Dissertation Section: Essential Unity of Trinitarian Persons and the Metaphor of the Universal Species in the De potentia Dei (original) (raw)
Related papers
School of Divinity Master’s Theses and Projects, 2015
This paper takes up a disagreement between Augustine and John of Damascus on the relation of the persons of the Trinity to the divine essence. Whereas Augustine rejects speaking of God as a genus or species with the divine persons as subordinate species or individuals, Damascene uses such an analogy freely in different writings. Peter Lombard sides with Augustine but allows for Damascene’s language according to metaphor or similitude. The purpose of this paper is to utilize the trinitarian theology and metaphysical categories of Thomas Aquinas to examine the nature of the unity characteristic of universals like species and whether, in his account, one may predicate such a universal to the Godhead. To this end, the concepts of analogy, essence, person, unity, plurality, transcendental multitude, predication, genus, species, individuation, universality, particularity, communicability, and incommunicability will be examined in detail. I will argue that ultimately an analogy of genus or species cannot properly be applied to the Trinity because it contradicts the doctrine of divine simplicity. The unity of the universal insufficiently characterizes the divine unity of essence. On the other hand, Aquinas does allow for a reading of Damascene similar to that of the Lombard, to the extent that, according to our limited mode of knowledge, the relationship of individuals to a species can help us to understand the mode of communicability unique to God’s essence.
The Unity of Nature and the Unity of Species in the Trinitarian Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas
Ave Maria University, 2022
This dissertation examines the possibility of describing the unity of the divine nature among the three distinct persons of the Trinity in terms of the universal species, according to the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. The unity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the one nature of divinity as similar to the unity of three human beings in the one nature of humanity is explicit in prominent in some patristic sources. This dissertation examines the use, deficiency, and defense of this “species-account” of the Trinity in the major trinitarian writings of Aquinas from across his corpus, including his Scriptum super Sententiis, Summa contra Gentiles, Lectura Romana, Compendium theologiae, De potentia Dei, Summa theologiae, and Lectura super Ioannis, among other texts. The analysis of Aquinas’s texts is first preceded by a historical overview of the species account in St. Augustine, the Cappadocian fathers, St. John of Damascus, and Peter Lombard. This dissertation shows that Aquinas treats the “species-account” with nuance, both showing its deficiencies as an analogy that cannot properly characterize the unity of the Godhead while also showing its strengths as a figure that illustrates various features of trinitarian theology. Aquinas’s metaphysical and trinitarian theology are featured throughout. A treatment of the role of analogical speech in sacra doctrina is also included.
Aquinas' Trinitarian Theology: Fides Comunicans Intellectum
Gregorianum 98/2, 2017
The Trinitarian theology of Thomas Aquinas goes beyond the universally accepted definition of theology from fides quaerens intellectum to fides comunicans intelletum. The methods, literary techniques and pedagogical skills used by Aquinas to present the Trinitarian doctrine display the fundamental intention of Aquinas’ Trinitarian theology as comunicans encompassing the activity of quaerens. Trinitarian theology already functions within the dogmatic «horizon» of the Trinity. An understanding, therefore, guides the Trinitarian theology of Aquinas right from the start directing him to understand not in the sense of comprehending the Trinity but in the sense of communicating the Trinity. A theologian who seeks understanding of the faith without communicating it does not do theology in the full sense of the term. Quaerens, therefore, must overflow into comunicans in the act of theologizing. It is this aspect that is highlighted in the Trinitarian theology of Aquinas.
The Unity of the Triune Godhead in St. Thomas Aquinas’s Lectura in evangelium Ioannis
2019
This paper seeks to examine the approach of St. Thomas Aquinas regarding the unity characteristic of the Triune divine persons specific to his biblical commentaries and in a particular way to his Lectura in evangelium Ioannis. Elsewhere in his systematic and occasional writings, Aquinas treats the issue either in a systematic way or especially as a rebuttal to particular objections raised with reference to previous thinkers such as St. Augustine, St. John of Damascus, or Peter Lombard. In commenting on the Gospel of John, however, Aquinas does treat the theology of God as Trinity quite extensively and at times with more profundity than in other writings such as the Prima pars. My goal is to trace the issue of the unity of the Trinitarian persons throughout the Lectura and to collect Aquinas’s statements in a systematic way, beginning with the types of unity in the Trinity (of nature and of love), and then treating the different types of distinction and real relations of origin, the relationship of the persons to the divine essence, the communication of the divine esse among persons, the modus of being and acting of each person, the mutual immanence of persons, and finally the numerical unity of nature among persons. I will conclude by highlighting how Aquinas notes the similitude and dissimilitude between the unity of a created species and the unity of the divine essence.
