Summa I, Q.31, Articles 1–2: Is There a Trinity in God, and Is the Son 'Other' (Alius) Than the Father?

Orientation #

He opens by going back “to that distinction I was pointing out last time” (proper vs. appropriated predication) (prev. lecture), and ends by proposing a break before the third article. The previous class treated q. 30 a. 4 on “person” as common to the three; the next takes up whether “solus” can be joined to an essential name.

The class, in order #

1. Appropriation vs. what is said properly of the Word (“Deus Illuminatio Mea”) #

Point: two ways a thing is said of the Word, one appropriated, one proper.

• “The Word was made flesh” vs. “the light that lightens every man” (John’s prologue): the first is proper to the Son (the Father did not become man, nor the Holy Spirit); the second is appropriated, since the creed says “God from God, light from light” — the Father is light as much as the Son, so the Father illuminates as much as the Son.
• Why appropriated to the Son: the Son proceeds by way of God understanding himself, as a teacher illuminates by his words. Thomas will justify appropriation later “in the comparative consideration”.
• “Deus illuminatio mea” (the class’s opening prayer) is therefore something the whole Trinity does — which “brings us to the question” of whether there is a Trinity in divine things.

2. The five objections against a Trinity in God (“either signifies the substance of God or a relation”) #

Point: he reads the objections and classifies them.

1. Either-or argument that eliminates all possibilities: every name in God signifies substance or relation; “Trinity” signifies neither (not substance, else each person would be Trinity as each is God; not relation, since it says nothing “towards another”). So no meaning.
2. “Trinity” is a collective name (signifies a multitude); collective unity is the least unity, but in God is the greatest (maxima) unity. He notes Thomas will grant an element of truth here.
3. “A little more strange”: everything three is threefold; triplicity is a species of inequality; there is no inequality in God (Father, Son, Spirit all equal — “double” would imply more than what it doubles).
4. Whatever is in God is in the unity of the essence (God is his essence); so a Trinity in God gives three essential unities — heretical.
5. In God the concrete is said of the abstract (deity is God, fatherhood is the Father): no distinction between “the haver and the had” except in our way of speaking. Aside on why we cannot avoid this: “justice” signifies that by which something is just; if God were justice he would not be just, if he has justice he is composed — so we keep both ways of speaking and negate the imperfection of our names. Then: if Trinity is trina, there are nine things in God.

• He suspects Thomas’s humour in obj. 5, “a little too subtle for most people”; compares Thomas’s gloss on the Baptist’s “he must increase, I must decrease” (Christ stretched on the cross, John’s head cut off).

3. Sed contra and body: a determined number (“signifies a determined number of persons”) #

• Athanasius: venerate unity in Trinity (the one nature in the three) and Trinity in unity (the three persons in the one).
• Body: as one lays down plurality of persons, so one uses “Trinity”; plurality signifies indeterminately, Trinity signifies distinctly the number. “Even the little things he’s careful about.”

4. Reply 1: etymology and proper meaning (“trium unitas”) #

Point: what “Trinity” signifies.

• By etymology (perhaps Isidorean, he guesses) Trinity = trium unitas, the one essence of three persons; by proper meaning it signifies rather the number of persons of one essence. Hence the Father is not the Trinity (not three persons).
• It does not signify the relations themselves but the number of persons related; hence secundum nomen it is not “to another”.
• Compare the earlier point on “person”: grammatically not towards another, yet signifies relation in God, but not per modum relationis; here “Trinity” signifies the persons by number, not as relation.

5. Reply 2: collective names (“a plurality of supposita”) #

Distinction: a collective name implies (a) plurality of supposita, subsisting things, and (b) some unity of order — a people is a multitude of men under some order.

• Trinity agrees in (a), differs in (b): there is not only unity of order (Augustine’s order of one from another, origin) but unity of essence.
• Parallel: “God” said of the three has a likeness to a universal but is not one — man is common to Socrates, Plato, Aristotle only in reason, not one man in reality; the three are one God in reality. “So you got to be careful.”

6. Reply 3: absolute vs. relative; Trinity vs. triplicity (“Trinity is said absolutely”) #

Distinction: absolute vs. towards another (as Thomas/Aristotle use “absolute” of quantity and quality against relation, in the categories).

• Trinity is said absolutely (a number of persons); triplicity signifies a ratio of inequality, a species of unequal proportion, as in Boethius’s arithmetic (“don’t knock arithmetic”). So no triplicity in God, but a Trinity.
• Father and Son are two persons (absolute) but not “double” (relative). Four is double towards two, half towards eight, but four is absolute.
• Grandchildren: daughter has 8, son 6 — absolute, as is 14; “more than”, 4 to 3, is the ratio; at 16 and 12 the ratio is the same, the absolute numbers not.
• Aside: Thomas says “proportion” where he, following Euclid, says “ratio”; he criticises this.

