Prima Pars
Lecture 150: Relations as Distinguishing Principles of Divine Persons

Transcript
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Would strength beat you up or would the strong man beat you up? You'd say the strong man beat you up, right? But maybe you could say by strength, right? Because of the way it signifies. So although there isn't this real distinction like there is an us between the strength and the strong one of form and matter, there is nevertheless a way of signifying in God this distinction, right? So by reason of the way of signifying, the one signifies as an individual substance and the other signifies as a, what, form, right? Something can be said of one that cannot be said of the, what, other, right? Even though they are in the thing the same, right? As we're reading there the third book of natural hearing, that's where in the first part Aristotle defines motion, right? And then after defining motion he gets into acting upon and undergoing, right? And what is the act in both cases? And the act is the same. And the objection, of course, is acting upon is not undergoing. I don't act upon myself, right? Okay. So is my kicking you and your being kicked? I need two different realities. What did you say? Aristotle says it's the same thing. But it's called kicking insofar as it's from me, the kicker. And it's called being kicked because it's in you, as a subject from me. Or not. Yes, yes, yes. So kicking and being kicked differ in definition, even though it's the same, what, reality? I was looking at Plato's dialogue. It's a terrible dialogue. I wouldn't recommend it to you. At least I wouldn't have no hard place to begin. The Parmenides, right? And in the Parmenides, Parmenides and Zeno have come to Athens. And they talk to this young guy, Socrates. And Socrates kind of convicts himself sometimes. Some of my articles I've used, this passage, but they were talking about being in one, right? And the way Parmenides and Zeno speak is if being partakes of the one and the one partakes of being, is you have to do two different things, being in one. Well, are they two different things? No, they actually differ in definition, but they're really the same thing. And in the fourth book of Wisdom, when Aristotle shows that wisdom is about being in the one, he shows that they're the same, but they're nevertheless, what, different definition. So one really means undivided being. But every being in order to be must be in some way undivided. And so when you divide, you know, you chop your head off and so on, you cease to be. And if I broke up, you know, if I separated the parts of this chair, if I broke up with the chair, you wouldn't have a chair anymore. So in a sense, the being of the chair and the unity of the chair are the same thing. But unity adds the idea of negation. That's negation of reason. Negation of division, right? Negation is a being of reason. So Parmenus and Zeno in the dialogue have not yet seen this, right? Whether Plato saw it, we don't know, right? A lot of times we see the problem in Plato's dialogues. Then you pick up Aristotle. It's in solving this, right? Now Plato gave lectures besides the dialogues, which we don't have. We've lost Plato's lectures. So whether in his lectures he got any further than the dialogue, we don't know, right? See, we see a problem in the dialogue, and then we see the solution in Aristotle. And as Aristotle helped in some way in the lectures of Plato, did Plato get no further than the, what, dialogue, you know? And sometimes in some of the dialogues there's a little suspicion that Aristotle's objections to the teaching of Plato were already being incorporated by Plato in the dialogues. It should be a very subtle thing, you know? Incidentally, though, it's a nice thing about Plato, though. So when Aristotle was talking about the infinite there in the third book of natural hearing, and he's asking, does the infinite exist? And he's going back and forth, right? And one reason he gives why people think the infinite exists is because they think time is infinite. Time seems to have, what, always been. I guess Zeno said this, right? Someone asked him, what is, can you give me something that's always been? And he said time, you see? And if you say that there was a time before time was, you can't get in yourself, right? So it seems that time always was, right? And Thomas in the commentary says, and this was the common opinion of the Greeks, right? And only Plato, as Aristotle points out later on, said that time had a beginning. That's interesting, right? Now, whether Plato knew that is another question, but he had the idea that time could have a beginning, right? And Aristotle, you know, in the book on probable reasoning, says that one of the things we long to know is whether the universe is eternal or not. And Thomas will maintain that by natural reason you can't really know whether the universe was eternal