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

342 Trinitarian Creation and Action
but into the second aspect of relation, as the divine being. And what one says
about relation can also be put in terms of person. The divine person is not
implicated in a relationship to creatures in its aspect as a pure relation to
another person, but it is involved in such a relation in the aspect in which it is
divine. The Holy Spirit saves and the Son creates, because the Son and Holy
Spirit are divine persons, that is, because they are God.
This is what St Thomas explains in reference to the Word, Love, and Gift:
the relationship to creatures does not enter into the ‘person relation’, as a pure
relating to another, but into the divine essence which the person ‘includes’,
since the person is the divine essence. It is in this capacity that the Son is
‘engendered Creator’: the word engendered signiWes the Son in his relationship
to the Father, and the word Creator means the Son in his divine being. These
two aspects of relating to another and divine subsisting are enfolded in the
notion of ‘divine person’. One has to take hold of the fundamental elements of
the synthetic theory of relation and person in order to understand the
relationship which the divine persons have to the world.
Do we not camouXage the personal facets of the Trinitarian economy if we
aYrm that God’s relationship to creatures derives not from the pure personto-person
relation, but from the divine nature, common to the three persons?
Do we not then mean that only the nature, and not the persons as such, enter
into creation and the economy of grace? Absolutely not, because the person is
not only constituted by the pure relating to another, but also through the
nature in virtue of which it is a person. This is why Thomas explains that a
relationship to creatures can indeed be ‘included’ in the notion of the divine
person, where it comes into play within the divine person ‘as a second step’
after the eternal personal relation. When we profess that the Son is the Word
of God, or when we recognize that the Holy Spirit is the Love and Gift of God,
a relationship to creatures is ‘included’ in that ‘just as the essence is included
in the notion of the divine person’.13 Thomas’ explanation of God’s relationship
to the created world as Xowing from the divine essence maintains that
the relationship belongs to the divine persons, since the person is a person by
owning the nature.
We need to take one additional step if we want to attempt to discern the
personal dimension of creative and salviWc action. What ‘role’ does that which
is proper to each particular person play in the relationship to creatures? How
do the properties of each of the persons enter into the Trinity’s action in the
world? Before we can answer this, we need to extend this preliminary discussion
with a reminder of the idea of the ‘causality of the Trinitarian processions’.
13 ST I, q. 38, a. 1, ad 4.