7. Reply 4: number and persons numbered; nature in persons, persons in nature (“in the name of the Father”) #

• Trinity involves both the number and the persons numbered. “Trinity in unity” does not place number in the essence but the persons in unity of nature, as supposita are said to be in their nature; conversely “unity in Trinity”, as a nature is in its supposita. Common in Thomas and the Fathers.
• Aside: in the Summa Contra Gentiles Thomas quotes Boethius’s De duabus naturis with a slightly different definition of person, res subsistens in intellectuali natura, against the Summa’s individua substantia rationalis naturae.
• “In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit”: why nomine singular, not names? It hints at the one nature, since (Aristotle) the name signifies what a thing is; the implied name is “God”; the one nature individually, not one in kind like Socrates’ and Plato’s. The Maronite sign of the cross adds “one true God”, spelling out what “name” already implies.

8. Reply 5: why Trinity is not “trina” (“nine things in God”) #

• “Trinitas est trina” multiplies the number by itself; trinum by itself implies distinction of supposita in what it is said of, so Trinity being three would give three supposita of the Trinity, nine — as “God is three” gives three supposita.
• Supposita ≈ hypostasis (Greek etymology); the English translators leave “supposita” untranslated.
• Further doubts: Sentences d. 24, q. 2, a. 2, whose order follows Lombard, not the Summa.

9. Article 2: objections that the Son is not alius (“ne uterus”) #

Point: the whole article turns on Latin gender, alius (masc.) vs. aliud (neut.), which English cannot capture.

1. “Other” is a relative of diversity of substance; so the Son would be diverse from the Father, against Augustine, De Trinitate VII (three persons does not mean diversity).
2. Whoever are other differ; against Ambrose, De fide I: one in Godhead, no difference of substance (substantia here = nature), no diversity.
3. Alienus comes from alius; but Hilary, De Trinitate VII: nothing diverse, alien, separable.
4. Alius and aliud signify the same, differing only in consignification of gender. Aside: Albert the Great derives “neuter” from ne uterus — what is in the uterus is male or female.

• Sed contra (he reads it as Augustine, “on faith to Peter”): one essence, in which not aliud Father, aliud Son, aliud Spirit, though alius Pater, alius Filius, alius Spiritus; the English “not one thing… another” shows the translators “don’t know how to do it exactly”.

10. Body: caution, modesty, and the two opposite errors (“from words put forth in a disordered way”) #

• Jerome: from disorderly words heresy is incurred — so proceed with caution and modesty. Shakespeare: “All my reports go with the modest truth, nor more, nor clipt, but so.”
• Augustine (which he reads on his birthdays): nowhere is error more dangerous, nothing sought with more labour, nothing found more fruitful. Aristotle: say some things better than predecessors, others as well as they said them; Kierkegaard on Mozart’s Don Giovanni; “Now cracks a noble heart… flights of angels sing thee to thy rest” — you can’t improve on it.
• Two ways of departing from truth: saying what is not is (adding), saying what is is not (clipping). Falstaff: more or less than the truth, “villains and the sons of darkness” — said by the biggest liar; “brevity is the soul of wit” said by the old fool who talks too much.
• Arius: with the trinity of persons a trinity of substances (Son’s less than Father’s) — says what is not is. Sabellius: with unity of essence unity of person (Father became man, called Son, sanctifies, called Spirit — one man, three names) — says what is is not.
• The Incarnation reverses it: one person, two natures; the errors are two persons (what is not is) or one nature (what is is not). “Kind of curious the way God has arranged this.”
• Sign of the truth: the two mistakes cannot explain each other (if three natures and three persons, why would anyone think one and one?), but the man in the middle can explain both mistakes and why they are made.
• Against Arius avoid: diversity, difference (lest unity of essence go — “distinction” is better, since “division” implies whole and parts and “difference” in logic divides genus into species; scripture’s “diversity” is to be read as distinction), separation and division (simplicity), disparity (equality), alien and discrepant (likeness; Ambrose, Hilary).
• Against Sabellius avoid: singularity (communicability of the nature; Hilary: to predicate a singular God of Father and Son is sacrilegious), unique (number of persons — yet “unique Son” is fine, not “unique God”), confused (lest the ordo naturae, order of one from another, be lost; Ambrose: nor is that confused which is one), solitary (the consortium of persons; Hilary IV: neither solitary nor diverse).
• Conclusion: alius in the masculine implies only distinction of suppositum, so the Son is alius — another suppositum, person, hypostasis. He notes Thomas writes alia persona, not alia alone: “don’t see alia by itself, or you’re getting in trouble.”

