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

The Person of the Father 171
the Father’s person: the Father does not derive his being from another. Albert
the Great had already explained this in much detail, before St Thomas did so.99
The question of unbegottenness exposes a split between Bonaventure’s
Franciscan Trinitarian theology and the Dominican school to which Albert
and Thomas belonged. For St Bonaventure, unbegottenness does have a negative
face (the Father has no principle), but there is also a positive face on it. Not
to receive his existence from another, as Bonaventure explains it, that is, to be
Wrst, constitutes a position of nobility: and his primacy implies fecundity. ‘It
is because he is Wrst that the Father begets [the Son] and breathes [the Spirit].’
With the Franciscan Master, Unbegottenness designates precisely the fecundity
of primacy. So it does not just consist in a negation, but also in the aYrmation
of a positive feature of the Father, in other words, his primordial fecundity
which ‘produces’ the other divine persons: ‘the unbegottenness of the Father
signiWes his originary plenitude (plenitudo fontalis)’. According to Bonaventure,
this is the meaning of the Augustinian theme of the Father as ‘principle not
from a principle’ or ‘principle of the whole deity’. As a result, the Father’s proper
distinction is initially posited in terms of unbegottenness (‘we can conceive of
the hypostasis of the Father himself without conceiving another person, and it
is thus conceived without paternity’), and is drawn out to its fullness by
paternity. To be even more precise, the Franciscan Master has it that, ‘it is
because he is unbegotten that the hypostasis of the Father engenders [the
Son]’.100
On Wrst glance, the divergence could look abstruse or trivial, but in fact it
reXects a fundamental characteristic of the thought of these theologians.
St Bonaventure foregrounds the theme of primacy: originary plenitude is
taken to be the root or source of the Father’s paternity. Despite some nuances
typical of Latin theology, this conception probably could stake an aYnity with
Byzantine theology. On the other hand, with St Thomas, unbegottenness
refers to a negation which, as such, rests on the recognition of the Father as
principle within the order of relation: the Father engenders his Son and
breathes the Holy Spirit, but no one has the relation of principle to the
Father.101 As St Thomas sees it, the Bonaventurian thesis implies that the
Father would somehow be constituted in his personal subsistence in advance
of his paternity-relation. He takes this to be an extra-relational conception of
the Father. Against Bonaventure, he argues that: ‘If we take paternity out of
99 In his Commentary on the Sentences, St Albert dedicates no fewer than six articles to the
unbegottenness of the Father (I Sent. d. 28, aa. 1–6).
100 Bonaventure, I Sent. d. 27, p. 1, a. un., q. 2, sol. and ad 3; d. 28, a. un., q. 2; d. 28, dubium
1. There is an English translation containing some extracts from this in Y. Congar, I Believe in the
Holy Spirit, vol. 3, pp. 108–114.
101 Thomas, I Sent. d. 28, q. 1, a. 2.