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

172 The Person of the Father
consideration, then we can no longer conceive the Father’s hypostasis.’102
So he distances himself from the Bonaventurian view that the unbegottenness
signiWes the Father’s originary plenitude: ‘This cannot be true, because then
unbegottenness would not be a property distinct from paternity and spiration
...:intheGodhead to be source . . . means exactly the same as to be principle
of origin.’103 It is clear what is at stake in this debate about the unbegottenness
of the Father: it is about the relational idea of the person, that is the role of the
relative properties (paternity, Wliation, procession) in the distinction and the
constitution of the hypostases or divine persons.
Hence, the patristic expressions are explained by means of the doctrine of
person and of relation. The Father, as Augustine puts it, is ‘principle without
principle’, ‘principle of the whole divinity’, or ‘principle of the deity’. This
means that, without receiving his being from another, the Father is the
principle both of the Son whom he engenders and of the Holy Spirit who
proceeds from him; he is the principle from whom the other persons come
forth.104 It is to this relation of the Father to Son and Spirit that one refers
when one says that the Father is ‘source’; and this is what is designated by the
‘originary plenitude’ of the Father.105 When he reads in Pseudo-Denys that
the Father is the ‘source of the deity’ (fons deitatis) or that the ‘originary deity’
(fontana deitas) is in the Father, Thomas explains that these expressions
designate the Father as ‘principle without principle’ or as ‘author’, in the
way that Augustine speaks of it.106 This takes us back to the two main features
of the investigation of the Father: being himself without principle, the Father
is the principle of the Son and the Holy Spirit.
5. FROM FATHER TO FATHER
Understanding the Father as Source within the Trinity, or ‘principle without
principle’, is also a good way of illuminating the economy. Taken from the
perspective of appropriation, because the Father manifests himself as Source,
this characteristic of the Father carries over into the attribution of power, of
eternity, of creation, and of other similar features, to the person of the Father.
102 I Sent. d. 28, q. 1, a. 2, ad 3. This had already been the teaching of St Albert the Great
(I Sent. d. 28, a. 4). See above, in Chapter 6, ‘Relation the Heart of Trinitarian theology.’
103 ST I, q. 33, a. 4, ad 1; cf. I Sent. d. 28, q. 1, a. 1 and a. 2.
104 I Sent. d. 15, exp. text.; I Sent. d. 29, exp. text.; cf. for example Augustine, De Trinitate
IV.XX.29.
105 ST I, q. 33, a. 4, ad 1.
106 In Dion. de div. nom., ch. 2, lect. 2 (no. 155); ch. 2, lect. 4 (no. 181); I Sent. d. 28, q. 1, a. 1.