or not, right? But it's interesting that, you know, for most of the Greek philosophers, and for most men, it would seem kind of, you know, obvious that time always was. And Plato said, no, it could have a beginning. And so in the beginning, God created heaven and earth. At the same time, he created time, right? That's the beginning of time. So you have to admire this guy, Plato, huh? Aristotle, or Thomas, really, says that Plato and Aristotle are the chief philosophers. Or as the prikipwi, it says, the sophie. So although he puts Aristotle higher, calling him the philosopher, right? He puts these two guys as the chief. Just like I might say to St. Augustine and St. Thomas are the chief theologians of the church, of the greatest minds. You can see that even in the catechism of the Catholic Church, right? Most of the quotes are from, except for scripture, obviously, are from Augustine, and then after Augustine and Thomas, you know? So, great minds. So, I'm ready to go. Do you want Article 2? Where the persons now are distinguished by the relations. To the second one goes forward thus. It seems that the persons are not distinguished by the relations. For simple things are distinguished, what? By themselves, right? I notice a cube of clay, a sphere of clay, could be distinguished by, what? Something other than self, right? By their shapes. There's a composition there, right? But simple things have to be distinguished, what? By themselves, it seems. But the divine persons are maximae. Most of all simple, right? Therefore, they're distinguished by themselves and not by, what? Relations, huh? Moreover, no form is distinguished except by, except according to its own genus, huh? For white is distinguished from black, only according to, what? Quality, right? It's a different quality. But hypostasis, huh? Signifies an individual in the genus of substance, huh? Like substance and relation, different categories, right? Different genre. Therefore, hypostasis are not able to be distinguished by, what? Relations. Moreover, the absolute is before the relative. Now, we've spoken before about, Thomas used the word absolute there for something that is itself rather than towards another, right? So the absolute is before relative. But the first distinction, of all distinctions, of all distinctions, real distinctions, that is to say, right? But the first distinction is the distinction of the divine persons. Therefore, the divine persons should not be distinguished by relations, but by something, what? Absolute, right? The first distinction should be an absolute distinction, not a relative distinction, right? Because the absolute is before the relative, huh? That's a marvelous objection. I wonder how this guy thought, I mean, slept at night, huh? My teacher and father, well, they, you know, he had his problems sleeping, you know. It used to be a book a day, you know. And so he couldn't sleep at night, huh? And they put him in the hospital one time, and they were experimenting with, you know, things to help him sleep. Because a lot of these things, I guess, to help you sleep, they'd be kind of groggy each day, and they couldn't find anything, right? I remember one of the friars complaining, I haven't slept in three nights, and I haven't slept in three years. Why can't I put him in this place? I think you've got problems. I hear what these military men sometimes, you know, doing a campaign, you know, when the action's tough and going for a few nights without sleep, you know. There's a story about MacArthur. There wasn't one where a friend came by, you know, and he sat down to eat dinner, you know. And the guy noticed MacArthur wasn't eating anything, right? He said, why aren't you eating? Are you hungry? MacArthur says, I'm too tired to eat, he says. Oh, right. So finally he said goodnight and so on. And the next morning this guy got up and he was leaving, and he said to the guy, say goodbye to MacArthur from home. I wake the guy up, he needs to sleep. Oh, he was up there two hours ago. So, I don't know how they stay awake, you know, but that's how they train him that they can really do it. But most of us are going to be much good, you know, in the planning at this time. So you wonder how Thomas here stayed. They describe Thomas, you know, he dictated several people at the same time. Somebody said, exhausted, laying down the bed, they're going to continue to dictate. I guess the fourth objection, right? That which presupposes distinction, right? Some distinction. Cannot be the first beginning of distinction. But relation presupposes distinction, since it is placed in its, what, definition. For the being of the relative is to have itself to another. So it's got to be another and different distinction before you can, what, have a relation. So how can this be the first beginning, distinguishing things in God? How can relation be such a thing? You know, okay, that's a coincidence of me, I