The Trinitarian Theology of Saint Thomas Aquinas - El Camino ...

Trinitarian Monotheism 149
Thomas rejected the notion of reducing the word God to an essentialist
meaning. God is a ‘thick’ name. Properly speaking, according to Thomas, the
word means ‘the divine essence in he who has it’, or ‘the divine essence in as
much as it is in that which possesses it’, not in an abstract way but in the style
of substantive concrete names: it is thus that the word man, for example,
refers to a human nature in a concrete individual; that is to say, a humannatured
individual. Using an analytic process which was commonplace in his
time, St Thomas distinguishes, on the one hand, what a word means, and, on
the other hand, the ‘supposition’ (suppositio, supponere) of this word. This
procedure is too important to Thomas for us to run over it lightly.
On the one hand, a word conveys a conceptual content: this is what it
formally signiWes. On the other hand, in our speaking, a word is often used
as a ‘place holder’ for a reality or to ‘represent’ it. When we say for instance,
‘these men have their freedom taken from them’, the word men in this proposition,
‘substitutes for’, ‘represents’, ‘stands in for’, or ‘refers to’ the persons who
are taken captive. The ‘supposition’ is linked to the signiWcation, since it is
because of what it signiWes that a word can have such a reference within our
speech.106 And, not just through an accommodation to our language use but
through its own proper weight, the name God has a good Wt for standing in for
a distinct divine person (the Father is ‘God who begets the Son’), or for
designating many divine persons (‘God born of God’, ‘God who breathes the
Holy Spirit’) or even for representing the divine essence.107 Commenting on
the Wrst verse of John’s Gospel (the Word was with God), Thomas explains that,
The name God signiWes the divinity, but in a supposit and in a concrete way, whereas
the name deity signiWes divinity in an absolute and abstract way. From this it follows
that, through its natural capacity and mode of signifying, the word deity cannot stand
in for person; it can only be a place holder for the nature. But, from its own mode of
signifying, the word God can naturally stand in for the person, just like the word man
takes the place of a human natured supposit . . . Thus, when it is said here that the
Word was with God, the word God must necessarily be standing in for the person of the
Father, since the preposition with signiWes a distinction from the Word which is said
to be with God.108
When, in the same verse of the Prologue to the Fourth Gospel, St Thomas
reads the Word was God (or: God was the Word), he explains that in this
instance the word God refers to the person of the Word, not the person of the
106 See E. Sweeney, ‘Supposition, SigniWcation and Universals: Metaphysical and Linguistic
Complexity in Aquinas’, FZPT 42 (1995), 267–290. The theories of supposition are complex; for
an introductory survey and the bibliographical details, see A. de Libera, ‘Suppositio’, in Dictionnaire
du Moyen Âge, ed. C. Gauvard, A. de Libera and M. Zink, Paris, 2002, pp. 1358–1360.
107 ST I, q. 39; I Sent. d.4,q.1,a.2. 108 In Ioan. 1.1 (no. 44).