Summa I, Q.32 a.3–4 and Q.33 intro: The Five Notions, When Opinions About Them Become Heresy, and Whether the Father Is 'Beginning' Without Being 'Before'

Orientation #

He opens “I guess you’re up to the third article here in question 32,” and refers back to “our second question” on the four relations and to a reduction “I was giving in terms of the soul” (prev. lecture). He closes q. 32 by recalling the division of the four questions on the persons in general and previews the six questions on the persons in particular. Last time treated q. 32, a. 2 on whether notions are to be posited, and previewed the number of notions.

The class, in order #

1. Three objections that there are fewer than five (“proper notions of the persons are nothing other”) #

He reads the objections of q. 32, a. 3 and flags that Thomas will answer both sides, the sed contra here being “in between the two.”

• Obj. 1: notions are the relations by which persons are distinguished; there are only four relations (Father–Son, Son–Father, Father-and-Son–Holy Spirit, Holy Spirit–them); so four notions. “That’s not a good objection.”
• Obj. 2: one essence, so God is one; three persons, so God is trinus; five notions would make God fivefold, “which doesn’t fit with the rest.”
• Obj. 3: three persons, five notions, so one person (the Father: unbornness, fatherhood, common breathing) has several. Either they differ in the thing (composition in the Father) or by reason only (then one is said of the other, as goodness is wisdom, so common breathing would be fatherhood).

2. Two sed contras that there are more (“from the Holy Spirit there is not another person”) #

• As the Father has a notion from being from no one, so the Holy Spirit should have a sixth from having no one from him.
• As Father and Son share the notion of common breathing, Son and Holy Spirit should share a notion of being from the Father. He puts it as “is it more or less than five?” and answers: “the truth is in between.” Five.

3. The body: five notions from the two sides of origin (“from whom is another, and who is from another”) #

Point: a notion is a proper reason for knowing a divine person; persons are multiplied by origin; origin yields two ways of making known.

1. Origin has two aspects: one from whom another is, and one who is from another.
2. Father: not knowable as from another, only as from no one: unbornness (“without birth, let’s put it that way”). As one from whom another is, known two ways: as the Son is from him, fatherhood; as the Spirit is from him, common breathing.
3. Son: as from another by being born, sonship; as one from whom the Spirit is, common breathing (same as the Father).
4. Holy Spirit: as from others, procession (“for want of a better name, proceeding”); no person is from him. Conclusion: five notions: without birth, fatherhood, sonship, common breathing, procession.

4. Four relations, four properties, three personal, not the same four (“without birth is a property but not a relation”) #

• Four are relations; unbornness is a relation only by reduction. Logic parallel: things are in a category as species, or led back to it as a negation of a species or as a beginning of one. Point is placed in quantity, not because it has size, but as the beginning of a line (continuous quantity); blindness is led back to quality as the negation of a quality. Unbornness (“doesn’t have a beginning”) is the negation of a relation and so led back.
• Four are proprietates. Property in logic: outside the nature but following on it; in the full sense belongs to one species only, to every member, always. “Half of four” is a property of two in the full sense; “less than ten” is not (belongs only to two but is not a full property); “logician” belongs only to man but not to every man nor always. Here Thomas means what belongs to one person only. Common breathing is not a property (Father and Son): it makes them known against the Spirit, not the Father against the Son. Fatherhood, sonship, procession, unbornness each belong to one person alone.
• Student: doesn’t the Holy Spirit also lack birth? Answer: Thomas takes ingenitum more generally, as negating anyone from whom he proceeds; the Son has an origin (the Father), the Spirit has an origin (Father and Son). Student suggests “without origin” would be less confusing; he agrees. Aside: the term proprietates is so ingrained it usually does not come from Thomas originally.
• Result stressed: “four of the five are relations, and four of the five notions are properties, but it’s not the same four”: common spiration is a relation, not a property; unbornness a property, not a relation.
• Three are personal (constituting persons: fatherhood, sonship, procession); common breathing and unbornness are notions of persons but not personal, “as will be more clear later on.” Summary: “five for three”: five notions, four relations, four properties, three personal.
• Aside: philosophy begins with another five, Porphyry’s genus, species, difference, property, accident, “O Chrysaorius,” needed for the categories, definition, division, demonstration; the Isagoge is an introduction to the categories and in a way to nearly the whole of logic and philosophy.

