Aquinas on the Trinity: Whether Fatherhood Comes Before Generation, and Why Notional Acts Are Attributed to the Persons

Orientation #

He opens by looking back at Thomas “ending the treatise on the substance of God with the unity of God” before taking up the Trinity, and refers back to “what we’ve shown before, that the relations both distinguish and constitute the hypostases” (prev. lecture). He closes with the proemium of q. 41 and its first article; the class breaks after the reply to the third objection. The previous class treated q. 40 aa. 2-3 (relations distinguishing and constituting the persons); the next takes up q. 41 a. 2, whether the Father generates by nature or by will.

The class, in order #

1. Why the Trinity was not revealed in a polytheistic age (“ending the treatise on the substance of God”) #

The point: mysteries are revealed in an order, and there may be a reason for it.

• Mohammedans think Christians are polytheists; Jews do not believe in the Trinity either. So it is striking that Thomas ends the treatise on God’s substance with His unity before starting the Trinity.
• De Koninck: had the Trinity been revealed explicitly in the Old Testament, in a polytheistic age, polytheism would not have been overcome.
• Same thought on the “Marian century” (Immaculate Conception to Assumption): Mary’s mysteries defined long after Christ’s, because she is so elevated she might be taken for another goddess; once the other mysteries have sunk in, her greatness can be brought out without that danger. De Koninck thought the mysteries of St Joseph might come out next.
• Aside: the side altars to Mary and Joseph in his home parish (Nativity, St Paul, Minnesota) and most St Paul churches: a sign of Joseph’s prominence.

2. q. 40 a. 4, the objections: are notional acts understood before the properties? (“the notional acts, like to generate, to breathe”) #

The point: three objections and the sed contra, with a preview of the distinction Thomas will use.

• Obj. 1: the magister (Peter Lombard) says he is always the Father because he always generated the Son; so generation is understood before fatherhood. Aside: for centuries everyone taking a doctorate in theology commented on the Sentences; Thomas commented on them and was thinking of revising that commentary when he decided to write the Summa; the magister was never made a doctor of the Church, not even a saint, though bishop of Paris.
• Obj. 2: every relation presupposes in its understanding that on which it is founded. Aristotle in the fifth book of Wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics V]: some relations are based on quantity (or the one), some on acting upon and undergoing; equality presupposes quantity; fatherhood is founded on the action of generation, so presupposes it.
• Obj. 3: as generation is to fatherhood, so birth to sonship; sonship presupposes birth (he is son because born); therefore fatherhood presupposes generation. He flags this as an argument by ratios, “likenesses that are far apart”, which “exercise the mind”: you must see exactly in what way they are alike (see §4).
• Sed contra: generation is the operation of the person of the Father; fatherhood constitutes that person; so fatherhood is before generation.
• Preview: the relation considered simply as relation is understood after generation; considered as constituting the person of the Father, before it. “That’s very subtle.” Shakespeare: we should “look before and after”; this is a question of before and after.
• Support from the Categories: Aristotle distinguishes four meanings of before, so A can be before B in one sense and B before A in another. Example: we study philosophy before theology in the order of learning, but theology is before philosophy in dignity or worth.
• Descartes, “I think, therefore I am”: thinking comes before in knowing that I am, but in things I have to be before I can do something.

3. The body of a. 4: origin signified actively and passively (“it is necessary to use a distinction”) #

The point: on the supposition that relations constitute the persons, three levels of distinction settle the question.

