A MULTIDIMENSIONAL DISCLOSURE: ASPECTS OF AQUINAS’S THEOLOGICAL INTENTIONALITY
Anthony J. Kelly, C.Ss.R.
Originally published in The Thomist 67 (2003): 335-74
TO GIVE SERIOUS ATTENTION to Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae is to be continually amazed at the extent of the harmonies and deep resonances that echo through its different parts. [1] It works like a hologram, manifesting now this, now that, now some other dimension. In this essay, I wish to pay attention to the theological intentionality of St. Thomas’s approach, in a way that might enrich our reading, and to continue the discussion that has been taking place more recently in the pages of this journal. It will involve asking what kind of consciousness Aquinas brings to his theological investigation, attending less to the metaphysical objectification of faculties, their objects, and the realities affirmed, and more to the experience in which all this occurs. It will mean a general kind of theological ‘intentionality analysis’ of Thomas’s approach’ while, at the same time, deferring to specialists in the area of theological phenomenology for a fuller context. [2]
For practical purposes, I propose to concentrate on that ‘new presentational whole’ that Brian Shanley [3] has persuasively described in Aquinas’s treatment of the mystery of God, with particular, but not exclusive, reference to the Summa Theologiae. The complex unfolding of its theology admittedly reduces most of us today, however provecti in some respects, to the status of incipientes, ‘beginners’ in the sense that the postmodern context is always one of beginning again. No matter how generally misunderstood or unnaturally schematized it often is, Thomas’s approach to God remains a classic resource to be continually retrieved in the history of theological reflection. [4]
To suggest something of the holographic, multidimensional disclosure of the divine mystery, I will present this reflection in four interrelated parts. The first deals more generally with the kind of intentionality that pervades the theological enterprise. The second treats of the horizon in which it unfolds. The third deals with the field of communicative intentionality in which theology explores the God-world relationship. The fourth returns to the Trinitarian narrative that underpins the whole.
I. Theological Intentionality
In this section, I will attempt to sketch five key aspects of Aquinas’s theological intentionality. While this is entirely focused on the divine salvific subject, it unfolds with a high sense of the unique sapiential character of theological knowing. Yet there is a mood of discretion and humility, a kind of ‘deconstructive’ attitude, which rejects any absolutist claims in regard to what it seeks to know, and with regard to the theological standpoint itself.
A) Aquinas’s Intention
In the prologue to the Prima Pars, Thomas accepts his role as ‘a teacher of catholic truth’ (catholicae veritatis doctor). The catholic span of the that truth will include, at different junctures of theological exposition, philosophical, psychological, doctrinal, moral, spiritual, legal, political, sacramental, and eschatological dimensions of the whole. The scope of his concern is evidently intent on disclosing the ‘holic’ in the ‘cat-holic.’ Yet he cannot write everything all at once, and so he proceeds in such a way as to guide his much admired ‘beginners’ along a fruitful path at the outset of their career as preachers and theologians. [5] Just as there are stages and degrees in charity distinguished through different types of studium (STh II-II, q. 24, a. 9), so also are there different levels of growth in the theological wisdom Thomas seeks to inculcate. For this reason, the ordo disciplinae is designed to avoid the confusions inevitable in a thicket of textual commentary and controversy’or, for that matter, occasioned by those unnatural and disjointed divisions often introduced in various efforts to schematize the exposition of the Summa. Aquinas’s steady intention is to present the universe of Christian existence and experience specifically sub ratione Dei (STh I, q. 1, a. 8), in the light of the self-revealing God. In this regard, he states his reliance on God’s help in addressing the task with brevity and clarity, ‘inasmuch as the matter will allow’ (STh I, prol.). After all, ‘God matters’ are inherently elusive. Because in this life we do not know the divine essence, we must make do with the data of what God has done ‘the ‘God-effect’ in the realms of nature and grace (STh I, q. 1, a. 7, ad 1).
The theologian par excellence is here necessarily treading a fine line, in a way that suggests the holographic quality inherent in his approach to God. The theological standpoint, the horizon of infinite Be-ing, [6] the inner vitality of the Mystery communicating itself to creation and indwelling human con-sciousness as known and loved in our knowing and loving these are all dimensions in the disclosure of what intrinsically exceeds human understanding. As a ‘word about God’ (STh I, q. 1, a. 7, sed contra), theology, like the Word it serves, is itself not ‘any kind of word, but a word breathing love’ (STh I, q. 43, a. 5, ad 2), as it participates in the eternal light of God’s own self-utterance. The light in which theology proceeds is ‘nothing other than a certain participated similitude in uncreated light’ (STh I, q. 84, a. 5), ‘manifesting’ everything that falls under it. [7] Moreover, like all truth, theological truth results from a movement of the Spirit. [8]
B) Dimensions of Saving Knowledge
First, theological discourse is always analogical (STh I, q. 13, a. 5). [9] Without the analogical dimension theology would be at the mercy of its own univocal construction, to end at best in an immobile mythological system. The way of analogy defers to the unobjectifiable excess of Be-ing, the loving source of all that is (STh I, q. 20, a. 2).Second, it operates within a much larger field of disclosure. The divine mystery intends our beatitude. Far from being an object of detached intellectual curiosity, it is our destiny, our last end, whose attraction is felt through the whole of creation, and especially manifested in our human God-ward existence. [10] To suppress this eschatological dimension would be to deprive theology of its basic dynamism and hope as a science of salvation.Third, though our pilgrim path must wait on the ultimate God-light of happiness, and though God is the ‘unknown one to whom we are united,’ there are also ‘many and more excellent effects’ (STh I, q. 12, a. 13, ad 1) that communicate a revelation of Trinitarian life which we are called to participate in and image forth. These effects are data in a special sense, for they are indwelling and transforming dona, actualized in the grace of the divine missions (STh I, q. 43, a. 6). Forgetfulness of the economy of grace and the missions at any stage would bleach Thomas’s approach of its Trinitarian color. [11] For the gift of grace works its own transformation, enabling the recipient to know and love God in a new intimacy. [12] Analogical knowing, therefore, anticipates a God-intended eschatological beatitude and is animated by the gifts inherent in the divine missions. Just as the divine Word, as just mentioned, is ‘not any kind of word, but a word breathing love,’ so the Spirit is not any kind of spirit, but the Love who proceeds from the Father and the Son. [13] A certain holographic intentionality is implied, as the various dimensions of data are considered. God is at once the object of theological inquiry, the source of the data it considers, and the light and the love in which such data are interpreted.In the prologue of the first question (STh I, q. 1), Thomas determines the limits of sacred doctrine (qualis sit et ad quae se extendat). It is characterized by a unique kind of excess. Human learning, typified in philosophy, works within the scope of human reason. But the God of salvation and revelation ‘surpasses the grasp of reason.’ Our intending, be it cognitional or moral, must be ordered to this transcendent destiny, in assenting to the divine truth on which ‘the whole of human salvation . . . which is in God’ depends (STh I, q. 1, a. 1). Theology must recognize this ‘wholeness,’ namely, the totality of the salvation that only God can give, the ‘things of God that have come to us by divine revelation.’ It is a realm of knowledge inaccessible to human reason alone. [14] Though it covers materially many of the questions typical of philosophy, the kind of knowing theology inculcates is generically different from any purely philosophical notion of God (STh I, q. 1, a. 1, ad 2; cf. ScG II, c. 4). It unfolds in a different horizon. [15] It is an exploration conducted within the world on the way to salvation. [16]
Citing the authority of Augustine, Aquinas sees theology as engendering, nourishing, protecting, and strengthening a healthy faith (STh I, q. 1, a. 2, sed contra). Despite its intrinsic limitations, it exhibits a dimension of a distinctive intentionality in that it is not dealing with something altogether absent or unrealized. At the upper limit of its intentionality, as a subalternate science, it draws on the luminous intentionality of both ‘God and the blessed’ of those who are experiencing the fulfillment of faith and love in the beatific vision. To this degree, the intentionality of theology has a dimension of realized eschatology even if its ordered sequences must take their own time. [17] The faith and charity that animate sacra doctrina already participate in the communicative bliss of God’s own self-knowledge and love. [18] Theology thus unfolds in a field of divine-human friendship as charity causes us to participate in the Spirit ‘who is the love of the Father and the Son’ (STh II-II, q. 24, a. 2; cf. II-II, q. 23, a. 1). In this it is the friendly science par excellence.
C) A Way of Wisdom
The intentionality of theology exhibits the character of a higher form of wisdom as it seeks to conform its ‘word about God’ to the Word of God, and the love it breathes (STh I, q. 1, a. 6). Like philosophical wisdom, it reaches toward the creator, in order to judge of all things in the light of the first cause, knowable only through creatures. But there is a difference. Because its specific data are accessible only through faith and revelation, theology is constituted within a manifold field of communication. It is focused on what God reveals of what is known ‘only to him about himself, and communicated to others.’ [19] This kind of intentionality is determined, therefore, not only by the objective data of revelation, but by the divine subjective intentionality communicating itself to the created intentional subject.