don't know how it, you know. So I think Thomas said, if there was no response. There was no response. Very good. Against all this nonsense is what Boethius says, the Greek Boethius, in the book De Trinitati, right? That only relation multiplies the, what, Trinity. Sola. Sola Relatio, right? Sola. Quite a bad way it is. Now, I was mentioning earlier, before someone came in, I had found this thing on the internet called the Literature Network. And it has, you know, the full text of a lot of fictional works, right? You can get all Shakespeare's plays, you can get all Jane Austen's novels, I guess all Dickens novels, a lot of, well, an awful lot from Chesterton and so on, you know? Get Homer and so on. And it's mainly a literary thing, Literature Network is called. But, see, here's St. Augustine, I don't know what they put there, so it opened up and it was about the Confessions, right? You can see why the Confessions are kind of regarded as more humanistic or more literary than the one of the De Trinitati in there, something like that. And, you know, Boethius' Constellation of Philosophy, you know, had been admired by the poets and, as you know, the great Chaucer, right? Translated it into, what, Middle English. I guess Queen Elizabeth was 20, her own translation. And Washington Irving talks about it and so on. So literary things, you know. It's written in the form of a dialogue, right? So just like Plato's, you know, dialogues are more pleasing to the poets than Aristotle's treatises, right? We've lost Aristotle's dialogues, but Cicero says they're even better than Plato's, but I don't know. You don't have them, you just have fragments, huh? You know, there's a fragment, you read the famous fragment from the dialogue in Philosophy. The guy says, either you ought to philosophize or you ought not to, what do you say? You say you ought to, then do so. You say you ought not to, you're going to have to philosophize to show why not. So in either case, you must philosophize. It could have been devastating enough to have lots. I remember seeing the two physicists debating, right? The physicist says, well, my philosophy is devoid philosophy. I know that's a trap he says, you know. It's kind of, you know, still living on in Aristotle's fragment. So is that all in English? Yeah, it's all in English, yeah. Get Homer in there, Tolstoy, Hawthorne, you know, quite a bit. I just got surprised. Yeah, really. And all three? Yeah, I kind of got it backwards because I was looking under Hawthorne one time and I found this kind of interesting work called Old Home, Our Old Home, which is about his travels around England. It's very interesting to read. Just kind of like reading, you know? And then I was looking at Jane Austen because we were hearing it on the TV and so on. And I said, well, Jane, it's a bomb, so put it in your network. I'm okay, I'll take that in. And all some other stuff comes up, you know? Wow. So. I'm sure there's all kinds of stuff I don't know about on the Internet. Yeah, sure. But, you know, even we clumsy, ignorant computers occasionally stumble upon something, right? Yes. I agree. Because even scientists sometimes stumble upon something, right? Uh-huh. And Eisenberg talks about the development of quantum theory and how it all started and so on. He says, it'll always be hard to understand how such an apparently accidental discovery, you know, should have led to all this change and the greatest change in physics since the beginning, you know? That's what somebody just, I heard somebody said, some of them think, oh, the great... The discoveries in modern science started with the expression, that's funny. They quote some famous scientist in the 19th century, you know, talking about how everything seems to be, you know, worked out and kind of complete and stuff, but there's a little cloud here and a little cloud there, you know. One led to relativity, one led to quantum theory. There's a little puzzlement out there on the horizon, you know, but it doesn't seem to amount to it, you know. All of a sudden this thing, you know, comes up in the whole sky, you know. A big change, you know. Incidentally, there's a new letter they discovered of Einstein, you know. It's going on auction. So it's in the news a little bit. And really he pans religion, you know, even the Jewish religion, right. It's all, you know, childish superstitions. Nothing will convince me otherwise, he says. So it's kind of, you know, really the most negative thing people have seen really from Einstein, you know. I'll let it go to somebody, you know, his views. I think this is common among the, you know, most of those great physicists, you know, they were atheists or something of that sort. But something that, the mind training, you know, at the time. Brother Rochelle likes to tell a story about Einstein. There was some seminarian that wanted to meet him or something. He went to meet him. And he said that