Handout for Prima Pars Lecture for the Not-At-Buckfast Summer School 2020 Richard Conrad, OP the “ANSWER to LIFE, the UNIVERSE, & EVERYTHING” IS 43

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Handout for Prima Pars lecture for the not-at-Buckfast summer school 2020 Richard Conrad, OP THE “ANSWER TO LIFE, THE UNIVERSE, & EVERYTHING” IS 43

Contents (1) A Note on the Summa – translations available, structure, Trinitarian structure. (2) Select Bibliography. (3) Notes on Prima Pars 2-26: overall structure; a note on the Five Ways; speaking analogically about God. (4) Notes on Prima Pars 27-42; summary of main points; summary of the largely Thomistic doctrine of the Holy Trinity as held by 19th- and 20th-Century Neo-Scholasticism; a popular-pictorial presentation of the psychological analogy of the Holy Trinity, leading on to the next question: (5) Notes on Prima Pars 43; Matthias Joseph Scheeben’s “take” on St Thomas’ teaching. (6) Brief notes on Creation; a note on Thomistic causality. (7) The Thomistic view of the human psyche – see diagram sent as a separate pdf file. (8) The Human Image of the Holy Trinity Made for Communion with the Holy Trinity: Prima Pars 93. Another supplementary file: CONRAD, Richard. “Humanity Created for Communion with the Trinity in Aquinas.” Preliminary version of chapter published in: George Westhaver (ed.) A Transforming Vision: Knowing and Loving the Triune God. London: SCM, 2018. 121-134. (1) A Note on the Summa We will focus on St Thomas’ Summa Theologiae (or Summa Theologica) his “complete course of Theology”. Three translations are available. One was done by Lawrence Shapcote early in the 20th Century & published in 20-something volumes by “The Fathers of the English Dominican Province”. It was reprinted in 5 vols by Westminster Press in the 1980s, & is now on the Internet (e.g. on the newadvent site). This is a “wooden” translation, which means it reads like a translation, & does not often deceive you. The second translation was done under Thomas Gilby’s editorship in the 1960s & 70s, & published in 60 vols by Blackfriars & Eyre & Spottiswoode – now re-issued by CUP. Each volume contains the Latin opposite the English (the Latin is easier to read than any English translation, once you get used to it!), footnotes, introduction, appendices. It is in more modern English. But Gilby did not unify the translation, so the same Latin technical terms are translated differently in different volumes, and that can be seriously misleading. [Timothy McDermott did a “concise translation”, in which he condensed this version of the Summa into one volume and unified the language. This is good for a “quick” read to get the shape of St. Thomas’ thought. But it shouldn’t be used for serious academic study since some bits are Timothy’s summaries & not St. Thomas’ words, and it loses the “dialogical” style of the original.] A third translation is being done by Alfred Freddoso at Notre Dame, and some is on his web-site, https://www3.nd.edu/~afreddos/summa-translation/TOC.htm . Structure of the Summa The Summa is in 4 parts (but they aren’t numbered 1-4) and a supplement: Prima Pars (1a or I; first part) covers God the Holy Trinity and the work of creation. The second part covers our journey to fulfilment in God. It is subdivided: Prima Secundae (1a2ae or I-II; the first part of the second part) covers what it means to have a goal; how we pursue goals; virtues and vices in general; law and grace. Secunda Secundae (2a2ae or II-II; the second part of the second part) covers individual virtues and all the related Gifts and vices; also particular ways of life. Tertia Pars (3a or III; third part) covers Jesus Christ and the Sacraments. It was not finished when St Thomas died, so after his death his disciples compiled the: Supplementum (supplement) by doing a scissors-and-paste job on his other writings. Each of these five divisions is made up of over a hundred Questions (which really means “topics”), each of which is made up of a number of Articles (which really means “questions”!) Each article discusses one specific issue within the topic of the Question. Each article of the Summa is set up as a disputation, so that: • First come OBJECTIONS (usually 3) which usually argue against Thomas’ own view; • Second comes a SED CONTRA (occasionally more than one) which is a quotation or argument in favour of his own view (now & then he takes a middle way between the objections & sed contra(s) and very occasionally argues for (or for in a qualified way) what he leads you to expect he is arguing against); • In the REPLY or BODY OF THE ARTICLE Thomas sets out his own view; • Lastly come REPLIES TO THE OBJECTIONS (often abbreviated, in references, as ad 1, ad 2…), in which Thomas answers the arguments against his own view with which the article began (and, if he is taking a middle way, he may answer the sed contra also). So each article typically begins with something St. Thomas does not agree with. Do not mistake objections for Thomas’ own views! On occasion, Thomas takes up a nuanced opinion, e.g. steering between the objections & sed contra(s); often he tries to agree with the objections in some ways, while disagreeing in others. Often, as a first attempt to understand what Thomas teaches, it is best to read just the bodies of the relevant articles; then to go back and (unless you have a good memory) for each article read the sed contra, the body of the article, the first objection and the reply to it, the second objection and the reply… Occasionally, as in some questions on the Torah, the meat of an article is actually in the replies to the objections. A reference like 1a2ae 68, 3, ad 2 means go to Prima Secundae, Qu. 68, art. 3, reply to 2nd objection. Some editors use Roman numerals: I-II 68, 3c means the same article but go to the body (corpus) of the article. A Trinitarian Structure of the Summa? Rahner thought that the structure of Summa Theologiae had led to the treatise on the Holy Trinity “locking itself up into ever more splendid isolation”: after the self-contained treatise in Prima Pars 27-43, the Trinity is hardly mentioned, and is treated as effectively irrelevant to the story of salvation. Rahner’s complaint may be true of some 19th- and 20th-Century manuals of theology (the kind on which students of theology used to be brought up), but in fact his valid concern to connect the Holy Trinity with salvation history and the life of grace is shared with Augustine and Aquinas. I propose a Trinitarian structure to the Summa: • Prima Pars 2-42 (the whole of this section) are on God the Holy Trinity. • Prima Pars 43 is the hinge which explains why the Holy Trinity “unfolds to us” in the work of creation and salvation: the Trinity does this because of the desire of each divine Person to give himself to us to be known, loved, possessed and enjoyed, now and forever. • Prima Pars 44-end is on Creation, which bears the traces of the Holy Trinity, and on the human being made in the image of the Holy Trinity for communion with the Holy Trinity (1a, 93). • Secunda Pars is on the Mission of the Holy Spirit who is given to craft us in grace, to shape us in love, to bring wisdom to birth in us, and to guide us on our way as our New Law. • Tertia Pars is on the Mission of the Son, through whose saving work, and the Sacraments that bring it home to us, the Spirit’s grace actually comes to us. (2) A Select Bibliography THE MEDIAEVAL CONTEXT LUSCOMBE, David. Medieval Thought. A History of Western Philosophy, II. Oxford: OUP, 1997. MARENBON, John. Later Medieval Philosophy (1150-1350): An Introduction. London: Routledge, 1987. BIOGRAPHIES… TUGWELL, Simon. Albert and Thomas: Selected Writings. New York: Paulist Press, 1988. Pages 201-267. TORRELL, Jean-Pierre. Saint Thomas Aquinas. Vol. I: The Person and His Work. Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1996. BAUERSCHMIDT, Frederick Christian. Thomas Aquinas: Faith, Reason, and Following Christ. Christian Theology in Context Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. ST THOMAS’ THOUGHT, INCLUDING INTRODUCTIONS TO THE SUMMA BAUERSCHMIDT, Frederick Christian. Holy Teaching: Introducing the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas. Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2005. [Some is on Google-Books.] BROCK, Stephen L. The Philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas: A Sketch. Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2015. DAUPHINAIS, Michael, & Matthew LEVERING, Knowing the Love of Christ: An Introduction to the Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002. DAVIES, Brian, and Eleonore STUMP (eds.) Oxford Handbook of Aquinas. DAVIES, Brian, O.P. Aquinas. Outstanding Christian Thinkers. London: Continuum, 2002. DAVIES, Brian. “Aquinas on What God Is Not.” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 52 (1998); reprinted in: Brian DAVIES (ed.) Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae: Critical Essays. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. DAVIES, Brian. The Thought of Thomas Aquinas. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. FATULA, Mary Ann. Thomas Aquinas, Preacher and Friend. GRATSCH, Edward J. Aquinas’ Summa: An Introduction and Interpretation. Bangalore: Theological Publica- tions in India, 1990. HAUSE, Jeffrey. Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae: A Critical Guide. Cambridge: CUP, 2018. JORDAN, Mark. Teaching Bodies: Moral Formation in the Summa of Thomas Aquinas. McCABE, Herbert. On Aquinas. An especially clear account of aspects of his philosophy/psychology. McCABE, Herbert. The McCabe Reader, papers 1-3, 15; God Matters, papers 1-4; God Still Matters, papers 1-3; Faith Within Reason, papers 4-8. [Some of these overlap.] McCOSKER, Philip, and Denys TURNER (eds.) Cambridge Companion to the Summa Theologiae. McINERNY, Ralph. St. Thomas Aquinas. Notre Dame, 1982. NICHOLS, Aidan. Discovering Aquinas, (Darton, Longman and Todd, 1992). PIEPER, Josef. Guide to Thomas Aquinas (Notre Dame, 1982). TE VELDE, Rudi. Aquinas on God: The ‘Divine Science’ of the Summa Theologiae. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. TORRELL, Jean-Pierre. Aquinas’s Summa: Background, Structure & Reception. Washington: Catholic Univ. of America, 2005. TORRELL, Jean-Pierre. St. Thomas Aquinas. Vol 2: Spiritual Master. Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2003. Van NIEUWENHOVE, Rik, and Joseph WAWRYKOW (eds). The Theology of Thomas Aquinas. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005. WEINANDY, KEATING & YOCUM (eds.) Aquinas on Doctrine. T & T Clark, 2004. [Some is on Google-Books.] WHITE, Victor. God the Unknown & Other Essays. (London: Harvill, 1956). Part I, essays II & III. COMMENTARIES ON SECTIONS OF THE SUMMA SHANLEY, Brian. Thomas Aquinas: The Treatise on the Divine Nature. Summa Theologiae I, 1-13. PASNAU, R. Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature. Cambridge: CUP, 2002. J. BUDZISZEWSKI. Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on Law (Cambridge: CUP, 2014), with a free online Companion; Commentary on Thomas Aquinas's Virtue Ethics (Cambridge, 2017); Commentary on Thomas Aquinas's Treatise on Happiness and Ultimate Purpose (Cambridge, 2020); Commentary on Thomas Aquinas's Treatise on Divine Law (Cambridge, forthcoming). - these are long but very clear and detailed commentaries on selected articles. - his website is at https://undergroundthomist.org/ ST THOMAS ON THE HOLY TRINITY AND THE INDWELLING OF THE HOLY TRINITY IN US CIAPPI, L. “The Presence, Mission & Indwelling of the Divine Persons in the Just.” Thomist XVII (1954) 131-45. CONRAD, Richard. “Humanity Created for Communion with the Trinity in Aquinas.” In: George Westhaver (ed.) A Transforming Vision: Knowing and Loving the Triune God. London: SCM, 2018. 121-134. CONRAD, Richard. “The Holy Trinity as Source of Human Dignity and Destiny according to St Thomas Aquinas.” Chapter 4 in: John Loughlin (ed.), Human Dignity in the Judaeo-Christian Tradition: Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican and Protestant Perspectives. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. DAUPHINAIS, Michael, Barry DAVID and Matthew LEVERING (eds.) Aquinas the Augustinian. Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2007. Papers 1, 2, 3 and 5. EMERY, Gilles, O.P. The Trinitarian Theology of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Oxford: OUP, 2007. EMERY, Gilles, O.P. Trinity in Aquinas. Ave Maria College: Sapientia Press, 2003. EMERY, Gilles. “The Trinity.” Brian DAVIES and Eleonore STUMP (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Aquinas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Paper 30. KU, John Baptist. God the Father in the Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas. New York: Peter Lang, 2013. LEGGE, Dominic, OP. The Trinitarian Christology of St Thomas Aquinas. Oxford: OUP, 2017. MERRIELL, D. Juvenal. To the Image of the Trinity: a study in the development of Aquinas’ teaching (Toronto, 1990). This is very detailed, but especially useful, and explores how Thomas was sensitive to the trajectory identifiable in Augustine’s De Trinitate. MOLLOY. “The Trinitarian Mysticism of St. Thomas.” Angelicum 57 (1980) pages 373ff. Van NIEUWENHOVE, Rik, & Joseph WAWRYKOW (eds.) The Theology of Thomas Aquinas. Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 2005. Chapter 6. WILLIAMS, Rowan. “What Does Love Know? St. Thomas on the Trinity.” New Blackfriars 82 (2001) 260-282. And for conversations between St Thomas and modern theology: LEVERING, Matthew. Scripture and Metaphysics: Aquinas and the Renewal of Trinitarian Theology. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. MIN, Anselm K. Paths to the Triune God: An Encounter between Aquinas and Recent Theologies. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005. (3) Some Notes on Prima Pars 2-26 God exists (Qu. 2); He alone possesses being, He alone can grant it (3.4, 8.1, 13.11; also 45.5). God (obviously!) cannot exist in a creaturely way – He cannot be complex (3) or changeable (9). But more than that, He is being, and good(ness) (6), and eternity (10), and One (11), and life (18), and Truth (16.5), and Beauty, etc. He is all these analogously, not metaphorically (13.1-6). That is, it is literally true that God is good, and that God is one, by contrast with, say, “The Lord is my rock.” But we cannot fathom God’s goodness and unity; creatures resemble (participate in) them in various lesser degrees, but God does not resemble creatures (4, 3 ad 4). We speak analogously when we use the same word with related but different meanings; Thomas’ example is “healthy”, as used of, say, cats and cat food. Healthy cat food makes healthy cats, but you cannot tell from healthy cat food very much about what a healthy cat is or is like. Angels are more like God than dogs are; Mother Teresa is much more like God than Hitler – but God is not just a bigger and better angel, and his goodness far transcends obedience to moral norms. Note: we must also use metaphors (1.9), for the sake of reverence! God has/is knowledge (14), love (20), mercy (21), power (25) and bliss (26). See Rowan Williams, “What Does Love Know?...” on this section as preparing for the next.