1. If the properties merely make known persons already constituted (the opinion Thomas rejects), then absolutely the relations follow the notional acts: they are just relations the persons have, as his person is more fundamental than his being a father or teacher. Then one says without distinction: because he generates, he is Father.
2. But supposing the relations both distinguish and constitute the hypostases (he notes Thomas “talks like a Greek” here), one must use a distinction. Aside on “use”: he dislikes saying “make a distinction”, which sounds like inventing one to escape a difficulty; better to say one sees a distinction, and having seen it, uses it.
3. Origin is signified actively (generation attributed to the Father; breathing, taken as a notional act, to Father and Son) and passively (birth or nativity to the Son, procession or “being breathed” to the Holy Spirit). “Passively” will turn out to be grammatical only (§8).
   • Origin signified passively is simply before, in our understanding, the properties of the persons proceeding, even the personal ones: because it signifies as the road or way to the person constituted by that property (being born is the coming-to-be of the one born).
   • Origin signified actively is before the relation of the originating person when that relation is not personal: breathing does not constitute the Father as fatherhood does, so the notional act of breathing precedes the unnamed relative property common to Father and Son.
   • “The most subtle distinction”: the personal property of the Father can be considered (a) simply as a relation, and so it presupposes the notional act, since relation as such is founded on act (Aristotle’s teaching again: on quantity or on action and passion, and in God not on quantity); or (b) as constitutive of a person, and so it is understood before the act, as the one acting is understood before the action.

• Student exchange: a student presses that “he wouldn’t be Father if he didn’t generate”. His answer: that is correct if you stop at the relation as relation; but if you go beyond and say this relation constitutes a person, then being is more fundamental than doing, and what he does is understood as proceeding from him as a person. Not so with the Son, who is understood as resulting from the act of generation.

4. The replies, and the 4:6 :: 2:3 example (“because he generates, he is the father”) #

The point: each objection is met by the distinction, and the third by seeing a difference within the likeness.

• Ad 1: the magister’s “because he generates, he is the Father” takes the name Father as designating a relation only, not a subsisting person; taken the second way one must say the reverse, “because he is the Father, he generates”, otherwise he would be doing something before he is understood to be.
• Ad 2: proceeds about fatherhood as relation, not as constitutive of a person.
• Ad 3: the objection goes by proportion, so he gives his “simple example for math”: 4 is to 6 as 2 is to 3; but 2:3 is a ratio of prime to prime, or even to odd, and one wrongly concludes 4:6 is likewise. Plato: likeness is a slippery thing. The likeness is only that 4 is the same parts of 6 that 2 is of 3 (think 4 as two twos, 6 as three twos); the mistake was exaggerating the likeness. So Thomas points out the difference: passive nativity is the road to the person of the Son, not understood as proceeding from him, hence precedes the Son even as constitutive; generation is signified as going forth from the Father, hence presupposes the personal property constituting the Father.
• Aside: among the four tools of dialectic Aristotle gives the tool of difference before the tool of likeness; he suggested to Monsignor Dion this is because seeing likeness without difference causes deception, and Dion seemed to agree.

5. Passage to q. 41 and its proemium (“compare it to the notional acts”) #

The point: the person has been compared to the substance and to the relations; now to the notional acts.

• Are Father and generation two different things? There seem to be four things (Father, generation, birth, Son), but the way of signifying differs: Father as relation, generation as act; we must do this because we understand God from creatures, where relation is based on quantity or on action.
• The six questions: (1) whether notional acts are to be attributed to the persons; (2) whether necessary or voluntary (does the Father choose to generate?); (3) whether the person proceeds from nothing or from something (is it like creation?); (4) whether there is a power with respect to notional acts (not only generating but the ability, potency, to generate and to breathe); (5) if so, what “power” signifies there (the great question of the De potentia); (6) whether a notional act can terminate at many persons. His tally: three about the acts, two about the powers, one about the limit of the act.

6. q. 41 a. 1: should notional acts be attributed to the persons? (“it seems that notional acts should not be attributed”) #

The point: the objections press the substance/relation dichotomy; the short body answers from origin.

