Notions in God: Abstract and Concrete Names for the Divine Persons (ST I q.32 a.2)

Orientation #

He opens with “the three articles on what notions” and closes with “whether there are five notions, we’ll talk about that next week.” He refers back several times to “the treatise on names” (q. 13, “was it?”) on using concrete and abstract names of God, and to having seen “four relations in God, but only three persons.” The previous class finished q. 31 a. 4 and q. 32 a. 1; the next treats the five notions and begins q. 33.

The class, in order #

1. The objections and the sed contra (“one ought not to place notions in divine things”) #

He reads the three objections and the authority against them, as Thomas gives them.

1. Dionysius (Divine Names, ch. 1): say nothing of God not expressed in Scripture; Scripture never mentions notions.
2. Whatever is posited in God belongs either to the unity of the essence or to the Trinity of persons (“we’ve seen this either/or before”); but we do not say fatherhood is wise or creates (essential), nor that fatherhood generates or sonhood is generated (personal). So notions fit neither.
3. In simple things one should not posit abstract “beginnings of knowing them,” since simple things are known by themselves; the persons are most simple.

• Sed contra: John Damascene says we recognize the difference of the hypostases in three properties, “the paternal, the filial, and the processional.”
• Aside: “Most people don’t know about notions too much… they heard about persons, but they don’t have the notions.”

2. Praepositinus and the answer from our way of knowing (“I ask your benignity”) #

The point: Praepositinus (Berquist dates him “around 1210” in his book) denied properties and notions in God out of regard for divine simplicity; Thomas answers that using both abstract and concrete names is not prejudicial to simplicity.

• Praepositinus’s move: wherever an abstract name appears, expound it as the concrete, as when “I ask your benignity” means “I ask you,” or “his holiness” means “he is holy”; so “paternity” is just “God the Father.”
• Thomas’s reply, as Berquist gives it:
  1. We name things as we understand them.
  2. Our understanding cannot reach the divine simplicity as it is in itself (“that’s for the beatific vision”); it grasps divine things according to its own way, taken from sensible things.
  3. In sensible things, simple forms are signified by abstract names, subsistent things by concrete names.
  4. So we signify God by abstract names for his simplicity, by concrete names for his subsistence and completion: “God is good” and “God is his own goodness”; “we can’t avoid that.”
• “This doesn’t make the mind necessarily false, because the way of knowing doesn’t have to be the way things are”; falsehood comes in only when you say the way of knowing is the way things are. He calls this “that simple question of philosophy.”
• Not only essential names (godhood/God, wisdom/wise) but personal names too must be taken both ways: fatherhood and the Father. “We saw this back in the treatise on names… question thirteen was it?”

3. Two things that force the abstract personal names (“Quid, quis, quo”) #

The point: Thomas gives two reasons why abstract personal names are necessary.

• First, the objections of the heretics. We confess one God and three persons; asked “by what are they one?” we answer “by the essence”; asked “by what are they three?” we need abstract names: the Father is distinguished by his fatherhood, the Son by his sonhood. So essence signifies as what, person as who, property as by what: “quid, quis, quo.” He adds: this “by what” is “part of the reason why we had to use the word person, too.”
• Second, one person is referred to two persons. The Father is referred to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, but not by one relation:
  1. If by one relation, then Son and Spirit would be referred to the Father by one and the same relation.
  2. Since “only relation in divine things multiplies the Trinity, as the great Boethius said,” they would then not be two persons.
  • Praepositinus’s escape, rejected: as God has himself in one way to creatures while creatures are diversely related to him, so the Father has one relation to Son and Spirit while they have two to him. Thomas: the specific meaning of a relation consists in being toward another, so two relations are not diverse in species if only one relation answers them from the opposite side. Hence Lord and Father are different species of relation, answering to the diversity of slavery and sonhood.
  • Creatures are all referred to God under one species of relation, as his creatures; but Son and Spirit are not related to the Father by relations of one meaning, since one is generated and the other breathed.
  • Further, God has no real relation to creatures, so multiplying relations of reason in him is not inappropriate; but the Father’s relation to Son and Spirit must be real. So two relations in the Father, but only one person of the Father; therefore the relations must be signified apart, in the abstract, “which are called the properties and the notions.”
• Example: “Can I have one relation to my wife and my daughter?” No: to one I am husband, to the other father; if they are related to me differently I need two relations in me. So the Father needs two, “and that’s another reason why you need the abstract.”
• Student: is the second reason like the first, a need for something by which to distinguish? Yes: one person related to two by different relations, so you need the “by,” Latin quo.
• Student: is this where Gilbert de la Porrée was wrong? “Yeah, Thomas is saying that”: he did not admit the necessity of both abstract and concrete names.