A NOTE ON THE FIVE WAYS A common idea among theists is that the world points beyond itself to a Creator. Before we look more closely at that, we need to note that for some people our mind itself points to God, in the sense that we can prove there is a God without needing to refer to the external world. The kind of proof I have in mind is the “Ontological Argument” associated with St Anselm. Since his time a lot of people have been unhappy with “defining God into existence” but have found it difficult to say what is wrong with Anselm’s argument; others have defended it or tried to produce better versions of it; others again have claimed that Anselm was not trying to define God into existence, but to do something else. A rather different argument for the existence of God is the “Moral Argument” which again starts within the human mind, with its sense of right and duty, and argues from that to a God who is the Source of goodness and “Guarantor” of right and value. Although this argument seems to have been especially important for relatively recent thinkers such as Newman its roots may go back to Socrates’ attempts (as Plato records them) to show that we have innate ideas of justice, etc. An often-quoted formulation of the Argument from Design is by William Paley. [Born 1743, fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, later Archdeacon of Carlisle. He wrote on Scripture and Morals as well as works such as View of the Evidences of Christianity (1794) and Natural Theology (1802). Died 1805.] It is useful to distinguish the “Cosmological Argument” from the “Argument from Design”. The latter proceeds from the intricacy of the universe to the existence of an intelligent Designer; and its modern formulation really depends on the scientific awareness of the universe’s intricacy, and on our relatively modern ability to design really intricate machines. Cosmological Arguments proceed from more basic facts about the universe – including its very existence. The most famous set of cosmological arguments are the Five Ways of St. Thomas Aquinas, given in his Summa Theologiae, Prima Pars Question 2 article 3. A huge litera- ture exists on them – partly because Thomas sets them out laconically, which I suspect is because (i) he assumes that those who start his course of theology have done plenty of philosophy already and (ii) the whole section Prima Pars Qu. 2-11 is a coherent attempt to build up an understanding of the Creator God. I would set out the Five Ways as follows: 1. We find that things change, so that latent possibilities get actualised. In this process things are as it were led forward by other things that are “more actual” – for example, the growth of living things on earth depends on energy from the Sun, which is a rich source of energy. As you “widen your perspective” you can see that all growth and development depends ultimately on God as the “Most Actual” in whom there are no latent possibilities that indicate dependence on something more actual still.1

1 Although this First Way leads to “the Unmoved First Mover”, I have used the terms “change” and “Most Actual” because for St. Thomas motus means any kind of change, not just movement through space. Since earlier philosophers had been puzzled by the fact of change, Aristotle analysed it as a “move” from (what went into Latin as) potentia to actus. For him and for St Thomas, actus is not just “realisation” (i.e. of certain possibilities), but the structured reality of things which is almost “vibrant” and makes them able to act. 2. We find that things depend on causes, and that there is a hierarchy of causes. To take a modern example, and to see “cause” as more-or-less equivalent to “explanation”,2 Fido is explained by his parents Rover and Lassie; but the possibility of their conceiving a puppy is explained by animal biology, which also explains how Felix and Tabby can conceive a kitten; and biology depends on the deeper structure of matter, which explains biology, and how stars produce light, and so on. As you “widen your perspective” you can see that all things depend on/are explained by a Cause and a Wisdom that does not point beyond Itself to anything more fundamental still. 3. [See below for my account of this Way.] 4. We find degrees of goodness, of beauty, and of other “transcendentals”. These realities point beyond themselves to the Unlimited Good, which they partially reflect.3 5. We find purposeful behaviour even among irrational creatures, e.g. bees dance on the honeycomb so as to tell others where the nectar is, & they collect nectar so as to make honey for the hive’s survival… The future goal can only influence present behaviour in this kind of way if it is already present in a Mind that can plan, and that can give things patterns of behaviour relating to purposes they cannot perceive. Some people are unhappy with proofs of God’s existence because they seem to make faith redundant. St. Thomas is not troubled by the problem. If you can prove that God exists, then you know He exists and can no longer believe it. So what? The real reason we need revelation and faith is that there are many things we need to believe that no created mind can possibly prove – such as the Trinity, and our invitation to share the Divine Persons’ happiness. It is a subsidiary purpose of revelation – necessary because of the Fall – to tell us things about God, our nature, and ethics, that human reason has access to, but many people have not the time or intelligence to work out, and even the cleverest philosophers have made mistakes about. You can see that although they start from obvious features of the world, these Five Ways soon get us into deep philosophical waters, and raise tough questions, such as: • Can we hold to Aristotle’s and Thomas’ idea of potentia and actus (“latent possibility” and “actualisa- tion”) in a modern scientific world? • What is causation? • Is it meaningful to speak of goodness and beauty as “realities” that need a Source? • Is the appearance of purposeful behaviour in the natural world an illusion based on the evolutionary selection of successful behavioural traits? • Are the Five Ways too tied up with the Mediaeval view of the universe? • Must we reject the whole philosophical world-view in which they make sense? Here is my account of the Third Way, designed to show that Thomas’ understanding of the universe is only a springboard to a philosophical perspective that is independent of one’s science, and that that philosophical perspective is something it is difficult to reject. (i) Certain things around us come into being and go out of being. If that were the whole story, given enough time it would happen by coincidence that each and every thing popped out of being at the same time, and then there would be nothing. So [either time and the things in it were set going not too long ago, and we need to ask “Who by?”4 or] there are things in the world with “a firmer hold on their