In due course, the question will arise: if God is so self-revealing, what is the reality of that self that informs both the mode and the content of divine self-revelation? The answer to this question is anticipated by referring to that even higher type of wisdom, the gift of the Spirit, by which the graced mind judges of the things of God. Through the connaturality of charity theological consciousness ‘not only studies but experiences the divine reality’ (non solum discens sed patiens divina [ibid., ad 3]). It is a receptive openness to the divine giver. Nonetheless, even though theology is ideally affected by the wisdom of experience flowing from the indwelling of God in grace, it still remains an ordered intellectual exploration (ibid.). [20] Though discens et patiens divina in a higher register of wisdom, on its level it is discens et patiens humana, humbly accepting the human limits to our knowledge of God in this life, and yet responding to the data, the ‘given,’ that lie within its scope. On that level, it must be able to defend its own procedures and integrity, even for those who would make no claims to mystical wisdom. [21] The intimacy of affective union with God is never a refuge from the demands of intelligence, even if charity and its experience underpin all such thinking. [22]
There is, therefore, an inevitable complexity in the cognitive intentionality here considered. There are many propositions and concepts (STh I-II, q. 27, a. 2, ad 2). What is evident to God in the simplicity of the one Word (STh II-II, q. 1, a. 2) is necessarily complex in our minds which are embodied in space and time, for what is known is in the knower after the manner in which that knower exists. Our present human condition demands the laborious complexity of concepts, judgments, and doctrines if the simple object of faith is to be respected. Yet this is not to miss seeing the forest because of the trees. For irradiating the complex creativity of the theological mind at work is the God-given intentionality of faith which already attains the divine reality (ibid., ad 2). Consequently, the numberless aspects of faith’s inquiry are to be so ordered as to allow the simplicity of the divine Word to shine through’not to have it obscured by the complexity of the theological process. Although the life of faith is not the vision of the blessed (STh II-II, q. 1, a. 5), hope for that vision and the persuasiones of theological reason keep the mind directed to divine Truth and open to the ultimate evidence, only attainable through God’s ultimate communication (STh II-II, q. 1, a. 5, ad 2). As faith touches on the divine reality and hope elevates and strengthens the will to rely on God in pursuance of its God-given end, charity, for its part, already anticipates its eschato-logical fulfillment in a kind of spiritual union that already savors what is finally to be revealed. In its affective and unitive role, charity, ‘the mother and root of all virtues’ (STh I-II, q. 62, a. 4), is the source of the most intimate wisdom and experience of the divine reality. Love already dwells in the loved object (STh I-II, q. 28, a. 2), and participates in its loving (STh II-II, q. 23, a. 2, ad 1). Such love inspires a search for ways of enlarging our apprehension and appreciation of what that divine lover has revealed. [23]
Theology realizes that its intelligence can never be complete, that it must be patient with its groping conceptions (STh II-II, q. 23, a. 6, ad 1). On the other hand, the will in its affectivity need show no such patience; it reaches toward the divine reality in itself, beyond the clouded and fragmented mode of our human judgments (STh II-II, q. 27, a. 4). As loved, God indwells the consciousness of lover. To the measure that theological intentionality is animated by charity it cannot be content with a superficial or monodimensional understanding of the divine other; rather, it seeks to appreciate its every aspect, and to penetrate it more deeply just as the Holy Spirit searches the depths of God (STh I-II, q. 28, a. 2).
Our knowledge of God in this life limps behind the attainment of love. However, here Thomas refers to a certain ‘circulation’ in theological intentionality (STh II-II, q. 27, a. 4, ad 2). The cognitive dimension is affected and underpinned by an undertow of union and experience (STh I-II, q. 28, a. 2). In this circulation, intellect and will embrace each other in a mutual inclusion (STh I, q. 16, a. 4, ad 1). The intellect understands the will carrying it toward the unknown divine object; and the will prompts the intellect to understand more worthily what intrinsically exceeds its grasp. Knowledge is, in this case, one particular good desired by the will to fulfill the imperatives of union with the beloved (STh I, q. 16, a. 4, ad 1; I-II, q. 4, a. 4, ad 2; II-II, q. 109, a. 2, ad 1). It occurs within the communication of friendship, in a heart to-heart communication (STh I-II, q. 28, a. 2), which has God as its source, form, and end. [24]
D) A ‘Deconstructive’ Attitude
Still, the intentionality of the theological life does not unfold in uncritical self-assurance, as though it somehow possessed the divine mystery as an object, and forgot the radically unknown character of God. Inherent in the Thomist attitude, while it is focused on God, is a kind of ongoing deconstruction, as it relativizes its own complex conceptuality and defers its final evidence till the vision of God, face to face. It has appeared to some as an extreme example of onto-theology, the very paradigm of presentiality and systematization. [25] After all, its metaphysical framework comprehends even psychology in its ambit, as human nature operates through the spiritual faculties of intellect and will, elicits acts determined by their respective objects, and so on. However, it should not be forgotten that the disclosive realism of Aquinas’s open, questioning mode of exploring the data of faith is underscored with the constant acknowledgment that we do not know what God is in this life (STh I, q. 12, a. 1), and that even the believer is united to the divine ‘as if to one unknown’ (STh I, q. 12, a. 13, ad 1). [26] Thomas, in fact, extends this unknowability of the divine object to include even the subjective state of the believing theologian. He allows that it may be possible for some to know that they are in the state of grace through a special revelation (STh I-II, q. 112, a. 5). But this does not seem to be a common theological privilege. Neither is it possible to judge one’s state in the light of God himself, the source and object of grace, since God, in the immensity of his light (ibid., ad 3), is unknown in this life. All that is left, even for the theologian, is to make a discerning judgment, ‘by way of conjecture through some signs’ (coniecturaliter per aliqua signa), such as delight in God, contempt for anything less than God, and a pure conscience. This can be readily translated as a joy in the theological task, and a refusal of all kinds of reductive ways of knowing dominated by some gnoseological or cultural idol. The intentionality of faith would thus rely on a certain experiential assurance (per quandam experientiam dulcedinis), in a theological consciousness operating within the domain of grace.
E) The Theological Subject
It is understandable that one would speak of God as the object of theology. But that is not Thomas’s precise language. God is the subject of the theological science. Everything theology considers is sub ratione Dei’God as the heart and horizon of faith’s theological explorations. While there is no possibility of knowing the divine essence in this life, we do have, as mentioned already, divine communications, the effects registered in the realm of both nature and grace (STh I, q. 1, a. 7, ad 1). These are instanced in the whole range of theological data, for example, the sacraments, the work of redemption, the whole Christ, head and members to say nothing of creation itself. God acts in the God-originated, God-informed, and God-finalized world of our existence. The essentially unknown God is known only in and through his creative and salvific activities, which include our own seeking, questioning, believing, and loving. In this regard, theology is an inductive or disclosive procedure, a movement from the data and the dona, from the given to the Giver. This is the sense in which God is the subject of theology. The divine mystery is not as a theoretical object somehow analyzable through human rationality. Rather, and this tends to anticipate something of the modern sense of the term the subject, the personal reality, is freely self-revealed so as to realize a relationship of intersubjectivity that already fully reigns among the blessed. The effects of divine communication take the place of a definition of the divine reality (ibid.; cf. also STh I, q. 13, a. 8 ad 2). As the subject of theology, God is allowed a self-definition that looks to its ultimate evidence in the light of the beatific vision.
Theological intentionality is not constricted to a foundational first principle of reason discoursing on an abstract object. It participates in a cointentionality of ecclesial faith illumined by the self-revealing God, objectified in the inspired Scriptures, creed, sacraments, and theological life of the Church, as it promises an ultimate fulfillment (STh I, q. 1, a. 8). This does not mean that theology ceases to be an intelligent activity (ibid., ad 2). Grace perfects nature, and does not destroy it. The grace of faith and charity subsumes our intellectual capacities to manifest the divine reality in its proper light. The thoughtfulness of theology is integral to faith and serves it, just as the natural inclination of the will to the good is fulfilled in the gift of charity, and serves its life. On the other hand, theological wisdom argues its position, not by way of a philosophical objectification of the aspirations of the human spirit, but primarily in terms of the scriptural data which convey an inspired witness to God and his works (STh I, q. 1, aa. 8-10).
II. The Horizon of Theological Intentionality
This section attempts to clarify the theological horizon in which the world is critically apprehended as God’s creation. In this regard, God is related to the world and intimately present to it, yet, at the same time, eminently absent as a known and classifiable object within it. The notion of divine Be-ing has a theological function. It makes a clearing space in which the Trinitarian life of God can be appreciated as the source and end of worldly existence.
A) God beyond and within the World
In his path of disclosure, Thomas sets himself to address, first, the divine reality itself, and then the manner in which God is the fulfillment of the rational creature. God’s pure otherness in infinite Be-ing dominates the horizon in which the spiritual nature of the human can unfold (STh I, q. 2, prol.). These two indefinables, the Be-ing of God and our transcendent fulfillment in God, are linked concretely in Christ as the way, not only of our journey into God, but as the visible mission by which God has made his way to us through the incarnation of the Word, the primary effect of God’s saving power. The Christ of the Tertia Pars is the via incarnate, transvaluing the values attributable to the divine essence. [27]
Yet the intimacy of God’s self-revelation in the created world operates out of the boundless horizon in which God transcends that world (STh I, q. 13, a. 8, ad 2). There is, as it were, an ineffable space of God’s absence and distance contrasted with the accessible presence of everything that is not God. This ‘remotion’ or otherness of the divine reality in regard to the created universe prepares for another dimension of otherness, namely, that of the Trinitarian interrelated otherness within God confessed in the distinction of the persons (STh I, q. 2, prol.) In due course, the Trinitarian differentiation of the notion of divine Be-ing and its self-presence will lead to a consideration of the manner in which created being comes forth from God, and is marked with its Trinitarian origin, especially in the knowing and loving of spiritual beings (e.g., STh I, q. 45, a. 7, ad 3) .
