Summa I, Q. 34, Arts. 2–3: Word as the Son's Own Name, and the Word's Relation to Creatures

Orientation #

He refers back to his earlier “little discourse on antonomasia” and to what “we saw with the word concept” (prev. lecture, on a. 1), and to “the five notions before.” He closes by announcing “the next word will be imago,” citing Colossians 1:15 as the text the next article uses. The previous class treated a. 1 (Word as personal name); the next treats Image.

The class, in order #

1. Article 2, the five objections (“it seems that word is not the son’s own name”) #

He reads the objections one by one, glossing each.

1. The Son is a subsisting person; a word or thought does not signify a subsisting thing (“my thought is not a substance, not a hypostasis, not a person”).
2. A word proceeds from the speaker by prolatio, “being carried forward” (latio = carrying, pro = forward); so if the Son is properly Word he proceeds only by way of speech, the heresy of Valentinus (Augustine, book on heresies). “Be very careful when you use the words.”
3. Every proper name of a person signifies a property; if Word is the Son’s proper name there is a property beyond the five notions numbered above. “That’s an interesting objection.”
4. Whoever understands conceives a word; the Son understands; so there is a word of the Son, and being Word is not private to the Son.
5. Hebrews 1:3, “carrying all by the word of his power,” from which Basil takes the Holy Spirit to be the Word of the Son.

2. Sed contra and the body of a. 2 (“the Word alone is taken for the Son”) #

Point: Word, said properly in God, is taken personally and is the proper name of the Son.

• Authority: Augustine, De Trinitate VI; “of course you could go to the Gospel of St John,” where the Word of God is clearly the Son.
• Reason (Thomas): (1) Word signifies an emanation of the understanding; (2) the person proceeding in God by way of intellect is called Son, and this procession generation; therefore the Son alone is properly Word.
• His gloss on why: persons are distinguished by processions that remain within God; there are only two kinds of activity remaining within, understanding and willing (loving); one person proceeds by God understanding himself (“the Son is God understood”), the other by God loving himself. So what proceeds by way of understanding is the same person.

3. Reply to the first objection: a thought that is a person (“in us, to be and to understand are not the same”) #

Point: God’s thought is a subsisting person because in God to be and to understand are the same.

• The first objection “is a good place to begin… the fundamental objection.” John’s logos could be translated “In the beginning was the thought”; but our thoughts are not persons, so how can God’s be? Thomas draws on the treatise on the unity of God.
• Argument: (1) In us to be and to understand differ (“I discovered in my life I can be without understanding something”), so what has intelligible being in us does not pertain to our nature; (2) in God to be and to understand are the same; (3) therefore God’s word is not an accident nor an effect (an effect would have a different existence from its cause) but pertains to his very nature; (4) whatever is in God’s nature subsists; so the Word subsists. Damascene: the Word of God is substantiale, being in a hypostasis; our words are powers/virtues of the soul, accidents.
• Examples: my thoughts are in me but are not me; even my thought of myself is not me; even reason’s definition of reason (“an ability for a large discourse, looking before and after”) is not reason itself, any more than reason’s being is its understanding of a triangle. “Now you know what God says: My thoughts are not your thoughts.”
• Antonomasia (back-reference): John speaks by antonomasia, “the Word”; saying Aristotle is a philosopher is not antonomasia, saying he is the philosopher is; Aristotle calls Homer the poet, Thomas calls Paul the apostle. One reason it is “the thought” is that it is the only thought that is a substance or person. “I’ve got thoughts, but none of them is a person. I have a son who’s a person.”

4. Replies 2 to 5 of a. 2 (“the same property is implied, which is in the name Son”) #

• Reply 2: Valentinus was not condemned for saying the Son was born by being carried forth (the Arians so name him; Hilary, De Trinitate VI) but for the other mode of bringing forth he laid down (Augustine on heresies); “not to worry too much about the objection.”
• Reply 3: Word implies the same property as Son (as seen with “concept”); Augustine: he is Word in the same way as he is Son. The Son’s nativity, his personal property, is signified by diverse names bringing out diverse perfections: Son (same nature as the Father), splendor (co-eternal, as splendor is simultaneous with the flame or light), image (altogether similar), Word (generated immaterially). No one name designates all. He notes the objection that “generation” first means something material; hence John begins with “Word” to bring out the immaterial way.
• Reply 4: the Son understands as it belongs to him to be God, since to understand is said essentially; but the Son is God generated, not generating, so he understands not as producing a word but as the word proceeding, which does not really differ from the divine understanding but is distinguished by relation alone from its principle. He corrects himself: the principle is the Father, not the Holy Spirit (“beginning of the Word… in the beginning was the word”).
• Reply 5: Hebrews 1:3 is figurative, “word” for the effect of the word; the gloss takes word for command, as things are preserved in being by the power of the word as they were produced by it. Basil’s “word” for the Holy Spirit is improper and figurative: whatever manifests something can be called its word, and the Spirit manifests the Son. “Gotta watch these guys.”