2 That’s a bold move! Still, for Aristotle & Thomas, a cause of some thing is something that accounts for its being. 3 The “transcendentals” are “realities” like goodness and beauty that are found in widely different ways, unlike, say, redness or unemployment “Transcendentals” are not so much “qualities” of things as the whole being of things viewed from a particular perspective. 4 I have made this point explicit, because Thomas thought you could not prove whether the world had a beginning or had always existed (he had no radio telescope to pick up the 3K radiation left from the Big Bang). He thought the Bible tells us the world began at a definite point in the past, but if you want a philosophical proof of God you must allow for the possibility that time is infinite. existence” than the things we meet on earth. These incorruptible beings [which Thomas called “necessary beings”] stick around and keep other things in being [e.g. by “energising” that process by which things don’t just pop out of existence but turn into other things]. (ii) The dependence of corruptible beings on incorruptible ones points us towards a deeper kind of dependence. These incorruptible beings: where does their existence come from? OK, once they have it they can’t lose it; but where is it from in the first place? Surely from a Being that does not need to receive Its existence from a higher source, & is the Source of the being of all things, corruptible and incorruptible. To many people, the first step in St. Thomas’ argument does not really prove that there have to be “necessary” (i.e. incorruptible) beings if the world is to keep going. After all, things don’t just cease to exist; they become other things. But I suspect it is precisely that process which amazed Thomas, as it did Aristotle: when a dog dies, the animal that once existed has ceased to exist; and the generation of new life-forms from its corpse is only possible because the Sun pumps down energy to the earth. Note that for Aristotle & Thomas the heavenly bodies’ forms actualized their matter in a higher kind of, so that they were incorruptible, losing nothing even as they kept things going here below. We know the sun loses 4 million tons a second – but we too have our “necessary beings”, since for us electrons & protons are incorruptible (on the whole, but not in so absolute a way as Thomas’ heavenly bodies) and dogs that die don’t just pop out of existence, because the stuff they are made of is rearranged, not lost. However, electrons & protons are “lower beings” than dogs and cats, not – as Aristotle and Thomas saw the Sun – “higher beings”. Whatever you think of the first step does not really matter, however, because it only serves to introduce a sense that things’ being is precarious and dependent, not self-explanatory. The second step is the crucial one. Thomas is trying to get us to see that the existence of each and every thing, no matter how noble and incorruptible, is dependent and in need of explanation. If you think the Sun is incorruptible, you can still ask, “Why is it here at all?” If you think electrons are incorruptible, you can still ask, “Why are electrons here at all?”5 If incorruptible beings exist, they will stick around; but we can still ask why they exist in the first place, for even such things do not explain their own existence. You can put this “precariousness” in several ways: • Knowing what even an incorruptible being is, you can imagine the world without it. • “The Sun exists” or “This electron exists” do not have to be true, unlike “2 + 2 = 4”. • Things’ essences (what they are) and their existence (the fact that they are) are not the same. A Martian who came to earth and read books about unicorns and orangutans would know what those animals are, but would still need to look and see whether in fact they exist or are mythical. So the basic fact that things exist points beyond itself to the source and Cause of their existence. There has to be a God whose Being is not precarious and dependent, who is “self-explanatory”, who is per se necessa- rium – has incorruptible being of Himself. So: • If you knew What God is (for now we can’t) you could not imagine Him not existing. • “God exists” has to be true – but while we are in this life we can’t see that it has to be true, because we don’t know what the word “God” means, rather as someone who did not know English could not see the necessity of “two plus two equals four”. • In God, Essence and Existence are not distinct – hence He is radically different from all creatures, in which the two are distinct. For scholars like Gilson & Herbert McCabe, this is one of the core principles of Thomism. I think it is also implied by the Name revealed to Moses, YHWH, which could mean both “He is making things to be” and (paraphrasing) “His Being is resplendent”. This seems to be an implica- tion of the way the revelation of the Name is described in Exodus 3, and of the 3rd-Century BC Greek (Septuagint) translation of the Torah.

5 It is said that Kierkegaard once stayed in a public park in Copenhagen after it was locked, and in the evening the park keeper saw a weird philosophical-looking character wandering among the flower beds. He approached him and said, “Why are you here?” Kierkegaard fixed him with an intent stare and replied, “Why are any of us here?” By this stage you may be wondering how useful St. Thomas’ proofs would be if you were faced in a pub with an “average agnostic”. But in the Summa they are not intended to convince an atheist that God exists, but to show the beginner in theology that: • All things point to and depend on God; • God has none of the creaturely features that imply dependence. Looking at the Five Ways from that point of view, we can see that however well or badly they work as proofs that God exists, they present us with the following perspective: 1. While God has no unfilled needs, and is beyond change, growth and development, He leads and guides all things in their changes, growths and developments, as the potentials within them unfold under His influence. 2. While God needs no cause, and is accountable to no higher principle, He is the Cause of all things, and His wise will is their ultimate explanation. All the causal inter-relationships within the universe, and all its intricacy of structure, derive from Him. 3. God’s existence is incomprehensibly higher than that of even the noblest creatures, for it is independent and as it were self-explanatory. Every thing that exists, in whatever way it does exist, is made to be by God. 4. All the limited goodness & beauty of things is a dim reflection of God’s unlimited Goodness and Beauty. 5. As the Guide of all things, and the Source of their structures and patterns of behaviour, God wisely plans their activities so that they pursue the goals that befit their natures - and this means that in some sense He draws them all to Himself, the Goal as well as the source of all things, the Omega as well as the Alpha.

SPEAKING ANALOGICALLY ABOUT GOD The following three short works may be helpful: McCABE, Herbert. Appendix 4 to Vol. III of the Blackfriars Summa (QQ. 12-13). McCABE, Herbert. “The Logic of Mysticism.” Chapter 2 in God Still Matters. McCABE, Herbert. Chapter 8 of Faith within Reason, on “God is Good”. St. Thomas distinguishes different ways of using language: • A word used univocally has a constant meaning, so when I say, “I can’t grow rhododendrons in my garden,” and, “There are lots of rhododendrons at Kew,” the word rhododendron has just the same meaning in each sentence. • A word used equivocally has several different, unrelated meanings, so when I say, “I keep my postcards in a box,” and, “I shall give you a box on the ears,” you cannot conclude that I am going to hang a card- board container on you as an ear-ring. • A word used analogically has several different meanings, but they are related to each other. So when I say, “Moggo is a healthy cat-food,” and, “Garfield is a healthy cat,” the word healthy is fittingly used in both sentences. Once you know the relationship between the two uses, you can conclude, for example, that feeding Moggo to Garfield would keep him healthy. We must speak about God using both metaphor and analogy. As Herbert McCabe puts it, they differ, when applied to God, roughly thus: • In metaphor, I know what I mean but do not literally mean what I say. • In analogy, I literally mean what I say but do not know what I mean. When I say, “The LORD is my rock,” I know what a rock is, and the rockier the rock I have in my mind the better - something really solid, like the Rock of Gibraltar, is a good metaphor for God’s dependability. But if there is a danger of misunderstanding I can add, “Of course, God is not really a huge lump of granite.” Metaphor is a necessary figure of speech that delights the human imagination and reminds us that we do not know What God is. But Scripture also speaks in literal ways about God, and we, too, must say things like, “God is good.” In such cases, we do not want to add, “Of course, God is not really good.”6 However, we do not claim to comprehend God’s goodness, or want to imply that it is just another example of the goodness we are familiar with in this world of people. We are speaking analogically. Certain concepts, like goodness, life and wisdom, are flexible, and capture “realities” that are found in widely different ways, and in fact are found in a higher – indeed a primary – way in God, and from Him derive to creatures. So the word “rock” applies more properly to granite than to God; but the word “good” applies more properly to God than to people, or dogs, or dinners (through which, however, we have learned to use the word good). Note that saying, “God is good,” is both true and does not enable us to know What God is! A Martian who visited Sainsbury’s after a Muslim government had forbidden pictures on packaging and was told that Moggo is a healthier cat-food than Tabby-tuck would know that Moggo is especially good at producing healthy cats, but would have no idea what a healthy cat is like until he had seen real cats. In a roughly similar way, using the word “good” of God and of the things He creates (though in this case more properly of Him, for the causal action is from Him to them), and knowing that better things and people reflect more of God’s goodness, does not at all tell us what God’s goodness actually is. We must wait till we see Him face to face. So in their various perfections and their various degrees, things resemble God their Source; but there is a greater unlikeness than likeness, and we cannot say God resembles them. The Fourth Way mentioned above may seem to suggest that if things are ranged on a scale of goodness or beauty they point to God as supreme on the scale. Looking more carefully, we can see that (insofar as there are meaningful scales of goodness and the like) God is not on the scale at all. See the following diagram:

NB 1: To preserve objectivity, I have refused any payment from the manufacturers of Moggo for commending it. NB 2: The name of the product I actually have in mind has been altered to “Tabby-Tuck” so as to avert libel suits from the manufacturers. NB 3: Note the use of “avert” in the previous sentence, and avoid committing the widespread error of using “avoid” when you mean “avert”.

