Summary of Chapter 23: Trinitarian Relations and Notional Names of Persons (from White’s book, The Trinity)

Aquinas’ relational analogy

Via causalitatis: The relational analogy for the Trinity is based first on a genuine likeness to Trinitarian persons that is found in relations between beings, as we experience them in creatures under two aspects: that of (1) being toward another;
Via negationis: However, we must make an apophatic qualification and deny in God’s relations a second aspect of created relations, (2) that of being rooted in a substance and prior property.
Via eminentiae: Our acknowledgment of the transcendent alterity of the relations in God points us, then, toward the absolute novelty and perfection of the Trinitarian relations. The persons in God are wholly relative in all that they are. They are subsistent relations who communicate to one another or receive from one another the plenitude of the divine life.

Aquinas follows Albert the Great, who came up with the notion of subsistent relations, while commenting upon Dionysius the Areopagite, to speak about the relations of the Trinity. It is significant that the Dominican school crafted an analogical way of thinking about divine relations in God while paying attention to the apophatic and superlative dimensions of Dionysian thought.

“Mysteriously, then, we must say that God simply is the relational life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The relations are identical with the essence, and yet the term “relation” draws out the added note of a being-toward-another, which is not expressed by the word “essence.” Understood in this sense, the notion of relation in God contains all that is proper to the divine persons: they are each relational, and they each contain in themselves the plenitude of the godhead” (433-4).

(1) Relations of origin:

Since each divine person contains in themselves the plenitude of the godhead, what differentiate the persons, then, are precisely their relations of origin with respect to one another.
Since the Son proceeds eternally from the Father and the Spirit eternally proceeds from the Father and the Son, there is a real relation, an eternal relativity, of the Father to the Son, and of the Son to the Father, and likewise of the Holy Spirit to the Father and Son.

(2) Substantial relations:

God simply is this relationality, since there are no accidental properties in God. .
God is wholly other than us in his relationality but not for that reason unintelligible. In his eminent and hidden perfection, God is especially and incomprehensibly relational and personal.
Relations & essence are identical in God: The relations are identical with the essence, and yet the term “relation” draws out the added note of a being- toward-another, which is not expressed by the word “essence” (434).
Because the divine essence is wholly in each person, there is nothing in one person that is not in the other, except the relational mode of being, in virtue of which a person or persons communicate the divine life to another or derive it from another.
The Father is in real relation to the Son as the principle of the Son. In virtue of his paternity, he is eternally generating the Son, through the act of his own understanding, as his begotten Word.
The Son is in real relation to the Father (and so eternally relative to the Father) because he is eternally generated by the Father. His is the real relation of filiation.
The Father and the Son are in real relation to the Holy Spirit as the principle of the Spirit through spiration.
Likewise, the Spirit is eternally relative to the Father and the Son, as one really proceeding from the Father and the Son as the mutual spiration of love they share between them.

Essential Terms and Notional Terms for God:

From this foundation in relations of origin, medieval theology then developed a distinction between essential terms for God and notional terms that we can use to name God.

Essential terms for God are the “divine names” that we considered in part 2 of this book, terms like simplicity, perfection, goodness, and so on. These pertain to the divine essence and, as such, are attributed to all three persons: The Father is perfect, good, and wise, the Son likewise is perfect, good, and wise, as is the Holy Spirit.
Notional terms for God, by way of contrast, pertain to the persons uniquely in their respective distinctness, and this according to the relations of origin. 5 notions: As the Father is from no one, so he is known by the notion of (1) innascibility or unbegottenness, but also (2) paternity, insofar as he is Father to the Son, and (3) common spiration, insofar as, together with the Son, he spirates the Spirit. Likewise, the Son is known by the notions of both (4) filiation and common spiration, and the Spirit by (5) procession.

Essential Acts and Notional Acts for God:

Essential acts are acts that are common to all three persons, which they perform in virtue of their common nature. All of God’s actions ad extra fall into this category, since they are acts of the Trinity, manifest, for example, by God’s actual communication of being to the created world, or his communication of grace to human beings (even if we might appropriate one action to one of the persons).
Notional acts, however, pertain to the immanent essential activity of God, his interior spiritual operations insofar as they terminate in the production of the divine persons.