4. Why we are forced to use both names (“God alone is what good”) #

The point: an exchange on why neither “God is good” nor “God is goodness” can stand alone.

• Christ says “God alone is good,” so we must say God is good; but grammatically “good” means “has goodness,” and haver and had seem two things. “I am not the charity that I have, not the health that I have”; but God is his goodness.
• If I said only “God is goodness,” they would say God is that by which things are good but not himself good, “just like my health is that by which I’m healthy, but is my health healthy too?” So “I’m forced to use both.”
• Both names reason recognizes as inadequate; our way of speaking follows our way of knowing, but “when you try to get to God in himself” you must distinguish the defects of our knowing from the way he is.
• Aside: God is wise “way more excellent than Aristotle was wise… even Thomas, yes.”

5. Reply to the first objection (“as the abstract in the concrete”) #

The point: as with the word “person,” Scripture does not mention notions but mentions the persons, in whom the notions are understood as the abstract in the concrete.

• Example: Scripture says God is good, not that there is goodness in God; but that goodness is in him is understood in saying he is good. Likewise “God loves you” (goodness/love in him).

6. Reply to the second: notions signify not things but rationes (“five, four, three”) #

The point: notions signify divine things “not as things in God” but as rationes, reasons or thoughts, by which the persons are known, though the relations they name are really in God; “that’s kind of a hard thing to see.”

• He recalls four relations but three persons; now five notions. “This is my Pythagorean Theorem… five, four, three,” the first numbers of the theorem (“two, three, four wouldn’t be”).
• Where one first sees five-four-three: the study of the soul. Aristotle distinguishes five genera of powers (vegetative, sense, appetitive, intellectual, locomotive) but four grades of life (plants; animals fixed like those on the ocean floor; animals that move from place to place; the intellectual), because the appetitive powers follow on having sense (emotions) or reason (will) and so make no separate grade. And only three souls, because “soul” indicates rising above the merely material: the living soul, the sensing soul, “the understanding soul, as Shakespeare calls it”; locomotive powers give no further grade above matter. “So five times four equals three.”
• Applied here: five notions: fatherhood, sonhood, breathing, procession, and innascibilitas, having no beginning, “not from anyone,” used to know the Father. Innascibility is not really a relation “except by kind of reduction,” so five notions come to four relations; one relation (breathing) is common to Father and Son, so four relations give only three persons. “That’ll come up.”
• Why innascibility counts as a notion of the Father: it pertains to his dignity; Thomas would not admit “no one is from the Holy Spirit” as a notion, since that adds nothing to dignity.
• Summary of how each person is known: the Father by innascibility, fatherhood, breathing; the Son by sonhood and breathing; the Holy Spirit “simply by his proceeding, his being breathed.”
• Consequence: whatever has an order to an essential or personal act cannot be said of the notions, since it is repugnant to their mode of signifying: not “fatherhood generates or creates,” not “fatherhood is wise or understanding.” But essential names that remove creaturely conditions can be: “fatherhood is eternal or immense.” And by identity of the thing, personal substantive names and essentials can be predicated: “fatherhood is God,” “fatherhood is the Father.”

7. Reply to the third, and the healthy becoming sick (“the haver and the had are not the same”) #

The point: though the persons are simple, their proper rationes can be signified in the abstract without prejudice to simplicity, “because of our way of knowing”; he traces that way of knowing to how we understand change.