6 Pseudo-Dionysius does want to speak in that way, but what he (or she) means by saying that God is not really good is that no concept or instance of goodness adequately represents God. And that is exactly what St. Thomas is saying by employing the concept of analogy. Chapter 3 of Alan Torrance’s Persons in Communion, for example, implies that analogy is often discussed in a much more complex way than I have done, and different forms of analogy can be distinguished. Karl Barth7 was suspicious of analogy since (as often presented by Catholic theologians) it seemed to give us an access to the nature of God independently of Revelation, whereas Barth’s great theme is our total dependence on God’s Revelation. But it can be argued that St. Thomas’ actual understanding of the role of analogy was much more modest than many of his commentators have supposed. In fact, for Thomas, even Reve- lation does not let us know the Nature of God! (4) Some Notes on Prima Pars 27-42, on the Holy Trinity Question 27: Processions (‘coming from’) – revealed, of course, by the Missions (see Q. 43) Scripture uses the language of “procession” regarding the Son and the Spirit. This must not be read in an Arian way (they are creatures that come from God), nor in a Sabellian way (they are names for actions that come from God, in the sense that we call him “son” as incarnate, and call him “spirit” as indwelling, just as we call him “Father” as creating). No; these processions are “within” God (in divinis, “within the divine realm”). The Son and the Spirit are from God the Father, not in the way creatures or exterior actions proceed from God, but rather in the way in which the acts of intellect and will remain within a spiritual being such as the human soul. So Aquinas immediately takes up Augustine’s ‘model’ of the mind, its self-knowledge, and its self-love, in the ‘toned-down’ manner of De Trinitate XV. In fact, Prima Pars 27 introduces this model rather tentatively; the main point is that even in our experience we can see that ‘procession from’ need not involve ‘going out from’, and so are prepared for seeing the compatibility of distinction and equality, even the compatibility of distinction and unity. As the treatise develops, and with the help of Q. 93, we can see that to know oneself is to form a ‘word’ or ‘concept’ that is from the mind and yet remains within it, and is distinct from oneself yet matches oneself. Likewise to love/value oneself is to ‘breathe forth’ an ‘impulse’ that is from the mind and yet remains within it, and is distinct from oneself yet matches oneself – but not in the way a concept matches the reality it expresses, hence (unlike the generation of the Word) the Spirit’s procession cannot be called ‘generation’. See my popular-pictorial presentation of the psychological analogy of the Holy Trinity below. But Thomas proceeds cautiously, step by step, as if to say we can’t jump too readily from the human model to God. However, in article 5 Thomas does appeals to the fact that there are only two purely spiritual processions in the mind (of knowledge & of love) in a way that looks a bit like a proof that there are only two Processions in God. We will return to this when we look at Q. 32. Q. 27 basically proceeds thus: 1. To understand the processions we are told about in God, we should use the highest analogue available to us, i.e. the human mind, in which there can be “interior processions”. 2. One procession is by way of knowledge, in which a concept proceeds as a likeness of the known. The Divine Word proceeds as the Perfect Likeness, and this fulfils the definition of “the generation of a son” – without implying that the Word came into being as some point. 3. Another procession is by way of love, and rather as, at the human level, the beloved is in some sense in the lover, so in God the Love Proceeding remains in divinis. 4. But knowledge and love are irreducibly different dynamics. Knowledge involves likeness; love involves tendency towards. The concept, and the impulse of love, both match the object known and loved, but in different ways. Hence the Divine Spiritus is not a son generated. 5. In a spiritual being (e.g. the mind) there are only these two dynamics (taking in what is known; tending towards what is loved). Hence there are only two Processions in God.

7 1886-1968. Important and influential Protestant theologian. Main work, Church Dogmatics. Torrance’s book is largely an engagement with Barth’s Trinitarian theology. Question 28: Relations – a concept introduced by the Cappadocian Fathers and explored by Augustine. The two processions ‘result in’ two pairs of relations: Paternity (Fatherhood) and Filiation (Sonship) ‘(Active) Spiration’ and ‘Procession (Passive Spiration)’ – philosophy has not provided us with a helpful pair of terms here. In creatures, relations are “accidents” – features about things less fundamental than their basic natures. Aidan’s belonging to the cat Leo is a feature about Aidan less fundamental than his human nature. God has no accidents: He is His wisdom, power and eternity. Hence in God, Fatherhood, Sonship, and the Spirit’s Procession are each identical with the Divine Nature. But not identical with each other!!! For Fatherhood (= bestowing the Divine Nature) is totally other than Sonship (= receiving the Divine Nature), etc. Unlike other accidents, such as quality and quantity, relationship has another feature – it intrinsically involves one-to-another. When, in God, accidents ‘collapse’ into the Essence, this feature of relationship cannot collapse, but must ‘remain’. We should not conclude that the Essence is somehow more real than the Trinitarian distinctions. The Divine Being/Nature is the Father’s Being, identical with the Father, which He gives in full to the Son, to be His Being, identical with Him, and which the Father gives in full through the Son to the Spirit, to be His Being, identical with Him. It’s the non-accidental aspect of relationship that is found – and is very real – in God. As far as I can tell, Thomas, like Augustine, is not trying to brush aside the apparent logical paradox of the Trinity, merely showing that if relationships are revealed (as they are), they don’t succumb to the rule that in God there are no accidents distinct from his Essence. And arguing that if we look at the Persons from the point of view of what distinguishes them (the Relationships), then they are irreducibly distinct; if we look at the Triune God from the point of view of his unity, there is no complexity in him. Don’t confuse the two perspectives; don’t try to do both at once. Perhaps it’s just that we cannot view the Divine Relationships from both perspectives at once, (a) as identical with the Essence; (b) as distinct from each other, rather as we cannot view electrons as waves and as particles at the same time. God’s Unity and the Trinity’s distinctions exceed our grasp. But the model of the single human psyche, with its knowledge and love, gains us some purchase on the compatibility of unity and distinction. Question 29: Persons Thomas starts with Boethius’ definition: Rationalis naturae individua substantia: individua substantia because substantia (= Greek ousia) could also mean natura/essentia/quidditas, and individua makes it mean hypostasis/subsistentia/suppositum.8 Thus persona has an ontological, not a Cartesian-psychological, meaning. But we reserve persona for beings with intellect. Hence the word “Person” is appropriately used for Father, Son and Spirit because (a) it refers to what subsists as distinct, and (b) it implies dignity. In the case of God, the Persons are the Relations, as subsisting and as distinct. The Fatherhood is the Father; the Sonship is the Son, the Proceeding-as-Love is the Spirit. Note that the way in which persons are distinct varies according as they are human, angelic or divine. Human persons are distinct from each other by being located under different “material conditions” of space-and-time – we have distinct histories, though we all belong to the same species. For Aquinas, each angel is of a different species – Gabriel differs from Raphael, not in the way Fido differs from Rover, but in the way a cat differs from a dog. Hence the personal differences among angels are even more interesting than those between human beings. The Divine Persons are distinct from each other in even more interesting ways! To the extent that each is personal in a different way from the other two. If “person” is not used

8 Ousia comes from the verb “to be”. It has 2 meanings: (1) an individual existing being, e.g. Garfield; (2) a common nature, e.g. felinity. This is appropriate, because it’s by being feline that Garfield exists; he is still Garfield if he becomes fatter or sweeter-tempered. But as the terminology developed (in a complex way), we came to use “nature”, “essence” & “whatness” for meaning (2), and “hypostasis”, “subsisting being” & “ontological subject” for meaning (1). For Thomas, “person” is also used for meaning (1), but only for beings whose nature is rational or intellectual. in quite the same sense of me and of my guardian angel, it is used in an even more different sense of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. See the next question. Question 30: Plurality of Divine Persons. Note especially articles 3 and 4, often overlooked. The two pairs of Relations “set up” three Persons – “active spiration” is common to Father and Son, and does not make Them distinct. But the term “three” doesn’t posit anything extra in God beyond the facts that each of Father, Son and Spirit truly exist, that Each is One, and that They are distinct from each other. Likewise, to coin a word used in the plural (“persons”) may make it sound as if there is a something (“personhood”) common to Father, Son and Spirit, that occurs three times. But no. It is a mental construct by which we express the facts that each of Father, Son and Spirit truly exist, and that They are distinct from each other. So there is no such thing as “personhood” in God that occurs three times. There is one Father- hood, one Sonship, one ‘Proceeding by way of love’. Each is identical with the One Divine Nature – as God, They have everything in common. Each is distinct from the other ‘two’ – precisely as Fatherhood, Sonship, and ‘proceeding by way of love’, They have no thing in common. They cannot be added to each other to make three of anything. An analogy: you can add 1 inch to 1 inch to 1 inch to make 3 inches, and something cannot be 1” long & 3” long. But you can’t add 1 inch to 1 ounce to 1 minute to make 3 anything. And a piece of chocolate can be 1 inch long, & weigh 1 ounce, & last 1 minute till I eat it. Of course, you can construct a mental category and say an inch, an ounce, & a minute are 3 units of measurement, but that does not posit anything extra beyond saying something, like the piece of chocolate, can be measured in irreducibly distinct ways that don’t compromise each other. Nor does it give you any purchase on what length, weight and time are. So God’s Unity is too intense for us to comprehend. And so are God’s Distinctions. The Divine Trinity is the Archetype of Unity-in-Diversity, Diversity-in-Unity. [Of course, the word “diversity” has been high-jacked in recent years in unhelpful ways.] To believe in the Trinity is not to water it down, but to profess distinctions too vast for us to comprehend. The Beatific Vision will be much more exciting than Unitarians or Deists can hope for. So Aquinas stands with Athanasius and Augustine in being wary of plural terms; the great Creeds use neither the term “three” nor the term “person(s)”; in a time of Christian-Muslim tension we need to point out that we do not believe that God is literally three anythings – we take the divine Unity equally seriously. Question 32: Knowing the Divine Persons By reason alone, without revelation, we can (in principle) know that God exists. By reason alone, without revelation, we cannot know that God is Trinity, and should not try to prove it. We believe it by Faith, on the basis of revelation. This claim is in tension with the fairly confident way Thomas launches his treatise on the Trinity – see the remarks above about Prima Pars 27, 5. [It is in even more tension with some of the theologians who were a bit earlier than, or contemporary with, Thomas.] A forthcoming interesting article in The Irish Theological Quarterly will grasp this bull by the horns of its dilemma, and suggest the tension is a matter of deliberate policy: it goes with the way in which both knowledge and insight, on the one hand, and reverence for the divine Mystery, on the other, increase as we journey into God, and, in Heaven, both will be even stronger. Question 33: the Father We can call the Father Principium (‘Source’); “Father” is His proper name, and to be “unbegotten” is proper to Him. The Fatherhood of God the Father ‘within’ the Trinity is prior to the fatherhood which expresses God’s giving being to creatures, and the fatherhood which expresses God’s adopting us by grace.