• Obj. 1: Boethius, on the Trinity: all the genera, turned over to predication in God, are changed into the divine substance except relativity; action is one of the ten genera, so an action attributed to God belongs to essence, not to notion.
• Obj. 2: Augustine, De Trinitate V: everything said of God is according to substance or relation; substance is signified by the essential attributes, relation by the names of persons and properties; no room left for notional acts. (Boethius is following Augustine, as Thomas is.)
• Obj. 3: action by its nature infers a passion; Aristotle’s poiein and paschein, actio and passio, “acting upon and undergoing”; but God is pure act, no undergoing; so no notional acts.
• Sed contra: Augustine, On Faith to Peter: it is the property of the Father that he generates a Son; generation is an act.
• Body (he notes it is very short, the replies long): the persons are distinguished by origin; origin cannot suitably be designated except by some act; therefore notional acts must be attributed to the persons. Without “the Father generates the Son”, “the Father and the Son breathe the Holy Spirit”, you would not see the proceeding.

7. Ad 1: a twofold order of origin (“a twofold order of origin”) #

The point: Thomas admits Boethius’ dichotomy and locates notional acts on the relation side.

• Every origin is designated by an act; but there are two orders of origin in God: (a) the creature going forth from God, common to the three persons, so the acts designating it (creating) belong to the essence; (b) one person going forth from another, so the acts designating it are called notional, because the notions of the persons are the habitudines and relations of the persons to each other.
• Aside: this follows the order of the Sentences: Book I the proceeding of one person from another, then the proceeding of creatures from God, the last two books the coming back of things to God, “a nice way of putting things together”.

8. Ad 2: one thing, two thoughts (“only differ according to the way of signifying”) #

The point: notional acts and relations differ only secundum modum significandi and are altogether the same in reality; why we nonetheless need both thoughts.

1. The magister, Sentences I d. 26: generation and birth “by other names” are called fatherhood and sonship. Not synonyms (they do not signify the same way) but signifying the same thing.
2. Thomas’s account of “action”: we first guess the origin of one thing from another from motion; something removed from its disposition by motion manifestly comes from some cause. Motion as in the movable from another is called passion; the origin of the motion, beginning from another and ending in the moved, is called action. Remove motion, and action implies nothing but the order of origin from some cause or beginning (“beginning is more general than cause”). Since in God there is no motion, the personal action is nothing but the relation of the beginning to the person from the beginning, i.e. the relations or notions (habitudo, “a rather rare word for relation”).
3. Why we speak this way: about divine and intelligible things we can only speak by the way of sensible things, from which we take knowledge (Aristotle, third book on the soul: the proper object of our reason is the what-it-is of something that can be sensed or imagined). Same reason as the concrete and abstract: Deus and divinitas, God as “having the divine nature”, though God and what He has are the same; derived from material things where form and the thing having the form are distinct (his image: the hair and the hat; father and fatherhood). In creatures actions and passions, implying motion, are other than the relations following on them; so we must signify separately, by way of act and by way of relation.
4. Is understanding one thing by two thoughts false? No: truth does not require that the way we understand be the way things are; falsehood enters only if from two thoughts you conclude two really distinct things in God. Aristotle saw this; Plato, Hegel and the rationalists (Descartes beginning, full-blown in Spinoza: the order of thoughts and the order of things are the same) confused them. For Aristotle, for the most part the orders are the reverse: we know effect before cause (every “why” is a sign of this). Example: water, hydrogen, proton (Greek for first): first, second, third in our knowledge, but proton first in things. Sherlock Holmes to Watson: “reason backwards”, from effect to cause. “Our mind is naturally backward.”
5. Theology imitates God’s knowing a bit, since it comes from God revealing His knowledge; God knows other things by knowing Himself, so theology considers God first. Thomas in the Summa Contra Gentiles: the order in theology is the reverse of philosophy, where God is last. Hence Gilson [ed.: transcript “Jesson”] was off track writing an introduction to philosophy on the order of the Summa Contra Gentiles.
6. Parallel closer to us: God’s understanding and will are not two things in God, yet we have two thoughts, one giving the reason for the other, because in us they differ and we know God through effects; what is one and simple in God is composed and multiple in creatures. Thomas quotes a prophet (he cannot recall which: “not Zachary… what’s the other one?”), “in that day there will be one name”: when you see God as He is you have one name; knowing Him from creatures you have many thoughts, God only one thought of Himself.

