The Father as “Principle” in the Trinity
The person of the Father is the unoriginate principle of the other divine persons.
Since a principle is that from which something else in some way proceeds, and the other two persons proceed from the Father, the Father then is indeed principle in the Trinity.
Divine Paternity & Filiation
Father is a personal name in God.
- The reason for this is that it is first spoken with reference to the Father in his eternal relation to the Son, in whom, in turn, the plenitude of filiation is expressed in virtue of his generation, as God from God.
- The Father is eternally Father, and would be so even if he had never created any dependent finite reality, simply in virtue of the mystery of the intra-Trinitarian processions.
- The Father’s temporal effects of creation and filial adoption by grace are expressions, in finite form, of the infinite plenitude of perfection he eternally possesses and expresses in the generation of the Son and in the spiration of the Spirit.
It is precisely for this reason that God’s paternity is capable of a diverse range of analogical applications.
- Just as the Father begets the Son from all eternity in his own likeness, communicating to him all that he is as God, so too the Father, through the Word, his Son, conceives the creation by similitude to the Son, in a participated likeness.
- Consequently, all creatures participate in the mystery of Sonship to varying degrees. Creatures produced by God the Father always contain a likeness to the Son, no matter how imperfect and remote this likeness may be in any individual case. We might say that all things that come forth from the Father remain relative to the first person of the Trinity. Their coming to be, their histories, their lives in grace, are all in some way expressive of his divine paternity.
The Innascibility of the Father
For St. Thomas, then, in considered contradistinction to St. Bonaventure, this trait of the Father as innascible is denoted in a fashion that is purely negative.
God the Father is named by us as “innascible” precisely as one who does not proceed from another. Consequently he is the unique source who is not “from another” within the Trinitarian life. The Father cannot be positively constituted as Father independently of the act of generation and spiration.
This way of thinking safeguards the “principality” of the Father, who is first and the origin of all else (the idea Bonaventure especially wanted to emphasize), but it also makes clear the absolutely relative identity of the Father, with respect to the Son and the Spirit. God the Father is absolutely first, but he is first only as the Father of the Son and the spirator of the Holy Spirit.
From the Father to the Father
And yet the proceeding persons are also always turned “toward” the Father, are “for” him, and in general are oriented to him as their term.
In the perfect life of the Trinity, then, all things come from the Father, but they also in a certain sense return to him, in virtue of the interpersonal communion of the three persons.
Significantly, then, this movement of procession and return—and thus, the exitus and reditus schema common in medieval theology—also finds an echo in creatures.
2 consequences:
- The first is that all created things that proceed forth from God the Father proceed forth always in his Word and Spirit, to whom he is utterly relative… The Trinity is therefore omnipresent to all that comes forth from the Father even as or just because the Father is the eternal primary origin of all things.
- Second, just as all things return to the Father, so the Son and the Spirit must be present to all things insofar as they are able to return to the Father, in the order of nature or of grace; and just insofar as things do return to God as Father, they will resemble in various ways the Son and the Spirit. Accordingly, the Son comes into the world to send the Spirit of his Father upon the creation, and the creation is perfected when all things participate in the life of the Spirit.
Dissimilitude to Human Persons
Having noted the previous dissimilitudes, we can also ask whether there is a proper analogy in human paternity to the paternity of the Father? Here we should note four considerations.
First, the divine nature is immaterial, simple, and incomprehensible. Consequently, as Gregory of Nazianzus noted against Eunomius, we cannot say philosophically that God is a biological father or mother, and indeed we must say that the divine nature transcends all designations of biological paternity or maternity precisely insofar as it is immaterial and transcendent.
Second, the revelation of the God of Israel as Creator entails the use of images of paternity and maternity, but the biblical revelation given to the prophets of Israel does not espouse the view that the Creator is a father per se. Instead, it underscores the transcendence of God vis-a-vis any human anthropological conception of the divine as a progenitor.
Third, then, the specifically Christian revelation of God as Father, communicated by Christ, is first and foremost a revelation about the inner life of God, and by extension a revelation of God’s creation of all things in his Word and Spirit, and of his invitation to communion in Trinitarian life. We call God “Father” insofar as God is the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, who sends the Spirit of filial adoption upon the world.
2 errors: (1) The first is that of an all-too-human, univocal conception of the Trinity that would understand the persons in God after the model of a biological family; (2) The second is an opposite position that claims that all paternal language for God is patriarchal and projective.
Finally, we can acknowledge that human parenthood does contains some likenesses to divine generation, ones that allow us to speak of similitudes by proper analogy even when speaking of the biological generation of persons.
- The first such likeness comes from an analogy of substantial generation in a common nature. Two human parents can conceive and beget a new human being who is identical with them in nature. They transmit to the child subsistent life in the body (so that the generation is substantial in kind), even if they do so principally in virtue of the matter of the body, rather than the spiritual soul, which is created immediately by God. When compared with Trinitarian generation, this likeness is very imperfect, since human generation is material, not immaterial, and the person who is begotten is substantially distinct from, and not identical with, the parents. Consequently, the substantial generation that exists among human persons entails material potentiality, not pure actuality.
- Second, we can say that in human parenthood, one person is the principle of another in the order of generation, and that one person proceeds from another. This analogy is based on relations of origin. If we place it alongside the first, we can say that human persons are principles of generation to one another, by the transmission of a common nature, one that is substantial in kind.
- Third, human persons also can act in knowledge and love, both toward one another in view of the generation of a child, and toward the children they beget. Therefore, like God the Father, they can be principles of life based on spiritual knowledge and love. Unlike God the Father, however, human parents transmit personal life freely rather than by essence, and their acts of knowledge and love are not substantial but utterly accidental. Their personal love can be absent, therefore, from either the sexual act of conceiving or the decision to love the child they conceive. What we can conclude from these comparisons is that human parents are most like God by similitude in two ways, first as principles of generation and second in the teleological term of the generation of children. When parents have begotten a being who is one in nature with them and they actively know and love one another and the child they have begotten, they are most like the uncreated communion of Trinitarian persons.
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