Question 34: the Son as Word Since the title ‘Father’ implies ‘Son’, Aquinas focuses on ‘Word’. Verbum (Greek Logos) is a proper name for the Son. Aquinas quotes Augustine (De Trinitate XV, 10): “Whoever, then, is able to understand a word, not only before it is uttered in sound, but also before the images of its sounds are considered in thought... is able now to see… some likeness of that Word of whom it is said, In the beginning was the Word.” ‘Word’ refers to a meaningful utterance, spoken aloud (or written). Before we speak, there is the interior concept of the mind, which is most principally to be called ‘word’. Thirdly, the sound that conveys the meaning in the language you are using, which is retained in the imagination, can be called a ‘word’. For example, when I say, “I like aubergine”, the spoken word ‘aubergine’ conveys a meaning, and it’s the same meaning as when an American says ‘egg-plant’ and an Italian ‘melanzano’. It expresses the universal concept by which we grasp the nature of that particular vegetable. And that concept is even more basically an expressive word than is the spoken word. On the other hand, the mere sound ‘aubergine’, like the sounds ‘egg-plant’ and ‘melanzano’, is not a word in so exalted a way, since I can retain a memory of the sound without actually knowing its meaning (just as I know some Polish Christmas carols by heart without in every case knowing what they mean!) When I speak meaningfully, I combine the meaning (which is “higher”, intellectual, and common to all who know aubergines) and the sound (which is retained in the imagination, at the level of sensation, and variable from language-group to language group), into the spoken word that conveys the meaning. This provides an analogy for how the Divine Word is a bit like the “interior word” in the mind; the Incarnation is this Word being “clothed” in flesh so as to be accessible to us – and by faith we grasp the meaning that Christ’s human life and teaching, Death and Resurrection, are meant to convey. The Augustinian points continue: Only the Father speaks, and only the Son is Word. But Father, Son and Spirit are each wise, and each knows, with the wisdom and knowledge identical with the Divine Nature. It is not the case that the Son is the divine knowledge, and the Spirit the divine love, in such a way that the Son and Spirit don’t know, or don’t love. In uttering His Word, the Father expresses both Himself and creatures (art. 3); in article 1 ad 3 the Father, knowing Himself, and the Son, and the Spirit, and creatures, expresses the whole Trinity and creatures in the Word. Hence “He spoke, and they were made” (Psalm 32:9). So we can picture God the Father as an artist who conceives beforehand what He will craft. We are foreknown in the Word. We can picture God the Father as the Friend who knows Himself perfectly, and by speaking His Word into the world at the Incarna- tion, speaks to us both of Himself and of His purpose for us. See drawings below. Question 36: the Holy Spirit We don’t have a proper name for the second Procession in God, since human generation reflects the first Procession [and, in 37, 1, philosophy has not been as good at exploring how love works as it has at exploring how intellect works]. But Scripture aptly speaks of the Third Person as ‘the Holy Spirit’. Since spiritus [like pneuma and ruah in Greek and Hebrew] can mean breath and wind, the Third Person, proceeding by way of love, can be called ‘Holy Spirit’ in the sense of ‘Divine Impulse’. In us, love follows from knowledge, since we can only love what we know. Hence the Holy Spirit, proceeding as Love, proceeds not only from the Father but from the Word, too, who proceeds by way of knowledge. Since the Son receives from the Father that the Spirit proceeds from Him, we can equivalently say that the Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son. Father and Son are one Principium of the Holy Spirit. Question 37: the Holy Spirit as Love Although each Person is Love, we can also use Amor, ‘Love’, as a personal name for the Spirit, given the relative lack of love-terms compared with the availability of knowledge-terms (i.e. philosophers have been more interested in a precise account of the intellect and how it relates to the senses, than of the various forms and dynamics of love). Rather as the known is in the knower, so the beloved is in the lover. Rather as an intellectual conception of the known arises in the knower, so an ““impression”” of the thing loved arises in the lover [I should prefer to speak of a chocolate-cake-shaped-impulse/orientation that matches the chocolate cake in a way different from the way the chocolate-cake-shaped-concept/image matches it.] So if you know and love yourself, you are in yourself by identity, and as the known, and as the beloved. This is where Aquinas gets closest to picturing the Word as the Father’s self-knowledge, and the Spirit as His self- love, and indeed to Augustine’s remembering-of-self, understanding-of-self, and loving-of-self.9 Augustine had “discovered” that the Holy Spirit is the Divine Love (of course, there is a Scriptural basis for this), and tried out the idea that the Holy Spirit is the one “by whom the Begotten is loved by the Begetter, and loves His Begetter” (De Trinitate VI, 5). In Qu. 37, art. 2, Aquinas appears to defend this, but in fact he rejects the idea that the Holy Spirit is the principle of the Father’s and the Son’s loving. Of course, he and Augustine agree that Father, Son and Spirit love themselves and each other by that love which is identical with the Divine Essence; but Augustine also thought of the Spirit as the communion and love between the Father and the Son, though he began to qualify this towards the end of De Trinitate. Looking at Their characteristic relationships, Thomas is happy to say that by loving each other, Father and Son breathe forth the Spirit as Love Proceeding. This allows us to complement the main “model” I draw below, with the following “model”, in which the orange is the love between Father and Son, and the red the Spirit proceeding from that love, as Love Proceeding:

With that qualification, we can say that by the Holy Spirit, Father and Son love each other, and us. So we can picture God the Father as an artist who not only conceives beforehand what He will craft, but delights in it and so fashions it. We can say we are fore-loved in the Spirit. We can picture God the Father as the Friend who, out of His Drive of Love, speaks His Word into the world, thus channeling His Love to us to carry out His purpose for us by enfolding us in His Love. See the drawings below.

A SUMMARY OF THE LARGELY THOMISTIC DOCTRINE OF THE HOLY TRINITY AS HELD BY 19TH- AND 20TH-CENTURY NEO-SCHOLASTICISM I think Thomas’ account of the Trinity had a pervasive influence on the doctrine of the Holy Trinity as received by the post-Tridentine Church, and as set out (often in a rather dry way) in manuals and text- books. The middle section of Rahner’s The Trinity gives a succinct summary. Here is my Summary. By reason as well as revelation we can know that God exists. In this life we cannot know what God is; i.e. we cannot know His Essence or Nature. We can know about It that that It is the Cause of all that is; and that It possesses in super-eminent degree all the perfections It gives creatures; and that no creaturely features are true of It. So we can speak truly of God by metaphor; and by analogy, as when we say God is good and beautiful and wise and one; and by denying change, limitation, complexity, comprehensibility, etc. of Him. In particular, by contrast with all creatures, in God there is no distinction between His Essence or Nature, on the one hand, and His Being, His “Act of Existence”, on the other.

9 Put away the myth that you aren’t meant to love yourself. Of course, you are meant to love yourself properly, which implies wanting to be just, generous, etc. It is sinners who really don’t love themselves. The divine Essence/Being is possessed by the One we call God the Father, who possesses it of Himself and from no other, so that He is Source without Source. The Father bestows the whole divine Being on Another in a way that is quite unlike the production of creatures. They are freely given limited existences; but in this eternal bestowing the one and single divine Being is imparted, not by a choice that might not have been made, nor by force of necessity, but purely naturally. The One who receives the divine Being from the Father is called His Word whom He utters, since the Father expresses Himself fully and perfectly in the Word, and our coming to know ourselves is a dim reflection of the Father’s uttering of the Word. The Word is also called Wisdom Begotten, and the Father’s Image. He is also called Son; His proceeding from the Father can be called begetting or birth. The begetting of the Son is eternal: it involves no change or development (it is “part of the way God is”), no before or after, no greater or less. Although the Son receives the divine Being from the Father, He is perfectly equal to the Father, possessing not a like nature but one-and-the-same Nature and Being. The Father and the Son bestow the whole divine Being on a Third in a way that is quite unlike the production of creatures. Creatures are freely given limited existences; but in this eternal bestowing the one and single divine Being is imparted, not by a choice that might not have been made, nor by force of necessity, but purely naturally. The Third who receives the divine Being from the Father and the Son is called the Holy Spirit, whom They breathe forth. He does not proceed as another image, but rather as an “impetus of love”: our coming to love ourselves, once we know ourselves, is a dim reflection of the procession of the Holy Spirit. Hence He can be called Love. The Holy Spirit is also called Gift, since Father and Son give Themselves perfectly in the Holy Spirit; and He can be seen (with caveats) as the Bond of Love and Joy between Father and Son. The procession of the Spirit is eternal: it involves no change or development (it is “part of the way God is”), no before or after, no greater or less. Although the Holy Spirit receives the divine Being from Father and Son, He is perfectly equal to Them, possessing not a like nature but one-and-the-same Nature and Being. It is these relations-of-origin that distinguish Father, Son and Holy Spirit from each other. Precisely as God, as possessing the one divine Being, nothing distinguishes Them. They are distinct therefore in that the Son is from the Father (not vice versa) and in that the Spirit is from the Father and the Son (not vice versa). The two processions set up four relations in two pairs: fatherhood and sonship; active spiration and passive spiration (= being the breathers-forth, and being breathed forth). These relations constitute the divine Persons in Their distinctness: by fatherhood and sonship the Father and the Son are told apart; by active and passive spiration the Father and the Son, on the one hand, are distinguished from the Spirit, on the other. The Spirit must be from the Son if He is to be distinct from Him. But the Son is not a Source of the Spirit independently of the Father: since Father and Son are one where there is no “being at opposite ends of a relationship” to distinguish Them, They are the one Source of the Spirit; since He has all that He is from the Father, the Son receives from the Father being-Source-of-the-Spirit – the Son is Source with a Source. So we can speak of the Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son, but principally from the Father, or of the Spirit proceeding from the Father through the Son; the Greeks reserve the word ekporeuetai for the Spirit’s proceeding from the Source without Source, i.e. the Father. In order to know the Trinity (in the sense of setting out an adequate array of terms, but not in the sense of comprehending the Mystery) we need to speak of five “proper notions”: these are the four relations that distinguish the Persons, and the notion of “ingeneracy” expressing the fact that the Father is from no other. To call Father, Son & Spirit “three Persons” is simply to say They really exist in distinction from each other; it does not say what They are, nor imply a feature that recurs three times. Fatherhood, Sonship and Pro- ceeding-as-Love each only exist once, and while they are distinct from each other with a richness we cannot imagine, they are also each identical with the one divine Being with a unity too intense to comprehend. Besides the “notional acts” of generation and spiration according to which the Son is born and the Spirit flames forth, the three Persons exercise “essential acts” – i.e. with the one divine Essence, identical with its power and goodness, They know and love each other, and create, sustain and guide the world. Because They possess one and the same Being, and know and love each other, the Three dwell within each other and are united in an “exchange of love and life”. The indwelling and “movement” are called circumin- session and circumincession respectively. We have analogies in our own experience for how distinction and unity, dependence and equality, need not be in tension with each other, but can “reinforce” each other. The following points emerge in Prima Pars 43, as we shall see: The Trinity is revealed in the sending of the Word, who came to reveal the Father and accomplish His saving work, and in the sending of the Spirit, who came to bring us to life & unity as the Father’s children adopted in Christ. The missions of the Son and the Spirit reveal and “extend Their eternal processions into the world”. Though, as regards external acts, Father, Son and Spirit work inseparably with one divine power, we can appropriate particular works to a particular Person because they bear some likeness to His personal charac- teristics within the Holy Trinity. Both Son and Spirit are sent to dwell within us, to shape us in wisdom and love and so enable us to possess the Father; hence in faith and grace we seem to begin to have a non-appropriated relationship to each of the three Persons. In the final state of bliss, Son and Spirit will be sent to us to shape us in knowledge and love, so that we will know the Father as He is (not comprehend Him fully) and rejoice in Him with the Son. The community of the Blessed will reflect the divine Community that the Trinity is, and we have even now a foretaste of that in the unity of the Church in faith and love. The analogy between the Trinity and the human psyche can perhaps be hinted at in these drawings:

In these drawings I also suggest an analogy for the connection of the Holy Trinity to salvation history and to the life of grace. Basically: I know myself and my plans, imperfectly, and I share myself with my friends by expressing some of that knowledge to them. Because I know myself (imperfectly) I love (value) myself (not exactly as I should, in a fallen world); out of this love (drive towards eudaimonia) I want to share myself in friendship; hence it is (ideally) out of love that I speak to my friends, and my conversation both expresses love and invites a return of love. All that, dimly points to how God the Father knows himself & his purpose perfectly, and expresses himself and his creative & salvific purpose in his co-equal Word. In the Incarnation he speaks this Word into the world, so as to reveal himself and enact his purpose. Because he loves and delights in himself, and in himself as expressed in his Word, the Father, with his Word, “breathes” the Spiritus who is Love and Joy; in him the Father and the Word rejoice in each other & in their creation and especially in us. It is out of this Love that the Father speaks his Word into the world – the Word is conceived in the power of the Holy Spirit – and this Love is communicated to us when, in his Sacrifice, the Word speaks most eloquently, communicated so as to create in us a response of love. That, of course, is by no means all we need to say, and it does not imply that the Word is the knowledge by which the Father knows himself, as if he stands in need of a power to know… Nevertheless, the picture may gain us some little purchase on the Divine Trinity and Its triune self-communication in the history of salvation. (5) Some Notes on Prima Pars 43 In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the mice (in their 5th-dimensional home) build a super-computer (“Deep Thought”) to work out the answer to life, the universe & everything. After a long time it announces, “The answer is 42.” That is out by 1; the real answer is Prima Pars 43. In this question, which is the hinge between the Eternal Trinity in Itself, and the Trinity unfolding to us in creation and in the Economy of Salvation, we find the following development of Augustine’s account of the Missions that reveal the Processions and extend them into the world: A Divine Person is given if He begins to be in the world in a new way; He is sent if He is from Another and begins to be in the world in a new way. As initially explored by Augustine, a Mission can be visible, such as the Incarnation; or invisible, i.e. part of the life of grace. The Son is sent visibly in the Incarnation, when he begins to be present in the human nature assumed; the Spirit is sent visibly merely as symbolized, by the dove at Jesus’ Baptism, & by wind & fire at Pentecost. The invisible missions of the Son & the Spirit involve 2 distinct but inseparable aspects of the life of grace: (1) New effects of the Divine Persons that reflect them in the personal characters; (2) A radically new presence of the Divine Persons as possessed in friendship. Regarding aspect (1): in the life of grace, the Gift of Wisdom (the greatest of the Spirit’s seven “gifts”) is a “participation” in the Divine Wisdom; and the Virtue of Charity is a “participation” in the Holy Spirit. [In 1a2ae 110, we find that Wisdom and Charity, etc., upwell from sanctifying (i.e. divinizing) grace, which is in the “essence” or “depths” of the soul. I therefore wonder whether we can see sanctifying grace as a “participation” in the Father.] In the life of grace, we are “formed” or “shaped” by the Divine Persons, each in his personal way. For this, see also 2a 2ae 23, 2 and 24, 2 on Charity as a created participation in the Holy Spirit, and 2a 2ae 45, 6 on how people “are called the children of God in so far as they participate in the likeness of the only-begotten and natural Son of God… who is Wisdom Begotten.” This being conformed to God the Son by Wisdom, and to the Holy Spirit by Charity, appears in 1a 43, 5, ad 2: The soul is conformed to God by grace. Hence for a Divine Person to be sent to anyone by grace, he/she must needs be likened to the Divine Person who is sent, by some gift of grace. Because the Holy Ghost is Love, the soul is assimilated to the Holy Ghost by the gift of charity: hence the mission of the Holy Ghost is according to the mode of charity. Whereas the Son is the Word, not any sort of word, but one who breathes forth Love. Hence Augustine says (De Trin. IX, x, 15): “The Word we mean to speak of is knowledge with love.” Thus the Son is sent not in accordance with every and any kind of intellectual perfection, but according to the intellectual illumination which breaks forth into the affection of love, as is said (John 6:45): “Everyone that hath heard from the Father & hath learned, cometh to Me,” and (Psalm 38:4): “In my meditation a fire shall flame forth.” Thus Augustine tellingly says (De Trin. IV, xx, 28): “The Son is sent, whenever He is known and perceived by anyone.” Now perception implies a certain experimental knowledge; and this is properly called wisdom (sapientia), as it were a sweet knowledge (sapida scientia)…” Part of the point here is that knowledge of theology, and even Faith, are possible even when we are in a state of mortal sin, and hence unlike God. But Wisdom (like the other gifts) is inseparable from Charity, since it is the kind of “being on God’s wavelength” that is only possible for friends of God. Regarding aspect (2) of the life of grace: Aquinas refers back to 1a, 8, 1 and 3, where he recognizes that God is in all things as their Cause, and mentions that there is another, very different, way in which God can be present in rational creatures. In 1a 43 he enlarges on how the invisible missions involve this new kind of presence: the rational creature is ‘enlarged’ by gratia gratum faciens (‘sanctifying grace’) so that the Divine Persons are present as the known in the knower & the beloved in the lover. Note the reciprocity between us and God!!, which will be called amicitia in 2a 2ae 23! – which also carries notes of equality, for we are lifted above the natural level to be “partakers of the Divine Nature” (II Peter 1:4)! The Persons are present as known and loved, possessed and enjoyed!!! The Father gives Himself, but is not sent because there is no one to send Him. All Three indwell (cf. John 14) – that is, in the life of grace we already possess the Divine Persons personally, by love. Thomas agrees with Augustine that the saints of the Old Testament received the Divine Persons by grace. John 7:39 refers to the visible mission of Pentecost and does not imply the Spirit was not present before Jesus’ Passion. The missions are renewed when we advance in grace, or perform some special act of charity, or exercise some special gift. There is a special mission to one who enters heaven [i.e. faith is replaced by Sight, hope by possession, and Wisdom and Charity grow]. Between entering heaven, and the Final Judgment, there are further missions as further mysteries are revealed to the Saints. In the eternal life of God, the Spirit proceeds as Love through the Son. Hence it is fitting (i.e. is beautiful) that the Son be sent visibly, as the Author of sanctification, i.e. he becomes incarnate as the One who will give us the Spirit. The Spirit is also sent visibly, but in a different way: His presence is manifested by dove, wind and fire, revealing him as the Gift that sanctifies – his invisible mission is the real one. This goes with what Thomas says in Tertia Pars Question 3, articles 4, 5 & 8, where we find that any Divine Person could in principle become incarnate (Rahner doesn’t like this, but Thomas is more reluctant than Rahner (or Scotus) to tell God what He can and can’t do), but it is especially fitting that the Word became flesh. [On which see Joseph Wawrykow, “Wisdom in the Christology of Thomas Aquinas,” in: Emery and Wawrykow (eds.) Christ among the Medieval Dominicans (Notre Dame, 1998) pp. 175-196. Presumably, if the Father or the Spirit had become incarnate, the “shape” and details of the work of salvation would have been different.] In short, Prima Pars 43 connects the Holy Trinity to Salvation History and to the life of grace. The diagram on the next page indicates both the temporal and the invisible missions: ● In the eternal life of God, the Father begets his Son who is his Word and Perfect Image; ● That eternal “coming from” is “projected into history” when the Word is sent to take flesh, so as to reveal and enact the Father’s mercy, especially in his Sacrifice; ● That eternal “coming from” is “extended into us” when the Word is sent to abide within us, so as to “form” us in Wisdom; ● In the eternal life of God, the Father breathes forth his Spirit who is Love and Gift; he does this with and through his Son; ● That eternal “coming from” is “projected into history” when, through the Word become flesh, and especially through his Sacrifice, the Holy Spirit is given into the world, visibly signified in the Pentecost event; ● That eternal “coming from” is “extended into us” when the Spirit is sent to abide within us, so as to “form” us in Charity. The following points are not shown in the diagram so as not to overload it: ● By Wisdom (and by Faith if brought alive by Love) and by Charity, we begin-to-know, and we love, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, so that they abide in us as known, loved, possessed and enjoyed. ● The Trinitarian “Economy” of Salvation is necessarily more complex than God the Holy Trinity who is supremely One. Hence the missions of the Son and of the Spirit are “intertwined” – see Catechism of the Catholic Church 687-689. The Son is conceived in the Holy Spirit’s power so that, as man, he receives the Spirit, even though, as God, he only gives the Spirit. In the Spirit’s power, he pursued his ministry, so that, as man, the Son was sent by the Spirit. This was symbolized by the dove resting upon him at his Baptism. This still reflects the eternal Trinity, in the sense that Jesus, as man, was filled with the Holy Spirit so that “from his fulness have we all received”. For in the eternal Trinity the Spirit proceeds through the Son. ● Likewise, in the life of grace, the Holy Spirit who overshadowed Mary, overshadows us so that Christ might be formed in us/we might be formed into Christ. Hence Wisdom is a Gift of the Holy Spirit, and is caused by Charity as well as causing Charity. This matches real psychology: if we love a friend, husband or wife, we attend to her/him and grow to be on her/his wavelength; the more we know someone we love, the more we value her/him. Likewise, love of the Divine Persons draws us to know them better; knowledge of God erupts into greater love of God.

