A Thomistic Analysis of the Trinitarian Anthropology in John Paul II's Mulieris Dignitatem (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 Thomist, 2010
Theological consideration on the Trinity is currently being undertaken in terms of “economic Trinity” and “immanent Trinity”. The present article seeks to offer an alternative to this Trinitarian-theological study schematic. Starting from the rela- tionship between theologia and dispensatio (economy), explained in accord with the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas on the divine processions and missions, the teaching of Trinitarian theology is proposed in three steps: beginning with economy, one then progresses to the consideration of the divine Persons in their eternal being and their relations, which illuminates the creating and salvific action of the Trinity.
2019
This thesis is a philosophical defense of certain proposals John Paul II outlined and argued for in his work A Theology of the Body. The format of this thesis will be the following, arranged into four parts. In part one, I will give a very brief historical introduction to John Paul II and his work. Then I will sketch the philosophical matrix which the Theology of the Body enters, and introduce the synthetic methodology that John Paul II employs. The second part will elaborate and explain John Paul II’s metaphysics and phenomenology of the human person, the theological dimension of the body, the thesis of the gift, and the meaning of human sexuality as developed in the Theology of the Body. In part three, I will consider certain criticisms against the arguments of the Theology of the Body, each of which will be followed by a philosophical defense of John Paul II’s thought. In part four, I will conclude with a few final remarks. Johansson ! of ! 5 73 JOHN PAUL II’s THEOLOGY OF THE B...
The Trinitarian Christology of St. Thomas Aquinas
The Trinitarian Christology of St Thomas Aquinas brings to light the Trinitarian riches in Thomas Aquinas's Christology. Dominic Legge, O.P, disproves Karl Rahner's assertion that Aquinas divorces the study of Christ from the Trinity, by offering a stimulating re-reading of Aquinas on his own terms, as a profound theologian of the Trinitarian mystery of God as manifested in and through Christ. Legge highlights that, for Aquinas, Christology is intrinsically Trinitarian, in its origin and its principles, its structure, and its role in the dispensation of salvation. He investigates the Trinitarian shape of the incarnation itself: the visible mission of the Son, sent by the Father, implicating the invisible mission of the Holy Spirit to his assumed human nature. For Aquinas, Christ's humanity, at its deepest foundations, incarnates the very personal being of the divine Son and Word of the Father, and hence every action of Christ reveals the Father, is from the Father, and leads back to the Father. This study also uncovers a remarkable Spirit Christology in Aquinas: Christ as man stands in need of the Spirit's anointing to carry out his saving work; his supernatural human knowledge is dependent on the Spirit's gift; and it is the Spirit who moves and guides him in every action, from Nazareth to Golgotha.
The Personal Mode of Trinitarian Action in St. Thomas Aquinas
In: Gilles Emery: Trinity, Church, and the Human Person, Thomistic Essays (Sapientia Press: Naples, FL)., 2007
In his Trinitarian theology, Thomas Aquinas maintains that the creative and saving activity of God is common to the whole Trinity. But in this common action, each divine person intervenes in the distinct mode of his or her personal property. Thus, for Thomas Aquinas, there is a proper mode of the action of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. This distinct mode, which accounts for the personal dimension of Trinitarian action and which grounds the value of appropriations, corresponds to the mode of being proper to each person, that is to say, to his personal relationship. Thomas Aquinas develops in this domain an aspect inherited from Cappadocian triadology (Basil of Caesarea).
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.
St. Thomas Aquinas on the Imago Dei: Themes and Developments
In this paper I manifest how St. Thomas’s understanding of the imago Dei developed over his career, how he had a more static understanding of the image of God early on that focused on the threefold powers of memory, intellect, and will as being the subject of the image by which man imitates the Trinity, but that later on he held to a more dynamic understanding of the imago Dei, seeing it as pertaining properly to the actions themselves of the mind, namely remembering, knowing, and loving, according to which knowledge, word, and love are produced in the soul. My mode of procedure is that of exposition, commenting on the main texts of St. Thomas in chronological order, making comparisons between them with regard to developments, changes, or regressions, as well analyzing his authoritative sources.
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.