5. Article 3, the objections, and why the article interests him (“a respect or relation to creatures”) #

Point: does the name Word imply a relation to creatures? He reads five objections: (1) names connoting an effect in creatures are said essentially, but Word is said personally; (2) names implying relation to creatures (Lord, Creator) are said of God in time, Word from eternity; (3) Word implies relation to what it proceeds from, so it would proceed from creatures; (4) the ideas (from the treatise on God’s knowledge) are many by diverse relations to creatures, so there would be many words; (5) God knows non-beings too, so the Word would be related to non-beings, “which would seem to be false.”

• His interest: “Son” implies no reference to creatures, only to the Father; but by a word you say everything you understand, and God in understanding himself understands everything else. Bonaventure calls the Word “eternal art.”
• Distinction: image vs. exemplar. Both involve likeness, but the image is toward something as its beginning, the exemplar is itself the beginning of what is like it. Toward the Father the Son is imago; toward creatures God is exemplar, not image; but “exemplar” is not the Son’s name.
• His forecast of the solution: the Word is chiefly of God, so it proceeds only from him; secondarily related to creatures because God in understanding himself understands all else.

6. Sed contra and body of a. 3 (“expressive not only of the Father, but also of the creatures”) #

Point: the Word implies a relation to creatures because God in knowing himself knows creatures.

• Augustine, Eighty-three Questions: Word signifies relation not only to the Father but to what is made through the Word by his operative power.
• Argument: (1) the word conceived in the mind represents everything understood in act; (2) in us there are diverse words as diverse things are understood; (3) God by one act understands himself and all else; so his unique Word is expressive of the Father and of creatures. (4) God’s knowledge of himself is knowing only (“not knowledge of how to make God”), of creatures both knowing and making; so the Word is expressive only of what is in the Father, but of creatures both expressive and operative (factiva). Text: “He said, and they were made” (he cites Psalm 32; “this is Genesis 2, I guess, when the Gospel interprets it”). His own line: “God the Father said it all in one word.”
• Aside on structure: one division of Lombard’s Sentences puts books 1-2 on God as beginning of things, 3-4 on God as end; but book 1 treats the processions in God together with the procession of creatures because, as Thomas explains there, the divine processions are prior to the procession of creatures not only in duration but as cause: “like God’s art to make them,” and presumably likewise the Holy Spirit by way of love. Contrast the Summa Contra Gentiles: one book on God himself, one on God as beginning, one on God as end. This is “anticipated here” in Word as expressive and productive of creatures.

7. Reply 1: nature included obliquely in person (“also included the nature, but obliquely”) #

Point: a divine person’s name implies no respect to creatures in its personal relation, but does in what pertains to the nature.

• “Obliquely”: person is not defined as rational nature but as individual substance of a rational nature; substance is said directly, nature obliquely. Example: point defined as end of a line; end is said directly, line is in the definition obliquely.
• So as it is proper to the Son to be Son, it is proper to him to be God generated (“the generated Creator”); through the nature included in the meaning, Word implies relation to creatures. “A delicate thing”: Thomas admits the force of the objection (relation to creatures belongs to the essence) while bringing the nature into the person’s definition.

8. Reply 2: immanent vs. transitive action, and eternal choosing (“relations follow upon actions”) #

Point: only relations following on actions that go into exterior matter are said of God in time.

• Distinction: some names imply a relation following an action that goes into exterior matter (to create, to govern), said of God in time; others a relation following an action remaining in the knower (to know, to will, “not a transitive action”), not said in time. Word implies the latter. He corrects the translation: “in time, rather than from time”; and notes there are also relations following upon quantity, not at issue.
• Example: God did not choose me in time after my parents met; he chose me eternally (“I have loved you with an eternal love”); but he created my soul in time, after the body was prepared (“I’m stuck with this body”); Columba Marmion quoting Hebrews, “A body thou hast prepared for me.” So God is Creator of my soul in time but not chooser of me in time.
• Doing vs. making: English “doing” names both; the act with an exterior effect gets the new name “making” because apart from it there is a product; understanding a theorem of Euclid leaves nothing apart from the understanding (“so they say you’re doing nothing”), making a chair leaves a chair. Not therefore better: Aristotle (ninth book of Wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics IX]) says doing is a perfection of the doer, making a perfection of the thing made, and applies this to ethics (man’s end is in the first kind).
• Marx criticised for placing man’s ultimate perfection in making; his answer that man transforming the world transforms himself has “some truth” (the carpenter who likes the job because he learns) but is the fallacy of the accidental: it is accidental that the maker is perfected by making, just as it is accidental that the teacher is perfected by teaching (though it happens all the time with profound matter, not with elementary repetition), since one is not a teacher insofar as one does not understand; the cook who knows how to make the meal does not learn it by making it.
• Relation of reason: God’s being chooser implies some relation to me, but not the real relation by which I am related to him as created; like Aristotle’s knowable relative to knower, where the knower is really related and the knowable only said to be. “Subtle thing.”
• Aside: Hillary “ready on day one”; “probably nobody’s gonna be ready on day one.”