The theologian inhabits the world as the sphere of divine disclosure. However sublime its aspiration to participate in the divine intentionality through faith and love, Aquinas’s theology never loses sight of this dynamic, actual world of interlocking and mutually conditioning realities. Within this world, and from this world, we are oriented, even if sub quadam confusione (STh I, q. 2, a. 1, ad 1), to the infinite ground of all that is. Aquinas’s viae are not refuting atheism in any modern sense. [28] None of the Greek, Jewish, and Arabian thinkers and commentators to which he refers doubted the existence of God. Rather, his viae are more invitations to the believer to a receptive and reflective self-positioning within the universe. For human intelligence, in following the movement of universal being, consents, as it were, to a fundamental dynamic that leads to both the possibility and the ultimate impossibility of naming the God who is like nothing in the world. In this ascent of the mind to God, Thomas is more a continuator of the older monastic theology than a rationalist modern philosopher. He is not applying general concepts to God, but inviting his fellow viatores into the movement, the via, of beings to Be-ing (STh I, q. 2, a. 3). The world is inhabited as the theater in which the unknowable God is necessarily present and already at work. Its reality is quasi-sacramental, contemplated, not as a sphere of delimited interrelating objectively visualized entities, but as a totality intrinsically God-ward in its constitution. It is the place of wonder, drawing the mind beyond itself, beyond its commonsense visible appearances, into the ‘no-thing-ness’ of Be-ing. In the five ways of disclosure (demonstratio), the experience of the universe takes us beyond our apprehensions, beyond the superficial presence of an object limited to sense data, imagination, or concept, to the all-actuating presence-in-absence of unknown Be-ing.
In our contemplation of this world as the theater of divine activity, God is intimated, through our manifold experience of the universe of being, as the light in which the world is intelligible in its ultimate reality indeed, as that which has been loved into being (STh I, q. 20, a. 2). In this theological horizon, God and human intelligence do not so much confront one another as they are related in a form of mutual inclusion: the world cannot be really known unrelated to God, and the divine source and agent of all that is cannot be disclosed unless through the effects of its action within that world. In this primal connection, as A. N. Williams notes, the self-revealing God is described already in relationship to the world. [29] Notions that will be part of a fuller disclosure, ‘demonstration,’ and ‘manifestation’ of God such as Be-ing, truth, goodness, life, happiness, person, and spiritual activity are implicit in this initial beholding of the world as it is experienced. The revealed name of God in Exodus 3:14, ‘I am who I am,’ while it evokes the particular history of revelation, is located within a larger context that is, within the intentionality of what all name as ‘God’ (STh I, q. 13, a. 9). As Thomas goes on to state, ‘The name, God, is employed to signify something existing beyond everything, which is the principle of all, and yet is removed from all. This is what those using the name God mean’ (STh I, q. 13, a. 8, ad 2). Thomas is situating his theology, not only with regard to the biblical and doctrinal data, but also in such a way as to include a much larger history of knowing and naming God.
The dynamics of remotion result, as Thomas himself admits, more in a consideration of how God is not than of how he is. Divine Be-ing infinitely exceeds every mode of being within the immediate world of our existence. God transcends the finite realm by being its immanent ground, ultimate intelligibility, and transcendent fulfillment. Aquinas deploys categories such as causality, perfection, intelligence, and so forth, but never in a way that effaces the background notion of God as sheer Be-ing. This functions as a kind of clearing space in which the mystery of God can be explored, affirmed, but never fully known.
B) The Divine Simplicity
Following Augustine, Thomas accents the simplicity of the divine subject. This is the realm in which the Trinitarian relationships will be disclosed, for neither the unity nor the trinity can be anything but itself, undivided into parts, a pure act that knows no potentialities nor any composite principles nor external dependence (STh I, q. 3, a. 4). Since all division, separation, and potentiality are removed from the divine, all-simple reality (STh I, q. 3, prol.), the whole of God is involved in each of the divinely wrought effects and manifestations though at this juncture the question of the Trinity of distinct persons is deferred. However that it is to be conceived, it will not be at the expense of the divine simplicity. In the fullest sense of the words, God simply is, all actual and simple Be-ing, whatever the complexity of our concepts, whatever the number of our propositions, whatever the number and division of the questions that make up the ordo doctrinae. Divine Be-ing is outside every genus and difference (STh I, q. 3, a. 5), as the self-involved source and sustainer of all that is. As omnino simplex (STh I, q. 3, a. 7), God cannot enter into composition with anything not as a world soul related to the world as a body; nor a pure potentiality, however creative, as a kind of transcendent prime matter (STh I, q. 3, a. 8)’the recurring problem for process thought especially in some recent ecological versions. [30] In short, God is present not as an ultimate object at the apex of a universe of interrelated objects, but as something else, an absence, a ‘no-thing,’ outside the whole order of the universe of beings. In the universe of potentiality and composition and generic and specific differences, statically imagined or conceived as presentations of being, the ‘to be’ of any concrete reality is the all-enacting perfection. The act of being draws the mind to go beyond itself toward another realm, beyond imagination and concept, to Be-ing itself, ‘of all things the most perfect . . . the actuality of all things’ (esse est perfectissimum omnium . . . actualitas omnium rerum [STh I, q. 4, a. 1, ad 3]). Since only God can be the source of this enacting ‘to be,’ God is necessarily ‘intimately within everything’ (STh I, q. 8, a. 1). The absence results in the most intimate form of presence. The remotion of Be-ing from the world enables our understanding of its return, so to speak, with the immanence of the Creator to creation.
Further dimensions of this divine within-ness will be disclosed in the light of Trinitarian revelation. There are anticipations of this in that the divine immanence to creation is realized in two possible manners, [31] both of which are of basic importance in the fullest Trinitarian theology: ‘God is in a reality in two ways: causally, and intentionally as what is known is in the knower and what is desired is in the desirer. In this special way, God is in the rational creature knowing and loving him either actually or habitually, as in grace’ (STh I, q. 8, a. 3). Absolutely presupposed is the causal presence of the divine giver of being, in the innermost constitution of all that is. In that metaphysical donation of being, God is the ‘Be-ing-giving-being.’ But already at this point of divine immanence the subject of theology is appreciated in what today we can call its intersubjectivity. The divine subject indwells human subjects in the cognitive and affective dimensions of human existence the interiority of the creature communicates with the interiority of God. Flowing from the fact that we are known and loved by God in the divine intentionality, we are enabled to know and love God in our human intentional being. We note, therefore, the importance of intentionality and affectivity in Thomas’s account: he is not allowing his students to be limited or confined to what can appear to be a purely objective and almost physical apprehension of being with Be-ing simply causing being as an effect, without any implication of interiority or intersubjectivity. [32] Not to appreciate this is to risk a very defective understanding of the relatio rationis of God’s relation to the world.
C) The Limits of Theology
Given the radiance of God, theology is vespertilionine in its search (STh I, q. 1, a. 1): the bat cannot bear sunlight, as it flits through its environment only with radar-like soundings of its dark world. Still, our state is not essentially nocturnal; there is a natural desire to see God, and to come into the light otherwise there would be a contradiction to faith which, as Chrysostom observes, promises a perfect knowledge of the Father and the Son (STh I, q. 12, a. 1). The clouded state of our intelligence (STh I, q. 12, a. 2) already participates in the divine light ‘in thy light we see light’ (Ps 36:9). Human intelligence, at the culminating point of God’s self-communication, will be strengthened by the light of glory to see God face to face. God will be in the creature as the known is in the knower, no longer according to the darkness of the human mode, but in accord with a divine mode, as God, in a final gift, joins himself to the created intellect (STh 1, q. 12, a. 4). This is a super-gift elevating the capacity of the human spirit (STh I, q. 12, a. 5, ad 1 and ad 3), making it deiform, and like to God (cf. 1 John 3:2).
In the meantime of our earthly existence, ‘God is known through the phantasms of his effects’ (STh I, q. 12, a. 3 ad 2). An intriguing phrase: it suggests how the intelligence of faith moves from its sensory and imaginative experience through the active light of understanding, to conceive and judge of the reality of these effects and their transcendent cause in the inexpressible realm of the divine (always Trinitarian) subject (STh I, q. 12, a. 13). The following words anticipate the pattern of what is to be addressed at a later stage: there are more excellent effects, and within that activity, a foreshadowing of the divine missions:Though through the revelation of grace in this life we do not know the divine essence, and so are united with God as to one unknown, nonetheless we know him more fully in that more, and more excellent, effects are shown us and in as much as we attribute to God through divine revelation things which natural reason cannot attain, namely that God is three and one. (Ibid., ad 1)Though faith is kind of knowing participating in the intentionality of the divine subject (ibid., ad 3), its mode of knowing is constricted by the connatural scope of the human mind situated in time and space. The transcendent realm can be approached only ‘by way of eminence, causality and negation’ (STh I, q. 13, a. 8, ad 2). Infinite Be-ing remains what it is, outside the whole created order, with everything ordered and related to it. But God is not to be thought of as frustrating the human effort to know him, but as lovingly respecting the creaturely mode of our present existence (STh I, q. 13, a. 7). In this regard, we stand securely on the floor or ground of our existence, but without any ceiling on either understanding or aspiration.