• Heraclitus vs. Parmenides, as he gives it:
  1. We see the healthy become sick; what becomes something is that thing; so the healthy are sick (Heraclitus, to save change).
  2. But if healthy and sick are the same, there is no change; so Heraclitus, admitting the impossible, fails to save change.
  3. Parmenides: the healthy can never be sick, therefore no change; absurd, since change exists.
  4. Aristotle: since change exists and a thing cannot be its opposite, there must be a third thing, the subject of the two contraries, e.g. the body, in which health is at one time and sickness at another, not at the same time.
• Alternatively: “the healthy” is a confused notion of what is there; something has health, but haver and had are not the same, and so we distinguish health from what has it.
• Stuck with this way of thinking, when we say God is wise we say God has wisdom; but God is altogether simple, so he is his wisdom and can never be foolish, is his goodness and can never become bad; whereas the good man can lose the goodness he has. “A very simple thing, but kind of very profound.”
• Student: St. Paul calls Christ the wisdom of God, the power of God; is that incorrect? Wisdom signifies that by which the wise are wise; God must have that if he is wise, but being simple cannot be other than what he has; so Thomas often says “God is what he has.”
• Does either way of speaking make the mind false? No, because we do not attribute the defect of our speaking to God: saying “God has wisdom” we do not attribute the composition; saying “God is wisdom itself” we do not deny he is wise. “As Aristotle said, the falsehood would come in in saying that the way God is is the way we know him”; otherwise God would have to be “six billion different ways.”
• But there are false ways of speaking of God: to say God is composed, put together of Father, Son and Spirit as parts, “then my mind is false.”
• Closing: out of time; “whether there are five notions, we’ll talk about that next week.”

His words #

• notions: the properties signified in the abstract by which the persons are known and distinguished; Latin rationes, “thoughts”
• godhood / sonhood / fatherhood: his renderings of the abstract personal and essential names [ed.: deity, filiation, paternity]
• breathing: the notion by which Father and Son are related to the Holy Spirit [ed.: spiration]
• procession: the notion of the Holy Spirit, “his being breathed”
• innascibilitas: “having no beginning,” “not from anyone”; a notion of the Father pertaining to his dignity [ed.: innascibility]
• quid, quis, quo: essence as what, person as who, property as by what
• the haver and the had: what has a form vs. the form; in God not two things
• five, four, three: five notions, four relations, three persons (“my Pythagorean Theorem”)
• relation of reason / real relation: God to creatures vs. Father to Son and Spirit
• the understanding soul: his name (via Shakespeare) for the intellectual soul

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 32, a. 2 (objections, sed contra, body, three replies)

Mentioned

• Dionysius, Divine Names, ch. 1 (in obj. 1)
• John Damascene (sed contra)
• Praepositinus; Gilbert de la Porrée; Boethius (“only relation multiplies the Trinity”)
• Summa Theologiae I, q. 13, “the treatise on names” (his back-reference)
• Aristotle, On the Soul (inferred): five genera of powers, grades of life
• Gospel: “God alone is good”; St. Paul: Christ the wisdom and power of God (no locus given)
• Heraclitus, Parmenides, Aristotle on change (no locus given)

His questions #

• By what are they one God, and by what are they three persons? One by the essence; three by fatherhood, sonhood, etc., which must be named in the abstract.
• Can I have one relation to my wife and my daughter? No; husband to one, father to the other; so the Father has two real relations.
• Is my health healthy too? No; that is why “God is goodness” alone will not do, we must also say God is good.
• Why are there only four grades of life when there are five genera of powers? Because the appetitive powers follow on sense or reason and make no separate grade.
• Does the fatherhood generate? No; contrary to the way notions signify, though “fatherhood is God” and “is eternal” can be said.
• When the healthy become sick, does health become sickness? No; there is a third thing, the subject (the body), in which the contraries succeed.
• Do these two ways of speaking make our mind false? No, unless we attribute our way of knowing to the way God is; saying God is composed of parts would be false.
• Whether there are five notions? Left open, “next week.”