Christ and the Church: "duo in carne una
2010
Chapter 1: Somatic Union with Christ according to the Eucharistic doctrine of Cyril of Alexandria Introduction ………………………………………………………………………………...65 1. The Christological Principles …………………………………………………………...67 1.1 "The personal, truly vitalising flesh of God the Word Himself"………………………...69 1.2 The Images and Similes………………………………………………………....72 1.3. The Causal Privileges belonging to the Body of Jesus: the efficacy of his physical touch ……75 2. The Anthropological Principles ………………………………………………………...79 2.1. Sanctification in accordance with the composite nature of Man: Sōmatikōs and Pneumatikōs …………………………………………………………………..…………......81 2.2. Union with the Incarnate Word according to a shared corporality ……………………..83 2.3. The Bodily and Spiritual: an inseparable and unconfused harmony ……………………84 3. Somatic union with Christ ………………………………………………………………87 3.1. 'Brothers-in-the-flesh': mankind's fleshly solidarity with the Incarnate Word…………87 3.1.1. Yet "the flesh alone profits nothing" (Jn. 6:63). ……………………………...90 3.2. Bodily union with the Incarnate Word through the Sacrament of His Body …………...92 3.2.1. The Sacramental modality of the Word made Flesh ……………………...….92 3.2.2. Natural Concorporality and Baptismal Incorporation: unions ordered to their Eucharistic perfection ………………………………………………………………………..95 3.2.3. The spiritual bond of Baptism ordered to its Eucharistic consummation……..97 3.2.4. "The Son is in us corporeally as man, spiritually as God"……………………99 3.3. Union according to a "common nature"………………………………………………..101 3.3.1. "Partcipation" in the Word through communion in His sacred Flesh……….105 3.3.2. Bodily incorruptibility through contact with the Body of Life……………...106 3.3.3. Why this bodily emphasis? ………………………………………………….108 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………….109 9 Chapter 2: The Physical Body of the Word: Salvation and Eucharist in St Thomas Aquinas Introduction: from Cyril of Alexandria to Thomas Aquinas ………………………….112 1. The Christological Principles………………………………………………………......116 1.1. The Centrality and Realism of the bodily humanity of Christ in St Thomas…………..116 1.1.1. "The Way that leads to God"………………………………………………...116 1.1.2. Corpus carneum et terrenum: a Christological realism……………………...119 1.2. "Power has gone forth from me" (Lk. 8: 46): the flesh of the Word as the Instrumentum coniunctum Divinitatis……………………………………………………………………...125 1.2.1. From disposing to efficient causality: the development of St Thomas' understanding of salvific contact with the sacred flesh…………………………………….128 1.2.2. St Thomas' mature position: "the whole of the one same effect is also attributed to the Instrument"………………………………………………………..133 1.2.3. The Christological Application……………………………………………...136 1.2.4. "He wrought divine things humanly, as when he healed a leper by His touch": a divine efficacy in the flesh………………………………………………………….138 1.2.5. "It pertains to the greatest glory of God to have raised a weak and earthly body to such sublimity": the heights of the corpus carneum et terrenum……………….140 2. Corporeity and the Eucharist: the physical body of Christ per modum sacramentale …..144 2.1. Introduction: the sacramental prolongation of the Word made Flesh………………….144 2.2. The physical body of Christ per modum sacramentale: the perfection of the sacramental order………………………………………………………………………………………...151 2.2.1. From action to presence: participated power to the substantial body of Christ … .15 3 2.2.2. Understanding the wonder of St Cyril………………………………………155 2.2.3. " … in the sacrament of the Eucharist what is both reality and sacrament is in the matter itself"……………………………………………………………………156 3. Corporeity and the doctrine of Transubstantiation: "It would be impossible to conceive a closer form of bodily presence"…………………………………………..158 3.1. Initial Considerations…………………………………………………………………..158 3.2. Sacramental contact by way of Touch…………………………………………………162 3.3. The fittingness of Christ's 'bodily presence' in the Eucharist…………………………166 3.4. Christ's 'bodily presence': a "special feature of friendship"…………………………..169 3.4.1. "It was fitting for God to become man, since man is naturally a friend to man" …..171 3.4.2. "It is peculiar to love that it unites lover and beloved, as far as this is possible" …..174 16 Address of Pope Benedict XVI (14 th General Congregation of the Synod of Bishops, Synod Hall, October 14 th 2008). As he said further, "when exegesis is not theological, scripture cannot be the soul of theology, and vice versa. … Biblical exegesis and theology are two dimensions of one reality we call 'theology'". 17 Our particular focus shall be upon Cyril of Alexandria though the theme emerges occasionally in many of Fathers. For example, "Omnis enim ecclesia sponsus Christi est cuius principium et primitiae caro Christi est; ibi iuncta est sponsa sponso in carne" (St Augustine In Joan. Epist. tract II, 2; PL 35, 1990). For further texts, see Cooper, Life in the Flesh (Ibid.) pp. 59-83; and Vagaggini (Ibid.) pp. 65-94. 18 The Life of St Catherine of Siena, Bl. Raymond of Capua, trans. George Lamb (Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books, 1960) p. 111. As he continues, "She knew, in fact, that though the adorable Sacrament of the Body of the Lord produces spiritual grace in the soul and unites it to its Saviour, this union being the end for which the Sacrament was instituted, nevertheless anyone who truly feeds on it is at once united with His Body …. Therefore wishing to unite herself ever more closely with the most noble object of her love, she determined to receive Holy Communion as often as she possibly could" (Ibid).
Individuality in the Godhead and the Trinity: Thomas Aquinas’s theory of individuals
Veritas: Kyodai Studies in Mediaeval Philosophy, 2021
This paper focuses on how Thomas Aquinas’s theory of individuals explains that God has the only one essence and three individual persons. Aquinas’s theory of individuals has long been studied with a strong focus on material substances. Joseph Owens and Lawrence Dewan are rare scholars who consider seriously the individuality of immaterial entities. Are we not allowed to view various individual beings in these entities at all? This is one of the questions we are trying to answer.