D) ‘The One Who Is’
To a visualist ocular model of knowing, the affirmation of God’s Be-ing must appear as an experience of absence rather than presence, a journey into ‘no-thing,’ an occupation of nowhere. But theological judgment has its own realist intentionality; and the intentionality of faith truly intends its divine subject. Given the supracategorial realm of divine Be-ing, the biblical name of God in Exodus as Qui est (Exod 3:14) is the most proper to God (STh I, q. 13, a. 11). God exceeds all form and conceptions of being, as a boundless oceanic fullness of Be-ing in which we are immersed. The designation of God as ‘the One Who is’ implies no limitation on the form or mode of existence. All other names appear as delimited and specific in their range; hence it is the most open-ended kind of designation, connoting the limitless breadth and timeless actuality of the divine reality.
‘The One Who Is’ is, therefore, the most appropriate name in our efforts to affirm the divine Being from below (ibid., ad 1). But as regards the actual singular reality of God, in the revelation and action that occurs from above, the personal, biblically based ‘God’ and YHWH are more appropriate for the invocative naming of the divine. In this interplay of philosophy and faith’ from above and from below affirming God as Be-ing does not replace the religious designation of God, but works to elucidate it. In the theological disclosure of the divine mystery, the history of salvation is set within a universe grounded in Be-ing; and Be-ing itself awaits the self-revelation that occurs only in the history of salvation.
Thomas responds to an objection that cites Dionysius, a representative of the common patristic tradition of naming God first of all the supreme good from which all the gifts flow (ibid., ad 2). He replies that God is good because God is Be-ing; God’s ‘Be-ing for’ creation as its ultimate good is explicable only in terms of God being Be-ing in itself, the ground of a universe that has no claim to exist of itself. All our ways of naming the divine, while triggered by the divine effects, are not reducible to God’s relationship to creation (ibid., ad 3). What God is, even though disclosed within the world, is not defined by creation. As transcending creation, as in the world by being beyond it, ‘the One Who Is’ is not annexed to any created economy made up of modes of being and the interrelationship of beings. [33]
Predictably, both biblical scholarship and deconstructionist philosophy find this blending of biblical and metaphysical thought suspect. Gilson’s ‘metaphysics of Exodus’ appears as a confusion of two different modes of discourse. On the other hand, one would expect the biblical authors to be rather nervous about speaking of God as ‘non-being.’ While the Lord is not in the earthquake, the wind, or the fire, but in the ‘sound of sheer silence’ (1 Kgs 19:11-13), it would be hard to tell the author of the Book of Consolation in Isaiah that God ‘is not’ (cf. Isa 40-41). This is even more problematic in the face of the more explicit philosophizing of the thirteenth chapter of The Wisdom of Solomon (Wis 13:1-19). Indeed, no less a scholar than Eric Voegelin, in his monumental Order and History, has interpreted both the cultural movement of ancient Greece and the religious journey of Israel as a progressive conversion to the transcendence of ‘being,’ as he terms it. [34] In his comparison of ancient symbols, he discerns a movement of metaxy, of the in-between-ness of symbol and being, in a kind of deconstruction of religious and philosophical symbols in the light of transcendent Be-ing, thereby precluding any gnostic idolatry. He deliberately differs from the generality of contemporary biblical historians who could not imagine how an early nomad people could come to such a transcendent sense of God. But here Voegelin agrees with Gilson: while there is no metaphysics in Exodus, there is a certain metaphysics of Exodus. He allows that ‘the Christian inter-pretation is well founded on the text,’ common as it is to Damascene and Aquinas alike. The intentionality of faith has realist implications. Voegelin proceeds to review in an appreciative manner how Thomas unpacked the meaning of the great symbolic experience of Exodus in terms of ‘being.’ This approach not only throws light on how the notion of divine Be-ing functions in the movement of Thomist thought, but suggests also why any reduction of the Thomist movement of thought to an immobile system is precluded. God’s Be-ing is not an inert conceptualizable content, but an undertow drawing sense, imagination, concept, and word into a realm of silence and adoration. The notion of ‘the One who is’ pervades every aspect of theological intentionality, but neither as a starting point nor as a label attached to an object already understood. The mind is ‘led by the hand’ (manuductio) from the immediacy of sense impressions and imagination (phantasmata) to its ultimate realm of communion with God. [35]
Hence, the Be-ing of God is not a concept nor a simple intuition. The following passage serves as a summary as Thomas notes the two ways in which divine Be-ing can be considered:
In one way, it means the act of being; in the other way, it means the making of a judgment which the mind comes to by joining a predicate to a subject. In the first way of taking ‘to be,’ we cannot know the ‘To-Be’ of God, just as we cannot know the divine essence either. This leaves only the second way: we know that this judgment which we make about God when we say ‘God is’ to be true. And we know this only from the divine effects. [36]It is thus clear that no initial mystical intuition of Be-ing is implied; nor is there any way beyond words and language to affirm a truth that can neither be contained by any human concept nor adequately signified in the domain of discourse. But within the critical performance of language and within the ordered unfolding of questions, ‘the One who is,’ while remaining radically unknown, can be affirmed, in an anticipatory answer to each of the questions arising from the data of faith and experience. [37] Such a ‘knowing unknowing’ is possible only because of the divine effects, the self-diffusiveness of Be-ing’in creation, grace, revelation, and, indeed, in the ongoing life of the Church. [38] In other words, the divine Giver is known only in the divine giving, even while any adequate understanding of either the Giver or the gifts is impossible.
E) The Plenitude of Be-ing
As a docta ignorantia, [39] theology is, however, a knowing or tutored unknowing. Though the mind moves from divinely wrought effects to their transcendent cause, from the gifts to the Giver, the manner in which such judgments are true in the divine mystery is an absence at the heart of all theological discourse. All our efforts to name God ‘fail in representing him.’ [40] There is no question of visualizing the divine or of conceptualizing the manner in which God is God. The divine subject is intended, but never contained in theological objectification. Because of the eminently divine difference, there is an endless deferral inscribed into theological intentionality, awaiting that final communication that only God can give. [41]
Question 14 of the Prima Pars opens up a more vital consideration of the divine Be-ing as conscious of itself and the whole of creation in the intentionality of knowing and loving (STh I, q. 14, prol.). God is maximally self-knowing (STh I, q. 14, a. 2, ad 1), understanding himself, in the sheer actuality of Be-ing, and all else through himself (ibid., ad 3). The divine knowing and willing is immanent to Be-ing, for it is not determined from without (STh I, q. 14, a. 4): ‘things are because God knows them’ (STh I, q. 14, a. 8, sed contra). [42] Because the divine understanding is sheer act (STh I, q. 18, a. 3), ‘God has the most perfect and eternal life because his intellect is most perfect and ever in act.’ The same holds good for the divine willing (STh I, q. 19, a. 1). We note in both cases the flavor of Thomas’s language’esse, intelligere, velle’verbs rather than nouns. The hermeneutical space is being cleared for the Trinitarian considerations of the intersubjective character of divine Be-ing constituted through the speaking of the Word by way of understanding, and the procession of the Spirit by way of love.
A later question addresses the passion and moral feeling in God on the analogy with human passions and moral habits, expressed in perfections such as love, justice, and mercy and providence (prudence) (STh I, q. 20, prol.; I, q. 22, prol.) This consideration brings out the plenitude of Be-ing, and connects it with the actual history of salvation. It leads in turn to a profound theology of love. Aquinas makes explicit reference to the New Testament, ‘God is love’ (1 John 4:16) (STh I, q. 20, a. 1, sed contra). ‘To be’ and ‘to love’ are one and the same in God. In terms of the divine Being-for-us in creation and grace, love is identified as the prime root of all movements of the will. Inasmuch as things are, they are good; and in as much as they are good, they are the outcome of the divine communicative love, not as objects already existing in some prior way, but as deriving from the divine love itself: ‘the love of God is actively infusive and creative of the goodness of things’ (STh I, q. 20, a. 2). Just as being has its source in divine Be-ing, all created goodness arises from divine loving. The goodness of all creation reaches a climax in a special love-wrought goodness of human existence, since God can enjoy a love of friendship only with intelligent beings (ibid., ad 3). In creating human being, the divine Subject lovingly brings a world of many subjects into being, in an intersubjective universe of friendship.
A question concerning the divine bliss both follows on the consideration of what belongs to the unity of the divine essence (STh I, q. 26, prol.) and introduces the explicitly Trinitarian series of questions even if some puzzles remain as to the precise positioning of this question. [43] But what is evidently reemphasized is that the beatitude of God is a feature of the communicative intentionality of the divine Be-ing. Since the divine Be-ing is God’s intelligere, that actual, simple intelligence is necessarily divine bliss, understood as the perfect good of an intellectual nature, knowing itself in act and in action (STh I, q. 24, a. 1). God’s joyful self-possession redounds to bliss to others who are assimilated to it (STh I, q. 26, a. 2; I, q. 26, a. 3, ad 1). All beatitude eminently preexists in God (STh I, q. 26, a. 4), in the sure and continuous contemplation of himself and others, and in the activity of governing the universe. The emphasis on the salvific economy of beatitude might explain why Thomas brackets divine beatitude out of a purely essential consideration pertaining to the divine ad intra. For a communication of blissful intentionality is involved: God possesses the happiness that he actively wills in friendship with his creatures. This highlights the sheer gratuity of the essentially blissful God seeking the beatitude of created others. In short, God’s happiness makes room for others to share in it.