9. Ad 3: passion in God only grammatically (“except speaking grammatically”) #

The point: action implying the origin of motion infers passion, but action is not placed in God that way; passions are attributed only grammatically, as “to generate” to the Father and “to be generated” to the Son.

• Not a distinction invented for the problem: “I see this glass” is grammatically active and “the glass is seen” passive, yet in reality the glass acts on my eyes and sensing, as Aristotle says, is an undergoing. So the real acting-upon is the reverse of the grammar.
• Do not confuse the grammatical with the real: this is one of the fallacies from language in the Sophistical Refutations, concluding from grammatical form to reality.
• Class breaks here.

His words #

• fifth book of Wisdom: his name for Metaphysics V [ed.: Metaphysics].
• acting upon and undergoing: his English for poiein/paschein, actio/passio [ed.: action and passion].
• the magister, the teacher: Peter Lombard, author of the Sentences.
• ratio (of the objection): a likeness between things far apart, argument by proportion.
• see a distinction / use a distinction: preferred to “make a distinction”, which sounds like inventing one.
• notional acts: acts designating the origin of one person from another (generating, breathing), as opposed to acts designating the origin of creatures, which belong to the essence.
• personal property vs. non-personal relative property: fatherhood constitutes the Father; breathing (common to Father and Son) constitutes no person and has no name.
• the road to the person: origin signified passively (birth, procession) as the way to the person constituted.
• secundum grammaticam / speaking grammatically: passion in God is only a way of signifying.
• secundum modum significandi: the acts and the relations differ only in the way of signifying, not in reality.
• habitudo: “a rather rare word for relation”.
• beginning is more general than cause: the order of origin is from a beginning.
• Deus / divinitas, habens divinitatem: concrete and abstract ways of speaking of God, from material things.
• ability, power, potency: the power to generate, to breathe (q. 41 a. 4-5).
• reason backwards: our knowledge from effect to cause, the reverse of the order in things.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 40, a. 4 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 41, prooemium (the six questions)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 41, a. 1 (objections, sed contra, body, replies 1-3)

Mentioned

• Peter Lombard, Sentences I, d. 26 (generation and birth “by other names”); the plan of the four books
• Aristotle, Metaphysics V (relations founded on quantity or on action and passion)
• Aristotle, Categories (four meanings of before)
• Aristotle, De anima III (proper object of the intellect)
• Aristotle, Sophistical Refutations (fallacies from language, grammatical form)
• Aristotle, Topics (inferred): the four tools of dialectic, difference before likeness
• Boethius, De Trinitate (genera changed into substance except relation)
• Augustine, De Trinitate V; De fide ad Petrum (as Thomas cites)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles (order of theology reverse of philosophy); De potentia
• Plato (likeness a slippery thing); Descartes, Spinoza, Hegel; Shakespeare (“look before and after”); a prophet, “in that day there will be one name”; Sherlock Holmes; Gilson’s introduction to philosophy

His questions #

• Is it possible for the Father to be before generation, and generation before the Father? Yes, in different senses of “before”: as constituted person before, as mere relation after and founded on generation.
• How is 4:6 like 2:3? Only in that 4 is the same parts of 6 that 2 is of 3; not as prime to prime or even to odd.
• Why does Aristotle give the tool of difference before the tool of likeness? Because seeing likeness without difference is a cause of deception (his suggestion to Msgr Dion).
• Are the Father and generation really two different things? No: the same in reality, differing only in the way of signifying.
• Which of water, hydrogen, proton is first in our knowledge, and which in things? Water first for us, proton first in things; our knowledge is the reverse.
• Is it false to understand one thing by two thoughts? No; falsehood only if you conclude two really distinct things in God.
• Are God’s understanding and will two different things in God? No; we have two thoughts because in us they differ and we know God through effects.
• When I see the glass, is the glass acted upon? No; the glass acts on the eye, sensing is an undergoing; the passive form is grammatical only.