Conclusion: The Emergence of Two Convergent Relational Analogies

Psychological analogy: On the one side, Aquinas preserves from Augustine a robust attentiveness to the use of the psychological analogy, which inevitably considers relations in the Trinity in a qualifiedly unipersonal way, so as to depict the immaterial processions of the Word and Spirit by analogy to processions of intellectual and voluntary life in one human person. The aim of this analogy is, first, to underscore the substantial unity of the Trinitarian persons, who are one in being and nature in a way more analogously proximate to one human person than to three human persons, and second, to underscore the immateriality of the processions, as distinct from generative material begetting, as we see in the world of animals and human beings.
Relational analogy: On the other side, Aquinas’s use of the relation analogy allows him to preserve a comparison of the Trinity to three distinct human persons in a relation of communion, and it has the advantage of underscoring the common nature of each divine person, who is truly God, just as each human person truly has a human nature. It also makes clear that we attribute natural acts of divine knowledge and love to each person and, in fact, to each person in relation to one another, as each knows and loves the others, in virtue of his essence as God.

Problems with only choosing 1 analogy:

Problem with only using psychology analogy: We will fail to grasp adequately that the three persons are each distinct hypostatically and are each God. Taken to extremes, the danger that arises is akin to that of Joachim in some ways. The natural acts of generation and spiration will be taken as differentiations pertaining to the nature of God, so that God is understood as an evolutive natural process or history of self-differentiation. If this is understood in impersonalistic terms, the model projects us toward modalism.
Problem with only using relational analogy: We fail to grasp adequately that the three persons are one in being and essence, and that the eternal processions in God are immaterial and can be understood properly only by resemblance to the immaterial life of knowledge and love in human beings. Taken to extremes, the danger that arises from this model is akin to that of Gilbert, since relations will appear as something extrinsic to the three persons, or ontologically subsequent to their subsistence. If this model is hardened in the direction of monotheism it simply leads to a denial of distinct persons in God, while if it is hardened while still holding to the reality of three distinct persons, it tends toward tri-theism, or towards a form of social Trinitarianism that struggles unsuccessfully to avoid depicting God as three distinct entities.

Benefits of using both analogies together:

They are convergent and mutually corrective.

Aquinas’s correlation of these two analogical modes of thinking about God has inevitable advantages because he shows us how the two are convergent and mutually corrective. He can do so in large part because of his theory of relations. This is clear first in his treatment of the eternal processions in God, which pertains to his use of the first analogy from the psychology of unipersonal acts of knowledge and love. Because the relations in God are subsistent, the immaterial generation of the Son as Word (by which he is related to the Father) and the spiration of the Spirit (by which he is related to the Father and the Son) must entail the plenary communication of divine nature to the Son and Spirit respectively. This is the case because the relational action and passion between the persons in God must pertain to all that God is substantially. Consequently, the first analogy from psychological actions is qualified by a substantial account of personal distinction: each of the persons contains in himself all that is in God, and is truly the one God. This allows Aquinas to avoid the modalist problem that would evacuate the distinct persons of their personhood.

Meanwhile, Aquinas’s account of relation also affects his use of the second analogy, the idea of the persons as three distinct subjects. In human beings relations are accidents and especially ontologically fragile ones, at that. Human beings are meant to become truly related to others by knowledge and by love, but they can fail to do so. Relationality can appear to some, then, as irrelevant to the nature of human persons, each of whom possesses a subsistent autonomy. Certain kinds of relationality perfect human nature but are not identical with it essentially. By casting relation in God in terms of subsistence, then, Aquinas radically qualifies any likeness in the Trinity to three human persons. The Trinitarian persons are each truly personal and are each truly God, but they are also each wholly relational, characterized entirely in all that they are by relations of communication of divine life. This relational mystery of communion in God is best understood by use of the analogy from psychological operations of knowledge and love. Just as the use of relation sends us from the psychological analogy to the interpersonal analogy (by way of the consideration of subsistent relation: the communication of the whole of the godhead), the use of relation also sends us from the interpersonal analogy back to the psychological analogy (by way of consideration of subsistent relation: each person is wholly relational in all he is).

If this theory adequately denotes something given to us to know by divine revelation and is non-contradictory (which I take it is the case), then Aquinas has successfully articulated a proper analogy for relational personhood in God that is non- metaphorical.

The equilibrium of Aquinas’s position is admirable and is of perennial significance for Christian theology in its ongoing effort to receive rightly the patristic heritage of both East and West, in view of its theoretical consideration of the mystery of the Trinitarian relations. 441