To summarize: the theological horizon embraces the world as a field of divine disclosure. Though, from one point of view, Be-ing is infinitely removed from the world of beings, it is present as the intentional source and goal of all that is, and especially within the intentional existence of the spiritual being. The notion of Be-ing is a clearing space in which the blissful love calls everything and everyone into being. We now proceed to an explicit consideration of the field of communicative intentionality in which human beings can appreciate themselves as the imaging of the divine Trinitarian reality.
III. The Hologram of Communicative Intentionality
This section moves to the explicitly Trinitarian intentionality of Aquinas’s theology. The understanding and love hitherto inscribed into the dynamics of the theological project now appear as a way of disclosing the understanding and love that constitute the life of the Trinity itself. In that disclosure, creation, and especially spiritual creation, is illumined as the sphere of Trinitarian communication.
A) Divine Intentionality
Aquinas moves from a consideration of the unity of the divine essence to an explicit consideration of the Trinity of the persons (STh I, q. 27, prol.). To that end, he sketches a delicate interrelationship between divine and human intentionality. He draws attention to biblical references to procession metaphors, while bearing constantly in mind the manner in which both Arians and Sabellians have failed to grasp the intentionality of the intradivine communicative life. Focusing on the intentional meaning of processions, Aquinas appeals to the psychological experience of immanent operations implicit in his presentation so far as not incompatible with either the biblical references or doctrinal orthodoxy: ‘whoever understands, from that very fact there proceeds an intellectual conception, a verbum cordis.’ Such an understanding of procession as related to immanent operations is in accord with the Trinitarian fides catholica. Moreover, this way of conceiving procession in God accords with the divine simplicity of Be-ing which has figured so prominently from the beginning of his treatment (STh I, q. 27, a. 1, ad 2). The more perfect the understanding, the more intimate to the knower is the conception of what is understood, a key to understanding how neither the divine unity nor the divine simplicity are compromised. Furthermore, the luminous intimacy of the divine Word spoken by the Father includes a knowledge of everything that is external to God (ibid., ad 3), namely, the universe that God knows and loves into being.
Divine Be-ing is the habitation of infinite light and love. Since the Word is the luminous evidence of infinite goodness, God cannot be conceived as detached from himself, but is unrestrictedly consenting to the goodness he is, and can be for the other, both ad intra and ad extra. The divine self-understanding and self-expression reach beyond themselves to love what is so understood and conceived. A second dimension of affective interiority, namely, love, which has been stirring in Thomas’s theological exposition up to this point, is declared: ‘according to the working of the will there is found in us a kind of other procession, namely the procession of love, according to which the beloved is in the lover, just as, through the conception of the word, the reality spoken or understood is in the understanding mind’ (STh I, q. 27, a. 3). Hence, there is a certain order (ibid., ad 3): there is no procession of love unless it is related to the procession of the Word. In contrast to human experience, God is not joined to himself ‘as if to one unknown’ (cf. STh I, q. 12, a. 13, ad 1), but loves himself as one who is known, and self-expressed in the Word. In this, divine love is supremely intelligent or rational. The love that animates the moral life as it is presented in the Secunda Pars is a disclosure of Be-ing and the manifestation of truth. Intelligence and rationality underpin all values and moral action. Conversely, divine loving, originating as it does in God’s self-understanding and self-expression, underscores the value of intelligence and its deepest rationality. [44] Yet the inmost center of divine truth moves beyond its self-expression to the self-giving of love, not just to a conception of the divine other, but to a real communion with the other. In this regard, love does not consist in expressing the other to itself, but proceeds more ecstatically, as a kind of impulse and surrender to the attraction of the other as a spiritus (STh I, q. 27, a. 4). When this ‘certain vital motion and impulse’ is experienced in loving, someone is said to be moved and impelled to action. The Spirit as the impulse or impetus of love receives the fullness of divine Be-ing from the Father and the Son in their joint loving: ‘From the fact that someone loves something, there occurs a certain impression, if I may so speak, of the reality loved in the affect of the lover, according as the loved object is in the lover as the reality understood is in the one who understands’ (STh I, q. 37, a. 1). The plenitude of the Trinitarian Be-ing is a limitlessly realized interiority as infinite Be-ing, knowing and known; and as infinite Be-ing, loving and loved: ‘Just as when someone knows and loves himself he is in himself not only through a [particular] identity, but as one known is in the one who knows, and as the one who is loved is within the one who is loving’ (ibid.; cf. Compendium Theologiae I, c. 50).
Although there is no before or after in the divine life, there is a sequence in the order of our understanding. It is not as though the Trinity were somehow caught in fieri, in a state of becoming. There is, however, a holographic development in our theological understanding and in our capacity to express what has been understood. Gilles Emery nicely observes that, by giving systematic priority to divine unity of essence as an explicative principle, the consequent explicit treatment of the Father is always in the light of his intrinsic relational reference to the Word/Son. [45] Though there may be good biblical reasons for considering the Father at the beginning of any theological exposition and so banishing any prior divine essence from consideration Thomas’s systematic accent on the unity of the divine essence suggests the principle by which the Father acts, the transcendent realm in which all divine action and relationship occurs and the notion of Be-ing which serves as the disclosive space in which all theological words, symbols, and ideas point beyond themselves to their unknowable eminent realization. Thus, Thomist theology is not primarily a ‘Patrology,’ but a theology in a more comprehensive Trinitarian sense; for the Father is not, as it were, already constituted independently before, or apart from, his generative and spirative acts and interpersonal relationships. The divine subject is the Trinity, not the Father alone. Both the Word and the Spirit are eternally subsisting persons (tam Verbum quam Amor est subsistens [STh I, q. 37, a. 1, ad 2]). Despite the bias of language and imagination, the Spirit is not an impersonal medium in which the Father and the Son operationally merge, but the third person proceeding from them and uniting them in their loving (STh I, q. 37, a. 1, ad 3).
Hence, ‘both the Father and the Son are said to love by the Holy Spirit or by proceeding Love, both themselves and us’: (et Pater et Filius dicuntur diligentes Spiritu Sancto, vel Amore procedente, et se, et nos [STh I, q. 37, a. 2; see also ad 3]). All creation, actual and possible, is located within this innermost Trinitarian interiority. Not only are ‘we’ known in the Word and loved in the Spirit, but, through a gifted participation in the divine Word and in the proceeding Love, we are enabled truly to know God and rightly to love the revealed God (STh I, q. 38, a. 1).
The notion of the simplicity of Be-ing does not cancel the reality of the relationships. It discloses the horizon in which their distinctive reality can be properly affirmed within the eternal and self-communicating vitality of God. Even if there is an expository order of theological conceptions and categories, the actual vitality of Trinitarian Be-ing always eludes both relative and absolute ways of affirming it. In this regard, there is only a distinction of reason between the divine person and the divine nature (STh I, q. 39, a. 1). Theological intentionality moves forward through a continual and patient ‘recycling’ or reiteration of the notions of the nature and person. [46] The notion of God as transcendent Be-ing, while it removes God from the world and affirms the divine reality as outside every genus of being, and beyond any human conception, does not swallow up the divine persons in an undifferentiated essence. Through the notional acts and relations it is disclosed as a realm of communion and communication. By holding to a distinction of reason in this regard, Aquinas is, in effect, respecting the personal and interpersonal character of the divine subject, and its self-communication to creation. For the theological intelligence that makes this ‘distinction of reason’ recognizes that God is not conditioned by any non-divine reality. It therefore excludes any real distinction in God other than that involved in the divine self-communication. It thereby highlights the intentional character of the Trinity’s relationship with spiritual creation, as God knowingly and lovingly relates to created subjects in the full reality of interpersonal life both of God and of ourselves. In other words, the Trinity is essentially God, and God is essentially Trinitarian, thus precluding the absurdity of the one divine reality somehow deciding to become Trinitarian for its benefit or our own!