Biblica et Patristica Thoruniensia, 2019
Relation has always been used as a tool to understand the central truths of Scripture, i.e., God as absolutely one and irreducibly three. In this paper, I first traced the use of relation in the Church Fathers' Trinitarian reflections, specifically that of Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Augustine; then I explained how Thomas understands relation as a special category of being and how his understanding of the divine persons as subsisting relations gives an excellent exposition of Scriptural truths on the one hand, and on the other hand provides a quite balanced and thus accommo-dative Trinitarian monotheism wherein the Church Fathers' functional use of relation merge together and their insightful reflections on the Trinity shine brilliantly.
The Oxford Handbook of the Reception of Aquinas, ed. Levering and Plested, 2021
This chapter proposes that Aquinas's philosophy of the human person is fundamentally motivated by his vision of the distinctive unity of the human way of life, illustrated by (a) his account of the human soul as the " horizon " of the bodily and spiritual worlds, and (b) his definition of the human being as 'rational animal'. Commitment to this vision is essential for any attempt to revive Aquinas's anthropology today. In this chapter, I also problematize the standard way of labeling Aquinas's anthropology as "Aristotelian," and make a case for rejecting such labels, not only in evaluating his own work, but also in evaluating receptions of Aquinas's own thought.
Augustine's Trinitarian Theology: Asymmetry between the Unity and the Diversity of the Persons
Western Trinitarian theology starts with the unity of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, while eastern Trinitarian theology starts with their diversity, which means that the former emphasizes on the divine unity, but the latter does on the divine diversity. 1 Augustine, as a representative of the western Trinitarian theology, focuses on the unity of God in developing his Trinitarian theology. Therefore Augustine's critics have argued that his Trinitarian theology is abstract due to its emphasis on the divine essence as well as that "the unity of the divine acts ad extra" prevents "the divine acts in this world from revealing the Persons of the Trinity in their distinctness." 2 This paper will examine about Augustine's Trinitarian theology as an heir of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan faith and show how the doctrine of the divine unity permeates his whole Trinitarian theology. At the end I want to evaluate whether Augustine develops an abstract Trinitarian theology due to its excessive focus on the unity of the three Persons as the divine essence and also its insufficient stress on the Persons' distinctiveness as the divine threeness. Before getting into Augustine's Trinitarian theology, it is interesting and necessary to briefly survey how the Trinitarian theology had been developed from the early fourth century to Augustine.
The Conversion of God in Aquinas' Summa theologiae: Being's Trinitarian and Incarnational self-disclosure for presentation to Wisdom Belongs to God June 21st 2017. Forty years of thinking about the trinitarian logic of Aquinas’ de deo has forced me to take up what is, simultaneously, the most abstract of all theological-metaphysical structures and at the heart of the most urgent of contemporary conflicts. This is the logic of identity. The Thomistic and Augustinian divine Trinity is self-related; it converts upon itself. In consequence, to effect trinitarian self-return, the identical must also be other to itself. The deepest metaphysical theologians of the Hellenic tradition treated this, some with more or less clarity. We have read together the De Li Non-Aliud of Nicholas of Cusa, heir of the tradition from Aristotle & Augustine, Dionysius & Eriugena, Ibn Sina & Aquinas to Eckhart wrestling with it. In the 15th century, the Cardinal Regent of the Roman Church grounded identity in the process of negation—as Jean Trouillard would do in the 20th century—and, through such a Neoplatonism transgressed the religious boundaries for the sake of The Peace of Faith. Aquinas shames 20th century philosophers with his capacity for disinterested consideration of reasons from everyone everywhere. Now a reactionary retreat into immediate identity overwhelms religion, theology, philosophy, politics, and psychology. This is true within the West and it determines relations to crucially important forms of Eastern thought. This paper and the one I shall deliver tomorrow, “Augustine’s Trinitarian Cosmos” go together. Both concern the Divine Trinitarian life, in itself, and as the reality of everything else. If Being is Trinitarian and Incarnational for Aquinas, then, for him, as much as for Augustine, God is everyday and everywhere. Both Augustine’s Confessions and Aquinas’ Summa move to God as Trinity from incomplete manifestations of the fundamental Trinitarian structure of reality. For them both, the totality of the self-differentiation in the divine conversion must be revealed step by step. Neither for their readers, nor for humankind generally, is that self-othering and the co-relative gathering-return back into the originating self seen all at once. For both of these two defining Western Christian theologians, the disclosure of real opposition in God, constructing three infinite divine subsistences, requires the Christian revelation. Nonetheless, as Dr Diamond’s paper tonight will make clear, because both are Aristotelian in their doctrine of God as self-thinking, they share a philosophical trinitarianism which is common to pagans, Jews, and Muslims. Thus, Augustine and Aquinas stand together in the tradition of Hellenic theology with Philo, al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, and Moses Maimonides, for example, an approach to which Dr Diamond was introduced by Robert Crouse.