11. The four replies (“quis est iste”) #

• Ad 1: alius is a particular name on the side of the suppositum; distinction of substance-as-hypostasis suffices (the equivocation of “substance” seen before); diversity needs distinction of substance-as-nature. In English perhaps “another”, or “other than”, but carefully.
• Ad 2: difference implies distinction of form; in English “form” is used for species (genus divided by differences). Lincoln: “of the people” is true of every government, “by the people, for the people” marks the species. One form only in God, Philippians 2:6, where “form of God / form of a slave” means nature (cf. the chapter on nature in Aristotle’s fifth book of wisdom — scripture speaks as Aristotle explains). Damascene, “the Greeks”, uses “difference” of the persons because the relative property (fatherhood, sonhood) is signified by way of a form: they differ not by substance but by determinate properties.
• Aside on Greek usage: he was scandalised reading Basil that the Father is the aitia (cause) of the Son; in Metaphysics V every cause is a beginning (arche) but not every beginning a cause, and “cause” would make the Son an effect, diverse in substance. Take aitia for arche; the proper article says it belongs to the Father to be beginning, not cause. A student presses “one has existence from the other”; he answers: he proceeds from the Father, which we call principle. Also “no one knows the Father except the Son” needs explaining. Basil knew Aristotle’s four causes (Hexaemeron sermons) though he cites scripture.
• Aside: custom vs. reason — “proportion” for ratio, “Physics” for the eight books of Natural Hearing; Shakespeare, “custom is a tyrant”.
• Ad 3: alienum means extraneous and unlike, not implied by masculine alius; so the Son is alius but not alien (Marx’s “alienation” popularised the word).
• Ad 4, “very important”: the neuter gender is unformed, the masculine (and feminine) formed and distinct; so the neuter fitly signifies the common nature, masculine/feminine a suppositum determinate in it. Quis est iste? — Socrates; Quid est? — rational mortal animal (goes back to Porphyry). Hence the Father is alius from the Son but not aliud; conversely they are unum (one nature) but not unus. “Learn your Latin, gentlemen.”

His words #

• appropriated vs. proper: said of a person though common to the Trinity, vs. said of that person only
• Trinity — trium unitas by etymology; proper meaning: the number of persons of one essence
• supposita — “subsisting things”; ≈ hypostasis
• absolutely vs. towards another — as quantity/quality vs. relation
• ratio — his term where Thomas says “proportion” [ed.: proportio]
• triplicity — a ratio of inequality, unlike Trinity
• the haver and the had — abstract and concrete in God
• what is is not / what is not is — clipping vs. adding to the truth
• distinction — preferred to division, diversity, difference
• ordo naturae — order of one from another, of origin
• form — for species/nature; “form of God” (Phil. 2)
• arche / aitia — beginning / cause; Basil’s “cause” to be read as beginning
• Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics]
• alius / aliud, unus / unum — suppositum vs. nature by gender

Texts #

Read in class:

• Thomas, ST I q. 31 a. 1 (objections, sed contra, body, five replies)
• Thomas, ST I q. 31 a. 2 (objections, sed contra, body, four replies)
• Thomas, SCG IV (verified: ch. 15) — Boethius’s definition of person (paraphrased)
• Shakespeare handout p. 25 (verified) — “modest truth”, Falstaff, “brevity”, “custom is a tyrant”

Mentioned:

• Sentences d. 24 q. 2 a. 2; Boethius, De arithmetica and De duabus naturis; Augustine, De Trinitate VII and the “faith to Peter” text; Ambrose, De fide I; Hilary, De Trinitate IV, VII; Athanasius; Damascene; Jerome; Basil (Hexaemeron); John 1; the creed; Philippians 2:6; Aristotle, Metaphysics V (nature; arche/aitia), Physics, categories; Porphyry; Albert the Great; Isidore (etymology, guessed); Kierkegaard on Don Giovanni; Hamlet; Lincoln; Marx on alienation.

His questions #

• In which of the two ways is “the light that lightens every man” said of the Word? By appropriation; “the Word was made flesh” is proper.
• Is four double or half? You must say towards what — double towards two, half towards eight; four itself is absolute.
• What does “name” signify in “in the name of the Father…”? The essence, the one nature (hence singular).
• Is Arius saying what is is not, or what is not is? What is not is (two substances that aren’t there).
• And Sabellius? What is is not.
• If there were really three persons and three natures, why would anyone think one and one? They wouldn’t; the mistakes are explained only from the truth in the middle.
• Aliud is masculine, feminine, or what? Neuter (Albert: ne uterus).
• Can you say the Father is the cause of the Son? No — take Basil’s “cause” for “beginning”; the Father is principle.
• Quis est iste? / Quid est? Socrates (a suppositum) / rational mortal animal (a nature).