Chapter 16. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (SCG 4,2–26)
CHAPTER 16. FATHER, SON, AND HOLY SPIRIT (SCG 4,2–26)
1. ND, 1, 63 [4].
2. The origins of what is now referred to as the Apostles’ Creed is a matter of debate, but the standard text of it seems to have its origin in a creed of the Roman Church dateable to the second century. The Nicene Creed derives from the First Council of Nicaea (A.D. 325), and the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed from the First Council of Constantinople (381). The Council of Chalcedon took place in 451. For editions of the texts coming from Nicaea I, Constantinople I, and Chalcedon, see Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, edited by Norman P. Tanner (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990), vol. 1. For the text of the Apostles’ Creed, see J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, 3rd ed. (London: Longman, 1972). Kelly’s book also provides copious historical discussion of the Creed of Nicaea and the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. For a fine account of Christian doctrine during the period from Nicaea I to Chalcedon, see J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1960).
3. Aquinas often gives preference to a literal reading of Scripture over other ways of reading it (as discerning, say, its “spiritual sense,” which might not have been recognized by this or that biblical author). See Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 300–306. Also see Beryl Smalley, The Gospels in the Schools c. 1100–c. 1280 (London: Hambledon Press, 1985), 265 and following.
4. For an introduction to Aquinas’s approach to Scripture, and for discussions of some of his specifically biblical commentaries, see Thomas G. Weinandy, Daniel A. Keating, and John P. Yocum (eds.), Aquinas on Scripture (London: T&T Clark International, 2005).
5. ND, 4, 37 [5].
6. ND, 4, 39 [9].
7. ND, 4, 39 [10]. I presume that by “passed on to us in a hidden fashion” Aquinas is saying that it is the reality of God that is hidden from us even if we accept Christian revelation, not that the revelation is something handed on secretly. He is saying that if we do not in this life know what God is (see SCG 1,28–36), Christian revelation is not going to enable us to know what God is as God and the blessed do. Rather, it is going to give us true beliefs about God, not an understanding of God’s essence (see SCG 3,40).
8. ND, 4, 39–40 [11].
9. For accounts of the history of thinking about the Trinity, see The Oxford Handbook of the Trinity, edited by Gilles Emery, O.P., and Matthew Levering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); William J. Hill, O.P., The Three Personed God: The Trinity as a Mystery of Salvation (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1982); and The Cambridge Companion to the Trinity, edited by Peter C. Phan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). See also Russell Friedman, Medieval Trinitarian Thought from Aquinas to Ockham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
10. As I explained in chapter 8, section 1, Aquinas takes willing and loving to be seriously related since he takes willing something—as being attracted to it—as understanding what it is in some way.
11. The natural theology of SCG 1 does not argue that what reason can know of God entails that there is distinction in God. But it does provide a context for what Aquinas says about distinction in God while relying on what he takes to be divine revelation.
12. For a brief account of Aristotle’s teaching on relations, and its influence on medieval thinkers, see Jeffrey Brower, “Medieval Theories of Relations,” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy online, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/relations-medieval/. For a book-length treatment of relations as discussed by some medieval philosophers, including Aquinas, see Mark G. Henninger, Relations: Medieval Theories 1250–1325 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).
13. Trinitarian theology invoking the notion of procession is clearly evident in the Athanasian Creed (late fifth century). And, as Aquinas was well aware, in John 8:42 Jesus speaks of himself as proceeding or coming forth from God.
14. As I have noted, Aquinas claims that the doctrine of the Trinity cannot be arrived at by reason. His consistently upheld position is that reason can lead us to know that there is but one God, though it cannot prove that there is distinction in God as proclaimed by the doctrine of the Trinity. In SCG 1, Aquinas takes himself to have shown by reason what God essentially is. But he accepts that his conclusions in SCG 1 do not entail that there might be distinction in God as proclaimed by revelation.
15. ND, 4, 143 [1].
16. ND, 4, 40 [2].
17. ND, 4, 43 [3].
18. ND, 4, 43 [1].
19. ND, 4, 49 [4].
20. ND, 4, 49 [5]. Compare ND, 4, 51.
21. ND, 4, 55 [1].
22. In SCG 4,9, Aquinas offers a similar biblical rebuttal to what he takes to be the teaching of Photinus and Sabellius.
23. ND, 4, 62 [1].
24. ND, 4, 75 [1]. For “secret” in this quotation, see note 6 above.
25. These arguments are not ones that Aquinas accepts. Indeed, he goes on to try to refute them in SCG 4,11. All the same, they are rather skillful philosophical attacks against his position on God the Father and God the Son.
26. ND, 4, 75 [2].
27. See SCG 1,16.
28. ND, 4, 76 [4].
29. ND, 4, 76 [4].
30. ND, 4, 76–77.
31. ND, 4, 77 [8].
32. ND, 4, 77 [8].
33. ND, 3, 77–78 [9].
34. ND, 4, 78 [9].
35. ND, 4, 78 [10].
36. In this argument, being a relation only in thought is being a relation only in a logical sense, as we might take the “relationship” of a thing to itself to be insofar as it is identical with itself. See Aquinas, De Potentia 7,11, ad.3 and Summa Theologiae 1a,13,7.
