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

314 Appropriation
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Hugh of Saint Victor knew this triad of divine
attributes from his patristic sources, and he applied it to his own Trinitarian
reXections with Wnesse and nuance. Hugh made a light and sparing use of it.
When Peter Abelard took this triadic formula over from Hugh, it took on a
primary role, and this primary function was something out of the ordinary.5
Reacting against what he perceived as Roscelin’s leaning to tritheism,
Abelard wanted to make a defence of traditional Trinitarian teaching against
the way the new ‘dialecticians’ were talking. This is what Abelard’s Theology of
the Sovereign Good sets out to do, as do its revised editions (the Theologia
Christiana and Theologia Scholarium). One of the main features of Abelard’s
thesis consisted in disclosing the three divine persons on the basis of power,
wisdom, and benevolence (potentia, sapientia, benignitas). The Father ‘is
called Father because of the unique power of his majesty’; the Son is called
Son ‘because one can see authentic wisdom in him’; and the Holy Spirit is so
called ‘according to the grace of his goodness’. Thus, ‘power is designated by
the name Father; Wisdom by the name Son; a favourable feeling for creatures
by the name Holy Spirit’. In sum, ‘That God would thus be three persons—
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—comes down to saying that the divine substance
is power, wisdom, goodness.’ Abelard’s reasoning about the Trinity leads him
to envisage it on the basis of the ‘sovereign good’ which consists in the three
notes of ‘power, wisdom and goodness’.6
Abelard had as deWnite a conception of the unity of God, as a single and
singular substance, as he did of the properties by which the persons are
distinguished.7 He had a good grasp of the Trinity in the light of the relative
properties and processions (generation and procession), but he nonetheless
tried to explain these properties by means of the triadic formula mentioned
above. The properties of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are distinct ‘because the
Father is said to be Father purely because he is powerful, the Son from the fact
that he can know, and the Holy Spirit on account of his being good’.8 Abelard
could see perfectly well for himself that the problem raised by this analysis
is how to use these attributes to distinguish the persons, given that one
5 See D. Poirel, Livre de la nature et débat trinitaire au XIIe siècle: Le De tribus diebus de
Hugues de Saint-Victor, Turnhout, 2002, pp. 381–383.
6 Abelard, Theologia Summi Boni, Bk I, ch. II (CCCM 13, pp. 86–88).
7 Ibid., Bk II, ch. I (CCCM 13, pp. 124–125).
8 Ibid., Bk II, ch. IV (CCCM 13, pp. 150–151). The same thesis is repeated at the conclusion
of the chapter: ‘because the Father, who is a Person by the very meaning of the word, must be
deWned precisely as divine Power, that is to say, God-as-Power; God the Son, as divine Wisdom;
the Holy Spirit as divine Goodness. Thus the Father is diVerent from the Son by his property or
deWnition; that is to say, he is another than him; likewise, both are diVerent from the Holy
Spirit.’ (p. 152; cf. pp. 87–88).