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

Appropriation 325
procession, linked to the distinction of attributes, which makes it possible for
appropriation to disclose the persons in a valuable and grounded way.49
In these analyses, Hugh of Saint Victor’s negative interpretation, which still
has an important position in Bonaventure’s presentation, and which Albert
also notes, has disappeared. In his Sentence Commentary, St Thomas does not
rely on this when he presents the general doctrine of appropriations: it only
comes in much later, in the exposition of the triad wisdom—power—
goodness.50 It is doubtless that, for Thomas, the diVerence between the
general doctrine of appropriations and the speciWc case of the triad of
power—wisdom—goodness stands out more than it did for his predecessors.
Even though, historically speaking, the question about the triad which issued
from Abelard and Hugh had been the occasion for the development of the
idea of appropriation, it could hardly be called the focal point of Thomas’
theoretical position. His theoretical idea rests much more on the positive
disclosure of the faith, founded on a precise analysis of the personal properties
and Trinitarian processions, and on a no less precise reXection on the distinction
of ‘rationales’ of essential attributes.
Thomas continues Albert’s practice of Wne-tuning the nature of the relationship
between the appropriated essential attribute and the personal property.51
(1) Considered in its proper notion (‘materially’), our minds grasp an
essential attribute minus the personal properties. A philosopher, or a non-
Christian believer, can recognize that God is wise without having embraced
the Trinitarian faith. This distinction is also binding on the Christian theologian:
what one expresses when we attribute wisdom to God does not include
that divine person in and of itself. In other words, if one takes account of the
route which our knowledge travels, one must recognize that, in our thinking,
the notion of divine wisdom comes about before we grasp the divine person:52
one cannot grasp a person without having grasped the divine substance (the
notion of person includes that of divine substance, for one could not otherwise
grasp the person as a reality existing in God), and thus, in our thinking,
the understanding of the essential attribute as such ‘comes before’ understanding
the person who has this attribute. (2) But, in so far as it is appropriated,
or ‘formally’, the attribute includes the person’s character, since its
appropriation rests on the kinship which it has with the personal property.
49 I Sent. d. 31, q. 3, a. 1.
50 I Sent. d. 34, q. 2. But the Summa Theologiae does reproduce this argument at the end of
the presentation of the general doctrine of appropriations (ST I, q. 39. a. 7).
51 I Sent. d. 31, q. 1, a. 2, ad 3.
52 This anteriority is not temporal but conceptual: it is a matter of the ordering of concepts,
that is, of the process of our thought.