B) Intra-Trinitarian Communication
In such matters, theological progress is possible only by way of a contemplation of Be-ing and its necessary immanent intentionality, explored and, to some degree, understood in terms of the created Trinitarian image we are. [47] What is eminently realized in God is the perfection of spiritual consciousness that we experience in our own knowing and loving. We cannot choose not to understand, since understanding is the very nature of our intelligence. Nor can we choose not to delight in the value of our understanding and loving, since that would be a denial of what we most radically are. Thomas sums up this point by simply observing that God naturally wills and loves himself, but others freely (STh I, q. 41, a. 2, ad 3); and that intellectual conceptions flow naturally, not by the will. There is a natural dynamic inherent in the intelligence involved, the ipsum quia that Frederick Crowe refers to. [48] The Word is spoken, not as contingently caused by the Father, but because the infinite self-expressiveness of the Father is identical with light of divine intelligence. When it comes to the divine order of processions, no temporal or privileged priority is implied. Here Thomas approves of Augustine’s pithy statement, ‘not that one is before the other, but that one proceeds from the other’ (non quo alter sit prius altero, sed quo alter est ex altero [STh I, q. 42, a. 3]): the Word and Spirit are not temporally subsequent to the Father, even if they proceed from him. Thus, in the one divine consciousness, the Father is God by uttering the Word and breathing with the Word; the Son is God as begotten and spoken; the Spirit is God as the affective inwardness of God, loved as known and expressed in the Word. The great Thomistic Commentator, Cardinal Cajetan, warned over four hundred years ago as he reflected on Thomas’s account of the divine transcendence:
In God, in reality or in the real order, there is one reality which is not purely absolute not purely relative, nor is it mixed or composed of or resulting from both; but in a most eminent manner it formally contains that which is relative (indeed, many relative entities) and that which is absolute. We err if we approach God with the categories of absolute and relative as though we imagined such a distinction to be established in some way prior to the divine reality itself, and believed that one member of the distinction was subordinate to the other. For the divine reality is prior to being and its differences; it is above being, beyond one , and so on. [49]The concepts of absolute and relative, and, consequently, of unity and community, are governed by a larger theological intentionality proceeding by way of negation to the transcendent eminence of the tri-personal reality (STh I, q. 28, a. 3, ad 3). Each divine person distinctly and really subsists in, and, indeed, as divine Be-ing: for example, ‘the Father is not less than the Trinity as a whole’ (tantus est Pater quanta tota Trinitas [STh I, q. 30, a. 1, ad 4]). The vitality of intra-divine communication does not imply either a sharing or a triplication of the divine essence. The divine person is alius, not aliud, a distinct divine ‘someone,’ an other in relation to others. This ‘incommunicability’ of the divine persons in their relative opposition makes for the special character of interpersonal communication. It is founded in the infinite depth of self-communication and self-presence (STh I, q. 37, a. 1). Indicative of the reality of this interpersonal communication is a certain order: for the Son proceeds from the Father, not vice versa (STh I, q. 31, a. 1, ad 2). And yet this order is eternal, precluding any temporal succession (STh I, q. 36, a. 3, ad 3). The Son is not generated ‘before’ the Spirit proceeds; for both belong to the eternal Now of divine life. Hence, acknowledging the Trinitarian order does not suggest an intradivine delegation of powers (ibid., ad 4), but rather the recognition of the intersubjectivity within the reality of the divine Subject the ‘relational opposition’ of traditional doctrine (STh I, q. 36, a. 4). The divine simplicity, far from implying either a negation or diminishment of Trinitarian unity, is the reason for unique interpersonal communion within God, just as the relational opposition between incommunicable properties of the divine persons guarantees the distinctive reality of Trinitarian communication.
In that vital unity of the three persons there is a circularity of mutual presence and indwelling. This triunity is based on the unreserved communication of the divine essence. The whole deity of the Father is communicated to the Son and the Spirit. Each is God, and the possessor of all that God is, even while the opposition of relationships remains. Indeed, even given the polar opposition of the relationships, the distinct reality of each subsistent relationship is inconceivable apart from the others: the Father is pure Son-wardness and Spirit-wardness; the Son is God by being purely Father-ward and Spirit-ward, just as the Holy Spirit is pure Father-and-Son-wardness. Moreover, from a more intentional perspective, in the light of divine understanding, the Father consciously conceives within himself the Word expressive of all that the Trinity is, and can be for others. For his part, the Son is the conscious and subsistent expression of all that the Father is as the principle both of himself and of the Holy Spirit, and, indeed, of all creation. In the same vein, the Spirit is the ecstasy of love toward the totality of the Trinity in the eternity of its life, and in its free temporal communication to the world (STh I, q. 42, a. 5). In the light of the triunity that includes both the divine simplicity and the communion of persons, all created inwardness of one entity in another is deficient (ibid., ad 1). Individual human consciousness, for example, is not the whole of human being, and its acts are varied, limited, and fragmented in time. On the other hand, a community of human individuals is a contingent coexistence of separate persons, ebbing and flowing in the vicissitudes of human communication and relationships.
We have been trying to bring out something of the interrelationship of divine and human intentionality in the Thomist theology of Trinitarian life. The more theologians, working at the lowly level of their own experience of knowing and loving the divine subject, have been able to disclose the communicative reality of the life of the Trinity, the more they return to themselves and to the creation of which they are a part to appreciate the whole as a sphere of Trinitarian action and presence. The next section will attempt to explicate this point in a more concrete manner.
IV. The Trinitarian Narrative: Moving within the Hologram
In this final section, we will stress the relativity of the psychological analogy in regard to the ‘given’ or revealed reality of the Trinity in the experience of Christian faith. We will show that the work of ‘appropriating’ Trinitarian faith is never complete, and that it leads back to where it began, to the self-giving of the divine persons in the history of grace and salvation.
A) The Psychological Analogy
Given the inevitable complexity of the concepts of processions, relationships, and notional acts, we must reiterate the importance of the data of faith to Thomas’s exposition (STh I, q. 32, a. 1). As faith adores God as self-revealed in Word and Spirit, theology reverently explores the manner in which God has such a self to give. But, detached from the data of faith, theological explanations can only be derisory, for the utter originality of the divine self-revelation would be displaced. Nonetheless, a critical consistency in our disclosure of the mystery is enabled by the use of the psychological analogy, grounded in the most intimate of human experiences of knowing and loving: ‘given the self-revelation of the Trinity, this kind of thinking is appropriate, but not so as sufficiently to prove the Trinity of persons’ (trinitate posita, congruent huiusmodi rationes; non tamen ita quod per has rationes sufficienter probetur trinitas personarum [ibid., ad 2]). The governing reality is always the biblical narrative, and the subsequent liturgical and doctrinal expressions of the Church itself. [50]
On the other hand, the search for further theological knowledge of the Trinity is necessitated if faith is to penetrate the deepest meaning of creation, a divine gift, given in divine freedom (ibid., ad 3). Though there is a superabundant self-diffusion of the divine Good, creation is the work of an artist rather than the impersonal overflow of substance (STh I, q. 34, a. 3). Our understanding of creation looks back to the Father, the divine source, understanding of himself and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and all else. [51] The Father’s Word expresses the whole Trinity, and all the possibilities of contingent creation (ibid.). The divine Word is expressive and operative in regard to all creation, and so is genitus creator (ibid., ad 3). Likewise, with regard to the Holy Spirit, we read, ‘As the Father expresses in his Word himself and the creature, so the Father and the Son are said to love by the Holy Spirit of proceeding love both themselves and us’ (STh I, q. 37, a. 2; cf. also ad 3). [52]
Creation, then, is not an impersonal, automatic overflow, but has its source and form in the divine processions (STh I, q. 45, a. 6). Trinitarian faith thus affects our sense of creation. [53] Our graced conformity to the divine persons enables us to detect the trace of the divine three in the universe. Since the processions are the cause of creation, the universe is most radically illuminated, not by a ‘process theology’ based on the interaction of contingent entities, but by a ‘procession theology’ deriving from the Trinity itself. The Trinity has created the world out of its immanent life of intelligence and love, and is thus intentionally related to all creation. Creation is gifted existence, intrinsically marked with its Trinitarian origin and destiny. The Trinitarian character of the universe appears most clearly in the spiritual subject, in its knowing and loving (STh I, q. 45, a. 7). Thus, the human mind is the special site of the disclosure of the inner reality of the Trinitarian cause. At one level, the contemplation of faith can discern in the world traces of its Trinitarian origin. But in the case of the Trinitarian image occurring within human consciousness and its intentional activities, there results a more inward conformity to the divine persons as they indwell creation in a new way. [54] From both points of view, the Trinity of persons is the explanatory cause of creation ‘in some way’ (cf. ibid., ad 3), manifested both in the character of the universe in general and specifically in spiritual beings within it.