5. Replies to the three objections (“not said to be fivefold”) #

• Ad 1: the Father is said to be beginning of the whole Godhead (“you have to be careful about that”), beginning par excellence. John 1:1 “In the beginning was the Word” has two readings: from all eternity, or “the beginning” meaning the Father (to return in the next question). Still, unbornness is more the negation of a relation than a relation.
• Ad 2: essence signifies as a res, so one God; persons signify as things, so three; notions signify not as things but as thoughts making known the persons, so God is not fivefold. He stresses the equivocation of the word res: Boethius’ definition of person uses res subsistens in intellectuali natura; to “are Father, Son, Holy Spirit one thing or three things?” the answer is “yes,” one absolute thing and three relative things, without contradiction, because “thing” has more than one meaning (going back to Aristotle’s categories). This reduction 5–4–3 differs from the one he gave with the soul, where genera of powers, grades of life and kinds of soul are different things; here five rationes, not five things.
• Ad 3: only relative opposition makes real plurality in God; several notions of one person are not relatively opposed, so do not differ in reality, yet are not said of each other because they signify as diverse thoughts. Parallel: we do not say the attribute of power is the attribute of knowledge, though knowledge is power. Our thoughts of God’s power, wisdom, goodness are not the same “for us,” though what corresponds is one in God. Father and son are relatively opposed (I cannot be my own father; real distinction between me and my father, me and my son); husband and father belong to one person, “really different relations for another reason.”

6. Replies to the two sed contras (“does not pertain to his dignity”) #

• To the first: person signifies dignity; no notion is taken from the fact that no person is from the Holy Spirit, since that adds nothing to his dignity, whereas being from no one pertains to the authority of the Father. He puzzles over “authority”: author carries the idea of origin. Part of the Father’s excellence is being from no one; that no one is from the Spirit adds no dignity, so no sixth notion.
• To the second: Father and Son come together in one special way of producing the Spirit (one and the same breathing); Son and Spirit do not go forth from the Father in one way (one generated, the other breathed); a beginning of making known must be something special, so no common notion. “Five notions, neither more nor less” (with a joke about villains and sons of darkness, “as Faustus says”).
• Student: distinction between filiation and generation? Left for “the comparative consideration”; for now, generation is the act underlying our thought of the father–son distinction.

7. Article 4: whether it is licit to opine contrarily about the notions (“something pertains to faith in two ways”) #

• Objections: Augustine, De Trinitate I: nowhere is error more dangerous than about the Trinity, to which the notions pertain; contrary opinions cannot both be free of error (if I say five and you say four, one is mistaken). Persons are known through notions, and one may not opine contrarily about persons. Sed contra: the articles of faith are not about the notions.
• Distinction: (a) directly of faith, what is chiefly handed down (God three and one, the Son incarnate): a false opinion is heresy, especially with pertinacity, adhering “with pride”; (b) indirectly, that from which something contrary to faith follows (e.g. that Samuel was not the son of [unclear in recording], from which it follows Scripture is false): one may think falsely without heresy before it is seen or determined, especially by the Church, that something contrary to faith follows; afterwards it is heresy. Hence many things now heretical were not before, as what follows became manifest. His example: some saints denied the Immaculate Conception; not heresy then, clearly heresy now, once determined as connected with the Incarnation.
• Applied: one may opine contrarily about the notions without heresy if not intending anything against faith; if one holds a false notion knowing something contrary to faith follows, heresy.

8. Closing q. 32 and the prologue of q. 33 (“about the persons in special”) #

• The four questions on the persons in general divide into three: the meaning of person; two on the number (plurality and what follows); the notions whereby persons are known. Next: six questions on the persons in particular, one on the Father, two on the Son, three on the Holy Spirit.
• Four articles on the Father: whether it belongs to him to be a beginning; whether “Father” properly signifies his person; whether “Father” is said first personally or essentially; whether it is proper to him to be unborn.
• On the third: in the Our Father, does “Father” name the first person or God? Students divided (first person, since Jesus prays; “King of Kings”). He argues: if prayer is ascent of the mind to God asking suitable things, and this is the prayer of prayers containing (Augustine) all we can ask, “Father” there seems to mean God, though it may be attributed to the Father by appropriation (as power is). So the name is equivocal, essential and personal, and the question is which is first. Articles 2 and 3 go together as concerning the name.
• On the fourth: it raises again the student’s question whether ingenitum is to be taken broadly, without origin. He notes nothing here on common breathing: only what seems private to the Father.
• Aside: a parallel passage is at the beginning of Contra errores Graecorum, which they had just seen printed out.