37. ND, 4, 78 [11].
38. ND, 4, 78–79 [12].
39. ND, 4, 79 [13].
40. ND, 4, 79 [14].
41. ND, 4, 81 [5].
42. ND, 4, 82 [8].
43. ND, 4, 83 [9] (with some modifications).
44. Aquinas does not deny that people come to understand insofar as they learn to talk. But he does think that human understanding does not just amount to an understanding of language and the ways in which we use it. His view is that our use of language has to proceed from what is in us apart from its representation linguistically. Aquinas takes language to reflect what precedes it in us, though he also thinks that human understanding can only be expressed in words.
45. ND, 4, 83 [11].
46. ND, 4, 84 [11].
47. ND, 4, 84–85 [12].
48. ND, 4, 89 [18].
49. ND, 4, 92 [2].
50. ND, 4, 93 [3].
51. ND, 4, 103 [15].
52. ND, 4, 104 [1]. In this connection Aquinas cites Matthew 28:19, 1 John 5:7, and John 15:26.
53. ND, 4, 116 [1].
54. ND, 4, 116–117 [2].
55. People nowadays, as always, I suppose, have been cautious in their use of the word “love” since we can love various things and to different degrees. At this point in the SCG, however, Aquinas is thinking of love as a desire in us for something to which we are attracted.
56. ND, 4, 117 [3].
57. ND, 4, 117 [3].
58. ND, 4, 119 [9 and 10].
59. Herbert McCabe, God Still Matters (London: Continuum, 2002), 51.
60. For a succinct account of what provoked this division, and of what might be said about it today, see Robert Letham, “The Triune God,” which is chapter 6 of The Oxford Handbook of Evangelical Theology, edited by Gerald R. McDermott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
61. ND, 4, 136 [7].
62. ND, 4, 137–138 [7 and 8]. Here Aquinas is saying what McCabe neatly summarizes in the quote I provided from him above.
63. Boethius, Liber de Persona et Duabus Naturis 3.
64. God Still Matters, 52.
65. God Still Matters, 49.
66. Aquinas, of course, was a biblical commentator in his own right. Yet his biblical commentaries seem to be grounded in doctrinal assumptions in the light of which he reads biblical texts. In his biblical commentaries he does not engage in the kind of historical and linguistic analysis typically found in contemporary biblical scholarship.
67. The Summa Theologiae turns directly to the Trinity in 1a,27–43.
68. G. E. M. Anscombe and P. T. Geach, Three Philosophers (Oxford: Blackwell, 1961), 118–119. See P. T. Geach, The Virtues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 79: “The common theological doctrine is that—except for the fact that only one [divine] Person became a man, and whatever consequences follow from this—all external works and deeds of God are common to all the three Persons. … It is on just this account, Aquinas teaches, that natural reason, proceeding from effects in the world to God as their cause, can tell us nothing about any distinction of the Persons, and so must be silent on the question whether there is only one Divine Person or rather several.”
69. I quote, with some emendations, from volume 6 of the Blackfriars edition of the Summa Theologiae (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode; New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), 103.
70. Aquinas takes X to be really related to Y if X stands to Y because of something in X. Thus, for example, he would have said that I am really related to you if I have you in mind. Yet he does not think that my having you in mind entails that there is something real in you constituted by my just having you in mind. Of course, if I have you in mind, it can be said of you that you are being thought of by me. This fact, however, does not mean that my coming to have you in mind entails the coming to be of a new accident in you. So, thinks Aquinas, “Fred is being thought of by John” can be construed as flagging a merely notional relation in Fred, but a real one in John, something in John that relates him to Fred.
71. William Lane Craig, “Toward a Tenable Social Trinitarianism,” in Philosophical and Theological Essays on the Trinity, edited by Thomas McCall and Michael C. Rea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 91.
72. Craig, “Toward a Tenable Social Trinitarianism,” 96.
73. For another example of someone endorsing what I take to be Social Trinitarianism, see Richard Swinburne, The Christian God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). For a vigorous and, I think, cogent critique of Swinburne arguing that he is committed to tritheism rather than orthodox teaching concerning the Trinity, see Edward C. Feser, “Swinburne’s Tritheism,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 42 (1997). For other criticisms of what might be called “Social Trinitarianism,” see Brian Leftow, “Anti-Social Trinitarianism,” which is chapter 4 of McCall and Rea, Philosophical and Theological Essays on the Trinity.
74. Anscombe and Geach, Three Philosophers, 118. For more from Geach on relative identity, see P. T. Geach, “Identity,” Review of Metaphysics 21 (1967), and P. T. Geach, Logic Matters (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972), 7.1 and 7.2. For another defense of the notion of relative identity, see Nicholas Griffin, Relative Identity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). For discussions of the doctrine of the Trinity drawing on the notion of relative identity, see James Cain, “The Doctrine of the Trinity and the Logic of Relative Identity,” Religious Studies 25 (1989); A. P. Martinich, “Identity and Trinity,” Journal of Religion 58 (1978); and Peter van Inwagen, “And Yet They Are Not Three Gods but One God” (chapter 12 of McCall and Rea, Philosophical and Theological Essays on the Trinity).
75. Geach on relative identity is both applauded and criticized by Harold W. Noonan in “Relative Identity,” Philosophical Investigations 38 (2015). He is criticized by John Perry in “The Same F,” Philosophical Review 79 (1970). In “The Plight of the Relative Trinitarian,” Religious Studies 24 (1988), Timothy W. Bartel castigates the notion of relative identity while arguing for a form of Social Trinitarianism.
76. Appeal to experience of God as something aiding an understanding of the Trinity features quite prominently in David Brown, The Divine Trinity (London: Duckworth, 1985).