B) Appropriation
In the dynamics of holographic reiteration, the essential attributes are appropriated to manifest the Trinitarian faith, making the less known manifest through the more known (STh I, q. 39, a. 7)’not that we should be under any illusion that we have an adequate knowledge of such divine attributes. Nor, for that matter, are the attributes to be detached from an explicitly Trinitarian setting. [55] The context of appropriation is constructed through the consideration of the notional acts and the relationships they imply by means of the psychological analogy. The psychological analogy can bring both clarification and its own kind of experiential intimacy, for it enables the Trinitarian mystery to be subjectively ‘appropriated’ as the form and dynamism of one’s own intentional existence.This analogical instance of theology, operating by means of cognitive and affective self-appropriation, works in a much larger field of meaningful attributions appropriation in the traditional sense. It is not a theological word-play, but a technique designed ‘to manifest the persons,’ and to be ‘a manifestation of the truth’ (ibid., ad 1). [56] In the psychological analogy, the persons are affirmed in propriis, while the essential attributes are connoted. In appropriation, the reverse procedure is more the case. It is a useful reminder of the unfinished business of Trinitarian theology. The experience of faith is always more than even the best kind of analogical thinking. And theology itself acknowledges in the mystery of God’s Be-ing aspects of eminence and interpersonal communication that necessarily transcend the valuable clarification that the psychological analogy offers. While Thomas’s methodical unfolding of the divine mystery proceeded by first creating the limitless space of the divine transcendence the divine Be-ing and its attributes it moved forward through the psychological analogy to consider the processions and the relationships they imply. But in a third phase, there is a doubling back in order to include the whole of tradition in its scriptural, mystical, and liturgical riches.This total field of faith’s experience guides the activity of appropriation. The divine subject thus always transcends and expands the intentionality of the human subject. For example, Trinitarian theology has in recent times included specific attention to divine revelation as related to the cross and resurrection. [57] This in turn has provoked an examination of how the psychological analogy works within the narrative drama of Trinitarian revelation, calling into play further symbolic, aesthetic, and affective and psychological dimensions of human experience as subject to the transformative action of grace. [58] Here, the possibility of a new range of appropriations emerges, based, not merely on the metaphysical properties of being, but on dimensions of human consciousness itself. In this regard, the psychological image is thereby notably enhanced, rather than replaced. The divine persons, though given, are never comprehended in any theological scheme because of the play of appropriations made possible in the scriptural narrative. As theology serves the disclosure of the self-revealing subject, its intentionality is always more than the sum total of theological techniques. [59] Nor should it be forgotten that the gifts of the Spirit, especially wisdom, understanding, and knowledge, operate in a supra-rational or instinctual mode in relation to the non-conceptualizable concreteness of the Trinitarian communication (STh I-II, q. 68, aa. 1-2).In short, the practice of appropriation reminds theology not to lose contact with its data-dona. The aim of appropriation, therefore, is to stimulate the most meaningful rhetoric of our Trinitarian experience, to manifest the persons in the truth to be affirmed and as the mystery to be adored and invoked. [60]
C) The Missions
With the divine missions, the effects of the Trinitarian God that have been so basic to Thomas’s presentation of God’s self-revelation are introduced in a new key of personal self-communication of an intentional order. God’s Be-ing has been progressively identified as the eternal communion of the divine persons, disclosed through a free communication or extension of the communal life of the Trinity. Through the missions, Trinitarian Be-ing enfolds created spiritual being into itself. Here there are two polarities (STh I, q. 43, a. 1). In the first place, the eternal Trinity in its interpersonal vitality is involved, for the missions of the Word and Spirit have a properly divine origin. Second, there results a transformed intentionality as the human subject, in its knowing and loving, relates to the divine subject in its own self-knowing and loving. The Trinity becomes newly present in the interpersonal knowledge and love existing between the Trinitarian selfhood of God and the human self (novus modus essendi in alio). The unique visible mission of the Incarnation is designed to manifest the salvific intention of God’s love as a concrete human nature is assumed into personal union with the Word. But in the realm of grace any number of intentional human subjects are assumed into a new intimacy with the Trinity now known and loved in a new way.
Because God cannot be conditioned by creation in any way, there is only a ‘relationship of reason’ (STh I, q. 28, a. 1, ad 3) between God and the world. But this often confusing phrase can now be understood in its proper light. It is an eternal relatio interpersonalis, a free divine self-determination embracing all creation in the speaking of the Word and in the breathing of Love. Its ontological, world-changing effect is the gift of grace by which the spiritual creature begins to participate in God’s own life.
This divine-human communication has a history, for it occurs in two interrelated ways (STh I, q. 43, a. 2). In the visible missions, the Word and Spirit are sent in an historical visibility. The hypostatic incarnation of the Word is the visible mission of the Son. Related to this is the Pentecostal economy of special divinely wrought signs manifesting the gift of the Spirit. These visible missions are marked with the particularities of space and time, and so necessarily are exposed to the contingencies of history and the particularity of the divine economy enacted within it. God’s communications are not reserved for pure spirits, but meet human existence in its temporal, historical embodiment (STh I, q. 43, a. 7; cf. I, q. 88, a. 3). God reaches out to human beings in a manner that accords with their nature (connaturaliter). In this way, the invisible mysteries are made known through the visible, that is, what falls within the immediate scope of our present mode of knowing. The incarnate visibility of the Son anchors in the world of immediate human experience the extent of God’s self-giving. On the other hand, the precise extent of the visible missions is moderated by the concrete good of the Church not so that believers should cling to the visible economy of God’s gift, but that faith be confirmed and inspired in its origins by the coming of Christ and the witness of the apostles and early disciples.For their part, the invisible missions operate in the interiority of grace, coextensive with the history of all holy lives (STh I, q. 43, a. 6, ad 1). [61] Our intentional existence is drawn into the transcendent depth of divine communion underlying all creation. God, knowing and loving, indwells the soul, as known and loved in return (STh I, q. 43, a. 3). The giving is interpersonal. It originates with the Trinitarian intentionality of God, and its term is the created spiritual mode of consciousness proper to the human person. As a result, our intentional consciousness is conformed to the divine persons (STh I, q. 43, a. 5, ad 2). A dynamic assimilation to the Spirit by way of love is related to an assimilation to the Son by way of wisdom, for the Word is ‘not any kind of word, but a word breathing love.’ The psychological analogy previously interpreted in more or less metaphysical-psychological terms is now grounded in experience marked by an interior enlightenment that ‘bursts forth in love.’ In this Augustinian perspective, the Trinity becomes an experienced reality implying a certain affectively experimental way of knowing. [62] Both missions communicate in ‘the one root of grace,’ but with the complementary effects of enlightenment and affectivity. In consequence, the graced believer does not simply behold God as an cognitive object, but is related to the Trinity in its subjectivity, by participating in the Trinitarian vitality of divine Be-ing.Presupposed to any understanding of the missions is the Trinity’s intimate presence to all creation. This is an indwelling proper to the creative activity of Be-ing, acting in love for all that is, ‘inpouring and creating the goodness in things’ (STh I, q. 20, a. 2). But this universal, essential indwelling blooms to a new intimacy in the human heart and mind. [63] The gift of grace awakens the spiritual creature to the wisdom and love that enable it to dwell in the Trinitarian God. A certain interpenetration of divine and human consciousness is implied, for the divine persons do not deal with their personal creation impersonally. Through the reciprocal indwelling brought about by grace, the created person is drawn into the Trinity’s interpersonal communal life. The deiform creature, known and loved by God, now knowingly and lovingly participates in God’s own self-knowledge and self-love. God is thus present, not in a kind of metaphysical physicality after the manner of a depersonalized ontology, but intentionally, in the knowing and loving that have their roots in God’s own Trinitarian consciousness. In this regard, the human being no longer simply beholds divine effects from without, but is enfolded into the divine communal life, knowing and loving God from within, in a growing interior familiarity that reaches its fulfillment only in heaven (STh I, q. 93, aa. 6-7). Consequently, Thomas’s treatment of the missions is marked with a subtle interplay between presence and absence, between the visible and the invisible, and between the ‘already’ in terms of Christian experience, and the ‘not yet’ of its eschatological fulfillment.
CONCLUSION
Through the four interweaving sections of this reflection, we have been attempting to show the holistic character of the Thomist disclosure of the divine mystery. The first section concentrated more on the subjective standpoint of the theologian in the humble and discrete exploration of the divine subject. This led into a sense of both God and the world in the light of infinite Be-ing, the boundless space in which theology must unfold. From there, a third section led into the field of communicative intentionality in which Thomist theology seeks to understand the God-world relationship, while the fourth part returned to the Trinitarian narrative that underpins the whole and that stands at the origin of all Christian theology.
We hope to have indicated something of the holographic intentionality of Thomas’s disclosure of the divine subject, the God of revelation. The data are the Trinitarian dona; the field in which they can be understood, in terms of both the gifts and the giver, is the limitless horizon of Be-ing, love and beatitude. The psychological appropriation of the Trinitarian mystery both clarifies the divine vitality of interpersonal communion and throws light on the manner in which the believer participates in that life by being conformed to the wisdom of the Word and the love of the Spirit. The result is a mutual indwelling, a two-way intentional communion, as human intentionality provides an analogy for the Trinitarian life of God, and as that Trinitarian life transforms our intentional existence into a divine dwelling place, to be the image of God (STh I, q. 93, a. 4). [64] Though the humble path of theology is always veiled in the mediations of sense and imagination and the complexity of human reason, it remains a progressive entry into the manner in which God knows and loves himself within the Trinitarian mystery (cf. STh I, q. 93, aa. 5-8). It celebrates our being joined to God, even if the reality attained by our faith and love defers a full knowledge of the giver of all gifts to a fulfillment beyond this life.
[1] An indication of the many distinctive readings is W. J. Hankey, God in Himself: Aquinas’s Doctrine of God as Expounded in the Summa Theologiae (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
[2] The following are resources for developing (and criticizing) the position I have taken here: Bernard Lonergan, Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas, vol. 2 of Collected Works (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997); idem, Method in Theology (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1972); Robert Doran, Theology and the Dialectics of History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989); Robert Sokolowski, Eucharistic Presence: A Study in the Theology of Disclosure (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1994); idem, Introduction to Phenomenology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and the still valuable study, Edward Farley, Ecclesial Man: A Social Phenomenology of Faith and Reality (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975).
[3] Brian Shanley, O.P., Sacra Doctrina and the Theology of Disclosure, The Thomist 61 (1997): 178.
[4] For a recent and thorough refutation of prevalent misconceptions on this point, see Gilles Emery, O.P., “Essentialism or Personalism in the Treatise on God in Saint Thomas Aquinas,’ The Thomist 64 (2000): 521-63.
[5] See John I. Jenkins, Knowledge and Faith in Thomas Aquinas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 5, 79-90, for a new view of these “beginners.’
[6] By translating Ipsum Esse as “Be-ing,’ I am trying to draw attention to the dynamic, verbal form of so designating the divine reality.
