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

Appropriation 333
connected to the mode of existence which is perfected within creaturehood.
Our ‘consideration’ of God and our words for naming God remain bound to
the mode of being of our sensible world, from which we take our knowledge.78
On this basis, Thomas reaYrms that we initially grasp an object as a thing
which is an entity: ‘what Wrst enters our mental conception is the being
(ens)’.79 This is a fundamental principle of the idea of knowledge: that
which our intellect Wrst conceives, as the best known to itself, and from
which it draws all its other conceptions, is the being, that is, the thing in so
far as it exists in act. The other conceptions which our mind forms about the
thing we know are, so to speak, adjuncts to this Wrst seizure of its being as
such. The next step which St Thomas mentions as a second element in the
process of knowing is the unity of the being. Our minds grasp the known
thing as a reality which is internally undivided, that is, one.80 We can see the
doctrine of the transcendentals in this.81 He adds to these Wrst moments the
no less basic principle of the ‘Wrst act’ and the ‘second act’, that is, of being and
of action. Knowledge of its action entirely belongs to knowledge of a being:
‘one does not know a reality perfectly unless one knows its operation’.82 A
thing acts and exercises its inXuence on other realities because of what it is.
What is Wrst stressed here is the precise capability, the intrinsic power of
action, that is, the principles of action, that through which a being acts. Then,
as a last step, and without specifying the kind of causality in question,
Thomas envisages the relations which a being’s action makes it have with
the realities which it ‘causes’, that is to say, the relationships given to an entity
by the inXuence it exercises on behalf of others.
Thus, this approach pictures four regions in which appropriation can be
applied, to wit, appropriations of attributes touching on: (1) God in his
absolute being (as in aeternitas—species—usus, the triad important to Augustine
and Hilary); (2) God considered as One (as in the Augustinian triad
unity—equality—connection); (3) God under the aspect of his power of
causation (power—wisdom—goodness, the triad of Hugh of Saint Victor
and Abelard; virtus appropriated to the Son); (4) God in the relationships
which he enjoys with creatures (as in the triad deriving from Rom. 11.36:
‘through him, with him, in him’; diVerent aspects of divine causality: eYcient,
formal, and Wnal).83
78 See above, in Chapter 6, ‘Person and Analogy’. 79 ST I, q. 5, a. 2.
80 ST I, q. 11, a. 1. 81 Cf. De veritate, q.1,a.1. 82 SCG II, ch. 1 (no. 852).
83 ST I, q. 39, a. 8; cf. q. 46, a. 3. In his Commentary on the Wnal salutation in 2 Corinthians
(In 2 Cor. 13.13, no. 544), Thomas introduces a further distinction: appropriation ‘by essence’
and appropriation ‘through cause’. Appropriation ‘through cause’ aims at taking this particular
biblical passage into account.