9. Article 1: is the Father a beginning, against Aristotle’s “first” (“does not signify beforeness, but origin”) #

Point: Thomas “kind of corrects Aristotle.”

1. Aristotle, Metaphysics V, on the names of wisdom, begins with principium, Greek arche, and gives about six senses: the beginning of a line or road (where one comes onto it, as going to Boston); the fundamental part (foundation of a house, keel of a ship, given as third); the mover or maker (Michelangelo of the Pietà, fourth); the beginning of knowing, principles of science (first); any cause, even the end (sixth). [He does not give all six distinctly.]
2. Common notion: a beginning is what is first in being, becoming or knowing; first means before all the rest.
3. If the Father is a beginning in that sense, he is before the Son; this contradicts the Athanasian Creed and a later article: no before and after in the Trinity, in no sense of before (time, being, knowledge, goodness; Aristotle’s chapter on “before” is touched on).
4. Aristotle, a pagan, knew no Trinity; every beginning known to natural reason is before that of which it is the beginning: point before line, beginning of day and of motion, foundation before house, Euclid’s definitions before the science, the Isagoge before the categories.
5. Ad 3 (read ahead): though “beginning” was imposed from priority, it signifies not beforeness but origin. So the Father is origin of the Son without being before him; the reason comes later.

• Augustine’s image in the mirror: it is there as soon as you are, not a few minutes later. The Son proceeds as the thought of the Father, and God is always actually thinking himself, so the thinker is not before the thought in time, nor can one be without the other; both have the same divine nature which is goodness itself, so neither is better. Aristotle, and Plato before him, said as much of opposites. “In no way is the Father before the Son.”

His words #

• notion: a proper thought or reason (ratio) for knowing a divine person; five thoughts, not five things.
• without birth / unbornness: innascibilitas, ingenitum; he prefers “without origin” or “without a beginning” as the broad sense.
• common breathing: communis spiratio [ed.: common spiration].
• proceeding / procession / being breathed: the Holy Spirit’s notion.
• reduction: being led back to a genus as negation or beginning of a species, not as a species.
• property (proprietas): belonging to one person only; in logic, to one species, every member, always.
• personal notions: those constituting a person.
• res: “thing,” equivocal: one absolute thing, three relative things.
• relative opposition: the only source of real plurality in God.
• authority of the Father: “author” as origin.
• pertinacity: obstinate adherence, needed for full heresy.
• beginning / principium / arche: signifies origin, not beforeness.
• fifth book of wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics V].

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 32, a. 3 (objections, sed contras, body, replies)
• Summa Theologiae I, q. 32, a. 4
• Summa Theologiae I, q. 33, prologue and a. 1 (opening and ad 3)
• handout “Note for Word Beginning”, p. 2 (read from during the Aristotle discussion)

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Metaphysics V (senses of beginning; chapter on “before”)
• Porphyry, Isagoge (opening address to Chrysaorius)
• Augustine, De Trinitate I; Augustine on the Our Father; the mirror example
• Boethius, definition of person
• John 1:1; Athanasian Creed
• Thomas Aquinas, Contra errores Graecorum (parallel passage)
• printed volume: DHB Vol. III, The School of Aristotle, p. 556

His questions #

• Is it more or less than five? Five; the truth is between the objections and the sed contras.
• In what genus do you put point? Where would you place blindness? Quantity, as beginning of a line; quality, as negation of a quality: by reduction.
• Is “less than ten” a property of two in the strictest sense? No; only to two, but not the full sense as “half of four” is.
• Are the Father, Son and Holy Spirit one thing or three things? Yes: one absolute thing, three relative things; res is equivocal.
• Why does Thomas use the word “authority” of the Father? Author carries the sense of origin; left partly open.
• In the Our Father, is “Father” the first person or God? He argues God, since it is the prayer of prayers; students disagreed.
• Is every beginning known to natural reason before that of which it is the beginning? Yes, in every example; but in the Trinity there is no before.
• Is Aristotle mistaken about what a beginning is? He was a pagan; “beginning” signifies origin, not the priority from which the word was taken.