[7] “Dicendum quod manifestatio quae fit per aliquod lumen, ad omnia illa se extendere potest quae illi lumini subiiciuntur’ (STh II-II, q. 171, a. 3).
[8] With an emphasis on the Spirit typical of the Secunda Pars, Thomas remarks that “whatever its source, truth is of the Holy Spirit’ (omne verum a quocumque dicatur a Spiritu Sancto est [STh I-II, q. 109, a. 1, ad 1]).
[9] On this topic of analogy, current discussion might note that Derrida’s whole deconstructionist project owes its origins to his desire to work out the terms of analogy. See Jacques Derrida, An Introduction to Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, trans. John P. Leavey Jr. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989): “Husserl never ceased to appeal to the imperative of univocity. Equivocity is the path of all philosophical aberration. It is all the more difficult not to be hasty here, as the sense of equivocity in general is itself equivocal. There is a contingent plurivocity and multisignificance and an essential one’ (100-101).
[10] A. N. Williams, The Ground of Union: Deification in Aquinas and Palamas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) 93-101.
[11] Jean-Pierre Torrell, O.P., Saint Thomas d’Aquin, maître spirituel (Paris: Cerf, 1996), 31.
[12] For a constructive suggestion within the current problematic of the gift, see Robyn Horner, Rethinking God as Gift: Marion, Derrida and the Limits of Phenomenology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000). How the various aspects of Aquinas’s treatment of grace can be related to this would require a further article.
[13] Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). In Thomist terms, we could say that, just as it Word is “not any kind of word,’ neither is the Spirit any kind of “spirit,’ let alone the Geist of the Nazi era.
[14] For a clear exposition of theology as sacra doctrina and of the interconnection of various types of wisdom, see Matthew Levering, “Wisdom and the Viability of Thomistic Trinitarian Theology,’ The Thomist 64 (2000): 598-604.
[15] Shanley, “Sacra Doctrina,’ 177.
[16] Of related interest is the article of Lawrence J. Donahoo, O.P., “The Nature and Grace of Sacra Doctrina in St. Thomas’s Super Boetium de Trinitate,’ The Thomist 63 (1999): 343-401.
[17] Mark F. Johnson, “God’s Knowledge in Our Frail Minds: The Thomistic Model of Theology,’ Angelicum 76 (1999): 24-45.
[18] “Y a conformity of perspective, a seeing with God; it is a teaching that strives to display the luminosity and intelligibility that things believed have in God’s own mind’ (Shanley, “Sacra Doctrina,’ 176).
[19] “id quod notum est sibi soli de seipso, et aliis per revelationem communicatum’ (STh I, q. 1, a. 6).
[20] For a more general but insightful reflection, see Rowan Williams, “What does Love Know? St. Thomas on the Trinity,’ New Blackfriars 82 (June 2001): 260-72.
[21] Though Thomas does not identify theology with infused wisdom, he never loses the opportunity to point out the relevance of a deeper, more intimate manner of knowing God.
[22] Levering, “Wisdom and the Viability of Thomistic Trinitarian Theology,’ 593-618.
[23] “Cum enim homo habet promptam voluntatem ad credendum, diligit veritatem creditam, et super ea excogitat et amplectitur si quas rationes ad hoc invenire potest’ (STh II-II, q. 2, a. 10).
[24] “solus Deus deificet, communicando consortium divinae naturae per quondam similitudinis participationem’ (STh I-II, q. 112, a. 1).
[25] Anthony J. Godzieba, “Ontotheology to Excess: Imagining God without Being,’ Theological Studies 56 (1995): 3-20.
[26] On the relationship of negation to affirmation in our knowledge of God, see De Pot. q. 7, a. 5. Further remarks are found Torrell, Saint Thomas d’Aquin, maître spirituel, 43-50.
[27] “our Lord Jesus Christ . . . demonstrated for us the way of truth in himself’ (STh III, prol.). Note, too, how the incarnation “transvalues’ our natural knowledge of God: e.g., STh III, q. 46,a. 3.
[28] Torrell, Saint Thomas d’Aquin, maître spirituel, 32-34.
[29] Williams, The Ground of Union, 40-41.
[30] Joseph A. Bracken, “Images of God within Systematic Theology,’ Theological Studies 63 (2002): 362-73.
[31] Though there is the special case of the Incarnation, “God in man through union’ (STh I, q. 8, a. 3, ad 4)
[32] Though the fuller disclosure of such interiority awaits a Trinitarian reiteration, it is already adumbrated. See STh I, q. 10, a. 2, sed contra; I, q. 10, a. 3; I, q. 11, a. 4; I, q. 12, a. 1, ad 1.
[33] Even in “the economy of the gift,’ as in Horner, Rethinking God as Gift.
[34] Eric Voegelin, Order and History I: Israel and Revelation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), 408-12.
[35] STh I, q. 12, a. 12. For a comment on the process of manuductio, see Philip A. Rolnick, Analogical Possibilities: How Words Refer to God (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993) 119-123.
[36] STh I, q. 3, a. 4. ad 2.
[37] For a linguistic reading of Aquinas, see David Burrell, Aquinas: God and Action (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979).
[38] In Eph. 1, lect. 8; In Heb. 11, lect. 1.
[39] In Div. Nom., c. 7, lect. 4.
[40] STh I, q. 13, a. 2.
[41] This is not to say that the via eminentiae is ultimately negative. Note how Thomas is increasingly severe on the agnosticism of the great Jewish commentator Maimonides; compare I Sent., d. 2, a. 1, ad 3 with De Pot., q. 7, a. 5, and STh I, q. 13, a. 2. Kevin Hart’s influential book, The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology and Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000) awaits a full Thomist response.
[42] Citing Augustine, De Trin., book 14.
[43] There seems to be a certain wobble in Thomass precise intention here, for he finished this question by stating rather summarily that he has said enough about what “pertains to the unity of the divine essence’ (STh I, q. 26, a. 4, ad 2), and then repeats the point in the prologue to the next set of Trinitarian questions in q. 27 : “having considered what pertains to the unity of the divine essence, it remains to consider matters pertaining to the Trinity of persons in God.’ I defer to specialists on this matter.
[44] Neil Ormerod, “The Psychological Analogy: At Odds with Modernity,’ Pacifica 14 (2001): 281-94; and Anthony J. Kelly, “A Trinitarian Moral Theology,’ Studia Moralia 39/1 (2001): 245-90. For surprising instances of the psychological analogy in German Protestant theology, see Samuel M. Powell, The Trinity in German Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 5-7, 18, 20, 47-53, 82-87, 210-18.
[45] Emery, “Essentialism or Personalism,’ 548-49.
[46] Ibid., esp. 554-63.
[47] For the contemplative and moral dimensions of the image, see Michael A. Dauphinais, “Loving the Lord your God: The Imago Dei in Saint Thomas Aquinas,’ The Thomist 63 (1999): 241-67.
[48] Frederick E. Crowe, “For Inserting a New Question (26A) in the Prima Pars,’ The Thomist 64 (2000): 565-80.
[49] Cajetan’s commentary on STh I, q. 39, a. 1 (Rome: Edit. Leonina, 1889).
[50] The usus Ecclesiae (STh I, q. 36, a. 1, ad 1).
[51] See the following: “Pater enim intelligendo se et Filium et Spiritum Sanctum, et omnia alia quae eius scientia continentur, concipit Verbum, ut sic tota Trinitas Verbo dicatur, et etiam omnis creatura’ (STh I, q. 34, a. 1, ad 3).
[52] See Max Seckler, La Salut et l’Histoire: La pensée de sant Thomas d’Aquin sur la théologie de h’histoire (Paris: Cerf, 1967), 73-79.
[53] Shanley, “Sacra Doctrina,’ 181: “To grasp the Trinitarian distinction is to see that God could have been all that there is and completely happy . . . quite apart from creation.’
[54] F.-X. Putallaz, Le sens de la réflexion chez Thomas d’Aquin (Paris: Vrin, 1991), 251-74.
[55] Torrell, Saint Thomas d’Aquin, maître spirituel, 208-13.
[56] For a recent treatment of this topic, see Timothy L. Smith, “The Context and Character of Thomas’s Theory of Appropriations,’ The Thomist 63 (1999): 579-612.
[57] Anne Hunt, The Trinity and the Paschal Mystery: A Development in Recent Catholic Theology (Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 1997).
[58] Anne Hunt, “Psychological Analogy and the Paschal Mystery in Trinitarian Theology,’ Theological Studies 59 (1998): 197-218.
[59] On this point, see Carl N. Still, “ >Gifted Knowledge’: An Exception to Thomistic Epistemology?,’ The Thomist 63 (1999): 173-90.
[60] Shanley, “Sacra Doctrina,’ 182: “sacra doctrina involves a new Trinitarian way of seeing the whole, but also of experiencing the whole.’
[61] For this broader sense of the invisible mission of the Word, see B. Pottier, S.J., “Note sur la mission invisible du Verbe chez saint Thomas d’Aquin,’ Nouvelle Revue Théologique 123/4 (October-December 2001): 547-57.
[62] Torrell, Saint Thomas d’Aquin, maître spirituel, 123-29.
[63] Note how this is anticipated in STh I, q. 8, a. 3, ad 4.
[64] See Williams, The Ground of Union, 157-60, for an illuminating summary.