9. Replies 3 to 5 of a. 3 (“not known by God by knowledge taken from the creatures”) #

• Reply 3: God knows creatures not by knowledge taken from them (then they would be “like his father”) but by his essence; so the Word does not proceed from creatures though expressive of them. The exterior object is in a sense the father of my sensing; God’s knowledge in no way proceeds from things, things proceed from him. Hence the comparison to art: the artist has his idea before it is executed in matter.
• Reply 4: “idea” as Augustine uses it is imposed chiefly to signify respect to creatures; God understands how the dog, the tree, the angel, the seraph and the lower angel would each be like him in a different way, so ideas are said plurally and not personally. “Word” is imposed chiefly to signify relation to the one saying it, and consequently to creatures; since there is only one understanding there is one Word, said personally. “He said it all in one word.”
• Reply 5: as God’s knowledge is of non-beings, so is his Word, since there is nothing less in the Word than in the knowledge. Of things God could make but never makes, the Word is expressive and manifesting only, not factiva; of things that are at some time it is both expressive and productive.

10. Closing (“the next word will be imago”) #

Image follows naturally on Son and Word; the text behind it is Colossians 1:15, Qui est imago Dei invisibilis, quoted in the next article.

His words #

• prolatio: “being carried forward,” from latio (carrying) and pro (forward).
• word / thought: his double rendering of verbum, “word in the sense of thought.”
• hypostasis: “a person, individual substance.”
• antonomasia: calling one thing “the X” as chief among all (“the philosopher,” “the poet,” “the apostle”).
• substantiale: Damascene’s term for the Word of God, “being in a hypostasis.”
• reason: “an ability for a large discourse, looking before and after.”
• eternal art: Bonaventure’s name for the Word.
• imago vs. exemplar: image is toward something as its beginning; exemplar is itself the beginning of the like.
• factiva: “productive,” of the Word toward creatures God makes.
• obliquely: included in a definition without being what is said directly (nature in “person,” line in “point”).
• in time (not “from time”): his correction of the translation of ex tempore.
• doing vs. making: immanent act vs. act with an exterior product.
• fallacy of the accidental: attributing to a thing as such what belongs to it by happening.
• relation of reason: as knowable to knower.
• ninth book of Wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics IX].

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 34, a. 2 (objections, sed contra, body, five replies)
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 34, a. 3 (objections, sed contra, body, five replies)

Mentioned

• John 1 (“In the beginning was the Word”)
• Augustine, De Trinitate VI; book on heresies; Eighty-three Questions
• Hilary, De Trinitate VI
• Hebrews 1:3; Hebrews, “A body thou hast prepared for me” (via Columba Marmion)
• Damascene (on the Word as substantiale)
• Basil (Holy Spirit as Word of the Son)
• Isaiah, “My thoughts are not your thoughts” (inferred locus)
• Jeremiah, “I have loved you with an eternal love” (inferred locus)
• Psalm 32, “He said and they were made”; Genesis 2 (as he says)
• Colossians 1:15
• Peter Lombard, Sentences (division of the four books); Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles (division of books)
• Bonaventure (“eternal art”)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics IX (inferred) on doing vs. making; Aristotle on knowable and knower
• Marx (man transforming the world transforms himself)

His questions #

• How would you translate logos in “In the beginning was the logos”? “Word,” but in the sense of thought; it could be “in the beginning was the thought.”
• Is reason’s definition of reason, reason itself? No; my thoughts are not me, not even my reason.
• If you say Aristotle is a philosopher, are you speaking by antonomasia? No; only if you say he is the philosopher.
• Does saying he is the Son bring out that he is generated immaterially, as “Word” does? No; no one name designates all the perfections.
• Would you think of the name “Son” as implying a reference to the creature? No, Son refers to the Father; but the Word says everything God understands.
• What is the difference between an image and an exemplar? Image is toward something as beginning; exemplar is itself the beginning.
• What does “obliquely” mean? Included in the definition but not said directly, as line in “end of a line.”
• When did God choose me to be? Eternally; but he created my soul in time.
• Apart from understanding a theorem of Euclid, what is there? Nothing; hence doing keeps the common name and making gets a new one.
• Does God know things he never makes, and does his Word express them? Yes; the Word is expressive of them but not productive.