensus: immeasurable, from the Quicumque
• relative opposition / opposition of relation: the only basis of real distinction among divine relations
• property (proprietas): a relation belonging to only one person; personal relation: one constituting a person
• concept: his cue that thought proceeds as a likeness, like offspring
• image: “the Latin word for a likeness”
• per modum compositionis: perfection by having many things or operations, opposed to perfection by simplicity
• order of nature (ordo naturae): one from another without before and after; order “in the common sense”
• numerus simplex: abstract number, in the understanding’s taking; number of things (numerus rerum): numbered number
• immense: not measured, because the persons have the same magnitude

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 30, a. 2 (objections, sed contra, body, replies 1–5)
• Athanasian Creed (Quicumque), “immensus Pater…” (quoted)
• 1 John, “three who give witness in heaven” (sed contra, quoted)

Mentioned

• Thomas, proemium to the treatise on the Trinity (order: procession, relation, persons)
• Aristotle, definition of number as multitude measured by one; the health comparison in “the later books of natural science”; tragedy vs. epic; the plot with beginning, middle and end (Poetics, inferred)
• Augustine, “three persons”; the order of nature
• Shakespeare, sonnets (thoughts as children); Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello
• Dickens on his favourite child
• Teresa of Avila on simplicity
• Peter Lombard, Vatican II on the study of Thomas
• Gospel of John (texts on Father and Son, on the Holy Spirit)

His questions #

• There are four relations in God; why aren’t there four persons? Breathing is opposed to neither fatherhood nor sonhood, so it belongs to both Father and Son and constitutes no person.
• Why should the one proceeding by nature and the one proceeding by intellect be the same person, when intellect and will give different persons? Both proceed by way of likeness, and in God understanding and being are the same; love does not proceed as a likeness.
• If the Holy Spirit did not proceed from the Son, would they be really distinct? No: there would be no opposed relations of origin, and per modum intellectus vs. voluntatis is not enough.
• Does the Father have a goodness that the Holy Spirit doesn’t have? No; the same goodness, but with a relation the Spirit doesn’t have; that does not make him better.
• What is neither before another nor after another in a plot? And who is neither from another nor has another from him? Nothing; nobody — no relation of proceeding, so no distinct person.
• Why can’t the Holy Spirit produce a divine person? His relation of proceeding from the others excludes a relation of origin toward another person; the only procession from him is to creatures.
• Is there a name for having the goodness with a different relation? No; he restates: each is the one goodness, had with a different relation.
• Are the three persons wiser or better than one? No; the goodness is numerically the same, unlike my son’s human nature and mine.