Einstein was fascinated with the doctrine of transubstantiation. Yeah, I'd heard that, yeah. It seemed like he thought it was true. Well, maybe not. He thought he was fascinated with it as a curiosity. Yeah, as imagination, you know. Okay. So that's sort of the body of the article now. I answer, it should be said, that whenever, in whatever many things, right, there's found something common, it's necessary to seek something that is, what, distinctive. So if man is common to all of us, there must be something that distinguishes us other than the fact that we're men. Okay, because that's, okay. Now, of course, the divine nature is common in a different sense than man is to us. Because man is something universal, but it's one divine nature individually, right, that is common. Whence since the three persons come together according to the unity of the essence. That book I was mentioning by the Pope, you know, during lectures, you know, use the term the triune God again that I'd seen in his lectures here. Whence since the three persons come together according to the unity of the essence. It is necessary to seek something by which they are distinguished. So not distinguished by the divine nature. In order that they might be, what, really, many, plural. Now he says there are found in the divine persons two things by which they differ. To wit, origin, right, one proceeds from the other, and the relations, right, which, although in reality do not differ, right, nevertheless, they differ in their way of what? Signify. For origin signifies by way of an action, huh? As generation, right? Relation, however, by way of a form as what? Fatherhood, right? Now, the question is which of these two, right? He's narrowing it down to these two, right? Some, therefore, noticing that relation falls upon an act, said that the apostases in God are distinguished by the origin. As if we say that the Father is distinguished from the Son, insofar as he, the Father, generates him, right? And the Son, because he is what? Generated. And that the relations or the properties manifest, consequently, the distinctions of what? Hypostasis or distinction of persons. Speaking of the Greeks and the Romans, right? Just as in creatures, the properties manifest the, what? Distinction of individuals, which come about to something else, namely the material principles, huh? But this cannot stand. On account of two things, Thomas says. First, in order, for this, that some two things be understood as being distinct, one from the other, is necessary that, what? To understand their distinction through something inside or intrinsic to each of them. Just as in created things, through, what? Their matter or through their form. But the origin of something does not signify something intrinsic to it, huh? But either as a road from the thing, like generating, right? Or to the thing, as being born or generated, huh? Just as generation signifies as a road to the thing generated, and as something going forth from the one, what? Generating. Rather than as intrinsic, right? Whence it is not able to be that the thing generated and the one generating are distinguished by generation alone, but is necessary to understand, both in the one generating, as well as in the one generated, those by which they are distinguished from each other. Does that make sense? But in the divine person, there's nothing other to understand except the essence and the relation or property, huh? Do they translate that property, proprietas? Yeah. Whence, since they come together in the essence, right? It remains that they do be distinguished through the relations of persons from each other. So they've got to be distinguished by something within them, right? And all that's within them is the divine nature and this relation. And one of these can't distinguish them in the divine nature, because that's common to all three. Therefore, it must be the remainder of the nation, right? That's like, similar to the reason why he says we can't distinguish by the act. It's similar to what you said about kicking. It's one act. Yeah. And it's common to both. Yeah. You can't. It's... But he didn't say that. You know, he sees some distinction, you know. The father generates, the son to generate. The distinction between them. But that's by reason of something that is signified as proceeding from one, or ending up with the other one, right? Rather than by something intrinsic to them, right? And Thomas says they have to be more distinguished by what is intrinsic to them, right? So he eliminates what is signified not as intrinsic to them, right? And then he subdivides what's intrinsic into the nature and relation. He eliminates, what? One of them. And the one that remains, as Sherlock Holmes says, however strange it may seem, must be the truth, right? And all but one have been eliminated, right? You know? And if I know one of you guys committed the murder, right? And I eliminate