MATTHIAS JOSEPH SCHEEBEN’S “TAKE” ON ST THOMAS’ TEACHING IN PRIMA PARS 43. This most creative of the 19th- and 20th-Century Neo-Scholastics published The Mysteries of Christianity in 1865. Only in the 1941 German edition, soon translated by Cyril Vollert and published by Herder (St. Louis & London) in 1947, were the emendations incorporated on which Scheeben worked from 1887 to his death in July 1888. The book has relatively recently been reprinted. Chapters II-VII, with two appendices, cover the Mystery of the Most Holy Trinity; Chapter VII with the two appendices covers the Missions. Scheeben speaks of the revelation of the Trinity in the events of 2,000 years ago – the visible missions – and in the life of grace. I think he would agree that the life of grace is not a clear revelation of the Trinity unless we understand, by faith based on public revelation, what is going on in the life of grace and interpret our experience as the invisible missions. Regarding the visible missions, Scheeben focuses on the visible mission of the Son, the Incarnation, because the visible missions of the Spirit involve no hypostatic union. In the Incarnation, the Son’s eternal Procession is “projected” into the world, and in his humanity the Son has the same relationship with the Father and the Spirit as he has in his Divinity. That is, in his humanity he relates to the Father as Father, and is bound in love with the Father by the Holy Spirit. This is explained in the first third or so of the following paragraph: The “objective revelation of the Trinity” is “effected in the supernatural works of the Incarnation and of Grace… We have purposely spoken of two distinct ways in which the Trinitarian relations are made known externally: by prolongation and continuance, and by imitation and reproduction. The first takes place if a divine person goes forth from God in His own personal character, and in His going forth preserves or, so to speak, bears with Him into the outer world the same relationship to the other persons which He had in the interior of the Godhead. This occurred – and can occur in no other way – when one of the divine persons hypostatically united Himself with a created nature and entered the created world by means of this union. The second is the case if God places a creature, a being existing outside of Himself, in a relationship with Himself similar to that in which the divine persons stand to one another, or so endows the creature that the processes which take place in him become a faithful image of the Trinitarian processes in God. We will show later that in such imitation a certain prolongation of the eternal productions and a certain entrance of their products into the creature must be conceived… If… the divine ideal is to be reflected in the soul with its full divine resplendence, the soul must be made like its exemplar in a supernatural manner; the soul, raised above its own nature, must participate in the divine nature and be thus enabled to reproduce in itself the processes proper to the divine nature… Thus illuminated, the soul conceives a word of like rank with the eternal Word, a word in which the divine essence and its eternal Word are mirrored. Then also the soul embraces with its love the God present in it in His essence… and the flame in which it flares up and the sigh which it pours forth are the living, faithful expression of the eternal outpouring of love in God which we have come to know as the Holy Spirit.” (§24).

The remainder of the above paragraph speaks of the invisible missions, in which the Divine Processions are “projected” into us, and we are drawn into a Trinitarian relationship with the Holy Trinity. I suspect “in a relationship with Himself similar to that in which the divine persons stand to one another” means that we in Christ become the Father’s adopted children, bound to the Father by love in the Holy Spirit. This is perhaps borne out by what follows in §25, where Scheeben explains that the natural sonship of the divine Word is the exemplar and God’s motive for making us His adoptive children. As proceeding by way of gift, the communication of the divine nature to us has its exemplar and basis in the procession of the Holy Spirit. In Thomist vein, Scheeben says we are children of all the divine persons, since all communicate their nature to us. But we can speak of the Son being born again in us. The remainder of the above paragraph (“so endows the creature that the processes which take place in him become a faithful image of the Trinitarian processes in God” and its unpacking) reprise what Thomas says more tentatively in Prima Pars 93. The image rises towards its perfection by imitating the Divine Trinity insofar as we “conceive an interior word about God” & so burst forth in an act of love towards God. [Perhaps we can suggest that the “deploying itself” of sanctifying grace in which it unfolds into Charity and Wisdom is an imitation of the Holy Trinity.] Scheeben goes on to explore the Invisible Missions in more detail, and points out that these missions, which are intensely real, are not merely appropriated (i.e. unlike created works in general, they are not merely attributed to one or other Divine Person because they resemble that Person; in the life of grace, we really do receive Father, Son and Spirit personally – though inseparably – precisely as Father, Son and Spirit). Scheeben is drawing on Thomas’ concept of Wisdom as a participation precisely in the Son, and of Charity as a participation precisely in the Spirit. The indwelling of the divine Persons according to sanctifying grace is an indwelling of Them. Scheeben draws on the Pauline concept of sphragis or seal: Only where the power and activity of the divine persons are manifested in a particularly sublime manner, in an effect by which the specific divine excellence of a person is communicated to the creature, and in the communication of which the processions of this person is reproduced in the creature according to His specifically divine character; where consequently this person appears as a seal which, stamped upon the creature, impresses in him the divine and hypostatic character of the person – can we say in the full and proper sense of the word that the person Himself, and not merely some gift derived from him, is lodged in the creature, is given to the creature, manifests Himself and is present to the creature. Then we can truly say that the divine person enters into the creature, not by some indeterminate effusion of His power, but by an outpouring that remains in its original character and, so to speak, in the same channel – an outpouring of the flood in which that person’s eternal procession is accomplished. Then, in a word, the divine Person Himself is sent into the creature. All this takes place in sanctifying grace, and in it alone. (§28). Unpacking this further, Scheeben enlarges on Thomas’ account of our participation in the Word and the Spirit to explore what he calls the first kind of real mission, in which the image of God that we are receives the “divine productions” so as to imitate them and be united to them: In the outpouring of supernatural, filial, divine love, of caritas into our hearts, the interior outpouring of the love between the Father & the Son that is consummated in the Holy Spirit is continued because it is reproduced. So we can say not only that the love is given to us and is poured out upon us, but that the Holy Spirit Himself is given to us and poured out upon us in this love. We should do even better to say that the habit and act of charity, poured forth by the Holy Spirit, come into our heart by the very fact that He Him- self, the torrent of divine love, is given and drawn to our soul. Similarly in the conferring of supernatural divine light and the reflection of the divine nature upon our soul, in the impress of the supernatural likeness of God, the eternal splendour of the Father is irradiated over us, and His consubstantial image, the Son of God, is imprinted in our soul and is reborn in us by an imitation and extension of the eternal production. Thus God’s Son Himself in His divine & hypostatic character is lodged in the creature as the seal of the creature’s likeness to God. By the impress of this seal the creature is made conformable to the Son Him- self, and by fellowship with the Son he receives the dignity and glory of the children of God. (§28).

There is a second kind of real mission, which is inseparable from the first, and which like the first is “as prolongations of the eternal processions and their entrance into the creature.” This second kind of mission is also found in Thomas: the divine Persons are present as possessed by us through knowledge and love, and we begin to enjoy Them even in this life, so that the Spirit’s presence is spoken of in Scripture as a “down- payment”: … the divine persons become present to the rational creature as object of a living, intimate possession and enjoyment… we enjoy God… as an object that is really and truly in us and is our own. We truly grasp Him with our knowledge and embrace Him with our love… the individual persons, too, as distinct from one another and especially so far as one proceeds from another, can give themselves to us for our possession and enjoyment. The proceeding person is presented to us for possession and enjoyment by the producing person, and by that very fact also presents His Author to us for our possession and enjoyment. (§29).

Then there is a further characteristic of the Spirit’s presence as He makes us temples of God; Scheeben helps us see what may be hinted at in John 14, and pointed to by St Paul: In His hypostatic character and by virtue of the same the Holy Spirit is truly the pledge in which and by which we possess and embrace the other persons. No less truly He must, likewise in His hypostatic character, be able to be their depositary in whom & by whom they possess us. Furthermore, as proceeding from the other persons, He must be able to dwell in us as in His own temple … He cannot take possession of this temple without them. Rather He takes possession for them… the communication or society (koinwnia) of the Holy Spirit of which the Apostle speaks… is not only a fellowship with the Holy Spirit Himself, but a fellowship of the creature with the divine persons through Him and based on His procession from them and His entrance into the creature, a fellowship in which the Holy Spirit unites every individual, and also all sanctified creatures as a body, to the divine persons, and therefore also among themselves... (§30).

