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

184 The Person of the Son
of the known reality, abstracted from material conditions, which presents the
known object to our mind and puts our mind into an active state of knowing.
This is obviously not what we intend to refer to in our use of words; ‘this is
not the intention of the one who names something’.23
So the remaining option is that what we are signifying through our spoken
words is the conception of the known reality which we form within us. The
conception we form is the concept or word of the known thing which our
intellect expresses within itself and which proceeds internally within our mind.
It can either be a matter of the word which we conceive when we grasp
something’s nature, expressed in its deWnition, or the complex conception
through which we separate or connect concepts in order to build them into
phrases. The word is not that through which the mind knows (which is the
species) but is, rather, the fruit of an internal making or conceiving, the
expression of the reality known within our mind: the word is that ‘in which’
(in quo) our mind knows realities. The word is thus relative through and
through. It is relative to the mind which forms it and to the known thing
which is manifested to the mind which conceives it. It is through the word
that we ‘unite’ ourselves to the known reality.24 ‘And with this we now know
the meaning of the term ‘‘word’’.’25
In sum, the central feature which a word bears in itself is the fact of
proceeding from an active intellect. In so far as it expresses a known reality,
the word is also ‘like’ to this reality. And if that which knows is simultaneously
that which is known, then the word will be the perfect expression and
likeness of the mind from which it proceeds. From this standpoint, Thomas
can see the analogical status which the word has for human beings, for
angels, and in God. When we consider the Word in God, the fact that we
are dealing with something divine constrains us to appreciate that there are
many diVerences here from our human word. It is not a matter of the
demands of a theological thesis forcing one to tone things down, but the
properties which are bound up with the very notion of ‘divine Word’. This
Word does not travel from potency to act, and nor does it result from a
discursive noetic process, for the way in which God knows is perpetually
active and direct. So the Word is co-eternal with the One who utters him.
The Word is unique in that, whereas we know through a series of acts of
knowledge (and thus through a series of words), the Father knows himself
and knows all things in one single act. Finally, this Word is neither an
23 In Ioan. 1.1 (no. 25). This is precisely the point which Thomas did not perceive so clearly in
his earlier teaching.
24 See above, in Chapter 4, ‘A Procession which is the Generation of the Word’.
25 In Ioan. 1.1 (no. 25).