SACRAMENTS OF THE INCARNATE WORD - ETD - University of ...

enough, according to this view, that human beings reflect God’s image intellectually, just
as the Word is the intellectual emanation or progeny of the Father. 14 This therefore yields
nativity or begottenness as the Son’s personal property, evoking his immaterial origin in
the Father, consistent with God’s intellectual nature. 15 “Son,” by contrast, while
indicating that he is “of the same nature as the Father,” 16 may, at a purely lexical level, be
understood mistakenly in a material sense. 17 In this way, Paissac notes, Thomas
apparently aims to avoid the “grave heresies” of Arius and Sabellius, both of whom
mistook what it means for the Son to proceed from the Father. 18 As “God is above all
things,” writes Thomas,
we should understand what is said of God not according to the mode of the lowest
creatures, namely bodies, but from the similitude of the highest creatures, the
intellectual substances; while even the similitudes derived from these fall short in
the representation of divine objects. Procession, therefore, is not to be understood
from what it is in bodies, either according to local movement or by way of a cause
proceeding forth to its exterior effect, as, for instance, like heat from the agent to
the thing made hot. Rather it is to be understood by way of an intelligible
emanation, for example, of the intelligible word which proceeds from the speaker,
yet remains in him. In that sense the Catholic Faith understands procession as
existing in God. 19
des créatures, ne saurait manifester à l’esprit plus que lui le mystère de la deuxième Personne” (Théologie
du Verbe, p. 201). Cf. p. 218ff.
14 I 35 and 93.
15 I 34, 2; cf. I-II 93, 1 ad 2.
16 I 34, 2 ad 3; cf. I 42, 2 ad 1.
17 Théologie du Verbe, pp. 205, 216, 218ff.
18 Ibid., p. 205; cf. I 27, 1 c.
19 I 27, 1 c. I will return to this basic argument of Aquinas in ch. 3 of the present study.
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