This seems to me an authentic development, which is faithful to the inseparable working of the Divine Persons, which is a doctrinal datum, but makes clearer (though it remains a bit mysterious) that we can speak of a special indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Finally, in this Part of his work, Scheeben accords a certain extra dignity to the second kind of invisible mission, which anticipates Rahner, and (I think) makes explicit Thomas’ insight that the self-communication of the Divine Persons is the basic reality – as I like to put it, the answer to “life, the universe and everything”: Of the two kinds of real, interior mission, the second kind is even more a mission than the first, since in the first kind we are still dealing with effects coming from God – effects very closely connected with the intra- divine processions – but in the second kind the divine Persons dwell within us and are present Themselves to us as what They are by Their eternal processions (§31). (6) Brief notes on Creation Prima Pars 44: anything that has any kind of being must be held in being by God; including “prime matter”; God is the Efficient Cause* of all things (appropriate this to the Father); Exemplar Cause* of all things (appropriate this to the Word); and their Final Cause* (appropriate this to the Spirit). Prima Pars 45: creation is to make something, not out of anything else; by creating, God does not make a difference to things, but “all the difference”; so being created is a relationship of dependence, which doesn’t “add to God”; and it’s whole things that are specially caused to be; no creature can have even an instrumental role in the creation of other things; natural causes work at a quite different level from God; and while the whole Trinity creates, things bear vestigia Trinitatis. Creation is complex and varied, so that the Divine Goodness and Beauty can be reflected and refracted in many ways, since no creature can reflect them perfectly. Creatures exist: for their own good; for the good of the whole cosmos; for the good of human beings (e.g. as our home or our helpers); for God’s glory. * A NOTE ON THOMISTIC CAUSALITY (relevant to 1a 44 and to much else, including how Christ saves us, and the Sacraments) To explain a statue of, say, Queen Victoria you must mention four causes: (1) the material cause is the stuff the statue is made of. (2) the formal cause is the shape that makes it a statue of Queen Victoria rather than of Disraeli. (2a) You can also mention the exemplar: the original on which the statue is patterned – or, in the case of some artists, the fantasy in his/her psyche! (3) the efficient cause is the maker. [Note: “efficient” does not mean “competent”, it means “the thing that effects”.] This can be the agent; but might include the instruments used by the agent – in this case, the sculptor & her tools. (4) the final cause is the purpose that drew the process – in this case, payment for the statue, or the fame desired by the sculptor. St. Thomas (following the Greek Father St. John of Damascus) saw Jesus’ humanity, and all that He did and suffered, as the most fitting instrumental efficient cause of our salvation – of course, Jesus’ humanity was an animate, willing, responsible “instrument”. Jesus’ humanity, and above all His Passion, Death, Resurrection and Ascension, was the Channel into this world of the divine power to save, grace and convert us. St. Thomas applies this to the Sacraments: if I write on the white-board with a marker pen, then I am the agent, my hand is a “conjoint instrument”, and the pen a “disjoint instrument”. Jesus’ humanity is like the conjoint instrument, the Sacraments are disjoint instruments. They channel to us in a fitting way the divine grace that flows into the world through Christ’s Passion etc. (7) The Thomistic view of the human psyche Questions 75-92 deal with human nature, especially the soul (“psyche” or “form of life”) and its powers (the “abilities” that emerge from our form of life), and the creation of the first man and woman. 94-102 deal with the unfallen state, i.e. what Adam and Eve were like, and what humanity would have been like had they not sinned. 103-119 cover God’s “governance” of things, including a fair bit on the interactions among creatures. All this would be several big topics in themselves. But note: The complexity of the human psyche – which does not at all make it incoherent. A diagram of the powers or faculties is sent as a separate pdf file. Note how much we share with the animals. For something more on this, see the November 2019 issue of New Blackfriars, especially the papers by me, Candace Vogler, John Finley and (regarding the animal component of the psyche) Daniel De Haan. A paper by me & Peter Hunter, ‘Why Aquinas Would Agree That Human Economic Behaviour Is Largely Predictable’ explores some aspects of St Thomas’ view of the human psyche and its dignity and vulnerability. It is in: P. Z. Rona and László Zsolnai (eds.), Agency and Causal Explanation in Economics. Springer Nature, 2020. 93-113. Downloadable at https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-030-26114-6 . (8) The Human Image of the Holy Trinity Made for Communion with the Holy Trinity: Prima Pars 93 1a 93 says it is on the goal of the production of the human being, insofar as it is said to be made in the image and likeness of God. Only rational creatures can be said to be images of God; His vestigia are found in all creatures. So, by nature, an angel is more in God’s image than a human being; but we are in God’s image in a wider range of ways. The image is on a kind of pilgrimage, from one degree of glory to another. That is, implicitly, the creation of the human being is not itself the goal, but is in view of the goal inscribed into us at creation; the real goal is to enter into active communion with the triune God. 1a, 93, 4 says: Since man is said to be the image of God by reason of his intellectual nature, he is the most perfectly like God according to that in which he can best imitate God in his intellectual nature. Now the intellectual nature imitates God chiefly in this, that God understands and loves Himself. Wherefore we see that the image of God is in man in three ways. First, inasmuch as man possesses a natural aptitude for understanding and loving God; and this aptitude consists in the very nature of the mind, which is common to all men. Secondly, inasmuch as man actually and habitually knows and loves God, though imperfectly; and this image consists in the conformity of grace. Thirdly, inasmuch as man knows and loves God perfectly; and this image consists in the likeness of glory. Wherefore on the words, “The light of Thy countenance, O Lord, is signed upon us” (Psalm 4:7), the gloss distinguishes a threefold image of “creation,” of “re-creation,” and of “likeness.” The first is found in all men, the second only in the just, the third only in the blessed. So we are made in the image of the Holy Trinity, for communion with the Holy Trinity – for the image comes to perfection in communion with its Exemplar. The journey involves three basic stages: ● Being in God’s image by nature, as apt for growing as God’s image (we would have had to grow even had there been no sin, but the journey now involves the overcoming of sin); ● Communion with God by grace: we already possess God by Charity, and we begin to know him by faith, insight and Wisdom; ● Perfection when we know God as he is, and Charity accordingly grows stronger. As Sullivan suggests in The Image of God: The Doctrine of St. Augustine & Its Influence (Dubuque: The Priory Press, 1963), the way in which the mind can know and love itself provides the best “model” to gain us some little purchase on the Holy Trinity. But to say we are in the image of the Trinity is not to focus on what we can learn from ourselves about the Trinity (which is nigh-on impossible without revelation); it is to focus on what we learn from the (revealed) Trinity about ourselves – who we are made by, with what inbuilt Trinita- rian structure and dynamic we are made, and who we are made for. This is true of Augustine, & of Thomas. For both, we are in the image of the Trinity insofar as the mind can actively know and love God. The following articles fill in the details. We are in the image of the Trinity, not just the Divine Nature (a. 5). We are really only in the image of God according to our mind (which includes will as well as intellect), not according to our bodily nature or sexual differentiation (a. 6). Although we are in the image according to our mental powers, and even more according to the virtues that “shape” them, we are most in the image according to our mental acts (a. 7), in particular as we “act on God” (!! – note the implicit reciprocity of friendship) by knowing and loving the Most Holy Trinity (a. 8). … if the image of the Divine Trinity is to be found in the soul, we must look for it where the soul approaches the nearest to a representation of the species of the Divine Persons. Now the Divine Persons are distinct from each other by reason of the procession of the Word from the Speaker, and the procession of Love connecting Both. But in our soul word “cannot exist without actual thought,” as Augustine says (De Trin. xiv, 7). Therefore, first & chiefly, the image of the Trinity is to be found in the acts of the soul, that is, inasmuch as from the knowledge which we possess, by actual thought we form an internal word; and thence break forth into love. (1a, 93, 7). St Thomas rejects Peter Lombard’s idea (which is something of a misreading of Augustine) that memoria, intellegentia and voluntas are three vires naturales animae (“natural powers of soul”; 93, 7, objection 3 and ad 3). For at the spiritual level, to remember something simply is to know it. I remember learning about endoplasmic reticulum in my imagination, where I retain a memory of the Babbage Lecture Theatre in Cam- bridge. But to say “I remember what endoplasmic reticulum is” is simply to say “I possess the concept in my intellect.” So there are two spiritual faculties, intellect and will, not three; Thomas sees their “movements” as reflecting the two Divine Processions. However, in the ad 3, Thomas preserves Augustine’s triad of memoria, intelligentia and voluntas or amor in a way that is faithful to the mature Augustine of the final Books of De Trinitate, by thinking of memoria as the habitual retention of knowledge and love (sic) from which actual knowledge and love flow. On the contrary, Augustine says (De Trin. xiv, 12): “The image of God exists in the mind, not because it has a remembrance of itself, loves itself, and understands itself; but because it can also remember, understand, and love God by Whom it was made.” Much less, therefore, is the image of God in the soul, in respect of other objects. I answer that, As above explained (art. 2 & 7), image means a likeness which in some degree, however small, attains to a representation of the species. Wherefore we need to seek in the image of the Divine Trinity in the soul some kind of representation of species of the Divine Persons, so far as this is possible to a creature. Now the Divine Persons, as above stated (articles 6 & 7), are distinguished from each other according to the procession of the word from the speaker, & the procession of love from both. Moreover the Word of God is born of God by the knowledge of Himself; & Love proceeds from God according as He loves Himself. But it is clear that diversity of objects diversifies the species of word and love; for in the human mind the species of a stone is specifically different from that of a horse, likewise the love regarding each of them is specifically different. Hence we refer the Divine image in man to the verbal concept born of the knowledge of God [verbum conceptum de Dei notitia], and to the love derived therefrom. Thus the image of God is found in the soul according as the soul turns to God, or possesses a nature that enables it to turn to God. Now the mind may turn towards an object in two ways: directly and immediately, or indirectly and mediately; as, for instance, when anyone sees a man reflected in a looking-glass he may be said to be turned towards that man. So Augustine says (De Trin. xiv, 8), the “the mind remembers itself, understands itself & loves itself. If we perceive this, we perceive a trinity, not, indeed, God, but, nevertheless, rightly called the image of God.” But this is due to the fact, not that the mind reflects on itself absolutely, but that thereby it can furthermore turn to God, as appears from the authority quoted above (see On the contrary). (93, 8) This seems to apply to the present life, since the Beatific Vision transcends any conceptualizing of God: we will then know God by his direct self-gift to the intellect, not by a “verbal concept.” We cannot really grasp or articulate what it will be for the image to come to its perfection.

In conclusion: the Prima Pars is not just a set of discrete treatises on God as One, God as Trinity, creation, Angels, the cosmos, human beings, and God’s guidance. It is a progressive and coherent unfolding of a theological vision, in which we find that the essentially Triune God “unfolds” to us in friendship, crafting – as a gift, not as a due – creatures to whom the Divine Persons can give themselves to be known and loved, possessed and enjoyed. For the human creature, the material cosmos is a home in which we can journey to this Bliss in a way that suits our nature, and always were meant to journey, whether or not sin had entered. So we are readied for studying how we make this journey (as things stand, from sin to glory) in the grace and with the guidance of the Holy Spirit (Secunda Pars) and in Christ who is the Way (Tertia Pars).