five of you, then the last guy. You're it. Strange it may seem that he would have done this. He must be the one, right? Yeah. And you have to be sure that it's exhausted, right? Yeah. Now, secondly, because distinction in divine persons should not be understood in this way, that something, what, common is divided, right? Because the common essence remains, what, undivided, right? But it's necessary that those things that are distinguishing constitute the very things, what, that are distinct. Thus, therefore, the relations or the properties distinguish or constitute the hypostasis or persons insofar as those very subsisting persons, insofar as they are those very subsisting persons. Just as fatherhood is the father, right? And sonhood or sonship is the son. In the way of speaking, that in God, the abstract and the concrete, what is and that by which it is, do not differ, right? It's against the notion of origin that it constitutes the hypostasis or the persona. Why? Because the origin actively signifies, it's signified, signifies as going forth from the person subsisting. Whence it, what? Presupposes him, right? So I couldn't generate unless I already were. So you have to see the person is somehow constituted before he can generate it. But the origin passing signified as nativity, birth, signifies as a way to the person subsisting, right? And not yet as, what? Constituting him, huh? Whence it is said better, huh? Helios, right? He's not saying that there isn't some basis for distinguishing the father and the son because the one generates and the other is generated, right? Okay. But is that the best way of distinguishing between me and my son? That I generated him and he was generated by me. It does distinguish us in some way, but aren't we better distinguished by something intrinsic to us, right? I'm a philosopher and he's a soldier in Afghanistan. Okay. Got an email from him saying, you know, you're getting a little used to going nowhere without your gun. Don't even go to the bathroom without your gun. Even though he's in a relatively safer part of, you know, of Afghanistan. He's not out on the board in there with the Pakistan. So something intrinsic to the man, right? It's the best way to distinguish, right? So Thomas is not saying that there's no truth in the other position, right? He says, Although they are distinguished in both ways, right? Nevertheless, before and chiefly through the, what? Relations. According to the way of, what? Understanding. Whence this name father not only signifies a property, but also a, what? Hypostasis person. But this name generator or generating signifies only a, what? Property. Because this name father signifies a relation which is distinctive of and constitutive of the hypostasis. But this name generating or generated signifies origin, which does not distinguish and constitute the, what? Hypostasis. So you convinced by Thomas then? You can understand him a bit? Of course. Every little bit. So you go past him, right? He's been past him. Thomas often says we come to the truth, paulatum, right? Which is probably translated in English, but it's bit by bit. I understand something of that. And now I'll read it again and understand a little bit more of it, you know? And I mentioned how when I was at Laval, you know, Deconic was, I'd been teaching, you know, the books of natural hearing, the physics since 1935 when I was up there in, you know, 58, you know. He says, you still see something new every time I go through these, he says, right? So, you know, C.S. Lewis complains, you know, he says, what do you do with the guy who says? Do you ask him, you know, have you read Homer? Have you read Shakespeare? Oh, yeah, once. It's something you read and you read again, right? Someone's describing a study of the Kittredge, you know, kind of the great scholar of Chaucer and Shakespeare and so on. And he taught Shakespeare as if he could go on reading Shakespeare forever, you know. He could never exhaust him at it. But he thought it's always true about something like this, huh? Now, the first objection was saying that simple things are distinguished by themselves, but the divine persons are most simple. Well, Thomas says in answer, to the first, therefore, it should be said that the persons are the subsisting relations. Whence it is not repugnant to the simplicity of divine persons that they be distinguished by relations, or being distinguished by themselves. The second objection, no form is distinguished except according to its, what, genus, right? Well, Thomas points out, the second it should be said, and this is very important now, that the divine persons are not distinguished in the being in which they subsist. They're not distinguished in the nature they have, right? They're not distinguished in their understanding, or willing, right? Nor in anything, what? Absolute, right? Whence, but only according to the fact that they are, what, said towards something, right? Whence, for their distinction, the nation suffices, huh? Whence, for me to be a distinct person from my son, I have to have an understanding and a will, rational nature, right? He's got to have another, you see? Rational nature, another understanding, another will, right? Yeah. Yeah, I was talking about, you know, makes you be a person. And, but in God, you have the same nature individually, in all three, it's common to all three. And the same understanding, the same will, right? So they can't be distinguished by something absolute, right? That the son is another divine nature from the father, no. Another understanding, another will, no. So he says, not my will, but thine be done. He's talking about the human will, right? And the divine will, right? There is an absolute distinction, right? But there's no distinction between the will of the father and the will of the son in his divine nature. Same will. So what's left is this, what? Relative distinction. And the third objection says, well, the absolute is before the relative. And the first distinction there in the thing should be, what? An absolute distinction, then, not a relative distinction. Now, Thomas gets very subtle here, right? That the more a distinction is before, right? It's prior. The closer it is to what? Unity. That's why the first distinctions are, in a sense, the smallest. And therefore, they're hardest to, what? See that. You know, the Greek philosophers, Aristotle and Plato and Albert the Great and Thomas the Ronan, are always saying that the beginning, you know, is small in size, but great is power. It's like a seed, yeah? So, it's difficult to see because it's so small, right? And then they warn you that even a little mistake there will be, in the end, a great mistake, like when you, you know, turn the road, right? A little mistake here becomes the further you go. Unity, almost. So, the more a distinction is before, right? The closer it is to what? Unity. Unity. I mean, we're doing the categories, right? You know how the categories goes, huh? You know, you start off with, let's say, substance, right? And you divide it into material and immaterial. Material may be into living and numbering. Living and, you know, animals and plants. And then, you know, it keeps on spreading out, right? And so, you get kind of like an evergreen tree, you know, going down. And so, they called this the tree of porphyry. So, I ended up at Leval there one time, Christmas time, when you give these little joking gifts, you know. So, they gave the logic professor the tree of porphyry, right? They said, you know, as you go on, you get, what, more and more multiplicity, right? You go down the tree, spread out. And as you go back, you're getting more and more, what, unity, right? To get on here. So, the closer you are, the more... A distinction is before, like this distinction before this one, and so on, the more, what? The closer you are to unity, right? So if the first distinction of all was a distinction of absolutes, it would not be, it would be further than unity, and a distinction of, what? That's very subtle, right? I'm a Thomaskin. He thinks these things, too. Quanto distincio prioris. The more a distinction is before, right? So much it is closer to, what? Unity. And therefore it ought to be minima. And therefore a distinction of persons ought not to be except through that which distinguishes the least, right? To it, to, like, the nation. Sometimes I have a close friend, you know, we think alike pretty much, you know, it's kind of nice to see him. My friend says, you know, how, why do we think alike so much, right? But, you know, the father and the son, they get, you know, they think alike because, you know, they have the same mind, right, huh? It's kind of an odd thing, you know, to think of two distinct persons having the same what? The same mind, yeah. Isn't that strange? Yeah. And you kind of took your thing and said, they think alike, didn't you? Yeah. That's true. Yeah. Yeah. We say sometimes in English, you know, you and I are one mind in this matter, right? You think alike. Right. Yeah. Yeah. This is interesting what Thomas is saying. Now, the fourth objection was saying that doesn't relation presuppose some other distinction, right? So how can it be the first source of distinction? Well, Thomas sees an element of truth in the objection that relation presupposes a distinction of the individual substances when it is a, what? Accident. But if the relation is subsisting, right, it does not presuppose a distinction, but it brings with itself a, what? Distinction. When it is said that the being of a relative is to have itself to another, through the other is understood the, what? Correlative, which is not before, but together, Nature's Aristotle says in the book called The Categories, right? So it gets in there, who knows? It gets in there, who knows? It gets in there, who knows?